Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  His shirt clung to his back, clammy with sweat. The back of his throat was raw. He felt sick and dizzy and he wanted to stop and urinate. ‘Not far now,’ the guard kept calling, until the words drained of meaning and made no more sense than the jangle of the harness or the soft slap-slap of the guard’s thighs against the horse’s leather saddle.

  *

  The lane entered woodland and led them up a small rise surrounded by forest, into some sort of camp. As they passed through the tall wooden gate, Emil saw three large barracks to the right, and a row of smaller ones. The camp was surrounded by a high fence topped with loose rolls of barbed wire. Sentries stood in watchtowers at the corners. A group of Czech policemen, guards, was waiting to greet them, gesturing towards a long row of trestle tables behind which half a dozen officials sat.

  They were at the head of the queue. As Emil gazed around, his father spoke to the first man seated behind the table. The ground of the camp sloped sharply upwards, so the barracks rose above each other on the terraced earth. On the far side of the camp, beyond a wide dirt square, there was an area annexed by open fencing that had pens of some sort. Emil looked up. The sky was baked blue; honest-seeming. I was born on a day like this, he thought vaguely. His mother always told him that, on hot summer days. She told him it so often that he would groan to make her stop. I am fifteen, he thought. Time to think about getting married.

  He stepped forward, to where his father was waiting in front of the table while a woman seated next to the official was making notes. ‘Taté …’ he said, glancing around at the high fence and the Czech guards and the long queue of Roma behind them.’ Taté, rrobija si kado than?’ Dad, is this a prison?

  Josef turned but before he could speak one of the guards – a large man in a shabby black uniform – strode forward from the row that was waiting by the desk.

  Emil saw the man coming towards him, then felt the man’s fist on the side of his head. There was a moment of sightlessness, a brief glimpse of the crazy, tilting sky, then the taste of dirt on his lips and tongue. As he spat out the dirt, someone grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. He felt the cloth rip and staggered as he came upright. He said in Czech, ‘My shirt …’

  The guard hit him again, less hard this time. Emil bent double but did not fall. The guard pulled him upright, then began to rip the shirt forcibly from him, tearing at the fine cotton and wrenching the seams. Emil staggered and swayed. The other guards in the line were laughing.

  When he had finished, the guard held the tattered remnants of the shirt clenched in his two fists. He shoved it in Emil’s face. He caught a glimpse of pink skin stretched over knuckles, plump fingers. The man smelled of sweat, layers of it; sweet sweat from the hot afternoon and sour sweat from days ago.

  ‘Ein hemd!’ the guard declared. Why was the man speaking German when he was a Czech policeman? ‘Ein hemd!’

  Emil moved back a step but the guard advanced upon him, shoving the shirt in his face. ‘Ein hemd!’ he said again, and Emil understood that the guard wanted him to repeat it.

  ‘Ein … hemd …’ Emil said, uncertainly. If the guard wanted him to say it, then why didn’t he just ask him to say it?

  The guard tossed the shirt aside and Emil got a proper look at him – a fat man, fat-faced; large nose, bulging cheeks, no neck, a chin that joined directly to a chest that rose and strained form beneath the tight uniform jacket. He rejoined the other guards, who were smiling and shaking their heads.

  Emil turned to where his father stood watching, his face a mask. His mother had moved to stand beside him and place a restraining hand on his arm. Emil knew his own glance was bewildered. He tried to compose himself. He wanted to signal to his father that it was okay, that he was glad he had not intervened, and that he was beginning to understand the way things were.

  The woman seated behind the table said in a quick, low voice, in Czech. ‘It is forbidden here to speak anything but German. It is the same for us. We have to speak German too.’ She switched to German. ‘You must hand over your possessions,’ she said, loudly, clumsily. Josef nodded and began to empty his pockets. On to the table went their identity papers, Josef’s leather wallet, a small stitched purse where he kept a few hallers and crowns, his tobacco pouch and pipe, an embroidered handkerchief and, last of all, his gold ring, the ring they had been saving as a bribe to get them into Slovakia – the last thing they had left of any value. Emil stared at the ring as it lay on the table. Finally, he comprehended. They were in prison. Their escape was as likely as his being able to crawl through that tiny, yellow circumference.

