Better You Go Home

by Scott Driscoll

  Outside the last gate and the peeling taupe wall, the spotlight strobes over our heads and casts macabre reflections among the rusted monsters in the concrete factory yard. Never have I been so glad in my life to take a gulp of fresh air, but the moment I attempt to relax, a sensation like a cutting torch sears through my back and takes my breath utterly away and leaves me doubled over. My father guides me to the bus stop bench across the boulevard by a streetlamp painted cinnabar red, the red of a sunset viewed through smog. I curl up on the metal bench. I tell my father to go to the town square and find a taxi. He won’t leave my side. We wait for a bus.

  Nothing matters now. Without Rosalie’s cooperation, there is no way to meet Jungmann’s demands. In the moment I am too sick to care about anything but finding my way back to the hotel and into bed.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  That Night after the Prison Visit: Last Week of October, 1994

  The Madonna in the Landa painting looks especially reproachful. Convinced I had it right when I curled up in my map room, that I never should have allowed my father to tempt me back here, the last thing I want to hear is Milada telling me I need to get up and try to walk. I have blood in my urine. The swelling won’t go down. All I want is to sleep.

  The only thing worse than no news is good news that is absolutely useless. Milada spoke by phone with Dr. Saudek in Prague. The results from the blood tests were not great, but four of seven blood leukocytes did not cause antibodies to form so they’ve agreed to do the transplant.

  My father is pacing the room, massacring toothpicks. Milada and Josef hover by my bed. What would it take to convince Rosalie to agree to Jungmann’s terms? It’s up to my father now. I’m done.

  Milada has to drive back to Prague. She has a shift to cover tomorrow morning. She suggests that I ride back with her so she can have my back X-rayed in Prague. I’m tempted. But my ordinarily over-protective father gives me the strangest look, or rather, a look I’m not used to in him. He wants one more shot at this. He’s convinced he can still win over Rosalie. It’s the venue that’s the problem. The prison is Jungmann’s turf. Despite what she says, she’ll never go there. Nor, I let him know, will I, not again, not willingly. Neutral turf is what this calls for. What if we suggested a ceremony at the orphanage? He looks at me.

  Milada leaves. She has to. Mainly because I want sleep more than anything else, I decide to stay the night, but I don’t agree to more than that. Following Milada’s advice, my father gets me off the bed and walks me around the room and brings me water and makes sure I drink plenty even though that will mean other unpleasant consequences.

  There’s a folkloric dance concert tonight at the Žamberk Municipal Library that Josef wants to attend. I urge him to go, by all means, he’s done enough already. If my father wants to talk to Rosalie, if he still thinks that will help Anežka, that’s his business. Go, I tell them both. Let me sleep. My father won’t hear of it. He won’t leave me this way. Josef, likewise, wonders if he should try again with Rosalie.

  “For god’s sake.” The two of them are fussing like my two candle shaving aunts in Cedar Rapids. The pain in my back at least goes numb when I’m up and moving around. How far is it to this concert? Josef points past the balcony. Just off the square by the mayoral house. “Let’s all go,” I say. “It’s better than this hand rubbing.”

  * * *

  For two excruciating hours the wide stage ebbs and flows with a tide of folk dancers washed our way from the Economic University of Bratislava. Pride glows in their sweaty faces. My back is squeezing like a clamp. I suddenly announce I can’t sit through another minute. My father is enjoying this so much he doesn’t want to leave. “Don’t you see it?” I ask my father. “It’s like watching old Leni Riefenstahl films glorifying the Olympics and Hitler’s alleged master race. Only this isn’t in black and white.”

  “The dances are nationalistic,” admits Josef. “Nationalist is patriot with inferiority complex.” He demonstrates that he can’t raise his left arm to the level of his shoulder. The prison doctor—an older generation nationalist—refused to notice the broken clavicle he suffered during a beating in jail, so it was never set and his fractured bones knit together “like people in village. Each one shove to get on top and no one go anywhere.”

  “The show’s almost over,” my father says. “How’s your back holding up?”

  The long finale commences. At last there is drama. A string band, accompanied by an oboe and a piccolo flute, fills the hall with a haunting atonal sound, by turns bright and then melancholic. Those youthful faces display their joyful aspirations like spring flowers. Soon enough they’ll see how grim adults adjudicate their revenge on such eagerness.

