Entanglement

Diane Awerbuck

Note: Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems. It is impossible to predict, according to quantum mechanics, which set of measurements will be observed. As a result, measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems entangled with it. (Wikipedia)

Sooner or later everyone came to Kotna Hora. In the green fields of the new Czech Republic, the empty factories and castles mouldered quietly to themselves, and from the window of the train Thomas the Twin saw that there were graveyards settled between the whispering fields of the farmers. There was no way to tell where the living fields ended and the boneyards began, but the crops sprang greenly and tall from the same earth.

Kotna Hora, Kotna Hora - the name was easy to say, even for foreigners, even for those who had lost their way and must trust that they would find it again: see them with their maps, squinting at the legends, angling up to the light the thin paper of their lives, thumbed and receding, unfoldable again along quite the same lines.

Thomas Heber, the first-born of the two children that came at the same time from the womb of their mother, was not a fearful man. And, being Jewish, he did not allow himself to be afraid of Hallowe'en, the time when people who called themselves Christians allowed their old ghosts to chase across Europe and to be born again into daylight. For did not his family name protect him? Heber: the one who has been passed over. That secret knowledge was lodged more firmly in his chest whenever he heard the word hebe passed behind him from mouth to mouth. You heard it less these days. People guarded more carefully their prejudices, and also, he was going deaf.

Forty years ago things were very different, and Jews had learned early to toughen their hearts against it. He looked around him at the other travellers on the train from Prague, but saw nothing to anger him. The old man's thoughts turned to his sister lying in her hospital bed, with her hair that had turned silver overnight and then fallen out in strands that lay on her pillow like candles.

He made himself think about his here and now instead, this tiny mining town dependent on silver for its existence. For hundreds of years the thin townsmen must have dragged it from the resting underworld, up into the light. The place was famous now for its ossuary (a term referring to any kind of container for the bones of the dead: a vault, an urn, the museum that is the mind). Technically, thought Thomas the Twin, we are all ossuaries.

He tried to turn his mind away from Miryam, and could not. They had not allowed mirrors near the terminal patients in the hospital. If it was true that the dying take their last image with them into the world beyond, then surely they deserved something more than the withering monsters that attended them. Near the end the body can be abandoned, thought Thomas the Twin. Remember the heaps of shoes and spectacles collected by the thrifty German guards at Bergen-Belsen, sad and momentous, the old skins shed and left behind.

Thomas the Twin was already in mourning: he was preparing himself. When a family member dies and Jews sit shiv'ah, the primary mourner must sit near the floor on a low chair, for they have been brought low by grief. They are allowed to say nothing and can ignore the guest mourners. But in one of her lucid periods, Miryam had turned to her twin from her memories and curled her hand around his wrist: he wanted to claw her off and yet he could not. She had held him close to her bed and whispered as though she was telling him a great secret, as though there were other people in the room who would care to know it at all. "Go," she said. "You are wasting your time. It is taking so long. I will be here forever."

He thought that there was an entire generation of people afraid to go travelling - not because they did not know what they would see there, but because they did. Who needed to go all the way to the other side of the world when they have already seen our ugliest parts, our bodies at their most degraded? There are a hundred reasons to stay at home. It was then that his sister's voice said quietly, behind his ear, "But cancer is not one of them."

And so it was that he travelled alone through Europe to find all the old places in the hope that they had changed. Though he first knew them by their other names, he hoped to find them still: Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic. And as he passed through them these places gave up their ghosts.

They say that the Black Death also familiarised people with their physical processes. It made them interested in display rather than concealment. "The plague," whispered Thomas the Twin to himself.

The skeletons of 40 000 of its victims are resting in the bone church at Kotna Hora. The place existed because it was every cave and every crypt, the hidey-hole of the Maccabees, the cellar and archive and oven, cool with ancient root systems or hot with tired breath, but always white white white all the way back in the eye sockets. It would have the feel about it of the plague - which, of course, it has seen - and the charnel house, and all the other places where people were slaughtered and dissected, sometimes with savagery and sometimes with care and precision: it would tell the history of scalpel and socket, the gynaecology of time.

After the concentration camps were opened up in 1945, there were things contained within that changed the Allied soldiers forever - the simple skeletons that fell as they turned to look at their liberators; the women who ran to wash themselves with the new soap, washing themselves among the remains of their children that floated belly-up in the water; the men eating worms as they clutched half a loaf of bread because they had had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Adam Heber, DSO (how his name has been preserved in the Imperial War Museum in London; how the others who were there have not!) gave his men orders to marshal the German prisoners of war so that they could begin the cleaning and the digging of mass graves, for the remaining guards were the only people still strong enough to carry spades. Often they had been left behind and given orders to destroy everything as their officers fled. They stoked up the ovens like gingerbread witches and burned bodies and papers as fast as they could.

