Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  Was she bipolar? Very possibly. Was it the benzodiazepines? They didn’t help. Was it the toxin of incest, the loneliness of exile? Was it depression, her marriage to my father, her nature?

  Most things in life are multiple-choice questions. There is no answer key.

  Which never stopped me from wondering. Or from standing back in dumb amazement at the turns that even the most damaged life can take—the power that a drowning soul can summon.

  “Do not go gentle into that good night?” When it came to Mom, going gentle was never a risk.

  The year after our close call, we spent the summer at Twin Lakes. The descent had begun in earnest. Two years later we moved to Bethlehem and the pull of the bottom grew stronger. The thing with girls had begun; the crazy, screaming, staggering-down-the-hall rages, the days and weeks of depression. She began to hallucinate, claiming she’d gone to New York, that she’d seen an old woman with periwinkle-blue eyes lying on the floor at the Port Authority. That she’d tried to help her, then left to get her some food only to find her dead on her return. That the police officer she alerted to the dead woman by the wall had sneered, “Yeah, so what? There’s plenty of dead people in New York.”

  My mother hadn’t been to New York in weeks, and one of the things she was most vain about were her “periwinkle-blue eyes.”

  And then it happened.

  I should have predicted it—it had happened before. In 1946, sinking fast, she’d clawed her way to the surface—applied for a job teaching English in a language camp, packed a bag, walked down the platform, climbed on the train.

  Twenty-eight years later she did it again, reversed the plunge. She applied for a visa, booked a ticket, called a cab to take her to Bethlehem’s ABE airport. It was the summer of 1974. She was going home.

  LII

  IT WAS SURPRISINGLY EASY. She was allowed to stay. To rent an apartment. To teach English at various language camps in the summer. The Communist Party bureaucrats on Leninová ulice (Lenin Street) in Brno, where all foreigners had to report within forty-eight hours of entering the country, would ask the usual questions, listen attentively to her answers, mention in passing the appeal of digital watches or pocket calculators (my mother would take note for the future), then stamp what needed stamping. She would have to check in with the authorities on a regular basis. Changes in domicile would have to be reported immediately. But she had her three months.

  In early summer, with the linden trees newly leafed out and everything—the dust, the stone, the herbs in the gardens—smelling just the way they had, it must have seemed as if time had stopped and only the people continued on, aging in a frozen world. Uncle Pepa and Aunt Sonya were still in the house they’d always been in. Her friend Jiinka was unchanged—the same steady soul, the same quiet laugh—just the hair, the eyes, a slight heaviness in the step.

  Her father was still living in the same house she’d grown up in on Zeyrová Street, remarried now. She’d last seen him in the early sixties when he’d visited us in the old apartment in Queens in the dead of winter. She paid a call one afternoon, met her stepmother. The three of them shared little sandwiches—chlebíky—drank some coffee, and then her father stood up and she left. He seemed neither interested nor uninterested in her. He’d been doing fine without her.

  She learned the rules of life under the new regime, adapted well, mastered the fine art of bribery like no one else. Rummaging through her purse at Leninová ulice, playing the scatterbrained, flustered woman to perfection, she’d spill out her compact, her sunglasses, her makeup, a pocket calculator, then wait for the inevitable compliment and push it over (barely noticing, still rummaging), with a casual “Please, take it, I have another,” sail through the obligatory protestations—he couldn’t possibly—then cut them off at just the right moment: Ah, here it was—the paper she’d been looking for. The calculator had vanished. Everything was understood. Welcome home, Pani Sloukova.

  Of course, what was a game to her—and to me, later, for she taught me well—was less amusing to everyone else. Corrupted from inside, the regime stood like a rickety house, teetering on collapse; collaborators were everywhere, as were those who hated them and yearned for the day when the tables would turn—people who labored under menial jobs, who couldn’t speak or think aloud, whose children were denied entrance to the university because of their parents’ refusal to join the Party. To her credit, my mother never forgot this, and did what little she could—tactfully taking care of the bills, quietly tanking up the car while her friends were in the restaurant, making it easy.

