Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  It seemed to last for minutes in his head, flying up through the trees and racing over the surrounding countryside. At some stage he must have drawn breath and howled again but somehow the tail of each howl was welded seamlessly to the mouth of the next. It echoed so loudly he imagined Čacko, alone in the camp below, would turn his head in fear. In Brno they would hear the howl, in Prague – even in Poland, hated Poland, where his family had been taken to be ripped out of the world and turned to ashes.

  He howled until there was no longer within him the capacity for sound.

  When he had finished howling, he rose unsteadily to his feet. He could have fallen down again, wept – but instead, he stood.

  He was empty now.

  He gazed upwards at the still-calm moon, a new moon, a broken promise.

  They were all gone. His father gone, gasping his last on a pallet bed. His mother, beloved Dei gone. Parni gone, eyes blank with bewilderment. Aunt Tekla was gone. Bobo gone; Aunt Eva and Aunt Ludmila; and the others captured in Bohemia, Václav and Božena Winter and all their daughters; Yakali Zelinka and his wife whose name he couldn’t think of and Justin and Miroslav and their wives and children and old Pavliná who would have known before any of them; and all the other Kalderash in all the other camps and the Lowari and the Polska Roma and the Sinti and Boyash and Marie, tiny beautiful Marie, and her silent mother and her brutal father and Dei … his beloved Dei, his mother, the strongest woman in the whole world. Dead, all dead. Pushed into the trucks, climbing up willingly perhaps, believing that nothing could be worse than the camp, not knowing that the worst still lay ahead.

  He gazed upwards, dizzy with grief, his face an upturned, broken wheel, turning beneath the night sky. After the howl, there was silence; not even a breeze; moon but no stars; and the blackness of night everywhere. He was the only Rom left in the world.

  PART 7

  1945

  CHAPTER 27

  Yenko was in his hotel room in Beroun when the phone rang. He was standing in front of the full-length mirror on the door of the wardrobe, buttoning his flies and baring his teeth at his reflection. His shirt needed pressing and he had lost one of his cufflinks. Maybe it was on the floor somewhere. The woman had pushed him back on to the bed before he had had time to undress. Stupid gadji whore. She hadn’t even re-applied her lipstick afterwards, a true sign of contempt and carelessness. Neither of them had said goodbye.

  Yenko turned and sat down on the bed, knees wide to avoid creasing his trousers. He picked up the phone and stuck it in the crook of his shoulder, muttering, ‘Yes?’ while reaching forward for the pack of cigarettes on the bedside table. As he upended the packet on to the bed, he grimaced. There had been eight in the packet, now there were only five. The whore must have lifted three while she was at work. He revised his opinion of her. She was a clever gadji whore. A stupid one would have tried to take the packet.

  ‘A call from Prague, Mr Michálek,’ The receptionist’s voice was distant and bubbly.

  ‘Put him through.’

  While he lit the cigarette, there was a series of clicks, then Blažek’s gravelly tones. ‘Jan. How’s it going?’

  ‘Not bad. Not that good but not bad.’ Yenko had two paper packets of wizened sausages in his suitcase and four eggs wrapped in handkerchiefs nestling in his hat. Judging by how light the eggs were, they were rotten. There were also three watches in the false bottoms of his brogues, straps removed, and two signet rings sewn into the folds of his long-johns, around the crotch. It wasn’t what you’d call a big haul, hardly worth the risk of the journey, which took so damn long these days, but just enough to make it worthwhile. The eggs and sausages would be sold when he got to Prague, or used for bribes, and the watches and rings would go to what Blažek called our retirement fund. Valuables had become more and more easy to acquire as the food shortages had worsened. The retirement fund was bulging.

  ‘Been busy here,’ Blažek replied. That meant prices were up again. Coffee had been eighteen hundred crowns per kilo when Yenko had left Prague, a couple of days ago. He wondered if it had gone over two thousand yet. The cigarette ration was down from thirty-five to twenty-five a week and you could get twenty crowns for one smoke. To say nothing of the booze. On Monday, he’d sold a bottle of brandy to a restaurant on Strosmayer Square for eight hundred and fifty – well, some of the liquid in the bottle was brandy. The owner wouldn’t complain. He’d spent the last two years cleaning out snail shells after each serving of escargot and refilling them with chopped dog.

