Better You Go Home

by Scott Driscoll

  Her father wants to show me what’s left of the land. We stop at a metal Quonset hut the size of a small airplane hangar. What I catch from his impassioned speech is that this milking barn was forced upon him by the SS. He agreed to run their dairy. It was that or enjoy more time in brainwash hotel, I gather. What seems to bother him most—judging from what I’m able to catch between his gestures and the smattering of German thrown in for my benefit—is that he’d become a Soviet lackey and would be judged for that. For that betrayal he blames Jungmann. At least Jungmann’s name comes up.

  Our path follows a creek toward Žampach Hill. Bedřich points to the fields to the south and spits the name, “Kacalek,” as though it were vomit in his mouth.

  “Toto je můj kus země! Toto je moje půda!” He makes a wistful sweeping gesture with his arm. All that was once the Dostál farm. All that land!

  The packed soil cleaves to the ribs in the soles of my Teva shoes. This would have been my father’s, most of what we see in this valley. When I was in first grade, I got into a fight with a kid on the playground who called my father German. I wanted him to know that my father was Czech so I told him my father lived in the forest in underground shelters with Party Sons—I had no idea there was such a word as partisans. I remember his admiring stories about the men who’d been disbanded from the army, but who refused to give up their guns. Whether he meant it or not, I assumed from his stories that he longed to have been one of them. Maybe that’s just what I wanted to believe?

  A chilly breeze swoops down off the hill, pushing back the ammoniac smell of manure. Bedřich hasn’t had livestock in four years. Outhouse leavings? He looks up at the purple clouds over Žampach Hill. There’s a crackle in the air.

  “Pojd’te, pojd’te!” He motions for me to follow him back to the house before the clouds burst.

  * * *

  We pass through a brick archway and enter a courtyard. He disappears through a low door after gesturing that I should wait while he checks on the status of things inside. Waiting outside is fine with me. I’m exhausted and the thought of a bed dampens even my desire to see the inside of my father’s old home.

  Rusting harrows and plowshares lay abandoned in the waist-high grass that fills the courtyard. The windfall timber Bedřich and Marie drag out of the woods to use for stove fuel is stacked a good twenty feet high in an open shed. Across the courtyard is the house the older generation moves into when the younger family takes over the main house. My father would be living there. Anežka and her husband and children, if they existed, would be in the main house.

  Two massive wooden posts support a beam that runs the entire length of the house and stalls and supports the loft above the stalls. My father and his sisters slept up there. The warmth rising from the animals kept them from freezing in the winter. That should have been where young Anežka slept.

  The creek runs past the open end of the courtyard. Beyond the creek, a grove of birch screens the Lenoch house from the Kacalek house. The leaves have begun to dry out and yellow and are chattering in the breeze. A wooden footbridge that once crossed the creek has caved-in. I’d be willing to bet this little bridge was kept in good repair in my grandfather’s time. He had only to walk over that footbridge and through that stand of birch to see Barbora Kacalka.

  “My father want show to you his rabbits.” Milada bursts out of the door, her father high-stepping close behind. “Tomorrow, I told him. We will not have time for this but I told him tomorrow so he will stop pestering.” A shed attached to the wing house used to be the pigsty. Her father is using it to keep the angora rabbits for which he is locally famous and of which he seems especially proud.

  I ask Milada for the suchý záchod. Between that coffee and the diuretics I take to reduce fluid retention, there may not be a lot of time between impulse and urgency.

  “If you can wait for hotel is better I think.”

  “I can wait.” Bedřich is waiting, his shoulders ramrod straight, palms open in supplication. Are we going? We can’t be going already …

  Walking along the path to the Škoda, I look back. Bedřich is preparing to spread composted rabbit and outhouse slops under his plum trees. Fruit rotting under the trees purples the ground. Bedřich used to take his plums to the Saturday market in Letohrad, but gathering more from the harvest than he and Marie care to can is too much effort these days, if it’s only to rescue the old trees’ dignity.

