Chapter 30: Štěpán, Lída, and Tomáš

For three nights Štěpán stayed in the hospital while doctors stitched up his wounds and shot him full of antibiotics. The rest of them crowded into his room, and his roommate complained about a bunch of rowdy Czechoslovak teenagers disturbing his rest.

Don’t blame them. I’m the rowdy one, Štěpán wanted to tell the old man, but he didn’t have the words.

He wouldn’t be here long enough to learn German either. With Tomáš translating, Štěpán told the man and woman from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees that he wanted to go to America to finish school and play hockey.

He didn’t want to offend the Austrians by asking to leave, but they seemed as happy for him to move on as he was. They gave him papers to fill out. He asked for a Czech-English dictionary. The land of Walt Whitman would be his land. On the inside of the manila folder with his asylum application, he wrote the verses from memory:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

He would leave those words with Tomáš. He’d noticed Tomáš staring up at the airplanes when they’d made their way through the woods. Even though Tomáš didn’t read poetry, he would understand.

The people from the United Nations said Štěpán had a clear case for asylum because he’d gone to prison and still bore its scars on his face. They told him he could Americanize his name on the immigration papers. He could be anybody.

He thought about it. He would always be a Czech boy. And he knew the man he wanted to be.

He picked up the pen.

SURNAME: Jelinek

GIVEN NAME, FIRST AND MIDDLE:

He flipped through the dictionary.

Steven Whitman

“You can call me Steve now,” he told the commissioners and his friends, and his roommate at the hospital who only grumbled.

It didn’t help foreign relations with his Austrian roommate that he kept singing “Break on Through” while snapping his fingers whenever his friends showed up. Tomáš and Pavol liked “The End” from that album best of all, but Štěpán found the seven-minute song morose and creepy and a laughably oversimplified rendering of Oedipus Rex.

When the hospital let him go with a bottle of pills, he went to the refugee center for unaccompanied minors next to the Vienna airport, the place where Tomáš and Lída and Nika were already staying. Nika had made him a huge thank-you card out of construction paper, and when he walked into the communal dining room, a banner in a kid’s uneven block lettering read VÍTEJTE, STEVE! NÁŠ HRDINA!

Welcome, Steve! Our hero!

Not a bad way to begin his life as Steven Whitman Jelinek.

He shared a room and a bunk bed with Tomáš, who’d already settled onto the bottom bunk but offered to switch.

“Thanks, Tomáš.” It would be a relief not to have to climb up and down the ladder. “Maybe I don’t need to be the hero all the time.”

Tomáš glanced up from his German textbook. “Good. Because I kind of like it.”

The UN people came to the center the following week with more manila folders and a bag of books. “Good news, Štěpán.”

“Steve.”

“Right-o, Steve.” The man grinned. “A preparatory school in upstate New York has invited you to play hockey and redo your senior year on a full scholarship, with room and board.” He handed Štěpán a brochure from the school. Štěpán flipped to the page for the hockey team.

Along with the incomprehensible English text, he saw the coach’s name: William Nedved. His mouth dropped open in shock before a smile crossed his face. He traced his finger over the coach’s face in the black-and-white photo. A dominating forward, Vilěm Nedvěd had disappeared suddenly, and no one had talked about him since.

“Yes, he defected about five years ago,” the man said.

That will be me. Everyone and no one will know who I am.

“Is this near Brooklyn?” Štěpán asked next, heart racing. In this new life, he could visit the places in the poems and the offices of the Brooklyn Eagle.

“It’s in the northern part of the state, closer to Canada. I’m sure the school organizes field trips to New York City.” The man handed Štěpán a map. “We’ve arranged for you to leave at the end of the week, so you can have six weeks of intensive English-language instruction before the semester begins. We don’t want you to fall behind in your studies.”

Štěpán examined the other pages in the brochure. It was an all-boys’ school, like his old one, but with ivy-covered buildings and no murals of smiling students and workers on the walls. The last page had a list of universities where the graduating students went. Perhaps he could also go to university and play hockey there. He would have to study hard and play hard and, if Ondřej was right, keep his secret to himself for much of the time. At some point, though, he would find people like him; he’d managed to find them in Czechoslovakia. Because we are everywhere.

In America he wouldn’t have to sneak around to replace Song of Myself or the other books he threw into the lake. He could read any book he wanted in freedom.

In Austria Lída saw Pavol everywhere. When the staff drove her into the city to pick out new maternity clothes, her gaze fixed on a thin boy with sandy shoulder-length hair who loped along the Ring Road with his backpack hanging off his right shoulder. He turned; she saw his beard and looked away. Another one passed on a bicycle a few minutes later, wearing a colorful headband and matching vest over his T-shirt. She waved instinctively, but he didn’t respond.

Still, it was as if Pavol had escaped before her, and skinny boys with long dark-blond hair brought him back to life. In this land of freedom, he was alive, and the Pavol of the StB photo with charred face and hollowed-out eyes no longer existed.

By now, he would’ve been eighteen. In her mind, he would always be seventeen. Kind, earnest, handsome, and in love with her.

