This book is dedicated to the man who in this novel is called Bertie.
"So now my friends will kill this person," said Fr&ulein Louise. Outside her window I could see the old chestnut trees, their glistening branches bare. It was raining hard. 'They will kill this person," Fraulein Louise repeated, smiling happily. "Nothing can stop him."
"Have they finally found out who it is?" I asked.
"Not yet." I see.
"And so," she said, "it could be a man or a woman." Her face bore an expression of boundless confidence. "It could be a young person, an old person, a foreigner, a German—"
Her name was Gottschalk, Fr&ulein Louise Gottschalk. She spoke with a slight Czech accent. She came from Reichenberg— Liberec today—in what was the Sudetenland in Hitler's time. Her hair was snow white. She was sixty-two years old and had been a social worker with juveniles for forty-two years.
"Does he or she have a brother?" she went on. "A sister, a father, a mother? Any relatives? Perhaps. On the other hand, this person may have nobody. What profession? Any profession or none. Anything is possible." I see.
"Where is this person's home? Or is he or she fleeing? What is his name—or hers, if it is a woman? My friends don't know the answer to any of this. After all, they've never seen the person."
"I know. And still you're sure?"
"Absolutely sure. Do you want to know why? Because I outwitted them."
"Outwitted them?"
"Yes. I discussed it with them until they were just as determined as I am. After all, they can't let someone who has done something wicked go on being wicked. Because of him. Because of him!" she repeated. "You understand, Herr Roland?"
"Yes."
"Pretty smart of me, wasn't it?"
"Very."
"So that's what they promised me. And my friends can do anything. There's nothing on earth they can't do. That's why I know they'll find this person and save him! Oh, you can't imagine how happy I ami"
"Yes, I can."
"When they have caught him and he has been saved—that will be the most wonderful day of my life!" She laughed like a child anticipating Christmas morning.
I have never known anyone kinder than Louise Gottschalk. Not until I met her did I learn to appreciate what they really meant—all those conceptions that have become senseless or perverted by unscrupulous misuse: tolerance, belief in goodness, loyalty, reliability, love, courage, and the tireless efforts to make others feel safe and at peace.
Fraulein Louise's friends are: an American advertising man from New York's Madison Avenue; a Dutch publisher of textbooks from Groningen; a German pickle-factory owner from Seelze, near Hannover; a Russian circus clown from Leningrad; a Czech architect from Brunn; a Polish mathematics professor from Warsaw University; a German savings-bank employee from Bad Homburg; a Ukrainian peasant from Petrikova, near the Dnieper River; a French court reporter from Lyon; a Norwegian cook from Christiansand, in the southernmost part of Norway, near Cape Lindesnes; and a German philosophy student from Rondorf, near Cologne.
Fraulein Louise's friends come from various regions, and their characters, experiences, likes and dislikes, opinions and degrees of education are very different, too. They have only one thing in common—they have all been dead for ten years.
He heard seven shots, then he heard his father's voice. It seemed to come from far away. The shots didn't frighten him. He had heard too many since coming here; besides, there was shooting going on in his dream, but his father's voice woke him. 10
"You must get up, Karel," said his father.
He was standing beside the bed in which his son had slept; his smile was reassuring. He was a tall, thin man with a broad, high forehead, and he had beautiful hands. That evening the expression on his tired face was somber. "I've spoken to people in the village," he said. "They change the guards at midnight. While that's going on, the channel is unguarded for five minutes. That's when we can cross."
"What if they don't change the guards?" asked Karel.
"They change the guards every night," said his father, "and every night people manage to get across. Did you get some sleep?"
"Yes."
Karel stretched. He had left Prague with his father about fifty hours ago. They had been fleeing that long. It had been difficult to get out of the city. They had made complicated detours on crowded streetcars, on a truck and on foot, to avoid the foreign soldiers, their tank barriers and controls. Finally they had hopped a train and had ridden for a long time in an empty cattle car.
Karel's father knew they were looking for him. In the early morning hours of August 21, as soon as he had heard the news, he had known what would happen to him. They were looking for him to arrest him. This was logical and inevitable. He wasn't angry with those who were looking for him. They had to do it, just as he had had to do what he had done.
The fact that they were looking for him had made him cautious. He had thought over every step carefully, and everything had gone well so far. They had almost reached the Bavarian border. Only two more kilometers and they would be safe. But these last two kilometers were the most dangerous of all. That was why Karel's father had insisted that his son get some sleep, here in his grandmother's house. His father's mother. Only his friends knew where his mother lived and none of them would betray him.
The old woman lived alone on the outskirts of the village, where she ran a small stationary store. When there were any newspapers, she sold them, too; but for two days now there hadn't been any. Karel and his father had come to her because she lived near a section of the border that wasn't supposed to be too closely guarded; one could cross more easily here.
"What's the time?" asked Karel.
"Ten o'clock," said his father, laying a hand on his son's forehead. "You're hot. Do you have a fever?"
"No. I'm sure I don't." He shook his head. "I'm only hot because of the lion."
"What lion?"