  The man at the table picked the ring up and turned it over. He glanced back down at the queue of waiting people, then drew a huge book towards him, a ledger.

  As they walked away, one of the guards was gesturing at Emil and Josef to hurry up a small rise towards one of the barracks. Emil kept his head down to avoid the fat guard’s gaze as they passed. It was only when they were halfway up the rise that he glanced behind and realised that his mother and the others were not being allowed to follow.

  ‘Do not look back,’ Josef said quickly, speaking under his breath. ‘Do not draw attention to yourself.’

  The barrack was low and wide and long. Inside, there were concrete pillars and a central island on top of which sat huge zinc tubs of water. Lining the walls were wooden bunks in tiers. The guard who had escorted them to the door told them in German to take off all their clothes and wash. He spoke slowly and loudly, and Josef replied, ‘Jawohl, dankeschön.’

  Emil was half-naked already but his father beat him to it, undressing swiftly and plunging his hands into the cold water then rubbing them over his body. Emil stood close by, his skin suddenly goose-pimpled. It was gloomy and dank in the barrack despite the heat outside. He had hardly ever seen his father naked. In winter, Josef slept in one of Anna’s nightgowns, wrapping it around his legs before pulling his trousers on top in the morning. Emil noticed the hairs on his fate’s chest were a light sandy colour, much lighter than the rest of his father’s hair. He felt a flicker of curiosity – the pale hairs, the loose stomach. Emil’s own body was still so narrow and hard: his father’s was a portent.

  While they stood shivering, an orderly in shabby, dyed shirt and trousers stepped into the barrack holding a sack and a stick. Josef had folded his clothes neatly and placed them on a bunk. Emil had copied him. The man lifted up the clothes with the stick, item by item, and shoved them into the sack.

  The guard saw them observing the procedure and said. ‘They will be disinfected and stored. You will be given a uniform.’

  Emil saw a muscle on his father’s cheek twitch and felt the pain of such an insult to him. His father – his father who would not even hold a teacup until he had scrubbed beneath his nails when he paused from work – his father’s clothes were going to be disinfected.

  Outside the block, the guard walked ahead and they followed, still naked, to where a row of huge black vans was parked on the hill just inside the perimeter fence. Emil glanced back down the slope. The queue of people at the trestle table looked endless, but other men were being escorted up towards the barrack. One of them looked up and saw them, his eyes widening in shock at their nakedness. Emil turned back quickly, his hands over his genitals. The guard gestured at them to mount a small set of wooden steps and to enter the back of one of the black vans.

  Inside, there were two long wooden benches, the length of the van. Four men waited.

  ‘The first!’ one of the men exclaimed happily in Czech. ‘Our first customers of the day!’ He gestured for them to sit down on one of the benches and moved forward towards Emil. Another of the men approached his father. They were holding razors. The first man bent and dipped his into a bucket at Emil’s feet, then wiped it on his apron and began to shave Emil’s head with swift, rough movements. The razor was blunt and there was no soap in the water. Emil winced.

  The men were in civilian clothes and seemed to be happily ignoring the proh
ibition against any language but German. Josef asked them rapid questions as he was shaved. ‘Why are you shaving us? Where will they put our clothes? Do we get a receipt? My boots were good boots.’ The man shaving him ignored him, whistling to himself. Josef tried again. ‘When do we get something to drink and eat? They gave us nothing in Brno.’

  ‘You’ve missed lunch, gypsy, a fine goulash!’ one of the other men said, grinning and showing a row of black teeth. ‘There’s a grand restaurant in this holiday camp, you’ll love it!’

  Realising he would get no useful information, Josef fell silent.

  The man shaving Emil took hold of one of his wrists and lifted his arm. ‘The body hair as well,’ he said, as he began to shave Emil’s armpit. When he had done the armpits and chest, he indicated for Emil to stand. He grimaced, then reached down and flicked the razor either side of Emil’s genitals. A few of the longer pubic hairs fell to the floor. Shaving him properly would clearly be a complex business.

