Better You Go Home

by Scott Driscoll

  A bare bulb, lacking any sort of lamp shade, dangles over a table planted on a square of sheet metal floor beside the kitchen area, which occupies the corner to the right as you enter. Bedřich is sitting at the table, waiting impatiently. Obviously he’s been coached by Milada to give us a moment before the onslaught begins. Marie, his former housekeeper-cum-common-law wife, is on a sleigh bed the size of four full-sized beds pushed together over against the wall near Milada. Marie’s gout-swollen leg is propped on a stack of pillows. She apologizes for not getting up.

  The chill is working its way down into my bones. I ask my father if he remembers the house being cold like this. He looks admiringly at the mammoth stove. It’s a beauty, with scenes of farm and forest on glistening tiles, albeit a cold beauty. The sweet aroma of something baked hangs tantalizingly in the air. One of the ovens must have been lit earlier.

  “Welcome, welcome.” Bedřich can’t take the suspense any longer. He stands, thrusts shoulders back military style, extends a hand to my father, gives my father’s hand two vigorous pumps, clasps his shoulder. Today Bedřich is wearing a clean brown corduroy jacket with elbow patches and freshly pressed chinos. His sparse snowy hair is slicked back. He grins at my father, unashamedly exposing that one brown tooth in a mouth full of empty gums. My father accepts the handshake as though he were a visiting dignitary who expects fawning.

  “Someone sleep in the blue room last night?” I join them at the table.

  Bedřich says defensively, “Where she is supposed to sleep?”

  As we’d surmised, Anežka’s mother had been staying off and on with Halbrstat, but with Anežka’s arrest something flipped Jungmann’s on-switch. He’s been intimidating everyone, so Rosalie has been moving around, occasionally spending the night here at the farm. Those imported cigarettes are hers, the Slivovice hers. My father registers this with a knowing click of the tongue.

  I feel like heaving one of Bedřich’s vexed sighs. A shadow crosses the windows facing the fields. Storm on its way. Milada leans over the sleigh bed, whispers something to Marie.

  “Cítíte se příjemně?” Marie is asking my father if he feels comfortable. In the kitchen area, a platter of poppy seed pastries, curved like a horseshoe, is giving off that sweet aroma. “Coffee will be soon.” She’d earlier plugged a heating rod into a wall outlet and placed the coil into a pot of water to bring it to a boil. When the grounds settle we’ll have Turkish coffee.

  Bedřich delivers the platter to the table and shovels wedges onto plates.

  “Děkuji.” I wipe crumbs from my lips. Marie’s rohlíky are neither too buttery nor too sweet. A splurge, for sure, but anticipating something like this I compensated with my shot this morning. “Delicious. Tell Marie we appreciate the trouble she went to.”

  Under the harsh light of the naked bulb, my father looks his age and then some. His face is thinner, bonier than I remember. Maybe worry has kept him awake too many nights. In the soft light filtered through the muslin curtains, Marie’s plump beaming face lends her the look of a child perpetually waiting for Christmas. This is how I’d always pictured my grandmother. It occurs to me I’ve never actually seen her in a photo.

  “You have any pictures of my grandmother?” I ask Bedřich.

  He waves away my concern. Sure, of course, by and by. Noticing that I’m eating sparingly, Marie swivels off the bed and straps on a metal cane. A ring clamps her left arm above the elbow. Her swollen left foot and ankle are wrapped in an ACE Bandage. Wincing with every step, she limps to the table.

  “Prosím.” She cuts a second generous slice of the pastry, glowering at Bedřich for his bad manners. Marie curses her “new Russian stove,” which was purchased in 1950 when goods from the east were subsidized. The stove has two large ovens and several smaller chambers. A box holds sticks the thickness of my wrist, the fuel they gather from the woods.

  “What’s wrong with the oven?”

  “It heats unevenly,” my father translates.

  Bedřich dismisses it as nonsense. She has her “new” stove, what more does she want?

