Museum of Many Bodies Ilan Magnani 
Museum of Many Bodies Ilan Magnani 
Museum of Many Bodies Ilan Magnani The Literary Arts Department Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, A Creative and Performing Arts Magnet 
CopyrightŠ 2019 Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12, A Creative and Performing Arts Magnet Pittsburgh, PA The copyright to the individual pieces remains the property of each individual. Reproduction in any form by any means without specific written permission from the individual is prohibited. For copies of inquiries: Pittsburgh CAPA 6-12 Literary Arts Department Mara Cregan 111 Ninth Street Pittsburgh, PA 15222 mcregan1@pghschools.org Ms. Melissa A. Pearlman, Principal
We gather ourselves: souvenirs of bone. —Tarfia Faizullah, “Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum”
Table of Contents 1. Hide and Seek 2. Darfuri Prayer in an Empty Room 3. Rules for the Listener 4. Returning Home: Speaker Series 5. Someone Died Here 6. Rohingya Muslim Speech Preparation 7. Science and Genocide: An Audio Guide 8. 26 Facts Your Visit to the Holocaust Museum Won’t Teach You 9. Sri Lankan Tamil Speech 10. Aryan in the Forest of Goblins
Hide and Seek With terrible effort, a man manages to twist and curl himself into a shape that could hide from the world inside a burlap sack. —Barry Yourgrau, “Burlap Sack” I was the only Jewish student in the eighth grade—an unsurprising statistic for a public school in Buckeye, Arizona—and I didn’t think it bothered me. A trip east served as our graduation ceremony. The plane ride to Washington, D.C. began our rite of passage. I chewed gum like a movie star as the wheels touched down, exhilarated. I adored the thrill of arriving in an unknown place. Our first and longest outing would be a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We’d all read Night and The Diary of Anne Frank, and I’m sure my classmates imagined they knew the story behind every deportation and death, that there were no vaults of knowledge they would stumble upon or reservoirs of empathy not yet unlocked. The museum reeked of bleach and air freshener. I decided it was too clean for what it was, a cemetery for millions of bodies no one could find. I couldn’t remember when I first learned what the Holocaust was. I sometimes wondered if, through some undiscovered epigenetic wonder, I was born knowing. A plump, older woman with hair like dandelion seeds handed us each a pair of headphones. A voice, she explained, would guide us as we walked through the exhibits, side-eyeing emaciated figures on the high walls and surveying the names etched into the floors of the frigid rooms, rooms like the hollowed winters foreign to Arizonians.
Rooms that would teach me to think of my body, unclothed and aching, running through snow, the barrels of rifles aimed at the back of my neck, eager. “We should play a game,” Jackson said. He was the kind of friend who made me restrict the volume of my laughs, careful not to rise above the acceptable limit. When hugging him, I’d count one Mississippi and then pull away before his cologne could settle in my nostrils. “Hide and seek in this giant museum?” I nodded before I realized he hadn’t meant it as a question. “We’ve got three hours,” he said. “It’ll be epic.” Jackson gathered the troops; six mutual friends, all boys, all half-second huggers. I hid by the mouth of the storage closet, listening to the guttural hum of a nearby heater. Weighed down by boredom and something else I couldn’t name, a sort of morbid curiosity, I popped an earbud in. “Many survivors owe their lives to neighbors and friends who risked their own lives to save Jews from the Nazis’ plan of extermination.” I indulged. I imagined my grandmother, silent and still, listening to the footsteps of unsuspecting visitors to the neighbors’ house where she spent months cowering in the cellar, a stowaway on her own street. A hand tapped my shoulder. I jumped. “Got you.”
