Free Before by Joseph Hurka Page A

hole.
    *   *   *
    During the brain hemorrhage last June Jiri had seen the walls of Lidice on fire, and he was looking around for Helena. He was shouting, terrified. There were only the black walls on fire: no houses, no people left. He could not remember where he was. He could remember Anna’s name, for she was there, suddenly, alarmed, leaning over him, but he was not sure if he was in Massachusetts or Seattle, or perhaps Prague; here was the painting of John Lennon in the Little Quarter, this wall too afire, and here was St. Nicholas Church: the Dome Fresco was in flames, the tall, amber, painted glass ceiling melting, blackening—a tunnel of hell toward the sky. Then he and Anna were in Hradany, looking down, and all of Prague was ablaze. Anna called immediately for a doctor, and soon that face was there, demanding Jiri’s attention—white coat, a man needing a shave. Asking Jiri for his location.
    Location? Jiri said vaguely.
    What state? the doctor said.
    Jiri tried hard to think. Was he in the United States? Was he in a bunker in Prague, perhaps, or behind a barricade in the May uprising? He was in a cold sweat. He waited, frightfully, for the sound of bullets on steel and concrete.
    There is a war going on, he said. Everything is moving. Everything is on fire.
    Jiri? Everything is moving? the doctor said. You’re feeling dizzy?
    The walls are all moving, Jiri said.
    Perhaps he is just very tired? Jiri heard the doctor ask Anna. Perhaps he is dreaming?
    No, Doctor, Anna said. Something is really wrong. This isn’t like him. I know my husband.
    The doctor said: Jiri, can you tell me who the president of the United States is?
    Jiri struggled; how could it be he couldn’t know? Roosevelt? he said. That brought alarm to the eyes of the doctor.
    *   *   *
    He shakes his head at the memory. He turns on lamps, and at first he blinks his eyes as if he has come from a cave. It takes a good while for his eyes to adjust. Then here is the photograph, on the shelf above the ottoman, of his mother with her arm around his sister. Helena’s eyes are merry with their mother’s impatience, and now she has Jana laughing. Jiri leans closer, blinking, looks at their faces. Hurry up, Jiri, his mother says, trying again to be serious. For heaven’s sake, your sister will be late for work.
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    One night in Prague in May 1945, Vĕra Kafková, Jana’s friend, Jiri’s old Lidice neighbor, immeasurably aged and with the insectlike blue number from Ravensbrück burned into her forearm, told Jiri of the last day she saw his sister and mother: We were held three days in the school gymnasium in Kladno, and then they took the children away from their mothers. It was like something from Dante, honey, truly. You cannot believe. Then they began taking us away in trucks. Your mother and sister were in the next truck over from mine. I looked at your sister waiting there with that new, colorful bracelet on her wrist, and I thought she is too pretty a girl, too young a girl, to be going to a death camp. Vĕra wept, and Jiri—realizing that as the Nazis came to Lidice his mother had given his sister his birthday gift—put his head in his hands and wept openly as well.
    Through late nights in 1948, in the SS Archival Room at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg—just one floor down from the army intelligence headquarters where he worked—Jiri had gone thoroughly through detention cards of Ravensbrück, Chelmno, Terezín. He found Marie Píhodová’s name quickly—confirming what he’d known since the end of the war—imagined her in the back of that truck at Chelmno, perhaps comforting one of the younger children as the exhaust gas killed them. He’d had to leave the room, to walk outside on the ravaged streets of the city, rage in his throat.
    There was no sign of his sister or mother in the long parade