The old prisoners hardly had time to cram their bread into the hollows of their mouths before the bugle blew again, close by, and we were all lined up together for roll call, each by his full name, the newcomers last. The names seemed to go on forever, while the workers swayed and twitched, dead on their feet; I watched with amazement as one skeleton responded—Ivan Genev!—Here!—and then fell instantly asleep standing up, as if he’d been waiting for that moment. Sometimes there was confusion about a name or a response, and then the guard with the roll call would back up many names and go through them again, all the first names I’d ever known or heard of, and some that were even new to me, but clearly Bulgarian. Once or twice I heard what sounded like a German or Romanian or Hungarian name, but could not be sure.
At last we were dismissed, and I took advantage of the momentary confusion to ask a cadaverous man standing near me what work they did.
“Quarry,” he said, as if extra words were too expensive to be wasted. “Mines. And a few to the timbering.” He kept his voice low and did not try to meet my eyes. Then he shuffled away from me.
I had assumed we would sleep in the two large wooden buildings, but those appeared to be full already. My new brigade was directed to a barrack near the back of the yard, a structure so low that the door seemed to lead into the ground—which it actually did. It was not a real building but rather a huge dugout in the mountain earth, and when we ducked down to get inside, the smell hit me so that I would have turned and gone back out to vomit if there hadn’t been another man crawling in just behind me. It was a smell like meat left out too long, but infinitely stranger than that. I put the sleeve of my dead man’s shirt over my nose and kept it tight. There were men already going to sleep, lying on the wooden bunks and even the floor. Our brigade leader, toothless Vanyo, pointed out empty bunks; because we were new, we would sleep near the slop bucket. The bucket accounted for some of the smell, but only some of it. Each bunk was covered with shreds of material that might once have been matting, and each of us had a decaying blanket from the war. There was one lantern to light all this—one lantern, one slop bucket, one doorway, and at least eighty men, once we were all in.
Now the skeleton workers were putting their shoes under their heads, for pillows. Some of them also had nests of things other than blankets—rotting jackets and rags from torn trousers. Someone was bolting the wooden door from the outside. If the lantern fell over, we would all roast, trapped. The smell hung in the air like something solid. A man in the bunk just above mine leaned down for a minute when I crawled in. His face was a skull like the rest. But I saw suddenly, as I would see over and over with other prisoners, that it was still a face, had once been normal and maybe even handsome. He almost smiled. “New,” he said—it couldn’t be a question.
“Stoyan Lazarov,” I said. I decided not to add that I was from Sofia.
He reached a bundle of bones down toward me and shook my hand. “Petar, from Haskovo,” he whispered.
“What is it?” I said. “The smell?” Someone blew out the lantern near the doorway.
Petar’s voice came again. “It’s the wounds. Our wounds. They get infected. Try not to notice, son,” he said, not unkindly. “And try to keep clean. Let’s sleep.” He retreated into the darkness above me. Someone else was hushing us, angrily. I tore a little cloth from my bedding and bound my aching finger with it, hoping that would help the bone heal straight. I knew I should sleep, too.
But I lay awake, most of that first night. Once the men were breathing quietly around me, or whimpering a little in their sleep, I began to hear the millions of bugs that lived in the walls, in the ceiling of woven branches and earth, in our bedding, in our clothes. I began to feel them on my skin, inside the dead stranger’s clothes, and I trembled and scratched myself with my good hand. I considered allowing my thoughts to return to that wonderful field, by the river, where my son sat, and then drew back. I wanted to save that, still—to look forward to it. Instead I said a short prayer for Vera and my parents, although I had not prayed since childhood and had no idea how to address it. It went out from me like a letter with no stamp.
Lying there, trying not to think about the itching or my hunger, I made myself a second promise. I had caused something terrible to happen, back in Sofia. These thugs could punish me for their own purposes, but only I had the right to punish myself for what I had really done. When I got home again, I would somehow attend to my real penance.
