Winter of the Returned

Eliška pulled the covers over her head to create a warm den in which she wished to spend the rest of her life.

Dull morning light filtered through the apartment window. At least the drizzle hadn’t gathered itself into a hard rain. She wouldn’t get too wet on her way to the tram without her umbrella, which she lost last week somewhere along Pařižská Street, stopping at windows to admire clothes she couldn’t buy.

Get up, she told herself. You’ll be late for class. And if you tarry too long Václav will pry the lock and enter your flat, stinking of cigarettes and hoping to crawl into bed, oblivious of the morning because he hadn’t gone to sleep.

She listened to heavy footsteps becoming louder in the hallway. “Go away, Václav,” she called out. “I’m getting ready to go to school.”

After she heard the diminishing sound of shuffling boots, she threw back the covers. Although he was unaware of it, Václav had a way of affecting the trajectory of her day, a constant presence to be carefully kept at bay. They knew each other from the ghetto, and when Eliška returned to Prague she thought it wonderful that they ended up in the same building with others who also had nowhere to go. Now, she wasn’t so sure, as Václav made himself welcome even when he wasn’t and his friendly companionship occasionally tipped to something darker and more desperate.    

With the rain easing, she wrapped a scarf around her head and decided to walk to school. It was a personal game to look at passing faces—pale from winter—and guess their past. Everyone had a past. What they did or did not do in the last few years. People on the street seemed so furtive, worried that someone would recognize them, perhaps call them out then and there. Eliška looked hard at the faces. Few allowed themselves a smile but when they did, she smiled back. Sadly, none of those who acknowledged her were young men.

She rounded a corner to enter the south gates of Charles University. Perhaps it was too much to ask these beaten and frightened people to accept themselves. All her friends wanted to go back to before the war and pretend it hadn’t happened, like lifting a phonograph needle and starting again at the beginning of a beautiful song that had turned discordant and horrible.

Taking her usual seat at the front of the class, Eliška hoped proximity to the professor would keep her focused on the equations at hand. She opened the algebra textbook and looked at the pages of incomprehensible squiggles and symbols that looked like they belonged in an Egyptian tomb. She often caught herself questioning why she needed to learn all this. It was so hard and humiliating. In their first action, the occupiers forbade her from attending school. Now, at age nineteen, if she simply resumed her studies, she would be sitting in a classroom of children.

Those who came back could not simply pick up their lives. Too much time had passed. The special school she attended had two tracks: pass, and be eligible for university in the fall, or fail, and that would be the end of her education.

Bent over her desk, gripping her pencil, she copied the professor’s every word. If caught in desperate confusion, she could later ask Václav for help, if he was sober.

He was in her apartment when she returned in the afternoon.

“Did you hear? Aleš left to go to Palestine,” he said, standing at her stove and stirring onion soup.

She unbuttoned her heavy coat.

“I thought that was all talk. I didn’t think he was serious,” she said.

“Gone. I went to visit him today and the lady in his building said he had given notice and left,” said Václav, the bulk of him taking up most of the corner of her apartment.

“I wonder what he will find in Palestine,” she said softly, lowering herself into a chair at her small table.

“A lot of sand and rocks. But if the Jews ever get a nation, I’d consider going myself. No one really wants us here. It’s like they are surprised any of us came back and we remind them of their guilt.”

“Palestine,” she said slowly. “It sounds so lovely and warm.”

“I wonder if Aleš will go and fight the British. Like he could handle a gun. He can’t even manage to rid his apartment of flies.”

He put a bowl of soup in front of her.

“You’re jealous,” she said to him teasingly.

“Maybe I am. We’ll see. Maybe he will write to us and beg us to fetch him at the train station when he returns home with Zionist holes in the soles of his shoes.”

Václav reached into the pocket of his jacket.

“Speaking of letters, your friend Tana stopped by. Such a short, stupid girl. She wants to go to the Barrandov with you tomorrow to see if you two could be extras on a film set.”

He passed along the note he had written.

Everything about Václav was oversized, the wrong proportions. His forehead was too large, his nose too broad, his uneven lips too full. His chin hung off the slab of his face like a deformity.

Eliška took the note from Václav’s thick and clumsy fingers.

“I wonder if we could meet someone glamorous,” she said after reading it.

She removed the clips from her black hair and shook her head. Looking up, she noticed Václav staring at her, and she blushed and turned away.

The next day, at the studio gates, she and Tana linked arms and approached a guard. “We want to be extras. Where do we go?” Tana asked and then giggled.

The man pointed them to a desk at the entrance, to what looked like an enormous empty warehouse.

A day of filming could earn a person a few koruny, hardly worth the effort but a way to pass the time. They presented themselves, and someone involved in the production looked them up and down and told them to go inside and talk to another man in a blue fedora.

The man in the blue fedora told them they were filming a circus scene, and the two girls could be part of the crowd.

Taking their seats in the bleachers, Eliška and Tana held each other’s hands and watched as trapezes swung and a man in a lion tamer’s outfit practiced cracking a whip.

There was no discernable plot during the endless takes and retakes, and after a few hours, the man in the blue fedora announced the day’s filming was over and they rose from their seats and left the studio.

On the tram, Tana took off her scarf.

“Tell me more about the American,” said Eliška.

