The guards leave. Our party is ruddy in the flickering glow. Uncertain shadows dance around Anežka, who hovers near the fire. I look at my father. He feeds the stove. Soon the others will arrive and he might not have another opportunity, but he can’t find it in himself to speak to her. I think he is afraid of his daughter.
“Jungmann has said to me you will sign some paper to say that he is my father.”
He clicks his tongue repeatedly.
“I’ve been wondering,” I say to give him time to reflect. “Any idea where that bison came from? The one out there—”
“No, no, I don’t know. It was not from me.”
While I might not understand his reasons, I do know that he would have said something nebulous rather than pointedly lie. “What about you, Anežka?”
“Where is my child? You will show to me please? Ano?”
“Sure, but now is not the best time. Jungmann will be here soon. You guys need a chance to talk.”
That only offers my father a way to avoid this touchy moment. “No, you two need to talk. Anežka, we have news from the lab in Prague. The blood tests?”
“Frank. Dad. Not now. Come on.”
Anežka lays a hand on my arm. “They took blood, but I know is not for tuberculosis. Nurse say they will not steal my kidney. I must give consent. I ask why? Why they want my kidney?” She looks at my father. “I know more than you think I know.”
“The tests were not great,” I say. “But there is enough compatibility.”
“I will help you. Samozřejmě. Of course.”
“Thank you.” I enfold her in a mawkish hug. Such relief. I had no idea how much in denial I had been.
“Before you knock me to ground, come. Show to me where is my child.”
Filled suddenly with a bravado I haven’t felt since the beating, I guide her out into the snowy yard. Her escorts are in their warm van playing Mariáš. I wave to them. At the bison she says a few words in her own language. She stares at the bison as though trying to see through it down to her beloved child. I assure her Dana loves her and would do anything for her. I gush with praise for how well she must have loved her children. Okay, the child I knew was a cat. But you would have to be more obtuse even than I not to see that cat as a surrogate for her orphans. I hug her again, even more mawkishly than before.
* * *
The vanilla aroma of Jungmann’s pipe announces him. When he pushes through the door, he is not alone. Halbrstat, shorter, thicker, coarser, limps in behind him. The prosthesis squeaks mightily in the cold. Jungmann touches his manicured goatee, the only twitch, the only chink in his façade to suggest he might be feeling something other than naked hubris. Has Dana had a hand in this? His tall lanky frame is buried under a sheepskin coat. Fair enough, it’s cold for real. But there’s more … a wide-brimmed black Stetson, the top pressed flat and brim rolled as though it’d been tucked into a dusty saddlebag. And the way it’s punched low over his brow. And a yellow bandana at the neck. And leather chaps over worn denims. Tooled cowboy boots with tall heels meant for stirrups. It’s John Wayne from central casting.
“Evening.” He flicks the brim of the hat without cracking a smile.
My father looks flat out disgusted. “You think she’ll be impressed?”
“I am impressed.” Escorted by Josef, the bride has entered quietly to avoid the usual fuss. Rosalie’s nose is purple from the cold and I wonder again if she has been hitting the brandy hard. Whatever she’s wearing is hidden under that faux London Fog.
Rosalie takes stock of her daughter. If there is pity in her, she hides it well. “You have enjoyed your stay at Hotel Jungmann? You’ve lost weight, I see.”
She turns to my father. “You have said your apologies?” He says nothing, eyes her evenly. Josef tends the fire in the stove.
Halbrstat, who is after all her cousin, she ignores as though he were a post. It’s Jungmann’s turn to fall under her scrutiny. Far from seeming surprised, she gives every sign of approving. “But, you look more Mephistopheles than sheriff. You promised you will shave goatee.”
Too late for that now. At her behest, we gather in the lantern circle around the swing. She mounts the platform. Jungmann follows her up and digs his pipe out of a pocket and frenetically scrapes and reloads. Anežka stiffens her spine. I stay close to her to lend moral support. It’s fortunate that Milada is not here; the mere presence of Halbrstat would spark a conflagration. My father seems to be listening for a distant sound only he can hear. Even with what’s left of my cloudy vision it’s easy to see he’s waiting for some sign from Rosalie that this is a charade.
