“Good plan!”
“Not so good. What he doesn’t know is that there is no morgue in the sinister If prison, or burials, because the bodies of the prisoners are thrown into the sea. They throw Dantès, still inside the sack, into the sea from a great height, and so when they discover they’ve been tricked, they assume that Dantès will have drowned anyway.”
“And does he die?” asks Dita anxiously.
“No, there’s still a long way to go in the novel. He manages to escape from the bag and, although he’s exhausted, he successfully swims to shore. But do you know the best part? Abbé Faria wasn’t mad; he really had found treasure. Edmond Dantès goes in search of it, and the riches he finds enable him to adopt a new identity: He becomes the Count of Monte Cristo.”
“And does he spend his life living happily ever after?” asks Dita na?vely.
Markéta gives her that look of utter amazement and slight reproach.
“No! How can he go on as if nothing had happened? He does what he has to do. He takes revenge on all those people who betrayed him.”
“And is he successful?”
Markéta nods so enthusiastically that there’s no question that Dantès ruthlessly exacts revenge. She summarizes the astute and intricate schemes whereby Dantès, now the Count of Monte Cristo, imposes devastating punishment on the people who ruined his life. It’s a complex and Machiavellian plan from which there is no escape, even for Mercédès, who when she thought Dantès was dead, finally married her cousin, unaware of his trickery. He shows her no mercy, either. He gets close to all of them, gains their confidence in his role as the rich and worldly count, and then crushes them.”
When Markéta finishes her story of the relentless revenge of the Count of Monte Cristo, the two of them fall silent. Dita gets up to go, but before she does so, she turns to the teacher and says, “Markéta … you’ve told the story so well it’s almost as if I’d read it. Would you like to be one of our ‘living’ books? That way we’d have The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, the stories of the American Indians, the history of the Jews, and now The Count of Monte Cristo.”
Markéta averts her eyes and looks down at the floor of rammed earth. She’s gone back to being the timid and unsociable woman she usually is.
“I’m sorry; that’s not possible. I’m fine teaching my girls, but for me to stand up in the middle of the hut … definitely not.”
Dita sees that just the thought of doing it has made the woman blush. But they can’t afford to lose a book, and so Dita quickly thinks about what Fredy Hirsch would have said in a situation like this.
“I know it’s a huge effort for you, but … for the time the story lasts, the children stop being in a stable full of fleas, they stop smelling burned flesh, they stop being afraid. During those minutes, they’re happy. We can’t deny this to these children.”
The woman agrees a bit reluctantly. “We can’t.…”
“If we look at our reality, we feel anger and disgust. All we have is our imagination, Markéta.”
The teacher finally stops looking at the floor and raises her angular face.
“Add me to the list.”
“Thank you, Markéta. Thank you. Welcome to the library.”
The teacher tells Dita that it’s too late for her to read the book now, and so she’ll ask her for it again tomorrow morning.
“I have to go over a few passages.”
It strikes Dita that there’s a touch of joy in her voice and that there’s a new spring in her step as she walks away. Maybe she’s coming round to the idea of being a “living” book. Dita sits there quietly a while longer, leafing through the book, whispering the name of Edmond Dantès, and trying to make it sound French. She wonders if she’ll manage to get away from where she is, as the protagonist of the novel did. She doesn’t think she’s as brave as him, although if she had an opportunity to run toward the woods, she wouldn’t hesitate.
She also wonders if, were she successful, she’d dedicate her life to taking revenge on all the SS guards and officers, and if she’d do it in the same methodical, implacable, and yes, even merciless, manner as the Count of Monte Cristo. Of course she’d be delighted if they suffered the same pain they inflicted on so many innocent people. But nevertheless, she can’t avoid feeling some sadness at the thought that she liked the happy and confident Edmond Dantès of the beginning of the story much more than the calculating, hate-filled man he became. She asks herself, Can you really choose, or do the blows dealt to you by fate change you no matter what, in the same way that the blow of an ax converts a living tree into firewood?
The memory pops into her head of her father’s last days, when he was dying in the dirty bunk without any medicine to give him relief, slowly being killed by the illness with which the Nazis have allied themselves in their obsession with death. And as she thinks about this, she feels her temples throb with rage and an insatiable hunger for violence. But then she remembers what Professor Morgenstern taught her: Our hatred is a victory for them. And she nods in agreement.
If Professor Morgenstern was mad, then lock me up with him.
22.
Two compounds away from the family camp, a scene takes place that no prisoner wants to witness. But they are given no choice. Rudi Rosenberg, who has come to BIId with some lists, is walking along the Lagerstrasse when an SS patrol enters the camp. They are escorting four thin Russians who are still feisty, despite their bruised faces, scraggly beards, and torn clothes. It was Rudi’s friend Wetzler, an inmate assigned to the camp morgue, who told him that the Russian prisoners of war were working on the extension to Birkenau on the other side of the camp perimeter. They spent exhausting days stacking up metal sheets and piles of wood.