In this enthralling, beautifully crafted novel, Jill Paton Walsh creates the intersecting worlds of families and friends in a fictional small town in Eastern Europe. Beginning in 1945 with a young girl whose home is destroyed by war, the novel traces the effects of the Communist Party on the lives of ordinary people. By the time the Berlin Wall comes down almost fifty years later, those lives will have been battered, broken, and ultimately made whole.

A Desert in Bohemia

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By Jill Paton Walsh

G. K. Hall & Company

Copyright © 2001 Jill Paton Walsh
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0783894309

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Chapter One

ELISKA, 1945 —

The forest edge was thick with the mist of early morning when the woman staggered out of the last line of trees, and stood there, staring. A very young woman; one might say a girl. She was blood-boltered from head to foot, her hair thickly matted in a helmet of coagulated blood, her clothes sodden and clinging with it. A bird flew up from above her with clattering wing beats, and she shrank back between the trees, with her teeth chattering in her head. But when the silence had re-formed she stepped forward again. Into an overgrown, half-vanished garden white with frost, with the mist swirling over it, the house in the garden only faintly visible to her.

    It was a white palace, engraved all over with sgraffito decorations, with gods and goddess, huntsmen, running hounds, rearing horsemen, and fleeing chimerical beasts. The plastered walls and the mist melted into one another, so that it seemed to the shivering girl that the pictures had been drawn in black ink upon the surface of the air, that the whole phantasmagoria was floating airborne ahead of her.

    She frowned and blinked. The building rose into golden light, the light of dawn, still level, passing above the forest, not probing yet between the trees, but bathing in clarity the upper storeys, the blazing glass of the ranks of molten windows, the steep red dope of the tiled roof. The clear light attached the graphic huntsmen to the walls. Up there gods and grotesque angels mingled with the hunt, and trumpeters sounded silent horns.

    The girl lingered in the freezing shadows, working her way round the garden. Here and there were topiary cones, sprouting untidily, and heraldic beast deformed by neglect. She flitted from one to another, taking cover, watching. Between the topiary, a sheet of rough grass carpeted the ground. Everything was thick and blurred under a prickly coating of frost. She stood for a long time looking at a solid wooden door, at ground level. There was a kitchen yard to the right of the door, a courtyard of modest outbuildings, with a woodpile, a cowshed and a chicken-run. A belated cock crowed, and she jumped back into the darkness under the trees.

    When the sun rose a little further the shadows would be shot through with sunlight; she could not stay hidden where she stood. At last she managed to run for the door. She was gasping and moaning with flight as she ran, clear across the open ground, to grab the iron bell pull beside the doorway arch and tug at it urgently. She heard the bell ringing somewhere at a distance inside. No-one came. She began to tug desperately at the bell, setting up a faintly audible clamour far within. The racket died away to silence. Still no-one came. The girl sank to the ground on the threshold, a kind of groaning escaping her clenched teeth. To the unmoving, iron-studded oak baulks of the door she said, 'Let me in', but she said it softly, without hope.

    She might have been there for an hour, slowly freezing to death, for the glass-clear sunlight seemed to have no power to thaw, when there were sounds in the forest from the direction in which she had come. There were clumsy, blundering footfalls on the dry branches of the forest floor, and distant voices, calling. Then a brief crackle of gunfire. She rose to her knees, and with her bare knuckles she pounded on the door, wordlessly wailing. She leaned her blood-striped cheek against it. And the moment she leaned against it, it opened; it had not been locked, not latched, even. She fell through it, and tumbled head first down three steps into a warm kitchen, landing spread-eagled on the flagstone floor. Under its own weight the door swung closed behind her, silently, and not quite heavily enough to tip the latch. The gift crawled towards the massive iron range on the other side of the room, where the embers were still bright in the fire-basket, and sat close by it on the floor while her frozen limbs burned as they lost their numbness, and her clothes lost their wet clinging, and began to reek like a butcher's shop and stiffen with a loathsome crust. Very slowly she stopped shivering, and started to swing between a moment of sleep and a juddering awakening, stung by fear.

