Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  It might have been 1942, or ’43, a time of terrible food shortages in the cities, and my mother had somehow come into possession of a peach—a rarity, a treasure. In the story, my mother and father are walking along a slow river, arguing, when something my twenty-year-old father says bumps into “it”—the wall beyond which no negotiation is possible. Speaking not in anger but with the steely determination, if not the voice, of Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven, my mother tells my father that if he says this thing one more time, she’ll throw the peach into the river. It’s not a threat, it’s a promise. My father, not realizing of course where he’s found himself, unaware of this Maginot Line in her character (after all, how could he be expected to recognize it?), aware only of the self-defeating idiocy of flinging away something so precious, calls her bluff. And my mother throws the peach across the water and into the trees, and my father, at that moment, glimpses in this girl a strength he’s never known, can’t understand, and sure as hell ain’t got.

  I grew up with that story. It was told to me more than once, and told well; I even seem to remember my father being there for the telling. But I wonder now if a peach, even in times of food shortages and food requisitions by the Gestapo, would be quite that valuable in a town of backyard gardens, and how, if it was that valuable, my mother would have come by it—did my father give it to her?—and how, finally, the two of them would have been out walking almost two years before they met.

  But no worries—the story was what it was, and I never thought to question it, probably because I didn’t want to. You see, I was one of those—like Yul Brynner or Steve McQueen—who would throw the peach. It was obvious, my mother said. I had the strength. She could see it in me. Which would have been fine, I suppose—kids grow into the imaginings of their parents all the time—except that none of this was about me. Not really. At least, not yet.

  The story of the peach—and how crude, how obvious, it seems to me now—fed like a tributary into the bedroom, that dark, inland sea. Manliness implied a certain ruthlessness of soul; it was about having a limit. If Steve McQueen said he’d shoot you if you said something again, your choice was simple. When my parents fought, my mother would often lock herself in the bedroom and sometimes my father, bellowing, goaded like a bull into a kind of helpless fury, would pound on the door with his fists, threatening to break it down.

  He never did—and my mother despised him for it. He was rational—he’d be the one who’d have to fix it. He was weak. By the time I was fourteen I understood that my father didn’t understand women, that there were some men, poor souls, who never quite admitted to themselves who they were; really, she’d admire him more if he had the strength to face up to his nature. And, deserter that I was—but why didn’t he talk to me, fight for me?—I’d agree with her.

  The man who breaks down the door; I can recognize the misogynistic cliché, the circa 1950 cinematic swoon—Eva Marie Saint’s fists pounding on Marlon Brando’s chest in mock resistance, “Oh, you big brute!”—even leave the PC police entirely behind and happily acknowledge that human beings draw their sexual current from all kinds of sources, many of them powerful in direct proportion to their dangerousness, and still be sickened by how quickly, in this case, the scene goes bad. If sexuality is like the human heart, constantly beating in systolic/diastolic rhythm, drawing from and coloring our world, now and then something goes very wrong: the heart beats poison. It won’t stop until it stops.

  I don’t want to trace this tributary, which deepens, unnaturally, the closer you get to its source, but I will. Not because I want to, but because there’s no one else, and justice requires it. The poet would remember, Czeslaw Milosz once wrote. It didn’t matter how many you killed, another would be born to expose your crimes.

  I’m no poet. Still.

  It’s taken me forty years to understand what I was being told—what it was she was trying to tell me—if she was trying. She touched on it four, maybe five, times in my life. She was never clear. Stunningly, I never thought to ask, to push her. I don’t know why. It may be unforgivable, and now it’s too late, though as I write this I wonder if, even today, I’d have the courage to force her through that door, or whether I’d hesitate, worried I’d be doing more harm than good. Is there a point beyond which the well-examined life turns into cruelty?

  There was “that day,” she’d say. That day her mother came unexpectedly into her room. When she was nineteen. Her father was in the room with her. All hell broke loose—there was a terrible scene.

