Our science teacher went off to fight and didn’t come back. Our Latin teacher came home on leave from the front and dropped by our school. He sat at the teacher’s desk and taught a Latin class. It was soon over, and things didn’t go as he had expected. One student who had often been decorated with rose hips said right at the beginning of class: Sir, tell us what it’s like at the front. The teacher bit his lips and said: It’s not what you think. Then his face went rigid and his hands started to shake. We’d never seen him like that before. It’s not what you think, he repeated. And then he laid his head on the table, let his arms droop next to his chair like a rag doll, and cried.
The Russian village is small. When you go begging you hope not to run into another beggar from the camp. Everyone begs with coal. If you’re a practiced beggar, you carry your chunk of coal wrapped in a rag, cradled in your arm like a sleeping child. You knock on a door, and if it opens, you lift the rag and show your wares. From May through September the prospects for the coal trade aren’t very good. But coal is all we have.
Going door-to-door, I saw petunias in someone’s garden: an entire bed full of pale-pink little cups with silver rims. As I walked on I closed my eyes and said, DEMITASSES, then counted the letters in my head: ten. Next I counted ten steps, then twenty, for both cups. But where I stopped there was no house. So I counted to one hundred for all ten demitasses my mother had in her china cabinet, and found myself three houses farther along. There were no petunias. I knocked on the door.
On the road
Riding somewhere was always a happy thing.
First of all: as long as you’re moving, you haven’t arrived. As long as you haven’t arrived, you don’t have to work. Riding in a truck gives you time to recover.
Second: when you ride, you come to some place that couldn’t care less about you. You can’t be yelled at or beaten by a tree. Under a tree, yes, but the tree can’t help that.
When we arrived at the camp, our only point of reference was NOVO-GORLOVKA, which could be the name of the camp or a town or the entire region. It couldn’t be the name of the factory, though, since we knew that was KOKSOKHIM-ZAVOD. I did find a cast-iron manhole cover beside the well in the camp yard, and used my school Greek to decipher the Cyrillic letters as DNEPROPETROVSK, but that could be a nearby city, or some foundry at the other end of Russia. Whenever you were able to leave the camp, you got to see more than letters—the wide steppe and the villages on the steppe. For that reason, too, riding somewhere was a happy thing.
Every morning, a transport crew was assigned to the vehicles in the garage behind the camp, mostly two men at a time. Karli Halmen and I wound up on a four-ton LANCIA from the 1930s. There were five trucks in the garage, and we knew the pros and cons of each. The Lancia was a good truck, not too tall and fully metal, no wood. The five-ton MAN, whose wheels came up to your chest, wasn’t as good. And with the Lancia came the driver Kobelian, who had a crooked mouth. He was a good-natured man.
When Kobelian said KIRPICH we understood he meant bricks, and that we would be driving through the boundless steppe to pick up a load. If it had rained the night before, the burned-out wreckage of automobiles and tanks would flash in the hollows. The steppe-dogs darted away from the wheels. Karli Halmen sat with Kobelian inside the cab. I preferred to stand in the truck bed and hold on to the top. In the distance I saw a seven-story redbrick tenement with empty windows and no roof. Half in ruins and all by itself, but very modern. Maybe it was the first building of a new settlement that had been scrapped overnight. Maybe the war had arrived before the roof.
The road was bumpy, the Lancia rattled past the scattered farms. Waist-high stinging nettle grew in some of the yards, and white chickens, thin as cloud wisps, roosted on iron bedsteads. Nettles only grow where there are people, my grandmother had told me, and burdocks only grow where there are sheep.
I never saw anyone in the farmyards. I wanted to see people who didn’t live in the camp, who had a home, a fence, a yard, a room with a carpet, maybe even a carpet beater. Where carpets are beaten, I thought, you can trust the peace. There, life is civilized. There, people are left alone.
On our very first drive with Kobelian I’d seen a frame for beating carpets in one of the farmyards. It had a roller so the carpet could be moved up and down. And next to that I saw a large white enameled watering can that looked like a swan, with its beak and slender neck and heavy belly. That was so beautiful that I kept a lookout for carpet-beating frames on every ride, even far out on the steppe, in the empty wind. But I never saw another carpet frame, or a swan.
Beyond the farmyards on the outskirts we came to a small town of yellow-ochre houses with crumbling stucco walls and rusty tin roofs. Streetcar rails could be seen in the remnants of asphalt, and now and then two-wheeled carts from the bread factory moved along the rails, pulled by horses. The carts were covered with white linen, like the bread cart in the camp. But the half-starved horses made me wonder whether it was bread the cloth was covering and not fully starved bodies.
Kobelian said: The town is called Novo-Gorlovka. So the town has the same name as the camp, I asked. He said: No, the camp has the same name as the town. There were no signs. Anyone who drove here knew the name of the place, just as Kobelian and the Lancia did. Strangers like Karli Halmen and myself had to ask. And whoever didn’t have anyone to ask didn’t wind up here and had no business being here in the first place.
