Five weeks have passed since Grandpa’s No, and subconsciously we begin to pack our belongings. None of us has the strength to uphold the belief in our No. We are in agreement without needing to speak.
We leave so many things behind. We bring the great oak table my great-grandfather carved when he worked as a carpenter for the Austro-Hungarians. A painting from the seventeenth century of a crying redheaded girl who looks just like my grandmother. Pots, pans, and porcelain plates that survived world wars and great floods. We leave behind the double king bed under which my grandmother hid when sirens announced the possibility of bombings from the Luftwaffe. We leave the stove that has kept the house warm since the days of Franz Ferdinand. We leave the dozen stray cats living in the attic with a full bowl of milk in place of an apology. We leave the rabbits, the chickens, the small new Louda. The dozen hand-carved puppets with which my grandmother put on plays for schoolchildren. The outhouse with its arachnid families. We leave books that have escaped Austro-Hungarian burnings, German burnings, Stalinist burnings, books that have kept the language alive while regimes attempted to starve it out. We can bring only so much.
We leave Šíma in another village with our cousin Alois. He is too wild for the city, too fond of chasing little creatures and swimming in the river. It would not be fair to make him suffer the concrete and the noise of endless city cars. My grandmother and I cry for him as we ride the train from Alois’s back to Středa. Šíma.
Throughout moving day, I clutch my copy of Robinson Crusoe. The marks of mice teeth pock the cover and the smell of mold clings to it, but the hard spine holds as strong as the gates of a fortress. After we are all loaded up, Grandpa insists on painting the gate before we leave. The movers, a couple of lanky Kazakhs with rum on their breath, smoke cigarettes and sigh with annoyance. I try to help, but he asks to do it alone. He has to break every few minutes because of the back pain, the strain in his deltoids and forearms. When we finally drive off, the gate is the color of fresh wooden logs that Grandpa and I would fetch from the forest during early spring, wood well-fed by morning rains and rich soil, wood that we’d have to leave out in the sun for months before it began to dry and lose its will to live. We leave the gate brown and solid for its new fate.
The apartment we have rented on Pařížská belonged to a Party official until 1989. After that, the new owner converted the entire floor into a French restaurant that went bankrupt within a year. Then a German entrepreneur bought the floor and split it into five apartments in the style of the New West, resulting in a plainness that makes it feel nothing like home. The sink is small and flimsy, the walls thin, the toilet seat plastic. Whenever a neighbor above us flushes, we hear the echo within the pipes. This is what we can afford on my grandparents’ retirement, an apartment I would never bring a friend to, had I any left. There is no history here, no legacy—everything we now own or rent seems to be made of plastic or tin in a factory for a few coins paid to immigrant laborers. Even if Shoe Man was serious about sending money, I know that Grandpa would rather burn it and get a job in construction, if it comes down to it.
But all of this lies ahead. On the way to Prague I know nothing about the apartment, and as Grandpa follows the moving truck, I spend my time in the backseat of the borrowed Škoda, deciding that I must be the biological carrier of my father’s curse. It must rest within my bowels like a tapeworm. I am determined never to disappoint my grandparents, never to misbehave, for their lives will now be confined within the tight space of a city without soil because of something that is inherently a part of me. We drive over the cube bricks of Prague’s Old Town, braking every few minutes for stray tourists standing in the middle of the road to take pictures of Gothic towers, old Jewish quarters, cemetery gates. The bakery where my father used to get rakvičky, or caskets—small pastries with tiramisu filling topped with whipped cream and chocolate shavings—is now a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I yearn for a juicy thigh I could dip into mashed potatoes and gravy, but I have no right to make demands. I am the curse, and we don’t have the money for Western takeout. Dinner will be potatoes and sour cream, the same dish that sustained my grandparents’ families through the second war. We drive past the shopping malls and multiplexes rising from the ruins of old community centers, the places where Prague youths once gathered to watch educational films about doing their part for the Soviets and played football in red T-shirts. I don’t recognize this city—its new, well-dressed explorers, its taxicabs and Tommy Hilfiger billboards. I don’t know this free Prague, but I’d like to. So many luxuries are now within reach, and I cannot afford any of them.
