Leaving My Face Behind
One evening my younger son Sirague said, "I'm glad I don't have teeth like yours. You look weird when you smile." Writing it down now, it doesn't seem like such a big deal, but at the time it broke my heart. My face and my teeth go everywhere with me. My top front teeth stick out in what is technically called an "over-jet" and it's difficult for me to completely close my mouth over them. My husband, Charles, likes this about me. He says I always look like I'm smiling.
I hid in my room several times over the next days. I wanted to leave my face behind, to set it down on the bed like a discarded mask. I could almost see it, the weight and color of shed snakeskin, lying on the bed as I walked away. Sometimes I don't want the vulnerability of my face, my individuality, my appearance. Nor do I want anyone else's - their gender, their race, their appearance, their physicality - and all that might mean to them or me. In this case it was all the more poignant because it had been initiated by my son. At one time, we had been of one body. I had loved him when he had no visible face.
I was pregnant with Sirague Ziv when my father died, which is the reason he is named after a mythological city of my father's invention. I imagined the name Sirague Ziv (Sirague Lives!) as a piece of living graffiti sent to my dad, tossed with all my heart to some wall at an unknown spiritual address in the afterlife, In that moment of memory, this face that I so casually wanted to leave behind changed from burden to silken collage of legacy.
My father, Vilem Kriz, was a surrealist photographer from Prague. As a child I knew that my parents were refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, a dark place that had broken my parents' hearts in some indefinable way. In the literal way of children, I could see, in my mind's eye, a metal veil that crossed Europe and blocked any light from reaching the part behind the curtain: a solidified shadow, dark and grey and strong.
Yet, around Christmas time we received vibrant packages from behind the Iron Curtain: garlands and fine ornaments for the tree made of Bohemian glass, tree candles, and one year a sky blue, hand painted apron for me. The gifts confused me. How could such vibrancy come from a place where there is no light – there couldn't be light behind an Iron Curtain, a veil of such strength that my parents had fled from it, a shroud of such power that it could enclose part of the world, could there?
It was years before I understood Czechoslovakia's relationship to the second World War and that non-Jewish people like my parents lived cloaked in unhealed traumas, their own personal Iron Curtains. It was decades before they revealed their personal secrets to me.
My father's quietly mystical photographs were easier to comprehend and revealed to me much sooner. When I was a child, he showed me a photograph that he took at the Paris flea market in 1949, a photograph of two dolls sitting in a cardboard box and looking regally towards the camera. He told me that the dolls were me and my brother and the cardboard box was poverty. We often moved for economic reasons and I accepted this into my personal mythology, that the cardboard box would suffice as a boat to carry us through the great sea of the psyche from which symbols, visions and dreams constantly arose. Though the vehicle of travel might be one of poverty, the journey itself was drenched in riches if one kept an open inner eye.
When I was nine years old we lived for a time in northern Quebec. We moved away on Halloween night, the night when people don masks, shed personas, and change identities with aplomb. After trick or treating in my tiger costume with my friends, I curled up in the plump back seat of an old Studebaker that had come to take us to the Catskill Mountains, which would be our home for a year. I had never seen the car or met the driver, a friend of my father's from New York, before. The mysterious and comfortable vehicle drove us through the dark and I remained untethered to any place or identity. Who I had been was gone. Who I was to be was not yet known. That rootlessness felt like home.
When I was twenty-eight years old, my father asked me if I would, when the time came, take his remains to his family plot in Prague. He had never come to terms with exile. Some people transplant well and can thrive in any soil on the globe. My father was not such a man. He was a homesick man.
I assured him I would, but not without trepidation as I remembered visiting Prague in 1973. Armed soldiers got on the train at the border and asked me in Czech if I was returning home. I answered in colorful Czech that I was American and not bound by their laws, that I could come and go as I liked. I stayed with my great-aunt, who made hefty sandwiches for me to take along on even the shortest of outings after a meal. I dutifully visited the famous astronomical clock in the Old Town Square, but I couldn't see its splendor. I stood there alone, under a gun metal sky and watched the apostles parade. I was in a state of paralysis, a nineteen year old free spirit hippie who was frightened by history and family ghosts.
Later that afternoon it rained and I danced in the middle of an intersection, to declare my freedom amidst the gloom. A man grabbed my shawl and tried to pull it off me. I had nothing on underneath. I punched him in the face. My relationship with Prague was always complicated.
