This sign like some omen shivers me when I pass under it, crossing over into ghost town brick buildings with curved roofs separated by dirt footpaths, patches of flourishing grass. Glassed-in rooms separated by the creak of knotted wooden floors, piles of hair, piles of glasses, piles of clothes, piles of toys. Crutches, plastic legs, plastic arms. Piles of shoes, kid-sized, women’s heels. Small dark rooms with slatted spaces for air where people spent days in solitary. In an empty courtyard there is a pole with a hook on it. I hear one of the tour guides say that this was where people were punished; they were hung howling by their wrists for hours.
“Do you want to get a tour guide?” Kat whispers, like we are being watched.
“I don’t know. How much do you want to know?”
She looks at me, squinting in the sun. Groups are thronging through the camp, huddled close to their guides like clinging children. We stand in the middle of the road for a few moments.
“What do you think of all the mounds of stuff?” I ask Kat. “Is that what becomes of us? A pair of glasses?”
“Maybe,” she says. “It’s hot. Your chest is turning red. Did you bring a shirt?”
“Yeah.” I pull a blue cotton long sleeve out and shuck it on. It clings to my clammy skin.
We follow the crowds to a small building with a flat roof, a half-buried bunker. People are lining up to get in and there is a steady stream coming out, uniform marching ants. As we get closer a couple of young women dressed in shorts and tanks ahead of us stop suddenly, hands on hips.
“I’m not going in there!” One of them cries out as Kat and I approach.
“What is it?” I ask. They are both blonde, a bit plump, strong Australian accents.
“It’s the ovens,” the one closest to me says, distraught.
“Where you from?”
“Melbourne,” they both answer.
We stand and chat a bit about Krakow. They are staying close to our hostel and introduce themselves as Lila and Linda. Sisters.
“This place is horrible,” Linda laughs, rueful. “We’re heading back to the bus.”
“I don’t know why we came here,” Lila says, and they turn around.
“Should we?” I’m curious, feel dirty. “Let’s go.” We follow the crowd, line up like pilgrims to see something holy. Descending the three steps, an oppressive wave of heat shot through with sweat hits, room is cramped, guides talk above the shuffling and mumbling. “This was the first gas chamber at the camp and it was kept to show the annihilation that was going on here…” The largest chambers and ovens were at Birkenau but they have been destroyed. What happened was this: the inmates were segregated into two groups, women and children together and then the men. They were told they were going to bathe so everyone took off their clothes. Once they entered the chambers, gas came out of the walls. There was no water. Panic soaked in, changed molecules of steel and cement like a force field, toxic, undiluted. Small bits like shrapnel absorb into our bodies, like gas seeping in, silent flood. Ledges of seats and little shower heads like the stalls at our hostel, innocent, utilitarian.
For a moment we are submerged, buried alive in consuming tongues of panic, arms and legs pounding in fear and then futility against the steel walls. Like a drum still percussing, reverberating fear, flowing out in waves, a grenade exploding the sea. We emerge from the chamber disoriented, stand in the sun. Breathe. It is time to head back to the bus.
Faces of the other travellers are flushed, overwhelmed. I am reminded of another hot bus full of tourists in Chiang Mai, where shooting rapids in a bamboo raft and hiking in the hills to Hmong villages created a casual camaraderie that connected us. Here, we are confronted by enormity, by horror and history and it is too much to talk about. Eyes are averted. Quiet reigns, thoughts reined in. Sombre Josef announces we will be at Birkenau in fifteen minutes.
*
Brzezinka. Polish word for birch
Auschwitz has three simple words to introduce its horror. Birkenau has train tracks and a narrow brick train station, relentless stare of the lookout tower. Kat and I find a map of the site at the tourist centre and start our exploration through the rows of barracks, blank buildings, dirt floors. Deep, battered sinks for washing. Wooden slats of bunks in stacks of three. Grounds feel like a graveyard. Barracks are memorials with no written names, fringed with stark, thin birch trees, sky wide and void of birds singing, flying.
“Here is the place where the old women were left to starve,” Kat points at a mark on the map, crumpled and sweaty in her wide hands.
