The View from Stalin's Head, page 8
You put yourself on guard to digest these terrible things, and then . . . No barbed wire, no barracks, no searchlights. Not like the movies.
She was waiting for the earth to open its mouth and swallow them all up.
“Are you okay?” Carl asked, prodding her ankle with one of his crutches.
“Fine,” she said and felt cold all over.
For lunch, there was nowhere to go except the grocery store on the square. The cashier, still hunched on his stool, didn’t even pretend to recognize them. A pile of Saran-Wrapped sandwiches had magically appeared next to him at the register.
“What’s in these?” Sarah asked and held one up, her fingers lubricated by the buttery Saran Wrap.
The guy shrugged. He looked old enough to have met Germans, Russians, and now Jews, hungry for lunch. She imagined him on that same goddamned stool through it all, not lifting a finger except to slap together sandwiches.
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You have to know.” She shook the slimy sandwich in his face like a piece of evidence. She wanted him to know she was Jewish. “Didn’t you make these?”
“He doesn’t understand,” Carl said, pulling her arm down. “Calm down.”
Thomas spoke to the man in Czech. “They’re cheese and tomato. And butter.”
Sarah wanted to storm out of the store, but she was hungry. She handed two of the sandwiches to the cashier. “And three Cokes.”
She couldn’t believe they delivered Coke to such a godforsaken place.
—
SARAH WAS STILL having trouble fitting their key into the front door when Mrs. Hubova came home from work. “You have to push a bit,” she said cheerfully as she let them in. “Before tea, I must make few phone calls and rest. We go after dinner, okay?”
“I’m not sure I want to take someone like her out to tea,” Sarah said, closing the glass-paned living room door behind them.
“Maybe she has some story,” said Carl. He covered his eyes as he sank into bed.
“I certainly hope so, because I’m going to ask for one.”
“She might have just moved in here after they left. Someone had to.”
“Even if she did nothing directly, she profited from Nazis. Don’t you get it?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, yawning. “I’m too tired to talk right now.”
Sarah scrubbed herself in the birdbath almost an hour, then changed into clothes that didn’t smell like Terezin. She couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t stay in the apartment either, so she ran out to buy chocolate, but it tasted like dirt as it crumbled between her teeth. The orange streetlights came on and cast blue shadows under the sickly, twisted trees. An old man came running out of a doorway, and Sarah sucked in her breath.
She walked to Wenceslas Square and sat on a bench under the equestrian statue. Two students had burned themselves to death there in 1969. The only memorial was two grainy pictures in metal frames with candles and red-and-white ribbons. It was the kind of thing she’d hoped to find here, but now she wasn’t interested. Instead she thought of her mother’s gray, meaty brisket, a recipe from the Old Country.
Her mother served brisket every Friday night on a set of plates with bluebird borders from Czechoslovakia. Her father drank wine out of a crude silver kiddush cup they kept hidden in the pillowcases. “This cup belonged to your grandfather,” her mother said in her heavily accented English. “We brought it from the Old Country. And it belonged to his father. And someday this will all be yours, when you have your own family, so I want you to know these things.” It was all a story of beautiful cutlery hauled across the ocean so it could sit in the cabinets of her sister’s house. Sarah got nothing because she’d reneged on the promise she’d made by being born: to keep memory alive.
—
IN THE CAFÉ of Hotel Europa, painted vines and flowers snaked up the walls and around a mirror above a polished wood-framed fireplace. The patrons bent over their short, intimate wood tables while waiters twirled by, coldly handsome in gray uniforms trimmed with white piping. Their faces were stiff and gray like their uniforms.
It took Carl a while to navigate the narrow spaces between the tables. The people in the café looked up from their coffees to stare.
“They’re not used to seeing people like you,” Mrs. Hubova said later, biting into a pink cake. She wore a fine gold chain around her neck and pearl earrings. “The Communists put all deformed people in asylums. When the doors were opened after 1989, no one believed how many there were. It was like at end of the war, when the wounded soldiers came home.”
