by Mark Slouka
Well, here he was. The analogy, and the image at the heart of it, gave him pleasure—he didn’t know why. The absurdity of it. The stick-in-the-wound absurdity of it. It was the first thing that had given him pleasure in days. Here he was. Here they all were, swimming in circles in their own little cistern—God’s little cistern—barking like cats. Eight cats drowning in a well. It sounded like a nursery rhyme.
She would save him. She was the rope, the rake, the steps appearing in the stone, leading up from the water.
THE MORNINGS ON THE TRAM ON THE WAY TO THE Language Institute in Libeň were difficult for my mother. By late afternoon she would be tired and so less likely to think about things. She tried reading, but the movement of the car gave her headaches, so she spent the forty minutes simply staring out the window at the people coming out of stores or waiting at the stops, some hurrying by with bags or briefcases—businessmen, lovers, a little boy in blue pants holding on to his mother’s dress with one hand while bouncing some kind of stringed puppet-like thing with the other...
In the first half of May, as the weather warmed, the half-windows in the tram would be pushed down and the air would come in—pillowy gusts smelling of petrol and leaves—until some idiot worried about her hair would lean over and ask the person under it if he could close the window a bit, and then May 27 came and human beings were lined up against walls and shot, and yet nothing changed somehow. People still went to work, if they had work to go to, and when the weather was warm, the half-windows were pushed down and the air still felt good in her hair. At times this seemed natural and right—what else did she expect? At other times—brief moments, usually—it seemed both heartbreaking and utterly mad as if, looking out the tram window one day, she had glimpsed a woman burning on a street corner, her dress going up in great black billows as she waited patiently for her tram.
She didn’t bother trying not to look for him. Twice she thought she saw him—the hat, the glasses, that smooth, deceptively easy walk—and rushed out at the next stop, to the predictable disappointment. It didn’t matter. On July 16, only six weeks later, she would take the train out to žd’ár. She’d already arranged to take the day off. She would get out at the familiar train station and walk along the wall and the trees, past the little hospoda where she and her father had once seen the dwarf sitting on the bench, then take the number 9 bus to the bridge. From there it would be less than five kilometers to the crossroads. One year. He might not be there; she knew that. It didn’t matter. He would be there eventually. And the forest—the mushrooms, the mossy icons, all the things they had known—would help. They’d make him real.
She didn’t let herself think, after May 27, that he might have been involved. It was not something she could think about. There were many things that my mother could not think about. That he was dead. That she would not see him again. That she would not hear his voice again in this life. When she heard the descriptions of the attackers being read over the loudspeakers in Václavské náměstí that outrageously blue Sunday morning, the phrases echoing off the façades of the buildings, overlapping each other, she had simply stopped breathing. All around her the streams of people hurrying up the sidewalks or crossing the avenue had shuffled to a stop and frozen. Pantomimes of listening—the hand to the ear like a timid greeting, the slight tilt of the head: At half past ten this morning, a failed attempt...anyone with information...two have escaped, one on foot, the other on a bicycle. It was not him. It was not him. Nothing else mattered.
Every day she checked the newspapers for the lists of names of those arrested or shot for crimes against the Reich. Nothing. He had disappeared. It did not surprise her. If anyone could slide through, he could. She’d seen his way with the world—his competence, his carefulness. He had that aura about him, the aura of luck. When the bullet came, he’d be the one who bent to tie his shoe. She believed this.
These days she found it easier to think about the other one. He was safer somehow. She hadn’t heard from my father, hadn’t expected to. It was strange sometimes to think of him only hours away, going about his daily business. Getting on the 4:40 train to the factory, waiting at the stop in the evening for the tram to žabovřesky...
Odd to think how different her life had been then, and how quickly it had passed. One moment you were taking the train to Vysočina or sitting in someone’s living room passing around a tray of koláče, and the next someone had licked a finger and turned a page and everything had changed. You could leaf back and see yourself taking the train, sitting on the sofa, passing the tray, but now it was as if you were reading about a character in a book, a character who resembled you in every way, whose thoughts were familiar, who was you—but a character in a book nonetheless.
They’d talked endlessly. They’d made love. It was easy to think about—had always been easy. It didn’t matter. Page after page. For a week or so that September they’d worried that she might be pregnant, but it was a false alarm. They’d talked about marriage. They could live with his parents until the war was over, he’d said, then move into a place of their own. He had been doing well at the newspaper before the war began; he could pick up again where he had left off. Nothing was certain, of course, he realized that, but Soukup himself had told him more than once that he could make editor by the time he was thirty. They could do worse.
His good-humored understanding of her had annoyed her those first few months, as did his failure to notice the men’s names she dropped into their conversation like tacks, hoping to get the reaction she’d always gotten from men before. Eventually, as she had come to see that his humor lacked condescension, that his confidence was not really presumption, it bothered her less. Touched by his decency, by his obvious regard for her, unable, in short, to find a good reason not to love him, she listened to his plans for them. She wondered now what she could have been thinking. It would all be over soon, he would say, stroking her hair as they lay in some grassy corner of the Špilberk gardens, and then they’d share the bit of food they had brought with them—generally a slice of bread and a small green kohlrabi—and start back down toward the city.
