Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  “Two years,” my father said.

  Nothing.

  “Three.”

  My grandfather looked at him for a while, then nodded toward the vise: “Don’t get greedy,” he said. “Six are enough, one-point-five centimeters apart. And watch out for ermák—he can see the door from his window.” And he left.

  Fifteen months later, the war was over. I don’t know if they celebrated together, but I like to think they did: father and son, the celebratory clink of the shot glasses of slivovice, then back to work.

  XXIX

  BACK IN THE 1970S, walking through the small, cobbled towns of Moravia, I’d often find myself waved over by people working in their yards—hoeing a garden, say, or building a wall—who’d somehow spotted my Western-style jeans or sneakers. They’d ask where I was from, then offer me a glass of home-made wine, or dinner, or a place to sleep, eager to show their hospitality to someone from the West. Our conversations would take place in freezing little wine cellars dug deep into the ground (heavy coats would always be hanging on pegs outside the entrance), or in tiny dining rooms with plastic tablecloths where, sooner or later, I’d be shown the hidden bust of Tomas Masaryk—the Czechs’ George Washington and, since 1948, a forbidden symbol of national independence.

  I remember those people still, though the years have blurred their particular features into qualities: pouched eyes and moles and laborers’ hands, into generosity, curiosity, pride. We talked about many things over the course of those afternoons and evenings, but one thing I remember hearing over and again, which troubled and confused me, was that in some ways the war had been preferable to what had followed it. In 1942, the consensus was, you generally knew who your enemy was: He wore a uniform. He spoke German. He could be shot. After the Communist coup in 1948, the lines blurred; the enemy was your professor, your neighbor, your brother-in-law. The rot was inside now. If summary executions and mass deportations were no longer the order of the day, lives were being destroyed nonetheless, decade after decade, with no end in sight. There was more. In 1942 or ’43 there’d at least been victories to hope for—now there was nothing. The West had no business here, the Berlin wall was the wall, and those who refused to join the Party were out of luck. Reduced to their sense of humor and their appreciation for the absurd, they watched the years pass.

  Twenty years later, fifteen years after the Velvet Revolution had consigned both the German and Soviet occupations to history, I asked my father if the opinions I’d heard back in the seventies—that the postwar years were worse than the war itself—surprised him. We were sitting at a “café” inside a horrible little mall on Vinohradská Street surrounded by mostly deserted, expensive stores—Montblanc, Versace, Louis Vuitton—catering to bulked-out Russian men and pneumatic women in leopard-print bustiers. Above us, hanging from the interior balcony in front of the second-floor stores, enormous posters of gorgeous models looked down on the Czechs who couldn’t afford their sunglasses.

  My father, in his old-man’s beret, had hung his cane on the fake café “railing.” People were people—it was natural to see today’s enemy as worse than yesterday’s; still, he suspected the Jews might have a different take. And then there was the fact that Czechoslovakia had suffered considerably less during the war than Poland, for example; nostalgia for the Reich might be a tougher sell in Warsaw. He shrugged, took a sip of his vodka: Anyway, the Nazis for six years or the Soviets for forty—these were the options?

  Remembering this some twelve years later still, a garish February sunset reddening the frozen hills outside my window and the mercury dropping like a stone, I realize it was precisely this unwillingness to sacrifice complexity to convenience (or convention), this refusal to choose door number one over door number two out of laziness or exhaustion or the desire to please anyone-the-fuck-at-all, even himself, that I loved most about my father, that I miss the most now that he’s gone, and that probably marked his life most profoundly. It makes sense that it would have. By 1948, throughout the Eastern Bloc, the Lie was just getting its legs; ideological conformity was the order of the day. In that climate, men (and women) of my father’s stripe were uniquely unsuited for survival.

  The facts spoke for themselves, after all: He’d survived the Germans for six years; after the Communist coup, he barely lasted six months.