  The Turkish coffee is ready. Milada abandons her post by the window and delivers the coffee on porcelain saucers and dumps four lumps of sugar into her tata’s coffee and gives him a peck to sue for peace. He ignores the peck. He watches my father to see how he’s reacting. Life behind the Iron Curtain has left scars. I have no doubt he’ll tell us all about it, and I’ll take plenty of notes in my Steno, but lodged behind that overweening grin has to be the worry that this farm by rights belongs to my father. It was my father who snuggled into that sleigh bed to stay warm while the bedpan he’d brought down from the loft simmered on the stove to thaw and the smell of cow piss wafted in from the stalls, and he had to have wondered why the smell of his father was not here, why he was sharing his funk with the Kacalek woman across the creek, or was life simply awash in funk, was that it? Was funk life itself?

  Talk requires lubrication. Bedřich sends Marie to a back storeroom to fetch liquor. Before Rosalie arrives and upsets everything and everyone, Bedřich wants us to hear his version of what happened.

  * * *

  Over the next few minutes, we nibble and Bedřich complains about the fall weather turning cold early. If it gets much colder we could get our first snow tonight.

  “Everyone wanted to escape to America. Be cowboy,” Bedřich says with that toothless grin that’s so hard to read. He reaches into his corduroy jacket and pulls out a black ledger book the size of a weekly pocket planner. “Someone had to stay home.” He shows my father his little black book. “Here. Everything they took from me. It’s written.” Incredible. He recorded every last scintilla of milk and meat and eggs he was ever forced to hand over to the collective, everything, that is, produced on my father’s farm over a ten-year period.

  “Tata, tata, tata.” Milada smoothes down his staticky white hair. “We don’t want to hear this old story. Where is Rosalie? We are still waiting for her.”

  “She is free. She will come when she want. Sit down.”

  Marie hobbles back in balancing a tray with two pint glasses of Czechvar pivo and three shot glasses and a bottle of Slivovice. The purple plums on the label are moist with dew. Milada gives me a stern look that says be moderate, don’t keep pace with her father.

  “Na zdraví!” Bedřich pours a round of brandy and raises his shot glass.

  “Pravda vítězí!” I rejoin. My father corrects my broad-voweled pronunciation. He sips the pivo but declines the shot. “The truth will win out.”

  Bedřich and I down shots. Marie hobbles back to the pantry to fetch food.

  “Ten years after you left,” Bedřich says, eyes already shiny from the brandy, “KSČ start reforms.” They got rid of, for example, any coins commemorating Masaryk. Thuggish men in cheap suits began to show up even in villages as small as Písečná. Anyone obviously “bourgeois,” and that included prosperous land owners, went to prison work camps for re-education if they didn’t have good enough protekce.

  This is a delicate subject, but I have to ask. I open my Steno and ready my pen. “In 1968 you were sent to prison, but before that they left you alone?”

  “My father, he buy farm from your grandmother. But they leave him alone because I have protekce with Jungmann.”

  “Show us what they took,” my father says, changing the topic, knowing I am certain to ask what Jungmann’s interest was in helping this farm.

  After glowering over his shoulder at his doubting daughter, Bedřich eagerly reads the ledger’s entries. In the ten years between 1948 and 1957—in 1957, following the Hungarian uprising, there was a crackdown that changed everything—he handed over: twelve thousand liters of milk, six thousand kilos of potatoes, one thousand six hundred kilos of beef, one thousand three-hundred kilos of pork. The egg count was spotty and highly variable. He scrunches up his forehead, estimates two thousand a year. So, roughly twenty thousand eggs.

  “They take, but they pay nothing! How I should feed my own f
amily?”

  “It was same for everyone, tata.” Milada ruffles his silvery hair to calm him down. “I was too young. I don’t remember much from that time.”

  “Winter of 1957-58 was worst ever. If farmer still believed in workers’ revolution he put his tongue behind his teeth.” They were forced to deliver to the co-op every liter of milk. Every kilo of pork and beef. Every egg. Most gave up the farm and went to work for the co-op rather than face starvation. He’s looking at my father now. “Josef Lenoch was not so crazy after all.”

  “I remember that winter. Mother was very sick.” Milada pulls her father’s head to her chest and rocks him like a baby.

  The rain’s sudden pelting halts our conversation. Milada distributes pots under numerous leaks along the west wall where the building is apparently not covered by the loft. We have to talk loudly to hear over the symphony of plonking.

