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  They wait now. Jiri thinks of Alena and how she rocked him, how she still seems to be rocking him, her long legs curling over his back, her lips kissing his throat. He wonders if she is thinking of him. He cannot see her face past the heavy, unshaven face of Mulák, but he sees the curve of her shoulder, her hair tied back beneath a scarf. They might die here, he and Alena and the others—there are not many of them, perhaps not enough. It moves through him coldly, this possibility of death. Well, he does not want to see Alena die, but what of it for him? What better way for him to die? Alena’s father, from Cheb, an anti-Nazi professor before the war, was shot right in front of her. She told him about it last night, after lovemaking, how the Nazi officer held the gun to her father’s head and fired and her father fell to the ground and she and her mother screamed in horror and the Nazi walked away, bored with their hysterics. You come to a point where you just want a small measure of justice, Alena said, her chin jutting out a moment. Just to kill as many of them as I can. That’s all I want in life. I’m not asking for anything else.

  That’s what I want, Jiri said.

  The train comes, a small sound at first. Jiri hears it but cannot see it, and then, glancing carefully over Mulák’s and Alena’s heads, he sees the black rectangle of it, through the rusting structure of the bridge, the triangle of headlights. Steam running up and back, a black iron block growing into the turn with the flatbeds, the shapes of tanks and guns beneath tarpaulins, freight cars behind, now coming beneath the bridge and larger, so you feel it in the ground. Then the shrieking lock of metal on metal—it goes on forever, this howling, you cannot think in its loudness—and the black rectangle tilts suddenly, burrowing into the cinders, thundering by them, and Jiri is getting up, watches the long train sliding, slowing, dust rising into the flat sky. Frantic German is snapping in the air and there is female screaming, faintly, and Jiri is scrambling down the embankment with the others, hearing submachine-gun fire from the opposite side of the train, a metallic thumping like the sound of clubs against a metal door. Mulák and Alena are beside him, and Hana and the others are already firing ahead, and there is fear in Jiri’s thighs and throat, but he tells himself, Screw this fear. I don’t mind dying killing these sons of bitches. He clears the trees and brush, and there is a small dip before the railroad bed, and then he feels the rise in his legs and the Nazi guards are dropping above from the sides of the train. Mulák and Alena and Jiri fire, a furious, quick exchange of bullets, and suddenly Mulák is falling and Jiri turns and sees him, on the ground, his forehead disintegrated into flesh and red and Jiri is ducking, running on the cinders now in the shadows of the train beside him, and there is a snapping of a 9 mm bullet passing him, and another, and other gunfire near him, the metallic knocking. When a gray uniform steps down five meters in front of him, black pin of gun aiming, Jiri does not wait but fires, the submachine gun tight to his chest, jumping, and the guard turns halfway and drops from Jiri’s bullet, and a moment later Jiri is leaping over the body, a quick impression of the German face sideways, blood running from mouth, dark on cinders, gravel. He shoots ahead madly, takes part of the face of another guard, who stumbles into brush at the bottom of the railroad bed. Jiri fires after him, bullets thumping into body. There is the smell of cordite, a sweet smell of blood.

  Jiri and the others come to the last car, and still there is a gun battle behind him, the explosion of a grenade on the other side of the train. He grabs a rusting handle to the car and slides the door open—so many faces, dirty, people packed tightly, exclaiming, baffled at the sudden light, harsh, immediate smells of urine and vomit. Some of the Jews have died from suffocation and are corpses, standing up, and there is wailing as these dead are discovered, and the Resistance people, coming in now from the fighting, are saying, Quickly, we must move quickly, and Jiri sees Dr. Kobera watching those coming off the train sharply, saying then, Dr. Jedlika; your wife? With me, please, sir. A balding man, disoriented, a heavyset woman. Alena, on the other side of the door from Jiri, is helping down an old woman and saying, Nedĕleite si starosti. Mother, it will be all right.

