Before (2 page)

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The boy lies in the forest. He listens for any sound that might tell him what is happening with his mother and father and Helena. He hears the cicadas and the truck engines; the moon slips behind a parade of clouds and his village becomes dark.

At least, by now, his family will know that he's seen the Germans, that he will have the sense to stay away. He thinks:
If the Germans are rounding up citizens for questioning, they soon will know that I am not among the others. They will get records from the Town Hall.
His mother will say that he is overnight in the mine barracks. But how long will it take before they check with the Kladno mine and find out that he is not? And what will that suggest? What will happen to his family then?

He will wait here, hidden, until the Germans have done whatever they came to do—a search only, he hopes,
please God,
and then over. There is a girl down there named Marie
P
íhodová
that he has been seeing lately. He thinks of her now at her window, looking out at the soldiers, her eyes wide with fear, calling back to her family. A few days ago, at that wall on Spálená where the German trucks have lined up, he held her under those oak and willow trees. He remembers the sound of her voice close to his ear that evening; how they stayed there, holding each other, in their dark village. The smell of her hair. Now she, now his family, now his friends, are watching the Nazi troops from their windows, and Jiri's throat tightens and he can hardly swallow.

There is sweat beneath his hair and at his neck. Sometimes he puts his head down on his forearms. His eyelids are eventually so heavy that at two in the morning he cannot help falling into a restless sleep.
He is in the village church, and Christ hangs against the stained glass windows; he is a child and impetuous, and his parents are admonishing him. His best wool suit itches; he wants to be out, running free with his friends on the endless green, the fresh-cut grass smell, of the soccer fields. Helena is trying to keep from laughing at him, her eyes alight at his antics, and then her face turns in shock to a sound.

It is a gunshot, and Jiri is awake. The crack echoes over the fields. Jiri can hear the faint screaming of a woman. He swallows, getting up again on one knee near the trunk of a poplar, watching, straining to see anything beyond the few shapes. In the field below the Germans stand, implacable dots, every few meters. Two distant rifle shots are fired almost simultaneously, and there is wailing from women and children. Jiri curses, clenches and unclenches his fists. The onion steeple is growing more distinct, and the steep church roof becomes dark red; a megaphone says something fast, unintelligible. Jiri looks at his watch: It is four forty-seven. How could he have slept so bloody long? The hours at the mine have drained him lately. Still, he should not have let it happen. He works his hands together, rubs his head with his fists, alternates between crouching and rising to watch the village. He stares desperately at the church.

What is his sister doing now? Are her eyes in fear, and are the Germans pushing her and his father and mother this way and that with their rifles? The thought of it makes him rage. And what about Marie—has she been ordered into the street in the morning, as the Nazis tear apart her home in their search for Resistance equipment? Birds flutter above him, sail over the lightening gray valley. He stares at the rooftops, wiping his face with his hand, closing his eyes, trying to think of something he might do. But every alternative puts him in the hands of the Nazis, too, gives his family, Marie, the horror of seeing him captured, probably shot.

Someone is in unimaginable grief down there; perhaps it is he, Jiri, who should be in grief. There was a funeral in town a few weeks ago, for old man
B
íza,
the grocery owner. Jiri thinks of the carriage that bore the coffin, the clopping of the horses, the glossy, varnished wood of the hearse reflecting the cobblestones, and how as the procession went through town wounded German soldiers watched, many of them on crutches, smoking cigarettes, their eyes distant or indifferent; Father Steribeck led the long line of mourners up to the cemetery. Jiri remembers the sad but defiant procession as they turned against the sky; the wife and three sons at the grave, the stillness of them, the leaves of the willows and poplars trembling.

The muted bell of St. Martin's Church rings five times. A group of trucks leaves the village, moving quickly down the highway. Jiri sees the low trail of dust behind them. There is a barricade on the road; he watches the trucks slow and then again pick up speed. The sky is coming in overcast; clouds gather heavily over the few fading stars. He can smell the wetness of coming rain. The birds are beginning their chattering.

Then the morning is broken by a volley of gunshots. It seems to explode with its suddenness and terror inside of Jiri.

He watches from his place in the trees, weeping, his hands in fists. The sound has come from the southwest, the direction of his home. Fifteen minutes later there is another volley from the same place. It echoes and rolls over the small valley.

He nearly runs into the village—
to do what, precisely?
He can die with his family. That would be something.
No: I will not go in and die.
He cannot imagine giving that to his mother as one of her last memories. The thought of him free is probably the last thing sustaining her now.
If she, if they are still alive.
He weeps, trying to keep his choking throat silent.

Another volley. Distant, angry shouting of men;
Jiri realizes through his panic that he is not hearing the hysterical sounds of women and children. Might his mother and sister and Marie have been in the trucks? Suddenly, he is sure that is the case: The women and children are being brought elsewhere. He stares at the black, wet strip of highway, the village, the last, hazy moon and stars overhead.

