Devil's Workshop

13

Through birches, bushes, sparse vegetation, over the nearly frozen snow. I don’t want to go back in the woods. I have a panic attack, out on the plain, but then I see a big black blot in the distance. Could be a marsh, a grove of trees, but it might also be a house, a place with walls where I can draw strength. Maybe at least some boulders, a hole in the ground. A ditch, a gully, a place to hide and watch the world go by.

The attack passes. I look down, focusing my eyes on the ground, and walk. An island of blackness lies in the twilight ahead like a prospect of hope.

I’m grateful to Alex for these clothes, that’s for sure. It’s like being in a protective cocoon. The thingamajig is frozen inside me.

Alex. Why did he tell me about the gutting? When somebody says they want to kill you, believe them: Lebo taught us that too. Where will I go? Everybody I knew is gone. I look down at the cold earth under my feet. It’s so much work just walking, I can’t even think of Maruška.

I make out the first cross through the flakes. It’s snowing. The wind is knocking me around. But I rejoice. And I’m also more on the lookout. People. I’ll get out of here somehow. This chilly land will let me go. Won’t eat me up, suck me in.

More crosses, in a row. I walk between them, lift my eyes, and, good, my head doesn’t spin.

The blot turns out to be a smallish hill covered in trees, bushes. I have to tramp through the crosses to reach the foot of the hill. Little crosses, big crosses, a massive pole, six feet tall, crossed with two smaller ones. Next to it a tiny cross of spruce branches with a faded pink ribbon fluttering. Surrounded with stuffed animals. A bear, a monkey, a couple more. Tattered, I guess from the wind and rain. They’re weighted down with stones. A few more tiny crosses.

I think I wailed. Out loud, which is just reckless. Another graveyard.

I push back the branches of the first trees. There are crosses everywhere here too. Also stones, some with inscriptions on them. In Cyrillic. And in my alphabet too. Names. A Jewish stone engraved with a star — I know that from back home.

I make my way slowly uphill through the crosses. There are also names carved on the trees. Some of the scars are grown over, others shine clearly against the bark. Not a human footprint anywhere, though. No signs of dog paws or goat hooves, nothing.

Even if I did dare to leave the hill of crosses and go back out there on the plain, the wind would’ve swept me away. Tiny, stinging hailstones whip across the landscape. I make my way through the crosses, they’re even thicker here than the trees, up to the top.

There’s a man standing there. I slip down into the snow, behind a rock.

Beard, quilted coat, knee-high boots. Looks like one of the guys from Arthur’s partisan outfit. But there’s no weapon in his hands. Or on his back. He’s holding a sack. Fishes some kind of shiny trinket or something out of it. Flings it into the snow among the crosses. Whistles to himself. Moves on. Towards me.

I slither away across a shallow grave. Slip behind a tree and slide down the ridge. Then I hear something. In the gorge, the ravine. A horse whinnying. I see a hefty woman in yellow overalls. Shielding her eyes with her hand, searching in the drizzle, looking up, towards me. The only thing I’m holding on to, unforgivably, is some slender tree roots. They give way and I go tumbling down, landing at her feet. So Ula and I meet again.

We compare stories about that night at the Falvarek. She remembers it well. The rat-filled courtyard. The city under martial law. So what’s the situation now? I ask. She says the president has probably crushed the opposition. But they’re still fighting in Minsk, and probably elsewhere too. That’s why they’re staying off the roads. But there hasn’t been a signal for days now. She says she’ll explain all that later.

She finds it funny that this time she’s the one helping me to my feet.

Yep, we’re both inostrantsi.

And colleagues besides.

This is Black Hill, Ula says. They built it to cover up the burial site. It’s actually a huge knoll.

I nod.

She’s glad to see me! Apart from that, she doesn’t see anything cheerful about our situation.

Ula’s in a grim mood. But I’m actually happy.

She isn’t fat. She’s big, hefty. Much taller than Maruška. Wrinkles on her face and forehead. I thought maybe she was just tired, but she’s a bit on the old side. Fair hair, darker than Sara’s. It actually looks nice with the yellow coveralls.

I’m glad I found her, that’s for sure.

We lie in a frayed tent on our bellies, heads poking out. A stretch of the plain shines white through the trees. I don’t look over there. For a while it doesn’t rain or snow, which is very rare, Ula explains. A tin pot of water heats up on the fire. There’s a stream nearby, she says. Nothing to eat.

Some guys with a fire about ten metres away are stuffing their faces with bacon. Bread. I recognize the bearded guy I ran into in the forest. Sitting there with his pal. The two of them look almost alike.

Fyodor and Yegor, Ula says. They broke the GPS, idiots!

