At school they forced me to learn English, the language of our enemies, and Russian, the language of our friends. I studied constantly, surviving the weight of the world by not looking out the windows and keeping my eyes on my textbooks, scanning the pages up and down, propping myself up with my eyes. I made it through thanks to those languages, that’s the only thing I remember from school, and they were also the reason I became Lebo’s right-hand man, they were what made me useful in building the Comenium, so in fact I was carrying on my dad’s legacy. I was working on Terezín’s behalf, and as Lebo later explained to me, laying his enormous hand on my shoulder, in my own way I was defending the town. So maybe my father, in spite of our last argument, which he didn’t survive, would’ve been proud of me after all.
Maybe.
They threw me out of school in the end, even though my dad was a major. I wasn’t deemed fit for the army.
I went back to herding goats and I was happy. The other boys and girls had all grown up and there were no new little tots, so I was left on my own with the flock.
The goats in Terezín weren’t just a country pastime, or a way to make a living. Goats are the symbol of fortress towns, they’re biological war machines.
The goats cleared the weeds and grass and bushes from the passages through the ramparts, the weak spots in our fortifications. They may not have ranked with such wonders of technology as the Prussian cannon, the rounded bastion, the Tiger tank, the Katyusha rocket launcher, or any of the more recent artillery of the Cold War, but only the goats, with their greedy mouths and their endless consumption of grass, could keep the ramparts clean.
What good was all that advanced weaponry if a single determined foot soldier could creep through the weed-filled ditch to the city gates and blast open a hole with the most primitive bazooka?
Every fortress town falls if the goats disappear.
But my dad didn’t want me to herd goats. He wanted me to learn how to be in charge and give orders, to turn men into machines. And one day, up on the ramparts, which have been blasted by cold winds for hundreds of years, so the bricks give off these tiny little clouds of red dust, the two of us got into a nasty argument. And near the end my dad must’ve realized that I was too grown up for him to beat me any more, and he clutched at his heart and he clutched at my hand, and I thought he was going to throw me off, but I stood tight and he slipped and fell, and landed thump on his back in the grass. My goats went running in every direction, so I climbed down and called out to calm them, and I tried to revive my dad the way they’d taught us in school, but it was no use.
He had a huge military funeral. The units lined up on the main square and paraded through town till evening to the boom of artillery. They played all the most famous tunes from the nearby garrisons, and my aunts and Mr Hamáček, who ran the greengrocer’s, said it was the most beautiful funeral in all of Terezín’s history. Everybody liked it. And of course a lot of the soldiers who still lived in town congratulated me too. But then they locked me up.
2
They gave me a sentence of many years for my father’s death, but there’s no use talking about it. When they let me out, I headed straight for the nearest pub.
All the other prisoners said that was what you did.
That included the ones I had escorted to the trapdoor, they all said they’d rather be going to the nearest neighbourhood dive.
Mr Mára, the technician, had a big huge prehistoric computer on his desk in the execution room, with a flickering green screen. He’d been arrested and convicted in a trial of cyberneticists, ‘traitors of the people’. But the prison administration had recognized his skills and he ended up as the executioner. Socialist cybernetics remained his passion.
I was told the old hangmen needed vodka by the bucket-load to calm themselves down, but Mr Mára was a man of the modern era. He had invented a game. And that made everyone happy, from the high-ranking officers to the simple men who worked as guards.
I was his helping hand.
The way that happened was one day they were executing a gangster from Slovakia, a hulk of a man, shaking and kicking as they walked him down the corridor in chains. Four jailers had their hands full with him. He knocked over my pail while I was wiping the floor. But when he came to the threshold of Mr Mára’s room, he pulled up short, his legs frozen with horror, and I helped him.
So they called me back the next time. And the time after that.
The prison directors were amazed that when I walked with the prisoners, they didn’t whimper, didn’t scream wordlessly like animals, didn’t struggle. They were calm and quiet, I suppose because I was calm. My head, my mind, my legs were used to the twists and turns of Terezín’s tunnels, the gloom and concrete of the cells and bunkers, the iron of the bars, so nothing in my body or mind rebelled against the rooms of death, and I didn’t vomit, or pray under my breath, or have nightmares, or break down in tears afterwards, which, I was told, often happened to the jailers who were paid to escort the condemned to their end. I wasn’t paid, they just shortened my sentence. None of the jailers or other prisoners wanted to do it, but it didn’t bother me, walking past the death cells, trudging down the corridors that led to the trapdoor — I’d grown up playing in places like these. The people they executed in Pankrác in those days were serial killers, fraudsters, rapists, vicious gangsters. They weren’t war heroes like my parents any more, by that time most of the heroes like them were six feet under. So what? I thought as I led the prisoners on their last journey. Saboteurs of the socialist economy, rapists and heartless killers — they knew where they were going and why. Mr Mára and I were never rough with them, just firm.
In quiet moments I’d sit next to Mr Mára, watching him operate the equipment, his long fingers dancing across the prehistoric keyboard, waiting for the coded radio command from the central office: Block B, prepare for winterizing!
At this or some other agreed command I would get up and go to the cell and take the prisoner away under the jailers’ supervision and then calmly, by myself, lead him down the corridors to Mr Mára, who meanwhile made everything ready.
When we came to the last room, some of the prisoners had beads of sweat on their forehead, their legs would freeze up like the Slovakian giant’s. I would help them. Mr Mára and I called it ‘seizing up’, like an engine. Even the calmest ones, who were quiet as we walked, or who teased and joked with me, about how I must be looking forward to the swill tomorrow, say — even they would sometimes suddenly seize up in horror, feeling queasy, about to vomit. My strength and my calm sometimes ceased to work on the threshold of the ropery. But Mr Mára always knew what to do.
I wasn’t involved in carrying out the sentence.
I just assisted with the preparations, and sometimes when it was done I would go and clean up with the bucket and rags and detergent.
I don’t want to do that ever again.
There were often long spells between carrying out the sentences. Then Mr Mára would let me sit at the computer, and my fingers, pale and peeling from the harsh detergent and countless buckets of water, would whizz across the keyboard, playing a game with dots that floated around the screen, crawling through fences and shooting each other. I would play the game and forget where and who I was, forget the screams and death rattles, forget the shit running down trouser legs, forget the faces of men turned into puppets by death, forget that I too was turning into a mindless puppet, reacting to the orders from the prison radio and the orders of Mr Mára, forget that everyone else in the prison hated me. It was probably one of the world’s first computer games.
Thanks to Mr Mára’s teaching, I didn’t type with two fingers any more, like I used to on the old-fashioned typewriter at school. Soon I was almost as good as he was. He even had to adjust the game’s settings based on my scores.