Devil's Workshop

3

One of the cornerstones of the Comenium student commune was laid the day I spied a gorgeous girl in shorts and a T-shirt stumbling across Central Square in the summer heat, a blond braid hanging down her sweaty back. There I was, merrily herding along my little flock, the few that had managed to escape both the auction block and the mental cases’ maws. The wind had long since blown the stink of prison off of me, and she recognized me. Yes, she had come because of Rudolf’s article, she felt aligned with us, she said, and wanted to meet Lebo and stuff, help us in our cause. Dazzled by this apparition of a girl, I said nothing, just turned and led her through the dust kicked up by the goat’s hooves. I was longing for twilight, eager for it to be sundown, so maybe she wouldn’t notice I was blushing with embarrassment, though I was also leaning in towards her, with a touch of hungry boldness. She gazed at me curiously as I led her to Lebo, the curtains stirring here and there in the hovels on either side, people peeking from half-open windows as Sara’s sandals slapped against the cobblestones. Not many found their way into our streets in those days, just buses with tourists visiting the Monument. Sara had set out for Terezín from Sweden to track down the bunks where her grandfather and grandmother had supposedly once rested their heads, before they were killed. She was one of the seekers of the bunks, young people with brains darkened by the cloud of the terrible past, by the horrors that had befallen their parents, grandparents, relatives, or just by the fact that those horrors had happened at all. Could they happen again? What is man capable of? How come it happened to them, but I was spared? What would I have done if it had been me being led to my death? Can it happen again? The seekers turned these morbid questions over and over again in their minds, a demon had taken hold of them, clouding their brains. Even now, they were tormented by the murders of yesteryear, making them ripe for the psychiatrist’s couch. But some of them took to the road, heading for the East, all on their own, with a backpack and a credit card from their parents in their pocket, and went digging through the damp ruins of Poland, Lithuania, Russia — in short, everywhere mass graves were common. The seekers, like drops of water, seeped into the underground currents of the mysterious East, so it was no surprise they often sank to the bottom in anguish. And occasionally one of them would turn up in Terezín. Longing to ease the painful pressure on their brain, these were no ordinary tourists, content to wander down a few trails of genocide, maintained for the world by the Monument. Ordinary tourists strolled through Terezín like it was a medieval castle, taking snapshots, shooting videos of the dungeons and torture chambers to show the family afterwards. The bunk seekers would never even think of such a thing. They showed up here crazed with pain, seized by the eternal question every seeker asked: If it happened here, can it happen again? They knew they weren’t in a medieval castle but in an abyss where the world had been torn apart, a place without mercy or compassion, where anything was possible. And it ate at their brains. Sara, too, had arrived sick like this, which was why she insisted on exploring every inch of the town. I have a feeling, she said over the trampling hoofs of my herd, that they left a message here for me … somewhere.

First she had wandered around the Monument, then she headed over to our seedy little town. I want to walk by every wall, every rampart in this town of death, I want to understand, to know, to feel, Sara said amid the clouds of dust and the bleating herd. She seemed a little dehydrated to me. I took her to Lebo.

That day, like every other day, I grazed my goats till dusk, but once the darkness had swallowed up the last shades of red, I was driving my flock back home, past Lebo’s ground-floor room, and the lights were on and I saw Sara, well refreshed now, thanks to my aunts. She was an important visitor, after all — she brought interest to our town of destruction, fresh air and life would follow in her footsteps, my aunts could sense it somehow.

Inside, Sara was listening to Lebo, the man who had drawn his first breath here at the eye of the hurricane, at the centre of all the horror, most likely right next to the bunk where Sara’s granny had slept. She paid close attention as Lebo opened his black satchel and showed her the old notes, spikes, and rusty bullet shells. I had completely forgotten that somewhere down in the catacombs, where nothing rots, we had found two fingernails, probably torn off scratching the plaster long since washed away by groundwater. Lebo had kept them, so Sara could touch them. She was hungry for details of life in the town of death, so Lebo talked.

The seekers of the bunks came thirsting for knowledge. All of them had been directly affected by what went on here and needed to hear that, despite all the horrible things that had happened to their grandparents or parents, in spite of it all and through it all, they could go on living. And the seekers spread the word about Lebo to each other, so more of them came, wanting to hear the witness who had been born in hell and survived and was now alive in the modern era. And coming face to face with the living Lebo and his objects helped them. And some — like Sara — stayed.

