by Liam Pieper
‘It seems strange to hate the Tartars after, what, half a millennium? They haven’t bothered you for some time, you know.’
‘It’s a tradition. They don’t have to make sense. In fact, it’s better if they don’t. Don’t you have traditions that don’t make sense?’
‘I’m from Russia. We don’t have traditions so much as superstitions, but we have all of those.’ He started to list them: never say goodbye on a bridge; never look at a newborn baby, never compliment a newborn baby; never give someone a knife; never give someone a kitten.
‘What happens if you give someone a kitten?’
‘It invites the devil in and you will die.’
‘Oy God.’ Jan sighed. ‘No wonder your country is fucked.’
‘You’ve no idea,’ replied Arkady. ‘If only we’d had a trumpeter when the Soviets came.’
Jan smiled. ‘Fine. I would like to show you one of my favourite traditions. I will take you to my favourite place in Krakow. But you must cover your head, or we will insult God. Here.’ He took off his hat and placed it on Arkady’s bare head, then removed his scarf and wrapped it around his own head, then wrapped it around his face. ‘There.’ He grinned at Arkady. ‘Do I make a beautiful babushka?’
They turned and walked into the Jewish cemetery on Miodowa Street. Something in the grand cobbled walls, the oaks that grew scattered between the gravestones, gave tranquillity to the place. The Krakow air, usually a miasma of coal smoke and merchants yelling at each other, was clean and quiet here. Graves, old and grand, so ancient the inscriptions had rubbed off, were sinking into the ground, tipped over by creeping roots from the trees, listing through the years. The dead are tossed and tumbled by time, just like the living. No one stays the person they were buried, not for long.
A soft grey rain fell as they walked slowly down the pathways threading through the headstones, taking turns to read the names in Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish, German, with a rash of German casualties from 1914 to 1918 filling up the gravestones.
‘This seems a strange place to show me. You know I am not a Jew.’
‘No, but I thought you would like it. It is peaceful.’
‘I do.’
They walked a little more, footsteps crunching on gravel over centuries of bones.
‘Why do you come here?’
‘To be alone, to find some privacy.’ Jan indicated with a tilt of the head that they should head down a path between the graves, where they found themselves sheltered between a small mausoleum and the cobbled wall, a spot shielded from sight elsewhere in the cemetery.
‘Why do you need all the privacy?’
‘Everyone is worried about the Gestapo. That they are coming for us, that they watch everything we do. They don’t have anything on my mother and her friends, though.’
‘So why don’t you leave?’
‘Ah, but I will. This is my final year in Krakow. I have studied previously in Berlin, and next year I am transferring to Charles University in Prague. I feel things will be better for my kind there.’
‘For Jews?’
‘Yes. And also . . . I am . . .’ Jan turned suddenly, and, leaning forward, kissed Arkady on the lips, then stood back, waited to see how his gambit would land, his eyes as sharp as a cat’s and as hopeful and trusting as a dog’s. He was right. His instinct rarely failed. The scarf fluttered to the ground, and after a moment, Jan kneeled to retrieve it.
‘Don’t be scared. Nothing bad will happen to you, my friend,’ he murmured, then took the Russian’s hand and rested it on top of his head, where his hair was already starting to thin into a pale tonsure through the black. ‘Just remember to keep your hand here. You do not want to anger God.’
The SS man stepped out of their way with a polite ‘bitte’, and by the time they returned to their table their plates had been cleared. A waiter approached, asked if they would like dessert. Jan asked for the drinks menu to be returned. Once the waiter had vanished, Arkady glowered across the table.
‘That was fun,’ Jan said to Arkady.
‘That was stupid,’ fumed Arkady. ‘If we’d been caught they would have killed us. He could have beaten our brains out right here without consequence.’
‘Spoko. That’s crazy talk. There are always consequences. For one, he would have gotten brains all over his nice new uniform. And besides,’ Jan lowered his voice and smiled winningly as the SS soldier passed their table on his way back to his lunch, ‘that boy isn’t old enough to beat his own meat.’
