Lidice, Bohemia, 1866; A Minor Event during the Seven Weeks' War
A wise man once observed: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
Her brother? She was an only child… And her mother had died in the Uprising.
Lidice? What the devil was Lidice?
'Uncle Stefan…' Oh, Lord, her mouth wouldn't shape the words right.
Where am I? What's happening to me? Who are these people? What's wrong with my mind?
German. That was it. Only no one spoke German anymore. Not outside a classroom.
What was this mumbo-jumbo? Only recidivist subversives believed that nonsense anymore. Only stupid, ignorant country people…
Slap! 'Marda!'
The blow floored her. And terminated the contest. The terrified thing in her mind twisted away with a fading shriek, as if sliding off round the treacherous curves of a Klein bottle.
Who was this ragged brute? The man who had been lying in the doorway.
'Father?'
'Yes. Come on. Get up.'
The words were butchered by lips and tongue that had never spoken Czech.
'What happened?'
'I'm not sure. There's no time to worry about it now. Just accept it. Help me with Stefan.'
His absolute calm enveloped her, included her. The thing inside her, the other, momentarily gave up trying to reassert itself. Numbly, she seized the feet of the hovel's remaining, now silent tenant and helped swing him onto the rude table. He was just a boy, yet his face was a land on which several bad diseases had left memorials.
No one outside a labor camp lived this way. Dirt floor to sleep on, a pallet stuffed with straw. Only furniture a homemade table… No, there were a few crude pieces in shadowed corners. No water. No toilet.
This wasn't her world.
'The woman. She went for someone.'
Then she studied herself.
And received a greater shock.
The body she wore, beneath the crudest peasant clothing, was tiny, emaciated, just entering puberty. It was the female counterpart of the boy on the table. 'Oh…' It couldn't be a labor camp.
One of those places, only rumored, where they experimented on enemies of the State?
Outside, the sun was rising. On a morning like this, the spires of Hradcany Castle would be visible from the church belfry.
A scant sixty miles to the northwest, men named von Bismarck and von Moltke were defining her history with words spoken by the mouths of cannon. Already the troops were moving at Kцniggratz.
She had come to a land more alien than she could believe.
Its name was July 3,1866.
V. On the Y Axis;
1975
The collapse of South Vietnam had begun in January, a slow, snowballing thing that had not seemed serious at first. But when Hue and Da Nang went and the North Vietnamese started whooping down the coast routes like a juggernaut, it became obvious that the end had finally come. Those with an emotional investment in the country could, like watching the football Cardinals go into the second half down by seventeen, hope for a miracle, but that hope was wan.