Darfuri Prayer in an Empty Room After M.I.A., “Born Free” Oh, Lord, wherever you are. Wherever you are, please save my people. The warplanes circled above, Lord. They dropped bombs on our village. You should have gathered winds to steer those jets off course and send them spiraling down from your sky. I saw skin and fire, skin and fire. You should have split the ground before the militiamen could reach us. You should have stopped their bullets midair, Lord. You should have sent rain. Of all the ways you’ve invented for us to die, isn’t burning the most painful? We lived off your creations. The trees bearing fruit burned, Lord. The guavas and oranges, Lord, the mangoes, unripe. Never gonna find utopia again, Lord, never again. Here, a wall of men with their right arms raised, palms flat. The men on the backs of horses and camels. Our cows they slaughtered, Lord—weren’t they your children, if not us? I pretended you’d deserted me, Lord. I played dead, Lord, I was dead for hours and hours in the village where I prayed to you, where my mother pushed me from her womb. She bled, Lord, bled when the bullets met her back as she ran. There’s no running allowed in this museum. I mistook the gunshots for your heavy rain, Lord. Hours and hours, Lord, I ran from the fire. Lord, your sky betrayed us. The night was blown open, the dark turned orange. We couldn’t drink, Lord. Your water was tainted by the grime of our families’ corpses. The flames ate our crops. Wells poisoned, Lord, by minds you molded, hands you pressed rifles into. Our home became the desert sand. Here, a picture of men with bodies like charred trees. Are they sinners for surviving? Lord, I stepped over limbs to speak to you again—I’ve got something to say. For a while, I’ve been ready to give up on you, Lord, to surrender my faith. In my
country, no one lays down their arms. My mother pushed me out of her womb into a world that stole from me. Your world, Lord, razed my home to dust. Oh, Lord, wherever you are, come out, wherever you are. I’m alive, Lord. Come out, wherever you are, and tell them, I’m alive. Tell them, I was born free. I was born free, Lord, born free.
Rules for the Listener After Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl” Sit down, but do not make yourself comfortable; do not eat; do not pretend you are hungry; do not point to my Pinocchio nose or hamsa pendant and think, This is how the Nazis found her; remember, this is just a conversation, I am no performer; remember, memory begins at age five, perhaps four or even three if something horrible happens, but no earlier; do not greet me like a child, I am your elder; remember your age and all the years between us, stretched so thin they nearly split; do not ask if I still believe in God; do not expect a story; like I said, this is not a performance; do not accuse me of lying (tip: make no accusations at all); do not envy my gaunt frame, my protruding ribs, the craters where cheeks should be—I am not here to be beautiful; do not draw swastikas on the wall; do not scan my skin for a number branded in black ink; do not wonder how I passed each selection; if you do wonder, do not ask; do not point to one side of the room and say stand there, even if you add please; do not tell me my life would make a good film; do not leave before I’ve finished speaking; do not cry (tip: learn to forget how); do not wince when I mention the man’s feet severed from his legs; feel no pride when I recount the day of liberation; do not throw pennies at my feet and say pick it up, Jew; offer me no food, no water; imagine a barbed wire fence bisecting the space between our bodies; imagine the stench of a mass grave; imagine my body if I was not lucky; imagine my body if I was as lucky as you; imagine my body if chunks of it had never been stolen by starvation and cold (tip: think of the happiest older person you know); do not call my siblings and parents and cousins and neighbors martyrs; do not call me a hero; when you applaud, clap slowly; do not pat my shoulder on the way
out (tip: a handshake is preferred); do not lie and say I have changed you; do not address me in Yiddish; remember to thank me before we part ways; do not follow me to my hotel room; do not smash the windows; do not set my skin alight or beat me past breath; do not think to yourself that my death is near; know I am alive, still alive; never pray for me (tip: never pray at all); do not let them take me again, please.  
