Devil's Workshop

by Jáchym Topol

  When Chernobyl blew up, the fallout contaminated a third of Belarus, she said. Radiation genocide, they call it. They trudged around the graves all day in hot weather and pouring rain. The locals from the village were ready to spit on them. They all knew where the skeletons were, but it was taboo. They said, When you dig up an old grave, you break the ribs of the living.

  The mayor of one of the villages said, Why are you digging there? Leave them alone. Us too. Their things went missing at night. They spent hours excavating an area only to have somebody come and fill it all back in. They suspected the village youths. One day Ula went shopping in town and had to convince the crowd that gathered around her that she was Dutch. Not German. Meanwhile the victims had obviously been shot by the NKVD.

  How do you know?

  From the bullets. And other details.

  Did you know that to this day the cancer rate for children in contaminated areas is still twenty times higher than anywhere else in Europe? They have to import their food.

  Ula, that’s awful!

  Her co-workers dropped out one by one. Work injuries, diarrhoea from bad water. Depression. And then the problems started with the workers from the ministry. A lot of samples were going missing.

  I tap her on the shoulder. Offer her two blues from my pocket. She swallows them and takes a drink of water.

  In Oktyabrsk we found graves with hundreds of people in them. They were executed either naked or in summer dresses that had rotted completely. The bullets and cartridges came from every type of weapon imaginable. Apart from that there was nothing. No identification papers, no coins sewn into linings, no shoes stuffed with newspaper, no little girls’ hairslides, nothing at all, no evidence whatsoever.

  What about teeth? I say. I remembered Kagan’s cellar. Or cave or whatever it was.

  Teeth repaired and unrepaired, Ula says. She waves at me not to interrupt. I take a drink of water too.

  We tested the skeletons using a modified carbon-dating method to try to determine when the massacre took place. Well, I wouldn’t attach too much weight to it, she says, then tells me anyway. If the grave’s full of civilians – Poles, say, or Russians – then there aren’t any differences. If they were Wehrmacht, though, or Jewish, then the differences are distinct. But don’t tell anyone about this. Genetics doesn’t have a very good reputation.

  I won’t, I promise.

  It was hell. I don’t know how many times I stood there, clueless, scraping around the edge of the pit, in the middle of the night in the rain, wondering. Was it Soviets killing Soviets, or Germans murdering Soviets and Jews, or Germans and Soviets killing other Soviets? Then on top of that, consider that here they were divided into Belarusians and Russians and Ukrainians and Ruthenians, and then of course there are also Poles and Balts, and, pardon me, but you are what?

  Czech.

  Uh-huh. I’m not familiar with them. Who’s in those graves? A key question. Here in the East they didn’t keep records like we did, nowhere near it. Even after all these years, the locals still won’t say a word.

  I guess they have their reasons.

  It’s a terrible mess! In any case, without a plan for the restoration of burial sites, Belarus will never get into the EU. Even if the dictatorship falls. What do they think? You can’t have pits of corpses lying around in Europe: don’t be silly! This all has to be cleaned up.

  I don’t say a word. They cleaned up Terezín all right. The eggheads.

  But, Ula, what does it matter in the end who’s in those graves?

  It matters a lot! There’s money at stake here. Who’s going to pay for it? The restoration? The specialized teams? All over Europe they’ve got flags flying at memorial sites. In the East they’ve got ravens walking around pecking at skulls. Dreadful.

  It was the devil’s workshop, all right!

  Ula reaches over to the wall of boxes and hands me a canvas sack. I reach inside. Buttons. Medals. I feel the heft of a swastika belt buckle. Skull insignias! Lots of them.

  Fyodor and Yegor and their cronies, Ula says in my ear. We caught the two of them walking around in the moonlight, tossing SS buttons in the pits. Why would they do that? They wanted Germany to pay for the restoration. But that isn’t right!