  ‘How many are they checking in today?’ the man asked his compatriots rhetorically. He waved a hand. ‘Oh, that will have to do.’ He pushed Emil lightly on the shoulder to indicate that he should be seated again, then stepped back to allow one of the others to come forward.

  The man was holding an aluminium bottle with a stained label, and a cloth. He had the bottle’s screw-top lid clenched between his teeth. He tipped the bottle on to the cloth and then rubbed it, first over Emil’s shaved head, then Josef’s. Emil felt a freezing, stinging sensation on his raw skin. Inhaling, he smelt kerosene.

  Josef at last gave way to fear. ‘Dear God!’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you going to set fire to our heads?’

  The four men burst out laughing, one bending double over the bench, another slapping Josef merrily on the shoulder. They sat together with their scalps stinging while the laughter echoed around the black van, back and forth, until the guard outside opened the door and snapped at them to get a move-on. Didn’t they know there was a line of prisoners coming up the path?

  They emerged, shaved and naked, into the sunlight, blinking at one another. Emil stared at Josef, his look wide-eyed in disbelief at the rapidity and severity of the transformation. The man who had been his father only minutes ago was now a bald, shrunken derelict. His head was red-raw in patches, with strands of black hair clinging limply here and there. A trickle of blood ran down his forehead until it was partially diverted by a rough black patch where his eyebrows had been. He was wide-eyed with bewilderment.

  Emil stared; his father stared back, their gazes mirrors of incredulity.

  Emil turned away and looked up at the sky, gazing at the silver disc of the sun. He closed his eyes and saw he had burned a circle into his retina, black against the orange interior of his lids. I was born on a day like this, he thought, his eyes still closed, his face turned upwards. It was the last time he played games with the sun.

  *

  Anna prised Bobo’s plump fingers away from her blouse, one by one. He was screaming – a high-pitched tone that rapidly soared beyond the limits of normal human sound to become a single singing note. A woman in uniform was pulling him around the waist and Anna knew that if she did not disengage her son’s fingers from her blouse he would be hurt.

  The woman turned swiftly when Bobo was in her arms. Anna was relieved when she could no longer see his face.

  Parni stood by, staring, her eyes dark and expressionless. Anna stared back at her, trying to communicate reassurance in her gaze, trying to say, it will be all right, be good, do whatever they tell you to do, I will come for you, look after your brother. Parni gazed until another girl, three or four years older, came and took her by the hand.

  ‘Come,’ said the other girl. ‘We have to go now.’ She seemed almost cheerful.

  Parni stared over her shoulder at her mother as she was led away.

  It was only then Anna realised that Bobo was the youngest child who was being taken – the nursing mothers in their group were allowed to keep their infants with them. As he was carried away, she felt a slight swell and tingle in her breasts, even though there was hardly any milk left in her and she was only letting him suckle once a day. She remembered how Ludmila had accidentally dropped Bobo on his head when he was eight weeks old, and how her breasts had sprung with milk at the sound of her newborn baby’s wail.

  The two families immediately behind them in the queue had also been registered. Their children, along with hers, were ushered away to a block in the middle of the camp. Most of them were crying as they walked away but Parni still seemed composed, holding the cheerful girl’s hand. She had made a friend already. That was good.

  A mother next to Anna was biting her own hand, staring after her children, tears streaming down her face. With her other hand, she was punching herself in the head.

  When Anna looked ahead, she saw that Josef and Emil were already being led away from her, up the rise.

  She breathed in deeply, closed her eyes once, then turned to face Tekla and Eva and Ludmila and Pavliná Franzová, all of whom were staring at her, waiting to take their cue from her behaviour. She straightened her back and tilted her chin towards the two women orderlies who stood a metre or so away, windmilling their arms, gesturing impatiently towards one of the large barracks. Our block, Anna thought, the place where we are to be kept. As they turned away, there was some commotion at the desk. One of the men was protesting in fluent German that there had been a mistake. He owned his own business making belt buckles, essential war work. He employed sixteen people. He shouldn’t be here. There had been a mistake.

