There were once hundreds of thousands of Jews in Czechoslovakia, according to her parents, but most of them were killed, or left before they could be. Today, the number is perhaps as low as three thousand, or as high as ten. It is hard to know, because being Jewish is still dangerous, illegal, something to conceal—but then again, Nina tells herself, practically everything is something to conceal. Many Jews don’t even know that they are Jewish; their parents spared them the knowledge that they were different, vulnerable, in an attempt to remove them from peril or to forget the fact themselves.
It’s a religion? Nina asked when they first told her, unclear on what Jews were besides hidden, persecuted.
Yes, her mother said. Well, partly.
But we’re intellectuals. Aren’t we?
Her father laughed. You can be an intellectual and also a Jew, Nina.
Being Jewish isn’t like other religions, Rayna explained. You don’t have to believe in anything—I’ve never believed. You’re Jewish by birth, like being Czech. If your mother is a Jew, you’re one.
Do I have to do anything?
Not unless you want to, Miklos said. I can try to get you some books that explain more, if you like.
Nina shrugged. Books were his answer to everything. What about Deda? Is he one?
Her mother’s father lives in Bratislava. Every time they see him, he tells Nina the same gentle jokes, and she pretends they’re new. When he exhausts his repertoire, Deda goes quiet, smacks his lips together, stares at nothing she can see. The skin beneath his eyes sags; fascinating bushels of hair sprout from the valleys of his ears. Once, she asked him why he was so sad. Deda looked over Nina’s shoulder, at her mother, and didn’t answer.
No, Rayna said. Your grandmother was Jewish. Her name was Eliska. She got up from her seat on the couch, squatted before Nina. She died giving birth to me, as you know. When the war started, a year later, Deda sent my sister and me to live in an Anglican convent, to hide us from the Germans. He was afraid that even though he wasn’t Jewish, they would find out we were. And take us away.
How long did you live there? Was it scary?
Until I was six. It was very scary. But Lenka was with me, and Deda would come visit. Rayna smiled. The nuns were not very nice, but I don’t want to think about that now. And you don’t have to be scared, Nina. All that was a long time ago. It will never happen again.
A few weeks later, Miklos brought her a book, wrapped in the ubiquitous brown paper that concealed any item one might wish to hide from the public eye, anything bought on the black or gray or pink market, anything purchased with foreign currency or subversive intent or from a vendor whose storefront was unmarked and locked from the inside—all in all, about half the items tucked under the arms of people scurrying through the Staromák at any given moment.
It was called The Story of the Jewish People, and Nina opened it reluctantly. It looked babyish, with its cover illustration of rosy-cheeked children sitting before a row of burning candles in a holder. She flipped through it, growing more and more perplexed. Jews lit candles every Friday night and prayed. They didn’t eat pork. They read Hebrew, believed in God, maintained that somebody named Moses split open the sea and led them out of Egypt when they were slaves, then went up a mountain and came down with laws that God wrote down on huge pieces of stone—although in the illustration, Moses was carrying one in each hand, so it must have been a very light kind of stone, something they had only in the desert outside Egypt.
It was like one long fairy tale, with holidays and rules added, and not even a good one at that; the collection of Greek myths her father had given her the month before put it to shame. Nina hid the book deep in her closet, so none of her friends would find it. Most of the time, she forgot she was Jewish. When she remembered, it filled Nina with fear, and she had to convince herself that it was probably one of those things adults made a big deal about for no reason, like skateboarding.
Tonight’s in-the-house talk, though, has nothing to do with religion or heritage or whatever. Miklos has finally succeeded in securing travel papers, and he will be leaving next week to attend a philosophy of language conference in San Francisco, California.
It is easy enough to visit one of the neighboring Communist countries, Yugoslavia or Poland, but if you want to venture outside Eastern Europe, you have to be everything her father is: well educated, prosperous, entrenched. Even so, getting this visa has taken him a year. Owning a home was what finally did it. The government, he tells Nina with a bitter laugh, considers property as great an incentive to return as family.
