Better You Go Home Read online

  She pushes the buzzer on the intercom panel to alert Jiří to our arrival. Jiří’s family name is listed on the panel. Her name is Kotyza. Her grandfather was related to my grandmother. Most lights behind the buttons on the panel are burnt out. I avoid looking at hers. I don’t want to see if they’ve troubled themselves to replace the bulb behind their buttons anymore than I want to think of Milada stuck here for the forseeable future.

  We bounce in the elevator up to the eighth floor and walk down a corridor with cracked and missing tiles. A decorative strip of plaster above the tile, painted the color of mustard, has browned with grime. And the smells. Sour cabbage, urine, acrid tobacco. Nose wrinkling neglect has turned this passageway into a tableau of the torture I imagine it must have been to raise her family here. No wonder she obsessed over the Skagit, the baldies, the turbulent water. The stinking salmon carcasses on the flood banks must have been ambrosia to her eastern bloc nose.

  Prague is earning a reputation as the world’s black market capital for illegal organs. I know this, but I did not anticipate Dr. Saudek’s insinuation—as he shoved me away from the shores of Prague this afternoon—that this was the reason I’ve come paddling into his little harbor.

  Milada insisted that we phone Blue Cross tonight and request an extension. Jiří’s black-light troupe—he’s their business manager—is performing at a local theater after dinner. She wants us to attend his show. She admits she is proud of her husband’s participation in the revolution. She will always love him for this.

  In the entryway to her flat we exchange shoes for slippers. Blinds cover the windows, an old precaution to prevent paranoid neighbors from spying, a habit she admits she finds hard to break. Curious—can’t help it—I lift a blind. In a littered lot between buildings is a rusty, partly collapsed play gym. All the reason I’d need to keep the blinds closed. Her dark furniture includes a massive armoire for coats and shoes and a credenza filled with the obligatory leaded crystal. Nothing in the details says Milada. Where does she keep her details? Following her to the kitchen, I ponder the degree to which the details we surround ourselves with ought to reflect our desires. To what extent does a paucity of details reflect self denial? My father kept his details in the basement. That amber bowl he flicked his cigar ashes into. The starched white undershirts, the ironed Union work pants. The bar of Ivory soap at the sink he brushed his teeth with, in the early days, when he still thought and acted like an emigrant. That stack of quarters, weekly replenished, that I was forbidden to touch. I liked to think they were savings kept from Mom in order to send money overseas to Anežka. What do those details say about him? That he was caught between worlds, a man whose heart desired a world that was in his past, that he longed for pointlessly? But he was kind. Those quarters, I’m convinced, were more than just beer and cigar money.

  In the kitchen, her husband winces at my broad-voweled American accent when I politely return his “dobrý den.” Jiří is a short man with an athletic build through the chest and thighs. With his pale eyes, sandy brows, sandy hair cropped conservatively short, he looks more handsomely like the Olympic skater he once was than a revolutionary. You’d expect to see his face on a Wheaties box, not on a prison mugshot. Their fifteen year old son, Martin, takes my jacket. His hair is jelled into neon pink and green Mohawk spikes. Milada tells me he is crazy about Seattle grunge. I gave him a Nirvana disc and a Walkman to play it in—he’s on his own for the batteries. Do I want coffee? he asks. I explain that I’d love it but it’s a problem of fluid retention; I have to measure intake. Then I decide why not, I’m going right back home anyway. Why not enjoy the little time I do have here?

  “Tonight,” Jiří announces with a dramatic sweep of his arms, “we serve Czech specialty, svíčková!” Pronounced “sveetch-ko-vah,” the word rolls off his tongue with a sumptuous ahhh! The sauce for the marinated beef dish takes two or three days to prepare. It will be too rich and too salty for me, Milada warned yesterday when she invited me to dinner, but I said no problem, I’ll take a spoonful and appreciate what I am missing. Throwing Jiří a stern watch-your-manners look, she disappears into a back room to change. While their son fixes coffee, I escape to the deck.

