Devil's Workshop

12

Maruška, you cute little decoy, leading all the other goats and goatlings under the knife. We’re driving along, sitting under a tarpaulin, Alex is across from me, Luis Tupinabi’s head in his lap. The old man’s eyes are closed, if his face didn’t twitch every now and then I’d think he was dead. We sit stiffly in the piercing cold. I look over at Maruška. I couldn’t be with the flock, or with Sara, or with you, or with anybody I wanted to be with, but here we are, riding together across this chilly land. Alex slaps his palm on the tarpaulin from outside. Don’t sleep, he shouts, we’re almost there! The sputtering tractor that’s towing our cart up the wooded slope is driven by my old friend Red Cap. A guy with glasses sits with us, Kalashnikov across his chest. We’ve long since left the asphalt, no ditch for me to hide in along these roads, trees all over the place like they’re standing watch.

I see a building, a small house, through the mist and light snow. We stop a little way past it, at a tent. The flap is open. Inside, a stove, and next to it, in the gloom — it seems everything here is either in the gloom or in the mist — a huddled figure, holding a dish, puking into it.

Rolf! I cry. He stares at me through his glasses, tries to get up, retches. Na pamyat o Minske, I decipher the Cyrillic on the edge of the dish.

Some tourist you are, puking all over a Minsk souvenir! Is that for your mum, or your girlfriend? I give him a slap on the shoulder. I’m happy to see him.

Listen, Maruška’s outside! It’s like a regular reunion, isn’t it?

Rolf laughs like I’ve told some amazing joke. Then coughs and starts retching again. He’s a wreck. This isn’t the happy-go-lucky guy I knew in Terezín.

He pukes into the dish again. With shaky hands he sets it down on the flowery camping table, lays his arms on the table too, and puts his head on them. I think he’s sobbing.

I remember that time he wept in the bunkroom — so did I. Then I freeze. Where’s Lebo? Is he dead? I blurt. I have to know.

But Rolf just starts spewing again.

I decide to go and look for Maruška. Tough Maruška, the mummy, hm.

She’s still under the tarpaulin. I lift up a corner and see her with Tupanabi’s head on her lap, wiping his cheeks and face with a handkerchief, I wonder if it’s the same bloody rag from the museum in Minsk. The two bruisers with rifles don’t put them down for a second as they move boxes and plastic bags into the tent. Probably food and stuff. They pay no attention to me.

Maruška pulls the old man’s cadaverous hand from the blankets and, stroking his face, slips a syringe from her sleeve into her hand and inserts the needle into his arm. She pushes the plunger, pauses, looks at me, staring me in the eye. Sees my lips move, saying her name, quietly. I lower the tarpaulin. I look around. Alex is nowhere in sight.

I take two, three steps away from the tractor, to see if anything happens. And the next thing I know I’m in strips of mist, it gives me cover, till the wind breaks through the mist on my left and shows me what’s ahead.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Chimneys jut towards the sky out of the damp earth. The chimneys of cottages, everywhere, rising out of the mist. Chunks of walls, broken stairs. Grey chimney pots surround me like masts in a graveyard of ships. But it’s a village graveyard. I’m on a road paved with black stones that leads to the flattened gate of a lifeless farmstead.

Come, let me show you my little museum, Alex says. The sneak. He’s right behind my back.

He grabs the rope hanging around my neck. I’d forgotten all about it. And we walk, again, him in front, leading me uphill. It’s drizzling. I’m glad the jacket Alex gave me has a hood. Drops of icy rain fall on Alex’s close-shaved head.

This is Khatyn, he says. There were hundreds of villages like this, thousands, not like in your country! Could they wipe out the Slavs? They tried, right here. Three hundred thousand they killed. And nobody in the West knows. How come it got swept under the rug? How come nobody talks about it? Huh?

It was a long time ago, I say in a normal voice. The noose is pretty loose now. It isn’t choking me any more.

Bullshit! Alex yelps. It got swept under the rug because the Germans were in charge, but the ones who did the killing were Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians. They did it for money, and everybody keeps quiet about it, because nobody wants to piss Putin off. Get it?

I nod.

Slovak soldiers were stationed in Oktyabrsk, where too many people got slaughtered and burned to even count! About ten of them were my relatives.

Awful, I say.

