by Mark Slouka
He turned to the other one. “Are you familiar with this area?”
“No.”
“Then I suggest you take the train from Mělkovice. It is only two kilometers from žd’ár, and there is a train for Brno at five-oh-five.” He turned to my mother. “Ivana, you and I can leave from žd’ár. I have a train to Prague at six, and there’s another for Brno at six-forty-five. Does that sound all right?”
She said she thought it was a good idea.
“Then we’re agreed.”
Bém stood. A single gesture: abrupt, unhurried. There had been no adjustment of weight, no release of breath, no scrape of leather against bark. He was suddenly just standing. And my mother, sitting with her back against a huge, rough-barked pine, saw him turn to adjust a strap by his neck, and something about the way he turned at that moment opened a door inside her. It was as though she were seeing something she’d known and forgotten, something she’d loved a hundred years ago. It made no sense.
“What time do you have to be at the factory?” she heard Svíčka asking.
“I don’t,” the other said.
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t have to be at the factory.”
“I don’t think I follow you.”
“I’m not returning to Brno.”
“Is that right? Does Kindl know about this?”
“He knows.”
Svíčka paused. “I’m sorry. I’ll need to know what happened. You understand why I have to ask.”
“I do. What always happens. We were interfering, slowing the work.”
“Someone informed on you in other words.”
“One of the lathes had been put out of commission. Some good citizen wanted to make the quota.”
“Forgive me—why didn’t the Gestapo arrest you then?” said Svíčka.
“I was out sick.”
“They didn’t come to your home?”
“They came. I wasn’t there.”
“Why didn’t they wait until all the saboteurs were present at the factory the next day. Or the day after. They’re not usually given to such errors.”
“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question.”
“Did you find an answer?”
“No.”
“And that satisfies you?”
“No. It doesn’t.”
Taking off his glasses, Svíčka breathed gently on the lenses, then rubbed them with a handkerchief. “This complicates things.”
“Does it?”
For just a moment, a tiny moon appeared in one of the lenses, then disappeared. “I’m afraid it does, yes. We have to assume they’re after you.”
“They’re after all of us.”
“There’s a difference,” said Svíčka quietly.
Bém took a long drag of his cigarette, then turned it into the dirt with his heel. “You’re right,” he said. “I should go.” He looked at my mother, sitting with her arms around her knees in the dark. “Goodbye,” he said, “I’m sorry we...” He nodded, then turned to go.
It was Svíčka who stopped him. “Wait,” he said—and that word was the pivot on which everything turned. Everything. Or maybe not. Maybe she came to see it as the thing that only made visible what had been coming their way forever, calmly measuring its steps even as they played and grew, fought and lost, separated now by fifty kilometers, now by five, even as my father and I waited patiently in the wings, as the theater began to darken...Maybe that one word simply served to flush the situation into the open so it could breathe and leap before being run into the ground like a crippled stag.
“Wait,” Svíčka said, and the other stopped and turned in a white stripe of light that cut him shoulder to thigh like a bandolier. It was night, Svíčka said. A weekday. They could cover the first eighteen kilometers together, then separate at the turnoff for Mělkovice.
They would be safer alone, the other said.
“Nonsense,” Svíčka said. “Everyone would be safer alone—don’t you agree?” he asked my mother. Besides, it was well after midnight, he said. No one but the devil would be out in the forest that late.
As they set off along the perimeter of the field, my mother turned around. In the woods behind them the changing angle of the moon had erased entire rooms and expanded others into great misshapen halls filled with one-legged tables and elfin chairs, richly upholstered with moss.
The logging road was long and straight, like a road in a dream, and they walked hard for the first hour, passing crossroads where logs as thick as men had been piled head-high in the ditch. Eventually a stream joined them. They could hear it burbling to itself in the dark, running through the grassy tunnels that cut under the road, then back. When it passed beneath them a third time Svíčka said they had to watch for the trail, and when they found the thumb-sized marker on the pine, its white frame barely visible in the shadows, Bém stepped up to it and lit a match, cupping the flare in his hands, and she saw the blue.
He looked up the mossy little track, veined with roots, that meandered off into the dark. “You say this will save us time?”
“Kindl said it was considerably shorter,” said Svíčka.
“It is,” my mother said.
Bém turned toward my mother. “You know these woods?”
My mother nodded. She had picked mushrooms here with her father when she was a child. The blue would stay small for two or three kilometers, she said, hardly more than a game trail, then widen. They would have to be careful—there were branching trails in the open woods, and one section led along the edge of an open field—but it would take six or seven kilometers off the distance by road.
They should stop and think, Svíčka argued. It would be slow going. They would have to stop at every marker. And six kilometers wasn’t much. If they stayed on the logging road, they could make up the time without the risk of getting lost.
“You think we should take the trail?” Bém asked, looking at my mother.
“I do.”
“Then lead on,” he said, stepping aside.
