The Visible World (7 page)

And so he did, said my father. Later. Personally, he’d always thought he’d returned to the Gypsies, where life was good for a dog.

And that was the end of the story.

A year or two later my parents bought me a dog. And one day that dog disappeared. We had moved to the suburbs by then, to a small house in Ardsley with a cracked driveway and a mimosa tree that dropped pink blossoms all over the yard. Perhaps he’d been stolen, my father said. Or run over by a car. We hunted around in the thin woods at the end of the road, calling his name, and hung up signs on the telephone poles asking whoever had found him to give him back to us, but no one ever called. In all honesty, I’d never really cared for the dog—a purebred boxer with a streak on his nose—but I’d gotten used to him, and when he disappeared, I missed him for a while. And then one day when my mother was driving me somewhere, we saw him in the back of someone else’s car.

It was a rainy day in late fall; gusts of wind shook the car and smeared the water across the windows. My mother tried to get the attention of the people in the other car, waving and tapping on the glass with her wedding ring, then followed them off the highway and through the tolls, mile after mile, down roads we had never been on before, to some part of Queens I didn’t know. After a long time we crossed a bridge over a big river to a world of factories where tall chimneys poured smoke into the rain while others burned like giant candles.

When it was almost dark the car stopped in front of a smudged little house and a family with two small children got out. It had stopped raining. They were frightened at first, and the man kept waving his hands and saying What do you want? What do you want? but when my mother explained, he apologized and said that he was very sorry but that the dog was theirs and that he and his family had come from Pakistan a year ago, and then he went into the house and brought out some papers. I talked to our dog, meanwhile, but he didn’t recognize me. Eventually we got back in our car and went home without him. I remember looking out the window as we drove back over the bridge. One black cloud was lit up from behind, and I could see the water and the factories.

It’ll be all right, said my mother. It doesn’t matter. And she laughed to herself and shook her head.

Later I remembered the flames and turned around quickly in my seat, but the road had taken a turn, and they were gone. And so the story stopped again, balanced on one foot, so to speak.

Twenty-five years later, on an October afternoon in 1985, I was working at my desk at a cabin I’d once lived in with my parents when I heard someone calling a hello and found an old couple I vaguely remembered from my childhood standing by the stone wall. They had been driving in the area, they said, and had suddenly remembered visiting my parents years ago at a cabin on a lake, and had decided on a whim to see if they could find it. They were very proud of themselves, and though I didn’t particularly want to, I invited them in for a glass of wine and we talked of this and that and they asked me if any of the other Czech families they had met in that earlier time still lived at the lake. They remembered Reinhold Černý very well, they said, and the Kesslers, whom they had met once or twice in the city. Černý had passed on years ago, I told them, as had Kessler. Kessler’s wife, Marie, I had heard, was living somewhere in North Carolina. And the Mostovskýs? Their children were two cabins down, I said.

At which point my dog, waking from where he’d fallen asleep in the shade of the small wrought-iron table around which we were sitting, knocked against one of the legs and spilled some wine. They begged me not to scold him—it hadn’t been his fault, after all—and explained that they had three dogs at home who were just like children to them, and how they had both felt sick, absolutely sick, to read in the paper, what with all the news about China and everything, that the Chinese still ate dogs. It was barbaric, absolutely barbaric, they said, and to think we could do business with these people. The whole thing had reminded them of my poor mother.

How so? I asked.

But surely I knew the story, they said—both my parents had spoken of it. A terrible thing for a child to go through. How my mother’s dog had been stolen by Gypsies one summer and how my mother, who could have been no more than seven or eight years old at the time, had crept out of her grandparents’ house in the middle of the night and walked miles and miles to a Gypsy camp and demanded her dog, only to be given a flour sack that might have held a rabbit, or a small carp, and how she had walked all the way home, the small dear, and buried the remains in the garden before returning to bed. Surely I remembered it now.

I told them I did.

This was a nice place, they said, looking around. It was odd, really. They hadn’t thought about my parents for years before they’d read that report about dogs in the paper, and yet, hardly two weeks later, here they were. Of course, it was probably because the article had started them thinking about my mother—though they hadn’t realized they were thinking of her at all at the time—that they had remembered our cabin and decided on a whim to try and find it.

