The Book of Dirt

‘Arnošt Flusser!’ The teacher called out from the front of the room. ‘Hands on your head this instant. We do not wave at wasps.’

The boy stood at the window, his right arm hoisted awkwardly in limp salute. It wasn’t clear to his classmates if he was welcoming the troops as they rolled in below or simply wiping clear the film of mist he created with each breath. Arnošt was that kind of boy. Everything he did seemed ambiguous. ‘A fine bed he makes…’ His teacher now spoke in a soft thrum. ‘Turning down the sheets so that the lice might be more comfortable.’ A pause. Some giggles, stifled. His teacher, louder: ‘He has yet to consider how he will sleep.’

Arnošt Flusser stood still. Was it defiance, fear or boyish fascination? He knew the teacher was pointing at him, but could not turn around. With his nose pushed against the glass, he did not see wasps or lice or insects of any kind. He saw three-headed newts, like in the story his father had told him the night before: salamanders that slithered across the bridge in perfect formation, their sleek bodies hiding the mechanical movement of their feet. They made no sound. The snow swirled fairy dust dervishes around them, settling on the cobblestones or disappearing into the river, but never gathering on their leathery skin. The newts did not stop to feast on the slugs that had gathered on either side of their columns, enthusiastically extending their antennae. Little Arnošt glimpsed stuttered movement in the whiteness of Křižovnická Street. He turned to look in the direction of the university, and saw clusters of chameleons changing colour as they tumbled forward: one moment grey, then a fluttering white, and, as they came closer to their reptilian brethren, red and black. How strange nature can be, he thought. Another puff of mist. Again Arnošt wiped it away.

The teacher sat at his desk watching as the young dreamer surveyed the dawning of a new city. Was the boy recalcitrant, touched or, as he often suspected, blessed? Either way it amounted to the same thing. Arnošt Flusser was a nuisance. It was not within the teacher’s powers to instruct such a child. At most he could help the boy survive, making sure he was not the butt of the other children’s scorn. But there were limits. Every few days he would send Arnošt to stand in the corner because, the teacher would tell himself, examples must be made.

Not that it seemed to bother the boy. On the contrary. The teacher suspected that he relished the opportunity to escape into his imagination, that he saw it as a reward. He could never tell. Best to leave him be. But today was different. Today the teacher wanted to storm to the corner and grab Arnošt by the ear, shake him and scream at him: ‘Can’t you see what you’re doing?’

For everyone else in the room nothing had changed. Why then must this one child insist on reminding them that the streets were no longer their own? That the moment the bell rang, and the doors flung open, they would step out into purgatory—and Arnošt, the only Jew, into hell? And yet the teacher did not have the strength to stand up, to walk those few steps, to take hold of the boy. Slowly, he exhaled. He had not slept in days.

At four-thirty that morning the teacher had rested the wireless on his lap, adjusting the frequency, hoping to hear the message without interference. It was from the State President and the Minister of Defence. ‘German Army infantry and aircraft are beginning the occupation of the territory of the Republic at zero six hundred. The slightest resistance will cause the most unforeseen consequences and lead to the intervention becoming utterly brutal. All commanders have to obey the orders of the occupying Army. The various units of the Czech Army are being disarmed. Military and civil aeroplanes must remain on their aerodromes and none must attempt to take to the air. Prague will be occupied at six-thirty.’ If only it were a hoax, a radio play, like last year’s Halloween broadcast that had caused panic in distant lands. How he had laughed when he heard. But not now.

The teacher had already resigned himself to the occupation. He knew it was coming. First the Sudeten, then the Slovaks. Only yesterday there had been an attempt to start riots in the streets, to incite his countrymen to fight and make victims of the German minority, victims that the little madman’s army might swoop in and rescue. Of course it failed, the Czech people would not rise to petty provocations. But it did not matter. The rescue was already underway. And as he prepared for that chunk of earth that was Czech without Slovakia to be tacked once again onto its northern lands, all the teacher could think about was that six o’clock was a terribly inconvenient time. How was he supposed to get to school to instruct the children?

The teacher made sure to leave home early. He did not want to be held up at roadblocks or, worse, crushed by some wayward tank. He gathered his books and stepped out the front door. Orbs of hazy light seeped from the street lamps, struggling against the unforgiving Prague night. The teacher could just make out others who had put forward their daily schedule by an hour or two.

This is what it took to be normal, to ignore the occupation, to show that life went on. The teacher listened for signs, explosions, the thunder of gravel crunching under wheels. But all he could make out was a howling gale as jagged shards of tiny icicles smashed into the side of his head.

And yet, on the wind there were whispers he could not hear. The conquering forces had been delayed. There was resistance. Their vehicles were breaking down. They were lost. The sun had begun to edge over the horizon and there were no tanks, no guns, no motorcycles, no planes. Prague was still free. The teacher made his way down Platéřska Street and turned into Křižovnická. He hurried, his collar pulled high. At the school’s entrance, he fumbled with his keys, then strode down the corridor to his classroom. All was as it should be. Soon the radiator would come on and the thaw would begin.

The teacher jumbled the sticks of chalk, making sure that there was no discernible order because, he thought, chaos is freedom. He wiped the top of his desk, although it was not dirty. That is what a free man can do. And then he slumped into his chair and awaited the arrival of the sun, of children and tanks, wondering which would come first to snatch this precious freedom away.

‘Children, please,’ the teacher said. They had stopped listening, and turned instead to watch Arnošt Flusser and revel in his mute rebellion. How could the teacher hope to impart knowledge anyway, today of all days? The bell had sounded, and he had tried to call them to order, but it was too late. The storm was finally upon them. Peace in our time.

Groups gathered in the street: student fascists from Vlajka in dark, starched uniforms, like-minded Germans and fräuleins, clutching bouquets of forget-me-nots to their sparsely covered breasts, flowers to throw upon the advancing soldiers on the off chance that their bodies failed to attract the desired attention.

The Vlajka students marched onwards to meet the approaching army, drunken fire still raging in their bellies from a night spent fighting with police outside the Deutsche Haus on Na Příkopě Street. There was no satisfaction to be had in that fracas. It was not like September, those few glorious months after Munich, when they had stormed the streets with impunity and given the Jewish parasites a taste of what was to come. It now seemed a lifetime since their nostrils had filled with the sweet smell of smoke from Jewish shops and synagogues. Five months. Yes, a lifetime.

And so they marched on, these fledgling fascists, brushing clumps of snow from their shoulders, gazing at the columns of motorcycles, each with three soldiers, that were riding towards the centre of the Reich’s newest city. They marched in anger, in shame, that the whole city had not come out to welcome their new masters. Only one of them stopped and turned around, catching sight of something that filled him with hope, with happiness. There in the window, three floors up, was a little boy, an honourable citizen, holding his hand high in salute.

A chorus of cheers erupted from around the room as glasses were thrust into the air, waves of beer spilling onto the floor. Anděl Richter shook his head, made a bow and turned back towards the kitchen. To those crowded inside he was a hero, a joker and quite possibly the shrewdest businessman in all of Prague. Across the city, at Café Manes and the Hanau Pavillion, on Slavic Island and at national clubs as far out as Smíchov and Strašnice, signs were popping up forbidding entry to Jews or quarantining them to sections away from the general view. But not at Café Palivek. Richter had refused to put up a sign, kept it all intentionally vague. Within days of Reichsprotektor von Neurath’s August expansion, Café Palivek was seen as an escape from the occupation, a place where patrons of all kinds could mingle unmolested. No doubt things would have continued as such had an off-duty German soldier not wandered in one evening and taken offence when asked by a tipsy Jewish man for a cigarette. A shouting match ensued and was about to turn violent when four quick-thinking patrons surrounded the soldier and bustled him out. As the man slunk into the dark streets, Richter was still at the door, waving his cleaver and shouting obscenities.

The following morning he was visited by the Gestapo. ‘If you wish to permit Jews inside,’ said the larger one, ‘you will put up a sign restricting them to a particular area. Don’t test us, Herr Richter. The rules are very clear. Any further breaches will result in the immediate transferral of this business to somebody more amenable. Good day.’ Richter obeyed, but in a way that was very much his own. He drew up a large sign and placed it near the entrance so that only two booths in the café were not ‘For Use By Jewish Patrons’. Then he sent his waiters, his chefs, his cooks, his friends, everyone he could possibly muster, out on the streets to spread the legend of Anděl Richter and his minor rebellion. As some told it, he had kicked out Reichsprotektor von Neurath himself and lived to tell the tale. Business began to boom, so much so that Richter was forced to employ new wait staff. He genuinely came to like these Jews. He liked the air they brought to his establishment. They smelled like money.

Jiří Langer dug in his pockets and pulled out a wad of notes. ‘Richter will swing one day,’ he said. ‘Old Konstantin will come down personally and drag him by the ear to Hradčany Castle. You’ll see him hanging from the tallest turret, flapping in the wind like a white flag.’ He slapped the cash onto the beer-soaked table. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Help a man into poverty.’

Georg Glanzberg reached across and grabbed the money. ‘Another round? Dr Jakobovits? Jakub?’

Jakub R sipped at the cloud of bitter white froth that floated across the rim of his glass. Georg shook his head and laughed. Tobias Jakobovits downed what was left of his drink. ‘Something smaller then,’ Georg said. ‘A tumbler. Maybe a thimble. Try to keep up.’ Jakub watched his friend disappear into the crowd.

‘I’ve had another letter,’ said Langer. ‘Max has finally settled in Tel Aviv. A nice apartment, he says, for a fledgling city. Elsa still berates him that he chose to take a suitcase of papers. Every day she rattles off the list of what they left behind. Of course, he couldn’t have taken anything valuable but she won’t hear it. She has banished him and his suitcase to the smallest room in the apartment. Meanwhile, he busies himself with the theatre. It’s the only art form he still abides.’

Langer dabbed at his lips with a napkin. His weary eyes lent him a distant air, as if his presence in Prague was now only physical. His announcement that he intended to leave for Palestine came as little surprise. He had long been a spiritual nomad: a committed Jew who could not decide which of the various images of Gods was His true face, and who was willing to walk to the ends of the earth to find out. As a young man he had ventured to Belz and immersed himself in that community’s strange interpretation of Hasidism. It was, if Jakub had read Langer’s account correctly, more akin to the mysticism practised in the Far East, complete with transcendental meditation and levitation. In other words, utter nonsense. When Langer returned to Prague, his own brothers hardly recognised him, and within months he journeyed back to Belz to finish his apprenticeship. It passed through him like a fever, and while he still professed a strong interest in Hasidic ideals, he returned once again to the city, shaved his beard and nestled up to a new god, Zionism. He now proposed to follow his old friend Max Brod to Palestine, not to escape any potential threat—Langer still had faith in the essential decency of the Czech people and was sure they would protect the Jews from harm—but to sow the seeds, quite literally, of an eternal homeland. He would not wait for the coming of the Messiah or the construction of the new holy temple, because Palestine was itself the Messiah, and fertile fields would be temple enough.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ Otto Muneles eased his portly frame into the booth beside Jakub. ‘Duty called.’ Short and ruddy-faced, Muneles spoke with a voice more accustomed to conversing with the dead: soft, low and without any discernible inflection. It was something he had honed while travelling with Langer among the Hasidim, when he was expected to exude no aura, make no mark, speak with no one. Back in Prague, he all but disappeared from communal life, unable to relate to those around him. When the head of Prague’s Chevra Kadisha—the Jewish Burial Society—died, Muneles was named his successor. Now his days were spent sitting and watching over the bodies of the recently deceased, patting them clean with a white cloth, and preparing them for their return to the earth. Only the news of Langer’s imminent departure had lured him from his kingdom of boxed pine. He was not even aware of the curfew that was to begin the following day. It was of no consequence; his life was already spent casting shadows.

Jakobovits leaned in to the group. ‘See what becomes of a soul without stimulation?’ he said. ‘They took away his country. They took away his business. And he loved both of those more than he loved life itself. Give a man time with his idle thoughts and soon enough he’ll conjure a noose.’

‘A cleaner end, for sure. And more certain. Perhaps he left it to God. Here, you choose.’

‘A dilemma for our dear rabbi, I suppose,’ said Langer. ‘Where to put all these suicides? The corner must be full by now.’

Muneles’s eyes narrowed, and he pushed his glasses to the bridge of his pug nose. ‘Fuchs was buried like any other man. In these times we need not make excuses. To jump from a window is a natural death. The widow cried, but only because he hadn’t dragged her out with him.’

‘Natural, indeed,’ said Jakobovits. ‘If the Community Council hadn’t found me something at the school when they closed the library, heaven knows what I might have done. This city is my life.’

‘Is suicide of a more protracted kind, where you die clinging to an idea. Isn’t that right, Jiří?’

‘There is no limit to what an idea might sow,’ said Langer. ‘From some grow beautiful crops. Herzl was an idealist. There can’t be much more labour in building a state than in tearing one down. Look at us here. In our own lifetimes we have lived in four different countries. And we didn’t have to move an inch.’

‘Masaryk would be turning in his grave.’ Tobias Jakobovits sat up and tugged at his lapel. ‘While we are being legislated out of existence, he is in heaven crying. Every time it rains I lick my coat cuffs expecting to taste salt.’

‘Here.’ Georg returned to the group cradling four glasses of beer. ‘Oh.’ He looked at Muneles. ‘I didn’t see you come in. I can—’

‘So which dune in the stinking desert will you call home?’ continued Jakobovits.

‘I go where the wind takes me,’ said Langer. ‘The city, a kibbutz…I’ll find my feet. Max says he has a few leads for my book. I’d like to be published there. It’s a fine way of putting down roots in a new homeland.’

‘Who knows what will be?’ Langer turned to Jakub. ‘You of all people should understand. A teacher? Who’d have thought it? One week you graduate law school and the next…Here you are. Taking my place. Come on, Tobias. Admit it. You’re happy to have him.’

‘Exactly,’ said Langer. ‘Theirs is a crooked jurisprudence. Even the simplest act of conveyancing is theft. How would Jakub spend his days? Transferring Jewish factories to Aryan hands? No, don’t pity him. He’s been spared. You should pity his poor classmates instead, having to submit to the dictates of our new rulers. He should teach.’

‘But you’re wrong,’ said Jakobovits. ‘Staying in Prague is an act of resistance. This entire city simmers with rebellion. This is not Poland. And meanwhile you abandon ship and we gather here to smash a bottle of our finest wine on the hull of your lifeboat.’

‘You do, Otto. You’re staying. Look, this is not the time for petty tribalism. Zionism is a golden calf, weakening us in the face of a terrible threat. We divide, they conquer. Where does your loyalty lie, Jiří? To the people who continue to stand by us even while their own freedoms are compromised, or to some idea that seeks to place our entire people in a sandy ghetto? I will not leave Prague. None of us will. This is the seat of Jewish life, with or without their laws.’

‘Please, Tobias,’ said Muneles. ‘Jiří is an ideologue, a poet. He is not a deserter.’

‘No,’ said Langer. ‘I’m a realist. Reichsprotektor von Neurath has gelded us with his decrees. I do not intend on spending this war in quarantine.’

