Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

‘Russia,’ Emil replied.

  The man shook his head, ‘The Soviet Union, where all men are brothers!’

  At this, the men exchanged sceptical looks.

  ‘It’s true, I tell you. Even the gadjos are brothers. Anyway, I’ll tell you about that another day. This story is about how the Germans have just lost the war. Stalingrad is in the east, way beyond where you can imagine, across rivers and mountains and huge plains of grass. The plains of grass stretch as far as you can see, for days and days. The plains are so huge a travelling kumpánia would have to navigate by the stars, like sailors on the sea. That’s how far east the Germans got. But at Stalingrad, they met their match. The citizens stood their ground and trapped them and forced them into the river. The German army was swallowed whole. None of them are coming back. And the Russians are sweeping west, towards us, even as we speak.’

  Some of the men shook their heads or pulled sceptical faces. Others looked impressed. A couple shook their hands at the wrist to show they were washing themselves of this nonsense. Emil believed the man: there was the light of truth in his face, he was sure of it. It will be finished by the summer, he thought. This man is right. All we have to do is sit tight until the summer. It would be madness to try and escape now. Isn’t the winter nearly through, already? It was always at its worst just before the weather improved.

  *

  One day, Emil returned to his bunk mid-afternoon. Čacko was unwell and had dismissed him for the day. The block was empty but the block Elder had left the stove alight, which meant he would be back soon.

  Emil checked to see that the piece of metal was still in place behind the loose plank, as he always did. It was still there, but the plank was damp. He investigated further up the wall and found a single thread of water filtering down the wooden crevices. The wood was blackened by the damp and already spongy in places. The expanding ice on the roof must have cracked the tar paper. Now, with the winter sun beginning to shine each day, the ice was melting and water leaking in. A thaw, Emil thought, pressing his fingertips against the pliant wood. It would soon rot. Winter had come early that year – surely Righteous God would now give them an early spring.

  *

  It was the next day that he was able to talk to Marie, for the first time in weeks.

  Čacko sent them into the small wooded area behind the dog kennels, to dig a hole for one of the dogs who had died, he said. He had sent them off with a cheery, complicit wink at Emil. Make the most of this opportunity, the wink seemed to say. I’m prepared to turn a blind eye.

  As they crossed the camp, shyly silent, Emil wondered whether he should perhaps follow Čacko’s suggestion. Should he grab Marie? Force her down? He was fifteen years old and had never had a woman. When else would he get the chance? The normal rules didn’t apply here. There was Marie’s father to think of, but he had been moved to the new men’s block and spent half his time in the punishment shed. Would she complain to him anyway? Marie had told Emil what her father was like back in the settlement. Emil thought he would like the opportunity to fight Jan Malík, to show how a Rom should behave. A man like Malík didn’t deserve a daughter like Marie. It would serve him right if Emil took her.

  They were out of sight behind the kennels: Čacko’s plan, Emil thought, his breath deepening. The dogs could be heard scratching and whimpering. The kennels had been insulated from the cold with piles of brushwood, which made them look like bonfires. How nice it would be to pour kerosene over them and put a match to them, to warm their hands on the flames from a crackling dog.

  They had been given a spade each, but Marie made no pretence of attempting to dig. She sat down on a mound of frozen earth and wrapped her skirt tightly round her legs, lowering her head on to her knees and huddling down against the cold. At least they were sheltered from the wind.

  Emil lifted his spade and tried to jab it into the frozen earth. Let her speak first, for once. After a few moments, he had made only a small dent. Damn the ground. He was not enjoying looking weak and incapable in front of Marie. Damn her for her silences. It would be nice to shake her, just like Čacko was expecting him to. He stood upright and wiped at his brow with his sleeve. ‘This spade is blunt,’ he said. ‘Let me try that one.’

  Without raising herself, she reached forward and lifted her spade, extending her arm towards him.

  He stared at her for a moment, tossed his own spade aside and crossed to her in two strides. He placed his hand on the shaft of the spade, but she did not immediately relinquish it. She looked at him. He stared at her without moving, a hard stare that made his intentions clear. She stared back for a moment, acknowledging him, then dropped her gaze.

