I Served the King of England

  I was in Pankrác prison fourteen days in all, and after further interrogation they realized it had been a mistake, that they had been waiting for someone else who was supposed to look at his watch, and they’d already caught the contact man and got everything they wanted out of him, except the other person’s identity, and I remembered that Zdeněk had been standing there and that he was just about to look at his watch too. Zdeněk had seen me get arrested for him, and that could be very important to me, because if no one from the cells vouched for me later, certainly Zdeněk would. So when I came back from the interrogations and just before they pushed me into the cells, I started my nose bleeding again and I laughed and laughed while the blood flowed. When they let me go, the interrogator apologized but reminded me that in the interests of the Reich it was better to punish ninety-nine just men by mistake than to let a single guilty person slip through their fingers. Toward evening, I stood outside the gates of the Pankrác penitentiary, and another man was let out just after me, and when he came out he broke down and sank to the sidewalk. The streetcars were going by in the purple twilight of the blackout, crowds flowed up and down the street, young people walked hand in hand and children played in the dusk as if there was no war going on at all, only flowers and embraces and loving glances. The girls wore their blouses and skirts in the warm twilight just so, and I too looked at them hungrily, because everything seemed prepared for men’s eyes, deliberately put into an erotic frame. It’s so beautiful, said the man when I came over to offer my help. How long? I asked. He said he’d just finished a ten-year stretch. Then he tried to stand up, but couldn’t, and I had to help. He asked me if I was in a hurry, and I said no, and when he asked me what I’d been in for, I said illegal activity. So we walked to a Number 11 trolley, and I had to help him on, and everywhere, in the trolley and on the streets, were crowds of people who all seemed to be on their way home or going to a dance, and that was when I noticed for the first time that Prague girls were prettier than German girls, with better taste, because the German girls wore their clothes as if they were uniforms, all those dresses and dirndls, those green suits and hunter’s hats. I sat down beside the man, who had gray hair though he couldn’t have been much over thirty, and I told him he looked too young for his gray hair, and then I asked him out of the blue, Who did you kill? He hesitated a moment, then stared at the prominent breasts of a girl who was hanging on to a strap with one hand, and finally asked me, How did you know? And I told him I had served the Emperor of Ethiopia. We went right to the end of the line, and the murderer asked me to come with him to his mother’s, to be with him in case he fell on the way. We smoked as we waited for the bus, which wasn’t long in coming, then went three stops and got out at Koníčkový Mlýn, and the murderer told me that he’d rather go the back way, through the village of Makotřasy, to surprise his mother and ask her forgiveness. I said that I’d go with him to the edge of the village, to the gate of his house, and then return to the main road and hitchhike home. I was doing this not out of any kindness but to give myself as many alibis as possible once the war was over, and it would be over before we knew it.

  We walked together through the starry night, and the dusty road took us through a blacked-out village and then back into damp countryside as blue as carbon paper, with a narrow little moon that cast an orange light and made a thin, barely visible shadow behind us or in front of us or in the ditches beside us. Then we walked up to the top of a small rise, not much more than a sigh in the earth, and he said that from here we should be able to see his native village. But when we got to the top of the rise, not a single building was visible. The murderer hesitated, seemed almost alarmed, and stammered that it was impossible, or could he have made a mistake? Perhaps over the next rise. But after we’d gone a hundred meters or so, fear came over us both and the murderer began trembling more violently than he had when he first walked through the gates of the Pankrác penitentiary. He sat down and wiped his forehead, which glistened as if sprinkled with water. What’s the matter? I asked. There was a village here once, and there’s not a trace of it now, babbled the murderer. Am I losing my mind, have I gone crazy, or what? What was the name of the village? I asked. Lidice, he said. That explains it, I said, the village is gone. The Germans blew it up and shot the men and took everyone else off to a concentration camp. Why? the murderer asked. Because the Reichsprotektor was assassinated and the assassins’ trail led them here, I said. The murderer sat down, his hands hanging over his knees like two flippers, then stood up again and stumbled through that moonlit landscape like a drunk. He stopped by what looked like a post in the ground, fell down, and embraced it. It wasn’t a post at all, it was what was left of a tree trunk with the stump of a single branch on it, as though it had been used as a gallows. This, said the murderer, used to be our walnut tree, this is where our garden was, and here—and he walked slowly around—somewhere here. And he knelt down and felt around with his hands for the crumbled foundations of the house and the farm buildings. He felt with certainty now, as if he was reading Braille reinforced by memory, and when he had felt out the whole foundation of his family home on his hands and knees, he sat down under the