Between the NKVD and the Nazis, particularly the Nazis, nearly half a million Jews were killed in Belarus. Most of the Jews in Minsk were killed. When I was released, I learned that my wife, my children, my mother, my uncle, and my brothers were among them.
I make this affidavit in good faith and for no improper purpose.
Sworn before me this tenth day of April, 2009, in the City of Minsk. Ivan Stasevich, a Notary Public in and for the Republic of Belarus.
The rawness of this takes her by surprise. She has been trying to develop some detachment from her clients, their harrowing lives. Second-hand disaster looms so large in this work, she knows she must find ways to stay at a distance herself, to avoid absorbing every harsh detail into her own being. But this, this is wrenching, this has ambushed her. Pray, Jew, pray.
What did you think a war criminal was? says Louis.
A man linked to something more impersonal, more sweeping, perhaps. Not this dirty individual torture, this personal violence. Although, strictly speaking, these are not war crimes — not committed in the course of armed conflict. What are they? Obscenities, horrors.
The NKVD humiliated people to break them down, says Owen, who has been getting briefings from the War Crimes Section. Sometimes they forced prisoners to make animal noises. Confessions were crucial, they had quotas to meet. And later on, they were so desperate to meet the quotas they began turning each other in.
No, no, no, says Drozd.
He is invading her daylight hours now, not merely her dreams, rasping in her ear.
These things did not happen, he says. People distort them, they exaggerate, he says. This is what they do — they try to justify naming other people, justify giving information. And if — if — there were cases where pressure was applied, a small number, I was not involved. I was not that man, the clerk. I was barely a man — young. Fifteen. Or sixteen.
Fifteen. Or sixteen. When do people become moral beings, or at least beings with moral capacity?
Twelve for girls, says her aunt. Thirteen for boys. B’nai mitzvah. The rite of moral responsibility.
There is no denying this, though: the linking of Drozd to the affidavit is hearsay, and shaky hearsay at that. They will need something stronger to deport him.
Hearsay — a tale of a tale. You must not come to tell a story out of another man’s mouth. The rule at a time when seeing was believing, when the hearing was considered more trustworthy, when memory was believed more faithful. A witness must speak to what hath fallen under his senses.
But this rule is still here, sitting beside her like a stuffed frog, blinking at her, unmoving. And perhaps still better than accepting borrowed truths, still safer than second-hand realities.
She takes another affidavit out of the box.
···
Una bomba, says Isabel, her fine-spun hair a pale mass. Your war crimes case. Here. Or perhaps at the courthouse. The police say they suspect it is a hoax — she pronounces it hocks — but still, they take it seriously, they notify the parties, they search the office.
They are milling around on the sidewalk, together with other people from the building, all of them still clutching the things they had been holding when they left. From offices, studios, a gallery, people standing with a croissant, a drafting ruler, an old book in their hands. Some of them are looking at these things in a puzzled way. Why do I have these scissors?
We had bombs in Colombia, says Isabel reproachfully, then she looks over her shoulder as if they might have followed her here.
She tightens her grip on Leah’s arm.
Why do they think it’s a hoax?
They do not say exactly, although they say a hoax is not uncommon. But even so, they take steps.
A trill of fear. Who would do this? The man Drozd, an attempt to disrupt the proceedings? Or perhaps someone who supports him. Or someone who despises him.
Who are these people now, olive green hazard suits, deep-sea divers appearing suddenly on dry land? Climbing out of a truck, helmets bobbing, their faces in shadow behind their visors.
Stay back, they say calmly. Stay back.
They lumber over to the building in their suits, heavy collars up around their faces — people out to search the ocean depths of the office, looking for sea creatures with explosives. But they are brisk for all their calmness, all their bulk.
Stay back.
Nate is there now, his hands cupped around the back of his neck. Louis? she says to him.
Court, says Nate.
He looks sharply at Isabel, who is becoming more agitated. Now she is stroking Leah’s arm, over and over.
Let’s go for a walk, he says.
How long does it take to find a bomb?
The trees are leafing out above them, branches arching over the pavement. A fitful sun is out, sifting through all this young greenery, newly alive. Yellow seedlings are littering the sidewalk, last year’s dead leaves clogging the gutters. Now they are walking under an umbrella of crabapple blossoms, bark peeling and blistered on the branches, sun glinting though them. Looking up, far up into this light-filled vault, she feels something inside herself expanding, reaching out, spinning through the branches. A brief swell of elation fills her chest, her head.
Look up, she says to Isabel. Look up.
Isabel looks up for a second and then down again.
This city — Leah is often startled by the odd pockets of loveliness it produces out of nothing, out of dirt and cement. These moments when some tired street bursts out into foliage, when a dead-looking hedge produces cascades of white flowers for no reason — some invisible algorithm of weather and season. Why this day, and not that day, this week and not the next? Sometimes she stumbles across a river of pale blue irises where there was nothing a few days before, or a patch of garrulous tulips, an old garage dripping wisteria. They insist on themselves, these things — so simple, so heady — and then disappear as quickly as they come.