“Quiet, everyone,” Rosalie says in a stern I’m-not-playing voice. She cues Jungmann to deliver a speech. Stroking his cheek, knowing he will be sensitive about this, she removes the pipe from his mouth.
“Her youth is marked by young shock workers …” In translation it sounds like Party sloganeering. “She has reasoning of million heads … strength of million of human hands.” It goes on, praise for the State that is midwife to ultimate harmony.
“Okay, enough.” Rosalie hands him the tiny crown of white flowers. He takes care not to dislodge a single petal. The flowers won’t last long in this cold, but he handles them with a feminine tenderness. Rosalie climbs into the wide swing. She invites Jungmann to sit beside her. She pushes off. What a sight. Rosalie with her silver hair in elegant braids, that knock-off coat hiding her dress, her ruby lipstick wonky, her look sharp with purpose. Beside her, Jungmann—with his refinements looking awkward in that John Wayne get-up—obeys her commands. Push off. Slow down. Steady the swing. Now kiss me, shyly, as though it were our first kiss. Their breath billows in the cold air. This is the adumbrated courtship ceremony. I could even find it touching if not for that cruel set to her mouth, his toadyish fawning. It’s as though we were watching a set piece from their club days.
Poor Anežka squints at her mother as though trying to find the missing piece to the puzzle that will solve her fractured life. We have washed up together on the shores of Prague, she and I. But are we nothing more than flotsam in the wake of our parents’ history? Milada doesn’t think so. That’s why she’s joined Zámečník in pushing the case against Jungmann to the European Court of Human Rights. What about Anežka? How can I help her do more than just survive?
The bride to be, satisfied with the courtship kiss, sheds her knock-off London Fog. Her outfit is not a wedding gown. If my guess is correct, the gray smock with the scalloped white collar buttoned at the throat, partly covered by a white apron with a bodice and shoulder straps, is a kitchen maid’s outfit. My father stares at her as if he’d seen a ghost.
“Flowers, please.” She directs Jungmann to place them just so. He regards her dubiously. Her outfit is not what he was expecting, nor is he pleased with the surprise. The swing creaks. The ropes strain. Delete the jowls and drinker’s nose, blacken that long white hair, and you’d have the calculating beauty who played siren to the boys in my father’s village.
“Now is time for stories.” Our breath forms stratocumulus clouds that are smoggy with poorly ventilated smoke. Rosalie tells her story first. It was an early summer afternoon, long ago, in a meadow resplendent with red poppies “beating like thousand breaking hearts.” She turns to Jungmann and adds, “I ask you to undress me. You run through meadow collecting poppies and you cover my naked beauty with poppies as proof of love …”
“No, stop. That’s our story,” my father shouts in Czech, interrupting. “You can’t do this, not this.”
Hearing all that distance disappear from his voice, as though he’d traveled a lifetime in a heartbeat, I decide this travesty can’t continue. “Go ahead,” I say to him. “Go ahead and tell her.”
“We have to talk about Leoš,” my father says achingly.
“Truth!” shouts Jungmann. “Ano, we love truth, ano, feed us truth. ‘In midst of blooming May, into faraway confines, above our old castle, flag swaying, we have words. Truth shall prevail! Glory! Glory
! Glory!’ ” He laughs, but then he says, “I am tired from this game. Let us be married and no more nonsense.” He calls out to Halbrstat. “Come up here. Let us begin.”
“Do not worry for Leoš,” she says soberly. “If he has not drowned Nazis would have made hell for him.”
“That’s an excuse?” I say. “You realize you’re marrying your brother’s murderer?”
“Murder?” Jungmann says indignantly. “What has your father been saying?”
“We were drinking vodka,” my father admits. “It was my first time. I’d never been drunk before.”
