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all the beautiful words

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WHEN YOU’RE HOMELESS, no day is good. But this day was bad.

It wasn’t the desert heat surging over me or the lack of hope encroaching around me. Nor was it my inability to escape this and my own self-pity. What made the day so bad was that the strap of my backpack had just broken. As I boarded the 111 bus to nowhere, all my belongings were hanging by a set of safety pins.

These came apart before I could even find a seat, which was when a drunk knocked into me from behind, sending my things to the floor.

“Look where you’re going!” he howled as he stumbled off the bus.

I was about to howl back when I noticed something hanging from one of the pouches of my backpack. Amid junk I hadn’t looked at in years was a thin old book, a book I didn’t recognize. I picked it up and saw that it was Jiří Orten’s Jeremiah’s Tears.

Despite everything that had happened, I smiled. I smiled at the book and all the light coming from it, much as it had long ago in a place far away.

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WITH THE SUN laboring above a sweltering Prague in August 1942, my grandfather Hermann woke. He woke with Ana in his arms.

This made him happy, the same happy that got him through each morning since his life had come apart. But it wasn’t enough to keep him that way. So, while careful not to wake his wife, he eased himself out of their featherbed and started dressing.

He dressed with a sense of purpose, which came from him having grown tired of moping. In the full-length mirror on their closet door, he put on his favorite suit, which he had made at the end of the previous war and no longer fit him so well because of a bit of a belly he’d been developing since before the occupation.

Getting into the suit wasn’t his biggest challenge that morning. He would say a greater one was pretending not to see the yellow star stitched into the jacket’s breast pocket. Though he overcame both and left the bedroom, and he grabbed his fedora on the way out of his apartment on Eliška Krásnohorská Street.

Hermann was a slight man, in spite of his belly. He was short too, with graying curly brown hair and an unimposing gait. You’d never know by looking at him that he once invoked fear in those who usually only induced it.

On this morning, no one was looking at him, as it was so early that he was the only person on the streets of the city’s dwindling Jewish district of Josefov. Which continued as he made his way toward Old Town Square, following a path he had taken so many times that he didn’t need to look where he was going.

Upon reaching the square, he saw it was empty as well, apart from a svelte young man approaching from the opposite side, who was wearing a checkered cap and carrying a large stack of typed pink papers into the district Hermann had just left.

Like with the yellow star on his jacket, Hermann pretended not to see the man. He especially pretended not to see his pink papers. He even tipped his hat to the statue of Jan Hus in the square’s center as the man passed.

Hermann finished crossing the ancient cobblestones, and he found himself striding toward the local police station a block away.

In front of it, he came to a stop while remembering that this was where he no longer worked.

Slowly, he turned and crept back to his moping. But he stopped when the station door swung open and a female voice called out, “Herr Weiss!”

With some reluctance, he turned around, and he forced a smile at a young woman with long light-brown hair and similarly-colored eyes, who rushed up and hugged him.

“How are you?” she whispered to him in German.

“I’m fine,” he lied in the same language before they broke their embrace.

“We miss you.”

“Yeah?” he muttered while trying to mask his disbelief.

“Well, most of us. It’s not the same without you. All the criminals are on the loose.”

With these words came the sound of a truck, which drove by them full of armed Nazi soldiers. Hermann nodded at it. “I can see.”

He also saw the door of the police station swing open.

This time an unkempt, heavyset man a decade younger than Hermann stepped out of the building, who averted his gaze from Hermann and mumbled, “Hey.”

Hermann replied in kind with a similar lack of enthusiasm.

“Let’s go, Marta,” the man uttered.

“Another suicide,” Marta told Hermann. “On Široká. A leaper.”

“I passed there no more than 15 minutes ago,” Hermann mentioned without any surprise in his voice.

“The call just came in.”

“Let’s go, Marta,” Detective Klima repeated and with more insistence, and the two started off.

“Mind if I tag along?” Hermann asked. Though he regretted the words at once, knowing that they sounded desperate and pathetic and that these were the last things he wanted to express, especially to Klima.

“Just go home, Hermann,” Klima growled.

