by Mark Slouka
He remembered the morning they died, Pavel Čertovský said. He waved his hand to indicate the half-kilometer-long square we were sitting in, or perhaps the entire city. “The whole square, from there, to there, all the way down to Večná Street, was cordoned off, a four-hundred-meter radius in all directions from the church. They had guards watching the sewers letting out into the Vltava...they thought of everything. Still, the boys held out longer than anyone would have thought.”
“You saw all this?” I asked.
“My parents lived right over there,” said Pavel Čertovský. My father and I watched the whole thing from the kitchen window. My mother just cried the whole time. There wasn’t much to see, to be honest, but you could hear the gunshots—pock, pock-pock—and I remember the fire truck coming up a side street and the puff of smoke when they dynamited the rectory. People guessed right away what it was about but of course there was nothing to be done—God himself couldn’t have saved those boys that morning.” Pavel Čertovský shook his head. “I prefer dogs to people,” he said. And he scratched the dog, who had laid his head on his owner’s lap, on the top of his nose, and the dog looked up at his face with an expression of adoration and sorrow that reminded me of fifteenth-century paintings of Christ looking up from the cross to a merciful heaven.
“After that it all went to hell, basically,” Čertovský went on. “The day after they killed Kubiš and Gabčík and the rest, we heard they’d gotten one of the main figures of the Resistance in Prague, a woman named Moravcová. She was able to get to some poison; her husband and son had it much harder.” He paused. “But you probably already know all of this,” he said.
“Some,” I said. “Tell me, has this place changed much since then?”
“The trees are bigger, of course,” said Pavel Čertovský. “And a few of the buildings are different.” He paused, as though gathering something. “It seemed happier somehow. You have to understand,” he said quickly. “I was twelve years old; everything seemed possible. Huge things were happening, every day something new was happening, but it all seemed to be occurring somewhere else, to someone else, not me. I can’t explain it. I can’t defend it. It was as if things had no gravity. Terrible things happened—you saw them happen—but then they’d just float away.” He shook his head. “Youth. In old age you go around creaking like an old garbage truck loaded down with shit, if you’ll pardon me.
“But listen to me running on—here, let me tell you something you may actually find interesting. If you go back to the church,” he said, indicating the direction of the church with his head, “go to the back room of the museum where they have that wall of photographs and look at the fourth from the right, three rows down. It shows the crowd gathered around Gabčík’s body that morning after they’d dragged it out into the street. If you look closely in the bottom right corner, between the legs of the man with the camera taking a picture of Gabčík’s face, you’ll see a foot with a white sock and a brown sandal.” He patted my knee conspiratorially. “That’s me,” he said, “and right next to...Karlíčku, přestaň!”—Stop that!—he called to the dog, who had wandered over to the huge supported branch of the oak and was peeing on the crutch. The dog lowered his leg. “What was I saying?”
But he was an old man, and had forgotten. “Funny,” he said. “I can’t remember four seconds back—I’ve already forgotten your name, I’m afraid—but I can see every detail from half a century ago. Every absurdity. I remember that our dog had to go that morning—dogs have no appreciation for history—and my father decided to take him out. This was still during the siege of the church, but well before we knew what it was really about. My father and I went out through the cellar to the back, then walked away from the square to the churchyard of St. Katherine’s on Viničná Street, just up from where the hospital is now, and the dog promptly did his business. I remember that as we were leaving he stopped to drink from a bucket someone had left on the walk, and I saw a couple on a bench to the right of the big wooden doors there; they were both quite young—beautiful young people, really—and she was holding him and he was shaking like a child and it wasn’t until that very moment that I had a sense of how bad the thing happening four blocks away really was.”
But he had to be going, he said, and we said our goodbyes and he and Karlíček walked off together past the skateboarders who stood about sullenly, holding their boards under their arms until they had passed.
A gray day. The wind, a warm breath, moved the leaves, lifted the dirty curls of one of the skateboarders out of his eyes, slid a paper bag a short distance along the walk. And sitting there I could suddenly feel them—the facts, the dates, the stories, the couple on the bench in the churchyard—gathering like iron filings around an invisible magnet, suggesting a shape.
5
THEY HAD BEEN HERE, ALL OF THEM, AND NOW THEY were gone. What could match the wonder of that? They’d leaned against a sun-warmed wall on a particular afternoon in June, scratched their noses with the backs of their wrists, pulled an oversoft apricot in half with their fingers. And now they were gone. I’d come to love two of them: their voices, should I somehow hear them again in this world, would be more familiar to me than my own. But others had known them. I never had, really.
Someone once said that at the end of every life is a full stop, and death could care less if the piece is a fragment. It is up to us, the living, to supply a shape where none exists, to rescue from the flood even those we never knew. Like beggars, we must patch the universe as best we can.
