The Forgotten Dead: A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller. Tove Alsterdal
come inside, I’m going to lock the door and you’ll have to stay out there all night.’
But I don’t go inside because I’m waiting for Papa.
Then I hear her footsteps. They’re echoing, becoming an entire flock of footsteps, and the door behind me opens and Mama grabs my arm hard, lifting me up. I’m dangling in the air like a rag. ‘Come inside this minute,’ she yells.
I kick and squirm to get free, crying ‘Ne, ne.’ I shout, ‘I have to wait for Papa. He’ll be here soon.’
‘Look at me,’ she bellows, but I squeeze my eyes shut. ‘He’s not coming back,’ she says. ‘Don’t you understand?’ And then she drags me up the steps, making my legs thump against the stone floor. The sound of the door slamming reverberates in the stairwell.
And that’s all I remember.
I’d never told what little I knew about my father to anyone, not until I met Patrick. He kept asking me about him. Those sorts of things were important to him. He always wanted to know where someone came from, who that person was.
‘I want to know everything about you,’ he said, pulling me close. ‘Everything.’
‘And I want more wine,’ I said. We were at his place on the evening I started telling my story, sitting on a small sofa squeezed in between the kitchen and the bed. That was before we tore down the wall between the rooms and I moved in. During that first, enchanted time.
‘What do you know about the Prague Spring?’ I asked.
Patrick opened a bottle of red wine.
‘They were trying to democratize the country, open it up, release all the political prisoners, and so on,’ he said. ‘A kind of glasnost twenty years too soon, and it ended in ’68 when the Soviet tanks rolled in.’
‘The political aspect was just a small part of it,’ I said. ‘Otherwise it was the same as in Paris and the States and everywhere else in 1968. Hippies and rock music and free love. Smoking whatever you wanted, fucking whoever you liked.’
Patrick filled our wine glasses and sat down next to me again.
‘And it didn’t stop because the Russians moved in,’ I went on. ‘They kept on playing rock and doing all those other things whenever the bureaucrats weren’t watching. You might say I’m the product of a basement concert and a whole lot of marijuana.’
‘Was your father a musician?’
‘He played in a band that nobody remembers any more, but I once heard Mama say that one time he jumped in as a substitute for the Primitives. Have you ever heard of them?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘One of Prague’s many bands in the sixties. Some of its members later formed Plastic People of the Universe.’
‘That’s a band I know,’ said Patrick, his face lighting up. Like all journalists, he took pride in knowing a little about almost everything.
Plastic People of the Universe became legendary in the Czech underground in the ’70s. They had lost their licence to play officially, so they continued in secret, converting radios into loudspeakers and giving concerts in barns out in the country. Inspired by Zappa and The Doors, they used to play under a banner with the words: Jim Morrison is our father. That was reason enough for me, during one period, to buy all The Doors’ records, imagining that the music somehow connected me to my father, that in the lyrics I could find traces of his thoughts. That particular detail I didn’t mention to Patrick.
‘When they were finally arrested, there were violent protests,’ I said. ‘Václav Havel and other intellectuals wrote Charta 77, proclaiming that everybody had the right to express themselves, that people couldn’t be imprisoned for playing music, and so on. A few years later, he disappeared.’
‘Your father? What happened? Was he arrested?’ Patrick took my hand.
‘I don’t know. He never came back.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I was three years old. What do you think I could do?’
‘But your mother, friends of the family, didn’t they protest?’
‘She had a child to support,’ I said, looking away. ‘She couldn’t get a job in the field she had trained for, thanks to him. She had to sew clothes and clean houses. Of course she was furious.’
I couldn’t look at Patrick. Those eyes of his that wanted more and more from me.
‘But haven’t you ever gone back and tried to find him?’
I shook my head.
In November 1989 I was eleven. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and on TV I watched the crowds swarming Wenceslas Square in Prague, people rattling keys, joined by more and more, hundreds of thousands. And I thought I would recognize him if only I could see his face. I remembered the camera zooming in on a grey shed made of corrugated metal, with big black letters scrawled on the side: It’s over — Czechs are free!
Then I read in the newspaper that the secret files kept by the police were going to be opened. Mama refused to discuss the matter. She certainly had no intention of ever going back. And besides, she said, I wouldn’t find anything in those files.
‘But they spied on everybody,’ I said. ‘There must be tons of information in those files.’
‘Nothing but lies,’ she said.
‘How do you know that before you’ve even read what they say?’
‘I just know.’
I could still smell the scent of her perfume as she came closer. I thought she was ugly. I wanted to be like my father.
‘And do you know why I know?’ she hissed in my ear. ‘Because that sweet little father of yours lied. He lied about where he’d been. “Love is free,” he’d said, and he wasn’t going to let anyone take away his freedom. He had no interest in politics, he just wanted to play guitar, and fuck whenever he felt like it. In all those years he would go running across the courtyard to that other woman, and everyone knew about it except me. He didn’t want to be bothered with a kid in dirty diapers who cried every night.’
‘Then why did you tell me he was in prison?’ I shouted. ‘You said he was a prisoner.’
I pulled away and threw myself onto the bed, shaking as my whole world split apart.
‘He ran off,’ said Mama. ‘He left us. And I was the one who had to pay the price. I was the one who couldn’t get a job and was left behind in that rat hole with a kid.’
After that I didn’t ask any more questions.
Patrick put his hand on my cheek. Pulled me into his arms. He smelled of olive soap and aftershave.
No matter what, she’s dead now, I thought. And nothing that happened in the past plays any role. It doesn’t exist. Time leaves everything behind. Only the present moment exists, and Patrick, who had asked me to move in with him. This is year zero.
That he was in my life at all constantly surprised me. And the fact that he didn’t leave when he got to know me better.
‘I would have gone back to look for him,’ he said. ‘I would have been totally obsessed with finding out where I came from.’
‘It was too far, and we couldn’t afford it. She didn’t want to. And besides, she lost her memory during those last years.’ I took a sip of wine. ‘And no matter what, she’s dead now.’
Patrick brushed a few strands of hair out of my face, and I wished he wouldn’t give me such an insistent look. The look that made me want to be completely truthful.
‘Right before the Communist regime fell, Plastic People was allowed to start playing again,’ I said. ‘But only on the condition