The Singing Forest

by Judith McCormack

  The place is dirtless, whip-clean, all blues and greys. Fabric has been tied over the chairs and sofas, making their surfaces softer. The KDB officer looks larger, stiffer here, out of place in his uniform.

  A pot of coffee, an apple torte. The woman limps as she walks, her ankles swollen.

  The investigator explains again: This is for a foreign court case, no, not here. They are looking for information.

  The woman keeps turning her rings around, looking at the KDB official.

  You should speak freely, says the investigator. She is a lawyer — he points at Leah — you have the protection of the law.

  Nothing will happen to me?

  Nothing will happen to you, says the investigator.

  But how does he know? Leah thinks. How can he be sure?

  The KDB official is frowning on the other side of the table.

  The woman pours out the hot coffee, wiping the drips off the bottom of the spout with a cloth after each cup. After the last one, she pauses for a few seconds, holding the coffee pot in mid-air. Then she puts it down abruptly, with a sigh — a deep, balloon-like sigh, as if she had been holding her breath for decades.

  We lived in a village near Minsk, she says abruptly. My father was a group leader at a kalhas, a collective farm, and also looked after the draft horses. My mother worked in the kitchens there — that was where they met, and eventually they had five daughters. I am the middle one, the oldest one died last year. My father loved the taste of mushrooms, so my mother would gather them for cooking.

  Mushroom picking is big here, the investigator says to Leah. The silent hunt, they call it.

  Polina frowns at him, and the woman continues.

  It was September, a warm September, rainy. Good for the mushrooms. My mother had heard of a small copse on the outskirts of Minsk between the Ring Road and the Zaslauje Road that had many mushrooms. She took us there, the children, we all had baskets. We picked all afternoon, the light was fading, but there were so many patches of them, we wanted to pick as many as we could.

  We were getting deeper into the copse when we heard the noise of shooting. Get down, snapped my mother, get down, get down. She was annoyed, she thought there were boys shooting grouse or hares. They should not be shooting here. Then the shooting stopped, and after a little while she let us stand up again, and we went looking for the last few mushrooms before the sun set.

  A moment — Polina makes an adjustment to a microphone and then nods.

  I found a clump of chanterelles apart from the rest, and then another and another, until I was separated from my sisters. As I was turning to go back, I heard voices. I went towards them, and saw a clearing through the bushes, through a wire fence, where two black vans were parked. Several NKVD officers were shovelling sand into a pit and smoothing it over. I could see a hand, a foot sticking out of the pit, before they pushed them down and buried them. Then they left in the vans.

  The KDB officer is rigid, his pen tapping twice as fast as usual. Be careful what you say. Tap, tap. Make sure it is the truth, that your memory is not tricking you. Tap, tap.

  The woman looks at him, anxious but stubborn as well. Now that she is finally telling this story, she is not willing to stop, perhaps she is not even able to stop.

  I know what I saw, she says doggedly.

  Not a word, my mother said later. Not one single word, not a word to anyone. If they knew you were there, they would kill you.

  A few days later, we were coming back from the market and we saw a man sitting by the side of the road, his back against a tree, reading a newspaper. As we went by, we saw that the man was a dead body that had been propped up. Someone had dug up a body in the night and posed it like that. My mother and father looked at each other, and then my mother said again: not a word, not one word. So even though I heard other stories over the years, I said nothing. But now things are different.

  This forest, says the investigator. Where was it?

  It was Kurapaty. Kurapaty forest.

  The investigator turns to Leah. An NKVD execution site. Where they took people to kill them, not only from Minsk, from other places in Belarus as well.

  She sits very still.

  No, says the KDB official loudly. It was an execution site, but it was the Germans who killed people there. All those rumours, this is all they are. It was the Germans, they were German-style executions. Russian guns? They used Russian guns they had captured when they invaded. Don’t forget, this woman was a child, she is confused, it was so long ago.

  Why do you say the men you saw were NKVD officers? she says to the woman.

  They were wearing NKVD uniforms. We would see groups of officers in the street sometimes, even I knew what the uniforms looked like. And it was several years before the Germans invaded, I was seven or eight. The Germans came when I was ten.

  There, says the official. You will take the word of a seven-year-old child?

  I remember, says the woman. And I know what I saw.

  Did you see the faces of the officers? says Leah.

  Yes, when they were shovelling, they went in and out of my view between the trees, the bracken.

  Leah shows her the photograph. Was he one of the officers?

  She studies it carefully and then puts it down on the glass coffee table.

  No, she says.

  Are you sure? blurts out Polina, then begins fiddling with her headset to cover her confusion.

  Yes, I’m sure.

  Leah feels herself sag. Of course. This case. This hapless case. What had she expected? She will be suspended in this limbo of missing evidence forever.

  One more try.

  Have you seen this man before at all? she says. Anywhere?

  Yes, says the woman.

  Where?

  At the graves, Kurapaty. As I was saying.

  The KDB official tenses up again, raises his voice. But you said he was not one of the officers.

  He was a driver, he drove one of the vans.

