The Visible World (11 page)

I ASKED HER ONLY ONCE. IT WAS ON ONE OF THOSE UNNATURALLY
warm, yellow October days that feel lost somehow, as though a day in June had floated loose and found itself in a world of frostbitten tomato plants and half-bare poplars. We were sitting on the back deck of the house in Bethlehem, which had a view of the rectangle of lawn and the row of pines intended to block out the neighbor’s house. A short distance away was the stump of the maple my father had cut down during the summer. I looked at the pines. They had caught some kind of blight and seemed to be rusting from the needles in, like discarded Christmas trees.

“You should give them a feeding of Miracid,” my mother said.

“Why bother?” I remembered my father saying once, when my mother had insisted I douse a pine in the front yard that had browned at terrible speed, as though it were burning. He’d chuckled. “Look at it. It doesn’t want to be here.”

“A good feeding can’t do any harm,” my mother had said.

“You might as well feed a shoe.”

“Still.”

My father smiled and waved his hand. “Water away,” he’d said.

“Can’t do any harm,” my mother was saying now. “You should give them a feeding when it cools off a little.”

I said I’d do that, and then asked her who he had been, this man she had loved all the years I was growing up. I told her I’d known about him since I was a child, and that I thought, now that I was grown, she might finally tell me the story. I didn’t blame her or resent her in any way, I said. Far from it. I was curious. What kind of man had he been? How had they met? What had happened to him? Had she met him before she met my father?

I knew it had happened during the war, I said, speaking quickly now. Sometime in 1942. Had he been in the Resistance? Had he died in the purges after Heydrich was killed? Could she tell me anything at all?

My mother took a dry, wafer-like cookie off the plate between us and took a small bite.

“I don’t really want to talk about that right now,” she said.

We sat in silence. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Your father’s a good man,” she said. And then, after a while: “I’m sorry.”

My mother was looking out over the yard—the poplars, the shadows on the lawn, the rusting pines. She was biting her upper lip, which made her chin stick out a bit, as if she were deciding something.

“You really should give them a good feeding,” she said at last. “It can’t hurt.”

WHEN I WAS TWENTY I STAYED FOR A TIME IN A
CHATA
by a pond, seven kilometers from the town of Bystřice nad Pernštejnem, with my father’s childhood friend Mirek. I’d fallen in love with a girl who was vacationing with her friends a few cabins down from ours. She was older than I was. We would spend every night around a campfire we built for ourselves along the shore, and always, often toward morning, end up making frantic love, still dressed in our smoky sweaters, our pants around our ankles, in the cold, dew-soaked grass. In the afternoons she would go on long sleepy walks in the woods with her friends, and I would swim across the pond with Mirek.

We always swam the long way, from the muddy little beach in the grass to the mill whose watermarked roof, furred with jigsaw pieces of moss, rose above the embankment on the far side. It would take us half an hour, sometimes more, and Mirek, whose right leg had withered to a stick half a century earlier when his father had refused to have a doctor set the toes his son had broken, would roll about in the dark water like a happy walrus, one moment paddling with his arm extended straight ahead as though lying on a sofa, the next raising his white belly like a hill into the air.

It was on one of these long swims across the pond that he told me about the afternoon when my father and his old friend Pavel Štepánov had looked into the execution yard. They were not yet twenty years old, he said, turning on his back and paddling along with small, flipper-like strokes while raising his head partly out of the water. About my age. At that time, he said, the people living in houses with windows facing the courtyard of Kounicovy koleje, a nondescript cluster of three-story dormitories that the Gestapo had turned into a prison, had been instructed to board them up. Not that it made any sense, Mirek said. Everyone knew what was happening there. The volleys usually began at ten in the morning and, except for a pause between one and two, continued until four. Every day except Sunday, shortly before ten, heavy trucks would bump up to the gates and disappear behind them. In the afternoon the gates would open again, usually around four-thirty, and they would leave.

