something wrong, perhaps fatally wrong. she
averted her face for an instant, glancing at an
adjoining line of prisoners shambling through
the Golgotha of their selection, and saw eva’s
flute teacher Zaorski at the precise congealed
instant of his doom—dispatched to the left
and to Birkenau by an almost imperceptible
nod of a doctor’s head. now, turning back, she
heard dr. Jemand von niemand say, “so you’re
not a communist. You’re a believer.”
“Ja, mein Hauptmann. i believe in christ.”
What folly! she sensed from his manner, his
gaze—the new look in his eye of luminous
intensity—that everything she was saying, far
from helping her, from protecting her, was
leading somehow to her swift undoing. she
thought, let me be struck dumb.
The doctor was a little unsteady on his
feet. he leaned over for a moment to an enlist-
ed underling with a clipboard and murmured
something, meanwhile absorbedly picking his
nose. eva, pressing heavily against sophie’s leg,
began to cry. “so you believe in christ the re-
deemer?” the doctor said in a thick-tongued but
oddly abstract voice, like that of a lecturer ex-
amining the delicately shaded facet of a propo-
sition in logic. Then he said something which
for an instant was totally mystifying: “did he
not say, ‘suffer the little children to come unto
Me’?” he turned back to her, moving with the
twitchy methodicalness of a drunk.
John F. Kennedy throwing a football to his nephew Bobby Jr. as his brother Robert looks on,
