I Served the King of England (18 page)

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 Zden
ě
k had been standing
there and that he was just about to look at his watch too. Zden
ě
k 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 Zden
ě
k 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 Koní
č
kový Mlýn,
and the murderer told me that he’d rather go the back way, through the village of
Makot
ř
asy, 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 Kro
č
ehlavy 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 commander 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. Sk
ř
ivánek 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.