Fires in the Dark

by Louise Doughty

  *

  Marie was waiting at the back of the queue. She looked uneasy as Yenko approached. He shook his head. She left the queue to approach him and took his arm, steering him away. ‘I just heard those women talking,’ she said. ‘I spoke to them.’ She hesitated. ‘She said there’s a wall, just round the corner from here. People are pinning up notices, survivors from the camps, like the messages from the radio. She said she found her cousin. She was sure he was dead.’

  Yenko felt a lump of misery well up inside him. He had promised himself he would not let himself be put through this.

  Marie stared at him. ‘You can read the messages at least. Let’s just go and look.’

  *

  All he could see, at first, as they turned the corner, was the crowd of people, two or three deep. Towards the far end of the street it thinned out and he saw the messages pinned on the fence. They began at head-height and went down as low as his knees. Some were large, some small – some had no more than a name and address, others had long, complicated messages. The bits of paper were bright white, creamy-white, brown as skin or pale blue. Some were stuck with a single pin, others with neat rows of nails. A few had become detached and fluttered to the floor where they lay at people’s feet. An old woman stood next to him. She was bending, very slowly, to pick up one of the fallen bits of paper. Her hand shook with effort, the gnarled fingers trembling. Just as she lowered herself sufficiently, a low breeze from a man rushing past whisked the paper away from her outstretched hand.

  Yenko shook his head. The fence stretched the length of the street. It would take days to read them all.

  ‘Go on,’ Marie said. ‘Even if we don’t see a name we know, we might find some other Roma, someone who’s been in Poland.’

  ‘You’re forgetting something,’ Yenko said. ‘Hardly any of our people can read or write.’

  ‘You can …’ she said, but her insistence was fading.

  He turned, brusquely.

  *

  He strode quickly through the New Town, his hands deep in his pockets, Marie at his side, trotting to keep up. He only slowed down as they approached Charles Square. At the bottom of the square, looking up, he could see more hordes of people, gathered in groups in the shade of the trees. A makeshift encampment had sprung up where the vegetable patches had been. One of the Red Cross groups had set up a tent. As they approached the square, Yenko could see yet another queue, waiting to register at a table. Behind the table was a young woman about the same age as Marie, scribbling frantically as each person gave their name.

  More writing down, Yenko thought bitterly, more questions, more records being kept, more notes on who everyone is and where they come from.

  Marie was standing next to him, facing away. He turned and saw what she could see; the rise of the square, the vast huddle of people covering almost every patch of available earth – some seated on boxes or blankets, others squatting on the dry ground, sleeping children, women talking, men arguing or silent.

  ‘Emil,’ Marie whispered from the side of her mouth, ‘is the whole world here in Prague?’

  Yenko did not reply. He was gazing at the people. Eventually he said, ‘None of them are Roma. Not one. There’s nobody but us, Marie, there’s no point in fooling ourselves.’

  ‘Talk to some of the Jews,’ Marie urged. ‘Most of them got sent to Poland. Someone will know something.’

  Nearby, there was a group of four men, all late middle-aged or elderly, sitting in a small huddle on one of the few remaining patches of grass. They were talking intently. Two of them were wearing striped prison trousers. All four had short, downy hair; the tell-tale recent re-growth. They looked like they hadn’t yet taken advantage of the food tents.

  Yenko approached and stood over the men, Marie following in his wake. They continued to talk softly amongst themselves. He waited until one of them lifted his head; an old man with a quantity of grey stubble and large sunken eyes, the lids loose flaps of skin. That camp look, Yenko thought bleakly. I would recognise it anywhere.

  ‘Excuse me …’ He didn’t even know what nationality they were. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you. Are you from Prague?’

  ‘We are Poles,’ said another of the men, his Czech heavily accented. ‘What is it? What do you want?’

  ‘You have come from the camps,’ said Yenko. ‘I was in a camp in Moravia for six months. My father died there.’ He was anxious to establish his credentials.

