It stopped raining.
“After a few weeks working there, I saw Klára for the first time, in the garden on the hospital grounds. I didn’t know her name yet, I only found that out later, but I saw two women sitting on a bench: one on the elderly side; the other one, next to her, a tall blonde with long, flowing hair. These days she’d probably have a career as a model for one of those magazines my daughter reads. But that didn’t exist back then. She sat straight, almost perfectly still. Then all of a sudden she turned and looked me right in the eye. I felt it in my gut. Blue-gray eyes and blonde hair down to her waist. She was so gorgeous my cigarette almost fell out of my mouth. Gorgeous and loaded with sedatives. It was like she was made of rubber. Walk, eat, and sleep, that was all she did. I asked a colleague about her one time and he said that she was in shock, but he didn’t know how long it would last. That was the last time I asked.”
“Why don’t we go to dinner? You can tell me the rest on the way.”
“You’re right,” Antonín said, and they went out into the street. The historical city center was crowded with restaurants.
“What are you in the mood for?”
“How about fish?” said Jiří.
“There’s a restaurant by the river, but I doubt the fish come from the Vltava.”
The restaurant was half empty. They chose a table and sat down. Antonín laid his cigarettes next to the ashtray. They looked through the menu and ordered their meals.
“So did you fall in love with that blonde?” Jiří asked after a while in silence, starting in on his soup.
“Yes. I was in love with Klára, and with the nature all around. I knew I was in love with nature, fortunately. I adored it. I walked all over the place. Thick, green forests. Dense woods. Dark, wet, lush greenery, with headstones all over the hills.”
“Headstones?” Jiří asked, slurping from the bowl as he tipped it toward him and spooned the last drops of liquid into his mouth.
Antonín glanced around distractedly, following Jiří’s maneuvers out of the corner of his eye. “That corner of the country was as charming as it was deserted. It was deserted right up till the end of the war. You couldn’t even tell that there had been a war there. I knew it, of course, the same way I knew that in 1882 Koch published his first work on TB. But that’s it. Just information. When I walked through the villages in the countryside, though, I discovered that the locals never went into the forest — they just walked along the edge. At first I thought it was because they were so close to the border with the Soviet Union, nowadays it’s Ukraine. Then one day, equipped with a good tourist map, I asked how to get to the next valley, and a woman in a village told me there was a path over the hills, but the last time she had taken it was on a march two or three years after the war. By the time I got there, it had been more than ten years since the war.”
“So how did they get from one valley to the other?”
“The regular way, by bus.”
“But why didn’t they take the path?”
“Well, one, it was harder, and two, because of the smell.”
“What smell?”
“The war had passed through even that remote region. I realized that the Germans had dug in there, in the mountains, gorges, and passes, dead set on not letting the Red Army pass. Apparently they call that a retreat to fallback position. Also, as one of my colleagues from there explained, there was no way around it. What with the mountains and all. So there had been fighting there. Even the smallest patch of land was full of steel. And fallen soldiers, too. The woman in the village told me the stench in the woods was so bad for years after the war that they just stopped going there. There were thousands of buried soldiers.”
“Mm,” Jiří said. “I don’t think I want that fish anymore.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
“I thought you were going to tell me about faith and all that.”
“Ach. I apologize. I didn’t realize where it would take me. Memories, you know? It’s been a lot of years.”
“I don’t think I want that fish anymore,” Jiří said again.
“So order something else.”
“I really am interested, you know. It’s just that I missed breakfast.”
“Oh, I understand. But you have to eat something. Otherwise your sugar will drop.”
“So then you met up with her later?”
“I went to consult with a colleague about something one day, and the conversation somehow ended up turning to Klára.”
“So what did he tell you?”
“People there are closer to each other, and I think nature is also closer to them. Have you ever seen a wolf? I mean in nature, not just a picture or on TV.”
“Once. At the zoo. Why?”
“My colleague told me what had happened to her. She came from a nearby village, good family, had just finished high school in the district capital. The principal was going to recommend her for college in Bratislava, on the other side of the country, all the way down in the south. Having a college degree doesn’t mean that much anymore, but back then, you know, if you were an ordinary person from a little village, where war blew through once every hundred years and then everyone just forgot about you for the next hundred, it meant a lot. Apparently Klára and her fiancé had been talking about getting married, and that winter they went to a party. Some people say they had a falling-out, that she and her boyfriend had a fight. But I also heard that Klára and her cousin cooked the whole thing up in advance, and then again other people say Klára got mad at her boyfriend for dancing with one of her relatives more than was appropriate.”
“I’m going to switch to the svíčková,” Jiří said. “How about you?”
“I think I’ll stick with the fish.”
“So how did that woman or girl end up in the hospital?”
“The girl — she was still a girl at the time. Though as I said, people didn’t remember too well what actually happened between Klára and her fiancé. To make a long story short, Klára left the party sometime around midnight. The village she lived in was a few miles away. It was winter, which out there always meant snow. Snow and cold. Bitter cold. People here can’t even imagine. Anyway, sometime after she left, her fiancé found out, so he left too, and went after her. But they never made it home. As midnight came and went, Klára’s mother began to get worried. The only phone in the village belonged to the chairman of the Unified Peasant Cooperative. When Klára’s mother woke him up, he called the pub where the dance was being held, but all they could tell him was that Klára and her fiancé had both already left. Their families and friends organized a search party with the border guards, the forest workers, and the gamekeeper. The soldiers brought machine guns, the workers took blowtorches. Nothing else works on wolves. The only thing they fear is fire. The two groups started down the path, one on each side. In each group there were a few border guards with machine guns and a few men with blowtorches and shotguns. Along the way one of the groups got attacked by a wolf pack in the dark. They fended them off with the blowtorches, spraying flames at them, but the longer the flames, the faster the fuel ran out. Everyone stuck together, and the soldiers went through several rounds of ammunition, firing blindly into the dark. It’s hard to hit a pack of wolves circling you in the dark. There’s always the risk you’ll shoot another man. Flames shed light, but also shadows. Not to mention the confusion, which a pack of wolves knows how to take advantage of. They found Klára up in a tree, clinging to a branch. The bark of the trunk was shredded bare. Her boyfriend, or what was left of him, was under her, at the bottom. Two men climbed up to try to get her down, but she just kept going higher and higher. She wasn’t even screaming, they said. Just grunting. Her knuckles were swollen from the cold and from gripping onto the branches for so long. Her fingernails were torn off. They had to tie her up once they brought her down. She couldn’t tell the difference between people and animals anymore. They made a makeshift stretcher out of branches and tied her onto it. The blowtorches were running low on fuel, so they had to run all the way to the nearest village. When it got light, a section of the border guards returned, more heavily armed, along with the workers and the gamekeeper to collect the remains of Klára’s fiancé, but they found nothing. The wolves had beaten them to it. Later, the boy’s family held a symbolic funeral, burying just a few bloody rags in place of his body. So that girl, that was Klára.”