  He took the spade from her and stepped away. ‘You know, Marie,’ he said, as he raised the spade to strike the earth, ‘it does not kill a woman to give a man a word of encouragement.’

  She remained silent. He glanced at her, but she was staring at the patch of earth in front of her feet, her expression thoughtful.

  ‘It wasn’t your tonsil you swallowed,’ muttered Emil. ‘It was your tongue.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my tongue,’ said Marie swiftly, then clamped her mouth tight shut, as if to stop more words escaping.

  Emil glanced around. ‘Marie, we are out of sight. What are you afraid of? You’re not in the settlement now. Your father won’t come after you with a stick. He’s probably forgotten you exist.’

  ‘The forest has eyes,’ Marie said quickly.

  Emil dug furiously. ‘Don’t give me proverbs. No one is looking and no one cares. All anyone in this place cares about is the gnawing in their bellies. Do you think anyone notices us? Don’t be so big-headed.’

  ‘My father notices everything.’

  Emil made a face. He chewed at his lower lip to prevent himself from saying something rude about Marie’s father. However much a person might hate a member of their own family, there was no surer way to make them love than than to agree.

  He could not afford to criticise Jan Malík himself but he wanted to prompt Marie into disloyalty against her father, to make her feel the two of them were complicit. She was only using propriety as an excuse. She knew that as much as he did.

  ‘So, what does your father say about us, the Kalderash?’ he asked casually, continuing to dig. Emil knew exactly the sort of the thing a man like Malík would say about the Vlach Roma, but Marie would feel embarrassed if he forced her to say it.

  She seemed relieved that Emil had changed the subject. She smiled, then shrugged.

  ‘Go on,’ said Emil. ‘I won’t be offended. I can guess.’

  ‘He doesn’t like anyone,’ she said, in a casual tone of voice to indicate she did not share her father’s prejudices. ‘He says the Vlach Rom are backward.’

  ‘Including the Kalderash, eh?’

  ‘He doesn’t distinguish, Kalderash, Lowari, Čurara …’

  Emil threw down his spade. ‘He puts us in the same group as the sieve-makers? My grandfather owned twenty horses!’

  Marie looked straight at him and said calmly, ‘You promised you wouldn’t be offended …’

  Emil picked up his spade again and resumed his digging with vigour. ‘Go on then …’

  ‘No, I won’t. You promised but you were not being truthful with me.’

  ‘No. I want to know.’ Suddenly, he did want to know. It was still a game, but not just a game.

  ‘He says some of you marry gadje and forget your Romani …’

  ‘Some do, not us,’ huffed Emil, panting a little due to the ferocity of his digging. He was still making little headway. ‘There are a couple of Boyash in our block. Nobody can understand a word they say …’

  ‘… And that means you are Unclean. We are Roma but you are …’

  Emil whirled round, hurling the spade from his grasp. It spun in the air and bounced off the pile of brushwood up against the back of one of the kennels. The dogs inside leapt to their feet and began barking furiously and scrabbling against the walls of the kennel
s.

  ‘How dare he? How dare he!’ Emil’s hands were fists. He shouted above the clamour of the dogs. ‘Unclean? Us? The Kalderash are the best Roma in the whole world. Our women are the most beautiful … you, you don’t even have braids! Our men can craft any metal! Copper, iron, tin … You live in a cottage, with whitewashed walls and chairs and tables. Tell your father from me, he can come to our block any day and stand in front of me and tell me I’m Unclean. I’ll knock him to the ground. My father died in this stinking place.’

  Marie had jumped to her feet in shock when he had flung the spade. Her eyes were small and dark with fury. ‘You lied to me! You said you wouldn’t be angry! You lied!’

  Emil sank to the ground, kneeling on the hard, frozen earth, unheeding of the damp that soaked rapidly through his thin trousers. He hung his head. ‘Taté …’ he said. Dad … He was overwhelmed with grief, a sudden and tender, yawning and gaping sense of loss. His father; his kind, gentle father, who never hurt a man or woman or child in his life – a wise, soft man who had died slowly because he was so wise and soft, while his son had done nothing but observe. He had never given his father so much as a single turnip peeling. He had thought, there is no point when he is going to die anyway. Now, he was dead. He could see the point, now.

