Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

  “No. But if I can help it,” the stranger says, stands up, and once again straightens out the creases on his jacket. “Anyway, this was a friendly introduction. You will be seeing me around. Maybe at the shop? The pub? I’ll chat with your neighbors some. I own a cabin by the woods now. Lovely view.”

  “What is it you want?” Grandpa says. “Say it plain.”

  “I’m not sure yet,” the stranger says, “but when I decide, I’ll come see you again.”

  He picks up the shoe and slides it inside his backpack. Grandpa’s shoulders sag and he stares out the window, overlooking the newly awakened chickens plucking at the leftovers of morning seed. I forget that I am not watching a movie. The man with the shoe opens the door and I fall backwards.

  “Little Jakub,” the stranger says.

  I struggle to my feet. He extends a hand. I ignore it.

  “What will you be when you grow up?”

  “Astronaut,” I say.

  “A hero, then. Did you like your father?”

  Grandpa takes the bottle again, runs toward us with the speed of a young man, and shouts “Shoo, scum. Begone!”

  The stranger rushes out the door and out the gate while Šíma nips at his ankles. He drives off. Grandpa stands in front of the gate and breathes heavily. It is shortly before noon, and neighbors are walking in pairs and trios on the main road to pick up fresh rolls from the store. They pause to study the scene of the stranger’s escape, surely enthusiastic to compose theories about the event later, during the evening’s game of Mariáš.

  “Did you hear us?” Grandpa asks when he comes back inside.

  I nod.

  “Are you feeling sick?”

  I shake my head. Anger burns in my stomach, as if I’m about to belch, but I’m not sure whom to be angry with. I’ve never witnessed a threat of violence in front of me. It does not feel good or thrilling, like in books.

  “Let’s go skin a rabbit,” Grandpa says.

  “He has the flu,” Grandma says.

  “Give him a shot of slivovitz, then. He’s been in the house for weeks. How is that healthy for a boy?”

  I put on a raincoat and follow Grandpa to the rabbit cages. He reaches for Rost’a, a fat white buck cowering in the corner. Rost’a squeaks and thrashes around until Grandpa deals a swift blow to the back of his neck. The chickens gather around the compost and bawk upwards in ecstasy as Grandpa cuts Rost’a’s throat and the blood pours over their beaks, thick and steamy.

  Grandpa hangs Rost’a on two tree hooks, plucks the eyes out with the tip of his knife, and lets me feed them to the chickens. The sticky residue feels like snot on my fingers.

  My father rarely spoke to me about his work. He said that while other people sat in hotel receptions or milked cows, cushy spots assigned by the state, he ensured that the truth and stability of the regime were not compromised by those without faith. People seemed to like him—they always said hello and smiled, although every year as I grew older and saw more, I noticed the insincerity of the gestures. Even after he had received his trial summons and the newspapers wrote about the likes of him, I didn’t think my father could have hurt anyone who was innocent, anyone who was not out to destroy our way of life.

  “Don’t believe everything that man claims,” Grandpa says as he slides the knife down Rost’a’s belly.

  “Do you know? If Dad could’ve been wrong to hurt him?”

  “I don’t know much more than you, Jakub. I know he did things I disagreed with. He thought he was carving a better world for you with his own two hands.”

  “Would he have gone to prison?”

  “You know that the world is always trying to take us. This country, that country. We can’t fight the whole world, the ten million of us, so we pick the people we think should be punished, and we make them suffer the best we can. In one book, your father is a hero. In another book, he is a monster. The men who don’t have books written about them have it easier.”

