“Son,” he pats my leg, desists when he sees me wince. “I’ve been thinking I want Anežka to have a nice funeral service.”
I nod. “Absolutely. I want to be there.”
“Next week we can claim her body. If you don’t mind, I’d like to bury her in the cemetery by our church with the Dostáls and Lenochs. We can have a proper ceremony when they let you travel.”
“What about Rosalie?”
Milada consults her watch. Her look says what she is too polite to say; we need to allow extra time, given the snow.
“Up at St. Vitus, in the bell tower?” My father still feels like he has to explain himself. “You asked me why I didn’t come back. Actually, in the 1950s, before the crackdown in 1957, some people were coming back. There was a lot of talk about this in Bohemie Town.”
Now that he’s opened the tap, I ask Milada to indulge us, just for a few more minutes.
“But I had to ask myself, is this really my country anymore? It sure didn’t look familiar in the photos. The Czechoslovakia I left was prosperous. Now there wasn’t much to eat. Many of those lucky enough to be alive suffered from diseases they picked up in prison. Most of the young men were dead. Most of the young women were accused of collaborating.”
“But you had a daughter here. The only one in her life who tried to help was Jungmann. Think about that.”
“I had a family in Iowa. That’s what I had to think about.” He sighs. In the dark this sigh seems to heave up from some partisan bunker. “In some ways I’m just glad my poor mother was dead. At least she didn’t have to go through this. I hate to say it,” he apologizes to Milada, “I would have gone back to the farm if Mother was alive, but my country was becoming a sad gray place.”
“Is why I had to escape,” Milada says. She shakes her head. “Poor tata.”
“He’s the real hero,” I say.
“They tortured him because I escape.”
“It was the farm,” says my father. No doubt he’s given this some thought; my father is not impulsive. When he adds, “I want to help him fix the place up, modernize it,” I know that in his mind it’s already decided. He looks at me. Would I care to join him in this enterprise?
“You guys go ahead,” I say. “Fix what needs to be fixed.”
“We could use your help.” But it’s a token offer. He doesn’t really need my help. He just knows I like to keep busy.
“While I was watching Anežka run for her life, I kept wondering what she desired so much that she would take that kind of risk? I still don’t know. But I have a theory.” Nobody stops me so I continue. “I’m guessing she wanted to tell Jungmann that she forgave him.” It’s too grave a subject just now so I attempt to lighten the mood with a joke. “Torkey? Remember her? She really is an old fussbudget, isn’t she?” Milada laughs. I explain the whiny red-tailed hawk to my father, that she’s deathly afraid of the dark, that they have to put her inside at night. “She loves the attention. God, look at me.”
“I will miss our cabin,” Milada says. My mention of the raptors has her thinking about the Skagit. “That was for me beautiful dream.”
“Would you miss it in February?” This is our inside joke.
“Especially in February,” says Milada.
“That was our month,” I explain to my father. I describe the scene, our first trip to the river. “The sky was white with overcast. The river was at flood stage. Milada and I decided to go for a walk on the other side of the river.”
“I enjoyed the river,” says my father.
“In February the river floods. Snags break off and pile against the bridge. You think any moment civilization will be wiped out and nature will reclaim everything. I found it pretty scary. Not her.”
“It was fascinating,” Milada says. “It woke up something in my soul.” My father leans toward her hungry for what she has to say. “We stood by river until it was after dark. It was cold and very much wind. Wind move away clouds. Suddenly it was very cold. We look up and we see stars, million and million of stars. I feel river like desire, like desire I have not felt since I was child, like we have gone back to beginning of time for humans on earth.”
“You’d go crazy out there.”
“Of course. But that desire fed my soul. That was when I knew I had to decide. Run away to America, or fight for justice.”
My father’s expression pinches with concern. “My generation worried about helping family keep body and soul together.”
The two of them button their coats. Mine is hanging down by the front entrance. I follow them down the spiral stairs, wishing I had Anežka’s cane. At the entryway they exchange slippers for shoes. Lack of adequate horizontal sleep has left my feet so swollen I can’t fit into even my loose shoes. I go out in wool lined slippers. My father pulls on that yellow cap and lets down the ear flaps. Outside, the car is warming. Josef is shoveling the walk.
