Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  ‘In Lety, I moved stones,’ the man beside him said. ‘I was the strongest man there. The boy next to me, he was beaten to death for not being strong …’

  Emil looked up at the man. His chin was harsh with grey stubble. He had no teeth. His eyes glistened.

  The man saw Emil observing him and repeated, ‘I was the strongest man in Lety. Hard for you to believe perhaps, hard for me too, until I look at the others.’ He looked down at himself, then gave another mirthless grin, as if noticing for the first time that his prison trousers only reached to just below his knees and that his huge feet were as white as bone, like ancient creatures. Then he sighed, an endless sigh. He shook his head.

  ‘Once upon a time, phrála, I owned the finest pair of boots in Europe. They came up to here.’ He indicated his legs vaguely with his spidery hands. ‘They were of softest pigskin. It took the cobbler in Manchester longer than it took my blacksmith in Madrid to make my horse’s harness. He advised against pigskin, told me it would spoil, so I had him make an extra boot for each foot, just in case. The English. They are like slugs, you know.’

  Behind them came a shout. Emil glanced over. The other men from Lety were clambering slowly upright. Two guards were trying to lift one of them to his feet but he looked as if he was frozen stiff. The Commandant had emerged from the staff hut and was pulling on a pair of leather gloves. Čacko was still talking to the other guard.

  Emil felt sorry for the skinny man with his empty, stubbled face and white bony feet. He said vaguely, ‘It looks like you’re going, to the sanatorium.’

  The man stared at him blankly. ‘Sanatorium …?’ he said eventually. He exhaled through his nostrils, a gentle, tired sound, then shook his head. ‘Keep working, phrála, keep being hated. It is keeping you pure.’

  He turned towards the truck.

  ‘Dja le Devlesa,’ Emil called after him. Go with God.

  The man stopped, then turned back. He bowed slightly and replied, ‘Ač le Devlesa.’ Stay with God. Then he looked at Emil again, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘You are a Vlach Rom,’ he said.

  Emil nodded.

  The man frowned, then said thoughtfully. ‘What was your father’s name?’

  ‘My father is Josef Maximoff. We are Kalderash. His father was Nikóla Maximoff.’

  The man stared at Emil, his eyes dark and shining. Emil could sense thoughts swimming inside the man’s large head.

  ‘Jonó Maximoff, my brother …’ the man said eventually, looking at the ground and slowly shaking his head. ‘I heard you had escaped to Slovakia.’ He looked up. ‘He is here, in this place?’

  Emil didn’t know who he meant. He glanced past the man anxiously, to where the last of the Lety inmates were being helped up into the truck. If the man didn’t go over to the truck straight away, the guards would come and get him, which would mean that Čacko would come and get Emil.

  One of the guards shouted at them. The man started, glanced over to the truck, then back at Emil.

  ‘When you see your father,’ he said, his voice faltering, ‘tell him something. Tell him you met a man who was once Todór Maximoff.’

  The skinny man with the grey stubble hurried back to the truck, as if suddenly keen to continue his journey.

  CHAPTER 19

  It was difficult to sleep now it was so cold. Emil still occupied a bunk near the door. The stove was extinguished at the same time as the kerosene lamps and its meagre warmth vanished instantly. The men around him gave off no body heat at all: they were all bone. The insides of his wrists itched. In the crevices around his eyes and between his toes, the skin was coming away in great white flakes. Sleep came and went, brief moments of cold unconsciousness. For the rest of the night, it was a process of awakening and re-awakening and realising, too quickly, that he was not asleep.

  *

  Morning. The door flew back with a crash, the kapo blew his whistle, air like freezing water flooded the block. Emil rolled over, trying to pull his blanket tight around his body, to enjoy a brief second more of nothingness. Instead, he felt a flame of pain along the left-hand side of his back, as if someone had thrown burning oil at him. He gasped, sat up and cracked his head on the roof of the block. His skin was on fire. He craned his head but could not see what was on his back. It was only when he looked back at his bunk that he saw something, a glistening strip. During the night, his uniform jacket had ridden up and his exposed flesh had adhered to the frozen wooden bunk. The sudden movement had ripped the skin from his back.

