Under Glass

Chapter 1: The Arrest

The last of the roses were dying when they came for Josef.

Jirina heard the engines first—two cars, heavy and deliberate, grinding over the cobblestones of the service road that wound along the garden's northern wall. She was in the alpine house, misting the gentians, and the sound made her set down the brass sprayer with a care that surprised her. She did not run. She wiped her hands on her apron, tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, and walked out into the October morning as though she had all the time in the world.

The black Citroëns were parked at angles across the main entrance, their doors already open. Four men in leather coats stood on the gravel path that led to the administration building—a modest two-story structure of pale stone that Josef always said looked more like a schoolhouse than a seat of authority. Two uniformed soldiers flanked the door. One of them was smoking.

Jirina stopped at the edge of the rose garden, forty meters away, and watched.

She could see Josef through the ground-floor window. He was standing behind his desk, his reading glasses still on, holding a sheaf of papers. He looked the way he always looked when interrupted during work: mildly annoyed, patient, his tall frame slightly stooped as though leaning toward the interruption to hear it better. The man across from him—shorter, broader, in a gray civilian suit—was speaking rapidly, gesturing at the papers.

She knew what those papers were. Josef had shown them to her three nights ago, sitting at their kitchen table with a glass of beer going flat beside him. A requisition order from IG Farben's pharmaceutical subsidiary, countersigned by the Reich Protectorate's office. They wanted the garden's entire collection of medicinal specimens: the Digitalis purpurea cultivars that Josef's predecessor had spent twenty years developing, the Cinchona bark samples brought from Java before the last war, the Papaver somniferum varieties with their precisely documented alkaloid profiles. Hundreds of specimens. Decades of careful work.

"They want to strip us bare," Josef had said, turning the papers over as though looking for something he'd missed. "Ship everything to their facility in Leverkusen. They say it's for the war effort. Medicines for soldiers."

"Will you give it to them?" Jirina had asked, though she already knew the answer. She had been married to Josef Polak for eleven years. She knew the set of his jaw.

"No."

That single syllable had hung between them in the lamplight. Not defiant, not dramatic. Just a fact, like the Latin name of a plant. A thing that was true and could not be otherwise.

Now, watching through the window, she saw Josef remove his glasses, fold them, and place them in his breast pocket. He shook his head once. The man in the gray suit turned and nodded to someone Jirina could not see.

Two of the leather-coated men entered the building. A minute later, they emerged with Josef between them. He was not handcuffed—not yet—but his arms were held firmly at the elbows. He walked with that particular stiffness of a man trying to preserve his dignity while being propelled forward by other people's hands.

Jirina stepped onto the path. One of the soldiers noticed her and raised a hand—halt—but she kept walking, not fast, not slow, until she was close enough to see the mud on Josef's shoes and the way his collar had been pulled askew.

"Josef."

He looked at her. His face was composed, almost serene, but his eyes were doing something urgent, scanning her face as though memorizing it.

"The Meconopsis betonicifolia needs moving to the cold house before the frost," he said. "The blue poppies. Don't forget."

One of the men in leather coats—Jirina would later learn his name was Hauptsturmführer Dietrich Wenzel—stepped between them. He was young, perhaps thirty, with a face that might have been handsome if not for the quality of his eyes, which were the flat, incurious eyes of a man who had learned to see people as problems to be processed.

"Frau Polak," he said, pronouncing her name with precise, accented Czech. "Your husband has been uncooperative with legitimate requests from Reich authorities. He will be detained until this matter is resolved. You may send one parcel per month through the appropriate channels."

"Where are you taking him?"

"Pankrác Prison. For now."

For now. The words were a door left deliberately ajar, showing darkness beyond.

Josef was guided into the back of the first car. He did not look back. Jirina understood this, too—he was afraid that if he turned, his composure would break, and he would not give them that. She stood on the gravel path and watched the cars reverse, turn, and disappear through the garden gates.

The soldier who had been smoking ground out his cigarette on the path and followed the last car on foot, not bothering to close the gate behind him.

Jirina stood alone in the October morning. A blackbird was singing somewhere in the lime trees. The fountain in the central courtyard made its patient, perpetual sound. The garden went on being the garden, as gardens do, indifferent to the catastrophes of the people who tend them.

She stood there for perhaps two minutes. Then she went back to the alpine house and finished misting the gentians.

---

The Prague Botanical Garden occupied a long, narrow parcel of land between the Vltava River and the steep wooded slope of Petřín Hill. It had been founded in 1775 by the Empress Maria Theresa's personal physician, who believed that the study of plants was the foundation of all medicine, and it had grown over the following century and a half into one of Central Europe's most respected collections.