  Yenko drew on his cigarette, pursing his lips to exhale in a fine, speedy stream.

  ‘Has your cousin collected his wages yet?’ he asked. They had an informant inside the police who let them know which of the black-market boys had been pulled off the streets recently. If it was anyone they had done business with, they off-loaded their stock and went quiet for a while.

  ‘Yes. He’s grateful to us. Things are very slow for him.’

  ‘Good. I’ll drop by when I’m back then.’

  ‘Safe journey.’

  *

  The journey was never safe. Trains were cancelled all the time because of the coal shortages, and those that ran were dangerously overloaded. The Allies had started to bomb the railway lines, now they were within range; the civilian trains as well as the troop carriers. (The Americans had dropped one on a tram on Schwerinstrasse last month.) No, the journey was never safe, but as Blažek said, ‘Jan, it beats doing twelve-hour shifts in a tank factory.’ Blažek was happy to sit in Prague doing the deals while Yenko performed the more dangerous task of travelling out to the country. Yenko didn’t mind. He liked to be on the move.

  Sometimes, on nights when he couldn’t sleep, he would lie in his dark hotel room, the rough blankets up to his chest, smoking and exhaling upwards, thinking that maybe he would just walk into the woods one day, somewhere, in the middle of nowhere, and strip off his smart suit and shiny shoes and ruffle his pomaded hair – start growing a beard, perhaps. He could do it, any time. That was why he didn’t worry like Blažek.

  He never did walk into the woods. He always went back to Prague. In Prague, there was no time to think.

  The war would be over soon. The Russians were already in Brno and the rest of Moravia would be theirs within weeks. It was just a question of who would get to Prague first, them or the Yanks. In the meantime, everyone was keeping their heads down. He and Blažek had the field to themselves.

  Blažek treated Yenko like an equal partner now. He never went short of cigarettes. In return, Yenko happily handed over his weekly ration of a quarter of a kilo of meat, especially once Blažek had told him it was horsemeat. Blažek had a lot of mouths to feed; a wife and four children in Krč and a mistress in the Little Quarter. The mistress came from a German family who had their bags all packed, ready for the dash to the American lines once the Russians got too close.

  Yenko stubbed out his cigarette in the tin ashtray and lifted the phone. The receptionist answered politely, ‘Yes, Mr Michálek.’

  ‘I’m leaving in a few minutes. Would you prepare my bill please?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Michálek.’

  He liked this receptionist. She didn’t look askance at him, the way some did, and she gave him the only hotel room in the whole district that had its own phone. The only people using hotels these days were businessmen like him, and Germans. Blažek barricaded the door at night when he stayed in a hotel.

  Yenko rose and took his jacket from the wooden hanger on the back of the door. He didn’t like the brown pinstripe any more. He had a smart grey suit now but he never wore it for travelling. He hoped there would be a train that day. If there was a troop carrier passing through, he would bribe the guard to let him ride up front.

  *

  He was back in Prague by late afternoon. He had left his bicycle in the safekeeping of the stationmaster at Smíchov and rewarded him with an egg. Bicycles were valuable these days. There was no fuel for cars and the trams kept breaking down and crash
ing because there were no spare parts.

  He strapped his case and his stick to the back of the bike with the long strand of string that he kept in his pocket. With the hat containing the three remaining eggs balanced carefully on the handlebars, he cycled slowly north, parallel with the river. He would cross over into the New Town so he could cycle past Charles Square. It had been dug up last year for the planting of vegetables, and one of the workers there was a friend who occasionally passed on a little something.

  The day had turned out sunny. As he crossed the bridge, he glanced north along the river, squinting in the bright light. There seemed to be more soldier activity than usual at the foot of the bridges. He hoped they were not going to close them – they did that more and more frequently these days. He wouldn’t be able to get over to the Little Quarto later.