‘You’d prefer to wilt in a faraway desert,’ said Jakobovits, ‘digging ditches and being accosted by camels.’

‘L’chaim,’ said Georg, raising his glass. ‘To our friend Jiří Langer and his ever-shifting ideals. To the last great wandering Jew. I think what Dr Jakobovits means to say is that we’ll miss you.’

‘Why?’ Jakobovits would not let go. ‘He’ll be back soon enough. In the meantime you and Jakub will keep his seat warm. That’s why you worked like dogs, right? Earning your fancy doctorates in disciplines now forbidden to us just to be stuck at Jáchymova?’

‘It may not be their first choice of profession,’ said Langer, ‘but in times like these it will do.’

‘Does that make it easier?’ Jakobovits interrupted. ‘Will you sleep better on your journey knowing that you sail on the winds of their broken dreams?’

Jiří Langer reached across and put his hand on Jakub’s arm. ‘Forgive him, Jakub. The Rebbe of Belz once told me that sometimes learning is an end in itself. I know you’d hoped for more and, to be frank, I don’t know what I’d do in your position, if all I’d worked for came to nothing.’

Tobias Jakobovits leaned back and stroked his goatee. ‘I suppose you’d go to Palestine,’ he said with a wry grin. ‘On a ship of fools.’

Františka Roubíčková sat at the kitchen table and watched as her cigarette burned a mournful halo at the base of the mottled black filter. For eleven years now she had been one of them, eaten their food, partaken in their rituals, hidden from their God, but not once had she longed for their cursed embrace until the day Ludvík marched her and the girls to the new Jewish Community Council office to sign the local register. ‘Not you,’ he said, gently wresting the pen from her hand. She stepped back, watched the nib as it spilled out his name in black ink. When he had finished he held the pen over the page and looked up at the clerk. ‘The girls?’ Ludvík said. ‘Their mother is…’ The clerk glanced at Františka, then nodded his head. ‘Them too,’ he said. From behind: whispers. The indignity, the finality of that word, mischlinge, half-breed, an umbilical tether, fusing flesh and blood. Her flesh. Her blood. Františka trembled as Ludvík added their names. How she wished to see hers beside them. Yes, it was true. At last she knew what it meant to be singled out among the nations, what it meant to be chosen.

And to think that good fortune had briefly touched upon her family. Two months before the Germans strutted in and set about choking the city, Ludvík had secured steady employment with Pan Durák, a distributor of women’s clothing. Finally he had a job that would allow him to return home to his family each night. Soon after they came, Jews were forbidden to leave Prague without a visa and Ludvík’s new employment proved an even greater stroke of luck. Had he not found Pan Durák when he did, had he not charmed the affable Sudeten with his half-truths of past business conquests, the girls would almost certainly have starved.

Pan Durák, too, found fortune in the German occupation and was eager to share it with his employees. On a spring evening in April, they gathered at a tavern in Nové Město to hear the distributor lay out his plan. ‘Enough with the dowdy salons that take our stock on consignment,’ he said. A waiter swept by and left a plate of beer cheese on the table. ‘Enough with the long journeys, the late nights. Here in the city we now have an army of customers.’ The men leaned in closer. ‘I know their type. I’ve fought alongside them and I’ve fought against them. It’s always the same. They care only for conquest then go blind in the afterglow. So, too, in commerce. You must make them think they’ve won. Let them stab you in the heart. You’ll see.’ He spat a fleck of rind to the table. ‘We’ll bleed crowns!’

Ludvík’s confidence grew with the warmth of spring and by the end of the first month he had sold more dresses than any of Pan Durák’s salesmen. Františka began to recognise in the man who shared her bed the boy who had once charmed her with his dreams and promises. Every night over dinner he regaled the girls with stories of danger and daring, so that they wanted nothing more than to see this brave knight in action. ‘Mama, please,’ said Irena on the first day of the summer holidays. What choice did she have? Excited children are like unexploded bombs. They must be defused or they will wreak havoc. She filled a hamper with dry biscuits and sliced meat and told the girls to get dressed. ‘Be sure to look smart,’ she said. ‘For Papa.’

At the sight of his family, Ludvík stood tall in the square. He waved, smiled, danced a clumsy two-step before straightening himself and charging into battle. Františka and the girls found a quiet place beneath the awning of a corner café from where they looked on as he haggled with the passing soldiers in their stiff grey uniforms. With every sale Ludvík turned to his family and winked. They clapped and cheered. Františka marvelled at the way the soldiers parted with their money. ‘I’m telling you,’ said Ludvík when he joined them for a quick lunch. ‘Prague has become the Nazi clearance store!’ That night the girls looked upon their father with a new reverence. Františka also felt a certain warmth, perhaps even pride. She would write to her family in the morning, invite Emílie to visit.

When it became apparent that the occupation was truly entrenched, that the world really had abandoned his little country, Pan Durák invited Ludvík and Františka to dinner at his apartment, to discuss a certain matter in private. ‘Please,’ he said as they entered. ‘No formalities. Here I am called Bedřich.’ The first two courses were devoured in good cheer. Paní Duráková—Františka never did catch her name—was a competent cook, skilled in technique if lacking in soul. Pan Durák talked of his time on the various fronts, and of the lessons he had learnt in war. ‘It is life,’ he said. ‘Only smaller.’ At her host’s instigation, Františka spoke of her millinery. He probed her about the source of her fabrics, her manufacturing process and likely yield. By dessert, Ludvík was all but a spectator to their exchange. Paní Duráková, too, had retreated to the kitchen to grate hard white cheese over a second batch of fruit dumplings. Františka was, she realised, cornered.

‘Consider a partnership,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll take whatever you can manage. Sixty–forty. In your favour, of course.’ He pointed across the room to a floral dress made of coarse fabric that was hanging from a doorhandle. ‘These soldiers, they are happy to buy whatever we show them. What do they know about materials when my salesmen speak with silver tongues? Think how much more we could make if your husband were to offer them a matching hat.’ Ludvík bit down on the silver cake fork. Františka pawed nervously at her napkin. ‘Pan Durák…’ she said. The Sudeten let his name linger in the sweetened air. The clink of plates and silverware chimed from behind the kitchen door. ‘Bedřich,’ he said when he saw she could not go on. ‘It is not something you must decide right now, though I can’t see what there is to think about. Your husband has made me good money. I owe him. Both of you. It is a fair offer.’ Františka blushed. ‘I know, yes. It’s just that… my hats…they…’ Pan Durák grunted and turned towards the kitchen. ‘It’s late,’ said Ludvík. ‘We should be going.’ The gentle strains of a Dvořák tune filled the room as Paní Duráková reappeared with the steaming balls of dough. ‘My husband’s mother claimed to be related to the composer,’ she said, before registering the change in mood. ‘Yes, yes,’ Pan Durák said. ‘A cousin.’ The dumplings were consumed in haste and the night ended with handshakes and kisses. Pan Durák helped Františka with her shawl and squeezed across her shoulders. She pulled herself free and hurried out the door.

‘Is he mad?’ Františka said as they made their way home. ‘Already he fills our house with his rags. And now this? He mocks me, Ludya. Right there in front of you. And what do you do?’ They walked on without speaking, the silence broken only by the rattle of passing tramcars.

The idea was quickly abandoned and Františka’s rage subsided as money continued to tumble in faster even than Ludvík could drink or gamble it away. He had returned to his ways, she knew it, but each time she stood in the square, the girls by her side, and saw how they cheered and blew him kisses, how he stole moments to sneak across with a boiled sweet or pastry, she thought it enough that he was a good man, a good father. Pan Durák, too, was unfazed. Other than a return to formalities—he curtly corrected Ludvík the first time Ludvík tried the familiar Bedřich—the Sudeten seemed pleased with his continuing success. It was a blessing that these brutes who watched over their city appeared to know nothing of taste. That was until they began to approach Daša.

Ludvík’s blood flowed weakly in Daša’s veins, much less so than in her sisters’. His dark, wavy hair, brown eyes and stooped gait were not evident in his eldest child. In the past, Františka had seen it as a cause for concern. There were whispers, she knew. Not just the girl’s looks, but her prospects. She had heard them. ‘Nonsense,’ Ludvík had said. ‘It will do good to bring some fairness to this community.’ She understood; it was an apology of sorts—she needn’t have been dragged into this mess. But what was done was done, and now the girl was being looked upon as a prize Czech artefact, another spoil of war.

She is a child, Františka thought. Have they no shame? But they, too, were children. And they spoke to her daughter with such reverence that it was hard for a mother’s heart not to be moved. ‘Frau,’ they would say, doffing their caps first in her direction before clumsily trying to engage Daša in her own language, never considering that she might be fluent in theirs. Watching these scenes, innocent teens giggling, reminded her of her own childhood, when she was courted by the boys at the lake, only to be scolded by her mother. ‘Františka!’ Paní Vrtišová would say. ‘You are destined for higher things.’ The city, that was her destiny. But fate had its own way and so, while her mother was right, she could not have known that, viewed from the wrong angle, Prague was just another Potemkin village; often behind the grand facades of high society lay empty plots. And Františka’s empty plot was called Žižkov.

Two raps at the door, a pause, then another. Františka Roubíčková stubbed out what was left of her cigarette. From the next room, silence. ‘Sleep, little Handulka,’ she muttered. More knocks, the same pattern. Františka fastened her apron and headed to the door. It was Ottla B.

Ottla B seemed only to exist in the reflected light of her son. Everything about her was muted: the matted brown hair that drooped from her small head, her eyes, which drifted from hazel to grey and back again, and her curved posture, as if she were in constant repose. Even her words curled back into her throat when she spoke.

Františka didn’t intend to become her friend. Theirs was a bond born of necessity, conceived in a fit of Ludvík’s indignation. From the day Bohuš first arrived to escort the girls to their new school, Ludvík had taken to spending his evenings alone in the corner of the local tavern, drinking the cheapest beer and picking at a plate of limp pickles. Jiří B watched the sad performance for a week until he could bear it no longer. Snatching up his glass, he walked across the room, settled onto a stool beside his neighbour and offered to help.

‘Don’t be so proud, Ludya,’ he said. ‘We all make mistakes. So your fortune won’t be measured in crowns. You have something far more valuable.’ A sip, for effect. ‘Each child is a blessing for which the father pays dearly. Unfortunately, the greater the blessings, the poorer the house. It is God’s way of keeping balance. My wife and I have been spared, I suppose, though I can’t say whose fortune I’d rather. Ottla would trade all the honour Bohuš brings us to have just one more, but it isn’t to be. And so our pockets grow full while our house remains empty. Such is our lot.’ Jiří plucked a pickle from the bowl. ‘Look, Ludya, I can help. I want to help. What good can it do me while a friend suffers? Just take it and move on. Or consider it a loan. Pay me back if you like, whenever you can. I won’t come knocking.’

Jiří went to put his hand on his neighbour’s shoulder but Ludvík shook it off, slammed his glass on the table and put his face right up to Jiří’s. ‘We don’t need you,’ he hissed in a rabid whisper. ‘We don’t need your son. And most of all we don’t need your charity.’ He stormed out of the tavern.

The rage simmered inside him with every step and by the time he opened the front door he could no longer contain it. The girls cowered behind the gauze curtain as Ludvík thundered at his wife. ‘Who does he think he is? Such a big man, taking pity on us. That bastard so much as looks at our family and God help me—’ Ludvík grabbed a saucer from the counter and threw it against the wall. ‘Do we starve here? Are we not content?’ Františka went to sweep up the ceramic shards but Ludvík seized her shoulder and spun her back around. ‘What does he have, anyway? That mouse of a wife? A son who has grown so large his fall will be heard in Moscow? Let the girls take themselves to school. They are not babies.’

If Ludvík was too proud to accept money from his neighbours, Františka had no such qualms. Back in Miličín, when she was a girl, the townsfolk always rallied to help one another. That was, according to her father, the very essence of community. Mother Nature was erratic; she would test each farmer in turn, destroying this one’s crop one year, causing pestilence in that one’s cattle the next. If it weren’t for his neighbours, each one would be left destitute when his time came. ‘Take this to Pan Sedlaček,’ her mother would say, handing her a pot of their freshest honey. ‘Wish him a sweet harvest. Now go.’

And so, the following afternoon, when Ludvík went out to search for yet another job or maybe just to drown his sorrows in a faraway bar, Františka Roubíčková tucked Hana into bed, kissed her forehead and walked proudly into the entrance hall of the nearby building.

‘Františka!’ Ottla could hardly contain her excitement when she saw who had been knocking. She beckoned her neighbour inside and pointed her towards the sitting room. ‘Tea?’ she said. Františka smiled and shook her head. The two women sat for a while and spoke of their children, then of their families, the street, fashion, current affairs, the rising price of fresh produce, music, millinery, theatre; in other words, everything except what they both knew had to be said. At last Františka came out with it. ‘This business with the car…it has made a shell of him. He tried. I know he did. If only he prayed to a god more generous than luck. Maybe now…Look, Ottla, we appreciate Jiří’s offer. Ludvík appreciates it. He just doesn’t know how to say yes.’

Ottla was relieved. When Jiří had recounted the events of the previous night, how he had been afraid Ludvík would punch him or, worse, harm himself, she feared a great feud. But now here was Františka, in Ottla’s apartment, not in the corner store, not at the tram stop, not making idle chatter on the street. ‘It is still on Jiří’s dresser,’ Ottla said. ‘Wait a moment.’

She returned, holding an envelope with the monogram J.B., Proprietor printed in the top corner. It occurred to Františka as she read those words that she didn’t know what Jiří did, how he came by his money. Ludvík had never spoken of it. But this was not the time to ask. Františka took the envelope. ‘It is only temporary,’ she said. ‘I will pay you back, I swear. Not only in crowns, but something more. A token of our friendship.’

For three months Františka toiled at her machine until she had saved enough to repay the loan. She regretted her promise of a token, but more so of friendship, and waited before rifling through her cupboards for something she could spare. Nothing too fancy, but enough to satisfy the hope in her neighbour’s heart. She found it underneath a bolt of linen in the corner cupboard: the hat—grey felt, with a red bow—that had stood on her dresser table, watching over her as she nursed baby Hana, taunting her with its tangle of thread, board and cloth. Once the child had left her breast, she had finished it after all and immediately hid it away. Now she held it up to the light. Yes, with a brush to remove the dust, it would make the perfect gift.

Ottla gasped when she saw it and immediately placed it on her head. Františka feigned pride in her work. To the untrained eye it was a beautiful object, but beneath the band lay the signs of professional neglect—missed stitches, slight overcuts, spilled glue. Františka saw in it a map of time, innumerable separate periods etched as clearly as the rings on a felled oak. That it had come together, she thought, was a credit to her perseverance, not her talent. To that, it was an insult.

Ottla donned the hat like a crown through the streets of Žižkov. She began to speak of Františka as her dearest friend, and would try to be seen in her company. Františka, on the other hand, hid away, waiting anxiously by the window until Ottla disappeared back into her home or onto a tram, before heading outside. To her, the business was done. Then, one morning, she opened the biscuit tin to find her money gone. Ludvík was nowhere to be seen. Františka set off across the street. They would be friends after all.

