Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  No one had yet been moved into the larger of the new blocks. It had been standing empty for four weeks now. No one knew why.

  *

  It was a few days later. They were at the quarry. The overseer stood at the top of the ditch and shouted at them and called them whores and demanded of the sky how he was supposed to meet his targets when they gave him nothing but women and girls. Women and girls and babies, the whole damn camp was full of them. But soon, thank God, that would change. They were getting some men from Lety, at last, so they could finish the stonework before the end of the month.

  ‘Did he say Lety?’ the woman next to Anna asked. They were on their knees in the frozen mud, trying to work their fingers beneath a huge stone.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna replied between her teeth, grunting with effort. Her fingers were bleeding, but they were numb so she felt no pain. That would come later. Lety was in Bohemia, wasn’t it?

  ‘My husband is in Lety,’ the woman said, her face lighting up. ‘Did he say they were sending some Lety men here?’ She dropped her side of the stone and clapped her hands together, squeezing her eyes tight shut and turning her face to the sky.

  ‘Wooden God,’ muttered Anna, sucking the blood from her frozen fingers.

  *

  One of the women on their detail had something going with the overseer. Normally, the others refused to talk to her, but when they were allowed to sit on the frozen ground for half an hour at lunchtime, she discovered a newfound popularity. ‘Tell us what you know, sister,’ said Anna’s work partner, ‘and we will sit round you and keep you warm.’

  They huddled down, their heads bent to the middle of the circle where the woman sat enjoying her new importance. ‘The overseers have been complaining for ages,’ she began. ‘They can’t possibly meet the targets by the end of January unless they have more labour. After that, quarry work has to stop until spring. So many of the men are sick, but we have a contract. It’s impossible. So last month the Commandant agreed to request a hundred men from Lety. A hundred.’

  ‘Where is Lety?’ Anna asked the woman sitting next to her, but the woman shushed her with her hand.

  ‘Only the fittest are coming,’ the overseer’s woman said, ‘he was most specific about that. The best that Lety have got.’

  A call from a nearby group announced that the soup had arrived. They scrambled to their feet.

  ‘Where is Lety?’ Anna repeated her question as they shuffled into line.

  ‘It’s a camp in Bohemia,’ the woman in front of her said impatiently. ‘It’s where they sent all our People who lived in Bohemia. When they rounded everyone up. My son is there. And my uncle.’

  Václav and Yakali, and the others … Anna thought. If Václav was in the Lety camp, he would surely be amongst the men sent here. Václav was like a bull. She would find out what had happened to Božena and the girls. Yakali’s sons, Justin and Miroslav, they were young and fit. Maybe they would be sent too.

  The trudge back to the camp was normally undertaken in silence, but now there were whispers all the way. One woman had four sons she thought might be in Lety. Would the men be allowed to bring food parcels, or clothing? Things must be better there, if they were sending men over. Did the men know they were coming yet? When would they arrive? ‘It will be almost as good as a harvest!’ one woman said out loud. ‘At least, there will be news.’

  As they re-entered the camp, Anna learnt something else. It was 1943.

  *

  Emil had had no news of his father since he had gone to the infirmary. His mother had managed to get in, once – there was a particular kapo she had been working on, she said. But now the infirmary was quarantined, the bribes were getting bigger.

  She came to Emil after roll-call one evening. They only had seconds, in the dark, during the brief, milling confusion that preceded the return to the blocks. The men got their bread ration after roll-call. Emil had just placed his carefully in his jacket pocket. He always ate it as soon as he got back to the block. Some saved theirs for the morning – which was what it was for, officially, to have with your ersatz coffee. Some saved theirs for bartering. He regarded either of these options as too risky. Better to have it safe inside your stomach.

  His mother did not even greet him. Her hand gripped his forearm, clawlike and demanding. ‘Give me your bread,’ she said. ‘I’m going to try to see your father tomorrow.’

  For the briefest flicker of a moment, it occurred to him that he had the power to refuse. Then he handed her the bread. She turned away.

