The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

bastard,” Miroslav was saying as Trn came into the sitting room. “That ass.”

      “Auf Deutsch,” Trn said.

      “Ja ja ja,” Miroslav said, waving his hand.

      “Why does Mr. Havlicek have a broken foot?” Aleks said, his face his own again, his hair soaked black.

      “Hitler is not another Napoleon. Scheisse. I should say not. Hitler was a goddamn corporal dragging dispatches through the mud from trench to trench. Arschlecker.”

      “Is it because he was a prisoner of the empire and they tortured him?”

      “All those good men dead in Flanders and he survives. They gassed him and still he lived through it. Like a vermin.”

      “Why are you speaking German?” Aleks said.

      “Yes,” Trn said. “Mr. Havlicek was in the castle when he was a young man, when it was the emperor’s prison, and they treated him very badly. Now let’s get a towel for that wet head.”

      “If history doesn’t repeat itself any longer,” Miroslav said, “then why isn’t the Führer on a stand in Whitehall tonight reviewing a Waffen-SS parade by torchlight? That’s what I’d like to know. Ignorant bastard. Waste. Betrayer.”

      “Good day,” the clerk said behind the counter. “May I help you?”

      “Good day,” Trn said, taking a basket. “I’m looking for toothpaste.”

      She indicated the far wall and as he passed the aisles he glimpsed a woman pulling her lip, pensive glasses overlooking the shelves. After he laid the toothpaste in the basket, he turned towards the packets of tissues to study her across the shelves, the lenses of her glasses so clean the bottles she examined shone in them. Her dark hair came out of her hat to whisper against her shoulders and as she bent to look more closely thin fingertips rose to catch the locket that swung on a silver chain. The shop smelled of new soap. She raised a bottle of lotion and the locket came to rest on her sweater, two fingers there to still it, one finger, the longest. She was slender and tall, taller than the man who stood beside her now glowering at Trn under thick brows.

      “What are you looking at?”

      “Nothing.” Trn shook his head. “Only shopping.” He showed his basket.

      “You have no right.” The man’s black hair was oiled to his scalp, his jaw stubbled black. “You’re a Jew, aren’t you? You’re not even allowed in the shops this time of day.”

      “I am allowed. I am shopping, like everyone else.”

      “He only shuffles like a Jew,” the man said. “And ogles other men’s wives.”

      The man would follow him to the counter, press against his shoulder. “You’ve no right to look at other men’s wives.” Trn handed his money to the clerk who watched him. The drawer shot open as the till sounded its bell and the eyes of the clerk shifted to the man behind him, Trn’s hand ready to slide his change from the counter.

      “Go home to your own wife and leave other men’s alone.”

      “I’m leaving now.”

      But the man stood in the aisle and she was there too, eyes wincing behind her glasses.

      “Mirek,” she said.

      “You don’t understand,” the man said. “I haven’t heard you apologize.”

      “If I have somehow offended you, sir, I apologize.”

      He stepped to the right but the man blocked him again.

      “To my wife, you filth. Apologize to my wife.”

      Trn looked over the man’s shoulder through the lenses into the long-lashed eyes.

      “I apologize, madam, for any offense.”

      “Mirek, he’s said he’s sorry.”

      “He’s still looking at you,” the man said. “Did you see? What are you, with that case on your shoulder? Some desk man?”

      “I’m leaving,” Trn said, stepping left. The man pivoted again and Trn dodged between him and the shelves, bringing to the floor a cascade of packages. The bell at the door tinged as another customer came through and Trn skirted her out onto the sidewalk but the man’s hand caught his shoulder and reversed him, pushed him toward the blocks of the wall.

      “Who do you think you are looking at my wife that way?”

      Passing faces took them in and palely faced away. A man in a sandwich board came by, a new restaurant with a German name, over the board his blank stare gaping past. Trn looked down at the paving stones they stood on, the cracked one the man stood on.

      “I think I should teach you a lesson,” the man said. “How would you like that?” His cheeks shook when he spoke, his jowls, a froth of anger at the corners of his mouth.

      “Mirko,” the woman said. She shifted her bag, laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “People are looking.”

      “I’m going to provide you a lesson about looking,” the man said. The hair at his temples grew to points that almost touched his eyebrows. He pressed Trn to the wall with a plump hand. “He can’t look at another man’s wife without something to remember.”

      “What if the police come?”

      “He doesn’t know what to do,” the man said, “so I’m going to show him.”

      He stood so close the breath of his words came up Trn’s nose, the sick lunch decaying in his belly, in his teeth.

      “Maybe I should follow him home, let his wife see me teach him a bit. She might like that. If he has a wife. You got a wife?”

      Trn looked down at a dark stain on the man’s yellow tie.

      “Mirko, come home,” the woman whispered at his ear. “Come home and I’ll give you something special.”

      A scoff gargled up from the man’s throat as his hand dismissed Trn’s lapel.

      “He doesn’t even know if he has a wife. He only looks.”

      “Come along home before the police come.”

      “I’ll be watching for you,” the man said over his shoulder. “I’ll be watching.”

      Up the hill Trn took the first lane he didn’t need to take, waited at a lamp post before correcting his way. He walked quickly, heel-beats sounding on the pavement, nothing behind but an old couple with a doddering dog. Further on he held to the iron stake of a fence and still nothing. At their gate he clinked through his keys, watching the empty street before and behind. In the dark well of the stairs he felt of his pockets, stopped and reached into his case, held it wide to squint and shift among the papers. Goddamnit. Six crowns and no tube of Chlorodont.

      When the broadcast was over and the jazz began again Miroslav said, “It was the same as last night. What a waste of electricity.” “What else could it be?” Alena said and left for the kitchen. Trn removed the Churchillka and replaced the back to the radio and tuned to Vienna so music waltzed into the room. The coil he wound three times in its linen and set in the sideboard drawer under the last tablecloth, the lace that had belonged to the mother-in-law he never knew. In Miroslav’s room he found the boy sitting on his knees in his grandfather’s chair, his figure huddled against the cone of light from the desk lamp.

      “It’ll soon be time for dinner.”

      The boy didn’t turn. His geography book was open to the bulging form of a yellowed continent, the boy’s finger tracing the names of colonies, rivers, settlements.

      “Does the radio say there is fighting in Africa?”

      “There