by Mark Slouka
ON JUNE 5, 1942, TOMÁŠ BÉM LEFT THE SAFE HOUSE IN which he had been hiding for nearly a week and crossed the city of Prague from the Dejvice district to Nové Město, wearing a lightweight suit, a hat, a coat over his arm, and an ampoule of strychnine around his neck. Soldiers were everywhere. A warm, still summer day. Crossing the Vltava, the air moving through the open window of the trolley, he smelled the water and the wet earth smell from the Petřín orchards.
It was just before noon. Eighty-three had been executed in Prague the day before, 106 the day before that. They were everywhere: a knot of four—boots, caps, riding crops—striding quickly along the south side of Národní Avenue, men and women stepping out of their way. A convoy of four cars, then another. Sentries on nearly every corner.
Three or four times a day, while Bém lay in the dark in the crawl space behind the sofa, old man Moravec would sit down heavily and read the paper aloud, interrupting himself at some point to call out to his wife in the kitchen, “Are you all right in there? Do you need anything?” and while Madame Moravcová called back that she was fine, that she would be right in, the old man would tap twice on the sliding panel—so close they could have touched hands—and then read on. SS Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank had declared that the attackers would be found, he read. They and all those who had helped them, along with their families, would be shot. The Wehrmacht would comb them out like lice.
Well, that certainly was welcome news, Madame Moravcová would call from the kitchen or the pantry. And then, to her son, Ota: “Pro kristapána, obleč se uǽ. For Christ’s sake, get dressed already. “Kolikrát to musím opakovat?” How often do I have to repeat it? And did the newspaper happen to say when the authorities thought this might happen? No mention of that, my dear, her husband would reply, the pages rustling. It seemed they had the bicycle and some other things the attackers had left behind on display in Václavské náměstí, where the populace could see them. There was a reward of ten million reichsmarks for anyone who could identify the owners of these things. A bicycle, said Madame Moravcová. It didn’t sound like much to her, unfortunately.
And lying in the dark, unable to see them, Bém could hear their words, spoken for the benefit of the walls, the door, the keyhole, as well as himself, all the more clearly—feel the thing, so very near hysteria, moving just behind the screen. It was too much. These were brave people. But even the brave could be broken in time. Forced by fear, the crack was growing, branching; at any moment the laugh might go on too long, the gesture fly loose, the record skip.
But it didn’t. They held on. On the fifth day, Madame Moravcová, while walking down the white gravel path from her mother’s grave in the vast Olšany Cemetery, met a very nice, scholarly-looking gentleman who commiserated with her about the times but maintained, while tipping his hat or exchanging a few words with passersby, that even now, with all the pain being visited upon the country, nature provided perspective and comfort. He himself, despite everything, still found solace in the changing of the seasons, he said, though he was more than prepared to admit that this was so because he had been raised that way—that our adult havens were invariably shaped in childhood. Didn’t she agree? His wife, for example, as befitted her upbringing, had returned to the church.
And where did his wife worship? Madame Moravcová asked. At the Church of Sts. Cyril and Metoděj on Řesslova Street, the man told her. She must know the place—a fine building. An ornament. It seemed that it gave his wife some sense of security, the man said. Perhaps it was the company she found there. One of the priests, she said, a Dr. Petřek, was particularly kind. And they chatted a bit more about the church, and the species of sparrow that he said was given to nesting in the thick ivy of some of the higher monuments, and then he lifted his hat and wished her a good day and they went their separate ways.
Just before noon the next day, Bém walked out of the house and down the hill to the tram stop. No one seemed to see him, though he himself knew he would never know if someone had. There was a soldier at the bottom of the hill, two more at the tram stop by the park. A small group of people—three businessmen with briefcases, an older woman with a net bag, a girl of seventeen—waited silently off to the side, not looking at the others, not looking at anything...Behind them, a large red poster plastered to the telephone pole listed the names of those executed the day before.
He joined them, the coat draped over his right arm. There would be no need to fumble for the pocket; just squeeze the trigger through the fabric. His forehead and temples were sweating under the hatband but he resisted taking off his hat. No unnecessary gestures. Nothing to attract attention. He could hear the crickets, sounding the heat. When the tram came at last and the doors opened, the group shuffled back. One of the men looked down at his briefcase; the other, as though thinking about something suddenly, or testing for a sore tooth, slowly ran two fingers along his jaw just below the ear. When the soldiers had climbed in, the group followed them.
Three stops later the soldiers got off the tram, and Bém took off his hat. The coolness of the air coming through the windows felt good in his hair. He could smell the orchards and the river. Thousands had been arrested, Moravec had told him. Round-the-clock interrogations were being conducted in the five-story building down from the central train station. He looked out the window. The city, though emptier, seemed faster somehow—electrified, spasming. Even the ordinary seemed strange. Two boys, dropping something into the Vltava, leaned out over the rail, their right legs bent into identical L’s behind them. A man and a woman, trying to get past each other on the sidewalk, feinted left, then right, like football players on the pitch. The bell sounded. He didn’t like this idea of the church, of all of them together in one place. Everywhere he looked, the red posters of the dead—mothers, fathers, entire families grouped by surname—on storefront windows, on walls, on light posts. The tram passed into the shade of the buildings. A white sign with a long number on it passed by too quickly for him to read it.
