It was winter. It had snowed the night before into the early morning but the snow had stopped falling and long icicles dangled from the gutters, just waiting for a snowball. My sister, Anne, two years older, had been allowed to walk on her own through the city park behind our house to the playground. Stuffed into a bulky snowsuit and mittens, I disobeyed mother’s orders and trailed her at a safe distance so I wouldn’t be sent back. Anne wanted to join the older boys’ play, but they wanted to go faster on the merry-go-round and one of them—a boy named John, who wore a leather belt with a broad silver buckle that I deeply coveted—shoved her off. Anne still didn’t know that I had followed. She pleaded with them to let her back on. They were enjoying her pleading, and I began to feel angry over the injustice. John said she could get on, but only if she pushed first. She tried to push but the ground under the snow was frozen and there were several of them and she was small. John jumped off. He shoved her down in the snow so she’d let go of the merry-go-round. My bulky snowsuit made running awkward. I remember the slick material chafing my thighs and making a scraping sound I was certain would give me away. Tackling John—that I also remember, the satisfying vertigo sensation of tumbling with the big boy. The element of surprise had given me the advantage. What I don’t remember, but Anne proudly reported later to Frank, was shoving snow into a startled John’s mouth. “Her praise struck me as unearned. I only did what a brother should do, right?”
Milada’s eyes narrow with suspicion. “Why you are saying this? She has made choice. Is nothing more you can do. What?” What does she see in my expression? I’m not going back. I’m going home. That’s all there is to it. “You wish to push snow on Jungmann? Believe me, we will push snow. But we are not children.”
The bus comes into the village on the back road, past the church my family built. It’s a simple gray limestone structure, utterly unadorned. One steeple. The clock added to the steeple tower not functioning. My grandmother must be buried in the small cemetery behind the wall at the back. There was satisfaction in that moment on the playground, the satisfaction of justice having been served. They let my sister play. Why? Because John repented? Because John was afraid of me? Of course not. Well, maybe a little afraid of my determination. No, because I pushed that merry-go-round. I thought I could make a deal for that fancy silver belt buckle so I pushed, and fell, and got up and pushed and fell and pushed. They were amused. I wish I could summon that determination now. But it’s too late. I’m exhausted. Why wait three months for that fistula? If dialysis is inevitable, let’s get started. Why wait until everything falls apart?
Chapter Nineteen
Returning to Seattle: Early October, 1994
My flight home includes a stopover and plane change in Detroit. From a pay-phone, I call my father in Cedar Rapids to let him know that he need no longer worry. He doesn’t pick up. This is not especially a surprise, though it is Sunday and that means he’s not working. His pickup—a round-hooded ’49 Ford with running boards, his first ever pickup, which he continues to use—will be parked in the long driveway and covered with a tarp. After mass at St. Wenceslas, he will have driven his two sisters in his spotless Oldsmobile home for lunch at their apartment with the priest. Father Josef rewards his “girls” for their volunteer work with distracting meal-time conversation starters such as, what accounts for the Catholic church’s failure to prevent genocide in Eastern Europe? The priest, like my father, was a young émigré.
I leave a message on his answering machine—a machine I bought for him when I was back visiting in January. In a few days, I should receive notice that I have Blue Cross’s approval for the surgery. My kidneys, unfortunately, have been deteriorating rapidly. So if he wants to visit, I add, maybe see the raptors, which he’s said he wants to do, he should come sooner rather than later. By the way, I met Anežka, I tell him, pretending the thought just crossed my mind. I’d be happy to tell you all about that if you’re curious, but she doesn’t believe you are her father and I’ve decided to drop the whole thing. Come out for a visit? I’d love to see you, if you can get away.
Home that night at my Seattle townhouse, the first thing I do is check phone messages. Nothing from my father. I have a pounding headache from the high blood pressure and jet lag, but I can’t bear to look at my untouched bed.
Whatever deal Anežka offered Jungmann didn’t work. I learned that waiting for my flight out this morning. She is being held at the prison in Žamberk where Milada’s father was once tortured. Mr. Anton Zámečník will hire an attorney to solicit the court, but we were warned not to expect anything to happen any time soon. The worst of it is that poor limping cat of hers now won’t eat. My cousin, Františka, promised to search the orphanage until she was found.
