Free Spark of Life by Erich Maria Remarque Page B

over to the barrack. “Did you get something?” asked 509.
    “What?”
    “Food. What else?”
    Lebenthal raised his shoulders. “Food! What else!” he repeated irritably. “What d’you think? Am I the kitchen kapo?”
    “No.”
    “Well! What d’you want from me, then?”
    “Nothing. I merely asked if you got hold of something to eat.”
    Lebenthal stood still. “Food,” he said bitterly. “Do you know that every Jew in the camp is to have two breadless days? Weber’s orders.”
    509 stared at him. “Is that a fact?”
    “No. I made it up. I always invent things like that. It’s funny.”
    “My God! That’ll make corpses!”
    “Sure. Heaps. And you still want to know if I got some food—”
    “Be quiet, Leo. Sit down here. This is a bloody story. Just now! Now, when we need all the grub we can lay our hands on!”
    “Do we? So perhaps it’s all my fault, eh?” Lebenthal began to tremble. He always trembled when excited, and he got easily excited; he was very touchy. With him it meant about as much as drumming one’s fingers on the table would mean with another. It came from the permanent hunger. It magnified and diminished all emotions. In the camp, hysteria and apathy were twins.
    “I’ve done what I could,” wailed Lebenthal softly in a high breaking voice. “I’ve lugged things along and taken chances and provided, and now you come and declare we need—”
    His voice drowned suddenly in a boggy, incomprehensible gargle. It sounded as though one of the camp’s loudspeakers had broken down. Lebenthal’s hands fumbled over the ground. Now his face looked no longer like an offended skull; it was merely a forehead with a nose and frog-eyes and underneath a lot of flabby skin with a hole in it. At last he found his false teeth on the ground, wiped them on his jacket and pushed them into his mouth. The loudspeaker was working again and the voice was back, high and wailing.
    509 let him wail without listening. Lebenthal noticed it and stopped. “We’ve often had breadless days,” he said feebly at last. “And more than two at a time. What’s the matter with you that you’re making such a fuss about it today?”
    509 looked at him for a while. Then he pointed at the town and the burning church. “What’s the matter? That there, Leo—”
    “What?”
    “That down there. What was that in the Old Testament?”
    “What have you got to do with the Old Testament?”
    “Wasn’t there something like this in the time of Moses? A pillar of fire that led the people out of slavery?”
    Lebenthal blinked his eyes. “A cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night,” he said without wailing. “Is that what you mean?”
    “Yes. And wasn’t God in it?”
    “Jehovah.”
    “All right, Jehovah. And that down there—you know what that is?” 509 waited a moment. Then he said: “It’s a little something like that. It’s hope, Leo, hope for us! Damn it, can’t any of you see that?”
    Lebenthal didn’t answer. He sat shrunk into himself and gazed down at the town. 509 let himself sink back. At last, for the first time, he had pronounced it. One can hardly say it, he thought, it almost kills one, it’s such an enormous word. I’ve avoided it throughout all these years; it would have eaten me up had I thought it—but now today it has returned, one doesn’t yet dare to think it quite out, but it is there, and now it will either shatter me or come true.
    “Leo,” he said. “That down there means that this here will also go smash.”
    Lebenthal moved. “If they lose the war,” he whispered. “Only then! But who can know that?” Automatically he glanced around in fear.
    During the first years the camp had been fairly well informed about the course of the war. Later, however, when victories ceased, Neubauer had forbidden the bringing in of newspapers and the reporting over the camp radio of news concerning the retreat. Since then the wildest rumors had spread through the barracks