At Karlovo náměstí he stepped off the tram. It made no sense. Better to separate, stay still, then get out of Prague. Across the street, three soldiers were walking south along the storefronts. He turned into the square, toward the white statue of Eliška Krásnohorská. He could see the bench where they had sat. He wondered where she was now. If she was safe. The air in the shade smelled of flowers and stone.
He sat down on the bench, folding the coat next to him. He’d walked off the tram and almost directly into her. A city of a million people.
The church was only a few hundred meters away; he could afford a few minutes. They had sat right here, both of them stunned by the force of it, the suddenness of it, trying to speak but unable to say anything that didn’t seem false the minute it was spoken. Banalities. Little gestures and politenesses. As though they had become different people in those few months, traveled too far from themselves, and the only way back was over a long, narrow bridge of clichés. As though they were afraid of frightening something. He remembered the rain, asking if she was all right, if she could take the time. Of course. Yes, he’d had to get glasses. No, he didn’t need them exactly. A nuisance—he didn’t like them.
She asked if he’d been well, whether he’d been in Prague for long. He could see the rain running down her hood, gathering at the edge, then dripping down. She herself had left Brno soon after...Anyway, it had seemed best. He’d nodded, looking at the oak behind her, at the branch hanging down like a huge, drooping tentacle. A relative had helped set her up, she said, found her work at the Language Institute in Líbeň. She’d missed him, she said.
There was the branch. A slight breeze, moving the heat. She had sat right there, to his left. Looking at it now, he felt a sharp pang of love for it. As though it remembered them, held them in suspension. Above all this horror. Absurd. In a few years you could sit in the crook of that branch and read a book, she had said. He could tell her nothing. They had said nothing. Before he could stop her, she told him she was staying a
t 7 Italská Street with her aunt and uncle who—“Stop,” he’d said. “Please. I can’t know...,” and seeing the sudden understanding in her face, the quick brimming of the eyes, he looked away at the puddles on the walk, the fountain, busy in the rain, the tram just coming to a stop in front of the stores across the way.
“How long before this is over?” she had asked. “Can you at least tell me that?”
“I have to go,” he’d said.
“I see,” she’d said. And then: “Will I see you again?”
“Of course,” he’d said, and even smiled.
“But...”
“I have to go,” he said. A quick kiss, her wet hair in his fingers, another, more desperate “I love you,” he said, “I swear to God I do”—and he was on the tram in two leaps, escaping something, feeling like something hollowed out and about to cave in. Strange—it had been right there; he could see the stop. For that matter, he’d probably seen the church that day, never realizing that he’d be coming back to it after it was all over. How very hard it had been. A quick wave and she’d been gone behind the rain and he’d sat down on the seat and begun the hard work of kicking himself back into vigilance like a drunk berating himself into paying attention. One misstep and it was gone, all of it. All the planning. All the lives on which it was built. One error, one moment of inattention or softness, one accidental turn, and the whole thing would go. And it couldn’t go.
A stocky man leading a dog with a pointy nose was coming up the path, the two of them passing through the dark, leafy shade and into the sun. Even now, dogs had to be walked. A beautiful summer day—there was no denying it. The way the light played against the stone. He watched the man and the dog make their way around a flower bed. When they reached the shade of the tentacle branch, he got up to go.
SHE UNDERSTOOD. AND SHE DIDN’T. SHE UNDERSTOOD why he sat next to her that afternoon like a clenched fist, why they couldn’t speak, why she kept noticing things—the oak, a white cloud of rain behind a passing tram, the black steeple of a church—as if she were falling down a well and these were roots to grab on to. She understood why he’d walked away from her so quickly, walking through the puddles like a man striding away from an avalanche, an avalanche he’d been waiting for his entire life. The tram windows had been steamed over, blurred by rain. He’d leaped on board, disappeared.
She understood. And she didn’t. She didn’t understand at all. She didn’t understand how a face, a voice, a certain kind of halfsmile could leave such a vacuum in her, how his absence could work on her like a chemical need, like opium withheld. She missed the physical fact of him, the lean, compact weight of him, his mouth on hers, his hair, the feeling of him in her hand. She missed talking to him, about everything really, the occupation and cheese, fascist Spain and the fashion in hats. She liked the way he listened to her, the way he would lie on his side, watching her as she talked. She liked his calm and the suddenness just beneath it; the pain in him and the pure unblinking dangerousness that pain had given birth to. She liked the quick smile that seemed to surprise even him. And now he was gone and she moved through the days diminished, transparent somehow, less like a ghost than like the last living, breathing soul in a world of ghosts. She understood how absurd this was, how self-indulgent. It couldn’t be helped. Holding him again mattered. Nothing else.
She clung to every bit of news now; her moods turned on a word. “This young man of yours,” her uncle had called out from the living room one night as she and her aunt wrapped the last of the dough around the canned apricots and lowered them into the big white pot steaming up the kitchen windows, “he’ll be back, I’m sure—if he loves you as you say, he’ll be back,” and because she was so miserable even this well-meant platitude had given her comfort and tilted the evening that followed—the dinner, the hour or so spent reading afterward—toward something like hope. Maybe it was all that simple. He loved her. He’d be back.
