7
Filmmakers of the Eastern Bloc talk about color—about its lack—when they want to get at the era. Not that it was in fact colorless: I myself counted the red stars on the Lenin Museum. But strip the primary colors away and you approximate in visual form what it was to be behind the curtain or wall. As viewers, we register only that something is off, the way in the dream when the car is held up and the shots fired, you realize even within the dream that the scene hasn’t ended as expected: you aren’t dead, nor are you awake. Either way that you explain the uncanny fact, it remains, though you remain safe in the script, a prop more than a person, a dreamer merely.
So it was only afterwards, listening to the NPR interview with the director, that you realize that the colors red and blue are nowhere in the film. It is in one sense a bloodless world, missing the colors blood takes, except when blood mars the scene. Her death destroyed you, though the filmgoers in the lobby gathered round to assure you that the actress had in fact survived the accident.
Her death was an invention, just as the story I told when I returned to the Prague apartment was an invention. My father had asked us to pack the car: we were headed back to the West. I had carried my suitcase and sleeping bag down the three flights of stairs, into the arcade that opened onto the butcher-shop, with its stale smell of death, and then through the heavy doors. They locked behind me, and because I had neither a key to the car nor to the building, I remained on the street a long time, waiting for the others to come down. I didn’t know what to do, where to look: the street was empty, dirty, except for the Lenin Museum across from the parked car, where an old woman mopped the steps. I counted the stars, tried to remember the words to some song. No one came; no one in the apartment above heard me shouting.
Eventually a man said something to me I couldn’t understand, then opened the doors. I followed him in, carried my bag and sleeping bag back up the circular stairs. Meanwhile, they had been caught up in looking at pictures of Filip as a boy, Filip who couldn’t come home, who had made himself homeless. I was frantic when I entered the apartment, a panic incommensurate with having being locked out, so when they asked what was wrong I said that a man had held a knife to me on the street. What he had wanted, I couldn’t tell them, and they laughed at the story, asking why I would say such a thing.
But there was a threat, though not to me. And we could say nothing of him, in case the apartment was still bugged. But I never imagined who might be doing the listening, crouched in some too-cold attic, hunched over some gray desk.
Words I didn’t know crept into my sleep, and what I wanted to say was, I worried, the wrong thing, and might put them all in danger. That he hated the cartoon we liked, for example, slammed the kitchen drawers as we watched until he had enough English to call them Damn Commie Smurfs. So we spoke of nothing in particular in a third language none of us knew very well, commenting on the weather, gray, the food, knedlíky and carp, parce-ce que confused with peut-être, cause with chance—
We went in his stead, were his surrogates, his sister as if our sister, his mother, as if ours, too. But it was to us a foreign country, its beauty more striking because subdued, queues in the city streets for toilet paper or eggs, while the state-owned shops selling glassware and garnets were empty except for us. We spent the money we had to exchange each day of our stay, buying the things they couldn’t afford as pretext for our trip. At the border, an officer fingered the receipts, checked the addition to be sure we hadn’t traded on the black market, and was too distracted opening the boxes of crystal, the jewelry boxes, to find the treasure we smuggled back, the papers that made Filip’s case tucked into the suitcase lining.
Jessica Fisher’s first book of poems, Frail-Craft, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award.
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