Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  In the first of the whitewashed cottages, the one furthest from the canal and set apart slightly from the others, lives a family by the name of Malík.

  Jan Malík is patriarch and ruler of all he surveys. When he smiles, the sun shines. When he frowns, his wife, daughter and both dogs hide beneath the kitchen table.

  His wife is called Líba. She is small (her husband is tall) and her face closed and pinched. It is a secretive, dark-little face, with neat, expressionless features. She wears clogs like all the other women, but unlike them has learnt to walk across the dirt floor of her cottage with tiny, sliding steps that are virtually soundless. She even manages to keep her skirt from rustling. She wears her headscarf tightly wrapped around her skull, as if the dark cloth might keep captive any thoughts that are in danger of escaping. She has learnt, over time, that to let a thought escape is a very dangerous thing indeed.

  The daughter is called Marie. More of her later.

  *

  The reason Jan Malík got into so many fights was – his brother Karel once said to him – that he looked like Charlie Chaplin.

  This was absurd. Jan Malík was a clear foot taller than the Little Tramp. His skin was four shades darker, his hands twice as big and his moustache three times as bushy. But there was something comic about Jan. His arms were too long – his jackets never fitted properly and he always displayed a length of wrist. He had a narrow waist for such a big man and his trousers always hung haphazardly around his hips. His feet were huge, his shoes bulging from beneath the loose flare of his trouser legs.

  This comic look was unfortunate, for there was nothing comic, or even happy, in Jan Malík’s nature, as many men had realised only too late. Another man could look at Jan and fail entirely to take him seriously. Surely there could be no harm in such an odd and slender figure – surely if Jan got into a fight he would be all arms whirling windmill-like and clumsy, half-meant punches? It was a misapprehension with sometime tragic consequences, the opponent would realise at the first blow, as the solid mettle of Jan Malík’s fist made contact with his soft flesh or smashed into and splintered brittle bone.

  Jan Malík liked a fight, and he liked to practise fighting. He fought with other men – any man – and he practised on his wife.

  There was a way to hit your wife, the men of Romanov agreed, and Jan Malík went way beyond the way. You had to keep a woman in line, of course – and there were some women who were never happy until they had provoked a good slap. But Jan Malík did a great deal more than that, and he was inventive. To lash out in anger was one thing, to use your imagination quite another.

  His wife was ill one day – jaundice it later turned out to be – and Jan Malík believed that she was shirking because he had told her to stop being dreary round the house and go and collect nettles from the river bank, to feed the geese. He knew she hated nettle-collecting. He knew that as she turned obediently for the door, she was giving a gentle sigh. The predictability of this reaction enraged him. He took his wife out to the front of the cottage, where the whole of Romanov could watch her humiliation, and beat her with a leather strap until her blouse was shredded and stained with blood. The others came to their doors to watch with narrowed eyes, but no one intervened. Later, when her eyes went yellow and a doctor had to be summoned, he accused her of becoming ill to draw attention to herself, to advertise her rawness to the world.

  On another occasion, he caught her sobbing in the back yard as she plucked a chicken. It was winter. Her hands were swollen and chapped from carrying water to and from the pump and the skin had cracked across the knuckles, leaving tiny red crevices of open flesh. The chicken’s plumage was sticking to the knuckles where they bled. Extracting the tiny white feathers from the wounds was making her weep and rock with pain.

  Jan was furious. She was weeping to shame him, he said, to tell the whole of Romanov that she was miserable at having such a bad husband. He would show her how bad he was. Let him give her something to cry about. He grabbed her hand and rubbed it up and down against the frozen, splintered bark of a nearby tree trunk.

  Everyone disapproved of Jan’s behaviour but nobody took responsibility for doing anything about it. If she had been a girl from a respectable Roma family then her father or another male relative would have reclaimed her long ago – but Líba belonged to nobody. She was an orphan, sold to Jan by an uncle when a group of itinerant farm-workers passed through Orlavá during the cucumber season. She knew nothing of her family history – the aunt and uncle who raised her had told her nothing. As she had no background and no trade, Jan had got her cheap.

