The Widow Killer by Pavel Kohout Read Free Book Online Page B

the ice slabs as far as it would go. His fingers grasped and dislodged a small package.
    He put the light on the ground to have both hands free, and unwrapped the wax paper very nervously, because the item inside was unnaturally hard. But it was the one! It was frozen, that’s all; how could he have doubted? He congratulated himself for having anticipated this crisis. It was here, his deed, imprisoning the wretched soul which could not fly away.
    He arrived home at peace. His mind, free now of distractions, was calm: those fucking policemen had kept his triumph secret! It seemed even more unfair to him when he remembered the way they had harped on his first failure. Will and ambition made him bold again. Finally he had something to tell her.
    So be it: I will strike again, and sooner than I planned to! And then again and again! We’ll see whose nerves are stronger. Three will be enough to start it going; censorship is powerless in this country against rumors.
    Still, he lacked the strength he had last felt in the house on the embankment. It had melted away as he wearily half sat, half lay on the park bench. Lunch at Angel’s had seemed to set him right, but later on the train he had fallen into a torpor he could not shake off.
    The next day he managed to leave work while it was still light. He chose a longer route through the city park to air the unheated building’s mildewy stench out of his clothes and noticed the celebrations. A couple of pathetic booths were bravely pretending, in this sixth wartime winter, to be a Lenten fair. He passed a shooting range, where a youth in a long coat hit five paper roses and the owner grudgingly gave him a prize. He stopped and stared. It was the thing he’d longed for since childhood: a Habesan. Of course, the large puppet was only a shadow of the prewar ones in their shiny colored satins, but here it shone brightly among the other trophies, the highest attainable goal.
    He found himself enviously eyeing the happy winner as a handful of the youth’s peers applauded. The boy gave the black turbaned doll to a girl, making another nearby plead for one as well. The sharpshooter looked embarrassed and balked. He dismissed his friends’ insistence and the overlooked girl’s reproaches. “I’d never be able to do it twice,” he said.
    The stand owner must have thought so too and sensed a chance to recoup part of his losses. Finally the young man could not resist the pressure and bought five more shots.
    He looked on, paralyzed, recognizing his own dilemma: he too was holding back, out of fear that his single success could not be repeated, that next time he would make a laughingstock of himself again. He knew from his stint in the army that even with a well-maintained weapon, there was almost no likelihood of a second round as good as the first. He faced his own failure as the youth carefully lined up his five lead shots, breaking open and reloading the gun. His fate is my fate, he told himself despondently.
    His head cleared when he heard the clamor. The angry stall owner was giving the second girl a Habesan as well.
    The image of the puppet lulled him to sleep that night. And when he woke up, he knew he was ready again. Time to find himself an alibi, the instruments, and some new clothes.
    Quiet wonder was the only description that fit Jan and Jitka’s state “afterward.” Throughout their lovemaking she remained silent, although her rushed breath would slowly grow calmer and her eyes, even now, would look at him with the same surprised expression as on the night of February fourteenth, when a new furrow of bombs had threatened to rip across Prague. At that moment he firmly believed that not only would he survive the death throes of the war, but he would live eternally in a suspended moment of grace named Jitka.
    Even in that first darkness, which stripped them of their inborn shame with unexpected ease, he felt that this was a moment of truth for both of them. Both came from