by Mark Slouka
“You have it here?” I asked stupidly.
“Ah, here it is,” he said, taking a small, cracked-leather notebook strapped with rubber bands out of his briefcase. “Let me...”
But the tram was already slowing. He glanced up. “I’m afraid we won’t have time,” he said. He dropped the notebook back inside the briefcase and snapped it shut. It had been very nice talking to me, he said, and if I could remember to send him those stamps when I returned home to America, he’d be very grateful. And grasping his briefcase, he walked out into the wind.
I got off the tram at the next stop.
All that fall I carried the receipt with his name and address on it safely tucked in my wallet until, on a crowded train, a week before I was to leave Prague for a few months, someone stole it from my inside breast pocket. When I tried to find the name I remembered, I got nowhere, and when I located a street whose name sounded much like the one I remembered him writing down, no one there could tell me anything of a frail-looking man with a white mustache who collected stamps.
For years I thought of him, still waiting for the stamps from Ceylon and Siam to arrive from overseas. And then I stopped.
3
ON A COLD NIGHT LATE IN 1988, I MET A MAN IN A hospoda in the village of Třebíč. The room was full of round tables covered with dirty white tablecloths and when the waitress came over with the beers which she carried three to a hand, she made a mark on a red cardboard coaster with a short black pencil. When I told the men at the table next to mine what had brought me there, they took me to a back table where an old man with bloodshot eyes sat sullenly in front of a mug of beer. His name was Ota Rybáč.
Ask him about the parachutists, they said. But the man seemed too far gone. “Musíme ho naolejovat”—We have to oil him—someone said. “Another beer,” someone yelled. “You can all go to the devil,” the old man said.
He’d been a young man, he said eventually, the night he saw them come down—not even forty. Back then he could still pee in less than half an hour.
Of course he did, he remembered it very well, every bit of it. He raised his heavy stein of beer, then put it down again. “America?” he said.
“Co si pamatuješ, Oto?”—What do you remember?—said a bear-like man at the table next to ours, who was leaning forward over his beer as though protecting it. A small, whiskered dog with a face like a ferret was lying against his leg. Whenever I looked at it, it turned its head, as though ashamed of its predicament.
“Everything,” said Ota Rybáč.
I looked at the dog again. It looked away.
“Every-fucking-thing,” said Ota Rybáč.
“It was cold as hell that winter,” Ota Rybáč said. “Our village, Nehvízdy, is in the fields, and the wind blows like a bastard. Snow was everywhere.
“There was no wind that night. I was lying in bed next to my wife, who didn’t snore yet then, and when I heard the plane I didn’t think about it until I heard it come back around again. It sounded lower this time, and the dogs began to bark. That made me curious, and before I knew what I was doing I was pulling on my boots in the hall. I managed to get the ladder from the barn without making any noise and I set it against the roof and climbed up behind the chimney. I tried to be quiet because my youngest was sleeping right there, no more than a meter under my feet. And then I saw it, a shape coming down out of the sky. It was swinging back and forth like this, like a child in a playground. I lost sight of it behind the chimney, then found it again. I could see it plainly enough against the stars. It came down somewhere not far away.
“Well, I knew right away who it was, of course: we had heard rumors of parachutists—our boys, trained in England and dropped into the Protectorate—and I’ll tell you right now, I nearly crapped myself. We’d managed to sit out the war all right until then. Keep our noses clean. What if someone saw me up there on my roof at three in the morning? I thought. How could I explain the snow scuffed off behind the chimney? Everyone would think I’d been signaling them. My legs began to shake so badly I had to wait a few minutes before I could make it back down the ladder. I took it and put it away and went back in the house and got into bed next to my wife and tried to sleep but I couldn’t because I knew I would have to go out into the fields in the morning.
