AT FIRST, I didn’t take the prospect of immigrating to the United States seriously. It seemed unlikely that the Czechoslovakian government would allow a known dissident to leave. But having a new aspiration felt better than drinking to pass time, planning my days around trips to the večerka for more liquor. Following Jirka’s instructions, I filed for permission to travel to Yugoslavia, claiming that the Adriatic salt water was necessary to alleviate my allergies. I obtained the required letter of commitment from the bank to exchange my crowns for dinars. The supervisor from my cleaning job vouched for my good standing at work (being a drunk himself, he paid no mind to my occasional stumbling and the vodka in my thermos). The bureaucrats verified that I had no unpaid debt to the state.
I cared little about these successes, as I knew that the final step, a review of my criminal history, would disqualify me for the trip. My name appearing on the roster of dissidents would put an end to the insane endeavor of emigration. I expected the cops might even pick me up again, just to see what I’d been up to. But my record came back clean. My arrest was not on file, and I remembered that I had not been asked to sign anything on my release from my brief hours in the prison cell. Perhaps there was no record. Or perhaps it was stashed in some confidential dossier the secret police kept for future leverage. Or maybe the bureaucrats and the shadow cops simply didn’t mind me going, good riddance to the enemy of the proletariat. An amicable breakup between tyrant and captive.
Whatever the reason, I received my dinars and my permission to travel within six months, against all odds. Jirka had to go through the same approval process, but his basketball games with party functionaries granted him nearly unlimited favors. Many of the functionaries used his smuggling skills for their own side businesses.
With our path cleared, I gained a new sense of hope. I felt like I wanted to take up more space in the world. Take it all for myself, as others did. The dollar was strong and the West was decadent and I wanted in on it. I was no longer a village girl looking for an acting career or a fair world for all. I wanted to become the consumerist piggy my good neighbors warned me about, live in the Yankee luxury that was unrivaled in history.
I traveled to Hluboká for a weekend to say goodbye to my parents. I spent Saturday with them as if nothing were amiss, an attempt to enjoy their company without conflict and sorrow, and announced the news of my pending adventure on Sunday morning. I convinced them that I’d obtained permission to fly to America directly; they had no idea I was facing the risks of the smuggling routes. In response, my father put on his rubber boots and went outside to complain about me to the chickens, his favorite confidants. They’d already heard many tales of the daughter who’d broken her father’s heart. As she was inclined to do in such situations, Babi produced a hidden treasure, the golden-beetle necklace that used to belong to my great-grandmother. It would bring me luck in America; Babi emphasized that it was also made of pure gold, and I could sell it in case of an emergency. Without meaning to, I promised my mother I would come back in six months, and we both wept through the lie as we held each other and waited for Jirka to pick me up.
This was my first trip outside the country, but I wasn’t meant to see any of Yugoslavia’s famous beaches. Jirka drove me straight through Slovakia and Hungary, each checkpoint along the way manned by police officers who scrutinized our documents and searched the car, eager to send us back for the smallest reason. Later that afternoon we reached an auto garage in a small Slovenian mountain village, our parting scene.
Jirka introduced me to my new handler, a quiet young man with odd patches of hair growing underneath his nose. Then he kissed me goodbye. “Don’t be humble,” he advised. “American men like to offer things. Take whatever they’ll give but never let them make you feel like you owe them.”
“We are born alone,” I said, parroting Ondráš’s farewell words. Jirka rolled his window up and set out on his return journey.
I crawled into the trunk of a champagne-colored Žigulík where I was to remain as my Yugoslavian contact drove me through the Dinaric Alps to Italy. I drank my allotted two bottles of water right away. It was unusually warm for August and the heat in the trunk was so unbearable I believed I’d suffocate, but I didn’t make a sound. That night, after we’d crossed the Italian border, the smuggler released me from my prison to sleep under the open sky inside a cheap sleeping bag.