Arkady snorted angrily, but couldn’t hide his amusement. ‘Grow up.’
‘I actually think he’s quite handsome,’ Jan said, warming to the theme, casting a mock-smouldering glance over to where the SS was eating with a uniformed colleague, their voices low, their hands holding silverware in the efficient German fashion. ‘Should we ask him to join us? The uniform is so dashing.’
‘You shouldn’t joke about these things,’ Arkady scolded him.
‘Who says I am joking? I would be joking if I asked us to take home one of those.’ He wrinkled his nose and nodded at another soldier, one of the Czech Vládní vojsko, the troops the Nazis had deputised with rounded helmets and obsolete rifles and ordered to stand forlornly on street corners and train stations. ‘These vojsko, they are as ridiculous as they look, flaccid little dildo men. But the SS! They would know how to fuck a man right.’
‘Keep your fucking voice down, Jan,’ Arkady growled. He was angry at Jan for his recklessness, his risk-taking in restrooms, and in the crowded corridors of trains and in bars down narrow alleyways in the old town, but he did not blame him. The secrecy was erotic, the danger an irresistible aphrodisiac, one quite removed from the reality of the situation. Since that first kiss in the Krakow cemetery, reality had been completely rewritten.
Outside, flurries of snow tapped against the window, but by the time the flakes reached the concrete expanse of the Národní Boulevard they had started to melt. The town was not ready for them, for the first snow of the season – the leaves had just started to fall, and the frost had not set in.
Jan was chatting with their waiter, taking his time to decide what he wanted to drink next, ordering then calling the waiter back. He was being a brat, deliberately testing the waiter’s patience, but he knew the waiter would tolerate being toyed with for the tip he and Arkady would inevitably leave, carelessly strewn across the table, as though money is no big deal, even in wartime.
Arkady was not done sulking, and to keep his hands busy, he reached for his napkin and folded it in half, then crosswise, then into a series of elaborate triangles. The very first toys he’d ever learned to make from his father, as a boy, before he’d learned the toy-making trade, before he’d given it up, running up loans and running away from Russia to become a doctor, were simple playthings from scraps of paper – a bird, a hat, a little boat seaworthy enough to race down the gutters of Moscow in the spring thaw. There was something meditative in it; he felt his mood lifting with every fold. By the time Jan had finally decided on two cups of hot wine and sent the waiter away, Arkady had turned his napkin into a tiny peaked cap, a cartoon version of the SS cap.
‘There.’ He reached across the table and fitted the cap onto Jan’s head at a rakish angle. ‘Now you can play dress-ups with your friends.’
Jan grinned, mugged in the hat for a moment, throwing clownish sieg heils out for the world, which, as far as he cared, consisted of just him and Arkady. Neither man saw the pair of SS on the other side of the cafe fall silent and start watching them, although Arkady did sometimes wonder what strangers saw when they looked at them. What do people see?
They looked, perhaps, like old friends catching up over lunch, although they aren’t that, not exactly, or, in their expensive but ageing suits, like medical students taking a break from study, but they aren’t that either, not since October 1939, when all the universities were shut down, their professors arrested. That prompted a thousand of their fellow students to protest in the streets, giving the R
eich-Protector the excuse he needed to round them up, and all the intelligentsia, to be shipped off to a concentration camp.
When the wine arrived it was hot and bitter. Arkady dropped two sugar cubes into the liquid and stirred them. They refused to give, so he reversed the spoon and used the fat handle to crush the crystals against the bottom of the mug. Flecks of red wine splattered the tablecloth.
‘You eat like a Mongol,’ complained Jan. ‘What part of Russia are you from again?’
‘I just want you to feel comfortable with me, since you think like a mule.’
‘You mean I fuck like a horse.’
‘Your ignorance is showing, city boy. If you’d ever smelled a horse you would not want to fuck it.’
