by Mark Slouka
I understand my aunt in those years. I do. I understand the voluptuousness of nostalgia, that need to pull out the past like a letter that still carries the scent—or so you imagine—of someone you loved. I understand that infidelity to the present, not only because my mother, inheriting the gene, raised the art of regret to a masochistic pitch I’ve never seen equaled, but because I tend that way myself. I don’t take kindly to loss.
When I was fourteen, my mother and father told me that we’d given up our cabin on Lost Lake, a place I carried inside me like blood. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have a vote. But I didn’t accept it, either. For weeks, instead of reconciling myself, building new loves, I’d spend the afternoon hours in a plastic folding chair in our stifling yard in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, remembering, recreating—I want to say reconstituting, as though I were adding water to things that would fatten and wave in the thick summer air—every inch of that lost shoreline, every fallen tree, every stone, smelling the sweet rotting smell of the coves, watching the water shadows crawling up the trunks of the oaks, hearing the thin scrape of a painted turtle pulling itself up on a log until, now and then, for a second only, by some miracle of memory as painful as it was exhilarating, I was there. No, I can understand my Aunt Sonya very well indeed.
It’s what happened next that I have a little trouble with.
The war ended, quietly, unambiguously, 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 his reflection passing in the dark windows, riding slowly up Zejrová 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 aim at the Soviet soldiers silhouetted against the fires of boards and bench slats blazing in the road until some of the men, my father’s father 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—so the story goes—one of them looked up from where he squatted by the flames, then out into the vague darkness, then back to the fire. Da nicego. Nas mnogo, he said. It’s nothing—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 havt’, the vermin (General Malinowski’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, crapping in the baby grand. When he was done, he left. Some raped a ten-year-old girl. She died. My nineteen-year-old mother, buried in the coal pile in the cellar by her father, survived.
Aunt Sonya didn’t see any of this because she was gone. Not dead, not kidnapped—gone. Swept up. Overcome.
I don’t know how it happened—where the soldiers met her, what she said, whether she was working in the garden or waiting for a tram. I’ll never know what things, exactly, in what proportion, drove her, how much of it was seeing her years of nostalgia suddenly made flesh, how much of it was the sound of those tongue-softened consonant phonemes, how much some deep dissatisfaction with my uncle and how much the straight-shot erotic rush (sorry, aunt) of being desired by hard men possessed of a certain ruthless charm. I’ll never know. What I do know is that at that time and place, at the end of that particular war, my Aunt Sonya’s answer to the question Would you forsake your house and home? was, “Yes, I would. I will. I have.”
This I also know: that when my Great-Uncle Pepa returned home that rainy afternoon in the spring of 1945 to find his wife missing, a neighbor braver than most told him everything: that they’d been Russian soldiers, that he didn’t know the division or regiment they belonged to, that they’d headed north, that Sonya hadn’t appeared unwilling. That she hadn’t reacted when he and his wife had shouted out to her. And my uncle nodded, packed a bag, and, unarmed, left to find his wife.
I heard it took him nine days. I have no reason to doubt it. The miracle is that he found her at all in the chaos of the liberation. It couldn’t have been easy. He spoke some Russian, and that helped, but it must have been hard inquiring after his wife like a missing bicycle that had decided to roll off on its own, explaining to commanders who, after all, had bigger things on their minds, like a war just passed, that no, his wife hadn’t been kidnapped, that no, he had no idea, really, why she’d left though she’d missed her home, that no, he’d never been unkind to her, or inattentive (ignoring the smiles, the occasional smirks), that yes, in spite of everything, no matter what she’d done, if she wanted to return, he’d have her back. It must have been hard following lead after lead, sleeping in haylofts like a tramp, walking down roads still alive with troop movements (an urban man, he had no car), accepting rides once or twice in military vehicles and once on the back of a sympathetic (or pitying) soldier’s horse. It couldn’t have been easy—none of it. I don’t believe he cared.
In my mind I see a small encampment by a rain-swollen river but really, I have no clue where it was, or what time of day, whether a fine misty spring rain was falling or whether he found her in someone’s camp bed or just stirring the soup—all I know is that he found her and told her it was time to come home if she wanted to come home, and that she said she did and that the soldiers didn’t shoot either of them but let her go and she came away with him as easily as she’d left him. And they started off on the long walk home to Brno.
Every marriage is forged differently; some crack at a touch, others endure beyond belief, still others are tempered by events and time. My guess is that my great-aunt’s and -uncle’s marriage was made on that walk back home, that lying next to each other in the hay-smelling dark somewhere along the way, they were able to dig into that soil of omissions and misunderstandings and regrets out of which this thing had grown, and make things right.
