She wants to tell me a story. “This will explain how it is to be suddenly free.”
She talks about hiking Europe’s “Green Roof”—the Czech name I can’t make out—in a forest in southern Bohemia. A backpacking camping story? That’s the best you’ve got? I tune her out and instead worry that when I meet Anežka in the morning she will want to see her mother’s letters, and not my translations.
But then Dana is telling me about an encounter she and her boyfriend had with some Arschlöcher from Munich in an overnight shelter and my interest perks up. The word means “assholes” but it is said without venom, as though just another word for Germans. Squinting at me, she says, “like you … I mean older, like you.” There were four of them, Anständige, decent, wearing Bundhosen and carrying walking sticks. They commandeered the crude hut as if by right of noblesse oblige.
“It was neúnosné . Unbearable.” Her boyfriend wanted to throw them out. “He was sehr …” she searches for the word, comes up with “eifersüchtig.”
“Jealous? Of the Germans?”
She laughs naughtily. “My boyfriend knows I love German things.”
She offered to dance for them, Salome-style. That would contribute to my jealousy. They offered to throw Deutsche Mark for each item of clothing she removed.
“Did you? Did they?”
Yes, she says matter-of-factly. Yes. They threw bills at her but she left the money on the shelter floor and walked naked into their circle. They hooted and applauded, but she silenced them. “This is our home,” she claims to have told them. “Remember that you are guests and be polite.” Her nakedness stopped everything.
“How did your boyfriend react when you took your clothes off?”
“My boyfriend say I am whore to Germans.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“I am very angry. I say him dignity does not come free.”
Hearing the mention of that word, “dignity,” I realize I am looking at a young version of Milada. What Milada did with Fritz—and is obviously doing now with Mr. Zámečník—and what Dana did with the Germans only confirms what my father has been trying to tell me. Dignity is the last refuge of the weak.
“Before Velvet Revolution, we were protected. If you don’t say nothing, life is okay.” I’m scribbling notes furiously. “Now? We are like wife who is rape by her husband. Sure, we are free. But where we can go? We have no money. We have no pride. Big bully in house of Europe can rape us and we have to accept.”
“Is rape the right word? I mean, if you strike a bargain with the bully?”
“I only have power if I am Czech Hure. Alles klar? Now I will dance for you.”
“You want to expose my naked desire?”
She laughs. “You are funny. But you are also old.”
“I hope to get to be a lot older.”
“Haben Sie Angst?”
“More afraid than I’ve ever been in my life.” Afraid because my belly is swollen tight like a gourd? Because my feet are wooden posts? Because rogue capillaries in my retinas are filling like the tide rising into the canals of Venice? Yes, I am afraid. I’m afraid of dialysis. I’m afraid of being that weak. That dependent. That isolated. That alone. I certainly don’t give a shit about Jungmann, if that’s what she’s thinking.
“We are finished with interview?” She looks at me with round earnest eyes. “I want to give you small gift. I think you like my breasts, ano?”
“Did Jungmann send you to spy on me?”
“If it is so, you believe I will say it?”
“Why are you here? And don’t tell me it’s for the interview.”
“You have some love letters.” She points to the armoire. “Old love letters are best ever, man. I want to see.”
“If Jungmann told you about the letters, that means he wants you to steal them. Well, sorry to disappoint you. Like I told him, they’re in Prague.”
“Schade.” She pouts, then brightens. “Show me something from you.”
After one of my visits to my grandfather—looking up at that silo beside the tracks, in the cover of that draw, the cornfields behind me and hills beyond, I felt as though I could walk for hours for miles and miles, just keep walking and never look back—I purchased an M. Hohner blues harmonica and attempted to teach myself to play railroad blues. If there’s one thing I’m not it’s a musician. Another thing I’m not is a wallower in blues. But I brought that harmonica with me. It’s in my travel bag in the armoire. The one tune I did teach myself to play is my father’s favorite, “Clementine.”
