Maybe you're a Sinner (2/6)
anonymous
August 30 2009, 10:43:49 UTC
The first day Gilbert refuses to believe.
Perhaps it’s some sort of sick practical joke. That must be it. So he sits on the wooden bench he wakes up on and stares up at the single bare bulb that throws shadows onto the mildewed ceiling and is bored.
The second day begins when a harsh voice wakes him. The light flickers and the door to the underground room shakes on its hinges. “Aufstehen!” it orders, and as sleepy as Prussia is he doesn’t want to disobey. He scrambles to his feet and stands to attention. But no one comes in.
The third day is when Prussia finally realises that he doesn’t even know if it really is the third day at all. The bulb never turns off. The sleep he does get is disturbed by angry men who don’t exist past the wooden door of his cell. There is no day and night here. There is no here. Prussia is alone and no one knows where he is.
The mildew gets into his lungs before long. The forth, fifth and sixth days pass in a blur of fever and insomnia. Gilbert shakes and his eyelids ache from the constant light bulb glare.
Prussia starts screaming on the seventh day. He’s not going to fucking stand this. Screw this. He’s Prussia and he’s done nothing to deserve this. Fucking screw this and everything-just-let me-fucking-be! Finally, his yells are heard and he hears the click of a key in a lock. But triumph turns to uncertainty as three men he doesn’t know crowd in, and he’s cornered. He writhes like a wild animal, hating but weak and at the breaking point after four days without rest and his muscles ache like his lungs-
His jaw is broken by one well-placed fist. He thinks some of his fingers have been dislodged.
When he comes to again, Prussia almost cons himself into believing that he’d been dreaming. He’s in a rubber room, now- he only knows that because he’s lying shattered-cheekbone down on a floor that smells like petrochemicals; there’s no light anywhere. Nowhere.
After hours of nothingness he hears dripping water. Throat parched and tasting like blood he gropes blindly for it, but then just when he finds a damp corner the drip is a rush and an inexorable force- litres upon litres plummet Gilbert’s head to the floor, trapped beneath a waterfall with the stench of plastic in his face. He can barely roll out of the torrent from the invisible ceiling above him and he lies there choking and coughing out his hate. The water doesn’t stop. The room is made of rubber.
Shit. Icy cold water rises in rapid inches, to his knees, to his chest, up to his neck so that he has to tilt his head back and kick out his toes to try and feel the bottom. It stops there. Every second breath that he takes is a pull of water. He shivers there for days and days (perhaps just hours- Prussia can’t tell), pleading and screaming and choking and drowning-
Then he wakes up again. A standing cell- a box barely more than a foot wide and 5 feet tall. He huddles hunchbacked and cramping in the pitch darkness; when they open the door he falls out still hunched, muscles frozen in spasms. Again, in a straight jacket in a circular padded room where he tries and fails to find a corner to curl up in and scream. Forced with his back bent over wooden slats at right angles and chains everywhere. In rooms filled with the stench of human waste and the eyes of the destitute and the dead. Constantly waking up but never asleep, his mind is a memory-cutting-room-floor.
Salvation arrives when he is lead out of his holding cell by a faceless guard and up out of the cellar into a sterile white corridor. There’s a state of unconsciousness that dwells behind the brain awake, where all sensations blur into one another and joints twitch and shake for no reason and everything just is too much. Gilbert is so far gone that he doesn’t even see the traffic lights at each corner.
Prussia is planted on a stool at one end of a long table in an office. An interrogation or something, he dimly recognises, but when his eyes clear he can only see a large bird on a perch next to the telephone. It doesn’t surprise him when it opens its raptor mouth and speaks to him.
Maybe you're a Sinner (3/6)
anonymous
August 30 2009, 10:51:34 UTC
“Are you going to tell us what we want?” it says in a voice like wind and freedom.
What do you even want from me? Gilbert thinks though his tongue is so swollen he cannot say it.
“A confession.” The Eagle has blood in its eyes. “It would be very easy for us to find your brother, Herr Beilschmidt. One quick trip to the West, one blow to the head, and he could be right here beside you.”
Prussia rasps. “NO! No-“
“You love this, don’t you?”
“No! What are you-“
The Prussian Eagle spreads its wings and keens loudly. “You do. Spying. Hating. The efficiency with which someone’s mind can be broken down into algorithms and patterns. The security of mind that you lack, Prussia. The State Security.”
“No!” he screams at the bird, mad. “Russia! That was fucking Russia! Not me-“
“The Deutsche Demokratische Republik was fucking Russia, Gilbert. Like the dirty whore you are. Communism. Red red red between the bed sheets. And here you stand,” it mocks, “unable even to stand your own torture.”
Gilbert’s Stasi uniform is torn and drenched and bloodstained but his fingers still clutch at it as he pushes his forehead into his knees and breaks down and sobs.
When Prussia really wakes up he’s back in the twenty first century and he’s not a country. For that fact he is glad- the trembling stays behind for days.
-
“How many was it?”
Sadiq ignores the voice from under the table.
“It was a great many, am I right in thinking?”
Germany obviously cannot hear the low whispers that coil around Turkey’s feet. Greece, sitting next to him, cannot either.
“It was a million, I think. A million of them off to Syria and off to their deaths.” Turkey clenches his fist in his lap and determinedly focuses on the meeting. It’s not there if he ignores it, he knows. If he doesn’t look down, it never happened. If he doesn’t show the fear and self-disgust he feels on his face, then maybe it didn’t happen.
“And I thought,” the Wolf at his feet says in syrupy tones, “that the Ottoman in you had died. Obviously not. Driving them into the desert and blowing off their heads- real class.”
Armenia avoids him in the corridors. It’s fine, because Turkey avoids him too.
