Before

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part II

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part III

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Acknowledgments

Also by Joseph Hurka

Copyright

 

For my aunt,

MIROSLAVA HŮRKOVÁ

and for my father,

JOSEF LEOPOLD HŮRKA

 

In the manner of men of the past

We build within ourselves stone

On stone a vast haunted castle.

—VINCENT MONTEIRO

Vers sur verre

PROLOGUE

Bohemia, June 9, 1942

The boy is tall and strong, all of fourteen. He hikes late at night through the forest, breaking the Nazi curfew, on an errand for his mother. He feels the heaviness of the clothes and curtains his mother has repaired through the straps of his rucksack.

He steps over the dark earth. There is the smell of the rugged pines, the sound of kestrel birds, the pale flight of them. Wind moans in the trees. The moon, silvered by clouds, is a ghost behind the shapes of branches.

Where the forest ends he enters a field; tall grass brushes at his knees. There ahead are the darkened
Kru
ina
farm buildings—everything is dark now, after nine
P.M
., under the Nazi penalty of death; Jiri Posselt pauses and looks carefully at the barn he approaches. He sees no movement, no shapes of Wehrmacht soldiers: no glow of a cigarette. Still he waits; after a few moments there is a sound, at first an insistent humming, growing louder into engines, coming from the direction of the farmhouse. It is a dark scraping of planes.

Jiri steps back and crouches in the forest, watches the old stone house against the hill, above it the white ghost of moon. Clouds twist over that light, and then three Messerschmitts emerge from the rise, flying very low, pin lights on their wings. They come on fast and steady, a quick moment of growing, thunderous engines, a quick run of shadows stretching over the field. Jiri feels the power of them in his throat and chest, in the bones of his arms and legs. They disappear behind the trees, the scraping following them.

He waits to make sure he does not hear the engines coming around, growing louder again. When he cannot hear them anymore he rises and walks purposefully across the grass to the first barn. He steps inside the rolling door; it has been left slightly ajar. The building is a great, yawning space, and in the shadows horses shift at his entrance. He can smell them and the hay, the old wood and mortar of this place. He stays in a dark triangle a moment, until the horses have settled, until all he can hear is wind tugging loose shingles above, twigs scattering. To his left in the darkness is a clean, lidded hutch, and Jiri opens it and takes out milk bottles, eggs, cheese, bread that is still warm. He sets all of these on the floor, then slips off his rucksack and pulls from it the bundles tied in burlap, the curtains held firm, wound around stiff cardboard, and puts these inside the bench. He loads the food into his rucksack, eggs on top; folds the excess cloth of the rucksack closed, fastens the straps.

He glances out the door: a battered path here through weeds, oak branches shifting on the charcoal sky. Still no shapes of men, no movement out in the field. It is not likely the Nazis would be patrolling this far out of town; in the two years that Jiri has been running the errands to farms outside his village he has been caught only once, and that was by a Czech gendarme, who whispered at him, fiercely, to get the hell home. Jiri swings the rucksack onto his shoulders, closes the lid of the hutch quietly.

He goes into the night. Soon enough the trees of Bohemia sway over him again, and the song of cicadas pulses through the darkness. He keeps up a steady rhythm, his shoes finding their way over roots and packed earth. At times he walks in a blackness so complete he feels he might be a ghost, a spirit sailing close to ground. The thought of this, and the greater danger of patrolling troops as he gets closer to town, frightens him. He imagines Nazi police discovering his form against the trees. There would be dogs, flashlights. The white of guns firing, the impact of 9 mm bullets. How much of this would he feel? How long would he be conscious of the Nazi bullets ripping into him?

He forces himself away from the image: He thinks of his family. His father, once a science teacher, a lover of the stars, would tell him to look for the archer, Sagittarius, coming up over the next open field; Jiri imagines the bright constellation, the drawn bow. He imagines his mother, how just ninety minutes ago she checked her list carefully to make sure she had packed everything she had sewn for the
Kru
inas;
Jiri's sister, Helena, cleaning the kitchen counters, laughed at their mother's precision. Helena will be eighteen in two days' time: Jiri can think of this. He has bought her a bracelet that is in safekeeping in his parents' room. He showed it proudly to his mother when he purchased it, and she exclaimed over its bright blue and red hand-painted swirls, its gloss of varnish. His mother said,
Helena will like it so much, honey, what a wonderful gift.
Jiri hears his mother's voice in his head, sees her hands turning over the bracelet. Helena admired the bracelet in a shop in
Plze
,
on a day when Jiri was impatient to get to the soccer fields, and he smiles in the darkness at how his sister will kiss him and remember it.

Now the clearing ahead. But the growing rumble of more planes comes from over Jiri's right shoulder. The moon is momentarily bright, lighting the forest floor. Jiri ducks into a group of fallen trees, glances up in the overwhelming sound as the monsters hurtle through the branches. Arados this time: soaring over the pale field, three planes tipping to follow the phone lines, their pin lights disappearing into the dark.

What is all this, tonight? There has been more military activity everywhere since the Resistance attack on SS General Heydrich's car, and particularly since the Butcher, as he was called, died from his wounds five days ago. Heydrich was Hitler's Bohemian ruler, his enforcer; now more Nazi guards patrol the mine in Kladno, where Jiri and his father work: more of the Messerschmitts and Arados fly overhead. There is a new, brisk feeling even with the soldiers who have been wounded on the Russian front and who are billeted in Jiri's small village, in the Sokolovna gym. A Nazi lieutenant used to come on crutches to watch the Sunday village soccer games—his heels had been blown off on the Russian front. He was an old German track star who enjoyed telling sports stories with the youngsters, but since the Heydrich killing the lieutenant does not come down from the Sokolovna anymore.

Jiri watches the sky carefully before he steps into the field. The planes are gone, their sound fading. The telephone poles are stout and the lines are tight against the heavens. Jiri, standing there, looking up, feels the earth beneath him spinning. He looks down again, shakes his head, regains his balance. He adjusts the rucksack into a more comfortable position, then follows the phone lines into one more dark forest. The ground dips and rises. His footsteps are a hushed progression; now through the last trees he sees the valley fall away and the hayfields pale yellow and there, below him, his village: a collection of pastel buildings, their rooftops angles against violet and gray. The baroque onion steeple of St. Martin's Church hovers just beyond the granary. To the west, only a few hundred meters from him, is the old Sokolovna, the moonlight breaking over its red pastel walls. He will circumvent it and the soccer fields by staying above in the tree line, then drop down through the hayfields to the Horák farm, to the path that leads to his home on Andĕlu.

Then Jiri hears the truck engines. He drops quickly to one knee, his heart pounding. When he looks long and hard at the dark village streets, he can make out hulks of German trucks—many of them—moving slowly. He inches back up the slope to a small stand of poplars, eases off the rucksack and sets it beside him, and, lying on the ground, propped on his elbows, he stares at Spálená Street, the main thoroughfare. The moon comes out of the clouds and he can just distinguish the rectangular vehicles slowing and stopping near the granary. Soldiers, dark spots, descend onto the cobblestones. Others already surround his village; he can make them out now, sometimes in groups, moving like shadows in the hayfields below him. There are so bloody many of them! The highway, too, far to the left, is filled with the shapes of trucks. Jiri smells the grass and dirt beneath him, feels the wowing of his heart in his ears.