Better You Go Home

by Scott Driscoll

  “Away? You mean to America?”

  “This old building is worm food. She must go away.”

  “Then, you promise to talk to Jungmann and my father?”

  “Ano. Tvému otci bylo ublíženo. Your father was very bad hurt.”

  “I have to ask you a difficult question.” What could I possibly ask that would surprise her? I press on. “Why did you send Anežka away? Why did you send her to grow up here?”

  “You ask why I send her to live in filthy place where no one care?” She touches her withered chest. “I know what girl will see at inn. I cannot have her around this. Is no place for child.”

  As she herself pointed out, I can’t possibly know what it must have been like. “Everyone was just doing what they had to to survive, I suppose.”

  “Crap.” I get the downturned lip curl. “I had my own orphanage for lost girls. I kept them safe. I hired teachers. After one year I make Jungmann use protekce to find for them work in government. I like to think of it as finishing academy.”

  “But with your own daughter it was different?”

  “Don’t step on my blisters.” She’s livid, the rancid poppies in full bloom. “I make sure my daughter will never become whore like me.” She turns. She peers into the orphanage’s dark interior, into that vandalized hollow abandoned place.

  “Do not worry.” Rosalie acknowledges our impatience to continue our mission. “You will find cat in loft.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Cat and the Loft

  A cold night breeze susurrates through the slabs of broken slate where the section of roof has fallen in. The cherry trees in the orchard have dropped their leaves. Corn stalks are bundled into sheaves. The last hay crop of the season is stacked in a hayrick right up to the loft. This handkerchief farm fed Anežka’s children. Thanks to Jungmann, it was never expropriated by the SS cooperative. Behind the iron curtain of the official story, Jungmann spent valuable protekce, a risk that could have placed him in a show trial that could have ended with a cold re-education in a Siberian gulag. Whatever else we might think of him, Rosalie claims, he did it for Anežka.

  Looking through the window at fields and orchards etched out of the dark by cold moonlight, I ask Rosalie why. Why would Jungmann do that for Anežka?

  “I made to him promise,” Rosalie explains.

  Behind the dank smell of mildew and dung, there’s a faint but unmistakable odor that’s hard to place. I’m beside Rosalie under the crowned center of the loft. Wielding the better flashlight, Milada pokes into cupboards in the covered recesses. Finding nothing, she demands that Rosalie stop playing games and show us where to find the cat. Rosalie refuses to be rushed.

  The breeze blows smoke from Rosalie’s lit cigarette in a swirl back into her eyes, causing her to lift a hand to clear them. That gesture, the lift of her hand, that and the odor call to mind an incident that happened when I was four and my father took me on my first hunting trip. It was fall, late October, like now. He flushed a male pheasant in the full glory of its plumage out of a cornfield, aimed, shot, and boom, down it tumbled with a thump like a bag of flour. Its breast feathers ruffled in the breeze. Was the bird still alive? I waved my hand in front of my face to make the awful smell go away. Until after he had showered, I would not allow Frank to touch me. That odor of violated flesh is here, but so masked by the smell of wet earth and hay and sour silage blowing over from the barn that I might have imagined it.

  “What did you promise Jungmann?”

  “Your grandmother. You should have heard her beg. Put pillow. Put pillow.”

  “Rosalie, you were telling me about the promise.”

  “Know what I said to her? I shouted ‘He never loved you you stupid cow. He never loved you.’ I wanted to be sure is last thing she will hear in her stupid life.” While telling me this she’s looking out the window at the bare orchard. “She sent your father away. You understand? How could I forgive? I could not.”

  Rosalie lights a cigarette, puffs. Her mood seems to lift, as though this admission had removed a terrible weight. “Thank you.” She pats my hand.

  “Your promise?”

  Milada warns that her patience is running out.

  She crushes the cigarette out against moistened fingers, drops the butt into the box in her pocket, immediately lights another cigarette. “He asked me to marry. To say no in my circumstance was not possible, really not possible. I say him I promise I will marry to you but you must wait. He said, if I agreed, he would adopt Anežka. She would inherit everything when I am gone.”