    A cry roused her to instant terrified alert. It was indoors; in the very room she trespassed in. A mewing, pizzicato, tremulous cry. She found the baby wrapped up in a blanket, cradled in a dough trough lying out of sight under the table. At once she noticed the feeding bottle standing in a pan of water drawn to the edge of the stove; set to warm, ready. She hesitated, letting the cry increase in urgency, expecting that it would bring someone from the house beyond the kitchen — whoever had prepared the milk. Minutes passed; then she pulled the trough out from concealment and lifted the child. It was very small; only weeks old, she couldn't tell how old. It was soaking in its own urine. And howling lustily now. Looking round she saw that squares of unhemmed linen were hanging on a line across the chimney alcove. She pulled off the wet nappy, and swaddled the child — a girl child — in a dry one. Then she sat in a chair by the fire, covered her lap with a linen square, and gave it the bottle of milk.

    As the child sucked, the girl grew less frightened. Its total helplessness protected her — even a trespasser does not need an excuse for feeding a hungry child. It waved its hands about aimlessly, as though they were fronds floating in a pool; it made little snuffling noises, and when it burped its mouth brimmed with milk. It looked at its benefactor with dark undirected eyes.

    `You don't care who I am, little one,' the girl said, and holding the babe in the crook of her arm she went looking for a dry lining for the makeshift cradle. Somehow she didn't feel like opening the kitchen door, and going further into the house, so she made do with an old curtain she found folded in the pantry. It was as she returned to the kitchen, bringing the curtain, that she noticed the bread crock standing on a shelf above the stove. A billow of dough was swelling up in it, and beginning to ooze over the edges in a thick, slow-motion wave. With an exclamation, the girl reached up to knock the dough down again, and when she had settled the baby back in the cradle she found the loaf tins on the pantry shelf, and kneaded and cut the dough into loaves. Six loaves. She set them to rise in a row on the top of the stove, and saw that the fire was almost out; only a few embers glowed in a bed of ashes. So she fetched wood from the pile, and made up the fire.

    To do that, of course, she had to step outside. She stood in the shadow of the doorway arch for a long time before stepping into the sunshine. The sun was now high overhead; the skin of shadow thrown across the garden by the tall trees had retreated, and lay some way distant under the forest verge. She frowned at the darkness between the trunks, trying to see what might lurk there, but all the while her ears were battered by a frantic lowing from the barnyard that lay beyond the woodpile to her left, in the curtilage of the great house.

    A flock of chickens came flapping and squawking to her knees when she stepped through the gate to the yard. She shooed her way through them to where the cow in the byre stood with swollen udder, mooing in pain. The girl looked round for the pail and the stool, and milked the cow. Then she led it out to graze in the garden on a long tether, found the grain barrel and fed the hens. And returned to her dying fire with an armful of logs.

    At dusk the loaves had been baked, the babe had been fed twice more, and the cow led back into the byre. She had washed the floor, swabbing away the smears of blood her own clothes had left when she fell at the foot of the steps. She sat down with one of the six loaves, and a sliver of cheese from a wedge standing wrapped in muslin in the pantry. She looked at the spigot in the beer barrel, but allowed herself only water.

    Only when full darkness fell, and she was still alone, did she go out into the moonlight, peel off her rigid and scratching clothes, and stand under the pump in the yard to wash herself, gasping, under the spurts of cold water, dragging at the clots of blood in her hair, using her fingers as a coarse comb. Inside again she looked at her armful of clothes, and with an impulse of loathing thrust them through the lid into the glowing fire in the stove. Then she opened the door to the rest of the house and walked boldly through it, stark naked.

    She wandered through the darkened rooms, stepping through pools of moonlight and seeing ghostly furniture, faint paintings on the walls, faint finery everywhere. Blind chandeliers glimmered passively in every room. The ceilings were caverns of darkness overhead. There were rooms where the walls were covered with weapons, with guns and crossed halberds, and fans of swords. There was a faintly pervasive dark smell. Glass cases of stuffed game birds, of hares and boars, lined a corridor which was forested with branching antlers from the heads of glass-eyed stags, staring fixedly, preserved not as in life but in the terror of the moment of death.