Returning Home: Speaker Series The five children thought of their grandmother’s bones. Thought of the bones as they were crushed on the side of the road between Lodz and Auschwitz. —Shoshana Surek, “The Strength of Horseradish” I. Daughter of Bengali Genocide Survivor My mother grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh. When I visited for the first time last spring, I saw a city that was strong and vibrant. It’s hard to imagine Dhaka how my mother saw it one night in March, 1971. West Pakistan had just launched Operation Searchlight to crush the East Pakistani independence movement. My mother was enrolled at Dhaka University, the epicenter of intellectual life in the city, and by extension, a place for dialogue surrounding independence, secularism, and Bengali identity. Soldiers attacked the university. My mother was inside her dormitory. Outside, students created barricades. There was gunfire and mortar shelling. My mother rarely speaks of that night, but she jumps every time there’s a loud noise. When I visited the university, I walked through the campus, I picnicked in a gorgeous courtyard, I tried to imagine what she felt that night. I couldn’t. It’s impossible to understand something so traumatic without experiencing it. II. Son of Auschwitz Survivor My father was a prisoner in Auschwitz for three years. He was originally from Hungary, but still, he refuses to call himself Hungarian because of all the times he was told to go back to Palestine, as if our family had any connection to there or any other nation. He was a foreigner in his own country. My father refuses to waste food because of how little he had. He never regained all the weight he lost in the camp. What he
remembers most clearly are the death marches. The temperature was freezing. He had no shoes on. The Nazis made him walk and run for hours. People all around him were dying. I wasn’t there, but his trauma has been passed onto me, so in a way, I feel like I’ve experienced Auschwitz through him. It’s been a difficult journey for us, finding strength in our survival, and I can’t say I always feel strong. I can’t say I feel strong right now. When I visited Auschwitz with my father, we could only stay for an hour before we’d both had enough. Of course there is value in seeing your history in front of you, but the truth is, I didn’t want to see it. I think the wound is still too fresh, for both of us. III. Rwandan Genocide Survivor It was only in the weeks before my mom’s death that I fully understood what it meant that I’m Tutsi. In 1994, it meant I wasn’t worthy of life. I see my life in two parts; before the genocide, when my mom was still alive and I hadn’t seen so much death and violence, and after. I think of those two halves of my life as the lives of two separate people. When I’m asked how I cope with the trauma, I answer that I have no trauma. I don't, in a way. I pretend I don’t, and a lot of the time, it works.
Someone Died Here After Patricia Grace, “At the River” I guess this museum is a target. I’m a guard here, and every day, I pat people down and stare at them as they walk through metal detectors. The guard before me was shot here. I replaced him, so I think I remind the others of what happened. I haven’t seen all the exhibits in the museum. I will one day. I was raised Jewish, but no one here knows. I’m an atheist now, and I guess I’m ethnically Jewish, but you could never tell by looking at me, so what does it matter? I don’t live in Nazi Germany. It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t affect me at all. No one knows about the days I spent in Hebrew school, the kippah stuck to my scalp, how fervently I prayed every Saturday morning, reciting Hebrew words I didn’t understand but deeply felt for hours. No one knows about the rabbis who told me I was a sinner. The next day, I let my boyfriend feed me bacon with his hands. I never went back to a synagogue. No one knows about the nights I spent in fetal position, crying over how I lost God. These secrets, I don’t think about them anymore. They’re irrelevant. When people ask where I work, I tell them I’m a guard at an art museum. It’s my job to keep this building safe. I take my job seriously. Someone died here. Some of my coworkers remember him, and sometimes I catch them in moments of grief, but his death motivates them now, just like it motivates me. It motivates me, even though I didn’t know him.
Rohingya Muslim Speech Preparation After Bessie Head, “Looking for a Rain God” It is April and warm, and as I approach the museum doors, I am almost reminded of home. I am here to speak about my people to a room of strangers. In my fragmented English, dampened by accent, I will explain what they did to us. As I wander through the shivering rooms of this museum, I choose where to begin—we lost citizenship in ’82— and recite my speech to myself. I can't imagine my story on the walls of this museum. The pictures here have no rivers or uprooted banyan trees. There are no burning villages. How can I explain that I lived through war, but have not fought? I am here because I am lucky. How can I explain that there were no deportations, that our own homes became our prisons? That it was in the fields where we played or planted or buried our dead where they dumped the bodies? I pass a bearded man with a black hat and two curls dangling in front of his ears. I realize that I have abandoned Islam since fleeing Myanmar and speak rarely of ethnicity, speak rarely in my mother tongue, speak rarely without first being spoken to. They say we’re all terrorists. They tried to kill us all. Everywhere, there was fire. You could always feel the heat and the smoke. Sometimes, I still feel it. I still feel it. I still feel it. I still feel it. I still feel it. I still feel it.
