by Ellen Datlow
“Hey, Mr. Gadeuszki,” she said, her enunciation studied, perfect. She’d made me teach her how to say it right, grind the s and z and k together into that single, Slavic snarl of sound. “What’s with the stones?”
She gestured at the tiny gray pebbles placed across the tops of several nearby tombstones. The ones on the slab nearest us glinted in the warm, green light like little eyes. “In memory,” I said. I thought about sliding over on the bench to make room for her, then thought that would only make both of us even more awkward.
“Why not flowers?” Penny said.
I sat still, listening to the clamor of new-millennium Prague just beyond the stone wall that enclosed the cemetery. “Jews bring stones.”
A few minutes later, when she realized I wasn’t going to say anything else, Penny moved off in the general direction of the Tribe. I watched her go, allowed myself a few more peaceful seconds. Probably, I thought, it was time to move us along. We had the Astronomical Clock left to see today, puppet theatre tickets for tonight, the plane home to Cleveland in the morning. And just because the kids were tired didn’t mean they would tolerate loitering here much longer. For seven summers in a row, I had taken kids on some sort of exploring trip. “Because you’ve got nothing better to do,” one member of the Tribe cheerfully informed me one night the preceding week. Then he’d said, “Oh my God, I was just kidding, Mr. G.”
And I’d had to reassure him that I knew he was, I just always looked like that.
“That’s true, you do,” he’d said, and returned to his tripmates.
Now, I rubbed my hand over the stubble on my shaven scalp, stood, and blinked as my family name—in its original Polish spelling—flashed behind my eyelids again, looking just the way it had this morning amongst all the other names etched into the Pinkas Synagogue wall. The ground went slippery underneath me, the tombstones slid sideways in the grass, and I teetered and sat down hard.
When I lifted my head and opened my eyes, the Tribe had swarmed around me, a whirl of backwards baseball caps and tanned legs and Nike symbols. “I’m fine,” I said quickly, stood up, and to my relief, I found I did feel fine, couldn’t really imagine what had just happened. “Slipped.”
“Kind of,” said Penny Berry from the edge of the group, and I avoided looking her way.
“Time to go, kids. Lots more to see.”
It has always surprised me when they do what I say, because mostly, they do. It’s not me, really. The social contract between teachers and students may be the oldest mutually accepted enacted ritual on this earth, and its power is stronger than most people imagine.
We passed between the last of the graves, through a low stone opening. The dizziness, or whatever it had been, was gone, and I felt only a faint tingling in my fingertips as I drew my last breath of that too-heavy air, thick with loam and grass springing from bodies stacked a dozen deep in the ground.
The side street beside the Old-New Synagogue was crammed with tourists, their purses and backpacks open like the mouths of grotesquely overgrown chicks. Into those open mouths went wooden puppets and embroidered kepot and Chamsa hands from the rows of stalls that lined the sidewalk; the walls, I thought, of an all-new, much more ingenious sort of ghetto. In a way, this place had become exactly what Hitler had meant for it to be: a Museum of a Dead Race, only the paying customers were descendants of the Race, and they spent money in amounts he could never have dreamed. The ground had begun to roll under me again, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the tourists had cleared in front of me, and I saw the stall, a lopsided wooden hulk on bulky brass wheels. It tilted toward me, the puppets nailed to its side, leering and chattering while the Gypsy leaned out from between them, nose studded with a silver star, grinning.
He touched the toy nearest him, set it rocking on its terrible, thin wire. “Loh-ootkawve divahd-law,” he said, and then I was down, flat on my face in the street.
I don’t know how I wound up on my back. Somehow, somebody had rolled me over. I couldn’t breathe. My stomach felt squashed, as though there was something squatting on it, wooden and heavy, and I jerked, gagged, opened my eyes, and the light blinded me.
“I didn’t,” I said, blinking, brain flailing. I wasn’t even sure I’d been all the way unconscious, couldn’t have been out more than a few seconds. But the way the light affected my eyes, it was as though I’d been buried for a month.
