by Mark Slouka
Leaning back, one lean, trousered leg draped easily over the other, Černý picked a pouch of tobacco off the table, opened the sumptuous, black foil, and began to stuff his pipe. A single flick of his wrist and a match flared. Holding it to the bowl, he took two meditative puffs, each accompanied by a slight popping sound of the lips. “Milý pane Mostovský”—my dear Mr. Mostovsky, he said finally, his voice wearily descending the syllables like a parent lowering itself to speak to a particularly obtuse child—“the depradations have continued long enough. Experts can only confirm what we already know. And as for wandering about the countryside, hoping to stumble across a wayward turtle now and again, well, that is a solution that strikes me as singularly ineffectual. No, my dear sir”—and here I could see my mother gently place her hand on my father’s arm—“what must be done must be done, and, as the Americans are fond of saying, a job worth doing is worth doing well.”
“That would depend on the job,” said my father quietly, his jaw set.
“Jak rozumíte”—suit yourself—said Černý, and then, to his wife: “What about that cake you’ve been promising us, my dear.”
Ever competent, ever thorough, like a carpenter in his workshop, he gathered his tools: thirty plastic gallon jugs, carefully rinsed of milk or vinegar or carburetor fluid; forty yards of double-gauge wire, rolled off the wooden spool at Washburn’s Store; fifty stainless-steel hooks, size 6/0, from the small saltwater-fishing section of Mazolla’s Bait and Tackle.
Mazolla’s son, Paul, just seventeen at the time, bagged the hooks for him. “Bluefish?” he asked, substituting, by the usual hunter’s shorthand, the object of the quest for subject and verb and everything else.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You goin’ for bluefish?” He pointed. “The hooks.”
“Ah, yes. No.” Then, after a pause: “Turtles, I’m afraid.”
“Turtles?” asked Mazolla, uncomprehending. “What for?”
Černý accepted the bag and change. “Because, young man, they’re a nuisance.” The little brass bell over the door had already jangled his exit when Mazolla spoke again.
“That’s a lot of turtles,” he said, nodding toward the small paper sack.
Černý paused in the open door. “All of them,” he said quietly.
But then, nothing happened. Those few who had given the matter any thought in the first place simply forgot about it, assuming, with some small relief, that Černý had quietly taken care of things in his own way, or abandoned the plan altogether. Labor Day came and went, bringing with it the return exodus to the city. By late September, the majority of cottages hidden behind the trees stood locked and silent.
My family was usually among the few who insisted on pushing the season, yet that year, hindered by my father’s obligations in town, we came rarely. I remember long, hazy days spent playing on the city playgrounds or in vacant lots, the huge blocky shadows of the buildings advancing a strange silence across the heated asphalt, dulling, as though under water, the far drone of the freeway. I argued and cried, of course, for a last weekend, a last escape, before the long rain of November set in, but there was no help for it.
You can imagine my joy, then, and my parents’ relief, when the Goldsteins, our neighbors at the lake, offered to pick me up one early Friday morning in mid-October, take me with them, and have me home in time for dinner. They were going, they said, to clean and lock up for the winter. I was welcome to come along. At six o’clock the next morning, I was waiting with my father in the first light along Sixty-third Road, holding only a lunch bag, a two-piece rod, and a tackle box into which my mother had slipped a change of socks.
The first thing I remember from that day is smoke rising straight as an exclamation point above the trees from the Černýs’ cabin. The second is seeing something white burst above the water under the overhanging trees, disappear, then rise again a few yards down.
I had rowed quite close before I realized the thing was a plastic jug, wired like a huge cork to something under the surface. I tried to catch it with an oar, but each time I approached, the jug—as though alive, and not merely an indicator of something living below—would plow a panicked furrow under the surface, reappearing a few yards away. I chased it along the shoreline for a while, and then—I don’t know why—instead of rowing on to the Černýs’ dock, slid the rowboat into the reeds and set off on foot.
There were no omens, no premonitions. The garden was empty, the house strangely silent. Smoke like a quickly blurring ghost still issued from the stone chimney. I didn’t call or hallo the cottage or the shed but instead walked around the house and into the woods as though following a string, straight to the top of a small, wooded rise.
Below me, inside a chicken-wire enclosure nailed to a circle of trees and carefully staked to the ground, was Rheinhold Černý, in hip boots and work gloves, moving about an old stone garden. A wheelbarrow lay on its side, its third wheel slowly spinning. To the left, by the fence, lay a pile of white plastic jugs, each connected to what appeared to be a fist-sized rock. I was about to call when a movement on the far end of the enclosure caught my attention. A stone was climbing the wire fence.
The mind runs slower than the eyes—it took me a moment to grasp what I saw. When I did, I vomited in the ferns.
Distracted by his work, Rheinhold Černý never noticed the little boy crouching like an animal in the bracken. To this day, if he lives, he lives unsuspecting that someone saw what he did that October day, that someone watched, like Dante over the ninth abyss, as he walked among the dying and the damned still dragging at the end of a yard-long wire the jugs by which he’d drawn them from the deep; how he pulled them to the wooden circle, one by one, their thick clawed legs scraping resistant furrows in the dirt; how he placed a foot on their useless shells, drew out their leathery necks by the wire still clamped to the hook in their throats, then severed their heads with two or three blows of a well-honed hatchet.
