The Visible World (15 page)

“What the hell was that?” said Ota Rybáč.

And that was the end of the evening.

JUST OVER THREE YEARS AGO I FOUND MYSELF SITTING
on a bench near the white statue of Eliška Krásnohorská in Karlovo náměstí, the square my mother had talked about the day we planted flowers together at our cabin on the lake almost forty years earlier. It was a still, sullen day in June, overcast and dull. A warm wind was blowing from the east. Three kids were riding their skateboards over a ramp they had set up on the sidewalk under a tree with branches so huge they appeared deformed, like thick, twisted ropes; the largest of these, a child-thick tentacle running straight out from the main trunk as though hoping to strike out on its own, had very nearly sunk to the ground of its own weight, and been propped up on a short steel crutch.

I had long before given up hope of learning anything conclusive, if in fact I had ever hoped for that. In any case, there had been nothing to see; the door was closed. A war had come. My mother had loved someone who had died. She’d married my father. On a bench across from me, two old women leaned toward each other holding their pocketbooks on their laps with both hands. Behind them, on the avenue, a tram slowed to a stop. The bell rang, the doors closed, the tram left. A store behind the stop was selling out its stock of shoes. The one next to it sold electronics.

The wind brought the slightly sickening smell of the flowers in their beds, then a gust of fumes, then the sudden coolness of plaster. It had happened right here; the entire square, I’d been told, had been cordoned off. The partisans had been hidden in the church whose cross I could almost see from where I sat. On a June morning like this one, all seven of them had died there. It told me nothing. There was no entrance; the past was closed for inventory.

The trolley bell rang again. In one of my father’s stories, a hunter shooting at a bird in a dark wood was surprised to hear the arrow strike something with a dull, metallic clang. Going to investigate, he parted the branches of a thick pine to reveal an entire town, abandoned a century ago to the plague. His arrow, missing the bird, had hit the village bell tower.

One of the skateboarders drumrolled onto the wooden ramp, spun and missed, ran three quick steps.

I was watching another trolley move past the storefronts when a small white dog trotted up and began to sniff my leg. I could see his owner, a blocky old man in a suit, like a hydrant dressed for church, hurrying up the walk.
“Bud’ hodnej, Karlíčku. Nezlob”
—Be good, Karlíček—he said to the dog in a tone full of good-humored sympathy for Karlíček’s winsome ways and not intended to be taken to heart. When Karlíček started to sniff my crotch I gently pushed him away, and Pavel Čertovský and I began to talk. So I was from America. He had been to America once, to visit his brother in Chicago. It had been very hot there. Most young people these days didn’t care about history, he said, when I explained to him, as best I could, why I’d come to Prague in the first place—it was all gadgetry and computers now. Why, just the other day he had read in the newspaper that 42 percent of students entering the gymnasium thought Charter 77 was a rock-and-roll group. “Come here, Karlíček,” he called out irritably, as though the dog were somehow responsible.

And then he told me, yet again, all the things I already knew: That there had been seven of them. That they had been trained in England by the RAF. That they had parachuted back into the Protectorate to assassinate Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, who I no doubt knew had been Hitler’s personal favorite and likely successor as well as the architect of the Final Solution. That thirteen days after Heydrich died, in the early morning of June 18, the group, hidden in the crypt of the Church of Sts. Cyril and Metoděj on Řesslova Street, had found themselves surrounded by two full divisions of Wehrmacht and three hundred SS—betrayed by one of their own, a man named Čurda. That even though the situation was utterly hopeless—they were outnumbered three hundred to one—they had fought bravely, desperately, three from the rectory, the other four from the crypt itself. That the three in the rectory had been killed almost immediately but that the others had held on for hours even after the fire hoses had been pushed in through the little window on Řesslova Street and the water in the crypt had begun to rise, until they came down to their last four bullets, which they had been saving for themselves.

He remembered the morning they died, Pavel Čertovský said. He waved his hand to indicate the half-kilometer-long square we were sitting in, or perhaps the entire city. “The whole square, from there, to there, all the way down to Večná Street, was cordoned off, a four-hundred-meter radius in all directions from the church. They had guards watching the sewers letting out into the Vltava...they thought of everything. Still, the boys held out longer than anyone would have thought.”

“You saw all this?” I asked.

“My parents lived right over there,” said Pavel Čertovský. My father and I watched the whole thing from the kitchen window. My mother just cried the whole time. There wasn’t much to see, to be honest, but you could hear the gunshots—
pock, pock-pock
—and I remember the fire truck coming up a side street and the puff of smoke when they dynamited the rectory. People guessed right away what it was about but of course there was nothing to be done—God himself couldn’t have saved those boys that morning.” Pavel Čertovský shook his head. “I prefer dogs to people,” he said. And he scratched the dog, who had laid his head on his owner’s lap, on the top of his nose, and the dog looked up at his face with an expression of adoration and sorrow that reminded me of fifteenth-century paintings of Christ looking up from the cross to a merciful heaven.

“After that it all went to hell, basically,” Čertovský went on. “The day after they killed Kubiš and Gabčík and the rest, we heard they’d gotten one of the main figures of the Resistance in Prague, a woman named Moravcová. She was able to get to some poison; her husband and son had it much harder.” He paused. “But you probably already know all of this,” he said.

“Some,” I said. “Tell me, has this place changed much since then?”

“The trees are bigger, of course,” said Pavel Čertovský. “And a few of the buildings are different.” He paused, as though gathering something. “It seemed happier somehow. You have to understand,” he said quickly. “I was twelve years old; everything seemed possible. Huge things were happening, every day something new was happening, but it all seemed to be occurring somewhere else, to someone else, not me. I can’t explain it. I can’t defend it. It was as if things had no gravity. Terrible things happened—you saw them happen—but then they’d just float away.” He shook his head. “Youth. In old age you go around creaking like an old garbage truck loaded down with shit, if you’ll pardon me.