  That’s it—that’s all I have. But I have the aftershock, the echo. You don’t need to see the bomb to understand the carnage in the marketplace. My grandmother took charge. My mother had been dating a boy—someone she barely knew. Within three weeks they were married, a marriage made easy by the fact that my mother—young, beautiful, solidly middle-class—was marrying the son of a former janitor. The man was my father.

  It gets worse. Within a month of the wedding, my grandmother arranged for my mother to have an abortion. My father, who was informed after the fact, and who apparently never calculated the dates, talked to me about it a few times in later years. It wasn’t as if he would have tried to stop her, he said—and to this day I don’t know to what extent, if any, he heard his mind whispering something, and to what extent the years of drinking were an attempt to drown it out—it was just that he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t discussed it with him first. It was a decision they should have made together.

  And so, my father—the poor, unmanned sap who wouldn’t break the door down. Who couldn’t understand that this gesture was being asked of him because we repeat and repeat the things that hurt us in the hope of making them our own. Who floundered in that pit with my mother—a pit not of their making, which neither of them understood—most of his life.

  Which brings me to my ddeek, my grandfather, the only one of my grandparents that I ever met. For two weeks in 1963, in the dead of winter, he visited us in Queens. I was five. I have a memory of walking with him down Queens Boulevard into a brutal January wind, of running after him, terrified that he’d leave me behind.

  Even now, looking at his photograph, I want to reach down into the frame and hit him before he can hurt me. It’s not just that he didn’t smile—plenty of people don’t smile, either because they’re sad, or shy, or because they don’t see any humor in the world . . . my grandfather didn’t smile because to smile would be to give you something—some recognition, some acceptance, something. He would give you nothing—because you wanted it, because you were weak. It gave him a certain small pleasure.

  Let me put it this way: When I look at my grandfather’s face—intelligent, self-contained, disapproving—I see a man standing by a cage with a starving dog. There’s a bowl of food an inch or two beyond the reach of the dog’s tongue. My grandfather doesn’t move the bowl closer, nor does he push it further away—he just watches: Everything’s perfect as it is.

  How easy he makes it for me, with his Hitler mustache and his passion for order, shooting the neighbors’ cats, then flinging their limp bodies into their owners’ yards. It takes a certain kind of man, a certain kind of soul, not just to commit the act but feed on the hate it brings him, to fatten on it like a tick, just as it takes a certain kind of man to admire the murderers who have flooded his country, to align himself with them, to welcome the discipline they bring his people. It takes, in this case, nothing more than a petit bourgeois Czech bureaucrat with deep German roots. A man stamped in the SS mold.

  The kind of man who would break down the door—but only if he knew he could hurt what was behind it.

  XVII

  A BALL BEARING, SUSPENDED on a string, slams into its brothers, and nothing happens. And then it does. So it is with us: Something happens—a mother unexpectedly walks into her daughter’s room—and the trauma goes underground, vanishes . . . until it reappears, weeks or decades down the line.

  It’s a nice, writerly analogy—and a flawed one. I want to believ
e it, but I can’t. Because we’re not ball bearings. Because the laws of physics don’t apply to the heart, or the mind, or to what used to be called the soul. They just don’t. Newton can’t help you here. Rhetorical tropes won’t help you either—metaphors obscure as well as reveal.

  Nothing about us is predictable, very little rational, nothing repeatable under identical conditions because identical conditions don’t exist in the world of time. There’s Heraclitus, dipping his toe in the river, then dipping it again. But it ain’t the same river any more, and it ain’t the same toe. How nice it would be if the energy of cruelty moved in a straight line, if the blow struck in 1945 erupted, on schedule, in 1963. Alas, because we’re human, the bearing shatters into fragments, some of which may return to haunt us—where and when they damn well please—or not. Who knows how they’ll visit? They can emerge in dreams. They can skip generations. They can be gone from this world—utterly gone—and reemerge in a slap, reborn in a cruelty that shocks the one who indulges it.

  Only two things seem certain: that what we thought was the “featuring blow” was preceded by others that prepared the ground, and that one way or another, once that blow’s been struck, we’ll be making its acquaintance again. If there’s anything immortal about us, it’s the deeds we do. Acts are a form of energy; for better or worse—transformed, disguised—they go on forever.

