Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  At the top, they both stumbled. Yenko fell to his knees and Ctibor dropped back against the wall. He flung his arms wide. The drink from Ctibor’s open bottle showered Yenko’s head as he scrambled upright.

  ‘BASTARDS!’ hollered Ctibor, in a huge, booming voice that echoed down the wooden corridor. This time, more than one door opened.

  ‘Ctibor … Uncle …’ hissed Yenko, trying to pull him away from the wall and propel him down the corridor.

  Ctibor pushed him away. ‘I am perfectly capable of walking, thank you, František,’ he said sneeringly, then staggered down the corridor on a diagonal, his shoulder sliding down the wall.

  Yenko followed behind, nodding at the half-open doors, his stomach hollow, quite certain that all of the tenants had now heard Ctibor call him František.

  Inside the room, Yenko kicked the door shut behind them and turned to help Ctibor, but he had already collapsed on the bed, fully dressed. His mouth was open and his eyes closed. As Yenko stood over him, wondering what to do, he began to snore.

  Yenko sat down in the armchair and buried his face in his hands. After a moment or so, he sat up and looked around the room. What a disgusting place to live; safe and dark, horrible and filthy and full of things that he and Ctibor had not told each other about. While Ctibor slept, he would try to tidy up a bit.

  *

  Ctibor slept for an hour, motionless as a corpse. Then he jerked awake, sitting up suddenly and shaking his head.

  Yenko was trying to wipe down the grooved wooden counter-top alongside the sink. It was covered in a thick layer of grease, sunk into the crevices of the wood. The rough cloth was coming away black, impossible to rinse clean under the tap.

  Ctibor sat on the edge of the bed and watched him silently.

  When Yenko had finished, he found a large, chipped mug from the shelf above the sink and filled it with water. He took it over to Ctibor. Ctibor took the mug from his hands then rested it between his thighs, gazing into it gloomily, fearfully, as if it might contain secrets. Yenko remained standing in front of him. Ctibor did not lift his gaze. ‘What do you think is happening to her?’ he asked, still staring into the mug, his voice sober and even. ‘I ask myself that every day, even though I know she must be dead by now. Most of them probably are. Except she isn’t “them”. She’s my Sarah. God forgive me …’ He lifted the mug to his lips and drained it, wiping his hand across the back of his mouth. ‘I’m never sure whether it helps or not, you know.’ He meant the water.

  Yenko took the empty mug from him and returned it to the sink. He came and sat on the arm of the chair, facing Ctibor. ‘Did the Germans take her?’ In all the weeks he and Ctibor had been living together, the old man had not once referred to his wife, until now.

  Ctibor gave him a look of infinite sorrow. His face remained steady but the lines on it seemed etched deeper by his expression. He looked down at the floor. ‘No,’ he said, then gave a deep sigh. ‘Is there any bread? I forgot to eat.’

  Yenko went to the kitchen cupboard and found a half-loaf, pulled it into pieces and put it on a tin plate. He took it back to Ctibor, pushing an upturned box with his feet so that it could act as table between them. They both took a piece of bread and Yenko realised he had stupidly divided it into three pieces, not four. As Ctibor leaned forward, he said, ‘You know, I have heard of people torn from the arms of their families, everyone screaming in sorrow, but sometimes I envy them.’ He chewed the bread with his mouth open. ‘You wouldn’t think anyone would wish that upon themselves, but I do.’

  He swallowed, reached forward and picked up the last piece of bread, raised it to his mouth and paused. ‘Two pieces each, right?’

  Yenko nodded, chewing the inside of his lip.

  Ctibor bit into the bread. Then he stopped and looked down at his hands, suddenly seeming like a very fat and very miserable child. ‘Sarah left me of her own accord, back in ’39, as soon as the harvest was in. I came home one day from the orchards, and she was gone. I thought at first she had been taken. I ran from room to room, but then I saw she had packed and taken her things, clothes, some sheet music, a few photos of her family – a terrible one of them all together after some holy day, touched up terribly, I mean. The photographer gave them all bright blue eyes.