She hates them. They belong to a group of partisans that the Ministry of Tourism assigned to her expedition.

Our trip was supposed to end in Khatyn, she says. That’s where we were supposed to bring the samples. But those bastards said they saw a fire and wouldn’t go any farther. So we stayed here.

The other attachés, as the Ministry called the partisans, had long since run away. Took what they could, destroyed the rest.

According to Ula, they’d been sabotaging her work ever since the political situation stabilized. Apparently the opposition was really taking a beating.

I tell her about myself. After trudging around on the plain, I’m in seventh heaven now, tucked cosily in a sleeping bag and safe inside a tent. I tell her about my foreign expertise, my trip to this country. And the fire at the museum. Not everything, just some of it.

The partisans weren’t lying, I say. Khatyn is gone now!

I don’t mention Alex and Maruška.

Yes, of course, Ula says. The Devil’s Workshop, that’s why I’m here too.

She shows me the samples. The ones that didn’t fall in the snow or get lost along the way. She had twice, no, three times as many!

She’s an egghead, a researcher and a field worker.

The best in her field!

That’s why they chose her out of everyone else in Berlin.

But now it’s over.

I turn around. Squint into the gloom of the tent to where she’s pointing. Crates, boxes. But not old-fashioned ones like Kagan had, all battered and made of wood. These are smart plastic things. Double-sealed lids. Blue, red, yellow — almost too much for my eyes to take.

Imported, huh?

Mm-hm.

All of her boxes and plastic bags, with bones and rags in various stages of decay, are stored at the back of the tent. Behind our backs, piled up in a wall. A wall against the wind.

And I can take as many blankets and sleeping bags as I want.

They’re left over from her colleagues and co-workers.

We bundle up and wait till the water’s ready for tea.

Talk back and forth in our languages.

I guess I fell asleep first.

I open my eyes, feel it, can’t see. Ula’s holding my hand. We’re warm. I hear a horse snorting. Didn’t get up to look, though. I’ll fix things in the morning, I promise myself. In the night I hear a scraping, probably the horse rubbing against a branch, clicking its hoof against a stone.

In the morning the two men are gone. Along with the horse. Ula sits outside the tent, a loaf of bread in her hand. They must have left it for her. She scrambles into the back of the tent, by the samples, crawls under a pile of blankets and stays there.

I go to check out the camp. We’re hidden from the wind by a gorge, a small, narrow ravine carved into the hillside.

I go on through the trees. There are crosses all over the place. And those stones with writing on them. I find the wagon right away. The horse was standing right here, to judge from the tracks. Maybe they both rode it. If I went down to the foot of the hill, I’d be able to see their tracks stretching away across the plain.

There are more boxes under the tarpaulin on the wooden wagon. I open the one closest to me, a red one, little by little, but there are no tsantsas, only skulls. One has a bullet hole in the forehead so big you could stick your finger through it. I give the skull a rap with my knuckles and put it back.

No supplies, no weapons, no clothing, nothing in the wagon but samples. We’ll leave it here, I say to myself. Screw the samples. Let ’em rot. We’re getting out of here. We’ll make it to some road or other. We’ll be together. That’s what I thought. But then the purga hit.

The next thing I know there are leaves and twigs flying at me, the trees shake and groan in the wind, the snow whips in off the plain, suddenly it gets hard to breathe, the air in my lungs begins to hurt, a six-foot branch tears loose and goes sailing over my head. I crawl back inside the tent.

There’s a storm, I say. Ula sits, leaning against the boxes.

It’s a purga, she says. We won’t get out of here now. I’ve got two buckets of water.

The ravine protected the tent. Still, I almost couldn’t poke my head out. The wind instantly glued my mouth shut, my eyelids together. I couldn’t even stand up outside. The wagon would’ve been blown to pieces. I imagined the broken crates, bones flying through the air, skulls smashing to bits on the rocks.

So, Ula. You’re the expert. How long will it last?

The last time a blizzard hit, she said, she was locked up for eight days. With a bunch of co-workers, food and drink, inside a cabin. They even had a guitar and board games. They were collecting samples in Siberia at the time. Soon it’ll start to snow, and once the blizzard’s over, then come the frosts. Unless somebody turns up, we don’t have much of a chance, Ula says.

At night, or whenever we think it’s night, we sleep. Squeezed together. We wake up. Eat some bread.

I have a dream about the Spider. It’s inside me. Melting. Poisoning me. All the data and contacts spill into my guts.

She’s sitting next to me with her eyes open.

She tells me about her work.

Her team was selected for reconnaissance of burial sites in one of the regions of Belarus that was severely affected by radiation.

