The White Hotel (32 page)

There was a clatter of spades and then heavy thuds as the earth and sand landed on the bodies, coming closer and closer to the old woman who still lived. Earth started to fall on her. The unbearable thing was to be buried alive. She cried with a terrible and powerful voice: “I’m alive. Shoot me, please!” It came out only as a choking whisper, but Demidenko heard it. He scraped some of the earth off her face. “Hey, Semashko!” he shouted. “This one’s still alive!” Semashko, moving lightly for a man of his bulk, came across. He looked down and recognized the old woman who had tried to bribe her way out. “Then give her a fuck!” he chuckled. Demidenko grinned, and started unbuckling his belt. Semashko rested his rifle, and yanked the old woman into a flatter position. Her head lolled to the left and looked straight into a boy’s open eyes. Then Demidenko yanked her legs apart.

After a while Semashko jeered at him, and Demidenko grumbled that it was too cold, and the old woman was too ugly. He adjusted his clothing and picked up his rifle. With Semashko’s assistance he found the opening, and they joked together as he inserted the bayonet, carefully, almost delicately. The old woman was not making any sound though they could see she was still breathing. Still very gently, Demidenko imitated the thrusts of intercourse; and Semashko let out a guffaw, which echoed from the ravine walls, as the woman’s body jerked back and relaxed, jerked and relaxed. But after those spasms there was no sign of a
reaction and she seemed to have stopped breathing. Semashko grumbled at their wasting time. Demidenko twisted the blade and thrust it in deep.

During the night, the bodies settled. A hand would adjust, by a fraction, causing another’s head to turn slightly. Features imperceptibly altered. “The trembling of the sleeping night,” Pushkin called it; only he was referring to the settling of a house.

The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored. Most of the dead were poor and illiterate. But every single one of them had dreamed dreams, seen visions and had amazing experiences, even the babes in arms (perhaps especially the babes in arms). Though most of them had never lived outside the Podol slum, their lives and histories were as rich and complex as Lisa Erdman-Berenstein’s. If a Sigmund Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still not fully have explored even a single group, even a single person.

And this was only the first day.

A woman
did
scramble up the ravine side, after dark. It was Dina Pronicheva. And when she grasped hold of a bush to pull herself over, she
did
come face to face with a boy, clothed in vest and pants, who also had inched his way up. He scared Dina with his whisper: “Don’t be scared, lady! I’m alive too.”

Lisa had once dreamt those words, when she was taking the thermal springs at Gastein with Aunt Magda. But it is not really surprising, for she had clairvoyant gifts and naturally a part of her went on living with these survivors: Dina, and the little boy who trembled and shivered all over. His name was Motya.

Motya was shot by the Germans while shouting a warning to the lady, whom he now looked upon and loved as his mother,
because she was kind to him. Dina survived to be the only witness, the sole authority for what Lisa saw and felt. Yet it had happened thirty thousand times; always in the same way and always differently. Nor can the living ever speak for the dead.

The thirty thousand became a quarter of a million. A quarter of a million white hotels in Babi Yar. (Each of them had a Vogel, a Madame Cottin, a priest, a prostitute, a honeymoon couple, a soldier poet, a baker, a chef, a gypsy band.) The bottom layers became compressed into a solid mass. When the Germans wished to bury their massacres the bulldozers did not find it easy to separate the bodies: which were now grey-blue in colour. The bottom layers had to be dynamited, and sometimes axes had to be used. These lower strata were, with few exceptions, naked; but further up they were in their underwear, and higher still they were fully dressed: like the different formations of rocks. The Jews were at the bottom, then came Ukrainians, gypsies, Russians, etc.

A great building site of manifold tasks was created. Diggers dug the earth; dredgers hooked the bodies out; prospectors (
Goldsucher
) collected valuables. It was strange and touching that almost all the victims, including the naked, had managed to secrete something of sentimental value to take with them into the ravine. There were even tradesmen’s tools. Many of the valuables had to be extricated from the bodies. The fillings Lisa had had done soon after her return from Milan were mixed with fillings from elsewhere—including some from the mouths of Freud’s four aged sisters—and turned into a consignment of gold bars.

