The Visible World (2 page)

But I could never go there. All I could do was peer from above as the people went about their day, unaware that with every step, every kiss, every tram ticket tossed to the curb, they were constructing the world that would shape my own.

WHEN I WAS A BOY WE LIVED IN A FIFTEENTH-FLOOR
apartment in Queens, like an aerie above the world, and at night my father would read to me from a thick yellow volume of Czech fairy tales. In the book was a page with a kind of tissue over it. Under it was a picture of a beautiful girl in a dark forest. She had thin arms and she wore a white dress like one of my mother’s scarves. She was leaning back against the trunk of a huge, mossed tree as though trying to protect it, a hunter’s arrow buried deep in her breast.

I would look at that picture when I was alone. At the thin fingers of her left hand splayed like a starfish, grasping the bark. At the blood-red fletching, the stub of the wooden shaft. At the place where it disappeared—right there, just above that small, painful arc, that indescribable, exquisitely painful arc. There was a look on her face, caught between the strands of black, blowing hair, that I found shameful and disturbing and mysterious. I could never look at it for long. A look of shock, of course. And pain, yes. But something else, something I could not understand then—can barely understand now. A look of pleading, of utter renunciation, of love. Of love beyond all song and argument.

No one could tell you about my father without first telling you something about her. She made him, you see, shaped him, turned him into the man he was. She changed the course of his life as easily as a hill turns a meadow stream. And though you might think that, given enough time, the stream will move the hill, or cut it through, it’s the stream that will twist in its bed, alter its course. The new comes to feel natural. Detour becomes destiny.

For twenty-six years, Antonín Sedlák was like every other mother’s son in the city of Brno, Czechoslovakia—four rows up, three over—running his own particular course to the sea. Then he ran into her, and nothing was ever the same for him again.

What can I say about my father that isn’t bent out of truth by hindsight, misshapen by love? My father was a good and decent man, I think, a man capable of outrage over the world he happened to have found himself in, but someone whose faith in reason, like some men’s faith in God or love, remained intact long after his life had made it ridiculous. He couldn’t help it. His every gesture departed from that well-lit station, and though he understood how quaint this was, he was powerless to change it. It was his nature, and he wore it with dignity, like a childhood hat one has long outgrown but can’t remove for the rest of his life. And somehow I could never bring myself to hold it against him.

I have a small, square photograph of him I’ve always liked for some reason I can’t quite explain. There he is—already tall at thirteen, handsome enough, seemingly comfortable in a collar as high and stiff as a whiplash brace—looking straight on. Not smiling. And yet there is something there—a touch of amusement perhaps, a calm recognition of the absurdity of the proceedings—that seems like a smile.

Everything that he accomplished in his life was a violence against that almost-smile. Against its generosity, its good-humored reasonableness and decency. Against his very nature. And that, too, the smile seems to anticipate, and accept for the irony it is.

I see him clearly now, like a house revealed by fallen leaves. My father, who fashioned himself over the years into a kind of load-bearing joint, braced up to his burden, and died two years after being relieved of it. Who didn’t know how to be in a world so suddenly lightened. I remember the bumps of blue veins on the backs of his hands, the mole on his cheek. I can see him, his big warm forehead, his way of listening while lighting a cigarette or taking a slow sip from his glass, that gesture of his—a slight backward tilt of the head, an open hand—at once wry and unresigned, as if to say, So, what would you do? I see him sitting in the chair by the long, low bookshelf, his bow and his violin propped against the wood next to him. Clean shaven. The flat planes of his cheeks. It embarrassed me to kiss him in front of my friends. I can see him smile. When he reaches for his glass or turns toward where I am kneeling, hidden in the wall, spying through the crack in the door behind my bed, the lenses of his small, rimless glasses turn into coins.

