by Mark Slouka
“That’s a big fish,” my father said.
“There are bigger,” Králíček said.
A week later, he was as dead as the carp in his picture. Rumor had it that he’d been caught smuggling food. And this too was funny, in its way—the way opening a vein with a pair of manicure scissors was funny.
The next Sunday, without knowing he was going to, my father went to the train station and took the train to Prague, where he walked around the streets for an hour, slapping his hands against his legs to keep them warm, then returned to the station and took another train back to Brno. There was no point in trying to find her. Let the comedy play itself out. If she returned, it meant that the other one was dead, and he’d take her back. He had no choice in the matter.
AFTER LIDICE, TIME CHANGED FOR BÉM. IT SMOOTHED out, unwound more easily. As if pain were a lubricant. He barely minded waiting now. It seemed to be the same for the others. A terrible patience had settled in, and if he recognized in it at times the resignation of snowed-in mountaineers who, having gone beyond their altitude, have quietly begun to die, he knew as well their reserves, what a moment’s need could loose in them.
The coffins were ready. Everything was set. On the morning of June 19 they would be driven to a storeroom in Kladno in two funeral cars. The coffins would be uncomfortable, Petřek had said—after all, they hadn’t been built for the living—but breathing, at least, would not be a problem. He and the others, he said, had discussed various possibilities, then settled on drilling small holes precisely every two centimeters along the edges of the lids. It had taken them the better part of an afternoon. The holes looked like some kind of decoration in the wood; touched up with paint to hide the work of the drill bit, they were almost imperceptible.
They would have to be ready by six, he told them. If all went well, they would be moved from Kladno to a gamekeeper’s cabin in the forests of Moravia that same evening. If any complications delayed the transfer, there were provisions enough in the storeroom to last them a week.
It was convenient to know the exact hour when you would be placed in your coffin, Opálka had said afterward, and the others, who would normally have been the ones to carry that burden, and who appreciated his effort, smiled politely and nodded. Not everyone had that luxury, they said. St. Peter by appointment.
He didn’t think about my mother. Or rather, he thought about her incessantly but held her back, didn’t look at her directly. She was his secret, the thing he had in reserve. If he indulged it, he’d use up its power; it was enough that she was there.
On the fourteenth the schoolteacher brought them kerosene and candles. The writer Vladislav Vančura had been shot, he told them. Others as well. The Germans were flailing, he said. The twenty-million-reichsmark reward had gotten them nothing; the bicycle was still in the display window of the Bata shoe store on Václavské náměstí. It would rust there. He could see no problem with their going out one at a time every few days for air. Kubiš and Gabčík, of course, were out of the question.
It rained that day, and they watched the clouds through the window on the north wall.
On the fifteenth Valčík put on his hat and went out for five hours with a gun in his pocket and a strychnine ampoule around his neck and sat in the sun on a bench in the Children’s Park.
On the sixteenth they cleaned their guns and went over the procedure one last time: The signal if the cars were being stopped; the signal to shoot. Where to keep the strychnine so that it could be found quickly and administered by someone else in case one were unable to get to it oneself. And that evening Kubiš, while slurping his soup, looked up at them and laughed and said, “Christ, boys, less than two days,” and the rest of them had shaken their heads and nodded. They were afraid, all of them, but that was all right. Fear they knew.
On the morning of the seventeenth, hoping to quiet the muscles in his legs, Bém went for a walk across the square and up Francouská Street and she walked out of a grocery store directly in front of him. It was absurdly hot for June, still and white, and he looked at her, at her hair, at the side of her face...She was looking into her wallet, counting her change, the net bag hanging from her arm, and he watched her tilt her head impatiently and push a strand of hair behind her ear with her left hand and then she stopped and looked up and stared at him for a few moments, and then, not even knowing that she’d begun to cry, the wallet still open and the bag swinging awkwardly against her side, walked straight into his arms. He hadn’t been looking for her. Or maybe he had.
They walked everywhere that long morning as the heat built up in the squares and the leaves began to droop, at first following the busier avenues, her arm through his and her head on his shoulder, an atom of life in the crowd, then drifting north through the Vinohrady district along crumbling retaining walls and up endless cascading flights of stairs that seemed to sweat some kind of stone moisture in the heat, until they came to the huge Olsany Cemetery, where they passed through the wrought-iron gates and down the four worn steps and disappeared into the vast shade of that place, a forest of ivy and stone. And when they came to the end of a long path they stood very still and she felt the same arms, the same chest pressed against her breasts, smelled the same particular smell of him. “I didn’t know if you were alive,” she said.
“I am,” he said.
She sensed it immediately, I think, in the paleness of his skin and the bones of his back and in the way he tried now when before he would not have had to try. There was a need in him now—they both knew this—and she wanted to tell him that she would fill that need, that he could draw from her for as long as he needed to. She didn’t ask where he’d been or how long he could stay; all she wanted to know was how long it would be until it was over. They were sitting together on a white stone bench at the end of a row of garish marble slabs that gave the impression of doors whose houses had disappeared. He had taken off his jacket and loosened his tie in the heat.
