Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  Which is fine, I guess, though I’m troubled by how often loyalty trumps truth when it comes to memory, how the past tends toward uniformity—all this or all that—how revising what I remember, even when it’s necessary and just, can feel like the profoundest betrayal. The past clings to me, whispering, “Trust in me beyond thought, believe in me above all things, love me like life itself”—and I have, and continued to, decades after it had been proven false.

  And I wonder—is it steadfastness that keeps most of us from questioning our memories, or fear of the pain that that questioning would exact? And if it’s fear that keeps us true, how pathetic that devotion is. For some of us, at times, memory is like the Old Testament God: Question me and I will make you suffer; abandon me and I will take your faith.

  The problem with being a writer is that well enough won’t leave you alone.

  I have my memories, drawerfuls of them—they are who I am. Spreading them out on the table, therefore, parsing them, is a kind of self-anatomy. “Uncomfortable” is not the word. I tell myself that this is what writers do, that no one else can hold this scalpel, that the time has come to lay myself down, crack through the rib cage, palp the heart. I tell myself this, but it doesn’t help.

  It’s not fear I have to resist at this moment, but an almost unbearable sense of disloyalty. Even cruelty. I’m betraying her, us, the past. Just leave us alone, she’s saying, pleading; leave at least those few memories intact, that handful of golden days when you were still small and the world was still magic and I was everything to you. If you ever loved me, save them. If you respect nothing else, at least respect what was—remember it, and draw a line.

  But it’s no good, ma. You raised me too well, gave me too much, started undoing your own work a few years too late. It’s a different “you” I hear now, the one who, were I to listen, would give me a look of disappointment bordering on disgust. “And you call yourself a writer?” you’d say. “What’s the matter, you want people to like you?”

  And you’d turn back to your book, dismiss me. It wasn’t worth talking about. When it came to writing, there was only one law. It was very simple: Go anywhere. Tell all the truth as you see it.

  If I didn’t have the guts, I should consider politics.

  It’s interesting how, once you begin excavating the past, dates change, chronologies adjust. I’d always believed that my mother’s descent into madness (though I didn’t see it as that for decades) began when I was in my teens; now, the further back I go, the more I remember.

  In 1962, when I was three, we learned that my grandmother—my mother’s mother—had pancreatic cancer. It had been six months or more since she’d been diagnosed; word had just gotten out.

  This was grief multiplied by circumstance, misery squared. My parents had escaped across the Czech border in the winter of 1948 with the aid of a professional smuggler they’d hired to lead them through the forests, to cut through the wire fences—in short, to do whatever needed doing. They knew they were closing the door to home but, like everyone else back then, believed that the new regime could never last, that in a year or two they’d be back. They were wrong. The Communist coup held. A decade passed, another began. News was choked off to a trickle; the occasional letters that came through had been opened and resealed. Fourteen years after my parents’ escape, the warrant for their arrest was still active. Returning was unthinkable.

  And now my grandmother was dying. There was nothing to do. The sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown. I may have been a handhold, as children often are. I hope so.

  Sometime during those months I sat down with my box of Crayola crayons and drew a creature like a cross between a pig and a crocodile with a long, lizard head full of teeth and a zigzag, poisonous tail. When my mother and father asked, I said it was a nebezpeny zvíe—a dangerous animal. I named it Rakovina—the Czech word for cancer.

  I still remember my mother’s joy over that drawing, which now lies buried in one of the boxes crammed with curling photographs and cutout pumpkins and thin luftpost envelopes that I’ve dragged around with me, at considerable cost to my wallet and my back, most of my adult life. Something about that child’s conjuring, that literalizing of her fear—something about the fact that even at the age of three I wanted to save her, explain away what was making her sad—opened some kind of channel inside her. I was her boy. I was on her side. She could bear anything.

  Years later she’d use that same drawing to gouge her own heart, taking it out of the big, brass-latched steamer trunk she and my father had brought from Australia and holding it up with two fingers like something disgusting—an emblem of my betrayal, a standard to gauge the depth of my fall.

