DES MOINES
Miloš Forman, Milan Kundera, and Martina Navratilova all struck me as a wonderful roster of late-twentieth-century Czech achievement, and a beautiful contrast to the previous seven centuries of Bohemian bloodshed. Directing Amadeus, writing The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and triumphing nine times at Wimbledon were all laudable aims and achievements. The question I had—planted in my head by my students—was why those three had all chosen to live somewhere else, as though Prague weren’t good enough.
America was, of course, apparently not good enough for me. It contained guns and Republicans and megachurches and personal injury lawyers and five square meters of television screen per household, headache-inducing beer, and far, far too much space that was relentlessly paved. It had laws determined by pressure groups, a language debased by idiots, and a mythology based on subliterate kids chasing cattle.
“Are there,” said Milan, “many Indians in Indiana?”
“There aren’t many anythings in Indiana,” I said. “Particularly Indians.”
“You left to escape the loneliness,” suggested Milan.
“I hadn’t thought of it as escaping until I got here,” I said.
I thought to myself later that in addition to the surplus space in America, there was always and also too much time. An hour in Indiana could last all day, the sun at a standstill and the mostly rotund residents shuffling toward air-conditioned cars they drove slowly past corn in the fields that was too sleepy to watch itself grow. There was also all the time necessary to cross all that space; an hour or two in the car every day. A job under American conditions would be intolerable, no task ever quite finished yet not enough to do. Daytime TV just elongated the hours further.
* * *
—
“We listen,” said Milan, “to a lot of American music.”
Vlasta was there but Ivan was away investigating the marriage of a forklift and somebody’s sternum. “I am interested,” she said, “in rappers who show respect to their mothers.”
“They exist,” I said.
“ ‘Mama Said Knock You Out,’ ” said Milan.
“That’s a very high bar,” I said.
“Crib—this means ‘bed,’ yes?—for my mom on the outskirts of Philly,” said Vlasta.
“I think that has more to do with the man’s earning potential,” I said.
“Yes, but he bought his mother a bed.”
“A house,” I said.
“Okay,” said Milan. “A little shout-out to my dad and mom.”
“You may know this stuff better than I do,” I said.
“What I hear,” said Vlasta, “is mainly concerned with bitches and hos.”
“Also much motherfucking. The gentlemen stand out,” said Milan.
“Perhaps they do,” I said. “Do either of you have children?”
“None that I know of,” said Milan.
“I have two,” said Vlasta. “One boy and one girl ages fifteen and twelve. Kuba is my oldest. Short for Jakub. He gets in trouble at school but I am very proud of him. Recently he made the Hitler salute to his class and said this is how high my dog jumps when I come home.”
“You have a dog?”
“No. Hanka takes after her father. He is in Switzerland with a sophisticated Western woman. They are wealthy and yet sometimes I must pay the train fares for the children to see him.”
“Do you go with them?” said Milan.
“No. Kuba is old enough to look after his sister.”
“Yes,” said Milan, “but you could drop them off and treat yourself to some skiing.”
“It would not be enjoyable,” said Vlasta.
“Elliott,” said Milan, “I think you must teach Vlasta sophistication.”
“Sure,” I said. “First lesson is how to order a Happy Meal.”
“Sometimes,” said Vlasta, “the way the children speak to me is awful. Like their father. Shut up. Go away. Leave me alone. Always it is worse when they return. They become agents of the devil, serving up little slices of hell. I worry that they will inherit their father’s inability to perceive the suffering of others.”
“Perhaps Elliott can teach you how to swear at them,” said Milan.
“Perhaps you could just buy them Angry Meals,” I said.
“You’re going to be rich, Elliott,” said Milan.
“It gets worse as they get older,” said Vlasta. “They prefer some things there. They prefer everything that costs more, basically. When I am walking Hanka to school and holding her hand and she is dragging her heels I feel that what I am really doing is dragging her father. Even though he has two good adult legs.”
“The only defense against capitalism is nostalgia,” said Milan. “That makes children especially vulnerable.”
“The only defense for a parent is love,” said Vlasta. “And it doesn’t work.”
Milan said that he had detected an epidemic of women who had men who were dreadful liabilities, whether chronically underemployed, or blackout drunk every night, or prone to frightening the children. He wouldn’t mind companionship, he said, but becoming or taking on liabilities, well, he was risk-averse.
“Do you always talk about love like an insurance product?” said Vlasta.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with insurance,” he said.
“It’s based entirely on fear,” I said.
“Fear is a perfectly valid biological fight-or-flight motivator,” he said. “If you suppress it you can focus on other things.”
“Like what?” I said. “The TV?”
“You could at least have a companion to watch it with,” said Vlasta.
“Inspiring,” said Milan. “I’ll start searching tomorrow.”
Listening to them bicker, I was reminded how much older they were: constrained by past choices, navigating ever-narrower channels toward largely foregone conclusions. The idea that you might meet somebody beneath the astronomical clock and together outrun the sun was preposterous.