    The girl marched doggedly past these shadowy frights, ears tuned to the slightest sound. She made no sound herself, going barefoot, and she heard nothing except the wind rattling a loose casement somewhere behind her. She turned a corner, and entered the wing of the house that was away from the moonlight. It was so thickly dark that she stopped, and then groping found a switch, and turned on the lights.

    A brilliant, golden room sprang into view. It was huge: as large as a field, and tall, with painted ceilings full of gesticulating figures seated on cloud cushions, and fat little child angels flying around like bumble-bees. The walls were made of mirrors in furiously elaborate golden frames. Gilt chairs stood against the walls. On a daïs at the far end was a grand piano with a red cloth over it. The girl suddenly shuddered at her own nakedness. But they must have had clothes, the people who had all this — and unable to bear walking slowly into the harshly sparkling light, she ran, and then halfway, frightened by the sense of movement, by the feeling of a crowd of flitting watchers following her, she whimpered softly, and came to a halt. But it was only herself; multiplied and remultiplied as the mirrors reflected each other, so that the barroom extended to infinity on either side of her. Extended to infinity and filled with the colour of human flesh, with the length and angles of human limbs, a crowd of stark ghosts like the damned in a church painting, like the overlapping dead in the pit, brought upright again, and flocking for judgement.

    All the shining selves in the ranks of mirrors had also stopped, suspended. She looked at herself, back and front, minored before and behind. There was not a mark on her body; not so much as a scratch. Not a drop of the blood she had come steeped in had been her own.

The lights dimmed as she stood there, flickered and went out. She stumbled on half-blinded while her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. But of course they had clothes, the people who had all this; they had presses and drawers full of them, and in the end she found some, by which time she was blue and hen-fleshed all over, and nearly in despair. But eventually there was a moonlit bedroom, a wardrobe of women's clothes. She took a blouse first and then fawn slacks. They were too long for her, she had to roll them up at the ankles. She gasped at the relief as she covered herself, finding socks and then a sweater. The shoes were all too small for her, but she found sandals with straps that would loosen. There was a dressing chest with a cheval mirror standing on it and a silver tray holding knick-knacks. There were matches and a stub of candle in a candlestick. She struck a match and lit the candle. She used the nail scissors to hack out the remaining blood cloths from her hair, leaving it crudely ragged. On impulse she took a silk square, decorated with game birds, and tied it round her shorn head.

    Then she returned to her inexorable taskmasters, the baby and the fire. But when she opened the door to the kitchen she found it was no longer deserted; a man was standing by the fire with his back to her. He swung round as he heard her step and pointed a gun at her. She didn't flinch, she only stared at him, taking in his wild and filthy appearance, the ill-fitting clothes — khaki trousers and blue military jacket — the five-day beard, the young face, hollow-eyed and twitching.

    `Who are you?' he demanded.

    `Eliska,' she said. But the words that had been ready for hours — `I have done only what was needful; I have taken only the least that I needed ...' — were pre-empted.

    `Where are the other?' he asked.

`Not here. I am alone.'

`Are you one of us?' he asked.

    She thought with the speed of light; danger made her careful. If he meant to ask did she belong in this house, was she family or servant here, then the question betrayed him. If he needed to ask, he could no more belong here than she did. So she said, `Yes.' He nodded, and put down his gun on the table.

    `The others won't be long,' he said. `And they will be hungry.'

    `I can cook,' she said. 'But you must help me.'

    `I am a partisan and a patriot,' he said. `Not a cook.'

    `Do you eat?' she asked. She found herself quite unafraid of him in spite of the gun.

    `Comrade,' he said, swaggering slightly, `one for all and all for one. From each according to his ability. Don't you remember? And if you can cook ...'

    `You can chop wood and bring water,' she said. It was in her mind that if he once stepped into the yard she could lock the door against him. `There's an axe in the yard,' she said.

    But when he stepped outside, and the sound of wood splitting clunked through the open door, she stood frowning at the light outside, and thought again. With the axe, he could probably break in again, and leave a door that could not then be bolted against worse than he.