“Dobry den, dobry den,” said a voice over me, and I squinted, teared up, blinked into the Gypsy’s face, the one from the stall, and almost screamed. Then he touched my forehead, and he was just a man, red Manchester United cap on his head, black eyes kind as they hovered around mine. The cool hand he laid against my brow had a wedding ring on it, and the silver star in his nose caught the afternoon light.
I meant to say I was okay, but what came out was “I didn’t” again.
The Gypsy said something else to me. The language could have been Czech or Slovakian or neither. I didn’t know enough to tell the difference, and my ears weren’t working right. In them I could feel a painful, persistent pressure.
The Gypsy stood, and I saw my students clustered behind him like a knot I’d drawn taut. When they saw me looking, they burst out babbling, and I shook my head, tried to calm them, and then I felt their hands on mine, pulling me to a sitting position. The world didn’t spin. The ground stayed still. The puppet stall I would not look at kept its distance.
“Mr. G., are you all right?” one of them asked, her voice shrill, slipping toward panic.
Then Penny Berry knelt beside me and looked straight into me, and I could see her formidable brain churning behind those placid gray-green eyes, the color of Lake Erie when it’s frozen.
“Didn’t what?” she asked.
And I answered, because I had no choice. “Kill my grandfather.”
II
THEY PROPPED ME at my desk in our pension not far from the Charles Bridge and brought me a glass of “nice water,” which was one of our traveling jokes. It was what the too-thin waitress at Terezin—the “town presented to the Jews by the Nazis,” as the old propaganda film we saw at the museum proclaimed—thought we were saying when we asked for ice.
For a while, the Tribe sat on my bed and talked quietly to each other and refilled my glass for me. But after thirty minutes or so, when I hadn’t keeled over again and wasn’t babbling and seemed my usual sullen, solid, bald self, they started shuffling around, playing with my curtains, ignoring me. One of them threw a pencil at another. For a short while, I almost forgot about the nausea churning in my stomach, the trembling in my wrists, the puppets bobbing on their wires in my head.
“Hey,” I said. I had to say it twice more to get their attention. I usually do.
Finally, Penny noticed and said, “Mr. Gadeuszki’s trying to say something,” and they slowly quieted down.
I put my quivering hands on my lap under the desk and left them there. “Why don’t you kids get back on the Metro and go see the Clock?”
The Tribe members looked at each other uncertainly. “Really,” I told them. “I’m fine. When’s the next time you’re going to be in Prague?”
They were good kids, these kids, and they looked unsure for a few seconds longer. In the end, though, they started trickling toward the door, and I thought I’d gotten them out until Penny Berry stepped in front of me.
“You killed your grandfather,” she said.
“Didn’t,” I snarled, and Penny blinked, and everyone whirled to stare at me. I took a breath, almost got control of my voice. “I said I didn’t kill him.”
“Oh,” Penny said. She was on this trip not because of any familial or cultural heritage but because this was the most interesting experience she could find to devour this month. She was pressing me now because she suspected that I had something more startling to share than Prague did, for the moment. And she was always hungry.
Or maybe she was just lonely, confused about the kid she had never quite been and the world she didn’t
quite feel part of. Which would make her more than a little like me. Which might explain why she had always annoyed me as much as she did.
“It’s stupid,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
Penny didn’t move. In my memory, the little wooden man on his wire quivered, twitched, began to rock side to side.
“I need to write it down,” I said, trying to sound gentle. Then I lied. “Maybe I’ll show you when I’m done.”
Five minutes later, I was alone in my room with a fresh glass of nice water and a stack of unlined, blank white paper I had scavenged from the computer printer downstairs. I picked up my black pen, and in an instant, there was sand on my tongue and desert sun on my neck and that horrid, gasping breathing like snake-rattle in my ears, and for the first time in many, many years, I was home.
