That August, the rest of the family had vacationed in Cannes while Hans was away at a YMCA summer camp near the town of Sázava, southeast of Prague. Otto and Ella had gone to collect Lotar, who had spent his second summer learning French at a language school in Cannes. There, the previous summer, he had met a fellow Czech from Prague, Zdenka Jedličková. The beautiful Zdenka with the confident cascading laughter and the dreamy blue eyes had transformed his life.
Lotar had fallen in love before they had even spoken. She had been in the middle of a group of young men, and as one lit her cigarette and she shielded it from the breeze, she had glanced across the street at Lotar and smiled. It took a full day for him to muster the courage to speak to her. After their first early-evening walk along the promenade, they spent together every second that remained of the summer. She was almost fluent, while this was only Lotar’s first summer in France, so she had helped him with his French. Seeing each other had been harder in Prague. In France, everything had been easy, both this summer and the first. It had been perfect. They had even performed together onstage. An article appeared in a local paper, L’eclaireur, on August 24, 1935, mentioning them both by name in a review of the artistic evening of the International School. Lotar kept it as his bookmark and, many years later, stored it in his box.
Lotar (standing) and Zdenka (second from left) in Cannes, 1936
Zdenka was fiercely independent. Her grandfather worked in property and had constructed many buildings in the New Town area of Prague. Her grandparents did not trust their son-in-law, Zdenka’s father, and had placed the properties they owned in their granddaughter’s name. They had given Zdenka ownership of a residential building on Trojanova Street, and the income and the responsibility had helped her grow in confidence and maturity. She was in her first year of studying law at Charles University and, rather outrageously, raced around the city in her own car. She was three years older than Lotar, a fact he had not yet shared with Otto and Ella. Zdenka’s own parents knew about the age difference and were less than thrilled. However, they were unhappier still when they learned that he came from a Jewish family.
“But we are not a religious family,” Lotar had explained to her mother one evening when the topic had arisen soon after they returned from France. “My father is more moved by Gandhi’s philosophies than anything. We were all forced to be vegetarians for a year!”
“They celebrate our holidays, even Christmas,” Zdenka had insisted. “They are also fluent in Czech and German, like us. Really, they are as Czech as you and me.”
Ella adored Zdenka. She could tell that Lotar was happily distracted. He was completely absorbed by the girl. His customarily grave mood had lifted so noticeably that he seemed physically lighter on his feet since his return. He laughed more easily, and often he appeared to do so for no reason at all. Otto, however, was unimpressed and preoccupied. Lotar had to focus on his studies; these were not times to dawdle. He had finished the last two years at the local high school, taken his maturita final exams, and enrolled at the Czech Technical College in Prague to study chemical engineering. Lotar had toyed with the idea of becoming an actor but, under some pressure from Otto, he had soon realized that drama was not a “proper” career.
Hans had not been expelled from school despite his truancy and had attained the grades to start a four-year course at the Chemical Industrial School. But Otto knew that this was just luck. His younger son oscillated between obsessions: one day it was poetry, another sculpture, another collecting stones. Hans was mercurial; it was obvious to everyone that he took after Ella and her side of the family. Uncle Richard was talking of migrating to America, and if he did, Otto would be left alone at the helm of the business. Otto beseeched Lotar to focus on school and work. Otto needed his elder son to study, work, and keep the company running. Hans could not be relied upon.
When Lotar had first introduced his parents to Zdenka at the café on the promenade of La Croisette, Ella had been chatty and warm. Otto, on the other hand, had been so cold that it bordered on the impolite. He had barely looked at Zdenka. Later that evening, as Lotar walked her to her building on a quiet side street, he felt the need to apologize. “I am sorry about my father—he is very serious and doesn’t know how to charm. But deep down he is kind, and he adores you, I know,” he whispered.