‘I’m not sure. There have been times of the day when I feel I could fuck anything that walks. Four legs, or two. What? Spoko! ’
‘Even the swine?’ Arkady nodded at the table of Nazis.
‘Even the swine.’
Arkady sighs heavily. ‘If you must. But not in our apartment, please.’
They have an agreement not to mind if one of them takes another lover now and again, but the apartment they share is inviolable, and both men love it, for different reasons. In Arkady’s eyes it is a relic of La Belle Époque. In Jan’s it is homely and humble, with its entry hall’s worn stone steps and bronzed handrail buffed shiny with use, only the edges decaying into greenish grime.
They rented it shortly after they both enrolled in the Charles University, to have a place to make love away from the prying eyes in the student dorms. They paid in cash, gave false names, and, after the crackdown on students, they simply never went back to college. One night they went to bed as trainee doctors; in the morning they were nobodies, and slipped into their fake identities. A strange thing, to go to bed as one person, and wake up another, but then, when one thought about it, people did that every day. The Arkady who sailed paper boats down Moscow streets was a different one entirely from the one who walked into Krakow cemetery, and it was a different Arkady again who walked out.
As time passed, and the occupation intensified, Jan hustled some false papers for them. Truthfully, neither of them came to Prague for the education. They are there for each other, and they will stay together until the war ends and the world rights. To run would be foolish, and their best chance is just to wait it out, hide in plain sight, the Jew and his Degenerate. Nobody in their block of flats asks questions, now that everybody has secrets to keep. With the world turned the way it has, only the really bad men have nothing to hide.
After lunch they made their way home, only realising after they stood up that they had drunk far too much, and they stumbled out, giggling, nearly tripping into the table of soldiers, and, ignoring the dirty looks, down the marble staircase into the street.
On the way home they saw the crowd gathering to watch the astronomical clock strike the hour. The clock had stood in the town square for more than five hundred years, with the mechanical astrolabe keeping track of the heavens, four moving rings tracing the path of the sun, the moon, the zodiac.
When the hour struck, two windows opened above the tower and little wooden automatons of the Twelve Apostles filed out in procession. Beneath them, four figures flanked the clock tower, each representing the most despised human afflictions. On the right, Death, a skeleton ringing his bell, stood next to a Muslim soldier depicting Lust. Across the clock face, Vanity, a man admiring his own image in a mirror, stood next to a hook-nosed Jew clutching a bag of gold. Greed.
Below, on the cobblestones, jostled by the crowd, Jan looked up at the procession, smiled wryly, pointed at Vanity and Greed. ‘I think they’ve captured us rather well, don’t you?’
‘Which one are you? Vanity? Or Greed?’
‘Oh, don’t make me choose, Arkady. Not so late in the day.’
As the clock chimed, Death’s bell rang out, and with each knell the other figures shook their head.
It is a sight Arkady never tires of. Apart from Jan, the orloj is his favourite part of Prague. He marvels at the gears that have ground on through the centuries, both modern and ancient beyond reason. There is a legend that says that, after creating the masterpiece on the order of the city, the fifteenth-century clock master was blinded so that he could never build another. In return, the blind clock master sabotaged the clock so badly it could not be repaired for a hundred years. Arkady loves this story. It fits perfectly with his understanding of the world – of consequence, of cruelty. As a device, timepiece and narrative, the clock appeals to his very nature.
Arkady, who for so long had no one to share his thoughts with, is a terminally introspective man, but this has its advantages in self-awareness. He knows, for instance, that he is built from a sticky combination of Soviet pragmatism and repressed white Russian sentimentality. He is equal parts science and superstition, and often broods about human nature.
Love, for example, when examined from a purely physiological point of view, looks a lot like heart disease – a racing pulse, confusion, panic, wandering thoughts. When the figurative heart pumps with its fullest glory, the literal heart, the gruesome hollow chamber that keeps the engines of life ticking over, suffers. Descartes, so impressed with his own theory of duality, hadn’t bothered to write that one down, that uplift of the soul meant derangement of the mind – Arkady had not been able to think straight since that day in Krakow cemetery.