But there are always remains, thought Thomas the Twin. And there is no going back. The bones have been laid under the earth, the loss and jumble of them, femur and funny-bone, families knitted together forever in the underworld. If you dug them up the eye sockets would not be accusing - they are empty. They say, We were here, but now we are not. You are. The dead need the living to remember them. Memento mori.

Under the Allies the German soldiers had dug more graves, more and more, an impossible number of holes in the ground that tore through the hard-packed soil like the rents which would follow in the clothing of the mourning families. The mayors and councils of the surrounding towns - along with the more daring of the citizens - had been shepherded through the gates to the camp, those gates that made a mockery of literacy because to read the iron words on them gave hope. The civilians were there as witnesses, as gatekeepers. They were there to believe the evidence in front of their eyes. They all stood still, and some of the women in their smart pre-war clothes fainted clean away. Spare a thought for Doubting Thomas, that other Jew with the telltale name, the unbeliever who pressed his hands into the wounds of Jesus because he could not understand what he saw before him.

What do you do when you are faced with the horror of the massed dead? You back away through the hole in the paper; you defend yourself against it with ink and pen, mightier than the sword. Thousands of the Allied soldier-men and women did this: they kept journals. They wrote and wrote in the evenings after they were given permission to take off the boots that had tramped through the skin cells and belongings, and that way they kept the darkness at bay. This is the opposite of the holocaust, the arson and scattering which was intended to wipe out and instead lit a flame of another kind, the message in the burning bush, the altar lamp of memory.

Heber had given his orders and then he had crept away out of the sight of his men and the Germans and the curious townspeople, and he wrote until his hand cramped and then tried to continue with the other, but the writing was too slow and crabbed, and he was forced to stop.

The journal records his amazement and his astonishment of heart. Heber's understanding was gifted back to him only when the aid bales finally began to come in with the arrival of the British Red Cross. One bale in particular seemed to be unintended for that location: for some reason it was filled with cosmetics instead of the new dresses and shoes and the thousand coats of Joseph that would set the new world dreaming.

It was a consignment of red lipstick. As red as the you-know-what that had led the internees here in the first place; as red as the fallen women against the walls.

They fell on it, those hungry Jews, though they knew it was not for eating. The internees smeared that scarlet lipstick all over their faces; they set themselves apart from their fellows with their identical skulls. The Angel of Death had seen fit to pass over them, and the ones who did die after liberation - so long, and no longer - went to their mass graves with circus faces. One woman died clutching a stump of it as she lay on the operating table. They could not pry her fingers from it, and the lipstick went along with her into some coloured afterlife. Heber's fingers were equally stiff with writing: he gave up and pressed them to his face as he stood weeping, and his fingers uncurled from their rigor mortis.

He pressed those same hands to his eyes now, so that he was made deaf and blind, and sighed. Time, the fourth dimension. It doubled back on you, stretched out or pulled you back to other places so that the events of forty years ago seemed more real than the present: the faces of prisoners of war instead of the Japanese girls on the train who slept with their small mouths open, the wide-eyed Americans tonguing their phrasebooks and wondering how on earth they had got there. How was it that a person's body could be in one place and their mind in another, and their heart in yet another beyond that entirely? He was nearly eighty, and still he did not know. And neither did his sister, though she had plenty of time to contemplate these mysteries as she lay swelling softly in her hospital bed, swelling like a woman left for dead, horizontal.

When he took his hands away from his face the train had stopped, as if the town had appeared expressly at his wish. In the late afternoon the autumn spread itself flat against the roofs of the town; it was pierced by the spires of the old convent and the ossuary. The sky was Russian blue and against it the moons and stars of the saints' haloes chimed, familiar and unfamiliar: they led Thomas the Twin on like the Star of Bethlehem. Those white figures bent down and blessed him with their stone hands where he stood dazzled on the platform at the station - which was no real station, but only a stopping place to gather yourself and go forward. The gilt weathervanes were the visible centre of the tiny settlement and they stretched out then like the branches of a menorah, burning blinding when the sun caught them and set them aflame. This is the place of the burning bush, thought Heber to himself, the place where God spoke to Moses on Sinai. From the same bush, root and stem, they say that roses still grow. The blooms from this rosebush on the other side of the world are precious: the convent of Saint Catherine was quick to raise its square walls around it, and the nuns still make preserves of the red petals. The people of the desert town claim that the petals have the power to raise the dead.

