Better You Go Home Read online

  My file has been assigned to a case worker, but she’s home today with a sick child. For confidentiality reasons, the office manager cannot tell me over the phone what’s in my file. Despite that, she says, “This claim was denied, but I see there’s been a review …” Realizing she’s already said too much, she stops and asks for my patience while she reads the review. Denied? Denied? But the board of surgeons, when they gave me their acceptance, they assured me … A close friend of mine from law school chairs the board that negotiates the health insurance contract for the union representing those hundred and twenty thousand municipal employees. I asked him to put in a good word for me with Blue Cross. That must explain the review of the denial. You don’t need to be from an eastern bloc country ...

  “So, you’re where?” she says, back on the line. “Did you say Poland?”

  “Prague. Searching for my Czech sister. I’m hoping she can donate a kidney. That’s why I’m here.” A lie, of course, but there’s no reason these people need to know that. “The letter I just received is signed by Dr. Pomerantz. The letter asks me to come back in for more tests. It sounds like approval of my transplant surgery is pending those results. But here’s the thing. I need a little more time to find my sister. An extension of one week on the deadline would probably do it.”

  “I can’t speak for Dr. Pomerantz. You should call the UW Medical Center.”

  “It’s not a medical question. I’m concerned about making your deadline.”

  “We process a lot of claims here. Those deadlines are firm.”

  “So, I can’t ask for even a week’s extension?”

  “I’ll put a note in your file that you called,” she says peremptorily. “Don’t miss the deadline. That would delay processing your case.”

  Milada commiserates. It is best for me to go home immediately and straighten this out. She will proceed with her conference in Brno then phone me regarding any progress with Saudek. Then we will decide if now is the right time to look for my sister.

  The very thought of waiting ... Waiting is the privilege of the healthy. Waiting owns the luxury of a future. Now we are going to the theater. The theater is a public place. There is something we need to discuss without fear of being overheard. Not one scintilla of what she has to say can get back to her husband, nor can her son be trusted to keep quiet. What could be so sensitive? But the prospect of spending an evening with her overcomes the slavering exhaustion that dogs me on bad days like this.

  * * *

  Václav Havel’s wealthy family owns the theater tucked into a backstreet off Wenceslas Square. The theater resembles the fin de siècle high-school lunchroom of my Cedar Rapids memories: oak floors polished to a basketball-worthy sheen; elevated stage—I half expect to see a scoreboard when the curtains open. Certainly fewer than a hundred tourists fan out among metal folding chairs, lured by the promise of seeing a simulacrum of the black light shows that fostered the revolution. Scraping shoes and shifting coats, they arrange themselves with as much dignity as possible. Is this the best venue Jiří’s troupe can afford? This sad little converted auditorium?

  Jiří comes out before the show begins, ostensibly to welcome us but really to fret over the rows of empty chairs. His actors do have to be paid. “So, Charles. I am sorry. What does she call you? Chico?” He pronounces my nickname cheeek-oh. “Tomorrow you are finally off to Písečná!”

  “Blue Cross wouldn’t give me the extension. I have to go back.”

  “But you’ve only arrived.” Do I hear relief in his tone? “Tonight we give you beautiful memory. A gift you will take home for your father.”

  “Dikyza všechno!” I thank him and wish him luck. The house lights dim. He hurries backstage before the curtains open.

  We move up to the balcony. We are alone. It will be easy to talk. Most of those in the audience below are overdressed European tourists in leather jackets and evening gowns. She points out a heavyset man at the rear of the theater wearing a cheap brown suit and standing with his hands braced on the back of a folding chair and gazing dully at the parting curtain on the stage. “He is not here for show,” she whispers. “He is here to watch someone. Everyone watching everyone to see who will cheat. Maybe he is sent by Jungmann.”

  Just in case, I lean back until I’m no longer in the brown-suited man’s line of sight. “Why would this guy Jungmann be interested in us?” Milada obviously still suffers her country’s chronic paranoia. I like to think of it as the pinching effect. Pinched shoulders, pinched brows, pinched expectations.

