ANDREW STANCEK
THE YEAR OF THE DOG
The year I was seven, I moved in with my parents, and they killed my dog.
Since my birth, my grandparents had been coddling me at their villa on the outskirts of Bratislava, but I longed for something else. I wanted a father who would carry me on his shoulders, pretending to be a wild bronco. I wanted a mother who would ruffle my hair and hand me a big slab of bublanina, a cherry sponge-cake. But most of all I wanted the greatest possession of every kid in the world:a dog.
Grandmother put her foot down. “I have quite enough of other people’s cast-offs without having to put up with a mangy cur.” I did not like being called a cast-off, but nobody ever said my parents, my Mami and my Oci, would come back for me.
Grandfather shrugged. He had fights with her all the time but knew he could not win that one.
Grandmother made desserts every day, and let me lick the remnants of milk chocolate or whipped cream from the spoon. She let me play with my mini-cars under the kitchen table while she cooked. She bandaged my scraped knees and wiped my tears. But when she seemed worn down by my incessant questioning about Mami and Oci, I asked about getting a dog, even a small one. She sighed and shook her head, “I have too much to deal with as it is.” She handed me a muffin, still hot out of the oven, and sent me to play in the garden.
One night, after our nightly checkers game, Grandfather cleared his throat. I knew that he had an announcement; he had hugged me hard when he returned from work; his play had been inattentive.
“Slavko, you know how much Grandmother and I love you.”
I nodded.
“We will always love you, always.”
Grandfather’s eyes were tearing up. He petted the top of my head.
“We would like everything to continue the way it has been but your father is back. He was cleared and they released him. He and your mother have an apartment now in the center of town. They are taking you to live with them.” His tears were dropping on the checker board. “But you will come to visit every weekend, they promised me that. We will still be together.”
I hugged him. My chest was tightening, my eyes were welling up. But then, I grinned.
“Maybe we’ll get a dog for the apartment? Maybe it needs to be guarded?”
Grandfather blew his nose and chuckled at my persistence.
Suddenly I did not think the prospect so bad.
The apartment Mami, Oci, and I moved into was on the third floor of a decrepit building in the center of Bratislava. The streets were narrow and winding, most of the streetlights broken by gangs. Tattered Soviet and Czechoslovak flags fluttered from flagpoles; the ever-present banners proclaiming “With the Soviet Union Forever” were covered with graffiti. Scraps of ripped newspapers were blown around, along with greasy cardboard cones, and pieces of chestnut shells. The dark passageways reeked of urine. Wet sand and cement dust crunched underfoot. Grim soldiers marched in formation throughout the squares. People spoke in whispers of robberies, rapes and beatings of pedestrians. Policemen were seen in the daylight, directing traffic, but never at night. After dark no one ventured out. I was frightened, not only at night, but in the daytime as well, unless I was walking with protective adults. Yet I was also happier than I had ever been.I had a Mami and an Oci. I had made friends among the hundreds of kids crammed into the other apartments, in buildings just like ours. All I needed now was a dog.
Mami was not normal like my new friend Jana’s. Mami loathed cooking. She would sooner enter a plane than a kitchen; to her bublanina was a foreign term. All our cooking was done by hired “aunts”.
Oci never carried me on his shoulders; he always got home after I was asleep. But on several weekends he took me into the woods, where we crept through the brush and gathered mushrooms. He carved a slingshot out of a tree branch and supervised my shooting practice. He showed me his old army gun and promised that one day he would teach me how to use it. He did not roll his eyes or laugh at me when I told him I needed a dog. He nodded.
“Of course you need a dog,” he said.
Every night I regaled Mami with the adventures of neighborhood dogs. She took to greeting me with “Not another dog story. Not today.” I did not listen; what else was I going to tell her about, the heroic exploits of Slovak partisans in the war that I learned about in school?
“Maybe a gerbil, one day,” she finally conceded.
A gerbil was a mouse as far as I was concerned. Mice were food for real pets. A big German Shepherd, that was a pet. A husky maybe. A lab. Or, a mixture of all the breeds. Being a pet owner was about a collar, a pink tongue to lick your face, a tail to wag when you walked by. I kept on with my stories.