  Wash is hung to dry on plastic lines. The deck side of the building faces the freeway, which is so close it roars like a thousand sewers draining all at once. The unfiltered exhaust makes my eyes water. I ponder the shove I took this afternoon from the esteemed Dr. Saudek. No doubt he was only being sensible when he said, “Better you go home.” Still, how could I not resent the insinuation that I’m here to steal a Czech kidney and that I’d take advantage of my father’s country in its desperation? Nothing I could possibly say would change the fact that in his eyes I’m an American and that’s that.

  * * *

  At first Dr. Saudek actually seemed willing to help. Short, wiry, with buzz-cut gray hair, the head of the Department of Diabetes wore a lab coat and had a clipped manner and was more at ease spouting statistics than in offering encouragement, but he did seem to take a special interest in my case. He proudly showed me a study he’d published in English entitled, “The Effect of Kidney/Pancreas Transplantation on Diabetic Retinopathy.”

  His secretary printed a copy. I read it using my magnifier while he watched. Eleven years in, more than ninety percent of the patients who received only a partial pancreas from a living donor had gone blind. Patients who received a complete pancreas from a cadaver are exhibiting a sixty percent rate of eye stabilization.

  “You still have functional eyesight,” he observed. “If you take only portion of your sister’s pancreas, you will certainly become blind.”

  “What I need most urgently is a kidney,” I said.

  That’s where the interview began to sour. To qualify for a legal kidney here, you have to be Czech, and I don’t have a Czech passport. When I was a dependent my father could have made this possible but he never expected to return and so chose not to do it.

  “Cost for surgery,” he went on, I’m sure to scare me, “including mandatory first year of care, would be about thirty thousand. In cash dollars. If you have this money,” he shrugged elaborately, “maybe we could put you on list.”

  I couldn’t help but notice the contradictory messages and was reminded that Czech doctors work for the State and are not well paid. Many take private patients who show up bearing envelopes stuffed with cash.

  He handed me a brochure that proudly announced the introduction of the immunosuppressant drug program ten years ago, in 1984. This program made it possible to transplant organs that wouldn’t be rejected by the recipient’s immune system. The annual number of kidney and pancreas transplants has risen steadily since then. Twenty-five are scheduled at his clinic for this year alone.

  “Better you go home,” he said tersely. “Among Czech people, six hundred thousand have diabetes. Patients on dialysis is up thirty-one percent from when we began our study.” He opened his hands, palms up, as if to say sorry, what can we do?

  Ushering us out of his office, he reminded Milada that the two of them are due to leave tomorrow for their conference in Brno. I’d forgotten about that conference. This might explain why she was so cavalier about my leaving immediately to return to Seattle. “Good luck to you,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. That was two hours ago. I still feel the steely pinch of his grip on my arm as he steered me to the door. During the metro ride out to Chodov, Milada assured me that he was only talking this way to avoid having to admit they take bribes. I assured her that I prefer to have the procedure at home with doctors I know and not to worry.

  * * *

  The smell of fresh coffee lures me back to the kitchen. My landlord, Tomáš—I’d forgotten that he’s a family friend—has arrived. Wiry, bearded, Tomáš is a ball of entrepreneurial energy. He and his father are both engineers. They buy old buildings for next to nothing, pay the families in them to move, then refurbish the buildings for resale to investors who have profited from the switch to the private econo
my. A notable example, I’m told, is a guy from my father’s village, Jungmann. The ex state security apparatchik was set to profit from the inn that burned the night of the government handover.

  Milada rented a room for me in Tomáš’ parents’ flat in Mala Strana in the heart of Prague, near the cathedral where we met yesterday. Last night his father serenaded me to sleep from behind closed double doors with his chronic cough. Was Milada worried that I would feel too isolated out here near the end of the subway line? Or … what? That her husband would cause trouble? We’ve certainly given him no reason.

