Devil's Workshop

2

They gave me a sentence of many years for my father’s death, but there’s no use talking about it. When they let me out, I headed straight for the nearest pub.

All the other prisoners said that was what you did.

That included the ones I had escorted to the trapdoor, they all said they’d rather be going to the nearest neighbourhood dive.

Mr Mára, the technician, had a big huge prehistoric computer on his desk in the execution room, with a flickering green screen. He’d been arrested and convicted in a trial of cyberneticists, ‘traitors of the people’. But the prison administration had recognized his skills and he ended up as the executioner. Socialist cybernetics remained his passion.

I was told the old hangmen needed vodka by the bucket-load to calm themselves down, but Mr Mára was a man of the modern era. He had invented a game. And that made everyone happy, from the high-ranking officers to the simple men who worked as guards.

I was his helping hand.

The way that happened was one day they were executing a gangster from Slovakia, a hulk of a man, shaking and kicking as they walked him down the corridor in chains. Four jailers had their hands full with him. He knocked over my pail while I was wiping the floor. But when he came to the threshold of Mr Mára’s room, he pulled up short, his legs frozen with horror, and I helped him.

So they called me back the next time. And the time after that.

The prison directors were amazed that when I walked with the prisoners, they didn’t whimper, didn’t scream wordlessly like animals, didn’t struggle. They were calm and quiet, I suppose because I was calm. My head, my mind, my legs were used to the twists and turns of Terezín’s tunnels, the gloom and concrete of the cells and bunkers, the iron of the bars, so nothing in my body or mind rebelled against the rooms of death, and I didn’t vomit, or pray under my breath, or have nightmares, or break down in tears afterwards, which, I was told, often happened to the jailers who were paid to escort the condemned to their end. I wasn’t paid, they just shortened my sentence. None of the jailers or other prisoners wanted to do it, but it didn’t bother me, walking past the death cells, trudging down the corridors that led to the trapdoor — I’d grown up playing in places like these. The people they executed in Pankrác in those days were serial killers, fraudsters, rapists, vicious gangsters. They weren’t war heroes like my parents any more, by that time most of the heroes like them were six feet under. So what? I thought as I led the prisoners on their last journey. Saboteurs of the socialist economy, rapists and heartless killers — they knew where they were going and why. Mr Mára and I were never rough with them, just firm.

In quiet moments I’d sit next to Mr Mára, watching him operate the equipment, his long fingers dancing across the prehistoric keyboard, waiting for the coded radio command from the central office: Block B, prepare for winterizing!

At this or some other agreed command I would get up and go to the cell and take the prisoner away under the jailers’ supervision and then calmly, by myself, lead him down the corridors to Mr Mára, who meanwhile made everything ready.

When we came to the last room, some of the prisoners had beads of sweat on their forehead, their legs would freeze up like the Slovakian giant’s. I would help them. Mr Mára and I called it ‘seizing up’, like an engine. Even the calmest ones, who were quiet as we walked, or who teased and joked with me, about how I must be looking forward to the swill tomorrow, say — even they would sometimes suddenly seize up in horror, feeling queasy, about to vomit. My strength and my calm sometimes ceased to work on the threshold of the ropery. But Mr Mára always knew what to do.

I wasn’t involved in carrying out the sentence.

I just assisted with the preparations, and sometimes when it was done I would go and clean up with the bucket and rags and detergent.

I don’t want to do that ever again.

There were often long spells between carrying out the sentences. Then Mr Mára would let me sit at the computer, and my fingers, pale and peeling from the harsh detergent and countless buckets of water, would whizz across the keyboard, playing a game with dots that floated around the screen, crawling through fences and shooting each other. I would play the game and forget where and who I was, forget the screams and death rattles, forget the shit running down trouser legs, forget the faces of men turned into puppets by death, forget that I too was turning into a mindless puppet, reacting to the orders from the prison radio and the orders of Mr Mára, forget that everyone else in the prison hated me. It was probably one of the world’s first computer games.

Thanks to Mr Mára’s teaching, I didn’t type with two fingers any more, like I used to on the old-fashioned typewriter at school. Soon I was almost as good as he was. He even had to adjust the game’s settings based on my scores.

He wanted it to be used as a war game, for training.

We were constantly improving it.

I would’ve done anything that Mr Mára asked me to.

By that point I had a cell to myself, since the prison officials were worried the other prisoners might try to kill me.

My great dream, Mr Mára said, is to use my game to prepare people everywhere, but especially children, who love new things, for the world’s triumph over fascism.

He may have been in prison, but Mr Mára was still a soldier and a communist. He couldn’t have been in his position otherwise, of course.

One day these little games, Mr Mára said, pointing to the flickering screen with wires and cables poking out every which way, will connect people all over the world, and I’ll be part of it. What do you plan to do when your sentence is done?

I think I shrugged.

This was shortly before they abolished the death penalty in Czechoslovakia.

Lucky for me that they did. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have let me go.

One day my reduced sentence came to an end.

And I walked out.

The first thing I did was to go and look for a dive. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No family, no girlfriend.

All that was about to change.

So many of my fellow prisoners dreamed about the Pankrác dives, where their fathers, mothers, friends, girlfriends, cousins, children and wives would be waiting for them. Often what they found instead was nothing but the warm embrace of their tattooed fellow-travellers.

I found Lebo waiting for me. He didn’t have any tattoos, though, since he was just a baby when he was in the camp. The authorities didn’t even know he existed.

Lebo stood in front of the pub. He said he knew they were letting me out, but he didn’t like the idea of waiting in front of the prison.

He looked exactly the same as I remembered him. An old man in a black suit. Lebo the giant, with his bare skull perched atop his veiny neck.

We didn’t even go in the pub. There wasn’t a moment to spare. We were going home.

Mr Hamáček, the greengrocer, drove us in his sputtering Škoda. He, like me, had grown old. He had some milk for me from the aunts, plus some bread with bacon fat, and hardboiled eggs from the Terezín hens.

We all called Lebo uncle, all of us little kids and older children born in the garrison town of Terezín.

Our fathers and mothers were soldiers, they didn’t have time for us, they kept the fortress town running and that was good enough.

My mother wasn’t a soldier, but even so it had been better for me to be with Lebo.

And now I was back with him again.