Free The Birthday Buyer by Adolfo García Ortega

in Auschwitz (as was the case with an Italian chemist) and told terrible stories of what he had experienced there in a matter-of-fact tone. However, we don’t know if he ever referred in public to the crippled child he had looked after with so much devoted care. He apparently didn’t.
    But Claricia Novaceanu did recall later, on the day her elder son Stanislazh was married in 1972, that Belo, alias Henek, used to tell Stanislazh, when he was very young, the story of a tree whose trunk housed a very pale being with the face and body of a little boy, a legless little boy. He had named this astonishing being Hurbinek and entitled the story “Hurbinek’s tree.” Claricia remembered it all of a sudden at the wedding; she remembered right there why that strange name was so unexpectedly familiar to her; she remembered it when her daughter-in-law asked her about Stanislazh’s childhood with the curiosity of someone who was in love.
    It was a story her husband told time and again with slight variations, but always with the same conclusion: the unhappy, tiny inhabitant of that tree couldn’t get out because he had no legs, he wept inside the tree and, if you listened carefully, pressed your ear against the trunks of those trees, you could hear him moaning or gasping. That was why Claricia remembered how her children, when they were very young, would go from tree to tree, put their little faces next to the trunks and try to hear a voice, while Belo told them, “Listen hard, very hard and you will hear him. He sometimes says my name. He sometimes calls out to me.” And Stanislazh or his brother Josef would get very excited and suddenly shout “Yes, yes, he said Henek, he said Henek!”
    Claricia remembered it then, as if it were a sudden revelation. But she didn’t know the source of that story, just as she didn’t know that a tree that held Hurbinek’s spirit within it grew in a place in Poland that the Germans once called Auschwitz.

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    Rubem never forgot the day when, with Levi and Henek, he buried Hurbinek’s small body at the foot of a tree. When he returned to Radzyn, his birthplace, the Hebrew schools where he taught weren’t there any more and he managed to find a job as a postman working for the Polish Post Office. He wept a lot, disconsolately, when he found out that what he had so feared was true: that his wife, Demetria, was gassed that same night they had reached Auschwitz and had been separated on the platform when one of the guards’ mastiffs bit her.
    He had to undergo psychiatric treatment for years because he suffered from nightmares and woke up soaked in sweat and dirtied by his own defecations. They were dreams prompted by pure fear, the doctors told him. Yetzev would relate his dream, that was invariably the same: he could see the man right in front of him in a long queue changing into a tobacco pouch made from his own skin. Several SS tortured him until they broke him. The torturers’ words were broadcast round the camp from a loudspeaker: “If you don’t help us, it will hurt a lot.” And those final words would hang in the air: “hurt a lot . . . hurt a lot . . . ”A screaming voice drilled through his eardrum and Yetzev also shouted out,
Jawohl, jawohl
! When he woke up, he confirmed night after night that he no longer controlled his sphincters and had shit himself in bed.
    A year before he died, in 1965, Rubem Yetzev decided to return to Auschwitz and seek out the tree beneath which Hurbinek was buried. He found it, or thought he had. He told the person accompanying him, someone much younger than himself: “Not a single day goes by when I don’t think about the child we buried by the foot of this tree. He has lived in my memory to this day.” The tree, a huge acacia, was very leafy and now brought shade to an irregularly shaped esplanade where Oven no. 2 had stood before it was blown up.
    Old Yetzev stood there for a whole afternoon and stared at the capricious shape of the roots that