Jahn went to the window and cautiously moved the curtain aside. The car drove slowly past without stopping. A minute later it came back downhill at the same slow pace.
“They’ve found my car. Now they’re searching,” said Jahn, “asking the way to Faber’s house, and they’ll find it too. We should have hidden somewhere else.”
But it was too late now. They heard the sound of car doors slamming and knocking at the door. The three men sat on the bed so as not to make the floor creak by standing on it. Jahn shook his head, furious with himself for putting Faber in this situation and dragging Bart into it too. Automatically, Faber had put his pillow on his knees and was kneading it. He looked uneasy. Bart made himself calm his breathing. From below, they heard Roberta’s anxious voice as she opened the door.
“Good day, gentlemen.”
“Where’s Faber?” barked one of the two men, without bothering to give a civil greeting.
“Not here,” moaned the poor woman, terrified. “Gone out.”
Then she uttered a cry. Faber clenched his fists at the sound. He hated the idea of anyone hurting his Roberta.
“He’s upstairs! Go and get him!” bawled the man.
“Upstairs? Oh, not there, not at all!” cried Roberta, in a voice so obviously intended to mislead that in other circumstances it would have been funny. The horse-women were no better at lying than their children.
“Go and get him, I said!”
“He’s not well,” said the poor woman, contradicting herself. She didn’t know what to do now to protect her husband, and her helplessness made her cry. She was sobbing as she climbed the stairs.
“They want you to go down,” she murmured, kneeling in front of Faber and clasping his hands between hers.
“Are they armed?”
The large woman nodded. Yes, they were armed. Jahn was distraught. To be found with Faber and Casal’s son was a terrible mistake. The Phalange would inevitably draw their own conclusions about the revival of the network. All three would be arrested anyway, and the Phalange would definitely have ways of making them talk.
It was now that Faber’s huge form leaned toward his wife. “Where are they?” he whispered.
At first Roberta didn’t understand what her husband meant. She looked at him with a question in her eyes.
“Are they there?” Faber asked. “There? There?” He pointed to what would be different places on the ground floor below.
“There,” said Roberta. “Near the table. Both of them. If they haven’t moved.”
Faber rose slowly and did something unexpected: he climbed on the bed and stood there upright. His head touched the ceiling, and he had to bend slightly.
“There?” he asked once more, pointing his forefinger.
“Yes,” said Roberta, and she suddenly understood what he was planning.
“You coming down?” shouted the man who had done all the talking downstairs, and he hit the living room ceiling twice, hard, probably with a broom handle. He had no idea that he was pinpointing his exact position and inviting his own ruin.
“I’m coming down!” replied Faber, and he jumped off the bed, raising his feet as high as possible so as to fall back on it with his full weight, landing on his posterior. The beam of the ceiling below him was too thin to stand up to the impact. It broke, and the bedroom floor exploded with a crash, opening up a gaping hole through which Faber disappeared. Jahn, Roberta, and Bart felt the floor beneath their feet give way, and they clung to the walls to keep from being carried down in the giant’s wake. The bed itself hesitated for a moment, leaning at a crazy angle toward the hole, and then it fell through the gap to land on the floor below. The faint groaning still to be heard down there soon stopped entirely, and there was only silence.
“Faber!” cried Roberta, and she ran downstairs with Jahn and Bart after her. When they reached the ground floor, Faber was already standing up and rubbing his forehead, which had a red bump on it.
“I flattened them, but the bed hit my head. Are you all right, Roberta? They didn’t hurt you?”
The couple embraced clumsily, and it was touching to see the colossus planting little kisses on his wife’s forehead. The two militiamen looked as if the sky had fallen on their heads. The first was lying on his stomach, his left leg folded under him at an unnatural angle. The other man, caught between the table and the frame of the bed, had broken his neck.
“We must get rid of the bodies,” said Jahn, and he started searching the dead men’s pockets for the keys to their car.
They went to get the car and parked it just outside the door. Then they extracted the two bodies from the debris of broken planks in which they were entangled and put them on the backseat. As he handled them, Bartolomeo tried not to look at their faces, but he couldn’t prevent himself from shaking. Faber helped too, muttering all the time, “My God, oh, my God, what have I done?” Jahn had to speak sharply to make him stop. Meanwhile Roberta was trying to shoo away the horse-children who were coming to gape, open-mouthed, at the strange spectacle.
A few miles from the village, there was a deep pond on one side of the road, half overgrown by rushes. They drove the Phalangists’ car to the side of the pond and pushed it into the water, with its two occupants in the front seats once more.
“An accident.” Jahn drummed the word home. “You hear, Faber? They had an accident. No one in the village saw them. If anyone makes inquiries, everyone must say the same thing. An accident.”
“That’d be a lie,” muttered the giant.
Jahn punched him in the chest. “Yes, but a lie to protect yourselves! Can you understand that?”
“I think so.”
In the pond, the roof of the car sank right underwater with a mournful gurgle. Reeds were already rising erect around it again.
They drove back through pouring rain. The windshield wipers worked hard; raindrops pattered down on the car. They said nothing for a long time, both still shocked by what had just happened. It was Bartolomeo who finally broke the silence.
