We do not want to take too many Jews,
but in the circumstances, we do not want to say so.
Departmental memo to Prime Minister Mackenzie King, 1938
Good, says Louis. But one seven-year-old witness isn’t enough.
She calls him from time to time to report, hoping for something beyond their present chilly truce. Let there be peace, even a shaky peace, she thinks, and he does seem to be thawing slightly. But now that she knows about this unexpected blind spot in his character, she worries she might stumble onto something else, put her finger on some other sensitive point lying under his skin. She is determined not to show this, though, she tries to carry on in the same way as before. He will pick it up in a second if she seems to be humouring him or tiptoeing around him, and even the slightest indication that he needs tactful handling would be fatal.
I know we need more, she says. We’re working on it.
Strictly speaking, the investigator is working on it; she is hampered by the lack of language, the local connections, how utterly foreign she is. But she can see that he is working hard. The shadows around his eyes are heavier, and his face is tense, cagey, hair a little unruly, in need of a cut. He has spoken to the people who talked to the archaeologist, at least the ones who are still alive and not senile. He has spoken to the people they have suggested, and the ones they have suggested in turn. In the area near Kurapaty, he has resorted to stopping old people on the street — his head whips around when he sees anyone white-haired, anyone stooped over. Did you hear anything? Did you see anything? Do you know anyone who did? He follows up one name after another, attempting to run rumours down to their roots. What do you remember?
We knew about it, says one man in his eighties. Most of us. How could we not? The crack and boom of the guns in the night, the vans, the dogs. It was something unspoken, that lay beneath the surface. We kept it there, kept it silently so that it would be in the shadows, less dangerous.
But were you there? Did you see anything?
No. But we knew about it.
Hearsay. Even hearsay multiplied a hundred times is still hearsay.
We must face these facts, says the investigator. Most of the witnesses were shot on the spot. The rest were NKVD, not likely to come forward. But I will find you a witness. I promise this. I will find you someone.
And he does.
···
Rafael Benyaminov. His face is crimped with tiny lines and pleats, but his eyes are keen, discerning.
Arthritis, he says, the joints on his hands and wrists knobby and swollen.
Treskovshchina, Minsk voblast. A home for the elderly. His room is small and stuffy, shared with another man. Faded photographs on every surface — a woman with a lovely pale face in a black, high-necked dress, two boys and a girl in woollen stockings, a picture of men and women standing in front of a house in the snow — the likenesses marking them as brothers, sisters, children. An old radio, a pink tin ashtray, a package of baked milk biscuits beside the bed.
The investigator has brought him cigarettes, and he takes out two, puts the rest behind the radio.
There is a sitting room we can use, says the KDB officer stiffly. I have arranged for it.
The room is on the main floor of the building, the walls blue, armchairs with a pattern of ferns. It smells of laundry soap and leeks, and on the wall is a picture, a still life of plums spilling out of a bowl. A set of playing cards, a box of dominoes, a pair of reading glasses are scattered around, a half-done puzzle on an end table.
Nearly all women here, says the investigator. A country of old women.
Polina positions the microphones, the recorder, her dark hair pulled into a knot, her movements fluid and quick. Her dress is sleeveless, her arms angular, white, a vaccination mark on one. She glances at the KDB officer, wrinkles her nose, and salutes with mock formality. He nods tightly, but the back of his neck begins to redden, and she laughs.
These two. Leah has spent so much time with them now, with the investigator, that they seem oddly close, oddly familiar, even though she really knows so little about them. What she knows, though, she knows intimately — the noise Polina makes in her throat when she is exasperated, her irreverence. The way she conveys to the officer that she does not believe in him — or at least who he thinks he is — but does not necessarily hold it against him. The way the officer cracks his knuckles, his fastidiousness. The state of the investigator’s stubble in relation to how much he had to drink the night before, his persistent air of reproof.
But she knows, too, how deceptive these things can be — the irreverent Polina has a subtle centre of gravity, the young officer has his hard side, the investigator nurses his hoard of aspirations.
Time to begin, he says now. Polina puts on her headset, and as always becomes brisk, efficient, starting her singsong introduction.
The man — a retired music teacher, he says — launches into his story immediately, the words running away from him.
