“You know that the world is always trying to take us. This country, that country. We can’t fight the whole world, the ten million of us, so we pick the people we think should be punished, and we make them suffer the best we can. In one book, your father is a hero. In another book, he is a monster. The men who don’t have books written about them have it easier.”
He gathers the liver, the heart, the kidneys. He slices off the legs and ribs, and leaves the skin hanging on the tree as we make our way back to the house. The fur will dry for a few days before Grandpa sells it. We peel chicken shit from our shoes with a butter knife, and while Grandpa washes the meat in the tub before packaging it for the freezer, I ask Grandma to make tea. On the living room table, a gigantic footprint disturbs a thin layer of dust. I wish the shoe was still there so I could touch it. At some point, my father had touched it, and perhaps a piece of him remained on it, a speck of dust, the smallest flake of skin composed of the same life as mine. When I go to sleep that night, no longer with fever but still nauseated, my grandparents speak in the kitchen, and there is one word I can safely recognize, repeated over and over: Prague.
A FEW DAYS LATER, I am well again. After school, I walk by the River Oh?e stretching from St?eda throughout the county, eventually connecting to the Labe, the blue vein of Europe. Red catkins cover the river’s surface. An occasional splash of fish interrupts the Sunday lunchtime silence of the main road. Everyone is at home eating potatoes and schnitzel, or potatoes and sausage, or potatoes with sour cream. They will watch the political debate shows where the newly found apostles of democracy spar with one another about how a free market should function and how severely communist collaborators should be punished under the humanist direction of President Havel’s slogan: Love and truth prevail over hate and lies.
Up ahead, beneath a low-hanging leafy branch, a man is pissing against the trunk of a birch tree. He zips up and turns around. The stranger with the shoe.
“Little spaceman,” he says, chewing.
“You’re not supposed to talk to me.”
“Charming places, these villages. Nice break from Prague. Too many Americans and Brits flowing in with their cameras after the fall of Moscow. Here, it’s beer and rivers and soccer friendlies. Good place for a boy. Gum?”
He extends his hand. Images of apples and oranges decorate the packet. I’ve never had this gum and I badly want to reach for some—the scent coming from the man’s mouth is as pleasant as that of cherry trees in the summer. But this man is not a friend. I slap the packet out of his hand and put my fists up, ready for him to strike. He laughs.
“Fighter! Good, good. Just don’t take it too far. Every man these days fancies himself a fighter. Not all of us are. And that’s okay. Just think: if the Americans had liberated us from Hitler before the Russians, we could’ve been free. Your father and I might’ve been great friends. You could’ve taken all the gum you wanted from me. I wonder. I always wonder.”
Until this moment, I have never felt hated. Back in Prague, I had a rivalry with a boy named Jacko—we were both good at soccer and thus always competing for captain of the school team. We had fights in which we slapped each other, and almost always missed, and we both knew we would never cause real harm. We professed hatred for each other, but I kind of liked him, and I believe he liked me too. Jacko is now gone, everyone I knew in Prague is gone from my life, and now I miss him and the rules of our engagement, because there are no rules established with the man in front of me. He smirks as if he knows things. He has walked into my grandparents’ house and made my grandfather, Grandpa the son of Perun, look weak. And now he is with me alone, and I recall all the news stories that make me sick to my stomach, the stories in which people of my age are dragged into the woods and killed by adults. I keep my fists up. Whatever he does to me, I won’t let it be easy.
The man lights a cigarette and turns away. I feel as if I might fall to the ground. He makes his way up to the main road, then north, toward the vacation houses. I sit down and breathe, absorb the adrenaline, my thoughts regaining clarity. Next to me rests the stranger’s packet of gum. I pick it up, rip off the wrapper, and place the pink contents on my tongue. It is sweet and sour, like berries with cream. I throw the gum in the river, as far as I can. While I walk home, I imagine the American tanks, decorated by the Allied silver star, rolling down our potato fields, and the girls of Bohemia lending their lips to the cut jaws and healthy bodies of boys raised on Marlboros and fudge sundaes instead of embracing the bare bones and starved chests of Soviet boys. What could’ve been.
For hours I walk the fields, throw pebbles at ducks, whistle tunes that do not exist outside my own mind, tease vicious dogs behind gates by poking at them with a stick. I feel childish, having never asked my father about his life. What I knew of our family while my father was alive came from hearsay and from the strange gestures of people around us, the way my friends cowered and catered to my every whim whenever we went outside (and now I wonder: What about Jacko? Why was he not afraid of me? Perhaps his parents failed to warn him, or maybe he was simply a maverick who didn’t care about my family’s status), or from how our neighbors ran into their apartments as my mother and I returned from the market so they wouldn’t have to say hello to us. I search my mind for these moments now, careful not to make them up, but the distinction vanishes like morning mist stretching along the lake’s surface. What I’m sure of now is that there is a stranger who sees my father in me and hates me for it. I am hated, and perhaps he wishes me harm, true harm. For a moment I wish to take it all back, the revolution, the fall of the Party. I want to be back at our big apartment in Prague, with my parents cooking together and tossing food at each other, the steam of the radiator fighting the annexation of winter. I don’t care what reigns outside our house—capitalism, communism, or anything else—as long as my parents will return to me and keep me safe from men like the stranger. Yes, perhaps my father could even torture him a little. I would allow it. I would ask my father to torture the man until he stopped hating me.
I wipe my face on my shirt, look around to ensure no one witnessed my sobs.
At sunset, I walk back to the house. As I arrive, only half of the sun peeks over the horizon. On the solid brown wood of the gate, letters have been spray-painted in red:
Stalin’s pigs, Oink Oink Oink.
Urine and spit drip to the grass below. I read the words repeatedly until it is dark and I can no longer see them. I enter the living room and Grandma looks at me from the newspaper. Wieners boil on the stove.
“What’s on TV tonight?” I ask.