She’d thought she’d been in love with him then. Which was not surprising. Good to look at, intelligent, funny, he’d seemed to be liked (or at least respected) by everyone who knew him, and when she let him take her virginity that night in the garden behind the second wall, it was not only because she liked his lank, dark blond hair and his thin, aristocratic nose but because she had begun to sense that his decency had little to do with weakness and a good deal to do with strength. It was not her fault. How was she to have known that love is not something to be measured out in spoonfuls, that decency has its limits.
There had been a calm about him that she’d liked at first, a refusal to be drawn in by the world, an understanding of things that was rooted in pain but rose above it. It was a quality she hadn’t known in a young man before—most of the men she knew were children, forever preening or pouting, throwing themselves this way or that without knowing why—and if truth be told she hadn’t minded living within the still circle it made. He wasn’t dispassionate. When they’d rolled over his rimless glasses that very first night, crushing both lenses with a hollow pop like the sound of a flashbulb going off, he’d chuckled and shook his head, and then, pausing only to see if she had been cut, rolled her over him and back to the grass, his fingers tangled gently in her hair, and finished making love to her.
Afterward they’d found what was left of the mangled frame and he’d put it in his pocket and she’d led him out of the garden and down the barely lit walks, and he had joked about the vague shapes he saw ahead of them and tapped the path in front of him with a crooked tree limb as though he were blind. She could tell he didn’t like this business of having to walk back down the sloping flights of stairs and through the half-deserted streets with his arm hooked into hers as if he had aged suddenly, inexplicably, but these things happened.
He’d taken it well. As he took everything. She’
d expected it—and both admired and slightly despised him for it. A good man. She could think of nothing to dislike about him. And yet, if just once she had sensed some anger beneath his decency, his irony. If just once she had sensed the place in him where all his negotiations with the world ended, and the man began.
It was unfair, really. He’d loved her—possibly loved her still. She could list his qualities, and these qualities were substantial and real. Anyone could see them. In fact, if the two of them had been houses or cars instead of men, he might well have been the better of the two. And none of it mattered, because for all the things he was, there was one thing my father wasn’t: he wasn’t the other one. For this she couldn’t forgive him. Fairness had nothing to do with it.
MY FATHER HEARD ABOUT HER OCCASIONALLY—FROM friends, from former schoolmates, even from her mother, whom he ran into one chilly April morning as she was crossing the street to the greenmarket. It was to be expected—Brno was a village of three hundred thousand souls, people always said, and it was true.
It had rained that morning, and low, fast clouds were rushing over the buildings, thinning to a clear, piercing blue one moment, thickening to rain the next. He saw her flinch when she saw him, saw first the quick, unpremeditated smile—she’d always liked him—then the quick desire to pass without having to speak to him, then the realization that it was too late. That it couldn’t be helped.
It was good to see him, she said; he was looking well for these times. She was just hurrying to the greenmarket—not that there would be anything to buy. For two weeks now there had been nothing, just potatoes full of eyes, some garlic...Everything was so overpriced...She didn’t know how people did it—well, that was not true, she did know, in some cases she knew very well, but this was not the time or place...And you, she asked him, your parents are well? He told her they were. And was he still at the factory as before? He was, he said. Everything was pretty much the same as it had been, he said.
Ivana was in Prague, she said, living with her uncle Ruda’s family. She was working at the Language Institute they had there. “You should write to her sometime,” she said, patting the sleeve of his coat, and for a moment he hated her for her stupidity and her kindness. My mother was young, she said. These things took time sometimes. She had cared for him very much, she said. And he smiled because he knew these things were true and because this was the joke of it, and he wished her well and continued on his way.
The world was full of jokes. My father appreciated them all. That he should have written that letter for Honza Kolařik that day was a joke. That he should have seen my mother’s face as if for the first time that afternoon, though he had seen it a hundred times before...that was a joke too. That he should love her still, that he should realize only after she’d left him that he’d made a space for her—a space that he now carried around with him everywhere he went, like a cored apple...that was yet another joke, and a good one. And he was the punch line. She loved another—she’d told him so to his face—and yet he continued to love her anyway, to think about her, to worry about her, and there didn’t seem to be any way out of it. That was the biggest joke of all.
In the first month or so he’d been just miserable and angry enough to let himself be talked into trying the usual schoolboy remedies: the bottle of slivovitz, the circle of friends, the long diatribes against women in general. For the better part of half an hour he’d sweated over a fifty-crown whore who had cried out in perfect time to the creaking of the metal bed as though she and the bed together made up some kind of mechanism, speeding and slowing down with his thrusts...ridiculous. Witchcraft. One thing had nothing to do with another. His friends might as well have recommended that he drink tea or eat a clove of garlic at midnight. It would have been no more absurd than anything else these days.
