by Mark Slouka
For a long time, Mr. Hanuš explained to me that afternoon, nothing happens. This was very important, this nothing. It made things the way they were. “For generations,” he said, “everything stays the same, looks the same—nothing changes. There’s the kitchen with the calendar, the same as always, and there’s the red runner in the hall that’s always bunching up by the bathroom door. You have to imagine it. It’s June, let us say, and dusk. A man in his shirtsleeves is leaning out the kitchen window, smoking, his elbows on the sill, which is peeling. In the courtyard below, everything is still: the piles of wet sand and brick, the rabbit hutches stacked against the north wall, the bicycles under the overhang. In the garden the kohlrabi are pushing up into the dark. It’s quiet: you can hear a sudden voice, the tinny bang of pots, a child crying. The year is 1923. It’s been five years since this man—who is your grandfather, by the way—returned from the war, where he suffered more than some, and less than others.
“Now a boy, no more than three, comes into the room, climbs knee-first onto a chair. ‘Did you wash your hands?’ says a woman’s voice. The man at the window doesn’t turn around. He’s half listening to the voices in the courtyard. His back feels good and strong under his shirt. He takes a last draw and stubs his cigarette on the outside wall below the sill.
“Years pass. Nothing has changed. The runner in the hall is maybe a bit thinner now. But there are the piles of sand and brick, the bicycles leaning against the shed. And there are the rabbit hutches, stacked like an apartment building against the bricks. Everything is wet. The air smells like steel, or brass. Far away, as if they were coming from another world, you can hear the tiny bells of a trolley.
“The same man is leaning out the window, watching the rain. ‘Antonín,’ he calls without turning around, ‘dones uhlí,’ and your father, who is twelve years old now, comes out of the room where he’s been memorizing Latin verbs—or pretending to—takes the coal bucket, and disappears down the hallway.
“Year follows year. A thousand times this man, your grandfather, smoothes the heavy ripples of the runner with his foot. A thousand times Mrs. Vondráčková shuffles out to the rabbit hutches with a piece of stovewood. Wet flakes of snow are falling on the hills of sand and brick, they look like sugar on the cellar door, and then it’s June again and the sun in the afternoons reaches halfway down the east wall and the air smells like fresh-turned dirt. On warm nights the windows are swung open to the courtyard. In the garden the knotty heads of the kohlrabi are cresting up through the soil again like rows of little green skulls. This is the world you know. You know it the way you know your room now.
“This is what I’m trying to say to you: For a long, long time, nothing happens. And then it does.
“In a place called Berchtesgaden, a tall Englishman with a white mustache named Chamberlain unfolds himself from a limousine. Arguments are made. Tea is sipped. Important men stab their fingers at the polished table. ‘Sie müssen...Wir werden...Etwas Tee, mein Herr?’ In Bad Godesberg this Englishman smoothes his hair with his right hand and says, I take your point, Herr Ribbentrop. And yet, if I may...we feel that...in the matter of...Can I take that as your final position?’ And it comes to pass.”
Mr. Hanuš smiled. “Berchtesgaden. Bad Godesberg. Berlin. All those B’s.
“But you look around. There’s the sideboard that used to be your mother’s. And your father’s leather-bound editions, locked safely behind the glass. Nothing has happened. Young girls still spend the long afternoons lying in their back yards reading novels. The dance tunes of R. A. Dvorský still play on the radio. Nothing has changed.
“And suddenly they’re there, like a thunderclap out of a March blizzard, the Mercedes limousines with their horsehair-stuffed seats moving down Národní Avenue past the statues and the frozen saints to the river. The city is quiet. No people, no trams. The tracks are still, the cobbles are marbled with snow like that cake your mother gets in that deli on Queens Boulevard. Gargoyles with long tongues stare from their niches under the pediment. You watch from inside your apartment, looking through cracks in the curtains, like everyone else. As they pass, far below, you can hear the snap and crack of banners.