“That’s right.” The Wolf yawns and rests its tame head on his feet as Sadiq picks a fight with Hercules to shut out the memories. “Keep ignoring me, Turkey. Maybe one day the Armenian Genocide will just disappear.”
-
It happens often for Ivan, every few decades when he stands alone in the Sibir, in fact. It begins with a flurry of snow and a voice that comes to him from beyond the curtain of wind. Russia turns to face it, gaze vacant.
“Come,” it calls, softly. “Come to me.”
Like a man asleep Ivan’s feet shuffle him towards the sound, siren’s song. Ivan is only aware dimly of casting off his scarf and his gloves. Everything pales in comparison to that low, promising, powerful voice that seeps into him from the permafrost below his feet. He makes a small sound in the back of his throat.
“That’s right,” the wind coaxes. “Such a good child. Deeper. Into me.”
Ivan winces, because the cold is starting to hurt him and the wind whips into his eyes. But, still with an empty smile on his face, his body begins to take off his boots. Continuing barefoot through the rocky ice, Russia is but a smear of white in a snow-white blizzard.
He has to keep going. There’s something waiting for him. That something pulls him forward, further and further away from civilization.
“A little more. A little colder. Brave child, beautiful child. I’m so proud of you.”
His muscles ache. His feet bleed for a while, then don’t because they freeze. The cold grabs him from all around and burrows deeper into his skin and eyeballs and into his heart, until Ivan can’t feel Ivan anymore. He’s not Ivan. He’s part of something greater- ‘nothing’, because that is what Russia can feel.
Simply nothing, he doesn’t read the warning signs or see the razor wire, or see the dead bodies littering the snow around him. And he arrives- coatless, barefoot, blue and white and frozen somewhere in time.
Maybe you're a Sinner (4/6)
anonymous
August 30 2009, 10:59:41 UTC
It’s a labour camp. A Grizzly Bear is standing by the gate.
“My brave boy,” she rumbles. “My brave, brave, good son.” And Ivan collapses into the she-bear’s scarlet brown fur and is somehow made colder. “I’m so proud.”
“Mother?” he whispers like a ghost.
“There’s something you came here to do, isn’t there?”
He pauses, in a dream. Then nods as his face brightens. “I…” His voice breaks and is almost lost in the bitter cold. “I want to…to make…my family happy.”
“That’s right. No war. No crime. No pain. No danger.” She shifts and swings her great head towards the huddled shapes of people inside of the compound. “That’s what they want, too.”
Is that really what they want? But the redness of his scarf and his love burning in his empty frozen chest, Bear-close, quash the thoughts that flitter down his spine. His boss is telling him to do it. His very nature is telling him- after all, Ivan was (or is) simply the world’s most dangerous idealist.
When he’s gone, frozen, like this, he has the power to make dreams come true.
He approaches the children sitting in slave chains. They look up at him, afraid, and as he smiles his traitorous body finds a revolver and points. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do- the electric sizzle behind his eyelids and in the growl of the she-bear makes him feel dangerous.
“Don’t hate me,” says Lithuania.
“Don’t hurt me,” Estonia whispers.
“Don’t kill me,” Latvia quails.
“Don’t invade me,” chokes Georgia.
“Please don’t do this to yourself anymore, Russia,” Ukraine pleads.
Belarus doesn’t say anything at all.
A quick count under his breath tells Ivan that he has six lovely siblings. He only wants them to be happy, and in one house, and together, and all the same, Russia, one with Russia, happywhethertheylikeitornot-
(Stalin signed the warrants as Ivan froze inside)
-Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang, and finally- Bang (Belarus still doesn’t speak.).
“They’re safe now,” the bear growls, and promptly starts to eat them. With the snap of Latvia’s skull being crushed between her jaws, Russia suddenly starts to shake, because he’s cold, and he’s hurting, and now he’s all alone. Unable to speak or even look away as Estonia’s feet disappear, Ivan’s wavering hand moves of its own accord and points the gun to his own temple.
It clicks.
Russia is out of bullets.
Ivan screams.
And, in a flurry of ice, everything is gone. An illusion. Nobody is dead, but that’s a lie- Russia dies and kills in Gulag camps and Stalinist executions every time that he draws breath.
Sometimes, Ivan thinks he might be insane. Like now, when he wets his lips and whispers into the blizzard, “One man’s death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”
Lying in the snow with the empty gun inches from his fingers, he thinks he remembers what it used to be like to be warm inside. But after he returns to Moscow, Katya hugs him from behind as Natalia winds his scarf around his neck, and Raivis, Toris and Eduard almost look worried, and he knows again what it is to be good.
Later, Russia buys earmuffs from Alfred. Sometimes they keep out the noise of the wind rattling at the windows of his empty house.
-
“I don’t know why I’m here. I mean, like…really.”
“Oh?”
A shake of the head, blond tresses to and fro. The white bird sitting on his head shifts and sinks its talons deeper into his scalp. He still doesn’t get it. “I totally don’t have to be here. Where is this, even?”
“What do you see in front of you, then?” Its voice is liquid and low in his ear. Molasses, strands coiling into his mind like the tendrils of a creeping plant.
He swallows and takes a look around him. There’s trampled snow beneath his feet, the imprint of military boots. Broken glass and smashed in houses. Somewhere in the night fires are burning. This is Warsaw, but not as Poland remembers it. He averts his eyes after the first corpse comes into view.
“This is your fault,” his national bird remarks conversationally.
“No it isn’t!” Feliks says, shriller than he intends. “It totally isn’t! This is the Holocaust, right? This is the war. Ludwig did this.”
“Of course. Blame Germany. He’s the one who killed them. You helped the Jews.”
Maybe you're a Sinner (5/6)
anonymous
August 30 2009, 11:05:12 UTC
“That’s right!” Feliks relaxes, still taught as a bow string. “I don’t have to see this. Show Ludwig.”
