Better You Go Home

by Scott Driscoll

  “Your boopsy bring this to you?”

  I’ve managed to wake Milada. “She felt bad about what happened. Remember I asked you to go with me to that shop in Letohrad but you said there wasn’t time?” I dive into the colors pooled on the sill, down into my father’s basement, down to the butterscotch bowl, down to the stacks of quarters, to the cot where I rubbed his feet. How utterly utterly lonely he must have been when he learned his mother was ill and he couldn’t go back and then Anežka was sent away to the orphanage, and he couldn’t go back, and then he had us, his Iowa family, and he couldn’t go back and he had this loneliness, his longing, his desire for something he couldn’t share, that had nothing and yet everything to do with us.

  Milada joins me at the window, small, thin, sleepy, naked from the waist down.

  “I want to say I have been very wrong.” She can never get the “v.” I am wary wrong. “Tak moc mě to mrzí, neměla jsem žádné právo to po tobě žádat. If you do not wish, maybe you will say nothing to Anežka about kidney tomorrow. I understand you do not wish to obligate.”

  “Let’s see what the blood tests say.”

  “I cannot believe she would say no. She is too generous.”

  “I’m more worried about Jungmann. You say she can be extradited to Prague for a medical emergency, but he’ll find some way to interfere, you know that. I can’t even … I can’t imagine what they’re doing to her in there.”

  “We’ll nail that bastard to cross. You will see.”

  “You certainly have a lot of faith in Mr. Anton and the human rights court.”

  “I have faith in justice.”

  “Really? My little escape artist believes in justice now? What has Mr. Anton been telling you?”

  “You think you are funny?”

  “I’m glad my father is here.”

  “Now you see his Czech side, what must you think of him?”

  “Honestly? I think he’s still a little bit in love with Rosalie. I see it, what everyone’s been saying. He’s nervous around her.”

  “It was better when he was lonely in Iowa?”

  “I didn’t say that. It worries me a little, that’s all.”

  The pub below fills the silence with accordion ditties. The radiator hums. I brush my fingers through her sweat-dampened hair, touch the tip of my tongue to that extra epicanthic fold at the corners of her eyes. A tide of desire floods in. Blood carrying willful little oxygenated protean hammers pounds its way to the axial point in my crotch. I touch her shoulder.

  “Chico, we can be happy tonight. We can make love? Is okay? You okay?”

  She hands me the Snickers bar. I chew it and swallow hurriedly and pull the sticky caramel out of my teeth. I run my tongue down her belly. Her skin smells even more down there of baked eggplant. My fingertip traces a figure eight along the inside of one taut thigh and over to the next. Seeking more stimulation, she nudges two of my fingers up inside of her. I put my tongue to work. She caresses my genitals, strokes my penis. For diabetics an erection is not a given. The Snickers bar is doing its job. Okay. Dissenting arguments make their case like so many judges. This makes no sense. It will only hurt worse. She pushed you away once and she’ll push you away again. I tell the judges to recuse themselves. Is it hopeless? Am I tossing my dignity into the corner like a dirty shirt? Her hand guides me in. The room burns amber. The vase wobbles. She whimpers, “You are inside of me, you are inside of me.” A home cast in amber. I am in it, tasting beaded sweat, inhaling baked eggplant. The amber preserves the moment, a container for all that longing that needed its object. I understand, I think, my father now. The hold Rosalie has on him.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Later that Night before our Visit to the Prison

  Soft light from the square caresses a drowsy post-coital Milada. Her chemical-dyed black hair fans out stiffly across the pillow. Curled under the comforter, she looks as small as a child. Much as I’d like to snuggle back into her eggplant warmth, I finally talked her into driving me to Hnátnice to search the orphanage for Anežka’s cat. If she gets too comfortable I worry she’ll change her mind.

  “Did you by any chance unlock Isis’ cage?” Before we go, there is one little thing I need to resolve. The night after our rafting trip, after hitchhiking back to Sardis, I knocked on the door of Waters’ cabin to apologize for deserting the group while Milada slipped away to have a private moment with our indomitable Peregrine.

