Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  He clambered over the soil and dead branches to the back of the truck, and saw that its contents had been disgorged across the floor of the gully: wheelchairs, thirty or forty of them. Some were upright, some were on their sides. Some had shiny chrome armrests with cushioned grips covered in deep red leather. Others were older models, with big iron wheels. He stood for a while by the pyramid of chairs, trying to work out how they might be useful to him – could he make a bicycle out of them? He shook his head to rid himself of such an absurd thought. He sat down in one, just for a moment, one of the expensive-looking ones, and imagined the luxury of being pushed everywhere, of never having to get up. Then he thought of having no legs, of his body simply ending, stopping in thin air beneath his waist, and the thought was so terrifying that he leapt up and scrambled back up the side of the gully and strode off down the road without looking back.

  *

  That night, he found himself walking along a railway line. Suddenly, the countryside fell back and he was approaching a tiny, rural station with a small goods train parked for the night between two empty concrete platforms. In the starlight, he could just see the small, square shape of a guard’s hut. He approached it slowly, then stopped. From inside, there came a single male voice, raised in song. He turned back and skulked along the platform, until he came to a sliding door in the train. It was securely padlocked.

  Above him, the stars were fading, one by one. The night was old.

  The door of the shed banged open.

  He ducked beneath the train. It smelled of oil. Supporting the carriage above him was a pair of diagonal iron girders. He climbed up on them, resting his stomach on the crossing point and, stretching his legs along the rear struts, grasped the forward ones with each outstretched arm. His bundle was strapped to his back, as if he was a beetle. He waited.

  *

  The train was hurtling along the track. It was daylight. Dirt and grit flew up from the wheels and stung him in the face. Metal screeched. He kept his eyes tight shut and clutched at the iron girders for his life, his teeth rattling and his whole body shaking so much he thought his bones would fall to pieces. His bundle had slipped sideways and hung from his back, threatening to drag him from the girders.

  The train entered a tunnel and the screeching metal noise became deafening. He opened his mouth and let out a scream as long and loud as the tunnel itself. The train shot out into daylight but he continued screaming. The dirt and grit flew into his open mouth and he coughed, choking.

  *

  The train was stationary, in open countryside. The only sound was the soft, ghostly chuffing of the engine. His arms and legs were so stiff he thought he might not be able to extricate himself, but by rolling his torso, he managed to tip himself down on to the wooden sleepers between the track and clamber carefully over the rails. Without looking up at the train, he scrambled on all fours to a nearby tree and hid behind it, back against the trunk, the soft bulk of his bundle cushioning him. He stayed there until the train began to creak, to move away from him, first with excruciating slowness, then with sudden noise and speed. When it was gone and the countryside around was silent but for the birds, he rose and tried to walk. As he moved from the support of the tree trunk, his arms and legs shook so much that he fell to the ground on his hands and knees. He remained there for some minutes, shuddering from head to toe. There was still grit inside his mouth. He spat it on to the ground. The tiny grey stones lay in a puddle of spittle, darkening the soil.

  *

  He stopped by a stream, and drank from it His food was gone but for the dead chickens, which he must save for barter. He picked the scabs from the palms of his hands and nibbled at them. He thought of the heavy clay jar of goose fat back at the old couple’s cottage, of the stale black bread and wizened apples. He pictured them, then saw a huge black crow looming over them, and jerked awake with a cry. I have no food, he groaned to himself, head in his hands. The misery of the fact was harder to bear after having provisions for a while. It overwhelmed the luck of the train and the mellow sky above and not being shot or discovered. I have no food …

  Having no food meant one thing. Gadje.

  *

  He hid his bundle before he entered the village. He washed his face in a stream, and put on the shirt and trousers he had kept carefully folded away while he travelled. He cleaned the old man’s boots with grass and made sure that his cap was pulled down low over his head to hide his stubbly hair. He strutted around the trees for a moment or two, practising insouciance. He sat and counted the old woman’s coins. Did he really need to barter the chickens? It was hard to know. But he couldn’t light a fire to cook them and he would need as much real money as he could find, later.

