It wasn’t so easy. The ground was there ahead of schedule, and my flailing feet hit it wrong, and my couchant body was improperly balanced, and there was a wide gulf, it seemed, between theory and practice. I stumbled, I bounced, I sprawled. And lay there, quite motionless, while the train picked up speed and hurried on toward Prague.
The damage was not as great as it might have been. I had managed to shred one trouser leg and most of the knee it had contained. The other leg was doubled up awkwardly beneath me, not broken, not sprained, but not in entirely perfect order either. I had bruises on the palms of my hands, an aching shoulder that I seemed to have landed on, and a bump on my forehead about the size of a robin’s egg. On the other hand, I did not have my suitcase, which I had left on the train, or my breath, which I had left somewhere between the trestle and the ground.
I got up tentatively and determined that nothing was broken. I tried walking and found that both legs hurt, but that the one which had been twisted in the fall was worse than the one that had been torn up. I limped around for a while. I was supposed to go to the town of Moll and tell Kurt Pisek that Heinz Neumann had sent me. No. I was supposed to go to the town of Neumann and tell Kurt Heinz that Pisek Moll… No.
I sat down. Everything went around for a few minutes. Before long they would be stopping the train at Tyn. More policemen would board it, and this time they would wait for the real Evan Tanner to stand up. They would spend perhaps half an hour searching the train before it became apparent to them that I had somehow left it. Then they would blow whistles and draw up plans and begin searching for me.
So there was not a great deal of time. But I could not start searching for Moll or Neumann or Pisek until I could clear my head enough to know which was which. I had to make use of what time I had.
I stretched out on my back, placed my arms at my sides, closed my eyes, and remained that way for twenty minutes.
I had not chosen the ostrich’s method of hiding from danger. The play was one I had borrowed from Yoga, a deep relaxation technique which helped replace sleep for me. I lay very still, contracting and elaborately relaxing each muscle group in turn, then doing what I could to turn off my mind, making it as blank as possible. About twenty minutes had passed when I yawned and stretched and sat up again. I couldn’t be sure of the time – my watch was another casualty of the fall – but that particular regimen generally takes somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three minutes.
I felt much better. The pains were still there but they didn’t get in my way as much. More important, my head was working again. I had to go to the town of Pisek, where a man named Kurt Neumann lived. I would tell Neumann that Heinz Moll had sent me. Pisek, if I remembered the map of Czechoslovakia correctly, was a few miles east of the Vltava and about twenty miles up the river from Tyn. I was probably about ten or twelve miles from Tyn myself.
The sky was overcast, with no stars to offer a clue to directions. I could follow the tracks of the train, but I knew too well where they would lead. They would take me straight into the railroad station at Tyn, and I knew the sort of welcome that awaited me there. And, once they knew I had left the train, it stood to reason that their initial search parties would work their way back along the train’s roadbed.
The Vltava River flowed parallel to the railroad line and seemed a better idea. I made my way over the tracks and went and saw the river less than a hundred yards away. My leg bothered me, but I managed to work my way down the grassy slope to the riverbank below. Walking was easier on level ground. I limped, but the limp became progressively less pronounced the more I walked and was almost entirely gone after a mile or so.
A couple of miles further, the river was spanned by a bridge of stone reinforced with steel pilings. I crossed to the west bank and headed north again. When the moon finally broke cloud cover it was easier for me to see where I was going. The river glistened in the moonlight.
I began whistling something, and it took me a few seconds to place the tune. It was the theme from Smetana’s Moldau, another name for the river along whose western bank I walked. I whistled more of it, then stopped.
The irony delighted me. The Moldau theme was doubly appropriate, tying in not only with the river but with my mission itself. It had been borrowed from Smetana’s work to serve in a song called “Hatikvah,” and so I was limping through Czechoslovakia, on my way to enlist the help of a Sudeten Nazi in the rescue of a Slovakian Nazi, while whistling the national anthem of the state of Israel.
It must have been around three in the morning when I hit the outskirts of Pisek. I was cold, my legs had lost their enthusiasm for walking, and, more than anything else, I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since Vienna. Several times along the way I had passed farms and thought about stealing a few eggs or even making off with a whole chicken and roasting it hobo-style at the river’s edge. But each time the risk had seemed disproportionately high.
Now, though, if there had been a plump hen handy, I might have eaten her, feathers and all.
The sky was still dark. It was a bad hour to call on strangers, whatever their politics. Etiquette aside, I had no way of locating Herr Neumann. Moll had not thought to give me Neumann’s address, and some twenty thousand people live in Pisek. At a better hour I could scout around and ask directions, but not at three in the morning.
And there was another problem, not so demanding at the moment as hunger, but even more vital in the long run. As things stood, I would be about as inconspicuous in the streets of Pisek as a Negro on a snowpile. I was bruised and battered and moderately dirty, and my clothes, American in cut, were at least as battered and a good deal dirtier than I. Once Pisek woke up and I entered its streets, I would not precisely blend with my surroundings.
I waited for the dawn in a small farmyard on the eastern edge of the city. The sky lightened, and I realized for the first time that the country was beautiful, lush and green, mostly flatland but rolling gently in spots. I saw lights go on in the farmhouse, and when I came closer I could hear movement within. There was no bell, so I knocked.
A man, short, thick-set, opened the door a crack and peered out at me. He asked me politely what I wanted.
“Food, if you have some to spare,” I said. “I am hungry, and can pay. I have money.”
“You do not live near here?”
“No.”
“It is early to be traveling.”
“I have just awakened. I slept in a field.”
“In my field?”
“No. Across the road.”
“I will be back in a moment.”
He closed the door and I waited while he went to talk it over with his wife. I knew he wouldn’t call the authorities – no phone wires ran to the house. He reappeared a few moments later and opened the door for me. I followed him to the kitchen and he pointed me to a seat at the round wooden table.
“Is ten koruna too much?”
“Not at all,” I said. I found a pair of five-koruna notes in my wallet and gave them to him.
“It seems perfectly fair.”
“Well,” he said, and took the money. His wife turned from the stove and smiled tentatively at me. She brought over a plateful of eggs and potato dumplings, all scrambled together.
“There is coffee,” she said. “And I will bring you some rolls, and I will heat some sausages. Have you come from very far away?”
“From Ruzomberok.”
“I do not know it. Is it far?”
“It is to the east, in Slovakia.”
“Ahh, that is very far. And you have come all this way?”
“He is hungry, Frida,” the man said. “Let him eat.”
I was even hungrier than I had realized. The eggs were fresh and had been cooked to just the right turn, neither too wet nor too dry. They were seasoned nicely with paprika. The bits of potato dumplings were light and fluffy. The sausage, thick red-brown blood sausage, was delicious. The coffee was hot and strong, almost as strong as the Greeks and Yugoslavs drink it, but tempered with a healthy dose of sugar and fresh cream.