by Mark Slouka
I said I thought it was silly.
“Smart boy,” my father said.
He looked at me for a moment, sitting on the sofa, skinny legs dangling like a ventriloquist’s puppet, then took a small sip from the glass on the shelf next to him. “We need to supplement,” he said.
For years afterward the Greeks tasted like Ovaltine, because every time my father decided to supplement, he would let me make a cup and sip it while he talked. And for years that taste was all I retained from our sessions in the living room—that and the memory of him sitting in his chair, talking to me as if I were older than I was, as if I knew why he was smiling or why he had run his hand over his head that way or why he’d looked out the window over Queens Boulevard as if suddenly remembering something, some appointment he’d missed.
He told me many things; I don’t remember them all. He told me about Empedocles and Parmenides and Anaximander, Heraclitus and Thales. He liked their names, and he would make me repeat them and seem pleased when I got them right. “Say Empedocles,” he’d say, “say Anaximander,” and I’d say Empedocles or Anaximander and he’d chuckle as if there were someone else in the room with us and say, “That’s good. That’s very nice.”
Parmenides, he said, had worried a lot about reality because he’d noticed that what his senses told him didn’t make sense. “Which didn’t really make sense,” my father said, “but never mind.” Parmenides, he said, went on to claim that reality could be understood only by thought, which was a disastrous thing to say if one thought about it—a bit like saying that a nail could only be hammered with a tomato—even if it was true.
The rational mind was a terrible tool for the job, my father said. It thought logically, or tried to. It sniffed after justice where there was none. It insisted on looking at everything, even when that was clearly a bad idea. It had this notion, which it clung to, that the truth would save us, though it was quite obvious that precisely the opposite was often true. “The fact is that many things are true,” my father said, “but we have to pretend they aren’t.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because the truth would confuse us and make us sad,” my father said. “Take Empedocles—can you say Empedocles?” “Empedocles,” I said. “Good boy,” said my father. Empedocles, he said, believed that there were only two basic forces in the world—love and strife. Love brought things together and strife pulled them apart. All very logical. Empedocles claimed that this explained how things could change and yet the world could stay the same. My father looked at me. “Now let me ask you. Which do you think is easier, to keep things together or to pull them apart?”
“Pull them apart,” I said.
“Exactly,” said my father. He smiled. “Maybe that’s why Empedocles dove into the volcano,” he said.
In any case, he’d never liked Empedocles much, my father said. Thales, who lived on the coast of Asia Minor and who could navigate ships and reroute rivers, was much more interesting. Thales, a bald-headed old man with hairy ears, said the world floated like a log on endless water—which it very well might, said my father—and that all things were full of gods—which they were. Of course, the problem with the second part, my father said, was that when people thought of the things that were full of gods, they always thought of death and sunsets and Niagara Falls, never doorknobs.
The Greeks were full of wisdom, my father said.
But I wanted to know when Mommy was coming home—it may have been the first time my father called me in to ask me about my schooling; it may have been some time after that. I don’t remember.
“Heraclitus was fun,” he said, not hearing me. “Heraclitus, you see, was bothered by the fact that nothing in the world stayed the same, that everything changed. That the world was always rushing on, whether we noticed it or not. And he tried to explain this constant changing and decided that since fire changed everything it touched, fire was to blame.” My father looked out the window. “According to Heraclitus, everywhere we look, the world is on fire, burning invisibly, changing before our very eyes.” My father paused. “Of course, some things never change, never mind how long they burn. So, so much for Heraclitus.”
But I wanted to know when Mommy was coming home. I was getting hungry and my Ovaltine was gone.
My father was looking out the window over Queens Boulevard. In the far distance, a small brown plane was turning toward La Guardia Airport. “Soon,” he said. “Very soon, I’m sure.”