  “To surrender!” He pours a second round of shots. The plum brandy burns less this time. Milada and my father both hurl a warning look my way. My kidneys can’t take it, my blood sugar will soar, I know, but I have this fatalistic attitude that caution just doesn’t matter today or tomorrow. I’m quickly getting drunk and I feel incredibly liberated and I’m going with it.

  Marie thumps back in with a cutting board and a length of klobása cut into thin slices and offers it around. Chores done, she settles in for a nap over on the sleigh bed.

  “So, Bedřich. How did you manage to hang onto the farm?” My father apologizes for my rudeness.

  “Jungmann. Who else? You have no idea. People disappearing. Neighbors spying on neighbors. You want to keep klobása in cellar, you will be denounced as enemy of people and you go in prison.”

  “Jungmann must have wanted collateral?” When he says nothing, I add, “It wasn’t out of the goodness of his heart.”

  Bedřich fixes my father with a pleading look. “We knew one day such madness would end. It had to end.” He grins. “Look. Here we are.”

  My father refuses to comment. That happened a long time ago. He prefers a journey into his memories. “My mother said her rosary every night before bed in the chapel. She hung her rosary from the crucifix on the wall. The beads were lavender crystal. Every Palm Sunday she put dried palm fronds behind the crucifix. Those fronds stayed there till the next Palm Sunday.”

  Bedřich admits that he really only knew my grandmother during the two years he and his father lived here before she died, and she was sick for most of that time.

  “I don’t get it,” says my father. “She was healthy as a bull when I left.”

  Bedřich watches my father as though expecting acid to drip cuttingly from his lips. “Tvůj otec věřil v předmanželský celibát. Ano?” He is claiming that he remembers my father, back when they were boys, being as Catholic as his mother. His mother believed in celibacy before marriage. “But then there was Rosalie.” He pours himself a third shot of brandy. I cover my shot glass.

  “Help me understand this. Her husband is sleeping with Kacalka at the farm next door. So what does my grandmother do? She takes in Kacalka’s beautiful daughter and keeps her like a consolation prize?” In a clearer mind I’d never be so forward, but it needed to be said and I’m glad I said it.

  “You don’t know what it was like,” Milada says.

  “Of course I don’t know what it was like,” I say loudly over the rain’s plonking. “But I do know what it was like to grow up with a father whose heart was always somewhere else.”

  My father refuses that bait. “What happened to my mother?”

  “Children, children.” Bedřich lifts his palms like a pontiff. “Prosím. Please.”

  I push up from the table. The vast room begins to swing. I clutch the table to catch my balance. “Please excuse me. I think I’ll go lie down until Rosalie gets here.”

  My father gives me a worried look. Milada guides me out into the corridor and through the saloon doors. In the blue room she smoothes the duvet on the cot. The rain out here is a muffled thrumming, a lullaby. She pricks my thumb. Blood sugar over four hundred. Can’t get away with anything. She gives me a shot of fast acting. For ten minutes I lie on the cot under a duvet that smells sourly of alcohol sweat. I keep my eyes closed. The room spins and spins. She takes her turn at ranting. No more alcohol. Let your father and my father settle their own business. We need everyone cooperating tomorrow. No word yet on the blood proteins. We might know as soon as tomorrow. Meanwhile, I need to be calm.

  “I need to find Anežka’s cat,” I say convinced the reasoning behind this is self-evident. “We have to find her before we go to the prison tomorrow.”

  She looks at me like I’m seriously demented. I hear her telling me reassuring things. No, the cat, I repeat. Nothing matters until we find the cat. With her cool hand on my forehead, I pass out.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Later that Afternoon at the Farm: Rosalie Shows Up

  The oil cloth taped over the window nearest the table keeps out drafts, but plunges the room’s midsection into a cellar gloom. In that middle is a simple wooden table covered by a utilitarian oil cloth and surrounded by rickety, glued-together ladder-back chairs. Around that is open space interrupted by stout posts and stacks of boxed sundries. The planked floor, radiating cold, is patched with sheet metal. A bench that looks like a church pew painted red abuts that mammoth sleigh bed. All of this is perfumed with essence of fermented cabbage and wood smoke. The breath of a lived-in home. My father looks up at my entrance, his eyes worrying. He is still sitting in the unflattering glare of that bulb dangling over the table. His elongated face looks gaunt.