It was my father who told me about Pythagoras. I was seven years old. Pythagoras, he explained, besides doing some very nice work on triangles, which I would someday have to learn about, had believed that the essence of all things was a number, that our souls migrated like finches from life to life until we were liberated from the cycle of birth, and that eating beans was a form of cannibalism. He had come to this last belief, he said, because a cut-open bean looked, and still looks, very much like a human embryo. My father lit a cigarette. And so, he said, since human beings must act on their convictions and, whenever they see a tragedy unfolding, throw themselves headlong under the wheels of history, Pythagoras did what his conscience demanded, and banned the eating of beans. As a result, in Crotona during those few years, among the Pythagoreans if no one else, beans were accorded the respect they deserved.

Which would have been poignant enough, but no, history could never resist the extra step, the peacock’s turn—it would always sign with a flourish. Which was why, on a cloudy afternoon at the end of the fifth century before the birth of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, Pythagoras, fleeing Magna Graecia with a mob at his heels, came to the edge of a vast bean field sleeping peacefully under the sombrous sky and, rather than run through this tender nursery of souls, stopped, and was beaten to death with short sticks.

A sad story? Not at all, my father said. A story of courage and conviction, sacrifice and love. Pythagoras was a hero. He took a sip from his glass. A hero for our time.

I DON’T KNOW THAT THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN I
didn’t know their story. It was always there, like a ray of light cutting into the room. It had been there before me. I simply walked through it in my time.

When I was young, of course, I didn’t understand exactly why they had hidden themselves in a crypt, which I knew to be a kind of basement in which people were buried. Or what had happened to them there exactly. I only knew that there were seven of them, that they were Czech soldiers, parachutists, and that they had done something very brave. That they’d been surrounded. That they’d fought to live.

Like the Alamo, I said to my father. Not at all like the Alamo, he said. They were fighting for their own country.

In the afternoons, when my mother was in the kitchen, I would secretly play parachutist (my men would sit on the back of a gray model airplane like cowboys on a horse and sail down into occupied Czechoslovakia on tiny blue parachutes I’d found in a shop on Canal Street), and for a long time, whenever I sat at my desk, I would play “hidden soldiers,” setting up my GI Joes in the partly open drawer that held my pencils and erasers so that they could shoot at the Wehrmacht battalions (GI Joes with their helmets painted black) arrayed along the edge of my shelf. The soldiers, partisans and Germans alike, stood on a flat base, like a skateboard, holding their flexible green rifles. Every now and again I would find one with a tiny bit of plastic still clinging to him—a remnant of the mold from which he had been stamped, a kind of factory placenta—and I would take this bit of stuff webbing the crook of an elbow, say, or linking chin strap to chest, and carefully tear it off with my fingernails.

I would study their faces: the flat green planes of their cheeks, the slight indentations that were their eyes. I wasn’t sure, early on, whether the men in the crypt had lived or died, so sometimes I’d let them live, flying up to the top of my desk like armed angels. Other times they’d be killed, and I’d knock them down with my finger. I continued to do this—killing them one time, saving them the next—even after I knew what had happened to them.

Like all children, there were many things I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why it was that the roses of Karlovy Vary, when dipped into a bucket of mineral water at the cost of ten crowns a stem, would grow streaked with gray and green deposits and harden to stone. I didn’t understand the story I’d overheard of twenty-year-old Robert Nezval, the poet’s son, whose mother had walked into the family parlor one winter afternoon to find him playing the piano with both his wrists slashed.

But some things I knew. I knew there had been a war. That all the people we knew had gone through it in one way or another. That Czechoslovakia, the country my parents came from, had been taken over. That some had fought back, and others hadn’t.

I knew other things. I knew that once upon a time there had been someone for whom my mother had cared very much. Who had gone out hunting in the rain one morning and never returned. Who had lost his way in the forest. Or leaned too far over the water. I knew this the way children know things, and knowing it didn’t trouble me. It had to be that way so that things could be the way they were now. So that in the early mornings my father could draw me whales with his fountain pen instead of working on his dissertation—three quick strokes made a spout; a single touch of ink, a backward-glancing eye.

