by Mark Slouka
They walked all that afternoon, slightly giddy from making love, their arms around each other’s waist despite the heat. She could feel his hipbone under her hand, the slip and clench of the muscle, the wetness of his shirt. And though it might have been more comfortable for them to walk apart, they didn’t separate for a long time, struck alike by the comfort of their stride, the sudden pleasure of fronting the world together, neither one realizing that they were a contagion upon this world, that as they stood at the crossroads or came upon the woman with the basket on her arm standing at the edge of the forest cutting away the bad parts of a mushroom with a small knife, it was already a part of them, turning whenever they turned, touching whatever they touched. They knew nothing. They walked down long forest roads between grassy ditches filled with tannin-brown water, listening to the frogs shriek and leap from the narrow banks as the sunlight tilted toward evening, and for the rest of her life my mother would remember passing a lonely little pond and glimpsing a man, as in a dream, neatly dressed in a suit and tie, sitting on a chair he’d set up by the shore as though expecting a waiter to bring him a glass of wine. But by then the scene would have a different cast—the future had tainted the memory, the absurd had taken the tiny step toward nightmare—and the thing they had laughed at now laughed at them.
She spent years trying to keep the memory of their days together free of irony, blowing off the fine dust of death. She failed. History and time were too much, even for her. How could she erase the fact that even as she walked next to him that first afternoon listening to the straps of his rucksack tap gently against the leather, the gods were already slapping their thighs and heaving with mirth, having glimpsed how perfectly the thing would work: how it would turn, slowly at first, then with gathering speed, whipping around to strike down precisely the most selfless, the most brave—better still, striking those who, like care workers during the plague years, had by their own decency chosen themselves. Bém would become known. His contacts, however accidental, would be traced. And it would be their love that made it possible.
By the time they came out of the fields into the village of Dobrá Voda, the shadow of the churchyard wall had reached across the road. A bird was calling from the oak as they passed under its branches. They crossed a small stone bridge and started toward the town. On a side road a boy with a flapping shirttail slapped at a hoop with a stick and ran after it, while another, behind him, tried to balance on his bicycle while standing still. “Tak pojd’ uǽ!”—Come on, already!—the one with the hoop called out behind him without turning around.
She knew there would be no store here, that if there were one it would be closed, that if it weren’t closed it would be empty. But a store was not what they were seeking necessarily. A woman with a pitchfork would do. Or a man hitting a cow on the rump with a stick, or a fisherman on a folding stool.
They passed the churchyard, the steeple, the charnel house with its wrought-iron cross and skull rising over the red, split-tile wall, then a black pond, already still with evening. The town seemed strangely empty. A bell began to ring.
When the man in the wagon came around the turn Bém let go of my mother’s hand and stepped into the road and the man twitched the reins and the horse shook its head and stopped. She watched him as he talked to the old man with the brambly eyebrows who sat leaning forward, elbows on his knees, the reins loose in his brown, thick-fingered hands. So this was how he was with the world! She felt an odd sense of ownership, as though his manner, his way, were also hers now. Something she had on her side. No idle conversation, no explanations or apologies, no observations about the weather. He simply wished the man a good evening and asked him whether he knew where they might buy some food.
The other did not seem to mind the directness at all. What did they need? A small dog, lying by his feet, stood and stretched its back like a cat. “Lehni,” he said. The dog lay down.
Whatever anyone could spare for a fair price: some bread, a few eggs, a bit of sugar or fat. It didn’t really matter.
The man nodded. The neck, the heavy shoulders—there was a stillness about him, she thought. The stillness of an anvil, or a shovel leaning against a wall in the dark.
If the lady didn’t mind riding in the wagon, he said, looking straight ahead between the reins as though talking about someone else, he would see what they could do. There wasn’t much. And he waited, not turning around, till he had felt them climb into the empty bed of the wagon, then moved his right hand and the horse began to walk.
A half loaf of bread, two dozen apricots, a small jar of milk. Half a kilo of fatty pork cuts and a few spoonfuls of lard. She would remember it for forty years.
As they rode up the grassy path toward the plain, plaster-sided farmhouse, a tall angular woman with a dark purple stain on her face and ear which looked from a distance like an odd loop of hair came out of the barn, wiping her hands on a cloth. They had nothing left, she said. They had nothing left—he knew that. Just quotas they couldn’t fill. They were being bled like pigs.
“Jirko, bud’ ticho,” said the old man. Be quiet.
Not that she would begrudge the Wehrmacht anything. She knew how much they needed her eggs. Kraft durch Arbeit—strength through work. Others’ work.
They were standing on the dirt now, the dog sniffing at their legs. Across the road, a woman in a light-colored housedress was calling someone named Marie to dinner. A breath of cooler air, as from somewhere underground, passed through the yard and was gone. They were sorry to have troubled them, my mother said. They knew how things were these days.
The old man, as though his task were done, had begun unhitching the wagon.
“You’re from these parts,” the woman said, looking at my mother.
“Račín,” my mother said.
