The Hideout E-Book

Egon Hostovský

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 159

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A kind, blundering Czech engineer is pressured by the Nazi government to hand over his invention, which could be key to their military operations. He flees to Paris, hoping to sell his invention to the French government instead; yet when the Germans invade France, he is forced into hiding, and spends months in a dark, damp cellar. Alone, he dwells on his memories - of his troubled marriage, and his decision to leave his wife behind in Czechoslovakia. When he is given the unexpected chance to redeem himself, both to his wife and history, he seizes it with utter determination - even though this heroic act will be his last.The Hideout is the man's last love letter to his wife, told with fiery tension and rich in human understanding. Atmospheric and gripping from the start, it is beautiful and dramatic, emotional and utterly unforgettable.

Leseprobe

EGON HOSTOVSKÝ

THE HIDEOUT

Translated from the Czech by Fern Long

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

Contents

Title Page12345678910About the PublisherCopyright

THE HIDEOUT

1

Dearest Hanichka:

AT LAST I can hope that some day you will learn the true facts of my strange story. The good people about whom I want to tell you promise me that they can take my notes somewhere to safety, somewhere beyond the ocean, perhaps, and give them to you after the war is over. You are still alive; I don’t doubt that for an instant, and you will be alive long after this awful storm of horror, madness and hunger has blown over. I am absolutely certain of it. I see you all the time; we’re together whenever I fall asleep; I know every new line that creases your face; I know that your hair is white and that you are bent now. Dear God, I know so many details about you—just as if we were together and saw each other day in and day out. You have been waiting, and not in vain, dear Hanichka! Some day you will read what I am writing now. Otherwise nothing would have any meaning, nothing at all—our life, our marriage, our worries and our mistakes. But I don’t believe that, and it is not so. Everything has its meaning, every event, every chance, every catastrophe, every slightest thing that happens.

You must live to get this, because you and I have to understand each other. And it is only now that I am ready to understand you. I have come to know so much, so much has become clear, I have found so many words and thoughts that I never even knew of before.

I don’t know if they will tell it to you after the war, or if they will write it to you. It may even be that you will learn of it only from these notes—from this paragraph. I, Hanichka, shall not live to know. It seems so silly to write that I want to die, or that I must die. I don’t really know how to tell you in just a few words that we can never meet again and live together and make up for all the things we did to hurt each other, and be happy together in the lives of our children. It would be ridiculous if I tried to make my death appear heroic. It isn’t altogether voluntary and perhaps it isn’t inevitable, but it is natural.

Please keep on reading; don’t let yourself go. It truly means nothing at all that I shall no longer be living at the moment you read these lines. It’s so long since you’ve seen me; you’ve probably buried me and wept for me many times over in your imagination. Truly it is nothing, my darling! I am closer to you, and I shall be closer, than I was when I lived beside you.

There, now I have written it. You know it and I feel much better. Look, until a short while ago, I had one fixed image. I saw my return and our meeting. I dreamed that we met again in Rokytnice, in the home of your parents. The door there still opens with difficulty and creaks; along the walls of the entry, casks and boxes are still piled, and it’s always cold twilight there. Of course you aren’t expecting me. I come back quite unannounced; you call from the kitchen: “Is that you, Father?” I don’t answer, because I can’t. You ask again and then you come out across the threshold; you come farther, you walk down several steps—and then you see me and recognize me. I see it all so plainly! You want to lift your arms, but you can’t; you want to cry out, but you only whisper. It is not my name that you whisper. For a while I am frozen to the spot. We are both deathly pale, and we feel as if we were dying. The air between us is not of this earth. You start to collapse, and that gives me strength. I am beside you in a bound and catch you in my arms. You don’t cry and you don’t smile. You only whisper that word, which is not my name.

A hundred times, a thousand times, I have imagined, dreamed and lived our meeting. I could picture everything: the twilight of the passage, the smell of it, the sound of your steps on the stairs, myself and you. There is only one thing that I can not imagine: the pain that would close around our hearts and throats while our hands sought each other and met. Everything but that dizzy feeling of happiness, or unhappiness, or some deep feeling without a name.

Would it be happiness, or would it be unhappiness? I don’t really know. I don’t know what my first words would be; I don’t know what I would ask about, whom I would look for; I don’t know where I would sit, what I would do with my hands and my memory and my will. And still I never longed for anything more than I have longed for our meeting and for that unimaginable something that would come after it. When I thought of my return, about that unredeemed miracle, I felt that I would be capable of doing anything to make it come true—capable of every sacrifice and every crime. Not from longing and not from exhaustion, but from a kind of burning curiosity, more burning than any longing or desire I ever knew.

