Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  ‘Which way have you come?’ the man holding him hissed.

  ‘Řetĕzová,’ Yenko responded.

  The man’s grasp on him was urgent. He was panting for breath. Yenko smelt fear.

  ‘Any activity?’ said the second man.

  Yenko shook his head.

  ‘Come, come!’ the second man snapped at the one keeping a lookout, grabbing at the back of his jacket. The first man released him. ‘Stay away from the river,’ he said to Yenko. ‘They are lining hostages up across the bridges.’

  The three man turned and ran down Anenská, back the way Yenko had come. Yenko waited in the doorway and a few minutes later, a patrol of Germans came pounding down the street. Just after they had passed, there was a burst of automatic gunfire which echoed and spun in the confined space of the alley, the cracks and whizzing and phutting noises of the bullets sounding as if they came from in front, behind, above and below. Yenko put his hands over his ears. He stayed in the doorway until it had fallen quiet, then strode swiftly back down the alley, turning right to avoid Řetĕzová and cut across Bethlehem Square. As he rounded the corner, he nearly ran into two Germans standing over the body of the man who had grabbed him. He was face down on the cobblestones, the top portion of his head blown away, and blood pouring in a dark river down to the gutter. The other men were nowhere to be seen. One of the soldiers glanced at Yenko as he passed but he raised both hands and backed swiftly away. They let him go.

  Beyond Bethlehem Square, in the sidestreets north of Wenceslas, it was business as usual. One or two of the shops had opened and women were queuing for their rations. At a tram stop, he saw two Czech policemen chatting with a couple of German soldiers, laughing. Beyond the stop, a man in a smart overcoat had openly set up a large suitcase on a bench and was calling out that he had bars of real shaving foam. Yenko’s professional pride made him hesitate and wonder if he should ask the man’s price. Then he thought better of it.

  *

  He made himself tea when he got home, hoping the routine of the task would get the picture out of his head – the top half of the young man’s head, blown away into the gutter; the blood, a little grey matter. The crow in the doorway. The old man’s cry. He shook his head. Don’t think about it. Don’t go out. Stay at home, working out how much those gold watches in Stano’s cellar might be worth when it’s all over. The Germans would either respond to the disturbances or pull out. He would stay at home from now on. Blažek could look after himself, so could Ctibor. What was he to any of them? Don’t think about it.

  His resolution lasted until the following day. He was listening to the wireless and heard Prague Radio announce that henceforth it would broadcast only in Czech. He sat down on the edge of his bed, pursing his lips. This was it. This was different from hanging a tricolour out of a window. It was different from the tram conductors refusing to announce the stops in German and the shopkeepers rejecting Reichsmarks. This was someone, somewhere, declaring the independence of the city It was war.

  He felt an odd mixture of confusion and relief. It would all be over soon. The Germans could not possibly tolerate this – already the radio station was requesting all citizens to come its defence. Today would be the day. Today was truly the day to stay at home, preferably in a basement with a flask of tea, a loaf of bread and several packets of cigarettes. No one in their right mind would go out on the streets today.

  He wondered if he should go down to the neighbourhood shelter, but the thought of being shut in a cellar was more than he could contemplate. He decided to inspect his wardrobe. Now he had smart clothes, he had become quite fastidious.

  He took the jacket of his best grey suit from its hanger and turned it inside out. The silk lining was worn through, where the left arm was stitched to the armhole. It was beginning to fray. If he didn’t stitch a new seam, he would have a hole soon. As he examined it, the Prague Radio announcer said, Citizens of Prague! Citizens! The attack has begun. Come and defend the voice of freedom from the forces of evil. Now is the time to avenge yourselves against the German murderers. Think of our innocent dead.

  He was threading the needle – holding it up to the light – when he heard the sounds of gunfire, some way distant, then a low booming noise. It has begun. The crow. Dei. Don’t think about it. The stitching took him over an hour. At first, he continued listening to Prague Radio’s increasingly frantic requests for help. Then he turned the wireless off. He replaced his one precious sewing needle, carefully, in the little leather needle holder, and put the holder back in the box with his two reels of thread – one brown, one black. He turned the jacket the right way round, replaced it on its hanger and brushed it down. There was a burst of machine-gun fire in a neighbouring street; loud, staccato and brief. It has begun, round here now, too. Don’t think about it.