  “Why did you make him wait?”

  “Why, is obvious don’t you think?”

  “But you were prepared to marry him the night of the fire.”

  “He got drunk. He never got drunk, I never see him so drunk. He had not asked again for many years. But that night he ask.”

  “The night the government was handed over?”

  “Ano. He would have title to property. I was thinking for Anežka future. He could leave us with nothing. I knew his tender side. He wanted to be loved, just like everyone. I decided that night why not. For what I am waiting?”

  “You had been waiting for my father?”

  “Jungmann had softness in his heart for children. He know I send money for taking care to this place. He understood.”

  “Did he know Anežka was my father’s daughter?”

  “Ach, they were no rivals. Men, women, what difference to him? He like to dominate. But he was very especial to boys. Not like you think. He was not …”

  “A pedophile?” I suggest.

  “Ne, ne, never something like this. He like them to call him John Wayne. He saw movie once, something like Searching. He want to be that guy.”

  “So, he asked you. And you said yes …”

  Milada shines her flashlight into the recess where the roof slopes down. The crib blanket is hanging like a curtain from a low beam. It looks inconsequentially small in that dark void, like a truce flag waved from too far away to matter.

  I don’t have a good feeling about this.

  “Cat is playing peek-a-boo?” Milada says snarkily.

  “Wait,” I say. “Calm down, please. Who really started that fire? What happened?”

  “Ano,” says Rosalie, the only adult I’ve ever known to actually huff out loud. That December night, she tells us, everyone in Písečná had been invited to the inn to celebrate.

  “Including Anežka?” I ask. “She was there?”

  “Why we are wasting time?” Milada says. “We have deposition from Anežka.”

  “I want to hear her story. When we talk to Jungmann I want to be sure.”

  “Dej mi konečně pokoj. Stop it. Leave me alone!”

  “What happened?” I say, this time more gently.

  “Anežka has said lie. She was not in kitchen. I was in kitchen. It was accident. I spill some oil by stove. Jungmann is smoking pipe. Flame catch in oil. I think, good. Let whorehouse burn.”

  “But why would Anežka—”

  “When she learned I agreed for adoption—”

  “She was angry? She didn’t want the adoption?”

  “What difference. It burn. Is nothing else matter.”

  “She’s in prison because of it. Why in the world would she confess …”

  “Maybe she want her hour in court to denounce Jungmann.”

  “It must have been the deal she was offering,” I muse, recalling what she told me in this very place. “She confesses to the fire. He gives her title to the orphanage without the stigma of adoption. But once he had her confession, he had her arrested. No more problem for him.”

  “I would have married him.”

  Milada announces that she has heard enough. I follow her across the creaking, sagging floor. The night breeze rattles through the slate. I can’t help shivering.

  “Chudák kočka!” Rosalie gasps. “Chudák kočka!”

  Milada stops before the hanging blanket. “She say we must feel sor
ry for cat.” The cacti and broncos and lariats look to my blurry eyes like the tattoo on Rosalie’s hip, like dark bruises. That odor of putrefying flesh is strong.

  “Let me do this.” I pull down the blanket.

  Caressed by the breeze, Anežka’s gray cat twists with excruciating slowness. Its head is canted at an acute angle, its mouth wrenched open, though not wide, not as though in protest but rather as though struggling to draw a last breath. A wire hung from the rafter loops under its chin. There’s something odd about the body’s posture. Rigor mortis would have had time to set in, then relax, and the body would have bloated, but none of this could have happened recently. This flesh is partly decayed. Were it not for the cold, the smell would be worse. Its legs are curled in toward the abdomen, suggesting either that it was tied up or that the cat died while curled in that position.

  “You knew the cat was here,” I say. Regretting my accusatory tone, I add, “We’ll give her a proper burial, of course.”

  “Police do this when they make arrest?” Milada says.

  “Ano, it must be police,” Rosalie says in a timid voice so unlike her.

