Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

Anna sat up and adjusted her skirts, wincing. Josef had hurt her a little in his fury, but it had never been the same after she had given birth to Bobo. She had torn along the length of the scar tissue still left from Emil. It had taken months to heal. Three children, it was enough, whatever anyone said. Her body felt turned inside out, wrung out. She was a bag of bones. This was the best bit, the afterwards; a pleasant, sticky warmth between her legs and the smell of Josef, the quiet talk. She lay back down beside him.

  ‘What do you want to say …’ she said coaxingly.

  Josef hesitated. ‘Remember our wedding night …?’ he said eventually.

  She smiled, lying next to him. She loved the redundancy of the question. It was his way of saying many things by saying nothing.

  She turned to him and propped herself up on one elbow. ‘I remember the arguments between our parents. Lord! Five thousand crowns and three copper basins. You were lucky my mother didn’t persuade my father to hold out for the kettle.’ She enjoyed deflating Josef when he became sentimental.

  ‘He knew well enough,’ Josef growled, ‘He knew if he didn’t palm you off on the Maximoffs no one else would take you, headstrong girl!’

  She thumped him. ‘Liar!’

  ‘Five thousand was a fortune to your father. He would have done the deal for half the amount.’

  ‘You begged your father to pay. He could easily afford it. You showed him my needlework and told him I would make it back for you in six months.’

  Josef pushed her off him, groaning. ‘I should never have told you that, girl, you’ve been big-headed ever since!’

  They lay next to each other for a moment, smiling up at the sky. Then Anna sighed. ‘Your poor father … your mother …’

  Josef’s parents had died within three months of each other, the winter after their son was married. His mother had contracted peritonitis and perished in agony in the small hours of a freezing January morning. Josef’s father, who disliked his own wife so much he had hardly spoken to her in years, contracted pneumonia in sympathy and withered the following month, three weeks before the first thaw. It had taken ice-picks and two days’ labour to bury him.

  She could not bear for them to become serious yet. ‘Do you remember, the bee …?’

  ‘You smashed it with your fist. Everybody laughed …’

  ‘Our wedding night …’

  She rolled over on top of him, her face very close to his, looking down on him with her smile growing wider and wider …

  He pushed at her, grinning. She rolled off him and sat up, tipping her face to the sky. No skylarks, today. She glanced down and saw that there was some dry grass on her skirt. She picked it off. Tekla was with Emil – or maybe she would have gone down to the stream by now and started the washing. Eva would have found some excuse not to help. Ludmila would be looking after Bobo who would be clinging and whining because his mother had dared to leave him for an hour. There would be stony looks when they returned to the cottage.

  ‘What are we going to do about Emil?’ Josef asked sadly. ‘He’s so naïve and immature. What if something happens to me? How could he be the man of this family?’

  ‘He was an only child for so long. Only children stay children much longer. He still thinks he will be looked after all the time.’

  ‘Oh, Anna …’ Josef was still lying on his back, his face upturned to the sky. She looked down at him and saw that he was crying, although his features remained still. The tears carved shining lines from the corners of his eyes, across his temples and into his hairline. He blinked, and put his hands over his face. ‘This stupid war. Didn’t they orphan enough children last time round? Wasn’t it enough misery for them?’

  Anna looked down at him. ‘Husband …’

  Josef removed his hands from his face and opened his eyes, wiping them with the back of his hand, his voice suddenly brisk again. ‘I must persuade the others tonight. We should have flown East while we had the chance. Every week, things get worse.’

  Anna stood and brushed down her skirt. She held out her hand, to raise him.

  He grasped her hand and sat upright but did not stand. He looked out across the fields, then up at her, frowning slightly. ‘The seam of my waistcoat is going, here, on the left-hand side …’

  ‘Oh …’ Anna said, keeping the impatience out of her voice. She adjusted her apron with her free hand. She hoped Tekla had had the good sense to start baking the potatoes. Eva would be wandering around the cottage waving a duster as if she was cleaning up. She never did anything unless Anna was there to berate her.

  ‘Tekla noticed this morning. She said you only have the grey thread left,’ he added as he stood, dropped her hand and ran both of his palms over the creases in his trousers. He buttoned his flies and buckled his belt. ‘I am hoping she’s wrong.’

