The Birthday Buyer Read Free

by their brothers, by their husbands; they knew, in any case, at least, that an anonymous Polish child would be born in a camp that had been expressly built in order to eliminate him, to eradicate him from this world. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine, if they had given it just a little bit of thought. Even if they didn’t know he would be called Hurbinek. And that the memory of him would last more than any memory of the vast majority of themselves.

7

    I have devotingly read the books written by Primo Levi and have been captivated, horrified and filled with admiration. I have read his stories, his wonderful tales. I was struck with awe when I read his autobiographical writing about his long journey to the hell of Auschwitz that begins in 1943 when the fascists arrested him in the Aosta Valley. First
If This Is a Man
, then
The Truce
, and finally
The Drowned and the Saved
. Shortly after writing this last book, in April 1987, he threw himself down the stairwell from the third floor of his house. He died from the injuries sustained in that brutal fall. He was sixty-eight years old.
    There is a photo of him in the glove compartment of my shattered Ford that is now in one of the car pounds run by the Frankfurt
polizei
. It is dedicated to me. He had been awarded the Campiello Prize for a second time for
If Not Now, When
? It was December 1982 and work had taken me to Turin. I remember it was dusk and that I went for a long stroll. There was a throng milling around beside a shop window in a small square. I went over and to my surprise I saw Primo Levi inside signing copies of his most recent book. I didn’t have a copy but he very kindly took a photo of himself from a leather wallet and wrote his name and mine and the date on it. I had no choice but to take that photo with me on my journey to re-tell—as if in a modest, personal homage—the life of a three-year-old boy who only ever experienced suffering. The photo of the guardian of his memory.
    The taciturn, peaceful look on his face augurs his suicide. He deceived no one. Like Jean Améry. Like Paul Celan. Like many other anonymous survivors who decided to stop re-inventing themselves day by day.

8

    Hurbinek was dumb. Or couldn’t speak. He’d make a supreme effort writhing his small triangular face as his eye sockets sunk down deeper and deeper, and he made only sounds, scraps of syllables, words that nobody understood. They might be moans, might be snatches of a song he had heard, might be the word that held his real name, always a mere approximation, always voiced by a terrified child who wants to live at any cost. If in fact what Hurbinek wanted, what floated in his eyes
was
the intense desire to speak, to explode in sounds, alongside his unspeakable exhaustion, total absence of energy, when it seemed every breath would be his last, the last drop of life fleeing as he gasped and panted, when his tiny lungs went anxiously up and down, always at the point of collapse.
    A six-figure number had been clumsily tattooed on his arm.
    He was paralytic, couldn’t swivel his hips and his legs were two sticks without any muscle that barely if ever managed to support him.

9

    I have always been left astounded by the kind, peaceful looks on the faces of aged Nazi murderers in their old age or when they appear in public accused of a crime against humanity. Hunted for years, then discovered, arrested and held while awaiting trial, those murderers are transformed in the process. They become faces worthy of compassion and benevolence. Like those belonging to the Eichmanns or Barbies or Pinochets or Pol-Pots when they are being tried (or in the future to Karadzic, Mladic and Milosevic, or the Ruandans Kabunga, Renzaho and Bizimungu). They seem good, innocent people, alien to everything they are accused of. It is then that I remember the mountains and mountains of teeth and molars I saw in that documentary when I was a child. It is then that the tooth pullers come to the