Otto had been irate at the end of that summer when he found out that Lotar had seen Zdenka every night in Cannes. He was furious that his son had auditioned for the stage again. “He must remember his priorities, he is there to study French. He cannot be derailed by a relationship that will never amount to anything.” After the fight, Otto had not spoken to Lotar for days.
Ella, on the other hand, had been relieved that he was having fun. “Let the boy live a little,” she said, laughing. As she was keen to point out, any whimsical behavior was entirely unusual for Lotar; he took nothing lightly. He actually took life so seriously that he had to be treated for ulcers and exhaustion in June during the final exams of his school.
On this autumn evening in Libčice, as Jerry, the elderly fox terrier, nuzzled up to him by the fire, Lotar’s stomach pains now seemed a distant memory. Hans, his lanky and disorganized younger brother, who lived in a fantasy world of ideas and poems, was predictably late.
Despite every chastisement and incentive, Hans was never on time. He had spent the day with Zdeněk Tůma, his new friend from school. The two had met on the first day. A teacher had asked a question about a chemical reaction, and Hans and Zdeněk had been the only ones to know the answer. Zdeněk—who, Hans soon realized, was always joking—had come up to Hans as they had left the classroom and said, “I think it is extremely important that we idiots join forces.”
Hans liked him immediately. Zdeněk was no idiot. He was the only pupil in the year to have gained a scholarship to attend the school.
Unlike Hans’s, Zdeněk’s childhood had been marred with difficulty. His mother, Marie, hailed from Benátky, a farming town close to the Slovak border, where her family had worked in the fields. She had raised him alone for the first few years, as his father, a wealthy married farmer, had denied any responsibility. Life for a single mother in the strict Catholic farming community had been untenable. Marie needed to find a job so, in the hope of making a better life for them both, had moved them to Prague. In the capital, she had found work as a cleaner at the famous U Fleků restaurant and brewery and had enrolled her boy in a school. When Zdeněk was eight, Marie married Antonín Tůma, a caretaker of a nearby building. Antonín adored little Zdeněk and had adopted him in 1929. The three of them lived a simple but happy life in the city. Zdeněk, ever chatty and precocious, had flourished in Prague and soon started arriving home with report cards filled with accolades. The staff from the Chemical Industrial School of Prague regularly ate and drank at U Fleků, which was only a few yards away. Marie, who was proud and ambitious, had made sure that they met her cheerful and bright young son. The teachers were so taken with the boy that they had reviewed his reports and arranged for him to take the chemistry degree course at the school for free.
But you would not have known that Zdeněk and Hans were high-achieving students. In the first days of the term, they had decided to join a society of practical jokers in Prague called the Klub Recesistů, or Prankster Club. In June 1936, the club had published the first Almanach Recesse, stating the aims of its prankster members: Everything is a joke. We must have fun because nothing can be done seriously. Egomaniacs and know-it-alls rule the world, so we must use the only weapon against them that has stood the test of time—humor. Hans and Zdeněk had passed the club’s entry examination by lying down in the middle of the main street in Nove Mesto amid the midday traffic. When concerned passersby asked if they were unwell, they had replied, “Oh no, just a little tired,” and run away. This jape had elicited the requisite number of laughs from the fellow members, and they were now full members of Recesistů.
That Saturday in September 1936, Zdeněk had come up from Prague to spend
the day in Libčice with Hans. Ella had wrapped some sandwiches in a basket for them, and they had headed for the promenade by the riverbank. They had whiled away their afternoon sitting on the grass, coming up with possible pranks to discuss at their next Recesistů club meeting. And they had chatted about novels and poetry—both Hans and Zdeněk loved poems and wrote verse. As they threw stones into the Vltava and tried to make them skip, they took turns reciting stanzas from a lyrical poem by Rilke.
As usual, they had lost track of time. Hans had taken his friend on the back of his bicycle to catch the train from a neighboring stop. Zdeněk had just managed to clamber onto the train, but the detour meant that Hans was late.