How else can I reconcile my aunt’s adventure with the marriage that followed it—how else incorporate that nail into the narrative?—except to see those days as not only something they survived, but as the very thing that allowed them to endure—that made them who they were? No, of this I’m sure: Over those two weeks some imbalance had been violently corrected and, like a broken bone set true, they’d healed stronger. Not because my uncle turned his face like Christ and forgave her—because that kind of self-abnegation, or is it condescension? would only engender pity, or disgust—but because he recognized in the events that had overtaken them a purging and forgivable necessity, the kind of storm that could clear the air for a lifetime or more.
XIV
I KNEW THEM. I knew them in that way of knowing that goes so far back you can hear the keel scrape off the shore of memory into that strange dark before you.
I remember almost everything about my father, though he’s been gone a while now, at least in the way we measure going. I remember his face, his eyes, his thin straight hair, his laborer’s hands with the yellowed, clamshell fingernails putting the lie to decades of professing. I remember his insecurities and his enthusiasms and his peasant endurance which looks, from where I am now, very much like strength. I remember his voice, which two years after his death—the anniversary is tomorrow—still cuts my heart.
But my father’s easy. Not because I knew him better, or because he was easier to know. Because he loved me, particularly in the later years. Because he loved those I loved. Because he and I came to accept ourselves in a way that let us both live our lives. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.
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Nothing about my mother was easy. Nothing. Sitting at the window of our cabin at Lost Lake (I returned, years later, because I don’t take kindly to loss) just a five-minute walk from where she and I spent the summers of my childhood nearly half a century ago, I can see the pasture wall someone built with a mule and a stone boat generations before I was born angling down between the oaks, then disappearing into water that wasn’t there then. And I know that some things change while others stay the same as the world changes around them, but that’s all I know.
As a kid, I’d follow the wall down into the lake. On hot summer days, with the cicadas sawing in the heat, I’d balance over the rocks, then out into the water soupy with tiny moths and gnats and purple loosestrife blossoms, knee- then thigh- then waist-deep, eventually dog-paddling, feeling around with my toes for the top of the wall below me. Now and then, thirty or forty or fifty yards out, I’d bump into that unexpected higher boulder, and stand, imagining someone on the shore seeing me rise up from the lake as if lifted on the back of some invisible thing.
When I try, I can hear my mother’s voice. Her face, for some reason, is harder, maybe because photographs have filled in for memory. Just now, as I wrote the previous paragraph, a lullaby she used to sing returned to me, every word, as if it had been resting somewhere. And for just those few seconds, mixed with the tidal sound of the September wind in the oaks, I heard her singing and, inevitably, like falling down a flight of stairs, I remembered loving her as she was then, forcing me to take off my glasses and rub my eyes to clear the words on the page.
What was it all about then, all that love and rage? What did it add up to, and what did it cost? Who betrayed whom? And what happens to those left standing on the field of days—what do they do?
They say you have to come to terms with the past. An odd expression—it has such a martial feeling to it. You imagine banners in the wind, unfurled scrolls, peace in exchange for territory. Which sounds about right.
There’s a place in Greece, a region of stone and olive groves and salt pools, that kept itself in equilibrium for centuries, they say, by adhering to the logic of the blood feud. At regular intervals, one family would declare war on another and a long, slow war of attrition would begin until, years or decades later, its rock fields mounded with the dead, one side would petition for mercy. So far, so good—the madness of our species is nothing new.
Attached to this recognizable horror, though, was a footnote: If an individual killed someone from another family, apart from any larger feud, and it was proved that this had been done by accident, or in a state of drunkenness, the killer could make amends by dedicating himself to his victim’s family, becoming their benefactor and protector. And often a lifelong regard, even love, would grow between the family of the murdered son or husband or father and the murderer who’d adopted them, something both extraordinarily beautiful and terribly sad.
But I wonder about it. Did you remember the son you’d lost—and if you did, how could you bear it? Was your love for his murderer an act of homage—or did you, in effect, murder him a second time by accepting the man who’d killed him into your heart? Most amazingly, how could the murderer not come to hate his victim’s family for what he’d done to them? Forgiving those who trespass against us is a piece of cake; forgiving those we’ve trespassed against, well, that’s another story.
“Look out for those who do you wrong,” my mother would tell me, “because they’ll hate you for it; every time they look at you, you’ll remind them of the kind of person they are.” The reverse was also true: “Allow someone to do you a kindness, and they’ll love you for it, because you allow them to think well of themselves.”
She wasn’t wrong. She just wasn’t entirely right. In my mother’s world, hate, like love, deepened like a coastal shelf; she didn’t allow for the islands lying just beneath the surface.
