Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  “Brno,” my father said.

  “You’re kidding—you’re from Brno?” the man said. “Do you know Tonda Pazourek?”

  Of course, my father said. He’d known Pazourek since he was a kid. They’d been on the same track team at the Gymnasium—lousy runner, stand-up guy.

  The tram came. They got on and kept talking. My father liked him. Coming to his stop, he introduced himself. “Zdenek Slouka,” he said, extending his hand. “I’d buy you a drink if I could afford it.”

  “Vikin,” the man said, and smiled: “We’ll see what we can do about that.”

  Vikin, it turned out, could do a great deal, beginning with the bottle he brought to their room the next day.

  How had he found them? my parents asked.

  It wasn’t difficult, he said—a young couple, just arrived from Brno . . . He smiled. If he’d known how beautiful the wife was—he said this so gently, almost regretfully, that my mother couldn’t help but smile—it would have been even easier.

  It was my beautiful mother who tackled it head-on. They’d heard some things, she said.

  Things?

  About him.

  He wasn’t surprised, he said.

  Were they true?

  Such as . . . ?

  Was he a card sharp?

  He knew his way around a deck, yes.

  She told him about the man in Jindichv Hradec.

  He hadn’t heard that one yet, he said.

  Was it true?

  He looked at her for a long second. “The last time I was in Jindichv Hradec, I was ten. I don’t remember stabbing anyone.” He paused. “It would be nice if you could keep that to yourself—we don’t want to confuse people.”

  To say that Vikin got my parents through those eighteen months would be overstating it a bit; to say he was their friend would not. A month after their arrival, with my parents digging pinecones out of the snow for fuel, Vikin cut my father in on his business selling black-market silk and cigarette lighters to the prostitutes around Innsbruck, who alone seemed to have a bit of money to spend. My father would remember their partnership fondly: the deep, frozen nights with the snowfields of the Hafelekarspitze still glowing pink high above the town; the pleasure of making a few shillings at a time when money mattered a great deal, the half-serious bargaining with the ladies, who weren’t opposed to barter.

  If Vikin admired my mother, as I’m convinced he did, he kept it to himself. The two of them would talk about everything—where they hoped to go, what life might bring them. When my mother contracted scarlet fever, he took over whenever my father had to be away, scrounging medicine or food; later, during her convalescence, he’d spend days lying on the floor by her mattress, propped on an elbow, joking with her, smoking, playing endless games of Old Maid. It didn’t go unnoticed. Increasingly worried for their safety, my parents’ friends tried to talk some sense into them: What was the matter with them—didn’t they realize who they were dealing with? It was only a matter of time before he turned. Unable to believe it, my parents put them off. Understanding the situation, Vikin, like a tactful ghost, began appearing only after those who feared him had gone.

  The day my parents told him their good news, that they’d secured passage on a ship to Australia, that they’d be leaving for Naples in five days, Vikin couldn’t speak. For a second, my father said, his rough, handsome face looked like a mask. He rallied instantly, mumbled how happy he was for them, then left soon afterward.

  Two days before their departure, Vikin disappeared. The hours wound down. My parents asked around but no one had seen him. They didn’t know what had happened. Had the thought of having to say goodbye been too much for him? Did he think they were abandoning him? Had he cut himself off to spare himself the grief? Or to punish them for leaving? They’d been friends. They’d hoped to say goodbye.

  There was nothing to do. The hour came to leave for the station—no Vikin. Perhaps he’d be waiting for them there—he knew the time of their departure. He wasn’t. A big, milling crowd, friends seeing off friends. There was still time—fifteen minutes, a little less—maybe he’d make it at the last minute.

  He didn’t. The train—a refugee transport with hard plank benches—came into the station and they pushed their way on. Ten minutes later the conductor stepped up, the whistle blew, the train lurched and began to move. My parents stood leaning out the lowered window, waving to their few friends, still scanning the crowd for the one face they’d hoped to see. It wasn’t there. The train gathered speed.

