Fatelessness by Imre Kertész Page B

day, or rather the night by then, during what was one of our longer halts. It soon became clear that he had been impelled by good intentions, coming merely to impart the news: “Folks, you have reached the Hungarian frontier!” He wished to take the opportunity to address an appeal, a request one might say, to us. His behest was that insofar as there were any monies or other valuables still left on any of us, we should hand them over to him. “Where you’re going,” so he reckoned, “you won’t be needing valuables anymore.” Anything that we might still have the Germans would take off us anyway, he assured us. “Wouldn’t it be better, then,” he carried on, up above in the window slot, “for them to pass into Hungarian hands?” After a brief pause that struck me as somehow solemn, he then suddenly added, in a voice that switched to a more fervent, highly confidential tone which somehow offered to forgive and forget all bygones: “After all, you’re Hungarians too when it comes down to it!” After a flurry of whispering and consultation, a voice, a deep male voice from somewhere in the wagon, acknowledged the force of this argument, provided we could get some water from the gendarme in exchange, to which the latter seemed amenable, despite its being “against orders,” as he noted. Even so, they were unable to reach agreement as the voice wished to be given the water first, but the gendarme said it had to be the articles, and neither would budge from his own sequence. In the end, the gendarme took great umbrage, snapping: “Stinking Jews! You make a business out of the holiest of matters!” In a voice nearly choking with indignation and loathing, he threw this wish at us: “Die of thirst, then.” That did indeed come to pass later on—that at least was what they said in our wagon. There is no denying that, from about the afternoon of the second day on, I too was constantly subjected to a particular voice coming from the wagon behind us: not exactly pleasant. The old woman, so they said in our wagon, was ill and had presumably gone mad, undoubtedly from thirst. That explanation seemed credible. Only now did I realize how right were those who had declared at the very start of the journey how fortunate it was that neither small infants nor the extremely elderly had landed up in our wagon. The old woman finally fell silent on the morning of the third day. Among our lot, it was said at the time that she had died because she could get no water. But then, we were aware that she was also sick and old, which is how everyone, including me, found the case understandable, all things considered.
    I am in a position to declare that waiting does not predispose to joy—that at least was my experience when we did indeed finally arrive. It may have been that I was tired, then again perhaps the very keenness with which I had been looking forward to the destination ended up making me forget that thought to some degree, but it was more that I was left somehow indifferent. I slightly let the entire event slip by. What I remember is that I awoke suddenly, presumably at the demented shrieking of nearby sirens; the faint light that was filtering in from outside signaled the dawn of the fourth day. The base of my spine, where it had been in contact with the wagon floor, ached a little. The train was idling, as it had often done at other times, invariably so during air raids. The window spaces were taken up, as they always were at this time. Everyone was claiming to see something—that too is how it was nowadays. After a while, I myself managed to get a place: I could see nothing. The dawn outside was cool and fragrant, with wraiths of gray mist lying on wide stretches of meadow, from somewhere behind which, a bit later, a sharp, thin, red shaft of light appeared unexpectedly, like a trumpet blast, and I grasped that I was looking at the sunrise. It was pretty and, on the whole, intriguing: back home, I was usually still asleep