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In the worst hour of the worst spring of 1975, much worse year than 1968, 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. The end of ordinariness of love and the dailiness of married life. Our house would never live as intensely again.
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 front 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 autumn 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 ...”
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