Just as we park in front of the building and Grandpa instructs the movers, Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock” comes on the radio. I reach over and switch to a different station. Grandma doesn’t say a word. The sound of flutes, bassoons, and a harp. The soprano of a woman calling for something, reminding me of an owl seeking the return of sound waves through the middle of a black night. I ask Grandma what this is, and she smiles.
“Rusalka,” she says. “It’s an opera.”
“Have you seen it?” I ask.
“It was your mother’s favorite. She and I saw it together soon after she married your father.”
“Are you angry with him? For all of this.”
The station’s signal vanishes, and the song morphs into static. Grandma ignores it and looks directly ahead. The static reminds me of a toothache. Finally, Grandma turns down the volume, gathers her things, and speaks upwards, as if making a declaration to a crowd, via microphone.
“No,” she says, sounding just like my grandfather.
Rusalka
THE CIGAR BOX was made of solid cedar and weighed exactly two kilograms and thirty grams. For the past few nights, after Hanuš and I finished our conversation and he nestled in his usual corner, just outside my sleeping chamber, I had removed it from the storage chest and run my hands over its matte yellow cover hailing Partagas—Hecho en Cuba. I would slide the cover off and pull out the silk pouch holding the ashes of my grandfather. I allowed the pouch to float around the cabin for a while, like a mother guiding her child on a first swim.
I couldn’t help but think of my grandfather’s actual body and how it would fare in Space, his short legs, stout enough to support a belly holding sixty full years of enthusiasm for brew, his thick arms tattooed with a blue jay and a fading cowboy, his bullish face covered with gray stubble and his thin hair permanently plagued with dandruff, all of this mass suspended in the air and calmly measuring the universe outside, occasionally wheezing and roaring with smoker’s cough and asking for a Marlboro to soothe it. I knew he would’ve liked the peace and quiet of Space to read the newspaper and write in his journals, but his hands would crave livestock and gardening in the midst of all the idleness, the waiting. No, I supposed, my grandfather would not have the patience for stargazing and matter expansion. He was not a man who could stare into darkness and wonder. Yet, I had brought him with me, hoping at last to discover his final resting place after having held on to the box containing his ashes for years. Every day, after breakfast and again before sleep, I wished to put the box into the dispenser and shoot it out into the cosmos. Every day, I could not bring myself to do it. Today was the day. Venus was so close now it made up the majority of the panorama. Within hours, I would make contact with cloud Chopra.
I returned to the Lounge, where Hanuš witnessed the approaching dust storm through the observation window. Over the past few hours, the patterns photographed by JanHus1’s lenses had been analyzed by Central, and Petr’s team had concluded that the cloud’s seemingly calm demeanor was a disguise for a storm raging within its borders, as if the thicker core held gravitational powers causing the dust to swirl around it, like a cyclone. The concerns about my safety were unspoken but clear on Petr’s face during our video calls.
Hanuš’s legs hung loosely beneath him. He was all shadow against the explosions of light ahead. A thick cloud of purple tainted the map of dying stars in fro
nt of us, like a swarm of buzzards raiding a can of paint. Over the course of my mission, the cloud had shrunk to half its original size, but it had not moved an inch, establishing a baffling relationship with Venus’s gravitational influence. I was so close now I could see the movement of its particles, snowflakes inside a freshly shaken globe. The swarming dust was phosphorescent, glowing around the edges and darkening until reaching the purple core, a mass so thick I could not see through it. The speed of the particles as measured by photographic analysis was deemed safe enough for entry. The excitement for the mission that I had lost now loomed around the edges of my mind again. Whatever Hanuš was, he wasn’t mine to possess, not even mine to understand. His presence was soothing, but his existence incomprehensible. The cloud ahead, however—behaving in a way we’d never seen a phenomenon of its kind behave, measurable, unable to run—was mine to own. The cloud ahead could be put under a microscope. It could be understood.
