Before (24 page)

The city is dark beneath the suddenly fierce winter rain, and water flows freely in the areas cleared of rubble. People seem to walk endlessly through the thoroughfares, the rain darkening their shoulders. Jiri sees a man, both of his legs amputated, riding on the shoulders of a friend. Women in shawls walk briskly beneath the window; he sees buildings where windows are burned-out holes, chimneys standing with no structure around them, like fingers pointing at the sky. There is a gathering of prostitutes at a corner two streets away, huddled beneath the eave of a blackened building, waiting for evening customers.

It is as if the war never ended, as if the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun still flicker with gasoline flames in the Chancellery garden. This is the Europe Hitler has left behind: these empty, crumbling shapes that beneath rain look like ancient ruins. Nine million human beings roam, finding what shelter they can. German teenage girls are raped by gangs of Polish orphans in alleys near the railroad stations. Jews are in a massive exodus (just this morning Jiri has walked by graffiti on this street reading,
Jude, verrecke! Croak, Jew!
), to France and the port of Haifa, and finally to their new country, which has been etched into history with violence. The darkness of Communism is strangling Czechoslovakia, sending those strong enough and brave enough, like Anna and those left of her family, over the
umava
Mountains to West Germany. Sometimes the Czech guides hired for these journeys are criminals who shoot their clients, leave them for dead, take suitcases with life savings. Jiri sets his jaw. He would like to meet such traitorous sons of bitches.

Dr. Kobera's group has come as an entire cell to Germany to assist United States intelligence, and the U.S. Army has requested Jiri's services on a steady basis, and he has, quite surprisingly, found that he has a career as a translator. He arrives, in civilian clothes, each day at the offices above and is then dispatched to Válka or to other nondescript buildings in Nuremberg; he interviews ordinary Czechoslovak citizens, and statesmen, and professors, helping counterintelligence create a constantly changing mosaic of the Czech nation with information from these refugees.
In what shape are the roads in your town?
he asks.
Are the bridges still functioning? Where have the Communists built military bunkers, do you know? How much do you know about the Communist dignitaries in your area? Can you tell us anything about any other military activities you have seen?
The refugees are paid eight marks for their information, and some wave off the money, saying it is only their patriotic duty to tell Jiri what they can; the hair-raising journey beneath the machine-gun towers and searchlights has left them furious that their home has, once again, been occupied.

Jiri shrugs his shoulders to release tension, turns his head from the winter window.

He has files here, spread across one of the long wooden tables, photographs taken by the precise SS to document their extermination of the inferior races of the world. He has gone through the photographs methodically from June 1942 on, a project so far of ten months, hoping against hope for a miracle, that he shall see his mother and sister somewhere, have, finally, an answer to how they perished. For he believes they are gone now, that somehow, with all of his searching, he would have found them. He is searching for himself, and for his father, to have answers.

Below him, a crime unfolds near the Baltic Sea: An SS trooper aims his rifle at a woman huddling with her child while frantic peasants dig a grave a few feet away. The huddling is efficient for the SS man; the woman and child can be killed with one shot. Jiri leans forward with the glass, looking carefully at the anguished faces of the peasants behind; there are some women, but none remotely resembling Jana or Helena. Soon enough, the mother and child are dead—a moment of the mother's body recoiling, the child falling, arms outstretched—the bodies quickly pulled and shoved into the grave, buried by the others. Then the peasants are shot as well. In another series Einsatzgruppen men sit and stand casually with rifles and pistols at the edges of death pits, where beneath them naked arms and legs are splayed, akimbo, in moments after shootings, some victims still alive. In a Russian city, an Einsatzgruppen killer beats a Russian woman savagely with a stick; the photograph catches the German with a grimace on his face as he delivers the death blows. Jiri goes over the faces of other prisoners watching nearby. Three women—none his mother or sister. A boy looks up in horror at his father, who strokes his head as the beating goes on. As hardened as he is, Jiri still catches himself full of emotion, and sometimes he can suddenly swear, especially seeing the children, their last moments on the earth visited by such horrors.

Here in a new set of prints women near the Baltic Sea lie naked on a knoll, a gentle sea of flesh. One of the Einsatzgruppen men who soon will kill them stands in the foreground, a dark figure with a rifle, a violent intrusion on the curving forms. Then he and other dark figures are firing, and there is blood from the women, some trying to run, and at the crest of the hill one woman has her arm protectively over another. Jiri looks carefully, but none of the faces in the foreground that he can make out belong to him; the women at the top of the hill are silhouettes against a white sky. Furious wind gusts at the window, a sudden drumming. Jiri looks up, and the glass is shuddering. He stands and walks to the window, and below in the street a prostitute is taking the arm of a man, and they huddle beneath an umbrella. The spokes of the umbrella are bending with the force of the wind.

Jiri goes on to the next file, marked
Ukraine
. After spending another futile hour with his magnifying glass, keeping careful note of those files he has looked through (a notebook now almost completely filled with identifying numbers and descriptions in his heavy pen), he takes his raincoat and shuts off the lights.

He has only a short journey home on the Autobahn, just outside the city, but he watches his speed; it feels idiotic, with other Germans speeding by him, but the MPs have lately been enforcing the 55 mph speed limit on cars with U.S. government plates to save fuel. He tries to push the dreadful SS images away from him—to leave them in that room, and to think only of the cardboard boxes he must ask his landlady for, for a neat job of packing the three Christmas coats—to think of Anna's eyes lighting at his attention to her family. He shall listen to his radio this evening, Sinatra and Benny Goodman; he shall wrap his presents. He plays the music every night; he needs the trumpet voice of Sinatra, the silk notes of Benny's clarinet to keep the horrific SS images at bay, just enough to sleep. Perhaps he will need, as he does sometimes, to drug himself with aspirin. The rain is letting up, and the night fog makes the trees here at the sides of the highway look like ghostly etchings. A moon is emerging from behind the clouds.