  Anna gave a small smile. ‘Ill look.’ Tekla was absolutely right, as usual. They turned to walk back along the hedge.

  *

  When they returned to the shack, they found Eva in floods of tears and Ludmila singing at the top of her voice at a screaming Bobo who appeared to be trying to tear out his own hair. Parni was sitting in the corner on the dirt floor, blithely scraping the rust from a bucket with a wire brush.

  ‘I see the war is still on,’ Josef remarked drily.

  Eva rounded on them. ‘She cannot expect me to help her with the sheets as well! Haven’t I enough to do! I do everything!’ she shouted. Tekla was nowhere to be seen.

  Josef picked his best hat from the peg just inside the door. ‘I must organise the divano,’ he said, with an air of great purpose. Anna ignored him. Looking a little deflated, he turned away.

  ‘Where is Tekla?’ Anna asked Ludmila.

  Ludmila stopped singing, thus achieving the purpose of Anna’s question. ‘Washing sheets. She knows I can’t take Bobo down to the stream. You know what happened last time.’

  ‘Bobo could have stayed with me!’ spat Eva.

  The boy was still crying, accompanied by the regular tsk-tsk of his sister’s wire brush against the bucket.

  ‘Why is she doing that indoors?’ Anna demanded of Ludmila, pointing at Parni.

  ‘Tekla told us all to stay inside,’ replied Eva. She dropped on her knees, grabbed a cloth from a nearby chair, wrapped it over her head and pulled an ugly grimace. ‘Don’t you know the Germans shoot people just for walking down the road?’ she said, mimicking Tekla’s deep, thick grumble of a voice. ‘Do you want to get us massacred …’

  ‘Stay inside and help me with the sheets!’ declared Ludmila, dropping to her knees and joining Eva in her mimicry. ‘Go to the stream and be sensible! Help me and don’t help me!’

  Bobo had stopped pulling his hair and thrown himself at his mother’s legs, clinging to them so desperately that she had to bend and prise him loose in order to be able to hoist him into her arms.

  ‘Wooden God give me strength!’ she shouted as she lifted him up, simultaneously spying the basket full of unwashed potatoes behind the door.

  *

  No one came to eat with them, which was unusual – and discourteous. After his solitary meal, Josef sat outside the shack on a stool while Tekla took the pan to one side so that the women and children could take their share. Normally, he had Emil for company, but Tekla had banished him down to the stream to eat from his tin plate alone. Josef’s anger against his son had melted now. He missed him.

  He took his pipe and pouch from his pocket. He had only a few shreds of tobacco left, mixed with dried grass and leaves, but the action of filling and lighting the pipe was comforting. A single puff and it went out again, which gave him the luxury of relighting the taper from the embers of the fire, each time managing to fool himself he was about to have a smoke.

  Anna came, lugging a zinc tub of damp earth, to clod down the fire before blackout. She put the tub down and squatted next to it, looking up at him. The evening had become cool; she had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked. She nod
ded.

  There was a silence. Their shack stood apart from the others, at the end of the lane. There were no other houses in the vicinity. Only their kumpánia inhabited the deserted hamlet. There was an old barn for the horses and room for the carts. The nearest gadje village was five kilometres away. Josef and Václav had managed to find farm work after they had returned from Kladno, unable to find Ctibor Michálek. The local council had given them permission to use the hamlet. It had been empty even before the invasion. It wasn’t a bad place to wait out the war.

  Anna said quietly, ‘You know that Václav will speak against you tonight, don’t you?’

  Josef paused in the action of raising the taper to his pipe. He put the taper down, removed the pipe from his mouth and frowned, still staring straight ahead. His voice was expressionless. Anna was speaking out of turn. ‘Václav is my oldest friend. We are brothers. He is Emil’s kirvo.’

  Anna did not respond. After a moment, she rose and went back inside the cottage.

  *

  The sky was beginning to darken. The fields were grey by the time Josef buttoned his coat and walked down the lane. As he passed the other shacks, he glanced in. Božena Winterová was pulling the blackout curtains across her window, tweaking the old cloth gently across the wire. She glanced out as he passed and gave the cloth a swift, violent tug. Next to the Winters’, the Zelinkas’ home was yellow-lit and the door open but nobody in sight. It was unusual for no one to be sitting on the step. The evening was mild. He wondered if everyone was staying indoors now they all knew of the killings at the village. Even the children were out of sight.

