Nobody's Son

by Mark Slouka

  I hid my things in a thicket of brambles and spent the day wandering; I swam, read, then fell asleep in the grass. Waking up sun-stunned and stiff, I splashed some water on my face and started back toward the old logging road, a kilometer or two away, that had brought me there. It was getting late, and I had a good two-hour walk back to my things.

  I remember that walk: the white-edged clouds in the darkening sky, the lupines along the ditch, the rows of lindens that marked the road’s progress through the fields. In the forests it was always quiet, the tired sound of the insects far off, like a conversation in a distant room.

  I’d gone around a bend in the road when I saw them and stopped. They were maybe a hundred yards ahead, walking through a tunnel of trees toward the light. The late sun was slanting across the field ahead of them, picking out the blood-spots of poppies in the grain. They had their arms around each other’s waists, and as I watched, my mother lay her head on his shoulder.

  And I remember something seizing me by the throat and having to blink my eyes to see, and then the road turned into the field and they disappeared behind the trees.

  It rained that night. The old tent I’d found in the shack had no fly or groundcloth, and I woke up soaked, a small stream running under my shoulder blades. A storm came, then another. I tried to dig a trench in the dark with my hands but the soil was full of roots, and when I tried to push the earth up into a ridge, the pine-needly dirt crumbled in the rain.

  At some point, knowing I couldn’t return to the shack, I gathered my soaking things and made my way back to the place in the woods, maybe a quarter-mile away, where my mother had parked her car. It was locked, as I knew it would be, but it didn’t matter. Crawling beneath the undercarriage, I dragged my things in after me and, unbelievably, fell asleep. I was eighteen. It didn’t matter.

  It was just after dawn when I woke to the sound of another car’s motor, and looking out from between the front wheels, saw F.’s blue Škoda bump by in the fog. It stopped at the road, then turned right.

  To the best of my recollection, I never saw him again.

  LV

  SOMETIME IN THE LATE spring of 1978 my mother returned to the apartment in Brno that she rented every summer. I was with her. Jiinka and her friend Jucina were already there, waiting for us with cakes and wine, as were three or four other people I can’t remember.

  Strange that I can recall the cakes and wine but not how we got there. Had we flown into Vienna, then taken a bus? Had we rented a car?

  We put our suitcases in the back bedroom. We could hear everyone laughing, pouring out the wine and talking over each other. I should go out, my mother said. She’d be right there. She’d bring the presents. And she smiled at me, because I knew she couldn’t wait to call, and she knew that I knew it, and I smiled back. We’d always been friends. And I went to join the others.

  My mother came into the living room a few minutes later carrying the half-dozen or so small presents we always brought with us—I vaguely remember a blue silk scarf and a bottle of Bailey’s, though my mind may simply be filling in gaps, imagining—and then we spent the next few hours the way we often did there: eating, drinking, gossiping, talking about whatever it is that friends talk about. I vacuumed up enough pastries to make a small, sweet child. Jiinka said it should be against the law to be able to eat like that and not be fat, and I answered her with my mouth full of custard and everybody laughed and complained about the injustice of it and how it would all catch up with me, I’d see, that I’d wake up one morning—maybe tomorrow—so fat I couldn’t roll over, and I smiled and belched. Plans were made for the next day, and for the next weekend, and for the next three months.

  Knowledge doesn’t always change what you remember.

  I remember it as a lovely, unremarkable afternoon. Even now.

  Hours before our friends left, before she brought the presents from our suitcases into the living room, my mother made her call. They had a code of some kind. My mother, let’s say, would call F.’s office claiming to be Alena Nováková, from firm such and such, and ask to speak to Engineer F.S. And F., hearing the code names, knowing my mother was back in the country, would tell his secretary he was busy, and that evening—that same hour, if he was able to escape—he’d call her back from a public phone.

  And so my mother, sitting on the bed because of the short phone cord, called the number she kept all year in the envelope taped to the back of the dresser drawer. She was Alena Nováková, calling from firm X. Was engineer F.S. available?

  There was a pause on the line that she put down to a bad connection.

  “I’m sorry,” said the woman, her voice altered, “are you a friend of Engineer S.?”

  “I am,” my mother said, feeling her world gathering into a drop.

  “Then I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you that Engineer S. passed away last week—a sudden heart attack, I’m afraid.”

  And the drop fell. My mother hung up the phone.

  But even this would not be enough. Still in that shadow between hearing and understanding, my mother tried to save something. There would be letters. Her letters. She had to get them—she had to try to save the family the scandal. If she could get an appointment, talk her way into his office, maybe . . .

  She called back. A different woman—younger, sounding rushed—answered the phone. My mother began to explain something about Engineer F.S.

  “One moment, I’ll connect you,” the woman said.

  And for those few seconds the world pulled back into shape, reconstituted itself—it was a mistake, she’d imagined it all—and then fate in its cruelty played its last card. A man answered the phone: a voice exactly like F.’s but thirty years younger, and she recalled hearing about the older son—an engineer like his father, his namesake—being hired the previous year.

