Free The Birthday Buyer by Adolfo García Ortega Page B

the result of a car accident on the road to Prague. A drunken German (It just had to be a German! Buczko lamented to himself in later years) went through a traffic light and smashed smack into Buczko’s Skoda. They took more than two hours to extract him from the twisted metal, but he didn’t feel his legs in all that time. We know that he thought of Hurbinek for one last time. The prediction he’d always made that he would be linked to him for life was thus fulfilled.

6

    Here is the eyewitness account of Yuri Chanicheverov, the nineteen-year-old Russian soldier who reached the Main Camp on the first day of March 1945 and looked through the window of the barrack where Hurbinek and the other sickly people were lodged.
    “I had left the route the patrol was following. I couldn’t deal with all those who were coming up to me and asking in Russian and Polish whether I’d come to execute or liberate them. They couldn’t decide one way or the other when they saw I was armed. I stumbled over several bodies that were scattered here and there on the ashen ground. Some still flickered with life, breathed in short bursts, clinging to other inert bodies, skinny as starving dogs. That’s when I wandered off and found myself opposite a window of a shack. Of all the horror we saw in that place, the unburied or half-buried corpses, the lunatics who walked by screaming hysterically, or the living dead who roamed as far as the barbed wire fences, and then threw themselves at them in order to keep standing, it was the inside of that shack crammed with sick people on rickety bunks that made the deepest impression on me. I could hear them moaning inside. They were frozen stiff, wrapped in blankets that stank as much as they did. The unpleasant smell hit me from the other side of the window. Immediately beneath the window I could see a child who filled no more than two or three palm-lengths of his bed. His face was tiny and sunken but his eyes bulged wide open. He was about to die at any second, or so it seemed, because he was surrounded by two other young people who were looking at him sorrowfully and holding his hands. He breathed anxiously, made a constant, hoarse noise, a forlorn moan, and kept shaking from pain that was beyond cure. His suffering was so awful in my eyes that I imagined how his little body that had almost ceased to exist contained all the horrors I had seen so far. I have never forgotten him and that day I think I learned once and for all the stark difference between pity and evil.”

7

    The nurse has switched off the light and gone. The room is now in shadows and perhaps it is time for a snooze, I’m not sure, but the nurse has given me a sedative. The fact is my legs were really hurting, the pain almost made me shout out. I miss Fanny and the children. I haven’t alarmed them too much: it was quite a minor accident. I am really missing my life before I entered this hospital. But I tell myself to be patient and try to put my situation into perspective. They’ll soon come to get me and I’ll soon be home.
    Nevertheless, I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore.
    I think about surviving, the very fact that I have passed by the gateway to death but not entered. Survival creates a degree of confusion, of bewilderment. Perhaps it is the greatest bewilderment a human being can ever face. If, for example, I think about Buczko, I get depressed. Like me, he had a car accident. Like him, I could have been left paralyzed. The sinister, curt Dr. Voghs had already said as much,“Broken knees, very bad, physiotherapy . . . but your spine is OK . . . fortunately.” It would have been a very unjust irony of fate if I had traveled to Auschwitz to end up paralyzed like Hurbinek.
    But I think about survival, about the harsh business of having to survive. For example, me. Now. Here.
    Certainly, I am alive, but everything serves to remind me that I could be dead, that I
should
be dead: my car off to the scrapyard, my knees as