Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  December, 1948. It’s snowing. They talk. My grandfather knows. He turns, walking quickly, the years lowering like an anvil. Fifty years later my father, unable to bear it, comes to his rescue: he stalls the descent, jams a story between iron and stone, delivers to him a second son.

  XXVI

  I HAVE A CONFESSION to make: The previous chapter appeared as an essay in 2011, the year before my father died. I decided to slip it in here not to make weight, but because it’s true as far as it goes. And because where it doesn’t go interests me. Music, as Claude Debussy once pointed out, is the stuff between the notes.

  What I didn’t mention in the essay is that when my father escaped Czechoslovakia in 1948, he wasn’t alone. Basically, I omitted my mother. In doing this—to keep from complicating the story, I told myself—I echoed Dad, who, two years earlier, had published his first book at the age of eighty-six, a full-length autobiography called Jdi po skryté stop (Go Down the Hidden Path) in which he managed almost entirely to leave out my mother. It was an act of revenge (for the years of belittling, for the “deflated balloon” comments) as elegant as it was cruel. All it required was the turn of one small grammatical lever—switching the first person from the plural to the singular—and she was erased. I survived, a slightly ghostly presence, more or less immaculately conceived.

  I look at my father’s book now, which sits on my shelf proudly autographed by the author, and I’m both appalled and thrilled by it. What could be more eloquent? What could express your feelings more clearly than to write the story of your life and leave out the person you’d shared it with for forty-six years? In one stroke he erased her, swept the table clean like Brando in Streetcar—“Now that’s how I’m gonna clear the table.” I didn’t know the old man had it in him.

  He sent her the book—neatly wrapped and signed. And my mother—she still had her mind, then—wrote back a week later to say how much she’d loved it. It was a grandmaster move on her part—swift and unanswerable. You could almost hear the pieces clicking the board, the hand slapping the timer—Queen takes Rook—checkmate.

  A few days ago (I’m inserting this here because it’s necessary—the other stories can wait) I went back to my father’s book to pick up some “ballast”—my word for the facts and dates that keep the imagination on course—and found a reference to my mother. And then another. And a third. I read on, feeling slightly sick. How was this possible? How had I misremembered my father’s book so completely? Had I wanted him to have left her out, to have gotten a little of his own back—and through him, a little of my own? What else had I imputed to him that wasn’t true? I didn’t go back to my writing that day. Or the next. I just reread my father’s book, in Czech, cover to cover. It took me a week; at seven hundred pages, it’s a big book. The more I read, the more this book, which I’d begun to think of as a kind of rescue operation, began to fade. All those facts and footnotes in my father’s book. How could I ever compete with that apparatus, that knowing?

  I seem to be one of those people doomed to rediscover things they’ve owned for decades—“Where did this come from? I love this jacket!” In this case it was the third-grade insight that you can be right and wrong at the same time. On the one hand, I’d been completely wrong: Though my mother’s name did in fact fade out in the second half of the book, which devolved into a list of my father’s academic awards and accomplishments, her name was everywhere in the first half: where she and my father had lived, how they’d escaped, who they’d known. In short, everything I’d said about my father exacting some kind of revenge on my mother by switching from the third person to the first was untrue—so wrong it felt malicious—a lie.

  It wasn’t a lie. Though her name was there, the human being was missing. What I’d remembered, typically, wasn’t the fact but the spirit of the work, its essence. In my father’s book my parents meet, they marry, they move here or there, but my mother’s thoughts, her fears, her memories are absent. Not once does he imagine her inner world; not once does he enter her thoughts in any but the most banal way; though she moves and speaks and travels the world, she’s all surface.

  In truth, the literal erasure I’d imagined would have been far kinder. This was death by disinterest, something we’ve all glimpsed in certain marriages, hopefully not our own—that stage beyond fighting that signals the end of curiosity, that says, I’m just not interested. We can remodel the kitchen and pay off the house, even fuck on schedule once a month, but I’ll never ask you what you dream or fear, and if one night, driven by some desperation, you feel the need to tell me, I’ll listen politely until you’re done.

  It’s a sin even Dante wouldn’t touch.

  And I’d lay it at my father’s door if it were his, but I can’t, because it wasn’t. Oh, he tried all right, but the indifference was a sham, an act. To the end of his life—though he’d move on, remarry, pull himself out of the whirlpool of her descent—he never found the strength to stop caring about her, or to stop pretending he had. Here he was, standing in front of the door again, threatening to break it down, to trash the room and everything in it. This time he meant it. This time was for real. And having done it, he sent her the door. See? See what I’ve done?

  And she saw right through him and thanked him for his efforts. Checkmate.

  XXVII

  I NOTICED HIM WHEN we walked into my father’s memorial service in Prague—a slim man in his sixties, standing off to the side in the rain, smoking under an umbrella—and then the business of grief took over and I didn’t see him again until we were leaving and he nodded at me with that slight tilt of the head that signals sympathy, regret, and he was gone.

  It was only later that afternoon that my stepmother, herself numb with shock, asked if I’d noticed the slim man, maybe in his late sixties, standing by himself at the service. I had, I said. It was the strangest thing, she said—she hardly knew what to make of it. He’d said his name was Slouka, too, that he’d known my father, though not as well as he would have wished.

