Triptych (9 page)

“Mother, please snap out of it,” Évike said under her breath.

With the next radio bulletin she got her wish.

“The curfew has been lifted temporarily to allow the public to buy food
,” the announcer said, adding, “
…but
w
e continue to advise the population in their own interest not to go out into the streets unless absolutely necessary
.”

Évike had barely taken in the news when a plate appeared on the table before her. On it, an apple cut into wedges and a fat slice of fragrant dark bread.

She looked up. Her mother's dark eyes blazed with passion. She rapped her knuckles against the tabletop, stared at her daughter sternly.

“Eat,” she said, untying her apron. “Then get dressed. We are going out. Learn firsthand what is going on. Find your father.”

Chapter Six

Chicago, 1986

The cooking genes in our family were passed on to my sisters. I do takeout. Today I will test the kitchen of May Lee's, a restaurant on my way home from work.

The late afternoon warmth is glorious. Vaclav is coming to dinner at my place. I'm unabashedly whistling the tune of
There She Is, Miss America
, when a library patron, whose name I don't recall, sees me. She smiles and I unpucker, smiling back.

My roots in Willow Grove are deep. I am wedded to the small town ambiance. Even now, at five o'clock, there is no congestion or rush hour to deal with. Yet if I yearn for a bit of culture, say a visit to a museum, one of the finest, the Art Institute, is only a short train ride away. To the west, once outside the “pop. 15,273” sign, there is only wide open space, corn and soybean fields, barns, silos, the occasional Old-World farm house. I love the sense of endless potential and imagination I feel driving, instinctively feeling my way down dirt roads hemmed in by a labyrinth of tall crops.

Willow Grove is not Vaclav's place, so he's told me many times. It is because his wife had family nearby, in Chicago, that they ended up here and not in one of the European countries offering sanctuary. “Over there, I would be near to home, to my parents, to people who understand what is importance of knowing politics. People who speak not just one language. Who value culture. Educated people.”

Always honest Vaclav. His opinion of Americans is not a benevolent one, and I am his America.

The high school where Vaclav teaches his avant-garde art techniques is in the next block. My motivation in helping Vaclav secure a teaching position had a selfish side. Passing the school, I stare at the building's red brick façade and smile, recalling the way his eyebrows shot up at seeing me among the dozen or so students in the art room ten months ago.

Self-Expression Through Collage Art
. I'd seen the listing in the community education fall catalogue and decided the time had come. Beneath the title, the summary indicated enrollees should bring a variety of materials relating to our interests or to the specific project we had in mind. The teacher would also have a stockpile of supplies—fabrics, papers, glue, threads, paints—on hand.

After everyone had found a work space, Vaclav gave an overview, concluding with, “You come with idea inside your head. I am here to help you make it to come alive. We will be having two hours together. Please to start by creating sketch or rough assembling of materials. I will move among you so we may discuss your ideas.”

My station was first stop on the circuit.

He held the taupe linen daisy piece, turning it over several times. My mother's work was so fine and intricate, it was difficult to distinguish front from back.

“Who make this?”

“My mother.”

“And what is it you would like to do?” His eyes were already disapproving.

Of all the places I would have expected to be safe, to have my brainchild understood, it was in Vaclav's class. Vaclav had not been afraid to express his unconventional views, even under threat of Siberia. Why humiliate me? Wasn't this class about self-expression?

“Unstitch the past.” My voice was very small. The notion had first come to me the evening Vaclav showed me the memorial in his apartment.

“Your tribute to Jan Palach,” I continued. “You called it
No More Secrets
. The shoes, the page from your dossier, they were part of a dark past, but you gave them new meaning. A work of art to honor your friend, but also to represent what's ahead, how you intend to live your life going forward. That's my aim.”

Vaclav shrugged. “Document not actually in shoe when I leave Prague.”

“What? Where is it then? Buried in some file room in a government office waiting for some bureaucrat to rediscover it? Order a death threat on you and Manka if you ever come back?”

The corners of Vaclav's mouth curved upwards. “You understand the Communist system well. Because of you, I understand how do you say, make lemonade from the lemons? An official page it make dramatic statement, yes? And secret compartment make good special effect too. Better for getting notice for Palach's sacrifice. So I create.”

