by Mark Slouka
So I told him how it was Selene, the moon, who had seen a shepherd named Endymion and fallen in love with him and had asked Zeus to grant him the gift of eternal sleep so that he might remain forever young and handsome, and that that was why she was looking at him from a hole in the moon. “I see,” said Mr. Hanuš. “And who does this huge hand with the grasshopper belong to?” That, I said, was the hand of Selene’s sister, Eos, who had also fallen in love with someone, maybe another shepherd, I wasn’t sure, but had made the mistake of asking the gods for eternal life instead of eternal sleep—a big mistake—and so had been left with just a grasshopper in her hand.
Mr. Hanuš looked at the picture thoughtfully. “I like the sheep,” he said. He closed the book with a gentle clap. “If I were you, I would stay away from sisters like that. And the gods too, maybe. Now go to sleep, quickly—until morning will do—or your mother will be angry with me.”
I lay down on my pillow and he pulled the dinosaur blanket up to my chin and petted my hair once, and I let him because I knew that this was important to him. “I’ll tell your mother and father to come give you a kiss,” he said, reaching for his canes. “Now sleep.”
And I slipped down as though pulled from below, and in my dreams that night the things I’d been told and the things I hadn’t mixed and blurred and Selene looked down over 63rd Road and SS troopers in their low, rounded helmets stood arrayed along the roof of Alexander’s department store watching as, far below, a silent herd of cows with yellow horns and brooms tied to their tails moved like a sea of humped, ridged backs through the unlit canyons toward Queens Boulevard, erasing themselves, while far, far above them in a dark apartment very close to the sky a young man sat in a wash of light as blue as ice and played the piano—beautifully, perfectly—until he fell asleep.
5
MY MOTHER AND FATHER MET IN BRNO IN 1939, FOUR months after the occupation began, when my father wrote her a love letter he had composed for someone else for a fee of ten crowns. He did this regularly, he told me, and did quite well by it. It was nothing, he said: a few particulars, a handful of ripe clichés, and the thing was done. This time, however, when he delivered the letter for his client, things went badly. “Honza didn’t write this,” the young woman who would be my mother declared almost as soon as she began reading it. She laughed, then read aloud: “‘...in the empty rooms and courtyards of my heart’? Oh, God.” My father started to say something. “Stop,” she said. “Honza’s a sweet boy, but he wouldn’t know a metaphor if it ran him over in the street.” She looked at my father. “What kind of man writes love letters for other men?” she said. “A poor one,” my father said.
They began to talk, and by the time he walked out of the pastry shop on Zapomenutá Street, where he had found her sitting with her girlfriends (the two of them had moved to a table near the back to talk privately), she had agreed to meet him the following day for a walk. There were reasons for this. He was handsome. He was not a fool. There was a kind of sad lightheartedness about him; he seemed not to care very much how he appeared to the world. And he had nerve. The day after they met, he found Honza in the locker room of the gymnasium after soccer practice (the schools had not been closed as yet) and gave him back the letter. He had decided to go out with the girl himself, he said. And when Honza, not entirely unreasonably, took offense at this turn of events, and with two of his friends gave my father a sound beating, my father, wiping the blood off his face with his sleeve, somehow managed to get up and pull a ten-crown coin out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, throwing it on the locker room floor. “A full refund.”
They saw each other all that summer and fall. He would meet her outside the steel railroad station and the two of them would walk arm in arm up the street that used to be Masarykova ulice but was now Hermann Göring Strasse, then across the square and down the small, quiet streets to Špilberk, where they would lose themselves, along with all the other lovers, in the vast grounds of the castle. I can picture them there, lying on the grass, my mother looking up into the deepening blue, my father, propped up on an elbow next to her, recounting some small thing or other, smiling in that way of his, turning the story like a candlestick on a lathe.
I like to think of the two of them there, wandering arm in arm up the paths and away from the town like newlyweds entering for the first time the house they would live in the rest of their lives, walking from room to blissfully empty room as though they could simply walk away from the gathering of things, as though they could still find a place—up this flight of stairs, maybe, behind this wall, in this room-sized garden—where time could not find them.