In the room she shared with Nika she placed the photos of her father inside plain wooden frames and set them on their dresser. Nika picked up the one with Ondřej wearing combat fatigues and holding his rifle.

“Is that what he looked like when he was your age?”

Lída hugged her. “He was twenty when they took the picture. In 1940, at the beginning of the war.”

“He was so different then.”

“The war changed him.”

“Do you think we went through a war, kind of? That we’ll be changed?” Nika asked. For someone who’d wanted to escape to tell the truth about her brother, she’d become strangely quiet since arriving at the camp. At night her crying kept Lída awake. She refused to buy a new stuffed animal with the allowance the refugee center gave them. Only the ones that had burned up in the car would do.

“Yes, we’re changed. But we need to make it a better change.”

The next morning, Lída met with the director and, with Tomáš translating, asked, “What do I need to do to get Nika’s mother and sisters out of Czechoslovakia?”

There’d been talk of sending both Lída and Nika to a children’s village in Austria, where the baby would live too. But a children’s village wasn’t a family—not even the chaotic, wandering kind of family that Lída once had and lost. To Lída, it sounded cold, collective, and impersonal, like the place they’d just fled.

Nika deserved a better future. So did the baby.

It was up to Lída to cobble one together.

“It’s going to be complicated,” the director said. “We’ll have to call in the Red Cross. But given that Mrs. Bartošová is this child’s mother and the grandmother of your child, I think we have a chance.” He paused and gave her a rare smile. “The fact that you brought documents helps.”

It took Lída most of a week to fill out the paperwork and another week to meet with the people from the Red Cross, but ten days after Štěpán left for America, the shelter director and the woman from the Red Cross called her, Nika, and Tomáš into her office. Already seated inside were the same UN people who’d worked with Štěpán.

“The country of Canada has offered to take the Bartoš family, as well as you and your child,” said the woman from the Red Cross. “The others will fly to Toronto first, and you and Dominika will meet them there a few days later. We’ve arranged for this by the middle of August because you aren’t allowed to fly within a month of your due date and it’ll be easier if your child is born on Canadian soil.”

Tomáš repeated the words in Czech. Even before he said them, she knew from the grin that split his face.

“My baby will have a real home.” Tears flooded Lída’s eyes, carrying both the greatest joy and the deepest sorrow.

“We’re so impressed with your courage and initiative, and the way you’ve faced and overcome adversity. We know you’ll make a good life in your new country.”

After translating, Tomáš added, “Not just your baby. You’re going to have a real home now, Lída.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. No one would call her kráva again. No one could make her believe she was a cow. She hugged Tomáš, then Nika. And each of the kind strangers in turn.

After the meeting, she and Tomáš walked across a field toward the airport, where he’d been going every afternoon, taking a break from studying and volunteering as a translator. She wore sandals on this warm summer day, and the dry grass and weeds tickled her toes.

She thought of Štěpán’s words. And her father and Pavol who loved nature.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

She shook out her hair in the breeze and breathed in air tinged with jet fuel. Now that she had a moment to herself, she wondered what it would be like to live in a giant city of brick and concrete, after she’d navigated forests, gathered firewood, and killed and skinned her own food.

Her father would never have survived that life, but she’d once dreamed of joining Pavol in Prague. She could make a home wherever she landed. Because, more than anything else, people made a place a home.

“Thank you for helping me,” she said.

Tomáš stopped and grasped both her hands in his. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’m going to miss you too.”

His gaze faltered before he met her eyes again. “I mean, I’m really going to miss you.” His eyelid twitched behind his glasses. “I think I’ve fallen in love with you.”

She squeezed his hands. Tried to find the right words because the wrong ones would cut him as surely as the barbed-wire fence had sliced Štěpán. Above and behind her, a buzzing pushed into her consciousness. “Tomáš, wherever you go, you will find someone right for you. She’ll be smart and kind, and the same things that fascinate you will fascinate her. You’ll want to spend your whole life with each other. Raise your kids together.” She pictured Nika walking to the children’s room of the Rozcestí library whenever she felt sad. “Maybe you two will build the world’s largest train set together.”

Tomáš let his hands drop to his sides. His head drooped.

He was a strange boy, innocent and kind. That’s what Pavol had said about him. And she wanted to help him and be his friend the way Pavol had been, even if an ocean would now separate them.

“If you need any advice, like how to talk to her, write me and I’ll answer. I’ll always be there for you. So will Štěpán.”

“Okay,” he said. He walked toward the fence. She couldn’t tell if she’d consoled him or if he believed her, but she’d show him. She’d write him a letter the moment she arrived in Toronto and every week after that.

The buzzing in the distance turned into a steady drone that grew louder until the roar of jet engines filled her ears.

Tomáš clung to the chain-link fence and stared up at the sky. A giant plane-shaped shadow screamed past, and its fleeting wake whipped Lída’s face and hair. The plane’s wheels touched down with a shriek and a tiny puff of smoke. The smell of burned rubber hitched a ride on the breeze.

Tomáš whirled around. His eyes sparkled. “That’s an Austrian Airlines, Sud Aviation Super Caravelle, with twin rear-mounted engines. The plane’s made in France. Engines are British, Rolls Royce.”

