The Visible World (19 page)

How was it possible, she thought, that a place they’d known only a few hours, eight of them while they’d slept, could grow so familiar? How could the grassy rise and the food stump and the way down to the stream and the pine by the bed-place so quickly begin to feel like a home: a home without walls or roof, windows or door, but a home nonetheless?

The fire was small and almost smokeless. He built it between two flat-topped stones. She watched him push the bigger one down into the dirt to make it level with the other, then try out the empty pot between them to see how it sat, then move the rocks again. Getting it right. When the dollop of lard began to hiss and sizzle he broke the eggs into the pot one after the other until they were done, laying the shells next to him on the grass, then pushed them back and forth with a pocketknife, reaching into the pot to get the knife blade flat, then rolled down his sleeves and took the pot off the fire and set it on a stone he’d brought over from the stream, covering the pot with the rag to keep out the pine needles. Reaching for the jar, he began impaling the squares of fatty meat he had cut on a stick he had stripped of bark, threading them over the raised parts, lining them up like so many fat beads on a string.

My mother watched, surprised by his competence, by the quick, thoughtless economy of his movements. A turn of the wrist, a small adjustment, the fingers reaching to nudge or to shift or to tap into place, this man knew his way around the world of things, and they leapt to him like filings to a magnet, eagerly, helplessly. There was something lovely and ruthless about it, something she hadn’t seen before. Or maybe she had sensed it from the beginning, had known it would be like that all along.

When only a hand’s width of space remained on both sides, he placed each end of the stick in the crotch of a branch he had pushed into the dirt on either side of the fire, and they ate the eggs, taking turns with the pot and the knife, sucking them carefully off the blade.

When they were done he reached over to a pile of short sticks he had prepared—each about the thickness of a man’s finger—and began to place them carefully one by one on the flames. The meat spit and dribbled. He turned the skewer. She watched him raise the branch a bit to turn it past a knot, then settle it back in place. The greeny-white wood between the pieces had begun to turn black. He reached for the bread, cut another slice.

“Would you like some more bread?” he said.

He handed her a slice and she watched him tear off a small piece and pause, as though forgetting for a moment what he had meant to do with it, then remember and wipe the bottom of the pot. Something in the stillness of his mouth. Something in the deliberateness with which he turned the skewer, his sudden distance from what his hands were doing. She knew what it was.

“Almost done,” he said. He wiped his fingers on the rag.

“Should we talk about it at all, you think?” she said.

He looked at her, and there was such utter regard in that look, and such a lake of rage beneath it, that she understood, perhaps for the first time, the quality of his love.

“I don’t know how to talk about it,” he said.

“You don’t know when you’re coming back,” she said. Not if—if was not possible.

“No.”

“And I won’t be able to see you.”

“No.” He smiled. “Is it crazy for us to talk like this?”

“I don’t think so. Does it feel crazy to you?”

“That’s what’s so crazy about it.”

“I know.”

He moved the stick a half-turn over the flames. “It’s just that I didn’t expect you. Everything was set before.”

“Would it be any different if we hadn’t met?”

“Everything would be different.”

“But you say you have to go anyway?”

“I do.”

“And you can’t tell me where you’re going?”

“No.”

She glanced at the scaly twig she held in her hand. “Then how will I find you again? After.”

“I’ll find you.”

“But...”

“I’ll find you.”

“It took you a while the first time,” she said, not smiling.

“I’ll do better this time,” he said.

The meat began to smoke. He picked up the ends of the skewer with two sticks and laid it on the stone next to him, then broke up the fire, spreading the ashes. They could break camp while it cooled. My mother stood and picked up the blanket that lay knotted on the ground. Exposed beneath it, an orange and black beetle, like a miniature shield, began to stumble over the deadfalls of flattened grass, running from the sudden light.

ON JUNE
5, 1942,
TOMÁŠ BÉM LEFT THE SAFE HOUSE IN
which he had been hiding for nearly a week and crossed the city of Prague from the Dejvice district to Nové Město, wearing a lightweight suit, a hat, a coat over his arm, and an ampoule of strychnine around his neck. Soldiers were everywhere. A warm, still summer day. Crossing the Vltava, the air moving through the open window of the trolley, he smelled the water and the wet earth smell from the Petřín orchards.

It was just before noon. Eighty-three had been executed in Prague the day before, 106 the day before that. They were everywhere: a knot of four—boots, caps, riding crops—striding quickly along the south side of Národní Avenue, men and women stepping out of their way. A convoy of four cars, then another. Sentries on nearly every corner.

Three or four times a day, while Bém lay in the dark in the crawl space behind the sofa, old man Moravec would sit down heavily and read the paper aloud, interrupting himself at some point to call out to his wife in the kitchen, “Are you all right in there? Do you need anything?” and while Madame Moravcová called back that she was fine, that she would be right in, the old man would tap twice on the sliding panel—so close they could have touched hands—and then read on. SS Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank had declared that the attackers would be found, he read. They and all those who had helped them, along with their families, would be shot. The Wehrmacht would comb them out like lice.

Well, that certainly was welcome news, Madame Moravcová would call from the kitchen or the pantry. And then, to her son, Ota:
“Pro kristapána, obleč se uǽ.
For Christ’s sake, get dressed already.
“Kolikrát to musím opakovat?”
How often do I have to repeat it? And did the newspaper happen to say when the authorities thought this might happen? No mention of that, my dear, her husband would reply, the pages rustling. It seemed they had the bicycle and some other things the attackers had left behind on display in Václavské náměstí, where the populace could see them. There was a reward of ten million reichsmarks for anyone who could identify the owners of these things. A bicycle, said Madame Moravcová. It didn’t sound like much to her, unfortunately.