  Height works to my advantage. I unloop the wire. The over-fed cat has shed much of its bulk but it still weighs several pounds. Breathing through my mouth, I lay the big gamey stiff cat on the crib blanket. There I see without a doubt what I only suspected when it was hanging. Allowing for the inflexibility of stiff limbs, the cat’s posture suggests an animal that had curled up and died, which, if true, could only mean that someone found the deceased cat and subjected it to a post-mortem noose. But why? As a cautionary tale of some sort?

  “Rosalie, how did you know the cat had been ‘seen to’?” The rear legs tuck in, one under, the other stretched from the lower joint as though in the moment before expiring the cat had thought to attempt one last time to uncurl and search for its mother. “Why would the police bother to stage a mock execution? Would Jungmann do this?”

  “Do not blame to him.” Bathed in the moonlight, chin quivering, lips parted in supplication, eyes open, dilated, Rosalie looks grief-stricken.

  “Rosalie? You all right?”

  “I came to feed child. I find cat in cupboard.” She points vaguely into the recesses. “I think she maybe eat some poison.”

  “Anežka warned us, remember? Did you tell anyone? Why not bury the poor thing?”

  “One day Anežka will leave prison. I fear she will come back and never leave.”

  “But, you can understand. This was her home.”

  “Home? This is home?”

  Rosalie pinches out her last cigarette. Pulling the back of her hand across her mouth, she smears cherry lipstick in a long gash. Sensing that she will accept comfort from me, I leave the cat on the blanket and go to her and wrap her thin shoulders in my arms and hold her and smell her sickly sweet brandy sweat but there is no fear in her smell. She sobs exhaustedly against my chest.

  “He really loved you.” It’s all I can think of to say. And then stuff pours out I didn’t know was in there. “My father loved you more than he loved my mother. I’m convinced of that now. There was always something missing, something he’d lost. I think I know now what it was.”

  She pushes me away. “Is very kind for you to say. Now go.”

  We offer a ride back to town. She says no, she wants time here alone. She’ll catch a bus later. I remind her of her promise to meet us tomorrow at the prison and warn her not to be late. Without the authorization letter, which we have, I’m not convinced they’ll allow her inside as far as the visiting room. It might be best, I suggest, to spend the night at the farmhouse and then accompany my father to the prison, just to make sure. Too readily she agrees. Okay. I’m not going to argue with her now.

  I fold Anežka’s child into the blanket and lead the way down the stairs and Milada and I plod through the muddy cornfield—she managing awkwardly, her pumps sinking—and in the barn we find an ax with a digging blade. The plan is to bury the cat in the birch woods behind the barn. Despite the cold, the ground has not frozen yet below the surface, but this just seems too unceremonious. What will we say to Anežka tomorrow? My suggestion, that we sneak into the graveyard behind the Písečná church, draws a horrified gasp. For one, Milada doesn’t want this smelly corpse in the trunk of her Škoda. For another, that would be unthinkably sacrilegious. Instead, we dig a hole beside the grave monument to the flier killed over France. To bury cat and blanket requires a considerable hole. We bury the cat close to the bison that had been Anežka’s toy. If she feels so inspired, Anežka can dig her up and move her, but for now we let the poor thing rest in peace near her mother’s home.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Prison: A Visit with Jungmann and Anežka

  There are times when it’s best to close your eyes and work on instinct. That line I owe to Waters. I jotted it in my Steno. I recall it at the prison.

  * * *

  Political detainees, during those harsh decades of human rights scrutiny, were routinely subjected to various “clean” tortures. Secure confessions leave no scars. That’s what prisoners endured while awaiting trial at Žamberk’s infamous prison. Their sentence was often deportation to a gulag, or, if the vaccine of re-education was deemed to have taken, repatriation to a happy labor camp. The really lucky ones returned to the cooperative barracks or were sent to a cellar to shred documents. The rusty pulleys and belts and silos of the abandoned concrete factory buffer the prison from public view about as effectively as the official view that only what was necessary to protect the revolution went on here.