Even now I see them crawling, their reptilian hearts too stubborn or dull to die, past their own sudden heads (still twisting and snapping like ghastly roots wrenched from some dark and troubled soil), past the growing pile of jugs by the fence, past their own brothers, who might hiss, if able, or continue on, mute like themselves, to the fence, which last barrier they would then begin to climb—unbelievably, absurdly—as though the memory of freedom had somehow outlived both their comprehension of it and their need for it, as though stopping their lives on the other side of a chicken-wire fence were a matter of some importance.
Pausing in his work, Rheinhold Černý pushed up his glasses with his shoulder (his right arm pointing straight ahead as though indicating something in the distance to an unseen companion), then walked to the fence. Carefully removing one soaked glove with the other, he hung them over the top wire like a pair of small bodies, freshly killed, then reached for something he’d left in the crotch of a tree. The lenses on his face sparked, then died. I watched him reach into his shirt pocket, then tilt his head in that familiar gesture I’d come to know so well, but by then the branches were already whipping at my face and I was flying headlong from the petrified silence of that place (marred only by the scrapings of claws on dirt) and the sight of Rheinhold Černý seated on an overturned bucket, one leg draped over the other, enjoying a smoke before completing his work.
I said nothing, revealed nothing, quick, like most children, to feel shamed by the shameful acts of others. I removed that day from my memory like a photograph from an album. The next season, I saw Černý again. I smiled at his teasing, listened to his anecdotes, accepted his gifts. And if, like any absent or invisible thing, that emptiness ordered the world around it, if it affected my life in any way at all, it did it in the time-honored way of troubled ghosts and buried memories, by supplying action and effect without agent or cause, by rearranging the portraits and the furniture of my life in ways I could neither control nor fully understand. I developed a lifelong affinity for the silent and forgotten, for thos
e who couldn’t scream. I swerved around snakes, stopped for tortoises, picked snails off rainy sidewalks. It was as though, forty years dead and buried, even the bone of their shells reduced to dust, the snappers still stumbled inside of me, as though their own indomitable blood were somehow my own, as though the compassion never shown to them had been passed, through the offices of my own shuttered heart, to all their kind.
Just so will evil sometimes undo itself, give birth to the sons and daughters who bury its fondest dreams.
the woodcarver’s tale
My Father’s Story
These are the facts as my father told them. In the old country during the Second World War, in the forests and villages of Czechoslovakia east of Brno, a man named Machár, or Macháč, made a name for himself as a smuggler, moving entire families across the Moravian border to Trenčín, then across Slovakia to Hungary, where others would take them on. His was the first and most dangerous leg in that human relay, a route as treacherous for its maze-work of forest paths as for the fields and towns and cemeteries that stitched the landscape tight and close; windows were everywhere.
But Machár could do what others could not. He was the son of a lesník, an expert gamekeeper and woodsman. It was said that he knew the Moravian landscape—the forests of spruce and fir, the mustard fields folded into the hills—as no one else; that he would move through it, use it to his advantage, with the thoughtless surety of an animal. That in winter dark, with the bowled smoothness of the trail filled with snow, and no moon or stars, he could find his way by the changing shape of sky showing through the trees.
From time to time word would come back from those he had helped across. This was of no small importance. Refugees were easy prey: they brought everything. No one knew they were going. No one would know if they didn’t arrive. And every spring, coatless, shoeless bodies, gold fillings wrenched from their mouths, would thaw out of snow banks all along the Hungarian border. Unlike some others, apparently, Machár would not steal or kill.
My father said he thought he might have met Machár himself in 1938, the spring before Munich. It was in . My father was stationed there, a member of the officers corps put in charge of organizing the local militias. Machár (if, in fact, it was Machár) was a powerful, not overtall, awkward man. A peasant, slightly stupid, instinctively suspicious. My father remembered him standing against the wall, sullen, generally unwilling, hands hidden in the baggy pockets of his gray canvas pants, giving not the slightest indication of hearing, much less understanding, anything being said. The only reason my father noticed him at all was that at that time Machár was already known in the region south of Hlínsko, in a small way, as something of a curiosity, an anatomical freak. Although the rest of his body was normally proportioned, his hands, apparently, were monstrous: not misshapen or hideous so much as simply outsized to the point of deformity. My father never saw them himself since the man by the wall never took his hands from his pockets.
But his hands alone would never have been enough to pull the man up from the floodplain of utter obscurity. Nor would his work as a smuggler have done so. Machár was an unlikely candidate for sainthood: gruff, uncommunicative, pathologically intense, frightening even to those he helped. The only reason anyone ever had cause to recall Machár at all was a story that surfaced toward the end of the war, in 1944. In January of that year, in a scene so unlikely, so ridiculously dramatic it had to be true, Machár, while leading a family with three small children at night through the forests south of Bosany, was surprised by two German soldiers on either side of the trail. One only had time to yell, “Halt! Wer da?” before Machár had seized them both around the neck, pressed his huge thumbs into the soft space beneath their chins, and snapped their spines like a pair of spring rabbits. He laid them in the snow along the trail, and the group continued on. A testament not to bravery but to outrageous brute strength, the explosive fuel of fear. In any case, it was enough. His name, for a short while, flickered in the great dark; then it, too, went out.