All those spoiled bunk seekers coming halfway across Europe so Lebo can blow on their wounds and make it better! All those hippie cunts and naive bitches with their parents’ credit cards and fabulous passports. Everyone here’s a seeker, get it? And you can bet your arse they don’t have any credit.

It dawns on me that the paths here are made out of black stone for a reason. It’s a monument to the village. Or a memorial.

I’m proud to be Belarusian, Alex says. But I don’t want to just sit around eating draniki and watching TV. Or protest and throw stones. I want to preserve the nation’s memory. If we lose our past, we lose our future. We won’t exist, get it?

Yeah, Alex, I get it. I wish you didn’t exist. That’s what I think. I don’t say it.

We can’t live like that. Buried forever along with our dead like we were some kind of demons. Can you even see what I mean? Do you fucking understand? He tugs on the rope around my neck. That bothers me.

Hey, Alex! I need to tie my shoe, OK? I hunch over and look to see if there’s a stone I can grab. Nobody’s going to tell me what to do any more.

Your shoes are fine, Alex says calmly, just come on.

So I get up and we go. Guess he knows that trick.

He lets go of the rope and gives me a friendly slap on the back. He knew the whole time he was choking me.

Look. He gestures grandly into the mist. We’re gonna build a huge car park for buses over there. Kiosks! Like they have in Auschwitz. Resurface the road! You think the tourists would like it more if it was bumpy? We could put in a rainforest! They don’t have that at home! What do you think? Work, you cunt! You’re the expert!

Rainforests are nasty, I tell him truthfully. Hot, muggy. Terrible weather. The tourists’ll tell him to go fuck off. Summers here aren’t nice like they are in Terezín.

Only now do I notice that all the chimneys have signs on them: Navicki, Navicka, 50, 42, 14, 5, 3, 1, 1 … names and ages of the dead, aha.

This just isn’t going to do the trick, Alex says, waving his hand around the ruins. Some boring, old-style memorial. That won’t get the attention of the new Europeans. Look at the Poles and that Katyn of theirs! A step ahead, again! They’re shooting a movie about it! And what about our Khatyn? Nobody’s even heard of it.

All of a sudden Alex jumps up on a wall and shouts: Listen to me, you heroic Poles! The people who got murdered here in Khatyn weren’t officers who could defend themselves. No, sir!

He jumps down, grabs the rope, and starts talking normally again.

They forced the men to run around in a circle, till they got tired. Then they herded them into a barn and set fire to it. They used another barn for the women and children. Why didn’t the people resist? Because Slavs are stupid brutes? No, they just didn’t believe it. Right up to the last minute. Throwing kids in the fire. Why would someone do that? Nobody thought it would happen until it actually did. The killers had it all worked out.

We start walking back towards the tent.

I learnt something there in Terezín. Alex gives me a punch in the shoulder. Oral history! The most important thing is the story. Authenticity. That’s what Lebo said, right?

We both stop short.

Lebo, that’s right.

This is Belarus, my friend. No Kafka T-shirts are going to help us here.

We walk straight towards the building, bypassing the tent. The flap is down. I don’t know where Maruška and Rolf are. The only sign of the tractor is the furrows in the snow.

I want to tell Alex to untie me and let me just squat down somewhere and take a crap in peace. I’ll give him the Spider. But I want out. Right now.

But I don’t say a word. The building is a little wooden cabin with slits for windows. I know what this is. The outer walls are tree trunks, but there’s armour plating behind them an inch thick, and the base is made of concrete. Yep!

Alex pulls out a key and says proudly: The museum’s inside this bunker. Fooled you, huh?

What a moron. This isn’t a bunker, it’s a firing cabin. They were all over the bastions in Terezín — we’d crawled through them all by the time we were five. They must’ve been left here by the Germans.

The bunker is behind the wood, built with a separate frame, double walls, fortified. I know the setup well. The tunnels and false hatches, the guard posts, all of it.

In spite of my bleak situation, I’m looking forward to going inside. The forest is starting to make me sneeze.

Alex drops the rope and, cursing, unlocks the door. We stamp our feet on the ice in front, I swing my head and arm around and the piece of rope’s behind my back. I take it as a good sign.

The dim glow of light bulbs. There are candles here too. Alex lights one. We used to use candles in the bunkers when we were kids. They’re pretty smoky, though. It’ll make your head spin if you aren’t used to it.

