Nobody's Son by Mark Slouka

Author:Mark Slouka [Slouka, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XXIX

BACK IN THE 1970S, walking through the small, cobbled towns of Moravia, I’d often find myself waved over by people working in their yards—hoeing a garden, say, or building a wall—who’d somehow spotted my Western-style jeans or sneakers. They’d ask where I was from, then offer me a glass of home-made wine, or dinner, or a place to sleep, eager to show their hospitality to someone from the West. Our conversations would take place in freezing little wine cellars dug deep into the ground (heavy coats would always be hanging on pegs outside the entrance), or in tiny dining rooms with plastic tablecloths where, sooner or later, I’d be shown the hidden bust of Tomas Masaryk—the Czechs’ George Washington and, since 1948, a forbidden symbol of national independence.

I remember those people still, though the years have blurred their particular features into qualities: pouched eyes and moles and laborers’ hands, into generosity, curiosity, pride. We talked about many things over the course of those afternoons and evenings, but one thing I remember hearing over and again, which troubled and confused me, was that in some ways the war had been preferable to what had followed it. In 1942, the consensus was, you generally knew who your enemy was: He wore a uniform. He spoke German. He could be shot. After the Communist coup in 1948, the lines blurred; the enemy was your professor, your neighbor, your brother-in-law. The rot was inside now. If summary executions and mass deportations were no longer the order of the day, lives were being destroyed nonetheless, decade after decade, with no end in sight. There was more. In 1942 or ’43 there’d at least been victories to hope for—now there was nothing. The West had no business here, the Berlin wall was the wall, and those who refused to join the Party were out of luck. Reduced to their sense of humor and their appreciation for the absurd, they watched the years pass.

Twenty years later, fifteen years after the Velvet Revolution had consigned both the German and Soviet occupations to history, I asked my father if the opinions I’d heard back in the seventies—that the postwar years were worse than the war itself—surprised him. We were sitting at a “café” inside a horrible little mall on Vinohradská Street surrounded by mostly deserted, expensive stores—Montblanc, Versace, Louis Vuitton—catering to bulked-out Russian men and pneumatic women in leopard-print bustiers. Above us, hanging from the interior balcony in front of the second-floor stores, enormous posters of gorgeous models looked down on the Czechs who couldn’t afford their sunglasses.

My father, in his old-man’s beret, had hung his cane on the fake café “railing.” People were people—it was natural to see today’s enemy as worse than yesterday’s; still, he suspected the Jews might have a different take. And then there was the fact that Czechoslovakia had suffered considerably less during the war than Poland, for example; nostalgia for the Reich might be a tougher sell in Warsaw. He shrugged, took a

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