Father,
he thinks.

Another volley. The sky opening on this horror. A scattering of blackbirds and kestrels from the trees.
I should go and die with him like a man.

He would say no. He would say, Find out what has happened with your sister and your mother, where they have been taken.

A ragged explosion of gunshots. Jiri clenches his jaw and, crying, swings on the rucksack and turns back in a crouch toward the forest and runs: scuttling like a crab, then standing straight, willing his thighs to move, his lungs heaving. Runs and walks and stumbles and runs again, making sounds in his throat of hysterical grief and rage, shaking his head back and forth.

The forest darkens and the rain comes hard and slants through the trees and Jiri hears the
huh huh huh
of his body fighting with each step.

I

ONE

Cambridge, Massachusetts: September 10, 2001

The pigeons flutter and sail through the city. They light over the vacant eyes of Demosthenes, high on Memorial Hall; they swoop beneath the leaves of Harvard Yard and crowd the rooftops above Massachusetts Avenue. It is four o'clock on a stunning fall day.

In the speech therapy office on Story Street, where shades are drawn against the late sunlight, Jiri Posselt is writing. He fills in the ovals that his therapist, Marjorie Legnini, insists upon, these areas at the top and bottom of the page meant to sharpen and gather his memory.

Who:
Me

What:
coming back from the
Kru
inas

Where:
Lidice

When:
June 1942

Jiri feels his wife, Anna, and Marjorie Legnini across the circular table, watching him carefully. He can hear the ticking of the clock over Marjorie's desk, and though he writes with the help of a lamp, Jiri senses late afternoon sunlight hovering on the large fern in the corner; ribbons glow on the rug and partially across Marjorie's desk. The figure
1942
hovers at him, rising from the page as if in conspiracy, but he closes his eyes a moment and thinks of the village at night below him, and when he opens his eyes the hovering has stopped and he is able to lean forward and apply himself again to the writing. He writes for a long time.

Jiri feels then Marjorie Legnini leaning over him; in the shadowed room she has come around the table and is watching his lines, and he feels her nodding and then—a strange series of sounds—she is quiet and then weeping, and Jiri glances up to confirm this—tears trickling down her cheekbone—and he quickly stares down at the page. He's faced a great deal of sentimentality himself since his strokes six months ago, and he is frankly uncomfortable with it; sometimes he will find himself weeping in the shower, beneath the torrent of water, from the smallest goddamn thing—a song heard on his shower radio, a remembered, hopeful face of one of the teenagers down here in Harvard Square, these kids with all their heavy damn makeup and hair every which way and their black clothes, walking about like sad crows. The open weeping has something to do with the way his brain has changed, and when it comes he cannot control it.

Marjorie moves back to her seat again, and Anna puts a hand over those of the young woman. Jiri watches them: Anna in her light blue sweater and with her glasses on her nose, and Marjorie in her white short-sleeved shirt, the lines of wetness beneath her eyes. Anna says: “It is hard to think of all this.”

“I've had an easy life,” Marjorie says, wiping the back of her hand over her cheek, recomposing herself. “I really see that when I think of what you people went through.”

“Well,” Jiri says, quietly. He clears his throat, emotional himself, his mouth firm. Marjorie is a good, earnest kid, maybe thirty-two years old, usually fairly jolly, and Jiri always looks forward to the individual and group sessions with her, joking with her, working hard on memory games, on his speech patterns; he isn't quite sure how to handle this, these tears, and is grateful to look up and realize that she has collected herself.

“I don't usually get like that,” she says, smiling, her eyes shining.

“It's good,” Anna tells her, still holding a hand over one of Marjorie's. “It means you care. Believe me, not all medical people are as caring as you are.”

Jiri nods very seriously and then concentrates again on his paragraph. His writing is even and running straight across the page; it does not seem that he has repeated any words. He looks up at his therapist hopefully. “I think I've managed to finish it,” he says.

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In March, as he was standing at the garage just behind his apartment building, Jiri's vision suddenly turned white; he saw his wife, the blue cinder of the drive, the large sumac bush by the chain-link fence, all becoming pale, disappearing. He said,
My God, Anna, something is wrong.
At St. Leonard's Hospital he was told he'd had a transient ischemic attack—a ministroke; on his second night there, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain and the pressure of the blood damaged his vision, particularly in his left eye. Two months later, still in recovery, he suffered another stroke that left him with halting language. With Marjorie's help his speech has steadily gotten better (sometimes now he gets through one or two paragraphs without thinking about them) and his eyesight is stabilizing, though he has trouble with bright light—it can even be painful—and with the letters piling up and hovering weirdly during reading. His short-term memory, too, is still often uncertain.