Fire on Water: Porgess and The Abyss (review)

Fire on Water is part of Northwestern University Press's series "Writings from an Unbound Europe," which offers literature from the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe in English translation. Arnošt Lustig, one of the most renowned contemporary Czech writers, is a Holocaust survivor who was incarcerated in Theresienstadt, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz before escaping from a train headed to Dachau. With his novels Porgess and The Abyss, Lustig seeks to communicate the grief and shattered dreams that haunt two young survivors of the Holocaust. But through his characters' ruminations, the author also stresses that words are largely inadequate for this task.

The narrator of Porgess recalls a visit with his disabled friend after the end of World War II. He had met Porgess in Prague in 1940 and was interned with him later in Theresienstadt. Right before Germany's capitulation on 8 May 1945, Porgess was shot by a transport commandant after jumping from a freight train. The shot paralyzed Porgess, requiring him to spend the rest of his days in bed with his agonizing memories and second-guessing his decision to flee. Jazz music proves to be the one constant joy in his life. Even as the Nazis were outlawing the "degenerate" art form, no one had been able to take away the melodies running constantly through his head. In the postwar era, jazz remains "his bridge with no pillars or chains upon which he could walk forward and backward without leaving his bed" (p. 104).

Lustig presents the relationship of the narrator and Porgess through the doppelgänger motif. Besides sharing many of the same interests (boxing, playing cards, jazz, numerology, attractive women), the alter egos are also kindred spirits in pain, to the point where the narrator becomes uncertain whose spine the perpetrator's bullet had actually hit: "I would bet my life on the fact that what that idiot did to Porgess he also did to me for the rest of my life, figuratively and literally" (p. 65). The narrator's reflections on the role of luck in determining one's fate suggest his realization that the tables easily could have been turned; as healthy as he might be standing at the infirm Porgess's bed, he too had been only one misstep away from paralysis or death.

In The Abyss, Lustig's protagonist David Wiesenthal finds himself in a physical and mental chasm after being caught an avalanche. As he struggles to maintain consciousness while trapped in the snow, David concentrates on remembering the women who had touched his life, from his mother to former girlfriends and fleeting lovers. The conversations with his mother are especially moving: she had been killed at Auschwitz in 1944, along with his father and sister, but now appears alive and well to her son in his present time of need. In David's delusional state, the two are able to reminisce and fill in the gaps resulting from their separation during the Holocaust. As for his lovers, David has difficulties remembering the one woman he had loved truly, and the prolonged attempt to recall her seems to keep him alive for at least a little longer.

Lustig expresses his captivating musings on temporality through the protagonist's reflections on three levels of time, "now, then, and even before" (p. 123), that seem to converge as he is trapped in the snow. Having survived the Holocaust as a boy seven years earlier, David now senses that his luck has run out; possibilities for the future do not enter his mind at this point, as the survival strategies he had learned in the camps are useless in the abyss. Only at the narration's end does the reader realize that the thoughts and memories taking up over one hundred pages in the novel surfaced within a mere second in the life of twenty-year old David Wiesenthal.

Several common threads justify the choice of including these two novels in one volume. The texts share...