He moved back on his pillow and waited. Somewhere in the distance the rain was hitting the metal roof of a shed like far-off pebbles in a pan.
She sighed. She stroked his arm and then sighed again, with more resolve. “We keep saying we don’t know what to do,” she said. “And everything we hear is a little worse than the last thing we heard. Only a little worse. That’s how it works; you wait for the next thing, and then the next thing, and then you’ll do something.”
Karel took a deep breath and blinked with shame.
“My mother sees how bad it is and still she says I’m an alarmist. I am an alarmist. Now she says it’s too late and we didn’t stop it, so now what?
“We have to do something,” she said, when he didn’t respond. “The people I talk to can’t imagine changing anything. There’s this — reverence, for what they assume must’ve existed at some point.” He felt the intensity of her desire to understand, and her frustration. He took her hand and squeezed it.
“I want you to help me,” she said.
He didn’t want to hear this. “What?” he asked.
“There’s no point in trying to put him in jail, or get people to overthrow him,” she whispered. “Everybody’s sworn allegiance to him personally.”
“What are you thinking? What are you trying to do?” Karel said.
“We have to kill him,” Leda said. “I don’t know how yet. I don’t even know if it’s possible. But I think somebody’s got to kill him.”
Karel was staring at her. The roof was going to fall in, spilling Kehr on the bed. Holter was going to break in the door and take them away.
She turned to him and took his face in her hands again, holding it the way he held newborn rabbits. “If it isn’t possible it isn’t,” she said. “But we should be finding out. We’re not infants anymore. Maybe now that we’re together there really is here somewhere a way to act, maybe all we have to do is look a little for it. I’m ashamed of myself sometimes. It’s like I think I’m just here to sit and wait. I’d like to find out if I am all just talk.”
“They’ll kill us,” Karel whispered. “Are you crazy?”
“It’s dangerous right now,” Leda said. “You think all those people who disappeared did something?”
He thought of the young man in the prisoner assessment room and put his hands over his eyes.
“They’d kill everybody,” he said. “They’d go crazy.”
“We’d only do it if we could do it,” she said. She came closer and kissed him, and then held him, his chin on her shoulder.
It was as if she held his fears a little bit, and settled them. He began to recognize a war inside him between the responsibility she was talking about and his old self, and he tried to settle back to observe it, like a spectator. He imagined himself learning to cherish what she cherished instead of just his own happiness and hers, imagined himself opening up to her, confessing his silence, his cowardice, his complicity, and being forgiven and purified. His mind wandered to the beach in the darkness and the rain, and he felt that he was unable to anticipate what was going to happen, that the future stood with its back to him.
“All the good I’ve tried to do I didn’t just do for its own sake,” Leda whispered. “I did it to look good. I did it for myself.”
He told her no and held her and decided he’d help, he’d do it even though nothing about him was heroic, because she was precious to him and it meant everything to her. She said, I won’t let anything happen to you, and it was her mothering voice, the moved, fearful one she used with her brothers, and he said, no, no, nothing’ll happen to us, and held her and prayed that whatever would come would at least spare her.
He wasn’t sure if he woke up slowly or just never slept. It was extra cold outside the blankets and the solid things in the room were darkening as the space around them paled and took on light. It was still raining and the darkness outside was blue.
He heard keys in locks and the squeak of a metal cart and imagined an old woman in black making the bed next door, smoothing wrinkled white sheets with her palm. He lay still, pondering a mysterious reflection in the mirror over the washbasin: a stripe and the corner of something wooden he couldn’t identify when he looked around the room. A swallow scissored past the window.
Leda sat up, abruptly, and wrapped herself in the outer blanket against the chill and then padded barefoot to the door and went into the hall to the bathroom. He got up and put his two shirts on and wished again he had long pants. His shirts smelled. He crossed to the window and gazed down to the street. People were up already, walking quickly with light short steps because of the rain. In a men’s shop through the streaked display window he could see little hats on pegs, only now becoming visible.
Leda came back in and crossed the room and hugged him, and then tried to get dressed while keeping the blanket on her shoulders. She spread her elbows and shivered, and the blanket tented out and flapped with her movements. Karel stayed by the window and thought of the kind of peace she brought for him to particular objects like the blanket or moments like this morning. Outside dew had frosted the hood of a parked car, and he registered two soldiers standing beside it, their arms folded. There was something else wrong and his mind was about to remark on it when the old metal washbasin near Leda rang softly and she said their first words of the morning: There, I’m finished, and the door banged and crashed open with such force that she seemed to be thrown backward not so much from the shock as the concussion of air.
Four men swept into the room wearing army shirts and civilian pants and two of them pulled the blanket up and over Leda’s head and wrapped it tightly around her and one produced some rope. Karel rushed to her and the fourth man hit him across the face with what felt like a small flat plank and a thousand stars sprayed the room, and while he rolled on the floor arms grabbed and pinned him and they put a small paper bag over his head and locked his hands behind his back with a series of sliding bars that squeezed his wrists. He felt and heard loose grains around his head in the bag and realized it was an empty sugar bag. Leda was screaming for help, muffled under the blanket, and they told her to stop or they’d kill her. He heard the grunts as they lifted her and then they pulled him up and shoved him from behind, and led him into the hall and down the stairs and out of the building at a great rush, orienting him with twists or pulls of his neck and shoulders. They were piled into a car. Leda kept calling his name and he would say, I’m here, his voice harsh and trapped in the sugar bag, and then she cried out when they hit her to quiet her down. There was something wrong with the car, it wouldn’t start, and eventually he had to get out and they unlocked his hands and told him to leave the bag on his head and he had to push with two other men at the back of the car until it started. They were quiet the rest of the way until Leda said, her voice still muffled, Why are you doing this? This is a mistake, and then the man beside Karel who was still breathing heavily from the pushing asked her angrily if she had any idea what was involved in an operation like this. Arms, civilian coordination, training centers, transports, intelligence gathering, paperwork: did she think all that operated in the service of mistakes? And the man in the front seat told him to shut up.
Then they were rushing along a corridor, with spaces he could feel opening out and closing suddenly behind him, as in a dream, and he felt a chill at his back from not knowing what was around him. Someone said Here, and he heard a heavy metal door swing open, and he touched his palm and fingertips to the rough wall beside him as a last gesture before they shoved him through the doorway.