The black-clad man interested Morava more and more. He remembered his grandfather, father, and all their neighbors sitting in the taproom after Corpus Christi service, pointing at a diminutive man who stood at the bar, sipping plum brandy. Look over there, his father nudged little Jan, who had been teasing the house cat under the bench and was already a mass of scratches; that’s a Communist! What’s that, Jan had inquired, and he had learned: He doesn’t go to church and wants to take everything we own away from us.
He had timidly watched the unshaven man with his luxuriant forelock, but the Communist’s stubborn aloofness somehow attracted the boy at the same time. Whenever Morava heard or read about Communist crimes during the war he thought of this man, a black sheep in a pious and pitifully barren land.
The prisoners, crammed into children’s cloakrooms, observed the scene mutely. It was as evidently unpleasant for the Communist as it was for Morava.
“Let’s move along!”
They went around the corner into the entrance hall.
“Why haven’t they been split among the classrooms?” he asked Lokajik quietly. “For God’s sake, whose idea was it to lock them up like animals?”
“The team decided…” the assistant commander said defensively. “Well, they were acting like animals earlier!”
One of his escorts flared up.
“Do you know what they were doing? Throwing grenades into shelters with children in them! Chasing us with tanks!”
“These people?”
“A German’s a German!” the man countered angrily. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth! And for the record: I’m a Communist too.”
“Is that so?” Svoboda answered icily. “Then instead of the Bible, quote this: ’Hitlers come and go, but the German nation remains.’ Do you know who said it?”
Once again Svoboda was a teacher, and the man stumbled like a pupil caught unprepared.
“No….”
“Comrade Stalin. And if you’re really a comrade, you should employ a class approach, not a nationalist one. Listen up!” Svoboda addressed the guardsmen, police, and soldiers, trying to rally the motley bunch around a common task. “Any Germans who have committed crimes will be punished severely and mercilessly, but we are depending on the German workers to help us bring about a worldwide socialist revolution. This human menagerie,” he pointed to the hallway, “is a stain on our ideals. Comrades, transfer them into classrooms immediately, men apart, women with children!”
“Yes…,” his men chirped, including the rebel.
“And what’s happening there?”
Svoboda pointed, and Morava could hear a clamor of men’s voices in the distance. The trio were even more hesitant.
“There…” Lokajík forced the words out, “that’s where they’re interrogating—”
“Who, whom, and why?”
“Our men are interviewing the Germans… about hidden valuables. ..”
The high functionary headed toward it. The rest of them followed him wordlessly down that depressing hall past the cages, where only the sniffling of a child’s nose could be heard. The din grew louder until only a door separated them from its source.
“You first,” Svoboda ordered the three locals.
They proceeded behind him into the school gymnasium, so similar to the one where young Jan Morava had trained his muscles. It had never occurred to him that a gym could serve admirably as a torture chamber.
Like school classes practicing in teams on various contraptions, groups of guardsmen were gathered around the equipment. One of them always had a notebook, pad, or piece of paper in his hand, as if grading their efforts. The focus of their attention however, was not gymnasts, but half-naked men, each tied to an apparatus: one to the handles of the pommel horse, another to the crosspieces of the wall bars, a further one to the grips of the Swedish box. The fourth, on a diagonal ladder, was stretched out by his hands and feet, like in the dungeons of old. The final man was swinging, arms and legs bound, from low-hanging rings.
The outsiders’ entrance attracted no attention; the guardsmen were apparently engrossed in the task at hand. On the rings nearby, the hanging man had just gotten a slap hard enough to start him swinging again.
“Make sure you remember all your stashes,” the man with the paper encouraged him in German. “If we find any more in your apartment you can kiss good-bye to any hope of ever seeing your family again.”
“We had all our valuables with us,” the swinging man rasped brokenly. “You already took those….”
Morava forced himself to suppress his emotions and scour the ghastly scene for his man.
It was clear that Svoboda was also on the brink of exploding.
“Put a stop to it,” he ordered Lokajík. “Have them unbound and taken away. Then I want to have a talk with all the Czechs. And introduce me!”
The surprise order was not welcomed, but it was carried out. Morava, however, was already sure that Rypl was not in the gymnasium, and Litera, Mátlak, and Jetel shrugged in unison as well. However, he saw an unfamiliar bald man hastily leave the room through the doors opposite. There had been someone similar in the radio station gang….
“Where do those doors lead?” he asked Lokajík.
“To the stairs to the auditorium, to the cellar and the toilets….”
“Have a look there,” he requested Litera, “but be careful….”
When only the Czechs were left and Svoboda had been introduced to them, he repeated roughly what he had earlier said in the entrance hall, but this time his voice rang sonorously through the large gymnasium; he must have been wonderful at political rallies. Morava noticed admiringly that even with these frustrated torturers the Communist did not mince words.
“Instead of revolutionary justice,” he finished, “youVe reintroduced the rule of torture, like in the Middle Ages!”
The guardsmen’s initial respect for his position and appearance dissipated; they progressed from muttering to open disagreement. Even then the man in black managed skillfully to keep control.
“I am stopping all interrogations in this form. Procure some water and food for the interned. Then take personal details and question them, but in a civilized fashion. The guards we send to confiscate items from the apartments will find everything anyway. Or was anyone planning to make a private visit?”
Morava watched the gymnasium quickly divide into three camps: One group was visibly ashamed, another was hissing like wounded geese, and a third seemed deeply indignant.
“Look here.” One of the note takers shoved his papers at Svoboda. “Every German mark, every ring, everything is recorded; I’m no criminal, I’m a patriot, and this is justified retribution!”
“Maybe not you, comrade,” Svoboda responded, “but opportunities like this make criminals. We Communists will not permit people to muddy the waters and then go fishing in them for property that rightfully belongs to the whole nation.”
To further his own goal, Morava quietly asked him, “Where’s the commander?”
The black-garbed man rephrased the question. “Who’s in charge here?”
“Captain Roubínek.”
“They didn’t tell you the RG doesn’t take old officers?”
“He was a partisan. He brought a whole group here from the forests.”
“And where is he?”
“They’re in the cellar… interrogating Germans….”
He! They! Now Morava was sure, but suddenly he felt nervous: Where was Litera? Why wasn’t he back? He had RypPs photos too!
“Should I go fetch him?” Lokajík asked ingratiatingly.
“We’ll drop in ourselves,” the envoy decided. “Meanwhile put things in order here, comrades!”
His speech had impressed Morava.
“Could I ask you for a couple of words in private,” he requested of the Communist.