The bird laughs, a fluty sound in the rabble of chaos around them. “Szmalcownik. You hypocrite.”
Poland’s blood runs cold. “Oh pu-lease,” he stresses, though his fingers are prickling with something buried in the deepest recesses of his mind. “That wasn’t really me. That was just ‘cause of Germany. And Russia.”
“And it was because of Germany that Jedwabne happened?” Poland remembers killing, remembers Ludwig watching him with sharp blowtorch eyes as he strangled children and shot their parents. The talons in his skull dig up the worst he has inside, and Poland hates. The bird on his head trills and presses a beak deeper into his ear.
“A few thousand Jews never meant anything anyway. You’re innocent. Completely innocent. Isn’t that right, my little Jew Hunter?”
Something in Feliks finally snaps- quivering, he reaches for his gun, but his hand slips on where the holster should be, grabs at empty belt, at hard iron. He yells and shakes, shakes like a dog to frantically get his accursed bird off of his head, out of his ears- when it does pull away with a few powerful wing beats he feels hot drops of blood inch through his hair. Finally his fingers touch metal so he grabs, not realising or caring that he’s drawing a sword out of the Holy Wars instead of a handgun.
“I’m fucking POLAND!” he screams at the white shape of the stalk as it alights metres away on the bloody ground. He takes faster steps towards it, sword pulsing hot in his fist like the heart in his throat. Before he knows himself it’s over his head with two hands, momentum forward, killing blow, fuck it all. “I’m POLAND! I’m the VICTIM!”
The metal stops an inch from the pristine feathers. He stops. There’s no sound, just eyes staring at eyes. The Eagle crouched in the human remains of a Jewish boy has white feathers, off of which blood rolls without a stain.
“My national animal is the stalk,” he grits between his teeth.
The White Eagle doesn’t blink, but somehow seems to grin. “When it pleases you.”
“But I’m…” Oh no. Poland is totally not going to start crying over this. “…I’m the fucking victim in all this.”
The fires keep burning on into the night. Poland stays frozen with his arms raised and sword tip trembling and the Eagle resumes his old perch behind his ears.
“Sure,” it croons. “Why not? I can pretend along with you.”
-
“I’m the victim,” Israel murmurs from inside his house. Outside Palestine builds a bonfire out of paper work and bureaucracy and tries to keep warm by nursing his hate. His reflection looks back at himself from the window glass and laughs, AK-47 and assault rifles and all.
“You fool,” it says. “There’s no such thing.”
-
Germany defined the word Genocide. Before World War II the word hadn’t existed. It was the word that they created to call what he’d done with the Jews all over his country. And the Russians. And the disabled men, and the gays.
“And the Gypsies. Don’t forget the Gypsies,” the boy adds from beside him as they stand in the snow.
He nods. “Ah.” Ludwig’s insides are numb.
Every winter, Ludwig takes the lonely train to Dachau from Munich. He always catches the earliest line, while it’s still dark, and there’s never anyone on the platform except for one little boy in a black cape and a big black hat. Germany doesn’t know his name. Then they catch the bus, and the boy stares at him. Germany lets him hold the bouquet of lilies as the dark winter flies by their window.
In the middle of winter, this early, there is nobody at the memorial. Everyone is at home celebrating the New Year, which is precisely why Ludwig comes. To be alone.
The guilt that Germany carries is not for him to share. It is his burden, and his burden alone.
The boy flies through the gates when they’re open and runs into the centre of the compound grounds and looks up at the blue, blue sky that appears in sunrise streaks. Something about him reminds Germany of when he was little and trying to watch the Eagles flying overhead.
As he lays the flowers and kneels to pray the child removes his large triangular hat and bows his head.
Maybe you're a Sinner (6/6)
anonymous
August 30 2009, 11:09:51 UTC
“What does that say?” he asks in a low, clear voice, afterwards.
Germany is a pillar of grey in the pregnant, bloody silence that hangs in the air. “Nie wieder,” he reads. “Never again.”
“Can you keep that promise?” he turns his head and enquires baldly.
“I hope so.”
“Do you know so?”
Silence, liquid, fills Germany in these moments. “No,” he admits in a whisper.
“What did you do?”
“I killed people,” Ludwig begins, staring at the sad buildings that cluster in the concentration camp. “I put them on trains like animals. I took their names away from them and made them into numbers.” Germany is good with numbers- so good, in fact, that he can count to 21 million deaths. “I hurt Francis, and Ivan, and Italy, and Roderich. I drove my brother away from me. I starved people. I gassed them. I raped them. I tortured them. I started two World Wars and killed in every moment of them.”
He speaks of it almost as if he’s a doctor reading a list of symptoms. Curt. Clinical.
“Why did you do it, Germany?” the boy with the blue, blue eyes and the swept back blond hair asks quietly. Standing in front of the watch house, framed in the snow around him, the boy suddenly seems very alone and out of place. A ghost, lost in time.
Ludwig sighs, haunted. “Because,” he says, “somewhere inside, I am a bad man.”
The gate swings shut as they leave again. Arbeit macht frei.
Work doesn’t set Ludwig free from his own conscience. It won’t. Ever. No matter how long he lives, no matter how much he works, no matter that the rest of the world has already forgiven him. No matter how close Ludwig is to Israel, no matter that he never sings his national anthem, no matter that everything he does is dogged by the ghosts of his memories- Ludwig will never let himself be a free man.
They walk back down the path with the skeleton trees to the bus stop. They leave behind only one pair of footprints.
“I don’t think you‘re a bad man, Germany,” the boy in the antique clothes says, taking his hand as they wait.
