Jáchym Topol - Devil's Workshop

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.