The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (50 page)

He used to tie his own trout flies. I'd come down late at night when we still lived in the old house, sneaking past the yellow bedroom where my sister slept in her crib, stepping over the creaking mines, and he'd be sitting there at the dining room table with just the one lamp, his hooks and feathers and furs spread out on the wood around him, and when he saw me he'd sit me on his knee, my stockinged feet dangling around his calves, and show me things. "Couldn't sleep?" he'd say. "Look here, I'll show you something important." And he'd catch the bend of a hook in the long-nosed vise and let me pick the color of the thread, and I'd watch him do what he did, his thin, strong fingers winding the waxed strand back from the eye or stripping the webbing off a small feather or clipping a fingernail patch of short, downy fur from the cheek of a hare. He didn't explain and I didn't ask. He'd just work, now and then humming a few notes of whatever he'd been listening to—Debussy or Chopin, Mendelssohn or Satie—and it would appear, step by step, the slim, segmented thorax, the gossamer tail, the tiny, barred wings, and he'd say, "Nice, isn't it?" and then, "Is it done?" and I'd shake my head, because this was how it always went, and he'd say, "Okay, now watch," and his fingers would loop and settle the thread and draw it tight so quickly it seemed like one motion, then clip the loose end close to the eye with the surgical scissors. "Some things you can finish," he'd say.

I don't know how old I was when I was first drawn to their faces on the mantelpiece—not old. Alone, I'd pull up a chair and stand on it and look at them: my grandfather, tall, slim, stooped, handsome, his hair in full retreat at thirty; my grandmother with her sad black eyes and her uncomfortable smile—almost a wince—somehow the stronger of the two; my aunt, a child of four, half turned toward her mother as if about to say something ... My father stood to the right, an awkward eight-year-old in a high-necked shirt and tie, a ghost from the future. I'd look at this photograph and imagine him taking it down when we weren't around, trying to understand how it was possible that they could be gone all this time and only him left behind. And from there, for some reason, I'd imagine him remembering himself as a boy. He'd be standing in the back of a train at night, the metal of the railing beneath his palms. Behind him, huddled together under the light as if on a cement raft, he'd see his family, falling away so quickly that already he had to strain to make out their features, his father's hat, his mother's hand against the black coat, his sister's face, small as a fingertip ... And holding on to the whitewashed mantelpiece, struggling to draw breath into my shrinking lungs, I'd quickly put the picture back as though it were something shameful. Who knows what somber ancestor had passed on to me this talent, this precocious ear for loss? For a while, because of it, I misheard almost everything.

It began with the hare's mask. One of the trout flies my father tied—one of my favorites because of its name—was the Gold Ribbed Hare's Ear, which required, for its bristly little body, a tiny thatch of hare's fur, complete with a few long, dark guard hairs for effect. My father would clip the hair from a palm-sized piece of fall-colored fur, impossibly soft. For some reason, though I knew fox was fox and deer hair was deer hair, I never read the hare's mask as the face of a hare, never saw how the irregular outline spoke the missing eyes, the nose ... Whatever it was—some kind of optical illusion, some kind of mental block—I just didn't see it, until I did.

I must have overheard my parents talking one night when they thought I was sleeping and made of it what I could, creeping back up to my room with a new and troubling puzzle piece that I would have to place, and would, in my way. I couldn't have known much.

The full story was this. As a young boy growing up on Taborská Street in Brno, Czechoslovakia, my father would have to go out to the rabbit hutch in the evenings to tend the rabbits and, on Fridays, kill one for dinner. It was a common enough chore in those days, but he hated doing it. He'd grow attached, give them names, agonize endlessly. Often he'd cry, pulling on their ears, unable to choose one or, having chosen, to hit it with the stick. Sometimes he'd throw up. Half the time he'd make a mess of it anyway, hitting them too low or too high so they'd start to kick, and he'd drop them on the floor and have to do it again. Still, this is what boys did then, whether they liked it or not.