‘Quickly,’ said Františka, stepping aside so Ottla could shuffle past. Františka pressed her eye against the crack in the door, peering out to make sure nobody was watching.

With the occupation had come a shift in the atmosphere of Biskupcova Street. Eyes no longer met, trust was undermined. Františka could not help but notice the way Jáchym Nemec from number nine would stand a little too close to conversations that didn’t concern him, or how Štěpánka Tičková from number twenty-two was quick to spread outlandish rumours, or Žofie Sláviková watched over every purchase made by the customers in her corner store, sometimes noting them in a pad she kept in her shirt pocket, separate from the business ledger. Even Marie Moravcová from number seven, the volunteer sister of the Czech Red Cross, lovingly dubbed Auntie by most of her neighbours, had become secretive and aloof. The disappearance of one of her sons was the subject of persistent scuttlebutt. Štěpánka Tičková had it, on good authority, of course, that he had fled to join the army and, although she could not be certain, she suspected it was that of their oppressors. Auntie Marie, insisted Štěpánka, was now hiding in shame.

The darkness had also enveloped the entrance hall of number thirteen. Františka was convinced that those in her own apartment block were watching her through their peepholes. And while the visits from Ottla B were nothing more than the meeting of two friends in troubled times, to a more fanciful imagination they might be taken for conspiracy.

Ottla had grown into their friendship but, even more, she had grown into the occupation. There was a new confidence about her, a brashness, even pride, as if all she had ever needed in order to be noticed was a diminution in those around her. Františka’s kitchen had become her staging ground. It was the unspoken interest on loans long since repaid, a chance to extend beyond who she had once been. Františka, for her part, had come to delight in her neighbour’s peculiarities.

‘No need, thanks.’ She leaned forward as Františka struck a match. A plume of smoke rolled up her face. ‘It’s nice, this,’ she continued with a meaningless gesture around the room. ‘We have some freedom now. I used to worry. I didn’t want you to feel—’

‘Pshah.’ Františka waved away the smoke. ‘You know how it is. This too shall pass.’

‘Jiří is pleased for me…for us. He says the company has reddened my cheeks. Meanwhile he grows pale in the shadows. I swear the man is a chameleon. Not that he talks about it. I know only that he has associates. Nothing more. I’ve half a mind to sniff at his collars, but if there’s a mistress it’s she who is being cheated. I can’t see my dresser for his gifts. Search out every opportunity, he says. There is money to be made in the occupation.’

‘He listens to his father. Then, the moment Jiří leaves in the morning, he, too, is out the door. I worry about him but what can a mother do? He is of that age.’

‘Maybe he is right. Ludya too. Personally, I dread these new opportunities. Here we are, more secure than ever. The girls, happy, fat. But we are feasting in the eye of the storm. One way or another it will come undone.’

‘You fret too much.’ Ottla smiled. ‘It’s like you no longer trust comfort. But look at you. How long has it been since you’ve come to my door? When did I last see you duck beneath the window ledge as I passed by? Now we go to cafés, the cinema, sit by the river. You fill your ration cards with money honestly earned. Face it, Frantishku, this occupation suits us. Now gather your things. The children will be home soon and we have a date with Lída Baarová. I didn’t much care for her in that last movie…what was it? Virginity. Yes. But this new one, a romance, they say…I might have to reconsider.’

‘Oh Frantishku, you don’t know? Lída Baarová…She’s taken Goebbels for her lover.’

Each night, as its inhabitants slept fitfully behind windows blackened to hide them from enemy pilots, the city transformed into a new and ever more frightening beast. Hideous plates of armour settled on the walls of its grandest structures, weighing down gargoyles and statues, and trapping the air so that the stench of half-digested hope hung on the dawn.

Behind a grey door on the second floor of an apartment building in Biskupská Street, Jakub R rose with the jangling of the alarm clock. In the darkness he felt the comforting presence of his mother, who still saw in him the future of their rabbinic dynasty, and the aura of an absent, yet omniscient father.

Jakub pushed the sheet aside and unfolded the nightgown that had protected his head from the wooden floor. It was still an hour before he would need to leave for work. He now had a rigorous, if not lucrative, routine—four days at the school in Jáchymova Street and two in the community archives—so Jakub R continued his dreams in the cramped kitchenette, stirring his coffee and telling himself that perhaps, when he stepped outside, he would find that the world had not changed for the worse.

One never escapes, he thought. There is always a trail. The hopeless, the weary, the heartbroken: eventually they will follow. And they did: Gusta, Růženka, Hermann and little Shmuel. Until the occupation, their presence had mostly gone unnoticed. He had taught them to get by in the city. But after four years of familial responsibility in the tightening vice that was his city, Jakub found himself trying to stave off resentment. His landlord had recently increased the rent—‘On account,’ according to the letter, ‘of the additional tenants and the decrease in security of a Jew seeing out a long-term lease.’

It was his penance, he knew, for having deserted his sick father, for not having come sooner to help his family. Now, for his recalcitrance, his mother lay in his bed in Biskupská Street with Růženka, while Hermann and Shmuel slept on the couches. The village folk had been good to his family, it was true. When they finally came to accept that their rabbi was not long for this world, they had made a collection of coins for his care in the city. Even some of those from across the bridge contributed. But word of pogroms in not-too-distant lands had tightened their purse strings and so, despite the best intentions of a community who owed the good tidings of their souls to this man, Rav Aharon and his family departed with little more than their carriage fare and the warm wishes of a terrified people. It was a mercy that the village folk never learned that their beloved rabbi died in a bleak hospice, writhing in agony as his helpless wife wailed beside him.

Jakub R tried his best to shield his family from the snide remarks of his neighbours. It was clear that they had come to begrudge the extra bodies. Tempers flared, most often outside the water closet that all the inhabitants of the second floor were forced to share. ‘What is this,’ said the widow Žuženka, ‘some kind of ghetto?’ Most aggrieved were the younger Jewish tenants. ‘Yesterday I was late again,’ said Albert Weil, the paper trader. ‘They gave me my second warning, you know. These people need not look for excuses to fire a Jew. Now my future is hanging on your mother’s bowels!’ Jakub explained to Gusta and his siblings that things had changed, that they might have to wait until after eight before venturing into the corridor. Gusta just shook her head, unable to comprehend city life.

On the day of the first student demonstration, Jakub R returned home late, national colours pinned to his lapel and Masaryk cap in hand, only to find his little brother curled up against their mother in tears. ‘I want to go home, Jakub,’ Shmuel said between sobs. Jakub patted the boy on the head and turned to Gusta. ‘Is Heju here?’ he asked, but did not wait for an answer. He already knew. Hermann would still be out among the students. He fancied himself one of them. Soon I will go to medical school, he once announced with certainty. But there was no money to send him to Charles University. So, instead, each day he followed Jakub through the winding streets of Nové Město to the National Square, before heading off south towards Kateřinská to loiter outside the medical faculty. Hermann made friends easily. The students let him into their clubs, their dormitories, their homes. He would often disappear late into the night, well past curfew, while Gusta sat quivering by the door until he stumbled home, invariably drunk on the potent brew concocted in the university’s chemistry laboratories.

The door swung open and they all turned around, expecting Hermann. It was Růženka. Like most nights after curfew she had been downstairs, in the Zahradníks’ apartment, her ear against their radio. ‘That box is cursed,’ Gusta said when she first arrived in Prague and heard the disembodied voices crackle from the strange contraption on Jakub’s dresser. ‘How can one trust words when the speaker hides his face?’ she asked. ‘It is all lashon hara, malicious gossip. For that box we will have to repent.’ Her relief was palpable when the decree came for all Jews to hand in their radios. ‘Now you will see,’ said Růženka. ‘From this day it will only be gossip.’ She did not speak to her mother for a week, as if it had been Gusta’s fault. She refused to join the family for dinner, instead knocking on the doors of their non-Jewish neighbours, asking if she might listen to the nightly broadcasts. Every one of them declined, some politely, others less so, until Kryštof Zahradník stopped her in the washroom one day and whispered that she should come to his apartment after sunset. Kryštof and Karolina didn’t seem to care that they were helping a Jew break the prohibition; they were listening to Jan Masaryk’s dispatches from England, which itself was punishable by death.

Jakub nodded. ‘Yes, after the march. We cleared the streets, the SS held their weekly peacock parade through Wenceslas Square, and then the crowd reconvened. I kept my distance and lost sight of Heju early. He headed to the square with his friends. Then the soldiers arrived.’

‘They are saying a man is dead. A baker. And fifteen others in hospital, mostly students. Some National Festival.’

‘He opened the window and watched as they ran past,’ said Gusta softly, tilting her head towards Shmuel. ‘They came in bursts, with fury in their eyes. They were screaming. He was screaming. It was like the plague of the firstborn. Only divine intervention stopped them from coming through the door and dragging us from this place.’ The boy was now dozing against her arm. ‘Tomorrow I may still mourn a son.’

‘They were. Or their evil spirits. They came from the gates, behind the church, to take us all away.’

At dawn, a dishevelled Hermann tried to sneak through the door, but his mother and siblings surrounded him. He barely had the strength to recount the story of his arrest and immediate release by the Czech police, and the promise he had made to the officers that he would stay off the streets until the situation had calmed and the Reichsprotektor ceased baying for student blood. ‘It was past curfew,’ he said as he lay down on the couch. ‘The streets were filled with German police detachments. We hid out near the hospital. Some of our friends were hit.’ Hermann pulled the sheet over his head and was asleep before his mother’s next question.

Gusta R experienced the occupation from the window in the bedroom of Jakub’s apartment. She was frightened among the masses. Whenever Jakub tried to convince her to go outside, insisting that the city could yet be her home, her eyes narrowed and she said, ‘This is exile. At home I knew everyone’s name.’

A month into the occupation, Jakub could see that even the corridors of the apartment building had become foreign to her. She stopped speaking to the neighbours. It was a mournful quarantine, but she had taken to it with determination; she wore only black, sat on the lowest chair, took off her jewellery, and kept her head covered with a threadbare shawl. From time to time, Jakub would come home and catch his mother in conversation with the one picture that remained of her husband. She still counted on him to protect her, and would sleep with the picture under her pillow so that his spirit might watch over her dreams.

In the fortnight following the student demonstration, Gusta Randova began to wonder if her mind was playing tricks on her. Black water seemed to trickle under doors and windowsills, and, in the puddles that crept towards the cracked walls of the apartment, she thought swarms of cicadas were breeding, clinging to the wooden beams behind the plaster, and rubbing their wings in chorus, until they sounded the news that Hermann and his friends had waited for in shrill alarm.

Gusta pressed her hands against her ears. Růženka crackled like the radio with words that were not her own. Hermann raged with the voice of a thousand students. There would be another demonstration, this time bigger, a wake like Prague had never seen, a wake worthy of a martyr. Only Jakub spoke softly, but it was his voice that cut the deepest. ‘You mustn’t go,’ he said to Hermann. ‘They will be looking for an excuse. It is suicide.’

For two days Hermann stayed in the apartment and kept to himself. On the third, he grabbed his coat and cap and rushed out the door.

The city raged in defiance and then fell quiet. Jakub set off for work and immediately sensed the presence of a malevolent seraph stalking the streets of Prague. The night had stolen the drunken, rebellious cries of the previous day and carried them, without trial, to a secret slaughter. But their spirits would not stay silent: the wind moaned with the ghostly echoes of young voices. The seraph continued its rampage into the new day, feasting on fear and anger, breaking open doors, chasing its prey from windows and grabbing those who hid in corners.

Jakub looked over his shoulder, checking for the beast, ensuring that it was not heading back towards Biskupská Street in search of Hermann. The boy was courting trouble; he had fought with the police outside the law faculty, and had driven them back over the bridge. Jakub could only hope that the mezuzah on their door might offer some protection.

At last Jakub reached the square, and his old spirit guide Jan Hus. The great martyr covered his eyes with a giant, bronze hand while the Hussite minions tended to a cemetery of rotting garlands below. The national colours had melted into each other, and ran like bloody tears through the gaps in the stones. A blast of warm wind tore across the square from the south and Jakub knew the seraph was near. Taking his leave from the monument in five backwards steps, as he was still conditioned to do, Jakub turned and rushed up Pařížská Street, hoping to hear the sounds of children at play. But there was only one other person in Jáchymova when he arrived: Georg Glanzberg sitting on the kerb, waiting.

‘School’s out,’ said Georg. ‘The whole city is in lockdown. Father sent me here; he knew you’d come. We need to get off the street. Now.’ Georg grabbed Jakub’s cuff and led him the two blocks to the family’s home on U Starého Hřbitova. ‘Von Neurath was summoned to Berlin with Secretary Frank as soon as Hitler heard. He won’t allow such weakness. In the past month he has survived three assassination attempts. And now this. He is celebrating his invincibility the only way he knows how, with an orgy of violence. The reprisals are already underway.’

‘This simmering calm,’ Professor Leopold Glanzberg said as he turned from the window. ‘It cannot be trusted.’ Jakub and Georg were standing near the radiator, still brushing the snow from their jackets. From the next room, the clattering of plates and a woman’s merry singing. Leopold walked towards the cabinet and reached for a bottle. ‘For your nerves,’ he said as he passed a tumbler to Jakub. Georg picked up his violin and tapped anxiously at its strings. Leopold poured one for him too.

‘A drink to luck,’ said Leopold, raising his glass. ‘L’chaim. A year ago and it could have been the two of you.’

Georg gulped down the whisky. It troubled him to see his father like this. The old man was quick to despair; he had retired from the bustle of academic life, found peace at the nearby Jewish Museum—dusting the plinths, straightening the exhibits. Professor Leopold Glanzberg came to rely on the daily ritual and, when not at the museum, would stand anxiously by the window, staring across the street at its ceremonial hall, pleading with his charges not to surrender themselves to the gathering dust. That his name had once echoed through the most hallowed academic halls of Bohemia, that he was once consulted by community leaders, rabbis and politicians alike was no longer of any consequence to him. He had given up the care of human souls for that of ones less finite.

‘The streets are almost deserted,’ said Georg. ‘Shopkeepers have not lifted their awnings. There is only the sloshing of buckets: German soldiers plastering the walls with posters. Another decree, of course. On my way back I saw an old classmate, who said the Germans have emptied the halls of residence and expelled anyone they suspect of involvement with the Opletal wake. Karl Frank wants to take Prague for himself—it is plain to see. The demonstrations made Von Neurath look weak so, while he was still trying to explain himself to Hitler, apparently Frank commandeered the official plane with a list of names in his hand. At this point my friend began to cry. If only it was expulsion, he said. Last night the student union meeting was stormed and the leaders taken away. As were some of the professors. Nobody has heard from them since.’

Leopold resumed his position against the window. ‘They’re dead, no doubt. And soon enough their loved ones will be receiving the bill for their executions. Boxes and bullets don’t come cheap. We pay in hard cash for this occupation.’