1989 brought the Velvet Revolution. The Iron Curtain came down and my father was welcomed home. He enjoyed exhibits and television appearances. It was sweet for him. Some of his property was returned, including the house where he was born. We all went to Prague to visit and celebrate in the spring of 1990. I was freshly in love with Charles and we videotaped people in stop frame, as they came and went at the astronomical clock. We ate chicken with bread and drank beer. I was unsettled by Prague still, though it was jubilant.
Vilem wanted to move back, but the rest of the family was hesitant. He didn't want to leave his family and so he hesitated too. In the autumn of 1994 he decided that the following spring he would move back regardless of what others decided. He was getting old. He wanted to die in the same house in which he had been born. He liked the symmetry of that. We joked about my being released from the obligation of taking his remains home.
In December 1994 he went into the hospital with a minor heart attack. None of us were alarmed. He had been diabetic for some time and had been hospitalized before for diabetic complications, including heart attacks. He was in the hospital for Christmas and the day after he died there of pneumonia.
My first tears were for him dying here instead of his beloved Prague. We had left nothing unsaid between us. We both knew that when he went back I'd probably never see him again and had been making good use of the time.
While on the way to the hospital to see his corpse, I looked up at the sky and something in its infinite blue assured me I could trust death with those I loved. I felt it in my body with an uncompromising certainty. Vilem had taught me to perceive life as a fluid mystery and in my mind, that fluid mystery spilled over into whatever comes after, as if with his death another seemingly impenetrable Iron Curtain proved to be made of human ideas, something that changed when minds changed.
My sorrow over his dying here quickly changed to gratitude for his dying close by as I was able to take care of the last things we do for those we love. My mother and brother were both quite reclusive and wanted nothing to do with it. What followed was my father's last gift to me and unlike anything I would have ever imagined.
There would be no empty words spoken over my father.
I fought all the death professionals who tried to keep me from having a private vigil with my father before he was cremated. Even the alternative death professional, who sold urns and coffins made by artists, kept an installation of ancient Egyptian art and soothsaying in his showroom, and did pyrotechnic work on the side, tried to talk me out of it, assuring me that it would not be a good experience.
Finally the death professionals agreed to give me an hour for a hundred dollars but then they kept changing the time. I had a three year old to get child care for. I was pregnant with my second son, Sirague. I got worn down. My mother urged me to forget it. If not for Charles, I may have done so, but he held my conviction when I couldn't. We planned to go together, just him and me with Sirague, to honor my father. The night before the vigil a friend of my father's phoned me. He had just come back to town and heard about Vilem's death. I invited him to join us, and he did.
When we got there, "there" being a tacky looking crematorium in Colma, I rolled my eyes heavenward and apologized to my father under my breath. He had never liked kitsch. Once inside, a death professional asked us, in a breathless voice "You're not going to. . . view, are you?" I wasn't sure what she meant. She meant looking at his corpse, "because, it's been a few days and well. . . he's starting to decompose. " She told us if we chose to "view" to let her know and she would come in and lift the cover off the box for us.
We went into the room. Charles, who does lighting for a living, found the light switches and turned off most of the lights. Vilem's friend said of the canned music, "This sounds like what they played at my wedding in Vegas." He found the tape player and the organ, turned the tape off and played haunting improvisations.
Along with the unknown of death and the lonely mystery of my mortality, the unknown of new life pulsed inside me. I had never lived in a world without my father in it. I took my first steps in this new world. I lay down on the floor next to the cardboard box that held my father's corpse. The cardboard box that held him was not poverty's sailing ship, just a box that politely shielded his remains. Whatever carried him on his journey was invisible and perhaps that is true of all things. On the floor next to the box, I went into a trance state, I suppose, and spoke spontaneously and deeply to my father. I babbled, uninhibitedly and at length to him and in the end I thanked him for making me the kind of person who could do such a thing. It was a culmination of all he had given me of his Surrealist vision and Bohemian genes.
The time came when we all held hands around the box to "view." Scenes from "The Night of the Living Dead" were playing in all our minds. We were sure we didn't need a death professional to open the box for us and opened the box ourselves, a bit nervous about this corpse beginning to decompose and perhaps too frightening to look at. He looked the same as he had in the hospital.
