by Jáchym Topol
You and your people need to step aside for now. Just for now!
Kagan’s spine stiffens. He’s furious.
I will explain! Arthur roars. Where is that girl from the ministry? Christ!
Maruška hasn’t moved from the spot.
How many millions were killed? he snaps at her.
Under the communists? she says meekly.
No, the Germans.
In 1941 the population of Belarus was 9.5 million, in 1945 it was only 5.2, Maruška recites.
Of course, Arthur snaps his fingers impatiently. And how many of the dead were Jews?
Maruška reaches into her satchel, pulls out a file and leafs through it.
Roughly, dammit! Screw the details, Arthur barks.
About a third, Maruška says. According to Wikipedia!
There we have it. Arthur bangs his fist on the table. That’s an awful lot, you understand? Now he’s talking to all of us, not just Kagan.
A third of the Devil’s Workshop money should go to Jewish victims.
That’s an awful lot. The president is concerned that our people won’t allow it.
Kagan is silent. All of us are.
You saw what they’re like, Arthur says. There’s no way to contain them. Simple people. Devoted to the president. They’ve never eaten so well. They’re not anti-Semites, God forbid, but they really believe that stuff about poisoned rats. He shrugs.
Kagan squeezes his fingers, his knuckles crack.
You need to find a way to explain to your people, Arthur tells Kagan. The president is appointing you head of the Committee for Coordination with Jewish Groups on the Devil’s Workshop Project. Fixed salary. Are you in?
I didn’t care how Kagan answered. I just sat there listening to the crackling wood. A few other modest little fires blazed around us. The partisans crawled into sleeping bags laid on top of beds of pine needles. The one in the red cap brought us blankets. I threw one over my shoulders. Nobody objected.
I open my eyes and see Alex lying on a bed of needles. Maruška’s hair is under his elbow, as red as the coals I was staring at as I fell asleep, thinking of her. What did I expect, though? They had come to us together. But back then I didn’t know she had kids. I certainly do now. My road to Maruška was at an end.
OK. I get up and walk away. Past the fire pit with the glowing logs. I steal into the forest and head for the broken asphalt road.
How far from here to Minsk? I’d walked from Terezín to Prague. But back then it wasn’t freezing. And there were cars going by.
Suddenly I hear the hum of an engine. I dive into the snow behind a tree and see them. The commander driving, Kagan beside him, arm around his shoulders. Singing, laughing, passing a bottle back and forth. Couldn’t thumb them down, obviously.
I try to walk through the forest, but the trees are too thick here. I sit down on a trunk, apparently felled by a storm, pull off my boots, take out the Spider. It only takes three tries, with the help of some wet snow, to get it down my throat. Now it’s inside me. That’s what I wanted.
I don’t have to wait long. Red Cap is the first to spot me, sneaking around with his Kalashnikov. He sees me, gives a whistle. The next thing I know, Alex is on top of me, throwing a noose around my neck. And we start back.
You amaze me, Alex says. This is a chance for you to continue what you started with Lebo. Don’t you think he’d be happy?
I don’t know, I say. But yeah, I’m glad they found me. In spite of the rope around my neck. The forest here makes me sick.
Are you nuts, trying to run away?
What should I tell him? That I’m used to crawling through catacombs, but this forest makes me want to throw up? That, yes, I helped Lebo, and had a crush on Sara, and Maruška too, oh well, but I don’t give a damn about his plans? He wouldn’t understand.
Hey, guess what we’ve got? Alex says. Duschegubky. Soul eaters. This is where they tested out the gas vans. We found two, if you can believe it. Rusted out, but the whole system is intact. The locals kept chickens in them.
Are you serious?
Yeah! You had two villages razed in Czechoslovakia, right? Lidice and that other one – Maruška would know the name. But they torched nine thousand here, some of them people and all. That was the Ost Plan, extermination of the Slavs. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like working on that.
He’s dragging me behind him. Too fast. The noose cuts into my neck. He stops.
Know what? Alex says. Hand over the archive and you can go wherever you want.
I look around the woods. Shake my head. There’s nowhere for me to go.
Where is it?