My parents were well off, my grandfather had been a merchant and my father was the director of a wine co-operative. We lived in the High Market area of Minsk and they were active in society, my mother in the Jewish Ladies Club and distributing food to the poor, my father in the State Jewish Library, in a burial society, in our synagogue where he sang in the choir. My mother would have dinner parties where we would listen to concert broadcasts or readings by poets — Izzy Kharik, Avrom Sutzkever.
My older brother was a talented cellist and when he was twenty, he became a cello teacher. He was well-known and had many students for his lessons. He was the eldest son and I was the youngest — there were three sisters after him, so there were eight years between us, but he was always kind to me. He would pay me a kopeck or two to copy out sheets of music for his students, take me for walks in the botanical gardens near Chelyuskintsev Park on the Sabbath, buy me ices. He taught me the cello as well, although I did not have his talent.
In 1938, when I was twelve, three NKVD officers came to our house, and arrested my brother, my father, and me. They confiscated our prayer books, our tallisim, back copies of Der Veker, Oktyabr, sheet music. They claimed that we were using music lessons to spread anti-revolution sentiment and to procure money and support for the Jewish Labour Bund. This was nonsense — my father tried to stay away from politics, and my brother and I were only interested in music.
They took us to the NKVD headquarters in Minsk and locked us in a cell. It was very crowded and some of the people were ill, or had open wounds — the smell was foul. My mother came to see us the same day, crying, and told us she had called everyone she knew, everyone who might have any influence. The ones who were Jewish were willing to help, but there was little they could do. Even the rabbi said that he had no influence with the NKVD. The ones who were not Jewish, she said, were suddenly aloof, uninterested.
She brought her brother, my uncle, who was an advocate — they had bribed the officers to let them see us.
My uncle told us that he argued with the NKVD captain for our release, but the man had rejected his pleas, and then threatened to arrest him as well. He had also spoken to a Party official he knew, but was told that his hands were tied, he could not intervene.
Could not or would not? said my father bitterly.
Does it matter? said my uncle.
But we will keep trying, said my mother, her face working. We will devote every minute, every ounce of strength, every kopeck we have to getting you out.
I remember the way she said that — every minute, every ounce of strength, every kopeck. Then she began to cry again, and kissed us through the bars.
After a day, a guard removed me from the cell. At least they are releasing you from this hell, my father said, looking relieved. Locking up a child.
Instead, the guard took me to an interrogation room, where an officer beat me on and off for three days, demanding that I confess to certain crimes. He ordered me to say that the sheet music was coded with Bundist messages, he insisted that I name my father and brother as co-conspirators.
You are a musician? he said. I will make sure you never play anything again.
When I still refused to confess, he broke the fingers in my hand.
He holds up a wrinkled hand now to show his middle and ring fingers are crooked.
I was very frightened and in great pain. After a few days, I confessed to being a Trotskyite, something that was not true. The officer brought in another man to write this down, to have me sign it. But I refused to implicate my father and brother. In the end, though, they charged them with associating with Trotskyites — in this case, myself. I was horrified at how I had been tricked, and tried to withdraw my confession, but they ignored me.
His voice wavers at this point, and he hastily swallows some tea.
They put me back in the cell, and one evening they told us we had been found guilty by a troika, a panel of three officials that made these decisions. We did not have the chance to address the troika, to use an advocate, or to defend ourselves in any way. Then they loaded all the prisoners in the cells into vans, and drove us to a forest clearing on the edge of Minsk. There were two shallow ditches there, and they told us we would be digging them deeper as part of our sentences for forced labour. They lined us up on the edges of the ditches, telling us they were waiting for more shovels. Then suddenly they opened fire on us, bullets flying past.
The KDB officer tries to interrupt him, but the man rattles on.
A second, less than a second before the shooting, I had bent over to slap an insect off my leg, and the bullets only grazed my shoulder. I fell into the ditch, however, because another man fell against me, and I was pushed into it. He ended up on top of me, twitching for a second or two, coughing, and then becoming still. Blood from his head was running onto mine, but I was rigid with fright. From where I was, I could hear the officers walking around, shooting anyone who was alive. They missed me because I was covered by the dead man on top of me, and because I lay completely still.
Then dirt began coming down around me, they were filling in the ditch. I thought I would end up dying anyway, suffocating from the weight of the man’s body, from the dirt. But his body fell in a way that created a small space around my nose and mouth, and I was able to breathe for a short period of time.
