by Mark Slouka
I moved to the apartment on Italská Street in Prague when I was thirty-seven. I still go back and forth as I can. I’ve learned that human beings are like the Silly Putty I used to play with as a child, that pressed to a piece of brick, we take the imprint of this world, then carry it like a sealed letter marked God and God alone to our deaths. I’ve learned that nothing in this world resists us like ourselves. And I think, if this is true, how then can we hope to know someone else?
1
IN MID-AUGUST OF THAT FIRST SUMMER I FOUND MYSELF walking up a steep, badly cobbled road in central Moravia that tilted to the left like a sloping hill. The village I was passing through, called Polnická, seemed deserted. No one moved in the dilapidated blue and cream-colored houses crowding the road from either side until an old man in slippers suddenly appeared, carrying a basket of apricots through a gate. Apparently recognizing that I was not from those parts, he invited me to his wine cellar for a glass of wine.
He led me through a neglected garden to a half-sized door with a wig of roses hanging over its skull-cracking sill. Through this door, which opened into a low, rounded hill, we entered a damp stairwell, tight as a burrow. The stairs descended a full five meters to a tiny earthen room. Two old men were already there, huddled in heavy, mouse-eaten coats, sitting on wooden benches. Three small barrels lay on a scaffolding made of sticks. A row of small glasses stood on a dirt shelf. A few roots, some cut flat, others still growing hopefully, protruded from the wall. This, my guide explained, was the wine cellar, and here the three of them could sit, sub rosa so to speak, safe from the great flapping ear of the Party, which sat listening like the old Victrola dog to every sound they made.
One had eyebrows like white brushes that drooped over his eyes; another, whose teeth seemed one size too big for his mouth, was dressed, under his bear-like coat, in a brown jacket, his shirt buttoned tight against his wattled neck; my host, who regularly refilled my glass from a snout-like hose attached to one of the barrels, had hands as seamed as paws.
I listened to them talk. Every now and then I thought I could hear, high above us, someone knocking on the little door at the top of the stairs. No one else seemed to hear it.
I asked them about the war, which they remembered well. Eventually there was a quarrel over whether it had rained on a certain day during the war when someone they had known had shot himself. My host was sure it had. The professor—for that was what I thought of him as being—was sure it hadn’t. The man had shot himself in the head, my host said, and collapsed face-down in the mud. He’d left his glasses on the rear-view mirror of his car, then walked up to the cemetery in the rain and shot himself. The professor called my host an idiot. “It was a day as blue as that house,” he said, pointing to a small, mildewed painting hanging from a root. Looking at me, he tapped the age-spotted skin over his temple. “Senility,” he said. “Everything’s blurring together for him.” He pointed at the ceiling half a meter above our heads. “It’s raining now, you see, so he thinks it was raining then. If it was snowing, he’d be saying he killed himself in a snowdrift.”
My host told him to go to hell. They argued.
“Goddamn it, I should know,” yelled my host at some point. “Vladislav Popelka was the graveskeeper, and my sister went to school with his daughter.”
“I remember her,” interrupted the one with the eyebrows, who had been quiet all this time. “Her brother had a hospoda in Nedvědice. I used to see him at the station sometimes after the war.”
“What was it called?” asked my host.
“U kolejí,” said the other, taking his glass.
“I remember that,” said my host.
“They had the most wonderful little game hens in nut sauce.”
They were all silent for a while. Again I could hear the knocking on the door at the top of the stairs.
“It’s that son-in-law of yours,” said the professor.
“I think it’s General Secretary Gorbachev, come to ask me what to do about the economy,” said my host.
“I could be wrong,” said the professor.
They were silent again.
“What time is it?” asked the one with the eyebrows. He’d promised to take his wife to see the new American film playing in Žd’ár, a love story of some kind. That actor was in it, he said, you know. Which one? they asked. The blond one, he said. With the mole on his cheek. “Redford,” said the professor. “Robert Redford.” “That’s him,” said the one with the eyebrows. “The wife had a dream about him the other night. Said he knocked on our kitchen window while I was taking a nap after dinner and asked her to come out to the barn with him. She was just taking her apron off to go outside when I woke her to ask where she’d put the keys to the shed. She wouldn’t talk to me the rest of the day.”
“So take her tomorrow,” said the professor irritably.
“To hell with Robert Redford,” said my host.
He had to go, the other said, standing into a kind of crouch. It had been a pleasure to meet me, he said, though I had hardly said a word the entire time, and with that they beckoned me up the narrow, clayey stairs to the half-sized door at the top, through which I emerged into a warm, sunny drizzle.
2
ON A WET APRIL DAY IN 1999, IN A TRAM ALONG THE Vltava River, I asked a frail man in a Homburg hat for directions. He wore glasses and was dressed in a dark suit of some heavy material. It had worn to a dull shine at the elbows, and I noticed that he had rubbed shoe polish into the thinning spots to hide them. He had a fine white mustache, and he asked me where I was from and ended up telling me about his father who had been a Latin teacher in a local high school and a collector of birds’ nests.