I try to say in the hotel, but I can’t, because of the noose.
You didn’t leave it in the hotel, Alex says. I already looked. Did some tidying up, too. They didn’t do a very good job of cleaning before you came! Sorry ’bout that, syabro! We sometimes work in that room. I bet you’ve got it on you, haven’t you? If I make you strip naked, you’re going to catch cold.
I keep my mouth shut.
You swallowed it, didn’t you? Alex laughs. Of course, what else? Well, let’s go, c’mon. He jerks the rope.
Where to? I rasp.
Khatyn. You can give me it there.
12
Maruška, you cute little decoy, leading all the other goats and goatlings under the knife. We’re driving along, sitting under a tarpaulin, Alex is across from me, Luis Tupinabi’s head in his lap. The old man’s eyes are closed, if his face didn’t twitch every now and then I’d think he was dead. We sit stiffly in the piercing cold. I look over at Maruška. I couldn’t be with the flock, or with Sara, or with you, or with anybody I wanted to be with, but here we are, riding together across this chilly land. Alex slaps his palm on the tarpaulin from outside. Don’t sleep, he shouts, we’re almost there! The sputtering tractor that’s towing our cart up the wooded slope is driven by my old friend Red Cap. A guy with glasses sits with us, Kalashnikov across his chest. We’ve long since left the asphalt, no ditch for me to hide in along these roads, trees all over the place like they’re standing watch.
I see a building, a small house, through the mist and light snow. We stop a little way past it, at a tent. The flap is open. Inside, a stove, and next to it, in the gloom – it seems everything here is either in the gloom or in the mist – a huddled figure, holding a dish, puking into it.
Rolf! I cry. He stares at me through his glasses, tries to get up, retches. Na pamyat o Minske, I decipher the Cyrillic on the edge of the dish.
Some tourist you are, puking all over a Minsk souvenir! Is that for your mum, or your girlfriend? I give him a slap on the shoulder. I’m happy to see him.
Listen, Maruška’s outside! It’s like a regular reunion, isn’t it?
Rolf laughs like I’ve told some amazing joke. Then coughs and starts retching again. He’s a wreck. This isn’t the happy-go-lucky guy I knew in Terezín.
He pukes into the dish again. With shaky hands he sets it down on the flowery camping table, lays his arms on the table too, and puts his head on them. I think he’s sobbing.
I remember that time he wept in the bunkroom – so did I. Then I freeze. Where’s Lebo? Is he dead? I blurt. I have to know.
But Rolf just starts spewing again.
I decide to go and look for Maruška. Tough Maruška, the mummy, hm.
She’s still under the tarpaulin. I lift up a corner and see her with Tupanabi’s head on her lap, wiping his cheeks and face with a handkerchief, I wonder if it’s the same bloody rag from the museum in Minsk. The two bruisers with rifles don’t put them down for a second as they move boxes and plastic bags into the tent. Probably food and stuff. They pay no attention to me.
Maruška pulls the old man’s cadaverous hand from the blankets and, stroking his face, slips a syringe from her sleeve into her hand and inserts the needle into his arm. She pushes the plunger, pauses, looks at me, staring me in the eye. Sees my lips move, saying her name, quietly. I lower the tarpaulin. I look ar
ound. Alex is nowhere in sight.
I take two, three steps away from the tractor, to see if anything happens. And the next thing I know I’m in strips of mist, it gives me cover, till the wind breaks through the mist on my left and shows me what’s ahead.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Chimneys jut towards the sky out of the damp earth. The chimneys of cottages, everywhere, rising out of the mist. Chunks of walls, broken stairs. Grey chimney pots surround me like masts in a graveyard of ships. But it’s a village graveyard. I’m on a road paved with black stones that leads to the flattened gate of a lifeless farmstead.
Come, let me show you my little museum, Alex says. The sneak. He’s right behind my back.
He grabs the rope hanging around my neck. I’d forgotten all about it. And we walk, again, him in front, leading me uphill. It’s drizzling. I’m glad the jacket Alex gave me has a hood. Drops of icy rain fall on Alex’s close-shaved head.