At last the sound of insect movements, their chewing and shredding, became my lullaby. I slept, briefly. Then the bugle blew, before dawn.
1949
I woke exhausted but painfully alert, knowing before I left my dreams that I was not in the right place. I felt the griping emptiness in my stomach and sensed the men moving around me. I saw a rectangle made of light, which was the opening of the dugout with a lantern sitting just outside. Someone had unbolted our barracks and opened the door, but the dark cool morning could not reach us in that stink. My ears suddenly remembered the call of the bugle—without it, I would have slept forever. In fact, I had no desire to wake up at all. I ached from head to toe. I wished for a moment that they had pulled me from the train car and shot me instead.
“Get up,” someone was hissing, and I climbed down and put on my ill-fitting shoes. My head itched where they had made me shave, and now there were rough places on my skin, under the worn-out shirt, either from the bugs or from the sheer filth. I told myself not to scratch them into open sores, remembering what Petar from Haskovo had said the night before, about infections. He wasn’t in sight, in the bunk above—half the place had emptied already, in a silent rush. I scrambled out of the dugout and limped toward the washhouse, taking long breaths of that normal air, wanting to eat it. It was still quite dark, apart from an electric light that burned on the other side of the yard. A moment later, two guards rushed past me to the doorway; when I turned, I saw that the next prisoners to climb out, the stragglers, had caught blows from their clubs and were ducking and yelping. One fell to the ground and a guard kicked him. I thought, On the street, in Sofia, I would have run to save the man on the ground. Yes, I would have been afraid for my hands, as every violinist is when a fight breaks out, but I would have helped.
At the washhouse, we stood in long lines for a row of eight toilet holes. The odor was terrible, a different terrible from the smell in the barrack. A few of the prisoners pushed to the front—hard-faced, rail-thin survivors—and everyone else let them barge ahead. It was the same at the basins, eight rusted metal bowls for hundreds of men. Each of us had a second or two at one bowl. I washed in gray slop from the faces of thirty or forty, not daring to take fresh water from the pitchers nearby, if it even was fresh. I didn’t know the rules here; I would have to watch everything carefully, as one did in a new orchestra, with a brutal new conductor. No one spoke, except to mutter at any man who was slow at the latrines.
Breakfast, which was given to us in the yard, was tea with a smear of jam on the lip of the cup. We drank it standing up. At first I did not understand that this was all we would get, nor that the tin cup I’d been given was mine to keep.
“You’re a lucky one,” said the man next to me. “But you’ll have to share. One in ten gets them.” The cups, he meant, although it looked to me as if many of the men had similar tin cups; they hung them up somewhere inside their clothes when they’d finished drinking. “Watch out or someone will take it from you,” growled the man. I wondered suddenly if he intended to steal my cup himself, and I tied it hard to the belt-loop of my trousers, using a shred of fabric from the end of my shirt.
Then we had to line up in our brigade groups again to be counted. While I stood there, the long list of names pouring over my head, I looked cautiously up at the night sky. It was rustling with stars. I had not noticed them, the evening before, or perhaps they were brighter toward morning, even with the watchtower light on. It had been years since I’d really looked up at the stars; in Vienna, I’d sometimes seen a
cold arch of them from my favorite park, when I was walking back to my room late at night.
Now I could trace long clear patterns, constellations whose names I wished I still knew. At the edge of the black sky, away from the lights of the watchtowers, one star stood by itself, as if it had fallen off the nearest constellation and drifted alone toward the horizon. I understood—from having seen sunset the evening before—that it was in the northeast, toward the faraway Black Sea, the Danube, the border with Romania. That star lingered by itself above a peak studded with fir trees; the trees looked blacker than the sky, as if their shapes opened onto an unthinkable darkness. I decided to call the star Beta-49, the most anonymous name I could think of, for the year in which I had discovered it.