  She was about to ask him who he was and how they’d met when a group of people interrupted to offer their condolences, and she lost track of him.

  I never told her the tale my father had told me—I’m not sure why.

  It’s been two years. I haven’t heard from my imagined uncle. I don’t expect to.

  XXVIII

  “TIME ROBS US OF ALL, even of memory,” Virgil reminds us in the Eclogues, his vision of a perfect, haunted world. Which is hardly news, not always the way it goes, and definitely not helpful. Still, even when it is the story, some memories hang on, linger like an afterimage in the mind’s eye.

  For my mother, the three crows she saw sitting on a branch just across the border dividing the Soviet and American sectors of Vienna while my father waited to be shot, would be one of the last to go. December, 1948. A cold, wet wind. The train didn’t move. Two hundred meters away she could see the American MPs with their white helmets and white armbands. The two crows on the left, like rumpled old men, had sunk into their feathers; the third kept preening, digging under its wing with its beak. From a distance it seemed to be signaling.

  She carried the image of those birds (for some reason I see them in the negative—three crow-shaped spaces on the outline of a branch) for more than sixty years. For all I know, she carries them still.

  How we end up in a particular place at a particular time—say, waiting to be shot on a train in the Soviet sector of Vienna—is always due to a cast of characters and a sequence of events that have conspired to move us, block by block, to where we find ourselves. The trick to retrospection—assembling the cast, stringing together the events that explain the mess we’re in—is designating a starting point, an original cause. It’s an arbitrary business. Spin the wheel.

  I’d nominate my father’s father, Rheinhold Slouka, one of the three grandparents I never met, and the only one I would have wanted to. I have a few pictures of him—none as a younger man. In one, a family portrait taken in 1940 or so, he’
s standing to the left, formally dressed in dark suit and tie, his wife next to him, then my aunt Luba, maybe ten years old, and finally my father. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that picture. There’s something about his lean, almost English face, his kind, slightly burdened eyes, the quiet smile, that I like very much. He looks like a man used to keeping his own counsel, to making up his own mind, though whether these qualities are actually visible or just something I’ve imagined because of what I know, I can’t say. What I do know is that Rheinhold Slouka seems to have been one of those human beings with an innate sense of their own worth, someone whose insistence on thinking for himself was only matched by his outrage toward those who’d question his right to do so.

  He was also, apparently, born lucky—a reasonable thing to say about a man who survives his own hanging.

  Though I told the story in a story called “Jumping Johnny,” the “story” of Grandpa’s execution happened to be true. During “the Great War,” Rheinhold had served as a spy for the newly formed Czech legions operating with the Allies. It didn’t go well.

  It was my father who told me how my grandfather, at the age of twenty-two, had found himself marching south through warm rain to the Italian front, chosen for service in the espionage unit, sent over the lines, and, just like that, standing on a hardpack road with his arms tied behind his back watching a man he’d never met tie a noose on the end of a rope.

  He knew exactly what was going to happen (by the time they came to him, after all, he’d watched forty or fifty of his comrades hoisted on the same horse, which was then simply walked toward the next tree until its burden slipped off its back), and yet, in spite of this, he went quietly, disbelieving, even as the rope was being slipped over his face, even as he felt the horse walking out from under him. The instant before his legs slid off the horse’s back, before the sky and the leaves and the dark fringe of trees on the horizon began their mad, tilting dance, he noticed a bunch of cherries—tight-skinned and fat—on a low, dripping branch a meter from his face.

  He jerked and thrashed like all the others—it must have made quite a sight, my father said, that three-kilometer alley of trees—except that after the others had stopped, he was still going. Seems they’d either left too much rope, or the branch had bent just enough, or the sides of the ditch in that particular place were just a bit narrower than elsewhere. When the Allied front came through later that afternoon, two men on horseback, one on either side of the lane, went from rope to rope with their bayonets, dropping the dead into the ditch. My grandfather was one of them.

  Except he wasn’t. Waking during the night, he crawled up on the road, cut the rope binding his wrists on a scythe he found leaning against a haystack, and started walking. Three weeks later, he was home. The only thing he had to show for it, said my father, who was born six years later, was a miniature tremble in his handwriting, as though his feet, leaving the back of that horse, had started a strange, nervous current, like death’s own heartbeat. That was it, my father said. That and a photograph, the torn-off page of a magazine, in fact, that hung in the parlor throughout my father’s childhood: inside its gray, handmade frame, below the white lettering of the magazine’s name, Domov a Svt, it showed a wet country lane stretching to the horizon, cherry trees, and two converging lines of the dead. A journalist traveling with the front had taken the picture before the cavalry cut the men into the ditch. Browsing a stationery store less than a month after his return home, my grandfather recognized himself as the fourth man on the right.

  He bought the magazine, neatly removed the cover, framed it, then hung the picture of his execution in the kitchen, where my father would sometimes find him, a bowl of cherries on the table next to him, studying it. Gloating. How many men, sentenced to hang by the neck until dead, lived to look at a photograph of themselves hanging by the neck? The experience cemented him in his disbelief, if any cement was needed, though it could just as easily have thrown him the other way.

