1.

When Josef Krug was nineteen years, four months and one day old – it was the second day of his compulsory military service – a tank landed on him and he sustained a fracture of the fifth cervical vertebra. He spent several weeks lying in hospital with suspected spinal arachnoiditis. He was subsequently sent to the psychiatric unit with depressive episodes and remained there for almost half a year.

On the third day after his release from the mental hospital in Černovice, he was taken back to the neurological department by ambulance as he had incurred concussion. He ended up in a sleep laboratory and after ten days of observation was returned to the world with a diagnosis of narcolepsy with occasional catalepsy.

He celebrated his twenty-first birthday with a female medical student and his future wife, then on a placement in neurology at the University Hospital in Brno. He was now a disability pensioner, fully exempt from military service and work, who had to wear orthopaedic insoles in his shoes, and when he felt a prickling in his legs as if hundreds of pins and needles were jabbing into him, he rocked from side to side while walking to relieve the pain.

It was happening now. I watched him moving along the trail leading towards Praděd with slow, rocking steps. He paid no attention to the sprightlier walkers passing him with their jackets tied around their waists, because it had turned hot – up here the clouds had been scattered by the wind, and the August sun was powerful.

Apparently it was not just people Josef Krug paid no attention to, but the sun as well. Dressed in an anorak, a cloth hat on his head, he tossed the bulging green rucksack on his back and almost came to a halt. His silhouette was visible through the trees on the bend about two hundred metres in front of me. When he heard and saw no-one coming along the path behind him – which is almost a miracle, since there is basically a constant stream of hikers – he stepped aside into the woods, ignoring the omnipresent signs instructing walkers to keep to the marked trails. It was his favourite route to the Midnight Cottage.

The others preferred to make their way down from the Kurzovní, where they left their cars parked behind the hotel as far out of sight as possible, but he opted for the journey by bus from Karlova Studánka up to the turning circle for the hotel Ovčárna and then on foot in the direction of Praděd. All he carried with him in his rucksack was a bottle of cola, some wafer biscuits, two pairs of socks and a kidney-shaped pillow, so the rucksack appeared full and yet bobbed lightly on his back.

Krug carefully climbed down over the rocks towards a swift-flowing tributary of the Bílá Opava so he could follow the riverbed deeper into the woods, further away from any stray tourists, into the silence, into the early-afternoon light falling on a small flat area of trampled grass in front of the south side of the wooden cottage, which he had restored to a more or less habitable state years before, preventing it from falling down.

It took him thirty minutes to cover those few hundred metres. He frequently stopped and peered through the giant scratchy leaves of butterbur that covered that entire side to see where exactly the bog was and where he could step without sinking ankle-deep in water. Each stop was welcomed by mosquitos, which instantly launched a mass attack on Krug’s sweaty, uncovered skin. He lifted the knee of his right leg as high as possible and aimed the tip of his sturdy Gore-Tex boot towards the violet flowers of the butterbur. The delicate stalk snapped as Krug put his full weight where he estimated solid ground to be. It was there.

He descended almost to the riverbed, sharply carved out in the ground, and heard the peals of a female voice through the babbling of the icy mountain water. They weren’t expecting him, otherwise they wouldn’t be making so much noise. He took off the rucksack and put it down on the grass at the edge of a torrent which broke off from the stream directly to the south and wound like a ribbon through eroded soil and moss between tall trees and their roots, only to end up frayed in a hollow beneath a rock, a few steps from the entrance to the cottage.

Gasping for breath, he climbed up above the fast-moving water among the trees and cautiously, so as not to make a noise and snap a twig with his foot, approached from tree to tree above the cottage, slightly downhill. Now he could hear her clearly. He pressed his lips firmly together among the sparse growth of his greying beard. Now he could see her too, and she wasn’t alone. They were both there, sitting outside on a bench formed from a roughly hewn piece of spruce trunk. They had even begun to sing, as if to taunt him.

Josef Krug stood in the cover of a huge pine tree, leaning on it with his gaze fixed on a dried-up teardrop of resin just in front of his face where a twig had been a short time before. He listened to the two of them, wondering what to do. He looked at his watch. It was half past eleven. If he stayed up here a little while longer, he might be able to go right up to the cottage unobserved.

He sat down under the pine tree on a moss-covered rock, stretched his legs out carefully and leaned against the trunk, taking the odd swipe at the mosquitos. He looked down at the light-grey tin roof, which they had replaced well over ten years ago – it could do with a new coat of paint as it was starting to rust. Sticking up from the roof were two narrow chimneys from the fireplace and the stove. The green shutters were open and the white-painted windows were bare and curtainless.

