Devil's Workshop Read Free Page B

other prisoners might try to kill me.
    My great dream, Mr Mára said, is to use my game to prepare people everywhere, but especially children, who love new things, for the world’s triumph over fascism.
    He may have been in prison, but Mr Mára was still a soldier and a communist. He couldn’t have been in his position otherwise, of course.
    One day these little games, Mr Mára said, pointing to the flickering screen with wires and cables poking out every which way, will connect people all over the world, and I’ll be part of it. What do you plan to do when your sentence is done?
    I think I shrugged.
    This was shortly before they abolished the death penalty in Czechoslovakia.
    Lucky for me that they did. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have let me go.
    One day my reduced sentence came to an end.
    And I walked out.
    The first thing I did was to go and look for a dive. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No family, no girlfriend.
    All that was about to change.
    So many of my fellow prisoners dreamed about the Pankrác dives, where their fathers, mothers, friends, girlfriends, cousins, children and wives would be waiting for them. Often what they found instead was nothing but the warm embrace of their tattooed fellow-travellers.
    I found Lebo waiting for me. He didn’t have any tattoos, though, since he was just a baby when he was in the camp. The authorities didn’t even know he existed.
    Lebo stood in front of the pub. He said he knew they were letting me out, but he didn’t like the idea of waiting in front of the prison.
    He looked exactly the same as I remembered him. An old man in a black suit. Lebo the giant, with his bare skull perched atop his veiny neck.
    We didn’t even go in the pub. There wasn’t a moment to spare. We were going home.
    Mr Hamáček, the greengrocer, drove us in his sputtering Škoda. He, like me, had grown old. He had some milk for me from the aunts, plus some bread with bacon fat, and hardboiled eggs from the Terezín hens.

     
    We all called Lebo uncle, all of us little kids and older children born in the garrison town of Terezín.
    Our fathers and mothers were soldiers, they didn’t have time for us, they kept the fortress town running and that was good enough.
    My mother wasn’t a soldier, but even so it had been better for me to be with Lebo.
    And now I was back with him again.

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    Lebo encouraged us as we crept through the maze of forbidden tunnels underneath Terezín, and he never gave us away when we trampled on some ancient sign sayingor ZÁKAZ VSTUPU ! or ACHTUNG , MINEN ! We kept finding more and more hiding places in the sewers sprinkled with sand, forgotten stores of planks and gas masks, passageways and crawl spaces, and it didn’t put us off one bit when we found an execution chamber filled with spent bullet shells buried in the sand. We brought them to Lebo and he stuck them in his satchel.
    Lebo could make a bullet shell whistle louder than any of us. We would hold races in the catacombs, where he would clock our time with a stopwatch while we ran back and forth through the water that gushed from underground, and he always had some story to tell to comfort the littlest kids, who still got lost and frightened in the dark and felt cold every now and then.
    Being friends with Lebo was the best.
    And the thing that made him happiest was when we brought back tracings of the words we found on the walls of the tunnels and bunkers, deep underground – initials, dates, and messages carved with spikes, keys, and fingernails. He stuck them all in his big black satchel, because he was a collector: his passion was to know and remember everything connected with the days when the fortress town was a prison and a torture chamber and an execution ground.
    He wanted to find it all and preserve it.
    We were just kids, so we didn’t take it that seriously.
    Creeping through the catacombs, wading through puddles with blind cave newts, we explored the bunkers and firing cabins