by Mark Slouka
One evening as they ate, my mother turned to look out the half-closed window and saw the two of them reflected in the glass. He was looking at her. The light was almost gone but she could still make them out, sharing a table out there in the near dark, and even in the reflection she could see how much he loved her, the tenderness he had for her. He seemed to be memorizing her—and moved by this she turned from the image in the glass to the man sitting just across from her, but he had already looked away and was reaching for a piece of bread.
Three had died almost immediately. The remaining four had saved their last bullets for themselves. They’d tried to dig through the meter-thick wall to the sewers using knives and pieces of brick. When the fire hose was pushed through the small window on the north wall, they’d managed to find a ladder and shove it back out on the street. They had been betrayed by an informer, a partisan named Čurda, who later helped identify the bodies. The underground was being pulled up by the roots—men, women, entire families. Everyone they’d known. Everyone who had helped them.
My mother saw him looking at the pictures in the newspaper that morning—at the wet bodies on the pavement outside the church, at the close-ups of Kubiš and Gabčík. She was sorry, she said. On the roof she could hear pigeons cooing and then a quick flurry of wings. It was all right, he said. And for just that one moment, it was. And then he looked up at her with an odd halfsmile on his face, as though he had lifted the paper to find he had no legs, and she said, “What? What is it?” and he said, “How would they have known it wasn’t me? They didn’t know it was Čurda when they died. They thought it was me.”
She talked. She explained. They knew him, she said. He seemed to agree. She found work at a bookseller’s and returned in the evenings and he was fine and she loved him and they ate their dinners together and he asked her about work and even smiled at the things that required smiling and day by day he slipped away—not willfully, not cruelly, but slipped away nonetheless. And she talked and cooked and held him at night and he did everything he could to help her and she said everything right and the reason it didn’t matter was not because the others had died and he had not, but because he had been gone for sixteen hours when it began and because he would never know whether, as the water rose up their legs and the stairs began to disappear one by one, they didn’t believe it was him.
And so together they staggered on, locked in love, until the morning my mother turned around at the tram stop for no apparent reason and made her way back to the flat next to the printer’s and found the note on the table under the salt shaker and read the name and contact information of the man who was to have gotten them out of Czechoslovakia and underneath it, in the tall, disordered handwriting she had only lately come to know: Please don’t look for me—I didn’t have the strength to say goodbye. I love you will always love you. Forgive me.
And my mother refolded the note and put it back under the salt shaker and began the rest of her life.
IT WAS RAINING THE MORNING HE PARKED THE CAR BY the old town wall, unwound the stems of his glasses from around his ears, hooked them on the rear-view mirror, and started walking up the road from žd’ár. No one had stopped him. He walked easily despite the rain, one hand in his trouser pocket, his head tilted slightly as though skeptical of the world ahead of him. Through the archers’ clefts in the wall he could see the river, solid as pewter, a sooted steeple, a wooded hill, and for an instant he saw them there—bows tensed, fletching brushing their cheeks. Like children’s figurines arrayed along the edge of a dresser.
At the wrought-iron gate he called to an old man dragging a tarp over an open grave, then pointed to some distant spot behind the bars and waited, his hand making a roof over the cigarette pinched between his fingers, calmly ducking his head every now and then for a drag, watching as the old man finished weighing down the four corners of the tarp with small heaps of brick, then shuffled, still partly bent over, past the cart half full of broken stems and small, muddy wreaths, and opened the gate, and he thanked him and walked on up the path—left, then right, then left again, putting as much distance between himself and the gate as he could—then stopped by a new grave and sank the knees of his trousers into the soft doughy soil. He brought the cigarette to his mouth in a big arc, sizzled it out carefully in the mud, then reached into his raincoat pocket and did what he would have done, had love and luck not interfered, twelve days before.
