Exiles in the Garden (26 page)

Lucia had so many questions to ask her father. She didn't know where to begin and she didn't want to sound like an inquisitor giving him the third degree. So far he had been forthcoming. She had hated telling him that she no longer spoke Czech or enough Czech to follow a complicated story. She saw the dismay on his face and heard it in his voice. She remembered her mother telling her she would never lose her essential Czechness. But it seemed she had. She couldn't imagine what was in her mind when she told Alec she needed protection. She didn't need protection, and if she had needed it Alec was not the man for the job. She had been with her father only an hour and she felt as if she had known him her entire life. Now she watched him roll the schnapps glass in his hand and take a swallow, still smiling at whatever thought or memory was occupying his mind.

When did you lose your finger, Papa?

Years ago, he said.

In the war?

Andre looked at the stump. He said, When I was a child. My father and I were chopping wood. I lost control of my ax. It was only a child's ax but sharp all the same and I wasn't paying attention. Instead I was watching my father to see how he used his ax. My father was a fine woodsman and knew all the tricks. I remember that he went chalk white when he saw the blood, but he picked me up and carried me the mile or so to our house. My mother was furious with him. There was a terrible row between the two of them, my mother yelling at my father like he was trash. She ordered him from the house while she wrapped my hand. My mother took me to the doctor's office herself in our horse-drawn cart, refusing to allow him to come along. Of course I felt responsible for their argument. All the way to the doctor's office my mother repeated over and over again, Idiot, Your father is an idiot, your father is an incompetent. I knew that wasn't true. He only turned his back at the wrong time. And I was careless. I promised myself never to be careless after that. A valuable lesson, Lucia. It saved me much grief later on. A small price to pay, one finger, for the lesson.

Does it bother you now?

Sometimes when the weather is clammy it aches, he said and resumed his watch of the street.

Lucia wanted to ask him how badly it hurt at the time. Probably his wound was worse even than her ski accident. She remembered the pain coming in waves, each wave larger than the one before until she passed out. She took his hand then, so heavy, heavy in her palm. She turned it this way and that, looking at the finger stump. The stump skin was waxy, slippery to the touch. She said, It's hardly noticeable. If that happened today they'd find a way to sew the finger onto your hand. And then you would be whole again.

I never notice it, Andre said. You learn to live without.

I never got over my leg, Lucia said.

Andre nodded in the darkness, then turned to Alec. Have you ever been injured?

Alec thought a moment and said, No.

No broken bones ever? No wounds?

I have led a fortunate life, Alec said.

I would say so, Andre said.

But I am losing my eyesight. Would that qualify?

I don't think so, Andre said.

Why are we talking about injuries? Alec asked.

Lucia mentioned them, Andre said.

Losing one's eyesight is a painless injury, Alec said. Even the effects of it are painless. Inconvenient, but painless. It's painful thinking of the future without eyesight but that's not pain of a physical sort. Alec finished his glass of schnapps and poured another. I have never been in prison, either. I have trouble imagining what it's like locked up, one day following another without much distinction between them.

The distinctions are small, that's true, Andre said.

The weather, I suppose. The task at hand.

The monotony, Andre said.

Trying to imagine what's over the horizon?

I suppose so, Andre said.

Alec sipped schnapps and wondered aloud if one single thing from the experience was—and he could not summon the correct word. Elevating? Convincing?