  My father tips forward on his folding chair. There’s something going on here, he sees something that has him entranced. Young women, wearing ankle-length pleated skirts with bloomers and rainbow colored aprons and bodices rimmed by hand-embroidered seams, ululate a cappella. My spine shivers. Wearing black ankle boots and knee-length pants with stockings and collarless peasant shirts, the young men yodel and strut like peacocks. This isn’t for show, they’re really into it. My father stares as though watching himself.

  The finale finishes with a couples’ dance. Boys from one village bounce the bottoms of girls on bent thighs, then swing them over shoulders and taunt their rivals with catcalls. There’s a fierceness in the rivalry that isn’t funny. My father has picked one of the couples as his favorite. All I see are pink faces pinched with parochial pride and piggy eyes. I realize I’m seeing my father in those faces, the side of him that would abandon his own daughter and his father as well. It’s too sad, too sad. I don’t know this man. I do see why he didn’t want to come back. What happened to Anežka cannot be blamed anymore on his father or on Rosalie, not entirely.

  I leave the theater without explaining. Let them follow if they want. At the hotel he catches up with me. I pack my bag hurriedly, worrying that I’ll miss the last bus to Letohrad where I can catch the late train to Prague via Brno. I leave things in the room, including that amber vase that had been intended as a gift. The room is paid for the night. As long as adrenaline or whatever it is masks the pain, I’ll keep moving. You owe Anežka, I tell him. Stay here. Don’t blow it this time.

  * * *

  The train from Letohrad to Prague via Brno stops at Lanšperk. The brakes screech at an excruciating pitch and the car jerks to a halt and we’re left in a deafening silence. The interior lights dim, abandoning us, my father and I, the car’s only passengers, to murky shadow. The outdoor platform is lit at sporadic intervals by gooseneck lamps. In the inverted conical light given off by those lamps a night fog promises that the air will be chilly and damp.

  We wait. The train shudders again. From a distance we hear a garbled voice over a loudspeaker. The ticket office at the station is dark. No passengers are waiting on the platform. Again there is a screech, but no sensation of motion. Finally, my father steps off onto the platform. The forward section of train has moved onto a connecting track. Our section has been left behind.

  The waiting room is not locked at night, I know this from Anežka, but I also remember her reporting that a guard strolls by once an hour to prod anyone who has fallen asleep with his nightstick. Vagrants are not allowed to overnight in station waiting rooms. Ticketed passengers are permitted, provided they don’t use the room to sleep.

  It promises to be a long, miserable night. It’s near the end of October and night temps fall below freezing. The waiting room is heated along the fringes by radiators, but the center of the hall is cold enough that we see our breath in clouds when we walk around and our feet under the benches get very cold. The middle of the hall is filled with parallel rows of slatted-wood benches that are hard on backs. The clock mounted above the dark ticket window torments us.

  After we’re settled more or less, I take a booster shot and eat two wedges of tasteless pasteurized cheese individually wrapped in foil—kitsch cream, I call these pallid
wedges—and munch a low-sodium cracker. I offer kitsch cream and crackers to my father. Knowing my more urgent need, he declines.

  Our reflections wall off the view to the night outside. It’s quiet except for the clock’s metronomic tapping on our frayed patience. Once, in the wee hours, a mail cart on metal wheels will roll along a platform on the opposite side, for a moment, in my drowsiness, giving me false hope that salvation has arrived. In the meantime, my throbbing ankles heat up like ovens. My back stiffens from the cold and too much sitting. Every nitrogen-poisoned cell in my muscles screams for relief. Nothing seems more precious than sleep.

  My father didn’t feel right allowing me to leave alone. Now he is overly solicitous. Can he bring me water? There must be at least a faucet in the washroom. Would I be more comfortable lying down on the bench? He’ll drape his coat over me as a blanket and then stand by the heater, and run interference with the guard if need be. He saw me looking at him in the theater. This is about pride. He will not make the same mistake twice.

  “This is really torture,” he says to make conversation. Then it dawns on him what he just said and he looks sheepish.

