41
This morning I wasted away, as I did with so many mornings,
feeling the pure procrastination of daylight like wearing an old
pancake on my head shade and then waiting for the big moment to
come out of it hopefully with some energy. Slowly, at least slowly,
the afternoon came over our neighborhood and I still followed
the thoughts in the middle of the days blankness, until finally
“something” would be going on with these thin strings in the vast
empty space ahead of me. Not much, but it was as if I arrived in
some slightly denser region of my introspective days journey. But
it was just the voice of the landlord in his backyard garden below
my window like last summer with endless daylight, when I, lazy
as possible from the endless days, used to listen to his endless
monologues.
Like listening again to one of the visitors very long ago, who
sometimes spoke polish too. He came by each winter and he would
say, the germans, they killed and they killed. He told more about
what happened before he was transported to the huge camp, then
actually about it. Like he would have said to us, that they put many
people together in some square, and he was one of them, and the
nazis asked the doctors and teachers to get separated from the rest
and go over to the other part of the square, and one of the teachers
said, I knew it, they will need us, and so they stood together and
the germans killed them after that. It took them some time, they
killed more and then the rest were taken away to the camp. He
often looked at me particularly, and now I start to understand,
what it might have meant to him, maybe he wanted that
particularly I hear him and know what happened, and that I will
be testimony of the story and tell it later. That way he looked at
me and explained that they killed everywhere and anywhere, they
came to every new town, they just killed and killed that same way.
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