Before Read online

  Then, after the long run to Plze, at the safe house of Dr. Jaroslav Kobera and Kobera’s lover, Boena Krásová—the address his father sent him to—he knelt, wept beside a radio in Dr. Kobera’s kitchen as Radio Berlin announced, matter-of-factly, the annihilation of his family. All men of Lidice have been shot, the announcer said. The women deported to a concentration camp. The name of the village immediately abolished. Later, in Germany, Jiri would see the precise 16 mm film the Nazis made, documenting the murder of his home. Every Lidice building wired with plastic explosives and blown to pieces. The church falling like sand. The graveyard bulldozed. German engineers had even diverted the stream to change the landscape.

  And his father’s body among the heap of others, at the Horák farm, where the men had been shot in groups of ten.

  There in Dr. Kobera and Boena Krásová’s kitchen, floorboards had rushed at Jiri: He’d dropped to his knees. An uncontrollable keening came from his chest and throat, and then the hands of Dr. Kobera and Boena were firmly on his shoulders; Boena Krásová spoke words into one of his ears, as if trying to keep him connected to life, to the oxygen above these waves.

  Dr. Kobera and Boena ran the largest Resistance group in Bohemia, and Jiri found out that his uncle, Petr Jaro, from Plze, belonged to it as well. For four years Jiri blew up ammunition depots, derailed trains, pulled Jews off the trains going to Terezín, and cut phone lines, thinking each day about the afternoon when, exhausted from his run, he’d found out about his family on Dr. Kobera’s radio. His personality, his life, was severed in that moment and became something else. From then until the end of the war, he lived to avenge his family.

  * * *

  Jiri paces through the darkness, thinking of all of it, moving through history and memory and literature. His shadow on the wall goes back and forth. Winston Churchill is warning the world about the Nazi threat, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi disappears into Nagaina’s lair, sinking his teeth into her tail. Jack London’s wolves move closer and closer to Henry’s fire, even as the desperate, tired man thrusts burning wood at them. Picasso weeps for Guernica—a tumble of abstract, tortured spirits, of explosion and death. A Nazi officer, looking at the gigantic canvas with awe, asks the artist, Did you do this?

  No, Picasso says. You did.

  The white spider hovers, but is not, as before, coming out at Jiri. He stops and looks at it. There within that slip of spine Adolf Hitler is seventeen, on the Promenade in Linz, with his friend August Kubíek, watching a beautiful young local girl named Stefanie; she has captured his attention so fiercely that the young Hitler can hardly live. She walks with her mother and occasionally a military officer will step up to her and offer a flower. C’mon, Adolf, Kubíek says. Go and buy a rose and present it and tip your hat! Make your intentions known! But Hitler shakes his head; he tells his friend, Nein, esist nicht möglich. She would only laugh. He has nothing to show for himself, no accomplishments. Still, the dark teenager has followed his Stefanie everywhere, has even dreamed of kidnapping her, of possessing her that way. Jiri imagines the psychotic, anguished boy in that fall of 1906; climbing the Freinberg late at night, overlooking Linz, the Danube a dark mirror below him. Making plans. To be Wagner’s Rienzi, to save my people. Vast crowds will salute him with a massive Heil!

  No Stefanie, no young woman, would dare ignore young Hitler’s affections then.

  * * *

  Jiri paces away from the swastika, back to Rilke, back to his own childhood in Lidice. It is 1940. The light is bright on the walls of his schoolroom. He sits in his row, entranced by the words of the poem, listening to Professor Voahlík read from the book:

  Früher. Klagtest. Was war? Eine gefallene

  Beere des Jubels, unreife.

  “The poet is an older man now,” says Professor Voahlík, tapping fingers for emphasis on his desk, his other hand cradling the book. The professor’s prodigious eyebrows raise to emphasize his point. “On cítí lítost víc ne v minulsti. He is feeling a sorrow greater than he has felt before.”