  ‘I was so distraught I didn’t see the note until later that evening, even though it was in the middle of the table. She had gone to find her family, to be with them, she said. She begged my forgiveness. She begged me not to follow her. She couldn’t stand it any more. We had been arguing a lot, ever since the spring. Things had got worse and worse between us. She said why had Hácha just let them march right in and I said what chance did we stand when Chamberlain and Daladier and the others had just handed us over and she said us, you mean you, and I said what, suddenly, you’re not Czech any more? And she said no, I’m not, I thought I was but I’m not … oh, well, I won’t bore you with the details …’

  He swallowed the last mouthful of bread and Yenko gave an involuntary, imitation swallow.

  ‘The thing is, I think she said all that to protect me. I think she ran away because she thought I would be safer without her, that it was better for me not to have a Jewish wife any more. But she knew if she told me that was why she was going then I would come after her, so she put all these other reasons. She made it sound as though she hated all us Gentiles for what the Germans were doing, as if we were all complicit She knew that the best way to protect me was to pretend she no longer loved me.’

  Ctibor shook his head restlessly, his face a mask of doubt. ‘At least, I think so, I think that was what it was … but I didn’t go after her, when there was still a chance I could have found her. I thought maybe she’d come back of her own accord. I didn’t … and then when the deportations started, I knew it was too late.’ He crashed his fists against his forehead. ‘Two years. Two years I waited for her to come back, for things to get better, while all the time they were getting worse and worse. Not a word. Then the deportations. I knew it was too late. Now I’ll never know. Why did she leave me? Did she really hate me or was she protecting me? I’ll never know.’

  ‘Maybe you will be able to ask her one day, maybe her family escaped.’

  Ctibor shook his head. ‘František, I don’t live that way, not like some. Let me tell you something.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice, ‘Just in case you think like she did that we’ve all been sitting by while these things have happened, I’ll tell you a story. The patriots who killed Heydrich …’ He crossed himself. ‘Want to know how the Germans found out where they were hiding? Someone sold the Gestapo the names of the Resistance members who were supplying the patriots with food. The Gestapo paid a visit. It was a couple and their teenage son. The mother heard them coming up the stairs and managed to get a cyanide capsule between her teeth. I don’t know what happened to the father. Anyway, they take the boy to Petschek Palace, and they torture him, all day, they don’t even give him a chance to confess, they just torture him, beat him, all the usual stuff. Then, when he is half dead, they open his mouth and hold his nose and pour whisky down his throat. They give it a minute or two to take effect, then take him into another room. They have cut off his mother’s head. It is floating in a tank of water. They show him the head and ask him where the assassins are hiding. He looks at the head and he says, the Church of St Cyril and Methodius on Ressel Street.’

  Ctibor gazed at Yenko, his eyes large and watery but without expression. ‘We’re not supposed to know this story, so how do we know? Someone talked. Someone let someone talk. They were proud of it. They wanted us to know. And the students? And the people they take to the stadium? They publish lists, you know, they don’t try to hide it. They advertise it in the newspapers. And those are just ordinary people, not even Resistance or Jews. The ones they shoot quickly are the lucky ones.’ He shook his head. ‘My wife is dead, František. All her family too. It doesn’t matter whether she left me to protect me or because she hated me. I’ll never know. My wife
is dead.’

  There was a long silence. They both sat motionless. Eventually, the spell was broken by the slow clip-clopping of horse’s hooves on the cobbles of the alley below, a horse-drawn cart passing beneath the window. Yenko ran his tongue over the gap in his mouth where his missing teeth had been. It had been a relief when the man pulled them out; worth losing the chickens for, in retrospect.

  ‘And your farm …’ he said, with an effort. ‘What happened to the farm?’

  ‘František, I can’t do this …’ groaned Ctibor.

  ‘What happened to the farm?’

  Ctibor sighed. ‘When they finally came, it was early in the morning. I was sitting at my kitchen table, alone, drinking coffee, thinking about Sarah, and about nothing, the only two things I have been able to bear to thinking about since this war began. There were four of them, a councillor from the Landrat, I’d met him before, a policeman, a couple of SS who looked me over then began wandering through the house. One of them removed his gloves to pat the stove. I could tell he was thinking, my wife will like this stove.