10
BY THE TIME I WAS NINE WE HAD LEFT THE CITY, THE asphalt playgrounds, those inland seas, I’d played on, the loafshaped hedges and shadowed continents of lawn, and moved to a small, flat house in the suburbs. The house had a fireplace that didn’t work and a basement and a sliding glass door which let out onto a porch that overlooked a scrubby patch of woods. In the spring, when the mud had finally thawed and the huge, ridged leaves of the skunk cabbage had sprung out of it, hiding the trash, I would catch red-backed salamanders there.
That summer, at the Memorial Day picnic, my father broke his glasses trying to catch a football which slipped through his hands. My mother hadn’t wanted to go. Mr. Kelly, who was from South Dakota, and who pitched to the kids on the block every Saturday from the foot of his driveway, aiming at a square he had drawn on the garage door with a piece of chalk, had thrown it to him from across the street. He felt bad afterward, and helped my father look for the pieces, and my father, who as a schoolboy in the summer of 1937 had run eight hundred meters around a cinder track in two minutes and one second, setting a national junior record that lasted for nine years, smiled and said that from now on he believed he’d stick to balls that didn’t have points.
It was not long afterward that we got into the DeSoto and drove north to visit the Jakubecs at a cabin they rented on a lake. The cabin stood on the top of a grassy meadow under some big trees and smelled wonderfully of Mr. Jakubec’s pipe. All the familiar people were there—Mr. Štěpánek with that laugh of his, and Mr. Chalupa and Mr. Hanuš, as well as some people I didn’t know—and Mrs. Jakubcová served coffee and strawberry tac, and later we all went swimming, everyone carrying towels and mats and drinks out into the hot sun, and my father and a man who lived on the lake named Mostovský made their arms into a kind of chair and carried Mr. Hanuš down through the grass to the water because the meadow was tilted and his canes stuck in the soft ground. As they carried him down through the long grass in their bathing suits Mr. Hanuš yelled to me to get him a rose from the hedge, and when I handed it to him he put the stem between his teeth and looked at my father and said, Kiss me, Sedlák, I feel just like a girl again, and my father laughed and told him to kiss Mostovský instead, that he deferred to the better man, and the two of them staggered on, sweating, to the water’s edge, where they set him gently down on the boards of the dock so that his feet, which looked like closed fists, could dangle in the water.
We stayed for five seasons, renting a cabin just down the shore. Years later, remembering our summers there, I returned alone.
There was a sort of softening that occurred to people there, an involuntary easing of something very much like pain. I don’t know what it was about the place exactly. Perhaps it was the sun, or the water, always busy with some kind of invisible midges, or the strange pleasure of seeing the dark prints of their bodies evaporating off the wooden dock. More likely, for people who measured everything by its similarity to the world they’d known before, it was that it was so close to the original they’d lost—a reasonable facsimile.
And yet it was this very closeness, which invited the heart to play, and which would find them staring at a line of light slanting through the leaves, or watching their own white feet sweep back and forth through the water...it was this very familiarity that brought out every difference like a thorn, that made the place more excruciating than New York City could ever be. It was so close, this small pond with its screen-door chatas smelling of cedar and smoke, and yet...the birds sounded different here, and the water was warme
r than it should have been, and the air did not smell of chamomile and pine and moldering loam and hříbky with caps of dirt on their velvety heads, but of other things.
Of course, even if everything had been precisely the same, it wouldn’t have helped. Nothing could match what they’d had, for the simple reason that they couldn’t have it again. It was not that what they’d lost had been better or more beautiful than what they’d found here, just that it had been theirs, and it had been lost. Not even the war had done that. They could no more substitute for it than a mother or father could substitute for a lost child by adopting another who shared the same features or spoke in the same voice. And yet, though they knew this, they couldn’t help being drawn to that other, newer child, listening to it, running a hand over its hair.
Even my father, who at best tolerated this kind of sentimentality, was not immune. In the mornings I would find him sitting on a chair he’d carried out to the shore, tracing the corners of his mouth with his fingers like a man smoothing a mustache, the slow waves of light from the water moving up his shirt.