In September of 1942, when he was nine, a few months after the partisans assassinated Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, my father's family hid a man in the rabbit hutch. My grandfather, who had fought with the Legionnaires in Italy in 1917, built a false wall into the back, making a space two meters long and a half meter wide. There was no light. You couldn't stand up. The man—whose name my father never knew, but who may have been Miloš Werfel, who was captured soon afterward and sent to Terezín, where he was killed the following spring—stayed for nine days.

Both had their burdens. My father, who had to go on making his miserable trips to the hutch to keep from attracting the neighbors' attention, now had to slide a food plate through the gap between the false wall and the floorboards, then take the bucket of waste to the compost pile, dump it, clean it out, return it. By the time he was done taking care of the rabbits, the plate would be empty. Werfel, for his part, lying quietly in the dark, broken out in sores, had to endure my father's Hamlet-like performances. To whack or not to whack. There were bigger things than rabbits.

Nine days. What strange, haunted hours those must have been that they spent in each other's company, neither one able to acknowledge the other (my father was under strict orders, and Werfel—if it
was
Werfel—knew better), yet all the time aware of the other's presence, hearing the slow shift of cloth against wood or air escaping the nose, or even, in Werfel's case, glimpsing some splinter of movement through a crack.

Who knows what Werfel thought? Poet, partisan, journalist, Jew—each an indictment, any two worthy of death—he must have known where things stood. Not just with himself, but with the boy who brought him food and took the bucket with his waste. Partisans weren't supposed to have children—this was just one of those things. As for my father, he didn't think about Werfel much. He didn't think how strange it was that a grown man, his suit carefully folded in a rucksack, should be lying in his underwear behind a board in the rabbit hutch. He didn't think about what this meant, or what it could mean. He thought about Jenda and Eliška.

Jenda and Eliška were rabbits, and they were a problem. That September, for whatever reason, my father's Uncle Lada hadn't been able to bring the family any new rabbits, and the hutch was almost empty. Jenda and Eliška were the last. My father, who had been protecting the two of them for months by taking others in their place, thought about little else. With that unerring masochism common to all imaginative children, he'd made them his own. They smelled like fur and alfalfa. They trusted him. Whenever he came in, they'd hop over to him and stand up like rabbits in a fairy tale, hooking their little thick-clawed feet on the wire. They couldn't live without each other. It was impossible. What he had yet to learn was that the impossible is everywhere; that it hems us in at every turn, trigger set, ready to turn when touched.

And so it was. Locked in by habit, my father had to go to the hutch to keep Mrs. Čermáková from asking after his health because the other evening she'd just happened to notice my grandfather going instead, had to go because habit was safety, invisibility, because it held things together, or seemed to; because even in this time of routine outrages against every code and norm—
particularly
in this time—the norm demanded its due. And so off he went, after the inevitable scene, the whispering, the tears, shuffling down the dirt path under the orchard, emerging ten minutes later holding the rabbit in his arms instead of by its feet, disconsolate, weeping, schooled in self-hatred ... but invisible. The neighbors were used to his antics.

It wasn't enough, something had been tripped; the impossible opened like a bloom. Two days after my father, his eyes blurring and stinging, brought the stick down on the rabbit's back, the hutch felt different; Werfel was gone. Five days later, just before nine o'clock on the morning of October 16, 1942, my father's parents and sister were taken away. He never saw them again. He himself, helping out in a neighbor's garden at the time, escaped. It shouldn't have been possible.

Sixteen years later my father had emigrated to New York, married a woman he met at a dance hall who didn't dance, and moved into an apartment on Sixty-third Road in Queens, a block down from the Waldbaum's. Four years after that, having traded proximity to Waldbaum's for an old house in rural Putnam County, he'd acquired a son, a daughter, and the unlikely hobby of trout fishing. And in 1968, that daughter came to the table, poured some milk on her Cap'n Crunch, and announced that she wanted a rabbit for her sixth birthday.