XV
SO MY AUNT AND uncle made their way home, walked into their house, began the rest of their lives. It would take a while for the bubble to return to plumb—my aunt’s transgression had been a big one—but from the beginning there were two things in her favor: She’d run away with Russian soldiers, who, despite the depredations of Malinowski’s troops, were still seen as liberators (had she run away with German soldiers, there would have been no coming back), and she herself was Russian, which not only made her “other,” but to some extent excused her actions; most of her neighbors could credit the madness that the memory of home could induce.
Still, she’d be made to suffer for a while—the salacious parts had to be pecked at and clucked over. How utterly had she abandoned herself? they worried. Would there be a child? Had she slept with one, or all; in sequence or at once? And though some—women in particular—would always assume the worst, and spend years furiously embroidering the image, talking about it in tones of disgust laced with envy, my mother, who loved Sonya, was never among them. Sonya, she maintained, was a good and decent woman, humanized by her transgression, not diminished by it, surrounded by hypocrites and clods deaf to their own hearts or lacking them entirely—she’d defend her to the end of her life. Who among us could say when the past would come knocking, or what shape it would take? Who could predict the extent to which our compromises had prepared us for its coming? No, given the right combination of things, anyone could fall.
I agreed with her then, as I agree with her now. And if it’s impossible for me not to see an element of self-justification in her embrace of my aunt, that doesn’t lessen the value of her loyalty. Charity is rarely disinterested, and rarely ennobled when it is; forgiving others is a way of forgiving ourselves—because it’s easier that way. No, I’m grateful for any measure of self-forgiveness my mother was able to find. She deserved it.
The war was over. It would be nice to believe that in the spring of 1945, for a while at least, life returned to its bed. It wasn’t so. Before the liberation was even over, the reprisals had begun; you don’t oppress a people for six years—or, in the case of Czech sympathizers, cheer on the oppressors—without paying for it when the tables turn. Some of the beatings, evictions, seizures of property, were richly justified. Others—because nothing about being a victim automatically confers virtue, and because cruelty is easily masked as moral outrage—were not.
I believe that my grandfather’s hanging, had it come to pass, might have ranked among the justified, but it did not come to pass for the simple reason that my uncle Pepa, on hearing from his frantic sister that my collaborationist grandpa had been dragged from the house, beaten, then thrown in jail to await his fate—which wouldn’t take its time in coming—dressed himself in his soldier’s uniform, tucked his box of Russian Army medals under his arm and went to save the bastard who had married his sister. And managed it, somehow, though forgiveness was not in the air that June, and he himself would probably have been just fine with letting things take their course. As would I.
And suddenly he’s here, peering between the lines, forcing them apart. I’ve tried to hold him off, partly out of cowardice, partly because releasing him means exposing so much, so quickly—entire lives, including my own. But it might as well be now.
The diorama begins to buckle, then burn.
XVI
TO GET TO HIM, I have to go through her, which is ironic and just. I have to work backwards, trace the burn patterns to the arsonist’s match.
When I was a kid growing up in Rego Park, or during the long summers at Lost Lake, my mother and I weren’t just close. We were in league with each other, soulmates, a church of two. We saw the world from the same angle, laughed at the same things. Beauty and pain entered us simultaneously, easily—the pull of the bow across a violin string, the taste of blackberries hot from the sun, the scene in The Jungle Book in which Mowgli, crying now as men do, must leave the jungle.
Unlike my father, the rationalist, the clod, who never closed his eyes while listening to a song, never felt without thinking first, never loved. Not really. Who couldn’t even cry when
his own father died but received the news, went to bed, fell asleep, while she herself—can you believe it?—spent all night tossing in a sea of grief. A good man in many ways—my mother didn’t mean to say he wasn’t, he was my father after all, and he had his strengths, she wouldn’t hear a word said against him—just a little weak. It wasn’t his fault. Different men simply had different strengths. Once, back in Australia, someone had referred to him as a splasklá bublina—literally a “popped bubble,” though “flaccid balloon” is better—which was cruel, but, well, not entirely off the mark, either.
Christ, how we laughed at him, the intellectual in his horn-rim glasses, always a beat behind, missing the joke, mishearing the lyric, giving away the secret; my father, who had no sense of style, no dash; who could be counted on to get wrong what any truly confident man would get right by instinct.
Some men just had it, my mother said. Others didn’t. Yul Brynner, with that steely gaze, that voice, that long smooth walk, had it. Steve McQueen, all catlike grace and cool, self-deprecating confidence, had it. It was something instinctive, innate, dangerous and unmistakably attractive: an inner barrier, a ruthlessness, a point past which no one could push. This barrier was never revealed, never alluded to—there was no bluster involved, no posing—others simply sensed it in you.
My mother had it, this inner strength, this frontier beyond which no negotiation was possible—a fact made clear in the story of the wartime peach.