  My grandmother, who I never met—who I might have liked, though it’s complicated—died that spring. Maybe a month later, my mother came into my room one morning and told me to get dressed. I had to hurry—quickly, quickly. She parted my hair neatly, dressed me in my white shirt and blue shorts, buckled the German sandals that I wasn’t yet old enough to despise. I had to hurry. Quickly.

  We locked up the apartment and ran down the long, open corridor that led along the fifteenth floor to the elevator, then down to the lobby and out onto 63rd Road. A hot, smoggy morning like they used to be back then, the air heavy with car exhaust and bakeries and grass, the buildings fading to white in the distance. We turned right toward Queens Boulevard (left meant Waldbaum’s), hurrying past the men in their hats and the women in their long, pencil skirts. I was excited, trotting alongside her. Where were we going? I asked at some point.

  “To meet your grandmother,” my mother said, a kind of disbelieving wonder in her voice. “Hurry—she’s waiting for us at Alexander’s.”

  We ran on in the heat. At some point my mother started to slow down, then stopped. She was still holding my hand.

  I asked what was the matter.

  She didn’t say anything. She looked confused. I remember her looking back toward our apartment building, then right toward Alexander’s.

  “I think we should go home,” she said.

  And we did.

  X

  I’VE NEVER LIKED CROSSWORD PUZZLES, probably because I’m bad at them and, like most people, I’m not crazy about things that make me feel stupid. I prefer chess, though I’m not really good at chess either, come to think of it, so maybe it’s something else altogether. Maybe it’s that crossword puzzles are so preset, so determined. There’s only one way to go—five letters, not six, beginning with d. How can you breathe in that world?

  I was raised in the thickets of human motivation—it’s where I feel most at home. It’s why the quantifiers, the technocrats, the code writers bent on reducing this wilderness to a logarithm frighten me. In this sense, like many others, I’m my mother’s child. She taught me, trained me in paradox, in contradiction, showed me the complicated pleasure of trying to see through the mask. By the time I was nine or ten, she was asking me why such and such a character in a Maugham or Maupassant story had said this or done that, what I thought they really wanted, and why, and whether they knew it themselves. I loved these games, loved her pleasure when I understood something. I was smart—not clever in the British sense of the word, which suggested chattiness, superfice, a mind like a well-ordered desk—but intuitive in the ways of the human heart and the eternally posing, self-conflicted mind. In short, nobody’s fool—unlike Daddy. I believed it. Mommy said so.

  Hell, part of me still believes it. In love with many things but ignorant of pretty much everything except growing things, fly-fishing, and, to some extent, literature, I can navigate the canals of self-delusion, say, like nobody’s business. The less certain something is, the more I understand it; the less tangible it is, the more readily my fingers grasp it. Just give me a little shove down the byways of regret, and I’m in my element.

  Which should make me perfect for the task at hand except that yesterday we started sorting through the cartons of photographs we brought back from my mother’s mold-ridden
cottage in Moravia ten days ago, separating them off into nine boxes marked “Pre-1930,” then progressing on through the decades—40s, 50s, 60s, etc.—and I’m in over my head. There are, quite literally, thousands of them; every fifth or sixth opens a world: my mother as a round-faced infant in 1928, sitting in the grass by the Beva River in Slovakia; my father with his track team in Brno during the war—all those beautiful young men—in 1941; my parents on board the USS General Harry Taylor, en route to Australia—1949. Our house in Ardsley—1967; the Horners on our porch at Twin Lakes, smiling up from their chairs—1970. The decades surge ahead, then vanish: my grandfather as a stern-looking child surrounded by women in Gibson Girl dresses; my daughter, in Leucadia, California, dressed up as a sunflower; my mother, newborn, smothered in lace like an elaborate pastry.

  I’ve always liked untangling things. As a kid, I’d patiently work through the hopeless snarl on my fishing reel rather than cut it loose and refill the reel, because I liked it.

  This is different. This nest is a century old and as big as a house—a tangle of lives and stories whose ends have run under the floorboards and into my skin; if I pull a thread, everything tightens, and I feel a pinch, like a stitch pulled before its time.

  XI

  MIGHT AS WELL BEGIN at the end—because it’s not.