“My brain still tells me the leg is there,” Carl said, shifting in his chair. “I feel it sometimes. My doctor says I may never forget.”
All around them, waiters cleared dishes and then snapped hot, damp cloths over the tables to erase all traces of departed guests. Sarah, who’d stifled herself during their tea, stared sullenly at the blond woman sitting across from her and stuffing her face with free cake. This stranger was nothing like her mother.
Sarah suddenly cut in, “Mrs. Hubova, do you know we are Jews?”
“I think so,” she said, dabbing the crumbs on her plate with her small finger.
“You know, we thought you might be Jewish too.”
Mrs. Hubova looked startled. “But how could you possibly?”
“We happened to notice the mezuzahs on the doors. The metal rectangles . . .”
“Aha, yes. The previous people in our flat, they were Jews. They left their metal religious articles on the doors.”
“Mezuzahs,” Sarah said, wishing they’d honored their reservations at the Europa.
“I thought about giving them to some museum, but my husband said it’s bad luck to remove them.” She turned to Carl. “Is it true?”
Carl hesitated. His cheeks looked very gray. “I don’t think so, but I’m no expert.”
“Why didn’t the Jews take the mezuzahs with them?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Hubova replied. “They probably hadn’t enough time.”
“You moved into your flat about fifty years ago, you said? That would be in 1945, ’44, ’43, maybe?” Sarah said. “How exactly did you find your flat?”
“What do you mean?”
Carl touched her arm, but she went on. “Was it listed in the paper? Did you call the super and make an appointment to view it? Did you have to write to anyone to get it?”
Mrs. Hubova furrowed her brow. “I don’t understand. What do you want to know?”
“It’s a beautiful place. I can’t imagine why the previous tenants would have left. Or if they had, I’m sure they would have asked a friend to hold on to it for them. Unless they didn’t have a chance because they’d been reported to the police.” She hesitated, then added, “Or something.”
Mrs. Hubova pushed back her chair and stood up. She touched her hair to make sure it was all still in place, but did not speak. In her cream-colored suit she looked as beautiful as a French painting. Sarah felt a little afraid of her. “When you are guests in my home, you do not accuse me to be Nazi,” said the lady, speaking slowly in a low baritone. “Even when you are American.”
“Paying guests,” Sarah corrected her.
“And it is reason why I don’t say go out of my house now and find some hotel. Because I cannot afford to give back your money. This is not polite!”
“Don’t worry about your precious money,” said Sarah. “We’ll be out tonight.”
Mrs. Hubova picked up her purse like a book and marched out the door, her jaw perpendicular to her neck, her spine straight as a rifle. Sarah felt miserable, for herself and for them all, stranded in one of the most dismal corners of the universe. Thank God her parents had had the good sense to escape when they could.
She took a bill out of her wallet, and a waiter with a black purse strapped to his belt immediately came by. “I don’t need change,” she said. The waiter bowed and spun away.
Carl made inquiries at the front desk of the hotel about a room, but they’d all been reserved. All the hotels in Prague were booked because of a trade convention. “They say it’s no use,” he said when he came back. “We have to stay where we are.”
—
MRS. HUBOVA WAS sewing a button onto her sweater in her room. She’d left the door open, just a crack. Carl went right to bed, but Sarah stopped by to explain they had to stay two more nights as planned. There was a mezuzah on Mrs. Hubova’s doorpost too, a wooden one. I should take it, Sarah thought. It would be a rescue, not a theft.
“This flat was empty when I moved here with my husband,” Mrs. Hubova said.
Sarah guessed anyone might have said that. “So what happened to the Jews?”
“We don’t know. They never came back. It happened fifty years ago. The Communists erased all our history. This is my home now. I am an old woman.”
“You should have tried, anyway. Didn’t you know their names?”
“I am sorry for them. It’s terrible, but I don’t know where they are.” She looked up from the sweater on her lap. “I believe they are with Jesus.”
“We don’t believe in Jesus,” Sarah said.
“No?” Mrs. Hubova seemed surprised. “What do you believe?”
