by Jáchym Topol
It’s warm inside. But the old bag won’t let us go any farther. Maruška has some words with her – Russian or Belarusian, I can’t tell. I look around the entrance hall: the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. The walls are covered with yellowing maps of victorious campaigns, black-and-white photos of long-dead veterans, magnificent decorations, flags and battle standards, all long since chewed through by moths.
Maruška, I say, this is just like back home! It really does remind me of Terezín. With the display cases and everything, it’s a bit like the Monument.
The dezhurnaya is yapping away at Maruška. Then she points to me. She wants more cash because I’m an inostranyets. Ticket for foreigner! She’s all over us. Maruška tries to explain that I’m a Western expert, I work for the ministry. The ministries are all shut down, snaps the old bag, yanking on my sleeve. I give the dezhurnaya a little pat on the behind, trying to calm her the way Lebo used to do with the aunts when they got mad because somebody had trampled mud all over their kitchen. I get hit so hard I see stars. I fall on my back and see she’s getting ready to kick me.
Maruška makes her move. I see the gleam as she stabs a needle into the lady’s forearm.
The dezhurnaya topples. Maruška drags her off by the legs into the shadows. I should help, but I just sit there, where I landed, on the cold marble. Blood drips from my nose. Oof, that old bag really walloped me. I tilt my head back. I’m sitting under a big black-and-white picture. Guys throwing kids off a truck. A pile of bodies on the ground.
Fascists massacre orphanage, it says.
Maruška squats down beside me, breathing fast. Pulls out a handkerchief, wipes the blood off my face. Looks where I’m looking.
Yeah, and the reason they were orphans was the communists murdered their parents. Who would dare take care of them? They took the kids away to special camps where they died quick. That’s what’s happening in this picture. Azarichi or Chervony berag, Red Riverbank. You might want to remember that. If nothing else.
Awful.
Didn’t have that in your country, huh? Haven’t seen that, have you? But you should’ve, since you’re the expert. You are a Western expert, right?
She gives me the handkerchief. I press it to my nose. Maruška is trying to teach me. Just like Sara.
You know how many people the Nazis killed in Czechoslovakia?
No, not off the top off my head, but we can easily Google it.
Three hundred sixty-two thousand, four hundred and fifty-eight! And you know how many here in Belarus?
About the same?
She clenches her fist. Shakes her head. Rolls her eyes. She is seriously angry. She actually stamps her feet! She looks like an angry teacher, picking on a kid in class.
I give her the bloody handkerchief back. She shoves it in her pocket. My nose isn’t bleeding any more. But it’s all stuck together inside.
They killed four million people here. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records! And you know how many people there were in Czechoslovakia and how many in Belarus?
No.
The same. Ten million. But you in the West, you don’t have a clue! Terezín was nothing!
What is she getting so angry about? I guess the dezhurnaya got her upset.
The world never saw camps like we had here in Belarus! Maruška yells.
Maruška!
They say all the death camps were in Poland. That’s bullshit! All the tour operators only go to Auschwitz! But that’s going to change.
Maruška?
The Spider’s digging into my hip. But I don’t want to get up while she’s still squatting. I should’ve hidden it in my boot. Somewhere safer. Later.
She looks at me without seeing me, looking right through me.
I wave my hand in front of her eyes, back and forth.
Maruška, hello!
What?
What do we do with the dezhurnaya?
She’s asleep, Maruška says. At least I hope so.
She gets up, dusts off her skirt, not that there was even a speck of dirt on the marble. Let’s go, she says. I follow her.
We pass through enormous rooms full of display cases, weapons on the walls, ancient things manufactured during the war and before the war, there’s even a cannon. I don’t have time to check it out – where is she dragging me to?
The parquet floor creaks as we walk over it, plus I’m snorting a little through my nose, which echoes in the silence. I’ll wait till the blood congeals and deal with it later. My hands don’t hurt at all any more.
I stop at a display case with a miniature wooden model inside. A mock-up of the Trostenets extermination camp. Here in Minsk, it says.