“There’s nothing to be done. Nothing at all. The motorcade passes over the Vltava. The walls of Hradčany Castle are barely visible; the archers’ clefts are empty. In the woods of Petřín, which are also deserted, there is only the slicing sound of the snow, sweeping up through the orchards. The government, the newspaper says, has been dissolved. Bohemia and Moravia—the woods, the fields, the towns, the paths you knew, the ponds you swam in—are now called the Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren.” Mr. Hanuš smiled: “‘Etwas Tee, mein Herr?’
“And still, even now, inside of you, it doesn’t feel as if anything has changed. Things go on. And they continue to do this until the moment something stops, and all those years of nothing tear like a curtain caught on a nail. Maybe you see someone struck on the street, or maybe it’s a voice on the radio, a voice like you’ve never heard before, a voice like a beating. But whatever it is, suddenly you know that everything has changed. That nothing is the same.”
People backed into heroism like crabs, my father once told me. Or tripped into it through clumsiness. They rushed into the fire, blindfolded by glory, and somehow survived to be paraded down the boulevard, or they wandered stupidly onto the surface of things, made it across by some combination of physics and fortune, then looked back and called it courage.
Generations of heroes, entire battalions of them, he said, were just ordinary people who had been overtaken by the course of events, who had done what they did with no more thought than a dog who bites when his tail is slammed in a door—people who, when their tails had been freed and their consciousness revived, felt like spectators of their own lives.
And yet—and this was the thing—every now and again, against all the rules of human behavior, it occurred: an act of heroism planned in advance, undertaken for the right reasons, and carried out with the full knowledge, one might even say tragic knowledge, of the risks involved. A thing as unbelievable as a rain of toads. It isn’t possible, you think. You can’t believe it. And yet there they are, bouncing on the pavement.
When that happens, he said, all you can do is marvel at it, and take off your hat.
I asked my father if he had ever been a hero. He said no, not even close to one, and because he was my father, I believed him.
13
BY THE TIME I WAS NINETEEN WE WERE LIVING IN Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in a depressing little community with streets named after poets no one read: Lord Byron Drive. Shelley Lane. Longfellow Circle. My mother and father barely spoke now. The town was dying. The steel mills by the river stood silent, blotting out the sky and the wooded hills behind them—they seemed embarrassed somehow. My father taught journalism at the university, started a garden. Eventually, to his own amusement, he took up jogging. He would run once around Mark Twain Circle, then down Northampton Street past the fringe of woods opposite the First Presbyterian Church, turn right at the Electronics Warehouse, right again on the broken dirt road that ran along the highway like something trying to call attention to itself, then start for home. It could be a treacherous run: the construction sites for the new subdivisions bled mud onto the road whenever it rained—lollipop swirls, slippery as oil, that scalloped into shells when they dried. My father would run around or hopscotch through them and appear on the back deck, soaked and red in the face, forty-five minutes after he’d left. He would stay there for a while, holding his knees and swaying slightly, then take a hand shovel from a peg on the back wall of the house and slowly start scraping the mud from the sides of his running shoes.
My mother, who could hear the click of the trowel behind her when my father replaced it on the peg, sat in the back bedroom with the small high windows and watched the soaps. “I want to see this,” she’d say, in Czech, when I tried to get her to come out for a walk. “Janice is going to expose Rick’s infidelity. What do y
ou think is going to happen?” And she’d take a draw of her cigarette.
And I’d have that feeling, which I always had in those days, that she was angry with me for something, though I didn’t know what it was. “C’mon, Mom,” I’d say. “You have to come out sometime.”
“Why don’t you leave me alone,” she’d say sweetly, not looking up.
“Because I want you to come out with me,” I’d say.
“Out where? For a walk along Nezval Circle, maybe? Akhmatova Lane?”
“C’mon, Mom...”
“His wife doesn’t know, you see. It’s all very exciting.”
