Van  Aaken

Leon Zeldis

 

Aaken arrived at the camp rather late. He was a thin, small man, perhaps five feet tall, not much more. He had a paunch that vanished very soon, and jumping eyes that looked at the world with an air of permanent surprise, beneath a shock of whitish hair. There was something deliberate in his movements, as a bird; he had the habit of standing in such a posture that made you think of instability.

 

He was a Dutch Jew. He had succeeded in hiding for a time, but finally the Gestapo caught up with him, and here he was, with the rest of us. By chance, he came to occupy the bunk above mine, empty since Johann died of cold. I had helped to take out the corpse. It was easy, so light; two of us lifted him without difficulty. It’s the least one can do for a friend.

 

Aaken did not speak much, but a certain relationship developed between us. Perhaps, because he appeared to be incapable of grasping what was happening to him. To my surprise, he awaked in me a spark of compassion. It wasn’t as he was mad, but rather he seemed to float in a bottomless sea, where the law of gravity did not apply. I helped him as much as I could, sometimes.

 

‘What I cannot stand,’ he once told me, in one of the snippets of conversation, when we tried not to think of food, ‘is not the hunger, or the cold, the filth, the death. These are horrible, but things that I can understand. They are - he thought a moment - human. I mean, they are things that could happen to you outside as well. But I cannot stand the depravity, the degradation, this caricature of humanity.’

 

Aaken spoke like this, using high-flown words.

 

‘I grieve for the death of beauty,’ he told me another time. ‘It’s calculated, calculated...’.

 

I didn't like to hear him speaking like this. In part, I didn’t understand everything he said, in his stilted school German, and also, I was afraid that somebody would squeal on us. You never know.

 

‘The guards are savages, not because they beat us and kill us, but because they make us less than human’.

 

He was an idealist, that was clear. Stuck in the deepest circle of hell he still had a mind to talk of idiocies such as humanity and beauty. I tried to keep my distance.

 

No matter, he looked for me. Perhaps the others did not want to hear, or he didn’t trust them. Aaken had been a painter. His specialty had been copying old masters for the tourists. That explained some things. What it didn’t explain was his habit of remaining still as in a trance, or looking for a dark corner and drawing on the rotting board strange figures, using a piece of carbon. Once, he explained to me that some figures were cabalistic formulas. He had studied cabbala for many years. Also alchemy.

 

At the time we were already insensible. We looked forward to nothing but the next ration of food. Food! I cannot describe what we ate. Even today, it turns my stomach. And how we fought for another morsel.

 

Aaken drew. Sometimes I recognized the drawing, a smoking chimney, for instance, but it looked like a locomotive rushing forward, fed with white and soft coal.

 

He was a good draftsman, although I wasn’t in any shape to appreciate it. I don’t understand much about painting, but his drawings were precise. He had a way of combining the common with the grotesque. With a few lines, a hand became a claw. A mouse turned into a monster. He was afraid of the guards, so that he drew some figures that nobody could recognize, using a private code. Everyday objects, a glass, a jar, a book, were transformed into sinister, ominous objects. A violin appeared to be an instrument of torture.

 

‘I draw in order to remember,’ he told me once. ‘The world must know. I shall paint everything when I come out.”

 

When coming out! I should have laughed, or slapped him to make him understand where he was. I did nothing. I was already indifferent. If he wanted to escape, to die gunned down on the electrified fence, that was his choice, and I didn’t want to know.

 

Aaken got lost more often in his private world. Walked as in a dream, and if another prisoner stole his food, he said nothing. He started to mumble words like “the forces” or “the power”. I tried to help him more than once, gave him a spoonful of gruel, protected him from the bullies.

 

He was close to the end, I realized. I didn’t try to dissuade him from doing something rash. What for? Some today, some tomorrow, we were all going to die, and it was his own life to lose. I only warned him not to do something stupid, like setting fire to the barrack. That would have been immediate extermination, to all of us, senseless. Perhaps, perhaps some of us would survive. Who knows? Hope is what kept us alive. That, and hate.

 

‘Yes,’ he confessed to me. ‘I’m thinking of escaping, but in a manner that nobody will be able to follow me, not the guards, not the dogs.’

 

His mouth trembled and his eyes were like embers. He had lost much weight and his skin hung in the neck like a turtle’s. In all, he had entered the camp four or five months earlier. I didn’t remember exactly

 

Aaken looked around, turning his head in small jerks. He came closer and whispered ‘I made contact. The gate is open. There are many levels, and I don’t know what’s on the other side, but if I stay here another day I’m lost.’

 

He stopped, looking at me with suspicion, as if deciding whether to continue or not.

 

‘I’m going to paint! That’s certain. How I am going to paint!’

 

His voice was shaky. He was mad, of course. I tried to put a hand on his shoulder but he turned away. Suddenly he was afraid of me. And I was afraid of him. We separated.

 

I don’t blame him. We were all afraid, in the camp.

 

Aaken went into the barrack and the next morning did not appear. Nobody saw him going out, and no attempt to escape had taken place. The Germans would have liquidated all of us right away, but then they found a corpse lying in a corner. It had the same number tattooed on the arm, but I swear he was not Aaron van Aaken.

 

A few days after that, the Americans came and the nightmare ended. Those left alive, we separated. Some returned to their towns, others, like me, made our way to Israel. We tried to forget all that had happened. Some times, however, before sleep came, I thought of Aaken and his drawings, and tried to imagine how he could have escaped, and where he was now.

 

Last Summer I returned to Europe for the first time. I had retired from my work, accountant in a factory, and decided to make a long journey and see something of the world before leaving it. I joined a group, eighteen persons altogether. We started in Madrid, where we were taken to see the monuments, the Retiro, the Royal Palace, the Prado Museum.

 

As we walked along the dark corridors, the rooms filled with gigantic pictures, I felt a premonition. I shivered. The place was depressing. I wanted to leave the group, but they pushed me forward, and then we entered a room and there, in a corner, was hanging a picture, not very large, that attracted me from afar, although others were blocking the view. I came closer, pushing aside the others, with my heart beating wildly, and there I stood with open mouth, looking at Aaken’s drawings, but now painted in brilliant oils, in full color.

 

There, in the light of infernal fire, were torturers and tortured, the chimneys, the grotesque beasts, the earth itself opening its maw to devour human flesh. All the degradation was in that picture, and at the side, the mindless people in their amusements, while the damned marched into the ovens.

 

I stood hypnotized, looking at the picture, I know not for how long. The group went on; I told them I would join them in the hotel. Nothing mattered to me; I just had to continue examining the picture. Then I looked at the name of the painter, in a small plate: Hieronymus Bosch, called El Bosco. There were two dates, 1450 with a question mark, and 1516. I asked the guard, who explained that the question mark meant that the exact date of birth was uncertain. The painting was called “The Garden of Delights”.

 

I asked to speak with somebody who could give me information about the painter. They were very helpful, and a young lady took me to the museum store, where I could buy a book about Bosch. Almost nothing is known about his life, only that he lived some 36 years in a town called Bois-le-Duc or s’Hertenbosch, in Holland, and that was the origin of his nickname. His real name was Van Aaken.

 

 

 

Leafing through the book, looking at the illustrations, I became convinced of the incredible fact. Van Aaken had really escaped. He had made a pact with the “forces”, had gone back in time five hundred years, and had painted, as he wanted. How he had painted, with desperation, with frenzy, wanting to disclose what was forbidden to say clearly, trying to warn the world about what was to be expected, trying to redeem his soul with his brush.

 

Perhaps he succeeded. I wish him well.