“Want to see my harmonica?” I sing a verse: “Light she was and like a feather, and her shoes were number nine …” She wants to see into the armoire. “Want me to dance for you?”
“Of course!” She laughs. “Ne, I make joke. That would be neúnosné.”
“It’s not that awful. When I have a new kidney and pancreas, you’ll see.”
“Schwarz!” she exclaims, visited by a sudden epiphany. “Now I understand why you are here. You want Czech kidney from black market.” She stares at me as though I were the rapist.
“If you want to know the truth, I’m here looking for my half-sister.” This I’m sure is a mistake, but I will not be thought a rapist, under no circumstances, I will not. This is my father’s home. My sister’s home.
“Your sister? She is Czech?”
“As Czech as you. Anežka Kacalka? That sound Czech enough?”
“But you are Lenoch!” she says. “Your sister will not marry Kacalek.”
“Her mother is Rosalie Kacalka. I’m assuming she took her mother’s name.”
“I know Anežka Lenochova. She was big shot at orphanage.”
“You know her? How? What do you know?”
Her eyes take on a childlike excitement and she says, “I will say you about your sister. But first you must show to me something you do not wish to show to me. I think you are ashamed for your water belly?”
She lifts the tail of my thermal shirt and peeks at my edema-poofed belly. There’s nothing more than curiosity in her look, so I relax and let her look. “Okay I touch?”
I wince, but not from the brush of her fingertips—I feel only a scratchy sensation on my belly. “I’m a little sensitive about this.”
“I have to make confession.”
I grab my Steno. Now I’m going to hear that she does work for Jungmann.
“My parents. Is not true what I tell you.” Her father, three months before her birth, refused conscription into the Soviet army and was sent to a gulag, where he starved to death the following year. To punish her family, the NKVD officers gang-raped her six-month pregnant mother. That resulted in a venereal infection that killed her mother the same year her father died. “I hate Soviets. Is why I prefer Germans.”
“How do you know my sister?”
“Until I have seven years, I am in orphanage. Then I live with aunt in Žamberk. I still live with aunt.”
“What was Anežka like?”
“I love her. She always say I am her dear child.”
Heat steams off her hands. “You’re too tense,” she tells me. “Sei locher. Locher.” Be loose. “When she is nervös or upset,” Dana adds, “she talk to her cat and call herself by name, like this, ‘Anežka loves you, little golden bug. Anežka will always love you.’ ”
When you’ve been tossed from clinic to clinic like broken machinery, the thought of more hands on you is revolting. But Dana’s kneading hands bring back the desire for touch. The light streaming in through the sheers casts a coppery reflection, like the tea-colored surface of a pond, with leaves rotting in fall, and that washes over my belly and produces a sensation of floating that’s the most delicious imaginable. I feel it down in every blasted nerve and bursting capillary.
“Usually being touched makes me feel twitchy. But, your hands ...” I tell her about Torkey, the hawk who has to be taken in every night. Her tenebrous features suggest that she’s not interested in wounded bird stories.
> She’s come to some decision. She slips her tee-shirt off and tosses it like a rag onto the carpet and thrusts her shoulders back and flattens her tummy. Her breasts are full in the way a ripe gourd is full. Dark areolas surround fat, erect nipples. After massaging her heavy breasts, she tugs on them as though they were puppies in need of discipline. She seems to be into pain. I’m surprised her nipples are not pierced, considering the studs in her ear cartilage.
“Sehr hübsch.” My rudimentary German makes me sound like a horny school boy. “Thank you. But you can put your shirt back on.”
“You do not like?”
“You’re beautiful, Dana. But I told you, I am not a rapist.”
“I will make nice pillow. Rest your poor tired head.”
When I hesitate, she lowers my face to her chest, pressing my nose into the under girth of those sumptuous lobes. “Rest my child. Sweet rest.” Her heated scent is a delicious mélange of wood soap and smoke. Her pulse—or is it mine?—throbs against my ear. Reminds me of logs pounding against the bridge in the flooded Skagit.