The dirt muffled the sounds after that, but I felt the ground rumble when the vans started up again, and then drove off. With my one good hand, I clawed my way out from under the dead man, out of the earth, and into the open air. I made my way slowly to my uncle’s house, where my aunt washed my wounds and put salve and bandages on them. I could not bear to see my mother, to tell her my father and brother were dead. And to tell her it was my fault. After a few days, they said it was no longer safe to keep me there, and they sent me to a cousin’s house in Brest — they would tell my mother after I was gone.
In Brest, I changed my name and over the next two years, as my beard began to come in, I let it grow to cover as much of my face as possible. I was fourteen when the Germans invaded, and I ran away from my cousin’s house and joined a partisan camp. I spent the years from 1941 to 1944 as a partisan, trying to destroy German supply and fuel depots and attacking communication lines. In the end, I am not sure how much damage we were able to do, but we did what we could.
After the war, I became a cello teacher myself, in honour of my brother and father. I used my crooked fingers to hold the bow, my good hand for the fingering.
He stops abruptly, he seems to have run down, out of words.
She places the photograph in front of him. Was this man the one who beat you?
No, he says.
Was he the one who wrote down your confession?
He looks at the investigator, who moves his head almost imperceptibly.
Go ahead, he adds, when he sees the others looking. It is safe to talk.
Yes, he was the one. He was much younger then, but I remember.
Younger, she thinks, but older than his victim. If twelve is old enough to suffer, is sixteen old enough to be accountable?
Was he one of the NKVD men who shot at you? she says.
He glances at the investigator again.
Yes, go ahead, says the investigator.
He was there, he says. He was there.
The KDB officer begins barking questions. He was not an officer, was he?
I don’t know.
Was he wearing a uniform?
I don’t think so.
What time of day was this?
In the evening. I don’t know what time.
Isn’t it true, the KDB officer says more loudly, isn’t it true that the people who tortured you, who shot at you were German troops, not NKVD?
No, he says. That is not true.
Are you sure that you remember properly?
The man flares up. You think I do not remember who arrested us? Who tortured me? Who killed my brother and my father? You think I do not remember? I would have to have a poor memory to forget those things.
···
When do I get the money? he says, as she and the investigator settle him back in his own room. He begins rubbing liniment on his swollen hands.
What money?
I will handle this, says the investigator quickly. I told him that if he would be testifying in court, there would be money for the travel fare, the travel expenses. To come and speak at the trial. I will explain to him how it works — please go on ahead.
···
Five o’clock in the morning. The telephone in the hotel room, an old dial set. Who would be calling her here? Nate? Louis? Not at this hour.
Val, her voice tinny.
Gus? What?
You mean Rudy.
No.
We don’t know how long he was lying there, she says. He’s in the cardiac ward now. They’re going to do a bypass, but — Her voice trails off.
This is what she says.
This is what Leah hears: he’s alive.
···
The air is heavy with the mingled breath and perspiration of so many people, so close together. The flight will be longer than usual — turbulence, says the pilot — they will have to fly farther north to avoid it.
She is beset with superstitions, omens. If she avoids drinking on the plane, Gus will survive. If she rejects the meal, he will recover. If she keeps her hands in her lap, he will be cured. And every object, every item has turned into a charm or amulet. Her paper cup has taken on mystical properties, the wooden stir stick a talisman. How quickly she has reverted to this, as if one inexplicable event has triggered an entirely different world, an ancient one with its own capricious rules.
Now this, she says to Nate, this is where a god might be useful again. A divine being to implore, to beseech. To hear my case.
For example. The appellant is a good man, a gentle man, a man who overcame his natural caution, his reticence to raise a child who was not his own. A man who read the books to her suggested by teachers, hesitating over some of the words, making his way through a list every year. A man who took her to swimming lessons — unable to swim himself — sitting fully clothed on a folding chair at the side of the pool while the other parents were in the water. Who listened seriously to her school tales of small indignities, tiny triumphs. A man with a quiet, obstinate heart, the same organ that has been starved of blood by a clot — now a lump of damaged muscle.
Why should he — of all people — have been chosen for illness, even death? Of all people.
Chance, says her aunt. Random chance. Haven’t you been listening? Think of all the different kinds of luck. Blind luck. Fisherman’s luck. Hard luck. Jewish luck.
