We continue a little way up the Labe and tie up for the night by an army barracks. There are no Mercedes here. The air is more sulfurous. Our mood has changed: We walk quietly up and down the barge, and the words we use, and the way we use them, are different from in West Germany. It is as if the world is divided into spheres of thought and we have passed from one sphere into another of lesser possibilities, as through a weather front from clear sky to rain.
I step off the barge into a meadow behind the barracks and stumble through a thicket of yew trees. It is quite dark. It is only now, out in the starlight, that I realize I have passed through the graveyard of a village erased by the Communist moment.
Emil
JUNE 21, 1973
I AM WOKEN NOW by a breeze billowing under the tarpaulin. I look up. It is the middle of the night. Sněhurka is awake in her crate. She is looking out at a red sack caught in the branches of a weeping willow on the far bank. The sack is torn into strips like the red ribbons that vodníks, or watermen, are supposed to hang from willow branches to attract young women. I stare across at the willow. There is always a hope I will see a vodník sitting in the branches, playing a violin sadly to himself.
The vodník looks after a stretch of a river or stream. He lives among eels in pools where trout circle. It is the vodník who causes a river to burst its banks in spring, carrying off a Persian leopard, and to sink low in summer. It is he who pulls under the unsuspecting fisherman and the drunk ferryman; he is the one who catches and cradles the mortally stricken child who has broken through thin ice. It is so striking, so very Czechoslovakian, that the vodník belongs to a single stretch of river, between a linden tree and a bend, or between a weir and a certain copse of crab-apple trees. He is not like the mermaids the East German sailors spoke of, who sink freely down from a cove and sing, with plucking of throat hairs, to whales in the faraway deep. There were vodníks before there were Czechoslovakians. In certain Byzantine mosaics you can see over the shoulders of Justinian and Theodora to a vodník half risen from a warm lagoon. The vodník has been too long exiled in our landlocked Czechoslovakia to move anymore in the sober and athletic way of those mosaics. He has grown thin and is seen most often in the local hospoda, or pub, where he fancies his green skin is disguised in the weak electric light of the Communist moment. He keeps his webbed hands deep in his pockets, except when buying rounds, but is nevertheless easily recognized by his ridiculous top hat, which has no place in ČSSR, or even in Tonakia, by the water dripping from the pockets of his jacket, the rank smell of his breath, and the weeds gathered about his ears. He is not a bad creature, not a frightening animal. He is not a potential candidate for any zoo. On the contrary, the vodník is a spiritual creature, a caretaker of souls. It is he who preserves all those who come to him. He snatches their descending forms but wants none of them. Those he takes, he takes on higher command. He puts their souls in ceramic jars, which he sets in orderly fashion on the shelves of his home, like the jars of pickled dolphin fetuses neatly arranged in the library of the Strahov Monastery in Prague. There the souls await the final judgment priests used to speak of, in which the drowned will rise from the rivers and the seas, even from the deep of the Baltic, rising straight up through the clouds, shedding lily pads and barnacles, but not before, as scripture has it, the second and third angels have poured vials into the rivers, turning them to blood, and killing all other living things within them, including the vodník. If this is so, if this comes to be, then the vodník is truly good, and his mournful violin playing from weeping willows hung with red ribbons is not just a declaration of his loneliness, but also of the dreadful end that awaits him and his river.
The red sack beats against the willow and lifts from the tree and is carried away on a wind that will give out long before it reaches ČSSR. I look again and can see no vodník in the branches. I look again at Sněhurka. Her eyes remain open, unblinking, and I cannot say whether she is awake now or sleepwalking. I lie back again on my sleeping bag. I close my eyes. I remember at once what my father shouted to me as the train pulled out of the station in Prague: “Remember, Emil, that all the vodníks on the Labe, even as far as Hamburg, are Czech-speaking!”
I am woken at first light by the shouting of the bargemen and by ropes being thrown from the riverbank to the barge and by the racing of the barge engines. We continue up, deeper into this sphere of lesser possibility. I go to the wheelhouse and drink coffee and smoke Red Stars with Hus. We find common cause in ice hockey. We talk of ČSSR’s star players. We share victories. We do not bond; we are too far apart for that, I searching for beauty, he for subspecies, but we come within speaking distance.
The names come easily.
“Then we had Maleček, Zábrodsky, Drobny,” I say.
“While now we have Nedomansky, Suchy,” Hus says. “Not forgetting Černy, Holík, Št’astny, and of course Hlinka.”
“Especially Hlinka,” I say. “The last victory over the Russians!” I exclaim, forgetting myself.
“That was something,” Hus says. “We’ll remember that even if the world falls apart and comes back together in a better way.”
I am given over to puncturing time and to hemodynamics and doubling, but only in ice hockey do I find myself quickened by the present. I am a fan. I jump on trams throughout Prague with my friends, going from one arena to another. We sit close to the ice in those places, among the factory workers from Kladno. We revel in the Rolbar ice machine polishing the surface before face-off, the players lacing plastic helmets under their chins in a tight bow, the leap from bench to ice. We mark the arc of bodies on blades and the quality of the stick handling — all of it too fast for me to frame. We drink cheap beer and smoke and duck when pucks fly up. We heckle players and whistle at the Soviet troops watching up in the rafters in their soft boots of the steppe. Playing ice hockey is even more pleasurable. I skated through childhood and skate still on winter weekends when the village ponds are frozen. I stand tall on the ice. I push out with my legs. I feel myself falling forward. It is not vertigo-inducing; it can be halted with a square turn of my skates. It is a swordfish moment, a loop on crystal, with no past or future save for a wrist-shot slapped into the goal from a narrow angle.
THESE HOURS ARE DAYS. I sweat here under the tarpaulin. I frame a flying fish breaking up through the skin of the river. I drift to sleep in time with the barge engines. I wake to the smell of giraffes, which is already familiar to me. I sit up against the crate containing Sněhurka. Time is stretched here as it must have been on the Eisfeld broken down off Zanzibar. It will snap back when the journey ends and I will no longer be able to remember the details, such as the shape and color of giraffe hooves, just as I can no longer properly remember the details of my army service. I feel Sněhurka’s legs behind me, through which veins run like vines, and I perform equations to represent the journey of blood through those veins to the ventricles of her heart, powerful as an elephant’s heart, on into thick-walled arteries, up the neck against the hydrostatic pull of gravity to her head, pushed impossibly high on an f-shaped stick. I feel her pulse. She cannot wish her heart to stop beating, any more than I can. So much of this life is without choice. I am grateful for that. I know that, were it possible, I might wish my heart would stop for a few seconds on a long afternoon in ČSSR, and I cannot be certain that if I felt that stoppage within me, if I felt crimson stars falling and the coming cosmic collapse, I would have the courage to strike up my heart once more.