Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  To say it was an infatuation, a current too insistent to resist, is not enough. It was, by all accounts, mutual, overwhelming, joyous, insatiable. But it was more than that. These two people—and the miracle is that they knew it—were meant to be together. This was a big love.

  And then she told him, or it slipped out somehow. She was married.

  The shock, the anger, even, was predictable: Why hadn’t she told him? Why had she hidden this from him? What did she think would happen? She’d meant to tell him, she explained. It was just that it had all happened so fast, and once the right time had passed, it became harder and harder to make things right.

  He broke it off. I can’t blame him. Raised Roman Catholic and dirt poor, his notion of adventures—of which he’d had his share—did not include affairs with married women. Even worse, in some ways, was the sudden uncertainty: What did he mean to her? What could he mean to her? And what the hell was he supposed to do now? In a few days she’d be returning to Brno, to her husband, sleeping in another man’s bed.

  If they broke up, and I seem to remember they did, each going their separate way—she in tears, he devastated—it didn’t last long. Or, at any rate, didn’t last. How often they actually saw each other over the next two years before my parents’ escape across the border, I don’t know. I don’t know if they spoke of the future, or talked themselves into knots the way lovers who can’t be together tend to do.

  What I do know is that they’d both seen the face in the crowd that defines you—the face, the voice, that no cynicism can undercut; the one that says, “You’re home, you’re safe—now shut the door.” That’s one thing I do know. The other is that my mother, a Roman Catholic herself, was married. In short, a hopeless situation made endurable, but only just, by youth, which doesn’t do hopeless.

  A purgatory of hope, of waiting for some unforeseen thing to change. When I imagine my mother and F. in 1946 and ’47, hanging on to their love, I see Kafka’s petitioner before the door to the Law. In the famous parable from The Trial he waits for months, then years, then decades; he grows old and deaf. He doesn’t understand why he’s not allowed to enter—the Law should be for everyone, he feels. He pleads and argues with the guard, petitions for entrance, and always the answer is the same: Entrance is impossible—now. Eventually, dying, he whispers his last question into the guard’s hairy ear: Why was he denied entrance?

  “Because this door was made specifically for you,” the guard bellows into the old man’s ear: “I am now going to shut it.”

  If love is a kind of law, my mother and F. didn’t have to wait that long. The world, which had a card to play, played it.

  XXIV

  WHAT CAN I SAY about my father that isn’t bent out of truth by hindsight, misshapen by love? My father was a good and decent man, I think, a man capable of outrage over the world he happened to have found himself in, but someone whose faith in reason, like some men’s faith in God, or love, remained intact long after his life had made it ridiculous. He couldn’t help it. His every gesture departed from that well-lit station, and though he understood how quaint this was, he was powerless to change it. It was his nature, and he wore it with dignity, like a childhood hat one has long outgrown but can’t remove for the rest of his life. And somehow I could never bring myself to hold it against him.

  I’ve been sitting here a while now, watching the snow come down on Prospect Street, trying to square the fictional father with the man I knew and loved. And I just don’t know. The portrait isn’t wrong—my father was a good and decent man, I think—but it’s not entirely right, either. Though he believed in reason, for example, his quintessentially Czech nose for absurdity complicated things, particularly as he got older. And though decent at heart, he was rarely that calm, that accepting of himself; he had his passions, his regrets—he flailed like the rest of us.

  So what was my fictional father—named Antonin in the novel—all about? Was I creating a portrait of the man I wished my father to be, flattering myself by imagining someone whose faults didn’t remind me of my own? Was I setting up an alternative DNA?

  If that was the motivation—and I think it probably was—I failed us both. My father was neither that decent nor that resigned. Neither am I, and though I may become both with age, I doubt it. I’ve always been too much in the world, too involved, both in love with what is and at war with it. It’s a complicated way to be—I can’t recommend it—but I seem stuck with it. The idea of justice has something to do with it.

  By 1945 the janitor’s son had graduated high school, become an editor at Lidové Noviny, begun the lifelong project of proving himself to the grocers’ sons and hairdressers’ daughters who’d shunned him in the courtyard when he tried to play with them. It was a task he could never finish, not even when, years later, the janitor’s kid would greet Václav Havel, the president of the Czech Republic, whose visit to the United States he’d largely arranged.

  Nothing could fill that gap, nothing could be enough. They’d always be there—sneering, throwing clods, or worse, ignoring him. Deep down, he was always returning to that courtyard, a sixty-year-old man now, a full professor, to show them, to make them take it back, to get his measure of justice, but something would always happen as he walked down those four cracked steps to the narrow passage that led into the half-light of the courtyard: his skin would smooth, he’d shrink in size, the well-cut suit would fall away, and they’d laugh at him standing there with the tears cutting a path to the corners of his mouth, babbling some nonsense about the president—and in my dreams it would be me striding out of that passage, grabbing the little bastards by the scruff, showing them how completely worthless and cruel they were. . . .