And I’d stand there, wanting to leave, wanting to shut that door and walk out of that house, wanting to slap her like in the movies—“Snap out of it!”—but instead I did nothing. She’d wait for me all week, my father said. When I called to say I couldn’t come till the next, she’d disappear into the bedroom, sometimes for days. “Don’t listen to what she says,” he’d say to me. “You’re everything to her.” And so I’d stand there those few seconds longer, ask one more time. I stood in that doorway for fourteen years. “You can’t sit here all day,” I’d say. “When was the last time you were outside?”
“If I needed your condescension, I’d ask for it,” she’d say then, still not looking up from the set.
“I just want...”
“Or that long-suffering tone, for that matter. You want to play the martyr, do it with one of your girlfriends in the city.”
“OK,” I’d say, closing the door quietly behind me.
And I’d hear her laugh to herself. “OK,” she’d say.
She was bleeding, of course, smoking her cigarette in a pool of blood as real in its way as any blood that ever flowed. And yes, I hated her, for her weakness and her pain, for the way she fed on it like a glutton, for her unwillingness to be done, ever. I hated her because she and her grief were such a perfectly matched pair, because I had grown and she no longer wanted anything but to be left alone, because life had cheated her, exquisitely, and she could neither forgive nor forget.
At some point I didn’t know who she was anymore. At times I could still glimpse—through an inadvertent laugh, a moment of stillness—the person I’d once known, who had once known me, but it was like seeing someone’s face from a passing car, or looking up during intermission at a play to see someone—someone familiar—looking at you through a hole in the curtain. And for this I hated her too.
It became my little burden to bear, this awkward sack of hatred and love. There are worse.
The winter after I left for college, I had a dream. In the dream my mother and I were on a boat in the middle of a blue ocean tacked tight to the horizon. Everything was still: the boat, its reflection, the pale hot circle of the sun.
My mother had decided to go for a swim. Far off, she was calling for help, her arms flailing in the air. I was there instantly. She grabbed onto my shoulders and neck as if I were a board flung into the water, crazy with fear. I tried to drag her back to the boat, but I couldn’t do it—her terror had given her outrageous strength. She fought and twisted as though shot through by some giant current. Holding her across her chest and under her arm, as I had learned to do in lifesaving class, choking and strangling, I somehow dragged her to the surface, only to be pulled under again and again.
It was then that I realized she was swimming down, deliberately trying to drown us both. I could feel her pulling into the dark, reaching for my face, my throat, and I began to fight, striking down with my fists, desperate to separate myself from this thing which only moments before I’d been determined to save, and woke myself with such a spasmodic wrench of my body that I knocked my glasses off the reading table by my dormitory bed.
I never told my father about the dream. He had his own dreams, I felt sure. And so did she. The next weekend, I took the bus from the city and walked home through the winter cornfields at dusk, the red and green Holiday Inn sign growing smaller behind me, lifting my feet so as not to trip over the frozen stubble. My mother was in the kitchen, making bábovka. She hugged me hello, and I felt her small back, how frail she’d grown.
And I remember knowing that the dream was true and yet realizing, in some half-formed way, that men rarely had the courage or the cruelty of their dreams and that this was good because life was lived among many kinds of things, all of them pushing for space, for air, all of them equally true: a wilderness of love and despair, laughter and rage, heroism and pain, while dreams, dreams were a haunted parkland—a stately oak, a bench, a fountain gushing blood.
14
I ASKED HER ONLY ONCE. IT WAS ON ONE OF THOSE UNNATURALLY warm, yellow October days that feel lost somehow, as though a day in June had floated loose and found itself in a world of frostbitten tomato plants and half-bare poplars. We were sitting on the back deck of the house in Bethlehem, which had a view of the rectangle of lawn and the row of pines intended to block out the neighbor’s house. A short distance away was the stump of the maple my father had cut down during the summer. I looked at the pines. They had caught some kind of blight and seemed to be rusting from the needles in, like discarded Christmas trees.