“It’s on his way home,” Marta argued.

“Fine. Just don’t get in the way.”

Silently, the three walked over the cobblestones to Široká Street, where down the block stood a uniformed policeman, a pair of paramedics, an ambulance, and a dead woman lying on a stretcher underneath a sheet. All they could see of her were her shoes.

“You boys got here awfully quick,” Klima said to the paramedics with some surprise once they reached them.

“We were in the neighborhood when the call came in,” one of them replied.

Klima said nothing back. He just glanced under the sheet without making the slightest reaction to the woman’s state. A state Hermann couldn’t help notice.

“Where’d you find her?” Klima snapped at the policeman, as if he blamed him for the woman’s death.

“In the street,” the policeman answered after pointing toward the spot. He further pointed at the building beside them. “Her name was Berta Ohrensteinová. She lived up there.”

Klima sighed. He sighed with lots of disinterest, and he told Marta, “Write this up for me, will you?”

Without waiting for a reply, Klima lumbered across the street toward a pub that was not only open at this hour but hadn’t actually closed the night before.

All of which Hermann barely noticed. He was too busy gazing at the roof of the five-story apartment building from which the woman had fallen and was a good distance from the street.

“Is something wrong?” Marta asked.

“Wrong?” Hermann replied.

“You don’t think it was a suicide, do you?”

Hermann smiled. “I still can’t hide anything from you.”

“Why don’t you think it was a suicide?”

“I didn’t say that exactly,” he answered with another smile. “Or rather, I didn’t think it. It’s just that, in my experience, when people leap off buildings, they don’t leap far from them, and they typically land face-first.”

“You think she was pushed?”

“Either that or she had a running start and somersaulted in the air.”

Marta nodded toward the woman’s heels. “Not in those shoes.”

Once more, Hermann smiled. “You have an excellent mind for this work, Marta. You should be the detective and Klima should be your assistant.”

“I’d rather be your assistant again.”

“Oh, well, I guess I should be going. It was nice seeing you.”

For the briefest of moments, Hermann hesitated before tipping his hat to Marta and walking off.

Though he hadn’t taken more than a few steps when he saw the man in the checkered cap up the road, the man with all those pink papers underneath his arm. The man he wished he hadn’t seen and didn’t want to approach.

“We could take a look inside her apartment,” Marta uttered.

These words caused Hermann to stop and turn toward her, and he uttered back, “What?”

“We could, couldn’t we, Pepa?” she said to the policeman after she spun toward him.

“Sure thing,” the man told her. “It’s on the third floor. Jirka’s looking through it right now.”

“I don’t know,” Hermann mumbled.

“You know,” declared Marta with a grin.

Hermann returned the grin, and the two walked inside the apartment building and up to the third floor, where they saw another uniformed policeman exiting the woman’s apartment.

“Herr Weiss,” the man gasped with no small amount of shock and reverence as he stood up straight and buttoned his jacket.

“Hello, Jirka,” Hermann said with a smile. I’m sure the kind that would welcome me so many times and one I could see even on that bus. “How are you?”

“Just fine, sir.”

Marta pointed to the door. “Do you mind if we have a look inside?”

“Klidně,” the man answered, not knowing how to express other than in Czech a word that expressed his acquiescence, and he opened the door and let the two inside the unit.

The first thing Hermann did was peek inside a closet door. “You’ll have to notify her husband.”

“How do you know she had a husband?” Marta asked.

Hermann responded by opening the closet fully, exposing coats and hats that belonged to both a man and a woman. He next began looking through some drawers a few steps away while Marta walked inside the living room.

“His name is Eduard,” Hermann called out after he found the man’s passport. “I know him a little. Ana and I have chatted with him a few times at that café on Maisel. A nice man.”

“Take a look at this,” Marta said as she walked up to Hermann with a typed pink slip of paper, one that made him cringe. “The Nazis were sending her to Theresienstadt,” she went on while reading the document. “She was supposed to leave from Hybernské tomorrow morning.”

“Hybernské?” Hermann muttered.

“That’s what the Nazis have renamed Masaryk Station.”

