The Book of Dirt

by Bram Presser

  ‘Is it true what they say? That he is back?’

  ‘Yes. No. He is not the same. The one who returned…he is not my father.’

  ‘Štěpánka says—’

  ‘All his energies are spent moving from window to window, peeling away the edges of the tape, peeking out from behind the blinds. At night he covers his face with pillows.’

  ‘I have tried to come. Ludvík too.’

  ‘You would have seen a cripple scrambling to hide under the table, Paní Roubíčková. With every knock he thinks they have returned. I try to leave the house but his eyes fill with tears and he whispers: They are watching. So I wait until he sleeps and then—’

  ‘You do what you can, I’m sure.’

  ‘No. I’m ashamed.’

  ‘Bohuš, please. It is nothing to—’

  ‘Of him, Paní Roubíčková. I’m ashamed of him. Of Mama too. So I’ve come because a son is supposed to honour his parents. Even when he has grown to resent them.’

  ‘Bohuš!’

  ‘I know you bring things from the country and share them with us. I am here to collect what is ours. I won’t stand by and watch my parents in this state anymore, Paní Roubíčková. I have ration cards if you want.’ Bohuš shoved a hand into his coat and pulled out a ration book. ‘Here,’ he said, holding the dog-eared pages out to Františka. ‘They’re worthless to us.’

  Františka pulled a chair out from the table. ‘Sit, Bohuš. Calm yourself.’ He slumped down. ‘Look,’ Františka continued, ‘I’m glad you’ve come. Your mother is like a little sister to me and Ludvík misses his friend. It’s just that winter…’ Františka scanned the pantry shelves. ‘Why don’t you stay for a while? I’ll prepare something nice. And what’s left you can take back to your parents. Go to the lounge. Lie down. Rest. It’s too much for a young man, all this responsibility. The girls should be home soon.’

  Bohuš dozed, breathing in the soothing aroma of warm milk, onion, butter and allspice. When the meal was ready Františka nudged him awake. The girls were already seated when he came to the table. They all pushed the bread dumplings around, soaking up the watery stew, stabbing for meat that wasn’t there. The girls laughed and chattered and Bohuš endured their questions with good humour, all the while exchanging coy glances with Daša. When they had finished, and their plates shone with an oily lustre, the two younger girls excused themselves and headed to bed. Daša and Irena began to clear the dishes. Bohuš went to grab the glasses but Františka took them from his hand.

  ‘Tonight you are our guest,’ she said. ‘My husband will be back soon and I don’t expect he’ll be in any state to entertain.’ She scraped what was left of the stew into a fresh pan. ‘For your parents,’ she said. ‘Tell them…tell them I’m sorry.’

  The Nazi standard hung over the great pylons of the National Museum, imprisoning King Wenceslas and his stallion in its tricolour bars. An unwelcome air of celebration was filtering through the streets of Prague like the fingers of the tenth plague. The soldiers marched in sharper step, flags frozen in position by the barrage of sleet. In one month it would be the second anniversary of the occupation, and still none of the neighbours had chanced to speak with Jiří B. Ottla no longer frequented Žofie Sláviková’s store. ‘It is worse than we thought,’ said Štěpánka Tičková. ‘At night I hear the cars pull up at their kerb. The engines idle for a few minutes and then they speed off. There is only one kind of person who attracts such visitors: collaborators!’

  ‘Enough with your rubbish,’ said Jáchym Nemec. ‘I have not heard these engines.’

  ‘That’s because your wife snores like a donkey. Half the neighbourhood shoves cotton balls in their ears thanks to her. You will see, Jáchym. Jiří B has become one of them.’

  ‘Štěpánka! Have you no heart? The poor man suffered in a camp. It is on the public record.’

  ‘You fool! It is common knowledge that he went to Peček Palace. I have it on good authority that he was down in the basement, in the old cinema, sitting against the wall by himself while all the other prisoners sat on pews, waiting to be poked with metal rods. Not him, though. He sat near the heater, face to the floor, too ashamed to look a single one of those martyrs in the eye. They were supposed to believe that he, too, was a victim. But the facts speak for themselves, Jáchym. Six months he was gone—exactly how long it takes the Gestapo to train its civilian operatives. And why him? Well, if you opened your ears for once you might already know. Biskupcova Street is a hotbed of resistance activity. Yes, can you believe it? Our Biskupcova! And who better to report on it than the man who waves around his copy of V Boj?’