I forced myself to keep my eyes open, having not an ounce of trust for my guide. He had been paid already, and whatever happened to me on our travels wasn’t likely to have consequences for him. But the intensity of his snores turned into a lullaby, and I too passed out. Eventually I awoke to the smell of coffee and eggs he’d cooked on a camping stove. The smuggler exchanged the tags on his vehicle, and we continued on to Milan, where the man provided an envelope of fake documents for Western travel and wished me luck in broken Czech.
I washed up and changed out of my sweat-soaked clothes in the airport bathroom. I flew to London, then from London to New York, and from New York to Florida. Whenever I took my seat on a plane, I passed out immediately as the passengers watched me, whispered about me, about the painful beet-red sunburn on my face, the armpit sweat inked into my clothes. I looked like a feral animal. I didn’t give a shit. These Westerners, upset over the lack of ginger ale on the flight, knew nothing.
At last I touched down at Tampa International Airport. I took a taxi to Hotel Goliath, a pale, ugly skyscraper erected in the midst of white sand on the beaches of South Sarasota. Every building on the coast as far as I could see looked the same. The shimmering waters of the Gulf of Mexico met the bright sun that turned the sky aflame, a shock to the retinas.
Florida seemed to hate color. The sun washed the hue out of every surface and turned it into a dull pastel as if eliminating its own competition: Only I am deemed worthy to shine. The rest of the world can look like a garment washed a few too many times. The humans living under the sun’s reign weren’t allowed to exist with their eyes fully open. They squinted or hid behind sunglasses, a permanent state of flawed vision that defined the Sunshine State. I rolled my suitcase to the hotel’s employee entrance, located right next to numerous dumpsters. In an office that doubled as an overflow pantry for canned tomatoes, I met Leszek, the Polish man who ran the operation. He had no scruples about describing what went on at the hotel. He brought in Eastern Europeans on tourist and asylum visas and employed us illegally as cleaners and kitchen staff. This ensured massive savings on taxes and labor costs while helping the refugees keep a low profile. Leszek explained with a laugh that American immigration wasn’t too concerned with hunting “white illegals.” We were tolerated.
He was a man in dire need of an ass-kicking, but I couldn’t be the one to do it. I had entered the country on a fake passport and family visa, pretending to be Adina Kowalczyk, Leszek’s visiting sister. Czech, Pole, Hungarian—to the Border Patrol it made little difference. We were from over there, the places frozen in time by the Cold War. I considered Leszek’s scheme to be morally acceptable. I was to clean hotel rooms and in exchange I’d get cash under the table every two weeks. I’d receive no benefits for my labor, had no safety net, and thus I felt no guilt about not paying taxes. There seemed to be no victims in this little scam of ours.
During the first week of my new life, I asked my favorite coworker and roommate, Ljuba, to take a photo of me standing on the hotel balcony during sunset. I leaned back with my elbows on the railing and bent my knee, a pose I’d seen on the covers of magazines. When I received my first wages, I had the disposable camera developed at a drugstore, and I sent the photo to my mother as proof of success. I was going to do well here. I just knew it.
TWO YEARS BEFORE my arrival, Ronald Reagan had been elected president of the United States. As I learned from the old newspapers I read to practice my English, Reagan’s presidency was the end of the country’s Carter malaise. In Carter’s America, people used to wait in line for gasoline, and back then our Czechoslovakian state media gleefully mocked the imperialist leader’s impotence. Now, I learned, Reagan was guiding the country into a new age of economic utopia, mostly by borrowing money. This seemed like a great idea—could I also become a millionaire simply by borrowing a million dollars? I developed no opinion of the new president based on his promises. I wouldn’t allow the newspapers to tug at my old political inclinations. The Americans could vote as they wanted. I was here for money, not civics.
On my first day of cleaning, I found a pair of shit-stained underwear placed on the dining table next to crushed potato chips and a pair of muddy shoes. I was startled by the rudeness of this filth, the fact that a human being would unabashedly leave such a mess for others to pick up, a confirmation that I was in a new culture. With plastic gloves I stripped the bedsheets stained with liquids and replaced them with fresh bleached linens that seemed too clean for any guest to deserve. I peeled used condoms off the side of the toilet bowl, flushed excrement and bloody tampons and puke, and scrubbed the toilets with my trusty brush. Dirty work, but it wasn’t hard to find a rhythm.
