The Visible World (3 page)

Soon he was bigger than a house. When he ate the plow horse, his mother and father came out to plead with him. Otesánek, please, they said, we will have nothing if you keep this up. When will you stop? Quick as lightning, Otesánek grabbed his mother and father in each of his huge, pudgy hands. When there is nothing more to eat, he croaked, and he stuffed them head-first into his mouth.

Otesánek ate the whole town: the cobbler and the cobbler’s wife, the tailor and the carpenter, the shopkeeper and the teacher and all the little children. One by one. And he might have gone on eating forever except for a little girl whom he had swallowed as she sat at her sewing holding a pair of rusty scissors. Down she went, down into the hot red room of his stomach. When she realized where she was, she took the scissors and cut a hole in Otesánek’s belly. Out she came. Out came the cobbler and the cobbler’s wife, the tailor and the carpenter, the shopkeeper and the teacher and all the little children. Out stepped the plow horse and the goat, the chickens and the geese. Out jumped the dog with the pink tongue. And out came Otesánek’s mother and father. They were happy to be alive. They danced and sang and carried the little girl around on their shoulders. And they all lived happily ever after.

I can still see him, the crease of the page cutting him vertically above the elbow and the knee. Dimpled knees arched across the road, he has just snatched his father and crammed him head-first into his mouth. He has a single tooth, as big as a dictionary. Black holes for eyes. To plead for mercy is absurd. There is no mercy here. He is the force that consumes, and he will keep on until the world—the narrow roads, the great square fields, the church itself, whose steeple pokes up like a child’s toy just above his thigh—is empty of man and beast. A grave under the sun. And only he is left.

They’re dying in the red room. All of them. Gesturing like bad Shakespearean actors, like swimmers fifty fathoms deep. The children turn slowly, uncomprehending, their schoolbooks paging in the hot tide.

A quick flash of inner pain, like gas, passes over the monster’s face. Something sparks on the white wall of his skin, like a diamond birthing itself from his heart. You can see it, there!—a tiny blade, spotted and fine. Now he is clawing at his stomach, thrusting his own fist down his throat, as though devouring himself. He is in agony. There is nothing he can do about it. He is as big as the sun, and he can’t stop it. To get at what’s killing him, he’ll have to tear himself open. Either way, he’ll die from within.

There she is, stepping through the thick door of his flesh into the morning air. The monster lies slumped against a hill, still in his diaper. She is holding the scissors by her side. She has long black hair and a sad mouth, and of all the people dancing in the square, she is the only one who isn’t smiling.

MY MOTHER HAD BEEN BORN IN
1920
IN RAČÍN, A VILLAGE
in the Vysočina highlands of Moravia. When I was a child she would tell me Račín looked very much like the pictures of Czech villages in my book
České pohádky,
and I would sit on my bed and look at them and imagine her there, hiding in the black shadow of an open door, or below the undercut bank of a stream. It seemed to me that if I looked closely enough, deeply enough, I’d make out her outline, a deeper dark within the shadow’s wedge, or recognize that bit of light between the blades of grass as the topmost curl of her hair.

When I visited Racin in 1979, I discovered that it was, in fact, just like the pictures in my book. A cluster of slate roofs. A tangle of close, muddy gardens and tilting fences. The requisite small, swift stream, thick with nettle, cutting under the road. An odd feeling. It was as though I had found myself inside my own storybook. No one seemed to be about that hot July afternoon—even the butterflies along the roadside seemed drugged, their wings opened wide across the blooms—and I wandered down a dirt road past a stagnant pond to the shade of a forest dotted with mossed stumps and thick tufts of grass, and all the time I had the strange but not unpleasant feeling of being watched.

At some point I remember sitting down on a pile of fresh-cut pines that someone had left by the wayside. The white circles where their branches had been lopped off made them look spotted. They were bleeding dark trails of sap from every cut—the air was rich with it. Large brown-and-purple butterflies I recalled from one of my childhood books moved in and out of the trees along the edge of the field; a small group fanned at the graying edge of a puddle a horse had left in the road. In my book, I remembered, the cardboard cutouts of the butterflies had slid in and out of invisible slots in the stems of flowers, opening and closing their wings as I opened and closed the book.