The longer he sat there, the louder the singing from the two down below seemed to him. Almost a roar, unbearable, impossible to ignore for miles around. Wait, now they had fallen silent – yes, hang on, he would have to raise himself up a bit to see… They had gone into the cottage. So he could slowly set out as well.

Carefully, cautiously, inaudibly, over rocks and roots – that stump looks rotten, I’d better not stand on it… Then he edged his way under the side window of the cottage and through the open door – just asking for uninvited visitors – into a rectangular room with an open fireplace, an old plush sofa, an imitation-leather armchair with tattered armrests, a wooden bench and a dining table with six chairs.

He was alone. He looked around. From the kitchen he could hear the clatter of dishes, and then they were both standing in front of him, each carrying a bowl full of mushy peas and two slices of bread. When they saw Krug, they froze.

It’s bad, worse than I wanted to admit, realized Krug as he looked at the face of the young woman, who was beginning to shake as she waited silently. Her companion, whose transgression against Krug and his faith was only slightly less serious than the one that rested on the plump shoulders of the pale woman in the shapeless black tracksuit, walked over to Krug and held out the food, offering him his lunch.

“I’ll have hers,” said Krug, not moving from the spot, just sticking out his right hand.

The woman handed him the bowl of peas and bread without a word, lowering her head guiltily to avoid looking him in the face, and her gaze dropped to her thighs in the tracksuit bottoms. She burst into tears.

“My rucksack is up by the boulder. Go and get it. And then one hour. No, an hour and a half.”

The woman left silently. She staggered off against the flow of the cascading water. Her stomach was gripped by an iron fist, yet she had long since forgotten her hunger. She was overcome with anger at her own failure and humiliation. She should have stuck it out, but she hadn’t. What had she been thinking? Why had she jeopardized years of work again? She entered the shade of the trees. It was as if someone had suddenly turned the light off, everything was blurred.

Her head peeked out from behind a stump and then she appeared in her entirety among the trees in our field of vision. We were hard pushed to recognize her. Shapeless, empty, lacking her own gestures and movements. Her gaze moved over us indifferently – from that distance she could probably only see fuzzy silhouettes and perhaps Dr Lébl’s blueberry-coloured rucksack, but it was also quite possible that for her we merged into the woods. She bent down and pulled out a rucksack from somewhere. She was leaving.

“I knew it,” exhaled the doctor triumphantly in my face once the woman had disappeared back below the hillside with the rucksack.

“Luck.”

“As if I wouldn’t find something! What am I like, eh?”

“Come on, you weren’t sure. You didn’t know where it was. We had the directions, but you know very well that if we’d just headed a few degrees west at the top we’d have drawn a blank. Not to mention the fact we lost Krug, and not because of me…”

“Fortune favours the ready. I was ready, she showed up. So we know,” the doctor said, tapping his belly. “Now I’d like to finally get something to eat. At the Kurzovní, or back to the Ovčárna?”

“How about a wafer or an apple, doctor? Seeing as we’ve found them…”

“If you want an apple, help yourself from my supply, I still have two in the side pocket of my rucksack. As for me, I’m having goulash or at the very least sausage with horseradish and beer. To the Ovčárna, I say. I’m not going back up the hill today.”

“Aren’t we going to go closer, since we’re here anyway?” I didn’t want to abandon my position, even though I had water in my shoes and some itchy bites on my neck and forearms. This was a unique opportunity. “Come on, doctor. Let’s have an apple and go down and see them. Then I’ll buy you a meal at the Ovčárna.”

“And what are we going to do there? What do you want to say to them? Introduce yourself? I don’t think you’d even need to, they’d soon figure out who we are, and it wouldn’t end well. Leave it for another time. We’ve accomplished our goal for today. We’ve found them.”

“I’ll say we’re lost. That’s a good pretext. And it’s basically true. We’ll ask for directions, that’s all. What could possibly happen? They must have come across tourists like that. And don’t worry, they won’t recognize us, wrapped up in outdoor gear like this. After all, you shaved off your beard just recently. And I’ll put on a baseball cap to hide my hair, see. And we’ve both got sunglasses.”

“I’ll wait for you over a plate of sausages. Give my regards to the mosquitos and squirrels. There’s one gambolling about over there. Best of luck.”

If we had suspected we were throwing away our last chance to see Josef Krug, to talk to him, the doctor would probably have let himself be persuaded. But nobody could have known that. And so I hesitated a moment longer, looking in the direction the brown female head had disappeared in, but then turned round with a sigh. I picked up my pace – the doctor was heading back to the Ovčárna at an unexpectedly brisk tempo.