At night, I would return to the low-income housing two miles from the hotel. Leszek rented a two-bedroom apartment that I shared with five other cleaners. The place was a shithole, with its leaking air conditioner, the brown carpet that smelled like wet underwear, the roaches the size of mice flying about like helicopters with failed rotors, knocking into us as we chased them. Yet we made it into a home. I walked from work along the road as strange men catcalled from their cars. Once, a truck pulled up and two men were about to drag me inside, but an old couple and their two mastiffs stopped to help. The couple seemed angry when I said I didn’t want to go to the police. Instead I began to carry a pocketknife. I hadn’t come to America to be raped or killed.
AFTER MY FIRST two months on the job, I felt I’d saved enough to reward myself with a bicycle. This added expediency to my days, and in expediency I found freedom. I worked morning shifts and returned home at four o’clock. As Ljuba and I had taken a liking to each other from the beginning, we shared a bedroom, each of us decorating a wall with photos of family and our villages, like students in a dorm. Another couple of friends took the second bedroom, while our youngest roommates slept in the living room. Ljuba and I rested together in the late afternoons, told each other stories and blew smoke out of the window covered with a filthy, torn mesh screen, caught the spiders and roaches trying to get inside with our fingers and squashed them.
After our afternoon snoozers, Ljuba and I would go to the beach. At night, it was no longer pale and dull. The lights of the hotels shone like torches and reflected on the sand, a golden sea; fires burned, music played, the ocean was dangerous and intoxicating as it rolled back and forth in the moonlight. I was wary of the ocean—I’d never seen anything so infinite and unknowable.
Ljuba charmed the rich men who walked around the beach hiding their bellies in white linen shirts unbuttoned at the top. She got them to buy us drinks and give us cigarettes and cocaine. Those nights I could shed the humiliations I suffered during the day, I stopped feeling like my hands were permanently soiled. I paid minimal attention to the men, who spoke of Reagan and the ways in which he would help their business interests. To avoid discourse, I claimed to speak no English. After all, I wasn’t here for conversation, for flirtation. I didn’t want to make friends. I was here to numb myself before the next day’s shift.
Though I had decided to become apolitical, it frightened me that the freedom of capital could turn people into soft-bellied fools. They believed their fortunes were a result of the special work only they could do, that they existed in a more exceptional way than others. Their money was role-play, divorced completely from the reality of labor, of raw resources, production. As I continued to learn during these parties, most of the wealthy men didn’t make anything. They had taken the money of their fathers and invested it and made even more. And when “more” didn’t satisfy their needs, they used their money as collateral to borrow even more money, so much money that they owed more than they’d actually had to begin with. These lives of luxury, all based on fictions. The difference between rich and poor was made up of chance and a thousand lies. I couldn’t quite decide if I wanted to become one of them or poison their drinks and send them all to hell.
Every two weeks, I received letters from my parents. The envelopes were cut open and stamped to confirm they had been inspected by the Czechoslovakian government. My parents wrote of the harvests, the dogs, the preparations for winter. I felt homesick only when I read the letters; there was no time for it otherwise.
The letters I wrote to my parents were always about my activities, never about my feelings. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’d lost my idealism, that I was no longer concerned about Marxist revolutions and the fate of the world; I was barely concerned for my own future. I mistook indifference for independence. I realize now that I was asleep, relaxed and numb. I planned to stay in the shithole apartment until I had too much money to keep safely in cash. No need to make plans until then. Laissez-faire. Let the future come to you. Would I return home, stay in Florida, or take off to another place, Canada or Argentina? Having no plan made me feel like anything was possible. I couldn’t share these thoughts with concerned parents across the ocean.
