The Dark Room (24 page)

—
Go swimming. Call one of your friends, have a sauna.

She steps up into the train doorway and puts her arms around him. She kisses him.

—Your favorite.

Micha takes the bag of pretzels from her. Still warm, they smell amazing. He watches her go. Mina waves when she gets to the steps at the end of the platform, then she takes them two at a time.

The Ostbahnhof in Berlin is crowded, but the compartment in the new train is empty. Micha reads the paper and then sleeps for quite a while, though it is still early. When he wakes up it is evening and they are at the edge of Germany. There is another man in the compartment with him now. Older, with thick square glasses and a thin face. Micha smiles at him, and he nods. Their passports are checked with their tickets and the train lumbers on, slowly picking up speed. They are in Poland but the landscape looks no different. Micha can’t believe he is doing this. Has no idea what will do when he gets there. He eats one of Mina’s pretzels and goes to sleep again.

Minsk is sticky. A hot Easter, the taxi driver says. Very unusual. Micha speaks English with him at first, tries a little German, and
then goes back to English again. He tells him he is going south, but the driver doesn’t answer. A few streets later, the driver points out a good restaurant. They don’t talk again.

In the hotel everything is quiet. A young woman sits at a wide desk in the narrow lobby. She wears heavy makeup, greasy in the heat. The room she gives Micha is large and bare. A bed and a TV; and a dripping shower in the bathroom down the hall. He opens the window after the young woman has gone and lies down on the bed and closes his eyes. There is no air in the room. The sheets smell faintly of smoke. TV noise leaks through the walls. Music and squealing tires, then low buzzing voices.

When Micha wakes up it is dark and cool. He turns on the TV and then has a shower. He lies on the bed and lets himself dry off, watching the evening news, which he doesn’t understand. Germany in the headlines. Pictures of Frankfurt, the chancellor waving at the press pack. He turns off the TV and gets dressed.

Micha is hungry. He goes out and looks for the restaurant the driver recommended, but when he gets there he doesn’t go in. He tells himself that he is looking for a bar, but when he finds one, he doesn’t go in there, either. He feels conspicuous. He goes back to the hotel, orders pancakes from room service, and eats them watching a soccer match. Later he orders some beer, and much later he manages to sleep again.

Micha spends a long day in Minsk. He tells himself he is sightseeing, but he knows he is just delaying. He is tired, disoriented. The city is all wide, bleak avenues under a thick, gray sky. He finds the river and follows its path, keeping off the roads and in the parks as much as possible. He sees onion domes above the treetops and knows he has come east.

For lunch Micha finds a crowded restaurant and orders by pointing at the food on the next table. Dumplings stuffed with mushrooms.
Real Belarusian food eaten by a real German tourist.
The waitress approves. In the main square he takes photos. Apart from that, he keeps his camera in his bag. Still feeling too conspicuous. At a kiosk, Micha buys an English-language guide to the city. The middle pages form a map of Minsk and the surrounding area. This map is scattered with red dots, which he looks up in the index. Sites of Nazi atrocities; ghettos cleared, villages razed, populations executed. Micha stops walking, stands a moment in shock in the road. He remembers why he is here.

Two towns now where Opa was. Eight villages. The German stronghold north of the marshes where his final year of fighting came to an end.

Micha arrives in the main town at dusk, after two trains and a bus from Minsk. The sun is setting and he needs a place to stay. The town is small; no bus station, just a stop. He sits down at the edge of the road and eats the last of Mina’s pretzels. It is stale, but he is hungry. It is cool here, the air smells heavy and damp. Micha pulls an extra sweater from his pack before he starts his search for a room.

He is on the main road: asphalt, and wide enough for two cars to pass. The edges are paved in concrete slabs, and the smaller roads leading off it are also of cement. Off those roads are dirt paths: beaten earth, hard as the concrete where dry, but with muddy dips where the rain has gathered. The streetlamps on the main road light up as he reaches the edge of the town. Micha thinks there are no hotels.
This place is too small for that.

