by Lev Golinkin
* * *
East Windsor, N.J., June 2007
“Ah, so, you are returning to Austria.” The casual, accented voice crackled through the receiver. Seventeen years had passed before I contacted Peter, telling him that I was planning a trip to Austria and asking if he would mind meeting with me. “Yes, you can come,” he acceded. “Telephone me when you purchase your tickets.” I informed three of my friends, Jeff, Steve, and Kyle, that I was traveling to Europe and making a sojourn to a castle to stay with a baron; they graciously offered to come along.
Peter met us on the hilltop outside the castle. I was nervous about seeing the man after a very long hiatus, especially with three strangers in tow, but Peter calmly shook everyone’s hands and began to supervise the unloading.
My friends disappeared inside, and I approached the baron. “How are you?”
“Well, my father died shortly after your family left Austria, and now I am in charge. I am doing good,” he replied.
I smiled. “My dad wanted me to become a doctor but I said no, and I’m writing a book instead. I am also doing good.”
“Ah yes, that is so. I have done a lot of remodeling—come inside.”
Having thus caught up on the past seventeen years, I followed Peter through the giant oak doorway.
The first thing we ran into was Kyle, frozen in the center of the courtyard. My normally impassive friend gaped at me. “I don’t think you described this … place adequately.”
I took a long look around. No one could’ve described the remodeled interior of Peter’s castle “adequately.” The best thing (the only thing, really) I can say is that it was a cross between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Applebee’s. Bright yellow paint warmed the indoor bailey. Gone was the cold opening to the sky, covered with a paned glass roof, and a tiled floor lay over what was once bare rock. Chairs and couches were arranged around tables. Green ivy draped the walls, and clean, restored cherubs, the ones that had once been scattered under the outside barrier, greeted the visitors from the courtyard balconies. And all of it—walls, floors, ceilings, alcoves—was filled with incongruous, seemingly incompatible items juxtaposed against one another. Triptychs and wall hangings mingled with rusty novelty plaques. A marble pedestal featured a lava lamp lovingly nestled between two 2,500-year-old Greek vases. Overhead, a grinning Beanie Babies devil dangled from a crystal chandelier. I turned to Kyle.
“I told you he was a baron and he lived in a castle. There’s the baron,” I pointed to Peter, “and here’s the castle. Plus, I was a kid back then; I mostly focused on the weapons.” I walked up to two jewel-encrusted Moroccan daggers mounted under an animal skull. “Didn’t I tell you he had lots of daggers?”
“Daggers? He has a Louis XIV bedroom set! I saw it upstairs, when we brought up the luggage.”
“Okay.” I yawned, making a mental note to Google what a Louis XIV bedroom set was.
“But he has medieval tapestries just hanging there like they’re dorm posters, which he also has, by the way. He has an entire room paneled with Byzantine icons! He has Renaissance paintings. He has paintings, painted in the fucking Renaissance … and a lava lamp!”
“He’s a baron. He can do what he wants.”
I walked up the back staircase, giving Kyle the time to acclimate and leaving faint murmurs of “Renaissance” and “lava lamp” behind me.
Peter took us on a greatly curtailed tour of the interior (a full one would’ve required a day). My friends may have laughed at the junk, but Peter gave it as much attention as he did to the relics. “Amethyst, Brazil. It’s really the best kind—the ones from Europe aren’t as deep in the color. License plate, Montana. Usually the metal is … not flat, but this one is in very nice condition. I was pleased to find it.”
We ended the tour at the main library, a beautiful room with provincial-blue walls overlaid with bright gold stenciling. “There is an identical study area at the Kaiser apartments in the winter palace of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy,” Peter remarked. “And that is a seventeenth-century book of maps.” He’d caught Steve hovering over an antique tome resting on a table. “Go ahead, you can read it.”
“Really? But—” Steve was working on a way to approach the atlas when Peter picked it up and handed it to him.
“So where’s the secret passage?” Jeff asked.
