The Cowards

by Josef Skvorecky

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘I kiss your hand.’

  ‘Good morning. What do you want?’

  ‘Madame, I’d like to lodge two English prisoners with you. The town is full of refugees and we’re trying to put our Englishmen up with some of the better families.’

  ‘Prisoners?’

  ‘Yes. English soldiers. Prisoners of war.’

  ‘Well, I really don’t know … my husband’s not at home.’

  ‘I’m sure your husband won’t object. Dr Vasak’s taken some, and Director Heiser and the Mouteliks and …’

  ‘And … uh … how many did you say there were?’

  ‘Just two.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure my husband will allow it. There’s little enough room as it is.’

  ‘Oh, he will. And if he does object, you can always phone us,’ I said. I was eager to unload my two prisoners on her as fast as possible.

  ‘For how long would it be?’

  ‘Just two or three days.’

  ‘Well … what sort of people are they?’

  ‘What do you mean, ma’am?’ I said, playing dumb.

  ‘Well, I mean … are they … they’re not filthy, are they?’

  ‘Ma’am, if they miss their daily bath, they get sick.’

  ‘Yes, well … I just don’t know what my husband’s going to say to this.’

  ‘No need to worry about that, ma’am. Thanks very much. I’ll bring them right over.’

  ‘Well …’ said Mrs Vevodova, but I’d already gone.

  ‘Go right in. She’s waiting for you,’ I said, shoving the fat one and the runt towards the door. I caught one last glimpse of the runt’s dirty boots and the fat guy’s greasy rear and then turned and hurried off towards town with my last two Englishmen. Just the thought of the mess those soldiers would make of Mrs Vevodova’s place made me happy and I hoped they’d do a thorough job of it. I really longed to see them turn her house into one big pigsty. She was one woman I just couldn’t stand. And so I prayed they’d really mess it up for her. We went down to the main street and headed off towards home.

  I took the two Englishmen – their names were Martin and Siddell – upstairs. Mother opened the door and I said they’d be staying with us for a couple days and then I took them to the bathroom so they could wash up. Here in the house, they both suddenly seemed very shy. I left them in the bathroom and went into the kitchen. It was two o’clock.

  ‘What should I give them to eat, Danny?’ Mother asked.

  ‘Oh, anything. Boiled potatoes would be all right. Anything.’

  ‘But I don’t have any meat.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mother.’

  ‘How am I supposed to talk to them?’

  ‘They know German. You have any lunch for me?’

  ‘It’s been ready for a long time, Danny.’

  ‘Could I have it then? I’ve got to go out again right away.’

  ‘My God. Where are you going this time, Danny?’

  ‘I promised Benno I’d come over.’

  ‘Danny, be careful. I don’t want you to get mixed up in anything dangerous.’

  ‘Don’t worry Mother.’

  The sergeant appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said, and got up and brought them into the room. Embarrassed, they sat down at the table and rested their hands on their knees. Mother brought in plates and bowls and served us soup.

  ‘So, bitte,’ she said.

  ‘Danke, Frau,’ said the sergeant.

  We finished the soup off and Mother brought some meat and potatoes.

  ‘Danny, do you really think I can serve them this?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s horse meat. I don’t have anything else.’

  ‘They won’t mind.’

  ‘Bitte,’ said Mother. ‘Es ist nur Pferdefleisch.’

  ‘Danke sehr, Frau,’ said the sergeant. We ate.

  ‘Where’re you from?’ I asked the sergeant

  ‘London,’ he said.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Liverpool.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the sergeant. ‘I’ve got three kids.’

  ‘Well, you must be glad you’re on your way home.’

  ‘I am indeed,’ said the sergeant. After a while he said,

  ‘This is the second time.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘This won’t be my first homecoming.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I served in the first war, too.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said.

  ‘And I’d go again if there were ever another one.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. You see, I hate the Germans.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. I didn’t know what to say to that. The sergeant, chewing away on his horse meat, looked at me soberly.

