by Mark Slouka
They had done the unthinkable, and in their own hearts they did not quite believe it. It had seemed strangely unreal to him even on the morning of May 27. He’d woken early, instantly conscious, and quickly gone to the living room and removed the gun from the hole under the sofa cushion. The ammunition was where he’d left it. The family he was staying with was still asleep. He’d told them the night before as they were eating dinner not to worry if he didn’t come home the following night, that he might be staying over with a friend in židenice for a while.
“For how long?” the father had asked, tearing off a piece of bread.
It was hard to say.
Was he taking everything?
It seemed best, he said.
“I’ll get up and make you something for breakfast,” the mother said.
He shook his head, pierced yet again by their courage, by the plain-faced little girl across the table with her straw-blond hair and her raw, bitten nails, by the plastic yellow tablecloth with its smiling, semicircle burn mark. He’d be leaving very early, he said.
The father broke off another piece of bread. “You’ll be careful, yes?”
“Of course,” he said.
“You take care of yourself, Tomás,” the mother said.
“I will,” he said.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he loaded the gun, put the rest of the ammunition in his pocket, then forced himself to eat a piece of bread and drink a half cup of coffee. He hadn’t noticed the vase, the jasmine cuttings. It didn’t seem possible that this was it—that after five months of waiting and planning, the day had come. Leaning over, he moved aside the heavy blue curtains. The sky was lightening. It would be a beautiful day. Four hours. He could picture the turn in Libeň, the tram stop, the row of stores. The spot by the wall where he would stand—110 meters from the turn, 4c to the nearest side street. He stood up, feeling the pressure of the gun under his left arm. All right. He slipped the money under the vase, swept the bread crumbs into his cup and saucer, and brought the dishes to the sink. He’d never prayed in his life. It seemed ridiculous to begin now. On a whim he clipped off a cluster of jasmine with his fingernail and slipped it in the buttonhole of his lapel.
By the time he walked out of the building to catch the tram to Vysočany where he was to meet the others it was morning. A pale, buttery light was already spreading from the east. There were few cars. The trip was uneventful, the tram nearly empty. Three and a half hours. The sudden rise of nausea, to be expected. He looked out the window. Wet pavements. Street sweepers. Here and there a uniform. The suit they’d gotten him was too hot. Three and a half hours. It didn’t seem real. It occurred to him that it might never seem real, and that it didn’t matter if it did or not.
He could see them now, again, standing by the corner of that little park that smelled like smoke, Gabčík carrying the battered suitcase with the sten gun and Líba Fafek making jokes about the bonnet she was to wear to signal to them whether Heydrich’s car had an escort or not, tilting it down, then back, like a girl preparing to pose for her portrait. They were just a group of friends: university students perhaps, now that the universities were closed, or musicians after a long night. The tall one carried a suitcase stuffed with grass for his rabbits, which were legal to raise in the Protectorate. Prague was full of back-alley hutches and suitcases of grass; entire fields were being moved this way and that.
Opálka went over the plan one last time. Everyone knew his station. Heydrich’s schedule had been confirmed the previous afternoon by a watchmaker named Novotný who had been called in to fix an antique clock and had seen a document left open on the desk. The Reichsprotektor was being summoned to Berlin that afternoon. He would depart his castle at Panenskě Břeǽany between nine-thirty and ten. His car would take the usual route. Since it was a beautiful day, he would demand that the Mercedes be open to the weather.
Bém knew it by heart. They all did. Líba Fafek was still playing with the hat. Kubiš, who along with Gabčík had been chosen to carry out the assassination, stood off to the side, nodding his head as though listening to fast music. Líba Fafek was to turn onto the road in front of Heydrich’s car. Valčík would be stationed above the curve; he would signal Heydrich’s approach with a pocket mirror. At the turn in Libeň, Líba would step on the brakes, forcing the Heydrich car to slow. Kubiš and Gabčík would be waiting by the side of the road. Kubiš would kill both Heydrich and his driver with the sten gun; should anything go wrong, Gabčík would back him up with a grenade. The others would be stationed above and below the turn to distract any police. After the hit, Gabčík and Kubiš would make their escape on bicycles. Was everybody clear on their destinations after the hit? Opálka asked.
A wave of sweetness came to Bém from the flowering lindens growing in the park. For a moment or two he thought he would be sick. A schoolboy with a boxer on a leash was walking the dog around an empty fountain. And suddenly it was as if he were outside the group, as though he were the boy with the dog, seeing them standing there at the corner—the man with the suitcase, the woman with the hat—feeling the tug of the leash in his hand. And then it passed and he knew he would be all right.
Gabčík had put his big arm around Líba Fafek, who wasn’t smiling anymore. She had taken off the hat and was holding it over her stomach.
They had a little over ninety minutes to be at their positions, Opálka said. No more waiting. He looked at Kubiš and Gabčík. The bicycles were waiting for them in the schoolteacher’s garage as arranged, he said. They were women’s bicycles, but since bicycles were in short supply, no one would notice.