He returned to his viewing spot, where a propeller plane lined up on the runway to take off. Lída’s heart ached at the thought of leaving him.

Because she did love him, just not in the way she’d loved Pavol. She didn’t think she’d ever love another boy that way.

Between when Štěpán flew to New York and when Lída and Nika received their plane tickets to Toronto, the first astronauts landed on the moon. Tomáš stayed up with the night-shift staff to watch Neil Armstrong proclaim, That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, at 4:56 in the morning Central European Time. Lída tried to stay up with them, but seven months pregnant, she gave out soon after Nika.

“It’s the world beyond the world,” Tomáš said in both Czech and German to anyone who’d listen.

He’d started applying to programs in aerospace engineering at universities in Austria and Germany. That meant language tests and exams in science and mathematics.

“We’ll need your secondary school transcript,” the director told him.

“That’s going to be hard. I’m not supposed to be alive. I faked my death so they wouldn’t go after my family.”

“We’ll have to figure something out.”

Tomáš recalled the math competitions he and Pavol used to enter, how they’d send away for problems from Moscow and elsewhere hoping to win prizes, though they never did win. “I have an idea. Send a telegram to Dr. Navrátil, the head of the school, and tell him I won a prize but you need my transcript to claim it.” He picked up the director’s snow globe. Inside were a train and a mountain lodge, miniature versions of the ones in his old train set.

He shook it, and as the white flakes descended, he imagined his family the moment the police told them they’d found the charred Škoda at the bottom of a gorge with all his stuff inside. Did his mother and sister cry? Did his father feel guilty for sending him to a camp he detested, for filling their final conversations with threats?

He couldn’t tell them he was still alive. He couldn’t contact them at all. Even if the police identified Ondřej and put the pieces together, they’d pretend the five of them had died in a car crash because the government—his father’s government—didn’t want to admit that people ran to the other side for freedom.

Tomáš returned the globe to the desk. “If you talk to Dr. Navrátil . . . If he says I died in an accident maybe you can say you want to send the prize to my family. Maybe there’s something I can put in, some kind of code to let them know I’m alive.”

The plan worked. Sort of. The transcript arrived. But there were more forms, and the director told Tomáš he couldn’t start classes in the fall. His life was now off track. Uncertain.

An invisible vise squeezed his chest. He reached for his throat, his nose, his glasses. He couldn’t speak.

Would this be his future on the other side?

If he didn’t look the man in the eye, if he stared at his new sneakers instead—not Botas but blue and white Adidas from West Germany—he could listen better.

“ . . . stay and translate . . . so helpful . . . time to adjust . . . Dr. Navrátil said . . .”

“You spoke to him?” Tomáš quickly glanced upward, then back at his feet.

“At length.”

“Was he sad? Because of what happened?” The sneakers were bright blue, with three white stripes. Comfortable and made to last a long time.

“He said you were one of the best math students he ever had, but you needed time to grow up. He wished you’d had the time.”

Tomáš’s lip quivered, and he hid his face with his forearm. He had the time. Pavol was the one who would never have it, and Dr. Navrátil had refused even to name Pavol at graduation. Having to wait until spring or the following fall to start university wasn’t the same as not getting to go at all.

I will translate. I will be a good helper. When I start university, I will be ready.

When Štěpán, Lída, and Nika left, it was as if his limbs were torn off one by one. But in the next weeks, more refugees arrived from Czechoslovakia, and Tomáš translated for them. In his free time, he watched airplanes take off and land from behind the airport fence or studied alone in his room. Realizing that the more he read, the better he’d understand German, he started books by Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Günter Grass, banned in his old country. The kind of books Štěpán liked.

He wrote letters to his friends, and they wrote him back. Lída sent him a poem she’d written—inspired, she said, by the poetry she and Štěpán had read every night when he lived with her. At the end of September, a photo of a newborn baby tumbled from her letter.

His name: Michael Andrew Bartos. Pavol’s son. Ondřej’s grandson.

Unlike the baby and Štěpán, Tomáš needed to add only one letter to his name to make it work in his new language. Tomáš was Thomas in both German and English, and it reassured him that he could fit in wherever he ended up, even if he had to wait a while to get there.

When the fake math trophy was ready, he and the director went to the shop in Vienna to mail it to his family. He dropped a cloth into the box.

The shop owner lifted it out, examined it. Tomáš had cut part of the waistband of the pants he’d worn during the escape. His mother had written his name in permanent marker so he wouldn’t lose track of his clothes at camp.

“What’s this? For cleaning?” the man asked.

“It’s for my mother. She’ll understand.”

They taped up the box. The man addressed it. Before he left, Tomáš hugged it tight, as if he could fill it with his love for her and that love could cross barbed-wire and electrified fences, border guards and censors.

He’d come to realize, though, that not everything about his old home was bad. It was where he’d made a friend in Pavol and learned of socialism with a human face, where he became one for all, all for one with Štěpán and Lída, who called people what they wanted to be called, taught him to be brave, took him from his walled garden into the world.

It was his turn to fly.