“Yes.”
“Well, he wrote that novel. And The War of the Worlds, in which he talks about Martians landing on Earth. And The Island of Doctor Moreau, with that mad scientist who combines human and animal genes. Dr. Mengele would like him. But I think his best book is The Time Machine. To go back and forth in time…” He sounds pensive as he continues. “Can you picture it? Do you have any idea what it would mean to get inside that machine, fly back in time to 1924, and prevent Adolf Hitler from being released from jail?”
“But all that business of the machine is made up, isn’t it?”
“Sadly, yes. Novels add what’s missing to life.”
“Well, if you think it would be better, I can put Mr. Freud and Mr. Wells at opposite ends of the bench.”
“No, leave them where they are. Maybe they can learn something from each other.”
And he says it so seriously that Dita can’t tell if this young teacher, who has the poise of an experienced man despite his youth, is joking or absolutely serious.
He turns round and returns to his group, and it occurs to Dita that he’s a walking encyclopedia. The assistant beside her hasn’t spoken a word. It’s only when the teacher has gone that he tells Dita in a high-pitched, childish voice—which makes his normal silence understandable—that the teacher’s name is Ota Keller, and he’s a Communist. Dita nods.
The teachers asked Dita for one of her “living” books for the afternoon—The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson. Mrs. Magda is a fragile-looking woman with snow-white hair and as slight as a sparrow. But when she starts to tell the story, she turns into a giant. Her voice becomes remarkably energetic, and she spreads her arms dramatically to describe the flight of the geese carrying Nils Holgersson through the air. A large group of children of mixed ages climb on board the flock of strong geese, too. They follow every word wide-eyed as they fly, seated on those geese, all over the skies of Sweden.
Almost all the children have heard the story before, in some cases several times, but the ones who enjoy it most are the ones who know it best. They recognize the various stages of the tale and they even laugh in anticipation of events, because they are already part of the adventure. Even Gabriel, the terror of the teachers in Block 31, who is normally incapable of staying still, has turned into a statue.
Nils is a willful boy who plays tricks on the animals on his farm. One day, while his parents are in church and he’s alone at home, he has a run-in with a tomte, or gnome, who has had enough of the boy’s arrogant attitude and shrinks him to the size of a small woodland animal. In an attempt to redeem himself, Nils holds on to the neck of a domestic goose and they join a band of wild geese flying over the Swedish countryside. In the same way that the impertinent Nils, clutching the neck of his goose, begins to mature and to realize that there is more to the world than him, so, too, the group of listeners rise above their harsh reality, full of the egotism of people pushing into the line to get to the soup first or stealing their neighbor’s spoon.
Sometimes, when Dita goes in search of Mrs. Magda to tell her that she has a session with Nils Holgersson at a particular time, the woman hesitates.
“But they’ve all heard the story a dozen times already! When they see that I’m telling it again, they’ll get up from their stools and leave.”
No one ever leaves. It doesn’t matter how many times they listen to the story, they always enjoy it. And not only that, but they always want to hear it from the start. Sometimes Mrs. Magda, worried that she’ll bore them, tries to take shortcuts and make the story shorter by skipping sections, but there are immediate protests from her audience.
“No, that’s not right!”
And she has to rewind and tell the whole story without leaving anything out. The more times the children hear the story, the more it’s a part of them.
The story comes to an end, and the guessing games being played by other groups also finish, along with the craft work. A group of girls has been making puppets out of old socks and wooden sticks. The children leave the hut and return to their families once the deputy director has finished the afternoon roll call.
The assistants finish their tasks quickly. Sweeping the floor with twig brooms is more of a ritual or a way of justifying their positions than an actual necessity. Arranging the stools doesn’t take long, either, or cleaning up the nonexistent leftovers from the meal, because nothing is wasted. The bowls are licked clean down to the very last drop of soup; even a crumb is like treasure. As the assistants complete their pretend cleanup, they leave the hut, and a peacefulness descends on Block 31.
The teachers sit down together on stools and discuss the day’s events. Dita is in her corner behind the woodpile, where she often goes when classes are over to read for a while, since the books can’t be taken from the hut. She notices a stick propped up against a wall in her corner. It has a small net at the top made out of string. It could be a crude butterfly net, although it’s so badly strung that if you tried to catch a butterfly, it would escape through one of the many holes. She can’t imagine who might be the owner of such a useless item. There aren’t any butterflies in Auschwitz anyway. If only!
She spots something in the gap between some planks in the wall, and when she pulls it out, she sees it’s a tiny pencil, little more than a stub with a black tip. But a pencil is an extraordinary piece of equipment. She picks up a small origami bird left behind by Professor Morgenstern and carefully unfolds it. She’s left with a scrap of paper to draw on. She hasn’t drawn anything for so long … Not since Terezín.
A very nice art teacher who gave classes to the children in the ghetto used to say that painting was a way of escaping. She was such a cultured and enthusiastic person that Dita never dared contradict her. But unlike books, drawing never took her out of herself or made her climb aboard the carriage of other lives—quite the opposite. Drawing catapulted her inside herself. Her Terezín drawings were dark, with unsettled strokes and dark-gray, stormy skies. Drawing was a way of having a conversation with herself when she was overcome by the idea that her youth, which had barely begun, already seemed to be over.
Dita sketches the barrack: the stools, the straight stone line of the chimney, and the two benches—one for her and the other for the books.