The Visible World (20 page)

“How long before this is over?” she had asked. “Can you at least tell me that?”

“I have to go,” he’d said.

“I see,” she’d said. And then: “Will I see you again?”

“Of course,” he’d said, and even smiled.

“But...”

“I have to go,” he said. A quick kiss, her wet hair in his fingers, another, more desperate “I love you,” he said, “I swear to God I do”—and he was on the tram in two leaps, escaping something, feeling like something hollowed out and about to cave in. Strange—it had been right there; he could see the stop. For that matter, he’d probably seen the church that day, never realizing that he’d be coming back to it after it was all over. How very hard it had been. A quick wave and she’d been gone behind the rain and he’d sat down on the seat and begun the hard work of kicking himself back into vigilance like a drunk berating himself into paying attention. One misstep and it was gone, all of it. All the planning. All the lives on which it was built. One error, one moment of inattention or softness, one accidental turn, and the whole thing would go. And it couldn’t go.

A stocky man leading a dog with a pointy nose was coming up the path, the two of them passing through the dark, leafy shade and into the sun. Even now, dogs had to be walked. A beautiful summer day—there was no denying it. The way the light played against the stone. He watched the man and the dog make their way around a flower bed. When they reached the shade of the tentacle branch, he got up to go.

SHE UNDERSTOOD. AND SHE DIDN’T. SHE UNDERSTOOD
why he sat next to her that afternoon like a clenched fist, why they couldn’t speak, why she kept noticing things—the oak, a white cloud of rain behind a passing tram, the black steeple of a church—as if she were falling down a well and these were roots to grab on to. She understood why he’d walked away from her so quickly, walking through the puddles like a man striding away from an avalanche, an avalanche he’d been waiting for his entire life. The tram windows had been steamed over, blurred by rain. He’d leaped on board, disappeared.

She understood. And she didn’t. She didn’t understand at all. She didn’t understand how a face, a voice, a certain kind of halfsmile could leave such a vacuum in her, how his absence could work on her like a chemical need, like opium withheld. She missed the physical fact of him, the lean, compact weight of him, his mouth on hers, his hair, the feeling of him in her hand. She missed talking to him, about everything really, the occupation and cheese, fascist Spain and the fashion in hats. She liked the way he listened to her, the way he would lie on his side, watching her as she talked. She liked his calm and the suddenness just beneath it; the pain in him and the pure unblinking dangerousness that pain had given birth to. She liked the quick smile that seemed to surprise even him. And now he was gone and she moved through the days diminished, transparent somehow, less like a ghost than like the last living, breathing soul in a world of ghosts. She understood how absurd this was, how self-indulgent. It couldn’t be helped. Holding him again mattered. Nothing else.

She clung to every bit of news now; her moods turned on a word. “This young man of yours,” her uncle had called out from the living room one night as she and her aunt wrapped the last of the dough around the canned apricots and lowered them into the big white pot steaming up the kitchen windows, “he’ll be back, I’m sure—if he loves you as you say, he’ll be back,” and because she was so miserable even this well-meant platitude had given her comfort and tilted the evening that followed—the dinner, the hour or so spent reading afterward—toward something like hope. Maybe it was all that simple. He loved her. He’d be back.

And then she saw him step off the tram and they sat on a bench in the rain and he was standing up to leave. And she felt his mouth and touched his face and for just one moment she glimpsed the fear and the determination inside him, side by side like orphans in a doorway, and understood that it could never be that simple. And he was gone.

Winter. It was as if the year would never die. She stood on lines, went to work, translated documents that meant nothing to her with two older men who seemed capable of moving nothing other than their right hands, and even those minutely, for hours at a time. The one window looked out on the stones of the building opposite. She listened to the pens’ scratch, to the windy shushing of rain, the sudden scattering of sleet.

At times she could almost imagine it, see it: the leather straps, the cords, the notched wheels...The country was being torn, slowly, irreversibly—and worse, learning to live with it. There was no food. The lists of the dead grew longer. Outrage folded outrage, building a soil of known things—of habit—from which anything might grow. Every afternoon now, crossing over the tracks on Vinohradská Street, she saw the trains, their windows nailed over with boards.

They were everywhere now. Russia was the answer, her uncle said that winter. He could see it starting already. The bastards would break their teeth on Russia. When the declaration of war on America was announced that December, he could hardly contain his glee. The idiots. They’d bitten off too much. The factories of Chicago would bury them.

He clung to it all that winter, even after things began to turn again. The Russian soul. The factories of Chicago. The Macháčeks, who lived in the next building, had been deported. A childhood friend he’d known since the day he’d hit him with a toy bucket in a sandlot forty-six years ago was taken into the courtyard he walked through every morning on the way to work and shot. They’d pay, he said. And all the quislings and collaborators with them. They’d taken too much. They’d choke like dogs. A year, maybe two, before the bone found the throat.

But the next morning, seeing their visored caps, their coats, their wet boots through the tram window, she knew that in some way it didn’t matter. Entire worlds could pass in a year or two. The factories of Chicago were far from here.

