Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  He abandoned the plank and crept swiftly around the building to the shorter side, where he found that the huge wooden door was rotted clean through at the bottom. There was no time to be cautious. He pushed his bundle underneath, then got down on his belly and crawled under. After the white light outside, the interior of the block was indecipherably dark. Only as his eyes adjusted did he see that he was in some sort of empty holding shed. It was freezing cold and his breath condensed in ghostly clouds. He sat on the dirt floor with his back against the wall and his bundle clutched to his chest, panting, waiting until it was quiet outside.

  After cleaning himself as best he could, he crawled back under the door. He crouched for a moment, checking that there was no one in sight, then stood and strolled openly past the train, picking his feet high over the rusting railway tracks. He reached the tall, open gates that led on to the street before he was seen by anyone, a workman on the far side of the tracks who greeted him with an enquiring shout. Yenko looked over at the man, gave a broad smile and a cheery wave. The workman lifted his hand to his eyes to peer at him. Careful not to quicken his step, Yenko strode through the gates and out on to the pavement. He crossed the empty street with unhurried confidence and took the first turning left, without looking back.

  *

  After two more turns, he found himself in a busy street. Men and women were on their way to work, rushing for the early morning shift; heads down, concentration pinching their features. He adopted the same look, the weary hurriedness – he must not hesitate or seem lost. Glancing around as he strode, he saw that tall buildings lined the pavements. They had a dirty, faded grandeur; stone portals with carved scrolls for porches, vast wooden doors with brass handles and the moulded plaster shapes of women draped in layers of cloth. He had never seen such big buildings. They made him feel dizzy.

  He kept his head down, only glancing up once in a while. There were no soldiers around and the workers were dressed in their factory clothes, swaddled tightly in scarves and hats. After a few turnings, he was in a commercial district. The surge of workers thinned and fell away. The occasional shop appeared, still closed, amongst the grander buildings. As the streets quietened, his anxiety grew. He turned down a sidestreet, found a low wall, glanced around, then jumped over it.

  He was crouched in the backyard of a windowless building. Chipped, apricot-coloured plaster revealed the bare stone, here and there. He thought, when the war is over, I swear I will never crouch again, not if I have to splint my legs to break the habit He closed his eyes and pressed the heels of his hands against his forehead. Which way from here, Father? Celetná, the street with the black tower. He couldn’t think. He was hungry. He extracted his small, remaining piece of bread and ate half of it. He closed his eyes for a moment. The effort of climbing back over the wall seemed insurmountable. Eventually, he forced himself to rise.

  The further he got from the station, the tidier the streets became, more great buildings in cream and beige and peachy colours, with huge carved doors. The workers had all disappeared and most pedestrians were men in smart suits and overcoats, women with feathered hats – some glanced at him as he passed. This was all wrong, his being in this district. He was becoming more obvious with each step. He began to sweat, despite the chill. Turning a corner, he saw a patrol advancing down the street towards him, a squad of Czech policemen marching with a sergeant at their head. He turned swiftly into the dark entrance of a nearby alley. It smelt of smoke, and piss. Head down, he hurried along it.

  As he progressed, the alleyway narrowed. The black stone walls closed in on him. All that was visible at the end was a sliver of white light and some brown cobbles. As he reached the end of the alleyway, he stopped dead.

  Before him was a huge square, the opposite side scarcely visible through the throng of people, motor vehicles and trams. Everyone on the pavement seemed to be hurrying, except for the soldiers on street corners. There were German soldiers everywhere, some cruising past on long, low-slung motorbikes, others standing guard. The central part of the square was some sort of tram interchange or terminus. Four trams were drawn up in a row, a fifth clattering to join them. The sky was transected with wires.

  As Yenko stood staring, a tram shot past, its red sides flashing an advertisement for toothpaste. The first car was nearly empty, just a few civilians and two soldiers. The second was crammed to overflowing by men and women in grey and brown with blank, unsmiling faces. The door had already opened and the conductor was shouting the name of the stop in German. The tram’s brakes were screaming.