And lying in the dark, unable to see them, Bém could hear their words, spoken for the benefit of the walls, the door, the keyhole, as well as himself, all the more clearly—feel the thing, so very near hysteria, moving just behind the screen. It was too much. These were brave people. But even the brave could be broken in time. Forced by fear, the crack was growing, branching; at any moment the laugh might go on too long, the gesture fly loose, the record skip.

But it didn’t. They held on. On the fifth day, Madame Moravcová, while walking down the white gravel path from her mother’s grave in the vast Olšany Cemetery, met a very nice, scholarly-looking gentleman who commiserated with her about the times but maintained, while tipping his hat or exchanging a few words with passersby, that even now, with all the pain being visited upon the country, nature provided perspective and comfort. He himself, despite everything, still found solace in the changing of the seasons, he said, though he was more than prepared to admit that this was so because he had been raised that way—that our adult havens were invariably shaped in childhood. Didn’t she agree? His wife, for example, as befitted her upbringing, had returned to the church.

And where did his wife worship? Madame Moravcová asked. At the Church of Sts. Cyril and Metoděj on Řesslova Street, the man told her. She must know the place—a fine building. An ornament. It seemed that it gave his wife some sense of security, the man said. Perhaps it was the company she found there. One of the priests, she said, a Dr. Petřek, was particularly kind. And they chatted a bit more about the church, and the species of sparrow that he said was given to nesting in the thick ivy of some of the higher monuments, and then he lifted his hat and wished her a good day and they went their separate ways.

Just before noon the next day, Bém walked out of the house and down the hill to the tram stop. No one seemed to see him, though he himself knew he would never know if someone had. There was a soldier at the bottom of the hill, two more at the tram stop by the park. A small group of people—three businessmen with briefcases, an older woman with a net bag, a girl of seventeen—waited silently off to the side, not looking at the others, not looking at anything...Behind them, a large red poster plastered to the telephone pole listed the names of those executed the day before.

He joined them, the coat draped over his right arm. There would be no need to fumble for the pocket; just squeeze the trigger through the fabric. His forehead and temples were sweating under the hatband but he resisted taking off his hat. No unnecessary gestures. Nothing to attract attention. He could hear the crickets, sounding the heat. When the tram came at last and the doors opened, the group shuffled back. One of the men looked down at his briefcase; the other, as though thinking about something suddenly, or testing for a sore tooth, slowly ran two fingers along his jaw just below the ear. When the soldiers had climbed in, the group followed them.

Three stops later the soldiers got off the tram, and Bém took off his hat. The coolness of the air coming through the windows felt good in his hair. He could smell the orchards and the river. Thousands had been arrested, Moravec had told him. Round-the-clock interrogations were being conducted in the five-story building down from the central train station. He looked out the window. The city, though emptier, seemed faster somehow—electrified, spasming. Even the ordinary seemed strange. Two boys, dropping something into the Vltava, leaned out over the rail, their right legs bent into identical L’s behind them. A man and a woman, trying to get past each other on the sidewalk, feinted left, then right, like football players on the pitch. The bell sounded. He didn’t like this idea of the church, of all of them together in one place. Everywhere he looked, the red posters of the dead—mothers, fathers, entire families grouped by surname—on storefront windows, on walls, on light posts. The tram passed into the shade of the buildings. A white sign with a long number on it passed by too quickly for him to read it.

At Karlovo náměstí he stepped off the tram. It made no sense. Better to separate, stay still, then get out of Prague. Across the street, three soldiers were walking south along the storefronts. He turned into the square, toward the white statue of Eliška Krásnohorská. He could see the bench where they had sat. He wondered where she was now. If she was safe. The air in the shade smelled of flowers and stone.

He sat down on the bench, folding the coat next to him. He’d walked off the tram and almost directly into her. A city of a million people.

The church was only a few hundred meters away; he could afford a few minutes. They had sat right here, both of them stunned by the force of it, the suddenness of it, trying to speak but unable to say anything that didn’t seem false the minute it was spoken. Banalities. Little gestures and politenesses. As though they had become different people in those few months, traveled too far from themselves, and the only way back was over a long, narrow bridge of clichés. As though they were afraid of frightening something. He remembered the rain, asking if she was all right, if she could take the time. Of course. Yes, he’d had to get glasses. No, he didn’t need them exactly. A nuisance—he didn’t like them.

She asked if he’d been well, whether he’d been in Prague for long. He could see the rain running down her hood, gathering at the edge, then dripping down. She herself had left Brno soon after...Anyway, it had seemed best. He’d nodded, looking at the oak behind her, at the branch hanging down like a huge, drooping tentacle. A relative had helped set her up, she said, found her work at the Language Institute in Líbeň. She’d missed him, she said.

There was the branch. A slight breeze, moving the heat. She had sat right there, to his left. Looking at it now, he felt a sharp pang of love for it. As though it remembered them, held them in suspension. Above all this horror. Absurd. In a few years you could sit in the crook of that branch and read a book, she had said. He could tell her nothing. They had said nothing. Before he could stop her, she told him she was staying at 7 Italská Street with her aunt and uncle who—“Stop,” he’d said. “Please. I can’t know...,” and seeing the sudden understanding in her face, the quick brimming of the eyes, he looked away at the puddles on the walk, the fountain, busy in the rain, the tram just coming to a stop in front of the stores across the way.