  The Lidice children, in their rows, listen attentively; the windows are large and the sunlight warms Jiri’s shoulder. A girl smiles at Jiri—her face, sixty-one years ago, comes to him now clearly: green eyes, freckles, a sweep of dark chestnut hair, so that he stops in the darkness, smiling at the memory. It is as if she is in front of him. The class ends, dust swirling in a shaft of window light; the girl asks him to write his name in her leather pen case. Says she hears he is very good at the soccer. Her name is Marie Píhodová; she plays soccer, too. Later, Jiri walks with her on the cobblestones before St. Martin’s Church, and they balance up on the Lidice walls, showing off.

  Then it is a summer evening in 1942, and Jiri and Marie hold hands there, by the old wall, hearing above the swaying branches of trees. There are no lights on in their town, just all of these steep shapes and the sound of the evening wind. They are near the stream and they can hear the water, and beyond them are more walls of Lidice, houses with roofs of red shale, and the earth is turning and night is coming. Fanta pond sparkles dark painter’s blue and silver beneath the stars. There, a few roofs up the hill, on Andĕlu, is the steep pitched roof of Jiri’s house, the shape of the large oak tree, the plum trees behind. There is the scent of Bohemian night: stone and mortar and the wetness of the earth, a heavy fragrance of greenery, white willows and oaks here by the stream. It is a wonder, Marie’s cheek now so close, her profile nearly touching Jiri’s as they talk. Her voice in his ear. Her eyes shining when she brings her head back, to look at him.

  But now my Tree of Joy is breaking, Professor Voahlík reads,

  What is breaking in the storm is my slowly

  grown Tree of Joy.

  The most beautiful thing in my invisible

  landscape, which let me be seen

  by the invisible angels.

  Marie watches him. And here is Helena: Jiri, three years old, leans out from behind the sunflower stalks where he has been hiding in the garden, and his sister’s eyes are on him, full of play, and she is saying, Kam jde, Jirko? Where are you going? You can’t escape me. Their mother calls them to dinner, and Jiri can hear his father’s voice in the house. There are crickets in the night.

  In the darkness, here, the photograph of his mother and sister stares out at Jiri, a fathomless hole.

  * * *

  During the brain hemorrhage last June Jiri had seen the walls of Lidice on fire, and he was looking around for Helena. He was shouting, terrified. There were only the black walls on fire: no houses, no people left. He could not remember where he was. He could remember Anna’s name, for she was there, suddenly, alarmed, leaning over him, but he was not sure if he was in Massachusetts or Seattle, or perhaps Prague; here was the painting of John Lennon in the Little Quarter, this wall too afire, and here was St. Nicholas Church: the Dome Fresco was in flames, the tall, amber, painted glass ceiling melting, blackening—a tunnel of hell toward the sky. Then he and Anna were in Hradany, looking down, and all of Prague was ablaze. Anna called immediately for a doctor, and soon that face was there, demanding Jiri’s attention—white coat, a man needing a shave. Asking Jiri for his location.

  Location? Jiri said vaguely.

  What state? the doctor said.

  Jiri tried hard to think. Was he in the United States? Was he in a bunker in Prague, perhaps, or behind a barricade in the May uprising? He was in a cold sweat. He waited, frightfully, for the sound of bullets on steel and concrete.

  There is a war going on, he said. Everything is moving. Everything is on fire.

  Jiri? Everything is moving? the doctor said. You’re feeling dizzy?

  The walls are all moving, Jiri said.

  Perhaps he is just very tired? Jiri heard the doctor ask Anna. Perhaps he is dreaming?

  No, Doctor, Anna said. Something is really wrong. This isn’t like him. I know my husband.

  The doctor said: Jiri, can you tell me who the president of the United States is?

  Jiri struggled; how could it be he
couldn’t know? Roosevelt? he said. That brought alarm to the eyes of the doctor.

  * * *

  He shakes his head at the memory. He turns on lamps, and at first he blinks his eyes as if he has come from a cave. It takes a good while for his eyes to adjust. Then here is the photograph, on the shelf above the ottoman, of his mother with her arm around his sister. Helena’s eyes are merry with their mother’s impatience, and now she has Jana laughing. Jiri leans closer, blinking, looks at their faces. Hurry up, Jiri, his mother says, trying again to be serious. For heaven’s sake, your sister will be late for work.

