by Jáchym Topol
Old homes. Broken cobblestones. Trickles of dirty water flowing from cracked sewer pipes. Collapsing barracks filled with cats and pigeons’ nests. The whole derelict town surrounding the Monument.
They didn’t want us there. We got in the way of the bulldozers. It was easy for them to round up a few unsuspecting mental cases and stick them in the nuthouse, hoodwink a couple of grannies and grandpas, nod them in the direction of some blocks of flats and watch all trace of them vanish from the world.
But we were the last inhabitants and we weren’t giving up.
Most of us moved into the building on Central Square.
The people from the Monument never liked Lebo. But compared to how much they hated him later, when we joined forces with the world and Lebo became the Guardian of Terezín, it was nothing.
The first few days I just sort of straggled around the sad town, reinforcing my heartache. Lebo left me alone.
But soon I realized: I was now the only one who called Lebo ‘uncle’.
All my fellow pupils, everyone from that bunch of kids who crawled through the catacombs under Lebo’s guidance, wading through underground streams looking for objects from his days as a child, was scattered around the world. Everybody who could had left the town.
That evening I stood on the crumbling ramparts alone, gazing out at the tall grass that hadn’t been properly grazed for years, and thought about Terezín.
I drove the little goats into their shed and fastened the shaky door with a chain as a warning, a sign saying, I’m here now, I’m back, look out! I didn’t want the mental cases killing and eating any more goats. The main ones I had my eye on were Kamínek and Kůs. I’m sure those bums would’ve been glad to drag their prey off into some cellar, their homeless berths stuffed with blankets and rags. Yes, my herd had been sold, killed off and plundered just like the town. Old billy goat Bojek, once a head-butting monster, now just limped along. Don’t worry, Bojek, I promised him, I won’t give you up.
Where is everyone? I asked the silent battlements.
And suddenly I realized I was standing on the spot where my dad had fallen from the ramparts.
It’s like there was never even anyone here, isn’t it?
Lebo. He had followed me. His black suit blended in with the gloomy mass of the night horizon. Only his eyes shone in his enormous skull.
You know, your father wouldn’t have agreed to end Terezín either. He was devoted to this town. It was right here somewhere – Lebo waved his hand towards a dusky patch of red grass beneath us – that he pulled your mother out of the grave.
Grave, well, Lebo said, pausing a moment to swallow. It was a pit. I was little, so I don’t remember, but they say there were pits everywhere.
What? I said. I didn’t know anything about this chapter of their lives.
That’s right, he pulled her out, Lebo said. And there, as night fell over the ramparts, Lebo told me the story my dad had told him once upon a time.
They were run ragged, all those Soviet troops and liberators of Terezín, when their formations came through Manege Gate to Central Square. There was typhus here, you know. They couldn’t even drink the water. Plenty of them had vodka in their canteens, but not your dad, he was just a boy, and that army drum weighed him down something awful.
And right here – Lebo gestured with his right hand – he came to lie down right here, set his drum down on the grass by the pits, and all of a sudden he looks! What’s that moving around in there? A naked girl, sitting on top of a pile of corpses, an absolute skeleton, and she’s waving to him. So he tears his strap off his drum, throws one end to her and pulls her out of the pit. She was Czech, he realized from the words rasping from her parched and blistered lips, which for him, being a Czech boy, was cause for celebration. In all those battles and offensives as the Red Army dashed to the aid of Prague, he just banged his drum, you understand, he wasn’t in a position to talk to any civilians.
The Red Army had scooped him up in some Czech village in the Carpathians, or maybe it was Ukraine, that’s right, and your father became the son of the regiment.