In the winters, when we were still living in the old apartment above 63rd Road, my mother would braid vánočka for Christmas Eve. She tried to teach me, but I was a hopeless case: my hands seemed to have been made for the express purpose of tearing dough or turning it into glue. Year after year I would stand beside her and watch her roll out four perfect ropes of yellow dough, press their ends together with the heel of her floured hand, then twine the separate plaits into a pattern of triangles, all the while dipping her fingers into a hill of flour spilled on a piece of curling wax paper. I understood nothing. She worked quickly, almost carelessly, with the kind of rough familiarity I had seen in expert gardeners, centering the flour into a flat-planed hill with her palms, wrecking it, building it up again. And suddenly it was done and she was painting the finished braid with egg yolks, making it shine.

I still remember those winter afternoons, with the perfume of the dying pine drifting in from the next room and the early dark coming on outside. The decorated balconies on the buildings opposite ours looked like small, multicolored candies. We laughed at the baggy constrictors of dough I produced and the great doughy highways I wove out of them, and one year she stuck big gecko pads to the ends of her fingers and chased me around the living room. I can still hear her laughter now and then, as if it had been trapped somewhere, and when I do, I’m once more in that kitchen with her, high above the world and separate.

After we were finished, I would watch her wiping the table down with short, sharp strokes, rinsing out the rag in the sink, pushing back her hair with her forearm. She would usually begin cleaning the sink immediately, sweeping around the edges with her hand, and I’d watch her scrub at the sides with blue cleanser, turning tight little whorls, miniature hurricanes. And suddenly—this is how it always was—something would change, and it would be as if there were someone else in the room with us.

“It doesn’t matter,” I heard her say once as she was rinsing her hands. “None of it matters.”

She turned off the water. For a few moments she leaned both hands on the sink, deciding, I thought, what to do next.

“Daddy should be home soon,” I said.

She was still thinking.

“Can I go play in my room?” I said.

My mother began wiping her hands on a dishrag decorated with pine trees and ornaments.

“Why don’t you go play for a while,” she said. “Daddy will be home soon.”

And there he would be. Placing his black hat carefully on the peg. Giving his heavy coat a shake before hanging it on the rack. My mother would come out of the kitchen holding a wooden spoon or an open cookbook and give him a quick kiss and then I’d be in his arms and he’d carry me down the hall and into our narrow living room, and after dinner he’d pull a chair to the side of my bed and read to me. The yellow shade of the pirate lamp made a small circle. My father would sit at the edge of it, holding the book in his left hand as though giving a sermon, always touching two fingers to his tongue before turning the page.

Once upon a time, he would read, there was a small village, and in that village lived a humble farmer and his wife. And to this couple one happy day there was born a son. They named him Otesánek.
What does Otesánek mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a name.
The farmer and his wife were very happy. Otesánek was a fat, healthy baby with small black eyes.
See?
Here’s Otesánek in his mother’s arms, and there’s the father, and there’s the horse, looking on from the stable. Is that their dog? I should think so.
All the neighbors came by to congratulate them. Look at those arms, said the tailor. Look at those legs, said the cobbler’s wife. What a healthy baby, they all said. Just look how he eats!

Otesánek ate and ate. He ate like no other baby had ever eaten before—
not like you, arguing with your
kašička
every morning
—and he grew like no other baby had ever grown before. The cow couldn’t give enough milk. The chickens couldn’t lay enough eggs.
Here he is, sitting on the floor. Look at all those pitchers of milk, all those loaves of bread. Is that his father? It sure is. Look how small he is. He doesn’t look very happy.
Otesánek’s mother and father ran all around the village buying food. Otesánek’s father carved him an extra-large spoon to eat with. But it wasn’t enough. Otesánek would eat whatever they put in front of him and scream for more.

Otesánek grew and grew. Soon he was bigger than his father. Soon he was bigger than a cow. He grew so big that he couldn’t fit into his parents’ little house anymore. He had to sit outside in the yard. One day a chicken wandered by, pecking at the dirt. Quick as a flash, Otesánek grabbed it and stuffed it in his mouth. The family goat came next, and the pigs, and the dog with the pink tongue. Otesánek ate the sheep in their hot, woolly coats. He ate the white geese that walked by the pond, and the carp that lived under the lily pads.
What are those, Daddy? Those? Those are the hooves of the cow.