Valčík abruptly leaned over and vomited into the bushes. “It’s fine,” he said.
“You’re all right?” Opálka said.
Valčík took a white handkerchief out of his pocket and neatly wiped his mouth. “I’ll be fine,” he said.
“You’re sure? If not, I have to know now.”
“Quite sure.”
Kubiš shook his head. “Women’s bicycles,” he said. “As a kid I wouldn’t have been caught dead.”
Gabčík, next to him, smiled that small, sad smile of his.
“I’m sorry,” said Opálka.
“When this is over, I’m going to put in a complaint with London,” said Kubiš.
“I understand.”
“Yes, well.” Kubiš looked around at the group. “Maybe we should go, don’t you think?” He turned to Gabčík. “Wouldn’t want to keep the goddamned rabbits waiting.”
They shook hands all around, feeling awkward, then turned to go. Gabčík kissed Líba quickly and picked up his suitcase.
“I just wanted to say that it’s been a pleasure,” said Opálka suddenly, but though Valčík nodded and wished him luck, the others were already walking away, and didn’t hear him.
And then it was just him and Opálka. A trolley went by. He could feel the fear now, like a physical thing, like a train in his body, one valley over. It was time. The boy with the dog had disappeared. He hadn’t noticed him go.
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, LESS THAN SIX HOURS AFTER she saw him turn and disappear around the bend of the road to Mělkovice, my mother stood waiting outside the Škoda factory in Adamov.
A darkening day. The women with the bowls of vitamin pills were already in place inside the steel-and-barbed-wire gates, waiting for the night shift. She heard the whistle and soon they were streaming out, thick with fatigue. She recognized him in the crowd, and she watched him walk up the broad avenue between the black, hangar-like buildings that seemed to fill that valley, then turn toward the security gate. He walked alone. He was wearing a blue factory uniform and a short jacket and carrying a lunch pail.
My father saw her standing across the road on the root-cracked sidewalk, and simply stopped. The crowd bumped and ground around him. She saw his shoulder jerk forward when someone shoved him and then he was walking across the cobbled road on which a line of canvas-covered trucks waited, halted by the river of men headed for the train stat
ion.
He stopped a few meters away. My mother saw him glance at the sandy patch of grass by the sidewalk, then up the valley. He nodded slightly, as though remembering something someone once said. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much he loved her.
“Are you all right?” he said finally.
She nodded. “I need to talk to you,” she said.
“No need.”
“I know. Still.”
He nodded again. She knew him. There would be no scene, no cinder-in-the-eye. He had his pride. He would make it easy for her.
“When did you get home?” he asked.
“Yesterday.”
“I love you,” he said. “Does that matter?”
“It matters,” she said.
He smiled. A smile like a spasm. “But not enough.”
“No.”
My father nodded and then, setting his lunch pail gently on the sidewalk, unpeeled his glasses from around his ears and began wiping the lenses with his handkerchief. There was nothing in his eye. She looked away. One of the women holding the bowl of pills by the gate was checking the heel of her shoe.
“We still have to work together,” he said.
“I know.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she said. “Can you?”
He picked up his lunch pail. “Is this what you want, Ivana?”
“Yes,” she said, looking at him. “It is.”
“You love him that much?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” My father put his glasses back on, winding them carefully around his ears. “I should go,” he said. “You’ll be all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” said my mother.
“Well...” He smiled, the way a man might smile while pulling a long splinter out of his arm. “I keep thinking I should kiss you goodbye.”
She was well down the sidewalk when she heard him call her name. He was standing by a bench with two slats missing from the back. She’d known him well. “There’s something you should know,” he said.
She waited.
“I want you to know that I’ll be here,” he said.
“Don’t...,” she began. “I don’t...”
“I know you don’t,” my father said. “But I’ll be here when he’s gone.” And he turned and walked away down the sidewalk.
That evening my father walked out of the Brno railroad station. He crossed the avenue to the trolley stop and took the trolley home to the corner by the butcher’s, closed now, then walked up the hill to his parents’ apartment overlooking the courtyard. And he woke at four in the morning and did it all again, backward: the unlit streets, the blacked-out train, the passengers groping for seats like the blind. And that evening when he walked out through the post and barbed-wire gate past the guards and the women with the vitamin pills he looked across the street, in spite of himself, to see if she was there, then turned toward the railway station with the others.
He couldn’t stop the thinking and he didn’t try. He thought about her when he walked up the square, where they used to walk together, or past the little tilting street that led to the Špilberk Castle gardens where they had planned their lives together. All that fall and well into the winter he worked his way through the briars that spring up in the foundations of love. He expected them. Rage? What was there to rage against? How do you fight for love? Or against it?
He saw her every few weeks. At meetings, on the street. They didn’t talk much. It didn’t matter. He could tell that this man, whoever he was, wasn’t with her—that he was gone and that she was waiting for him.
My father didn’t wish him ill. Anything but that. No, to kill the beast he needed it alive. Alive and well and living in boredom. Sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on its slippers; arguing at dinner over the price of the new furniture. Just let him live, he thought, and die on the field of days as other men do. He could wait.
