That’s the kind of thing my aunts, the old ladies from the neighbourhood, would say — Aunt Fridrich, Aunt Dohnal, Aunt Holopírek and the rest — when they got together and gabbed about my mother: It’s because of what happened! It isn’t her fault! She suffered like an animal!
My mum never went outside, she needed a room’s edges and corners behind her back, just a tiny space to breathe in was enough. Still, she didn’t die in the nuthouse, they never did take her away. Even after the time when she tied me up in the pantry so I couldn’t go to school, even after that and all the other times my mum didn’t want to let me out in the world, they didn’t lock her up. My mum was a martyr, in other words a war hero, so she could do just about anything she wanted, and even though she took her life when I went away to school, nobody dwelled on it or blackened her memory, and nobody said a word about it to my dad either, because he was a war hero too. There were lots of them in Terezín. Even Uncle Lebo, who gave my mum those huge bouquets, was considered a hero, including by the eggheads and the board of the Monument, and even though he was only born in Terezín during the war, so he was actually too young to remember any of it.
We were the last stubborn handful of defenders of Terezín, and Uncle Lebo was our leader. He had been born here, gone to school here, worked at the Monument here, then walked away from it, but most important, he collected objects.
Together with Uncle Lebo and Sara, who was the first person to come to us from the world, we founded the Comenium commune, our international school of healing for students from around the world.
Lea the Great, who showed up in Terezín right after Sara, was the one who came up with the name Comenium, after John Amos Comenius, the Czech educator known as ‘the teacher of nations’, who said that school should be play.
But the whole thing ended in ruins, not only that but in flames, and now I’m on the run to Prague.
Alex, from Belarus, arranged the trip for me.
He arranged it because I’m the only one with a head full of Lebo, Lebo and his plans, especially all the addresses and contacts that we milked for cash, and I’ve got it all hidden away on a flash drive, a teeny-tiny techno thingamajig I call the Spider.
Lebo is unique because he’s the only person on earth who was not only born in Terezín but spent his entire life there.
Lebo had a passion for everything connected with Terezín — not so much its glorious military past but its horrifying wartime history. He spent dozens of years gathering objects and collecting the contacts that would help him save the town. And he turned the contacts over to me, so we could milk them for money to support the Comenium.
You see, Lebo insisted that Terezín be preserved whole. Not just its tunnels, bunks, cellars, and words scratched on walls, but its life and all its inhabitants too: the greengrocer’s, the laundry, the cookshop, and all of the people who worked in them.
I knew every one.
Lebo didn’t want to see Terezín reduced to a Monument and a few educational trails. None of us wanted that.
So now I’ve got the Spider with all Lebo’s contacts tucked away in my pocket, clenched in my hand.
And because I’ve got the Spider, I’ve got somewhere to go. Alex arranged it. He wants me to come and help him in his country. He wants to carry out Lebo’s plan in Belarus.
Now I’m walking through a night full of sounds, the hum of cars zooming down the highway to Prague. I walk along the ditch by the roadside, sit down, make myself comfortable. Back pressed up against the dirt, I dream.
In Terezín I used to walk the goats around the ramparts. As my little flock nibbled away at the grass, it increased not only the walls’ defensive strength but also their beauty. I often led the flock to the outermost walls, my honourable duty, as Dad would say. They were the first thing the delegations from Prague would see when they came to pay tribute to the Czech patriots tortured to death in the Small Fortress, and the Jewish prisoners tortured to death and otherwise slaughtered all over Terezín, or exported to the death camps in the East. Yes, these redbrick ramparts, the last ones you saw as you left Terezín and the first ones as you arrived from Prague, are the fortress town’s calling card, as my dad the major used to say, and that was why they were graced with a huge red banner that read WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NEVER OTHERWISE. Every now and then I would drive my goats all the way out there, to the outermost rampart.
But usually my flock grazed on the grass right beneath the walls, they loved the grass with the red dust that flaked off the bricks.
My dad was one of the liberators of Terezín. He came to the town during the last days of the war, met my mum, and ultimately made his name putting on military parades on the town square, a huge appelplatz built in the days of Maria Theresa.
I can still hear the sound of my dad’s marching band. When I was little and I would hide in my mum’s arms, walled in behind the carpet, the couch, the mirrors, the chairs, and all the rest of the furniture, breathing in the delicious smell of her neck, and later, when I ran away from her to the ramparts and the bunkers, to play with the other kids, and we would graze and bleat like goats, even then we could hear the marching band. As the littlest in Terezín it was one of our duties to lead the goats around the fortress walls, until my dad put an end to it and I went off to military school, where they were supposed to hammer even more military marches into me.
Most of my peers also went to military school, and the ones who didn’t have what it takes went into the auxiliary army at least, the girls as laundrywomen or cooks or whores, the boys as coachmen and sappers. The dumbest ones found work as attendants in the slaughterhouse, but I was the son of a major, so the auxiliary army was out of the question for me.
I wouldn’t have minded working at the slaughterhouse. I could’ve brought the old goats there. It was a stone’s throw from the ramparts, right by the graveyard, but I had to go away to school, and my mum died the very next day after I left. My aunts told me afterwards how it happened: coming home from band rehearsal, my dad carried out the routine he had learned to get into the flat when the furniture was all stacked up and pushed together to create a safe crevice for Mum, just big enough so she could breathe, but this time when my dad pressed down on the door handle he hanged her as she was kneeling down to take up the smallest space possible, that was her thing.
She was crazy! said Aunt Fridrich. It was that shock she got in the pit! said Aunt Holopírek. Poor child! said Aunt Dohnal as I wept into her apron. But I wasn’t a child any more, I was a military school deserter and there were punishments for that — the alley of brooms, the hog-tie, hundreds of squats, the staff’s contemptuous laughter at the crack of the hazel rod, and most of all stinking jail, military jail — but I didn’t give a damn, I just wanted to get home to my goats. I didn’t give a damn what the punishment was, and I was right, too. Nothing happened to me that time or any other time either. My dad was a major, after all.
He was unhappy with me for deserting, though, and he gave me a beating, which he paid for in the end.
My own unhappiness sprang from the fact that I had to study. Stumbling around shooting ranges, stuck in classrooms with huge windows that let in the weight of the world, I ran away whenever I had a chance, and even when I didn’t. I could squeeze my way out even if all the doors were sealed. I always managed to escape somehow, even when they locked me up, and I would make my way home, and they’d come and find me in a nook of the ramparts, where the boards and bricks came together to form a makeshift goat shed.
My dad knew that’s where I’d be.
And whoosh, straight back to school.