Before (22 page)

*   *   *

At dinner, with candles lit, Jiri volunteers nothing, much as Helena tries to lecture him about getting into fights.

Rí
a
clears his throat. “And how was Prague?” he asks his wife.

She fills them in on the relatives: She and Sophie visited old aunt Milena Posseltová, on Vinohradská, and later had lunch with Uncle
Ale
and Daniela
Jaro
ová
at their flat on Bethlehem Square.

“They all send greetings. But it is strange now, everyone afraid,” Jana says. “Many of the shops are closed. There are SS walking everywhere. And you cannot believe—on the Old Town Square they have put up this banner of Hitler—just before
T
n
Church. It is four or five stories tall, just his face. His
eyes
look so troubled—”

“A banner?” Jiri says.

“Like a square sail, this huge, heavy cloth. Held up with metal poles and wires,” Jana says. “It is just his face—I don't know what it is for—and the swastikas are everywhere around, hanging from the building eaves. There was a stage in front of the banner, too, just built. It is like they are preparing for some gathering.”

“Maybe something to do with the Heydrich,” Helena says.

“It might be,” Jana says. Jiri listens with his face lowered, his jaw working. Jana cannot tell what he is thinking, for his hair hangs a little over his eyes.

“Hitler like God,”
Rí
a
says with disgust. “It means that nothing is important but Hitler.”

“They are quite crazy,” Helena says. “Two Wehrmacht came in during the morning today to buy sheets of plywood. They said they were repairing the Sokolovna ceiling. One of them couldn't stop giggling,” she says. “It was like he had no control of himself. His companion kept apologizing for him.”

“Were you frightened of them?” Jana asks.

“No, Mother. They've been in a number of times before. I just try to not react and I am polite and otherwise I ignore them.”

“Quite right,” Jana says.

Usually, after he makes his bed on the couch for sleep, Jiri will just tolerate his mother's hugging him, but tonight he puts his arms around Jana first and wishes her a good night; her boy, gangly and strong, is not a child anymore. She holds back, tightly, before he can break the connection.

*   *   *

The dark secrets of this day settle like the blackbirds at the edges of the fields. Jana dreams of the giant troubled eyes of the Führer, the angry face staring at Prague. Then of Heydrich: Moonlight comes from Andĕlu Street onto the bed and the dresser, falls over pictures of her family. There is the sound of cicadas through the window. Somewhere in the night a protective bird sings, and the grandfather clock in the living room strikes the half hour; there is a distant, heavy sound of drums. And there in the bedroom doorway stands the Reichsprotektor, tall, and in his full black Nazi regalia, death's head adorning his cap, SS leaves at his collar, his odd hips and thighs that seem those of a woman.

Jana cannot see the features of Heydrich's face, for it is in shadow, and she wakes with a frightful start and
Rí
a
beside her is in an exhausted sleep—his cheekbone an emaciated 7 in the pale light—and their room is exactly as it was in the dream, so that it is possible for Jana to believe that maybe the ghost of Heydrich is here, only now invisible.

She senses that a demon has come to threaten her family. She rises and steps across the cool tiled floor and stands there in the doorway, gooseflesh on her arms where her nightshirt falls away, gooseflesh on her neck; her hands rise, grip the doorframe. She stays there and slowly the room is more calm, her husband's intelligent features against the pillow. She goes back to the side of the bed and puts on her leather shoes and taps down the hallway and looks in on Helena in her very small room across from the bath; Helena's hair drifts over her eyes, and moonlight makes a triangle above her on the wall. Jana moves on to Jiri on the living room couch; his face, too, is exhausted, and bruised from the fight. The Philips radio is beside his head. Her son breathes deeply there, in the night. She wants to touch Jiri's face but is afraid to wake him and afraid that he would open his eyes to her weeping over his bruising, his young whiskers. The moonlight stretches over pictures on the stone mantel of Jiri with his Sokol group, standing on a field in
Plze
with their wooden rifles at age ten, and on a field trip to Prague, to the Old Town Square. And what is on those Prague cobblestones now, before the church of
T
n—the
same place where her boy, with his buddies here, has stood? The same place where Kafka wove his stories, where Hus and Mozart and Copernicus walked? Now the portrait of insane Hitler, there for his insane followers to draw inspiration from. The Nazis are poisoning the nation. They do not believe that Czechoslovakia exists.
That my family exists.
Jana leans forward and kisses her boy and smells his hair and skin, and he stirs slightly in his sleep. And then she goes back over her solid, smooth wooden floor to her bed.

*   *   *

In the morning Jiri insists on taking a photograph of Jana and Helena as Helena prepares to go off to work. They pose leaning against Helena's bicycle, and Jana says, “For heaven's sake, hurry it up, Jiri, she can't be late.”

Jiri tells them both to smile, and Helena laughs at the combination of her mother's impatience and Jiri's cheerfulness, and Jana cannot help laughing with her.

“I mean it, Jiri,” she says, trying to recover, shaking her finger at him. “You need to take the picture and stop kidding about.” She puts her arm around Helena, and then it is done and Helena is gliding down the hill, waving at the corner, and Jiri slips the film roll in his coat and ducks back into the house with his mother clucking after him.

When
Rí
a
and Jiri have gone, Jana sequesters herself in Vĕra Kafková's sewing room, by a second-floor window that looks down on her own garden. Vĕra's Singer is a more recent model than Jana's, and, since Jana often uses Vĕra's machine for more complicated projects, Helena will not think it unusual that her mother is doing work here. The plum trees that Jana shares with Vĕra are bright green through the window, shifting a little with wind—they seem, for a moment, almost to glitter. Jana starts cutting, the scissors making a decisive part through the tissue of her pattern and the cloth for the birthday dress—quick slashes: now the divided fronts, now the collars and sleeves, now the back. She has fashioned her pattern after a dress worn by Carole Lombard in
My Man Godfrey,
just before the war; Helena has talked of her favorite actress's style ever since seeing the film in Prague. It will have long cuffed sleeves and an offset neckline bow of white crinoline; one day, when the barbarians have gone, her daughter shall dance in it.