by Mark Slouka
As a child, I remembered, I’d touch the appendectomy scar that pulled in the skin on the right side of his stomach. It looked like a man sucking in his cheeks and felt strange and smooth against my fingertips. I was fascinated with it—with its drama and ugliness—but most of all, with the fact that he’d gotten it when he was only twelve years old. This was of no small importance. I knew twelve-year-olds. My father’s body, incredibly, had once been like mine. I would be like him. But looking back now, I could see there was more. That I unconsciously touched that scar—as my own son now touched the fat white strip on my arm—the way a pilgrim touches a holy relic. Seeking absolution for the sin of innocence. Or acknowledging, by way of the surrogate flesh, the accumulated scars unavailable to view.
And there were a few. Not an exceptional lot, perhaps—there were some who bore worse—but vivid enough, “creative” enough, as it were, to justify a drink or two or three as the years came on, to explain the inability to loop and snug a length of clothesline into a child’s knot. Cowardice? Maybe. But I’d never watched the stain of fear spread on a young man’s pants, nor watched him dance and die at the end of a common rope. I’d never had to imagine, as my father had, his own father’s head passing through the noose.
It happened like this: twenty-four years after the evening I closed the Graumont and Mansel, ten before his heart gave out, my father, newly divorced and drunk on the back lawn of our suburban house, told me that his father, a spy for newly formed Czech legions operating with the Allies in Italy, France, and Russia, had been hanged in 1917. The Austro-Hungarian front had been moving quickly, he said. Retreating north, they had left the cherry trees along both sides of the road thickly strung with executed legionnaires; for a full three kilometers, they dangled from the fruiting branches like the pupal sacks of some ghastly insect.
Watching my father’s hand shake as he brought the glass to his mouth, listening to the muffled clicking of the ice cubes, I approached the thing as delicately as possible.
“But Dad,” I said, “Grandpa died when I was eight, remember?”
“Do I remember?”
“But you said …”
“I know what I said. I said they hung him. I didn’t say he died.”
I was silent for a few seconds.
“I didn’t say he died,” my father said again. He picked up his glass, shivering in the hot sun. “They were in a hurry, the bastards. They had a lot to do.”
“So …”
“So he managed to kick around till somebody cut him down, that’s all.”
The story came out slowly during the course of that drunken afternoon. How my grandfather, a cobbler with the face and charm of a dissolute duke, had found himself, at the age of twenty-two, suddenly marching south through warm rain to the Italian front, chosen for service in the espionage unit, sent over the lines, and, just as quickly (the whole thing must have seemed strangely accelerated, as in a dream) standing on a ditched, hardpack road with his arms tied behind his back, watching a man he’d never met construct a nine-loop noose on the end of a pale brown rope.
He knew exactly what was going to happen (by the time they came to him, after all, he’d watched forty or fifty others hoisted on the same horse which was then neither slapped nor spooked nor jerked away as in the movies but simply led off toward the next tree until its burden had slipped from its back) and yet, in spite of this, he went quietly, disbelieving, even as the noose was being slipped, almost gently, over his face, even as he felt the horse walking out from under him. The instant before his legs slid off the horse’s back, before the sky and the leaves and the dark fringe of trees on the horizon began their mad, tilting dance, he noticed a bunch of cherries—tight-skinned and fat—on a low, dripping branch a meter from his face.
He jerked and thrashed like all the others—it must have made quite a sight, my father said, that three-kilometer alley of trees—except that after the others had stopped, he was still going. Seems they’d either left too much rope, or the branch had bent just enough, or the sides of the ditch in that particular place were just a bit narrower than elsewhere. In any case, when the Allied front came through later that afternoon, two men on horseback, one on either side of the lane, went from rope to rope with their bayonets, dropping the dead like huge fruit into the ditch. Grandpa was one of them.