Back in the village I found the house—fourth down from the pond—without too much trouble. I had an old photograph, taken before the war. It hadn’t changed. I looked at it for a while, with its slate roof and stuccoed walls. At the end of a goat-eaten yard was an old barn, half stone, half brick. A sheep with bits of leaves and sawdust in its wool was lying in its shade. No one seemed to be at home, and after a minute or two, when the sheep hadn’t moved and the strangely familiar face of a six- or eight-year-old girl had not appeared in the double windows to stare at me—as I had half believed and feared it might—I went on my way. If there had been someone to warn, someone to tell of the things to come, I might have stayed.

She had been the third child born, and the first to survive. There had been a brother who came after her, she told me, though he had lived only a few hours, like a moth, and had been buried in a down-filled box hardly larger than a loaf of bread. My mother remembered that morning—the morning they buried her little brother—as one of the most precious moments of her childhood. She couldn’t tell me why. Sometimes there are things you love and can’t explain, she said.

A cold morning. A fresh wind roughed the grass along the road; the flowers shook their heads and nodded. Her father, she said, held her hand as they walked, his calloused palm as hard and warm as a piece of wood left in the sun. On the way, she remembered, he told her a wonderful story about a
trpaslík
—an elf—who knew the path to a stone door, no taller than a hammer, that led to the other world. The one below the pond. From there, her father told her, you could look up and see
this
life, see everything—the trees, the separating clouds, the fishermen pulling at their earlobes or folding up their wooden stools—all this, just slightly distorted, like a face behind poorly made glass or a pane of new ice. These glimpses of our world were very precious to those who lived below; they could gaze at a dog’s pink tongue lapping at the edge of the sky for hours, and on those rare afternoons when the children leaped from the clouds, spearing down toward the silted roofs of their world clothed in white sheaths of bubbles, they would gather in great swaying crowds, their clothes fluttering about them, and weep.

I begged her to tell me what happened after that, how the story ended, but she had forgotten. It didn’t matter. There were some things my mother wouldn’t tell me—I was used to that. But the story bothered me. I wondered what the pond people did in the winter when the sky above their heads stiffened and their world went dark; how they could see or play, and whether they had great watery fires to keep them warm.

And so, for some time after my mother told me her father’s half-story, whenever I found myself alone with one of my parents’ friends, I would ask them—Mrs. Jakubcová, for example. Mrs. Jakubcová had never had any children of her own. She had calves as big and smooth as bowling pins, and she always sat on the sofa with her legs to one side as if glued at the knees, and smelled sweet and sad, like a dusty pastry. One day I asked her about the people who lived under the pond, and while I was at it, why the young man had played the piano instead of calling for a doctor, and who the men in the crypt had been. And she tented a napkin over her finger and touched it to the corners of her lips two or three times—a few yellow crumbs and a chalk line of powdered sugar had stuck to her rose-colored lipstick—and told me that as far as she knew the people who lived in the pond slept a kind of half-sleep, like bears, waking fully only when the ice had cracked apart and light came into their world again, and that she didn’t know but that perhaps the young man had cared for his music more than he did for himself, and that the men in the crypt had been heroes. Czech patriots. Those had been hard times, she said.

Some weeks later I tried Mr. Hanuš, who walked with two canes because he had lost all his toes in a town I thought was named Mousehausen, but when I asked him one evening after he’d hobbled into my room to say good night to me (for he insisted on this), he didn’t seem to know anything about the pond people sleeping through the long winters. Sitting on the edge of my bed—I couldn’t have been more than six—he told me that the winters were the times of storytelling, when they imagined what they could not see and entertained themselves with long, complicated tales in which all the things they had glimpsed the year before played a role. I asked him about the young man who played the piano. Robert Nezval hadn’t wanted to live anymore, he said. Picking a big, gray picture book off the floor (it was a book of Greek myths; I have it still), he began to page through it absent-mindedly, past the picture of the herd of cows that Hermes stole from Apollo, with their bright yellow horns and blushing udders, past Athena being born from the head of Zeus, and Persephone being dragged into the earth by Hades. I wanted to show him the small wooden brooms that Hermes had tied to the cows’ tails to erase their tracks, and the four sleeping pigs, pink as newborn mice, falling into the dark with Persephone, but he was moving too quickly. Sometimes people just didn’t want to live anymore, he said. It happened.

