Věra makes coffee—three heaping teaspoons in the bottom of a small cup, covered with boiling water—and we talk for a while with our hands and some memories of French. She has an allotment a forty-five-minute bus ride away where she stays on weekends. There’s a small shed, just enough room for a mattress, faucet outside, outhouse. She describes it like a country estate, lots of gardening and relaxation. When we run out of things to say she ushers me into what must be her living room and gently closes the glass door behind me.
So I’m sitting on Věra’s couch/single bed, removing the mass of twine from around the green suitcase, when there’s a frantic knock—Entrez!—and Věra rushes in, wide-eyed and pale—Les Russes! Les Russes!—one hand covering her mouth and the other gesturing in circles for me to follow her to the small black-and-white TV in her bedroom. Smoke is billowing out of a large building. Sounds of gunshot, people running through the smoke, the camera jumping confusedly, Věra gripping her hands and pleading to the ceiling in words I don’t understand, but the gesture of prayer is clear, God help us, not another war.
Is it the Soviet Parliament? I go back to her living room, search the radio dial for the BBC, the pulse suddenly loud in my ears. The only English-language station I can find is Voice of America, broadcasting a feature about sky diving.
•
I’ve been untangling the twine that should last me years, sitting on Věra’s couch, thinking about Uncle Lou in the hallway of the flat in London, pushing and flipping and turning the suitcase as the ball of hairy twine got smaller. And our long walks along the Thames, from Kew to Richmond, my heart loosening. Lou has a certain optimism, maybe because he swims every day of the year in the Serpentine, though he too has his demons.
What’s in here, rocks? Lou barked at me while flipping the bag over and over, kind of roughly, like something was eating him, that familiar and corrosive anger just beneath the surface. Oh, clothes, books, I started to say. You don’t need so many books! (Lou should talk: in his toilet alone, which has a big chain from the tank on top and no sink, he has stacks of books, obscuring the window and about to fall on you, on subjects ranging from orchid cultivation to Sanskrit poetry. Just like his older brother, David, who did the same in New Jersey.)
Lou wasn’t exactly supportive of my decision to take a train to a city where I have the names of only two people (it’s a start), don’t speak the language (if I stay, I’ll learn), alone (easier that way), and a woman (enough!). So he told me stories he’d heard, or embellished or invented, from his patients, his main contacts with the outside world. I’m beginning to realize he’s a kind of recluse, the artist/therapist in his consulting room overlooking the corner of Moscow Road and Queensway, with all the tiles and rugs and masks and early printed books and ancient plants whose root systems have wound their way through old boxes of LPs. All you can see from the streets are the plants in the windows, the pelargoniums and begonias and geraniums and tradescantia (or Wandering Jew).
Some of his patients have, according to Lou, been dragged off trains in the former Eastern bloc, robbed and left for dead in the forest by the border. From these examples Lou launches into a diatribe against travel itself, or rather tourism. Why would anyone choose to travel rather than stay home? Tourists suffer from a form of neurosis requiring immediate medical attention. Get them to a hospital! Tie them down! Medicate them!
And no wonder he hates travel: both his parents were immigrants, his father mostly absent (or rather, with his other family downtown), his mother moving sometimes twice a year to save rent, when he was a child. In her sixties she became a committed wanderer, moving to a cheap room in Florida or Mexico or California in the winter, back to her apartment in Washington Heights when it got too warm, staying until the following winter. I migrate wid da boids, she’d say to her grandchildren, though much of her migration was by ship. In her eighties she sailed from Liverpool to Ashdod with a shipload of English cars and an Italian crew. She was the only passenger.
They had to keep moving all through his childhood, in advance of the enemy, as his older brother Sly put it, their mother always having to escape some form of persecution. Lou was married and a father at twenty, reading leftist literature and Freud, pumping gas, working at a fridge factory, going to night school, studying psychology. His three older brothers had been in World War II: no way was he was going to Korea. But then the FBI would show up wherever he was working and he’d be fired. His wife got sick, he was broken down with exhaustion and worry and no money, caring for their baby daughter. His mother couldn’t help, brothers and sister didn’t have any money to send him, either: I had to give up my dream of becoming a teacher, having a steady income, enough to eat, Lou said, slightly accusatory. You don’t have any idea how easy you have it.
So that’s the legacy, displacement, and there’s Lou’s response, to stay home. But exile resides in him. If only this family were a nomadic tribe, moving around together, rather than geese whose mates have been killed, flying alone, hungry. The scattering of feathers all over the earth. The conking sorrow. Wandering the earth, looking for a place of protection, cultivating their loss and their anger like a night-blooming rose, taking it out on their children.