  He clambered down from the bunk, gasping with pain. The kapo ignored him, blowing the whistle repeatedly. His neighbour on the bunk was cursing him for not moving out of the way more quickly. Emil clenched his teeth, wincing and gasping as he tumbled out of the door towards the washroom.

  After splashing his face and urinating, he hobbled over to the Appell-platz for roll-call, only able to walk if he twisted an arm behind his back to hold his uniform jacket away from his raw skin. The freezing air stung him but numbed the burning. After roll-call, he found Čacko and showed him the raw patch. Čacko dismissed him with a wave of his hand.

  A queue had already formed outside the doctor’s hut. Emil joined it. He closed his eyes and, experimentally, lowered his shirt. As long as he stood still, the rough cloth would not come into contact with his skin – but it was too cold to stand still. Finally, his turn came. He entered the hut.

  Another man was sitting behind Dr Steiner’s desk. His jacket, also with a yellow star, hung on the back of the door instead of Dr Steiner’s long black coat. Emil was too disappointed to be polite. ‘Where is Dr Steiner?’ he demanded.

  The new doctor stared at him. He was dark-eyed, hollow-cheeked; a bald, elderly man, with the huge gaze of a child. He did not smile. After a pause, he said quietly. ‘Dr Steiner and his family have been sent to Terezín. How may I help you?’

  *

  Descending from the hut, Emil paused and sat for a moment on the stone step, ignoring the man who was next in the queue and had to push past him muttering.

  Dr Steiner was in Terezín. And his family; the wife who had ripped the shirt from his back, the daughters who had helped, the son whose dog had been taken away. He imagined Dr Steiner in Terezín. It was bigger than this camp, apparently. Huge, they said, with a theatre and flower-beds and a proper hospital. But the Jew he had met in the woods didn’t look like he had been spending much time at the theatre. He thought of the Jew, the one he had not helped.

  He frowned to himself, taking a moment or two to identify the precise nature of what was troubling him. Was he worried about Dr Steiner and his family? Only a bit. Terezín had to be a lot better than here. And anyway, surely nothing bad could happen to a man like that, such a sunny sort of man?

  No, it was the thought that the student he had left in the woods back in the summer, the one who had asked him for help, had probably been recaptured and sent back to Terezín, and maybe one day he would meet Dr Steiner and Dr Steiner would tell him how he had been a doctor in one of the gypsy camps. Then what would the student say? Gypsies! Pah! It’s true what we’ve always thought of them. I could have escaped but this gypsy boy lied to me. He never came back. And Dr Steiner would say, but there are some good gypsies. I met a nice boy in Hodonín camp. And they would talk, and realise they were talking about the same boy, and Dr Steiner who had liked him would not like him any longer.

  Emil buried his head in his hands. Then he gave a deep groan, an elemental sound that came from the pit of his belly. The scenario was absurd. He was not worried about it. He was hoping it might happen. That would mean that the Jew he had left in the woods had survived, that the boy who was also called František had not been left to die alone, that Emil’s father and mother and brother and sister and all the rest of his family were not being punished for what he had done or not done; that Dr Steiner was alive somewhere, chatting away, cheerfully – that there was hope. All his thoughts, all his dreams, were so much mist. He just wanted to believe that wh
at was not true was true. How else could he continue? A sanatorium …?

  There were whispers around the camp, whispers about what was really happening to the Jews. Whatever they do to the Jews they will do next to us. But the things they said – you could not believe that anyone would really do those things, not even the Germans.

  Suddenly, Emil turned and smashed his head against the side of the hut, his temple making contact with the wooden planks with such force that he bounced away and staggered. The man emerging from the doctor’s hut at that moment sprang back, exclaiming in surprise.

  Emil’s back did not hurt any more. Nothing hurt any more. There was nothing but a blackness that blotted out all the other thoughts, all the confusion. He smashed his head again, and again, until two men in the queue grabbed him and pushed him to the ground, cursing his stupidity.

