Better You Go Home

by Scott Driscoll

  “There’s nothing to see. Some clothes stuffed in a bag.”

  She approaches swinging those hips.

  “There something I can help you with?”

  “I have message from your girlfriend.”

  Picking through a three-language gorp, I gather that Milada will not be coming back to the hotel at half past seven as planned. She’s made dinner reservations at the Snack Bar around the corner. The clerk will show me the way.

  Noticing that she still seems eager to chat, I ask when she will finish her shift and I show her my Steno and suggest that I’d like to interview her for my notes. She looks at me with a smile that says easy prey. She’s wrong. I have my methods. She’ll give away more than she realizes.

  “I work desk until Mitternacht. Shall I come to your room after?”

  “That’s late for me. Knock three times. If I don’t answer, I’m asleep.”

  After assembling the necessaries in my daypack, and remembering that I still need to find that tiny key to my padlock, I follow her down to the reception desk in the lobby, only then realizing that she’s taken my Aunt’s candy-dish vase with her. A bland friend with a thick blond baguette ponytail, non-descript in the way friends of beautiful girls often are, has been watching the desk while she was away. Seeing the phone on the desk, remembering that the phone at the farmhouse is out of order, I ask how one would go about calling the airlines. It requires a cash deposit. She offers to make the call for me, right now if I prefer.

  I hadn’t expected to have to make a decision so suddenly. Dinner is waiting at the Snack Bar. In a short while I’m to meet my cousin at the hotel pub. After that, Jungmann. Common sense would dictate that I do nothing until I’ve spoken with Jungmann, and yet I don’t want the pressure of Milada telling me what to do. Would it be foolish to stay? Am I deserting Anežka to an awful fate if I sneak away tomorrow? I watch the clerk light a cigarette, metal jangling, chest wobbling, brash with teen certainty. I’d love to just hand her my credit card and have the decision made, but I really have to take care of this business with Jungmann.

  “What are your plans for my vase?”

  “This granny thing?” She gives my granny vase to her baguette ponytail friend behind the desk. “People will say Czech people are behind times. Ne, tomorrow I will trade for better in shop.”

  It’s 7:15. By the way I’ve calculated my shot, I need to eat in the next fifteen minutes or so. Whatever this silly game is, there’s no time to argue. Outside, she pauses to light up another cigarette, a knock-off brand of Marlboros. Around the corner, at the entrance to Snack Bar, we stop under a mirrored globe. She grabs my shoulder and pulls herself onto her tiptoes and gives me a peck on the cheek. She smells like her cigarette.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dana,” she shouts as she spins away. Sounds like Dunna.

  “See you tonight at midnight, Dana. If I’m not asleep. Děkuji!”

  * * *

  Nowhere in Snack Bar’s vast interior is there any sign of Milada. A throbbing disco beat bounces out of an impressive set of speakers and a revolving mirrored ball throws opals of light connected by filaments—the pattern reminds me of the veils my aunts wear over their hats when they go to church. The DJ apparently doesn’t start until the Friday night dance crowd shows up. Currently, I am the only customer. Waiting for a waiter, suffering through a taped loop of oldie goldies—the Bee Gees, Abba, a wrenching twist into Santana’s Abraxas—anxiety begins to gnaw at my stomach. She’s got better things to do with Mr. Zámečník, obviously. Where treachery is concerned I’m out of my league. I should take her advice and leave tomorrow.

  A lugubrious waiter wearing a starched white jacket shows up bearing on a platter a dinner Milada must have pre-ordered. The first course is a “Vitamin” salad, a frothy concoction resembling an ice-cream sundae. A prod with my fork digs up sliced beet and celery root buried in a mound of whipped sour cream. The main course, delivered soon thereafter—obviously he’s been told to hurry this along—is a platter with wafer-thin slices of cold pork arranged like a row of little corpses next to slabbed vegetables, in the middle a heap of greasy pommes frites.

  The cream gives the “vitamin” dish too many carbs, and pommes frites? Milada wouldn’t have ordered those. Must be the house special, disco fuel. The bill, I am told by the waiter, who stares disinterestedly at me while I eat, has been prepaid. This can only mean Milada knew very well she wouldn’t be here.