The disappearance of one's friends, Andre said, often without explanation, and then days later the rumors begin. So-and-so was transferred. Had a heart attack. Was found dead in bed by his own hand, or another's hand. Was taken away and shot. The Stalin years were the worst. Later on, discipline relaxed a little. The food improved. The weather never improved. Andre screwed another cigarette into his holder and lit it, allowing the match to burn down to his fingertips. It was difficult keeping one's senses in such an atmosphere. You became unnaturally aware of your own body, the lost weight, your bones visible beneath the skin. Rotting teeth. Obscure pains that came and went. Sexual desire went into hiding. It had to be there somewhere but you could not locate it. The absent-minded man lost the keys to his car and no amount of wishing or recollection brought them back. Your situation was ludicrous. Absurd. And unfathomable. In a sense inscrutable. Of course those were not the words you used then. They came later when nutrition had improved and you were able to think clearly, relatively speaking. Make an assessment of where you were and how you had come to be there and what might happen next. That is to say, think about the future. I cannot tell you what a luxury that was, conceiving the future. It was the equivalent of imagining yourself in a wonderful café somewhere in the company of close friends, everyone laughing. Someone is telling a story. A policeman walks by and smiles because everyone is having such a good time. You begin to wonder if at some unspecified date in the future they will let you out. Decide that you are harmless after all. Not a threat to the state. Not a threat to anyone. Perhaps conclude that a mistake has been made, a bureaucratic blunder, understandable in wartime. No hard feelings.

I don't want to hear any more, Lucia said.

Andre filled his glass and Alec's. Lucia's was untouched but he poured a little anyway, absent-mindedly, minding his manners.

Please go on, Alec said.

Lucia doesn't wish it, Andre said.

I don't like to think of you in prison, Papa.

Well, he said, I was released. Many weren't.

What did they tell you when they released you? Alec said.

That I had served my sentence and that I was free to go.

No explanations?

None asked, none given. They gave me some money and put me on a train to Prague. When the train reached its terminus I got off. That was all there was to it. End of story.

Just like that, Alec said.

I had been ill, Andre said. They had finally allowed me to see the camp doctor, who said I had pneumonia and must enter the hospital at once. Except there were no unoccupied beds so my admittance was delayed, and when they found space for me I was hallucinating. My fever was high. Tremendously high. The drugs on hand were few and not altogether potent. I don't know how long I was in the hospital. Weeks certainly, all that time either comatose or hallucinating. Sweating, then chills. In my delirium I conjured fantastic visions, the gardens of Bosch and Dali's melting clocks. And when I woke it was to the solemn colorless interior of the pneumonia ward. My God it was cold in the ward, only one small brazier fire at one end of a long dark room, cots along both walls. One sheet and one thin blanket. But I refused to die. That was what the doctor told me—he, too, was a prisoner so he knew what he was talking about. The offer was made and I refused. I have always had a strong constitution. So I improved, and as I improved I began to think about the world I had made for myself. I knew I had fallen behind in life, all those years in camps, and my own actions had brought me there, no matter how unjustly my actions were judged by the authorities. I had to account somehow for the lost years and began to rationalize them in this way. They were like one's infancy and early boyhood, call it the years from birth to age six or seven. One has scant memory of those years, and the memories one does have are trivial unless there's drama of one sort or another, a death in the family, an earthquake, something of that nature. Of course I had been in prison a very long time but still I could think of the years as childhood years when not much is recollected. God knows there was little enough to recollect from the monotony of captivity. Prison is more a process of forgetting than remembering. I was not ashamed of the acts that had brought me first to Poland and then to the Soviet Union. I would not change anything except naturally there were acts of cruelty and indifference during the war. I regret those acts but I am not ashamed of them. They are war's signature, cruelty and indifference. War has its own rules, handed down through the centuries. So I lay in my hospital bed and improved and improved some more and when I had improved enough they released me. And a month or so after that I was let go altogether, given some money and a train ticket and another man's suit of clothes.
Do svidanya.
No hard feelings.

Now you must excuse me a moment, Andre said, setting aside his schnapps and stepping inside the house, leaving Alec and Lucia alone in the darkness and neighborly silence of a suburban street.

All those years in prison, Lucia said. I wonder if he ever thought of my mother and me. Wondered what had happened to us.

I'm sure he did, Alec said.

He didn't say he did, Lucia said in a small voice. He mentioned Bosch and Dali. His pneumonia. Many other things. Not us.