Georg stood up to pour himself another drink. ‘On Maiselova one of the posters says they’re closing the universities. It is not enough that they kill our students; they are murdering the institution itself.’ Georg raised his glass. ‘To the death of knowledge. And, of course, to you, Jakub. My friend. Quite possibly the last Jew to attain any. May they put you on a plinth across the street so that my father can dust your shoulders.’

They played chess late into the afternoon. Each game lasted as long as Georg decided it should, allowing him to test out new gambits before moving in for the kill. Jakub’s defences were clumsy, but occasionally Georg would sit back and look over the chequered battlefield, forced to reconsider his next move.

It was dusk when Leopold returned to the room. ‘The patrols are more frequent,’ he said. ‘Jakub should leave while it’s still light. His mother need not worry about two sons.’ Jakub considered his impossible footing on the board. Once again, every piece was in danger of falling to Georg’s perfectly positioned army. ‘Stalemate, then?’ he said as he got up.

Life had yet to return to the streets. Snow muffled the footsteps of the German patrols. Windows fell shut as Jakub raced the sun to Biskupská Street. There were still hours before curfew, but he did not trust the dark, the silence. The day had brought phantoms enough.

When he opened the apartment door and saw Hermann on the couch, Jakub stopped to kiss the mezuzah. The angel of death had passed over their home.

‘I should be on one of those buses,’ said his brother. ‘I should be with them.’ He had rushed to the dormitories when he’d heard, found them empty, saw the carnage. Books strewn across the floor, desks toppled onto their sides, broken glass and blood in the flowerbeds. Hermann began packing as soon as he got home. A few clothes, books, a spare pair of shoes. A blanket. He would need to travel light. There was no money for a train fare, let alone the migration tax. Anyway, Gusta would need it just to live. His only option was to walk, to stow away. He would make do wherever he landed. England. America. Palestine. He would join the army, the medical corps. One way or another he would be initiated on the front line.

Gusta cursed, then pleaded, then cursed again. Hermann sat by her side, explaining his reasons in his soothing voice, while she gazed at the picture on her lap, as if Rav Aharon might offer counsel. Their last hours together were spent planning Hermann’s journey, inventing adventures in foreign lands. Scheherazade in Biskupská Street. The sun arrived to take him, and they all stood at the door. Only Shmuel failed to appreciate the gravity of the moment; in his eyes his brother was a storybook hero.

Their black robes disappeared into the curtains on the surrounding walls. Three stern men: disembodied heads and hands. On the table before them lay a dossier—the indictment, only a few pages, provided in triplicate. The men read in murmurs, stopping only to ask a question of the officer standing at attention behind the desk nearby. He answered through a police interpreter. The men returned to the papers, the clickety-clack of a typewriter continuing throughout. They looked up as one, a single organism, at the condemned man, crumpled on a steel chair, his hands tied with cord. The three heads of Cerberus, guarding the gate to Hell. Five days of interrogation, then here. It was not their place to consider what he had endured. They knew enough—that in the nearby palace the interrogative method was refined torture. Here, in the single courtroom of Pankrać Prison, it was their job merely to make a show of justice. The charges were unremarkable: clandestine sales, forging ration cards and making black market purchases. A profiteer. Nothing more. The trial would take less than ten minutes.

When they first came to arrest him, Jiří B assured his wife and son that he would be back that afternoon, that it was a misunderstanding, that he was a simple businessman trying to get by in difficult times. It was a calculated charade, designed to fool the Gestapo men who had knocked at the door just as his family were finishing their breakfast. The men spoke no more than was necessary and waited by the entrance for Jiří to gather his things before ushering him outside and bundling him into a waiting car. Ottla lingered on the porch, trying to catch a glimpse of her husband. The car idled by the kerb just long enough for her to see the larger of the Gestapo men fasten a blindfold over Jiří’s eyes. It was an unnecessary caution. Everyone in Prague knew where these unannounced visitations ended and, anyway, Jiří was familiar with every pothole on the short drive to Peček Palace in Bredovská Street. He had banked there briefly before the war, and stood outside its imposing black facade during the recent demonstrations while the crowd demanded the release of his friends.

He thought it easiest to confess, to name names, not out of fear or spite but out of expedience. It would be enough to deny his captors the pleasure in their cruelty; he wanted to watch the dissatisfaction in their gaze as they slid the sharpened bamboo reeds under his fingernails, or stubbed out their cigarettes on his cheeks, or touched the electrodes to his exposed balls. These men in their black shirts and pants were merely playing out scenes that had, through constant practice, been rendered almost natural. Only their hands gave it away: the men were always unsure what to do with them, where to position them. It was uncomfortable watching them. Jiří saw no need to prolong it. Let them do their jobs. They didn’t want to be here any more than he did.

When they were finished with him, when they were ready to bring him before the court, the blood and the bruises would render him almost unrecognisable.

The girls slept soundly, the train’s rhythmic rattle dissolving into dreams of summer play as it carried them back from the country. Františka Roubíčková let her eyes drift to the passing fields. How quickly one can fall under nature’s spell, she thought, to believe in the promise of peace. Somewhere beyond it all a war was being fought, one in which they were all expected to do their part. Even in her little town of Miličín, where the birds still sang and the honey still flowed, men watched over crops like fretful parents. There were records to be kept, quotas to be met. Penalties to be paid. ‘They’ve conscripted us all,’ Emílie had said while they sat outside on the veranda in Sudoměřice, watching the girls splash in the lake. ‘Even the bees.’ She took a sip of tea and placed the cup back on the saucer. ‘And you?’

Františka could not tell her sister how it was in the city, not the truth, anyway. Two months had passed since Pan Durák closed his business, casting Ludvík back into the grips of his affliction. Most days now, Františka sought comfort in the hum of her sewing machine. Only when the girls returned from school did the clamour of life resume. She saw little of Ludvík and had stopped watching the clock as curfew came and went. So seldom did he lie beside her at night that he did not notice the small gap Františka had made, pushing their single mattresses apart.

‘His parents are suffering. The factory is gone, sold for a pittance to a manager who promised to keep Papa Roubíček on in the storeroom. Four days it lasted before he was fired. Now he puts on airs so we don’t think them a burden, but we can sense the despair behind his crooked smile. To think all this time they’ve helped us get by and now, in their need…We try to help. I try to help.’

‘Frantishku, please. At this rate you will all starve and I won’t have that on my conscience. For years I’ve held my tongue. Oh God, how I wanted to say something while you scampered around in the dirt like a fieldmouse trying to make ends meet. But no, it was your choice, your doing. You wore Ludya’s sickness like a girdle. But this is different. Elias and I have talked about it. We want to help. We have our obligations to their Reich, but it is a good season, this year. The hives flow freely and the earth is burgeoning. Our larders are full and those bastards are none the wiser. When you leave you must take whatever you can. My dear, it’s enough that you insist on calling yourself a Jew, but you need not live like one.’

‘Damn your pride. Take. And when it is gone, send the girls for more. Give their barren aunt some joy.’

Františka Roubíčková knocked on her neighbour’s door. From the stairwell behind her she heard the click of a latch, a slow creak and the snap of a tautened chain. Františka held her package close to her chest—a square of butter wrapped in baking paper, a jar of honey and what remained of the salami she had sliced for her lunch, bundled in a dishcloth. It was only right, she thought, to share this first bounty with her friend. But why? The debt had been repaid, forgotten. Yet each act of kindness was still stained with her disgrace. What would it take to right the order of things? Kindness, time, gifts, friendship: she had tried them all. No. Absolution would have to come from within. She would first have to forgive herself her original sin of weakness.

A faint scratching came from behind the door. ‘Ottla?’ she whispered. The scrape of metal hissed through the landing as a series of locks were unbolted. The door swung open to reveal her friend, unkempt, pale and drawn. Ottla pulled her close, heaving as she sobbed. Františka felt the damp warmth of tears seeping into her collar. In the flat light of the corridor, she saw swirls of dust above the litter on the floor. The sobs receded and Ottla stepped back. She took Františka into the sitting room and, as she sat on the couch, Ottla began to mutter, as if a valve had been twisted loose.

They had come for Jiří soon after Františka left for the country. For the first two days Ottla waited by the door. On the third she pulled down the blackout blinds and fastened them to the windowsills with tape. Until he returned it would be night, for that was when Jiří usually came home, when they would sit together as a family for their evening meal and talk of the day’s events. She scolded Bohuš when he complained about the gathering grime. Her bed grew cold, unwelcoming. When Jiří had not returned for a week, she took her pillows and a blanket to the sitting room and lay them on the couch. The slightest noise would wake her and she’d rush to the door. Mostly it was nothing but, if it was Bohuš, she scolded him again: for staying out late, for breaking curfew, for giving her hope. Exasperated by her moods, he carried the pillows and blanket back to her bed. ‘Let me wait up,’ he said. And so she slept for the first time, but her head filled with horrible dreams: the fatal shot, the swing of the trapdoor, the snapping of his neck. In the morning, she checked the mailbox. There was no letter. She went out to check on the lists of the dead plastered across the city walls. Jiří’s name was nowhere to be found. It became her daily ritual. Bohuš spent less time at home.

Official notification of Jiři’s fate came three weeks after he was taken. He had been sentenced to six months’ hard labour in the south. Matthausen. He would return in the winter, if he returned at all. Ottla could send him provisions but, given the nature of his crimes, all packages would be scrutinised. Anything for which she could not give a proper receipt would be confiscated and she would be brought in for questioning. She had yet to send him a thing and could hardly eat for the worry and the guilt. Bohuš couldn’t understand and had taken to treating her like an invalid, forcing food into her mouth. Sometimes he looked at her with disdain, like he was already an orphan, tethered to the graves of his parents. He could not wait to escape, to run to his friends at the SOKOL youth club.

Františka knew she would spend the afternoon here; she would tear the brown tape from the curtains, let the day back in. She would go to the kitchen, find bread, cut away the mould and prepare a meal. Tomorrow she would return and do it again.

All this time she had been mistaken: absolution does not only come from within. It is also found in the depth of another’s despair. There is no satisfaction, no pleasure to be had. Absolution is a shrivelled kernel of shit: hard, unpalatable. It chokes away what is left of your soul. But it restores the balance. It silences debt’s echo.

Every day it starts anew. The morning siren howls across the camp, but they are already awake. At night, exhausted, they had prayed for sleep. And still they lay there, staring into the dark until the whispers began. They spoke of their families, but not of their crimes. The night is no confessional, it cannot swallow shame. What is there to say, anyway? That what they did was of no consequence? That if only they’d had more strength, more courage, they might have done something that warranted death? Here they broke rocks, or the rocks broke them. Here they served their sentence, one day at a time. Each day an eternity.

Jiří B counts the drops of piss as they fall onto his blanket from the bunk above. He does not know how long he’s been here, how much of his sentence he’s served, only that it is enough not to be bothered by the failing bladder of a dying man. Soon they would take the poor soul to the infirmary, from where he would not return. Jiří pushes the blanket aside and gets out of bed. His face is level with his bunkmate. The old man smiles and holds out his hand. Jiří takes it and brings his cracked lips to the knuckles. ‘Sleep, sleep,’ he says. ‘There’s still time.’ The old man mumbles and closes his eyes. Jiří rushes to the mess hall. A cup of tepid coffee and a crust of stale bread: fuel for a day in the quarry.

As the leaves turned yellow, the laughter of young girls danced on the cool Miličín breeze. They tried to outdo each other with their adventures. If Marcela smoked out the hives, Irena dived in the lake. If Daša slept alone in the attic, Marcela slept on the floor beside her aunt. For those short visits they forgot the occupation, forgot what it meant to be a Jew, and when it came time to leave, their souls were light and their cases heavy.

At home, too, their stomachs were full. Even Ludvík who, despite all his failings, knew better than to ask questions, ate like a free man. But he took without giving, and for that Františka grew further away from him.

Ottla counted the days until her husband’s release, scoring each one on the 1940 Baťa calendar that she kept on the kitchen bench. There was solace to be found in numbers, comfort in the shifting weight of time. Ottla did not blame Jiří for what had happened nor did she entertain the possibility of his guilt. It is no crime to provide for your family, she said. She was not bothered either by the appearance of so many familiar names—men she had not met but who she knew were important to her husband’s dealings—on the lists of the condemned. A wife ought not assume the worst of her husband for the company he once kept. Where were they in her time of need, anyway? They had not come to console her. They did not bring her groceries or anything that might help her get by. Curse them and their fair-weather ways. After all that Jiří had done for them! Ottla stood and straightened her skirt. She picked up her pencil, leaned over the calendar and crossed off another day.

It was almost November when the first dusting of snow fell on the city. Františka opened her pantry. The girls had returned from a weekend in Miličín but this time there was not enough to fill the shelves. The frost had come early to the fields. The bees, too, had taken to their hives and would not come out. Daša spoke of a strange hush in the yard, the stillness of hibernation. What a privilege, Františka thought, to sleep through the war, to not know hunger. She had been expecting this day and had hoped to be better prepared. They would all have to make do with less. But how? Already, she could hardly recognise Ludvík’s parents, with their distinguished clothes now so ill-fitting. How mean she would feel watching Papa Roubíček kiss the sachets of rice or barley that she brought, knowing that she could have given more. And what of Ottla B? Until the ground softened and sprouted again, it was not Františka’s concern. Let them fend for themselves. So long as her girls were fed. It is no crime to provide for your family.

On the day designated for Jiří’s release, Ottla resumed her vigil by the door, but he did not come. She waited through the night and the days that followed, afraid that the moment she stepped away he would stagger into an empty hallway and think she had abandoned him. Still he did not appear. Bohuš came and went like a house cat, to feed and attend to his bodily needs. He often smelled of fertiliser or gasoline or sweat. He was a man now and she was proud but also afraid. More than ever, he needed a father to guide him. Her Jiří: provider, survivor and, dare she say it, hero. Ottla stood by the door and waited.

Františka Roubíčková stopped on the pavement outside 13 Biskupcova Street and looked at the building on the other side. A white winter’s sun shone in the clear sky. It was strange, Františka thought, that she had not heard from her friend. She had knocked on the door, whispered through the keyhole. Nothing. She left a small package on the mat—enough for a little cake to celebrate Jiří’s return—and headed back downstairs. As she stepped onto the street she thought better of it and ran back. The package was gone.

Could the rumours be true? Štěpánka Tičková had spoken of a spectre that had recently crept through Biskupcova Street. It shielded its face from the light, she said, as it stumbled forward, tripping on the pants that hung from its cinched waist, before disappearing into a nearby building. Heavens above, Štěpánka insisted, there was no mistaking it. That sickly creature was all that remained of Jiří B.

‘She buys disinfectant,’ said the shopkeeper to the small group gathered at her counter. ‘Mostly iodine. And bandages. Sometimes she takes apples, razor blades. She refuses to talk. Just goes to the shelves, takes what she needs, and pays. I ask after the husband, but she will not be drawn. He is sick, that much is for sure. I suspect he has been quarantined, which suggests only one thing: consumption. She is taking the right precautions, sterilising the house like that, but watch yourself near their building. This is no time to be stricken.’

