The Visible World (26 page)

There were no rages, no tears, no flashes of anger. They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t know how. They took the blow like a short, hard kick to the stomach from an invisible opponent—from God, say—and went on. It was the only thing they knew how to do. They’d been chosen precisely because they could.

But he could feel it there nonetheless—a kind of sickness, a rot. These men—Gabčík, Kubiš, Valčík, and the rest—were still dangerous, they would always be dangerous, but now something had changed in them. Something essential. And because they sensed this, they grew still, careful. They didn’t fight with each other, or even argue. A simple, instinctive civility became the order of their days. There was nothing false or forced about it. “I’ll need those potatoes when you have them.” “You want some more soup?” “No, I’m fine.” It was pure instinct. Something was hunting them. Something they couldn’t see, or fight. If they stayed still, stayed together, it might pass them by.

He tried to keep them numbers: 150 men and boys, 190 women and children. Numbers. Not unaware that this was exactly what the others had done in order to be able to do what they did. He didn’t care. He had been to Kladno, only a few kilometers away from Lidice. He knew these towns. If he allowed himself to see the faces blinking in the lights, the marks of the sheets showing on their faces like scars, the men—enemies, perhaps, who had not spoken for years—now suddenly talking, asking each other what was happening, where they were going, as if nothing before had ever really mattered but had only been a long, elaborate game...If he heard them giving quick instructions to their wives or assuring their sons that everything would be all right even as the village dogs, barking, were being shot down one by one in the street, in the chicken yards...If he allowed this, something might give. And that could not be. Ever. They were numbers. To hell with them.

But some things could not be fenced off. They came through the walls. They were like a chemical change in the brain. Day by day he could feel it coming over him, a kind of slow, undramatic numbness, as though some invisible spigot had been turned the night Petřek had come down to tell them the news. It was like falling out of love: one moment she was still the woman you knew and thought you wanted, the next something had shifted imperceptibly and it was over. The world outside was receding. Or maybe he was the one falling away from it. Either way, he was unable to care in the same way he had before. The Benes government in exile, the Resistance, the Wehrmacht and security police even now combing the city for them—all these seemed far away from him, strangely abstract. He told himself how he should feel, why these things mattered, and mattered supremely, but it was no good. He could remember how he had once felt, but that time had passed.

Hour by hour, day by day, as they made their meals or did their exercises or wrapped themselves up in blankets before crawling into their niches, he could feel the circle drawing tighter around them. Around him. Two things mattered now. The men around him mattered, because they alone, of all the people on the earth, carried the same burden. Because they understood. And she mattered. Because she didn’t. Because she was free of it. Because he loved her.

She would be the rope into the well in which he was drowning. He knew this as surely as anything he had ever known in his life. There was nothing sentimental about it. It was simply a fact. Paper would burn. Day would bring light. What lived would eventually die. She would save him, and she would be able to do this because she was who she was. Because the gods of the arbitrary world had decided it should be so. Because her voice, her body—her very soul, if you like—spoke to him.

When he was twelve he’d spent two weeks on his uncle’s farm near Jindřichův Hradec. One night he’d woken up to a sound—a kind of rhythmic barking, a forced
aark aark aark
—unlike anything he had ever heard before. The sound was coming from somewhere behind his uncle’s barn. He tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t, so he pulled on his pants and woke his uncle, and together the two of them went out to see what it was and found an old water cistern with the neighbor’s cat drowning at the bottom of it. His uncle pulled it out with a rake, still making that awful barking sound—a sound he wouldn’t hear again until he visited the seals at the London Zoo—and wrapped it in a shirt to keep it warm but it didn’t seem to know where it was and it just kept barking until it died. If they’d fished it out a half hour earlier, his uncle had said, the thing might have made it.

Well, here he was. The analogy, and the image at the heart of it, gave him pleasure—he didn’t know why. The absurdity of it. The stick-in-the-wound absurdity of it. It was the first thing that had given him pleasure in days. Here he was. Here they
all
were, swimming in circles in their own little cistern—God’s little cistern—barking like cats. Eight cats drowning in a well. It sounded like a nursery rhyme.

She would save him. She was the rope, the rake, the steps appearing in the stone, leading up from the water.

THE MORNINGS ON THE TRAM ON THE WAY TO THE
Language Institute in Libeň were difficult for my mother. By late afternoon she would be tired and so less likely to think about things. She tried reading, but the movement of the car gave her headaches, so she spent the forty minutes simply staring out the window at the people coming out of stores or waiting at the stops, some hurrying by with bags or briefcases—businessmen, lovers, a little boy in blue pants holding on to his mother’s dress with one hand while bouncing some kind of stringed puppet-like thing with the other...

In the first half of May, as the weather warmed, the half-windows in the tram would be pushed down and the air would come in—pillowy gusts smelling of petrol and leaves—until some idiot worried about her hair would lean over and ask the person under it if he could close the window a bit, and then May 27 came and human beings were lined up against walls and shot, and yet nothing changed somehow. People still went to work, if they had work to go to, and when the weather was warm, the half-windows were pushed down and the air still felt good in her hair. At times this seemed natural and right—what else did she expect? At other times—brief moments, usually—it seemed both heartbreaking and utterly mad as if, looking out the tram window one day, she had glimpsed a woman burning on a street corner, her dress going up in great black billows as she waited patiently for her tram.

