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  Jana sees it: her son with the black and wooden shovel swinging and the sun overhead. The sky like bright tin. Jiri’s teeth gritted against the strain. She feels pride, fear, sorrow, fluttering in her. “You cannot do this, Ría,” she says. “You cannot let it happen.”

  * * *

  At dinner, with candles lit, Jiri volunteers nothing, much as Helena tries to lecture him about getting into fights.

  Ría clears his throat. “And how was Prague?” he asks his wife.

  She fills them in on the relatives: She and Sophie visited old aunt Milena Posseltová, on Vinohradská, and later had lunch with Uncle Ale and Daniela Jaroová at their flat on Bethlehem Square.

  “They all send greetings. But it is strange now, everyone afraid,” Jana says. “Many of the shops are closed. There are SS walking everywhere. And you cannot believe—on the Old Town Square they have put up this banner of Hitler—just before Tn Church. It is four or five stories tall, just his face. His eyes look so troubled—”

  “A banner?” Jiri says.

  “Like a square sail, this huge, heavy cloth. Held up with metal poles and wires,” Jana says. “It is just his face—I don’t know what it is for—and the swastikas are everywhere around, hanging from the building eaves. There was a stage in front of the banner, too, just built. It is like they are preparing for some gathering.”

  “Maybe something to do with the Heydrich,” Helena says.

  “It might be,” Jana says. Jiri listens with his face lowered, his jaw working. Jana cannot tell what he is thinking, for his hair hangs a little over his eyes.

  “Hitler like God,” Ría says with disgust. “It means that nothing is important but Hitler.”

  “They are quite crazy,” Helena says. “Two Wehrmacht came in during the morning today to buy sheets of plywood. They said they were repairing the Sokolovna ceiling. One of them couldn’t stop giggling,” she says. “It was like he had no control of himself. His companion kept apologizing for him.”

  “Were you frightened of them?” Jana asks.

  “No, Mother. They’ve been in a number of times before. I just try to not react and I am polite and otherwise I ignore them.”

  “Quite right,” Jana says.

  Usually, after he makes his bed on the couch for sleep, Jiri will just tolerate his mother’s hugging him, but tonight he puts his arms around Jana first and wishes her a good night; her boy, gangly and strong, is not a child anymore. She holds back, tightly, before he can break the connection.

  * * *

  The dark secrets of this day settle like the blackbirds at the edges of the fields. Jana dreams of the giant troubled eyes of the Führer, the angry face staring at Prague. Then of Heydrich: Moonlight comes from Andĕlu Street onto the bed and the dresser, falls over pictures of her family. There is the sound of cicadas through the window. Somewhere in the night a protective bird sings, and the grandfather clock in the living room strikes the half hour; there is a distant, heavy sound of drums. And there in the bedroom doorway stands the Reichsprotektor, tall, and in his full black Nazi regalia, death’s head adorning his cap, SS leaves at his collar, his odd hips and thighs that seem those of a woman.

  Jana cannot see the features of Heydrich’s face, for it is in shadow, and she wakes with a frightful start and Ría beside her is in an exhausted sleep—his cheekbone an emaciated 7 in the pale light—and their room is exactly as it was in the dream, so that it is possible for Jana to believe that maybe the ghost of Heydrich is here, only now invisible.

  She senses that a demon has come to threaten her family. She rises and steps across the cool tiled floor and stands there in the doorway, gooseflesh on her arms where her nightshirt falls away, gooseflesh on her neck; her hands rise, grip the doorframe. She stays there and slowly the room is more calm, her husband’s intelligent features against the pillow. She goes back to the side of the bed and puts on her leather shoes and taps down the hallway and looks in on Helena in her very small room across from the bath; Helena’s hair drifts over her eyes, and moonlight makes a triangle above her on the wall. Jana moves on to Jiri on the living room couch; his face, too, is exhausted, and bruised from the fight. The Philips radio is beside his head. Her son breathes deeply there, in the night. She wants to touch Jiri’s face but is afraid to wake him and afraid that he would open his eyes to her weeping over his bruising, his young whiskers. The moonlight stretches over pictures on the stone mantel of Jiri with his Sokol group, standing on a field in Plze with their wooden rifles at age ten, and on a field trip to Prague, to the Old Town Square. And what is on those Prague cobblestones now, before the church of Tn—the same place where her boy, with his buddies here, has stood? The same place where Kafka wove his stories, where Hus and Mozart and Copernicus walked? Now the portrait of insane Hitler, there for his insane followers to draw inspiration from. The Nazis are poisoning the nation. They do not believe that Czechoslovakia exists. That my family exists. Jana leans forward and kisses her boy and smells his hair and skin, and he stirs slightly in his sleep. And then she goes back over her solid, smooth wooden floor to her bed.