  He rose and went over to the cupboard underneath his sink. In another small wooden box, he kept a tin with his last scrap of dried-out shoe polish. He returned to the bed wearing his right shoe on his right hand and clutching the polish and a rag in the other. He flipped the lid off the polish, one-handedly, and placed the tin on the bed beside him, then dabbed the polish with the rag. He lifted the rag in one hand, and the shoe on the other.

  He sat looking at the two items he was holding. They seemed disinclined to meet. He glanced from rag to shoe, and back again. When Blažek had first found him some shoes to go with the brown suit, two years ago, Ctibor had got down on his hands and knees, a fat old man on his knees. He didn’t have any polish, so he had cleaned them with spit and a shirt he said he didn’t need any more.

  Damn the old man. He’s only going to go out and get himself in trouble. Yenko dropped the rag on the bed and the shoe on the floor. He pushed his right foot inside it, and bent to lace it up. On the way out, he picked up his walking stick.

  *

  The street was deserted. He stood for a moment, on the doorstep, listening to the unnatural quiet. Then he heard, in the distance, the low rumble of thunder. There was bright sunshine. The thunder died, then came again. He walked to the corner of his street and looked down the neighbouring one, in the direction of Celetná. It, too, was deserted, except for some activity at the end, the dark shapes of men in jackets, jumping and leaping. He began to trot towards them. As he neared, he saw that they were in the final stages of constructing a barricade. Already, it was shoulder high, mostly stones and doors, with a few sandbags on top. A heap of furniture lay piled against the stone wall of a nearby shop, and several of the men were throwing chairs and chests and planks of wood on top of the barricade. Two other men were using bars to lever up cobblestones from the street. As Yenko approached, there was the sound of automatic gunfire from the other side of the barricade. Two of the men piling furniture stopped and withdrew pistols, scrambling up the barricade to return fire. The men levering the cobblestones raised their heads. One of them saw Yenko and began frantically wheeling his hand.

  Yenko looked back down the street. As he turned his head, a bullet whistled past his ear. He crouched down and ran forward, to shelter behind the barricade. One of the men standing on the furniture above him fell back soundlessly, arms flung wide. His pistol dropped to the ground. One of the other men picked it up and tossed it to Yenko. Yenko caught it clumsily. It slipped through his fingers and made a metallic clatter as it fell. He picked it up. Not knowing what to do with it, he put it in his pocket. The other man on top of the barricade was shouting down at them, ‘Go back, go back! Pull back!’

  The man next to Yenko grabbed the shoulder of his jacket and hauled him to his feet, and together they ran back down the street. Then something strange began to happen. As he ran, Yenko felt the ground beneath him become fluid, and disappear. The air in front of him shuddered. He heard a roaring noise but his ears seemed to be having trouble transmitting the noise to his brain. He felt, rather than heard the rumble, like a hundred trains rushing past him at once. He fell to his knees, hands over his ears. The buildings around seemed indistinct. He blinked
madly, trying to make them come back.

  The man running next to him stopped and turned round. He grabbed both of Yenko’s hands and pulled them away from his ears. He was shouting into Yenko’s face, but Yenko couldn’t hear anything – then noise rushed into his head, as if a pair of sluice-gates had opened. ‘You’re okay!’ the fighter shouted. ‘You’re just stunned! Come on!’

  ‘What was that?’ Yenko gasped.

  ‘They are shelling from over the river. It landed close. Come.’ He pulled Yenko to his feet and together they ran down to the corner of Celetná. The other men had disappeared.

  ‘Stay back,’ the fighter hissed, as he peered round the corner. When he turned back, he said to Yenko. ‘They still have most of the street. We need to get a unit behind them. Go back to Masná and tell White Dog to bring some men up Rybná. If it’s blocked, we’ll have to circle back the other way. I’ll stay here.’ Yenko stared at him. The fighter stared back. ‘Go!’ he said. ‘Now!’