tree trunk and yelled, You murderers! Then he stood up and clenched his fist until the blue veins stood out on his neck in the light of the sickle moon. After he had cursed the murderers, the murderer sat down on the ground, bent forward with his hands under his knees, rocked back and forth as in a rocking chair, and stared at the branch outlined against the moon, then he spoke as if he was making a confession: I had a handsome father who was betterlooking than me, arid I’m a failure compared with him, and Dad was crazy about women and women were even crazier about him. He had a fling with the neighbor’s wife, and I was jealous of her, and my mother suffered, and I saw it all. See this branch right here? He’d grab it and swing himself over the fence to visit the neighbor’s pretty wife. Once I waited for him, and when he swung back over the fence we had an argument and I killed him with an ax. It wasn’t that I wanted to kill him, but I loved my mother and my mother was suffering. Now all that’s left is the trunk of the walnut tree, and my mother, I’ll bet she’s dead too.

  I said, Maybe she’s in a concentration camp, and she’ll be coming back soon. So the murderer got up and said, Will you come with me to ask? And I said, Why not? I can speak German. So we set out for Kladno. Just before midnight we got to Kročehlavy and asked a German patrol where the Gestapo headquarters was. The patrol told us how to get there, and soon we were standing in front of the main door. There was some kind of party on the second floor—we could hear the hum of talk, the clinking of glasses, and piercing female laughter. Then the patrol arrived and the sentry changed. It was already an hour past midnight, and I asked the commander of the guard if we could talk to the head of the Gestapo, and he roared, Was? and told us to come back in the morning. Just then the door opened and a crowd of SS men in high spirits came pouring out, gaily saying their farewells as though they’d been at some kind of celebration or birthday or name-day party, just the way our exhilarated guests used to leave the Hotel Paris every day when it was time for them to leave. And on the very top step stood a soldier holding a candelabra with burning candles in it. He was drunk, his uniform was a mess, his hair fell over his forehead as he held the candelabra up in a gesture of farewell. When he saw us, he came down the stairs to the threshold and asked the sentry, who saluted him respectfully, who we were. The sentry replied that we wanted to talk to him. The murderer told him, and I translated it, that he’d been in prison for ten years and had come home to Lidice and hadn’t been able to find a single house or his mother, and he wanted to know what had happened to her. The commander laughed, and little tears of hot wax dripped to the ground from the tilted candelabra. He turned and started walking back up the stairs, but then he roared out, Halt! And the guards opened the door and the commander came back down the stairs and asked the murderer what he’d got the ten years for. The murderer said he’d killed his father. Now the comman
der held the candelabra, with the candles still dripping wax, up to the murderer’s face, and somehow he became sober, as though he was delighted that fate had sent him a man that night who was looking for his mother after he’d killed his own father, and who now was standing where the commander himself often stood as a murderer, whether he murdered on orders or of his own free will. And I, who had served an emperor and had often seen the unbelievable come true, I saw this imperial German state murderer, this wholesale murderer with decorations clanking on his chest, climb the stairs followed by a simple murderer, a patricide. I wanted to leave now, but the sentry took me by the shoulder and roughly turned me back toward the stairs. So I sat at a large table covered with the leftovers from the banquet, and it looked just the way tables look after a wedding or a large graduation party, with scraps of cake and bottles empty and half empty, and the drunken SS man sat down on the table and made the murderer tell him the story all over again, while I translated—everything that had happened ten years ago by the walnut tree—but what the commander got the biggest kick out of was how efficient the organization in Pankrác was, so efficient that the prisoner never learned about the people and the town of Lidice. And something even more unbelievable came true that evening. Hidden behind the mask of a translator with a battered and healing face, unrecognized, I recognized in this Gestapo commander one of the guests at my wedding, the military gentleman who hadn’t even congratulated me or offered his hand, though I raised my glass and clicked the heels of my polished shoes and stood there with my arm and my glass extended, offering to drink to my own happiness, only to find the gesture not repeated. I had felt terribly humiliated, so I blushed to the roots of my hair, just as I’d done when Mr. Šroubek refused to drink to my health, and Mr. Skřivánek too, who had served the King of England. And now fate was offering me another one, another of those who had ignored my offer of friendship in the glass. Here he was, sitting right in front of me, making a big thing out of getting up from his chair to wake up the archivist and have him bring out the registry book, and then flipping through the pages on the banquet table, getting them all smeared with sauce and liquor, turning the pages until he found the right page, so he could read what had happened and announce that the murderer’s mother was in a concentration camp and that so far there was no date and no cross after her name to indicate her death.