  Later that night, back in his bunk, the grazes on his forehead were at least a distraction from the agony of his back. He felt angry with the men who had stopped him from cracking open his skull.

  *

  Anna was at the head of the squad coming back from the quarry, so she didn’t actually see it happen. She paused when she heard the commotion, and had a moment to appreciate the excuse to pause. The kapo at the head of the squad had run back to see what was happening and a group of women were clustered round by the side of the road. Anna dared not sit, but she rested a hand against the rough trunk of a pine alongside the track and lifted her foot as if she needed to check one of her clogs. She closed her eyes briefly, but that made her lose her balance. I am so tired I want to die, she thought simply, too exhausted to articulate the thought beyond those words.

  ‘Anna, Anna …’ Ludmila rushed up to her, her eyes glistening. ‘A woman just dropped dead. I mean, she just dropped dead …’

  ‘Not really,’ muttered the woman next to them. ‘She sat down first. I saw it.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ said Ludmila. ‘She sank down, then just keeled over, now she’s dead.’

  Anna walked back a few paces with the others to see. A huddle was around the woman on the ground by the side of the track and the kapo was shouting at them to lift the corpse. It was a tiny, thin woman who had died, hardly more than a girl, but after a day at the quarry, the three or four women around her were struggling to lift her bony frame. Dear God, thought Anna, a day’s work and now we are expected to carry each other to and fro. Were they sure the girl was dead, hadn’t just fainted or something?

  ‘Put her down! Are you stupid!’ A woman guard was upon them. A guard went out with each work party, the kapos not being trusted as sufficient, but this one had fallen behind on the walk back. Now she was running towards them. The kapo turned to the guard. The guard grabbed one of the women who was attempting to lift the corpse and pulled her away by the arm, hurling her aside with such force that she spun away and landed on all fours on the track. The other women dropped the corpse back on to the frozen mud. The dead girl’s head snapped back as she fell, mouth open.

  The guard turned upon the kapo, her face a few inches from the other woman’s, hissing furiously. ‘Are you stupid! Don’t you listen to anything you are told?’

  ‘All prisoners must be accounted for …’ the kapo began feebly.

  The guard lifted both hands and gave an angry shove at the kapo’s chest, using the heels of both hands. ‘For God’s sake! For God’s sake!’ she shouted repeatedly, before turning away with an exclamation of despair. She stormed off down the track, ahead of them, abandoning the prisoners she was supposedly escorting back to camp.

  ‘Form up!’ the kapo called unconvincingly, her voice shaken.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Ludmila asked Anna, ‘That guard was in tears.’

  The woman next to them gave a sceptical snort. ‘She doesn’t care about us, not that one!’

  ‘She isn’t crying for us,’ Anna replied as they began to march in pairs.

  ‘What do you mean?’ hissed Ludmila.

  Anna shook her head. She did not want to frighten Ludmila.

  *

  Her group was the first of the work parties back at the block. It was empty but for two small groups of women at the far end, near the stove, stitching blankets in the poor light.

  One of them lifted her head as Anna entered. ‘You! Hey!’ she called across the barrack.

  Anna glanced at her dully as she sank down on to her bunk, too tired to acknowledge the call.

  ‘They say your husband is worse!’

  Anna lifted her head.

  The woman was a dark-skinned, toothless girl of indeterminate age. Her face was creased and her brow furrowed but her eyes twinkled.

  ‘My husband is sick too. He’s at the other end, near the door – they put the worst ones at the far end because of the smell. I was talking to the kapo earlier. Your husband was moved there in the night.’ She paused. ‘It’s not good.’

  Anna rose. She brushed down her skirt. There was a dull ache between her shoulder blades. She was hugely thirsty. She only had a short-time before evening roll-call.

  As she turned to leave, the woman called. ‘You’ll have to give that Dumb One your bread ration, sister, but if your husband is dead already then when you come back you can have a bite of mine.’