  “Hey, they’re actually very good,” I add. In the opening act, lithe actors in harlequin costumes perform incredible feats that combine balletic elegance with impressive gymnastic acrobatics. “As far as that goes, how would this guy even know we’d be here?”

  Images of village scenes flash from a projector onto shifting screens—a fountain, a square, farm people in homely garb crowded into market stalls. The Eternal Wanderer—the story’s hero, a bearded dancer swathed in black robes and suspended above the stage from invisible wires—floats through the night above towns where doors and shutters slam closed as he passes. No one admits to knowing him. No one will invite him into their home. Behind him is a deep void of inky night.

  “Milada. How could that guy possibly know we’d be here?”

  “You see this?” whispers Milada, still avoiding my question. “It could be your father. It could be my father. They float above two worlds. No one invite them.” The Eternal Wanderer is unable to go back to where he came from, and is unable to end his tragic life by dying. He jokes and sings, but his jokes are sad and his singing melancholy. Only one thing can save him from his fate—the love of a woman from his home village who pines for his return.

  “You see? He is your father. And she is Rosalie.” She waves an arm dramatically. “I have seen this show many times but never before have I seen this connection for you. You must bring your father to here. He cannot say no. No more. You must convince to him. He will make known he look for Rosalie and they will come to us and you will find your sister.”

  “Milada. Why is this man here?”

  “Okay, is what we must talk about, yes? I have friend, he is mayor of Písečná.”

  “He found Anežka?”

  “Ne, ne.” She leans toward me, looking around to make double sure no one is listening, which is of course absurd, right? We’re the only ones in the balcony. “He search in archives.” She launches into a description of the meticulously kept records that are only now beginning to be unearthed like buried corpses, records of orders to arrest and deport the well-to-do farmers who had no interest in signing over their land to the collective, who were accused of fomenting dissension among the kulak. My father, she reminds me, would have found himself among the deportees. Yet, I remind her, her father was not. She presses my hands and searches my eyes, for what? Forgiveness? Understanding?

  “It is difficult to explain. My father collaborate with Jungmann so he can keep farm. He deal with Devil for favors and still he nearly starve. When I escape, he is arrested and tortured. Jungmann had to make look good, yes?” There’s something more. Her hands press mine. They are sweaty and she keeps sneaking looks down at the brown-suited man. “Also he find two memos signed by Jungmann from September 1968. This was when my father was in prison.”

  “The memos implicate this guy Jungmann using torture?”

  “I do not know details. I haven’t seen. It is not your concern. I only say you this because my mayor friend, his name Zámečník, he wants to bring human rights accusations in court against certain individuals.”

  “And Jungmann is one of them.”

  “Ano. I worry, if Jungmann finds out I am connected—”

  “How are you connected?”

  “I am not, not really. But I admit I will like to see Jungmann pay for how he betray my father. My father don’t know about this. I only tell you because maybe Jungmann will make trouble for us. I think is better we find your sister and take h
er away before troubles begin.”

  “Jungmann has a good reason to look for her, right? The inn? The fire? She had plenty of motive to burn that place to the ground, from what you said.”

  “Ano, it is true. He took away her orphanage. Is better I think if she is gone before my mayor friend make trouble.”

  “This is why we came up here? This is what you wanted to tell me?”

  “I see this brown man. Then I am sure. You must know about this.”

  The Eternal Wanderer calls out the name of the woman who loved him. Has anyone seen her? Anyone? The tumblers on stage, if they hear, refuse to respond. “The sexiest thing that ever happened in our city office is the TV news show, America’s Most Wanted. They interviewed my police chief. People wanted to hear about the Green River killer.” Only a month into my six-month medical leave, I haven’t been forced yet to address the question of medical retirement. That world seems as far away to me as the world that awaits me post-transplant. I have to be optimistic about this. I am, but I don’t want to face this alone. I don’t want to get up and take my meds only to face my couch alone. I would have saved myself for what? No, this post-apocalypse of mine should be shared. I have a room for my sister. I want her with me.

  “Neboj se. Are you afraid? I think you are.”

