I’m grateful to Alex for these clothes, that’s for sure. It’s like being in a protective cocoon. The thingamajig is frozen inside me.
Alex. Why did he tell me about the gutting? When somebody says they want to kill you, believe them: Lebo taught us that too. Where will I go? Everybody I knew is gone. I look down at the cold earth under my feet. It’s so much work just walking, I can’t even think of Maruška.
I make out the first cross through the flakes. It’s snowing. The wind is knocking me around. But I rejoice. And I’m also more on the lookout. People. I’ll get out of here somehow. This chilly land will let me go. Won’t eat me up, suck me in.
More crosses, in a row. I walk between them, lift my eyes, and, good, my head doesn’t spin.
The blot turns out to be a smallish hill covered in trees, bushes. I have to tramp through the crosses to reach the foot of the hill. Little crosses, big crosses, a massive pole, six feet tall, crossed with two smaller ones. Next to it a tiny cross of spruce branches with a faded pink ribbon fluttering. Surrounded with stuffed animals. A bear, a monkey, a couple more. Tattered, I guess from the wind and rain. They’re weighted down with stones. A few more tiny crosses.
I think I wailed. Out loud, which is just reckless. Another graveyard.
I push back the branches of the first trees. There are crosses everywhere here too. Also stones, some with inscriptions on them. In Cyrillic. And in my alphabet too. Names. A Jewish stone engraved with a star — I know that from back home.
I make my way slowly uphill through the crosses. There are also names carved on the trees. Some of the scars are grown over, others shine clearly against the bark. Not a human footprint anywhere, though. No signs of dog paws or goat hooves, nothing.
Even if I did dare to leave the hill of crosses and go back out there on the plain, the wind would’ve swept me away. Tiny, stinging hailstones whip across the landscape. I make my way through the crosses, they’re even thicker here than the trees, up to the top.
There’s a man standing there. I slip down into the snow, behind a rock.
Beard, quilted coat, knee-high boots. Looks like one of the guys from Arthur’s partisan outfit. But there’s no weapon in his hands. Or on his back. He’s holding a sack. Fishes some kind of shiny trinket or something out of it. Flings it into the snow among the crosses. Whistles to himself. Moves on. Towards me.
I slither away across a shallow grave. Slip behind a tree and slide down the ridge. Then I hear something. In the gorge, the ravine. A horse whinnying. I see a hefty woman in yellow overalls. Shielding her eyes with her hand, searching in the drizzle, looking up, towards me. The only thing I’m holding on to, unforgivably, is some slender tree roots. They give way and I go tumbling down, landing at her feet. So Ula and I meet again.
We compare stories about that night at the Falvarek. She remembers it well. The rat-filled courtyard. The city under martial law. So what’s the situation now? I ask. She says the president has probably crushed the opposition. But they’re still fighting in Minsk, and probably elsewhere too. That’s why they’re staying off the roads. But there hasn’t been a signal for days now. She says she’ll explain all that later.
She finds it funny that this time she’s the one helping me to my feet.
Yep, we’re both inostrantsi.
And colleagues besides.
This is Black Hill, Ula says. They built it to cover up the burial site. It’s actually a huge knoll.
I nod.
She’s glad to see me! Apart from that, she doesn’t see anything cheerful about our situation.
Ula’s in a grim mood. But I’m actually happy.
She isn’t fat. She’s big, hefty. Much taller than Maruška. Wrinkles on her face and forehead. I thought maybe she was just tired, but she’s a bit on the old side. Fair hair, darker than Sara’s. It actually looks nice with the yellow coveralls.
I’m glad I found her, that’s for sure.
We lie in a frayed tent on our bellies, heads poking out. A stretch of the plain shines white through the trees. I don’t look over there. For a while it doesn’t rain or snow, which is very rare, Ula explains. A tin pot of water heats up on the fire. There’s a stream nearby, she says. Nothing to eat.
Some guys with a fire about ten metres away are stuffing their faces with bacon. Bread. I recognize the bearded guy I ran into in the forest. Sitting there with his pal. The two of them look almost alike.
Fyodor and Yegor, Ula says. They broke the GPS, idiots!
She hates them. They belong to a group of partisans that the Ministry of Tourism assigned to her expedition.
Our trip was supposed to end in Khatyn, she says. That’s where we were supposed to bring the samples. But those bastards said they saw a fire and wouldn’t go any farther. So we stayed here.
The other attachés, as the Ministry called the partisans, had long since run away. Took what they could, destroyed the rest.
According to Ula, they’d been sabotaging her work ever since the political situation stabilized. Apparently the opposition was really taking a beating.
I tell her about myself. After trudging around on the plain, I’m in seventh heaven now, tucked cosily in a sleeping bag and safe inside a tent. I tell her about my foreign expertise, my trip to this country. And the fire at the museum. Not everything, just some of it.
The partisans weren’t lying, I say. Khatyn is gone now!
I don’t mention Alex and Maruška.
Yes, of course, Ula says. The Devil’s Workshop, that’s why I’m here too.
She shows me the samples. The ones that didn’t fall in the snow or get lost along the way. She had twice, no, three times as many!
She’s an egghead, a researcher and a field worker.
The best in her field!
That’s why they chose her out of everyone else in Berlin.
But now it’s over.
I turn around. Squint into the gloom of the tent to where she’s pointing. Crates, boxes. But not old-fashioned ones like Kagan had, all battered and made of wood. These are smart plastic things. Double-sealed lids. Blue, red, yellow — almost too much for my eyes to take.
Imported, huh?
Mm-hm.
All of her boxes and plastic bags, with bones and rags in various stages of decay, are stored at the back of the tent. Behind our backs, piled up in a wall. A wall against the wind.
And I can take as many blankets and sleeping bags as I want.
They’re left over from her colleagues and co-workers.
We bundle up and wait till the water’s ready for tea.
Talk back and forth in our languages.
I guess I fell asleep first.
I open my eyes, feel it, can’t see. Ula’s holding my hand. We’re warm. I hear a horse snorting. Didn’t get up to look, though. I’ll fix things in the morning, I promise myself. In the night I hear a scraping, probably the horse rubbing against a branch, clicking its hoof against a stone.
In the morning the two men are gone. Along with the horse. Ula sits outside the tent, a loaf of bread in her hand. They must have left it for her. She scrambles into the back of the tent, by the samples, crawls under a pile of blankets and stays there.
I go to check out the camp. We’re hidden from the wind by a gorge, a small, narrow ravine carved into the hillside.
I go on through the trees. There are crosses all over the place. And those stones with writing on them. I find the wagon right away. The horse was standing right here, to judge from the tracks. Maybe they both rode it. If I went down to the foot of the hill, I’d be able to see their tracks stretching away across the plain.
There are more boxes under the tarpaulin on the wooden wagon. I open the one closest to me, a red one, little by little, but there are no tsantsas, only skulls. One has a bullet hole in the forehead so big you could stick your finger through it. I give the skull a rap with my knuckles and put it back.