We had to pass through the town to pick up the bricks. They take a while to load: one and a half hours, if you have two people and can park the Lancia close by. You carry four at a time, pressing them together like an accordion. Three are too few and five are too many. You could carry five, but the middle one would slip out. You’d need a third hand to hold it. You fill the entire truck bed, making sure there are no gaps, stacking the bricks in three or four layers. Bricks have a bright resonance, each one sounds a little different, but the red dust is always the same and settles on your clothes. Brick dust is dry, it doesn’t envelop you like cement dust, and it isn’t as oily as coal dust. The brick dust made me think of sweet red paprika, though it has no smell.
On the way back, the Lancia never rattled: it was too heavily weighed down. We again drove through Novo-Gorlovka, over the streetcar rails, past the farmyards in the outskirts, and down the road under the wisps of clouds drifting over the steppe. All the way to the camp. And then past the camp to the construction site.
Unloading went faster than loading. The bricks did have to be stacked, but not so carefully, because they’d be hauled off the next day to the masons on the scaffold.
With the travel time there and back, and the loading and unloading, we managed two trips a day. Then it was evening. Occasionally Kobelian would take us out one more time, without saying anything. Then Karli and I knew it was a private delivery. We only filled half the truck bed with a single layer of bricks, and drove back to the seven-story ruin. There we turned off into a low-lying area where the houses were bordered by rows of poplars. At that time of day the clouds were as red as the bricks. We drove between a fence and a woodshed into Kobelian’s yard. The truck jerked to a stop, and I found myself standing up to my waist in the middle of a withered fruit tree, its branches full of shrunken balls from the previous summer, or the one before. Karli climbed up to me. The last bit of daylight dangled fruit in front of our faces, and Kobelian let us pick some before we unloaded.
The balls were dry as wood, you had to lick and suck at them before they tasted like sour cherries. If you chewed them well, the pit felt very smooth and hot on the tongue. Those night cherries were a happy thing, but they only sharpened our hunger.
On the way home the night was made of ink. It was good to arrive late at the camp. Roll call was over, and supper had long since started. The thin soup from the top of the kettle had been served to others. There was a better chance of getting something more substantial.
But arriving too late was bad. Then the soup was all gone. Then you had nothing except t
his big empty night, and the lice.
On strict people
I’m sitting on the bench with the backrest. Bea Zakel has washed her hands at the well and is walking down the path. She sits down next to me. Her eyes slowly drift off to the side, almost as if she were cross-eyed. But she isn’t, she lets them slide like that because she knows it makes her look more striking. So striking that I feel self-conscious. Then she starts talking, just like that. She speaks as fast as Tur Prikulitsch, but not as capriciously. She turns her drifting eyes toward the factory, follows the cloud from the cooling tower, and tells me about the mountains where the three lands meet: Galicia, Slovakia, and Romania.
When she lists the mountains from home she talks more slowly: the Lower Tatra, the Beskids, which flow into the Eastern Carpathians, by the headwaters of the river Tisza. My village is called Lugi, she says, a poor village stashed away near Kaschau. There the mountains stare down through our heads until we die. The people who stay are given to brooding. Many move away. That’s why I left, to attend the conservatory in Prague.
The cooling tower is a tall matron, wearing her dark wooden casing like a corset. The white clouds pass through her narrow waist and rise out of her mouth day and night. And they move away, like the people leaving Bea Zakel’s mountains.
I tell Bea about the mountains around Transylvania, which are also part of the Carpathians, I say. Except our mountains have deep, round lakes. People call them sea-eyes, and they’re so deep that their bottoms connect to the Black Sea far underground. When you stare into a mountain lake you have your feet on the mountain and your eyes in the sea. My grandfather says that far below the earth the Carpathians are carrying the Black Sea on their arm.
Then Bea talks about Artur Prikulitsch, how he’s part of her childhood. That he comes from the same village and lived on the same street and even sat at the same desk with her in school. When they played together she had to be the horse and Tur was the coachman. The street was steep, and one day she fell and though she didn’t realize it until later, she had broken her foot. Tur goaded her on with his whip and claimed that she was just pretending to be in pain because she didn’t want to be his horse anymore. Whenever she played with Tur he was always a sadist, she says, and I tell her about the Millipede Game. The children were divided into two millipedes. One was supposed to pull the other across a chalked line in order to eat it. In each of the millipedes the children were told to put their arms around each other’s waists and pull with all their strength. We were practically torn apart, I got bruises on my hips and a dislocated shoulder.
I’m not a horse, and you’re not a millipede, says Bea. If you are what you play, you’re bound to get punished for it, that might as well be a law. And you can never escape the law, even if you move to Prague. Or to a camp, I say. Yes, because Tur moves with you, says Bea. He also left our village and went off to Prague to study. At first he wanted to become a missionary but ended up switching to business instead. You know, the laws of the small village, and even the laws of Prague, are strict, says Bea. That’s why you can’t escape them, because they were made by strict people.