  XXX

  ACTION AND REACTION: WHERE Big History is concerned, some sequence is believable—thing follows thing. And so, a brief recap: In 1938, betrayed at Munich (not only will England and France not come to their aid, the Czechs are told, but should they choose to defend themselves, the decision will be construed by their former allies as an act of war), Czechoslovakia is thrown to Germany—a steak to keep the dog at bay. It’s a bad move—the steak just makes the dog stronger, hungrier: The country’s munitions and its considerable industrial might are promptly absorbed by the Reich, then turned against the appeasers. A few months later, Germany invades Poland. England, at long last seeing the light, declares war. Six years and approximately 50 million lives later, the Axis powers are defeated and the Reich stopped, 988 years short of its 1,000-year goal. Soviet armies, albeit with some excesses (forcing young girls to be hidden in coal piles), liberate Czechoslovakia.

  Thing follows thing: In 1945, the war finally over, 2.9 million ethnic Germans are summarily booted out of Czechoslovakia, sometimes brutally, often extralegally, still more often unjustly, and, at least on some visceral level, understandably. Thanks to the horse trading at Yalta, Czechoslovakia is now under the Soviet sphere of influence. Initially at least—one of history’s little ironies—a significant number of Czechs are just fine with this. Grateful to the Russians for their liberation, with the West’s betrayal at Munich still fresh in their minds, they’re not indisposed: Papa Stalin’s off in Moscow, a long way away. As for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, well, compared to its equivalents in Yugoslavia or Poland (where members of the wartime Resistance are being arrested and pogroms are accomplishing what pogroms are meant to accomplish), the KSC is a shining light, a responsible party in the ruling coalition.

  From here, things proceed quickly, and—at least in retrospect—predictably. Initially inclined to participate in the Marshall Plan, the Czech government is forced to back out by the Kremlin, which suddenly feels a whole lot closer. In 1947, the Czech prime minister and Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald is summoned by Papa to Moscow, spanked, and told to get cracking; on his return home, Gottwald demands more power for the Communist Party, then forces President Beneš’s hand. Beneš holds out for a while, and then, fearing Soviet military intervention, capitulates. The date is February 25, 1948. By this point, the writing is on the wall; nothing it says is ambiguous.

  Still, some maintain, not all the lights have gone out. Though the Communist Party has consolidated power, though the Soviet Union—having used the three years since the end of the war to recover and strengthen its position—has begun to assert itself, a few holdouts, most notably the Czech foreign minister and son of the first president, Jan Masaryk, are still standing—candles against the dark and so forth. Until March 10, 1948, that is, when Jan Masaryk commits suicide by flying out of his window (leaving scratch marks on the wallpaper and feces smeared on the floor) and the lights, most definitely, go out.

  Throughout all this, my father, like some wannabe Edward R. Murrow, continues to wave the banner of the fourth estate. Genetically programmed to stubbornness (as well as probably wanting to impress his older, more experienced colleagues), he misses the fact that windows generally outnumber journalists. What’s happening in Czechoslovakia—the lies, the propaganda, the purges—is an outrage; the press alone can, no, must continue to report the truth. Which is an admirable position, a just position, a position reminiscent of a certain Stephen Crane poem: “Have you ever made a just man?” / “Oh, I’ve made three,” answered God / “But two of them are dead, / And the third— / Listen! Listen! / And you will hear the thud of his defeat.” Just so.

  Me
anwhile, because people will fall in love in bomb shelters as well as on tropical beaches, my mother and F. continue to stand before the door to the Law, waiting for something to happen. To what extent they’re aware of what’s happening around them and to what extent they inhabit a country all their own—as people in love often do—is hard to say. My guess, since neither is stupid and F.’s patriotic bona fides as a former Green Beret are beyond question, is that like most people caught in great historical moments they see the unfolding situation in alternating flashes of clarity and confusion: aware of the danger but unsure of its depth, aware that something must change but unsure of what, wanting to be together yet realizing, dimly, that the city of Brno, like the country around it, like the continent of Europe, has begun to move under their feet.

  XXXI

  SOMETHING HAD TO CHANGE. It did.