This is Khatyn, he says. There were hundreds of villages like this, thousands, not like in your country! Could they wipe out the Slavs? They tried, right here. Three hundred thousand they killed. And nobody in the West knows. How come it got swept under the rug? How come nobody talks about it? Huh?
It was a long time ago, I say in a normal voice. The noose is pretty loose now. It isn’t choking me any more.
Bullshit! Alex yelps. It got swept under the rug because the Germans were in charge, but the ones who did the killing were Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians. They did it for money, and everybody keeps quiet about it, because nobody wants to piss Putin off. Get it?
I nod.
Slovak soldiers were stationed in Oktyabrsk, where too many people got slaughtered and burned to even count! About ten of them were my relatives.
Awful, I say.
All those spoiled bunk seekers coming halfway across Europe so Lebo can blow on their wounds and make it better! All those hippie cunts and naive bitches with their parents’ credit cards and fabulous passports. Everyone here’s a seeker, get it? And you can bet your arse they don’t have any credit.
It dawns on me that the paths here are made out of black stone for a reason. It’s a monument to the village. Or a memorial.
I’m proud to be Belarusian, Alex says. But I don’t want to just sit around eating draniki and watching TV. Or protest and throw stones. I want to preserve the nation’s memory. If we lose our past, we lose our future. We won’t exist, get it?
Yeah, Alex, I get it. I wish you didn’t exist. That’s what I think. I don’t say it.
We can’t live like that. Buried forever along with our dead like we were some kind of demons. Can you even see what I mean? Do you fucking understand? He tugs on the rope around my neck. That bothers me.
Hey, Alex! I need to tie my shoe, OK? I hunch over and look to see if there’s a stone I can grab. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do any more.
Your shoes are fine, Alex says calmly, just come on.
So I get up and we go. Guess he knows that trick.
He lets go of the rope and gives me a friendly slap on the back. He knew the whole time he was choking me.
Look. He gestures grandly into the mist. We’re gonna build a huge car park for buses over there. Kiosks! Like they have in Auschwitz. Resurface the road! You think the tourists would like it more if it was bumpy? We could put in a rainforest! They don’t have that at home! What do you think? Work, you cunt! You’re the expert!
Rainforests are nasty, I tell him truthfully. Hot, muggy. Terrible weather. The tourists’ll tell him to go fuck off. Summers here aren’t nice like they are in Terezín.
Only now do I notice that all the chimneys have signs on them: Navicki, Navicka, 50, 42, 14, 5, 3, 1, 1 … names and ages of the dead, aha.
This just isn’t going to do the trick, Alex says, waving his hand around the ruins. Some boring, old-style memorial. That won’t get the attention of the new Europeans. Look at the Poles and that Katyn of theirs! A step ahead, again! They’re shooting a movie about it! And what about our Khatyn? Nobody’s even heard of it.
All of a sudden Alex jumps up on a wall and shouts: Listen to me, you heroic Poles! The people who got murdered here in Khatyn weren’t officers who could defend themselves. No, sir!
He jumps down, grabs the rope, and starts talking normally again.
They forced the men to run around in a circle, till they got tired. Then they herded them into a barn and set fire to it. They used another barn for the women and children. Why didn’t the people resist? Because Slavs are stupid brutes? No, they just didn’t believe it. Right up to the last minute. Throwing kids in the fire. Why would someone do that? Nobody thought it would happen until it actually did. The killers had it all worked out.
We start walking back towards the tent.
I learnt something there in Terezín. Alex gives me a punch in the shoulder. Oral history! The most important thing is the story. Authenticity. That’s what Lebo said, right?
We both stop short.
Lebo, that’s right.
This is Belarus, my friend. No Kafka T-shirts are going to help us here.
We walk straight towards the building, bypassing the tent. The flap is down. I don’t know where Maruška and Rolf are. The only sign of the tractor is the furrows in the snow.
I want to tell Alex to untie me and let me just squat down somewhere and take a crap in peace. I’ll give him the Spider. But I want out. Right now.
But I don’t say a word. The building is a little wooden cabin with slits for windows. I know what this is. The outer walls are tree trunks, but there’s armour plating behind them an inch thick, and the base is made of concrete. Yep!
