Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  ‘We can’t do anything until the artillery arrives,’ said the Rat. ‘All we can do is make sure they don’t go anywhere while they make sure that no one else goes anywhere either.’

  When the heavy gun arrived, dragged by a crew of six, it took another hour to manoeuvre it into place behind the sandbags in a position where it would not kill any of their own people if it recoiled or backfired. Then it had to be loaded with shells, and the few remaining shells placed in an orderly pyramid ready for re-loading.

  ‘Once the first shell hits, they will concentrate all their fire here,’ the chief gunner told the Rat. ‘Move your men up.’

  ‘Thank you, Comrade,’ the Rat said sarcastically, adjusting his leather cap to scratch his forehead. Turning to Yenko he added, ‘Does the man think I’m a fool?’ He squeezed Yenko’s shoulder and said, ‘I know. I hate these boring bits too. I wish we could just go in there. The waiting, it’s worse than anything.’

  The Rat formed them into five squads; two to hold the arches and provide firing cover while the others stormed the building once the artillery had done its job. Yenko was pleased that he was staying in the arches. This was different from the adrenaline of the previous day. There was time to plan and anticipate; time to become afraid. As soon as it is safe to cross the square, he thought, I will slip away. Enough heroism.

  The gun crew was preparing to fire the first shell, when one of them turned to where Yenko and the Rat were waiting in the next archway and said, ‘Look.’

  On the opposite side of the square, a group of women had emerged from a building and were standing up against the wall, peering across the square. There were about ten of them, a mix of young and old, clutching at each other and looking this way and that, preparing to make a dash for it. Two of them were waving white handkerchiefs.

  ‘In God’s name…’ muttered the Rat. ‘They are crazy, why don’t they just stay put?’

  ‘Can we signal to them?’ asked Yenko.

  Before the Rat could reply, the women decided to make a dash for it. They broke away from the wall and ran alongside the far edge of the square. Immediately, the SS troops in the corner building began to fire. The line of running women collapsed like dolls. Coats and arms flapped in the air as they fell.

  There was a scramble in the next arch, a lurching pause, then a huge booming sensation that seemed to fill the low overhang and blow Yenko sideways. Blasts of gunfire opened up in response. He saw the Rat shouting again but could not hear him above the noise; the machine-guns from the SS, rifle shots from the German soldiers on the other side of the square and the guns of their own men. To his right, he saw men leaping over the sandbags and running across the square.

  He flung himself back down on to a sandbag, pulling his Polish rifle from his shoulder. He laid it flat and peered down the sight. He tried to remember what the Rat had told him to do. Squeeze gently like you would with any rifle but when you feel resistance release and squeeze a second time, otherwise the trigger locks. Across the square, four of the women had risen and were running back to the building. One of them had become separated from the others. He turned the rifle and aimed in the direction of the German soldiers behind the barricade. He remembered to pull the butt of the rifle hard against his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle thumped back in the hollow between his shoulder and his collarbone. He pulled the trigger again, then thought, maybe the Germans behind the barricade aren’t shooting at us, maybe they are shooting at the SS. He turned so he could take aim at the corner building but two more artillery shells fired in quick succession. The noise deafened him. He closed his eyes and instinctively flung an arm over his head to protect it. When he lifted his head and opened his eyes again, the square was full of smoke. There was an acrid smell, a burning sensation in his nostrils and an intense humming inside his head.

  Bastards, he found himself thinking wildly, about no one in particular. Then the Rat was pulling him by the shoulder, over the pile of sandbags. As he scrambled up, his rifle slipped from his grasp and he tripped over it, tumbling down on to the pavement beneath the barricade, landing heavily on one wrist and crying out. Bullets tore into the sandbag above him, the brown cloth shredding and dirt pouring out. He rolled over. The Rat was lying on the ground, face up, one arm across his chest. He’s dead, Yenko thought. Nearly got me killed too, the reckless bastard. He waited until there was a pause in the firing, then scrambled back over the sandbag.

