My mother’s voice was both strangled and ringing, late at night on a cellphone line. “Your father died an hour ago. I can’t talk. Your sister is coming.” Click.
Leaving me staring, first at the phone, then at the wall, at the ink drawing of Prague, the city of his birth. Saying, I knew it was coming, when I saw him scant weeks before, in a rehabilitation facility bed, needing help to move a foot to make a blanket more comfortable, insisting that he didn’t want food, moving was too difficult, and he wasn’t going to die any time soon.
Thin, small, not the man who swung me around his body at 4, who helped me lug my suitcases. I knew, but even when your father’s 86, you don’t want to know and you don’t admit it.
He’d gone back to speaking only in Czech, the man who’d insisted once that only English be used in our house, and country music be played, to rid us of our accents sooner. That second — no, third or fourth — language wasn’t rooted as deep, and he ran out of words quickly, when his grandson came to visit.
I remember him now at his most resolute. In 1968, after the Soviet Bloc invaded and ended the fragile wonder of the Prague Spring, he knew we couldn’t go home, that night. He’d been too active in the liberalization movement — he’d angered too many loyal Communists — prison, divorce, penury would be his reward. His fierce certainty got us into a refugee center in Vienna, got him a job at the university there, and finally, got us onto a plane to the USA, cocooned in layers of clothing to make our suitcase lighter.
That same resolution made him attempt to eradicate a wasps’ nest near our first family campsite with gasoline, and nearly die of the stings, in those pre-antihistamine days. One night, he also threatened hippies playing rock-n-roll late at night — with an axe. But thatap a whole another story.
“My father was … he was me,” I told my boss, tears welling, the day after he died.
And he was. Never the charmer, my father; I read, in his letters begging the dons at Karlova University in Prague to certify he’d finished his medical degree there, the same overdone obsequiousness I sometimes show to those who have power over me. Never quite sure of his place in the world, always being told he was too smart for whatever job he had. He’d succeeded in America, he’d fed his family, educated his daughters, and retired to a place of aching beauty, with the money to go anywhere he wanted to — though his world shrank over the years, to journeys only between his bed and the kitchen table.
I was never quite comfortable with him and never knew why. I would read accounts of other girls, who were besties with their dads, but I always worried he would judge anything I did as too trite or too emotional. His compliments, however few, however reserved, lit me up for weeks; yet the one time we tried to dance together, I couldn’t keep my feet straight.
Now, my heart breaks, and keeps breaking. For this man who was last happy so long ago, I hardly remember. Who molded me with his words and branded me with his anger. Whose soft eyes teared up as he left me the first time I moved far away, who nodded his head and said “you’re growing” as I told my oil field stories, who often knew what would happen and it rarely pleased him. Who paid $1,800 to the scammers who said his grandson was in jail in Spain, because even as an old man he would do anything for his boy.
The words that occur to me, that so remind me of my father, George Syrovy, so much I can’t stop sobbing, were written by Mary Chapin Carpenter in her song “Jubilee”
And I can tell by the way you’re listening
That you’re still expecting to hear
Your name being called like a summons to all
Who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears
They can’t add up to much without you
And so if it were just up to me
I’d take hold of your hand, saying come hear the band
Play your song at the jubilee.
And I hope that, wherever my father is, itap a great party up there.
Eva Syrovy teaches school in in Colorado Springs.