  The next day, when I got back to Chomutov, I found myself fired: they’d heard the news of my arrest, and mere suspicion was enough to have me packing my bags. I also found a letter saying that Lise had gone to see Siegfried at his grandfather’s in Cheb, in the City of Amsterdam hotel. She asked me to come too and said she’d taken the little suitcase with her. I got a ride by car right to the edge of Cheb, where I had to wait because an air-raid warning was in effect for Cheb and Aš. As I lay in the ditch with the soldiers, I heard a pounding like the regular and rhythmic working of a machine, and it came closer and closer, and my son appeared to me, and I saw how every day—today too, because I’d bought him five kilos of eight-inch nails—he would crawl along and regularly and rhythmically pound nails into the floor with powerful blows from his hammer, one beside another, with a single energetic blow for each, as if he were planting radishes or a thick row of spinach. When the air raid was over, I got back into the military automobile. Driving into Cheb, we saw people, old Germans, walking out of the city and singing songs. But they were happy songs, and I wondered if what they’d seen had driven them mad or confused them, or was it a custom of theirs to sing a happy song in the face of adversity? Then we ran into clouds of dust and yellow smoke, and there were dead bodies in the ditches, and then streets with houses ablaze, and ambulance crews pulling people out of the rubble, and nurses kneeling and wrapping bandages around heads and arms. You could hear moans and wailing on all sides. I remembered how we’d driven past this place in carriages and cars on the way to my wedding, when everyone was drunk with the victory over France and Poland. And I saw red swastika flags with the flames licking at them, the banners burning and crackling as though the fire was devouring them with a special relish, and the fire advanced up the red cloth, followed by the blackening end, which curled up behind it like the tail of a sea horse. Then I found myself standing in front of the collapsed and burning front wall of the City of Amsterdam hotel, and a slight breeze came up and drew aside a curtain of beige smoke and dust, and on the top floor I saw my little son still sitting, picking up nails and pounding them into the floor with powerful blows. Even from that distance I could see how strong his right arm was, and how that was all he really had, just a strong fist and a rippling bicep that could drive a nail right into the floor with a single blow, as if no bombs had fallen, as if nothing in the world had happened. And the next day, when people came out of their bomb shelters, Lise, my wife, had still not shown up. I asked about a small, scuffed suitcase, and they told me Lise kept it with her all the time. So I took a pick and dug around in the courtyard all day long. The next day I gave my little boy five kilos of nails, and he gaily pounded them into the floor while I went on looking for my wife, his mother. It wasn’t until the third day that I came across her shoes. Slowly—while Siegfried was having a tantrum because he’d run out of nails—I freed my Lise from the pile of rubble and dust, and when I uncovered half her body I saw that she was curled into a ball to protect the little suitcase. First I carefully hid it, then I dug out the rest of her, all but her head. The blast had taken her head off, and we spent two more days looking for it while my son went on pounding nails into the floor and into my brain. On the fourth day I took the little suitcase and without saying good-bye to anyone walked away, and behind me the blows of the hammer grew fainter, blows I would hear for the rest of my life. That evening a society for mentally handicapped children was supposed to come for Siegfried. And Lise was buried in a common grave with a scarf wrapped around the stump of her neck so people wouldn’t get strange ideas, because though I had dug up the whole courtyard, I never found the head.