This I can see even without the magnifier. “She must have remarried?”
“Ne, ne. See here? She remarry but not until 1939 when she is in Iowa.” She runs her finger down an adjacent column. “Now look. For every six childrens from Barbora, one man is godfather. You see?” Jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab. “All six same. Who is this man? It is Joseph Lenoch, your grandfather.” Halbrstat threatens to take the book away if she doesn’t stop jabbing it. “Now look here. Which are name of childrens born after 1922? Can you see?”
I bend close to the book again. It has that musty smell of old paper mixed with pine, probably from the box it’s kept in. Shifting the magnifier, I see the entry she has in mind. “There’s Rosalie, my sister’s mother. Born in 1923.”
“Exactly. She is born one year after Kacalek hang himself.”
“So, we have a mystery. Who was Rosalie’s father? You think it could be my grandfather?” What an ugly possibility. Milada shrugs but clearly this same thought has occurred to her. If my grandfather fathered Rosalie, that makes my father and Rosalie siblings and means my father had sex with his half-sister. I sit up straight and take a long breath. The nun in Solon must have figured this out. Did my father know? He must have known. That could explain why he left and why he wants nothing to do with his daughter.
Halbrstat asks what the problem is. After listening to the explanation, he laughs avuncularly. “Someone I know will object to such crazy story.”
I search further down the columns for any sign of Anežka’s name, but in my agitated state it’s impossible to focus.
“My father,” I say, “you remember him?”
“Of course.” Halbrstat raises an eyebrow. “Your father was …” Halbrstat and Milada search in vain for the precise word. We settle on “gullible.”
“Gullible?” This doesn’t sound like him.
Halbrstat shakes back that greasy mane of hair. He’s still wearing that yellow tee-shirt with the sunbathing pig. “Someone have three childrens after suicide, but who? Not Barbora. It was my other aunt, Aunt Rosalie whom I spoke about.” A Marlene Dietrich look-alike with stabbing eyes, this ambitious Aunt Rosalie planned to go to Prague to find work as a photographer’s model, but after Kacalek’s suicide, she was forced to stay on at the farm to help Barbora. Desperately unhappy, she began to sleep indiscriminately with men who stayed at the inn. Her profligacy resulted in three children born out of wedlock.
“Because she never marry, her three childrens are listed for Barbora.”
“Your Aunt Rosalie named her first born after herself?”
“Ano. My cousin Rosalie, she was beauty, like her mother.”
“Okay. We don’t know who Rosalie’s father is, but there’s no doubt that Anežka is the daughter of Rosalie and my father, right?”
Halbrstat says only, “Look what it will be written.” My magnifier follows my nervous finger down the column. There she is. Anežka. I feel as excited as if I’d found her and not her listing in a book. Born April 2, 1939. Mother: Rosalie Kacalka. Father: but here the entry is in pencil and is faint. It looks to have been hastily erased. “Milada? Can you please take a look?”
“You will see imprint of name from your father, František Lenoch. Someone erased, but you will see it there.”
“Why pencil? Some of these others are in pencil, too.”
In the Soviet decades, he claims, the record book was passed from house to house. Entries were written in pencil by whoever had the book and only rewritten in pen when they could be officially verified. “Verifications take time.”
“Who erased my father’s name? Why?”
He looks at me, considering his answer before speaking. Milada frees her hair from its ponytail, scrunches it back in. “My cousin belly is big when he leave. Why he is in big hurry? He is afraid from Nazis? He know Chamberlain will allow Hitler to annex Czech lands? I do not think so. Nobody know this.”
“But who changed the entry in the book?”
After careful consideration, he says, “You must ask Jungmann.”
“He had access to the book?”
“It pass around.”
“What about Rosalie?” I’m thinking of that name on the birth certificate.
“Ah, Rosalie. Ano, if you wish to speak, I can arrange.”
“We were told she sometimes stays here.”
“Ano, ano.” He leans close over the table and speaks in a conspiratorial hush. “But you will trust what she will say?”
