Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  A few days later, Goebbels had his miracle, his czarina. Returning to Berlin late on the night of April 12, the capital around him rising in flames, he was approached by a secretary with urgent news: Franklin Roosevelt was dead. Phoning the news to Hitler in the bunker beneath the burning Chancellery, Goebbels was ecstatic. Here, blazingly revealed at last, was the power of Historical Necessity and Justice. The news, he felt, would revive the spirit of the German people. His feelings seem to have been shared by most of the German Supreme Command. “This,” wrote Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk in his diary, “was the Angel of History! We felt its wings flutter through the room.”

  Less than two weeks later, in the cramped air-raid shelter of the Ministry of the People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, Goebbels’s six children lay dead, their lips, eyes, arms and legs turned blue from the potassium cyanide pills given to them by their father. Goebbels’s wife, Magda, who had apparently dressed the children for the occasion, was also dead, shot by her husband, who then poured gasoline on her and set fire to her skirt. Goebbels himself, after killing his family, poured gasoline on his clothes, set fire to a trouser leg, then turned the gun to his temple. Across the Wilhelmplatz, German gunners lay buried beneath the crumbled barricades of books, the high-ceilinged rooms behind them wavering in the heat of raging fires. In a small room in the bunker below, having rejected poison after watching the agonized deaths of the Chancellery dogs, Adolf Hitler sat down on a deep-cushioned brocade sofa next to the body of his bride, Eva Braun, put a gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Blood flowed down and coagulated on the brocade. The Angel of History fluttered its wings.

  I can see von Krosigk’s angel, inscrutable as any mortal, clattering like a CGI fairy over my diorama of the city of Brno, sowing fire or favor as the mood grabs him, linking small things to large, indulging his taste for whimsy. It’s as good a way as any of explaining how, thirty-four years after Adolf Hitler shot himself on that brocaded sofa, forty years after my father watched his motorcade pass through Brno, I found myself in an apartment on West 69th Street in New York holding a bloodstained piece of cloth that had been cut out of that same sofa by a young journalist named Beatrix Turner who’d talked her way into the bunker on May 4, 1945, cut out a souvenir, and who now, four decades later, wanted to prove to the skeptical college kid helping her out in her old age that it had all been true.

  Of course it’s pure egotism, this business of linking our lives to Big History, of drawing connections between things so vastly different in magnitude, but who can resist it? The blurring of years and fates brings a sense of weightlessness, of grandeur, of historical vertigo.

  It’s 1939. My fifteen-year-old father watches Hitler’s motorcade come through Brno. I don’t exist; I’ll be resting in the other dark another nineteen years.

  It’s 1945. The same man my father saw from his window puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his thumb. As the hammer hits, a journalist named Beatrix Turner is already making her way across the rubble of Berlin toward the Reichschancellery, where she’ll talk and flirt her way past the Russian guards, grope her way down the flooded stairs in the dark and cut herself a souvenir stained with his blood.

  It’s 1979. Suddenly in her frail seventies, Beatrix Turner hires a broke and impatient college student named Slouka (is it Mike?) to clean her apartment and sign her checks and ends up convincing him that she is who she is and did what she did by digging a cloth stained with Hitler’s blood out of her closet.

  It’s 1997. My sixteen-year-old father is an old man now; I’m married with children. Over lunch with my editor at Harper’s Magazine, I tell him the story of Beatrix Turner and Hitler’s couch. He commissions an essay on the spot, I write it, and Harper’s (after asking me to present my journal from 1979 to the magazine’s fact-checkers) pays my rent for slightly less than two months. I send the essay to my father, who likes it, but tells me the curtains he looked through sixty years earlier were red, not blue.

  “What’s the takeaway?” my neighbor’s always asking his kids whenever they run into something harder than they are. It’s a good question. I suppose the takeaway is that we live in history the way fish live in water. Whether we know it or not. Care or not. Whether the “fact-checkers” give us their stamp of approval—or not. We’re of it. Our dance in the current doesn’t have to yield a meaning. It doesn’t have to be significant. Our time will braid with others’—helplessly.

  Significance is in the eye of the beholder. For me, what matters is not some tortured connection I might make between the fact that Adolf Hitler committed suicide the same month—the same hour, for all I know—that my grandmother walked into my mother’s room to find her husband (with his Hitler mustache) with her daughter, but the fact that neither event was quite the ending it seemed to be.

  The ongoingness of things fascinates me. It connects Big History to small, our lives to our stories. It’s my one Truth, which I sing with the zeal of the converted: Life runs through the finish line; the period is just a comma in embryo. To wit: Adolf Hitler blows his brains out and the war echoes on, shaping actions and attitudes for generations to come. My mother escapes her house and the nightmare comes with her. You think it’s a new beginning? It’s not.

  Nothing dies, and that’s both good and bad.

  I wish I could have warned them. Sat them down in some café the week before the wedding and said, “For God’s sake, don’t be fooled—whatever the opposite of a beginning is (without actually being an end) this is it. Your one chance is to drag this thing between you out of the shadows, expose it mercilessly, beat that fucker to death with words before it tunnels into your souls—and if you think I’m being melodramatic, I am, but not nearly enough.”

