Better You Go Home Page 7

  “You escaped, but you underestimated the consequences for your family?”

  “My father,” she says, choosing her words deliberately, “refuse to give farm to cooperative. His ‘non-cooperation’ had consequence for me.”

  It was impossible to get recommendations from her college teachers, so she was refused entrance to the medical school at Charles University, and studying medicine was the thing she cared about most. Only by escaping to the west could she pursue her avocation. In Austria, Milada slipped away from her skating team and asked for asylum at the police station. They sent her to Johannesbrunn, a refugee village in Bavaria.

  “I stay one week at U.S. military base in Munich for interrogations.” They slapped her file on the desk, warning her not to lie. “They ask if I am member of communist party. I say absolutely no.” Next they asked about her father. “They say they know more about my family than I know myself. I am afraid they will send me back.” So she told the truth about her father, Bedřich Kotyza. He was not a party member, but he paid Jungmann in pork for protekce so he could keep the farm and he was accused by villagers of collaborating with the Soviets.

  “How much you need to know? Your aunt is waiting.”

  “You still haven’t said why you came back.”

  She was granted refugee status. She had distant relatives in Iowa. They were contacted and agreed to sponsor her, but a plane had just flown with refugees bound for America. She couldn’t leave Germany until all seats were filled on the next plane. “I am warned I may wait as much as one year in Johannesbrunn.”

  She was housed in a monastery and shared a communal barracks-style room with refugees from Poland and Albania, a few from Lebanon, but despite the crowding, Milada found to her surprise that she liked life in the camp. This had to do with Fritz.

  “Fritz? You fell in love?”

  “You don’t want to know about Fritz.” I’ve pulled my Steno pad from my daypack and I wait, pen poised. “Okay, if you must.” Fritz was one of the military policemen who did the head count each evening. A year older than Milada, he was waiting for a place in the university. They were forbidden to work outside camp, but Fritz pretended he didn’t see.

  “Why was Fritz so eager to be helpful?”

  “Ne, I see I have said too much already.”

  My aunt is waiting, but I warn her. Soon as we’re underway again, she’s going to tell me about Fritz.

  Chapter Seven

  Visiting Aunt Magdalena: Late Friday Morning, First Week of October, 1994

  Confined to dragging around an air tank, Aunt Magdalena is fortunate to have a ground floor apartment and a spacious one at that. On a table in the entry hall, a black leather-bound Catholic missal is displayed so it can’t be missed.

  “Your aunt pulled some brown strawberries from her freezer. She wanted to offer something for you but she said, ne, this I cannot serve.” Milada had to convince her we would only say hello and ask a few questions about my sister.

  We enter a glass-enclosed terrace, a kind of hothouse filled with plants and steamy with a tropical heat, the glass foggy with condensation. Once we’re in and the door closed, my aunt appears through another door.

  An air tube, connected to a portable tank on wheels, hangs from her nose. She pushes the tank ahead of her and leans on it like a walker, shuffling along in slippers. A plastic bag dangles from one wrist. She breathes in measured gulps. She’s small, lost under a billowing robe. She has my father’s round head and protruding ears, but that’s the extent of the family resemblance. We smile awkwardly at each other.

  “Do you enjoy your visit?”

  “Everyone has been very welcoming, thank you.”

  My aunt beckons for me to approach. She clutches my arm with the strength of the desperate. “Jungmann ask some questions, yes?” She pauses to gulp air. “If I like my flat? He say he will purchase this buildings.”

  “I’m afraid I’m the cause of this trouble.”

  Her strong fingers dig into my arm as though to cut through any false modesty. “He ask if my brother is coming.” By brother she of course is referring to my father. “I say him I don’t know, is very long time since last I have seen František. When he will come to see me?”

  “He wanted to come.” But I see in her earnestness and frailty that we’re beyond pleasantries. “Actually, I don’t know. I was hoping you would know.”

  “He was like father to me. He read to me stories.”

  “What kind of stories?” Not on task, but I need her to trust me enough to open up and talk.