  ···

  Kurapaty. A carpet of wood anemones, white flowers stretching in every direction beneath the spruces, rows of black crosses between them. She is standing with the investigator, the forest dim and green in the morning light.

  If spirits really do depart the dead, if there are phantoms of some kind that rise from bodies, this forest must be thick with them, she thinks. A city of dead souls, elbowing each other, stepping on pale, cold toes, jostling for position. Thousands of bodies, hundreds of thousands. Officially, only thirty thousand.

  But nobody believes that, says the investigator.

  No surprise, then, that these spirits might be crowded. A fifteen hectare forest tomb.

  Have they left some residue of their thoughts, their emotions here, some substance cast up at death? Some essence of being that arose at the very moment of passing? Unlikely, perhaps, although even a scientist might grant that unknown — as yet — things such as this might exist. In a world of quantum physics, of sound waves, of particle theory, perhaps other unseen forces should not be ruled out too quickly. As a matter of science, was the idea that such a large number of deaths might leave their mark somewhere — a mark that might one day be as measurable as radon or carbon dioxide — so impossible?

  Either way, a profoundly melancholy place.

  Congratulate your researchers, she says to Owen. Give them a hand. Give them a raise. Tell them their intuitions were impeccable.

  This was a war, says Drozd. If they were troops killed in battle, thousands of soldiers, nothing would be thought of it. This was a war, a battle to protect the revolution, these were the casualties of the other side.

  Jus ad bellum. The just war, war as a natural right. Out of fashion in principle, persistent in reality.

  Persons taking no active part in the hostilities shall in all circumstances be treated humanely. Fourt
h Geneva Convention.

  The rules of war. Clumsy. Honourable. Absurd. This mass slaughter, this bloodbath is permissible. This one is not. Soldiers, yes, even conscripts. Civilians, no.

  They were all enemies, says Drozd. Attempting to destroy us. And some of them were not really people. Jews are not really human. This is a proven fact. They are closer to animals. They are filth. And the others were scum — the kulaks, the traitors. It was a war.

  Do you really believe these things? she says.

  Yes, he says loudly.

  Then why were you hiding the bodies?

  ···

  Is there anything to the argument that it was the Germans at Kurapaty? she says to the investigator.

  No, it is pigwash, he says.

  Hogwash, she says silently to herself — but at this point, he can call it whatever he likes.

  Even a commission set up by the Communist Party found it was the NKVD, says the investigator. That the shootings took place between 1937 and 1941, part of Stalin’s purges. Before the German invasion in 1941.

  What about the idea that they were German-style executions?

  Shooting people at the graveside was not invented by the Germans.

  ···

  If Kurapaty is not full of crowded spirits, if it is only earth clinging to old bones, there is still Dzyady, the feast of the dead. When deceased ancestors visit the living, a gentle gathering.

  Superstition, says the investigator, but he seems tolerant of it — indulgent rather than his usual scorn.

  A relic of a time when the boundaries between this world and the next were more flimsy. A day when relatives of the dead sweep their graves, pour vodka around the headstones, leave food. A moment when they invite the restless dead into their houses. Come in, come in, welcome, warm your cold bones by the fire. Hoping for a dreamlike word, a gossamer touch from a departed brother, a husband, a mother. Places are set at the table for them, honey, barley porridge, eggs, blini laid out. The table is circled three times with a candle, and the doors and windows are opened, the names of the dead are called out. Come in, come in, make yourselves comfortable, come and be with us. They drift in, smelling of sweet death, they settle down, silently companionable. At the end of the evening, they return to the everlasting, unless a particularly amiable one is kept around. And for the others, if they seem reluctant to go, if they want to settle in where they are? They are swept out with a broom.

  Now, on Dzyady, people come to Kurapaty, says the investigator. They collect near the Luch watch factory, they march slowly past Kalinoŭski, past Lahoiski Trakt, past Mirashnichenka, then on to Kurapaty, clutching their crosses and banners.

  What do the dead say to them, their rustling hands, their whispery voices among the trees?

  We are here. We are waiting.

  Ten

  You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.

  Josef Stalin

  I have started a child, says Aksana, stroking her belly tentatively. Her stomach is still flat, the hairs below it curling, no sign of any burgeoning underneath. The oil lamp casts wavering shadows on her skin, a play of light gold, dark gold.

  He is flooded with irritation. Why tell me?

  Then he pauses for a moment in the act of buttoning up his shirt. A child. A slip of a person, someone he has fathered, who might have his eyes, his mouth, his head. A son, who might give him more substance, who might make him seem older, who might look up to him. For a moment, he can see a dark-haired boy, clean-limbed. My son is strong, he could say to Sidorenko.

  Then he remembers — this could be anyone’s child.

  I need money, she says reluctantly, picking at a seam in the green coverlet, smoothing it down, picking at it again and smoothing it down. Money to get rid of it.

  Why ask me?

  I’m asking all my patrons, I’m asking each one to give a little.

  What about him?

  He gestures with his head towards the floor above — the man who runs the place, fleshy, red-faced.

  He will not pay, he will only throw me out. He says he can find another girl easily.