  Ano, mužu Vám s ním pomoct? Yes, can I help you with something?

  He had no idea she’d existed. He never would. He sounded like his father had in 1946.

  Je nkdo tam? Is someone there?

  And I imagine my mother held on to that voice for a moment, then two, and then maybe one more, before laying the phone in its receiver.

  Being my mother, she sat very quietly on the edge of the bed for a few seconds, then opened the suitcases, collected the presents, and walked toward our voices in the living room.

  I wouldn’t learn till later that night that he was gone.

  And I think it’s only now, looking out at the pasture wall running down into the lake, that I see that that afternoon I lost her, too.

  LVI

  YOU WONDER ABOUT THINGS. I’ve wondered for years why she didn’t say anything that afternoon, what compelled her to come out of that bedroom, knowing that her life was basically over, and put on that act. It never made sense to me: Most of the people in that room knew about F. already, and the others surely wouldn’t have suspected anything to see her upset because a close friend of hers had died unexpectedly. Why would she ask that of herself? Why would she make herself endure something so useless?

  For a while, groping for an answer, I put it down to her overblown sense of social propriety, her stiff-upper-lipness, her admiration for Somerset Maugham’s colonials, insisting on getting dressed for tea in some malarial jungle: “Yes, but one must do what one must, musn’t one,” etc. It never quite fit.

  Revelations stutter into view—in dreams, through words, some more welcome than others. And though I distrust revelation—it smacks of impatience, the desire to be done, the hurried nail in the coffin—this one might stand: My mother did what she did because, over the years, pain had become personified, plural—a them to be resisted, to be denied their pleasure. But this wasn’t like Ahab, projecting the world’s pain (and his own) on something outside of himself and then, “as though his chest were a mortar, wreaking his hot, heart’s shell upon it”; this was something closer to Kafka. They, the ones responsible, the sources of all pain, were inside you. The ultimate battleground—which would swallow
both sides—was the self.

  I have a photograph of my mother that I don’t look at very often. Almost never, actually. There’s no date, but it’s from the seventies because she’s maybe forty-five or fifty. Still young, still beautiful. It’s summer somewhere in Czechoslovakia, and she’s wearing a bathing suit, lying on a towel in the grass. She’s smiling up at the camera. Her father, in a track suit, is lying next to her.

  How it came to be I have no idea. The usual way, I imagine. She’d be invited to their cottage; there’d be a picnic. And she’d go because she had to, because they had to be resisted. And when someone with a camera suggested a father and daughter picture, she smiled, and meant it, because they would be denied their pleasure. Because they would never see her pain.

  How quickly I’d save her now—from them, from herself. Assuming she’d let me, which I doubt. Because at some point, they—the ones who wished her harm, who were cruel, unjust—grew to include me.

  I have a vague memory of us being invited to my grandfather’s chata in the country, though I don’t know where it was or when, what we could have talked about or why we went.

  For all I know, I could have taken the picture. And I’m haunted by it. That she’s smiling at me, pleading with me, asking me to read her. And I can’t.

  LVII

  THE REST WAS WHAT it was—not a happy ending. My mother-in-law, who can’t abide unhappy endings, probably wouldn’t like it. My mother returned to Bethlehem, because it didn’t matter. I’d come home from college once a month to find a quarter-inch of dust on the record we’d listened to the last time I was there.

  The vortex strengthened—the craziness, the delusions, the rages grew worse. My parents separated, then divorced—by now my father’s place among the enemies, like my own, was official. When the Velvet Revolution of 1989 returned Czechoslovakia to itself, they both returned home, my father to Prague and, eventually, a new marriage; my mother to Vydí. At one point, after she and the man she lived with kicked us out of their home with our eighteen-month-old daughter and four-year-old son (after refusing to let us borrow the car to buy diapers, then screaming at us to hose off the rash-covered toddler in the yard), I didn’t talk to her for seven years. I didn’t miss it. I’d dream about her now and then, let whatever pain or regret I felt seep down into an aquifer I hoped was limitless, and go my way. I didn’t miss it.

  And if, in some sense, it didn’t matter—if it was actually done the afternoon she heard a voice on the other end of the phone saying “Then I’m very sorry to have to tell you . . . ,” if she basically walked under a bus the next year while still living in Bethlehem—the life remaining still had to be dealt with.

  She wouldn’t go easy—not my mother. She’d build her nightmares in the air, then put foundations under them. My father would save himself, barely; find some measure of peace, come to love our children. I’d anchor myself like a tent in the wind to my own family. My mother, meanwhile, would return to Czechoslovakia alone—confirming the Gypsy’s prophesy—scorning all help, raging at the world.

  There’d be collateral damage. But in her fury, battling to the last vestige of memory, she’d make herself into a kind of art.

  Am I being clever at my mother’s expense? Trust me, no.

  It came to me in Vydí last summer. There, within arm’s reach of her bed in that boarded-up, piled bedroom, were the letters, the quietly moldering journals, the curling pictures of F. as a young man, of me as a child, of the grandchildren she’d never wanted to know. It seemed extraordinary to me—the way she’d cocooned herself in heartache, surrounding herself with precisely those things calibrated to hurt her most. There was a kind of genius to it.

