by Laird Barron
He reached into the pocket of his overalls, and tossed me a small white rock. Later that night, in my hotel room, I soaked it in alcohol. Underneath the paint, the rock was black and porous, but that was all.
Anna Taborska
* * *
THE GIRL IN THE BLUE COAT
Anna Taborska is a British filmmaker and horror writer. She has written and directed two short fiction films, two documentaries and award-winning TV drama The Rain Has Stopped. Anna also worked on seventeen other films, and was involved in the making of two major BBC television series: Auschwitz: the Nazis and the Final Solution and World War Two behind Closed Doors—Stalin, the Nazis and the West. Anna’s short stories have appeared in a number of Year’s Best anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4 and Best British Horror 2014. Anna’s short story Bagpuss was an Eric Hoffer Award Honoree, and the screenplay adaptation of her story Little Pig was a finalist in the Shriekfest Film Festival Screenplay Competition, 2009. Her debut short story collection, For Those who Dream Monsters, released by Mortbury Press in 2013, was nominated for a British Fantasy Award. You can view Anna’s full résumé at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1245940, watch her films and book trailers at http://www.youtube.com/annataborska and learn more about her short stories and screenplays at http://annataborska.wix.com/horror
So it’s our last day together. You’ve been a good listener. And thanks to you I’ll have a voice—albeit a posthumous one . . . I’m sorry—I’ve made you feel uncomfortable. But I believe that’s what you wanted to cover today—my thoughts on my imminent demise. Well, we can do that, but first I want to tell you a story. I’ve never told it to anyone, but then again you’re not really anyone—are you? Please don’t be offended—you know I value your work, and one day you’ll be a successful writer in your own right and under your own name. But today you’re just the extension of a dying old man.
The painkillers they’re giving me have stopped working; the pain is becoming unbearable, and soon I’ll be on morphine. The doctors tell me I’ll be hallucinating and delusional, and nobody will believe the ranting of a cancer-ridden old man . . . Is the Dictaphone working? Good . . . As you’re my ghostwriter, the story I’ll tell you is most appropriate because it’s a ghost story—at least, I think it is . . . Do I believe in them? Perhaps once you hear the story, you’ll be able to tell me. I don’t know. It all happened long ago . . .
I’d only been working at The History Magazine for four months, but they were pleased with my research skills, and I was the only person on the staff who spoke Polish. It was my second job since leaving university, and I’d already cut my teeth on an established, if somewhat trashy, London daily. So when the powers that be decided to revisit the Holocaust, the Senior Editor chose me to go to Poland.
I’d been to Poland before, of course. My mother’s family hailed from the beautiful city of Krakow, and I’d been taken there fairly regularly as a boy to visit my aunt and cousins. But this time I was to travel to Międzyrzec—a small and unremarkable town, the name of which caused considerable hilarity among my colleagues, and which I myself could scarcely pronounce.
“You’ll be going to My . . . Mee . . . here . . .” said my boss, thrusting a piece of paper at me with a touch of good-natured annoyance at the intricacies of Polish orthography. Foreign names and places were never his thing in any case. He seemed happiest in his leather chair behind his vast desk in the Magazine office, and I sometimes suspected that the furthest he’d been from Blighty was Majorca, where he’d holiday with his wife and children at every given opportunity. And nothing wrong with that; nothing wrong at all—I thought—as I drove my hire car through the grey and brown Polish countryside, trying hard not to pile into any of the horse-drawn carts that occasionally pulled out in front of me without warning from some misty dirt side track.
