by Mark Slouka
“It changed him,” he said. “It wasn’t a sudden thing. Of course I can’t tell you for sure that it was that day and not some other one, but I think it was. It turned something inside him. He has this smile, you know the one I mean, almost sweet, but closed, like this”—and he raised a closed fist above the water—“that only appeared afterward. The funny thing is that when I think of your father now, I see that smile. As if that was who he was supposed to be. It’s the same with Štěpánek,” he added. “That irritating laugh of his.”
“I never saw what happened there myself,” Mirek continued. “I remember the German hausfrauen walking past our gate during breakfast. They would walk down Tolstého Street to the corner, then up toward the dormitories. We couldn’t see what they saw, but from our kitchen window we could see them standing against the post-and-wire fence they had there, holding up their children to see.”
We swam quietly for a while. Mirek was looking up at the sky. “How far are we?”
“Maybe halfway,” I said. I looked down into the water between my arms. “How deep do you think it is here?”
“Can you touch the bottom?”
“No.”
“Then it’s deep.”
We swam on. “What did he see?” I said.
But Mirek couldn’t tell me. “More than he should,” he said.
His own father, he told me, whose prison cell had overlooked the courtyard at Kounicovy koleje for almost a year, until he was shipped off to Dachau, said the things one heard were the worst of all. He’d learned to insert pills of toilet paper into his ears, then wet them to make them expand. Others would crawl under their mattresses, supposedly, or wrap their bed-sheets around their heads to keep from hearing. An unstable man named žáček, a butcher, had somehow managed to rupture his own eardrums with a smuggled pencil.
It was all very organized, Mirek’s father said. The holding area was separated by a barbed-wire fence from the execution yard itself, which was right where the trucks came in. The children were almost always taken first. Sometimes, just before they were led away, the parents would try to press themselves against them, or whisper something to them, as though giving them a message to deliver. Surprisingly often they would yell at them—Stop crying! Listen to me!—as if their words through some last miracle of habit or authority could make that place something other than what it was.
Sometimes the mother would lose consciousness, Mirek’s father told him. More often she would begin to scream as soon as the first child was taken. The father might try to do something then, run at a guard, perhaps, or try to kick him, which only meant that he wouldn’t have to watch. Mostly, though, the parents would just stand there, like sleepwalkers waiting in line at a bank. Some would make odd, spastic little gestures—reaching up as if to touch their right cheek, for example, or frowning quickly, or suddenly fingering a button. The men watching them from the windows would often unconsciously do the same.
It was the strangest thing, Mirek’s father said, to see the same gesture duplicated, as if in a mirror, fifty meters away; it reminded him of that elementary school contraption that copied on a second sheet of paper—through the use of a kind of movable armature attached to a pencil—whatever was drawn on the first. Often, he said, you could tell what was happening in the courtyard simply by looking at the person watching. When the watcher’s face turned away slightly and his head began to shake, for example, you knew it was almost over, because people about to be killed often developed an odd, Parkinson’s-like tremor, looking off to the side and shaking their heads as if denying what their senses told them.
We lay on the grass bank under the mill for a long time that afternoon, moving east to stay ahead of the shade. I remember Mirek leaning up on one elbow, twirling and untwirling a blade of grass around his finger, his belly resting comfortably on the ground, his bad leg thin and ridged as a ham bone. I remember realizing, dimly, how much I loved this man—his round, happy face and his strong, soft shoulders and the thicket of white hair covering his chest. During the war, when my father and the others had intercepted the arms that dropped like dandelion seeds into the Vysočina forests—cutting them loose from the parachutes, then rushing them through the dark on makeshift stretchers—he had been the one waiting in the wagon, the one who covered the crates with firewood or manure, then drove them out to the safe houses alone, the horse snuffing wetly in the morning air.