  In March, 1948, not long after Jan Masaryk’s “suicide” (“A very tidy man,” the Czech joke went, “so tidy that when he committed suicide by jumping out the window, he remembered to close it behind him”), a man in his early fifties with a vaguely intellectual air—the pipe, the coat, the quietly observant attitude—approached my twenty-three-year-old father on his way home from work. They wouldn’t speak long.

  Names weren’t important, he said, declining to shake my father’s hand in public. He’d come straight to the point: Rheinhold Slouka was a legionnaire. His son, aside from being an idealistic fool—but let it go—was Rheinhold’s son. It was for the sake of a fellow legionnaire, and for only that reason, that he was sticking his neck out and passing on this bit of news: Lists were being drawn up. My father’s name was on one of them. He had a week, maybe less, to make whatever arrangements necessary to escape the country. Personally, he’d go with “less.” Rheinhold, of course, knew nothing about this, nor should he. And the man told my father the name and address of a pašerák, a smuggler—no, of course he couldn’t write it down—and left.

  In many ways, it was like preparing for any trip: You needed documents. You had to pack. You had to figure out how to get to where you were going, how much it would cost, who would take you. Finally, and this was fairly important, you had to decide how many were in your party.

  Which is where the narrative of my parents’ lives, like the path in Frost’s yellow wood, splits in two: To the end of his days my father would maintain that he came to my mother the same evening he was told that he had to leave the country. They both knew that their marriage was in trouble, he said to her—it wasn’t hard to see. He wouldn’t ask her to come with him. He would get across if he could, set himself up, then send word. If she chose to join him, they’d try to make a go of it in exile; if not, he’d understand.

  My mother’s version of events, told with the same conviction, repeated through the decades, was the exact opposite. Coming home that evening, my father told her he’d been warned he had to escape Czechoslovakia before he was arrested. He was leaving it in her hands: If she came with him, they’d make a go of it together; if she chose to stay, he’d stay as well and hope for the best. It amounted to blackmail: If she stayed and my father was arrested, as he most likely would be, his imprisonment (or execution) would be on her conscience. She didn’t want to go, my mother said, didn’t want to leave her country, didn’t believe it would be over nearly as soon as everyone said it would. She had no choice.

  “I shall be telling this with a sigh / somewhere ages and ages hence / two [stories] diverged in a yellow wood . . .” In some ways it’s almost beautiful, this twice-told tale—so perfectly calibrated, so delicately balanced a single grain of fact could move it. I’ll never have that grain, that breath that causes one pan or the other to dip—with both of them gone, it’s frozen for good.

  I don’t mind, really, and the fact that I don’t, that I can live with these irreconcilable opposites, makes me wonder whether the competing stories I was told as a kid—one truth from column A, another from column B—played some small part in shaping me into who I am. What better way to make a writer—or a schizophrenic, I suppose—than to have a single child, isolate him, provide a steady diet of opposing and irreconcilable versions of “the facts,” and wait?

  One way or the other—and my guess is that the “truth” lies somewhere between the two stories, that my parents’ decision was complicated from the get-go by hope, jealousy, guilt, fear (as well as the excitement of taking the plunge), then obscured under strata of self-justifying hindsight, remorse, resentment—they left together. My father, believing the warning he’d been given, made arrangements with the pašerák.

  As exotic as it sounds, arranging to be smuggled out of your own country was in many ways a practical, even mundane transaction: somebody had to get you from point A to point B; you worked out the details—price, meeting place, time, etc.—more or less the way you’d set up a ride to the airport. Except this wasn’t a ride to the airport. For one thing, the men capable of getting you there—those likely to know the terrain, the fences, the timing of guard patrols, etc.—weren’t always the gentlest souls. For another, refugees were easy prey. They carried everything of value they owned. Nobody knew they were going. More to the point—as the bodies with the gold fillings torn from their mouths along the Austrian border testified—nobody would know if they didn’t arrive.

  I don’t know what my mother’s thoughts were during those last few days—whether she spoke to F., whether he knew she was leaving. Whether he tried to dissuade her if he did. All I know is that, for whatever reasons, she went with my father, and that when she did, something inside her froze.

