the sky, a tiered coffin with room for all of us to be laid out, just like in the barracks. And over the topmost tier was the black-lacquered cover of the night. From the towers at the head and foot of the catafalque, two honor guards dressed in black kept watch over the dead. At the head, nearest the camp gate, the guard lights shined like a candelabra. At the darker foot end, the snow-draped crown of the mulberry tree made a magnificent bouquet, with all our names on countless paper bows. Snow muffles sound, I thought, almost no one will hear the shooting. Our families are slumbering away, tipsy, unsuspecting, worn out from celebrating New Year’s Eve in the middle of the world. Maybe they’re dreaming about our enchanted burial in the New Year.
I had no desire to leave the box with the tiered coffins. Fear of death can become a kind of trance if you try to master it but don’t quite succeed. Even the icy cold that keeps you from moving softens the horror. Death by freezing lulled me into a state where I could surrender to death by shooting.
But then two of the heavily wrapped Russians from the trailer tossed shovels at our feet. Tur Prikulitsch and one of the Russians laid out four knotted ropes parallel to the factory wall, forming two corridors between the looming darkness and the snowy brightness. Shishtvanyonov had fallen asleep in the cab. Perhaps he was drunk. He slept with his chin on his chest, like a forgotten passenger left in the train at the last station. He slept the whole time we shoveled. No, we shoveled the whole time he slept, because Tur Prikulitsch had to wait for his instructions. The whole time he slept, we went on digging two ditches between the ropes, for our execution. I don’t know how long we dug, until the sky turned gray. And that’s how long I heard my shovel repeating: I know you’ll come back, I know you’ll come back. The shoveling had shaken me awake, I now preferred to go on starving and freezing and slaving away for the Russians rather than get shot. My grandmother was right: I will come back. Although I qualified that with: But do you know how hard this is.
Then Shishtvanyonov climbed out of the cab, rubbed his chin, and shook his legs, perhaps because they were still asleep. He waved the heavily wrapped guards over. They opened the tailgate and threw down pickaxes and crowbars. Shishtvanyonov spoke unusually briefly and quietly, gesticulating with his index finger. He climbed back inside and the empty truck drove away with him.
Tur had to give Shishtvanyonov’s mumbling the tone of a command and shouted: Dig holes for trees.
We searched for the tools in the snow as if they were presents. The earth was frozen hard as bone. The pickaxes bounced off the ground, the crowbars clanged like iron against iron. Nut-sized clods sprayed into our faces. I sweated in the cold, and froze as I sweated. I split into two halves, one ember, one ice. My upper body was scorched with fire, it bent and blazed away automatically for fear of the quota. My lower body was numb with frost, my legs pressed cold and dead into my gut.
By afternoon our hands were bloody, but the holes were only knuckle-deep. And that’s how we left them.
The holes didn’t get finished until late spring, when two long rows of trees were planted. They grew quickly. These trees didn’t grow anywhere else, not on the steppe, not in the Russian village, nowhere nearby. Throughout our time in the camp no one knew what they were called. The taller they grew, the whiter their branches and trunks became. Not delicate and wax-white translucent like birches, but robust, with dull skin like plaster paste.
During my first summer home, I saw these plaster-white camp trees in the Alder Park, old and huge. Uncle Edwin looked in his tree atlas and found: Stout and sturdy, this rapid-growing tree can shoot up to a height of 35 meters, with a trunk reaching two meters in diameter. Specimens can attain an age of 200 years.
Uncle Edwin had no idea how correct, or rather, how fitting the description was, when he read out the word SHOOT. He said: This tree doesn’t seem to need a lot of care and it’s quite beautiful. But its name is a royal lie. Why is it called BLACK POPLAR when its