Science and Genocide: An Audio Guide Exhibit One: Nazi Experiments. Though the Nazis’ theories of a biologically superior Aryan race lacked a scientific base, meticulous scientific research, experimentation, and design were central features of the Holocaust. Human experimentation is often an overlooked aspect of the Holocaust. Many of the experiments performed on unwilling prisoners by the Nazis aimed to provide information that would be valuable to the military objectives of the Axis powers. Prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp were placed in chambers designed to simulate conditions of low air pressure at high altitudes. In the first image on the right, we see a prisoner losing consciousness in a high altitude chamber. The second photograph shows another victim of a low oxygen experiment. The victims of these experiments most often died as a result. If they survived, they lived with terrible injuries. The purpose of these experiments was to determine at which altitude it became unsafe for a soldier to parachute down to earth from a damaged aircraft. Similarly, experiments involving exposure to extreme cold were carried out in an effort to discover a treatment for hypothermia. The third photograph, also taken at Dachau, shows a prisoner being forcibly immersed in a tub of ice water. Prisoners were also exposed to mustard gas and phosgene in order to find potential immunizations for soldiers. Exhibition Two: Designing Murder. The Nazis’ attempted racial cleansing nearly wiped out European Jewry. Most notoriously, gas chambers were used for quick, large-scale killings. The women and children in the first photograph are being led to a gas chamber. This image is from Auschwitz-Birkenau and was taken in May of 1944, during the period of the Shoah
when deaths in gas chambers were at their peak, with an average of six-thousand Jews being gassed each day in Auschwitz. In 1941, the company IG Farben set up a factory at Auschwitz. Auschwitz III, shown from an aerial view in the second photograph, was built adjacent to this factory. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was first built by Soviet prisoners of war, who were later joined by Jews and Poles. The company Topf and Sons began construction of Birkenau’s gas chambers and crematoria in 1941. The third image shows a blueprint from November of that year. The blueprint provides an external and underground view of what the document calls the “Corpses Room,” consisting of two chambers, one for undressing and one for the gas. Construction at Auschwitz stopped in November of 1944. Shortly before the arrival of Soviet forces, the Nazis destroyed nearly all of their records, but because the construction records were stored in a separate building, they were not destroyed in time, and the Soviets found an archive of blueprints and paperwork detailing the structure and design of the gassing facilities. Because of this, we have knowledge of the gas chambers, which, of course, no one survived to recount.
