Prologue
EpiphanyI missed Czechoslovakia by six days. It had been an odd sort of companion throughout my childhood, like an invisible mirror or rumored cousin, never quite real enough to manifest, never quite imaginary enough to vanish. There was reason for its reticence, of course. It was communist, though poor little Czechoslovakia couldn’t really be blamed for that. Whenever I visited the red and gray farmhouse in upstate New York cobbled together by my grandparents’ meager construction skills, I would spin their globe, swiping the Atlantic Ocean out of sight, to locate the inverted circumflex amidst a crazy-quilt of countries small enough to be states. Surely Czechoslovakia had the most wonderful name of them all. Fourteen letters, beginning with that peerless Cz cluster, hinged in the middle by a modest but muscular o flicking upward the long fishtail of the remainder. The little orange strip, topologically ridged to represent the Carpathians, could barely accommodate its unwieldy moniker, in marked and modest contrast to the vast swath only a thumbprint’s width away, which fittingly named itself with a four-letter word: U.S.S.R. I knew things about Czechoslovakia that other people didn’t, and not only how to spell it. Czechoslovakia, like Gaul, was divided into three parts: Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. I assumed they were ordered according to the principle of save-the-best-for-last. My people were not Bohemians or Moravians. We were Slovaks. I also knew that the pseudo-word “Slovakian”—usurper, pretender, and offense against eye and ear—was our private shibboleth, the unerring indicator of an outsider. It was anathema to us Slovaks; no one on the inside ever, ever said it, The New York Times notwithstanding. Ditto the equally opprobrious “Czechoslovakian” as a term for a nonexistent language. I knew, moreover, that it made no nevermind that three generations of us had never actually been there. American citizenship was a mere epiphenomenon, a fact that my classmates, most of whom hadn’t the faintest idea of their own ethnic heritage, seemed unable to grasp. Whereas I knew that if sentimentality for the lost motherland gripped the church ladies in my grandfather’s Slovak congregation, the sure result was to be cabbage rolls, boiled with an inch of their lives. Plus ziti. Contradictions were allowed. There was something else I knew, of which Czechoslovakia was but one of several echoes reverberating back to me from afar: I knew how always to be homesick for somewhere else. We had never lived anywhere very long, of necessity trotting along after the zigzags in my dad’s education and then career, pastors being nearly as itinerant as lieutenants and captains. I liked to tot up all the places I’d called home since birth: St. Louis, Long Island, Manhattan, Jersey City, Garfield. The result was that I distrusted our eventual stopping point of Delhi, New York, a pretentiously named but phonetically pronounced township at the north end of the Catskills, inhabited by artsy-fartsy refugees from the City and down-on-their-luck dairy farmers who declared the soil to boast “three rocks for every dirt.” I was nine when we got there and permanently puzzled as to what qualified as home. In our first year I set about writing memoirs of the places that came before, bestowing upon each work such a grandiose title as Sarah of Jersey City, according to the hallowed template of Anne of Green Gables. It was only in my mid-teens, just as I was allowing myself to relax into a sense of belonging, that the inevitable next move was announced. This move was going to be different, though. Things had happened, unexpected things, unimaginable things. A wall fell. A revolution followed. An evil empire dissolved. And then, so did Czechoslovakia. My parents had no inkling, when the idea of moving abroad started to sprout, that a brand-new country was sprouting, too, or that they’d arrive in its very first year. Mom, an honorary Slovak by marriage and habit, had paid her first and only visit to Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1992. On a July afternoon, strolling through Bratislava—long since demoted from its old glory as the coronation city of Hungarian royalty—she came to a halt in SNP Square just in time to observe a “Declaration of Sovereignty” by the Slovak National Council, broadcast live from Prague on a huge screen in front of a department store. Bratislava would become a capital city again after all! But the crowds around her only paused on their way out of Dunaj and its nearly empty shelves to glance up and walk on, silent. The grand declaration must have seemed unconvincing at best. Most of them didn’t even want it. Czechoslovakia was drawing to a close, and so was my childhood. Possessed of loyalty to nowhere, I brooked no objection to Dad’s scheme of reverse immigration, and when Mom conceded to me her spot on the plane for the final January visit before moving in August, I could only count the hours till Christmas was over. My trip to the newborn nation signaled freedom: soon to be unshackled from Delhi and, by means of early graduation, unshackled from a fourth year of high school as well. At midnight on New Year’s 1993, as the bells tolled that most velvet of divorces, Slovakia won its independence. My first trip to my ancestral homeland fell six days later, on the feast of the Epiphany, when the nations of the world, personified in the erudite Magi, discover the fulfillment of their hopes in a child living in conquered territory. • • • Our layover was in Amsterdam, making the Netherlands my first European country on a sheer technicality. I got right down to work seeking out and everywhere finding foreignness. Holland, as seen from the air, rewarded me with all the flatness, windmills, and tidy canals of my Dutch expectations, stereotypes left neatly intact. Austria came next. But it was not so much Austria I pined for as Vienna, city of music, city of cafés. Not that I saw any cafés. Confined to the airport while awaiting the bus to Bratislava, I studied the wonderful chocolate—in 1993 wonderful chocolate was nowhere to be found in upstate New York—and T-shirts proclaiming, “No kangaroos in Austria.” I spotted a postcard of Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna on a train. “Mom would love this,” I said, and Dad agreed. She’d recently finished a master’s degree in counseling and had been feeding me Freudian tidbits since my early adolescence. I had far more knowledge of neuroses, complexes, and repressions than was strictly necessary for a cheerful sixteen-year-old. I wrote to her and my little brother: Hi Mom & Will!
