The Book of Dirt

by Bram Presser

  Long after the latest train had been emptied, after most of the women had given up and turned back, Daša lingered at the fence, the hum of electric current charming the hairs on her arm, and waited for Bohuš. The men from the Kanada kommando stood on the ramp with mountains of bags, hauling them onto carts and trucks. She spotted him, watched as he ducked away under the guise of collecting more bags. He came close, tossed a small package wrapped in cloth over the fence. ‘Your father sends his love.’

  ‘And Auntie Gusta?’ she said. ‘Still no word?’

  ‘Look.’ He pointed beyond the wire to the far end of the camp. ‘For a while everyone sent from the fortress was there. Now they are gone. I didn’t want to tell you before. I’m sorry.’

  After the first week, Daša thought about home. She must write to her mother. For days she had been composing the letter in her head. My dearest golden Mummy…

  Paper: three bread rations.

  Pencil: a stick of mouldy butter.

  Delivery: she had yet to consider her options.

  Daša sat on the furthest hole in the latrines, facing the wall, scribbling furiously. When the lead grew blunt, she bit at the surrounding wood, refashioned the point. Her life, here, on two small pages. In each word, her own mortality, that of Irena, their father. She omitted nothing, just to be sure.

  She read it over, pictured her mother holding it. It was not goodbye, but if it was, it would be enough. She folded the paper, stood and headed back to the barracks. A figure loomed at the door, blocking the way.

  ‘Mischlinge!’ The Slovak stood with her hand out. ‘The paper.’

  At the evening roll call, she was ordered to step forward. An officer stood, rigid, shielding the letter from the rain. Daša dared not look around. Twelve hundred eyes bored into her back.

  ‘Who here can translate this? Step forward now or nobody eats.’

  The Slovak waded into the group, pushed one of the girls to the front. Daša did not recognise her.

  ‘Czech?’

  ‘Jawohl.’

  ‘Read it.’

  The girl scanned the letter, drew a breath. ‘It say…’ she began in stilted German. ‘It say: My dearest gold Mother. I am moved away from Terezín, off east.’ The girl looked up at Daša. ‘We have long train ride together. Here I am…healthy. Sister too. It is big place with many of…’ A pause. ‘Many of friends. Do not be fear for me. We are treating us well. We have big food and warm bed. I am waiting for chance to work again and I write you soon to tell about it. I miss you very much, dearest Mother, and also family. But I know’—the girl was barely looking at the page—‘soon we be together again. Please give to everyone big kisses that I love them and always am thinking of them. Your biggest daughter, Daša.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Crawling, crawling. Hands sinking into the mud. So close. If only…

  Daša woke from dreams of electric wire. Her ears were throbbing. The taste of metal on her engorged tongue. It was coming back to her, the beating, the horsewhip, black, polished boots. Her head filled with Irena’s desperate howls. For a moment she caught the Slovak, arms around her sister, holding Irena back. A jolt—the ring was gone—but Daša could not break free of her delirium, could not sit up. Through puffy slits she could just make out a figure standing above her, observing. The face was warm, caring. It did not belong in this place. ‘Try to drink,’ it said. She looked at the glass, at the liquid they called coffee, and closed her eyes. Not yet. It still hurt to breathe.

  The infirmary block was like all the others. Long, wooden, hollow. A home for dysentery, for typhoid. There was little medicine to speak of, only rest and the promise of a less disturbed sleep. The orderlies fussed over Daša, daubed at her wounds with dirty rags, scraped away the crusted blood. When her sister came, they busied themselves elsewhere, ignored the precious bounty she carried. There is a man who gives it to them, they whispered over soiled linen. Irena waited for them to move away, then leaned in close. ‘It’s okay,’ she said and lifted her tongue to reveal the golden band. ‘I have it.’

  Another week had passed.

  For three days she slept, oblivious to the bodies that climbed over her, the one that clung to her at night. She recognised her sister’s breath, the even flow of whispered stories of the lake at Sudoměřice. She was woken only for roll calls, when she stood in a trance while she was counted. Twice a day Irena held a metal rim to her mouth and she sipped. Small clumps of bread passed her lips on pinched fingers and she waited for them to dissolve.

