Pavel Kohout - The Widow Killer

The certainties he had grown up with now left him. Doubt filled the void.

Maybe there is no God. What a frightening thought.

Or what’s worse: maybe God exists, and would let Jitka and their child die, leaving him alive.

I don’t want a God like that!

Inwardly he flinched. Would this bring His wrath down on them? Then his resolve hardened: it was the only way to save her.

If He were as just and loving as the Scriptures said, He would be appalled by what was happening and save her.

Three faithfully devoted sheep, or none at all. He would have to decide for Himself.

At the height of his agitation, Morava fell asleep on his uncomfortable chair.

SHE WAS STILL WITH HIM!

Only SHE could have led that guy to his compartment, of all the ones in the almost empty train.

The little fellow was looking for a match to light his cigarette, but failing to score one, he stayed on for a chat.

When he spoke, it was one long salvo of insults against the Reich and its Führer.

At first he thought this half-pint had to be a provocateur, but soon he came around. This was no stool pigeon, just a person who, after six years, had had enough.

IT’S STARTING TO BREAK!

At first he listened, then grunted his assent, and after a while they were talking heart-to-heart; he felt himself being drawn in, and waited for HER sign. Finally it came. Light filled the cabin, like a ray from heaven.

He saw his old sergeant, Kralik, giving him the thumbs-up as he had done on the Brno shooting range.

I’M A SOLDIER, AFTER ALL!

He remembered the incident on the bombarded train.

AND I HAVE NERVES OF STEEL!

AND IMAGINATION!

Immediately, he confided to the guy in strictest confidence who he really was. The story was so convincing that he believed it himself. With his military background, it was easy to create the impression that he was still active in the now-illegal Czechslovak Army.

By the end of the trip, the runt was bursting with pride. After all, he was sitting in the same compartment as a real parachutist, just back from England!

At Smíchov station, he pulled the contents of his bag out of the concrete pipe in the guy’s presence, dispelling any remaining doubts. Of course, he was taking a risk, even there on the deserted railway platform, but now he was sure he was back on track.

HER HAND PROTECTS ME!

His old army pistol clinched the deal. The guy — naive beyond his years! — enthusiastically promised to hide him in his own home.

THANKS, MOTHER!

Jitka Modrá died at exactly five A.M., and with her died what would have been her child.

The firm grasp of a man’s hand accompanied her on her journey into oblivion.

Jan Morava slept soundly through it, waking only later to Erwin Buback’s sympathetic hug.

The sun had just peered over the crown of the nearby hill, silhouetting the stadiums against the morning sky, when the car pulled up outside the house.

Buback could hear the music even over the noise of the motor. A raucous melody split the air, one that supposedly had the whole American army grooving wildly on the dance floors. It was the Glenn Miller Orchestra playing boogie-woogie; Grete seemed to think this Miller fellow was some sort of god.

The young driver in the cap with skull and crossbones listened carefully. When his eyes met Buback’s, he smiled almost conspiratorially.

Throwing custom and protocol to the winds, Buback slipped the driver a fifty-mark note. The SS agent took it as calmly as a waiter would a tip.

Now I know the war is ending! The thought pleased Buback, but he immediately remembered the living man and the dead woman he had just left. Evil, however, goes on….

The staff car vanished around the curve below. Upstairs, the noise went on unchecked, a testimony to the gradual depopulation of Little Berlin. However, as he rummaged for his keys on the sidewalk, the house’s front door opened, revealing the judge. Dressed already, at this early hour? No. The man’s unshaven cheeks suggested that he had not yet gone to bed.

“There’s no need to go around the back, Herr Oberkriminalrat, come this way….”

From up close he confirmed that the radiogram Grete had recently moved to his place was even louder here than outside. Evidently it was now set to its highest volume. He realized it had undoubtedly kept the judge up, but he did not feel the slightest desire to apologize.

“Thank you, but I’m used to it by now.”

“What are you going to do,” the judge wailed after him in despair.

Buback tried to imagine how many anguished howls this pitiful, sleepy figure had caused, screams torn from the throats of countless men and women before the bullet or blade reached its mark. He responded with barely disguised glee. “Apparently, we’re going to dance.”

On a volcano, he thought, climbing the winding back stairs that shook with the syncopations of degenerate music. As he pressed down the door handle, it flooded over him as if he had opened the sluice gates.

Grete half lay, half sat on the bed in black ski pants and a black T-shirt; its long sleeves gripped and further flattened her chest. One hand clutched a cigarette holder, the other curled around a glass; all around her were stains and cigarette butts from an overflowing ashtray. Her eyes were unfocused; she was so engulfed in the melody, humming along wordlessly with it, that it took several seconds for her to realize he was home. First she smiled dreamily at him, then flung away the holder, cigarette, and glass, and, jumping up, threw her arms around his neck.

“The bastard croaked,” she exulted, “bit the dust!”

And so he learned of the death of Adolf Hitler, who supposedly fell in the defense of Berlin.

Once she cooled down a bit, he extinguished the smoking carpet and prevailed on her to turn down the gramophone — not because of the judge (who had no power anymore), but so that they could hear each other speak. She listened to his story so intently that all the alcohol seemed to evaporate from her completely; her gray-green irises stared at him without blinking, like the eyes of a beast of prey. When he reached the part where they found the dead policeman and the wounded Jitka, she interrupted him with a shout.

“No! That son of a bitch saved me?”

She was clearly still tipsy; forgetting about his story, she launched directly into her own. There hadn’t been any performance, she said, pointing to her morning message still lying there with his afternoon postscript. That son of a bitch, she repeated, that pig Meckerle had her brought over like a cheap whore to a hotel outside Prague, one she knew the officers used as a high-class flophouse, but she didn’t realize what was happening even when the unfamiliar driver took her to the suite and told her to wait there for her colleagues and wardrobe, until she entered the bedroom (“stupid cow,” she fumed), where the colonel was waiting for her (“naked, the swine!“) in a state of drunken anticipation; he locked the door and threatened to rip off her clothes if she wouldn’t undress herself, and that really made her blood boil: She grabbed him, threw him down on the bed, and then went from his head to his chest past his belly down to his lap, and then…

“I bit him as hard as I could!” she grinned. “Right in his stiff dick!”

She said he’d let out a dreadful scream; he must have thought she’d bitten it off, she continued, shaking with laughter, but he wasn’t even bleeding, and when she thought he’d regained enough strength to beat her to death…

“Then I started to shriek; I never knew I could make such a loud noise, and he was so terrified that he just fled, naked, in a panic.”

Buback remembered Meckerle’s painful grimaces that afternoon and marveled that he had escaped his superior’s office alive.