    `How many others are there?' she asked him, when he reappeared with his arms full of wood for the stove.

    `Six in our group, Comrade. I expected them to be here by now.'

    `So seven to cook for?' she asked him, and added hesitantly, `Sir.'

    `You should call me comrade,' he said.

    `Why?' she asked.

    `Because we shall all be comrades in the new brotherhood,' he said. `Things are going to be quite different, Comrade Eliska, from now on. The fascists are defeated — they can't run away fast enough — and we shall have a new people's republic. We shall all be equal; we shall all be free. Everything we have hoped for and fought for will come true.'

    `Perhaps,' she said.

    He turned on her with blazing eyes. `I know it is hard to have faith, Comrade, to believe that the suffering and oppression are over, that we shall follow the example of the mighty Soviet Union, and put an end to exploitation and injustice. But you must have faith; the old world is in ruins; everything will be different now.'

    She returned his gaze with a frozen and unreadable expression. `How do you know?'

    `Because there has never been anything like us in the history of the world,' he said simply.

    `When do you think thee others will arrive?' she asked.

    `I was expecting them by now,' he said, uneasily. `Soon.'

    `Hadn't you better go and look for them?' she asked. She saw him shudder at the thought.

    `Why did you separate?' she asked.

    `They sent me on; they said they would come when they were finished he said.

    `Finished what?'

    `Filling in the pit,' he said, gagging.

    It was her turn to shudder. She stared at him. `Were you one of them?' she said.

    `Oh, no,' he said. `It wasn't us. We found it. It had to be covered up.'

    `Hard work,' she said. `Why didn't you stay and help, Comrade?'

    `I was sick,' he said, in a whisper, a red flush colouring his unshaven cheek.

    She saw suddenly how young he was; perhaps only eighteen — perhaps younger than she was herself. Though she herself was now unimaginably old. Something had detached her from herself, for she looked coldly at a young man whom she might have pitied, sympathized with — when? In an earlier life, six months ago. She looked at him as one might look at an animal, assessing the danger of it, and the possible use. He has a thin face, with a long mouth and large eyes — a face on which expressions moved freely and passed as a baby, but for the shadows under his eyes; those had clearly seen something to jolt him.

    `I wish they would come,' he said.

    `Go and look for them,' she suggested.

    He shook his head. `In the darkness? In a forest?'

    `You're cold,' she said, watching him shiver. `There's bread and cheese and onions. There are beds.'

    `I'm afraid to sleep,' he said. `I'll wait up for them.'

    She shrugged. She put the bread and cheese in front of him on the table, picked up the sleeping baby and the feeding bottle, and withdrew.

* * *

The great house was cold. Cold ashes filled the fireplaces in the bedrooms; the unnatural size of the rooms, the acres of floor the heights of the gaudy ceilings cast a chill. Once darkness filled the windows the rooms seemed uneasy, afraid of watchers out of doors. Eliska found a bed with curtains, crept into it with the baby in the crook of her arm, and drew the heavy embroidered fabric round herself. When the feeding bottle was sucked dry she settled down to sleep with the baby beside her. It made little wuffling noises, and the hollow in the top of its head smelled sweet. How could its mother have left it? Perhaps its mother lay in the pit. Perhaps she had gone at gunpoint, and pushed the baby in its blanket out of sight under the table, just in time. Perhaps she thought its chances were better under the kitchen table in a deserted palace than they were wherever she was going. Perhaps she was right. While I'm here, thought Eliska, the baby will be all right. She thought of this as a very temporary thing. While I'm here ... she thought, falling deeply asleep.

    Of course, one bottle of milk wouldn't keep the child quiet all night. In the darkness Eliska had to get up and return to the kitchen, groping her way by memory and whatever moonlight glimmered through the unshuttered windows. The kitchen was warm; the soldier slept in an armchair by the fire, until her creeping movements woke him. He sprang awake with a start that shook him trunk and limbs, and fell out of the chair, stumbling towards the gun on the table. Before he could see that it was only her they heard gunfire crackling outside, only a little way off. Both their eyes travelled at once to the bolt behind the door. But how many other doors to this house were there and were they all locked?

