My Own Revolution (3 page)

“You two eat,” Mami says, pacing. “I’ll wait.”

“Where is Tati?” my little sister, Bela, asks, and Mami swats at the air as if chasing away a fly.

Whenever our father is even a little bit late, Mami thinks he’s been brought in for questioning, that he’s losing his job, that he’s being sent off to someplace where he’ll never see his friends or family again. But usually he’s late only because the bus is running behind.

We don’t eat. Not even Bela. Mami opens the door, and we all listen. Maybe she’s right. Maybe this time he’s not coming. Bela grips Mami’s hand.

At last we hear Tati’s footsteps on the stairs. Two floors up he comes: 97, 98, 99 . . . And we thank our lucky stars that we don’t live on the fourth floor, where Danika lives, or the sixth or the ninth. The food would be stone cold by the time Tati got up.

Tati comes in and throws his briefcase on the coffee table. He squeezes up his face as he yanks his tie loose. My father’s hair is receding, leaving a soft gray tuft in front. I touch my own hair. It’s short but still nice and thick and growing all over. I don’t ever want just that tuft on my head.

“What is it?” Mami asks, picking up the tie where it dropped. Tati doesn’t usually throw his things around. “Sit down before you tell me,” she says, pulling out his chair.

He doesn’t sit, though. Instead he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sheet of paper, saying, “Look at this.” He places the paper in Mami’s hand.

Reading, she narrows her eyes.

“Can I see, too?” I ask, leaning over Mami’s shoulder. It’s a letter headed with the government seal. Black words march across the paper, words about a man named Eduard Bagin. The words say that his diagnosis is mild schizophrenia and that the only work he is capable of performing is working on farm tractors.

“What does this mean?” I ask Tati, who is now shaking all over, his face as red as the Communist flag. But I don’t really need to ask.

“It means . . .” he says. “It means . . .” But he can’t go on.

Bela grabs him around the waist.
“Tati!”

He puts one arm around her shoulders, but his eyes still dance wildly.

“What it means,” says Mami slowly, “is that the party is ordering your father to diagnose this man as mentally ill. This poor man probably stood up for something he believed in. He was probably talking against the regime.”

“And now he’s going to the insane asylum, like Adam Uherco,” I finish. As a psychiatrist, Tati visits the insane asylums. He says people scream and slobber, that they’re tied up in nets.

“Not this time,” says Mami. “This man will get a job he’s too smart for.”

“Mr. Bagin is a judge,” says Tati, “at the downtown judicial building. I’m a psychiatrist, not their . . . their . . .” He pounds his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I refuse to play this game.”

I take the letter from Mami and read it through again. It all sounds so logical, so matter of fact. I think of Mr. Babicak staring down at me, asking about my family. Could someone be forcing Tati to do this thing because I painted out a couple of letters on a wall? The smell of Mami’s beef stew with turnips, my favorite, suddenly makes me queasy.

“Come eat,” says Mami to Tati, this time pulling out a chair at the table. Steam rises from the soup pot, billowing into the dining room, into the light from the swinging lamp.

Bela sits down, and Mami ladles out a bowl of stew.

But Tati doesn’t go to the table with the burgundy cloth, the cloth with the flowers faintly woven in. He plops down on the couch so hard that the cushions spring up. “I refuse to do it,” he says. “I won’t.”

Mami crosses the room. She kneels beside the couch, taking one of Tati’s hands in both of hers. “If you don’t do this, what will become of you? Of us?”

I don’t go to the table, either. Instead I open my history book and read:
Athens, the strongest city-state in Greece prior to the Peloponnesian War, was reduced to a state of near subjugation.

Bela starts to cry, wiping her face with the edge of the burgundy tablecloth.

Tati buries his face in his big free hand. The clock ticks. The cuckoo bird slides out, pecking up and down. At last he says, “Okay, okay. I won’t sign anything without at least seeing the man.”

I flip the page and read:
Destroying whole cities, the Peloponnesian War marked the dramatic end to the golden age of Greece.
The black words swim. I memorize the words about the fall of the Greeks. The way they couldn’t hold out. The way they just fell.

We travel with the windows of the baby-blue Fiat rolled down to let the springtime air in. Bela is sitting in the front on Mami’s lap, dancing her doll up and down. The wind fills our hair with the smells of pine trees and fresh-cut hay. Danika sits next to me here in the backseat. Ever since we were little, she’s always come with us to Dr. Machovik’s vacation house in the spiky green pines.

This two-lane road winds through small towns, then through the collective farms, with their combines and tractors rolling through the fields. We pass a line of horse-drawn wagons. It feels good to get away from Trencin and Mr. Babicak and
The Communist Manifesto.
Away from whoever is bearing down on Tati.

In the front seat, Mami and Tati say things like “Look at that quaint house” or “Look at that new factory out here in the middle of nowhere.”

The factory is called Eastern Slovakian Steelworks. Under a hammer and sickle, two painted slogans scream at passersby:
Long Live Communism!
and
By working hard, we’ll have success in our future!

Tati snorts. “No one wants to work hard. If you do, there’s no reward. If you slack off, there’s no punishment.”

If we ever get to America, I’ll work hard pumping gas at my great-aunt’s gas station.

“Look at that,” Tati says, braking and pointing to a policeman with a radio. “See him talking into that? He’s informing his buddy on the other end of the village that we’re coming through. If we arrive too soon, we’ll get a speeding ticket.”

He pulls up to a small shop. First he takes his time wiping down the windshield, then he goes inside. After a while, he comes back out carrying a small box of chocolates, saying, “No speed trap is going to catch us! The government isn’t going to get extra money out of me!”

