Lost Lake: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Mark Slouka

  There was no sign. It took a while for him to open the door, a big man with a heavy drinker’s face and small, close eyes. A growth of white chest hair, stark against his reddened skin, sprouted from his unbuttoned woolens. “Ano?” he said, stooping slightly forward under the door frame, one hand behind the half-opened door, the other propped behind the wall. She explained why we’d bothered him. He stared at her, mouth slightly open, rocking forward with each labored breath, until she started to say it again, then reached for a set of keys and shuffled past us down the walk.

  A stone path, sunk into the earth and overgrown with weeds, ran along the house, then bisected a poor, shady garden with kohlrabi and radishes and a few ragged heads of lettuce. A chicken turned nervously on the gate of a wooden fence, then squawked to the ground. We passed through to a sort of thick-walled shed, plastered and rude, maybe five meters square. He unlocked the door, the key clinking minutely against the steel, then moved aside.

  We stepped into a white plaster room with a small, dusty window set deep and off-plumb, a cracked cement floor, rough pineboard shelves running the length of the walls from floor to ceiling. In the center, a hard-backed chair and a small table. The carvings, arrayed like infantry, lined the walls. Of the hundreds there, perhaps a dozen were of square-legged horses or faceless turtles or small, moored rowboats with pencil-thin oars. The rest were devils. Some were medieval, with straight, ropy hair and chiseled faces, sharp as an ax. Some were fat, grinning, tall as my forearm. There were small groups of miniatures, each the size of a man’s thumb, with tiny horns the size of a grain of rice.

  “Mě znají ve Vídni,” he said suddenly from the doorway. They know me in Vienna. He stopped, standing away from the wall like a rooted tree, hands in his pockets. I nodded. Very nice, I lied. My friend nodded her agreement. This one’s wonderful, she said, gently taking a small, naked devil off the shelf. The wood had dried badly. A small crack ran lengthwise from the nape of the neck, halfway down the back. He didn’t say anything.

  I brushed past her, pretending to be absorbed, and walked further along the wall, wondering how soon we could leave and whether we would have to buy something. I could feel the way her sweater slipped easily over her skin. I wanted to be outside.

  In the end we bought a carving and left. I’m not even sure who picked it. We missed the bus that afternoon and ended up walking away from the road, straight through patchy woods and briar tangles and across small streams thick with stinging kopřiva to a place by a deserted cow pond, where we made love on our clothes laid out like some crazy blanket against the stickers. Afterward we left the crushed space we’d made and waded around in the overwarm water, no more than thigh deep, and splashed, and laughed.

  I inherited the statue. Twenty years later it stands on a bookshelf, suddenly eloquent, and I almost believe I remember noticing it that first time, wedged there between those ranks and battalions of devils, no more than a foot in height: the deformed figure of a man, grotesque, almost abstract, with huge, amphibious hands and feet, kneeling in supplication before an unseen judge, his head forced to his chest as though crushed from above, like Jesus on the cross except that rather than nailed to the horizontal wood, his hands, monstrous and heartbreaking, reach out ahead, palms out, as though begging forgiveness, or offering themselves as explanation for some irrevocable wrong.

  It has been four years now since my father, noticing the statue perched precariously on the edge of the living-room bookshelf, began talking of the war and a man named Machár, or Macháč, who was said to have huge, outsized hands and whom he thought he might have met once over half a century ago. And I remember the man at the door, the grizzled cheeks, the wisps of uncombed hair, fine as an infant’s, and I have no way of knowing if it was him.

  The odds are less than small. I never actually saw the old man’s hands. There was nothing in his face or manner. The town we had found ourselves in that summer afternoon was nowhere near Jíndrichův Hradec, the town Machár was said to have returned to. And my father, not least, had always been a storyteller, a magician for whom even the most sober handkerchiefs tended to burst into tropical bloom at the slightest provocation. Perhaps there was no Machár. Or perhaps he was a composite—of other men, other stories, of anecdotes overheard, misread, misremembered, from a war already half absorbed by fictions. Perhaps all I had, all I would ever have, was a wooden statue with hands as round and deep as a pair of catcher’s mitts, chosen from a roomful of demons by a woman I’d once known and cared for.

