Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  Forced to call it, I’d go with a combination of acts and accidents: things done, words withheld, and sheer dumb luck.

  Beyond that, I have no idea. Some things stick to us, others don’t. Some of the things we do we learn to recognize and avoid; others—the vast majority—are invisible to us. We’re a mass of effects cut off from their causes, a crime scene with a million clues. Good luck playing detective. It took years of effort . . .

  Blaming Mom and Dad for the “mess that you see” is traditional but there’s not much profit in it and what little there is devalues with age. Better, I think, to put together a list of “Acknowledgments”—the kind you’d find in the back of a book written by someone with too many friends—or given to currying favor.

  Finally, I’d like to thank my parents, Zdenek and Olga Slouka:

  For my overdeveloped nose for beauty and regret, my capacity for pain, my compensatory sense of humor.

  For my dreams, which are ungodly; for my love of music and words.

  For the natural world, which has been my haven—from them and everything else.

  For the way I overreact to perceived unfairness—something a long line of “superiors” have come to know well. For my awkwardness with praise; for my trademark blend of insecurity and confidence.

  For my loyalty. For my readiness to walk the fuck out.

  For my positively statesmanlike reasonableness—and my willingness to throw the peach.

  For my distrust of surfaces.

  For my obsession with justice, which I hunger for the way some men lust for God.

  For the way I incline toward the past (and the present), toward solitude (and the company of friends), toward silence (and laughter).

  For the way I’m always mourning the last place I left.

  For the fact that the easiest way to piss me off is not to tell me what’s pissing you off because it drops me, even at the age of fifty-seven, straight down the “What did I do, Mommy?” rabbit hole, which in turn makes me so furious that I overcompensate by blowing up the rabbit hole.

  For my oversensitivity to rudeness and my proportionally excessive gratitude for the smallest civility, kindness, or act of generosity.

  For my pitch-perfect ear for mortality, which saturates my world with fear and wonder.

  For my persistence. Tenacity. Fine—stubbornness.

  And my problem(s) with authority. And bullies of all sizes and stripes. For my instinct to charge the thing that frightens me.

  For my vaguely Old World (and very expensive) disdain for self-promotion; for my utter inability to network; for my dog-like devotion to talent (as defined by me, of course) wherever it appears.

  For my sentimentality, which I keep on a leash though it regularly chews free, digs under the fence, gives me away.

  For all the fistfights I had as a kid, which I never sought but which seemed to find me; for the snot and blood on my collar.

  But this last item might be worth a carrot in the manuscript.

  Once upon a time, when I was fourteen, I was walking around a reedy mountain lake in the High Sierra when I came across a young man squashing frogs with a flat rock. I was no hero, semitough at best, and this kid had a couple of years and thirty pounds on me. I told him to knock it off and he told me to go fuck myself. When I was safely out of reach, I yelled back—my voice shaking, probably, because by now I knew where this was going—that if I found him doing it again I’d kick his ass, and he laughed.

  I happen to like frogs; the gold dust in a frog’s eye is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

  I spent the next twenty minutes working myself into a froth, then came around to find him doing what he’d been doing before. He’d pick up the rock, wait patiently till a frog surfaced, then drop it. So I snuck up and punted him into the pond—a big, uninhibited, Ode-to-Joy-ish kick in the ass (and whatever was adjacent to it, most likely, because he spent a long time on his hands and knees in the shallows). He didn’t come after me. By now I had a rock in one hand and a good stick in the other. If I’d had a boulder, he’d have ended up like Piggy in Lord of the Flies. Eventually I left.

  Flying out over the water, his back humped up and his legs trailing, he’d looked oddly like a leaping frog. Which made me happy.

  He deserved it. I’ve never been able to tolerate cruelty—another thing I’d like to thank my mother for. Still, my blood-in-the-eye willingness to brain him with a rock that day may have had other roots.

  That was the summer I learned we were moving to Bethlehem because Dad was an alcoholic and Mom couldn’t risk him “driving those distances”; the summer I was told we’d had to give up our cabin at Lost Lake and wouldn’t be going back; the summer my mother took me out for boysenberry pie at the Grants Grove Lodge and told me about F.—a man she’d known and cared for many years ago and still thought about sometimes.

  I reminded her of him, she said. I had his walk.

  XLVIII

  MID-MAY, 2015. I’M BACK at Lost Lake. I’ve been writing here for some weeks now, watching the season come on, gradually losing the thermals, the ski hat, the fingerless gloves. Shedding like a snake. The stone wall is where I left it last fall, angling down into the water. A pair of phoebes have built their annual nest under the eave. I check it daily with a long-handled mirror as part of my prewriting ritual: two white eggs the size of jelly beans.

  It’s occurred to me lately that my mother might die while I write this book. That she’s linked to it. That somehow, 6,000 miles away, though she hasn’t moved or spoken in months, she’s aware of it.

  I should write her story, she used to tell me. I’d rather have stuck needles in my eyes.

  It wasn’t mine to tell, I’d say—it was hers. Or I’d kick it down the road to never: “Who knows?” I’d tell her. “Maybe I will, someday.”

