“You like your old man?” he says.
“Only good for a fight with people strapped down,” says the Prague boy.
I study the blood on my hand, my shirt, the moss underneath. The blood won’t stop dripping. Mládek is blurry, everything is. I wonder where all the blood comes from, how it fills me to capacity and waits for the slightest reason to burst out. The Prague boy holds me down as I kick and scratch. His fingers push into the back of my skull, his knee lodged between my buttocks. Mládek rolls up my right pant leg and takes a deep breath. At first, the flame feels cold on my calf, but a second or two later the pain travels beyond my body, I smell my own searing flesh, my muscle seems to be melting into the ground and merging with dirt. Red patches shoot into my vision. The Prague boy has released me but I cannot move. My jaw muscles are cramped and I am no longer sure whether any sound is coming from my throat. The Prague boy runs away and Mládek drops the sizzling stick next to my face. His understanding of the history that brings us to this moment isn’t any clearer than mine, meaning there is nothing we can say to each other. He is looking at my leg with his mouth agape.
“Oh that’s big. Big, too big…” And he runs too, and I am alone.
Only the birds chirping above me know how long it takes before I regain control of my arms, and I dig my fingernails into the dirt and moss and pull myself forward, and again, and now I can push with my left leg too, but I have to wonder, did my right one catch on fire? Did it fall off? I don’t dare look back to find out. I crawl out of the woods and back onto the football field, where the evening dew of manicured grass soaks into my lips. At last I feel my right leg again, a moment of relief brought on by the cool droplets before the real pain sets in, my scorched nerves no longer under the anesthesia of shock. The witch is buried somewhere inside the steadily burning pile of wood, and the celebration attendees are now more interested in alcohol and shouting. I crawl all the way to the pyre until finally their eyes turn toward me, and a wave of bodies runs in my direction. Mrs. Vlásková faints when she sees my leg. Men extend their hands toward me until I am airborne, steadied on broad shoulders. I shut my eyes and count. Count and wish my father could carry me now, wish he could apologize in every language of the world.
TWO WEEKS LATER, I hobble to the mailbox and find a letter from the government. During this time of rest ordered by the doctor and intensely enforced by Grandma, these small trips for the mail are the highlight of my days. The envelope is standard mail size and contains a page folded thrice, with a stamp the size of my fist. My grandfather growls at the table as he finishes reading, then looks at me lying on the couch. I close my eyes, breathe deeply in pretense of sleep. My leg is sore and itchy beneath the bandaging, and the yellow antiseptic and plasma seep onto my fingertips whenever I scratch it. I breathe through my mouth to avoid the smell of medicine and pus.
My grandfather stands up and walks over to the pantry. He takes out a gray plastic box and sets it on the living room table, glancing at me often. He removes his flintlock pistol from the box along with a vial of gunpowder and a bag of lead balls, scratches off a bit of rust with his fingernail, and blows into the barrel opening. Sliding the pistol under his belt, he pulls the bottom of his flannel shirt over it, and puts the ammunition in his front breast pocket. Šíma studies him with head tilted. Grandpa grabs his hiking stick and heads outside, steering off the main road and toward the vacation cabins by the lake. When he is out of view, I rise, slap my wound gently to ease the itching, and pick up my own hiking stick, the one Grandpa carved for me when I was six. Grandma will be in town buying books for a while longer, and so there is no one left to keep me on the couch. As I step outside, Šíma emits a subtle whine. He has never liked being alone.
Most people in Středa claim that the vacation cabins are their own village, as the cabin population has nothing in common with the people of the village. The houses stand far apart, each one surrounded by rich layers of trees, bushes, gardens. There must be at least two dozen of them by now, these new families having flowed in to embrace the weekend country life, teenage daughters tanning by inflatable pools, teenage sons hitting trees with sticks and fishing in the lake, fathers grilling with their legs spread wide apart and mothers drinking wine and reading on porches. The village kids say that Shoe Man’s house is far away from the others, built at the edge of the forest, and that no one ever sees him arrive or depart—one day, he is simply there, and the next, the windows are shuttered and the heavy oak doors locked and secured. He does not purchase his goods in town, does not go to the pub, does not go for strolls on the main road.