Jewish luck?
Also known as bad luck. What — I have to explain?
Malcolm singing tunelessly under his breath. I’ve got the left hind leg of a rabbit. Things are going my way. All I have to do is reach out and grab it. Things are going my way.
But luck is not an answer; luck is part of the question itself. Or a way of saying: there is no answer, no answer that makes sense, that has meaning.
The thought barred from her brain: it was supposed to be Rudy.
Not that she would ever wish such a thing on Rudy. Never. Never. But this? This is an ambush.
Ask Rabbi Yitzchok, her aunt said once, when the little girl pleaded for another piece of strudel.
Who?
Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev. The lawyer for the Jews — he interceded for us with God. Dead now, but that wouldn’t stop him. Better give him a try, because you’re not getting another piece from me.
Rabbi. A request now.
If you look to your left, says the pilot, you’ll see quite a remarkable view of Greenland. Usually the cloud cover is too thick, but we have an unusually clear day. You can see the fjords over there, and the icebergs floating down them.
He sounds a little elated, even a little awed, and the passengers look up curiously. Then they begin standing up, filing over to the aisle on the left side of the airplane. The aisle is quickly crowded, but something about the pilot’s voice has made them subdued, unexpectedly polite and careful with each other, murmuring apologies or requests in low voices. They peer over heads, between shoulders, past the rows of seats on the left side, ducking and craning. No one tells them to return to their seats, or that the seat belt light has come on, or that they need to balance out the load, as if the crew, too, was suspended in this moment.
She can see the fjords carved into the snowfields from where she is standing, the mountainous icebergs, the Arctic water — shifting colours of white, green, turquoise, grey. The brilliant light, the eerie beauty of it are quietly exhilarating, they reach into her and touch something buried. For a moment, she forgets everything else, she feels a brief stab of gladness.
The passengers are hushed, transfixed by the sight. Then they seem to shake themselves, and begin moving back to their seats, slowly, silently, their faces bemused.
···
He is pale under his tan, a tube in his heavy nose. Too burly to be a natural patient, he seems out of place, as if he might have wandered into the hospital by mistake, as if he might have been nabbed by a particularly efficient orderly and hooked to an IV, electrodes slapped on his chest. This whole thing must be some misunderstanding.
She glances at the band on his wrist. No.
His eyes are closed, the lids swollen, but when he hears her voice, they open for a few seconds and then close again. His hand moves on the sheet, a half-gesture of greeting.
The drugs make him sleepy, says the nurse.
She wants to take that hand, to have something reviving, something life-giving flow from her hand to his. Something that will say to this shirker, this loafer of a heart muscle: wake up, get moving, make an effort. But she has nothing like that to give him, she has only a wild longing for his survival. And to hold his hand while he is so weakened seems to be taking advantage of him, an attack on his barricades of reserve. So she sits as closely as she can, her arm almost touching, and watches the monitor transmitting its jagged lines of information. Perhaps if she watches it long enough, these lines will begin to make sense, will become a language she can understand.
Your mother went home to change her clothes, says the nursing assistant.
My mother?
A sliver of hope leaps in her chest.
No, no, no. She must be talking about Val. Val.
But she is astonished to find that such a hope, such an absurd, strangled hope is still even imaginable, has been hibernating in her all this time.
How could this be possible? Is this what happens to the hope of a six-year-old, shocked beyond understanding, beyond any form of belief? Something deeply buried, desiccated after so many years, but still there. Or perhaps hope is always irrational — perhaps this is one of the things that makes it hope, makes it different from saner, more logical kinds of thought.
Time for the procedure, says the nurse.
A technician wheels in a white monitor on an extension arm, a curved keyboard, heavy cords looping around. The patient’s chest is bared, a few grey and white hairs exposed. His skin, his flesh looks particularly defenceless, surrounded by the hard edges of the equipment. The technician attaches more sensors and places a dollop of gel — this will be cold — on his chest. Gus flinches, and then closes his eyes again. Then the technician picks up a wand and begins drawing circles in the gel.
Sound waves to the heart, he says, while he watches the monitor. When the waves bounce back, they form an image.