First thing we’ll buy once we get some cash is a proper generator, Alex mutters.

Concrete steps to the basement. Passageway. Staff room, they call it. Bet he doesn’t know that. Bundles of wires on the walls, saws and cleavers, knives and other junk. A long table. Nasty chemical smell. A heap of rags. Dark spill on the ground. Canisters. We used candles, but the bunkers were empty. You don’t use candles if there are chemicals. Place is a mess. I bet all his experts are Russian. Generator, right. First thing he needs to put money into is some proper ventilation. I make a note to myself to let him know.

He lights candles here too. Manages to get a couple of bulbs turned on. The low ceiling is covered in cables.

He doesn’t even have a head torch. Wires draped all over him. He’s holding a dynamo or something.

An old lady in a scarf and long skirt is sitting right by the door. She’s not alive but it’s like any moment her eyelids are going to open behind her glasses. Her face twitches, lips move. I was in the cellar with my mum and little sister, they were stamping around upstairs, my little sister was going to scream so I put a piece of bread in her mouth, to keep her quiet. I was holding my hand on her mouth and she suffocated.

She stops talking and just starts groaning and wailing, on and on. Alex disconnects the wires, turns her off.

It reeks of chemicals, human bodies, death. Alex switches wires. An old man says they killed a hundred thousand in the ghetto and took the rest out to the woods. The soul eaters came and they herded people into them and started up the engine. The gas and the smell from the engine killed every one. Jürgen’s sick today, somebody says. We need a driver. An officer in a cap waves his hand, he picks me.

And you can bet your arse he wanted to be in our museum! Alex says proudly. His neighbours would’ve beaten him to death if they’d found out that he stepped on the gas in a soul eater. But he wanted to tell his story. So he signed an agreement with us and now he’ll tell it here. He died content, knowing that kids in school will be able to hear his story forever.

There’s an old lady behind a plastic curtain. A bouquet of waxed flowers next to her, some candles. She was seven, they nailed her dad to the gate, burned everyone else, and all she remembers is the galoshes, Alex says. He turns her on. Why did you have to wear those rubber boots, little brother? Your feet are going to burn too long. In the rubber. Then the lady tells how they burned her and stabbed her with bayonets. Alex brushes a tiny ball of dust off her skirt and draws the curtain back again. Next to us a man’s voice is saying how he was afraid they would find him in a pile of corpses, because snow doesn’t melt on the dead and it would only melt on him.

Alex flicks the visor on the man’s canvas cap and points to the pipe in his hand. The Ethnographic Institute helped us out with period artefacts, he says.

He pulls me by the arm to the next room — more of them, but they aren’t really people, and I want to tell him I can’t do this, but actually I don’t know, why not?

There are stuffed people in the recesses, where the guard posts used to be. I can hear them in the passageway too. Mummy, hide us, we cried. But our mother said, The rye is still low and the grass hasn’t grown yet, spring is late this year. Where should I hide you? Hide yourselves as best you can.

Stories softly whispered or told in cracking voices mix with sobs and moans. I stagger from one to the next, tripping over the tools littering the floor, vats reeking of chemicals and flesh. My head reels from the smell, or is it disgust at what they’re doing here? What was Alex thinking? You can’t do this to people.

But then I’m gnawed by doubt. Actually why shouldn’t he? He wants the eyes of the world to turn here, and this’ll do the trick.

There are six of them in this room, six old heads on six wrinkly necks, mechanically opening and closing their mouths, and always telling the same story — soldiers come into the village and kill, houses and people burn — repeating it over and over, and it will just go on like that, the soldiers will keep coming back, as long as Alex holds the wires that carry the electricity that runs the stories stuffed inside the people’s innards.

Hey, Madonna donated to Terezín, didn’t she? What if we had Marilyn Manson shoot a video here?

Bad idea, I say.

How come?

I don’t know.

You could be in charge of the whole thing and live like a king. But if you don’t have the stomach for it, well then, fuck off. Hand over the Spider. It’s in your stomach? OK, I’ll open you up. People are expendable.

I suddenly remember Aunt Fridrich. They would rob her of her death and put her on display. Uh-uh. I couldn’t bear it.

Look, Alex says, just think it over. I’ll give you time.

No, I say.

Trust me, you get used to it. It’s an eastern tradition. Lenin, Stalin, all the big chiefs. Did you know the Soviet Union was going to have a mausoleum of Communist saints in every district?