Hanuš turned toward me. Black liquid dripped from the corner of his mouth and formed miniature bubbles dancing around the Lounge.
“When I was young I caught these grains on my tongue, skinny human. This dust holds the beginning to all things.”
“It’s impossible to know where things began,” I said.
“Yet you want to believe so badly. I insist, skinny human—these grains were present when the universe exploded into being. They were the first to Be and they will be the last.”
Hanuš grinned as widely as I had ever seen. Central’s call came from the Flat. I strapped myself down, ran my hand over my freshly shaved skull, and accepted the call.
On the screen appeared the main operations room of the Space Institute, a U-shaped auditorium stuffed with monitors and bodies. The crew of this room, thirty engineers with Petr in the lead, was responsible for the entire mission, from running the automatic functions of JanHus1 to analyzing my stool. Today the room was hosting a much bigger sampling of the country’s finest, along with bottles of champagne, cocktail servers, and tables holding shrimp and tea sandwiches. Next to Petr stood Dr. Kuřák, a notebook in his hand ready for note-taking, along with members of the board of trustees, CEOs of partner companies, Senator Tůma (tanned, slim, ready to become prime minister) with other members of the House I’d seen on television, and, ahead of them all, President Vančura himself. These important men and women, together with the members of the press loyally snapping pictures and recording video, formed the core of a larger circle of the institute’s employees, engineers and bureaucrats alike, all applauding for me. Behind the Flat monitor, out of view of the camera transmitting my likeness to Earth, was Hanuš. The greatest discovery in human history was about five feet away from becoming a reality to the rest of Earthlings. My role was to sit and pretend he wasn’t there.
The sound of gentle flutes filled the hollow spaces of JanHus1, followed by English horns. This was the cue.
“What is this sound, skinny human?” Hanuš asked.
“Rusalka,” I replied. “It’s an opera. I chose it to announce this moment.”
Hanuš nodded, and already Petr had begun to perform the rehearsed lines that public relations had given us:
“JanHus1, confirm functionality of filtering systems. Countdown to contact begins: twenty-nine minutes, three seconds. Report…”
I tuned in to TV Nova’s live stream of the Petřín Hill festivities, and here, on the hill where the nation had witnessed my ascent four months earlier, the people once again gathered with brews and fast food in hand. This time their attention was turned toward a magnificent IMAX screen installed on top of the hill, courtesy of Tonbon, major operator of the country’s largest cinemas and mission sponsor. A trio of streams appeared on the display: one of my face, its imperfections processed by airbrushing wizards, so large that I saw the sweat upon my earlobes; one that cut between the main operations room, containing the politicians and scientists responsible for the triumph, and Czech actors, singers, and reality stars giving interviews from their own exclusive podium on Petřín Hill; and a third showing the footage captured by JanHus1, which closely resembled what Hanuš and I were seeing from the observation window, with the contrast adjusted and some kind of special effects glow added to emphasize a science fiction experience. All three streams were intercut for internationally televised programming interrupted briefly by commercials from all mission sponsors. If only there were a way to contact the mysterious government agent now, ask him to run over to Lenka’s apartment and peek through her window, see if she was glued to the television, eager to partake in my triumph.
It was nighttime in Prague, and though the massive stadium lights surrounding the hill massacred much of the horizon, on the crowd’s screen Chopra announced itself in the form of a watercolor hue melting into the atmosphere. But on my screen, the coloring, so distant and so foreign, looked like an ominous stain. It seemed much more befitting that cloud Chopra would attach itself to Venus and remain there forever, keep away from our home and cease to alter the comforting nighttime darkness that humans had embraced for centuries. Panic seized me. I looked around the Flat panel, seeking the button that would instantly parachute me back to Earth, directly to my bed four or five years ago, when stipend cash was enough to pay for spaghetti, and Lenka and I had little but our sex and our books and a small world that seemed knowable and kind. A time when the universe was black and glossy on the pages of overpriced textbooks.