Finally, I have caught up with my grandfather. He stalks through the front gate and stomps through the wildly overgrown grass covering the front lawn. A great cherry tree looms above the house, its products not yet ripe but already violated by bird pecks and weighing down the crown. The cabin itself is humble compared to the others—it is small, with a tin roof, and does not possess a satellite dish, porch, garage, or pool, the popular amenities of the other Prague weekenders. Judging from the faded texture of the wooden walls and a collapsed chimney, the cabin must have been here for a long time, perhaps decades, but I never saw it during the spying raids I took part in when some of the village children still tolerated me. The house has appeared before me as suddenly as Shoe Man and his backpack, a part of our lives that was always present but, until now, concealed.
I pause before the gate. Perhaps it would be best to allow my grandfather to do whatever he has come to do. What could the letter have said to make him place the gun under his belt? If he kills, we will lose him. It will be down to me, Grandma, and Šíma, a clan too small to amount to anything. We need Grandpa. I need his nightly coughing fits to fall asleep; I need the musk coming from his work shirts to feel I have a home.
I walk inside the house, the pain in my calf shooting into my knee, the tips of my fingers trembling. The front door creaks as I enter. The inside of the cabin is as sad and barren as the exterior—a plastic living room table with an empty beer bottle, a stove, shaggy carpet underneath a chair to my left on which my grandfather sits, the pistol in his lap. Across from him, Shoe Man leans back on a hideous orange couch, covered by a blanket. At his feet lies a black German shepherd, head resting on its paws, ears perked up. The space is so small that I could take two steps and touch any of them.
“Jakub, go back home,” my grandfather says. “I won’t tell you twice.”
“No,” I say.
“I take it knocking is not a part of your family’s customs?” Shoe Man says, stretching out his right arm. He seems relaxed, pleasantly disheveled, as if he has just woken up from a nap.
“If I ever needed you to listen to me, it’s now. Go home,” Grandpa says.
I walk over to the chair next to Grandpa and take a seat. I can hear his dentures grinding. The dog watches me carefully.
“If you want me home, you’ll have to drag me there,” I say.
“I like him,” Shoe Man says.
“You keep your mouth shut,” Grandpa says.
“Yes, of course, I shouldn’t speak inside my own house. What difference does it make whether the boy is here? You came here to talk, not to shoot, despite the show you’re putting on. Besides, shouldn’t the boy know what kind of blood flows through his veins? Don’t shelter him from what he’s bound to become.”
“I’ll shoot you in the knee,” Grandpa hisses.
“My dog will rip out your throat.”
I feel as though I’m breathing too loudly, and try to pace myself. But the more I try, the more fatigued my lungs become, until I am heaving and bending over. Grandpa puts his hand on my back.
“We can do this another time,” Shoe Man says. “Or, we can speak calmly, without threats.”
Grandpa pulls the crumpled letter from his pocket. “Will the dog pounce if I hand this to you?”
“I know what’s in it,” Shoe Man says.
“It tells me here that our house was confiscated by the Party fr
om you in nineteen seventy-six, and given to my family as part of the redistribution of property to Party officials.”
“Yes.” Shoe Man doesn’t seem amused by this, does not smile, or gloat. He has the solemn, neutral look of a weather anchor announcing an impending storm that might destroy a city or simply pass into the ocean.
“My great-grandfather built the house with his factory wages before the industrial revolution,” Grandpa says. “This is a lie with a bureaucrat’s stamp on it.” He restlessly taps his finger on the pistol handle. A tic I have never seen, as my grandfather is not a nervous man. He wipes his sweaty palms on his shirt.
“And doesn’t that get us right to the heart of the problem, Mr. Procházka? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that your great-grandfather dug the basement with his own bare hands, that the sun burned his forehead as he coated the roof. The document in your hand states that the house was stolen from me and given to you as reward for your son’s work. So the state declares. You have two weeks to leave and hand the property over to its legal owner.”
