FUNERAL OF YOUTH

UNWANTED MEMORIES OF AGA'S GRAVE

Seven Winters after the Prague Spring of 1968

The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I think somebody has already written that.
I did! But I was wrong about the title then. That title was supposed to
belong to the novel I'm writing right now.
- Milan Kundera

In spring of 1975, my faith and the faith of my family came under
attack. I was sitting at the kitchen table with Tato having tea. Tato
just made me laugh. No one could listen to Mamka's angry voice and roll
his eyes as Tato could - upside down, inside out, back to front. 'Jozo,
don't bring your dust into my kitchen!' Mamka said it in a voice
reserved for talking about those who don't take their shoes off when
she just swept the carpet. No matter how much or how often Tato was in
trouble from women who cleaned the house for his habit of wiping the
sawdust from his overalls on the kitchen floor his wide palms just kept
rolling up and down his overalls out of habit. This would be the last
time Mamka would ever nag him for bringing sawdust inside her clean
kitchen.

Mamka and Gitka sat on the divan in the family room knitting jumper and
embroiding a tablecloth, a stunning design from a German magazine the
Burda, for Aga's engagement to the love of her life, Peter. My Mumka
and sister were addicted to knitting and sewing. Just one more row.
Into the night. Until their eyes almost fell out of their heads. I
remember the comforting click-clack of Mamka's No 7 needles and the
birth of my first German design jumper. A conservation about how hard
it was to find a good wool in Czechoslovakia lead to what I wanted for
my seventeenth birthday. Only that I never finished saying what I
wanted. We heard Aga's footstep on the from verandah and our normal
family life was about to transform into years of grief.

Aga walked in that evening in tears. I looked at Aga's salty eyes. I
saw something inside I had never seen before. Fear. My heart squeezed
in the cage of my chest. She had not been feeling well ever since she
started working in a new laboratory in Svit. In the last three weeks
she told us, she had felt so lethargic and without energy that all she
could think of was sleep. We put it down to the European spring.
However we soon found out it had nothing to do with the seasons. Aga
went for blood tests which soon revealed the horrific truth - she had
leukemia. As Aga announced an abbreviated version of her illness, an
eerie silence swept through the room like a fog. When Mamka walked to
embrace Aga and to say something, her eyes seemed to swim out of focus.
"Oh my God," she said. "Oh God." An uneasy sensation of foreboding so
overwhelmed me, I could almost taste it. I didn't realise at that
moment that Aga, at age 22, had received her death warrant. There was
disbelief, anger and my life was in a freefall.

Next day, I opened the giant wooden door leading from the main square
of Kezmarok to the reference shelves of the town library. I remember
thinking that I had been one of the most joyous boys in the world.
Sadness had its long claws deep inside me by the time I walked out of
the Kezmarok library. The whole world above me was no longer a festival
of warm colors. The verdict was the most confronting thing I have ever
been told by medical dictionaries and journals. The houses in Kezmarok
of Count Imre Thokoly no longer stood securely fastened to the ground.
Everything in town looked unsteady and black. Suddenly, I wanted to put
my books down and pick up a rock and toss it right through the glass of
the town hall building. The future direction of my inner life was
decided that week of my seventeenth birthday.

When I came home, Aga was sitting on the bench supported by pillows in
our garden. One tiny human figure under an enormous sky. The birds
still played music in our garden, but never against my Aga asking me to
sit next to her, "And hold my hand Jozo, I am afraid." The words
hovered a chilling presence in the air between us, but we didn't speak.
We were at the mercy of a God. We went through the best and worst
things together - skiing, skating, visiting Pilhov, Tatranka,
accidents, fights.

Within days, Aga stopped doing all those things that I used to think
were so cool. Aga used to automatically reach for her divine hair,
patting both sides of her head to push down any strays. She used to
sing and hum all those Karel Gott's songs. She used to notice when my
eyes were laughing and beg me to tell her, "So what have you done this
time?"

I no longer felt safe to look Aga in her eyes. I was flooded with the
overwhelming instinct to cry. I saw that Aga was in excruciating pain.
I sat next to her, put my hand on her hand and listened to the silence
of the universe. I still remember that sad, sad silence. Every emotion
was new to me. I wished it was my pain. When I was a child, I was
walking barefoot in our garden and stepped on a rusty nail. It went
right through my foot. It hurt. Ouch. And . . . here words fail me. I
experienced my first sensation of trembling.

Which hurts more: stepping your foot on a rusty nail or stepping your
heart on a broken glass?

Once I believed my Tato was made of steel. My Tato went from greeting
the morning from "Good morning, God!" to greetings which were more
like, "Good God ... morning?"

In Tato's workshop one afternoon he tried to explain something
difficult about Aga's pain to me and was confused when I did not
understand. I found at the end of the explanation that I was looking at
a broken man, though I could not remember making an image of a broken
man or even having decided to accept Tato's loss of authority.