  When was the last time he had heard his mother speak his real name? She was the only other person on earth who knew what it was. If she did not speak it to him, who would?

  He wrapped his arms around himself and trotted back to the block, nauseous with hunger. The cold bit at him, now his bread was gone. I thought I knew about hunger, before, on the outside, he thought. He had gone without often enough. But now I know I did not know. It was just ordinary hunger, hunger that niggled at you all day long. Now I know hunger that hurts, like a knife in your side, hunger so hard you cannot think about anything else. Inside the block, before climbing up to his bunk, he removed his shirt and carefully turned the pocket inside out. A row of tiny grey lice nested in the seams. He brought the shirt up close to his face, and pushed the lice aside with one finger, looking for any crumbs that might have dropped from his lost piece of bread.

  Don’t scratch, Dr Steiner had told him. You scratch, you break the skin, the lice shit on you and the shit enters your bloodstream. Typhus. Emil paused with his finger half-raised to his mouth. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and forced himself to wipe the finger on his trousers, turning his shirt back the right way, shaking it, and putting it back on.

  Settled down in his bunk, he squeezed his eyes tight shut in an effort to forget his pains. He comforted himself with thoughts of Dr Steiner. Last time he had seen him, he had told him a funny story about how his wife had stopped him leaving the house that morning. He had put on an old, un-ironed shirt. You’re not leaving the house in that! his wife had told him. What does it matter, woman? he had said, there is a war on! It matters! she had replied. When he tried to put his coat on top, she had come up behind him and grabbed at the shirt, pulling the tails out of his trousers and ripping the shirt right up the back. His daughters had gathered round and joined in, and together the women had shredded the shirt from him, leaving him standing there with tears of laughter running down his face.

  Tears of laughter had run down Dr Steiner’s face as he told Emil the story, standing in his hut, miming his wife’s action – and Emil, in return, told him the story of how Čacko had ripped the shirt from his back on the day they had arrived in camp, and they had both laughed and slapped their legs, even though there was nothing to laugh about, and Dr Steiner had given him a small piece of charcoal to chew on, for his diarrhoea, and somehow even that had seemed funny.

  Emil lay on his bunk, his teeth chattering with cold and his stomach so hollow and painful it felt as if it was folding itself over and over inside him. He replayed Dr Steiner’s jokes in his head, until he had exhausted every detail and the thought of them lost the power to distract him.

  The kapo moved down the block, extinguishing the lamps. The men around Emil settled down to sleep. In the extra privacy afforded by the dark, Emil thought of Marie. He had only been able to talk to her twice since they had fed the pigs together – both times facilitated by Čacko, who seemed amused by their friendship.

  He pictured her small smile, her assuredness. He imagined meeting her at a harvest gathering. He imagined her secretly to be Kalderash – it was the only quality lacking in her, after all. Once or twice, after lights out, he had reached down to hold himself between the legs. There was never any more than a faint stirring there, but he liked to feel it, to remind himself of what it used to be like once upon a time, when he would touch himself so often at night he worried that he might be doing himself damage. It will be like that again, one day, he
thought, when I get out of here. Just watch how strong I’ll grow then.

  Marie: her neat little mouth, her teeth, her infrequent smiles. He never knew what she was thinking, or what she thought of him, but thinking of her made him forget other thoughts. There were the endless days. And then there was Marie. She and Dr Steiner were the only ones who talked to him of things beyond the camp – they seemed to believe the rest of the world still existed. Not like his own family, who were dying, sick, taking bread from his mouth – who had forgotten his name.

  *

  The next day, Emil was at the water pump, with Čacko standing next to him. It was around noon. Two large details of women had just left the workshops behind the pump, when Emil heard a sudden, excited holler. He lifted his head to see that the women had broken ranks and were racing across the Appell-platz, their mouths open, shouting, arms waving in abandon. Behind them, two women kapos ran in furious pursuit.

  Emil looked round. The gates to the camp stood open and two trucks were reversing into position beside the staff hut. In a moment, the women were upon the trucks, banging on the sides, calling out.

