Even though my legs feel like concrete blocks, I tell Milada I’ll nap later. Halbrstat keeps the village record book. I’m not going to miss the chance to see Anežka’s name officially listed with my family.
We drive over the ridge to the valley on the far side. The one-steeple church that my family built nearly six-hundred and fifty years ago stands alone on a slope above the farmhouses. The only thing taller in view is the yellow crane scooping chemical mud out of the empty pond. The skeleton of Jungmann’s inn beside the pond is a black scar on the face of an otherwise tranquil village.
Before we see Halbrstat, she warns, there’s something we need to discuss.
Chapter Eleven
Strategizing: Písečná, Friday, Mid-Afternoon
Baroque architectural beauties are common in Bohemia, but Písečná’s square missed the pageant. Shops surround what amounts to a cobbled junction of two roads with a dry fountain in the middle. All but one dry goods store have been abandoned. Ground floor windows shuttered, second story windows shattered by vandals, stucco exfoliating as though it were necrotic flesh … The concrete statue in the fountain commemorates Charles IV’s routing of the robber baron. Charles is missing his nose. What could such a repair possibly cost?
Milada parks and points to an archway with two flower boxes filled with geraniums. A courtyard beyond the archway leads into a modernized dairy barn.
“Flat from Halbrstat.”
“I don’t like that look you’re giving me.”
She opens the console between our seats and pulls out a Sani-Wipe to remove invisible bacteria from her hands. “I will just say it. Please don’t interrupt with your questions. Be patient and I will explain.” She gives me a piteous look. The square is quiet but for a passing diesel tractor.
“Birth certificate of Anežka list her family name as Kacalka, same as her mother. Rosalie Kacalka. But father is František Kacalek, not František Lenoch.”
“František Kacalek? That can’t be. It should have listed my father.”
Why does that name sound so familiar? I pull the genealogy papers out of my daypack. There it is, the name the nun in Solon brought to my attention. František Kacalek was the one who committed suicide. The geneology lists him as Rosalie’s father, not as Anežka’s father. “I speak about this with Zámečník. He say you should not worry. This name, František Kacalek, is very common. In time of war, young women with children which are illegitimate will forge birth certificate with name of fallen soldier. They collect pension from dead man.”
“Any way of knowing who this guy might have been?”
“He search files. He found František Kacalek in Czech air corps. He is shot down in 1940, close after time when Anežka is born.”
“What about Halbrstat’s record book? Why wouldn’t the authorities have tested her claim against those records?”
“This you must ask to Halbrstat. Village will hide record books in times of war. It will pass secretly around village so authorities cannot … how do you say—”
“Confiscate.” This just can’t be. The record book will surely set this matter straight.
* * *
Before we go in to see Halbrstat, she warns there could be more trouble. According to Zámečník, Anežka had a motive for the fire that looks pretty incriminating. The fire happened on the night of December 28, 1989, the same night Havel was elected president. A crowd gathered at the inn that night, but the talk was mostly about who was brave enough to go to Prague a month earlier, when the growing protest first spilled out into the streets. Heavy snows had been falling in November for days and the temperature was reported to have plummeted to as low as minus 15 degrees Celsius but that didn’t deter a busload of Písečná villagers from joining the million or so protesters gathering in Prague in Letnà park.
“What about you? You were in Prague that day?”
“I stand home with my sons. Too much risk. If I am in trouble with police I would go immediately into prison. Jiří don’t care. He is zealot. He join riot on Narodni. They arrest him for five days. Fine, I say, you can have him.”
“You gotta admit, he acts on his convictions.”
“I refuse to admire him for being crazy.” But there’s pride in her voice, too. Admit it, I tell her, come on, but she turns angrily on me and says, “This stupid pride, ne, it make me sick, sick.”
The night the handover was announced, Rosalie invited all villagers, whether or not they’d gone to Letnà park, to the inn’s pub. They kept it open late and served, compliments of Jungmann, an unending river of free pivo and becherovka and slivovice. Card games were interrupted to make room for toasts and speeches.