“Where did you find the paper?”

“On a bureau.”

“Was there one for Eduard?”

“I only found this.”

“Strange. They usually send families to the camps together.”

“Perhaps he’s got his slip with him. Perhaps he’s at work or running an errand.”

“Perhaps.”

Suddenly, something caught Hermann’s eye: a thin open book lying facedown on a writing table a handful of steps away. He and Marta walked over to it, and he picked up a copy of Jiří Orten’s Jeremiah’s Tears and glanced at a few of its pages.

“Ana loves his poems,” Hermann murmured with his head shaking, and he read a verse aloud. “‘If there is light in me, it is also in pain, it’s in you, in you as well!’”

Again, Hermann felt happy, as happy as he had in Ana’s arms earlier. The same happy.

“Strange,” Marta remarked while looking around the room.

“What is?” Hermann asked as he put the book on the table.

“It’s strange that a German-speaking, middle-aged Jew would be interested in Czech modernist poetry.”

“You’d be surprised at what a German-speaking, middle-aged Jew would be interested in.”

“No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Well, it sure looks like she killed herself,” Marta exclaimed with exasperation as she shook her head. “First, they were sending her to that camp, and then she was reading that book. Leave it to you to find the one hopeful verse in it. The rest is depressing as hell.”

“You’re right,” Hermann told her with a nod. “It sure looks like suicide.”

“But you still think someone killed her.”

“All I’m certain of right now is that she didn’t jump.”

Marta made no reply, and Hermann continued looking through the apartment. He did until he came upon a window facing Široká Street, where he saw Klima stagger out of the pub and down the road.

“How are you for time today?” Hermann called out.

“I can take as much as I want,” she answered. “Klima’s usually drunk by this time of the day. As long as I type up that report sometime before I go home, it’ll be fine. And I’d like to type the truth. It’d be a nice change.”

“Let’s see what we can find.”

The two left the apartment and the building, and they walked across the street into the pub, where the stench of stale beer was palpable. Along with it, they found a half-dozen groggy patrons and an aging bartender, and Hermann explained to them what had happened to Mrs. Ohrensteinová and asked, “Did anyone see her fall?”

“I did,” a man replied after raising his hand. “I told Honza,” he added while nodding toward the bartender, “and he called it in.”

“Did you know her?” Hermann asked next.

The man shook his head, but another a few tables over said, “I knew her in passing. She was the mother of that poet who was killed . . . what was his name?”

“Jiří Orten?” wondered Hermann.

“That’s the guy.”

“He was killed?” mumbled a third man in astonishment and dismay.

“He got hit by an ambulance,” Hermann let him know, “and the hospital wouldn’t treat him because he was a Jew.”

“That’s a lot of tragedy for one family.”

“It certainly is. Does anyone know her husband? His name is Eduard.”

“He comes in here now and then,” the bartender said. “A nice guy.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“A few days ago, I think.”

“Do you know where he works?”

“He lost his job a while back.”

“When a man loses his job,” interjected one of the patrons while gazing into his beer, “he loses his purpose.”

“I have just one more question for all of you,” Hermann went on. “Did you see anyone exit the building after the woman fell?”

The men all looked at each other, and they all shook their heads. Though one of them mentioned, “There’s a back door in that building. It leads to an alley.”

“Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

With a sigh, Hermann left the pub with Marta, who said, “Everything we learned in there only corroborates that she killed herself.”

“You’re right, Marta,” he acknowledged while experiencing a self-doubt that was alien to him. “Maybe I’ve been wrong about all this.”

“It’d be the first time.”

“Maybe I’ve lost my touch. Along with my purpose.”

“I don’t believe it. Let’s check that back door.”

“We should check the roof first. We should’ve checked it before the apartment. I really have lost my touch.”

“You’re just a little rusty. It’ll all come back to you. You’ll see.”

Without enthusiasm, Hermann nodded, and the two entered the apartment building again and climbed to the roof. As Marta followed the sound of a door opening and closing in the street below, Hermann walked to the ledge from which the woman had fallen.