Every spring in those years during the war, he said, his father, whose displeasure could provoke even the dullest students into prodigious feats of memory, and who could seem so severe behind his small rimless glasses, what with his creased cheeks and his thin brown hair combed straight back, would wander in the woods around Prague listening for bird calls. He knew them all—skřiv´nky and pénkavky and r´kosníky Having located a nest, he would wait patiently for the chicks to hatch and then to leave, returning week after week until the nest was empty. He would mark the spot on a map, with a symbol like a footnote, then describe the position in more detail in a small leather notebook he carried with him, triangulating his position with the local landmarks: a scarred oak, a steeple, a stone road marker like a tiny gravestone. Only after the birds had abandoned it, the man assured me, turned half around on the tram’s uncomfortable plastic seat, would his father add the nest to his collection. When he finally harvested a nest, the mood would be festive; his father would be in good spirits all day. Sometimes, especially when there were trees to climb, he would take his son with him, handing him the thin-bladed, collapsible saw, instructing him where to cut.
Collecting birds’nests was his father’s passion, the man in the Homburg hat told me, and every fall and winter through the early years of the war, whenever his father had spare time, he would work on his displays at a small desk in a corner of the living room—mounting each nest on the appropriate branch of the appropriate tree or bush or reed—all the while regaling his family with amusing stories of how he had come to secure this particular treasure, what he had said to this or that acquaintance who had happened by just as he was scrambling up a tree like a schoolboy, how he had lifted his hat to Madame So-and-So with one hand while holding on to a branch with the other.
Sometimes, when an egg didn’t hatch, his father would blow it out through a pinhole and place it in the nest to add realism to the display. Everyone, he maintained, needed a koníček, a hobby, especially after a certain age, and his was certainly no more absurd than many others. He himself, said the man in the Homburg hat, had started collecting stamps soon after he had turned forty. He found that it gave his life a kind of order that nothing else could supply. There was a real pleasure, he said, on receiving a bundle of stamps from some acquaintance from overseas, in sitti
ng down under a good lamp on a rainy evening to study and sort and perhaps affix them in their proper places.
I told him I had some stamps my parents had collected over the years for some reason, and that I recalled my mother saying that some of them were from places like Siam and Ceylon, countries that, as he knew, no longer existed under their former names. I had no idea if they were valuable, but if he was interested I would send them to him. He said he would be very grateful, and I handed him a pencil and a store receipt I found in one of my pockets and he placed the receipt against the window and wrote down his address for me. “Four more stops,” he said.
So he had inherited his father’s collection? I asked, in part to fill in the sudden silence.
He shook his head. The collection had been destroyed when his father was arrested.
I was sorry, I said.
The old man waved it away. “The Gestapo came for him in July of 1942,” he said matter-of-factly. “I was thirteen years old. My father’s collection must have had close to a hundred nests in it by then. It was really quite something. They were all over our apartment—in the parlor, in the dining room, in the hallway, so many that at times it was as if you were walking through an enchanted wood, a wood in which walls had miraculously begun to appear among the branches, while at other times it seemed as if the walls themselves had come alive and sprouted through the plaster. A wondrous home to grow up in.”
After breaking his father’s nose with the butt end of a rifle, he said, the soldiers had made his father tear the nests out of the walls and step on them. The three of them—he and his mother and father—had just sat down to breakfast when they heard cars screech to a halt in front of the apartment. He remembered his father slowly folding the morning paper in half and laying it alongside his plate, then looking at his mother—not at her face but her chin and hair and throat, tracing the frame—and then they were there.
He remembered them going through the apartment. He remembered them standing about in the hall in their boots shouting Los, los, schneller!—Step out, faster, faster!—and his father bringing the branches into the living room like armfuls of stovewood while the blood poured from his nose and throwing them in a pile on the rug. There were big white pieces of plaster, like puzzle pieces, hanging off the ends.
“Why was he arrested?” I asked.
The tram had come to a stop. People streamed out into the wet spring air, others pushed in.
“Three more,” he said.
They had learned later, he said, that one of his father’s students had mentioned his father’s name under torture. He shrugged. “Who knows what people will say under those circumstances? My father had given him a four—what to you Americans would be a D. Perhaps my father’s name floated into his head by accident, as in a dream.”
At the time, said the man in the Homburg hat, he and his mother hadn’t known anything about this. They had no idea what was happening. It was all a terrible mistake. It was only much later, after the war, that they had learned that two of the parachutists sent to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich had hidden themselves for a time near one of his father’s favorite collecting places, a stretch of scrubby woods near an abandoned quarry twenty minutes from Prague, and that this coincidence, coupled with the young man’s mentioning of his teacher’s name in a delirium of pain, had been enough.
“What happened to your father?” I asked.
