by Jáchym Topol
It takes all I’ve got not to slip and fall on the rocks.
Our mum survived the Khatyn massacre. I’m sure Alex told you. She was seven. They nailed our grandfather to the barn. Burned everyone else alive in the cottage. She hid in the shed. They ran her through with bayonets and burned down the shed, but somehow she managed to crawl out and get away.
Her little brother, my uncle, that is, was wearing boots with soles cut from old tyres. People wore them in those days. My mum saw the executioners coming, so she told him to take them off. So he wouldn’t burn too long in the rubber. So he wouldn’t suffer any more than he had to. But my mum’s bad luck was that officially there were no survivors of Khatyn, especially not a little girl like her. That’s how it was written down, that’s what they reported. And all of a sudden she comes out of hiding and says, I was there, I saw it, and those men were speaking Ukrainian.
What men?
The killers. Which means it wasn’t only Germans, but Soviets too, you see? It was a disaster for her. There was only one story she told about it when she came back from the concentration camp in Siberia. The one about the galoshes. It freaked me out, you know. The horror of it.
So who’s your husband, then? I wanted to know everything about this girl.
Kagan.
I stop in my tracks. So she’s married to that harsh old man. I turn around, so she can’t see my face.
She touches my shoulder. It’s good that you’re with us. I’m glad.
I don’t see any smoke above the museum. We can go downhill now.
Want to know how we met?
Absolutely.
I was just a little girl, but I couldn’t get it out of my brain, Maruška says. The world is a place of horror, that’s all I kept thinking. Because of what happened. The killing. That’s what people are capable of. And it’s going to happen again. What do I do?
Uh-huh! I say. I knew that one.
Whenever anyone looked at me, the first thing I’d do is think to myself: Will they hide me or turn me in, when the time comes again? I’d walk in someplace and right away: Where would I hide? The attic? The wardrobe? And it just kept getting worse. I thought maybe I should just kill myself. I mean, the world’s so ugly and full of cruelty. People are evil.
I look at Maruška. Talking about what it was like for her. She didn’t look at all like a bunk seeker, though.
Alex brought me to Kagan. A million people died in the concentration camps in Belarus. But not Kagan. A lot of people like me went to see him. They still do.
He went through it all as a little boy. They killed all his people. He was in the ghetto when it burned. Dug himself out of a mass grave. Saw people eating people. And he was able to talk about it. We listened. And we laughed together. You can live with all the horror and in spite of it. He taught us that. He rid me of my obsession. You give everything to a person like that. If that’s what he wants.
Hm.
She stops in the middle of the slope. Giggles. She must’ve popped another pill. Yep, she digs around in her satchel and hands me one too. I swallow it down with a handful of snow.
Remember how we had to run for it from the Falvarek?
Yeah!
We both giggle a while.
This Devil’s Workshop’s going to mean work for a lot of people. Maintenance men, technicians. Security guards, guides, all of that. And tourists bring money. It’s only right that the descendants of the people who got murdered should get some cash out of it, don’t you think? Anyway, there’s nobody else around here. And when I get old, I can live in peace and be the dezhurnaya. In our museum.
She’s walking next to me like she’s used to it. Not being careful at all. She doesn’t realize I’ve got to get out of here. Alex is still in there. Rolf. The partisans will kill me.
For a second a flash of sunlight shines through the drizzle and mist. Her uniform’s covered in stains. But her hair is glowing. She keeps laughing. I’m laughing too. She’ll never run away with me. She’s got kids.
We come to the bottom of the hill. The forest starts here. Birches. I stop. There’s one more thing I want to know.
Did you give Lebo an injection too? When you guys brought him here?
Yeah. We got you into Minsk under the Czech-Belarusian agreement on transportation of prisoners. Greased a few palms, you know how it is. Look at those trees over there!
Were you with Lebo at the hotel?
No, I was with my boys. My brother took care of him.
So do you know what’s in the museum?