In my message to my father, I said nothing of her arrest. I want him to visit and I don’t want that trouble to stop him. He can stay in the map room. He’ll enjoy that. The map room’s high, narrow horizontal window faces north to the interior courtyard. When the blind is closed, the room is nearly cave dark like the room in his basement where he keeps the cot. I enter and close the door and push a towel against the aperture at the bottom to make the dark as dark as his basement. I close the blind. With my lousy vision it would be easy to trip over the feet supporting the folded treadmill, or the cords snaking to my PC desk, but I know this room well. Anežka will spend her first few nights in a cold, brightly lit cell. This is how Jungmann will break her down for questioning. This warm dark womb of sympathy is for you, Anežka.
What I told her was not a lie. Even Hnátnice, even her tiny village, population something under fifty, is on my wall map. Is it really? Suddenly I wonder if I made that up. I snap on the LED light from my key chain and focus the concentrated beam. Not only is Hnátnice on the map, it’s designated as a bus stop and postal pickup, a veritable metropolis. It’s just above the navel in the triangle that contains everything of consequence that my father left behind. If Žamberk is the north corner, Letohrad the southeast corner, Oucmanice the southwest corner, my father’s village, Písečná, is the triangle’s heart. It’s a tiny world, and yet I’m more convinced than ever that his life in Iowa is nothing but a prolonged interruption of his life in this tiny world.
If fixing the world starts one bird at a time, is the corollary also true? Will failing to fix that bird diminish the world? My head is convulsing, my ankles throbbing. I’m desperately exhausted and I can’t sleep. The bed in the map room, a black cast-iron frame with an arched headpiece stabilized on thinly spindled columns, salvage from a European hotel—my ex bought it for next to nothing at a rummage sale and left it when she moved out—is made up for my sister. It’s covered with an amber bedspread, has a skirt that hides the frame, and has throw pillows decorated with views of Prague’s spires braced against the head stead like greeting cards. The slender forest green vase with gold filigree from Letohrad is on the computer table. First chance I will add flowers. I pull a down comforter from the closet and spread it out on the bed. I crawl under the comforter. The womb is complete. No farther to go. I will ask my transplant team to sign me up for the fistula.
* * *
Things go as expected with Blue Cross, a minor miracle in itself. Wednesday their rep shows up at my townhouse wearing a stethoscope around his neck and carrying a valise full of forms. Looking out the south-facing plate-glass windows of my unit, he exclaims what an excellent view I have of the Aurora Bridge. “Famous for suicide jumpers,” he says, grinning. Those high arching steel girders frame my view of water, hills, and the concrete gray sky. “It is lofty,” I say, feeling called upon to say something. He sniffs around my cast-iron wood burning stove, asks about smoke leaks. He’s concerned about my high blood pressure and asks for a full list of medications and asks me about the sodium in my diet and what I’m doing to control that. Of course the real reason he’s here is to ascertain how I’ll manage when I’m incapacitated. He looks at my burgundy leather couch, the neatly folded blanket, the TV with the VCR under it. And
he looks at Kasia.
My Polish ex-wife with her movie-star cheekbones and limpid brown eyes has taken a few hours away from her mortgage broker’s office today to act as my liaison. Kasia enchants him with tales from our two-hundred mile Seattle-to-Portland bicycle adventure, omitting mention that this happened several years ago. Her ability to sell low down-payment mortgages with arms that crush you later comes in handy. He’s charmed. He’s been thinking of jumping into the market himself. He finishes with a battery of questions concerning my consumption of alcohol and diet, tests my reflexes, looks at my swollen ankles, mutters, makes notes, accepts her card, and leaves.
Kasia stays.
Would I like to enjoy her restorations? For old times’ sake? We speak often by phone, but it’s been since before the Wyroc hearing that I saw her last. Between her personal trainer, a serious weight regimen, and her bike club, she’s lost weight and toned up. Milada is out of my life, as far as she’s concerned, and since we have an entire afternoon ahead of us … Your trainer won’t care? She was sleeping with him even before we officially filed for divorce, though if asked she will vociferously deny this. I’ve met him a time or two. He likes to wear tights and spend his weekends in the saddle with boys and he’s very nurturing and that’s why she likes him. I’m sure he’s gay but in denial but he’s a distraction and apparently a good dancer and she loves being feted by her boys. Don’t get the wrong impression. If she’s a party girl now it’s a reaction to the dry years with me.