“It is right here.” Peter unlatched a glass door protecting one of the bookcases and grasped the edge, easily swinging it open. The bookcase turned out to be a panel skillfully painted with trompe l’oeil books, so that only a close inspection revealed them to be fake. Our host permitted himself a little dramatic flair as he gestured toward the gaping void in the wall. “When you were last here, Lev, I was not with my wife, Gabi, but now we are back together. This door is very useful, especially when you’re having an argument and would like to get away for some time.” He pointed to a bookcase across the room. “There is another passageway over there, but that shelf contains actual books, not painted ones, so it is difficult to move,” he said apologetically.
I nodded. I had long ago ceased to be amazed by Peter. In fact, if the sci-fi writers are correct and somewhere on this planet is a portal to Narnia or to John Malkovich’s brain, I’m certain the gateway lies in a forgotten corner of Peter’s castle, and if he ever shows it to me, I’ll just nod. My friends were cracking up. They, too, reached the threshold at which you accept that things work differently with Peter, and all you can do is smile and be glad you’re with him.
The next morning the baron loaded the four of us in a new, yet still midnight-green Mercedes jeep and took off on a tour of local towns and monasteries, just as he had done with my family years earlier. Our first stop was Freistadt, a remarkably preserved medieval fortress encircled by ancient battlements and a moat. Peter steered toward the cobblestone plaza in the center of town and calmly parked the jeep next to a PARKING VERBOTEN sign. It was a bright day, and the square was alive with cafés and tourists.
“I shall stay with the car, and you take a look. It is a very old town, and very nice—enjoy.” Jeff, Steve, and Kyle ambled off to explore the local church. I kicked around the plaza for a bit, then made my way back to the jeep. Peter was inside, arm leaning out the window, methodically munching on an ice cream cone. “I saw all of this before; you go and look.”
“I’d like to stay here for a couple of minutes, if that’s okay.” I lit up a cigarette, just to have something to do. A long, branching chain of causes and effects streamed through my mind. What if Peter hadn’t rescued Lina and Mom from the Austrian cops at the bridge? What if we’d gone to Brooklyn? What if he didn’t get Dad a job in Austria and then Dad wouldn’t have gotten one in the U.S. and would’ve probably joined the 97 percent of foreign engineers who wind up driving taxis or delivering pizzas, and then I couldn’t have gone to a good college, and … I shuddered. All that aside, here was a man who’d taken interest in us when we were at our lowest point, who somehow managed to make refugees feel like welcome guests in his land. How the hell do you say thank you for that? Expressing emotion wasn’t my strong suit, and if memory served it also wasn’t Peter’s, but I wanted to say something, as a migrant and a writer, about the role he had played in my life and in my plot.
“I just want to say I really appreciate you having us over,” I began. Me, my friends, my family. “And—and spending your time with us.” Both now and back then.
Peter slowly polished off the remnants of his cone. “That is fine,” he shrugged. “It is not a problem.”
* * *
After Niederösterreich we headed to Prague, and Peter was kind enough to drive us across the Czech border to the nearest train depot. My friends occupied an empty cabin, and I was about to head for the ticket counter when Peter cut me off.
“The tickets are here—go.” He shoved four tickets into my hand and, before I could protest, reached into his suit and began producing photographs, which he laid atop the tickets, one by one. “Maybe they will help for your book. He
re is the castle, the town, ah yes, a nice lake, another one of the castle.” Finally he tossed one more rectangle onto the pile. It was a photo of him, taken from behind someone’s back, a candid shot and not a great one at that.
I beamed. Peter glanced up at me. “I still do not like photographs taken, I do not like it at all, but Gabi managed, and you can show it to your family. They have asked me for one a long time ago.”
“Board now!” yelled the conductor. I mumbled “Thank you,” and leapt aboard the train. The last I saw of Peter, he was straightening his suit and arranging his hair, a bemused little smile on his face. I put the rest of the photographs in my suitcase. The one of Peter I tucked into my passport, which, along with my interview notebook, never left my side.
