Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  I wasn’t a liar. I wasn’t even wrong—laughter can be as good a way of dealing with the things we can’t deal with as any. I just wasn’t listening.

  So here I was. Years ago I’d thought of using a quote from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying as an epigraph to a novel called Brewster, then exchanged it for something else and forgot about it. It came back to me now like a rejected lover who gets the last laugh: “You see me now, don’t you?”

  I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it.

  A hard line for a writer to credit, and like most beautiful lines, only half-true, but a line I needed to hear. Certain things had been done—in 1933 and 1945 and 1970—steps taken, blows struck, doors closed, and they had to be acknowledged. Condemned, redeemed, forgiven, but above all, acknowledged. “Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underground,” Kafka wrote, though he didn’t make it far—“mine is by writing.”

  Besides pictures and memories—the airiest fictions of all—words were all I had. But these would be different words—words as a form of listening.

  IV

  MAYBE GUILT IS THE secret heart of every immigrant’s story, however desired or necessary the leaving may have been. Guilt over your betrayal, guilt for having abandoned the home you were born into, its sounds and tastes, the feel of that place, that past.

  When immigrant parents die, the sense of betrayal is reduced to language and inherited by their children. Writing about my mother and father now, I have this inescapable sense that I’m lying because they were never mom and dad, but maminka a tatínek. Just saying the words aloud, how quickly they’re resurrected—and me along with them. There we are. I was Denda, or, as a kid, Dendiek, the ek suffix doing the same cutesifying work as the Spanish ito, say, or the German chen. I had nicknames: Špuntík, or “little cork,” and Šefík, “little boss,” because I was a stocky, self-assured little beggar at three.

  The lies begin with the language; you have to allow for it like a statistician calculating standard deviation. Calling for me in the woods that night in 1970, my mother didn’t say, “Where on earth has he gone?” but, Ježiš, Marie, kde je? which translates to “Jesus, Mary, where is he?” To translate it that way, though, would have been wrong, a small violence against the moment, against the strange reservoir of strength she always tapped into in moments of crisis. It would have suggested a religiosity that wasn’t there. “Jesus Christ, where is he?” on the other hand, would have risked introducing a hint of irritation, obscuring the “what have we done?” note in her voice. To get it right I had to lie.

  Every immigrant’s kid faces this dilemma, this sense of estrangement. If you spoke Spanish or German or French at home, mommy’s a word; mamacita or Mutti or maman is your mother suddenly calling you in for dinner. The same would be true, of course, if you grew up speaking English in Beijing. The words mommy and daddy would forever conjure Mommy and Daddy. The ones you knew. Who knew you.

  Every now and then, when I was young, we’d run into immigrant families who cut the past like a rope. Jenom anglicky! Only English! Even then it seemed perverse to me, like willing yourself into amnesia. How do you make yourself forget? In the case of one kid, the old language died before the new one took root, leaving him stranded in a world I find hard to imagine. Eventually his new, English-speaking self took hold, yet I wonder if today, half a century later, he still sometimes dreams in Czech, and if he does, if he understands what his dreams are saying, or if the language he left behind is like the people we meet in dreams—people we’ve never known, who seem so terribly familiar.

  In my family we stuck with Czech. I wouldn’t trade it. It intensified our exile, our isolation—concentrated us, as in a reduction sauce—but it was who we were.

  One time, my wife-to-be came out of my room in the old house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where we’d gone to visit my parents, to find me sitting on the beige sofa in the living room, talking to my mother, tears of anger and frustration running down my face. It was her first visit—we’d just met.

  She asked me about it later, and I tried to explain, but it was impossible. Let me tell you about my mother? In what language? How could I explain that Mommy had her ways and means, that she could break you. Whatever explaining there was to be done—of whatever love, or betrayal, whatever grief turning in on itself—had to be done in Czech. I’d run into the first, most obvious layer of exile: the problem of language, of the essence that refuses translation. Let me tell you about my mother? Maybe the replicant shot his questioner out of frustration.

  There’s nothing to be done—it just needs to be said. I still speak Czech. I dream in it often. But I live and write in English. I try to tell the truth. Sometimes I fail less badly than others.

  The distortion, the deviation, are inevitable. It’s like writing about childhood, a different form of exile.

  It is what it is. Acknowledge it. Move on.

  V

  I NEED TO SAY this up front. This memoir—how uncomfortable that word still is for me—isn’t a straight story. It’s a nest of memories, a tangle of anecdotes, told to me and misheard, misremembered; of regrets and revisions forced by time; of days and words lying dormant, sometimes for decades, until something—some dream, some secret cue—cracked their husk to a small, provisional understanding. In short, it’s complex, nonlinear, sometimes contradictory, often inconclusive—a bit of a mess. A lot like life, if I get it right.

  It’s like this because I believe the record of our time, told as truly as possible, is never, or rarely, chronological. Life is always looping back, revising itself, elaborating itself; it’s constantly intersecting with others’ lives, responding to new facts—or what appear to us as facts—being shaped by motivations barely understood that are themselves constantly evolving, or fading, or strenuously denying their own existence.

