Before (20 page)

A rabbit hangs on Jana's back doorknob, a deadweight in a small white burlap bag—she organized with Libor
ermák,
the village butcher, to kill her animal just before she arrived home—and she puts the rabbit in the kitchen pantry and takes the canvas satchel to her bedroom. She eases the tissue-wrapped fabric for Helena's dress out of the satchel and puts it into a drawer, beneath a sweater of hers. She changes into a housedress and, in her kitchen, puts on an apron for chores.

*   *   *

In the late afternoon Jana cleans the rabbit and dices the meat, and leaves it a moment on the wooden chopping block; in the shadowed laundry house of the garden she takes an onion and potatoes from a hinged storage box and puts them in her apron. There is a section of the building they reserve for coal, and here she shovels a small tin bucket full and walks back through the sun. Young sunflowers bow their heads to her as if in greeting, and she smells the sunlight on the earth. She shovels the coal into her iron kitchen stove and lights it; she washes her hands and takes sunflower oil from the pantry, puts a bit on an iron pan, slides the meat into it, and cooks the rabbit, and the smell is so provocative that she swoons and must check the impulse to have some. While it browns she cuts the onion at the window, her eyes glassy, and sometimes her eyelids are forced closed; she steps away and watches over the young garden and the broken spot of wall where Jiri always reads in the last of the sunlight. Beyond it is the Horák farm, the red pitch of roof, the top of the gray mortar walls. Emile Hodja has recently done repairs there, too; she remembers the comfort of seeing the roofer there in the mornings, how when she did not feel like doing her chores she watched his industry for inspiration. He is a hard worker, Emile Hodja. When he is not fixing roofs, he is repairing clocks—last year, as another charity to the church, he fixed the broken clock of St. Martin's, and Jana thinks of this each time she hears the bells chime.

Blinking, she sweeps up the cut onions with a wide knife and, in three trips and without spilling, puts them into the sizzling skillet, waiting as they turn to glass.

The illegal birthday dance she had planned for Helena (it was to take place at Vĕra's Kafková's home next door, for Vĕra and her husband, Vladná, own a phonograph—an afternoon dance and dinner with the heavy curtains to the living room pulled and Vladná and
Rí
a
watching out for soldiers coming up Andĕlu, and Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington playing softly) is unquestionably off, but she can still have the dinner for her daughter here at the house. The Nazis don't allow the dancing, and one cannot tempt fate now, but a celebratory dinner—there is no law against that. She will have a few of Helena's closest friends here, and she can invite the boy her daughter seems to like—his name is Rudolf Hejma—if he and his family check out. She will ask Vĕra about them. Jana wanted to watch her daughter dance. She thinks of Helena in candlelight, grasping the hand and shoulder of the boy, the two of them beginning to move gracefully, and shakes her head angrily and swallows down her emotion and turns to the rabbit.

The crowns she will spend for the birthday pork (Libor
ermák
will give it to her at a good price, under the table), the rationed coupons she will use for the dinner, will still require considerable sacrifice. But Jana has four rabbits living—she can hear them snuffling now, through the kitchen window—and there are three geese. This should help bring her family into mid-August; she might even be able to stretch her meat sources into September.

The rabbit is cooked. She covers it and sets it to the cooler side of the stove. She walks down the short hallway, into the bathroom, and, after putting towels beneath her knees, scrubs the steel bathtub of the fine coal dust that Jiri couldn't entirely get out last night, a constant, thankless job that they all participate in, for the men with their coal dust blacken it every day except Sunday. She scrubs the tiled floor then, the sunlight coming in over her, over the tub. Then she runs the water and bathes, a small luxury in this day. The floating of her back in the warm water loosens her muscles, seems to slightly separate the vertebrae of her spine. She washes and rises and dries her body and then feels guilty for lying in comfort on the bed in her and
Rí
a's
bedroom, when the rest of the family is working, but tells herself she will be no good to anyone tired into her bones or sick. In the drawer beside her she puts her watch, lays it next to the oval wooden container with Jiri's gift. Jana thinks of the bracelet on Helena's wrist, just before she sleeps. She told Jiri how beautiful it was; she told him of her plans to make the dress. She thinks of the dress, finished, on her daughter—tiny yellow and red flowers against blue, like hope, like something you might paint on an egg at Easter.

Then in her dream SS General Reinhardt Heydrich is in the doorway, looking at her, and she wakes with a start, her heart hammering.

*   *   *

Helena is home. Jana hears her in the kitchen; she rises and goes to her daughter and kisses her cheeks and hugs her, and Helena says, “We are fine, Mother, but we were worried about you.”

Helena goes back to grating the potatoes for dumplings. Jana gets a bowl, salt, egg, and flour, moving into this dance the two of them participate in.
Rí
a
and Jiri have arrived, too, banging their coal-stiffened clothes against the garden wall, hanging them over a line there in the corner, and then Jiri comes in to bathe and kisses Jana's cheek quickly, and she brushes back his hair and touches his face, feeling swelling there, at the cheekbone and eye, and he says, quickly “
Dobr
den, Mother.” And she says “Jiri,” thinking,
Did a Nazi do this?
It swoops through her stomach, but she does not say more; Jiri walks directly into the bathroom and she can feel that he is upset, worked up, and the bathtub water is running; she steps out into the garden where
Rí
a
stands, philosophically, in his shorts, looking down on the Horák farm, the fields of grain, and beyond at the golden
epka
in the hills.

Rí
a
turns to her as she approaches; there are infinitesimal wood chips in her husband's hair, in his ears, in his eyebrows. She holds him a moment: her thinning
Rí
a.
Kisses his cheek. The hands she takes, kneading the swell of thumbs, are callused, with dried blood on the knuckles. The forearms are muscular and with fresh cuts. She turns them over, looks at them, looks at
Rí
a's
eyes. Helena, through the window, is boiling salted water and on the counter next to the stove mixing up the dumplings in a bowl.