  At the end of every life is a full stop, and death could care less if the piece is a fragment. It is up to us, the living, to supply a shape where none exists, to rescue from the flood even those we never knew.

  We all, like beggars, must patch the universe as best we can.

  The Woodcarver’s Tale

  As Frantisek Machar was being born into a wooden room thick with the smell of lamp oil and women’s sweat, the brittle shelves of ice that covered the ruts on the roads sloping to the river were caving quietly under a hard March rain. Streams and rivulets threaded the meadows, gushed into roadside gutters, dug tunnels beneath old snowbanks, and swept on. The river loosed and groaned. The midwife cleaned up the mess and lowered the lamp. On her way home, she flung the afterbirth to the pigs. It was 1915, the second year of the war. The little boy was the son of the village lesník. It would be a year before the father returned from the front.

  The child grew quickly, not all that different from the others who survived: tough, resistant, slow to cry and quick to forget. By the time he was five, he was spending his days in the forests with his father. They would rise at dawn in the cold. If it was raining, he would look down at his shoes walking up the dirt road and listen to the rain drumming on his hood like fingers on a wooden table. To keep his direction, he watched his father’s legs, the black huntsman’s boots with the heavy wool pants tucked in at the top, his father’s hand with the tufts of black hair on each finger curled around the heavy, big-bore rifle he had brought home from the war. Where the road ended, the two of them would climb up through the soaking grass, away from the town, the river, to the fogged silence of spruce and pine.

  In the forest the rain was diminished, a distant hissing, a spray of mist across his face. The needles and moss would be like sponge beneath his feet. He wouldn’t talk, he’d listen, and his father’s voice (low, clear, rough as a pine burl) would seem measured to the place, to the creak of trees, the spaces between the wind.

  This, rather than any desk or pew, was his source. To him, the things his father’s voice explained or touched were scripture; the questions, the answers, a forest catechism; every blood-tipped quill, every broken reed, every flash of color in the gloom, a parable of survival or death. What about this? Machár’s father would say, indicating a yellow-stemmed mushroom prodding up to the air, a cap of loam still perched on its velvety head. And the boy would have to recite what he had learned: no skirt, no sheath, gills burned orange and closely layered, swollen like pages left in the rain, a smell like crushed walnuts. “Dobry,” he would say. It’s good. And his father would dig beneath the loam with his hands, not pleased, and a finger’s depth down his thumb would run the rim of a ghostly sheath, thin as membrane. “Eat this, you’ll die,” he would say to the boy. “Remember that.”

  Years of stories built around a core of fact. If a skřivánek burst from the edge of the meadow, his father would point out the flash of yellow on the underwing, the looping glide. They’re nervous, quick to fly, he would say. When you see one, be careful. They tell you something’s moving. That flower, bright as arterial blood? It’s vlčí mák, the wolf poppy. Eat the bulb at the center for pain. And he’d tell him about Petr Vaculík, a logger from Řásná, who, crushed by a freak fall, a wrist-thick branch jammed through his body like a spear, walked out of the forests on a bent-limb crutch, eyes like a saint’s, his mouth and chin dark with pollen and a bouquet of crimson poppies clutched in his bone-white hand.

  And wood:
always the smell, the roughness, the company of wood. His father’s saw raining softly, piling small hills of dust: orange, pink, white. The boy would run his fingers over the crosscut, reciting pith, heartwood, sapwood, bark. The pith was the eye, he knew. Heartwood was next, bone-hard and dead. Sapwood was lighter: living cells that would shrink and warp. It would clasp the saw, admit the chisel, endure badly. Oak had clean, well-defined rings. It was strong, flexible, hard to cut, held the nail like a mother her child. Ash had a clear border, a frontier between heart and sap. Beech was reddish white throughout: no heart, or sometimes a false one, soft and unworkable. Good, his father would say, when he had done well. Remember it.

  And he would. He would remember it all: the long days, the grasses frozen in the meadows at noon … He would remember his own legs trembling down the tilting fields toward home, the evening star like a speck of mica in the blue above the hills, how his dreams would be filled with the sad soughing of trees and the burbling of water and his father’s voice asking, “What is it? What are they saying?” and him knowing he could answer, easily, without effort, forever.