  Her eyes struggle to open. “Please.”

  “I know.” I caress her warm cheek. Her lipstick is still on, still too thick. Those cheekbones, those squinty eyes. Memorize this moment, this bliss, this calm. Press it into your memory’s passport pouch. The form thank you card from Sardis included a scrawled note from Waters informing volunteers that Isis’ cage had been left unlocked, and for that reason all lock combinations had been changed. “But, did you?”

  She regards me as though I were fruit she wonders if she should have left unpeeled. “Remember Torkey?” I nod. How could I forget the red-tailed hawk that has to sleep inside the clinic lest she screech in terror at the least sound. “Torkey cry out. I thought certainly Waters will come.”

  “She and I were weighing the pros and cons of a cabin by the Skagit.”

  “I wanted to see if Isis would be calm with me.”

  “That means you had to open his cage?”

  “Isis is bird. He have to have chance to do what instinct tell him to do. If cage is locked is not ...” We do a word search. “Authentic. Authentic freedom.”

  “Well, you know … But, what did he do?”

  “He is nervous but soon he is calm.”

  “He make any attempt to leave his cage?”

  “He came to edge. Does he want freedom? I think okay, is not right for me to decide for you my frightened little man. So I close his cage.”

  “Apparently you forgot to reset the lock.”

  She laughs. “Maybe I thought he will try escape on his own power.”

  Reluctant to leave the womb of our lovemaking, she nevertheless hauls herself with some zeal to the modernized bathroom for a rare pounding sizzling hot shower. A to-go food order is waiting around the corner at Snack Bar. We’ll eat en route. Tonight is my father’s chance to talk privately with Rosalie. I picture them sitting side by side on the cot in the blue room. Rosalie in black silk, by turns funny and disdainful, sipping Slivovice, smoking those brown cigarettes, František in his blue Union pants and cushiony Rockports, yellow golf cap squashed over his thinning hair, chewing a toothpick, looking solemn, wondering what she did to his life. Our visiting hour isn’t until mid-afternoon, after the prisoners have had their lunch and time in the prison yard. We can strategize over breakfast tomorrow. By then Dana should have something to report.

  * * *

  Dana is not at reception. Must be on the job. Good. In the cool night, exiting town south along the boulevard with the street lamps painted optimistic primary colors and the curbs cleared of embarrassing pre-revolution Škodas, a route that first took us past the abandoned concrete factory, and behind that the guard tower cupola with its roving, menacing searchlight, we pass two headscarved older women. They’re carrying yellow plastic shopping bags and have just departed a late bus. They recognize Milada, or seem to at least, turning their shoulders away, muttering, throwing caustic glances back as though her Škoda carried something contagious and shameful. Since she started working with the mayor to find witnesses to the torture she’s been seeing this reaction. The human rights business is a trash pile many locals would not benefit by seeing turned over. Too many family rats might scurry out.

  The spindly pines on the foothills are etched in the harsh silver glow of a rising gibbous moon. Farm lights cluster below, buoys in a turbulent dark sea. In the moonlight, from a distance, Anežka’s orphanage with its gargoyles looks apocryphal.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  That Night at the Orphanage: A Surprise Talk with Rosalie

  A scant seven kilometers
separate Písečná from the orphanage. Still, Rosalie confesses, tonight is only her second visit ever. Her first was the memorial service held more than fifty years ago for the flier incinerated over France. She admits she bogusly claimed to have married the flier. With Jungmann’s protekce, falsified papers were no problem. “Why I should not take his widow pension?”

  Rosalie pokes a finger into worm tunnels riddling the logs. “So much money I send! See how my daughter take care to this place? You mustn’t let her fool you. She is no saint. She refuse work for me but she will happy take my money. Little thief.”