  The Pole gave a bitter laugh. ‘Six months. This man here,’ he indicated one of the others, ‘was arrested in 1940. Six months is zero.’ He gave a grin that revealed him to be toothless. ‘How old are you? I’m twenty.’

  ‘Please, where were you, which camp?’

  The man shook his head. ‘Not in Poland. We were in Buchenwald. We’re on our way back to Poland. God knows why. Here, the women give us apples and milk.’

  ‘My family was sent to Poland,’ Yenko said. ‘In 1943. My mother, my two aunts and little brother. I’m trying to find out if they could have survived.’

  The men had fallen silent. They glanced at each other. Finally, the second one spoke. His Czech was fluent. ‘My name is Roman Blynsky,’ he said. His voice was deep, his age impossible to fathom. ‘Before the war I was a Professor of Linguistics in Warsaw. When the Germans invaded I was picked up in the first wave. They sent me to Buchenwald, to act as a translator for the Commandant’s office there. The rest of my family were in the ghetto, then the camps. My cousin arrived in Buchenwald in ’44. He had been in four camps, including Auschwitz, back and forth. He told me many things, things he had seen with his own eyes. Whenever I meet anyone who has been where my wife and children might have been I question them. It’s always the same answer.’ He looked down and grabbed a handful of grass, tugging at it, struggling to pull it up from the possessive earth. When he had succeeded, he threw it back down. ‘Everyone is dead. One or two of the men survived, somehow, like us. The women and children? No. I’m sorry but you must say Kaddish for your family. They burned everybody, the women and children first.’

  ‘I am not a Jew, I am a Rom,’ Yenko said desperately. ‘I know they killed the Jews but what about us, the Gypsies …?’

  The Professor stared at Yenko. His expression softened slightly and a little curiosity came into his features. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

  ‘František Růžička,’ Yenko said.

  ‘František …’ the man said, and gestured to the grass beside him. Yenko knelt on the grass. Behind him, Marie remained standing. ‘František,’ the man repeated. ‘I thought before the war that I knew all the words a man could know. I spoke six languages fluently and could get by in another four. I could tell you the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb in French. I could write poetry in Finnish, even Estonian. Do you want to hear a new phrase I learned on our long walk from Buchenwald?’ Yenko stared at him. The man continued. ‘Us camp survivors talk, wherever we meet, exchanging news and names, everyone is desperate to hear their own surname from another’s mouth. I have seen a man turn around and head back the way he came after walking three hundred kilometres, all because somebody described a girl who sounded like his daughter. As we came through Leipzig I was talking to a man of words like myself, a magazine editor before the war, a Jew like me. He had been imprisoned in Germany with some people like you, and he said to me, “Know what the Gypsies call us now?”’

  The Professor stopped and stared at Yenko, as if he really thought that he might know. Yenko shrugged.

  ‘Smoke Brothers,’ said the Professor. ‘That’s what you Gypsies call us Jews now.’ Seeing Yenko’s incomprehension, he turned to the others and sighed, rolling his eyes as he might once have done in response to a particularly slow student.

  ‘Smoke Brothers,’ he repeated, and he lifted his hands, spreading his fingers to form a wide cup and then made a whooshing motion upwards. One of the men cackled with laughter. ‘We went up the chimneys together.’

  *

 
As Yenko strode down towards the river, Marie followed close behind but made no attempt to draw level or take his arm. Eventually, he turned and sat on a stone bench looking out over the water. Marie sat next to him, at a slight distance. A few metres to the right, a work detail of Germans was dismantling a low, concrete machine-gun bunker. He stared at them. There were six men, in jackets, with swastikas painted on their backs in white paint. They were all wielding pickaxes, bringing them down time and time again with weary imprecision. He was near enough to see that their faces were shiny with sweat, their chests rising and falling with their laboured breathing. Their expressions were set, despairing at the uselessness of their small tools against the huge concrete slabs.

