Milena remembered that her name meant Loving One.
I still have the name, but I had lost its meaning, until now. It was as if her name had taken off a mask, to have its meaning restored, to hear her mother say it again with the sound it first had in Milena’s first world.
Milena’s mother is pulling her towards a seat, and talking to her, in a voice that other people can hear:
‘To nikdy nebylo zviratko, Milena. To narostlo. Pestuji kozesinu jako rostliny.’
It never was an animal, Milena. It was grown. They grow the fur like a plant.
Milena wants to know why they do that. But she is afraid, afraid of another burst of laughter. She is deeply chagrined. Obviously, it is a bad tiling to ask questions. Questions show that she is stupid. The child already knew that she was stupid, that she must keep quiet, that she must hide. They had given her viruses time after time, but the viruses would not hold. Milena would not learn. She was resistant.
Her mother lifts Milena up onto a seat. Milena can feel how small and light she is, as if she can flick herself up into the air like a playing card. It is a talent to be so light, so quick, so much like a fire. Time seems so slow and smooth, like honey. Milena’s legs swing high off the floor. Her mother pulls her back into the seat and her legs have to stick straight out in front of her. Nothing is made for children.
There is a screeching and a sudden lurch forward. Slowly, as if weary or reluctant, the train begins to pull away.
‘Zamavej no rozloucenou, Milena.’
‘Wave goodbye, Milena. Wave goodbye.’
Her mother is weeping very silently. Milena the child is perplexed. She had been told they were going away, but she did not believe it. Go away where? What other place to live is there? To Prague? That would be lovely, but wasn’t Prague dangerous? Hadn’t they left Prague to hide?
The drab little station is hauled away. It is not possible to see the village. There are trees, and the old river, and the cows, dim in the mist, and a steeple with a rounded dome. Gradually, it is all swallowed up in darkness.
Home, wept the Milena who was remembering. That’s my home. Milena the child is not weeping. For her it is just a passing landscape. That is the country I have never seen again, thought the one who remembered. That is the place I carry around in my head, unformed, part of me, but not remembered. Until now.
Milena’s mother holds up Milena’s hand in a tiny mitten and waves the hand for her, makes it wave goodbye to no one.
Not mittens, but palcaky.
The clothes the people on the train wear, the way their hair is cut and combed, the stockings over trouser cuffs to keep out the cold, the smell of the trains. Mint tea and little sugared cakes in boxes to eat on the way, and that particular resin panelling, and the sound of the train, its low throaty growl, as if it had a beard and sang songs in a wild, strained voice or smoked cigars. As if, like her father, the train talked about freedom until it died.
Not freedom, not freedom, but svoboda.
Those aren’t houses, they’re domy..
Those aren’t fields, they’re pole.
Those aren’t blackbirds, they’re kosi.
And I am not Milena Shibush. I never became Milena Shibush. She is elsewhere, in the land that might have been.
Oh Tato, oh Mami, does it stretch that far away? Does life pull us apart so much, that we stop being real? All of that then was real? How did it fade? And how is it here again?
Milena remembered childhood.
She remembered skinning almonds in someone else’s house. Loving One, Loving One, they kept calling her. The almonds came out of a red clay bowl of boiled water and they were hot. Milena kept pushing with both thumbs, and then magically, mysteriously, the almond would slide out of its brown skin.
It was Easter. She and the other children ran through a huge garden, giggling, in sunlight, to cut chives with scissors. A shaggy horse with feeling lips kissed the chives out of their open hands and Milena gasped in wonder. They found ladybirds and tried to keep them in a bowl full of grass, and in the front room of the great old house, which was a warehouse, the girls built a secret room out of boxes. They had a toy piano. They fought to keep the boys out of their secret room, and as they fought secret music tinkled. Milena remembered pushing a boy over. Milena fought and won, squealing with excitement.
Milena remembered the faces of the friends she had forgotten. There was a little girl who had almond eyes, beautiful black hair in a ribbon and a pink dress. There was Sophia with blue eyes and brown hair, and a wan little boy, weaker than the girls but who refused to cry and kept bravely coming back to storm the redoubt. Milena’s hand was slammed in a door and she wept and wailed, and then, as soon as the pain subsided, she ran off, laughing again, to be with the others in the garden, hunting chocolates under the leaves.
I was happy.
And I have never been at home in England. I have never felt English, I have never felt in the way they do. I know their words but I do not really feel them. I do not really cry in English, or laugh in English, or make love in English. I find the people dull or cruel, bland or pretentious, rude or prim but I never quite get their measure. And I never quite do the right thing or say the right thing, because underneath my grammar is not only bad. My grammar is Czech.
And Milena remembered later on that same Easter Day, the child beginning the long climb home. There had been an Easter pageant in the domed church, and the child wore white robes now, and wings covered in crinkled resin that caught the light. She was climbing the hill that led up from the village back to the hot limestone house. The path sloped up through a dark wood. The child was holding her father’s hand, and her mother’s hand, and she was dressed as an Angel. Her plump face, flushed purple, looked up.
The child looked up at Milena.
She can see me, thought the Milena who was remembering. I can see her.
Her father tried to pull her higher up but the child resisted. She stared glumly right at Milena, at her adult self.
I remember this! thought the adult.
And Milena remembered looking at an old woman whose skin seemed to have gone yellow wherever the bones pressed against it as if the bones would break out. The woman was bald, except for a few wisps of hair. The child saw her and felt dread. It was unaccountable dread, as if she knew this wasted spectre was her future.
And time stood still. The moving hub of the world turned around a point that was still and Milena stood in it, Milena at the beginning and Milena at the end.
The adult knelt underneath the branches of the trees that had paused for breath, in the sunlight that was not moving, in one instant that was fully apprehended.
‘Do you have time?’ the adult asked the child. She wanted to talk to the child, to warn her.
The child did not understand English. That’s right, of course! thought the adult, and put a hand to her face. She tried to remember the words in Czech. She wanted to warn her, protect her. Warn her against what? Life? Death? Leaving home? The child scowled, perplexed.
‘Be happy,’ croaked the adult, whose world it no longer was. She reached for a foreign language and came up with the wrong one. ‘Soyez content.’
The child tugged at her father’s hand and time began again.
Stay here! thought Milena the adult. Don’t hurry to be away. Your father will the, your mother will the, you will lose this whole world! You will lose your self!
Milena remembered seeing an old, desperate, sad face yearning to deliver a message that perhaps no child should understand.