When Chernobyl blew up, the fallout contaminated a third of Belarus, she said. Radiation genocide, they call it. They trudged around the graves all day in hot weather and pouring rain. The locals from the village were ready to spit on them. They all knew where the skeletons were, but it was taboo. They said, When you dig up an old grave, you break the ribs of the living.

The mayor of one of the villages said, Why are you digging there? Leave them alone. Us too. Their things went missing at night. They spent hours excavating an area only to have somebody come and fill it all back in. They suspected the village youths. One day Ula went shopping in town and had to convince the crowd that gathered around her that she was Dutch. Not German. Meanwhile the victims had obviously been shot by the NKVD.

How do you know?

From the bullets. And other details.

Did you know that to this day the cancer rate for children in contaminated areas is still twenty times higher than anywhere else in Europe? They have to import their food.

Ula, that’s awful!

Her co-workers dropped out one by one. Work injuries, diarrhoea from bad water. Depression. And then the problems started with the workers from the ministry. A lot of samples were going missing.

I tap her on the shoulder. Offer her two blues from my pocket. She swallows them and takes a drink of water.

In Oktyabrsk we found graves with hundreds of people in them. They were executed either naked or in summer dresses that had rotted completely. The bullets and cartridges came from every type of weapon imaginable. Apart from that there was nothing. No identification papers, no coins sewn into linings, no shoes stuffed with newspaper, no little girls’ hairslides, nothing at all, no evidence whatsoever.

What about teeth? I say. I remembered Kagan’s cellar. Or cave or whatever it was.

Teeth repaired and unrepaired, Ula says. She waves at me not to interrupt. I take a drink of water too.

We tested the skeletons using a modified carbon-dating method to try to determine when the massacre took place. Well, I wouldn’t attach too much weight to it, she says, then tells me anyway. If the grave’s full of civilians — Poles, say, or Russians — then there aren’t any differences. If they were Wehrmacht, though, or Jewish, then the differences are distinct. But don’t tell anyone about this. Genetics doesn’t have a very good reputation.

I won’t, I promise.

It was hell. I don’t know how many times I stood there, clueless, scraping around the edge of the pit, in the middle of the night in the rain, wondering. Was it Soviets killing Soviets, or Germans murdering Soviets and Jews, or Germans and Soviets killing other Soviets? Then on top of that, consider that here they were divided into Belarusians and Russians and Ukrainians and Ruthenians, and then of course there are also Poles and Balts, and, pardon me, but you are what?

Czech.

Uh-huh. I’m not familiar with them. Who’s in those graves? A key question. Here in the East they didn’t keep records like we did, nowhere near it. Even after all these years, the locals still won’t say a word.

I guess they have their reasons.

It’s a terrible mess! In any case, without a plan for the restoration of burial sites, Belarus will never get into the EU. Even if the dictatorship falls. What do they think? You can’t have pits of corpses lying around in Europe: don’t be silly! This all has to be cleaned up.

I don’t say a word. They cleaned up Terezín all right. The eggheads.

But, Ula, what does it matter in the end who’s in those graves?

It matters a lot! There’s money at stake here. Who’s going to pay for it? The restoration? The specialized teams? All over Europe they’ve got flags flying at memorial sites. In the East they’ve got ravens walking around pecking at skulls. Dreadful.

It was the devil’s workshop, all right!

Ula reaches over to the wall of boxes and hands me a canvas sack. I reach inside. Buttons. Medals. I feel the heft of a swastika belt buckle. Skull insignias! Lots of them.

Fyodor and Yegor and their cronies, Ula says in my ear. We caught the two of them walking around in the moonlight, tossing SS buttons in the pits. Why would they do that? They wanted Germany to pay for the restoration. But that isn’t right!

Ula burst out sobbing and burrowed back into the blankets. I stuck the sack back with the boxes. Took a drink, broke off a piece of bread. The blue pills kept me going. Outside the wind whistled and it was probably snowing too. Inside our tent we were warm. The ravine shielded us. Ula tells some awful stories, but so does everyone around here. I didn’t actually feel that bad.

Then her hand slid out from under the blankets. Her nails were black and broken. I guess from digging. She took my hand and pulled. I was happy to burrow into the blankets with her.

Tears were running down her face.

You know, I’m also one of the living whose ribs get broken by digging, she says.

What?

Yeah, I was a little girl when I found the pictures. My mum kept them behind the dresser. My dad was here during the war. He was a captain in the Wehrmacht. I’m less than fifty, so don’t go getting the wrong idea. But my dad was the youngest captain in the entire army. And what I saw in those pictures! Dead villagers. Next to my dad. And he was smiling. My mum said they had liberated a village from the Bolsheviks and found them there. Yeah, right. I almost went out of my mind.