Except he wasn’t. Waking during the night, like some mud-soaked Jesus from his own personal Golgotha, he crawled out of the ditch, cut the rope binding his wrists on a scythe he found leaning against a haystack, and started walking. Three weeks later he was home. The only thing he had to show for it, said my father, who was born six years later, was a miniature tremble in his handwriting, as though his feet, leaving the back of that Austrian work horse, had tripped some invisible switch, starting—just a bit too early—a strange, nervous current, like death’s own heartbeat. That was it, my father said. That and a photograph, the torn-off cover page of a magazine, in fact, that hung in the parlor throughout my father’s childhood: inside its gray handmade frame, below the white lettering of the magazine’s name, Domov a Svet, it showed a wet country lane stretching to the horizon, cherry trees, and two converging lines of the dead. A journalist traveling with the front, apparently, had taken the picture before the cavalry cut the men into the ditch. Browsing a stationery store less than a month after his return, my grandfather recognized himself as the fourth man on the right.
Pouring himself another drink, my father looked over our burned-out lawn to the anemic row of poplars bordering the yard, pausing so long I thought for a moment he’d lost the thread of his story.
“He had this magnifying glass,” he said at last. “Big wooden handle, big glass … every now and then he’d lift the picture from the wall, sit me on his lap, and show me, just a millimeter or two from his face, a tiny cluster of spots no larger than the grain of the picture itself. You could see them there against the clouds—the very same cherries he’d noticed the instant before they hung him. The last thing he should have seen on earth.”
I said something more, but my father, lost in the near distance, was no longer speaking to me but to someone else: his own personal amanuensis. Or his father. Or god himself. I wanted to reach over, to wipe the fine sheen of sweat from his forehead. I couldn’t move.
My grandfather, he said, would sit at the kitchen table, sometimes till dusk, picking cherries out of a white bowl with his work-hardened fingers, carefully spitting the pits into his hand. Gloating. Looking in from the doorway, his eight-year-old son could see the picture lying flat on the white tablecloth next to him; at that angle, he said, it looked like a small, dark window, or a fishing hole in winter ice.
A familiar universe. A sea of small recognitions. A vast brotherhood of thoughts and things. I set the Graumont by the Jumping Johnny, left the cellar as it was. Outside the street was gray with light, a photograph in the developing tray: gutteredge and rail and wall. I started walking.
Two days later, when my father awoke from the morphine and demanded his pants and his cigarettes, when the doctors spoke of the heart’s fibrillations sometimes continuing to carry oxygen to the brain as though operating on memory alone, I knew that a different kind of memory had kept him alive: the memory of a man at a table at dusk. As though the son, looking up to the light, had seen a familiar face. As though the father, seeing how things were, had reached down to his drowning son and borne him to the light one last time.
the exile
It was nearly ten when I finished bailing the boat, and the moon, rising over the eastern shore, sat perfectly full on the trunk of a broken birch. The sky was opening quickly. I placed the disjointed rod against the wood and undid the rope, listening to the trees along the shore dribbling into the water. In the woods behind my back a pale, slanting room, its walls and ceiling open, its floor carpeted with leaves, showed where the moon had cut into the darkness.
Her name was Maruška but everyone called her Marie and I remembered her, though it had been thirty ye
ars at least since I’d watched her (a fourteen-year-old hidden in the shadows by the shore), slowly row her boat across the open field of sky on a night no different from this one. She was a tall, almost pretty woman with no one to tell her so, a woman who worked hard at happiness without, it seemed, ever quite knowing what it was. I liked her. Though she was older than my parents, she seemed, at times, strangely young to me: a sad, precocious child trapped inside a grown-up’s body. She’d speak to me in Czech when we met on the path and kid me a bit without making me feel foolish, but even I couldn’t help noticing that her laughter, as she sat on the float with the others, her knees drawn up, always seemed to stop just a bit sooner than anyone else’s, or that in the middle of things she’d suddenly look down as though seeing something under the water’s surface, then quickly glance up to see if anyone had noticed.