When I turned my head toward the shouting, the guards we’d seen the night before—those three who’d beaten the man who’d spoken up—were standing in front of us. “New workers!” called the only one who had a uniform. “Does anyone have complaints this morning?”
We were silent, and the skeletons shuffled their feet like leaves, as if to warn the rest of us.
“Very well,” he said. “Let me show you what happens to complainers. Also to those who fall out of line, and to anyone, anyone at all, who tries to leave his work site. Momo!” He made a quick movement of his hand, and his assistant, the light-haired young man who’d held the prisoner for him to beat the night before, stepped forward. “Which one, Momo?”
Momo smiled at us. I saw with creeping horror that he looked like a little boy, the innocent face of seven years old, with a broad gap between his top front teeth. But this child was perhaps sixteen or seventeen. His name struck me as ridiculous; in Vienna or Paris it would have been the name of a clown, or a street magician. He scratched the back of his head and rumpled his angelic hair. I thought he might be German, or Russian, or Czech, with that curly yellow hair and the purity of his face, but his voice was Bulgarian when he spoke. “Don’t know, Chief. Maybe that one.” His hand darted out and he pointed at a man near the front of the line, not one of us new men, but a worn-down fellow with graying stubble on his shaved head.
“Well, then.” The Chief handed Momo his own club, and although the prisoner ducked quickly, it struck him on the side of the face and an animal sound of pain rose out of him. He bent over, shielding his head with both arms.
“He’s good for nothing,” the Chief said in a loud voice. “Be sure the rest of you are good for something.” He made another rapid gesture—the guards seemed to have a sort of sign language among them for all their rituals—and the boy Momo reached into a wheelbarrow that stood nearby and handed the cringing man a big empty sack.
“No,” said the man. “Please. I beg you.”
“You’ll have to carry it, you know,” Momo said. The prisoners were all stock-still, no one looking at anyone else.
“Please,” said the man. “I have a family at home, two children.”
“Well, we all have families,” the Chief said reasonably. “But we can’t keep bad examples here. Is that understood?” His voice rose to a sudden shout. Momo stepped back, smiling, as if his work was finished, and had been done well.
“Yes,” the men muttered, but it was like wind among old trees, no real sound. I didn’t know why the man who’d been given the sack was in despair—it was empty, light to carry; it couldn’t be any burden to him. But when we were ordered to march forward, we rounded the corner of the washhouse; huddled against the base of one wall was a similar sack, full of something lumpy, the shapes of a head and limbs, a dead weight. I realized it must be—it had to be—the man they’d beaten the night before, unless someone else had died during the night. My stomach twisted inside me and I thought for a moment I would have to lean out of the line to vomit up my breakfast of tea.
Then the bugle blew, and we marched out of the gates, as if we were heading back into freedom. I could see the gentle-looking, brown-bearded man—now minus his beard—who belonged in a Sofia café, and also the drunken man from my cell, both of them ahead of me. They were still part of my brigade, and I hoped to speak with the gentle-faced man, if there was a chance, later on.
—
I WALKED WITH MY BRIGADE that first morning up a road that wound behind the camp area and into the mountains, perhaps two kilometers. The road unfolded along a railroad bed, although I hadn’t heard any trains pass the camp. I wondered if this rail line was the same one that had brought us to the village of Zelenets, and whether anyone ever tried to jump onto the side of a train to get away. There was no place to run to, even if we’d wanted to dare the guards to catch us; the mountainside rose steeply on our left, just beyond the railroad—exposed rock with sickly trees clinging to it. To our right, the land fell away among shrubs, so that anyone sliding down into the abyss would either tumble to his death in a few minutes or be shot easily from above. I wondered who had built such a road around the edge of a mountain—perhaps other damned souls like us.
The walk to our destination would have been easy for me a few days before; now, hungry and faint, I found myself gasping on the slightest rise. The guns prodded us along, and I noted that a couple of the younger guards, including the cherubic-looking Momo, cradled clubs in their arms as they marched beside us.
