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wakes it up, knowing, like a humming bird flying backwards, where to find Marisa, open and defenceless and selfless and needy and warm and hospitable and familiar, and inhabits her body as if it were a house, and he lets desire take control of him and his heart sinks and he cries, and in the distance machine guns rattle.

6
    In Once, the Jewish quarter of Buenos Aires, after the shops have pulled down their shutters, the pavements overflow with left-over fabrics, rolls of cardboard and other unwanted material thrown out by the shop-keepers. Men, women and children dig through the waste, fishing out anything useful or anything that can be sold to the recycling plant for a few coins per kilo. Such enterprising families manage to survive by sifting through other people’s rubbish. Thus the police in the Seventh district receive their bribes not as protection money but for turning a blind eye to this practice.
    Rich Jewish families have begun a slow but irreversible exodus: they keep their businesses in Once but prefer to live in Barrio Norte or Belgrano, districts of greater social prestige. The elderly are left behind, in once luxurious buildings of the Golden Age, the founders of the fortunes that now pay for huge flats overlooking Libertador Avenue, holidays in Punta del Este, imported cars and private education at supposed British schools. The younger generation never loses sleep worrying about how to scrimp and save; indeed they revel in flaunting their wealth. Children of affluence, who never experienced the privations of the war, the miseries of
the pogroms , the phantasmagoria of the concentration camps, they are busy acting grand. They think good living means spending more. There are quite a few exceptions. Elías Biterman is one of them.
    This is one of those moments of dead time in Biterman’s life. He tries to avoid these empty hours. They are the flanks used by the occupying forces of his memory to attack the haven that is his life in the present. His mind wanders back to when he was very young, crowded together with hundreds of fellow Jews in a caged train, watched over by SS soldiers with machine guns. The train crossed the countryside without stopping at stations, Polish Catholics greeting the passing convoy with chants about Zyklon B and crematorium ovens. They were headed for a concentration camp near Oswiecim , christened Auschwitz by the Nazis. When he read the sign above the gate, Arbeit macht frei, and saw the state of the prisoners, he knew he would have to escape as soon as possible, while he still had the strength and the will to try.
    His father, Shlomo, a survivor of the Ukrainian pogroms , had been alert to what was going on in Germany in the Forties. By lining the pockets of an official at the embassy, he managed to obtain Argentine passports for him and his wife.
    Years earlier, during the depression, Shlomo had rescued Heinz Schultz from poverty. Shlomo gave him food, work and board without asking for much in return, until Schultz was tempted by the most patriotic of callings: a position as a guard at Auschwitz. Before leaving a Germany adorned with the ubiquitous swastika, Shlomo got in touch with Heinz and gave him a bundle of Reichsmarks and the promise of more if he facilitated Elías’s escape.

    Schultz shared the money with his colleagues and one night Elías was pulled out of the stalag barrack where he was kept . The rest of the prisoners, accustomed to people being taken away and never coming back, lamented his ill luck and shamefully rejoiced in their own relief. Elías was hidden in the false floor of a provisions truck and taken to a nearby wood. There, the driver took his photo alongside a smiling Schultz. When Elías saw his captors’ hands move towards their holsters, he didn’t hesitate. He punched Schultz on the nose with all his might and set off running into the forest, into the night, weaving between the trees as they lit up with the flash of gunshot. Not all the bullets