“They tortured him for three days, then cut off his head. They did that sometimes.” He paused. “A curious thing. When I was fifteen or sixteen—an unfortunate age under the best of circumstances—I became quite obsessed, morbidly so, you might say, with the details of my father’s death. I thought about it all the time, until one day, on an outing near Klánovice, I offered a villager fifty crowns if he would let me kill a chicken. I can still see him—a big, thick-nosed man in blue overalls. He looked at me strangely—he must have thought I was crazy—then went into the hen house and came out carrying a chicken and a short hatchet. I took the chicken by the neck—it was squawking terribly—and walked over to a kind of chopping block that stood in the middle of the yard. I was a city boy. I had no idea what to do. I put the chicken on the block, but everything kept blurring because I was crying and I couldn’t take off my glasses to wipe my eyes. I was worried I’d cut off my fingers on top of everything else, so I held its body down as best I could with my right foot and stretched out its neck like a rubber band and chopped off its head. I had been afraid it might run around, but it didn’t do anything. I lay the head and neck—a floppy, boneless thing—next to the body, paid the money, and left.” He shook his head. “What idiots we are,” he said.
“It didn’t help?” I said.
“Not a bit. I still thought about it, just as I had before. I thought for a time that I was losing my mind. And then at some point, for no particular reason, I stopped thinking about it.”
It had all been a very long time ago, he said. These days he passed the building in which his father had been interrogated at least three times a week. It was still there, a huge, blocky structure with bars in the windows, just down from the main train station. A statue of a barefoot prisoner, representing all those who had been interrogated there during the war, had been erected above the sidewalk on the southeast corner. He was an old man now. He never thought of it. The only thing that still troubled him at all was that the last memory he should have of his father was of him in his rest-day clothes, barefoot like the statue, trying not to cry out as he stamped on the branches strewn over the living room floor. More than a few of his father’s species, he explained, had nested in thorns.
I said something about how horrible this must have been for him, and how tragic a mistake.
He glanced out the window. “The next is mine,” he said. “Yours is the one after that.”
There had been no mistake, he said. Shortly after the war, in 1945, a man had knocked on their door and told them everything. His father, Oldřich Růǽička, had been a valuable member of the Resistance, he told them. He had relayed information from a man named Jindra. He had hidden two of the parachutists who had been dropped into the country by the RAF in an old cellar in the middle of a raspberry field, then kept them supplied with medicine and food and information for nearly two weeks until they could be moved to safety.
The man had read to them from a small book as he sat on their sofa. “On November 7, 1941”—here the old man looked at his open palm as though a notebook were lying in it—“Oldřich Růǽička carried crystals for a radio transmitter from a house in žyǽkov to an apartment on Poděbradova. On December 12 he relayed a message to someone code-named Jiřinka at the Olsany Cemetery. And so on.”
Curiously enough, the old man said, rather than give them comfort, this knowledge had taken away the one source of comfort he and his mother had had left. There were no certainties now, only questions. It was as though the man they had known had really been someone else. Next to every smile, every anecdote, there was now an asterisk, and though his father’s face and voice and hands remained as vivid to them as if he had just stepped out of the room to get something from the kitchen, they could no longer be sure exactly who it was that had left.
They had learned to live with it as best they could. In time, the man said, his mind had simply grown around this unwanted information, this other, alternate father, the way a tree will grow around an iron spike, incorporating it, enfolding it, until at times it seemed to him he could almost remember his father hinting at his other self, speaking in code, winking as he lifted his coat off the hook below the skŕivánek’s nest in the hall and went out for the afternoon.
But it was a lie, and he knew it. An uncertainty was still an uncertainty. A spike, though buried, was still a spike. And it still bothered him, particularly now, in his later years, when he realized it would outlive him. What troubled him most, he said, though he recognized that there was something wonderfully absurd about it, was that he would never know whether his father’s interest in birds
’ nests had been real—that is, whether it had come first and then been used by him as a convenient cover when the war began—or whether he had adopted it when the need arose. Whether all those nights—the man’s entire childhood, it seemed—that his father had sat at his work desk in the corner of the living room, tucking in strands of straw and tufts of lint with a needle and telling them about his adventures, had been genuine or only part of a long story he told—and lived—to protect them.
There were other options of course, said the man in the Homburg hat. Perhaps his father’s interest in birds had started out false and grown real with time. His father’s leather notebook, in which he had kept all his notes, had somehow, almost miraculously, survived—hidden in plain view on the bookshelf. More than once, he said, he had looked at it, with its location diagrams and crude pictures and descriptions of birds’ nests, and wondered how much of it was in code. He shrugged. Neither he nor his mother, in the years before she died, had been able to recall with any degree of accuracy when his father had started his hobby. It was not something he was likely to find out in this life. Perhaps the next.
It made for a very strange feeling, he said, to look at his father’s fountain-pen drawings, still so familiar to him with their arrows and circles and tight, angular handwriting, and to not know whom they had been intended for. Here and there, he said, one could find, in the thicket of Latin genus and species names, Lanius collurio or Emberiza calandra, a date and a time, (23. dubna 1942, 15:14), and next to it, carefully noted, the height of the nest from the ground in centimeters and the number of eggs that had hatched. Only recently, he said, had he noticed that there was always only one or two, and never more than three. He had no idea what this meant, if indeed it meant anything. “Here, let me show you,” he said, and leaning down, he opened the battered briefcase resting against his leg.