Authors: Mark Slouka
“You have to picture it. Three cars are waiting in the dark. A door opens, he climbs inside. He has no idea where they’re going until he hears the name. Some woman named Moravcová. An apartment in žiǽkov. He just sits there on the leather seat, holding his hat on his lap like a truant. What else can he do? No one speaks to him—they don’t trust him, naturally, and his ability to speak German only makes things worse because it means he’s neither one thing nor the other, hammer or nail.
“It’s a quick trip. The city is almost deserted at that hour, and the limousine races through the intersections, crosses Bulhar Circle, then turns left up that long hill there. He knows they’ll be there in three minutes, then two, and then they’re there and Fleischer, the commanding bastard that morning, is already pounding on the door, swearing, when it opens and a bent, tiny woman appears, like a hedgehog in a fairy tale.
‘Schnell, wo wohnen die Moraveks?’
Fleischer yells as they shove past her, and Chalupa begins translating when the hedgehog calls out at the top of her lungs, as though she’s suddenly been struck deaf, ‘Would you like to take the stairs or the elevator,
mein Herr?’
but they don’t notice because they’re already rushing up the stairs and it’s too late for anything at all.
“By the time Chalupa gets there, they’re all three standing with their faces against the wall, the father and the boy still in their pajamas, Madame Moravcová in a housedress, as though she’s been awake all night.
“Wo sind sie, wo sind sie?’
—Where are they?—Fleischer is roaring as the rest of them pour into the other rooms, as the sofa and chairs are tipped on their faces and pulled from the walls, and Chalupa begins to translate
Kdo, já nevím
...—
‘Wer? Ich weiss nicht
...’ and then stops because Fleischer has her by the throat and is striking her face, hard and fast, back and forth: ‘Wo—
sind
—
sie, Wo
—
sind
—
sie, Wo—sind
—
sie.’
She sinks to the floor.
‘Steh auf!’
She stands. ‘Please,’ she says, I have to go to the bathroom, please.’
“Chalupa looks at her husband and son. They are both barefoot. There is the smell of shit in the room. The husband’s hair is standing up; his right leg is trembling as if he were listening to a very fast song. The boy is looking into the wallpaper. In the transcripts Chalupa claimed he never saw such terror in a face in his life. ‘Please, I have to go,’ Moravcová says again. She doesn’t look at her husband or her son. Chalupa translates:
‘Sie sagt, dass sie aufs Klo muss’
—She says she must go to the bathroom...and now he understands. Fleischer is striding into the other room, still looking for the paratroopers.
‘Nein.’
“So there you have the basic situation. A wrecked room. Three people lined up against a wall. A single guard. ‘Please, I have to go,’ Madame Moravcová is pleading, over and over again, ‘please.’ Perhaps she realizes that their lives are over, that life is simply done. Perhaps not. Suddenly someone is yelling from the hallway outside:
‘Zastavte! Zastavte!’
—Stop! Stop! Though maybe it’s just
‘Václave! Václave!’
—The name. Who can tell? They sound alike; anyone could confuse them. And Chalupa—here’s the thing—supposedly translates the first and the bastards run out, thinking the paratroopers have been flushed into the open, and in the five or six seconds before the guard remembers himself and rushes back in, Moravcová sees her chance and takes it, and by the time they push past her fallen body blocking the bathroom door from inside it’s too late for the water they pour down her throat to do them any good. So,
zastavte
or
V´clave,
take your pick.”
“She left her family?” I said.
“Indeed.”
“She must have known what she was leaving them to.”
“I doubt she imagined the particulars. Supposedly they broke the boy the next day when they showed him his mother’s head in a fish tank.”
“Good God.”
“Doubtful,” the old man said. “But we should get to work.”
I remembered Mr. Chalupa. He’d slept in my room. I could see that irritated look, the way he would lift his violin out of its case with three fingers, the way he would sink into my father’s chair. “How are the Beatles, young man?” I could hear him say. “How are the Fab Four, eh?”
THIS IS HOW THINGS WERE IN MY HOUSE
.
