The Cowards Read online

‘And you’re going to be in on that, too?’

  ‘I guess so. But if we don’t like the looks of it, we pull out.’

  I didn’t say anything for a while again. I had to get a gun out of Prema somehow.

  ‘Listen – you think there’ll be anything for me?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, maybe a submachine gun or something like that.’

  ‘Sure, don’t worry. We’ve got lots more weapons back at the warehouse.’

  ‘You’re not saving them for somebody else then?’

  ‘No. We thought we’d distribute what we couldn’t use once things get started.’

  ‘Well, thanks.’

  We came to the warehouse. The corrugated-iron overhead door was pulled halfway down and Mr Skocdopole stood in front of it. When he saw me, he looked surprised.

  ‘Well, so you did it, eh boys? How come you didn’t have to shoot?’

  ‘They let me go. Sabata put in a good word for us,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s different,’ said Mr Skocdopole. ‘Anyway, it’d still be a bit too early.’

  Vahar rolled up the flag and crawled inside. The boys went in after him, one after the other. Prema stayed outside with me. Mr Skocdopole came up to us. He had a black patch on his left eye. He’d lost his eye in Siberia when he was in the Czech Legion.*

  ‘Now, just be careful, boys,’ he said. ‘The essential thing is not to do anything rash and to think things through. But when things get rough, don’t get scared.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Prema. ‘I can use you.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said.

  ‘I’m supposed to meet the Lof kid at Serpon’s place. Know him?’

  ‘That’s the redhead from Messerschmidt, huh?’

  ‘That’s the one. He worked in the factory.’

  ‘Yeah, I know him.’

  ‘All right, listen. He’s supposed to bring me a report from Black Mountain. Could you go there instead of me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And tell him they’re supposed to come here to the warehouse tomorrow morning. Got that?’

  ‘Yeah. What time?’

  ‘Oh, around eight.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’ll go there then, right?’

  ‘Sure. Have you got any password?’

  ‘No. Just tell him I sent you. He knows you, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So I can depend on you?’

  ‘Sure. And listen – I can count on that gun, can’t I?’

  ‘Naturally. When they announce mobilization, come straight to the warehouse.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘That’s all right. And you bring me Lof’s report back to the warehouse too, huh?’

  ‘You’re going to be here this afternoon?’

  ‘Yeah. We’ve still got to clean the guns.’

  ‘I’ll be there. Is that all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  I gave him my hand. He shook it.

  ‘Well, cheers.’

  ‘Cheers, and thanks,’ I said.

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Mr Skocdopole.

  ‘Good-bye,’ I said, and turned.

  So I had a gun. But that thing with Lof was a nuisance. Only there wasn’t much I could do about it. One good turn deserves another. I went under the viaduct and headed back towards the square. It was only then that I noticed there were people standing on the opposite sidewalk looking towards the warehouse. And they were watching me, too. It gave me a good feeling. Too bad I hadn’t had a gun when I walked up to the boys. But maybe it looked good that way. As if I was their superior or something. I hurried towards the square, feeling fine, and forgot all about Lof. The sun wasn’t shining any longer because, in the meantime, the sky had grown overcast with rain clouds. They had blown in from the north and covered the sun and soon the whole sky was clouded over. I turned into Jew Street. It was narrow, cobbled, and deserted. Flags hung out from a few of the houses. I looked at my watch. It was already past twelve o’clock and people had probably gone home for lunch. Not even the revolution could interfere with that. I turned the corner and passed the post office on the square. People were already walking around normally again, but the crowds had dispersed. Flags flew from the church and the loan association office and it looked like noon on the 28th of October.* The flags gave me a kind of frustrated feeling of emptiness. It seemed to me you could almost smell nice, fat geese roasting in the ovens in all those houses. That was it. Roast goose. You could bet on it. That’s how things go. Fear, cheers, brass bands, speeches, and roast goose with sauerkraut and dumplings. Everything would be the same again. Nothing would ever change. A couple of exciting days and then the same old bowl of oatmeal, stiff and gummy like it always used to be. And belching after lunch. I’d been feeling fine a little while ago, but now all of a sudden I was fed up. At least I had jazz. But even that didn’t help just then. At least I’d be going to Prague, to the university. That didn’t help either. Christ! Irena, at least. Nothing. I felt completely numb, stunned. I felt like I’d gone lame or blind and that I’d never see again, never feel again. Nothing, either pleasant or unpleasant, just this dull monotony of a life without any future. Quick! Look forward to something! Be glad about something! Love something! Or get furious at something! But nothing happened. I stood at the corner by the post office and I didn’t feel a thing. It was awful. Suddenly my life had no goal whatsoever. All there was to do was to lie down and sleep. But I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. I was too jittery, too keyed up. Lord, one had to at least have something! At least Irena. I tried to imagine her and I did imagine her, but nothing happened. Nothing but numbness. I’d have to see her in the flesh. Maybe that would help me, at least. Yes. See her and kid around with her. At least that would help. I rushed into the post office. The frosted window was closed. The room was quiet. I went up to the telephone window and knocked. The window slid up and behind it sat the big-nosed girl with bleached hair who alternated with Irena. Irena wasn’t there any more.