  ‘I had been expecting it, so in a way it was a relief. I had to sign all sorts of things and officially they paid me. I didn’t care. I even made them coffee. They were perfectly civil. I had two hours to pack my things. I was lucky. They’d been clearing out the farms all over the place and half my neighbours were new Germans, mostly shipped in from the Balkans. One family had come all the way from Bessarabia. Most of the previous owners got sent off to the Reich as slave labour. I was too old and decrepit, I suppose. My friend from the Landrat knew I had a place in Prague, so he persuaded the SS to let me move up here and take an administrative job overseeing jam production for the good of the Protectorate.’

  Ctibor rose, got down carefully on his knees and pushed a hand underneath his bed. He grimaced for a moment or two, then withdrew a thick, brown glass bottle with a home-made cork. He pulled out the cork with his teeth and offered the bottle to Yenko.

  Yenko shook his head. Ctibor shrugged, then took a deep draught.

  ‘As I was loading my bags into their car – the councillor was dropping me off at Kladno station – truckloads of soldiers arrived, scores of them. Why so many? I turned to the councillor and said. Is it going to be a billet? I had assumed they were giving my house to one of those high-ranking SS men. I had heard one of them talking about whether or not a grand piano would fit in the corner of the drawing room. The councillor said, they are here to cut down the trees.’

  Yenko looked up. ‘The whole orchard?’ he asked.

  Ctibor lifted his hands. ‘I know. It must have taken them days. Your father and I walked through those trees each time you all came, talking things over. As the harvest began each year, the old women would spend the first morning going round to pick the first cherries and hand them out to children of other tribes. Do you remember that? They always gave the first cherries of the new harvest to unknown children …’

  ‘To feed the Ancestors …’

  ‘To feed the Ancestors … It took me twenty-six years to build up that orchard. Black beetles and white mould had failed to destroy it. It had survived the winter of ’29 and the Depression and the floods.’ He took another swig from the bottle. ‘The German army cut it down in less than a week.’

  Yenko did not reply. He was thinking of his father, and his father’s father, and grandfather and great-grandfather and all the Maximoffs back through the centuries. For all he knew, he was the last one.

  Ctibor looked at him and took a long swig from the beer bottle. He licked the foam from his lips. ‘I know what you are thinking, Father Confessor. What are a few trees? I know. I’ve thought it too. A week after I came to Prague, there was a shooting in the street, not far from here. It was a girl, about twenty years old. I heard the shot and there she was on the pavement, right in front of the Powder Tower. Two soldiers were standing over her. I couldn’t help looking as I passed. She was very tidy, hair still in plaits like a teenager, shoes scrubbed clean, her arms flung and a neat hole in her forehead. The blood was running into the gutter. I thought of her mother. Raising a child – well, I’ve never done it myself but I’ve seen it. Meals to be cooked, lessons to be taught. All that effort wasted because in a moment some soldier twitches his finger and BANG!’

  Ctibor stood suddenly and shouted, clapping his hands together and slopping liquid from the neck of the bottle. Yenko jumped. ‘It’s all gone! In a moment! Just like that …’ Ctibor slumped back in his chair. ‘It’s so easy … so easy …’

  Suddenly, Yenko felt desperate to get away from Ctibor’s misery, the mirror being held up to his own. I want to run across a field, he thought wildly. I want to feel my feet striking the earth and a breeze on my face. He looked around the room, as if a door might open in the wall and reveal a meadow.

  Ctibor had emptied the bottle and was holding it against his cheek. ‘You and me,’ he mumbled. ‘You and me, and the girl’s mother and the hundreds they killed to get the farms and the thousands they arrested after Heydrich, and the Jews … and, hey, František, we’re just the civilians. We haven’t even started on the soldiers yet. Each one of them has a story, each one of them took twenty years to grow. Sometimes I forget there are soldiers in this war. Sometimes I forget there is a front line at all. It feels as though the war is happening right here, in Prague, here …’ he lifted a finger and placed it on his temple. ‘Here inside my head. Is it really a World War? That’s what they tell me. I don’t believe them. They’ve invaded me, that’s what they’ve done, and the League of Nations didn’t give a damn, they just handed me over. I’m dispensable, you see. They thought, let’s hand over old Ctibor Michálek and maybe Hitler will stop there …’ He was drunk again.