"On Wenzelsplatz. In my dream. There were a lot of lions, and even more rabbits. But the lions had guns and the rabbits couldn't get away. The lions shot at the rabbits and every time one of them fell down."
"Poor rabbits!"
"No, no. Nothing happened to the rabbits. Every time a lion shot, a lion fell down. Wasn't that strange?"
"Very strange," said his father.
"Seven lions shot and all seven fell down and that's when you woke me up." Karel threw back the quilt and jumped naked out of his grandmother's high bed. He was eleven years old. His body was strong, long-legged and tanned, his eyes were big and as black as his short hair, which shone in the light of a nearby lamp. Karel was a serious boy; he read a lot. His teachers had nothing but praise for him. He had lived with his father in a big apartment in an old house on Jerusalemska Street. If you leaned out of the window, you could see the beautiful trees and blossoming shrubs and flowers of Vrchlickeho-sady Park and the small pond in the middle. When he had been a little boy, Karel had gone for walks in the park with his mother. He could remember it very well. His mother had asked her husband for a divorce and had moved to West Germany with another man just before Karel's fifth birthday. They had never received a letter from her.
When Karel's father had got him out of bed in the early morning hours of August 21, packed two suitcases and hurried out of the house with his son, first to hide in the apartment of friends, Karel had seen tanks with machine guns in the park between the roses, carnations, and dahlias. Men in strange uniforms had sat in the turrets, looking bewildered and sad. Karel had waved to them, and quite a few had waved back.
Karel's father pointed to a chair beside the bed. "I've put out your things," he said, and Karel could see his blue suit, the one he was only allowed to wear on Sundays. "We've got to wear our best thi
ngs," said his father, who was also wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie embroidered with tiny silver elephants. Two shots could be heard outside, in rapid succession. "We may lose our suitcases or have to leave them behind." 12
"Oh, that's why we're all dressed up," said Karel. "I see." His father crossed over to the window, pushed the calico curtain aside a little and looked out at the village street, lying empty in the moonlight. "Damn the moon!" he muttered, looking up at the honey-colored orb afloat in a dark sky full of stars. "I had so hoped it would be cloudy."
"Yes," said Karel. "That would have been better. Would you please help me with my tie?" He was a polite child. As he raised his chin so that his father could knot his tie, he asked, "But we're taking your trumpet, aren't we?" Now he sounded excited. "You're going to need it over there."
"Of course," said his father, his fingers awkward as he leaned down to fix his son's tie. "We're taking both suitcases and the trumpet."
Karel's father was a musician. For three years now he had been playing the trumpet he was about to carry from his native Republic of Czechoslovakia across the border to the Republic of West Germany, the so-called Bundesrepublik. It was a very good trumpet. Karel had often played it, too. The boy was very musical. Until the night of August 20, Karel's father had played in the EST Bar. It was one of the most elegant nightclubs in Prague and was part of the prestigious Esplanade Hotel on Washing-tonova Street, next to Vrchlickeho-sady Park and not far from their apartment on Jerusalemska Street.
"Ill carry the suitcases," said Karel's father, "and you carry the case with the trumpet."
"Oh, yes!" Karel was radiant. He worshiped his father because he was such a great artist and could play the trumpet so beautifully. Karel wanted to be a musician when he grew up; he had made up his mind about that. Whenever his father had practiced, Karel had sat on the floor at his feet, listening. But with the coming of spring, Karel hadn't been able to listen to his father practicing any more. A lot of strangers and some men and women he knew came to their apartment and talked agitatedly with his father and with each other for hours. They spoke of "freedom," of "the dawn of a new day," of "the future"—all very beautiful things, Karel decided. And then there was the evening when Karel was terribly proud of his father. Svaz spisovatelu, the Author's League, had invited other cultural groups to join in a panel discussion on television. It had lasted several hours, and among famous men and women—those pictures and names Karel had seen in the paper—there on the television screen in
13
their living room, he saw his father again and again, and heard what he had to say. And he had had a lot to say. Karel couldn't understand all of it, but he was sure that what his father said was good and wise, and he couldn't stop watching. The debate lasted until 3:30 in the morning (the television station had set no time limit), and it wouldn't have been exaggerating to say that practically every adult in the country had been listening and crying for joy and clapping at the screen, applauding those men and women who were saying what millions had wanted to say, had dreamed of for such a long time.
It was one of the things Karel couldn't understand, that because of his father's appearance on this television program, they had had to leave their apartment when the foreign soldiers came, and hide in the home of friends, and now had to flee the country in the middle of the night. But that was what his father had told him. The broadcast was the reason.
Since he couldn't understand any of it, the boy began asking questions again.
"If you hadn't talked so much about freedom and a new era, the soldiers wouldn't have come after us, would they?"
"No. I guess in that case they would have stayed in their barracks."
"And we could have gone on living in Jerusalemska Street."
"Yes."
The boy gave the matter some thought. "I don't care," he said finally. "What you said was wonderful. Next day everybody at school envied me." He thought again, and then went on. "I bet they're still envying me. And what you and the others said is still beautiful. I never heard anything like it. Honestly! My friends' parents and everybody else I spoke to felt the same way about it. And a thing can't be beautiful one minute and not beautiful the next, can it?"