I'd begun to understand some things by then—I was almost nine. I knew, though he'd never show it, how hard this business with the rabbit would be for him, how much it would remind him of. Though I couldn't say anything in front of him, I did what I could behind the scenes. I offered my sister my gerbils, sang the virtues of guinea pigs, even offered to do her chores. When she dug in, predictably—soon enough it was a rabbit or death—I called her stupid, and when she started to cry, then hit me in the face with a plastic doll, I tried to use that to get the rabbit revoked. It didn't work. She'd been a good girl, my mother said, incredibly. We lived in the country. I had gerbils. It wasn't unreasonable.

That weekend we drove to the pet store in Danbury (I could come too if I behaved myself, my mother said), and after a last attempt to distract us from our mission by showing my sister the hamsters running on their wheels or pawing madly at the glass, I watched as my father leaned over the pen, lifting out one rabbit after the other, getting pine shavings on his lap while she petted their twitching backs or pulled their stupid ears ... I wanted to hit her. When I took my father's hand at one point he looked down at me and said, "You okay?" and I said, "Sure." My sister picked out an ugly gray one with long ears, and as we were leaving the store I stuck out my foot and she hit herself on one of the metal shelves and my father grabbed me and said, "What's the matter with you, what's gotten into you these days?" and I started to cry.

It got worse. I wouldn't help set up its cage. I wouldn't feed it. I refused to call it by its name. I started calling it Blank for some reason. When my sister asked me something about it, I'd say, "Who? You mean Blank?" and when she started to cry I'd feel bad but I couldn't stop and part of me felt better. When it kept my sister up at night with its thumping and rustling and my parents moved its cage to the living room, I started walking around the other way, through the kitchen. I'd pretend to myself that I couldn't look at it, that something bad would happen if I did, and even watching TV I'd put my hand up as if scratching my forehead, or thinking, so that my eye couldn't slip. Sometimes I'd catch my father looking at me, and once he asked me if I'd like a rabbit of my own. When I said no, he pretended to be surprised.

It was sometime that fall that I had a bad dream and came down the stairs to find him sitting at the table under the lamp, tying his trout flies. He looked up at me over the silly half-glasses that went over his regular glasses that helped him to see. "Well, hello," he said. "Haven't done this in a while."

"I couldn't sleep," I said.

"Bad dream?"

"No," I said. I could hear the rabbit in the dark behind us, thumping around in his cage.

"He can't sleep either," my father said.

"What's that one called?" I said, pointing to the fly he had in the vise.

My dad was looking at me. "This one?" he said. And he told me, then showed me how it was made, clipping four or five blue-gray spears for the tail, then selecting a single strand from a peacock feather for the body. I watched him secure it with a few loops of thread, then start to wind it toward the eye of the hook, the short dark hairs sparking green with every turn through the light ... And that's when I saw it, not just the thick, familiar chestnut fur of the cheeks and head and neck, but now, for the first time, the missing nose and ears, the symmetrical cavities of the eyes, even the name itself, reaching back to deepest childhood through the medium of my father's voice saying, "Pass me the hare's mask," "Let's take a little bit off the hare's mask."

It was the next day that I took the hare's mask and hid it in my room. When he asked me if I'd seen it I lied, and when he came back upstairs after going through everything in the dining room (as though that piece of fur could have jumped from the table and hidden itself behind his books), I swore I didn't have it and even let myself get indignant over the fact that he wouldn't believe me. Eventually, he left. "For Christ's sake," I heard him saying to my mother downstairs, "it didn't just disappear," and then, "That's not the point and you know it."

I slept with it under my pillow. I'd keep it in my pocket and run my thumb over the thin edge of the eye socket and the soft bristly parts where my father had clipped it short. When no one was home I'd hold it up to the rabbit cage and, appalled at myself, thrilled and shaky, yell, "Look, look, this was you" to the rabbit, who would sometimes hop over and try to nibble at it through the wires. I pushed my nose into it, breathing in that indescribable deep fur smell.

And that's how he found me, holding the hare's mask against my face, crying so hard I didn't hear him come into the room, two days before my ninth birthday. Because he'd understood about dates, and how things that aren't connected can seem to be, and that he'd been nine years old when it happened. And he held me for a long time, petting my hair in that slightly awkward, fatherly way, saying, "It's okay, everything's going to be okay, everything's just fine."