  Unable to bear any more, Yenko rose and strode to the window. The afternoon was grey Darkness would come soon, curfew, another evening trapped in the room with Ctibor. The old man was right. Take each of their stories and multiply it by millions, how could you imagine that much human suffering? Best not to think of it, otherwise you would go mad, or take to drink like him with his veined nose, mumbling about his wife and his cherry trees.

  On the windowsill, in the gloom, a sparrow was hopping expectantly, pecking at the stonework now and then, then turning his head sharply from one side to the other, confused there were no crumbs.

  *

  Yenko had no idea how long he had been asleep when he was awoken. The room was in darkness and hot. He had rolled off the cushions and was lying on the bare boards of the floor with the blanket wrapped tightly around him. His head was resting on the floor, and as he lifted it, he felt the vibrations that had awoken him.

  He sat up, breathing hard. There was a low rumble. Above it, he heard Ctibor stirring too.

  All at once, he was violently awake, heart thumping.

  Ctibor was out of bed, sensing his alarm, saying, ‘Hush, hush, I think …’

  They stood close to each other, listening.

  It became apparent that vehicles were approaching, very slowly. Yenko stepped over the cushions and shuffled towards the window, slowly, hands outstretched so as not to bump into anything in the dark.

  ‘It’s not safe!’ Ctibor hissed.

  Yenko crouched beneath the sill, lifted the edge of the blackout curtain, then the hook which fastened the shutters together. Ctibor hissed, ‘František!’ but then came and crouched next to him. Together, they slowly creaked the shutters ajar, just enough to allow them to peer over the sill.

  The vehicles, lorries and jeeps, had almost passed beneath the window, bumping in single file along the cobbled street, its walls so narrow they could only just squeeze down it. The convoy was lit by the white headlamps of motorcycles, driving in two rows. As Yenko peered to decipher the inky black night, he saw that behind the motorcycles was a long, thin column of people, civilians: men, women and children, loaded down with goods, bundles, suitcases. There was a man in a smart coat and Homburg hat, with a huge roll of blankets tied up with string on his back
and a saucepan in each hand. An elderly man clutched a suitcase to his chest and worked his jaw soundlessly as he walked. Two women in headscarves went by, heads bent, arm in arm. A man in a flat cap and galoshes carried a boy on his shoulders.

  ‘Where are they going? At this hour?’ he whispered to Ctibor.

  There was a pause. ‘They are Jews.’ After another pause, he said, ‘More Jews. In the name of the Holy Father, more Jews. I did not think there were any left. I thought they were all gone by now. I did not think there were as many Jews in the world as I have seen pass by this window at night.’

  Yenko watched them. A young girl went by, staggering beneath the weight of a child not much smaller than herself.

  ‘Why do they move them at night?’

  ‘So that the rest of us won’t see, so that we won’t realise how many are being deported. For the first few months, I used to watch all the time. I used to think I might see her.’

  ‘Are the stories really true, do you think, about what they are doing to them?’ Whatever happens to the Jews will happen next to us.

  ‘No one ever comes back,’ Ctibor said slowly. ‘I have realised that now. For a while, I hoped. But I am not a fool. They set dogs on them at the railway stations. They shoot them if they don’t climb up quick enough. The stories …’ His voice dwindled.

  Yenko thought of a saying the gadje had in the East. My house is outside the village. I don’t know anything.

  There was a small commotion beneath the window. One of the motorcycles had sputtered to a halt and its headlamp had gone out. Some of the deportees also halted, confused. Soldiers began shouting.

  Afraid that in the confusion someone might look up, Yenko withdrew, sitting down with his back against the wall.

  He looked over at Ctibor, expecting him to do the same, but Ctibor seemed to have lost all fear and remained where he was, peering below. Yenko wondered how many times Ctibor had done this.

  ‘Do you know what the worst of it is?’ Ctibor said, without turning his head. ‘The worst of it is the ones who look hopeful, determined. I see it in the mothers, clutching their children to their chests. They are trying so hard to fool themselves. As long as I can hold on to this child, then somehow I will be able to protect it. They make themselves believe that. I think they believe it right up to the edge of the abyss.’