Is there a higher order of value here? If one holds out, not out of bravery necessarily, but because one believes it is wrong to be complicit, yet the result is that one dies, is that sacrifice more valuable than a bogus confession that keeps one alive to tell the story? Now and then the phone rings in the living room. My phone enjoys my view of the Aurora Bridge. At one point I hear my father’s voice leaving a message but I can’t hear what the message is. If I leave the map room, it’s only to eat a few nibbles of low-sodium crackers and skim cheese so I won’t fall into a glucose coma. I want to stay awake for this stress torture. I want to feel what Anežka is feeling.
The Red Cross had nothing but rumors to report to the United Nations. The United Nations did nothing. Prisoners died. They didn’t even die for a cause, most of them, they were merely victims of chance. Wrong place, wrong time.
Kasia calls. “I called your father,” she shouts into my answering machine. “I know you’re listening. Get your ass out of bed and answer or I’m coming over.”
How he gets himself here, lets himself in, and finds me curled up in the map room I’m not entirely sure, nor do I ask. He’s here. Now I have to deal with him. Frank. František Lenoch. Silver hair, neatly combed, sparse on top. Frail in the chest now that he’s into his seventies. Wrinkle-free Union work pants, royal blue. He’s wearing a sleeveless undershirt and I know it will be as white as freshly fallen snow.
“I have to tell you I’m sorry,” I hear him saying. This is confusing. Sorry that Anežka is in prison? Sorry I’m feeling this way?
“She is an admirable person,” I hear myself saying. I sit up and lean into the pillow, braced against the iron head stead. These things weren’t built for comfort.
He thinks I’m talking about Milada and effuses over her helpfulness. “No,” I correct him. “Anežka. Your alleged daughter. She is admirable.” I have some clarity on this situation, I tell him.
“We should act because it is the right thing to do,” he says, quoting me back to myself. “Remember you said that?”
“We don’t. We like to think we will, but we don’t. She did, though. Now she is in prison and her child is starving to death.”
“Child? What child?”
He can’t help it, he slips a toothpick into his mouth and chews. It’s semi-dark in the map room. Cocoon-like under the comforter. It has the vinegary odor of unwashed me. Must be late afternoon. He sits at military attention on the swivel chair at my computer desk. Who does that remind me of? Picks up the slender vase with the gold filigree. Pokes at the flowers with a work-blunted finger. “Nice,” he says, being nice. He aspires to look at it more closely but I ask him not to turn on the light. I don’t want him looking more closely at me.
“Milada asked me to pass on a message to you.” He waits for that to sink in. I let him wait. He goes on. “She made me repeat this until I had it more or less memorized.” He fiddles with the vase until I ask him, given its fragile nature, to please set it aside while we’re talking. “It’s a quote from Vacláv Havel. She said you needed to hear this. I was really impressed. My Uncle Alfons certainly would have been—”
“Frank.”
“Okay. Sorry. Okay. Hope is not being convinced that what you’re doing will turn out well. No.” He fidgets with the vase again. I give him a look. “Hope is finding a way to believe that it makes sense to do what you’re doing, that it is the right thing to do, whether it turns out well or not.”
“You can sure see why Havel would say this.” But I can’t summon the will to argue. “Milada really told you to say this to me?”
“She’s worried about you. She told me about Anežka’s arrest.”
Suddenly I’m up, the comforter sloughed. I’m dizzy and head-achy but I’m off the bed. I shine my LED light on the map. Show him the triangle. Show him Hnátnice, home of the orphanage where I met Anežka. So many questions I have. Why was she sent there when she had two perfectly live and healthy parents? Did he ever send money or try to contact her? I search for my Steno on the computer table. “I’m going to take notes.” He advises me to calm down.
“I told Milada I’m coming over there to see what I can do. I might have some influence with Jungmann. She said she wants you to come with me. I told her I’d check to see if you’re feeling well enough.”
“Really? I’m surprised. She say why she changed her mind?”
“I’m concerned about your kidneys.”
“Dad. Anežka says she’s not your daughter.”
He looks at me, fiddles with the vase, catches himself, stops. “She could be.”
“Could be?”
Now he’s worrying that toothpick.
“Jungmann? There something to that?”
“What did he tell you?”
“Me? Nothing. It’s what he told Anežka.” When my stubborn father merely chews that toothpick, I tell him about Jungmann’s offer to cut a deal.
“After all these years.”
“What are you talking about? Maybe you didn’t notice, but I’m not doing so well here. I don’t have time for any more nonsense.”
“How is Rosalie doing? You spoke with her?”
“No, actually. And apparently she’s not speaking to Anežka these days. But your old buddy, Halbrstat, he can put you in touch. If she’ll talk to you.”
“If I will talk to her.”
“You know what. I think you just better go there yourself.”
“Yes, you are probably right.”
