Better You Go Home Page 8

  “There were two kinds of farm collectives,” Milada explains. “The Jednotné zemĕdĕlské družstvo, known as JZD, were owned by State but run by local farmers. There were also Státní statky, SS collectives run by State. We had this one.” Jungmann had her father locked up and interrogated. Every animal on his farm was expropriated.

  Her father would starve, she knew, rather than give the farm to the SS, but under torture his resistance broke. Milada’s mother had coughed so hard through the previous winter, fighting off viral pneumonia, she’d separated ribs from her sternum.

  “So I went back. I gave myself to authorities.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “Now I am disgusting to you.”

  “You really think I think you’re a coward for going back? Milada.”

  “Ne ne! You think I am whore for what I do with Fritz.” My predictable denial is met with a reminder that she only told me this story so I will not suffer any illusions about getting involved. This cold Milada could not be more different from the Milada who waved wildly for me to join her in the alders, the Milada who said she’d found paradise on earth when floating down the Skagit in a raft and coming upon the harbor seal chasing the Chinook.

  “This place changes you.”

  “Ne, I’m sorry, Chico. This is me, too. This is more real me.”

  “I sometimes wonder,” I muse. “If my father had stayed, would he have voted for the communists? He used to vote Republican because there was only one issue he cared about. Whoever he thought would be toughest on the Reds.”

  “Here we knew to expect usual tricks.”

  Her father avoided starving by running the co-op dairy the SS built on his farm. Her mother died that winter. Her older siblings were married and gone. She only avoided prison by signing a bogus confession denouncing the decadent west. She got pregnant, used Jiří’s protekce to obtain a letter of recommendation, studied medicine at Charles University, had three sons, and the rest I already know.

  “Were you watched? You have to constantly worry about going to prison?”

  “Nikdo se nebál, protože oni byli snadno k poznání. No one worry so much because they are easy to recognize.”

  “They?”

  “Tajná policie. Secret police. Okay, they could be anyone. But you know.”

  “How did you know?”

  “They are like you. They ask so many questions.”

  At the center of the fountain, the statue of the Madonna mounted atop a lofty granite column wears a shawl of pigeon poop on her shoulders. Reminded of the ermine shawl the monk draped over the Bambino, I laugh, loudly.

  “Chico, I think you must eat soon.”

  Ordinarily I resent being told that my blood sugar is off, as though diabetics had no emotions not sugar strained, but, I do the poke. My blood-sugar reads 78, just under the low range of normal. I pop a couple of Life-Savers just to be sure.

  We drive on. Exiting town, we come upon an arrow-shaped road sign with black lettering on white pointing south: “Oucmanice 7 kilometers.” Milada corrects my pronunciation. “OOTS-ma-NEE-Tsa.” The town Aunt Magda mentioned, where my Aunt Kateřina lives. Something about that town sounded oddly familiar the first time I heard it. Using my magnifier, I skim my packet of genealogy papers and make the surprising discovery that my grandfather was from that village.

  “That would explain why Aunt Kateřina lives there.”

  “Ne, Chico, ne ne ne. Ne. My mayor friend is waiting in Letohrad. He is making for us favor.”

  “It’s only seven kilometers. There’s no traffic. Look at it this way. If Aunt Kateřina can tell us where to find Anežka, we don’t need to meet with the mayor, right?”

  “If it could be so simple, Jungmann would have been here.”

  “You have other reasons for wanting to meet with the mayor?”

  Milada gives me a pitying look. “Chico, Chico.” She puts the car in park and pats my hand. “You cannot be jealous with everyone I speak.”

  “Who said anything about jealous?”

  She turns skeptically south, following the arrow’s direction. “Okay, you must leave on Wednesday flight. Okay. We ask for your sister. But if we frighten your aunt today, we will not have second chance. Is why I think we should speak with Josef first.”

  “We’ll just be careful not to mention Anežka’s mother.”