The garden's geography was its genius. The slope provided natural terracing—alpine specimens at the top, temperate collections in the middle, and the great glass houses along the river at the bottom, where they could draw water for their elaborate heating and humidity systems. Underground, a network of tunnels connected the various buildings: root cellars carved into the hillside, propagation chambers heated by coal-fired boilers, and—deepest of all—a set of Victorian-era drainage passages that ran from the base of the hill to an outlet near the river. These passages had been built to manage the runoff from the slope during spring floods and were shown on no public map.

Josef had been director for eight years. Under his stewardship, the garden had become a quiet center of botanical research, hosting visiting scholars and maintaining exchange agreements with gardens in Kew, Leiden, and Uppsala. The war had ended most of these connections, but the collection itself remained intact—until the requisition order.

Jirina had studied botany at Charles University before the German occupation closed the Czech universities in 1939. She had met Josef there; he had been her professor, fifteen years her senior, a quiet man with large hands and an encyclopedic knowledge of plant taxonomy that he delivered in a voice so soft his students had to lean forward to hear him. Their courtship had been conducted largely in Latin binomials.

Now she was thirty-one years old, her husband was in Gestapo custody, and she was responsible for a garden that the Reich considered strategically valuable.

In the days after Josef's arrest, Jirina moved through the garden with mechanical precision. She had a staff of seven—down from the prewar complement of twenty-three. Old Frantisek Horak, the head gardener, who had worked at the garden since before the first war and whose knowledge of the heating systems was irreplaceable. His nephew Pavel, a silent young man with a gift for propagation. Two women from the neighborhood, Bozena and Hana, who came in mornings to help with the outdoor beds. Milan Stepanek, twenty-two, who had been hired six months ago to replace a gardener conscripted for labor in the Reich. And two part-time workers whose names Jirina sometimes confused because they were both named Vaclav.

She told them all the same thing: the garden would continue to operate. The collection would be maintained. Director Polak would return when the misunderstanding was resolved.

Frantisek, who was sixty-three and had survived one world war and one occupation already, looked at her with his weathered face and said nothing. He didn't need to. They both knew that misunderstandings with the Gestapo were not resolved. They were survived, or they were not.

Jirina wrote to the Protectorate's office requesting information about Josef's case. She received a form letter acknowledging her inquiry. She wrote again. No response. She sent a parcel to Pankrác Prison containing warm socks, a bar of soap, and a copy of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, which she hoped the censors would consider harmless. The parcel was accepted. She had no way of knowing if Josef received it.

At night, in the apartment above the administration building where she and Josef had lived since his appointment, Jirina lay in their bed and listened to the garden. The greenhouses made sounds at night—the tick and groan of expanding glass, the hiss of steam pipes, the drip of condensation. In the tropical house, where the temperature never dropped below twenty-five degrees, the banana plants rustled their broad leaves like restless sleepers. The garden breathed, and Jirina breathed with it, and sleep came in fragments, shallow and unsatisfying.

She dreamed of Josef's hands, sorting seeds.

---

Three weeks after the arrest, a man came to the garden at closing time.

Jirina was locking the gate to the succulent house when she saw him standing on the main path, hands in the pockets of a worn overcoat, looking at the labels on the chrysanthemums with an air of studied casualness that immediately marked him as someone who was not there for the flowers.

He was perhaps thirty-five, of medium height, with dark hair cut short and a face that was memorable mainly for its ordinariness—the kind of face that could disappear into any crowd in Prague. He wore no hat despite the cold.

"We're closing," Jirina said.

"Chrysanthemum indicum," the man said, reading the label. "Used in traditional Chinese medicine for inflammation. Your husband mentioned it once."

"You know my husband?"

"I know of him. My name is Tomas Bartos." He looked up from the chrysanthemums and met her eyes. His gaze was direct, appraising, without warmth but also without hostility. "I'm a friend of Karel Dvorak."

Karel Dvorak had been a colleague of Josef's at the university before the closure. Jirina had heard, through the careful whispers that passed for communication in occupied Prague, that Dvorak was involved with the resistance. She had never sought details. Details were dangerous.

"Karel sends his regards," Bartos said. "He also sends a request."

"I'm a gardener, Pan Bartos. I don't know what kind of request—"

"There is a man named Professor Samuel Kohn. He taught mathematics at the German University until the racial laws removed him. He has a daughter, twelve years old. Renata. They have been hiding in an attic in Žižkov for four months, but the building's concierge has begun asking questions. They need to be moved tonight."

Jirina felt the ground shift beneath her, though she stood perfectly still.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because this garden has root cellars that stay above freezing in winter. Because the tropical houses are warm enough to live in and loud enough to cover sound. Because the garden is a legitimate operation that requires workers at all hours, which explains any movement or light. And because Josef Polak, before his arrest, told Karel Dvorak that if it ever came to it, the garden could be a refuge."