Germany swallows down the tears that he never lets himself shed and clenches his teeth. “How can you say that? Who are you to judge me?” he hisses, emotion in his voice for the first time today. “Who are you to say that to me?”
He looks down. The boy is gone. He’ll be back next year, on the same day, on the same platform.
Germany catches the bus back alone.
-
“I wish I was a country,” Sealand says one night. England raises an unimpressed eyebrow, ignoring the Unicorn and the Lion in the corners of the room. In Africa, England’s other children play with machine guns.
“Finland says that I’m allowed to be a country.”
In 1947 Arthur forced Pakistan and Bangladesh to get married. After that, Bangladesh was found bloody and beaten in a mass grave along with her rebels. They’re divorced now, and she still doesn’t talk to him.
Arthur spins the thimble idly on his thumb. “That’s because Finland isn’t your real mother. He’s allowed to say stuff like that.”
Sealand harrumphs. “Well, I’m still gonna be a country.”
A country, like Italy or Germany. Like Turkey or Russia. Like Nigeria, like the children Europe left behind in Africa, not caring about religion or ethnicity or race. Maybe Arthur’s a bad father, because now they all try to kill each other.
Finally, he clears his throat. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“But you get to do anything you want!”
“…Yes, you do.” England clutches at his last chance to be a good parent. Rwanda and Sudan still haunt him from behind his colonial eyelids.
It’s your fault, the Unicorn whinnies.
That night Alfred calls about the dreams he’s been having- about machine-gunning Vietnam, about being sold as a slave, the Civil War and the Atomic Bombs and he and Ivan being swallowed up by Bear and Eagle. About being raped in Abu Ghraib and drowned in Guantanamo Bay. Sealand’s content snores filter from across the hall; America’s voice over the telephone is shaken and disturbed.
When you’re a country, you get to do anything you want. It’s coming to terms with what you’ve done after the fact that’s the problem.
England rolls over in his bed, can’t sleep, and knows exactly how he feels.
author's note
anonymous
August 30 2009, 11:33:21 UTC
Countries are allowed to do anything. Sometimes, it's not a good thing.
Did you know?
1. The Italian invasion of Assyria (Ethiopia) in WWII was successful. Until being displaced again by the Allies, the Italian assault and occupation resulted in 5 million Ethiopian deaths.
The Italian Wolf is Italy's national animal.
2. The Stasi were the secret police of East Germany during and after direct Soviet administration. The bugging of houses, kidnapping of residents and searching of government buildings was used to gather intelligence on possible traitors to the communist cause.
During the Russian attack on Germany and directly after tortures as those described above were used on Germans who resisted the Soviet invasion.
Later in the DDR there were several secret correctional facilities, one of which, Hohenscheonhausen, was located in outer Berlin. Here dissidents were kept in solitary confinement and psychologically tortured before being interrogated for information on family, friends and political groups.
The Black Eagle is Germany's national animal.
3. Turkey was responsible for the genocide of a million Armenians in 1915-16 in the First World War. The Armenians, who sided with Russia, were taken to Syria and put into labour camps, or shot. Turkey is yet to formally accept responsibility.
Turkey's national animal is the Grey Wolf.
4. Russia is, well, Russia. Under Stalin, especially, hundreds of thousands of people (including Russians)were randomly executed- millions were put into labour camps in Siberia. The Chechens, Tartars and Kalmyks were mass deported from their homeland.
Stalin is quoted- "One man's death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."
Russia's national animal is the Bear.
5. Although Poland was the country that resisted German invasion the strongest, the all pervasive antisemitic atmosphere did eventually reach Poland. At the same time that most Poles helped Jews escape the German regime and protected their neighbours, Jew Hunters (Szmalcownik) would blackmail and kill Jews as well as hand them in to the Nazis.
In Jedwabne between 800 and 1600 Jews were killed by Polish civilians under German surveillance.
Poland's two national animals are the Stalk, and the White Eagle.
6. Israel is a victim, but also the perpetrator.
7. Nazi Germany is though to be responsible for 21 million deaths of civilians through the Holocaust and concentration camps.
In Dachau, the first such camp ever built, stands a memorial with the words "Never again" written in 7 languages.
8. England, France and Spain are thought to be indirectly responsible for the violence and genocides in Africa and South America, because of their colonial practice of making countries out of tribes that hated each other.
Re: author's note
anonymous
August 30 2009, 14:46:18 UTC
Powerful.
And what I most loved - despite everything, despite it all - is the fact that Ludwig, who perpretrated the most abominable crimes in the history of the human race is really the only one who faces up to them. The only one who isn't saying 'it's not my fault', or even falling back on that old excuse - 'I was only following orders'. The only one who faces up to what he does and is genuinely, truely sorry - my heart broke when he said that he was a bad man.
Re: author's note
anonymous
August 30 2009, 15:16:44 UTC
God. That was amazing; very powerful and moving.
The part with Germany was what got me the most -- the way he's so stoic (for want of a better word) about it all and accepts it, unlike the others even considering that...well, the crimes they committed are some of the worst against humanity.
RE number 8 of your notes; *sigh* It makes me ashamed of my country's history. (I'm British.) We did some truly horrible things because of imperialism.
Re: author's note
anonymous
August 30 2009, 19:23:52 UTC
Thanks for writing this, especially the part about Ethiopia. Few people know about it at all. But it shouldn't be a forgotten war, it must be remembered. I'm still stunned that the vatican (or at least most Italian bishops) actually supported it.
And thanks for including the Armenian genocide. I have Turkish friends and their reactions to it are pretty much the same as Sadiq's. They don't want to know. And the Armenians sided with Russia, they were enemies of the state. Deporting them was an act of self-defence. Turkey was the victim. But I'm sure there are also many Turks who know of the genocide and feel sorry for it.