  That Rosalie would be waiting for us at the orphanage came as a complete surprise. Well, not complete. Approaching through the wet yard, we saw a light through the boarded up windows and knew something was up, but we ignored the condemnation notice posted on the door, figuring that with Anežka in prison the worst had already happened. When we first entered, a rat skittered through one of the doors that lead into perimeter rooms, giving us a moment of false hope. Then we beheld what had become of Anežka’s sanctuary. Furniture smashed. Bedroll ripped, tufts scattered like fur from a butchered animal. What happened to her crib blanket?

  The odor of rodent dung climbs up my nose. “Cat must be on vacation.” Rosalie laughs at her own joke, the morbidity of which is not yet known to us. She adds, “You like to see my tattoo, son of František Lenoch?”

  “Tattoo?” I can’t get over feeling incredulous, not that she would have a tattoo, given her trade, but that she would be here instead of with my father at the farm.

  “Very few people have seen. But you I think will find interesting.” Exasperated by Milada claiming that none of this is necessary, that we’re here for one reason and that is to find the cat, Rosalie opens her stylish overcoat, a faux London Fog, and tugs down on her silk pants. On the exposed withered blue-veined buttock is a tattoo that looks like a bruise. Milada aims the flashlight. I bend over my magnifier. A butterfly with dangling legs? Actually—I don’t tell her this—it resembles a mosquito.

  How could I not see what is obvious? It is flying stork, thank you very much.

  The stork is carrying something. I ask what it is. Look more closely, I am told. It’s no use. Though I sense this is nearly the last thing in the world Milada wants to do, at my request she peers through the magnifier.

  “I see two initials.”

  “F and L,” Rosalie says, not one for prolonging suspense.

  “František Lenoch?”

  She grins. “I had a devil in me.”

  Rosalie hoists her pants and closes her coat and produces one of those brown imported cigarettes and lights up. “I wanted to please your father. That whore, she make impossible.”

  That the “whore” is my grandmother requires no translation.

  “Činíš hodně mužů šťastnými? You keep all your men happy?” Milada says.

  Rosalie drags hard on her cigarette. “What do you know about love? You love Fascist you have married?”

  “At least we raised our own children.”

  “Don’t step on my blisters!”

  Before this spirals down a toilet of vituperative, I ask if she’d care to explain what she meant earlier when she said Anežka’s cat had been “seen to.”

  “Do you know,” she says, evading my question, “your father wanted to be cowboy?” I wait for her to go on. “True. He have big dream. Go out west and ride horse and round up cattle and shoot rattlesnake with six shooter.”

  “My father? The wannabe historian?”

  Shivering in the draughty air, Rosalie tugs her overcoat tightly around her shoulders, pats her long silvery baguette braid to inspect for fly-aways. “My mother died when I am young. It was not choice for me to go on big adventure.”

  “Your mother? According to the record book your mother was very much alive in December, 1938, when she went to Iowa with the Lenochs.”

  “You speak of Barbora Kacalka. She is my aunt.”

  Now I remember the confusing details in the record book.

  “Posečkej, než nade mnou uděláš kříž. You must wait before you judge.” Her mother, she confirms, was the sister of Barbora whom Halbrstat had told us about, the Marlene Dietrich look-alike with the razor eyes.

  “What about your younger brother, Leoš? Same mother?”

  “Leoš I could not help. When I am fourteen, my aunt send me to your grandfather house. She say I am old enough, I must earn money.”

  “It was my grandmother who set you up in the blue room, correct?”

  “Ano, but your grandfather gave to me for my fifteenth birthday satin bed-sheets. They were red and so smooth. I was tall and beautiful like my mother. I have krásná bujná ňadra.”

  Milada laughs despite her agitation. “She say she had lively breasts, like colts.”

  “My mother has died crazy from syphilis. I never had something nice.”

  “Why would my grandfather give you satin sheets?”

  She touches my cheek with a lotion-smoothed hand that reeks of her cigarettes. “Your grandmother was fat cow who gave hard kicks. He want me to feel welcome.”