  The rest of the men were still crouched down in the cover of the arches. The man nearest to him looked up at him, as if expecting orders. Yenko turned and looked across the square. The other units had reached the corner building. Two men were kicking at the door, while two others were standing a few feet out in the square, fully exposed, firing up at the windows. One of them fell.

  ‘Tell them to hold the artillery, for fuck’s sake,’ the man next to him said. Yenko ran along to the heavy gun arch.

  ‘Hold it!’ he shouted.

  One of the gun-operators turned with a furious face. ‘Of course!’ he hollered, waving him away. Yenko ran back.

  The first man looked up at him and said, ‘What now?’

  Yenko looked out across the square. The Germans behind the barricade had stopped firing. Perhaps they were using the confusion to retreat. There was still machine-gun fire coming from the corner building. Through the smoke, he could see that the woman who had become separated from the others was trapped against the wall of a building. She was a tiny old woman. She had her hands splayed back against the wall and her mouth open in a huge scream, inaudible above the firing.

  Then the machine-gun firing stopped. Yenko saw that the advance units had broken through the door and were entering the corner building. As he watched, an SS rifleman crouched in a top-floor balcony turned, flipped backwards over the stone ledge and plummeted to the square below. They’ve done it, Yenko thought.

  He turned to the other men and waved a hand, shouting, ‘Let’s go!’ I sound like the Rat, he thought. He clambered up the sandbags, jumped over the Rat’s body and began to run across the square.

  There were three isolated shots as they ran, he couldn’t tell where they were coming from. As their resonance died, he could hear that the tiny old woman pinned against the wall was still screaming, crazed with fear and panic. He turned and saw through the drifting smoke that she was running towards them. She was not old but young, and had her hands outstretched, her eyes huge in a pinched, dark face. She was staring at him.

  ‘Emil!’ she was screaming wildly, as she ran towards him, ‘Emil!’ He stared back at her, uncomprehending. It was only when she had flung herself upon him, crying and grasping his upper arms, that he realised she was shouting out his name.

  CHAPTER 30

  Marie Malíková had become trapped because of her own stupidity – and been rescued by the bravery of someone else, a woman who didn’t even know her. All her life, she was to remember this. For the last three days, she and her parents had not left the basement near the river. They had huddled down with their backs against the damp wall, listening to the bombardment. She had thought, I am going to die buried in this hole. At least in the camp we were above ground. Finally, she had pushed herself out of her mother’s terrified clutches, and dashed out of the door.

  In the open air at last, she ran without reason, feeling nothing but the reckless joy of movement. Her pace only slowed as she reached the square, which seemed quiet. She glanced behind her as she crossed it, and it was then she saw the column of German soldiers. When the shots started she dropped down behind a stone bench with her hands over her ears. Three soldiers ran past her, almost reaching the far corner of the square before the firing opened up again and they fell. One began to thrash on the ground, screaming in agony. She raised her head and looked around, to see who was killing the Germans. The gunfire echoed.

  It was then that she saw the young woman in the doorway, wearing a spotted blouse. She was waving frantically, beckoning her.

  Marie was
incapable of rising. She stretched out her hand to the woman, fingers splayed. The woman continued to wave. There was another burst of gunfire and terror gave Marie the energy to push with her legs and fling herself towards the building. As she reached the woman, she clutched at her. The woman grabbed one shoulder, and her hair, and fell backwards. Marie tumbled on top of her, into the dark. There were other women, shouting. Someone pulled at her leg. The door behind her slammed shut and the light from the square disappeared. Marie tried to rise. She was kneeling on someone’s stomach. They cried out. Other hands dragged her up and someone tugged at her arm. She was pushed through another doorway.

  She was in some kind of office or ante-room. The windows were shuttered but stripes of white light illuminated the faces of the women around her. She burst out, ‘Can’t we get out the back?’

