The Book of Dirt Read online

  Dr Randa was shown to a cold room in the basement of the museum in which two bunk beds had been erected. The SS guard gave him his pass and told him he no longer needed to wear the yellow star. ‘You may travel between here, the bathroom, the kitchen and your office. Everywhere else is off limits.’

  The next morning he awoke to find three others in the room: Dr Eppstein was an antiques dealer, Dr Muneles, a museum curator, was an expert in Jewish calligraphy and illuminated manuscripts, and Dr Murmelstein, a former rabbi from Vienna, was a celebrated authority on Jewish ritual artefacts. They were the only men who remained of the hundred who had first been summoned. They had been selected, by order of the Führer himself, to put together a special catalogue of Jewish life and culture that would be turned into a grand display when the war was over. It would be called The Museum of the Extinct Race.

  Each morning for the next two years, the men were separated, taken to a room filled with their respective type of artefacts, and forced to sort through the Nazi plunder. They met at night to discuss their progress. For the most part it was dull, laborious work but occasionally they would come across a book, a curio, a Torah scroll of immense beauty, a true treasure. They would describe it to one another with the wide-eyed wonder of cultural archaeologists. Eppstein even found his father-in-law’s Chanukah candelabra. He recognised the inscription. That night, as he told the others of his family, he broke down in tears for what he had lost.

  One after the other, Dr Randa’s colleagues disappeared —first Eppstein, then Muneles and, finally, Murmelstein—until only he was left in the museum. By then the building had become as much a prison as Theresienstadt. He had never even had the opportunity to look out the window and see the streets of his beloved city of Prague. His solitude didn’t last long. The work was deemed complete and he was deported to Auschwitz.

  There is no documentary evidence, nothing about how it was set up or who was involved. It is all hearsay. And yet the Museum of the Extinct Race has become the central pillar of the collective Czech memory. Hitler planned a museum to commemorate his greatest achievement: the total annihilation of European Jewry.

  It is what sets the Czech wartime experience apart from all the others—a ghoulish spectre from an alternative past, haunting the Jewish imagination. Just as this Dr Jacob Randa, who might have been my grandfather, now haunts mine.

  His former students approached me in the street, wanting to talk, wanting to ask if I had known. I was forced to wear the story like an old coat, all the while digging through its pockets for clues, anything that might have given me cause to doubt.

  There is one clue, from when I was ten years old, that I return to again and again.

  The garden bed lay at the far end of my grandmother’s backyard orchard, behind the fig tree. Like all the other beds, it was framed with dry wooden planks, but the dirt inside was unturned, untended. When I asked my grandmother why it had been left alone, while everything around it flourished, she either pretended not to hear me or said, ‘That one isn’t mine.’

  At first I just heard him. A soft, melodious humming. I was old enough to know that the tune had its roots in another country, another world. There was also the occasional word, breathed rather than spoken. I sneaked past the fig tree and there he was, sitting in that lonely garden bed, his back to me, legs crossed. He was running his finger through the soil as if to plough it, but in a circular motion. I stood silent. There sat a man, always so impeccably clean, often to the point of vanity, now in scruffy clothes, covered in dirt. This was not the grandfather I knew.

  His humming grew louder and, I thought, more joyous. It rose to a crescendo, but then descended to the doleful tone I had first heard. He rubbed out the tracks his fingers had made and fell silent. I ducked behind one of the trees, but I needn’t have bothered. He didn’t look up, simply resumed his singing, words this time, in what must once have been a beautiful voice. I recognised some of the words from the beginning of every Jewish prayer, blessing God, king of the world.

  I leaned forward, trying to decipher the rest of the prayer. Without warning, he thrust his hand into the ground, pulled out a clump of dirt and, holding it to the sky, cried out. I stumbled backwards, fell over the mess of broken branches at my feet. My grandfather spun around and looked at me, tears streaming down his face. I will never forget that look of fear and sadness. As if I’d just tripped over his soul.

  How many lives does the Lord bestow upon one man?

  If I had only known Yaakov, son of Rabbi Aharon and Gusta Rand, who fled his village at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains in search of a greater life/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known Jakub Rand, who found his calling in the grand academic halls of Prague, only to have his dreams snuffed out by the malevolent course of history/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known Dr Jacob Randa, hand-picked by a monocle-wearing Nazi professor to curate an exhibition on the liturgical texts of an extinct race/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known A-1821, sickly, emaciated prisoner in a place with no birds, teaching children while the furnaces were being stoked to receive their withering bodies/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known Jan Randa, survivor, hapless suitor and, eventually, husband to a reluctant bride with whom he would father two children/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known Jack, labourer in a new land who, after almost dying in an accident on the factory floor, found a path back to the world of teaching thanks to a letter about kosher pickles/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known the Dikduk Doc, grammar maven and revered teacher to four generations of Jewish children in Australia/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known Grandpa, avowed non-believer, who was prepared to challenge God to save his youngest grandson/

  it would have been enough.

  If I had only known that nameless, faceless man sitting in a five-by-five plot of dirt, humming and thrusting his fist to the sky/

  it would have been enough.