  They found the severed head of the buck the week before he turned seven. His eyes had caught the dull light of bone before he saw they were teeth, drawn back from the gums, before the head itself had leaped into shape. It rested on the blood-soaked ground in a blue tangle of guts, just off the trail. His father squatted beside it. Poachers, he said. Fanning away the iridescent cloud with the barrel of the rifle, he turned the head carefully over, then turned it back. Looking up, he squinted off into the near distance of the forest. The poachers had left it there for him. To think about.

  His father didn’t speak but, knowing instinctively that death must be made familiar, deflated, made no more of than what it is, stood, picked a sturdy stick off the forest floor, and jammed it into the cavity of the neck. Hoisting the thing over his shoulder like some ghastly parody of a vagabond’s sack, he set off straight across the woods, the boy following, until the random streams of ants crossing and recrossing the trail grew thicker and faster and there, fifty meters ahead, stood a swarming, chest-high mountain of needles set against a spruce. Machár stood there beating the ants off his shoes with a fir branch, watching his father walk steadily toward it, carrying that grisly offering. When he touched the buck’s head to the mound, the darkness boiled up like a cloud.

  He was eight when the poachers roped his father to a hill just like it in the forests outside Branna, and the world should have jarred on its axis, the sun struggled to rise, but nothing happened. The river ran, the rain fell. No one told him how his father died. No one spoke to him about it. But he knew. And the lesson seemed clear: evil was everywhere, in the sheath on a mushroom, the opaque eyes of a butchered buck, and if you let it in the door, if you died, if things went wrong, it was your fault, your failure. The evil, in some dim way, was yours.

  No one told Machár this; he figured it out himself, as he thought his father would have wanted him to. In the spring he and his mother moved away, boarding the train to Brno with a suitcase each, Machár carrying his father’s death like a peach pit lodged halfway down his throat. It was in town that his hands, big and floppy as a puppy’s since birth, first became a burden to bear. At home there had been the usual fistfights; here his hands seemed a particular curse, and he dragged them on like a badly anchored ship through the tedium of school (erro, erras, errat), through the three years at the prümyslovna, the technical institute, then the strojírna in Žár. When the war came, he did what he did without thinking about it much. The work of a smuggler came easily to him. And then the war was over.

  The peace was nothing. The country gasped for air like a swimmer caught in heavy surf, only to be buried again. Machár married his wife in January 1948. The coup came on February 24. On April 9, young Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s last hope of a return to the days of the First Republic, plunged seven stories from Černinský Palace to the cobbles. Machár’s son was born the next winter.

  He came first for her, true, but it was for him that Machár left, crossing the open farmlands south of Mikulov to Drasenhofen, then through the Soviet zone to the British sector of Vienna. It was for him that he cut through the fences, at that time still free of electric current, slipped past the wooden towers, slogged miles through the muddy dark toward the Austrian oilfields gusting up like candles in the distance.

  Like a fox ferrying pups, he brought her across, then crossed again, running the gauntlet, returning one last time across the still, February fields, eleven hours each way, for the pinched red face that did not know him, the wisp of black hair, the tiny spastic arms, softer than anything he had ever known or would again in this life. He wrapped him in a gray blanket and started back. The baby was sick. He cried, his small, animal wail sounding through the muffled pines. Terrified, Machár held him close to his chest with his huge hands and crashed on through the crusted snow. It was not until dawn, crossing a vast, white field ridged and furrowed by wind, that he stopped and unwrapped his hands from around the quiet bundle he had held for hours in the warm cave of his coat. It took him a long time to realize the child was dead.

  And the world ran out like a marble down a long, dark tunnel, and then there was only silence. And voices, somewhere, trying to talk to him. She left some time later, and he did not try to stop her. It was his fault, he knew, his utter responsibility and guilt, just as it had been his father’s, except that his father’s mistake had been fast and final and killed only one; his, Machár’s, had taken three. He would stop now, on roads, in doorways, his face suddenly collapsing like a child’s that has been struck for no reason, and remain there, long after the pain had gone, with that surprised, inward look of a man still listening for the murmur of his own dead heart. For a time he existed in the refugee camps near Innsbruck, then, having nowhere else to go, returned to Czechoslovakia, alone.