But today I know, Hanichka, that I was dreaming of the impossible—as I have done so many times before. I should bring you no happiness from far away. I should come back to you, old before my time (I’ll soon be fifty) a man whose story would seem like senseless gibberish to you. I should be a hindrance to you and our children. (Ah, I know nothing at all about them! Marta is twenty and Johanna eighteen, I believe? I think of them shamefully little, and I don’t see them even in my dreams. I lost them and they lost me.) Well, I should be returning to a life where something had been lacking while I lived it. I should be returning to it out of a bad fairy tale, without the golden key and the elixir of life. There would be an emptiness between us and I shouldn’t know how to fill it. All the love I am able to wring out of my desolate heart, all the feeling and devotion I may be putting into these lines, is released in me only because I know that I shall soon die. It is the knowledge that I have found the right ending for my ordinary life, and that happiness lies in renunciation, and peace where there is no fear of death. I wish I could say it in some other way; I wish that I could let you look into my thoughts which are so much clearer, so much less brittle than the sentences I have just written! But I believe that with all my clumsiness I shall still find words now and then that I should not have found before, and words that will find their way to your understanding.

The most important thing of all is that you should know at the very beginning that I did not run away from you. I did not say good-bye to you and the children because I thought I should be coming back in a few days, but I was kept from doing that by events. Later on, as I write, I want to explain all that to you too, if I have time to do it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish this little notebook, and so I’m going to put down the most important things first and then come back to the details later.

On March 10, 1939, I did not go to Ostrava, as I told you at the time, but I flew to Paris. Immediately after Prague was occupied I found out that the Germans had a warrant for my arrest. I was afraid for you and the children and that is why I neither wrote to you nor sent you any message. In France I lived off the beaten track, and most likely none of the other Czechs knew—or knows—where I finally disappeared. When France was collapsing, the Paris police arrested me by mistake. They set me free after they had kept me for a week, and by then the Germans were at my heels. I didn’t get any farther away from Paris than a little village in Normandy, where I sought out my old friend, Dr. Aubin. I think I must have told you about him long ago. This fine Frenchman took pity on me and proposed a fantastic scheme: to hide me in his home for the duration of the war. I agreed to this. And from that day to this I have been living in a little cellar with one window, through which you can see nothing, and a chink in the wall, through which you can see very little. I eat, after a fashion, I read the papers, sometimes I listen to the radio, but I hardly ever hear a human voice, and I seldom see a human being flit by outside. Dr. Aubin comes to me only at night, in the dark. I have been living in this prison since the second half of June, 1940. Now it is May, 1942.

At the end of last April something happened. You could hardly imagine, let alone believe, what I did. How should I tell you? I’ll come back to this later, but in the meantime—well, I killed a man. He was a man I knew, and it wasn’t in self-defense. Yes, God forgive me, that’s the truth! I had to kill him, even though I had never harmed even a chicken up to that moment. It happened when I came out of my hideout for the first time. I pulled the body into my cellar and lived with it a night and a day and a night, and still a day, for it was that long before Dr. Aubin came back to me. When he finally did come, he found me in a terrible state and he himself was horrified at the death. It was on my account, or rather, on account of the dead man in his cellar, that he had to tell his secret to the underground. They got rid of the corpse but discovered me. When they found out that I was an engineer they asked me to undertake a suicidal thing. At first I would not agree to it. But then all at once many things became clear to me and I realized that God himself had sent these people to me. At first I could not understand why everyone wanted me to die: the Germans and the French people in the underground, friends and enemies. But suddenly I understood, and I promised to do it. I haven’t the slightest hope that I’ll come out alive but, even so, please don’t think I’m any hero. I shall do what I have to do gladly, even though I may not fully agree with it. After all, someone must sacrifice himself, you know, and I am doing it first of all for myself, and then for you. If I didn’t do it, probably nothing in the world would change, only I shouldn’t be able to tell you everything as I am doing now, and I should die somewhere alone and forsaken, and the past would weigh me down terribly. Now I feel so light—almost as if I could fly. Everything between you and me is so very clear; all at once Dr. Aubin is more than a friend, and these strange Frenchmen are like my brothers and I can imagine real peace, yours and my own and our children’s. And this unearthly, exultant glory of victory that I carry around in myself no one can ever know!

Only God knows how I was able to live in this hole for so long. Alone, alone, always alone! My fear of death must have been stronger than my fear of emptiness, of constant hunger and cold. Besides, my prison was a natural sequel to all my life that had gone before. Even before I had been in constant solitude; even before it had been as if my best friends came to me in the dark, and as if I very seldom saw a human face.