When the women became too old or ill to work anymore, they were moved here and given no food or water. Warm wind blows through the hollow centre, shafts of dirt fan the doorways and on to the next one, where a painting hangs of German officials in dark blue, thick severe moustaches still menacing. They are holding clubs in their hands, waving them in the air. Konigsburg is written above the scene.
The earth has absorbed so much emotion that all it has the energy to do is grow grass. It is June and the buildings are dappled. I would love a smoke but I won’t, it would feel like a desecration. All the crematoriums have been destroyed. Flat pieces of concrete mark where they were and memorials of bright yellow daffodils, soft pink carnations, black and white photos rest on the corners of memory. Kat and I settle on one, concrete heat rough on our bare legs, passing a bottle of water between us. The unknowable hovers at the entrances, the gates, the railroad, rises up through the soles of my feet. We walk back to the bus, weary, like we are wading through knee-deep water instead of grass. Ride back is quiet, even Josef and the driver have worn out their conversation. Something has been settled, maybe, between them, the world fitting back in to where it should be, and we are the voyeurs of black holes. The earth remembers everything.
Dene
Na’kwoel is the first really historical aborigine mentioned by the Carrier Indians of Stuart Lake. Agreement is that his birthdate is 1660 and his name became the symbol of old age. He was short and very corpulent, which was quite rare among the Western Denes. He held the position of toeneza, or hereditary nobleman, of the Stuart Lake clan and was the first Dene to own an iron axe or adze, which he acquired in 1730 from the village of Tsechah, which is now Hazelton, on the Skeena. He held a great feast for his fellow tribesmen and the adze hung like swinging gold from the rafters of the lodge to be admired. Na’kwoel kept it always within his sight except one winter, when it fell off a bough it was tied to into the snow. It was found only after a Medicine Man divined it, being led by the spirits through his prayers.
One day when Na’kwoel was butchering a caribou on solid lake ice, killed and brought to him by friendly neighbours, he heard footsteps on the frozen snow. Bold, they echoed in the stillness, then a sudden stop. It was a native of Natleh, Fraser Lake, and Na’kwoel immediately seized his bow and arrow and aimed it at the unwelcome intruder.
“You know that we do not speak with people from Natleh. Why are you here?”
The visitor pretended not to notice and if he was afraid, he hid it well. Snow blew veils of white dust between them. He looked straight into Na’kwoel’s eyes and walked over to where other members of Na’kwoel’s tribe stood on the lake, watching. They welcomed the stranger and talked and laughed for some time when the stranger suddenly bent his bow and aimed his arrow at Na’kwoel.
“Who are you, old Na’kwoel, who will not speak to our people? What reason do I have not to sink this arrow between your ribs?”
The men stood on the firm ice in taut silence, waiting for some word or gesture of forgiveness or aggression. Na’kwoel’s sharp dark eyes took their time deciding and eventually his body bent back to his work. The stranger from Natleh chatted and laughed awhile longer and then returned to his village, named for the salmon that come back.
Poland
On our last day in Krakow, we come across the Remuh synagogue beside the Jewish cemetery, a smooth, white-washed building guarded by a black gate, and up winding stairs there is a gathering of
school-age children surrounding an old man, short, bald, sagging blue eyes with a bit of dance in them. Laughing, he clears his throat, and a quiet descends. The kids are expectant. American, we find out from a translator, a bright-eyed woman with a bouncy dark ponytail.
“The man is a Holocaust survivor, one of Oskar Schindler’s kids,” she says by way of introduction. “He was chosen from the Krakow ghetto at the age of ten and worked in one of Schindler’s factories making mess kits for the German soldiers.”
“I was very scared.” His voice muffled, a bit shy. “But I kept quiet, kept busy, for my family. Most of whom, including my mother, father and brother, were killed at Auschwitz.” Placid face, no wrinkle of emotion worries it.
“I survived the war by working in factories and by the time it was over I was a young man and an apprentice mechanic. I never left Krakow.” I notice that a few teeth are missing in his warm smile. “And when I turned twenty-one, I married a Catholic girl and we had five children!” He laughs to himself and the talk ends. Everyone claps enthusiastically.