  It’s a rhetorical question. We watch the final act in silence. The Wanderer does find his home village, but everything has changed. No one recognizes him when he calls out greetings. Then we see the former lover, alone on the stage, sitting hunched, her head shrouded in a shawl. He calls out to her. Her head never lifts.

  Lift your head. Say his name. Say his name!

  “Chico, go home, take care to Blue Cross, but you must immediately return. It is better if you take kidney here. I will help with recovery. I will speak again with Saudek at conference. Also I think it will be easier for your sister. She has probably never been away from our district. It would not surprise to know she has never seen Prague. Here she will be more comfortable.”

  “I made copies of her mother’s letters.” So she could see her mother pleading for a word from my father, for anything to indicate when he would come back to help raise his daughter. There was a promise veiled in that pleading.

  The house lights come up. The man in the brown suit is gone. On our way out, I poke my head backstage to thank Jiří and tell him how much I loved his play. All he can do is lament. “Where is my Czech audience? Where are my people? You tourists understand nothing. Where are my people?” Looking pinched, he turns away.

  Despite her saying it’s not necessary—she’s angry and I can’t tell why, maybe because I couldn’t promise when I will be back—I accompany Milada on the metro out to Chodov. We ride in clickety-clacking silence on an increasingly emptier train. We walk from the station past the Soviet worker statue sissified by vandals who painted his boots pink, then continue through a freeway underpass reeking of piss and approach her gray sídliště. Hearing the dented security grate clang shut behind her, I finally understand that this is not about my sister, not only about my sister. Milada wants something from me. Of course, I’m her best escape option. No, no, I don’t see the cynic in her. That love for the otters and the river? She would never be ironic about a thing like that.

  Catching a cab back to Tomáš’ flat, I decide I’ll invite Milada to visit me as soon as we find my sister. Maybe we could find a getaway property on the Skagit not too far from the raptor center. We’ll hang out, the three of us together. Our hearts will sing like the children in the cathedral. Can there be anything more joyous than having a future again?

  Chapter Three

  Raptor Rehab: Late September, 1994

  The first thing that greets me in Seattle is the box of mail, kindly dropped off by my townhouse neighbor who has my keys. Flipping through the condolence cards from my staff, bless them, then the depressing stack of billing statements from labs and clinics—the law journals and bar reviews tumble directly into recycle—I come across a letter from the board of transplant surgeons. How the medical bureaucracy grinds. Nearly a month after granting approval, they send a letter reminding me that family should schedule blood tests? These tests were of course done long ago. My father was ruled out as a viable donor. Anne, my older sister in Iowa, not only had incompatible antigens and the wrong Rh factor, but the blood tests uncovered a condition that might jeopardize her own kidneys. That leaves my Czech half-sister who, as far as my medical team is concerned, does not yet officially exist.

  The extra labs required by Blue Cross take me to the University Medical Center, where I’m told my creatinine levels are high, but we knew that. My blood pressure is unacceptably high, as is, obviously, my fluid retention. I’m checked in for a day and hooked up to catheters and subjected to a stern lecture about lowering sodium and fluid intake. It seems that my internist might have been overly optimistic when he informed me that I needn’t worry about preparing for dialysis for another six months. Three, he’s guessing now. In three months he wants me to have my left arm fitted with a fistula. For diabetics it can take weeks to heal and he wants the fistula in my arm and ready when dialysis can no longer be avoided.

  Back home, taking in the view of the ship canal and the lofty Aurora Bridge, locally famous for its suicide jumpers, I decide I deserve pampering. I walk up to the video store, then spend the afternoon and evening on my soft leather couch with a giant bowl of air-popped popcorn—no salt, no butter. But after my second time through The Emigrants, a riveting Swedish film dramatizing the quest undertaken by a young Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow for freedom in the hinterlands of Minnesota—escaping a debt-burdened farm, a fate shared by an earlier generation of my Czech family—I can’t stand it any longer. The walls are closing in on me. That evening, in the room I’ve prepped for Anežka—the room is small, with a full-sized bed, a desk, a treadmill that folds up; there’s hardly room to stand without tripping over cords—I lance stickpins into the map, into every village in eastern Bohemia ever named in the letters I stole from the family Bible, villages with names like České Libchavy, Oucmanice, Sudislav nad Orličí, Hnátnice. Somewhere in that district, maybe in one of those very villages, my sister is hiding—very likely with relatives, if Milada is right. The day the approval comes through from Blue Cross, I book my return flight.

