Authors: Mark Slouka
Strangely, instead of irritating Kubiš, Gabčík’s silence provided an outlet for jokes and insults, which helped calm him to a degree. “Look at him,” Kubiš would complain to no one in particular, “just lying there by his bowl,” and Gabčík, ignoring him, would move the cigarette over to his left hand and slowly reach over to the pot and dip a ladle in the soup without rising from his elbow. “You have no idea what it was like living with him in that goddamned cellar in Poděbrady,” Kubiš continued. “He ate everything. At night he’d creep out and graze on berries in the moonlight. You’re going to get us both killed, you fool, I’d tell him. I’m hungry, he’d say.”
Gabčík put the ladle back in the pot, stirred once, then moved the cigarette back to his right hand.
“He didn’t stop eating for three days,” said Kubiš. “When we ran out of food I started getting nervous. I thought I’d have to shoot him, like in that Jack London story.”
“What Jack London story?” said Gabčík.
“The one where he shoots the dog.”
Transferring the cigarette again, Gabčík reached over the pot, moved the ladle this way and that, as though clearing a space, then delicately dipped some soup and brought it to his mouth. Replacing the ladle, he moved the cigarette back to his right hand and took a long, thoughtful drag. “Don’t think I know that one,” he said.
And Bém, watching from the side, appreciating their gesture, as the others did, thought again that if it came to it, Gabčík would be the one he’d want next to him. More than Opálka, their commanding officer; more than blond, stoic Valčík, who looked like a spellbound shepherd when he slept; more than any of them. Two days earlier, in the middle of the morning, a sudden shouting from the street followed by three quick shots had sent a surge of fear and adrenaline through them all. It had had nothing to do with them, they learned eventually, but in the first ten seconds they had all reacted in their own way: he himself had stayed precisely where he was, behind the column next to which he had been standing; Opálka, gun drawn, had run to his predetermined position by the sleeping wall; Kubiš, as though some catch had been released inside him, had sprung to the wall under the small high window that looked out on the bricks of the building opposite. Gabčík, seemingly without haste, had taken three long strides to the central column midway between the stairs and the west wall, put his back against the stone, and stopped, his gun pointed at the ground and his head bowed as though listening to someone explaining something important. On his homely, wooden-puppet face was the same expression he’d had while stirring the soup: calm, inward, attentive but removed. It was only later, after everything had passed, after the trembling in their leg muscles had stopped and the taste had gone from their mouths, that Bém realized that Gabčík had moved instinctively to the one place in the crypt with a clear view of both possible entrances, the covered stairwell and the high window.
On June 8, shortly after the bells had rung noon, Opálka left the church for three hours. He returned visibly shaken. The reprisals were getting worse: hundreds dead, thousands more arrested or tortured, the Resistance under siege all through the Protectorate. Rumor had it that on hearing of Heydrich’s death, the Führer had demanded the immediate execution of ten thousand Czechs, chosen at random, and had only been dissuaded by Karl Hermann Frank’s argument that a reprisal of such magnitude and visibility would hurt morale among Czech factory workers and lower output from the munitions plants.
The new way was no less bloody, Opálka said. The net was tight: intellectuals, writers, former government officials, sympathizers, anyone suspected of harboring pro-Resistance sentiments, all were being arrested. Some had escaped. Others were apparently hoping to somehow slip through. Many, especially those with children, seemed frozen in place, unsure of where to run. The reward for any information leading to their arrest, Opálka said, had been raised to twenty million reichsmarks.
At times he wondered if it seemed as unreal to the rest of them. If they too found it hard to believe that just over their heads, not ten meters away, a hot June day had begun and that men waiting for the tram on the corner of Řesslova were taking off their hats to wipe their foreheads, or that two hours from now, schoolgirls lying out in their gardens listening to the bigband sound of Karel Vlach on the radio would be moving their towels into the shade. How amazing that life should continue on as it did, that the trams should come and go and people should shop for food and fall in love and complain of indigestion. It seemed absurd, like cooking a meal in the kitchen while a fire raged in the living room. And yet for most, that was how it was. Children who had been born when the tanks pulled into Prague were almost four years old. Time had done its work; the fire in the living room, though roaring now, was nothing new.
