The People's Voice
Nerotysia's Premier Digital Newspaper
Overwhelmingly Gray
By Yuli Tsaplin | 7 May 2015, 00:00 NST
The nation of Vioska is overwhelmingly gray.
The violent northern storms which shake the nation to its bones are a dirty, pounding gray. The aggressively efficient architecture, adopted to maximize resource use and defensibility, is a drab concrete gray. The streets and the cars that ride atop them are gray. The faces of politicians are impeccably gray. The faces of people droop gray under the sun, which itself is often gray with smog and smoke.
This is as true for the capital city of Iasemberg as it is for the rest of the nation, but travel only a few miles outside of the city and there is another color, so bright and startling it seemed like a giant daycare had been dropped into the middle of a vast puddle. Creeping through the dense forests with our cameras, we could hardly believe our eyes.
Sky blue. Sky blue and egg white spotted the space behind the barbed-wire fence we found ourselves facing. It was raining that day, dampening the ground beneath us, and our shoes became stuck in the mud as we stood dumbfounded, unmoving. The chains of the fence laced the fateful colors with more of the ever-present gray, but the effect was not reduced in the slightest.
Rumours of brutal work camps in Vioska ring loud and clear throughout the communist bloc, and much of the world. In 1994 Vladimir Dhiutzov escaped to Nerotysia. He traveled through miles of Slovskan forest, braving ice and cold and the clutches of bears, fearing capture and torture at the hands of the Slovskan authorities, ever desperate for information about their shadowy neighbour. He made it to Ossia after months of harrowing travel, and one year later
Roses and Rainstorms took the world by storm. Detailing the gruesome working conditions inside these camps, the novel was condemned by Vioskite authorities but nevertheless captured the attention of Escar. The camps were revealed to be ideological prisons, where fascists, capitalists, intellectuals and even reform-minded communists were sent for "re-conditioning," which mostly involved mining Vioska's rich coal deposits. The book, however, died without a peep. Just one year later the Grand Depression hit, and the once-furious capitalist powers turned their eyes inward. Nerotysian leaders, already looking for an excuse to ignore the situation in Vioska, embraced the death of the controversy with open arms.
It seemed that Vioska's facade had been breached. It seemed that the government might be so embarrased that they would trudge towards reform. It seemed that Dhiutzov had accomplished his mission.
But in 2005 there was a shakeup in Vioskite politics, largely due to the Depression and the humiliation of the scandal. The sharp cheekbones and deadly cunning of Persius Zhernobyl swept into power. And though he seemed to herald the coming of reform, the reality of life in the nation only took a violent turn for the worst.
We decided that it must be one of the work camps, and we were puzzled. Snapping pictures of the startlingly blue buildings inside the fence, we began to think that Zhernobyl had been lying. He hadn't been closing down the camps, he hadn't been cutting down on repression and torture and all of the other tactics regularly employed by the State Police. Zhernobyl had, in fact, made no changes at all. We decided he must have simply allowed the status quo to stand.
How wrong we were.
We returned the next week, armed with better cameras and a determination to learn more. There were figures off in the distance, being hustled in chains between buildings, but we could not imagine a way to contact them without the guards noticing. We knew that the Nerotysian ambassador would not help us - he was hostile to our investigation from the get-go. We were posing as embassy staff in order to fool the Vioskite government, and the ambassador only saw us as a diplomatic liability. No help would come from him.
We tried to whistle, hoping we would get lucky. We planned to break into the camp, but decided it would be too risky. We again appealed to the ambassador, in vain. We knew we needed something more, we could sense we were teetering on the edge of something big.
Zhernobyl is a curious man with a curious style of speaking. He speaks and acts rather like a Prince Charming, and often he wears quite tight-fitting uniforms. He played the noble progressive on the international stage, and he smiled modestly when asked if he considered himself a savior of his troubled country. "No," he would say, "I am only a servant."
But as we continued our sniffing in Iasemberg, stumped and looking for answers, we came across a rather distrubing anecdote.
Our embassy car had become stuck in a blinding blizzard, and we were taken in by a family of four living in a small townhouse on the outskirts of the city. Three little boys and one mother. We primarily dealt with the mother, the matriarch of the family, who resembled a PTSD pumpkin, with her world-weary wrinkles which wrapped around her face like rolls of duct tape. That night we sat down with her in her living room, where her entire family slept, and we began talking. We asked what had happened to her husband.
"Oh, he was taken years ago. I don't know which camp he works in, but they let him send me letters for his good behavior." We said it must be difficult, living without him.
"Oh, yes, yes. It was easier back when Zasha was still around, you know, because she was such a little trooper, always wanting to do this or that - she was a great help. And she looked so much like her mother..." her voice broke. Confused, we asked what was wrong.