The walk to the ossuary was short, but Heber was tricked by the thin river that lay alongside; it seemed to go in the opposite direction to the centre of Kotna Hora. He stopped the only man he saw, who smelled of sweat and living but was kind enough to gesticulate along the obvious path. Thomas the Twin followed it, and came to the largest building on the skyline. What else could it have been but the ossuary?

He was a little surprised to find that the bone palace was surrounded by a modern graveyard. There were entire families walking among the mounds, come to tidy and weep or perhaps only to make sure that the dead had remained so, pinned in the ground by the headstones over their chests. The graves were well-tended, white-marbled and red-flowered like underwater gardens. The headstones bore the particular smiling faces of the citizens of Kotna Hora, not as they were at the moments of their deaths, but as they were in decent middle age. How was it possible that lives could end up these dry memorials, decorated with bunches of flowers drawn in tightly at the neck? "We are born wet," said Heber to himself, "and every wrinkle after that is only desiccation until we are burned or blown to dust."

Thomas the Twin paid his pathetic entrance fee and descended the sweeping marble stairs. Inside the ossuary it was so cold he could see his breath. He was braced for the smell of pickling and rot, but the hundred thousand bones were beautifully scrubbed, bald and glowing in the darkness. Bone chandeliers twinkled above his head and the floor tiles had been locked sweetly into place like the grand ballroom it could have been. The bone coats of arms were picked at by bone birds, the winking bone cupids smiled down fondly: it was the blossoming Garden of Death.

The bars in the bone palace of Kotna Hora were no real deterrent, he thought. If you really wanted to, you could fit your hands through the mesh and stroke the bones, the cold protuberances of pelvis and knee: in life these bones were the houses of bodies and souls; they kicked and screamed.

Their creator was a monk who found that he had survived the plague that had taken everyone around him. He had looked at the carnage and thought: All this will become worse than mere waste; and so he had got to work, boiling down the bones like Beatrix Potter and then coating them with whitewash when they were dry. Then he made the mortal remains into pyramids and chains and crown jewels, linking all the ancient wonders of the world together across the ceiling. And as he worked the skeletons knocked hollowly together on the tiles of the monastery workshop; at night after he left his bench, they still plinked and plonked, though they ought to have been still. There was no one left to hear it but their maker, and he was sleeping like the dead.

Heber could hear a faint humming: he was afraid his ears were playing up again, but the sound seemed to be coming from above him. He lifted his old head to the cupids on the ceiling and recalled his old learning: they say that there were angels clinging to the travelling Temple that was the Ark of the Covenant, the traces of women in the Old Testament that were lost. Shamash: the ancient name of some Semitic god, but also the word which came to mean "attendant", "caretaker", "custodian", and then, finally, "synagogue janitor".

He craned his neck, feeling the short sinews creaking at the base of his skull. There was a faint glow among the cupids, who hovered and hummed, and Thomas the Twin thought he could see their wings shivering in the cold. The circles of their heads multiplied: another face shimmered down at him, with its hair of silver and cheeks of gold. "Miryam?" said the old man. The other visitors glanced at him curiously, but he did not notice them: he was smiling up into the features of his sister. The light behind her pulsed around her head and then blazed out into its seven pillars of flame. Thomas the Twin's last thought was a generous one. Bless us, every one, he thought, those of us who are sunk in the past or rocketing into the future, those who are dancing to the tunes in their heads right in the here and now.

Then he stretched his transparent hands towards them and was warmed, so that when he fell heavily to the tiles the fire consumed him in minutes. It was utterly peaceful, there in the hot white light of the bone palace of Kotna Hora, the wishes from the old lives laid aside in the ashes and the fears given over to burning.

In the hospital bed Miryam Heber's face relaxed on the pillow. Her fingers unclenched and the handful of ashes sifted quietly to the floor.

Diane Awerbuck teaches History, Narrative and Aesthetics at Cedar House and AFDA Film School. She reviews fiction for the South African Sunday Times and writes a column ("The Portable Pilgrim") for www.extrange.com. Awerbuck is currently hammering out the last draft of her new novel, The Assumption, and is also collaborating with Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lauren Beukes and Mary Watson on a book titled Exquisite Corpse.

LitNet: 08 November 2005

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