  The dead are passed to the door, and Jiri, helping to carry off a dead teenage girl, trying not to look at her white face, her opened mouth and dull teeth, is suddenly transfixed by a bracelet on her wrist. It is almost like the one he bought for Helena: golden varnished wood, a pattern of intricate flowers and greens. Perhaps even purchased at the same shop in Plze. He tightens his jaw, carries the corpse, lays her a few feet from the cinders beside other bodies, and here is her mother, who had apparently not understood in the shock of the journey that her daughter had died; the mother kneeling, a god-awful sudden keening that is cut off by others who cover her mouth and weep with her. They cannot hold her, and she stumbles forward and embraces her daughter, trying to get the girl up, off the ground. Jiri stares at the bracelet, the daughter’s face in death; at the gray roots of the mother’s hair, the gray of her arms and neck, her face buried in her daughter’s skin. He thinks desperately of the caves near Chrást that they must bring this mother and the others to, a forty-five-minute hike; the Nazi police are already well on the way. He pulls the mother gently from behind. We must go, Mother, he says.

  Já ji nemůu nechat—

  My musíme jit. We must go.

  Writing at this kitchen table fifty-eight years later, Jiri is stunned at how immediate everything is when his pen is on the page, at how the writing has led him to the mother and daughter, the bracelet. The struggle of the mother’s flesh and muscle, how she begged to stay and die with her daughter, and how Alena and tĕpán had to help Jiri bring her into the forest. She took the bracelet with her, walked with it clutched to her chest, rocking, tears streaming from her eyes. The mother had hardly flinched as the train was blown behind her, as the others turned back with the concussions, orange light on their faces. She kept staring forward in shock. Jiri walked beside her, stepping quickly; he and Alena and tĕpán and a small group of twenty made their way quietly through the trees. Jiri kept his hand on the mother’s arm the whole way. He turned to her and watched that last light of dusk on her face, then the darkness, her face quivering, looking down, her eyes filling in disbelief. She said, Ja ji nemuzu nechat? What will they do with my baby? She is all alone there, and Jiri said, But her spirit is not there anymore, Mother. They can do nothing to her. She is with us now. We must keep moving. Keep moving with me, just stay with me.

  III

  ELEVEN

  Who: Mother

  What: the day after Heydrich died—coming home with birthday material from akova’s

  Where: Lidice, home

  When: June 1942

  Jana is grateful this morning to bump into Lidice with Petr Jaro, her brother-in-law, to wake in his koda car, her canvas satchel on the seat beside her. Petr nods and smiles a little as she comes out of an anxious sleep. She was shopping for fabric in Prague yesterday with her sister, Sophie (the blue print material for Helena’s birthday dress is in the satchel now, from akova’s on Bethlehem Square, and Jana can finally go to work on it), then visiting the relatives, delivering the small paintings by Helena and Jiri. At the old homestead in Plze last night, where Sophie and Petr now live, there was the news on the radio of Heydrich’s death. A terror had run quickly through Jana; she’d said, I must get to my family. But, of course, travel in darkness—with headlights—was completely out of the question. All will be well, Petr had said, trying to reassure her, if we make no motion to attract the beasts. So Jana lay awake much of the night, in her childhood room, full of worry for her family.

  Here are the familiar walls and tight buildings, the hardware store where Helena is working, the post office. St. Martin’s Church glances by beneath the arc of sun. Atop the roof is Emile Hojda, a silhouette against the sky, crouched to his shingles. He has volunteered to make the repairs to the roof; the church is paying only for his materials. His three sons, Jana can see, are higher up, swinging hammers. Jana imagines what Emile Hodja sees: He is very high,
for St. Martin’s Church is built onto a hill. There will be a patchwork of the many red-tiled roofs and stove-top chimneys, small gardens behind each house just emerging from shadows, fields of green and gold where workers are already bundling hay, and the distant tree line and epka fields. Emile Hodja’s vision is the dream of a home she had with Ría, so many years ago in Prague; they were students at Charles University, full of plans (he would be a science teacher, and she would have a small business doing upholstery to help their income, as she’d done with her mother). On and on Jana and Ría had talked, their shadows slipping before them over Prague cobblestones.

  They drive by the bus station—two Nazi soldiers sit in the shade there, crutches on the bench beside them; one is missing a leg. The other has the Lidice paper in his hands: Jana makes out the name Heydrich in the headline, a brief image of the SS general’s thin, strange face. It took him seven days to die after the Resistance threw a grenade at his car, suffering he certainly deserved after the thousands he murdered in Czechoslovakia. But now the Nazis will be even more vicious, and there will be no more visiting of relatives, no going to Prague, for a long time to come. A fear is in her for her relatives, for her sister and happy, unshaven Petr—here he is, physically, beside her, talking and shifting gears, and with only a slight turn of events he might be gone; such is life now with these rulers.