  But I wasn’t around yet, and so they danced their dance and now they’re gone—from this life, or, in my mother’s case, from everything that gives life meaning. And that, as they say, is that.

  And yet.

  XX

  IF I STAND BACK far enough—the moon might do it—I can almost see some humor in it: “So Olinka and Zdenek are getting married! How lovely! What a handsome couple they’ll make. Of course, like all newlyweds, they’ll have the usual wrinkles to iron out: the blushing bride’s abortion of her father’s child, for one, and the troublesome fact that the rapist lives, unpunished, unrepentant, a tram ride away. And then there’s the bridegroom’s utter cluelessness—an obtuseness, an innocence so profound, so fated, so downright Greek, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief to believe at all—and, finally, adding a wash of Big History to this private horror, the fact that the country they live in is still spasming after six years of war, gasping for air like a swimmer about to be buried again . . . but hey, what are these things compared to Love?”

  I realize the race is never even, the handicaps never fair. But this? This feels gratuitous, rigged. This is like toeing the starting line for a race and having the starter say: “On your marks, set—by the way, you there, second from the left, I tied your ankle to a truck—go!”

  It’s only when I allow myself to see them as they were then that it gets me. In the spring of 1945 my dad was not yet twenty-two; my mother, nineteen. They were good kids. What chance did they have? I see them setting up their little apartment, playing husband and wife, and the sadness is almost unbearable.

  They had a June wedding, God help me. A quick, minimal thing. I don’t know who was present. I can’t imagine anything more freighted than their wedding night, more unfair to them both.

  The new marriage didn’t set—a shock, I know. Within a month, my father, a reporter at Lidové Noviny, began staying late at the office, ignoring his bride, returning home at midnight, then at one in the morning, then two. My mother, so the story goes, didn’t know what was wrong, how she was failing him, what to do. She couldn’t ask her mother’s advice because, well, good Catholic girls didn’t talk about such things with their mothers in those days. And so, neglected, alone, watching the dinner she’d made co
ngealing on the table, she began starving herself.

  This is what she told me and I didn’t think to question it: Of course she starved herself—she was unhappy. I’d be in my fifties—such is the staying power of the things we’re told when we’re young—before it occurred to me that starvation is probably not the most normal response to marital discord. That something else might have been involved.

  Still, as Exhibit A in the case of Mommy’s Pain v. Daddy’s Callousness, this was powerful stuff: As his bride was starving, Dad was yukking it up at the office, knocking out copy, busily ignoring the disaster.

  That the picture doesn’t square with the man I knew doesn’t change the fact that my mother did, in fact, almost succeed in killing herself. She wasn’t fucking around. Within six months she’d withered down to forty-five kilos—about a hundred pounds. By the spring of 1946 she was down to forty-one. He didn’t know what to do, my father told me fifty years later. Of course he knew something was terribly wrong. Almost from the beginning, it was as if she didn’t want to be with him. He didn’t know where to turn. Desperate, he eventually asked her mother, who advised him to be more attentive. He thought there was something wrong with him. That it was his fault somehow. And so, yes, it was true—he hid in his work.

  There were terrible fights, many of them growing from the smallest misunderstandings as if fueled by some hidden grievance. They changed nothing. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men. In nine months my mother had shrunk into a premonition of the skeleton I’d find sixty-nine years later in a care home just two miles away.

  What compels us to hurt ourselves is hardly ever this obvious: Every Saturday that first year, my mother and father would board the tram with a basket of whatever food they’d been able to find and go visit my mother’s parents, where my mother would find what had happened to her buried so neatly that the thing itself, still breathing under the smiles and the small talk, began to seem false—a ghastly invention of her own making.

  Half of her wanted nothing more than to believe it was just that. The other half, holding fast to a truth that burned her, fought against letting go as if fighting for life itself. An existential rack—I can’t think of anything crueler.

  And so, forced to endure the weekly ritual—the kisses on the cheek, the compliments on the little sandwiches, or chlebíky, forced to literally break bread with her abuser-father as her husband sat by, uncomprehending—my mother began to turn on herself; the mind, in its magnificently unjust way, exacted its price . . . and charged the body. Whether she understood what was happening or not, I don’t know. It didn’t matter. Well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the cause of that peril; yet the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.

  Or twenty-year-old girls, as the case may be.

  Except when they don’t. Told by her doctor that she was months away from major organ failure if something didn’t change, my mother somehow dragged up the will to apply for a summer job in a language camp in the forests of Moravia. She’d always loved languages.

  She got the job, packed and left. It must have taken enormous strength to wrench herself out of that slide, but then my mother always had a gift for the violent gesture—the hurled peach, the lunge for the sapling. She’d go hard, make it difficult, get in her own way. She’d fight herself to a standstill.

  My mother left Brno (and her first life) on a hot Sunday morning. She had one small suitcase.

  I can see her on that day, fragile as an insect, making her slow way down the shadow side of the platform, climbing aboard the 9:52 to the town of Žár nad Sázavou with the help of an elderly conductor whose nose is as delicately blue-veined as a piece of Stilton. Two hours ahead, the man who will fill her heart for the next thirty years pours himself a second cup of coffee, then walks through the shade of the courtyard to meet his first class.