  He gathers the liver, the heart, the kidneys. He slices off the legs and ribs, and leaves the skin hanging on the tree as we make our way back to the house. The fur will dry for a few days before Grandpa sells it. We peel chicken shit from our shoes with a butter knife, and while Grandpa washes the meat in the tub before packaging it for the freezer, I ask Grandma to make tea. On the living room table, a gigantic footprint disturbs a thin layer of dust. I wish the shoe was still there so I could touch it. At some point, my father had touched it, and perhaps a piece of him remained on it, a speck of dust, the smallest flake of skin composed of the same life as mine. When I go to sleep that night, no longer with fever but still nauseated, my grandparents speak in the kitchen, and there is one word I can safely recognize, repeated over and over: Prague.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I am well again. After school, I walk by the River Ohře stretching from Středa throughout the county, eventually connecting to the Labe, the blue vein of Europe. Red catkins cover the river’s surface. An occasional splash of fish interrupts the Sunday lunchtime silence of the main road. Everyone is at home eating potatoes and schnitzel, or potatoes and sausage, or potatoes with sour cream. They will watch the political debate shows where the newly found apostles of democracy spar with one another about how a free market should function and how severely communist collaborators should be punished under the humanist direction of President Havel’s slogan: Love and truth prevail over hate and lies.

  Up ahead, beneath a low-hanging leafy branch, a man is pissing against the trunk of a birch tree. He zips up and turns around. The stranger with the shoe.

  “Little spaceman,” he says, chewing.

  “You’re not supposed to talk to me.”

  “Charming places, these villages. Nice break from Prague. Too many Americans and Brits flowing in with their cameras after the fall of Moscow. Here, it’s beer and rivers and soccer friendlies. Good place for a boy. Gum?”

  He extends his hand. Images of apples and oranges decorate the packet. I’ve never had this gum and I badly want to reach for some—the scent coming from the man’s mouth is as pleasant as that of cherry trees in the summer. But this man is not a friend. I slap the packet out of his hand and put my fists up, ready for him to strike. He laughs.

  “Fighter! Good, good. Just don’t take it too far. Every man these days fancies himself a fighter. Not all of us are. And that’s okay. Just think: if the Americans had liberated us from Hitler before the Russians, we could’ve been free. Your father and I might’ve been great friends. You could’ve taken all the gum you wanted from me. I wonder. I always wonder.”

  Until this moment, I have never felt hated. Back in Prague, I had a rivalry with a boy named Jacko—we were both good at soccer and thus always competing for captain of the school team. We had fights in which we slapped each other, and almost always missed, and we both knew we would never cause real harm. We professed hatred for each other, but I kind of liked him, and I believe he liked me too. Jacko is now gone, everyone I knew in Prague is gone from my life, and now I miss him and the rules of our engagement, because there are no rules established with the man in front of me. He smirks as if he knows things. He has walked into my grandparents’ house and made my grandfather, Grandpa the son of Perun, look weak. And now he is with me alone, and I recall all the news stories that make me sick to my stomach, the stories in which people of my age are dragged into the woods and killed by adults. I keep my fists up. Whatever he does to me, I won’t let it be easy.

  The man lights a cigarette and turns away. I feel as if I might fall to the ground. He makes his way up to the main road, then north, toward the vacation houses. I sit down and breathe, absorb the adrenaline, my thoughts regaining clarity. Next to me rests the stranger’s packet of gum. I pick it up, rip off the wrapper, and place the pink contents on my tongue. It is sweet and sour, like berries with cream. I throw the gum in the river, as far as I can. While I walk home, I imagine the American tanks, decorated by the Allied silver star, rolling down our potato fields, and the girls of
Bohemia lending their lips to the cut jaws and healthy bodies of boys raised on Marlboros and fudge sundaes instead of embracing the bare bones and starved chests of Soviet boys. What could’ve been.

  For hours I walk the fields, throw pebbles at ducks, whistle tunes that do not exist outside my own mind, tease vicious dogs behind gates by poking at them with a stick. I feel childish, having never asked my father about his life. What I knew of our family while my father was alive came from hearsay and from the strange gestures of people around us, the way my friends cowered and catered to my every whim whenever we went outside (and now I wonder: What about Jacko? Why was he not afraid of me? Perhaps his parents failed to warn him, or maybe he was simply a maverick who didn’t care about my family’s status), or from how our neighbors ran into their apartments as my mother and I returned from the market so they wouldn’t have to say hello to us. I search my mind for these moments now, careful not to make them up, but the distinction vanishes like morning mist stretching along the lake’s surface. What I’m sure of now is that there is a stranger who sees my father in me and hates me for it. I am hated, and perhaps he wishes me harm, true harm. For a moment I wish to take it all back, the revolution, the fall of the Party. I want to be back at our big apartment in Prague, with my parents cooking together and tossing food at each other, the steam of the radiator fighting the annexation of winter. I don’t care what reigns outside our house—capitalism, communism, or anything else—as long as my parents will return to me and keep me safe from men like the stranger. Yes, perhaps my father could even torture him a little. I would allow it. I would ask my father to torture the man until he stopped hating me.