He saw no evidence of foul play, but he felt the same pull many have from the edge. He felt this intensely. “Just one step,” he told himself while recalling another of Orten’s verses. “I’ve found my fall. And on what? Tears!”

Hermann reached his right foot over the abyss, and he would swear that he should’ve fallen. But something prevented it.

A smile. Ana’s smile. It was everywhere, all around him. The smile he first saw when he stumbled through the doors of U Zlatého Tygra twenty years earlier. The smile that greeted him every morning and sent him to sleep every night. The smile that said he mattered. The smile that was holding him up.

“Herr Weiss!” Marta loudly whispered from the other end of the roof. “Quick!”

The shock of this almost sent Hermann tumbling to the street. But he regained his balance and scurried over the roof to the ledge facing the alley, where he saw the same ambulance from earlier as well as a man speaking to its driver.

“That’s Eduard,” Hermann told Marta as the man staggered toward the back of the ambulance and opened its door. “Do you have something to write down that license plate?”

Hurriedly, Marta yanked out a notepad and a pen from her handbag and wrote down the number. Then, even more hurriedly, the two rushed down the stairs and through the back door of the building.

Just as they turned toward the ambulance, it sped from them.

“Now what?” Marta asked while trying to catch her breath.

Hermann needed a few seconds to catch his own breath before answering. “When we first got here, Klima was surprised to see the ambulance. Why?”

“Things have changed since you left the force. Because it’s so difficult to get spare parts, there are fewer ambulances on the road. But there are more people needing them, so they must give priority to the living ones. Usually, it takes hours before they pick up a corpse, if that.”

Hermann pointed at the building. “There was a phone in the apartment. Let’s call the dispatcher and find out who was driving that ambulance.”

As quickly as they could, the two returned to the Ohrensteins’ flat, where Marta made the call and spoke to the dispatcher for a few minutes before telling Hermann, “The woman insists that the ambulance we saw is out of service and that they haven’t even dispatched one here yet.”

“Give her the description of the two paramedics,” Hermann said, “and ask her if she can identify them.”

Marta did, but the dispatcher insisted that many people there could match the descriptions.

Hermann sighed. “Get the names and addresses of all the paramedics who aren’t working right now and the reasons why they’re not working.”

But there were dozens of these men once the dispatcher had counted all those who worked on different shifts and those who were either sick or on vacation. There were so many that Hermann thought about giving up, as he knew they’d only have time to check out a handful of people.

Instead, he asked for what he hoped would be the smallest subset of suspects and the one most likely involved: those who had called in sick.

There were only four of these people, but their homes were spread across the city. Making the task more difficult was that the two had no car at their disposal, so they had to take the city’s ramshackle network of trams and buses.

This took all day and into the early evening. It was tiring and tedious and most of all quixotic. By the time they had arrived at the home of the third man, they had gotten nowhere.

The man lived on the outskirts of the city, in a northern district called Libeň. As the two came to his apartment door, Hermann took off his jacket and laid it and the yellow star across his arm, just as he had when visiting the other men. He then knocked on the door, and a woman in her thirties answered it.

Hermann showed her his old police ID. “We are looking for Petr Dobrý.”

“That’s my husband,” she replied. “But he’s not here right now.”

“We were told he called in sick today.”

“Yes, but it’s not that kind of sickness.”

“I don’t understand.”

The woman hesitated before looking into Hermann’s eyes and murmuring, “Why don’t you come in.”

The two did, and Mrs. Dobrá served them tea in her living room. “My husband hasn’t been well at all since the accident.”

“What kind of accident?” Hermann asked.

“He accidentally killed someone in his ambulance.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the name of this someone?”

“It, it was Jiří Orten. It wasn’t Peťa’s fault. They’ve got the drivers running around like mad these days. It was bound to happen. It’s just a shame that it happened to Jiří. Peťa did everything he could to help him. He literally begged the people at the hospital to take him, and he didn’t even know who Jiří was at the time. It was only after he died that Peťa read some of his books, and he’s been inconsolable since.”

“Does he know Jiří’s parents?”