* * *
—
Elsewhere, capitalism metastasized. First there were Whirlpool and Nike logos on the sides of trams. Then the advertisements on the Metro—even if your Czech reading abilities were rudimentary—began to promise exclusive honey from pedigreed bees, organic milk from intellectual cows, sound educations for deserving children, and you could even learn German in three weeks. Sports facilities throughout the city were renamed after multinational corporations. The buildings that retained their old names seemed quaint, like the National Theatre, suggesting there once was a nation that aspired to have a theater, although you could equally argue that the august concert hall called the Rudolfinum was named after the emperor Rudolf II before multinational conglomerates elbowed emperors out of the way.
There was a nightly TV weather forecast watched and beloved by all or most or perhaps only half of the Czech nation. It consisted of a beautiful woman rising naked from bed and dressing appropriately for the following morning, a striptease in reverse. What began with titillation quickly gave way to worry about whether she was going to be warm enough in what she was wearing. The show aired at midnight, and each viewer was sent to sleep with mild anxiety about the day ahead. It was common after watching an erotic-meteorological performance to have nightmares about catastrophic weather events.
The more I thought about the balcony man, the more convinced I became of his terrible isolation and profound self-loathing, this pariah whose only experience of conviviality was a confederation of squabbling pigeons who did not judge him. Whatever human relationships he had ever had compromised, and whatever vitality he had ever possessed spent. I began to picture him in my daydreams and in my sleep, playing tennis. I could not fix his face in my mind, old or young, but I could feel the exhilaration of a good serve and the humiliation of a weak return, even though I only ev
er tried playing once myself. I could hear the ball meeting the racket and feel the need to wipe sweat from my forehead before it reached my eyes. Or I pictured him in the water with his swimmer, hopelessly outclassed and charmed, trying to come up with invitations that weren’t too obvious. I tried to imagine a life of which the central event was someone else’s broken toe. Which toe was it? The newspapers wouldn’t necessarily record a detail like that. The archives detailing whom he had got sent to the uranium mines and why would be altogether devoid of interest. Did his swimmer cook for him, or he for her, and if so, what?
I pictured him, frail and elderly, walking into a library or a bookshop intent on learning every possible thing about Des Moines. That is, I imagined him imagining her life, desperate to know where she bought her groceries, terrified that in that and other respects Des Moines might not be a suitable place. Perhaps he checked a map, saw numbered streets on an alien grid, hostile to comprehension. I imagined his vexation at not being able to check the Iowa forecast every day. Above all I felt unbearably sad that whoever and wherever she was, she had no way of knowing what had happened to him.
“I would imagine,” said Amanda, “that she has moved on.” We were in the bathtub again, but on a Saturday morning with coffee and books and a small selection of cold meats from the lahudky. “If they were ever involved. Why are you so sure he wasn’t simply investigating her disappearance?”
“I guess I don’t think wankers investigated things,” I said. “They left that up to the cocksuckers.”
“I expect she was a target,” said Amanda. “Or that he was just a perv.”
“He didn’t have a file on her,” I said. “Just the photos and clippings of an admirer.”
“Or a creep.”
“Those are synonyms,” I said.
“People see what they want to see,” said Amanda.
“Maybe,” I said, “he helped her escape.”
Amanda had already returned to her book. I was only twenty-four, and I hadn’t hurt anybody yet.
PART II
BROTHERS
Time passed in spurts that pooled here and splashed there. Coin colonies took over Graceland, piles of crowns and hellers I discharged from my pockets when I got home, which irritated Amanda immensely. Coffee, bagels, and burgers improved throughout the city center, but prices didn’t. The poor hellers like surplus labor took shelter with me.
One morning alone together over beer in the Golden Lion, Milan told me that he had had a twin brother named Ludvik. When the boys were about a year old their mother was bathing them before bedtime, but she went to chat with a neighbor, and when she returned an hour later one of the twins had drowned.
It was easy and reasonable to pin the blame on their father. He had a couple of witnesses who were reasonably sure he had been in the pub at the time, but she had numerous witnesses to testify that he drank three liters of brandy every day. It was her word against his and she won. Off went the father to prison, although negligence and manslaughter were apparently not serious crimes, and he was back at his pub a year later. Meanwhile the judgment and behavior of the mother went before the court of neighborly opinion.
She was a scatterbrained chatterbox to begin with, or the tragedy would never have occurred. Afterward, said Milan, her judgment and behavior became increasingly erratic, although he was too young to know it then. Only she had ever been able to tell the children apart, and at first it was widely accepted that Ludvik, not Milan, had drowned. But increasingly she called Milan Ludvik, so that in his first memories he was a child named Ludvik whose brother Milan had drowned. There was no real reason why he couldn’t or shouldn’t go through life under the one name instead of the other, but only his mother called him Ludvik, so when he started school he became Ludvik at home and Milan in the world. The divergence between home life and school life did not stop there. At home he fed himself—exclusively sweets—and went to sleep by collapsing at midnight while his mother babbled or sobbed or passed out on the sofa from all the rum in her hot chocolate. She was never emotionally distant, he said, but she knew how to cling and not how to protect, and through maternal channels difficult to analyze she passed all her grief and guilt straight to him.