“I tossed and turned the rest of the night. I couldn’t see any way out of it. I worked on the roads then, but a few weeks earlier I’d taken a second job as a gamekeeper, working for some rich factory owners who’d rented a hunting lodge a few kilometers away. Every morning I would go around with a big rucksack full of forage for the game. If I didn’t go out that morning, people might get suspicious. Better to act as though everything was the same as always, and simply go about my business.
“So after breakfast the next morning I went out to the barn, loaded up, and set off. It was a beautiful morning but cold as shit. I didn’t say anything to anyone about what I’d seen, of course. I was no fool. It was simple mathematics. Every person who knew something doubled your chances of being shot. And not just because they might blurt out something by accident. Any idiot could be an informer: some bastard who had never liked you, or thought you’d slept with his wife, or wanted to buy your field...I just put on my pack and went out.
“I found their tracks halfway across the field, about two hundred meters from a group of trees like a small island. It was quite a shock; I’d pretty much talked myself into believing I’d imagined the whole thing. I can’t tell you what a strange sight they made, those two sets of tracks suddenly leading off across the snow. Any fool could see them. The snow had been disturbed and piled up in a kind of heap, and when I kicked at it, a rope tangled around my boot. I took off my pack and pretended to drop some forage in case anyone was watching from the village, then followed the tracks across the field toward the trees. Why? I don’t know why. I think that somewhere in the back of my mind I just wanted to see them.
“Behind the woods the ground dropped away into an old, unused quarry. It was a pretty wild place, thick with briars and scrubby trees and in the summer there was a pond at the bottom and a cave where my boys used to piss around when they were kids, playing at bandits and whatnot. It’s still there. And that’s where I found them, at the bottom of the quarry: two men hardly older than my oldest, maybe twenty or twenty-two, pretending to study a map. They were ordinarily dressed, in old coats and boots. They had seen me. One of them, who was tall and slopeshouldered, had his right hand in his coat pocket. The other, a slim, dark-haired fellow, simply looked up from the map and nodded.
“I knew that I couldn’t walk away, so I made my way down the hill toward them, slipping a bit in the snow. They watched me the whole way. How goes it, boys? I said as I came closer.
“They were doing a survey, the taller one began. There was talk about mining the quarry again.
“I nodded, but I could see right away that the other one knew I didn’t believe it. I saw him look slowly up along the rim of the quarry to see if there was anyone else there. I knew I had to say something, and quickly, or they would just shoot me right there. I know who you are, boys, I blurted out. I found your parachutes in the snow. I covered them up for you.
“The tall one started to say something but the other one stopped him with his hand. I got the sense that he was some kind of superior. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me. What’s in the pack? he said. Forage, I said, I can show you. He shook his head. You do this every morning? he asked me. Four times a week, I said. How long had I been doing it, he wanted to know. I told him. I’d needed a second job, I said. I had a big family. Did anyone else know about them? he wanted to know. I said I didn’t think so.
“All this time he never took his eyes off me for a moment. All right, he said, and nodded at the hill behind me. You better be on your way before someone notices you’re late.
“I can help you boys, I said. I swear to God, I’d had no idea I was going to say that. It just came out.
“You have a family, he
said.
“I said it again: I can help you, I said. And that time I meant it.”
“I learned later that they’d been trying to figure out where they were. It turned out that they’d been dropped at least twenty kilometers off course, the taller one told me. The pilot had miscalculated in the dark and brought them too close to Prague. They had a transmitter with them, which they protected like the goddamned Holy Grail. Over the next week I brought them blankets and bandages—it was bitter cold that whole time, and the taller one had hurt his foot coming down—and a small bottle of slivovitz and even a wedge of Christmas cake which I told my wife I’d eaten while everyone else was sleeping, which she bitched me out about. They asked me about the police in the village and a lot of other things—whether there were any troops moving about and such—and the quiet one gave me an automatic pistol in case something happened. I’d never held a pistol in my hand before. I carried it in my rucksack, and every morning when I came home from the fields I’d hide it in the barn in an old can under a handful of nails where no one could find it.