  ‘Has Irena gone already?’ I asked hurriedly.

  The girl peered at me curiously and nodded.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said and hurried out of the room. The heavy, brass-bound door gave me a hard time. My God! Where’s Irena? Where’s anything? The sky above the square was completely overcast by now. A chilly light lay over everything. The red in the flags had faded and a handful of people were loitering around the church. The church! I clutched at that bulbous steeple as if it was a lifebelt. Its windows in their deep niches and its blind sun-dial on the wall. To the church, fast! Feel something, say something to wake an echo in me, to break up this numbness, to find some sort of resonance inside. An empty, a desolate life. What did I care about Irena? About jazz? About anything? My whole life. I practically ran into the church. The doors were ajar. I burst inside. There was a little table in the vestibule with religious brochures and a cashbox. At the left there was a crucifix and, on the right, an old gravestone of some nobleman or other. I panicked, afraid that the glass doors into the main nave were locked. They usually were. I grabbed the latch. They weren’t locked. I went inside and a churchly chill wafted over me. I dipped my thumb into the holy water and made a damp sign of the cross on my forehead and on my chin and on my chest.

  A few old ladies were sitting in the pews – quite a few, more than usual. A white light poured in through the windows and dissolved into a little puddle of cold twilight. God, why doesn’t it have stained-glass windows? But they’d taken them out on account of the danger of air raids. Three arched Gothic windows behind the main altar had just turned frigid in the unpleasant chill. God! The whole church was bright and clean. Too bright. You couldn’t do anything here. You couldn’t feel a thing in this church. How in hell could a person imagine God in such a light? And I needed to feel something, quick. My eyes skidded over the altar that had been ridiculously restored and was all polished up. The pewter baptismal font stood by the left altar. T
hat’s where I’d been baptized. Next to it rose the last pillar supporting the side wing of the choir loft. I looked over there. That was what I was looking for!

  It was dim there. There was a little altar with a Virgin Mary in front of which a little red lamp burned. There at the least it was dim. I went over. My heels made an awful noise on the floor and a couple of old ladies stared at me. I knelt in front of the altar and looked up at the Virgin Mary. She wasn’t the prettiest I’d ever seen. I closed my eyes and imagined mine instead. She had red lips and green eyes. Like Irena. In fact, she looked just like Irena.

  ‘Hail Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life and desire,’ I began. I felt the Virgin Mary was actually listening to me. And she was. ‘Our hope, we the outcast children of Eve, call out to Thee from this vale of tears.’ The Virgin Mary listened and watched me. ‘Speak. Speak to me,’ I implored. ‘My God, say something so I’ll be able to feel something at least.’

  But she didn’t say a thing. All she did was listen. But she never said a thing. All she’d ever done was listen dumbly like that.

  ‘Turn upon us Thy gracious gaze,’ I pleaded, and I could see her turn her lovely eyes towards me and that was wonderful and it excited me and her pretty ruby-red lips were parted and it was night and her eyes were half closed. Maybe she’d reconsider and marry me after all. It wouldn’t be bad at all to get married to her. It would mean an end to everything, to all my plans and so on, but then plans never work out anyway and being married to her would be good. Good. Very good. My God! To sleep with her and make love to her, but then what? What the hell else can you do with Irena? You can’t talk to her. All you can do is kid around and I’d soon get fed up with all that all the time. Nuts. I’d just as soon she wouldn’t reconsider, that she’d just go on making Zdenek happy. Sure. I’d be better off without her. A lot better off. There’re probably dozens of Irenas in Prague. Nuts to Irena. She’s not bad, but that’s only because there wasn’t much choice. I looked up at the altar and remembered I’d wanted to pray.