  He fell back into the alley and turned but at the far end, where it broadened, he could see two German soldiers who had stepped just inside, their backs to him, peering out into the road and glancing from side to side. Satisfied they were unobserved, they leant against the walls of the alley and removed their helmets, chatting to each other. One was smoothing his hair while the other pulled a packet of cigarettes from the top of his boot.

  Yenko pulled his cap down on his head and shoved his hands into his pockets, then stepped out on to the pavement. He walked with his shoulders hunched and head down, keeping close to the walls. Suddenly, a black shape rushed upon him and he felt the breath slammed out of him. He staggered backwards, wheeling his arms. ‘Look where you’re going,’ snarled a large man in a woollen coat, before continuing on his way. Yenko turned his back to the square to smooth down his jacket and straighten himself.

  Directly in front of him was a small restaurant with a glass conservatory protruding out on to the street. In the corner, a group of SS men and three women were gathered around a heavily laden table. One of the SS men was standing, making a speech. His companions were gazing at him, smiling. It was a celebration of some sort. Paper streamers had been pinned to the dark wooden frame and the SS man were wearing conical hats with streamers cascading from the top. Their caps were clustered on a nearby hat-stand.

  A silver coffee pot stood on the table with several smaller silver jugs around it. Each guest had a white china plate before them – the woman nearest to Yenko had not eaten much of her cake, a crumbling confection with a thick wodge of cream at its centre. A discarded silver fork lay resting on the plate.

  The noise and clamour of the square behind him had faded into nothing. The people rushing past were phantoms. He could not prevent himself from staring at the cake. Cream, and sugar. He ran his tongue around his mouth, trying to capture some mirage of those tastes in his saliva, possessed by a craving so hollow he felt as though his insides were caving in, as if he would fold down upon himself and collapse like a pair of empty trousers on to the pavement. Involuntarily, he tipped forward on his toes. And that woman could not be bothered to finish it.

  She was on the periphery of his vision – all he could gaze upon was the cake – but he had a vague impression of her. She was smiling up at the SS man. She was in a silver gown, incongruously glamorous for morning, bare-shouldered. Her upper arms were slender. On the table next to her plate was a purple velvet handbag with a gilt chain strap. Yenko felt himself tipping, tipping. The cake lay scattered on the plate like a derelict building, crumbled walk of stiff sponge crushed and broken. The men and women around the table were laughing at the speech, their faces distorted by the glass. The paper streamers teemed from their hats. One of the white china cups was sitting in its saucer in a puddle of black coffee. The wall behind the group was painted in broad stripes of blue and gold. A waiter was approaching, starched white linen hung over his arm. He bent to remove the cups. The woman threw back her head, displaying a smooth white throat. She placed a hand on the arm of the man sitting next to her. Yenko had a sudden image of his mother placing her hand on his father’s arm, restraining him as Yenko was being beaten by Čacko in the admission queue at the camp.

  He felt the palms of his hands crash against the glass as he fell forward. His face was pressed up against the window, his vision blurred. The woman’s face twisted in alarm. One of the SS men was shouting. Yenko was still sta
ring at the crumbled cake. It cannot be, he was thinking, madly. I cannot be seeing this. His head was full of pictures of the camp; the wooden boards he had slept on, his father’s grey, carved face; the insects scurrying to and fro along the edge of the bunk. It cannot be. He could not make his thoughts any more coherent than that one, lunatic assertion. If I am seeing this, then the camp did not exist. This and the camp cannot both be.

  The waiter had him by the shoulder and was dragging him backwards. Yenko felt a rough, open palm slap him across the face, spinning him away from the restaurant and sprawling him across the pavement. When he was on the ground, the waiter kicked him twice in the stomach, then lifted him up by pulling at one of his arms.