“It’s not so simple,” she replied. “I think of it as an attitude. I mean, there are things Jews do and don’t do. Like Jews don’t smoke or drink too much or anything low-class like that. And they take care of their communities, they’re very community-oriented. And education and social justice are very, very important.” She realized how inadequate her answer sounded. “Why? What do you think a Jew is?”
Mrs. Hubova shrugged. “Your people have no pity.”
—
ON THEIR LAST full day in Prague they slept in to avoid Mrs. Hubova, who left them breakfast as usual, which they didn’t touch. They visited the Castle and stayed out late.
Sarah decided she wanted to become a better Jew. She went back to the Jewish Quarter and bought a gold chain with a Star of David. After she left the store, she realized the necklace was too ugly and heavy for her neck, but she wore it anyway. She took Carl to eat lunch in a kosher restaurant called A Taste of Honey.
“I’m sorry about all this,” he said over their falafel. “Next year let’s try Paris.”
“That’s right,” she said, playing along. “Next year.”
When they came back, they found Vitek’s business card on their pillow.
The next morning, Sarah called for a taxi and then dropped the apartment key on the kitchen table. One thought still haunted her, however, those mezuzahs clinging to Mrs. Hubova’s doorposts, a lie. Sarah decided to take one of the mezuzahs down, install it in a proper Jewish home or a museum, where it belonged. But when she checked the doorposts, they were bare, every one. She pressed the naked wood and looked again and again; the mezuzahs had vanished. No one would have known they’d ever been there except for a few oblong patches of discolored wood, each studded with a matching pair of small black holes.
SYMPATHETIC
CONVERSATIONALIST
WHEN I MOVED TO PRAGUE, my aunt Cassandra gave me two bits of advice: bring toilet paper and watch out for the civil war. Even after I lugged out our atlas, she refused to believe that Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were not the same country.
As it turns out, Czech toilet paper is brown, recycled, and only slightly more abrasive than its white American counterpart. Also, civil wars are in short supply. In fact, my life’s so peaceful that I could easily forget that I’m alive if it weren’t for my Thursday-morning rides to work, when I cram into a public bus with a mob of shrieking pink-cheeked teenage hooligans on their way to high school. I’m the twenty-six-year-old American with a mole on his left cheek, an authentic Parisian beret, a black turtleneck, and a three-quarter-length black trench coat from a vintage store in Boston. (The coat fits tighter across my gut than it used to; I’ve had the buttons moved.) The American pops a Rolo into his mouth and pretends to read his wrinkled copy of The Nation while the teenagers fire volleys of spitballs over his head.
Today, for fun, I’m staring at a girl, the one in the red ski hat. Her coat’s unzipped and her tiny breasts are barely visible through her thin pink sweater. In fact, her breasts are smaller than mine. I pretend I’m about to speak to her in my broken Czech.
With a rude jerk, the bus pulls up to my stop, a snowy corrugated metal lean-to papered over with posters for next week’s elections for this country’s newly created Senate. No one is sure what a senator does, though like in America they serve six years. Most of the posters feature the sagging jowls of Milos Zeman, the fat, charismatic ex-Communist who leads the opposition. This past month, he’s been riding a truck up and down the country with a bullhorn and taunting the effeminate prime minister, Vaclav Klaus, a Margaret Thatcher acolyte who speaks in a tiny, polite voice about tightening belts. His bushy white mustache and eyebrows suggest a slimmer Santa Claus.
The wind reeks of coffee and makes my nose run. I break into a brisk jog that leaves me panting against a wire fence after a few feet. More than once, I’ve been accused of “running like a girl.”
After a couple of Rolos and half a cigarette, I feel healthy enough to go on.
DaniCo coffee factory is a block away, next to the Amway headquarters. Across the road, there’s an outdoor market where Vietnamese guest workers who came over in the late seventies as part of a Communist trade pact now hawk cheap batteries and duffel bags.
“I think it is Simon!” Katka twitters as I enter the warm gatehouse. She leans over the desk, and her auburn curls tumble loosely over her thin, pointed ears. Her cheeks are wrinkled in a comforting way, like an oatmeal cookie, and she never wears makeup, even in a land where women apply eye shadow and rouge in thick stripes like house paint. I can see her panties through her white cotton dress, much too flimsy for winter.