Aga began to see specialists. Lots of them. They tested her blood. They
tested her urine. They put a scope up her rear end and looked inside
her intestines. "We need to check this further," the doctors said,
looking over their results. All summer, Aga's blood counts had been
less than one fifth to one tenth of what a normal person needs in order
to breathe adequately, absorb enough food, and move his limbs.

We would never talk directly about death. Even as Aga's 172 cm frame
began rapidly to shrink to 43 kilograms, we lived with a kind of
wordless understanding that it was better not to understand. We danced
around the subject, talking instead about Gott's latest songs or the
book Aga was reading or my friends and teachers at college. Then one
day ambulance took her to hospital. My Tato who learned to ask, "Have
you seen my glasses, or shirt, or shoes?" had stopped asking for help.
That week Mamka left the house to go shopping without a list. Mamka was
nothing without her lists.

No one accepted that Aga was confronting the end of her life. It was
hard to believe that such a thought could have even entered anyone's
mind. It was denied by all in the beginning. No one ever expects that
they might some day find themselves with a dying twenty-two-years-old
sister, daughter, schoolfriend, fiance in front of their eyes.

Aga, tall and radiant, had turned heads and broken more than a few
hearts. Within weeks of the diagnosis, Aga's rosy cheeks were gone. She
looked five years older in her hospital bed, ashen-coloured. She
endured spells of increased bloating, most noticeable were her puffy
feet and legs, as well as her shallow breathing. In the stark white
room, she felt constantly nauseous.

When I sat beside Aga's bed at hospital, watching her life slip away,
my thoughts ran back to our childhood when Aga was the strongest rock
in my life. There she lay, an unrecognisable girl, unable to
communicate, her eyes seemed withdrawn and had an air of someone who
had learned too much of life to indulge in smiles, but with a heart
still full of sister's love. In that split second between my lips
whispering the "Hail Mary" and "Our Father," an eternity went by in
which my mind was falling over in pity, panic, and most of all some
unexplained fear.

Everytime I said goodbye to Aga I felt taller and tanner than the last
time, and when she held me, I felt awkward, older, as if I was her
older brother and she was my younger sister.
At home, torrent of tears came without warning. Once our wholesome
kitchen echoed with the laughter of family sharing funny stories. From
that time on our meal times proceeded in silence. No genuine laughter
would be heard for a long time to come.

Over those next six months, Aga suffered intense and growing pain
throughout her body as a result of swollen bones. There was no medicine
available to treat her due to lack of the foreign currency. My parents
appealed to the authorities to let us obtain the drugs such as
Interferon directly from our aunties in Germany or France. Auntie Ota
and Zofka sent drugs to us, but every time they were confiscated. The
official reply was: 'it is illegal to bring in these drugs without
permission.' My parents never completely stopped feeling responsible
for not getting the appropriate medicine for Aga. The only thing they
could give her was raw liver. Not a good thing for Aga who couldn't
even stomach a pate. In the end, Aga begged us not to give her another
spoonful of liver or she would vomit again. For all that was happening
to her, Aga's voice was strong and inviting, and her mind was vibrating
with a million dreams. There were days when she was intent on proving
that one day she will sit at a cafe in Vienna.

Then, her condition had worsened to the point where death was
inevitable. One sad spring morning, Mamka awoke, confused from sleep,
to answer the telephone. "I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but
there is nothing more we can do," whispered Aga's doctor. Aga came home
from the hospital to die. 157 sunless days, a grey smear of time,
without colour and without end. Leukemia is like a lit candle: it melts
your red blood cells and leaves your body a pile of white wax. It
begins inside and works its way out. By the end, like something from a
science fiction movie, Aga's flame of life froze inside her own
flesh.

As the Vrbov sat down to breakfast on 21 September 1975 the bells of
church struck death. The strokes were borne on the Tatra mountain wind,
"There's a girl whose soul has been taken to heaven."

Most fear death and some welcome it , but all are afraid of death when
it takes away one's loved one.

... St Servac church overflowed with mourners who spilled out into the
autumn cool breeze. No song, just simple organ music began the service.
The sobbing started before the music but grew louder and stronger when
Farar Glatz approached Aga's coffin. The funeral march rubbed salt in a
wound that already hurts too much. Father Glatz, our neighbour and
friend, was supposed to lead us in prayer, but few people could follow
his voice scorched with grief. The funeral service was a blur to me. I
remember little of my Mamka's pain-clouded eyes or my Tato's shaking
hands. I was not aware of the world around me. I felt what a
transcendental force the air had after the service. Did I place a stone
on Aga's grave, offering whatever it was I was supposed to offer?

Did I hear Father Glatz and his half question half fact?, 'You know, we
are all dying, not just your sister.' 'Is not doubting God a part of
faith?'

Did I say, 'I doubt that God can get me through this.'