  He was an orphan too, so he handled his own negotiations. His brother Karel tried to act for him but Jan dismissed his help – as he dismissed everything that Karel tried to do. Karel was the good brother, the well-thought-of one. He was the only person who might have brought pressure to bear on Jan to desist but apart from a few quiet words, Karel did nothing.

  (On his deathbed, in 1962, Karel Malík, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was to confess to his daughter. All his life, he said, he had told himself that he never stopped his brother Jan from beating his wife because it wasn’t his place to interfere. Only when his body was rotting inside-outwards from stomach cancer had he the courage to admit the truth. Jan’s bad reputation had suited Karel fine. Having such an ill-thought-of brother was obliquely gratifying. People said, Karel Malík is so kind and wise and modest, what a shame about that terrible brother.)

  There were sixty-seven people living in the eight cottages of Romanov, counting the half-derelict one that housed only Shabba, the beggarwoman-drunk. Collectively, they all had a vested interest in doing nothing.

  *

  Líba Malíková had committed other sins apart from being poor, unskilled and having no lineage to speak of. She had produced but one child, for a start, a girl.

  Líba had been afraid of how Jan would react to the birth of a daughter – every man was disappointed not to get a son – but for a while, Marie seemed to soften him. She was born in the summer. As soon as autumn threatened, he was the first man in Romanov down at the woods collecting pine cones. With a baby in the house, he said, they would need a good stock for the winter. Líba watched him labour up the lane bent double underneath the weight of the huge wicker basketful. Sometimes, he even sang while he chopped wood. Things were not so bad when Marie was a baby.

  Then came that night. Líba and Jan were lying together on the wooden bed, Marie between them. Jan suddenly lifted himself over the baby and flopped down on top of his wife. She had jumped, her breath pushed out of her, then lain obediently still, feeling the rough pressure of his knees pushing up her skirt and forcing her legs apart. His left hand grasped a fistful of her hair – the other was fumbling with his trousers.

  After a few minutes of fumbling, he seemed to give up, lying motionless on top of her, his stubbled cheek resting against hers and his other hand still grasping her hair. She was holding her breath, his unsupported weight heavy upon her. Her lungs began to ache with the effort. Eventually, he lifted himself from her and slid carefully over the baby, to his side of the bed, where he lay turned away from her, facing the wall. Líba kept her breathing shallow, undetectable, until she was sure he was asleep.

  The beatings resumed the following day. They seemed worse now. Perhaps they had always been that bad and she had just forgotten in the brief interlude when she had not been beaten. But there seemed to her an extra element of disgust and repulsion in the way he handled her. If he came upon her breastfeeding, he winced and turned away. I am revolting to him, Líba thought. Maybe it was simply that she had always revolted him. On their wedding night, he had gestured for her to lift her own skirt – he would not contaminate himself by handling her lower garments. She was always careful to stand still and fold her skirt out of his way as he passed, wrapping it tightly around her legs until he was safely out of reach. The only useful thing her aunt had ever taught her as a girl was that if one of the male harvest workers i
nsulted her in the field, she was to shake her skirt at him. The threat of such defilement would send the bravest youth running back to the safety of the other men.

  As their daughter became older, as she showed the first signs of puberty, Jan’s behaviour worsened further. Líba knew it must be difficult for him – it was hard for any man to be outnumbered by women in his own home. She worked at her duties with extra diligence, and she taught Marie to stay out of his way.

  *

  Jan never beat his daughter. He never needed to. She was used to standing in the corner and watching as her mother was hammered to the floor, so one of her father’s dark looks was always enough to make her drop to her knees and bow her head in submission.

  One day, while Jan was sitting at the table, finishing his lunch, he said to Líba, who stood in the corner. ‘Where is the girl?’

