a moment like half a melon. When that, too, went under, all we could see was her back, and the supervisor said: Zhalko, ochyen’ zhalko.
Then he brandished his shovel, drove the whole group to the edge of the construction site, where the lime women worked, and shouted: Vnimanye, lyudi. Attention, people—if a saboteur is looking for death that’s fine with us. She jumped in, he said, the bricklayers saw it all from up on the scaffold. Konrad Fonn the accordion player had to translate for the supervisor.
After that we had to line up, march into the camp, and stand in formation to be counted. It was still early morning, still raining ice-nails, and we stood there, aghast, silent outside and in. Shishtvanyonov ran yelling out of his office, foaming at the mouth like an overheated horse. He hurled his leather gloves at us. Wherever one landed, someone had to bend down and take it back to him. Again and again. Then Shishtvanyonov turned us over to Tur Prikulitsch. He was wearing an oilcloth coat and rubber boots. He had us count off, step forward, step back, count off, step forward, step back, into the evening.
No one knows when Irma Pfeifer was fished out of the mortar pit or where they scraped a little dirt away to bury her. The next morning the sun was cold and bare. There was fresh mortar in the pit, everything was as usual. No one mentioned the previous day. I’m sure more than one person thought about Irma Pfeifer and her fine cap and her good quilted work jacket, since she was probably laid to rest in her clothes, and the dead have no need of clothes when the living are freezing.
Irma Pfeifer wanted to take a shortcut. She was carrying a sack of cement in front of her and couldn’t see where she was going. The sack had soaked up the icy rain and went down before she did, which is why we didn’t see any sack when we came to the mortar pit. At least that’s what Konrad Fonn the accordion player thought. You can think all kinds of things. But you can’t know for sure.
Black poplars
It was the night of December 31, New Year’s Eve, in our second year. Halfway through the night the loudspeakers summoned us to the Appellplatz. We were chased down the main street of the camp, flanked by eight guards with rifles and dogs, and followed by a truck hauling a trailer. In the tall snow behind the factory, where the empty fields began, we were told to line up in rows along the brick wall and wait. We thought: This is the night we will be shot.
I pushed into the front row so I could be one of the first. That way I wouldn’t have to load corpses onto the truck, which was already waiting off the road. Shishtvanyonov and Tur Prikulitsch had crawled into the cab, the motor was running to keep them warm. The guards paced up and down. The dogs huddled together, their eyes squeezed shut by the cold. Now and then they lifted a paw so it wouldn’t get frostbitten.
We stood there, our faces aged, our eyebrows covered with frost, our lips shivering. Some of the women mumbled prayers. This is the end, I told myself. My grandmother’s farewell was: I know you’ll come back. That, too, was in the middle of the night, but also in the middle of the world. At home they’ve already welcomed the New Year, maybe raised a glass to me, a midnight toast to my being alive. I hope they thought about me in the first hours of the New Year and then climbed into their warm beds. By now my grandmother’s wedding ring should be lying on the nightstand, she takes it off every evening because it’s too tight. And I am standing here, waiting to be shot.
I saw all of us standing in a giant box. Its top was made of sky, lacquered black by the night and decorated with sharply whetted stars. The bottom was lined knee-deep with cotton wool, so that we would fall into softness. And the sides of the giant box were draped with stiff, icy brocade, silken tangles of fringe, endless lace. Toward the back of the box, between the watchtowers, a catafalque of snow was lying on the wall of the camp. And on top of that, as tall as the towers, a stack of bunk beds reached to