by Mark Slouka
And of course she found it, a one-room shack like a hole in the wall of the forest, tucked deep in the cove of a meadow that looked just like every other meadow for days in either direction. Mossy black boards, a small porch with a crude table. A wooden bench against the wall. A cup, hooked on a wire, bobbed and dipped in the wind.
“There’s a lock on the door,” she heard him call, and went up and joined him. He felt around the hinge with his fingers, then pushed the door and felt it again. When the metal had loosened from the wall, he used one of the screws to pry the others out of the sodden wood, and suddenly they were in. They felt around in the musty dark, a pantomime of the blind, and then a match scratched and he was tipping the glass of a dirty lantern and lowering the smoking wick. Wooden shelves, two windows, a narrow musty cot with mouse-speckled sheets and a thin brown blanket. A squat black stove with a pot on top of it and a rusty file for opening the stove door and picking up the pot and probably stirring whatever was in it. He closed the heavy wooden door against the wind.
She would remember it all, that flyspecked cabin and everything in it: the rag they used to dry themselves and the man’s blue shirt with the hole just above the left breast that she wore and the name on the can of nails they emptied out and set on the floor under the drip coming through the roof. She would remember the can’s deep red, and that there were three wooden shelves to the left of the stove, and that just in front of the metal bed there were two hollow-sounding floorboards that hid the pantry: a chest-high hole in the earth with a basket on a string for lowering things down and taking them back. And she would remember the key she discovered outside, above the windowsill, and the taste of the walnuts they found in a bowl on the third shelf and ate with the raspberries they picked in the rain, and how he looked sleeping next to her, and how the rain coming off the porch at first light looked very much like a curtain that tore open every now and then to reveal the forest, then sewed itself up again. All this and more.
They stayed, assuming that no one would come into those dark and dripping woods. They were right. He found a flat brass box with some tools and a few tin boxes of screws and moved the hinge up into harder wood. They made love whenever the moment found them; almost any task could suddenly take a detour of an hour or more and did, often. “Can I borrow your spoon?” she’d say, walking her fingers under the bowl on his lap as they sat cross-legged in the morning with the watershadows moving up the walls, and he’d look at her with that half-smile, so very confident, so beautiful, so hers, and say “Be my guest,” trying not to move as she helped herself for a minute, then two, smiling at him—“And some cream, please, sir?”—and by the time they got back the tea would be cold and he’d take it out on the porch and toss it in the long grass and walk out after it as naked as the day and then talk her out as well and she’d run laughing, still sticky and warm with him into the sodden field and hold him as the wind raked the world around them. When they weren’t making love they’d busy themselves by gathering what they could into meals and by sitting next to each other on the porch with their backs against the wall and their feet drawn up, watching the pine branches dip and wave and the wind comb the tall grasses, talking. She told him things: about her village and her parents and her summers with her mother on the Bečva River and the dog she had lost when she was eight. And she told him about the man she had met in Brno the year before and what he was like and that they had talked about getting married once.
Days of small rituals. Three times a day they would move aside the floorboards and pull out the basket with the shrinking bit of cheese and the quarter loaf of bread she had bought in town with the last of their money, then lower it back down and cover the hole with the boards like a secret. Twice a day they would walk out into the rain to collect whatever half-dry wood they could find, snapping the small branches from inside the prickly hearts of pines, searching under overhangs for pine cones. One day they came across a door lying flat on the grass in a meadow, then a broken window, and realized they’d come across an old shack that had fallen years ago. Some of the wood that was off the ground looked burnable. They picked up the window and pretended to look through it to see what the weather was like outside and propped up the door because it looked so strange standing in the middle of that meadow like a memory of something, then dragged it back through the soaking woods to their shack, where he broke it up with an ax he’d found leaning against the wall by the stove. The helve was loose but someone had driven a nail through the top to keep the ax head from sliding off, and they started a small pile of boards and sticks to the left of the door and every night they made a fire in the stove and the wood cracked and spit and before she fell asleep she would look at the orange light coming through the crack around the stove door, like a thin, crude circle in the dark.
It was on the fifth day, as they sat on the floor of the porch sipping tea they had made from chamomile buds and strained through a piece of burlap, that she told him about the morning she had walked with her father to bury her brother. Her brother, she said, had lived only a few hours in this world, like a moth, and been buried in a coffin the size of a loaf of bread. She’d never known him, and perhaps it was for this reason that she remembered that morning not for its grief but for its warmth.
A magical morning. On the way to the cemetery her father had held her hand and told her a wonderful story about a trpaslík, an elf, who knew of a door in a hillside—a door no larger than a hammer, he said, with a wig of grass hanging over its sill—which led to another world, the world below the pond.
The people who lived there, her father told her, spent their days looking up like astronomers, watching the signs of the upper world, mourning what they had lost. A fisherman’s red bobber touching the sky, a dog’s pink tongue lapping at the horizon, children clothed in silver bubbles, like frogs’ eggs, which would unpeel and follow them as they kicked to the surface...These were the things they lived for, and in the long winters they would sit in the icy dark by their watery green candles and spin fantastic tales from the bits of misunderstood things they had seen.
