The Visible World Read online

  I would spend hours spying on them through the blocked-off door behind my bed. I found that by turning off the light and pushing over the curtain a little, I could see nearly half the living room through the crack between the door and the frame. When Mr. Chalupa was there, my father would always sit on the sofa directly below me. Kneeling on my bed in the dark, barely breathing, I’d look over the smooth sloping shore of his balding pate to the white bookshelf on the far side of the room. Mr. Chalupa sat to the right, his violin and bow laid neatly across his lap or leaning against the bookshelf. My mother, whom I could see only half of unless she leaned forward to get something from the glass table, usually sat next to my aunt Luba (who wasn’t really my aunt) on the small sofa with the hole below the left cushion in which I used to hide Sugar Daddies before I was discovered.

  There was nothing much to see, really. They’d talk and laugh and drink, and eventually the guitars would come out of their cases and the violin bows would be rosined up and the men would take off their jackets and loosen their ties and Mr. Chalupa, who played the violin better than anyone else and knew every lyric to every song, would roll up his sleeves and the singing would begin: “Pri dunaji saty prala,” “Mikulecke pole,” and “Polka modrých očí”—Slovak and Moravian folk songs—and when enough wine had disappeared, dance tunes like “Na prstoch si počítam” and “Ked’ sa do neba dívam,” and on and on till two or three A.M. Sometimes I’d wake up deep in the night and hear them leaving, saying something about their coats or bumping into things by the door, shushing each other and laughing. And it seemed to me in those moments that their voices were all that was left of them, that they were good-natured spirits the hours had made insubstantial, and lying in bed I’d listen to them gathering their instruments, whispering, joking, joining in part of a refrain until, stepping through our apartment door, they disappeared as abruptly as the voices at the end of a record.

  Mr. Chalupa had escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1948, like most of them, then spent some years in Salzburg, some more in Toronto, another in Chicago, before coming to a temporary rest in our apartment in Queens. The year was 1956. I was six years old. We put him up for a few weeks, during which time he slept in my room and hung his pants over the back of my chair while I slept on a mat on the floor of my parents’ bedroom. When he found a place somewhere on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, I moved back to my room. For the next year and a half he continued to come by our apartment every week or two, to play his violin.

  I saw him for the last time (though I didn’t know then that it would be the last time) on a night in January 1958, when he broke a bottle of red wine against the corner of a shoe rack while taking off his coat in our hallway. It was one of those huge bottles, my father said later, that looked as if it had been bought from a Spanish peasant for a kilo of cheese or a length of rope, and it soaked everything. Chalupa looked at the mess he’d made—at the small red lake at his feet, at the wine spattered knee-high up the wall, at the neck of the bottle still in his hand—and shook his head. Everything breaks, he said.

  No word of concern, no apology. My mother picked up the ruined rug and hung it over the outside railing where it rained wine onto the leafless hedges fifteen floors below, and eventually others came by with more wine and everyone forgot about it. The group spent the evening singing as always, and late that night, when they were all leaving (Chalupa was the last to go), my father said we would see him in two weeks and Chalupa said he wasn’t sure, and when my father asked why, he shook his head as though he had heard that the Ftrain would be out of service on that day, and said, “Melanoma, old man.”

  “I saw him once or twice more in the hospital,” my father said, “but that was that. Between the toes, Antonín,” he said to me. “That’s where they found it. Absurd.”

  I didn’t hear the story for a long time, and when I did, it came as something of a shock to realize that Mr. Chalupa had been dead all those years. I had always assumed for some reason that he had simply left New York, that he had been playing in some other circle—picking at someone else’s b´bovka. I could see him there, in that other apartment, leaning back stiffly in someone else’s reading chair or drumming his small white fingers on the neck of his violin while waiting for the others to return from the kitchen.

  For a while, the knowledge that he had died a full ten years earlier troubled this picture I had of him, like wind on water. But then the picture re-formed itself, and though I knew it was a lie, it still felt truer than the one that had replaced it. It was as if the fact of his death had left a space—like the chalk outline of a body—in the shape of the thing that had gone. The easiest thing was to bring back the body. It fit best. There he was again, back in that other apartment, in Baltimore or Chicago, playing his violin.

  It was not until many years later that I learned that Mr. Chalupa, who had once slept in my room, had also worked for the Gestapo.

  I had arranged to meet an old couple I was working with at the time in an outdoor café on Londynska Street in the Vinohrady district of Prague. At the last moment the wife couldn’t make it, and so it was just me and the old man. It was late May and the cobbles were wet from the rain and the branches dripped water on the umbrellas over the metal tables. Except for a young couple with a miserable-looking dog, we were the only ones there.

  We talked for a while about the translation project we were collaborating on, and then the conversation turned to what it had been like growing up in New York in the Czech exile community, and Chalupa’s name came up.

  “Miloš Chalupa?” the old man asked.

  “You knew him?” I said.

  “Everyone knew him,” he said. “Or of him. He was some kind of accountant before the war, though I’m not sure what he accounted for, or to whom. During the war he was an interpreter for the Gestapo.”

