The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

twenty-second,” Trn said.

      “The twenty-second.”

      “Yes, Anamaria.”

      “He never got the pork. I received the receipt for the parcel but weeks and weeks later when we had a card from him he said thank you for everything else so he never got the pork. I guess a guard sluiced it, they did that in the gymnazium too after I wasn’t permitted to give him the box directly.” She spoke as one murmuring in her sleep. “Today is our wedding anniversary. You stood by his side, didn’t you, Viktor, all those years ago?”

      Trn nodded but she still looked down and then the bruises started open on him.

      “Viktor, I often wonder. I wonder why they took him. Do you know, Viktor, do you know why they should take Pavel?”

      “They took him because he was brave, Anamaria. Because he would write the truth.”

      “They took a lot of them,” Alena said.

      “I used to get so angry at him. He’d leave in the middle of the night to talk to someone about things he couldn’t tell me. He couldn’t tell me but he could write them in the paper.”

      Trn leaned at the edge of his chair and on the couch Anamaria collected herself into a corner.

      “That was to protect you, Anamaria. You and Jakub.”

      “Or stay late because he had some midnight deadline. How I hated that newspaper in our box every morning. After he would read it I would take it and burn it up in the stove even in summer. But now I like to think he’s started a paper in the camp. The Prisoners Daily or something similar, I don’t know. It would give him work to do with his hands, his mind, it would give him something to endure with. His hands were always alive here. But what could he write that they don’t all already know. And they would never let that happen. I tell myself that too. That it would never happen.

      “Now I like to think that if they let him come home I’ll never burn his paper again.”

      Her eyes were staring at the thumbnail stabbed into her thigh. She jointed her hands in her lap, looked up into the window, spoke to the dim light.

      “But he was taking care. I begged him to be careful and I convinced him to be more correct in what he wrote and what he was. The censors hardly struck anything anymore, not like in the beginning, even the German censor left him alone. And then all of a sudden on that day they should come here, just as the bombs are falling on Poland, the sun barely up and Pavel still in his pajamas. He hasn’t even got the paper yet, Viktor. And they stand outside the bedroom door while he puts on his pants and while he’s buttoning his shirt and buckling his belt. And I looked at his buttons and I said to myself, ‘See, he doesn’t need any help, his fingers aren’t even trembling.’”

      “I know, Anamaria. I know that morning was terrible.”

      Her hands came undone and she reached to move a small china plate on the end table. The nail of her long finger scratched at the paint on the plate and then her hands came together again.

      “I’m holding his coat for him and he says, ‘If you need anything go to Viktor.’ Because he’s known you all these years, in school and university and even before. And he doesn’t even have his tie on and they’re one on each side of him, their hands on his arms, fat hands, and they say, ‘You won’t need a tie,’ and Jakub comes up behind me at the door, rubbing his eyes, and he says, ‘Mama, where is Papa going?’ and I say I don’t know and I hurry to the balcony so down the street I can watch the van, just a gray van with gray doors and they open them and they hold him while he steps up and bends his head and I can see another man in there on the bench, I can see the hat on his head as he leans forward, his elbow on his knee and suddenly it comes to me. ‘What if that’s Viktor in there too?’ And I think that will be good for Pavel, but you weren’t, Viktor, they never picked you up even when they closed the universities. And so in all these months, in these years, I’ve begun to wonder. They’ve arrested a lot of professors but they’ve never rounded up Viktor. Why is that? They took Pavel with the neighbors watching, with Mrs. Krupkova and her puny dog staring at him herded down the street between two strangers and her dog squatting to shit in the gutter and then I hear he’s in the castle where the stone drips and then in the gymnazium and after the gymnazium they took him to Buchenwald, one day I get a note with the Gestapo eagle at the top telling me Pavel’s been transported to Buchenwald, it doesn’t say why, it doesn’t say when. Nothing ever says why. And so I wonder, Viktor, I wonder why they took Pavel and never took you?”

      The thumb worked her flesh but she was watching him. The bruises did not blink. He looked down at the carpet.

      “Did you inform on him, Viktor? Did you tell them to lock him away?”

      “Anamaria, you know that I didn’t.”

      “I don’t know anything, Viktor. You saw him only the week before. I remember you were here. I know you were the last friend to see him. You went to that pub. He told me.”

      “I don’t know why they arrested him, Anamaria, other than the fact that they took a lot of brave people that day. All over the country.”

      “I remember, Viktor, I remember that day so well. Jakub’s first day of secondary school and the pants and shirt I had ironed still hanging in the kitchen from the night before. And they hung there all day because I didn’t let Jakub go because I didn’t know what would happen to him without his father. His father taken with a lot of other men but not you, Viktor. Never you.”

      “They don’t explain these things, Anamaria, as you know. They just do them.”

      “Perhaps your time will come then.”

      The room was so dim he could not tell the pattern in the carpet. A burgundy swirl in the dark, a dried blood. He stood and lifted his coat and his hat. Alena took up her plate. Anamaria watched them and finally rose. Alena went into the passage and he followed, turned back.

      “I’m sorry you feel this way, Anamaria. I would like to help.”

      “The only help I need, Viktor, is my husband out of Buchenwald. Can you do that?”

      Trn opened the door and Alena walked out. From the landing he said, “Perhaps there is something I can do for Jakub. Help him with his studies perhaps.”

      “He’s too busy studying German.”

      “Perhaps I could move his mind back to engineering.”

      “I think his mind is unmovable at this point, Viktor.”

      Even now the thumb scissored out from her hand, pinning the dress against her.

      “Goodbye then, Anamaria.” He looked at her a last time. “I’m sorry you feel this way.”

      “I’m sorry about a great many things, Viktor. The outer door will lock behind you.”

      They went down the stairs and into the cold again. He checked the knob twice. Alena passed through the gate he held for her and they took their way down the sidewalk.

      “So,” Alena said. “That wasn’t so bad as last time.”

      The frame of her bed creaked and her feet brushed the two steps across the rug and cold air swept his arm as the covers lifted and his mattress gave in to a warmth returning. Her touch drifted, raised his shirt, glided over his naked chest. Breath at his neck, humid, stale. Beyond the black curtain a tram down on the avenue clanged up the morning through the cold dawn. Her fingers traced the hair of his belly, glanced, glanced and stayed, the cup of her fingers. “It’s time.” A whisper dry as dust in the dark. “The right time.” Deeply he breathed, the weight of her head on his shoulder, her sigh at his neck. Her hair grazed his cheek and the warmth of the cup drew away. She rolled onto her back.

      “Why don’t you ever want me anymore?”

      “I do. But I must use the toilet.”

      “No. You don’t