  Two guards raced across the Appell-platz, batons in hand. Four more jumped down from the step of the staff hut, one blowing frantically on a whistle. Emil stared as they set about the women, beating them back. Several women were on the ground, crying. Others were openly defiant, waving their arms above their heads and shouting hysterically.

  Čacko was watching too. He shook his head. ‘There’s no point in them getting het-up,’ he said chummily to Emil. ‘They’re going to find out who’s arrived soon enough. Let’s go and see, shall we?’ He clapped his hand down on Emil’s shoulder. ‘We can pretend we’ve got to shift that pile of logs round the back. We have, actually. Let’s go and see what’s going on.’

  As they approached, the Commandant was restoring order, shouting and waving his pistol in the air. A row of guards stood with their backs to the trucks and rifles held across their chests, blocking the women’s way. The women were clutching at each other, one or two at the back were jumping up repeatedly to catch sight of the Lety men as they descended. The Commandant was shouting at the women to move back.

  The driver of the first truck had jumped down from his cabin and was trying to get the Commandant’s attention, waving a piece of paper. Eventually, the Commandant turned to him, leaving the guards to keep control of the crowd. The women were talking to each other. The Commandant looked up at the first truck and windmilled his hand. Two guards jumped down from the back of the truck. The tailgate dropped with a resonant, metallic clang that echoed round the camp.

  As he and Čacko approached, Emil saw the first Lety prisoner peer out from the truck and gaze around, over the heads of the people below. He saw a grey face, bald head, and bony shoulders from which hung a ragged, filthy shirt. The man’s eyes were huge, dark and staring in fear. He lifted a hand and scratched at his head, peering out at the women in alarm. The women fell silent.

  Emil and Čacko stood to one side and watched as the men descended; thin, filthy skeletons, each recently shaved, their uniforms even more ill-fitting and threadbare than Emil’s. Several were shaking uncontrollably. Two of them fell to the ground as they jumped down from the truck and were unable to get up. The Commandant strode forward and shouted at the other prisoners to help them up but the men just stood staring at him, their mouths agape.

  ‘Sit down, then!’ the Commandant barked, and the other prisoners dropped down obediently, on to their haunches.

  Some of the women had begun to weep and moan. Čacko leaned forward and whispered to Emil, ‘There’ll be hell to pay for this, mark my words. They were supposed to send us the good ones. Look what we’ve got.’

  The Commandant was pale and quiet. He went over to the drivers of the trucks and ordered them into the staff hut. Then he told the guards to disperse the women.

  When the women were told to go back to their work, they stood their ground at first, some still craning their necks to see the men, others weeping or shaking their heads. One was on her knees, arms outstretched, praying loudly: but none of the men was making any gesture of recognition. With a little prodding from the guards, the women turned away. Emil now had a clear view of the group of men sitting on the ground, shoulders hunched. These men are half-dead already, he thought. We have better in our infirmary. A couple of the men stared back at him with hollow, incurious gazes. One clawed at the ground with a rigid, palsied hand, as if there might be treasure beneath the ice.

  Beside him, Čacko let out a low whistle. ‘Go and help in the kitchens, we can move the logs later. I’m going to see if I can find out what’s going on.’

  *

  Čacko did not come to get him from the kitchen until the end of the afternoon. He was grinning with glee and keen to impart what he had learned. He stood over a huge vat of soup, rubbing his hands together in the steam, face alight with self-importance. ‘Guess what?’ he said to no one in particular – there were three orderlies hammering dough for tomorrow’s bread while Emil was picking bits of stone from a bucket of grey flour. ‘Those skeletons they sent from Lety. They are the best they had! The boss is beside himself. He asked for their fittest men but didn’t bother to find out how fit they were! Imagine what the rest must be like.’ One of the orderlies turned and spat into the corner. ‘There was the most almighty row,’ Čacko continued. ‘The boss has refused to admit them. We’ve got quite enough problems as it is, he says. Says they’ve got to go straight back. They can’t even stay overnight. They’ve been sitting in the snow all day and he won’t even put them in the new block. It’s only a corporal in charge of the convoy. He doesn’t know what to do. The trucks were supposed to be in Brno by nightfall. The boss is on the phone now, sorting it out.’

