Better You Go Home Page 6

  The start of our trip takes us past block after block of concrete enclaves, most limited to five stories since dwellings taller than five stories were required to install costly elevators. The Škoda’s caramel leather interior still smells of factory chemicals. I buzz down a window to let in fresh air, regret it, and close the window again.

  “Bud’ bez obav. It is ugly now, but you will see. Hey, good news.” Her expression remains rather deadpan when she says this. “I phone to your cousin, Josef Kolář, yes? He will meet us tonight at pub. He say this morning we must stop in Hradec Králové so you will meet his mother. She is your aunt. She must have information about your sister.” A warning follows the good news, “She will be nervous to meet you.”

  Once we’ve left Chodov behind, Milada plants her foot on the gas and we jet eastbound on the E67 motorway past a phalanx of Communist-era rust buckets and she reviews our itinerary. Two appointments this afternoon in Písečná. The first with the mayor. We’ll find out what his surveillance has turned up on Anežka. Later in the afternoon we meet with Pavel Halbrstat, the town historian who has agreed to show us the family records.

  “I am not happy, but I do this for you.” Halbrstat is the former Party apparatchik who carried out Jungmann’s security orders. Ordinarily, Milada’s family does not speak to Halbrstat’s family, not even in the pub where the men play cards.

  “Do we need his help?” How protective I’ve been feeling, ever since our tryst in the alders.

  “In this book we might learn interesting things about your family. And mine. I am curious, too. My grandfather and your grandmother, you know, they were related.”

  More and more, I’m coming around to seeing that my father needs to be here. If there’s trouble, he should face it.

  Clipping along at a breezy 160 km per hour, we whiz past the Škoda factory, a palace of steel and glass. Further east we sail through agricultural flats where the air smells of damp earth and fertilizer and it occurs to me that I should be taking notes.

  To make best use of my five days here, I’ve decided to interview anyone in my family willing to talk about crimes committed against our fathers. Really, it was Milada who put me up to it—her sneaky way of making sure I wouldn’t object to her helping the mayor with his case—but I thought why not, and then got excited about it. What is my generation, the progeny of exiles, angry about? Should we be angry? Or should we just forget what happened to our fathers and make the best of our lives?

  Milada throttles down suddenly and steers the Škoda onto the shoulder. I see it, too, rotating blue lights in the rearview. Between curses, she touches up her lipstick and gives me a hard look that says, This is how it is. The cop taps at her window with his clipboard. Along with her license, she tucks four hundred-koruna notes into his palm. He writes a warning. The next cop, he lectures, will not be so sympathetic.

  Milada swears bitterly when he’s gone. “Ještě jednu pokutu a nebudu moct jezdit. One more ticket and I would not be permitted to drive more.”

  “We were speeding for my sake. I’m sorry ...”

  She waves away my offer of money. “I speed because I love thrill. But now I must drive more slowly. Perhaps we don’t have time for stop in Hradec Králové.”

  “But we have to talk to my aunt, right?”

  “It is Friday. If we are late Zámečník will go away to his weekend chata.”

  Zámečník is the mayor who’s supposed to help us. “My father spent his entire adult life feeling he was living in exile. The only family I ever heard him say he really missed was his little sister, Magda.” Magda is the aunt we’re slated to visit.

  “Exile? Your father was not exile. He escape by choose. Is not same.”

  “Escape? Exile? How is it not the same?”

  Ignoring my question, she turns off the motorway onto Highway 11. The narrow two-lane road will be less patrolled by police. Immediately we run into a backup of long-haul trucks chugging eastbound to Slovakia and Ukraine. The muddy valley is flat and vast, the soil in the fields chocolate brown, the sky mauve, the air heavy with moisture. If you didn’t look at road signs you’d swear you were in Iowa.

  “What’s the difference between escape and exile?” I persist.

  When after a time she still says nothing, I nudge again, “You tried to escape in 1968. You called that an escape, right?” I open my Steno and ready my ballpoint for my first interview. “By the way, I never heard you say why you came back.”

