Jáchym Topol - Devil's Workshop

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?