Once again Bea lets her eyes slide into a sidelong glance and she says:
I love people who are strict.
At least one of them, I think, but I have to hold my tongue, because she lives off this strictness, and her strict person has given her this job in the clothes room, which is a lot nicer than what he’s assigned to me. She complains about Tur Prikulitsch, she wants to live like him but still be one of us. When she talks fast she sometimes comes close to denying the difference between us and her. But at the last moment she slips back into her safe place. Maybe it’s her sense of safety that causes her eyes to drift. It’s possible that she’s always thinking about her privileged position when she talks with me. And that she talks so much because in addition to her strict person, she wants to have a little freedom—freedom he doesn’t know about. Or maybe she’s coaxing me out of my reserve, maybe she confides everything we talk about to him.
Bea, I say, the song of my childhood goes like this:
Sun high in the haze,
yellow corn,
no time
Because the strongest scent from my childhood is the rotten stench of germinating corn. In summer we’d go to the Wench highlands for eight weeks of vacation. By the time we came back, the corn we’d left on the sand pile in the courtyard had sprouted. I pulled it out of the sand, the cobs were falling apart, with smelly yellow kernels dangling off to the side from white, threadlike roots.
Bea repeats: Yellow corn, no time. Then she sucks on her finger and says: Growing up is a good thing.
Bea Zakel is taller than me by half a head. Her braids are rolled around her head, a silk cord thick as an arm. Perhaps her proud look doesn’t only come from sitting in the clothes room, but because she has to carry this heavy hair. She probably had this heavy hair as a child, so that in her poor, stashed-away village, the mountains wouldn’t stare down through her head until she died.
But she won’t die here in the camp. Tur Prikulitsch will see to that.
Onedroptoomuchhappiness for Irma Pfeifer
By the end of October it was sleeting icy nails and snow. Our guard and the site inspector gave us our quotas and went straight back to the camp, to their warm rooms. At the construction site a quiet day began, without the dread of shouted orders.
But this quiet day was interrupted when Irma Pfeifer screamed. Perhaps HELPHELP or ICAN’TTAKEANYMORE—we couldn’t make out the exact words. We grabbed shovels and wooden boards and ran to the mortar pit, but not fast enough, the supervisor was already there. Raising his shovel, he ordered us to drop everything: Ruki nazad—Hands behind your backs. He forced us to stand there and look into the mortar pit. There was nothing we could do.
Irma Pfeifer was lying facedown in the bubbling mortar. First it swallowed her arms, then the gray mass came oozing over the backs of her knees. For an eternity, a few seconds, the mortar rippled and waited. Then the mixture suddenly sloshed up to her hips, and then wobbled between her head and her cap. Her head began to sink and her cap floated away, with outspread earflaps, drifting slowly to the edge of the pit like a fluffed-up pigeon. Shaved bare and scabbed with lice bites, the back of her head hovered a moment like half a melon. When that, too, went under, all we could see was her back, and the supervisor said: Zhalko, ochyen’ zhalko.
Then he brandished his shovel, drove the whole group to the edge of the construction site, where the lime women worked, and shouted: Vnimanye, lyudi. Attention, people—if a saboteur is looking for death that’s fine with us. She jumped in, he said, the bricklayers saw it all from up on the scaffold. Konrad Fonn the accordion player had to translate for the supervisor.
After that we had to line up, march into the camp, and stand in formation to be counted. It was still early morning, still raining ice-nails, and we stood there, aghast, silent outside and in. Shishtvanyonov ran yelling out of his office, foaming at the mouth like an overheated horse. He hurled his leather gloves at us. Wherever one landed, someone had to bend down and take it back to him. Again and again. Then Shishtvanyonov turned us over to Tur Prikulitsch. He was wearing an oilcloth coat and rubber boots. He had us count off, step forward, step back, count off, step forward, step back, into the evening.
No one knows when Irma Pfeifer was fished out of the mortar pit or where they scraped a little dirt away to bury her. The next morning the sun was cold and bare. There was fresh mortar in the pit, everything was as usual. No one mentioned the previous day. I’m sure more than one person thought about Irma Pfeifer and her fine cap and her good quilted work jacket, since she was probably laid to rest in her clothes, and the dead have no need of clothes when the living are freezing.
Irma Pfeifer wanted to take a shortcut. She was carrying a sack of cement in front of her and couldn’t see where she was going. The sack had soaked up the icy rain and went down before she did, which is why we didn’t see any sack when we came to th
e mortar pit. At least that’s what Konrad Fonn the accordion player thought. You can think all kinds of things. But you can’t know for sure.
Black poplars
It was the night of December 31, New Year’s Eve, in our second year. Halfway through the night the loudspeakers summoned us to the Appellplatz. We were chased down the main street of the camp, flanked by eight guards with rifles and dogs, and followed by a truck hauling a trailer. In the tall snow behind the factory, where the empty fields began, we were told to line up in rows along the brick wall and wait. We thought: This is the night we will be shot.