  When he returned he was arrested, though no punishment had ever meant less to a man. The nine years passed like sleep. He dug potatoes, worked the roads, fought when he had to. On a warm September afternoon, the bus dropped him off at the crossroads, and for the first and also the last time he walked down that long hill and over the bridge with the water clattering below. The house was owned by an uncle he had met once as a boy. Years ago he had heard he was living here. He took Machár in, then died. When no one came to claim the house, Machár stayed on.

  And time built its slow rings around his guilt, hardening pain into truth. When a weasel slipped like an eel through the coin-sized knothole in the wall of the chicken house, he read the lesson in the carnage of feathers and blood. He saw it in the torment of a mole batted about by a cat on the front walk, tossed in the air, batted again. In the squeal of piglets eaten by the sows, in the demonic grunting from the pen.

  It was not long after Machár arrived that he picked up a hunk of cedar from the splitting log. He turned it slowly, suddenly remembering his father cupping big handfuls of wet sawdust to his face, breathing in the rough perfume. It seemed to him that in the dead solid shape of the heartwood was the suggestion of a face, and he went to the shed for a chisel and hammer, took out his pocketknife, and started hacking him free: small, straight horns, curved nose almost touching the thick upper lip, the rude first progenitor of many generations to come, truer and more lasting than the generations of men.

  And that is where he would stay, alone, unbothered, not well but not dangerous, frightening only to children who like being frightened, staggering on under the weight of his days until the morning he tried to rise from his chair at the table and found he could not, then laid his head on the wood by his half-eaten breakfast and died.

  And yet this could not have been all. Two, maybe three years earlier, there would have been an October afternoon threatening snow that found him, like every other afternoon, in the workshop, moving carefully through the living cells to the dark striping of the heart. There would be no salvation here. No love. No redemptive vision of midges suspended above the wate
r and naked children swimming till late in the flatwater by the dam. Only mercy, perhaps: unbidden, emerging as of its own volition with each lifting curl of the unshaped wood, revealing to him, as though for the first time, the faces of those who had worked his father free, beating at the black swarm moving up their arms and legs, then wrapped him in burlap and carried him home; those for whom his father’s death had been meant as a warning. Those, so like his father, after all, who did not listen. Who did not know how.

  It would come back to him in a rush: the woodshed the day after his father’s funeral, filled to the roof with cedar, oak, even applewood, aged, split, and stacked. And how every Sunday at dawn, there would be something hung out back, out of reach of the dogs: a pair of ducks tied at the neck, a pheasant, a whole leg of venison. And the old coin sack filled with toys: miniature pine-cone owls with button eyes, twig feet, and wings of leaves; hazelnut mice with hair whiskers and tiny rope tails … and sitting there, watching his huge hands doing their work, old Machár could almost hear his father’s voice: “Remember them.”

  And he would remember now too the hand lost in his like an egg in a nest, the one he had dropped that night as he lunged for their throats, the softness under his thumbs coming up against the bone, the clear crackling as of branches when he brought the strength of his shoulders to bear through his forearms, his wrists …

  And that is where I leave him, years before my life would cross his, in a bare cold room thin with wind, and outside the small pocked window shoved off-plumb into the thick plaster wall, small curled leaves gathering against the clutter of fences and catching in the tangled gardens, not hearing the bang and bang and bang of an unpainted shutter beating the changes, calling the river to frost, not seeing the small aromatic drifts of shavings gathering, spilling off the gullied lap of his blue canvas pants to his shoes (set far apart and sad like the facing cornerstones of some vast, unspared mansion), from them to the cracked and broken floor, knowing only that emerging from the palmed wood was not the same familiar shape, the monotonous affirmation of his guilt, but (see the head bent low to the chest like a resting child, the bending back, the aching, cross-hatched ribs, those huge and haunted hands, palms outward, supplicant) his brave and broken self.