I nod. It’s a fact.

And you know Gottwald, your first Communist president? Guess who embalmed him? Luis!

Alex pushes open an iron door. The infirmary. Every bunker like this has one.

Luis lies in a bathtub on his back. Pants, jacket, miniature socks, slippers, all bunched up in a jumble on the floor. All that’s left of him is a tiny little body. His head is propped against a wooden support, gripped in a vice. His beak of a nose juts up towards the strong light bulb on the ceiling. There’s a stink from the tub, that chemical smell again. And Rolf is there. Sitting on the edge of the tub.

Yep, the Czech comrades wanted their man embalmed too, just like the Soviets. But put a Czech on display for eternity, like Lenin? Be serious! The KGB ordered Luis to pretend he messed up, so your president would rot. Luis! Are you kidding? He wouldn’t mess up. He taught taxidermy and embalming in Milovice — I told you. And he was a damn good teacher!

Alex nudges Luis’s clothes out of the way with his foot, then kneels down and snaps Luis’s hand into a clamp on the edge of the tub. He goes around and snaps the hand in on the other side. I don’t know which arm Maruška stuck with the injection.

We recorded the tapes with Luis ages ago, didn’t we? Alex turns to Rolf. He came as a stowaway on a ship from South America and, get this, he lands in Hamburg during a Nazi parade — an Indian chief with feathers on his head! He wanted to see the world. They put him in a camp, right here in Belarus. It was a cannibal camp. Luis made it through. And the Nazis heard about his expertise. Now we’ll do him. He was the first one to make the tapes. He built this museum, he knew he’d be an exhibit. A lot older than Lebo, huh?

Snap. He fastens Luis’s leg in a clamp, above the ankle.

The ancient, emaciated body is stretched pretty tight now. Still soaking in all the fluids. Snap, now the second leg’s in place too.

Alex puts on rubber gloves.

Oh, wait, he turns to me. I promised you those tsantsas, right?

He takes a box down from the shelf and opens it for me to see. Human heads, little ones, their pursed lips sewn shut with string, or is it coarse thread?

Naranjitos, they call them, says Alex. I guess because they’re like oranges.

He yanks the box away and puts it back on the shelf.

A tsantsa like this takes finesse. Crushing the skull so the face stays intact, pulling all the little bones out through the nose, now that’s what I call a masterpiece. Everyone was blown away when they found them in the camp. Yevgeni Khaldei took pictures for the Nuremberg Trials. As proof of Nazi perversion. Luis was supposed to be sentenced but the Biochemical Institute in Moscow requested him as an expert. Like the Yanks with Wernher von Braun. And from Moscow to Milovice, it was only a step.

Let’s open him up, Alex says, nodding to Rolf. Rolf gets up from the tub and just stands there, shaking his head, glasses glinting in the gloom. Alex wrenches something out of his hands, the dish I saw him with in the tent.

He wipes the mucus and vomit on Rolf’s shoulder and shoves the dish in his face.

You see? Na pamyat o Minske, he reads aloud. That’s Russian! Na pamyats pra Minsk, it should say, this is Belarus, damn it! And besides, it should be ‘Mensk’! He flings the dish to the floor. The pieces go flying.

Alex sighs, sits down on the tub.

The Russians are our big brothers. Too big, actually. They want to swallow everything up. Now they’re even muscling in on our tourist industry. It isn’t right.

I notice something in his hand, some kind of doctor’s saw.

What’s wrong with him? I say. Rolf is blubbering quietly.

Our idiot president even spoke Russian when he declared martial law!

What’s wrong with him?

He’s soft, not like you. He was supposed to do the publicity — photos, interviews — then send it out to the world. But he went over the edge. Couldn’t handle it.

Handle?

Journalists, you know, living in the magazine world, cranking out articles, and then this! A little museum in the woods. You can handle it, though, can’t you?

Handle what?

He caved in when it came to signing. When the old-timers signed the agreement with us to put them on display.

You said they asked to do it.

Most of them, yeah. Some.

Uh-huh.

We must become great in enduring the suffering of others, Alex says jokingly. He’s grinning like a schoolboy. That’s right, sometimes we just have to tolerate other people’s suffering. The Nazis really thought it through. Jean Améry, ever read him?

