by Ivan Klíma
A few days later – the town had been placed under strict quarantine – my cousin Jiří arrived to release us.
We changed into our best clothes; the trousers of my sailor suit, now several years old, only reached half-way down my calves. It was a clear day in mid-May as we walked through the streets still crowded with people: here was the church whose tower I could see every day, the horses’ heads above the barracks entrance; in that wooden pavilion over there, a band had played for several weeks to show off to the commission of the Red Cross, here was the Vrchlabí Barracks with its de-lousing station; once when they brought a transport of Polish children here no one could understand why the children threw themselves on the ground and begged for mercy; several of the streets I had walked along countless times; the massive rampart wall; the fence which only a few days ago earlier had lain half demolished at the edge of the path, now entirely disappeared, and in its place a dusty, slant-eyed soldier-boy patrolling. I crossed the now only imaginary line of the fence and was immediately seized with terror that something was bound to happen. The little soldier who had just moved away from us would turn round, press the trigger of his machine-gun and we would fall down dead, as a punishment for crossing a border that couldn’t be so easily crossed after all. And out of the shrubs there appeared heads in grey-green caps with skull badges; I knew they hadn’t disappeared so easily and we were being pursued by our ever-vigilant, eternal and invincible guards. We walked past the young Red Army man and moved up the road towards the bridge. This was the mill whose smell I knew but had never set eyes on before. This was the River Ohře and the bridge that so many of my friends had passed across – an ordinary bridge! So I really was free; I could leave the road, leap the ditch and run around in the field. Beyond the next bend a small lorry was waiting, generating gas in its boiler for the journey, its sides bedecked with flags. I took one last look and at that moment the church tower and the building-brick fortress walls with their wide tops covered in soft grass all started to move. My childhood, my friends, twelve hundred and fifty-two days, my first love, the terrifying summer storms, the centuries-old lime tree below our window, God’s Eye in its topmost branches, life on a thread, dark lofts, the stench of a room crammed with people, Friday prayers in the dormitories, funeral carts, one of which had borne away my grandfather, people paraded with numbers round their necks, square-built SS men, Arie whose photo I was carrying with me in my pocket, the waiting for this moment – everything was leaving me and disappearing into the treetops. The wood gas gave off an irritating and unusual smell. My cousin opened his briefcase and unwrapped a slice of bread topped with egg and slices of wartime salami, and home-made buns filled with curd cheese and jam.
He asked about our father, from whom we had had no news for several months. The lorry would stop each time it came to a hill that was at all steep and I would jump down and walk those few free yards up the road alongside ditches full of helmets that had not yet rusted and the debris of motor vehicles. When at last we reached the top of a hill from which we could see Prague, Mother burst into tears and there was no consoling her.
4
Our flat in the house on the Old Town Square (the very day after our arrival, I ignored their objections and ran off to see it, squeezing through half-cleared barricades, jumping holes in the paving, sliding down heaps of stones and granite blocks, gaping at a bomb-site and an overturned tramcar until I finally arrived and was brought up short by the woeful sight of the burnt-out and smouldering shell of the Old Town Hall) was still locked, deserted and apparently full of other people’s things, so we spent the first days at Auntie Simona’s.
Auntie Simona was the wife of my father’s brother Gustav. I scarcely remembered my uncle, because he’d fled the country even before the outbreak of war; Auntie stayed behind because she didn’t think the war would last long. She was scared of going abroad and didn’t want to abandon her elderly mother. Now she was awaiting her husband’s return as we were our father’s and her patience was rewarded. A few days after the war ended a letter arrived bearing the stamp of the British military post. A single sheet of paper on which Uncle Gustav asked for news of herself, her mother, her brother-in-law Viktor – my father – and the family in general, whether we were alive, and then tried to give an account of the six years during which he had been unable to send us any news; he wrote that he had fought under General Montgomery at Tobruk and later taken part in the siege of Aachen, where he did get wounded, but not seriously. Auntie sobbed with joy. But we waited in vain for similar news. We had no idea where to look for Father or from what quarter the good or bad tidings might come. Mother would telephone the authorities and different institutions and we would spend our evenings glued to the wireless set in case we missed any of the announcements from the repatriation commissions. It seemed to me inconceivable that among all those names of all those people, the one we waited for hadn’t yet appeared. But the longer we waited the harder we found it to believe that the name would eventually come up. I would creep into the corner of the room that was allotted to me and where my bed was covered in the eight volumes of The Three Musketeers and freshly baked goodies. But in the evening, when I’d finally torn myself away from my book and switched off the light, I would lie there sleepless. I can’t be sure whether what I felt was anxiety about my father or my own fear of a world without Father. Although during the previous four years I’d almost lost all awareness of the normal world – the world in which people go out to work, earn money, and go shopping – I understood enough to realise that unless my father returned there would be no chance of a return to anything of my former life, which seemed within reach.