They wouldn’t have been surprised, now that they thought of it, if my parents hadn’t told me the story of my mother and her dog. A terrible thing to tell a child. How she must have suffered, the poor dear, walking all those miles with that sack at her side. Still, they agreed, the story said something about her character. How strong she was. They nodded, agreeing with each other. The Lord only visited those who could bear it, they said.

SHE HAD BEEN BEAUTIFUL. I HAVE A FEW PHOTOGRAPHS
, favorites I salvaged after my father died from the shoeboxes I found piled in the basement by the folded ping-pong table: one of a black-haired tomboy standing by her bicycle in the Vysočina forests, looking at the photographer as if wondering whether he’s going to try to take it away from her; another of a young woman on a windy corner in Brno, too impatient to be fashionable, pinning her hat to her hair as the statue of a dead saint, behind her, points to an escaping trolley; a third—overexposed—of my mother against a white sea of cloud in the Tatras, the hand of a companion—not my father—visible at her waist.

And then there’s the one of him, or so I have to assume. I’ve looked at it closely. At the overlong sleeves of the sweater—the left pushed partway to the elbow, the other almost covering his hand. I’ve studied the cigarette, like a tiny stub of light clamped between the tips of his fingers, protruding from inside the wool. There’s nothing to see. A man standing in the snow, squinting into the glare. Not particularly handsome. The snow on the hill behind him has partly melted.

I don’t know what he meant to her exactly. Or how he died. I only know that his face, the sound of his voice, never really diminished for her. That she simply refused to give him up.

There are people like that, after all—individuals who resist the current, who hold out against that betrayal. Who refuse to take their small bouquet of misremembered moments and leave. You’ll run into them at the deli counter, or while waiting in line at the theater, and they’ll say, “I had an acquaintance many years ago” or “I once knew someone who I cared for very much who also hated sauerkraut,” and suddenly, standing there waiting to give the butcher your order, or clutching your paper ticket, you can see them leaning into the current’s pull, hear the rocks of the riverbed clattering like bones.

It wasn’t a matter of jealousy or fear. My parents never slept in separate beds or took vacations with “old friends” or hurt each other more than husbands and wives generally hurt each other. It was subtler than that. My mother respected my father’s strength, his endurance, was grateful to him for taking on the role he had for her with such tact, but hated him for it too. And because she recognized the injustice in this, she loved him—or tried. And because she knew he recognized it too, she failed.

And my father? My father saw it for the perfect thing it was, appreciated it the way a master carpenter will appreciate a perfectly constructed joint, the tongue mated to the groove like an act of God. Kafka would have understood: he would do the right thing—the only thing—and be hated for it. Inevitably. Even justly.

ONE DAY WHEN I WAS SEVEN AND HAD BEEN GOING TO
school for a year or so, my father asked me what I was learning (he was sitting in his favorite chair by the long white bookshelf in the living room; my mother had gone out, to do some shopping, she said), and I told him about reading and spelling and math. I’d written a report on volcanoes, I said.

My father nodded. “The Greek philosopher Empedocles dove into a volcano to prove he was a god and burned to a crisp,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

I said I thought it was silly.

“Smart boy,” my father said.

He looked at me for a moment, sitting on the sofa, skinny legs dangling like a ventriloquist’s puppet, then took a small sip from the glass on the shelf next to him. “We need to supplement,” he said.

For years afterward the Greeks tasted like Ovaltine, because every time my father decided to supplement, he would let me make a cup and sip it while he talked. And for years that taste was all I retained from our sessions in the living room—that and the memory of him sitting in his chair, talking to me as if I were older than I was, as if I knew why he was smiling or why he had run his hand over his head that way or why he’d looked out the window over Queens Boulevard as if suddenly remembering something, some appointment he’d missed.