  “On mi vyprávěl příběhy které byly zajímavé, ale taky strašidelné. He tell me stories which are interesting but also scary.” Milada confers with Aunt Magda.

  “Your father liked to tell story that is called Little Otik.”

  It’s a gruesome folktale about a couple who can’t conceive children. The woman, obsessed, pretends that a rough doll carved out of a gnarled tree root is her child. To her surprise, the root comes to life, but he is a monster who eats every bit of food they have and then eats them as well.

  Who could blame me for thinking of Anežka as that root child who eats up her parents’ lives. I ask permission to take notes. She is certain that I do not want to waste my time with her “foolish granny stories.” It’s her brother she wants to talk about. Anything I can tell her, anything at all. I should leave out nothing.

  “Your father married that Kacalek woman in Iowa, you know.” She does know, and she isn’t surprised to hear that Frank—growing up we called him Frank, not Dad—never spoke again to their father after that. “He also refused to allow me to ever visit my grandfather.” I mention that when I was sixteen, I snuck a visit anyway. “Unfortunately, he found out.” She insists that I tell her what happened. She won’t let me go until I do.

  * * *

  Reaching Sulphur Springs required roughly an hour and a half drive on mostly unpaved county roads. The town amounted to a post office, a brick, three-story school house, perhaps a dozen clapboard bungalows clustered around a crossing of two roads. My grandfather’s whitewashed bungalow set at the rise of a grassy knoll overlooking a community garden. Below the garden, railroad tracks ran alongside a stream, Dead Man’s Creek, screened from view by fronds of pussy willows and cat o’ nine tails. Josef Lenoch worked in his old age at the school across the road. He was the custodian. He was easy to locate. I simply asked a nosy woman out hanging her wash, a Mrs. Lookingbill, who had dark hairs growing out of a mole on her chin.

  I found my grandfather sitting alone on his back porch. He wore overalls, a blanket draped over his lap. He was thin-built, like my father, but smaller.

  Mrs. Lookingbill hollered over at him from her back porch to put his hunting cap on. He ignored her and she marched over and shouted at his left ear and retreated, shaking her head. His wife, Barbora Kacalka Lenoch from Písečná, had died earlier that same year.

  “Kacalka, she steal my father. We don’t speak about her.”

  My grandfather’s eyes were watery and pale and his slender fingers would have better suited a pianist than a farmer. Like my own father, he seemed to have been meant for a different life. Sometimes he understood who I was, sometimes he mistook me for his son. He’d gone mostly deaf. When he did speak it came out in an idiolect of Czech and German and English; a conversation was out of the question. On the several occasions when I returned to Sulphur Springs, usually without letting him know I’d come, I’d walk along the railroad tracks, and when the season was right, I’d climb the pile of feed corn spilling out of the trap door at the bottom of the grain silo. The words “Superior Seed” were painted on the cylindrical metal silo in large black letters. One cold wintry afternoon, I realized that no matter how many times I walk these tracks and look at the seed spilling out of the silo, I will never know what it felt like for him to be torn from his family in Czechoslovakia and forced to live out his life in the end of nowhere. That afternoon I pestered my grandfather with a seventeen-year-old’s over
heated questions. Do you miss your home in Czechoslovakia? Would you ever go back? Why won’t my father speak to you?

  “He only patted my head and smiled. I will say he had a kindly smile.”

  It was after dark and the roads were icy when I drove home. “I’d missed dinner, and missing dinner was not an option in our house. I knew there’d be trouble, but I had no idea.” At the back door, the entrance from the carport, my father was waiting for me on the landing. He must have heard me drive up. The moment I pulled open the door, he cocked his fist and said, “I don’t know why I stop to hit you.” His eyes were red and dilated. For a moment I thought he was upset because I’d driven my unreliable Ford Fairlane after dark in such weather. I assured him I’d checked the oil and put in a quart.

  “He said if I ever went to see my grandfather again, and he found out, I would no longer be welcome to live in his house.”

  His anger that night surprised me, but what followed was worse. He seemed to withdraw from his own family. Every Sunday morning we went to mass as usual at St. Wenceslas, then stopped for his usual bacon and samizdat at the butcher in Bohemie town, and we’d take the usual bag of kolatches, as we called them, home from the Czech bakery, but it was as though we were only doing it for the sake of appearances.