Sara! It wasn’t only her grandfather and grandmother who had breathed their last here. About twenty of her relatives had perished in Terezín or somewhere in the black holes of Poland. Only her dad managed to save himself. Thanks to the Swedish Red Cross, he made it out on a children’s transport to Sweden. Sara wasn’t interested in the streets the town and the government had designated to be preserved. She liked tramping along the crumbling ramparts, crawling through the overgrown drains, running her fingers over the scratches that might’ve been greetings from those going to their death. She also enjoyed taking part in the lives of those of us who were left, and that was the thing, that was the reason why they liked her. She enjoyed listening to the old codgers puffing away on the peeling benches of Central Square, speaking with pride of the days when the regiments of the Czechoslovak People’s Army paraded through, and how many of them had paraded with them, or even led those regiments. Sara spoke German, which all the old people here knew. She was the Swedish girl who had come to us from the world, an apparition, a sign of life. At first the locals just stared cautiously through the curtains, watching as she looked around and listened in fascination, here in the graveyard condemned by the world to ruin and decay.

But soon Sara had an open door wherever she went, probably because she reminded the old ladies of a granddaughter of theirs, or a little niece, and they loved telling her stories about their youthful years in Terezín. Maybe they had even known her grandmother — oh, definitely. Whenever Sara paid a visit to their homes, which had been spared so far, the old ladies wiped the dust off their plastic tablecloths and opened their glass-fronted cabinets, fumbling among the painted dolls, glass deer, and decorative cups and spoons, reaching for the brandy glasses and filling Sara’s to the brim. Afterwards when she came back to our squat, she would either whoop it up or crawl straight into her sleeping bag on the bunk, and while I pounded away on the keyboard, following Lebo’s instructions, or Lebo read out the news we had received from the world, Sara would sleep, puffing in and out. We were glad to have her here. Soon all of the town’s old folks and drunkards were saying hello to Sara, sometimes even the hopeless mental cases would shyly waddle along behind her in the dust, as though maybe she could take them away somehow. It fascinated Sara when, in her honour, Aunt Fridrich cut off a hen’s head and threw it out of the window, into the brook under the ramparts, the way it had always been done, and she was glad to help Mr Hamáček haul his basket of kohlrabi or sacks of potatoes to Central Square. She even got involved with the kitchen, helping to serve the tea. Sara had decided to live a normal life in this town of death, and I had the feeling she was recuperating, coming out of her grief, escaping the despair that can cloud a mind with blackness and, especially in young and innocent people, produce a shock of realization at how terrible evil is and can be.

One day Sara said we should take a trip to Prague to buy souvenirs, so we’d have something to sell the occasional tourists who wandered our way. The cloud was slowly lifting from her mind. Plus she was the practical type.

We were doing brilliantly with Lebo at the computer hunting for contacts, running fundraising campaigns, and sounding the alarm, but, maybe because she was a newcomer and saw the situation through the eyes of an outsider, Sara insisted that if we could attract more people to the town, it would be a big help against the bulldozers.

You have to bring in tourists, get the world’s attention.

Only if the eyes of the world are on Terezín can we begin the process of revitalizing the town, Sara said.

And revitalizing means revival, or even rebirth, she explained.

Sara had studied history, ethnography, literature, and religion. All of our students, before they came here, had studied a wide range of fields. Everyone except me. I’d only gone to military school, and even then not the whole thing.

Sara knew how to paint as well, and one evening as I was pounding away on the keyboard to Lebo’s dictation, we were interrupted by her cry, but it was a cry of triumph. She sat down on the bunk and showed us a T-shirt with a picture of a man she said was the writer Franz Kafka. She had bought it in Prague and added the word Theresienstadt to it, plus a gallows and the words If Franz Kafka hadn’t died, they would have killed him here. This could really catch on! Sara crowed. She wouldn’t dream of taking it to a printer’s, she said. We could produce the T-shirts ourselves, using her stencil, handcrafted and artistic, that was the only way it made sense.

Lebo and I nodded OK. We trusted her. She was from the world, after all.

