by Mark Slouka
“Thinking this way.”
“Not as absurd as it should be.”
“True.”
“And you? You’ve made arrangements? For your family, I mean?”
“I have. Thank you.”
Opálka pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to check his watch. “It’s time, I’m afraid,” he said.
“I don’t mind,” said Bém.
Bém had gone only a few steps when he heard him call. “Tomáš?”
He turned.
“One more thing...Do you like beer?”
Bém paused. Opálka was a brave man.
“I do,” he said, though he didn’t, particularly.
“We should get a beer sometime...when this is over?”
“I’d like that.”
Opálka nodded. “All right,” he said. “All right. We’ll do that, then.” And picking up his briefcase, he walked away.
By the time he got to the tram stop, walking in the shadow of the buildings, he was sweating freely. The suit they had gotten for him was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He would sweat like a pig. It didn’t matter.
He waited in the shade, his back against the façade of a three-story building like a soiled cake. The crowds were increasing. Men carrying briefcases stood on the island, holding their hats in one hand, with the other wiping their heads with handkerchiefs. Boys in shorts dodged through the crowd. He couldn’t help but look for her, even now. The thought that he might actually see her terrified him.
A sweet-faced matronly woman with calves like bowling pins walked next to a dark-haired young woman pushing a baby carriage. He knew these faces. Two workers in overalls passed by, one leaning in toward the other, the other listening intently until suddenly he exploded with laughter, throwing back his head as if shot. They knew nothing. None of them.
A tram. Not his. One hour and fifteen minutes.
What would the woman and her daughter say, he wondered, if he walked over and told them what was going to happen in Líbeñ in just over an hour? Would they believe him? Would they turn around and go home and wait by the radio? Would they start screaming to the two soldiers looking in a shop window on the opposite side of the avenue?
He could feel the weakness rising in him like a wave: that familiar inner trembling, that doubt. He recognized it for what it was—fear, not of the leap itself, but of the seconds before the leap, of those moments on the cliff when everything could still be otherwise. And leaning against the building, feeling his legs going weak under him, he did what he had done with that fear ever since they were children together and quickly killed it, opening the tap of rage in his heart and feeling it flood through his veins like adrenaline, thinking of his mother’s laugh coming up from the courtyard and the look on his sister’s face the morning she came upon the jar of yellow butterflies dead in the sun and the winter morning two years ago when he had watched an old man kicked to death in a square in Brno because he had tried to board a tram without seeing them waiting. It had taken a long time. He’d watched through the frame of the tram window as one of them whipped the old man’s face and back with a black riding crop in a fury so profound it seemed like a crack in the order of things. The old man had crawled about in the melting snow, first trying to pull himself up a lamppost, then grabbing onto the boots of his attacker, then toward the crowd which moved back like a respectful audience, and from somewhere in the tram a woman’s voice had said, perfectly clearly, “For the love of God, someone do something,” not because she expected it, but because she had to say it. No one moved. Bém noticed that the man next to him, a laborer dressed in overalls and a heavy black sweater, had bitten his lower lip; a thin stream of blood was running into the stubble on his chin. There was nothing to do. And remembering all this, Bém felt the sickness leave him, and when the tram came he walked across to the island and swung himself on and the doors closed behind him.
He could see them there, just before the road turned into itself and disappeared: Gabčík, his suitcase next to him, pretending to do something with the chain on his bicycle; Kubiš leaning against a telephone pole a few meters away, smoking. Even from that distance he seemed both alive and nonchalant, like a man waiting for a date while pretending not to care.
The fact of it flashed through his brain like a jolt of electricity and was gone. They were waiting for Reinhard Heydrich. Reichsprotektor. Obergruppenführer.
Forty minutes. The usual crowd. Heydrich’s car would be leaving Panenskě Břeǽany any minute. It could have left already. A tram pulled up to the stop before the turn and three people got off. If a tram stopped there during the hit, Kubiš had pointed out, it would be directly behind Heydrich’s car. They had considered that fact. There was nothing to be done.