So he pulls the girl out, lays her on the grass, and peels off his shirt to cover up her shocking, skeletal nakedness. It was a sunny day in May when your parents met. And then he hears the Russians laughing and looks up and sees them walking along with the Czechs who took up arms and rebelled, and they’re putting the Germans they captured into the typhus camp, which had been emptied of Jews – about four thousand all together, hundreds of women and children died in there. Probably some of those little bones and messages and hairpins you brought me came from them, I can’t tell them apart. So the Russians and Czechs were herding the Germans past the typhus pits into the camp, but a few of the Russians turned aside and went over to your father, their brother-in-arms, and they had water! Right, so they gave the girl a drink too. You must keep that girl now! the Russians told him with a devilish grin. Whoa ho, the molodets has found a girl! So we hold wedding now, no? Teasing him like soldiers do, but your father was crazy with thirst, so he just nodded deliriously and that was it, the marriage was set. The army doctors managed to pull her through, against the odds. She had typhus, sure enough, not to mention being completely exhausted from giving birth! Just imagine, Lebo says, and I feel his hand on my shoulder and I don’t want to ask a thing.
You know why she was in the pit? Lebo says. The forces of law and order sentenced her to death for getting pregnant here in Terezín, that was her offence. But the Russians came so quick that the Krauts didn’t have time to shoot everyone they convicted. And that’s why you’re here, do you understand now?
No, I don’t, and I don’t care! I said, stamping so hard it raised a little whirl of red dust.
I know what you mean, Lebo said. I stopped caring who my father was a long time ago. They probably killed him anyway. Lebo shrugged.
We stood, looking out from the ramparts. The pit my mum was in when she waved to my dad was almost exactly the same spot where my dad fell off the ramparts. It was strange.
Ah, who cares, I said, shrugging my shoulders like Lebo.
We looked at each other, Lebo’s enormous hand on my shoulder. And in a flash of understanding, the two of us sealed a pact never to talk to each other about our parents again.
Then Lebo told me how the Russians held a wedding, a war wedding in Terezín.
Your father stayed here with your mum, and out of nothing he created the most famous regimental music in Czechoslovakia, the military band of the town of Terezín, known far and wide beyond the town borders, and believe me, for an army boy, a shrimpy little rat-a-tat-tat who grew up poor, that was no joke! Your father put all he had into this town! You should carry on his legacy.
And for the first time Lebo confided in me his plan to save the town. He had been drawing on his contacts for some time already, pleading and begging and sounding the alarm to all corners of the earth.
You know, he would have been proud of you, Lebo said, gesturing in the twilight at the spot down below us where the tall grass trembled in the gusts of evening wind.
That’s where my dad breathed his last.
If he hadn’t died that way, the town’s undoing would have killed him for sure, Lebo said.
He was probably right.
Just imagine a military marching band, the proud blare of brass, in these ruins!
That’s how my dad saw the town’s ramparts in his final moment, as he went flying past. It was a good death, especially for a liberator of Terezín.
And I made up my mind right then and there to dedicate the rest of my life to Lebo’s plan to save the town.
We set to work that same night.
Now I could finally view my childhood as a closed chapter.
We went straight back to our building, to my bunk. Lebo slid a desk next to it. He looked at me, smiled and nodded, then pointed to the wall: an Internet hook-up, the same as the one in Pankrác, a shiny, tiny thing.
I nodded. This was where the Mon
ument had planned to put its office.
You know what I did in prison, Lebo?
He shrugged. Did he know or didn’t he?
We left it at that.
Lebo pulled out an old satchel filled with notebooks and scraps of paper, the satchel he’d stuffed with our copies of the messages scratched by fingernails. Sometimes there was also a name, and some of the people had survived, or their relatives had survived, and now they were out in the world.
He’d had decades to find them, based on all the notes we’d found beneath the town. He had pages torn from encyclopaedias, educational books and memoirs. Now Lebo sat down next to me and began to dictate from memory, weaving his web of connections and contacts that were going to save Terezín.
Yes, we spent that night, and the following days and nights, writing letters, cries for help, pounding on many doors. We fought for the dilapidated town by begging, sending pleas to everyone who’d ever been here, and their relatives and friends as well. We sounded the alarm.
As time went by, we partitioned off my bunk with boards to make a computer room. My desk was quickly covered over with notebooks, stacks of floppy disks. We didn’t want to move out of the bunkroom.
