Better You Go Home Page 9

  Chapter Nine

  The Orphanage: Friday Afternoon, First Week of October, 1994

  When it comes to sorting out identity, it’s the memories we don’t have in common that define us. One of my father’s persistent memories, one he told me about in any case, was of waking in the loft above the stalls at night filled with dread. When the heavy duvet would slip off and he’d wake up to freezing cold, the first thing he’d do would be to listen for the “angel breathing” of his little Magda. If he heard that, he’d then listen for the familiar snorting of the mare in the stalls. If he heard that he knew the world was in order and he could go back to sleep. While we take a circuitous loop and squander precious time to throw off hypothetical pursuers, Milada tells me that her father still wakes up with that acid burn of fear in his gut if he so much as hears a stray cat in the stalls. The dark void of early morning is when trouble came. To this day he’ll still get up and go to the stalls to check. I of course grew up never feeling anything remotely like mortal fear for our safety.

  Rounding a fishhook bend in the road, Milada suddenly shouts “H-NAHT-NEET-tsa,” and jerks the Škoda to a stop. “Orphanage. It is your sister’s home.” It’s a tiny village. A half dozen log-walled farm homes fold around the bend under a canopy of chestnuts. We’ve stopped near a manse with gargoyles leering out from beneath massive eaves. The old orphanage with its swayback roof and flaking plaster is pretty dilapidated. A muddy hayfield separates the manse from a newer brick flat that Milada believes might have been my sister’s domicile when she was the director.

  “I do not usually go on this road. I forgot is here.”

  “How old was Anežka when she was sent here?”

  “Small child. Her mother was not welcome to stay at farm. She give Anežka to orphanage, then she have arrangement with Jungmann for his club.”

  Creeping ivy is colonizing the orphanage walls. What plaster still covers the square-logs is painted cerulean blue, the color of a naked summer sky. In my notebook, I add, “sky blue covering shame.” And then wonder, why did I write “shame”?

  “We are late. We must not make Zámečník wait more.”

  “This is where my sister was seen, right?” Against her protests I open the car door and step out. “You said the woman might have been my sister? That was here, right? Just give me a minute.” My jeans are soon damp from scrambling through knee-high alfalfa or timothy grass or whatever it is, but no matter, I’m anxious for a peek inside. The threshold has broken away from the stone foundation. The front door is thick and solid but hangs askew on gate-sized hinges. An official notice has been posted on the door. The word “Pozor” catches my eye. Beware. Must be condemned. Milada gives a nervous cough with the horn. I shove in before she can stop me.

  The interior is dark but for a shaft of daylight sluicing down through a hole in the roof and loft. When my eyes adjust I see a row of stout posts framing a long hallway. A tiled wood burning stove is missing its flue and doors. Scavengers must have removed any usable metal. Rotted studs and broken furniture are piled by the stove for kindling. Near the pile is a bedroll. Cold ashes fill the stove’s belly.

  A plump feral cat I’ve managed to startle skitters up ladder stairs into the loft. The musky odor of rodent is strong. More prey than one cat can eat. There’s another odor. Piss maybe? Stale sweat from the bedroll? I jot in my notes “smells like a homeless person’s camp.” Near the pungent bedroll is a folded clean white child’s blanket. A closer look using my magnifier shows the little figures on the blanket to be saguaro cacti and bucking broncos and flying lariats. A touch of the Wild West in Bohemia?

  Somebody is staying here, at least occasionally. Why a child’s blanket?

  My sister grew up here. Worked here. I flash on an image of Sulphur Springs, the community garden, the train tracks and cat o’ nine tails, the Superior Seed silo, the pile of corn spilling out. Her grandfather in exile, living out his days, staring off at something only he could see from his back porch. What concept would she have of him? And her father. Did she wonder who he was? What would she have thought if she knew he attended the annual kolatch festivals in Cedar Rapids’ Bohemie Town? Could she have imagined him dancing the polka to the accordion strains of Červenka and his orchestra Friday nights at Danceland while she was stuck here? Would she have conceived of him teaching Czech history to children at the Czech Saturday School but refusing to come back for her? Poor Anežka never got to feel the tender grip of his hand at the back of her neck. Would she have minded him leaving smears of the Vaseline he used to clean his hands on the doorknobs? Would she have chided him, like Mom did, for his habit of chewing toothpicks after dinner? All that life lived there. And she never got to be a part of it. How sad. How utterly utterly sad.