Re: author's note
anonymous
August 30 2009, 19:30:00 UTC
Small correction author!anon: Stalin is quoted- "One man's death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." Despite the general misconception, Joseph Stalin never said that. The quote, in fact, is the final line of chapter eight of The Black Obelisk (1956) by Erich Maria Remarque.
Re: author's note
anonymous
August 30 2009, 19:44:18 UTC
So heavy indeed. And so true that no nation is the complete victim, everyone commited crimes, sometimes, and not all of them are willing to admit this.
Your descriptions flowed and moved like water, smooth and elegant. I also appreciate you treating everyone the same, even those usually thought of as the victims; it really added power to the story. I suppose no one is innocent; not anymore.
Thank you for sharing your talent with us, Writer!Anon~ <3
Perhaps it’s some sort of sick practical joke. That must be it. So he sits on the wooden bench he wakes up on and stares up at the single bare bulb that throws shadows onto the mildewed ceiling and is bored.
The second day begins when a harsh voice wakes him. The light flickers and the door to the underground room shakes on its hinges. “Aufstehen!” it orders, and as sleepy as Prussia is he doesn’t want to disobey. He scrambles to his feet and stands to attention. But no one comes in.
The third day is when Prussia finally realises that he doesn’t even know if it really is the third day at all. The bulb never turns off. The sleep he does get is disturbed by angry men who don’t exist past the wooden door of his cell. There is no day and night here. There is no here. Prussia is alone and no one knows where he is.
The mildew gets into his lungs before long. The forth, fifth and sixth days pass in a blur of fever and insomnia. Gilbert shakes and his eyelids ache from the constant light bulb glare.
Prussia starts screaming on the seventh day. He’s not going to fucking stand this. Screw this. He’s Prussia and he’s done nothing to deserve this. Fucking screw this and everything-just-let me-fucking-be! Finally, his yells are heard and he hears the click of a key in a lock. But triumph turns to uncertainty as three men he doesn’t know crowd in, and he’s cornered. He writhes like a wild animal, hating but weak and at the breaking point after four days without rest and his muscles ache like his lungs-
His jaw is broken by one well-placed fist. He thinks some of his fingers have been dislodged.
When he comes to again, Prussia almost cons himself into believing that he’d been dreaming. He’s in a rubber room, now- he only knows that because he’s lying shattered-cheekbone down on a floor that smells like petrochemicals; there’s no light anywhere. Nowhere.
After hours of nothingness he hears dripping water. Throat parched and tasting like blood he gropes blindly for it, but then just when he finds a damp corner the drip is a rush and an inexorable force- litres upon litres plummet Gilbert’s head to the floor, trapped beneath a waterfall with the stench of plastic in his face. He can barely roll out of the torrent from the invisible ceiling above him and he lies there choking and coughing out his hate. The water doesn’t stop. The room is made of rubber.
Shit. Icy cold water rises in rapid inches, to his knees, to his chest, up to his neck so that he has to tilt his head back and kick out his toes to try and feel the bottom. It stops there. Every second breath that he takes is a pull of water. He shivers there for days and days (perhaps just hours- Prussia can’t tell), pleading and screaming and choking and drowning-
Then he wakes up again. A standing cell- a box barely more than a foot wide and 5 feet tall. He huddles hunchbacked and cramping in the pitch darkness; when they open the door he falls out still hunched, muscles frozen in spasms. Again, in a straight jacket in a circular padded room where he tries and fails to find a corner to curl up in and scream. Forced with his back bent over wooden slats at right angles and chains everywhere. In rooms filled with the stench of human waste and the eyes of the destitute and the dead. Constantly waking up but never asleep, his mind is a memory-cutting-room-floor.
Salvation arrives when he is lead out of his holding cell by a faceless guard and up out of the cellar into a sterile white corridor. There’s a state of unconsciousness that dwells behind the brain awake, where all sensations blur into one another and joints twitch and shake for no reason and everything just is too much. Gilbert is so far gone that he doesn’t even see the traffic lights at each corner.
Prussia is planted on a stool at one end of a long table in an office. An interrogation or something, he dimly recognises, but when his eyes clear he can only see a large bird on a perch next to the telephone. It doesn’t surprise him when it opens its raptor mouth and speaks to him.
Reply
What do you even want from me? Gilbert thinks though his tongue is so swollen he cannot say it.
“A confession.” The Eagle has blood in its eyes. “It would be very easy for us to find your brother, Herr Beilschmidt. One quick trip to the West, one blow to the head, and he could be right here beside you.”
Prussia rasps. “NO! No-“
“You love this, don’t you?”
“No! What are you-“
The Prussian Eagle spreads its wings and keens loudly. “You do. Spying. Hating. The efficiency with which someone’s mind can be broken down into algorithms and patterns. The security of mind that you lack, Prussia. The State Security.”
“No!” he screams at the bird, mad. “Russia! That was fucking Russia! Not me-“
“The Deutsche Demokratische Republik was fucking Russia, Gilbert. Like the dirty whore you are. Communism. Red red red between the bed sheets. And here you stand,” it mocks, “unable even to stand your own torture.”
Gilbert’s Stasi uniform is torn and drenched and bloodstained but his fingers still clutch at it as he pushes his forehead into his knees and breaks down and sobs.
When Prussia really wakes up he’s back in the twenty first century and he’s not a country. For that fact he is glad- the trembling stays behind for days.
-
“How many was it?”
Sadiq ignores the voice from under the table.
“It was a great many, am I right in thinking?”
Germany obviously cannot hear the low whispers that coil around Turkey’s feet. Greece, sitting next to him, cannot either.
“It was a million, I think. A million of them off to Syria and off to their deaths.” Turkey clenches his fist in his lap and determinedly focuses on the meeting. It’s not there if he ignores it, he knows. If he doesn’t look down, it never happened. If he doesn’t show the fear and self-disgust he feels on his face, then maybe it didn’t happen.