The cloakroom attendants pulled off any clothing of good quality; the builders constructed giant pyres; the stokers set the fire going by igniting the people’s hair; the crushers sifted the ashes for any gold that had escaped the prospectors; and
the gardeners took the ashes in wheelbarrows to spread over the garden plots near the ravine.

It was a frightful task. The guards could only endure the stench by swigging vodka all day long. The Russian prisoners were given no food (but woe betide them if they weakened); and now and again one of them, driven crazy by the delicious aroma of roast flesh, would be caught thrusting his hand into the flames to pull out a piece of meat; and for such barbarism would himself add to the tempting aroma, cooked alive like a lobster. In the end, the prisoners knew, they too would feed the flames, when the last corpse had been burnt; those who lived that long. The guards knew that they knew: it was a subject of banter between the two groups. One day an extermination van arrived, full of women. When the gas was turned on, the usual banging and shouting started; but it was not long before silence fell and the doors could be opened. More than a hundred naked girls were pulled out. The drunken guards hooted with laughter. “Go on! Have a go at them! Give their cunts a christening!” They almost choked on their vodka bottles: the joke being that the girls were waitresses from the Kiev night clubs, and therefore probably not vestal virgins. Even one or two of the prisoners cracked their bony faces into grins, as they piled the girls—the dead and the still living—on to the pyre.

When the war was over, the effort to annihilate the dead went on, in other hands. After a while Dina Pronicheva stopped admitting she had escaped from Babi Yar. Engineers constructed a dam across the mouth of the ravine, and pumped water and mud in from neighbouring quarries, creating a green, stagnant and putrid lake. The dam burst; a huge area of Kiev was buried in mud. Frozen in their last postures, as at Pompeii, people were still being dug out two years later.

No one, however, saw fit to placate the ravine with a memorial. It was filled in with concrete, and above it were built a main road, a television centre, and a high-rise block of flats. The corpses had been buried, burned, drowned, and reburied under concrete and steel.

But all this had nothing to do with the guest, the soul, the lovesick bride, the daughter of Jerusalem.

6

The
Camp

A
fter the chaos and overcrowding of the nightmarish journey, they spilled out on to the small, dusty platform in the middle of nowhere. They struggled over a little bridge; then it was good to breathe the sweet air, and to be ushered through without bullying or formalities. Outside, there was a line of buses waiting.

The young lieutenant in charge of Lisa’s bus had a diffident stammer which relaxed the atmosphere as he read out the roll. He smiled shyly when the passengers’ chuckles told him he had got one of the difficult names wrong. He had particular trouble with Lisa’s. Under a film of sweat—the day was very hot—a white scar ran up his cheek and across his forehead, and a sleeve rested uselessly in his uniform pocket.

As the bus moved off in a cloud of dust, he swung himself into the empty seat in front of Lisa. “Sorry about that!” He smiled.
“Don’t worry!” She smiled back. “It’s Polish, I take it?” he inquired; and she confirmed it was so. Actually, she was embarrassed by her error. Having decided not to use her Jewish name, Berenstein, nor her German name, Erdman—because of all the harassment she had been through when asked to produce her documents—she had wished to give her maiden name, Morozova. But for some strange reason she had given her mother’s maiden name instead: Konopnicka. It was too late now to do anything about it. The young lieutenant was asking her how the train journey had been. “Terrible! Terrible!” said Lisa.

He nodded sympathetically, and added that at least they would be able to rest at the camp. It wasn’t a palace, but it was fairly comfortable. Then later they would be sent on further. Lisa said he would never know how much it meant, to hear a friendly voice. She looked out at the monotonous desert, under the burning sky, and missed his next question, about what she did in her previous life. He had to repeat it. He was pleased to hear she was a singer. Though he didn’t know much about music, he enjoyed it, and one of his tasks was to arrange concerts at the camp. Perhaps she would be willing to take part? Lisa said she would be glad to, if her voice should be thought good enough.