He turns around and makes his way back toward the bus stop and beyond, although he doesn’t remember seeing a hotel on the way into the town, either. The street is quiet; no one to ask. The windows of the houses are lit yellow and white, and a truck passes on its way through the town, headlights throwing Micha’s shadow far ahead of him on the pavement. A generator thumps on a side street; a mechanic working late. He has a bare bulb clipped to the open hood of the car he is working on, leans deep into the engine.

Micha knocks gently on the fender of the car. The mechanic smiles in greeting, speaks no German or English, and waits patiently as Micha works his way through the phonetics of his phrase book. The mechanic smiles again; he mimes sleep: eyes closed and head cocked against an open, oily palm. When Micha nods, the mechanic claps his hands together and lifts his pack.

The room is small and Micha likes it. A cot bed; wood-paneled walls painted pale green; a window with dusty muslin curtains; a chair and a small table; a huge wardrobe. It is at the back of the house, facing out onto an overgrown garden and the dark evening sky. The mechanic is pleased when Micha nods. He writes down a figure on a scrap of paper, and Micha pays for three nights.

In the kitchen, the mechanic sits Micha down with a glass of vodka and slips out the door. In two minutes he is back with an old woman and a heavy book. She is carrying a steel pot and a loaf of bread. While the woman gathers plates and slices bread, the mechanic leafs through the book to a map of Europe. He pushes it across the table and points at Micha, then the map, and then Micha again. Micha points at Germany, and the mechanic nods vigorously, exchanges words with the old woman at the stove. Micha watches them both, but they keep smiling. Micha realizes he was expecting a negative reaction. The old woman puts soup and bread on the table in front of him. She pats Micha’s shoulder and pushes the glass of vodka closer to his plate.

The mechanic lays his palm flat on his chest.

—Andrej.

—
Michael. Micha.

Micha holds his hand out across his plate of soup and Andrej takes it. They both smile, half-rise from their seats. Andrej introduces the old woman as his mother, or perhaps grandmother, Micha doesn’t quite understand. He holds out his hand, but she waves it away, smiling, points instead at his soup. Micha eats and they watch, talking with each other. Micha knows they are talking about him, but it doesn’t make him uncomfortable, and he enjoys the soft whispering
noise of their words. Andrej holds up his hand, five fingers, and slips out again. The old woman smiles at Micha across the table, speaks to him in Belarusian, Russian, he doesn’t know. He smiles back and eats the bread she cut for him.

Andrej comes back with another young man. He wears greasy overalls, too, crescents of black under his broad fingernails. He speaks some German, translates for Andrej and his mother/grandmother.

—They would know why you come to our place. From Germany.

Micha can see he is flushing, aware of his halting translation.
I can’t tell them about Opa.
It is too nice in this kitchen this evening. Micha tells them he is on holiday,
I am a tourist
, and they laugh. Andrej speaks, the other man translates.

—We have people from the newspapers here. Chernobyl. The Pripet has radiation and they come past here on their way. It is not so far.

—
I am not a journalist.

—No. Good. They are happy to have a tourist. Andrej and his mother.

Micha drinks vodka with Andrej, his friend, and his mother; all together and smiling around the kitchen table. Andrej starts to ask more questions, but his mother slaps his arm. Andrej looks apologetic. He does his little sleep mime for Micha again, and Micha nods. They all stand up with Micha, and Andrej leads him back to his room. He shows Micha how the light works, and where the toilet is, and they say good night.

Micha hears them talking on in the kitchen as he brushes his teeth and gets into bed.

Now that he is here, he doesn’t know what to do. He should find people, ask questions, make use of his time. He has the stolen photo with him, still missing from the album Oma keeps by her bed. Opa on his honeymoon, standing in shirtsleeves in front of a lake.
Not so long, only a few years before he came here.

Micha has four days and he is afraid.

Andrej lends him a bicycle, and a map of the area. He shows Micha the nice places to go, and his mother packs food in a bag. Micha cycles, eats his lunch, cycles some more.

In the evening, he writes to Mina, propping the photo of Opa against his knee. Micha tries to imagine him in uniform. In the doorway of Andrej’s kitchen with a gun, standing at the crossroads at the edge of the town. The man in his head, with the SS insignia, he is Nazi Opa. The man in the photo is just Opa. Opa before Micha knew him, but still Opa, all the same.