  At that point the waitress, who had been staying inside because of the rain, came out with a rag to wipe the tables that weren’t covered with umbrellas. “Dáte si dalsí, pánové?” she called to us from across the small patio. Would we like another? “Ale dáme,” the old man said. A low rumble sounded in the quiet street. It seemed to come from over the train yards to the south.

  “You’re saying Chalupa was a collaborator?” I said.

  “Who knows?” the old man said. “They say he was approached by the Resistance sometime in 1941, around the time the RAF dropped those paratroopers who were to assassinate Heydrich into the Protectorate. He told them he couldn’t help them.”

  “So he was a collaborator,” I said.

  “Listen,” the old man said, “if only the heroes were left in Prague after ’45—or in Warsaw or Leningrad, for that matter—there would be fifty people left between here and Moscow.”

  The waitress placed two glasses of wine in front of us and went back inside the café.

  “Maybe he did it to keep himself above suspicion,” the old man said. “So that they would trust the picture he gave them.”

  “You believe that?” I said.

  “I believe it’s going to rain,” the old man said as the first fat drops began to smack down on the cloth above our heads. He leaned over the table to light a cigarette, then dropped the match into a glass on the table next to ours. “I saw Heydrich once, you know. I was waiting for the tram in front of the National Theater. They stopped everything, cleared the street. I saw him get out of the limousine. Very tall. I remember he moved his head like this, like a bird.”

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “Nothing happened. He walked into the theater. I walked home.”

  It was raining hard now. Everything around us had turned gray. The old man was quiet for a while; I saw his head shake very slightly, as if he were disagreeing with something, though it might have been simply a tremor. He ran his fingers over the back of his hand. “You see, it wasn’t always easy,” he said. “To tell. To know who was who. Now take the boys who assassinated Heydrich in May of ’42. A heroic act, a just act, and eight thousand
died because of it. Entire towns were erased from the map.” He shook his head. “Don’t fool yourself; I suspect your parents knew who Chalupa was. We had all heard the stories about him. In the end we just had to choose which one to believe.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Are you dry over there?” he said at last.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Here’s an ugly story for you,” he said.

  He couldn’t tell me what Chalupa thought, he said, or what he believed. He could only tell me what he had done, which was really all that anyone could say about anyone. There were some facts: After the uprising in 1945 Chalupa hadn’t been shot as a collaborator. He’d been at such and such a place at such and such a time. X number of witnesses had confirmed that this or that had been said. It all amounted to little or nothing. The interrogation had focused on a single, well-known event—I could read the report if I wanted. Obviously his questioners had given him the benefit of the doubt, because he’d lived to play the violin in my parents’ apartment in New York.

  The basic story, the old man said, began and ended with a woman named Moravcová, who lived up in the žiǽkov district with her husband and their sixteen-year-old son, Ota. “You’d have had to see her,” he said. “A real hausfrau by the look of her—thick legs, meaty face, all bosom and bun. She was one of the most important figures in the Prague underground during the war—the anchor. No one did more, or took more chances. Nothing got past her. Nothing. When one of the paratroopers sent from London approached her for shelter in the fall of ’41, she supposedly brushed him off at first, even threatened to turn him in to the authorities, and so convincingly that for a few hours he thought he had approached the wrong person, simply because there was something about him that had made her suspicious. London had to confirm, and a second code had to be arranged, before she would take him in. Couldn’t risk endangering her boys, she said. And they were all her boys: the paratroopers—two of whom stayed in her apartment posing as relatives looking for work—their contacts...

  “She washed and ironed their clothes, went shopping for them. Basically, she did everything. She’d bring parcels of blankets and clothing and cigarettes to the safe houses, traveling by tram, holding them right there on her lap, right under their Aryan noses. Not once or twice, you understand, but dozens of times, knowing all the while that if any one of them demanded that she open the package, she’d never have time to get to the strychnine ampoule she carried like a locket around her neck. On certain days she would go to the Olsany graveyard to receive and send messages, lighting a candle or pruning back the ivy on her mother’s grave, maybe exchanging a few words with someone who might pause at the adjoining plot or tip his hat to her on the path. She was rational, smart, tough as an anvil. What made her special, though, was that she was apparently terrified the entire time. Rumor had it that she took to wearing a diaper, as if she were incontinent, for the inevitable accidents. That after Heydrich was assassinated, when everything was going to hell, she’d pretend to be nursing a toothache and travel with the ampoule already in her mouth—which, if true, was simply madness. The point is that she knew what she was risking, and she risked it anyway.”

  The rain had begun dribbling between the two umbrellas I had crossed over our heads, and the old man moved his wine out of the way.