  In 1980, the year I graduated from college, my mother and I took a trip. A memorable one.

  The journey across Europe from Rotterdam to Brno, billed as “our last trip as mother and son” (Why last? I kept wondering), was a quick descent—completely unexpected, shocking in its swiftness. By the first night in Rotterdam, where we would spend three rainy days in a tiny, dank pension with a nearly vertical staircase called the Van Der Hoot, she’d stopped talking, her face transformed into the haggard mask you see on those who’ve undergone some unfathomable grief, except that in this case the pain came larded with rage. The car, which my father had arranged to have sent from the Port of Newark, was late in arriving. He’d done it on purpose—stranded us here. She’d told him to see to this, arrange for that, warned him (in fact, she’d said nothing, left everything to him), and this is what it came to. It was always like this, always. I argued, tried to defend him, tried to make her feel better. She sat hunched on the bed under the low, tilted ceiling still wearing her raincoat, crying. No, it was always like this. Everything was like this.

  I didn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t go out. For three days I’d leave her in the tiny room and walk all day through a city I didn’t know, whose language I didn’t speak, killing hours. On the fourth day, the car arrived.

  She rallied, instantly optimistic. She put on some makeup and her Jackie Onassis sunglasses and we caught a taxi for the postapocalyptic wasteland of the Rotterdam shipyards, where “always” reasserted itself. We had a copy of the bill of lading, not the original; they couldn’t release the car.

  My mother broke down. She pleaded, then begged—actually begged—then wept, slumped in a chair in that little wooden office while I squatted next to her, my arm around her shoulders, embarrassed (to my retrospective shame), talking to her in Czech. God knows what I said. God knows what those Dutch office workers thought of this madness. Half an hour later, eager to be done with this mess that nobody had asked for, somebody signed off on the copy. Mom rallied, signed the release papers. The sunglasses came back on. We were off. It had worked, she said, backing out of the lot, it had all been an act, and not knowing what to say to something so obviously untrue—did she expect me to pretend to believe it? was this a test of some kind?—I played along, feeling as though I were somehow betraying her trust by agreeing with her. She’d fooled them alright, I’d never have guessed it, and she laughed as we merged onto a larger road—her hands gripping the wheel, her fingers stretching and flexing as though working out a cramp—while somewhere in my head a small, increasingly panicked voice was wondering what was happening, where this was going, and how soon—and how—I could get out.

  From the outside, I suppose it could seem almost funny: We couldn’t seem to get out of Rotterdam. Following the signs, we took exit after exit, merged and merged again . . . then recognized a landmark we’d passed twenty minutes or half an hour earlier. We tried it again, me helping to navigate with the map while reading signs, both of us agreeing that we’d seen what we’d seen: “It said right—it definitely said right.” And there was the landmark—it had happened again. And then a third time.

  The highways were fast, the drivers understandably impatient. A steady, misting rain blurred the traffic between swipes of the blades. My mother, scared now, was turning on me. I should find another route, she kept yelling. I couldn’t see another route, I said—I had no idea where we were. Just look at the map, she screamed, find another route. Quick, was that a left? Did I see that? Quick—did it say left? Tell me what to do, quickly, quickly.

  I’d been looking at the map, I said, I hadn’t seen the sign.

  For God’s sake, should I take the exit? Oh, God, he’s not letting me in! Decide!

  Mom, I was—

  Decide!

  Left—take the left.

  And she’d swerve onto the ramp in an angry blare of horns and we’d be more lost than ever. It was my fault. What was wrong with me—did I want to get us both killed? I was doing this on purpose. I wanted to ruin everything. I always wanted to ruin everything. I was my father’s son.

  Never one to turn the other cheek, I fought back. I was doing everything I could. I had no idea where the hell we were. Why didn’t she pull over and look at the goddamn map herself, or better yet, let me drive?

