Perhaps a Tragedy

Svatava

I had met the love of my life five years earlier when we both worked in the textile factory. Our stools were side by side. Every so often our elbows would brush, and we’d trade a shy smile. She was strong, that was the first thing I noticed about Tereza. She had strong hands and her fingers always knew exactly where they needed to go. She never stumbled or faltered. She would have been described as elegant if it weren’t for her wide, square jawline and her narrowed eyes. Her eyes were what kept the others from approaching her. Those eyes that were always glaring about something, even if she was looking at you, she could be counted on to be scowling about some passing thought or another.

A year before the war broke out, I made her smile, and it was all over for me.

Our love story was built in the shadowy places, in stolen moments and prolonged glances that broke apart with profuse and ridiculous blushing. I loved how easy it was to make her blush when she finally let me learn how. It wasn’t even hard to do, but then, everything about her seemed effortless when she let you in.

Then the assassination occurred, and the war began, and she disappeared. Work was harder and we started manufacturing uniforms. Without her there I could hardly stand the factory at all. I would get a postcard every once in a while. One from France. One from Belgium. It was after the one from Berlin that I finally quit my job at the factory. I had caught the attention of one of the German higher-ups and he promised to keep me comfortable. I would have been a fool to say no to a job where all I had to do was sit still and look pretty. I was good at it.

One from Russia.

And then, the war was over, and Prague was pushed into the hands of the Russians and the Germans left and I was living on my under-the-mattress savings. It was probably the most confusing time of my life. I couldn’t tell you if I smiled at all in those next months. There was no reason to. Everyone kept their heads down, no one spoke on the trains or bothered to trade banter in bars with strangers. It was quiet. It was lonely. I was running out of money.

Then she came back. She was dressed as a man, and I called them “they”. And they were just as stunning as before, stronger now than ever, and they made me smile.

They were quiet mostly, trained into it by the governments and agencies who had commissioned them during the war. They made a good spy “because I can be whoever I need to be as long as they’re not over 170 cm”, they said when I asked why they’d been picked. They then added, “and I don’t stand out like someone pretty, like you,” and tweaked my nose playfully. I’d retorted by saying that they were just as pretty as I ever was. They disagreed but we both ignored the absurdity.

And then we got the invitation.

Dearests Ms. Václavíková & Ms. Zavadilová:

You have been cordially invited on an all expense paid trip that is promised to fulfill your deepest desires and exceed your highest expectations. Only a select few have been chosen. Please consider this a high honor. We ask that you follow the enclosed travel plan (tickets enclosed) and arrive promptly at the meeting point by 8 a.m. on August 15, 1946.

Your Humble Hosts,

The Knights of the Mortar

We argued for days about whether we should go or not. The trip was only a week away. We didn’t have anyone to notify, as neither of us was employed in any traditional sense and my last living relative had died in the war, neither of us had anyone left. These were all of my arguments, of course.

Tereza were more practical. We couldn’t just up and leave, they said. We couldn’t possibly just trust this mysterious group that no one had ever seemed to have heard of. We could be walking into a trap. What if they were Nazis and they were targeting us for what we’d done during the war?

“But”, I said on the third day after getting the letter, two days before we were supposed to get on a train to Moscow, “what if it’s true? What if they can give us our deepest desires? What do you think that means?”

“What would that even mean, Svatava?” they asked calmly in that way that let me know that whatever I was saying sounded stupid to everyone but me.

I raised a brow, “What if they’re like us? What if they can find us a place to be together? What if they can find a place where we aren’t under the thumb of us foreign regime, at least? There are so many free places in the world! Places where no one cares what their neighbors are doing, where they don’t get paid for paying too close attention. What if…” I wasn’t even sure what, but I could see the way the line of her mouth had softened.

“Fine. But I’m packing the gun.” And that was the end of it.

We took two trains and a car in order to reach the hotel where we were supposed to be meeting up with the rest of our group. That was what the “meeting point” meant in our hushed theories batted between our too-close faces on the train. We didn’t sleep that night, despite the comfortable bed—one bed in the room, we both noted with slight discomfort.

Downstairs, in the lobby, we were met by the others: three sisters from Japan, an English musician from America with tight curls and a charismatic smile, a marine-life scholar from India, and the gorgeous German siblings who seemed to genuinely hate each other. Nine travelers together, none of whom knew where we were headed.

I wouldn’t be able to remember much about the journey, except that I was cold, and I huddled against Tereza the whole way. We were packed into a car with the scholar and the musician, and I liked both just fine. The musician wouldn’t stop talking, showing off what little Czech he knew, but he was funny enough that I never seemed to mind the noise.

When the caravan of three cars stopped, they let us out on a snowy road in the middle of nowhere. The Russian countryside was wooded there, the snow wasn’t thick on the ground, but the air nipped enough at our faces that everyone’s nose was red. A driver handed each unit of us a card in our language.

Follow the red ribbons. When you get to the hill with the flag, stay put. The magic will begin soon. Do not stray from the path. Move quickly. Do not be afraid.

Your Humble Servants,

The Knights of the Mortar

I glanced at Tereza who had been reading over my shoulder. They were desperately trying to not let their fear show but I could see the stain of it seeping through. I knew them too well. I took their hand and started toward the first ribbon, tied to a branch of one of the nearby trees. The ribbons were easy to spot in the stark browns and whites of the wilderness and I gripped Tereza’s hand the whole way. The others followed our lead, all of our directions had said the same thing, we realized through the interpretation of the scholar and the musician. The German brother theorized that they gave each group individual cards so that there would be no questions about what the instructions were. Sounded feasible enough to me.

