Chapter 4: Lída

The Sunday before Christmas, Pavol’s mother invited Lída and her father for dinner. Pavol’s family lived on the ground floor of a subdivided building near the town center—a solid, well-lit space so different from the wood-and-stone cottage in the woods where Lída and her father had moved two summers ago. In some ways, Pavol’s family was even poorer than hers. Their two rooms, not counting the shared kitchen and bathroom, had little furniture, and meat thickened the potato stew only because of the rabbit that Lída had trapped and brought to them. But it was a foundation. A piece of a community. A place where someone could grow up strong.

It was the life Lída wanted with Pavol: to read his books over his shoulder in a student apartment in Prague, learn his family’s Slovak language, show she wasn’t the kráva her aunt and everyone at school had called her.

After Pavol’s mother served the meal and sat at the head of the table, they clasped hands. Lída squeezed Pavol’s smooth warm palm and her father’s fingers, knobby and twisted from a lifetime of battles.

Accustomed to saying grace from previous invitations to their home, Lída joined Pavol, his mother, and his three sisters as they recited, “Bless us, O Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

Her father grunted.

“Pa, please,” she whispered.

Lída wondered if the youngest sister, Tereza, eight years old and sitting right next to him, detected the caustic odor on Ondřej Pekár’s breath and skin. He had started early, or maybe never finished from the night before. Had the Christmas season not meant so much to Pavol’s family, Lída would’ve once again come alone and made excuses for him.

If anyone noticed her father’s condition, they said nothing, and Sunday dinner passed without incident. Ondřej scraped his share of meat onto Tereza’s plate, winning a smile from her and a glare from Nika, her next-older sister. They talked about winter’s early start that year, all three sisters on the honor roll at their primary school, the math contests Pavol had entered, and his plans to become a civil engineer, building railroad tracks over rivers and through mountains.

Like the Soviet occupation, Lída’s job—or the fact that she had a job instead of finishing school—was one of those things they didn’t talk about. Even though as many girls left school at sixteen to work in the factories as boys did to extract the brown coal that lay under the hills on the way to Most, she’d never planned to be one of them. But she didn’t have high test scores to protect her from a government that had turned her father’s work absences into her problem.

Days after she’d started her final year at the girls’ school, the principal escorted her to the office, where a Party functionary waited. Ondřej Pekár is a fine mechanic, he said while her principal looked on, silent. We need you to make sure he gets to the factory to do his work. The only way we can do it is have you show up with him.

Her principal added, For unusual academic talent, we could’ve made an exception. We encourage you to continue your studies in night school. She handed Lída a schedule of evening classes at the town library, classes she’d never be able to take without electricity at home to do her assignments after working all day.

The schedule offered nothing for her real dreams, to direct the kind of movies shown at the community center. Movies filmed all over the world, from the deserts of Siberia to the tropical forests of Cuba. In the spring before the tanks, a woman director, Věra Chytilová, had even come to Rozcestí to talk about the movies she’d made.

A girl like her had to be practical, though. Lída would study nursing if she had the chance.

She and Pavol had come up with a plan to go to Prague together. A five-year plan, he joked, but for her, a plan for life.

After dinner ended and Lída helped Pavol’s mother and sisters carry the dishes out to the kitchen, her father stood and rested his hand on Pavol’s shoulder.

“Walk back with Lída and me.” His gravelly voice still carried a commander’s authority from his years in the Czech Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

Lída pressed her lips together in a weak smile. Until now, her father had withheld his approval, even though she’d introduced Pavol to him in the spring and they’d met several times over the summer at rallies to support Comrade Dubček’s reform government. Since she wasn’t yet eighteen, she needed her father’s permission to go to Prague with Pavol in September. She also needed to make sure he could get along without her.

The three of them crossed the main square and walked along slick cobblestones to the muddy uphill path on the town’s northern edge. Lída’s father edged closer to Pavol. “Call me Ondřej.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Pekár.”

Lída laughed and took Pavol’s hand. So polite. So endearing.

It was bitterly cold, light fading fast on the shortest day of the year, coal dust turning the sun a bloody orange on the horizon. Lída pressed herself against Pavol for warmth, crunching through the thin icy crust of puddles rather than let him go. She wanted her father to see how much she loved Pavol.