  ‘Well, fine,’ I said and turned to the other one. ‘Are you married too?’

  ‘No,’ he said, making a face as if he’d stepped on a nail.

  ‘Well, then you’ve got something to look forward to too, don’t you?’

  ‘I should say so.’

  ‘We’ve got some pretty girls here, don’t you think? You like them?’

  ‘Oh, very much.’

  ‘They’re pretty, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes. But then, you see, I haven’t had a girl for five years now.’

  That kind of shocked me. He said it the same way a man might say he hadn’t had anything to eat for a week.

  ‘Well, you can have one now.’

  ‘Really?’ he said with interest. ‘But I don’t have any money.’

  This time I made a face.

  ‘You don’t need money,’ I said. ‘Our girls are good patriots.’

  The Englishman chuckled. He was a big, redheaded, husky guy. I thought about Mitzi. Maybe I should do a good deed and let him go to meet Mitzi instead of me. No. If he’d held out this long, he might as well hold out a little longer.

  ‘Well, I’ve got to be going now,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you this evening. In the meantime, get some rest.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Well … good-bye for now.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  I got up.

  ‘Will you make up their beds for them, Mother?’ I said.

  ‘You’re going already, Danny?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Be careful, Danny.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Good-bye, Mother.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  I went out the door and hurried downstairs. When I got to the landing I looked back and saw Mother standing in the doorway watching me. She looked worried. I blew her a kiss. She smiled and waved. Then she turned away. I hurried downstairs. Out on the street everything still looked the same. The same grey crowd as before except now, somehow, it seemed to me they were moving faster. I headed down towards the station but after putting away all that horse meat, walking wasn’t easy.

  ‘Gnädiger Herr,’ I heard from behind me. Somebody touched my arm. I turned and saw an incredible filthy ugly woman in a striped dress.

  ‘Bitte, wo ist das?’ she said and held out a piece of paper. Behind her stood a whole flock of other women wearing striped clothing like hers. You couldn’t even tell whether they were old or young. Hunger stared from their eyes. They looked like ghosts. I glanced at the piece of paper. On it was a typewritten message: ‘For Lewith factory cafeteria: Serve lunch to fifteen Jewesses from Schörkenau concentration camp.’ At the bottom there was a round rubber municipal stamp and somebody’s signature.

  I handed the paper back to the woman and said, ‘Come with me. I’ll show you the way.’

  The woman held up a bony hand and said a few words in a shrill voice to the others. I turned and started off. The whole group followed along behind me. I turned to the woman with the piece of paper and slowed down.

  ‘You just got out of a
camp?’ I asked. She looked up at me respectfully, then came to me as meekly as if I were her master. We walked on side by side.

  ‘Yes. From Schörkenau,’ she said in an almost reverent tone of voice. I didn’t know what to talk about. She trotted along beside me, alertly and expectantly, and I could tell she was ready to tell me anything I wanted to know, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything at all. Just by looking at her you knew everything. I’d heard a bit about the camps. About Schörkenau especially. Some of the guys who’d worked for Luftmetal had told me about the Jewish women from the camp who were laying a spur line there. So I’d heard about the place already. The Jewish woman limped along at my side, her bare feet caked over with dust, her striped clothes hanging on her like on a skeleton.

