The Visible World (27 page)

It was unfair, really. He’d loved her—possibly loved her still. She could list his qualities, and these qualities were substantial and real. Anyone could see them. In fact, if the two of them had been houses or cars instead of men, he might well have been the better of the two. And none of it mattered, because for all the things he was, there was one thing my father wasn’t: he wasn’t the other one. For this she couldn’t forgive him. Fairness had nothing to do with it.

MY FATHER HEARD ABOUT HER OCCASIONALLY—FROM
friends, from former schoolmates, even from her mother, whom he ran into one chilly April morning as she was crossing the street to the greenmarket. It was to be expected—Brno was a village of three hundred thousand souls, people always said, and it was true.

It had rained that morning, and low, fast clouds were rushing over the buildings, thinning to a clear, piercing blue one moment, thickening to rain the next. He saw her flinch when she saw him, saw first the quick, unpremeditated smile—she’d always liked him—then the quick desire to pass without having to speak to him, then the realization that it was too late. That it couldn’t be helped.

It was good to see him, she said; he was looking well for these times. She was just hurrying to the greenmarket—not that there would be anything to buy. For two weeks now there had been nothing, just potatoes full of eyes, some garlic...Everything was so overpriced...She didn’t know how people did it—well, that was not true, she did know, in some cases she knew very well, but this was not the time or place...And you, she asked him, your parents are well? He told her they were. And was he still at the factory as before? He was, he said. Everything was pretty much the same as it had been, he said.

Ivana was in Prague, she said, living with her uncle Ruda’s family. She was working at the Language Institute they had there. “You should write to her sometime,” she said, patting the sleeve of his coat, and for a moment he hated her for her stupidity and her kindness. My mother was young, she said. These things took time sometimes. She had cared for him very much, she said. And he smiled because he knew these things were true and because this was the joke of it, and he wished her well and continued on his way.

The world was full of jokes. My father appreciated them all. That he should have written that letter for Honza Kolařik that day was a joke. That he should have seen my mother’s face as if for the first time that afternoon, though he had seen it a hundred times before...that was a joke too. That he should love her still, that he should realize only after she’d left him that he’d made a space for her—a space that he now carried around with him everywhere he went, like a cored apple...that was yet another joke, and a good one. And he was the punch line. She loved another—she’d told him so to his face—and yet he continued to love her anyway, to think about her, to worry about her, and there didn’t seem to be any way out of it. That was the biggest joke of all.

In the first month or so he’d been just miserable and angry enough to let himself be talked into trying the usual schoolboy remedies: the bottle of slivovitz, the circle of friends, the long diatribes against women in general. For the better part of half an hour he’d sweated over a fifty-crown whore who had cried out in perfect time to the creaking of the metal bed as though she and the bed together made up some kind of mechanism, speeding and slowing down with his thrusts...ridiculous. Witchcraft. One thing had nothing to do with another. His friends might as well have recommended that he drink tea or eat a clove of garlic at midnight. It would have been no more absurd than anything else these days.

There were distractions, of course, some of them quite humorous. The factory was a distraction. They were hated there, ironically enough not by their enemies, the soldiers charged to protect the Reich’s armament industry, but by the factory workers who had been there before the war, good Czech citizens like themselves. These hated them for being intellectuals, troublemakers, for interfering in things, for disrupting things. Carburetors or shell casings, it was all the same to them. Making the quota meant a Christmas bonus, an eighth of a liter of rum—everything else was politics. Idiots. They could be told they’d all be shot on Saturday, and they’d work like dogs to get out the required number of bullets by Friday. And betray anyone who tried to slow them down.

He was liked a bit more than the others, he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because his father had been a janitor, or because he knew one end of a screwdriver from the other, or because he didn’t try to ingratiate himself. “You’re all right, Sedlák,” one of them had said to him a few weeks after he’d started there, “not like all these others with their Latin grammars jammed up their asses.”

“Is that right?” he’d said.

“I can tell,” said the man, whose name was Tonda Králíček, and who worked the lathe two stations down from him, his stomach in his blue worker’s overalls pushed against the steel. “You know how to work.”

And work he did, he and four of the others, adding steel dust to the oil while pretending to correct some small malfunction or measuring the gap of the blade with the micrometer, resisting the temptation to do more, to go faster. One broken machine could knock out the line for a day, a week...One tenth of a centimeter difference in the depth of the holding groove could make the casing too tight, and somewhere on the Russian front a shell would explode while still in the cannon. It had to be enough. Get too greedy, go too fast, and you’d make a mistake. Someone—likely as not one of your fellow citizens—would notice something and then the process, unencumbered by any need for evidence or courts, would accomplish the rest with great efficiency. You’d be led out to the courtyard between buildings B and C, near where the bicycles were parked, and shot in the back of the neck. It had happened twice in the past month—a man taken out, a bicycle orphaned.