“You want clean story?” says Jungmann. “Airbrush some bruises you do not wish that your son will see? Okay, I give you clean story and we will both wash our hands. We fought. Leoš fell in and hit head. I could not save. You saw. You were there.” Jungmann pauses, looks at my father. “You want to say something more?”
My father, listening to this story, hunched under his coat, jiggering foot to foot like Isis, looks so lonely I want to put a comforting arm around his shoulders but he senses this and gives me a look that says not now.
“Leoš was tender boy,” says Rosalie. “I couldn’t protect him.”
My father has been avoiding her, staring at the fire in the stove, but something clicks. He purses his lips as though sucking on a toothpick.
“You wanted to stop him from talking.” My father faces Jungmann now. “I watched you do it, I didn’t even try to help him. That’s the part I’ve had a hard time living with. I just let you do it.”
“He was your father’s bastard,” Jungmann says with an amused twist to that feminine mouth. “You hated him. Admit it. But you were coward. You would never make your own hands dirty. No, not you. Like everyone. Leave dirty work to Jungmann. He is not afraid. He alone is not afraid of truth. Truth shall prevail!”
“I felt sorry for him. My father pretended he didn’t exist. It was my father I hated.”
The irony of what he has just said, with his daughter standing behind him, warming herself by the fire, is not lost on him. He turns to Anežka and says, “I can never expect you to understand …” Then he catches himself and says simply, “I’m sorry.”
Anežka says “Ano.” Her tone is perfunctory. She looks to her mother. It’s not his pity she wants, nor for that matter, mine. If it’s an apology she’s after, it will have to come from her mother.
The air is growing acrid with poorly ventilated smoke. We won’t be able to stay in here much longer. The flickering glow from the fire creases one side of Anežka’s face like a burn, like a scar, while the other side is in darkness. Anežka does not move. The little orphan girl is still in her, still waiting for her mother’s acknowledgment.
“What happen to Leoš,” says Rosalie, “happen to each of us. Our heads were push under. But we found our way here. No more looking back. Let us proceed.”
The barrel-chested gnome with the greasy mane of hair tucked behind his ears, the keeper of records, the artist cum security enforcer, hobbles up onto the platform. In Halbrstat’s arms is a sheaf of documents.
Among the paternity release forms, the falsified birth certificate, the marriage certificate, and the title to this property, there should be, if Anežka’s legal counsel did his job, two additional documents: a form allowing Anežka to recant her confession, and a form releasing her from the court’s custody. Anežka’s future, my future, rides on this deal going through.
“It is cold,” says Jungmann. “Let us put history behind and say vows. I invite all of you to be my guest at Žamberk pub.”
“Dost!” says Rosalie, rising from the swing. She waits until all eyes are on her. “Nothing will be signed yet. Not until there has been test.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
An Orphan Runs Back: What the Fire Consumes
What happens next is not in the script. Rosalie asks my father to join them on the makeshift altar. Bearing his sheaf of documents, Halbrstat obediently awaits his next command. Rosalie stands with her back to those of us who are waiting by the stove. Jungmann is to her left. My father to her right. Wearing clothes borrowed from Bedřich, the brown corduroy jacket under a heavy WWII vintage P-coat, hands jammed stiffly into pockets, my father looks provincial, like he was carved out of this place.
“One question?” I say. “Who did give that bison to little Anežka?”
“Mother, you said it was gift from my father.”
“Dost,” says Rosalie. “It was gift from man who wanted to be your father. No more questions. Is time for test.” Addressing Jungmann, she says, “Show to them. Open your coat.”
He is shockingly compliant. A coiled length of lariat is hooked to his belt.
“Place wrists together in front,” she commands.
He hesitates, not a good move, apparently, or maybe this is part of an act, I really can’t tell. She insults him, calls him a libidinous pervert, a molester of the innocent, a bully, a coward. With the crackling and snapping of the wood in the belly of the stove I only catch part of Josef’s translation, but it’s enough. She loops the lariat over his wrists, pulls it snug. For her age she’s efficient. He complains that it’s too tight.