  As he walked down the lane to the raw of houses, the first person he saw was a bread-seller, a tall young woman with a dozen loaves threaded on a piece of string slung across her chest. She was walking towards him. He had the chickens in his hand, clutching their necks, and he raised them to her and gave a cheery smile. She smiled back and lifted her hand. I must be in Bohemia, he thought.

  After she had passed, he waited a few moments, then turned and followed her. From behind a low stone wall, he watched as she tapped at a door, and was turned away. She went to the next cottage, and this time was admitted. The door closed behind her. After ten minutes or so, she emerged, waved at the woman who saw her off from the step and continued her journey.

  Yenko stayed crouched low behind the wall and counted to a hundred, five times. Then he jumped the wall and walked up to the second cottage, whistling loudly.

  He tapped at the door. There was no answer. He tapped again, waited. He took a few steps back down the path, then stepped over an empty flower-bed to peer into a small window. The interior of the cottage was too dark for him to see inside.

  The door opened as he was still peering in the window. He jumped back. A heavy-set, dark-skinned woman barked at him, ‘Yes?’

  Caught off-guard, Yenko stammered, ‘Good morning, madam. It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? Yes?’ He held up the chickens, feeling ill-prepared for this, his first encounter. Perhaps the woman would think he was a simpleton. That was a good idea. ‘Chicken! Chicken!’ he said, grinning, raising them. ‘Only two left!’ He made a clucking sound.

  The woman glared at him. ‘How much?’ she snapped.

  Yenko stood, dumbfounded. How much? He hadn’t got a clue. How much was a chicken? He was horrified at his own stupidity. How could he not have thought the encounter through? How much, how much? If he got the price wrong then the woman would be suspicious. He stared at her in panic, breathing heavily.

  The woman continued to glare at him. She leaned backwards, opened the door to the house and called inside, ‘Bohumil!’

  I should run, Yenko thought, but his feet were planted firm and wide on the woman’s path and he was turned to stone.

  A large, jowly man with a bald head and full moustache came to the door, wiping his hands on a cloth. He was dressed only in a long-sleeved vest and breeches, despite the cold, his braces hanging loose on either side of his legs. He wiped his mouth and stared at Yenko.

  The woman indicated him with one hand. ‘He’s got two chickens but he doesn’t know how much he wants for them.’

  It was then that Yenko saw the red piping down the seam of the man’s trousers – a uniform. I am done for.

  ‘Boy,’ said the man. Yenko looked up. ‘Why are you holding your face?’

  Yenko lowered his hand. I have been holding my face for days, he thought, surprised by the knowledge. He had become so used to the pain in his jaw that the gesture was automatic.

  He stepped forward and opened his mouth. The woman made a noise and turned her head in disgust but the man leaned forward from the step and peered at him. ‘Those teeth are grey and the gum is swollen. You are getting an abscess,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault …’ Yenko faltered.

  The man exhaled through his nostrils. ‘Give the chickens to my wife an
d I’ll take those teeth out If someone doesn’t you’re going to be in big trouble.’

  ‘One chicken,’ said Yenko.

  The man snarled, ‘Don’t haggle with me, boy.’

  Yenko stepped forward meekly and handed over the chickens. The man’s expression softened. ‘Give the boy some bread and dripping, and some salt,’ he said to his wife, then, turning to Yenko, ‘Wait here.’

  The man and woman went inside and closed the door behind them. After a few minutes, the woman returned with a rough-cut slice of bread smeared with dripping and a twist of brown paper. Yenko divided the bread into two, withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket, folded and wrapped one half of the bread and replaced it in the pocket Then he balanced the remaining piece of bread on his forearm while he unwrapped the twist. Realising he was about to put the salt on his bread, the woman snapped, ‘No, no, are you stupid?’ She snatched the paper from his fingers and re-twisted it firmly. ‘Put it in your pocket.’ He obeyed. She watched him while he ate the bread. He forced himself to chew slowly. When he had finished, the woman said, ‘My husband is a volunteer in the night-watch.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Yenko. They know what I am, he thought miserably, and they have just stolen my chickens. ‘I’m only passing through,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ she replied.

