The Visible World (12 page)

And I can see her saying it: “Have a nice day.” That sardonic half-smile. We hadn’t spoken in seven years. She left no phone message, no note. No taped cassette on the dining room table. Just a casserole dish half filled with ashes and a few feathery bits of letter paper. I poked around in the ashes with the eraser end of a pencil. Along the edge of a blackened piece of blue
Luftpost
letter paper I made out two words: “I still.” And that was all.

MY MOTHER ERASED HERSELF SO THOROUGHLY THAT
for a long time after she died, I couldn’t find her anywhere. Two years later my father died, and not long afterward I resigned my job and moved to Prague. I was thirty-seven years old. I hadn’t forked any lightning, wasn’t really expecting to. Maybe I was looking for them, I don’t know—men do all sorts of foolish things. Or maybe I was hoping to discover how our particular story, of which I knew so little, really, fit the larger one. Face to face with that larger, known puzzle—of the past, of Prague, of war—I would see the empty space that was us, recognize its shape. And I would understand.

I found stories enough, but not ours exactly; empty spaces we should have fit, but didn’t. Everywhere I went, things seemed to speak of her, to hint of her, yet revealed nothing; they were like a stranger passing in the street who whispers your name, then denies having said anything at all. Held up to life, metaphors melt like snow.

That first summer I moved to Czechoslovakia I stayed for a while in an old inn, a wood and plaster building located at the base of a grassy dam that rose like a mountain just meters from the back windows and gave the light a permanently hooded, storm-like cast. The building had once been a mill house; the brook that had been stoppered up long ago still trickled past the parking lot. At night, lying in bed, I could hear it through the open windows after the drunks had gone home. At my back, basking in the moonlight, was the reservoir, stretching for kilometers through the mustard fields. No one seemed troubled by the fact that a continent of water hung above their beds, that carp slurped at the air five meters above the kitchen chimney.

I stayed four days. I was the American eating trout by himself every evening in the small wooden dining room with the dirty tablecloths and the outraged-looking boar’s head which appeared to have simply rammed itself through the wall and stuck fast above the lintel. The one just comfortable enough in the language to be uncomfortable in his own skin, surrounded by quiet families who grew noticeably quieter every time he entered the room, who pretended to be busy wiping their children’s faces whenever he glanced up from his plate, who watched the waitress approach his table as though she were a matador entering the ring. Not quite knowing what to do with myself (I had no one to talk to, and reading would have seemed rude), I would pretend to be fascinated by the room itself—looking this way and that with the curious, benign expression of a parrot on a branch—eat quickly, and leave.

One day I passed by a small, weedy pond that was being emptied. Four young men in heavy boots were plunging about in the mud, grabbing the huge silver carp that everywhere flopped and slithered in the dwindling water and throwing them into the bed of a truck that had been backed to the water’s edge. It was a beautiful day, fresh and hot, and the men, who were strong and quite brown from the sun, were enjoying themselves enormously, shouting and laughing as they splashed after the carp that tried to get away, grunting every time they turned and spun a heavy fish over the rail. The carp slapped around for a time, then died, buried under their fellows. I watched the men work, turning from the hips like discus throwers, their heads thrown back with effort every time they released a fish into the air, then went on my way.

That evening I recognized them as I ate dinner at a local inn. They had washed and changed their clothes. Their hair was combed. They seemed so dull and sullen, sitting over their glasses of beer, that for a moment I wondered if I was mistaken. And then one of them turned toward the bar and I saw a carp scale, like a giant silver fingernail, stuck to the back of his suntanned neck.

I don’t know what I had expected. Some of the people I spoke to—a humped-up woman with a hairy mole under her eye whom I met at a wooden bus stop, a small badger of a man hurrying along a fence—remembered my mother. They seemed touched to hear she was dead—they remembered her when she was like this, playing right over there—but no more than they were by the fact that her son had come all the way from America to find the family house. They’d heard that she’d gotten mixed up in something during the war, that she’d escaped, immigrated to New York. The Resistance? Another man? They hadn’t heard. I was invited inside, plied with cups of thick Turkish coffee and
jahodový táč,
taken into the back room and shown the bust of President Masaryk hidden behind the curtain. They had had him there through everything, they assured me. I learned nothing I hadn’t known.

I collected facts, as I always had, like a child hoping to build an oak from bits of bark. I traveled to the few towns I recalled my mother mentioning, visited the houses where the partisans had met, hunted down the places where they had died. I pored through documents and letters, talked to those who had survived. The majority of those involved in the Resistance had been executed immediately or deported to camps right after the Heydrich assassination in 1942. Most of this second group had died there, some at Mauthausen, others at Terezin, still others at Auschwitz. Which told me nothing. Many had died.

One hot June day that summer I took a bus to see a certain town in Moravia I had read about whose citizens had been particularly active in the Resistance and had suffered for it. I’d heard my mother mention it. The air in the bus was stifling—most of the windows seemed glued shut—and when I discovered that I’d gotten off one town too early, rather than get back in, I pretended that that had been my destination all along. But this wasn’t Malá Losenice, the driver explained, trying to save me from my mistake. No, no, this was exactly where I wanted to go, I assured him, and finally, with an irritated wave of his hand, he dismissed me. A young woman with a heavy bag of groceries started to climb into the bus. Conscious of being watched, I headed up a tilting dirt road lined with squalid houses as though I knew precisely where I was going. The smell of the fields, of sun and drying hay and stables, came in hot waves.

I asked directions. Malá Losenice was eight kilometers by the main road, I was told, five by the red-marked trail that led through the woods. I would have to watch carefully for the turnoff for the blue trail.