A plow has left a slush berm. The streetlights are spread too far apart and the berm is dark and the road is crunchy with ice. Crossing to the car, I flail my arms to steady myself. I am Anežka pumping across the frozen field. I will never really know what desire sent her running into that firestorm. I look back through the neighborhood. The snow has knocked down what remained of the leaves. For the first time, through the bare branches of the chestnuts, the upper stories of Milada’s panelák are visible from here. Which window is hers? The one with the light on? The distance from here to there is surprisingly not very far.
Anežka spent her life burning with what she wanted to say. Then it was too late. “Dad.” I pump my arms. I thrust my hips the way she did and manage to cross to him without falling. “Dad, I forgive you.” My shouting will disturb the neighbors.
He takes my arm to steady me. “We’ll talk later.”
When you get around to fixing up the farm, you gotta replace that stove. It heats unevenly. There’s no excuse for it anymore.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Epilogue: a Few Months Later in Prague
Tonight’s opera is not at the national theater. Our opera is second string, but Milada’s youngest son is in the orchestra pit. The old opera house is thankfully only a short walk from the Museum metro stop at the top of Wenceslas Square. I’m getting out more these days, but am easily exhausted. The theater’s Rococo interior—fluted, gold painted stucco, urchins and angels leaping from every surface—is too busy for my taste, but my father, sporting a salt and pepper wool jacket with a white shirt and a three-button vest, looking ever more European and professorial, ogles the lobby like a boy digging up treasure. The period interior is giving him such obvious pleasure—a slice of beloved history—I swallow my critique.
Anda-Louise Bogza, a popular soprano from Bucharest, is singing the lead role. This explains the unusual crowd. Aunt Magda, my father’s favorite little sister, is on her way but running late. We’ve arranged for seats in the front row where the aisle is wide enough to accommodate her portable oxygen tank. Milada waves to her neon-spiked son. Shortly before the house lights go dim, Aunt Magda rolls in with an usher’s help. There’s a hugging, shoulder squeezing, crying scene right in front of the orchestra pit. Frank, look at you, crying for purely sentimental reasons. And so solicitous. Can I bring you something, a glass of champagne? Are you comfortable? Please tell us if this is tiring and we’ll leave. In Iowa, he’d spent his life modulating his accent, steeled against a phantom that never materialized. Here he talks, he laughs, he hugs. Here, he’s alive.
Like the rest of the crowd, he cheers wildly at the soprano’s curtain call. It wasn’t all a smashing success. At times the orchestra drowned out the singers, and the trumpet flatulated notes that even the strings’ perfume couldn’t hide. When the conductor comes out, an Italian man sitting next to my father leaps to his feet, cups his hands to his mouth like a megaphone, and boos with enough gusto to suggest he felt as double-crossed as Tosca herself. “You butcher! You killed Puccini!” he yells.
“Try Janáček,” yells a German. “Maybe
you will do From House of the Dead.”
The smile thins on the conductor’s face. The audience, mostly tourists, laughs. Mercifully, the house lights come on. The conductor bows and hurries off.
“Do not waste pity on him,” Milada says of the conductor. She’s wearing a short-skirted black dress with three strands of garnets wrapped at her throat, her hair piled extravagantly. She looks gorgeous. “He has health. He is young and talented. So tonight were mistakes. He has future.”
My father disagrees. “I’m the lucky man. I am with my family in my birth land and free of the hungers that will eat him alive.”
It’s suggested that we continue this conversation over dessert. We catch one of the taxis lined up outside the emptying theater. Despite worrying that it will be late for me, my father asks to stop by the Vltava to show his sister the swans drifting through reflections of the castle lights. He’s full of history tonight. Memories banked now can’t replace the history they lost, but they don’t seem to obsess over that. They enjoy talking about what they do remember. Using her protekce at Café Slavia, Milada snags a standing-only table, tough for me, but Aunt Magda can lean on her walker and just seems thrilled to at last spend time with her older brother.