It was on one of those days that my parents accidentally took the second set of stairs leading down from Špilberk Castle instead of the first, and so found themselves walking past the entrance to the crypt of the old Capuchin monastery. My mother had never been there. The crypt would be closing in fifteen minutes.
A watery-eyed old woman with long white hairs on her chin was sitting in a chair at the top of the stairs, next to a rickety card table and a bowl with three coins. They were the last, apparently. The school groups, if there had been any that day, had left. The tourists who had once crowded the stairs to view the bodies of the monks, centuries dead, had dropped off with the war. The place felt oddly deserted. The old woman might have been waiting there for years.
“Je tam dole zima, děti,” she said, looking at them. It’s cold down there, children. “Oblečte se teple.” Dress warmly.
And indeed they could feel the dank, subterranean chill breathing up out of the stairwell. My father put his arm around my mother’s shoulders. The woman handed them two yellow tickets.
“To vám nepomůže,” she said, smiling. That won’t help you.
My father took the tickets, though there was no one to give them to, and together they started down the steep, turning stairs. They were halfway down, laughing about something or other, when they heard her call down the shaft after them: “Musíte spšchat, děti.” You have to hurry, children. “Není moc času.” There isn’t much time.
Perhaps it was the change from the upper air, or the sudden silence of those dim, low-ceilinged rooms, or the clayey smell. Perhaps it was something about the short, unlit halls, where my father had to duck his head as he led my mother by the hand to the next candlelit room. Or something else altogether. It was nothing, after all. In the outside world the universities had been closed, the factories turned to the business of war. Up above, the newspapers listed the names of the dead in thin black rectangles, like advertisements for faucets or shoes.
In the first, main room, where generations of schoolchildren had giggled over the poor mummified body of Franz Trenck, they stopped to look through the glass-topped coffin at the black, jerked flesh, the finger-thick cable of the neck, the nail emerging from the cuticle. In the second room a prison-like cell dug out of the wall and closed off by iron bars was filled with small brown skulls. They lay jumbled, one on top of the other, cheek to cheek, jaw to neck, some facing this way, some that. Some seemed to be laughing. The bars had been set into the stone.
My father asked my mother if she was cold. She was fine, she said. They read the brief biographies framed on the walls—the dates, the names—and walked on.
In the fourth and last room, apparently, there was a row of caskets arranged along the wall like basinets on a nursery floor. In each was a shape that had once been a human being but was now just a pelvis, a skull, a few fraying ropes of tendon. Here and there, hipbones tented bits of desiccated cloth. So much death, so neatly arranged. Walking from one to the other, my father told me years later, gave one the uneasy feeling of being asked to choose something.
All the caskets were open. Next to each, at the end of a curved metal stem like a rectangular flower, was a sign that gave some information about the body next to it. It was a bit of a jolt, my father said, to learn that some of the dead had once been women, but once one knew, it was possible to imagine one could see it. And not
just in obvious things—a wider pelvis, perhaps, or a thinner chest—but in other, frankly impossible things: in the girlish bend of an elbow or the inward tilt of a knee. In the demure, almost coquettish turn of a chin. They began to try to guess in advance.
She was in the ninth casket in the row of eleven. It was obvious right away that she had been buried alive, my father said. Unlike all the others, who seemed more or less at rest, with their arms and legs laid straight out and their chins tucked almost thoughtfully into their throats, she was all rage and fury. Her caramel-colored skull, with its few pitiful wisps of hair, had bent straight back on the spine, so that she appeared to be arching up on her head. Her mouth was still open, caught in mid-scream. Worst of all, though, were her hands, or what remained of them, which lay palm-up by her neck like birds’ feet, still clawing at what had long ago given way.
A tiny bell sounded from the stairwell, and they turned and left the abbess in her coffin, walking past the rows of sleeping dead and the tumbled skulls and Franz Trenck in his glass-topped coffin, then up the narrow stairs to the street where they found the sun already fallen behind the body of the church and night coming on.