“You're wrong. I
don't
understand.” I snatched the linen swatch away from him, wave the limp piece in the air. The hot Hungarian blood in me was boiling. “You took liberties. You created new from the past. Why can't I?”
Turn back time, to before I became Miss Ugly American, to before I'd lost her.

Ever since the party at Vaclav and Manka's apartment, I had been contemplating ways to free myself from the past. My mother had been dead twenty years. That morning, I'd dismantled my parent's “shrine,” relegating all memorabilia, with the exception of the daisy piece, to the recesses of a cabinet. Afterward, I'd walked to the high school.

Standing beside me at the table, Vaclav's voice had turned soft. “Please look at me,” he said. “I am artist and believe expression must be free, but with this—” He placed a hand gently on the linen, patting it almost reverently. “It would be mistake to go through with what you plan. There is relationship here: with your mother.”

“It's
my
design, not hers.” My voice was stronger but still somewhat shaky. “No, not even mine any longer. It's a child's expression. The old pastel flowery me. Now the child is grown up. She wants to express herself in a new way.
Her
way.”

“I think what you would like to do runs deeper than merely a woman determined to say ‘so long' to the child in her.”

“I am not my mother. She always worked within a pattern. With this piece—” I gestured to the cloth, “—she broke from the traditional. But she still stayed within boundaries.
Flowers.
I want to be free.”

Still Vaclav would not condone my undoing it. “You have original idea. Unstitch embroidered pieces. Very good. But
not
good when there is connection. No, instead you must find way to honor your mother. Sorry, but I must tell you this truth.”

Three months later, after we became lovers, the subject had come up again. “You must bring honor to your mother. It is up to you, her loving daughter.”

“I am not a good person,” I tell him. “My mother died, and I could have saved her.”

To Vaclav, my failings were the precise reason it was my duty to make amends. “Shame, doubt, and guilt they make complex knot,” he'd said brushing my forehead with lips still moist and warm from our lovemaking. “Is up to you to untangle it.” And, of course, for Vaclav, the “how” was obvious.

“In my country, in my family,” he had whispered in my ear, the hot rush of air making me shiver, “we never would allow murderer of loved one to go unpunished.”

***

There are three antique stores in Willow Grove. Irina's Antique Shoppe is located in the commercial strip by May Lee's Restaurant; the other two are on the outskirts, at opposite ends of town. I pause before the display window at Irina's. Ten months ago, after Vaclav had rejected my idea for his class, he'd proposed an alternative to placate me. “I tell you what. We meet tomorrow, go on field trip. Find way to make your invention work.” We'd stopped here at Irina's.

Irina Marinovna from my first English conversation group—the same class as Vaclav—had recently purchased the shop. Irina's English was actually quite good. She'd come to class only to support Natascha, a recent arrival and distant relative from Russia.

In a bin of needlepoint samplers, Vaclav found what he was after. It was a beach scene, three fourths of the canvas sky—a glorious shade of Adriatic blue (the precise color of Vaclav's eyes). Along the narrow bottom strip, beach flora—sprinklings of lavenders, greens and deep purples—dappled a white and taupe strip of sand. A smidge of green-blue ocean separated sky from sand along one corner of the canvas.

“Forgive, please. I have not yet had the time to weed—” Irina had said coming up behind us. “That thing, it must be something made by a child or an untrained crafts woman. Sorry—” She reached to rescue the piece from Vaclav.

“No.” He smiled and turned to me. “Exactly what we look for, yes?”

I nodded. I was smiling too. “I already know what I will call it.
Dream
.”

Vaclav insisted on paying for the sampler. It was only a dollar and I did not object. Gentle, sure of himself, he draped his arm casually around me as we walked to the counter. “In dreams you can have all you want,” he had whispered.

***

I give in to the urge to take a quick pass through the store. Irina's shop reminds me of Auntie Mariska's bookstore. I never met either of my grandmothers in Hungary, but drawing a deep breath of the musty air I am transported to their homes. In the crowded aisles, I see the furnishings they might have had.

At the bin of vintage samplers, I flip through, stopping almost immediately. A house set among pine trees, its chimney spouting a squiggly plume of smoke. Along the top and sides, a decorative pattern of hearts and soaring birds.

Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not
our hearts.

The verse, stitched in black, is at the sampler's center, above the rising smoke.