  Yenko turned and ran back down the narrow road. At the crossroads he paused. Maybe he should try and creep behind the Týn Church and get to Ctibor’s place. It wouldn’t be safe to go back the way he had come.

  He turned left, and saw that the narrow road ahead of him was strewn with rubble. A building at the end had taken a direct hit. Half the roof was gone and wooden beams were exposed. Something else seemed to have exploded up from the middle of the street. There was a shallow crater surrounded by huge stones covered with a scattering of earth.

  Then he saw, next to the crater, a German soldier, lying on the ground. He was on his stomach, in the shelter of a wall, peering down the street, away from Yenko, down the sights of a machine-gun propped up on a stand. The soldier’s helmet and back were also covered with loose soil. He was lying beneath a shop window, an optician’s, with rows of spectacles in tiers staring down at him. Suddenly, the glass in the window shattered and the spectacles jumped off their stands. The soldier cried out and began firing the machine-gun, shouting all the time with his mouth open and his face distorted, his words inaudible above the clatter of the gunfire, Tiny explosions detonated in the wall above him, showering him with dust. A ricochet sang past Yenko’s ear.

  Yenko withdrew the pistol, checked that the safety catch was off, and took a step out into the street. He pointed the pistol at the German soldier, aimed at the side of his body, and fired.

  There was a noise inside his head. The German soldier flipped over on to his back and lay still. Almost immediately, two fighters ran down the road, leaping the broken masonry. One seized up the machine-gun and the other turned to Yenko. ‘Well done, Comrade!’ he shouted joyously.

  Yenko felt a wild flush of happiness and self-importance. He was a partisan fighter, a hero. ‘I have to get back to the barricade on Masná,’ he replied. ‘I have a message for White Dog.’

  The fighter grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him. ‘This way!’

  This is how it happens, Yenko thought, his feelings oddly detached as he followed the two fighters leaping from corner to corner. This is how you fight a war, and die in it. It is happening to me.

  *

  White Dog was a woman. She was wearing a tin helmet and a bulky brown coat tied with string around the waist. She listened to his message, then turned away to consult a group of men and women seated around a wooden table just behind the barricade. The men who had run with Yenko disappeared into the crowd. He looked around, wanting more congratulations, but everyone was busy. No one seemed to notice him.

  There was a lull in the fighting round here – there was no firing from the other side of the barricade. He turned back down the street, and began to walk towards a crowd of about twenty people, halfway down, where it widened out. They seemed engaged in some business of their own. As he neared the group, he saw that they were standing around a German officer, a tall man, who had one hand raised, whether in supplication or remonstration, it was hard to tell. The men and women were around him in a circle, talking to each other. One of the women shouted across the group. ‘They’ve shot the hostages on Mendel Bridge! They’ve killed them all!’

  Someone else called out. ‘Vlasov’s lot have gone!’

  The German officer took a step forward. The crowd closed in. He stepped back. He looked from one face to another, as if trying to work out which of the faces to negotiate with. His stance was imposing, calm and uncowed. Yenko said to the man next to him, ‘I’ve just come from the fighting on Celetná. I had an important message for White Dog.’ In the distance, from the direction of the river, there was a series of explosions. Several of the people looked around in alarm, then turned their attention back to the German.

  ‘Has anyone disarmed this bastard?’ the first woman called out.

  A small, smart man wearing little round glasses stepped forward from the group. He was holding a brick. He approached the officer from behind and, reaching up, brought the brick crashing down on the back of the officer’s head. The officer dropped to all fours, and the crowd closed in on him. Yenko lost sight of him. He stood on the edge of the crowd, listening to the grunts of effort as they kicked and beat him.

  After a few minutes, there was firing from the end of the street, and everyone looked around in alarm. When it became apparent there was no immediate danger, they turned back. The German officer was still alive, up on his elbows and trying to crawl. Yenko was struck by the slowness of his movements. Blood was running down his face in thin streams. His expression seemed resigned, or stunned, it was impossible to tell which.