  She was forty-nine that summer. Still beautiful, I think. I visited her there that first July. She showed me all the places she’d known as a girl, introduced me to Jiinka, who I liked immediately, brought me to meet my great-aunt and -uncle, who took me in, told me stories, fed me. I hadn’t seen my mother so happy in a long time. Like someone condemned to be shot at dawn, then reprieved at the last moment, she was learning to believe again. She and Jiinka would drive into the country, stopping here or there, at this restaurant or that one, picking mushrooms or swimming in ponds, then make their way back to Brno with the wind drying their hair, sunburned and singing.

  In the summer of 1975, my mother and Jiinka took a long weekend and drove out to the Vysoina highlands—there was a little restaurant Jiinka had heard about, the forests were beautiful and endless, and the week’s rain would mean mushrooms.

  The restaurant was only so-so but the woods were lovely, the water cool and refreshing, and they lay on their stomachs in the high grass and talked like they used to when they were fifteen, then meandered back to the car, where they changed out of their bathing suits. They’d try to get a room in a little hotel they knew in Raín, they’d decided—stretch things out another day.

  It was one of those afternoons in June—strong sun, dark shadows—with dustings of blossoms on the roads and just enough breeze to make the clothes feel good on your body. At a crowded intersection in Žár my mother hesitated (she’d always been a timid driver), missed her turn to go, then hesitated again. Cars began to honk. Flustered, still learning to drive stick, hemmed in by male drivers whose cheap Trabants ran on an Italianate mixture of testosterone and impatience—my mother stalled out. Increasingly frantic, she restarted the engine, let up on the clutch, started to move . . . and stopped.

  Halfway into the intersection now, she put the car in neutral, then turned off the engine. Jiinka, who had the unflappable cool of a nineteenth-century schoolteacher or an RAF fighter pilot, asked her what she was doing. My mother, as if hypnotized, opened her door and stepped out of the car.

  Across the intersection, like a boulder in a river of swerving automobiles, another car had come to a stop. Its door was open. A man in a white summer shirt and dark slacks was standing next to it.

  It was the most extraordinary thing she’d ever seen, Jiinka said. They were looking at each other across that intersection as if they couldn’t hear the chaos around them—as if nothing else in the world existed.

  LIII

  AND REALITY OUTRAN THE dream. As it sometimes will.

  Can I explain how they recognized each other behind the windshields of their cars across a gap of fifty feet and twenty-seven years? No, I can’t. It seems impossible, and when you consider that most of us only see what we anticipate seeing anyway, as if our expectations prepared the world for our coming, it seems even more impossible. And yet I believe it. I don’t have a choice. Jiinka could no more embellish a story than I could sing opera.

  In truth, how it happened doesn’t matter. It happened. The end validated the means. Except it wasn’t the end. It was a beginning.

  It would be nice to think that those touched by more than their share of grief come in for a refund; that the Fates, acknowledging that they’ve piled on, throw us a tidbit: “Here, take it, it’s yours—a little something for all you’ve lost.”

  In my mother’s case they did exactly that. In fact, they outdid themselves, engineering something s
o unlikely, so much like fiction, that if you found it in a novel you’d put the book aside in favor of something closer to life. But I didn’t read it in a novel. I saw it. This was the great compensation of my mother’s life—the not-quite-saving grace. And the force of it swept disbelief from its path like dust.

  Everything began again exactly where it had left off. Effortlessly. As if they’d seen each other the weekend before. As if Innsbruck and Naples and Australia, that dank and beautiful house outside Munich and the Manhattan skyline rising out of the fog, hadn’t happened yet—or had been a memory all along.

  I’ve never been able to laugh at love, though it’s tempting. We’re so dazed, so vulnerable—dropping things, not hearing things, then smiling, almost wistfully, like people caught remembering something long ago—so obviously in a state of grace that we can’t help being a target. And maybe it’s because we’re so easy to take down in those moments, and because we don’t care if we are, that I’ve never joined in. It seemed unsporting; better to stand back, watch it run.