  How condescending a son’s pity is—and how very much like love. And how misguided, possibly. Who’s to say, were it possible for me to make my way back to that courtyard, that I wouldn’t be rescuing him from the one thing that made him who he was, that enabled him to force the world’s attention?

  XXV

  THERE ARE TIMES I think the past is nothing more than a room attached to ours. We enter it a hundred times a day, argue with whoever’s there; we flatten a cowlick, move the vase, true the picture on the wall.

  I recall standing at the window looking out at my garden some years ago (something I tend to do in November) and thinking of my father. For just one second it seemed impossible that he should be eighty-seven and living in Prague—where they were having an early winter, he said—while I found myself six time zones back, renting a house no more than five minutes from where we’d once lived as a family. It felt like I could just walk over, find us there.

  A cat appeared on the fence and a gust of sparrows rose against the neighbors’ house. My wife and I had cleared the beds the day before, hauling off long armloads of pea vines segmented like the legs of sea creatures; for the first time in months I could see the wooden borders framing the dirt.

  Zdenek Slouka. When I say my father’s name out loud, I hear his voice coming out of my mouth. Years ago I stopped using my middle name—his first. He never mentioned it. He remarried later, but it didn’t matter: We were the only ones left, and we both knew it.

  It’s hard for me to see his life as anything but a column of subtractions, as if God, picking flowers for the celestial vase, decided out of curiosity to pluck one bare—he loves me, he loves me not. His parents, whom he had to leave behind when he escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1948, died before the regime that had exiled him fell. He never saw them again; I never met them. His sister, Luba, my only aunt, threw herself out of a window in 1950, though my father wouldn’t know about it for two years, imagining her all that time walking to school or lying in the grass above the athletic stadium in Brno with her friends—a temporary afterlife, like an image in a bubble. When a letter finally got through in September of 1952, the knowledge that she’d been gone so long made for a grief both slightly uncanny and tinged by insincerity—like going under anesthesia, I imagine, watching your own leg being r
emoved.

  And so it went, leaf by leaf. An old friend, a Latinist reduced to doing manual labor for refusing to join the Party, sat down to dinner the day before Christmas, 1966, cracked a walnut and died. Eventually there were just the three of us: my father, my mother, and me. The nuclear unit, famously unstable.

  Whatever the question, my mother, who he must have made love with at least once, was not the answer. Not for him. An only child herself (capable of the most spontaneous joy I’ve ever known in an adult), she was broken by sixty, battered by gusts of sadness and rage. When she finally divorced my father in 1991 after forty-six years of marriage, she moved, along with the uncomfortable suburban furniture that had filled our home, to a mold-ridden farmhouse in Moravia where she re-created the rooms she’d been so miserable in, then gradually forgot everything: our cabin at Lost Lake, the days we laughed, the hot afternoons at the station when we’d wait for my father in the burnt electric smell of the ties and the steel—everything. A mercy for someone infatuated with regret. “Zdenek? Zdenek who?” she asked me four years ago, still here but not.

  Which left just my father and me to carry all that history. We carried it well enough those last years—my father especially. Wedded to reason, inclined like a heliotrope to whatever could be known (author of the monograph The Intercontinental Shelf and International Law), he had the gift of being able to accept the gavel coming down, of being able to bear the sentence: “It wasn’t.” The comma and the conjunction he left to me, the lord of revision: “It wasn’t, but it could have been.”

  “It could have been.” He must have sensed the gene in me long before I did. There I was, like an apprentice St. Sebastian, inserting my baby arrows into my skin, practicing. My mother’s son. Time didn’t lay down its tracks in a line for me, the print didn’t set: I mourned every house before we’d left it, then refused to leave it after we had. Was meant nothing to me; long before I knew what the conditional mood was, I was humming its tune: If he had known, if she had said, if we had stayed. My life, my work, was one long argument for commutation.

  My father had no ear for it. To traffic in “if” was absurd, an exercise in masochism. What was, was. His sister was gone, sent in a fit of delirium tremens on an errand through thin-paned glass to the courtyard three stories below. His mother, awakened by a sound she would never forget, was also gone. It was the way it was.

  In December, 1948, the day he learned that he was to be arrested, my father quietly began making arrangements to escape his own country. It couldn’t have been easy—he could tell no one. Those who knew him would be interrogated; their ignorance would need the ring of truth. He’d have to vanish with a wink and a wave, disappear out of their lives like a magician’s assistant stepping into a wardrobe. The only thing making it bearable—a saving irony—was his certainty that he wouldn’t be gone long: a year, maybe two. The regime could never last.

  The afternoon before he left, my father told his mother and sister that he’d be going to see a friend in Prague after the late edition of the paper. He’d be back in Brno on Monday. He gave his mother a quick hug, careful not to raise her suspicions, kissed his sister on the forehead. His father was still at the office.

  At eight o’clock that night my father walked out of the clatter and ring of carriage returns for a few minutes to wake himself up in the cold winter air and ran into his father coming home from work. The two men stopped to talk as the snow came down. He was going to Prague for a day or so, my father said.