As for the men in the crypt, he said, it had been a bad time and they had done a brave thing, as true and just a thing as one could imagine, and thousands had died because of it. That happened too.

“What did they do?” I asked him.

“They killed a man named Reinhard Heydrich.”

“How?”

“How?”

“How did they kill him?”

Mr. Hanuš sighed. “They tried to shoot him but the gun didn’t work, so they threw a bomb which wounded him and later he died. This all happened long before you were born, in 1942.”

“Did he wear a black helmet?”

“Heydrich? No. A kind of cap. Some of his soldiers did, though.”

“Why did they kill him?”

“He was a cruel man. He deserved to die.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because he killed a great many people who did not deserve it, and sent many more to places that were very bad.”

“Like prison?”

“Worse.”

“Did you...?”

“So who is this?” he asked me, pointing to a picture of Selene gazing down from the moon at sleeping Endymion, who lay, vaguely smiling, surrounded by strangely wild-looking sheep. He looked at me over the tops of his half-glasses. “I get to ask some questions too, you know,” he said.

So I told him how it was Selene, the moon, who had seen a shepherd named Endymion and fallen in love with him and had asked Zeus to grant him the gift of eternal sleep so that he might remain forever young and handsome, and that that was why she was looking at him from a hole in the moon. “I see,” said Mr. Hanuš. “And who does this huge hand with the grasshopper belong to?” That, I said, was the hand of Selene’s sister, Eos, who had also fallen in love with someone, maybe another shepherd, I wasn’t sure, but had made the mistake of asking the gods for eternal life instead of eternal sleep—a big mistake—and so had been left with just a grasshopper in her hand.

Mr. Hanuš looked at the picture thoughtfully. “I like the sheep,” he said. He closed the book with a gentle clap. “If I were you, I would stay away from sisters like that. And the gods too, maybe. Now go to sleep, quickly—until morning will do—or your mother will be angry with me.”

I lay down on my pillow and he pulled the dinosaur blanket up to my chin and petted my hair once, and I let him because I knew that this was important to him. “I’ll tell your mother and father to come give you a kiss,” he said, reaching for his canes. “Now sleep.”

And I slipped down as though pulled from below, and in my dreams that night the things I’d been told and the things I hadn’t mixed and blurred and Selene looked down over 63rd Road and SS troopers in their low, rounded helmets stood arrayed along the roof of Alexander’s department store watching as, far below, a silent herd of cows with yellow horns and brooms tied to their tails moved like a sea of humped, ridged backs through the unlit canyons toward Queens Boulevard, erasing themselves, while far, far above them in a dark apartment very close to the sky a young man sat in a wash of light as blue as ice and played the piano—beautifully, perfectly—until he fell asleep.

MY MOTHER AND FATHER MET IN BRNO IN
1939,
FOUR
months after the occupation began, when my father wrote her a love letter he had composed for someone else for a fee of ten crowns. He did this regularly, he told me, and did quite well by it. It was nothing, he said: a few particulars, a handful of ripe clichés, and the thing was done. This time, however, when he delivered the letter for his client, things went badly. “Honza didn’t write this,” the young woman who would be my mother declared almost as soon as she began reading it. She laughed, then read aloud: “‘...in the empty rooms and courtyards of my heart’? Oh, God.” My father started to say something. “Stop,” she said. “Honza’s a sweet boy, but he wouldn’t know a metaphor if it ran him over in the street.” She looked at my father. “What kind of man writes love letters for other men?” she said. “A poor one,” my father said.

They began to talk, and by the time he walked out of the pastry shop on Zapomenutá Street, where he had found her sitting with her girlfriends (the two of them had moved to a table near the back to talk privately), she had agreed to meet him the following day for a walk. There were reasons for this. He was handsome. He was not a fool. There was a kind of sad lightheartedness about him; he seemed not to care very much how he appeared to the world. And he had nerve. The day after they met, he found Honza in the locker room of the gymnasium after soccer practice (the schools had not been closed as yet) and gave him back the letter. He had decided to go out with the girl himself, he said. And when Honza, not entirely unreasonably, took offense at this turn of events, and with two of his friends gave my father a sound beating, my father, wiping the blood off his face with his sleeve, somehow managed to get up and pull a ten-crown coin out of his pocket. “Here,” he said, throwing it on the locker room floor. “A full refund.”