Filip dropped his head into his hands. He had noticed Savko; there was something intriguing in his perpetual scowl, something that appealed to Filip’s own guarded nature. They might have been about the same age, but Savko already had the outsized hands of a farmer or laborer, so unlike Filip’s own. He looked at his hands now, revolted by the weeping scabs, the cracked nails, the skin caked with coal dust and grime, which no amount of washing seemed to remove.
I wish we could have talked. He thought he might have said the words aloud, but no one paid him any attention; the subject had moved from politics to the comparative qualities of the camp’s women.
Savko had taken his midday meal with other men from his camp. Talking while working was nearly impossible, and what language would they speak? Russian, which the new Yugoslavs avoided with visceral hatred? Serbian, of which Filip knew only a few words, was even worse, sure to stir up ancient rivalries. German? It seemed absurd. Yet he was sure they could have found a common tongue. If only he had tried.
What pushed a man to this extreme, to commit an act so senseless? That cupful of urine in the vat was not sabotage; it made no difference whatever to the quality of the product, would make no wall crumble or foundation crack. It was either an irrepressible childish prank or simple, insane suicide.
Savko’s body lay on the floor until the evening of the next day, gradually sifted over with a thick layer of stone dust that filled his open mouth and powdered his chestnut hair, leaving only his eyes to glisten, unseeing, in the gloom of the cavernous hall. Dust penetrated every crease of his stained brown shirt, the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular hairless arms until they, too, were covered, along with his torn worker’s pants and bare feet.
The task of removing the corpse fell to two of his campmates. “Where to?” they asked.
The SS captain never looked up from the evening roll call. “Into the furnace.”
5
MORE WORKERS ARRIVED; the men from the new transport replaced most of the women at the plant. Ksenia and Galina were assigned to the camp kitchen. Ksenia was on familiar ground. Rising an hour before dawn to prepare the officers’ breakfast was no hardship at all. A good cook, she knew how to work wonders with the simplest ingredients, how to compensate for shortages. Several of the guards noticed, and rewarded her on the sly: two extra potatoes here, a sliver of hard cheese, the uneaten crust of an officer’s bread.
“Don’t eat the workers’ bread,” she cautioned her family. “There’s sawdust in it.” She tried by sleight of hand, she told them, to avoid adding the pulverized wood shavings to the dough, but there were too many eyes and no one could be trusted. “It is indigestible,” she said. “It will kill you, in time.”
“Mama.” Galina’s voice was barely audible, her head lowered over a bucket of half-rotted potatoes she was peeling for the inmates’ dinner. “They want me to go to the officers’ club, to wait on tables. I would have better food and a bed in a special dormitory.”
“That will never happen,” her mother vowed, bringing her cleaver down on the mess of cabbage in front of her with enough force to make the table shake.
When they came for her, two men, one holding a frightened young woman by the arm, the other reaching for Galina, Ksenia put down her knife and stepped between them. “My daughter is a respectable married woman, with a husband in this camp. You will have to kill me before you take her.”
“That would not be difficult,” the younger guard sneered, reaching for his pistol.
“Wait,” the older one said, remembering, perhaps, the previous day’s turnips flavored with a hint of bacon and parsley. His own mother had never thought to do that. What other magic could this stubborn Russian woman do in the kitchen? “I saw livelier girls at the factory. All they need is a bath. But you”—he pointed at Galina—“you will report to Herr Doktor Blau. He has work for you.”
The camp matron who escorted Galina to the dentist’s house told her he’d been recently widowed, perhaps to explain his taciturn disposition. Herr Doktor Blau was well into middle age; his creased and jowly face was not unkind, although he seldom smiled. His wife had been much younger, Galina saw from the framed picture on his desk. They stood in front of a park carousel, she laughing, one hand holding a wide-brimmed straw hat to her head, the other pushing down the skirt of her summer dress against a playful breeze. The dentist, at her side, looking at her with bemused admiration, the painted eye of a carousel horse just above his head, two small girls aloft on the horse’s back.
He said nothing about his wife’s death, and Galina did not ask. The cottage stood a short distance from the camp, along the road the truck traveled to deliver workers to the factory, dropping her in the early morning and picking her up ten hours later. After a month spent toiling in the cement plant, and another laboring in the camp kitchen, this work was easy. She bathed the three-year-old twin girls, combed and braided their hair, helped them to dress, prepared their meals. Unless the weather was stormy, their father expected them to play outdoors, in the little fenced backyard, before they came in for a bowl of hot soup and a long afternoon nap. She cleaned the house and did the laundry, picked up their wet boots and soggy mittens with a smile, trying to decipher their cheerful chatter of southern German laced with baby talk.
“Listen for the siren,” the dentist said on his way out to the black car waiting at the gate. He spoke to her in clear, slow German. “If there is an air raid, take the girls to the basement and stay there until all is clear. Understand?”
She understood, wondered where that black car took him several times a week—a vehicle that, as far as she knew, never portended anything good. Other days, he received patients at home, the whine of the drill from the examining room setting her own teeth on edge.
Afternoons, while the girls slept, she starched and ironed his shirts and their dresses. He wouldn’t let her press his trousers, said he liked them just so, preferred to do them himself. It was amusing to watch him at the ironing board, bent close to his task, absorbed in placing each knife-edge crease with absolute precision. But she never dared laugh, just busied herself with the dinner they would eat after she had gone.
The morning the beggar came she was alone in the kitchen, washing the breakfast dishes. It had rained, a quick, drenching spring shower that left the yard too wet for the girls to go out until later. She could hear them twittering together like a pair of little birds, playing dolls in the dining room. Herr Doktor was out.
The man appeared out of nowhere, popping up at the open window like a circus performer on a trampoline. He was so close she could see the lice crawling in the stubble of his shaved head. He pulled a bundle from under the shirt of his striped pajamas, a yellow star hanging by a thread just below the collar. He held up a short-sleeved red dress with big white buttons, a clothespin dangling from one shoulder. “Nice, for you. You buy?” he croaked at her in rapid German. His voice was high, rasping, painful to hear.
Galina tried to scream, but no sound came. His collarbones were sharp as razor blades under the filthy cloth of his threadbare shirt. Huge scabby hands hung from his matchstick wrists; the toothless, gaping mouth smelled of rot. How could anyone so decimated still walk and talk? When had he last seen food? She reached for the nearest thing, the unwashed pan from this morning’s oatmeal, several spoonfuls of cold cereal stuck to the bottom. She thrust it at the man and slammed the window shut.
She heard the pan crash to the ground. Footsteps, running. Dogs. A stifled wail. And silence, broken by the call of a crow, raucous in its sudden vulgarity.