  He’d heard, my grandfather said, lighting a cigarette. Did he have everything he needed?

  It was an odd question. Sure, my father said. He’d be staying with Mirek.

  “Money?”

  He was fine, my father said.

  My grandfather nodded, then looked up the street at the cones of snow coming down from the lamps like light in a comic book. “So,” he said, “I better be getting home, before your mother begins to wonder.” He smiled (and I can imagine that smile, though fifty years have passed since he died, because I’m only two years younger than he was then): “You’d better get back in there—don’t you have a newspaper to put out?” And he put out his hand and my father took it and then he was walking away up the sidewalk past the closed shops toward the square.

  My father stood there until he couldn’t see him any longer and went back to work. He would never see him again. He’d be sixty-eight before he returned, his own son ten years older than he himself had been when he left.

  The day he told me about that evening we were sitting on the deck behind our house. Things had happened the way they did, he said, imparting the lesson, the attitude, as always. What was, was. So what if he’d known, if he’d held his father’s hand a little longer, or given him a hug—he hadn’t. He looked out over our yard, already figuring out what needed his attention. He could use my help in the garden.

  It was 1978, summer. I was home from college. We were still a family—sort of. My mother still had a memory.

  Seventeen years later saw some changes. The revolution had swept in like a welcome tide, receded; the three of us had separated. My mother had returned to Moravia. My father was living in Prague by then, working in the Academy of Sciences on Národni Street, a cavernous, museum-like building with forty-foot ceilings and empty, unlit corridors. He’d stay late, working, reading, drinking, and I’d find him there, groping my way toward the flat European switches on the wall that lit another section of hallway, temporarily, then went out behind me.

  It was there, in the Academy of Sciences Building, my father told me, that he experienced one of the oddest moments of his life.

  He’d been working late, he said, when a knock on the door nearly stopped his heart. It was well after midnight; the building had been dark for five hours or more. My father opened the door to a man in his early forties carrying a small, battered briefcase. The man extended his hand and gave his name—the standard Czech greeting. “Zdenek Slouka,” he said.

  My father, naturally enough after all the years he’d lived in America, assumed the man had asked him his name instead of giving his own. “I’m Zdenek Slouka,” he replied, “can I help you?” The man smiled—a kind, strangely familiar smile. “No, I know you’re Zdenek Slouka,” he said. “The thing is, so am I.”

  They talked nearly till dawn, and a story emerged—a story, my father said, that he would never have believed if he hadn’t heard it himself. The other Zdenek Slouka had been conceived out of wedlock. He didn’t remember his father, a man from Brno, who had quietly supported him through his childhood and who had asked, in return, that he be named Zdenek.

  One by one, the pieces locked into place. The conclusion was obvious. The other Zdenek, my father told me, was from the same logging town that his father had originally come from, and to which he’d begun returning late in life. It was there that he’d had an affair, fathered a December child. And it was there, apparently, staggering under the erasure of his family—his daughter’s suicide, his wife’s slide into madness, his son’s disappearance into exile—that he’d taken a stab at the impossible, a gesture at once absurd and bottomlessly sad. He began again. He fathered a son, then named him after the one he’d lost. The man in the office was not just his namesake, my father said, but his half-brother. In other words, my uncle.

  We were sitting in a café on Londynská Street. My father signaled the waitress and pointed to his vodka. Of course the whole thing was mad, a testament to the things that pain can drive us to, no more. But the man was real enough. And it was a comfort, wasn’t it?—knowing we had a relation in the world, a good man apparently, eager to know us both.

  I lived with the thought of this man, this second father, for quite a few years. Though I never actually met him—he was always gone, or traveling, when I visited Prague—I’d hear about him from my father. He’d called from Vienna, he’d tell me; he was coming to town the week after next. Over time I heard less, forgot to ask. Gradually he faded, a photograph left in the development tray. It
didn’t matter. Fixed in my imagination, having elbowed a space for himself in the past, he lived on. It took a long time for me to admit that he’d probably never been.

  It was the small things that turned the key: a date that didn’t match, a part that didn’t fit, even that overelaborate frame in which the thing had been set: the fateful knock at midnight, the long-lost brother, emerging out of the dark. . . . My father had been drinking then, weighing accounts. I can see him, sitting up late in the Academy of Sciences, working his way down the bottle. The rationalist, cornered at last. His own losses he could bear; my own—imagined or real—were another thing. I was his only son, the only child of only children—existentially alone in terms of blood—and he was getting old.

  So he made me a gift. His father, forced to let his son go into the world alone, had had no choice. He did. I’d have a relation, a companion—someone to talk to in the long years of exile.

  Regrets accrue, old investments come to term; I’ve never been able to laugh at the concessions that love can force from us.

  But I don’t think it was for me alone that my father bent his faith, that he tried, awkwardly, to walk into the past, to flatten a cowlick, adjust the vase, make it right; there was another consideration, a moment in the past, like a bone in the throat, that needed his attention. And I know what it was because now and then time leaves a marker—a note in the margin, a corner turned down—so that we know where to look.