‘Syphilis!’ said Jáchym Nemec. ‘It was the same with my uncle. Caught it from a whore in Bratislava on one of his business trips. One day a car arrived and two men whisked him away to a spa. It was my aunt who called them; she wanted it all taken care of with a minimum of fuss. He stayed there for months while worms bored holes in his brain. They stuck him with so many shots of Salvarsan that he had to sleep on his stomach for the first few weeks. But there was no improvement. He ended up covered in rashes and pissing blood. His death was attributed to liver failure—that’s what the doctor put on the certificate—so at least my poor aunt was spared the humiliation. They even gave her back his amputated arm free of charge. It was still fresh—he only outlived it by a fortnight. Every man who glimpses Armageddon in this occupation runs to the nearest whorehouse. Poor Ottla, she is now left to nurse that bastard while he oozes his infected discharge over her bedsheets.’

‘It is obvious how she survives,’ said Štěpánka Tičková. ‘Look at her, all quiet and pious, hiding her face in a shawl as she canters past. I’m telling you, it is different across town in Holešovice. There she wears much less. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how he caught it in the first place. Did you never ask yourself how they could support such a life? Always grandstanding, he was, but I have it from a reliable source that there was no company, no business to speak of. Such shame that family brings to our street.’

A sharp rapping on the glass. Františka recognised Bohuš’s shoes immediately—from her sunken vantage point it was how she knew the comings and goings of most of her neighbours. She rushed down the hallway and into the foyer. Bohuš was peeking through the mail slot as Františka approached. ‘Please, Paní Roubíčková, you must let me in.’ She fumbled with the lock until it slipped free. Bohuš pushed past, crouching as he ran. Františka closed the door and followed him.

Well dressed, in suspenders and a loose-fitting shirt, Bohuš had the beginnings of a dark moustache and a wispy beard. He was growing into a fine young man, with a serious and determined manner. And yet there was still something childlike about him: scuffed shoes, a soft hat perched over unevenly trimmed hair, a crooked smile not yet dulled by the demands of adult life. As he shifted from one foot to the other, Františka saw his maturity ebb and flow: first a man, now a boy, now a man again. His essence was elusive. He could be a panhandler, a student, a layabout or the son of a banker. He would blend into any street, any environment. He reminded her of Daša in that there was nothing that marked him out as a Jew. Františka looked at him with fondness. It was only their kind, she thought, who had a future in Prague.

‘All his energies are spent moving from window to window, peeling away the edges of the tape, peeking out from behind the blinds. At night he covers his face with pillows.’

‘You would have seen a cripple scrambling to hide under the table, Paní Roubíčková. With every knock he thinks they have returned. I try to leave the house but his eyes fill with tears and he whispers: They are watching. So I wait until he sleeps and then—’

‘Of him, Paní Roubíčková. I’m ashamed of him. Of Mama too. So I’ve come because a son is supposed to honour his parents. Even when he has grown to resent them.’

‘I know you bring things from the country and share them with us. I am here to collect what is ours. I won’t stand by and watch my parents in this state anymore, Paní Roubíčková. I have ration cards if you want.’ Bohuš shoved a hand into his coat and pulled out a ration book. ‘Here,’ he said, holding the dog-eared pages out to Františka. ‘They’re worthless to us.’

Františka pulled a chair out from the table. ‘Sit, Bohuš. Calm yourself.’ He slumped down. ‘Look,’ Františka continued, ‘I’m glad you’ve come. Your mother is like a little sister to me and Ludvík misses his friend. It’s just that winter…’ Františka scanned the pantry shelves. ‘Why don’t you stay for a while? I’ll prepare something nice. And what’s left you can take back to your parents. Go to the lounge. Lie down. Rest. It’s too much for a young man, all this responsibility. The girls should be home soon.’

Bohuš dozed, breathing in the soothing aroma of warm milk, onion, butter and allspice. When the meal was ready Františka nudged him awake. The girls were already seated when he came to the table. They all pushed the bread dumplings around, soaking up the watery stew, stabbing for meat that wasn’t there. The girls laughed and chattered and Bohuš endured their questions with good humour, all the while exchanging coy glances with Daša. When they had finished, and their plates shone with an oily lustre, the two younger girls excused themselves and headed to bed. Daša and Irena began to clear the dishes. Bohuš went to grab the glasses but Františka took them from his hand.

‘Tonight you are our guest,’ she said. ‘My husband will be back soon and I don’t expect he’ll be in any state to entertain.’ She scraped what was left of the stew into a fresh pan. ‘For your parents,’ she said. ‘Tell them…tell them I’m sorry.’

The Nazi standard hung over the great pylons of the National Museum, imprisoning King Wenceslas and his stallion in its tricolour bars. An unwelcome air of celebration was filtering through the streets of Prague like the fingers of the tenth plague. The soldiers marched in sharper step, flags frozen in position by the barrage of sleet. In one month it would be the second anniversary of the occupation, and still none of the neighbours had chanced to speak with Jiří B. Ottla no longer frequented Žofie Sláviková’s store. ‘It is worse than we thought,’ said Štěpánka Tičková. ‘At night I hear the cars pull up at their kerb. The engines idle for a few minutes and then they speed off. There is only one kind of person who attracts such visitors: collaborators!’

‘Enough with your rubbish,’ said Jáchym Nemec. ‘I have not heard these engines.’

‘That’s because your wife snores like a donkey. Half the neighbourhood shoves cotton balls in their ears thanks to her. You will see, Jáchym. Jiří B has become one of them.’

‘Štěpánka! Have you no heart? The poor man suffered in a camp. It is on the public record.’

‘You fool! It is common knowledge that he went to Peček Palace. I have it on good authority that he was down in the basement, in the old cinema, sitting against the wall by himself while all the other prisoners sat on pews, waiting to be poked with metal rods. Not him, though. He sat near the heater, face to the floor, too ashamed to look a single one of those martyrs in the eye. They were supposed to believe that he, too, was a victim. But the facts speak for themselves, Jáchym. Six months he was gone—exactly how long it takes the Gestapo to train its civilian operatives. And why him? Well, if you opened your ears for once you might already know. Biskupcova Street is a hotbed of resistance activity. Yes, can you believe it? Our Biskupcova! And who better to report on it than the man who waves around his copy of V Boj?’

‘Yes, there is no end to the shame. And the boy? Coming home covered in paint the same morning we woke to that awful graffiti. What were they thinking, provoking the Germans? I have half a mind to report it.’

Štěpánka Tičková pulled her coat tighter around her and screwed up her face, as if she were ready to spit. ‘A scourge on the whole family, I say.’

A lone figure, cloaked in grey, walks along the Charles Bridge, his head bowed. Snow has begun to fall, and the sentries positioned along the path breathe lassos of vapour, as if to ensnare the flakes. They laugh at the patches of white on the statues. The man keeps walking. He could be a resistance fighter, an assassin or a saboteur. But he is not. He is just a man, crossing a bridge, relying on a thick cane to hold him upright. He is neither old nor young. His footsteps are quickly erased. The soldiers pay him no heed. Their guns, strapped to their left shoulders, point skyward. There is peace on the streets again; guns will not be needed for now.

The man carries his burden past the saints on the north side, pausing at this one and that, as if to pay his respects. Sometimes he takes pity on his cane and stops to rest against the uneven stone balustrade. He puts one hand on the cold surface and gazes down at the raging Vltava below. When he reaches The Crucifix and The Calvary he pauses to mutter the words spelled out in an arc of gold—Holy Holy Holy Is The Lord Of Hosts—in his broken Hebrew, a language he has forsaken since his youth. His voice alerts nobody. Snow falls, its trajectory unaffected by the shift in the air.

Neither soldier nor saint nor cobblestone notices when this husk of a man tumbles from the bridge near the eastern bank, and lands with almost no sound in the water below. Even the Vltava has become accomplice to his disappearance, spitting him out on the shore far enough downriver to ensure that nobody could recognise him. The shopkeeper who drags the body up from the mooring pole on which it has become snagged does not send his assistant back across the bridge to alert Otto Muneles at the Chevra Kadisha. Instead he calls the local police, who grudgingly come to collect the body and take it to the city mortuary. There it lies for three days, after which it is consigned to a pauper’s grave in the back corner of the Olšany Cemetery along with several other indigents.

And so it is that no stone will ever mark the final resting place of Jiři B. He has been erased from history.

They huddled behind the chipped wooden pews, these prisoners of Babel, flotsam from the outer reaches of an empire that was devouring faraway lands while constricting around the throats of those trapped inside. Here they were all castaways and immigrants, a jarring symphony of mashed syllables, from Žižkov, from Nusle, and from the Sudeten, Vienna and Munich as well. They came in shifts, one in the morning, one in the afternoon; what had been a spacious if Spartan, school eighteen months before, was now an over-crammed warehouse for the unwanted.

Jakub R thought of his own childhood in the village, when every word from his teachers’ mouths had been spoken first by the sages. To save just one life, it is written, is to save the entire world. That was how sacred each person was to God. Yet here at Jáchymova, where he had been a teacher and was now more like a cattle dog, fifty worlds collided in every classroom twice a day, and the result was a confined catastrophe. They looked like vagabonds, gutter-dwellers. For more than a year they had not been permitted clothing vouchers. Jakub could see the seams where the shirts had been let out, and the shorts patched with strips of curtain. Even young Herschmann, the refugee boy from Munich, who lived with his uncle, the cobbler, had holes in the leather of his shoes. Only the cloth stars still looked new: golden, beaming like suns from the fading greys and browns onto which they had been stitched.

‘Children,’ said Georg Glanzberg, ‘please form five lines. Be quick about it.’ They rushed into their cliques, a small society with its own pecking order. Jakub noticed each group, and would listen in to their conversations. Up front were the Czech children, who considered themselves above this corral of foreigners. They still had parents, homes, the semblance of a settled life. Their mothers cooked in the same pots they had used for the past twenty years; their fathers sat on armchairs into which the impressions of their bodies had been imprinted. These children asked one another if they, too, had begun to smell. More than once Jakub found that peculiar boy Arnošt Flusser in the bathroom frantically scrubbing his hands. For those like Hana Ginzová, the daughter of a Jewish father and Christian mother, the insult was enhanced: by Jewish law she was not even one of them and yet here she was, at the Jewish school, forced to share in the bread of their affliction.

The German and Austrian refugees gathered in the third row, looking as confused as they had on the day they arrived. Some had been in the city for almost four years, but they had yet to properly assimilate. Their parents had enrolled them in Prague’s German schools in the hope of easing their transition, but they soon fell victim to mockery and physical attacks. It was as if these schools were sovereign German territory, with all the attendant prejudices and proclivities to violence. Their expulsion at the end of the previous school year had been a relief, and they looked forward to finding their feet at a Jewish school in which they would be the superior class. The reality, however, proved a shock: they were jeered by their Czech classmates. Cast adrift in a hostile city, they would often speak of their homeland, but they meant Palestine, not Hitler’s vile dominion. Jakub once overheard two of the boys, Herschmann and František Brichta, reminiscing about a camp they had enjoyed when Jews were still allowed to ride the trams as far as the country terminus. The boys had gone on long walks, practised tying knots, sung aspirational songs and roasted knackwursts on a stick. ‘I swear,’ young Brichta said, ‘this is how it will be in Palestine. This is what it is to live on a real kibbutz.’ Jakub hadn’t the heart to tell them of the letter he had received from Jiří Langer: his mentor had contracted a chest infection on the boat over and spent the first eight months of his spiritual homecoming convalescing with consumptives and hypochondriacs. There is no need for Hitler in Palestine, he had written. The desert air has spite enough. It is like I never left, and yet I am free.

The Sudeten refugees did not speak of Palestine. The very concept of home had lost its meaning; they had seen how one day their state could exist and the next it could disappear. Most looked within themselves for a sense of belonging. They were as uncomfortable among their Czech classmates—who rebuffed them as traitors or deserters—as they were among the Germans.

Some students tended towards truancy, like Frederick Fantl, son of the journalist and conductor Leo Fantl. Jakub R and Georg Glanzberg had often spoken of the boy, his potential, his sporting prowess—the boy could run faster and jump higher than anyone else in his class—and his fine intellectual pedigree. But Jakub did not question absence anymore. Invariably they came back, all except one, the Viennese boy Kurt Diamant. His disappearance in late April shook his fellow pupils; he was the first of them to be deported along with his family. The class was poorer for his absence, not only because he was a friendly and intelligent boy, but also because his mother was a skilled dressmaker who would often help with the children’s rags, turning them into something presentable. Jakub, too, had availed himself of her services. A few weeks before his sister Růženka left for America, he took her to visit Gisela Diamantová at her home in Valentinská Street. Kurt’s mother was a stocky woman, her strawberry hair cropped and pinned to her head. There were folds of skin beneath her eyes from years of squinting at needles and thread. Růženka had brought with her four dresses, ample material for Gisela Diamantová to assemble one piece. ‘I can’t carry much,’ said Růženka as she laid the dresses on the table. ‘Only one case, and what I have on my back.’

Gisela was stern and businesslike but these riches of material brought a smile to her face. She measured Růženka, occasionally turning to Jakub to ask about Kurt’s progress at school. ‘An amiable boy,’ Jakub replied. ‘In sport, I am told, he excels. Had things been different he might have made a promising boxer.’ Ten days later Jakub and his sister returned to Valentinská Street to collect the dress. It was sturdy but modest, something that would allow its wearer to meld into the greater whole without catching the eye of a swindler, cad or gendarme.

Otakar Svoboda disappeared under the black cloth behind his camera. ‘Little girl in the third row,’ came his muffled voice, ‘we cannot see your pretty face. Please move a touch to your right.’ Jakub turned to see Markéta Fischerová edge gingerly out from behind the Kleinová girl. The poor child still bore the scars of having lost her dog Schnitzli last year. She was not the only one; when the decree came that Jews could no longer keep pets, several of the children had to find new homes for their beloved creatures. But nobody had wanted Schnitzli. The mangy thing was old and incontinent, and used to snap at whoever reached out to pat it. Only Markéta could calm the dog, and would let him sleep on her bed, cleaning up whatever he had left behind in the morning. The deadline loomed, and word got out that the Germans were planning to euthanise all remaining Jewish pets. Markéta’s father grabbed Schnitzli by the scruff and told the girl to bid the dog farewell. Schnitzli wheezed and growled as Markéta held him close. ‘It is the right thing,’ said her mother. ‘At least we can be sure he won’t suffer.’ The poor creature did not make a sound when Pan Fischer took him to the bathroom and drowned him in the sink.

‘Smile!’ said Otakar Svoboda. He held up his flashbulb and pressed on the switch. It would be the last picture of Jakub R before he returned, almost four years later, from the hell into which he was cast. For Georg Glanzberg and for most of the students, it would be their last photo ever.

The many possible fates of Jiří B remained the talk of Biskupcova Street until even Štěpánka Tičková ran out of theories and, instead, turned her attention to a more urgent threat: resettlement.

It had been tried before. The entire community had been shaken by its brutality: a thousand Jews sent to a small agricultural compound in Nisko, near the Polish town of Lublin. Within a few months, six hundred of them had either frozen or starved to death. The rest were sent back to their homes, only to find them occupied by strangers. The Jews had rejoiced in the plan’s failure but its spectre continued to haunt them. Day after day they now lined up at the head office of the Jewish Religious Council of Prague, demanding assurances from Dr Emil Kafka that a similar fate was not in store for them. ‘He speaks in circles,’ said Jáchym Nemec, to nobody in particular as he walked back down the steps without an answer.

