She left her desk and went to the coffee machine.
A spider’s web of trails had been made.
If, if, the call to Sarov had been answered as few as twenty-five kilometres from the city, the triggers would not have reacted … Mistakes had been made. The young woman’s messages and attachments were now inside a building in London of monstrous ugliness on the south side of the river Thames, VBX to all who worked there.
The trees moved with the wind. The pines had been planted in regimented lines and filled rectangular shapes, apparently the work of a woodsman with a character of parade-ground orderliness, and they grew ram-rod straight. Among them, making a defiant chaos, were wild birches that lacked the strength of the pines, and were forced to grow tall and too fast if they were to find natural light. They were spindly and many had been bent almost double by the winter snow. The canopies of the pines wavered, moved with that wind, but they were planted sufficiently close to diminish the daylight on the floor of needles. Reuven Weissberg sat quietly among the trees, awaiting the call.
A light rain fell, but the wind was from the east, from across the river, and the tight canopies deflected the dribbling water. Little cascades came down among the birches, but where he sat his head and the shoulders of his jacket stayed dry. It was a small matter to him whether he was soaked, merely damp or dry, and his mind was far from considerations of his personal comfort. His thoughts were of what had happened here more than six decades ago, and the stories he had been told, which he knew by heart. He heard the bright songs of small birds, and the cry of an owl … That was no surprise to him because the place had long been known — before the events that had made the stories he could recite — as the Forest of the Owls. The surprise was only that the owl had called, perhaps to its mate, during the day, in the morning. That small birds sang was a surprise too. It was said, he had been told, that birds did not come, refused to nest and breed in a place with a history such as this. They flew between the lower branches of the birches, perched precariously and called for company, then flew again; he watched them. It was strange to him that they should show such joy here, as if they had no sense of where they were, did not understand that the misery of mass death haunted this place.
Behind him, a mobile phone had rung, had been answered. Then the silence had cloaked him and the trees again.
In that quiet, he could imagine. Not imagine Mikhail, who was fifty metres clear of him and would be standing against the trunk of the broadest pine he could find, a pile of littered cigarette stubs at his feet. Or imagine the screams and struggles of the Albanian Mikhail would bring to the warehouse the next afternoon. Or imagine the consequences of the call that Mikhail had taken.
He seemed to see them, figments of his thoughts that came to life. They were in flight. The heroism of some and the panic of many had shaped his existence. He was their creature. Figures drifted, either fast or painfully slowly, between the steady trunks of the pines and the wavering stems of the birches. They were clear in his eyes. He thought he could have reached out, touched them. The sight of them was agony to him. In the peace around him, he could hear also the guns, the dogs and the sirens.
This was Reuven Weissberg’s heritage, here, in the Forest of the Owls. He did not know that a satellite photograph of this mess of farmed and wild trees had been sent as part of an attachment to a building known as VBX, and that the photograph had picked out a grey-white shallow mound. Such a mound was in front of him, perhaps eighty metres across, but near-hidden from his view by the pines and birches. To him, a story that has a beginning is only of value if it has an end. He knew that story from its start to its finish.
He had been told it so many times. It was the blood that ran in his veins. He was the child of that story, knew each word, each line and each episode. As a small boy he had wept on his grandmother’s shoulder as she had told it to him.
Now he told it to himself, as she would have done, from the beginning. The trees rustled above him, the rain fell and the birds sang. It was Anna’s story, and in his lifetime he would never be free of it, or want to be.
It was early in the morning of a summer day in 1942 that we were ordered to be ready to move from Wlodawa. Most of our people had already been taken in the previous four months, but we did not know where they had gone. We no longer had access to our homes, but had been made to live inside and around the synagogue. That area was fenced off and we were separated from the Polish people — already I had learned that we were Jews, were different, were subhuman.
I did not know where we were going … If there were any among us who did, they did not share it. I believed everything I was told. We were told that we could bring one bag with us, and in the last hour before our departure each of us — young and old, man and woman — filled a bag or a case, and some of the older men sewed gold coins into the linings of their overcoats and some of the older women stiched diamonds or other jewels from bracelets, necklaces and brooches into slits they had made in their clothing.
Always there was little food at the synagogue, and that morning I do not remember whether we ate. I think we started off hungry. Yes, hungry and already tired.
When we were formed up and counted, about a hundred of us, the officer said that we were going to walk to a transit camp. There, selections would be made, and then we would move to new homes in the east — in the Ukraine part of Russia. We walked, and left behind our synagogue. As we went through the town we passed the houses where some of our people had lived. Washed sheets hung from windows and the doors on to the street were open, and we realized that our homes had been occupied by Polish people while we had been kept at the synagogue.
I walked near the back of our group. I was with my father and mother, my two younger brothers and my elder sister, with my father’s parents, my mother’s father, three uncles and two aunts. We wore the best clothes we still had. At the front of us was an officer on a horse. I remember it — a white horse. Alongside us were Ukrainian soldiers who walked, but there were Germans at the back on horses. We crossed the bridge over the Wlodawka, near to where it flows into the Bug river, and then we came to the village of Orchowek. The reaction of the villagers, as we passed them, was a great shock to me … but for many months we had been confined inside the wood fences around the synagogue, and it was nearly two years since I had seen Polish people.
People were lined on either side of the road, as if they had been warned that we were coming. They abused us, threw mud and rocks at us, spat on us. When I was a child, before the war had started, before we were sent to the synagogue, I had worked often when there was no school in my father’s shop where he repaired clocks and watches. Among those on the side of the road, I recognized some who had come to my father’s shop. They had thanked him for the work he had done, or had begged him to accept late payment. I did not understand why now they hated us. A bucket of waste and urine was hurled at my father. Some of it splashed the silk scarf I had been given for my eighteenth birthday, two weeks before. I looked at the Germans on their horses, hoping they would give us protection, but they were laughing.
Beyond Orchowek, where the road goes east and towards Sobibor village, the officer on the white horse led us on to a forest track close to the railway line, the one that goes south to Chelm. I remember also that in the late summer of 1942 it had rained heavily. The track we were now on was a river of mud. I was one of many women and girls who had worn their best shoes and one of many who lost a shoe and had to walk barefoot through big puddles.