Did I hear my Tato finish his sentences?, 'To outlive a child is the
cruellest thing. A life sentence ..."

My heart failed me each time I tried to return to my daily routine.
Aga's absence made less and less sense. I made less and less sense to
others, as time went by. Much less and less sense to myself. It is hard
to believe that six months had gone by since I stopped measuring myself
against Aga. I'd do anything to row the time backward against the
ripping tide to hear my ancient words plead again, "Aga, Aga. You just
wait. I'm a going to be taller!" What was over was my faith in divine
benevolence as the fundamental tone of my existence. I no longer
believed in gravity. Each day I grew taller and taller and I assumed
less and less that my feet would hit the floor when I got up in the
morning. Each dawn and dusk, I clenched my hands in fists of rage. For
the very first time I found myself not caring whether I would grow as
tall as my uncle Paul who used to boast that girls had to climb up me
him to get a kiss.

"Why is God punishing me, Mamka? I was up ten times," I asked not
realising that she did not sleep at all. Privately, in the recesses of
my heart, I took a vow of revenge, a vow of retribition.

A life sentence for my misty parents and grandparents and Aga's fiance
and brothers and sisters and me. Growing up in communism was hard
enough without having your sister poisoned by chemical laboratory. I
had experienced uncontrollable feelings, consuming hatred and grief.
The layers of grief had been building up for months. I knew it was
manly not to cry! Madness lay in all directions. The thousand shades of
blackness bit me down like a sore tooth. My world went black. I felt my
insides leave me, lungs, stomach, heart all rolled up into a little
ball. No one could understand the deep hollows in my body, let alone
myself. I was sick of people repeating stories about the nature of life
and death and about the threshold between endings and beginnings. The
world deflated like a pair of lungs unable to inflate back again. And
feld a cold emptiness after each prayer.

I knew that words were not enough. I could only think there was a
self-preservation mechanism in us which allowed us to see just the
smallest glimpse of the sadness that lied ahead. To be confronted with
a sense of loss of sister was so heart-wrenching that I felt I could
not possibly take it all in.

That night the tyranny of loss and anger left me weeping in a foetal
position in my attic room. I gave myself up not to dream but to death.
In the dream I made my way with some difficulty to Aga's grave, finally
speaking with Aga after all the others around her. We wondered through
our favourite places. The dream replayed moments from our lives, times
when Aga told me a story of hoping to be a nun, or taking me to Tatra
Mountains or when she woke me up to eat my breakfast or the time in
church when we sang psalms and practiced folklore steps in the
garden.

It was a week before I realised that I didn't say a word to anyone. By
then I understood the meaning of the shortest sentence in the Bible,
"Jesus wept." The author of the psalm wrote that "my tears have been my
food, day and night." "Don't cry," Jimmy Cagney once said. "There's
enough water in the goulash already." While I cast my salty eyes on
black letters, the pages watched my great gift for turning water into a
spiritual wine. I almost became blind from excessive crying, but that
didn't not bury my grief. Only when my little niece Janka said, "Jozko
smells," I understood why Mamka was losing patience with me. But I
needed time. Time to smell. Time to study photos of Aga dancing,
smiling, studying me.

Some dreams one never tells anyone, because one does not want to be
ridiculed. Although rarely did I hear Aga speak to me. Once she said,
"If you become a father, don't name girls after me. Name them after
Dubcek." And another time Aga reminded me of Chamillova, "Remember what
Stara used to say, 'Now tell me what nice things happened to you
today.'" But, each dream seemed to have the same ending: Aga walking in
Father Glatz's meadow while I was running after her. I was never able
to catch up with her because Mr Rambacher never cut the long grass
which was between us. My feet were moving, but I was on the same
spot.

The mood surrounding the dreams stayed with me during the day. Awake or
asleep, I suddenly doubted my own senses. Ghosts and mediums were very
big in the middle of the day. Dream felt like a reality: it kept me in
suspense and consumed me with a sense of anticipation. Aga's absence
was too strange. I saw her or I heard her moving about or humming to
the rhythm of Tato's hammer.

I could not understand how our house could be filled with sweet
memories and be simultaneously so achingly empty. What did I grieve?
For the loss of a sister whose presence in my life made me laugh and
love. Grief for a wasted life. Grief for my own loss. The possibilities
of dying young had never crossed our minds.

Since then I measure my life by Aga, not by calendar, Before Aga and
After Aga. There is no end of missing, loving and longing. I was
seventeen and life seemed finished. At that point, I switched off
emotionally, from friends and family, and retreated into my aching
heart alone, not caring what happened around me.

A month after Aga's burial I was not ready to return the Agricultural
college. Of all the pain in human heart, the strongest must be the
feeling of grief. I became overcome by the strange feeling like I was
living in a country where the sense of north, west, east and south
disappeared. One think, therefore one is.