  Crossing a stone bridge that arches over a rocky gorge, we pass three fishermen in black rubber boots standing with their legs thrust apart in the pellucid waters of the Orlice. They look so much like the stolid figure of the Worker statue in Chodov I find myself staring. Can they be real? They turn as one and watch us pass, their expressions absolutely scrubbed of curiosity. Maybe it’s a mistake after all to talk to Aunt Kateřina right away. I mention my worry to Milada.

  “Everyone is paranoid, yes?” Jungmann, she explains, is the great great great grandson of the venerated scholar credited with saving the Czech language by translating the Bible into written Czech. “Jungmann senior was for us like George Washington for you. No one will cooperate with American if it means go against Jungmann family.”

  “What about Anežka? If we do find her?”

  “You really should bring your father here.”

  “Not much I can do about that now.”

  Cresting a steep incline, we pass fields bordered with a windrow of birch. Their fall yellow leaves quake in the breeze. We come upon Oucmanice on the down side of the hill. The village has prospered in the three years since the Velvet Revolution. Most of the slope-framed homes have been freshly stuccoed and white-washed. Flower boxes adorn windows. Roaming chickens poke into blooming gardens. A woman wearing a beaded vest and white blouse, her hair twisted into ram-horn braids, leans out of an open window and gives a rug a few smart whacks with a broom. Seeing the new model Škoda slow down, her expression hardens into a mask.

  Milada lowers her window. “Which house is Lenoch house?”

  The woman offers terse directions, pulls in the rug, closes the window, and releases a metal shutter that rolls down with a snap.

  “Lidé se stále bojí. A nemají rádi cizince. These people are suspicious, yes?”

  “She sure got quiet when you mentioned my name.”

  “You think she is afraid by your name?” Milada gives one of her hearty laughs. “Maybe Lenochs were tajná policie!”

  It could obviously mean that Jungmann has been here. At the low end of town, we approach a decaying farmhouse. The slate roof is sloughing tiles. Sections of stucco have peeled from the walls, exposing mud and straw chinking. Gaps in the chinking remind me of the “chilly bands of air” from Milada’s train story. I imagine trapped people looking furtively out at us. Milada parks out of view of the Lenoch house just in case. We walk back. You can’t help but catch the eye-watering smell from the outhouse. “This place could use some work.”

  “In village, it is man job to move outhouse each month.”

  “Guess there aren’t any men at the Lenoch house.”

  Though it’s midday, the windows are tightly shuttered. Milada declares that no one is here. We can drive on to Letohrad to meet the mayor. At least we can knock, I insist. A tunnel of rosebushes has overgrown the arbor leading to the porch. Forced to stoop to walk through, I manage to tear an inch-long gap in the shoulder seam of my fleece vest and swear out loud. Milada admonishes me to be quiet, just in case.

  The porch stones are wet. Recently mopped? “Someone was home.”

  “If your aunt is home, we say only hello and make time to visit tomorrow.”

  I lift and drop the brass lion’s-head knocker. Hearing shuffling footsteps, I give Milada a thumbs-up. The front door creaks open. A tiny white-haired woman peers up at me. Her face is deeply furrowed, like a helium balloon with the gas leaking out. Thick, furry, snow-white eyebrows knit together in a frown.

  “Kateřina Lenoch?”

  “Co chcete? What do you want from me?” She blinks in the bright light, peers myopically p
ast me to see who is translating her words into English.

  “Is this the house of Josef Lenoch?”

  “Not here.” She attempts to slam the door shut, but I grab the handle. Milada gives a disapproving click of the tongue. If we want her trust we have to be more diplomatic.

  “Co chcete?” she says again. “What you want from me?” Her furrowed face pokes like a turtle’s head out from the wedge of opening. “Sie sind Polizisten, nicht wahr?” she says, reverting to German.

  “We’re not police.” Now I do regret my hasty move. “I’m your nephew. From America? Frank … František’s son?”

  “Sie Sind Polizisten! Já nevím nic a nikdo tady není. I know nothing.”

  A female voice from inside chastises the older woman for being unwelcoming to visitors. She steps aside, though not before casting a baleful look my way.