Sara and I got on really well from the start. When she first arrived, consumed by sadness, wandering around the ruins, her brain clouded, I made sure that she didn’t fall down a shaft or get swept away by the current that wound its way through the catacombs, that she didn’t go too far into the old armoury, where a brick from the weathered walls might fall on her head. Sara had become used to me, and to my animals. I showed her my little shed, and she didn’t even mind Bojek and his head butts.

Sara loved my animals and I’m pretty sure I was in love with her. I doubt she felt the same about me, but now I’ll never know. Either way, we did share a few sudden outbursts of love — a roll in the grass was simple enough. And that’s all there is to say about it. Anyone who goes on about that sort of stuff in public should be put up against a wall, just like in the old days.

When evening came, we got up and drove the herd home. People teased us of course. The thing is, the dust from the bricks on the ramparts gets in your hair, in your clothes, into your skin. Everyone can see it on you when you roll around in the grass.

In Prague we stayed in a hotel. We had plenty of money in those days, so much we didn’t even count it, and our trips to Prague were for business, so they were paid for out of the money that gushed from Lebo’s contacts.

Whenever we needed funds, Lebo, usually accompanied by Sara, and sometimes by other girls as well, would make a trip to the bank in Prague and withdraw the required amount. Every now and then, of course, the girls needed a little something, as Lebo used to say, so they would also spend some time in the department stores. I didn’t pay any attention to money. Sara took care of whatever we needed for the computer room, and also chose my clothes.

She bought the T-shirts and other souvenirs, planned our promotional brochures, bought the crates of red wine for our celebrations. I mainly just carried stuff, lugging backpacks around the city with her. We travelled by taxi — Sara taught me to do that too.

Our room in the hotel tucked away off Old Town Square was filled with Sara’s scent. It was quite unlike the next hotel room I would be in.

In Prague there are more streets than you can count. Our hotel is on a long, narrow, crooked street, like all the rest. There is the occasional piece of dog shit and rubbish on the cracked pavement. I don’t feel at home here.

Terezín is a military town. It’s laid out in right angles. That’s why you can find your way around there, country boy. Sara is explaining to me why I would be lost here without her. Prague is medieval, so it’s convoluted, it’s twisted and contorted, she says.

We sleep here in this little room, organizing our purchases, holding each other, talking. This is where we stay on our business expeditions.

You know, Terezín actually reminds me a lot of Venice, Sara says, leaning nonchalantly against my shoulder. Stacks of Kafka T-shirts are drying on the floor around us. We got soaked in a downpour, now I’m breathing in the black damp of Prague rain from her hair. You know, St Mark’s and the gondolas? That’s how your government-backed Monument looks in the eyes of the world, but right nearby there are normal people, living behind peeling walls. She shakes her head. Normal, right. All over Western Europe there are mass graves from the Second World War, carefully tended and maintained, whereas in Terezín, amazingly, you’ve got Mr Hamáček selling kohlrabi on a slaughter ground, Mrs Bouchal and Mrs Fridrich swearing at their permanently jammed laundry press on the very same spot where trains used to leave for the extermination camps in the East. When you were kids, you played in morgues and felt each other up in bunkers! It’s a nightmare, you’re all perverted and you don’t even know it. In the West they wouldn’t allow kids to go in places like that. It isn’t allowed here either! I say. But you don’t give a damn in this country, she objects. Yeah, well, why should I care whether it’s allowed or not, just as long as I don’t get caught, I say. Sara shakes her head, we talk, a little later we go to sleep.

The next day the commandos from the Patriot Guard made a raid on the street where we were staying. We were coming back to our hotel, weighed down with bags, when we saw a crew of Roma kids dodging through the streets. The dark-skinned teenagers scattered down passageways, the lumbering Guards in their vests with knives and batons in hot pursuit. A few people leaned out of their windows, applauding the pursuers and pointing out which way their quarry had fled. Sara stood open-mouthed, her package of Kafkas dropped to the ground.

Two young guardsmen stood blocking the entrance to our hotel. They had their backs to us, so I looked to see if there might be a piece of scaffolding lying around, a plank or a loose cobblestone, thinking I could take them out, quick and from behind. But they’d already picked them all up for themselves, the brutes.

