“Emil Tischbein is free in the way I wish you to be free,” my father said.
This was at a family celebration in a country orchard. There were striped deck chairs, Chinese lanterns, beer and sausages cooking on an open fire. Blossoms drifted among the elderly relatives, who sat as they had as children, with their feet in a stream.
“I want you to listen to me now, Emil,” my father said.
“I’m listening.”
“This other Emil wants to show us it is possible for a child to be upstanding without the authority of a uniform.”
“A child such as me?”
“Such as you. Tischbein means table leg in German. You can depend on a tischbein. Just as there is no question the Tischbeins, mother and son, despised all the Nazis stood for. That’s why the Nazis burned Emil and the Detectives. They thought it subversive. They threw Emil on the pyre.”
“They burned him, really?”
“Yes, imagine that,” my father said. “As if he were a pestilence.”
I DO IMAGINE IT. Fictional Emil going up in flames, page by page, hands in pockets, rocking back on his heels, his shy smile not changing, his innocence intact. There is no more book-burning. Emil and the Detectives simply goes unpublished. A few copies of the book are locked away in the cellars of my country’s libraries, secured there behind heavy doors so that no one can hear fictional Emil’s cries of “Stop, thief!” as he races through the streets of Berlin.
There are other signs of burning in this ČSSR of 1973. We run here and there through the woods in fear of mass incineration during nuclear drills, remembering as we run in suits and masks students who doused themselves in gasoline and made human torches of themselves in protest at our captivity. Pinned to the breast of every child during sessions of Communist indoctrination, there are enamel badges showing three flames, the largest for Party members, the smallest for little children learning to march and sing workers’ songs, and the other for teenagers asked to stand at attention beside the grave of a revolutionary martyr, on which flickers an eternal flame. This is another thing I notice about Communism: how its youthful symbol is a book of knowledge set alight and no one comments on it.
THE LIGHT IS ALCHEMICAL in the kitchen now, on the clear fluted jars of dried mushrooms and forest honey. I pick up a paper airplane from a chair and float it across the room. An old postcard rests against a jug of wildflowers on the long table. Only objects with utility or resonance remain apparent in our house: The card must have been left out for a purpose. I pick it up. It was sent from Munich in 1899 to a long-dead Freymann, living then in the Hradčany district of Prague. The address marks out Bohemia as a province of Austria. The message is written in a florid hand but conveys only that the sender will return to Prague by the Thursday morning train. I turn it over. A self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer stares out at me. It dates from 1500. I study the braided hair, the trimmed beard, the expensive fur coat of martens and mink. I note the long fingers scandalously set in mock benediction: This is Dürer as Christ. I hold the postcard up to this strange light. Art can puncture time, so that what has passed can become what is yet to be. The note on the card was written in expectation of a journey to a Bohemia that is no more, while Dürer’s self-portrait is futuristic, pushed far out beyond this ČSSR. And this is the way it is with the photographs on the walls of the villa. They were taken by avant-garde Czechoslovakian photographers before the Second World War, before the exterminations, the clearances, the departures and silences, but they are openings, windows speaking to me of some moment not yet arrived.
I VENTURE ONTO the observation deck on the roof terrace, which juts out over the garden like a diving board or a gang-plank. My grandfather had it built: He owned a small airline and wished to see his planes taking off from a nearby grass runway. The pilots dipped low over Nad Pat’ankou Street in those hopeful days, and my grandfather leaned back against the deck railings and waved his hat at them as they set off for Dresden and Vienna and sometimes as far as Bucharest, which was all glamour then, with a Columbia Records shop near Palatul Telefoanelor selling all the new tunes and Dragomir Niculescu’s delicatessen on the corner of Calea Victoriei supplying the fine breads and cheeses, champagnes, beers, and chocolates. “A Dacian King Kong Manhattan,” my grandfather said of the oil barons and Transylvanian industrialists, from whom he made plenty of money. It is my habit to stand on the observation deck on clear mornings and evenings in search of beauty. The photographs in the house have done this to me. They have given me an eye that does not sweep as a human eye should sweep, as a cinematographer sweeps, but one which is always stopped photographic in search of beauty.
I look about me and frame and shutter some beauty now. I stare at the paneláks, which are tower blocks made of thin concrete panels, rising gray from Bohnice Hill. I keep a few of their windows that are flecked with twilight, like gem-stones. I keep the portion of the sky that is spangled with coming stars. I keep the kit of pigeons flying in an arrowhead formation down the River Vltava, which flows black and brown, silent, at the base of Baba Hill. I stop the pigeons as they touch the Vltava with their wings. I watch the kit rise now toward the red-starred fighter jets patrolling far above. I keep the white contrails the fighter jets let out, that join one emerging star to another as children join dots to form a picture. I watch these contrails dissolve into the finest tissue lines, like the scars on my wrist where I cut myself with a pencil-sharpener blade as a boy, letting out droplets of blood. I most often frame the way light strikes objects or landscapes. People are harder to frame. They meet my eye when I stare at them and cause me to turn away. If I frame a person, it is fleeting, when he or she is unaware, caught at a strange angle, or in repose. Animals are easier. They move more predictably. I know this because the Prague Zoo is just down there, on the far bank of the Vltava. I can see the cages strung along the riverbank (when the floods came, they carried off a Persian leopard, which miraculously made it, bedraggled, to the shore downstream, where it prowled the flooded meadows for months afterward). On clear mornings I can frame the sea lions parting the waters of their kidney-shaped pool, but it is too dark now to make out the sea lions or to discern the whiteness of the polar bear; it is too dark even to see the tiger burning bright.
I lean over the railing. I measure the space between the deck and the sloping garden. I feel gravity coming up at me, as if with hands, to pull me underwater. I am drawn to the edge of things, to margins and borders. I stand beside windows. I hike up to escarpments and teeter at the lip of limestone quarries. In 1961 my mother was on a team of architects who built the noted swimming pool in the Podolí district of Prague. She designed the high-diving platform. We venture to Podolí once or twice each summer, as a family. The point is not to weave a front crawl through the crowds in the pool, or to sunbathe beside the pool, but to admire the form of her tower, rising slender, yes, like a giraffe. I climb to the top of the platform on such outings. I stand at the edge, at the head of the giraffe, my toes out in space, my hands at my sides. It is my intention to dive. I look out. There is a fine view of Prague up there — not planetary black and gold, but green and blue. I look down at the pool, far below. Invariably, I see a few faces upturned toward me, looking at me, as did the elderly couple when I appeared to them in the triptych of my imagination. It is only then that I experience vertigo. Dizziness overcomes me. I know vertigo has a hemodynamic explanation: It is nothing more than restricted flow through my vertebral artery. Still, I cannot let go. Fictional Emil would dive. He would do a swan dive. Pip would dive. He would be amazed and humbled, but he would dive. He would carefully take off his jacket and laborer’s boots and set them on the platform, and he would fall without understanding, grabbing the air, snatching at it as he fell, in trousers and shirt, calling out for a blacksmith. I stumble backward from the edge. I grab railings, inspired by the railings I grip now. I persuade myself that I am being sensible, that I would drift in my dive under a gust of wind and strike concrete, ending up with a broken neck, paralyzed, with nothing to frame but a ceiling, and not even the cathedral ceiling of Kant. But there is no wind in our ČSSR. There is not even the faintest zephyr to stir the flags of the Communist moment. I teeter, I peer down. But in the end I am about safety; I make the safe choice.