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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part II

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part III

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Joseph Hurka

  Copyright

  For my aunt,

  MIROSLAVA HŮRKOVÁ

  and for my father,

  JOSEF LEOPOLD HŮRKA

  In the manner of men of the past

  We build within ourselves stone

  On stone a vast haunted castle.

  —VINCENT MONTEIRO

  Vers sur verre

  PROLOGUE

  Bohemia, June 9, 1942

  The boy is tall and strong, all of fourteen. He hikes late at night through the forest, breaking the Nazi curfew, on an errand for his mother. He feels the heaviness of the clothes and curtains his mother has repaired through the straps of his rucksack.

  He steps over the dark earth. There is the smell of the rugged pines, the sound of kestrel birds, the pale flight of them. Wind moans in the trees. The moon, silvered by clouds, is a ghost behind the shapes of branches.

  Where the forest ends he enters a field; tall grass brushes at his knees. There ahead are the darkened Kruina farm buildings—everything is dark now, after nine P.M., under the Nazi penalty of death; Jiri Posselt pauses and looks carefully at the barn he approaches. He sees no movement, no shapes of Wehrmacht soldiers: no glow of a cigarette. Still he waits; after a few moments there is a sound, at first an insistent humming, growing louder into engines, coming from the direction of the farmhouse. It is a dark scraping of planes.

  Jiri steps back and crouches in the forest, watches the old stone house against the hill, above it the white ghost of moon. Clouds twist over that light, and then three Messerschmitts emerge from the rise, flying very low, pin lights on their wings. They come on fast and steady, a quick moment of growing, thunderous engines, a quick run of shadows stretching over the field. Jiri feels the power of them in his throat and chest, in the bones of his arms and legs. They disappear behind the trees, the scraping following them.

  He waits to make sure he does not hear the engines coming around, growing louder again. When he cannot hear them anymore he rises and walks purposefully across the grass to the first barn. He steps inside the rolling door; it has been left slightly ajar. The building is a great, yawning space, and in the shadows horses shift at his entrance. He can smell them and the hay, the old wood and mortar of this place. He stays in a dark triangle a moment, until the horses have settled, until all he can hear is wind tugging loose shingles above, twigs scattering. To his left in the darkness is a clean, lidded hutch, and Jiri opens it and takes out milk bottles, eggs, cheese, bread that is still warm. He sets all of these on the floor, then slips off his rucksack and pulls from it the bundles tied in burlap, the curtains held firm, wound around stiff cardboard, and puts these inside the bench. He loads the food into his rucksack, eggs on top; folds the excess cloth of the rucksack closed, fastens the straps.

  He glances out the door: a battered path here through weeds, oak branches shifting on the charcoal sky. Still no shapes of men, no movement out in the field. It is not likely the Nazis would be patrolling this far out of town; in the two years that Jiri has been running the errands to farms outside his village he has been caught only once, and that was by a Czech gendarme, who whispered at him, fiercely, to get the hell home. Jiri swings the rucksack onto his shoulders, closes the lid of the hutch quietly.

  He goes into the night. Soon enough the trees of Bohemia sway over him again, and the song of cicadas pulses through the darkness. He keeps up a steady rhythm, his shoes finding their way over roots and packed earth. At times he walks in a blackness so complete he feels he might be a ghost, a spirit sailing close to ground. The thought of this, and the greater danger of patrolling troops as he gets closer to town, frightens him. He imagines Nazi police discovering his form against the trees. There would be dogs, flashlights. The white of guns firing, the impact of 9 mm bullets. How much of this would he feel? How long would he be conscious of the Nazi bullets ripping into him?

  He forces himself away from the image: He thinks of his family. His father, once a science teacher, a lover of the stars, would tell him to look for the archer, Sagittarius, coming up over the next open field; Jiri imagines the bright constellation, the drawn bow. He imagines his mother, how just ninety minutes ago she checked her list carefully to make sure she had packed everything she had sewn for the Kruinas; Jiri’s sister, Helena, cleaning the kitchen counters, laughed at their mother’s precision. Helena will be eighteen in two days’ time: Jiri can think of this. He has bought her a bracelet that is in safekeeping in his parents’ room. He showed it proudly to his mother when he purchased it, and she exclaimed over its bright blue and red hand-painted swirls, its gloss of varnish. His mother said, Helena will like it so much, honey, what a wonderful gift. Jiri hears his mother’s voice in his head, sees her hands turning over the bracelet. Helena admired the bracelet in a shop in Plze, on a day when Jiri was impatient to get to the soccer fields, and he smiles in the darkness at how his sister will kiss him and remember it.

  Now the clearing ahead. But the growing rumble of more planes comes from over Jiri’s right shoulder. The moon is momentarily bright, lighting the forest floor. Jiri ducks into a group of fallen trees, glances up in the overwhelming sound as the monsters hurtle through the branches. Arados this time: soaring over the pale field, three planes tipping to follow the phone lines, their pin lights disappearing into the dark.