  She screamed at me—betrayed, deserted, as she always knew she’d be, all along, by all of us, because I was a coward, just like my father—clutching the wheel like the collar of her enemy, merging left, then right, aimlessly now, refusing to pull over, refusing to let me drive, then—lowering her voice to the kind of hiss of disgust you might hear from someone cutting an infection out of their own arm—said to me what she wouldn’t say again for eight years until I came to visit her in Brno, leaving my pregnant wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she dug through my suitcase, painstakingly packed with shirts and pants she’d approve of, and pulled out a t-shirt I’d brought in case I had a chance to take a run:

  This is what you’d bring? she whispered, disbelieving. This is what you’d bring—to spite me, to embarrass me? She was staring at me over the top of the t-shirt, which she was holding by the edges like something obscene. Ty seš zlej, she hissed, outraged, disbelieving, like a child that’s been struck for no reason, or like a witness confronting the child’s attacker, or maybe even the attacker himself, yet at the same time—this is important—both broken and indomitable, like Medea confronting Jason with the bodies of his children, paying back his betrayal a hundredfold: Ty seš zlej—You’re evil—then louder, declaring it as truth, as fact: Ty seš zlej. Then screaming it: Ty seš zlej, zlej, zlej!

  By the time of the t-shirt, I was more prepared, protected, able to see the insanity of calling your son evil for packing a t-shirt. Able to defend myself. Outside of Rotterdam, eight years earlier, all I remember was a sense of shock edging on terror, as though my mother had suddenly opened her mouth and begun mewing like a cat. No, I’m not, I said, because I wasn’t, because even then I knew I’d never be, not intentionally, not in my heart. No, I’m not, I said to her, but I was too late; some small part of me—three percent of me? five?—swayed by her hatred, assumed the guilt for it. Justice has nothing to do with it, this part of me said. She’s your mother. Why would she say this if, on some level, in ways you can’t understand or don’t want to see, it wasn’t true?

  But that part of me would bide its time, go deep, reveal itself through the years in amusing ways; at the time, the part of me she’d raised fought back. I clung to truth, to reason, to sanity itself, refusing to budge, to move a single inch toward whatever place she’d found herself in,
where she was fighting to the death surrounded by enemies, by hate, by evil itself.

  How long this went on, I don’t know. How we managed not to die on the autobahn that day is also a mystery—testimony to sheer luck or my mother’s driving, probably the former. All I know is that it went on and on—that we fought as only she and I could fight, with me dug in, prepared to maintain my stand till the last dog died and her battering herself against my defenses, accusing, despising, belittling—and then we were somehow on the road to Germany, and my mother, screaming and weeping, deaccelerating from 140 kilometers an hour in the fast lane, was steering onto the median. The cement curb was low, we didn’t bounce into traffic, we didn’t roll; the car just plowed out onto the grass and stopped, the traffic blurring by on either side.

  And there we sat. My mother wouldn’t talk. She wept, the tears running from under the sunglasses she was wearing despite the clouds, the rain. I tried to reason with her, calm her. I wasn’t a liar, I said—somehow, not being able to get out of Rotterdam had made me a liar—it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was OK. I asked if I could drive.

  She didn’t move. I was a liar. She’d said this, said that, warned me about such and such an exit. What had I done? I’d sneered at her, ušklíbl se—a kind of condescending, taunting sneer. No I hadn’t, I said. She could remember precisely when it happened, how I’d looked, how I’d turned and said . . .

  I asked if I could drive, get us out of there. She didn’t move. I was a liar, not even man enough to admit when I was at fault. And so it went.

  I don’t honestly know how it was possible for us to sit there in the middle of that highway—maybe the entire Dutch police force had the day off, or maybe they recognized the Corolla with the American plates for the black hole that it was and wisely held back—but we did. We sat there for almost two and a half hours. I know because I looked. Two and a half hours is a long time to fight. For two and a half hours she wept and raged while the rain pounded on the roof and the traffic passed on either side of us trailing water like smoke. She wouldn’t drive, and she wouldn’t let me drive. By three a rainy dusk had set in.