26 Facts Your Visit to the Holocaust Museum Won’t Teach You After Matthew Burnside, “38 Things You’ll Never Know…” Count to 1,000,/ you suggest. Count to two./ Three…/ Who counts dolls, hand/ stitched, face down in dirt?/ Count to five. Six. Count/ body, bone, belongings… —Tarfia Faizullah, “Register of Eliminated Villages” 1. A museum guard once died right where you're standing. If you asked the shooter why, he would shrug and say, “I hate kikes.” 2. You’re thirteen percent Ashkenazi. Unless you take a DNA test, you’ll never find out. 3. You’ve been pronouncing your Jewish coworker’s name wrong for almost three years. 4. You won’t ever take a DNA test. 5. The man you just saw standing alone in a small room spent days running from militiamen in the Sudanese desert. He remembers the sights of burning bodies, dead and living. You’re going to think about this man tonight when you can’t sleep. You’re going to imagine him as a stranger to violence, someone confronting genocide for the first time. He’s going to fall asleep thinking about his country and the militiamen, the fire, the running. 6. The elderly woman standing five feet away from you was once mugged by a schoolmate who pointed a knife at her and said, “I know you have money. You’re a Jew.” 7. If you asked, your maternal grandfather would tell you, “I gave this kike a black eye once.” 8. The tear-shaped jade earrings your mother bought you last Christmas were mined in Myanmar and sold by a company with military affiliations. The army there just torched another village. One woman close to your age hid under her husband’s body while the soldiers searched for survivors, knives in hand, rifles, matches. In twenty years, your daughter will turn thirteen, and you’ll gift her the earrings. 9. The quiet Jewish girl from your fifth grade class threw up one afternoon after you stuffed her sandwich with salami at lunch when she wasn’t looking. 10. That girl was here a month ago, and she threw up again. 11. The cacao beans used in the chocolate bar you ate this morning (while thinking about how you really didn't want to come here and have to think about the Holocaust for
two hours) were harvested by a ten-year-old Ivorian slave. He’s still learning not to scream with each lash and punch and kick. He’s never tasted chocolate. 12. You came here today because of the expression on your coworker’s face when you told her you’d never visited. You didn't come to learn or mourn. You came to repent, even though you don't truly feel guilty that your grandfather once warned you about the greed of Jews and you never fully stopped believing him. 13. The tiny black letter U you’ve never noticed on your smoked mozzarella is called a hechsher. It means your cheese is kosher. The Jewish girl from your fifth grade class wasn’t allowed to bring food without a hechsher into her house. She just graduated from rabbinical school. She remembers your name even though you don’t remember hers. 14. You’ve been pronouncing Aushwitz wrong since you learned what it was at age fourteen. 15. When the Sonderkommandos—with faces concealed by masks, breaths steady— entered the gas chambers, they found corpses with foam rising from their mouths and blood pooling in their ears. 16. The United States knew about the extermination in 1942. 17. Your mother once drew a swastika on her bedroom wall. Your grandfather only scrubbed it off so the cleaning lady whose name your mother could never pronounce wouldn’t see it. 18. No matter how hard you try, you will never be able to imagine the sensation of suffocating from pesticide. 19. The resort you stayed at two summers ago in Sri Lanka was built on a beach where thousands of civilians died. You spent hours lounging—mango cocktail in hand—above a mass grave. 20. The fifty-year-old man in the apartment directly above yours is a Holocaust denier. He thinks Jews control the banks, just like your grandfather. Jews don’t control the banks, or the weather. Often, Jews don’t even control their own lives. 21. Your insomnia will never kill you. You’ll never get over it, but it won’t cause you significant harm. 22. You’ll never learn to feel lucky. “Why me?” you’ll ask when it’s nearly morning and you’re still awake. You’ll never realize that more time awake is more time conscious, more time completely, beautifully alive. 23. Your great aunt and uncle’s house in Louisiana was once a slave plantation. Hundreds of slaves worked and bled and screamed and cried and gave birth where you
played with imaginary friends. You lost your imagination to the routine of corporate life and the burden of the cell phone bills you act like you can’t afford. 24. When you count down from one hundred in your head while trying to fall asleep, you’re really just calming yourself down. Not being able to sleep makes you nervous, and being nervous makes you unable to sleep. 25. You will never learn to appreciate the fact that it is not memories of bodies burned or left swinging from gallows or piled over you, almost taking you with them, that keep you awake. You will never fight sleep because of the ghettos and the trains and the camps, the crematoriums. You will never know near-lethal hunger and thirst. You will never know how quickly a bullet meets skin and the body collapses, how slowly lungs lose their oxygen, how loud you can scream. 26. You’re going to die old, at age ninety-three, in a warm hospital bed. You will be sleeping when you take your last breath. It’s not going to hurt.