Mami opens the box, gives a chocolate to Bela, then gives it to me. Danika and I each unwrap a chocolate, the gooey sweetness melting onto our fingers.

Danika rests her arms on her violin case. She takes that violin everywhere. As we drive, she hums bits of the Vivaldi piece she’s working on.

We arrive at my favorite part of the trip: passing through the Tatra Mountains with pines piercing the sky and the pointy snowcapped peaks. If you ride the ski lifts, you can see all the way to Poland. Here in the Tatras, Janosik and his band of loyal men hid in tough times.

Tati stops and we get out and stand shivering, gazing at the glaciers. I find myself wondering what kinds of mountains they have in America. I lift my camera and capture the folds and flow of the largest peak.

Danika moves closer. As her shoulder brushes mine, I wonder if Janosik’s sweetheart also hid out in the Tatras.

Since the light is falling in the valley below, we climb back into the car for the last part of the trip. We cruise out of the mountains, back to the villages and collective farms.

At last we arrive in Shindliar, a little town lined with brick houses enclosed by white picket fences. Tati turns down a dirt road into the pines. The rutty road jostles me against Danika until we pull up at a house with a steep-pitched roof covered by emerald-green moss. Smoke unfurls from the chimney.

Dr. and Mrs. Machovik come out the front door, the doctor with his pointy goatee, and Mrs. Machovik wiping her hands on her apron. Dr. Machovik has been our family doctor since I was born.

They stand waving while Tati parks the blue Fiat. When we get out, they gush on about how Bela and Danika and I have grown. The collie, named Tulo, licks and jumps against my legs. I settle him down, pressing my cheek into his fur.

Dr. Machovik takes us around the side of his house to show off his garden of tomatoes, squash, and peas. He shows us the currants Mrs. Machovik makes into jam. He explains that when he’s in Trencin being a doctor, the neighbor cares for all of this.

“I’m lucky the government lets me grow anything at all. They want everything collectivized.” Dr. Machovik bends down to yank out a weed. “But without these little gardens, we’d all starve. I should give half to the government, of course,” he says. “Instead I give to my friends and declare less.”

Danika and I make faces at each other. We’ve heard this rant before.

With a smile, Mrs. Machovik takes Bela’s hand and leads her away to the crisp blades of new tulips bursting through the soil.

Meanwhile, Dr. Machovik starts showing off the white boxes housing the bees. I used to be afraid of bees and hid in the house whenever Dr. Machovik put on his bee suit. But today only a few stray ones wander through the early-evening air. “In the winter I feed them sugar,” Dr. Machovik says. “That makes inferior honey.” He chuckles. “That’s the honey I give the government.” He chuckles again.

I know where this conversation is headed. Dr. Machovik and Tati will rage over the way the Moscow advisers are handing down unworkable policies for Czechoslovakia.
Willy-nilly,
they’ll say.

“Let’s go to the river,” I say to Danika.

The springtime river, which has angled down from the Tatra Mountains above, is a leady color with sharp whitecaps. In the summer, it’ll turn green and lazy again, glinting with yellow sparkles. We’ll picnic and sunbathe on the hot sand, then jump into the current, which carries us to the river’s bend. Just before the white water, we’ll climb back out and return by the forest trail.

The light dims, and the river becomes a blur. The pines turn gray. The voices of Tati and the doctor grow softer as they retreat into the house. Finally, Mrs. Machovik calls us to dinner.

Inside the house, good cooking smells fill the air. I take in the familiar shelves of porcelain figurines, the photographs in their silver filigree frames. There’s even one of me and Danika playing with a ball. Lace doilies extend over the arms of the chairs, the back of the sofa — everything crocheted by Mrs. Machovik.

“Come here,” Mrs. Machovik beckons. She lifts the lid of a basket. Inside, nestled in flannel, lie two newborn bunnies, their eyes still closed.

“Their mother was killed by a cat,” Mrs. Machovik says, handing one bunny to Bela, another to Danika, “so I took them in.” Danika’s bunny opens its tiny pink mouth and yawns.

I reach out a fingertip to caress the little head. But I find it’s not the rabbit I care about. Suddenly I want to stand right next to Danika, just as we stood at the river. That word
sweetheart
bounces into my mind, but I bounce it right back out. Danika and I are like sister and brother. Simply that.

“And now, back into the basket,” says Mrs. Machovik, lifting the lid to the bunnies’ bed. “Dinner’s ready.”

We sit down to potato dumplings and tiny lettuce leaves just picked from the garden. For dessert Mrs. Machovik serves fat red plums the neighbor canned.

“We trade our produce,” says Dr. Machovik, winking.

After dinner, when the house is lit by soft yellow lights, Tati and Dr. Machovik sip coffees spiked with splashes of brandy. Outside, the crickets are starting up.

Mami helps Mrs. Machovik with the dishes in the kitchen big enough for only two, while Bela cradles her doll and watches the bunnies sleep.

I reach for two packs of cards on the sideboard and hand one to Danika. We start up a game of double solitaire, laying down our cards with precise little clicks.

Tati turns the conversation to the reports of race riots in America. Negro people are said to be fighting with white people. In their battle for equal rights, they’re led by a fiery preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King.

Humming under her breath, Danika lays down three cards in a row, then draws three more.

“Such a thing could not happen in that great country,” claims Dr. Machovik, lighting a cigar. “It is all propaganda by our own government to discredit the great U.S. of A. Like the way they say people have to sleep under bridges. How in such a wealthy country could that be?”