At the far eastern corner of the pond, at a small beach, I could see tiny children leaping off a dock, their screams sounding strangely close over the still water. Just to the right I could see the space in the reeds where we had had our fire the night before: there were the blackened stones, like flecks of pepper, and there was the stunted willow, like a child’s drawing, whose roots had scratched my back.
“We should go,” Mirek said, sitting up on the bank. “I have a date tonight.”
“It’s going to be cold,” I said, looking at the water.
Mirek stood, a bit unsteadily as always, and started toward the water. “Courage, boy,” he said. He slapped his belly, and the sound carried across the water like a single clap. “Courage and fat.”
I watched him wade in up to his knees, throwing water on his arms and chest, then plunge in. But I hesitated. The sky was darkening. The children were gone. On the spillway a carp fisherman had set up his stool. I watched him finish rigging his line, cast out past the trees to the darkening sky, then settle himself carefully on the stretched fabric.
Later that night I waited on the dark path under the trees, carrying a small sack of sausages and rohlíky, tin cups and tea. The wind moved, making the lights of the cabins wink on and off. And suddenly I felt terribly lonely, as apart as I ever had in this world. The air was cool, but every now and then I could smell the hot smell of the fields. A woman’s laugh came from one of the cabins. She was enjoying herself. She wouldn’t come. I waited in the dark under the trees for a long time, leaning against a huge old chestnut with smooth, skin-like bark, thinking every few moments that I saw her flying along the bank or down the road to meet me, then threw the sausages and the rohlíky and the cups into the water one after the other and went home.
16
ON MARCH 17, 1984, MY MOTHER APPARENTLY DECIDED to walk to the Westgate Mall in a freezing rain wearing a summer dress with a raincoat over it. It had been raining for a long time. She tried to cut through a cornfield behind the subdivision on Whitman Drive but found herself lifting clods of clayey mud with each step, and retreated to the road. She walked to Hochstetler Lane (the town fathers having run out of literary lights), then along the gravel shoulder past the gas station and the little shopping area with the H&R Block to the stretch of sidewalk over the highway and then another mile or so past the Sears Automotive Center to the vast parking lot of the mall.
Inside the mall, made to look like the street of a small town, she sat down on one of the shiny green benches set up under the eave of the Bavarian Haus. Music was playing. A group of seniors on an excursion from the retirement home came and sat down on the bench next to her to wait for the bus to Allentown. Every few minutes the music stopped and after a few seconds a woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker: J. C. Penney was having its annual electronics sale. For that day only, everything would be marked down 20 to 50 percent. Then the music would come on again.
It was raining hard. The rivulets of water rushing down the glass made everything seem oddly submerged. A tall boy in lederhosen with a ravaged face offered her some flavored cheeses on a wooden tray. The cubes were impaled on toothpicks. My mother said something about the bits of colored cellophane on their tips, but didn’t take any. She was very polite.
From where she sat, she could see the imitation street lamp to the left of the Century 21 real estate office and a sign with white letters saying main street. On the ceiling, high above the steel rafters, someone had painted a summer sky, though you could barely see it. I don’t know if she noticed it.
A frail old man in a pink w
indbreaker sat down next to her on the bench. “Goin’ to Allentown?” he asked. My mother looked at him. She seemed to be thinking about it. “I don’t think so,” she said.
A poster taped to the brick wall showed a snarling tiger on a small stool, a clown with a huge white mouth shooting a tiny bow and arrow, and a powerful man with long blond hair holding a whip. He was yelling something, but he looked as if he were crying.
My mother stood up.
“Shprecken Zee Dutch?” said the old man.
My mother took off her raincoat, folded it neatly, and placed it on the bench. “Have a nice day,” she said, then walked out into the rain, across the parking lot and out to the turnoff ramp from the highway where she stepped directly in front of the 4:38 bus to Allentown.
