The confession tyb-2

by Olen Steinhauer

  Two doors on either side of the desk led from this room. We took the left one through a low corridor, not unlike the Militia station’s corridors, but what I noticed was this: There were no names on the doors’ translucent windows, and no numbers. And that is when I became afraid. The unmarked doors of Yalta 36 were part of a world that was beyond my understanding.

  We descended a concrete stairwell at the end of the corridor, and I wondered if Georgi had followed this same path. I tried to remember the details of what he’d recounted; but the growing panic was making me forgetful. Three levels down, Sev knocked on a steel door and waited for the tiny barred window to open and close. A series of locks were worked on from the other side, and then the door opened.

  The guardroom was just big enough for a desk holding a telephone and a copy of The Spark. Hooks on the wall held keys. The guard was a meaty man with round glasses. He smiled and asked me to empty my pockets. All I had was some loose change, my wallet, and my Militia certificate. “Laces?” he said, and waited as I knelt and unthreaded my shoelaces. He spoke to Sev while looking at me. “Which one?”

  “Seventeen.” Sev’s voice was flat.

  The guard handed over a key and used another one on the next door. It opened onto a narrow, concrete corridor lined by more steel doors.

  “Is this really necessary?”

  Sev acted as if I’d said nothing as I followed him to the ninth door on the left. Here, at least, were numbers, but they were drawn with chalk-at any moment they could be wiped clean and changed. Sev worked with some effort on the lock, but got it open, then glanced at the guards who waited back with the jailer. In the dim light his face had lost all its color. “We both know it’s necessary. At least for now.”

  I followed the direction of his hand, and the door closing behind me filled the cell with darkness.

  2

  When we were captured in the trenches near Humenne and marched westward, I had wondered what the prisoner-of-war camp would be like. My imagination had come up with details of a hypothetical cell: dirt floor, bunk, a slot in the door for food, maybe a hole in the corner for a toilet, and certainly a barred window one had to stand on one’s toes to look through to see the sun. None of these details matched the cell on Yalta Boulevard. It was extremely small, like-as Georgi had said-a soundproof water closet; unlike Georgi’s cell, this one was unlit. The ground was rough concrete, and there was no hole in it, only a small pot in the middle of the floor. No bunk and no window, no matter how high I reached my fingers up the wall. Then I remembered: I was under the earth.

  The darkness settled on me with real weight. It became thicker with time, and after a while I could only sit in the corner, lacking the strength to climb up through it. I touched the dead German soldiers on my fingers and repeated their names. I think it helped, because it reminded me that in the war people died indiscriminately, and I was back in that world. That was at least familiar. I would live or I would die based on the whims of people I could not see, could not argue my case with. Fatalism settled into me with the fog.

  But with time either the darkness sheds its weight, or you shed yours, because I began, without realizing it, to pace. Three steps took me to the back of the cell; two crossed its breadth. But I was able to make a kind of lap by using infant steps. Sometimes I ran into the wall-the concrete left a scrape on the tip of my nose-but I learned to sense the wall by the movement of air along it, and turned, quickly, to continue my lap.

  The tiny cell stank of mildew and my sweat and urine. I held off defecating as long as I could-how long, I don’t know-then gave in. I used my undershirt to cover the small pot, but that didn’t help the stink.

  My fatalism wavered over the hours. It wasn’t as strong as it had first appeared. I was still healthy-physically, at least-and could stand up straight. That in itself seemed enough to assure my survival. I was strong, and it didn’t make sense that a man as large and strong as I was could simply be erased.

  This is the irrationality of darkness. You begin to grasp at little things. Just the sound of your footsteps on concrete give hope: They are so loud in the absence of all other sounds, they are godlike.

  The hunger that came on and off and twisted my stomach into knots seemed like the only way to track time. I could go without eating for a couple days, which perhaps meant I’d been there two days. I considered banging on the steel door and calling for food, but I doubted my voice would make it through. And this was what I knew they wanted, for me to panic.