“It’s not that I don’t understand,” he said to me once.
I’d sat down in the grass next to him. My parents had had an argument the night before over some movie I didn’t know, and my mother had gone into the little wooden bedroom next to mine and slammed the door.
He waved his hand to indicate the black water, the trees, the last slips of mist being dragged up into the bluing sky. “I do,” he said. “It’s just that it does no good.”
I didn’t miss the city, particularly. I missed driving in on summer mornings, when a kind of bruise-colored fog obscured the buildings and only the tallest skyscrapers rose above it, flashing their sides one after the other like great, silver-scaled fish, and I missed the coconut custard pie and milk my mother would buy for me at the Chock Full o’ Nuts with its clean, curving counters, and the obst-torte with the glazed strawberries we would share at the German pastry shop on Second Avenue. But that was all, really. Our friends still visited us at the lake in the summers, and my father still brought home Irish soda bread in white paper bags as he always had, and though I missed my room in the apartment on 63rd Road, what I really missed, I see now, was not the room itself but the feeling of being a child there. For a while after we moved I would wake up in the dark and think I was still there, and that the door to the hall was behind me rather than to the left, and it would take me a few moments to move things around, so to speak, to reconcile where I was with where I’d been.
A year after we moved to our house in the suburbs I dreamed that I was walking through our old apartment. It was dark and yet I could see all of our old things: the low white bookshelf in the living room and my child’s desk and my bed with the pirate lamp and the chair my father sat in whenever we had guests, all of which we had left behind. And though I could see all these things, I knew, as you can sometimes know things in dreams, that I no longer lived in this place, that I was only visiting, and I wandered about from room to room, looking at these things which were still so familiar to me, wondering what had become of them, and it seemed to me that they must miss us.
I didn’t remember that dream for a long time. Many years later I found myself on a train traveling south from Prague to visit friends near Jindřichův Hradec. Wet snow had been falling all morning, but now a dull winter sun had broken through. Coal smoke hung like a mist over the towns with their smudged little houses. The train ran beside the river that curved against the hills and spread in great gravelly shoals between the fields, and everywhere I could see the remnants of a flood which only that past October had submerged all the things I was now looking at. I saw a sofa lying upside down on a sandbar and a white refrigerator like a boulder in the current. On the television antenna of a low abandoned building I glimpsed what looked like a pair of blue pants, stiff as a weathervane. And at that moment for some reason I remembered my dream—the dream I had had a year after we had moved out of our apartment on 63rd Road. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I watched the country scrolling by. All along the way, beards of trash hung in the bushes and the trees like Spanish moss, except that here everything was at the same height—the high-water mark—everything below having been swept away by the current.
Strangely enough, just as dreams will sometimes color our memories, the view of the river that day and the dream it recalled together forced themselves on the past, so that afterward, whenever I thought of our old apartment, my recollections would always carry a residue of future times, and remembering our apartment I would immediately be forced, like a man stumbling down a series of steps, to recall wandering those same rooms in my dream, and from there to remember the winter morning I’d spent, years later, looking out the dirty windows of the train to Jindřichův Hradec at all the things, once caught in the current, the flood had left behind.
11
WHEN I THINK BACK ON OUR FIVE SEASONS AT THE LAKE, I see my father reading in the big wicker chair that usually stood in the corner under the lamp with the green shade but which he would drag in front of the fire on chilly days. He was a great reader, my father: at ease, engaged, capable of sitting for three hours at a stretch without feeling the need to get up or move about, indeed, almost immobile except for now and again a small inward smile or a slight tilt of the head in anticipation of the page’s turning. Sometimes I’d see his arm swing like a crane to the little table at his side. He’d pick up the glass with three fingers, begin to bring it to his lips—all this without once looking up from the page—and stop. And the glass would just hang there, sometimes for a minute or more, and I’d make bets with myself about whether it would complete its journey by the time he got to the bottom of the page, or be returned, untouched, to the table.