It was a peculiar game. You had to dance just right, though you couldn’t hear the music and the steps themselves were unmarked, and every now and then, just to keep things interesting, your leg or arm would be jerked by a string you hadn’t known was there. That February, for example, Králíček had joined him as he sat eating his piece of bread with preserves in the second courtyard, rotting his teeth, and they’d talked a bit. He lived near Blansko, Králíček said. He had two daughters and a son. He didn’t give a damn about politics. If there was one thing he hated, it was these little interferers, snuffling their wet noses into everybody’s business. That breakdown in the drill press in the second sector had not been an accident—he knew that—and they’d all lost three days of work. And for what? It was not as though they were treated all that badly...they should be grateful for having work at all. He had a sense the breakdown had something to do with the oil.

He had a
chata
in the woods not far from Blansko, Králíček said, just a little place near a pond. Not much, really, but he loved it like a baby loves its nipple, counted the days till the warm weather returned and he could start going up. “You like to fish, Sedlák?”

He told him he’d never been. It wasn’t true, but he sensed that this was what he needed to say in order to keep up the terms of the relationship—a relationship based on the illusion of his directness, his unwillingness to pretend to anything. “You’ll have to come up sometime, then,” Králíček had said, “I’ll take you,” and in spite of himself, he had felt moved. Králíček, he realized, was not a bad man, and most of the horrors of this world were committed by men just like him.

It became this thing between them: he would take the bus up to Blansko and they would go fishing. His son hated fishing, Králíček told him, had never been much interested in anything besides playing with himself.

He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll hate it too,” he said.

“Maybe you will,” Králíček said, and smiled.

He discussed it with the others, and it was agreed they would ease off for a time. Adjusting the settings of the carborundum bits was simply too dangerous; quality control could catch the discrepancy at any time, and the authorities made no allowance for accidents. The dust in the oil was better; it worked flawlessly, if slowly. And the dust was already everywhere—in their mouths and ears and shit; sitting in the latrine, he could see it glistening in the light coming through the hole in the pane, a fine steel rain. Králíček was a problem; they’d have to watch him carefully.

Nothing happened. The dance went on—the grand distraction, from which he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted. None of them knew what to do about Králíček or the others, and a week later they began to seed the oil again, a fraction of a gram a day. And then one morning during the first break, Králíček waved him over to where he sat on his stool two stations down, his short legs in their blue overalls crossed at the ankles, and pulled an envelope from his chest pocket. “Take a look at this, Sedlák,” he said, taking out a small stack of photographs. One photograph was of a one-room cabin with a metal pipe for a chimney; another showed Králíček sitting on a stool by the edge of a small pond holding a long fishing rod, his legs crossed at the ankle. Very nice, my father said. A third was of a big carp; the fish had been knocked on the head, and one of its eyeballs had bulged and swiveled upward, giving it a comical look. Králíček, who was holding it forward, had drifted out of focus; only his fingers, made huge by proximity, stood out clearly, pressing into the fish’s scales.

“That’s a big fish,” my father said.

“There are bigger,” Králíček said.

A week later, he was as dead as the carp in his picture. Rumor had it that he’d been caught smuggling food. And this too was funny, in its way—the way opening a vein with a pair of manicure scissors was funny.

The next Sunday, without knowing he was going to, my father went to the train station and took the train to Prague, where he walked around the streets for an hour, slapping his hands against his legs to keep them warm, then returned to the station and took another train back to Brno. There was no point in trying to find her. Let the comedy play itself out. If she returned, it meant that the other one was dead, and he’d take her back. He had no choice in the matter.

AFTER LIDICE, TIME CHANGED FOR BÉM. IT SMOOTHED
out, unwound more easily. As if pain were a lubricant. He barely minded waiting now. It seemed to be the same for the others. A terrible patience had settled in, and if he recognized in it at times the resignation of snowed-in mountaineers who, having gone beyond their altitude, have quietly begun to die, he knew as well their reserves, what a moment’s need could loose in them.

The coffins were ready. Everything was set. On the morning of June 19 they would be driven to a storeroom in Kladno in two funeral cars. The coffins would be uncomfortable, Petřek had said—after all, they hadn’t been built for the living—but breathing, at least, would not be a problem. He and the others, he said, had discussed various possibilities, then settled on drilling small holes precisely every two centimeters along the edges of the lids. It had taken them the better part of an afternoon. The holes looked like some kind of decoration in the wood; touched up with paint to hide the work of the drill bit, they were almost imperceptible.

They would have to be ready by six, he told them. If all went well, they would be moved from Kladno to a gamekeeper’s cabin in the forests of Moravia that same evening. If any complications delayed the transfer, there were provisions enough in the storeroom to last them a week.

It was convenient to know the exact hour when you would be placed in your coffin, Opálka had said afterward, and the others, who would normally have been the ones to carry that burden, and who appreciated his effort, smiled politely and nodded. Not everyone had that luxury, they said. St. Peter by appointment.

He didn’t think about my mother. Or rather, he thought about her incessantly but held her back, didn’t look at her directly. She was his secret, the thing he had in reserve. If he indulged it, he’d use up its power; it was enough that she was there.