Alex pulls out a key and says proudly: The museum’s inside this bunker. Fooled you, huh?
What a moron. This isn’t a bunker, it’s a firing cabin. They were all over the bastions in Terezín – we’d crawled through them all by the time we were five. They must’ve been left here by the Germans.
The bunker is behind the wood, built with a separate frame, double walls, fortified. I know the setup well. The tunnels and false hatches, the guard posts, all of it.
In spite of my bleak situation, I’m looking forward to going inside. The forest is starting to make me sneeze.
Alex drops the rope and, cursing, unlocks the door. We stamp our feet on the ice in front, I swing my head and arm around and the piece of rope’s behind my back. I take it as a good sign.
The dim glow of light bulbs. There are candles here too. Alex lights one. We used to use candles in the bunkers when we were kids. They’re pretty smoky, though. It’ll make your head spin if you aren’t used to it.
First thing we’ll buy once we get some cash is a proper generator, Alex mutters.
Concrete steps to the basement. Passageway. Staff room, they call it. Bet he doesn’t know that. Bundles of wires on the walls, saws and cleavers, knives and other junk. A long table. Nasty chemical smell. A heap of rags. Dark spill on the ground. Canisters. We used candles, but the bunkers were empty. You don’t use candles if there are chemicals. Place is a mess. I bet all his experts are Russian. Generator, right. First thing he needs to put money into is some proper ventilation. I make a note to myself to let him know.
He lights candles here too. Manages to get a couple of bulbs turned on. The low ceiling is covered in cables.
He doesn’t even have a head torch. Wires draped all over him. He’s holding a dynamo or something.
An old lady in a scarf and long skirt is sitting right by the door. She’s not alive but it’s like any moment her eyelids are going to open behind her glasses. Her face twitches, lips move. I was in the cellar with my mum and little sister, they were stamping around upstairs, my little sister was going to scream so I put a piece of bread in her mouth, to keep her quiet. I was holding my hand on her mouth and she suffocated.
She stops talking and just starts groaning and wailing, on and on. Alex disconnects the wires, turns her off.
It reeks of chemicals, human bodi
es, death. Alex switches wires. An old man says they killed a hundred thousand in the ghetto and took the rest out to the woods. The soul eaters came and they herded people into them and started up the engine. The gas and the smell from the engine killed every one. Jürgen’s sick today, somebody says. We need a driver. An officer in a cap waves his hand, he picks me.
And you can bet your arse he wanted to be in our museum! Alex says proudly. His neighbours would’ve beaten him to death if they’d found out that he stepped on the gas in a soul eater. But he wanted to tell his story. So he signed an agreement with us and now he’ll tell it here. He died content, knowing that kids in school will be able to hear his story forever.
There’s an old lady behind a plastic curtain. A bouquet of waxed flowers next to her, some candles. She was seven, they nailed her dad to the gate, burned everyone else, and all she remembers is the galoshes, Alex says. He turns her on. Why did you have to wear those rubber boots, little brother? Your feet are going to burn too long. In the rubber. Then the lady tells how they burned her and stabbed her with bayonets. Alex brushes a tiny ball of dust off her skirt and draws the curtain back again. Next to us a man’s voice is saying how he was afraid they would find him in a pile of corpses, because snow doesn’t melt on the dead and it would only melt on him.
Alex flicks the visor on the man’s canvas cap and points to the pipe in his hand. The Ethnographic Institute helped us out with period artefacts, he says.
He pulls me by the arm to the next room – more of them, but they aren’t really people, and I want to tell him I can’t do this, but actually I don’t know, why not?
There are stuffed people in the recesses, where the guard posts used to be. I can hear them in the passageway too. Mummy, hide us, we cried. But our mother said, The rye is still low and the grass hasn’t grown yet, spring is late this year. Where should I hide you? Hide yourselves as best you can.
Stories softly whispered or told in cracking voices mix with sobs and moans. I stagger from one to the next, tripping over the tools littering the floor, vats reeking of chemicals and flesh. My head reels from the smell, or is it disgust at what they’re doing here? What was Alex thinking? You can’t do this to people.