He tells Mina he is not getting very far. He crosses that out, starts again.
Not trying hard enough.
But he crosses that out, too. On a new sheet, Micha writes what he really thinks.
I’m a coward. I don’t know what to do.

Andrej drives Micha around in his pickup. Micha enjoys Andrej’s gentle banter with his customers, understanding nothing but the smiles, the serious handshakes. He walks through the villages past old men sitting on their porches, making the most of their warm Easter morning. He thinks about showing them the picture and saying Opa’s name, but he walks on.

They could say anything. He shot my brother and twenty other men. Hunted down the Jews in the forest here. Look, here behind my house. He hated them, you see, wanted them dead.

Micha tries to imagine a voice telling him that; a face. He tries to imagine how he would feel if that’s what he heard.

Andrej talks to him in Belarusian, Micha speaks German, and they get on well. At lunchtime they drink scalding tea and eat heavy bread with butter and jam. A German brand. Sitting on a rise at the side of the road on a fresh spring day. Cars beep as they pass, and Andrej raises his arm in greeting. Micha buys beer on the way home, to share with Andrej and his mother. They sit together in the evening, watch TV in the kitchen. Andrej and his mother laugh, and Micha, too.

I need a translator.

He goes to bed, but he can’t sleep.

Micha gets up early and goes out to find Andrej’s friend before breakfast. The German-speaker. The books in the library are Belarusian, he says, amused that Micha should want to read them. English books, German books, are in Minsk. Not here.

—
I have questions, though, about this place. Maybe only people around here will know.

The friend shifts his weight onto his other foot. Micha doesn’t say Opa, he only says war, occupation, Nazis, and he looks at the friend’s collar, at his ear, while he talks. Micha tries to ask him: for help, to find people, translate. But it all sounds so vague and strange. Even in Micha’s head.

Andrej’s friend is embarrassed for him, and Micha knows it.

There is a museum, he says. Not in this town, the next one. He takes Micha to the road, flags down a car, leans in through the open window, tells the driver where Micha wants to go. They both look at Micha briefly, and the driver smiles and opens the passenger door. Andrej’s friend shakes Micha’s hand.

—It’s a small place. But a good museum.

Next to the old town hall Micha finds a wooden building with a concrete floor. Objects and photos are lined up along the walls. All done with care; neatly written tags; thin rope strung on hand-turned posts to keep visitors at the correct distance. A young woman sits at the door on a canvas chair. Micha drops coins into the box at her feet and she smiles and goes back to her book.

Along one side are old paintings and photos of the town in the early years of the century. The main dusty, busy street of 1925 contrasted with the asphalt and two cars of last year.
Bigger then before the war. Thriving.
Houses, people, a marketplace. Outside the wind is blowing. Micha can hear it in the trees. The branches brush against the skylight in the roof of the museum.

He has reached the first corner of the room. Opposite Micha, in the second, stand three tailors’ dummies, each with a uniform on. SS, Wehrmacht, and a third he doesn’t recognize. Empty arms hang loose and thin beside the stuffed chests. He doesn’t hurry toward them. He turns to check, but the young woman is not watching him, she is still reading.

Between Micha and the uniforms are exhibits and pictures of the Jewish communities who lived in the town before the war. A small school, and a textbook written in Yiddish. A graveyard from which the stones were stolen to pave the streets. Micha blinks, moves on to the uniforms.

They are creased, threadbare.
Worn.
Two are German, and the unfamiliar third is Russian. Micha sees a button missing from the heavy SS coat.
Torn off, cut off, shot off, dropped off.
This coat is real, not a replica.
Someone undressed a corpse and kept a trophy. Or someone threw it off and ran away when the Red Army came. Or someone found it and wore it and maybe they were even glad of it, even though it was German, because it was wool and warm and it was winter and they were cold.

All along the final wall are photos taken during the war. Micha sees them out of the corner of his eye while he is still by the uniforms. He prepares himself to look closer; tells himself what they will show.
Public executions, smiling Germans, mass graves, mass shootings.
He is right. Heads hanging loose, bodies hanging long from trees. Young men aiming rifles at kneeling children. Soldiers standing, smoking in the sunshine, and behind them, the dead lying pale and naked in rows.