  The sound of the door scraping shatters my reverie. “We must go. Police are coming.” I hear it, too, da-doo-da-doo, distant, but drawing nearer.

  Back in the Škoda, we head south, away from Letohrad in case we’re followed. This will cause another delay, but Milada knows the farm roads; it will only be a small detour. Safely away from Hnátnice, she curses me lustily, “Someone has seen you go in. They call police. Are you satisfied? Now we will be watched.”

  “It was my sister’s home. I had to go in.”

  “Ne. You don’t had to go in. You had to listen and do what you are told.” These things, she insists, must be arranged with permission from authorities.

  “What authorities? It’s an abandoned building for god’s sake.”

  “Moc se ptáš. You ask too many stupid questions. Now you must do what I tell you, understand? People are helping us. I have someone watching orphanage, your family, a cousin. We must not make trouble for her.”

  Careening around a blind curve on the down slope into Letohrad, we nearly plow into the back of a Mercedes tour bus and avoid a collision only when Milada whips into the on-coming lane and passes. Take it easy, I tell her. We’re late as it is. Not the most judicious thing to say. She keeps her temper on simmer, but warns me, no more screwing up. What she tells me, I must do.

  Chapter Ten

  Letohrad: Friday Afternoon

  Kneeling workers in blue overalls are scrubbing at four decades of grime with hand brushes, one cobblestone at a time. Pressure-washers thread hoses through throngs of Friday afternoon shoppers. A tower of scaffolding covers Letohrad’s Madonna statue, which, I notice, climbs above even the castle’s tower. What I find fascinating is not the mother of God’s loftiness so much as the scarved ladies armed with yellow plastic shopping bags. Bobbing stiffly side to side like penguins, they march through the arcade with a missionary zeal as though afraid that Monday the shops might not reopen.

  Milada parks outside a Konditorei that fronts on the square. Wait in the car, I’m told. Do I want anything? I ask for a coffee. I should avoid using coffee as a fluid, but looks like I’ll miss my afternoon nap so I need it to stay awake. She knows the people who run the bakery and plans to use their phone. The mayor asked her to call before we show up. He might need us to pick up some files at the records office.

  * * *

  Preparations for a gala reception are under way at the castle. A row of Mercedes tour buses idles, motors rumbling. Flowers for the reception are rushed through a side door under a banner bearing a photo of a man with a broad face wearing square black glasses and a sardonic smile, a politician of some stature I take it. When Milada does not immediately return I grow restless. What if the shops close for the weekend?

  If I’m going to buy a gift for my father, this might be my only chance. She did say wait in the car, but the shops are right here. If she’s back before I am I’ll see her. I follow the penguins into the arcade. The window display at a dry goods store features a pyramid of sun-faded washing powder boxes and a rack of Marlboro knock-offs and plumbing accessories. Under the display, blanketed with dust, are several seemingly forgotten hand-blown crystal vases. A vase would appeal at least to my aunts.

  Inside, I muster a few words o
f Czech aided by a grope with my magnifier in my traveler’s dictionary. The sullen clerk ignores me. “Vázu,” I say, again. “Pro Čechy.” A penguin looks me up and down, accusing me with her eyes of being German. She bumps my leg with her yellow bag. “Pro moji českou rodinu,” I add, still not sure I’ve gotten it right. Vases for my Czech family. Then I remember to add, “USA, českou rodinu in USA.”

  “Ano.” She brightens at last. “American!” It’s in my favor apparently that I am not after all one of the Germans from the tour buses.

  Detouring around the belligerent penguin, I follow the clerk back to the display. Her stooped shoulders, shapeless gray smock, the seam up the back of flesh-colored nylons, all remind me how much locals must resent foreigners waltzing in with open wallets. Much as I don’t want to be one of those obnoxious foreigners, their resentment might be the price I have to pay.