  On the fourth day she stood up and headed to the cubicle near the front of the barrack. Her knuckles smarted against the flimsy wood. She did not wait for a reply, just turned the handle and stepped inside. The Slovak sat on a low bench, tearing at crusts of bread. A grunt.

  ‘The letter. You knew…’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But you…’

  ‘Tell me, mischlinge, to whom would you have given it? Your boyfriend in Kanada? It was a fool’s errand. You would have been killed for sure. The guards, they’d have taken your letter, taken your ring’—she registered the surprise in Daša’s face—‘and seen you shot for sabotage. As it was, you wrote a dream. You are a young girl. There is no harm in that. I knew you’d be punished, but not death. Not now. Things here have changed.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘She has been transferred to the main camp to work as a nurse. Now she eats, she has warm quarters. I don’t expect to hear from her again.’ The Slovak held out a piece of bread. Daša sat on the woman’s bunk and pocketed the crust.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘In this place, why anything? To protect myself. To save your friend. To help the little nurse. Because I, too, was a mother, a sister. Because I am hungry, bored. Because when this is over I want someone to remember that I was here, in this world. Listen up, mischlinge. Tomorrow there will be a special selection. A flax mill in Silesia has purchased two hundred of you to replace the boys they’ve sent to the front, and for some reason they want only Czechs. They are sending a foreman to interview possible workers. When they call for volunteers at the roll call, be sure to step forward. Take your sister. Remember, you are weavers. Your family are weavers. All you have ever known is weaving.’

  The next morning, Daša was ready. She had stood before the man, told him of their mother, her millinery. He asked about fabrics, material, machinery. Yes, she said, she was familiar with them. Her sister even more so. Her head filled with the voice of Pan Durák, the way he spoke of clothes as living beings, and his words became hers. The man tested her with numbers, seemed satisfied with the answers. When it was over he jotted something in his notebook and thanked her for her time. The kindness in his words was jarring.

  She waited to hear their numbers at the next roll call, but there was no selection and her heart grew heavy. Snow tumbled from the blackened clouds, the colour of midnight. Irena looked at her, anxious. ‘Maybe they haven’t decided,’ she said. They lined up again in the evening. When the counting was done a different man stepped forward. ‘If you are called, approach.’ He read the list with indifference and she watched the women step forward. More than fifty, sixty, seventy. Then her number. And Irena’s. Daša looked for the Slovak but she had returned to the barracks.

  In rows of five, one hundred women march along the road in the direction of the forest. They follow the path between the ruins of Krema IV and the belching stack of Krema V until they reach the Sauna block. They recognise it in the fading light, see in it hope for what is to come: the water scalds, a welcome fire. As they file out, dripping, naked, they are thrown new dresses and shoes, ill-fitting but clean. Wind whips through the trees, lashing the fabric to their skin. They march onwards, past the Kanada Barracks and come to a stop beside Krema III. There they stand throughout the night, until the dawn comes, and with it, the shape of a third-class train.

  Behind the wire, inmates stumble from barracks for the morning roll call. Sh
e watches them flock into the muddy fields, gather in rows as she makes her way down the ramp towards the train. She is leaving this world, will never speak of it. As she nears the carriage door, her eye catches a lonely figure standing by the fence. In his face she sees her own, her sisters’. She pulls at Irena’s arm, points in the man’s direction. He brings his fingertips to his lips. They do not see his tears, of joy, of relief, of farewell.

  10

  SACHSENHAUSEN

  She watched him leave the Family Camp from behind the wire. He marched in step, turning to catch one last glimpse. Then another. Take it, she had said, holding out the stale crust. He snatched it greedily from her fingers, felt his hand brush against hers. Little more than bone. She cried while he ate and he began to mutter, Sorry…sorry. She wiped away a tear and ran her tongue along the shimmering trail it left on her wrist. No, she said. Eat. Just eat. He felt it crumble in his dry mouth. He sucked on the crumbs and waited for the flow of saliva. It isn’t true, that the body cannot forget. It had been like this for weeks, since the day they were scheduled to die. He could feel his throat tense, a memory of swallowing. The bread stung as it tumbled through him. Sorry, he said again. His voice, hoarse.