“I have a sister in Malá Losenice,” the woman said.
She looked at Bém. “Are you from the highlands as well?”
“No.” Funny how he could do that, my mother thought, and have it be neither cold nor abrupt nor anything but what it was. An answer.
The old woman looked at him the way a woman of a certain age wiping her hands on a rag and wearing a baggy, meal-colored blouse and a pair of cracked rubber boots will look at a man. Not giving a damn for his black hair or his mouth or anything else visible to the eyes. And saw that he didn’t either. He simply looked back. Polite enough. When he saw Joǽka begin to push the wagon into the barn, he lay his pack in the grass and walked over to help. And Joǽka, who did not like help, particularly from people he didn’t know, moved over without a word and let him. She looked back at the girl. Here was another one. God help the mother whose daughter she was—there’d be a soul to go with that face, a reckless kind of soul. She could see the way she looked at him. Keeping nothing in reserve. Though he was not unmoved, no, not at all. The way he’d stood next to her. The way he’d touched her arm when he went to help Joǽka with the wagon. No, there was a chance here. And a fine couple they would make, no denying that.
“Well, come into the house, then,” she said to my mother.
When they came back out into the yard, the dark had begun. A warm summer night. The pear trees by the wall were a solid mass now, stretching nearly to the house. The two men were just crossing over from the stable. Joǽka had something wrapped in a rag. Zbytky ze zabíjačky, he said gruffly. Trimmings from last week’s butchering. She knew better than to argue.
“You’re sure?” Bém said to them as he took the rag.
The old man grunted and wiped his nose. “Nothing from nothing.”
“They’ve lent us a blanket,” my mother said, indicating her bag. “And a pot.”
He looked at them. “Thank you,” he said, then squatted down and put the bundle in his rucksack. A small light blinked just above the weeds. Another against the stable door. And another. Standing up, he reached into a pocket and pulled out some money.
“To si můǽete nechat”—You can keep that—the woman said before he could speak. “W
hat would we do with it?”
“Buy yourself something,” my mother said.
“Nothing to buy.”
“Then just...”
“I don’t have time to stand here debating with you. Really.”
“You’re sure?”
“When I want a new fur, I’ll look you up.”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll be all right?” the old man said.
They would be fine, they said.
The road had begun to emerge, pale against the dark. They walked under the cherry trees that lined the road, then back through the village, where small wavery lights showed through the windows. A woman’s voice was calling someone, a child answered, then the thin clank of a pail. On one of the benches by the pond a couple sat still as stone, locked into one shape.
They didn’t say anything now. She felt his fingers as they walked. His hand felt cool, dry. She explored the knuckle of his thumb with hers, felt the scar, then the square, smooth nail.
By the time they came to the churchyard, the wall with the archers’ clefts was just a paleness narrowing into the dark. She could hear their footsteps scraping on the dirt of the road. She looked up: the steeple and the skull had disappeared, leaving only their starless shapes behind.
NIGHT, NIGHT. THE OTHERNESS OF IT! LIKE A DOOR TO a room we’ve never entered, hidden behind our childhood dresser. Like another world, living inside the one we know. The wind in the grass sounds different here. The wind in the wheat reminds you of something. The bone-whiteness of the fields reminds you of something. No dream can match this dreaming. And now the moon, raising itself above the fields.
The night my mother and Tomáš Bém walked into the forest from the town of Dobrá Voda the sky was clear and huge and hot, the moon just two days short of full. It rose, slightly misshapen, as they walked between the fields, so that by the time they entered the shadow of the forest, diving under a wave of air smelling of moldering loam, mushrooms, and sap, the way was already shot through with bits of light. They stood for a moment, letting their eyes adjust to the dark, learning to read the shapes of things, then went on, stepping carefully over the deadfalls, ducking the black branches that swept down from the ceiling.
They came to a vast pool of light which they thought at first was a meadow. An emptied pond stretched before them, a hollow socket, barren and sad. A stream ran through the hardened mud. They walked around the perimeter, backing away whenever the ground started to pull at their feet, then followed the stream back into the dark until they came to a place of thick knotted grass and put down their things. You could almost see. To the right, between the trees, a small rise like a long, soft shelf. A low mossy stump. A fallen pine, level enough for sitting on.
“Here?” she said.
“All right,” he said. They hadn’t said anything for a long time. She liked hearing the sound of his voice. It made him familiar again.
He kissed her. “Welcome home,” he said, then walked into the shadow by the stump and lay the rucksack on top of it and began taking out their food.
The stream was right there, she thought, listening. She began to feel over the surface of the ground with her hands, tossing aside thumbnail-sized pine cones and broken sticks, clearing a space.
“Hungry?” she heard him say.
“Tired.”
“Come have some of this.” She could see him holding out the jar, blue in the moonlight. She walked over and sat next to him on the fallen pine. The milk was cool and smooth.
“You didn’t get much sleep last night,” he said.
“Neither did you, I think.”