  It was a talent I recognized. This was my inheritance, a gift I’d spent half a century hemming in with happiness. But if my own talent for regret was notable—worth a polite round of applause, no more—hers was thunderous, undeniable, damn near demonic. Nobody could mourn the past like she could. She was the Mozart of pain, playing herself to the end.

  Three days after our trip to Vydí, sitting on a bench in a forgotten little park in Prague that I love, it occurred to me that it was a shame that my mother and Kafka, who died the year before she was born, had missed each other. He would have liked her. Understood her. In some ways he’d imagined her—her inner exile, her guilt, her lust for atonement. Her ability to punish herself so exquisitely.

  In “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka’s Meisterstück of cruelty and existential guilt, a torture instrument inscribes the prisoner’s crime—whatever commandment he’s said to have disobeyed—deeper and deeper into his skin. The condemned is strapped naked to a mechanism called the “bed,” which “quivers in minute, very rapid vibrations” corresponding very exactly to “the harrow” above it—an instrument consisting of harrow-like needles. The condemned has no opportunity to defend himself because “guilt is not to be doubted.” Nor will he (or she) be told his sentence because, given time—and the harrow takes a long time to complete its work—he will “learn it on his body.”

  In her last years—and I’d have torn them off this story the way Marlow tears the end off Kurtz’s letter in Heart of Darkness if I didn’t know she’d despise me for it—my mother at long last turned the harrow on herself. Year after year she executed the sentence and endured it, inscribing into her skin, deeper and deeper, the names of the things she’d loved and lost—creating a self-portrait of unendurable pain and unbendable endurance in perfect equipoise, like two wrestlers matched to the last atom until—and here was the turn to genius only Kafka could have imagined—when the man she’d loved left her for good, when the past she mourned became familiar and dull, she invented losses that had never occurred, like the loss of my love, and mourned those.

  I don’t know that she had a choice. And all I can be is sorry for it. And let her go.

  LVIII

  I DON’T BELIEVE IN beginnings. Or endings. I just don’t.

  She died yesterday. An e-mail from Brno. Sitting here, the room lightens, then darkens. A pattering of warm rain, then sun. I can smell the garden.

  We’re a run-on sentence. All of us, every last mother’s son.

  LIX

  IT’S MORNING, EARLY. THE house at Twin Lakes is quiet, the air coming in the window, cool and sweet.

  I’ll sneak out the back, jump on my bicycle. I’ll pick her some flowers. It’ll make her happy.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m so grateful to have so many to be grateful to.

  First, this book wouldn’t exist if my wife, Leslie, hadn’t understood that the time had come for me to write it. And said so. If our kids, Maya and Zack, hadn’t backed her up, pushed me through, and, like Leslie, read and re-read. So here it is, guys. Without your love, I wouldn’t have had the courage. Then again, without your love, it wouldn’t matter.

  I want to thank a handful of trusted friends for their early readings: Richard Abramowitz, Beth Beringer, Geoff Chin, Brian Hall, Dan Raeburn, Victoria Redel.

  I’m indebted to my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her early encouragement, her steady support, and, not least, for suggesting the title for The New Yorker essay that became the title of this book. I’m grateful to her and to the folks at Norton for giving this orphan a home that feels like a home.

  Finally, I owe a growing debt to my agent, Bill Clegg, whose instincts I’ve come to trust implicitly, whose diagnoses are as accurate as his bedside manner is frank, supportive, generous. What more could you want?

  Illustrations

  My dad and his family, around the beginning of the war. He’s on the right. Rheinhold, my grandfather, is on the left.

  Dad

  Mom during the war, maybe seventeen years old.

  Mom outside her childhood home. Her mother looks on in a polka-dot dress.

  The German Reich’s document giving my seventeen-year-old mother permission to live in her own country.

  F. as a young man.

  My mom teaching English at the language camp where
she met F., summer 1946.

  F.—the famous skiing photo.

  Mom and dad with a friend, somewhere in Germany, early 1950s.

  Mom and dad with a friend, Sydney, 1951.

  Mom in some unidentified train station, circa 1948.

  The document identifying my mom and dad as official refugees.

  The good times in Australia. Mom and dad are on the far right. The others are Czech refugees/friends. Circa 1950.

  Mom arriving in the New World, the Statue of Liberty in the background.

  Dad, New York skyline.

  Mom and Dad, probably at Lost Lake, in the early years in America.

  Mom and me, Jones Beach, New York.

  Forest Hills, New York, circa 1960.

  Me using dad as a jungle gym.

  Archery lesson, summer morning, Lost Lake.

  Me and mom, around 1974.

  Mom with Uncle Pepa and Sonya.

  My mother and her father, František Kubík, 1970s.

  Me, mom, and our friends, 1976. Jiinka is in the second row, far left. Mirek Vlach, with whom my father was in the underground as a teenager, is in the back row, far left.

  My mom with her friends after she returned home to Czechoslovakia. Jiinka is in the window.