  It had come at last, the day they’d been expecting. Dawn. The camp filled with soldiers. He was told to report to the schoolroom. Block 31. He stood in line, stripped to the waist, as the doctor made his way across the room. A pinch. A prod. The thin skin on his arm puckered, unable to settle outwards. He flattened it back with his palm. By the afternoon he had received new orders. Prepare yourself, the man had said. You are moving on. He ran to her with the news, but she was not coming. She was old, weak, a woman. She had not even been examined. Please, she had said. Don’t remember me like this. He marched away in the early light. How could he leave her? Outside the gate a truck was waiting. Georg marched beside him, almost unrecognisable but for the rhythm in his step.

  She stood against the wire, still. As he stared at her, in a flash, her skin dried out and cracked, her body atrophied, and creeping wisps of earth sprouted from the ground to fill the spaces. The sky was empty above them. An engine turned and sprang to life. Puffs of black smoke. He stepped up onto the truck. It was the last he would see of his mother: a pillar of dirt.

  From afar: Jakub. Jakub, please…They’re evacuating the camp.

  He lay in a shroud that might have been his father’s tallis, drifting in the darkness. The sounds of purgatory, uncertain yet reassuring, floated past his sinking grave. His eyes were glued shut, his skin torn open. He had come apart but was somehow whole again. He remembered the skies filling with the shriek of impending hellfire while he staggered forward. Sirens, growing louder, pushing him into the field. He turned towards shelter but was chased away with barks and snarls and the tips of bayonets. Metallic fists fell around him like hail. He watched the others, his comrades, disappearing in clouds of pink mist, their loads crashing to the ground and sinking into the dirt. For a moment he was flying. Then nothing.

  He woke to a stiff cocoon of hospital linen, surrounded by panes of shifting light, a constellation of swooping angels. Here. A hand slipped behind his head and pulled him forward. A lukewarm liquid splashed across his lips. Drink. The faint whistling continued inside his head from… from…It came back in fragments. Every day it was the same: sent into the fields to clear the rubble. The bombing was relentless and still the Schwarzheide plant churned on, synthesising fuel, fabricating hope.

  ‘Jakub! For God’s sake, listen. You have to get up. They’re moving us.’

  ‘Georg?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long have I…?’

  ‘Two days. The wound in your leg…’

  Jakub drew his arm up from under the sheet and rubbed at his eyes. Georg’s haggard face emerged. ‘The front is moving closer. They are evacuating the camp. At least if we walk there’s a chance…Here.’ Georg grabbed Jakub’s arm and slung it across his shoulder. ‘I’ll help you up.’ He braced his knee against the wooden bedframe.

  ‘Save your strength. I’m not coming.’ Jakub went limp, a dead weight. Georg heaved, twice, a third time, but grew tired from the effort. ‘There’s no point. I can’t walk.’

  ‘It is just an infection. Rest on my shoulders if you need. I’m not leaving you here.’

  ‘I’m not moving. This is the last place.’

  ‘Please Jakub…’

  ‘Don’t be an ox.’

  Jakub reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the small clay pellet that had been digging into his breast. ‘Do you remember Tadeusz?’

  Georg felt Jakub press the hardened dirt into his hand.

  ‘Take this, Georg. It will keep you safe on your march. And when you get home, when this is all over, take it to the bank of the Vltava, the one closest to where the Maharal rests, and bury it in the mud. Next time the creature wakes, let him rise with the force of our murdered souls.’

  ‘Come,’ Georg said with a smirk. ‘Your head we can fix later.’

  ‘Your father…This dirt, I couldn’t tell you…He swore me to…’

  ‘Jakub, I know. The book of dirt. I’ve heard it too. And many more. They made a fortress within a fortress, he and his friends, its ramparts built of legend. Those poor men, great sages one and all, cut down by circumstance. Any other time and it might have been different. But in that prison? What did they have but each other and the comfort of dreams?’