  I sit on the Eckbank beside Tomáš. He points out the new knotty-pine paneling, the self-replenishing eight liter electric hot water tank mounted above the sink that offers—get this!—instant hot water. His remodel of Milada’s kitchen ended abruptly. Martin uses a spatula to tug open drawers that have broken half-shell plastic handles with wickedly jagged edges that would lacerate unwary fingers. According to Milada, Tomáš tried in vain to talk Jiří out of diverting every koruna of that Russian loan into his father’s chata. Bad business move, pure sentiment.

  Milada re-enters wrapped in a kimono exposing a lot of bare thigh. Her husband catches me looking. She removes a place setting. A friend from the neighborhood, Yveta, was invited—she wanted to meet the visiting American—but she’s recovering from radiation treatment for breast cancer and doesn’t feel up to an outing.

  “Too bad,” Martin says to me. “Tomáš fixed up flat in home of Yveta. It has three private rooms. She will rent cheaper than this thief.” A nod to Tomáš. “Okay, here is beautiful Turk coffee.” He serves it to me grounds and all in a glass. An oily sheen swims on the froth.

  “Ach, not that coffee for our guest,” says Milada.

  “What?” says Martin, offended. “We always serve to our guests this coffee.”

  Tomáš opens a few bottles of Staropramen desítka, a local beer. “Na zdraví.”

  “Drink coffee,” says Jiří. “Tonight you must stay awake to see my black light play. Is another Czech specialty.” He laughs and then says, “Your father is Czech, ano? He tell you about our black light? Why you do not speak Czech?”

  “My father,” I say into the awkward silence, “refused to teach us. It’s something I regret, for sure. What did your father do after the war?”

  Jiří sets down his glass of beer. His handsome features flinch and tighten. “Dĕlal vše proto aby zůstal naživu.”

  Milada translates: “He do what he is told if he wants to stay alive.” It’s a sore subject. I do know a few details. Jiří’s father, a registered Communist and the supervisor at Jáchymov, a uranium mine, got into trouble when he refused to cede control to the Soviets. They needed the uranium and turned the mine into a forced labor camp for dissidents. “They very nicely invited Jiří’s father to become inmate.”

  “What about your father, Milada?” I’ve never been able to get more out of her than the fact that he still lives on the farm in Písečná that used to belong to my father’s family, and that when she escaped in 1968, he was arrested, interrogated and tortured by Jungmann’s state security.

  “Moje rodina je bláznivá!” She throws her arms dramatically into the air. “My family is crazy!”

  “She will never say more,” Jiří says.

  Tomáš says to me, “I think you are judging Czech people.”

  “Czech people,” says Milada’s son, “have inferiority complex.” Leave it to youth to point to the white elephant in the room. “You wish to call us cowards? Okay. We need your money. Everything you say is okay.”

  Milada scolds Martin, reminding him that my father is Czech. She apologizes to me. “We love to complain. We do not learn how to live free like you Americans.” She tosses back her beer and refills her glass.

  “My father gave his life to protest Soviet occupation,” Jiří shouts. Lower the volume, Milada chides. We’re not deaf. “He defend what belonged to Czech people. For why? So we tell to every coward who fled, come back and take what you want? Ne! To musí přestat.”

  “My father really wanted to join the partisans.” It’s a lie. Actually, there might be some truth to it. “Imagine the torture, never knowing what happened to my sister.”

  “We don’t need to imagine torture.”

  “Stop this!” shouts Milada. “It make me sick, always fighting!” Following another warning to her husband, Milada disappears again, this time to slip into her theater clothes. When she’s gone, Martin confides that he has something I’ll be interested in seeing. He unfolds on the table the opinion page from a last March issue of the Everett Herald. There is the photo the reporter took of his mother in February, when she came to Seattle to attend the language school at Skagit Valley College. The photo accompanies the essay Milada wrote. Milada doesn’t know I keep a copy of the photo in my passport pouch. Martin, of course, would also have no way of knowing this. Or that many times I’ve pulled it out to study those eyes, squinty even though the light could not have been bright in Skagit Valley in February. Was emigrating on her mind as she pondered the Skagit flooding into the fields?