There were distractions, of course, some of them quite humorous. The factory was a distraction. They were hated there, ironically enough not by their enemies, the soldiers charged to protect the Reich’s armament industry, but by the factory workers who had been there before the war, good Czech citizens like themselves. These hated them for being intellectuals, troublemakers, for interfering in things, for disrupting things. Carburetors or shell casings, it was all the same to them. Making the quota meant a Christmas bonus, an eighth of a liter of rum—everything else was politics. Idiots. They could be told they’d all be shot on Saturday, and they’d work like dogs to get out the required number of bullets by Friday. And betray anyone who tried to slow them down.
He was liked a bit more than the others, he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because his father had been a janitor, or because he knew one end of a screwdriver from the other, or because he didn’t try to ingratiate himself. “You’re all right, Sedlák,” one of them had said to him a few weeks after he’d started there, “not like all these others with their Latin grammars jammed up their asses.”
“Is that right?” he’d said.
“I can tell,” said the man, whose name was Tonda Králíček, and who worked the lathe two stations down from him, his stomach in his blue worker’s overalls pushed against the steel. “You know how to work.”
And work he did, he and four of the others, adding steel dust to the oil while pretending to correct some small malfunction or measuring the gap of the blade with the micrometer, resisting the temptation to do more, to go faster. One broken machine could knock out the line for a day, a week...One tenth of a centimeter difference in the depth of the holding groove could make the casing too tight, and somewhere on the Russian front a shell would explode while still in the cannon. It had to be enough. Get too greedy, go too fast, and you’d make a mistake. Someone—likely as not one of your fellow citizens—would notice something and then the process, unencumbered by any need for evidence or courts, would accomplish the rest with great efficiency. You’d be led out to the courtyard between buildings B and C, near where the bicycles were parked, and shot in the back of the neck. It had happened twice in the past month—a man taken out, a bicycle orphaned.
It was a peculiar game. You had to dance just right, though you couldn’t hear the music and the steps themselves were unmarked, and every now and then, just to keep things interesting, your leg or arm would be jerked by a string you hadn’t known was there. That February, for example, Králíček had joined him as he sat eating his piece of bread with preserves in the second courtyard, rotting his teeth, and they’d talked a bit. He lived near Blansko, Králíček said. He had two daughters and a son. He didn’t give a damn about politics. If there was one thing he hated, it was these little interferers, snuffling their wet noses into everybody’s business. That breakdown in the drill press in the second sector had not been an accident—he knew that—and they’d all lost three days of work. And for what? It was not as though they were treated all that badly...they should be grateful for having work at all. He had a sense the breakdown had something to do with the oil.
He had a chata in the woods not far from Blansko, Králíček said, just a little place near a pond. Not much, really, but he loved it like a baby loves its nipple, counted the days till the warm weather returned and he could start going up. “You like to fish, Sedlák?”
He told him he’d never been. It wasn’t true, but he sensed that this was what he needed to say in order to keep up the terms of the relationship—a relationship based on the illusion of his directness, his unwillingness to pretend to anything. “You’ll have to come up sometime, then,” Králíček had said, “I’ll take you,” and in spite of himself, he had felt moved. Králíček, he realized, was not a bad man, and most of the horrors of this world were committed by men just like him.
It became this thing between them: he would take the bus up to Blansko and they would go fishing. His son hated fishing, Králíček told him, had never been much interested in anything besides playing with himself.
He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll hate it too,” he said.
“Maybe you will,” Králíček said, and smiled.
&nbs
p; He discussed it with the others, and it was agreed they would ease off for a time. Adjusting the settings of the carborundum bits was simply too dangerous; quality control could catch the discrepancy at any time, and the authorities made no allowance for accidents. The dust in the oil was better; it worked flawlessly, if slowly. And the dust was already everywhere—in their mouths and ears and shit; sitting in the latrine, he could see it glistening in the light coming through the hole in the pane, a fine steel rain. Králíček was a problem; they’d have to watch him carefully.
Nothing happened. The dance went on—the grand distraction, from which he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted. None of them knew what to do about Králíček or the others, and a week later they began to seed the oil again, a fraction of a gram a day. And then one morning during the first break, Králíček waved him over to where he sat on his stool two stations down, his short legs in their blue overalls crossed at the ankles, and pulled an envelope from his chest pocket. “Take a look at this, Sedlák,” he said, taking out a small stack of photographs. One photograph was of a one-room cabin with a metal pipe for a chimney; another showed Králíček sitting on a stool by the edge of a small pond holding a long fishing rod, his legs crossed at the ankle. Very nice, my father said. A third was of a big carp; the fish had been knocked on the head, and one of its eyeballs had bulged and swiveled upward, giving it a comical look. Králíček, who was holding it forward, had drifted out of focus; only his fingers, made huge by proximity, stood out clearly, pressing into the fish’s scales.