  Well, never’s here. It’s mine to tell now. I like to think she’d approve of the telling, but I don’t know.

  I know it’s crazy, this link I’ve made between her life and these pages—mystical bullshit if ever there was any—and yet I can’t shake it. I feel like she’s waiting for me to finish.

  The stones of the wall past the window screen. The Adirondack chairs in the shade of the oaks, too rickety to sit in. When the breeze picks up, I can hear the rainy sound of the wind in the leaves. This doubled shoreline, this small, dark lake—are haunted by us.

  And I can’t write fast enough.

  XLVIX

  SOMETIME IN THE FALL of 1944, egged on by her friend Jiinka, my mother had her fortune told to her by an arthritic crone in a colorful shawl not far from the Brno train station. A small, dark apartment smelling of cats, low lamp light, the unavoidable beads. The Gypsy woman, who my mother said had disconcertingly light-gray eyes, like an old dog’s, sat down opposite her on a small stool, took her hand, stroked it with the backs of her fingers, then glanced down at the open palm and froze. Eventually, she spoke. She was sorry, she said, but the lines didn’t lie. My mother would leave her home country. She’d live in a foreign land for many years. She’d marry, have one child—a son. But she’d return home alone, having lost us both. She was sorry—there was no mistake. And she offered to waive her fee.

  For twenty-five years my mother lived in fear of that fortune, ridiculing herself for her superstition yet terrified that something—a moment’s inattention on the highway—would make the prophesy true.

  The Gypsy was wrong. And not.

  In 1969, my parents returned to Czechoslovakia—a quick, two-day, heart-in-your-throat kind of strike across the border that must have seemed completely unreal to them both. I was eleven years old.

  How, exactly, it came to pass I don’t know. This was a year after the Soviet invasion, a time of considerably heightened risk, and yet for some reason they’d been granted visas (had the charges against them been dropped?) and there we were, in a boxy blue rental car, approaching the border at Stehov. The unsmiling guards in their green uniforms with the red stripe on the visored cap thum
bed through our American passports, then asked us to step out of the car. It took them two hours: every book was turned upside down and shaken, every piece of makeup scrutinized. When we finally got back in the car and the gates rose and we drove through toward the ruined castle looming over the road, something inside my mother was released. We were with her. The Gypsy had been wrong.

  I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like for them. I’ve tried to imagine myself living in China, say, for twenty-one years—unable to return home, unable to communicate, hearing of one parent’s death, then the other’s—all the time dreaming of walking through the sliding doors at Kennedy into a hot New York night with the cabs blaring and the luggage guys yelling to each other and some guy with an employee badge on his shirt saying to his buddy, “And I’m like, whadda you kiddin’ me?” and then suddenly finding myself walking through those doors, smelling those smells, hearing that laughter—laughter that’d been there, incredibly, all the years I’d been away.

  I’ve tried to imagine it. I don’t think I came close. Not just because for them the intoxication of returning home was cut by fear—the regime hadn’t changed, and the chance that “something might happen” was considerable—but because nothing could have prepared them for what they found: Nothing had changed.

  It must have seemed, quite literally, unbelievable—a waking dream. In the normal run of things, after all, the world goes on after we leave, antiquing our recollections of it: neighborhoods decline or come up, people move, our best friend’s home is an office building. It’s a mercy disguised as heartache: Returning home, we’re forced to reconcile the new world with the one we remembered, and it’s this business of reconciliation that buffers our hearts, gentles our ascent.

  There’d be no buffer for my parents. This was a memory come alive.

  I remember the growing silence in the car, the speechlesness of amazement: There was that place, and that one, and, “Oh, my God, look!” Eventually we stopped before a nondescript seven-story apartment building in the Žabovesky district of Brno. A warm, late-summer afternoon, the street already half in shade as if filling with water. My mother pointed up: her best friend Jiinka had lived right there, she said, shaking her head. She remembered the building. She’d always wave up at her so she wouldn’t have to walk up the stairs, and Jiinka would come down and they’d go to the Pehrada or the movies.

  We got out of the car. I was bored. It was a building.

  It was like yesterday, my mother was saying—just like yesterday. Twenty-one years. She remembered which window was hers, six floors up—and she began to count—and seven over: one, two, three . . .

  And then she didn’t say anything more because Jiinka, a middle-aged woman now, had swung the windows into the late sun and glanced out over the street as if still, after all those years, watching for her friend.

  L

  THE NEAR-MISS, THE ALMOST-ACCIDENT, is always a source of wonder. Things went the way they did; two inches over, everything would have been different.

  That first trip to Czechoslovakia was a near-miss for us, the closest we ever had as a family. We sneezed and the bullet ruffled our hair. We bent to tie our shoes. Still, if the dice had rolled differently that day, if my parents had been arrested as American spies and sentenced to twenty years in the uranium mines (I’d have been packed off to live with my maternal grandfather—an interesting twist in the tale), it’s fair to say there would have been a certain humor in it.