  He dragged him bodily back down the street. Yenko felt his trousers being pulled down and had to grab at them with his free hand to prevent himself being stripped, the other hand flailing as he clutched his belongings to his chest. The waiter deposited him in the mouth of the alleyway and, when he tried to rise, slapped him down again. ‘You fucking fool!’ he hissed viciously, bending to him.

  ‘Don’t … don’t …’ was all Yenko could say, weakly.

  The waiter’s voice was hoarse with rage. ‘I’ve saved your life, you fucking, fucking idiot. What did …? In the name of God!’

  ‘Please …’ Yenko gasped, reaching out a hand and grabbing at the waiter’s perfectly creased black trouser leg. ‘Please, I …’

  The waiter was trying to shake him off. Yenko managed to gasp out hurriedly. ‘Please, which way is Celetná Street, it’s by the Old Town Square …’

  The waiter peered down at him as if he was deranged, his face a furious frown. ‘I know that, you fucking little fool!’ he hissed ferociously as he shook his leg free.

  I must find out from him, Yenko thought wildly. I daren’t stop anyone else. ‘Please …’ he repeated, almost weeping.

  The waiter stood upright and waved his hands, to rid himself of this mad boy. Before he turned, he gave him one last, half-hearted kick in the legs, and waved an arm in a northerly direction, towards other side of the square.

  Yenko crawled back into the alleyway, out of sight, huddling down on the ground. He clutched his heaving chest and discovered his belongings were still strapped there. He glanced down the far end, but the soldiers had gone. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. His ribs ached and there was a sharp pain in his right hand. He lifted it and looked at it. It had dragged along the pavement and the rough stone had taken the skin from the back of the hand, blood was pricking in the pink flesh. He winced, and closed his eyes again. The pain felt good. It made sense.

  *

  He recognised the street called Celetná from Josef’s description but walked the length of it twice looking for the right sidestreet to turn off it. It was a busy shopping street, crawling with off-duty soldiers, but by then he was reckless with exhaustion. Some of the shops were closed, while others seemed extravagantly open. He passed one set back in an archway with a trestle table in front of it on which were heaped elegant piles of lace tablecloths; snow white, creamy-white and beige. The greengrocer’s next to it had only one small box outside containing two large black mushrooms, crinkled with age. A sign above the mushrooms said, Edible Goods.

  The street curved gently round. When he reached the black tower at the end, he knew he had gone too far and started to make his way back.

  He was less than halfway back when he looked up and saw, ahead, two German soldiers who had stopped to observe his approach. One of the soldiers had his arms folded and his legs planted wide, blocking the pavement. The other had withdrawn a pistol from his holster. The people walking along the pavement ahead of Yenko were parting either side of the soldiers, like a river dissecting itself to avoid a midstream boulder. There was no point in turning or running – he could only walk towards the soldiers, towards the inevitable. Forgive me for failing you, Father, he thought.

  From the other side of the street, there came a shout. A shopkeeper was standing outside his premises – a glassware shop – and shouting at a woman who was clutching a large blue vase. She was shouting back in German, calling him a dirty crooked Slav. The shopkeeper had his fists clenched and his face was purple with fury.

  The two soldiers turned and ran across the street. Yenko passed the empty space on the pavement where they had been standing, his body miraculously sliding through the air where the boulder had been.

  He took the next sidestreet, and the one on the left after that, then several other turns, back on himself and around, before he found what he thought must be the right place, a deserted alleyway off one of the sidestreets. Halfway down was a narrow, black stone building squeezed between two bulkier, paler neighbours. The ground-level front of the building was a small shop with a single grimy window. Yenko approached and lifted his hand to shade his eyes and peer inside. The display was no more than a row of wooden shelves, bare but for a row of empty glass bottles, scrubbed clean, their old, tattered labels showing pictures of apricots. Behind the window, the shop was empty and dark. The door to the left had a printed sign nailed to it, the card brown and buckled from weathering. In small letters – first in German, then Czech – it read Closed for the Victory of the Reich. On the other side of the shop window was a low passage that led beneath the building, crouching down under a stone archway of black brick.