I’d done my homework before driving the eighty miles east from Warsaw to Międzyrzec. Before the outbreak of World War II there had been about 12,000 Jews living in the town—almost three-quarters of the population. The town had synagogues, Jewish schools, Jewish shops, a Jewish theatre, two Jewish football teams, a Jewish brothel and a Jewish fire brigade. I wondered idly whether the Jewish fire brigade was sent to extinguish fires in Christian homes too, or just in Jewish ones. I figured it was the former, as by all accounts the Poles and Jews got on like a house on fire—excuse the pun—and most of the town’s inhabitants worked happily side by side in a Jewish-owned factory, producing kosher pig hair brushes, which were sold as far afield as Germany. In fact, commerce in Międzyrzec flourished to the degree that the envious, poverty-stricken inhabitants of surrounding towns and villages referred to the place as ‘Little America’. . . Does prosperity render a man better disposed towards his fellow man? I don’t know. Certainly, during the course of my research, I read of various acts of generosity—big and small—which were extended to others regardless of background, so that, for example, when a film such as The Dybbuk came to town, the cinema owner would organise a free screening for all the citizens of Międzyrzec, and the queue stretched half way down the main street.
As with any positive status quo, the good times in Międzyrzec were not to last long. When war broke out in September 1939, the town was bombed, then taken by the Germans, before being handed over to the Russians, and finally falling into German hands once more. The horrors that followed were fairly typical for Nazi-occupied Poland. The Polish population was terrorised, while the Jews were harassed, attacked, rounded up and either murdered on the spot or sealed in a ghetto, from which they were eventually shipped off to death camps. Nothing new there, I thought, as by now I was becoming—not jaded by all the atrocities I’d read about, but something of a reluctant expert on Nazi war crimes and the pattern they followed in the towns and villages of German-occupied Poland. And yet something about the destruction of this surprisingly harmonious community—not just the murder of people, but the annihilation of a functional and thriving symbiotic organism formed from thousands of disparate souls—added to the customary level of distress that I’d somehow learned to live with since being assigned to the Second World War project.
Finally the countryside gave way to ramshackle housing, and the dark green and white road sign confirmed that I’d arrived at my destination. All I had to do now was find the town library, where I had a meeting with the librarian turned amateur historian—a pleasant fellow with a neatly trimmed brown beard, who furnished me with the details of several elderly local residents, including a lady who ‘remembered the War’.
“She doesn’t have a telephone,” he told me as I thanked him and took the piece of paper with the names and addresses, “but she’s almost certain to be at home. You can’t miss the house. It’s the last house but one on the left as you leave town, going east. It’s one of the old wooden houses, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’d already left Międzyrzec, as those old houses are virtually out in the countryside.”
I decided to start at the far end of town, with the old lady. Everything was as my bearded friend had said: the ugly apartment blocks and equally unattractive family houses (presumably built hastily after the war, to re-house those whose homes had been destroyed) gave way to what looked like small wooden farmhouses, with fields and meadows behind them stretching away into the distance.
I drove slowly in an effort to ascertain which house was the last but one on the left-hand side before leaving town. I was fairly sure it was a run-down wooden house with peeling green paint, set back from the road. I drove past just to check, but I’d been right—there was only one more house beyond the one I’d instinctively picked out. I turned the car around carefully and doubled back, pulling up on the grass verge by the side of the road. Chain-link fencing some six feet in height surrounded the property, and the only way in—from the roadside, at least—was through a gate, which was locked. There was a bell, but no intercom. I pressed the bell and waited. After a minute or so I pressed it again, not sure if it w
as even working.
After a couple more minutes, the front door of the house opened with a creaking worthy of an old horror movie, and an elderly grey-haired woman peered out apprehensively. I waved at her and after a moment’s hesitation she waved back. Then she went back inside and shut the door behind her. I was taken aback and nearly rang the doorbell again, but then the woman reappeared, pulling a woollen shawl over her shoulders. I smiled at her reassuringly as she made her way slowly and painfully down the porch steps and across the front yard towards me.
“How can I help you?” she asked through the fencing.