I lift the framed piece out of the bin, knowing I will buy it to add to my collection of sentimental embroideries, purchased so that I can remake them.

I reread the verse and experience the familiar ache. In China, my mother had moved eight times. Then, forced by war conditions, she emigrated to yet a third continent where she would never seem at ease. Home, the place to which she could never return.

Recently, I have been experiencing a sense of not belonging myself. Of feeling apart. Apart from what? I don't know. The logical side of my brain would like me to acknowledge that my thirty-eighth birthday is creeping up. This would account for a ton of churning feelings. What else could it be? I am not my mother. I am firmly placed in Willow Grove, my library job, my condo, Vaclav…

A traditional decorative motif surrounds the verse. I find the discordant colors selected by the needleworker wildly inspiring. In my mind, I begin transforming the array into colored squares, composing a grid over the faded blue pattern lines in the old motif. I play with what to leave showing.

Where we love is home.
I trace the verse. I might have been born in Ohio, but my blood is one hundred percent Hungarian. I am intimately linked to a country trapped beneath the oppressive knuckle of Communism—a tenuous connection. But from it, Vaclav had lionized me into his ideal American. “My America.” Mostly Old World with a brushstroke of New. As part of the old order, my loyalty to country—and family—ought to be in the same league as his.
“In my country, in my family, we would never allow murderer of loved one to go unpunished.”

I am so absorbed in my thoughts that the sound of Irina's voice startles me.

“So you have fell in love?”

I smile. “Have
fallen
in love, and, yes, I simply must have this.” I hand her the piece and lift my tote bag from the floor. Irina eyes the protruding bouquet of flowers. Her mouth forms a tight line.

“Vaclav?” she asks.

My chin shoots up. “Yes. From one of his gardening projects. He's artist of the month at the library, did you know?”

Irina cocks an eyebrow. Of course she didn't know. The exhibit was barely up. Taking her lead, I clamp my lips shut.

Irina knew that Vaclav and I would be lovers before I did, from our first visit to her shop. “In public, in my presence, he place arm around you,” she had said the next time I stopped in. “As if in buying you the needlework, he at once own you. Vaclav, he knows what he is made of,” she seemed unable to resist adding. “The old country, his wife, his art. You never will be part of that. Is not possible. He will break your heart.”

No, Vaclav would not break my heart.
Unattainable Vaclav
. Irina could not know it was precisely why Vaclav was so right for me.

Irina turns, and we walk toward the cash register. A spry slight woman in her mid-fifties, Irina is wearing a flowy pleated skirt that sways, and the toes of her flats point outward as she walks duck-footed, her back perfectly straight, slightly ahead of me.

Irina steps behind the counter and sets the sampler on its surface. The light picks up the smudge my finger made on the glass. She finds a cloth and begins polishing. She chuckles. “What you do here? Try to erase the little stitched home?”

I smile lamely at Irina. “The opposite. I am trying to connect.”

Irina's age and difficult past are evident in lines crisscrossing her face. In her teens, she trained with the Kirov ballet in Leningrad. During the horrific siege of the city by the Germans, she fled with her parents, wending through Sweden to eventually arrive in London. She was a principal ballerina with a famed company until, in the mid-fifties, her parents sought better opportunities in Toronto.

Irina dips down, rummaging beneath the counter, and extracts a length of brown wrapping paper. “Home. This is very important, connection,” she says. “If you are proud of where you came from, you will always know where you are going, and you will take pride in everything you do.”

Irina had brought a jacket to my conversation group class, handmade like the one she is wearing today, but more primitive. She had crafted it along her journey out of Leningrad from old clothing donations sent by the Red Cross.

I pay for the sampler. Perhaps it's because we share a flair for transforming second-hand goods, Irina's face lights up at the sight of Mariska's shawl.

“You have completed more destruction,” she says.

I laugh. “Deconstruction.”

Before leaving the library, I'd wrapped the shawl around my hips, over my black leggings. The two small independent circle clusters that earlier today floated on my shoulders now rest on either side of the large knot at my hip. Irina reaches for the pointed end of the shawl. The fringe dances as she pulls the fabric away from my thigh, holding it aloft, eyeing the boldly colored circles-within-circles abstract design I'd created—my “Kandinsky rings,” as Ioana had dubbed them.