Fatelessness by Imre Kertész Page A

rifles, surly, buttoned up to the chin, looking somehow as if they were watching over enticing goods but weren’t really supposed to touch them—no doubt, it crossed my mind, on account of an authority even mightier than them: the Germans. The sliding door was closed on us, with something being hammered onto it on the outside, then there was some signaling, a whistle, busy railwaymen, a lurch, and—we were off. We boys made ourselves comfortable in the rear third of the wagon, which we took over as soon as we boarded. It had a single windowlike aperture on each side, placed fairly high up and carefully covered with tangles of barbed wire. It was not long before the matter of water and, along with that, the duration of the journey was raised in our wagon.
    Other than that, there is not much I can say about the journey as a whole. Just as before, at the customs post, or more recently at the brickyard, we had to find ways of somehow passing the time. Naturally, here that was, perhaps, made all the more difficult by the circumstances. On the other hand, the consciousness of a goal, the thought that every completed section of the journey, slow and tiresome as it might be, what with all the bumping, shunting, and stoppages, was in the end bringing us closer—that helped one through the troubles and difficulties. We boys did not lose patience either. “Rosie” kept on reassuring us that the trip would last only until we got there. “Fancyman” was ragged a lot over a girl—here with her parents, the boys reckoned— whose acquaintance he had made in the brickyard and for whose sake he often vanished, especially to start with, into the depths of the wagon, with all sorts of rumors about this circulating among the others. Then there was “Smoker”; even here some sort of dubious, crumbling twist of tobacco, a scrap of paper of some sort, and a match would emerge from his pocket, and he would bend his face to the flame, sometimes even during the night, with all the avidity of a bird of prey. The occasional cheerful word or remark was to be heard, even on the third day, from Moskovics (incessant streams of sweat and grime trickling from his brow—as they did on all of us, myself included, it goes without saying—to run down his spectacles, his snub nose, and his thick lips) and from all the others, as well as the odd flat joke, albeit with a stutter, from “Leatherware.” One of the adults even managed, I don’t know how, to discover that the destination of our journey was, more specifically, a place by the name of “Waldsee,” and whenever I was thirsty or it was hot, the implicit promise held by that name in itself promptly gave a degree of relief. For those who complained about the lack of space there were plenty who reminded them, quite rightly, to remember that the next time there would be eighty of them. And basically, if I thought about it, when all was said and done, there had been times when I was more tightly packed: in the gendarmerie stable, for instance, where the only way we had been able to resolve the problem of fitting ourselves in was by agreeing that we should all squat cross-legged on the ground. My seat on the train was more comfortable than that. If I wanted, I could even stand up, indeed take a step or two—over toward the slop bucket, for example, since that was situated in the rear right-hand corner of the wagon. What we initially decided about that was to use it as far as possible only for purposes of taking a leak; but as time passed, entirely predictably of course, it was forcibly brought home to many of us that the demands of nature were more powerful than any vow, and we boys acted accordingly, just like the men, to say nothing of the women.
    The gendarme did not, in the end, cause too much unpleasantness either. The first time, he startled me a bit, his face popping up at the window opening on the left, just above my head and shining his flashlight in among us on the evening of the first