Maybe Jungmann correctly assessed the sea change in the air and wanted to come down on the side of the victors? “Was Anežka there that night?”
“Dost, Anežka was there. One witness claim she leave because she protest having children around so much drinking. Other witness say she fight with Jungmann.”
“What’s her motive?”
“Orphanage was closed only few months before. Anežka was forced to live with mother. It is said those two fought like Czechs and Russians.”
“Still, that doesn’t mean she burned down the inn.”
“Jungmann make some claim she did not like.”
“The witnesses are credible?”
“Halbrstat is witness. That night Jungmann announce that Rosalie Kacalka has agreed to marry with him. Halbrstat confirm this to police. Why now she say yes? What have he told to her? Whatever he say, it made Anežka very angry.”
“They got married that night?”
“Ne, ne. There is fire, so, no wedding.”
What does Jungmann gain by pursuing an arson case against Anežka now? Must be something personal. Maybe he wasn’t kidding when he hinted he’d make trouble for her if that’s what it took to lure my father over here.
While she talks, I jot notes in my Steno:
Trials inevitably pit villager against villager. In a transitional government, courts run the danger of (intentionally or not) sanctioning revenge. For a stable transition to liberal democracy and a capitalist economy, there has to be the assurance of recourse to law that rises above partisan interests.
What exactly is Jungmann’s interest? What does it have to do with Anežka?
Chapter Twelve
Our Meeting with Halbrstat: Friday Afternoon First Week of October, 1994
The homely reek of cow piss fills our noses while we wait for Pavel Halbrstat to respond to our ringing on his bell. A satellite dish is mounted above the archway. A sign of affluence in this village no doubt. When the town historian does hobble down the stairs and open the door, lurching on a prosthesis—the stocky gnome lost a leg during the war—he bows deeply. “Allow me.” He sounds obsequious even without the translation. We slip off shoes, pull on the slipper sandals he proffers, and follow his creaking progress up the stairs.
After sitting us at a wooden table covered with an oilcloth, he sets out a cut crystal bowl filled with Italian plums from his trees. “Please, please enjoy.” Rather than disappear immediately to fetch the record book, which is mainly why we’ve come, he lingers to watch until we’ve eaten several over-ripe plums, obviously picked a couple of weeks earlier, and yummed our appreciation. When finally he’s gone, I cast a curious eye about the cluttered space. A dozen or so carousel horses, mounted on brass poles, lean wherever they have been left. Our guest, I take it, is not above accepting gifts for whatever his protekce is still worth. Tall double doors close off an adjoining room. Through those doors canned laughter explodes from a popular American TV game show, Wheel of Fortune. Milada and I exchange a look. Who could be in there? Rosalie? The mayor did tell Milada that Rosalie stays here occasionally.
Several dozen framed wood-block prints line the walls. In one that catches my eye, villagers cower in what is recognizably Písečná’s square while a man with a bullhorn harangues them. Halbrstat is the artist. Her own father, Milada tells me, hangs a f
ew of his prints. Halbrstat was born and raised in this village and earned acclaim as a young artist in Prague before he went underground—his art’s un-ironic social realism should have appealed to the Soviets but he fell out of favor for depicting Party bosses in what was deemed an unfavorable light. Zámečník believes he allowed himself to be recruited as Jungmann’s enforcer to divert scrutiny from his ideological failings. This will make him vulnerable should the mayor need him to turn on Jungmann.
“I’m feeling fuzzy. Where’s the bathroom? I need to do a poke.” Milada directs me to a back room. Thank God, an indoor toilet.
* * *
A crapper, sans toilet seat, has been retro-fitted in a storeroom against the outside wall under a window. No nod to privacy. Wash hangs on lines strung across the room. Curing sides of pork dangle from brutal looking hooks. Jarred garden vegetables are stacked wherever there’s space. I perch on the crapper, prick my finger, squeeze. Sixty-eight on the digital readout. Too low. I pop three Lifesavers.