  ‘A month ago he had caught syphilis from his whore of a wife. Now this?’

  ‘Yes, there is no end to the shame. And the boy? Coming home covered in paint the same morning we woke to that awful graffiti. What were they thinking, provoking the Germans? I have half a mind to report it.’

  ‘You will do no such thing. Leave them be.’

  Štěpánka Tičková pulled her coat tighter around her and screwed up her face, as if she were ready to spit. ‘A scourge on the whole family, I say.’

  A lone figure, cloaked in grey, walks along the Charles Bridge, his head bowed. Snow has begun to fall, and the sentries positioned along the path breathe lassos of vapour, as if to ensnare the flakes. They laugh at the patches of white on the statues. The man keeps walking. He could be a resistance fighter, an assassin or a saboteur. But he is not. He is just a man, crossing a bridge, relying on a thick cane to hold him upright. He is neither old nor young. His footsteps are quickly erased. The soldiers pay him no heed. Their guns, strapped to their left shoulders, point skyward. There is peace on the streets again; guns will not be needed for now.

  The man carries his burden past the saints on the north side, pausing at this one and that, as if to pay his respects. Sometimes he takes pity on his cane and stops to rest against the uneven stone balustrade. He puts one hand on the cold surface and gazes down at the raging Vltava below. When he reaches The Crucifix and The Calvary he pauses to mutter the words spelled out in an arc of gold—Holy Holy Holy Is The Lord Of Hosts—in his broken Hebrew, a language he has forsaken since his youth. His voice alerts nobody. Snow falls, its trajectory unaffected by the shift in the air.

  Neither soldier nor saint nor cobblestone notices when this husk of a man tumbles from the bridge near the eastern bank, and lands with almost no sound in the water below. Even the Vltava has become accomplice to his disappearance, spitting him out on the shore far enough downriver to ensure that nobody could recognise him. The shopkeeper who drags the body up from the mooring pole on which it has become snagged does not send his assistant back across the bridge to alert Otto Muneles at the Chevra Kadisha. Instead he calls the local police, who grudgingly come to collect the body and take it to the city mortuary. There it lies for three days, after which it is consigned to a pauper’s grave in the back corner of the Olšany Cemetery along with several other indigents.

  And so it is that no stone will ever mark the final resting place of Jiři B. He has been erased from history.

  6

  They huddled behind the chipped wooden pews, these prisoners of Babel, flotsam from the outer reaches of an empire that was devouring faraway lands while constricting around the throats of those trapped inside. Here they were all castaways and immigrants, a jarring symphony of mashed syllables, from Žižkov, from Nusle, and from the Sudeten, Vienna and Munich as well. They came in shifts, one in the morning, one in the afternoon; what had been a spacious if Spartan, school eighteen months before, was now an over-crammed warehouse for the unwanted.

  Jakub R thought of his own childhood in the village, when every word from his teachers’ mouths had been spoken first by the sages. To save just one life, it is written, is to save the entire world. That was how sacred each person was to God. Yet here at Jáchymova, where he had been a teacher and was now more like a cattle dog, fifty worlds collided in every classroom twice a day, and the result
was a confined catastrophe. They looked like vagabonds, gutter-dwellers. For more than a year they had not been permitted clothing vouchers. Jakub could see the seams where the shirts had been let out, and the shorts patched with strips of curtain. Even young Herschmann, the refugee boy from Munich, who lived with his uncle, the cobbler, had holes in the leather of his shoes. Only the cloth stars still looked new: golden, beaming like suns from the fading greys and browns onto which they had been stitched.