“Hello, my name is Frank Johnson,” I told her. “I work for The History Magazine in London, and I understand from Dr Lipinski that you remember the time when there was a ghetto . . .” I never got to finish my sentence. The old lady had been observing me with amicable curiosity, but now her face crumpled and she started sobbing uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face and gathering in her wrinkles. I was mortified and started to mumble a hasty apology, but the woman raised her hand in a conciliatory gesture.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “I’ll take some medicine for my nerves. Please come back in an hour and I’ll tell you all about the ghetto.” I smiled at her as best I could and nodded my head vigorously. “The gate will be open,” she added, trying unsuccessfully to stem the flow of tears with a shaky hand.
“I’ll come back in an hour,” I told her.
There was really nothing constructive I could do in an hour, but I didn’t want to make the old lady any more uncomfortable by sitting outside her house, so I drove back into the town centre, parked up and sat in my car. There was no decent pub to speak of and there was no point in getting a cup of tea, as I knew from my experience of Polish hospitality that I’d be having tea and cake at the old lady’s house whether I wanted it or not.
I’d interviewed survivors of trauma before, and I’d had interviewees cry during interviews, but never before I’d even started. I’d always imagined Polish peasants to be a hardy breed, taking history’s worst cruelties in their stride and not shedding much in the way of tears for themselves, let alone for the plight of an ethnic minority that shared neither their religion nor their cultural traditions. If nothing else, the old lady should provide some good first-hand material for The History Magazine—provided she was able to pull herself together and wasn’t totally nuts.
After half an hour of sitting in the car, going through my notes and interview questions, I got bored and decided to drive back to the old lady’s house and see if she’d talk to me a bit earlier than agreed. This time I knew exactly where I was going, so I was able to concentrate less on houses and house numbers, and more on the road itself. It struck me how deserted it was. Despite having only one lane in each direction, this was the main road heading east from Warsaw, all the way to Belarus; and yet my car seemed to be the only vehicle on it. Not even an old peasant on a hay cart in sight. Perhaps an accident somewhere further up had stopped the traffic, but that would explain the lack of cars in one direction, not both. Perhaps all the other drivers knew something I didn’t . . . I chided myself for letting my imagination run away with me. But as I pulled up alongside the chain-link fence, I couldn’t shake the feeling of unease.
The gate was open, as promised. I wondered if I should ring the doorbell anyway, to warn the old lady of my imminent arrival, but I didn’t want to bring her all the way out in the cold again, so I slung my bag over my shoulder, locked the car and let myself in, closing the gate behind me. As I headed across the front yard to the rickety old house, a chill breeze stirred around me, whispering in the unmown grass and rustling the leaves of the sapling trees that had seeded themselves and sprouted unchecked on either side of the stone slab path. Although only a dozen or so metres separated me from the old lady’s porch, I paused to zip up my parka. As I did so, the breeze grew stronger, making a high pitched sound as it weaved its way through the eaves of the house. Unexpectedly it died down, and the air around me was as still as the proverbial grave. Then a sudden gust of wind—this time blowing from the direction of the field behind the house. Urgent, angry almost, the wind brought with it something else: a sound—human, yet unearthly; a cry or moan—distant, but so heartfelt and full of despair that, despite the warmth of my down anorak, an icy shiver ran down my spine.
I made my way to the back of the house and looked out over the field that led away to a swampy patch of land, and ended in a stream or river of some sort—obscured by sedges and tall reeds. Beyond the line of water, a wasteland of grass, bushes and wild flowers stretched away to a railway track, and then further, to a dark tree line on the horizon. A mist was rising from the marshy land and, as I peered into the miasma, I thought I saw something: a flash of blue against the grey and brown. The wind blew in my direction again, and this time I was sure that the sound I heard was a young woman weeping.
“Hello!” I called out.
“Hello?” the voice came from behind me, making me jump. “Young man!”
I’d forgotten all about the old lady and my interview. She must have seen me out of a window, and was now holding open the back door, gesticulating for me to come inside. “You’ll catch your death of cold!” she chastised gently. I noticed a slight frown crease the woman’s already furrowed brow as I threw a last glance back over my shoulder before entering the house. Apart from that passing shadow on her face, my interviewee was a different person from the one I’d left sobbing her heart out almost an hour earlier. Calm and collected, she smiled at me in a warm and friendly manner. When she spoke, her voice was clear and steady.