  * * *

  In the morning Jiri insists on taking a photograph of Jana and Helena as Helena prepares to go off to work. They pose leaning against Helena’s bicycle, and Jana says, “For heaven’s sake, hurry it up, Jiri, she can’t be late.”

  Jiri tells them both to smile, and Helena laughs at the combination of her mother’s impatience and Jiri’s cheerfulness, and Jana cannot help laughing with her.

  “I mean it, Jiri,” she says, trying to recover, shaking her finger at him. “You need to take the picture and stop kidding about.” She puts her arm around Helena, and then it is done and Helena is gliding down the hill, waving at the corner, and Jiri slips the film roll in his coat and ducks back into the house with his mother clucking after him.

  When Ría and Jiri have gone, Jana sequesters herself in Vĕra Kafková’s sewing room, by a second-floor window that looks down on her own garden. Vĕra’s Singer is a more recent model than Jana’s, and, since Jana often uses Vĕra’s machine for more complicated projects, Helena will not think it unusual that her mother is doing work here. The plum trees that Jana shares with Vĕra are bright green through the window, shifting a little with wind—they seem, for a moment, almost to glitter. Jana starts cutting, the scissors making a decisive part through the tissue of her pattern and the cloth for the birthday dress—quick slashes: now the divided fronts, now the collars and sleeves, now the back. She has fashioned her pattern after a dress worn by Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, just before the war; Helena has talked of her favorite actress’s style ever since seeing the film in Prague. It will have long cuffed sleeves and an offset neckline bow of white crinoline; one day, when the barbarians have gone, her daughter shall dance in it.

  Jana works over the next two days whenever she can, the Singer needle diving steadily through Helena’s dress and her projects for the Kruinas: an old canvas coat needing mending, curtains with plain casings for the Kruina kitchen, pillow covers for little Marta Kruinová’s bedroom, two of Marta’s dresses needing minor repairs. Sometimes Vĕra comes in, nodding with approval at the progress of the birthday dress. She brings Jana drinks of water and once a vase of wood sorrel and star flower, picked here on the Horák hill. Jana says, “Dĕkuji, Vĕra, they look wonderful,” and watches her friend bend to a small table and put down the flowers, a new shadow on the floor.

  Vĕra says, “Keep working, it looks very good—I shall make us something to eat whenever you are hungry,” and then is gone, descending the stairs.

  There is the pulsing sound of the cicadas, and as Jana sews she glances out the window and sees the hill falling away to the Horák farm, rows of young crops, grain, and the hills rise again to the forest. Some two miles in the distance there is the Kruina farm, and for a moment Jana would like her family to live there, with its availability of food, with its distance from the Nazis billeted here. The church bell sounds the hours, and Jana listens; s
he imagines others in her community looking up to the sound as well—it is part of their history that Emile Hodja has mended. It means nothing to the Nazis but hours marked. Below, the sunflowers are quiet now, the crickets sing, and the plum trees are heavy with their leaves.