This is Dad and me in the train to Turany
& we’re having a great time with our super-egos!*
Love, Sarah
*They took our ids at the customs office in Vienna. Anxious to try out my four years of German, I strutted to die Post and announced: Ich möchte eine Briefmarke kaufen, “I would like to buy a stamp.” To which the shopkeeper replied in swift and unintelligible Viennese dialect, pointing off to the left. I swallowed and choked out a Bitte? which only earned me a reprise of the same. At that very moment I became an expatriate: I faked comprehension. I nodded and headed off to the left as instructed. When I was sure I was out of sight, I doubled back to my father, head hanging. He had been abroad before, he read and spoke German, he took the postcard and strutted off just as I had. A minute later Dad was back. “I couldn’t understand her either,” he confessed, sheepish. I delivered the postcard in person when we got home a week later. • • • In the murky darkness of a January evening we crossed the border. Men in uniforms of a cut and color still riffing off the Old World mounted the bus and examined passports. Their counterparts outside cradled machine guns with all the easy insolence of the armed. I looked out at a mere border, no longer a barrier, no longer an iron curtain, but still I could see the shadows of the line that just minutes before, it seemed, had divided Europe in two like a scalpel. There was otherwise little worth the look through the bus window: nothing but fields deliberately left as fields. In a field it’s easy to spot a defector, and shoot her. It took only an hour to cross from the kingdom of light to the former kingdom of darkness and its bus station. I’d found the airports of Amsterdam and Vienna wonderfully foreign, but I instantly reassigned them to a new category of like-us foreignness. In Bratislava I saw what was unmistakably not-like-us foreignness. It was, as we used to say then, the Second World, stranded between folk poverty and industrial development, a modernity gone awry. The grim gray concrete structure of the bus station with its empty hallways and vast staircases conceded space here and there to advertising, the icon of advancing capitalism. But mixed in with the stubby simplistic typography of Slovak’s unpronounceable jumble of consonants were human faces too broad and gleaming, as if the ideal of the strong-boned proletariat had survived unaltered in the new consumerist paradise. Marlboro, I could tell, was the only one that got it. Colonizer of coolness, with its red and white tangram shapes, a touch of gold, not pandering, just announcing its easy superiority. I wondered if the coolness upgrade happened automatically to anything American that crossed the border. Or anyone. • • • Július Filo arrived. My father’s patron, Július had brought him for this final interview to persuade the university’s faculty of Lutheran theology to take on an American outsider—an American who was somehow also a Slovak—to teach the booming post-communist population of seminarians. Though for years he’d worked as a parish pastor, my dad’s first love was teaching and his driving passion theology. I grew up thinking all theologians were dashing. I’m still surprised when they’re not. Július was running late. Unlike Dad, who’d had to let it go this year, before coming to get us Július conducted an Epiphany service at his parish in Svätý Jur, “Saint George,” the first stop out of Bratislava. Fluent in English, he enveloped us in a steady stream of observation, encouragement, dry remarks in a world-weary key, and the occasional giggle—a disarming contrast to his gray face and thin frame. He whirled us into the center of Bratislava in his Volkswagen and arrived at a little restaurant just behind the old communist department store Prior. The restaurant was in fierce denial not only of the capitalist present but also of the communist past: this was aristocratic Europe frozen in time. The dining room gave the impression of being all red velvet curtains. Something famous, mostly of violins, drifted through the air. As Dad and Július talked shop, an appetizer coalesced before me out of the mists of time: two oval slices of smoked cheese, an oval of ham sheathed between them, the whole of it oven-fired just to the melting point. Off to one side lay three tiny piles: one of canned corn, another of beet cubes, the third of cabbage confetti. I savored the dish as if I were one of the long-lost aristocrats. I could get used to red velvet, I thought. After dinner Július installed us at the university guesthouse a short way up the Danube from the city center, a concrete monstrosity called Hotel Družba. It was spartan in the ways Americans seek out only for stoic pleasure, like on a camping trip. Dad and I each got our own duvet tucked into a sheet like a letter in an envelope, folded in half, and plumped on top of a thin foam mattress. The furniture was reminiscent of the worst efforts of the 1970s, perfumed with a faint whiff of