But the trpaslík, her father said, who knew the upper world for what it was, in all its beauty and corruption, felt sorry for them. Not realizing that they loved their sadness, that the truth would be as poison to them, he resolved to tell them what he knew. One day, taking an especially deep breath—for trpaslíks could hold their breath for almost an hour, her father said—he opened the secret door and walked down the long narrow stairs until the clay began to get soft under his feet and he saw, far ahead, the dim circle, rimmed with roots, that marked the entrance to the pond.
He found them, as always, swaying like water weeds in a gentle current, looking up at their watery sky with tears in their eyes. He would save them, he thought. And he began to speak, but as he did, a look of even greater sadness came over their faces, a sadness different from the one he knew, and they bent as if in pain and tried to stop up their ears with their soft green hands and when they found they couldn’t block out the sound of his voice telling them the truth they wrapped those hands around his throat and held him until he stopped speaking. And the trpaslík woke, her father said, and in his heart was a pain and a love he’d never known, and he looked up at the sky toward a watery light he didn’t understand and thought if he could only look at it forever he would never want for anything more.
She didn’t know why she loved that story so much, she said, looking out over the soaking meadow, or what it was about the memory of that morning that meant so much to her, but she had wanted to tell him about it. She wanted to tell him everything, she said, even the things she didn’t know.
And Tomáš Bém, who did not yet carry an ampoule of fast-acting strychnine around his neck, sat on the floor of the porch with his feet out of the rain and nodded. “Tell me, then,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
And he fixed some things and told her what he could of his life and memorized what he could of hers and when the rain had stopped and their ti
me was up they put the nails back in the can and made the bed and locked the door behind them and replaced the key on the sill and left. And yes, my mother turned around at the edge of the meadow and looked back, and once more after they had parted at the turnoff to Mělkovice having agreed to meet at the same place a year later at dawn if the war had ended and he had not yet come for her, and on the first of each month after that. Not quite the year-and-a-day of the fairy tales, but close enough.
And he turned at the bend of the road as she knew he would, the rucksack on his back, and stood there for a moment, looking at her across all that space, then raised his right hand as though taking a pledge, and was gone.
HE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT IT WITH THE OTHERS, NOT BECAUSE he didn’t know or trust them, but because he knew—from their silences, from the absurd ways they tried to keep themselves busy, from their small hard flashes of anger—that they were all fighting the same enemy, an enemy they were uniquely unsuited to fighting, an enemy that grew stronger by the day. When they talked, they talked about other things: the stove, the cold, whether the schoolteacher was coming too often. They talked about whether it would be possible for them to leave the church for a few hours at a time to break the monotony and get some hard information about what was happening outside. They talked, in bits and pieces, about the places they’d known in Poland and France (Gabčík had joined up with the Czecho-Slovak Legions in Agde, Kubiš in Sidi Bel Abbes; both had been in the fighting along the Marne), about the Egyptian ships that had taken most of them to England after France had fallen, about the men they remembered from Manchester and Ringway.
He liked them all, if not equally, recognized the value of their hardness, their stubbornness, admired their capacity for pain, but of all of them he liked Gabčík best. Trained as a metalworker and a machinist, he seemed an unheroic character at first glance; with his sloping forehead and his pointy features and his small, almost womanly lips he reminded Bém of the wooden, swivel-headed puppets parents liked but children never played with, the ones whose cone noses always fell off before the day was done. And yet there was something about the man: his eyes, maybe, which seemed almost sleepy but weren’t, or the unselfconscious way he would lie on his side propped up on an elbow, smoking. Unlike the others, who seemed to be pacing even when they were still, Gabčík alone seemed willing to wait, to lie on his elbow and smoke, watching the others in that slow way of his, until something came up that required movement. He and Kubiš made a good team; the one shorter, quicker, more volatile, the other tall and slow and quiet, his eyes always one step from a small, sad smile, his big body storing energy like a cat in the sun.
Strangely, instead of irritating Kubiš, Gabčík’s silence provided an outlet for jokes and insults, which helped calm him to a degree. “Look at him,” Kubiš would complain to no one in particular, “just lying there by his bowl,” and Gabčík, ignoring him, would move the cigarette over to his left hand and slowly reach over to the pot and dip a ladle in the soup without rising from his elbow. “You have no idea what it was like living with him in that goddamned cellar in Poděbrady,” Kubiš continued. “He ate everything. At night he’d creep out and graze on berries in the moonlight. You’re going to get us both killed, you fool, I’d tell him. I’m hungry, he’d say.”
Gabčík put the ladle back in the pot, stirred once, then moved the cigarette back to his right hand.
“He didn’t stop eating for three days,” said Kubiš. “When we ran out of food I started getting nervous. I thought I’d have to shoot him, like in that Jack London story.”
“What Jack London story?” said Gabčík.
“The one where he shoots the dog.”