The scene was strangely peaceful. The trees on the hill above the turn moved tentatively in the breeze and were still. A car went by. Then another, the other way. Then two more. To the south, dimly, he could see the city. The air above the Vltava, or where he knew the Vltava to be, seemed softer, shot through with mist. A sort of calm had settled over things. A distance. The world seemed drugged, slowed.
No police to be seen. Nothing unusual. No sign. Gabčík picked up the bicycle and leaned it against a pole. A blue summer sky. Two small clouds.
He turned to look behind him. Through the shrubs that grew along the top of the retaining wall at his back he could see a row of small houses, their yards a clutter of fences and gardens and half-successful trellises and piles of brick. A woman was hoeing, working the ground with short, choppy strokes. An older, shirtless man was pushing a wheelbarrow. He noticed that the wall to his left was bulging a bit, the stones tilting out from the face, as if forced by the weight of earth above it. Someone would have to repair it.
Nothing. What would happen would happen. It was all right. He thought of her for a moment and she seemed very fine to him and very far off. He couldn’t bring her closer.
He could feel himself sweating, the cold rivulets trickling down his back and sides. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve and looked toward the hill. Nothing. He felt the gun under his arm. Kubiš was still leaning against the pole. He’d wanted to be the one to look him in the face and pull the trigger. Didn’t matter.
Another tram arrived. An old woman got off—he could tell by the way she walked, bent under the weight of the bags in each hand, by the blue kerchief on her head. It was half an hour from Panenskě Břeǽany. He looked toward the hill. Nothing.
Sweat. Blooms. The smell of grass. No police. A man holding a little boy by the hand was crossing the street. Another tram was...
A flash like a spark of mica on the hill. For an instant he didn’t realize what he’d seen. He glanced down toward the curve. Gabčík was kneeling on the sidewalk by the open suitcase. He stood and slipped something into his coat and kicked the suitcase shut with his foot and strode toward the curb as Líba Fafek’s car appeared around the curve, a black open Mercedes, like a premonition of something, right behind her, both cars already slowing until the Mercedes seemed to have stopped altogether and there was Gabčík standing in the road ten meters away, throwing open his coat.
Nothing happened. There was no sound. Everything seemed to have stopped. He could see the gun in Gabčík’s hands. He could see the driver, suspended, staring at the big man in the raincoat as though he didn’t understand who he might be or what he could want. He could see the man seated behind him: the visored cap, the long, white face...
Suddenly everything accelerated. He could see Gabčík moving and jerking about strangely, bent over the gun in his hands as though talking to it. The gun! The gun had jammed! It was impossible. The limousine was picking up speed. It was simply going around him. Instinctively, helplessly, Bém began to run toward the scene even as he saw Kubiš sprinting up from the side and then a flash and a burst of black smoke and the limousine skidded to a stop. Two popping sounds. Another. Gabčík fell and was up, staggering toward the bicycle leaning against the wall. The man was standing up
in the back of the car as though it were a chariot, pointing at him. Bém could see Kubiš running down the avenue. The driver was firing at him. Gabčík was on the bicycle now, pedaling madly down the sidewalk. People were jumping out of his way.
Bém slowed, then stopped. The man climbed out of the smashed end of the limousine as if stepping over a fence. He was alive. It was over. They had failed. The suitcase lay ten meters away. Kubiš’s bicycle was still standing by the wall.
He recognized him. Even from this distance, he recognized him. That face. That long, curved talon of a nose. He was gesticulating with his right hand, ordering something.
A delivery van had stopped. The man took two strides toward it, raised his right hand as though snatching something off a high shelf, and fell to the pavement.
Bém began to walk in the other direction. Quickly, not hurrying. He walked past the bulging stones where he had waited. The shirtless man he had seen pushing the wheelbarrow had come down to the edge of his yard. There was no avoiding him. “Viděl jste co se tam stalo?” he called down to Bém from the top of the wall. Did you see what happened there? Bém said he thought the tram had hit someone, and walked on. Don’t look back. He was grateful he’d put on the hat. Still, his abruptness had made him worth noticing. He should have stopped, gossiped a bit. Erased himself.