  On July 6, 2014, my wife and daughter and I traveled from Prague to Brno, Prague’s poorer sister to the southeast, to find my mother. On the train, crammed with backpackers bound for Vienna, I talked to a cheerful, elderly couple from Sydney who told me they’d visited the shrine dedicated to the Czech paratroopers who, in 1942, assassinated Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, the so-called Butcher of Prague—how moved they’d been to see the bullet holes in the chipped wall, the flowers in jars left there by locals who still remembered the day, now three-quarters of a century gone. Nice people, they invited us to visit them in Sydney.

  In Brno, we caught a taxi to our hotel, one of those Soviet-era high rises offering the full menu of offenses to proportion and taste: vast, deserted dining rooms perpetually awaiting a party of two hundred; shin-reflecting mirrors on the sides of the “Bowling Bar”; mirrors on walls, on doors, on the elevator ceiling just in case you decided to get it on before you reached your floor or wanted to check the progress of your bald spot. We ate a fine, fatty dinner, then braved the subterranean, –1, level where, by knocking on several locked doors in a white hallway we magically summoned a tall young man dressed like an undertaker who ceremoniously ushered us into the spa featuring multicolored changing lights on the ceiling of the steam room and a whirlpool that drained itself every fifteen minutes.

  We laughed. We made jokes about booking a room at the Overlook Hotel, about Jack Nicholson—Heeeere’s Johnny!—breaking into the bowling bar. I felt better than I had in months. I knew what was coming, or thought I did, but I was ready. At some point, as we sat in the hot tub, a dour, undercooked young man emerged from the sauna, winced over the massage-therapy rocks glued to the floor, then disappeared into the towel room where he proceeded to change, not realizing that the central panel on this door, of all the doors in the hotel, wasn’t a mirror. Perfect.

  In the morning, after a breakfast in the empty dining room featuring a buffet of sausages, breaded meats, cheeses, roasted vegetables, potatoes, etc., large enough to glut a small invading army, we climbed into the rental car and James, the GPS gnome with the reassuring Oxbridge accent (“In one KILO-meetah, tuhn left”) led us to my mother who, after a lifetime of exile on three continents, now found herself only a short walk from where she’d been born.

  There it was—a pleasant, three-story building on a leafy side street. When we rang the bell, we were welcomed as if we were family. The place was clean, full of light, the nurses large, soft women possessed of that indomitable sense of humor you often find in people who do truly hard things for a living. They seemed warm, genuinely kind. There was a small garden in the courtyard. I could hear birds outside.

  Time accelerates. The attention narrows, tunnels. The tag on the door had two names—one I didn’t know, and Olga Slouka. My mother.

  For a second, maybe two, I didn’t understand what I was looking at, and then, as Melville (yet again) once wrote, “reality outran apprehension.” She was sitting with her back to us in a bed with a slide-up child’s guard like a giant crib. Her legs, protruding from her diaper, were thin as my forearm. Next to her was a stuffed rabbit. She was making a noise I’d never heard before, a kind of prolonged, whining moan. It was the sort of noise you might hear coming from someone deep in sleep, and if you heard it, you’d wake them.

  There was nothing to do but go to her, fall to my knees, touch her arm, say her name. It’s me, I said, in Czech. Your son. It didn’t matter. She was gone. Her eyes looked at me, lost focus, moved on. I could see my wife and daughter standing by the door with their hands over their mouths; the next instant my daughter was by my side, petting her grandmother’s arm, talking to her, reminding herself to her.

  I didn’t cry. I’ve always been an easy weep: Reading Old Yeller to our son when he was five—or was it Shane?—I remember struggling against the closing of my windpipe, then pretending I had something in my throat. Yet now, faced with something that could force tears of sympathy from a complete stranger—the tongue moving obscenely as if of its own volition in her half-open mouth, the missing uppers extending her chin into the witch’s point of the fairy tales—I didn’t cry. It’s her, a voice in my head kept saying. To seš ty—It’s you—I wanted to say to her, so I could believe it. But I didn’t. Because it wasn’t.