“I’ll see Jungmann tonight. Shall I tell him you said to ask?”
He shakes his head. Locks of jelled hair rake his shoulders like chain mail. “We were comrades. We were like this!” He’s entirely forgotten that I’m taking notes. “Some people,” he looks knowingly at Milada, “say we were brutes. We wished only to cause harm for some pleasure.” I’m scribbling furiously, trying to jot down every translated word Milada spits at me. “Maybe few are like this. If we knew of it, they were punished. But we, ne. Ne. We have cause that is beautiful. We want all of mankind to be happy and to live in harmony.” I’m convinced he’s merely spouting Party propaganda, but when I look up from my Steno I see none of that stentorian attitude I saw before when he was rewriting history for my benefit. “What price could be too high to pay for happiness and harmony for all mankind?”
“Price?” Milada no longer holds back the venom. “What price you have paid? Is easy for you to say happiness and not feel nausea in your fat belly.”
He folds the record book closed with a shaking hand.
“What you want from me? Why you are here?”
“Apology. I want apology for what you did.”
“Apology? They were running dogs for bourgeoisie. Traitors.”
“It is my father you speak about.” Impatient suddenly to remove herself from the company of this greasy man, as though moral pustulence were a disease one could catch on contact, Milada rises from the table.
“He was worst of them. He is not worth to lick bottom of my boots.”
Milada slaps Halbrstat hard across the face. “You deserve to be held in fountain with pole until your filthy mouth fill with water.”
“Milada.” I take her hand. Rage vibrates through her like an electric shock. “Come on, he’s not worth it.”
From the other room, his daughter shouts, “Beaten dog! Go to your bitch!”
“Women!” Halbrstat looks pointedly at me, his obsequious grin restored. “Always complaining. What can you do?” As though to be conciliatory, he makes a sign to indicate that his daughter is demented and needs his attention. He extends a hand and pumps mine. “Sunday dinner then?” Lowering his voice to a whisper, he adds, “If you like, I will invite Rosalie. Is no problem, I will arrange.”
Milada’s expression remains stony. “Don’t expect apology from me. It will never happen. I will be with harmony only when I see you in prison.”
* * *
On our way out to the car, I notice a shadowy figure with a wild nimbus of silver hair peering down at us from a window above the archway. Halbrstat’s daughter? Rosalie. She clutches at the sheer curtain as though intending to throw open the window, but then apparently thinks better of it. I tug at Milada’s arm, but by the time she looks the apparition is gone.
We pile silently into the Škoda. Scattered dry fall leaves skitter across the deserted square, propelled by a breeze with a nip in it. I ask Milada if she would mind driving by the farm before we head to the hotel, but my request is met with moldering silence. “You know, it’s to avoid scenes like this that people hire lawyers,” I say, trying for a lighter tone. She only digs deeper into her silence. We round the fountain. Whatever caused that damage to Charles IV also sheared off part of his horse’s tail. A Soviet tank took the turn short? But why assume it was the Soviets? There seem to be plenty of local zealots. By leaving the damage unrepaired they are at least complicit, are they not?
Chapter Thirteen
The Old Farmstead: Late Friday Afternoon, Early October, 1994<
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The crushed gravel road follows the river north through the heart of the village past log-walled farmhouses, most centuries-old, solid, sagging, original but for the shed roofs added to keep out the weather until renovations can be afforded. A chicken lurches like a sudden surprise into the lane in front of the Škoda. Rather than slow to miss it, Milada speeds up as though daring it, too, to end up under her wheels.
She has yet to say a word since leaving Halbrstat’s. She won’t look at me. With each farmhouse that we pass, each barn nesting on its stone foundation, each leaning wooden scythe, each Hunter green shutter, I imagine my father walking here, gazing out of one of these low windows longing for his family’s maid to walk by, inspired by her coltish beauty to what? Risk everything for a night or two of forbidden love? Not that I’m in a position to take the moral high ground, here, but look what he stood to lose. What did Jungmann have to do with it?