Don’t get the idea, Hanichka, that I know nothing of what’s going on in the world. I hear the Paris radio from the neighboring houses at least once a month, if it’s on loud enough and if the people leave their windows open. Dr. Aubin often brought his radio down here and we listened to London. Several times we even heard the Czech broadcast. My host brings me the newspapers, so that I keep informed on all the really important happenings. But no matter what I hear, no matter what I read, I have to translate it all into a new language which only I understand. You know, it’s something like this: if someone says the word space, other people think of something quite different to what a person of my training thinks of. I know that space is the unimaginable essence of the universe, bound up inseparably with whatever goes on—because I am a mathematician and a physicist, and a mathematician and physicist with very special training, at that. How could I ever come to an understanding about space with a man who imagines something quite concrete when he hears the word space? And, you see, that’s how it is with the echo of the world which reaches me here. It tells me only that there is a terrible war on earth raging between several worlds. And that in this war it is a question now of something quite different to what it was in the beginning, and at the end it will be a question of something quite different to what it is today. This war, I think, broke out and is being fought from causes and for aims which no one has yet been able to express clearly. I keep having the feeling that a good half of the human race got drunk in a kind of gigantic space where the air is all breathed out. The born fighters and brawlers started to fight in their drunken orgy, and they were helped along and encouraged by the drunken hypocrites. And all at once the fight spread like wild fire until it touched everyone. By now, thank God, we have advanced far enough so that we can tell our friends from our enemies, but the drunkenness lasts, the guilt is still debatable and the harm done is beyond imagination.

I got mixed up in the mêlée without rhyme or reason. I was living the quiet life of a peace-loving citizen; I never betrayed anyone; I didn’t drink; I didn’t smoke; I paid my taxes and I was a respecter of the law; I didn’t meddle in politics. My brain isn’t big enough to grasp and realize all the catastrophes which kept me from returning home, going on with my work, taking care of my wife and children. I was certainly not responsible for any of it, and I never deserved to have to live worse than a dog, not allowed to leave my kennel, not allowed to work, not allowed to speak in an ordinary voice, and not allowed ever to eat my fill or to get warm enough. And still I do not have the right merely to wait and sleep through the storm in my hideout.

Now I have come to the most troublesome point in my story. And it’s the point that means the most to me. As long as I was running away and hiding from death my head was empty. What could I do, what could I do? Some voice kept crying out in me: why all this? You’re innocent! And the echo of the world told me nothing. Then I did not know the language into which I could translate it for my heart. What could I do? If I left my shelter, the Germans would catch me and torture me to death. Try to get to England? How? Dr. Aubin couldn’t help me. Turn to the French underground, which my host scarcely knew? They couldn’t use me; they couldn’t use anyone who had to hide.

And while I was torturing myself, thinking, not sleeping, losing my mind, my fate was mounting to its climax. I had forgotten, that is, that even my crippled life and my fantastic role were only parts of the great drama going on outside myself. And you can’t run away from that drama, Hanichka. A person can’t escape himself, people, God and the world all at once. No matter how he hides himself, he’s still in the play. Every move he makes is measured and weighed somewhere. But some understanding can exist between subject and object. If I had only known and understood in time, I should have been able to wait for my right moment patiently and I shouldn’t have tormented myself with vain questioning. The right moment comes to every life—only to recognize it! Only not to miss that instant when it depends on us whether we shall unite ourselves forever with mankind and the universe, or whether we shall change into the wandering shadows of shadows! Only not to sleep through that time when we can step out from the wings and recite our soliloquy irrevocably, and play our part well!

I don’t know how these French conspirators understand my decision, how Dr. Aubin understands it, and how that man, whose voice I often hear on the London broadcast, would understand it. But that doesn’t matter. It’s more important that what I am doing gives me that infectious strength which is needed to tame the raging elements. My decision opens a new way to an almost mystic communion with the people whom I came to know only a short time ago, and it definitely returns me somehow to those long-ago days, almost beyond remembrance, when life still had all the marks of sublimity and glory, when dreams had halos and when faith dubbed us knights.

With a sort of premonition, long before my fate was decided, I turned back to my childhood again and again, to the very threshold of that lost Paradise, for it is only from there that you can start afresh. Change into a child, and you change the world! Perhaps those who make the echo of the world and whose speech I have to translate for myself, would find that I have gone mad; others would say that I am a suicide, and others still that I am a hero. Or a criminal, a murderer, a coward. What do I know? What does it matter? What does anything at all matter, if I can forget everything with which I grew old, and if I can march forward with a manly stride to meet my greatest adventure, at whose end you will be smiling, and our children, and my new friends, and all the unknown living and dead who bear the escutcheon of poverty and the shield of misery, those eternal soldiers for whom, from the beginning of the world until today, no archangel ever trumpeted a summons to a truce?