  Marie was silent for a while, then she said, ‘When we were first released, I was just so numb and grateful I couldn’t think about the camp. Then, when I had got warm again, and had a little food, I wanted to tell everyone. It was unbearable. I wanted to grab strangers in the street, the ordinary people we passed on the streets of the city. I wanted to shake them from their dreaming and say, this happened to me, and this. It hurt so much inside. I couldn’t say it. I had to just keep my head down because we had to stay unnoticed.’

  ‘I nearly smashed a window,’ Yenko said. ‘In a restaurant full of SS officers, and women. I saw them all eating and laughing. Fat white women like cows. And I nearly smashed the window with my fists. I wish I had, even though they would have killed me. It would have been worth it to see the shock and fear on their faces, just for a second.’

  ‘But it changes …’ Marie said. She sighed, then leaned down and picked up a handful of small pebbles from the ground and began tossing them one by one back on to the ground. ‘You think when you first get out, you can’t wait to tell everyone, they will be so shocked and horrified. And then you realise there is no one to tell. So you stay quiet and then you start to hear everyone else’s stories. After a while you realise, there were places even worse than our camp, places with ovens, places where they …’ The pebbles were finished. She was staring ahead.

  Yenko felt as though his head would burst if he had to think about it any more. He put his hands over his ears, but Marie wasn’t looking at him and continued talking. ‘Do you want to know the worst story I’ve heard? About a man who tried to escape from a camp in Poland, one of the worst ones. I heard this in one of the bread queues. A boy was saying, a man in his camp had tried to escape. He was a big strong man. They put him in a wooden box, so small he was crouched right down, and nailed down the lid, then they drove nails through the box, into his flesh, then left him to die. It took days. He went mad. His screams kept the whole camp awake, night after …’

  Suddenly, Yenko wheeled away from her, crouching down beside the bench. He began to roll on the ground, as if he were being attacked by a swarm of bees. He thrashed from side to side, making guttural sounds at the base of his throat.

  Marie threw herself on top of him with a cry, trying to wrestle his hands away from his face, calling out in despair, ‘I’m sorry … I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’

  Eventually, he quietened. She sat back up on the bench and brushed at her skirt.

  The Germans on the work detail and their Czech guards had stopped to stare at them. Marie jumped to her feet, rounded on them and cursed them in Romani. They went back to their tasks. She turned back to Yenko and spat on the ground. ‘Gadje …’ she muttered bitterly, ‘Filthy, evil gadje …’

  Yenko stood, brushed himself down and sat back on the bench. Marie joined him, sitting closer this time. He turned to her and tried to smile. She smiled back, and for a second or two he was able to hold the moment. Then the effort of smiling made something inside him collapse and crumble. He rose and turned away from her, walking over to the wall behind them, pockmarked by bullet-holes. He placed both hands flat on the rough stone, leaned forward and let his head hang down. The blood surged, pulsing, in his ears.

  Marie came and stood behind him. ‘Emil …’ she said softly.

  Yenko shook his head.

  He had a vision. He saw how their union would have been in the countryside, in the summer, in another time. His father would have had his mother sew a new waistcoat. The women would have oiled their hair. Members of their vitsa would have come from all over the Czech lands, the Carpathians, Hungary, Slovakia – family members they had never even met before. The feasting and dancing, hours of it – the light of the fires in the dark, a whole forest of people to celebrate the wedding of Josef Maximoff’s eldest son.

  He would never have met Marie had it not been for the devouring of all those people. Could he forgive her that?

  He closed his eyes and for one sweet moment wove himself a fantasy; he and his kumpánia somehow managing to pass through South Moravia and stopping for water; Marie standing shyly by the pump; him helping her, then running to his father to beg that he find the parents of the quiet girl and bargain for her; his father refusing angrily at first because she wasn’t Kalderash, then relenting; Jan Malík transformed into a kind and loving father who would raise his hands and say, ‘Well, I had thought to place my daughter elsewhere, but if the two young people really love each other, who am I to stand in the way?’ The two fathers would seal the pact by drinking together all evening, ending with their arms around each other’s shoulders, singing songs …

  They are dead. They are all dead, but I’ll never know for certain, so they will carry on living just enough for me to be reminded, every day, that they are dead. Every time I have hope, for a minute, they will have to die again.