Around a curve in the road, the mountainside opened into a flat area with a huge pit in the middle, perhaps two hundred feet deep. I could see the zigzag of ramps leading up to the edge of the pit from shelves of earth inside, and wheelbarrows sitting nearby. Piles of half-split rock lay strewn around the open area. The railroad ran directly beside it, with a long spur for trains to stop on.
“Quarry!” shouted one of the guards, and half the brigades, including mine, fell out of our long line and walked with him toward the pit. The rest of the men, skeletons and newcomers, went on up the road without us, and I saw the small stooped man with the club walking behind them, as well as two guards in uniform. Momo had come with us to the edge of the quarry. When I turned around and took note of his presence, he caught my eye with a look I did not like at all, although I couldn’t have said what it meant. I had noted his face, earlier, but now I saw how strong his frame was, with broad shoulders and massively thick arms. His clothes were nearly as shabby as my own; but he, like the other guards, seemed to be getting enough to eat.
I was assigned to a plateau partway down the pit, where we would break quarried stones into rocks small enough to load on the wheelbarrows. The wheelbarrows were built to fit onto narrow tracks and be pushed up the ramps. Three or four of the men from my brigade were also sent to this plateau, including the gentle-looking man and an old fellow with tufts of white hair at each temple. The old man’s hands shook and I wondered if he would last the day. As it turned out, he had worked on construction sites all his life, and he picked up pieces of rock faster than I could.
At first we all did the same thing, each in turn breaking stones with a pickax, loading them on a barrow, and pushing the barrow up the slope on the rails to where another brigade took it away and hauled it toward the railroad line. Before long, however, we’d figured out that it made sense to divide the labor. The gentle man and a middle-aged fellow who said he was from Pirin broke the rock with pickaxes, straightening up frequently to relieve their backs. The old man volunteered to keep lifting rocks with his strong, shaking grip. I was grateful to be able to push the barrow; this was hard on my hands, especially since I had to keep my swollen little finger off the handles as much as possible, but it was not as damaging as the rocks or ax would have been. It was only a matter of time, I knew, before I would develop blisters and then wounds.
It seemed to me that the sun had barely risen before we were already tired enough to stop for the rest of the day. The guards noticed, because suddenly several of them were climbing down into the pit to shout at us about our laziness. Momo stopped at our plateau and swung his club in the air near the old man’s head. “What are you slowing down for?” he cried.
The old man said nothing, but his st
rong shoulders and arms swung a little faster between the rock piles and the wheelbarrow. I held the barrow as steady as I could for him to drop in the rocks. I could see his hands were reddened and cut already; I decided that as soon as Momo left I would offer to relieve the old man of this work, or help him wrap them. Anger surged up inside me; this was a terrible dream, a piece of nonsense, a sickening joke. I looked carefully away from Momo, but he seemed to smell my emotion, like a dog, and he stepped closer. “Why don’t you take a turn with the rocks?” he said.
“This fellow is a violinist,” the old man said proudly. I wondered how he’d found this out, and then remembered I’d told him myself during our first and only exchange. A peasant from Pirin, a construction worker, a violinist. The gentle-looking man had said nothing about himself.
“A violinist?” Momo looked at me with curiosity. His face had the peculiar blankness of beauty stretched over a void; he didn’t seem so much unaware of his own good looks as unaware of even being alive, in this place where no kind of beauty counted, anyway. I thought he was like a dangerous animal, a lion pacing a zoo enclosure, without self-consciousness, out of place. “You play the tsigulka?”
“Yes,” I said. I told myself not to let even the smell of my anger seep out again, but he was already toying with me.
“Oh,” he said. “Did you bring your tsigulka with you?” He laughed, as if he’d found his way to hilarity and was proud of getting there all by himself. I wondered if he was right in the head—but would anyone do his job who was right in the head, or remain sane while doing it?