A dirty plate has been left on the washer. Cheese rind, bread crust, a few plum seeds. Someone’s lunch? Beside the toilet is the usual stack of rough gray wipes. So, even former appartchiks don’t rate soft toilet paper. A door at the far end of the storeroom has been left slightly ajar. For a moment I entertain the creepy notion I’m being watched, but when I tap on the door there is only silence.
Rejoining Milada at the table, I tell her about the plate. We agree that it couldn’t have been Halbrstat or I’d have heard his prosthesis squeaking. But if Rosalie is here, why wouldn’t she come out and join us?
* * *
Halbrstat reappears, cradling a book the size of a photo album. “My beautiful child.” A tracery of wrinkles creases the book’s leather binding. I write in my Steno: This looks like an authentic original.
Halbrstat is wearing square black glasses similar to those worn by Škvorecký and I wonder if he’s deliberately cultivating the intellectual look. Despite that he’s in his seventies, Halbrstat’s mane of gelled hair is still dark and hangs theatrically to his shoulders. Halbrstat kisses Milada on top of her head. She allows this intimacy without flinching, though she does avoid my look of surprise.
“Your father will be happy for your visit,” he says. And then to me, “How long you will stay?”
“Only a few days …” We should have rehearsed how much to reveal.
“I am sorry. If you could stay one month we have ski run. Have you seen? You must be our guest for Sunday dinner. My daughter will make svíčková.”
Daughter? Must be who’s watching TV. “By the way I have something for you.” This we did rehearse. Despite his worldly education, Milada assured me he would not be above accepting gifts from America. I offer him from my daypack the hip flask of Jack Daniels. He solemnly sets the bottle in a place of honor on the mantel above the wood-burning stove. It’s chilly in here. Though we’re well into October, the villagers, Milada warned me, save their wood. It’s not winter yet.
When he’s returned to the table, I give him one of the Iowa beach party tee-shirts. He grins like a kid, showing four chocolate brown teeth amid empty gums. He gleefully tugs the yellow tee-shirt on over his starched white shirt and suspenders. Even he must realize he looks ridiculous with that pink pig sipping a tropical drink stretched over his sagging belly, yet his enjoyment seems genuine. “Look, I am American! Like your Kennedy. Ich bin ein Berliner.”
“My father wanted me to hand those out.” A lie, of course, it was Anne. My father didn’t want me coming here, but I don’t want Halbrstat to know that yet.
“Your father loved history.” Drawing himself up like a senator, he proceeds to lecture. “In your school lessons, is it said that there was great celebrating in Europe in 1848 when Emperor Franz Josef free robotník? Ano?” I nod. I don’t have the heart to tell him that the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire rated hardly more than a few paragraphs. “But who explain to sedlák how they will pay wage to workers and pay taxes, too?” He beams, pleased with himself for his brilliant analysis. “This was plan to allow greedy estate owners to steal land.”
Calm only a moment before, Milada is suddenly livid. “Dost! Open record book. We will see who own this land before 1848.”
Without asking anyone’s permission, I’m taking notes.
Small land owners, Halbrstat explains for my benefit, were forced to offer sections in trust to pay debts after their serfs were freed and began to demand wages for their work. In 1867 Prussia defeated Vienna. Sensing a revolution brewing in Bohemia and hoping to appease the malcontents, Franz Josef passed a civil rights law that legalized private property.
“Your family,” he accuses Milada, “purchased parcels for next to nothing when other farmers default.” Known as “handkerchief” plots—most no more than ten to twelve acres—the parcels were too small to afford a living and most of the tenant farmers were ruined by debt. It didn’t help that cheap grain from the American Midwest was killing profits in Europe. “Our family has photo from this time.” He locates an album in one of the stacks and extracts a sepia-toned print. A family is huddled together on their bundles at the railway station in Prague. “You see? Kacalek family is waiting for train to Hamburg so they will catch boat.” Their heads are bent. They look clobbered.
“Dostáls paid for that land.” Milada is shouting.
The person in the other room jacks the TV volume to drown us out, then switches the channel to what must be an NBA rerun, judging by the squawking klaxon. Halbrstat apologizes. “My lazy daughter. She love to watch Chicagos Bull.”