Then one evening, Oci appeared for the first time ever before supper, whistling one of his endless Slovak folk tunes. My mother was in a foul mood. Her work had not gone well. State Radio refused to air the interview she had been working on for two weeks. “Glorifying the first violin of the State Orchestra is absolutely out of the question,” the Party commander had decreed. “No single musician, even one in the State Orchestra, can be held above the others. Not in the interests of the State.” Even before Oci arrived home, Mami had already raged at me for not getting a perfect score on my Slovak dictation, and was set to storm at him simply for being there.
“What the hell do you have to whistle about, Milos?” she snapped. “There won’t be enough food for supper. You’re never home at this hour.”
Then she noticed the basket, covered with his coat. Presents always warmed her heart. She was beginning to smile when he whipped off the coat.
Mami leaned back to hang onto the sink. “What in Christ’s name have you done now?”
“Now Blanka, before you make up your mind, let’s just talk about it.”
I was already at the basket, having my face licked. The puppy’s short tail was wagging, one of its ears was cocked, its eyes full of hope.
“Oh, look at those spots. Can I keep him, Mami? I can, can’t I? I can, right? Where did you get him, Oci? Can I name him? Can he be mine? Can I go show him to the guys? Isn’t he perfect, Mami? It’s exactly what I wanted.”
My mother glowered.
“Could you have done anything stupider, Milos?”
“Look at the boy, Blanka. Look at him. The dog won’t be any trouble, you’ll see.”
“Yeah, for you, maybe. For you it will be no trouble at all. You breeze in, drop it off. Once in a blue moon you deign to honor us with your presence. Who is going to take care of it, feed it, clean up after it?”
As if on cue, the puppy peed. My father laughed. The dog looked at him and woofed. He smelled his pee, and waved his head around, his tongue flopping out of his mouth. I laughed too.
“Oh, Oci, he peed, he peed in the basket. What do we do?”
Mami glared at me and slammed the door when she stormed out.
Like many in Bratislava, we had a little plot of land out in the country, in Koliba, about an hour’s trip by streetcar, where Mami grew tulips, daffodils, and narcissi, and Oci harvested pears and walnuts. We slept in the two-room garden shack with its three decrepit beds, and Mami looked after her beloved flowers. Mami said that the dog, whom I named Napoleon, would be banished there.
On the way to Koliba the first weekend I had Napoleon, Oci told me the story of how his friend Anton had brought the pup to work and plopped it onto Oci’s desk. “You will love it, and so will your boy. You know you both want one.” They shared two shots of slivovica, then one more for the road, and the deal was sealed. My father had borrowed a discarded doghouse that I decorated with blue, red and white crepe and, hand in hand, the two of us set up the doghouse out in the garden where my dream dog would live for a while, until Oci could convince Mami otherwise.
“I didn’t want the damn thing in the first place,” my mother had yelled. “For now, until we decide what to do it stays here in Koliba. You arrange the feeding. You look after it. You set up the dog run on the far end of the garden. I won’t have it in the house.”
My first Saturday with Napoleon was blissful. We crisscrossed the garden on the run. I filled his bowl with water and when no one was looking we slurped out of it together. He grabbed my sleeve in his clenched teeth and would not let go but the rip was only a small one and I knew Mami would not notice. When he started digging holes with his front paws, I did too. His hole was much better, though. Oci, trimming the lilacs, kept looking over, laughing. Napoleon was the best dog ever.
“Isn’t he real smart, Mami, did you see how smart he is? I will teach him to fetch, I will. He is really good at digging holes, isn’t he?”
My mother could not respond. The holes we’d made had dug up bulbs, imported through connected acquaintances directly from Holland.
“Yeah, real smart, real great dog,” she finally sobbed.
When we left, I hugged my best friend and whispered into his floppy ear that I would come see him very soon.
On Sunday, my aunt Zuzka was celebrating her birthday at my grandparents’ house so Mami said we could not go back to the Koliba garden. My father had a good excuse to avoid the party.