  The man re-emerged and, with a toss of his head, indicated that Yenko should follow him around the back of the cottage.

  Behind the cottage was a small yard and a garden with tidy rows of sticks ready to support the vegetable plants when they began to grow. Six snow-white geese wandered gracefully around a wire pen. The man indicated to Yenko that he should sit on a tree stump, that went over to a wooden shed and came back clutching a large pair of pliers.

  Yenko closed his eyes and opened his mouth, thinking, I’m used to pain. It will be all right. There was a tugging sensation in his jaw, than another, and another. He opened his eyes and saw three teeth lying in the mud at his feet.

  ‘Didn’t even hurt, did it?’ the man said. ‘Thought not. There was no blood in the cavities. Those teeth were stone dead.’ He was wiping the pliers on a cloth. ‘Open up.’ Yenko looked at him. ‘I took out the three which were discolouring but you might have some other dead ones in there, I’ll give them a tug if you like, we’ll soon know.’ He held up the pliers.

  Yenko shook his head. The man shrugged. ‘Please yourself. Rinse with salt water as often as you can. Hot water, if you can get it. So how come you’re on the road, boy?’

  The question came casually, the sentence hanging off the one that preceded it. The man wasn’t even looking at him.

  Yenko could think of no reply that wasn’t an obvious lie.

  The man sighed, glancing up at the sky. ‘They took our son away. He’s somewhere in Germany. The last postcard we had was from Magdeburg but he said they were about to move him. That was eight months ago. He’s making anti-tank shells, I believe. People die in those factories. Lots of accidents. It’s dangerous work.’

  Yenko sat very still. The man fell silent.

  The back door opened and the woman stepped down. She was holding a large earthenware bowl. She did not look their way. She crossed over to the geese and lifted the lid of the wire cage, then began to throw in handfuls of the feed; potato shavings, cabbage stalks and tiny white strips of fat. Her hands were large, red-raw with the cold.

  ‘You’d better get going,’ the man said, and turned away.

  *

  He found the railway line the next day, on the outskirts of a town. This was no tiny rural outpost, but a wide-gauge double track with goods coaches stacked in a siding – the main route west. Behind the siding was a thorn thicket. He snapped a pair of thin branches from a nearby tree and used them to part the thicket and crawl carefully to the centre of it, where there was just room to unroll his blanket. It felt good, to be surrounded by thorns.

  He had to wait two days, timing the patrols of passing soldiers and leaving his hiding place only once, when he managed to steal a loaf of bread and a small pie from a windowsill not far from the station. The pie was filled with almost-liquid fat and grey, gristly meat. As he sat eating it amongst the thorns he thought, I can’t wait to tell the others about this pie – after the war, when it is all over, when we are well-fed and sale again and can joke about things and listen to each other’s stories. I will tell them how the gadji must have shouted at her husband or dog and put the pie on her windowsill, for safety, for me to come along and take it. He paused, looking up. The sky was just visible through the thicket; blue, a good sign. Spring was coming, and he was having luck. Baxt. God meant him to succeed. After the war, he thought, we will all have our stories. Everyone will talk about the luck they had. It will seem as if everyone was lucky, as if there was always a loaf of bread on the windowsill or some eggs in a corner of the barn that the farmer’s wife had missed. We will seem so lucky that the people who come after us won’t believe our tales, but what they will forget is the ones who aren’t around to talk, the other ones, the ones who froze to death huddled under bushes or starved crouched over streams or just gave themselves up and were shot. He stopped eating. The sun had gone in. The trees and bushes will be full of the ghosts of the ones who didn’t survive. After the war, people will be afraid to go near trees and bushes, because of the ghosts.