IN ANOTHER TIME, THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN SOME HUMOR
in it. How perfect, after all, to hide the living among the dead; no one would think to look for them there. Just as no one would think to search for the dead among the living.

It was so simple, Bém thought: to escape death, all you had to do was die. The priest moved the cement slab, the cold breathed out, and down the stairs you went, carrying your long skier’s underwear, your sweaters, your hat, your woolen socks, your blankets—all the necessary provisions for the grave. Or the crypt, at any rate. And there were your comrades, like skiers in hell: Opálka and Valčík, in hats and bulky sweaters, squatting by a small stove; Gabčík rising on his elbow from a mattress laid out in one of the deep niches in the wall; Kubiš pacing under the one small window. The other three were upstairs in the rectory, standing guard.

He’d made it! By God, they’d known he’d make it. They had been here four days. It was cold as hell. Gabčík had hurt his eye in the attack but had managed to bicycle away with one hand. There was a plan, they said. They would be taken out in coffins—in a few weeks, maybe less—then driven out of Prague in a funeral car. The priests had it all figured out. They would stay in a storeroom in Kladno, then be moved to the forests in Moravia. Petřek, the priest, had arranged for a gamekeeper’s cabin. They could hide there for months if necessary. But how had he gotten here? What news was there?

“What news could there be?” said Kubiš. And it was true: he had no news to give them.

He had to get dressed, they said. Quickly. Once the cold got into his bones...

A supply line had been established. The teacher, Růǽička, came once a day with supplies and food.

But how had he made it? They had heard of the curfew, of ten thousand arrested, of interrogations, executions—the entire city under siege.

They had thought of turning themselves in, Valčík said. To stop it.

He had thought they were done talking about that, said Opálka.

But they were the ones the bastards were looking for, Valčík said. It was all because of them that this was happening.

They were done talking about it, said Opálka. The message from London—

But this wasn’t London, interrupted Kubiš, who had paused in his caged pacing to light a cigarette.

They were done talking about it, said Opálka. It would accomplish nothing.

It would accomplish something if it stopped it, said Valčík quietly.

They turned to him, the last man in, the last to see how things were. What did he think?

Nothing would stop it, he told them.

He would come to know it well: the low, dank, vaulted ceiling, the corner with the buckets, the sealed-off stairs on the north end, the bottom of the cement slab...He memorized it. The water stains, the gouged wall, the heap of crumbling mortar beneath it. The two bricks missing from the floor between the cooking area and the stairs, like broken teeth.

It was the hollow emptiness of the place that was most striking: no table, no chairs. Just columns, stairs, bricks, cold. This place had never been meant for the living. And though there were at least four of them there all the time, they made no impression on it. They knew they were trespassing, and the place seemed to know it too.

The sleeping wall: sixteen black niches like a giant’s honeycomb dug into the stone, coffin wide and coffin deep. The four on the left had been sealed off for some reason, as if with wax, making the illusion complete. They slept in the others. There was nowhere else. None of them thought to ask the priests what they had done with the coffins, or where they now stored their dead.

The middle hole on the top row, slightly larger owing to the curvature of the ceiling, had been given to Gabčík, who was still recovering; during the day he would sit in a low crouch near the entrance or lean up on an elbow, smoking. The others were worse. And because it was bad they made jokes about roses and buttonholes as they slid into place feet-first, the damp cement pushed so close to their faces by the thin mattresses the priests had managed to find for them that at times it felt as though the whole church—no, all of Prague—were poised above their chests. At one time or another, each of them, waking during the night, had smashed his head into that sudden, unfamiliar ceiling; every night, it seemed, they were awakened by someone cursing. There seemed to be no getting used to it.

He could see the problem immediately: these were not men accustomed to being still. Trained to move—chosen precisely because they could move when others could not, because their minds would not stop them—they could be patient enough when patience was required for some kind of action. This was different. This was just waiting to escape. There was nothing to do, nothing to plan. All they could do was think about what was happening in the outside world, what their actions had caused, and, unable to smother these thoughts with tasks, unable to keep themselves from turning inward, they began, by slow degrees, to grow human. To become afraid. It made for a particular kind of hell, he thought, a hell crafted to their natures: a perpetuity of fear and regret, stasis and rage, the rage of paralytics forced to watch their families being attacked.

They moved about, tried to sleep. They paced back and forth, looking up at the crease where the ceiling met the wall. They spent some time throwing bits of mortar into a can for points, then grew bored. They waited silently for their shift in the rectory. Two hours before the attack, Kubiš had been almost lighthearted. Coming out of the Moravecs’ apartment building that morning, the sten gun carefully packed inside the ubiquitous brown leather suitcase, he had joked with the Moravecs’ boy, Ota, who had been up half the night worrying about his Latin exams. “Why the face?” he’d said, tousling his hair. “Look here—it’s simple. You either pass or you fail. If you pass, you’re a scholar; if you fail, I’ll find you a job digging ditches,” and the boy had smiled and looked relieved. There was no humor now. There was nothing to set it against. And day by day, memories were coming back, occupying the vacuum.