The Visible World by Mark Slouka Read Free Book Online Page B

over, that life is simply done. Perhaps not. Suddenly someone is yelling from the hallway outside:
‘Zastavte! Zastavte!’
—Stop! Stop! Though maybe it’s just
‘Václave! Václave!’
—The name. Who can tell? They sound alike; anyone could confuse them. And Chalupa—here’s the thing—supposedly translates the first and the bastards run out, thinking the paratroopers have been flushed into the open, and in the five or six seconds before the guard remembers himself and rushes back in, Moravcová sees her chance and takes it, and by the time they push past her fallen body blocking the bathroom door from inside it’s too late for the water they pour down her throat to do them any good. So,
zastavte
or
V´clave,
take your pick.”
    “She left her family?” I said.
    “Indeed.”
    “She must have known what she was leaving them to.”
    “I doubt she imagined the particulars. Supposedly they broke the boy the next day when they showed him his mother’s head in a fish tank.”
    “Good God.”
    “Doubtful,” the old man said. “But we should get to work.”
    I remembered Mr. Chalupa. He’d slept in my room. I could see that irritated look, the way he would lift his violin out of its case with three fingers, the way he would sink into my father’s chair. “How are the Beatles, young man?” I could hear him say. “How are the Fab Four, eh?”

7
    THIS IS HOW THINGS WERE IN MY HOUSE .
    One afternoon when I was perhaps seven years old, no more, I asked my mother whether she had ever had a dog. I wanted one myself. She told me she had, in fact, had a dog once, but that it had been very long ago. He’d gotten lost, she said. She would tell me about it sometime.
    So I asked my father. I found him in his office, which looked down into the canyons between the apartment buildings to the little playground where I played. He first asked me what my mother had said, then sighed and capped his pen. “Move those papers over,” he said. And then he told me about my mother’s dog.
    As a young girl, my father said, my mother had spent her summers with relatives in the Valašsko region of Moravia. In those days, he said, the
cigáni,
the Gypsies, could still be found camped along a river or on some empty ground. One minute there would be just a field, a dirt road, a stand of birches; the next they would be there: the men unhitching the horses, the women beating down the weeds for fire rings or yelling at the dogs, dirty-faced children with hair as black as ravens staring as though they’d never seen a person in a wagon. There were poplar trees along the fields, and their small leaves would twirl like decorations in the wind. And if you happened to be the person in the wagon, you’d look up and see them—the old ones—already half a kilometer down the road to town, their huge black skirts with the loops and the hooks sewn into them dragging in the dirt.
    In any case, my father told me, my mother spent a lot of time in the company of an old man named Mr. Koblíǽek who lived two houses down and who was something of a storyteller. He had a square block of a head silvered by stubble and ears like miniature lettuces, and he’d sit on a bench on the south side of his house in his tattered slippers smoking a short black pipe.
    No one had quicker hands than a
cigánka,
Mr. Koblíǽek told my mother. No one. You could watch her all you wanted, but it wouldn’t matter. “The
cigáni
were not like other people,” he said. They knew things. Oh, they could mumble and scrape humbly enough, but if you threw stones at them, they would turn in the middle of the street and curse you so vilely even the dogs would turn away. He himself, Mr. Koblíǽek said, had once seen a
cigánka
put a spell on a dog who had bitten her, so that the poor animal couldn’t open its mouth to eat or drink, but went about slobbering and rubbing its head in the dirt, trying to push its tongue through its clenched teeth, until its owner finally realized