The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

      He said, “You know the Slovaks are evicting Czechs,” but her hands were already dusting him from their palms. She twirled toward the window so her skirts flared.

      “Look, Viktor, a beautiful spring. It’s only beginning and already the sun’s brilliant.”

      The same flare, the smile beaming as she whirled to face him, leaned back into the sill. Her teeth were graying.

      Yesterday was cold rain. He didn’t say that either, didn’t say that cold rain would settle over them again before they had spring in earnest.

      “What will we do for money, Alena?”

      “We have what we saved for a cottage and can borrow the rest. I’ll earn some.” Her fingertips played against one another. “Sewing, and cakes.” She bit at the nail again. “Everyone on the street loves my pastries.”

      “The sugar you’ll buy on the black market,” he said. “And the flour.”

      “I’ll set some aside from our ration every week.”

      Trn spanned his brow with a hand.

      “How much sugar will you need to bake a bridge for us all to England?”

      “Maybe the Overseas Service,” she said.

      “I’m sure the BBC have all the Czechs they need.”

      “You won’t even write to England, will you? Not even to save your own son.”

      “I no longer know anyone there. And letters don’t go to England from here anymore.” Just behind the clenched eyes he felt the skull. The temple bones grown close under the skin. He dropped his hand to look at her across the room. “And what about your father? Even if we had the money, if I had the slightest promise of a job, is he well enough to travel?”

      “I’ve thought of that too,” she said. Her gaze examined the floor. “Father will have to stay here. We’ll get someone to look after him, Mrs. Asterova will look after him, and then after we’re settled we’ll send for him. Send someone to bring him.”

      “Who, Alena? Mrs. Asterova is older than your father.”

      “Dita will help her.”

      “Dita has all that she can bear with Mrs. Asterova.”

      She glared so long and blue that he faced the radio, huddled his hands in his lap. He heard a long sigh.

      “Why do you always have to paint the devil on the wall?” she said. “I see leaving this country as our only hope.”

      “I don’t see that as a hope, Alena. It’s a dream.”

      The squares of parquetry cracked under her heels. The dress flounced toward him.

      “Another man would do something.”

      The dress passed on. Across the hall the door to the bedroom shut. The key rattled and shot the bolt. Since he was not another man.

      Her prettiest dress. His favorite. Bleached for the occasion.

      When Aleks was finished with his breakfast they asked but Alena frowned and shook her head and Miroslav said he didn’t feel quite up to it today even though the sky through the window looked fair. The old man discomposed the boy’s bangs and told him to enjoy his holiday and Aleks smoothed them right again, wincing. They heard the Steinhardt boys stomp down the stairs, waited for quiet, and then went out and followed the street and the path that left the street and went in under the pines. The ground dropped steeply and they held to roots and striplings to slide down the clay and then the slope gave way to flat ground again on the valley floor, the sound of water not far off. Ravens overhead croaked through the cool of the morning.

      “Look, Daddy. Just like a tomahawk.”

      Aleks flung a stick wapping through the air and smiled and Trn smiled down.

      They parted hands round a solitary oak and joined on the other side. A bleak sun gleamed off needles, broke among the branches to dapple the leafmeal, the soft straw. A dove cooed and they stopped to listen till its thin throat went quiet. Others moaned unseen in distant trees. A black beetle stumbled over a dead branch and they knelt to watch the legs strive with the air. As Trn reached it righted and disappeared without a sound they could hear beneath a crumbling log. They came to the freshet trundling over rocks in the steep groin between two pine hills and Aleks leaped out to a rounded stone.

      “The snows are melting in the highlands,” Trn said. The boy vaulted to the far bank, dropped to his knees and fashioned a sloop from an oak leaf, a smaller leaf for sail. He set it into the current and watched it ride, spoke across the water.

      “Once more?”

      Aleks made a horn of his hands. “Will my boat?”

      Trn crossed with two long strides, crouched beside the boy.

      “Will it sail to the lake and go over the dam?”

      “We’re south of the dam, downstream. So I’m afraid your little boat is destined to float past wide fields and under the bridges of beautiful cities and into the Danube and then the Black Sea.”

      “Is the sea really black?”

      “I think it is.”

      “Will I see the sea one day?”

      “I’m sure you’ll cross many seas.”

      “Someday we’re going to build a boat and sail it on the lake, aren’t we? Only a little boat. Will it be as long as this?” He stretched his arms. “I want it to be blue. With red sails and white lines. Can it be blue?”

      “Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” Trn said.

      They spoke of squirrels that barked lies about the humans crossing their forest down below and the different shapes of leaves they trod and the four black birds that scurried into the air after Aleks charged their bush. The birds had been eating red berries and Trn plucked a few that rolled together in his palm. They marveled how birds had stomachs that could swallow them but boys must never because they were poison. They looked for hedgehogs balled in the underbrush but none showed themselves and Aleks talked of the two new boys from somewhere in Slovakia whom he was helping with the routines of school. Next week was his mark on the calendar to feed the mouse in his cage and he wouldn’t forget but Franto would sing every morning, “Aleks, mouse, Aleks, mouse.” He picked a stick and whipped it to break against a trunk.

      “How do you know Franto will do this?”

      “He does it every time.”

      “If he does it to everyone try not to worry over it.”

      Aleks flung the remnant of stick. Trn looked at the sky.

      “We should start home.”

      “I don’t like the climb back.”

      “I know. It’s not easy but it’s good for us. To work to get back home.”

      The last stretches on the street in the unshaded noon were thirsty. He held the hose in the garden for Aleks while the boy slurped and then he drank. They trooped upstairs. Seeing Alena and Miroslav in the sitting room Trn said, “What’s wrong?”

      Miroslav pointed to the radio.

      “Norway, and Denmark.”

      The newspapers next morning told stories of the Danes’ feeble resistance. Black arrows on a gray map speared the Norse coast above the Arctic Circle.

      “They couldn’t possibly mean Narvik, could they?” Trn got down the atlas and Miroslav looked over the page with him. “Surely they mean Larvik.”

      “They mean both,” Miroslav said.

      A mild May day a month later and the same papers said the Wehrmacht had broken the frontier of the low countries. The fanfare from the radio one afternoon heralded an announcement of victory