A famous hangout for literati the likes of Hašek and Škvorecký, the café is in a gray last-century building so nondescript you’d walk right past. The interior, on the other hand, all original art deco—glass sconces, mirrors, sleek curved metal, all lines streamlined—drips with the period chic that connoisseurs love and that has my ordinarily taciturn father raving. We stand at a stylish pedestal table. Milada orders a round of the café’s famous dessert, warm strudel with crème. I take a bracing regimen of immunosuppressant pills three times a day and have to be very careful in crowds to avoid sneezing and handshaking—I wash my hands constantly and do not use handrails—but wonder of wonders I can eat this food. Saudek warned me not to expect to recover eyesight. At least the retinal bleeding has stopped. Aunt Magda gasps for air through her hose but she looks up at us, beaming.
“František,” says Aunt Magda, returning to the debate interrupted at the theater. “You speak as though your life were over. Now you are home.”
He kisses her on the forehead. “It’s good to be home.”
We enjoy our strudel. The crowd, obvious Americans in jeans, Czechs in local drab, Germans and French in sophisticated theater clothes, are oblivious to our joyful reunion. My concern slings back to my father’s remark about the conductor.
“I think it’s time.” Deep down, the shame festers. You feel complicit, if only because you are alive and idle.
“I think it’s too soon. Dr. Saudek is saying it takes at least a year before you get your strength back and your organs are stable.”
It’s true. I’ve already had one scary near-rejection episode that landed me back in the clinic hooked up to drains and an insulin drip. “No, it’s time. I’ve got to put it out there and see what happens.” With help from the mayor’s protekcé, we got title to the orphanage property. Thanks to the fire, it will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. My father claims the fire did us a service. But that is my father’s specialty. We’re applying for non-profit status so we can accept donations. In this economy, I’m afraid that means catering to Germans and Americans anxious to do business here, but until the local economy is back on its feet it’s a compromise we have to make. Once we’re up and running, we’ll staff the shelter strictly with locals. Josef will be our manager. This is what I want Anežka to have wanted.
“He is right,” Aunt Magda says to my father. “Desire like his must to be honored. You cannot expect he will keep tongue behind his teeth.”
He looks sadly at his sweet little sister. So quietly I have to strain to hear, he says, “I am sorry I was not here.”
“Now you are here and you have your son.”
Milada looks at me with that hard glint she gets when she talks about escape. Don’t let anything stop you. And don’t look back.
* * * *
Scott Driscoll, an award-winning instructor (the University of Washington, Educational Outreach award for Excellence in Teaching in the Arts and Humanities 2006), holds an MFA from the University of Washington and has been teaching creative writing for the University of Washington Extension for seventeen years.
Driscoll makes his living as a writer and teacher. While finishing Better You Go Home—a novel that has been several years in the making and which grew out of the exploration of the Czech side of his family in the 1990s after Eastern Europe became liberated—Driscoll kept busy freelancing stories to a variety of magazines, both commercial and literary. He most often writes feature stories on subjects ranging from health to philanthropy to education to general reporting for Alaska and Horizon Airlines Magazines, but he also does profiles and book reviews, including an October 2010 profile for Ferrari Magazine 11, and a July/August ’08 profile in Poets and Writers Magazine.
Driscoll’s short stories and narrative essays have been published extensively in literary journals and anthologies, including Image Magazine, Far From Home (a Seal Press anthology), Ex-Files: New Stories About Old Flames (a Context Books fiction anthology featuring high-profile writers such as David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Diaz), The Seattle Review, Crosscurrents, Cimarron Review, The South Dakota Review, Gulfstream, American Fiction ’88 and others.
Driscoll has been awarded seven Society of Professional Journalists awards, most recently in 2009 for social issues reporting, and including best education reporting and general reporting 2004. His narrative essay about his daughter’s coming of age was cited in the Best American Essays, 1998, and while in the MFA program, he won the University of Washington’s Milliman Award for Fiction (1989).
You can find Driscoll on the Web at www.scott-driscoll.com.
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