In any case, it wasn’t as though there were no distractions—the occupation made sure of that. The work in the factory was unpleasant, the daily ritual of seeding the bearings with steel dust bad on the nerves. The older factory workers—dutiful men, law-abiding traitors—hated him and his few comrades on principle: for being students, for being new, for interfering.
The world outside the factory was hardly better. Nothing was sure. No one knew how far things would go, or when they would be over. Some things stayed the same; others changed. The diktats printed in the newspaper or announced over the loudspeakers seemed to bring something new every day. The schools were to be closed on such and such a date. All radios were to be registered with the authorities between the hours of ten and four. All persons of Jewish descent were henceforth forbidden from entering public spaces: theaters, movie houses, restaurants...Listening to foreign frequencies was a crime punishable by death. Absurd. This wasn’t war. This was disease. They were everywhere you looked now: in cars, on corners, striding down the cobbles, like an infection in the body.
Appropriately enough, symptoms had begun to appear, like yellowed nails or brittle hair. To amuse himself, he noted their progression. In answer to the command form, for example, a forest of gestures had appeared, gestures signaling not merely a recognition of the status quo—for who could help but recognize it?—but agreement, willingness, above all, subordination: the dropped glance, the slightly bowed head, the careful smile. A bag or briefcase clasped like a child to the chest.
It was fascinating in its way. Faced with an individual who had complete power over them, most people would find themselves, almost unconsciously, wanting to please him. You could see them seeking out the right facial expression, the correct stance; like animals in the open, they would instinctively find the place between dignity and cowardice—and stay there. Not move. Draw their neutrality around them like camouflage. It was a kind of game. Validate the other’s disgust for you without encouraging it; play the mongrel without incurring a kick.
Of course, this was the easy part. The challenge was in keeping public behavior from bleeding into private life, in keeping the two selves apart. And this was impossible. No one could accomplish it entirely. No one. Every hour you lived, from the moment you woke in the dark, you were reshaping yourself to survive.
It made for an interesting problem: the better you were at the role, the more talent you had for it, the more likely it was that you’d live—and the more likely that you’d lose yourself along the way.
Hate helped. In keeping things clear. But hate was a hammer anyone could use, and it served the others as well, and in precisely the same way.
And so he waited, and survived, seeing every side. Amused and appalled at the spectacle of men’s predictability: at the shopkeepers who now refused to sell bread to Jews, at the children who made good money shopping for them.
That June, tired of his friend’s constant questions, he told Mirek what had happened. He was sitting at the kitchen table, facing the window that looked out on the garden and the apricot tree, heavy with unpicked fruit. The whole south side of the house was overgrown with a layer of green vines, half a meter thick. When they bloomed once a year, as they were blooming now, the air inside the house seemed to vibrate as though it were alive. He looked down at the table: gray bees were landing on the small gray blossoms that waved and dipped over the napkin and the fork and the empty plate. “She’ll come back,” said Mirek. “She’ll grow tired of him after they’re together for a while.”
“Maybe,” said my father. And because he loved her as much as he did, he almost wished it could be otherwise.
HE AND OPÁLKA WERE THE LAST TO LEAVE. THEY STOOD next to each other watching Gabčík and Kubiš walk down the cracked sidewalk toward the avenue, passing through the long morning shade. Líba Fafek had disappeared up a side street. Valčík was already walking around the empty fountain, one hand trailing along the stone.
The air moved, a breeze bringing a breath of coolness. It seemed to come from the buildings above them: a deep, musty sigh, sme
lling of cellars and hallways.
Opálka picked up the battered leather briefcase which no longer contained the student papers and music sheets he had carried in it for fifteen years but a length of sausage in newspaper and three hand grenades, nestled in the dark like hard green eggs.
“So...,” he said.
“So,” said Bém.
“We have a few minutes yet, we may as well wait here.”
“All right.”
“It’s going to be a hot day.”
“Yes, it is.”
Opálka took off his hat and looked inside it, then placed it back on his head. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.”
“Nervous?”
“Of course.”
Opálka tried to smile. “For a few seconds this morning I couldn’t remember the number of the tram to Vysočany. I’ve taken it all my life.”
They turned back to look at the others. Kubiš and Gabčík were nearly at the avenue now. As they came to what appeared to be a stretch of broken cobbles, Kubiš gave his friend a small shove with his shoulder. When the other shoved back, he stepped neatly aside, making Gabčík stumble slightly.
“Boys,” said Opálka.
“He seemed almost happy this morning.”
“Kubiš? He’s in his element. They both are, in their way. I’ve never been like that. I think too much.”
“Most do,” said Bém.
“A curse. I have to keep it leashed all the time.”
“It’s not all bad if it helps you see things.”
“Think so?”
“Not really.”
Opálka paused uncomfortably. “I should have asked you this before, but is there someone...”
“You mean in case...”
That’s right.
“No. Not in the way you mean. Thank you.”
“Absurd, isn’t it?”
“What?”