“What was my father like, Mr. Jahn? You’ve never talked to me about him.”
Jahn hesitated. “Do you want the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Your father was a somber, secretive man. I often saw him at our clandestine meetings. I always remember his deep black eyes. When he looked at you, you felt he was reading your mind. It was extremely intimidating, and it made him very successful with women.”
“He didn’t talk much?”
“Very little. He was a taciturn man, but the moment he did open his mouth, everyone else fell silent. He still had quite a strong foreign accent. What else can I tell you? He seldom made a joke. There was a great melancholy in him. Very sad. I don’t know where it came from.”
Bart said nothing.
“Not that it kept him from being a hard man too.”
“Hard?”
“Yes, perhaps too hard . . . He never hesitated if there was any doubt of someone’s reliability. He would be in favor of eliminating that person, even at the risk of making a mistake, and he wanted the same to apply to him if necessary. He insisted on taking part himself in all dangerous operations: the execution of Phalangists, sabotage, commando raids to free comrades of ours. He took a great many risks. He was destined to die and he knew it. I often wonder if he wasn’t actually looking for a chance to die in his prime. Your father was no angel, Bart.”
“Was he tall, like me?”
“No. Lean, but not very tall. I suppose you must get your height from your mother, but I never met her, or I’d have talked to you about her, you may be sure. I don’t know much about your family.”
The car drove on through the ceaseless rain, throwing up fountains of water on both sides of the narrow road. Jahn said no more. Bart pulled his coat around him. He couldn’t have said if he felt sad or happy, confident or despairing. The picture of the two dead men in their car kept coming back into his mind, with their limbs dislocated like the joints of puppets as they san
k into the muddy water of the pond.
It was the very end of the winter, and a sudden spell of bitterly cold weather struck the city. It froze under a dirty gray sky. People stayed at home whenever possible, and after midday the squares, avenues, boulevards, and parks were populated only by large crows. They too looked frozen as they came down in hundreds to perch on the bare branches of the trees. Only the powerful river resisted the cold, and its dark waters flowed on, never freezing over.
Helen gave up her walks and spent the afternoons reading in her room. She turned up the radiator, got under the covers of her bed, and immersed herself in a favorite novel. During these days it seemed to her as if nothing important could happen, as if the world were stuck in a groove. But she also felt that something profound and unknown to her was moving in the space inside this numb, drowsy sensation. As if the sleeping earth were incubating a secret, throbbing life in the warmth of its belly. She would have to wait. . . .
Sometimes the book fell from her lap and she sat motionless for a long time, her eyes fixed on a mark on the wall or the ceiling, lost in painful reverie. Where are you, Milos? I wish I could see your wild curls again, hold your big hands in mine, talk to you, kiss you. Are they treating you well? You haven’t forgotten me, have you?
These thoughts saddened her, but she needed to spend such moments with her absent love. She began keeping a diary in which she wrote to him every day.
Dear Milos, I was late for my shift today. Let me tell you about it. . . . Dear Milos, Dora is really impossible! You wouldn’t believe what she did this morning. . . .
She confined herself to describing the small events in her life. And she imagined what the two of them would do when they were together again later, but she could never manage to write that down.
She waited for Bart to come and tell her when he had more news, as he had promised he would. He didn’t come. She reassured herself by remembering what he had said on the riverbank: he knew something was going on but he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. One day Milena told her that Bart had been to what she called “meetings,” but she couldn’t talk about them either.
An afternoon came when Helen had suddenly had enough of her sad, somnolent state; she was tired of staying shut up indoors. She put on her thickest sweater and her brightly colored cap, wrapped herself in her coat, and went out. No trams were running; she supposed the cold had damaged their engines. She was alone on the deserted sidewalks, and it felt like walking through a ghost town. When she came to the former Opera House, she stopped and cautiously climbed the steps, which were gleaming with black ice. It was hard to imagine Dora, years earlier, climbing the same steps arm in arm with Eva-Maria Bach, both of them cheerful and happy. Then she saw the poster on the locked door covered with obscene graffiti. She didn’t have time to look away. The words leaped to her eyes: The Winter Fights . . . Arenas . . . Reservations at . . .
The very realistic picture on the poster showed two black swords under the red beam of a floodlight, one raised in triumph and dripping with blood, the other broken, lying in the sand, the sword of the defeated man.
She lived through the next few days in a state of anxiety and nausea. She felt she was falling ill and confided in Dora one evening. In spite of the cold that stung their cheeks, the two of them were walking along the banks of the river, making sure that no one overheard them.
“But who goes to see these horrible spectacles, Dora? Do you know?”
“Practically all the Phalangist leaders, Helen. Anyone who seems to disapprove is considered squeamish, and people suspect he might turn traitor sometime.”
“That wouldn’t be enough to fill all the tiers of seats, though! And apparently the arena always has a full house.”
“You’re right. A lot of people go.”
“But why?”
“I suppose we have to believe they just enjoy it. And I imagine they also go to the arena to be seen there, so that the authorities will think well of them, as part of the family. Boys get dragged along by their fathers. They have to prove themselves capable of watching such things without being physically sick. Basically it’s a kind of initiation, like rites of passage in primitive tribes. When they’ve watched a fight, they think they’re men.”
