You are strong, you are powerful, you are pleased with yourself. You have killed people and you are going to kill many, many more. Everything you do succeeds. Nothing can resist you. In the space of barely ten years you have become “the most dangerous man in the Third Reich.” Nobody makes fun of you anymore. They don’t call you the Goat now—they call you the Blond Beast. You have undeniably moved up the hierarchy of animal species. Everyone is afraid of you, even your boss—a bespectacled little hamster, albeit a dangerous one.
You are sitting comfortably in your Mercedes convertible and the wind is whipping your face. You are going to work; you work in a castle. All the inhabitants of the country where you live are your subjects: you have the power of life and death over them. If you decide to, you could kill them all—every last one. In fact, that might be exactly what ends up happening.
But you won’t be there to see it, because you are headed for other adventures. You have new challenges to face. Later today, you will fly away and abandon your kingdom. You came to restore order in this country and you have succeeded brilliantly. You have made an entire people submit to you; you have led the Protectorate with an iron fist; you have governed, you have ruled, you have reigned. You leave to your successor the tough task of perpetuating your legacy. They must: prevent any resurgence of the Resistance movement that you crushed; keep the entire machinery of Czech industry at the service of the German war effort; continue the process of Germanization, which you began and whose forms you defined.
Thinking of your past and your future, you are overwhelmed by an immense feeling of self-satisfaction. You tighten your grip on the leather bag that rests on your knees. You think of Halle, of the navy, of France, which awaits you, of the Jews you will kill, of this immortal Reich whose most solid foundations you have laid. But you forget the present. Is your policeman’s instinct blunted by the daydreams that fill your mind as the Mercedes speeds along? You do not see, in this man carrying a raincoat over his arm on a hot spring day and crossing the road in front of you, you do not see in him the present that is catching up with you.
What’s he doing, this imbecile?
He stops in the middle of the road.
Turns to face the car.
Looks into your eyes.
Pushes aside his raincoat.
Uncovers a machine gun.
Points the gun at you.
Aims.
And fires.
He fires, and nothing happens. I can’t resist cheap literary effects. Nothing happens. The trigger sticks—or perhaps it gives way too easily and clicks on nothing. Months of preparation only for the Sten—that English piece of shit—to jam. Heydrich is there, at point-blank range, at his mercy, and Gabčík’s weapon fails. He squeezes the trigger and the Sten, instead of spraying bullets, remains silent. Gabčík’s fingers tighten on the useless hunk of metal.
The car has stopped, and time has stopped too. The world no longer spins, nobody breathes. The two men in the car are paralyzed. Only the tram keeps rolling as if nothing were wrong, except for the faces of a few passengers, frozen in the same expression—because they’ve seen what’s happening: nothing. The screech of wheels on steel rails rips through the petrified moment. Nothing happens, except in Gabčík’s head. In his head, everything whirls, unimaginably fast. If only I could have been inside his head at this precise instant, I am absolutely convinced I would have enough material to fill hundreds of pages. But I wasn’t, and I don’t have the faintest idea what he felt. Examining my own safe little life, I can’t think of a single situation that would allow me to imagine even a watered-down version of what filled Gabčík’s mind. A feeling of surprise, of fear, with a torrent of adrenaline surging through his veins, as if all the floodgates of his body had opened at the same time.
“We who perhaps one day shall die, proclaim man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant.” I spit on Saint-John Perse, but I don’t necessarily spit on his poetry. It is this verse that I choose now to pay homage to these men, even if they are, in truth, above all praise.
There’s a theory that the Sten was concealed in a bag that Gabčík had filled with dry grass. It seems a strange idea. If the police checked him, how would he explain the fact that he was walking around town with a bag full of hay? Well, actually, that’s easy: all he’d have to say is that it’s for the rabbit. In those days, many Czechs bred rabbits at home in order to improve their daily diet, and fed them on grass taken from the city’s parks. Anyway, the theory is that it was this grass that got stuck in the mechanism.