What is conscience? she thinks. Regret? Can you regret an entire life?
It had begun when she betrayed her family during the occupation. She had revealed their roots to the Germans and they had set off for the Jewish cemetery near Babi Yar with all their belongings loaded onto a wheelbarrow. It was envy that had driven her to inform on them.
She was a mamzer, an illegitimate child who didn’t belong.
That autumn day she had made up her mind to live the rest of her life as someone else.
But she had wanted to catch a last glimpse of her father and two older brothers, and had come out here. Not far from where she is now there was a clump of trees surrounded by tall grass. She had lain hidden there, barely twenty metres from the edge of the ravine, and witnessed the whole thing. The pain in her finger throbs as the memories come back to her.
One of the Germans’ Sonderkommandos and two Ukrainian police battalions took care of the logistics. Because it had been a systematic, almost industrial process.
She had seen hundreds of people led up to the ravine to be shot.
Most had been naked, stripped of their possessions. Men, women and children. It hadn’t made any difference. A democracy of extermination.
Another turn of the thumbscrew. The wooden screw creaks as she turns it, but the pain has disappeared. It’s just a strong pressure that feels hot. She has learned that mental pain can be driven out with physical means, and she closes her eyes and can see it all before her once more.
A Ukrainian policeman had walked up with a rusty old wheelbarrow full of screaming babies. Another two policemen had joined him, and together they had thrown the tiny bodies into the ravine.
She hadn’t seen her father, but did see her brothers.
The Germans had tied a group of young boys together, two or three dozen tied up with barbed wire that cut deep into their naked flesh, and those who were still alive were forced to drag their dead or unconscious comrades.
Both of her brothers had been in the group, and had been alive when they fell to their knees at the edge of the ravine to be shot in the back of the head.
She has five minutes left to live, and at last she undoes the little wooden thumbscrew and puts it in her pocket. Her finger throbs and the pain returns.
She kneels down, the way her brothers had in the same place, and she is both now and then at the same time. She had turned her own family in, and everything had started with that.
Everything she has done in her life can be traced back to what happened on those autumn days.
She had been part of the informant community. Stalin’s dictatorship turned friends into enemies, and not even the most dedicated Stalinists had been safe. When the Germans came it continued, but with the roles reversed. Then you had to inform on Jews and Communists, and she had only done the same as everyone else. Adapting and trying to survive. That was impossible as a Jewish girl, mamzer or not, but perfectly feasible as a strong young man.
It hadn’t been easy to hide her physical gender from others, and hardest of all in Dachau. It would probably have been impossible if it hadn’t been for the protection of the guard commander. To him she had been an Ohrwürmer, an earwig, both male and female.
Mentally Gilah Berkowitz is both male and female, or neither, but outwardly the social advantages have made it most practical to perform as a man.
She had even married one of the young girls from Sigtuna College, Henrietta Nordlund, and the marriage had been ideal. She had provided for Henrietta in exchange for her silence and regular appearances as a wife.
She couldn’t have wished for a better wife. But in recent years Henrietta had become something of a burden.
The same applied to Anders Wikstr?m, and it had been necessary to arrange an accident.
It’s a quiet night, the tall trees shut out all noise from the city, and she has just three minutes left to live. She identified her executioner ten years ago, when Madeleine was just ten years old.
The same age she was when she betrayed her father and brothers.
Now Madeleine is a grown woman with many lives on her conscience.
Gilah Berkowitz listens for footsteps, but it’s still quiet. Only the wind in the trees and the dead in the ground. A low moaning.
‘Holodomor,’ she mutters, pulling the coat with the white cross tighter around her.
Images flood through her. Dried-out faces and emaciated bodies. Flies on a pig’s cadaver and the memory of her father at the dinner table with the silver cutlery in his hands. On the white plate is a pigeon. Father had eaten pigeons and she had eaten grass.
The Holodomor was Stalin’s stage-managed famine, and that act of organised mass murder had taken the life of her mother. They had buried her outside the town, but the grave had been plundered by the starving masses because the recently dead were still edible.
And during the war the Nazis made gloves of human skin and soap out of an entire race, and both have now become exhibits on show for the price of a museum ticket.
Everything sick ends up in museums.
If she is sick then everyone is sick, and she wonders if it was a coincidence that she arrived in Denmark, which has the most embalmed corpses in the whole world. The skulls of the dead had holes drilled in them to let out evil spirits, then they were lowered into the bogs.
Not far from Babi Yar is the Monastery of the Caves, containing the mummified bodies of monks who shut themselves in cramped holes to get closer to God. Now they’re in glass cabinets and their bodies are like little children’s. They’re covered in fabric, but their shrunken hands stick out, and sometimes a fly manages to get behind the glass and crawl on the fingers, eating whatever’s left. The corpses in the dark caves are exhibits, and the price of crying over them is the same as for a thin wax candle.
Now she suddenly hears steps, heels striking stone, slowly but purposefully. Which means that she has just a minute or so left to live.
‘Konets,’ she whispers. ‘Come to me.’
She thinks of the art she has created, and she has neither an explanation of what she has done nor any answer as to why she has done it. Art creates itself, because it is inexplicable and primitive.
It is Gnosis, child’s play, liberated from express intentions.
If she hadn’t seen her brothers die at Babi Yar, and if her mother had lived and not died in the great famine, then she would never have forced two Kazakh brothers to kill each other with their bare hands while she looked on dressed as her mother, a true Jewess.
Mamzer is the word for what she has done. Mamzer is regret and exclusion and it is life and death at the same time, frozen moments of what has been lost.