Liberation Movements

Peter
1968

They were the only customers left in the bar when it closed at one, and they stumbled arm in arm down Celetna, past soldiers standing against the old town’s medieval stone walls. Stanislav sometimes drunkenly saluted them. “Oblov, you’re still here?” he called in Russian.

A fat soldier on the opposite corner squinted. “Stanislav, get your ass out of my district or I’ll personally take care of that girlfriend of yours!”

Stanislav shot him a rude hand gesture, then grabbed Peter’s shoulder and walked on.

By the time they reached the arch of the Charles Bridge’s Old Town gate, Stanislav was failing. A long day of drinking had broken up his words into barely comprehensible syllables. “Got to…I’m…uh…tired.”

“You’re tired?”

“Da.”

“Should I get you to the train station?”

“No… nyet. There.”

Stanislav pointed at the small door on the inside of the bridge’s gate. “In there,” he mumbled. “Good for sit.”

Peter was surprised to find the battered old door unlocked. Inside in the darkness, he squinted to make out the twisting stone steps leading high into the tower. He peered back to see Stanislav falling through the door, then closing it behind himself. “I don’t think you’ll make it,” said Peter.

“Eh?”

“To the top.” He pointed up into the blackness.

“I’ll make it.” Stanislav ushered him up with his hands.

But as they reached the fourth narrow window that looked down on the bridge and across to the castle district, Stanislav sat heavily on a step.

“Just a little…rest. Da? But you…” He yawned and looked up. “But you will wake me? Eight,” he said. “Eight thirty.”

“I’ll do that.”

Stanislav stifled another yawn and closed his eyes. “You won’t…sleep?”

Peter settled on a step above the soldier and opened the window, letting in a cool river breeze. The alcohol had been washed away by his night’s act of betrayal, and as his eyes adjusted to the shadows of the bridge he wished they’d brought along another bottle. “Don’t worry. I won’t sleep.”

For a half hour Peter remained there, his knees up to his chest. The breeze coming in off the Vltava seeped through his thin coat and pants. From below he heard occasional distant voices he thought were Russian. Once, a truck rumbled across the bridge, and he watched its lights dwindle between the rows of statues.

“What’re you thinking, Peter?” Stanislav seemed to be speaking in his sleep.

“I’m wondering how I can have a life like yours.”

The soldier squirmed into a tighter fetal position, his head on the step just below Peter’s foot. “ Da, da. Well, wake me up when you know.”

Another truck passed under them, then the noise faded away. He had no answers. The only sure thing was that he could not return to the university. His phone call to Captain Poborsky had ended that. Those who had not been rounded up would know who had turned them in. They would manhandle him from his bed in the night, then carry him to some vacant janitor’s closet or toilet stall; they would teach him a lesson.

The soldier began to snore. In the darkness, Peter could just see his hunched back, the way he was rolled tight. On the crest of his hip, where his fine coat had fallen back, the knife from his father was looped in his belt. It seemed to Peter like a motif in their relationship. A single object that signified the difference between the two of them. Stanislav’s loving family was in that knife, and the knife, like the family, protected Stanislav as he made his way through the world.

Peter cleared his throat. “Stanislav?”

The snores continued, the soldier’s chest rising and falling.

Peter spoke quietly. “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve done. I killed my best friend and the woman I loved. Not on purpose, but because of my stupidity. But now-now I’m not so sure. Did I mean to do it? Did I want us to be caught? Was I so jealous I’d rather they were dead than together? Because afterward I did something completely consciously. I made a phone call I never thought I would make. And right now, my old friends are in that convent on Bartolom jska. They’re probably…” He couldn’t finish the sentence aloud, but his mind repeated it in full: They’re probably being tortured. He cleared his throat again, his mind now inventing grotesque scenes that took place in that small basement room. Poor meek Jan in a chair, tied down, his glasses cracked and blood dripping from his fingernails.

He felt like he was going to be sick, so he put his face as far through the window as he could, sucking in fresh air.

It wasn’t only the gore of his imagination, but also the realization of this fact: Because his old friends were the kind of men they were, with their pride and convictions, at some point Comrade Poborsky would walk them out to the convent courtyard and shoot them in the head.

He looked out at the river and across to the lights of the castle district. That was something he would miss. Mistakes or not, what he’d done in the last days had rerouted his life. It was entirely different.

He sank back on the steps, his stomach now settling.

The only sounds were water lapping medieval stones down below and Stanislav’s irregular snores. Peter leaned forward and reached out, touching the handle of the knife. Another hawk was carved into its worn wooden handle, stretched to fit the length. When he slid it out, the blade reflected a distant street lamp into his eyes, and he blinked. It was a heavy knife, and well balanced. Like the soldier’s family, he thought, and smiled. Because not even then did he know what he was going to do.

In his study of the semantics of music, he had learned about Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the “dyadic sign,” that which unites a work’s concept with its sound-image. What Peter liked about this was that it completely disregarded the composer, who, at the point when his work is being played, is entirely disassociated from the piece. His intentions and desires no longer matter. The piece he has written is now simply action and sound. Now, here, Peter felt like a composer out of touch with his creation; he was instead in the audience, only understanding his actions as they were being performed.

He took two steps down and bent over the snoring soldier’s large ear. The Warsaw Pact collar was up over the neck, so he folded it down. The soldier did not stir, his snores a steady engine echoing lightly up the tower’s stairwell.

By now he knew, though to put it into words would have been impossible. He lowered the knife in front of the soldier’s throat, parallel to the ground, and placed a knee behind the neck.

Peter remained in that position for a minute, his quick breaths feeling hot in this cool place.

Only now could he find the words to describe what he was doing.