  Outside the barrack door, Anna stopped, drew breath. From where she stood, she could see across the camp, past the children’s block to where the infirmary huts and the wagons they were now using for the overflow were packed next to each other, close to the perimeter fence. It was a kapo on duty at the gate sectioning them off, rather than a guard. She could probably get past him. She had no bread left but two weeks ago, when she was on sewing duty, she had managed to unpick a length of gold thread from a nightgown she had been shredding in the workshop. She had rolled the thread into a skein and tied it with a piece of lace.

  It was nearly dark. The work parties were arriving back – a group of twenty men were jostling each other slowly into one of the men’s barracks and the main gate was opening to admit another detail. Roll-call would be soon, then lock-up. If she went straight to the infirmary she might miss her only chance to visit Bobo. She hadn’t seen him for four days. If she went to see Bobo she would miss Josef.

  She had visited Bobo less since Parni’s death, and he seemed less and less anxious for her visits. He would look up when she entered the block and stare at her solemnly, as if he wasn’t entirely sure who she was. His eyes had been weeping pus for several weeks now – most of the children’s were. At first, she had managed to hold him down and squeeze a drop of her breast milk into each eye but her milk had dried up completely because she was so hungry. It wouldn’t make any difference anyway. He would be re-infected by the other children soon enough.

  He didn’t cry when she left him any more, just turned his head away, his gaze indifferent, misty, his suffering beyond her comfort. And her own attitude towards him was changing. Once, he had been her favourite, her perfect plump one, the one she wished would never grow up. Now, when she thought of him, she thought of how quiet and serene Parni had always been, the smoothness of her brown skin and the solemnity in her gaze. Thank God she is dead, she thought sometimes. She did me that favour, put herself beyond all suffering.

  She hesitated, then she strode firmly past the children’s block, to the infirmary.

  *

  Josef Růžička, Jozef Maximoff, Phrála Jonó, Branko, Limping Boy, my son, grandson – Kakó, the Rom Baró … Sometimes he rehearsed all the names he had been called, as if in that litany he might find a part of himself that was the essential core, the heart of him, the part lost when he had been admitted to the camp. Branko. His real name. He never used it, even to himself. He had never felt the need, until now. How strange a thing to have forgotten oneself, to have become a shell, a husk, to know intently that there was another self somewhere, in a place where he had really existed, lost in the past.

  My name is Branko Maximoff, common name of Josef. I am Rom Baró of my kumpánia. We winter in Moravia, not far f
rom Třebič, but in the summer we move around the Czech lands. Harvest time finds us at the cherry orchards. They are owned by a good man. I forget his name. He keeps a fine table. The Tent-Dwellers antagonise the other Roma but I always make sure to smooth things over. I believe we are all brothers. We once held a kris for over three hundred men. I was allowed the honour of speaking first. There was a new law afoot. Grave news … the men listened to me. They showed me great respect.

  Josef knew why they had moved him to the far end of the hut in the night. One’s progression along the bunks was indicative of deterioration. The healthiest prisoners, the ones who could get up to relieve themselves, were placed near the door because that was where the kapo’s table was. The kapo had nothing to do all day except keep an eye on everyone and ensure that nobody sprang back to ruddy health and scrambled out of a window and over the perimeter fence. He wasn’t even obliged to fetch them water.

  It was not logical that the weakest should be furthest from the door, and this lack of logic bothered Josef. If he wished to relieve himself, and he wished it every half hour or so, he had to call out in the hope that a patient further down the block would hear him and pass the call down – via several other patients – so that such information might at last reach the kapo, who then might, if he felt like a little exercise, take his feet from his desk, amble next door to the orderlies’ hut and inform them that someone, somewhere, needed to be lifted to the latrines. By which time it was too late.

  I wonder what day of the week it is, Josef thought, what month? What year? How strange that I cannot remember the year. I know there is a war on, that much I know.

  There was a dull, hot pain in his abdomen. I stink, he thought miserably. Of course I do. I stink. The orderlies will be angry when they eventually come.

  His fever had reached a plateau. For days, his temperature had been soaring up and down, bathing him in sweat, then freezing him. Then he had been delirious for a short time, an almost-pleasant, drunken state. Now there was a simple constancy while whatever raged inside his body raged away. It was peaceful.