The Birthday Buyer Read Online Free

his chest as long as he could, even hid him until the SS ran off, still whimsically killing as they drove along in their cars.
    Hiding that body wasn’t difficult.
    Hurbinek clutches one of his fingers. Henek tries to play a kind of game and tries to prop Hurbinek up, but he can’t support himself. His little body hardly takes up a third of the bunk under his blanket. His badly shaven head spotted with sores is visible, and under the blanket his lungs can be made out, going up and down, but then there’s nothing, as if there was no more body beyond that small thorax. His skinny legs seem crushed, non-existent, artificial.
    Hiding such a body isn’t difficult.

4

    “Hurbinek was a nobody,” writes Primo Levi, “a child of death, a child of Auschwitz.”
    When they asked Henek about that child, he invented a new story every time. He’s my brother, he’d say, or he is the son of a Russian woman I met a year ago, he’d say, or the son of a man who just died and who left him to me, he’d say, another Hungarian like me.
    Hurbinek’s voice was almost inaudible. Its sounds were all mixed up with his asthmatic gasps as he panted and tried to breathe. Henek discerned the word Hurbinek in that timid, faint death rattle, repeated time and again, as if it were all he could say. Those syllables took shape on his parched lips, hur-bi-neck. That’s his name, Henek said, an affirmation to inject greater realism into the stories he was inventing about the origins of that kid who clung on to life and defeated death. He’s with me, Henek always added, as if he were still afraid someone might try to snatch him away. Henek wanted to look after Hurbinek. He had become his reason to live.
    I’m trying to be punctilious over the detail, I would hate to leave anything out now I have decided to give life to my small child. From my bed in Frankfurt I now see Hurbinek’s pale, terrified face, that ashen or gray earthy color people acquired in Auschwitz. I can see him now, I really can. I only have to close my eyes and touch my body underneath these sheets, in this hospital, to imagine the shape of Hurbinek’s body. My knee is enough. What would Hurbinek’s knee have been like? It is starting to obsess me. What
were
Hurbinek’s knees like? A tear at the end of my nail.

5

    I think Hurbinek lived just that length of time not to have memories, the time about which nobody could say I did such and such, went to such a place, felt such an emotion. Except for rare exceptions, all our memories begin
after
we are three, not before. That’s why I’m horrified to think that Hurbinek, with all his strength and desire to live, only experienced a pre-life, only lived a strange extension of his mother’s uterus. And yet all he lived in that time without memories was the permanent suffering, pain and fear that were his food, his playthings, the air he breathed.
    Henek soon gave up on the daily exercises to restore life to Hurbinek’s atrophied legs. It wasn’t about whether blood was circulating through them or not, or whether they’d frozen or not, and that was why it made no sense rubbing them as much as Henek did. He only managed to warm them slightly. His legs never grew, it was as simple as that. Perhaps as a result of some congenital failing or kind of torture, his legs were always spindly like that. His legs grew at a different pace, if what happened to Hurbinek can be graced by the word “growth.” Skinny, very skinny, limply hanging from his hips, without bones to join them to his hips, as if skin alone had joined them to his torso and they had then become dislocated and cut off from the rest of his body. Hurbinek’s legs were like a ragdoll’s. Henek was familiar with the circuses in Budapest during the city’s great summer fairs, and was reminded of those puppets hanging on strings manipulated by a puppeteer in a Punch and Judy show. Hurbinek’s legs were always very cold and his tiny, tiny feet were frozen and pretty.
    He’d