The View from Stalin's Head Read online

  THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD

  STORIES

  AARON HAMBURGER

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS NEW YORK

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  A MAN OF THE COUNTRY

  JERUSALEM

  THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD

  THIS GROUND YOU ARE STANDING ON

  SYMPATHETIC CONVERSATIONALIST

  YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

  GARAGE SALE

  CONTROL

  LAW OF RETURN

  EXILE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BY AARON HAMBURGER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD

  COPYRIGHT

  Dedicated to my mother and father,

  and to Meggin Silverman

  A MAN OF

  THE COUNTRY

  ALL FAIRY TALES HAVE IN common not “once upon a time” but an unlikely pairing of characters who under normal circumstances would never have met. Like a former waiter from Madison, Wisconsin, and a giant.

  Jirka is tall and tlusty, which translates roughly into “thick.” It is an equally useful word for describing people who weigh over two hundred pounds as well as books that clock in at over a thousand pages. His nose, chin, and fingers are fleshy and full of life. The only subtle thing about his looks is his smile, which curls up in the corners of his lips as if he’s winking at you.

  We met on a subway platform. I was standing under an ad for the new Pizza Hut, my nose buried in a book with the cover wrapped in brown paper. A guy from Minnesota advised me to cover all my English books to avoid being hassled by undercover ticket inspectors on the subway.

  Jirka picked me out of the crowd to ask if he could take a picture of my nose.

  “It is regret I do not understand what you have said,” I told him in Czech.

  “Where are you from?” he asked. He wore a bright yellow knit cap over his mangy curls and a dull blue winter jacket that looked like he’d slept in it. I wore a full-length Czech gray raincoat to hide my American clothes.

  “I am a man of America but I speak a little of Czech.”

  His eyes, already big and round like moons, widened. “You are American and you can speak Czech?”

  I said, “Is it contrary to a law for an American to speak Czech?” Sometimes I was reckless in languages that were not my own.

  “Wir können to speak the English,” he replied.

  We rode the subway to Dejvice together and then transferred to the tram. Jirka, who worked in construction, wanted me to be his English teacher. After fumbling around in his coat pocket, he fished out a pencil stub and a wrinkled Dunkin’ Donuts napkin so he could write down his phone number. How much did I charge for lessons? Could I give him a list of books? He would buy them the very next day. He knew a good bookstore.

  “Wait, wait,” I said.

  “I no can wait,” he told me and pulled my arm. The other passengers in the tram stared. “I must besser speak English. It is important to make my fortune.”

  “But this is my stop. I have to get off. Moja zastavka.”

  Jirka looked deep into my eyes. “Please call to me tomorrow,” he begged.

  —

  A YEAR PASSES, and I’m going home. Jirka the giant and I stand in front of a pink and green castle on a hill that inspired a novel by Kafka. We are not lovers and Jirka has no idea I ever wanted to be, but he has taken the day off work to spend it by my side like a lover would. The smog has melted, as if in honor of my leaving, and we have a clear view of the trams, the tourists on Charles Bridge, trees dragging their leaves over the water, paddleboats on the Vltava River, shadows, islands.

  After a last look over the city, we walk down the craggy steps of Nerudova ulice into Mala Strana, a neighborhood of narrow streets where the buildings are painted in pastels and trimmed with scallops and curls like wedding cakes. Jirka scratches his chest with a proud, satisfied smile. His size and rocklike good looks turn heads everywhere. Even the American tourists wearing the red-and-black-checkered velvet hats for sale on Charles Bridge stop to look at him. I can’t decide if he’s unaware of the attention he’s getting or if he enjoys it.

  We turn right onto Malostranske namesti and Jirka puts his hand on my neck. His touch feels cold and heavy, like a metal clamp. “Please, my friend.” He slips his whole arm around my shoulders and pulls me against his hip. I try not to get hard because we’ve never talked about it openly, this propensity of mine to be attracted to him.