  * * *

  On the next evening, a little after ten P.M., Jana paces with concern for her boy. It is still early yet for Jiri to be back from the Kruina farm, but she shall stay awake until he comes home, will give him something to eat, some potato pancakes and bacon when he returns. She steps out into the garden, listens to the crickets and frogs in the fields. The plum trees glow with their dark thickness, and the sunflowers suddenly have grown considerably, nodding at their moorings. The wall, the shed, her small garden, all are heavy with dew, and you can smell that wetness and the greenery. Jana thinks of collecting flowers in the morning with Vĕra—perhaps there will be time before rain comes—wood sorrel and black mustard and wolfbane, arranging them into vases, this freshness and life in the rooms of their families. She walks to the wall, clutching her robe tight to her. In the plum trees icterus birds are making brief, golden flights; she listens to them, watches them, waiting for her son, until another sound—an odd, heavy disturbance of truck engines—takes her suddenly from her thoughts.

  The icterus birds scatter in a bright explosion.

  TWELVE

  The soldiers were everywhere, Vĕra Kafková told Jiri, on their night in Prague after the war. Motioning with her hands. Everywhere. Like a swarm. They stayed outside the houses through the night and we watched them from the windows. Then in the early morning they came for the men and tore our homes apart and marched the women and children to the school. Here Vĕra broke down, waving a hand at the futility of her emotions. To bylo hrocné, honey. It was terrible.

  In his kitchen, Jiri has been writing it all down. He thinks he has his mother’s face right: high cheekbones, skin Bohemian dark with sun, eyes the color of wheat. His mother’s face—turning at the sound of the trucks, looking over the garden wall at the Germans coming down the Horák drive, hearing them on the streets. Then the violence: houses searched, everything thrown out windows, smashed. Jiri imagines the dress for Helena thrown into the garden dirt, the telescope he used with his father in pieces. He remembers how he sensed rather than saw Helena sleeping on that last night: his sister, a curving moment of white blanket, the shy triangle of light on the wall above her. His parents nodding to him in the shadows of the hallway and, when he looked back at the break in the garden wall, before going down the path, he saw his mother watching him from the back doorway, waving. Lidice under the moon as he slipped from town, up around the hayfields and the village below then to his right as he climbed up Liska hill toward the forest. Not a light to be seen in town, the stars over the dark shapes of houses and Fanta pond.

  The night is quiet outside the screen window now: the garage where Jiri’s Buick sits, the fence, a house beyond. A moth insists at the window, trying indefatigably for Jiri’s light, bringing him from that last night in Lidice. Jiri thinks about driving with Tika in his car, him driving, to the Arboretum or to the sea, his eyes just a little better than they are now, and Tika saying, It is amazing, Jiri, so wonderful, your recovery.

  A car goes by on Irving Street, through houses and trees, playing this rap, this heavy declaration of war, of angry existence. The rap music fades; in the relative quiet afterward the kitchen clock is synchronized with the grandfather clock in the living room. It is twelve-fifty. Jiri remembers the St. Martin’s clock that Emile Hodja fixed, the simple, clear sound of it. He remembers three years later, in Prague—the Town Hall clock cracked by a Nazi missile. He was there, fighting with partisans in the uprising at the end of the war. He was running through the Old Town Square and there was the astronomical clock, split in half after four hundred years of operating, slumped in defeat; the Nazis were targeting historic artifacts. The clock had been so much a part of Jiri’s childhood excursions that even there, in the heavy fighting, it was hard to believe what the Nazis had done. It made him furious. This was what they did, Jiri writes, now bending to the page again, addressing Markéta and Tika and Anna and also Marjorie Legnini—what Hitler did, what the Communists did after him. They were determined to destroy any memory we had, you see? To put their vicious stamp on everything they touched. This is what such people do: They wipe out your memory, they replace it with their own. They want you to believe that your own history never existed, to loosen your moorings so that they can control you. So you must work to remember, even if they take your whole town away and make it nothing but wind and grass! Remember what life was like before their terror! Our country rebuilt the clock as it was, rebuilt Prague as it was, and I think of my home and I remember the Ferris wheel in front of the Lidice church when the fair came in fall and all of the people gathered there and the band music at night and a girl I flirted with at the wall when I was twelve. The Nazis destroyed all of it, but I remember it.