Are you crazy? I’ll see it on opening day. It’ll be great! There’ll be people coming from Minsk and all over the place. I’ll put on my ceremonial uniform. I can’t go in this. See? She stuck a slender finger through a hole in her coat and wiggled it around.
A beautiful woman like you could go dressed in a potato sack!
Cut it out! I don’t like that kind of talk!
But she isn’t angry. And she didn’t kill Lebo. If she had, she would’ve told me.
Look, you can go over there in those trees! I’ll turn around.
I go down to the trees, peel off a strip of bark. Anything happening? No. I have to do it. I’ll be gentle. I start back uphill towards her.
Hey, wait a sec, she says. She smells it too. The smoke. Carried here on a gust of wind. The thick smoke of a fire.
Stop! she shouts.
I speed up. I want to put the bark over her mouth so she can’t scream. Knock her down. Put her to sleep.
I ram into her full force, she sinks to her knees, head twisted back. Did she faint? Has she had enough? But then suddenly she’s like an animal, springing up from her knees, the needle bounces off the piece of bark I’m holding up. She comes at me again, I sidestep, grab her hand, we slip, she falls on top of me, jams the needle into her thigh. Not a sigh. Nothing. This is not what I wanted.
That’s what I keep telling myself, this is not what I wanted, Maruška, this is not what I wanted. I carry her down the hill in my arms to the dead village, lean her up against a wall, there’s still red in her cheeks, she’s breathing. I pick her back up and suddenly a burst of flame leaps from the roof of the cabin below us, green and orange fiery serpents creeping across the museum roof. The sound of cracking and muffled blows carries to us on the wind. The rafters caving in, or that chemical stuff blowing up.
I lay her on the bed in the tent. Maruška. You only got what you were going to give to me. So this is your sleep of the just. I take off her boots. Loosen the belt on her jacket. Cover her up. They’ve got all kinds of blankets and sleeping bags.
I fish around in her satchel. Swallow a blue one, put a handful in my pocket.
She’s also got scissors in there. I’ll just snip off a single strand, she won’t even notice. Not that I’m some kind of pervert! I just don’t know how to say goodbye.
I wrap a red strand of her hair around my fingers. Hold it up against the sky, as the flames swallow up the museum. The sky is red.
I just stay like that.
With her.
I don’t have much time, though.
Where will I go?
I fish around in my memory: it’s there, stored in the database, the address. I probably have the envelope too, somewhere. Or maybe not.
I wouldn’t work with Mr Mára, not a chance. But I’ve got money. From the game. It might be enough to make a fresh start, I fantasize.
It’s a nice fantasy.
I feed the stove. A lot. She needs warmth.
And then I hear it.
The tractor. Good thing it’s so noisy. I see Red Cap in the driver’s seat. And there are others. So I slip out under the canvas, vanish into the mist.
13
Through birches, bushes, sparse vegetation, over the nearly frozen snow. I don’t want to go back in the woods. I have a panic attack, out on the plain, but then I see a big black blot in the distance. Could be a marsh, a grove of trees, but it might also be a house, a place with walls where I can draw strength.
Maybe at least some boulders, a hole in the ground. A ditch, a gully, a place to hide and watch the world go by.
The attack passes. I look down, focusing my eyes on the ground, and walk. An island of blackness lies in the twilight ahead like a prospect of hope.
I’m grateful to Alex for these clothes, that’s for sure. It’s like being in a protective cocoon. The thingamajig is frozen inside me.
Alex. Why did he tell me about the gutting? When somebody says they want to kill you, believe them: Lebo taught us that too. Where will I go? Everybody I knew is gone. I look down at the cold earth under my feet. It’s so much work just walking, I can’t even think of Maruška.
I make out the first cross through the flakes. It’s snowing. The wind is knocking me around. But I rejoice. And I’m also more on the lookout. People. I’ll get out of here somehow. This chilly land will let me go. Won’t eat me up, suck me in.
More crosses, in a row. I walk between them, lift my eyes, and, good, my head doesn’t spin.