  As he passed along Ressel Street, he saw more soldiers grouped on the corner. Something was up. He slowed down. Four women were standing by the Church of St Cyril and Methodius, clutching bunches of flowers, dandelions and spring daisies. The swastikas which were usually draped over the entrance to the crypt were lying crumpled on the pavement. The Germans were gathered around the women but the atmosphere was quite calm. They seemed involved in some sort of negotiation.

  Yenko sighed to himself at the women’s folly. It was far too early for that kind of gesture. They would be all right dealing with ordinary soldiers but just wait until the Ordnungspolizei turned up. They would catch it then. Didn’t people realise that now was the most dangerous time? They would get dragged off to the basement of the Petschek Palace, all for a few dandelions. Why couldn’t people just sit tight and wait for the Americans to come?

  There was no sign of their friend amongst the diggers at the Charles Square vegetable patch, so he continued cycling past. As he crossed Wenceslas Square, he saw that some of the shopkeepers had taken down the German versions of their signs. He shook his head.

  *

  He was renting a small apartment in the Old Town, not far from Ctibor’s place. He didn’t see much of Ctibor these days. He told himself it was safer for Ctibor that way but in truth the old man embarrassed him. He was still drinking, still becoming maudlin. He never seemed to eat anything but never got less flabby. When Yenko went to visit, he would open a bottle of some disgusting rubbish and drink himself unconscious while Yenko sat in the armchair, smoking and nodding. Yenko would let himself out later, after he had emptied a few beans of coffee from a small brown envelope into Ctibor’s tin. He wondered if the old man ever guessed that it was Yenko who gave him the coffee, or whether he awoke from his stupors and thought it miraculous that there always seemed to be just enough coffee for one cup, to sober up.

  When Yenko reached his lodgings, he cycled up to the door and dismounted carefully. He unstrapped his suitcase and stick from the back, put them under one arm and the hat with eggs between his teeth, then hefted the bicycle up on one shoulder. He unlocked the door with his free hand and used his foot to push the door open.

  As he manoeuvred inside, his landlady emerged from her ground-floor apartment. ‘Mr Michálek, Mr Blažek came by just an hour ago to see if you were back yet. He seemed a little agitated.’

  Yenko attempted a grin with the hat still clenched between his teeth. He put the bicycle down, propping it against the wall, and removed the hat. ‘Mr Blažek is always agitated,’ he replied nonchalantly. The last thing he wanted was to get stuck in conversation with Mrs Stropová. She always wanted a chat when he returned from one of his trips. Leaving the bike, he carried the hat and suitcase up the stone staircase. ‘But thank you anyway …’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘Do come down for some tea if you’re thirsty,’ she called up after him. ‘I bought my new ration today…’

  ‘I have to go out straight away, Mrs Stropová, but thank you anyway …’ he was nearly at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Well, later perhaps …’ her voice echoed up the gloomy stone stairwell.

  Yenko muttered to himself as he let himself into his room. Maybe he would drop in for tea on the way back from seeing Blažek. It was always a good idea to keep your landlady happy.

  As he put the hat and suitcase down on his small iron bed, he wondered what Blažek was agitated about. Probably just woman trouble – his perpetual problem – but it might be something more serious. He checked his watch. If he went over to the Little Quarter straight away, then he would be in time to catch Blažek following his afternoon exertions with Heda.

  *

  Blažek and Heda had a love-nest, dangerously close to her family home – a room above a bar, with oak shutters and a wrought-iron balcony. The patron underneath also let Yenko and Blažek use his cellar to store the retirement fund. He was well paid, although they had been careful not to let him know the real value of what he was hiding for them. They pretended it was bolts of cloth and cutlery. Blažek’s affair with Heda was a good cover for their other activities. All the gossip about Blažek was about his Fräulein.

  Yenko left his bicycle at his landlady’s, cutting on foot behind the Old Town Square through the deserted Jewish Quarter. As he limped past the Pinkas Synagogue, the crows nesting in the trees above the walled cemetery were cawing wildly to one another. The late-afternoon light was golden but it had turned unexpectedly cold. He shivered.

  The bridges were still open. He crossed at Mánesův, keeping pace with a crawling, clanging tram, and headed down Letenská. When he had started walking around Prague he had tried to avoid streets like Letenská, with high walls either side, affording no escape. He didn’t bother now. Two soldiers patrolled past but they ignored him. Past the square where the trams stopped, he took a couple of left turns into a deserted courtyard – it could hardly be called a square, with a black stone statue of a weeping angel and a single bar tucked into the corner.