  “I was thinking for my father.” She heaves a deep sigh. “I was foolish enough to believe my family would be okay if I say absolutely nothing to no one.” Family members of escapees were forbidden to travel outside the country, and that, she assumed, was the worst that would happen to them. The rare escapee who dared to return could expect four years of harsh treatment in prison, but she wasn’t expecting to go back.

  “The worst thing for my father was never seeing his homeland again.”

  “Is easy to miss cage when you can’t go back in, yes?”

  “You only see it as a cage because you couldn’t leave. For him—”

  “Ne, I could leave. I left. But my father suffer because I do this.”

  “So. Tell me what happened?”

  “Ne, I do not wish to speak about this.”

  “Maybe it would do you good to speak about it.”

  “Ne. You will judge me. You will not understand.”

  We drive on in awkward silence. The genealogy passed on to me by the nun in Solon indicated that my father’s family owned the farm when he left, the same farm her father eventually took over and where she was raised. It’s a subject I’ve avoided before, but I bring it up now. “Would my father still have a legal claim to the land?”

  “My father sacrificed everything to save this farm,” she says icily.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just trying to understand what happened. So your father was tortured? That why you came back? You knew?”

  “I came back. Is enough for your notes.” She studies the passing fields as if corn were the last living thing on earth.

  “My father abandoned his daughter here and never came back. Believe me, it’s not a joke for me either.”

  Milada gestures wildly. “My father risk everything for his pride. So what do I do? I marry zealot just like him.”

  “Your father have any scars from his time in prison?” A lot of international human rights groups formed in the 1960s to monitor Soviet doings. This scrutiny had the unintended side effect of encouraging torturers to do their work “cleanly,” the word used in the case studies I reviewed at her request. If possible, they left no marks.

  “His feet walk funny. You will see.”

  “Would he make a statement?”

  It’s a tender subject. She doesn’t want to talk about it, but my pestering helps her decide we should stop after all to see my aunt. Maybe my aunt will be willing to talk about these matters.

  * * *

  After crossing a stone bridge into Hradec Králové, we pull into a car park beside the narrow Labe River. A row of blond, nineteenth century stone buildings casts its reflection in the channeled, glassine water.

  “This place is beautiful. In a way I envy you.”

  “You might as well envy prisoner in cell.”

  Nearby is a public phone box. Her plan is to call her mayor friend to warn him we’ll be a little late and ask him to wait for us. When he knows that we’re talking to my aunt he’ll understand, though the Friday afternoon pilgrimage to the country chatas is a powerful ritual, a ritual not easily resisted.

  Trimmed birch and linden trees line the riverside promenade. The clouds have begun to break up. The sun warms benches where old men wearing jackets with elbow patches sit and smoke and talk. One of them, much taller than the others, sits off by himself smoking a pipe and intently reading a book. He’s wearing a beret and an embroidered peasant shirt and looks rather professorial in his contemplations, not lumpy like the others. He would be my father, had my father
stayed and studied history as he wanted.

  “We have time for short visit,” Milada announces, returning to the Škoda. “Zámečník will wait for us at school in Letohrad. He is headmaster.”

  I point across the river. “That man smoking the pipe?” I repeat my hypothesis that he is the image of what my father would have become.

  “Poslouchej.” She clips her hair back so tautly it raises her eyebrows. “This man you find so elegant is Jungmann.”

  “Jungmann? Here? What would he be doing here?”

  “Somehow he has heard that you will be here. Is best I think if you will speak with him. Don’t worry. He speak excellent English. Don’t give away anything about your sister. We must learn what he can tell us.”

  Milada seems worried for some reason that if Jungmann knows that I have Rosalie’s letters he will find a way to get his hands on them. I assure her I’m no neophyte in these matters. Back when I took cases to court, I advised clients if they had to travel to leave original documents home. The originals of Rosalie’s letters to my father are locked in Yveta’s flat in Prague. I did bring copies with me, in case they are needed for official purposes, and of course I have my translated copies. She gives me a backward skeptic’s glance then heads in to let my aunt know we’re here and to find out if Jungmann has bothered her and what she might have said to him.