Women liked her, advised her, spoke for and over her. Men—even those who, like diviners, sensed some depth beneath the surface—lost their bearings before her silences, her conspicuous lack of artifice. Her guilelessness showed no seam; her sadness, no source. She was all of a piece, unapologetic and whole, and this frightened them, and their wives, recognizing the danger in this, quickly fired up the moat of condescension and kindness. As she grew older, of course, as her breasts and thighs grew slightly heavier and younger ingenues warranted more of their husbands’ attention, they let the fire burn itself out; a few, in fact, discovered that they quite enjoyed her company now, that what had once been false—a self-protecting ritual—had now become genuine and true.
I worked my way along the eastern shore, casting into the bars and stripes of light coming through the trees. A doe and her fawn, backlighted by the meadow, stood poised and still, stenciled against the pale grass. “Marie Kessler?” Virginia Hass had said to me that afternoon, when I asked. “You mean the one married to that writer? She died last fall, I believe. Or maybe the year before that, I’m not sure. I’m surprised you even remember them. You were just a boy then. They moved to Pittsburgh, I think, soon after the trouble that summer.”
I’d hardly known her and yet, I’ll confess, it was strange to hear she was gone. Somehow, I realized now, I’d always imagined her here, all the years I’d been gone myself, as though her story had made her a part of this landscape, irreplaceable as any wooded rise or croaking meadow.
I raised the oars. The cicadas and the katydids had been starting in the trees since the rain let up, and now a great rhythmic sawing filled the night. Ten thousand tiny throats were calling in feverish unison from right over my head, ten thousand more from the opposite shore: urgent, intoxicating, relentless as surf. Thirty years ago, crouching in the shadows of the shoreline trees, I watched her row away from the yellow lamp under which her husband sat reading, saw her stop, tilt her face to the moon, then slowly run her hands over her cheeks, her throat, her breasts. The insects raged and screamed. When she lifted the oars again, I’d followed.
Josef Kessler was just forty-seven when he noticed her—her hair, her simple dress, opened at the throat, the slight tilt of her head—in the second row of the amphitheater at Masaryk University in Brno. At the reception following his lecture (which he had agreed to as a special favor for a childhood friend), he introduced himself. Though they spoke of music, specifically, his passion for American jazz, she, like everyone else in that room, knew the facts. By the age of twenty-seven, Kessler had been an adviser to the president; by thirty-five, one of the intellectual pillars of the First Republic; now, after six years in exile with his family, one of the most powerful and respected figures in Czechoslovakia—a man of undeniable courage and grace. She was not yet twenty-two, a first-year student newly arrived at the university but already gaining a grudging reputation among the faculty of the School of Philosophy (with whom she stubbornly refused to sleep) as a writer of surprising passion and depth.
They spoke. He was charming. She listened, mostly, watching his face, aware that something was happening, powerless to stop it. He apologized, explaining he had to catch the ten o’clock train back to Prague. She shook his hand. Six months later, in a move that made the front pages of the Prague papers, they were married. Josef Kessler left his family, resigned his post, retired to private life—fully prepared to spend a year or two writing, advising, patiently playing his hand from behind the curtain until the day when he might once again regain the public sphere. His young wife, newly ensconced in a spacious, sun-filled apartment off Old Town Square, swept up by something very much like love, left the university and Brno and learned to enjoy the not insignificant pleasures of music and conversation and wine in the company of people whose names invariably graced the next morning’s papers.
Whether Marie Kessler, in time, would have found happiness in Prague, I have no way of knowing. It’s important to say (though it complicates our story), that she felt neither seduced nor stifled, that she cared for her husband, that she respected him (or, at least, respected the extent to which others respected him), that she enjoyed seeing his pleasure. Clearly, he was fond of her, and, with her own family less than a half day away, she returned often with her husband’s blessing, walking the forests, swimming the ponds she’d known as a child. Entirely solid, contented lives have been built on less.