Katka is a girl’s name. A woman in her forties should be Katarina or Katja.
“S’il vous plaît, Simon, can I offer you some coffee? Some tea or biscuits?”
Before I can say yes, her long fluttering fingers fly to the white plastic kettle and at the same time the phone, which she picks up on the first ring. “Dobre rano, DaniCo!”
I come here on Thursdays, to “enrich” the students’ conversation. The rest of the week, my class is taught by Vera, an iron-faced Czech woman who requires me to write down my lesson plans in a pink notebook. If I don’t, she’ll make a special trip to the factory to scold or quiz me on fine points of grammar. Sometimes she comes anyway and detains me for half an hour so I can nod sorrowfully as she tells me how Communism wrecked her life.
Back in the swinging sixties, when Czech socialism wore a more human face, Vera was a teenager studying English in London. Then in the spring of 1968, the Russians rolled into Prague with tanks and called Premier Dubcek to Moscow. A few weeks later he retired to Bratislava, where he worked as a locksmith and wasn’t heard from until 1989.
Vera could have stayed, but she’d promised her fiancé she’d come home. She wasn’t sure she still loved him, but a promise was a promise. “Our government wasn’t so bad before,” she said, “but they became worse than the Soviets. In the time of perestroika, they used to censor the Russian newspapers because they were too liberal.” During the years that followed, Vera had no opportunities to use English. If you obeyed the official rules to the letter, when a foreigner stopped you on Wenceslas Square to ask “What time is it?” you had to, without saying a word, run into the local Communist Party headquarters, get permission to answer the question, and then go back to say “Two-fifteen.”
Of course, who except Vera obeyed the official rules to the letter?
A sad story, but sad stories grow on trees here. Pretty girls in berets standing tall and straight with flowers in front of tanks, intellectuals arrested for scribbling clandestine independence manifestos. English teachers whose students never show up to class.
“Au revoir!” Katka giggles and removes my teacup. I tutor her privately in the cafeteria after my regular English class, our secret. Vera probably would have me fired if she found out. Private enterprise on DaniCo property—oh, the horror!
Outside, I cross the yard, a patch of frozen mud and loose bricks. DaniCo clings to a steep, icy slope with a view of the factories spewing gray smoke over the valley between us and the city center. Our own smokestack belches more than its share. Shaggy men in blue uniforms dusted with snow loiter next to a tractor parked in the yard. One of them, Hansa (a nickname for “Jan”), is a student of mine. I call his name three times before he runs over to pump my hand and say he’s sorry, but he has a big transport from “Dansko.”
“Denmark,” I correct him. “Remember when we talked about nations?”
“Yes, Denmark,” Hansa says with a bright smile as if he knew the right name all along and was just teasing me. “I no class today. Big, big transport . . .”
“Okay, Hansa,” I say. “But please, can you try to come next week? I’m lonely.”
“Next week,” he says emphatically, just like last week, and pumps my hand again.
Our classroom is a corner of the cafeteria sectioned off by an accordion door. Two women with their hair in plastic nets guard the lunch counter and serve fried pork, fried cauliflower, fried cheese by the gram. They watch eagle-eyed as they pour drinks into glasses marked at 0,3 liters with a white line. You are not entitled to a free napkin.
The accordion door is always locked, even though our stuffy, overheated room contains only a table, plastic chairs, and a flip chart. A mural on the back wall depicts four giant bags of DaniCo coffee on the summit of a snowcapped mountain.
I prop the window open with an old board so I can breathe. I wait. My “lessons” are mostly games, “to promote a free flow of conversation,” an hour of treading water. Katka approves. “It’s no good to be firm like Vera,” she says. “It’s not way of Buddha.”
“They are so simpleminded,” Vera complains. “The most basic concepts, I drill them for an entire hour and I ask, do they understand? They nod their heads yes and then the next week, poof! Every word has flown out of their heads.”