Pavel Štepánov, Mirek said, had discovered a crack in one of the boards over the upper bedroom window. By inserting a bread knife into the narrow part of the bolt and twisting gently, he could widen the crack to a centimeter or so. It was a still, hot summer day; the air in the half-boarded house was stifling. No one was at home. It was just after two. Štepánov reached under the fringed shade of a bedside lamp and turned on the light. On the other side of the boards they could hear someone yelling orders. And though he didn’t want to, Mirek said, my father put his eye to the crack, and saw what he saw.

“It changed him,” he said. “It wasn’t a sudden thing. Of course I can’t tell you for sure that it was that day and not some other one, but I think it was. It turned something inside him. He has this smile, you know the one I mean, almost sweet, but closed, like this”—and he raised a closed fist above the water—“that only appeared afterward. The funny thing is that when I think of your father now, I see that smile. As if that was who he was supposed to be. It’s the same with Štěpánek,” he added. “That irritating laugh of his.”

“I never saw what happened there myself,” Mirek continued. “I remember the German
hausfrauen
walking past our gate during breakfast. They would walk down Tolstého Street to the corner, then up toward the dormitories. We couldn’t see what they saw, but from our kitchen window we could see them standing against the post-and-wire fence they had there, holding up their children to see.”

We swam quietly for a while. Mirek was looking up at the sky. “How far are we?”

“Maybe halfway,” I said. I looked down into the water between my arms. “How deep do you think it is here?”

“Can you touch the bottom?”

“No.”

“Then it’s deep.”

We swam on. “What did he see?” I said.

But Mirek couldn’t tell me. “More than he should,” he said.

His own father, he told me, whose prison cell had overlooked the courtyard at Kounicovy koleje for almost a year, until he was shipped off to Dachau, said the things one heard were the worst of all. He’d learned to insert pills of toilet paper into his ears, then wet them to make them expand. Others would crawl under their mattresses, supposedly, or wrap their bed-sheets around their heads to keep from hearing. An unstable man named žáček, a butcher, had somehow managed to rupture his own eardrums with a smuggled pencil.

It was all very organized, Mirek’s father said. The holding area was separated by a barbed-wire fence from the execution yard itself, which was right where the trucks came in. The children were almost always taken first. Sometimes, just before they were led away, the parents would try to press themselves against them, or whisper something to them, as though giving them a message to deliver. Surprisingly often they would yell at them—Stop crying! Listen to me!—as if their words through some last miracle of habit or authority could make that place something other than what it was.

Sometimes the mother would lose consciousness, Mirek’s father told him. More often she would begin to scream as soon as the first child was taken. The father might try to do something then, run at a guard, perhaps, or try to kick him, which only meant that he wouldn’t have to watch. Mostly, though, the parents would just stand there, like sleepwalkers waiting in line at a bank. Some would make odd, spastic little gestures—reaching up as if to touch their right cheek, for example, or frowning quickly, or suddenly fingering a button. The men watching them from the windows would often unconsciously do the same.

It was the strangest thing, Mirek’s father said, to see the same gesture duplicated, as if in a mirror, fifty meters away; it reminded him of that elementary school contraption that copied on a second sheet of paper—through the use of a kind of movable armature attached to a pencil—whatever was drawn on the first. Often, he said, you could tell what was happening in the courtyard simply by looking at the person watching. When the watcher’s face turned away slightly and his head began to shake, for example, you knew it was almost over, because people about to be killed often developed an odd, Parkinson’s-like tremor, looking off to the side and shaking their heads as if denying what their senses told them.

We lay on the grass bank under the mill for a long time that afternoon, moving east to stay ahead of the shade. I remember Mirek leaning up on one elbow, twirling and untwirling a blade of grass around his finger, his belly resting comfortably on the ground, his bad leg thin and ridged as a ham bone. I remember realizing, dimly, how much I loved this man—his round, happy face and his strong, soft shoulders and the thicket of white hair covering his chest. During the war, when my father and the others had intercepted the arms that dropped like dandelion seeds into the Vysočina forests—cutting them loose from the parachutes, then rushing them through the dark on makeshift stretchers—he had been the one waiting in the wagon, the one who covered the crates with firewood or manure, then drove them out to the safe houses alone, the horse snuffing wetly in the morning air.