It all happened with tremendous speed. In the dream she would remember the rest of her life it was night and she was leaning out the window of an unlit train, waiting for it to leave the station. The wooden platform was empty, a stage set under a single cone of light. She felt thirsty. Suddenly a man she had never seen before walked quickly out of the station, his long black coat lifting behind him, and she said something as he passed and he looked up and smiled and she started humming a tune—an obscure folksong her mother used to sing—and he was humming it with her, and suddenly he was more familiar to her than anyone had ever been in her life: she felt she’d known his broken nose, his dark hair, falling over his forehead, the shape of his hands and fingers, for untold ages, and without a word she leaned out the window and kissed him even as she became aware of a sound she’d been listening to, without being aware of it, for some time—a rapid, urgent knocking. Looking up the tracks, she saw the conductor, annoyed, leaning out of another window three cars down, rapping on the side of the train with his knuckles. “Close the window,” he yelled. “I can’t,” she lied, feeling the train shift beneath her. “It won’t close.” Again the train moved, strangely, as though floating on water, and turning back to her lover she kissed him again, desperately this time, feeling something changing, shifting, feeling him slipping away into something very like death, and again the conductor knocked, louder this time, the sound thundering now across the empty platform, and suddenly she was awake in a diminished if familiar world, the apartment filled with sound, her husband, pulling on his pants, already at the door.
A rough-looking young man in a long brown coat stood in the doorway, letting in the frigid air from the hall. He spoke to them both briefly, handed over a fat, unmarked envelope, excused himself, and left. It was December 19. They’d been married one year and two days. Twenty-four hours later they were following a hired smuggler (a sullen, brooding man who appeared at the rural inn they had been directed to and stood unmoving in the doorway, hands jammed in his pockets, while they collected their bags) through the bitter dark of the southern forests and across the Austrian border. She remembered little: the squeak of snow; the precut hole in the border fence; the vague form of her husband, just ahead, insisting at first on carrying their single suitcase, finally giving in to the smuggler who, for all his initial awkwardness, moved through the woods with the ease and strength of a big cat, took his pay at the edge of a field within sight of an Austrian train station, and disappeared.
Two weeks later they were in Paris; three months after that, New York. The truth of it is that she hadn’t wanted to go. When word had come that the coup was imminent, that her husband would soon be arrested, that to save himself years of imprisonment—or worse—he needed to leave, yet a
gain, the country he loved, she had balked. They had talked all that night, the envelope with its directions and false documents on the coffee table between them like a silent third party. He was convincing, urgent. He wouldn’t go without her. If she decided to stay, he said, he’d stay with her, and take his chances. He meant it.
As always, she watched him as he talked. He seemed to her intensely alive that evening, energized by the crisis, like a boxer beaten once, eager for a rematch. Exile, he argued, was as fascinating as it was frightening, as much opportunity as threat. America would show them something new and, after all, the situation wouldn’t last forever—two, three years at the most. Soon enough they’d be back. They had to decide, quickly, now. She resisted, argued, finally cried. (Perhaps she’d begun to guess even then that she didn’t love him; had begun to realize that to him she was a detail—an important, perhaps even essential detail, but a detail nonetheless—in the larger drama of his life and times.) The small space where the curtains failed to meet began to pale. What if things didn’t change? What if this was forever? The clattering of a trolley hushed by cold came from the street below. “Very well,” he said, slipping the envelope like a thin volume onto the bookshelf, already adjusting to the new situation, “We’ll stay, my dear.”
She left. She left without seeing her parents or her brother or her things, the village or the woods or the ponds she’d known. Her leaving was a sudden death, and in her memory, everything froze: the smells of alfalfa and dung; the dust on the roads that she’d run as a child, her ribs tight against her chest; the leaning stable where she’d lost her virginity to a cigan, a gypsy, a beautiful young man with smooth brown skin and soot-black hair who entered her gently and spilled himself across the straw on which they lay; the pasture where she’d found her father, bleeding from the mouth, the day he was kicked by the plow horse. All these and more—the scent of herbs, the language of gestures, the particular fingerprint of each season’s shadow and color, in sum, her home, her youth—all these she carried with her across that snowed-in border like invisible, precious luggage no smuggler could ever help her with.