He came to the next road and took a right, walking up the quiet sidewalks, then down the hill past the school to another avenue. A tram was coming. He got on it.
WE MUST THANK GOD FOR BLOOD POISONING, THE priest, Dr. Petřek, had said. He was standing at the bottom of the steps wearing a long coat with a fur collar. No, no, he wouldn’t have any, thank you. Heydrich’s wound, he said, had not been considered particularly dangerous. No vital organs had been affected; the bleeding had been contained. The German surgeon who had been rushed in had assured the authorities that the ten-centimeter-deep gouge was not fatal, that the Obergruppenführer’s life was not in danger. Petřek stroked his white, goat-like beard. The swine had counted their cards early, he said; the good Lord had yet to play his hand. The wound, it turned out, had been full of debris—bits of metal and upholstery from the car seats, leather and horsehair...But perhaps he would have just a little, no more than a finger’s width—it was cold down here. In any case, a week later septicemia had developed and quickly finished the job, which proved once again that even when we thought we were free and clear and seemingly out of danger, the hand of the Almighty could smite us. And he drained his glass in a way that showed he was not entirely unfamiliar with slivovitz, and left them.
“That was a nice coat,” Gabčík said. He was sitting crosslegged, cutting carrots into a can. No one had said anything.
“We must thank God for blood poisoning,” Kubiš said, and farted.
On the evening of June 10 Petřek was back. Bém had slept badly the night before, struggling through dreams in which his father appeared to him in a threadbare suit and he saw his mother sitting on a small stone bench against a wall with his sister on her lap. Then it was dark, and in the dream he knew he had to meet her somewhere, that she was waiting for him, and he rushed through endless, unfamiliar cities, running up stairwells and down badly lit hallways, looking for rooms whose numbers were always out of sequence or missing, all the while knowing that the whole thing was absurd, that he was years too late but unable to bring himself to stop. He was in an industrial district filled with low brick factory buildings surrounded by high fences. Tilting cement embankments, pale and high as Sahara dunes, rose in his path, and he scrambled up them on all fours, like a dog. At some point he found himself standing on the shore of a vast river, and realizing that he would have to cross it, he bent to take off his shoes, and woke. The stone ceiling of the niche was inches above his face.
He rolled over to look into the main room of the crypt. A white square was shining on the stone floor. For a second he didn’t know what it was, then realized that the moon’s pitch had somehow caught the tiny window high on the north wall, that he had woken at the precise moment—perhaps the only such moment for a month, or a year—when everything met. Then again, maybe it had been the moonlight itself that had woken him, like a visitor moving about the room. He watched it narrow, parallelogram, rectangle, square. How beautiful it was. Ten minutes later it was gone.
The next evening, Petřek came down to talk to them, and nothing was quite the same afterward. He came without his coat, and they all knew from this that something had happened—or told themselves later that they’d known—and they left what they were doing and gathered by the bottom of the steps. He didn’t hesitate. At ten the night before, Petřek told them, the village of Lidice, about twenty kilometers west of Prague, had been destroyed. An act of retaliation. The inhabitants were registered; movable property was evacuated. At dawn, the male population of the town—150 men and boys at least—had been herded into a barn and executed. Another 190 women and children had been deported, presumably to Ravensbrück. The town itself had been razed. Obergruppenführer Frank’s orders, supposedly given to him personally by the Führer, had been to erase all evidence that the town had existed, all coordinates, all markers. Rumor had it that the stream that ran through the town was to be rerouted in its bed. It appeared the town had been selected at random.
He had thought about whether he should tell them, Petřek said, and had decided it was only right. He was terribly sorry.
Bém watched them as he spoke. Kubiš, who had been cleaning his gun, looked down at it for a moment, then brought it up to his face and blew on it as though blowing away some dust. Gabčík, who had been leaning against the wall eating a piece of bread, kept chewing. Valčík smiled and looked down.
He was sorry, the priest said again.
“Well...,” Opálka said. He shook his head.
