The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

Tower a red flag lashed the wind. Hitler was driven through the empty city to see it.

      They sat on the couch listening, he and Miroslav. Alena paced with folded arms. Trn looked at the clock. The city’s church bells rang.

      “They’ll burn London now,” Miroslav said. “Like they did Rotterdam. Like Warsaw.”

      “Is there not one man in Paris with a rifle and a rooftop?” Alena said. “I would like to know that.” The toes of her shoes pointed at him. “And you. When they came here all you could do was tell me to fill the tub with water while you ran to the shop for bread.”

      The joints of the parquet resumed their cracking.

      “A historian, a student of history, that’s what you call yourself, and that’s all you could think to do.”

      “What would you have him do?” Miroslav said. “Even the president said don’t resist.”

      Trn looked at his watch. “I must leave to get Aleks.”

      “Hacha is an ass,” she said. “And look where it’s got us, such strategy. At least that regiment in Silesia resisted.”

      “And now they’re all dead,” Miroslav said. “Is that what you want, the whole country burning? Every city a smoking ruin? The hospitals and schools hulks of rubble and the people inside too?”

      Alena’s face crimped. “Miroslav,” Trn said, laid a hand on the old man’s shoulder. She wiped at both eyes.

      “No,” Miroslav said. “Listen. Have you not heard what this Luftwaffe does to bodies of flesh and bone? Do you need to thrust your hand into a charcoaled corpse? Had their bombers flown here you would have been the first one weeping like a Magdalene.”

      “Why do you never do anything?” Her voice trembled toward Trn. “You sit there and you sit there and you never do anything.”

      The chair she flung herself into screeched upon the floor and they each stared at a different pattern in the rug and there were no more trains west.

      When Trn opened the door to Miroslav’s room, Aleks twisted in the chair, something in his hands on the desk.

      “Are you ready for our walk?”

      “But it’s raining.”

      “It’s clearing now. What’s that?”

      The boy frowned at the wooden box clasped in his palm.

      “Only my treasures.”

      “Where did you get it?”

      “Grandfather gave it to me. He found it in his wardrobe.”

      “What do you have inside?”

      The boy raised his vast eyes and held out the box to Trn.

      “Is it all right?”

      Aleks shrugged, nodded. “It doesn’t hold much. It’s small.”

      When Trn slid back the lid a marble swirled blue beside a round cedar cone, a pigeon feather with a broken shaft. A ten heller coin. Two crude lumpish things that Trn fingered out to shake like dice in his hand.

      “Where did you find these, Aleks?”

      “On the street.”

      “Not our street?”

      “Nearby. In the gutter.”

      “When did you find them?”

      “I don’t know. Sometime.”

      “Why do you keep them?”

      “They’re interesting. I found them and they’re interesting.”

      Trn stared at the yellowed enamel, the rotted pith.

      “I’ll give you a crown for each of them.”

      “Two crowns?”

      “Yes, two crowns.”

      “Two crowns each?”

      “I didn’t realize I was dealing with a banker.”

      “I’m not a banker.”

      “Very well. Four crowns altogether.”

      Aleks raised his hand.

      “Is that to shake across our bargain or to take the money?”

      Aleks grinned. “Both.”

      Trn took the coins from his pocket, replaced them with the molars.

      “Get your shoes and coat and I’ll meet you at the gate.”

      Since their weight might rest in the neck of the toilet and even in the bin they might be rediscovered he went into the back garden and pressed a crescent grave deep into the soft earth with his heel, let the teeth drop there and stamped them back out of sight.

      The dial on the radio ran like a scale climbing all the frequencies their range once took in. Zürich, Preßburg, Rome. Athens and Warsaw. Trn watched the boy run his forefinger along the names.

      “I smell cabbage. Are you hungry?”

      Aleks wrinkled his nose away and said, “I don’t really like cabbage.”

      “I know.”

      “We always have the aftermath of cabbage.”

      “What’s that?”

      “That’s what Grandfather calls the smell.”

      “The smell of cooked cabbage?”

      “No. The smell after. After we eat it.”

      Trn laughed and the boy did too.

      “But Grandfather says he can always light his pipe to dispense with the aftermath of cabbage.”

      Back and forth, still the finger of a child, pale and tapering. Bucharest, Vilnius. Alexandria. Paris, Kiev, Stockholm.

      “Do you want to get the atlas? We can find them all there.”

      Amsterdam, Lisbon, Algiers. It always stopped at Alexandria. The boy liked this best because it looked like his name.

      “Now we listen only to Vienna.”

      “That’s right. And Prague.”

      “And some others. But only when you and Grandfather put in the Churchillka.”

      “Viktor?” Alena called.

      “Remember. We shouldn’t talk about the Churchillka.”

      “We used to listen to so many. In the evenings. Even if we didn’t understand the words. Once we listened to someone in Albania.”

      Trn smoothed a hand over the boy’s hair. “That’s right.”

      “Viktor. I need you in the kitchen.”

      “But now we listen only to Vienna. Mostly.”

      “I’m coming,” Trn called.

      “Because the penalty for listening to the foreign broadcasts is death.”

      “Where did you hear that?”

      “Viktor!”

      The boy lifted his eyes so they roamed over the far angles of the room. He shrugged.

      “It says so there around the knob,” and he pointed at the paper notice warning in Czech and German what Trn had thought the boy’s mind too young to read.

      Before he could hang his coat Alena called from the kitchen, “Did you get the sugar?”

      “Yes. They had sugar.”

      He took the box from his case and stood it on the table, sat.

      “There is a God,” said Miroslav, “and