I IMAGINE THEY DIDN’T SPEAK MUCH THAT FIRST HOUR or so as they made their way deeper into the forest, up dank sloping paths where rainwater had left shores of pine needles like sea wrack in the dirt, past piles of logs spotted white where their branches had been lopped close to the trunk, then off the trails entirely. Damp, sweet gloom, resiny and wet, then a shot of strong sun, as from a different world, then shadow and sun, shadow and sun. A Gypsy wagon, its wood swollen fat with water, stood in the middle of a dense patch of woods, barred in by ten-year-old pines. Covered in needles, its canvas gouged by branches, it seemed to have been dropped from the sky. They passed through an old abandoned orchard, then made their way along the edge of a marshy field that might have had a lake at its center, its reeds loud with birds.
His name was Tomáš Bém, the surname just one step removed from the umlaut and the German “Böhm,” and he came from Vyškov, a village twenty kilometers north of Brno. He was twenty-two years old that summer, a man of average height, not particularly handsome. There was something concentrated about him, as if the energy of a larger man, and the bitterness of an older one, had been forced to fit that slimmer frame. The day they met—a hot, still day in late July of 1941—he took the early train from Brno to žd’ár nad Sázavou, then a bus that bounced interminably over bad roads as women fanned themselves with whatever papers they happened to have handy and men sat sweating stolidly into their collars. When the bus stopped at a small wrought-iron bridge near a country market he got out, shouldered his rucksack, swung the tin cup that hung from a leather thong around his neck over his shoulder, and began to walk. As he made his way up the long sloping road he could feel it, tapping lightly on his back. Ten minutes later he was in the forest.
He walked steadily for three hours along vast, empty fields, through the shade of pine forests mossed and tufted with thick, soft grass, stopping only to eat his lunch on a pile of fresh-cut pines that someone had stacked by the road. Sap bled from the cuts. He watched two women, only their upper bodies visible above the shimmering wheat, cross the field that began just on the other side of the pines. There had to be a path there. Or a road. One of them suddenly skipped ahead, her hands flying up like a girl’s. Perhaps she had jumped over a washout in the road. The road angled down the slope of a hill. He watched them until they disappeared, sinking into the grain.
Two yellow butterflies, drifted in from the edge of the field where hundreds like them fluttered in the weeds, settled on the e
nd of a log and walked in small, tight circles. žlut’ásci. His kid sister Majka had once caught ten of them in a jar because he’d told her she couldn’t, then forgotten them in the sun.
Shouldering his rucksack, he jumped off the logs and walked a short distance back the way he had come to where a deep seam of overgreen grass marked a stream trickling through the forest loam. Ten meters off the path was a stone basin. A metal cup hung on a hook. He drank, then poured the second cup slowly over his head. Behind him he could hear the wagon go by—the clop of steel on dirt and stone, the quick creak of wood. He let it pass without turning around.
He’d memorized the directions to the house. A man from the factory had come up to him as he walked to the train after his shift, told him the directions and how to announce himself, then veered off up the hill. They would be expecting him, he’d said. He was to put nothing on paper—ever—unless expressly told to do so. The leader’s name was Ladislav Kindl.
He appeared at the back door of the house just after dark with a rucksack on his back and the tin cup hanging from his neck half full of raspberries. The others were already there, sitting awkwardly around the living room, bits of fern stuck in the straps of their sandals. Kindl, whose house it was, introduced him. He nodded hello, then took a chair off to the side and listened. My mother, who was twenty-one that summer, sat next to Kindl’s wife on the sofa. She had come alone. My father, who was not yet my father but just a man she had come to care for, was sick in Brno.
It was the way he listened maybe, as though attending to every word being said, but from somewhere else. Or the way he would look at someone, straight on, until he had seen what he wanted. There was a kind of mild, innocent ruthlessness about it, though he himself seemed neither mild nor innocent nor particularly ruthless. He sat leaning forward on the uncomfortable chair Kindl and his wife kept in the pantry for getting preserves down from the shelves, strangely immovable, like a man looking out of a statue, and yet when he moved he moved with a smooth youthful abruptness, a complete lack of adjustment or preparation, that was somehow disconcerting. It was as if he were on fire inside, had been on fire for years, but with no way of getting at the flames, had simply learned to live with it. She looked at him, at his hands folded over each other, at his short black hair, his mouth. There was something slightly misshapen about the face, she decided. Something about him irritated her, she couldn’t quite say what.
By the time they left the house that night the moon was up and a warm wind was moving the wheat. The others had already gone: some toward Vrchovice, others toward Havlíčkův Brod, three weaving down the road to the car they’d left at the inn, their arms around one another’s shoulders, singing.
There had been a great deal to discuss. Radio contact between the government in exile and Prague had been reestablished, Kindl had informed them. President Beneš himself had communicated his gratitude from London. The expansion of existing cells of resistance in Bohemia and Moravia was now of paramount importance. London had instructed them to acquire a copy of the poem “Enthusiasm,” by Svatopluk Čech, in the World Library edition. It would be used to set up a secure code. Teams of parachutists trained by the RAF were to be dropped into the Protectorate. Every effort would have to be made to help them. They would have to be provided with the addresses of safe houses and the code names of partisans. They would need identity cards, police declaration forms, work papers, ration books. And so on.
