Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  For whatever reason, maybe because they were so obvious, or so young, nobody said a thing; now and then a man or woman would look at them while chatting to a friend or over the top of a newspaper, then look away. The train came. They got on it. Now, at least, they could take off their coats without drawing attention. Not talking or looking at each other, as they hadn’t since coming out of the woods, they took their seats.

  And then, before the platform outside had even screeched to a halt, a guard in a Soviet Army uniform, no more than seventeen or eighteen years old, had jumped on board and was making his way up the car. Holding a cigarette, he’d wave his fingers for the documents, check the offered papers and toss them back. Sometimes he’d take a long drag while looking at the papers’ owner, release a blue wall of smoke up past his mustache, and only then hand them back. Once or twice—unsmiling, aware of being the center of attention—he’d call something to his comrade, working his way toward him from the back.

  Careful not to appear nervous by seeming too relaxed, my father glanced out the window, then across the aisle at the people opposite, then tilted his head slightly and pressed his thumb into his cheek as if testing a toothache. The kid was six rows ahead; the arm with the cigarette abruptly rose in a half-salute, then dropped to his side. Five rows ahead. Four. The terror was a distant voice trying to get your attention, like pain under anesthesia.

  And then he was there and my father had reached into the vest pocket of his jacket for his papers and the kid had glanced at them, said something to his friend and handed them back. Irritable now, increasingly impatient, he took my mother’s papers, paused to look her up and down, lingering offensively, and handed them back. A minute later, finished with the car, the two made their way to the front where the other guard pushed open the door and stepped off the train. Someone out on the platform laughed.

  And just like that, it was over. They were through. Somehow, unbelievably, it was over. In ten minutes they’d be handing their papers to the American MPs. It was over. My mother could smell the winter smell of the car. It smelled of melting snow and leather.

  At the front of the car the kid with the mustache turned, looked down the aisles. Moving his head slightly as his eyes ticked from face to face, he went carefully, row by row—when he came to my mother he had it. Vy! he called, pointing at my father. You! The sweat leaped out on my father’s forehead as instantly as if he’d been lowered into an oven. He glanced to his left and right, then back to the guard—Ich? The kid yelled something in Russian, then switched to German: Du—auf! You, out.

  From somewhere outside, someone yelled something in Russian and the kid jerked his head slightly as if to look out. My father started to get up, began gathering his coat. Du! Auf! Schnell! Again someone yelled something from outside: My mother recognized the Russian word for “girls,” worked it out from there—“Fool—we’ve got girls here.”

  My father picked up his hat, dropped it, picked it up again, folded his coat over his arm.

  Again the voice from outside: “Get out here, you asshole—what’re you doing?”

  My father began walking toward the front of the car. He fumbled his coat, dropped it.

  “Get out here, you idiot!”

  Again the kid glanced outside, then back at my father, still making his snail’s progress up the aisle, then slapped the air with disgust and rushed off the train. My father stopped, unsure of what to do, then made his way back to his seat and sat down. He didn’t look at my mother.

  And nothing happened. Nobody looked at them. The train didn’t move. Now and then there were voices from outside. The brakes hissed. A hundred meters away, three crows sat on the bare branch of a tree behind the American line—one of them, preening, seemed to be signaling something. They’d been there forever. They would always be there.

  My father aged over those few minutes, my mother said. He didn’t move, he didn’t speak—it seemed he didn’t breathe. He didn’t look at her. He just sat there, watching the open door at the front of the car, almost calm except for the sweat streaming down his face, which he couldn’t help, the muscles in his face flinching each time the brakes hissed, each time the train lurched, then settled, each time a voice yelled something in Russian from the platform. And then the brakes released again and the train lurched back, then forward and began to move, the platform crawling by almost imperceptibly, so slowly anyone could still step on board, then faster, so that a man would have to jog, then faster—and time resumed its flow. Minutes later my parents were in the American zone and not long after, the French, where their documents were examined with a typically Gallic mixture of weariness and amusement and they were officially recognized as refugees. They carried two mud-smeared suitcases. In most ways that matter they’d remain refugees for forty years.

  I like to think about the girl on the platform—the one who looked so fine in her sweater, her heels, who saved my father from a bullet to the brain, who inadvertently extended his life another sixty-four years, allowing me to be born, to marry a certain girl from Florida, allowing the two of us to have the (grown) children we have. . . . I’d like to find her—an old woman in her late eighties now, living in Vienna a block or two from a small beserlpark, where she still likes to walk when the weather’s good. I’d like to thank her.

  With one long-fingered hand on her hip, the other pulling back her hair to accept a light, she let my parents go, allowed them to carry their burden of memories and dreams a little further down the road. Can’t ask for more than that.