Jirina opened her mouth to deny it, to say that Josef had never discussed any such thing, but the words caught. Because it was true. Josef had said it to her, too, one night in August, standing in the doorway of the palm house, looking at the maze of paths and structures that made up their small, enclosed world.

"If things get worse," he had said, "this place could hide people. It's a labyrinth. It has heat, water, space. And no one looks twice at a garden."

She had thought he was speaking hypothetically. She understood now that he had not been.

"Tonight?" she said.

"Tonight."

She looked at Bartos—this ordinary man with his extraordinary request—and felt terror rise in her chest like water filling a glass. She thought of Josef in his cell at Pankrác. She thought of a twelve-year-old girl in an attic in Žižkov, waiting.

"The root cellar beneath the orchid house," she said. "There's a door behind the boiler. It leads to a chamber where we store bulbs over winter. It's dry, it's warm, and it has ventilation. I'll leave the service gate unlocked at midnight. Bring them through the south entrance, along the river path. I'll be waiting."

Bartos studied her for a moment. Then he nodded once.

"Josef chose well," he said. It was unclear whether he meant the garden or the wife.

He turned and walked away down the path, past the chrysanthemums, through the gate, and into the gray Prague evening. Jirina locked the succulent house with hands that trembled so badly she dropped the keys twice.

Then she went to prepare the root cellar.

---

They came at midnight, as arranged.

Jirina stood in the darkness beside the south service gate, listening to the river. The Vltava moved slowly here, its surface catching the faint light of a cloud-covered moon. The blackout was in effect; Prague was a city of shadows, its streetlamps dark, its windows covered. Only the river had any luminosity, a dull pewter sheen that made the water look solid, like a road.

She heard footsteps—careful, deliberate—and then three figures materialized from the darkness. Bartos first, then a tall man carrying a small suitcase, and behind him a girl in a coat too large for her, clutching the man's free hand.

Professor Samuel Kohn was perhaps fifty, with a scholar's posture—slightly rounded shoulders, a forward tilt of the head—and eyes that showed four months of hiding in their deep-set wariness. His daughter Renata was small for twelve, with dark braids and a face that was trying very hard to be brave.

"No talking until we're inside," Jirina whispered. She led them along the path that ran beside the river wall, through the gap in the laurel hedge, past the potting sheds, and down the stone steps to the door behind the orchid house boiler.

The root cellar was exactly as she had described it: a stone-walled chamber, roughly four meters by six, with a vaulted ceiling and wooden shelving along the walls. She had spent the afternoon clearing the shelves of bulb crates and replacing them with two mattresses from the apartment's spare room, blankets, a chemical toilet she had fashioned from a bucket and lye, and a kerosene lantern with the wick turned low. A jug of water and a basket of bread, cheese, and apples sat on an upturned crate.

Professor Kohn looked around the chamber with the expression of a man who has been shown something he did not dare to hope for. Renata looked at the mattresses and then at Jirina.

"It's warm," the girl said, with a note of wonder that broke something in Jirina's chest.

"The boiler is on the other side of that wall," Jirina said. "It heats the orchid house above us. As long as the boiler runs, this room stays between fifteen and eighteen degrees. I'll bring food twice a day—once in the morning before the staff arrives, once in the evening after they leave. The privy is that bucket; I'll empty it daily. You must not make noise during working hours, and you must never, under any circumstances, go above ground without my direct instruction. Is that understood?"

Professor Kohn nodded. "Understood."

"One more thing. If you hear three knocks, then a pause, then two more knocks, it means I'm at the door. Any other pattern means stay silent and do not open."

She showed them the ventilation shaft—a narrow brick channel that connected to the greenhouse above, bringing fresh air and the faint, sweet smell of orchids.

"You'll hear the garden during the day," she said. "Footsteps, voices, the sound of water. Don't be alarmed. Sound travels down through the shaft, but it doesn't travel up. I've tested it."

This was true. She had spent an hour that afternoon with Frantisek, conducting the test. She had gone down to the cellar and spoken in a normal voice while Frantisek stood in the orchid house above, his ear to the floor grate. He had heard nothing.

Frantisek had not asked why she was testing the acoustics of the root cellar. He had simply done as she asked, then gone back to pruning the wisteria. Jirina was beginning to understand that Frantisek knew more than he said, and said less than he knew, and that this quality was going to be essential.

Bartos left the way he had come, melting back into the Prague night. Jirina locked the service gate, checked the garden perimeter, and returned to her apartment. She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and pressed her hands together to stop their shaking.

She had just committed an act that, if discovered, would mean her death. Not imprisonment—not a cell at Pankrác like Josef's. Death. The Germans did not imprison people who hid Jews. They shot them, or they hanged them, and sometimes they did it publicly, as instruction.

She thought about this for exactly one minute. Then she lay down, pulled the covers to her chin, and slept more deeply than she had in three weeks.

In the morning, she moved the blue poppies to the cold house, as Josef had asked.