  And so one afternoon in March, 1948, my mother and father got on the train in Brno with a suitcase each. It was a day of wet snow. Their destination was a small town near the Austrian border. They were to report to a certain address. They would wait there until 1 a.m., at which time the pašerák would take them through the forests to the place where, earlier that night, he’d cut a hole in the fences, at the time still free of current. The guards were on a twelve-minute schedule.

  Bits and pieces of that night would remain vivid to them for the rest of their lives, a shared memory no amount of time or animosity could erase: the weight of their suitcases, the cold smell of the pines, the slipperiness of the wet snow on the trail. Reading the path by the openings in the trees over their heads, the pašerák—a gruff man with grotesquely outsized hands—moved quickly; my father, to keep from losing him, kept his left hand on his shoulder, my mother, in turn, kept her hand on my father’s.

  Crouched in the dark, watching the wavering beam of the guards’ light pass below them, they waited till the smuggler rose, then followed him quickly to the place where he’d cut the fence. The hole had been repaired.

  The situation was immediately clear to them all: The border guards were alerted to a possible escape attempt. The schedule meant nothing. Quite possibly, they were dead already—a rifle might flare in the dark at any moment. Which left only one question: Retreat or continue? They made the decision instantly: Push on, use the available minutes. Lifting my father on his shoulders the way a father lifts a child so it can dive into the water, the smuggler brought him almost to the level of the top wire. My father threw himself over into the snowy mud, rolled, recovered. My mother came next, handed over the top strand like a parcel of goods, followed by the suitcases. And the pašerák was gone.

  My parents made it to the woods, vanished. Four hours later, slogging across snow-covered fields thawing into mud, they arrived at a rural train station outside Vienna. It was just after dawn. The goal was to make it from the Russian sector—Vienna at the time was cut like a pie into Soviet, French, British, and American slices—to the American, and from there to the French.

  If the goal was simple, realizing it wouldn’t be. The issue, the one issue above all others, involved the stolen papers they’d bought—my father’s in particular: Under the pressure of time, drawing on the tiny, time-sensitive supply of citizenship papers stolen daily from Austrian citizens or “borrowed” fr
om the recently dead before the authorities could circulate their names, the fence had been unable to find a good visual match for my father: Kurt Habermann looked nothing like him. The fence apologized, offered my father his money back; if he’d had another week, maybe two . . .

  A decent man, he told them the truth. My mother, he said, would most likely get through. The papers were under different names—they’d have to remember to take off their wedding rings—and would ideally allow them to travel from the Westbahnhof station to Ennsbrucke. My father’s odds, he regretted to say, were not good. Worse, actually. His Czech accent was not the problem—the Russian guards spoke barely a word of German and were either too nationalistic or too stupid to employ native speakers to ferret out the escapees—the problem was the picture itself. My father might get lucky, of course, and if the issue came down to certain arrest at home versus possible arrest on the border there was no choice . . . still, it was a shame. If only he’d had more time.

  He had a final word of advice: A few days earlier, the husband of a couple trying to escape together had been caught and ordered off the train. Realizing that his life was done (within two or three minutes he’d be executed behind the station), unable to acknowledge his wife with so much as a glance, much less say goodbye or kiss her, the man had taken their one suitcase off the rack like a sleepwalker and stumbled off the train. His wife, in shock, continued on, not only a widow, but a penniless one. His advice, if it came to it—and he sincerely hoped it wouldn’t—was simple enough: Leave the luggage.

  The astonishing thing is that they made it as far as they did. Needing to blend in with the early morning commuters going in to the city, my mother and father had done what they could. Before arriving at the station they’d cleaned the mud off their clothes, wiping off the worst with handfuls of snow. My mother put on a bit of lipstick; my father adjusted his tie. They stood out like giraffes on a roof. Waiting on the train platform, their suitcases smeared with mud, their shoes squelching water, they might as well have been carrying a sign: CZECH REFUGEES—SHOOT US.