  ‘A good thing it’s all over now, isn’t it?’ I said, and as soon as I’d said it I felt how dumb it was. I was sure it must sound insulting to her. I felt guilty. I wasn’t sure why but I felt guilty anyway. For no good reason maybe, but there I was walking with a full stomach in front of all those women and then, in that same obsequious voice, the woman beside me said, ‘Yes. Yes, it’s a very good thing,’ and then went back to being as alert and attentive and cautious as before. It was embarrassing how servile these women were. Hell, if I could only have told them they didn’t need to act that way any more, that they weren’t in a concentration camp any more and that they had just as much right to everything now as I did or something like that, but I didn’t know how to tell them and I had the feeling it was impossible to, or that maybe I didn’t have any right to tell them things like that, so I didn’t say anything and just kept on going, wishing we were already at Lewith’s. We’d been walking along the sidewalk on the right hand side of the street and, crossing over to the other side in front of the Grand Hotel, had to make our way through a swarm of people. The mixture was still the same – Mongolians, French, Italians, Serbs, and clusters of people in rags – but it seemed to me there were more people than ever now and that they were moving faster. Every once in a while the sea of people parted and a wagon creaked by loaded with children or a skinny nag clomped past with two or three kids on its back. Sometimes somebody on a bike wove in and out along the fringe of the crowd – usually a man in uniform, a Frenchman, or a guy with a NEDERLAND patch on his shoulder – but the main current of that human flood flowed steadily by on foot, surging westward through the heat and swirling dust. I cut across that current, me and my Jewish women, and we walked on towards Lewith’s cafeteria. The white concrete building of the new spinning mill – which the firm of Lewith had finished just in time for the Germans – gleamed in the sunshine like a palace and there was a line of refugees, standing or squatting, that stretched the full length of the iron fence. Small bunches of them, led by kids wearing white armbands, were being let into the cafeteria. I took my armband out of my pocket, put it on and turned to the Jewish woman.

  ‘Could I have your paper now?’ I asked. She handed it to me. We walked down the sidewalk, rows of squatting and exhausted people to each side, towards the factory gate. Two guys from the Red Cross stood at the gateway. Without a word I handed the paper to one of them. He read it and handed it back to me.

  ‘Where’s the cafeteria?’ I asked.

  ‘Around the corner to the left,’ he said, and the next minute he was already busy with another group.

  ‘Follow me,’ I said to my Jewish women and led them around to the left between the fence and the white factory wall. Around the corner there was a little yard bright with sunshine and full of refugees sprawled out on the grass. We passed a long row of big windows until, almost at the end of that side, we came to an open door in which two women in white coats were standing. I handed the paper to one of the women.

  ‘Fifteen lunches,’ she said to two other guys wearing armbands.

  ‘Come on in,’ one of them said.

  I told the Jewish women they could go in and one after another and each one looking as solemn and as close to dying right then and there as the other, they filed in past me.

  ‘Jesus,’ the guy said to me as he counted them, ‘they must have just got out of a concentration camp.’

  ‘From Schörkenau,’ I said.

  ‘Aha.’

  And just then, drifting in with the rattle and clink of spoons and the foul smell of cafeteria food, there was the sudden wail of a strange kind of music, a twanging, keening sound, something like mandolins, only much better I thought.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Russians,’ the guy at the door said. I listened. I couldn’t see all the way inside, but I listened. It was one of those peculiar Russian melodies, sad but not maudlin, a melody that sounded detached and uplifted, above it all.

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  ‘Sure, go on in.’