  “I worried about him. But your two sisters”—my two aunts never married and live together in an apartment near St. Wenceslas where they shave candles—“they don’t like to talk about the past. I do remember them once claiming they knew Rosalie had poisoned your mother, but, well, you know, I just assumed—”

  “That whore wanted your grandfather.”

  “You mean the Kacalka woman?”

  “Ne, ne. Rosalie.”

  Anežka’s mother wanted my grandfather? Seeing that I’m scribbling this down, Aunt Magda backs away from an outright accusation. Between gulps of air, she says, “It is so long ago. I had only four years when they left. When our mother died I was sent to live with family in Oucmanice. I waited for František to rescue me. I waited and waited.” She pauses to breathe. Milada suggests we curtail the visit and come back another time but I wave her away.

  “Rosalie was maid. She lived in our house. Terrible business, what she do.”

  “My father had to have known she was pregnant when he left, yes?” After I told him I’d found Rosalie’s letters, he took me for a drive in his Oldsmobile Delta 98 through the Amana colonies. The boat of a car with chrome fenders looked as new as the day he’d bought it. We stopped in Ox Yoke to have lunch in the stone communal dining hall built by German homesteaders. Mom had especially like Ox Yoke, she liked to visit the millhouse to shop for the Americana that decorated our home—washboards, kettles, butter churns, irons—so I knew our coming here was for my father a sentimental journey. On the ride home, his gaze roamed the passing hills. The north sides of the hills were hard from the winter freeze. Where the earth was turned the fields were covered with white foam, the frost that hadn’t thawed. He pointed to the frost on the hills and said, “Those people are dead. Forget about them. My life is with my family here.”

  Aunt Magda has turned away and gone silent. Her breathing comes in hard rasps. My visit seems to have upset her. Milada helps Aunt Magda settle into an overstuffed chair and insists that our interview is over.

  Before we leave, my aunt asks Milada to give me the plastic bag that has been dangling from her walker. “Open now,” she says between gasps.

  Inside the bag is a black and white photo in a fold-out cardboard frame of four children. At first I wonder if one of the girls in the picture is Anežka, then I realize that the boy must be my father and the three girls are his sisters. The little cutie is Magda herself. The other two are the sisters who stayed behind. The eldest, Kateřina, named after their mother, has plain looks, with small eyes and a plump face. Her most striking feature is her furry eyebrows, two black caterpillars that nearly join in a v-shaped frown. My father looks to be maybe sixteen; the photo must have been taken right before he left Písečná. His hair is slicked behind protuberant ears. He was a handsome kid with a broad bashful smile.

  “Take it,” she says. Gulp for air. “Tell František he is very bad for not come to fetch me. Tell him I want to see him. Oh, which way you will drive?”

  Milada explains that we’re detouring south to Letohrad to track down the mayor.

  “Letohrad. Oh, then you will pass Brandýs nad Orlicí.” Aunt Magda raises an admonishing finger. “Look for sign to Oucmanice.” She glances around as though afraid Jungmann had bugged her flat. “Kateřina live there. She is nosy one in our family. Maybe she will know where is Anežka. But I must warn to you, she is very suspicious. Very suspicious. If she do not trust, she will say you nothing.”

  “Who would she trust? What about your son? What about Josef?”

  “I don’t know. He is friends with Rosalie. I never understand why he betray family to help Rosalie. My own son. I just don’t know.” She pats my arm. “My sister hate Rosalie because what she has done to our mother. Don’t speak this name.”

  That’s it. Visit over. On our way out, I promise I’ll pass her invitation to my father. In the hallway, the two baggies I leave beside the missal, filled with Seattle’s Best Coffee beans, look sadly inadequate as a token from home, but I can’t imagine she’d want a tee-shirt with a pig sipping tropical drinks. Outside, the late morning sun is bearing down on the river. The old men are still on their benches. Jungmann is gone.