At a bend in the road we cross a low bridge and Milada pulls over at the site of Jungmann’s inn. The silent crane looms over the mud hole that was once a pond. Apparently the crew is taking Friday afternoon off to make their great escape. She opens the console and pulls out another sanitary wipe and scrubs her hands and then she pinches the wipe gingerly between fingers and drops it behind her as though it carried dangerous germs. What she deserves, I decide, is a good scolding.
“What did you expect from him? Did you really think he’d apologize?” She takes that as a rhetorical question and doesn’t deign to respond. “If he’s unhappy with the way Jungmann is treating him he could have helped us.” When still she doesn’t respond, I add, “At the very least he could bring us to Rosalie. Maybe he still would.” The mere suggestion that we could cooperate with Halbrstat breaks through the silence she’s erected between us like a Berlin wall.
“Chico, I have realized something today. I have been telling to my friend Anton, no, I cannot help you, I must not be involved.” She’s referring to Zámečník, the village mayor. When did he become Anton? “I have said this for you, so you will not have trouble. I am sorry, but I cannot anymore pretend that this trouble is not belonging to me. You see how they are.”
Not sure what to say, whether to console or reprimand or plead, I climb out with my Nikomat and set about snapping off shots of what’s left of the inn. The stone foundation still supports a fretwork of charred posts that look like cauterized amputees. Rosalie lived and worked in this inn for something approaching five decades. Five decades of wanting to tell my father something she couldn’t say in a letter? In the letters it’s all about coming home and taking over the farm, very little personal detail about Anežka, nothing sweet, nothing that would particularly appeal to the heart of a bereft young father. About the time Anežka was sent to the orphanage, the letters stopped.
When I’m back in the Škoda, Milada turns to me, her eyes red-rimmed. She was shedding tears while I was out snapping photos. She clutches my arm. “You must know that I will help Anton now. It will not be safe for your sister if they choose to retaliate.”
The crane’s bucket has dredged to the surface an oily bluish sludge that smells like a toxic sewer.
“What can happen between now and Sunday? I know how you feel, but another day or two?”
Suddenly the softness is gone and the bottled rage erupts again. “Kecáš nesmysly! You are so full of shit!”
I wait for her to calm down, but she swipes at me again.
“Some things are more important than your sister. Why she need to be saved anyway? Maybe life here is best for her.”
I let down my window. The solvent in the mud leaves an astringent taste at the back of my throat. “Jesus, Milada, you’re starting to sound like him. Harmony at any price. Sacrifice a few people, oh well.”
“Who sacrifice? You want to blame, maybe you should blame to your father.”
“All right, yes, I should blame to my father, but he’s not here is he?” Obviously neither of us is in a mood to be reasonable. “Can we drive by the farm?”
“Okay, but we don’t stop.” She’s already explained that if we stop, her father won’t let us get away without staying for dinner and drinks and talk and we have to get to Žamberk and book a room in the hotel and give me time to nap before our meetings tonight with my cousin and Jungmann.
“Maybe I shouldn’t meet with Jungmann tonight. If you and Mr. Zámečník”—I can’t bring myself to call him Anton—“are going to let him have it with everything you’ve got, you don’t want me getting in the way.”
“Do what you want. I will do what I want.”
* * *
A short way past the pond, near a bus stop, a side road bends under a tenting row of chestnut trees in the season of dropping their pods. We turn down that lane. The pods littering the road batter the Škoda’s undercarriage and the vibration I find surprisingly soothing to my swollen ankles. A bank of indigo storm clouds is piling up behind Žampach Hill.
About two hundred meters along, a U-shaped enclave of buildings stands alone in a run of fields. The farm where my father grew up. A mammoth slate roof overhangs the farmhouse and its adjoining house and stalls. Low windows deeply set into logged walls peer out from under that overhang as though shy of revealing what’s inside. Though I don’t doubt I will see the shabby details Milada has so often apologized for, from a distance the farm looks pretty grand. The notion that my father would walk away from all this simply because his lover was pregnant is obviously absurd.