  “I’d like to ask a few questions about my family,” I shout to the woman inside. “The Lenochs?” The vinegary smell of fermenting cabbage is familiar from my aunts’ apartment in Cedar Rapids. My eyes adjust by degrees to the interior gloom. She’s a head taller than the older woman and is wearing a plaid wool skirt over white knee-stockings and loafers, what appears to be the outfit of a school girl. But she is no girl. She has a porcelain smooth, round face traced with wrinkles like fine cracks. Her steel gray hair is pulled efficiently back and clipped. She’s leaning against an object that could be a cane, but in this light it’s hard to be sure.

  “Come back another time.” Her eyes never leave their study of me.

  “How about tomorrow? What would be a good time?”

  “Ano, tomorrow. That will be best.”

  “What time?” I decide to take a chance. “Josef Kolář will come with us.”

  “Josef Kolář can stay with whore.” It’s the older woman who spoke. Catching me in a distracted moment, she yanks the door out of my grasp. Shouting, so I won’t miss her meaning, Aunt Kateřina says, “Our roof fall down and no one fix. Maybe Josef Kolář will fix.”

  No mistaking her sarcasm. “Maybe I can help.”

  “Já mám ráda osvobozené země!” She slams the door. Two deadbolts shoot into place. Pop! Pop!

  “What’d she say?” I say to the brass lion’s head knocker.

  “She said, ‘I love liberated countries.’” Milada guesses that she’s frightened of being fingered as a Communist sympathizer. “She believe you say her nephew name to trick her so she will make confession.”

  A “chilly band of air” leaks through the hole the rose thorn tore in the seam of my vest. “What do we do now? Dammit, I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  We retreat to the Škoda. Milada fastens my seatbelt for me when I forget and reminds me we need to stop and eat lunch. As we speed back into the hills, she makes an observation that catches me off-guard. “The younger woman, yes? How well you could see her?”

  “I did see what looked like a school uniform.”

  “I thought she look some like you. Her forehead slope back like you. She is tall and she have same long straight nose like you.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Maybe she is your sister.”

  “Anežka? No, really? If it’s so easy for us to find her, Jungmann would have been here first.”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe he know, but he keep her like bait.”

  “Bait for who?” But then I catch what she’s saying. “We have to go back!”

  “Ty máš bujnou fantazii,” she says. “You have strong imagination. It would be useless to go back and knock on door. We will speak with Josef, hear what he think.”

  To make up time, we eat our lunch from the picnic basket en route. Between gulps of a dry sausage sandwich—one slice of bread—and plums chased with bottled water, I grill her. If this woman is my sister, why didn’t you recognize her? Why didn’t she recognize you? I roll down my window. Steam eddies rise off a pond warmed in the sun. Frogs are bellowing.

  “She was in Hnátnice. I was in Prague.”

  “But she moved back to your village, right?”

  “State close orphanage only few months before Velvet Revolution. There were not so many kids left, I think. Anežka lived with her mother at inn from Jungmann only for short time.” Even in that short time, Anežka certainly had eyes. “Inn burn down on night our government was given to freedom fighters. Probably it was accident, too much celebrating. My father will know some story.”

  Despite that it will delay our arrival in Letohrad, Milada wants to show me a castle ruin. It’s along the way, and seeing it and hearing the story of its fate she believes will help me understand my family. After ascending a steep, winding road, Milada pulls over and parks under a choked stand of pines. Tramping uphill through monoculture woods, we pass a wooden sign with a poster photo of a fox that says: “Pozor, nebezpečí.” Please beware of danger. A rabid fox is loose. Milada snorts. “Even our animals are polluted.”

  On the crown of Žampach Hill, a triangular limestone peak looming over the valley where my father spent his youth, we come upon a crumbled stone wall with the remnant of a tower, all that remains of the castle. The breeze up here is bracing. “Sit with me?” Milada pats a smooth spot on the stone beside her. She’s a little heater. I snuggle close.