  ‘Our Father,’ I began, but what was it I’d wanted to pray about? Oh yeah, to feel something again. But I was already feeling again. I didn’t need to pray any more. I had lots of feelings now. About Irena and all those other Irenas in Prague. And how I’d fascinate them with my saxophone – the sexiest instrument there is. Sexophone. A real honey pot for girls. I wanted to hurry through my prayers and get out of there because everything was all right already but first I had to pray about something. At least an Our Father and a Hail Mary. Maybe God wants us to get bored saying our prayers so he can test us that way and find out whether we’re willing to do something for him or not. I started in on the Our Father but couldn’t get through it. I kept getting it all mixed up with Irena and saxophones and Prague and night clubs and all those girls and then the revolution and Prema and guns and where I was supposed to go this afternoon to meet Lof, and I couldn’t finish the prayer. Finally I concentrated so hard my head ached, but I managed to get through to the end. I sighed with relief and crossed myself hurriedly. My conscience bothered me a bit, but not for long. It disappeared as soon as I was out in front of the church again. The cross I’d made on my forehead felt chilly and it was like I still had a drop of water there. I quickly wiped it off so nobody’d see and headed around the church towards home. There were only a few people out on the street and I didn’t run into anybody I knew. Slowly I went up the apartment-house steps. I remembered how the German soldiers had taken me through the streets. I hoped Mother hadn’t found out about it. She probably hadn’t. It wouldn’t be good for her if she had. She was nervous and had high blood pressure. I unlocked the door and went into the apartment. I expected something to happen. But Father and Mother were just sitting at the table in the dining-room.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Greetings,’ said Father. ‘Well, what’s going on outside?’

  ‘Nothing. Dr Sabata’s negotiating with the Germans.’

  ‘Oh, gracious, let’s just hope we all get through this safely,’ said Mother. She hadn’t heard anything. That was good.

  ‘We will. Don’t worry,’ I said and sat down at the table.

  Mother got up, took the soup tureen and filled my bowl with the aluminium ladle. It was beef broth.

  ‘We spent the morning painting over the German signs,’ I said to break the silence.

  ‘So I heard. And tell me, what happened at the square?’ Father said.

  ‘Nothing. The Germans just made everybody go away and then they left.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Then I quickly changed the subject away from what had happened at the square. ‘Listen, what’s with Vladyka?’

  Father made a wry face. ‘Nothing, for the time being. This morning we told him to go home and wait for further decisions.’

  ‘I saw him in front of the bank. He was wearing a tricolour in his buttonhole as big as the side of a barn.’

  ‘Really? Oh, he’ll be a big patriot now, you can be sure of that.’

  ‘Will you make things hot for him?’

  ‘Well, I could, I suppose. But it all depends what the other men at the bank decide,’ Father said.

  Father was a soft-hearted man, a good man. I knew him.

  ‘You really ought to,’ I said. The soup was good. I didn’t leave a drop.

  ‘What’s next?’ Father asked.

  ‘Roast sirloin,’ said Mother.

  ‘Horse meat?’

  ‘Why do you ask? You know very well there’s nothing else these days.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not complaining. Horse sirloin is even better than the real thing.’

  Mother went into the kitchen. I picked up a book which lay on the radio. Bread of the Sea by Willibald Yöring. I opened it and was bored right away. This Yöring was interested in the life of Norwegian fishermen. I wasn’t interested in the life of Norwegian fishermen. I put the book back. Books are awful, most of them anyway. Records are better. I was interested in food. In life, too, or my own life anyway. Mother appeared in the doorway, carrying a casserole on a wooden tray which she set down on the table. Father carefully lifted the lid.

  ‘Aaaah,’ he said.