Soon it was summer and the city gleamed. Posters adorned the walls and pylons. Another decree, in black and red. All Jewish inhabitants of the city’s outer reaches were to come to central Prague, where they would be housed in one of three districts. Similar directives were issued for the Protectorate’s other major cities. There would be resettlement after all, but it was to be a more contained affair. The most affluent Jews were particularly put out: evicted from their homes and moved to rundown tenements, they found themselves worse off than even the poorest of their brethren. They clung to the trappings of their former lives, many choosing to don suits and ties as they undertook the menial jobs found for them by the Council. And so it was that for a few short months the city had the best-dressed street sweepers and garbage collectors in all of Europe.

Then Von Neurath fell out of favour with Berlin and was replaced—in practice, if not in title—by a far less forgiving man. Štěpánka Tičková found out as much as she could about this new Acting Reichsprotektor, and what she learned she did not like. His reputation for savagery on the Russian front was the stuff of Nazi legend. He rides a chariot and hunts Jews for sport. Štěpánka rushed to warn her neighbours, but there was no need; from the moment he assumed control of the Protectorate, Reinhard Heydrich wasted no time in proving his mettle. Before the first week was out he had ordered the execution of close to a hundred people, closed down all of Prague’s synagogues and, by stepping up the frequency and brutality of German patrols, effectively decimated the resistance. By midway through the second week he had already set in motion the complete Aryanisation of the Czech lands. The Jews would be first to go.

Heydrich was able to avail himself of the existing arrangements. Adolf Eichmann had overseen the Central Office for Jewish Emigration since the beginning of the occupation and had successfully encouraged a minor exodus of Jews. It was also Eichmann’s office that had coordinated the concentration of Czech Jews into the major cities. The key to the next stage, figured the Acting Reichsprotektor, was simply to remove the element of choice. For several hours, Heydrich, Eichmann and Von Neurath’s former deputy, Karl Hermann Frank, pored over maps and schedules and lists of addresses, drawing up a plan of action. When it was done, they drank a toast to the Fatherland, to their own efficiency and to absolute victory, and then sent their instructions to Dr Kafka. Heydrich’s wishes were to be enacted forthwith. Kafka was also to establish a Jewish Community Trust, to deal with abandoned property.

The cramped offices of the Jewish Religious Council exploded with activity as directors and secretaries alike sat hunched over their desks, frantically compiling lists and transcribing the information onto index cards. On each one was printed a name, an address, a date and the same location: Wilson Station. Those summoned were to bring a single suitcase. A combination of warm clothing and valuables was recommended. On some, where Dr Kafka recognised the name, he printed a short message. Forgive me.

The cards went out en masse. Their arrival was met with confusion, but the news soon spread and within days an unexpected knock at the door became the most feared sound in all of Prague. In this way, five trainloads of Jews, some five thousand people in all, mostly academics, professionals and aristocrats, were resettled in the Polish ghetto of Łódź. Among them were Ludvík’s parents, Papa Roubíček and Mama Roubíčková.

What Von Neurath had sown, Heydrich reaped. The entire harvest took less than three weeks.

‘Victory for the Zionists! We shall have a homeland after all.’ Jáchym Nemec dropped a small bag of potatoes on the shop’s counter.

‘Enough with your glibness, Jáchym,’ said Žofie Sláviková. ‘It does not become you.’

‘And why not? They have cleared the town. Even Kafka won’t deny it, the damn flunky. Trains full of Czech peasants flooding into Brno and the Sudeten, wherever there is space, proudly doing their civic duty. They are offered our property as incentive. It’s a fine trade they have made.’

‘The prospect is not without promise.’ Žofie Sláviková pulled the ration clip from her apron.

‘Yes, to live like wildlife on a reserve, left to fend for ourselves. Look at us, Žofie, and tell me how long we’ll survive. We are city folk now; the farming life is foreign to our kind. We count on people like you, with courage to sell us what we need from under your counters.’

‘You’ll survive,’ she said as she clipped Jáchym’s ration book. ‘I would be glad to see the back of this overflowing sewer. Banish me to wherever, just leave me in peace. Eventually this war will end. I almost envy you Jews.’

‘But a military garrison? When Štěpánka told me I didn’t know whether to believe her. It sounded so…so—’

‘Yes. I thought maybe she had misheard. You know how she is. But she insisted, said she’d heard it from the Council herself. It has begun, she told me. Go see for yourself. So I did and, sure enough, they were there at the precise hour she had said. Young men, strong men, huddled together, sitting on their suitcases, some playing cards, a few smoking, all looking bored. At last the wait was over. A crowd had gathered, watching as the men boarded the carriages. The direction of the tracks did not escape our attention. The train was headed north, not east. These young men would remain in the Protectorate. The rumours about Terezín were true. A hundred faces, more, rolled by as the train set off. They all blended into one until, suddenly, I saw him. Leaning against the window, staring right back at me. Bohuš B. Older, broader. But I’m certain it was him.’

Františka Roubíčková woke from a night of fitful dreams to glimpse the silhouette of her eldest daughter scampering across the window bench like a frightened animal. The girl’s thin arms swatted away the curtains so she could peer at the street.

Františka slipped from the bed, careful not to wake the others. The pale light of an early dawn cast eerie shapes on the far wall, nightmare visions of the avenging angel that had descended on the city just hours after the attack on Acting Reichsprotektor Heydrich. With each of Daša’s jolts, the shadows shifted to reveal momentary scenes of horror, ever more ghastly as the tyrant succumbed to his infected wounds.

A pushbike and a leather coat dancing a slow waltz in the window of a city store.

A praying mantis, encased in wood and red silk, blind to the wailing masses filing past its mangled corpse as they mourn their own impending deaths.

Františka moved towards her. Any moment now Daša would turn around, let out a gasp or fall from the bench. The sound would set the neighbours howling with fright. The sentries would be alerted; a detachment would turn up at the apartment. They’d find what she kept hidden.

‘Mama,’ she whispered. ‘I heard cars doors slamming. And voices. I ran to the window. There were legs, in suits not uniforms. Polished shoes.’ Františka crouched beside the bench and put her arm around Daša’s waist, but the girl pulled away. ‘Look towards Mladoňovicova. There. It is still curfew and there are people at the crossroads.’

The girl was right. Františka wedged herself into the corner, her cheek and nose squashed against the glass. Down the road, people were milling about. Two black cars were parked at the end, obscuring her view across the thoroughfare to number seven. Františka put a finger to her lips, nodded in the direction of the door.

They went to find their coats. On the small table by the rack, a crumpled handbill taunted them with the promise of unimaginable wealth for any information. When Ludvík had taken it from his pocket yesterday and held it up, he looked imploringly at Františka. ‘Maybe you’ve heard something,’ he said. She shook her head, tried to turn away. He would not let it pass. ‘We have five days, then more reprisals. Harsher. It’s not about the money, Frantishku. They’re killing people. What happened to Heydrich, it isn’t the salvation we had hoped for.’

Who was he, anyway, to ask such things? Most nights he wasn’t even home and, although she tried to hate him, hate the idea of him, she would find herself praying for his safety, praying that he was sleeping on a friend’s sofa or on the floor of a barkeep’s apartment. Since the deportations had begun, it was not unusual for people to just disappear. Family members and friends would rush to the assembly grounds near Stromovka Park, hoping to catch a glimpse of their loved ones, to know that they were still alive, and that perhaps, when their own time came, they would meet again. Františka, on the other hand, knew to wait. He would return.

The morning sun cut through Biskupcova Street in its summer splendour. Weeds unfurled in the pavement cracks and birds chirped in the dense bloom of linden trees.

Františka and Daša Roubíčková ran to the corner and elbowed through the crowd. Several men in suits, with long black trench coats and gloves, stood guard at the kerb, forcing back the occasional surge from the anxious neighbours. Beneath peaked caps, beads of sweat lined brows framing dead eyes. Daša watched the bustle on the opposite corner as sharp-faced men in identical garb weaved in and out of the door to number seven. Františka listened to the panicked whispers around her. Names were bandied about, most of which she had never heard. How could she live so close to this many strangers? But there was one name that kept recurring: Moravec.

‘To think I sold her supplies.’ Františka recognised Žofie Sláviková’s stern voice. ‘I hope they don’t take me for an accomplice.’

‘I knew it.’ This time, Štěpánka Tičková. ‘Didn’t I tell you I knew it?’

Then Jáchym Nemec: ‘You wouldn’t know it if the entire resistance was operating from your kitchen.’

Františka felt her daughter’s grip tighten around her wrist as she was pulled to the front of the crowd. The bodies parted to afford her an unbroken view across the intersection. Gestapo men surged out of the building and stood at attention beside an idling car. A moment of absolute stillness. All eyes fell on the door, as they waited to see what would emerge.

In the days that followed, Štěpánka Tičková would tell how Alois and Ata Moravec held their heads high in defiance and marched with singular purpose as they were escorted to the waiting car. No one in the crowd would have the heart to say otherwise—it does not do well to speak ill of the dead—but they would all remember a middle-aged man, glasses askew on his sunken face, walking beside a whimpering youth with unkempt blond hair, both in shabby pyjamas, their hands tied behind their backs. It was only a few steps to the kerb and it was over in a few seconds. The car door slammed, the motor revved, and they disappeared in the direction of the Old City and, inevitably, Peček Palace. ‘The men should be ashamed of themselves,’ said Jáchym Nemec, ‘walking to their slaughter like that.’

‘She’s escaped,’ whispered Štěpánka Tičková. ‘I knew it. Stole away in the night and left the others to pay. That is what becomes of—’ She would have continued cursing her neighbour, regaling those who remained on the corner with tales of the woman’s descent into moral ruin, had everyone’s attention not been drawn back to the open door. From where they stood, it was almost comical: a uniformed soldier tripping backwards over the threshold, out onto the pavement. In his hands, two feet, then came a torso and at last the strange sight of another soldier gripping his load under the arms, his chest melded to its shoulders, obscuring the head and creating an obscene sideshow attraction of flailing limbs.

The two soldiers released their hold and the body of Marie Moravcová fell with a dull thud to the ground. Much would be said about her after the siege at the church: her involvement in the plot to assassinate Heydrich, her bravery in biting into the cyanide pill, the beheading of her corpse at Peček Palace. Word would soon spread that the bloody tendrils hanging from his mother’s neck were the last thing Ata Moravec would see before breaking down and telling the Gestapo everything he knew. They would try not to blame him; after all he had delivered them from a violence Prague had never seen and still paid with his life.

When the clock struck curfew’s end, and Biskupcova Street filled again with its usual bustle, Františka would return to the corner and look across the street, remembering the face of Alois Moravec. This, she thought, is the measure of true worth. This is a man.

Jakub R curled up in the corner of the cart, arms locked around his legs, the jolt of every cobbled stone like a bayonet in his spine. It was his turn to rest now—to lean against the pillows and couches, the steamer trunks, the sacks and boxes—while the cart lurched through the street, pulled by two horses, and Georg Glanzberg holding the reins.

Jakub pressed his eyes to his knees and was back home, in his village. It was deserted now. Only the clack clack clack of a horse’s shoes on stone could be heard. From nowhere, four children appeared, rushing towards him. ‘A newspaper,’ said the oldest, holding out his hand. Jakub rummaged through the bric-a-brac, but all he had to offer was Der Stürmer, that awful gutter rag whose very ink was venom. Still they took it, just to have word from the outside. They thanked him, and ran to the river to imbibe its poison. He watched, waited. Then he laughed, his entire body quaking, as they lay down and died at the water’s edge, their bodies sinking into the mud.

Clack! Jakub sat up, startled. They were gone. They were never here. The pile of newspapers rested beside him, held fast by thick twine. It was not for reading, but wrapping. Anything fragile, anything of value. So said the director.

Beside Jakub was a black folder, a record of the accumulated worth of those who had moved on. Each page told a tale of frantic packing: decisions made, then taken back and made again. Words were crossed out, others scribbled in the margin. Fights between husbands and wives. Pleas from children. What to take, what to leave behind. Jakub closed the folder between each stop, so that the echoes of these sorrowful cries would not frighten the cherry blossoms from their branches. And, as the cart rattled through the streets, from house to house, collecting things left behind by his people, he knew that he, too, was just another forsaken item.

‘Like Haman,’ Georg had said when taking the reins. ‘The vile prince of Amalek.’ And he was right, thought Jakub. The ignominy of it all, parading through the streets of Shushan. It was always the same: his fellow employees of the Jewish Community Trust waiting in the doorways for the cart’s arrival, hoping that this time, at this address, it would not be their colleagues, their friends, their families.

For a third time Jakub had been saved. By Emil Kafka, Jakobovits, perhaps even Muneles. The cart floated on Pařisžká Street like a lifeboat. The waters below: boredom, hard labour, despair. But the cart was protection from the index cards that sealed the fate of those less fortunate than him. His harbour, still, was Jáchymova. ‘I am sorry, Jakub,’ said the principal when it was decreed that the school must close. ‘We will find you something else.’ That was in June. The young teacher was soon summoned to the Religious Council with Georg. Their employment would continue, in a new role. A scrap of paper with that familiar address: 3 Jáchymova Street. ‘Report tomorrow to the stockroom,’ the secretary said. ‘We are struggling to keep on top of the transports.’

Jakub barely recognised the place. The school had transformed overnight into a maze of scaffolding. Shelves lined every wall and there were vast piles of goods, fragments of broken lives. The rooms were arranged by contents. Never before had he seen in one place so many clocks, so many sewing machines, so much silver cutlery. In some of the items he saw his students’ faces. This book is František Brichta, that rocking horse, Hana Ginzová. He would meet them again, in photo frames, portraits, as he emptied their houses, always struck by how little they had. So few items by which to remember you, he would think. Some of the children were still in Prague; he would see them in the street making mischief, bored, and he would turn away, hoping they didn’t notice him.

Only one more stop for the day, unscheduled. A boy had come to the house in Břehová Street with a message from the Council that there was an urgent assignment. The cart was already full, but there was no choice. The horses strained to heave the load along the uneven street. Jakub was now walking beside Georg, so that he did not add to the poor creatures’ suffering. They were all exhausted, these four beasts of burden. Sometimes they tugged on the bridle; the horses halted and they all waited until the pile no longer swayed.

The two friends had to reach the house on V Kolkovně Street, empty it and return to Jáchymova with enough time to get home before curfew. When they arrived, another cart was already there, as was one of the few delivery trucks still owned by the Trust. Weary packers leaned against the wheels or sat in the gutter. Only one man was standing, hands buried in the pant pockets of his suit, impatiently tapping his feet. The foreman. Jakub had not seen him before, but he knew to fear the man’s presence. He was the only one in the Trust’s employ without calluses on his palms.