At what point in life can we do something about ourselves, Lou asked me. Meaning, in his case, when did he stop the migrations. As a young man he lived in L.A., Vancouver, and Israel before settling in England when he was almost thirty, half a lifetime ago. To settle. To unsettle. To bear the legacy. He’s been in the same flat now for thirty years. Hasn’t been back to the U.S. since leaving in the early fifties, afraid he’ll be arrested as a draft evader, or Party member. And then he asked again. At what point in life can we do something about ourselves, meaning, when are you going to deal with being depressed and get on with it? I’m not depressed, I said a little defensively, I’m just trying to figure things out. When you figure them out you’ll be dead. Just get on with life. Feel some joy. Walk with me along the river. Make poems.
There are so many different teachers, voices, in Lou. There’s that one, which for fifty years would write letters to his brothers full of descriptions of clouds and they would complain, Oy, Lou sent another meteorological treatise. And the pedant who exclaims, What?! You haven’t read Ignacio Silone? And the urban utopian, who envisions roof gardens and playgrounds and free museums and solar-powered trolleys. To which I would add bike paths and truck gardens and fresh bread. Despite some lapses, like insisting that a woman’s destiny isn’t fulfilled until she has a child, Lou has an orientation that comforts me. And he’s told me more over the years, even though we live thousands of miles apart, about my father’s childhood than Sly himself has—my father talks as though he came to life working in the stacks of the New York Public Library as a runner when he was seventeen. According to Lou, their mother called him black dog and hit him with a skillet. It’s hard to know what that means.
I went into the kitchen and Lou was sitting in the chair facing the old Whiteley’s department store through the window, reading a book about shipbuilding. We said hi. He picked up a small box of matches and was examining it, rotating it slowly in his hands. I was boiling some water. He looked up. You can learn something even from a matchbox, he said. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear about the matchbox. That’s how global capitalism works, he continued. Human artifacts imply social relations. He put the matchbox down, spooned some Greek yogurt into a pot of kasha cooling on the stove, poured on the wheat germ, picked up the matchbox again. Or maybe I would listen for a while.
What do you mean?
Well, who made the matchbox? Who designed the label? Someone had to look at a pair of scissors and draw the picture, someone had to pick the colors.
He sat down with the pot and spoon, put his legs up on the table, and started to eat. And what about the people who harvested the wood? Another mouthful. Who owns the boats that take the matchboxes to the stupid smokers who ruin their health? Stirring the kasha and yogurt and wheat germ into a brownish grey mass, eating with the same wooden spoon. What else do those ships carry? Bacteria? Insects? Plague? Chewing and swallowing. See what I mean? You can start with a matchbox, or anywhere.
Actually, the way Lou thinks fascinates me. I’d listen to him for a long time. It’s not exactly a conversation, but that’s OK. I don’t have a lot to say. I’m sitting on Věra’s couch holding the matchbox with the picture of the scissors, thinking about him, badly wanting a smoke.
•
Věra must be around seventy. Above the telephone in her modestly appointed hallway hangs a poster/calendar of a woman naked except for a g-string. Huge tits, erect nipples. It’s kind of shocking, but apparently not to the Czechs. There are breasts everywhere, in store windows, selling cans of paint, car parts, magazines. The chests that support the breasts are not always attached to heads. Reminds me of the processions of tits in novels by Kundera and Hrabal in which the women they are affixed to are symbols of submission to a totalitarian aesthetic, humorless and lust-inspiring. I love these writers so I have to bleep over the passages of woman-hate, which fill up pages and pages, like descriptions of weather in Victorian novels. It’s part of the landscape, the weather/woman-hate, though the Czech writers weren’t being paid by the word, so they have fewer excuses.
In some balance with the ubiquitous breasts are all these faded signs on the sides of buildings that advertise, if you could call it that, basic foods. Beautiful typefaces and simple graphics with circles, diamonds, and spirals: I’m struck by their stylized directness, untouched by a form of marketing I’m familiar with—cynical, manipulative—and calling their viewers’ attention to the presence of, the essence of, milk, long-life rolls, mineral water, fruit juice—and the crumbling walls behind them.
Some stores sell noodles and vodka but not juice, others offer cheese and butter but not bread, some only potatoes. Beer is cheaper than milk. Beer bottles are a uniform size, with different labels. They are all recycled and slightly scratched. Ditto large bottles of other liquids: juice, vinegar, mineral water. Very little plastic packaging. Large displays of ketchup, cat food, a German liqueur that’s suddenly everywhere, a can with a message in black letters printed on a white label—sterilizovani (sterilized) beans.
At a cafeteria where you can point to food displayed behind a glass panel I order some meat and gravy with flat flour dumplings, a green spinachy sauce, a bowl of tomatoes in sugar water with onions, an unmarked bottle of yellow bubbly liquid. After mastering hello for different times of day, please and thank you, I’m learning numbers. The meal costs 90 cents. The clientele is elderly and unhurried, in blues and greys and greens, eating their soup with oversized aluminum spoons covered with scratches from all the teeth chomping down on them.
