The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

and Miroslav clapped his knee as the voice on the radio introduced an aria from Parsifal.

      Aleks still turned the piece in his hand. He rubbed the rough bearded face with the pad of his thumb, the worn crown, the wooden eyes.

      “It’s the king, isn’t it?”

      “It is.”

      “Why did he give you the king?”

      “I don’t know why.”

      Aleks looked up into his father’s face. His big eyes dark but open to the world, darker against the palest skin and the ghosts of veins at his temples.

      “Why did he get to keep the pieces?”

      “I don’t understand.”

      “You said he carved them with his friends. But he kept all the pieces. Till he gave you one.”

      You cannot tell such a child all the truth. Such a child cannot hear it and remain a child. So you cannot say, “Because he was the last one left alive. He was the solitary survivor. The one who pulled his mask on first, the one who burrowed deepest in the slime, the one who didn’t live just long enough after the concussion subsided to see the pair of his legs tangled on the far side of the trench before he whimpered and bled out all his blood.” You must instead blink and stare across the emptiness of words between you and innocence and say finally, because after all something must finally be said, “I don’t know why.”

      One evening at dinner Aleks had a story to tell.

      “Three men came to my school today.”

      “Are you such ruffians,” Miroslav smiled, “that it requires six extra hands to teach you?”

      “They didn’t teach us. One only watched. He watched the other two. One man had a notebook and he wrote down what the first man said.”

      “And what did the first man say?”

      “Numbers.”

      “Only numbers?”

      “Yes.”

      “Why was this?”

      “The man had an instrument.” Aleks chewed some potato. “In German, ‘why’ is ‘warum.’ Isn’t that a funny word? Like an engine. Like the engine of a car.”

      “Aleks,” Alena said. “You eat like a farmer. Chew with your mouth closed.”

      “You have one like it, Grandfather. With two legs, measuring legs. To tell the distance apart.”

      “Calipers?”

      “Yes. I think. Calipers.”

      Trn and the old man glanced at one another.

      “And what did the men measure?”

      “Just one man did the measuring.” Aleks took another bite, chewed. “Our heads.”

      Alena saw them before they could shift their eyes away again.

      “How can I chew with a closed mouth?” Aleks asked. He swallowed. “They measured our eyes and noses. The metal was cold but not sharp. Not really. They measured us all, all over our heads. Franto said it hurt but I didn’t think so.”

      Aleks’s tines shrieked against the china and Trn winced.

      “They moved up and down the rows. Warum did the men measure our heads?”

      He looked into each face, stopped at Trn’s. Alena looked at him too before she stared at her father.

      “Daddy, why are you watching your food?”

      Finally Miroslav said, “You know the Germans. They are great ones for numbers. For information. Data their scientists call it. They are great collectors of data. They travel the world, taking the measure of everything. For their sciences.”

      “Will the man come to measure your heads?”

      Trn watched the cabbage congeal to his plate but it felt hung in his throat.

      He coughed, said, “Have you finished your lessons for tomorrow?”

      “I have one column of maths.”

      “Best to finish it now. The electricity may go out and you don’t want to have to do your sums in the dark again.”

      The boy furrowed potatoes with his fork.

      “Is this politics?”

      “No,” Trn said. “Only mathematics.”

      When the room was quiet, when they could hear Aleks telling over figures to himself at the kitchen table, Alena said, “I want to know why they are measuring his head.”

      Trn glared, leaned to close the door.

      “You know very well why,” her father hissed.

      “Tell me then.”

      “To see what they are going to do with him. To see if he is Aryan. Or a Jew.”

      “He is no Jew, they know that. They can see he is no Jew.”

      “So you don’t have to worry about that,” Trn said.

      “All the Jews already have their stars. The old quarter is the Milky Way, that’s what everyone calls it. Nobody in his family has a J stamped in his identity card. So why then? Why this measuring?”

      “Because they can read our blood,” her father said. “If we aren’t Aryan, if we are too much Slav to be made German, then we are to be sent to arctic Siberia when Russia is conquered. This land will become another gau of the Drittes Reich.”

      “How do you know this?”

      “Everyone knows this.” His thumb jerked toward the black curtain behind him. “Everyone. Haven’t you listened? Those trucks that come to examine us for consumption, these mobile clinics, what do you suppose they’re really doing? Think. They won’t let Czechs marry Germans without their approval. They study pictures of them naked before they decide. So you tell me, what is the end of that? The end of registering our noses and indexing the color of our eyes to a patch on a board? Why does everyone suddenly need a new identity card since Heydrich came? We are being numbered. Can’t you see? Weighed and divided. We are less than an inferior race. We are a foreign body, a vermin. A bacillus.”

      She rose and snatched the plates into a clatter. A knife rang against the tile of the floor as she pressed past Trn into the kitchen. In the sink water splashed and drowned Aleks’s counting.