Contemporary Jewish Writing in Brazil: An Anthology

Shed II

Stefan made Mlotek’s acquaintance five days before the surgery. ‘I want a new face,’ he said. ‘You will have one,’ he heard, during the longest dialogue of the consultation. Stefan did not notice a tiny movement on Mlotek’s face, his eyes opening in order to augment his angle of perception, his eyebrow raised by his forehead. One of his lovers, right after the war, had confidentially revealed to Mlotek that when his lips began the movement of separating one from the other to articulate some sentence, his eyes had already disclosed a ‘briefing’ of what he essentially wanted to say. On Mlotek’s face that movement was something like a supplementary network of nerves that linked brain, eyes, and mouth, articulating thought and speech in an entirely personal manner. When his eyebrow reached the maximum height on his face, the slow movement that transformed his antiseptic indifference into suspicion ended. It was Stefan’s ‘sehr gut,’ practically inaudible, between hiding any trace that might reveal his identity and his cry of salvation expressed in the only language he felt comfortable speaking. Stefan did not explore Mlotek’s countenance. The transitory aspect of his own face made the impulse to register his interlocutor’s facial features unimportant, and so Stefan backed away, confident of the meticulous gaze Mlotek was casting upon him. For one moment he looked at the palms of his hands and thought about changing his fingerprints. Stefan did not think this would constitute a relearning of the world, his hands having to touch and recognize objects all over again; for him his hands were merely mechanical arms of his brain, the world made up of objects and realities, not textures and cloth. ‘It’s going to be good,’ he repeated to himself, ‘sehr gut.’ The sudden pain in Mlotek’s tooth was the first sign. Next the terror he felt after each surgery, making his body a mere collage of tissues suspended by the bloody stream. This was the camp’s code; that tooth Roney Cytrynowicz Shed II 228 roney cytrynowicz was the key of memory. Every time it was pressed, a long battle began: pain versus memory. War of nerves. Chemical war. The shards in his head now seemed to compress themselves and crush his brain. Mlotek understood it was necessary to identify the man before the surgery, before he himself crossed out the marks of that face and destroyed forever the possibility of stopping the pain. The tooth twinged a second time. A pang of memory banned forty-five years ago had been reset in motion. The pain demanded the settlement of memory’s debt. Pain and memory equipped their armies, cellular microbattles being resolved within a few seconds. Forty-five years of suffering irrupted, imploding a vast network of lines of resistance and phobias that protected the core of memory, a sealed capsule, shielded by nervous impulses that the most remote reminder would detonate. Mlotek did not prepare himself for the reencounter; he grabbed the pistol and kept it in his coat pocket. It was the first time they would be facing each other as equals. The first battle had ended in a tie. The second one was now beginning. Shed II of the camp, Mr. Stefan, does this name remind you of something ? What did you do to me? Shed II of the camp, Mr. Stefan? Who are you? I was in Shed II, Mr. Stefan. What do you want from me? You were the doctor in Shed II, Mr. Stefan, weren’t you? That was almost fifty years ago. I was a boy, five years old. At that age, one saves everything, memory stays in one’s bones. Bones grow and so does the memory inside them. Even after death memory stays. Tell me, what do you want? I had a twin brother, Mr. Stefan. You preferred twins. I don’t remember anything. You wanted to know why we were so alike, isn’t that so, Mr. Stefan? I did that for science. Science! Shed II 229 Science! When he heard that word, Mlotek squeezed the pistol inside his pocket until he assured himself that he was grabbing it, the barrel pointing to his own body; not being sure whether the shot would go off in another direction. His forehead raised his eyebrow to the maximum height permitted by his muscles. Science! Forty-years after, the...