  When it comes to memory, chronology isn’t a lie; it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy, an attractive oversimplification, at best, a happy accident. All right—a lie.

  Fiction is a different kind of lie—an inescapable one. The past tense, by which I mean all memory, all history, the story of what you did this morning, is the domain of fiction. Try as we may, we can’t help but shape what was, any more than we can help shaping ourselves.

  An example? In the opening section of this memoir I told the “story” of the summer my family and I spent up in northwest Connecticut when I was twelve. Embedded in that story was the day that our friends, the Horners, came to visit.

  Objective truth? Well, we were friends with a family named Horner, who visited us the summer of 1970—and I have a fine memory of showing off my new air rifle to their boys—but I left out a few things. I left out that Mr. and Mrs. Horner had faded blue numbers tattooed on the white skin of their forearms, courtesy of Treblinka, as I recall. I left out that Mr. Horner, who was barely five feet tall and the walking definition of the word “mensch,” claimed that he had no problem with his stature because it had saved his life, that on a death march near the end of the war, as German children coached by soldiers practiced their aim by shooting at the heads of those staggering past, his size had kept him hidden in the crowd.

  Leaving these things out didn’t make my story of that day untrue, it just shaped it—which is how it has to be if we’re to tell anything at all.

  The past? My God, sometimes I think it’s the biggest fiction of all, that “was” is just a convenient way of separating two eternities that otherwise would overlap like transparencies on an overhead projector. If the dead are gone, why do I continue to talk to them, think of them, dream of them? If those words my father said, or didn’t say, are done, if that shameful thing I did twenty years ago is over, why am I still compensating, denying the pain, striving for some balancing decency?

  I don’t believe in beginnings. I just don’t. I know they’re convenient to believe in, that like the idea of God they give a certain shape to our lives, that
the New World was dreamed on that notion, but I just can’t. The root always goes deeper. Always. Everything is a reaction—whether imitation or resistance—to something earlier, and if that makes us feel less original than we’d like, less self-made, it shouldn’t. It’s how we answer the shaping pressure of the past that makes us who we are.

  The payoff, of course—the flip side of the emoticon frown—is that if beginnings don’t exist, neither do endings.

  I was born on a night of heavy snow in Queens, New York, in 1958, but the gears were already engaged, the Fates doing their thing. My mother, beautiful, still able to laugh, already carried around the image, the voice, of the man—the love of her life—whom she’d met the year she married my father. My father, his thinning, dark hair combed straight back and his rimless glasses giving him the look of an athlete standing for his final exams, had already watched Hitler’s motorcade enter Brno, Czechoslovakia, run guns to partisans’ barns in Moravia, shoveled coal in Chullora, Australia.

  Everything was already in play when I dropped like a marble into the immigrants’ wheel.

  VI

  I LOVED HER, YES, but the word falls short; for a time, for years, I was her. We hadn’t separated yet—we were like a half-fissioned cell, still sharing a single nucleus. At night in our old apartment in Queens, she’d curl herself against my back and I’d smell her perfume, her hair, the deep, cave-like warmth of her, and she’d hum some Czech song or other until I pretended to be asleep. She loved me. We’d always lie on our right sides for some reason (only now do I realize it was because the left side of my bed was pushed against the wall, forcing her to climb in from the right), my head tucked under her chin and her left arm around me, and often—it’s one of the things I remember about her most clearly—her fingers would twitch against my stomach or my chest as if she were playing the piano that she used to play as a little girl.

  My wife tells me my own fingers twitch slightly when I’m falling asleep, though I’ve never played the piano in my life. A legacy I can live with.

  It’s not surprising that it took my mother so long to teach me to hate her, or that when I learned it at last, I embraced it like an apostate drowning his doubt.

  The hate that replaces love is always a violent thing; to rip out those roots, you have to reach deep, get a good grip, close your eyes and pull. Ignore that strange loosening in your chest.

  VII

  IN THE PHOTOGRAPH—“CATSKILLS, KAZIMIRS’, 1956??” my mother’s written on the back—they sit side by side in Adirondack chairs half-buried in the uncut grass. It’s summer—that deep, grateful shade. If you look closely, you can make out tiny planes of light in the tall, sweating glasses on the arms of their chairs—the ice cubes in their drinks forever unmelted.

  I can feel it in the way they’re sitting, in the afternoon breeze blurring the carnations behind my mother’s left shoulder. My father’s just said something to the person with the camera; my mother, wearing a short terrycloth robe over her bathing suit, is looking down, smiling, like she can’t help it. Like they’ve just had an argument and she’s still angry but she can’t help it. They’re happy.

  This was true, too. Whatever came later, this was true.

  How much easier it would be if, like the Manichaeans of old or yesterday’s talk-show hosts, we could split the universe into darkness and light.