“True enough.” She could almost see his smile. He poured a little water from a canteen into the empty jar, then spilled it out on the grass. “Maybe we should just give up on it altogether,” he said.
“Sleeping?”
“What do you think?”
“Maybe we should.”
They slept that night, lying naked on the clothes she had spread on the grass like a rag quilt while he took the meat and put it in the empty milk jar and placed the jar in a sidewater below the bar where it bobbed quietly in the dark, herded in by rocks. They slept, her head on his arm, half covered by the blanket, the wet rag and his rucksack and her bag hanging off the broken branches of a pine as from a giant coat rack, not hearing the stream chuckling to itself, or the sudden call of a bird from somewhere by the dry lake, not feeling the long, fine file of ants, like a thread dragged endlessly across his calf, or the fat-bodied moth that settled on her hair like a child’s barrette, or the mosquito that lit lightly on his eyebrow and danced along that line until it found its place and grew quickly dark with blood. They slept, not seeing or hearing any of these things, and woke together, as lovers will, his arm around her and her breasts pressed flat against his ribs, to find the gullies in their blanket and the clothes on which they had lain and the soft little crevasses where skin touched skin filled with pine needles, as though they had slept for a week, or a month; and sat up and shook out their things and then my mother, leaning over, picked the tiny brown spears one by one out of the hair on his chest.
How was it possible, she thought, that a place they’d known only a few hours, eight of them while they’d slept, could grow so familiar? How could the grassy rise and the food stump and the way down to the stream and the pine by the bed-place so quickly begin to feel like a home: a home without walls or roof, windows or door, but a home nonetheless?
The fire was small and almost smokeless. He built it between two flat-topped stones. She watched him push the bigger one down into the dirt to make it level with the other, then try out the empty pot between them to see how it sat, then move the rocks again. Getting it right. When the dollop of lard began to hiss and sizzle he broke the eggs into the pot one after the other until they were done, laying the shells next to him on the grass, then pushed them back and forth with a pocketknife, reaching into the pot to get the knife blade flat, then rolled down his sleeves and took the pot off the fire and set it on a stone he’d brought over from the stream, covering the pot with the rag to keep out the pine needles. Reaching for the jar, he began impaling the squares of fatty meat he had cut on a stick he had stripped of bark, threading them over the raised parts, lining them up like so many fat beads on a string.
My mother watched, surprised by his competence, by the quick, thoughtless economy of his movements. A turn of the wrist, a small adjustment, the fingers reaching to nudge or to shift or to tap into place, this man knew his way around the world of things, and they leapt to him like filings to a magnet, eagerly, helplessly. There was something lovely and ruthless about it, something she hadn’t seen before. Or maybe she had sensed it from the beginning, had known it would be like that all along.
When only a hand’s width of space remained on both sides, he placed each end of the stick in the crotch of a branch he had pushed into the dirt on either side of the fire, and they ate the eggs, taking turns with the pot and the knife, sucking them carefully off the blade.
When they were done he reached over to a pile of short sticks he had prepared—each about the thickness of a man’s finger—and began to place them carefully one by one on the flames. The meat spit and dribbled. He turned the skewer. She watched him raise the branch a bit to turn it past a knot, then settle it back in place. The greeny-white wood between the pieces had begun to turn black. He reached for the bread, cut another slice.
“Would you like some more bread?” he said.
He handed her a slice and she watched him tear off a small piece and pause, as though forgetting for a moment what he had meant to do with it, then remember and wipe the bottom of the pot. Something in the stillness of his mouth. Something in the deliberateness with which he turned the skewer, his sudden distance from what his hands were doing. She knew what it was.
“Almost done,” he said. He wiped his fingers on the rag.
“Should we talk about it at all, you think?” she said.
He looked
at her, and there was such utter regard in that look, and such a lake of rage beneath it, that she understood, perhaps for the first time, the quality of his love.
“I don’t know how to talk about it,” he said.
“You don’t know when you’re coming back,” she said. Not if—if was not possible.
“No.”
“And I won’t be able to see you.”
“No.” He smiled. “Is it crazy for us to talk like this?”
“I don’t think so. Does it feel crazy to you?”
“That’s what’s so crazy about it.”
“I know.”
He moved the stick a half-turn over the flames. “It’s just that I didn’t expect you. Everything was set before.”
“Would it be any different if we hadn’t met?”
“Everything would be different.”
“But you say you have to go anyway?”
“I do.”
“And you can’t tell me where you’re going?”
“No.”
She glanced at the scaly twig she held in her hand. “Then how will I find you again? After.”
“I’ll find you.”
“But...”
“I’ll find you.”
“It took you a while the first time,” she said, not smiling.
“I’ll do better this time,” he said.
The meat began to smoke. He picked up the ends of the skewer with two sticks and laid it on the stone next to him, then broke up the fire, spreading the ashes. They could break camp while it cooled. My mother stood and picked up the blanket that lay knotted on the ground. Exposed beneath it, an orange and black beetle, like a miniature shield, began to stumble over the deadfalls of flattened grass, running from the sudden light.
