“No,” Grandpa says, and nothing more.
He leads me out of the cabin, past the gate, over the river bridge, back to the main road, and as we walk his No resonates, its tone weak and uncommitted, so unlike the declarative nature of my grandfather’s usual speech, where every syllable is a truth not to be trifled with. A silent, humiliated No spoken by an entirely different man. A No that meant nothing.
“We’re not leaving,” I say once we’ve returned to the house.
“Go wash up. Grandma will be home soon. I’ll boil up frankfurters.”
“We’re not leaving.”
“No. We are not.”
My grandparents speak somberly late into the night. I poke ?íma’s tongue as I read Robinson Crusoe with a flashlight underneath the bedsheet.
The pub owner will no longer serve my grandfather. He drinks in the garage while sharpening his killing knives.
We find a gutted rat on our doormat. Most likely the cats.
We look into school transfers for me. I could wake up at 5 a.m. and take the bus to a school three villages away.
We take a train to the doctor in Louny and he spreads ointment on my wound. “Healing nicely,” he says. “It will be the world’s most interesting scar.”
I pull newspapers from the trash. Prague apartments circled in green.
No.
I pass by Shoe Man’s cabin three times. Its windows and doors are shuttered. A feral cat jumps at me from the top of the gate. I urinate onto the side of the house. Scratch tiny obscenities into the wood with a pocketknife.
The man who usually buys my grandfather’s rabbit skins says he can’t accept them anymore.
My grandmother is no longer welcome in the book club she founded. I catch her whispering to her plants early in the morning.
No.
My grandfather’s hair seems terribly thin and gray, his eyelids sagging, like cave openings so small no human could breach them.
My grandmother’s retirement check is lost in the mail. For two weeks, Grandpa has to take a job as overnight security in town to ensure we can pay the gas company. Every day for breakfast and dinner he eats cheap French fries from the rotisserie chicken stand across from work. Sometimes the cook takes pity and gives him the burnt wings that would otherwise be tossed. His breath and sweat smell of canola oil, and he spends what little time he has with us talking about his pigs, his land, food that fills the stomach to capacity without tearing at his intestinal lining. The lost check is never recovered, despite multiple filings with the government.
Five weeks have passed since Grandpa’s No, and subconsciously we begin to pack our belongings. None of us has the strength to uphold the belief in our No. We are in agreement without needing to speak.
We leave so many things behind. We bring the great oak table my great-grandfather carved when he worked as a carpenter for the Austro-Hungarians. A painting from the seventeenth century of a crying redheaded girl who looks just like my grandmother. Pots, pans, and porcelain plates that survived world wars and great floods. We leave behind the double king bed under which my grandmother hid when sirens announced the possibility of bombings from the Luftwaffe. We leave the stove that has kept the house warm since the days of Franz Ferdinand. We leave the dozen stray cats living in the attic with a full bowl of milk in place of an apology. We leave the rabbits, the chickens, the small new Louda. The dozen hand-carved puppets with which my grandmother put on plays for schoolchildren. The outhouse with its arachnid families. We leave books that have escaped Austro-Hungarian burnings, German burnings, Stalinist burnings, books that have kept the language alive while regimes attempted to starve it out. We can bring only so much.
We leave ?íma in another village with our cousin Alois. He is too wild for the city, too fond of chasing little creatures and swimming in the river. It would not be fair to make him suffer the concrete and the noise of endless city cars. My grandmother and I cry for him as we ride the train from Alois’s back to St?eda. ?íma.
Throughout moving day, I clutch my copy of Robinson Crusoe. The marks of mice teeth pock the cover and the smell of mold clings to it, but the hard spine holds as strong as the gates of a fortress. After we are all loaded up, Grandpa insists on painting the gate before we leave. The movers, a couple of lanky Kazakhs with rum on their breath, smoke cigarettes and sigh with annoyance. I try to help, but he asks to do it alone. He has to break every few minutes because of the back pain, the strain in his deltoids and forearms. When we finally drive off, the gate is the color of fresh wooden logs that Grandpa and I would fetch from the forest during early spring, wood well-fed by morning rains and rich soil, wood that we’d have to leave out in the sun for months before it began to dry and lose its will to live. We leave the gate brown and solid for its new fate.