The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

Herr Steinhardt, I am.”

      “Good, good.”

      Mrs. Steinhardt held her husband’s elbow. That this pair could spawn such boys, not one but two in the same clutch. Trn pressed the wall for them to shuffle past, Mrs. Steinhardt’s spectacled eyes watching as her husband took the stairs one by one, always the right foot first, her hair white as his.

      “We must hurry,” she said.

      “I know it, I know it.”

      “Have you the key?”

      “I told you that I have it, here in my pocket.”

      Trn jogged up the stairs, knocked as the door opened.

      “Oh. Viktor.” Dita’s hand went to her throat. “We thought you’d be coming. I had the radio off but I heard the others coming down the stairs.”

      “We have time, Dita. The sirens haven’t even started yet. Do you want a wrap, Mrs. Asterova?”

      “Oh,” Dita said. “I’m forgetting again.”

      “You shouldn’t have to do this, Mr. Trn. I believe with my hand on the rail I would be able.”

      “We’re fine, Mrs. Asterova. We’ll be there in a moment.”

      A distant wail began to climb nearer before he could support Mrs. Asterova as far as his own door, his arm around her, a hand on the knob of each elbow. Dita looked back at them, at the scuff of her mother-in-law’s slippers on the stairs, went down a few steps and looked back again.

      “Thank you, thank you, Viktor. We don’t know what we’d do without you.”

      “It’s nothing, Dita. We’re almost there.”

      Steinhardt was jangling the keys at the lock in the cellar door, the others gathered and watching. Miroslav leaned toward Havlicek and Trn heard him whispering, “Alles ist in ordnung.”

      “Mein Gott, Herrmann,” Mrs. Steinhardt said.

      “Try that one, Father,” one of the twins said.

      “I tried that one already.”

      “Mein Gott. I thought you sorted all those after the last time.”

      “There it is,” he said. “That’s what I thought.”

      He went first down the stairs, twisted a switch on the wall that lit two dim bulbs hanging in the cellar. “Quickly, Father,” one of the boys shouted. The stairs creaked under them all, Alena holding Aleks’s hand and Miroslav handling the wooden rail with Havlicek hobbling behind on his crooked foot and Trn last with Mrs. Asterova following Dita.

      “You secured the door, Herr Trn?”

      “I did, Herr Steinhardt.”

      “That is good.”

      The Steinhardts shared an old settee along the inner wall, gazed up at the narrow cellar window black with painted panes. There were stuffed chairs for the two boys and a straight chair for Mrs. Asterova. Miroslav and Alena and Dita perched on the crate of an old trunk. Aleks made himself small on a folded blanket in the corner.

      “Mr. Havlicek, won’t you have a seat?” Trn said. “Aleks.”

      “I’ll stand,” Havlicek said.

      The twins gripped hands and grimaced to make the other surrender. Such bold health from exhausted loins. Beyond the zone of light the smells of damped clay, spades, dead grass, patches of fungus molding on block and mortar. One of the twins cried out and the other strained all the muscles in his arm the harder.

      “Boys,” Steinhardt said.

      The one who suffered balled his free fist and punched his brother on the neck. The brother cried out and struck back with a blow that landed squarely on the Hitler-Jugend armband.

      “Erwin. Erich.”

      They smirked together. Not identical but nearly. Not the same egg but two clearly allied. The Steinhardt-Steinhardt Axis.

      “I hope there isn’t a power cut,” Mrs. Asterova said. “I wouldn’t like to be down here in the dark. Do you have candles, Herr Steinhardt?”

      “It would be better than being upstairs, don’t you think?” Mrs. Steinhardt said.

      “Oh yes, Frau Steinhardt. I didn’t mean that. Yes.”

      “We have flashlights,” one boy said. He brought it from his pocket, played an oval of light across the floor and conjured weird shadows among the beams of the ceiling strung with webs, motes suspended in the sudden light as if surprised. The light winced through Trn’s eyes and moved on. He loosened his tie, undid the collar button.

      “The batteries, Erich.”

      He flashed it in his brother’s face and the boy threw his arm across his eyes, the other hand slapping out blindly. It struck an ear and the flashlight fell and rolled its beam across the floor.

      Aleks watched from his corner, rubbed his nose, the canister across his lap. The Steinhardts gazed over the heads of those on the crate. Alena and Dita sometimes whispered. Trn’s eyes met Havlicek’s and they each looked at the concrete floor again.

      Steinhardt said, “I suppose we will have more of these nights now. The British will be desperate to disrupt the invasion in any way they think possible. Rail lines, supplies. But it will in the end make no difference.”

      Trn glanced at Miroslav’s appraising frown. Aleks unbuckled the canister and pulled out the mask, spread the straps and drew the rubber hood over this head, surveyed the room through the round goggle lenses, over the snout of the filter.

      “The Wehrmacht says every stage of the offensive goes according to plan. After Minsk, Smolensk. You can see it all unfolding in the papers. Moscow is next, that’s where Army Group Center is directed.”

      “Across the River Nieman,” Miroslav said, “and down the same high road taken by Napoleon and his Grande Armée.”

      Steinhardt looked across the gloom with narrowed eyes.

      “But with this great difference, Herr Vesely. This army does not retreat. Where the Wehrmacht soldier once sets his boot there it remains.”

      “I was merely observing the historical parallel,” Miroslav said.

      “Here history will not repeat itself,” Steinhardt said. “Here all parallels end.”

      The boys were locked in the vise of their handshake again. One reached to choke his brother by the knot of his black kerchief.

      “This time history writes a new page with a different conclusion. The Führer is not another Napoleon.”

      “I think that must certainly be true,” Miroslav said.

      Finally the all clear sounded through the black window.

      “Only another false alarm then,” Steinhardt said. “They say the British are flying over with empty planes just to provoke the warnings, to try to deprive the factory workers of their sleep. They haven’t bombs in any case.”

      “One might think,” Miroslav said in the hollow march up the cellar stairs, “that empty bombers would be as easy quarry for the antiaircraft as the others,” but Steinhardt at the switch appeared not to hear. He put the cellar into darkness again, locked the door with the third key he tried.

      Trn said, “Herr Steinhardt. You have not yet said what we are to do if some evening you are out and we have a warning.”

      The boys took the stairs at a sprint, the one trailing grabbing at the leader’s leg to trip him.

      “Yes, yes, I will see to that, Herr Trn. But we are so rarely going out evenings. Gute nacht.”

      Havlicek closed the door to his flat without a word to anyone. Miroslav went up with Alena and Aleks,