Lights Out in the Reptile House (29 page)

He found it after a few minutes' walk. The new owners had put an addition over his porch, and there were flower boxes on the balcony. When he tried to get a better look a woman poked her head through the kitchen window and told him to get away from the house or he'd be explaining his sightseeing to the Security Service. He spent the rest of the day down by the waterfront, watching the loading and unloading of cargo.

He returned to the Golden Angel after dark and went up to his room and lay on the bed with his hands behind his head. The room had a small round clock on the desk and he watched its hands move. When it was past ten someone knocked. Leda came in and shut the door behind her as if there were wolves in the hallway. She was furious, she said, and ashamed and sorry, and she felt terrible for him. He got off the bed and went to her with no clear idea of what he was doing and put his arms around her and kissed her. She kissed him back, her hands on his head and arms and then his head again, and they reeled around the room, bumping things, putting a hand out every so often to steady themselves, and she was crying and he kissed her more passionately for that. He eased her onto the bed and she looked up at him, intent on his expression, whatever it was. The moment was frozen and detached from itself and from what seemed to have gone before. Their kisses were intent and noisy and her lips were glazed under his. He pulled at her clothing and she pulled at his. Her skin when he touched it was so delicate that he left pink spots that resisted fading. He had his clothes off, all but a shoe, and hers were in a tangle near them. She had her hands on the back of his neck and was still looking at him intently. She scratched herself so that the bed shook. That sense of a revelatory something about to happen returned, and she laughed, looking at him, at his expression, laughed at the suddenness of his own transition from not seeing to seeing the extent of her love for him.

Somebody came to the door and knocked a few minutes later. Leda pulled her legs up and covered herself with the bedspread in terror, and Karel rose to all fours on the bed and waited. There was some muttering and a voice outside the door said, “Whoops whoops whoops,” and then they heard rapid steps heading down the corridor the opposite way.

“Oh, God,” Leda said. He settled beside her and hugged her, and she shifted and got up and turned off the overhead light and switched on the little desk lamp. Then she pulled the covers back and got under them, and he followed.

She huddled against him. He was still excited but thought maybe he should just hold her. Just before, she'd been worried and careful even through her passion and had frustrated his attempts to enter her. He kissed her again, and she made a pleased sound. They were quiet for a long time and he realized she was beginning to doze. He heard the light uneven sound of rain beginning on the window, and then it accelerated, the droplets on the glass catching light against the darkness and slipping individually down the pane. He hadn't heard or felt rain for months. The window was open a crack and he could feel the dampness in the air outside the blankets. He imagined the wet terrace of a nearby café, the waiter wiping slabs of tables. He turned to Leda, determined to watch her all night, to remember everything.

It was still raining. The window curtains bellied in the wind. He brushed a damp hair from her ear and drifted a thumb across her temple. Her hair was still slightly pungent from the sun and the ocean. He ran the tip of his tongue lightly along her bottom lip and kissed the place at the outside of her eye where he imagined her tear duct to be. She murmured something in her sleep or half-sleep about his being so nice, and he had the impression that even her hidden thoughts were innocent, that she had no secrets or only virtuous ones, and he was overwhelmed with his good fortune at being here with her. He found himself considering and reconsidering her sleeping profile with the tenderness that someone going blind would have for what he still sees.

Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up, with a quiet start. She took his face in her hands and kissed him, and when he moved up against her small noises flowed out of her with a kind of thrilling ease. He understood her reticence with certain things and so wished he knew better what he was doing in terms of pleasing her, wanted his touching to be not only tender but intelligent. She pulled him closer and he wanted to be everywhere she was, imagined himself dissolving like sugar in her mouth. She stopped him again after a while and said she was sorry, and he said no, don't be sorry. She lay still after that with her mouth to his ear and then she said, “Listen. I was going to wait, but listen.”

He moved back on his pillow and waited. Somewhere in the distance the rain was hitting the metal roof of a shed like far-off pebbles in a pan.

She sighed. She stroked his arm and then sighed again, with more resolve. “We keep saying we don't know what to do,” she said. “And everything we hear is a little worse than the last thing we heard. Only a little worse. That's how it works; you wait for the next thing, and then the next thing, and
then
you'll do something.”

Karel took a deep breath and blinked with shame.

“My mother sees how bad it is and still she says I'm an alarmist. I
am
an alarmist. Now she says it's too late and we didn't stop it, so now what?

“We have to do something,” she said, when he didn't respond. “The people I talk to can't imagine changing anything. There's this—reverence, for what they assume
must've
existed at some point.” He felt the intensity of her desire to understand, and her frustration. He took her hand and squeezed it.

“I want you to help me,” she said.

He didn't want to hear this. “What?” he asked.

“There's no point in trying to put him in jail, or get people to overthrow him,” she whispered. “Everybody's sworn allegiance to him personally.”

“What are you thinking? What are you trying to do?” Karel said.

“We have to kill him,” Leda said. “I don't know how yet. I don't even know if it's possible. But I think somebody's got to kill him.”

Karel was staring at her. The roof was going to fall in, spilling Kehr on the bed. Holter was going to break in the door and take them away.

She turned to him and took his face in her hands again, holding it the way he held newborn rabbits. “If it isn't possible it isn't,” she said. “But we should be finding out. We're not infants anymore. Maybe now that we're together there really is here somewhere a way to act, maybe all we have to do is
look
a little for it. I'm
ashamed
of myself sometimes. It's like I think I'm just here to sit and wait. I'd like to find out if I
am
all just talk.”

“They'll kill us,” Karel whispered. “Are you crazy?”

“It's dangerous right
now,
” Leda said. “You think all those people who disappeared did something?”

He thought of the young man in the prisoner assessment room and put his hands over his eyes.

