Then a listless stroll past Jitka’s desk.
Then bed, and a fall into darkness.
Then the dream about Rypl, and his mother.
Then waking up with the picture of his mother and Jitka.
Now a sharp memory of his conversation with Beran.
And finally the hope that when he managed to fall back to sleep he would meet those two dear beings again.
Once they had cut a path through all the rubberneckers and cowards they found a skinny redhead tagging along, who had picked a Panzerfaust from the arsenal the Germans left.
” ’scuse me, can I come with you? You’re tough guys; you can make the Nazis swallow anything, hairs and all!”
“C’mon, you’re not even fifteen yet,” Lojza probed.
“Sure I am.”
“Don’t try it. If you wanna come, own up, we don’t take liars.”
“I will be in six months,” he admitted, “but nothing fuckin’ scares me.”
“Your parents let you go?”
“Pop bit it and my mom can go fuck herself,” he explained maturely. “She had her way I’d be wearing a skirt.”
This caught his attention.
“You an only child?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“She ever beat you?”
“Like to see her try! She knows I’d send her flying.”
He was confused.
“You’d hit her…?”
“Why not? Not like I asked to be born. And I don’t give a shit if I survive, either. So why should those fuckin’ Nazis live? Well, can I come?”
“Why not,” he said to the other two. “Maybe he’ll learn a few new words too.”
He would watch the boy. He had to figure out HOW HE GOT FREE FROM HER.
They were a scant two hundred yards uphill from the radio building when the crescendo of a motor caught their attention. At first he thought it was a tank and his eyes darted to the boy’s Panzerfaust, but when he turned around, he saw an unusual-looking airplane appear above the buildings. A large cigar separated from it and dropped toward the ground. Immediately a detonation rolled past, so powerful that it shook the cobblestones beneath their feet. Lime-white dust rolled upward from the radio building, and tiny bits of concrete whizzed through the air toward them.
“Good fucking show!” the boy rejoiced. “That’s what they get for taking the Nazis’ side.”
Everyone had to laugh at that.
Garlanded with guns, they trudged uphill along the main avenue side by side. The people hurrying downhill to help moved respectfully aside to let them pass. The fighters soon realized they would not have much fun that day. The citizens of Prague had gone crazy; their latest hobby seemed to be prying up and hauling around paving stones. Rain began to pour down, and in a wide area around the barricades the naked roadbed quickly changed into mud under the countless footfalls of their builders.
They were not dressed for this work.
“Where do we go for the night?” asked the youth, who had told them to call him Pepík.
“I’m from Brno,” he said, half truthfully. “I don’t have an apartment here.”
Ladislav lived on the opposite — and therefore inaccessible — side of the city, Lojza had found a new guy at his girlfriend’s, and there was no question of going to the boy’s mother’s. After a long while the caretaker on the embankment flashed through his mind. Why not finish him off and then stay there…?
“For God’s sake,” Lojza said, lighting up, “there must be loads of empty apartments from the Germans. I know one that’s pretty close, in fact. Belongs to the director of a glue factory — where I worked till the bastard handed me over to the Work Exchange. Everything that happened to me after that was his fault.”
“What if they’re still there?” Pepík inquired.
“Their bad luck. They kept a goat at their Vyso
any plant and since I was the second watchman there, I brought them milk every day at noon. Twice I caught another guy in the apartment; I think my boss’s wife sweet-talked her husband into bringing the milk himself in the evening, so he cut me loose. I’d like to kiss that whore’s ass good-bye.”
The intimately familiar word grabbed his attention. He approved.
The turn-of-the-century street far from the main avenues was trying to pretend it had nothing to do with the rebellion. No one reacted to the night bell. The bald man swore regretfully.
“The evening’s still young. ..” The stoker repeated what was evidently his only joke.
He did not want to give up so easily.
“We can open it. Anything handy?”
“Could always blow the fucker open with the Panzerfaust.” The boy grinned.
No one even laughed. They were dragging an entire armory with them and it was useless. His years with the theater, however, had taught him that in a pinch anything would do. Now he remembered his knife. When he drew it out to its full length from the pouch tied around his body, Lojza whistled appreciatively.
“Nice poultry knife. You a butcher, by any chance?”
“No,” he said, “but I like butchering.”
The lock clicked on the first try. They lit matches. The apartment Lojza led them to took up the entire third floor. The doorplate had no name on it, understandably. They rang. Nothing. They gave a longer ring. From the depths of the apartment they could hear the bell. Still nothing.
“The blade?” the boy asked impatiently.
Then they heard a woman’s footsteps: When she opened the door, chain in place, and he shoved his foot between the door leaves, he felt the excitement. It grew as Lojza tried to persuade her. Of course she should let them in; they’d been sent to protect her and she knew him, after all, he used to bring her milk from the factory…
“Ick habba eenen tseegenmilk haulen, gnaydigga frau…”
From then on, though, everything was different. Lojza and Ladislav played with her for an hour like cat and mouse; they let her change out of her nightgown and bathrobe into the clothes she’d wear to the assembly point for Germans; of course she could take her valuables with her. She outdid them in obligingness, and his mouth began to water when she poured a half liter of scrambled eggs into a pan.
Slowly she regained some color, repeating ad nauseam how grateful she was to Mr. Alois (as she called Lojza), because he was a personal acquaintance of theirs. Her husband must have been delayed over in Vysoany; Mr. Alois of all people knew how decently they’d both treated the Czechs.
He ate his fill, but otherwise kept quiet. Conversations with women weren’t his specialty; after all, he’d only ever had one (that time in the train), and look how it had turned out. But what about HER? Wasn’t SHE a woman too? How does it work, he began to wonder: are mothers women to their sons or not? SHE clearly had been, and such a strong one that he’d never had room in his life for another. The one time he’d been curious what he was missing, that woman had mocked him. He punished her on the spot, and since then he had either hated other women or simply ignored them. Now, for the first time, he could observe how men treated them and what they might want from them. Only his hellishly tight self-control stopped him from gaping open-mouthed like the boy.
They let her wash the dishes — so the Czechs who would come to live here, the bald one urged her, wouldn’t think Germans were pigs— and then they all accompanied her as she went to make the bed. She continued to nod and obey them until Lojza gave her an almost friendly order to undress.
“Tsee dick aus!”
Once again she turned ashen and began to beg. He was very surprised that she chose him from among the four of them as her intercessor. Before he could react, Lojza’s sharp slap silenced her.