NEARLY A YEAR into my American life, on a day off, I took a morning stroll along the beach. The beginning of June had brought severe tropical storms that turned the fine sand into cake batter, keeping the beaches empty. I’d pulled a poncho over my tank top and shorts, but the plastic steamed my skin and I had to rip it off to scoop the sweat from my armpits. The rain thickened and a strand of lightning vanished in the sea. I had been working more shifts to keep up with the height of tourist season, and these moments of free time were precious. At night I dreamed of nothing but work. I was grateful for this small break, as the cool rainwater washed the sweat from my skin.
I thought I might be the only one out in the storm until I spotted a silhouette of some hunchback, a man hiding underneath a see-through poncho. He held a film camera, turning the lever as he pointed it at the unsettled waves and lightning. I observed him for a while until he looked in my direction and took a few steps back. He put the camera in his bag as if I might rush to rob him.
“Scared me,” I heard through the noise of the rain.
“Sorry!” I shouted.
“Just getting some bee footage,” he said.
“There are no bees on this beach,” I said, confused.
“No, it’s… for background. I’m making a movie.”
“Okay. Good luck.” Suddenly the man who was taking footage of the stormy beach didn’t seem mysterious or fascinating anymore. I turned to leave.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Walking,” I said.
“What for?”
“Just walking. You don’t just walk?”
“I like your necklace,” the man said and introduced himself as Michael.
I don’t know what made me invite him to have coffee in the hotel bar, especially after such a boring line. (I like your necklace? Really?) I wasn’t interested in him at first, though it helped that he was attractive—no one can tell me this doesn’t make a difference. It seemed mad to go to the beach and stand by the water just to film something as ordinary as a storm. Maybe it was his madness I liked. Maybe my weakness for dissident artists had traveled with me to America, though this boy was no dissident and the scope of his artistry was yet to be seen. Either way, by the time we were dry, Michael had written down the number for the landline in my apartment. When he called the same night, he first had to speak to three of my roommates, who mocked him in their respective languages. If he withstood their torture, he’d be allowed to speak with me. “Ring of fire,” they told him. “You have to earn it, Florida man.”
But Michael wasn’t the only man I was talking to. After a year of silence, I received a letter from Jirka. It had been sent from West Germany, and thus it hadn’t gone through the hands of Czech government censors. Jirka told me he couldn’t stop thinking about me, that he wanted to maintain our friendship across the ocean. Would I be willing to exchange letters, to keep him informed of my adventures in America? Happy to hear from him, I replied with a letter twice as long, detailing all of my exploits so far. I sent him postcards from the places I frequented: Siesta Key, Saint Armands, Anna Maria Island. Greetings from Manatee County! the card beckoned, and I adorned it with a drawing of a manatee holding a sickle in one flipper, a hammer in the other, a personal touch I thought Jirka might appreciate. It became a correspondence we maintained for the rest of my time in America.
ON SLEEPLESS NIGHTS, Ljuba and I often discussed people’s immediate assumptions about the two of us. Some imagined we came from hamlets without electricity, where donkeys carried wheat from house to house and women in traditional skirts baked bread for the men who worked in the fields. At night, we entertained ourselves by candlelight with homemade violins and danced the Cossack and whittled figurines for our pagan gods. “Wonderful,” people would exclaim when they found out we’d come from behind the Iron Curtain to America, as if it meant we had traded primitive tyranny for enlightened liberty. I felt that with their assured exclamation of Wonderful!, the assumption that by reaching America, we’d found the sweet life of unbearable lightness, they were taking ownership of us. The men in white suits felt like they’d directly contributed to our salvation.
This gave them a great sense of entitlement. Wonderful! They behaved as if I owed them thanks, as if by merely paying their taxes, they had saved my life. Some felt entitled to more. They asked me to marry them in a drunken slur, tried to follow me into hotel rooms as I worked. They were shocked, even outraged by my lack of compliance when I ignored them or cursed at them in Czech or picked ice out of my glass and threw it at them. On a particularly troublesome night, the heir to a ketchup fortune dialed the INS tip line right in front of me and reported the hotel as a harbor for illegal immigrants. Ljuba and I decided it was no longer safe to attend the parties of the rich.