  *

  In the barrack, Anna sank on to a lower bunk near the door as the women around her undressed and washed. One of the orderlies stood in the doorway and told them to wash, then put their clothes back on. There were some uniforms, she told them, old Czechoslovak army uniforms, dyed black, but only enough for the men. The orderly waited until the barrack had filled up, repeated the order, then left them to it.

  Eva and Ludmila had a brief but vehement argument, then agreed that they could not bear to be parted and should share the bunk above Anna. Tekla had chosen a bunk next to them. Pavliná scuttled to the far end where there was more room and chose a bunk with empty bunks either side, a move that rapidly became redundant as the block filled up.

  Eva and Ludmila began to cry as they undressed; soft, timid sobs of distress. The women around them were whispering to one another, glancing at the open door. Two guards were patrolling outside.

  Tekla removed her clothes with swift, determined movements. When she turned and saw Eva and Ludmila weeping, she snapped loudly in Romani, ‘Shake out those blankets!’

  A couple of other women lifted their heads.

  ‘How are we supposed to dry ourselves?’ Tekla continued, holding her own blanket up to the light, tutting and frowning. ‘Golden God! Is that all the water they have given us? For all of us? Start using that bucket, Eva. Ludmila, stand close behind her. We’ll all use that one. I’m not sharing a bucket with anyone I don’t know, I don’t care what they say.’ Some of the other women had stopped what they were doing to listen to Tekla’s scolding.

  ‘What are you crying for, you stupid soft girls?’ she snarled at her cousins. ‘It could be a lot worse. Golden God, Eva Demeter, STOP that snivelling! You could be stuck in Brno prison or lying dead in a ditch with a bullet through your head! What are you snivelling for? Think you’ll grow wings if you cry hard enough? Ha! Stupid girl! You’ve always been witless. I’m surprised you found your way out of your own mother’s belly!’ Eva was cupping her hands and lifting the water slowly to let it run down over her naked chest. She was still weeping softly. ‘So they’ve put us in a camp, men, women, babies,’ Tekla continued. ‘Did you ever expect any better from the gadje?’

  Anna listened to Tekla’s monologue, the only voice in the large block. Tekla. It would take more than the Moravian police force to keep her quiet. Around them, the other girls and women were sitting on their bunks awaiting their turn a
t the buckets, pretending not to listen.

  ‘At least we are still alive! All we have to do is obey the rules and survive. The war will be over before winter sets in. We’re a lot safer here than on the road. It was the best thing that could have happened to us. Whose mad fool idea was it to try and make it to Slovakia? May we all die! It was craziness! If we’d got to the border we would have been mown down by machine guns or torn to pieces by dogs … Praise to God we were arrested! We’re so lucky! He’s keeping an eye on us, the Lord, thank Him for that!’ She was speaking loudly enough for them all to hear, her voice a rough, determined sing-song, rising and falling as she shook out the blankets. ‘La-di-la-di-la! Filthy! Who DO they THINK we are?’

  Anna gripped the edge of her bunk tightly with her hands, grasping at the rough-hewn wood. She thought, I must not go mad. If I am to protect my family and save my children’s lives, then I must think clearly and calmly the whole time we are here. She could still hear Bobo’s singular scream in her head, as if the sound of it had lodged in her brain like a piece of food stuck between two teeth. I must not go mad.

  CHAPTER 13

  The whistling sound had a derisive quality. It was derision that awoke Emil at 5 a.m. precisely each day.

  The orderlies were called kapos. They were mostly Czech prisoners from Brno, sometimes Roma or Sinti, and they were given all the duties that the guards declined to perform. It was a kapo who woke them each morning, flinging back the door with a crash. Like Anna and the others, Josef and Emil had chosen bunks near the door, to quell the claustrophobia of imprisonment, but being near the door had its drawbacks. The morning reveille had a personal, abusive quality. Back banged the door, open snapped his eyes – to painfully white light The chill morning air rushed over him and the whistle pierced his ears with a shrillness so sharp and unpleasant it seemed to originate inside his skull.