  * * *

  One night in Prague in May 1945, Vĕra Kafková, Jana’s friend, Jiri’s old Lidice neighbor, immeasurably aged and with the insectlike blue number from Ravensbrück burned into her forearm, told Jiri of the last day she saw his sister and mother: We were held three days in the school gymnasium in Kladno, and then they took the children away from their mothers. It was like something from Dante, honey, truly. You cannot believe. Then they began taking us away in trucks. Your mother and sister were in the next truck over from mine. I looked at your sister waiting there with that new, colorful bracelet on her wrist, and I thought she is too pretty a girl, too young a girl, to be going to a death camp. Vĕra wept, and Jiri—realizing that as the Nazis came to Lidice his mother had given his sister his birthday gift—put his head in his hands and wept openly as well.

  Through late nights in 1948, in the SS Archival Room at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg—just one floor down from the army intelligence headquarters where he worked—Jiri had gone thoroughly through detention cards of Ravensbrück, Chelmno, Terezín. He found Marie Píhodová’s name quickly—confirming what he’d known since the end of the war—imagined her in the back of that truck at Chelmno, perhaps comforting one of the younger children as the exhaust gas killed them. He’d had to leave the room, to walk outside on the ravaged streets of the city, rage in his throat.

  There was no sign of his sister or mother in the long parade of identifying photographs and documents, a search of nearly a year; he spread out other SS photographs on the long wooden tables and bent over them with a magnifying glass—these carefully documented archives of annihilation, records for the master race—hoping to find the figures of Helena and his mother in them, a hint of where they might have been taken. His early inquiries to the Western intelligence services, in 1945 and 1946, done through Dr. Kobera, had turned up nothing. He’d put advertisements in every major German and Czech publication starting in May 1945, and especially in the Plze Examiner, thinking that his mother might somehow have made it back to her old family home with his sister. He’d had flyers made with this photograph of Jana and Helena and plastered them all over the train stations of Czechoslovakia and Germany, Jana and Helena smiling beside so many other lost relatives, an ocean of faces, photographs, and messages fluttering sadly from these corridors, these walls of war-torn Europe: so many relatives lost to terror, the words LAST SEEN glaring from every flyer. Helena Posseltová, age 18, and Jana Posseltová, age 38, read Jiri’s message, of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, last seen in Kladno being taken into Nazi trucks on June 13, 1942. Please contact American Army Division, c/o Jiri Posselt, Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, Germany.

  He visited brothels throughout Munich on a tip that some Czech women, who had been brought to the Russian front as prostitutes for the German troops, were working now in Germany. Perhaps Mother and Helena survived, he’d thought, walking through the wet Munich streets one night in March 1947. Perhaps the mistreatment of the soldiers made them crazy, and they no longer know who they are. He showed prostitutes, and madams, and johns the picture of Helena and his mother and the bike, but no one recognized their faces.

  The swastika still glows when he looks over. Hitler is there, looking down on the Danube, imagining the fires he will make. Following the girl named Stefanie, hovering in ghostly orbit around her, thinking of holding her in a place where she cannot escape him.

  The sound of the first Lidice killing squad on June 10, 1942, is a terrifying crack through Jiri’s stomach.

  Didn’t he see Tika today? Didn’t he tell her about it? Did he tell her about the walls, the sound of the guns?

  He remembers that he wanted to talk to her, to tell her of how the Nazis documented what they had done. How the Nazi title burned on the screen—Instructive and Cultural Films—and you saw the abandoned Lidice crest from Mayor Horák’s office, three roses beneath a great green “L,” and near it Jiri’s father lay among the other murdered Lidice men, right arm thrown out across the ground, the hand in a fist, head turned to the sky. A Nazi moved among the bodies, pushed at his father’s body with a jackboot. Jiri, watching the film for the first time in his Nuremberg office, had been unable to breathe in the clicking, film-sprocket darkness, had bent over to try to fill his lungs, and the sergeant running the projector for him had asked if they should continue.

  Yes, Sergeant, keep it going, Jiri had said. I need to see the rest of it.

  He had wanted to tell Tika, when they were walking by the roses at the Arboretum, whenever that was. Then he had looked over at her face and she seemed so happy that he had not wanted to bring his horror into the conversation.

