Jim Shepard - Lights Out in the Reptile House

“We’re not the first family to be brought here,” Leda said.

“We’re the first family I know,” Mrs. Schiele said. “We didn’t know the other families in those cases.”

Leda turned away.

Karel put his hand on her wrist. Mrs. Schiele sat by herself on the folding chair away from them all and touched her eyes and hair and clothes in small repetitious cycles. He had a momentary sense of how put-upon and abandoned she felt. She’d always been frightened of most things, and now her fear was more comprehensive.

“Nicholas, I need to talk to David a minute,” Leda said quietly. “Can I do that?” She nodded to encourage him. Nicholas stood and walked to the other side of the room. Once there he put his hand on the wall and seemed to be studying its texture.

“David, they’re going to talk to us soon, one by one,” Leda said, her voice low. “And they’re going to want to know about my books. The books I kept in the special place. Now, Nicholas doesn’t know about them and Mom already knows what to say. What are you going to say if they ask?” She was holding him by both arms.

“The books?” David said. He was clinging to his toy boat.

“You know, the books, the secret books,” Leda said. She was keeping her voice calm, but Karel could hear the desperation in it. “Now everything depends on you. Remember what I whispered to you in the truck? What are you going to say?”

“In the truck?” David said.

“David!” she said, and shook him hard, once. He began to cry.

“David, don’t cry, don’t cry,” she said, near despair. Across the room Karel could see Nicholas looking over, unsure what was going on and sad that he had so little he could contribute.

“What will you say, honey?” Leda persisted.

“The man brought them in when you were out,” David half-wailed. She hugged him tightly.

“That’s it, that’s it, honey,” she said. “Did I know him?”

“No,” he wailed.

“Did any of us know him?” she said. She was looking up at Karel.

“No,” David said. He pulled away and rubbed his eyes.

She let him go. He sat down and focused on his boat with fierce concentration. She put her hands over her face and remained where she was, kneeling.

Karel crouched beside her. “They’re going to interrogate you?” he asked. She didn’t respond. She brought her hands down from her face. “Are you scared?” he said.

“Yes I am,” she said, without shame. “Very.”

Kehr opened the door and signaled. Karel leaned forward impulsively and kissed Leda on the cheek. “I’ll get him to help,” he whispered. “It’ll be okay.”

She made her mouth into a tight line and nodded. Mrs. Schiele stood up and gave him a hug. Kehr waited at the door with an easygoing patience.

Outside in the hall he raised a hand when Karel was about to speak. He shut the door and led Karel in silence to a small room a few doors down. The corporal was gone. The room was dark, and Kehr sat him in front of a pane of glass and then left, shutting the door behind him.

The pane glowed with light and Karel realized he was gazing in on another room. There was a bare black table centered in it with a hard-backed chair on either side. It was absolutely quiet.

Kehr interrogated them alone. They came into the room one by one. Karel could hear nothing.

Mrs. Schiele was first. Karel sat in the dark and watched her and heard nothing. She gestured and swung her arms around, leaned back as if to physically avoid certain questions, leaned forward to seem confidential. He imagined her chatter: defenses of Leda mixed in with scraps of old fights and resentments, protests against the injustice of all this, assurances that someone somewhere had made a comic mistake. Toward the end she gave Kehr a sly look and Karel figured she was attempting some sort of maneuver. Kehr looked bored.

Nicholas was next. He was there only a few minutes. He gripped the edge of the table and sat upright, making a visible effort to be alert. When Kehr stood up and dismissed him, Karel could see in his face his sense that he’d failed again to provide something that somebody wanted or would approve of.

Leda followed. He sat right up on top of the glass and he still couldn’t hear anything. She faced Kehr with the same calmness Karel knew and loved from the afternoons in her garden, that expression that was at once open and placid and intelligent. She was questioned a longer time than the first two, but when she got up he knew she was still safe.

He shook with excitement and fear waiting for David. There was some delay. He put his fingertips to the glass and they trembled across it like something dropped into hot oil. When David finally came in, Kehr acted differently, sitting on the floor in the corner as if too shy to confront him. David had his boat and sailed it back and forth across the table.

Karel waited in something that was getting to be like agony. Kehr was still in the corner, and now David was talking to him. He stayed in the corner but finally put his elbows on his knees and his chin on his fists and said something, and the boy instantly looked warier. They talked some more. Kehr stood, still shy, and approached the table. He had his hands in his pockets. He took them out. He swung both down on the table so hard the concussion made David jump and the boat flew into the air. He shouted something, and the boy started crying. Karel was up on his feet, helpless. Kehr shouted again, banged the table again. He shouted. David started to wail, though Karel could still hear nothing. Kehr lifted his end of the table and crashed it down, intent on David. He shouted. David put his hands over his ears and began shouting back.

Karel lunged for the mirror. “Don’t tell him! Don’t tell him!” he called, pounding on the glass with open palms, but he knew he already had.

“Here’s the situation,” Kehr said to him later, the two of them alone in the room. Karel was moving back and forth in agitation as if tied to a perpetually restless little animal. “She kidnapped her brother from a state institution. She’s in possession of subversive literature concerned with the overthrow of the state. There’s evidence she’s part of a group helping to produce such literature.”

“What?” Karel said.

Kehr held his hands up, as if to say he wasn’t enjoying this either. “We found ink, we found blank paper, we found boxes for the paper. And the younger brother told us strange men drop packages at the house.”

Karel’s mouth dropped open. “None of that’s true,” he said.

“She’s confused,” Kehr said, as if that were the end of the subject. “The state isn’t in the business of trying to fill its prisons. I’m not in that business. You help me, I’ll help her.”

“What? What do you want me to do?” Karel asked.

Someone in this town was running the partisan cell for the area, Kehr said. He thought Karel knew who it was.

“Is that what you’re doing here?” Karel said.

Kehr didn’t answer. Then he said, “All I want from you is a confirmation of what I already believe.”

“I told you I don’t know any partisans,” Karel said. “I don’t know any.”

Kehr shrugged, as if he had all the time in the world.

“What’ll happen to her?” Karel asked.

“There are people in our prison system who are absolutely reprehensible,” Kehr said. “I could tell you stories.”

Karel was breathing through his mouth. Sweat appeared on his back and forehead like magic.

The sort of people who believed any scruple could be overcome by a good beating, Kehr said.

“Oh, God,” Karel said. “Oh God.”

“We use the law as far as it serves us,” Kehr said. “Then we move to other methods.”