Jaroslav Kalfař - Spaceman of Bohemia

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.

“A documentary about rock and roll in East Germany, before the wall fell. Octopus, a French gangster movie. Violent, but you can watch it.”

I want to confess to Grandma. I’d like to tell her that I wish my father would return and hurt people for me. I’d like to tell her that I am afraid. Instead I eat wieners with hot mustard and watch the Frenchmen on the screen, their mouths out of sync with the Czech words they speak. Grandma applies her facial cream and I ask to sniff it from the bottle.

“Did Grandpa see the gate?” I ask.

“Yes. He went to the pub to calm his nerves.”

Full and lazy, I lean back in the chair and place Šíma on my lap. Outside, I can hear Kuka, the village drunk, stumbling on the main road and singing about tits and rivers filled with Becherovka. The gate creaks open, and Šíma and I run to the door to greet Grandpa.

He sits down in a chair, blood dripping from his forehead onto both sides of his face. Šíma licks the salty spaces between Grandpa’s toes while Grandma soaks a snotty handkerchief in peroxide and holds it to the wound. Grandpa’s right cheek is black and swollen.

“It was Mládek and his little town friends,” he says.

Mládek, the town cretin, body fed by a lifetime of pork consumption but mind fed only by misdirected rage. He swaggers around town like its appointed sheriff with his deputies of Prague vacationer teenagers, living on his parents’ wages and drinking himself to an early death. He is the new breed of young Czech, the inadequacies that were both caused and subsidized by communism now rendering him useless to society. Of course Mládek finds his new cause in our family shame.

“Still had some red paint on his T-shirt, that fascist. All the new paint I have to buy. On this shitty retirement.”

“At least it’s not as shitty as it used to be,” Grandma says.

“It’s never enough,” Grandpa says. “Different lords and the same shit for the commoner.”

“Hold still.”

“Did you hit them?” I ask.

Grandma gives me the same look she uses when I step on her plants or forget to feed Šíma.

“I did. You know I did, Jakub. You should see them, goddamn heathens, fascist shitfuckers. I grabbed Mládek by the rat tail and dipped his schnoz into the pavement.”

“This is not how we wanted it,” Grandma says quietly.

“It’s all him. That shoe guy,” Grandpa says. “No one seemed to care much before he came here and started running his mouth. We can always leave.”

“We’ve done nothing,” Grandma says. “Old Sedláková’s son is in prison for touching a teenage boy, and what do you see on her gate? Nothing. Everyone trips over themselves to pat her shoulder, poor woman, giving birth to a monster—‘Here, we made you strudel.’ Why isn’t she running? What makes us different?”

“Perverts didn’t occupy the country for sixty years,” Grandpa says.

“They’ve occupied the planet since the dawn of days,” Grandma says.

She bandages the wound and gives him three shots of slivovitz for the pain, though his breath already stinks of rum and beer. Wordless, they retire to their bedroom and I slide under my covers. Šíma is not allowed on beds, but I pull him up anyway and bury my nose in his fur, the smell of Grandma’s cooking and residue of flea shampoo. Usually, my grandfather snores loudly throughout the night, but today, aside from the apple tree branches scratching on the roof, the house is silent. For the first time since my parents’ funeral, I can’t sleep.

My father loved Elvis Presley. He bought his records from a blacklisted German actor who smuggled them in through the Berlin Wall. He would put the record on when he cooked, when my mother cooked, before bed, while on the toilet, while in the bath, while looking out the window at the cloned concrete housing projects, magnificent and dreadful in their efficiency. Women returned from work and threw wet dresses and bras over the clothing lines fastened to poles just outside their windows, lines of dripping rags expanding across the world like the sails of a haunted pirate ship, while men walked slowly and with their heads down, unsure whether to go to the pub and risk arrest for saying the wrong thing after too many beers, or go home and face the one-station television and the single-thought shelf of books, tools incapable of interrupting the silence of their lives. My father smoked and nodded his head to the music and it seemed as though everything was just the way he wanted it.

Don’t tell anyone about Elvis, he would say at breakfast. His catchphrase. Those discovered listening to Western music were brought in for questioning, nothing too severe, as my father said (though I do wonder now: What did nothing too severe mean to him?), just a room with a small window and a casual comrade asking why the musical gifts from Mother Sovetia weren’t enough to make the suspect happy.

One day, my mother found the box of records on the kitchen table, outside their usual hiding place in the pantry.

“You’d lose your job if someone took a photograph through the window,” she said.

My father put his hand around her waist and caressed the edges of the records with his fingertip.

“They can take a thousand pictures,” he said, “and here we’re going to stay, drinking coffee and peeling potatoes. No one informs on the informer.”

Two days later, I found my father holding a cup to the wall between our living room and the neighbors’, his ear inside the hollow space. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for me to come over. He lowered the cup to my height and I listened. A sharp voice carried through static, announcing that a shortage of potatoes throughout the Soviet Union was just another sign of mismanagement by Moscow. Radio Free Europe, the cardinal sin, the enemy. My father went to his bedroom and dialed a number on the phone. About an hour later, shouting erupted in the hallway, and I cracked the door open to see Mr. Strezsman and his son, Staněk, being taken away by four police officers. I felt my father’s breath on the back of my neck, and Mr. Strezsman, in a voice not dissimilar to the deadpan voice of the radio announcer, cursed in the direction of our door. “Collaborator cunt,” he said. Over and over.

I wanted to question my father then. If only I could have strapped him down to a chair and set a hot teakettle on his lap until he told me about his workdays, his state secrets, told me who he was. He was so calm in his actions—setting the record player needle down, caressing my mother, picking up the phone, always straight-spined, letting out the smallest cough before he put on his official voice, the baritone of duty—that I couldn’t see a life in which he wasn’t the hero. He continued to play his records and I continued my silence.

Now I am here, watching a stray cat pierce a beetle with its unchecked claws on the windowsill as the sun rises, while my grandfather still does not snore, and I kick the heavy blanket off my body and the dust floats around in the thin rays of light, like the first pollen of the summer or star projections on the walls of a planetarium.

In the morning, Grandpa and I walk outside holding cups of tea. Overnight, more artists contributed to our gate. Fascist, Marxfucker, Love and Truth Prevail over Fuck You, and a simpler one: Get Out . Eventually, the vandals gave up on spraying letters and instead created simple lines and crosses in red, blue, and white, the colors of the republic. Through my rose tea, I smell urine, so much of it. Grandpa gets on his bicycle to go buy paint. He returns in a couple of hours, so drunk that he cannot keep his left buttock on the seat.