  XXXII

  AT THE BOTTOM OF Wenceslas Square in Prague one summer evening years ago, maneuvering through the crowd of Russian mafiosos in leather jackets and Czech dads with their little girls sitting on their shoulders, hands locked like seat belts around their fathers’ foreheads, past the German and Italian tourists and the hookers and the shirtless Brit vomiting into the tulips on the central island . . . there, amid various Bad Art installations I came across a human skeleton sitting on a box. He was seated inside a crude wooden cage, like an orangutan at the zoo. I stopped. Around us the crowd babbled multilingually—a beautiful evening. He was leaning forward, elbows on his kneecaps, bony hands turned out at the wrists. His attitude was both querulous and resigned, aggressive and beseeching. “What?” he seemed to be saying. “Tell me what the fuck you want?”

  I want truth. And while I’m at it, justice for all.

  I’ll settle for what I can get.

  Two days ago, I received a note from the director of the care home my mother’s been “living” in for the past year or so. A compassionate soul, she wanted to warn me: I had to prepare myself.

  I wrote back to thank her, because she was kind and because I was grateful. I didn’t tell her that the person I’d loved had been gone for years; that when it came to my mother it was complicated—a stew of love and outrage, recrimination and regret—complicated. That when it came to my mother, things didn’t follow from A to Z, love didn’t rise or decline like the stock market, revelations didn’t appear on schedule.

  In the fall of 1991, after my parents had separated, my father suffered a massive heart attack. I flew to Bethlehem, slept in the waiting room of the IC unit. My wife, pregnant with our daughter, arrived with our two-year-old son a few days later. The next day, Mom flew in from Prague. And the madness commenced. She staggered around the halls of the hospital, weeping, yelling at me, at my father in his coma, at the staff—who finally threatened to have her removed—claiming we were all conspiring against her. She got the keys to my father’s apartment from the hospital closet and went through his letters, then read them aloud to me, raging over the beeping of the monitors. She refused to pick up our son, claiming we thought she was filthy.

  It was sometime during those insane days, which I thought might end with the two of us strangling each other over my father’s body, that an old friend of my parents, who’d come to offer his support, took me aside in the hallway. He’d appeared three afternoons in a row, bringing food,
staying out of the way.

  He’d been in psychiatric practice for forty-five years, he said, but he was speaking to me now as a friend, not a doctor. He needed me to hear him.

  “She will destroy you,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder, and then he said it again. “You have a young family, what seems like a good marriage . . . I know what I’m talking about. You have to distance yourself. You won’t save her.”

  I was so taken aback that I didn’t thank him. I’m doing it now.

  I’d needed to hear what I’d known in my heart for a long time. It didn’t mean I could act on it.

  Fifteen years earlier, the winter of my freshman year of college, I had a dream which I wrote down in my journal so I could forget it. In the dream my mother and I were on a boat in the middle of a blue ocean tacked tight to the horizon. Everything was still: the boat, its reflection, the pale hot circle of the sun.

  My mother decided to go for a swim. Far off, she was calling for help, her arms flailing in the air. I was there instantly. Crazy with fear, she grabbed onto my shoulders and neck as if I were a board flung into the water. I tried to drag her back to the boat, but I couldn’t do it—her terror had given her outrageous strength. She fought and twisted as though shot through by some giant current. Holding her across her chest and under her arm, as I’d learned to do in lifesaving class, choking and strangling, I somehow dragged her to the surface, only to be pulled under again and again.

  It was then that I realized she was swimming down. I could feel her pulling into the dark, reaching for my face, my throat, and I began to fight, striking down with my fists, desperate to separate myself from this thing which only moments before I’d been determined to save, and woke myself with such a spasmodic wrench of my body that I knocked my glasses off the reading table by my dormitory bed.

  XXXIII

  OVER THE SEASONS, AS I’ve worked on these pages, I’ve kept a particular photograph of my mother on my desk. Hardly bigger than a postage stamp, it’s become a kind of talisman; wherever I write—in motel rooms, in the Reading Room at the New York Public Library—I have it on the table next to me. It was taken on January 1, 1952, at Palm Beach in Sydney, Australia. I know this because my mother wrote the place and date, in blue ink, on the back.

  Of all the pictures I have of her, and I have many, this may be my favorite. The cloudy, southern hemisphere sky is marred by two small water spots, the cottony surf blurs in the foreground. My mother, not quite twenty-seven years old, is coming out on the beach. She’s holding what looks like a bathing cap filled with water, intended for the person taking the picture—almost certainly my father.

  It’s hard to analyze why we love what we do, but here goes nothing.

  I love this picture because the joy it captures seems so big, so sovereign, it should have been able to hold its own against anything that came afterward. I love it because it couldn’t. I love it because as a kid I heard the echoes of that joy—hours of contentment and laughter and who-knows-what that have come to feel slightly unreal to me, and for that reason all-the-more precious. I love it, finally, because it seems to support what I want to believe I remember: that my mother was able to keep the demons out for months and even years at a time before they finally forced the lock.

  But what do I know, really?—what’s visible is always dwarfed by what’s not. I can tell you that my mother’s happy in that photograph even though F’s not there, even though it’s been four years since she’s seen him, two years or more since she’s had a letter from him, and that this is significant somehow, but for all I know she’s full of joy because just seconds before the shutter froze her, she recalled splashing him by the side of some reedy pond and the memory of his body came over her like a wave and suddenly giddy with groundless hope, she scooped a capful of water from the surf.