“Yes, and they don’t blame him a bit. They even hugged Peťa when we went to Jiří’s funeral. Still, my husband feels so guilty. He does everything he can to help those people. He’s with them today, in fact.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Dobrá,” Hermann said to the woman before turning to Marta. “Maybe you could help her clean up.”

“That isn’t necessary,” Mrs. Dobrá insisted.

“It is,” Marta insisted back, understanding why Hermann wanted her to do this. In the same breath, she picked up the tea service, and she and Mrs. Dobrá stepped into the kitchen.

After watching them disappear, Hermann began rifling through some nearby drawers. But he found nothing interesting. So he opened the closet by the front door and rummaged through Peťa’s coats and jackets. In one that was still damp from the previous evening’s thunderstorm, he found a receipt for a shovel, which he stuffed into his pants pocket as Marta and Mrs. Dobrá returned from the kitchen.

“Thank you again for your time,” Hermann told Mrs. Dobrá with a forced smile as Marta joined him at the front door. “You’ve been more than helpful.”

“Well?” Marta whispered when she and Hermann were far enough down the corridor. “Did you find anything?”

“I think I know where we can find Mr. Dobrý,” Hermann let her know. He did with heaviness in his voice, as he knew this case wasn’t likely to resolve itself so neatly.

The two returned to the tram, and they made their way to the Žižkov section of the city and the New Jewish Cemetery. In the setting sun, they found the ambulance parked outside the gates.

Inside them, a caretaker greeted the two and told them where they could find Jiří Orten’s grave. They found Peťa not far from it. He was in his undershirt digging one grave with another dug one beside it, alongside a cart carrying a pair of pine coffins.

Peťa saw Hermann and Marta approach, and he stopped his shoveling while looking as if he had been expecting them.

Slowly, the two reached him, and he nodded toward Jiří’s tombstone as if they had asked him about it. “If Prague has ten thousand more poets,” he said, “it still will never have another Jiří Orten. And I killed him.”

“It was an accident, Peťa,” Hermann murmured while trying to hold back his tears.

“Tell that to the beautiful words,” Peťa growled as he continued his shoveling. “Tell it to all the beautiful words he’ll never write.”

“What happened today?”

“I promised the Ohrensteins two things this morning. The first was that I would give them some morphine to make it easier for them to jump. The problem was that it didn’t help. They still couldn’t do it.”

“So, how’d she die?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. But I heard them arguing before she fell. Maybe she goaded him into pushing her. Maybe it was an accident. It doesn’t seem to matter.”

“How’d he die?”

“When I found him in the ambulance after I parked here, there were empty bottles on the floor. But if you ask me, he died of a broken heart.”

“What was the second thing you promised them?”

“To bury them next to their boy, and that’s the only thing that does matter.”

Hermann had nothing more to say, and I don’t think he could’ve said any more even if he had. So he just put a pebble on Jiří’s tombstone, which we Jews do to show that the dead are remembered, and he and Marta walked off.

“Aren’t we going to have him arrested?” she asked while nodding back toward Peťa.

Hermann thought about it and answered, “The only thing they’d arrest him for is befriending Jews.”

“What am I supposed to put in my report?”

“That you were right all along. It was a suicide.”

Glumly, the two returned to Old Town, during which time there was only quiet between them. They didn’t say a word until they said their goodbyes. They said them in front of the same door where they had earlier said their hellos. Like then, they hugged too.

Hermann afterward went home. Again, he crossed the ancient cobblestones, and again he tipped his hat to Jan Hus. Though this time with the silence of the beautiful words pounding inside his head. It got louder and louder until he thought it’d bring him to his knees.

Somehow he made it to his apartment and the light in his pain: Ana, who was waiting for him in her rocking chair. She was waiting with one of her smiles. The smile that refused to let him fall.

This wiped away his gloom, and nothing could bring it back, even when a slip of pink paper came sliding under their door.

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the end

thank you

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Thank you for taking the time to read my story. You can contact me at colinjcohen@icloud.com.

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You can find me as well at https://colinjcohen.github.io.

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Also available: Last Jew in Prague

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