And she did. Here and there, between the trees, or on a long slope spotted and cut with light, she could see her father in his black boots, walking with the slight stoop of the mushroom hunter, his hands behind his back like a schoolmaster listening to sums, or prodding beneath the grass with his stick. The pond called Vápenice appeared to the right, a scattering of stars between the pines. Listen, her father said. It was March, dusk, spits of crusty snow still holding on in the shade. Far off, a riot of croaking, ecstatic and desperate. You can hear the pond before you see it, he said. It passed now on the right, a small black circle, its surface half covered with pine needles.
And then the ferns, reaching for their legs, another marker, another match. Blue. He nodded to her, indicated with his hand. They went on. A long downward slope through stands of thick oaks, a different dark, and then the birches like scratches or matchsticks and finally the vast, low, shore-like edge of the fields, mustard and barley, open to the sky. What was he thinking? Was he looking at her? The way he moved—the long smooth stride, the pull of his hips...that hair looked like it had been cut with a pair of garden shears. She led them quickly along the field, then across a narrow wooded peninsula filled with boulders, and suddenly they were back in the cool, dark smell of the pines, and the wooden sign nailed to the tree at the crossroads said Mělkovice, four kilometers; žd’ár nad Sázavou, seven. She looked for the name of the town they had come from, to see how far they had come, but it wasn’t there.
He was looking down the road, distracted. What could she have been thinking? This was ridiculous. She was going home, to Brno.
“Can you give me a light?” Svíčka said. Bém lit another match. Svíčka looked at his watch. It was almost three-thirty. Bém swung the rucksack off his back and took out a tin canteen of water.
“So tell us, what did you do before all this?” Svíčka asked. “Before the war, I mean.”
“I was a fitter.” He offered my mother the cante
en of water.
“Good work?”
“I didn’t mind it. Not what I would have chosen.”
“What would you have chosen?” my mother asked.
It seemed almost like a smile. “Something different,” he said after a moment.
“Can I ask you something?” Svíčka said.
“You can ask.”
Svíčka took the canteen from my mother, took a sip of water, then handed it back to Bém. “When they came to look for you, what happened to your family?”
“I have no idea.”
“I’m sorry,” Svíčka said.
“Thank you.”
“Perhaps...?”
“Perhaps.”
Svíčka shook his head, then shrugged into his rucksack. “And so now you’re going abroad,” he said. “Well, audentes fortuna iuvat, as the saying goes—fortune belongs to the daring.”
Bém looked at him for a moment.
“We’ll see,” he said.
They came to the turnoff just after four. The air above the fields had begun to change, tracing over the edges of things, darkening the horizon of woods. Mělkovice was just down the road. Bém could take the early train, Svíčka said; he would go on from žd’ár. Since men were mostly the ones leaving early for the factories, my mother would wait in the forest for an hour so as to avoid drawing attention to herself, then follow. She still had the sack for the mushrooms? Good. She should pick some. Svíčka took out his watch and opened it, holding it close to his face. He nodded at Bém. It was time.
A quick good luck and he was gone, walking fast, his slim form disappearing against the trees before he had reached the curve. Nothing. There had been nothing. My mother and Svíčka walked on together toward žd’ár. She would be all right? She had everything she needed? She barely heard him. He said goodbye and left.
When she couldn’t see him anymore she took the net bag out of her pocket and unfolded the handles and smoothed the creases out of the mesh against her leg, mechanically running her hand over and over the wrinkled mesh, then turned and started back into the forest. She could feel something trembling inside her. She felt soft somehow, hollow...For a moment she thought about my father—his face, his hands on her...
It was still dark when she came to the turnoff. There was no one there. The moon was down, the forest strangely silent. She stepped over the choked little ditch and walked into the woods, picking her way between the stumps and the broken branches that blocked her way. She had an hour, maybe more. An easy walk. She knew the station well: the low wall across the tracks, the pruned trees along the road, that hospoda where she and her father had seen the dwarf sitting on the bench. Some mushrooms would go well tonight. My God, what a fool she was. There was one! Even in the gloom she could see the fat pale stem. She rocked it gently out of the humus and put it in her bag.
She could almost see. The sky overhead, blue-black, was beginning to fill up with light. What had she been thinking? There had been no sign, no understanding. Another! Funny how you could see them so well against the soil. And so arrogant, in his way. And here she was, stumbling about the woods. She could actually feel her heart. She stopped, smiled to herself, then spun and smashed the half-full bag against the trunk of a tree. As she turned to go, a small, hard branch clawed deep into her calf. She pulled up her dress. She could see the gouge welling up with blood. She held her hand to her leg for a moment, then wiped it on the moss. It was time to go.
My mother picked up the net bag of smashed mushrooms. The woods were graying quickly now, the mist sweeping through the trees in long tatters like steam over a pot of water about to boil. She was tired. She had misunderstood. Anyone could misunderstand. There was nothing to think about.
He was standing at the turnoff by the grassy V where the roads split, his rucksack by his feet like a dog.
