No supplies, no weapons, no clothing, nothing in the wagon but samples. We’ll leave it here, I say to myself. Screw the samples. Let ’em rot. We’re getting out of here. We’ll make it to some road or other. We’ll be together. That’s what I thought. But then the purga hit.
The next thing I know there are leaves and twigs flying at me, the trees shake and groan in the wind, the snow whips in off the plain, suddenly it gets hard to breathe, the air in my lungs begins to hurt, a six-foot branch tears loose and goes sailing over my head. I crawl back inside the tent.
There’s a storm, I say. Ula sits, leaning against the boxes.
It’s a purga, she says. We won’t get out of here now. I’ve got two buckets of water.
The ravine protected the tent. Still, I almost couldn’t poke my head out. The wind instantly glued my mouth shut, my eyelids together. I couldn’t even stand up outside. The wagon would’ve been blown to pieces. I imagined the broken crates, bones flying through the air, skulls smashing to bits on the rocks.
So, Ula. You’re the expert. How long will it last?
The last time a blizzard hit, she said, she was locked up for eight days. With a bunch of co-workers, food and drink, inside a cabin. They even had a guitar and board games. They were collecting samples in Siberia at the time. Soon it’ll start to snow, and once the blizzard’s over, then come the frosts. Unless somebody turns up, we don’t have much of a chance, Ula says.
At night, or whenever we think it’s night, we sleep. Squeezed together. We wake up. Eat some bread.
I have a dream about the Spider. It’s inside me. Melting. Poisoning me. All the data and contacts spill into my guts.
She’s sitting next to me with her eyes open.
She tells me about her work.
Her team was selected for reconnaissance of burial sites in one of the regions of Belarus that was severely affected by radiation.
When Chernobyl blew up, the fallout contaminated a third of Belarus, she said. Radiation genocide, they call it. They trudged around the graves all day in hot weather and pouring rain. The locals from the village were ready to spit on them. They all knew where the skeletons were, but it was taboo. They said, When you dig up an old grave, you break the ribs of the living.
The mayor of one of the villages said, Why are you digging there? Leave them alone. Us too. Their things went missing at night. They spent hours excavating an area only to have somebody come and fill it all back in. They suspected the village youths. One day Ula went shopping in town and had to convince the crowd that gathered around her that she was Dutch. Not German. Meanwhile the victims had obviously been shot by the NKVD.
How do you know?
From the bullets. And other details.
Did you know that to this day the cancer rate for children in contaminated areas is still twenty times higher than anywhere else in Europe? They have to import their food.
Ula, that’s awful!
Her co-workers dropped out one by one. Work injuries, diarrhoea from bad water. Depression. And then the problems started with the workers from the ministry. A lot of samples were going missing.
I tap her on the shoulder. Offer her two blues from my pocket. She swallows them and takes a drink of water.
In Oktyabrsk we found graves with hundreds of people in them. They were executed either naked or in summer dresses that had rotted completely. The bullets and cartridges came from every type of weapon imaginable. Apart from that there was nothing. No identification papers, no coins sewn into linings, no shoes stuffed with newspaper, no little girls’ hairslides, nothing at all, no evidence whatsoever.
What about teeth? I say. I remembered Kagan’s cellar. Or cave or whatever it was.
Teeth repaired and unrepaired, Ula says. She waves at me not to interrupt. I take a drink of water too.
We tested the skeletons using a modified carbon-dating method to try to determine when the massacre took place. Well, I wouldn’t attach too much weight to it, she says, then tells me anyway. If the grave’s full of civilians — Poles, say, or Russians — then there aren’t any differences. If they were Wehrmacht, though, or Jewish, then the differences are distinct. But don’t tell anyone about this. Genetics doesn’t have a very good reputation.
I won’t, I promise.
It was hell. I don’t know how many times I stood there, clueless, scraping around the edge of the pit, in the middle of the night in the rain, wondering. Was it Soviets killing Soviets, or Germans murdering Soviets and Jews, or Germans and Soviets killing other Soviets? Then on top of that, consider that here they were divided into Belarusians and Russians and Ukrainians and Ruthenians, and then of course there are also Poles and Balts, and, pardon me, but you are what?
Czech.
Uh-huh. I’m not familiar with them. Who’s in those graves? A key question. Here in the East they didn’t keep records like we did, nowhere near it. Even after all these years, the locals still won’t say a word.
I guess they have their reasons.
It’s a terrible mess! In any case, without a plan for the restoration of burial sites, Belarus will never get into the EU. Even if the dictatorship falls. What do they think? You can’t have pits of corpses lying around in Europe: don’t be silly! This all has to be cleaned up.
I don’t say a word. They cleaned up Terezín all right. The eggheads.
But, Ula, what does it matter in the end who’s in those graves?
It matters a lot! There’s money at stake here. Who’s going to pay for it? The restoration? The specialized teams? All over Europe they’ve got flags flying at memorial sites. In the East they’ve got ravens walking around pecking at skulls. Dreadful.
It was the devil’s workshop, all right!
Ula reaches over to the wall of boxes and hands me a canvas sack. I reach inside. Buttons. Medals. I feel the heft of a swastika belt buckle. Skull insignias! Lots of them.
Fyodor and Yegor and their cronies, Ula says in my ear. We caught the two of them walking around in the moonlight, tossing SS buttons in the pits. Why would they do that? They wanted Germany to pay for the restoration. But that isn’t right!
Ula burst out sobbing and burrowed back into the blankets. I stuck the sack back with the boxes. Took a drink, broke off a piece of bread. The blue pills kept me going. Outside the wind whistled and it was probably snowing too. Inside our tent we were warm. The ravine shielded us. Ula tells some awful stories, but so does everyone around here. I didn’t actually feel that bad.
Then her hand slid out from under the blankets. Her nails were black and broken. I guess from digging. She took my hand and pulled. I was happy to burrow into the blankets with her.
Tears were running down her face.
You know, I’m also one of the living whose ribs get broken by digging, she says.
What?
Yeah, I was a little girl when I found the pictures. My mum kept them behind the dresser. My dad was here during the war. He was a captain in the Wehrmacht. I’m less than fifty, so don’t go getting the wrong idea. But my dad was the youngest captain in the entire army. And what I saw in those pictures! Dead villagers. Next to my dad. And he was smiling. My mum said they had liberated a village from the Bolsheviks and found them there. Yeah, right. I almost went out of my mind.
What did he say?
He hung himself when I was still little. Never said a thing to me. When I went to school, I started reading all those memoirs, watching movies. Then I went to the archives. I thought I’d go out of my mind from the horror. It wasn’t even about my dad any more, just the whole thing.
That it happened?
Yeah. Once you realize just how much horror is possible, and the fact settles into your brain, you’re a different person from everyone else. It stays inside you. Like a wound that won’t heal. I used to wonder how my friends could go to school and play ping-pong and go on dates. We need to scream, we need to stop the evil. I was obsessed. Wherever I looked I saw evil. In everything. Soon I didn’t have any friends left.