Tiny little barricades, topped with barbed wire of thread. Flaming borders made of skewers. Teeny-tiny light bulbs represent the fire’s glow. Tiny little bodies stacked along the borders. Smoke rising from corpses painted on the plywood. The caption says: Jews from the West were murdered here.
Psst, Maruška hisses to me. I walk over to where she’s standing, by the wall. The darkened hall stretches behind us as far as I can see. A beam of moonlight falls through the windows. A huge map hangs on the wall in front of us. Maruška rolls it back. Well, look at that. A lift. I feel Maruška’s breath on my face. She isn’t angry any more.
An old wooden lift. Carved with stars, sickles, and hammers. Stalin himself probably rode in it, whenever he managed to tear a chunk of time out of his crowded schedule to oversee the construction. We sink into the depths. I hear ropes and chains unwinding, then there’s a jerk as we come to a stop. The door opens on to a gaping chill. I hope Maruška knows where we are. It’s dark and cold. Damp. Suddenly a bright light stabs me in the eyes.
He lowers his torch. Tall guy in a rubber coat. Craggy chin. Tough old guy.
Maruška talks a mile a minute, the old man keeps cutting her off. We walk behind him. Other lights flicker in the darkness around us. We come to a huge mound of dirt. This must be where the generator is, I can hear the engine humming. A dim yellow light shines on the heaps of damp earth around us. Light bulbs hang off a wooden flagpole. I see a tent. Crates, benches. I stamp my foot, dirt. Are we in a cave? The ceiling’s too high up to see.
The lights around us are head torches. Now I see them: silent workers moving all around us. Carting wheelbarrows of dirt out of a deep pit reinforced with wood. Long wooden crates sit next to the hills of dirt, stacked on top of each other.
The guy in the rubber coat is still giving Maruška a dressing-down.
I make a move, this is too much. The guy hisses, Maruška turns and disappears into the darkness.
Now he’s staring me in the eyes. I stand as if nailed to the spot.
Mark Isakyevich Kagan, he says, squeezing my hand. You were quite delayed. But the main thing is you’re here, my friend. I trust the journey from Terezín was satisfactory?
He turns away, uninterested in my answer, and we tramp along in the light of his torch. I look around for Maruška, and slip in the dirt. In my mind I thank Alex for giving me solid boots. We come to the big pit with the light bulbs on a pole.
He shines his light into the crates. They’re filled with corpses. Ancient, rotted corpses. One or two in each crate. Some are just a heap of bones. Their skin looks like an old rag or piece of paper with a coating of dried grey cement. In some there’s just a skull and bones. They must have a special rat patrol, that’s for sure.
We never found anything like this in the catacombs. Lebo would’ve pulled us out. That would’ve been too much.
But I know from the way the air rolls around underground why some of the corpses hadn’t rotted completely. You’d find a dog or squirrel like that in some of the Terezín cellars, but the work crews cleaned out most of the human remains after the war.
Kagan calls over one of the workers pushing a wheelbarrow out of the pit. He shines his light on it: yep, full of bones. The worker is a boy with a ponytail. He stops at an empty crate. Takes the bones out with gloved hands, lays them in the crate
.
There’s a low, heavy table I hadn’t noticed before. Some coins, pieces of paper on it, a few bullet shells. Old, yellowed photographs. Kagan shines his light on them.
Naturally this is a secret operation, Kagan says. And you see what conditions are like. But we already have results. The Katyn massacre was a walk in the park compared to this, I’m telling you, friend! Kagan slaps me on the back. He’s trying hard to be friendly, but the tension’s coming off of him like a live wire. He picks things up from the table as he speaks.
The last layer’s pre-war, he says. There are thousands of them, maybe ten thousand. That’s why they built the museum here after the war. To cover the execution site.
He hands me a piece of fabric.
These are NKVD epaulettes, he says. Soviet secret police. There’s always something to find in those graves. A family portrait in the lining. Officer stripes. Break open a lump of dirt and you find a piece of newspaper the executioners used to roll their cigarettes.