That night at the hostel we watch the men shower from the women’s bathroom. They preen, soap up, some shave, shampoo rolling down their faces in white waves. “They know we are watching,” I tell Kat. They are putting on a show. We eat bread and cheese in our room and then go out to the town square, drink wine while the gypsies make their rounds, playing violins, a tattered guitar. They are young.
“Ten? Eleven?” I say to Kat.
Some part of me is hollowed out, a clear space for the wind to blow through. We almost miss our train even though we’ve had all day to get ready, we scramble and swear on the platform. God. What is wrong with us?
Later we laugh, roll and rock in our narrow beds like babies. We return to Prague and discover that our other flatmate, Robert, has left without paying rent. No note, just dust under his vacated bed. I see this as a sign and I decide to go home. It is the summer of 2004. Kat stays on, finds a job, falls in and out of love with a Czech man and moves to England. I find a job in Vancouver and begin the process of what I call normal life, but I’m restless. Kat meets a man in the army and begins a longdistance relationship. She moves back to Colorado and teaches but is restless too.
What is it? she writes to me. This urge.
In 2008, I go to Ho Chi Minh City to work for a friend for six months, which extends to a year because I fall in love with a Japanese man. I am becoming unhappy though I try to convince myself I am fine. Kat finds a job travelling with a retired army captain who wants to go back to Vietnam before he dies. She makes the arrangements, keeps him company. When they come to Ho Chi Minh City, I meet Kat at a Lebanese restaurant down one of the narrow, twisting dark alleys. There is outdoor seating, plush pillows, candles, puffs of sweet apple hookah smoke. When I see her I begin to sing, and the Kat came back, the very next day, yes, the Kat came back, we thought she was a goner, but the Kat came back the very next day, the Kat couldn’t stay away. She is effusive, laughing, tanned, wearing big silver hoops and heels that show off her shapely, athletic legs.
“Should I leave him?” she asks me. “I never see him.”
“I don’t know. Do you love him?”
“Love is the least of it.” She sips her wine. “I can’t stay here. It kills me to leave him but this is not for me.”
We order tangines and a bottle of wine. It has been four years since our trip to Krakow, since we lived in our flat with the balcony where we talked, smoked, healed a little. We don’t mention Auschwitz or Birkenau but it is still there, all the neat rows and piles. Hook gouged into a post for hanging.
Mosquito Lake
Toby dreams he crosses the lake. Marauders throw flaming hatchets past his head, hiss as they plunge. He paddles an old canoe, insides scooped out, scratched raw. He can hear the howl follow, searing sound. Leaves of skin glint in sinking waves, glow of bone. Water still cold after all that burning. Canoe reaches a hill so steep he scuttles sideways. Shell of torn jacket pummelled with cones, branches tired of holding. All this dreaming war, arrows slice. Salal rustles, grumbling bear gnawing roots, berries. Blood pounding shifting guts speckled sweat. As a child he made shadows on grass, the shape of a cross. He did not dream then. Bear becomes his father, smooth hair glowing skin. Only circle of light in the forest. When Toby wakes, Lucy is screaming.
Who knows how the war started. A word, a look, a killing. Blades and arrows thrown till they thud, wrenched out, thrown again. Such horror doesn’t dull, wakes up when the earth slumbers. A killing, a word, a look, and it begins again.
Mile 13
Toby and Nigel refuse to go to Mile 13 to pick mushrooms. No one will go except Cook. Efficient, he chops, cuts, carries. Chanterelles he picks show up in omelettes, in stews, peppery and light.
“There must be more where they came from,” Corey says. “Picking territory gets snatched up quickly. Here’s a chance to grab ours.”
“But isn’t it Cook’s territory?” I say, judicious, trying to back out for good reason. Respecting tribal lines, invisible to me but inscribed as surely as any drawn on a map.
“He doesn’t care, I asked him.” Corey gives me a level gaze. So it is decided. We’re going in. We’re going in with buckets that used to hold oil, cleaned out, scoured but with a whiff of noxious residue. Bear bells, fluorescent rain gear that is not standing up to the weather. Box cutters as mushroom scalpels. Packs around our waists with nuts, raisins, chocolate chips. Gardening gloves for a firm grip of the thin plastic handle. My fingers ache in them. Dirt still clings to my scalp after my shower yesterday, imprint of permanent earth on my knees. Corey insists that we bring bright pink tape to mark our way in so we can find our way out.