    `Who is it?' she asked him. `Fighting, out there? Is it your gang?

    He shrugged. `We are behind Red Army lines,' he said `I though the fighting was all over, but ...'

    He watched her while she watered the milk, and warmed it, and poured it carefully into the feeding bottle. She did these things as though her life depended on them, not just the baby's. She seemed to be sleepwalking, whereas he was so jumpy he could barely close his eyes for a minute.

    `Who is the father?' he asked her.

    `I don't know,' she said.

    When she left the kitchen and returned to the curtained bed upstairs he followed her.

    `Eliska,' he said, `let me come too.'

    She did not resist him because he was so vividly afraid, so much in need of comforting. Whereas she was the living dead, who could feel nothing at all.

    Later she would not be able to remember how many days they spent alone before the others came. It was days or weeks. There were several nights when gunfire in the woods disturbed their sleep. His name was Jiri Syrovy, and he had joined a group of partisans in the mountains somewhere east of Comenia, trying to sabotage bridges that the fascists needed for their retreat. They were supposed to be working with the Soviets, and there was a communist with them who had taught them what to think. But somehow Jiri's unit had become lost. And now he had lost his unit. She did not ask him much because it brought on a shaking fit when he thought of things. He said he was nineteen, but she thought he was younger.

    One night the cow was stolen, and all the hens. Once there was no milk the baby's frantic cries of hunger tormented them.

    `Haven't you any milk of your own for it?' he asked her.

    She shook her head. `For her,' she said. `It's a girl.'

    But still he didn't ask the important question. He looked sagacious and put an arm round her shoulder. `You mustn't be surprised,' he said, `and you mustn't blame yourself. It happens to women in war. When they killed my mother', he added conversationally, `my sister's milk dried up. She cried away all the juice in her body, I think.'

    `What happened to the baby?'

    `It starved. It was a child of rape, Eliska, like yours.'

    `I don't want this one to starve,' said Eliska. `We will ask for milk in the village.'

    Jiri took his gun. They chose a moment just after dawn, and boldly left the castle in the other direction from the one by which they had originally entered out through the grand front door, which faced across a sweep of gravel greening with stunted grass, to a wrought-iron gate. Beyond they could see houses, and the tower of a church with a little rounded blue dome on top, and a square with the dry basin of a public fountain. They walked very slowly across to the gate went through it. Nobody was moving in the street; the houses had broken windows and smashed doors. They had left the howling baby behind them and all around them was a thick silence.

    `Where is everybody?' he said

    `Hiding,' she thought.

    `This has all been ransacked,' he said. `We'll be lucky to find a single crust.'

    They began to walk round. But only some of the housed had been smashed. Others were nearly intact, except for an upturned chair, a broken dish on the floor. Some still had blankets on the beds, curtains blowing to and fro, shredding themselves against the broken window panes, pictures a little crooked on the walls. The fires were all out and cold and the larders were full of scuttling rats. When the people left they had not taken their food, but now the bread was green, the butter was rancid and the pans of milk curdled and acrid. In one kitchen there were bullet holes in the wall, and the blood on the floor, but no body.

    They walked on, taking one turning after another, until they had walked every street in the little place. No-one. No cow, no goat. No hens. Behind a hen house Jiri found an axe. `Come on,' he said. `In bad times people hide food.'

    He entered a house and began to hack up the floor-boards. In the third house he ravaged he found a bag of oatmeal in a tin under the floor, and they carried it off.

    She made gruel, thin and sweetened with a little sugar from the stores in the pantries. She used some and hid some. The pallid liquid pacified the baby and perhaps eased its frantic need, for it slept a little.

    `I'll keep looking,' Jiri told her. `I'll find more things tomorrow.'

    `Where did everyone go?' she wondered.

    `There was a German bible in one of those houses,' said Jiri. `I expect they ran away.'

    `I expect you buried them,' she said under her breath.

