He wanted it to be used as a war game, for training.
We were constantly improving it.
I would’ve done anything that Mr Mára asked me to.
By that point I had a cell to myself, since the prison officials were worried the other prisoners might try to kill me.
My great dream, Mr Mára said, is to use my game to prepare people everywhere, but especially children, who love new things, for the world’s triumph over fascism.
He may have been in prison, but Mr Mára was still a soldier and a communist. He couldn’t have been in his position otherwise, of course.
One day these little games, Mr Mára said, pointing to the flickering screen with wires and cables poking out every which way, will connect people all over the world, and I’ll be part of it. What do you plan to do when your sentence is done?
I think I shrugged.
This was shortly before they abolished the death penalty in Czechoslovakia.
Lucky for me that they did. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t have let me go.
One day my reduced sentence came to an end.
And I walked out.
The first thing I did was to go and look for a dive. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No family, no girlfriend.
All that was about to change.
So many of my fellow prisoners dreamed about the Pankrác dives, where their fathers, mothers, friends, girlfriends, cousins, children and wives would be waiting for them. Often what they found instead was nothing but the warm embrace of their tattooed fellow-travellers.
I found Lebo waiting for me. He didn’t have any tattoos, though, since he was just a baby when he was in the camp. The authorities didn’t even know he existed.
Lebo stood in front of the pub. He said he knew they were letting me out, but he didn’t like the idea of waiting in front of the prison.
He looked exactly the same as I remembered him. An old man in a black suit. Lebo the giant, with his bare skull perched atop his veiny neck.
We didn’t even go in the pub. There wasn’t a moment to spare. We were going home.
Mr Hamáček, the greengrocer, drove us in his sputtering Škoda. He, like me, had grown old. He had some milk for me from the aunts, plus some bread with bacon fat, and hardboiled eggs from the Terezín hens.
We all called Lebo uncle, all of us little kids and older children born in the garrison town of Terezín.
Our fathers and mothers were soldiers, they didn’t have time for us, they kept the fortress town running and that was good enough.
My mother wasn’t a soldier, but even so it had been better for me to be with Lebo.
And now I was back with him again.
3
Lebo encouraged us as we crept through the maze of forbidden tunnels underneath Terezín, and he never gave us away when we trampled on some ancient sign saying 
or ZÁKAZ VSTUPU! or ACHTUNG, MINEN! We kept finding more and more hiding places in the sewers sprinkled with sand, forgotten stores of planks and gas masks, passageways and crawl spaces, and it didn’t put us off one bit when we found an execution chamber filled with spent bullet shells buried in the sand. We brought them to Lebo and he stuck them in his satchel.
Lebo could make a bullet shell whistle louder than any of us. We would hold races in the catacombs, where he would clock our time with a stopwatch while we ran back and forth through the water that gushed from underground, and he always had some story to tell to comfort the littlest kids, who still got lost and frightened in the dark and felt cold every now and then.
Being friends with Lebo was the best.
And the thing that made him happiest was when we brought back tracings of the words we found on the walls of the tunnels and bunkers, deep underground — initials, dates, and messages carved with spikes, keys, and fingernails. He stuck them all in his big black satchel, because he was a collector: his passion was to know and remember everything connected with the days when the fortress town was a prison and a torture chamber and an execution ground.
He wanted to find it all and preserve it.
We were just kids, so we didn’t take it that seriously.
Creeping through the catacombs, wading through puddles with blind cave newts, we explored the bunkers and firing cabins under the outermost bastions. And as boys and girls, future male and female soldiers, enchanted by the perpetual gloom and dripping water, we were soon exchanging shy kisses and fleeting touches. Amid the flicker of candles and the smell of dripping wax, how could we not, given that we were practically always together, not to mention our sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t be long before we’d be ordered off to school, or maybe to some faraway garrison. Our favourite place to play was in the crawl spaces between the ramparts and the other forgotten parts of town, as far away from other people as possible.
Some days we grazed the flock with stakes, some days without them. A goat on a chain would graze a circle in the grass by nightfall, and the next day we’d just move the stake. On sunny days — and there were plenty of them! — we often let the goats run free. They’d always find their way to where the grass was thickest. If a goat ran away, we could track it by its droppings. They were black, which made them easy to spot in the red grass.
But even back then Lebo knew it had been decided and that Terezín’s days as a living town were numbered. The army was leaving.
Lebo also knew the only part of town that would be preserved was the Monument, where the eggheads, in return for their cushy income, worked, as Lebo put it, hand in glove with the government, so they couldn’t have cared less that the town would be torn down.
That was why he was so obsessed with every spike, every inscription, every bullet shell, each and every human bone we brought him back from our wanderings.
He wanted to save it all.
Being a kid, I never thought to ask him why. None of us did. He wouldn’t talk to anybody who asked him why the town should be preserved. Rolf the journalist was the one who eventually came up with an answer for the world. And now, if I want to ask why we shouldn’t let this town of evil collapse and let the grass grow over all the long-ago death, all the long-ago pain and horror, why not just let it disappear, Lebo can’t answer. All I hear now is the rustle of the grass, all I hear is the echo of footsteps in the ruins, the drip of water in the catacombs. It’s over, and nobody can answer me any more, because it happened: the town of Terezín fell.
Mr Hamáček drove slowly while I just stared in amazement. In the days before I was in prison, every once in a while a swarm of Tatra 613s would come speeding down the road, which meant the government was coming to town for some war anniversary. The rest of the time it was just horse-drawn wagons, tractors from the collective farm, and every now and then a clunker or two like Mr Hamáček’s. Now the cars zoomed by, one after the other. Mr Hamáček explained that while I had been locked up, we had become part of Europe and there had been a tremendous influx of all sorts of new cars. I was amazed at the petrol stations, as lofty and clean as any spaceship I’d ever imagined, and as Mr Hamáček’s Škoda lurched to a stop at one of the pumps, I didn’t get out for fear of being crushed by all that open space, I didn’t even peek out of the window. And that was before I had any idea how Terezín had changed.
I kept an eager lookout for the sign that said WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NEVER OTHERWISE. For my whole life it had marked the goat herd’s outermost post. But now it was gone, disappeared, nothing but a long, soggy field at the edge of the ramparts.