Nate has slowed down his strides so that he can talk to Isabel, talking about nothing in a careful, airy voice.
Outside, his bare head makes him look smoother, lighter, all of a piece. Egg-shaped, yes, but harder, a mineral egg, an egg made of ivory, perhaps. Something about this head, this big-boned body makes him seem unusually coherent, defined — as if he had finished becoming who he was at an early age, had completed the shape of his personhood early on.
So different, she thinks, we could belong to different species.
He is unhurried, grounded, she is restless — she twists her dark hair up and then drops it, she crosses and uncrosses her arms, she puts her hands in her pockets, stretches her legs. Sometimes she tries to hold herself still, but this only lasts for a minute. Pins and needles? She was born on them, lives on them, is propelled by them into motion. And one motion flows into the next and the next, a stream of disquiet.
They say that we should watch out for suspicious parcels as well, says Isabel abruptly, stopping and twisting her fingers together. But what does this mean, how will I know, what does this look like — a suspicious parcel?
Her face is distressed. Suddenly, the lives of other people might be in her hands. Or her hands might be blown off.
Nate reaches out to put his arm around her, and she brushes him away.
I thought this was a safe country, she says, her voice accusing, bewildered.
···
Safe? No such thing, says her aunt. Who’s safe? Not us, anyway. A tribe of people forever gambling on existence.
···
More affidavits, more brutal stories, more problems of proof, of evidence.
The office has been declared bomb-free for the moment, and she is making piles of paper, making labels for the piles, changing the piles, changing the labels. She is looking for something solid, something to build a case around. None of this is working, but the stories are slipping out, cr
eeping over the edges of the boxes. The arrested, the tortured, the dead, their accounts recorded by wives, fathers, brothers, cousins, friends. All these stoical people, all these matter-of-fact descriptions. Full of small, shimmering braveries — If I must give in, I will not do it easily. If I must name people, I will name people who have already been arrested, already dead.
So personal, so intimate. For the victims, of course, but even for the perpetrators — perhaps shattering bones, inflicting pain, creates not only a physical intimacy but a moral one as well. Or rather an immoral one, but at least a proximity of sorts, a permanent linkage.
The emotion is largely drained from these documents, though, little here in the way of grief or rage. But they are all the more powerful for the missing parts, the unspoken words. This was agonizing. This was heart-rending. This was unendurable.
How do they survive it? Are they numb, afterwards, half-paralyzed? Do they strain themselves to the utmost to avoid talking about it? Or do they talk ceaselessly, unable to stop? Let me tell you about being beaten, about being tortured. Let me tell you about being worked and starved in a slow form of murder, about riding the edge of death for months, years. Let me tell you about losing everyone I ever loved. Everyone. Every single one.
What does it do to them? Scarred, wary, determined to make sense of their own survival. But how do they manage to live anything resembling a normal life with these nightmares, this anguish buried inside them? How can they stand the feeling of someone else’s skin against their own again, to kiss a crying child? Can they possibly have tears left for anyone else?
Tearless. A chronic condition, said Nate when they first began working together. The body begins attacking itself, its own saliva and tear glands. The mouth becomes dryer and dryer, the eyes become dryer and dryer, sometimes blurring.
I can’t even cry, he said.
But he said it in a bemused way, as if he wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad.
She felt a sudden impulse to touch his eyes, to run her fingers across his eyelids, his lashes.
Now, she thinks: These people. These people inhabiting the affidavits — are they living dry-eyed existences as well? Or perhaps it is the opposite, perhaps they spend hours weeping uncontrollably. Either way, they are turning into spiders in her brain, picking their way around her frontal lobes. Urging her, hectoring her.
Go away, she says to them.
No, they say in a graceful, spidery way.
I’m doing what I can, she says.
Do more, they say.
Law, sleeping in the background, turns over restlessly.
···
We’re lawyers, says Louis. Not alchemists. We can polish up the facts, frame them differently, show them in the best light. But straw into gold? Impossible.
Lead into gold, she says. She is in his office, sitting across from him.
What?
The alchemists were trying to turn lead into gold. Spinning straw into gold was the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin.
God give me patience, he says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
He means this. Despite his cynicism — or perhaps because of it — he has taken to dropping into a small synagogue from time to time. She wonders if this impulse is the result of that moment when he seemed to have misplaced himself, when he seemed adrift in a world suddenly emptied of substance, only the outlines left. Perhaps this has sent him searching for an anchor of some kind, for additional purchase.
She envies him his careless Jewishness, though — the idea of dipping into it from time to time. The thought that he has so much of it merely sitting there, that he can pick it up or drop it whenever he wants, even waste it. Her own seems much less reliable — sometimes she feels as if she has to hold on to it deliberately, or it might skitter away from her. But she also feels unexpected surges of it once in a while, surges that are almost palpable. A flood of something potent, like a wild sweetness in her veins. I am this. This is me.