In a previous life she must have known about horses, for she caught herself thinking `a horse does that.' She could remember nothing about anything before the morning she ran out of the forest. But remembering nothing did not feel to her like a blank, like an obliterating fog, not in the least as if something had been forgotten; her mind bucked and shied away from whatever it was, not as though she couldn't, but as though she wouldn't remember. A strong instinct told her it might be better not to try.

    The result was that she wasn't good at answering Jiri's questions. And then, of course, they weren't really the right questions. He asked who were her family? Where was she from? Would she go back after the war? He did not ask where are they now? She knew very well where they all were, but ... `a horse does that.'

    Jiri talked a lot. She had found him a clean shirt, but he liked to wear his mixed and battered uniform. There was a bloodstain on the sleeve of the jacket, but she didn't mention it. It was amazing what he knew, for such a young person. He knew what would happen to Comenia now — it would be governed for the people. The ordinary working people in all the countries that had been at war would unite to build a new world.

    `Workers in Russia?' she asked.

    `They are our brethren. They have shown us what can be done.'

    `Workers in Germany?'

    He hesitated. `The workers have no country. We shan't be bothered with national boundaries,' he said. `Those are invented by the old regime to divide the brethren and deflect their loyalties,'

    His feverish enthusiasm astonished her. His night frights were terrible, as she knew all too well, when she held his pitifully thin ribcage tightly in her arms and he sobbed and shook, and woke gabbling in some language she didn't know, sometimes sobbing and shuddering even as he entered her, and achieved a few moments of quiet sleep afterwards. But by day, with his precious uniform jacket hanging loosely on his frame, he seemed to have kept intact both faith and hope. A new world had been paid for, paid for horribly and in advance, and would be delivered any minute — she could see it light up his narrow face, his deep-set eyes, and long expressive mouth.

    For his part he was amazed at how little she knew. Whoever had recruited her to the party had done a poor job of informing her. Of course, she was just a woman, and there was a war on; was it still on? Hard to tell in this lonely castle, deep in the forest. He was troubled about her. Not that he was sleeping with her, that caused him no worry; he foraged for food and kept a gun handy; she cooked and provided sex. One for all and all for one ... but when you slept with a comrade you got fond of her. He couldn't get to the bottom of it; she knew nothing. She said, `I had forgotten that,' whenever he told her that good communists thought or knew this or that. Of course it occurred to him that she might not really be a communist. Perhaps she had just said she was because of his gun. That didn't matter — it didn't matter why someone saw the light. And it would better for her if she were a communist when the others turned up. Sooner or later someone would have to teach her, and he had none too much to do, waiting.

    Something must have gone wrong, he realized. They had sent him on ahead many days ago to find food and shelter, and he had done so, and waited for them ... He had not done anything wrong, he told himself.

    Nevertheless, it was time to take Eliska in hand. He sat her down in the evening, at the table in the kitchen where they spent most of their time. It was the only warm room in the place. By now the fire was of floorboards from the ransacked houses because the woodpile was shrinking, and he did not know how to fell a tree. He might have to learn. He took from his inside pocket the battered little book that he carried with his tiny hoard of money, and a picture of his mother — the kind of little picture on card that is called a carte de visite.

    His book was the Manifesto of the Communist Party, dated 1848. He began to read it to her.

`The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles ... The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal patriarchal idyllic relations. It has piteously torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors" and has left no other nexus between the people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment" ... it has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value ...'

    At this point the baby began to cry. Eliska got up, rocked it in her arms and gave it a finger dipped in honey to suck. `She's cold,' she said. Somewhere behind her she must have known about babies, as well as about horses. And bread. She put the cradle nearer the fire, and returned to her chair, sitting in it hands folded, while he continued:

`... and in place of the numberless indefeasible charted freedoms has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe — it has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet into its paid wage labourers ...'

    `I don't understand much of this, to be honest, Jiri,' Eliska said. `It's all about the past, anyway. Doesn't the book say about what is to happen now?'