  Jiri turns off the light and goes clumsily to the bathroom, brushes teeth; he spits, and he is weeping, thinking of his father facing the guns. Of Marie in the truck, holding one of the crying children. That’s what she would have done. For God’s sake, what happened with Mother and Helena? He puts cold water into his mouth: That is better, cold water over his neck and face, for his head is aching. A towel. Something normal, for God’s sake. What was done was long done now and you know that if Mother and Helena had survived they would have found you, you would have found each other. Think of Markéta, married now—and perhaps there will be children still, a new generation, untouched by this madness. And think of Tika, enjoying her evening in freedom with a young man she loves—something Helena did not get to do. Think of these positive things.

  The bathroom light is bright; these orange-striped towels seem to glow. The aching will disappear with just some aspirin. But is it all right to have aspirin with the Coumadin? I don’t know, I don’t want to wake Anna. Just some cold water to the forehead, then. Think of Markéta learning to ride her bike here on Trowbridge Street, Markéta looking over, quick smile: Look, Daddy. The colors of fall leaves all around her. Of visiting Markéta, of going to that all-night bookstore they have in Seattle, Markéta walking and breathing and the night-smell of the sea. Walking next to happy Markéta. The sound of gulls. In the warm bookstore your daughter pulled out books she wanted, Joan Larkin and Tobias Wolff and Gina Berriault. I will get them for you, honey. No, Daddy, you don’t have to. I’m a big, rich girl now. Fending off her outstretched hand with cash: No, honey. Markéta’s hand retreated with the bills and her eyes stared back, uncharacteristically shy.

  Jiri rubs the towel roughly over his cheekbones, his neck. Opens his shirt and cools his chest. Runs more cold on the cloth and holds it to his head awhile. He goes to bed, and in shadows Anna turns to him as he is sliding in. She comes close to him for a moment and he smells her hair, the closeness of her body.

  “All right?” she says.

  “Yes,” he lies, and she is kissing his chest; sweet, poor Anna. She rolls back on her side and through the window you can see a bit of Trowbridge Street, a circle of tar beneath a streetlight, shadows of taut phone lines crossing that space.

  II

  FIVE

  It is 1966.

  Mrs. Dorling takes Simon and Jim out into the sun. Her feet are bare and tanned and she holds their hands. Her hand feels cool and smooth. They walk across the grass. Simon can feel the heat on his shoulders and back. Mrs. Dorling wanted them to wear hats and she has given them some of her own big straw ones and Jim and Simon laugh at each other, at how floppy the hats look. They hold the sides of the hats and say wings and big ears and beautiful Mrs. Dorling says, laughing with them, Oh, you guys are so
silly. They reach a small fence and Mrs. Dorling points in.

  Look at the sunflowers, she says. Look at how they turn to the sun.

  I have them in my backyard, too, Simon says.

  Aren’t they pretty? Mrs. Dorling says.

  Look at all the bees, Jim says. They kind of scare me.

  You don’t need to be scared, Mrs. Dorling says. She kisses the throat, the side of the face of her son. Simon wishes she was doing that to him. Mrs. Dorling says, They’re very busy. They’re not so worried about stinging us.

  Simon watches the bees hover and dip. They circle the big flowers. They light in the black orange center. He watches them crawl busily there. They twitch their wings.

  You see these? Mrs. Dorling touches one of the floppy leaves of the sunflowers, and Simon is amazed that the bees do not bother her. Floppy, she says, like your crazy hats. These are called ray florets. They’re here to attract the bees.

  How do they know how to do all that? Simon says. Do the flowers have a brain?

  Well, Mrs. Dorling pauses. Well God knows how to do that, honey.

  * * *

  The walk home for Simon that late afternoon is over the black hill. The tobacco grows there, green rows of leaves. Soon it will be picked and put into the barns and you will smell it all fall. He likes the smell of the tobacco. There are blackbirds near the tobacco barns, flying around in those trees at the edge of the field. The trees look like spiders against the red sky. Simon can see his house from here, single-story, the roof tin in places, the old barn. The road he is walking on doesn’t do that thing anymore where it looks hot and wavy.

  He is touching his new light green T-shirt. The other shirt is tied around his waist—Mrs. Dorling tied it before he left, her arms stretching the sleeves around him, making a firm knot.