It was getting harder not to think about her—to guess where she was or what she was doing. He tried not to remember her walk or her smile, the way she would look at him sometimes. He tried not to remember her spontaneity, the sudden glimpses she gave him of the child she’d once been. He tried not to think that she was out there, a five-minute tram ride away. It didn’t work. It made no sense to exclude her. How much easier the whole thing would be, he admitted to himself now, if he could only talk with her for an hour—one hour—absorb a bit of her strength.
They were to be taken out of the church on the nineteenth, Opálka had told them. Bém tried not to think about that either, about the eleven days still ahead of them, about the coffins they would have to lie down in with their guns at their sides, listening to every noise coming in from the outside world, and yet there was nothing else to do but think about the coffins, the days still ahead, that date interminably crawling down to them like a glacier in the sun.
That his life could end on the nineteenth, or any day before that, he simply did not consider. Over the past two years he’d grown as used to the idea of dying as any man could—he’d tried to think about it clearly and rationally, but the thought of not hearing her voice again was not possible. He would not permit it. He would survive. He knew this. He would find her again. He would make it to the other side through sheer force of will.
The others, he felt, believed much the same thing. A new kind of strength was taking over now that they had a fixed date toward which to aim. They would survive this frozen crapper and the goddamned sleeping holes, and they would survive this war, and Gabčík would marry Líba Fafek, who had been with them at the hit, and Opálka would return to his family, and Valčík would work on his motorcycle until the Second Coming of Christ, and someday when the war was over they would get together and bore everyone around them silly recalling the stove and the cans and the goddamned window and the missing bricks, arguing over how many columns there had been between the beds and the wall or whether Petřek, the priest who looked like an aging goat, had actually had a goatee or not.
At times it all seemed possible. The day would come. They would get in the coffins. The plan would work. At other times they would suddenly remember what they had done, and the enormity of it would flood over them as if for the first time and they would see it as if from the outside—as if someone else had been responsible, not them—and they would know that it could never be that easy.
They had done the unthinkable, and in their own hearts they did not quite believe it. It had seemed strangely unreal to him even on the morning of May 27. He’d woken early, instantly conscious, and quickly gone to the living room and removed the gun from the hole under the sofa cushion. The ammunition was where he’d left it. The family he was staying with was still asleep. He’d told them the night before as they were eating dinner not to worry if he didn’t come home the following night, that he might be staying over with a friend in židenice for a while.
“For how long?” the father had asked, tearing off a piece of bread.
It was hard to say.
Was he taking everything?
It seemed best, he said.
“I’ll get up and make you something for breakfast,” the mother said.
He shook his head, pierced yet again by their courage, by the plain-faced little girl across the table with her straw-blond hair and her raw, bitten nails, by the plastic yellow tablecloth with its smiling, semicircle burn mark. He’d be leaving very early, he said.
The father broke off another piece of bread. “You’ll be careful, yes?”
“Of course,” he said.
“You take care of yourself, Tomás,” the mother said.
“I will,” he said.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he loaded the gun, put the rest of the ammunition in his pocket, then forced himself to eat a piece of bread and drink a half cup of coffee. He hadn’t noticed the vase, the jasmine cuttings. It didn’t seem possible that this was it—that after five months of waiting and planning, the day had come. Leaning over, he moved aside the heavy blue curtains. The sky was lightening. It would be a beautiful day. Four hours. He could picture the turn in Libeň, the tram stop, the row of stores. The spot by the wall where he would stand—110 meters from the turn, 4c to the nearest side street. He stood up, feeling the pressure of the gun under his left arm. All right. He slipped the money under the vase, swept the bread crumbs into his cup and saucer, and brought the dishes to the sink. He’d never prayed in his life. It seemed ridiculous to begin now. On a whim he clipped off a cluster of jasmine with his fingernail and slipped it in the buttonhole of his lapel.
