“I’m tired, Hanu?.”
At last I looked at the oxygen gauge, which showed three minutes of remaining oxygen. The ship’s claw was no longer erect. It had bent into position, ready to pick me up, or perhaps to penetrate me—what was the difference? They would save me in time unless I removed my helmet. I did not want to be saved. By anyone, but especially not by Them. Those who had engineered my father, had given him the power that transformed him into what they needed him to be. This was the one thing my grandfather and I had never agreed on. He insisted that the blame should be placed on the person, not the circumstances. My father, he felt, was bound to make the same kinds of mistakes under any regime. I couldn’t accept this. I couldn’t accept that without the arrival of the Rus, without Moscow’s puppets in Czechoslovakia waving rewards and promises in front of my father’s desire for a better life, he would still be capable of inflicting the same pain. We do not live outside history. Not ever. And here I was, another Procházka forced to capitulate to the occupier.
As I checked the oxygen gauge again, I recounted the number of people who owed me explanations, who owed me looks and kindness and life. There was Lenka. Somewhere out there she existed, outside the picture sent to me as consolation, and the simple temptation that her hands might once again touch my sore back seemed reason enough to consider breathing the expiring O2.
What kind of carpet did Emil Hácha feel underneath his feet inside Hitler’s office as he pondered whether the Czechs would fight against invasion and be slaughtered, or concede and lose dignity? After making the old man wait until the morning hours while he watched movies with his posse, Hitler spit in Hácha’s face as he recounted the various ways in which a country could be raped, in which children and women could be bled, in which the king towers of Prague could be bombarded, shot, burned, stomped into a fine powder, and soaked in the piss of the Gestapo. How close was Hácha to exercising stupid heroism, to asking Hitler to go fuck a herring, thereby earning himself a bullet in the cheek and slaughter for his nation? He too was a bastard in a basket, an old man of ill health who had replaced the president in exile after Hitler’s machinations picked the republic apart. The country had been sold to the highest bidder at the Munich Betrayal, where, without our presence, Chamberlain/Daladier/Mussolini/Der Führer shook hands, ate tea sandwiches, and agreed that a wee Czechoslovakia was a small price to pay for world peace. How close was Hácha to unleashing the Great Genocide of the Czechs and Slovaks? How much easier might it have been simply to die at the Führer’s hand and allow for someone else to deal with the greater questions? Hácha chose life, and shame. His reward was seeing the nation survive, witnessing the capital emerge from the war unscathed, unlike the beautiful towers of Warsaw and Berlin. After Hitler’s abuse, Hácha fainted. The Nazi royalty helped him to his feet shortly before he signed the country over into protective occupation by Germany. This coward who saved the nation by giving it up along with his pride.
Two minutes of life remained and I held on to my friend. When I gripped one of his legs more tightly it fell from his body like a leech, trailing bubbles of gray juice. His lips and belly fur were sticky with chocolate and hazelnut. And then I saw them: Hanu?’s Gorompeds, those little ovum parasites that lived in his blisters, crawling onto my suit and finding their way underneath it. They swarmed between my armpit hairs. I kicked, pulled both Hanu? and me away from the Russian ship to buy just a bit more time before the rescue. The Claw was so near my legs I felt goose bumps at the anticipation of its touch.
I saw what would have happened if Hácha had decided to die for principle. He would have gotten his bullet to the head, and the Aryans thirsty to claim their Slav slaves would have overrun the fighters of our nation, whose Bohemian bodies would have turned the Vltava red as they floated West, small gifts to Chamberlain and his na?veté. I saw Prague burning; the castle that had served the most magnificent of European kings pillaged by the greedy hands of hate-filled German boys; beautiful village girls with freckles hiding under their beds from the entitled hands of sour-breathed captains; the Moravian grapevines flattened under tank belts; the pure creeks and hills of ?umava soiled by guts and deforested by hand grenades. Hácha had made his decision. Death was too easy.
The Claw caught my ankle, as gently as a mother tugging on a newborn. It pulled.
“I wish you could come with me,” I told Hanu?.
I felt him shrink. Another leg left us.
“Not much longer now,” he said.
“You have saved me,” I said.
“Would you feel better if I wasn’t real?”
“No.”
“What are your regrets?” Hanu? said.
“Now that I know I’ll live, I have millions.”
“Odd.”
“I don’t know if I want to go back. To divide life into mornings and nights. To walk upright, attached at the foot.”
“Do not leave, then, skinny human.”
The grip of the Claw tightened. Did the Russians see the friend in my embrace?
“I want to die within you,” Hanu? said. “Take me to a good place. I too will show you where I come from. Home.”
A Goromped crawled across my cheek, evoking the sensation of a sticker that Lenka had once attached to it. I remembered the pain then as I had pulled the sticker from my beard, removing a small patch of hair in the process.
This would be my final gift to Hanu?. I did not cower from his invasion. For the first time I felt the heaviness and despair of death that he had learned from me, a dull pain in my abdomen. My dry tongue encountered a new sore on my gums and my head was battered by the pressure building at the back of my skull. In these last moments, Hanu? was welcome to every last bit of my lifetime. I craved to see his home.
What came to me was an afternoon in May. A beautiful month. Lenka and I used to read Karel Hynek Mácha together. He wrote a famous romantic poem about May, and all of us had to learn it in school, rolling our eyes at its sentiments, not yet understanding how easily pleasures led to poetry. There is a section I can hear Lenka read as if she were here now, as she was back then inside our tent in the forest, lying naked with her hair tucked behind her ears, sweat glistening on the white fuzz of her belly button:
In shadowy woods the burnished lake
Darkly complained a secret pain,
By circling shores embraced again;
And heaven’s clear sun leaned down to take
A road astray in azure deeps,
Like burning tears the lover weeps.