Dinner at home in Libčice, or in Prague, was always at seven-thirty p.m. As Hans raced back up the path to the house on his bicycle, he missed a stone in the shadows cast by the waning sunlight. He lost control. He fell off. He picked himself up, blew the dust off his glasses, and rearranged the chain. He had scraped his arms and legs, and reddened dirt had lodged in his cuts. Tomorrow, undoubtedly, the contusions would be obvious, but this was of no consequence. Hans seemed to be perpetually covered in bruises. He struggled with coordination and constantly walked into things, misstepping, losing his hat or scarf, or leaving his school books behind. He frequently fell off his bicycle. Organizing his body, his things, or his time was not a strength or, as he liked to clarify, a priority. As a result of the mishaps to which he was prone, his parents, with a mixture of pity and affection, had nicknamed him the “unfortunate boy.”
At seven thirty-four that evening, scratched and grimy, that unfortunate boy dumped the bicycle by the side door and rushed in through the kitchen. Ella, Otto, and Lotar were already sitting in the dining room. The stew and dumplings on the sideboard had been served. Jerry wagged his tail as he waited for crumbs beneath the table. Hans quickly sat down and stared at his father with defiant green eyes that seemed more olive as his face reddened with embarrassment. “Handa…” Ella sighed with resignation as he apologized for being late. Hans looked down and rubbed his muddied hands under the table. Before him he could see the elaborate pattern of cobalt-blue vines and flowers meandering across the white plate. This was visible everywhere except in the center.
There, in rebuke, instead of dinner, his father had placed his plain gold pocket watch.
CHAPTER 3 It Thunders Everywhere
In the late 1970s, when I was a young child in Caracas, my parents would wake at different times. My mother liked to sleep longer and then linger in bed. My father used to say that he needed to “stretch the hours” and, weekday or weekend, would rise no later than six-thirty a.m. and disappear into the study that connected with their bedroom. From there, he enjoyed watching the sky lighten.
I was not to disturb them in the mornings. I was allowed into my parents’ rooms only once either was awake and reading the newspapers. There were very few rules in our house, but my parents were strict about this one. Eager to please as the only child at home, I scrupulously obeyed. My parents would call for their breakfast through an internal intercom. My own bedroom was on the other side of the house, so I had no way of hearing the phone ring or the bustle of preparations in the kitchen. I only knew that my parents were awake because of the newspapers.
So I would wait patiently for my cue. The routine hardly altered. The night guard received the papers in a bundle in the small hours and handed them to the housekeeper in the kitchen when he collected his breakfast. She would cut the string that bound them and place them on the cream-carpeted floor just outside the closed white door that led to my parents’ room. She carefully arranged them in a half-opened fan so that the name and headline of each was visible at a glance. When the papers disappeared from the end of the hall, I knew that I was allowed in.
First, my father would take the papers from the floor and withdraw to his study for breakfast. It was then that I joined him. Often I brought my own breakfast tray so we could eat together. There was only room for one at the table by the daybed, so he would help me place my tray on an armchair as I positioned myself cross-legged on the floor. He would hand me the comic strip, the puzzle pages, and a pencil. He gently inquired how I was, but aside from discussing the crossword clues, the sporadic conversation would habitually revolve around the news that he read.
When he finished with the papers, he would carefully arrange them again on the hallway carpet for my mother. He would then go away for meetings, make calls at his desk, or vanish into the room where he repaired watches, leaving me to finish the puzzles on my own.
I would return to my room and wait for the papers to disappear once more, signaling that my mother was up. She ordinarily woke around nine or ten a.m. and had her breakfast in bed, elegant in a nightgown even then. My mother was not interested in puzzles, so I left those behind. I was allowed to usher in the three enormous dogs, and we all nestled in the bed around her while we listened to music or talked about her friends or mine. She worked in the arts and told marvelous stories about the quirks of conductors, musicians, and ballet dancers. Sometimes as she dressed, we would pretend that we were on a stage and dance around the room. On occasion, we sang at the tops of our voices, my mother melodically and I, unfailingly, off-key.
