The Visible World (21 page)

She would come to him constantly while he was still on the outside: the thought of her, of her strength...for him. No one had ever aligned themselves with him the way she had. Immediately. Unquestioningly. No one. He remembered watching her once, sitting in the shade by the side of a pond, lost inside herself, and when she had looked up there had been no shift, no translation. Everything was open to him. Everything. He’d never known such courage. He wanted to live inside her—he damn near had—but inside her voice too, inside her thoughts, her dreams. It was obsession, he told himself, but it didn’t feel like obsession. There was nothing weakening about it, nothing unclean. It felt like air, like sanity itself.

But all that was before. Before this place. Air was not wanted here, nor too much sanity, either. What had been strengthening before was something else now. A diluting thing. The look on her face underneath him—the bitten lip, the strand of hair, the yearning for the precipice, and then the long, sweet fall—the feel of her against him at night, the meals shared—all these had to be put away now, ruthlessly. They could only hurt him here. And yet, five, six times a day, inadvertently, helplessly, he’d catch himself whispering her name, the very sound of it, Ivana, Ivana, like a talisman, like hope, like a holy relic to a failed apostate.

He thought of odd things, small things. For the better part of two days he tried to place the scent he’d caught when the priests had moved the slab and the cold air smelling of stone and urine had rushed up into his face. He smelled it now and again in the days that followed, more faintly each time, and having little else to do, he spent some time vainly trying to put a name to this ghost until the moment someone’s spoon scraped against the side of the pot and he had it: the courtyard of the building he had grown up in. He remembered it now. He and Miloš Mostovský had spent days digging a network of tunnels through a small mountain of wet sand. They hardly spoke. By late morning the sun would move across the courtyard, but in the shade the sand felt cold, and every day an old man who was building a low brick wall along the communal garden would scoop wet cement from a small wheelbarrow with a trowel and slap and scrape it between the bricks. The smell of wet cement—it was as though that smell had simply disappeared from the earth in all the intervening years, till now. As though it had been kept here for him, preserved like a jar of cherries or pickled mushrooms until the day he discovered it again.

He remembered the courtyard perfectly: the way the air felt, the smell of soil and garbage. Every now and then his eye would catch a movement in the rabbit hutches against the wall. Amazing to think that these same hands had dug through the sand those mornings until the sand loosened and he felt, with that strange shock of the living touching the living, fingers grasping his, reaching from the other side. That he was that same person. That the years should have brought him here.

During the days he managed to keep the thinking away, filling in the hours with the work of staying warm or making stew (they skinned the rabbits the schoolteacher brought them by hanging them from a spike that protruded from the wall, tying their legs with shoelaces) or rereading the newspapers, which told him nothing. At night his dreams, as though taking their revenge, rushed back, crowding each other in their eagerness to reclaim the territory from which they’d been expelled. And always she would be there, somewhere, waiting for him to find her.

He was back in Manchester, in the soldiers’ barracks, packing for the mission, and suddenly knew the plane had left without him. He was in a seaport at night—he recognized it as Gdynia. He was on the ship he was to take to France—the engines had already started—but he had to find the stairs to the crypt. They were covered with a slab. In the dream he realized quite clearly that he wasn’t supposed to know about the crypt yet, that he had not yet been dropped into the Protectorate, that he had not even been to England, but it didn’t matter. He rushed down the ship’s narrow hallways and stairs, looking for the door. Everyone he met seemed eager to help.

Now he was in the plane, sitting on the wooden board in the dark. The door was open. Strangely, there was no wind. Outside, a shoreless blackness. His father was sitting next to him. He looked at his father and realized that his father was terrified for him, that he didn’t want him to jump but knew he couldn’t stop him. And in the dream he reached out and patted his father’s stubbled cheek reassuringly. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and his father said, “But it’s dark out there. How will you know which way is up?” “The ground is always down,” he replied, and his father seemed comforted by this and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell your mother.”

Every night the dreams bled into each other, leaving him exhausted. He was back in school, worrying about an exam. He was opening a suitcase filled with grass. He was standing by a frozen lake with Kubiš. It was snowing. Someone was coming toward them and he put his hand on the gun in his pocket, but now it wasn’t Kubiš behind him anymore, it was her, and the man coming toward them was saying, “Just some trimmings from last week’s butchering.” He could feel her there behind him. It was dark. They were in the forest now but something was wrong—there were cobbles under his feet instead of pine needles. Far ahead, a tiny white light kept appearing and disappearing behind the trees. He wondered what it could be. When he realized he was looking at a candle flame high in an apartment window, he stopped. “What’s wrong?” he heard her say. “I don’t know,” he said, “there’s been some mistake,” and taking the tin cup that dangled around his neck he swung it over his shoulder and woke feeling her presence so intensely that for one mad instant he almost reached behind him to see if she was there in the space between himself and the stone, as if, before reason destroyed the illusion, his faith could make it real.

He thought about his parents now, his sister...spent hours remembering their apartment on Michalovská ulice: the hallway with its worn red runner, the kitchen, the window overlooking the courtyard. More and more it seemed impossible not to; the pictures came back to him in quick, uninvited flashes as he slid into his niche or out of it, as he laced his boots or cut the eye out of a potato: his mother standing by the kitchen table, complaining about the price of meat; his father’s voice yelling at him to get the coal from the cellar; his sister’s face when he did or said something that hurt her—the way her eyes filled and she sucked in her lower lip before coming after him. At times these stabs of memory brought with them a pain that was distinctly physical—a seizing-up sensation in the chest, a sharp tightening of the throat, as if he might actually suffocate—and in those moments he would move quickly, desperately, bending down to tie a boot that didn’t need tying, or wrenching himself abruptly to the left or right if he was lying down, as if freeing himself from something closing in around him.