And then she saw him step off the tram and they sat on a bench in the rain and he was standing up to leave. And she felt his mouth and touched his face and for just one moment she glimpsed the fear and the determination inside him, side by side like orphans in a doorway, and understood that it could never be that simple. And he was gone.
Winter. It was as if the year would never die. She stood on lines, went to work, translated documents that meant nothing to her with two older men who seemed capable of moving nothing other than their right hands, and even those minutely, for hours at a time. The one window looked out on the stones of the building opposite. She listened to the pens’ scratch, to the windy shushing of rain, the sudden scattering of sleet.
At times she could almost imagine it, see it: the leather straps, the cords, the notched wheels...The country was being torn, slowly, irreversibly—and worse, learning to live with it. There was no food. The lists of the dead grew longer. Outrage folded outrage, building a soil of known things—of habit—from which anything might grow. Every afternoon now, crossing over the tracks on Vinohradská Street, she saw the trains, their windows nailed over with boards.
They were everywhere now. Russia was the answer, her uncle said that winter. He could see it starting already. The bastards would break their teeth on Russia. When the declaration of war on America was announced that December, he could hardly contain his glee. The idiots. They’d bitten off too much. The factories of Chicago would bury them.
He clung to it all that winter, even after things began to turn again. The Russian soul. The factories of Chicago. The Macháčeks, who lived in the next building, had been deported. A childhood friend he’d known since the day he’d hit him with a toy bucket in a sandlot forty-six years ago was taken into the courtyard he walked through every morning on the way to work and shot. They’d pay, he said. And all the quislings and collaborators with them. They’d taken too much. They’d choke like dogs. A year, maybe two, before the bone found the throat.
But the next morning, seeing their visored caps, their coats, their wet boots through the tram window, she knew that in some way it didn’t matter. Entire worlds could pass in a year or two. The factories of Chicago were far from here.
IN ANOTHER TIME, THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN SOME HUMOR in it. How perfect, after all, to hide the living among the dead; no one would think to look for them there. Just as no one would think to search for the dead among the living.
It was so simple, Bém thought: to escape death, all you had to do was die. The priest moved the cement slab, the cold breathed out, and down the stairs you went, carrying your long skier’s underwear, your sweaters, your hat, your woolen socks, your blankets—all the necessary provisions for the grave. Or the crypt, at any rate. And there were your comrades, like skiers in hell: Opálka and Valčík, in hats and bulky sweaters, squatting by a small stove; Gabčík rising on his elbow from a mattress laid out in one of the deep niches in the wall; Kubiš pacing under the one small window. The other three were upstairs in the rectory, standing guard.
He’d made it! By God, they’d known he’d make it. They had been here four days. It was cold as hell. Gabčík had hurt his eye in the attack but had managed to bicycle away with one hand. There was a plan, they said. They would be taken out in coffins—in a few weeks, maybe less—then driven out of Prague in a funeral car. The priests had it all figured out. They would stay in a storeroom in Kladno, then be moved to the forests in Moravia. Petřek, the priest, had arranged for a gamekeeper’s cabin. They could hide there for months if necessary. But how had he gotten here? What news was there?
“What news could there be?” said Kubiš. And it was true: he had no news to give them.
He had to get dressed, they said. Quickly. Once the cold got into his bones...
A supply line had been established. The teacher, Růǽička, came once a day with supplies and food.
But how had he made it? They had heard of the curfew, of ten thousand arrested, of interrogations, executions—the entire city under siege.
They had thought of turning thems
elves in, Valčík said. To stop it.
He had thought they were done talking about that, said Opálka.
But they were the ones the bastards were looking for, Valčík said. It was all because of them that this was happening.
They were done talking about it, said Opálka. The message from London—
But this wasn’t London, interrupted Kubiš, who had paused in his caged pacing to light a cigarette.
They were done talking about it, said Opálka. It would accomplish nothing.
It would accomplish something if it stopped it, said Valčík quietly.
They turned to him, the last man in, the last to see how things were. What did he think?
Nothing would stop it, he told them.
He would come to know it well: the low, dank, vaulted ceiling, the corner with the buckets, the sealed-off stairs on the north end, the bottom of the cement slab...He memorized it. The water stains, the gouged wall, the heap of crumbling mortar beneath it. The two bricks missing from the floor between the cooking area and the stairs, like broken teeth.
It was the hollow emptiness of the place that was most striking: no table, no chairs. Just columns, stairs, bricks, cold. This place had never been meant for the living. And though there were at least four of them there all the time, they made no impression on it. They knew they were trespassing, and the place seemed to know it too.
The sleeping wall: sixteen black niches like a giant’s honeycomb dug into the stone, coffin wide and coffin deep. The four on the left had been sealed off for some reason, as if with wax, making the illusion complete. They slept in the others. There was nowhere else. None of them thought to ask the priests what they had done with the coffins, or where they now stored their dead.