He told me many things; I don’t remember them all. He told me about Empedocles and Parmenides and Anaximander, Heraclitus and Thales. He liked their names, and he would make me repeat them and seem pleased when I got them right. “Say Empedocles,” he’d say, “say Anaximander,” and I’d say Empedocles or Anaximander and he’d chuckle as if there were someone else in the room with us and say, “That’s good. That’s very nice.”

Parmenides, he said, had worried a lot about reality because he’d noticed that what his senses told him didn’t make sense. “Which didn’t really make sense,” my father said, “but never mind.” Parmenides, he said, went on to claim that reality could be understood only by thought, which was a disastrous thing to say if one thought about it—a bit like saying that a nail could only be hammered with a tomato—even if it
was
true.

The rational mind was a terrible tool for the job, my father said. It thought logically, or tried to. It sniffed after justice where there was none. It insisted on looking at
everything,
even when that was clearly a bad idea. It had this notion, which it clung to, that the truth would save us, though it was quite obvious that precisely the opposite was often true. “The fact is that many things are true,” my father said, “but we have to pretend they aren’t.”

“Why?” I said.

“Because the truth would confuse us and make us sad,” my father said. “Take Empedocles—can you say Empedocles?” “Empedocles,” I said. “Good boy,” said my father. Empedocles, he said, believed that there were only two basic forces in the world—love and strife. Love brought things together and strife pulled them apart. All very logical. Empedocles claimed that this explained how things could change and yet the world could stay the same. My father looked at me. “Now let me ask you. Which do you think is easier, to keep things together or to pull them apart?”

“Pull them apart,” I said.

“Exactly,” said my father. He smiled. “Maybe that’s why Empedocles dove into the volcano,” he said.

In any case, he’d never liked Empedocles much, my father said. Thales, who lived on the coast of Asia Minor and who could navigate ships and reroute rivers, was much more interesting. Thales, a bald-headed old man with hairy ears, said the world floated like a log on endless water—which it very well might, said my father—and that all things were full of gods—which they were. Of course, the problem with the second part, my father said, was that when people thought of the things that were full of gods, they always thought of death and sunsets and Niagara Falls, never doorknobs.

The Greeks were full of wisdom, my father said.

But I wanted to know when Mommy was coming home—it may have been the first time my father called me in to ask me about my schooling; it may have been some time after that. I don’t remember.

“Heraclitus was fun,” he said, not hearing me. “Heraclitus, you see, was bothered by the fact that nothing in the world stayed the same, that everything changed. That the world was always rushing on, whether we noticed it or not. And he tried to explain this constant changing and decided that since fire changed everything it touched, fire was to blame.” My father looked out the window. “According to Heraclitus, everywhere we look, the world is on fire, burning invisibly, changing before our very eyes.” My father paused. “Of course, some things never change, never mind how long they burn. So, so much for Heraclitus.”

But I wanted to know when Mommy was coming home. I was getting hungry and my Ovaltine was gone.

My father was looking out the window over Queens Boulevard. In the far distance, a small brown plane was turning toward La Guardia Airport. “Soon,” he said. “Very soon, I’m sure.”

BY THE TIME I WAS NINE WE HAD LEFT THE CITY, THE
asphalt playgrounds, those inland seas, I’d played on, the loafshaped hedges and shadowed continents of lawn, and moved to a small, flat house in the suburbs. The house had a fireplace that didn’t work and a basement and a sliding glass door which let out onto a porch that overlooked a scrubby patch of woods. In the spring, when the mud had finally thawed and the huge, ridged leaves of the skunk cabbage had sprung out of it, hiding the trash, I would catch red-backed salamanders there.

That summer, at the Memorial Day picnic, my father broke his glasses trying to catch a football which slipped through his hands. My mother hadn’t wanted to go. Mr. Kelly, who was from South Dakota, and who pitched to the kids on the block every Saturday from the foot of his driveway, aiming at a square he had drawn on the garage door with a piece of chalk, had thrown it to him from across the street. He felt bad afterward, and helped my father look for the pieces, and my father, who as a schoolboy in the summer of 1937 had run eight hundred meters around a cinder track in two minutes and one second, setting a national junior record that lasted for nine years, smiled and said that from now on he believed he’d stick to balls that didn’t have points.