  The revelation drained him of all energy. He stayed kneeling, his head hanging, and neither of them spoke for a long time. The dogs fell silent. No one came to investigate. A few sparse flakes of snow began to fall. How pointless it seemed, all the struggling.

  ‘I am sorry for your father’s death …’ Marie said eventually. ‘For many reasons …’

  Emil looked up at her.

  Marie shook her head. ‘Even if your father was alive, to talk to mine …’ she said. Then she drew a deep breath. ‘My father would never permit me to marry a Vlach Rom.’

  Sitting in the mud, mourning his father, Emil felt a strange, drunken rush of happiness; a heady, illogical joy. I am going a little mad, he thought. The air around was light. Marry. It was a word full of future, a stupid word, idiotic, a word that had wings. To pronounce it at all was an act of such daring. All at once, Marie seemed heroic. She was right. There was a world beyond. Marry … He threw back his head and gave a short, hysterical laugh – and Marie, seeing this, smiled and smiled at him, and for a moment they were united in their amusement at their own absurdity. So this is how it is, he thought, between men and women, to be thinking the same thing but in different ways. There was I thinking of pinning her down, and she was thinking of it too in her womanly way, and the gulf between us is so huge and strange at the very time when we are both thinking the same thing. And he laughed again, feeling the gulf between them, and he loved Marie for laughing too, for believing that she understood.

  *

  That night, the inmates stood for a long time at roll-call. A rabbit had gone missing from the hutches at the west side of the camp. Emil stood in line with the other men in a sweat of fear that someone might make a link between his and Marie’s sojourn behind the dog kennels and the missing rabbit. Čacko was not on duty and some of the guards had a vengeful streak. Being a favourite had hazards as well as benefits.

  They all stood, men and women in separate rows, while the blocks ware searched. The Commandant was in a fury, storming up and down and shouting that he was prepared to turn the children out of their block into the freezing night to search if the culprit did not come forward. Some of the women were crying. They had all been told to stand still, to attention, but two women collapsed and were taken to the infirmary. One awoke as she was being pulled along the ground and kicked and screamed as she was dragged away. They were all terrified of the infirmary now.

  Emil worked his toes in his footwraps to stave off frostbite and tried to calculate how long they were being made to wait. The night was clear. The stars were out. His breath condensed on the air in white clouds. His toes began to ache with wriggling but if he stopped they went numb. The man next to him was shaking uncontrollably with cold, his head making tiny juddering motions up and down.

  Eventually, the guards who had searched the block were all gathered together, shaking their heads. Two were showing the Commandant other items that had been found during the search – in the dark it wasn’t possible to see what they were showing him. Emil closed his eyes and said to himself, O Del, blind the evil gadje and let me keep that piece of metal, and I promise I will hide it in my shirt from now on and use it when I get the chance. Give me the chance.

  The guards had summoned the block Elders and were trying to identify the owners of the bunks where the items had been found. At last, two men were selected from the lines, one at the front, one right behind Emil, and taken away.

  Normally, the whole camp observed the beatings; the victims would be bent over logs, stripped, and water poured over their buttocks, but it seemed that tonight even the Commandant had had enough. It was pitch dark The floodlights above gave each prisoner a huge black shadow. He announced that the search for the rabbit thief would continue tomorrow. The culprit was not to imagine he had escaped detection.

  A collective groan of relief ran through the men and women as they were dismissed to their blocks.

  Emil was shuffling away in a group of other men when he felt a fierce clutch at his elbow, a pinch. He turned – it was his mother. Her face was contorted. She gave a shriek, ‘Aieeee …’ and collapsed. He bent over her.

  ‘Take me to the infirmary …’ she hissed, her voice quite normal. ‘Tell them … alone …’

  Two other men had bent to help. A kapo was striding toward them. Emil stood and waved them all away. ‘It’s my mother, she’s sick, she has a fever.’ The kapo halted his approach.

