Devil's Workshop Read Free

was carrying on my dad’s legacy. I was working on Terezín’s behalf, and as Lebo later explained to me, laying his enormous hand on my shoulder, in my own way I was defending the town. So maybe my father, in spite of our last argument, which he didn’t survive, would’ve been proud of me after all.
    Maybe.
    They threw me out of school in the end, even though my dad was a major. I wasn’t deemed fit for the army.
    I went back to herding goats and I was happy. The other boys and girls had all grown up and there were no new little tots, so I was left on my own with the flock.
    The goats in Terezín weren’t just a country pastime, or a way to make a living. Goats are the symbol of fortress towns, they’re biological war machines.
    The goats cleared the weeds and grass and bushes from the passages through the ramparts, the weak spots in our fortifications. They may not have ranked with such wonders of technology as the Prussian cannon, the rounded bastion, the Tiger tank, the Katyusha rocket launcher, or any of the more recent artillery of the Cold War, but only the goats, with their greedy mouths and their endless consumption of grass, could keep the ramparts clean.
    What good was all that advanced weaponry if a single determined foot soldier could creep through the weed-filled ditch to the city gates and blast open a hole with the most primitive bazooka?
    Every fortress town falls if the goats disappear.
    But my dad didn’t want me to herd goats. He wanted me to learn how to be in charge and give orders, to turn men into machines. And one day, up on the ramparts, which have been blasted by cold winds for hundreds of years, so the bricks give off these tiny little clouds of red dust, the two of us got into a nasty argument. And near the end my dad must’ve realized that I was too grown up for him to beat me any more, and he clutched at his heart and he clutched at my hand, and I thought he was going to throw me off, but I stood tight and he slipped and fell, and landed thump on his back in the grass. My goats went running in every direction, so I climbed down and called out to calm them, and I tried to revive my dad the way they’d taught us in school, but it was no use.
    He had a huge military funeral. The units lined up on the main square and paraded through town till evening to the boom of artillery. They played all the most famous tunes from the nearby garrisons, and my aunts and Mr Hamáček, who ran the greengrocer’s, said it was the most beautiful funeral in all of Terezín’s history. Everybody liked it. And of course a lot of the soldiers who still lived in town congratulated me too. But then they locked me up.

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    They gave me a sentence of many years for my father’s death, but there’s no use talking about it. When they let me out, I headed straight for the nearest pub.
    All the other prisoners said that was what you did.
    That included the ones I had escorted to the trapdoor, they all said they’d rather be going to the nearest neighbourhood dive.
    Mr Mára, the technician, had a big huge prehistoric computer on his desk in the execution room, with a flickering green screen. He’d been arrested and convicted in a trial of cyberneticists, ‘traitors of the people’. But the prison administration had recognized his skills and he ended up as the executioner. Socialist cybernetics remained his passion.
    I was told the old hangmen needed vodka by the bucket-load to calm themselves down, but Mr Mára was a man of the modern era. He had invented a game. And that made everyone happy, from the high-ranking officers to the simple men who worked as guards.
    I was his helping hand.
    The way that happened was one day they were executing a gangster from Slovakia, a hulk of a man, shaking and kicking as they walked him down the corridor in chains. Four jailers had their hands full with him. He knocked over my pail while I was wiping the floor. But when he came to the threshold of Mr Mára’s room, he