  I wipe my face on my shirt, look around to ensure no one witnessed my sobs.

  At sunset, I walk back to the house. As I arrive, only half of the sun peeks over the horizon. On the solid brown wood of the gate, letters have been spray-painted in red:

  Stalin’s pigs, Oink Oink Oink.

  Urine and spit drip to the grass below. I read the words repeatedly until it is dark and I can no longer see them. I enter the living room and Grandma looks at me from the newspaper. Wieners boil on the stove.

  “What’s on TV tonight?” I ask.

  “A documentary about rock and roll in East Germany, before the wall fell. Octopus, a French gangster movie. Violent, but you can watch it.”

  I want to confess to Grandma. I’d like to tell her that I wish my father would return and hurt people for me. I’d like to tell her that I am afraid. Instead I eat wieners with hot mustard and watch the Frenchmen on the screen, their mouths out of sync with the Czech words they speak. Grandma applies her facial cream and I ask to sniff it from the bottle.

  “Did Grandpa see the gate?” I ask.

  “Yes. He went to the pub to calm his nerves.”

  Full and lazy, I lean back in the chair and place Šíma on my lap. Outside, I can hear Kuka, the village drunk, stumbling on the main road and singing about tits and rivers filled with Becherovka. The gate creaks open, and Šíma and I run to the door to greet Grandpa.

  He sits down in a chair, blood dripping from his forehead onto both sides of his face. Šíma licks the salty spaces between Grandpa’s toes while Grandma soaks a snotty handkerchief in peroxide and holds it to the wound. Grandpa’s right cheek is black and swollen.

  “It was Mládek and his little town friends,” he says.

  Mládek, the town cretin, body fed by a lifetime of pork consumption but mind fed only by misdirected rage. He swaggers around town like its appointed sheriff with his deputies of Prague vacationer teenagers, living on his parents’ wages and drinking himself to an early death. He is the new breed of young Czech, the inadequacies that were both caused and subsidized by communism now rendering him useless to society. Of course Mládek finds his new cause in our family shame.

  “Still had some red paint on his T-shirt, that fascist. All the new paint I have to buy. On this shitty retirement.”

  “At least it’s not as shitty as it used to be,” Grandma says.

  “It’s never enough,” Grandpa says. “Different lords and the same shit for the commoner.”

  “Hold still.”

  “Did you hit them?” I ask.

  Grandma gives me the same look she uses when I step on her plants or forget to feed Šíma.

  “I did. You know I did, Jakub. You should see them, goddamn heathens, fascist shitfuckers. I grabbed Mládek by the rat tail and dipped his schnoz into the pavement.”

  “This is not how we wanted it,” Grandma says quietly.

  “It’s all him. That shoe guy,” Grandpa says. “No one seemed to care much before he came here and started running his mouth. We can always leave.”

  “We’ve done nothing,” Grandma says. “Old Sedláková’s son is in prison for touching a teenage boy, and what do you see on her gate? Nothing. Everyone trips over themselves to pat her shoulder, poor woman, giving birth to a monster—‘Here, we made you strudel.’ Why isn’t she running? What makes us different?”

  “Perverts didn’t occupy the country for sixty years,” Grandpa says.

  “They’ve occupied the planet since the dawn of days,” Grandma says.

  She bandages the wound and gives him three shots of slivovitz for the pain, though his breath already stinks of rum and beer. Wordless, they retire to their bedroom and I slide under my covers. Šíma is not allowed on beds, but I pull him up anyway and bury my nose in his fur, the smell of Grandma’s cooking and residue of flea shampoo. Usually, my grandfather snores loudly throughout the night, but today, aside from the apple tree branches scratching on the roof, the house is silent. For the first time since my parents’ funeral, I can’t sleep.