Sound waves. If only she had known this was how to assess his condition. Then she might have done it herself, making a clear sound, a bell-like sound near his chest perhaps, listening carefully for the echoes. And if she had been able to translate the results, Rudy could have drawn the image with his inks, a pinkish cross-section of the thoracic cavity. Something that might have revealed a weakness, a flaw, that might have sparked an alert.
The technician watching the screen looks thoughtful, then serious.
What is it? she says.
His doctor will discuss the results with you.
Don’t leave, she says to Gus.
I might not get another chance, he says.
···
The physical world seems to be rising up against her, the corner of a desk catching her on the hip, a cabinet door reaching over to hit her forehead, a lower drawer stretching out to trip her.
How is he? says Louis.
Not good, she says shortly. Have you spoken to Owen?
Yes, and we think we have enough evidence now, enough to go ahead — with the last two witnesses, particularly the music teacher, and then the more circumstantial evidence, the records. The War Crimes Section has a couple of researchers who are doing more digging into the documents as well.
The music teacher. She feels a faint twinge, a sense of unease. He seemed credible enough, although she is not sure how to evaluate the credibility of someone remembering events from so long ago. What condition can these memories be in, when so many later memories have been layered on top of them? Although he must be right, if any memories would stay clear and fixed, surely it would be these — torture, the execution of his father and brother, his own strange almost-death. Buried in the arms of warm corpses, a stiflingly close view of mortality. A twelve-year-old surrounded by bodies, bodies with a last expression frozen on a face, a shout still fixed on a set of lips.
No one would forget that, no one could forget that. But the details might have become distorted over the years, perhaps even now they slide in and out of focus. Particularly a detail about the presence, the face of a particular person.
Memory can be embedded in the body. She has read this somewhere, that memory can permeate cells, become physical. The example: phantom pain. But what does this really mean? Do people become the physical embodiment of all their past experiences? Do memories twist and shape muscles, organs, blood vessels? Or perhaps they strengthen those things, nourish them. A moment of joy fused into lung tissue, an exquisite painting fixed on the surface of a cornea.
Good find, this evidence, says Louis. You may have a future here yet.
Maybe you could be more specific, she thinks.
···
Still thinking about your witness? says Nate, tracing lines on the back of her neck.
She is lying with her head on his chest, lingering in the torpor that suffuses her — both of them — afterwards. She is beginning to think of this act — the aching buildup of desire, the shuddering release — as a thing in itself, something apart from both of them, an entity of its own. Something that drugs them, leaving them in this languid haze.
Being here now is soothing, a quiet hole in time where no one is recounting horrors, no one is frighteningly ill. Where the ground is not shifting, at least for the moment — something that seems rarer than before. She runs her hand over the hairs on Nate’s arm, the folds of the pale yellow sheet. Her wariness about this accidental — incidental — coupling is fading away. Sometimes she finds herself watching his hands, his torso for clues — attempting to make some sense of him from his body, to make sense of the two of them.
At the moment she is listening to the lazy thump of his heart, wondering if she could record it somehow. Record it, and play it back to Gus, to his own defective muscle, to jerk it into awareness, to remind it how to go about its duties. Listen to this. Remember this? You can do it.
The witness?
I wasn’t thinking about him, she says sleepily. But I am now.
When do I get my money?
Is it really just the travel money? she had said to the investigator afterwards, looking at him hard.
Of course, he says, astonished that anyone would suspect otherwise.
First you were obsessed with finding enough evidence, says Nate, and now you’re questioning what you’ve found. Based on what?
Nothing, really. That’s the problem.
She is convinced now that Drozd was involved in torturing and executing prisoners, that he was involved in the executions in the forest. How much do the details matter then? Whether it was this prisoner or that one, whether it was this killing or that one, he was an accomplice to such ruthless brutality that these distinctions might be irrelevant. And he is only being deported, not imprisoned. Losing a life, but not his only life. A life he stole. A life that was denied to his victims.
No, no, no. This is wrong, this is a kind of slippage. She can almost see legal tenets dissolving before her eyes. There must be specific facts, there must be evidence, even for the balance of probabilities, that untidy test. This is a case about wrongdoing, not a quality of character. He must be guilty of something precise, knowable — something he has done, not something he is, not some innate evil.
Evil again. Its own foul and hideous bulk. Saint Augustine.
Protean, ever-changing, stretching to encompass new horrors. But if there is anything that counts as evil, surely it must be torture and killing. What kind of person takes part in these things? A spontaneous human mutation, someone born without the ingredients of a conscience?