“I’m Richard Lyons,” he said, offering her his left hand over the back of the seat. Awkwardly she shook it with her own wrong hand. The name stirred a memory; and astonishingly it turned out she had known his uncle. She had met him while on holiday in the Austrian Alps. “He thought you were dead,” she said; and Lieutenant Lyons said, with a wry grin, “Not quite!” and patted his empty sleeve. Of course he knew the hotel where she had stayed, for he had skied there often.

“It’s a beautiful place,” he said.

“Yes, but so is this,” she replied, glancing out again at the sand dunes. “It’s a beautiful world.”

She took the opportunity to ask him how one should set about trying to trace relatives. He took a notebook and a pencil from his breast pocket and, using his left hand adroitly, both to grip the notebook and to write in it, wrote the name Berenstein. He promised to make some inquiries. “You can be sure your relatives will be scanning the new lists too,” he said. She thanked him for his kindness and he said it was nothing, he was happy to help.

He excused himself to move back through the bus, and exchange friendly words with some of the other passengers. Kolya, tired out, was asleep, his head lolling on her shoulder. She changed her position to make him more comfortable. Her breast was very tender. Soon, anyway, she had to wake him, because the bus drew to a halt. Despite their weariness the passengers exclaimed with pleasure, seeing an oasis—green grass, palm trees, sparkling water. And the building itself looked more like a hotel than a transit camp. Lisa and her son had a room all to themselves. It smelled sweetly of wood. The beams were of cedar and the rafters of fir.

Kolya was soon out exploring with Pavel Shchadenko, but Lisa was so tired that she flopped into bed straightaway. She was awakened, in the half-light of dusk, by a timid knock on the door. She thought it was Kolya, not quite sure if this was their room. Naked as she was, not having unpacked, she went to open the door. It was the lieutenant. He apologized, flushing to see her naked, for disturbing her rest; he ought to have realized she would have gone to bed early. His stammer was embarrassing. He simply wanted to tell her he could not find a Victor Berenstein on the lists; there was, however, a Vera Berenstein. Was that
any help? It was marvellous, she said: “Thank you.” He blushed again, and said he would keep trying to find her husband’s name. And he thought she might like to know there was someone else with her unusual surname—a woman called Marya Konopnicka. “But that’s my mother!” she exclaimed in delight. He was glad, and promised to make more inquiries.

The days flashed by. She was forever glancing round the tables at mealtimes and seeing a face she thought she recognized. Once, she even thought she caught sight of Sigmund Freud: an old man with a heavily bandaged jaw, eating—or attempting to eat—alone. She was too much in awe of him to go up and speak. Besides, it might not be he; for the old man was said to have come from England. Yet could she mistake that noble expression? When she saw him painfully take a few puffs of a cigar, through a mouth that was no more than a tiny hole, she was almost certain. She had an impish urge to write him a postcard (with a picture of the transit camp, the only one available) saying: “Frau Anna G. presents her compliments and would you do her the honour of taking a glass of milk with her?” It might make him smile, remembering the chef at the white hotel. As she toyed with the postcard, wondering whether to buy it, she suddenly realized that the old, drying-out, kindly priest in her journal had been Freud; and she wondered how she could have failed to see it at the time. It was so obvious. Then she went hot and cold, because he himself, so profoundly wise, must have been aware of it, and probably thought she was laughing at him. It would hardly be tactful, therefore, to send him a postcard which would recall it to his mind.

She passed him one day, when he was being wheeled to the medical unit. His head was drooping, and he did not see her. He looked dreadfully ill and unhappy. If she made herself known
to him, she would have to cast even more serious doubts on the accuracy of his diagnosis, and that might add to his gloom. It was best to keep away, and just pray that the doctors could help him. They certainly seemed to know what they were doing. The young, overworked doctor who had seen her had been efficient but gentle. Even so, she had flinched from his examination of the painful parts. “What do you think is wrong?” he asked, as she drew back from his touch. “Anagnorisis,” she sighed. The drugs he had prescribed had eased the pain.

She felt well enough to start going to language classes—in the very next classroom to Kolya’s! She wanted to learn Hebrew properly. All she knew was a quotation Madame Kedrova had taught her, the Hebrew for “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” She had always found languages easy, and her instructors were pleased with her progress.