On our return from Saspe Cemetery, we found new tenants in Mother Truczinski’s flat. They were nice enough people and offered to take us in until we had found something else, but Mr. Fajngold refused to countenance such overcrowding and said we could have the bedroom of the ground-floor flat, he could manage for the present with the living room. To this arrangement Maria objected, feeling that it would not be right in her recently widowed state to live at such close quarters with a gentleman alone. At the time Fajngold was unaware of being a gentleman alone, but Luba’s energetic presence made it easier in a way for him to appreciate Maria’s arguments. For Luba’s sake as well, they would make a different arrangement, he would turn the cellar over to us. He even helped us to rearrange the storeroom, but he would not let me move into the cellar, for I was sick, a poor sick child, and so a bed was set up for me in the living room, beside my poor mama’s piano.

It was hard to find a doctor. Most of the doctors had left with the troops, because in January the medical insurance fund had been evacuated westward and patients had become exceedingly rare. After a long search, Mr. Fajngold managed to scare up a lady doctor from Elbing, who was amputating at the Helene Lange School, where wounded from the Wehrmacht and the Red Army lay side by side. She promised to look in, and four days later she actually did. She sat down by my sickbed, smoked three or four cigarettes in a row while examining me, and on the last cigarette fell asleep.

Mr. Fajngold was afraid to wake her up. Maria gave her a timid poke. But the lady doctor didn’t wake up until her cigarette burned down and singed her finger. She stood up and stamped out the butt on the carpet. She spoke tersely in a tone of nervous irritation: “You’ll have to excuse me. Haven’t closed an eye in three weeks. I was in Käsemark with a trainload of children from East Prussia. Couldn’t get the kids on the ferry. Only took troops. Four thousand kids. All blown to pieces.” There was the same terseness in the way she stroked my cheek. Thrusting a fresh cigarette into her face, she rolled up her left sleeve and took an ampoule out of her briefcase. While giving herself a shot in the arm, she said to Maria: “I can’t tell you what’s the matter with the boy. Ought to be in a hospital, but not here. You’ve got to get away. To the West. The joints of his wrists, knees, and shoulders are swollen. It’s bound to attack his brain in the end. Make him cold compresses. I’m leaving you a few pills in case the pain prevents him from sleeping.”

I liked this terse lady doctor, who didn’t know what was wrong with me and admitted as much. In the few weeks that followed, Maria and Mr. Fajngold made me several hundred cold compresses which soothed me, but didn’t prevent my knee, wrist, and shoulder joints, and my head as well, from swelling and aching. What horrified Maria and Mr. Fajngold the most was my swelling head. She gave me the pills, but they were soon gone. He began to plot fever curves, took to experimenting with pencil and ruler, constructed bold fantastic shapes round my temperature, which he took five times a day with a thermometer obtained on the black market in exchange for synthetic honey. My fever chart looked like a mountain range with terrifying chasms—I thought of the Alps, the snowy peaks of the Andes. In reality, there was nothing so fantastic about my temperature: in the morning I usually had a hundred and five-tenths; by evening it had risen to something over a hundred and two and the most I ever had during my period of growth was a hundred and two point seven. I saw and heard all sorts of things in my fever; I was riding a merry-go-round, I wanted to get off but I couldn’t. I was one of many little children sitting in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on dogs, cats, pigs, and stags, riding round and round. I wanted to get off but I wasn’t allowed to. All the little children were crying, like me they wanted to get out of the fire engines and hollowed-out swans, down from the backs of the cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, they didn’t want to ride on the merry-go-round any more, but they weren’t allowed to get off. The Heavenly Father was standing beside the merry-go-round and every time it stopped, he paid for another turn. And we prayed: “Oh, our Father who art in heaven, we know you have lots of loose change, we know you like to treat us to rides on the merry-go-round, we know you like to prove to us that this world is round. Please put your pocket-book away, say stop, finished, fertig, basta, stoi, closing time—we poor little children are dizzy, they’ve brought us, four thousand of us, to Käsemark on the Vistula, but we can’t get across, because your merry-go-round, your merry-go-round…”