The path left the town quickly and meandered up through mustard fields and young wheat, still and unmoving in the heat, then turned into the forest. A hunter’s stand of cut pines stood against the trees, a small pile of rusted cans at its base.

I got lost. There was no blue trail, nor any other for that matter, and when I retraced my steps after an hour or so, I didn’t recognize any of the places I came to. To make matters worse, I hadn’t brought enough water, and there didn’t seem to be any streams in these woods. I walked on and on, sitting down to rest every now and then, then nervously jumping up to walk another mile. It was absurd, all of it. What had I been thinking? I was going home...as soon as I could figure out which direction home might be.

Walking down a long, sloping dirt road through the fields, I found myself behind an old woman dressed in black, making her slow way toward the forest. Setting her stick ahead of her, then moving up to it, she reminded me of a fragile spider testing unfamiliar ground.

When I was still some distance behind her I cleared my throat so as not to startle her. She had paused by a wooden fence to catch her breath, one hand on the top slat, the other on her cane. Hearing me, she transferred both hands to her stick, which she had planted in the dirt, and pivoted slowly in my direction.

“Dobrý den,”
I said, greeting her. She didn’t respond. She was very old, her face and neck under her kerchief fissured like bark. As I passed, I could see her mouth working as if searching for a bone with her tongue. When I asked her for directions back to the town I had started from, she raised a trembling claw and pointed in the direction I’d been going.

And suddenly—perhaps it was the heat—I had the absurd desire to ask her if by any chance she remembered a couple, a young man and a woman with very black hair, from the early years of the war. It wasn’t completely mad. She was certainly old enough. I’d grown up hearing about the forests of Moravia, had seen the look on my mother’s face when she spoke of them. Maybe this woman had seen them one July evening as she was coming back from the well. Or glimpsed them through her kitchen window one morning just as her husband called to her from the pantry to ask if she’d said apricots or cherries. I wanted to ask her—this one woman out of a hundred thousand, living in a place that most likely had nothing to do with them at all—if she remembered...something. To take a wild stab at chance, at the miracle of coincidence.

I didn’t. Her hands, veined and speckled, grasped each other over the flat head of her walking stick. I continued on. When I turned around at the edge of the pines I could see her, half a kilometer back, making her way down the road toward the trees like the shadow of a small, dark cloud.

I moved to the apartment on Italská Street in Prague when I was thirty-seven. I still go back and forth as I can. I’ve learned that human beings are like the Silly Putty I used to play with as a child, that pressed to a piece of brick, we take the imprint of this world, then carry it like a sealed letter marked God and God alone to our deaths. I’ve learned that nothing in this world resists us like ourselves. And I think, if this is true, how then can we hope to know someone else?

IN MID-AUGUST OF THAT FIRST SUMMER I FOUND MYSELF
walking up a steep, badly cobbled road in central Moravia that tilted to the left like a sloping hill. The village I was passing through, called Polnická, seemed deserted. No one moved in the dilapidated blue and cream-colored houses crowding the road from either side until an old man in slippers suddenly appeared, carrying a basket of apricots through a gate. Apparently recognizing that I was not from those parts, he invited me to his wine cellar for a glass of wine.

He led me through a neglected garden to a half-sized door with a wig of roses hanging over its skull-cracking sill. Through this door, which opened into a low, rounded hill, we entered a damp stairwell, tight as a burrow. The stairs descended a full five meters to a tiny earthen room. Two old men were already there, huddled in heavy, mouse-eaten coats, sitting on wooden benches. Three small barrels lay on a scaffolding made of sticks. A row of small glasses stood on a dirt shelf. A few roots, some cut flat, others still growing hopefully, protruded from the wall. This, my guide explained, was the wine cellar, and here the three of them could sit, sub rosa so to speak, safe from the great flapping ear of the Party, which sat listening like the old Victrola dog to every sound they made.

One had eyebrows like white brushes that drooped over his eyes; another, whose teeth seemed one size too big for his mouth, was dressed, under his bear-like coat, in a brown jacket, his shirt buttoned tight against his wattled neck; my host, who regularly refilled my glass from a snout-like hose attached to one of the barrels, had hands as seamed as paws.

I listened to them talk. Every now and then I thought I could hear, high above us, someone knocking on the little door at the top of the stairs. No one else seemed to hear it.

I asked them about the war, which they remembered well. Eventually there was a quarrel over whether it had rained on a certain day during the war when someone they had known had shot himself. My host was sure it had. The professor—for that was what I thought of him as being—was sure it hadn’t. The man had shot himself in the head, my host said, and collapsed face-down in the mud. He’d left his glasses on the rear-view mirror of his car, then walked up to the cemetery in the rain and shot himself. The professor called my host an idiot. “It was a day as blue as that house,” he said, pointing to a small, mildewed painting hanging from a root. Looking at me, he tapped the age-spotted skin over his temple. “Senility,” he said. “Everything’s blurring together for him.” He pointed at the ceiling half a meter above our heads. “It’s raining now, you see, so he thinks it was raining then. If it was snowing, he’d be saying he killed himself in a snowdrift.”

My host told him to go to hell. They argued.

“Goddamn it, I should know,” yelled my host at some point. “Vladislav Popelka was the graveskeeper, and my sister went to school with his daughter.”

“I remember her,” interrupted the one with the eyebrows, who had been quiet all this time. “Her brother had a
hospoda
in Nedvědice. I used to see him at the station sometimes after the war.”

“What was it called?” asked my host.