  Chapter Fourteen

  To the Hotel in Žamberk

  A shortcut on a farm road hardly wider than a tractor winds north through fields and woods and we pass an industrial dump with black, acid-scarred oil drums stacked three high behind chain-link fencing. The industrial waste that’s been leaching toxins into the groundwater? Too tired to take notes, I don’t bother to ask the question.

  A few kilometers later, jolting through a cow pasture, Žamberk dead ahead, Milada comes to a decision. “I have tried to phone Anton from my father house, but phone is not working.” For the first time since our spat she looks at me with some tenderness. “I will miss you, Chico. But I think is best if you go home as soon as possible.”

  Of course she would say this. An urgent loneliness takes over me. I say, no doubt sounding desperate, “I’ve had time to think about what you were saying before. I could rent Yveta’s flat. It’s plenty big enough. If they were a way to get a kidney here, without a long wait …” I don’t have to add how afraid I am of dialysis, that I only have a few months. She knows that very well.

  “Perhaps you do not understand.” She strokes my cheek. I nudge her hand away. It feels patronizing. “Marie has just told me about Jungmann visit.” He knew we were seeing Halbrstat and he guessed better than we what the result would be. Before our meeting tonight, Jungmann will know everything. It will require only a small leap of logic to assume she has enlisted in the mayor’s human rights campaign.

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “My guess? He will send police to arrest Anežka.”

  “He has to find her first.”

  Despite everything, she laughs. “He only must follow you.”

  “Give me until tonight. Let me talk to him. Call off your …” Dog, I wanted to say, but think better of it. “Let Mr. Zámečník wait.”

  * * *

  We come into Žamberk from the south on a wide boulevard clear of junkers and with streetlight posts festively painted primary yellows and reds. It’s Friday, after school hours. Passing a playground with kids, I hear the joyous sound of their laughter and remember that sound in the cathedral. A heaviness like a fog settles over me as I see myself alone on my leather couch, no one staying in the map room, not one detail out of place. Even the image of Isis jitterbugging in his cage fails to rescue me from this funk.

  We pass an abandoned concrete factory. The windows have been shattered, interiors gutted, the chutes and conveyor belts and machinery of the massive labyrinth left to rust behind a brick enclosure topped by concertina wire. Looming beyond the factory is a five-story structure crowned by a wooden cupola fashioned as a watchtower. It’s the district prison where her father was held for the kind of rough interrogation that was unfortunately common in the late 60s when she escaped and he was arrested. If Anežka is arrested, Milada speculates, this is where she’ll be held.

  But Žamberk is a lucky town. It lies on the main route to the Orlické Mountains, a popular destination for the new generation of recreation seekers. That’s why my cousin Josef lives here. He hires himself out as a climbing guide.

  The town square surrounds a park with mature lindens and chestnuts and old men relaxing on benches. Shops are open. People out strolling the paths that crisscross the park are dressed in pleated slacks and fashionable V-neck sweaters as though Friday afternoon were a fancy gala.

  A mausoleum in the park supports a tall column atop of which is a gilded Madonna statue with a moon face and knee bent in a renaissance S-curve. The Mother of God, holding in her right hand a slender olive branch, gazes dow
n—I swear she’s looking at me—with a furrowed expression of pity. I sorely want to point out the olive branch to Milada when it dawns on me that this Madonna looks familiar. Maybe they all look alike, I don’t know. I do remember that the Madonna in my father’s stories was a beacon of the faith that couldn’t be stolen by the occupiers, but it was also a reminder that faith could not prevent them from conscripting him into their army.

  Milada parks before a pink stuccoed building shrouded by scaffolding. Our hotel. “Before we go in I want you to see beautiful Žamberk church.”

  Looming down a side street, the cathedral with its gothic vault and Renaissance domed towers looks like something straight out of Salzburg and The Sound of Music. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, but my family preferred worshipping in the humble church they’d built in the village, and besides, I tell Milada, if I’m going to make it through tonight what I need immediately is a nap.

