Making it up to ease the pressure of reality

Fiction: On reaching the age of 50, the narrator of this heartbreaking, unforgettable and devastating book recalls: "I knew where I was going with my life, so all that was left was to figure out where I had come from. I went round the archives, visited the museums, brought books home from the library."

It is a story about the determined retrieval of the past. The narrator is a single man, a teacher, conscious of being surrounded by ghosts bearing names he has forgotten, faces he never saw.

His family was part of the contingent of Serbian Jews rounded up during the summer of 1942 and gassed to death, not in a chamber specially constructed for the job, but in the back of an innocuous-looking sealed truck. Death took these victims by surprise; neat, efficient and very brutal.

David Albahari was born in Serbia in 1948 and lives in Canada. His book, which was first published in Belgrade in 1998, is a war memoir like no other. It is also an investigation and a heartfelt lament, a search for "vanished cousins". A simple remark - "it is terrible to live in history, and even more terrible to live outside it" - becomes a refrain of sorts. The facts are familiar enough, given the appalling record of war and destruction.

Lives were abruptly stopped by a vicious extermination policy marked by inhuman cruelty and grotesque efficiency. The narrator begins to reconstruct events, pursuing the missing and allowing them to live out their final hours, their last moments, while he relives the fear.

Yet although the facts are horrific, and the story outrageous, the genius of the narrative lies in its telling. Albahari's narrator, eloquent in his despair, is himself a study in numbed grief. We are given the portrait of a solitary man, no longer young and suffering twinges, including a sore ear the lobe of which he has taken to stroking. Aware of his mortality, he is intent on recreating something which is beyond his experience, though within his awareness.

The unrelenting tone of his narrative is one of sustained horror filtered through surreal comedy and bitter fury. The more he discovers, the more he pieces together, the greater his grief becomes and the sharper his irony. There is also an almost scientific dimension to the book, as the narrator frequently attempts to make sense of the horror with the lucid curiosity of one peering through a microscope.

If ever a translator has most brilliantly caught the voice of the original writer, Ellen Elias-Bursac appears to have done so. She has made it possible to feel privy to the author's voice, that of a man in pain confronting a past that he never actually lived. Reading this book is to engage directly with both author and narrator, the story being told in a deadpan, angry if numbed delivery which holds the attention until the final sentence, itself an act of painful rebellion.

In order to make sense to himself of the litany of outrage, the narrator confesses to having created two characters, Götz and Meyer, two soldiers entrusted with the job of killing ("Having never seen them, I can only imagine them"). Imagine them he does, with a chilling attention to detail, particularly the human detail of the lives he gives them. For him, these men, are both one reality and two distinct beings. They could have been German, or maybe they were Austrian:

In twosomes like theirs, one is usually taller, the other shorter, but since both were SS non- commissioned officers, it is easy to imagine they were both tall, perhaps the same height . . . One of the two, or so witnesses claim, came into the camp, played with the children, picked them up, even gave them chocolates.

From the opening page, the narrator makes it clear that he has spent long hours in the company of these two men, imagining them and the reality of their everyday existence. The two are interchangeable - Albahari makes effective use of a clever device, often writing "Götz or Meyer" ("Meyer or Götz").

But they are evoked as individuals, not caricatures. The narrator imagines:

Götz, or Meyer, had always wanted to be a fighter pilot. I have no proof whatsoever that this was what he dreamed of, but I find the thought appealing that he'd step up into the cab of his truck as if sliding into the cockpit of a bomber, wearing a leather jacket, but not a pilot's cap because that would have been a little awkward with his fellow traveller sitting there.

The narrator wonders about them: "Did Götz and Meyer have nicknames?"

He imagines the twosome, these tough soldiers, one married, the other not, both proud of their Saurer truck, their shared instrument of death. They polish it and tend it and are distressed when its axle breaks. Whichever soldier happens to be the married one might have a little daughter, she could have a cough and he might be very worried about it. Yet his daily business - whatever about giving chocolate to the children in the camp - is about being part of a killing team of two soldiers who drive a truck that does the job for them.

The narrator imagines what it is like to be gassed to death - "now I might be in the back of the Saurer, and the longer I held my breath, the longer I'd be able to preserve my soul. How long can a person hold his breath? Half a minute, one minute, two? . . . Götz and Meyer wouldn't care for this frequent mention of souls, as I have said before. According to them, a person is a sack, and when everything is shaken out of the sack, it is over. All that is left is the rag, and rags are no good for anything".

Every word, each sequence of the text carries immense resonance:

Sometimes, when they'd clean out the truck in the yard of the police station, Götz and Meyer would find odds and ends: a child's shoe, a comb, a blurred photograph, a crust of bread, a handkerchief, a nail file, a brooch. Götz, or Meyer, would drop these things into a paper bag: Meyer, or Götz, preferred not to touch them. Nothing sadder than things without owners, even he knew that . . .

At one point, the narrator asks: "How old were Götz and Meyer? One more question I can't answer." His quest for information becomes an obsession that follows him into the classroom. He tells his students we'll be sorry "if we ever stop telling stories because if we do, there will be nothing to help us sustain the pressure of reality, to ease the burden of life on our shoulders". He reports how his class stopped as one and looked up at him, asking: "Isn't life a story?" To which he answers: "No, life is the absence of story." He imagines his two soldiers discussing life: "I was thinking of life, Meyer announced, or was it Götz?, and shrugged in his attempt to get rid of a cloud of midges and mosquitoes. It is more precious, he added, than you think, much more precious, believe me, I know what I'm talking about."

In writing this sequence Albahari is attempting to give these men, or at least one of them, a sense of the shared horror. Later, he imagines them as old men, pondering their complicity, or perhaps giving it no thought at all. Many powerful books have been written about war, all wars; the crimes, the victims, the legacies and this stark, marvellous work is yet another which revisits the horrors, the sadness and the anger while also offering a fresh eloquence, a new profundity and a rare sense of what it is like to be human and to have been left with the loss, the legacy and that burning rage.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times