Page 28 - WTP Vol. X #2

Viktor (continued from preceding page)
his grandfather walking with him—Rafe was five— the two of them at the edge of the dark forest that surrounds his grandparents’ home. Viktor had pointed: that hummingbird, hovering and darting around Tereza’s sunflowers, was a kolibřík. That pigeon, strutting with importance, a holub; the red- feathered bird swooping down through the shad- ows was a kardinál—just emphasize the last part, Viktor said to his grandson, smiling. Rafe asked Viktor to repeat the names. Viktor did, and Rafe said them, and laughed and danced with his grand- father. Funny words.
He’d gone everywhere in childhood with his grandfa- ther: to baseball games that Viktor worked hard to understand, many times to the Museum of Science and Industry, the U-505 submarine there dark in its vast hanger, the long, menacing torpedo behind glass. Rafe and his father dropped in on Viktor at work often, at the engineering firm by the Dockett River, and Viktor would stop everything and was eager
to see them, introducing Rafe around, My grand-
son. Viktor: tough, honest, upbeat. He’d once fought with the American special forces in Korea, and Rafe dreamed of one day being a soldier, too. Rafe noticed that his grandfather only became grim during politi- cal discussions—at news of Cook County corruption, betrayal, these dark corners of greed and power: The damned politicians will ruin the country, Viktor often said. He could sometimes go into a spiral of anger, shaking his fist with emotion. He wrote stubborn, heated letters to senators, Illinois judges, governors, once the president.
One night when Rafe was sixteen, sitting after dinner with his grandfather and father, he watched the older man’s blue eyes stare off beyond the dining room walls. You could hear Tereza working now in the kitchen, then upstairs, reclaiming the normalcy of her home. Rafe’s mother had told Rafe once—her voice lowered, as if revealing a family secret—about Vik- tor’s time in the main political prison in Prague when he was a young man—the interrogations, the execu- tions of his friends; about his solitary confinement
in winter—in a cell with no heat—once for nineteen
days. But Rafe had never heard Viktor speak about any of this. Now, tonight, his grandfather was talking about the prison. It would be one thing if this were
a Soviet jail, Viktor was saying, his eyes switching
to Rafe’s, then to those of Rafe’s father. Some clear- cut enemy. But these guards and interrogators were Czechs—they were our countrymen.
Rafe watched his grandfather’s hands. They trembled on the white linen. Then he realized that his father’s hands, clasped together near Rafe, were also shak- ing slightly on the table. Rafe felt himself rising in
the room. He had never seen his grandfather or his father this way.
~
Rafe and Isa got off the subway when the soft female voice said Pražského povstání. They walked out-
side the few steps to the red and gray buildings of Pankrác prison; they stopped at the soiled concrete eastern wall. The sprawling place was in use only for hardened criminals now. There was a water-tower to the right, barbed wire. You could see the red clock tower rising over the buildings.
“They used to silence the clock-bells before execu- tions,” Rafe said. “So that the condemned men didn’t know how long they had left.”
“It’s just barbaric,” Isa said, shaking her head, “all that happened here, the violations to humanity.” She’d read some of the Pankrác history—the Nazi guillotine, the communists executing hundreds here by hanging, shipping off many thousands more to the Jáchymov uranium mines to labor until death. And Rafe had told her Viktor’s story—Viktor in the Czech army, aged twenty-two, accused of treason
for greeting an American friend in Prague and not reporting the meeting to communist authorities. The communists thought Viktor was passing on secrets. It wasn’t true. He’d been ten months in Pankrác, a hell on earth.
Isa was looking at the clock tower, turning back and watching Rafe. Her hair fell onto her forehead, her shoulders; she wore a sweatshirt that said Praha—
a rendering of a radiant sun over the spires of the city. The sweatshirt, her sunglasses clipped onto the collar and the way she had dressed—faded jeans and canvas sneakers, the portrait of an idealistic Ameri- can tourist—all of this seemed, for a moment, like remnants of some trusting, forgotten hope.
In solitary confinement they made Viktor wash the floor constantly, they made him wash his own blood
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