  And then he was there, bursting through the crowd like a rugby player, sprinting down the platform, his coat billowing behind him. Losing ground, he managed to hand off a huge, mounded basket to a man three cars down along with a threat that he’d hunt him down and cut his throat if he learned that the basket hadn’t reached its intended party—the lady in the red jacket, three cars down.

  The basket, an impossible treasure trove of my mother’s favorite foods—pâté and apricot jam and pickles—a virtual inventory of all the things she’d mentioned, daydreaming, over the course of those five hundred days, reached its intended party. They never saw or heard of Vikin again.

  I always loved that story. It’s only now, writing it down, that I think I see it for what it is. The one-name card sharp with the heart of gold? That last-second cinematic entrance? It’s fiction—a story embedded in fact, embellished over time.

  But if I don’t quite believe in Vikin—at least not the one in the story—how is it possible for me to see him? Because I do. What kind of “seeing” allows me to imagine a man I never met, never spoke to, and don’t completely believe existed?

  He bursts from the crowd like a rugby player, hurtles a suitcase, sprints down the platform. I can see the billowing coat, the strain in his face, see him, at full speed, handing the basket up to the window. He’s part of my legacy now, my store of memories—I’ll remember his run the rest of my life, dream it when I’m old.

  XXXV

  TELLING ANY STORY INVOLVES sacrificing some things for others, thinning the row. Hardly news. What surprises me this time, though, is how hard I find it. I always enjoyed cutting back, opening up silences, always agreed with Hemingway that pretty much any story could be made better by being made shorter. The problem is, when it comes to my parents’ story, it doesn’t feel like I’m paring a manuscript, it feels like I’m paring a life, and the ellipses, the omissions, seem like lies.

  It can’t be helped. I have to stick to the trail of my story or risk losing myself in a wilderness of “facts”—fake trees, remembered valleys, rivers more rumor than truth. I know this, but it doesn’t sit easy. What gives me the right to cut ahead, to leave out faces, years—all for the sake of the one narrative, the one face, that I’ve decided shaped them all? By what authority do I get to decide?

  The answer is brutal, unarguable—something like an essential human right: By the authority of survival, which bestows on us all the right to shape until we are shaped in turn. It’s a dangerous authority, an imprimatur that can tempt to arrogance—after all, those who would catch or correct me are gone—but I’ll take it. It’s my turn now. It’s my story. I’ll write what I believe, cut what I want.

  I sound defensive. I know why.

  In the bad years, let’s say between the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” and Hall and Oates’ “Maneater,” when my mother was going crazy in our little suburban house in Pennsylvania and my father was barely hangin’ on to his shit, as the children say, I’d come home from college on the weekends and the three of us would talk. It didn’t feel like a choice. During the week I’d rehearse excuses for why I couldn’t make it, but Friday would always find me, duffel bag on my shoulder, on the No. 1 subway to Port Authority, where I’d catch the Allentown bus to the Holiday Inn off Route 22. From the green lights of the Holiday Inn, I’d walk the two miles in the dark—a bit less if I cut through the cornfields—to our house. They were all alone, and that house was the most silent house in the world. I had t
o do what I could.

  And so we’d talk over slices of my mother’s bábovka (she still baked then) and endless cups of tea. We’d talk for hours, sitting in that narrow living room with the beige sofa and the overvarnished, slice-of-a-tree coffee table and the crackling leatherette recliner that you moved back with a kind of stick shift on the right-hand side, and sometimes it would go well and we’d talk about school and politics and books, reminisce and laugh while our cat, Chiquita, slept on her embroidered cushion, once maroon, now the color of dried blood, and sometimes it wouldn’t.