“I really am afraid. Actually.” It is not easy for me to admit that.
“Shhh.” She sags back against the bedstead with an exasperated oof! “Maybe my boyfriend is right. But if I am Hure, it is because I want something better than this shithole!”
There is something to be said for the comfort of a modern bathroom, I decide, when I excuse myself to do my nightly ablutions. I consider the shower, but my bleary eyes remind me that tomorrow morning will come early.
Dana is gone when I return from the bathroom. My heart sinks a little, just a little, though of course it is better this way. Still, I worry she’ll report the bicycle to Jungmann and he’ll have us followed and I will be the cause of Anežka’s arrest. I’ll leave extra early and take a longer route. The plan is to meet up in Letohrad and catch a bus to the orphanage so that we won’t risk Milada’s Škoda being followed. Drifting at last into sleep, I wonder if any of it even matters. If she’s going to be arrested anyway.
Chapter Seventeen
Saturday Morning: Six Days till the Drop Dead Date with Blue Cross
Blood prick. Glucometer readout. Shot prep. Twelve units, two fast–acting. Going to be a long hard day with more exercise than I’ve attempted in months. Cornflakes, orange juice. My little padlock key falls out of my passport pouch as I’m packing. So that’s where it was. Should I lock the letters in my bag and leave them in the armoire? Would she at least like to see the original? I could read the translations to her.
The manila envelope’s red thread is looped loosely over the clasp. Odd. I would have bound it tightly. Was I having a reaction?
I heft the envelope. Too light. Really? I look in. Thirteen translations and one original gone? Every one of them?
“Un-fucking-believable!” I yell. That whole thing last night, use my chest as a pillow, rest your poor tired head. “Fucking bitch!”
By now Jungmann must have read the letters. I wish I’d read back through them last night. What did Rosalie really say about Anežka? Jungmann’s name was never overtly mentioned per se, that I recall, but did Rosalie effuse, actually, over her love for my father, actually? What I recall is a demanding tone. She was young. She had an infant. Thanks to the Munich accord the Nazis had just walked into her country as though it were their backyard. She could not have understood what she was demanding from my father, the impossibility of it. But did she love him? What exactly was she threatening without expressly saying so?
* * *
I pull on the stocking cap Josef left for me. The duck canvas hunting coat is scratchy; it’ll chafe my neck. No helmet. I commandeer the steel-framed black one-speed with fat tires quietly down to the lobby. Plastic sheathing everywhere. No Dana at reception. So far so good. Being a chronic early riser is coming in handy for once.
Cold early morning ground fog shrouds the pastures and meadows south of Žamberk. I take the farm road, avoid the main road. Everything is drenched in dew. Fence posts, barn roofs, birch leaves. The hoo-hooing of a mourning dove serenades the crunch of my tires on the packed gravel. Reveling in the sensation of crisp air stinging my ears, I wonder why I’ve abandoned my Raleigh International to the storage closet. Fatigue is like a governor on an engine. It slows you down, sure, but it needn’t stop you. And I’ve let it stop me for too long.
Cornfields, dense woods, back to the main road. An occasional Zastava or Volga chugs past, but no one slows or seems to take an interest. A beige seventies-era bus belches cindery black clouds of diesel exhaust into my face. I welcome the warmth. Soon enough I’ll be alone on my couch waiting for the nightmare of dialysis to begin. This will all seem like a dream.
* * *
A few shopping penguins have gathered for their Saturday morning march in Letohrad’s square, and the team of street workers in blue overalls is already, at seven-fifteen, on knees prying out cobble stones one at a time like removable teeth. I lean Josef’s bicycle against the Plexiglas bus shelter, lock it with that spoke lock, look around. Nothing suspicious. A beige bus shows up, more exhaust, more stench. The driver snaps his ledger closed, Milada and Josef materialize as if out of nowhere, the bus doors hiss shut. Before a word has been spoken, the shock-less bus is laboring over the ridge and then bouncing down at a breakneck pace into the valley and wrenching into a sharp turn south and throwing us around like a roller coaster.