  I suppose I could have hated my mother for her love affair with F., seen it as a betrayal of my father, used it against her for all the grief she’d given me for my own loves. I never did. I wasn’t being noble; it just never occurred to me. It seemed like a miracle, and I didn’t believe in miracles.

  The facts were straightforward. F. was unhappily married, with two grown sons. His wife was a decent woman, a good mother; he wouldn’t talk against her—he certainly didn’t blame her—but their marriage had been built on habit, not love. For a while it had seemed enough. There’d been affection between them once, but affection had passed into tolerance, silence—I’m sorry, did you say something?—mutual invisibility. They both knew this—had talked about separation for a decade or more; she wouldn’t hear of it.

  He’d never expected to see my mother again. Hardly even thought of their time together anymore. The years had come on and that was all right. He didn’t mind so much. He’d been a boy when she left. He took pleasure in his sons, in his work; he had friends in Žár he saw quite often. Whatever he’d once felt was like a fire in a closed room; he expected it would take the rest of his life to go out. It was all right.

  And now, in one instant, the room had been thrown open, the windows and doors ripped off their hinges. They were standing at the intersection. It was all still there. And it blazed.

  It lasted four, maybe five, summers—I can’t be sure. I witnessed it, I was there—my mother’s confidant, her co-conspirator. I aided and abetted and I can’t find it wrong. I liked this man: the way he carried himself, the way he talked to me—neither condescending nor ingratiating but measured, listening. I liked the way my mother was in his company, the way he seemed by some magic to have returned her to herself. And to me. I’d been living with my parents’ misery for years. I thought this could save them both.

  And so for those four or five summers, my mother and F. did what people in love (who aren’t supposed to be) have always done: lied so they could be together. Making up stories of weeklong conferences in Budapest or trips to Prague, they’d sneak off like teenagers to some shack in the woods where they’d cook their meals on a single-burner Primus and lower the milk and the cheese into a meter-deep hole under the floorboards to keep it cool. When it rained they’d take long, dripping walks through the woods or pick raspberries in the clear-cuts or drive out to some out-of-the-way place for lunch, and when there was sun, they’d lie in the sun in the grass by one of the lonely little ponds Moravia is known for until it was time for him to go or until September had come, which was when my mother would put down everything that sustained her and return for the year to Bethlehem.

  And then May would arrive, and in the halls of Freedom High School the kids would be wearing cutoffs and Mom would be packing to leave for another summer. And when she arrived in Brno, sometimes with her friends still laughing and eating pastries in the living room, she’d sneak off and call F.’s office in Žár—they had a code to let him know she was in the country—and everything would begin again. They were thinking of getting married, she told me. Now that I was older it seemed that maybe . . . I had to tell her the truth—did I like him?

  Very much, I told her, pleased with how mature I sounded, grateful that my opinion still mattered to her; grateful, as well, not to be taking fire for being in love myself. After all, I said, we could both admit that things with Dad had been difficult for years.

  “I just want you both to be happy,” I remember saying to her once, and meaning it, while not unpleased with how well the halo suited me. It was dusk, June, the air thick with the smell of cut fields and still water. The evening’s first coolness was coming off the fields. We were walking along the small dirt path that wound around Skalák, the same pond where, just a little ways further down the shore, she’d count out for me the number of pills it would take to stop her life.

  LIV

  I’M SUSPICIOUS OF MEMORY, though I’ve played in its fields all my life. I don’t trust how it accommodates us, how it adjusts to whatever it thinks we want, smiles or snarls as we do. Sometimes I think it’s just a mirror of our moods, a step away from mimicry.

  A strange thought: The past lightens, darkens, lightens again—like a landscape under passing clouds—because somewhere in the future, years ahead, someone just had an argument with their boss.