  *

  That afternoon, he was woken by a train thundering into the siding. He crawled forward on his belly, to the edge of the thicket. The train was huge, dark brown, tall-sided, with an uncountable number of carriages stretching either side of where he lay. This had to be the one. He waited until dusk, terrified that the train would move in daylight and he would have missed his chance. This has to be it, he thought, my train. Darkness was gathering as he ran, crouching, alongside the track, glancing up at each carriage in turn, to find an unpadlocked door.

  He had nearly reached the front of the train when he located one. The side of the carriage was so high that he could not reach the handle to check. Instead, he had to prise his fingers between the edges at the bottom of the door and push with all his might, sweat breaking out on his forehead and prickling his back. If anyone saw him doing this, there would be no story. Eventually, one of the doors slid back with a dull, wooden sound, echoing in the dying afternoon. He threw his bundle in, then, without looking round, hauled himself up and slid the door closed behind him.

  It was dark inside, and smelled of hay. He felt around behind him until he found a bale, wrapped in some sort of cloth. He sat leaning against it with his legs drawn up, clutching his bundle to his chest and panting after the exertion of opening the door. He closed his eyes and thought of his mother, back in the camp, of the lines on her grey face as she had ordered him to escape. He thought of the barbed wire and the constant fear of being beaten. Then he thought of how glorious it was to be hidden away somewhere dark, to know with absolute certainty that nobody knew where he was, and to feel that he was being born again, as a man of action, a true Rom, with a plan in his head and a future ahead of him. He began to pray.

  CHAPTER 23

  All through the night he forced himself to stay awake, peering anxiously through the wooden slats of the carriage into the pitch blackness, trying vainly to decipher the train’s progress. His efforts to stay awake were so successful that he fell asleep just before dawn, as the dark was melting and the fields forming grey shapes in the gloom.

  He awoke with a jolt as the train braked heavily and he was thrown from a hay bale to the floor. He jumped into a crouching position, heart thumping. Shouts were approaching from the outside. The shouts stopped. Booted feet crunched on gravel, passing. After a few moments, he dared to peer out between the slats. All he could see were large, grey-cement buildings, two or three metres away. He stood, shaking his head. The train’s lack of motion had a finality about it, he thought. He braced himself and slowly eased back the sliding door.

  The train had pulled into some sort of goods depot. Before him was scrubland, dissected b
y rusting railway tracks, overgrown with grass and weeds. The grey buildings were huge engine sheds, with tiled roofs and vast green doors. He could hear voices on the far side of the train. He jumped down. It was further than it looked and he stumbled as he hit the ground. He glanced swiftly from left to right. Alongside the nearest shed was a row of old oil drums. Bent double and clutching his bag to his chest, he leapt across the rusting railtracks until he reached the drums. He crouched down beside them, catching his breath.

  The cement block was disused, the windows boarded, long brown tentacles of weeds clambering up the cracks in the mortar. To his left, a blackened construction of pipes and cables led to an adjacent block. In front of that was a pile of iron chairs and trolleys that had been left in a haphazard, corroding pyramid. Next to it, there was a tall pink chimney. Beyond, he could see row upon row of buildings ascending into the distance and a black dome, the blocks and curves of the city arching around as far as he could see in all directions. He was in the heart of it, this place that he had never even dreamed of. The light was bright white – full dawn but still early. The air was fresh and the birds calling a discordant cacophany. So, he thought, this is Prague.

  *

  When he had caught his breath, he crawled out from behind the drums and along the cement block until he found that this one too had loosely boarded windows. He glanced around; still no one about, but there were distant voices, threatening in their casual rise and fall. Above him was a window with dark wood planks nailed loosely over it. He put his bundle down and reached up, to see if the lower one would come free. He managed to loosen one end and worked it back and forth to free the nail that was holding it on the other side. The protesting creak of wood against metal was excruciatingly loud in the silent dawn. He had almost succeeded when he heard a voice, just the other side of the buildings. There was someone standing by his train. Perhaps they had discovered that the sliding door of his carriage was no longer securely fastened. He heard a shout, and an answering shout, some banging. If the man wandered around this side of the building, then he would be discovered.