“But we have a compass,” I say. They don’t always work here, he tells me. Something about iron deposits or the ghost of a logger killed here awhile back, sliced up at the green chain, messes with the directions. The green chain, a makeshift mill with a giant saw, is at the centre of a clearing, Corey tells me, a few miles north from the road. I imagine a crude gallows, where trees refuse to grow, moss shrivels from branches. Impatient to get going, he is already climbing the embankment, looking over his shoulder: “Come on!”
An experienced picker, Corey offers terse instructions. Make sure you wear cork boots, double tie your laces. Stop to take a reading on your compass at the top of a hill, every few hundred feet if you can remember. Watch where you step, it’s easy to break an ankle if you slip between logs. I am careful, careful like I am carrying tea cups in my hands while walking tightrope. Moisture coats my face, twists my hair into a thick, unmovable wave. At night we are so exhausted we hardly speak and in the morning I wake up first, make coffee in the blue-tarp lean-to, sit on the cold bench. Mist makes pools in the hollows of the road. Knees, elbows ache. No-see-ums, tiny transparent flies, dive into my eyes, ears, try to crawl up my nose. Bites and unbearable itch force me down the road, involuntary morning walk.
We met in a bar in Vancouver, long glances over brims of beer. On a break from tree planting contracts, he told me about Haida Gwaii, about Yoho, sand dunes in Oregon. Letters with pressed purple, orange, blue petals, seeds settled at the crease of the envelope. Smell of stony mountain slopes, sun-warmed earth. Three months later we are squatting on an abandoned logging road, huddling together for warmth, instructions filling the up and down of our days. Passing patches of trees ripped and strewn and rotting. Every so often I stop to tie ribbons on sturdy branches, so they will stand out from the blobs of moss, bulbous mounds thick at the base of trees, spatters from a child’s paint brush.
Corey tells me about the time he was lost for days in the forest, kept alive with berries and water from streams. He was so cold and thirsty that it consumed his fear. Panicked, he wandered at first and then he gave in, surrendered out of exhaustion. Helicopters and other pickers searched the hillsides of the territory where he picked, guessing that he had hit a patch of iron ore, metal that disturbed his compass. He was found huddled at the base of a tree and c
ried with relief, shaky when he walked out. A rookie, he was bolder, less afraid, he said, more aware than before he got lost. He went picking after a few days’ rest and stopped talking about it altogether. There isn’t a lot to say when you are alone in the woods. When you know where you’re going and the picking is good, the forest is friendly. When you are cold and lost, the moss turns into shrouds, keeping you from the light. You fold in, focus on survival, on imminent rescue. Like after a meal when all the blood rushes to your stomach, all your thoughts crowd around that one thing.
“Does the ghost do anything?” I ask. Our feet make hollow sounds on the moss like we are treading softly on the moon. Smell of earth beneath, taste of sea. I am hungry but it is too soon for lunch.
“No. He watches,” Corey answers, out of breath from a fight through a salal bush. Streaks of blood from scratches graze his fair skin, leaves stick out of his hair, sheaves of wheat ruffling his collar.
Trailing blobs of bright pink ribbon, we continue north. I think of the van, peaceful behind us, long to be safe in the seat, rolling down the road. In the gully below, a patch of peach chanterelles calls out to Corey, who descends on them, ravenous gatherer. I catch my breath, cold sweat slips down my spine. While he can spot them instantly, it takes a few minutes for them to peep out at me from the moss and rot where they hide. Clamber over fallen logs, haul our half-full pails over and crouch down to cut. Monotony of trees, trying to calm my seasick stomach. Constant fear of bears. At the campfire in the evening there are stories, bears eating salal berries surprised by a sudden face in the bush. Curious ones climb trees, claws ripping through thin bark.
“You’re supposed to make noise, fight fear, jump up and down,” says Lucy, and the pickers nod.
The Earth Remembers Everything Page 2