The three of them take the bus to the airport together, Nina making use of the long gray ride to recite, one last time, the list of toys and clothes she wants her father to bring back for her. They walk him to his gate, hug and kiss him good-bye, stand before a huge window and watch the plane taxi, ascend, vanish. Nina misses her father pleasantly for two weeks. Then the whispering begins.
“I have a surprise for you,” Rayna confides, tucking her into bed. “We’re going to go to San Francisco and meet Daddy. We might go very soon, so I want you to say your good-byes to the house, okay my love?” Nina gasps, kicks her heels against the mattress in delight, then sits up and clutches at her mother’s arm. Questions tumble from her lips, each one erasing the last: “Will we stay in a hotel with a swimming pool?” “What if my English is no good and everyone laughs at me?” “How far is San Francisco from Disneyland?” Before Nina can get any answers, her exhilaration proves too much for her small body to sustain and she falls giddily asleep.
The next night, because Nina insists on hearing all of it again, Rayna renews the promise of America. She does so every day for the next month, and Nina bounds through life in a constant state of near delirium, bursting with anticipation and the burden of keeping the trip a secret as instructed.
“Today?” she asks each morning—in English, all she speaks at home now—and each morning her mother, a coffee mug hiding her mouth, head-shakes a no.
“Tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
Every evening, Nina practices filling her small suitcase, meticulous and artful in her conservation of space. The thought of any of her stuffed animals missing out on the trip distresses her, but Nina considers herself too old to sidestep the dilemma by asking if there is any extra room in her mother’s luggage.
It is during a packing session that Rayna tells her they aren’t going to be leaving as soon as she thought.
“There have been complications,” she says in a voice taut as piano wire, and bends at the knees, palms resting on the trim thighs of her olive slacks, to come face-to-face with Nina. “Did you tell anyone that we were going?”
“No,” Nina whispers. “Of course not.” Her mother continues to look at her, so Nina shakes her head from side to side.
“You’re sure? Not even Beta?”
“I kept the secret, Mama.”
Rayna drops her head and rubs her eyes, then squeezes Nina’s hand. “I’m sorry, child. I believe you.”
“What happened?”
Her mother stands. “Someone has informed on us.”
“Who?” Nina asks, aghast. She knows, from listening to her parents and their friends, that informing is a terrible thing, the reason one must always be careful around whom one speaks. Anyone could be an agent. Miklos sometimes made light of it, carrying on in that grand, farcical way of his, which, if it went on long enough, made Rayna stop laughing, reducing her mouth to a thin line. Your auntie, he’d boom, pinching Nina on the nose and moving past her through the room, she’s been eyeing your teddy bear collection. Your best friend, he follows you home from the pub to see whether you talk to anyone seditious. The old grandmama at the bakery is bugging your bread. By this point, his audience of dinner guests would be awash in pained hysterics, and Miklos would draw himself up for the denouement: For if we help the government to rob our comrades of their freedom, it is sure to reward us with our own!
Despite
her father’s rhetoric, and the schoolyard gossip of her classmates, who huddle together during recess and discuss politics in the same hushed tones they use to talk about sex, Nina’s understanding of the plague of agents is thin. She knows to hate and fear them, but these things she has known since kindergarten. Agents are the bogeymen of the Prague playground, the source to which any misfortune or inexplicable phenomenon is linked. If a classmate is mean to you, the cruelest revenge is to float a rumor that his father is an agent. The child will be shunned, and by his best friends most intently.
And yet Nina has never bothered to understand what kinds of things these agents listen for, or say, or to whom they say them, or what consequences follow. Is agent a job, or does reporting something make you one? Do agents really take over the homes of their victims? Why would an agent not want her to see her father?
“It is wrong to leave the country, Mama?”
Rayna smoothes the top of Nina’s straight brown hair with a dry palm. “It’s not wrong. But if you don’t plan on coming back, leaving is not allowed.”