  “You want to hear about torture?” Recalling Josef’s rendition, I paint for my father the image of what must be happening to poor Anežka. “For two or three days, they put you in a room even colder than this. No windows. The walls are not soundproof. You hear screams and praying. Sometimes the sounds are coming from you. They flood the floor of your cell with cold water and take away your clothes, all but your underwear, and they give you a little scrap of a blanket and let you shiver under bright lights. The slop bucket is never more than a meter or two from your nose. There is no way to escape the smell or the light or the cold. To eat they make you crawl to the metal slot that’s set at about knee level in the door. The bread has mold and the dishwater soup gives you diarrhea, but you eat it, what else are you going to do?”

  “I’m sure it’s awful,” my father says. His face looks blue and even more drawn and gaunt in the cold light.

  “Not always. Then they act like your best friend. Like you’re on the same team but you just needed a little wake up. You get better food. You get to sleep in warm dry clothes. In the dark. But in a way, that is worse. They never tell you if it’s something you said or didn’t say when they throw you back into that cell with the cold water.”

  “They want a confession.”

  “They want to break your will. When I first met Anežka, she told us a story from her days as a kid in the orphanage that really stuck with me. I asked her if Rosalie ever came to visit. What would you guess she said?”

  “I’m guessing probably not.”

  “Right you’d be. But Anežka was glad for that.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?”

  “Yes, we do have to talk about this. Know why Anežka was glad? Your daughter was glad she never got visits because the ones who did got their hearts broken again and again and again.”

  “Okay. Okay, I’m sorry.” He paces the rows of benches, breath billowing, his supply of toothpicks exhausted, hands jammed deep into coat pockets. “In 1946, there were ships going back to Europe. The SS America was making a return run. Maybe I could have booked passage. I don’t know. Mostly it was wealthy people, movie stars, politicians …”

  “Did you even try?”

  “I still blamed your grandfather and Rosalie. I could not forgive them. Anyway, I don’t know where I would have gotten the money. In Bohemie town there was talk. New York seemed so far away …” He breaks off. What does it matter what his intentions were? “Look, I’m here now. Maybe you believe this is a lost cause, but I have to try. Will you help me? I can tell Rosalie likes you. Maybe you could persuade her.”

  “To what? Marry Jungmann? Sign paternity papers declaring that Anežka is his? You prepared to sign such a document?”

  He clicks his tongue. “Just persuade her to agree to meet.”

  “No. I’m going home.”

  “What if I can persuade Jungmann to bring Anežka to the orphanage?” he says. “You could talk to her. We have the results of the blood test. It’s worth a try.”

  I frown. “How are you going to persuade him?”

  “Well, if he wants to marry Rosalie—”

  “Milada believes he’ll go before the human rights court,” I say. “I’m certain none of the judges or prosecutors got where they’re at without getting their hands dirty. It’s in their best interest to keep this quiet. You think Jungmann’s not working it?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “I don’t think he is.”

  “You’ve been away too long.”

  “I know him.”

  “What do you mean, you know him?”

  “I saw him kill Leoš.” My father’s jaw, desperate for its customary toothpick, clenches and unclenches.

  “What did you see? You saw him actually do it? What weapon did he use?”

  “I didn’t actually see it happen. Actually happen.”

  “What exactly did you see?” I persist. It’s the lawyer in me, I can’t help it. His vagueness at a time like this drives me crazy.

  “It was dark in the stalls. But I could still see what Jungmann was letting Leoš do to him. They ran down to the river. I waited. I didn’t want to embarrass them. When I got to the river I saw Jungmann pushing down on something. It was dark, like I said, I couldn’t see what he was pushing. The next day the best swimmer in the village is found in the river.”

  “You never reported this?”

  “I was so angry with Rosalie I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Forgive my saying so but this thing with Leoš seems to really bother you. I never heard you say anything about him, and finally you come back home to Czecholand and it’s Leoš Leoš Leoš.” After some time passes without him saying anything, I add, “What is he to you?”

  “My father ... I just don’t know. There is a good chance …”

  “What? A good chance what?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know. But Leoš might have been … my father’s …”

  “I can see how this would be a sensitive subject, but what does this have to do with Jungmann? Why does this keep coming up?”

  “You saw. He’s in denial. He’s told himself some other story.”

  “In his heart he knows what you know? Can we use this somehow?”

  “I think it’s best we let it drop.”

  “You think Rosalie needs to hear more about this?”