  One of the orderlies had stopped kneading dough. ‘Well, they’ll just get sent up north, won’t they?’ he asked rhetorically.

  Čacko continued rubbing his hands. ‘I suppose so …’ he glanced over at Emil, at the orderly, then back at Emil, ‘… to the sanatorium.’

  Another of the orderlies gave a short bark of a laugh, slapping his dough.

  After a while, Čacko tossed his head at Emil and they left the kitchen together. ‘Better get those logs shifted before it gets dark,’ Čacko said. ‘That was my excuse for hanging round.’ As they approached the huddled men, Čacko lowered his voice and said, ‘I thought they might be gone by now. The boss wants them off the premises before the work parties get back, otherwise there’ll be another riot. He’s swearing if they don’t take them away then he’ll make them sit right there all night, the corporal too. There’s no way he’s admitting them.’

  The logs were piled up against the side of the staff hut. Some of them had been chopped already, short fat chunks, and these Emil moved with ease to the tin fuel caddy at the back. The rest of the logs were uncut and far too heavy for him to move alone. He and Čacko stood staring at the pile for a few minutes, then a look of mischief came over Čacko’s face. He glanced around. ‘Get one of those to help you,’ he indicated the men with his head.

  Emil looked at him. Had he gone mad? What would the Commandant say?

  ‘Go on,’ said Čacko. ‘I’ll go and speak to the guards. Get the job done.’

  Emil turned, shaking his head.

  The afternoon was so gloomy, cold and grey, it seemed as though night could fall any minute without warning. As he approached the group, Emil tried to imagine what it must be like for the men to be sitting there, in agony from the cold, waiting to learn whether they would be allowed into a block for the night or have to travel on in the miserable dark. I bet they haven’t been given any rations, he thought. There must have been thirty men in the first group, but he could not see a single one who would be any use in lifting logs. They had the beaten look of men who had observed his approach and determined to remain unnoticed. It was cruel to select one.

  One of the squatting ones, the nearest, glanced up as Emil approached. He was the
only one who looked at him, so Emil said, ‘Bruder. Bitte. Hilfe.’ He gestured over to the pile of logs.

  The man stared past him, where Čacko was waiting, glanced wearily up at Emil, then stood.

  Emil saw at once that his choice had been a huge mistake. The man was enormously tall and skinny as a pine tree. He and Emil were completely mismatched. When they shouldered the logs, Emil would bear the brunt of the weight, unless he persuaded the skinny giant to walk on his knees.

  He sighed and turned, flicking his head to indicate that the man should follow him.

  As they walked back to the logs, the man said to him in Romani, ‘You are thin, phrála, but strong-looking. Do they give you extra food for this?’

  Emil noted the man’s Vlach accent, then glanced around. Čacko had wandered over to the guards. He made sure he was out of earshot before replying, ‘No, phrála. They make me do everything because that filthy gadjo pig hates me. But it makes the time go quicker. I have to follow him around all the time making him feel good about himself. But it’s better than being at the quarry for ten hours like the others. He gives me extra rations sometimes. Sometimes it’s a beating.’

  They reached the pile of logs. The tall skinny man looked down at them, then down at Emil. He gave a mirthless chuckle, then knelt in the snow.

  It was easier than Emil had anticipated. He placed the end of the log on his shoulder, and the skinny giant rested it against his chest, supported by his large bony hands. They had to move forward slowly, with Emil at the front, but the skinny man worked steadily without complaining. Only his breathing betrayed his exertion. When they dropped the logs down beside the fuel caddy, he gave an exhalation which sounded from deep inside the cavity of his thin chest.

  The last log was the longest. They paused in front of it, as if weighing up the easiest way to lift it, while in fact giving each other a short rest. Emil looked over at Čacko but he was still talking to the guards by the truck.