When a woman came to tell us our hour was up, we were all quietly lying down or sitting around the box that held my father's remains. No lights, no music. I think she was afraid of what she saw. She said nothing and quickly closed the door again. We went out and told her we were done, then accompanied the box to the oven. We asked for, and received, permission to be the ones to put the box in the oven. I wanted to take his body out of the box and take the silly plastic loincloth off his body and let his ashes be more pure, but I knew that would go beyond the limits and didn't ask.
We were able to leave the face of convention behind and mourn spontaneously, without a structure or a person in charge. We had no directions but that which arose in us. I can imagine a situation where that would be disastrous. We were lucky. Later we did more public events: a memorial at the cafe where he had held court almost daily and an exhibit and memorial at the art school where he had taught
There was the matter of my father's ashes and my promise to him. My mother became quite unhelpful at this stage and insisted I mail him. She had someone in Prague willing to pick him up. Mail him? I couldn't do that. Unfortunately she had all the information I needed. My father's family had a plot in a cemetery somewhere in Prague. I didn't know where it was. Eventually my mother quit telling me to mail him. The time came in 2000 when my boys weren't babies anymore and we had close friends they could stay with. My mother helped out with the information and Charles and I flew to Prague.
At the airport I was asked by an official what was in the small wooden box. "My Dad!" I gleefully announced in Czech. He let me pass without another word. The man who had offered to pick up Vilem's ashes at the airport took care of the arrangements. He had wanted to pick us up from our hotel and drive us to the cemetery, but I didn't let him. Charles and I walked. The small but heavy wooden box that held my father's ashes rode on my back in a daypack and the front gardens of homes were full of peonies that day.
It was as if some residue of my father reached around from behind me and removed another set of blinders from my eyes. I walked through the streets of Prague and the city came alive for me in a way it never had before. I thought I was seeing it through my father's eyes. Later I considered that I was releasing an early childhood image of Prague, an image of a place that my parents had suffered in, a place that had hurt them, an image had covered my perception whenever I was there. I don't know, but I fell in love. Time melted: Iron curtains and Christmas tree candles and Halloween masks and plump back seats of old cars and cardboard boxes sailing through the fluid mystery of life and the ashes of my father all conspired to bring me to a moment that opened my eyes to the spirit of the city he had always loved "like a mother" as he said on Czech television.
That was where the name Sirague came from &mdash Vilem said he loved Prague like a mother and Paris like a lover. Sirague was what he named the capital of his internal landscape, his own mythological city to ease the burden of exile. Put Paris backwards in front of Prague forwards and take the P out of both and you have Sirague, his home in exile.
We arrived at the cemetery and put the remains of my father in the family plot to join other relics of the Kriz family. The crypt was opened for us and I saw the skull of a grandmother I never met. The wooden box that had enclosed her had rotted away, revealing a family skeleton smiling up at us. The cemetery workers didn't seem to mind that I was so exuberant about it all. Maybe it's a Bohemian thing.
I visited the Old Town Square and the astronomical clock once again. By 2000 they had added an elevator to take people to the top of the clock tower and more places to sit and drink and eat. The clock became the place where my past selves merged and my relationship with Prague reconciled. I didn't mind the tourists. I was in my own world.
In 2007, I took my older son, Devin, to Prague. The first night, I rushed to the Old Town Square to properly greet the city. A ten or fifteen foot high inflated beer bottle, held down with cords like a hot air balloon dreaming of flight, hunkered next to the Clock Tower. To my eyes, it was a second tower erected in homage to global capitalism. Drunken tourists crawled over the square like ants over a carcass. My father had been devoted to beauty, I realized then. He was a man carefully following an endangered species and preserving it with his heart and camera. Later, my son and I went to Vilem's grave and cleaned it up and planted some flowers. Despite my many years of claiming an identity of rootlessness and dissociation from Prague, my father's remains compelled me and I was suddenly and irrevocably rooted.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Fiction
Dominica Kriz
Dominica Kriz (Dominica Bridget Krizova) was darkroom assistant to her father, Czech surrealist photographer Vilem Kriz, the subject of this memoir. She has worked in video, embroidery / computer graphics collage, dance and multi-media performance art. She currently studies tango and teaches memoir and fiction writing in San Francisco.