“And I thought,” the Wolf at his feet says in syrupy tones, “that the Ottoman in you had died. Obviously not. Driving them into the desert and blowing off their heads- real class.”
Armenia avoids him in the corridors. It’s fine, because Turkey avoids him too.
“That’s right.” The Wolf yawns and rests its tame head on his feet as Sadiq picks a fight with Hercules to shut out the memories. “Keep ignoring me, Turkey. Maybe one day the Armenian Genocide will just disappear.”
-
It happens often for Ivan, every few decades when he stands alone in the Sibir, in fact. It begins with a flurry of snow and a voice that comes to him from beyond the curtain of wind. Russia turns to face it, gaze vacant.
“Come,” it calls, softly. “Come to me.”
Like a man asleep Ivan’s feet shuffle him towards the sound, siren’s song. Ivan is only aware dimly of casting off his scarf and his gloves. Everything pales in comparison to that low, promising, powerful voice that seeps into him from the permafrost below his feet. He makes a small sound in the back of his throat.
“That’s right,” the wind coaxes. “Such a good child. Deeper. Into me.”
Ivan winces, because the cold is starting to hurt him and the wind whips into his eyes. But, still with an empty smile on his face, his body begins to take off his boots. Continuing barefoot through the rocky ice, Russia is but a smear of white in a snow-white blizzard.
He has to keep going. There’s something waiting for him. That something pulls him forward, further and further away from civilization.
“A little more. A little colder. Brave child, beautiful child. I’m so proud of you.”
His muscles ache. His feet bleed for a while, then don’t because they freeze. The cold grabs him from all around and burrows deeper into his skin and eyeballs and into his heart, until Ivan can’t feel Ivan anymore. He’s not Ivan. He’s part of something greater- ‘nothing’, because that is what Russia can feel.
Simply nothing, he doesn’t read the warning signs or see the razor wire, or see the dead bodies littering the snow around him. And he arrives- coatless, barefoot, blue and white and frozen somewhere in time.
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“My brave boy,” she rumbles. “My brave, brave, good son.” And Ivan collapses into the she-bear’s scarlet brown fur and is somehow made colder. “I’m so proud.”
“Mother?” he whispers like a ghost.
“There’s something you came here to do, isn’t there?”
He pauses, in a dream. Then nods as his face brightens. “I…” His voice breaks and is almost lost in the bitter cold. “I want to…to make…my family happy.”
“That’s right. No war. No crime. No pain. No danger.” She shifts and swings her great head towards the huddled shapes of people inside of the compound. “That’s what they want, too.”
Is that really what they want? But the redness of his scarf and his love burning in his empty frozen chest, Bear-close, quash the thoughts that flitter down his spine. His boss is telling him to do it. His very nature is telling him- after all, Ivan was (or is) simply the world’s most dangerous idealist.
When he’s gone, frozen, like this, he has the power to make dreams come true.
He approaches the children sitting in slave chains. They look up at him, afraid, and as he smiles his traitorous body finds a revolver and points. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do- the electric sizzle behind his eyelids and in the growl of the she-bear makes him feel dangerous.
“Don’t hate me,” says Lithuania.
“Don’t hurt me,” Estonia whispers.
“Don’t kill me,” Latvia quails.
“Don’t invade me,” chokes Georgia.
“Please don’t do this to yourself anymore, Russia,” Ukraine pleads.
Belarus doesn’t say anything at all.
A quick count under his breath tells Ivan that he has six lovely siblings. He only wants them to be happy, and in one house, and together, and all the same, Russia, one with Russia, happywhethertheylikeitornot-
(Stalin signed the warrants as Ivan froze inside)
-Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang, and finally- Bang (Belarus still doesn’t speak.).
“They’re safe now,” the bear growls, and promptly starts to eat them. With the snap of Latvia’s skull being crushed between her jaws, Russia suddenly starts to shake, because he’s cold, and he’s hurting, and now he’s all alone. Unable to speak or even look away as Estonia’s feet disappear, Ivan’s wavering hand moves of its own accord and points the gun to his own temple.
It clicks.
Russia is out of bullets.
Ivan screams.
And, in a flurry of ice, everything is gone. An illusion. Nobody is dead, but that’s a lie- Russia dies and kills in Gulag camps and Stalinist executions every time that he draws breath.
Sometimes, Ivan thinks he might be insane. Like now, when he wets his lips and whispers into the blizzard, “One man’s death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”
Lying in the snow with the empty gun inches from his fingers, he thinks he remembers what it used to be like to be warm inside. But after he returns to Moscow, Katya hugs him from behind as Natalia winds his scarf around his neck, and Raivis, Toris and Eduard almost look worried, and he knows again what it is to be good.
Later, Russia buys earmuffs from Alfred. Sometimes they keep out the noise of the wind rattling at the windows of his empty house.
-
“I don’t know why I’m here. I mean, like…really.”
“Oh?”
A shake of the head, blond tresses to and fro. The white bird sitting on his head shifts and sinks its talons deeper into his scalp. He still doesn’t get it. “I totally don’t have to be here. Where is this, even?”
“What do you see in front of you, then?” Its voice is liquid and low in his ear. Molasses, strands coiling into his mind like the tendrils of a creeping plant.
He swallows and takes a look around him. There’s trampled snow beneath his feet, the imprint of military boots. Broken glass and smashed in houses. Somewhere in the night fires are burning. This is Warsaw, but not as Poland remembers it. He averts his eyes after the first corpse comes into view.
“This is your fault,” his national bird remarks conversationally.
“No it isn’t!” Feliks says, shriller than he intends. “It totally isn’t! This is the Holocaust, right? This is the war. Ludwig did this.”