  What is all this, tonight? There has been more military activity everywhere since the Resistance attack on SS General Heydrich’s car, and particularly since the Butcher, as he was called, died from his wounds five days ago. Heydrich was Hitler’s Bohemian ruler, his enforcer; now more Nazi guards patrol the mine in Kladno, where Jiri and his father work: more of the Messerschmitts and Arados fly overhead. There is a new, brisk feeling even with the soldiers who have been wounded on the Russian front and who are billeted in Jiri’s small village, in the Sokolovna gym. A Nazi lieutenant used to come on crutches to watch the Sunday village soccer games—his heels had been blown off on the Russian front. He was an old German track star who enjoyed telling sports stories with the youngsters, but since the Heydrich killing the lieutenant does not come down from the Sokolovna anymore.

  Jiri watches the sky carefully before he steps into the field. The planes are gone, their sound fading. The telephone poles are stout and the lines are tight against the heavens. Jiri, standing there, looking up, feels the earth beneath him spinning. He looks down again, shakes his head, regains his balance. He adjusts the rucksack into a more comfortable position, then follows the phone lines into one more dark forest. The ground dips and rises. His footsteps are a hushed progression; no
w through the last trees he sees the valley fall away and the hayfields pale yellow and there, below him, his village: a collection of pastel buildings, their rooftops angles against violet and gray. The baroque onion steeple of St. Martin’s Church hovers just beyond the granary. To the west, only a few hundred meters from him, is the old Sokolovna, the moonlight breaking over its red pastel walls. He will circumvent it and the soccer fields by staying above in the tree line, then drop down through the hayfields to the Horák farm, to the path that leads to his home on Andĕlu.

  Then Jiri hears the truck engines. He drops quickly to one knee, his heart pounding. When he looks long and hard at the dark village streets, he can make out hulks of German trucks—many of them—moving slowly. He inches back up the slope to a small stand of poplars, eases off the rucksack and sets it beside him, and, lying on the ground, propped on his elbows, he stares at Spálená Street, the main thoroughfare. The moon comes out of the clouds and he can just distinguish the rectangular vehicles slowing and stopping near the granary. Soldiers, dark spots, descend onto the cobblestones. Others already surround his village; he can make them out now, sometimes in groups, moving like shadows in the hayfields below him. There are so bloody many of them! The highway, too, far to the left, is filled with the shapes of trucks. Jiri smells the grass and dirt beneath him, feels the wowing of his heart in his ears.

  * * *

  The boy lies in the forest. He listens for any sound that might tell him what is happening with his mother and father and Helena. He hears the cicadas and the truck engines; the moon slips behind a parade of clouds and his village becomes dark.

  At least, by now, his family will know that he’s seen the Germans, that he will have the sense to stay away. He thinks: If the Germans are rounding up citizens for questioning, they soon will know that I am not among the others. They will get records from the Town Hall. His mother will say that he is overnight in the mine barracks. But how long will it take before they check with the Kladno mine and find out that he is not? And what will that suggest? What will happen to his family then?

  He will wait here, hidden, until the Germans have done whatever they came to do—a search only, he hopes, please God, and then over. There is a girl down there named Marie Píhodová that he has been seeing lately. He thinks of her now at her window, looking out at the soldiers, her eyes wide with fear, calling back to her family. A few days ago, at that wall on Spálená where the German trucks have lined up, he held her under those oak and willow trees. He remembers the sound of her voice close to his ear that evening; how they stayed there, holding each other, in their dark village. The smell of her hair. Now she, now his family, now his friends, are watching the Nazi troops from their windows, and Jiri’s throat tightens and he can hardly swallow.

  There is sweat beneath his hair and at his neck. Sometimes he puts his head down on his forearms. His eyelids are eventually so heavy that at two in the morning he cannot help falling into a restless sleep. He is in the village church, and Christ hangs against the stained glass windows; he is a child and impetuous, and his parents are admonishing him. His best wool suit itches; he wants to be out, running free with his friends on the endless green, the fresh-cut grass smell, of the soccer fields. Helena is trying to keep from laughing at him, her eyes alight at his antics, and then her face turns in shock to a sound.

  It is a gunshot, and Jiri is awake. The crack echoes over the fields. Jiri can hear the faint screaming of a woman. He swallows, getting up again on one knee near the trunk of a poplar, watching, straining to see anything beyond the few shapes. In the field below the Germans stand, implacable dots, every few meters. Two distant rifle shots are fired almost simultaneously, and there is wailing from women and children. Jiri curses, clenches and unclenches his fists. The onion steeple is growing more distinct, and the steep church roof becomes dark red; a megaphone says something fast, unintelligible. Jiri looks at his watch: It is four forty-seven. How could he have slept so bloody long? The hours at the mine have drained him lately. Still, he should not have let it happen. He works his hands together, rubs his head with his fists, alternates between crouching and rising to watch the village. He stares desperately at the church.