  At some point a slot at the base of the door opened, filling the cell with a dim, painful light. This, at least, was something I had imagined while walking under German guard: an opening in the door for food. A tray slipped through, spilling soup from a tin bowl. Bread, and a brackish, chunky liquid I could not identify. By the time the slot closed again, I had almost finished it.

  3

  They came four meals later, while I was sleeping. I had slept so much in that cell, though sleep never rejuvenated me. There was the shock of light, the aching eyes, and two sets of hands pushing my shoulders as I stumbled through the steel door and up three flights of stairs, which, I remembered vaguely, placed us on the ground floor, where there were two doors. The one on the right led to the long corridor without numbers and out the front; the left one led, as I learned, directly outside, into a wide courtyard, where vans and cars sat in rigid lines. It was night, and a light blanket of snow covered the ground. They threw me into the back of an empty white van, locked the door, then climbed into the front. I pressed my face against the metal screen. “Where?”

  The driver, the one with the mustache, looked at me in the rearview. “Don’t worry so much. You’ll give yourself a hernia.”

  The other stuffed my shoelaces through the screen. “Put these back on.”

  I tried to remain standing in order to see out the back windows. I thought we were driving south, but when we passed Unity Medical and entered the Second District, I realized we were headed west. The van jostled, and I hit my head on the ribbed ceiling, then squatted. I hadn’t noticed the cold until then; it burrowed into me.

  When I checked again, we were in the Fifth District, stately Habsburg homes sliding past. Then a right-hand turn took us to our destination: the Fifth District train station. Unlike the central station, this one closed at ten every night and reopened at six. We drove through the empty lot and into a corner, where a ramshackle building stood hidden in the shadows, smoke trickling out of a smokestack.

  We left prints in the fresh snow up to the door. Inside, it was too warm, and a fat man with bristle on his cheeks dealt cards to another fat man at a desk. The dealer smiled at us. “Guests?”

  My clean-shaven guard took some folded papers from his pocket and handed them over. The dealer set down the deck and read thoughtfully. Then he leaned on his knees, grunted, and stood up. The keys on his waistband made a racket when he walked to another door and unlocked it.

  “Get in,” said my clean-shaven guard.

  The one with the mustache said, “Good luck, Inspector.”

  This cell was huge-a paradise. There was a bench attached to a wall, and when I stood on it I could just see through the barred window to the overcast night sky. The cold didn’t bother me, and for the moment I didn’t worry about what would happen next. For the moment I could take long strides and even jump, which I did, many times.

  4

  I woke to the first sunlight I had seen for a long time. But the elation drained away as I looked down on my blackened hands and soiled clothes and tasted the decaying teeth in my mouth. My own grime and smell were intolerable.

  The fat card dealer brought some soup that I ate while standing and staring at the sky. When he came to take the bowl, I asked where I was going. He waved the bowl as if it were a little flag, “You’re going to put yourself to use for once, Comrade. You’re going to work.”

  “Which camp?”

  He shrugged.

  Three hours passed, then five, and I watched th
e sun set through the bars. My time didn’t come until after I’d fallen asleep on the bench, and I woke to the dealer standing in the doorway with three soldiers holding rifles. “It’s your big moment!”

  The train was already sitting on the tracks. I was led to its rear, to a cattle car that held three young men-no older than seventeen-with bruised faces. Dirty straw covered the floor, and when the door was pulled shut the darkness and smell of decay covered us. One voice said something about concentration camps. Another told him to shut up.

  The train whistled and started to move.

  They introduced themselves, and in passing lights through the high barred windows I could connect names with faces. Gyula, his ear crusted with dried blood, was the one who was afraid of concentration camps. Florian, with a purple, swollen right eye that remained shut, had no patience for such talk. He asked what I’d done to end up here. When I told them it was connected to a case, and that I was a militiaman, they fell silent again. But I enjoyed the sound of their voices. “What did they get you on?”

