Liberation Movements

Peter
1968

Peter and four other students were released without comment on the twenty-eighth of August, 1968, and for a moment the five of them paused, sweating under the low-lying sun in front of the sooty yellow facade of Bartolom jska 9, which had once been a convent and was now a prison. “Does anyone have a cigarette?” Peter asked as he took off the dirty old pinstriped jacket he’d worn for the last week.

A fat young man started to rummage through his pockets.

“Not here,” said Daniel, and he led them down the street, then around the corner to Narodni, where they walked in silence to the Vltava. Halfway across Legions’ Bridge, Sharpshooters’ Island was so thick with trees that, from a distance, it looked to Peter as if a forest were growing out of the water. They stopped at the beginning of the bridge, across from the Cafe Slavia, and the five of them shared three cigarettes, staring at the sluggish Vltava and, upriver, the Charles Bridge and its rows of statues.

“What now?” said the fat one.

“I’m going to find those partisans,” said a red-faced student who had, in the jail cell, seemed the most frightened.

“Not me,” said Daniel. He stroked a hairy cheek. “I’m going to find my girlfriend and we’ll get our papers straight and move out to the provinces. I’m too old for this. I want to raise a family.”

“How old are you?” asked Peter.

“Twenty-four.”

They all nodded.

Peter thanked the fat student for the cigarette, shook all their hands, and walked slowly northeast from the river, to the Karolinum district, where the university lecture halls were scattered. Some walls still commanded the Russians, in red paint, to go home, while others were coated in fresh layers of white. Soldiers wandered the streets, Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, watching him pass. Some were Russian, others Polish or Hungarian, and more races he could not immediately identify. The length and breadth of the Warsaw Pact-excepting, of course, the Romanians, who had refused to take part in the invasion. It was because of people like these-the devoted members of the socialist neighborhood-that his life had changed so radically in the past couple of months. Before, he’d been a mild student examining the fluid structures and semantics of musical forms. There had been nothing hanging over his head, no question of the political landscape, no weight of guilt.

He stopped in the Torpedo, a small, smoky bar just around the corner from Republic Square, on Celetna, and bought a half liter of lukewarm Budvar. He took the beer to a cool corner and settled at a scarred wooden table half in darkness. In other corners large men in dirty workers’ coveralls sipped glasses of brandy. Though the bar was nearly full, it was silent, like a film that had lost its sound track.

Peter used a fingernail on the tabletop, scratching out a rough star with bowed lines. He remembered that field outside eske Bud jovice, the chopped, knee-high cornstalks, and running. Then he looked up at the sound of boots clattering up the steps outside. The door opened.

The soldier was large, with a round, generous face, and his fatigue-green jacket put Peter’s grimy pinstripes to shame. A rifle hung from his shoulder. In the doorway he judged the situation, then stepped over to the bar and asked for a beer.

The bartender got to it immediately.

The soldier leaned back against the counter and looked over the crowd, casually, as if he were not part of an invading army. Peter didn’t meet his eyes at first, staring instead at his scratched star, but then raised his head. The soldier noticed, smiled, and turned to pay for the beer. He wandered with his glass over to Peter’s table.

“Is okay?” he said in stilted Czech.

Peter shrugged; the soldier sat down and sipped his beer. Then he pulled his lips tight over his teeth.

“Mmm. Is good. That.” He pointed at Peter’s glass. “You like, too?”

The soldier’s cheeks, pinked by the cold outside, were chubby; his eyes were wet. He had a face not unlike Peter’s but without a student’s gauntness; the invader was well fed. Peter spoke in the soldier’s language: “You don’t have to speak Czech. I grew up in Encs, just on our side of the border.”

The soldier laughed. “That’s a relief! Try starting conversations when you don’t know how to speak. No one wants to talk to me.”

“It’s not because of the language.”

The soldier considered that. “You get conscripted into the army, and six months later you find yourself in Prague. But you’re as far from a tourist as you can be. And the whole city hates you.” He shrugged. “It’s the injustice of the world.”

Peter agreed.

“Listen, I’m Stanislav. Stanislav Klym. I’m only here two more days-my captain gave me my discharge papers today-and I want to celebrate. Can you afford to be seen with me?”

“Are you buying?”

Stanislav winked. “I’m buying.”

So Peter let the foreign soldier buy him Budweiser Budvar; and while Peter said little, Stanislav spoke like a nostalgic old man, describing his life back in his hometown, his plans for becoming an engineer, and his girlfriend, Katja Uher.

“She’s young-seventeen-but I’ve known her most of my life. We’re from the same village, Pacin. Once I get back we’re going to move into my apartment in the Capital. I can absolutely not wait.”

“You have your own apartment?”

“Used to be my grandfather’s. When he died, my grandmother moved back to Pacin so I could take it over. Of course, as soon as she gave me the keys I was packed off to the army, so I haven’t enjoyed it yet.” He grabbed his pocket, making a sound like loose change. “I always keep them with me, just to remind me what I’ve got to go back to. And this,” he said, reaching into another pocket. He took out a crisp photograph and placed it on the table: a girl with dark eyes and a handsomely bent nose inside a bob of blond hair. “She’s a smart one, my Kati. I think she’ll be a mathematician. Numbers-she’s got them all figured out.”

“I’m no good with numbers,” said Peter, lifting the snapshot and staring at the face.

“You’re also uglier than she is.” Stanislav raised his glass. “To my Katja’s unbearable beauty.”

They both drank.

“They give you a good coat,” said Peter.

Stanislav rapped the table with his knuckles. “Socialist quality, one hundred percent!” He put the photograph away. “Lots of pockets-I can fit my whole life in them. Apartment keys, documents, my girl. I even carry this.”

From his belt, Stanislav unhooked a knife and set it on the table. The leather sheath was worn and old, the burned-in design of a hawk with folded wings just visible. “Belonged to my grandfather. My father presented it to me when I got sent here. We drank brandy to celebrate. The old man even cried.”

“Why did he cry?”

“You know. Sentimentality. Fathers get that way over their sons.”

Peter tried to judge whether this was a joke. He could not remember his own father crying for him. There had been tears, but only for the animals that died on the farm, placing his family that much closer to starvation. And the tears were always tamed by alcohol, which gave his father the strength to rage-at his whore of a wife, at his useless son. You’re a humiliation for me-you know that? Get your fucking education, what do I care? A goddamned humiliation.

“Sure,” said Peter, lifting the knife. He unsheathed it and found his own face in the reflection of the clean blade. “Sentimental fathers.”

As they talked, Peter noticed the bar clearing out. The men would stare at one another across their tables, then at Stanislav’s back and the Kalashnikov he’d propped against the table. Then they would leave. After a couple of hours, Peter and the soldier were the only customers, and Stanislav looked over his shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “This keeps happening.”

“Where are your friends?”

“Eh?”

“You’re out here celebrating, but you’re alone. Where are the other soldiers from your regiment?”

Stanislav scratched his neck under his collar. “It’s a funny thing. They stick us in mixed regiments-internationalism or something like that-so I’m surrounded by Polacks and Bulgars and Ukris, and we all communicate in what little Russian we know. There was only one other guy from home, and he…well, he was killed last week, over at the radio station. I don’t know.” He waved for another round of drinks. “It’s all right, they don’t want to mix with me either. So I figure it’s best to celebrate on my own. Or with you. No?”

“And if I hadn’t come along?”

He reached into yet another pocket and tugged out a wrinkled envelope. “I’d reread Katja’s letters. Again and again.”