  What I’m getting at is that while my father inherited exactly nothing from his father in terms of money or property, in terms of what Nabokov called “un-real estate” his inheritance was considerable, including (along with a talent for storytelling and a streak of sentimentality), a hearty disrespect for organized religion, an extra measure of luck and a second helping of stubbornness. The third item would determine his behavior during the German occupation and after it; the second would allow him to survive the rain of crap it brought down on his head.

  Which brings us to the next war. Just twenty years after a senseless squabble had left 15 million dead from Belgium to the Balkan Peninsula, the march of boots and the sound of 10,000 voices roaring in unison spread across Europe. Stamped out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just twenty years earlier, its constitution proudly patterned on the Constitution of the United States, the tiny country of Czechoslovakia quickly found itself overwhelmed. Which didn’t mean that there weren’t some, like my father and grandfather (and others, infinitely braver), who didn’t buck that tide instinctively, creatively, continually. There were quite a few.

  Though the line between resistance and suicide could be hard to see in 1942, my father and grandfather seem to have walked it well. In retrospect, there was a certain, inherited “Daddy was a pistol, I’m a son-of-a-gun” thing going on: The abuse of power didn’t sit well with either of them. At the same time, whatever mirroring there may have been was unconscious; neither spoke to the other about what he was doing, both denied they were doing anything at all. Whatever they accomplished, they accomplished separately, through a sort of unacknowledged and deadly form of parallel play I find hard to imagine: Small things mattered supremely—a single misstep could erase you.

  My grandfather, appropriately, was better at the game: Older, more cautious, a family man operating under the terror of that responsibility, he understood that survival depended on keeping the circle small, blending in, doing your damage quietly. And Rheinhold, with his sleepy smile and his tall man’s stoop, was a quiet one. When the betrayal at Munich in late 1938 made armed resistance impossible, the Czech legionnaires from the First World War had quickly gone underground, forming cells that would disrupt the German war effort at every opportunity; as a former legionnaire, Rheinhold was there from the beginning, keeping his mouth shut, doing his bit.

  The keeping-his-mouth-shut part was key. Equally important was knowing when to play to expectation, to act the ignorant, subservient Slav. When in early 1939, for example, every household with a radio was issued an official, stick-on warning label (to be affixed to the radio’s face) stating that listening to foreign broadcasts was a crime punishable by death, Rheinhold bowed his head, muttered “Ich verstehe,” and did as he was ordered: The sticker went on the family radio . . . its far right edge carefully aligned with the BBC’s position on the dial. It saved all that time spent fiddling around, he said—truly, the Gestapo thought of everything.

  With the exception of one terrifying week in 1942 during which the family secreted a Jewish man in the rabbit hutch behind the garden (I know neither the name of the man, nor whether he had anything to do with the assassination, that June, of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, nor indeed, whether he even survived the war), the Sloukas’ involvement in subversive activities was, to all appearances, nil. Which mattered; appearances were everything.

  For well over three years, father and son kept each other in the dark, Rheinhold working with the legionnaires, my father with networks of young men primarily assigned the task of getting to the arms shipments dropped by parachute into the forests of Moravia before the Germans did, then rushing them through the woods on makeshift stretchers made from tree branches and coats to the barns and stables of sympathizers. Unbelievably, they managed it—each convinced the other was going about his day—until early 1944.

  That winter, to aid the disastrous German retreat from Leningrad, the Occupation Authority requisitioned all the cross-country skis in the Protectorate, one of those slightly surreal detai
ls whose very simplicity carries the ring of truth. Russian winters came with snow. Snow was hard to walk in. Ten thousand frostbitten troops could use all the help they could get. What better way to acquire thousands of pairs of cross-country skis instantly than to take them from those who already had them?

  The Czechs, inspired by the Gestapo’s customary “under penalty of death” incentive program, hurried to comply; spiky mountains of cross-country skis piled up at the collection depots, not a few of them modestly decorated with tiny, black beauty spots along a fifteen-centimeter section just behind the upturn of the ski; handpainted along the rail, inconspicuous and symmetrical, the dots hid small-diameter holes drilled through the part of the ski certain to receive the greatest pressure when in use. Shipped en masse to the front, they’d hold up for a kilometer, then snap with a sound like a gunshot: Life was full of small pleasures.

  On the day in question in 1944, my father and his friend, Mirek Vlach, were in the toolshed busily doctoring a ski when my father happened to look up to find his father, who was supposed to be at work, leaning in the doorway in his shirtsleeves. He had no idea how long he’d been standing there. There was nothing for my father to say: For two years he’d been righteously assuring his father that he’d taken his orders to heart, that—like him—he was keeping himself out of it, being smart.

  My father waited by the vise, unsure of where this would go. His father lost his temper rarely—when he did, you wanted to be somewhere else. He glanced at Mirek, whose face seemed stuck in a permanent wince.

  “How long?” my grandfather said.

  “Not long,” my father said.

  My grandfather didn’t say anything.