  Yenko stood in front of the building, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched. He had expected something grander. He had expected the shop to be open. He could not stand around in the street like this for long, however quiet it was. How long would his luck last? He glanced up and down the alley. No one was around. He withdrew to a doorway on the other side of the street and sat down on a step. He leant his head against the stone portal: a moment of tiredness, that was all he could permit himself.

  He was woken by the scraping sound of shoe upon stone and his heart jumped inside his chest as his eyelids sprang open. How long had he been asleep? A minute? A day? He glanced quickly around and saw that the street was still deserted, the sky bright white.

  Then he saw, opposite, a hunched dark figure standing in front of the narrow passage by the shop. The man was wearing a greatcoat that came almost to the ground and leaning with one hand resting on the stone portal, as if weak or exhausted and needing to catch his breath before proceeding down the passage. He was hatless, despite the cold, and a few sparse hairs fluttered lightly in the breeze, clinging half-heartedly to his reddened scalp.

  Yenko scrambled to his feet and without waiting to look left or right, crossed the cobbles. He no longer cared that he might have the wrong street or the wrong building. He felt it hardly mattered if the man turned and withdrew a pistol from his greatcoat and put a bullet through his heart. It was finished, his flight. He had arrived – or ended. It hardly mattered which.

  ‘Prosím …’ he said weakly. Please … His voice sounded pathetically thin.

  The man turned.

  He was fat – no, not fat, flabby. He had been fat once but ill-health or old age had made his flesh sag without reducing its bulk. Heavy bags of skin hung beneath the watery eyes. There was white stubble on his chin. His lips were purple and he stank of alcohol.

  ‘Yes?’ he said wearily. He was of indeterminate age. His voice was deep and gravelly. It had a loose sound, like pebbles in dirty water.

  Yenko was overwhelmed with disappointment. This could not be the man. The man his father had described was upright, proud, amusing – and hugely rich. He was looking for a tall, friendly gadjo with a beaming smile and open arms. This could not be him.

  ‘You live here?’ Yenko gestured feebly towards the closed shop. ‘You are the owner?’

  ‘So?’ muttered the man gloomily, ending his question with a cough which spluttered towards Yenko; the stink of cabbage, half-digested, alcohol.

  What was the point of asking further questions? This man would not help him. Yenko hovered, on the point of turning.

  ‘Who are you?’ the man dem
anded suddenly, his voice surprisingly strong, his gaze sharp and suspicious.

  ‘My name is František,’ Yenko said. ‘František Růžička. My father is Josef Růžička, formerly Maximoff, of the Kalderash.’ Yenko blinked. White spots had appeared before his eyes. He struggled to remember what his father had told him, in a different life, a year ago, as they sat up on the front of the cart on a moonless night, passing through the Moravian forest, the only sound the soft clink of the horse’s harness. His father had made him learn three things: an address in Prague, the directions to reach it, and a speech. The address he had recalled successfully but the speech was beyond him. He shook his head and took a deep breath, so deep he felt it might be his last. ‘My father is Josef Růžička,’ he repeated, emphasising it as if the man might disbelieve him. ‘He used to work for you. The orchards. He calls himself your friend. He asks you in the name of honour… No, no. He sends his greetings to you, hopes you are well, brother, and asks you …’ The rest of the speech was gone. It had been long, and formal. But all he could think to add was, ‘My father is dead.’ He hung his head and gave a hollow, breathy sob.

  The man was staring at him in disbelief.

  Yenko said weakly, ‘I am looking for a man called Ctibor Michálek. Landowner, farmer. Perhaps …’

  The man lurched towards him and grabbed his face between his plump, clammy hands. He drew him in and Yenko fell forward, too weak to resist. The man’s watery eyes stared into his face.

  ‘You are Josef’s son? Josef’s boy …?’ He shook Yenko’s face a little, as if to make sure he was a real person.

  Yenko gave a gasping sound, a sob with depth this time. He felt his knees buckle. ‘My father is dead …’ he cried out.