Every day, when he can, he stops here. It has become a superstition – he feels uneasy if he misses the clock. He has no faith but science, but he adores astrology because it takes away our agency. The idea that who we are is determined by the month in which we are born is very soothing. He wished he could explain some of this to Jan, in front of the clock, but they dared not speak their Slavic in public, and he knew his boyfriend would tease him if he started tripping over his German grammar.
If he could have said so, he would have liked to tell Jan: ‘Doesn’t the idea of fate make it all a little easier? That we have no choices? That you and I are not degenerates and failed doctors. We are just two men, who were always meant to meet, always meant to be here. If we kissed right here —’ then he would dart across to kiss him ‘— that was always in our stars.
‘Everything we are and all we ever will be was decided by a gear forged long before we were, Jan. The horrible and wonderful thing is that we will never know that.’ He would’ve liked to say all this, and then to point to where the skeleton would be ringing his bell, the greedy man and the vain man shaking their heads in argument. ‘No more than they ever will.’
He wished he could explain some of this to Jan, but their improvised language failed to extend to the metaphysical, and besides, to pontificate on life all the time is boring, so instead Arkady slipped a hand into his boyfriend’s, and gave it a quick squeeze. Spoko.
Perhaps it was that squeeze, or the SS man interrupting them in the cafe toilets, or a million other indiscretions, or something not even their fault at all – an informant in their building who traded money or freedom to sell them out. Whatever it was, he will never know; that knowledge will be shared only by the Gestapo, and the skeleton on the clock tower.
The boots are at the door now and Arkady thinks to turn, ready to greet Jan, but the next sound is not Jan’s key scraping clumsily at the lock. It is an angry hammering on the door, and he realises, too late, that he has heard not one set of boots outside but many.
Escape is not an option. The window does not open, only affords a view away from town: the medieval bridge across the sparkling river, the motorcycle division rolling past the statues of the martyrs, and beyond them the patchwork orange, green and black of the forested hills, which every autumn morning have been a little rustier, and he knows now that he will never hike them after all.
Soon the leaves will all be gone, turned to be mush underfoot, where they will rot for a few days before snow will fall and cover everything in crisp, clean white. By then he will be travelling to Poland, crowded into a train w
ith hundreds of other prisoners at Bubny, the quiet, suburban station where commuters looked on silent and indifferent as Arkady was jammed into a cattle car. Before all that, though, as the door splinters and falls open, and then blows the rain down, and he is dragged bleeding from his home – he will find himself somehow in two places at once: on the cool, marble staircase of his Prague home, and the polished concrete floor of a barracks in Auschwitz, as boots ring out over stone and hands grab and tear at him, and he will realise that of course Jan was right, always had been, that the leaves are at their most beautiful as they fall.
SIX
Adam couldn’t hold still. He’d only just sat down at his desk, but after a few seconds of staring at the computer screen without taking anything in, he was on his feet again. He’d been like this since the night spent soul-searching in the wake of his grandfather’s diagnosis – constantly excited, and beyond invincible. It was as though everything that had come before had been the first part of the story and a new phase had begun, a period of toil and altruism, which ended only when he came to work one day and found that his life was over.
He’d started his renaissance of the company by firing half the staff. You built up by cutting down; be the blood and bone on the roses, the volcano that spat lava across the land from which the verdant fields of Hawaii grew. There were several staff members who had been on the books for decades whom Adam simply couldn’t see the point of. For example: they had a tea lady, who’d been hired in the seventies and had clung to the company while she raised her children and ground through two marriages. A fucking tea lady! Out the door with you!
He was, admittedly, a little weary. It was only in the past weeks, with Tess spending all her time at the hospital with Arkady, that he’d realised just how much work she did to keep the company running, far beyond the financial responsibilities – from organising events, getting media hits and maintaining the website, down to ghostwriting the Mitty & Sarah children’s books that went out every Christmas.