cigarette smoke. There was definitely no red velvet. In the morning we stumbled down to the mess hall styled after the workers’ cafeterias ubiquitous throughout the eastern bloc. Dad giggled with equal parts glee and shame as he presented what our inflated American bucks bought us: at the price of fifteen crowns, about forty-five cents, we feasted on coffee, orange juice, bread, butter, honey, jam, and a hot dog stuck the long way into half a solid bun, from which it flopped over obscenely. Once fed we hopped the tram. “They call it an električka,” I enthused. “Isn’t that cute?” Dad’s attention, however, was on the transit tickets Július had given us and how to validate them. “No one else is getting their ticket stamped,” I observed. “Must be a hangover of the communist days,” Dad guessed. “Free public transportation for the workers.” We decided to leave ours unstamped, too. Despite my first taste of jet lag, the night had blessed me with sleep while cursing the city with Glatteis, as the Austrian news had informed us on the tiny black-and-white set in our room. “Black ice,” a glossy sheen without ridge or rupture, was as new to me as the coarse gray toilet paper and the doors with handles instead of knobs. From the tram stop to the Fakulta building Dad and I clung to the cast-iron fence and skidded down the sidewalk, joking that this poor ol’ post-communist country probably couldn’t afford the salt. We found out only later that we were right. We swiveled inside and beheld my father’s future workplace. It was not to be a move rife with glory. The Evanjelická bohoslovecká fakulta—Protestant theological faculty—had only just been welcomed back into Comenius University after forty years of principled communist exclusion. The building’s dim dreariness was not a special insult to the church but representative of the general air of decrepitude that characterized socialist management. Paint peeled off the walls, naked bulbs hung from the ceiling, must and mold scented the air. I climbed the stairs after Dad to the secretary’s office, where a typewriter was the most advanced piece of technology. Once our presence was made known we were ushered in, seated, and plied with fruit tea garnished with a lump of sugar. I trotted out my meager vocabulary of prosím, please, and ďakujem, thank you, but the more I listened and the more I studied the stern notices on the walls around me, the more alarmed I got. How on earth were you supposed to pronounce a word that started with vzkr-? The day passed in much busyness. Dad went in for a meeting with the whole faculty in which, it seems probable, Július translated between him and the colleagues in a manner selectively advantageous to both. Then the systematic theologian to be my father’s chief colleague and aspiring muse, Igor Kišš (whom my brother and I later nicknamed “Kišš My Ašš”), paternally escorted the two of us to his home for a visit. Large, hairy, and fitted with kofola-bottle glasses, he started each anecdote with the punchline. “I know only biblical Greek!” began one, followed by a spare-no-detail account of a holiday he took in the Aegean, during which he asked waiters for items in a dialect so antiquated it made Shakespeare sound slangy by comparison. “Laktos I wanted! Laktos I asked for! But this is biblical Greek, and they do not say it that way anymore! They laughed at me! Because I only speak biblical Greek!” Dinner was at the Hotel Kyjev, showplace of the old regime for entertaining Western visitors, swathed in acres of pearly gray travertine and fitted with wiretaps in every room in hopes of collecting blackmail material. A strange but compelling work of culinary art appeared before me: a whole peeled apple, thinly sliced crosswise, interspersed with slivers of sautéed goose liver, topped with a pile of frizzled bacon and a sweet-tart sauce. Somewhere between the travertine and the liver, I fell in love. • • • Another night at Hotel Družba, and another day at the Fakulta. I occupied myself with the mound of schoolwork that came of cramming two years of high school into one. At the end of the day Július shuttled us out to his home in Svätý Jur. We drove up the wide street dividing the village, between the two solid walls of concrete-fronted, red-tile-roofed houses shielded by pollarded trees whose stubby limbs resembled giants’ clubs. Július pointed up ahead at the enormous yellow church with white trim, a dark gray roof, and a gigantic bell tower. “They took it from us,” he intoned solemnly. “Who? The communists?” “No,” he said, throwing Dad a puzzled glance. “The Catholics. During the Counter-Reformation.” That was in 1674. A grudge older than America. The Lutheran church, for its part, was barely identifiable as a church. Sitting kitty-corner from the now-Catholic marvel, it looked exactly like all the other houses, concrete front and red tile roof and all. Its broad wooden door, carved with arches and circles, seemed to be lacking only a moat, a portcullis, and a troll; a door so massive that a smaller door had been cut into the center in case only a person, and not a whole army, were to pass through. Overhead a tiny sign etched in stone announced: This Lutheran church