Then we heard them in the street behind us, chanting slogans, marching. Soon a procession of Patriot Guards in black shirts, with flags, filled the street. It was best not to tangle with these guys. All I knew about them was the stories my aunts in the laundry told, about the Nazis. So I grabbed Sara by the elbow — she was just standing there calling them names in Swedish — the young guardsmen made way for us, and as soon as we were through the door I heard, Hello! One of them, the one with the swastika tattooed on his neck, handed me Sara’s package. I grabbed it and dragged her up the spiral staircase to our room.

Sara sat down on the bed.

Wow, I just saw a pogrom. They even had uniforms. My first pogrom. I think I’ll mark it down in my diary, she said.

She might’ve helped me, instead of just rambling on like that. I was busy straightening out the T-shirts on the floor, even though I was still weighed down with the backpack and the bags.

Outside we could hear shouting and the wail of police sirens. And someone running down the street, screaming. And the noise of the mob moving slowly away.

You don’t look Jewish or anything, though. Good thing you’re blonde, I said. And they thought I was a tourist, ha ha ha! I thought it was hilarious.

I think I’m going to puke, Sara announced, stretching out on the bed and staring up at the ceiling.

You know, she said after a while, we look the same. Two legs, two arms, a freckle or two, we both get by in English, but it’s actually an illusion! Culturally we’re totally different! I mean, I’m completely untouched by communism, but you’re up to your neck in filth! And you don’t even know it. Your goats are dropping turds on a sacred memorial site and you don’t even realize it, none of you here in Eastern Europe realize how screwed-up you are still.

Now that got me mad, she should’ve left my goats out of it. Here I am slogging around Prague with her while my flock might be thinning out again, Bojek wasn’t keeping an eye on it, that’s for sure.

Hey, I heard you guys have a pig farm on the site of a former Roma concentration camp. Is that true? Can you take me? Sara went off again, but I didn’t know the first thing about pigs. We never had them in Terezín.

Jesus Christ, Sara said, does that seem normal to you? A pig farm on a killing field?

She doesn’t like it when I shrug, but then again I don’t like it when she yells. Maybe I could put a pillow over her mouth. I tell her how Lebo came to have his name, she doesn’t breathe a word, and when I look closer I see she’s sobbing.

Jesus, I mean that midwife could’ve been my grandma.

That’s right, your grandma almost suffocated him! She was angry! Just like you!

Quiet, goat king, Sara croaked into her pillow. Shut it, shepherd!

All right, I said, I’ll be quiet. I was actually glad, because when Sara came to us, she was a shadow of a girl, and now, damn it, she was alive. She said she’d never slept with anyone as old as me before, but here it seemed totally normal, since everything was so twisted and bizarre. I told her it didn’t matter to me how old she was either. Nineteen? Twenty? Twenty-one? I really don’t care, I said, trying to soothe her.

But I don’t think you’re an idiot! Sara leans on her elbow, looking at me. I guess the cultural difference between us must be even deeper now.

We lay on our backs, heaps of Kafka T-shirts all over the floor, plus some bottles of wine and other stuff, Czech crystal, cups and saucers we painted with Greetings from Terezín! plus a few other souvenir items in bags, and Sara gave me a lecture on Eastern Europe. There were times when she just couldn’t hold back with that education of hers.

I was searching for the East, Eastern Europe, but, you see, going to Eastern Europe means you never stop looking for it. My relatives are from Slovakia, Sara said, taking a deep breath to tell me how waves of evil had washed her relatives to Terezín and beyond, which is more or less how all the stories of the bunk seekers began — whether they made their way to our fortress town by hitchhiking or climbed out of an air-conditioned tour bus to shuffle through the piles of rubble to us in our hovels and tour the town of death. Their ancestors always came from some history-crinkled eastern metropolis, blackness lurking down every alleyway. They pronounced the names of those places, villages, towns through tight lips, like they’d learned them in front of the mirror at home, after long hours of searching, as an icy terror crept into their hearts, pierced with dread. Tell me again what happened to my relatives? And how come my grandpa, dad, uncle, great-grandma … back in Prague, Brno, Ubľa, Kyiv, Drogobycz, Pińsko, Kraków … didn’t hightail it out of there to NYC in time? they asked themselves as they looked in the mirror, rehearsing the opening sentences they would use to gain admission to our space. I was familiar with the bunk seekers’ confessions: they’d learned them long ago, and many of them had undergone all sorts of therapy, until finally they ended up in therapy with us.