  I knew them all, and yet I didn’t know my grandfather at all.

  Arrivals

  1

  Františka Roubíčková peered into the empty biscuit tin and cursed her husband. Damn him! Damn his religion, damn his gambling but, most of all, damn the goodness in his heart, for that was the root of her own weakness. He knew it, took advantage. Once again he was off on one of his special ‘sales trips’, leaving her and their three little girls almost destitute. But who ever heard of a salesman returning with less money than when he left? It wasn’t as if she needed him. Soon her hats would be prized throughout Žižkov. Already what she earned she used for the family. She bought the food, the clothes, the household goods. Anything left over she would hide away. In a drawer, in a shoebox, between the mattresses. Even in little Daša’s jewellery box, the one that refused to sing. Damn him! He found them all. And so, like it was a game, Františka Roubíčková had taken to using the old biscuit tin. They never spoke about it, for it would be an admission that she, too, was keeping secrets. Whatever pittance he earned he gave to his girls. And he honestly believed that it was only a matter of time before luck would find him. ‘We don’t live like royalty now,’ he once said, ‘but one day we will. Mark my words, there will be a plaque on the street bearing the name Ludvík Roubíček.’

  ‘Trinkets!’ she said, exasperated. He would be back on Thursday, carrying useless baubles wrapped in scraps of butcher’s paper, as if he was Saint Nicholas himself. That, to him, made everything all right. What should it matter that he had left with enough money to buy a chicken, unplucked mind you—they could never afford the luxury of Pan Hašek’s fine plucked birds—and came back with only enough to buy some potatoes and an onion? Could he not, just once, find his way back to his employer without stumbling over a card table? ‘You’ll
see,’ he told the last man, the one who threatened to have him thrown in jail and his family tossed onto the street, ‘I’ll make you more than you can possibly hope to get from this junk you have me hawking. Luck is on my side.’ The other one, fist clenched, had said—Ludvík was laughing when he told Františka, and perhaps a little drunk—‘Luck? Young man, you are lucky your girls aren’t on the street right now selling the only thing your family has left to sell!’

  Františka Roubíčková was determined not to cry this time. She had made the ultimate sacrifice, she had taken on his religion against her better judgment. ‘He is a nice boy, true,’ her mother had said. ‘But they are trouble. They hunger for money, you know?’ She had never thought that her mother meant it literally, that he would actually devour money, her money, before she could turn it into anything useful. Look how she lived, in a cramped apartment, with all of them, while her sisters were frolicking in the country, in their summer homes, because they had all married well above their stations, to prosperous butchers and bakers. They sent her photos with inscriptions on the back. ‘We miss you!’ and ‘Our love to the girls, bring them here to play.’ The girls. Daša, her oldest. Then Irena and little Marcela. With another child on the way, maybe this time a son. Ludvík was determined to have a boy to carry on the family name. He was the only child of an only child. He had no cousins. When he died, the very essence of Roubíček as it had existed in him would be extinguished. Maybe it’s a good thing, she thought. At least the girls will be able to hide behind their new names. They could undo her mistake, marry fine young men of the gentry. Get out of Žižkov.

  And yet, all the same, she knew that when Ludvík came back on Thursday evening she would take him into her arms, and eventually into her bed. Every return played out in the same fashion. She wouldn’t ask him about the details, the money. She wouldn’t ask how many of Pan Whoever-it-was-this-week’s wares he’d managed to sell. They would put the girls to sleep, tuck them in, sing them lullabies, and then make their way to the other side of the gauze curtain. He would make a big show of putting some notes in the moneybox they kept in the chest of drawers, notes that had already been in his pocket when he left, only fewer. He would say that she had grown even more beautiful in his absence. Then he would climb into bed and they would wriggle towards one another and, as if she had forgotten every one of the curses that she had uttered over the past few days, she would hold him close and they would make love in silence. As he ran his finger over her belly in the afterglow, they would choke back their laughter, remembering that life was just getting started, because when little Roubíček arrived it would all be different. Good fortune would finally come their way. They would move out of Žižkov, where Ludvík knew she hated living, and spend more time with her family. No longer would he spend his days hustling for these charlatans. He would work on his own terms, while everyone in Prague sang the praises of Františka Roubíčková, the most celebrated milliner in all of Bohemia.

  Daša stood at the door, her lip twitching as she watched Františka. Their eyes met for a second and the girl looked away. From the other room, the sound of Marcela crying. Daša disappeared back into the dimly lit hallway.

  Serious little Daša. What was a mother to make of her? Soon she would be old enough to work, maybe at Žofie Sláviková’s grocery store down the street, although Františka would prefer she concentrated on her schooling. Already at nine the girl showed a quick mind, was wise beyond her years and possessed a formidable will. She seemed happy within herself, popular with her peers. Now Ludvík’s mother, Mama Roubíčková, was insisting that she move schools, to begin a Jewish education. How dare she! When her son had married outside the faith, Mama Roubíčková had mourned him as if he had died, and for three years continued to act as if he were dead just to spite them. Never mind that her own husband sneaked over most afternoons to give the young couple whatever treats he could gather without the old bat noticing. ‘Frantishku,’ he would whisper, this fine and pious Jew, ‘I brought you a ham. Let us eat it in the garden together, our little secret.’ Fine and pious, indeed.