What did he say?

He hung himself when I was still little. Never said a thing to me. When I went to school, I started reading all those memoirs, watching movies. Then I went to the archives. I thought I’d go out of my mind from the horror. It wasn’t even about my dad any more, just the whole thing.

That it happened?

Yeah. Once you realize just how much horror is possible, and the fact settles into your brain, you’re a different person from everyone else. It stays inside you. Like a wound that won’t heal. I used to wonder how my friends could go to school and play ping-pong and go on dates. We need to scream, we need to stop the evil. I was obsessed. Wherever I looked I saw evil. In everything. Soon I didn’t have any friends left.

I handed Ula a piece of bread. She left it for later.

There’s no way to understand the cruelty. Our minds aren’t equipped for it. But it dawned on me that I had to balance out the horror myself. At least a little. I could become a nun and pray. I could go to Calcutta and help lepers. But I became a researcher. It helped me. Anyway, that was all in the past. Now I’m here.

Ula throws the blankets off and sits up. She looks at me.

So then, are you more of a researcher or a curator? she asks.

I think back to the catacombs in Terezín and Alex’s museum.

A researcher, I say.

So you know about this place. They brought people from the city out here and killed them. Stalin wiped out twenty per cent of the Russian intelligentsia, compared with ninety per cent of the Belarusian. Everyone knows about the mass grave in Kurapaty. But Black Hill wasn’t discovered by Belarusian archaeologists until a few years ago. None of the researchers live here any more. The president had them disappeared, either that or they escaped. But I’m sure you know all that.

The truth was I didn’t have a clue. But I nodded. Whenever Ula spoke in that educated way, it reminded me of Maruška, and Sara too. But when I looked at Ula, I thought of Ula.

Kurapaty’s on the outskirts of Minsk, she says. And the president has decided to build a road through it. So a national site will be destroyed.

Sending in the bulldozers, huh?

Mm-hm. Ula nods. She rummages around in her boxes again. If the blizzard gets any stronger, it’s going to knock them down anyway. But I’d rather not think about that.

She pulls out a bottle. Vodka.

There could be fifty, a hundred, even two hundred thousand dead in this hill, Ula says broodingly. The same as in Kurapaty. Our team was supposed to explore here too. But the president’s people were lying when they promised to let us work. Now that the president has crushed the opposition, he could easily send in the bulldozers here as well. Except for a couple of crazies, nobody wants to know about it. It’s like it never happened.

I’ve never drunk vodka. I offer to open the bottle for her, but she shakes her head and pop! She’s holding the cap in her hand.

This was supposed to be for the celebration, she says, tapping the cap against the bottle. To celebrate the founding of the Devil’s Workshop museum. But there’s still time for that to happen. And you know why? Because the devil’s still active as hell here!

She laughs. Why not? We both have a good laugh. Outside the wind is whistling. It’s dark. We have to squeeze close just to see each other. But we’re laughing, coughing, we can’t stop, we fall exhausted into the covers, pass the bottle back and forth. Then we sleep.

Sometime later, Ula says if it freezes we’ll die here. She says it because it’s true.

Outside the purga rages.

We go on sleeping.

I poke my head out and there’s no more wind and rain, no more howling. And underneath a magnificent, radiant sun the machines are heading towards us over the frozen snow-white plain. The president’s bulldozers are as colourful as Ula’s boxes, yep, the same machines that crushed the walls in Terezín. We pick ourselves up and walk down to meet them. With Ula I can easily handle the plain.

It was only a dream. Her crying wakes me. The wind, coming through the gorge now, rattles the tent canvas. Ula’s crouched in the corner, I lie down beside her.

A day or two later we try to go out but only make it a couple steps. Even holding each other up, we can’t make any headway against the wind. We have to turn back. We’re also weak with hunger. I’ve only got a few blues left.

We snuggle up in the blankets. Squeezed together. Trying to keep each other warm. Maybe the reason we’re so cold is that we’re hungry. At night I get the feeling that Ula’s melting. Fading away. So I hold her tight.

We go on sleeping.

I wake up and something’s different. I shake my head. Uh-huh. It’s quiet outside. I stick my head out. Sun. Wriggle out of my sleeping bag, crawl outside.

Lots of trees are gone. Where there used to be the green of the treetops, now you can see the plain.

The sun is climbing higher. You can walk pretty well on the frozen snow.

Ula crouches at the entrance to the tent. Watching. The silence is magnificent.

We’ll definitely go. We’ll make it somewhere. Save ourselves. Yeah, it might work out.