  “I have a request,” I say. Our guest, a tall lean figure sipping coffee in the kitchen area, arrived while I was napping in the blue room. “We all drive over to the orphanage and once and for all find Anežka’s cat.” They look at me like they never heard of the cat.

  A smoke-hoarsened voice replies, “Do not worry for this child. Child is ...” She searches for a word. My father translates. “Taken care to. Seen to.”

  “Seen to?”

  Anežka’s mother steps into the light. She is taller than her daughter, even a bit taller than my father, her waist-length white hair gathered behind her in a thick baguette ponytail. Rosalie’s lank figure is draped in black silk, loose pants, a billowy top with embroidered seams bearing a pattern from the village. She’s smoking one of those long brown imported cigarettes.

  “You must be Charles.” She squints through the smoke, scrutinizing me. “You are much taller than your father. More handsome, too. He’s gotten too thin.” Her angular face has an exquisite bone definition that I don’t recall seeing in her daughter’s saucer face. Her mouth especially fascinates me. If ever there were such a thing as an aristocratic mouth it’s hers. Her thin lips tilt down in one corner, in the manner of one perpetually bored by the inevitability that she will get her way. Cherry red lipstick slops over the boundaries of those lips. Drinking brandy? Her sweat reeks of it, but her voice is steady.

  “How long you are diabetic?” Rosalie looks at me with what I take to be an expression of sympathy. With her, sympathy could be merely pity.

  “Seventeen years. Since law school.”

  “Milada and your father have told to me you wish for kidney from Anežka? This is true?” Her aristocratic lips press down with bemused disgust. “Maybe she will finally do one thing useful in her life.”

  “I intend to ask her. Tomorrow, when we visit.”

  “You think she had hard life?” She coughs. A chronic smoker.

  “Growing up in an orphanage—”

  “You are young. You are American. What would you know?” One unusually cold January morning, Rosalie tells us, one of the “girls” at the inn came running in from the yard, where she was collecting eggs, screaming that her fingers were turning blue. “She had diabetes. She had been sent to us by her mother. Her name was Martina. Her father was German. He had been killed in purge of German men. Her mother thought she’d be safe with
us.” To save her hands from frostbite, three fingers had to be amputated to the knuckle joint. Disfigured, she was no longer acceptable to the foreign clients. They wanted her eliminated when they found out her father was German. Rosalie refused. “I took care to my girls.”

  Bedřich is gazing open-mouthed at Rosalie as though she were minor royalty. Marie is napping over on the sleigh bed. The rain’s plonking has slackened.

  “When did my mother get sick?” my long-faced father asks.

  “A year after you leave her stomach blow up like balloon.” Bedřich looks at Rosalie, Rosalie looks at Bedřich. One of them has to tell this story. “Little Anežka called Lenochova babi. It was very sweet.”

  Rosalie snorts. “She didn’t know Lenochova was so …” They search for a word and come up with “cruel.” My father scarcely flinches.

  How can I say this diplomatically? “You were very very young. Were you even sixteen when Anežka was born?” Rosalie shakes her head all but imperceptibly. “My aunts in Cedar Rapids once told me they believe you poisoned Lenochova. Rat poison? I always assumed that was just a crazy story.”

  Milada interrupts her pacing. “It was probably stomach cancer.”

  “It was pillow.” Peeling away that aristocratic dignity as though it were a mask, Rosalie seethes with righteous anger, the kind only a self-absorbed teen would display without irony. On the loose-skinned face of a seventy-one-year-old woman, this naked anger looks demented.

  A few months after Anežka’s first birthday, Bedřich continues undaunted, my grandmother’s condition worsened. At her own request, she was given the cot in the blue room. “She demanded to keep child with her. She loved little Anežka.”

  “Where did she go, meanwhile?” I nod to Rosalie.

  “There was too much work.” He looks at my father. “After you have left, my father and I move into here. We give to Rosalie small house.”

  This proves too much for my father. “My mother should never have let you stay.”