  In the hotel lobby, a plastering machine whirs and clatters, raising a mist of throat-clotting dust. Plastic has been draped over everything but the reception counter. A minute at least, arguably a rude amount of time, grinds away with no response to Milada’s tapping on the bell. Wait here, I’m instructed. I clear a space in the dust and set down my daypack and my soft-sided travel bag that converts into a backpack. The two crystal vases I purchased in Letohrad are wrapped with newspaper several layers thick in my daypack. The room we’re booking is strictly for me. Milada decided she would spend tonight at the farm to keep up appearances with her father. I didn’t argue. The sensible thing for me to do is to leave now and forget that things are about to get ugly and let Milada do what she has to do, and take care of myself. God knows, that’s a big enough job.

  Instead of the familiar Čau—locally pronounced “chow”—a lovely young woman, rubbing food from her mouth, appears through a side door and says, “Guten Tag.” I’m not German, I explain in English, to which she replies, “Nerozumím, prosím,” a polite way of saying she doesn’t understand. “Nemluvím English.”

  “Nemluvím Deutsch,” I say. She giggles as if this were the funniest thing. In fact, I do speak a smattering of German, but I don’t want to be mistaken for German and sure enough, when not bent on practicing her German, she speaks halting English.

  “You are American? We have been told you will come.” I lift my brows. Did Milada call ahead to book a room? How? If the phone at the farm isn’t working … I’d place the clerk’s age at about eighteen. She has a moon face that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Madonna in the square. Her bobbed hair is dyed lamp black and she has multiple piercings in her ears, even in the cartilage, and a nose stud, and a tongue stud. All she lacks is black lipstick and she’d be as goth as my niece in Iowa.

  “Please make you comfortable.” Her eyes open wide like fountains, drinking in everything about her rare American guest. Her form-fitting pullover, a brash mustard color, showcases generous breasts that wobble like jellyfish with her every excited hop.

  “Thank you. But, actually, I have a question. I’m looking for somebody. Do you … live around here?”

  Milada chooses this propitious moment to return. She gives me a warning look before engaging the clerk in a heated exchange. “She demand 880 koruna for double room with shower. I explain we are not double. You will stay alone.” A quick calculation works this out to be about $32 for a night, roughly what a cheap motel would cost at home.

  Milada tells her to wait. Out of her hearing range, Milada says, “She won’t give Czech price to foreigner. She believe I wish to cheat her. She demand full price for two.” Milada taps her head in frustration with the inability of her compatriot to understand basic capitalism.

  “Let’s not squabble over a few dollars.”

  “There is another hotel, not far.” She looks at me dubiously. “Maybe you prefer here because you like this cat at reception?”

  “Please.” But this is good. She can be jealous, too.

  “What have you said to her?”

  “Nothing. I said I was looking for someone.”

  “Chico, ne. After what I have spoken to Halbrstat, we must be careful. How do you know Jungmann has not paid this boopsy girl to spy? You think she is eager to pleasing to you because you are too sexy?”

  The deal is consummated. The clerk, surly now, hands over a key that looks like it could have opened a chest in Charles IV’s day. The newly installed elevator is not yet operating. Milada and I climb two flights of stairs to a modern room with two queen beds invitingly covered with white, thickly-piled down comforters. Hung between them is an original oil painting signed by Eduard Landa. Milada whistles appreciatively. He’s an artist of considerable local renown. Executed with thick, rough brush strokes, the painting depicts Žamberk’s square with the Madonna prominently silhouetted against a chalky winter sky, the cathedral in the background, balconies and roofs all wearing snowy eyebrows. The painting’s somber tone seems wrong for hotel decor. A closer look—my eyes are adjusting to the dim light—suggests that this assessment might have been hasty. In fact, there is warm ochre in the square where sun has penetrated the overcast. I find that heartening. I am so grateful for that touch of warmth I feel like weeping. Obviously you need to nap.

  “Look at bathroom,” Milada says excitedly. “German plumbing. Fluffy towels. Look at this. Tonight you will have nice soft tissue for your bottom.”

  Milada jokes that she might stay after all. “Unless you wait for your boopsy clerk?”

