Authors: Jáchym Topol
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.
Sara and I made it back to Terezín in under an hour. That time with Mr Hamáček in his beat-up Škoda, it had taken half the day.
Volunteers printed the T-shirts with Sara’s design, and as our
revitalization
movement grew in strength and more journalists and more bunk seekers began to seek us out in our broken little town, Sara and I went on more and more shopping trips to Prague. Our T-shirts, which the aunts peddled to tourists at the Monument, went like
hot-cakes
, and we sold other things too – pebbles from the riverbeds of the nearby Elbe and Eger, they made nice talismans. We numbered them in indelible ink, so every tourist who came to Terezín would know what number visitor they were.
And then Lea came to us.
It was Lebo himself who caught her, after she split away from her tourist group and wandered off the Monument’s designated trails and ended up in town. Almost six feet tall, with cropped red hair, even shorter than mine, she was staggering across Central Square in the midday sun, dazed by the heat, wearing nothing but green boxer shorts – she had torn off all her clothes and thrown them away, along with her backpack. Swaying and teetering, slowly, cautiously, she lifted her right hand, fumbling, groping in the air, eyes bulging. She smiled later as she explained that in her mind she had been trying to grab hold of the wires, to give herself an electric shock and put her out of her misery, to stop her marching, tortured brain that was trying so hard to understand. All those tours had driven her mad. She’d visited many sites in Poland, but the pivotal point, the place from which her family had set out for the wires of death way back when, was here in Terezín, and so here she was. With a fever. She felt awful.
Getting to know Sara helped the girl we sometimes called Lea the Great. For a whole day and night she slept on Sara’s bunk, and once she had pulled herself back together a bit, she listened to Lebo breathlessly. After reading so many encyclopaedias, tracking down her family and walking through museums and down educational trails, now all of a sudden she had a living witness, a witness who spoke healing words. And it was calming for her to share the objects left behind by the dead or disappeared. First with Sara, and later with Rolf and the others, she handled every little thing, every single item we’d found as kids in the tunnels under Terezín and brought back to Lebo. This sharing, along with Lebo’s strength, began to break up the black cloud in the heads of the seekers afflicted with the horror of the past. The well-travelled Lea meant a great deal to us. She gave our community a name.
And food. She copied the idea from the Kraków ghetto, so the tasty, crunchy pizza that Lea and the aunts began to bake in our kitchen became known as ghetto pizza. The secret ingredient was a light dusting of Terezín grass, a seasoning that didn’t exist anywhere else. And one day two girls showed up who Lea had met on a visit to Auschwitz – of course they were also from the second or third generation of victims and their minds were also shadowed with a black cloud. Lea had tipped them off to us, and after a few days our new students decided to stay. They looked after the tent on Central Square, which we called the Amusement Centre. A multicoloured T-shirt of Kafka flew above it and the delicious smell of ghetto pizza filled the inside. That alone was a sign of revitalization, since not only were the local people creeping out of the shells of their half-broken-down homes to experience the smells, the colours and all the movement in general, but more and more people were heading our way from the world outside. So we set up the Main Tent by our first stall on Central Square and during the day Lebo would talk to people inside. Sara and Lea were in there with him, protecting him from the new visitors. It’s true Lea provoked some amazement among the country folk, but children adored her, especially when the giant redhead made funny faces at them, and besides, towering in front of the tent, dressed as she usually was in a green track suit, she guaranteed no wise guys snuck in without paying. Sara collected the money at the entrance. There were people who came here just to get a glimpse of the famous Guardian of Terezín, and they had to put a coin in the dish. Now Sara would just shake her head when she saw me waiting for her to come out to herd the goats with me. In fact the day Lebo started talking to newcomers in the Main Tent on Central Square, Sara stopped coming to see me. I think that was one of the reasons why I said yes to Alex.
By then we were already calling ourselves the Comenium. Lea, who had come up with our name, thought we should offer instruction in the history of horror, as well as therapy for it, including dance. We agreed, since she had come to us from Holland, the country where Comenius had resided after his merciless expulsion from Bohemia.