We keep walking past the crates. To another pit, more like a crater. The light of the head torches reveals the pale, narrow faces of girls. They look funny, hunched down in the muddy pit like fireflies. Brushes and blades flash in their hands.
Classic wartime interlayer, Kagan says, pointing to the pit. Jews. The ghetto was here during the war, right over our heads. The Germans totally wiped it out, killed them all, burned it. Nobody knows it existed.
He points his torch back at the table. A small heap of rusty, twisted bits of metal. The same kind of stuff we used to fish out of Terezín for Lebo. Bent safety pins, hairslides, a small shiny something or other, maybe a flattened bullet. And that’s not all.
Teeth! Kagan raps on the table. None of the villagers ever had their teeth repaired, but the intellectuals all had a filling or two. Some even had dentures. Here they’re all mixed together. And what have we got here?
Kagan points out a badge: a tiny silver skull. He starts picking things out of the pile and holding them up in front of my eyes, flashing his light in my face. I back away and bump into the boy pushing the wheelbarrow. Must’ve wandered over when I wasn’t looking. He’s got one of his co-workers with him, also in muddy rubber boots. The girls start climbing out of the pit, walking slowly towards us. Like they don’t want to miss what their boss is saying.
German prisoners were shot here too. They had to dig their own pit, of course, not too far from the Jewish graves. Something of an irony of history, isn’t it?
Now Kagan is shoving uniform buttons in front of my face. A swastika belt buckle. A badge with a skull.
The girls take everything he hands them and lay the objects back on the table. I’d rather be talking to them. What do I want with some lecture? I’ve had enough of underground graves. For as long as I live. I was pretty angry that Kagan had chased Maruška away. Looking around at the girls, they remind me of someone.
Then it hits me: it was pale creatures just like them, all twisted up with pain inside, who used to come to us, the seekers of the bunks. The girl laying a buckle on the table right now had that same tough, hardened look – except when she looked at Kagan and a softness stole into her eyes.
Kagan turns to go and we follow along behind him, the boys covered in mud, the girls from the pit. Stretching out our stride, mud squirting at every step, we walk back to the pole where the generator hums. And I see more people, standing and sitting around on the crates and benches. Young people. All of them Kagan’s workers, to judge from the mud.
He steps up on a crate and reaches with both hands towards the depths of the cave, or whatever it is we’re in, as if he’s groping for the edge where the light gives way to darkness.
Now all we have left to uncover is the final layer, Kagan says loudly, towering atop the crate in his rubber boots, waving his hands like some spooky magician working his abracadabra. Everybody stands and listens, some clutch a pickaxe or shovel, but nobody so much as coughs or shuffles their feet. Then Kagan raises his voice even louder. The echo is pretty impressive.
Yes, now we will dig in the dirt where the tyrants forced your parents and grandparents to kneel. You know as well as I do that this government won’t allow a word about Belarusians murdering one another. But we will shatter the silence! To forget the horrors of the past is to consent to a new evil, Kagan thunders.
He snatches a shovel out of the hand of one of the girls from the pit and holds it in the air.
You see? Dig in the ground and the house of tyranny will collapse! he cries.
The girl looks happy Kagan chose her. But also a little embarrassed.
Kagan leaps down from the crate and seizes me by the hand. Then he goes on speaking.
Your work in Europe, your devotedly maintained and freely visited burial sites are a model to us, dear friend, he says, pumping my hand.
Terezín is in every encyclopaedia, every textbook, he says, speaking now just to me. We want to be on the world map too. We believe you can help us achieve that.
Kagan is shaking my hand, sealing our bond of brotherhood, when all of a sudden we hear it: a sharp, nerve-rending sound. A siren. It wails intermittently as the yellow bulbs blink on and off. An alarm.
Everyone freezes at first, then springs into motion, some people go running off into the dark as Kagan drags me towards the tent. I don’t resist, since all of a sudden I see her, holding open a flap. We slip inside, Kagan gropes around on the ground, lifts a wooden cover. I see stairs, the faint glow of light bulbs. Maruška’s right behind me, we clamber down the steps, there are others behind her.
