Then I was alone in the corridor outside our dormitory.
And through the door I could hear the soothing voices of Sister Eulalia and Sister Emiliana.
The smallest longshirts had been terrified by the fighting. I could hear them crying here and there, but I could also make out Monkeyface’s contented gru, gru! One of the nuns was probably trying to soothe him and lull him to sleep, so I didn’t have to worry. I didn’t feel like going in and joining the little ones. As the nuns left the dormitory, I hid around the corner, and I was pleased to discover that the bread I had concealed under my clothes had survived intact. The whole home fell silent as the boys slipped into sleep, while the nuns were probably lingering over their prayers.
I ran downstairs and stood by the big front door. It was locked. I tried the handle on the kitchen door, but that was locked too. Then I stood on the steps to the cellar, where it was almost dark. I could hear a voice coming from down below, so I set off down the stairs and along past the bend in the corridor… I knew it was Dýha shouting and singing, and that he was down there alone with the rats, and I thought I’d take a good look at him. He was behind bars, so if anything happened he couldn’t get at me.
I followed the bends of the cellar passageway. It was almost dark. Here and there water dripped down, and because I was frightened of the rats I ran through the vile water making it splatter. I approached the punishment cell, past cubicles stuffed full of old papers. I knew that above our two dormitory floors there were more floors, but the nuns never went up there. The floors above us were kept locked and barred, and were said to be full of papers as well. Through the bars of the cellar cubicles I could see bundles of paper tied up with string, like little cities for mice… and then I was standing in front of Dýha and staring at him.
In the punishment cell he had a bucket and a blanket. A single bulb gave him light. He was leaning against the bars. I didn’t know whether to say something, because longshirts never spoke to shortpants unless they were spoken to. I wasn’t a longshirt, but I didn’t really belong with the shortpants either… I waited for him to notice me.
‘Wow, a rat!’ said Dýha. ‘I thought you was a big rat coming for me. And it’s you, you rat.’
‘Rats aren’t this big.’
‘They are though. Down here there’s rats this big!’
‘No way!’
‘You’re a bit small for a boy, but big enough to be a rat.’
‘What do you do down here?’
‘Nothing. Got a fag?’
‘No.’
‘There’s a Communist uprising going on outside. So nip out and find Karel and get me some fags.’
‘What?’
‘Listen, why don’t you sleep with us lot upstairs?’
‘I’m staying with my brother.’
‘Look here, Ilya. You’re small, but old. You should be up top. How long’ve you been in the Home?’
‘Since for ever.’
‘Listen, if you get me some fags, we might take you with us. Might.’
‘Where?’
‘Foreign Legion. We’re going: me, Karel and Páta. Chata as well. We’ve got knives and torches. You can come with us. We’re the Bandits.’
‘Can Monkeyface come too?’
‘No way! Monkeyface is useless!’
‘Then I’m not going, either.’
At that point Dýha shot his arm through the bars and hit me on the chin. The blow sent my head backwards, then he stuck his hand up my shirt and stole my sandwich.
‘You just want to stay behind and stare at Dolores’s tits, eh?’
‘Idiot,’ I muttered, gazing at my sandwich.
‘I’ve had nothing to eat yet,’ said Dýha, stuffing the bread into his mouth. ‘Stop gawping and quit snivelling, will you, you big crybaby? You hungry?’
‘No.’
‘I haven’t eaten!’ said Dýha.
‘Stupid idiot!’
‘Ilya, you really are crying! Here!’
He handed a bit of the bread back to me through the bars. I popped it in my pocket.
‘My old man’s an airman,’ said Dýha. ‘He’ll get me and some of the other lads into the forces. He sends me reports about the Communist uprising. How about that, then?’
‘My old man’s an airman too,’ I said.
‘Bollocks! They chucked you away! You and that little shit. No airman would do that.’
‘Bollocks! He would!’
‘You gonna fetch them fags?’
I was going to go, but we both froze and tried to grasp what we were hearing… It was the midday silence, and anyone who broke it was severely punished, but we both heard it. The front door had creaked noisily, we could hear voices and the tramping of feet, people shouting… It was as if a lot of new boys had come into the Home. Yet we could hear their voices and they were the voices of grown-ups. And now grown-up feet were pounding the stairs to the upper floors.
Dýha tried to poke his head through the bars, probably to hear better, but he couldn’t. He was twisting, comically.
‘They’re supposed to walk quietly,’ I said. ‘I’m off to get them fags.’
I turned and went back through the cellar. I tried to go fast, to get through the gloom as quickly as possible and be out in the corridor.
‘Wait, rat! Don’t go!’ shouted Dýha, but I wanted to see those people.
2: Previously
The manor house was at the bottom of the hill. From the house you went uphill to the village. At the edge of the village was the cemetery, and in it the family vault of the manor’s previous occupants. When it was the manor house we lived in the kitchen. We never went to the upper floors. Mr Cimbura said that when the Czech nobility, like everything else Czech, came to an end, the Nazis put a soldier in the house. Mr Cimbura said that Hitler personally chose the best man for the job. ‘Had a rifle to guard the locked upper floors with, he did. He never drank, not a dram,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘He was human enough, though. Even lived in the village. When Holasa and Kropáček were sent to work in the Reich, and Moravčík and Kropka were in a concentration camp for poaching, he used to lend a hand in the darkened houses with no men in them.’ Mr Cimbura winked at me and drank straight from his flask, while Sister Alberta tried to stop him. ‘Of course, when the blokes came back, they sorted him out in no time. Yeah, there were any number of them, them Jerry soldier boys, knocking about in Chapman Forest in those days, I can tell you,’ said Mr Cimbura, and he went on to tell me all about it.
‘Then our bloodstained bourgeois government put a different soldier in, don’t you know? A Czechoslovak lad. The very sort as had been shooting at the hungry masses during the uprising. Hanging’s too good for the likes of them,’ said Mr Cimbura, who went on to regret that I was too little for him to send me out for another bottle in such foul weather with snow on the ground. Mr Cimbura said nothing about Monkeyface. ‘Yeah, guarded the upper floors, he did, that bloke with his tin hat and his little gun. Then he disappeared as well — to Hell I expect. But it was all still locked upstairs.’
He was right. The third floor was locked. Padlocks hung on the door, black and huge.
‘But the rule of the people’s yet to come,’ said Mr Cimbura. ‘It’ll be some while before the new order reaches us all the way from Prague. But it will, you can bet on it, sonny.’
Mr Cimbura called me ‘sonny’, even though I wasn’t his son. My mum and dad were in Shadowland. They had no faces. I taught myself to go back and visit them. It worked if I moved. I would rock backwards and forwards and Shadowland would start to come down over me. I used to do it when I was little. I used to do it before I met Hanka.