  The koda motors up Andĕlu and Petr drops Jana at her front door, apologizing that he cannot come in: He will be late for his shift at the koda factory and it is too dangerous now to raise any alarms. She says of course, kisses his rough cheeks, hugs him, takes her satchel. She waves as her brother-in-law swings in a circle and goes back down the hill.

  A rabbit hangs on Jana’s back doorknob, a deadweight in a small white burlap bag—she organized with Libor ermák, the village butcher, to kill her animal just before she arrived home—and she puts the rabbit in the kitchen pantry and takes the canvas satchel to her bedroom. She eases the tissue-wrapped fabric for Helena’s dress out of the satchel and puts it into a drawer, beneath a sweater of hers. She changes into a housedress and, in her kitchen, puts on an apron for chores.

  * * *

  In the late afternoon Jana cleans the rabbit and dices the meat, and leaves it a moment on the wooden chopping block; in the shadowed laundry house of the garden she takes an onion and potatoes from a hinged storage box and puts them in her apron. There is a section of the building they reserve for coal, and here she shovels a small tin bucket full and walks back through the sun. Young sunflowers bow their heads to her as if in greeting, and she smells the sunlight on the earth. She shovels the coal into her iron kitchen stove and lights it; she washes her hands and takes sunflower oil from the pantry, puts a bit on an iron pan, slides the meat into it, and cooks the rabbit, and the smell is so provocative that she swoons and must check the impulse to have some. While it browns she cuts the onion at the window, her eyes glassy, and sometimes her eyelids are forced closed; she steps away and watches over the young garden and the broken spot of wall where Jiri always reads in the last of the sunlight. Beyond it is the Horák farm, the red pitch of roof, the top of the gray mortar walls. Emile Hodja has recently done repairs there, too; she remembers the comfort of seeing the roofer there in the mornings, how when she did not feel like doing her chores she watched his industry for inspiration. He is a hard worker, Emile Hodja. When he is not fixing roofs, he is repairing clocks—last year, as another charity to the church, he fixed the broken clock of St. Martin’s, and Jana thinks of this each time she hears the bells chime.

  Blinking, she sweeps up the cut onions with a wide knife and, in three trips and without spilling, puts them into the sizzling skillet, waiting as they turn to glass.

  The illegal birthday dance she had planned for Helena (it was to take place at Vĕra’s Kafková’s home next door, for Vĕra and her husband, Vladná, own a phonograph—an afternoon dance and dinner with the heavy curtains to the living room pulled and Vladná and Ría watching out for soldiers coming up Andĕlu, and Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington playing softly) is unquestionably off, but she can still have the dinner for her daughter here at the house. The Nazis don’t allow the dancing, and one cannot tempt fate now, but a celebratory dinner—there is no law against that. She will have a few of Helena’s closest friends here, and she can invite the boy her daughter seems to like—his name is Rudolf Hejma—if he and his family check out. She will ask Vĕra about them. Jana wanted to watch her daughter dance. She thinks of Helena in candlelight, grasping the hand and shoulder of the boy, the two of them beginning to move gracefully, and shakes her head angrily and swallows down her emotion and turns to the rabbit.

  The crowns she will spend for the birthday pork (Libor ermák will give it to her at a good price, under the table), the rationed coupons she will use for the dinner, will still require considerable sacrifice. But Jana has four rabbits living—she can hear them snuffling now, through the kitchen window—and there are three geese. This should help bring her family into mid-August; she might even be able to stretch her meat sources into September.

