Before (9 page)

Here in the closet he grasps himself, remembering how the pain of his small shoulders, his body and the humiliation it caused, meant nothing next to that soaring. Squeezing through his trousers, surrounded by the skins of this other, regal girl. There is a honk of a car horn in the street, very close, that brings him back to reality.

Fool! What is he doing? He takes his hand roughly away from his erection and extracts himself from the closet, a brisk rustling of plastic and cloth; a moment later and he might have suffocated in his own weakness, might have lost his head enough to be discovered. He straightens out the plastic, the dresses and shirts, as best he can. The thought of Mrs. Dorling, of her eyes taking him so seriously, shames him, and he feels the blood in his face. He smoothes the bedspread and collects his cardboard container and checks the room quickly that nothing is out of place.

Very soon, he is outside again in the open darkness, slipping south, taking off the gloves and putting them in his pocket, going through the opening of the chain-link fence and onto the Trowbridge Academy lawn and emerging at Cambridge Avenue. He walks purposefully on the sidewalk. It is not hard to recover your equilibrium here, with cars passing by and shops lit brightly, an anonymous, innocent brightness, the package swinging quickly, like a pendulum, beneath your arm.

FOUR

Heart, to whom will you cry?
Wem willst du klagen, Herz?

Rainer Maria Rilke is here, in darkness on the library wall: Jiri can recite the poem from his childhood. He can touch these volumes even without light in the room; can name them in order as he paces like a captain on a quarterdeck.

Remarque, Richter, Rilke, Rumi.

Salter, Seferis, Seifert, Shirer, Sis.

kvorecky,
Steinbeck, Sterling.

So how can he remember all of this, but not when he saw Tika last? She was concerned about the adultery—the selfish damn Susan Bristol and the Australian—but whether it was this evening or yesterday, or earlier in the week—this he cannot get a fix on. He walks, leaning on his cane, trying to think it through. It must have been tonight, sometime, for there are tomatoes in the kitchen, in a bag, and those had to have been brought by Tika; he and Anna have not had Vivian Topalka over for at least a week.

He makes hardly any noise in his slippers, on this carpeted floor: Anna sleeps soundly in the next room. Here on a shelf, a square in the darkness, is a photograph of his mother and sister that he took just a few days before the Nazis came. He'd left the spool of film in his coat pocket—the same coat he'd worn during his frantic escape. Though the photograph is indistinguishable, he pictures it precisely: his mother with her arm around his sister, his sister's hand on the seat of her bike. In the cool summer morning outside their home Helena is bemused, and his mother is laughing a little after hurrying Jiri to take the picture—
Jiri, your sister will be late for work! For heaven's sake, hurry it up!
Helena climbed on the bike afterward and pushed away from the curb, and her feet gained purchase with the pedals; she waved as she turned off Andĕlu, down Nova Street, and her hair and sweater blew behind her. Jiri remembers this, and his last moments with Helena, a few nights later—Helena asleep in her room, in the darkness, a triangle of moonlight above her head—before he went to the
Kru
ina
farm.

Then, after the long run to
Plze
,
at the safe house of Dr. Jaroslav Kobera and Kobera's lover,
Bo
ena
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
Bo
ena
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
Bo
ena
were firmly on his shoulders;
Bo
ena
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
Bo
ena
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.