I was made a ward of the state and spent the last two of my school years with the Jesuits in Woolton, walking around the edges of rugby fields in a gray V-neck sweater.
What I recal of growing up: redbrick houses, rough stones from the worked-out pit, shaved shoulders of sunlight on street corners, dockside cranes, penny sweets, gul s, confessionals, brushing gray frost from the bicycle seat. It was not exactly violins I heard when I stuck my head out the train window and bid Liverpool goodbye. I'd missed the war—a measure of luck and youth and a dose of cowardice. I went south to London where I spent two years on a scholarship, studying Slovak. I ran with the Marxists and mouthed off on the soapboxes of Hyde Park, to little success. My work was published intermittently, but mostly I sat at a smal window that looked out beyond the half-open blinds at a dark wal and the faded edge of an Oval-tine advertisement.
I fel in love, briefly, with a beautiful young librarian, Cait-lin, from Cardiff. I bumped into her on a ladder, quite literal y, while she was shelving a book by Gramsci, but our politics didn't match and Caitlin sent me packing with a note that her life was too dul for revolution.
In my flat, the skyline became a shelf of books. I wrote long letters to novelists and playwrights in my old man's country, yet they seldom wrote back. I was fairly sure the letters were being censored in London, but every now and then a reply fel on the welcome mat and I brought it down to the local teashop where, amid the stains and the day-old cakes, I opened it.
The replies was always terse and clean and to the point: I burned them in the ashtray with the tip of a cigarette. But then in 1948, after a burst of ink-spattered correspondence, I was on my way to Czechoslovakia to translate for a literary journal run by the celebrated poet Martin Stränsky, who wrote to say that he could wel do with a new set of legs—would it be possible, he asked, to bring a few bottles of Scotch whisky in my bags?
In Vienna the smal wooden huts of the Russian sector were warmed by single-bar electric heaters. The guards interrogated me over cups of black tea. I was passed from hut to hut and final y put on a train. At the Czechoslovakian border, some leftover fascist guards roughed me over, rifled through my suitcase, took the bottles, and threw me into a makeshift cel . My hands were tied and they beat the bottoms of my feet with sticks
rol ed in newspaper. I was accused of falsifying documents, but two weeks later the door opened to Martin Stränsky who seemed, at first, just a shadow. He said my name, lifted me up, put his sleeve in a cold bucket of water, and cleaned my wounds. He was, against expectations, a smal man, tough and balding.
“Did you bring the booze?” he asked.
As a youngster he had been friends with my father in an il egal Socialist youth group, and now he ‘d come ful circle; he ‘d been instrumental in the Communist coup and was wel liked by those newly in power. He slapped my back, put his arm around me, and walked me beyond the tin-roofed sheds where he had already taken care of the last of my paperwork. The two guards who'd beaten me and taken the bottles were sitting handcuffed in the back of an open truck. One stared down at the truckbed but the other was moving his bloodshot eyes side to side.
“Oh, don't worry about them, Comrade,” Stränsky said. “They'l be al right.”
He kept a tight grip on my arm and helped me towards a military train. The white headlamps burned and a brand-new Czechoslovakian flag fluttered from the roof. We took our seats and I felt buoyed by the shril whistle and the blast of steam. As the train chugged off, I caught a last glimpse of the handcuffed guards. Stränsky laughed and slapped my knee.
“It's not so serious,” he said. “They'l have a day or two in lockup to recover from their hangovers, that's al .”
The train jolted forward and we passed through rows oftal forest and low cornfields towards Bratislava. Pylons. Chimneys. Red and white railway barriers.
From Hlvanä Station, we walked along the tramtracks, down the hil towards the old town. It struck me as medieval, wiry, even quaint, but revolutionary posters were pasted on the wal s and thumping music rose from loudspeakers. I stil had a slight limp from my beating, but I skipped along in the light rain, carrying, of al things, a cardboard suitcase. Stränsky chuckled when it opened up—a nightshirt fel out and a long sleeve trailed the cobblestones.
“A nightshirt?” he laughed. “Two weeks of political reeducation for you.”
He clapped his arm around me. In a vaulted beerhal , ful of drunks and hanging pottery, we clinked glasses for the Revolution and for what Stränsky cal ed, as he looked out the window towards the street, other fathers.
In the winter of 1950 I was sick for quite a while. When the day came for me to leave hospital, the doctor signed me out, undiagnosed, and told me to go home to rest.
I lived in a worker's flat in the old part of town. The communal kitchen, on the first floor, ran with mice. Laundry was strung up and down the length of the corridor—boiler suits, overcoats, shirts eaten through with acid. The staircase quite literal y swayed under my feet. When I got up to my tiny fourth-floor room, a patch of snow lay on the wooden floor. The concierge had forgotten to fix the smashed window— a week before, in a dizzy spel , I had fal en against the pane—and a cold wind blew through. I took my bedding to the only warm part of the room, where the poppet valve on the radiator hissed. In gloves and overcoat I curled up near the valve and slept. I woke coughing in the early morning. It had snowed heavily again during the night, and the floor was already covered in stray flakes. Around the radiator pipes was a patch of wet wood. The things I adored the most, my books, lay ranged on the shelves, so many different volumes that it was impossible to see the wal paper. Three translations awaited me—chapters from Theodore Dreiser, Jack Lindsay, and an article by Duncan Hal as—but the thought of delving into them fil ed me with dread.
I had bought a secondhand pair of boots, stamped by a Russian bootmaker, and, although they leaked, I liked them, they seemed to have a history. I went out into the cold streets, stepping over gutters and cobblestone, past the barracks, beyond the checkpoint.
At the mil Stränsky had set up a smal room where, in between printing jobs, he often sat and read. The room had no ceiling, and so one could look up to the high roof of the mil and watch the pigeons flap from eave to eave. I lay down on the green army bed he kept in the corner, and the noise of the machines rocked me to sleep. I have no idea how long I slept, but I woke disoriented, not even sure what day it was.
“Put your socks on for crying out loud,” said Stränsky from the doorway.
Behind him, a little confused, stood a tal young woman.
She was in her early twenties, not beautiful, or not traditional y so anyway, but the sort of woman who stal ed the breath. She held herself at the door nervously, as if she were a bowl of water that would not be al owed to spil . Her skin was dark and her eyes were as black as any I'd ever seen.
She wore a man's dark overcoat, but beneath it a wide skirt with a tripled-over hem: it appeared she had patched two or three skirts together and rol ed the hems over each other. Her hair was tied back beneath a kerchief, and two thick plaits hung down either side of her face. She wore no earrings, no bracelets, no jangling necklaces. I rose from under the covers and slipped on my wet socks.
“Forgotten your manners, young scholar?” said Stränsky as he pushed past me. “Meet Zoli Novotna.”