“Nothing happened for a few days. One morning I was making my way down the hill to see them, holding on to these ratty little birches that grew out of the rocks, when I noticed someone crouched against the cliff. I couldn’t make out who it was—it was snowing hard—but I was sure he’d seen me, so I couldn’t go back. I said to myself that as the gamekeeper I had the right to know who was about, so when I got closer I shouted, and he came out into the open. It was Baumann, the butcher. What the hell are you doing out here in all this? I said. I could hear my own heart in my chest.
“He’d been skating, Baumann said. Ten meters below us, the pond was frozen solid as a brick. The wind had blown most of the snow off.
“Where are your skates, then? I said, and because he was afraid he got angry and said who the hell was I to be wandering about the country asking him questions and that he’d only meant that he’d come out to look at the pond and check the ice to see if he could bring his kids there, but as he was talking I saw him glance over my shoulder toward the cave the boys were staying in, and I knew he knew.
“I took the chance. So you know about them too? I said.
“He admitted he did, and we discovered that both of us had been bringing them food and information for days. Being careful men, they hadn’t told either of us about the other one.
“After that I saw Baumann every day in the village, and our secret was something there between us. I didn’t like it one bit. I’d known him since I was a kid. I’d never liked him—thought he had the makings of a real son of a bitch. My nerves were shot all to hell. I couldn’t sleep.
“The parachutists stayed for a little less than two weeks. I heard later they moved on to a safe house in Šestajovice, and from there to Prague. But you know the rest. I had no idea they were Anthropoid—we’d never even heard of it then—or what they’d been sent to do. I wouldn’t have believed it if I had. Who could have believed such a thing back then?”
“I remember the day it happened,” interrupted the bear-like man at the other table. “We had the curtains closed to keep out the sun, and my old man came home early and closed the door and called my mother and said that there had been an attack on Heydrich’s car up in Líbeň. ‘God help those boys,’ he said. I remember it because it was the first time I’d ever heard my old man mention God—my mother was the religious one in our family. And I remember my mother just pulled a chair out from under the dinner table and sat down on it sideways. ‘God help us all,’ she said.”
“They were good boys,” said Ota Rybář. Another beer had appeared in front of him and he took a long drink, then wiped the foam off his upper lip with his sleeve. “Funny—there are times even now when I find it hard to believe they’re gone,” he said. “I grew quite fond of them. After they’d left I wondered sometimes what became of them, but it wasn’t until after the eighteenth that the pictures came out and we knew they’d all been killed in that church.
“Of course that’s when things got really bad. Until then I’d been more or less all right. After the assassination, when the purges started, I was sure they’d come for me sooner or later. And after the thing in the church, it was worse. For a long time I waited for the knock on the door, but it never came, and then one day I realized that the only one who really knew my name, or that I’d had anything to do with them, was Baumann. As I said, I’d never liked him, what with that chickenshit mustache of his and his fat finger always on the scale. My wife claimed he was Jewish, but he wasn’t, since he was still there in ’42 when all the others had been taken. I can tell you this: it didn’t make me like him any better to know that my life was in his hands. I actually thought of killing him. I could shoot him with the pistol, I thought, and no one would ever know. And who could blame me, really? He was the only link to us. By shooting him I’d be saving my family. It never occurred to me that he might be thinking the same thing.”
Ota Rybáč stopped. He seemed to have lost the thread of his story. He took a long drink of his beer. “Christ that’s an ugly dog,” he said.
“So what happened?” someone asked.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean what happened?”
“You want to know what happened?” said Ota Rybáč. “I’ll tell you what happened.” He had been drinking for a while now. When he turned his head, it wobbled like a child’s toy in need of tightening. “I’ll tell you what happened,” he said again. “When they came for him, the bastard kept his mouth shut and they never came for me. He was killed later, and I heard his whole family died at Mauthausen. The funny thing is that after I’d seen his name in the paper, even though I was sorry for it, I was able to breathe again for the first time in months.”
He was silent. “That’s it?” someone said after a while.