‘You are late,’ said the foreman. Jakub stared across the street at a shopfront that had been sealed off with planks of wood. Someone had scrawled a crude Star of David on the middle plank. The foreman continued: ‘The Gestapo came earlier. There were reports of sounds, movements. Impossible for an empty house. The Landsbergers lived here, but they were transported over a month ago. We should have already been here. An oversight. A neighbour became suspicious, called the authorities. The Gestapo wanted to make sure there were no Jewish ghosts hiding in the walls, if you know what I mean. They snooped around for two hours. Then they came out, said it was clear for us to start. Of course, they put a few boxes in the back of their car and crossed the valuable items from my list. Here,’ he said as he handed the clipboard to Georg, ‘take it.’ The other packers had already begun to gather near the entrance. ‘You have an hour,’ said the foreman as he opened the door. ‘Maybe less.’

They rushed up the three flights of stairs, spilled onto the landing and waited at the door marked 5. Ten men, more than could possibly be required. Jakub was relieved that he wouldn’t have to drag the furniture down with Georg. Neither of them was cut out for it. Georg ran through the inventory, divided it among the packers. The bigger men would be responsible for the heavier items: tables, couches, beds and the like. The slighter men could handle the kitchenware and religious artefacts. The books would be left to Jakub and Georg. ‘You heard him,’ Georg said. ‘Time is against us. Take your items, wrap them up, whatever you can find. Someone else will sort it at Jáchymova.’

They had once lived well, the Landsbergers. That much was evident. The name was revered in Prague; it could be traced back over five generations. Maximilian Landsberger, his son Aleš, and Aleš’s son Matěj had all been in shipping. Then came Max, named after his great grandfather, who steered the course of the family business away from what he called yesterday’s fancies. Max was a man of his times; electricity was his passion but, to his dismay, it was not shared by his own son, Heinz, the present Mr Landsberger. His love was steel. Czechoslovakia, still in its infancy, was booming thanks to foreign investment and local naivety. Heinz seized the opportunity and used his inheritance to partner with the great Max Bondy. To many, Heinz symbolised the fledgling nation: something new forged from a turbulent past. Such was his renown that Karel Čapek had wanted to make a character of him, and even went so far as to work him into the first draft of his lizard book. Landsberger vetoed the idea, and told the author to use Max Bondy instead. ‘He prefers the attention.’

That was before the occupation. Like all business owners, Heinz Landsberger sold his interest to a non-Jewish administrator for a pittance and was surprised to find that it did not bother him. He already had what he wanted. A wife, two children, the trappings of comfort. He also had the luxury of time to take stock of his life. With each decree he gave away more of his possessions, and came to appreciate the humbling effect of austerity. By the time most of Prague’s Jewish aristocrats were forced from their homes, he had already taken up more modest accommodation in the Old City. The change pleased him. What had begun to look sparse in the great mansion in Smíchov fitted perfectly in his new home on V Kolkovně Street. They didn’t come looking for him when they rounded up the Czech gentry; he was no longer counted among them. Rather, Heinz Landsberger was a fatalist and an ascetic; any remnants of his former life were merely nostalgic, and mostly his wife’s. He was resigned to the same fate as every other ordinary Jew.

The packers went about their duties like drones, not a word exchanged between them. Georg crossed each item in turn from his list. One by one the packers disappeared, makeshift sacks slung over their shoulders. The hour was almost up, and only Jakub and Georg were left inside. Below, the foreman was standing alone in the street, guarding their cart.

Jakub headed to the empty bedroom. He looked around—door to the bathroom, door to the closet, door to…He gasped. Another door. Had it been hidden behind the dresser? It was small, granted, but how did they all miss it? Again, shuffling sounds from above. Jakub rushed to the door, put his ear against it. Louder. He turned the knob. Behind there was only blackness. Jakub reached inside and grasped something cold, metallic. A rod. He slid his hand up and felt a flat surface, coarse like sandpaper. His hand glided further, then reached another flat surface. Then another. Stairs. Impossible, he thought. I am already on the top floor. Jakub stepped inside; there was enough space for one person, no more. He edged his foot forward. A sudden flash of pain. He had kicked the first step with his shin. It was one of those spiral staircases: only the steps themselves and a twisted rail for support. Jakub waited for the pain to subside, then began his ascent. There was no light above or below and his eyes could not adjust. Outside, it might already have been dusk.

At the top he gingerly poked his foot around to find solid ground. There were beams, boards slung between them. The sound of someone breathing, soft, shallow. ‘Hello?’ he said. No reply. ‘Hello?’ He ventured a step, steadied himself against the sloping surface of the roof. He stopped again, listened. A single breath, like water down a plughole. Then a loud rustle and he was thrown backwards by a terrible force. It took Jakub a moment to realise that he had been tackled to the ground. Something was on his chest, crushing him. Is it man or beast?

‘Don’t move.’ Jakub sensed it was a man’s hands running along his hips, slipping into his pockets. ‘All right,’ the man said. ‘You are not armed. Not even a chisel.’ Jakub was still trapped between the man’s thighs, but it no longer felt like a vice. ‘So you are not an artist at all?’

‘No, the ones clearing out the Landsbergers’ place. I’ve been watching it all through the air vents. A real pity, I say. But they have no more use for it.’

‘Of course. Every artist knows his benefactor, even if the opposite is not always true. Follow me.’

‘I—’ A sudden rush of air. Jakub felt the man’s knee brush across his sternum. A soft hand took his own and helped him to his feet. The two made their way across creaking boards. ‘Watch your head,’ the man said. Jakub reached up and felt the roof come in at a sharp angle before opening up again. After a few minutes, the man stopped, grasped Jakub by the shoulders and turned him to his left. ‘Here,’ said the man. Shafts of flat light came through cracks in the roof, and forms began to emerge from the darkness. In front of him, on an easel, was a huge canvas.

‘Someone got lazy. Every entrance was supposed to be sealed off. We were quite content to be left alone.’

‘Artists, my man! After the occupation, it was too dangerous for us on the streets. We came up here, to the crawl spaces in the roofs. They are all connected, you know. We colonised according to medium. This part of Josefov was for painters, though the various schools kept to themselves. Realists, Expressionists, Romanticists. We were spread out as far as Pařisžká, Kozí and Vězeňská streets. There was even one colony in Benedíktská. All satellites rotating around our last remaining sun, the gallery owner Avram Becher, God rest his soul.’

‘Yes. It was inevitable, I suppose. When the army arrived, the city lost its colour. Only the Realists rejoiced. Their landscapes and fruit bowls would be the toast of occupied Prague because that’s all the new masters would permit. The rest of us just sat here, staring at our blank canvases. Then Becher lit the fuse of hope. Never fear, he insisted, there is another space for more discerning patrons. Let our presence there be an act of defiance, for artists do not take up arms. Or some rubbish like that; he always spoke as if hoping to be quoted. Still, it worked. His words halted the creative paralysis. The rooftop city sprang to life.’

‘Yes. I owe that to one person: Yitzik Berenhauer. A tragic end.’ The artist let out a slow sigh. ‘And a debt I shall never repay.’

They came because of him and they left because of him. The mad modernist of Josefov. He appeared among us one day and set up his easel. What took shape on his canvas—a traditional manger scene—had been done a thousand times, and we were ready to dismiss him. Then we noticed a fourth wise man standing over the baby. In his hand was a dagger, its blade flushed crimson. At first we feared a blood libel. Was this painter trying to have us all killed? But, then, a daub of purple near the child’s lips. Wine. This was Christ at circumcision. The painter signed his name across the bottom: Yitzik Berenhauer.

He painted them without pause, the others in his series: Jesus the Jew—Jesus at Bar mitzvah, Jesus under the Succah, Jesus prostrating himself before the ark on Yom Kippur—and when each was done he would turn around to find an ever-larger crowd gathered around him. By the time he set to work on the final canvas, a replica of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, Jesus at the Passover Feast, the roof space was full.

Only I was not under his spell; my mind was elsewhere. In necessity I had found inspiration. While pushed up against the wall, I had moved aside a tile so I could breathe, and when I drew my hand back from the cold Prague night it was black: pages from our holy books, set ablaze on some distant pyre and returned to me as char on the wind.

I gathered strips from the garments of the huddled mass around me, stretched them across a large wooden frame and began to paint. Layer upon layer of ash, it defied perspective, each scene disappearing into the next.

Lost in exquisite blackness, I was interrupted by an ungodly cheer. Jesus the Jew was complete. I watched as Berenhauer put down his brush, rubbed his hands on a rag, and walked towards the exit. The carnival of acolytes followed, hooting and whistling as he led them out of this rooftop captivity and down into the streets. I perched on his plinth and pushed aside another tile so I could watch. A figure appeared in the door opposite: Avram Becher, arms out to greet them. That was enough for me. I put the tile back, stepped down and looked around. I was alone.

I fell into a sleepless routine, painting the entire city. Occasionally I stopped to watch the scene at Becher’s gallery, the same every day. Visitors came to see Berenhauer’s pictures but Jesus the Jew was nowhere to be found. They begged Becher, chastised him, but he would not be moved. He was too cunning for that. There had already been a raid. Two. Three. They found nothing, but I knew it was inevitable. To the hum of the disappointment below, I devoted myself to my portrait of our city—I wanted to be hung alongside Yitzik Berenhauer before it was too late.

First came the river, its waters turned to blood. On either side, the city sprawled outwards, its streets and buildings, castles and parks, covered in a dirty shroud. This cartographer’s nightmare would serve as a backdrop for the faces of those trapped within. They came to me like revenants, demanding to be seen. Jan Kohout, a student of weak will and shifting passions who might just as well have stood at the bridge with armbands but instead mounted the barricades, now imprisoned in Oranienberg, waiting for the city to pay his ransom with its surrender. Our dear Mayor Otakar Klapka, blood oozing from his wounds like stigmata, executed at the Ruzyně Barracks for treason—for placing a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier, and for running a resistance cell from City Hall. Petr Bamberger, set upon by Nationalist thugs for failing to display his star in public, and for failing to vacate a tram at peak hour. The terminally serious Feliks Kral, sweating in an isolation cell, accused of making jokes about Hitler, wishing that he had not beaten the vindictive Marek Zalenka to that promotion. And so it went, the march of the damned. But behind each heroic moment was something less noble, something disturbing; it was only when I reached the end that I saw what it was. A loss of hope, of faith, of dignity. The betrayal: their society had been relinquished to the sympathisers, collaborators and opportunists.

I sat against the wall and stared at the canvas. For all its horror there was still something lacking. At my first encounter with Becher, seven years ago, he glanced at my work then shook his head. ‘You have skill,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want architecture, I want soul!’ Yes, populated by so many souls, my grand portrait lacked one of its own. How was I to know that the ill-starred Becher would provide it?

The screech of tyres, the slamming of car doors, a gunshot. A chorus of screams, then a terrible wail. The blood left my body. It was Becher. They had found the other gallery.

I rushed to my perch, pushed aside the tile. Becher stood in the street as four Brownshirts boarded up the windows. And Berenhauer. Poor Berenhauer. Throwing his arms into the air. Screaming profanities. He tried to pull down the boards, only to be met with the butt of a pistol. That shut him up. The soldiers escorted the men back inside. Soon they appeared again: Avram Becher with his wife and their four children, dragging suitcases, pillows, blankets. The soldiers herded them all into the back of a waiting truck. And then Berenhauer and his last four apostles, carrying a stack of half-finished paintings. A few soldiers stepped forward. There was a scuffle, but it was no use. The canvases were stomped on by polished jackboots.

The engine started, but there was still one more indignity in store. A Brownshirt dragged out little Chana Becherová by her scraggly hair and, to punish her for being her father’s child, to show her that anyone could paint, but that not all painting should be considered art, he made her daub the boards covering the entrance to the gallery with a giant Star of David. Then he grabbed the child by her leg and threw her into the truck. The engine revved and they were gone.

The other cars drove off. A lone soldier stood over the broken canvases. He kicked the pieces into a pile, picked up a bottle from the gutter and splashed out its contents, fumbling in his pocket for a lighter. A flash. The canvases screamed the last testament of Yitzik Berenhauer. I reached out to pull the flames towards me, the embers scorching my fingertips. Before they cooled, I sketched what I had witnessed: God shutting His eyes.

‘Completely black. To the unknowing eye, yes, I suppose it is.’ The two men stood there, mute. A distant chime. Six. ‘Now take it. Tonight I’ll make my escape to the south, but I must know that it wasn’t all for nothing.’ The artist snatched the canvas from the easel and forced it awkwardly into Jakub’s hands. ‘Take it,’ he panted, pushing Jakub backwards. ‘Let it be among the things you confiscate from the Landsbergers. I’ve seen how your lists work. Add this, cross out that. What’s another painting? Give it life, let it be seen. Take it! Take it!’ he began to shout. ‘TAKE IT, JAKUB!’

He woke to find Georg standing above him, shaking his shoulder. The room was empty, just as he remembered it. A door to the bathroom. A door to the closet. That was all. Jakub was lying where the other door should have been, but the wall was smooth. ‘I heard a sound. You collapsed,’ said Georg.

‘Stay there, I’ll get you some water.’ Georg disappeared into the living area and returned with a glass. ‘Here. I think you’re dehydrated.’ Jakub took a sip, then gulped down the rest. ‘Today was long. Too long. We must get the cart back before curfew.’ Georg helped Jakub to his feet. In the entrance hall, a barrow was filled with clumps of paper. ‘I wrapped them all,’ said Georg. Jakub walked slowly down the stairs, holding on the railing for support. Georg followed, backwards down each step, dragging the barrow, wincing every time it landed with a jolt. At the bottom he shuffled around to the other side and pushed it towards the door with his foot. The barrow slid down the steps of the stoop and came to rest in front of the foreman.

Georg handed the man the folder. The foreman glanced over the pages, nodding. On the last page he signed his name with a flourish, gave back the folder, and headed off. Georg waited until he was out of sight then went over to Jakub, who was leaning against the back of the cart. ‘He’s right,’ said Georg. ‘You’re sick. Just wait there while I unload the barrow. We’ll get this to Jáchymova then get you home.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I have my ways. Curfew is a game of strategy like any other.’

Jakub slept a week, a month, maybe more, scarcely registering the presence of his mother as she tended to him. Georg came but Jakub did not understand what his friend was saying. There were sensations, hot, cold, a fever, and he feared that he was sinking beneath the surface, choking on his own sweat. It was all a haze until this: the sound of approaching footsteps and a knock at the door. He heard his mother speaking with someone, then crying out to the corridor. They had been summoned for transport.

Františka Roubíčková rode the tram towards the small civil registry office in Nové Město. She sat in the front carriage, peeking into her bag from time to time, checking that the papers were still tucked inside. It had not occurred to her that she ought to have been in the back. Snow muffled the clatter of the wheels as they chewed into the rusted tracks; beyond the pavement, the buildings anchored the streets to a bygone era. As each grand edifice gave way to the next, Františka considered her strange limbo. The occupation would continue, but for her soon it would be different. It is his idea. It’s what he wants. ‘I am the lens through which they will see you,’ he had said. ‘Please, for the girls.’