6
AMERICA WAS MY FOREGROUND, FAMILIAR AND KNOWN: the crowds, the voices, Captain Kangaroo and Mister Magoo, the great trains clattering and tilting west, pulling out of the seam in the summer wall as my father and I sat waiting in the DeSoto on Old Orchard Road. Behind it, though, for as long as I can remember, was the Old World, its shape and feel and smell, like the pattern of wallpaper coming through the paint.
My father loved America, loved the West—the idea of it, the grandness and the absurdity of it. It was a vicarious sort of thing. To my knowledge, for example, he never watched a baseball game in his life, yet the thought that millions of men cared passionately for it, that they had memorized names and batting averages, somehow gave him pleasure. The time we drove west, my mother in her sunglasses and deep blue scarf looking like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, he was nearly stunned into speechlessness by the vastness of it all: the sheer immensity of the sky, the buzz of a bluebottle under that huge lid of sun, the oceanic valleys stretching to the horizon. The little two-lanes and the sleepy motels thrilled him; every menu was an adventure, and he’d study the gravy-stained paper through his reading glasses as if it were a letter from some distant land, which I suppose it was.
I have a memory of him standing in the open door of some small motel room in New Mexico, leaning against the doorframe, smoking. Swallows or bats are dipping under the telephone wires. It’s dusk, and the land on the other side of the road opens into endless space—bluing, vast, lunar. It’s as if the room, the motel, the gas station down the way could tip into it at any moment and snake like a necklace into a well. My mother lies on the bed under the light, her legs crossed at the ankle, reading a magazine.
“My God, Ivana, you should come and see this,” my father says. “I could fit half of Czechoslovakia into the space between the road and those cliffs out there.”
“I’m sure you could,” says my mother.
The West, my father liked to say, especially after he’d had a glass or two of wine in the evenings when we had friends over, was the great solvent of history. It dissolved the pain, retained the shell: “Paris, Texas; Rome, Arkansas...Just try and imagine it the other way around,” he’d say. “Chicago, Italy? Dallas, Austria? Unthinkable.” No, the funnel was securely in place. Everything was running one way. Eventually all of Europe, all the popes and plagues, the whole bloody carnival, would be a diner somewhere off the highway in Oklahoma.
“Here he goes,” someone would say.
“Think of it,” my father would say. “The Little Museum of Memory. The Heaven of Exiles. Entertainment for the whole family.”
On a train out of Grand Central one March day, many years later, I ran into a man I recognized vaguely from childhood. He sat by the window in the winter light, busy with shadows. A sculptor from Prague, older than my parents, he had come to our apartment half a dozen times in the late 1950s, then disappeared. He was in pharmaceuticals now. He had a house in Rhinebeck. And so how were my parents? I told him. He had liked them, he said, he had liked them both very much, they had been very kind to him when he had arrived in this country. And yet every time he had come to our apartment he would get the feeling that everybody there was slowly suffocating, but too polite to mention it. At some point he just couldn’t stand it anymore.
“It was a new world out there,” he cried as small ice floes on the river behind him disappeared into his head, passed through the back of the seat, and reemerged on the other side. “All they had to do was take it. And what did they do? They sat there, even though they were still young and full of...possibilities, mourning what was lost. Reading the old books. Singing the old songs. Kde domov můj?—Where is my home? I’ll tell you where it is—right here,” he said, slapping the cracked leather seat next to him.
“In Rhinebeck,” I said.
“Yes, in Rhinebeck,” he said. “Or in Riverdale. Or Larchmont. But here. In America.” He shook his head. “But your father understood all this. He had a poetic phrase for it—sklerosa duse. Do you know what that means? Sclerosis of the soul. We all suffer from a kind of sclerosis of the soul, Vašek, he would say to me, brought on by a steady diet of fatty songs, one too many rich regrets...but here, have some wine, they say it’s good for these things. Laughing at it. Making a joke out of it. Nostalgia, he’d say, was the exiles’ hemophilia, though contagious rather than hereditary. Oh, he could be charming, your father. And your mother, so lovely.”