Grandpa reaches into his front pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. As he lights one up, Shoe Man reaches for the thermos in front of him and pours a tall glass of milk.
“Sure, you can smoke in here,” Shoe Man says. “No problem. Would you care for some milk? Jakub? It is still warm, fresh out of the udder.”
For the first time in two weeks, I do not feel the pain of my wound. I feel no physical sensation whatsoever aside from the difficulty of breathing. How can we do it so effortlessly all day and all night? Five short breaths, one long. Three long, a dozen short. I count, tap my finger on my knee, and try to synchronize with Grandpa’s tapping, focus all my brainpower on easing myself back into the classic inhale, exhale, one, two, but I am no longer the master of my own lungs.
“Don’t talk to him,” Grandpa whispers through clenched teeth, and I’m not sure whether he’s telling me or Shoe Man. He rises and steps forward, and Shoe Man holds his snarling dog back by the neck skin.
“I’ve thought of this moment for years,” Shoe Man says. “First, of course, when I did my time, four years in political prison. The food was salt and mush out of a can, Spam on Sundays, with hard rye bread and bleached water. My cellmate jacked off while he watched me sleep. He said that in the dark my jawline reminded him of his wife. He was some artist who’d painted genitalia into Brezhnev’s eyebrows. This is where I decided I would come looking for your son someday. The Party moved my mother and father out of the apartment where they’d spent most of their lives, put them into one of those cramped studios with the other exiled families of political prisoners. When they found out we were of Hungarian heritage, they even considered putting them on a train to Budapest. They took most of our furniture and cut my parents’ retirement. I can only be thankful I didn’t have children—imagine what the Party would have done to them. Or to a wife. My life was taken from me by electrical currents and a signature on a statement of condemnation, Mr. Procházka. My family was banished so that yours could flourish. Now, I am the one with friends. I’m on the winning side.”
The struggle to breathe leaves my throat hoarse. I crave Shoe Man’s milk, but I can’t accept it. Not ever. Grandpa lights a second cigarette while Shoe Man finishes his glass. I admire his resistance to lactose.
“You sent them to hurt Jakub,” Grandpa says. “Is that part of settling accounts? Hurting little boys?”
“I’m not little.”
“I deeply regret what happened to Jakub,” Shoe Man says. “I’ve never been a proponent of using violence to achieve my goals, and I certainly never encouraged anyone to act against you. I’ve heard that the culprits were captured and punished?”
“Captured and let go,” my grandfather sneers. “Jakub’s word against theirs, they said. He must have tripped and fallen on the burning stick himself, they said. I wonder how Mládek’s tractor-driving father managed to afford a fancy Prague lawyer.”
“The other boy was from Prague, was he not? Listen, Mr. Procházka, I haven’t been sleeping much. I don’t want you to think I take it lightly—my being here, posing a threat for you. The reason I haven’t been sleeping is that I’ve wanted so badly to know what it is I want from you. What kind of reparations you can offer. It was after the attack on Jakub that I finally figured it out. Do you believe in fate? I don’t. But sometimes my education and my books and my sense of chaos are overthrown by the pure force of coincidences we are handed. My punishment for you will also be your salvation. Banishment. You sell off some furniture, move somewhere far from here, where you can be anonymous, let Jakub grow up without the weight of your son’s achievements. No one can hurt him anymore, he will not be a victim to the anger that has caused him harm. For now, it’s the safest option. And your only one.”
I wonder if the dog will bite me if I try to pet it. What is its name? In silence, Grandpa smokes a third cigarette, then crushes the empty packet under his foot. Finger upon the trigger.
The anger burning in my chest is not directed at Shoe Man, but at my father. My father should be the one sitting here, chain-smoking and losing his birth house. I want to apologize to the stranger. Kick him. Beg for the house my grandfather has held together for a lifetime, attacking the summer mouse infestations with cats and poison, filling the cracks in the walls with concrete so that ice won’t fill them and bust them apart. How many pigs have soaked the dirt with their blood, how many flowers have bloomed and withered in the garden under our watch?