  He climbed the stile. Across the rapidly darkening field, the other men were already gathered, awaiting him. No fire could be lit, but they were seated in a circle around a symbolic pile of twigs. A couple of faces turned towards him at the sound of his approach, and continued to stare as he strode across the scrubby grass towards them.

  When had Anna ever been wrong? Pray to God she was wrong now. If Václav spoke against him, it meant the end of the kumpánia.

  He knew as soon as he took his place that Anna was right. Václav gave him a coldly courteous nod as he arrived. The others would not look at him. Everybody seemed morose.

  After the greetings, he rose immediately. There was no point in delaying what had to be said.

  ‘I have been saying for some time now that we should keep moving,’ he said, ‘and the events of today have proved me right. The Devil Germans have gone completely mad. We must flee to Slovakia immediately. We must try and forge papers or find a gadjo who will do it for us. I have said all along that we should leave Bohemia, as soon as we failed to find the gadjo Michálek. He was our only reason for coming here in the first place. We should have gone straight back to Třebič there and then. We are sitting ducks in this hamlet. They can come and get us whenever they want. This morning proved that. They know exactly where we are. Those villagers they killed, they thought they could just sit tight as well. It will be our turn next.’

  After he had finished, he sat, and in the silence that ensued, he realised that every other man around the fire was waiting for Václav to speak. Was he the last man in the kumpánia to realise he would be opposed?

  Václav glanced at him as he rose. Then he bowed slightly, turning in a semi-circle to include all of the seated men. He lowered his head and directed his remarks to the pile of twigs. Above him, the bats swooped soundlessly in the gloom.

  ‘You know with what regard I hold our Rom Baró,’ he began, acknowledging Josef with a brief dip of his head. ‘Kakó, you know it too.’ Josef wondered if there was not a slightly sarcastic edge to that Kakó. Chief. He was unused to hearing it from Václav’s lips. They were normally just brothers.

  Václav had turned back to the others. ‘He and I have travelled together many long years. I am kirvo to his first-born, his son. But I must oppose him now. Slovakia is not the place for us to go. In Slovakia, the Roma live in holes in the ground. I would rather die than go back there. It is a land of darkness and ignorance. There may not be so many Germans but the Slovaks will be doing their job just as well, you can be sure of that. Josef is sincere but misguided. I believe he is weak in his thoughts. It was seven years before his wife bore him a child – I do not mean to offend you, Kakó, but I must speak as I find. Seven years is a long time. He is a good man but not strong. He has hesitated all his life. We all know he is led by influences …’

  The silence of the men had acquired a stunned quality, broken only by a distant shout from the cottages, a mother calling in a child. Josef stared at Václav. They all knew he hated Slovakia and was determined not to go there but he was speaking against Josef in such personal terms. Such words could only mean that a dam was breaking, that years of withheld bitterness and resentment were coming to the fore.

  Josef became aware that he was drawing breath very deeply, his eyes staring wide and unblinkingly at Václav.

  ‘We knew where Law 117 would lead,’ Václav continued. ‘Czechs, Germans, Germans, Czechs. They’re just as bad as each other.’ He began to slap the back of one hand into the palm of the other. ‘A gadjo is a gadjo is a gadjo! Getting away from Germans will do us no good whatsoever. The truth is, all gadje are evil. The Slovaks too …’

  Josef rose to his feet. To rise while another man was still speaking was a clear breach of etiquette. The other men looked from Josef to Václav and back again. Yakali murmured in alarm.

  ‘They are not the same,’ Josef said, unable to do more than quietly assert what he knew in his bones to be true. His voice was low. ‘They are not.’

  Václav faced him, speaking quietly too. ‘To us, they are.’ Then he shouted. ‘I say they are!’

  In the face of his vehemence, Josef wavered. ‘What are you suggesting we do?’ he said.

  Václav shrugged. ‘We have no choice. We hide out here. We wait. We work the farms while we can and live off roots if we have to, we’ve done that often enough before.’