  I will speak to him.

  She shrinks back on the bed, her dark-blue eyes clouded with fear.

  Then he will throw me out because of that.

  Not when I am finished.

  The man is more corpulent than ever, his hands pudgy.

  Take care of this, barks Drozd, flashing Plisetsky’s badge.

  Of course, of course, says the man, changing tack mid-air, about to reject any request. Now he is ingratiating, his face wobbling — half-afraid of the man, half-hoping for business from other officers.

  Aksana looks at him wonderingly when he comes back down. She makes much of him, stroking his head, rubbing his back.

  This little victory warms him. He stores it away in his mind, and over the next few days takes it out to examine over and over, nursing the moment of the man’s sudden deference, Aksana’s surprise. No matter how many times he does it, though, no matter how much satisfaction he gets from it, he ends up with the same thought.

  He needs his own badge. He needs his own uniform. He needs his own gun.

  ···

  The prisoner, says Sidorenko. Someone has to watch him.

  They are short-handed again, two officers have gone back to Russia without replacements. The captain has become terser, more dour. Men needed all over, he says shortly.

  The possibility of a war in Europe has been scratching at the edges of their existence. Still nothing more than a foreboding, a wind drifting in from the west, carrying faint traces of oil, smoke. But there is a sense of expectancy, of uncertainty — a foreshortening of the possible future.

  Make sure he does not sit or lie down, says Sidorenko. He has been standing for four days now, I have been working with Bazhanov. Soon he will break down, soon he will confess. But Bazhanov is sick today, so this is your chance. If he starts to collapse, throw snow water on him. I will take over again in the morning.

  Who is he? What has he done?

  Another kulak. He resisted the farm collectivization, had labourers to plant and harvest his grain, to look after his livestock. Bull-headed. Refuses to admit his crimes. And our numbers are low.

  Refuses to admit his crimes.

  Article 58. Any action aimed at overthrowing, undermining, or weakening of the power of the worker and peasant soviets or the economic, political, and national achievements of the proletarian revolution.

  Too undefined, too broad to be good law, says Leah, shaking her head. Constitutionally suspect. The doctrine of vagueness.

  It covers everything, says Drozd smugly.

  Our numbers are low. The estimates from headquarters — the crowds of traitors, out to destroy progress, to take the bread out of people’s mouths. The renegades who must be found, interrogated, executed, or sent to labour camps. The pressure is intensifying, the possibility of a war making it more urgent. The sheer number of bodies required is relentless, they are sometimes reduced to rounding up thieves, beggars, vagrants, priests. Fear has begun slipping into their conversations, their decisions, their reactions.

  Fear. His old acquaintance, something he knows. An expert, he is familiar with all its shapes and sizes. And now the signs of it are becoming unmistakable — he can hear their hesitations, he can see their doubts, he watches their restless hands. Underneath the swagger, he can sense it — fear of denunciation, fear of the regional directorate, fear of new crimes or failures. Fear of allegations that might reach out and grab them, that might send them spiralling into their own machinery of torture and confession.

  Trust no one.

  But this is to his advantage. He starts quietly, repeating a spiteful comment to one officer, a word of praise to another, a line or two from a telegram on the captain’s desk to a third. Then he watches the effects, adjusts his tactics.
He becomes a conduit, a purveyor of small tidings. Most of the officers are wary, but the condition of fear makes them hungry for information, and they are not particular about where it comes from or who is peddling it.

  Comrades. If this was ever anything more than jargon, there is little in the way of camaraderie left now. Some of them have kept their old alliances, but many have been eroded or weakened. He is not surprised — he has always found the idea of friendship baffling. And a form of calcification has taken hold in certain parts of himself — has built up gradually — so that even if he understood it, he would be incapable of responding. But now, if he is isolated, they are becoming more withdrawn as well — an office full of suspicious loners. The squad itself a wolf in danger of eating its own tail.

  This is your chance. The kulak.

  The first night: he maintains a watch outside the interrogation room, through the tiny aperture in the door. The man shudders and sags in the cold, but stays upright through the evening, past midnight.

  In the early hours of the morning, though, the man begins sinking, millimetre by millimetre, drooping, dropping in slow motion until he falls to his knees. Drozd unbolts the door and throws the bucket of melted snow over him. He screams and Drozd slams the door, waiting outside until the man is standing again. The room is so cold, he wonders if the man’s wet clothes will freeze on him. He is determined that this man will get no rest, not even a moment of sleep, until he confesses. Stoiki.

  A few hours later, the man is down again. He throws the snow water over him, the man screams again, but he stays down. Another bucket. Nothing. Another bucket. Nothing.

  He is furious. He drops the bucket and grabs the rubber truncheon, begins hitting the man with it. The man curls up on the floor, attempting to protect his head with his hands, his arms.

  This only increases his rage, the blood singing in his ears. The miserable traitor, foiling his efforts. Anger pours through him, a small grunt of it escaping with each blow. The feel of the truncheon landing on flesh, over and over, the impact rising up through his arm. But when he stops for breath, the man is still curled up on the floor.