Who he was mattered to him increasingly. Other children announced or displayed an allegiance or preference for one parent or another, but Milan couldn’t even get that far. He determined early on that he had little in common with either parent, but he didn’t even know who he was. He did not enjoy school, but found it less unbearable than life at home. Girls avoided him, and boys tormented him, which meant that fortunately he never confessed his secret to some merciless small person of his own age.
Milan was a teenager before it occurred to him that perhaps he had actively murdered his brother. At the least it seemed likely that they had played some baby game together in which Milan had not understood the consequences of his actions. His waking and sleeping hours were filled with images of him sitting on his brother’s head. More important, he did not know as a teenager whether he was Milan or Ludvik, and it seemed to matter, and he didn’t trust his mother’s account. He began to believe that either Milan or Ludvik was still alive, and that the whole drowning story was cooked up to cover some other nefarious thing. He couldn’t leave home without looking for the other boy, often seeming to catch sight of him on a passing tram or cycling the other way over cobblestones with his teeth rattling. He also couldn’t stay home, because he had grown to loathe his mother. His father had long ago become a kind of prostitute, living with any woman who consented to keep him in drink.
He insisted on seeing his brother’s grave, but his mother refused to take him or tell him where it was. Enraged, he knocked her down. Not, he said, because of her refusal, but because he discovered that the grave had gone unvisited for years.
The means of self-destruction available to a young man in communist Czechoslovakia were severely limited. There were no hard drugs to do or violent gangs to join. There were endless ways to get in trouble with the law, but none of them very therapeutic. He covered his bedroom walls in pictures of beautiful lakes until one day, realizing what he had subconsciously done, he burned all of them. He experimented with various kinds of self-harm but concluded that he was squeamish and cowardly. He began playing tennis so that he could pretend that his opponent was his long-lost brother, Milan. A volley returned signified some human presence on the other side of the net, defying the human absence Milan keenly felt in every other arena of his life.
Once a month since before Milan could remember, his father’s brother had paid a visit. As a rule he stayed exactly ten minutes, paid no attention to the child, and spoke to his sister-in-law scornfully, impatiently, like, said Milan, a doctor confronted by an epidemic and a silly woman at the same time. Milan’s uncle did something within a succession of government ministries. Milan never knew what, but it was evident from the uncle’s villa in Krč that his best friends lived in Moscow. Communication between Milan’s mother and father occurred exclusively through Uncle Jiří, whose opinion of his own brother lay somewhere south of his opinion of his sister-in-law.
Milan was fairly sure that Uncle Jiří worked on very sensitive matters. The tunnel he burned through his brain with a Browning after the revolution suggested he had something to hide. As an adult Milan surmised that Uncle Jiří probably worked for the KGB, not the Czech security services, thus making him a traitor to his own people twice over. Yet adult Milan also surmised that Uncle Jiří’s regular visits had nothing to do with his mother’s well-being and everything to do with his.
He never forgot Milan’s birthday. It was the only visit in a given year when Uncle Jiří spoke to him directly until he turned fifteen. On that occasion Uncle Jiří gave him a pair of Nikes, forever after a mystery of provenance and purpose. Then he brutally announced to Milan’s mother that he was taking the child camping for a week. Milan had no interest in camping, p
articularly not with Uncle Jiří, but questioning orders was not a viable option, and Jiří told him to pack before he tried the shoes on.
Uncle Jiří had no children of his own, no affection for or interest in them, and adult Milan guessed that Uncle Jiří had about five minutes per week for women. They walked briskly to the train station in silence, Milan sensing that there was nothing recreational about the expedition; that Uncle Jiří needed Milan in order to perform some sort of job. They did not speak on the train or at the far station, six miles from Prague. When they arrived at Uncle Jiří’s country cottage—a two-room wooden cabin about a mile and a quarter from the station and unsuitable for year-round habitation—Uncle Jiří told Milan to lay a fire in the woodstove. Milan felt he was being tested. Jiří then opened a trap door in the floor and from it produced two bottles of beer. They drank in silence until Jiří handed Milan a package of sausages and a block of cheese and told him to make dinner. When they had eaten they drank in silence again. There were several books in the cabin including a whole shelf of samizdat material, covertly photocopied or furtively printed, without cover art or any appeal to a reader beyond the words themselves, that Milan dared not ask about. Uncle Jiří noticed him looking and said that although that material was prohibited, keeping abreast of it was part of his job, and Milan was unlikely to come to any harm reading some of it if he wished. Uncle Jiří unfolded a cot and poured them each a slivovice before taking the bedroom for himself. Milan might have enjoyed being drunk had he not been so terrified of his uncle. He went to sleep with his new shoes on.
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