The Czech Republic must’ve updated their tobacco laws: the train was non-smoking, which forced Kyle and me to scout out a deserted cabin so as not to disturb the conductor. We slid down the window and split a Marlboro, and stared out at the pine forests and peat bogs passing by. Crossing into eastern Europe was creepy. Public smoking rules may have Westernized, but time stood still in the backwoods of old Czechoslovakia. Every so often, a cluster of Soviet-era apartments broke through the pines, brick boxes with all the dull functionality of Communist architecture. Laundry lines hung between balconies, birds pecked around for crumbs, and an occasional babushka waddled by, sacks of groceries in hand. I could almost see the parades. My forearms and knees started tensing up, sometimes visibly twitching, which I hoped Kyle would ignore or, better yet, not notice. Reality was, I was a twenty-seven-year-old American tourist visiting a European country with all the protection of the U.S. of A. at my back. The other reality, just as real, was the vague sense of panic pulsing through my body, screaming at me to get out, go somewhere, America, Austria, Japan, doesn’t matter, anywhere other than this land that was no land, where bad things lived and bad things happened and nobody stepped in to make them stop. Shit, harmless dinosaur bones still quicken the blood of the caveman in us, and a few kilometers across the Czech–Austrian border was all that it took to wipe away seventeen years, planting me back in Kharkov. I was grateful my friends were with me.
I spread my feet wide, like I used to when I rode trains as a kid, and tried to concentrate on something pleasant. My body rocked with the cabin’s lazy cadence, and I smoked and thought about the past few days with Peter. I noticed that the baron wasn’t as eager to be in motion. He drove markedly slower than he used to back in the days when he would tear through Austria with my family. Perhaps I was too young back then and all speeds seemed fast; perhaps age slowed him down, or maybe they finally started enforcing speed limits on the autobahns. I hoped those weren’t the sole reasons. I’m not a fan of tacking undue fluff onto a situation, but after listening to Peter, watching him around Gabi, marking his driving, I felt comfortable enough to hope, very much hope, that he had reached some acceptance, had finally found a bit of peace.
Part Three
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
—George Santayana
THIS AIN’T ELLIS ISLAND
New York, N.Y., June 1990
The three women from HIAS were enjoying the air-conditioning at JFK’s international arrivals hall, quietly waiting for the afternoon’s cases to land. The women spoke Russian. Like most HIAS greeters, they themselves were recent newcomers to the States. HIAS recognized that the best person to relate to a refugee was an ex-refugee; hiring Russian speakers also circumvented the language barrier. The first case on June 19, 1990, was the Golinkin family, file #90-2212, arriving on flight TW749. An hour later, a family from Naples would land, followed by two more from Rome. For the four families, June 19 would become a milestone, a unique holiday to celebrate down the road. For HIAS, it was just another day in the mission. Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society has stood at America’s doorstep since 1881, before Ellis Island opened its gates or Lady Liberty first gazed over New York Harbor. “We used to wait in harbors; now we wait in airports,” Valery Bazarov, one of the directors at HIAS, told me. “Little else has changed … Refugees are refugees.”
I don’t remember seeing the Statue of Liberty or the famed Manhattan skyscrapers; I remember badges, clipboards, and fear. Passing through customs was simple, since we carried little physical baggage, but immigration was another story. INS workers drilled us to verify that we qualified for political refugee status, and then sent us to quarantine. In reality, these were formalities: HIAS would not have flown us out of Austria without assurance of asylum from Washington. But standing in line while strangers in uniforms decided your fate was too similar to the tamozhnya. Inspectors in lab coats circled around us, consulting chest X-rays and pathogen reports performed by American physicians at the U.S. embassy in Vienna. Head down, don’t attract attention, avoid eye contact. Old habits I didn’t remember learning kicked in. Just as at the border, or with Kolya and his stash of illegal coins when the druzhinniki swept through the yard, the paralysis around people in uniform had followed us to America. The quarantine room was so clinically sterile there was nothing to focus on but the floor, and all I saw were the inspectors’ legs, white coats, and a white hand that seemed to move on its own accord, lifting up my shirt to expose my chest. After a moment’s pause, the hand dropped down, the legs moved on. We passed.
