Before (10 page)

*   *   *

Jiri paces through the darkness, thinking of all of it, moving through history and memory and literature. His shadow on the wall goes back and forth. Winston Churchill is warning the world about the Nazi threat, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi disappears into Nagaina's lair, sinking his teeth into her tail. Jack London's wolves move closer and closer to Henry's fire, even as the desperate, tired man thrusts burning wood at them. Picasso weeps for Guernica—a tumble of abstract, tortured spirits, of explosion and death. A Nazi officer, looking at the gigantic canvas with awe, asks the artist,
Did you do this?

No,
Picasso says.
You did.

The white spider hovers, but is not, as before, coming out at Jiri. He stops and looks at it. There within that slip of spine Adolf Hitler is seventeen, on the Promenade in Linz, with his friend August
Kubí
ek,
watching a beautiful young local girl named Stefanie; she has captured his attention so fiercely that the young Hitler can hardly live. She walks with her mother and occasionally a military officer will step up to her and offer a flower.
C'mon, Adolf,
Kubí
ek
says.
Go and buy a rose and present it and tip your hat! Make your intentions known!
But Hitler shakes his head; he tells his friend,
Nein, esist nicht möglich. She would only laugh.
He has nothing to show for himself, no accomplishments. Still, the dark teenager has followed his Stefanie everywhere, has even dreamed of kidnapping her, of possessing her that way. Jiri imagines the psychotic, anguished boy in that fall of 1906; climbing the Freinberg late at night, overlooking Linz, the Danube a dark mirror below him. Making plans.
To be Wagner's Rienzi, to save my people.
Vast crowds will salute him with a massive
Heil!

No Stefanie, no young woman, would dare ignore young Hitler's affections then.

*   *   *

Jiri paces away from the swastika, back to Rilke, back to his own childhood in Lidice. It is 1940. The light is bright on the walls of his schoolroom. He sits in his row, entranced by the words of the poem, listening to Professor
Vo
ahlík
read from the book:

Früher. Klagtest. Was war? Eine gefallene

Beere des Jubels, unreife.

“The poet is an older man now,” says Professor
Vo
ahlík,
tapping fingers for emphasis on his desk, his other hand cradling the book. The professor's prodigious eyebrows raise to emphasize his point. “
On cítí lítost víc
ne
v minulsti
. He is feeling a sorrow greater than he has felt before.”

The Lidice children, in their rows, listen attentively; the windows are large and the sunlight warms Jiri's shoulder. A girl smiles at Jiri—her face, sixty-one years ago, comes to him now clearly: green eyes, freckles, a sweep of dark chestnut hair, so that he stops in the darkness, smiling at the memory. It is as if she is in front of him. The class ends, dust swirling in a shaft of window light; the girl asks him to write his name in her leather pen case. Says she hears he is very good at the soccer. Her name is Marie
P
íhodová;
she plays soccer, too. Later, Jiri walks with her on the cobblestones before St. Martin's Church, and they balance up on the Lidice walls, showing off.

Then it is a summer evening in 1942, and Jiri and Marie hold hands there, by the old wall, hearing above the swaying branches of trees. There are no lights on in their town, just all of these steep shapes and the sound of the evening wind. They are near the stream and they can hear the water, and beyond them are more walls of Lidice, houses with roofs of red shale, and the earth is turning and night is coming. Fanta pond sparkles dark painter's blue and silver beneath the stars. There, a few roofs up the hill, on Andĕlu, is the steep pitched roof of Jiri's house, the shape of the large oak tree, the plum trees behind. There is the scent of Bohemian night: stone and mortar and the wetness of the earth, a heavy fragrance of greenery, white willows and oaks here by the stream. It is a wonder, Marie's cheek now so close, her profile nearly touching Jiri's as they talk. Her voice in his ear. Her eyes shining when she brings her head back, to look at him.

But now my Tree of Joy is breaking,
Professor
Vo
ahlík
reads,

What is breaking in the storm is my slowly

grown Tree of Joy.

The most beautiful thing in my invisible

landscape, which let me be seen

by the invisible angels.

Marie watches him. And here is Helena: Jiri, three years old, leans out from behind the sunflower stalks where he has been hiding in the garden, and his sister's eyes are on him, full of play, and she is saying,
Kam
jde
,
Jirko? Where are you going? You can't escape me
. Their mother calls them to dinner, and Jiri can hear his father's voice in the house. There are crickets in the night.

In the darkness, here, the photograph of his mother and sister stares out at Jiri, a fathomless hole.

*   *   *

During the brain hemorrhage last June Jiri had seen the walls of Lidice on fire, and he was looking around for Helena. He was shouting, terrified.
There were only the black walls on fire: no houses, no people left.
He could not remember where he was. He could remember Anna's name, for she was there, suddenly, alarmed, leaning over him, but he was not sure if he was in Massachusetts or Seattle, or perhaps Prague; here was the painting of John Lennon in the Little Quarter, this wall too afire, and here was St. Nicholas Church: the Dome Fresco was in flames, the tall, amber, painted glass ceiling melting, blackening—a tunnel of hell toward the sky. Then he and Anna were in
Hrad
any,
looking down, and all of Prague was ablaze. Anna called immediately for a doctor, and soon that face was there, demanding Jiri's attention—white coat, a man needing a shave. Asking Jiri for his location.