The Visible World (24 page)

And then it was just him and Opálka. A trolley went by. He could feel the fear now, like a physical thing, like a train in his body, one valley over. It was time. The boy with the dog had disappeared. He hadn’t noticed him go.

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, LESS THAN SIX HOURS AFTER
she saw him turn and disappear around the bend of the road to Mělkovice, my mother stood waiting outside the Škoda factory in Adamov.

A darkening day. The women with the bowls of vitamin pills were already in place inside the steel-and-barbed-wire gates, waiting for the night shift. She heard the whistle and soon they were streaming out, thick with fatigue. She recognized him in the crowd, and she watched him walk up the broad avenue between the black, hangar-like buildings that seemed to fill that valley, then turn toward the security gate. He walked alone. He was wearing a blue factory uniform and a short jacket and carrying a lunch pail.

My father saw her standing across the road on the root-cracked sidewalk, and simply stopped. The crowd bumped and ground around him. She saw his shoulder jerk forward when someone shoved him and then he was walking across the cobbled road on which a line of canvas-covered trucks waited, halted by the river of men headed for the train station.

He stopped a few meters away. My mother saw him glance at the sandy patch of grass by the sidewalk, then up the valley. He nodded slightly, as though remembering something someone once said. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much he loved her.

“Are you all right?” he said finally.

She nodded. “I need to talk to you,” she said.

“No need.”

“I know. Still.”

He nodded again. She knew him. There would be no scene, no cinder-in-the-eye. He had his pride. He would make it easy for her.

“When did you get home?” he asked.

“Yesterday.”

“I love you,” he said. “Does that matter?”

“It matters,” she said.

He smiled. A smile like a spasm. “But not enough.”

“No.”

My father nodded and then, setting his lunch pail gently on the sidewalk, unpeeled his glasses from around his ears and began wiping the lenses with his handkerchief. There was nothing in his eye. She looked away. One of the women holding the bowl of pills by the gate was checking the heel of her shoe.

“We still have to work together,” he said.

“I know.”

“Can you do that?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can you?”

He picked up his lunch pail. “Is this what you want, Ivana?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him. “It is.”

“You love him that much?”

“Yes.”

“I see.” My father put his glasses back on, winding them carefully around his ears. “I should go,” he said. “You’ll be all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” said my mother.

“Well...” He smiled, the way a man might smile while pulling a long splinter out of his arm. “I keep thinking I should kiss you goodbye.”

She was well down the sidewalk when she heard him call her name. He was standing by a bench with two slats missing from the back. She’d known him well. “There’s something you should know,” he said.

She waited.

“I want you to know that I’ll be here,” he said.

“Don’t...,” she began. “I don’t...”

“I know you don’t,” my father said. “But I’ll be here when he’s gone.” And he turned and walked away down the sidewalk.

That evening my father walked out of the Brno railroad station. He crossed the avenue to the trolley stop and took the trolley home to the corner by the butcher’s, closed now, then walked up the hill to his parents’ apartment overlooking the courtyard. And he woke at four in the morning and did it all again, backward: the unlit streets, the blacked-out train, the passengers groping for seats like the blind. And that evening when he walked out through the post and barbed-wire gate past the guards and the women with the vitamin pills he looked across the street, in spite of himself, to see if she was there, then turned toward the railway station with the others.

He couldn’t stop the thinking and he didn’t try. He thought about her when he walked up the square, where they used to walk together, or past the little tilting street that led to the Špilberk Castle gardens where they had planned their lives together. All that fall and well into the winter he worked his way through the briars that spring up in the foundations of love. He expected them. Rage? What was there to rage against? How do you fight for love? Or against it?

He saw her every few weeks. At meetings, on the street. They didn’t talk much. It didn’t matter. He could tell that this man, whoever he was, wasn’t with her—that he was gone and that she was waiting for him.

My father didn’t wish him ill. Anything but that. No, to kill the beast he needed it alive. Alive and well and living in boredom. Sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on its slippers; arguing at dinner over the price of the new furniture. Just let him live, he thought, and die on the field of days as other men do. He could wait.

In any case, it wasn’t as though there were no distractions—the occupation made sure of that. The work in the factory was unpleasant, the daily ritual of seeding the bearings with steel dust bad on the nerves. The older factory workers—dutiful men, law-abiding traitors—hated him and his few comrades on principle: for being students, for being new, for interfering.

The world outside the factory was hardly better. Nothing was sure. No one knew how far things would go, or when they would be over. Some things stayed the same; others changed. The diktats printed in the newspaper or announced over the loudspeakers seemed to bring something new every day. The schools were to be closed on such and such a date. All radios were to be registered with the authorities between the hours of ten and four. All persons of Jewish descent were henceforth forbidden from entering public spaces: theaters, movie houses, restaurants...Listening to foreign frequencies was a crime punishable by death. Absurd. This wasn’t war. This was disease. They were everywhere you looked now: in cars, on corners, striding down the cobbles, like an infection in the body.

