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In 2007, my father and I visited the Czech Republic. There were many core memories during that trip, but the most meaningful were from the day we spent at Terezín. Known more widely by its German name, Theresienstadt was a World War II Nazi station where Jewish prisoners were sent before being transferred to extermination camps. Thousands died there, too. The site is now a memorial, museum, and site of deep reflection.
Terezín – like Srebrenica, Jallianwala Bagh, Wounded Knee Creek, and other sites of mass murder – compel us to remember the past and ponder on how much we have truly learned. What happens when the dead are not memorialized but still speak? When they are not acknowledged by any government as a form of reconciliation? According to the Engineer in Sergei Lebedev’s The Lady of the Mine:
“There is no language to describe us. Language will say that we have become stone, but it cannot convey the extent of our detachment, our effacement, our oblivion. The Nazis killed us. They killed us so that we would disappear, so that the memory of us would never revive.”
The Lady of the Mine is a historical whodunit but not in any traditional sense of a mystery novel. Told from the perspective of five voices, during “five days in July 2014”, Lebedev has written a tough work of historical fiction that slowly builds toward a series of translucent revelations on the epigenetic trauma of the Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR: of fascism on top of fascism. The questions at the core of The Lady of the Mine are not an uncovering of the victims or when they died, but why these Ukrainian Jews were never given the chance to be remembered.
That moment of revelation as to why the Soviets did not challenge the Nazis’ blatant disregard for life should anger the reader because of the callous calculus and disregard for humanity; “stay in the shadows/ cheer at the gallows”, as Radiohead sings in “Burn the Witch“.
The Lady of the Mine begins with the story of Zhanna looking after her ailing mother, Marianna, a mysterious woman with superior skills as a launder who turns the dirtiest of clothes into sparkling treasures. But Marianna is a complex character whose true purpose is not revealed until later, and even then, it is cloaked in mystery (like her purported role as caretaker of the coal mine known as Shaft 3/4, which centers the story).
Lebedev’s lack of clarity about Marianna – as experienced by Zhanna – is frustrating. Is she “just” a woman with a special gift for washing clothes and linens, or is she part of a broader group of women with a Bene Gesserit of Dune-like sisterhood? The other figure whose presence complicates the narrative is Valet, a childhood neighbor who is banished and returns years later as a rising member of the Russian military. Valet is a sexual deviant who seeks gratification through force; he openly debates raping Zhanna (as revenge on her mother) and later is aroused seeing the semi-nude dead body of a female airline passenger.
Valet’s impotence, of sorts, is contrasted with the virility of the General, who has spent decades pondering the secrets of Shaft 3/4 and why the government he serves has covered up this crime of genocide. “They hadn’t realized it yet,” thinks the General, “but they had turned into those whom they considered their worst enemy, whom they had defeated and crushed: the Nazis … They had turned into Nazis with a fetish for historical deprivation, for being robbed by others: dishonest, dodgy, and devious. With their paranoid delusions of historical grievance. Zombies don’t know they are zombies.”
Lebedev’s real contribution here, the jab-cross-hook-uppercut of The Lady of the Mine, is the perspective of the Engineer who speaks on behalf of the Jews in Shaft 3/4. A coal expert who designed the mine that would eventually become his tomb, the Engineer writes about the inhabitants of the mine as ghosts, fossils, and the organic matter that itself becomes coal. But like Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of homo sacer, or the sacred man, the Ukrainian Jews in the coal mine are not dead but are “removed from the limits of everyday life.” They are not remembered as victims of the Holocaust.
“The execution ditches and pits, the crematoria of concentration camps can be seen, can be imagined. But we, imprisoned in the mine shaft, cannot be seen, cannot be made an object of imagination: imagination stumbles on us; we are too black, too merged in the materiality of the unimaginable.”
I could have read these chapters as a stand-alone story and been satisfied. The powerful writing here about life, loss, and memory offset the novel’s inconsistencies. The people in Shaft 3/4 are “the mute horror of the European subconscious. Its deepest cellar, where, as in a leprosarium, the unhealable past is locked away.”
The Lady of the Mine is an important novel that uses death and the denial of its memory to make a case for how poorly we understand the wants of the victims of fascism, forgetting that even those without life still deserve dignity. Its narrative style, however, might confuse some readers and annoy others, but it should cause everyone who reads it a sense of discomfort. As the Engineer writes, “One day, when the zombies are defeated, when it is time to rebuild what has been destroyed, then, as you sort through the ruins of war, you will one day find us. A deposit of humans.”