“A while,” he said. “A few weeks.” Dusty-looking sparrows kept spearing into the greenery, then flying out. “It’s not quite done,” he said.
“And the sixteenth?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know if...,” then looked at her and said, “I’ll be there.”
“Can you walk with me for a while?” my mother asked him.
“Anywhere,” he said.
And so they did, down street after street, avenue after avenue, through deserted districts filled with warehouses and across a little bridge that spanned railroad tracks on which no trains could be seen in either direction, then up through the dusty vineyards and down again toward the river, burning in the midday sun. Just before two o’clock they stopped in a small potraviny store and bought a quarter loaf of bread and some soft cheese and she reached up and took a jar of preserved apricots off a shelf and they paid and carried them a kilometer or so to a small park near a building that looked as if it might once have been a museum of some sort and sat down in the shade to eat, but the cheese had begun to go bad, and even though he tried to cut off the bad parts with his pocketknife it was no good—the mold had gone through. He wasn’t really hungry anyway, he said. My God, it was hot.
“Not quite the same, is it?” she said, smiling.
“No.” He was lying on his back in the grass, the bits of pared-away cheese and the open knife next to him, and he leaned up on an elbow and looked at her. “It doesn’t matter.” She watched him tear off a blade of grass and begin twisting it around his finger. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said. And he told her about the gun, feeling as if he were making it up to make himself more interesting, and she said it was all right, though in fact the word “gun,” like a single clap, had set a flock of panicked thoughts wheeling through her mind, first this way, then that, and then he said, “So, should we go?” and he was suddenly standing in that way he had, just as he had that first night after they had come out of the wheat field with Svíčka and she’d seen him sitting back again
st the pine with his rucksack. He reached down his hand to her. “It’ll be the same,” he said, pulling her up to him. “It may take a while, I don’t know how long—a few weeks, maybe longer—but it’ll be the same again. Trust me.”
“I know that,” she said. “I do.”
He indicated the little park they were standing in, the vacant lot next to it, the reedy weeds, the white, hot sky. “This doesn’t matter.”
“I know,” she said.
But it did matter. The gun in the coat over his shoulder mattered. Their presence on every street or sitting in the cafés with their black boots thrown over their legs mattered. The heat mattered. Yet she knew there was nothing to be done. They had to walk. The red shoes were on—there was nothing else to do.
Just after three they crossed Libeñský Bridge, the Vltava flowing small and discolored below them, walked up a broad avenue with rows of small buildings on either side to a park with a stagnant fountain, and shared a lemonade. They sat on a stone bench and my mother told him about her uncle’s apartment and her morning ride to work and how she thought she had seen him, and he listened and smiled when she said something funny and looked at her face as she talked, and she knew that he loved her, and that it would be just enough. She could feel it slowly bearing them down, and she could hear herself talking, talking simply to drown out its presence. They walked on, though they had nowhere to go, exhausted now, first left, then right, then left again, staying to the shade, wiping the sweat...
There was no shade along the bank of the Vltava, and as they hurried along the deserted cinder walkway they could see him, far ahead, sitting shirtless on a little stool between the shoreline bushes, the telltale rod sticking up like a scratch in the air. He was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, motionless—a man fishing in an oven. They walked on, not talking now, bent on the shade of a stand of willows half a kilometer ahead, and as they approached she could see the fleshy shelves of his back, coated with sweat, the black rod protruding from a holder pushed into the bank. The river was narrower here, filthier. Pieces of what looked like furniture or bits of carpeting bobbed in the current; an automobile tire was wedged in the crotch of a tree.
It was as they were passing him, the sweat stinging her eyes, that my mother saw the yellow carp, the milk-white streak of its belly rising above the foam, its scales like rows of yellow coins or rotting armor, like a detail out of a dream of dying. Or so it would seem to her afterward. It floated just beyond the reach of his rod like an affront, and there was something terrible and funny about this. When she looked back from the shade of the willows she could still see him sitting there, his elbows on his knees, and she imagined she could see the fish, a spot of yellow in the shoreline foam, but knew she couldn’t.
They went on. The sun had stopped in the sky. The fountains were dead. How long could he stay, my mother asked, though she hadn’t meant to, and he looked away and said not long, a while, and for one miserable moment she wished he had to go so that they could stop this day, then knew it was the one thing in this world she wanted least, and that he felt exactly the same way. There was no help for it.
By seven they had made their way back to Vinohrady and the sun had gone behind Petřín Hill. A sluggish breeze moved down the avenues, then died. At a butcher shop they bought a bit of chicken, then a few stale rohlíks at a bakery that was closing, and walked on. On žitná Street a group of four came down the middle of the sidewalk, and she and Bém stepped toward the buildings and let them pass. Two hours before the curfew, she asked him again how much longer they had before he had to go, and he looked at her and smiled a strange, pained smile. “I can’t seem to leave you, can I?” he said. “Then don’t,” she said.