  Chapter Six

  Jungmann in Hradec Králové

  Wednesday, the day before returning to Prague, I spent the afternoon buried in the university law library. Milada had asked me to research case law that might help her mayor friend in return for his help. One case in particular stood out. The defendant was Ukrainian, a security officer. His rank made him the equal of Jungmann’s officer, Halbrstat. He stood accused of torturing a political prisoner in 1962 using an electrical device placed on the victim’s head. The device was alleged to have traumatized the victim psychologically. The judge threw the case out. In his summation, the judge opined, “Electroshock therapy has been known to have beneficial effects on the insane.” The rule of law in these human rights cases relies heavily on the judge’s discretion. Somebody was obviously being protected. What I told Milada was that the threat of a trial might be more effective than the trial itself. Most judges now would have been young prosecuting assistants then, and could be personally implicated in having turned a blind eye to torture when it was useful for extracting bogus confessions.

  But I had an image of these torturing security people as lantern-jawed, bulldoggish thugs. Jungmann does not fit the stereotype. His glasses have slipped down his slender, aquiline nose, and he doesn’t notice me standing near, so engrossed is he in his book. The shock of white hair under his beret lends a dark tone to his skin as though he were a retired snowbird accustomed to wintering in Florida. Like my father, Jungmann must be in his seventies. The smoke curling up from his pipe scents the damp river air with vanilla.

  “I’ve been told to introduce myself.”

  “Jak se daří?” He peers up at me over his bifocals. No hint of greeting softens his expression until I explain that I’m the son of Frantiśek Lenoch, visiting from America. At the sound of my family name, followed by “America,” he pulls the pipe out of his mouth and inspects me closely. His goatee and mustache are fastidiously trimmed. He’d be capable of cruelty, I decide, no doubt, but he’s got an intelligent and curious look that appeals all the more to my desire to see something of my father in him. He’d be a good subject for an interview.

  “Jak se má tvůj otec?”

  “I don’t speak Czech, sorry.”

  “You come to see village of your father?” Jungmann draws ponderously on his pipe. His command of English makes me feel ashamed of my lack of Czech and I find myself suddenly fascinated by the idea of soliciting his views.

  “Yes, and to …” I almost slip. “To meet family. It’s my first time here.”

  “Second, actually,” he says.

  So Milada was right. That brown-suited man at the black light theatre a couple weeks ago was working for Jungmann.

  Jungmann snaps his book closed. He gives his pipe a hard suck. The pipe went out while he was looking me over. His long slender fingers probe the pocket of his peasant shirt, withdraw a plug of tobacco from a pouch and tamp the plug expertly into his pipe, albeit, oddly, without him first cleaning the dead plug out of the bowl. “But I am puzzled. Your father is not with you?” He doesn’t bother to hide that he’s had me watched. I appreciate his candor. “Why has your father not come with you?”

  Return candor for candor? “I don’t know. I certainly asked him to come, but every time I’d bring up the subject he’d say, ‘Never mind, all those people are dead, there’s no point.’ Why would he say that?”

  He tries again, without success, to stoke his pipe. The old plug is preventing it from lighting, but he doesn’t seem aware that he left the old plug in. “Dead. This is word he spoke?”

  “I’ve had a really hard time getting him to talk about … any of this … why he left, all that.”

  “You must bring him here. Today is Friday. Friday night I play Mariáš at pub in Žamberk. Your escort will know this pub. I will see you there. You will hear some story.”

  “I have a meeting tonight with my cousin,” I tell him, “but I will try.”