Nearing a plum orchard, Milada brakes to a crunching stop. A small man in the garden is stabbing a pitchfork into a compost pile. He lifts his head, hearing us pull up. He pointedly does not look our way.
“Ty něco slyšíš a hned si myslíš, že to musí být pravda.”
“Excuse me?”
“You hear one thing and you assume you know truth.”
“You mean about Rosalie and my father?”
The little man stabs the pile as if there were something in it he wanted to destroy. Pausing to blow his nose, he straightens his upper torso with military correctness and pushes back the cap squashed onto his head and takes a moment to ponder the clouds banking behind Žampach Hill.
She leans over the console. Suddenly full of mercy, she presses my cheeks between her cool hands, not tenderly, but as though I were a sandwich she wanted to squeeze sense into. “My father know nothing about what Anton is doing. You must understand; he refuse to join Party but he is fanatic nationalist, more even than my husband. Yes?” I attempt a nod. She lets go of my cheeks. “I am not certain I understand this myself, but it don’t matter what they do to him in prison. He will not betray Jungmann. He don’t like Jungmann. He will not say kind things. But betray? Ne, he believe Jungmann protect our village from Soviets.”
In the end, maybe nothing will be salvaged, maybe not even her father’s dignity, but for three years she has been paying the taxes on this estate. “I want to see is possible to save this farm, even if my father say he is tired and he don’t care no more. Kacalek family have taken most of it because my father sign paper in prison. Jungmann will not be happy until he take all.”
“I see. Between this and the human rights trial—”
“You should be thanking me, Chico. It was once your father land, too.”
The man with the pitchfork sees the black Škoda, looks confused, recognizes it, and suddenly he’s waving a friendly salute and coming our way along a twin rutted path. His steps mince. Each foot lifts flatly and sets down the same way.
“My father. Now we will have to speak with him. Give to me promise. You will say nothing of what I have decided to do.”
“Does he speak English?”
“Ne, ne. You will remember some Czech.”
When he’s near, Milada waves out her open window and hurls a cheery “Ahoj!” He’s beaming. Happy to see his daughter. Eager to meet the American.
“Dobrý den, dobrý den.” Limber for eighty-two, Bedřich Kotyza stoops and peers in. His fine, silvery hair is smoothed un
der a flat cap but even with the cap it’s easy to see that he has the round head and back sloping forehead of the Czech side of my family. He’s dressed in baggy chinos, plaid shirt open at the collar, brown corduroy jacket with elbow patches. His grin displays a mouth empty of teeth but for a lone brown stalactite.
“Nazdar!” I say. He continues to grin. Is my pronunciation that awful?
We step out. Milada hugs him, but then he pushes away. Jungmann stopped by here less than an hour ago. Must have been while we were with Halbrstat. He parked his black diesel Mercedes right here in the lane where we’re parked.
“Warn your daughter to stay out of this, he say. I am confused. I tell to him I don’t know what he is saying.”
His common-law wife, Marie, picks this moment to lean out of a window to sprinkle water over her flower box. “Ahoj!” She waves and her heavy bosom rolls under the print dress she obviously pulled on anticipating an occasion.
“Oh, no.” Milada sounds genuinely worried. “Marie has seen us. I will have to explain why we cannot stay for dinner.” She walks the path with her shoulders hunched and her hands tucked into the pockets of her cardigan, worn down by the weight of everything she’s trying to carry on her own.
Bright red geraniums planted in window boxes add a touch of zest to my father’s old house. That enormous slate roof wears a sweater of moss. Where the plaster sags, gaps expose the logs underneath—What was it? I wrote in my Steno, “Bands of air, something like that”—and now I’m thinking of Milada and Fritz in that railroad car that might have transported my father’s neighbors to those terrible camps, and I see me alone on my couch with my beeper waiting for the phone to ring, and it seems too sad and lonely and pointless. If there were a way to get a kidney here … No, no, I can’t start thinking that way, no, I need to get my sister out of here, take her home and wait for a kidney. She can drive up to Sardis and help me with Isis.
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