  The rabbit is cooked. She covers it and sets it to the cooler side of the stove. She walks down the short hallway, into the bathroom, and, after putting towels beneath her knees, scrubs the steel bathtub of the fine coal dust that Jiri couldn’t entirely get out last night, a constant, thankless job that they all participate in, for the men with their coal dust blacken it every day except Sunday. She scrubs the tiled floor then, the sunlight coming in over her, over the tub. Then she runs the water and bathes, a small luxury in this day. The floating of her back in the warm water loosens her muscles, seems to slightly separate the vertebrae of her spine. She washes and rises and dries her body and then feels guilty for lying in comfort on the bed in her and Ría’s bedroom, when the rest of the family is working, but tells herself she will be no good to anyone tired into her bones or sick. In the drawer beside her she puts her watch, lays it next to the oval wooden container with Jiri’s gift. Jana thinks of the bracelet on Helena’s wrist, just before she sleeps. She told Jiri how beautiful it was; she told him of her plans to make the dress. She thinks of the dress, finished, on her daughter—tiny yellow and red flowers against blue, like hope, like something you might paint on an egg at Easter.

  Then in her dream SS General Reinhardt Heydrich is in the doorway, looking at her, and she wakes with a start, her heart hammering.

  * * *

  Helena is home. Jana hears her in the kitchen; she rises and goes to her daughter and kisses her cheeks and hugs her, and Helena says, “We are fine, Mother, but we were worried about you.”

  Helena goes back to grating the potatoes for dumplings. Jana gets a bowl, salt, egg, and flour, moving into this dance the two of them participate in. Ría and Jiri have arrived, too, banging their coal-stiffened clothes against the garden wall, hanging them over a line there in the corner, and then Jiri comes in to bathe and kisses Jana’s cheek quickly, and she brushes back his hair and touches his face, feeling swelling there, at the cheekbone and eye, and he says, quickly “Dobr den, Mother.” And she says “Jiri,” thinking, Did a Nazi do this? It swoops through her stomach, but she does not say more; Jiri walks directly into the bathroom and she can feel that he is upset, worked up, and the bathtub water is running; she steps out into the garden where Ría stands, philosophically, in his shorts, looking down on the Horák farm, the fields of grain, and beyond at the golden epka in the hills.

  Ría turns to her as she approaches; there are infinitesimal wood chips in her husband’s hair, in his ears, in his eyebrows. She holds him a moment: her thinning Ría. Kisses his cheek. The hands she takes, kneading the swell of thumbs, are callused, with dried blood on the knuckles. The forearms are muscular and with fresh cuts. She turns them over, looks at them, looks at Ría’s eyes. Helena, through the window, is boiling salted water and on the counter next to the stove mixing up the dumplings in a bowl.

  “Co se mu stlo?” Jana says. “He is not himself.”
r />   “There was a fight, at lunch,” Ría says.

  “Jiri was in the fight?” Jana says, feeling her mouth go dry.

  “Even I was in it,” Ría says, smiling and gesturing at his hands, “though I’m afraid I didn’t give much of an account of myself—”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “Communists. Always Communists. On the coal trucks. They don’t think like Czechs anymore. They just think like Moscow. First defending Hitler—now after Heydrich dies saying Stalin will save us! Such goddamn fools.” Ría shakes his head.

  “It is amazing they didn’t turn on Stalin when he got in bed with Hitler,” Jana says. “They are as stupid as Stalin is horrible.”

  “They were telling us—Jiri, and me, and Smetáek and Rejsek—you know him, from Kladno?—that Stalin would save us all! Can you believe? And Jiri told them, and he is right, that Stalin will just rape the country the same way Hitler has and one of them came at Jiri—”

  Jana imagines the fistfight as Ría tells it: Ría jumping in immediately to defend his boy and the others, too, hitting suddenly, getting swept up in it, the sound of guttural male fury. Czech guards coming and hitting with clubs and telling everyone they were fools, to shut up. The few Nazi guards looking on, watching to see if something should be done, if someone should be shot to take the starch out of the others.

  “You cannot do this,” Jana says in horror. “Ría. The fighting will just get someone killed.”

  “Ano.” Ría is nodding. Jana knows he tried to calm down his hotheaded teenage son. Knows that Ría has reproached himself all afternoon for failing. “You’re right, drahouku. We cannot let these things happen. We must somehow ignore the philosophies of these idiots or just tell them right away to shut up, before it gets out of hand. I told Jiri all of it after. But I must say”—Ría leans to Jana and lowers his voice—“our son fights like a lion. And Rejsek told me Jiri made a point of matching the Communists shovel for shovel all afternoon.”