The Happy Workshops were Sara’s idea.
*
I was out for a walk with Bojek and the other goats one day, strolling along, when one of the nanny goats squatted down, so we stopped to wait. Goats pee like girls, you see – not a lot of people know that – and it was a good thing we stopped, too, since all of a sudden I saw … Sara, in the grass down below us! Kamínek the mental case had knocked her down and was standing over her. I went tearing down there, screaming at him, and Kamínek grabbed his crutches and hobbled off, scuttling through the grass like some disgusting insect, rear end shining,
clutching
at his pants. Sara got up, her T-shirt torn across her chest. She was in shock, not even talking, so Bojek and I escorted her home. And that evening she came up with the Happy Workshops.
The mental cases stayed out of my way. I stopped by Mr Hamáček’s vegetable shop one day and Kamínek and this other bum took one look at me, got up and wobbled off, past the baskets of rotting potatoes, sacks of onions, and kohlrabi, crutches clattering, in those shabby army overcoats of theirs. They sure don’t want to talk to you! said Mr Hamáček. I hadn’t told a soul about my time in the slammer – why would I? – but the mental cases had somehow got wind of what I did there. Somebody from that loud-mouthed society in Pankrác Prison had recognized me, ratted on me, and passed it on. They may have been cripples, thieves, and losers, but they had feelers everywhere, they were all connected somehow.
Sara thought up, founded, and ran the Happy Workshops for them.
She even arranged it with the town, that is with the Monument, so they could work, which was unheard of.
The mental cases made brooms, then strolled around town with them, and along the Monument trails, and actually made some cash out of it.
And eventually they’ll gain some pride, Sara said.
She didn’t tell Kamínek off or anything. Instead she went and had her picture taken in a brand-new T-shirt, supervising the Happy Workshop that she set up on Central Square, next to the T-shirt stalls, not far from the ghetto pizza. All they needed for the first workshop was a wicker awning against the sun, and the mental cases sat on the ground, bearded, scarred, and scabbed, in their old scraps of uniform and tracksuits, whatever they’d managed to steal or beg, making brooms that instantly fell apart. That way they always had plenty of work. They nodded to Lebo respectfully whenever he strode by, and silently ogled the female students, especially Sara, but they didn’t pay any attention to me, and I ignored them too.
They strolled around the town with their brooms, sweeping stuff up into little heaps. None of them laid a paw on any of our students again, though I think it was less out of pride than because they were under supervision.
They need light, joy, and activity, Sara declared the evening I dragged her out from under the eager Kamínek, when she set out her plan for the Happy Workshops, and Lea the Great confirmed that, yes, a humane approach like this to human ruins was precisely in line with the thinking of John Amos, and so the project became part of the Comenium.
You can tell a society’s values by the way it treats those who are worst off, Sara explained when I marvelled at her reaction to having nearly been raped, perhaps even beaten to death or tortured in a lair under the ramparts, and the devil knows what else.
No one would’ve been surprised if you had gouged his eyes out. I would’ve held him down.
She gave me a look.
*
Then the summonses started arriving.
Lebo crumpled them up in little balls and tossed them on the ground. He had neither the time nor the inclination to answer some stupid questions from some stupid court, he was too busy teaching. Meanwhile I stood on Central Square, holding the goats by their tethers, watching as the court’s summonses disappeared in the dust, trampled to bits by tourists. We also had families come and visit us in Terezín, and to the delight of the children I sometimes brought my goats to Central Square. One day I placed the rope from around the neck of one of my last nanny goats into the age-and work-hardened palm of Aunt Fridrich, who led it away to the cookshop. I ran off to my office in the bunkroom. I couldn’t take care of the goats the way I used to any more – everything was in motion, things were going on.
