One day Sara said we should take a trip to Prague to buy souvenirs, so we’d have something to sell the occasional tourists who wandered our way. The cloud was slowly lifting from her mind. Plus she was the practical type.
We were doing brilliantly with Lebo at the computer hunting for contacts, running fundraising campaigns, and sounding the alarm, but, maybe because she was a newcomer and saw the situation through the eyes of an outsider, Sara insisted that if we could attract more people to the town, it would be a big help against the bulldozers.
You have to bring in tourists, get the world’s attention.
Only if the eyes of the world are on Terezín can we begin the process of revitalizing the town, Sara said.
And revitalizing means revival, or even rebirth, she explained.
Sara had studied history, ethnography, literature, and religion. All of our students, before they came here, had studied a wide range of fields. Everyone except me. I’d only gone to military school, and even then not the whole thing.
Sara knew how to paint as well, and one evening as I was pounding away on the keyboard to Lebo’s dictation, we were interrupted by her cry, but it was a cry of triumph. She sat down on the bunk and showed us a T-shirt with a picture of a man she said was the writer Franz Kafka. She had bought it in Prague and added the word Theresienstadt to it, plus a gallows and the words If Franz Kafka hadn’t died, they would have killed him here. This could really catch on! Sara crowed. She wouldn’t dream of taking it to a printer’s, she said. We could produce the T-shirts ourselves, using her stencil, handcrafted and artistic, that was the only way it made sense.
Lebo and I nodded OK. We trusted her. She was from the world, after all.
Sara and I got on really well from the start. When she first arrived, consumed by sadness, wandering around the ruins, her brain clouded, I made sure that she didn’t fall down a shaft or get swept away by the current that wound its way through the catacombs, that she didn’t go too far into the old armoury, where a brick from the weathered walls might fall on her head. Sara had become used to me, and to my animals. I showed her my little shed, and she didn’t even mind Bojek and his head butts.
Sara loved my animals and I’m pretty sure I was in love with her. I doubt she felt the same about me, but now I’ll never know. Either way, we did share a few sudden outbursts of love — a roll in the grass was simple enough. And that’s all there is to say about it. Anyone who goes on about that sort of stuff in public should be put up against a wall, just like in the old days.
When evening came, we got up and drove the herd home. People teased us of course. The thing is, the dust from the bricks on the ramparts gets in your hair, in your clothes, into your skin. Everyone can see it on you when you roll around in the grass.
In Prague we stayed in a hotel. We had plenty of money in those days, so much we didn’t even count it, and our trips to Prague were for business, so they were paid for out of the money that gushed from Lebo’s contacts.
Whenever we needed funds, Lebo, usually accompanied by Sara, and sometimes by other girls as well, would make a trip to the bank in Prague and withdraw the required amount. Every now and then, of course, the girls needed a little something, as Lebo used to say, so they would also spend some time in the department stores. I didn’t pay any attention to money. Sara took care of whatever we needed for the computer room, and also chose my clothes.
She bought the T-shirts and other souvenirs, planned our promotional brochures, bought the crates of red wine for our celebrations. I mainly just carried stuff, lugging backpacks around the city with her. We travelled by taxi — Sara taught me to do that too.
Our room in the hotel tucked away off Old Town Square was filled with Sara’s scent. It was quite unlike the next hotel room I would be in.
In Prague there are more streets than you can count. Our hotel is on a long, narrow, crooked street, like all the rest. There is the occasional piece of dog shit and rubbish on the cracked pavement. I don’t feel at home here.
Terezín is a military town. It’s laid out in right angles. That’s why you can find your way around there, country boy. Sara is explaining to me why I would be lost here without her. Prague is medieval, so it’s convoluted, it’s twisted and contorted, she says.
We sleep here in this little room, organizing our purchases, holding each other, talking. This is where we stay on our business expeditions.
You know, Terezín actually reminds me a lot of Venice, Sara says, leaning nonchalantly against my shoulder. Stacks of Kafka T-shirts are drying on the floor around us. We got soaked in a downpour, now I’m breathing in the black damp of Prague rain from her hair. You know, St Mark’s and the gondolas? That’s how your government-backed Monument looks in the eyes of the world, but right nearby there are normal people, living behind peeling walls. She shakes her head. Normal, right. All over Western Europe there are mass graves from the Second World War, carefully tended and maintained, whereas in Terezín, amazingly, you’ve got Mr Hamáček selling kohlrabi on a slaughter ground, Mrs Bouchal and Mrs Fridrich swearing at their permanently jammed laundry press on the very same spot where trains used to leave for the extermination camps in the East. When you were kids, you played in morgues and felt each other up in bunkers! It’s a nightmare, you’re all perverted and you don’t even know it. In the West they wouldn’t allow kids to go in places like that. It isn’t allowed here either! I say. But you don’t give a damn in this country, she objects. Yeah, well, why should I care whether it’s allowed or not, just as long as I don’t get caught, I say. Sara shakes her head, we talk, a little later we go to sleep.
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.