  “And my father? What did he think about the sheets?”

  Her brow furrows. A softness steals over her that I haven’t seen before. “I must tell to you story. Is about your father.”

  It was a dry warm June afternoon on what she claims would become the best day of her life. There was time to fill before the evening milking and dinner chores. Rosalie and my father rode bicycles to Žampach Hill and climbed through the woods past the castle ruins to a meadow she’d discovered one day while hunting mushrooms.

  “Red poppies spread over field like thousand beating hearts. It was so beautiful. Ah!” She pinches out her cigarette, adds the butt to the box in her pocket.

  “He was shy, your father. Very … čistá duše.” An innocent soul. Curiously, this sounds very like the words Milada’s father used to describe my father. “I laid down blanket. I said to him we will only enjoy sun, nothing more.” She lights another cigarette. “Your father admire me like … hrdinku.” Milada considers for a moment then translates this as “heroine.” Tears well in eyes already red from the earlier brandy. “He was sweet to me, your father. He pluck poppies from meadow and make bouquet and bring for me. He cover my breasts and belly with poppies. So sweet.”

  She sobs. It’s an awkward moment. I want to throw a comforting arm around her shoulders, but Milada’s impatient squinting persuades me to censor the impulse.

  “You don’t ask if I was virgin,” she accuses, composure restored.

  It’s cold in this draughty hall. Our breath escapes in puffs. Feeling a shiver working through my resolve to stay warm, I ask if we can talk while we search for the cat.

  “This stupid cat is all you care about?”

  “It’s just cold, is all.”

  “Even your father don’t know this. I have never told to him.” Rosalie proceeds to tell us about a visitor at the inn. The visitor when she was ten took her into one of the upstairs rooms made up for overnight guests and showed her his penis and made her touch it. She laughs, but it comes out as more of a humph. “I have seen penises. Who cares? Is nothing special. But, Leoš. He is sent to this room to clean. This man is regular customer. I don’t know, but I think something happen with Leoš. I cannot protect him. I am sent to Lenoch house. There is nothing I can do.”

  “What did Leoš have to do with Jungmann?”

  “It was so long time ago.” She puts out her cigarette. Instead of lighting up again she gives me a strange look, a look that seems to draw back the curtain on a world she is not accustomed to exposing.

  “For more than fifty years I have lived with Jungmann. Never, until your father say about Leoš, have I understood him.”

  We hear the soughing of the night breeze. If the cat were here, and alive, we’d hear skittering that was not rats.

  “You wish to know why I come here tonight?” Those aristocratic lips press ruefully together. “Before
he leave for America, your grandfather demand return of satin sheets. I say him no. They are mine. I still have satin sheets. I am still waiting.”

  “Waiting?”

  Milada presses my hand, urging me not to encourage more of this confession that in Milada’s view is at best disingenuous. I frown at Milada. I want to hear it.

  “Charles, poslouchej. You are listening now?

  “I’m listening.”

  “Good. I must tell to you something. Anežka is your sister. This is why I have come here tonight. You must know this.”

  “But, why couldn’t you have simply said so? Have you told him? You have to.”

  “It has become complicated. He would believe? I don’t know. I didn’t want to see his look.”

  That look. I know the look she’s talking about. That faraway look of betrayal, of distrust, of longing for something that can never be.

  “You must believe.”

  “I do. I believe you.” Unless plum brandy has rotted your brain.

  She shoves her face close to mine. Pores bloom like rancid poppies in her drink-reddened nose. “Your father think I am greedy donkey. He think I make love with your grandfather so one day I will have farm.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Ne. Your father loved me. True love is rare. I never would betray. Jungmann was horribly jealous.”

  Of course, there is Jungmann. “You have to come with us tomorrow to the prison. I need you to tell Jungmann what you just told me.”

  She reaches a hand to my shoulder. “But you must make promise to me.”

  I nod. She takes my silence as encouragement.

  “Promise you will take Anežka away from here.”