HE’D BEEN TRYING TO READ THAT MORNING, I’M SURE of it—first Sova’s poems, then Horace, then Heine—fascinated by the way the fever seemed to charge certain words and phrases with a significance he couldn’t quite grasp and suspected probably wasn’t there. A warm, cloudy morning. Rain. His parents had both gone out. When the wind swung the window partly open my father wrapped the blanket around himself and went to shut it, and when his hand touched the wet metal of the latch, he shuddered.
He had hardly opened the new book when the frontispiece came out in his hand, and, irritated, he got up again and rummaged through the drawer of a desk that stood next to a tall black piano, then walked over to the dining room table with a squat brown jar and a pencil. He might be able to glue it back in. He wondered when they would return. The brush was too fat; it would glue half the page to the one after it. Dipping the point of the pencil just past the lead, he placed it across the mouth of the jar, opened the book to the missing page, then touched the gluey tip to the crease. A tricky business. Twice the book closed accidentally. Once he dropped the pencil on the table. He hated being sick. Heine had been sick for seven years, had written his greatest poems from the bed he would die in. It didn’t make him feel any better.
The page went in badly. He pulled it out, dabbed at the glue in the crease with the tip of a napkin, then tipped it in again. Who knew when they’d be back. Everything took forever these days. He closed the book carefully, placed the Horace on top of it for weight.
Miserable weather.
He looked out the window and there she was. She was walking up the sidewalk, leaning slightly toward the suitcase in her right hand. She was wearing a long gray coat. For one nightmarish instant—perhaps it was the fever—my father thought that she was blind.
He wouldn’t make her open the gate, walk up the path, knock on the door. He met her on the sidewalk in his slippers, in the rain, and even before he saw her face, before she collapsed in his arms and he half carried her down the rickety bricks that he and his father had put down when he was twelve, before he even got up from the table, in fact, he understood.
He saw it all, the arc and fall of his life—the sad carnival tune to which it would play—illuminated as clearly, as incontrovertible as if he had been hit by that hackneyed bolt experienced by characters in novels. He saw the gift, and the loss in that gift, and he rose from the table without hesitation or regret to shoulder the burden of his love.
ONE NIGHT WHEN I WAS FIVE OR SIX MY MOTHER WALKED out of the country bungalow we were staying in at the time. I woke to hear my father pulling on his pants in the dark. It was very late, and the windows were open. The night was everywhere. Where was he going? I asked. Go back to sleep, he said. Mommy had gone for a walk. He would be right back, he said.
But I started to cry because Mommy had never gone for a walk in the forest before, and I had never woken to find my father pulling on his pants in the dark. I did not know this place, and the big, square windows of moonlight on the floor frightened me. In the end he told me to be brave and that he would be back before I knew it and pulled on his shoes and went after his wife. And found her, eventually, sitting against a tree or by the side of a pond in her tight-around-the-calf slacks and frayed tennis shoes, fifteen years too late.
And I wonder if it was something in particular, the moon that night or the smell of the fields, that sent her out of my father’s bed and into the forest, as though by simply walking far enough, deep enough, she might find him there, and herself as well, asleep in the moss, covered by a single blanket. I imagine my father closing the white
-painted door of the bungalow and walking into the dark. Calling her name after he’d walked a bit farther from the other cabins. Listening to the far-off thrum of the freeway, two valleys over.
I wonder how he found her in all that darkness. And if he didn’t say anything at all but simply took her back—for what else could he do?—holding her arm along the wood-chip path like an invalid crippled by grief. And if there was any way on this earth, in this life, she could not have hated him for it.
But I would wish it for her now—an endless forest, and twenty years till dawn.
About the Author
MARK SLOUKA is the child of Czech immigrants himself, and draws on his personal experience and the inevitable intrusions of the past on the present. He is the author of the novel God’s Fool, named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the short story collection Lost Lake, a New York Times Notable Book in 1998, and the nonfiction work War of the Worlds. Three of his essays have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays, and his short story “The Woodcarvers Tale” won the National Magazine Award for fiction. He is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine, and is currently the director for the writing program at the University of Chicago.