My grandpa’s from Košice, Sara said. All right, I thought. Slovakia’s got railways and mobile phones, I’ll start there. So I set out for Košice, and I took a look around there, at the stores and the cafés and the little shops on main street, and the waiting rooms at the station where it’s probably the same hard wooden seats as seventy years ago. I wanted to work out what Eastern Europe really was, since we may look the same but culturally we’re different. So where is the real East? I wondered. The Slovaks all told me I’d stopped too soon — Slovakia was Central Europe, not Eastern! Same as those stupid Czechs back there, sorry to say, not to mention the Hungarians, they aren’t even really in Europe. Wouldn’t go there if I were you, they won’t understand a word you say, they explained at the information window at Bratislava station. Yes, they took pity on me, and when I insisted, they admitted that the real Eastern Europe was actually not far from Slovakia — of course I’d have to make it past the wolves and bears of Subcarpathian Rus. Ah, the Carpathians, Sara said. So you look at the map and off you go. But then the people in Subcarpathian Rus get mad when you ask if they’re in the East. That’s nonsense, they say, and send you packing to the real East, to Galicia! But the locals there, like all the Poles, say, This is Europe, not Eastern. This is the centre of Central Europe! And they wave their hand: You want the East? You’ve got to go to Ukraine, that’s a fair way away. And they spit, bitterly and knowingly. Listen here, the East is poor and broken! People from the East go to the West to work, not the other way round! Sara said, spitting too. The Ukrainians send you farther still, to Russia. But the Russians don’t think they’re the East, to them that’s an insult, seeing as they’re the centre of the entire civilized world, though they do allow that the true East might be in Siberia, right. So I travel all the way through Siberia, thousands of kilometres on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and at the end station, in Vladivostok, I climb out, all broken-boned, and the locals there tell me, East, young lady, are you crazy? Why, this is the West, the honest-to-God end of the West, this is the end of Europe!

Amazing, Sara! You’re a real world traveller. I’ve never been anywhere.

I didn’t mention that I’d lived in Prague for years, but only in prison, or what I did there. She wouldn’t have understood, and probably wouldn’t have believed me.

Vladivostok, hm. So you go and buy yourself something to eat, some vodka, of course, and walk out to the edge of town. There’s a bench, so you sit and look at the water — there it is, the end of the road: the Sea of Japan. So there is no Eastern Europe actually.

You’re right about that, Sara!

I still thank God, or whoever, that I was born in the West.

Yeah?

Most of my relatives got killed in Terezín, but my dad made it out to Sweden with the other Slovakian Jewish kids, on the Red Cross transport, like I told you before. He grew up normally. The movies were the only place he ever saw Nazis and Commies. Just like me.

Right!

So the cultural difference between you and me comes from dozens of years of terror, oppression and humiliation. That’s what makes you guys different! And I don’t think that’s about to change anytime soon.

Oh no?

My dad was a smart little boy. Sara clapped her hands. He made it to Sweden, and that means I’m normal. I can finish university, I’ve got a passport that’s good wherever I go, no debt. Eventually I’d like a kid or two, a man, a house, all of that.

Hm!

They stuck them on a train in Prague with signs around their necks, and off to Sweden you go! Did you know that Sweden was neutral during the war?

No. What does that mean?

Oh, never mind. Listen, you know why I like the East?

Yeah, you’re looking for your ancestors and roots here and stuff.

No, come on, you know why I feel so good here?

No.

I feel superior. You’ve all got complexes because of who you are and where you’re from. But I’ve just got my own personal complexes, you see? Now, good night!

All right, g’night, I said.

But she didn’t really mean it about going to sleep. We could hear the hum of Old Town Square nearby. The tension in the air from the battle had disappeared. We held each other tight for a long time. But I was glad when she fell asleep. At least I could put the T-shirts in my backpack in peace. Sara was too careful packing. Sometimes it took us hours. But if the T-shirts got a little squished, the aunts could always iron them. They didn’t mind.