  Six years ago, when it became known that a second child was on the way, Papa Roubíček had summoned her to his office at the factory. ‘Please sit down,’ he said, taking her woollen cardigan and ushering her to the leather armchair.

  ‘I am tired of this business,’ he said. ‘Two years and Mama Roubíčková has yet to see little Daša. Now another one. She pretends not to care but it weighs on her mind. A husband knows these things. She misses her son, but she longs for a daughter even more. She wants to undo what was done, to take back her shiva. You have a good soul, Frantishku. Perhaps even a Jewish soul.’ Papa Roubíček let out a great sigh and placed his hand on her knee. ‘I don’t believe in it either, but to her it is everything. Save a mother from her torment. Take our faith, your husband’s faith.’ His voice softened and he looked at Františka ruefully. ‘Please.’

  That she did so should have been enough. Now Mama Roubíčková was at it again. ‘I won’t ask anything more of you, I promise,’ she said as the two fussed over the stove one afternoon. ‘It is easy to forget, with your painted eggs and festive trees, but these girls are Jews. I know you try, and perhaps I am to blame for raising a son like Ludya, but they should be with their own kind. Learning the traditions. Here they will know nothing of our God.’

  ‘But Mama.’ The word clung to Františka’s throat. ‘She is happy. Her teachers are happy with her progress. Her friends—’

  ‘She is a child. She will find happiness again.’

  ‘But to interrupt her—’

  ‘Papa Roubíček and I…We want to help. Them, yes, but also you. I won’t force it. We are not the kind to make demands. But it is something to consider, no?’

  Františka clenched her fist around the wooden spoon and continued to stir. Again she would relent. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But eventually. This she already knew.

  2

  Jakub R didn’t know whether he saw or smelled or heard the city first. But here it was, towering above him. He was an ant, no, something smaller, a louse. All about he saw city people doing what he could only surmise were city things. They looked like another species. He would not fit in, even with his payes tucked behind his ears and tzitsis shoved under his belt, half-bunched into his underpants. They would see through him. Why had he even bothered to shave his beard on the ride from B? Their city eyes could grow whiskers on his face as soon as cocoon him like a moth in a tattered tallis.

  Jakub’s first step onto the platform of his great city dreamscape was tempered by the soot spewing from the train’s stack. It was in his chest now, clutching at his lungs, squeezing out what little air was left. Prague, seat of culture and learning, home to President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, to everything Jakub had longed for, already despised him. Dirt. That was what struck him most. He looked through the gaping hole above, a wooden halo that canonised the station. A series of blackened statues gazed down solemnly, as if to say: ‘Welcome and beware. Beyond this place there is nobody to watch over you.’ Was this the message that Josef Fanta had intended when he designed the magnificent railway station as a monument to his beloved Emperor Franz Josef I? The declaration of Czechoslovakian independence in 1918—only twelve years ago—saw the city’s ever-pumping heart renamed after the first President’s friend and ideological ally, Woodrow Wilson, but Herr Fanta’s imperial vision could not be ignored, no matter how hard Masaryk tried.

  A shove, and our new arrival found himself surging forward. He glanced down the platform, towards the stairs that ascended like Jacob’s ladder to the main concourse. Three gypsies were huddled at the bottom, their jangling tunes dancing into the pockets of the milling crowds. People stopped to watch. Others spat on the floor as they rushed past. Jakub tried to look into their mouths, to count their teeth. What was the saying about gypsy teeth? Something about omens. His mother used to mutter it under her breath every time a band of them neared the village. He searched the crowd
for other gypsies who might take advantage of a distracted traveller. Nothing. But could they not appear and disappear at will? Jakub clutched his bag to his chest and felt a pang of guilt. It was exactly what the people across the bridge would do when they saw a Jew.

  Jakub resisted the invitation of the two archangels beckoning him to the streets of Prague, and approached a man in what he took to be a uniform.

  - Sir, I am lost.

  - You must go north-west.

  - I’m sorry, I don’t understand.

  - I cannot help you, other than to say head north-west when you exit the station but not so far as the river. I am told you will find those like you in that direction.

  - Like me?

  - Yes, people of your kind. But I suggest you buy yourself a new hat and, if fortune permits, a matching coat.

  - A coat? In this weather?

  - It is not for the weather, but for the journey.

  - The journey?

  - I must be going now. Head north-west, I say. If you reach a bridge then you have gone too far.

  - But how will I know when I get there?

  - You can’t miss it, wherever it is.

  The man disappeared into the crowd.

  Jakub dropped his bag on the ground, sat on it and stared at the exit. All of a sudden he noticed a stall with a row of hats hanging from the awning. It almost certainly hadn’t been there before. He leapt to his feet, scooped up the bag and rushed across the hall.

  - A hat for the nice young man, if I am not mistaken. And I am very rarely mistaken.

  - Well, yes, perhaps, but for now I am only browsing.

  - Oh, but, sir, time is of the essence if you wish to reach your destination before sundown.