Soon the first charges arrived from the Monument, claiming that the erection of the Main Tent on Central Square constituted a gross desecration of this sacred site, from which hundreds of thousands had gone to their death in the camps. All our hustle and bustle and selling was completely against the law, they said, and Lebo scrunched the charges up into little balls and tossed them on the ground. He never noticed that whenever I heard the word ‘charges’ I broke out in a hideous sweat. I was a former convict and didn’t want to go back to prison. I was pretty sure the prison directors couldn’t care less about me – they no longer needed my former speciality – but the rest of them in the slammer, especially the heartless gangsters, the bloodthirsty sickos and rapists, who nobody hung any more, had never forgiven me for running the Pankrác ropery. They all knew each other, and the world of bars and cells has a memory measured in decades.
I knew I didn’t want to go back to jail.
Nothing wrong with that, is there?
That was the other reason why I said yes to the Belarusians, why I went along with Alex.
I wanted to tell Lebo, after I had wiped the sweat of dread off my brow, but he was hurrying off to the evening sitting. Twilight was settling over the ramparts and the sittings were the most important thing for our society. Lebo didn’t pay as much attention to me as he used to, and no wonder! I wasn’t the only one whose shoulder he could lay his hand on any more. There were plenty of young people, younger than me, who called him Uncle Lebo now. And they kept coming, to the displeasure of the eggheads and the politicians from the Monument. More and more visitors were leaving the buses and heading straight to us, through the nettles and flattened fences, over piles of rubble, through Manege Gate. They found their way to Central Square and stuffed themselves with ghetto pizza, bought Kafka T-shirts, and took pictures of Lebo in his black suit bearing witness to the terrible times of long ago. And they also took pictures of Sara, of course, since she was a beauty, and of Lea the Great – they’d never seen anything like her before – and the girls at the stall always had a petition handy for visitors to sign, saying
No to the Bulldozers!
That was when Rolf came and found us again. Rolf the journalist, who had set the whole revitalization of Terezín in motion, who had listened closely to Lebo, to all those horrible stories that ended somewhere in the black holes of Poland or Lithuania or maybe Belarus. Rolf came back and took pictures of the newcomers, the seekers of the bunks, who would turn up every now and then with a confused look on their face and head straight for the Main Tent. They’d already heard that nobody here could help them work out how all that horrible stuff could actually happen to people, but at least they could learn how to live with the knowledge of that horror, and Rolf’s pictures in the glossy magazines of the world – pretty pictures of pretty young people in T-shirts, shorts, ponchos, and capes of every colour, with alternative decorations, sporting shaved heads or dreads down to their waist – motivated other young people to come and see what was going on, and the battle to save the town felt absolutely right to them. In a world where everything’s relative, this is an ethically unambiguous issue, Rolf explained, and that means I’ve got a hit! he said, eyes smiling behind his glasses. Rolf walked around town rhapsodizing about the influx of young people and what fantastic material it was, since Lebo’s stories themselves wouldn’t captivate anyone, it was all too long ago. You’re in the heart of darkness here, touching the depths of horror, it’s irresistible! he assured us. The evening sittings with Lebo and the crowd filling up the Main Tent and our nightly dances in the grass below the ramparts – the newspaper world was enraptured by it all. Your energy is sending the world a powerful signal! Rolf said. He probably meant his memory of the world, since he lived with us too, drinking in the ordinary life of the town, helping old Aunt Fridrich lug the tubs of washing to the laundry at the station, which must’ve been pretty tough for a skinny guy like him. Then he’d stand around the crummy little station, lost in thought, while Aunt Fridrich washed and pressed and gossiped. Rolf would stand staring at the tracks, his eyes following the rusty rails to the point where they disappeared into Poland, just beyond the horizon, where all the trains from Terezín had gone. But the moment old Aunt Fridrich called him, Rolf was right there at her side, ready to lug the tubs again.
One day Rolf was walking me out to pasture with Bojek – we would do that together from time to time – and there, at the foot of a tall rampart, we ran into Alex, from Belarus. He had just arrived in Terezín, with Maruška, a redhead. Both of them had backpacks on. It was obvious she was with him.
We greeted the newcomers, shook hands, and Alex told us they had just chosen their names now, as they walked through Manege Gate. They sound Czech enough, don’t you think? he said.