Tana laughed. “There’s not much more to tell. Marie came round and begged me to go to a nightclub. No one was there, not on a Wednesday. The band was good, as I said, and there was a group of soldiers.”

“What about his looks?” asked Eliška.

“Tell you the truth, I don’t remember much other than he didn’t speak Czech and he smiled a lot. That made him good-looking.”

“What happened then?”

“Marie and I left. We didn’t have any money.”

They rode in silence. Tana squeezed Eliška’s arm. “Spring is coming. Things are always better in spring,” she said.

Eliška nodded, tears in the corners of her eyes, jealous beyond belief of Tana’s experience with the American.

It was dark by the time Eliška pushed open the heavy doors of her apartment and climbed the four flights of creaky stairs to her flat.

She heard Václav’s heavy breathing in her room before she snapped on the light.

“Did you have a nice afternoon?” he slurred, eyes in narrow slits.

“You’re drunk and ought to go to bed,” she said.

“Bed? I don’t go to bed. I never sleep. I’m like a golem, a monster come to life,” he said.

She moved past him to the corner of the room. Setting aside a heavy pan, she put a kettle on the one-ring burner and looked for matches.

“Tea so late? That won’t agree with you,” said Václav, moving toward her, unsteady on his feet.

“You need to leave. You’re drunk and it does you no good.”

“And do what when I go to my apartment, stare at the walls? Do you know what I see when I close my eyes? I relive it. Everything. I don’t want to. I want to be with you.” His breath was sour.

Eliška put a hand on his shoulder to push him away.

“Don’t be trouble, Václav. I am serious.”

“I am serious now, too,” he said, and clasped his hand around her waist. This was something he had never done before, a line crossed. Using his body to trap her against the stove, he put his face close to hers. His cracked lips lifted into a half smile revealing crooked brown teeth. He pulled her close and then let go, wobbling on an invisible tightrope between the unthinkable and the unattainable.

She wanted him to gain control of himself, to return to the same awkward, shy, lovable man she knew from the ghetto, but he was drunk and this made him dangerous. He could not be allowed to go any further. She could not allow it to happen.

He reached for the back of her neck, meaty fingers cold against her skin.

Grabbing the handle of the heavy pan, she swung it hard against the knotty expanse of Václav’s forehead, barely keeping her balance as the weapon met its mark. She used all the force she could muster, knowing he would forgive her when he sobered.

The noise was like a hammer hitting hard wood.

Václav took a step back, eyes wide and unfocused. And then he fell.

Eliška let out a laugh. Václav, forever playing the clown. She knew she had hurt him, but his reaction was surely made for comedy, a memory they could share later for a good laugh.

Václav did not move. An egg-sized welt appeared on his forehead. She shook his shoulders and slapped his face. She had seen death before. She knew what it was.

Pushing herself against the wall, she fought the impulse to scream. Screaming did no good. She’d learned that in the camps. It was important to filter out all other thoughts and focus on survival. Her life and her future were the only things that mattered. One day, the sun will shine on a land reborn. Trees will fill with blossoms and only the lucky will inhale their delicious scents.

With her knees drawn up to her chest, she waited until the faint beginning of dawn to see if Václav would miraculously recover. He did not.   

The window by the stove looked over the building’s tiny courtyard. She opened it wide and placed a chair below the sill. Grabbing Václav by the shoulders, she hauled him with a strength she didn’t know she possessed until his great head was out the window, then his arms, and then his waist. And then he tipped out, his body tumbling to the cobblestones below.

After class the next day, Eliška walked home. When she got near her apartment, she turned away and headed to the Charles Bridge. At midspan, she looked at the river below and imagined it full of souls, sweeping gently from the city and far away through farmer’s fields and under stone bridges to a place where the rushing of water and singing of starlings were the only sounds.

When she arrived at the steps of her apartment, the porter leaned on his broom and beckoned to her.

“You missed the excitement. A man jumped from the roof last night. They just took him away,” he said.

“Oh, yes? A man who lived here?” she asked, making her face a mask.

“Václav See. You knew him, didn’t you? He was one of those who returned. They are never right in the head, you know. Going through all that and then jumping off the roof.”

The porter shook his head and returned to his sweeping.

A few weeks later, Eliška received her grades for the term, and she’d done better than she’d expected.

The sun shone and the city embraced its warmth. After class, on her way to pick up a pair of stockings she’d had repaired, she was walking, lost in thought, when she heard men’s laughter. Looking up, she saw a group of American soldiers in their green uniforms, caps smartly on their heads, standing around a jeep. They were watching her and one of them whistled and they laughed again.

She smiled and turned away, blood pumping in her ears as her face turned red.

Rounding a corner, she noticed a movie poster plastered on a wall. The scene was a circus, and she stopped and examined it. Unmistakably, she found herself and Tana in the crowd on the poster. She looked around, hoping to find somebody to point this out to, even a stranger. But there was no one. She would bring Tana and Marie to the spot so they could share a laugh.

To celebrate the fineness of the day, she bought a bouquet of flowers on her way home. At the small table in her room she put the flowers in a glass and reread the letter from Aleš.

You must come to Palestine, he’d written on the light blue paper.

She knew at that moment that she would stay in Prague. She would lock her memories in a heavy trunk. She would have a good life. After all, an American had whistled at her.