At the far eastern corner of the pond, at a small beach, I could see tiny children leaping off a dock, their screams sounding strangely close over the still water. Just to the right I could see the space in the reeds where we had had our fire the night before: there were the blackened stones, like flecks of pepper, and there was the stunted willow, like a child’s drawing, whose roots had scratched my back.

“We should go,” Mirek said, sitting up on the bank. “I have a date tonight.”

“It’s going to be cold,” I said, looking at the water.

Mirek stood, a bit unsteadily as always, and started toward the water. “Courage, boy,” he said. He slapped his belly, and the sound carried across the water like a single clap. “Courage and fat.”

I watched him wade in up to his knees, throwing water on his arms and chest, then plunge in. But I hesitated. The sky was darkening. The children were gone. On the spillway a carp fisherman had set up his stool. I watched him finish rigging his line, cast out past the trees to the darkening sky, then settle himself carefully on the stretched fabric.

Later that night I waited on the dark path under the trees, carrying a small sack of sausages and
rohlíky,
tin cups and tea. The wind moved, making the lights of the cabins wink on and off. And suddenly I felt terribly lonely, as apart as I ever had in this world. The air was cool, but every now and then I could smell the hot smell of the fields. A woman’s laugh came from one of the cabins. She was enjoying herself. She wouldn’t come. I waited in the dark under the trees for a long time, leaning against a huge old chestnut with smooth, skin-like bark, thinking every few moments that I saw her flying along the bank or down the road to meet me, then threw the sausages and the
rohlíky
and the cups into the water one after the other and went home.

ON MARCH
17, 1984,
MY MOTHER APPARENTLY DECIDED
to walk to the Westgate Mall in a freezing rain wearing a summer dress with a raincoat over it. It had been raining for a long time. She tried to cut through a cornfield behind the subdivision on Whitman Drive but found herself lifting clods of clayey mud with each step, and retreated to the road. She walked to Hochstetler Lane (the town fathers having run out of literary lights), then along the gravel shoulder past the gas station and the little shopping area with the H&R Block to the stretch of sidewalk over the highway and then another mile or so past the Sears Automotive Center to the vast parking lot of the mall.

Inside the mall, made to look like the street of a small town, she sat down on one of the shiny green benches set up under the eave of the Bavarian Haus. Music was playing. A group of seniors on an excursion from the retirement home came and sat down on the bench next to her to wait for the bus to Allentown. Every few minutes the music stopped and after a few seconds a woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker: J. C. Penney was having its annual electronics sale. For that day only, everything would be marked down 20 to 50 percent. Then the music would come on again.

It was raining hard. The rivulets of water rushing down the glass made everything seem oddly submerged. A tall boy in lederhosen with a ravaged face offered her some flavored cheeses on a wooden tray. The cubes were impaled on toothpicks. My mother said something about the bits of colored cellophane on their tips, but didn’t take any. She was very polite.

From where she sat, she could see the imitation street lamp to the left of the Century 21 real estate office and a sign with white letters saying main street. On the ceiling, high above the steel rafters, someone had painted a summer sky, though you could barely see it. I don’t know if she noticed it.

A frail old man in a pink windbreaker sat down next to her on the bench. “Goin’ to Allentown?” he asked. My mother looked at him. She seemed to be thinking about it. “I don’t think so,” she said.

A poster taped to the brick wall showed a snarling tiger on a small stool, a clown with a huge white mouth shooting a tiny bow and arrow, and a powerful man with long blond hair holding a whip. He was yelling something, but he looked as if he were crying.

My mother stood up.

“Shprecken Zee Dutch?” said the old man.

My mother took off her raincoat, folded it neatly, and placed it on the bench. “Have a nice day,” she said, then walked out into the rain, across the parking lot and out to the turnoff ramp from the highway where she stepped directly in front of the 4:38 bus to Allentown.