Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  Ctibor’s face was no more than a dark-grey shadow in the tiny light that came up from the street. Yenko heard the throaty growl of the motorcycle engine coming back to life, more shouts, the footfalls continuing. He closed his eyes. Dalé, he thought. Mum. Don’t die. Don’t die before I come back for you. I’m coming. I’m sorry it’s taking so long but I have to save myself before I can save you. And I’m being so slow because I’m frightened and don’t know what to do. I’m trying not to think of you. I have to try all the time. If I think of you I will go mad. What would be happening back at the camp? It seemed so far away. Would the quarantine be lifted yet, or would they all still be locked in to die? They must have done something about the typhus. They wouldn’t have abandoned the staff, at least. Maybe they would. Maybe they were all falling sick, one by one, as he hid safely in a Prague backstreet, doing nothing. Don’t die, Dalé. Please don’t die.

  It seemed to last forever, the low murmur of the engines, the rumble of the feet against the cobbles. What did you put on your feet when you had been warned that you would be deported? Your best shoes, the most valuable? Or did you wear the sturdiest? Did you stop and think that the choice was pointless? Or, as Ctibor had said, did you continue to delude yourself until you stood at the edge of the abyss, until delusion was no longer possible? The Biboldes have it worse than us, he thought. We have never expected anything but death from the gadje. The Jews have lived with the Gentiles all these centuries, in this city, making things for them, doing business with them, marrying them, and where has it got them? A night stroll through the stony streets of Prague, a choice about which pair of shoes is better for the walk into oblivion.

  He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. Would it never cease? The engines, the feet, a river of murmurs, ceaseless, already-ghosts – and he and Ctibor lost in their own misery; Ctibor’s wife, his family.

  Yenko squeezed his eyes tight, pressed his hands against the side of his head, and wished profoundly that he was back in the camp with his people, whatever was happening there. Anything was preferable to this, this knowledge. He hated himself.

  There was a shuffling in the dark. Ctibor had crawled beneath the window to where he was sitting. Yenko felt a rough, plump hand fumble for his arm and squeeze it. ‘Thank you,’ Ctibor whispered hoarsely. ‘Thank you for coming to me.’

  *

  Blažek visited two weeks later with a present for Yenko: a suit, brown pinstripe with wide lapels and turn-ups on the trouser legs. The identity card would take a little longer, he said, but the suit meant he could at least walk down the street without looking as though he had a sign hung round his neck saying illegal.

  They were all in the back room of the office. Ctibor sent Yenko into the toilet to change into the suit. When he emerged, Blažek and Ctibor both stared at him. Yenko looked down at himself. The suit was too large around the waist and the legs of the trousers were far too long.

  ‘Those will need taking up,’ said Blažek, pointing with his cigarette.

  ‘I’ve got a needle upstairs, I can do it,’ said Ctibor.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Yenko.

  The jacket was roomy round the shoulders but the arms were just right.

  ‘Brown,’ said Blažek, thoughtfully. ‘It suits you.’ For some reason, all three of them laughed.

  ‘Socks. Shirt. Braces. I can manage those with my clothing coupons,’ said Ctibor.

  ‘I’ll pay you back,’ Yenko said.

  Ctibor flapped both hands, ‘Ach! What do I need with clothes?’

  ‘Shoes are difficult,’ said Blažek. ‘Shoes are important. Shoes are what gives a man away.’

  ‘Can you sort it out?’

  ‘Of course,’ Blažek said with a smile. ‘But you will pay me. The suit is a gift. But you pay me for the shoes. I’ll put it on your tab, underneath the identity card but above the spectacles, hair ointment and cigarettes. Your own father won’t know you by the time we’ve finished with you.’

  Yenko said. ‘I’d better get this off,’ and turned away.

  When he emerged, Blažek said, ‘There’s something else.’ He picked his cigarettes up from the counter-top and tossed them across the room to Yenko, who caught them neatly, withdrew one and tossed them back. ‘We need to cripple you.’