One morning in 1979, when I was eight years old and before I had found the false identity card in the box, my father woke much earlier than usual.
It was not yet dawn. The hallway lamp that was kept on, because I was afraid of the pitch dark, had not yet been switched off. I had heard a rustling and looked down the hall to find the papers gone. The garden leaves rippled in shades of black through the bars of the windows. Yet the lights were turned on in my father’s study. It was too early for breakfast, and I did not have my tray to bring in. I crept down the long hall, pushed gently at the half-open door, and peered through. My father sat, dressed in his navy cotton kimono decorated with white seagulls, lost as he gazed out the window. Outside, the garden was feebly patched with the promise of light. The newspapers lay in a pile unopened on the daybed. I installed myself in my usual spot on the floor. His hair seemed especially white in the shadows. The characteristic poise was absent, and he seemed somehow disjointed, unsettled. He did not hand me the comics or the page with the puzzles. Instead, he turned to me, profoundly serious, and announced that something odd had happened the night before during his dinner at the restaurant. As he had chatted with his friends, he had felt a sharp pain in his left leg.
“When we got home, I looked under my trousers, and I saw these.”
He lifted the edge of his gown slightly, uncovering part of his shin. He pointed at two small red wounds, one exactly above the other, that were clearly visible on his pale skin. “Do you see these holes in my leg?”
I did.
“What do you think they are?” he asked slowly. He seemed exhausted, as if he had not slept.
“Mosquito bites, Papi?”
“I hope you are right. I am not sure at all. They are very round, and their position is unusual. I think they’re something else.”
I was reminded of a news story that he had recounted a few weeks earlier of a Bulgarian dissident in London. The man had been poisoned by spies with a tiny bullet fired from an umbrella as he waited for a bus. The bullet had been shot into his leg and left a minute wound. My father’s meaning struck me.
“Like the one in the man’s leg in London?” I ventured.
He nodded. “Exactly. They can just shoot you when you are no longer useful. If they don’t like you, if they think you are a traitor, just like that, without process or trial, they just kill you. And the worst thing is, nobody would ever know.”
His words threw me. I inspected his leg again. The perfect dots, with fine red scratch lines around them, definitely looked like insect bites to me.
“But Papi, no one wants to kill you. Don’t they itch? Are you sure they aren’t mosquito bites?”
His evident fear unnerved me. I wanted it to go away, I longed to dispel it. I bent my elbow
toward him and pointed at a scab of my own, which I had just scratched.
“Look, Papi! See, yours are the same.”
“You are right,” he said, his gaze still adrift.
Then, after a pause, he looked at me again and murmured affectionately a term that he had derived from the French word for mischievous and that he used for both my mother and me.
“Coquinita. That’s what they probably are.”
He looked away, but his laugh, intended to reassure me, sounded wrong. He was nervous still, I could tell. It was obvious to me then that he did not think he had been the victim of a biting insect. It was as if he had forgotten that I was his young daughter and just wanted me to be a witness to these strange wounds on his leg. He passed me the comics, opened a paper, and hid behind it.
It did not make sense. My father was not fearful, he was resolute and strong. He personified security, success. Yet he seemed frightened. Why would he think that anyone wanted to kill him? But I did not say anything more, and neither did he.
When I went into my mother’s room that morning, I told her about my father’s bites. My mother repeatedly maintained that children must never be lied to. I knew this and found it reassuring. It did mean that she was uncommonly candid with her explanations and opinions.
“It’s probably that he’s concerned about malaria… there used to be lots of cases here. But no longer.”
I countered that was not it at all, that he was not afraid of mosquitoes or malaria. He thought someone was trying to kill him, as they had the Bulgarian.
When Time Stopped Page 5