The image from Jiri’s black light play comes back to me. The older woman, who once pined for the Eternal Wanderer’s return, sits hunched, wrapped in a shawl, refusing to look up. Look up, look up, I tell her, but no, she can’t hear it, or won’t.
* * *
A day after my father’s arrival, the second Friday of October, I get the congratulatory call from the University Medical Center. Come in and collect your beeper. I am now on the official waiting list. My best chance to make the short list—maybe only six months—is to sign up for the dual kidney/pancreas transplant. My internist consults with me. With medication and a strict low-sodium diet we can reduce the swelling and lower my blood pressure and that should reduce or even eliminate the headaches. My creatinine is high, but not dangerously so. “Hold out for the transplant,” he says. Regarding dialysis, he wants to wait and see. He thinks it’s premature to fit me with the fistula. Wait and see how long? “Oh, three months,” he says, blithely. “Let’s revisit this in three months.”
Milada calls me back late Friday night, early Saturday morning in Prague, with unexpected news. Dr. Saudek, her colleague and head of the transplant team at IKEM in Prague—she reminds me, in case that bit of information has slipped my wracked mind—informed her that they have an unexpected opening on their surgical calendar a week from Wednesday. Ordinarily it would take at least a month just to process the necessary tests for a live donor, but he would personally arrange to have the process expedited. I laugh. Is she serious? If I had a live donor I wouldn’t be starring in this horror show. Your sister, she reminds me. Your half-sister. Anežka. If her blood antigens are compatible … Such tests can be run on a patient in prison; a blood draw can be ordered without the patient’s consent if the clinic claims to be looking for tuberculosis. For a medical “emergency,” she could be transported under guard to Prague. Anežka could obviously refuse to cooperate, but if all went well I could have a kidney as soon as the end of October. In Milada’s view, I should feel grateful for this offer. She used up a lot of protekce to arrange this. “If it does not happen, okay, better you go home and you will begin dialysis.”
“What about her child? Any word?”
Sadly, Františka has not been able to find the cat. We can only hope the cat is feral enough to have returned to hunting. This is an absurd assumption. The selfish thought of escaping dialysis puts me over the edge. I tell my father I’ll accompany him, if the invitation is still open. He admits there is another worry. Rosalie. “I thought I never wanted to see o
r talk to that woman again in my life,” he says. He asks me a strange question, uncharacteristic for him. Have I ever wondered why I was forbidden to visit my grandfather? Have I ever wondered?
Have I ever wondered.
“Well,” he says, “now I guess you’re going to find out.”
Chapter Twenty
Back to Prague: Third Week of October, 1994
A chilly late October wind whips around the south bell tower of St. Vitus Cathedral. The vantage in Prague Castle up on the hill offers an excellent view of the Vltava in its Prague bend, where it curls shallowly past Old Town and under the Karlův Bridge. I talked my father into coming up with me to the cathedral’s tower parapet—he was game for it, despite his knee trouble, though he took his time—as I wanted to see if my comparison was apt, if the Skagit, in flood, was as grand as Prague’s river, but now that I’m back here I can’t find any honest point of comparison. Between the rotten salmon and the baldies and harbor seals and a racing current that piles downed giant conifers against bridges as though they were matchsticks, what similarity is there to a restaurant barge featuring a string quartet playing Dvořák and Janáček while floating under a medieval bridge so crowded with tourists it might as well be nicknamed pickpocket row? A teen couple mounted the tower’s two hundred and eighty-seven spiraling steps just ahead of me, boots clinking with metal. My heart pounded and my ankles screamed, but I kept up, step for step. I still have it in me.
Despite the sting of the wind, they grope each other with abandon. “What else do you do with that tongue piercing?” I say but they ignore the funny American, if they hear me at all. My creatinine at last check had climbed to just under eight, near to crossing into the red zone. My internist was dead set against my leaving Seattle. I told him to tell the surgery team I’m here to ask for my sister’s kidney. I did not mention the possibility of surgery in Prague. Squeezing past the lovers, I inhale the perfume of their lust with a hunger that’s pure nostalgia, no real appetite.
He’s leaning over the parapet, my father, František Lenoch. Frank. The ear flaps on his lemon-yellow cap are tied under his chin to prevent the cap from flying in the wind. The brand new Rockports with cushiony soles he bought just for this trip give him an added inch in height. I suggested he ask for Bat’a at the shopping mall, a more European style. A sales clerk working on commission convinced him Rockports were more popular. For a man who went through what he did, he can sometimes be so, I don’t know, naïve? Okay, he was young when he left. I can’t suppress a sigh. He looks like a tourist in his own homeland.
“Any of this look familiar?”
“I only came once to Prague. I was with my Uncle Alfons.”
“Has it changed much?”
“I don’t remember everything being so gray and brown.”
“What do you remember about your Uncle?”
“I’ve told you about him. He was the history professor at Prague University?”