She didn’t bother trying not to look for him. Twice she thought she saw him—the hat, the glasses, that smooth, deceptively easy walk—and rushed out at the next stop, to the predictable disappointment. It didn’t matter. On July 16, only six weeks later, she would take the train out to žd’ár. She’d already arranged to take the day off. She would get out at the familiar train station and walk along the wall and the trees, past the little
hospoda
where she and her father had once seen the dwarf sitting on the bench, then take the number 9 bus to the bridge. From there it would be less than five kilometers to the crossroads. One year. He might not be there; she knew that. It didn’t matter. He would be there eventually. And the forest—the mushrooms, the mossy icons, all the things they had known—would help. They’d make him real.

She didn’t let herself think, after May 27, that he might have been involved. It was not something she could think about. There were many things that my mother could not think about. That he was dead. That she would not see him again. That she would not hear his voice again in this life. When she heard the descriptions of the attackers being read over the loudspeakers in Václavské náměstí that outrageously blue Sunday morning, the phrases echoing off the façades of the buildings, overlapping each other, she had simply stopped breathing. All around her the streams of people hurrying up the sidewalks or crossing the avenue had shuffled to a stop and frozen. Pantomimes of listening—the hand to the ear like a timid greeting, the slight tilt of the head:
At half past ten this morning, a failed attempt...anyone with information...two have escaped, one on foot, the other on a bicycle.
It was not him. It was not him. Nothing else mattered.

Every day she checked the newspapers for the lists of names of those arrested or shot for crimes against the Reich. Nothing. He had disappeared. It did not surprise her. If anyone could slide through, he could. She’d seen his way with the world—his competence, his carefulness. He had that aura about him, the aura of luck. When the bullet came, he’d be the one who bent to tie his shoe. She believed this.

These days she found it easier to think about the other one. He was safer somehow. She hadn’t heard from my father, hadn’t expected to. It was strange sometimes to think of him only hours away, going about his daily business. Getting on the 4:40 train to the factory, waiting at the stop in the evening for the tram to žabovřesky...

Odd to think how different her life had been then, and how quickly it had passed. One moment you were taking the train to Vysočina or sitting in someone’s living room passing around a tray of
koláče,
and the next someone had licked a finger and turned a page and everything had changed. You could leaf back and see yourself taking the train, sitting on the sofa, passing the tray, but now it was as if you were reading about a character in a book, a character who resembled you in every way, whose thoughts were familiar, who
was
you—but a character in a book nonetheless.

They’d talked endlessly. They’d made love. It was easy to think about—had always been easy. It didn’t matter. Page after page. For a week or so that September they’d worried that she might be pregnant, but it was a false alarm. They’d talked about marriage. They could live with his parents until the war was over, he’d said, then move into a place of their own. He had been doing well at the newspaper before the war began; he could pick up again where he had left off. Nothing was certain, of course, he realized that, but Soukup himself had told him more than once that he could make editor by the time he was thirty. They could do worse.

His good-humored understanding of her had annoyed her those first few months, as did his failure to notice the men’s names she dropped into their conversation like tacks, hoping to get the reaction she’d always gotten from men before. Eventually, as she had come to see that his humor lacked condescension, that his confidence was not really presumption, it bothered her less. Touched by his decency, by his obvious regard for her, unable, in short, to find a good reason
not
to love him, she listened to his plans for them. She wondered now what she could have been thinking. It would all be over soon, he would say, stroking her hair as they lay in some grassy corner of the Špilberk gardens, and then they’d share the bit of food they had brought with them—generally a slice of bread and a small green kohlrabi—and start back down toward the city.

She’d thought she’d been in love with him then. Which was not surprising. Good to look at, intelligent, funny, he’d seemed to be liked (or at least respected) by everyone who knew him, and when she let him take her virginity that night in the garden behind the second wall, it was not only because she liked his lank, dark blond hair and his thin, aristocratic nose but because she had begun to sense that his decency had little to do with weakness and a good deal to do with strength. It was not her fault. How was she to have known that love is not something to be measured out in spoonfuls, that decency has its limits.

There had been a calm about him that she’d liked at first, a refusal to be drawn in by the world, an understanding of things that was rooted in pain but rose above it. It was a quality she hadn’t known in a young man before—most of the men she knew were children, forever preening or pouting, throwing themselves this way or that without knowing why—and if truth be told she hadn’t minded living within the still circle it made. He wasn’t dispassionate. When they’d rolled over his rimless glasses that very first night, crushing both lenses with a hollow pop like the sound of a flashbulb going off, he’d chuckled and shook his head, and then, pausing only to see if she had been cut, rolled her over him and back to the grass, his fingers tangled gently in her hair, and finished making love to her.

Afterward they’d found what was left of the mangled frame and he’d put it in his pocket and she’d led him out of the garden and down the barely lit walks, and he had joked about the vague shapes he saw ahead of them and tapped the path in front of him with a crooked tree limb as though he were blind. She could tell he didn’t like this business of having to walk back down the sloping flights of stairs and through the half-deserted streets with his arm hooked into hers as if he had aged suddenly, inexplicably, but these things happened.

He’d taken it well. As he took everything. She’d expected it—and both admired and slightly despised him for it. A good man. She could think of nothing to dislike about him. And yet, if just once she had sensed some anger beneath his decency, his irony. If just once she had sensed the place in him where all his negotiations with the world ended, and the man began.