by Mark Slouka
7
THIS IS HOW THINGS WERE IN MY HOUSE.
One afternoon when I was perhaps seven years old, no more, I asked my mother whether she had ever had a dog. I wanted one myself. She told me she had, in fact, had a dog once, but that it had been very long ago. He’d gotten lost, she said. She would tell me about it sometime.
So I asked my father. I found him in his office, which looked down into the canyons between the apartment buildings to the little playground where I played. He first asked me what my mother had said, then sighed and capped his pen. “Move those papers over,” he said. And then he told me about my mother’s dog.
As a young girl, my father said, my mother had spent her summers with relatives in the Valašsko region of Moravia. In those days, he said, the cigáni, the Gypsies, could still be found camped along a river or on some empty ground. One minute there would be just a field, a dirt road, a stand of birches; the next they would be there: the men unhitching the horses, the women beating down the weeds for fire rings or yelling at the dogs, dirty-faced children with hair as black as ravens staring as though they’d never seen a person in a wagon. There were poplar trees along the fields, and their small leaves would twirl like decorations in the wind. And if you happened to be the person in the wagon, you’d look up and see them—the old ones—already half a kilometer down the road to town, their huge black skirts with the loops and the hooks sewn into them dragging in the dirt.
In any case, my father told me, my mother spent a lot of time in the company of an old man named Mr. Koblíǽek who lived two houses down and who was something of a storyteller. He had a square block of a head silvered by stubble and ears like miniature lettuces, and he’d sit on a bench on the south side of his house in his tattered slippers smoking a short black pipe.
No one had quicker hands than a cigánka, Mr. Koblíǽek told my mother. No one. You could watch her all you wanted, but it wouldn’t matter. “The cigáni were not like other people,” he said. They knew things. Oh, they could mumble and scrape humbly enough, but if you threw stones at them, they would turn in the middle of the street and curse you so vilely even the dogs would turn away. He himself, Mr. Koblíǽek said, had once seen a cigánka put a spell on a dog who had bitten her, so that the poor animal couldn’t open its mouth to eat or drink, but went about slobbering and rubbing its head in the dirt, trying to push its tongue through its clenched teeth, until its owner finally realized what was happening and killed it.
No, the cigáni were not to be trifled with, Mr. Koblíǽek said, waggling a great square finger at my mother. The suffering of our Lord Jesus meant nothing to them. They never went to church or prayed for their souls. He’d heard it said that the old ones could see the dead walking down the road or resting in the shade of the trees at noon. That they could catch the reflection of the moon in a pot and carry it under the trees, where it would glow all night like a white lantern.
Anyway, my father said, it was during one of those summers along the Bečva that my mother got a dog. She found it in a corner of a neighbor’s stable—a squirmy brown pup, fat with worms, struggling to reach a teat—and somehow convinced her uncle to let her keep it in the barn. It could not have been easy, my father said. You have to remember, he said, these were country folk—practical, unsentimental people; that same afternoon the rest of the litter was probably put in a sack with a stone and tossed in the river.
My mother, my father said, had never had a pet before, and she loved the thing dearly. Soon it grew into a small, brown, wormy dog who followed her about everywhere and who would sit waiting for her on the bank of the Becva, looking worried, whenever she went swimming in the afternoons. She made the dog a bed of rags in the hay. Sometimes she would lie down next to it and pet it on its brown nose while it slept, my father said, which was probably how she came to have worms.
That August, when the Gypsies were encamped a kilometer down the road in a fallow field by the river, the dog disappeared. He’d probably been eaten, her uncle told her—the Gypsies ate dogs sometimes. He was very sorry. He had been growing attached to the little mongrel himself. My mother just stood there, runny-nosed and barefoot, ugly with grief, sucking her upper lip to keep from crying. Pulling her closer, her uncle wiped under her nose with the edge of his thumb and then, with the other edge, made a wide, flat smear across her cheek. They would try to get her another dog, he told her.
But that was not the end of the story, my father said.
“Another child would probably have cried in her bed that night,” he said, “or lay awake listening to the wind, looking for things in the garden, or dreaming of what she would do to those who could do such a thing. Your mother got up to get her dog.”
She went barefoot. In the house, everything was still, as if under a spell. As she closed the heavy wooden door behind her, she could hear the clock start to whir and then chime, twice. To avoid waking the village dogs she cut back through the garden, then up through the fields to the road. Everything was moving as though under water, the clouds rushing over the fields and the road and the white trunks of the birches. The moon flew across the sky, its reflection leaping among the trees.
She knew where she was going. She had passed the field where they were camped at least a dozen times before with her uncle. When she came to the crossroads, she turned right toward the river, walking on the soft dirt along the side, stepping over the briars and their shadows because it’s impossible to tell one from the other in the moonlight. Even before she saw the wagons lined along the road by the side of the field, she could see the firelight on the trunks of the trees and hear the yelling of the men.