The hill was just that: a hill. The snow was thicker here, the air colder. The walk hadn’t felt long but the sun was lower in the sky and shrouded by clouds. The group of us waited, swathed in our dark coats, huddled against those we knew.

I was staring down at my gloved hands when I heard Tereza gasp.

I followed their gaze to the crest of the hill. There stood a figure clad in black, staring down at us with a face hidden by the shadow of it’s hood. There didn’t seem to be anyone else. We all waited with bated breath.

And then the figure tilted back its head, letting out a horrible, heartbreaking screech that stopped my breath and tightened my grip on Tereza. Red smoke rose from its mouth, a blood red column that hovered above them like it was waiting for something.

The screaming stopped.

Silence.

And then, my world went black. The last thing I remember before I died is the sound of Tereza screaming my name.

Tereza

It began when we died. And then I lost everything.

We had survived the war, almost a year into Russian occupation and we had still found each other through it all. She was the only reason I returned to Czechoslovakia at all. The whole war I hadn’t been able to get her out of my head.

We were doing alright, keeping our heads above water but below notice, figuring everything out. We were doing just fine. Until that infernal letter arrived on our doorstep.

I couldn’t say no to her. Not when her greatest wish was that we could just be happy. I couldn’t argue against that, not when all I wanted was the same thing. Not when it raised new questions about who these Knights of the Mortar were. If they knew who we were and knew about us, they needed to be dealt with. I could do that, but I knew that I would need faces and names first. Or at least to be within shooting range. Things I couldn’t get from that infernal letter alone.

So, we hopped on a train, then another. We crammed all of Svatava’s too-much luggage into a car that came to pick us up and we found ourselves in a hotel we couldn’t sleep in. One bed. They had to know. They had to be dealt with.

The next morning, we met the others in the lobby with my suspicions about what the Knights knew confirmed and gnawing at the back of my mind. I didn’t like the look of the German siblings, they fidgeted like they had something to hide. I didn’t like the musician, he was chatty. I didn’t like the scholar or the sisters from Japan, they were all too quiet and seemed to notice too much. One of the sisters, the one who wore trousers, kept trying to smile at me and it was making me uneasy. Any of them could have been Knights in disguise.

Of course, Svatava was fast friends with nearly all of them.

She had that thing about her, something that just drew people in and trapped them forever. Honey in a fly trap. It was a useful skill when she weaponized it but mostly it was just the way she was. Clearly, even I wasn’t immune, and it never failed to impress me that no one else seemed to be either. Sometimes I wondered why she ever returned to me when she could have had almost anyone at all.

All the same, I remained thankful for whatever it was until the last moments when my sanity fled.

We got jammed into a car with the musician, who never shut up the whole way, and the scholar who never said more than a couple words. I learned to like the scholar more in those hours.

Eventually, we were dropped off in the middle of the Russian wilderness with nothing but a note telling us to “not be afraid” and “follow the red ribbons to the hill”. More vague bullshit that put my teeth on edge and had me checking the status of the gun in my jacket pocket. It was still there, of course.

Svatava held my hand as she dragged me through the woods. I wondered how anyone so brave could have been passed up for my position during the war. I often found myself wondering such things. I’d long ago concluded that she was much too pretty. Too memorable. I was much easier to forget—a lesson I would soon learn quite intimately.

Finally, the trees opened to a clearing, with a snowy hill. We waited for something to happen. Svatava crowded close to me again. She’d been shaking like a leaf ever since we’d gotten to this god forsaken country. I’d never wanted to return to Prague so badly as I did in that moment, scanning the terrain for a threat with the love of my life huddled into my side.

My stomach dropped and I must have made a noise when he finally showed himself. He had to be at least 203 cm, though it was hard to tell from that distance and with him towering over us on the hill.

Everyone froze around me, staring up at the cloaked figure on the hill.

The man screamed, tilting his shrouded head back towards the sky and Svatava became a board against my side. A blood red cloud emerged from his screaming mouth, hovering in the air around him. The red of it held my attention like a running bull. I couldn’t bring myself to move.

But then, Svatava collapsed. Her eyes rolled back, and she just dropped into the snow. Her body convulsed and she was choking, and I might have screamed. I might have been calling her name as I rolled her onto her side, I might have begged her to come back to me as her own blood pooled around her, expelled from her mouth like water after a drowning. It kept coming and coming, soaking the ground around us red.

Others dropped while I held her. One at a time, they fell.

The musician screamed and it was cut short when he dropped. The sisters fell against each other quietly, with the grace of a prima donna swooning on stage. The scholar went quickly, muttering a prayer. The German brother tried to run but was dead before he made it three steps back to the tree line. His sister knelt and had less to fall. And then it was just me.

Alone with Svatava in my arms, already growing cold, both of our coats heavy with her blood. I tried to stand, to take her home. To take her anywhere but here.

I met the eyes of the monster on the hill as I stood. The red smoke swirled around him languidly. I could tell he was staring back at me even though his face was still shrouded.

I never remembered the gun.

I could only feel her. What was left of her weighed me down and I savored it.

I took one step toward the monster, then another. I don’t know what I was thinking, what I would have done had I made it up to him. But it’s a question I’ll never have to answer.

Mid-way through my second step there was a burning, a terrible burning. I fell to my knees. I couldn’t stop the scream that tore itself from me. Everything in me told me to run, to roll, to do something, but all I could do was kneel over Svatava, gripping her body to my chest. And then it was over, and I was gone too.

When the nine of us awoke, none of us were the same.