Before (23 page)

Jana works over the next two days whenever she can, the Singer needle diving steadily through Helena's dress and her projects for the
Kru
inas:
an old canvas coat needing mending, curtains with plain casings for the
Kru
ina
kitchen, pillow covers for little Marta
Kru
inová's
bedroom, two of Marta's dresses needing minor repairs. Sometimes Vĕra comes in, nodding with approval at the progress of the birthday dress. She brings Jana drinks of water and once a vase of wood sorrel and star flower, picked here on the Horák hill. Jana says, “
Dĕkuji,
Vĕra, they look wonderful,” and watches her friend bend to a small table and put down the flowers, a new shadow on the floor.

Vĕra says, “Keep working, it looks very good—I shall make us something to eat whenever you are hungry,” and then is gone, descending the stairs.

There is the pulsing sound of the cicadas, and as Jana sews she glances out the window and sees the hill falling away to the Horák farm, rows of young crops, grain, and the hills rise again to the forest. Some two miles in the distance there is the
Kru
ina
farm, and for a moment Jana would like her family to live there, with its availability of food, with its distance from the Nazis billeted here. The church bell sounds the hours, and Jana listens; she imagines others in her community looking up to the sound as well—it is part of their
history
that Emile Hodja has mended. It means nothing to the Nazis but hours marked. Below, the sunflowers are quiet now, the crickets sing, and the plum trees are heavy with their leaves.

*   *   *

On the next evening, a little after ten
P.M
., Jana paces with concern for her boy. It is still early yet for Jiri to be back from the
Kru
ina
farm, but she shall stay awake until he comes home, will give him something to eat, some potato pancakes and bacon when he returns. She steps out into the garden, listens to the crickets and frogs in the fields. The plum trees glow with their dark thickness, and the sunflowers suddenly have grown considerably, nodding at their moorings. The wall, the shed, her small garden, all are heavy with dew, and you can smell that wetness and the greenery. Jana thinks of collecting flowers in the morning with Vĕra—perhaps there will be time before rain comes—wood sorrel and black mustard and wolfbane, arranging them into vases, this freshness and life in the rooms of their families. She walks to the wall, clutching her robe tight to her. In the plum trees icterus birds are making brief, golden flights; she listens to them, watches them, waiting for her son, until another sound—an odd, heavy disturbance of truck engines—takes her suddenly from her thoughts.

The icterus birds scatter in a bright explosion.

TWELVE

The soldiers were everywhere,
Vĕra Kafková told Jiri, on their night in Prague after the war. Motioning with her hands.
Everywhere. Like a swarm. They stayed outside the houses through the night and we watched them from the windows. Then in the early morning they came for the men and tore our homes apart and marched the women and children to the school.
Here Vĕra broke down, waving a hand at the futility of her emotions.
To bylo hrocné, honey. It was terrible.

In his kitchen, Jiri has been writing it all down. He thinks he has his mother's face right: high cheekbones, skin Bohemian dark with sun, eyes the color of wheat. His mother's face—turning at the sound of the trucks, looking over the garden wall at the Germans coming down the Horák drive, hearing them on the streets. Then the violence: houses searched, everything thrown out windows, smashed. Jiri imagines the dress for Helena thrown into the garden dirt, the telescope he used with his father in pieces. He remembers how he sensed rather than saw Helena sleeping on that last night: his sister, a curving moment of white blanket, the shy triangle of light on the wall above her. His parents nodding to him in the shadows of the hallway and, when he looked back at the break in the garden wall, before going down the path, he saw his mother watching him from the back doorway, waving. Lidice under the moon as he slipped from town, up around the hayfields and the village below then to his right as he climbed up Liska hill toward the forest. Not a light to be seen in town, the stars over the dark shapes of houses and Fanta pond.

The night is quiet outside the screen window now: the garage where Jiri's Buick sits, the fence, a house beyond. A moth insists at the window, trying indefatigably for Jiri's light, bringing him from that last night in Lidice. Jiri thinks about driving with Tika in his car,
him
driving, to the Arboretum or to the sea, his eyes just a little better than they are now, and Tika saying,
It is amazing, Jiri, so wonderful, your recovery.

A car goes by on Irving Street, through houses and trees, playing this rap, this heavy declaration of war, of angry existence. The rap music fades; in the relative quiet afterward the kitchen clock is synchronized with the grandfather clock in the living room. It is twelve-fifty. Jiri remembers the St. Martin's clock that Emile Hodja fixed, the simple, clear sound of it. He remembers three years later, in Prague—the Town Hall clock cracked by a Nazi missile. He was there, fighting with partisans in the uprising at the end of the war. He was running through the Old Town Square and there was the astronomical clock, split in half after four hundred years of operating, slumped in defeat; the Nazis were targeting historic artifacts. The clock had been so much a part of Jiri's childhood excursions that even there, in the heavy fighting, it was hard to believe what the Nazis had done. It made him furious.
This was what they did,
Jiri writes, now bending to the page again, addressing Markéta and Tika and Anna and also Marjorie Legnini—
what Hitler did, what the Communists did after him. They were determined to destroy any memory we had, you see? To put their vicious stamp on everything they touched. This is what such people do: They wipe out your memory, they replace it with their own. They want you to believe that your own history never existed, to loosen your moorings so that they can control you. So you must work to
remember
,
even if they take your whole town away and make it nothing but wind and grass! Remember what life was like before their terror! Our country rebuilt the clock as it was, rebuilt Prague as it was, and I think of my home and I remember the Ferris wheel in front of the Lidice church when the fair came in fall and all of the people gathered there and the band music at night and a girl I flirted with at the wall when I was twelve. The Nazis destroyed all of it, but I remember it.

The moth works at the window. The clocks chime softly together. One o'clock. Jiri looks down at the garage, the dark roof there. He thinks a moment and writes,
P.S. Anna, one of the hardest things for me is that I cannot drive anymore. It is one of the ways I am no longer of any help to you. I am hoping I'll be able to drive again. You have never thought of yourself as a good driver I know but you are actually a very good one and your only problem is that when you make left turns you jerk it, angle by angle, instead of making a smooth turn. This is a problem of concentration, not of driving, and I would not mention it except I am scared of it and we start getting cross with each other and shouting at each other in the car and I wish I handled it better. I just want you to concentrate and be safe,
drahou
ku.
But I hope I will drive again.

*   *   *

And now Jiri falls again into his history.

It is a few days before Christmas 1948. The sound of drenching rain through the glass. Jiri stands in the window of the SS Archival Room in the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, watching the storm over the city. He is taking a break, allowing himself a well-deserved daydream. He has met a woman at the Válka camp for refugees; she flirts with him with her large blue eyes. Her name is Anna
roubková
and she has come in, a month before, from Slovakia, with her mother and cousin (the rest of her family was lost in the war, her father in the Prague uprising in 1945, in those same streets where Jiri fought). Jiri has told Anna once, full of emotion, that his family was from Lidice and that he has not found news of his mother and sister. And they have spoken no more of the dark times, as if agreed in the touch of hands that the tragedy is there but they must also live, move forward; she has made Jiri feel alive again. Sometimes he takes the tram across broken Nuremberg just to walk with her on the road from Válka to Soldier's Field. In that huge stadium, where Hitler once exhorted his robot troops to fight as one, where now threadbare couples stroll through with picnic baskets on warmer December days for lunch, Anna will laugh about the large blue ski coat she was issued, with its big arms that flop. Jiri has bought for her, for Christmas, a fine warm coat, and coats for her mother and cousin, too, and he cannot wait to give them these presents on Christmas Eve.