She walked right up to him. She could see him breathing. He shook his head slightly. “I couldn’t...,” he began, and it was as though she’d known that voice forever.
“I know,” she said.
“I couldn’t seem to leave you,” he said, then added quickly, as if he’d surprised himself, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t...”
“I know,” she said.
They didn’t touch. They stood there looking at each other for a moment, trying to understand that they were both here, that this was happening, and then he bent and picked up the rucksack and slipped it over his shoulder. “Which way?” he said quietly. And she turned without a moment’s hesitation, without a single thought for the world she’d known or the woman she’d been, and led him into the forest.
ON ONE LEVEL, THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING: losing themselves in the forest, in a mazework of paths leading off from roads already knee-high in grass, passing through the gates of gamekeepers’ wooden fences and around the edges of abandoned fields and small black ponds where butterflies slept in the sun slanting through the trees. It had been done before, after all, though with mixed results.
Ten months later, when she saw him step out of the trolley on Náměstí Míru so much thinner than she remembered him, when she saw the new, rimless glasses and the newspaper under his arm and the briefcase in his hand and watched him make his way through the crowd holding his hat to his head as though that would help with the rain, not seeing her standing there in front of him as fixed and still as the cobbles under her feet because it simply wasn’t possible that it should be him, that she should be seeing that face, that mouth; when they wandered that one flying hour out to the vineyards and then down to the square, where they sat helplessly on a bench in the drizzle before he got on another trolley and left without having told her how he came to be back in the country or what he was doing in Prague or where he would be; when she ran into him yet again later that June, as though fortune would have it no other way, and they spent that oppressive dying day and the night that followed as in a fevered dream wandering from Vinohrady to the cemetery, from the cemetery to Líbeň, from Líbeň to the Vltava where they saw the yellow carp floating in the foam among the boards and the garbage...when those days came, and all the days after, these were the days she remembered.
She remembered waking from a drugged sleep that first afternoon to find him looking at her. The sun had moved on. Next to her, a shirt hung over three curved sticks pushed into the ground, a shade for her face. It lifted quickly, as though someone were peeking beneath, then fell.
“Thank you,” she said.
He nodded. “You’re welcome. I felt somehow responsible.”
“Did they teach you that in the Scouts?”
An almost-smile, a flash of that crooked tooth. “I don’t remember the Scouts being much help in situations like this.”
“And have there been many...situations like this?”
“No,” he said. “There haven’t.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Four or five at the very most.”
“I’m glad.”
They looked at each other for what seemed like a long time.
“Can you tell me what’s happening here?” she said at last.
He shook his head. “No.” Reaching over, he caught a strand of her hair on the back of his fingers and moved it off her forehead. “All I know is that I can’t leave right now.”
A high breeze was playing with the light on the grass. My mother could hear the stream. There was an afternoon slant to the light.
“I should get dressed,” she said.
“No,” he said. “Never.”
He watched her dress, raising her hips, slipping her skirt up over her knees. Reaching around, she brought the ends of her hair in front of her face and began looking through it. “What will Mother think?” she said.
“Let me do that,” he said, and moving against her, he began to pick the bits of grass and leaves out of her hair. She could still feel him, the sweet shock of him, pushing inside her. She could feel his hands moving through the heavy mass of her hair, combing out the strands. Her scalp was st
ill slightly damp along the hairline. She could feel it cooling.
“How long do you think we have?” she said.
“A few days.”
“Just pull on it—you don’t have to be so gentle.”
“I thought I was pulling at it.”
“And then you have to go.”
“I do. Sorry—there’s a knot here.”
“For how long?”
His fingers paused for a moment, though they might have just been working out a tangle. “I don’t know. A year. Maybe less.”
“Just pull on it,” she said.
“You won’t have any hair left.”
“I’ll live with it.”
“All right.”
“I need to tell you something,” she said. “Not for you. For myself.”
“Tell me, then.”
“I’ve been seeing someone. For about a year now. In Brno.”
“I expected there would be someone.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
“It doesn’t bother you either?”
“No.” And then: “A little.”
She turned around to look at him.
“Done,” he said, gently brushing off the collar of her blouse. “Mother will never suspect a thing.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. Any of it. Do you believe that?”
“I do,” he said. He reached for her hand, began rolling the knuckles with his thumb. “Tell me the truth—can you do this?”
“Can you stay?”
He nodded. “For a while.”
“Then I can do anything,” she said.
“It’s dangerous,” he said.
“I know that,” my mother said, and then, feeling his hand: “How did you get this?”
And he told her about the wine glass he’d stepped on while wading along the shore of a carp pond as a boy: how he’d felt a kind of tender, caving crack, as if he’d stepped on a thin-walled shell, and how he’d reached down to feel what he couldn’t see and understood the moment the blood plumed up out of his hand, and listening to him she felt an absurd rush of anger toward the nameless drunk who had thrown his glass into the pond and at the same time a small thrill at owning this thing, this knowledge.