I shake my head. I never read anything except those stupid textbooks, which I forgot as soon as I read them, and the emails for the Comenium, which wouldn’t mean shit to him.

You should. Alex laughed. Seeing as you’re the expert.

Here I am getting schooled again. Hm. I slide my eyes around the room. Infirmary. There must be an operating room next door. There are some boxes stacked along the wall. Canisters, metal and plastic. Some instruments arranged on the shelves. A pair of large pliers attached to the wall above my head.

I turn as the saw in Alex’s hand starts to spin, a whirring sound slices into my ears, it must run on batteries.

Go ahead and take a look around, Alex shouts over the noise. You can help me later!

He turns his back to me and bends down towards Luis.

Keeping an eye on Alex, I reach out my arm and snatch the pliers. Slip them under my jacket. Rolf won’t give me away. He’s too out of it. He tugs on my sleeve, like a child, dragging me behind him. Pattering along like some scared little pet. He used to film people dancing under the ramparts. Now he’s in a bunker where they make people into mummies.

Rolf, I shout, the red grass, remember that? It’s no use. The basement is filled with the whirring sound of the saw.

We enter the little room next door and the pliers nearly fall out of my hand.

He’s sitting there, in a black suit, bent slightly forward, just like I knew him my whole life. All those evenings he spoke to the students of the Comenium, the ones he healed, he looked like this. He’s even sitting on a bunk bed made of slats. Alex is all about authenticity.

I think this is what he wanted.

For me to see Lebo like this.

So I would shit my pants. So I’d know who’s holding all the cards.

It almost worked. I almost said hello.

I realize I don’t hear the saw any more.

I look at Lebo. But I’m waiting for Alex.

So I’m not surprised when I hear his voice. Plus I’ve got the pliers under my jacket.

We’re the last ones who know the witnesses personally, he says. And when they die, the museum will be here, so their stories will live on forever. That’s what Lebo wanted, wasn’t it?

He’s between Rolf and me, feeling around for the light switch. Lebo looks even better in the light. Yeah, he looks good. But he’s dead.

You think it was easy getting the old man on a plane? Alex says. We took him from Terezín by ambulance. All bandaged up. To fool the cops, you see?

Uh-huh.

He wanted to leave Terezín and continue his work here. In the Devil’s Workshop. You have to believe me.

They kidnapped him and made him into a puppet. I’m waiting for Alex to turn his back. I don’t want to see his face when I strike.

So did you kill him here?

Here in our museum Lebo will be for everyone, Alex says, bending down to fiddle with the wires. Not just for some spoiled brats from the West, like in Terezín.

Did you kill him?

Kill? Just the opposite! From now on he shall live in eternity, as our conscience, our strength, our weapon, Alex declaims, tugging on the wires poking out from Lebo’s jacket. Do you know it? Song of Lenin. Did you even go to school?

There aren’t any other mummies in the room. Alex’s way of showing Lebo respect, I guess. But I don’t want to hear him. I don’t want to hear his voice coming out of a corpse.

He wouldn’t want you stuffing people, I say. He wouldn’t want you using all those atrocities as a reason to kill more people.

Not even old ones? Alex’s fingers are fiddling with the wires. He still has on the rubber gloves. They don’t even slow him down.

Suddenly it dawns on me that they must have sawed Lebo up in the hotel room where I stayed. Those stains everywhere. They killed him there.

Maruška, hm, I say to myself. I know you’re with Alex. But sorry, I have no choice.

So you don’t believe me that Lebo signed an agreement? Mr Hard-line says. His voice is totally calm. He’s testing the connections.

That he gave us all the cash? That he went to the bank with us completely voluntarily? None of that ‘Your money or your life’ stuff! Don’t you believe me?

Lebo moves. Tips his head — the current has kicked in. It’s Lebo and it’s not.

I was born on a bunk in the camp, it says. It’s his voice — that was how he used to begin his story, in the evening. A soldier pulled my mother out of a typhus pit, says the old man on the chair … a young drummer boy, son of the regiment. They got married and had a son. But my mother … was afraid of open space … I brought her bouquets … ahem, ahem, ahem … The chin of the puppet in the black hat starts to quiver, like the words are getting stuck. It goes silent. His face is yellow, from the light. Lebo’s head nods up and down, something’s jammed.

I can’t help also moving my head a little as I stare at him.