And I can see her saying it: “Have a nice day.” That sardonic half-smile. We hadn’t spoken in seven years. She left no phone message, no note. No taped cassette on the dining room table. Just a casserole dish half filled with ashes and a few feathery bits of letter paper. I poked around in the ashes with the eraser end of a pencil. Along the edge of a blackened piece of blue Luftpost letter paper I made out two words: “I still.” And that was all.
MY MOTHER ERASED HERSELF SO THOROUGHLY THAT for a long time after she died, I couldn’t find her anywhere. Two years later my father died, and not long afterward I resigned my job and moved to Prague. I was thirty-seven years old. I hadn’t forked any lightning, wasn’t really expecting to. Maybe I was looking for them, I don’t know—men do all sorts of foolish things. Or maybe I was hoping to discover how our particular story, of which I knew so little, really, fit the larger one. Face to face with that larger, known puzzle—of the past, of Prague, of war—I would see the empty space that was us, recognize its shape. And I would understand.
I found stories enough, but not ours exactly; empty spaces we should have fit, but didn’t. Everywhere I went, things seemed to speak of her, to hint of her, yet revealed nothing; they were like a stranger passing in the street who whispers your name, then denies having said anything at all. Held up to life, metaphors melt like snow.
That first summer I moved to Czechoslovakia I stayed for a while in an old inn, a wood and plaster building located at the base of a grassy dam that rose like a mountain just meters from the back windows and gave the light a permanently hooded, storm-like cast. The building had once been a mill house; the brook that had been stoppered up long ago still trickled past the parking lot. At night, lying in bed, I could hear it through the open windows after the drunks had gone home. At my back, basking in the moonlight, was the reservoir, stretching for kilometers through the mustard fields. No one seemed troubled by the fact that a continent of water hung above their beds, that carp slurped at the air five meters above the kitchen chimney.
I stayed four days. I was the American eating trout by himself every evening in the small wooden dining room with the dirty tablecloths and the outraged-looking boar’s head which appeared to have simply rammed itself through the wall and stuck fast above the lintel. The one just comfortable enough in the language to be uncomfortable in his own skin, surrounded by quiet families who grew noticeably quieter every time he entered the room, who pretended to be busy wiping their children’s faces whenever he glanced up from his plate, who watched the waitress approach his table as though she were a matador entering the ring. Not quite knowing what to do with myself (I had no one to talk to, and reading would have seemed rude), I would pretend to be fascinated by the room itself—looking this way and that with the curious, benign expression of a parrot on a branch—eat quickly, and leave.
One day I passed by a small, weedy pond that was being emptied. Four young men in heavy boots were plunging about in the mud, grabbing the huge silver carp that everywhere flopped and slithered in the dwindling water and throwing them into the bed of a truck that had been backed to the water’s edge. It was a beautiful day, fresh and hot, and the men, who were strong and quite brown from the sun, were enjoying themselves enormously, shouting and laughing as they splashed after the carp that tried to get away, grunting every time they turned and spun a heavy fish over the rail. The carp slapped around for a time, then died, buried under their fellows. I watched the men work, turning from the hips like discus throwers, their heads thrown back with effort every time they released a fish into the air, then went on my way.
That evening I recognized them as I ate dinner at a local inn. They had washed and changed their clothes. Their hair was combed. They seemed so dull and sullen, sitting over their glasses of beer, that for a moment I wondered if I was mistaken. And then one of them turned toward the bar and I saw a carp scale, like a giant silver fingernail, stuck to the back of his suntanned neck.
I don’t know what I had expected. Some of the people I spoke to—a humped-up woman with a hairy mole under her eye whom I met at a wooden bus stop, a small badger of a man hurrying along a fence—remembered my mother. They seemed touched to hear she was dead—they remembered her when she was like this, playing right over there—but no more than they were by the fact that her son had come all the way from America to find the family house. They’d heard that she’d gotten mixed up in something during the war, that she’d escaped, immigrated to New York. The Resistance? Another man? They hadn’t heard. I was invited inside, plied with cups of thick Turkish coffee and jahodový táč, taken into the back room and shown the bust of President Masaryk hidden behind the curtain. They had had him there through everything, they assured me. I learned nothing I hadn’t known.