III
IN JUNE OF 1978, on the day after school let out, I was sitting in my bedroom in Albuquerque, New Mexico, thinking about absolutely nothing when my dad came in and sat down on my bed and said, “I want you to do something for me.”
In my nine years of life, my father had almost never asked me to do anything for him. As far as I could tell, he had very few things that he wanted. He worked at an insurance firm and came home at exactly 5:30 every night and played an hour of catch with me before dinner or, sometimes, walked me to the ice-cream shop. After dinner, he sat on the black couch in the den reading paperback mystery novels until 9:30. The paperbacks were all old, with bright yellow or red covers featuring men in trenchcoats and women with black dresses sliding down the curves in their bodies like tar. It made me nervous, sometimes, just watching my father’s hands on the covers. I asked him once why he liked those kinds of books, and he just shook his head. “All those people,” he said, sounding, as usual, like he was speaking to me through a tin can from a great distance. “Doing all those things.” At exactly 9:30, every single night I can remember, my father clicked off the lamp next to the couch and touched me on the head if I was up and went to bed.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked that June morning, though I didn’t much care. This was the first weekend of summer vacation, and I had months of free time in front of me, and I never knew quite what to do with it, anyway.
“What I tell you, okay?” my father said.
Without even thinking, I said, “Sure.”
And he said, “Good. I’ll tell Grandpa you’re coming.” Then he left me gaping on the bed while he went into the kitchen to use the phone.
My grandfather lived seventeen miles from Albuquerque in a red adobe hut in the middle of the desert. The only sign of humanity anywhere around him was the ruins of a small pueblo maybe half a mile away. Even now, what I remember most about my grandfather’s house is the desert rolling up to and through it in an endless, never-receding red tide. From the back steps, I could see the pueblo, honeycombed with caves like a giant beehive tipped on its side, empty of bees but buzzing as the wind whipped through it.
Four years before, my grandfather had told my parents to knock off the token visits. Then he’d had his phone shut off. As far as I knew, none of us had seen him since.
All my life, he’d been dying. He had emphysema and some kind of weird allergic condition that turned swatches of his skin pink. The last time I’d been with him, he’d just sat in a chair in a tank top, breathing through a tube. He’d looked like a piece of petrified wood.
The next morning, a Sunday, my father packed my green camp duffel bag with a box of new, unopened baseball cards and the transistor radio my mother had given me for my birthday the year before, then loaded it and me into the grimy green Datsun he always meant to wash and didn’t. “Time to go,” he told me in his mechanical voice, and I was still too startled by what was happening to protest as he led me outside. Moments before, a morning thunderstorm had rocked the whole house, but now the sun was up, searing the whole sky orange. Our street smelled like creosote and green chili and adobe mud and salamander skin.
“I don’t want to go,” I said to my father.
“I wouldn’t either, if I were you,” he told me, and started the car.
“You don’t even like him,” I said.
My father just looked at me, and for an astonishing second, I thought he was going to snatch out his arms and hug me. But he looked away instead, dropped the car into gear, and drove us out of town.
All the way to my grandfather’s house, we followed the thunderstorm. It must have been traveling at exactly our speed, because we never got any closer, and it never got further away. It just retreated before us, a big black wall of nothing, like a shadow the whole world cast, and every now and then streaks of lightning flew up the clouds like signal flares, but illuminated only the sand and mountains and rain.
“Why are we doing this?” I asked when my dad started slowing, studying the sand on his side of the car for the dirt track that led to my grandfather’s.
“Want to drive?” he answered, gesturing to me to slide across the seat into his lap.
Again, I was startled. My dad always seemed willing enough to play catch with me. But he rarely generated ideas for things we could do together on his own. And the thought of sitting in his lap with his arms around me was too alien to fathom. I waited too long, and the moment passed. My father didn’t ask again. Through the windshield, I watched the thunderstorm retreating, the wet road already drying in patches in the sun. The whole day felt distant, like someone else’s dream.