  How will we ever recover? Yenko thought as he leaned against the stone wall with his eyes closed, listening to the fall of the picks from the work detail, an arhythmic chipping and clicking. Whatever happiness comes to us in the future, how will we recover from all we have lost? How will the world live now, with splinters in its heart?

  Marie was standing close behind him. She placed a hand gently on his shoulder and said, ‘Come. It is enough.’

  He turned to her and allowed her to take his hand and lead him away from the bench and the Germans at work chipping stone, as if he were a blind man, unable to find his way.

  CHAPTER 33

  Summer in Prague, early summer; the air wavers, the sky above the city is an unblemished blue. It is the kind of summer when all the ills of the world seem transmutable, when a person might believe that there is meaning and purpose and that everything can be made whole again, with enough will. It is 1945.

  Marie Malíková’s heart is breaking.

  *

  As they walked along the road above the river, away from the work detail, she thought to herself, when we were in the camp, we told each other stories about cherry blossom and schnitzels. Now we are free, we tell each other stories about death.

  They walked in silence towards Charles Bridge; the bridge, in all its dark, strange beauty, hung, misted, in the haze of heat. From this distance, the stone statues strung along its balustrade were like black angels, wings raised in benediction above the liberated city. There was no damage to the streets here. The grand buildings set back from the street had large windows overlooking the water. In one, opened wide, a lilac-coloured chiffon curtain flapped.

  As they neared the bridge, Marie felt the distance between herself and Emil. I should not have made him look at the notes on the fence or speak to those prisoners, she thought. I have ruined everything. His silence was beyond ordinary quietness. He was far away from her. His was the silence of a man who has finally realised and accepted something, and is about to say goodbye.

  At the corner of Anenská Street he stopped and said, ‘Will you be all right from here? I’m going to go this way.’

  She felt as if she was dropping from a great height. She was right. He was saying goodbye. He knew all he needed to know now: his family was not coming back. He had decided to cut himself away from all the suffering he had been tethered to – she was his last link with it, after all. He had had enough of living with her and her parents
in the grand apartment that would be taken away from them. (What would happen then? Another basement?) He was going back to the life he had had before they had met as the smoke cleared from the Uprising. He was going to go back to being a gadjo.

  He was looking at her. He said, a little brusquely, ‘It’s easy from here. You just go over the bridge and you’re in the Little Quarter.’

  ‘I know that by now,’ she snapped. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She turned swiftly. She did not want kind words of farewell from him, not when he didn’t even realise what he was leaving her to; her parents, a future as bleak as a fallow field in February.

  She strode no more than a few paces before she regretted her haste. She turned, but he had already walked off down Anenská. She caught a glimpse of his departing back, then he was gone. She closed her eyes briefly. She should not have been so hasty. Pride had made her turn on her heel, to show him she would be fine with or without him. If she had not been so foolish, perhaps she could have persuaded him to stay, to love her. I love him, she thought, in the same way that a baby blackbird loves a parent bird as it sits in the nest with its tiny beak agape, begging to be fed. I should let him go. He’s better off without me, without us. He can do whatever he wants without us holding him back. If he stays with us, he will always be a gypsy.

  Full of self-loathing and misery, she turned towards the bridge.

  *

  Yenko strode down Anenská and was soon at the Old Town Square, where one of the cafés was displaying a sign saying, Get Your Cup of Liberation Coffee Here – One Cup Per Customer While It Lasts (the coffee, that is!). He stopped and pointed at the sign, saying to a boy clearing a nearby table, ‘Real coffee, eh, šav?’ The boy frowned at him and Yenko corrected himself. ‘I’m sorry, young man – is it real coffee?’