Appropriately enough, symptoms had begun to appear, like yellowed nails or brittle hair. To amuse himself, he noted their progression. In answer to the command form, for example, a forest of gestures had appeared, gestures signaling not merely a recognition of the status quo—for who could help but recognize it?—but agreement, willingness, above all, subordination: the dropped glance, the slightly bowed head, the careful smile. A bag or briefcase clasped like a child to the chest.

It was fascinating in its way. Faced with an individual who had complete power over them, most people would find themselves, almost unconsciously, wanting to please him. You could see them seeking out the right facial expression, the correct stance; like animals in the open, they would instinctively find the place between dignity and cowardice—and stay there. Not move. Draw their neutrality around them like camouflage. It was a kind of game. Validate the other’s disgust for you without encouraging it; play the mongrel without incurring a kick.

Of course, this was the easy part. The challenge was in keeping public behavior from bleeding into private life, in keeping the two selves apart. And this was impossible. No one could accomplish it entirely. No one. Every hour you lived, from the moment you woke in the dark, you were reshaping yourself to survive.

It made for an interesting problem: the better you were at the role, the more talent you had for it, the more likely it was that you’d live—and the more likely that you’d lose yourself along the way.

Hate helped. In keeping things clear. But hate was a hammer anyone could use, and it served the others as well, and in precisely the same way.

And so he waited, and survived, seeing every side. Amused and appalled at the spectacle of men’s predictability: at the shopkeepers who now refused to sell bread to Jews, at the children who made good money shopping for them.

That June, tired of his friend’s constant questions, he told Mirek what had happened. He was sitting at the kitchen table, facing the window that looked out on the garden and the apricot tree, heavy with unpicked fruit. The whole south side of the house was overgrown with a layer of green vines, half a meter thick. When they bloomed once a year, as they were blooming now, the air inside the house seemed to vibrate as though it were alive. He looked down at the table: gray bees were landing on the small gray blossoms that waved and dipped over the napkin and the fork and the empty plate. “She’ll come back,” said Mirek. “She’ll grow tired of him after they’re together for a while.”

“Maybe,” said my father. And because he loved her as much as he did, he almost wished it could be otherwise.

HE AND OPÁLKA WERE THE LAST TO LEAVE. THEY STOOD
next to each other watching Gabčík and Kubiš walk down the cracked sidewalk toward the avenue, passing through the long morning shade. Líba Fafek had disappeared up a side street. Valčík was already walking around the empty fountain, one hand trailing along the stone.

The air moved, a breeze bringing a breath of coolness. It seemed to come from the buildings above them: a deep, musty sigh, smelling of cellars and hallways.

Opálka picked up the battered leather briefcase which no longer contained the student papers and music sheets he had carried in it for fifteen years but a length of sausage in newspaper and three hand grenades, nestled in the dark like hard green eggs.

“So...,” he said.

“So,” said Bém.

“We have a few minutes yet, we may as well wait here.”

“All right.”

“It’s going to be a hot day.”

“Yes, it is.”

Opálka took off his hat and looked inside it, then placed it back on his head. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“Nervous?”

“Of course.”

Opálka tried to smile. “For a few seconds this morning I couldn’t remember the number of the tram to Vysočany. I’ve taken it all my life.”

They turned back to look at the others. Kubiš and Gabčík were nearly at the avenue now. As they came to what appeared to be a stretch of broken cobbles, Kubiš gave his friend a small shove with his shoulder. When the other shoved back, he stepped neatly aside, making Gabčík stumble slightly.

“Boys,” said Opálka.

“He seemed almost happy this morning.”

“Kubiš? He’s in his element. They both are, in their way. I’ve never been like that. I think too much.”

“Most do,” said Bém.

“A curse. I have to keep it leashed all the time.”

“It’s not all bad if it helps you see things.”

“Think so?”

“Not really.”

Opálka paused uncomfortably. “I should have asked you this before, but is there someone...”

“You mean in case...”

That’s right.

“No. Not in the way you mean. Thank you.”

“Absurd, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Thinking this way.”

“Not as absurd as it should be.”

“True.”

“And you? You’ve made arrangements? For your family, I mean?”

“I have. Thank you.”

Opálka pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to check his watch. “It’s time, I’m afraid,” he said.

“I don’t mind,” said Bém.

Bém had gone only a few steps when he heard him call. “Tomáš?”

He turned.

“One more thing...Do you like beer?”

Bém paused. Opálka was a brave man.

“I do,” he said, though he didn’t, particularly.

“We should get a beer sometime...when this is over?”

“I’d like that.”

Opálka nodded. “All right,” he said. “All right. We’ll do that, then.” And picking up his briefcase, he walked away.

By the time he got to the tram stop, walking in the shadow of the buildings, he was sweating freely. The suit they had gotten for him was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He would sweat like a pig. It didn’t matter.

He waited in the shade, his back against the façade of a three-story building like a soiled cake. The crowds were increasing. Men carrying briefcases stood on the island, holding their hats in one hand, with the other wiping their heads with handkerchiefs. Boys in shorts dodged through the crowd. He couldn’t help but look for her, even now. The thought that he might actually see her terrified him.