At that moment there was a loud crash at the bar—someone had knocked over a bottle—and a man laughed and the dog with the ferret’s face stood up and then lay down again.
“What the hell was that?” said Ota Rybáč.
And that was the end of the evening.
4
JUST OVER THREE YEARS AGO I FOUND MYSELF SITTING on a bench near the white statue of Eliška Krásnohorská in Karlovo náměstí, the square my mother had talked about the day we planted flowers together at our cabin on the lake almost forty years earlier. It was a still, sullen day in June, overcast and dull. A warm wind was blowing from the east. Three kids were riding their skateboards over a ramp they had set up on the sidewalk under a tree with branches so huge they appeared deformed, like thick, twisted ropes; the largest of these, a child-thick tentacle running straight out from the main trunk as though hoping to strike out on its own, had very nearly sunk to the ground of its own weight, and been propped up on a short steel crutch.
I had long before given up hope of learning anything conclusive, if in fact I had ever hoped for that. In any case, there had been nothing to see; the door was closed. A war had come. My mother had loved someone who had died. She’d married my father. On a bench across from me, two old women leaned toward each other holding their pocketbooks on their laps with both hands. Behind them, on the avenue, a tram slowed to a stop. The bell rang, the doors closed, the tram left. A store behind the stop was selling out its stock of shoes. The one next to it sold electronics.
The wind brought the slightly sickening smell of the flowers in their beds, then a gust of fumes, then the sudden coolness of plaster. It had happened right here; the entire square, I’d been told, had been cordoned off. The partisans had been hidden in the church whose cross I could almost see from where I sat. On a June morning like this one, all seven of them had died there. It told me nothing. There was no entrance; the past was closed for inventory.
The trolley bell rang again. In one of my father’s stories, a hunter shooting at a bird in a dark wood was surprised to hear the arrow strike something with a dull, metallic clang. Going to investigate, he parted the branches of a thick pine to re
veal an entire town, abandoned a century ago to the plague. His arrow, missing the bird, had hit the village bell tower.
One of the skateboarders drumrolled onto the wooden ramp, spun and missed, ran three quick steps.
I was watching another trolley move past the storefronts when a small white dog trotted up and began to sniff my leg. I could see his owner, a blocky old man in a suit, like a hydrant dressed for church, hurrying up the walk. “Bud’ hodnej, Karlíčku. Nezlob”—Be good, Karlíček—he said to the dog in a tone full of good-humored sympathy for Karlíček’s winsome ways and not intended to be taken to heart. When Karlíček started to sniff my crotch I gently pushed him away, and Pavel Čertovský and I began to talk. So I was from America. He had been to America once, to visit his brother in Chicago. It had been very hot there. Most young people these days didn’t care about history, he said, when I explained to him, as best I could, why I’d come to Prague in the first place—it was all gadgetry and computers now. Why, just the other day he had read in the newspaper that 42 percent of students entering the gymnasium thought Charter 77 was a rock-and-roll group. “Come here, Karlíček,” he called out irritably, as though the dog were somehow responsible.
And then he told me, yet again, all the things I already knew: That there had been seven of them. That they had been trained in England by the RAF. That they had parachuted back into the Protectorate to assassinate Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, who I no doubt knew had been Hitler’s personal favorite and likely successor as well as the architect of the Final Solution. That thirteen days after Heydrich died, in the early morning of June 18, the group, hidden in the crypt of the Church of Sts. Cyril and Metoděj on Řesslova Street, had found themselves surrounded by two full divisions of Wehrmacht and three hundred SS—betrayed by one of their own, a man named Čurda. That even though the situation was utterly hopeless—they were outnumbered three hundred to one—they had fought bravely, desperately, three from the rectory, the other four from the crypt itself. That the three in the rectory had been killed almost immediately but that the others had held on for hours even after the fire hoses had been pushed in through the little window on Řesslova Street and the water in the crypt had begun to rise, until they came down to their last four bullets, which they had been saving for themselves.