  She’s promoting a slender, sea green vase, fussy with gold filigree, but near it is an amber vase, stocky, solid but for a narrow hollow, that refracts the light streaming through the window in a layered coppery pool, like a pond recumbent with autumn leaves, and I know instantly, that’s the one. I point. That one. I’d forgotten about this, but my father has that small amber bowl on the desk in the basement where he keeps the books for his remodel business. As far as I know, it’s real Baltic amber, a gift given him by his mother before he fled Bohemia. He’d flick cigar ash into that bowl while he watched his Friday night fights on the portable black and white Magnavox he’d lug down there because Mom couldn’t stand that “racket,” as she called it.

  “Ne, ne.” The clerk wags a finger. Not for sale. It has a slight wobble in the base and an interior fracture that causes the light to refract in that layered manner, which as far as I’m concerned makes it the perfect gift. That vase will remind him of his amber bowl. That vase will be my Trojan Horse.

  “To je místní výroba.” She keeps promoting the other vase. No, I tell her, I have to have that one, that one, I keep pointing, but she’s turning away. All right, I say, all right. I’ll take that granny vase and I point as well to a cobalt blue bowl on a wine-stem pedestal, I’ll take that one, too. My Czech aunts in Cedar Rapids will love them even if my father won’t. They had an identical bowl they used as a candy dish—likely nothing but carnival glass won at a county fair ring-toss—that I broke as a child. My total comes to just under 1,500Kč, less than thirty dollars. She’s beaming. Must be a good sale for her.

  “Děkuji,” I mutter, exiting the shop frustrated but excited. One way or the other I have to convince Milada to persuade the clerk to sell me that amber vase.

  * * *

  Back at the Škoda, Milada’s tongue is molding a chocolate ice-cream cone into the shape of a volcano. She hands me a lukewarm coffee in a plastic cup.

  I show her my purchases. “I also found the perfect gift for my father, but she wouldn’t sell it—”

  “Charles.” She never uses my real name unless she’s truly angry. “You think we have time for shopping?” She fills me in on what’s transpired. The mayor called the Radniční úřad, the district records office. No answer. The woman who runs the office might be at the castle for the reception, which, as it turns out, is for the famous author whose book Jungmann was reading, Josef Škvorecký. He fled Czechoslovakia following Prague Spring and ran a publishing house for samizdats in Toronto. Now he’s back and on the lecture circuit.

  “Zámečník want us to bring files. Maybe she is there and she don’t pick up phone.” He’d requested that she set aside files from September and October 1968. If we have her call him, she should let us take them. Knowing we’re here snooping around, Jungmann’s suspicions will be raised. The mayor wants those files in his hands before Jungmann gets to them.

  “Why those files in particular?”

  Zámečník found a report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission claiming that in the late sixties, during the time of Prague Spring when Milada escaped and her father was arrested, police in some Soviet bloc countries electrically charged water thrown on the floors of prisoners’ cells. It was a more efficient means of forcing confessions than the stress positions that took so much time. The mayor expects to find evidence of this torture having been used by Jungmann at the prison in Žamberk where Milada’s father was held. Zámečník has been detained by an incident at the school and couldn’t get over here to collect the files himself.

  The Radniční úřad, in a two-story steel and glass building more devoid of personality than even my city hall office, is tucked into a back street off the main square. The downstairs door is unlocked. We let ourselves into an enormous room filled with desks stacked high with loose files. The place looks deserted. A browse through a few stacks—Milada cursing and muttering the while—reveals nothing more recent than the 1880s, useless shit. The director’s office is up a steep flight of metal stairs. I wait below. Milada runs up. Locked. A sign announces that the office will reopen on Monday.

  “Chico, if we had been on time—”

  “Look, I’m sorry. But if your friend can’t get the files, neither can Jungmann, right?” We retreat to the car. “Since he’s stuck at his office anyway, can we please just take a minute to buy that amber vase?” It’s unpleasant to have to plead, but this vase has become my golden ring, so certain am I that my father will understand the significance.