  The following day, faced with the gloomy prospect of more couch time, I find to my great relief a card in the mail from Rainy Waters. Okay, roll your eyes. It’s a name the raptor rehab center director assumed after reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and falling off her ranch horse and into the cause. The card is a pre-printed thank you, but in the margins, in her hectic scrawl, Rainy lets me know that she has a possible solution to Isis’ situation. This particularly uncooperative Peregrine falcon, she is well aware, is my favorite bird at the center. Also, she’s taking sign-ups for the late September rafting trip on the Skagit to do the pre-winter baldy count. If I can’t make it I need to let her know. This outing is hugely popular with newbie volunteers.

  An attorney is neither a vet nor a wildlife biologist, obviously, and with my experience limited to municipal law, I can’t even offer legal counsel to the raptor center, beyond reviewing county zoning regulations. I can’t draft settlement proposals with Cock-a-Doddle-Moo, the ad hoc organization of local farmers that wants the center gone. Federal protections offered Peregrines and baldies restrict the farmers’ use of pesticides, not to mention any shrub clearing that would reduce habitat. But I don’t go there to use my law degree, and Waters understands that and hasn’t asked me, yet, to sit in on negotiations. A month away from the office, I’ve begun to wonder if I would have gone into municipal law at all, had I not needed a career offering high-grade disability insurance without the stress of billable hours. This past summer, with the Wyroc hearing looming and committee meetings eating up my every morning and evening, and especially when it was no longer possible to go out for my long, soothing runs, I found my only calm around the birds. My first day as a v
olunteer, last March, fired up with a Milada–inspired passion for saving one of the last “clean, good smelling and wild” places on earth, I hungrily swallowed the sermon: “We are Giving Back to the Sacred Circle.” Birds are more than just birds at Sardis. “By mending their bones and wings and returning them to their habitat,” Carrie, the vet student chief of volunteers, explained, “we volunteers are healing our wounded world.” Healing? I signed up, met Isis, witnessed his jitterbugging retreat from humans he ungratefully doesn’t trust, and realized I needed a way to be useful. If I can’t actually help, I bravely told Waters, send me away.

  Thanks to progressive retinopathy, I have the option of having myself declared legally blind. I should not have the option of getting behind the wheel of my Saab. Concerned friends want me to give them my keys. By palming my eyes, I can actually clear the blur. What I don’t tell them is that it’s like defrosting a car window on a cold day; they have to be cleared regularly. So it’s with foggy vision that I steer onto Interstate 5 during the late-morning traffic lull. Despite knowing that I could be arrested for such reckless behavior, I drive the two hours north to Sardis, my sanctuary.

  * * *

  The chipped-bark path to the raptor center meanders through a cathedral of Douglas-fir and hemlock and western red cedar mintily redolent of sap and needles. Listening to the shrill cry of the Harrier hawk that seems to have adopted the center, far from the roar of the freeway and doctor visits, my death sentence feels like it’s been lifted. This is what I come for—this and my sentimental desire to free Isis.

  The sprawling compound, an array of feeding barns and flight cages, also has a medical clinic with an ambulance parked outside. Waters and her husband and dogs live in a rough log cabin above the clinic so that Waters can be on call for emergencies. En route to see Waters and let her know I’m back, I pass Carrie among the holding cages.

  “Wanagi says hello.” Carrie slips on an elbow-length leather glove. Wearing no makeup, a sweatshirt draped over baggy jeans tucked into rubber boots, Carrie reminds me that I need to change if I’m staying to work, and that reminds me of the motto hanging above the changing room—“We are mending our relationship with the world one bird at a time!” Sappy, okay, but that motto inspired me to reach deep into my heart for the courage to save the sister I am coming to think of as a wounded bird, though I have no concrete evidence of this, nor any specific notion of what she needs to be saved from.