The Visible World (16 page)

He’d memorized the directions to the house. A man from the factory had come up to him as he walked to the train after his shift, told him the directions and how to announce himself, then veered off up the hill. They would be expecting him, he’d said. He was to put nothing on paper—ever—unless expressly told to do so. The leader’s name was Ladislav Kindl.

He appeared at the back door of the house just after dark with a rucksack on his back and the tin cup hanging from his neck half full of raspberries. The others were already there, sitting awkwardly around the living room, bits of fern stuck in the straps of their sandals. Kindl, whose house it was, introduced him. He nodded hello, then took a chair off to the side and listened. My mother, who was twenty-one that summer, sat next to Kindl’s wife on the sofa. She had come alone. My father, who was not yet my father but just a man she had come to care for, was sick in Brno.

It was the way he listened maybe, as though attending to every word being said, but from somewhere else. Or the way he would look at someone, straight on, until he had seen what he wanted. There was a kind of mild, innocent ruthlessness about it, though he himself seemed neither mild nor innocent nor particularly ruthless. He sat leaning forward on the uncomfortable chair Kindl and his wife kept in the pantry for getting preserves down from the shelves, strangely immovable, like a man looking out of a statue, and yet when he moved he moved with a smooth youthful abruptness, a complete lack of adjustment or preparation, that was somehow disconcerting. It was as if he were on fire inside, had been on fire for years, but with no way of getting at the flames, had simply learned to live with it. She looked at him, at his hands folded over each other, at his short black hair, his mouth. There was something slightly misshapen about the face, she decided. Something about him irritated her, she couldn’t quite say what.

By the time they left the house that night the moon was up and a warm wind was moving the wheat. The others had already gone: some toward Vrchovice, others toward Havlíčkův Brod, three weaving down the road to the car they’d left at the inn, their arms around one another’s shoulders, singing.

There had been a great deal to discuss. Radio contact between the government in exile and Prague had been reestablished, Kindl had informed them. President Beneš himself had communicated his gratitude from London. The expansion of existing cells of resistance in Bohemia and Moravia was now of paramount importance. London had instructed them to acquire a copy of the poem “Enthusiasm,” by Svatopluk Čech, in the World Library edition. It would be used to set up a secure code. Teams of parachutists trained by the RAF were to be dropped into the Protectorate. Every effort would have to be made to help them. They would have to be provided with the addresses of safe houses and the code names of partisans. They would need identity cards, police declaration forms, work papers, ration books. And so on.

Kindl walked out to the back fence and stood there for a while, smoking a cigarette in the dark. Nothing. No light at all. He could barely make out the silhouettes of the houses across the road. It was odd to think of the entire Protectorate—ten thousand homes, towns, cities—slipping into darkness every night, disappearing. Three years of blackouts. He looked again at the blocky shapes across the road. He didn’t like them—it was easier to see out of a dark house. Still, it was late. He waited. The wind moved. There would be mushrooms tomorrow. Christ, it was a beautiful night.

He leaned over a bit to see around the edge of the house. Before the war he could see the electric street lamp by the inn, two hundred meters away. Moths would be flying in and out of the light. He started another cigarette, then stubbed it out on the wood. He didn’t like that moon. Or the windows he knew were there.

He had oiled the hinges two days earlier, so when he lifted the latch from its bed and pushed open the low wooden gate it swung soundlessly until it thumped back against the fence. They came out of the pantry then, walking quickly: Svíčka, the girl, and three steps behind her, moving as easily as if he were going out for a game of tennis, the new man, Bém. There was something he didn’t like about him—he couldn’t say what exactly. That green shawl she’d worn around her neck that evening—or not a shawl, more like a big
šátek
of some sort—had looked old-fashioned, like something her grandmother might have given her. Strange how good it had looked with her hair.

A warm night. From the shadow of the house he watched the three of them slip through the gate, then hurry across the open ground, their number doubled by the moon. Svíčka was a good man—rational, methodical. Rumor had it that his wife knew nothing whatsoever about his activities, that he’d thought it best to hide them from her, the way another man would an affair. The forest was right there, narrow at one end, then widening out. It looked like a strip of black fabric torn from the sky and the field. Kindl breathed in a chestful of air, then slowly let it out.

The door opened quietly behind him. “Come in the house,” he heard her say from the dark.

“I’ll be right in.”

He had heard a rumor that Bém was going to England. He wondered how he would go. From Gdynia, probably, to one of the French ports. He would have gone too, once.

“It’s late. I’m tired.”

“So go to bed if you’re tired.”

They were there now. He could barely make them out against the wheat. Svíčka was still in the lead. The girl was holding her shoulder bag to her side to keep it from swinging. He’d seen her looking at the new man. It was too bad, really. He’d liked the other one better. He hoped it wouldn’t cause any difficulties.

The wheat was a low, pale wall. He watched them come up to it, then disappear, one by one.

AS THEY CROSSED THE OPEN GROUND AND STARTED UP
the path toward the wheat field, my mother could hear nothing: Svíčka’s steps, her own breathing, the slight chuff of her bag against her clothes. Nothing else. It was as though he had simply disappeared. And yet she knew he was there. She felt shaky overdrawn, but absolutely alert. The moon, the scratch of the crickets—she noticed everything. Svíčka’s legs looked like a wishbone. She wanted to laugh.

As they came up to the edge of the field it reached out to meet them—a sigh of sun-warmed grain in their faces—and then they were in, plunging arms forward like divers into that close, pale world. The moon was everywhere. It scored the double of every stalk, every seed-filled head on her legs, her arms, her shifting bag. A million soft little hands scratched and tugged and brushed her face—but why couldn’t she hear him? Two meters ahead of her, his hands up and his head turned slightly to the side, Svíčka shifted to another row. She knew what he was doing, looking for spaces, trying to walk as much as possible between the grain. It wouldn’t work. She had walked a thousand fields before this one. She shifted with him, listening. Nothing. She resisted the temptation to turn around, concentrated on following. Why had he decided to leave with them? They would have been better off without him.