He’d never forget them, he said, but at some point he’d realized he could have nothing more to do with them. Why? Because they understood the trap they were in but did nothing to get themselves out of it. And not only did nothing to get out of it, but spent their days caressing it, polishing the bars, so to speak. Sad, really. A tragedy, in its way.
The train had stopped. It had been nice to see me again, he said. And giving me his card, for some reason, he picked up his coat from the rack and hurried out into a snow flurry descending from a clear blue sky.
When I think back on that close little apartment with the Kubelius sketches in the hallway and the bust of Masaryk by the door and the plastic slipcovers on the new sofa, it seems to me that even when the living room was full of people eating meruňkové koláče and drinking, they were somewhere else as well. I don’t know how to describe it. They seemed to be listening to something...that had already passed. And because I loved them, I grew to love this thing, this way of being, and listened with them.
As a child, my bed was pushed against the wall, blocking off a door to the living room. A matter of space. My father unscrewed the doorknob and covered the hole with a brass plate and then, because the frame of the door looked so ugly rising up behind my bed, my mother hung a bamboo mat over it to hide it. It was this makeshift curtain, which smelled like new-mown grass, that I would move aside so that I could spy on them as they talked: the Jakubecs and the Štěpáneks, Mr. Chalupa and Mr. Hanuš with his two canes...It’s odd for me to think, simply by adding the years, that they must be gone. Only pieces of them remain: a genteel, tremulous voice; white fingers tightening a bow tie; a musty, reassuring smell, like cloth and wool and shoe polish, which reminded me, even then, of the thrift shops on Lexington Avenue...How quietly, like unassuming guests, they slipped from the world. How easily the world releases us.
Mr. Štěpánek was a small man who always sat very straight on our couch, as though hiding something behind his back; he had a lot of opinions about things and got into arguments with people because he thought a lot of things were funny. His laugh was like a little mechanism in his throat: a dry, rapid-fire cackle—ha ha ha ha ha ha ha—that always went on a second or two too long. He and my father had been childhood friends—they had grown up in adjoining buildings in the židenice district of Brno—and perhaps for this reason he irritated my father in that close, familiar way th
at only old friends can irritate each other.
I loved Mr. Hanuš best, but it’s Mr. Chalupa whom I remember most clearly. I’m not sure why. He never brought me things. Or talked to me much. Or came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed, as Mr. Hanuš did, and looked at the pictures on my wall. It was never “Uncle Pepa is here, look what he brought you,” just “Say hello to Mr. Chalupa, where are your manners?” and I never minded much because I couldn’t imagine him any other way. He wasn’t interested in me. He’d show up at our door every Friday, carrying his violin case and a bottle of wine in a kind of wicker net and a white paper bag with a loaf of the Irish soda bread my father liked, and say, “Here, take them, take them,” as though they were an itchy garment he couldn’t wait to shed, and my parents would smile for some reason and take the things from him, and my mother would say, “Say hello to Mr. Chalupa, what’s the matter with you?” and he’d say, “How are the Beatles, young man? How are the Fab Four, eh?”—in English, as though he didn’t know I spoke Czech—then sink into my father’s chair, which used to be by the long white bookshelf in the living room, and tell my parents about the troubles he’d had on the F train out from Manhattan. And that would be it for me.
I remember him well dressed, in a suit and tie, a slim man of average height who wore a hat and who always seemed somewhat put upon, as though the world were a vast, willfully cluttered room he had to negotiate—and quickly—because the phone was ringing on the other side. When I dreamed of him, nearly forty years later, he was sitting in my father’s chair on an African beach at nightfall, still dressed in his suit and tie. A huge, still lake, backed by mountains, lay before us; behind us, white dunes of shells rose to a distant ridge on which I could see rows of fires and the silhouettes of men and monkeys. He was sitting there with that look on his face, staring irritably at the sand in front of him, ignoring me. I was about to say something to him when a tall wooden ship, far out on the water, spontaneously burst into flames. He seemed unsurprised. He looked up at the thing—the blazing masts, the spar like a burning sword, the beating wings of the sails—and, shaking his head slightly, turned his hands palms-up without raising his wrists from the armrests then let them fall as if to say, “Well, that’s just fine.”