One afternoon when I was perhaps seven years old, no more, I asked my mother whether she had ever had a dog. I wanted one myself. She told me she had, in fact, had a dog once, but that it had been very long ago. He’d gotten lost, she said. She would tell me about it sometime.
So I asked my father. I found him in his office, which looked down into the canyons between the apartment buildings to the little playground where I played. He first asked me what my mother had said, then sighed and capped his pen. “Move those papers over,” he said. And then he told me about my mother’s dog.
As a young girl, my father said, my mother had spent her summers with relatives in the Valašsko region of Moravia. In those days, he said, the
cigáni,
the Gypsies, could still be found camped along a river or on some empty ground. One minute there would be just a field, a dirt road, a stand of birches; the next they would be there: the men unhitching the horses, the women beating down the weeds for fire rings or yelling at the dogs, dirty-faced children with hair as black as ravens staring as though they’d never seen a person in a wagon. There were poplar trees along the fields, and their small leaves would twirl like decorations in the wind. And if you happened to be the person in the wagon, you’d look up and see them—the old ones—already half a kilometer down the road to town, their huge black skirts with the loops and the hooks sewn into them dragging in the dirt.
In any case, my father told me, my mother spent a lot of time in the company of an old man named Mr. Koblíǽek who lived two houses down and who was something of a storyteller. He had a square block of a head silvered by stubble and ears like miniature lettuces, and he’d sit on a bench on the south side of his house in his tattered slippers smoking a short black pipe.
No one had quicker hands than a
cigánka,
Mr. Koblíǽek told my mother. No one. You could watch her all you wanted, but it wouldn’t matter. “The
cigáni
were not like other people,” he said. They knew things. Oh, they could mumble and scrape humbly enough, but if you threw stones at them, they would turn in the middle of the street and curse you so vilely even the dogs would turn away. He himself, Mr. Koblíǽek said, had once seen a
cigánka
put a spell on a dog who had bitten her, so that the poor animal couldn’t open its mouth to eat or drink, but went about slobbering and rubbing its head in the dirt, trying to push its tongue through its clenched teeth, until its owner finally realized what was happening and killed it.
No, the
cigáni
were not to be trifled with, Mr. Koblíǽek said, waggling a great square finger at my mother. The suffering of our Lord Jesus meant nothing to them. They never went to church or prayed for their souls. He’d heard it said that the old ones could see the dead walking down the road or resting in the shade of the trees at noon. That they could catch the reflection of the moon in a pot and carry it under the trees, where it would glow all night like a white lantern.
Anyway, my father said, it was during one of those summers along the Bečva that my mother got a dog. She found it in a corner of a neighbor’s stable—a squirmy brown pup, fat with worms, struggling to reach a teat—and somehow convinced her uncle to let her keep it in the barn. It could not have been easy, my father said. You have to remember, he said, these were country folk—practical, unsentimental people; that same afternoon the rest of the litter was probably put in a sack with a stone and tossed in the river.
My mother, my father said, had never had a pet before, and she loved the thing dearly. Soon it grew into a small, brown, wormy dog who followed her about everywhere and who would sit waiting for her on the bank of the Becva, looking worried, whenever she went swimming in the afternoons. She made the dog a bed of rags in the hay. Sometimes she would lie down next to it and pet it on its brown nose while it slept, my father said, which was probably how she came to have worms.
That August, when the Gypsies were encamped a kilometer down the road in a fallow field by the river, the dog disappeared. He’d probably been eaten, her uncle told her—the Gypsies ate dogs sometimes. He was very sorry. He had been growing attached to the little mongrel himself. My mother just stood there, runny-nosed and barefoot, ugly with grief, sucking her upper lip to keep from crying. Pulling her closer, her uncle wiped under her nose with the edge of his thumb and then, with the other edge, made a wide, flat smear across her cheek. They would try to get her another dog, he told her.
But that was not the end of the story, my father said.
“Another child would probably have cried in her bed that night,” he said, “or lay awake listening to the wind, looking for things in the garden, or dreaming of what she would do to those who could do such a thing. Your mother got up to get her dog.”