  The woman in the spotted blouse put an arm around her shoulders and said, ‘It’s all right, you’re safe now.’ She pulled her towards a wooden table in the centre of the room and seated her on a bench.

  Another woman, an older one, said, ‘There’s only one back door and it leads on to a street which is overlooked by the other side.’

  ‘The other side of what?’ Marie asked. The spotted-blouse woman shushed her.

  ‘The building the SS are firing from,’ the older one said.

  ‘They aren’t firing out of the back, not now …’ said a third woman, crossly. ‘We should have gone out that way as soon as they started shooting the soldiers. It’s only twenty metres to the corner.’ Marie looked at her. She was also young. Her hair was curled in careful brown waves.

  ‘You want to try it, go ahead,’ the older woman said.

  The spotted-blouse one released Marie. ‘I think it’s best we stay here, until someone comes to flush out those men. There’s no point in getting killed.’

  ‘What if they shell?’

  ‘Isn’t there a basement?’ said Marie. All at once, basements seemed more attractive.

  The women shook their heads.

  Later, when the fighting was over, Marie thought of those women. She tried to picture them; the spotted-blouse one who had saved her life by pulling her into the building; the older one; the one who was young and cross and wanted to make a run for it; and the others who came in later, from upstairs; the one who stared at her rudely; the one weeping uncontrollably in fear; the thin, brown-haired one who cried to her, ‘What is your mother thinking of, little girl?’

  It upset her, later, when she found herself getting them confused. (Was the one who cried out the thin one, or the one in black? Was the one who lit a cigarette also the one who said, ‘I’m freezing. Why is this building so cold?’ And who was it said, ‘I can’t stay here any longer, I just can’t. My husband will be frantic. He will come looking for me, then what will happen?’) It bothered her that she never asked the women why they were there. Did they all work in the building? Had they taken shelter there when the firing started? Which was the one who shrugged and said, ‘Helene, why don’t we sing that song about the woman and the man who’s gone off on the horse, you know the one?’

  Whose idea had it been to leave the building? ‘There hasn’t been any firing for ages, for God’s sake let’s just go.’ Which one of them had said that, and why had they listened?

  Most of the women were killed instantly when the machine-guns started firing. Three, she thought, might have made it back into the building. (Which three?) The others were shot down around her, their small group exploding apart in the same instant as the noise was upon them. As she scrambled back to the relative safety of the wall, she trod on the arm of the woman wearing the spotted blouse.

  Trapped against the wall, pinned down in the open for the second time that day, she lost herself in fear and found that inside the fear, there was release. She screamed and screamed, unable to hear the sound of her own voice except as a pain inside her head. She thought in pictures: her mother being beaten to the ground in their cottage in Romanov; the German soldiers who had pushed them out of the truck when they got to Brno; the block Elder in the camp saying, listlessly, ‘You might as well know. Tomorrow at roll-call, they’re announcing a quarantine.’ All those times when she had felt afraid, all rolled into one and turning over each other, as if all those experiences were spinning her against the wall like one of those mad fireworks she had seen once at an Easter Day parade. She screamed until screaming was effortless.

  And then she was running. She was running towards someone, and she could not remember which had come first, the running or the recognition …

  When she fell upon Emil, she could say no more than his name. When he pulled her away from the square, when they ran together, she thought she had escaped the guns only to die on her feet because her lungs would burst. She made him slow down, once they were away from the square, but continued to cling to his arm as they walked and her breathing returned to normal, as if he might slip away when she let go.

  *

  They sat down by the river. For some time, they did not speak. Marie did not feel capable of speech, only of staring. She could not stop herself. Emil, she kept saying in her head, over and over again. It is Emil … He sat with his knees raised, looking out over the water, allowing her to gaze upon him without embarrassment. She wanted to finger the rough cotton of his shirt, to grab at his light brown hair – his hair had been so short in the camp – to punch him in his hard, narrow chest and kick his legs. It is Emil.