The war ended (quietly, ambiguously, like the fine breath of rot raised by a thaw) exactly on April 26, 1945. It wasn’t much, my father said: no Soviet tanks bucking across the soaking fields, just one man on horseback, a Cossack, at dawn, watching only his own slow passing in the dark windows, riding slowly up Zejrova Street to the foot of the vineyards, then slowly back.
After him came others, two, three at a time. This was the liberation: no regiments, no heavy artillery. German snipers still held the hills outside Brno. At night they would pick off the silhouettes of the Soviet soldiers against the fires of boards and bench slats blazing in the road until some of the men, my grandfather among them, couldn’t stand it anymore and went out and said for the love of god stay to the side, why die for no reason? And apparently, the story goes, one of them looked up from where he squatted by the flames, then out into the vague darkness my grandfather had indicated, then back to the fire. “Da nicego. Nas mnogo,” he said. There are many of us. My grandfather had already crossed the street when the man spoke again, not looking up from the fire. “Hide your women, old man. We’re not the last.”
The havět, the vermin (General Malinovsky’s troops), came later. Špína, my father called them, dirt, the after-scum of the general army: illiterate, ragged, undisciplined, many of them two and three years on the front. They moved through from the southeast, a bestial tide, monstrously unpredictable, unafraid to die. Some, like stunned children, were capable of small, absurd gestures of generosity. Some gobbled toothpaste, squeezing it on their bread like pâté. My grandfather, hearing the sound of breaking glass and the crash of piano keys, came downstairs to find one, pants pulled down around his ankles and rifle by his side, using the Austrian baby grand as a toilet. When he was done, he left. Some raped a ten-year-old girl. She died. Four months later, they were gone.
By the fall of 1945, President Benes had returned from exile in London. By winter, the free press had returned to Czechoslovakia. And Machár was out of work. He went back, as far as anyone knew, to whatever it was he had been before the war. He disappeared.
The rest is almost too thin to tell: it offers no resistance, takes no shape. It slips through the sieve like water. Some remembered that Machár had worked in the strojírna, the factory, in . That he drank. That he had a foul temper. That he married a woman from Třebíč, and that the marriage for some reason had gone bad. Some recalled hearing about his father, a lesník, a gamekeeper, tortured and killed by poachers sometime after the first war.
A man from Javorník whom my father once met on a train claimed he had heard that Machár had escaped to Vienna after the Communist coup of 1948. Or maybe to Munich. That he had returned across the fences for his wife. And again for his child. That he had been seen in the refugee camps near Innsbruck in the winter of 1949, where intellectuals and journalists threw bricks to each other to roughen their hands and improve their chances of being farmed out for laborers’ jobs in Australia and Brazil. That he had returned to Czechoslovakia years later. Alone. That he’d been living, a broken man, somewhere near Jíndrichův Hradec.
My father shrugged. Lives are such baggy things, he said. Sometimes there are pieces left over. He looked out the window, not seeing the snow, the trees, the burdened wires. That’s all, he said.
But of course it’s not. In death as in life we push against the universe of facts, force a space, elbow our way like pups to a teat. And the world adjusts. Eternity, such as it is, is in the echo. Our lives continue to sound long after we are gone.
My Story
Years before I had heard of Machár, sixteen years, to be exact, before that long winter afternoon when my father told me what he remembered of a man he had probably never met, a drunk in a green Trabant dropped me and a woman I had been living with at a crossroads not far from Telč, Czechoslovakia. It was a hot late afternoon in July of 1974. We were hitchhiking back to Brno and from there to Vyškov, to visit her parents. All day long she had been picking herbs along the wayside; the
y filled the huge shoulder bag she carried with her everywhere she went. She smelled like herbs. She was naked under her crumpled skirt and loose cotton sweater. She had fine golden fur on her legs and arms and stomach, and a small white scar on her left breast. We were both giddy with making love. Neither of us could remember eating anything and neither of us was hungry. I was not yet twenty-two years old.
With the sun still high in the poplars bordering the road, we started down a long hill thick with the smells of manure and cut hay and somewhere, coming from the village below, the fresh sweep of water. We seemed to unfold the season as we went. By the time we reached the bottom she was glad for the sweater. A fast, clattering stream ran behind the village along the base of a steep hill, then cut to the center and under the main road. We stood on the bridge and listened. Except for the water and the far bark of a dog, everything was quiet. In the little town of white houses with clay-colored roofs and small, cramped gardens, I soaked my head under a pump while she went into a store to ask directions. She came out with two bottles of sticky-sweet yellow limonada. We drank them sitting on the rim of the well. The last bus would be coming through in an hour. A few doors down, apparently, there was a woodcarver’s studio. I cupped my hands and drank some water.