She sees what other people don’t.
Down on the quay by the old goods line she had seen small trucks rattle past, fully laden with dead bodies. Out in the water she saw a frigate flying the Soviet flag and knew that the crew was sick with scurvy after months on duty in the Black Sea. The sky over Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula had been the same mustard yellow as here, and in the shadows of the bridge lay the ruins of bombed-out houses and the slagheaps of waste from the rocket factories.
She had found the boy in the bag at the closest metro station to the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev over a year ago. The station has the same name as the concentration camp the Nazis constructed on the site, where so many people she had known were killed during the war.
Syrets.
She can still taste the boy in her mouth. It’s a yellow, fleeting taste a bit like rapeseed oil; like light-polluted skies and fields of grain.
Syrets. The very word seems to drip with the yellow taste.
The world is split in two, and only she knows it. The two worlds are as different as an X-ray picture is from a human body.
The boy in the plastic bag is in both worlds right now. When they find him they will see how he looked when he was nine years old. His body is preserved like a photograph of the past, embalmed like an ancient boy king. A boy forever.
The woman in the car keeps driving north, through the city. She looks at the people she passes.
Her senses are highly refined, and she knows that no one can have any idea of what she’s like inside. No one knows what goes on inside her. She sees the anguish that is permanently present around people. She sees their evil thoughts painted in the atmosphere surrounding them.
She herself can’t be seen. She has a capacity to be invisible in a room full of people, her image doesn’t register on their retinas. But she is always present in the moment, observing her surroundings and understanding them. And she never forgets a face.
A short while ago she saw a woman on her own go down to the quayside of Norra Hammarbyhamnen. The woman had been unusually scantily clad for the time of year, and she had sat by the water for almost half an hour. When she eventually stood up to leave, a street lamp had lit up her face and she had recognised her.
Victoria Bergman.
It’s been more than twenty years since she last saw her, and then the girl’s eyes had been burning, almost invincible. They had contained an immense strength.
Now she had seen a dullness in them, a sort of tiredness that had spread through her whole being, and her experience of people’s faces tells her that Victoria Bergman is already dead.
Gilah
To eat your own children is a barbarian act!
– Soviet proclamation, Ukrainian SSR, 1933
FATHER HAD EATEN pigeon, and was telling stories to little Gilah, his daughter.
‘Darling tokhter.’
She was hungry, had only had grass to eat, but it was probably worse for the boy in the other house. His body was so weak that he fell over when he tried to walk.
‘Story. About boat and witch.’
Father kissed her on the forehead, and she noticed the bad smell from his mouth. ‘Once upon a time there was a father and a mother, and they had a little girl whose name was Gilah Berkowitz. She was so small, but she grew very fast. Just like you …’
He smiled, poked her tummy, and it tickled, but she didn’t laugh.
‘One day little Gilah said to her father: I want a boat of gold with oars of silver, so I can fetch food for you and my brothers. Please, make me a boat like that, Father.’
‘Please, Father,’ she whispered.
‘Little Gilah got her boat of gold and silver, and every day she went down to the river and fished, and came home with food for her father, mother and brothers. And every evening her mother went down to the river and called: Come back to shore now, little Gilah.’
Mother is sick, she thought. Her mouth all black, and her face completely white.
Father looked at her. ‘What did little Gilah say then? When Mother was calling for her?’
‘Boat of gold, let Gilah drift to the shore,’ she said, and heard her mother coughing in her bed.
Father’s hands were cold and his face was shiny. Maybe it was fever. A girl who lived at the end of the street had died of fever and been eaten by her mother. The girl’s mother was an ugly, mean witch. Not like her own mother, who had been so pure and lovely before she got sick.
‘Yes, that’s what happened. Every day for many, many years. Little Gilah grew and got bigger and bigger, and Mother came to the shore each evening and called, but then one evening …’ He fell silent as Mother coughed in her bed again.
But Gilah didn’t want to listen to Mother’s cough. ‘Tell me more,’ she cried instead, and laughed as Father lifted her up. ‘Into the oven with the witch!’
He held her high in the air. Now he was tickling her tummy again, and this time it was properly funny.
But soon Mother coughed even louder and Father no longer looked happy. He turned silent and serious and put Gilah down on the floor and ran his hand through her hair.
She could see he was sad, but she wanted to hear the end of the story, when the witch went up in flames.
‘I can’t tell you more. I have to look after your mother. She needs water.’
There isn’t any water, Gilah thought. It’s hot and dry and Mother has said that everything out in the fields that Stalin hasn’t taken has died. Mother has also said that she’s going to die soon, that she’ll cough herself to death. Drying out, just like the crops.
‘There’s no point getting water,’ Gilah said.
Father looked at her sternly. ‘What do you mean?’
He probably knew, because he had always said Mother was an oracle, someone who knew everything that was happening out in the world, and who was always right.
‘Mother says she’s going to die.’
His eyes were wet and he didn’t reply, but he took Gilah’s hand. Then he stood up, went over to the closet, and took out his hat and coat, even though it was so hot outside. He shivered, and then he left.
Gilah stood by the window and watched her father go down the street. She knew it was dangerous out there, and only Father was allowed to go out, not Mother, not her brothers, and not her. There were dead bodies lying out there, and they had to be eaten because there was hardly anything else to eat, except for grass, leaves, bark, tree roots, worms and insects. Eaten up. Because they weren’t doing any good otherwise, those dead bodies.
Gilah Berkowitz had never eaten chicken before.
Father says he stole it, but she didn’t believe him.
Now it was on her plate. Her brothers didn’t want any, and when she tasted it she couldn’t understand why. It was the best thing she’d ever eaten.
A pity Mother was dead and couldn’t taste it.