  For a time they loved each other, loved me. I know that. I do. It’s the most difficult thing for me now. I can see it in the pictures—the two of them hovering over me as a newborn, tickling my belly, rejoicing in my senile, gassy smile. I can read it in the entry that my mother, propped up on pillows in her hospital bed, wrote in her diary the day I was born—an entry I didn’t find until fifty-six years later, four years after she’d forgotten she’d ever had a son. “A little boy was born to us today. . . . ”

  I was their rivet for a while—maybe longer than I knew.

  That I wasn’t enough, that the wars, both civil and not, already threatening to tear us apart would have their say, doesn’t take away from the fact that, for a while, everything held. In fact, it’s a miracle it held as long as it did. I’d been born into a hurricane; those first years were the eye.

  VIII

  THEY SAY THE SOUL tempered by fire—tortured true—is the better for the trial. I’d have to say it depends on the soul. And the fire.

  I’ll never know what they went through. Not really. Or how I would have survived it myself. My experience was not theirs. I was born between the wars.

  I’ll never know. It hasn’t stopped me from trying.

  If you walk out to the I. P. Pavlová tram stop in the Vinohrady district of Prague on any Saturday morning in summer, you’ll find a local flea market—two or three dozen tables featuring a handful of genuine crafts in a sea of tourist crap. I was there with my wife and daughter in July of 2014, when, among the pocket watches and antique postcards and knockoff German pens, the First Republic coins and Russian cigarette lighters, my wife, who’s Jewish, came upon a yellow Jewish star. It was in a protective cellophane wrapper like a prized baseball card.

  You can’t reclaim someone else’s past, no matter how fearless your imagination—not really. You can understand perfectly well that there was a particular day, seventy-five years ago, when this piece of cloth in the cellophane wrapper was issued by some representative of the German Reich to someone whose country had been overwhelmed by a tide. That this was absolutely, unquestionably true. You can understand that this man or woman, being Jewish, found themselves doubly marked—the reviled among the conquered. You can imagine the shame, the humiliation, the fear, picture yourself returning home, sewing it on the officially prescribed place on the sleeve thinking, “This is absurd, unbelievable,” but it’s not you holding the needle while listening to the sounds of the street outside your window, it’s not you standing by the window when your wife pricks herself with the needle and starts to cry and can’t stop. It’s just fucking not.

  The past is all around us, but the moment holds itself apart. We can’t get there. I don’t know that we’d want to, necessarily.

  My mother and father were thirteen and fifteen, respectively, when the German army occupied Czechoslovakia. My father was not yet sixteen when he watched that motorcade come through Brno, the Führer, visible only as a visored cap, standing up in his limousine. He was seventeen when he joined the resistance without telling his father, who himself had joined without telling his family. He was twenty-one when, as a cub reporter for Lidové Noviny, he was forced to report on the executions that had begun to ramp up in the city. I’ll never know what it did to him, where inside of him those hours were buried, whether the trial tempered his soul, or imperceptibly bent it.

  In the summer of 1977, I was crossing that same crowded square with my mother when a young man walking toward me clipped my shoulder so hard I nearly fell. He kept walking—no word of apology, no acknowledgment at all. I didn’t appreciate it. This wasn’t an accidental brush-by in a crowd—this was a sucker punch as a kind of joke.

  When I started after him, intending to get an apology, in whatever language, my mother panicked, begged me to let it pass, to forget it, to walk on. Just look at his clothes, she said, clutching my arm. He’s German.

  I tried to argue—this was 1977, for Christ’s’s sake, and I was pissed off—but she was genuinely terrified. By now the guy was halfway across the square. I let it go, grudgingly, thinking her ridiculous.

  I’m older now. I have more respect for the wells that can open decades after we thought they’d been filled in. My mother had seen the Frauen in their white blouses walking their children to the execution yard at Kounicovy Koleje, lifting them on their shoulders for a better view. She’d seen a man, beaten to the ground, trying to grab the boots of the soldiers stomping him into unconsciousness not five minutes from where we stood. Worse, in some way, her own father, František Kubík, had been a Nazi sympathizer who’d barely escaped death when the war was over. No, I couldn’t blame h
er.

  Strangely, the real victim in that episode was the guy in the square. A punk with an attitude, he should have been taken to task, held responsible for his particular misdemeanor, not the high crimes of his country’s past. What’s the worst that could have happened—a few angry words, at worst a fistfight between nineteen-year-olds? I liked my chances.

  Instead he walked on, burdened by association, a murderer by proxy.

  The sins of the fathers visit us in curious ways.

  IX

  NOTHING’S MORE SACRED THAN memory. It’s the great, untouchable thing. That stoop I used to sit on with my mother. Her laugh, her smell. My father’s big, soft shoulder when he carried me to the car at dawn, lay me down on the back seat, covered me. That night-walk he took me on, his flashlight cutting the gloom like a sword. These things are my essence. My coordinates. They don’t have to be good. I’d kill to keep them.