    Jiri turned the pages. `It isn't the historical analysis that matters,' he said, `it's the programme. You are quite right, Eliska. Comrade Eliska. Here it says: "In bourgeois society the past dominates the present; in communist society the present dominates the past." Try this bit: "We communists have been reproached with the desire to abolish private property ..."'

    `People need to own things,' remarked Eliska.

    `Yes, yes, the widow needs her hens. We are not talking about hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has already to a great extent destroyed it ...'

    `And war,' she said.

    `What?'

    `War. There wasn't any industry for three days' walk from where I lived. The war is what destroyed it.'

    `And where was that, Eliska?'

    `I don't remember,' she said, wonderingly.

    He paused. `Would you like more?' he asked her.

    `I don't understand what you are reading to me,' she said. `Just tell me about it.'

    `There will be no private property,' he said. `No rich and poor. The proletariat will take over. Then, when the causes of class antagonism have been removed, there will be no more classes, or rather, only one class. The system will take from each of us according to our abilities, and give us in return what we need. The workers have no country, Eliska. National antagonism will be a thing of the past. There will be no need for wars ...'

    `But how could such things happen?' she asked him. He was reading to her by the light of a candle, for the lights had not worked since that first evening when the ballroom had glowed briefly into haunted life. The candle flame put a bright flickering highlight into his eyes, glowed diffusely across his features, and lost interest in the scene behind him, so that he looked like one of the saints in the dark pictures upstairs.

    `We will abolish property in land, and use all rents for the public good,' he told her. `We will abolish all rights of inheritance. We will confiscate the property of all emigrants and rebels ...'

    And that is how Count Michael found things when he came home. He had not known what to expect. His house was still standing, almost unscathed. And in the kitchen there was a sleeping baby, and two young strangers studying the Communist Manifesto by candlelight.

He did not come through the outside door, but from within the house. He took them totally by surprise. Jiri jumped up, tipping over his chair, and seized his pistol.

    `Who the hell are you?' he asked.

    `I might rather ask you that,' the stranger said, `since this is my house.'

    `This is yours?' said Jiri. He raised and pointed his pistol. The newcomer stared at him coldly, unflinching.

    Eliska was taking note of him. A handsome man, in his forties. Dark hair, touched with grey. He was in her eyes very strangely dressed; neither in uniform, nor in the haphazard clothes of the very poor, of refugees, but in a well-cut civilian suit and a silk shirt, with the tie loosened at the collar and askew. Eliska had never seen a person in the flesh dressed like this. But he was haggard; he looked tired and was steadying himself on the door frame. She said to him brazenly, `Are you hungry? Sit down. There's stew in the pot.'

    `I think I will,' he said, `since the food too, I suppose, is mine.'

    `We are thieves, do you mean?' said Jiri. He was tense, angry, Eliska thought. His fingers twitched on the stock of his pistol. It crossed her mind that he might shoot the newcomer.

    `Is this food yours?' she said, having grasped that Jiri could be diverted into discussion rather easily. `The flour for the dumplings is yours. The onions were stolen from the garden plot of an absent household. But Jiri shot the rabbit and I skinned it. Jiri fetched wood for the fire and I cooked it. I should say it was ours.'

    Jiri put the gun down on the table, beside his own plate. `Eliska, this is just what I was telling you!' he said. `This — this bourgeois trash — thinks that he owns the product of other people's labour! This is what we must do away with!'

    A funny lopsided smile appeared on the newcomer's rice. `Before the war I would have been offended by someone who called me bourgeois,' he said. He was not looking at Jiri; his eyes followed Eliska as she fetched a plate, tilted the stewpot and scraped it out to the bottom to fill the plate, and brought it to him. The moment it was in front of him he seized the spoon, and ate rapidly and ravenously, head bent down to shorten the journey between mouth and food. Both his companions knew that state. They were silent while he ate.

    At last there was only the sound of his spoon drawn round and round the empty dish. He put the spoon down on the table and looked at Eliska.

    `There isn't any more,' she said.

    `Ah,' he said. He looked at Jiri. `The rabbit was mine

Continues...

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Excerpted from A Desert in Bohemia by Jill Paton Walsh Copyright © 2001 by Jill Paton Walsh. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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