  * * *

  The Orlické Mountains, a sub-range of the Carpathians, swing down from Poland and run like a spine through Eastern Europe. We drive into foothills where the woods are thick and the road follows the terrain and squeezes into stomach-churning turns. There’s no traffic to speak of. To recover lost time we speed past meadows resplendent with wildflowers and flush geese out of tall grass. A domestic white goose crosses the road honking at our rudeness. At last we have found the fabled Bohemian loveliness I’ve heard so much about. I glance at my Steno notes. I’d jotted in the margin to be sure not to mention the “maid” to Aunt Kateřina. That will be difficult of course, considering that the “maid” is Anežka’s mother.

  I ask Milada what she knows about Rosalie. Why does everyone in my family have this strong reaction when she enters the conversation? “Remember the inn,” she asks? The inn burned to the ground just before Anežka disappeared. The inn’s upstairs rooms had become Jungmann’s private “club.” Anežka’s mother was the mistress of the inn. She was beautiful and wore jewelry and lipstick and grew her luxuriant hair down past her hips and ate lean meat whenever she wanted at a time when other women in the village worked until their hands looked like turnips and their bodies like potatoes and they consumed goulash with fatty gravy. They hated Rosalie. No one knows how the fire started. Anežka has not been charged, but she is wanted for questioning.

  Chapter Eight

  An Unplanned Detour

  The woods we pass through are thick with spruce and lodge pole pine. The occasional mushroom hunter’s bicycle with baskets leans against a trunk. “It is beautiful here, you know. You’re way too hard on your country.”

  “No one can destroy beauty of soul, yes? Is like flower that so want to be free it will grow through crack in stone wall.”

  “That would also be true in a refugee camp, right?”

  “You still want I should tell you about Fritz? Don’t deny, I see your questioning mind turning, turning.” The road drops off the hill and follows the river and we cross a stone bridge into the charming baroque town Aunt Magda mentioned, Brandýs nad Orlicí. Milada pulls over and parks near the fountain in the town square. “I must explain something. I only say you about Fritz so you will not wish to become involved with me. We must not allow this.”

  “It’s understood.”

  “Is not about you. Anyway, you will see.” Desperate to find out what was happening to her father, she devised a crude plan to return by obtaining a fake passport from Turk Gastarbeiter. Together with Fritz, who
would pretend to be her German brother, they would cross the border to check on her family. If there was trouble, she would not go on to America.

  A complication delayed her plan. Fritz was ordered by his superiors to stop the shop owners from illegally employing refugees and to strictly enforce the curfew. Having tasted freedom, the women resented being again confined to the monastery. It was decided that in exchange for the Albanians using their black market contacts with the Turks to buy her a passport with Fritz’s last name, Milada would keep Fritz distracted.

  I jot in my notebook: Here comes the part I’m not going to like. “Were you, how would you say this, experienced?”

  “This is question you should not ask.”

  “Go on.”

  Fritz found an open cattle-car on a sidetrack, a train car that had been used by the Nazis—and later by the Soviets—to deport dissidents to forced labor camps. She found holes bored into the boards. People trapped inside the cattle cars, often for days at a time, bored so many peep-holes they allowed in “bands of chilly air.” I jot this in my notes. Bands of chilly air.

  Fritz presented her with a gift he’d smuggled under his coat, a machine-gun belt from WWII. He draped it across her chest and said she looked beautiful. Returning to that moment, her eyes gleam and I see a glimpse of that willful dark young beauty who wanted to be ravished by Fritz. I find myself feeling absurdly jealous of him. If only that could have been my coat she spread across the straw on the floorboards near the door—she had a fear of being locked inside.

  Three months later, a Czech family arrived. They had obtained a travel visa and had driven their Trabant into Yugoslavia and continued back through Austria and into Germany, where they asked for asylum. At dinner one evening, she overheard the family talking about the castle in their home town. From their description of the castle’s portraits, she knew they must be from Letohrad, less than five kilometers from Písečná, where they had relatives. Yes, they had news of her family. The news was not good. Milada’s father, the only local farmer foolish enough to refuse to give his farm to the cooperative, had been arrested. Many of the locals were saying he deserved it.