  I want to believe that those four or five summers my mother and F. were together in the 1970s were blissful, stolen seasons. That they were a compensation for all the pain behind her and all the pain to come. I want to believe that very much. It would make things easier—for me, mostly.

  Alas, wanting to believe ain’t enough. You have to check yourself, learn to spot the seductive shape of narrative, which bends things to its will. As the Czechs like to say of their dealings with the Russians, Dovuj, ale provjeuj—Trust, but verify.

  The summers my mother spent with F. in the 1970s were some of the happiest times of her life—I’m as sure of this as I am of anything on earth—and they were larded with pain. With him she soared—repaired, reborn. Away from him, she plunged. For me.

  It’s interesting to think how much damage people do, to others as well as to themselves, out of a sense of obligation. “I’m doing this for you,” they say, “because it’s the right thing to do, because I love you,” yet give it a little time—wait for a moment of weakness or anger—and the real words rise to the surface: “I’m suffering for you, because I love you—and the least you can do is be grateful.”

  I wasn’t the only reason my mother had to return to Bethlehem, but I was the main one and I knew it. Every September she’d come home to Lord Byron Drive, unpack, and the world would start to darken—because of me. And maybe it’s because I still carry the crimeless guilt for those winters—it would have been kinder to us both if she’d stayed in Czechoslovakia—that I try not to inflict my righteousness on others, to do the martyr’s dance. I have other failings. I owe her that.

  But again, the darkness of Bethlehem was hardly total. There’d be times that were better—an hour here, an afternoon there. Music helped. We’d sit in the windowless dining room where the turntable was, and I’d play her records I thought she’d like: “Sweet Baby James” and “Bridge over Troubled Water” and singles from the tattered stack I kept in my room (singles I still listen to with our daughter), and even, once—I was feeling bold—some Creedence, which to my surprise she liked. “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” was a wonderful song, she said.

  It wasn’t much and it didn’t last. The music ended, the silence returned; the things hemming her in asserted themselves. A cartoon she clipped from the Bethlehem Globe-Times—which she kept for thirty-five years, and which I found in the papers in her house in Vydí—captured the view from her world: It shows a man, bleary with sleep, who’s just gotten out of bed in his pajamas. It’s the start of a new day. Ahead of him is a maze that stretches to the horizon.

  The winters were endless. And they weren’t. Time woul
d go on—with or without her. Every March, obeying the call, the snow would obediently pull back against the walls and the fences. The diorama would fire, the lights would go on, and the figure frozen in the chair would take a sip from her cup. May would come.

  Few things are as hard to capture as happiness that’s passed. Especially someone else’s. You’re looking back, remembering what it was like. And there’s nothing there. It’s all moments, hints—discrete, mute—like tiny bits of film that have to be glued together to create the feeling, the time, or at least the illusion of it. Then again, sometimes a single piece can stand for the whole. I’ve saved one, like a piece of celluloid in an envelope.

  I’d been staying in a little shack in the forests a long day’s walk from the town of Tel. For a while there’d been a girl, but she’d returned to her family in Vyškov for a while, and I’d been spending the days alone, swimming in the ponds, thinking of her, walking to the village for supplies. A blissful time. The cabin had two wooden bunks, a hole under the floorboards that served as a refrigerator, a kerosene lamp for light.

  When my mother came by, we sat on a mossy bench against the north wall and she told me that F. might be able to get away that night and I offered to clear out. I’d go camping, I said. She tried to argue with me—she didn’t want to feel like she was pushing her own son into the woods—but I wouldn’t hear it. It wasn’t a big deal. It was summer. I’d be back the next day.

  I remember that afternoon as one of the most beautiful I’ve known, though I couldn’t tell you why. Beauty, like happiness, slips the sieve. Maybe there was something about the light, the big piled clouds to the west lending everything a clarity you could almost touch: the decaying stump hedged in ferns, the pool of shadow under pines, the midges dancing in a ray of light—all these seemed painted.