As he followed her inside the cottage, Pavol ducked to avoid hitting his head on the lintel. Lída pushed her rolled-up mattress and blankets against the front wall under the window to create a makeshift sofa. It faced the handmade pine table, four chairs, and two stacked cupboards—keepsakes from her father’s years working on collective farms. Behind the wood stove next to the dining area, a plastic curtain hid his bedroom.

Ondřej lit the wood stove, fanning the flames with a newspaper that he tossed into the firebox before slamming the metal door.

“I guess I’d better be getting back to town, Mr. Pekár,” Pavol said, bowing slightly as if he was already exiting through the front door. “I’m meeting some friends from school.”

“Ondřej.”

“Right.” Pavol hesitated. “Ondřej.”

Lída’s father opened the bottom cupboard and brought out an unlabeled bottle of homebrew slivovice along with two shot glasses. He set the bottle and glasses next to a candle on the table.

“Pa, no.”

“Sit, kid.” Ondřej held his hand, palm up, over one of the chairs. “I see you’re surrounded by women. I’ll show you how to be a man.”

He filled both glasses to the brim. Lída shuddered.

How do you plan to support my daughter? Will you help her go back to school and finish her education? Those were the questions a father should have asked. Not How much can you drink before you pass out?

She stood on tiptoe and whispered in Pavol’s ear, “You don’t have to do this.”

Pavol touched his lips to her cheek. The lightest of pressure melted the chill inside her. “My mother isn’t expecting me,” he said. “And my friends can wait because there’s no school tomorrow.”

A pang shot through Lída’s heart. The shoe factory didn’t have the day off. They would work right up to Christmas and if needed, on the day itself. Christmas meant nothing to the invaders.

Ondřej drained his glass and poured another. “Okay, I’ve had a head start. I assume this isn’t your first time.”

With a shake of his head, Pavol sat at the table and lifted his glass. Lída had seen him drink a few beers with his friends while she pretended to sip the bitter liquid from her bottle. She kept track of Pavol whenever they went to parties and taverns. Back when she lived with her aunt and uncle in Znojmo, Aunt Irina—herself an expert on how to choose shitty men—warned her never to marry someone who drank. I tell you this because girls gravitate to boys like their fathers.

Lída wanted the opposite of her father. Someone stable, who could move to a place and grow roots. Make friends. Be the kindest one among their friends.

Pavol Bartoš is the kindest boy in Rozcestí. Not bad-looking either. She’d heard that from Daria, the Roma girl in her class, the one who befriended her when she arrived from Znojmo via Pardubice and Liberec and Ústí nad Labem and Most.

Yet he seemed to want to take her father’s test, and Lída didn’t know how to stop him.

“I’m going out for water and kindling. We’re running low,” she told them. She would need to heat water for coffee in the morning, to make sure her father showed up at the factory along with her. So he wouldn’t lose yet another job and force them to move again.

Lída filled and lit a kerosene lantern and picked up the bucket. The creek where she fetched water, scrubbed their clothes, and bathed in warmer weather ran parallel to the road, an easy walk. After breaking a thin coating of ice, scooping up water, and leaving the bucket by her door, she followed a narrow trail through the woods in the opposite direction, past the latrine, to the railroad tracks. Her shoes left prints in the shallow snow that lingered on the sunless path long after it had melted everywhere else. She sat on the track where she and Pavol had spent so many hours over the summer, trading I love yous and talking about their future in freedom. Puffs of snow on the underbrush refracted the lantern’s flickering orange light.

They’d met at a poorly chaperoned dance in the cafeteria of the all-boys’ technical school in February 1968. Daria had talked Lída into going, along with Daria’s twin brother Grigor, a student there. Lída stood with the Roma kids against one wall while other kids danced to the booming music they called rock ’n’ roll. Lída tapped her foot in time to the rhythm, then shook her hips when she thought no one was looking. Grigor and two of his friends smoked skinny hand-rolled cigarettes. A harsh laugh made her stiffen.

“Well if it isn’t the track sweepers.” The voice above her was slurred, its owner’s face bright red and beaded with perspiration. His gelled-up blond hair glistened. He stepped so close Lída could breathe in the stench, like her father’s acrid sweat when he staggered home late. She pressed her back to the wall.