  He laughs, but his laugh has an edge. “You do not ask why am I here? You think I have nothing to do except to follow you? You Americans are so arrogant.” He waves his pipe at me dismissively. “Of course you are arrogant. It is your privilege. Only we are jealous. But I really hoped to see your father.” I nod and keep my mouth shut. We are being watched by the lumpy men on the benches. “Your father is Czech. He will understand this.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Let’s start to chase, as I believe you Americans like to say. I know why you are here. Don’t look surprised. Even your poor Aunt Magda know this. Everyone know you are coming to find her.”

  “Okay.”

  “I make you proposal. Bring your father. You will hear stories then you decide. You decide what is right.”

  “What is right? I’m sorry, I don’t follow—”

  “This woman, Anežka, whom you believe is your sister. If you bring your father and he agree to talk, Anežka will have no trouble from me.”

  “But if not?”

  “My inn. You have learned about fire?”

  “What does this have to do with Anežka?”

  “She will be arrested for arson if you do not agree.”

  “What’s her connection to the fire?”

  “This is not your concern.”

  “Say my father cooperates. You get charges dropped and she’s free to go?”

  “It is gamble, yes? But is your best gamble I believe.”

  Seeking a diversion, anything to stop me from calling attention to the obvious hole in his reasoning, my eye settles on the book, folded now in his lap.

  “You are curious? It is novel by Josef Škvorecký. Surely you have heard of him?” My inventory of Czech authors is exhausted after Kundera, Klíma, Havel, Hrabal, Hašek, oh yes, Kafka of course. “You father will be disappointed. Škvorecký was on short list for Nobel prize.” That air of bemusement drains suddenly and his expression turns cold. “In English, it is called ‘Miracle Game.’ It is about lies and deception. We excel at this game.”

  Waiting for that to sink in, he points to the reflection in the mirror-smooth water. “Beautiful, yes? In Žamberk there is also beautiful building. Alas, born too soon for Jugendstil, but still beautiful. This building is district prison. I will happily arrange inside tour of this beautiful building for Anežka. But it is messy. If we can avoid, is better.”

  “Let’s talk tonight.”

  He returns his attention to his uncooperative pipe. “Good. Tonight.”

  Sensing I have been dismissed, I hurry back to the Škoda. Milada is waiting. The fact that he was talking to my aunt she finds more disturbing than his threat of prison for Anežka. “To j
sou pitomý lidi. There are stupid people in village. They are still very afraid to Mister Big Shot. They talk.”

  I mention the meeting we agreed to at the pub tonight. “What do you think?”

  “Starý dluh. I wish only to pay old debt to Jungmann. Ty bys asi použil slova odplata. But I do not wish that your sister will be hurt. First she must be away. I think you must bring your father to speak with Jungmann.”

  That doesn’t settle what we should do tonight, but I let the matter drop for now. Leaving the Škoda in the car park by the river, we enter a neighborhood of trim concrete apartment buildings separated by manicured patches of lawn. My aunt has emphysema and breathes on a respirator and Milada warns that her blood pressure is low and she becomes dizzy if up for too long so we will have to keep our visit brief.

  Before going in, there’s an issue I still want to clear up. “Most people have a day that tethers their lives to world events, yes? Even though I was just a kid, for me it was the day President Kennedy was assassinated. I’d never seen so many grownups crying before. For you? Let me guess. The night of August 21, 1968?”

  “You think you can so easily trick me to talk?”

  “Something happened to you. It’s like it’s still happening.”

  “I will tell to you some background. Is all you need to know.”

  * * *

  The Writers’ Union had pushed Dubček to relax censorship that spring. He was sympathetic to the cause, but Brezhnev was not. Upwards of 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops marched into Prague that hot August night. Milada joined the mobs of student protesters changing street signs in an attempt to confuse the invaders.

  Wenceslas Square was a dangerous place to be. Molotov cocktails flew out of windows and the tanks drove into the crowd. That night the reformers were packed onto a plane bound for a Moscow-style brainwashing. The next morning Praguers awoke to a Soviet tank parked under the tail of King Wenceslas’ horse. Prague Spring, that window with a peek-a-boo view of freedom, had just been shuttered.