  When Yenko had lit the cigarette, he inhaled deeply and said, looking at his fingers, ‘How, exactly?’

  Blažek shrugged. ‘Take your pick. We can get a crippling disease put on your identity card, tuberculosis maybe. We’d need a doctor’s letter as back-up. Trouble is, you will still get stopped and your story checked out. It’s better if it’s something visible. You could strap up one arm and keep it inside your suit, or limp.’

  ‘You just don’t see any young men on the streets these days,’ said Ctibor apologetically.

  ‘A limp,’ said Yenko.

  ‘Good choice,’ said Blažek. ‘I’ll find some sort of brace and surgical sock so you can strap up each morning when you get out of bed. You have to do it every single moment. Don’t even go to pee or answer the door without it.’

  ‘I know how to limp,’ said Yenko shortly, frowning at his cigarette. He brushed a few flakes of ash from the sleeve of his shirt. Already, it seemed old and worn, unsuitable. He missed the suit. He wanted everything else as soon as possible. At last; to look like the people around him, to be able to walk down the street … ‘Get me a stick. With a silver top.’

  Blažek gave an ironic bow. ‘Whatever you say.’ The two older men chuckled indulgently at Yenko’s newly acquired air of authority.

  Yenko tipped his head back and blew a long stream of smoke towards the ceiling.

  CHAPTER 26

  Yenko was standing outside the main railway station. He had removed the shoe on his ‘bad’ foot and was tapping it against a nearby tree and frowning into it. Passers-by ignored him.

  There was no stone in his shoe, or any other object, but he needed a moment or two to collect himself. It was one thing to limp into bars behind Blažek, smoothing back his oiled hair and lighting a cigarette while Blažek did the talking. He had even got used to walking past German soldiers. It was another matter to go up to a ticket counter and say, ‘Single to Brno,’ as if he bought railway tickets all the time. The last time he had travelled on a train, he had been an escapee in a goods car. Now, only a few months later, he was going to hobble past the soldiers on guard, make his way slowly to the counter, purchase his ticket (you didn’t even have to show your identity card) and board the train. You are a cripple, but a confident cripple, Blažek had told him. Practise your lock. Damaged but suave – the girls will love it. Injured men make them feel patriotic. Play your cards right and I’ll introduce you to some girls. It was complicated, being a gadjo.

  He tipped his head to the sky, closing his eyes against the sun. It had risen fast that morning, hard and bright in a blanket of blue. No blue was as positive as the blue of early summer, as if God had something to prove.

  The heat on his face returned a memory to him: the evenings when he would lean against his mother as they squatted next to the fire, listening to her and the other women singing softly. He could remember lifting a hand to stroke her cheek, amazed at the texture of her dark brown skin, so much darker than his, bathing in her indulgent smile. Their wordless unity – that was what he remembered. His mother was a tall, smooth-skinned woman, with gold coins in her braids, not the grey-faced skeleton he had last seen in the camp. It was that other mother, that early one, he was going to find. The mother you remember no longer exists. He squashed the thought.

  He pictured himself on the train. He would sit on a seat, his bad foot resting upon the other knee and his stick across his lap, playing with an unlit cigarette and staring out of the window at the countryside flashing in the sunlight. The train was going to carry him back through time as well as distance, the harsh spin of its iron wheels rolling back the years to the life he had had as a child before the war, before all the white people had gone mad. If he
thought beyond that, he would lose his courage and go and hide beneath Ctibor’s eiderdown. My father died. He did nothing. He just curled up and died. He opened his eyes and bent to pick up his small case.

  *

  He spent the night in Brno; and the following morning at the tiny district railway station trying to get a train to Nědvedice. At first he was told there were no passenger trains stopping at all that day, but a few crowns to the stationmaster soon elicited a different story. There were passenger trains going up that way but because of travel restrictions in the area no one was allowed to get on them. Once they had begun to talk, the stationmaster was curious as to his business up there. Yenko fobbed him off with a story about visiting relatives. Why was it a restricted area? he asked the stationmaster, pretending he had not been up there since the Occupation. The stationmaster changed the subject to warn him about how long the train would take. He could probably walk there quicker. It would be nearly evening by the time he arrived.

