Before (18 page)

Four other Resistance men lie beside him, along with Alena and Hana Krásová, a Jewish woman in her forties who has joined them recently. There are another eight Resistance members directly opposite, on the other side of the tracks, hidden well behind large stones and brush. The forest floor is cold and you can feel the early breath of winter coming from it.

Now, from behind the abandoned warehouse, three men, headed by the figure of Dr. Kobera, jog quickly down the opposite side of the tracks. The men bend over the rails and organize sticks of dynamite there, where the rails are curving, and then run back toward the warehouse, their heads down, crouching, and they are gone behind the wall and corrugated tin roof and Jiri ducks and there is a massive
crack
splitting the air, cinder and wood debris settling like a harsh shower of rain, and when he looks up some of the debris is still floating over the milky sun. Jiri brings the submachine gun close to him; it smells of oil. He has three of these German egg grenades, also, hanging over his shoulder, resting on the ground now between him and a man in his thirties named Mulák. Jiri glances out at the fresh destruction on the tracks, a rail twisting savagely away from the smooth curve, two of the ties upended; one of the men—it looks from here like
tĕpán
Pet
ík—has
run out and is kicking the ties, to no avail, to at least lay them flat, and the other two men run out and try to help, but the upended wood is stubborn and they give it up and jog again behind the warehouse.

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.
Jedli
ka;
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
nem
ů
u
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.