The Visible World by Mark Slouka Read Free Book Online

tell me what Chalupa thought, he said, or what he believed. He could only tell me what he had done, which was really all that anyone could say about anyone. There were some facts: After the uprising in 1945 Chalupa hadn’t been shot as a collaborator. He’d been at such and such a place at such and such a time. X number of witnesses had confirmed that this or that had been said. It all amounted to little or nothing. The interrogation had focused on a single, well-known event—I could read the report if I wanted. Obviously his questioners had given him the benefit of the doubt, because he’d lived to play the violin in my parents’ apartment in New York.
    The basic story, the old man said, began and ended with a woman named Moravcová, who lived up in the žiǽkov district with her husband and their sixteen-year-old son, Ota. “You’d have had to see her,” he said. “A real
hausfrau
by the look of her—thick legs, meaty face, all bosom and bun. She was one of the most important figures in the Prague underground during the war—the anchor. No one did more, or took more chances. Nothing got past her. Nothing. When one of the paratroopers sent from London approached her for shelter in the fall of ’41, she supposedly brushed him off at first, even threatened to turn him in to the authorities, and so convincingly that for a few hours he thought he had approached the wrong person, simply because there was something about him that had made her suspicious. London had to confirm, and a second code had to be arranged, before she would take him in. Couldn’t risk endangering her boys, she said. And they were all her boys: the paratroopers—two of whom stayed in her apartment posing as relatives looking for work—their contacts...
    “She washed and ironed their clothes, went shopping for them. Basically, she did everything. She’d bring parcels of blankets and clothing and cigarettes to the safe houses, traveling by tram, holding them right there on her lap, right under their Aryan noses. Not once or twice, you understand, but dozens of times, knowing all the while that if any one of them demanded that she open the package, she’d never have time to get to the strychnine ampoule she carried like a locket around her neck. On certain days she would go to the Olsany graveyard to receive and send messages, lighting a candle or pruning back the ivy on her mother’s grave, maybe exchanging a few words with someone who might pause at the adjoining plot or tip his hat to her on the path. She was rational, smart, tough as an anvil. What made her special, though, was that she was apparently terrified the entire time. Rumor had it that she took to wearing a diaper, as if she were incontinent, for the inevitable accidents. That after Heydrich was assassinated, when everything was going to hell, she’d pretend to be nursing a toothache and travel with the ampoule already in her mouth—which, if true, was simply madness. The point is that she knew what she was risking, and she risked it anyway.”
    The rain had begun dribbling between the two umbrellas I had crossed over our heads, and the old man moved his wine out of the way.
    “In any case, after Heydrich was hit—it happened right up here in Líbeň, though it looks quite different now—things happened very quickly. They carried him out across Charles Bridge at night, torches and dogs everywhere, and before they got him to the other side, SS and NSKK units were sweeping through the city, searching neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block. Combing for lice, they called it. They were very good at it, very thorough. Wehrmacht battalions would seal off an area, five or six city blocks, and then they’d go apartment to apartment. It’s all television now, really. I barely believe it myself. I’ll give you an example. Right after Heydrich died, Wenceslas Square was filled with half a million Czechs swearing their loyalty to the Reich. People were hysterical; they knew what