  En route to the pub, I stop by the hotel reception to look for Dana and ask whether Milada might have mentioned anything about Mr. Zámečník, but once again Dana has abandoned her post. I cross to the square.

  The paths are unlit and meanwhile it has grown dark so I confine my search to the perimeter where there are streetlights. The petite palaise that earlier looked so charming now look only smug. The melancholic strains of a busker’s violin drift my way from the side street that flanks the cathedral. None of the evening strollers in the park venture down there to hear the violin. No one throws halíř in his open violin case. He doesn’t appear the least concerned. It’s a perfect sound chamber. What is that? Dvořák, must be. Who wouldn’t recognize those languorous strains from his New World Symphony, but then the violin’s mood shifts, this time to frenzied Slavonic dances and I’m reminded of the folk dances my father took me to see at Danceland in Bohemie Town, when he would still admit to having some pride in being Czech. The lilting sound fills my heart with an ache for something hard to define, something that must be nostalgia for the child who watched those dancers in their peasant shirts and billowing embroidered skirts and imagined an exotic world that belonged to his father. The music lifts me above the palaces to that world—a world with no illness no occupation no torture, a world in which my father inherits the family estate and raises Anežka and plums—but then I notice that I can see from the park the actual cupola atop the actual prison, actual spotlights aimed down at the actual prison yard. The fantasy vanishes.

  The bell in the mayoral house tower chimes the three-quarter hour. I’m now officially late for my meeting with my cousin Josef. Maybe I should just go back to the hotel and have Dana call the airlines and get on with it. But maybe Josef could help. At the very least, before I go, I have to ask Jungmann what the deal is with that erased entry in the book and see what can still be negotiated.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At the Pub Friday Night

  The air in the hotel pub is blue with smoke. Somewhere in that blue ocean, somewhere among the Mariáš players shouting and slapping down cards and bawling to the squeeze of an accordion, is my cousin. The walls are greasy from the smoke, but the lead mullioned windows give the pub a medieval charm that’s complimented by the coffered ceiling and the tooled backrests of booths that look to be hundreds of years old. Despite the nearly unbreathable air, I feel an odd affection for the place. “Affection” isn’t the right word. It feels familiar, though that’s absurd, too. I’ve never been here before.

  Long tables are crowded with thick-backed farmers and workmen in blue overalls and denim shirts. While I search through the smoke for my cousin, a drunk grabs my arm. His eyes plead for something urgent he can’t seem to remember. He asks for a cigarette. I signal that I don’t smoke. He pulls out a pack of Spartas and offers me one of his as though we were best chums.

  A passing waiter, wearing a white shirt and black bow tie, whispers into the guy’s ear. The guy mutters an apology. He isn’t a bother, I indicate to the waiter. God knows, this is his pub, not mine. The moment the waiter darts off, the guy lifts his hands as though conducting a symphony. “Co jste hasiči, co jste dělali,” he sings, which I will be told by my cousin translates, “You, firemen, what did you do when the brewery burned?” To which they reply, “There’s not enough beer, but we won’t drink water ’cuz that’s what frogs drink, and we won’t drink rum ’cuz that’s what old women drink.” He presses his head to my chest as though we’d agreed this were the saddest song in the world.

/>   A strong hand claps my shoulder. A kind voice sends the drunk sailing off into the haze. “Ahoj my American cousin.” He’s my age give or take and wearing a snug pullover that shows off a muscle-bulked chest. He wears his hair cropped athletically close. I don’t see much family resemblance. A broad, back-sloping forehead like my father’s, he has that, but otherwise Josef’s is an uncomplicated stranger’s face with a welcoming smile.

  “Jungmann here?”

  “Jungmann is playing Mariáš in back room.”

  “I should head back. You and I could catch up later?”

  “They are taking his money. He will be here for some time.”

  Steering me to a booth, Josef totters, I can’t help but notice, and I am not usually prissy about these things, but I wonder if he’s already had a few beers too many. This is worrisome. If I decide to stay, he could be my liaison with my sister and my paranoid aunt, but will he even remember what we talk about tonight?