“Of course. Blame Germany. He’s the one who killed them. You helped the Jews.”
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The bird laughs, a fluty sound in the rabble of chaos around them. “Szmalcownik. You hypocrite.”
Poland’s blood runs cold. “Oh pu-lease,” he stresses, though his fingers are prickling with something buried in the deepest recesses of his mind. “That wasn’t really me. That was just ‘cause of Germany. And Russia.”
“And it was because of Germany that Jedwabne happened?” Poland remembers killing, remembers Ludwig watching him with sharp blowtorch eyes as he strangled children and shot their parents. The talons in his skull dig up the worst he has inside, and Poland hates. The bird on his head trills and presses a beak deeper into his ear.
“A few thousand Jews never meant anything anyway. You’re innocent. Completely innocent. Isn’t that right, my little Jew Hunter?”
Something in Feliks finally snaps- quivering, he reaches for his gun, but his hand slips on where the holster should be, grabs at empty belt, at hard iron. He yells and shakes, shakes like a dog to frantically get his accursed bird off of his head, out of his ears- when it does pull away with a few powerful wing beats he feels hot drops of blood inch through his hair. Finally his fingers touch metal so he grabs, not realising or caring that he’s drawing a sword out of the Holy Wars instead of a handgun.
“I’m fucking POLAND!” he screams at the white shape of the stalk as it alights metres away on the bloody ground. He takes faster steps towards it, sword pulsing hot in his fist like the heart in his throat. Before he knows himself it’s over his head with two hands, momentum forward, killing blow, fuck it all. “I’m POLAND! I’m the VICTIM!”
The metal stops an inch from the pristine feathers. He stops. There’s no sound, just eyes staring at eyes. The Eagle crouched in the human remains of a Jewish boy has white feathers, off of which blood rolls without a stain.
“My national animal is the stalk,” he grits between his teeth.
The White Eagle doesn’t blink, but somehow seems to grin. “When it pleases you.”
“But I’m…” Oh no. Poland is totally not going to start crying over this. “…I’m the fucking victim in all this.”
The fires keep burning on into the night. Poland stays frozen with his arms raised and sword tip trembling and the Eagle resumes his old perch behind his ears.
“Sure,” it croons. “Why not? I can pretend along with you.”
-
“I’m the victim,” Israel murmurs from inside his house. Outside Palestine builds a bonfire out of paper work and bureaucracy and tries to keep warm by nursing his hate. His reflection looks back at himself from the window glass and laughs, AK-47 and assault rifles and all.
“You fool,” it says. “There’s no such thing.”
-
Germany defined the word Genocide. Before World War II the word hadn’t existed. It was the word that they created to call what he’d done with the Jews all over his country. And the Russians. And the disabled men, and the gays.
“And the Gypsies. Don’t forget the Gypsies,” the boy adds from beside him as they stand in the snow.
He nods. “Ah.” Ludwig’s insides are numb.
Every winter, Ludwig takes the lonely train to Dachau from Munich. He always catches the earliest line, while it’s still dark, and there’s never anyone on the platform except for one little boy in a black cape and a big black hat. Germany doesn’t know his name. Then they catch the bus, and the boy stares at him. Germany lets him hold the bouquet of lilies as the dark winter flies by their window.
In the middle of winter, this early, there is nobody at the memorial. Everyone is at home celebrating the New Year, which is precisely why Ludwig comes. To be alone.
The guilt that Germany carries is not for him to share. It is his burden, and his burden alone.
The boy flies through the gates when they’re open and runs into the centre of the compound grounds and looks up at the blue, blue sky that appears in sunrise streaks. Something about him reminds Germany of when he was little and trying to watch the Eagles flying overhead.
As he lays the flowers and kneels to pray the child removes his large triangular hat and bows his head.
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Germany is a pillar of grey in the pregnant, bloody silence that hangs in the air. “Nie wieder,” he reads. “Never again.”
“Can you keep that promise?” he turns his head and enquires baldly.
“I hope so.”
“Do you know so?”
Silence, liquid, fills Germany in these moments. “No,” he admits in a whisper.
“What did you do?”
“I killed people,” Ludwig begins, staring at the sad buildings that cluster in the concentration camp. “I put them on trains like animals. I took their names away from them and made them into numbers.” Germany is good with numbers- so good, in fact, that he can count to 21 million deaths. “I hurt Francis, and Ivan, and Italy, and Roderich. I drove my brother away from me. I starved people. I gassed them. I raped them. I tortured them. I started two World Wars and killed in every moment of them.”
He speaks of it almost as if he’s a doctor reading a list of symptoms. Curt. Clinical.
“Why did you do it, Germany?” the boy with the blue, blue eyes and the swept back blond hair asks quietly. Standing in front of the watch house, framed in the snow around him, the boy suddenly seems very alone and out of place. A ghost, lost in time.
Ludwig sighs, haunted. “Because,” he says, “somewhere inside, I am a bad man.”
The gate swings shut as they leave again. Arbeit macht frei.
Work doesn’t set Ludwig free from his own conscience. It won’t. Ever. No matter how long he lives, no matter how much he works, no matter that the rest of the world has already forgiven him. No matter how close Ludwig is to Israel, no matter that he never sings his national anthem, no matter that everything he does is dogged by the ghosts of his memories- Ludwig will never let himself be a free man.
They walk back down the path with the skeleton trees to the bus stop. They leave behind only one pair of footprints.
“I don’t think you‘re a bad man, Germany,” the boy in the antique clothes says, taking his hand as they wait.
Germany swallows down the tears that he never lets himself shed and clenches his teeth. “How can you say that? Who are you to judge me?” he hisses, emotion in his voice for the first time today. “Who are you to say that to me?”