“You know he was in the war, right?” my father said, and despite our crawling speed, he had to jam on the brakes to avoid passing the turnoff. No one, it seemed to me, could possibly have intended this to be a road. It wasn’t dug or flattened or marked. Just a rumple in the earth.
“Yeah,” I said.
That he’d been in the war was pretty much the only thing I knew about my grandfather. Actually, he’d been in the camps. After the war, he’d been in other camps in Israel for almost five years while Red Cross workers searched for living relatives and found none and finally turned him loose to make his way as best he could.
As soon as we were off the highway, sand-ghosts rose around the car, ticking against the trunk and the hood as we passed. Thanks to the thunderstorm, they left a wet, red residue like bug-smear on the hood and windshield.
“You know, now that I think about it,” my father said, his voice flat as ever but the words clearer, somehow, and I found myself leaning closer to him to make sure I heard him over the churning wheels, “ … he was even less of a grandfather to you than a dad to me.” He rubbed a hand over the bald spot just beginning to spread over the top of his head like an egg yolk being squashed. I’d never seen him do that before. It made him look old.
My grandfather’s house appeared before us like a druid mound. There was no shape to it. It had exactly one window, and that couldn’t be seen from the street. No mailbox. Never in my life, I realized abruptly, had I had to sleep in there.
“Dad, please don’t make me stay,” I said as he stopped the car fifteen feet or so from the front door.
He looked at me, and his mouth turned down a little, and his shoulders tensed. Then he sighed. “Three days,” he said, and got out.
When I was standing beside him, looking past the house at the distant pueblo, he said, “Your grandfather didn’t ask for me, he asked for you. He won’t hurt you. And he doesn’t ask for much from us, or from anyone.”
“Neither do you,” I said.
After a while, and very slowly, as though remembering how, my father smiled. “And neither do you, Seth.”
Neither the smile nor the statement reassured me.
“Just remember this, son. Your grandfather has had a very hard life, and not just because of the camps. He worked two jobs for twenty-five years to provide for my mother and me. He never called in sick. He never took vacations. And he was ecstatic when you were born.”
That surprised me. “Really? How do you know?”
For the first time I could remember, my father blushed, and
I thought maybe I’d caught him lying, and then I wasn’t sure. He kept looking at me. “Well, he came to town, for one thing. Twice.”
For a little longer, we stood together while the wind rolled over the rocks and sand. I couldn’t smell the rain anymore, but I thought I could taste it, a little. Tall, leaning cacti prowled the waste around us like stick figures who’d escaped from one of my doodles. I was always doodling, then. Trying to get the shapes of things.
Finally, the thin, wooden door to the adobe clicked open, and out stepped Lucy, and my father straightened and put his hand on his bald spot again and put it back down.
She didn’t live there, as far as I knew. But I’d never been to my grandfather’s house when she wasn’t in it. I knew she worked for some foundation that provided care to Holocaust victims, though she was Navajo, not Jewish, and that she’d been coming out here all my life to make my grandfather’s meals, bathe him, keep him company. I rarely saw them speak to each other. When I was little and my grandmother was still alive and we were still welcome, Lucy used to take me to the pueblo after she’d finished with my grandfather and watch me climb around on the stones and peer into the empty caves and listen to the wind chase thousand-year-old echoes out of the walls.
There were gray streaks now in the black hair that poured down Lucy’s shoulders, and I could see semicircular lines like tree rings in her dark, weathered cheeks. But I was uncomfortably aware, this time, of the way her breasts pushed her plain, white-denim shirt out of the top of her jeans while her eyes settled on mine, black and still.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, as if I’d had a choice. When I didn’t answer, she looked at my father. “Thank you for bringing him. We’re set up out back.”
I threw one last questioning glance at my father as Lucy started away, but he just looked bewildered or bored or whatever he generally was. And that made me angry. “’Bye,” I told him, and moved toward the house.