  Three teenage boys dressed in oversize sweatshirts and backwards baseball caps like the hip-hop artists they watch on Euro MTV are heading straight for us, but Jirka doesn’t drop his arm. He points at the show window of a store that imports Levi’s. “It is funny reklama for slips. How you say reklama?”

  “Advertisement.” The ad in question, for men’s underwear by Diesel, consists of three close-up shots of crotches in various states of arousal as seen through white briefs. The word for underwear in Czech is slip. I ask him, “What kind of slip do you wear?”

  Jirka hikes down the waist of his pants low enough for me to see his paisley-print bikini briefs.

  The boys walk by and take no notice of us.

  —

  HE USED TO live in an apartment in a complex of high-rise cement buildings called Cerveny vrch, or Red Hill. When you came over, you had to phone from the corner. Instead of letting down his golden hair, he’d open his window and throw you his keys.

  “Why don’t you fix your buzzer?” I asked when I visited him the first time.

  “I like to give keys out window,” Jirka said. He took my raincoat and pointed to a towel spread on the floor where I could leave my shoes.

  Jirka rented his spare bedroom to Jason and Teal, a Canadian couple whom he never saw except passed out on their mattress, once next to a pool of vomit. Their backpacks, still stuffed with clothes, lay unzipped next to a stack of books covered in candle drippings, books like On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Jirka had taped an index card to the phone for them: “Jirka neni doma 5 Jirka no home.”

  Pots of basil and thyme and baby tomatoes grew on the windowsill in Jirka’s kitchen. I sipped a glass of carbonated water while he consulted a water-stained cookbook his mother had given him when he moved to the big city from his village. The black-and-white illustrations showed ecstatic families in peasant clothing sitting down to a traditional Czech meal after a hard day’s work on a collective farm or the People’s Steel Factory. Jirka nodded thoughtfully as he leafed through a few pages, then tossed the book aside and scrubbed five potatoes in the sink. After boiling them into a mash, he mixed in two sticks of butter and a small tub of sour cream.

  We ate without speaking. I stared at the tiles on the floor, the color of piss, and tried not to touch the sticky table. When Jirka finished, he wiped his bowl clean with a hunk of wheat bread. “If my English is no so good, you must say me, okay?” he said, licking the corners of his mouth for crumbs.

  “Okay.”

  “I want show you some things.” He wouldn’t let me wash the dishes so I piled them in the sink.

  Jirka stored his treasures in a scratched china cabinet with its left door missing. I nodded my approval as he held up a few specimens from his collection of design magazines from Austria, a couple of crystals wrapped in rags, and incense.

  “Smelling sticks are good for relaxation or when you must meditate. And here is my favorite auto.” Jirka reached over my head to grab a Mercedes ad tacked to the wall, and I inhaled a whiff of his spiky body odor, warm and honest. As I admired the car he wanted and could never afford, he grinned as if he was rea
dy to offer me anything. “I like your nose,” he said and pointed a lamp at my face. “It is Judish nose, no?”

  “Yes.” I braced for an insult.

  “I like it.” He spread out his palms to frame my nose, and I smelled his armpits again. “Some-when I want take good photo of your nose. Ja?”

  After I promised he could take a picture of my nose, Jirka lay back on his double bed and stretched his legs. He had a massive chest and thighs like horse flanks. There was so much of him, it was really impressive. “You want use toilet maybe?” he asked.

  “No thanks.” I sat on the edge of the bed and stared up the folds of his shorts hanging loose. “We don’t say toilet in English. We say bathroom.”

  “Why? When you no want bath, why say bathroom?”

  “It’s softer, more suggestive. Maybe more polite.” Jirka shook his head to tell me he hadn’t understood. “Zdvorily.”

  He snorted. “I think is strange, Americans must say they want take bathroom when they want take toilet. Is no normal.”

  Amazingly, in all the time we’ve known each other, Jirka hasn’t yet managed to take a picture of my nose. But then he still has one day left to try.