Familiarity is a comfort at times like this, let me tell you. If you’re in your forties, male, and diabetic, you worry about erectile dysfunction, but she’s playful and the new definition looks good on her, though it can’t hide the dimples on the backs of her thighs left over from the indulgent years. In those dimples I take solace. I am obviously no longer the whippet I used to be. How I miss her unapologetic way with pleasure. In fairness, though, it’s a pleasure shaded with sadness. She looks at me so wistfully. Now that she is thirty-nine, her shot at children is looking like a long shot.
It’s the second week of October. The days are growing shorter and chillier, but we haven’t yet descended into our winter’s perpetual gray. We enjoy a lovely walk along the ship canal. We stop to watch tall-masted pleasure craft cruise past the long row of poplars, the occasional commercial fishing boat with booms and pulleys and nets chugging out to the locks. The Fremont drawbridge goes up. We gloat over our good fortune at not sharing the misery of the backed up commuters. Kasia brags of her training climbs on Queen Anne Hill across the channel while I shiver at the sight of tourists crowding the deck of an aquatic-capable duckmobile honking its indignant goose-sounding klaxon at passersby, including us. That water just looks so cold. We walk on. I can’t look at the boats anymore. We stop by the twin silos of the gravel plant, where the path shared between pedestrians and bicyclists turns away from the canal. The gray, chalky dust covering the lot reminds me of Wyroc, which reminds me of that rusty labyrinthine monument to abandoned industrialism in Žamberk, and that reminds me of the plaster dust in the hotel lobby where I met Dana, the goth-girl who stole my letters, the translations anyway, and suddenly I long to be back there. I mention this to Kasia. My ex makes the mistake of asking about Anežka.
My father did call me back, finally, yesterday. He apologized for taking so long to get to it. Winter pretty much puts a stop to outside work in his part of the world and he has a remodel project going that he can’t abandon to his foreman until the frame is bolted into place. When I told him about the orphanage and the grave and Anežka’s claim that the World War II flier was her father, he dismissed it outright as nonsense that Rosalie cooked up. I asked him point blank: are you her father, or aren’t you? Silence followed my question. “Your name was penciled in beside hers in the record book.” I did not mention that it had been sloppily erased. Instead of answering, he asked if I’d met Jungmann. “We need to talk about that,” I said, “because he had Anežka arrested …”
Well, while this was an awkward way to deliver the news, it wasn’t clear to me that he would particularly care, so his reaction stunned me. I was unprepared to hear him say “That is unfortunate.” He repeated it, “That is unfortunate.” Not his usual anthem: those people are dead, it’s not our concern. No, this time it was unfortunate. We agreed that he should come out to visit as soon as he could get away.
Since that conversation, I’ve concluded that no one will catch Anežka’s child. That child is hiding and will wait for its mother to return. Suddenly I hear “on your left.” I step out of the way of bicyclists on the path. Her child is starving, slowly. She will starve to death. There is nothing I can do about it. I burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” Kasia’s eyes fill with the surety that she could fix this, whatever it is, if I’d only let her.
“Kasia,” I say through the snot and tears. “Anežka’s child is going to starve to death. I’m so sorry I couldn’t give you children. You would have been so good with children. I’m so sorry.”
“You mean I wouldn’t have starved them?” She holds me until I stop shivering. Her thin riding jacket smells of the funk of hard earned sweat. There is a bracing marine saltiness in the breeze. I’m reluctant to part from her warmth; it’s so hard to stop shivering these days. “Let’s go back,” she says, “I’ll make you a nice low-sodium mushroom and celery soup. It’ll have a little cream in it for flavor. You’ll feel better.”
On the walk home I can’t talk for the sadness of it all.
After dinner, Kasia offers to head up Fremont Avenue to the video store but I tell her I’m not up to it. She offers to spend the night so I won’t have to wake up alone—as much, I suppose, so she won’t have to wake up alone. I thank her for a lovely day and assure her it’s just exhaustion, it would make anyone weepy. When she’s gone, I go into the map room, close the door, and curl up under the comforter on Anežka’s bed. Except to go to the bathroom and take medication, that’s where I stay.