“Now you have to understand,” my father said, looking at me. “This was a very foolish thing to do.” The cigáni were not like the people my mother knew in the village, he said. He himself had once seen a group of cigáni in the Tatra Mountains dig half a horse out of the earth and eat it. They had a game they played. Four or five men, sitting around a wooden board, would wrap rags around their hands. These would be tied off at the wrist, leaving their fingers just enough flexibility to grasp the handle of a knife. Everyone would be very drunk. Bets would be made, drinks taken from jugs standing in the dirt, another log or board tossed on the flames for light. Then, when all were ready, my father said, their elbows on the board and their bandaged arms raised and the crowd yelling and shoving for a better view, the ear of a hare would be thrown into the center of the board.
“An unpleasant business,” my father said. By the time someone emerged from the fray with the ear pinned on the tip of his blade like a slice of sausage, the rags would be stained black as if splashed with paint. And sometimes things went wrong. A friend of his had seen a cigán, furious over some real or imagined slight, slowly force another’s arm to the wood and then, with a tremendous blow, as though killing a wolf, drive his knife through the bones of the other’s hand, pinning him palm-down to the board.
“Anyway, it probably took them a few moments to notice the little girl on the other side of the fire,” my father said. “It probably took them a few more to realize she was real.”
Co tady chceš?—What do you want here?—said a voice like a crow. Běž domů. Go home.
I want my dog, said my mother.
A man snorted like a boar; a few people laughed. Let’s get on with it, someone said.
Ztrať se, a number of voices yelled. Get lost. Go back where you belong. From somewhere under the trees a pig was grunting quickly. A huge gust of sparks rose into the branches.
What makes you think we have your dog? said the voice like a crow.
Horses neighed from the dark. An old woman in a wide, colored skirt was coming toward my mother, making sweeping motions with her hands as though pushing away an unpleasant smell. Maž, maž. Tady tě nikdo nechce. Go. Nobody wants you here.
The men were getting on with their business, wrapping their hands in rags, tearing at the cloth with their teeth. When the cigánka got to the edge of the fire, my father said,
my mother stooped and picked up a branch that was sticking out of the flames.
The crowd burst out laughing. Why would we take your dog? they yelled. Go home, you little fool. Someone said something she didn’t understand and the crowd howled with laughter.
Give her the dog, called the crow, and a tall, powerful-looking man in loose cloth pants stepped out of the smoke. The crowd quieted. He had long black hair and a thick black mustache and his skin was as brown as the bark of a tree. He looked at her for a few moments, then began slowly unwrapping the rags from around his hands.
Get the dog, he said, and instantly the dog was there, led by a boy about my age. The dog seemed well fed, my father said, and he had a short length of woven horsetail leash around his neck. He seemed glad to see her. The cigán nodded. And without another word my mother took her dog and walked home to her uncle’s house and led him to his rag bed in the barn. Finally she returned to the house, and lifting the heavy wooden door so it wouldn’t creak, crept past the ticking clock up the stairs to her room. As she lay in bed she could see the dark frame of her window against the lightening sky. It was almost morning.
He had to work now, my father said. He had only told me this story about my mother and her dog because, he said, he wanted me to know something about my mother.
I nodded. But Mommy said her dog ran away, I said.
And so he did, said my father. Later. Personally, he’d always thought he’d returned to the Gypsies, where life was good for a dog.
And that was the end of the story.
A year or two later my parents bought me a dog. And one day that dog disappeared. We had moved to the suburbs by then, to a small house in Ardsley with a cracked driveway and a mimosa tree that dropped pink blossoms all over the yard. Perhaps he’d been stolen, my father said. Or run over by a car. We hunted around in the thin woods at the end of the road, calling his name, and hung up signs on the telephone poles asking whoever had found him to give him back to us, but no one ever called. In all honesty, I’d never really cared for the dog—a purebred boxer with a streak on his nose—but I’d gotten used to him, and when he disappeared, I missed him for a while. And then one day when my mother was driving me somewhere, we saw him in the back of someone else’s car.
It was a rainy day in late fall; gusts of wind shook the car and smeared the water across the windows. My mother tried to get the attention of the people in the other car, waving and tapping on the glass with her wedding ring, then followed them off the highway and through the tolls, mile after mile, down roads we had never been on before, to some part of Queens I didn’t know. After a long time we crossed a bridge over a big river to a world of factories where tall chimneys poured smoke into the rain while others burned like giant candles.
When it was almost dark the car stopped in front of a smudged little house and a family with two small children got out. It had stopped raining. They were frightened at first, and the man kept waving his hands and saying What do you want? What do you want? but when my mother explained, he apologized and said that he was very sorry but that the dog was theirs and that he and his family had come from Pakistan a year ago, and then he went into the house and brought out some papers. I talked to our dog, meanwhile, but he didn’t recognize me. Eventually we got back in our car and went home without him. I remember looking out the window as we drove back over the bridge. One black cloud was lit up from behind, and I could see the water and the factories.
It’ll be all right, said my mother. It doesn’t matter. And she laughed to herself and shook her head.
Later I remembered the flames and turned around quickly in my seat, but the road had taken a turn, and they were gone. And so the story stopped again, balanced on one foot, so to speak.