The curly-haired young man weaved the yellow minivan through Queens, zigzagging toward LaGuardia Airport. As he drove he spoke, and as he spoke his right arm mimicked the motion of the van, haphazardly jerking around the cabin. “I came here from Costa Rica, got here a few years ago—Fuck!” He swerved to avoid a collision with another taxi. “This ain’t Ellis Island, so don’t buy into the old ‘stand there and look helpless’ garbage. Everyone’s an immigrant here, and don’t let no one tell you—Fuck!” Another yellow blur screeched by. New York had a lot of taxis.
“What’s ‘fuck’?” I tilted my head toward Lina, who sat alongside me in the back of the van, feet propped on suitcases.
“ ‘Fuck’ is a great word,” mused Lina. “You’re going to love it. For starters, you can use it to draw attention to what you’re saying, so if something’s really great, it’s fucking great, or when it really sucks, it fucking sucks. It’s kind of like the Swiss Army knife of English: you can use it in so many ways.” She paused and her eyes scrunched together. “Just be careful, because some people …” She glanced at Dad, blithely talking to the driver. “Some people might not appreciate it.”
Lina’d previously taught me many Russian words, the sound of which made her giggle and Dad glower. Russian is a fantastic language for cursing, with obscene variants to the most innocent words, and intricate tiers of insults that allow one to tailor a slur to the desired level of humiliation. Lina had invested a great deal of time helping me navigate the maze of profanity, and I was excited about continuing my education in America.
“Got it.” I don’t understand. Please speak slower. ABCDEFG. Fucking. Fuck. My English is growing!
* * *
Unlike LaGuardia and O’Hare, Purdue University Airport in West Lafayette, Indiana, was not equipped with gates, so the little puddle jumper from Chicago simply taxied to a standstill in the middle of the tarmac. A hundred yards away sat a brown one-story building, and in front of the building, separated from the tarmac by a short chain-link fence, waited the crowd. There were children, a couple of babies, plenty of middle-aged couples, and one ancient, bearded rabbi. Several photographers hovered next to the fence, twisting and tweaking their lenses. Two women tapped on microphones connected to cameramen. A large paper banner made on a late-eighties dot matrix flapped from the overhang above the crowd. Lina translated the gray, pixilated letters: WELCOME HOME. The only thing missing was the marching band.
I’d love to know what went through the heads of our fellow passengers when they realized that the five nervous strangers whispering in an odd language were actually goodwill ambassadors, or foreign dignitari
es, perhaps even an “international delegation.” As soon as the stairs folded down, everyone, including the flight crew, evaporated from sight. “Just close the door on your way out,” mumbled the pilot as he squeezed past Lina.
“Now what?” I tugged on Dad’s sleeve as the two of us surveyed the scene from atop the stairs.
Dad took in the banner, the crowd, the bright summer sky, and I watched his fingers pumping and flexing around the suitcase handles, getting the blood flowing, the way he always did before charging into an important matter. “The sign says ‘Welcome Home.’ ” He nudged his glasses against his face. “So we go home.” We traversed the tarmac to the buzzing of gnats and the drone of another plane taking off, strode up to a gap in the chain-link fence, and paused. Somehow I wound up in front; perhaps Dad decided to commence the introductions with the cutest family member. The crowd was silent. The photographers lurked.
Across the gap towered a mustached man in a checkered beige sports jacket. His thick glasses reminded me of Dad’s, which put me at ease. The man extended a long beige arm, I shook it, stepping across the gap, and suddenly everyone moved. Rapid shutter clicks burst through the air. The women in suits jostled toward us, tugging on cameramen and chattering into microphones. I heard the faltering rumble of Dad’s English mingled with the surer stream of Lina’s. The wizened old rabbi began speaking to Grandma, others approached, and handshakes flew everywhere as we were engulfed by Americans.
A kid cautiously edged his way around the crowd. He was tall and skinny, with black hair, black eyes, thick black eyebrows, and a black T-shirt with a shark on it. I tensed, anticipating the upcoming greeting; my handshake with the tall man with glasses had been limp and nervous, and I didn’t want to mess up the next one, especially not with someone my age. But the kid looked like he was no expert either. He swung out a lanky arm in an awkward arc, and we shook. “Aaron,” he coughed in a low quiet voice.