  Then he served himself a nice big helping of meat and poured gravy over the whole plate. He dunked six dumplings in it. Father was a nice guy. I liked him. He was a good guy because he didn’t pretend to be something he wasn’t. That’s why I liked him. I’d noticed a long time ago that whatever a man lives by, or for, becomes the most striking feature of his anatomy, his physiognomy. That’s strictly according to Darwin, or whoever it was who wrote about the effect of habit on the adaption and development of characteristics. Maybe it was Spencer. There’s nothing funnier than a big-mouthed, highbrow intellectual. You can tell right off which it is they work with more – their brains or their bellies. But Father didn’t make any pretences. He had a beautiful big mouth and jaws, his cheeks were like pouches and when he ate – and he always ate with his mouth closed – you could hear how everything was being ground up and mashed and kneaded and pulverized inside that great big mouth of his, even though he didn’t smack his lips at all while he ate, because he always kept his mouth closed. Otherwise he was jolly and full of fun and he knew how to tell awful jokes and he kept on telling the same ones over and over, and the funny thing was that he always made a big hit with them. Those jokes seemed pretty lousy to me, but I guess other people didn’t think so. I used to think that nothing could move him, but when Aunt Manya died he bawled all day and when he tried to talk he sobbed like a little kid. Yes, he was a good guy and I liked him. He didn’t understand me but I didn’t care. The main thing was, he gave me my allowance and let me do whatever I felt like doing. That he did.

  I helped myself to the meat and dumplings and gravy and polished it off in a couple of minutes. It was awfully good. I’m not surprised that there’re people who live just to eat. If I could have food like this all the time without going to a lot of effort to get it, and if I didn’t hav
e any digestion problems, I could easily live for food too. The fact that I ate to live, instead of the other way around, was just because most of the time Mother cooked meals that weren’t worth living for, because of the food shortage. That’s why I had to think up other reasons for living.

  After lunch Mother cleaned off the table and Father went to lie down on the couch in the kitchen. I got up from the table and sat down in the armchair by the radio. You could hear the clatter of dishes from the kitchen. I switched on the radio and looked out the window. It was nice to let all sorts of thoughts run through your head after lunch. Clouds were piling up over the town and it started to rain in the valley. All I could see from the window were hillsides and woods and houses, but no people. The people were out of sight, down in the streets. The set had warmed up and a desperate voice rang out from Prague Radio: ‘We are calling all Czech police, constabulary, and national troops in the region to report immediately to the Radio Building! The SS are trying to kill us! Report immediately!’ My heart jumped into my throat. This was sensational! Nothing like this had ever happened before! An uprising set off and directed over the radio! I wanted to be in on it too. Well, so it’d already started in Prague. So they were already shooting inside the Radio Building. That’s on Foch Boulevard, the place guarded by a Kraut wearing a tin half moon on his chest. So they were shooting there. Maybe they were already dead. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine it. A guy in a sharp-looking suit with a rifle, crouched behind an overturned streetcar. A smooth-looking guy in a light tan hat, carrying a submachine gun, crouched behind a lamppost. That was my idea of a revolution. Uniforms didn’t appeal to me. Uniforms were something for the Germans. This was more like it – the zootsuiters, as the German magazines scornfully called them, all dressed up and chewing gum. This was the way to stage an uprising against the Germans. To hell with uniforms. I went on listening. Just music now, no voice. Then it came on again. My spine felt chilly this time. Maybe things were really bad in Prague. Maybe they’d blow up the whole city. I felt like fighting. The Old Town Hall was on fire, they said. The best place to be would be on Kobylisy Hill where you get a nice view of Prague, kind of an unusual one, and from up there the town looks grey and flat, just chimneys and little turrets sticking up above the flat mass. And now I could imagine columns of smoke rising up towards the rainy skies and the wind blowing and shifting the smoke, and the fires springing up all over town as far as Vysehrad, and as dusk fell over the city, the fires burning brighter and brighter and huge flames licking at the Museum and the little towers and the Liben gas works, and in the distance the fires burning, smaller and smaller, while black columns of smoke wave and twist towards the stars. Prague was in ruins and there I sat in an armchair and I had a funny feeling in my stomach and in my brain, too. And it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, either. So we weren’t going to get by unscathed after all. So we weren’t as spineless and weak as some of us thought. We were going to have it like they’d had it in Stalingrad, in London, in Warsaw. Prague, too, is burning. I turned up the radio and the announcer began reporting excitedly that German tanks were approaching Prague from Benesov and then he said in Czech-accented English: ‘Attention! Attention! German tanks are approaching Prague from Benesov. We need air support! Attention, Allied Air Force! We need air support!’ That sounded great. Then he repeated it in Russian, but I didn’t understand that. And I could see those huge Typhoons and Thunderbolts with machine guns jutting out of their wings diving through the fine rain above the Benesov highway and blowing up the whole column of German tanks. I could just see those Tigers and Panthers burning and SS men in leather helmets tumbling out of the tank turrets, falling in the mud and racing off across the fields and the little green Spitfires going after them, diving low.