  I follow her out the French doors and onto a balcony fronting the square. Forgetting my exhaustion for a moment, I take in the view, feeling like royalty in a box seat at the theater. At the low end of the square is the local “mayoral” house, their version of city hall, a prim, two-story nineteenth century palace painted an arrogant sunflower yellow and with flowerboxes under tall French windows and a bell tower rising out of its steeply canted roof. Most of the buildings crowding the square shoulder to shoulder are similarly restored mini-palaces. In the days of the empire, Žamberk was a popular resort town for visiting Viennese. By the prosperous look of the square, Žamberk is prepping for the empire’s triumphal return, at least the capitalist version.

  Together we watch the “boopsy” goth clerk exit the hotel and hurry across the cobbled road to the mausoleum where she steals a few puffs from a friend’s cigarette.

  “My number two son is same age like this girl. We fight for freedom. Now they enjoy, but we are afraid to be wild and free.”

  Surprised by this rare admission of fear, I look at her more closely. The wrinkles in the folds of her eyes are not entirely from squinting. She has lived through hell and it shows and I can’t possibly blame her for wanting to join forces with Mr. Zámečník. It’s just that her timing couldn’t have been worse for me.

  “Let’s say tonight I convince Jungmann that I can bring my father here.”

  “Ne, I know what you want to say, but, ne. You find Jungmann so interesting. I tell you, he is not to be trusted.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Tonight while you meet with your cousin I will speak with Anton.”

  “You have to keep calling him Anton? What happened to my mayor friend? Look, I’m sorry. I’m tired. Can’t it wait, just a couple more days? Give me the weekend. Then I’m out of here, with or without Anežka.”

  Refusing to bite, she announces peremptorily that she will be back for me at half past seven. “Get some sleep. You have busy night ahead. Oh, also, be sure to keep Rosalie letters safe. Another thing I learned from Anton. Jungmann very much wants those letters. Maybe we can use to bargain.”

  “Those letters belong to my father.” I don’t bother to mention that I only have one original presently with me. “You would need to ask him.” But I am curious to know why they believe Jungmann would place so much value in those old letters.

  “Like any tyrant, he is desperate for proof that someone love him.”

  Before leaving, Milada gives me a kiss to make up, but she�
�s distracted, with the mayor no doubt, and I’m too tired to ask for more. When she’s gone, I transfer the manila envelope with the translations of Rosalie’s letters, including the original, into my travel bag, just in case. I’ve forgotten where I put the padlock key. Exhaustion turns my brain to mush. Everything will be so much easier after a nap. I unwrap both vases and set them out on the window sill by the French doors. The late afternoon light passes softly through the green vase as though illuminating a mossy patch on a forest floor and I take out my Steno and scribble:

  Paradoxically, history in this place is both alive and a graveyard full of buried family secrets. What price are we, the progeny of exiles, willing to pay to unearth those secrets? What price am I willing to pay? What if I don’t hear what I want to hear?

  * * *

  “Wachen Sie bitte auf!”

  The tapping repeats. I check the time: 7:05. Preparing to lecture Milada for being early, I laugh at the sight before me when I do open the door. The boopsy jangling goth clerk is hopping with worry that I might have overslept.

  Without waiting to be invited, she breezes into the room and crosses to the French doors. I step into the bathroom and give myself a poke and consider the readout on my test strip and then decide to give myself a couple extra units of fast-acting, just in case. When I return, she has picked up the candy dish and is grimacing at it. “Sehr hässlich.” The thick stem supports a plump-bottomed bowl garlanded with tiny porcelain forget-me-nots. Okay, it is old-fashioned, but to call it ugly is going too far.

  “I have two Czech aunts in Cedar Rapids who’ll think it’s beautiful.”

  She hides the candy dish coquettishly behind her. “Show to me something you have brought from America. May I look in armoire?” The light from the square accentuates her tight waist and round hips. By modern measure she’d be described as voluptuous, though compared to the Renaissance Madonna she’s positively svelte.