  Wanting to practice his English, Martin reads the essay out loud. “ ‘One day, I saw an otter in the Skagit River. This is an animal that hasn’t lived in the rivers of my country for many years because of pollution. I felt something nice in my restless heart.’ ”

  “Dost,” says Jiří. “She feel something it is certain.”

  They stopped having conjugal relations two years ago—at least, that’s what Milada claims—when Jiří borrowed that money from the Russians and Milada understood, finally, just how deeply the hook of shame had set in him, the shame of the occupied, so deeply that he would take out a high interest loan on their future.

  Martin reads on. “ ‘I’ve seen in your country many miles of virgin woods. This is something that doesn’t exist in my home. But not only nature excited me so much. The people I met returned something to my soul.’ ”

  “She look like she is begging.”

  “ ‘Please take loving care of this nice country where the raptors that have died in Europe are still flying. Please regard the Native Americans who revere the sun and the moon. Your country must never stop being clean, good-smelling, and wild.’ ”

  “To je, hloupost. It is stupid, yes?” Jiří rises from the table. “We have beauty here. You have some castles? Ne, you have Disneyland.”

  “Why don’t you come visit? See for yourself. I’ll take you to see the raptors.”

  “Him?” Martin says with disgust. “We live in this shithole so he can pay one hundred thousand dollars to rebuild his mountain house.”

  “We have wounded birds right here.”

  “He is patriot.” Martin raises his hand in a mock Nazi salute. “Patriots believe only we are good and they are evil. They do harm for superficial reasons.”

  “Never do that again in my house,” Jiří says, defeated. Judging by Martin’s smirk, they’ve been round this bend before.

  “Your father is nationalist,” says Tomáš. “Is different. They believe in country.”

  “You call them nationalists, so now ethnic cleansing is okay?” Then he looks at me, knowing of course that his father is watching. “I think she will love Seattle. She hate how brown and sick everything is here.”

  Milada strides back into the kitchen to put an end to the bickering. “Yes, it is beautiful, but this is our home.” In her evening outfit, a black gown with a high neckline and a flouncy skirt, an enormous rock of Baltic amber dangling at her breast from a silver necklace, she looks slim and beautiful, but in that way I’ve noticed Eastern European women seem wont to put it on: lipstick too thick, skirt too short, outfit too clingy.

  Would she really consider such a thing? Has she spoken about this with her son? I read her essay when it came out in the opinions column. It seemed at the time like nothing more than what anyone would say who’d spent four decades growing up behind the Iron Curtain.

  She pats her son’s arm. “
No provoking your father while we eat.”

  Their son fills soup bowls. Jiří dishes up svíčková with buttery dumplings and a red cabbage salad with sour cream. The sauce I can only sample. Way too much sodium. He hardly touches the sliced beef on his own plate before grabbing his jacket. Leaving for the theater, on his way out, he repeats his invitation. “You do not have something like this, yes?” When he is gone, Tomáš apologizes to me for his rudeness. “His own wife is not Czech enough for him. You must not take personal insult.” Announcing that he must get to work at the train station, Tomáš says goodnight, then he, too, is gone.

  Now it’s Milada’s turn to apologize. His black-light troupe is struggling financially and he has that murderous loan to pay off. “We will phone to Blue Cross. If they give okay you will stay here and we will begin immediately to look for Anežka.”

  “What about your conference? Aren’t you going to Brno?”

  She looks at me gravely. What now? What haven’t I understood this time? My God these people can be touchy. I see where my father gets it. “I have agreed to conference so I will find some opportunity to speak with Saudek about your case. If you wish I will meet you there in three days. Or you will wait for me here.”

  It would be pointless to attempt this on my own and of course she knows that. “That was quite some essay you wrote. Sounds like your son wants to move to Seattle. You guys talk about this?”

  “Later. We will have time for this later.”

  While Martin cleans up, Milada dials a long string of numbers on the old Bakelite rotary-dial phone hung on the kitchen wall, then hands me the phone. It’s shortly before ten o’clock in Seattle’s morning. A female voice answers.