And suddenly the edge of the field and then the shadow of the trees and they were out. Not far off, along the edge of the field, stood a hunter’s stand of cut pine, like a chair on stilts. She turned around now just as he stepped out of the grain, behind her. She couldn’t see his face but she could see the shape of him—his hair, his shoulders, the rucksack with its belts and straps. He walked past her and squatted down with his back against a tree, the rucksack still on his back. When the match flared she saw his face: the nose, the black hair, the impatient mouth.

He paused, holding the cigarette down by the ground, then, as if remembering, brought it up to his mouth in a big arc. She had thought he was smiling.

He was holding something out to them with his left hand.

“Go ahead,” she heard him say. “Take two.”

“Where did you get these?” Svíčka said.

“Don’t ask,” he said.

Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness now. Here and there in the forest behind them she could see spears of light cutting down through the pines, and farther off, where the trees opened, a well-lit space, like a small room between the trees, and then another, and another. The air moved, bringing the dank, loamy smell of roots, and right after it the hot, strong smell of horse and pig and oats. There would be mushrooms tomorrow. Even now they were prodding up through the loam and the black needles, their fat brown heads capped with bits of turf like the soft felt hats of cardinals.

They talked about which way to go. Vrchovice was too close, they agreed. Best to put some distance between themselves and the house. The logging roads and the trails were clearly marked, Svíčka said, and they had at least four hours of darkness left. He smiled. “It’s eighteen kilometers. If we walk hard and skip the picnic we can make it to žd’ár by dawn.”

He turned to the other one. “Are you familiar with this area?”

“No.”

“Then I suggest you take the train from Mělkovice. It is only two kilometers from žd’ár, and there is a train for Brno at five-oh-five.” He turned to my mother. “Ivana, you and I can leave from žd’ár. I have a train to Prague at six, and there’s another for Brno at six-forty-five. Does that sound all right?”

She said she thought it was a good idea.

“Then we’re agreed.”

Bém stood. A single gesture: abrupt, unhurried. There had been no adjustment of weight, no release of breath, no scrape of leather against bark. He was suddenly just standing. And my mother, sitting with her back against a huge, rough-barked pine, saw him turn to adjust a strap by his neck, and something about the way he turned at that moment opened a door inside her. It was as though she were seeing something she’d known and forgotten, something she’d loved a hundred years ago. It made no sense.

“What time do you have to be at the factory?” she heard Svíčka asking.

“I don’t,” the other said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I don’t have to be at the factory.”

“I don’t think I follow you.”

“I’m not returning to Brno.”

“Is that right? Does Kindl know about this?”

“He knows.”

Svíčka paused. “I’m sorry. I’ll need to know what happened. You understand why I have to ask.”

“I do. What always happens. We were interfering, slowing the work.”

“Someone informed on you in other words.”

“One of the lathes had been put out of commission. Some good citizen wanted to make the quota.”

“Forgive me—why didn’t the Gestapo arrest you then?” said Svíčka.

“I was out sick.”

“They didn’t come to your home?”

“They came. I wasn’t there.”

“Why didn’t they wait until all the saboteurs were present at the factory the next day. Or the day after. They’re not usually given to such errors.”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question.”

“Did you find an answer?”

“No.”

“And that satisfies you?”

“No. It doesn’t.”

Taking off his glasses, Svíčka breathed gently on the lenses, then rubbed them with a handkerchief. “This complicates things.”

“Does it?”

For just a moment, a tiny moon appeared in one of the lenses, then disappeared. “I’m afraid it does, yes. We have to assume they’re after you.”

“They’re after all of us.”

“There’s a difference,” said Svíčka quietly.

Bém took a long drag of his cigarette, then turned it into the dirt with his heel. “You’re right,” he said. “I should go.” He looked at my mother, sitting with her arms around her knees in the dark. “Goodbye,” he said, “I’m sorry we...” He nodded, then turned to go.

It was Svíčka who stopped him. “Wait,” he said—and that word was the pivot on which everything turned. Everything. Or maybe not. Maybe she came to see it as the thing that only made visible what had been coming their way forever, calmly measuring its steps even as they played and grew, fought and lost, separated now by fifty kilometers, now by five, even as my father and I waited patiently in the wings, as the theater began to darken...Maybe that one word simply served to flush the situation into the open so it could breathe and leap before being run into the ground like a crippled stag.

“Wait,” Svíčka said, and the other stopped and turned in a white stripe of light that cut him shoulder to thigh like a bandolier. It was night, Svíčka said. A weekday. They could cover the first eighteen kilometers together, then separate at the turnoff for Mělkovice.

They would be safer alone, the other said.

“Nonsense,” Svíčka said. “Everyone would be safer alone—don’t you agree?” he asked my mother. Besides, it was well after midnight, he said. No one but the devil would be out in the forest that late.

As they set off along the perimeter of the field, my mother turned around. In the woods behind them the changing angle of the moon had erased entire rooms and expanded others into great misshapen halls filled with one-legged tables and elfin chairs, richly upholstered with moss.

The logging road was long and straight, like a road in a dream, and they walked hard for the first hour, passing crossroads where logs as thick as men had been piled head-high in the ditch. Eventually a stream joined them. They could hear it burbling to itself in the dark, running through the grassy tunnels that cut under the road, then back. When it passed beneath them a third time Svíčka said they had to watch for the trail, and when they found the thumb-sized marker on the pine, its white frame barely visible in the shadows, Bém stepped up to it and lit a match, cupping the flare in his hands, and she saw the blue.