But God our Father, the merry-go-round owner, smiled in his most benevolent manner and another coin came sailing out of his purse to make the merry-go-round keep on turning, carrying four thousand children with Oskar in their midst, in fire engines and hollowed-out swans, on cats, dogs, pigs, and stags, round and round in a ring, and every time my stag—I’m still quite sure it was a stag—carried us past our Father in heaven, the merry-go-round owner, he had a different face: He was Rasputin, laughing and biting the coin for the next ride with his faith healer’s teeth; and then he was Goethe, the poet prince, holding a beautifully embroidered purse, and the coins he took out of it were all stamped with his father-in-heaven profile; and then again Rasputin, tipsy, and again Herr von Goethe, sober. A bit of madness with Rasputin and a bit of rationality with Goethe. The extremists with Rasputin, the forces of order with Goethe. The tumultuous masses round Rasputin, calendar mottoes with Goethe … until at length the merry-go-round slowed down—not because my fever subsided, but because a soothing presence bent down over my fever, because Mr. Fajngold bent over me and stopped the merry-go-round. He stopped the fire engines, the swan, and the stag, devaluated Rasputin’s coins, sent Goethe back to the Mothers, sent four thousand dizzy little children floating off to Kasemerk, across the Vistula, to the kingdom of heaven—and picked Oskar up from his sickbed, and lifted him up on a cloud of Lysol, that is to say, he disinfected me.

It started on account of the lice and then became a habit. He first discovered the lice on little Kurt, then on me, Maria, and himself. The lice had probably been left behind by the Kalmuck who had taken Matzerath from Maria. How Mr. Fajngold yelled when he discovered them. He summoned his wife and children; the whole lot of them, he suspected, were infested with vermin.

Then, having bartered rolled oats and synthetic honey for different kinds of disinfectant, he took to disinfecting himself, his whole family, Maria, and myself every single day. He rubbed us, sprayed us, and powdered us. And while he sprayed, powdered, and rubbed, my fever blazed, his tongue wagged, and I learned about the whole carloads of carbolic acid, lime, and Lysol that he had sprayed, strewn, and sprinkled when he was disinfector in Treblinka Concentration Camp. Every day at 2 p.m., in his official capacity as Disinfector Mariusz Fajngold, he had sprinkled Lysol on the camp streets, over the barracks, the shower rooms, the cremating furnaces, the bundles of clothing, over those who were waiting to shower, over those who lay recumbent after their showers, over all that came out of the ovens and all who were about to go in. He listed the names, for he knew them all. He told me about Bilauer, who one hot day in August had advised the disinfector to sprinkle the camp streets with kerosene instead of Lysol. Mr. Fajngold had taken his advice. And Bilauer had the match. Old Zev Kurland of the ZOB had administered the oath to the lot of them. And Engineer Galewski had broken into the weapons room. Bilauer had shot Hauptsturmführer Kutner. Sztulbach and Warynski got Zisenis by the throat; the others tackled the guards from Trawniki Camp. Some were electrocuted cutting the high-tension fence. SS Sergeant Schopke, who had always made little jokes while taking his protégé’s to the showers, stood by the camp gate shooting. But it didn’t help him, they were all on top of him at once: Adek Kave, Motel Levit, and Henoch Lerer; Hersz Rotblat and Letek Zegel were there too, and Tosias Baran with his Deborah, And Lolek Begelmann shouted: “What about Fajngold? Got to get him out of here before the planes come.” Mr. Fajngold was waiting for Luba, his wife. But even then she had stopped coming when he called her. So they seized him left and right, Jakub Gelernter on the left side, Mordechaj Szwarcbard on the right. And in front of him ran little Dr. Atlas, who, in the camp at Treblinka and later in the woods round Vilna, had recommended a thorough sprinkling with Lysol and maintained that Lysol is more important than life. This Mr. Fajngold could corroborate, for he had sprinkled the dead, not one corpse but many, why bother with figures; he had sprinkled dead men and dead women with Lysol and that was that. And he knew names, so many that it became tedious, that to me who was also swimming in Lysol the question of the life and death of a hundred thousand names became less important than the question of whether life and, if not life, then death, had been disinfected adequately and on time with Mr. Fajngold’s disinfectants.