was built on the basis of the
Patent of Toleration
of Emperor Joseph II
and consecrated on 12 October 1783
For which after 200 years we thank the Lord God Which is to say, once Joseph gave up the Hapsburg family habit of executing, exiling, or selling Lutherans into slavery, he let them stay in his realm on the condition that their churches not resemble churches at all. Hence the grudge. Július and his family lived in the apartment in the front of the church compound, one floor up and overlooking the street. The sanctuary was behind and below, and beyond it lay a series of overgrown courtyards, outbuildings, and dark caverns in disrepair. Anna Filová scooped us in, surrounding us in a sweet-scented cloud of affection and food. Shy pastor’s children—Julo (a year younger than me), Danka (a few years younger), and Peter (at nine, my brother Will’s age)—grinned at us. Peter took to me at once, instructing me in a computer game featuring cavemen and introducing me to episodes of Mr. Bean. At the table Anna placed before us carrot soup swimming with elbow macaroni and treating parsley like a vegetable. It was so simple, something one theoretically could have invented in America, yet one never had and never would. There was, I perceived, some enchantment at work in this little Slovakia. In return for my heart it would lay laurels of parsley on my head. Over the meal Dad and Július discussed the possibility of our family living in this very apartment. The Filos were renovating a house one street over, and despite being seminary dean Július would continue as the pastor of the congregation, so no one else would need the flat. I eavesdropped, doubtful. This little village? Not the big exciting city, Europe’s newest capital? • • • Any potential disappointment was deferred by my first proper train trip. I feasted my eyes on white lace curtains on the windows, countryside studded with red tile roofs and not a suburb in sight, and a dining car with a menu and waiters and real silverware. The Slovaks seemed to prefer their own homemade picnics, untucking salami sandwiches on thick-sliced bread and hard-boiled eggs from their satchels. Dad and I took advantage of the vacancy to order fried pork cutlets en route, little knowing what awaited us on the other end. At Vrútky we got picked up by car and transported to our ancestral village of Turany. My dad had been to (Czecho-)Slovakia twice before and done the rounds with all the third-cousins-once-removed, but I was fresh blood primed for the initiation. So many relatives, all looking vaguely familiar, collided into me in waves of hugs, body smell, consonants, food, and slivovica: ancient Milka, my great-grandfather’s youngest half-sister—and her daughter, Marka-doesn’t-she-look-just-like-Aunt-Ann—and Ján, Marka’s son—and Ján, Marka’s son-in-law—Naďa, Marka’s daughter, married to the latter Ján—their children Peter and Martinka—the first Ján’s wife Janka and their daughters Simonka and Žanetka—Irenka, Marka’s sister, buxom, gold-toothed, and owner of the local potraviny, which boasted one aisle for booze and chocolate and one aisle for all the other groceries—and her daughter Janka—and her daughter named what-else-but-Janka—Tetka Betka, “Aunt Betty,” my grandfather’s penpal cousin throughout the communist years—and her kids—and their kids—and, and, and… Nobody cared whether I remembered their names. And it hardly mattered what my name was. Those who tried to learn it were baffled by my dad’s introduction, because the American “Sarah” sounds not unlike the Slovak word for “daughter,” dcéra. The principal thing our arrival signaled was the outbreak of an unholy war for the right, privilege, and status of feeding the Americans. Oh, I was hungry. During our Delhi sojourn I had of necessity stifled a hunger for the whole wide world, equally eager for Hong Kong and Helsinki, London and Lhasa. Now I was finally feeding it, and the feeding inflamed the hunger rather than satiating it. My voracity for the world extended to actual foodstuffs, mysterious recombinations of familiar elements in startling ways— But. A limitless hunger for the whole of human experience is not actually matched by a limitless physical appetite. Or I was no match for aggressive Slovak hospitality. The day after arrival Dad and I were compelled to consume five fried pork cutlet dinners. Not to mention the potatoes, pickles, and cake. At ten, noon, three, five, and seven. “Eat up,” Dad ordered me in a desperate whisper at our fourth stop of the day. “I’m sure they’ve gone to great expense to give us so much meat. This is an honor for them, and they’re showing honor to us.” “By hiding in the kitchen?” I pleaded in equal desperation. Apart from their smattering of German we had no common language, so half the time our hosts left us to eat in