  I slipped into the cafeteria and looked around. It was a big place with benches and tables, full of smoke and bad smells and food. Tattered POWs were sitting around the tables, stuffing themselves. Aproned women were clearing. A long queue stretched back along the wall from the serving window. I walked between tables towards the music. The room was L-shaped and around the corner another big hall opened up and there I saw a Russian orchestra seated on a platform, playing this song. Actually they weren’t Russians. They were Mongolians or Georgians, men with wide flat faces and walrus moustaches. About eight of them sat there, smiling broadly and incessantly, twanging away on all kinds of odd mandolins and balalaikas. In front of the platform, where a couple of kids stood gaping at the orchestra, benches and tables had been cleared away and a handful of French soldiers were dancing with girls from Lewith’s kitchen. The girls’ cheeks were bright red and they looked like they were dancing in heaven. I squeezed my way up close to the orchestra and stood there. The Mongolians sat straight as statues, but every single one of them was grinning from ear to ear and their small hands flickered skilfully over the strings. You could hear the smooth, drawling, full-blown, mournful melody with a bass underneath and the little, high-pitched, tinkling tones of some sort of mandolin. The Mongolians played without stopping and without notes, grinning the whole time, blissful and mute and motionless in the midst of all that stink and clatter and talk. I watched them and listened to their song and wondered where on earth they’d come from and how they’d ever managed to wind up here and what a tremendous thing music was – how it was better than everything else put together and how, just because of their music, I felt some sort of fraternal feeling with these dirty mujiks, and as I listened to them, I watched their hands, the way they played, wonderfully, their fingers moving over the strings with a marvellous calm and precision. For a few minutes some of them would stop, take a breather, then join in again, right on the beat, whether they were all playing in unison or harmony. Every once in a while a couple of them would play a lower-pitched plunking melody and the others would come up with something like trumpet riffs in jazz. I listened and forgot about everything. Then the orchestra stopped and a young kid played a solo on a huge bass balalaika or whatever it was. He played a low-pitched tune and the deep plunks of the balalaika sounded so weirdly and fantastically beautiful that it was almost like a miracle, almost as miraculous as when Armstrong sings ‘St James Infirmary’ and Kid Ory answers him on a muted trombone, and then suddenly that whole grinning and speechless bunch started singing and they sang a wild, wailing song in those Oriental voices of theirs and my hair stood on end and I felt they were lifting me straight up to heaven. The Frenchmen whirled the girls around the floor till their skirts flew up and you could see their silly pink panties and when the song was over one of the dancing Frenchmen yelled at me, ‘Vive la France! Vive les Soviets! Vive la paix!’ and he smiled. I smiled back at him and wanted to yell something, too, but suddenly I was embarrassed. I would have liked to holler something back but I couldn’t. The best I could come up with was a grin and I waved my hand and was furious that I didn’t know how to shout like that and it ruined the music for me. I couldn’t shout, ‘Lo
ng live Czechoslovakia!’ or anything like that. I just couldn’t. Maybe because Czechoslovakia is such an awfully long word. Still I might have yelled something shorter like ‘Long live Peace!’ But I couldn’t do that either. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wasn’t spontaneous enough. Sure, naturally it was good that the Germans were gone. But it didn’t even start to make me feel ecstatic enough to holler. I’d never been able to holler or shout when parades went by or yell ‘Welcome!’ and stuff like that. It was all very fine but, damn it, why couldn’t they leave me out of all that? Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? I wasn’t dying to yell whatever it was I felt. I felt mad at that Frenchman. The damn fool. Why should I holler just because he had? I was glad the Protectorate was over but I didn’t feel any urge to go crazy just on account of it. And I couldn’t stand the feeling that somebody was standing there just waiting for me to go crazy.

  I turned and elbowed my way out of there. The Mongolian melody pursued me, growing louder and stronger. They’d started singing again, a bouncy, yelping, beautiful steppe song, and a wave of sadness broke over me, a completely mindless and helpless kind of sadness, and I made my way blindly between the long tables. A sadness like when, out of the night air during the Protectorate, I picked up the Golden Gate Quartet or heard Wings Over Jordan singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ or Leadbelly singing ‘Cedar House Blues’ or the Mills Brothers or Bob Crosby’s full four-part Dixieland with the tenor sax and knew it couldn’t last much more than a minute and that maybe I’d never hear it again and that there wasn’t much chance I’d ever have a record of it though I knew that any fool over in America could get one cheap and easy and there I was, stuck in the Protectorate and aching because that music was so beautiful and in a little while it would fade out and I’d never – damn it! – hear it again. And now here I was feeling that same longing and heartache I’d felt so often in the past and it made me sick to think how helpless people really were and how stupidly the world was organized after all, a world filled with marvellous things most of which you never get around to seeing or hearing or knowing and, even if you do, it gets lost in no time leaving you with a hole of despair in your heart so you feel like dying. I pushed my way out of the cafeteria, crossed the lawn between the sleeping people, and went through the gate and out into the street. New clumps of haunted, hungry people were headed towards me, escorted by boys wearing armbands and looking very eager and self-important. The sun was scorching and everything looked dusty. I started up the street towards the station and then to the Manes house.