“They'd kill everybody,” he said. “They'd go crazy.”

“We'd only do it if we could do it,” she said. She came closer and kissed him, and then held him, his chin on her shoulder.

It was as if she held his fears a little bit, and settled them. He began to recognize a war inside him between the responsibility she was talking about and his old self, and he tried to settle back to observe it, like a spectator. He imagined himself learning to cherish what she cherished instead of just his own happiness and hers, imagined himself opening up to her, confessing his silence, his cowardice, his complicity, and being forgiven and purified. His mind wandered to the beach in the darkness and the rain, and he felt that he was unable to anticipate what was going to happen, that the future stood with its back to him.

“All the good I've tried to do I didn't just do for its own sake,” Leda whispered. “I did it to look good. I did it for myself.”

He told her no and held her and decided he'd help, he'd do it even though nothing about him was heroic, because she was precious to him and it meant everything to her. She said, I won't let anything happen to you, and it was her mothering voice, the moved, fearful one she used with her brothers, and he said, no, no, nothing'll happen to us, and held her and prayed that whatever would come would at least spare her.

He wasn't sure if he woke up slowly or just never slept. It was extra cold outside the blankets and the solid things in the room were darkening as the space around them paled and took on light. It was still raining and the darkness outside was blue.

He heard keys in locks and the squeak of a metal cart and imagined an old woman in black making the bed next door, smoothing wrinkled white sheets with her palm. He lay still, pondering a mysterious reflection in the mirror over the washbasin: a stripe and the corner of something wooden he couldn't identify when he looked around the room. A swallow scissored past the window.

Leda sat up, abruptly, and wrapped herself in the outer blanket against the chill and then padded barefoot to the door and went into the hall to the bathroom. He got up and put his two shirts on and wished again he had long pants. His shirts smelled. He crossed to the window and gazed down to the street. People were up already, walking quickly with light short steps because of the rain. In a men's shop through the streaked display window he could see little hats on pegs, only now becoming visible.

Leda came back in and crossed the room and hugged him, and then tried to get dressed while keeping the blanket on her shoulders. She spread her elbows and shivered, and the blanket tented out and flapped with her movements. Karel stayed by the window and thought of the kind of peace she brought for him to particular objects like the blanket or moments like this morning. Outside dew had frosted the hood of a parked car, and he registered two soldiers standing beside it, their arms folded. There was something else wrong and his mind was about to remark on it when the old metal washbasin near Leda rang softly and she said their first words of the morning: There, I'm finished, and the door banged and crashed open with such force that she seemed to be thrown backward not so much from the shock as the concussion of air.

Four men swept into the room wearing army shirts and civilian pants and two of them pulled the blanket up and over Leda's head and wrapped it tightly around her and one produced some rope. Karel rushed to her and the fourth man hit him across the face with what felt like a small flat plank and a thousand stars sprayed the room, and while he rolled on the floor arms grabbed and pinned him and they put a small paper bag over his head and locked his hands behind his back with a series of sliding bars that squeezed his wrists. He felt and heard loose grains around his head in the bag and realized it was an empty sugar bag. Leda was screaming for help, muffled under the blanket, and they told her to stop or they'd kill her. He heard the grunts as they lifted her and then they pulled him up and shoved him from behind, and led him into the hall and down the stairs and out of the building at a great rush, orienting him with twists or pulls of his neck and shoulders. They were piled into a car. Leda kept calling his name and he would say,
I'm here,
his voice harsh and trapped in the sugar bag, and then she cried out when they hit her to quiet her down. There was something wrong with the car, it wouldn't start, and eventually he had to get out and they unlocked his hands and told him to leave the bag on his head and he had to push with two other men at the back of the car until it started. They were quiet the rest of the way until Leda said, her voice still muffled, Why are you doing this? This is a mistake, and then the man beside Karel who was still breathing heavily from the pushing asked her angrily if she had any idea what was involved in an operation like this. Arms, civilian coordination, training centers, transports, intelligence gathering, paperwork: did she think all that operated in the service of mistakes? And the man in the front seat told him to shut up.

Then they were rushing along a corridor, with spaces he could feel opening out and closing suddenly behind him, as in a dream, and he felt a chill at his back from not knowing what was around him. Someone said Here, and he heard a heavy metal door swing open, and he touched his palm and fingertips to the rough wall beside him as a last gesture before they shoved him through the doorway.

He heard voices and had the impression of a large room and was pushed down to a sitting position against a stone wall, scraping his back. The sugar bag was removed and his handcuffs taken off.

Leda was beside him. She hugged him. They were in a huge dark cell with a low ceiling. The walls were lined with sitting or squatting people. Some had bundles and small overnight bags. The floor was cold with seepage and he felt it through his shorts, so he got up into a crouch. Leda was on her knees.

An officer of the Civil Guard sat at the table near the door, flanked by two soldiers. The officer said, “You new arrivals should turn your valuables in here, voluntarily. At the depot there's a lot of stealing goes on.” He was addressing the group around Karel and Leda. Karel looked at the man beside him, and the man looked away timorously, like someone too shy to acknowledge an invitation. A few people got up and crossed to the table.

He could hear sobbing from around the room and realized there were a lot of women and children here. “Thank God they haven't got my family,” Leda whispered, and he understood she'd noticed, too. She seemed both more frightened and more despairing, and he wondered if that meant he was courageous or ignorant.

He could smell moldy clothing. An older man on the other side of the room stared at him hopelessly. He tried another direction and a woman asked him sharply what he was looking at. He moved closer to Leda.

They stayed there for hours. New people were brought in occasionally. Karel and Leda shoved over to make room along the wall. A boy David's age was thrown to his knees so hard he skidded on them. The soldier who did it gave him an apple afterward. They boy sat whimpering against his mother, holding the apple.