justice. Khristo, when he was out among the people, believed he could actually feel it, like a sickness, a cold, gestating rage that swelled toward the moment of its birth. And the harder the Germans bore down, the more they whipped and tortured and executed, the more it grew. “The day will come,” one of his agents had told him, “when we will hang them up by the feet and soak them with gasoline and set them alight. Upside down, you see, so that they do not die too quickly from breathing the smoke. You will be here,” the man said. “You will see it.”
Khristo believed him. It was not a fantasy of the oppressed, it was a plan, a lucid, thought-out ritual of justice, and the day of its reality was not far off. In the Staromestske Square, in the old part of the city, there was a medieval clock high on the facade of the town hall. When the hour struck, a painted Christ and twelve apostles would appear one by one in a little window below the clock, followed by the figure of hooded Death, whose bell sounded for the passing of time, then the Turk, the Miser, the Vain Fool, and, at last, the Cock. The Germans found it fascinating-Bohemian folklore displayed for their pleasure-and they would gather below the clock when it struck the hour and point and smile and take photographs. They seemed able to ignore the faces of the Czechs who surrounded them: taut, watchful faces, pale amid the dark clothing that everyone seemed to wear, pale in the perpetual dusk of cloudy days and coal smoke that hung above the city.
His principal contact with the Czech underground was named Hlava, a stolid, heavy man who wore eyeglasses with clear plastic frames, a man whose hoarse, measured breathing seemed, to Khristo, a kind of audible melancholia. They sat one seat apart in movie theaters, bumped shoulders in the street as they made brush passes-a scrap of paper moving invisibly from one to the other-urinated side by side in metal troughs in railway stations, shook hands like old friends in shopping streets just after dark. In one week in February they saw the same German newsreel three times: Hermann Goring, having just shot a bison in his private game preserve, distributed the meat to refugees on the road as they streamed in from Soviet-conquered territories in East Prussia.
Hlava was employed as chief bookkeeper in a factory that repaired shot-up Messerschmitt fighter planes. Now and then they were able to meet in a situation where actual conversation was possible, and Hlava revealed himself to be a man who told a certain kind of joke. “Three Czechs-a Bohemian, a Slovakian, and a Moravian-meet in heaven. The first one says …” He never laughed at the jokes, simply gazed at Khristo, awaiting a reaction, his breath rasping in and out in a slow, methodical tempo.
There were, at any given time, about a dozen other agents. Khristo spent his days bicycling around the city, hard-pressed to make his
But then, on March 20, he was offered information of a very different sort. It reached him in bed, amid a jumble of sweaty blankets in a hotel room that rented by the hour, reached him as he smoked a cigarette and stared at the waterstained ceiling above him, numb and mindless for the moment, in a blank daze that passed for tranquillity.
Magda, she was called, buxom and fat-hipped and exceptionally pink, with a thick yellow braid that fell to the small of her back. Had his controllers known about her, they would have told him he was signing his own death warrant. And she was not the only one; there were others, who drifted into his life, then disappeared: one was dark and looked like a Gypsy, another was very young and brought him small gifts. There was a seamstress who scented herself with lilac water, and a soldier’s widow who dressed all in black.
Together, they constituted yet another step into the forbidden zone. Like the burned-out factory where he slept. Like the pistol beneath the horsehair pillow on the hotel bed. He’d been driven to it, somehow, he did not understand why, but something had its fist in his back and forced him into acts which, in his particular circumstances, amounted to dancing blindfolded at the edge of a cliff. The women he knew were not prostitutes, they simply needed money and needed to make love and weren’t averse to going to bed with a generous man. And he was generous. “Here,” he’d say, “make sure and eat a good dinner tonight, you look worn out.” He knew that he was calling attention to himself, easily the worst thing he could do, but he couldn’t stop. Maybe, he thought, his nerve really had slipped. Or was it, perhaps, some premonition about the future that compelled him to a kind of greed, compelled him to take from life anything it might give him.
“Hey you, dreamer,” said Magda, rolling onto her ample stomach and propping her chin on her hands. “I met an old friend of yours. He said, ‘That black-haired fellow you see, we used to be pals.’ “
Magda was much given to fancy, he didn’t take it too seriously. “Oh?” he said. “What did he look like, then?”
“Mm, like Death in a play.”
She was evidently going to spin a tale. Amused, he turned on his side to see her face. “How strange. He carried a scythe, perhaps?”
“No, you stupid man. He was thin as a skeleton, with staring eyes and long, bony fingers. A scythe indeed! I was at the Novy Bor restaurant, at the buffet. He just came right up to my table and spoke to me. ‘Say hello to him for me,’ he said.”
She moved her face close to his. “Now give me a great big kiss,” she said.
The truth of it began to reach him and his body tensed. “What are you saying?” he asked, eyes searching her placid face.
She made popping noises with her lips. “Kissy,” she said, running a fingernail down his flank.
“Is this true? What else did he say?” His voice was quite different now.
She pouted for a moment and rolled her eyes-she’d gotten his attention, but it wasn’t the sort of attention she’d wanted. “Some silliness about a postal box. B, F, uh, eight something. I don’t remember. But there is no such address in Prague. We don’t use the alphabet, just numbers. One of your black market friends, no doubt.
“That’s it, all of it?” he said, every nerve in his body humming.
“Yes, my little king,” she sighed, sorry now that she’d bothered to bring it up, “that’s all of it.” She snuggled against him and cooed on his chest, her hand walking on two fingers down his belly.
He made himself respond, and the cooing became mock-surprised, then appreciative. “Witch!” he said softly by her ear, “you turn a man into a tomcat.” He reached across her shoulder, pressed his cigarette out in an ashtray on the bedside table, stroked her back.
“Meow,” she said.
Lunch and dinner at the Novy Bor on March 21.
A long, narrow room, windows white with steam so that people in the street passed like ghosts, black and white tiles of the floor awash with water from muddy boots, over a hundred people talking in low voices, the clatter of trays, a portrait of Hitler on the yellow wall above the bubbling tea urn.
And again on March 22, this time aborting a pass from Hlava scheduled for noon.
A pass successfully managed at the fallback location on the morning of March 23, a page torn from a copybook pressed into his hand:
Lunch on March 23 at Novy Bor. Khristo sat against the wall opposite the buffet counter. As he was stalling through the last of his beer, Josef Voluta appeared at the table with a bowl of soup on a tray. Almost immediately after he sat down, two old men joined them at the table.
“Salt, please,” Voluta said, handing him a slip of paper beneath the table. Khristo passed him the salt.