  The castle’s owner, Baron Jan Pinčer, was a friend of the beloved emperor, Charles IV. Why this matters will be clear in a minute. In those days, the 1300s, the main road through the valley passed an immense land-holding that belonged to my grandmother’s family, the Dostáls. Baron Pinčer’s posse was known to swoop down the hill and extort “protection” fees. Everyone in America, I tell Milada, claims their family was once connected to royalty. We don’t need this, do we? Really? She takes offense at my attitude. The Dostáls were not royalty, but they owned enough land they were able to bend Charles’ ear with their complaint. It could also be that he wanted to send a message to other rogue barons. In any case, in return for his help, Charles asked only one thing of my family. He was a devout Catholic known to sneak out of the castle in Prague to pray privately and meditate. He asked that they remove the stones from the castle and use them to build Písečná’s first church. My family of course agreed. Good to his word, Charles put the sword to greedy Baron Pinčer. Good to their word, in 1350 my family, the Dostáls, built a modest church using the castle’s limestone. That church stands today in Písečná and is still the only church in the valley.

  “Já jsem ti řekla tenhle příběh, abys věděl, jak hluboké jsou tvé kořeny v téhle zemi. I tell you this so you will know that your roots grow deep in powerful family. It would not have been allowed for your father to marry maid from poor farmhouse.”

  “If my father had inherited the farm. There’s something I’m still not clear on. How exactly does your father end up with the farm?”

  “My grandfather, Antonín Kotyza, was half-brother to your grandmother. When she is dying, he and my father take over farm.” She laughs. This means we’re related, all the more reason I must stay away from her.

  I write in my notebook: “In exile my father and his father could not speak the language of their dreams. I wonder if their dreams over time grew rancid with anger and longing and shame.”

  Milada takes my pen away. “There is something I must say you. Tahle vesnice je můj domov. Village of your father is also my home. A já mám ráda moji vesnici. I love my village. Your father also love his village, don’t believe if he say different.”

  “That’s ironic considering you both couldn’t wait to escape.”

  “There was no future for me here. I had to leave. Your father had trouble with Rosalie. It could not be allowed.”

  “You get excited every time you say trouble.”

  She looks up at me with eyes the color of wet scorched earth. “I think you want to kiss me?”

  “Ne, ne, I am afraid.” But I laugh and bury my nose into the warm lotion–scented nape of her neck, under the collar of the cardigan, and pull a long deep huff.

>   “Come.” She stands and takes my hand and leads me to the lip of a precipice on the northeast side of the ruin. Our footsteps crunch on windfall twigs. It’s very windy up here and cold. The season is changing, winter drawing near. “Engels said of Czech národ we don’t exist because Czech people don’t have history that belong only to us. But he is wrong. Czech people exist in village like Písečná. You will see.”

  She parts blackberry vines. “To je ono. There it is. Pee-SETCH-nya.”

  The slopes of the curving valley are quilted with grassy fields so vibrantly green the view has me silently supplying ridiculous clichés like “lush” and “pulsing with life.” A pumpkin-colored river rolls southwest and loops around Žampach Hill. The village farmhouses string out along the river like bows on a kite tail.

  “Malý, ale náš. Is Czech say. It’s mean, ‘It is little’ ”—I love the way she says lee-tell—“ ‘but it is ours.’ ”

  “The river?”

  “Is name Potočnice. Is not usually muddy. They are digging chemicals from pond beside Jungmann inn.” Milada directs my gaze along a tractor path leading to a dry pond where a giant yellow crane is taking muddy bites with its bucket. “There was inn. Fields of your father started by river and came to end of valley.”

  “What’s left of it now?”

  “Eighteen-hectare.” She points to a long section, narrow like a runway. I make that to be a not so glorious forty-five acres.

  “You said your father doesn’t want the rest of the land back?”

  “He is old. Not so easy he start over. But please, write in your Steno. For us, place is identity. Is not something you sell like car.”

  We’re running late for the mayor. She leads me back past the castle ruins and down through the woods past the rabid fox warning and races the Škoda down the hill and we drop into the valley onto a tiny paved road and turn south toward Letohrad where the mayor, anxious to depart for his precious weekend chata, impatiently waits for us.