Rusalka continued to play, a series of violins and horns, reminding me of the gentle comfort of music playing on elevators, inside shopping malls, hotel lobbies. I touched the sleek material of the desk before me, tightened my chair straps such that I could truly feel the support pushing into my back. Panic gave way to momentary bliss. The megalomania of the possible discoveries that lay ahead, even the simple act of witnessing, overshadowed everything else. I had leaped over the canyon on a motorcycle. I was about to land, and the rush of blood into my ears and eyes blocked out the audience, strangers and loved ones, their applause and chants, the explosive piping of eagles flying above our heads, the roar of a teased engine and the crashing of my bones against gravity, it gave me three, four, five seconds of complete detachment from what the world asks and what it provides, making the fact of living purely physical, a soaring of the body through the elements. I was grateful.
The cloud would make contact any minute now.
“Last remote analytic data coming in,” Petr said. A close-up of his face split my screen in two, taking attention away from the festive panorama of chattering politicians. “You are at one hundred percent, JanHus1.” He paused to chew on his mustache. “Jakub, are you ready?”
Ready. What a question. A smooth American astronaut would have given a thumbs-up and shown a row of bleached teeth. I closed my eyes and exhaled and nodded.
“I have never experienced humanry being this quiet, skinny human,” Hanuš said. “For the first time, I cannot hear the hum of Earth.”
Hanuš and I observed the collision quietly. I saw the images of the cloud reflected in the eyes of Petr. The politicians grew mute, newly filled glasses of Bohemia Sekt suspended in midair. For a moment, I wondered whether they had all forgotten that I existed. Hanuš too turned his attention away from me, did not search my mind for reactions, his body rising and falling in front of the observation glass.
What else rested within the contours of ever-expanding matter? What mysteries other than bamboo-legged extraterrestrials and volatile clouds of intergalactic gas and debris awaited me? Rusalka sang her joys and sorrows. Petr and his engineers and politicians gazed upon their many screens. (I had to wonder whether any of these men and women felt jealousy—as children, we had all wanted to be here, lone spacemen upon a distant planet, yet they ended up wearing ties and making promises they couldn’t keep for a living. I also couldn’t help but speculate about whether my mentor from university, Dr. Bivoj, was watching from the village house to which he had retired, whether he was ecstatic or enraged that his pupil had surpassed by light
-years his most significant accomplishments.) Hanuš focused all of his eyes—thirty-four, as I had recently counted—on the cloud as if he too had never seen anything so unfamiliar. The fact that my extraterrestrial companion could still be in awe of these purple particles confirmed that whatever other life flourished in the universe had some level of cluelessness and thus a capacity to be genuinely curious. A trait proudly claimed by humans that could, in fact, be universal.
I held on to the restraints cutting into my chest and stomach, took a few deep breaths. Hanuš stirred. Petr finally turned his attention back to me, wiping sweat from his forehead. The dust particles rolled past in waves, poured over the observation window like shavings of wood flying off a chain saw blade. The contact was soundless, but JanHus1 trembled nonetheless. The trajectory of the spacecraft changed left to right, up and down, as its burning fuel struggled against Chopra’s chaotic influence. Petr instructed me to shut off the engines, and I did, now simply gliding along the rotating patterns around the thick core. On Earth, the Petřín Hill crowds raised their Staropramens and cheered the old adage: The golden Czech hands! I embraced the kitsch. Those raised beers were all for me.
How would Jan Hus feel about this encounter? Would he take it as a reaffirmation of his all-powerful deity? I wanted to think that his brilliant mind would embrace it as a token of complexity of the universe, a clue that the definition of deity goes beyond the abstract definitions of scripture.
“We are here,” I would tell Hus, “the only humans. Every time we venture out farther in thought or time or space (and isn’t it all the same, master?), we are giving your God a steel-bound handshake. You did it and now I did it too, even if my God is the microscope.”
I ran my fingertips along the panel and activated Ferda the dust collector. The control interface displayed the filter as it slid out of its protective shell and began to collect the dust particles. No, the belly of my ship would not go hungry. Already Ferda’s scanners displayed the structure of the crystals it had gathered. Lapping them all up like a dog’s thirsty tongue.
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