Jaroslav Kalfař: Spaceman of Bohemia

We boil Louda’s tongue. I pierce cubes of it with a knife and bring it to my mouth, hot, fatty, delicious. Grandpa cleans the pig’s intestines with vinegar and water. This year, I am given the honor of the grinder—I stuff the sliced chin, liver, lungs, brisket, and bread into a hopper plate and push down while I turn the lever. Grandpa scoops the mash and stuffs it inside the cleaned intestines. He is the only man in the village who still makes jitrnice with his hands instead of using a machine. The neighbors wait patiently for these party favors to be done. As soon as Grandma divides them into packages, still steaming, the guests begin to leave, much earlier than usual, and half of them are not even close to drunk. They are eager to get back to their televisions and radios, to see about the events in Prague. Šíma begs for scraps and I allow him to lick lard off my finger. My mother and grandmother take the meat inside to bag it and freeze it, while my father sits on the couch, looks out the window, smokes cigarettes. I walk inside to enjoy the sharp scent of dinner goulash.

“Too soon to tell,” my mother says.

“So many people, Markéta. The Party wanted to send the militia out to disperse them, but Moscow said no. You know what that means? It means we’re not fighting. The Red Army isn’t behind us anymore. We’re done. We should stay in the village, safe from the mobs.”

I go back outside to see Grandpa, who places a wheelbarrow in the middle of the yard. He loads it with dry logs and uses them to make a small fire. The dirt underneath our feet is soggy with organ blood. We slice bread and toast it to go with dinner as the sun sets.

“I wish Dad would talk to me,” I say.

“The last time I saw this expression on his face was when he was a kid and a dog bit his hand.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“Don’t tell your father, Jakub, but this is not bad.”

“So the Party will lose?”

“It’s time for the Party to leave. Time for something new.”

“But then we will be imperialists?”

He laughs. “I suppose so.”

Above the trees lining our gate, a clear horizon of stars blankets our view, so much clearer when not obscured by Prague’s street lamps. Grandpa hands me a slice of bread with a burnt edge, and I accept it between my lips, feeling like a man on television. People on television eat slowly when faced with a new reality. Perhaps it is here that a pocket of new energy bursts through the firm walls of physics and singles out a life so unlikely. Perhaps here I lose the hope for an ordinary Earthling life. I finish the bread. It is time to go inside and hear my father’s silence.

“Twenty years from now, you will call yourself a child of the revolution,” Grandpa says as he turns his back to me and urinates into the fire.

As is usually the case, he is right. What he doesn’t tell me then, perhaps out of love, perhaps out of a painful naïveté, is that I am a child of the losing side.

OR PERHAPS NOT. Despite the discomfort of my spaceman’s throne, despite the fear, I was prepared. I served science, but I felt more like a daredevil on his dirt bike, overlooking the powerful gap of the world’s greatest canyon, praying to all gods in all languages before making the leap for death, glory, or both. I served science, not the memory of a father whose idea of the world had crumbled over the Velvet Winter; not the memory of pig’s blood upon my shoes. I would not fail.

I slapped the Tatranky crumbs from my lap. The Earth was black and golden, its lights spreading across the continents like never-ceasing pebbles of mitosis, pausing abruptly to give reign to the uncontested dominion of dark oceans. The world had dimmed and the crumbs began to float. I had ascended the phenomenon we call Earth.

WAKING TO THE OCCASION of my thirteenth week in Space, I unstrapped myself from the Womb and stretched, wishing I had curtains to spread or bacon to fry. I floated through Corridor 2 and squeezed a pea of green paste onto my blue toothbrush, courtesy of SuperZub, a major distributor of dental supplies and mission sponsor. As I brushed, I ripped the plastic off yet another disposable towel, courtesy of Hodovna, a major chain of grocery megastores and mission sponsor. I spit into the towel and looked closely at my gums, pink as a freshly scrubbed toddler, and the bleached molars, a result of my country’s top dental artistry and a meticulous oral hygiene routine aboard the ship. Though I had resolved that I would no longer do so, I felt with my tongue around one of the molars, and a familiar pain intensified. Despite the high marks I had received from my dentists before takeoff, this tingling of decay appeared during my first week in Space, and I had kept it secret ever since. I was not trained for tooth extraction, and where could I find a good Space dentist? Would he bring his own nitrous oxide, or would he gather it from Earth’s polluted atmosphere? I grinned to myself but refused to laugh. Never laugh out loud at your own jokes, Dr. Kuřák had advised. It is a sure sign of a deteriorating mind.

Perhaps the most jarring part of the mission was how quickly I’d adjusted to the routines. My first week in Space had been an exercise in uninterrupted expectation, as if I were sitting in an empty movie theater, waiting for the hum of a projector to light up a screen and chase away all thought. The lightness of my bones, the functions of my machines, the creaks and thuds of the ship as if I had upstairs neighbors, they all seemed exciting, worthy of wonder. But during week two, the desire for something new was already setting in, and the act of spitting toothpaste into a disposable towel instead of an earthly sink lost its novelty. By week thirteen, I had forever abandoned the cliché of treasuring journey over destination, and in the daily tedium I found two methods of comfort: the thought of reaching the dust cloud to harvest its onerous fruits, and speaking to Lenka, her voice a reassurance that I still had an Earth to come back to.

I floated on through Corridor 3, unfastened the pantry door, and slathered a chunk of Nutella on a white pita. I flipped it up and watched it quiver through the air, like a pizza maestro spinning his dough. Food was my silent co-conspirator on this flight away from home, an acknowledgment of sustenance and thus the rejection of death. The ship burned its fuel and I burned mine, the chocolate-flavored protein blocks and the dehydrated chicken cubes and oranges, sweet and juicy inside the freezer. Times had changed since astronauts relied on a diet of powders as rich and enjoyable as expired packets of Tang.

As I ate, I knocked on the dead-eyed lens of the sleek surveillance camera provided by Cotol, major manufacturer of electronics and mission sponsor. One of the dozen broken cameras on the ship, failing one by one as the mission went along, causing the company embarrassment and heavy losses in the stock market. No one could figure out what had gone wrong with the devices—the company even put three of their best engineers on a conference call to guide me through a repair process, broadcasting the video feed online in hopes of reestablishing their brand. No luck. Of course, I did not disclose the presence of insistent scratching that resonated throughout the ship whenever one of the cameras went offline, skittering away quickly as I approached from beneath the corner. Such hallucinatory sounds were to be expected, Dr. Kuřák claimed before the mission, because sound is a presence of something earthly, a comfort. No need to chase ghosts. Besides, I did not mind that the cameras no longer observed my every step—I could enjoy violations of my strict nutritional guidelines with sweets and alcohol, I could skip workouts, I could move my bowels and enjoy onanism without worrying about my guard dogs watching. There was great pleasure in being unseen, and perhaps it was best that the world’s collective imagination was teased by the denial of a 24/7 video feed of their Spaceman in sweatpants.