  There were different ways for it not to go well, but one in particular stands out. It would work like this: Over the course of a two-or-three-hour conversation, the talk would drift from this to that, from—I don’t know—Jimmy Carter to peanuts to whomever I might be dating (always a dangerous subject) to some remembered day (“Do you remember that time we . . . ?”), and somewhere along the way we’d get into a long argument about, say, whether vitamins made sense or were just a lot of hype. We’d talk about it for fifteen, twenty minutes or more, marshaling arguments, coming up with (probably bogus) evidence, maintaining this side or that . . . who cares?—the point is that we’d spend a long time talking about vitamins, and then, eventually, the conversation would jump to something else.

  Maybe half an hour later, seeing some kind of connection, I might say, “But isn’t that just like the thing with the vitamins?” and my mother would look at me and say, “What vitamins?”

  This is how it would start.

  “You know, the vitamins,” I’d say—“about whether they’re a scam and all that.”

  My mother would shrug uncomprehendingly: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about vitamins,” I’d say, and laugh, “you know, that whole argument we just had about—”

  “Why would we have an argument?”

  “Fine, not an argument, a conversation—”

  “Why are you so upset?”

  “I’m not upset, I’m just . . . I just don’t see how you can’t remember that.”

  “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?” she’d say to my father.

  My father would shake his head.

  By now I wouldn’t be laughing. “I’m talking about vitamins,” I’d say, confused, “about the long conversation the three of us had just a few seconds ago—”

  “A few seconds ago?”

  “Minutes ago—”

  “You just said seconds—”

  “—in this room, in which you said . . .”

  “I don’t understand why this means so much to you.”

  “It doesn’t, I’m just saying . . . For Christ’s sake, just five minutes ago you . . .” And I’d go on to recount big chunks of the conversation: what my father had said, how my mother had made the point, let’s say, that in the old days her mother simply cooked what she cooked and you ate what was put in front of you and were grateful for it . . . How could they not remember this? Why would I make it up?

  And my mother would pause, then look at me and say, very calmly, as if gentling a horse, “Nobody’s said a word about vitamins all day,” then turn to my father. “Did you hear anyone say anything about vitamins?” and they’d both shake their heads and my mother would say, Kluk má nervy na dranc—something like, “The boy’s nerves are shot” but closer to “He’s losing it”—and exchange worried looks, then awkwardly change the subject. And that would be that. If I chose to pursue it—and I would—there’d be a fight. I’d lose.

  It didn’t happen often, true—then again, with some things a little goes a long way. I had no tape to play back, no brothers or sisters or eccentric old aunts to confirm what I remembered. It was just the three of us. It was always just the three of us. I couldn’t understand what was going on—why would they do this? I could recall specific details of what we’d said, who’d answered whom—how was it possible they didn’t remember? And then there’d be that look—a look that those with mental handicaps must know very well—a look that moves from worried confusion (a gathering between the eyebrows) to comprehension (a spasm, like gas), to embarrassment (a certain tightness, the cheekbones standing out, then a quick glance away), to a lame attempt to cover up (often betrayed by a slight, almost involuntary shake of the head).

  It seemed so sincere—was so sincere—that it threw me. After all, how could I be so sure? Was it possible that I’d imagined it all? Could there be something wrong with me? After all, this was my mom and dad—why would they lie? What right did I have to disregard what they both remembered, or, rather, didn’t remember? By what authority could my memory, my truth, override theirs?

  It seems ridiculous to me now, all this adolescent angst—irritating in that special, almost parental way that our younger selves are often irritating to us. I’m disappointed in me; I should have been tougher, smarter. I’m like one of those fathers in their wrinkled office shirts stalking around the edge of the wrestling circle yelling, “Put him down, goddamn it! Show some guts!” I’m just glad my nineteen-year-old self can’t hear me, because he’d get up off the couch, wipe the tears of frustration off his face with the back of his wrists and punch me in the face.

  The fact is, it mattered then. It mattered because I loved them, and because love—more than is generally acknowledged, I think—is about trust. If I was weak, then I was weak, but I’ve never been able to laugh at the concessions that love can wring from us. After all, this wasn’t just another argument about “young people these days” or the general decline of music since Mozart. This was an ontological battle. As the joke went, “Who you gonna believe—me, or your lyin’ eyes?” I had to choose who to believe, and one way or the other there’d be blood on the floor.