Sri Lankan Tamil Speech Little is left: one sari on a clothesline, two months past dry; wounds, kumkum red in our memories; a water tower toppled, gutted by shelling; souvenirs of shrapnel; unfound graves. In 1983, my family’s house was torched by a Sinhalese mob. They had voter registration papers from the government, so they knew which houses to ransack and burn—the Tamil ones—and which to pass by. After our house was destroyed, we fled north, to the Vanni, the Tamil heartland of Sri Lanka. We settled in Jaffna. I was four years old. My father was hurt the worst by what had happened to us. It was as if his organs had been spooned out of him. He was all empty. He wasn’t eating. He grew frail, tired. He moved with such difficulty we thought he was dying. When he joined the Tamil Tiger fighters in ’87, it seemed like the resistance movement had revived him. He built himself around this new purpose. He lived and breathed the dream of Tamil sovereignty and self-determination. There was a ceasefire in 2002, and my wife and I hoped the war would reach its end with peaceful negotiations between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil rebels. We left Jaffna for Kilinochchi. We prayed for a lasting peace, and not just peace, freedom. My wife had a child in 2004, the same year that my father died. We still don't know what happened, exactly. Maybe it was a heart attack, or an aneurysm. His body just stopped. My mother came to live with us in Kilinochchi. By the time my daughter was four years old, the war was escalating. I cannot tell my family’s story and say it made us stronger. I cannot say that what happened to us is unique. I cannot say I’ve found forgiveness in me. We understood that the government wanted to rid Sri Lanka of Tamils. The world pretended that the situation in Sri Lanka was nothing more than a fight against terrorism, but me and my family, we weren’t terrorists. We weren’t
even fighters. I’m sorry, I can’t speak about this in detail, but my mother, wife, and daughter, my young daughter, they all died from government shelling.
Sri Lankan Tamil Speech Little is left: one sari on a clothesline, two months past dry; wounds, kumkum red in our memories; a water tower toppled, gutted by shelling; souvenirs of shrapnel; unfound graves. In 1983, my family’s house was torched by a Sinhalese mob. We fled north, to the Vanni, the Tamil heartland of Sri Lanka. We settled in Jaffna. I was four years old. My father was hurt the worst by what had happened to us. He wasn’t eating.. He moved with such difficulty we thought he was dying. When he joined the Tamil Tiger fighters in ’87, it seemed like the resistance movement had revived him. He built himself around this new purpose. He lived and breathed the dream of Tamil sovereignty and self-determination. There was a ceasefire in 2002, and my wife and I hoped the war would reach its end with peaceful negotiations between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil rebels. We left Jaffna for Kilinochchi. We prayed for a lasting peace, and not just peace, freedom. My wife had a child in 2004, the same year that my father died. We still don't know what happened, exactly. Maybe it was a heart attack, or an aneurysm. His body just stopped. My mother came to live with us in Kilinochchi. By the time my daughter was four years old, the war was escalating. I cannot tell my family’s story and say it made us stronger. I cannot say that what happened to us is unique. I cannot say I’ve found forgiveness in me. We understood that the government wanted to rid Sri Lanka of Tamils. The world pretended that the situation in Sri Lanka was nothing more than a fight against terrorism. I’m sorry, I can’t speak about this in detail, but my mother, wife, and daughter all died from government shelling.