The morning fog is burning off. Sun dapples the old hardwoods. The bouncing jars my ankles painfully. I tell them about my interview with Dana, declining to mention my head nestling into her pillow. Josef knits his brow. He’s too polite to upbraid me for briefing the enemy. Milada, not so polite.
“This means we will certainly be followed.”
“I was careful this morning. No one saw me leave.”
“Don’t be stupid. You make sex with your boopsy so now you think you can trust?” I’ve seen her angry before, but never so coldly angry. This is a Milada I don’t know. “What do you think I am doing last night? Anton used his protekce to help you. We have birth certificate. We have medical visa. All that is required is X-ray and check-up to know she will not have tuberculosis. He even arrange for passport with falsified stamp. He take risk so we will send Anežka to Prague with you today.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”
“You see why.” Her tone is hard, beyond exasperation.
“Stop it. Dana lived in the orphanage, okay? Her parents are dead. She thinks of Anežka as her mother. Push come to shove, her loyalty will be on our side.”
“If this is so, why she steal letters?”
“She said she wanted to read love letters. I believe her.”
Milada deems this unworthy of even one of her cynical quips. She turns on the bench and keeps a keen eye on the road behind us.
“Look, I know it sounds silly, but I’ll tell you why I believed her.” If I really did. “After the funeral Mass we celebrated for Mom?” Josef listens patiently, still frowning. Milada won’t even turn to look at me. “This grandfather was chatting with my Czech aunts when a boy runs up to him and this grandfather lifts the boy off his feet and dances around with him, and I see the expression on the grandfather’s face and I hear the boy squeal and I realize, I’m seeing unadulterated joy for the first time in my life.”
“What this has to say about stolen letters?”
“Patience. So my father comes around in his big Oldsmobile. He’s chewing a toothpick. Mom would never have allowed that at church. He doesn’t say a word. One of my aunts puts a hand on his shoulder. He just keeps chewing his toothpick. Then he says, I’ll never forget this, he says, ‘There’s probably something in the fridge.’ Suddenly it’s like I’m seeing my father for the first time. Mom just died and that’s the best you can do? ‘There’s probably something in the fridge?’ ”
Josef gives my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Milada stonily keeps her vigil.
“I realized something that day. I realized I’d never se
en my father show a strong emotion. Corny jokes, okay, he was great at that. That’s how you knew he was having fun. But actual joy? Sorrow?”
“Chico. What this has to do with your stolen letters?”
“Think about it. An actual expression of genuine love? Real honest to god longing? That’s really what she wanted. Of course, not to say she didn’t pass the letters on to Jungmann.”
“You can be certain of this.”
Josef admits his mother was like this, too, every emotion guarded. Every day like she was anxiously waiting for something that never arrived. We commiserate. One of those somethings was my father. Their generation had it hard.
* * *
We get off at Lanšperk. From there we walk two kilometers through the woods and come the back way to the sirotčinec in Hnátnice, past a barn and through a muddy cornfield. No sign yet of police or Jungmann’s Mercedes.
Josef approaches the brick caretaker’s flat first. An African violet has been set in the window, the sign that we have the all clear. A woman roughly Milada’s age, my cousin Františka it turns out, is at the door, waving us hurriedly in. A loose wool sweater tents a thickish shape. Her straw hair, shot with premature gray, is chopped soberly short. She peers at us over the top of heavy-framed glasses. “You are absolutely certain no one has followed?”
“Děkuji, děkuji.” I thank her for helping arrange this.
Milada warns her that I might have given us away last night. Her weary look suggests she’s not surprised. Her engineer husband, who is working on a building contract for Jungmann, said nothing about trouble before he left this morning, so it’s possible Jungmann is not onto us yet. By the way, Anežka is in the orphanage tending to her feline “child.” Would we like a nibble of cheese and koláče while we wait? She sets out a tray, starts a kettle on her new two-burner electric stove for tea.
Better You Go Home Page 15