A GUIDED TOUR OF SUFFERING
To your left,
perhaps your right,
perhaps even straight ahead,
you find a small black room.
In it sits a Jew.
He is scum.
He is starving.
He is afraid.
Please—try not to look away.
• • •
A few hundred miles northwest, in Stuttgart, far from book thieves, mayors’ wives, and Himmel Street, a man was sitting in the dark. It was the best place, they decided. It’s harder to find a Jew in the dark.
He sat on his suitcase, waiting. How many days had it been now?
He had eaten only the foul taste of his own hungry breath for what felt like weeks, and still, nothing. Occasionally voices wandered past and sometimes he longed for them to knuckle the door, to open it, to drag him out, into the unbearable light. For now, he could only sit on his suitcase couch, hands under his chin, his elbows burning his thighs.
There was sleep, starving sleep, and the irritation of half awakeness, and the punishment of the floor.
Ignore the itchy feet.
Don’t scratch the soles.
And don’t move too much.
Just leave everything as it is, at all cost. It might be time to go soon. Light like a gun. Explosive to the eyes. It might be time to go. It might be time, so wake up. Wake up now, Goddamn it! Wake up.
The door was opened and shut, and a figure was crouched over him. The hand splashed at the cold waves of his clothes and the grimy currents beneath. A voice came down, behind it.
“Max,” it whispered. “Max, wake up.”
His eyes did not do anything that shock normally describes. No snapping, no slapping, no jolt. Those things happen when you wake from a bad dream, not when you wake into one. No, his eyes dragged themselves open, from darkness to dim. It was his body that reacted, shrugging upward and throwing out an arm to grip the air.
The voice calmed him now. “Sorry it’s taken so long. I think people have been watching me. And the man with the identity card took longer than I thought, but—” There was a pause. “It’s yours now. Not great quality, but hopefully good enough to get you there if it comes to that.” He crouched down and waved a hand at the suitcase. In his other hand, he held something heavy and flat. “Come on—off.” Max obeyed, standing and scratching. He could feel the tightening of his bones. “The card is in this.” It was a book. “You should put the map in here, too, and the directions. And there’s a key—taped to the inside cover.” He clicked open the case as quietly as he could and planted the book like a bomb. “I’ll be back in a few days.”
He left a small bag filled with bread, fat, and three small carrots. Next to it was a bottle of water. There was no apology. “It’s the best I could do.”
Door open, door shut.
Alone again.
What came to him immediately then was the sound.
Everything was so desperately noisy in the dark when he was alone. Each time he moved, there was the sound of a crease. He felt like a man in a paper suit.
The food.
Max divided the bread into three parts and set two aside. The one in his hand he immersed himself in, chewing and gulping, forcing it down the dry corridor of his throat. The fat was cold and hard, scaling its way down, occasionally holding on. Big swallows tore them away and sent them below.