  Ula burst out sobbing and burrowed back into the blankets. I stuck the sack back with the boxes. Took a drink, broke off a piece of bread. The blue pills kept me going. Outside the wind whistled and it was probably snowing too. Inside our tent we were warm. The ravine shielded us. Ula tells some awful stories, but so does everyone around here. I didn’t actually feel that bad.

  Then her hand slid out from under the blankets. Her nails were black and broken. I guess from digging. She took my hand and pulled. I was happy to burrow into the blankets with her.

  Tears were running down her face.

  You know, I’m also one of the living whose ribs get broken by digging, she says.

  What?

  Yeah, I was a little girl when I found the pictures. My mum kept them behind the dresser. My dad was here during the war. He was a captain in the Wehrmacht. I’m less than fifty, so don’t go getting the wrong idea. But my dad was the youngest captain in the entire army. And what I saw in those pictures! Dead villagers. Next to my dad. And he was smiling. My mum said they had liberated a village from the Bolsheviks and found them there. Yeah, right. I almost went out of my mind.

  What did he say?

  He hung himself when I was still little. Never said a thing to me. When I went to school, I started reading all those memoirs, watching movies. Then I went to the archives. I thought I’d go out of my mind from the horror. It wasn’t even about my dad any more, just the whole thing.

  That it happened?

  Yeah. Once you realize just how much horror is possible, and the fact settles into your brain, you’re a different person from everyone else. It stays inside you. Like a wound that won’t heal. I used to wonder how my friends could go to school and play ping-pong and go on dates. We need to scream, we need to stop the evil. I was obsessed. Wherever I looked I saw evil. In everything. Soon I didn’t have any friends left.

  I handed Ula a piece of bread. She left it for later.

  There’s no way to understand the cruelty. Our minds aren’t equipped for it. But it dawned on me that I had to balance out the horror myself. At least a little. I could become a nun and pray. I could go to Calcutta and help lepers. But I became a researcher. It helped me. Anyway, that was all in the past. Now I’m here.

  Ula throws the blankets off and sits up. She looks at me.

  So then, are you more of a researcher or a curator? she asks.

  I think back to the catacombs in Terezín and Alex’s museum.

  A researcher, I say.

  So you know about this place. They brought people from the city out here and killed them. Stalin wiped out twenty per cent of the Russian intelligentsia, compared with ninety per cent of the Belarusian. Everyone knows about the mass grave in Kurapaty. But Black Hill wasn’t discovered by Belarusian archaeologists until a few years ago. None of the researchers live here any more. The president had them disappeared, either that or they escaped. But I’m sure you know all that.

  The truth was I didn’t have a clue. But I nodded. Whenever Ula spoke in that educated way, it reminded me of Maruška, and Sara too. But when I looked at Ula, I thought of Ula.

  Kurapaty’s on the outskirts of Minsk, she says. And the president has decided to build a road through it. So a national site will be destroyed.

  Sending in the bulldozers, huh?

  Mm-hm. Ula nods. She rummages around in her boxes again. If the blizzard gets any stronger, it’s going to knock them down anyway. But I’d rather not think about that.

  She pulls out a bottle. Vodka.

  There could be fifty, a hundred, even two hundred thousand dead in this hill, Ula says broodingly. The same as in Kurapaty. Our team was supposed to explore here too. But the president’s people were lying when they promised to let us work. Now that the pre
sident has crushed the opposition, he could easily send in the bulldozers here as well. Except for a couple of crazies, nobody wants to know about it. It’s like it never happened.

  I’ve never drunk vodka. I offer to open the bottle for her, but she shakes her head and pop! She’s holding the cap in her hand.

  This was supposed to be for the celebration, she says, tapping the cap against the bottle. To celebrate the founding of the Devil’s Workshop museum. But there’s still time for that to happen. And you know why? Because the devil’s still active as hell here!

  She laughs. Why not? We both have a good laugh. Outside the wind is whistling. It’s dark. We have to squeeze close just to see each other. But we’re laughing, coughing, we can’t stop, we fall exhausted into the covers, pass the bottle back and forth. Then we sleep.