Twenty-five years later, on an October afternoon in 1985, I was working at my desk at a cabin I’d once lived in with my parents when I heard someone calling a hello and found an old couple I vaguely remembered from my childhood standing by the stone wall. They had been driving in the area, they said, and had suddenly remembered visiting my parents years ago at a cabin on a lake, and had decided on a whim to see if they could find it. They were very proud of themselves, and though I didn’t particularly want to, I invited them in for a glass of wine and we talked of this and that and they asked me if any of the other Czech families they had met in that earlier time still lived at the lake. They remembered Reinhold Černý very well, they said, and the Kesslers, whom they had met once or twice in the city. Černý had passed on years ago, I told them, as had Kessler. Kessler’s wife, Marie, I had heard, was living somewhere in North Carolina. And the Mostovskýs? Their children were two cabins down, I said.
At which point my dog, waking from where he’d fallen asleep in the shade of the small wrought-iron table around which we were sitting, knocked against one of the legs and spilled some wine. They begged me not to scold him—it hadn’t been his fault, after all—and explained that they had three dogs at home who were just like children to them, and how they had both felt sick, absolutely sick, to read in the paper, what with all the news about China and everything, that the Chinese still ate dogs. It was barbaric, absolutely barbaric, they said, and to think we could do business with these people. The whole thing had reminded them of my poor mother.
How so? I asked.
But surely I knew the story, they said—both my parents had spoken of it. A terrible thing for a child to go through. How my mother’s dog had been stolen by Gypsies one summer and how my mother, who could have been no more than seven or eight years old at the time, had crept out of her grandparents’ house in the middle of the night and walked miles and miles to a Gypsy camp and demanded her dog, only to be given a flour sack that might have held a rabbit, or a small carp, and how she had walked all the way home, the small dear, and buried the remains in the garden before returning to bed. Surely I remembered it now.
I told them I did.
This was a nice place, they said, looking around. It was odd, really. They hadn’t thought about my parents for years before they’d read that report about dogs in the paper, and yet, hardly two weeks later, here they were. Of course, it was probably because the article had started them thinking about my mother—though they hadn’t realized they were thinking of her at all at the time—that they had remembered our cabin and decided on a whim to try and find it.
They wouldn’t have been surprised, now that they thought of it, if my parents hadn’t told me the story of my mother and her dog. A terrible thing to tell a child. How she must have suffered, the poor dear, walking all those miles with that sack at her side. Still, they agreed, the story said something about her character. How strong she was. They nodded, agreeing with each other. The Lord only visited those who could bear it, they said.
8
SHE HAD BEEN BEAUTIFUL. I HAVE A FEW PHOTOGRAPHS, favorites I salvaged after my father died from the shoeboxes I found piled in the basement by the folded ping-pong table: one of a black-haired tomboy standing by her bicycle in the Vysočina forests, looking at the photographer as if wondering whether he’s going to try to take it away from her; another of a young woman on a windy corner in Brno, too impatient to be fashionable, pinning her hat to her hair as the statue of a dead saint, behind her, points to an escaping trolley; a third—overexposed—of my mother against a white sea of cloud in the Tatras, the hand of a companion—not my father—visible at her waist.
And then there’s the one of him, or so I have to assume. I’ve looked at it closely. At the overlong sleeves of the sweater—the left pushed partway to the elbow, the other almost covering his hand. I’ve studied the cigarette, like a tiny stub of light clamped between the tips of his fingers, protruding from inside the wool. There’s nothing to see. A man standing in the snow, squinting into the glare. Not particularly handsome. The snow on the hill behind him has partly melted.
I don’t know what he meant to her exactly. Or how he died. I only know that his face, the sound of his voice, never really diminished for her
. That she simply refused to give him up.
There are people like that, after all—individuals who resist the current, who hold out against that betrayal. Who refuse to take their small bouquet of misremembered moments and leave. You’ll run into them at the deli counter, or while waiting in line at the theater, and they’ll say, “I had an acquaintance many years ago” or “I once knew someone who I cared for very much who also hated sauerkraut,” and suddenly, standing there waiting to give the butcher your order, or clutching your paper ticket, you can see them leaning into the current’s pull, hear the rocks of the riverbed clattering like bones.
It wasn’t a matter of jealousy or fear. My parents never slept in separate beds or took vacations with “old friends” or hurt each other more than husbands and wives generally hurt each other. It was subtler than that. My mother respected my father’s strength, his endurance, was grateful to him for taking on the role he had for her with such tact, but hated him for it too. And because she recognized the injustice in this, she loved him—or tried. And because she knew he recognized it too, she failed.
And my father? My father saw it for the perfect thing it was, appreciated it the way a master carpenter will appreciate a perfectly constructed joint, the tongue mated to the groove like an act of God. Kafka would have understood: he would do the right thing—the only thing—and be hated for it. Inevitably. Even justly.
9
ONE DAY WHEN I WAS SEVEN AND HAD BEEN GOING TO school for a year or so, my father asked me what I was learning (he was sitting in his favorite chair by the long white bookshelf in the living room; my mother had gone out, to do some shopping, she said), and I told him about reading and spelling and math. I’d written a report on volcanoes, I said.
My father nodded. “The Greek philosopher Empedocles dove into a volcano to prove he was a god and burned to a crisp,” he said. “What do you think of that?”