* * *
What does a child look like who’s starving to death? What will poor little golden lady bug look like? Will her mouth wrench open? Will she curl up quietly and wait for her mother? The refrigerator hums now and then. Wind claps the stove flue. Buses growl out on Fremont Avenue. The whoop whoop of a helicopter? Another suicide jumper on the bridge? She’s curled up in some recess in the loft. Rats will find her. I am the cause of it. I’ve failed. Failed at everything. Failed everyone. Kasia. Milada. Anežka. Failed my father. I am not a cause worth fighting for. Dialysis will be wasted on me.
A boat blasts its klaxon. The sound is muffled, far away. What if the bridge went up and wouldn’t go back down? What if there were no alternate route? What if you just waited? At what point would it be acceptable to say, okay, it’s time to curl up?
I’m curled up. I have no reason to exist. I am necessary to no one.
In the university law library I read about a landmark 1980s Chicago case, Wilson v. Cook County. Wilson was told to confess to the killing of a police officer. When he refused, under the direct supervision of the commanding officer, he was trundled in a sack and beaten severely. When still he wouldn’t confess, the detectives applied alligator clips to his ears and nostrils and shocked him. He screamed from the pain. He fainted and had to be revived. The shocks were repeated until he said what they wanted him to say. If they said he killed the officer, he killed the officer.
What was he thinking when his nerves were being stimulated and his neurons and skin were frying? At what point did he curl up and say enough?
They hadn’t counted on him squealing about his treatment and suing everyone. Plenty of witnesses corroborated Wilson’s testimony and the allegations were proved to the satisfaction of the civil court. Still, all that ever came of it was the dismissal, more than ten years later, of the commanding officer involved. No criminal charges ensued. Why? More than a third of the judges in Cook County were assistant district attorneys at the time when torture was used routinely. They got th
eir confessions. They looked the other way. Now these same people were the judges hearing human rights cases. I told Milada that if she decided to help Mr. Zámečník she would obviously salvage nothing for her father, he might even say things she’d rather not hear, and it would only break her heart. She countered with the observation that to do nothing is to be complicit.
Even if Františka puts food out, the rats will eat it.
Around the time of Prague Spring, with so many human rights watch groups snooping around, the prisoners had to be kept looking unharmed for show trials, so guards switched to using so-called “clean” exhaustion tortures. These could tend to take a lot of time, requiring guards to keep going at the prisoner around the clock, but they didn’t cause visible damage, like even the electroshocks did, often leaving a corpse or a lobotomized zombie. The prisoner would be kept awake in a near-freezing cell under bright lights for two days. On the third day—by then most prisoners would cry in terror at the least sound, the least stimulation—the prisoner was forced to do deep-knee bends or pushups until they fainted outright. The interrogators would then have the guards wake up the prisoner with ice water and start again. After one or at most two rounds of this, most prisoners signed whatever was put in front of them. For the more incorrigible cases—or for the more famous prisoners, such as Milada’s father, who could not be allowed to get off so “easily”—an especially ingenious torture awaited, a stress torture that no one could withstand indefinitely, but that would make the prisoner foolish enough to complain in court sound like a whiner.
Zámečník told Milada about the “nose-to-wall” technique. It’s not a torture I’ve read about. He told her that this was certainly done to her father. After her insulting conversation with Halbrstat, hearing about this was enough to push her into his cause. According to Zámečník, the guards forced Milada’s father to stand with his toes and the tip of his nose against the cold wall in the interrogation room. His hands were wrenched up behind his back and bound in such a way that his shoulders were nearly pulled out of their sockets. After an hour or so of enduring this, according to Zámečník, and especially after two days of being kept cold and awake, followed by maniacal exercising, you would scream for mercy. “Your eyes would feel like they were bulging out of their caves. You felt like heavy rocks were squeezing you from all sides.” Your ankles and feet in that hour would swell to double their normal size. Most prisoners were crying or praying out loud well before the hour was up. But there was no visible damage, and that’s what Jungmann and the courts counted on. Apparently a few hard cases sometimes did hold out. If they didn’t give in and sign confessions and point the finger at others, the nose-to-wall procedure was repeated three times over a twenty-four hour period. During this time, the prisoner was given no water to drink. The pressure and the lack of fluid caused their kidneys to fail. These were the disposable prisoners. There was no dialysis in their future.
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