He looks down. The boy is gone. He’ll be back next year, on the same day, on the same platform.
Germany catches the bus back alone.
-
“I wish I was a country,” Sealand says one night. England raises an unimpressed eyebrow, ignoring the Unicorn and the Lion in the corners of the room. In Africa, England’s other children play with machine guns.
“Finland says that I’m allowed to be a country.”
In 1947 Arthur forced Pakistan and Bangladesh to get married. After that, Bangladesh was found bloody and beaten in a mass grave along with her rebels. They’re divorced now, and she still doesn’t talk to him.
Arthur spins the thimble idly on his thumb. “That’s because Finland isn’t your real mother. He’s allowed to say stuff like that.”
Sealand harrumphs. “Well, I’m still gonna be a country.”
A country, like Italy or Germany. Like Turkey or Russia. Like Nigeria, like the children Europe left behind in Africa, not caring about religion or ethnicity or race. Maybe Arthur’s a bad father, because now they all try to kill each other.
Finally, he clears his throat. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
“But you get to do anything you want!”
“…Yes, you do.” England clutches at his last chance to be a good parent. Rwanda and Sudan still haunt him from behind his colonial eyelids.
It’s your fault, the Unicorn whinnies.
That night Alfred calls about the dreams he’s been having- about machine-gunning Vietnam, about being sold as a slave, the Civil War and the Atomic Bombs and he and Ivan being swallowed up by Bear and Eagle. About being raped in Abu Ghraib and drowned in Guantanamo Bay. Sealand’s content snores filter from across the hall; America’s voice over the telephone is shaken and disturbed.
When you’re a country, you get to do anything you want. It’s coming to terms with what you’ve done after the fact that’s the problem.
England rolls over in his bed, can’t sleep, and knows exactly how he feels.
-
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Did you know?
1. The Italian invasion of Assyria (Ethiopia) in WWII was successful. Until being displaced again by the Allies, the Italian assault and occupation resulted in 5 million Ethiopian deaths.
The Italian Wolf is Italy's national animal.
2. The Stasi were the secret police of East Germany during and after direct Soviet administration. The bugging of houses, kidnapping of residents and searching of government buildings was used to gather intelligence on possible traitors to the communist cause.
During the Russian attack on Germany and directly after tortures as those described above were used on Germans who resisted the Soviet invasion.
Later in the DDR there were several secret correctional facilities, one of which, Hohenscheonhausen, was located in outer Berlin. Here dissidents were kept in solitary confinement and psychologically tortured before being interrogated for information on family, friends and political groups.
The Black Eagle is Germany's national animal.
3. Turkey was responsible for the genocide of a million Armenians in 1915-16 in the First World War. The Armenians, who sided with Russia, were taken to Syria and put into labour camps, or shot. Turkey is yet to formally accept responsibility.
Turkey's national animal is the Grey Wolf.
4. Russia is, well, Russia. Under Stalin, especially, hundreds of thousands of people (including Russians)were randomly executed- millions were put into labour camps in Siberia. The Chechens, Tartars and Kalmyks were mass deported from their homeland.
Stalin is quoted- "One man's death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."
Russia's national animal is the Bear.
5. Although Poland was the country that resisted German invasion the strongest, the all pervasive antisemitic atmosphere did eventually reach Poland. At the same time that most Poles helped Jews escape the German regime and protected their neighbours, Jew Hunters (Szmalcownik) would blackmail and kill Jews as well as hand them in to the Nazis.
In Jedwabne between 800 and 1600 Jews were killed by Polish civilians under German surveillance.
Poland's two national animals are the Stalk, and the White Eagle.
6. Israel is a victim, but also the perpetrator.
7. Nazi Germany is though to be responsible for 21 million deaths of civilians through the Holocaust and concentration camps.
In Dachau, the first such camp ever built, stands a memorial with the words "Never again" written in 7 languages.
8. England, France and Spain are thought to be indirectly responsible for the violence and genocides in Africa and South America, because of their colonial practice of making countries out of tribes that hated each other.
Bangaladesh and Pakistan are one such example.
That was heavy. >.
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Too put it simply, You blew me away author!Anon
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i think i'm going to go read it again. because it was beautiful.
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And what I most loved - despite everything, despite it all - is the fact that Ludwig, who perpretrated the most abominable crimes in the history of the human race is really the only one who faces up to them. The only one who isn't saying 'it's not my fault', or even falling back on that old excuse - 'I was only following orders'. The only one who faces up to what he does and is genuinely, truely sorry - my heart broke when he said that he was a bad man.
Loved the HRE reference, btw.
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The part with Germany was what got me the most -- the way he's so stoic (for want of a better word) about it all and accepts it, unlike the others even considering that...well, the crimes they committed are some of the worst against humanity.
RE number 8 of your notes; *sigh* It makes me ashamed of my country's history. (I'm British.) We did some truly horrible things because of imperialism.
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Oh yeah, welcome to the sad history club. That makes three of us and your'e the only one who actually did Europe!
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And thanks for including the Armenian genocide. I have Turkish friends and their reactions to it are pretty much the same as Sadiq's. They don't want to know. And the Armenians sided with Russia, they were enemies of the state. Deporting them was an act of self-defence. Turkey was the victim.
But I'm sure there are also many Turks who know of the genocide and feel sorry for it.
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Stalin is quoted- "One man's death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."
Despite the general misconception, Joseph Stalin never said that. The quote, in fact, is the final line of chapter eight of The Black Obelisk (1956) by Erich Maria Remarque.
Even so, the fill is good.
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Your descriptions flowed and moved like water, smooth and elegant. I also appreciate you treating everyone the same, even those usually thought of as the victims; it really added power to the story. I suppose no one is innocent; not anymore.
Thank you for sharing your talent with us, Writer!Anon~ <3
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