More often though the memories were so distant they seemed someone else’s, and in his mind he would wander through his old apartment as dispassionately as if he were giving himself a tour of his own home, and even when he heard himself saying
This is the room where your sister used to live,
or
There is where your mother used to beat the rugs once a year in the spring,
even when the voice in his head informed him that he would not see them again, it seemed as if these were things he had known for a very long time, and had grown accustomed to.
They were gone.
Yes, he knew that. Certain things simply were what they were. There was nothing to be done.

And yet, though he felt a sense of relief in being able to face these facts, he noticed that his memories at these times had a certain vague quality about them, as if drawn by an artist who, while adept at sketching the general outline of things with quick, nervous strokes—the torso, the bend of the legs, the perspective of the room—left out the specifics. His mind leaped from thing to thing, touching here, erasing there, darkening, reinforcing, then leaping elsewhere before the picture took on life. He could think of the evenings at the beginning of the war, for example, when the four of them would sit around the dining room table listening to the BBC on the radio his father had positioned on top of the cupboard for the best reception
(and here’s the kitchen table where you would sit listening to the BBC
...), and everything would be fine until he remembered his father’s socks as he stood on the chair to reach the dial, or the way he would bend his head, listening, his finger raised to mark the burning sound of static while the radio lit up slowly, like an oven, waiting for the opening phrase of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—
ta-ta-ta-taaah
—which always marked the beginning of the BBC’s broadcast into occupied Czechoslovakia—and suddenly something would catch in his heart like a long thorn and he’d know, really know, that they were gone.

This is how things were now.

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT IT RAINED. THEY HAD SEEN ALMOST
no one: once a hunched figure with a basket over its arm; another time a couple on a distant hillside, the man asleep, the woman sitting over him, her arms around her knees; the third a fisherman sitting back against a tree by a reedy pond, his arms crossed, staring at his rod in its holder. Nearby, his black bicycle leaned against a pine. He didn’t see them.

Where the forest had been cut, letting in the light, they picked raspberries, raspberries so ripe they trembled like water on the end of a branch and dropped at a breath, two or three to a handful, big as the joint of a man’s thumb. The raspberry brambles were close and hot and still and afterward they washed the bloody stains and the itching yellow hairs off their arms and ate what they had not already eaten in the shade. They picked mushrooms which they fried up in lard and ate with bread and tore handfuls of yellow chamomile buds for tea, and they swam in ponds so lonely and lost they seemed never to have seen another human being but to have been waiting there for centuries under the midday sun, untouched. They slept in the morning, or at noon, and woke in the middle of the night and made love and then lay next to each other and talked, sometimes for hours, then walked gingerly over the pine needles to the muddy shore of a warm, shallow lake. Wading in, they could feel their feet pushing into the yielding bottom, smell the faint green smell of decay, and standing where the water was nearly up to their chests, they would hold each other like a statue of lovers half drowned by the tide.

On the third day she had walked out of the forest into the town of Nedvědice and sent a telegram to her parents, knowing my father would go to them eventually to see if they knew where she was: Do not worry
stop
Am well and safe
stop
I’m sorry
stop,
then scratched out the last two words and passed the paper under the little barred window to the telegraph operator, a thin, sad man in a black vest who pushed her change back to her coin by coin with the tip of his finger, collected her change and walked back.

It had felt odd to be alone again. She had refused to take the gun, and he had not tried to convince her. She would be back before noon. The walk in had taken a little over two hours. The trail had led out to a grassy path that wound around a muddy pond, then meandered up through terraces of uncropped grass and wildflowers and overgrown wooden fences. She came to a gate sagging on its hinges and lifted it up off the grass and swung it open and passed through into a rising field of wheat that shook and moved like the mane of a horse whenever the wind went over it. At times the trail was swallowed up in the wheat and she had to guess her way by what seemed like a gap between the rows. A small flock of birds burst out from under her feet as though shot into the air. Pushing up to the crest of the hill, sweating now, she startled something, a fox perhaps, that moved off through the grain like a fish under water, disturbing the surface.

From the crest of the hill she could see the lane, the thinning edge of the field marked by dun-colored weeds and spotted with poppies—a scattering of drops, arterial red—and stopped to catch her breath. The sheer beauty of it was so insistent, so undeniable, that she couldn’t help but marvel at it: the white storybook clouds in the hot sky, the smear of lupines along the ditch, the long, stately row of lindens that marked the road’s progress. In the far distance, a cluster of red-tiled roofs, an ornate steeple. The landscape lay before her: half asleep, enchanted, shameless.

Walking down that long, straight road, silent except for the wind in the high trees and the tired insects in the hedgerows whenever it died, she noticed with a kind of wonder how strange to herself she’d grown. She was the same person, holding the same conversations inside her head—wondering how much farther it was to the turnoff, or whether she should stay on the road or cut through the pastures—except that now it was as though she were talking to him as well, as though a third person had entered the room that only she and herself had shared. She wanted to talk to him, think aloud with him. His entrance had displaced something essential, she knew, then realized with a kind of voluptuous sorrow that she had been waiting for this displacement all of her life, that things would never again be quite the same and that she didn’t care and wouldn’t miss them.