The blot turns out to be a smallish hill covered in trees, bushes. I have to tramp through the crosses to reach the foot of the hill. Little crosses, big crosses, a massive pole, six feet tall, crossed with two smaller ones. Next to it a tiny cross of spruce branches with a faded pink ribbon fluttering. Surrounded with stuffed animals. A bear, a monkey, a couple more. Tattered, I guess from the wind and rain. They’re weighted down with stones. A few more tiny crosses.
I think I wailed. Out loud, which is just reckless. Another graveyard.
I push back the branches of the first trees. There are crosses everywhere here too. Also stones, some with inscriptions on them. In Cyrillic. And in my alphabet too. Names. A Jewish stone engraved with a star – I know that from back home.
I make my way slowly uphill through the crosses. There are also names carved on the trees. Some of the scars are grown over, others shine clearly against the bark. Not a human footprint anywhere, though. No signs of dog paws or goat hooves, nothing.
Even if I did dare to leave the hill of crosses and go back out there on the plain, the wind would’ve swept me away. Tiny, stinging hailstones whip across the landscape. I make my way through the crosses, they’re even thicker here than the trees, up to the top.
There’s a man standing there. I slip down into the snow, behind a rock.
Beard, quilted coat, knee-high boots. Looks like one of the guys from Arthur’s partisan outfit. But there’s no weapon in his hands. Or on his back. He’s holding a sack. Fishes some kind of shiny trinket or something out of it. Flings it into the snow among the crosses. Whistles to himself. Moves on. Towards me.
I slither away across a shallow grave. Slip behind a tree and slide down the ridge. Then I hear something. In the gorge, the ravine. A horse whinnying. I see a hefty woman in yellow overalls. Shielding her eyes with her hand, searching in the drizzle, looking up, towards me. The only thing I’m holding on to, unforgivably, is some slender tree roots. They give way and I go tumbling down, landing at her feet. So Ula and I meet again.
We compare stories about that night at the Falvarek. She remembers it well. The rat-filled courtyard. The city under martial law. So what’s the situation now? I ask. She says the president has probably crushed the opposition. But they’re still fighting in Minsk, and probably elsewhere too. That’s why they’re staying off the roads. But there hasn’t been a signal for days now. She says she’ll explain all that later.
She finds it funny that this time she’s the one helping me to my feet.
Yep, we’re both inostrantsi.
And colleagues besides.
This is Black Hill, Ula says. They built it to cover up the burial site. It’s actually a huge knoll.
I nod.
She’s glad to see me! Apart from that, she doesn’t see anything cheerful about our situation.
Ula’s in a grim mood. But I’m actually happy.
She isn’t fat. She’s big, hefty. Much taller than Maruška. Wrinkles on her face and forehead. I thought maybe she was just tired, but she’s a bit on the old side. Fair hair, darker than Sara’s. It actually looks nice with the yellow coveralls.
I’m glad I found her, that’s for sure.
We lie in a frayed tent on our bellies, heads poking out. A stretch of the plain shines white through the trees. I don’t look over there. For a while it doesn’t rain or snow, which is very rare, Ula explains. A tin pot of water heats up on the fire. There’s a stream nearby, she says. Nothing to eat.
Some guys with a fire about ten metres away are stuffing their faces with bacon. Bread. I recognize the bearded guy I ran into in the forest. Sitting there with his pal. The two of them look almost alike.
Fyodor and Yegor, Ula says. They broke the GPS, idiots!
She hates them. They belong to a group of partisans that the Ministry of Tourism assigned to her expedition.
Our trip was supposed to end in Khatyn, she says. That’s where we were supposed to bring the samples. But those bastards said they saw a fire and wouldn’t go any farther. So we stayed here.
The other attachés, as the Ministry called the partisans, had long since run away. Took what they could, destroyed the rest.
According to Ula, they’d been sabotaging her work ever since the political situation stabilized. Apparently the opposition was really taking a beating.
I tell her about myself. After trudging around on the plain, I’m in seventh heaven now, tucked cosily in a sleeping bag and safe inside a tent. I tell her about my foreign expertise, my trip to this country. And the fire at the museum. Not everything, just some of it.