I would lie there with open eyes, the dull light from the street lamps shining into the room. Between Athos and d’Artagnan, in the deafening thunder of horses’ hooves, blue and white figures would be running about, their gaunt heads shaven; the muskets would go off and the figures would fall to earth and lie there frightful and non-human as I’d seen them lie by the moat and on the pathways, their lifeless faces covered in flies. It was possible that somewhere my father was lying like that, unidentified, and we would go on waiting in vain for weeks and months to come, and it would be up to me to start taking care of the family, going out to work – but how and what as? And at that moment I would convince myself that my father was strong and always coped somehow and would search my memory for proof. But usually the only image to surface was very ordinary: my father sitting at his writing desk in the evening surrounded on all sides by piles of books and papers. In front of him and slightly to one side, his drawing board and his big white slide-rule with the Faber trade-mark. Father was working; his head, with its short black hair, motionless; only his hand was moving; he was writing. Father heeded nothing and I was strictly forbidden to disturb him. Or I would remember waking up in the middle of the night – I was afraid of the dark, so my mother used to leave open the door to the hallway where earlier a light had been left on but was now switched off; only an enormous, terrifying moon hung unmoving in the sky. I wanted to cry out in fear, but at that moment I caught sight of a beam of light shining from Father’s study and I got up and ran quietly to the door and saw him through the chink: his motionless back, dark head and short haircut. And I at once felt safe. On another occasion, we were going somewhere by diesel express and the train halted in the middle of nowhere. When we had been stationary for several minutes, my father, too restless to sit and wait like the other passengers, got down from the train (and I with him) and set off in the direction of the locomotive. Two mechanics were squatting flummoxed by the open motor. Father asked them something, then took from his pocket the little black notebook he carried with him everywhere (incredibly dog-eared and every single page written on; but he loved well-used things, or rather he enjoyed testing things to see if they could be pushed beyond their normal limits as he could), made a rapid drawing in it, then took off his jacket, knelt on the ground and started to fiddle about in the motor. (I swelled with pride
at the time, while quivering with anxiety whether he would manage to cure the enormous machine’s immobility.) Another time, during a storm in the woods, there was my father building me a little awning from branches and a rain mac; at some meeting in a hall full of people, there he was arguing with the speaker, the audience around him first doubling up with laughter and then applauding him; in the flat below ours, a Mr Chromec gassed himself, the housekeeper was ringing our doorbell white with agitation, and there was my father in a black dressing-gown picking the man’s lock with a piece of wire. Above all, don’t strike a light! The sickly and oppressive smell of gas wafted out of the flat; there was Father leaping over something lying on the floor and opening the window. He could cope in all sorts of situations, so why hadn’t we heard his name yet?
5
I discovered his journal many years later: a school exercise book with red covers. The label bore Father’s name, now scarcely legible, and above it the inscription:
ELEKTR. ANMERKUNGEN –
March–April 1945
I turned the first page. I had never been able to understand a single sentence or equation of all the tens of thousands of sentences and equations that Father had so far written and solved; I opened the book purely because of the date on its cover. Inside the cover, Father had drawn his own calendar for 1945; the days were methodically crossed off as far as 12th April, his birthday.
The opening was algebra. Lambda one equals zero five, lambda two equals one point zero eight phi. Father had used the backs of printed forms from an airport for drawing his diagrams and graphs and stuck them into the notebook somehow. The forms had columns labelled: Flugweg nach . . . Frontansflug um . . . Uhr . . . Fronteinflug . . . Zeitänderung um . . . I found it odd that Father should have been making calculations during those last days in a German camp, and I thumbed through the book page by page. The days were carefully marked and as usual I could make no sense of the calculations, until it came to 12th April when the calculations abruptly stopped and in their place Father had written: ‘It’s my birthday. If only I knew that my loved ones were alive. I wouldn’t want to face the future without them. But I’m sure we’ll soon see each other again well and free. For my birthday I have 200 gms. of bread for the day and this evening I’ll probably get a litre of soup, 50 gms. of margarine and 20 gms. of honey substitute.’
And with a different pencil, apparently that same evening, he had added: ‘Around 14:30 we had an air raid. The building next door burned down. I was lucky enough not to end my life with an exact age.’
This was followed by regular diary entries. Father used to keep note of the food rations, and of the Wehrmacht news bulletins, from which he tried to deduce the movements of the Red Army troops.
On the twenty-first of April at two o’clock at night they were issued with a loaf of bread, a quarter kilo of salami, a tin of ersatz coffee and some tea. Father also packed ‘my blanket, the photos of my loved ones, my slide-rule, notebooks, spoon and knife . . .’ Then they were herded northwards.