*   *   *

The moth insists at the screen. Jiri is on the St. Martin's roof over Lidice. He is working with Emile Hodja. In the street below Helena is riding her bicycle. It is fall. You cannot see her flesh, for she wears gloves and she is dressed in black, with a wide hat that hides her face, but Jiri is certain it is his sister, for he sees the bracelet on her wrist—the only color on her body. He is calling to her but she does not see him. She just keeps gliding over cobblestones, soundlessly, through a very empty Lidice. Behind him, Emile Hodja is whispering, fiercely,
Jiri.

“Jiri.”

Jiri wakes. It does not make sense that the light is on at night, for the Nazis will see it, and there will be a harsh knocking at the door, terrible reprisals. Amazingly bright light. Everything is too immediate. The vinyl tablecloth—roosters set in a beige crosshatched pattern—why in the hell hadn't he and Anna, in all of their years of marriage, gotten something a little more artistic to put on their table?

“Jiri!”
Anna gently lifts his head from where it lies, on the book, the smell of the paper still in Jiri's nostrils, the pen still in his hand. The moth is trying for the light, bumping the screen. The light is too goddamn bright. He is not sure where his magnifying glass has gone to. It was here in his hand a moment ago.

“I've been looking,” he says.

Anna sits next to him in her robe, staring at him through her glasses. She rubs his cheekbone, holds his jaw.

“I've been looking,” Jiri repeats. Just a moment ago he saw those ghostly trees reaching through the fog.

“Are you all right?” Anna says. “Should we go to the hospital?”

Jiri thinks of nurses probing for his veins, the sharp pin of the needle going in. He hates the goddamn needles. Sitting in bloody waiting rooms, going into dimly lit bathrooms that smell of urine and antiseptic and men's sweat. The forced cheer of nurses, the occasional sharp arrogance of one doctor or another. He seems all right, for Christ's sake. He says so.

“Who is the president of the United States?” Anna says.

“I wish I didn't know,” Jiri says.

“Jiri,
who
?”

“Daddy's boy. George W.”

“What state are you in?”

“Massachusetts. We saw the fire performers this afternoon.”

“Well, that's something, anyway,” Anna says. “You gave me a scare.” She strokes his cheek. “I'll put on some soup,” she says.

And this is good now, better. He pushes his writing aside. What the hell was he thinking, writing like a madman? It happens sometimes now, that when he starts to feel he is recovering some function of brain or body, he immediately overdoes it. He needs to take it easy, breathe the cool evening, listen to the sound of his wife's voice.

Anna moves in her kitchen, speaking to him, as Jiri tries to collect his thoughts. It is September 2001, he tells himself. Many things are long past. Markéta is all right; she is in Seattle, and there is always a chance that she might come home with her job and husband—if he can find work here—in a year or so. Tika is on a date with Jesse, and he's a good kid, he's serious enough, he'll look after her. It seems Tika was here for dinner tonight but Jiri is a little uncertain of this. On the radio recently—tonight?—the NPR people were talking about that Washington intern who has disappeared. He feels for the poor damn parents. Hell, if it were Markéta or Tika, he would be on a crusade of no mercy. He would shake that congressman's neck until the guy spilled it. The son of a bitch.

They sit at the table with the lentil soup. Jiri tries to concentrate on the light conversation of his wife, tries not to think of the world of the dead, this place he hovers in now sometimes. He looks down to where his car is, is just beginning to form the words
I hope I'll be driving again soon
to Anna, when Anna suddenly is saying, “Wait, Jiri, I hear something. I just heard something.” Her hand touches his forearm to silence him, and Jiri waits and then, through the night, they hear a woman scream.

THIRTEEN

Alison Tiner has left her door open, and Ghost-Man puts his groceries down on the outdoor step and takes out his legal package with the knife and unties the twine and goes right in after her.

The dark wood hallway smells of Alison: aloe and oils and glues, and of long days spent thinking about the position of things on canvas. There are tongue-and-groove thin-stained boards on the ceiling and walls here. A sharp smell of flowers, in a vase on the hall table. The meth seems to make his thighs sing, his shoulders float. He hears her in the kitchen, follows. She is turning on an overhead light, the grocery bag crackling as she sets it down on the counter. The kitchen is wide, with a butcher-block table, and Alison Tiner has turned—realizing that someone is directly following her. She drops the white bag she is holding and she is screaming, the rice splitting on the wood floor, hissing white and thin, and Ghost-Man is looking at it with horror, then holding up one hand as if in surrender, trying to explain.

“Just
listen,
” he says as calmly as he can, in the midst of that female bellowing, that face contorting, lips drawn back away from teeth.

She screams,
“Get out get
out
of my house, oh my God get out—”

The sound of Alison Tiner seems to explode through the room. He couldn't tell her about Christ before, about what it must have been like
to have had a Roman soldier with his knee holding down your elbow, driving a spike through your wrist
. To tell her about how if you took your lover to Brazil you would see the blood on the statues and maybe that would be good for you, to see reality instead of your little fucked-up yuppie Cambridge. It is hard to express everything, now that he's actually speaking to her; he finds that his voice is shaking. He is staring from her to that rice.

She is drawn back against the counter, yelling,
“Fire! Oh God, fire—”

“Just
li
sten to me,” Ghost-Man says, beginning to shout also. “I'll tell you just
one fuck
ing thing and then I'll
fuck
ing go, all right?
Fuck.
Just fucking listen.”