•
Karla and Johanna, friends of Cybele who are active in the newly visible gay rights movement, take me camping in the Bohemian countryside, where every field is under cultivation: potatoes, rye, safflower. The forests are planted in rows, almost exclusively fir trees, slightly creepy, no randomness. And like any monoculture—even Czechoslovakia after the war, all the Germans and Hungarians expelled, the Jews and Roma and queers already disposed of—probably vulnerable to disease. I’m thinking about this as they scan the forest floor, finding boletus and chanterelles, mushrooms I don’t even notice because I’m fixed on the weirdness of the forest planted in rows. The eye must be trained, says Karla, filling up her basket. We boil water for tea on a kerosene stove in the front passenger foot area of their Škoda, to prevent a light rain and wind from stealing the flame. No concern for blowing up the car. They pour in some rum. I’ve never had a more delicious cup of tea.
Without the necessary Party connections they weren’t accepted to the university: Johanna tried for seven years before finally going to nursing school. Karla taught herself computer programming—and English from reading Dickens. Society is advancing gradually to accept that one may love whosoever one desires, without resort to surgery, is how she speaks. We’re holding cups of tea in the drizzle, talking when we want to. Karla asks if I am ambitious. I hide my ambition well, I tell her, even from myself. I want to say, My ambition is to feel joy. We sleep in a row in their tiny tent at the edge of a field.
•
Maps are out of date (street names change as socialist heroes fall out of favor) but still useful for orienting. I start with the river and the bridges, move into the cobbled streets of baroque buildings beautifully stained with soot, the squares, the human figures carved into facades, crouching to hold up the enormous weight of a balcony. Find myself at the river again.
Scaffolds everywhere, workers chipping away at old walls, constructing new ones. Reading about the dissidents who were assigned jobs as stokers by the Communists, I used to think what a punishment it would be for a painter or writer to have to shovel coal into some furnace. I didn’t imagine there would be people who do those jobs anyway: now I see them shoveling coal into small buckets with leather straps and hoisting the straps around their necks and lugging them into buildings, men rolling wheelbarrows up stairs rigged with boards, into windows via loose planks that bend and bounce under their loads. In the other direction come wheelbarrows full of rubble, which the men transfer, one shovelful at a time, into a dumpster—navigating the river of tourists, coughing. Their faces are covered in brown dust.
Just outside the center of the city, bisected by a boulevard but otherwise covering many square blocks, is the modern Jewish cemetery. Inside the main gate a sign directs visitors to “Dr. Kafka, 400 m.,” where he’s buried with his parents. The plots along the way are covered in ivy and have taken on the shapes of people lying in green rows. Mausoleums for families whose stature has been forgotten—who could have imagined in so short a time? Their delicate wrought-iron gates are frozen open. Ivy chokes the twists and flourishes, obscures the paths. Another Jewish cemetery in the city was partially razed and excavated—what did they do with the bones?—during the construction of the Žižkov Television Tower. Signs of Jewish absence everywhere.
Tables of new books for sale on the street, many about omelets or bonsai. Countless copies in used bookstores of Sinclair’s Jungle and Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang. In the Metro, people read books in homemade wrappers, sometimes cut out of a brown paper bag: to protect the covers? disguise the contents? Rocking back and forth through the tunnels beneath the city, I relive taking in what people were reading on the E train, the A train, the IRT on my way to work. Anaïs Nin, Fractal Geometry, Jane Jacobs, The Koran, The Book of Common Prayer, The Kaballah, Thomas Merton, Arundhati Roy. Each in a separate world, jostling against one another. Maybe I miss riding the subway. Maybe I miss the city of sorrow. And the view from my window, staring out of it for hours. The garden that was once the yard of a women’s jail—in all seasons. An explosion of textures, like the voices of the women calling down from their barred windows to their lovers on the street below. The day when for hours afterward people hung around, their backs to the garden, pointing to the spot where it happened, where they’d come from, the blood that hadn’t been washed away. The terrible crash, the screams, the mangled bicycle. (The preciousness of each life devoured by war.) An ambulance came and two emergency workers, a guy and a much taller woman, took the bike messenger up the street to St. Vincent’s. They say you get used to that in the city—what in the human realm are called accidents, the powerful stepping over the homeless, the noise, the not knowing whether the messenger lived or died— and what happened to the driver if a life ended there—but I couldn’t.
Which is not to dismiss the beauty of it, the invigorating randomness, the fragile seasons, the idleness, the industry, the deep loss. Fur merchants standing behind long tables, animal pelts piled in front of them, window displays of artificial eyes, costume jewelry stores, people in wheelchairs, almost asleep, holding out paper cups with an image of the Parthenon, a few coins inside about to fall—all its exultant melancholy, erotic loneliness rushes through me, still.
Read more in Little Star #3 (2012)
Photo by Revan Schendler