“You should give them a feeding of Miracid,” my mother said.
“Why bother?” I remembered my father saying once, when my mother had insisted I douse a pine in the front yard that had browned at terrible speed, as though it were burning. He’d chuckled. “Look at it. It doesn’t want to be here.”
“A good feeding can’t do any harm,” my mother had said.
“You might as well feed a shoe.”
“Still.”
My father smiled and waved his hand. “Water away,” he’d said.
“Can’t do any harm,” my mother was saying now. “You should give them a feeding when it cools off a little.”
I said I’d do that, and then asked her who he had been, this man she had loved all the years I was growing up. I told her I’d known about him since I was a child, and that I thought, now that I was grown, she might finally tell me the story. I didn’t blame her or resent her in any way, I said. Far from it. I was curious. What kind of man had he been? How had they met? What had happened to him? Had she met him before she met my father?
I knew it had happened during the war, I said, speaking quickly now. Sometime in 1942. Had he been in the Resistance? Had he died in the purges after Heydrich was killed? Could she tell me anything at all?
My mother took a dry, wafer-like cookie off the plate between us and took a small bite.
“I don’t really want to talk about that right now,” she said.
We sat in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Your father’s a good man,” she said. And then, after a while: “I’m sorry.”
My mother was looking out over the yard—the poplars, the shadows on the lawn, the rusting pines. She was biting her upper lip, which made her chin stick out a bit, as if she were deciding something.
“You really should give them a good feeding,” she said at last. “It can’t hurt.”
15
WHEN I WAS TWENTY I STAYED FOR A TIME IN A CHATA by a pond, seven kilometers from the town of Bystřice nad Pernštejnem, with my father’s childhood friend Mirek. I’d fallen in love with a girl who was vacationing with her friends a few cabins down from ours. She was older than I was. We would spend every night around a campfire we built for ourselves along the shore, and always, often toward morning, end up making frantic love, still dressed in our smoky sweaters, our pants around our ankles, in the cold, dew-soaked grass. In the afternoons she would go on long sleepy walks in the woods with her friends, and I would swim across the pond with Mirek.
We always swam the long way, from the muddy little beach in the grass to the mill whose watermarked roof, furred with jigsaw pieces of moss, rose above the embankment on the far side. It would take us half an hour, sometimes more, and Mirek, whose right leg had withered to a stick half a century earlier when his father had refused to have a
doctor set the toes his son had broken, would roll about in the dark water like a happy walrus, one moment paddling with his arm extended straight ahead as though lying on a sofa, the next raising his white belly like a hill into the air.
It was on one of these long swims across the pond that he told me about the afternoon when my father and his old friend Pavel Štepánov had looked into the execution yard. They were not yet twenty years old, he said, turning on his back and paddling along with small, flipper-like strokes while raising his head partly out of the water. About my age. At that time, he said, the people living in houses with windows facing the courtyard of Kounicovy koleje, a nondescript cluster of three-story dormitories that the Gestapo had turned into a prison, had been instructed to board them up. Not that it made any sense, Mirek said. Everyone knew what was happening there. The volleys usually began at ten in the morning and, except for a pause between one and two, continued until four. Every day except Sunday, shortly before ten, heavy trucks would bump up to the gates and disappear behind them. In the afternoon the gates would open again, usually around four-thirty, and they would leave.
Pavel Štepánov, Mirek said, had discovered a crack in one of the boards over the upper bedroom window. By inserting a bread knife into the narrow part of the bolt and twisting gently, he could widen the crack to a centimeter or so. It was a still, hot summer day; the air in the half-boarded house was stifling. No one was at home. It was just after two. Štepánov reached under the fringed shade of a bedside lamp and turned on the light. On the other side of the boards they could hear someone yelling orders. And though he didn’t want to, Mirek said, my father put his eye to the crack, and saw what he saw.