“I will tie you there,” she points to a lamp hook nailed to a beam, “if you do not shut up.”
My father has the temerity to question her tactics.
“ ‘You are so beautiful,’ you liked to say, ‘You are so beautiful.’ ” She’s mocking my father now. “We will see what you remember.”
“We were so young. It was a long time ago.”
“Stop sniveling. Hold this.” She hands my father a glass-beaded rosary with a large wooden crucifix. “Your mother’s. Recognize?” He nods. It’s the rosary that hung in the farmhouse chapel. That explains why she was there today. “Hold like this.” She presses his hands together, crucifix foremost. “Very pious. Nice.”
The yin and yang in her life. Neither dares to oppose her outright.
“Mother. Is this necessary?”
“Ano, if you want to hear truth.”
Our breath emerges in smoggy puffs. The air is thick enough to inspire coughing. Outside in the freezing night there is the sound of large approaching vehicles, the grinding downshift of gears, the screech of brakes. There is no time to wonder about that now.
Squirming causes the rope to cinch even tighter. Jungmann knows better but squirms anyway. At least that truth, the pain truth, will prevail. My father, with his gaunt cheeks and pinched brow, looks both resigned and determined to see this through.
“Now we find out which of you truly loved me. Maybe it is neither, ano?”
Jungmann, blinking, desperately wishing for his pipe in his mouth, you can tell, wants this over with and no more games.
“Here is my question. I have mole. It is brown and round and small like little bug. I have had since birth. Where is it?” She points to Jungmann. “You first.”
“Who cares about mole? We are here to be married.” Wrists lashed together, he combs at his goatee like a peasant raking hay. Everyone is watching. His eyes dart to his old friend Halbrstat, but he finds no help there, then that unctuous smile returns and he says with confidence, “It is in place I should not say of course. It would be undignified.”
“Stop eating my liver. Where is it?”
“Very well,” he says, swollen with faux certitude. “Between your legs, just beside labia majora.” Despite the cold his brow has reddened.
“Is your final answer?” She is imitating her favorite TV game show host.
Receiving no help from the audience, he affirms that it is.
My father’s turn. His thoughts take him back to that poppy strewn meadow, that anxious virgin boy, that ambitious beautiful girl with breasts like wild colts. He will tell me about this later. That wistful resignation softens into a smile of gratitude.
“Your right arm.” He points. “Inside your upper right arm, kind of hidden. You can only see it when you’re giving a hug.”
“That is your final an
swer?” she says.
He nods. When he’s feeling pensive you can see the craving for a toothpick working in his jaw but there is none of that now.
Rosalie reaches behind her and unties and sheds the apron and loosens the back of her maid’s smock. The smock hangs from her shoulders. She unwinds the braids. A cascade of white hair shakes free like a waterfall. The smock falls in a heap at her feet. She is wearing nothing under it. Her slack skin is blue from the cold. I would like very much to see the expression on my father’s face when he sees the tattoo, but her falling hair hides it.
Jungmann’s delicate mouth twitches. The fire snaps. The smoky air burns in the eyes. There is a moment like dreaming, when dreaming becomes waking. My father sets down the rosary. He pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket. He is of the generation of men who still carry handkerchiefs. He daubs at the smudges of lipstick over-bordering her lips. Something comes over him. He rubs at the lipstick as if he intended to erase from his memory the red silk sheets his father once put on her bed.
She opens her arms to my father and gives him the shy kiss she had wanted earlier. Unused to an audience, he returns her kiss stiffly. “I want to ask for our daughter’s forgiveness. Anežka?” She stays by the fire, not making it any easier. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be a father to you.”
“Try harder,” I say. “Help us understand.”
“He is coward,” Jungmann scoffs. “That is truth. He run away.” He turns a cold eye on Rosalie. “I risk freezing to death in gulag so you will have harmonious home for your children. This is how you give to me thanks? So be it. Sign papers. She will be my daughter. We will say vows and that will be end of it.”
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