Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam

Scene Seven

He spoke of the fire and of the burning of the bodies, saying it was a moment he neither wanted to remember nor talk about.

The guy choked on his words. He wrestled with meanings, so that he could speak of how he experienced the fire that burned the last of the bodies and their remains. He produced the words like one who has lost the ability to produce words and wept like one who has no more tears.

(When I tried to write about this moment, which I did several times, I’d suffer a complete collapse. I’d be drenched in cold sweat and feel as though my heart had stopped beating. I’d be overcome by exhaustion, stop writing, throw myself on the bed and doze. This is my seventh attempt to write down what I heard. I drank half a bottle of vodka, sat down at the table, and decided to forget all the dreams I’d have when such exhaustion struck me. But I couldn’t forget one dream that pursued me for seven days and seven nights: We three–Itidal, Murad, and I– are sitting down. Murad drains his glass to the dregs and gets drunk. He pours another glass and drinks it, and the words come out of his mouth and turn into a rope that winds itself around his neck. The man cries out for help in words that come out as separated syllables, and with each cry the rope tightens around his neck and his words turn into a sort of rasp. Itidal and I never move from our places. We’re like people watching a horror movie. The dream begins and ends without anything happening: the guy doesn’t die and we make no attempt to save him. I’d wake up from this dream, light a cigarette, and open my eyes as far as they’d go so that I wouldn’t fall asleep again. Then, when the heat from the cigarette’s little glowing tip reached my fingers, I’d get up in panic, then fall asleep again and enter a world in which delirium blended with the memories of that night. I became convinced that if I went on that way, I’d end up dying in a fire caused by my cigarette, so I decided to stop writing temporarily, but the decision did not release me from the maze of fires that Murad described as he choked on his words.)

Murad spoke of those days: “Look, it’s true that collecting the bodies and burying the remains were the hardest parts of the work, but during those days there were two teams of young men working on looting the city and clearing the roads. You were a baby and don’t remember anything, so you can’t help me remember the names, and you know that old age has its claims, which begin with memory, and memory forgets, and the first thing it forgets is names. First, the name disappears, then little by little the features evaporate, and finally the person vanishes into his name.”