No matter what.
I would sit at the computer, fingers flying over the keyboard, while Lebo paced back and forth, or more often sat on a bunk and dictated.
Even later, when we had some of our students sleeping in the room, exhausted by the evening sittings, we didn’t care, we worked.
Lebo knew which important people we should contact. He’d had decades to seek them out, plus the Internet and me. He knew who to turn to.
He had gazed up at some of the survivors from his Terezín cradle, a shoebox hidden under the bunk he was sitting on right now. He wanted their money, and their influence, and the money and the influence of their relatives and friends.
I would never have believed the rocket-like rise of our cause if Lebo hadn’t been reading me the replies. Plenty of people agreed to help us, no questions asked. Those were the kind of people Lebo was looking for, people who didn’t wonder whether or not the old town of evil should be torn down, who didn’t need any deliberation or discussion, because they knew that every splinter of every bunk should be preserved, every battered brick, every corner of the old fortress. Every inch of Terezín should exist always and for ever, and, as Rolf would later write, feed the memory of the world.
I didn’t care about memory, though. I just needed a place to live.
I really hoped Lebo could save the town. And I hoped his contacts could feed us all – everyone living here, even the ones who were only half alive. My aunts, the old men and women, the drunks, cripples, and mental cases, the ones who couldn’t leave Terezín. If the bulldozers came, they’d have nowhere to go, as I’ve said before.
And that evening, when we walked home from the ramparts together, Lebo started broadcasting the news of the fortress town’s destruction to the world. From then on we wrote letters every day, oftentimes working for nights at a stretch.
Soon the replies started coming in. The people Lebo knew already wrote to the others that he was OK. And soon everyone wanted to get a look at Lebo, Guardian of Terezín, as Rolf dubbed him in his article.
Rolf’s reportage was published with a photograph of the giant Lebo dressed in black, gazing out from the ramparts into the reddening twilight as he declared, This place of dreadful horror must be preserved for the memory of humanity. Of course Rolf made up the ‘memory of humanity’ part – Lebo didn’t talk about his activities. And he had no intention of feeding the world’s memory. He just wanted to feed the dying inhabitants of Terezín.
Our work had just begun.
Rolf ’s article was reprinted in many languages, it was published all over the world, so it wasn’t just academics who could speak for Terezín any more, academics installed by a government that didn’t want to pour billions or even millions into a decaying town with no army. Now there were other spokesmen for the town besides the board members and researchers, feasting off of their cushy incomes and keeping quiet about the coming of the bulldozers. The world had found out about us. Visitors started arriving.
And that was the beginning of the Comenium.
4
One of the cornerstones of the Comenium student commune was laid the day I spied a gorgeous girl in shorts and a T-shirt stumbling across Central Square in the summer heat, a blond braid hanging down her sweaty back. There I was, merrily herding along my little flock, the few that had managed to escape both the auction block and the mental cases’ maws. The wind had long since blown the stink of prison off of me, and she recognized me. Yes, she had come because of Rudolf’s article, she felt aligned with us, she said, and wanted to meet Lebo and stuff, help us in our cause. Dazzled by this apparition of a girl, I said nothing, just turned and led her through the dust kicked up by the goat’s hooves. I was longing for twilight, eager for it to be sundown, so maybe she wouldn’t notice I was blushing with embarrassment, though I was also leaning in towards her, with a touch of hungry boldness. She gazed at me curiously as I led her to Lebo, the curtains stirring here and there in the hovels on either side, people peeking from half-open windows as Sara’s sandals slapped against the cobblestones. Not many found their way into our streets in those days, just buses with tourists visiting the Monument. Sara had set out for Terezín from Sweden to track down the bunks where her grandfather and grandmother had supposedly once rested their heads, before they were killed. She was one of the seekers of the bunks, young people with brains darkened by the cloud of the terrible past, by the horrors that had befallen their parents, grandparents, relatives, or just by the fact that those horrors had happened at all. Could they happen again? What is man capable of? How come it happened to them, but I was spared? What would I have done if it had been me being led to my death? Can it happen again? The seekers turned these morbid