“This is the acceptable reparation,” Shoe Man says. “I want the house. I want you out. I can’t get my justice from your son, but I will get something. Give it to me peacefully. Be dignified in your defeat.”
Grandpa weighs the pistol in his hand. The dog raises its head to its master. There are no clocks in the room, I notice, no ticking, no rhythm—a perfect stillness.
“You will leave us alone if we go?” Grandpa says.
“Sure.”
“Not good enough. I can fight this in court.”
“On your retirement? Don’t you realize I can get a judge to say no before you even file? You will be carried out of that house if you don’t vacate.”
“I could shoot you through the lungs.” Grandpa grips the pistol handle. I remember the pistol’s lead ball crushing through the pig’s insides, that instant flow of blood mixing with the soil. Would a human shot with an old pistol bleed the same?
“You could. You will lose the home all the same. Jakub here can visit you in prison on Sundays.”
Grandpa sits back down and rubs the root of his nose.
“What will happen to the house if I give it to you?”
“I’ll renovate it. Rent it to some nice Prague folks. A museum of our relationship, a gravestone to mutual injustices. Tell you what. I’ll even send you a cut of the rent, so you don’t fall on hard times. A peace offering. This is not about money.”
Grandpa stands up again. The dog lets out a baritone growl, and Shoe Man puts a hand on its head to calm it. The dog would kill me without hesitation, I realize, rip out my throat and chew it like a tennis ball. So be it. I will die by my grandfather’s side.
“Let’s go,” Grandpa tells me.
I reach out a hand, and he takes it, pulls me to my feet. I lean on his shoulder to stop myself from falling.
“I trust you will vacate within the time specified in the letter.”
“No,” Grandpa says, and nothing more.
He leads me out of the cabin, past the gate, over the river bridge, back to the main road, and as we walk his No resonates, its tone weak and uncommitted, so unlike the declarative nature of my grandfather’s usual speech, where every syllable is a truth not to be trifled with. A silent, humiliated No spoken by an entirely different man. A No that meant nothing.
“We’re not leaving,” I say once we’ve returned to the house.
“Go wash up. Grandma will be home soon. I’ll boil up frankfurters.”
“We’re not leaving.�
��
“No. We are not.”
My grandparents speak somberly late into the night. I poke Šíma’s tongue as I read Robinson Crusoe with a flashlight underneath the bedsheet.
The pub owner will no longer serve my grandfather. He drinks in the garage while sharpening his killing knives.
We find a gutted rat on our doormat. Most likely the cats.
We look into school transfers for me. I could wake up at 5 a.m. and take the bus to a school three villages away.
We take a train to the doctor in Louny and he spreads ointment on my wound. “Healing nicely,” he says. “It will be the world’s most interesting scar.”
I pull newspapers from the trash. Prague apartments circled in green.
No.
I pass by Shoe Man’s cabin three times. Its windows and doors are shuttered. A feral cat jumps at me from the top of the gate. I urinate onto the side of the house. Scratch tiny obscenities into the wood with a pocketknife.
The man who usually buys my grandfather’s rabbit skins says he can’t accept them anymore.
My grandmother is no longer welcome in the book club she founded. I catch her whispering to her plants early in the morning.
No.
My grandfather’s hair seems terribly thin and gray, his eyelids sagging, like cave openings so small no human could breach them.
My grandmother’s retirement check is lost in the mail. For two weeks, Grandpa has to take a job as overnight security in town to ensure we can pay the gas company. Every day for breakfast and dinner he eats cheap French fries from the rotisserie chicken stand across from work. Sometimes the cook takes pity and gives him the burnt wings that would otherwise be tossed. His breath and sweat smell of canola oil, and he spends what little time he has with us talking about his pigs, his land, food that fills the stomach to capacity without tearing at his intestinal lining. The lost check is never recovered, despite multiple filings with the government.
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 10