  “In any case, after Heydrich was hit—it happened right up here in Líbeň, though it looks quite different now—things happened very quickly. They carried him out across Charles Bridge at night, torches and dogs everywhere, and before they got him to the other side, SS and NSKK units were sweeping through the city, searching neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block. Combing for lice, they called it. They were very good at it, very thorough. Wehrmacht battalions would seal off an area, five or six city blocks, and then they’d go apartment to apartment. It’s all television now, really. I barely believe it myself. I’ll give you an example. Right after Heydrich died, Wenceslas Square was filled with half a million Czechs swearing their loyalty to the Reich. People were hysterical; they knew what was coming. I saw this with my own eyes, and I still don’t believe it.

  “Anyway, after Heydrich’s death, the underground freezes. Moravcová somehow manages to get her family out of Prague. The boy goes to the country, the husband to stay with an army friend in Královo Pole. Moravcová herself hides in Brno, which is hardly better. After a few weeks, when nothing happens, all three return one by one to their apartment in žiǽkov, who knows why. Maybe they’re worried that their absence will be noticed. Maybe they just want to come home.

  “Which is where Chalupa, the translator, comes into it. He gets a telephone call at four-thirty in the morning, is told to be ready in five minutes. He doesn’t know that the paratroopers hiding in the crypt of the church on Řesslova have been betrayed, that they will die in that crypt early the next morning, June 18—that the whole thing in fact has begun to crumble. He only knows that something is wrong.

  “You have to picture it. Three cars are waiting in the dark. A door opens, he climbs inside. He has no idea where they’re going until he hears the name. Some woman named Moravcová. An apartment in žiǽkov. He just sits there on the leather seat, holding his hat on his lap like a truant. What else can he do? No one speaks to him—they don’t trust him, naturally, and his ability to speak German only makes things worse because it means he’s neither one thing nor the other, hammer or nail.

  “It’s a quick trip. The city is almost deserted at that hour, and the limousine races through the intersections, crosses Bulhar Circle, then turns left up that long hill there. He knows they’ll be there in three minutes, then two, and then they’re there and Fleischer, the commanding bastard that morning, is already pounding on the door, swearing, when it opens and a bent, tiny woman appears, like a hedgehog in a fairy tale. ‘Schnell, wo wohnen die Moraveks?’ Fleischer yells as they shove past her, and Chalupa begins translating when the hedgehog calls out at the top of her lungs, as though she’s suddenly been struck deaf, ‘Would you like to take the stairs or the elevator, mein Herr?’ but they don’t notice because they’re already rushing up the stairs and it’s too late for anything at all.

  “By the time Chalupa gets there, they’re all three standing with their faces against the wall, the father and the boy still in their pajamas, Madame Moravcová in a housedress, as though she’s been awake all night. “Wo sind sie, wo sind sie?’—Where are they?—Fleischer is roaring as the rest of them pour into the other rooms, as the sofa and chairs are tipped on their faces and pulled from the walls, and Chalupa begins to translate Kdo, já nevím...—‘Wer? Ich weiss nicht...’ and then stops because Fleischer has her by the throat and is striking her face, hard and fast, back and forth: ‘Wo—sind—sie, Wo—sind—sie, Wo—sind—sie.’ She sinks to the floor. ‘Steh auf!’ She stands. ‘Please,’ she says, I have to go to the bathroom, please.’

  “Chalupa looks at her husband and son. They are both barefoot. There is the smell of shit in the room. The husband’s hair is standing up; his right leg is trembling as if he were listening to a very fast song. The boy is looking into the wallpaper. In the transcripts Chalupa claimed he never saw such terror in a face in his life. ‘Please, I have to go,’ Moravcová says again. She doesn’t look at her husband or her son. Chalupa translates: ‘Sie sagt, dass sie aufs Klo muss’—She says she must go to the bathroom...and now he understands. Fleischer is striding into the other room, still looking for the paratroopers. ‘Nein.’

  “So there you have the basic situation. A wrecked room. Three people lined up against a wall. A single guard. ‘Please, I have to go,’ Madame Moravcová is pleading, over and over again, ‘please.’ Perhaps she realizes that their lives are over, that life is simply done. Perhaps not. Suddenly someone is yelling from the hallway outside: ‘Zastavte! Zastavte!’—Stop! Stop! Though maybe it’s just ‘Václave! Václave!’—The name. Who can tell? They sound alike; anyone could confuse them. And Chalupa—here’s the thing—supposedly translates the first and
the bastards run out, thinking the paratroopers have been flushed into the open, and in the five or six seconds before the guard remembers himself and rushes back in, Moravcová sees her chance and takes it, and by the time they push past her fallen body blocking the bathroom door from inside it’s too late for the water they pour down her throat to do them any good. So, zastavte or V´clave, take your pick.”

  “She left her family?” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “She must have known what she was leaving them to.”

  “I doubt she imagined the particulars. Supposedly they broke the boy the next day when they showed him his mother’s head in a fish tank.”

  “Good God.”

  “Doubtful,” the old man said. “But we should get to work.”

  I remembered Mr. Chalupa. He’d slept in my room. I could see that irritated look, the way he would lift his violin out of its case with three fingers, the way he would sink into my father’s chair. “How are the Beatles, young man?” I could hear him say. “How are the Fab Four, eh?”