The tram came to a halt at the corner of Jindřišská and Panská streets. Nobody paid the handsome woman any attention as she weaved her way through the carriage and out onto the pavement. At Nekázanka Street she picked up her pace. Again she said it to herself: It is his idea. It’s what he wants.

The registry office was halfway down the street, hidden on the second floor of one of the smaller buildings. Františka made her way up the stairs and let herself in without knocking. ‘Yes?’ said the woman behind the desk. Františka didn’t know how to say it. An awkward beat, then: ‘I’m here about my marriage.’ The woman motioned to the one empty chair, against the wall. ‘Take a seat. You will know when he is ready.’ Františka sat down and looked around the room. The others did not acknowledge her presence. She understood. To be here was a capitulation, a disgrace. They sat together, in conspiratorial silence, waiting for a knock, a chime, the buzz of a phone, anything to signal the end of this purgatory. But there was only the faint whistle of the clerk’s breath, the scratching of her pen on the stack of paper.

Františka saw the passage of time in the changing height of the stack. Every now and then, one of the other women would stand and go through a door marked ‘Private’. There was an order, to be sure, but Františka did not know her place in the queue. She tried, once, twice, shuffling forward on the chair, arching her back as if preparing to rise, but the clerk swatted at the air. She sat back down, inspected her shoes. On her third try, the clerk did not stop her. Františka pushed open the door and stepped through.

‘Yes. No.’ Františka fumbled with her bag. ‘That is why I’ve come here.’

The registrar put out his hand, took the papers. ‘Married to Ludvík Roubíček.’

The registrar leaned back in his chair and held the papers close to his face. His glasses remained on the desk near the ink pots. ‘For convenience, then?’

‘No, sir,’ said Františka. ‘You don’t understand. It is a long time coming. He is a fine man, mostly. But there are problems. This…it is his idea. It’s what he wants.’

‘I am not here to judge you, Paní Roubíčková. How you choose to survive these times is your own business. There are consequences, of course.’

‘Yes, sir. I understand. He has already taken residence elsewhere. The address there, that is mine. Any correspondence to my husband should be forwarded to 20 Cimburkova Street. He stays with an associate. There is no point in renting, he says. His time in the city is short.’

‘Hmmm…it will take a while to stop using that term, husband.’ The registrar recoiled as if the very word was sour on his tongue. ‘You should forget him now. A pretty girl like you will have prospects when this all blows over.’

‘But for now…well. Look, Paní Roubíčková. You mustn’t feel unfaithful. Our vows have been reduced to nothing. One cannot betray that which does not exist.’ He scribbled on his blotter. ‘And the children?’

‘I suppose you wish to report that this man’—the registrar looked at his notes—‘this man, Ludvík Roubíček, is not the father.’

‘Paní Roubíčková, I’ll ask it again. Are you absolutely certain that these children belong to your husband and weren’t conceived out of wedlock with another man? Let’s say…an Aryan man?’ When there was no answer he continued: ‘It is a simple question. They have made whores of you all, no matter how you respond. All I need to know is this: are you the kind of whore who deserves mercy?’

They had not discussed it. In all their conversations—his pleas for her to cast him aside, to save herself and the girls, her stubborn refusal to grant him such easy absolution for their years of penury—not once had they even considered it. To vitiate their bond, that was one thing. But to expunge his very existence? It was unthinkable. She couldn’t do it.

The registrar shook his head and leaned forward, deflated. ‘It will be done in a few days, then. He will no longer be protected by his marriage to an Aryan woman and you will be free to disappear into the general population. As for your children, they will remain mischlinge. But without the millstone of their father they might yet escape this madness. I hope for their sake that you have made the right decision.’

None of them heard the footsteps in the foyer, but three sharp knocks at the door told them enough. Daša got up from the table and walked calmly down the hallway. Three more knocks, impatient. She stood at the door a few seconds. The man on the other side stumbled backwards when he saw her. ‘Paní…’ Daša said nothing. Let the man squirm, she thought, as she leaned against the doorjamb, her hips pressed against the frame, pushed forward in a pose he might mistake for seduction. The man was short and scrawny, his clothes dishevelled from an evening spent playing the devil’s postman. He looked from her to the scrap of paper in his hand then back. ‘I am sent from the Jewish Council,’ he said. ‘I have just been to an address’—again he looked to the paper—‘Cimburkova 20. But there was no one. I was also given this address. Perhaps…’ The envoy was sweating. ‘Perhaps you know the man I’m after. Ludvík Roubíček. He is not registered here but I am told I might find him.’

Daša glanced behind her. In the kitchen the family sat huddled around the table, picking at their meal. She would not disturb them. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He is here.’

The man knelt down and opened his briefcase. Inside, there was a wad of pink papers, tied with a red ribbon. He unfastened the knot and fanned through the papers. ‘Yes…Wait…I know it’s—’ He pulled out a single pink slip, followed by several forms from a secondary pocket. The click of the briefcase lock reverberated through the stairwell as the man regained his composure and got to his feet. ‘If I might speak with him—’ But he knew better than to expect an answer. ‘In that case, please pass this on. He is to report to the trade fair grounds in three days’ time for relocation. The details are all on the summons. If he’s late, it will no longer be in our hands. Acts of resistance do not go unpunished. As it is, I should report him for failing to be at his registered address after curfew.’

The man shrank back as Daša snatched the papers. She slammed the door, but his voice could still be heard in the distance, rattling off ever more fanciful warnings.

The night before he was to leave, Ludvík Roubíček sat in the cramped lounge room of 13 Biskupcova Street with his two eldest daughters, while Františka busied herself in the entrance hall packing, unpacking and repacking his suitcase. Fifty kilograms. That was the weight of a man’s life. From the kitchen, the smell of condensed milk on the boil, fresh bread and onions. As the hours wore on, they did not speak, only listened to the sounds of Biskupcova Street that Ludvík had long ago stopped hearing. Behind the gauze curtain Marcela and Hana snored softly, dreaming whatever young girls dream.

The sled was Irena’s idea. ‘There’s a plank of wood on Rečkova Street,’ she said, breaking the evening’s silence. ‘Perhaps if we tied a rope to it we could drag Papa’s suitcase.’ Ludvík continued to go over the transport forms, filling out his details as best he could. He didn’t have a home to hand over. Or personal property. Everything had already reverted to Františka. He had no keys to give them, no inventory to be traded for the privilege of this transport.

At first light, they woke Marcela and asked her to prepare the cardboard label that was, according to the summons, to hang around Ludvík’s neck. She took to the task in earnest, practising each letter of the identification number several times before finally inscribing it on the brown rectangle: CC-109. She held it up. It was perfect. Ludvík could not possibly get lost. He would reach his destination and send her exotic gifts. Marcela searched her mother’s sewing drawers for a knitting needle. She held it against the top corners of the cardboard, punched two holes. After she had threaded the string and tied it off, she ran back to Ludvík. ‘Papa, put it on,’ she said. But he ignored her, continuing with his papers. ‘Papa, please,’ she said. ‘I made it for you!’ Ludvík slid it over his head and slumped forward, resting his cheek on the table. ‘Show me, Papa,’ said Marcela. Františka pulled the girl back by her shoulder. ‘That’s enough, Marcela. Papa must be left to prepare now. We will be leaving soon.’

‘For the circus?’ The girl had heard them say it, taken the term literally. How was she to know that’s what they all called the trade fair grounds?

They set off in the morning chill, the sled leaving a path of discoloured snow in its wake. They took it in turns to pull it along, first Ludvík, then Františka, then Daša and Irena together. Little Hana sat at the front, her legs hanging over the suitcase, smiling and waving to passersby. Marcela skipped around them, clapping and singing. Ludvík Roubíček did not look back at his old home, nor into the eyes of his wife or daughters. He held his head high, his gaze fixed in the distance. Františka kept the cardboard label inside her coat, to protect it from the falling snow, but also so that he could walk the streets as an unmarked man as they made their way towards the Hlávka Bridge. When they reached the clearing at the southern bank, Františka could see other families, other sleds, and the tracks of those who had come before.

They arrived at Výstavíště Trade Fair Grounds to the fading sound of church bells. Ludvík looked at the clock on top of the central turret of the Industrial Palace; it was just after noon. They had been walking for almost two hours. A swirling grey mosaic of stone tiles lined the grand promenade, rubbed clean by a constant stream of shuffled feet. ‘Wait,’ Ludvík said. Daša and Irena stopped dragging the sled. All around them, groups of people huddled together. Some came from the road, others alighted from the back carriage of trams. A few talked, a few cried, but most proceeded in mute resignation, cardboard labels around their necks, all marked with the same two letters, CC. Ludvík let them pass. There was no hurry. They were not heading for the towering ceilings and slate floors of the Industrial Palace, which for over fifty years had been the envy of barons and princes alike. Instead they would be shunted to the Radio Mart exhibition hall, the wooden annex that had last been used to house the electronics trade show. How many times had he come to these grounds as a younger man, to tout the wares of whatever charlatan would have him, to revel in those carnivals of abundance? Back then he would skip to the gate. Not now. Let them pass, he thought.

The nearby Stromovka Park, once a royal game reserve, lay dormant; no one dared venture near the assembly point lest they find themselves dragged in to make up the numbers. There were no children playing, no young couples exchanging sweet nothings. Only the wagtails and rooks still swooped towards the frozen fountains. Their numbers had thinned; there was no one to feed them.

Ludvík took hold of the rope handle and pulled the sled. It was his burden now, this bundled life. The others followed in single file, up the promenade towards the barbed wire fence. Ahead was a long line of people ending at a table placed in front of a flimsy metal gate. A lone clerk from the Community Council sat up straight, tugging at his coat, trying to fend off the icy wind. Nearby, a policeman leaned against the fence, chewing on a wad of tobacco, oblivious to the brown spittle dribbling down his chin. Ludvík stepped forward, joined the line. Those who had already passed through to the other side of the barbed wire now milled about, puffing on cigarettes. Some stopped to barter—a gold watch for a tin of condensed milk, a razor for some onions, whatever might help them in their new home. Wandering policemen joined in the transactions, or, when they did not favour the exchange, simply confiscated the most desirable goods.

The clerk adjusted his white armband and took the pink slip from Ludvík. He checked the name and number then opened the master roll to record the new arrival. Ludvík tried to find a name he knew, someone who could keep him company on the journey, but there was none. The policeman cleared his throat and spat a glob of phlegm near the clerk’s foot just as he was drawing a line through Ludvík’s details. Františka handed over the cardboard number and, as Ludvík slid it around his neck, Marcela began to clap, the sound muffled by her woollen gloves. ‘I made Papa’s ticket. We will see the elephants.’ Ludvík puffed out his chest and slid the label across to cover his yellow star. For those few moments, he still belonged to Prague.

‘It’s best you part ways here, then. Inside—’ He gestured towards Hana on the sled, then Marcela beside her. ‘It’s not for them.’ Františka ignored him and went to pick up the rope. Daša and Irena stood on either side of their father, each clutching an arm. The gate swung open on its loose hinges. They stepped forward. Immediately, Františka was jolted back. The policeman stomped his foot on the sled. ‘From now you carry.’

Step right up, little Marcela. Here is the circus you’ve been so anxious to see. Is it as you had imagined? Would it help if I told you that this is just the sideshow? God knows where they have set up the big top. I suppose I’ll get there in the end. What did you say? Don’t cry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scream. It’s just that I can’t hear you over this horrible din. You’ll have to lean closer, speak into my ear. Even when they are not barking, those loudspeakers blare with the phantasms of our discarded radios. Now come. Follow me. Stay close.

Ah, this is the spot. CC-109. Yes. What is that you say? There is only one seat? Well, of course there is. Can you have it? No. I know your legs are tired. But this patch of dirt will not do for a girl as delicate as you. And look how the lady here spills across the line with her arm. Shhhhh! She is old, you mustn’t wake her. Can’t you see that she is lying on a stretcher, that she doesn’t move? Leave her be. Climb on my shoulders and we can explore this circus together.

Queues everywhere. People queuing up for their last chance to win. It’s okay. There will be plenty of time to play all the games: two, maybe three days. And you can come and go as you please. Me? No. I will wait here and hold your place. So where should we start? Let’s try this one. First you must take your ticket to the clown at the table. Do you see him? Yes, that’s right, the fat one with the wiry hair and nervous expression. So here, take this ticket—Yes. Yes, I know. It looks exactly like Papa’s ration card, but surely you know that in the circus nothing is as it seems—and hand it to the clown. He will wave you away, no doubt, but it is all part of the game. You come back and stand with me. Then you wait and you wait and you wait and eventually he will send one of his monkeys out with a tray of delicious treats. You have to be lucky, though. Not everyone is a winner. That’s a lesson you must learn. Sometimes you end up with nothing.

We’ll move on, then. Look at this! A grand sculpture like you’ve never seen before. Spoons, forks, knives—all silver—piled higher than the old clocktower itself. Of course I don’t pretend to know what it means. Modern art escapes me. It is more your mother’s domain.

What is that? You want to play this game? But Marcela, look at how they stand in line. Holding their house keys in their hands? But those are no ordinary keys. Watch how the man in front hunches forward like that key is the heaviest thing he has ever held. That’s because it is, my dear. If only you had one to hold you’d understand that it is the exact weight of all that he has ever owned. And we who come here no longer have the strength to carry such things. That, then is the game: a test of strength. Is there a man in all of Prague strong enough to hold his key when he reaches the clown at the table? I think not. Just look at the relief on their faces as they hand it over. As if the brass has burnt holes in their skin. This is not a game for little girls. And Papa doesn’t have a key. Let’s move on to the animal enclosure instead. Over there, it is that great pile of darkness in the corner.

Why do they lie there like that? you ask. Can’t you see they are sleeping? Foxes and minks and beavers and bears, huddled together in peaceful slumber. They are tired like you. They’ve also come from far away, from all over Prague, hiding in handbags and suitcases, rolled up in mattresses. No, you cannot pet them. We are not allowed past the chain. It is for your own good. One should never wake a sleeping bear. Here’s let’s—

Quick. Get down. Sit. Please, Marcela. You must sit. He’s here. There. Across the room. Fiedler the Lion, the most ferocious creature of them all. See how he struts, head held high, fangs peeking out from his thin lips, claws punching holes in the ground. It’s a very strange act, I know. We wait here with our eyes to the floor, hoping not to catch his attention. What sort of thrill is that, to not even look at the main attraction? But the lion is a wild beast, no matter how well he’s been trained. You never know when he will lash out and swipe a little girl across the face. Many have already perished by his claws.

When he is gone I will take you to play the last game, the greatest of them all. I have the ticket right here in my hands, a piece of paper with my name and photo and a big red ‘J’ across it all. There are so many stories about this game. You will no doubt be told that Papa ran away and joined the circus, that he was afraid to turn around and face the lion, that he boarded the train with all his new friends and was finally taken to the big top. But they are wrong, Marcela. That is not how this game works. There is no big top. There is no show. No. In this game, when we reach the front of the line, when we come face to face with the clown who sits at his table, we hand over the ticket. The clown will take his big rubber stamp, he will hold it high in the air so you can see the single word on its inky base—EVACUATED —and, with a great flourish, he will bring it down. And, just like that, Papa will disappear.