An oversight, Alec said. But he was not interested in what Andre did or did not recollect of his wife and daughter, safe in neutral Switzerland. Andre had said, I knew I had fallen behind in life. What did that mean? He had fought bravely in the war and been imprisoned first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets for what appeared to be decades and his assessment was that he had "fallen behind in life"? That was true as far as it went but it did not go nearly far enough. Andre seemed to bear his captors no real rancor, and that was hard to believe. History had swallowed him up, then spit him out. His voice was gruff but colored also by irony, a psychic detachment, as if the appalling events had happened to someone else. In a literal sense he seemed to stand apart from his own circumstances. Alec was all but overcome with admiration for Andre Duran, whose endurance seemed to him all but superhuman. He was a courageous man. Andre had regret, he said, but no shame over what he had done. He had merely obeyed war's rules. "Merely." Alec was in no position to judge. He wondered if there were photographs of Andre in the war and later in the camps, and if the photographs, if they existed, would add anything important to the story. Certainly they would not add glamour.

It would not have been an oversight, Alec.

That was a joke, Alec said.

I don't like jokes at this time, Lucia said. Jokes have no place here. I would like to think that my mother and I were remembered if only for a minute. She turned away from him and stared into the empty street. She said, You would never understand. That was never your métier, Alec, understanding the situation of others. I am sorry now that I asked you to come with me.

Alec did not reply but thought to himself, You forgot him. Why would he not forget you?

All this time we thought he was dead. We had no idea where he was. We had no idea how he died and where he was buried.

And then Andre was back, slamming the door behind him, humming some unfamiliar melody, standing at the porch railing inhaling the night air, searching his pockets for his cigarettes and ivory holder, his matches, absently rubbing the waxy skin where his little finger had been. He reached down suddenly to pat Lucia's knee, three taps and a gentle squeeze, smiling all the while.

I am so pleased you have come to see me, he said.

Papa, she said, and for a moment Alec thought she would break down.

I wasn't certain that you would, Andre said.

Of course, Papa. What did you think?

One never knows, he said.

I admit it was a shock to me, hearing from you.

It could not be avoided, he said. Andre said nothing more for a moment, looking fondly at his daughter. He said at last, I see a little of me in you.

She smiled and said that Kryg had remarked on the resemblance.

Kryg was not stupid, Andre said.

I didn't like him, Lucia said.

He was harmless. I think Kryg never found his true place in the world. He did not want to make enemies. He spent most of his life staying out of harm's way and then harm came to him in Corsica.

Sardinia, Lucia said.

Corsica, Andre said sharply. He gave Lucia's knee a final pat and sat down in the rocking chair. For a moment no one spoke. Kryg had been disposed of.

So you arrived in Prague, Alec said.

Yes, Andre agreed.

What happened then?

That's enough of my story, Andre said.

No, Papa, Lucia said. Please go on.

Old war stories are boring, Andre said.

Not to me, Lucia said.

I went looking for friends, Andre said with a sigh. I needed papers. I needed some proof of identity, it didn't matter whose identity. Nationality didn't matter. The papers mattered. I had friends who managed that sort of thing. But it took me a while to find them. So many were dead or moved away. I had been out of touch for a long time and only my closest friends knew where I had been. They had been sworn to silence and they were not eager in any case to reopen the book. It had been a long time. I was not certain and they were not certain whether I was wanted in some other jurisdiction. At last I found a friend, the one I needed. He and his wife and your mother and I used to see each other in Prague in the old days. Quite the surprise for him when I showed up at his door. He made the necessary inquiries, which did take quite some time. There were no outstanding warrants. So he fixed me up with an identity card and a passport and I went away to the mountains. End of story.

But—where in the mountains?

Andre laughed. A small resort in Yugoslavia. Nobody ever heard of it. One chairlift. I got a job operating the chairlift and giving ski lessons on the side. I had my own chalet, quite comfortable. Living was cheap, a happy interlude for me. My health came back quicker than I expected, no doubt the result of mountain air, downhill skiing, a decent diet, and anonymity. An average life, I would say. And as I told you, I have a strong constitution.