Karel found it infuriating. If only the state apparatus weren’t so full of weak individuals. If only he were surrounded not by these profit seekers but by people who respected the rules, people who could see beyond their own pockets and embraced the collective ideal, things could really move ahead. Significantly. But even though things were moving along, there were still plenty of those around who were without a conscience. Or who, somewhere along their way up the ladder, had lost it. And all of this was happening now, just as things were changing for the better. Now, just as even Karel was finally beginning to get back some of what, over the past seven years, he had invested in the party.
It was true that the other day he and Gerta had shared a good laugh over the paper as they read excerpts from Jan Drda’s latest novel. How did it go?
Comrades are dying, but the idea continues, alive, immortal! You’ll see, your children will already be living in socialism. In the Soviet Union, they’re opening new factories, new mines; they’re building colossal dams and hydroelectric power plants. We must look to them, to the Soviets, to learn.
Gerta had laughed so hard at this dialogue between two milkmaids that tears had streamed down her face. It was true that such pathos generally did more harm than good to the common cause. Even Karel himself made fun of it a few times, although he would have preferred not to. In fact, he would have preferred that instead of paying attention to such cheerleaders, people would lend an ear to serious journalists who possessed a sense of moderation. Not those who, in a rush of exuberance or self-interest, tried to out-do one another, and in so doing devalued the very means intended to strengthen the socialist state. Karel knew moderation and respected the rules. He saw the direction in which things should be moving and what still needed to be done for Brno and for the Republic. For the past seven years, he had lived for the cause as no one else in his circle. Not even Josef and Radovan with whom he had run off to Hostýn toward the end of the war to join the Jan Žižka partisan brigade—not even they were still as engaged as Karel was. He understood why, naturally. If earlier on he had acquired a taste for shared evenings, for Sunday excursions, or for those brief moments when he stole away from meetings to be with Gerta, then perhaps by now he, too, might be less engaged. Perhaps. If toward the end of the war he hadn’t found out that Gerta was pregnant, perhaps he never would have run away at all. If she hadn’t gotten tangled up with whoever it was behind his back—God, how could she have done that to him?—he still would have been prepared to marry her after the war, on the spot if necessary, just so that she wouldn’t have had to leave. And then everything would have been different. The truth was, he had never forgiven her. She had destroyed his future, which he had envisioned so clearly and which had made him so happy. She derailed him from the course he had charted for his life, in which she was to have played a major part. And the sudden upheaval she caused was also to blame for the situation in which they now found themselves. It had taken years for him to be able to trust anyone again. It would have been easy for him to find her through the district administration. And he easily could have intervened. Had he wanted to, by the fall, she could have been back home, on Sterngasse, that was to say Hvězdová—there would have been no need to reallocate their apartment. But for a long time, he found it impossible to forgive her for having someone else’s child. The decision to bring her back he regarded merely as one of several options that might grant him some relief. That might bring back the light, which continued to emanate from their past, from a time when they were both barely twenty—a light he found himself craving to rekindle, to see if it might help him. So he gave it a try, without much enthusiasm and with minimal expectations. He gave it a try because at the time, he was prepared to try anything. And it worked. It worked so well that he had finally stopped obsessively scrutinizing Barbora’s features and, after his committee meetings, he no longer went straight home.
VIII
Uncle Karel. Every time I say it, I feel like there’s a butterfly fluttering in my throat. It’s been like that from the beginning, since the first time I saw him. He was gorgeous, tall, and he came to pick me and Mom up in a big blue car, like I’d never seen before. He came and took the bundle that Granny Zipfelová had packed for us out of Mom’s hand, put it in the trunk of the car, and when we were finally done saying goodbye to Granny, held the car door open for Mom—held it open for me, too—and had us sit on the soft seats inside that car and drove away with us, to a big city where I’d never been before, but that Mom had told me a lot about. She said it was big and beautiful and that lots of nice people lived there, but it must’ve changed or something, because I never saw anything beautiful there, just gray streets with big beaten-up buildings, not even a tree anywhere, and it smelled pretty bad. Even Mom looked disappointed. I guess she couldn’t find those nice people she used to talk about, because the only person we ever seemed to see was Uncle Karel. I liked him a lot; I did, except at the beginning I was still kind of sad. A little bit because of the dumb kids in kindergarten, but mainly because of Granny Zipfelová—I missed her real bad. I had no idea we could exist without her, that it was even possible, since my whole