isolation. But I could imagine only too well the scene that would otherwise unfold at the potraviny the next day: “The Americans don’t seem to like fried pork very much.” “Really? They gobbled mine right up. Maybe they just don’t like yours…” I had lost the will to resist by the fifth and final iteration at some now-forgotten distant cousin’s house, tucking in to the platter set before me as a buffer against the icky propositioning from the drunkard father of the family when his wife and my dad were looking the other way. I felt an uneasy sort of kinship with the museum-worthy collection of stuffed and mounted animal trophies we saw the next day at another relative’s home. We ate fried pork there, too. • • • One night I was given a free pass. We were visiting with Milan and Libuša, whose daughter Libka was exactly my age. Four years earlier, when my dad visited the still-communist country with his parents, they’d brought her blue jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a red bandana: a major windfall for a girl who played the accordion and was denied entrance to a good high school because she’d gotten confirmed at church. The accordion days were behind her now. Milan reported a recent battle they’d had over her attire: “That’s not a skirt,” he barked, “it’s a belt.” What Libka wanted far more than miniskirts, though, was to get out. Just like me. Where each of us wanted to get to were polar opposites: for her it was England or the States, somewhere big and important, while for me, and more with every passing minute, it was her dinky, insignificant homeland. Libka schlepped me down to the local bar to be free of pork for a while. My massive new crush on Slovakia notwithstanding, I was three centimeters shy of panic: in America, sixteen-year-olds did not go to bars. But apparently in Turany they did little else. I put on a brave face—my second expat skill—as if I did this sort of thing all the time, consenting to be her status symbol for the evening. The bar was a haze of smoke and loud American pop music. Libka plopped us down with a couple of boys from her school. They looked older, all too wise, vaguely sinister. They were not. They asked, in schoolboy German to match my own, what I thought of George Michael and whether America was really like in the movies. I was a Beatles purist and hadn’t seen even The Princess Bride. I drank a virtuous Coke and disappointed Libka at every turn. Not long after, she escaped the village by becoming an au pair abroad. I never saw her again. • • • When the trip wound down, Ján and Ján drove us back to the station in Vrútky. Snow, slush, and freezing rain flew by on all sides of their jittery Škoda, which is Slovak for “shame,” prompting the obvious pun, “What a škoda that you have a Škoda.” Not that the inclement weather in any way inhibited the driving technique of our estimable cousins, or of any other Slovaks on the road. It is a distinguishing quality of foreign drivers that they are always worse than one’s own. And of course there were no seatbelts. Bracing ourselves, wondering to each other in English if this would be the end, Dad and I at the same moment detected slivovica. Homemade plum hooch, and enough of it to perfume the entire car. Drinking this early in the day! and in this weather! I got more panicked than at the bar. Ján and Ján let out joyous shouts of Na zdravie, “Cheers!” Dad was preparing a respectful scolding when gestures explained what words could not: the slivovica was not a drink in the driver’s hand but the windshield wiper fluid. Cheaper than the real stuff, they managed to explain in broken German, and just as good. That did not mean, however, that booze for breakfast was out of the question. In the quarter-hour that remained before our nine o’clock train, the two Jáns plunked down in front of Dad a half-liter of beer and relentlessly watched him drink it all down. He was already enslaved to the dictates of Slovak hospitality. I got off easy with a handful of braided cheese. • • • There was one thing I’d been sure of all my life, my solid ground amidst the many moves and odd status of the highly educated but poorly paid pastor’s family: I was a Slovak. When I was little my dad taught me to say Ja som Slovák, grammatically right for him though wrong for me—I am a Slovenka. Still. We Slovaks ate poppy seed koláč and sauerkraut piled high with klobásy (not kielbasa, thank you very much). We sang Čas radosti at Christmas and cried at baptisms. We kept our heads down in the big world but became our true selves when we got together at church and partied with other loud, proud, hard-drinking, exuberant, ebullient Slovaks. And now I knew that all along I’d been in exile. At last I’d seen the land of castles and cake, the land where I would be not a peripatetic American but a long-lost daughter and heir. Now I knew what I’d always been homesick for. My cure awaited. I was a Slovak, and it was high time I came home.
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