  What is his sister doing now? Are her eyes in fear, and are the Germans pushing her and his father and mother this way and that with their rifles? The thought of it makes him rage. And what about Marie—has she been ordered into the street in the morning, as the Nazis tear apart her home in their search for Resistance equipment? Birds flutter above him, sail over the lightening gray valley. He stares at the rooftops, wiping his face with his hand, closing his eyes, trying to think of something he might do. But every alternative puts him in the hands of the Nazis, too, gives his family, Marie, the horror of seeing him captured, probably shot.

  Someone is in unimaginable grief down there; perhaps it is he, Jiri, who should be in grief. There was a funeral in town a few weeks ago, for old man Bíza, the grocery owner. Jiri thinks of the carriage that bore the coffin, the clopping of the horses, the glossy, varnished wood of the hearse reflecting the cobblestones, and how as the procession went through town wounded German soldiers watched, many of them on crutches, smoking cigarettes, their eyes distant or indifferent; Father Steribeck led the long line of mourners up to the cemetery. Jiri remembers the sad but defiant procession as they turned against the sky; the wife and three sons at the grave, the stillness of them, the leaves of the willows and poplars trembling.

  The muted bell of St. Martin’s Church rings five times. A group of trucks leaves the village, moving quickly down the highway. Jiri sees the low trail of dust behind them. There is a barricade on the road; he watches the trucks slow and then again pick up speed. The sky is coming in overcast; clouds gather heavily over the few fading stars. He can smell the wetness of coming rain. The birds are beginning their chattering.

  Then the morning is broken by a volley of gunshots. It seems to explode with its suddenness and terror inside of Jiri.

  He watches from his place in the trees, weeping, his hands in fists. The sound has come from the southwest, the direction of his home. Fifteen minutes later there is another volley from the same place. It echoes and rolls over the small valley.

  He nearly runs into the village—to do what, precisely? He can die with his family. That would be something. No: I will not go in and die. He cannot imagine giving that to his mother as one of her last memories. The thought of him free is probably the last thing sustaining her now. If she, if they are still alive. He weeps, trying to keep his choking throat silent.

  Another volley. Distant, angry shouting of men; Jiri realizes through his panic that he is not hearing the hysterical sounds of women and children. Might his mother and sister and Marie have been in the trucks? Suddenly, he is sure that is the case: The women and children are being brought elsewhere. He stares at the black, wet strip of highway, the village, the last, hazy moon and stars overhead.

  Father, he thinks.

  Another volley. The sky opening on this horror. A scattering of blackbirds and kestrels from the trees. I should go and die with him like a man.

  He would say no. He would say, Find out what has happened with your sister and your mother, where they have been taken.

  A ragged explosion of gunshots. Jiri clenches his jaw and, crying, swings on the rucksack and turns back in a crouch toward the forest and runs: scuttling like a crab, then standing straight, willing his thighs to move, his lungs heaving. Runs and walks and stumbles and runs again, making sounds in his throat of hysterical grief and rage, shaking his head back and forth.

  The forest darkens and the rain comes hard and slants through the trees and Jiri hears the huh huh huh of his body fighting with each step.

  I

  ONE

  Cambridge, Massachusetts: September 10, 2001

  The pigeons flutter and sail through the city. They light over the vacant eyes of Demosthenes, high on Memorial Hall; they swoop beneath the leaves of Harvard Yard and crowd the
rooftops above Massachusetts Avenue. It is four o’clock on a stunning fall day.

  In the speech therapy office on Story Street, where shades are drawn against the late sunlight, Jiri Posselt is writing. He fills in the ovals that his therapist, Marjorie Legnini, insists upon, these areas at the top and bottom of the page meant to sharpen and gather his memory.

  Who: Me

  What: coming back from the Kruinas

  Where: Lidice

  When: June 1942

  Jiri feels his wife, Anna, and Marjorie Legnini across the circular table, watching him carefully. He can hear the ticking of the clock over Marjorie’s desk, and though he writes with the help of a lamp, Jiri senses late afternoon sunlight hovering on the large fern in the corner; ribbons glow on the rug and partially across Marjorie’s desk. The figure 1942 hovers at him, rising from the page as if in conspiracy, but he closes his eyes a moment and thinks of the village at night below him, and when he opens his eyes the hovering has stopped and he is able to lean forward and apply himself again to the writing. He writes for a long time.

  Jiri feels then Marjorie Legnini leaning over him; in the shadowed room she has come around the table and is watching his lines, and he feels her nodding and then—a strange series of sounds—she is quiet and then weeping, and Jiri glances up to confirm this—tears trickling down her cheekbone—and he quickly stares down at the page. He’s faced a great deal of sentimentality himself since his strokes six months ago, and he is frankly uncomfortable with it; sometimes he will find himself weeping in the shower, beneath the torrent of water, from the smallest goddamn thing—a song heard on his shower radio, a remembered, hopeful face of one of the teenagers down here in Harvard Square, these kids with all their heavy damn makeup and hair every which way and their black clothes, walking about like sad crows. The open weeping has something to do with the way his brain has changed, and when it comes he cannot control it.