Alex tuts angrily. Tugs on the wires. Crawling around Lebo on all fours, idiot. He doesn’t have a clue that I’m boiling over inside.

So you really don’t think he wanted to be here? Alex says, still showing me his back.

I can sense the movement next to me. It’s Rolf. Shaking his head. Shaking his head: no.

Go fuck yourself, I tell Alex. Really loud. He turns around. Looks at me. Sees the pliers. I’m holding them over my head. I can see his eyes and the terror in them. Now he knows. I have to tolerate it. And I do: I swing my arm and he gets the pliers smack in the face. Teeth crack. He topples over, skull slamming against the concrete. And bang, with the second swing I take out the bulb. I don’t want to see Lebo like this. Humiliated, helpless. More defenceless than when he was a baby. Now he’s just a black lump in the black darkness.

The two of us move. Down the passageway, bits of glass crunch under our feet. We come to an intersection. Stuffed people on every side. In the recesses. Mummies in chairs along the walls. A light bulb or two flickering. But some of the candles have burned out. Never mind, I know my way by heart. Rolf sits down on the ground. Hands me a key. I take it and stick it in my pocket.

Get up, man! We’ve got to run for it!

He shakes his head. I tell him to get up, in both our languages. He shakes his head. I smack him in the face. Hard. And again. He doesn’t even blink. Maybe they’ve been beating him.

You want to stay here with the mummies? You’ll go right off your rocker! Come with me!

He shakes his head.

I put my ear to his lips.

It’s great here, he whispers.

Bullshit!

I’m staying with them. I like it. It’s the closest you can get.

To what?

To horror.

I feel sick. From breathing the air. And Alex might come to. I didn’t finish him off, didn’t have it in me. Thought I did, but I don’t. I’m not going to wait around.

So you’re not getting up?

Go fuck yourself, Rolf says to me.

You too, I tell him, marching off.

Arms stretched in front of me, I run straight into the soft belly of an old woman, dead eyes beneath her scarf, rocking back and forth in a creaky chair. The gloom and darkness don’t bother me, I know how these tunnels work. But Terezín’s were empty. I run, dropping the pliers. Trip over a tool on the ground, bump into the tub, liquid splashes out. I’m bumping into mannequins too, chopping bodies down as I run. Knocking over candles too, the puddles turn blue with flame, drops fly through the dark with a hiss, but now I’m sprinting up the steps. I couldn’t finish Alex off, but the fire isn’t my fault, is it? Yes, no, yes, no, I don’t know. At last I see the massive plate covering the door: the exit.

I run out. Slam the door shut behind me. Take a deep breath. And another. Drink in the air, relief. Suddenly the noose pulls tight around my neck, and I slip, fall on my back, I can’t feel a thing.

So the two of you worked it out? says a voice as I come out of my fog. My head is in Maruška’s lap. We’re in the tent.

Does it hurt? You had a rope around your neck. I just tugged it for fun. Sorry!

Ice, I say with some effort. My head feels like it has axes floating around inside it.

She drops two pills in my mouth. Hands me a glass. Takes one herself.

Alex was on my case pretty bad, what with you running away all the time. So I snagged you. Just for practice, though!

I sit up. Look around.

So you finally wised up and decided to give us those records of yours.

How do you know? Everything’s better after those pills. As usual. But my neck is going to be one giant bruise.

Alex would never have let you leave otherwise. From the museum. I would’ve been upset if he’d gutted you.

Upset? You mean it?

You swallowed it, didn’t you?

I nod.

So go shit it out.

She didn’t have to be so vulgar about it. If Alex was going to gut me, she’d have given me an injection. But nobody’s going to take out my guts. I lie on my back. It’s nice here. Stove glowing. Rain beating down on the tent.

At least with the rain it’ll take a while for the fire to make its way out of the basement and reach the wood of the cabin. At least I think there’s a fire. There were flammables all over the place. But maybe it went out. And Alex’ll be back any moment. We need to get out of here.

Maruška, I’m embarrassed! I can’t do that in front of you.

Oh, please! You’re like a little kid!

Why don’t we go for a walk so I can loosen up my bowels? Just for a couple minutes, OK?

I don’t know!

I’m frozen solid. You’re a nurse. You should understand.

I could give you something to make you vomit.

Come on, please!

OK, but if that doesn’t work, I’m giving you a laxative.