  The moth works at the window. The clocks chime softly together. One o’clock. Jiri looks down at the garage, the dark roof there. He thinks a moment and writes, P.S. Anna, one of the hardest things for me is that I cannot drive anymore. It is one of the ways I am no longer of any help to you. I am hoping I’ll be able to drive again. You have never thought of yourself as a good driver I know but you are actually a very good one and your only problem is that when you make left turns you jerk it, angle by angle, instead of making a smooth turn. This is a problem of concentration, not of driving, and I would not mention it except I am scared of it and we start getting cross with each other and shouting at each other in the car and I wish I handled it better. I just want you to concentrate and be safe, drahouku. But I hope I will drive again.

  * * *

  And now Jiri falls again into his history.

  It is a few days before Christmas 1948. The sound of drenching rain through the glass. Jiri stands in the window of the SS Archival Room in the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, watching the storm over the city. He is taking a break, allowing himself a well-deserved daydream. He has met a woman at the Válka camp for refugees; she flirts with him with her large blue eyes. Her name is Anna roubková and she has come in, a month before, from Slovakia, with her mother and cousin (the rest of her family was lost in the war, her father in the Prague uprising in 1945, in those same streets where Jiri fought). Jiri has told Anna once, full of emotion, that his family was from Lidice and that he has not found news of his mother and sister. And they have spoken no more of the dark times, as if agreed in the touch of hands that the tragedy is there but they must also live, move forward; she has made Jiri feel alive again. Sometimes he takes the tram across broken Nuremberg just to walk with her on the road from Válka to Soldier’s Field. In that huge stadium, where Hitler once exhorted his robot troops to fight as one, where now threadbare couples stroll through with picnic baskets on warmer December days for lunch, Anna will laugh about the large blue ski coat she was issued, with its big arms that flop. Jiri has bought for her, for Christmas, a fine warm coat, and coats for her mother and cousin, too, and he cannot wait to give them these presents on Christmas Eve.

  The city is dark beneath the suddenly fierce winter rain, and water flows freely in the areas cleared of rubble. People seem to walk endlessly through the thoroughfares, the rain darkening their shoulders. Jiri sees a man, both of his legs amputated, riding on the shoulders of a friend. Women in shawls walk briskly beneath the window; he sees buildings where windows are burned-out holes, chimneys standing with no structure around them, like fingers pointing at the sky. There is a gathering of prostitutes at a corner two streets away, huddled beneath the eave of a blackened building, waiting for evening customers.

  It is as if the war never ended, as if the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun still flicker with gasoline flames in the Chancellery garden. This is the Europe Hitler has left behind: these empty, crumbling shapes that beneath rain look like ancient ruins. Nine million human beings roam, findin
g what shelter they can. German teenage girls are raped by gangs of Polish orphans in alleys near the railroad stations. Jews are in a massive exodus (just this morning Jiri has walked by graffiti on this street reading, Jude, verrecke! Croak, Jew!), to France and the port of Haifa, and finally to their new country, which has been etched into history with violence. The darkness of Communism is strangling Czechoslovakia, sending those strong enough and brave enough, like Anna and those left of her family, over the umava Mountains to West Germany. Sometimes the Czech guides hired for these journeys are criminals who shoot their clients, leave them for dead, take suitcases with life savings. Jiri sets his jaw. He would like to meet such traitorous sons of bitches.

  Dr. Kobera’s group has come as an entire cell to Germany to assist United States intelligence, and the U.S. Army has requested Jiri’s services on a steady basis, and he has, quite surprisingly, found that he has a career as a translator. He arrives, in civilian clothes, each day at the offices above and is then dispatched to Válka or to other nondescript buildings in Nuremberg; he interviews ordinary Czechoslovak citizens, and statesmen, and professors, helping counterintelligence create a constantly changing mosaic of the Czech nation with information from these refugees. In what shape are the roads in your town? he asks. Are the bridges still functioning? Where have the Communists built military bunkers, do you know? How much do you know about the Communist dignitaries in your area? Can you tell us anything about any other military activities you have seen? The refugees are paid eight marks for their information, and some wave off the money, saying it is only their patriotic duty to tell Jiri what they can; the hair-raising journey beneath the machine-gun towers and searchlights has left them furious that their home has, once again, been occupied.