questions over and over again in their minds, a demon had taken hold of them, clouding their brains. Even now, they were tormented by the murders of yesteryear, making them ripe for the psychiatrist’s couch. But some of them took to the road, heading for the East, all on their own, with a backpack and a credit card from their parents in their pocket, and went digging through the damp ruins of Poland, Lithuania, Russia – in short, everywhere mass graves were common. The seekers, like drops of water, seeped into the underground currents of the mysterious East, so it was no surprise they often sank to the bottom in anguish. And occasionally one of them would turn up in Terezín. Longing to ease the painful pressure on their brain, these were no ordinary tourists, content to wander down a few trails of genocide, maintained for the world by the Monument. Ordinary tourists strolled through Terezín like it was a medieval castle, taking snapshots, shooting videos of the dungeons and torture chambers to show the family afterwards. The bunk seekers would never even think of such a thing. They showed up here crazed with pain, seized by the eternal question every seeker asked: If it happened here, can it happen again? They knew they weren’t in a medieval castle but in an abyss where the world had been torn apart, a place without mercy or compassion, where anything was possible. And it ate at their brains. Sara, too, had arrived sick like this, which was why she insisted on exploring every inch of the town. I have a feeling, she said over the trampling hoofs of my herd, that they left a message here for me … somewhere.
First she had wandered around the Monument, then she headed over to our seedy little town. I want to walk by every wall, every rampart in this town of death, I want to understand, to know, to feel, Sara said amid the clouds of dust and the bleating herd. She seemed a little dehydrated to me. I took her to Lebo.
That day, like every other day, I grazed my goats till dusk, but once the darkness had swallowed up the last shades of red, I was driving my flock back home, past Lebo’s ground-floor room, and the lights were on and I saw Sara, well refreshed now, thanks to my aunts. She was an important visitor, after all – she brought interest to our town of destruction
, fresh air and life would follow in her footsteps, my aunts could sense it somehow.
Inside, Sara was listening to Lebo, the man who had drawn his first breath here at the eye of the hurricane, at the centre of all the horror, most likely right next to the bunk where Sara’s granny had slept. She paid close attention as Lebo opened his black satchel and showed her the old notes, spikes, and rusty bullet shells. I had completely forgotten that somewhere down in the catacombs, where nothing rots, we had found two fingernails, probably torn off scratching the plaster long since washed away by groundwater. Lebo had kept them, so Sara could touch them. She was hungry for details of life in the town of death, so Lebo talked.
The seekers of the bunks came thirsting for knowledge. All of them had been directly affected by what went on here and needed to hear that, despite all the horrible things that had happened to their grandparents or parents, in spite of it all and through it all, they could go on living. And the seekers spread the word about Lebo to each other, so more of them came, wanting to hear the witness who had been born in hell and survived and was now alive in the modern era. And coming face to face with the living Lebo and his objects helped them. And some – like Sara – stayed.
Sara! It wasn’t only her grandfather and grandmother who had breathed their last here. About twenty of her relatives had perished in Terezín or somewhere in the black holes of Poland. Only her dad managed to save himself. Thanks to the Swedish Red Cross, he made it out on a children’s transport to Sweden. Sara wasn’t interested in the streets the town and the government had designated to be preserved. She liked tramping along the crumbling ramparts, crawling through the overgrown drains, running her fingers over the scratches that might’ve been greetings from those going to their death. She also enjoyed taking part in the lives of those of us who were left, and that was the thing, that was the reason why they liked her. She enjoyed listening to the old codgers puffing away on the peeling benches of Central Square, speaking with pride of the days when the regiments of the Czechoslovak People’s Army paraded through, and how many of them had paraded with them, or even led those regiments. Sara spoke German, which all the old people here knew. She was the Swedish girl who had come to us from the world, an apparition, a sign of life. At first the locals just stared cautiously through the curtains, watching as she looked around and listened in fascination, here in the graveyard condemned by the world to ruin and decay.