by Jáchym Topol
on a river of emotion
on a hillside without emotion
a tin sun
founds
a colony of terror
Pavel Zajíček
Look, I’ve got someone else’s scars, how did they get there?
Dorota Masłowska
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Author’s Acknowledgements
Translator’s Afterword
Also by Jáchym Topol from Portobello Books
Copyright
1
I’m on the run to the airport in Prague. Run, well, more like I’m walking along the roadside ditch, wrapped in a dizzying cloud, from my drinking.
I’ve been drinking a lot lately.
Now I’m walking along the highway. Every now and then I get down in the ditch and crawl so the cops won’t be able to spot me from their patrol car.
So they won’t catch me and ask me about the fire in Terezín.
Sometimes I throw myself down in the ditch, wedge myself in with my back pressed up against the dirt, and just stay there like that.
Little by little, I’m making my way to the airport in Prague.
There’s still some of Sara’s wine left in the bottle. I ate all the meat that they gave me.
At first I didn’t want to, but eventually I forced it down. I need the energy.
The moon’s almost full now.
The redbrick walls of Terezín are far behind me, the walls of my hometown.
The town that, as my dad used to say, was founded by the Empress Maria Theresa, since whose reign hundreds of thousands of soldiers from many an army have passed through its gates. The Empress Maria Theresa was fond of military parades, said my dad, a major of military music who loved the Terezín parades and their marching bands.
I’m walking along with my back to the town, all those enormous eighteenth-century buildings far behind me – storehouses for millions of bullets, stables for hundreds of horses, barracks for tens of thousands of men. I left, like all the defenders of the town left before me. The influx of soldiers to this town created for soldiers had come to a halt.
And, without an army, the town was falling apart.
They sold my goats, who used to graze on the grass inside the fortress walls.
Most of them.
My dad didn’t live to see it.
I’m one of the few who wanted to save Terezín.
My mum said she and my dad weren’t expecting it when I came into the world. She also used to say that it would’ve been just the most beautiful thing if I had stayed so tiny I could’ve hidden inside a thimble. I could’ve lived on peas, fought over drops of milk with the cat, and walked around wrapped in a little rag of cloth, her very own Tom Thumb.
At first it delighted me, how could it not?
But there was no avoiding it: I grew up the same as everyone else.
I no longer rejoiced when my dad went off to work with his baton in a red case painted with a yellow hammer and sickle and my mum sealed the windows and doors with pillows and blankets.
When I was very young, I’m told, I used to clap my little hands when my mum pushed the furniture away from the walls.
In the middle of all the cabinets and chests, the cupboards, overturned chairs, armchairs and the fancy divan, she created a safe hiding place, a nest for just the two of us.
I was overjoyed when my mum and I would huddle up close in our warm nest and hold each other till my dad came home and dragged us out of our safe place.
The world outside was huge and my mum refused to set foot in it.
As soon as I could, I started running away from her.
I’m not really sure how it happened, but one day I wrenched myself out of her grip, unwound myself from her sweet embrace, pushed away her outstretched arms, crawled under the divan, climbed over the armchair, tugged at the door handle, opened the door, and scooted out.
I joined the other kids, racing back and forth along the ramparts, falling down in the grass like we’d lost our senses, and getting back up and doing it all over again.
And Lebo! Everybody knew him, there was no way not to in Terezín.
Then there was also that business with my mum.
Lebo was her only friend. Oh, not like that, but he brought her flowers.
The aunts also took care of my mum.
She wouldn’t even leave our flat.
But whenever Women’s Day rolled around, or the anniversary of our liberation by the Soviet army, she could always count on Lebo to give her a huge bouquet of flowers he had picked under the ramparts, out of reach of my greedy goats. Even on Mother’s Day, which wasn’t celebrated under communism, he would secretly hand her a bouquet dusted with red from the town’s walls. Uncle Lebo always made sure to give my mum a bouquet.
Supposedly there was once a time when he and my mum actually talked, but I don’t remember it.
What I do remember is that she hardly spoke in the end.
All she ever wanted to do any more was curl into a ball and take up the smallest possible space, searching for a spot just big enough to take a breath, that was all she needed.
All of the kids in Terezín knew Uncle Lebo.
We used to think that he was called Lebo because of his long skull, which didn’t have a single hair poking out of it. We just assumed his real name was Lebka, which is Czech for skull, but Aunt Fridrich explained to me that when she was a girl in the concentration camp here during the war, she had hidden the newborn Lebo in a shoebox under her bunk, safely off in a corner of the room for condemned women and girls, and the way it was with his name, she said, was the bunkroom elder was a Slovak, and a midwife, as luck would have it, and when she delivered the baby she said, out loud but in a whisper, what everybody in the room was already thinking: Bude potichu, alebo ho udusíme – Either he’s quiet or we’ll suffocate him – and that Slovak word lebo became his name.