  I’ll never know. I can study her face with the magnifying glass, but she’s hidden away from me. Which is as it should be. When they invent the technology that can unlock her laughter, I’ll know I’ve lived too long.

  XXXIV

  I HAVE THE DOCUMENTS from the years that followed: the foreign-worker cards and the soft, well-worn passports with their photos and their purple stamps, the information (hair: brown; face: oval) filled in with a fountain pen. I have pictures of them—in Innsbruck, in Sydney, in Munich and New York—and the fact that they’re so young fills me with wonder and something like jealousy: How much they’d lived by the time they were thirty.

  Taken together, the letters and the telegrams and the Carnets d’Identité pour Personnes Deplacées tell a familiar story, a story not that different from that of the Syrian or Sudanese refugees in today’s paper: a tale of dislocation and loss, of men and women and children officially “displaced,” drifting from port to port before eventually landing, through a combination of perseverance and ingenuity and maybe even luck (though only time can answer that), in the West. It’s an important story, but it’s not the real story where my parents are concerned, and if I told it straight and safe, following the trail of bread crumbs, I’d be leaving out everything essential. Facts are just scaffolding for the heart.

  That said, in my parents’ case the scaffolding was interesting enough. For a year and a half, before they could get berths on a ship for Australia—the only country besides Brazil that would accept immigrant couples, not just men—they survived in the refugee camps outside Innsbruck. It was a hard time made bearable by youth, by the company of others (as in “misery loves . . .”) and, eventually, by the softening passage of time: At the time, the winter was long, fuel scarce, food communally scrounged.

  What remains of our lives, of the hours of plotting and hope, of the taste of a particular meal—never mind the river of impressions and dreams that runs under our conscious day? Not much—a handful of names, misremembered dates, a few anecdotes retold much too often. Live long enough, the past caramelizes into fiction.

  Still, maybe because it left a space, one story from their days in Innsbruck seemed to matter to them, and for that reason to me. It can stand in for the many.

  Though the giddiness of making it across the border carried them a while—for the rest of his life my father would maintain that the bratwurst he bought on the platform in Innsbruck as the wind chilled the sweat on his back was the best thing he ever ate—it didn’t take long for reality to take off its shoe and pound it on the table. They were nothing now. Whatever rights they’d had, or could at least lay claim to, were gone. For the next three years, like leaves in a spring flood, they’d go where the tide of personnes deplacées would take them, herded into camps, formed into lines, escorted by immigration authorities and Italian carabinieri from trucks to trains to ships, from holding station to holding station, meal to meal. From now on, whatever privileges might be bestowed on them, from the right to travel to the right to work, whatever aid they might receive—a slice of bread, a bed to sleep in—would be at the discretion of whatever nation allowed them inside its borders.

  Like soldiers nostalgic for the camaraderie of battle, they would look back on those years as a time of friendship, friendship fueled by mutual poverty, by small victories—a kilo of lemons, a purple stamp on a visa—made large by circumstance. It wasn’t just the obvious truth—that within certain limits, having less means living more; it wasn’t just the romance of youth. It was about distraction. In my mother’s case, survival distracted her from herself, suppressed her capacity for giving herself pain. Ironically—or maybe entirely predictably—it would be the New World, with its wall-to-wall carpeting and its fifty-seven flavors, that would defeat her. No longer required to fight, sitting in her bedroom switching from Days of Our Lives to The Edge of Night, she’d begin to devour herself.

  But here I am, the morbid son, flying on ahead, bringing bad news. In the winter of 1948–49, my parents’ future lay in embryo. They were living on the nick of time. They had two suitcases. They had their lives. It was enough.

  Which is not to say, “easy.” In the refuge
e camps around Innsbruck in the winter of 1948, there was no work and little food. A black market existed, but the risks were considerable. Securing passage to one of the countries accepting refugees could take years. Complicating things even more was the usual congregation of criminals that appears, attracted by some frequency of desperation, wherever refugee communities form—many of them refugees themselves. My parents had to be careful, keep their distance, avoid getting drawn in at all costs.

  One name in particular seemed to float to the surface of every conversation. Vikin was no joke, people said. A sociopath with the deceptive good looks and lank brown hair of an American movie star, he’d stabbed a man through the throat in Jindichv Hradec, then escaped across the border a step ahead of the law. A thief, a smuggler, a card sharp known to the authorities in Budapest and Prague, he was ferociously quick with a knife, utterly mercurial. He’d made a space for himself around Innsbruck, coming and going as he pleased, doing what he wanted; even other criminals stayed out of his way.

  Though I have few particulars, less than a week passed before my father, standing at a tram stop, let’s say, was asked if he had the time, in German, by a man in a long coat. My father hitched up his sleeve to look at his watch—the last thing of any value in his possession. It was just after three, he answered. The man grinned, placing the accent. “You’re Czech,” he said, switching over from German.

  He was, my father said.

  “Where from?”