I duck my head and follow Kagan down a long tunnel, till we come to a train. It looks like one of those rides for kids.
We sit down, Kagan, Maruška and me, some big guy squeezes in with us, plus two girls, panting for breath, smeared with dirt. People are coming out of the tunnel one by one and climbing on board. The carriage next to us, a little thing, is filled with wooden crates, sealed shut. Kagan chuckles softly.
I bet you didn’t know there are still countries where an archaeologist can feel like Indiana Jones. Eh, my friend? Ho ho ho!
And we’re off. The ride is bumpy in places, and slow, but we move right along. I can’t believe we didn’t think of this in Terezín! A little train like this – it’d be great for older tourists! From the Monument to the cemetery and the ramparts. And the kids! Then they wouldn’t be so worn out from walking.
Where’re we going? I ask Kagan.
Headquarters. Of our opposition party. Whatever we find, we store there, he says.
Is it safe? I ask. I have my doubts.
The government and the opposition both support our plan. So there’s no threat to your mission, he says, leaning in towards me. I can’t see his face, but I can smell the strong stink of his rubber coat.
Where’s your headquarters?
Minsk.
Oh no. And here I was hoping we were on our way somewhere else. But if I’d had any idea where I was going to end up, I would’ve stayed nailed to my seat in that train.
The last faint light disappears around the bend. Now it’s really dark and cold. I want to hold Maruška’s hand, but it’s too cramped to move. Still, I bless the darkness, at least now I can take care of the clot in my nose. I’d be embarrassed in front of them.
I reach into my pocket, take out the Spider, and stick it in one of my fabulous boots. Wiggle my fingers, feeling it through my sock. Slowly we wind our way through the dark, blacker than black, nobody talks. Why bother. It’s obvious they’re after us.
10
Finally the light appears and the train jerks to a stop. We get out and walk. Another narrow tunnel, another set of wooden stairs. We walk up, Kagan first, somebody up there is holding open the cover. We’re in a house. Bare wooden walls, high ceiling. No furniture, just crates. They’re everywhere, some new and smelling of wood, others ancient and warped, stinking of dried mud. All of them are shut. Kagan is greeted by a crowd of men and women. They exchange strong hugs, happy to see each ot
her. I want to wait for Maruška, but then all of a sudden I see him. He splits off from the others, walks over to me.
You got the Spider? Alex asks.
Way back when, I had told him what I named it.
Better give me it now. I don’t know how much time we have, he says.
You mean martial law? I ask.
Whatever happens, stick with me. You got it or not? Alex asks again. Mr Hard-line. It actually hasn’t been that long since we saw each other in Terezín. Now he’s got a screwdriver in his hand, wires draped around his neck. Overalls with big pockets. Pliers, tape measure, a few other tools poking out. I haven’t seen him like this before. He looks like a handyman.
The people who were working under the museum come crawling out one by one. Next thing you know the wooden floor’s covered with footprints. Young girls, boys. We could’ve used them at the Comenium. They would’ve liked it there. I follow Alex as we walk towards the back of the room, working our way through the crush. These seekers of the bunks are a tougher bunch than our sensitive students. There’s anger on their faces. I bet they’re pretty pissed off they had to make a run for it. Everything’s tougher and crazier here. In our country the girls would be selling souvenirs instead of digging with shovels. Listening to Lebo’s talks instead of Kagan’s fiery speeches. At night they’d be smoking red grass, drinking and dancing. They wouldn’t be so pale. Ah, well! Wouldn’t that be nice? And then I see Maruška.
She’s cradling a little boy in her arms, with another one hanging on her skirt. Both of their faces are glowing as she whispers something into the down on the little one’s head.
In the corner of the room there are more kids, women, older ones too.
There’s something I want to show you, says Alex. You didn’t have this in Terezín.
We go behind a divider. Again I’m blinking in the dark. I can feel the Spider in my boot. Now what? After I give it to Alex, then what’ll happen to me? Where will I go? These are the questions I want to discuss with Mr Hard-line. The sooner the better. He takes me by the elbow, we keep walking.