Difficult to know, say the experts. A stunted amygdala, says one. An endocrine malfunction, says another. A damaged childhood, says a third.
People have miserable upbringings without becoming torturers or murderers, says Nate.
Brain chemistry. Faulty circuitry.
More chillingly: an inherent human tendency, some of them say, liable to surface in anyone in the right circumstances.
No, she thinks. Not anyone. And what about guilt? What about accountability? There must be a role for them somewhere in this poisonous combination of greed, callousness, self-interest.
Your job is to deport him, says Nate, not to inspect his inner workings.
Still. What happened to the normal human brakes on cruelty, the taboos against murder?
Not such strong brakes, says her aunt. Not such hard taboos.
True, he had been surrounded by other people involved in these things, people who initiated him into these obscenities. But there is no sign that he was a reluctant participant.
All those officers — lulling themselves with drink, with self-justifying cant.
What do you know about these things? says Drozd, furious.
Not nearly enough, she thinks.
···
The bypass surgery is in an hour, and he is awake.
Here, says the nurse, propping him up, handing him a pill in a paper thimble, then a cup of water. A little something to keep you calm, to keep your heart rate down. They’ll give you the anaesthetic in the operating room.
The pill makes him unusually talkative, almost chatty — so unlike Gus that it is almost unnerving.
Hospitals. Hospitals, he says, nodding.
You’ve been in a hospital, he says confidentially. Just a baby. They were over at the house. When your father was still around. She was coming down the stairs with you in her arms.
He yawns.
She tripped — a piece of the carpet. I was in the hall, I saw her. But she didn’t grab for the handrail, she kept her body curled around you like a snail. Like a snail. Down she went, banging, crashing, curled around you. She ended up with a concussion, bruises, a broken arm, but you — nothing, you were fine. She made them check you out at the hospital, they kept you overnight.
His eyes are closed again.
The next day she took a picture of you — that camera — a picture of you crawling up the stairs.
He is quiet for a minute. Has he drifted off?
And the other time, he says, suddenly stern.
What other time?
You with your broken leg after the accident. Just a little thing, you were, in that big bed.
Time to go, says the orderly, expertly knocking out the brakes on the bed.
And the fever, mumbles Gus. It wasn’t just your leg.
Wait, she says to the orderly. The fever? she says to Gus.
You don’t remember? That’s why you were in the car. She was up at someone’s cottage with you, and you spiked a fever, a high fever. She was taking you to the hospital when she had the accident. Don’t you remember?
···
I have something for you, says her mother. She holds up a flat paper bag.
What? What is it? says the little girl, hopping up and down.
A colouring book.
She runs to get her box of coloured pencils. They sit down together on the old sofa and she opens the book.
The pages inside are blank. She looks up at her mother, puzzled.
Pick a colour, says her mother.
Green.
She shows her how to scrub it back and forth across the page.
As the page fills in with colour, white lines begin to show up, and then begin joining together. Slowly an image of water reeds, a duck, a frog emerges.
Where does the picture come from? she says, astonished, looking on the back of the page, underneath the book.
Her mother smiles.
···
The air wobbles again.
The little girl lies there, stunned, bewildered. She can hear night sounds, the occasional rustle, a squeak, the snapping of bracken. Overhead in the trees, a nasal heent sounds twice. The ditch has a rich, sickly smell, the smell of vegetation in stagnant water.
Her throat is dry, burning, she has been crying, calling out for hours, she is exhausted, thirsty. Her mother stubbornly refuses to wake up. The silence is heavy.
With a shock, she realizes that a tall, bedraggled man is standing next to her, his face hidden, so close that one of his arms is almost touching her through the broken window. She freezes with fright. While she sits there stock-still, there is a rustle of wind. The man reaches over with a long arm, and brushes the window with a wet, prickly hand. Her heart bangs in her thin chest, then she sees it is a branch. She begins to wail again.
Now the pain engulfs her again, billowing out the window, into the sky, expanding and shrinking with each breath.
What do we have here? says a gruff, kind voice.
A kid, says another.
Heads bobbing up and down, hands around her, patting, undoing the seat belt. Pulling, lifting gently.
Another burst of pain, and then she is in the arms of a stranger.