In no time I found myself sitting in a worn armchair in a small parlour, nursing a glass of black tea in an elaborately engraved silver-coloured holder.
“I’m afraid I don’t have much to offer you,” said my hostess, holding out a plate with four different types of homemade cake. “You said you wanted to know about the War. I’ll tell you everything I remember.”
Her name was Bronislava. She was born in Międzyrzec and lived with her mother in an apartment block near the town centre. Her street was mixed Polish and Jewish. Not all of the Jews spoke Polish, but most of the Poles spoke at least some Yiddish, and it was normal for children from the two ethnic groups to play together in the street. Bronislava’s father had died when she was little and, as her mother was out cleaning for some of the town’s more affluent residents during the week, the little girl spent most of her time at the house of her best friends Esther and Mindla, so that her friends’ mum was like a second mother to her. Bronislava and Esther were nine when war broke out; Mindla was a couple of years older. For a while not much changed, but slowly rationing and other increasing restrictions meant that hunger and fear crept into all their lives. Esther and Mindla’s family was ordered to wear armbands with the Star of David, along with all the other Jewish residents, but at this point violence against the Jewish community was incidental rather than systematic.
Then one day, German soldiers with dogs and guns, and auxiliary Ukrainian militia, came marching into Bronislava’s street. They swept through the houses, pulling out Jewish families, beating them and leading them away. Bronislava and Esther were playing with the other children. Mindla was out running an errand. When Esther’s mother heard all the commotion, she came running out to the two girls, grabbed their hands and tried to pull them away from the shouting soldiers. The three of them were caught and shoved along behind the other Jews. Amid the blows and kicks that rained down on them from all sides, Esther’s mother tried to shield the two girls as best she could. Then Bronislava’s mother, who had been sewing at home that day, spotted her daughter out of the window across the road, and came running out, shouting that her child was Polish. Somehow she managed to fight her way to Bronislava, and yanked her away from Esther and her mother. Bronislava screamed and grappled with her mother. She tried to go after her best friend, but her mother scooped her up and ran back to their building.
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The old woman spoke in a dry, dispassionate, almost robotic way, which I would have found a little disconcerting had I not known that she’d taken some kind of tranquiliser especially for the occasion. She spoke of street roundups, summary executions and coldblooded murder. When she told me about a hyped-up Ukrainian militiaman, in the service of the German military, ripping a baby apart with his bare hands, her voice wavered, and I realised that even with whatever drugs she’d taken, she was making a valiant effort to keep it together.
Some time after Bronislava’s Jewish neighbours had been taken away, the German army took over the building in which she and her mother lived, and the remaining residents were evicted. Some of them moved in with extended family elsewhere; others were forcibly re-housed with other Poles.
“We were lucky,” Bronislava told me. “My mother had cousins who lived on the outskirts of Międzyrzec—in this very house. Out here things were quieter. The Germans raided the farms to make sure that the peasants weren’t hiding any livestock or reserves of grain over the allotted ration quota, but it was easier to grow some vegetables here and occasionally buy a few eggs from a neighbour who’d managed to hang on to a hen or two. My mother and I helped out in the house, and my mother still took on the odd cleaning or sewing job, so we got by somehow. We were hungry, but we weren’t starving . . . Would you like some more tea?” I shook my head and she carried on.
“I quickly discovered that there was no love lost between our cousins and the family next door, and the reasons for this became clear soon enough. I know one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” Bronislava frowned, “but there is no other way to speak of those monsters. The farmer was a mean-spirited and violent drunk. His wife was a greedy, spiteful and malicious gossip, and their son, although slimmer in build than his bloated, overfed parents, was a vile combination of the two of them in both temper and habit. As soon as they laid eyes on my mother and me, they hated us with as much venom as they did the rest of our household.
