The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

that Czech pilots in exile were bringing down their share of the Luftwaffe, more than their share. Vienna said the docks of London were a useless wreckage. “Troglodytes,” the old man said. “That’s us.”

      “Why do they always begin the broadcasts with such nonsense?” Alena said.

      “What nonsense?”

      “It’s like French poetry. ‘The pen is green.’ ‘Memory is watchful.’ ‘Delta to the Nile.’”

      “That’s not nonsense,” Miroslav said. “It’s code. Coded messages.”

      “Coded for whom?”

      “The resistance.”

      “We certainly won’t need to hear that here then,” she said.

      In the cool of an evening rain while Miroslav watched the boy, he and Alena went to the cinema like they used to do except now the newsreel with brass blaring spun up the monumental eagle of Die Deutsche Wochenschau. The spectators rose to salute and shouted “Sieg Heil!” and more than half the theatre was standing. When the Führer appeared such applause erupted that no one could hear his speech. After the torchlit parades other fires. British bombs on an oil depot in Lorient, on a Belgian hospital demarked with the red cross, the work of the war criminal Churchill. Wehrmacht soldiers in their coal scuttle helmets trained hoses on the flames. Goebbels said the whole of the Thames would not suffice to quench the fires begun by the Luftwaffe in retaliation and it looked so. Aerial footage of the Tilbury docks ablaze in the night, the Thames Haven petrol tanks. St. Paul’s and Westminster shrouded in a cerecloth of smoke. He could imagine the Tube tunnels, the oily grit of their angles where Londoners crouched in their long coats, the tang of piss. Crying babies and the little children staring round for what they should do next, big eyes cringing at each detonation. When Trn looked up again they were all somewhere in arid Africa, an Italian tank geysering sand behind its treads.

      The projector clattered and trumpeted the studio theme and the house dimmed. No cartoons to laugh at. The cone of light shot blue through the cigarette smoke and began to speak its German. She was quite beautiful, the heroine, lips as glossy as her haloed eyes in the unfocused close up, great lashes slumbering closed before the one permitted kiss. A single kiss, all that could be bestowed in wartime. Once UFA had made wonderful films. As a boy, he would leave the cinema after the matinee blinking into daylight again, half in love with all the perfect faces. More than half.

      The night was cold when they came out. Arms folded, Alena said while he looked out into the black rain, “Aren’t you going to put up the umbrella?”

      She hung a hand at his elbow and they looked down into puddles like tar. “They don’t even know to turn off the lights during the newsreel,” she said.

      “They want to see who misbehaves before the Führer. That’s why the policeman’s there.”

      He could feel his trouser cuffs go sodden round his ankles, the water squeezed from his shoes at every step. Hulks of cars with their hooded headlamps crept along the street with goats’ eyes, the slur of rainwater behind their tires.

      “Do you want to wait under an awning for it to let up? Or we could have a coffee. Or a drink.”

      “I want to get the next tram,” she said. “I’m soaked through already.”

      “It wasn’t very good, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

      Her shoulder shrugged at his. “You’re the one who wanted to go to the cinema.”

      “What’s the matter?” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Are you thinking about that letter again?”

      “Why do I have to go to another school? I was just getting used to this one.”

      “Going to school will be an adventure now. We’ll take the tram every morning.”

      “The Steinhardts still get to walk to school. Why is it only for German boys now?”

      They approached a poster pillar, pasted there at eye-level a large red placard bordered in black and presided over by an eagle clawing a wreath. Below the talons the black columns of those most recently sentenced by the special court for unfriendly behavior toward the Reich. The parallel text in Czech, the same names to be hanged and the towns where they had lived, the days upon which they had been born.

      Aleks glumly stuffed his fists in his pockets.

      They passed Mrs. Zigismundova in the window of her vegetable stand and said good day as she smiled and nodded. Trn snapped his fingers and went back and asked for two onions and put them in his coat pocket with the newspaper. He took Aleks’s shoulder and they made way for a lady with a baby carriage as Trn doffed his hat.

      Aleks kicked a stone tumbling over the paving.

      “I still don’t understand why I have to go to a new school.”

      “Let’s see what’s in the paper, shall we?”

      Trn took it from his pocket and unscrolled it before them as they walked more slowly.

      “Why is he in the newspaper?” Aleks said.

      “This man? Because the Germans and Japan have signed a treaty. An agreement between two nations about certain things.”

      “What do they agree on?”

      “Practically everything.”

      “He’s the führer of Japan.”

      “Yes. The emperor.”

      “The Japanese believe he is a god.”

      “That’s right. Where did you learn that?”

      “From you.”

      “Oh.”

      Their steps had come to a halt. Together they stared at the emperor in plumed shako, long black coat with its tails parted neatly and trailing over the haunches of the white horse on which he sat.

      “Do you know his name?”

      Aleks shook his head. “I don’t remember. It’s too hard.”

      “Hirohito.”

      “That’s funny to say.”

      Trn began to read.

      “Daddy?”

      “Yes?”

      “Do the Japanese never wonder why God needs glasses?”

      At the square table in the front room he read over his history until his eyes winced at the page. Beyond the panes spires of spruce wavered over the roofs of houses scaled with tiles like red fish. Morning smoke from a scatter of brick chimneys ran before the wind. At the very crown of the hill sat the solid and foursquare gymnazium, the steep roof shingled with pigeons. What the stone of those walls hoarded now, the echoes they confined. All the dormer windows were barred and painted black. Some pigeons gathered themselves and heaved into the air, wheeled about and settled among the same slates. A few more stirred and then the whole flock suddenly vaulted and swept away into the dark of the trees before the echoing report penetrated the glass, followed instantly by two others. A space of time and then three more deliberate shots. The chimney smoke trailed toward him. Three more to make sure. He closed his book.

      In that courtyard he’d kicked at footballs. The classrooms made over into cells now where they counted the prisoners’ bones with their fists. Three roped bodies slumped from three posts driven into the ground where Pavel and Tomas had shouted at him, the ball bounding off the wall and the monitors admonishing them about the refectory windows. Rough triangles of cloth knotted at the back to blind the final seconds. What the red eyes of those pigeons witnessed. Blood and gore pulsing over the knots.

      The lessons they handed out there now. The instruction the Gestapo trafficked in. Selling tickets to those with German names who wanted to watch the hanged man swing by his crooked neck from the arm of the gallows.

      In