life she’d been the head of our family. For as long as I can remember, we always did exactly what she said, me, Mom, Auntie Hermína, and before that, even all the other aunties who lived with us in the house, and all of their kids, who were like my brothers and sisters. That’s how it was, Granny Zipfelová and Auntie Ida, who was always buzzing around and used to wear white petticoats under her skirt. They’d take care of us when our moms were at work. I remember our yard, where we all used to run around, me, Auntie Marie’s Jan, Auntie Edeltraud’s Katty, and Anni and Rudi who were Auntie Johanna’s kids and had that funny last name, Polivka, which means soup. Back then, Auntie Hermína was still with us, and Auntie Teresa, too, with her knocked-out front tooth, but she left us pretty soon, same as Auntie Ula, whom the kids used to call “Antula,” and Dorla, but actually them two I don’t remember, Anni just told me about them. We were a really great family, I mean back when we were still all together, before Auntie Marie, Auntie Edeltraud, and Auntie Johanna with her kids all left, and I have to say I missed them real bad, too, especially Anni and Rudi. Maybe even worse than I missed Granny Zipfelová after Uncle Karel brought us to Brno. Yeah, I’d say definitely worse, because you couldn’t do the kind of stuff we kids did together with Granny Zipfelová, and I still remember the things we did, because they were really funny. Like when we gave the chickens swimming lessons. I don’t know what we were thinking. Nobody was watching us, because the yard was small, and there was really no place we could get hurt, so we did different things, even things that now seem totally dumb. Like with those chicks. Someone was saying that those little yellow chicks running around the courtyard were jealous of the baby geese because they knew how to swim, and they wanted to chase them around on the pond and stuff, but they didn’t know how. Jan said that he already knew how to swim, and that we should help him teach them. But really, he had no clue; he was full of hot air when he said it back then. I don’t remember us ever going to a pond. And I doubt Auntie Marie would have taken him on her own. Our moms did everything together. And I don’t think they would have just taught Jan, when Anni and Rudi could easily have learned how to swim too. And besides, if my mom didn’t know how to swim, I bet Auntie Marie didn’t know how to either, and if she didn’t know, then there was no way she could have taught Jan, right? But we taught the chicks anyway. We picked them up, one by one, and tossed them into the aluminum rain barrel that collected the water that came out of the gutter. Next to it was a pile of wooden boards. I remember climbing up that pile of boards, holding a little chick in my fist, and because I was clumsy, I kept having to lean on that fist for balance. So I’m not sure if it was already dead when I was holding it, or just when it went into the water, but at any rate, it didn’t swim. It just sort of floated on the water but didn’t move. I guess by the end, there were lots of limp little yellow chicks floating around on th
e surface of the water inside that barrel. Rudi still tried to get their claws to move, and I poked at them with a stick. The whole thing seemed a bit weird. I remember that when I’d poke them, some would go under and then pop back up. We were excited to see that some of them were already learning how to dive, but pretty soon they all sank to the bottom, and the fun was over. We stood around the barrel, looking at each other, totally confused. But the next day, when Granny Zipfelová was going around looking for them, the chicks showed up again, bloated and stinky on the surface of the water in that barrel, and me and Anni and Rudi and Jan got a terrible beating, which was how we figured out that we must have done something pretty stupid. It was my first beating ever, and Aunt Ida told us that the belt belonged to Uncle Helmut who’d disappeared—who had fallen on the front lines. I didn’t know the first thing about it, but from then on, I was terrified of Uncle Helmut, because a beating with his belt hurt like hell; our butts stung for a good long time. I still remember it real well, because afterward, whenever I’d get it, I could pretty much predict for how long it was going to hurt. Uncle Helmut became a big bogeyman for me, although I never laid eyes on him. And maybe that’s exactly why—the less I knew about him, the bigger and scarier he became. Aunt Ida and Granny Zipfelová both used to say he was a hero, but he must have also been pretty mean, to allow his belt to be used to give kids a beating. I can’t even remember if Mom tried to comfort me that time, but most likely she just said something like those chicks belonged to Granny Zipfelová and Aunt Ida, and now they’re dead, and that’s why we got spanked. That’s how I understood it, anyway, and she probably even agreed with it a little bit, but still, it hurt like hell, especially since no one felt sorry for us.
I caught a beating a few more times, that’s for sure. Like when Anni and Rudi and me climbed up on the roof of the house and threw flowers down Granny Zipfelová’s chimney to make her happy, or when we left the courtyard to go visit our moms in the fields and got lost on the road to Mikulov. But that time it wasn’t Aunt Ida who gave us the beating; by then she’d moved in with Uncle Šenk on his farm, so it was Granny Zipfelová who used the belt on us one last time, and I think it gave her a lot less satisfaction than when Aunt Ida used to let us have it.