  ‘I sent her to the pump, Husband,’ Líba replied, looking at the ground – it would have been insolent to raise her head when Jan addressed her. ‘She must learn to draw water cleanly. Yesterday, the bucket came back muddy. I had to send her back three times.’

  It was essential for any Roma girl to know how to draw water cleanly. Her future husband’s family would judge her on that. Some of the women in Romanov talked of nothing but how their daughters could fill a bucket to the brim and bring it home without ever once resting it on the ground or allowing it to brush against their skirts.

  Líba liked to pretend to Jan that she was hard on Marie. It was the best way to protect her. ‘She didn’t want to go,’ she added, ‘but I told her, she has to learn.’ It was already the longest conversation Líba and Jan had had for some months.

  Jan was silent for a moment, wiping his plate with his bread. He gave a small snort. ‘I suppose so. I will want clean water.’

  Líba raised her head swiftly. Jan was not looking at her. She lowered her head again, drawing breath slowly, then approached the table to take away his empty plate. Head still down, she turned away.

  Jan stood. He gave a small sigh of satisfaction and ran his hand along the length of the table. It was new. He had made it himself. Lately, all the men in Romanov had taken to making chairs and tables and eating from them instead of squatting on the floor like the Old Ones.

  He went over to their bed and dropped down upon it. Líba followed him and removed his boots, placing them carefully side by side on the floor. By the time she had finished, he was already snoring.

  Líba returned to the fireplace, placed the dirty dishes in the tin bucket next to it, and only then did she allow herself to properly exhale.

  She had foreseen her daughter’s future.

  I will need clean water … he had said, casually. When you are gone, he might have added.

  It had not occurred to Jan that Marie must learn the ways of a Romni in preparation for marriage. He had clearly never considered the possibility that she might one day belong to another man. She was his daughter. His wife Líba would die before him: she was small and weak and her health was poor. When she was gone, his daughter Marie would take her place, to save him the bother of remarrying. Líba would die and Marie’s sole inheritance would be her father. There would be nobody else for her. She would never have anybody else.

  Automatically, Líba took the carpet beater from the alcove and went out to the yard. Her one pride in their poor cottage was the small piece of rug which Jan had brought home one day and which she lifted from the dirt floor every morning and hung over a piece of rope she had tied between two trees in the yard.

  She began to beat it.

  It was a close afternoon, warm and still. Most of the hamlet was dozing after lunch. The dull thwumping noise of the wicker beater against the rug returned a soft echo in the quiet of the day. Beyond the canal and the railway track, in the fields, the tall grasses swayed gracefully. Líba set up a rhythm of beating until the rug swayed on the line like the grasses. Her heart was pounding in time: her head felt as if it might explode. Her daughter, her girl whose bleeding had only just begun, was going to become her, identical to her in every way. There would be nothing in her life that her mother had not also had.

  Thwump. Thwump. Líba increased the power behind her beating. I will kill him, she thought, suddenly flooded with strength and purpose. I will kill him for what he is going to do to my daughter. Thwump. Thwump. The rug bounced on the line. I will take a boiling pan of water and pour it over his face while he sleeps. I will find the axe and break his skull open and watch as the blood leaps from it. Thwump. It seemed as though the fury in her head was running through her limbs and her arms were tense as steel. She felt hugely powerful, as though she was going to hit the rug hard enough to make it fly through the air, high up above the hamlet of Romanov, above the town of Orlavá, over all Moravia and beyond.

  ‘Woman.’ The word was spoken softly, simply.

  She froze, the carpet-beater limp in her grasp, her breath coming in huge gulps from her exertions.

  Jan was standing in the doorway of the cottage. He had a sleepy look on his face. He had pulled his boots on but they were still unlaced.

  ‘You woke me up,’ he said. ‘Are you trying to rouse the village?’

  She bowed her head, as she always did before a beating. Words only increased his fury.

  He stepped towards her and took the carpet-beater from her grasp.

  ‘Call this clean?’ he said. She looked up.

  He nodded towards the rug. ‘Every day you beat this thing and every day it comes back into the house looking worse than when you took it out.’