  ‘Children,’ said Georg Glanzberg, ‘please form five lines. Be quick about it.’ They rushed into their cliques, a small society with its own pecking order. Jakub noticed each group, and would listen in to their conversations. Up front were the Czech children, who considered themselves above this corral of foreigners. They still had parents, homes, the semblance of a settled life. Their mothers cooked in the same pots they had used for the past twenty years; their fathers sat on armchairs into which the impressions of their bodies had been imprinted. These children asked one another if they, too, had begun to smell. More than once Jakub found that peculiar boy Arnošt Flusser in the bathroom frantically scrubbing his hands. For those like Hana Ginzová, the daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother, the insult was enhanced: by Jewish law she was not even one of them and yet here she was, at the Jewish school, forced to share in the bread of their affliction.

  The German and Austrian refugees gathered in the third row, looking as confused as they had on the day they arrived. Some had been in the city for almost four years, but they had yet to properly assimilate. Their parents had enrolled them in Prague’s German schools in the hope of easing their transition, but they soon fell victim to mockery and physical attacks. It was as if these schools were sovereign German territory, with all the attendant prejudices and proclivities to violence. Their expulsion at the end of the previous school year had been a relief, and they looked forward to finding their feet at a Jewish school in which they would be the superior class. The reality, however, proved a shock: they were jeered by their Czech classmates. Cast adrift in a hostile city, they would often speak of their homeland, but they meant Palestine, not Hitler’s vile dominion. Jakub once overheard two of the boys, Herschmann and František Brichta, reminiscing about a camp they had enjoyed when Jews were still allowed to ride the trams as far as the country terminus. The boys had gone on long walks, practised tying knots, sung aspirational songs and roasted knackwursts on a stick. ‘I swear,’ young Brichta said, ‘this is how it will be in Palestine. This is what it is to live on a real kibbutz.’ Jakub hadn’t the heart to tell them of the letter he had received from Jiří Langer: his mentor had contracted a chest infection on the boat over and spent the first eight months of his spiritual homecoming convalescing with consumptives and hypochondriacs. There is no need for Hitler in Palestine, he had written. The desert air has spite enough. It is like I never left, and yet I am free.

  The Sudeten refugees did not speak of Palestine. The very concept of home had lost its meaning; they had seen how one day their state could exist and the next it could disappear. Most looked within themselves for a sense of belonging. They were as uncomfortable among their Czech classmates—who rebuffed them as traitors or deserters—as they were among the Germans.

  Some students tended towards truancy, like Frederick Fantl, son of the journalist and conductor Leo Fantl. Jakub R and Georg Glanzberg had often spoken of the boy, his potential, his sporting prowess—the boy could run faster and jump higher than anyone else in his class—and his fine intellectual pedigree. But Jakub did not question absence anymore. Invariably they came back, all except one, the Viennese boy Kurt Diamant. His disappearance in late April shook his fellow pupils; he was the first of them to be deported along with his family. The class was poorer for his absence, not only because he was a friendly and intelligent boy, but also because his mother was a skilled dressmaker who would often help with the children’s rags, turning them into something presentable. Jakub, too, had availed himself of her services. A few weeks before his sister Růženka left for America, he took her to visit Gisela Diamantová at her home in Valentinská Street. Kurt’s mother was a stocky woman, her strawberry hair cropped and pinned to her head. There were folds of skin beneath her eyes from years of squinting at needles and thread. Růženka had brought with her four dresses, ample material for Gisela Diamantová to assemble one piece. ‘I can’t carry much,’ said Růženka as she laid the dresses on the table. ‘Only one case, and what I have on my back.’

  Gisela was stern and businesslike but these riches of material brought a smile to her face. She measured Růženka, occasionally turning to Jakub to ask about Kurt’s progress at school. ‘An amiable boy,’ Jakub replied. ‘In sport, I am told, he excels. Had things been different he might have made a promising boxer.’ Ten days later Jakub and his sister returned to Valentinská Street to collect the dress. It was sturdy but modest, something that would allow its wearer to meld into the greater whole without catching the eye of a swindler, cad or gendarme.