  Even now I’m tempted to rewrite it—to make what actually happened more believable by making it less true—but I already did that once.

  XXI

  MAYBE NOW AND THEN the powers that be, bored of watching us get run through by invisible things, stifle a yawn and say, “Enough for now. Let’s try something different, shall we?” And just like that, love’s cavalry comes thundering in.

  I can’t explain it. I don’t know that I have to.

  I like to think of them that morning, the dotted lines of their fates converging; it gives me pleasure to imagine their ignorance of what lies ahead. “Just wait,” I want to say to them, like a parent placing a gift under the tree—“You have no idea.”

  I picture my mother, a third my age, looking out the train window that hot morning at the passing barley fields, the blood-drops of poppies, at the slate-roofed villages with their cluttered little gardens—a metal wheelbarrow lying on its side on a pile of bricks, the gray cloth of a spillway in the shade, the winking of a water wheel. I imagine F. lying under the sheets with his hands locked behind his head trying to recall the dream he had, then sitting up and moving aside the curtains to see what kind of day it will be.

  If I could say something to them now—if I could be in that train compartment with her, or standing by the coffee pot in the cafeteria—what would I say? Would I give them my blessing, say, “Go, go and don’t look back,” or would I say, “Wait, save yourself”—because, really, what were the odds that love could outrun its own decline?

  The train sways on. The village, the garden, the small gray cloth of the spillway pass. The curtain drops. And the dotted lines converge.

  XXII

  MY MOTHER KNEW a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake.

  I tried to write them once before; I’ve been writing her all my life.

  The words are from a novel, The Visible World, specifically from a section that I called “A Memoir” because the amount of fact I’d poured into it had tipped the story into something other than fiction. I wouldn’t say “more.” Other.

  A memoir embedded in a novel; an apt description of my life.

  Looking back, I see that I stretched and pulled their story because it was too much for me then, too vast a canvas, and because I thought no one would believe it if I wrote it straight. Fiction would allow me to shape the deeper truth. This is what I told myself. Maybe it’s true.

  But I’m older now, my mother’s gone, and I’m less concerned with being believed. It’s time to settle up with memory, square what can be squared, come to terms.

  XXIII

  I DON’T KNOW WHERE love goes when we die, but more than most things, it’s hard for me to believe in its passing.

  My mother’s love for the man I’ll call F. was a big love, unstoppable, and if it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake, well, that’s all right. The blood was their own, mostly, and love that matters can be messy.

  They didn’t know each other during the war. They met a year later, in a language camp in the forests of Moravia. In summer. She was skeletal, twenty, “fixin’ to die” as the song says; he was a year younger, a Green Beret during the war, now a teacher of Spanish.

  And then there’s the one of him. I’ve looked at it closely. At the overlong sleeves of the sweater—the left pushed partway to the elbow, the other almost covering his hand. I’ve studied the cigarette, like a tiny stub of light clamped between the tips of his fingers, protruding from inside the wool. There’s nothing to see. A man standing in the snow, squinting into the glare. Not particularly handsome. The snow behind him has partly melted.

  Well, no—sorry. I didn’t have the actual photograph at the time I described it in The Visible World; I had to remember it, and recollection is fiction.

  I found the actual photograph last summer, curled like a leaf on the table next to my mother’s bed in the boarded-up bedroom in which she spent the last years of her life before being moved to the care home. And there, painfully obvious, were the lines of my embroidery: no sweater, no cig
arette stub, no sleeve pushed partway to the elbow. What I remembered as “partly melted snow” was actually a long, cerrated shadow cast by a row of pines.

  Not particularly handsome? Hard to say. Handsome enough, I think. He’s standing in a snowy cut between the pines, a pair of skis on his shoulder, his right hand resting on his hip. He’s wearing some kind of open, military-style jacket, a thick scarf at the neck; his dark hair, combed straight back, is starting to recede. He’s squinting into the sun—I got one thing right—and there’s something about the way he’s standing, the hand on the hip, even the squint, that conveys a certain kind of easy masculinity, a confidence in his place in the world that was still there almost thirty years later, when I met him.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the summer of 1946, the Spanish teacher and the English teacher saw each other and fell in love. For life, as far as I know. What she saw in him seems obvious enough. What he could have seen in her—shockingly thin, trembling with fatigue, husbanding her energy like a woman in her seventies—is anybody’s guess. There was nothing of the savior about him, no apparent need to be a port in the storm for anybody, so my guess is that what he saw in her was her strength. And what he saw, she became. She started eating, she put on weight; she blossomed like the proverbial rose.

  It must have been quite a thing, that stolen season. With its hidden ponds and its silent, moss-furred woods, there are few places more romantic in the summer than the forests of Moravia; for six weeks my mother and F. (whose initials she would write on the back of his photograph when her mind began to go), stole every hour they could, quietly coordinating their schedules for common mornings or afternoons off, then going in separate directions, one with a bit of bread and cheese, the other a blanket. . . .