  There are no empty booths. We share with a young couple. The man, wearing a Tiroler hat with a Gemsbock, repeatedly says to me while pounding me on the shoulder, “Where are you come from?” Meanwhile he is downing, one by one, the half-dozen shots of corn rum lined up in front of him. His giggling girlfriend, wearing a polka-dot bow in her hair and sipping zelena, a syrupy peppermint schnapps, admonishes him to stop pestering. He continues punching my shoulder, saying, “Hey big guy, you are American.” Before there can be trouble, she hauls him to his feet and I watch them jig a wobbly polka around the accordion, glad for a moment’s calm.

  Josef orders a Turkish coffee for himself, a desítka, a light, ten degree lager for me. The pivo has more carbs than I can afford on top of dinner, but those extra two units of fast acting should take care of it. Brushing aside my protest that I’ve just eaten—and, I suspect, to suggest that he’s doing well—Josef orders food. “No goulash and dumplings.” He winks. “Not for us anything so ordinary.”

  “So,” I say when the waiter leaves. “My half-sister, Anežka. You know her? I was told you know her mother pretty well.”

  “No one really knows Anežka except her children.” He confirms that Anežka and her mother did not get along in that brief time Anežka shared her mother’s upstairs rooms at the inn. “But children. She loved children. Children loved her.”

  “She ever marry? Any children of her own?” Nothing of this nature was written in the record book; of course it would change everything if she had a family here.

  “Ne, ne. She had orphans and cats. They were family.”

  “I understand she’s hiding from the police because of the fire?”

  “After fire she disappear.”

  “Would Rosalie know how to get in touch with her?”

  He gives my shoulder a bruising squeeze. “Don’t expect help from Rosalie Kacalka.” That hand is gnarled, part of two fingers missing. Climbing injury? “She say me she refuse ever to speak again with her daughter.”

  “I met your mom, by the way.” His brows lift inquiringly. “This morning. We stopped on our way through Hradec Králové.” We commiserate. The oxygen. A shut-in for years, and she never a smoker. “She seemed pretty disappointed that my father never came back for her.”

  “She don’t really put blame to him. It was so, she know this.”

  “What do you know about the night of the fire? Were you there?”

  “Police already asking to me these questions. I tell them Jungmann say something that make Anežka very angry. She accuse her mother of being big liar. Next thing I know, smoke is everywhere.”

  “Why is it alleged that Anežka started the fire?”

  “Halbrstat tell to police he has seen her in kitchen arguing with Jungmann. Burning oil in kitchen start fire.”

  “So Halbrstat was also in the kitchen. It could be him.”

  “She tell everyone Jungmann should be hanged.”

  “Any sympathy for that view in the village?”

  “Of course, but everyone have business with Jungmann, yes? You want favor, he has protekce. He is Big Shot.”

  I look at my watch. Blurry. “What time is it?”

  “Kdy se naučíš česky?”

  “Actually. This is one thing I can say in Czech. But now I’m too embarrassed.”

  “It is nearly a quarter past eight.”

  While I stew over what Milada could be up to with the mayor, Josef pulls from his shoulder bag a book-length manuscript typed and hand-bound on cheap paper. The title translates into English as The Death of Mr. Balthisberger, a collection of stories by Bohumil Hrabal. This censored manuscript was circulated illegally before it was officially published sometime around 1963—he can’t remember when exactly—and still bears in bold letters across the bottom of the title page the stock disclaimer: “Výslovný zákaz dalšího opisováni rukopisu.” Translated: “It is strongly prohibited to reprint this manuscript.” Obviously a wink to censors.

  “In Czech Republic, we don’t forgive success.” He’s referring to writers like Kundera, whom he accuses of defecting. “I love this manuscript. It speaks to Czech soul.”

  I pull out my Steno. “You’re familiar with Klíma, yes? Klíma claims the very word revolution so tempted leftist intellectuals they turned a blind eye to what was actually being done. Like, torture, for example.”

  “Okay, Young Pioneers were brainwashed.”

  “What about the stuff Jungmann was doing in his club?”

  “Young sexy girls, they want to eat meat, they work for Jungmann.”

  “Is that what Anežka was upset about?”

  “It could be. Clients are strictly Party higher-ups. Very exclusive. Rosalie, she protect girls.”