“Men? More like barbarians,” murmured Helen. “It’s so depressing.”
“Yes. Yet they’re our human brothers — in theory . I sometimes wonder whether I don’t prefer animals.”
“Do you think something could still happen to prevent the fights? They’re in two weeks’ time. That seems like no time at all to me. I’m so frightened for Milos. I can’t sleep at night.”
“I don’t know, Helen. We have to go on hoping in spite of all the darkness around us. I remember how the worst happened within only a few days fifteen years ago. So I tell myself that something good could happen quickly too. Even though that could never bring back our dead.”
“Do you believe in God, Dora?”
“I began to have doubts before it happened, but I’ve lost all faith since they crushed my hand and set the dogs on Eva. Still I wouldn’t want to put other people off believing. You asked me a question; I told you the answer, that’s all.”
“But then what gives you the strength to be . . . well, the way you are?”
“The way I am?”
“Yes. You’re always smiling, you comfort people, you’re amusing . . .”
“No one needs strength for that. Or anyway, no more strength than it takes to be sad or cruel, right? I don’t know. It must be my own way of resisting. But it’s yours too. We’re like each other, you know. Not brilliant but dependable!” She broke into laughter and pressed Helen’s arm. “Well, there it is — not everyone can be a Milena!”
“Do you think Milena’s as gifted as her mother?”
“It’s a different kind of gift. Her voice isn’t as strong as Eva’s. Not so full, you might say. But she’s more at ease in the higher registers. And she can find nuances that make you think you’re hearing a melody for the first time when you’ve known it for years and years. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do. It always is the first time with her.”
“Exactly. And then she has . . . well, grace, and I don’t know how to explain that. It’s something beyond technique. Perhaps the quality of her soul — it’s very mysterious. But anyway, I can tell you that Milena is going to be an exceptional singer. If nothing gets in her way.”
Two sturdy militiamen, fur collars turned up behind their shaven heads, passed slowly in the opposite direction, gave them a baleful glance, and disappeared into the night.
“If no fat pigs get in her way,” said Helen in a low voice.
Ten days later, when Helen came into the restaurant for her evening shift, she was surprised not to see Dora there. She asked more than ten people where she was, but none of them knew. A platform had been put up against the back wall, and a piece of furniture of some kind stood on it, concealed by a blue cloth.
“What’s that?”
“No idea.”
No one seemed to know anything this evening.
Helen set to work, made vaguely uneasy by her friend’s absence. The customers arrived as usual from seven onward, muffled up in winter coats and scarves. Within a few minutes the two rooms of the restaurant were full of noise. Helen had come to enjoy the daily ballet performed by the girls in blue aprons, the understanding between them, the challenge — also a daily event — of standing up to a tidal wave of hungry customers, serving tables, clearing away, cleaning up, and restoring the restaurant to its original state of peace and calm.
She told herself that no doubt she could do something else with her life, but while she was waiting, she owed it to Mr. Jahn to do the job he had given her as well as she could. What would have become of her without him? Without Dr. Josef, without Mitten? All of them, she guessed, were links in a secret chain. She wondered how many of the workers sitting at these tables shared the same burning desire for freedom to return, so t
hat everyone could talk freely again, and sing, and the Opera House could be reopened. In three months at the restaurant Helen had never heard a single word of discontent. A deafening silence reigned. But perhaps if someone dared to speak that first word, then everyone would rise up and they would all open their hearts.
She had just brought the dessert course to one of the tables, a tray of small bowls of fruit in syrup, when she heard the tinkling sound behind her. She turned to look. Mr. Jahn was standing on a chair, looking uncomfortable. His paunch swelled inelegantly under his buttoned waistcoat. He was trying to get silence by tapping the rim of a glass with a spoon.
“Please, my friends! Silence, please!”
It was rare for Mr. Jahn to assert himself. There must be some serious reason, and curiosity showed on all faces.
“Listen to me, please, friends.”
Before he started speaking, Helen had time to notice a dozen men standing close to the entrance, arms crossed over their chests. Their long heads, short necks, and massive torsos left her in no doubt: they must be horse-men. She had never seen any before and was impressed by their tremendous physical presence.
“My friends,” Jahn began.
At that moment the staff in the kitchens were relaxing a little after the usual frantic activity. The last dishes of dessert had been sent out; there were no more orders. They were already beginning to tidy up and clean the stoves. This was the moment for Lando, the head chef, to give his daily performance. Without pausing in his work, he cheerfully struck up an operatic aria. He wasn’t always entirely in tune, but he certainly had a powerful voice. His face as red as a peony, he ended the aria on a last reverberant note, and acknowledged the applause and laughter like a diva.
Milena was washing dishes with two of her comrades, bending over one of the huge zinc tubs in the sinks. All three girls were talking cheerfully, but Milena was in a hurry to get the job done and go to the canteen to eat. She was ravenously hungry, and Bart would be there by now.
“Hi, Kathleen. They want you in the restaurant.”
Winter's End Page 22