  Eventually, she said, ‘Emil,’ then paused to savour the word. ‘Emil, you look like a proper gadjo now.’

  His mouth twitched a half-smile, but he did not respond. Instead, he looked down and patted his trouser pockets.

  ‘Have you lost something?’ she asked.

  ‘Cigarettes,’ he said. Unable to locate them, he reached out a hand and snapped off a long stem of grass, then sat chewing the end.

  She looked out over the river. Something dark was floating in the water, a few metres out; a bloated jacket, and just visible behind it, the jutting heel of a shoe. She looked back at Emil, then said, her voice suddenly loud and high, ‘Lift your hair up, back off your forehead.’

  He glanced at her.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  He pushed his fringe back from his face, and she saw what she wanted to see, the small red scar, close to the hairline.

  ‘How are you?’ she said, but before the sentence was out he interrupted her.

  ‘I can’t talk like that. I can’t do that, not until you tell me what happened after I escaped,’ he said. ‘Tell me everything.’

  They were sitting in a secluded clearing close to the water’s edge, in the middle of a small patch of earth, surrounded by grasses and a few tall weeds. Behind them, in the Little Quarter, there was still the occasional burst of gunfire. She glanced back at the buildings, then up at the blue sky above. When she looked back at the river she saw that the body in the water had not moved.

  ‘We are safe here,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I was screaming, back then,’ she said, ‘when there was all that shooting. It felt good. I thought I would just scream and scream until I died.’ She wriggled her bottom on the ground – she was sitting on some gravel. She fanned her skirt out and leaned back on her hands. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sky, then began. ‘After you escaped …’ she stopped. What should she tell him? That they stood on the Appell-platz for half the night, and that two women collapsed while they were standing? That the Commandant strode among them shouting and three men from the work detail who had been at the quarry were taken to the punishment block and beaten? He has gone, she had thought, without me. Of course.

  ‘It gave us hope,’ she said, ‘the whole camp. And then when they didn’t bring you back, we all knew that someone had really got away.’ She heard the unnatural timbre of her voice, the strain and brightness, but he did not challenge her.

  ‘When did you escape?’ he asked.

  ‘We didn’t,’ she replied. ‘We were rel
eased. Me, and my mother and father.’

  He turned to her, looked her full in the face for the first time.

  ‘They closed the camp,’ she said. ‘They transported everyone.’ Her voice faltered. He would ask about his family, now.

  He turned his head away. He knows and doesn’t want to know, she thought. He knows and wants a moment or two of delay before he has it confirmed, just a brief space in which a small amount of self-delusion is still possible.

  ‘When we were first arrested, they held us in Brno prison because of an appeal from our village, a local officer my uncle was friendly with. When we were sent to the camp, we just assumed it hadn’t worked. It was only when it came to the transport that we were told there was a list. A few people had reasons for getting out. Contacts outside, appeals against their status.’

  ‘What was yours?’ Emil asked.

  Marie felt her face twist with the irony of it. She gave a small, almost-laugh. ‘It was on our papers, we were down as, well, not really gypsies …’

  ‘Didn’t they look at your faces?’ Emil said, turning to her again, his expression wide-eyed with disbelief.

  ‘We didn’t believe it ourselves,’ she said quickly. ‘We were all waiting in line. We didn’t find out until the day they took everyone. We were standing in the line like everybody else. They had allowed the families to stand together so that they would be in the same truck. Next to us were the Lomeks. The trucks had been waiting forever. The transport police were having some sort of argument with the Commandant. The police were saying that they were only going to take us all as far as Nĕdvedice and the Commandant was saying the trucks were to go to Brno and pick up the train there. The Germans would take over at the border. As soon as I heard that I began to shake. I didn’t know whether we should tell the other families or not. My father told me to stay close to them and keep quiet. We waited.’