Hidden in the orchard outside the house she had grown up in, she waited until the German family went to bed. Someone played an accordion, smoke rose from the chimney, a lamp burned in the window, and a dog was tied up outside the door. Magda treaded carefully around her own property. It occurred to her that her world had been more than simply turned upside down. She had been thrown outside of it. Her parents had likely been killed in Lidice, there had been no word from her brothers, and she was on the run from the Nazi officer who governed the district. And these strangers—these Germans from somewhere—now lived in her home. This was what it must feel like to be dead and to return as a ghost, to be looking in on a life that had gone on without her.
Once the lights flickered out, Magda crept toward the farmyard. The washing line was still hung up, the apple tree just to the right of it. She dropped to the ground, soggy from all the rain, and as she tested the earth around the southeastern root of the apple tree, hoping for a clue, despair wrenched through her. Her brothers’ guns could be anywhere within the radius. Her knees ached from the cold. Her first attempt turned up nothing. She moved away from the trunk, and using a rock she had found and her bare hands, she dug a second hole.
She was covered in mud. And then the dog barked from the front of the house. The barking gradually became furious.
Magda pushed herself up from the muddy hole when pain sliced through the heel of her palm. She bent closer to the ground and patted the spot where her hand had just been. It was the corner of a metal box. A lamp flicked on in the house, spilling light into the side of the yard. A man yelled at the dog. Magda raked her hands around the corner of the box and eventually pried it out of the earth just as the dog’s raspy barking came around. A chain rattled along the ground. It had been let loose. A voice called into the darkness, ordering the dog to protect, to get whatever there was to get.
Scooping the box against her, Magda fled into the orchard. The dog stopped at the edge of the property. The last thing she made out as she whirled around, wheeling backward, was the outline of someone holding a flashlight. She turned and disappeared down the hill and into the dale.
“All you were supposed to do was stay out of sight,” Aleš snapped. He paced before her. “How dare you?”
“How dare you put yourself into danger?” Renata translated.
As if Magda had not understood why Aleš was so angry. Truly she did. She was asking herself who the hell she had thought she was, pulling that stunt.
Davide examined the weapons on the table. He was the only one visibly pleased with Magda’s undertaking.
Renata reached into her satchel and tossed Magda an army tunic and a brown woolen pullover. Magda did not ask where they came from. She did not want to know. Every time the three of them checked on her, they were dressed in an assortment of newly pilfered military gear. Over the last months, Aleš had assembled a Red Army jacket with the insignia ripped off, a German infantry cap, and a pair of jack boots. Renata wore brown breeches and a military tactical strap draped over her like a debutante’s sash. Magda wanted a pair of trousers as well. And new boots. The soles of her shoes were cracked and useless, her socks had holes in them, and her feet were always wet in this weather.
Wordlessly, Magda unbuttoned her dress, slipped it off her shoulders, and pulled the tunic over her head. It reeked of sweat. She pulled the dress back on over that, then tugged on the pullover while Aleš and Renata watched her. Magda stood before them, taking the two of them in as well. Did they see the kinds of changes in her as she saw in them? Aleš had gray hairs along the edges of his temples, although his hair had been shorn to the scalp, and his face was gaunt. When he spoke, his breath stank, even as far as Magda stood away from him. Renata’s frown lines were deeper, and she had new ones around her mouth. Her hair was matted and dirty, pressed to her head like a helmet. She also seemed to have lost a half a foot in height and girth. Davide, in the meantime, had grown a grizzled beard, and bags had settled beneath his eyes, which had changed color—from hazel to dark green.
Magda reached for her coat and withdrew the remainder of the half loaf of bread and the knob of soap. “I got this too.”
She placed them next to Davide, who pulled the trigger of the second revolver, then wiped at it again with his coat sleeve, casually glancing at the loot. The rain picked up outside, and water dripped in from the roof and into the tin pot Magda had placed on the floor near the door.
Renata considered the items and rolled her eyes. “Keep the bread and the soap. You need it.”
“And you’ll take the weapons,” Magda said.
Davide turned in his seat. “I think I can dig up some bullets…” He winked. “Pun intended. We’ll take one. You keep the other.”
Unearthing the weapons beneath the apple tree had only left Magda with another layer of fear, and the shame that followed that.
Aleš