  ‘I’ll take her …’ Emil added unnecessarily, pulling Anna by one arm and lifting her with his other arm around her waist.

  The kapo turned away.

  ‘If I take you to the infirmary, you’ll get sick …’ Emil hissed to his mother as they limped away, her leaning on him, head down.

  ‘Never mind that, I’ll talk my way out tomorrow. Just listen. Walk more slowly. Give us time.’ Men were streaming past them in the dark, keen to get back to the block.

  Emil and Anna limped along together, their breath condensing in the night air and mingling into a single cloud. When she spoke, her voice was low and urgent.

  ‘I was cleaning by the administration block. There was a guard and some girl, a gadji, out back, one of the secretaries, his whore. She was crying and he was trying to comfort her. She was making him promise not to tell the other guards.’ A kapo walked past and Anna stopped talking until he was out of earshot. ‘There’s going to be a quarantine. The order has come through but nobody is supposed to know yet. The whole camp is going to be sealed off from the outside world. Everyone. The guards have been expecting it for weeks, that’s what this guard kept saying, well we all thought it would happen. She was crying and crying. They are all trapped here now, like us. Leave is cancelled and nobody will be relieved. No one will be allowed in or out. They’re making the final preparations. They are going to re-route the road and deliveries will have to be left at least two hundred metres from the main gate. It’s typhus. They are sealing us all in, prisoners, guards, everyone, and leaving us to die.’ They were almost at the infirmary gate. A guard stood at attention. Beyond him, a tiny electric bulb cast a weak yellow light over the fresh snow which coated the concrete step up to the hut. ‘You must go,’ Anna said. ‘Once word gets out about this, no one will get out of here. I don’t know how long you’ve got. A few days, maybe less.’

  He wanted to say something but she pushed him away and hurried up to the guard, who looked at her. She spoke to him, clutching her stomach and groaning. He opened the gate for her, closing it after she had passed.

  Emil watched as she mounted the step, opened the door without looking back at him, and disappeared inside. The door closed behind her with a bang which shook its weak wooden frame. A thin shower of icicles detached from the lintel a
nd dropped soundlessly on to the snow-covered step. It was the last time he saw his mother.

  *

  That night, Emil lay awake in his bunk, shuddering with the cold but hot with excitement. His piece of metal was now tucked into his right footwrap, where it lay flush with the sole of his foot.

  There could be no more vacillation. It was die here or die out there, in the open. At least give me the chance to lie down in the snow and die of cold, he thought, at least spare me dogs or bullets. That’s all I ask. Dying of cold must be painless, he thought. You would just go numb. The difficult part was trying to stay alive – but if you knew you were going to die anyway …

  The secret of courage – he had discovered it: to resolve to die. After that, it was simply a matter of preferring one method or another. He preferred to lie down in the snow, go numb, sleep and die rather than stay trapped in the camp and die of typhus. His mother urged it. His father and his sister were dead, his brother beyond help, his mother and his aunts wanted him to do whatever he chose. His conscience was entirely clear.

  Marie. He frowned to himself in the dark.

  I will take her with me. His thoughts ran with the idea. We could pretend we were married. It’s probably easier that way, than a man on his own. Less of a threat. We could pretend she was pregnant. We’d get taken in somewhere.

  Then he thought of having to run … Marie, her little feet. How would she manage if there were dogs on their heels? She would hold him back. He bit softly at the inside of his mouth. Marie would hold him back, no doubt about that – she would be an asset once they were safely away, but how to get away? How to even get her out of the women’s block?

  Would she agree to go? There was her mother and father to consider. Could he trust her not to warn them if he told her about the quarantine? He fell asleep deciding he would have to go alone.

  *

  He awoke resolved to take her with him. To be alone was terrible. He would need support on the outside, someone to talk to. Then, when spring came, he would come back and rescue his mother and his aunts and Bobo. The quarantine might be lifted by then. He would get Marie’s parents out too. Together, they would all form a new kumpánia. He would speak to her today. He would find a way.