Giving birth and hiding a baby in the bunkroom wasn’t allowed, but the women hoped the Red Army was making its way to Terezín, and they turned out to be right.
None of my aunts, including Aunt Fridrich, was actually at the birth itself. It was overseen by older, experienced women, who are all dead now. If only my aunts hadn’t been so young, they could’ve told me who Lebo’s mum was, but who cares! The girl who had Lebo probably lost her life during the war. Maybe she went off on one of the last transports to the East, or maybe, like my aunts said, she met her end in a typhus grave. If she’d been caught giving birth illegally, it would’ve meant a bullet for her anyway, Aunt Fridrich explained.
But none of us took precautions! she said as she sat there reminiscing about the old days in Terezín, her gaze sliding along the walls of her tiny flat. Then the sound of suppressed laughter came bubbling up from her throat, until she burst out laughing, and Aunt Holopírek and Aunt Dohnal, who had also spent their youth in Terezín, laughed right along.
Lebo was our uncle, he was uncle to all the little tots in Terezín.
It was for him we combed the tunnels. Being small, we could fit into every sewer and drain, where the build-up of fence boards, washed out of the meadows by floods, sometimes made the water bulge in strange ways. Nothing rotted underground. The warning signs posted by the Monument staff were a joke, even a child’s hand could push them out of the way, and the bunkers in the outermost bastions had an irresistible charm.
It was great finding a hollow pipe, or an old cowshed just for yourself, a parapet out on the ra
mparts where nobody went much, with bottles and condoms lying around, and squeezing right into the corner, feeling the edges and curves of the walls.
My mum didn’t even want to let me go outside.
You should’ve stayed inside me, she used to say. What were you missing? She herself didn’t go out at all.
Crazy lady.
That’s the kind of thing my aunts, the old ladies from the neighbourhood, would say – Aunt Fridrich, Aunt Dohnal, Aunt Holopírek and the rest – when they got together and gabbed about my mother: It’s because of what happened! It isn’t her fault! She suffered like an animal!
My mum never went outside, she needed a room’s edges and corners behind her back, just a tiny space to breathe in was enough. Still, she didn’t die in the nuthouse, they never did take her away. Even after the time when she tied me up in the pantry so I couldn’t go to school, even after that and all the other times my mum didn’t want to let me out in the world, they didn’t lock her up. My mum was a martyr, in other words a war hero, so she could do just about anything she wanted, and even though she took her life when I went away to school, nobody dwelled on it or blackened her memory, and nobody said a word about it to my dad either, because he was a war hero too. There were lots of them in Terezín. Even Uncle Lebo, who gave my mum those huge bouquets, was considered a hero, including by the eggheads and the board of the Monument, and even though he was only born in Terezín during the war, so he was actually too young to remember any of it.
We were the last stubborn handful of defenders of Terezín, and Uncle Lebo was our leader. He had been born here, gone to school here, worked at the Monument here, then walked away from it, but most important, he collected objects.
Together with Uncle Lebo and Sara, who was the first person to come to us from the world, we founded the Comenium commune, our international school of healing for students from around the world.
Lea the Great, who showed up in Terezín right after Sara, was the one who came up with the name Comenium, after John Amos Comenius, the Czech educator known as ‘the teacher of nations’, who said that school should be play.
But the whole thing ended in ruins, not only that but in flames, and now I’m on the run to Prague.
Alex, from Belarus, arranged the trip for me.
He arranged it because I’m the only one with a head full of Lebo, Lebo and his plans, especially all the addresses and contacts that we milked for cash, and I’ve got it all hidden away on a flash drive, a teeny-tiny techno thingamajig I call the Spider.
Lebo is unique because he’s the only person on earth who was not only born in Terezín but spent his entire life there.
Lebo had a passion for everything connected with Terezín – not so much its glorious military past but its horrifying wartime history. He spent dozens of years gathering objects and collecting the contacts that would help him save the town. And he turned the contacts over to me, so we could milk them for money to support the Comenium.
You see, Lebo insisted that Terezín be preserved whole. Not just its tunnels, bunks, cellars, and words scratched on walls, but its life and all its inhabitants too: the greengrocer’s, the laundry, the cookshop, and all of the people who worked in them.
I knew every one.
Lebo didn’t want to see Terezín reduced to a Monument and a few educational trails. None of us wanted that.
So now I’ve got the Spider with all Lebo’s contacts tucked away in my pocket, clenched in my hand.
And because I’ve got the Spider, I’ve got somewhere to go. Alex arranged it. He wants me to come and help him in his country. He wants to carry out Lebo’s plan in Belarus.
Now I’m walking through a night full of sounds, the hum of cars zooming down the highway to Prague. I walk along the ditch by the roadside, sit down, make myself comfortable. Back pressed up against the dirt, I dream.