Behind the boy were two others—dark-haired, tall, and solid. They wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders, a human snowplow. Grigor and his friends, so much smaller, held their palms out in a gesture of submission. Caught where they didn’t belong, even though the Roma boys in the special integration program were also invited to the dance.

A gangly boy approached with a purposeful expression. His hair, the color of wet sand, covered the tips of his ears and crept down his neck. Like the others, he’d taken off his jacket, loosened his tie, and unbuttoned his shirt collar. His neck was pale and pimply, and below his Adam’s apple a wooden cross dangled from a leather cord. The Communists had banned displays of religion. He was the first boy she’d seen with a cross.

He’s a brave one.

He tapped the drunk boy’s forearm with his fist. “What’s up, brácha?”—though they didn’t look at all like brothers.

“A bunch of dirty gypsies stinking the place up.”

Lída noticed how the new boy looked Grigor in the eye as he said, “How’s that our business, Štěpán? We came here to have fun. Listen to music. Dance.”

“Get drunk.” One of the darker-haired boys held up a metal flask.

“Meet girls,” the skinny boy said.

“Lot of good that’ll do you, Saint Pavol.” The drunk one in the middle pointed to the cross. Its wearer grinned as if the name suited him.

He stepped forward and bowed to Lída and Daria. “Ladies . . . gentlemen. I am so sorry for the behavior of my friends this evening. I promise that it will not happen again. Please excuse us.”

His friends laughed and slapped his back as they moved toward the dance floor.

“That’s Pavol Bartoš,” Daria told Lída as soon as he and the others left. “The only decent one of the bunch.”

Grigor said, “There’s another gadjo who doesn’t mess with us, but he’s not here. He never comes to parties.”

“Neither would I, if I didn’t get points for being here,” one of Grigor’s friends said.

Lída chewed the inside of her lip. She didn’t belong here. She should never have let Daria convince her to come. The Roma kids had to prove they’d integrated into society even though they’d never be accepted as equals. And here she was, the only one among them who wasn’t Roma, doing nothing to keep away the kids who wanted to mess with them.

Because the others would only mess with her too.

Daria elbowed Lída’s upper arm, urging her forward. “Pavol’s cute. You should dance with him.”

“Oh, no. Not me.” Lída’s voice wavered. She’d never danced with a boy before. Constantly moving, living alone with her father in forest cottages abandoned by Party officials as soon as the government gave them better ones, she’d become invisible, ghost-like. As if she could come and go and leave no footprints.

With delicate hands, Daria pushed her toward the center of the room. She could’ve resisted, but she didn’t. She found herself at the snack table, facing Pavol.

“Thank you for your help with my friends,” she shouted over the music.

He smiled. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “You’re new here, right?”

Blood rushed to her face. “How do you know?”

“I go to all the dances. This is the first time I’ve seen you.”

He spoke Czech with an accent. “You’re not from Rozcestí either,” she said.

“Slovakia. A village near Banská Bystrica.”

Lída pictured his village on a map. Her father had fought with the partisans there during the Second World War. “So you’re used to a whole different language.”

Pavol shrugged. “It hasn’t been too hard to adjust. In Slovak, Rozcestí means the same thing as in Czech: ‘a fork in the road’ or ‘a parting of the ways.’ ” He shook his hair back. “Kind of ominous, don’t you think?”

“So do you think romance is doomed for people in this town? Like one of those tragic movies?” She clapped her hand over her mouth. What a ridiculous thing to say.

He laughed, then pointed at the loudspeaker. “Do you like the Beatles?”

Lída nodded. The music was wild, aggressive, and free, the words as foreign as the instruments and rhythms.

“This music was banned here until a few weeks ago. Now we’re dancing to it. Pretty amazing.” In the low light, his eyes were deep blue like the sky at dusk. Sincere eyes.

It was her time to act. To control her own course rather than letting the whims of others blow her in their directions. She reached for Pavol’s wrist.

Her words would be a betrayal of Daria, her only friend. Even so, she wanted this chance.

“You can dance with me. I’m not a gypsy.”