By the time he walked out of the building to catch the tram to Vysočany where he was to meet the others it was morning. A pale, buttery light was already spreading from the east. There were few cars. The trip was uneventful, the tram nearly empty. Three and a half hours. The sudden rise of nausea, to be expected. He looked out the window. Wet pavements. Street sweepers. Here and there a uniform. The suit they’d gotten him was too hot. Three and a half hours. It didn’t seem real. It occurred to him that it might never seem real, and that it didn’t matter if it did or not.
He could see them now, again, standing by the corner of that little park that smelled like smoke, Gabčík carrying the battered suitcase with the sten gun and Líba Fafek making jokes about the bonnet she was to wear to signal to them whether Heydrich’s car had an escort or not, tilting it down, then back, like a girl preparing to pose for her portrait. They were just a group of friends: university students perhaps, now that the universities were closed, or musicians after a long night. The tall one carried a suitcase stuffed with grass for his rabbits, which were legal to raise in the Protectorate. Prague was full of back-alley hutches and suitcases of grass; entire fields were being moved this way and that.
Opálka went over the plan one last time. Everyone knew his station. Heydrich’s schedule had been confirmed the previous afternoon by a watchmaker named Novotný who had been called in to fix an antique clock and had seen a document left open on the desk. The Reichsprotektor was being summoned to Berlin that afternoon. He would depart his castle at Panenskě Břeǽany between nine-thirty and ten. His car would take the usual route. Since it was a beautiful day, he would demand that the Mercedes be open to the weather.
Bém knew it by heart. They all did. Líba Fafek was still playing with the hat. Kubiš, who along with Gabčík had been chosen to carry out the assassination, stood off to the side, nodding his head as though listening to fast music. Líba Fafek was to turn onto the road in front of Heydrich’s car. Valčík would be stationed above the curve; he would signal Heydrich’s approach with a pocket mirror. At the turn in Libeň, Líba would step on the brakes, forcing the Heydrich car to slow. Kubiš and Gabčík would be waiting by the side of the road. Kubiš would kill both Heydrich and his driver with the sten gun; should anything go wrong, Gabčík would back him up with a grenade. The others would be stationed above and below the turn to distract any police. After the hit, Gabčík and Kubiš would make their escape on bicycles. Was everybody clear on their destinations after the hit? Opálka asked.
A wave of sweetness came to Bém from the flowering lindens growing in the park. For a moment or two he thought he would be sick. A schoolboy with a boxer on a leash was walking the dog around an empty fountain. And suddenly it was as if he were outside the group, as though he were the boy with the dog, seeing them standing there at the corner—the man with the suitcase, the woman with the hat—feeling the tug of the leash in his hand. And then it passed and he knew he would be all right.
Gabčík had put his big arm around Líba Fafek, who wasn’t smiling anymore. She had taken off the hat and was holding it over her stomach.
They had a little over ninety minutes to be at their positions, Opálka said. No more waiting. He looked at Kubiš and Gabčík. The bicycles were waiting for them in the schoolteacher’s garage as arranged, he said. They were women’s bicycles, but since bicycles were in short supply, no one would notice.
Valčík abruptly leaned over and vomited into the bushes. “It’s fine,” he said.
“You’re all right?” Opálka said.
Valčík took a white handkerchief out of his pocket and neatly wiped his mouth. “I’ll be fine,” he said.
“You’re sure? If not, I have to know now.”
“Quite sure.”
Kubiš shook his head. “Women’s bicycles,” he said. “As a kid I wouldn’t have been caught dead.”
Gabčík, next to him, smiled that small, sad smile of his.
“I’m sorry,” said Opálka.
“When this is over, I’m going to put in a complaint with London,” said Kubiš.
“I understand.”
“Yes, well.” Kubiš looked around at the group. “Maybe we should go, don’t you think?” He turned to Gabčík. “Wouldn’t want to keep the goddamned rabbits waiting.”
They shook hands all around, feeling awkward, then turned to go. Gabčík kissed Líba quickly and picked up his suitcase.
“I just wanted to say that it’s been a pleasure,” said Opálka suddenly, but though Valčík nodded and wished him luck, the others were already walking away, and didn’t hear him.