Nina looks up at her. “But we are coming back.”
Rayna sits down on the bed. “No, sweetheart, we’re not. I didn’t want to tell you this yet. Your father has a new house for us in America. We’ve been planning this for years. And now that he’s gone, he can never return. They’d put him in jail.”
“But I don’t want to go.” Nina bursts into tears.
Rayna studies her, just long enough for Nina to register her mother’s distance, her hesitation, then gathers Nina into a hug. “Don’t you want to see Daddy?”
Nina sniffles into Rayna’s shoulder. “Yes.”
“Well then, we’ve got to go.”
Nina steps back, out of the embrace. “But we can’t go.”
Rayna’s mouth opens, then shuts, and Nina recognizes the new emotion flickering across her mother’s face. Panic.
Now Nina feels it herself: a fluttering rush of knowledge, overwhelming as a flock of bats. Her family has been attacked, betrayed by an enemy whose identity remains unknown, who might be watching them right now. They are impotent and stranded and the plan has failed. Her mother is as scared as she, and can’t even pretend otherwise.
“We’ll find a way,” Rayna tells her. Nina nods, but not because she believes it.
Before exhaustion claims her at 4:30 that morning, she begins and abandons a letter to her father, indulges herself in two long, pillow-muffled bouts of sobbing, spends an hour in systematic but fruitless contemplation of the agent’s identity. Sometime around two, Nina starts to feel herself anneal with resentment for her parents, for their incompetence in carrying this off. She wakes up headachy, grouchy, in no mood to sit through class, but Rayna claims it’s crucial that they go on as if nothing is wrong. She brings the girl a mug of hot chocolate, flings the bedroom windows wide.
They walk together toward their schools, weaving through cobblestone alleys that seem newly dark and narrow. Nina remembers Miklos explaining that the Staromák was built this way on purpose: if Prague’s people are its blood and Staromestské Námesti its majestic heart, rimmed with sky-piercing Gothic church spires and baroque terracotta-roofed hotels and beating to the rhythm of its famed astronomic clock, then quelling an uprising is as simple as blockading the veins. And thin, winding streets are easier to cordon off than open boulevards.
The autumn air is cold enough to icicle the tips of Nina’s just-washed hair. Rayna wears a scarf around her head. She hasn’t showered. “What we talked about last night we shouldn’t talk about again at home. Only outside.”
Nina glances over, full of scorn and fear, and finds her mother staring straight ahead.
“Why? Is someone listening? Can they do that?”
“I don’t know. They’re watching very closely now. We must be careful. All right?”
Nina nods, endures seven interminable hours of lessons, learns nothing, returns to a house that has changed completely in the time she’s been gone. She cannot trust it anymore: imagines microphones in the walls, cameras in the bathrooms, ripe-smelling men huddled in vans, watching her shower. She begins to do her homework at Café Vasek, a small restaurant owned by a friend of her father, heading home only at dinnertime.
The meals that await her are simple and bland, as if Rayna has forgotten how to cook, or no longer cares enough to season anything. The only topic worth discussing is forbidden, so they eat in silence—broken only by Rayna’s inquiries into the mundanities of school, and restored by Nina’s monosyllabic responses.
Nina tries to be encouraged by the hardening of her mother’s features. She tells herself Rayna is preparing for battle. But it’s hard to believe. There are skirmishes. One night, the doorbell rings and Rayna rises from the dinner table as if she’s been expecting it, runs her napkin across her mouth and drops it on her chair, then stalks out of the room. The visitor penetrates no farther than the hall, where he and Rayna exchange muffled words; the only phrase loud enough for Nina to make out is “traitor to his socialist homeland,” and it ruins her appetite. Within minutes, the door is closed behind him, and her mother is back at the table, hands shaking. She pushes her plate away and pours herself a shot of vodka.
“God only knows how he heard about us,” Rayna says the next day on the way to school. “But he won’t be the last of the vultures.”