"Nothing, nothing..." we pressed her, gently, aware that something big was rolling just beneath the surface, and we needed to tease it out with the utmost care...
Finally,
"She was taken only a few years ago." The mother sniffles, ashamed of her tears. "They - she - she is Kolish, you see. She was the daughter of a friend of mine, and when she passed away I took her in. She was so young then, she hardly remembered her real mother."
We waited while she reigned in her shaking.
"So...my friend was Kolish, and so was she, and I suppose they must have found out somehow. They came for her when she was twelve - said she - said she was not worthy of real work - said she..."
The woman could not continue through her tears. We left without finding out more. But the seed had been planted. We raised hell at the embassy, threatened to contact the Central Committee and reveal all of the subterfuge, the fact that the embassy routinely burned documents, the fact that they regularly lied on their reports to the Central Committee. So they buckled. They had no choice.
Zhernobyl is a marvelous wordsmith. He coined the name of the program, "Ethnic Housekeeping." He wrote every manual. He gave every private speech to the Vioskite People's Liberation Party. He personally developed the psuedoscience and rhetoric backing the program's implementation. He twisted the Grand Depression to suit his peculiar needs, pinning the blame on the most prosperous ethnic group in Vioska.
We returned to the camp in an armored convoy. We had failed to inform the government of our intentions, and we had cowed the guards at the gate in minutes. Before long we were finally inside the camp.
The buildings, so pretty from far away, were lined in rows stretching as far as the eye could see. They had no windows, and the doors were squares of iron dug into the ground. Black-suited guards stood nervously at attention as we rumbled down the road. They had no idea what was going on - no one was normally allowed in here.
We stopped a little ways down and went up to the first door, demanded that it be unlocked. In seconds it was. We crept inside.
The rancid scent of sweat and blood hung in the air, dancing with heat so intense it burned your eyes. The acrid taste of metal salted the tongue. Ragged, bruised bodies dotted the walls. Young men and boys, some girls too, all awake the instant we had opened the door, all staring fearfully at our tall figures. Some were alone. Others sat in clusters. In one corner, a young girl was being tended to by an older woman. We approached them. The girl's face was monstrous, distorted by purple-yellow bruises, streaked and crusted with dried blood. The older woman curled protectively over her.
"Please. She needs to recover. Take me, take someone else. Please." Her voice was oddly mechanical, a calculated attempt to salvage some mercy. She was clearly used to saying such things, to no avail.
Zhernobyl's writings are labyrinthine in their logic, but beautiful in their style. He writes extensively about the importance of Ethnic Housekeeping, about the importance of ensuring the survival of the Hadriak race, about the inferiority of the Kolish people. His writings dream of a day when all of Escar will be cleansed of the Kolish disease. He is expert at linking the Kolish people to the hated monarch that rules north of the border. He is a true wordsmith.
Throughout the day we explored the rest of the camp. Towards noon, when guards began to become twitchy and when news of our sniffing had surely reached the central government, we reached the very center of the camp. In a giant central square there stood two enormous buildings. Two smokestacks sprouted from both, each with thin tendrils of smoke rising lazily into the sky. They had been used very recently - this morning, probably.
By then each of us knew, or at least suspected, what we were about to find. But we entered anyway. At first, the inside seemed innocuous, only a large silver room, it's ceiling studded with showerheads. But moving further inwards we discovered what the guards called the 'Cookery.'
Piles upon piles of bodies are clumped in one corner. The room is stiflingly hot. Along the brick walls are arrayed two dozen large steel doors. As for what was behind the doors we needed only to guess.
We returned to the outside. We took the injured girl with us, promised the other prisoners we would return. We left, although the guards were sour about our extra baggage.
Her name is Zasha. Her mother died when she was very young, and she was raised by a family friend. They came for her when she was twelve, told her that people of her kind weren't worthy of work. She had at first been pushed into an even more putrid room, where every day hordes of people were taken away, never to return. One day, she was grouped in with the 'Goners.' However a guard noticed her physique. He held her back. Ever since then she had been imprisoned with the workers, though her work differed from theirs quite a bit. She was a toy to be passed around, as were some of the other women.
Zasha had birthed three children in her five years at the camp. All three were taken from her, to be adopted by pure Hadriak families. She had miscarried twice.
In the following hours we rescued her mother from the State Police. They had been punishing her for talking to us. Her face was like her daughters', decorated with bruises. One of her boys had already been shot. When she saw us again at the embassy she threw herself into our arms.
"Thank you for bringing my daughter back from death," she said. "Thank you for bringing all of us back."
The nation of Vioska is overwhelmingly gray. For Zasha this gray is forgotten life, while the blues and whites are well-remembered death.
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