The partisans weren’t lying, I say. Khatyn is gone now!
I don’t mention Alex and Maruška.
Yes, of course, Ula says. The Devil’s Workshop, that’s why I’m here too.
She shows me the samples. The ones that didn’t fall in the snow or get lost along the way. She had twice, no, three times as many!
She’s an egghead, a researcher and a field worker.
The best in her field!
That’s why they chose her out of everyone else in Berlin.
But now it’s over.
I turn around. Squint into the gloom of the tent to where she’s pointing. Crates, boxes. But not old-fashioned ones like Kagan had, all battered and made of wood. These are smart plastic things. Double-sealed lids. Blue, red, yellow – almost too much for my eyes to take.
Imported, huh?
Mm-hm.
All of her boxes and plastic bags, with bones and rags in various stages of decay, are stored at the back of the tent. Behind our backs, piled up in a wall. A wall against the wind.
And I can take as many blankets and sleeping bags as I want.
They’re left over from her colleagues and co-workers.
We bundle up and wait till the water’s ready for tea.
Talk back and forth in our languages.
I guess I fell asleep first.
I open my eyes, feel it, can’t see. Ula’s holding my hand. We’re warm. I hear a horse snorting. Didn’t get up to look, though. I’ll fix things in the morning, I promise myself. In the night I hear a scraping, probably the horse rubbing against a branch, clicking its hoof against a stone.
In the morning the two men are gone. Along with the horse. Ula sits outside the tent, a loaf of bread in her hand. They must have left it for her. She scrambles into the back of the tent, by the samples, crawls under a pile of blankets and stays there.
I go to check out the camp. We’re hidden from the wind by a gorge, a small, narrow ravine carved into the hillside.
I go on through the trees. There are crosses all over the place. And those stones with writing on them. I find the wagon right away. The horse was standing right here, to judge from the tracks. Maybe they both rode it. If I went down to the foot of the hill, I’d be able to see their tracks stretching away across the plain.
There are more boxes under the tarpaulin on the wooden wagon. I open the one closest to me, a red one, little by lit
tle, but there are no tsantsas, only skulls. One has a bullet hole in the forehead so big you could stick your finger through it. I give the skull a rap with my knuckles and put it back.
No supplies, no weapons, no clothing, nothing in the wagon but samples. We’ll leave it here, I say to myself. Screw the samples. Let ’em rot. We’re getting out of here. We’ll make it to some road or other. We’ll be together. That’s what I thought. But then the purga hit.
The next thing I know there are leaves and twigs flying at me, the trees shake and groan in the wind, the snow whips in off the plain, suddenly it gets hard to breathe, the air in my lungs begins to hurt, a six-foot branch tears loose and goes sailing over my head. I crawl back inside the tent.
There’s a storm, I say. Ula sits, leaning against the boxes.
It’s a purga, she says. We won’t get out of here now. I’ve got two buckets of water.
The ravine protected the tent. Still, I almost couldn’t poke my head out. The wind instantly glued my mouth shut, my eyelids together. I couldn’t even stand up outside. The wagon would’ve been blown to pieces. I imagined the broken crates, bones flying through the air, skulls smashing to bits on the rocks.
So, Ula. You’re the expert. How long will it last?
The last time a blizzard hit, she said, she was locked up for eight days. With a bunch of co-workers, food and drink, inside a cabin. They even had a guitar and board games. They were collecting samples in Siberia at the time. Soon it’ll start to snow, and once the blizzard’s over, then come the frosts. Unless somebody turns up, we don’t have much of a chance, Ula says.
At night, or whenever we think it’s night, we sleep. Squeezed together. We wake up. Eat some bread.
I have a dream about the Spider. It’s inside me. Melting. Poisoning me. All the data and contacts spill into my guts.
She’s sitting next to me with her eyes open.
She tells me about her work.
Her team was selected for reconnaissance of burial sites in one of the regions of Belarus that was severely affected by radiation.