  Sometime later, Ula says if it freezes we’ll die here. She says it because it’s true.

  Outside the purga rages.

  We go on sleeping.

  I poke my head out and there’s no more wind and rain, no more howling. And underneath a magnificent, radiant sun the machines are heading towards us over the frozen snow-white plain. The president’s bulldozers are as colourful as Ula’s boxes, yep, the same machines that crushed the walls in Terezín. We pick ourselves up and walk down to meet them. With Ula I can easily handle the plain.

  It was only a dream. Her crying wakes me. The wind, coming through the gorge now, rattles the tent canvas. Ula’s crouched in the corner, I lie down beside her.

  A day or two later we try to go out but only make it a couple steps. Even holding each other up, we can’t make any headway against the wind. We have to turn back. We’re also weak with hunger. I’ve only got a few blues left.

  We snuggle up in the blankets. Squeezed together. Trying to keep each other warm. Maybe the reason we’re so cold is that we’re hungry. At night I get the feeling that Ula’s melting. Fading away. So I hold her tight.

  We go on sleeping.

  I wake up and something’s different. I shake my head. Uh-huh. It’s quiet outside. I stick my head out. Sun. Wriggle out of my sleeping bag, crawl outside.

  Lots of trees are gone. Where there used to be the green of the treetops, now you can see the plain.

  The sun is climbing higher. You can walk pretty well on the frozen snow.

  Ula crouches at the entrance to the tent. Watching. The silence is magnificent.

  We’ll definitely go. We’ll make it somewhere. Save ourselves. Yeah, it might work out.

  AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks

  To Jaroslav Formánek and Anneke Hudalla, who sent me on my first reporting trip to Terezín. To Jan Horníček, the town mayor, and Vojtěch Blodig, historian of the Ghetto Museum, for their time and patience, with apologies for my failure to write about demons realistically. To Edgar de Bruin, who was part of this story from the beginning, for his enthusiasm and advice. To Dora Kaprálová, without whose encouragement and ideas I would probably never have written this book. To Adéla Kovácsová for the first and Zuzana Jürgens for the last careful and critical reading. To Tereza Říčanová for The Book of Goats. To Stephan Krull for inspiring conversations. To Míša Stoilová for orientation in the language of our friends. And to Sjarhej, Arina, and Maryjka, who showed me where the devil had his workshop.

  Notes

  The author of the poem ‘Kill the President,’ on page 90, is Slavomir Adamovich. The villagers’ testimonies, on pages 127 and 128, come from a collection documenting the Ostplan massacres, compiled by Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl, and Vladimir Kolesnik, Ya iz ognennoy derevni … (Minsk: Mastackaja litaratura, 1975); Czech translation, Václav Židlický, Moje ves lehla popelem … (Prague: Naše vojsko, 1981).

  Jáchym Topol

  Berlin, DAAD, 2009

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  The horrors of history are familiar ground for Jáchym Topol. His first novel, Sestra, translated into English as City Sister Silver in 2000, contained a full, grim chapter dedicated to Auschwitz, and numerous references to the butchering of indigenous people in the United States. In this novel, his fifth, Topol revisits the Holocaust – albeit by way of its present-day echoes – setting the first half of The Devil’s Workshop in Terezín, an eighteenth-century fortress town north of Prague that the Gestapo used as a prison and ghetto for Jews in the Second World War. But in the novel’s second half, which takes place mostly in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, and Khatyn, a village on its outskirts, he turns to a little-known chapter in the annals of atrocity.