  “Nothing!” said Johann, the third, who blushed beneath his bruises. “They didn’t tell us anything. They took us from our homes, beat us, and brought us here. It’s unbelievable!”

  They were students who had helped draw up a little manifesto during the height of the Sixth of November fervor, then quietly returned to their studies. But their names had appeared alongside their classmates’, and these signatures became part of the long lists of the condemned.

  When the sun rose, we could see through the high windows that we had reached the countryside. Then we stopped at a station that Gyula believed was Ricse. When we arrived at Dombrand, stopping just before the station, I was sure of our destination. Soldiers opened the doors and walked us to another train. Some travelers with luggage watched from the platform, hands shielding their eyes. They put us on another cattle car that was connected to a regional train with passenger cars up front. There were other prisoners there, young and old men, some with no marks on them at all. One held on to his blood saturated pant leg. I moved to a corner and watched them talk among themselves. Then the train pulled up to the station and, pulling myself up to the window, I could just make out the very clean travelers climbing into their cars.

  From there we stopped often, letting travelers on and off, and when we reached Vatrina, which must have been the end of the line, the final regular passengers disembarked. The soldiers waited until the platform was empty before opening the cattle cars. There were about sixty of us in all, from three cars. An officer approached, a tall man with buzzed hair who held a black truncheon, and he told us to assemble on the edge of a field that bordered the station. Once we were collected, the officer motioned to the soldiers, who began to herd us across the field and away from town.

  I knew this route. We were heading east, and to our right was the road I had driven to the camp. Six, seven miles. A cold wind came over the field, arching the grass and slowing us down. My dirty shirt stuck to me. In a wheatfield just in sight of the five towers of the camp, the prisoner with the bloody pants stumbled and dropped into the grass. A guard wandered over and shouted at him, but we could not see his reaction through the grass. Twice he kicked the prisoner, looking down and shouting, then he took a pistol out of his belt holster and shot him.

  Gyula kept looking back over his shoulder. I thought that he was trying to catch my eye. But he was looking farther back, to where the dead man lay.

  We reached the barbed wire and waited while the guards conferred by the front gate with Gogu. He looked healthier now that he was in business again. They handed him a file full of papers, and he spoke to his men, his flushed bald head bobbing as he joked. Then the guards ran about, shouting, rounding us up into lines like soldiers on display. Gogu put his hands behind his back and waited until we were ready.

  “Welcome,” he shouted, his dirty voice on the edge of breaking, “to Work Camp Number Four-Eighty! I am Captain Gregor Kaganovich and you are my pets! I reward and I punish-I am your last recourse before your god!” He raised his thumb. “Only one rule here-this is simple, now- work! If you want to eat, you work! If you want to sleep, you work! If you ever want to leave here alive, what must you do?”

  A couple prisoners in the front answered him, and two guards came over and slapped their faces.

  “Work,” said Gogu. “Not talk.”

  The blows began. Each guard had a truncheon that he used with fervor, beating us in the general direction of the gate. I caught sight of Filip, the excess skin collecting on the back of his neck, his scarred face twisted into screams as he swung. They beat us into five groups in front of the five buildings. My back and arms stung, and my ear was bleeding. The guard who struck me on the ear shouted, “It’s the big ones that go first, bastard! It’s the big ones we liquidate!”

  He was the one who ordered us to strip completely, except for our shoes, and throw our clothes into a pile. We were marched around the side of the buildings, where four guards stood with razors to shave our heads. We froze in that line, waiting for the guards to dump water on our heads and then chip at our scalps. The barber took my hand. “What are these?” He tugged a ring-Hans Lieblich-off my left pinkie. “Hey, Filip!”

  Filip came over and called me a bourgeois pansy, then the two of them worked each ring off. Not once did Filip recognize me, and I never saw my German soldiers, nor my wedding band, again.