  ‘So I thought too. Until Tadeusz…’

  ‘Killed in a cloak of dust. It’s tempting, of course. To ascribe it to a clay man. But I’m afraid whoever killed that brute was all too human. Who didn’t want him dead? And coming upon him in the act with that poor Flusser boy. Some horrors even the devil won’t abide.’

  Still, Georg closed his hand around the clay. After the bomb had fallen, after he had watched Jakub hurtling through the air in a spray of dirt like a discarded doll, after the silence had passed, Georg rushed across to mourn his friend, to stand over his broken body and utter the words he wished he could have said for his parents, his brothers, all his people: Blessed is the true judge. He had crouched to kiss Jakub’s forehead, a final goodbye, but instead felt the warm rush of air from between his friend’s lips. The soil had turned to peat in the blast, wrapping around Jakub and cushioning his fall. Georg reached down and helped Jakub to his feet. They stood at the bomb crater’s edge and he brushed the dirt from Jakub’s clothes. The blast had ripped a hole in the fabric at his calf, a gorge of open flesh filled with bloody loam. ‘I’ll get you to the hospital.’

  The doctor cleaned it, poured in alcohol and sewed the wound together. ‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘The mud staunched the flow.’ The following day, Georg helped Jakub hobble back to the site and watched as his friend sifted through the earth until he found a single hardened piece of clay unlike all the rest. They returned to news of liquidation: Schwarzheide was to be emptied. They would have to walk. Those willing to work would be exempted and transported by truck to Sachsenhausen, the main camp in the north. Jakub stepped forward, careful to look steady on his feet. Georg stayed back a moment, then joined him. But there was no work to be done at the other camp. Jakub and Georg waited in their new barracks, lost among the sea of unfamiliar faces. Jakub scratched at the wound, felt the molten lava of sepsis throb beneath his skin. Three days after they arrived, Jakub collapsed outside the barracks.

  ‘Georg?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go. Please.’

  Jakub turned to the wall and rested his face against the straw pillow. His eyes grew heavy.

  A shock of blonde hair and the girl was gone. He chased her through a paper city, the ground tearing beneath his feet. All around him towers of books lurched in the storm. In the distance, he could make out the roar of an open furnace. She was leading him on towards the darkness. He ran blindly, panicked. He stopped to catch his breath, bent over. When he looked up he saw that the street had changed. The smell of smoke, ash, stripped of the sickly sweetness
of burnt flesh, drifted from the city’s glowing edge. The street shrank as the towers staggered inwards to consume him. At their foundations he saw the bent forms of old friends—Langer, Muneles, Jakobovits—a band of crumpled Atlases, their faces twisting under the weight. He jerked forward, tried to push his way through as they closed in around him, but it was too late. He was in the room again, in the old converted barn, at a desk sifting through the dirt he had found inside a weathered prayer book. They sat in their assigned spots, soldiers of clay, going about their duties. A blizzard of white cards blew around the room, each one streaked with crusted filth. He looked down to the pile before him and could see it pulsing to an irregular beat. From within, laughter, the forgotten sound of carelessness, of freedom. Then, the sound of his name. He thrust his hand into the dirt and sent it spilling onto the floor. He kept digging, throwing aside muddy clumps, filling the room around him. The laughter grew louder with each fistful. Soon the hole was deep enough for him to reach inside with his arm. He felt around, surprised at the warmth, until his finger caught on something: a delicate tripwire. He tugged at it. Nothing. Again. Propping his other arm against the desk’s flat surface for leverage, he grasped at the thread and pulled it out of the hole. It was shorter than he had expected and coated in earth. He ran the thread between his lips and wiped it clean. It hung limply between his fingers: a single, delicate strand of blonde hair.

  Jakub R held it to his breast and waited for death.

  11

  PRAGUE

  25/XII.44

  Our golden beloved mother

  I have just had lunch and got up to write to my dears. I am writing this in such a lovely room, that is the toilet. Today is Christmas Day and I remember how you visited us last year. At the time, of course, we indeed did not think that we would still not be home this year. However, already next year we will certainly be home and make up then for the whole of the three years.