  I can spend the night in the woods, thought Yenko. No more fat bouncy pillows for me. They can keep their beds. Soon, I will become a Rom again.

  He walked from Nĕdvedice, taking the track that led up to the camp, following it until he judged the time was right to turn into the woods and climb upwards so that he was above and behind the camp. The light was beginning to fail when he found a suitable clearing with a springy cluster of new-growth ferns and bracken beneath a tree. He opened his case and extracted the thin sheet he had brought with him from Prague. It was a concession to the gadje world, laying a sheet down before he slept on the forest floor – but he only had one change of clothes. He removed his jacket and hung it on a nearby twig, then sat down and smoked a cigarette, feeling profoundly comfortable. It was a mild night.

  When his cigarette was finished, he sat for a long time with the stub between his fingers, listening to the tiny cracklings of the forest, like noises from a dream. The dusk began to gather. The forest has eyes. He rose, took his water bottle from his case and tucked it under his arm. He walked a few metres, to piss against a tree, then poured a little water over his hands and rubbed them together, apologising to the Ancestors for his many recent breaches of the laws of decent behaviour. He would be seeing his mother soon. She would want to know he had done his best to keep himself Clean.

  He replaced his water bottle and closed his case, then lay down with his arms bent sharply at the elbow and tucked under his head, as he used to when he was a boy. He was tired. He thought he would fall asleep quite quickly.

  After a minute or so, he sat up and brushed a few stray pine needles from his sleeves. What was wrong with him? Had a few months of gadje beds made him soft? Here he was, back where he belonged, in the open air. Perhaps he needed just one more cigarette.

  As he smoked, he pulled small strands of tobacco from between his teeth and tucked them into the top pocket of his shirt. His father had never wasted a single strand of tobacco. He closed his eyes, blew smoke into the air, and thought about Josef. Oh Dad, he thought, a well of soft sorrow opening in his chest. I am not letting you down. I found the gadjo Michálek, and I survived – and everything you said about Prague is true, by the way. It is a den of snakes. But there are other things I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect to like seeing big buildings, after a while, and sitting in a bar in a suit, and having gadji women glance at me with glances that seem to mean something. The gadjo Blažek says I look much older than I am. It’s the missing teeth and weather-beaten skin, he says. I know differently. I know it is the things I have seen. I could have stayed in Prague. I could have turned into a swindling gadjo like Blažek but I didn’t, although it was getting easier and easier with each passing week. I stopped starting to become whatever I was becoming. I even have a limp now. Isn’t that enough for you?

  He gave a sudden shudder. Was he cold? He looked around at the darkening forest. His father had died locked in a hut full of sick and dying souls. His ghost would have been unable to escape. Would it have returned to his body and been buried with him, in the pit above the camp? Perhaps it would have slipped out of the winding sheet and even now be wandering around the camp’s perimeter, in Hell, unable to leave, moaning for his surviving family and bewailing their inability to set each other free.

  Yenko’s breath began to deepen at the thought. He wished he could ask his Aunt Tekla. She would know what had happened to his father’s soul.

  The air between the trees was grey. Patches of mosquitoes were just visible in the gloaming, floating like blouses drying in the wind. Distantly, a fox barked, was silent, and barked again. His father’s soul might be nearby. It might stumble upon him in the night, its eyes dark and disbelieving, its mouth an open hollow. My son, why did you allow me to be trapped, rotting, for all time?

  Aunt Tekla. Yenko jumped to his feet. His need of her was overwhelming. She was already sick by the time he ran away from the camp. What were the chances she had survived? Perhaps these woods held her spirit too, joined with that of his father, aimlessly united in their misery: and Parni, small Parni, transformed into a malicious sprite. Her tiny fingers would pluck at his eyes. Who else? Bobo: a small, plump demon? His Aunts Ludmila and Eva: their slim, wavering figures would be like flames in the dark. The forest has eyes.