  We waited, arms around ourselves, shivering. Beside the barbed wire were two full burlap sacks. The guard shouted for our attention and walked over to one. He opened it so we could clearly see the dead man inside, his battered face lumpy and purple.

  “This!” the guard shouted. “This is the only way out of here!”

  Under a rain of more truncheon blows we ran inside the barracks. On the rotting hay was a pile of soiled, striped prison clothes. The guard screamed at us to dress.

  It’s hard to say what I was feeling at that point. A certain terror, yes, but a part of me was sure I would make it out alive. The extremity of my surroundings was almost too deadly to comprehend, so I held on to the only thing I could understand: Gogu’s one rule: work. I was still a strong man, and could at least keep up with that. And this was my mistake: I still thought that rules had a power of their own. I thought that camp rules would ensure a path of safety.

  5

  That night the weary veterans, who had been out at Work Site Number Two all day, returned to the barracks. Some became angry when they found their bunks occupied by newcomers, while others, too weary to shout, simply dropped into a free shelf. Some questions were answered. We would know when to do what by a bugle call. When to wake, eat, and work. The work at Site Two-the new project Gogu had mentioned a long time ago-was digging: They were building a canal to the Tisa, about five and a half miles away.

  The bugle sounded early, and I woke to the cold and a sweet, sickening smell. As I climbed down from the bunk, I asked a veteran who slept below me. He was an old man with a permanent look of worry on his face. “The pus,” he said. “You’ll smell like that once you’ve been hit enough. You’ll get worms, too, but don’t worry, they’ll clean those out in the infirmary.”

  There were more truncheon blows when we gathered for the morning roll call behind the barracks. The sun had not yet risen, and in the darkness a guard with a wavering, young voice called the names and we each yelled “Here here! ” as loudly as we could. Gogu looked on from the door of his office. Halfway through the names a heavy, bearded guard reached forward and pulled one of the new prisoners-a student-out of our ranks and dragged him to an electrical pole. As the names continued, he shouted at the student to hold on to the pole, and as he did so, began beating the student’s back. Whenever the student screamed, he delivered a blow to his head. This went on until the student passed out. Roll call was over.

  We had the same kind of soup and bread I’d had in Yalta 36, sitting outside in the cold, and were then marched through the predawn night out of the camp and farther east
. I was hit a couple times by the barracks guard, and the old, worried man was hit three times. It impressed me that, despite the blackening welt that showed when his shirt rose from his hip, he could keep moving. There were about three hundred of us in all, being beaten across the wheatfields, two miles to Work Site Number Two.

  The work on the canal had not been going on long. A crevice about fifty yards wide and a quarter of a mile long had been dug, and we were told that our daily quota was ten cubic yards. If we did not reach that quota, we would be punished. Each of us was given a shovel and a wheelbarrow and sent into the hole. They had picked a sandy area, and as we hefted the heavy wheelbarrows sand spilled out. The guard standing by the truck where we dumped it looked at each load critically, asked our name, and marked down an estimate. This went on.

  The first day was the hardest. It was unbelievable how heavy those wheelbarrows were, and how undependable the sandy wall of the canal could get. Often I would make it halfway up, only to slide and see my entire load turn over. A guard would scream at me from above, accusing me of sabotage, while I tried to focus and fill it up again. I didn’t make the quota at all the first week, and each night, after a dinner of more soup, I cut wood outside, under the glare of the camp searchlights.

  Although they sometimes made excuses, it became evident that the killings had no logic other than the logic of terror. Those who did not collapse on their own could at any moment be pulled out of roll calls, out of our dinner huddle, out of work details or bed. Sometimes a guard approached a prisoner in the morning and held a small mirror in front of his face. “Take a good look-this is the last time you’ll see yourself alive!” Then he handed the prisoner a burlap bag to carry to the work site, and that night the bag carried him back.