I collected facts, as I always had, like a child hoping to build an oak from bits of bark. I traveled to the few towns I recalled my mother mentioning, visited the houses where the partisans had met, hunted down the places where they had died. I pored through documents and letters, talked to those who had survived. The majority of those involved in the Resistance had been executed immediately or deported to camps right after the Heydrich assassination in 1942. Most of this second group had died there, some at Mauthausen, others at Terezin, still others at Auschwitz. Which told me nothing. Many had died.
One hot June day that summer I took a bus to see a certain town in Moravia I had read about whose citizens had been particularly active in the Resistance and had suffered for it. I’d heard my mother mention it. The air in the bus was stifling—most of the windows seemed glued shut—and when I discovered that I’d gotten off one town too early, rather than get back in, I pretended that that had been my destination all along. But this wasn’t Malá Losenice, the driver explained, trying to save me from my mistake. No, no, this was exactly where I wanted to go, I assured him, and finally, with an irritated wave of his hand, he dismissed me. A young woman with a heavy bag of groceries started to climb into the bus. Conscious of being watched, I headed up a tilting dirt road lined with squalid houses as though I knew precisely where I was going. The smell of the fields, of sun and drying hay and stables, came in hot waves.
I asked directions. Malá Losenice was eight kilometers by the main road, I was told, five by the red-marked trail that led through the woods. I would have to watch carefully for the turnoff for the blue trail.
The path left the town quickly and meandered up through mustard fields and young wheat, still and unmoving in the heat, then turned into the forest. A hunter’s stand of cut pines stood against the trees, a small pile of rusted cans at its base.
I got lost. There was no blue trail, nor any other for that matter, and when I retraced my steps after an hour or so, I didn’t recognize any of the places I came to. To make matters worse, I hadn’t brought enough water, and there didn’t seem to be any streams in these woods. I walked on and on, sitting down to rest every now and then, then nervously jumping up to walk another mile. It was absurd, all of it. What had I been thinking? I was going home...as soon as I could figure out which direction home might be.
Walking down a long, sloping dirt road through the fields, I found myself behind an old woman dressed in black, making her slow way toward the
forest. Setting her stick ahead of her, then moving up to it, she reminded me of a fragile spider testing unfamiliar ground.
When I was still some distance behind her I cleared my throat so as not to startle her. She had paused by a wooden fence to catch her breath, one hand on the top slat, the other on her cane. Hearing me, she transferred both hands to her stick, which she had planted in the dirt, and pivoted slowly in my direction.
“Dobrý den,” I said, greeting her. She didn’t respond. She was very old, her face and neck under her kerchief fissured like bark. As I passed, I could see her mouth working as if searching for a bone with her tongue. When I asked her for directions back to the town I had started from, she raised a trembling claw and pointed in the direction I’d been going.
And suddenly—perhaps it was the heat—I had the absurd desire to ask her if by any chance she remembered a couple, a young man and a woman with very black hair, from the early years of the war. It wasn’t completely mad. She was certainly old enough. I’d grown up hearing about the forests of Moravia, had seen the look on my mother’s face when she spoke of them. Maybe this woman had seen them one July evening as she was coming back from the well. Or glimpsed them through her kitchen window one morning just as her husband called to her from the pantry to ask if she’d said apricots or cherries. I wanted to ask her—this one woman out of a hundred thousand, living in a place that most likely had nothing to do with them at all—if she remembered...something. To take a wild stab at chance, at the miracle of coincidence.
I didn’t. Her hands, veined and speckled, grasped each other over the flat head of her walking stick. I continued on. When I turned around at the edge of the pines I could see her, half a kilometer back, making her way down the road toward the trees like the shadow of a small, dark cloud.