"No."
"And you see," said Karel, frowning, "that's why I can't understand why you have to run away because of it, and why they want to lock you up. Why do they want to lock you up?"
"Because what I said didn't please everybody," said his father.
"The foreign soldiers didn't like it?"
"Oh... the foreign soldiers—"
"What about them?"
"They only obey orders."
"So the ones who give the orders weren't pleased?"
"They don't dare be pleased." 14
"Are those people very powerful?"
"Very powerful, yes—and then, again, quite powerless."
"Now I really don't understand," said Karel.
"Let me try to explain," said his father. "In their hearts, many of those who give the soldiers orders liked what we said, just as much as you and your friends and millions of people in our country did. And they're just as unhappy about it as the soldiers were in the park."
"So they're not wicked."
"No. They're not wicked. But they daren't admit that they liked what we said, and they daren't allow us to say things like that, or think or write them... because if they did, something terrible could happen."
"What?" asked Karel.
"Their people might get rid of them just as we got rid of our powerful ones. That's why those people who are so powerful are not really powerful at all. Now do you understand?"
"No." Karel frowned, and as if trying to excuse his ignorance, he added, "That's politics, isn't it?"
"Yes," said his father.
"That's why I can't understand it," said Karel.
Somewhere behind the little moonlit houses, far away across the fields in which the corn already stood high, they could hear the rat-tat-tat of an automatic weapon. "They're shooting again," said Karel.
"But not as often as this afternoon," said his father. "Come. Grandmother's waiting in the kitchen."
They left the dingy old-fashioned bedroom with its nineteenth-century furniture. Karel's father glanced for a moment at the picture over the bed, a lithograph of Jesus and his Apostles at the Garden of Gethsemane. The Apostles were asleep and Jesus was standing in front of them, the only one awake. He was speaking, His hand raised. At the bottom of the picture, in Czech, were the words, "Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak." And in the left-hand corner, in very small letters, in English: Printed by Samuel Levy and Sons, Charlottenburg (Berlin) 1909.
Outside, in the moonlight, the automatic was still rat-tat-tatting, dogs howled, then all was still again. And in the year 1909, immortalized on a lithograph by Samuel Levy and Sons in Berlin-Charlottenburg, the Savior was still preaching to his sleeping Apostles. It was 10:14 p.m. on August 27, 1968—a Tuesday.
"Radio Free Europe. We have just broadcast the news for our Czechoslovakian listeners." The voice ending the newscast came through the loudspeaker, followed by a recording of the Fidelio overture.
The old radio stood in a corner of the smoky kitchen, and it was playing so sof dy it was barely audible. Karel's grandmother had her ear pressed against the speaker. Now she switched to the Prague station and turned the radio off. Stooped over, she walked to the stove, on which a big pot was simmering. Her face had grown smaller with age, and her ability to stand up straight had diminished. Often she wished her time to die had come, but death kept her waiting. "There you are!" she said as Karel and his father walked into the kitchen. She picked up a ladle and began to fiU three soup plates. "Lentil soup," she said, "and I put in a few slices of smoked pork."
"Was it fat?" Karel sounded anxious as he sat down at the table beside the stove.
"It wasn't fat, dear heart," said his grandmother. She always c
alled him "dear heart." "It was just as lean as it could be."
"That's good," said her grandson.
Outside there were shots again. Karel tied a big napkin around his neck, waited for the others to start, then began to spoon up his soup. "It's very good, Grandmother," he said. "Couldn't be leaner."
After four spoonfuls of soup, Karel's grandmother said, "Radio Free Europe just said that the United Nations is in session day and night because of us."
"That's good of them," said her son.
"The Americans are furious."
"Of course. And after the newscast they played Beethoven."
"I'm not sure. It sounded like Beethoven."
"Of course it was Beethoven."
"How do you know?" asked Karel.
"When something happens like what's just happened to us, the 16
station always plays Beethoven after the news. The Fifth Symphony or the Fidelio Overture."
"Fidelio is beautiful; so is the Fifth Symphony/' said Karel. "Everything Beethoven wrote was beautiful, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said his father, passing a hand across his son's hair.
"We should resist and not lose heart," said his grandmother. "We are a heroic people. That's what they said."
"Sure, sure," said her son, eating his soup.
"And they are going to help us."
"Of course they are. Just the way they helped the Hungarians when it happened there."
"No. This time they're really going to do something about it. The Americans are going to demand that the Russians get out of our country and out of all the other countries they've occupied."
"Like hell they will!" said her son. "The Americans least of all! The Russians told them exactly what they were going to do so that the American people wouldn't panic and think the Third World War had started. They told the Americans that they had to occupy our country—it had become a necessity—but that was all they intended to do. And the Americans said: If that's all you're going to do—all right!"
"I don't understand," said his mother, looking frightened and old. "How do you know all this?"
"Our people found out about it in Prague. It's a conspiracy between the Great Powers. But of course in the West they have to pretend to be horrified. And that goddamned station still dares to offer us hope and urges us to resist! Just as they did when Hungary was occupied, and before that during the rebellions in East Germany and Poland."
The Traitor Blitz Page 1