  Instead, with the help of one of her nurses who swept into the room like life itself, who sat my mother up, brushed back her hair, then lifted her onto a kind of walker, all the while gabbing away—You want to take Petík with you? Well, why not? How’re we doing? A little slower?—we all went down to a cheerful common room with pale yellow curtains where we spent half an hour talking to someone not there.

  And it’s so strange, as anyone who has gone through it knows, to look into that absence, to wonder if somewhere in that great dark some memories, like bits of dream, still circle. Memories of the two of you together, maybe. Good memories, you hope.

  Alas, that would not be my mother’s story. No, she’d bring it crashing down, all of it, uncompromised to the bitter end. She’d go hard. No fairy-tale endings here—at least not those fairy tales.

  Her body, reduced to sixty pounds or so, was going fast, the brain, in its utter helplessness, no longer able to communicate the necessary instructions; she was eating four times a day and starving to death. And the mind? Who’s to say, exactly? Ja se bojím, she kept saying over and over again in that sun-filled room overlooking the garden. I’m afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mom, I kept repeating, stroking her hand, which she seemed to like. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

  Ja se bojím, she’d repeat in that whiny, child-robot voice I could barely recognize.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, Mom. Look—Petík is here, we’re here.

  Ja se bojím.

  Everything’s fine, Mom.

  Ja se bojím.

  What is it, Mom? What are you afraid of?

  She paused.

  Ja nevím—I don’t know.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, I repeated, idiotically, because I didn’t know what else to say, because I needed to convince myself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. What are you afraid of?

  She paused again, the tongue turning and prodding as if the answer was something she’d find in her mouth.

  Tell me what you’re afraid of, Mom, I said again, holding her hand.

  And she looked at me with those watery eyes, lost, not recognizing me, her only child. But she’d found it.

  Zlo, she said, and I thought I saw a flash of her old self, dug in deep at the end of the world. Evil.

  Two days later, I went back. I had to. I sat with her for five minutes, talked to her about the stuffed lion we’d broug
ht, which seemed to have made friends with the monkey, which was resting its head on the lion’s shoulder.

  Then I kissed her on her head, then once more—that thin, familiar hair, that scent that was hers alone in this world—and left.

  XII

  IN THE MID-1970S WHEN I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, I’d travel to Czechoslovakia, the country my parents had grown up in, escaped from, and would eventually return to, and during these visits I’d sometimes take the tram to see my great-uncle Pepa and my great-aunt Sonya.

  This was still a decade and a half before the unimaginable, pickup-sticks collapse of the Soviet Union, fifteen years before the Velvet Revolution gave back to Czechoslovakia the sovereign right of every nation to foul its nest in its own way. Václav Havel was still a dissident playwright, foreigners had to report to the authorities within forty-eight hours of crossing the border, the stores were more or less empty—except, of course, for those reserved for the elect. You watched what you said, where you said it, who you said it to—if not for your sake, then for the sake of those speaking to you, who in any case would have to fill out a special form reporting that they’d had contact with someone from the West and explaining the reason for it.

  Perversely, maybe because I was young, or because the blue passport in my back pocket protected me from most humiliations and risks, I have wonderful memories of that time. It was undeniably exciting, full of intrigue, rich in subtext, innuendo, double-speak. I felt like a secret agent. As a kid from New York, one who spoke Czech, no less, I was a curiosity, which was almost like being popular—a new experience for me. I didn’t mind.

  I liked prerevolution Czechoslovakia. I liked the otherness of it, the smell of plaster and coal smoke, the courtyards with their plots of lettuces and kohlrabi, the rabbit hutches stacked under the eave. I loved the electrical smell of the trams, the lonely Moravian forests into which I’d disappear with a book, a hammock and a couple of rohlíky and cheese. I liked figuring things out, jumping on lines whenever they formed on the sidewalk because there was bound to be something desirable—oranges from Croatia, say, or batteries from Poland, or a new translation of The Trial—at the end of them. I fell in love—with a girl, yes, but with a country as well—and three or four times a summer I’d spend an afternoon at my great-aunt and -uncle’s, where my aunt would stuff me like a Christmas pig.