  Dei. Mother. She would still be alive, no matter how sick the rest of the camp had got. She would not have let him down by dying.

  He snatched his jacket from the twig where he had hung it and shrugged it on. He picked up his case and shook it free of forest debris. He could not wait a moment longer. The camp was just over the rise. He had to go and look at it, just look. He could not spend the night sitting and waiting and staring into the dark.

  He left the sheet where it was and hurried through the trees, up the rise, then turned to skirt the fence with the old quarry lost in gloom to his right. He tried to console himself by thinking of the look on his mother’s face when she saw him, when she realised he had come back. How many other sons could have achieved what he had? The perilous journey, the transformation, the return … Even she would find it hard to hide her amazement.

  *

  After skirting the low fence that bordered the farmland, he headed back up into the forest, so that he could approach the camp from behind. He would go to the edge, where he could look down on the perimeter fence and find a safe place in the trees. Then he would sit up all night, awake, watching the camp, so close to his family that they would probably hear him if he stood up and shouted. The next morning, he would walk down to the road that led past the camp. If the quarantine was still in force, there would be signs on the main gate, which would be visible from the road. If anyone challenged him, he had a story ready: he was a businessman, Jan Michálek, interested in the possibility of cheap labour. (‘Here is my identification. Would you care for a cigarette?’) But he wouldn’t get challenged unless he got too close. When he had taken a good look at the camp, he would return to the woods and plan how to get his family out; a ruse, bribery – perhaps it would be simplest to dig beneath the perimeter fence one night and force the lock on the women’s block. Dei. Marie? He could hardly remember what the girl looked like – when he thought of her he had only an impression of smallness and self-possession. Dei, she was the important one. He would save her, and then she would be able to save him and together they would save the others. He must find a way of talking to her, at least. But until he knew whether or not the quarantine was still in force, it was pointless to plan.

  He thought of walking past the camp in daylight, just strolling down the road. He was confident the guards would not recognise him. They knew him only as a shaven-headed gypsy, bony and weak, in prison uniform. Now, he had hair and creases in his trousers and collar studs. Even so … Perhaps he should take a closer look at the back of the camp now. It was almost dark.

  He could soon make out the perimeter fence from his vantage point on the edge of the forest. It had changed, he thought. It was not quite where he remembered it – it was nearer the
trees, and not as tall. It had been untended in his absence, the barbed wire hanging loose in places. The sentry towers were unoccupied. They must be changing shift.

  The absence of sentries gave him the courage to skirt closer – the patch of scrubby ground between the fence and the trees was no more than ten metres wide. What a poor state of repair the fence was in, the wooden planks broken and skewed. I could scramble under that in an instant, he thought scornfully. Could he really be at the same place? That fence looked so short. Emboldened, he glanced left and right, then stumbled in the growing darkness over the rubble-strewn ground to crouch by the fence and peer through a gap in the rotting wood, into the camp itself.

  It was difficult to make things out in the gloom. A thin line of smoke was coming from the cook’s hut on the far side of the camp but he could see no one from the narrow angle afforded him by the gap in the fence. Everybody would be in their bunks by now, the lamps extinguished. Nearest to him was the men’s barracks. He had the sudden, mad idea of creeping in there and starting an uprising, a mass breakout. That would give them something to think about. If only there were six of me, he thought. Six men could do it. If he had a pistol he would do it on his own. It would be so fine to stroll in there now, to greet that Jan Malík with a casual grin. He wouldn’t recognise him at first. When he did, his eyes would pop out of his head. He’d soon change his mind about whether Yenko was Rom enough for his daughter. Yenko felt his breath quicken. It was so tempting.

  Odd there were no patrols. He remembered the night-sentries wandering the camp continuously, skirting the inside of the fence and weaving between the barracks, on the constant lookout, especially in the summer. There were always more escape attempts in summer. He could see no one, in fact.