  The bar was deserted, not even Old Stano was around, so Yenko went to the bottom of the tiny wooden staircase and shouted up. ‘Blažek! Blažek, are you there? It’s Jan!’ Then he returned to the bar and sat at one of the empty tables by the open door, where he could see out into the courtyard. The weeping angel cast a heavy shadow.

  He withdrew a cigarette and tapped it on the table. After a few minutes, he heard a light step on the stair and turned to see Heda descend, barefoot, in a thin dressing-gown, her hair in disarray. Her expression was sleepy and annoyed. Her grey eyes gazed at him. He returned her gaze.

  ‘He’ll be down in a minute,’ she said eventually, then slunk over to the bar where she helped herself to a beer. She turned back to the stairs.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Yenko, as she trailed past him.

  Heda made a small huffing sound. ‘He’ll tell you.’

  Yenko returned to watching the square.

  After a while, Blažek descended, fully dressed but for his jacket, smoothing his few strands of thinning hair back over his head and frowning heavily. ‘You’ve been back to your place then?’ he asked rhetorically, as he pulled them two small beers. As he sat down at the table, Yenko lit the cigarette, then exhaled, waiting for Blažek to explain.

  Blažek stared at him for a moment or two, then exclaimed, ‘Ah, Jan! Are you made of stone? Have you never been in love? I know you’re only young but even so! The whores tell me you are like a machine. I don’t understand you.’

  Yenko gave him a level gaze.

  Blažek drained half his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I wish I was like you. That girl is driving me crazy. I’m beside myself. I don’t know what to do.’

  Yenko sighed. Had Blažek really dragged him all the way over here just to discuss his tart?

  Blažek observed his impatience. ‘No, hear me out. Listen. Since you’ve been away, things are moving. There are all sorts of rumours. Toussaint has put the army on a state of alert. The whole city is chewing its fingernails. The Resistance won’t wait for the Russians.’

  ‘So?’ said Yenko, swapping his full beer glass for Blažek’s empty one. He still h
ated the beer.

  ‘What am I going to do about her?’

  As he spoke, Heda descended the stairs. She had dressed in a pale blue dress, cut just above the knee, with a row of lace daisies about the cuffs and collar. Her hair was drawn back with a white ribbon. She took her beer glass over to the sink behind the bar and rinsed it.

  Blažek lowered his voice.

  ‘Just look at her, Jan. She’s eighteen. Have you ever seen anything so perfect? Imagine what’s going to happen to her and girls like her if the Russians get here first?’

  ‘I thought she was getting out.’

  ‘The father wants to. The mother refuses to go. My family’s lived in this city for three centuries. You know the kind of thing. You know what those old German families are like.’

  Yenko didn’t know and didn’t care. He shrugged. Heda was still at the sink, scratching lipstick off the glass with a fingernail.

  ‘I think I can persuade them,’ Blažek said.

  Yenko raised his eyebrows.

  ‘They know all about me and Heda. I’ve been helping them out, since things got bad. I think I can persuade them to clear out but I have to promise them I’m going to look after their things until they’ve worked out whether it’s safe to send for them.’

  Yenko was beginning to see where he might come into all this. ‘So …’ he said slowly.

  ‘I need the basement. You wouldn’t believe the junk they’ve got. But the mother’s hysterical. She refuses to try and take the heirlooms out on a cart. I said wrap them in cloth and pretend they’re sacks of bedding but she said no. And she’s probably right. They’d get lynched if they got caught with it. Stano says it’s all right to move our stuff up to his attic but he won’t let me do it unless he gets your permission as well.’

  ‘When do you want to do it?’ Yenko asked wearily. Blažek hadn’t even asked to see what he got in Beroun.

  ‘Right now. Stano has gone to Helichová for pickles. He’ll be back any minute. If he unlocks for us straight away, there’ll be plenty of time to empty the basement and let you get back over the river. I can get someone else to help me move Heda’s stuff tomorrow.’