In the end she agrees to go for a walk. I set off, leading the way. Up the hill towards Khatyn, the dead village. That way we’ll have the hill between us and the museum, in case there’s smoke — she won’t see it. I don’t know what I’ll do if Alex turns up.

The first chimney rises up from the mist ahead of us. And Khatyn’s first demolished house. What’s left of it. We walk side by side. She’s got her satchel. Just like when we were walking in Minsk, Sun City.

Hey, I say to her, getting my courage up. What about your boys, your kids?

What about them?

Who are they with now? Their grandma?

No.

So where are they?

They stayed in the house. With the other kids. The older ones. They’ll figure it out, they’ll either run away or hide. Those people won’t hurt them.

You don’t sound too sure.

Nothing’s for sure. But it’s part of the plan, part of the teaching technique.

What plan?

The plan to survive.

Huh?

My boys are faced with situations. Like all of our children. Different situations, so they learn how to cope from early on.

I remember the crazy mob, the screaming, the stones, the sticks, the way the house shook from the explosions.

That’s pretty harsh.

They have to learn how to cope. Nobody knows what’ll happen.

That’s true. Who are the other kids you were talking about?

Our friends’ kids. Mark Kagan was the one who came up with the teaching technique. But the boys are probably safe by now. They’re probably with their dad.

Huh? I thought your husband was Alex.

He’s my brother.

I grabbed her hand and squeezed so hard she gave a little squeal. There was no way she could’ve known that a boulder had just been lifted from my heart. Depriving someone of their brother is awful, I admit. But if I had made orphans of Maruška’s boys, I don’t think I could ever have forgiven myself.

We keep walking uphill. Then along the black stones, past the other ruins. A bell tower or two. Made of stone, not wood. The bells don’t move an inch, even in the wind.

Normally you hear the death knell all the time here, Maruška says, pointing to the belfries.

Yeah?

In memoriam. The bells run on electricity, but we need it for the museum now. Some say it’ll bring us bad luck. What do you think?

It takes all I’ve got not to slip and fall on the rocks.

Our mum survived the Khatyn massacre. I’m sure Alex told you. She was seven. They nailed our grandfather to the barn. Burned everyone else alive in the cottage. She hid in the shed. They ran her through with bayonets and burned down the shed, but somehow she managed to crawl out and get away.

Her little brother, my uncle, that is, was wearing boots with soles cut from old tyres. People wore them in those days. My mum saw the executioners coming, so she told him to take them off. So he wouldn’t burn too long in the rubber. So he wouldn’t suffer any more than he had to. But my mum’s bad luck was that officially there were no survivors of Khatyn, especially not a little girl like her. That’s how it was written down, that’s what they reported. And all of a sudden she comes out of hiding and says, I was there, I saw it, and those men were speaking Ukrainian.

What men?

The killers. Which means it wasn’t only Germans, but Soviets too, you see? It was a disaster for her. There was only one story she told about it when she came back from the concentration camp in Siberia. The one about the galoshes. It freaked me out, you know. The horror of it.

So who’s your husband, then? I wanted to know everything about this girl.

Kagan.

I stop in my tracks. So she’s married to that harsh old man. I turn around, so she can’t see my face.

She touches my shoulder. It’s good that you’re with us. I’m glad.

I don’t see any smoke above the museum. We can go downhill now.

Want to know how we met?

Absolutely.

I was just a little girl, but I couldn’t get it out of my brain, Maruška says. The world is a place of horror, that’s all I kept thinking. Because of what happened. The killing. That’s what people are capable of. And it’s going to happen again. What do I do?

Uh-huh! I say. I knew that one.

Whenever anyone looked at me, the first thing I’d do is think to myself: Will they hide me or turn me in, when the time comes again? I’d walk in someplace and right away: Where would I hide? The attic? The wardrobe? And it just kept getting worse. I thought maybe I should just kill myself. I mean, the world’s so ugly and full of cruelty. People are evil.

I look at Maruška. Talking about what it was like for her. She didn’t look at all like a bunk seeker, though.

Alex brought me to Kagan. A million people died in the concentration camps in Belarus. But not Kagan. A lot of people like me went to see him. They still do.

He went through it all as a little boy. They killed all his people. He was in the ghetto when it burned. Dug himself out of a mass grave. Saw people eating people. And he was able to talk about it. We listened. And we laughed together. You can live with all the horror and in spite of it. He taught us that. He rid me of my obsession. You give everything to a person like that. If that’s what he wants.