And she took him by the hand and led him back to Olšany Cemetery, carrying her shoes to save her blistered feet, and they found a gate that was open and a dark, overgrown place by the long back wall where the scraggy grass and dirt behind the row of trees and ivy were cool against her skin and he unbuttoned her clinging blouse and pushed up her sweaty skirt and entered her without saying a word, and the familiar shock of it, the desperate, unapologetic, hand-over-the-mouth ferocity of it, was enough to tell her that it would be enough. That she could save him. That she could save them both.
They stayed together that night, first moving even farther back into the dark of a small crawl space behind a row of overgrown monuments, then rolling her skirt for a long, thin pillow. It was very dark and they lay together, not touching because of the heat, talking as they hadn’t been able to talk all day, and as she drifted toward sleep his voice would begin to fade, then suddenly grow louder, then fade again. Breaking the curfew was madness, they knew that. But it was done, and this place was as safe as any place could be; a patrol might come through, but there would be no dogs, and there were probably twenty kilometers of paths, thousands of monuments...No one would think to look behind precisely this set of stones, to crash through this particular thicket of vines.
At one point, it must have been well after midnight, she felt him jerk to attention and they lay very still as footsteps passed some distance away—a sound like knuckles tapping slowly on a bone—then disappeared, and sometime during those hours, reckless from fatigue, or love, he told her everything there was to know, where he had been and where he had to return in the morning and how it would go, and she felt, listening to him, that she’d somehow known it all along. She must give her notice at the Language Institute, he said—leave Prague. He knew someone who could get them over the border. They would meet on the sixteenth in the forest, just as they had planned.
And because they were young they made love again, just before the first leaves began to stand out from the dark, then dressed quickly, took a drink from the tap at the end of the row where visitors drew water for the flowers, and hurried out toward the gate.
The avenue was still nearly empty. She would walk him, my mother said.
It was a bit earlier than they’d thought. They waited for the tram for a while but none came, so they started walking down Vinohradská—walking tired, thinking about how they would manage it when the time came—then up Italská to Náměstí Míru, where a small knot of people stood talking on the corner, then finally down Anglická, past the shuttered stores toward Karlovo náměstí. There was some kind of commotion down by the square. An accident. They could see the barricades.
Bém had stopped. What is it? my mother said. A young woman was walking toward them, away from the square. Some kind of police action, she said. Something having to do with the church on Řesslova. The whole square was cordoned off.
She couldn’t get him to move. She noticed they were beginning to attract attention. “Now,” she said, taking his arm and whispering into his ear like a lover, “we have to go—now,” and then he was walking fast, his head down, and as they passed each street like the spoke on a wheel she could see the barricades, the sentries, the security police with their black helmets standing in the low morning sun, and along with the nauseating throb of fear came the realization that he should have been one of them but wasn’t, that he was here, with her, that he had escaped, that when the shot had come he had bent to tie his shoe, and they ducked into a small courtyard and my mother led him to a bench hidden behind the gate and held him as he sobbed, racked like a child, even as she noticed, over his shoulder, a father and a small boy with a white dog walk past them and out the gate, even as she heard the pop pop pop of gunfire, and realized with a kind of stunned gratitude that it was his love for her that had saved him.
IT WOULD TAKE TIME, MY MOTHER KNEW, PERHAPS A lot of time, but they would make it through—had made it through. The worst thing, the unsurvivable thing, had passed them by; now they could run. There would be no more waiting. He had said he knew someone who could get them out. And eventually, of course, the war would end, as all wars did. It had to end. The dead would be buried, the wounds would heal—or they’d learn to live with them.
She did everything. She managed to get them
out of Prague to Jindřichův Hradec, from Jindřichův Hradec to Brno. She borrowed some money from her parents, found them a place, a two-room flat on the third floor of a building next to a printer’s shop. It had an alcove for a kitchen and a window that looked out over the street, and there were a few pieces of furniture—a bed, a small table, a long white bookshelf with a few books in German and a Hebrew grammar...They had had to say they were married, of course, and when the landlady unlocked the door and showed them in, my mother had walked ahead, taking in the size of the rooms, the light, the bucket-sized sink, and she saw him watching her, and he understood what it meant to her and even tried to go along, turning a light switch on, then off...and when she had asked him if he thought it would be all right, he had smiled and said it seemed fine to him, a distinct improvement over their last place. A few minutes later, while checking the stove with the landlady, she looked up and saw him leaning against the wall by the open window, looking out on the street.
There was little meat to be had in the stores, but she managed anyway, making apricot dumplings one evening, bread and lentil soup the next, and they ate at the table by the window as the city grew dark around them. The evening breeze lifted the corner of the tablecloth now and then, and they talked about where they would go, what they would do. He had said he knew someone, she said, someone who could get them out. He would look into it, he said. They could stay here in the meantime, she said, until everything was ready. Yes, he said, it was the best idea. It was a very comfortable flat, he said—he liked it.