“But listen to me running on—here, let me tell you something you may actually find interesting. If you go back to the church,” he said, indicating the direction of the church with his head, “go to the back room of the museum where they have that wall of photographs and look at the fourth from the right, three rows down. It shows the crowd gathered around Gabčík’s body that morning after they’d dragged it out into the street. If you look closely in the bottom right corner, between the legs of the man with the camera taking a picture of Gabčík’s face, you’ll see a foot with a white sock and a brown sandal.” He patted my knee conspiratorially. “That’s me,” he said, “and right next to...
Karlíčku, přestaň!”
—Stop that!—he called to the dog, who had wandered over to the huge supported branch of the oak and was peeing on the crutch. The dog lowered his leg. “What was I saying?”

But he was an old man, and had forgotten. “Funny,” he said. “I can’t remember four seconds back—I’ve already forgotten your name, I’m afraid—but I can see every detail from half a century ago. Every absurdity. I remember that our dog had to go that morning—dogs have no appreciation for history—and my father decided to take him out. This was still during the siege of the church, but well before we knew what it was really about. My father and I went out through the cellar to the back, then walked away from the square to the churchyard of St. Katherine’s on Viničná Street, just up from where the hospital is now, and the dog promptly did his business. I remember that as we were leaving he stopped to drink from a bucket someone had left on the walk, and I saw a couple on a bench to the right of the big wooden doors there; they were both quite young—beautiful young people, really—and she was holding him and he was shaking like a child and it wasn’t until that very moment that I had a sense of how bad the thing happening four blocks away really was.”

But he had to be going, he said, and we said our goodbyes and he and Karlíček walked off together past the skateboarders who stood about sullenly, holding their boards under their arms until they had passed.

A gray day. The wind, a warm breath, moved the leaves, lifted the dirty curls of one of the skateboarders out of his eyes, slid a paper bag a short distance along the walk. And sitting there I could suddenly feel them—the facts, the dates, the stories, the couple on the bench in the churchyard—gathering like iron filings around an invisible magnet, suggesting a shape.

THEY HAD BEEN HERE, ALL OF THEM, AND NOW THEY
were gone. What could match the wonder of that? They’d leaned against a sun-warmed wall on a particular afternoon in June, scratched their noses with the backs of their wrists, pulled an oversoft apricot in half with their fingers. And now they were gone. I’d come to love two of them: their voices, should I somehow hear them again in this world, would be more familiar to me than my own. But others had known them. I never had, really.

Someone once said that at the end of every life is a full stop, and death could care less if the piece is a fragment. It is up to us, the living, to supply a shape where none exists, to rescue from the flood even those we never knew. Like beggars, we must patch the universe as best we can.

I IMAGINE THEY DIDN’T SPEAK MUCH THAT FIRST HOUR
or so as they made their way deeper into the forest, up dank sloping paths where rainwater had left shores of pine needles like sea wrack in the dirt, past piles of logs spotted white where their branches had been lopped close to the trunk, then off the trails entirely. Damp, sweet gloom, resiny and wet, then a shot of strong sun, as from a different world, then shadow and sun, shadow and sun. A Gypsy wagon, its wood swollen fat with water, stood in the middle of a dense patch of woods, barred in by ten-year-old pines. Covered in needles, its canvas gouged by branches, it seemed to have been dropped from the sky. They passed through an old abandoned orchard, then made their way along the edge of a marshy field that might have had a lake at its center, its reeds loud with birds.

His name was Tomáš Bém, the surname just one step removed from the umlaut and the German “Böhm,” and he came from Vyškov, a village twenty kilometers north of Brno. He was twenty-two years old that summer, a man of average height, not particularly handsome. There was something concentrated about him, as if the energy of a larger man, and the bitterness of an older one, had been forced to fit that slimmer frame. The day they met—a hot, still day in late July of 1941—he took the early train from Brno to žd’ár nad Sázavou, then a bus that bounced interminably over bad roads as women fanned themselves with whatever papers they happened to have handy and men sat sweating stolidly into their collars. When the bus stopped at a small wrought-iron bridge near a country market he got out, shouldered his rucksack, swung the tin cup that hung from a leather thong around his neck over his shoulder, and began to walk. As he made his way up the long sloping road he could feel it, tapping lightly on his back. Ten minutes later he was in the forest.

He walked steadily for three hours along vast, empty fields, through the shade of pine forests mossed and tufted with thick, soft grass, stopping only to eat his lunch on a pile of fresh-cut pines that someone had stacked by the road. Sap bled from the cuts. He watched two women, only their upper bodies visible above the shimmering wheat, cross the field that began just on the other side of the pines. There had to be a path there. Or a road. One of them suddenly skipped ahead, her hands flying up like a girl’s. Perhaps she had jumped over a washout in the road. The road angled down the slope of a hill. He watched them until they disappeared, sinking into the grain.

Two yellow butterflies, drifted in from the edge of the field where hundreds like them fluttered in the weeds, settled on the end of a log and walked in small, tight circles.
žlut’ásci.
His kid sister Majka had once caught ten of them in a jar because he’d told her she couldn’t, then forgotten them in the sun.

Shouldering his rucksack, he jumped off the logs and walked a short distance back the way he had come to where a deep seam of overgreen grass marked a stream trickling through the forest loam. Ten meters off the path was a stone basin. A metal cup hung on a hook. He drank, then poured the second cup slowly over his head. Behind him he could hear the wagon go by—the clop of steel on dirt and stone, the quick creak of wood. He let it pass without turning around.