In Terezín I used to walk the goats around the ramparts. As my little flock nibbled away at the grass, it increased not only the walls’ defensive strength but also their beauty. I often led the flock to the outermost walls, my honourable duty, as Dad would say. They were the first thing the delegations from Prague would see when they came to pay tribute to the Czech patriots tortured to death in the Small Fortress, and the Jewish prisoners tortured to death and otherwise slaughtered all over Terezín, or exported to the death camps in the East. Yes, these redbrick ramparts, the last ones you saw as you left Terezín and the first ones as you arrived from Prague, are the fortress town’s calling card, as my dad the major used to say, and that was why they were graced with a huge red banner that read WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NEVER OTHERWISE. Every now and then I would drive my goats all the way out there, to the outermost rampart.
But usually my flock grazed on the grass right beneath the walls, they loved the grass with the red dust that flaked off the bricks.
My dad was one of the liberators of Terezín. He came to the town during the last days of the war, met my mum, and ultimately made his name putting on military parades on the town square, a huge appelplatz built in the days of Maria Theresa.
I can still hear the sound of my dad’s marching band. When I was little and I would hide in my mum’s arms, walled in behind the carpet, the couch, the mirrors, the chairs, and all the rest of the furniture, breathing in the delicious smell of her neck, and later, when I ran away from her to the ramparts and the bunkers, to play with the other kids, and we would graze and bleat like goats, even then we could hear the marching band. As the littlest in Terezín it was one of our duties to lead the goats around the fortress walls, until my dad put an end to it and I went off to military school, where they were supposed to hammer even more military marches into me.
Most of my peers also went to military school, and the ones who didn’t have what it takes went into the auxiliary army at least, the girls as laundrywomen or cooks or whores, the boys as coachmen and sappers. The dumbest ones found work as attendants in the slaughterhouse, but I was the son of a major, so the auxiliary army was out of the question for me.
I wouldn’t have minded working at the slaughterhouse. I could’ve brought the old goats there. It was a stone’s throw from the ramparts, right by the graveyard, but I had to go away to school, and my mum died the very next day after I left. My aunts told me afterwards how it happened: coming home from band rehearsal, my dad carried out the routine he had learned to get into the flat when the furniture was all stacked up and pushed together to create a safe crevice for Mum, just big enough so she could breathe, but this time when my dad pressed down on the door handle he hanged her as she was kneeling down to take up the smallest space possible, that was her thing.
She was crazy! said Aunt Fridrich. It was that shock she got in the pit! said Aunt Holopírek. Poor child! said Aunt Dohnal as I wept into her apron. But I wasn’t a child any more, I was a military school deserter and there were punishments for that – the alley of brooms, the hog-tie, hundreds of squats, the staff’s contemptuous laughter at the crack of the hazel rod, and most of all stinking jail, military jail – but I didn’t give a damn, I just wanted to get home to my goats. I didn’t give a damn what the punishment was, and I was right, too. Nothing happened to me that time or any other time either. My dad was a major, after all.
He was unhappy with me for deserting, though, and he gave me a beating, which he paid for in the end.
My own unhappiness sprang from the fact that I had to study. Stumbling around shooting ranges, stuck in classrooms with huge windows that let in the weight of the world, I ran away whenever I had a chance, and even when I didn’t. I could squeeze my way out even if all the doors were sealed. I always managed to escape somehow, even when they locked me up, and I would make my way home, and they’d come and find me in a nook of the ramparts, where the boards and bricks came together to form a makeshift goat shed.
My dad knew that’s where I’d be.
And whoosh, straight back to school.
At school they forced me to learn
English, the language of our enemies, and Russian, the language of our friends. I studied constantly, surviving the weight of the world by not looking out the windows and keeping my eyes on my textbooks, scanning the pages up and down, propping myself up with my eyes. I made it through thanks to those languages, that’s the only thing I remember from school, and they were also the reason I became Lebo’s right-hand man, they were what made me useful in building the Comenium, so in fact I was carrying on my dad’s legacy. I was working on Terezín’s behalf, and as Lebo later explained to me, laying his enormous hand on my shoulder, in my own way I was defending the town. So maybe my father, in spite of our last argument, which he didn’t survive, would’ve been proud of me after all.
Maybe.
They threw me out of school in the end, even though my dad was a major. I wasn’t deemed fit for the army.
I went back to herding goats and I was happy. The other boys and girls had all grown up and there were no new little tots, so I was left on my own with the flock.
The goats in Terezín weren’t just a country pastime, or a way to make a living. Goats are the symbol of fortress towns, they’re biological war machines.
The goats cleared the weeds and grass and bushes from the passages through the ramparts, the weak spots in our fortifications. They may not have ranked with such wonders of technology as the Prussian cannon, the rounded bastion, the Tiger tank, the Katyusha rocket launcher, or any of the more recent artillery of the Cold War, but only the goats, with their greedy mouths and their endless consumption of grass, could keep the ramparts clean.
What good was all that advanced weaponry if a single determined foot soldier could creep through the weed-filled ditch to the city gates and blast open a hole with the most primitive bazooka?
Every fortress town falls if the goats disappear.