  —

  WE STOP BY my flat, which after today I no longer rent. My bags are sitting by the door, ready to transfer to his place where I’ll spend the night before waking up early to catch my plane. Pan Cerny, the landlord, has given up renting the flat because he can make four times as much money letting it out week by week to tourists or Western businessmen. He’s eager for me to go so he can accommodate a pair of insurance agents from Rome.

  “Can we make sit?” Jirka asks and wipes his forehead with his arm. We stretch out right on my gray felt carpet. When I moved in, pan Cerny brought a roll of it and cut off a square with a pair of scissors he’d borrowed from a neighbor.

  Jirka unbuckles his belt, then opens the top few buttons of his pants, a brand of Levi’s knockoffs called Lee Cooper, which he is surprised to learn are not available in America. He opens his pants everywhere, even in pubs or restaurants. I used to try to convince him to button himself back up, but he’d say, “Why? I like it. It is easy.”

  I stare at his briefs out of habit and feel nauseous. “Is cool color, no?” he says and stretches out his waistband. “But I want find yellow. Yellow for me is the favorite color.” Jirka explains he has been searching for a pair of yellow briefs but has never found any and if only some-who would buy him yellow underwear, then he would be really happy.

  I nod and he nods too. “Why you all the time with head . . . ,” he says.

  “I guess it’s a habit from teaching. To make sure people understand.”

  Jirka smiles blankly. He unbuttons an extra button on his pants, kicks off his shoes, and props his wide stockinged feet, sweat-stained along the toes, next to mine as if we’re married. “Ahh,” he says and folds his thick fingers over his stomach.

  But we can’t stay like this forever.

  I ask if he’s ready to go and then leave the keys on my bed, next to my old Czech raincoat. I bought it for cheap in one of the Vietnamese street markets and it began falling apart a week later.

  “You want call taxi or take tramvaje?” he asks outside.

  “A taxi is too expensive.”

  Jirka laughs. “You are really Jew,” he says.

  I drop my bag. “Jirka, that’s terrible. That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  “Why?” he says. “I think is nice compliment for you.”

  “Would you say to a Czech person who is stupid, You are really Czech?”

  He shrugs. “I think is nice compliment for you,” he repeats stubbornly.

  —

  A YEAR AGO, back when I left the States, my mother took me to Kmart to load up on toiletries. (Prague had a Kmart too; they sold Oreos and peanut butter in the “imported foods” section.) As we wheeled past a rack of condoms, she asked out of the corner of her mouth like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, “You need any of those?” I shook my head. The day before at that same Kmart, I’d bought a packet of them, sandwiched between Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver, both of which I threw away in the parking lot.

  She smiled. “I didn’t think so.”

  When my mother was young, black-and-white movies faded out after kisses. Women wore gloves and men fedoras. “Graphic,” “direct,” and “explicit” were obscene words. “Everything was suggested,” she’d marvel when Now, Voyager or Random Harvest came on TV. “There was no need to come out and say everything. That was the beauty of it.” Still, I dreamed of the day I’d wake up in a pink T-shirt glued to my chest that said FUCK ME, I’M GAY in capital letters. How wonderful to walk down the street with FUCK ME, I’M GAY printed on your chest in pink. Instead of guessing and hinting and winking, men would simply run out of buildings and give you their phone numbers, or throw down flowers from their windowsills. A prince in gold armor would swoop down on a vine from the roof of a gay bar with a sunflower in his hand.

  After Kmart, my mother took me to lunch at a Greek diner. Our waiter caught my mother wearing her newly acquired reading glasses. They were light and thin, almost transparent. She’d whip them out and glance through them at menus, programs, newspapers. After gleaning whatever information she absolutely needed, she’d shove them back into her purse, where they clicked against her compact mirror and lipsticks.

  In the middle of our meal, my mother leaned over her Greek salad and said in a low voice, “When you’re over there, be careful what you tell people about yourself, that you’re Jewish or, you know, who you go around with. People there are different. It’s not the States.”