My mother read too, though differently. For days or weeks she would read nothing at all, or nothing but the newspaper, then suddenly take a book off the shelf, pull a chair next to my father’s, and disappear. She read with an all-absorbing intensity, her stockinged feet drawn up underneath her, that I understood completely and yet still found slightly unnerving. Hunched over the book—which she would hold at her stomach, forcing her to look straight down—she looked as though she were protecting the thing, or in pain. No smile, no cup of tea, no leg thrown easily over the other, this was less a dance than a battle of some kind, though what was being fought for, and by whom, I could hardly guess. Two days after it had begun—during which time my mother would often drag a chair out to the shore after breakfast, or retire to one of the hammocks my father had strung about the place, in which she would lie, straight-legged, smoking cigarette after cigarette, holding the book above her head—it would be over. I would find her lying in the hammock, staring up into the trees, the book tossed on the grass beside her.
I liked it there. I liked the rainy days when the three of us sat around the card table and played board games for hours on end, raising our voices over the dulling sound on the roof, and I liked finding things like the pencil-thin milk snake that crawled out of a crack in the foundation stone of the communal barn one day, but most of all, I think, I liked sitting on the dock with my mother on hot summer afternoons in July or August when a storm was rising out of the west and we knew it wouldn’t miss us.
Such stillness. The sky above our heads remained perfectly clear, a deep, serene blue, but already the light would be changed, troubled, and with every deep rumble that seemed to move the wood beneath our chairs, I’d feel a thrill of anticipation, and sometimes my mother, who liked these storms as much as I did, would reach out her hand and squeeze my shoulder as if to say, “That was a good one—here we go.”
It was the inevitability of the thing that we liked, I realize now: the hundred swallows flicking down to their reflections in the water; the mountain growing over us toward the sun, then swallowing it in a slow gulp, which always brought on a small, sad wind that felt good in my hair; and then the crash and rumble, extending, extending, longer than one would have thought possible, then subs
iding into poised quiet. There was nothing to be done, nothing we could change, and there was a quiet joy in this.
Sometimes my father would come out on the sagging porch and tell us to come in, and we’d call back that we’d be right there and stay right where we were, transfixed, as the curtain rose higher and higher, and then what always looked and sounded like wind would turn the water on the other side of the lake mirror-green to pewter-gray, and in the next breath the squall line would be halfway across the water and my mother and I would be running for the cabin.
It was in our second season on the lake that my father shot the dog with Mr. Colby’s gun and Mrs. Kessler fell in love with the man who lived in the cabin on the other side of the lake. He was much younger than she was, which was very important, and everyone talked about it those two weeks whenever they thought I couldn’t hear, changing the subject to food or interrupting themselves to ask me whether I had seen the heron by the dam as soon as I came closer. She had made a spectacle of herself, which made me think of glasses even though I knew what it meant, and really it was a bit much, this carrying on in plain view. Everyone seemed angry about it, and though my parents and the Mostovskýs and some of the others didn’t have much to say, I could always tell when people were talking about it by the way they would look slightly off to the side, shaking their heads, or the way their shoulders shrugged, as if they didn’t care, or the way some would lean forward while others, giving their opinion, would lean back luxuriously in their Adirondack chairs.
I knew it was probably wrong and shameful for a married lady to fall in love with someone, and particularly someone younger, but the truth was that I liked Mrs. Kessler. She had come across me once while I was working on one of my many forts in the woods and kept my secret, and sometimes when Harold Mostovský and I spent the long, hot afternoons feeling around in the water with our toes, trying to walk the pasture walls that had disappeared when the lake was made, we would look up and see her sitting on the shore watching us, her arms around her legs, and when she saw we had seen her, she would give a hesitant little wave, raising her hand a bit, then a bit more, as though unsure of how high she should bring it, and we would go back to what we were doing. It never bothered us having her there, and then at some point we’d look up and she’d be gone.