  He motioned with his head for her to stand back, then he lifted the beater backwards, way back, and brought it down on the carpet with a huge swing of his long arms. The thwumping sound had a depth and resonance Líba could never have achieved, a sound which seemed to fill the air around them and the field below. The brown dirt puffed out in clouds.

  Líba watched as the rug flapped and danced under Jan’s beating.

  When he had finished, Jan turned and rested the carpet-beater up against the cottage wall, then nodded at her to come to him and tie his boots.

  She knelt before him. When she had finished, he bent and raised her by pulling on one of her arms. He held the arm tight in his fist and squeezed it, then shook his head. He chuckled.

  ‘What stupid, stringy arms. I’ve seen more strength in a squirrel.’ He laughed, a full, open-mouthed laugh. ‘You are really are pitiable aren’t you?’ He grabbed her chin in one hand and shook it playfully from side to side. ‘Pi-ti-ab-bull!’ He turned away from her, laughing still. His laughter echoed as he strode off down the lane.

  CHAPTER 11

  The way it works is this. The man in charge of public order in this forgotten backwater is Officer Sergeant Holt. Holt considers himself to be a decent man. He was sorry when they took the Jews because he didn’t have anything against them personally. They never troubled anyone as far as he could see. He has no such scruples about gypsies. He wouldn’t care if he never saw one of them again. But he does like Karel Malík, whom he doesn’t really think of as a Gypsy, as such.

  He and Karel Malík go back a long way. They were at school together, before Karel left to help his father at the factory. They didn’t see each other then for some years, but when Officer Sergeant Holt was promoted to his public order post he found that Karel was by then an Elder in Romanov and their lives began to intersect again. Now, they meet once a fortnight to play cards – Karel always lets him win, which is a standing joke between them. And Officer Sergeant Holt is confident that Karel respects him and keeps order in Romanov, as much as he can.

  There is a world weariness about Karel Malík that Holt recognises and imagines he shares. They are both men just trying to do the right thing for their separate communities, after all. He thinks of Karel as a white man trapped in a brown heathen skin. And he sees himself as a happy, abandoned fellow, by nature, enclosed by his own sense of duty as an officer of the law. Gypsies – the Devil take the lot of them! But Karel Malík
is all right.

  That brother of his, however, is another matter. Jan Malík nearly got Romanov burnt down just before the war. A local pedlar went to Romanov selling cleaning materials, a harmless boy, half-simple, with blond hair and a withered arm. Jan Malík accused him of looking at his daughter – which the boy might well have done, as it was easy enough to look at someone when you were selling them a dishcloth. Jan had kicked the boy down the lane. Unfortunately, the boy was the nephew of one of the town merchants, a popular man with a lot of friends. Holt had been forced to dissuade them from going down to Romanov one night with their faces covered, holding flaming torches.

  Sergeant Holt made Karel Malík pay for that. Two gold bracelets found their way on to the wrist of the popular merchant’s sister. Where they came from, he didn’t like to think. As long as it was out of his district, he didn’t care.

  The war has put an end to vigilante threats from the residents of Orlavá but Sergeant Holt knows that a far worse threat to Romanov is looming. He meets with the local Landrat each week. He receives regular circulars from the Ministry of Interior. Back in May, there was the Government Decree on the Preventative Fight Against Criminality. Gypsies and persons wandering in a gypsy fashion are now officially asocials, which means they can be arrested at any moment. Ever since last year, the Ministry has been asking him to fulfil certain quotas. Each district has to arrest a certain number of miscreants, vagabonds and general layabouts to be sent to the punitive work camps. If he can’t find them, then Sergeant Holt is obliged to arrest the nearest thing he can get. So far, he has managed to keep it down to well-known ne’er-do-wells; men from the workhouse, a couple of old down-and-outs who camped on the other side of town and were not related to the Romanov lot. He has not had to touch Romanov, or anyone liked or respected in Orlavá itself. But it is only a matter of time.