In the weeks that follow, Nina grows accustomed to dinnertime visits and the low tones of StB agents and counteragents, all of them unseen, distinguishable only by the degree of body odor lingering behind them. They come calling with cagey proposals of assistance and facilitation: offers to guide exorbitant sums into the correct pockets and thus usher the woman and the child onto a train, a bus, a plane. They proffer visas, just as costly, guaranteed to be accepted at the airport for brief windows of time. In return, they want the house.
The agents remind Nina of the suitors waiting for Penelope to make up her mind—occupying the royal palace and feasting on her food and demanding her hand in marriage when Odysseus is really alive, clawing his way back toward Ithaca to set his kingdom right. It is her favorite story in the book her father gave her, and more so after Miklos explained that among the classical heroes, Odysseus alone was a man of cunning rather than brute strength, a modern man in ancient times. That only he was descended not from the line of Zeus, but from that of Hermes, patron god of travelers and thieves.
“Why don’t we just give them the house and go?” Nina demands one morning as soon as she and Rayna step outside. Part of her has come to hate their home, to blame it for the insomnia she and her mother share. The only thing worse than wandering the dark house, wide-awake at two in the morning, is running into Rayna in the kitchen. “We’ll have a new house where we’re going anyway, won’t we?”
“This house has been in your father’s family for almost a hundred years,” says Rayna, glancing back at it. “I’ll be damned before I hand it over to the likes of them. Besides, there’s no way of knowing whether a visa will work until you’re standing at customs, and then if you’ve been cheated, it’s too late. We’d be in jail and they’d be sleeping in our beds. Are you willing to risk that?”
Nina pauses to consider this. “What’s he doing over there anyway?” she asks as they pass through the racket of an accordion player who has been busking for tips on this corner for as long as Nina can remember.
Rayna dons her sunglasses and looks into the distance. “Let’s hope he’s found a job.”
How would they know if he has? How will they ever hear from him? His letters, if he writes any, will be intercepted. His calls, monitored. For all they know…Nina stops short of completing the thought, afraid to fill in the blank. It feels disrespectful, somehow, to imagine too minutely what her father is doing. She gives herself over to vague ideas instead: Miklos is in New York. Miklos is in Hollywood. Occasionally, momentarily, Miklos is dead—and then he is even more vigorously in New York or Hollywood. Nina watches American movies whenever she can, knowing it�
�s silly but hoping to catch a glimpse of her father in the background, shuffling along in a crowd scene, puffing on his pipe and looking out of place.
As the first year since his departure nears completion, Miklos begins to grow hazy in Nina’s mind, and she has to appeal to her mother for reminders. At first, Rayna provides them with enthusiasm, pulling photo albums from the bookcase and narrating the moments immortalized within. Nina listens primly, hands folded. She concentrates on remembering, tries not to notice how much the turning pages and her mother’s recitations remind her of the clicking slides and lectures Rayna gives at school. Better is when Rayna merely tells her husband’s jokes and apes his mannerisms, brandishing an imaginary pipe and patting her poked-out belly as she mocks a very real professor of moral philosophy, a man who was Miklos’s favorite target.
The memory sessions invariably end in tears—sometimes Nina’s, always Rayna’s. “It’s okay,” she smiles, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand, “I like talking about him.” But the evidence says otherwise, and Nina initiates the sessions less and less. They’re of little help anyway. Her image of her father is being replaced by the image of her mother playing him.
At the two-year mark—the time Miklos should have gained citizenship, with an American university as his sponsor, and been able to come back for his family, divorce Rayna and then remarry her as an American—Nina’s mother decides she’s no Penelope. She takes on a heavier course load in hopes of earning tenure and begins leaving Nina money for dinner rather than cooking. The doorbell still rings in the evenings, but even if Rayna happens to be home, she doesn’t answer. One day, Nina returns from school and finds a selection of bras laid out on her bed, price tags still attached. Rayna runs her eyes across her daughter’s chest the next morning, confirms that Nina is wearing one, and nods.
End of the Jews Page 5