  As it happened, one or two things had changed.

  It went like this. Heading for the border on the second day, my father insisted on a detour: There was a certain place he’d known as a boy—a view from a hill across a river valley. He’d been a scout there, gone camping there as a young man, known a girl there. He wanted to see it.

  Once on the track, typically, nothing would stop him. He found first this village, then that one, then a hardpack road sloping up through mustard and barley fields into the pines. Everything was coming back. We bumped and scraped along, the grain swishing against the sides of the car. A beautiful summer day, the shadows of small white clouds floating serenely across the fields. Everything was deserted.

  My mother didn’t like it. Something wasn’t right. Why did all the fences have signs saying VSTUP ZAKÁZAN!—(Entrance Forbidden!)? she said.

  What signs? my father said.

  Signs. Like that one. And that one.

  Those were for the cows, my father said, because he was my father. To keep them out of the fields, probably.

  Nonsense, my mother said—cows didn’t read, and the local farmers would know to keep them out of the fields. Plus there weren’t any cows.

  My father drove on. By God, he remembered this! It was just up this way.

  Eventually we lurched to the top of a densely wooded hill and piled out of the car, my father, in his white tourist cap and black horn-rims, carrying his camera and lenses in a bag over his shoulder, my mother in her fashionable slacks and blouse, me in my humiliating German shorts and socks and sandals. The view should be just past those trees, my father said, heading off like an Indian scout.

  At that point the sound of an approaching motor came through the trees and a man on a black motorcycle appeared on the road. He took in the Austrian plates on the car, our Western outfits, parked behind us and came over to chat. A man in his early forties, very polite. Years later I’d meet polite men like him in Nicaragua—men who’d conducted guerilla warfare in the jungle for six years.

  A beautiful day, he said.

  Yes, indeed, my father said. A magnificent day.

  Every alarm bell in my mother’s head was going off at once.

  A beautiful day, the man said again, smiling. Could he help us find something, perhaps? He’d noticed we weren’t from these parts.

  No, no, my father said. It was very kind but he knew exactly where he was—there was a certain view, just over that way. . . .

  A view?

  A beautiful view, a river valley—he used to go camping there as a boy, such wonderful memories. He wanted to take some pictures.

  I see, the man said. And—forgive me—you’re Austrian?

  American, actually.

  American.

  Born in Brno. Just here for a short visit.

  The man took a pack of cigarettes out of his leather jacket, offered my father a cigarette, then took one for himself. A lovely camera—might he see it?

  Of course.

  The man looked through the viewfinder. Wonderful optics. He was guessing there was a telephoto lens in that beautiful bag.

  Of course. And my father, happy to have made a friend, launched off on the virtues of various lenses while I started after some black and orange beetles I’d noticed on the forest floor and my mother stood there with both hands over her mouth, knowing we were plunging into something but still unsure of exactly how deep it was.

  At some point the chatter was over, the smile gone. We needed to get back in the car, the man said, quietly. The view my father had been heading for with his American camera and his telephoto lens overlooked a protected military zone—surely we’d seen the signs?

  My father blinked, still dense with sleep but waking quickly. Cows, he said. We thought they were for the cows.

  No, the man said.

  My mother would later claim that in that instant she saw something like pure amazement in his eyes.

  One more thing, he said as we rushed to our car.

  Yes?

  Don’t stop.

  We didn’t. I peed in a bottle, kneeling on the floor in the back of the car. We were at the border in less than two hours. It wouldn’t be until after the revolutions of 1989 that we’d learn how mad a coincidence it had been, and how very badly it should have gone: Strolling down memory lane, my father had found the one spot offering a perfect visual overview of one of the top-secret Soviet missile sites in Czechoslovakia.

  Idiocy has its privileges, my mother maintained. As does truth, apparently: Our story of
cows and camping had been too unbelievable not to be true—no actors in the world could have cooked that up on the fly. For whatever reason—though I doubt he was a man given to sentiment—our friend delayed reporting us long enough for us to make the border.

  He’d have a story to tell his wife that evening.

  LI

  WE RETURNED HOME AND the world shut down. The humor faded, the fights grew worse. It wasn’t all one thing or the other; there were bouts of normalness, of joy throughout. The better times would still show up, like old friends who can’t stand to see you fall, for years to come.

  During the decades of Soviet occupation, the Czechs developed a fine catalog of jokes at the Russians’ expense—the power of the powerless, truly. On any given bus ride, some drunk brave with slivovitce would stand and deliver, swaying lightly, for the pleasure of all concerned: “You know the one about . . . ?”

  “Did you hear? The Americans have developed a new kind of submarine. It winds through the water like this, like a snake, to avoid the mines.”

  “Yeah? Big deal. The Russians have a new submarine that goes like this—up and down, like a roller coaster.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “It lets the rowers catch a breath.”

  My mother was that Russian submarine. For a long time she rose and fell, caught her breath, then submerged again. It wasn’t one thing or the other. It was never one thing or the other. It would have been easier if it had. Eventually the trips to the surface came less frequently. Until they stopped altogether.