Transferring the cigarette again, Gabčík reached over the pot, moved the ladle this way and that, as though clearing a space, then delicately dipped some soup and brought it to his mouth. Replacing the ladle, he moved the cigarette back to his right hand and took a long, thoughtful drag. “Don’t think I know that one,” he said.
And Bém, watching from the side, appreciating their gesture, as the others did, thought again that if it came to it, Gabčík would be the one he’d want next to him. More than Opálka, their commanding officer; more than blond, stoic Valčík, who looked like a spellbound shepherd when he slept; more than any of them. Two days earlier, in the middle of the morning, a sudden shouting from the street followed by three quick shots had sent a surge of fear and adrenaline through them all. It had had nothing to do with them, they learned eventually, but in the first ten seconds they had all reacted in their own way: he himself had stayed precisely where he was, behind the column next to which he had been standing; Opálka, gun drawn, had run to his predetermined position by the sleeping wall; Kubiš, as though some catch had been released inside him, had sprung to the wall under the small high window that looked out on the bricks of the building opposite. Gabčík, seemingly without haste, had taken three long strides to the central column midway between the stairs and the west wall, put his back against the stone, and stopped, his gun pointed at the ground and his head bowed as though listening to someone explaining something important. On his homely, wooden-puppet face was the same expression he’d had while stirring the soup: calm, inward, attentive but removed. It was only later, after everything had passed, after the trembling in their leg muscles had stopped and the taste had gone from their mouths, that Bém realized that Gabčík had moved instinctively to the one place in the crypt with a clear view of both possible entrances, the covered stairwell and the high window.
On June 8, shortly after the bells had rung noon, Opálka left the church for three hours. He returned visibly shaken. The reprisals were getting worse: hundreds dead, thousands more arrested or tortured, the Resistance under siege all through the Protectorate. Rumor had it that on hearing of Heydrich’s death, the Führer had demanded the immediate execution of ten thousand Czechs, chosen at random, and had only been dissuaded by Karl Hermann Frank’s argument that a reprisal of such magnitude and visibility would hurt morale among Czech factory workers and lower output from the munitions plants.
The new way was no less bloody, Opálka said. The net was tight: intellectuals, writers, former government officials, sympathizers, anyone suspected of harboring pro-Resistance sentiments, all were being arrested. Some had escaped. Others were apparently hoping to somehow slip through. Many, especially those with children, seemed frozen in place, unsure of where to run. The reward for any information leading to their arrest, Opálka said, had been raised to twenty million reichsmarks.
At times he wondered if it seemed as unreal to the rest of them. If they too found it hard to believe that just over their heads, not ten meters away, a hot June day had begun and that men waiting for the tram on the corner of Řesslova were taking off their hats to wipe their foreheads, or that two hours from now, schoolgirls lying out in their gardens listening to the bigband sound of Karel Vlach on the radio would be moving their towels into the shade. How amazing that life should continue on as it did, that the trams should come and go and people should shop for food and fall in love and complain of indigestion. It seemed absurd, like cooking a meal in the kitchen while a fire raged in the living room. And yet for most, that was how it was. Children who had been born when the tanks pulled into Prague were almost four years old. Time had done its work; the fire in the living room, though roaring now, was nothing new.
It was getting harder not to think about her—to guess where she was or what she was doing. He tried not to remember her walk or her smile, the way she would look at him sometimes. He tried not to remember her spontaneity, the sudden glimpses she gave him of the child she’d once been. He tried not to think that she was out there, a five-minute tram ride away. It didn’t work. It made no sense to exclude her. How much easier the whole thing would be, he admitted to himself now, if he could only talk with her for an hour—one hour—absorb a bit of her strength.
They were to be taken out of the church on the nineteenth, Opálka had told them. Bém t
ried not to think about that either, about the eleven days still ahead of them, about the coffins they would have to lie down in with their guns at their sides, listening to every noise coming in from the outside world, and yet there was nothing else to do but think about the coffins, the days still ahead, that date interminably crawling down to them like a glacier in the sun.
That his life could end on the nineteenth, or any day before that, he simply did not consider. Over the past two years he’d grown as used to the idea of dying as any man could—he’d tried to think about it clearly and rationally, but the thought of not hearing her voice again was not possible. He would not permit it. He would survive. He knew this. He would find her again. He would make it to the other side through sheer force of will.
The others, he felt, believed much the same thing. A new kind of strength was taking over now that they had a fixed date toward which to aim. They would survive this frozen crapper and the goddamned sleeping holes, and they would survive this war, and Gabčík would marry Líba Fafek, who had been with them at the hit, and Opálka would return to his family, and Valčík would work on his motorcycle until the Second Coming of Christ, and someday when the war was over they would get together and bore everyone around them silly recalling the stove and the cans and the goddamned window and the missing bricks, arguing over how many columns there had been between the beds and the wall or whether Petřek, the priest who looked like an aging goat, had actually had a goatee or not.
At times it all seemed possible. The day would come. They would get in the coffins. The plan would work. At other times they would suddenly remember what they had done, and the enormity of it would flood over them as if for the first time and they would see it as if from the outside—as if someone else had been responsible, not them—and they would know that it could never be that easy.
