Boy, Snow, Bird(31)

I don’t know, Boy. I think she got close to going crazy. But when Stalin died last March, they let everybody out of the camps and Aunt J went home again. I wrote to her right away. She hasn’t seen me since I was a boy, but she says I’m her favorite and stupidest nephew. I wrote: Hey, Aunt Jozsa, what can I do for you, what can I send you? A plane ticket maybe? I mean, I could do it too, with a little help from my dad and my uncle in Milwaukee.

She answered: Send me candy, my boy. Send a lot of that great American candy. Send an amount that will shock me, send enough to make the neighbors say “That is a LOT of candy, the New World is certainly being kind to the Vacics.”

So I did, Boy. I sent her a cardboard box by freight. A couple of feet wide, a couple of feet tall, and heavy. At the bottom of the box I put a note saying that there was more where that came from if she came to America. She’s a skinny woman and I now know for sure that she doesn’t really eat much candy, because she only found the note a couple of weeks ago—a year and a few months after I sent her the candy box. She wrote: You know very well I can’t live in your shitty capitalist country, Charlie. I’m not even interested in visiting.

I got angry. Because who was it who locked her up—communists or capitalists? I asked her that question, and I asked her what had become of her communism now. And I’ve got her reply right here; I’m looking at it as I write to you—she says:

I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But it will not always be like this.

That’s it. What am I supposed to do with that?

C

Charlie’s Aunt Jozsa, who just couldn’t walk away from certain principles. I thought of her, on and off, for days. I didn’t reply to his letter, but if I had, I would’ve told him that his aunt probably called him her favorite because their hearts worked the same way. Charlie and I were still in love. How strange it is to wake up in the middle of the night with that feeling that someone has just left the room, that just moments before someone has been whispering: Me and you, you and me, soft music that stops playing the moment you really begin to listen. Who’d have thought that Charlie Vacic could be so tenacious? “People underestimate the freckled.” He’d told me that more than once, with all seventy-two of his own freckles scrunched up together. I’d underestimated him too, and I had to face up to the reason why.

It’s true that nothing really happened the night I ran away. It’s a night two weeks before that I don’t like to think about. It was a Saturday and Charlie Vacic was back in the city visiting his mom. He met me for a slice of pie at the diner where I worked, and then he walked me home. I told him and told him there was no need to walk me right to my door, but he insisted, and the rat catcher came out with a covered cage just as we reached the front doorstep. I bet he’d timed it that way. I bet he’d been watching us from the window. “Hello, Charlie,” he said, friendly as could be. “I’ve seen the way you look at my daughter. You think she’s pretty, don’t you?”

Charlie said: “More than just pretty, sir. I think she’s beautiful.”

They both turned to me and went on a looking spree. I left them to it and wished I could sail over their heads and into the acid blue sky. They didn’t look for long, it was more a practiced series of glances; they knew what they were looking for and seemed to find it. It was a wonder there was anything left by the time they were through looking.

“Say thank you, Boy. Didn’t you hear what Charlie said? He thinks you’re beautiful.”

I told the sidewalk thank you, and the rat catcher took me by the arm, thanked Charlie for “bringing me home safe and sound,” and closed the front door in his face. We walked side by side down the hallway to our apartment door, the rat catcher and I, and he scraped away at me a little more with his dull nickel gaze. “So you’re a beauty, hey?” He slapped me. “Or are you not?”

“I’m not.”

“So you’re ugly?”

I nodded.

Another slap, harder. “You have to say it.”

“I’m ugly.”

I went to my room, switched on the radio, and lay down with a book. But I didn’t read it. I left the door open and watched for the rat catcher’s approach, feeling very bitter toward Charlie Vacic. He’d really done it this time. I heard the rat catcher moving around the apartment and waited for him to yell that it was time I made dinner, but he didn’t. I smelled cooking. Good cooking. When my father called me to the table, there was chicken paprikash and dumplings and cold beer to cool the heat of the paprika. Foodwise it was the best dinner I’d had yet, and I ate a lot. We didn’t talk, he watched foam swirling in his beer, but he kept biting his lip, and I stopped eating when I clocked that he’d bitten down so hard that blood came through. The rim of his beer glass was smeared with it. I muttered a compliment to the chef, went to bed, and lay on my swollen stomach in the hope that it’d be flat again by morning. Yeah, ideally in the morning my stomach would be flat again and the rat catcher would already have left for work and life would be as good as it could get.

I woke up in the basement with the rats. I tried to lift myself out of the chair I was in, but my arms were tied behind me and my ankles were so tightly bound to the chair legs that they already felt broken. There was no light, and the rats crunched on the newsprint that lined their cages. The rat catcher loomed over me and I smelled wet fur. The blinded creature he held paddled the air with its front paws. A paw thudded against my forehead, but if I hadn’t seen it happen, I wouldn’t have known. No part of my face would move. I looked up into the rat catcher’s clear eyes.