A few days later, I agreed to have dinner with Michael. I had made him wait a full three weeks after he’d asked me out during our first phone call, but he didn’t seem to mind at all. During our early dates, he asked about my homeland, its history, the first American man to do so. He understood I could be attracted to the allure of his country and yet remain suspicious, a harsh critic of my new home. Any country should appreciate its immigrants as objective observers—the immigrant views a country without the hue of nostalgia, the childhood indoctrination that establishes that our country must be good because it produced us, and we are good. But the criticism of governance, of systems, of cultural values is a necessary catalyst for progress, not a personal insult. A few times I grew frustrated at trying to express complicated ideas in my very flawed English, but Michael never interrupted me, never corrected me, never tried to fill in the words. Today I view this as basic decency, but back then, it seemed miraculous enough to make me want to see him again.
I didn’t realize how lonely I had been until I began to spend my nights at his apartment. Until his hands caressed my hip bones and we slept entangled despite the stifling heat. Being with another person wasn’t unlike being in one’s own invented country. We made up our own language and our own customs and names and local foods, and these secrets served as accelerants for romantic free fall. Always I fell for the dreamers, except this one felt safe. He told me he loved me one month after our first date, and I waited to say it back. Waited four months to see if my hesitance might discourage him, wound his ego, make him angry. But he stayed, he waited, without pressure, until I could no longer deny myself.
In simple terms, I fell in love despite my best efforts. The cash I’d hidden in the hair-coloring box and under my mattress no longer felt like an end in itself. I allowed myself brief visions of the future, possibilities that went beyond the numb hustle. I saw fragments of the woman sipping champagne with other dissidents in the Playwright’s house, the woman I’d been before my arrest and Ondráš’s betrayal. I was doomed. These small reminders of who I used to be felt an awful lot like hope, and for such a crime, the punishment could be severe.
INDEED, PUNISHMENT WAS imminent. On a Monday morning in February, INS agents acting on the old tip from the ketchup magnate arrived at Hotel Goliath in full tactical gear, semiautomatic weapons in hand. They rounded up the managers along with Leszek, Ljuba, and six other coworkers from housekeeping and the kitchens, then they zip-tied their wrists and placed them in a van and drove them out of my life.
I received the news from Alenka, another roommate of mine who had watched the whole scene from the parking lot because she’d arrived late for her shift. She and I were the last survivors in the apartment, picked by fortune simply because our work schedule had misaligned with the raid. We packed immediately, wished each other luck, and left the apartment as it was, filled with the other women’s belongings. Despite the panic of being hunted, expecting the agents would snatch me from the parking lot before I could escape, I felt sorrow at leaving the only refuge I had.
Michael picked me up in his red Buick and took me to his apartment. I locked myself in the bathroom and wept for Ljuba, who would be held in jail along with the others for an undetermined amount of time before deportation. Leszek had described the options to us during orientation. In case of capture, we could plead for amnesty, thanks to the policies of the Reagan administration. We should speak of the danger awaiting us in our authoritarian home countries; we should bad-mouth the Russians, insult the Soviet Union, flatter the American sensibility, anything to provoke the smallest bit of compassion. I knew this wasn’t going to work. Every successful INS raid was heavily publicized, and the story of undocumented Eastern Europeans moving around America during the second wave of the Cold War could only end in mass deportation.
As I tried to shake off my despair, I came out into Michael’s living room, furnished only with a couch and a television and unruly piles of VHS tapes. He sat on his couch and fiddled with a small black box. I swallowed. My throat and eyes and ears burned. The skin underneath my eyes itched. I tried to tell myself it was all bound to happen, that I’d known from the beginning this was temporary, and it wasn’t for nothing that I had saved up three thousand dollars, the result of my awful diet of bananas and tuna fish, of riding my bicycle instead of paying for the bus, of letting others pay for my alcohol and cigarettes. This money meant independence. In a way, I had fulfilled my mission.
Here was Michael, a waiter at the Ritz by day but a filmmaker by heart, running around town, filming storms crashing in the midst of the sea. I tried to gauge how easy it would be to leave him behind should I decide it was time to go home. I feared it would not be as easy as I’d hoped, even though it was only eight months ago that he’d been a complete stranger. The bastardy of love.