  “I said we should let it drop.” He stands in shadow by the wall heater, shivering, rubbing his arms. “I think Jungmann in his twisted mind really thought he was protecting him from the Nazis. People were frightened. That was in the days right after Munich. Beneš was in London. No one knew who to trust.”

  “That must have been right before you left.”

  “Yes.”

  It seems comical to me now, all those years as a kid thinking of my father as a brave hero who would have joined the partisans and lived in the forests in Poland. What it all comes down to is everyone saving themselves and then telling a good story later. Am I any different? Apparently not. I’m still leaving.

  * * *

  Neither of us talks again for a long time. At some point I’m aware of lying on the bench, his coat over me. The next thing I know a blunt poke against my shoulder has jolted me awake. The hand that’s holding the nightstick is purple from lousy circulation, I recognize the symptom from my own ankles. The guard’s blue uniform reeks of damp wool and cold. It’s his job to harass us, of course. Now I’m awake. Where is my father? I sit up. The guard continues his rounds. There he is, standing by the wall radiator, his arms wrapped over his chest, ear flaps down over his ears, looking gaunt and cold and withdrawn into his loneliness, but then he sees me sit up and he smiles wonderingly, am I okay? I see the apology in his look. He tried to keep the guard away. Before falling asleep I had been remembering how heroic I thought he was, and now he just seems so lonely and so lost, a
man no longer of his time, a man who lost his home and who certainly never believed he had real choices, not as I see it, and only now does it occur to him, because I rub it in his face, that he did have choices. But I don’t have to abandon him to that shame and loneliness, do I? So I might not make it home. Aside from staying alive, what exactly did I have to do that was so pressing?

  * * *

  When the kiosks open, with our baggy eyes and lumpy faces we buy fruit and coffee and hang out at the station. While waiting for the train back to Žamberk, I tell my father I’ll stay, but this is our last chance. I’m having some difficulty with urination and I’m feeling nauseous and headachy and hypersensitive. Might be sleep deprivation as much as my kidneys. That’s why it’s an effective torture. You feel everything acutely. You’re open to suggestion. You start to believe anything they plant in your psyche, including the notion that abandonment, even torture, can be a sign of love.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Monday Night Waiting in Žamberk: Two Days Left before the Scheduled Surgery

  The dark shades of gray and ochre splashed against that cold chalky sky in the Landa painting capture pretty realistically the feel of early winter hanging over Žamberk’s square. A biting wind blew snow flurries through the park in the late afternoon, dusting limbs with skeletal leaves hanging on, dusting the mausoleum, throwing a veil over the Madonna. The season’s first snow caught my father returning from the courthouse. He pulled the flaps on his yellow cap down over his ears. Is it also snowing in Prague? If snow accumulates on the old plum in Yveta’s garden, I worry it won’t survive, it’ll split. We need to get word to her. She must get her boys out there to shake off the snow. My father can’t dissuade me from this obsession. He dutifully heads back down to reception to use Dana’s phone.

  A wedding ceremony has been arranged. Josef talked to Rosalie. My father wisely elected to stay out of it, at least, long enough to give Josef a chance. Meanwhile he met with Anežka’s legal counsel and delivered an envelope thick with U.S. dollars, an envelope that officially does not exist, which the counsel, with prodding from Mr. Anton Zámečník, distributed to the correct judges, after which authorization for medical transfer to IKEM in Prague was filed at the prison. Copies of the authorization were also filed at the records office with the judges’ signatures. Still, Jungmann could easily have found a bureaucratic way to delay the procedure, if nothing else by transferring her to a different ward, where other paperwork, other bribes, would be required. But in this one respect, my father’s intuition regarding Jungmann proved correct. Call it hubris. Call it delusion. Call it psychosis. All excuses for not calling it what it really is. Jungmann believes Rosalie has always loved him, and will now prove that by marrying him, and Jungmann wants everyone there to witness this grand apotheosis. Does that make him a megalomaniac? He believed in his cause. He believed in the revolution as the path to ultimate harmony. He believed that it was his duty to reeducate the revolution’s enemies. But he also believed the Soviets were colonizing thugs. Were it not for his protecké, my father’s farm would have ceased to exist. But for his beneficence, Anežka’s orphanage would long ago have been taken over as barracks for the Soviet cooperative. There would have been neither meat nor uniforms nor a home for her children.