I may not remember that much, but I definitely know that we were a family and that I really liked it there. Even sleeping in the same room with the Polivkas, where there was just one big bed for the moms, and then blankets on the floor where Anni and Rudi and me used to sleep. I remember all the good smells and how there were so many things we could do, at least before Katty, Jan, and then in the end even the Polivkas left. Later on, we were just me, my mom, Auntie Hermína, and Granny Zipfelová. I was the last one left of all the kids and had only Granny’s dogs to play with. Mom and Granny never let me go out to play with the village kids, not that they wanted to play with me anyway; the most they’d do was curse me out, calling me Hitler’s bastard. If it hadn’t been for me dreaming about leaving there and moving into a big apartment with a kitchen that would be twice the size of Granny’s, with a round, removable inset sink, as well as a real toilet instead of Granny’s latrine, and a bathroom, which I’d never seen in my life, then seriously, back then I’d have thought it was all over, that I’d spend the rest of my life alone with the dogs and never have any friends again. But those dreams kept me going the whole time, and then they even came true. Uncle Karel came to get us, and when we finally got settled in that apartment where he dropped us off, and that I’d always been dreaming about, we went to pay our very first visit, and it was to see the Polivkas. By some miracle, Mom had managed to track them down, and you can’t imagine how unbelievably happy I was to see Anni and Rudi again. After that, I almost stopped feeling homesick, although to this day, I sometimes still close my eyes and imagine that I’m running through that sweet-smelling meadow behind the chapel in Perná, all the way to our cottage, where I push open the gate and call out for Granny Zipfelová at the top of my lungs.
IX
“Granny, Graaannnyyyy!” shouted Barbora as soon as she pushed open the gate in the picket fence.
The chickens scattered in all directions; the cottage and the courtyard looked deserted. The front door was closed, and the yard was quiet.
“Granny Zipfelová!” Barbora called out again, dashing for the door.
Almost at the same instant, Zipfelová appeared in the doorway. Barbora hurled herself into her arms.
“Easy, girl, easy, hold your horses; you can’t rush at me like that; I’m an old lady,” Zipfelová said with a laugh, hugging Barbora, who had locked her arms around her neck.
“Hello,” called Gerta, shutting the gate behind her.
“Gerta, come on in, come on, what a happy surprise,” said Zipfelová with a smile as they kissed one another on the cheeks.
Who could have imagined it back then, when Gerta had stood here for the very first time, famished and thirsty, pushing a baby carriage with Barbora in it?
On the threshold of the kitchen, Gerta stopped. It was as if she had stepped back in time to years before. Around the table again sat Johanna, Teresa, Ula with Dorla, Edeltraud, Maria, Hermína. On the floor about them, the children, and Ida and old Zipfelová.
“It’s hard to believe it was real, isn’t it?” Zipfelová said, still smiling as if she, too, were seeing the same thing as Gerta. “Remember how we barely fit? All the children, ten grown women, and the two of us, Ida and me? What a time, practically still the war.”
“Of course I remember, Mrs. Zipfelová. It’s impossible to forget. That and how good you were to all of us.”
“Oh, come now, it’s what any good Christian woman would have done. Why, you were all so skinny and exhausted, and those poor children. It was terrible. A disgrace is what it was. But enough about that. Come on in and sit down—you, too, you little imp,” she said, smiling at Barbora, who was bouncing around her.
“How’ve you been, Mrs. Zipfelová? I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long.”
“Don’t be silly, girl. I knew starting a new life from scratch would be no bed of roses. I imagined you’d have other things on your mind than coming to visit an old lady. I’ve still got my Hermína here with me, and everything is the same. These days she works at the JZD, the farm cooperative. But tell me what you’re up to.”
“Granny, can I go to the garden?”
Zipfelová was just setting a third glass of water down on the table.
“Of course you can, my girl. You go right ahead and take a good look at everything.”
Gerta gave Barbora a shake of her finger, just to be safe.
Zipfelová looked run-down. She was more stooped and brittle than when they last saw her a year and a half ago. She sat opposite Gerta, stirring her chicory coffee with a spoon.
“I don’t even have anything to offer you. You’d be surprised, but we’ve got next to nothing around here.”
“Please don’t worry, Mrs. Zipfelová. I didn’t come here to get fed.” Gerta gave a laugh. “For that matter, it’s the same for us. There’s nothing in Brno either.”
“No, dear girl, you don’t understand. Here, we’ve really been left with next to nothing. Everything belongs to the JZD. We’re not self-sufficient farmers anymore—a few chickens are all I have left. And there’ll never be another thing from Šenk’s ever again. Have you heard?”
Gerta leaned across the table. Zipfelová was looking at her quizzically.
“Heard what?”
“They sent Šenk to the mines, dear girl. Can you imagine?”
Gerta raised her eyebrows in astonishment. “To the mines?”
Zipfelová sadly nodded her head. “To Jáchymov, in the Ore Mountains. And they moved Ida and the child out to some state farm in Kostelec nad Orlicí. Do you know where that is?”
Gerta shook her head.
“All of us women went over there at six o’clock in the morning on the day they moved them out—her and her child, and his crippled old mother too. All th
ey let them take were a few rags, a bed, a wardrobe, and their comforters. Nothing else. They drove away in a van. And on top of it, they had a guard from the National Security Corps, the SNB, standing over them, keeping watch the whole time.”
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