Anything else? says Louis. You do have your own office.
Owen, she says. We have to speak to him, alert him to the problems. We have to tell him we need more evidence, better evidence.
No, he says, looking at her sharply. We do the case we’re given. Owen is as astute as they come. He is certainly aware of any problems, and the case is enough of a hot potato as it is. Some of the associations — Hungarians, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans — are opposed to these kinds of cases proceeding, and the Jewish groups want them to go ahead. We don’t want to present him with a dilemma where anything he does — even nothing — will incur political liability. He needs cover — if we ever want more work from him. And we do.
But we’re likely to lose.
Lose? say the spiders, shocked.
He hesitates.
You don’t know that, he says finally. Anything is possible. Very few judges will want to see someone walking away from these things. Especially when the end result is only a deportation. But we’re not raising it with Owen, at least not yet. So for now, you’re going to have to cobble together something that works. Look again. See what you can find. It doesn’t have to be a perfect case, a watertight case — just something respectable that gives us a shot. Now get out.
He rubs his face with his hands.
···
She needs Nate — where is he? He is a necessity, a requirement, she needs to talk about the case.
This is what they do, and when they do it, they are good at it. When they talk about law, they are nimble, acrobatic, casting up ideas then prodding, poking them for weak spots. He has a more instinctive feel for it than she does; in school, he took to law effortlessly, as if he were rediscovering a dialect he already knew. She had to acquire hers by hand, every piece hard-won.
She had been immersed in an art history degree, engrossed in the painters of Der Blaue Reiter, their deep, bright colours, their sensual lines swirling around her. One day she realized — belatedly — that this would not produce a livelihood, not the one she needed, not without more degrees and time than she could afford. She had torn herself away from her courses, miserable about the loss, resentful at her own lack of foresight. Looking around for something that would provide a living, she slid sideways into law.
At first she refused to consider whether she could take any pleasure in it, as if this might be a form of infidelity, faithlessness to her first love. And the law itself irked her.
So clumsy, she had said to Nate. So inept. Blundering around in human lives like that.
He raised an eyebrow.
They had found each other the first week of classes, had detected a possible kinship, standing in line for casebooks.
Not clumsy, he said. Something else. Muscular.
You have to concede this, then — the logic is bizarre.
I concede nothing, he said.
But she found the shift from art to law unnerving. She felt as if she had been exiled from a world of hues and pigments, and sent to a place of flat words, a place from which all the colour had been leached. Banished to some arid country she had no idea even existed.
After a while, though, she began to realize that if she listened closely enough, there was something like a dry song running below the surface of these words, the rolling Latin phrases. And she was tantalized by some parts of it — by the obsession with fairness, with rightness, by the flirtations with morality.
The doctrines lured her in further, each one a piece of reality that had been carved up and tied into a bundle. Ideas exhaling the air of other centuries — the British ones in particular, their cases spreading out to the colonies, to her colony. Even their names had a dusty ring: the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, Viscount Maugham, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest. Eventually she began to come around, first to the point of declaring a ceasefire, and later a partial surrender. And slowly her paintings abandoned her, although pieces of them still
bobbed up from time to time — a woman in a dark dress disappearing around a corner, a blue-black fox curled in sleep. Sometimes, in dreams, she found herself inside one of the pictures, part of it — climbing up a Mediterranean hillside, or moving through a formal public garden, people in top hats strolling around her.
I concede nothing.
All of this took longer than it should have, too long. School inched forward, turtle-paced, and then she would be out of money — forced to take a job for a spring term here, a fall term there.
···
A thousand dollars, said Rudy.
She looked up, worried. A new debt?
They sat down beside her, around the dining room table, and Gus began fanning out bills, Malcolm looking on unhappily. Six hundred of this was his, a long odds bet on a horse. Vain, selfish, the uncle who had been married and divorced, who had returned a year later. A man with a flair for duping people, but who did it so affably, so kindly, that people almost lined up to be duped. And the horses, the racetrack — one of his haunts. All those possibilities, all those people thin-skinned with eagerness.
Not a man who would give up money easily. But Rudy and Gus had wrestled it out of him, harassing him, nagging him, rattling him until he handed it over, coming up with the other four hundred on their own.
For the school fees, Rudy announced.
She was speechless. How had they done this? They must need the cash for other things.
Yes, said Malcolm.
Never you mind, said Rudy.
These men, she thought. Looking around at them — Gus sheepish but pleased, Rudy grinning, Malcolm’s face screwed up, torn between pride and resentment. These men, taught by circumstance to keep their eyes on the ground, the few skimpy prospects they had disappearing over the years — they believed in her illogically, boundlessly.
Something rare, this belief. A windfall. She felt a rush of fondness, she was almost haplessly grateful.
Then Rudy started to waver, to slip to one side in his seat, another faint rolling over him, and she and Gus leaned forward to grab his arms.
The Singing Forest Page 6