By evening they had walked twenty-five kilometres and Father and his friend G. slept out in the woods under the sky. He ate a quarter of his bread and a third of the salami. He was a methodical man and had decided to spread his meagre food ration over three days. Next morning they were roused at dawn and had to walk non-stop for half a day. Only in the afternoon were they given an hour’s rest. ‘I am lying on my back thinking,’ he wrote. ‘Everything possible is going through my head. What has become of the family? Are they still where they were? Perhaps they’ve been driven out too. I reassure myself that the front isn’t moving towards them and they are therefore safe. But what about when the front reaches them? Did they get sent to Auschwitz? Then I think about myself. What if I don’t make it? It would be a shame not to be able to publish my work on the bimotor theory. I think I’ve made a good job of setting it out. It suddenly strikes me that it’s wrong to be thinking about something so insignificant. The main thing is that the Germans should lose the war. Yes, that’s easy to say, but even so I wouldn’t like to finish buried here in the sand. I don’t want to lose right at the very end! I have eaten my piece of bread and salami slowly. It’s disappearing terrifyingly fast!
‘We’re still moving. It’s starting to rain and a cold breeze is blowing, most likely from the sea; perhaps we’re almost there. I put the blanket over my head. It’s awfully windy here. Walking is difficult. My coat and blanket weigh a hundredweight; I don’t know how to carry them. I’d sooner chuck them away – but what about the night? And what if it doesn’t stop raining?
‘No stopping. We’ve already done at least 25 kms. How far do they want to go? There’s a village on the horizon. Maybe there. No. Onwards again. We pass through several more villages until late in the evening the SS mark out a square in the forest. It’s dreadfully wet, everything is sodden. I threw the blanket off me and thought I’d fall on my face. There are three of us trying to find somewhere a bit dry to sleep. G. and I rake together leaves and I look for a wire or stick to prop up an awning. I make the awning out of a blanket and a few sticks tied together with bits of string. One blanket goes on the ground, one goes on top of the three of us, and the third is supposed to shield us from the rain. When I’m finished I eat a mouthful of bread and go to bed. I don’t even have the strength to think. At night it rains. An absolute downpour. I’m proud of my awning. It’s miraculous: the water runs off the blanket as off a tent. My mind went back to scout camps. I wouldn’t have dared do anything like that then. Sleeping out on the ground with just a thin blanket for a tent. In the middle of April! And 35 kms. a day on an empty stomach. But we saw one little boy who couldn’t go any further. He was left behind in a ditch with a red hole in the middle of his head. I don’t want to end like that! I mustn’t! I must withstand everything! The Germans have already lost the war, I don’t want to lose it too. I’ve got big plans still.
‘23.4.1945. We’re making tea. There wasn’t enough time; I only managed a swallow. I ate a piece of bread and some of the remaining portion of salami. We trudge along waterlogged and muddy tracks again. The first evening, I swapped my shoes with a Pole for some high boots of a larger size. They are almost too big for me. I’m getting blisters on my feet and they hurt at every step. The leader is constantly haranguing us for dawdling. It’s already noon and no break yet. Why all the hurry, since we can’t be going anywhere in particular? I’m feeling the effects of hunger and thirst. I chew at some plant that grows in the ditch and tastes like leek. We’ve already gone at least 35 kms. since morning and we straggle through the meadows like a wounded snake. My legs and feet hurt terribly – like walking through fire. I walk. Left. For a long time, nothing, then: right. Nothing again, then: left. Just pain. Even so we managed to reach the village without a single loss of life. Most of the lads had been receiving parcels from home and are therefore fit. I’m one of very few out of those five hundred really to have gone hungry for the past month and lived entirely from my own body’s reserves.
‘They divided us between two barns. We had straw and a roof. I almost fell on the ground. For a while I just lay there, then I ate the last morsel of bread but it only made me more hungry.
‘24.4. In the morning we get up and wash at the trough. Starting the day without anything to eat? So I go to the guards in the yard – an SS-man is looking for people to do a job. I volunteer in the hope of coming into contact with locals and getting a chance to trade the only thing I have: the tin of coffee. We’re going to fetch drinking water. There is some Pole sitting in the doorway eating bread. I expect I looked terribly envious because he took pity on me and called out to ask the SS-man if he could give me some. So I dashed over to the Pole – the slice was almost whole and spread with dripping, which even contained bits of meat. I gave half to G., and ate the other half myself. I never tasted anything so good in my whole life. In the end the farmer filled our hats with hot potatoes and we immediately had the feeling we were winning.
‘About eleven o’c
lock we set off again and walked for several hours through a sandy wasteland before we caught sight of an SS camp in the forest. Everywhere there are cars, lorries, cases, field kitchens, prisoners, horses. We are approaching a forest of tall trees growing out of the sandy soil. All the camps from the Berlin area are now assembled in the Mecklenburg Forest. Possibly 40,000 people.
‘They say we’re to stay here for some time. Actually it’s just as well, as I’m exhausted. I haven’t even the strength to build a tent. It’s not raining, so we just rake together a pile of leaves at the side of a stout tree-trunk. I spread a blanket out and G. and I lie down. After a few hours’ rest, I go off for a look at the people. They all have drawn features and are too thin to be recognisable. Thank goodness I can’t see what I look like.