  “Maybe Anežka wanted him shut down?”

  “He warned her, never judge your own family.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “You must ask to him.”

  “What about you? You enjoy his Party protekce?”

  “Ne, ne! I was thrown out of university and they put me in jail.” He tosses this out with a wry smile, as though it were a badge of honor.

  Our drinks arrive. I shove the noisome ashtray to the far end of the booth, take a cool sip of my lager. “What happened?”

  His story takes us back to the twenty-fourth of January, 1982. Biting cold, driving snow. Brezhnev in Prague with a Soviet delegation visiting. Josef was a forestry grad student at Charles University. Climbing was his passion, but that could never become a career in cold war Central Europe where endorsements went to places like VUML, Vysoké učení marxismu-leninismu, Prague’s College of Marxism-Leninism. That Sunday in January, the day Brezhnev arrived (no one knowing he’d be dead ten months later), he ripped down Soviet flags, caving in to an impulse to join a few hundred other foolish—depending on how you choose to see it—student protesters. He was caught and held in jail for the usual five days. He was married at the time. Jitka, his wife, also a student, was pregnant and not feeling well and had decided to stay home. Until his release the following Friday, she had no idea what had become of him. A trial resulted in a three-year prison sentence. Jitka’s mother contacted a former lover, a highly regarded swimming coach, who petitioned the court on Josef’s behalf. Upon appeal, his sentence was reduced to two years’ probation.

  “Mind if I ask what they did to you in jail?”

  Picture, he says, a freezing cell with no window. You’re only allowed to wear underwear. They gave you nothing to sleep with except a torn piece of blanket. “Food, my God! Thin soup, it taste like dirty water. Something is wrong with bread so I am sick with diarrhea and shivering.” He refused to rat on his friends. For this he was beaten repeatedly. It was then he thinks that he became sterile.

  “I’m worried this could be Anežka’s fate.”

  “But now is 1994. Security police will not do this kind of rough stuff, not anymore. They know better way. They will wait for her confession.They can be patient.” His arrest was only the start of his trouble. Josef was kicked out of the university. C
ouldn’t find a job. Jitka was allowed to continue her studies, but was harassed, her study group disbanded. He was watched by the secret police. There were knocks in the middle of the night. Jitka couldn’t take the stress of living with a target of police surveillance and she lost the baby and then she left him.

  I nod at the gnarled hand. “That happen in prison?”

  He examines the claw. “Climbing in High Tatras. Three years ago. My legs … how do you say … gave up on me? But my hand catch in crack, like piton.”

  He’s forty, it turns out, two years younger than I am, and from what I can see, exceptionally fit. If I were to stay. If his blood type and antigens are favorable. If he wouldn’t mind being laid up for a couple of months. If I paid him for the clients he lost.

  The waiter drops off a platter with a round of breaded and fried cheese served with pommes frites and tartar sauce. Josef smacks his lips. “Czech specialty!” Another specialty. I’m really getting the treatment. He carves a wedge of fried cheese for me, assuming that I’m only being polite when I say no thank you.

  “Actually, I’m diabetic,” I explain. His expression devolves from surprise to furrowed concern. “Type I? Yes? Shots?” I feign a poke in the rear.

  “I had client, he was diabetic.” He nibbles a wedge of fried cheese, looks away. “Is how I lost fingers.”

  But Josef wants me to understand that behind the Iron Curtain not everything was grim. He cut his climbing teeth on the Adršpach Mountains bordering Poland. “We liked to say, you could climb from hell to hell,” he adds, laughing. There he made the acquaintance of Orolin. The name means nothing to me. Josef looks perplexed. My ignorance of my father’s homeland apparently exceeds even his modest expectations.

  A Slovakian climber who earned his fame in the Himalayas, Orolin introduced Josef to day climbs in the High Tatra Mountains at the north of Slovakia, a short way south and east of here. One of the more popular areas, Prachov, a series of limestone pillars, had earned the reputation: “Český ráj,” Czech paradise. Josef perfected his technique on a brutal spire nicknamed “Jehla,” the Needle. Rising vertically 50 meters, the tallest, thinnest spire in Prachov is a mere meter square on top.