  ‘We have a few hours’ work each week. This winter we will freeze to death in those hovels, or starve. That’s if the Germans leave us alone that long.’

  ‘Now you are certain. Now, all of a sudden, because a few gadje have been shot, that makes your mind up, after we have been debating all these months? How do we know you won’t change your mind halfway down the road? How, Kakó?’

  Josef felt anger rising up within him again and was suddenly overwhelmed with it. First my son disobeys me when I forbid him to leave the cart, now this. Does no one heed me, value me? Am I of no consequence? I am Rom Baró! ‘It doesn’t matter what I have said or thought in the past. I am saying what I think now. That is what matters! Does it matter to you, Václav?’

  Václav looked at the men around him, lifted his hands and let them drop, as if to say, see, I was right. He shrugged, and sat.

  Josef felt breathless. He had been about to step forward to Václav and raise his hands to him, to shake him for his insulting behaviour, but Václav seating himself had made that impossible.

  What am I? Josef thought. Am I losing my dignity? I nearly hit him then – nearly began brawling like a common drunk, a gadjo. It is vanity. I am arguing because I cannot bear to think that I may be wrong and Václav right. I am intent on avenging a personal slight without stopping to wonder whether, however clumsy his speech, Václav’s opinion could be correct. A true Rom Baró thinks only of his kumpánia, not himself. But another voice in his head said, let them go. The fewer the better. If it is just our family trying to get into Slovakia we can dress as peasants and go on foot. If we try and take this whole lot with us, we don’t stand a chance. Václav has just insulted me. The rest of them sit there like sheep. I owe these people nothing, myself and my family everything. Walk away. Let them go.

  Josef drew himself up to his full height. ‘This divano is broken!’ he declared. ‘I will not wait for a vote from Elders who have seemingly lost their tongues. You have conspired before this meeting. If you wish Václav Winter to be y
our new Rom Baró then you are free to elect him. I and my family will be leaving for the East just before dawn. Anyone who wishes to do so of his own free will is welcome to join us.’ He turned to Václav. ‘If you ever speak of my wife again, I will cut out your tongue.’

  Václav leapt to his feet. He slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand. ‘How dare you threaten me!’ He advanced upon Josef. The other men scrambled up from the grass. ‘Me mangar kris!’ Václav bellowed. I demand justice!

  Josef stepped towards him. Václav squared up. The others were between them, all talking at once.

  Yakali cried out, ‘Beat him with words! Beat him with words!’

  Justin said, ‘How can we have a kris? Who will adjudicate?’ He was right. Where would they find krisnitoria in the middle of a war?

  ‘How can we not have a kris?’ Václav shouted in retort. He was right too. If there was no kris, then there was no justice, no law, nothing. It meant anarchy. Josef felt dizzy. They were all shouting like children. The kumpánia was unravelling before him, like a shawl being pulled by a thread. Everything he had worked for, it was all dissolving. How could he have threatened Václav like that? He must restore order immediately or his reputation would be gone.

  He hesitated for a moment, then turned sharply and limped off into the darkness. Behind him, there was a moment of shocked silence before the men’s voices broke out again. Someone called after him – Yakali, perhaps – but he continued striding away as fast as his bad leg would carry him. They could say what they liked. He was sick of being a Rom. He would dress like a cowherd and lead oxen when they got to Slovakia – Anna could take in washing for all he cared. They would pretend to be gadje for as long as it took to stay alive.

  *

  No one came near them for the rest of the night, not even to bid them farewell. The others slept but Josef stayed awake, watching the night sky, chewing dried oak leaves and thinking bitter thoughts. While it was still dark – while it was darkest – a single, bent figure made its way up the lane, dragging a sack of belongings which clattered and chinked as if the pots and pans inside might be protestingly alive. It was Pavliná Franzová, the Ancient One, an extra mouth to feed but a mouth that spoke fluent German. She’s not stupid, Josef thought, observing her approach, and she knows the Germans better than any of us. She and her long-dead husband had joined up with Josef’s kumpánia after the last war, when they had been hounded out of their homes during the riots between the Czechs and Germans in Sudetenland. Josef was reassured by her decision to join them. It was not just him, then, leading his family into doom.