Seeing that the feud between these two is only likely to escalate, I ask if he minds if I have a look in the record book. This business with the name on the birth certificate has me more anxious than I’m letting on and I don’t want any trouble to come between me and seeing Anežka’s name listed with my father’s family.
“Samozřejmě! You are my guest.” Oh so delicately, as though it were the only extant edition of the Bible itself, he lays open the record book. Entries date back only to 1753. He apologizes for that. “If you want to see earlier records, they are in Letohrad.” The pages, crosshatched like graph paper, have certainly yellowed with age, but the feel of the paper is less brittle than I expected.
“Turn like this,” he chides. Because I am a coarse American, proper handling methods must be demonstrated. “Start with Farmhouse Number Seven. It is house from your father.”
The farmhouse my father grew up in is also the house Milada grew up in. Even her curiosity is piqued. She leans over the book with me.
By 1753, the immense Dostál estate, which would briefly become the Lenoch estate before it became the Kotyza estate, had shrunk to just over two hundred hectares, but by the 1860s the estate had swelled again to over three hundred hectares, a size it would retain through the time my father was born in 1922.
Milada pushes up from the table. “You stole land from my father. You dare deny you tortured my father so he will sign papers?”
Far from daunted, Halbrstat pats her hand as though she were a confused child. “Once you were big star. People in village worshipped you. State paid for you training. You will win Olympic gold we are sure!” She says nothing. He pats her hand again like a dear uncle. “We all have disappointments. We. You. Everyone.”
Lest we never get to the records, I beg her to please calm down and sit.
“Ano,” says Halbrstat. “You like some food? My daughter will bring.”
Slowly, achingly, protesting in every inch of her, Milada lowers herself back into her chair and then turns to our host and in a monotone says, “No thank you, we’re fine.”
“You remind me of my Aunt Rosalie.” He appraises her as though seeing her for the first time. “Beautiful, ano, but also very … stubborn.”
“You speak of aunt?” says Milada. “Rosalie Kacalka is your cousin, ano?”
“Ach, I show to you something.” He hobbles to one of his stacks and searches for a photo he doesn’t seem able to
find. My God, no, another delay? No, it’s not possible. I eye the book, already turned to the pages devoted to Farmhouse Number Seven. “Your grandfather. He cause this trouble.”
He returns to the table with a photo he sets on the oilcloth in front of me. “Here. Your grandfather, Josef Lenoch.” The young man who married into the Dostál family and took over the estate wears a bushy, Stalinesque mustache and looks keenly, his eyes predatorily alert, out of a gaunt but handsomely proportioned face. Nothing in this assertive young man bears any resemblance to the deaf defeated silent old man I visited in Sulphur Springs.
“Your grandfather go to Iowa with my other aunt, Barbora Kacalka.” He and Milada argue about who is related to whom. Convinced the bickering will never stop, I interrupt and ask one of them to please translate for me what’s been written on my family’s pages.
Milada pores over a column. Lighting on an entry with her finger, she says urgently, “Chico, look!” I scoot my chair closer. “First husband from his aunt, Barbora Kacalka, commit suicide in 1922. You see?”
I bend near the page with my magnifier. “František Kacalek. Must be the suicide the nun in Solon told us about. Rosalie’s father, or so we think, right?”
“Maybe not. Look at these dates.” Barbora—Halbrstat’s aunt—married František Kacalek in 1917. They lived at Farm Number Eight, which at that time was listed at only forty-eight hectares, too small to support their large family. The Kacaleks ran the inn, which they sold to Jungmann in 1939, a few months after my father and my grandfather and Barbora Kacalka and several children left for Iowa.
“Hanging by rope.” She taps her finger at the entry. Then she points to an adjacent column. The dates show up under the lens of my magnifier, but I can only see one column at a time.
“Look here, this column. First three childrens from Barbora list František Kacalek for father.” She jabs that column until I see what she’s talking about and nod. “But he hang himself by rope in 1922. After 1922, three more childrens are born to Barbora. You see?” Jab, Jab, Jab. “But, who is father from them? Look down this column. No father is written. All three are blank.”
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