She went barefoot. In the house, everything was still, as if under a spell. As she closed the heavy wooden door behind her, she could hear the clock start to whir and then chime, twice. To avoid waking the village dogs she cut back through the garden, then up through the fields to the road. Everything was moving as though under water, the clouds rushing over the fields and the road and the white trunks of the birches. The moon flew across the sky, its reflection leaping among the trees.
She knew where she was going. She had passed the field where they were camped at least a dozen times before with her uncle. When she came to the crossroads, she turned right toward the river, walking on the soft dirt along the side, stepping over the briars and their shadows because it’s impossible to tell one from the other in the moonlight. Even before she saw the wagons lined along the road by the side of the field, she could see the firelight on the trunks of the trees and hear the yelling of the men.
“Now you have to understand,” my father said, looking at me. “This was a very foolish thing to do.” The
cigáni
were not like the people my mother knew in the village, he said. He himself had once seen a group of
cigáni
in the Tatra Mountains dig half a horse out of the earth and eat it. They had a game they played. Four or five men, sitting around a wooden board, would wrap rags around their hands. These would be tied off at the wrist, leaving their fingers just enough flexibility to grasp the handle of a knife. Everyone would be very drunk. Bets would be made, drinks taken from jugs standing in the dirt, another log or board tossed on the flames for light. Then, when all were ready, my father said, their elbows on the board and their bandaged arms raised and the crowd yelling and shoving for a better view, the ear of a hare would be thrown into the center of the board.
“An unpleasant business,” my father said. By the time someone emerged from the fray with the ear pinned on the tip of his blade like a slice of sausage, the rags would be stained black as if splashed with paint. And sometimes things went wrong. A friend of his had seen a
cigán,
furious over some real or imagined slight, slowly force another’s arm to the wood and then, with a tremendous blow, as though killing a wolf, drive his knife through the bones of the other’s hand, pinning him palm-down to the board.
“Anyway, it probably took them a few moments to notice the little girl on the other side of the fire,” my father said. “It probably took them a few more to realize she was real.”
Co tady chceš?
—What do you want here?—said a voice like a crow.
Běž domů.
Go home.
I want my dog, said my mother.
A man snorted like a boar; a few people laughed. Let’s get on with it, someone said.
Ztrať se,
a number of voices yelled. Get lost. Go back where you belong. From somewhere under the trees a pig was grunting quickly. A huge gust of sparks rose into the branches.
What makes you think we have your dog? said the voice like a crow.
Horses neighed from the dark. An old woman in a wide, colored skirt was coming toward my mother, making sweeping motions with her hands as though pushing away an unpleasant smell.
Maž, maž. Tady tě nikdo nechce.
Go. Nobody wants you here.
The men were getting on with their business, wrapping their hands in rags, tearing at the cloth with their teeth. When the
cigánka
got to the edge of the fire, my father said, my mother stooped and picked up a branch that was sticking out of the flames.
The crowd burst out laughing. Why would we take your dog? they yelled. Go home, you little fool. Someone said something she didn’t understand and the crowd howled with laughter.
Give her the dog, called the crow, and a tall, powerful-looking man in loose cloth pants stepped out of the smoke. The crowd quieted. He had long black hair and a thick black mustache and his skin was as brown as the bark of a tree. He looked at her for a few moments, then began slowly unwrapping the rags from around his hands.
Get the dog, he said, and instantly the dog was there, led by a boy about my age. The dog seemed well fed, my father said, and he had a short length of woven horsetail leash around his neck. He seemed glad to see her. The
cigán
nodded. And without another word my mother took her dog and walked home to her uncle’s house and led him to his rag bed in the barn. Finally she returned to the house, and lifting the heavy wooden door so it wouldn’t creak, crept past the ticking clock up the stairs to her room. As she lay in bed she could see the dark frame of her window against the lightening sky. It was almost morning.
He had to work now, my father said. He had only told me this story about my mother and her dog because, he said, he wanted me to know something about my mother.
I nodded. But Mommy said her dog ran away, I said.