  Readers of this book are likely aware, more or less, of the basic facts of the genocide of European Jews in the Second World War. Yet the mass killings of non-Jewish Belarusians during the same period have only recently been dragged out of the shadows, thanks to US historian Timothy Snyder’s tour de force of 2010, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. So even though The Devil’s Workshop is a work of fiction, readers should know that on 22 March 1943, the 118th Schutzmannschaft auxiliary police battalion (made up largely of Ukrainian collaborators, deserters, and prisoners of war) and the Waffen-SS special battalion led by the notorious Oskar Dirlewanger murdered the inhabitants of Khatyn – 149 Belarusian children, women, and men – and this is a fact. As Snyder wrote in Bloodlands: ‘Dirlewanger’s preferred method was to herd the local population inside a barn, set the barn on fire, and then shoot with machine guns anyone who tried to escape.’ This is the method he used in Khatyn and it is described in Topol’s book by one of the story’s fictional characters.

  Those who keep up on world news will know that Belarus is commonly described nowadays as Europe’s last dictatorship, another reality reflected in The Devil’s Workshop. One example of this is the scene in Minsk where the Belarusian President appears on TV and declares martial law. This does not depict an actual event, but the words Topol puts in the mouth of the President are based on the text of a controversial and disputed interview with Alexander Lukashenko from 1995.

  This mixing, and blurring, of fact and fiction is one of Topol’s favoured techniques, though, as I learned when I was translating City Sister Silver, the more blood-chilling the anecdote, the more likely it is to be true. As I wrote in my preface to that book, unearthing the sources Topol drew on was a major part of my work on his first novel. With The Devil’s Workshop he took a different approach, including acknowledgements that cite, among other things, the source of the stories told by the macabre talking corpses in Alex’s museum: they are taken directly from the testimony of Belarusians who survived atrocities similar to the ones in Khatyn.

  A more personal note on the interplay between fact and fiction: one of the events that happened in my own backyard while I was translating this novel was the birth of the Occupy movement. Hearing the participants and sympathetic observers comparing it to the Arab Spring, which in turn had been compared to the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, I couldn’t help seeing some kinship between the people occupying Zuccotti Park and, in Topol’s novel, the bunk seekers who ‘occupied’ Terezín, and the protesters with their tents on the square in Minsk. Before I ever met Topol, as a graduate student in 1990, I had read about him – not only because of his poetry but also because of his work as a human-rights activist. As a reporter for a samizdat newspaper, Topol was intimately involved in the downfall of communism in Czechoslovakia. This was on my mind in mid November 2011, when the New York Police Department violently dismantled the Occupy encampment in Zuccotti Park. There is always a continuity, of varying visibility, that sneaks from the past into literature, into the present, and back again, and I was acutely conscious of it while working on this translation.

  Finally, a few words about the title: Topol’s original name for the book was Ďáblova dílna (‘The Devil’s Workshop’). Shortly before its publication in Czech, however, a German film was released called Die Fälscher (‘The Counterfeiters’), which in the Czech Republic was retitled Ďáblova dílna, so in order to avoid confusion Topol and his publisher decided to
call this novel Chladnou zemí (‘Through a Cold Land’ – another phrase that appears in the book). A Czech friend of mine, pointing out the cold/hot dichotomy between the two titles, told me she preferred the newer one, since it better corresponded to the novel’s chilly mood and atmosphere. I agreed with her but still felt that ‘Through a Cold Land’ (or simply ‘A Cold Land’), if less of a cliché, was also less evocative, and seeing that most translators of the novel into other languages had opted for Topol’s original title, I decided to do the same.

  Alex Zucker

  Brooklyn, November 2012

  Also by Jáchym Topol from Portobello Books

  Gargling with Tar

  Copyright

  This translation is dedicated to Jáchym, my brother from another mother

  Published by Portobello Books 2013

  Portobello Books, 12 Addison Avenue, London, W11 4QR, United Kingdom

  The original Czech edition was published in 2009 under the title Chladnou zemí by nakladatelství Torst

  Copyright © Jáchym Topol 2009

  English translation copyright © Alex Zucker 2013

  The moral rights of Jáchym Topol and Alex Zucker to be identified as the author and translator of this work respectively have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publisher, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.