“Did I ever tell you I met Reagan?” Michael said, eyes still on the box.
“The president?”
“Well, we didn’t really meet, but I saw him,” Michael said. He had seen Reagan when he was still known as an actor and a governor at a dinner benefit organized by movie studios. Michael had been working catering gigs to rent equipment for his graduate thesis, the kind of routine Scorsese rip-off most men wrote in film school. In the middle of the event, Reagan stood up and walked to the bathroom, and he touched Michael on the shoulder as he passed. Their eyes met, Reagan flashed his famous smile, all teeth, as he swaggered by like some cowboy diplomat, and this brief contact reminded Michael of his deceased father. Michael understood immediately that Ronald Reagan had a message for him, only for him: Hear you’re a good kid and you want to be in the movies. Push for it. No one is coming to save you. Don’t count on others to offer a hand. Make your way. I’ll see you at the top. Son.
I didn’t ask Michael whether he’d considered the possibility that Reagan had touched him by accident and meant to say nothing at all except Let me lean on you, waiter, as I make my way to the shitter. This is the difference between the New World and the Old.
“Whatever you think of him, Reagan made it far with that philosophy,” Michael said. “America is for the bold.” He paused, as if realizing how he must sound to me. “I know you want to go home. You must feel unsafe here, exposed in ways I can’t comprehend.”
I didn’t pay much attention to him as he spoke. I feared I already knew where the speech was headed, and I felt the need to keep an eye on the front door, expecting any minute that the Mayflower police would burst through and take me to a shared cell with Ljuba.
“I love you, Adéla,” he said and quickly added, “I want us to be practical. I would’ve waited much longer to ask, since I don’t even know if you want this. But if we go to city hall tomorrow, we can apply for your green card and take it from there.”
He opened the box. I had never been particularly fond of diamonds, and thus the small jewel set in an old silver ring—a family heirloom—didn’t make much of an impression. But the words did, despite the fact that due to my illegal entry into the country using someone else’s identity, legal marriage wasn’t possible for me. Michael didn’t know this yet. But the sentiment felt good on the day I’d lost the few certainties I had in America.
“You want to marry me and wipe my sins clean,” I said.
Michael flinched but I didn’t have the energy to apologize. His timing seemed at once opportunistic and kind. I explained that I had entered the country using a fake identity—though he knew me by my real name, Adéla, the name on my passport was Adina, I said. We couldn’t even file paperwork to get married at city hall without the authorities catching on. It wasn’t that my answer was no, rather that our marriage could only ever be unofficial, between us, an agreement underscored by ceremony. Why do it at all?
Michael took this news in. “Okay,” he said, his eyes bright with a new idea. “Then let’s make it simple.” He held the ring box toward me and swore he would do anything to keep the INS agents away. He would support me if I couldn’t find another job that paid under the table, hire a lawyer to see if there was a way to alter my status. If the worst happened and I was deported, he would come with me. I wouldn’t have to feel alone ever again. We were going to build our own private empire, and we didn’t need official papers to do it.
I didn’t answer the roundabout proposal in words. I never said yes. I straddled him and kissed him and with that I decided, on a whim, to stay in America indefinitely. It wasn’t a leap of faith but a plea to fate: Please don’t chew me up too badly when this backfires. Michael offered me a way to anchor myself, to replace the friends I’d lost to deportation proceedings in a single day, to provide the sense of family I missed.
After the proposal, he took me to Red Lobster to celebrate, and I gnawed on dry biscuits and tried my best not to retch at the heinous smell of crab Alfredo permeating the restaurant while I thought of the sweet scents of a Hluboká pub, the spilled beer and pickled wurst and the endless fog of cigarette smoke. I decided it was time to exorcise my attachment to these memories of home. I’d come too far to trap myself in homesickness, to suddenly idolize the country I had been so eager to leave not long ago. With a single gesture, Michael had opened a new future for us. Now it was time for me to take the lead.