Looking out over the sea of steeples and spires and chimney pots, I remember how my mysterious Great Uncle Alfons grew to hero status for me when, as a boy, I learned that he’d been executed by the Nazis. I pull out my Steno, thinking to take notes, realize it’s too cold and windy for that. And besides, I get the feeling that if he knows the story is strictly off the record he’ll talk more openly.
“He invited me to visit him in Prague to watch Masaryk’s funeral procession. At that age I was very patriotic. I didn’t understand what he wanted to warn me about.”
“When was that?”
“September … ’37? I was fifteen, so, must have been.”
“Did he encourage you to leave?”
“Yes and no. Let me tell you what happened. If you are still curious then you can ask your million questions.” The night before the procession, my father begged his uncle to take him up to the castle, up to this very cathedral, St. Vitus, to view the casket and honor their hero. Masaryk had been president during most of their short-lived democracy and was enormously popular. The press was warning to expect a long line and they were not disappointed. By the time it was their turn to walk past, the casket had been closed. Pointing to the tricolor flag of the republic draped over the coffin, Alfons said, “Do not trust Beneš.” That was the new president. Don’t believe anything that traitor says tomorrow when he gives his speech.
“Did you think he was exaggerating the danger?”
“I thought he was being unpatriotic.”
Alfons took my father the next day to join the procession. Frank can’t remember if Beneš delivered his speech in Old Town Square or Wenceslas Square, but he thinks it was Old Town Square, maybe even from the very balcony where the Communist takeover was announced eleven years later. The speech was quoted verbatim in the papers and my father committed it to memory and recalls bits of it to this day.
“Those were words you don’t forget.” My father looks off across Prague’s vaunted spires as though he could still hear the joyful sound of the cheering multitudes. I call you all without exception, from the left to the right, from the most remote hamlet to this capital city. The crowd was quiet. Everyone expected this much. But he finished with a line that made everyone cheer like they had heard St. Peter’s call to heaven.
“In English it translates, ‘To the bequest which you placed in our hands, we shall remain faithful!’ That’s a famous quote from Hus. He was a patron saint for us. ‘Faithful we shall remain!’ ‘Věrni zůstaneme!’ You should have been there. You should have heard it.”
“What did your uncle think? Sounds like he might have been suspicious.”
“That’s when he finally admitted the real reason he invited me to Praha in the first place.” Under a clear autumn sky, more than a million people—my father is obviously impressed by these astonishing numbers—lined the streets along the casket’s route into Wenceslas Square. “It was so quiet you could hear the horses’ hooves. A general on horseback rode ahead of foreign heads of state. That was exciting.”
“What did he say? Why did he invite you?”
“He reminded me that I was his sister’s only son. He advised me not to be here when the Nazis came. ‘When you will come back,’ he said, ‘then you and young men of your generation will help us rebuild our freedom.’ ”
“How did you react?”
“I told him he was crazy. I told him there was no way I was ever going to leave.” He laughs. “I had no idea how much influence he had with your grandmother.”
But it’s cold and I’m shivery so I ask if he’d mind if we leave the tower and head down into St. Vitus and talk out of the wind. He’s fine with that.
It occurs to me, as we descend the narrow stairway, that what we more urgently need to talk about is Anežka. Saudek put me on the schedule for a kidney transplant at IKEM for Wednesday next week. Because I’m one of those rare lucky individuals with AB positive blood type, it’s all but certain Anežka could be a donor provided she has at least four out of seven blood antigens favorable to mine. If indeed she is my half-sister, that’s an added value. Live-donor organs from family have a significantly lower rejection rate post surgery. Anežka’s blood has been drawn and is currently being put through the lab tests. Anežka is still in prison in Žamberk. Of course no one has found her cat at the orphanage. My father is probably right. It makes no sense to distract ourselves with a search for a cat that is surely already dead. Still, I have to know. I have to have something definite to tell Anežka. It would be too cruel to simply show up with a shrug, especially when I consider what I’m asking of her. Shame can be a powerful deterrent, I get that, and I sense that my father is making excuses to avoid having to see the place where his daughter was forced to grow up. If he wants to help me he’ll have to understand that this is the right thing to do.
Before we finish our talk, my father wants me to see the wooden panels in the cathedral that depict Bílá Hora, the infamous battle of White Mountain. “This defeat began our shame,” he says, showing me brown carved story panels. It’
s so dark in this vault I can’t see the details, but I do remember reading about this bit of Czech infamy. Bílá Hora ended in 1620 with the foreign-born king and queen forgetting their own child, they were in such a hurry to flee. I remind him of this, goading him for a reaction. “Oh, I just think that makes a pretty good story,” he says dismissively. Sensing I’ve touched a nerve, I decide to let it go, for now.
The cathedral’s echoey stone interior is hardly warmer than outside. Now that I’ve started I can’t seem to stop shivering so I ask if he’d mind continuing our talk back at the flat. We stroll down the hill and catch the trolley to Wenceslas Square and descend the escalator to the metro platform and catch the “C” line out to Chodov and I escape to my room for a nap.
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