  Three men on the edge of the crowd moved in. Two of them grabbed one of the officer’s legs each, and they dragged him backwards towards the edge of the road. As they pulled him, his chin thumped on the rough ground. One of his high boots came off in one of the men’s hands and the crowd laughed. The man tossed it into the air. Someone produced a rope. They tied the rope around the bootless leg and threw it up over the arm of a nearby lamp-post. It took one, two, three attempts, before it caught. Then the men sent a boy shimmying up the lamp-post, to pull down the loose end. Meanwhile, the German lay face down on the pavement, breathing heavily. The crowd around had fallen silent, apart from the occasional, lacklustre cheer.

  As they hoisted the officer up, his long coat fell down and ballooned around him. His hands hung limply, as though he had given up all struggle. From the edge of crowd, another boy approached with a jerry can of kerosene. He poured it over the German’s upper body. Yenko turned away. As he took a turning that would lead him back home, he heard a high, agonised cry. He glanced back, but the crowd had closed in and all he could see was a little black smoke rising above their heads.

  He had lost interest in being a partisan fighter. He picked his way across the rubble in the sidestreet that led back to his lodgings, looking down at his jacket and seeing that it was spattered with blood. He tried to recall where it had come from.

  His road was quiet, although sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire were still coming from the Old Town Square. He mounted the stairs slowly and let himself in, pulling off his jacket immediately, with a shudder. He was hanging it up, automatically adjusting the shoulders on the hanger, when he heard feet pounding up the wooden stairs to his room followed immediately by rapid banging on the door. A voice he didn’t recognise, a woman’s voice, was calling, ‘Michálek! Michálek!’

  He stood very still.

  ‘Michálek! Jan … Jan, please …’ the voice sounded breathy, desperate.

  ‘Hold on!’ he called. When he opened the door, he saw that it was Blažek’s wife. He struggled to remember her name. They had only met three times in the two years he had been working with Blažek. She lived in the suburbs.

  She was sweating profusely. Strands of her dry brown hair had come loose from her chignon and hung about her face. She was wearing a flowered day-dress and brown lace-up shoes with no stockings. Heda got the stockings.

  He stood back to allow her in, and saw that she scanned the room.

  ‘He isn’
t here,’ Yenko said. ‘I don’t know where he is. He isn’t with you?’

  She was panting from her dash up the stairs. He closed the door behind her and gestured at his armchair.

  ‘When did you last see him?’ she asked, as she sank into it.

  ‘Not for over a week.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Last time you saw him. What did he say?’

  Yenko pulled a face. ‘Well, he was concerned, of course. But he was relieved you and the children were safely out of the centre of town. He will be most worried to learn that you have come all the way up here. It’s not safe.’

  She turned to him with a look of plain hatred. ‘Don’t tell me it’s not safe. They’ve gone crazy in Krč. Those little SS boys are taking their revenge while they’ve got the chance. They’re pulling people out of their houses and killing them in the streets. My neighbour Milada was six months pregnant. They dragged her out by her hair and cut her open in front of my eyes. Her children were watching from the window. Don’t talk to me about how safe it is. My children are with my mother, thank God. I’ve risked my life to come up here and find my worthless shit of a husband.’

  Yenko was speechless in the face of her venom.

  She was sitting bolt upright in the chair, her face shiny with sweat, her eyes glistening. Then the light in her face went out and she dropped her shoulders. She said, miserably, ‘It’s too late, isn’t it?’

  Was the woman deranged?

  She raised her head again. ‘He’s gone, hasn’t he? He’s gone with his little German whore.’

  Yenko stared at her, his surprise quite genuine, while knowing immediately that she was absolutely right. As he drew breath, slowly, he knew something else. He knew that when the streets were safe again, when he went to Old Stano’s bar, up to the attic, he would find that the money and valuables he and Blažek had been hoarding for two years would be gone, and that the German family’s furniture in the basement – if it existed at all – would be entirely worthless.