  It wouldn’t be mine. Not this time.

  Nothing happened. I just never trusted them quite the same way again. Though I’d return to Bethlehem for years (and backslide into loving them for decades), the moment that I decided that nothing, not even love, trumped the sanctity of my own consciousness, I simultaneously left home and became a writer. I’d manage to run from both facts for twelve years—I’m good at running—but it didn’t matter: the bearing had hit.

  It’s as good a creation myth as any.

  Forty years later, our beige sofa sits rotting in my mother’s overgrown villa in the tiny, medieval village of Zadní Vydí in Moravia. The carnival’s moved on: Our house in Bethlehem has been someone else’s burden for a generation. My father’s gone and my mother just about, and last summer, going through my mother’s moldering rooms at Vydí, I found a flat, colorless mat under a pile of water-damaged books and recognized it as the embroidered cushion that Chiquita used to sleep on. Sentimental fool that I am, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out.

  Like turtles crossing a highway to get to water, we’ll do what we have to do to be. When I think of the three of us in that dark little house, Eddie Albert crooning “Make the World Go Away” from the windowless dining room, I’m struck by the dumb, vine-like strength of a kid’s trust. That trust was like life itself—even as it looped around my throat. It took an act of violence to cut it.

  It would take some years for me to understand that that’s what liberation sometimes demands.

  That’s my authority.

  XXXVI

  IT’S SUMMER, 1949. PEE Wee Hunt’s “Twelfth Street Rag” is a big hit, the Berlin blockade has ended, the Stalinist show trials are in full swing. My parents, twenty-six and twenty-four years old, are on the transport train to Naples. As for me, I’m still in the great dark—a prelife ghost.

  I need to speed the clock, make the calendar pages flutter. I need to get to where the answers lie and the story resumes, and if that involves putting history in the microwave, in it goes. A chapter should do it.

  Picture those corny white dashes from the opening of Casablanca, that toy plane crossing the Mediterranean, that hectoring narrator’s voice, so suited for peddling Geritol. . . . And so, a torturous, round-abo
ut refugee trail sprang up. Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran . . .

  I love that movie for many reasons, but one of the most important is that the world it depicts—the world of Rick and Ilsa and Victor Laszlo, Ilsa’s rectitudinal Czech-o-slo-vakian husband with the oddly Hungarian surname (the a in “slovakian” always pronounced in the horrible nasal of “back-pack” rather than “tick-tock”)—was my parents’ reality. Sort of. Fine, hardly at all. Not, basically. Still.

  I like to imagine them selling the real Casablanca, or the postwar version, at any rate: Prod the MGM roaring lion, hoist up the Warner Brothers’ shield: “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You! An Unforgettable Story of Tedium and Uncertainty, Recrimination and Regret . . .”

  It would be a tricky thing to score. Instead of the chorus of “La Marseillaise” conducted by Laszlo for Major Strasser’s benefit, you’d want to go for something less obvious, less rousing; something closer in spirit to Kafka than Capra (or Curtiz, for that matter): Satie’s Fourth Gnossienne, maybe, or a cut from Sylvester and Tweety—a whistle, a slap, a vibrating spring. The absurd was everywhere, and wherever it was, as Sylvester could tell you, pain wasn’t far behind.

  On July 21, 1949—a kind of Sylvester moment—my parents waited for five hours on the docks of Sydney Harbor in a long, wilting line of “New Australians,” waiting to be “processed.” Ahead of them, a former professor of engineering from Budapest who they’d gotten to know came forward and placed his one bag, a pillowcase, on the long, wooden table for inspection: a single pair of shoes, rubber-banded together sole to sole, three books tied with string to keep them from getting damaged, two shirts wrapped in paper, one cap, one small book of photographs, one raincoat, one can opener. When the young man calling out the list of items pulled out a heavy steel pipe with wires extending from both ends, everything stopped.