  She sat back against the vinyl booth and stared at her salad, dripping with oil. I faced a skewer of fat gray chicken kebab chunks on an overflowing bed of pale rice. “They have big portions here,” I said. We dug our forks into our food as quickly as we could.

  —

  JIRKA AND I are riding the subway toward Haje, a neighborhood of crumbling housing projects on the edge of town that’s so dirty and poor, Czechs insult each other by saying, “Go to Haje!” Jirka claims to know a good pub there.

  A friend of mine, a Slovak named Petr, once said to me about Jirka, “Your friend is a real man of the country. He carries the dust of the small town wherever he goes.”

  I wonder, if he’s a man of the country, what does that make me?

  I’ve never been as far as the Haje station. We get off the escalator and emerge from a cavelike mouth of crumbling concrete. The air is damp with fog that smells like oil. Jirka leads me down a dark narrow space between thick gray walls fifteen stories high. Overhead, the lines of laundry block out the stars.

  A sign flashes NON-STOP BILIARDY next to the pub entrance. All the pool tables are taken so we sit at the bar, next to a row of video games with flashing lights and names like “Hard Drivin’ ” and “Terminator X.” The bartender, talking into his cell phone in a corner, waves a cigarette at a tired-looking waitress when Jirka snaps his fingers for service. Our beers come in Coca-Cola glasses. Jirka winks at the woman as she shuffles away in her tight Levi’s and slippers. “What you think of this servant?” he asks.

  “She’s pretty.” I utter a silent prayer of thanks that I don’t wait tables anymore. Of course I might have to do it again when I get home.

  “How is type girl you like? Yellow hairs or black hairs?”

  “I don’t know.” I think of the men I’ve been with, different types and ages, some attractive, all liars. “Nice girls. They’re all the same.”

  Jirka almost falls off his stool. “No are all same,” he insists, almost angrily. “Some girl you like, some no. How can you say are all same? It’s crazy!” Then he laughs deep and loud. “Hloupy americany.” Silly Americans, indeed.

  —

  SOME MORNINGS I woke up and could actually feel my personality evaporate into the smog I breathed each day. As I shaved, I stood dumbfounded in front of my reflection until the glass fogged up with my bad breath. In class
, I bit my words into chewable syllables and watered down my 99th-percentile-on-standardized-tests vocabulary. I became an expert on talking about the weather.

  “A cloud, a storm, but you can’t count rain unless you have a drop of rain.”

  “She is from Germany. She is a . . . does anyone know?”

  “Few means not many. But a few means some.”

  A few of my students invited me over for dinner and I learned it was unofficially part of my job to accept. I smiled a lot, made polite comments about weather and Czech dumplings, stretched the bit of their language I knew to its fullest extent, which prompted much initial admiration and then quicker tongues. I smiled on, determined to concentrate and get back on track, but my brain invariably fogged up until the native speakers realized I wasn’t paying attention and then it was time for me to go.

  Few of them ever invited me to come back.

  How had I become this robot (Did you know a Czech invented the word “robot”?), this impersonation of a man, who breathed, ate, paid crowns, all without passion?

  I’d been this way long before coming to Prague. Even as a kid in school, I used to dress to blend in with the cinder blocks, slink through classes and bathrooms and the backs of libraries. My disguise proved so successful that when the principal called my name during high school graduation, I heard several classmates say, “Who is that?”

  —

  JIRKA AND I order a second round of beers, and then I take out my portable magnetic checkers/backgammon set. “I want sex two girls,” he tells me. His nipples keep peeking out from the thin straps of his Chicago Bulls tank top. “I meet nice girl in tramvaje yesterday. She say she like girls. I say to her, okay, I will watch, but she say she will only have sex when she is allein with other girl, not for show to man. I say why not? Why you don’t want at least to try it? She is crazy, I think.” He jabs one of his stiff fingers into my chest. “You had sex with two girls some-when?”

  I shake my head and finish setting out the pieces for a game of checkers.

  “Hey, you like girls?”

  “I like them,” I say.

  “Only girls? Or girls and boys?”