Hm.

She stops in the middle of the slope. Giggles. She must’ve popped another pill. Yep, she digs around in her satchel and hands me one too. I swallow it down with a handful of snow.

Remember how we had to run for it from the Falvarek?

Yeah!

We both giggle a while.

This Devil’s Workshop’s going to mean work for a lot of people. Maintenance men, technicians. Security guards, guides, all of that. And tourists bring money. It’s only right that the descendants of the people who got murdered should get some cash out of it, don’t you think? Anyway, there’s nobody else around here. And when I get old, I can live in peace and be the dezhurnaya. In our museum.

She’s walking next to me like she’s used to it. Not being careful at all. She doesn’t realize I’ve got to get out of here. Alex is still in there. Rolf. The partisans will kill me.

For a second a flash of sunlight shines through the drizzle and mist. Her uniform’s covered in stains. But her hair is glowing. She keeps laughing. I’m laughing too. She’ll never run away with me. She’s got kids.

We come to the bottom of the hill. The forest starts here. Birches. I stop. There’s one more thing I want to know.

Did you give Lebo an injection too? When you guys brought him here?

Yeah. We got you into Minsk under the Czech-Belarusian agreement on transportation of prisoners. Greased a few palms, you know how it is. Look at those trees over there!

Were you with Lebo at the hotel?

No, I was with my boys. My brother took care of him.

So do you know what’s in the museum?

Are you crazy? I’ll see it on opening day. It’ll be great! There’ll be people coming from Minsk and all over the place. I’ll put on my ceremonial uniform. I can’t go in this. See? She stuck a slender finger through a hole in her coat and wiggled it around.

A beautiful woman like you could go dressed in a potato sack!

Cut it out! I don’t like that kind of talk!

But she isn’t angry. And she didn’t kill Lebo. If she had, she would’ve told me.

Look, you can go over there in those trees! I’ll turn around.

I go down to the trees, peel off a strip of bark. Anything happening? No. I have to do it. I’ll be gentle. I start back uphill towards her.

Hey, wait a sec, she says. She smells it too. The smoke. Carried here on a gust of wind. The thick smoke of a fire.

Stop! she shouts.

I speed up. I want to put the bark over her mouth so she can’t scream. Knock her down. Put her to sleep.

I ram into her full force, she sinks to her knees, head twisted back. Did she faint? Has she had enough? But then suddenly she’s like an animal, springing up from her knees, the needle bounces off the piece of bark I’m holding up. She comes at me again, I sidestep, grab her hand, we slip, she falls on top of me, jams the needle into her thigh. Not a sigh. Nothing. This is not what I wanted.

That’s what I keep telling myself, this is not what I wanted, Maruška, this is not what I wanted. I carry her down the hill in my arms to the dead village, lean her up against a wall, there’s still red in her cheeks, she’s breathing. I pick her back up and suddenly a burst of flame leaps from the roof of the cabin below us, green and orange fiery serpents creeping across the museum roof. The sound of cracking and muffled blows carries to us on the wind. The rafters caving in, or that chemical stuff blowing up.

I lay her on the bed in the tent. Maruška. You only got what you were going to give to me. So this is your sleep of the just. I take off her boots. Loosen the belt on her jacket. Cover her up. They’ve got all kinds of blankets and sleeping bags.

I fish around in her satchel. Swallow a blue one, put a handful in my pocket.

She’s also got scissors in there. I’ll just snip off a single strand, she won’t even notice. Not that I’m some kind of pervert! I just don’t know how to say goodbye.

I wrap a red strand of her hair around my fingers. Hold it up against the sky, as the flames swallow up the museum. The sky is red.

I just stay like that.

With her.

I don’t have much time, though.

Where will I go?

I fish around in my memory: it’s there, stored in the database, the address. I probably have the envelope too, somewhere. Or maybe not.

I wouldn’t work with Mr Mára, not a chance. But I’ve got money. From the game. It might be enough to make a fresh start, I fantasize.

It’s a nice fantasy.

I feed the stove. A lot. She needs warmth.

And then I hear it.

The tractor. Good thing it’s so noisy. I see Red Cap in the driver’s seat. And there are others. So I slip out under the canvas, vanish into the mist.