  After walking through an arched iron gate, we approach a ten-foot high wall topped with concertina wire. The prison wall is taupe, a scraped, peeling stucco. We face two doors. A large brown set of double doors allows for vehicle egress. We enter through a small metal door off to one side, a door painted the blue of old enamel pots, and find ourselves in a room closed off by a barred gate.

  A ceiling mounted camera watches our every move while we drop our personal items, including my daypack with my money envelope and insulin kit, into a blue box and remove a key. A voice on an intercom tells us to use the key and enter. When the bars close behind us we are instructed by a guard to approach the reception booth. A grinning toothless granny, flanked by five guards in the standard royal blue uniform, asks for our passports and the letter from the court authorizing our visit.

  We are shown to a wooden bench. We sit and wait to be admitted.

  * * *

  For the sake of appearances, Milada spent the night at Josef’s flat. This morning, she picked me up in her Škoda and drove me to the farmhouse. Rosalie had left. I would never have taken her to be a coward, but sure enough she reneged on her promise. Josef was sent out to find her. Bedřich harangued my hangdog father for having driven Rosalie away. To make matters worse, Dana told me she was unable to find Jungmann last night and had nothing to offer to our negotiations.

  Even Milada reneged. This morning, of all mornings, she decides her time will be better spent with the mayor? The lab results from Anežka’s blood tests should come today, she reminded me by way of excuse, as though I needed reminding. The chance of a good protein match, meaning a match that produces minimal antibodies, we were told by Saudek, is about one in four if the living donor is not family. With a family donor—and if what Rosalie says is true, Anežka is family—the odds are better, though there is still some debate on this. Since we are not in Prague and not near a fax machine, Milada asked that the results be called in to the only absolutely reliable phone in the village. Besides, Anton deposed a witness whose reputation is unassailable. If Jungmann gives us trouble, there’s our trump card. Tomorrow, regardless, she has to return to Prague to her medical practice and to her neglected husband and son. Today, at the prison, it is just my father and me. Anežka’s counsel is due to join us.

  We wait on the bench. The granny seems to forget about us entirely. My father asks me to have faith in him. I do, but, still.

&
nbsp; “Feelings don’t lie,” I say. “I’ve seen you two together.” The intimacy is still there, like a dormant reaction waiting for the right allergen to flare it up. “Rosalie and I had a deal. How could she screw this up now?”

  A tight-lipped guard interrupts, insisting that we follow him. He leads us through a series of three clanking barred gates into a corridor. The plaster walls and floor tiles are peeling and cracked. On either side are wooden doors with round peepholes. The guard ushers us through one of those doors into a small room with a wooden table the size of a desk and flanked by four polished wooden chairs in much better shape than the corridor. A tall wooden coat rack, a pole with hooks and rings, is the only other piece of furniture. No windows but that peephole. My father respectfully reminds the guard that Anežka’s legal counsel is supposed to meet us here. The guard says he will report our concern and then leaves and the door shuts automatically behind him with a resounding click that leaves us wondering if we’ve been locked in.

  I feel around the furniture for hidden bugs but can’t find any and my father reminds me that it has been three, going on four years since the Velvet Revolution rendered such paranoia unnecessary. He further warns me that I must stop thinking like a brainwashed American. We will be treated like visiting dignitaries, he guesses, and I’m thinking, Jungmann? Really? We hear shreds of conversations through the walls. Since my father is absolutely convinced it’s safe to talk, I repeat a factoid Milada shared with me this morning. Anton Zamečnik found a 1973 Amnesty International report claiming that in the preceding ten years in Czechoslovakia, from roughly the early 60s to the early 70s, there were no incidents of torture. These dates precisely correspond with the use of “clean” stress techniques like the nose-to-wall torture. “Her mayor friend is preparing an eyewitness. We should use this to squeeze Jungmann. She wouldn’t tell me the name of the witness. Has to be confidential until the trial.”

  “I think I can persuade Jungmann to cooperate.”

  “You keep saying that. You haven’t persuaded Rosalie to help us.”