Kindl walked out to the back fence and stood there for a while, smoking a cigarette in the dark. Nothing. No light at all. He could barely make out the silhouettes of the houses across the road. It was odd to think of the entire Protectorate—ten thousand homes, towns, cities—slipping into darkness every night, disappearing. Three years of blackouts. He looked again at the blocky shapes across the road. He didn’t like them—it was easier to see out of a dark house. Still, it was late. He waited. The wind moved. There would be mushrooms tomorrow. Christ, it was a beautiful night.
He leaned over a bit to see around the edge of the house. Before the war he could see the electric street lamp by the inn, two hundred meters away. Moths would be flying in and out of the light. He started another cigarette, then stubbed it out on the wood. He didn’t like that moon. Or the windows he knew were there.
He had oiled the hinges two days earlier, so when he lifted the latch from its bed and pushed open the low wooden gate it swung soundlessly until it thumped back against the fence. They came out of the pantry then, walking quickly: Svíčka, the girl, and three steps behind her, moving as easily as if he were going out for a game of tennis, the new man, Bém. There was something he didn’t like about him—he couldn’t say what exactly. That green shawl she’d worn around her neck that evening—or not a shawl, more like a big šátek of some sort—had looked old-fashioned, like something her grandmother might have given her. Strange how good it had looked with her hair.
A warm night. From the shadow of the house he watched the three of them slip through the gate, then hurry across the open ground, their number doubled by the moon. Svíčka was a good man—rational, methodical. Rumor had it that his wife knew nothing whatsoever about his activities, that he’d thought it best to hide them from her, the way another man would an affair. The forest was right there, narrow at one end, then widening out. It looked like a strip of black fabric torn from the sky and the field. Kindl breathed in a chestful of air, then slowly let it out.
The door opened quietly behind him. “Come in the house,” he heard her say from the dark.
“I’ll be right in.”
He had heard a rumor that Bém was going to England. He wondered how he would go. From Gdynia, probably, to one of the French ports. He would have gone too, once.
“It’s late. I’m tired.”
“So go to bed if you’re tired.”
They were there now. He could barely make them out against the wheat. Svíčka was still in the lead. The girl was holding her shoulder bag to her side to keep it from swinging. He’d seen her looking at the new man. It was too bad, really. He’d liked the other one better. He hoped it wouldn’t cause any difficulties.
The wheat was a low, pale wall. He watched them come up to it, then disappear, one by one.
AS THEY CROSSED THE OPEN GROUND AND STARTED UP the path toward the wheat field, my mother could hear nothing: Svíčka’s steps, her own breathing, the slight chuff of her bag against her clothes. Nothing else. It was as though he had simply disappeared. And yet she knew he was there. She felt shaky overdrawn, but absolutely alert. The moon, the scratch of the crickets—she noticed everything. Svíčka’s legs looked like a wishbone. She wanted to laugh.
As they came up to the edge of the field it reached out to meet them—a sigh of sun-warmed grain in their faces—and then they were in, plunging arms forward like divers into that close, pale world. The moon was everywhere. It scored the double of every stalk, every seed-filled head on her legs, her arms, her shifting bag. A million soft little hands scratched and tugged and brushed her face—but why couldn’t she hear him? Two meters ahead of her, his hands up and his head turned slightly to the side, Svíčka shifted to another row. She knew what he was doing, looking for spaces, trying to walk as much as possible between the grain. It wouldn’t work. She had walked a thousand fields before this one. She shifted with him, listening. Nothing. She resisted the temptation to turn around, concentrated on following. Why had he decided to leave with them? They would have been better off without him.
And suddenly the edge of the field and then the shadow of the trees and they were out. Not far off, along the edge of the field, stood a hunter’s stand of cut pine, like a chair on stilts. She turned around now just as he stepped out of the grain, behind her. She couldn’t see his face but she could see the shape of him—his hair, his shoulders, the rucksack with its belts and straps. He walked past her and squatted down with his back against a tree, the rucksack still on his back. When the match flared she saw his face: the nose, the black hair, the
impatient mouth.
He paused, holding the cigarette down by the ground, then, as if remembering, brought it up to his mouth in a big arc. She had thought he was smiling.
He was holding something out to them with his left hand.
“Go ahead,” she heard him say. “Take two.”
“Where did you get these?” Svíčka said.
“Don’t ask,” he said.
Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness now. Here and there in the forest behind them she could see spears of light cutting down through the pines, and farther off, where the trees opened, a well-lit space, like a small room between the trees, and then another, and another. The air moved, bringing the dank, loamy smell of roots, and right after it the hot, strong smell of horse and pig and oats. There would be mushrooms tomorrow. Even now they were prodding up through the loam and the black needles, their fat brown heads capped with bits of turf like the soft felt hats of cardinals.
They talked about which way to go. Vrchovice was too close, they agreed. Best to put some distance between themselves and the house. The logging roads and the trails were clearly marked, Svíčka said, and they had at least four hours of darkness left. He smiled. “It’s eighteen kilometers. If we walk hard and skip the picnic we can make it to žd’ár by dawn.”