  My father loved Elvis Presley. He bought his records from a blacklisted German actor who smuggled them in through the Berlin Wall. He would put the record on when he cooked, when my mother cooked, before bed, while on the toilet, while in the bath, while looking out the window at the cloned concrete housing projects, magnificent and dreadful in their efficiency. Women returned from work and threw wet dresses and bras over the clothing lines fastened to poles just outside their windows, lines of dripping rags expanding across the world like the sails of a haunted pirate ship, while men walked slowly and with their heads down, unsure whether to go to the pub and risk arrest for saying the wrong thing after too many beers, or go home and face the one-station television and the single-thought shelf of books, tools incapable of interrupting the silence of their lives. My father smoked and nodded his head to the music and it seemed as though everything was just the way he wanted it.

  Don’t tell anyone about Elvis, he would say at breakfast. His catchphrase. Those discovered listening to Western music were brought in for questioning, nothing too severe, as my father said (though I do wonder now: What did nothing too severe mean to him?), just a room with a small window and a casual comrade asking why the musical gifts from Mother Sovetia weren’t enough to make the suspect happy.

  One day, my mother found the box of records on the kitchen table, outside their usual hiding place in the pantry.

  “You’d lose your job if someone took a photograph through the window,” she said.

  My father put his hand around her waist and caressed the edges of the records with his fingertip.

  “They can take a thousand pictures,” he said, “and here we’re going to stay, drinking coffee and peeling potatoes. No one informs on the informer.”

  Two days later, I found my father holding a cup to the wall between our living room and the neighbors’, his ear inside the hollow space. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for me to come over. He lowered the cup to my height and I listened. A sharp voice carried through static, announcing that a shortage of potatoes throughout the Soviet Union was just another sign of mismanagement by Moscow. Radio Free Europe, the cardinal sin, the enemy. My father went to his bedroom and dialed a number on the phone. About an hour later, shouting erupted in the hallway, and I cracked the door open to see Mr.
Strezsman and his son, Staněk, being taken away by four police officers. I felt my father’s breath on the back of my neck, and Mr. Strezsman, in a voice not dissimilar to the deadpan voice of the radio announcer, cursed in the direction of our door. “Collaborator cunt,” he said. Over and over.

  I wanted to question my father then. If only I could have strapped him down to a chair and set a hot teakettle on his lap until he told me about his workdays, his state secrets, told me who he was. He was so calm in his actions—setting the record player needle down, caressing my mother, picking up the phone, always straight-spined, letting out the smallest cough before he put on his official voice, the baritone of duty—that I couldn’t see a life in which he wasn’t the hero. He continued to play his records and I continued my silence.

  Now I am here, watching a stray cat pierce a beetle with its unchecked claws on the windowsill as the sun rises, while my grandfather still does not snore, and I kick the heavy blanket off my body and the dust floats around in the thin rays of light, like the first pollen of the summer or star projections on the walls of a planetarium.

  In the morning, Grandpa and I walk outside holding cups of tea. Overnight, more artists contributed to our gate. Fascist, Marxfucker, Love and Truth Prevail over Fuck You, and a simpler one: Get Out. Eventually, the vandals gave up on spraying letters and instead created simple lines and crosses in red, blue, and white, the colors of the republic. Through my rose tea, I smell urine, so much of it. Grandpa gets on his bicycle to go buy paint. He returns in a couple of hours, so drunk that he cannot keep his left buttock on the seat.

  Most of the children in the village never liked me—I am a city boy, will always be a city boy, and in this they assume I feel superior to them, with their village roots, though I have always regarded Středa as an equal home to Prague. Now their dislike turns hostile—they shout at me, chase me on their bicycles, and I make sure that I never find myself without adults around. The adults’ hostility is more hidden. When I walk on the main road to buy ice cream, the women’s hellos and how-are-yous are pointed accusations, as if to say that my well-being imposes on theirs. The men, young and old, are quietly aggressive, clenching their fists and flexing their forearms whenever they see me. The only person who does not act differently is my friend Boud’a. We have spent every summer vacation together since we were three, and now he has become my only friend and companion. He never speaks of my parents, doesn’t mention my past. We simply walk to the Riviera, the village’s version of a beach, and swim in the river when all the other children are away. We collect ants in soup cans, we try our first cigarette in the woods.