In the meantime Krug was finishing his mushy peas. He was almost certain they had already forgotten about him. Even the people who had been searching for him on their own initiative years ago after he fled the country so they could get hold of their money, or simply get even with him, had given up. Looking back, he had to admit that he had made a lot of mistakes. He didn’t even want to know how many people he had overestimated or underestimated. He swallowed the greenish-yellow mush. He tried not to fret about things like that – he still had a big task ahead of him. That was one reason why, as a precautionary measure, he didn’t show himself at his official permanent address or visit other people. They came to him. To the monastery. It was Erik’s brilliant idea to put him up in the newly renovated part of the abbey which the Benedictines rented. No-one looked for him there. In the lion’s den, in a sense.

The Midnight Cottage was the only one of the original sites that remained secret even after the scandal and police investigation. He could keep coming back here and feel the energy of the early days again. Here, in a building without water or electricity in the middle of the woods, which he criss-crossed his way through, he was able to concentrate fully. He felt safe here. What’s more, he had let his beard grow a little right after it happened six years ago and laser surgery had rid him of his glasses.

He swallowed the peas automatically and remembered the Child, that miracle of transformation. That was really how it was; he hadn’t imagined it, or had he? He quickly gulped down the last mouthful and went to take a look out of the window. He saw the chubby arms wobbling at each leap over the skipping rope, he watched the obese adult woman, so similar to the man with a belly he had once been. That child has to come back, snapped a voice in his head. Krug snorted angrily.

Erik watched him out of the corner of his eye. He knew he should have been stricter, but he couldn’t find the old zeal within himself – perhaps he was even losing his faith. The realization shook him – but how many times had that happened in recent weeks? – because already it was almost certain. Before he had time to give in to it, Krug was sitting down next to him, writing.

“You know, like that other time. It took less than two months. It’ll work this time too. Even though the others have failed, we’ll never give up. Nor will she. We have to help her. She’s been through hell too, like you, don’t forget that, maybe even more so, definitely more so, you have to help her. It’s your task. I don’t trust anyone as much as you.”

Josef Krug looked Eric in the eye. His inexpressive voice sounded hollow and at the same time fuller, as if it was travelling across the entire universe. It stuck in Erik’s brain: “I trust you. Forget about Ema and about everything that happened. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

“I put them out of my mind a long time ago. I’m just annoyed that everything is ruined because of them. It was a mistake.”

Erik recalled the prison cell. He looked at his chewed fingernails. He had brought that compulsive bad habit back with him from behind bars in Pilsen. To blood, to flesh, to needles of pain all the way to oblivion and back again, more, stronger, more clearly towards what awaited him, what he had to do, what he wanted to do, what he had been chosen for. He didn’t want to disappoint, he didn’t want to lose faith. He observed Krug’s silhouette against the sun-drenched window. Now came the most beautiful hour of the day as the radiant ball finally cleared the tallest tree and the cottage was bathed in sunlight. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her movements outside in that hot bath of light.

He had first caught sight of her as he swayed to the rhythm of the wind at the top of an eleven-metre pine, dressed only in shorts with a pair of binoculars around his neck, surveying the area and trying not to look below him so he didn’t panic and let go. When he saw her back then, when he was thirteen years old, slowly shuffling after the leader of the group, he didn’t even notice she was a girl. It didn’t occur to him, because there were no girls among the Termites. That was the way Geronimo wanted it. At the end of the day, girls would be nothing but trouble on their expeditions in the woods.

So once again Erik cast his gaze over the horizon. There in the distance, beyond a field of sunflowers, he could just about make out the town where they had arrived by train at the start of the summer holidays, laden with rucksacks. He cautiously let go of the tree trunk with one hand and brought the binoculars up to his eyes. Somewhere in the direction of the field, at the edge of the woods, there should be another member of the troop also on the look-out. If Erik managed to spot the other boy, he would gain an extra point for today’s test of courage. What Erik longed for more than anything was to be praised by Geronimo. So far it had only happened to him twice, and each time that feeling of having his own value and special status confirmed had sustained him for months.

If he had managed to overcome his greatest fear, a terror of heights, he would also manage to find the other guy through concentrated observation. Him or me, all the way. That was Erik’s new motto – that was the high-voltage music that had been his soundtrack for the last year. As well as good grades, he started coming home with bruises and torn trousers.

That day too, his shorts had been christened by a hole running along the side seam of the right leg. When Erik was climbing down from the pine tree with a full bladder and his skin covered in cold sweat from the fear of falling, his shorts got snagged on a protrusion from a broken branch. Because he was afraid to loosen his convulsive grip on the tree trunk even slightly, he sacrificed the shorts.

In the end, triumphantly, with trembling legs, he jumped down onto the ground, quickly pulled his zip down and directed the stream of urine towards some nearby ferns. Beside the place where his relief landed with a muffled splash, she appeared. Only then did he notice that, in spite of the short hair and boy’s trousers, this was a girl.

 

Translated by Graeme Dibble