“An inhuman thing,” the priest said. “God will not be merciful...”
“Yes,” Opálka said.
“None of you must think...”
“No...of course not.”
“No one could have foreseen this.”
“No,” Opálka said. “You’re right.”
“We must pray...”
“Yes,” Opálka said. “Thank you.”
There were no rages, no tears, no flashes of anger. They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t know how. They took the blow like a short, hard kick to the stomach from an invisible opponent—from God, say—and went on. It was the only thing they knew how to do. They’d been chosen precisely because they could.
But he could feel it there nonetheless—a kind of sickness, a rot. These men—Gabčík, Kubiš, Valčík, and the rest—were still dangerous, they would always be dangerous, but now something had changed in them. Something essential. And because they sensed this, they grew still, careful. They didn’t fight with each other, or even argue. A simple, instinctive civility became the order of their days. There was nothing false or forced about it. “I’ll need those potatoes when you have them.” “You want some more soup?” “No, I’m fine.” It was pure instinct. Something was hunting them. Something they couldn’t see, or fight. If they stayed still, stayed together, it might pass them by.
He tried to keep them numbers: 150 men and boys, 190 women and children. Numbers. Not unaware that this was exactly what the others had done in order to be able to do what they did. He didn’t care. He had been to Kladno, only a few kilometers away from Lidice. He knew these towns. If he allowed himself to see the faces blinking in the lights, the marks of the sheets showing on their faces like scars, the men—enemies, perhaps, who had not spoken for years—now suddenly talking, asking each other what was happening, where they were going, as if nothing before had ever really mattered but had only been a long, elaborate game...If he heard them giving quick instructions to their wives or assuring their sons that everything would be all right even as the village dogs, barking, were being shot down one by one in the street, in the chicken yards...If he allowed this, something might give. And that could not be. Ever. They were
numbers. To hell with them.
But some things could not be fenced off. They came through the walls. They were like a chemical change in the brain. Day by day he could feel it coming over him, a kind of slow, undramatic numbness, as though some invisible spigot had been turned the night Petřek had come down to tell them the news. It was like falling out of love: one moment she was still the woman you knew and thought you wanted, the next something had shifted imperceptibly and it was over. The world outside was receding. Or maybe he was the one falling away from it. Either way, he was unable to care in the same way he had before. The Benes government in exile, the Resistance, the Wehrmacht and security police even now combing the city for them—all these seemed far away from him, strangely abstract. He told himself how he should feel, why these things mattered, and mattered supremely, but it was no good. He could remember how he had once felt, but that time had passed.
Hour by hour, day by day, as they made their meals or did their exercises or wrapped themselves up in blankets before crawling into their niches, he could feel the circle drawing tighter around them. Around him. Two things mattered now. The men around him mattered, because they alone, of all the people on the earth, carried the same burden. Because they understood. And she mattered. Because she didn’t. Because she was free of it. Because he loved her.
She would be the rope into the well in which he was drowning. He knew this as surely as anything he had ever known in his life. There was nothing sentimental about it. It was simply a fact. Paper would burn. Day would bring light. What lived would eventually die. She would save him, and she would be able to do this because she was who she was. Because the gods of the arbitrary world had decided it should be so. Because her voice, her body—her very soul, if you like—spoke to him.
When he was twelve he’d spent two weeks on his uncle’s farm near Jindřichův Hradec. One night he’d woken up to a sound—a kind of rhythmic barking, a forced aark aark aark—unlike anything he had ever heard before. The sound was coming from somewhere behind his uncle’s barn. He tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t, so he pulled on his pants and woke his uncle, and together the two of them went out to see what it was and found an old water cistern with the neighbor’s cat drowning at the bottom of it. His uncle pulled it out with a rake, still making that awful barking sound—a sound he wouldn’t hear again until he visited the seals at the London Zoo—and wrapped it in a shirt to keep it warm but it didn’t seem to know where it was and it just kept barking until it died. If they’d fished it out a half hour earlier, his uncle had said, the thing might have made it.
