that sensation from time to time, more often in my childhood. I’d look at somebody and suddenly I’d be scared that the person would soon be gone. I’m not trying to suggest that I have second sight. I’ve been wrong on numerous occasions. And some people exude the breath of death for years while being alive and well.
During the war my father was living in the same fortress ghetto, within the same ramparts, but I couldn’t see him, a lot of walls and prohibitions divided us. Until one day the door opened and there, unexpectedly, he stood. Grown thin, his hair recently shaved off, wearing a boilersuit, he appeared in that door and his eyes swept the far corners of the dormitory. I cried out and suddenly he saw me and said: Quiet, quiet, I’m only here to repair the wiring. And he laughed at me. Then he took me in his arms, although I was a big boy, hugged me to himself and said: My little boy! And all the time he was smiling, but somehow oddly, his eyes were moist , and as I looked up at him I saw with amazement that my big, strong and powerful father was crying.
When I learned after the war that all those I had been fond of, all those I had known, were dead, gassed like insects and incinerated like refuse, I was gripped by despair. Almost every night I would walk by their sides, entering with them into enclosed spaces. We were all naked, and suddenly we were beginning to choke. I tried to scream but was unable to, and I heard the rattle in the others’ throats and I could see their faces turning into grimaces and losing their shape. I awoke in terror, afraid to go to sleep again, and my eyes roamed feverishly through the empty darkness. At that time I slept in the kitchen, near the gas cooker. I’d get up time and again to make sure no gas was escaping. It was clear to me that I had only been spared through some oversight, some omission that might be put right at any moment. In the end I was so crushed by horror and fear that I fell sick. The doctors shook their heads over my disease, unable to understand how a microbe could have got into my heart, but they never thought of the real gateway.
They prescribed bed and absolute quiet. But in that quiet I was able to surround myself with my friends, who had turned into spectres, and spend with them all that slowly passing time, and be drawn into their world, in which time no longer passed at all. I told no one about them but I was with them and they invited me to them, they repeated their invitations so persistently that I understood that I too was to die.
But I was still afraid of death, so much afraid of it I didn’t dare to look in the mirror. Thus I spent weeks in immobility, until one day my mother brought me War and Peace in three volumes, put them on my bedside table and told me not to pick them up myself, they were too heavy. I really was weak, I could hardly lift one of the volumes although they were just ordinary books. But when my mother handed me a volume I propped it up against my knees and read lying down. And as I read I was gradually transported into a different society. At times it occurred to me that the people I was reading about were also dead by now, that they had to die even if death did not overtake them on the pages of the book. Yet at the same time, though they were dead, they were living. It was then I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying. I was seized by wonder at this miracle, at the strange power of the author, and there began to spring up within me a longing to achieve something similar.
I asked my mother to buy me some exercise books, and when I was on my own I began to put together my own experiences and to give back their lives to those who were no longer alive. At that moment, as though miraculously, their rigidified, cold and dismal features increasingly began to fade. When the doctor allowed me to get up six months later all the dead
Dorothy Calimeris, Sondi Bruner