  Otakar Svoboda disappeared under the black cloth behind his camera. ‘Little girl in the third row,’ came his muffled voice, ‘we cannot see your pretty face. Please move a touch to your right.’ Jakub turned to see Markéta Fischerová edge gingerly out from behind the Kleinová girl. The poor child still bore the scars of having lost her dog Schnitzli last year. She was not the only one; when the decree came that Jews could no longer keep pets, several of the children had to find new homes for their beloved creatures. But nobody had wanted Schnitzli. The mangy thing was old and incontinent, and used to snap at whoever reached out to pat it. Only Markéta could calm the dog, and would let him sleep on her bed, cleaning up whatever he had left behind in the morning. The deadline loomed, and word got out that the Germans were planning to euthanise all remaining Jewish pets. Markéta’s father grabbed Schnitzli by the scruff and told the girl to bid the dog farewell. Schnitzli wheezed and growled as Markéta held him close. ‘It is the right thing,’ said her mother. ‘At least we can be sure he won’t suffer.’ The poor creature did not make a sound when Pan Fischer took him to the bathroom and drowned him in the sink.

  ‘Smile!’ said Otakar Svoboda. He held up his flashbulb and pressed on the switch. It would be the last picture of Jakub R before he returned, almost four years later, from the hell into which he was cast. For Georg Glanzberg and for most of the students, it would be their last photo ever.

  7

  The many possible fates of Jiří B remained the talk of Biskupcova Street until even Štěpánka Tičková ran out of theories and, instead, turned her attention to a more urgent threat: resettlement.

  It had been tried before. The entire community had been shaken by its brutality: a thousand Jews sent to a small agricultural compound in Nisko, near the Polish town of Lublin. Within a few months, six hundred of them had either frozen or starved to death. The rest were sent back to their homes, only to find them occupied by strangers. The Jews had rejoiced in the plan’s failure but its spectre continued to haunt them. Day after day they now lined up at the head office of the Jewish Religious Council of Prague, demanding assurances from Dr Emil Kafka that a similar fate was not in store for them. ‘He speaks in circles,’ said Jáchym Nemec, to nobody in particular as he walked back down the steps without an answer.

  Soon it was summer and the city gleamed. Posters adorned the walls and pylons. Another decree, in black and red. All Jewish inhabitants of the city’s outer reaches were to come to central Prague, where they would be housed in one of three districts. Similar directives were issued for the Protectorate’s other major cities. There would be resettlement after all, but it was to be a more contained affair. The most affluent Jews were particularly put out: evicted from their homes and moved to rundown tenements, they found themselves worse off than even the poorest of their brethren. They clung to the trappings of their former lives, many choosing to don suits and ties as they undertook the menial jobs found for them by the Council. And so it was that for a few short mont
hs the city had the best-dressed street sweepers and garbage collectors in all of Europe.

  Then Von Neurath fell out of favour with Berlin and was replaced—in practice, if not in title—by a far less forgiving man. Štěpánka Tičková found out as much as she could about this new Acting Reichsprotektor, and what she learned she did not like. His reputation for savagery on the Russian front was the stuff of Nazi legend. He rides a chariot and hunts Jews for sport. Štěpánka rushed to warn her neighbours, but there was no need; from the moment he assumed control of the Protectorate, Reinhard Heydrich wasted no time in proving his mettle. Before the first week was out he had ordered the execution of close to a hundred people, closed down all of Prague’s synagogues and, by stepping up the frequency and brutality of German patrols, effectively decimated the resistance. By midway through the second week he had already set in motion the complete Aryanisation of the Czech lands. The Jews would be first to go.

  Heydrich was able to avail himself of the existing arrangements. Adolf Eichmann had overseen the Central Office for Jewish Emigration since the beginning of the occupation and had successfully encouraged a minor exodus of Jews. It was also Eichmann’s office that had coordinated the concentration of Czech Jews into the major cities. The key to the next stage, figured the Acting Reichsprotektor, was simply to remove the element of choice. For several hours, Heydrich, Eichmann and Von Neurath’s former deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, pored over maps and schedules and lists of addresses, drawing up a plan of action. When it was done, they drank a toast to the Fatherland, to their own efficiency and to absolute victory, and then sent their instructions to Dr Kafka. Heydrich’s wishes were to be enacted forthwith. Kafka was also to establish a Jewish Community Trust, to deal with abandoned property.