Sri Lankan Tamil Speech Little is left: one sari on a clothesline, two months past dry; wounds, kumkum red in our memories; a water tower toppled, gutted by shelling; souvenirs of shrapnel; unfound graves. In 1983, my family’s house was torched by a Sinhalese mob. We fled north, to the Vanni, the Tamil heartland of Sri Lanka. We settled in Jaffna. I was four years old. My father was hurt the worst by what had happened to us. He wasn’t eating.. He moved with such difficulty we thought he was dying. When he joined the Tamil Tiger fighters in ’87, it seemed like the resistance movement had revived him. He built himself around this new purpose. He lived and breathed the dream of Tamil sovereignty and self-determination. There was a ceasefire in 2002, and my wife and I hoped the war would reach its end with peaceful negotiations between the Sinhalese government and the Tamil rebels. We left Jaffna for Kilinochchi. My wife had a child in 2004, the same year that my father died. We still don't know what happened, exactly. His body just stopped. My mother came to live with us in Kilinochchi. By the time my daughter was four years old, the war was escalating. We understood that the government wanted to rid Sri Lanka of Tamils. The world pretended that the situation in Sri Lanka was nothing more than a fight against terrorism. I’m sorry, I can’t speak about this in detail, but my mother, wife, and daughter all died from government shelling.
Aryan in the Forest of Goblins Not so long ago, upon hearing the cry of a child, a golden-haired woman entered a forest of cherry blossoms. Her grandfather had once warned her of witches and goblins lurking in the woods, hiding inside the trunks of hollow trees. The woman stepped lightly on the soil to avoid making sound. She heard another cry. Soon after, she heard yet another. The woman then noticed a pair of eyes staring at her. The eyes seemed to glow. They were the eyes of a young, dark-haired boy with a long, hooked nose. His feet were bare. The woman remained still. She did not dare to breathe. “Have you seen my father?” The boy asked. The woman shook her head. “Are you lost?” “I need to find my father,” the child said. “I can help you find him,” the woman said. She offered her hand to the boy, and he took it. The boy led the woman deeper into the forest. Together, the pair began their search for the boy’s father. The petals of the cherry blossoms seemed to grow darker and duller the deeper the woman and the boy ventured. After walking for some time, they came across a large pile of shoes. There were hundreds, possibly thousands, of torn, dirt-streaked shoes towering above them at the height of the tallest cherry blossom trees. The woman stopped to examine the pile, but the boy pulled her away, and they continued onward, deeper into the forest. Behind them, the pile of time-worn shoes continued to rot, as it had done for many years already.
The sun set, and the moon and stars came out of hiding. The woman and the boy continued walking through the forest for a very long while, passing many cherry blossom trees, before reaching a peculiar pit. The pit reeked of spoiled fruit and was very long and very wide, so long and wide that one could hardly see across it from one side to the other. The woman stopped to examine the fractured, decomposing contents of the pit, but the boy pulled her away from the edge, and the two walked alongside the deep, massive hole in the ground for quite some time. They walked silently, more silently than usual, in order not to disturb the dead. The sun rose and set again as they walked on. Finally, they reached end of the forest. Where the trees stopped, there was a large building with tall metal doors. Behind the building stood a fence topped with barbed wire. The view behind the fence was obscured, either by fog or by smoke. The boy led the woman towards the building and pushed open the doors. Once inside, the boy pointed to another door nearby, which had been left ajar. “My father could be in there,” the boy said. He and the woman entered the room. A handful of people—ten, maybe twelve—stood in a circle. Each person held a candle. They did not speak. The boy turned to the woman and shook his head; he did not see his father. The next door opened to a cafeteria. The room was crowded, but nearly silent. Every table was filled, but every plate and every glass was empty. Each person in the cafeteria seemed not to notice that there was no food or water in the room. They all brought their cups and utensils to their mouths. They chewed and swallowed.
The boy stepped out of the room and headed towards the next door. The woman followed close behind. The door opened to a winding hallway. The walls were lined with photographs. The first showed a cartoon of a man with a hunched back carrying a sack of coins. His hair was dark and thick, his body was fat, and his nose was long and hooked. The second photograph was a black and white image of men whose bones pushed through skin. The boy looked at it for a while, and then moved onto the third picture, a photograph taken of equally emaciated men crowded together, wearing tattered clothing. Some of the men in the picture were wrapped in thin blankets. All of them were barefoot. The young boy pointed to one man standing near the edge of the frame. The man’s eyes were facing forwards. The young boy smiled and said to the woman, “I found him.”