  “Ne, Chico, ne. No shopping. You will find crystal vase in every village. Tomorrow morning in Žamberk I am certain shops will open.”

  It has to be this vase. I describe the flaw in his amber bowl. She scoffs. Memory is unreliable. When was the last time I saw his amber bowl? No, we’ll find a vase tomorrow. Back at the square, a worker in blue overalls has made a point of planting his bucket behind the Škoda. Milada shouts at him. A grin cuts like an incision across his grizzled face. Cursing, Milada slips him a twenty-koruna note to speed things along.

  But speed is not to be had. The great weekend escape to the mountains is in full flood. Stuck in traffic, we creep past row after row of concrete panelák. By the time we reach the bottom of a long curved drive leading up to a colonnaded school, Milada is seething. She parks. We climb out.

  Before we manage much distance from the car, the mayor’s teenage son, a student at the high school, slouches down the drive, greeting Milada with the barest of nods. He’s playing a Walkman so loudly I hear the Techno scourge assaulting his ears through the headphones. She asks if his father has waited for us. He shrugs.

  “Kde je tvůj otec? Nechal pro mě nějakou zprávu? Did your father leave some message for me?” She yanks off the boy’s earphones. She’s a mother of teen boys. She understands guerilla tactics.

  He looks wide-eyed, offended. But now that she has his attention he admits that his father is in his office and the door is closed.

  “Why should this time be different, yes?”

  Translating that, Milada’s sour look suggests he’s hit a sore spot. He eyes me up and down as though I were some exotic brand of fool. Fritz, I want to tell him. Just another Fritz.

  She dismisses the smirking sullen boy. He continues slouching down the drive.

  “You meet with your mayor friend. I’m going to nap in the car.”

  Perhaps not surprising, she doesn’t even attempt to argue with me. Her pride is wounded. Something is wounded. I’m inconvenient. “Go. Do what you have to do.”

  * * *

  For the next twenty minutes, unable to nap because of that coffee I should have dumped, I scribble in my Steno, as she calls it, now and then glancing at the housing enclave. Trimmed linden trees are planted like potted lollipops along the road bordering the housing development at exact intervals. A woman wearing an old-fashioned print dress, hair under a scarf, hangs wash out to dry on lines strung across her deck. Her persistence with the clothes, hanging them just so, knowing that if they are out for too long they’ll turn gray, reminds me of my father in the basement he built for himself in the house in Cedar Rapids. He persisted in maintaining
a few of the old habits from home, the Czech butcher, the Saturday language school, despite that over time they only managed to hold him in a gray world that never belonged entirely to one place or the other, and never, at least in his own mind, would he be able to do the one thing that would enable him to escape this gray netherworld: never would he be able to go back for the daughter he left behind.

  I write, Torturers and their collaborators live together with their victims in these projects. Jiří’s father died of lung disease five years after his release from the uranium mine. One of his former jailers lives one floor below in Jiří’s mother’s building. Milada’s father lost some of his teeth during his interrogation and his hair went white—perhaps from the electroshocks?—but they left no mark except the injury to his feet. He walk like his tender feet are on ground glass, she had said. He continued to live in the village with Jungmann and Halbrstat for neighbors. It would be no different if my father and Anežka lived in adjacent panelák.

  * * *

  About the time I’m longing for a hotel room and a bed, Milada rushes down the drive and climbs into the Škoda. Her dyed black hair has been loosened from its ponytail and flung back of her shoulders like loose straw. She apologizes for taking so long. “You have napped? All is okay?”

  “Shouldn’t have drunk that coffee.”

  “You look like you need hotel.” When I don’t immediately reply, she adds, “Okay, I will meet with Halbrstat. You rest.” She proceeds to tell me that Zámečník found Anežka’s birth certificate, a document we need to go with her visa. “But, Chico, something is crazy.” He did confirm that the woman with Aunt Kateřina, the woman wearing the school-girl outfit, could very well be Anežka.