“We have a dog and someone has to go down to feed and walk him. That someone is me.”
More than anything I wanted to go with him, to be with Napoleon. But missing a family celebration was not an option.
“We have so few family occasions together anymore,” my grandfather had sighed more than once. “I am not getting any younger.”
Mami said we had to be there and Oci promised I would see Napoleon again next weekend.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back for supper,” my father assured us, winking at me. “I’ll just feed him, give him a good run, and be back.”
Mami and I travelled to my grandparents’ place, ate my grandmother’s wonderful food: wienerschnitzel, potato salad, her special Sachertorte, and, as always, Mami had a huge fight with her.
My grandfather, normally the most peaceful of men, raised his voice.
“Just for once, can you not let it be?” he yelled. “Can we not have one family celebration in peace?”
My grandmother waddled off into the kitchen in tears, slamming dishes, banging forks against the heavy pot in the soapy dishwater.
My mother sat next to my stretched-out grandfather, brought out the Opoldekl ointment and massaged his forehead.
“Has it been bad recently?” I heard her whispering. He sighed.
We left soon after and came home to wait for Oci.
It was a long wait. Much past our dinner time Mami finally warmed up the meal prepared by one of the “aunts”. The smell of burnt cabbage wafted into the room where I was building a castle. In the kitchen Mami threw something against the wall. “Hnusna mrcha,” I heard her yell at Oci, even though he wasn’t there.
“No, you cannot stay up for him,” she said when I came in to the kitchen.
“But, Mami, he has to tell me about Napoleon. He promised. You promised. Wasn’t Oci supposed to be back already? Are you sure nothing happened to him?”
“Stop your asking. He probably ran into some friends.”
Even at seven I knew that most of my father’s friends wore skirts.
“The two of us will eat without him and then you have to go to bed. You have school tomorrow and God only knows when he’ll be back. I will tell him to kiss you good-night when he gets in.”
I stood staring out the window, trembling, hearing the Blue Church bell outside strike seven.
We were eating when we heard a heavy thump against the front door. The door creaked open and Oci swayed against the frame, sobbing. Stinking of liquor he looked down, hit the door with his palm, and shuddered.
“Dead,” he sobbed. He leaned against the door, slid down, fell over.
“Oci, Oci, what happened?” I cried.
He coughed, hiccupped, coughed again. His eyes shifted from me to Mami and back, saw no easy mercy.
“I bought Napoleon a treat at the butcher’s. Enough of this prepackaged food, I figured. He is a big dog; he needs real food, real nutrition. So I went and bought a hunk of meat on a bone, good meat for a big dog. He was all excited to see me, jumping up and down. I threw him the treat. Still in midair he caught it. Then he gagged, gagged. I could not help him. I tried, I really did. I got my hand into his throat, pulled. He wheezed, wheezed, I could not do it. He just shook. It was too far down.”
I went to my Oci, sprawled on the floor, shirt sleeve torn.
“I know you didn’t mean to, Oci. We loved Napoleon, you and I.” He reeked of distillery, death, and in his eyes there was a drunken appeal for forgiveness. He reached up to put his arm around me. I leaned back. My dog was dead. His arm fell down.
“I am sorry, Slavko, I am so sorry.”
My mother snorted.
“Supper is ruined, too. Get yourselves cleaned up, both of you. We’ll eat together for once, even if it’s burnt.”
Less than six months later Oci was gone, too, moving out to the Koliba shack.
Throughout my visits in subsequent years, the dog house in the far corner of the overgrown garden remained vacant.
The year I was seven, I moved in with my parents, and they killed my dog.
Since my birth, my grandparents had been coddling me at their villa on the outskirts of Bratislava, but I longed for something else. I wanted a father who would carry me on his shoulders, pretending to be a wild bronco. I wanted a mother who would ruffle my hair and hand me a big slab of bublanina, a cherry sponge-cake. But most of all I wanted the greatest possession of every kid in the world:a dog.
Grandmother put her foot down. “I have quite enough of other people’s cast-offs without having to put up with a mangy cur.” I did not like being called a cast-off, but nobody ever said my parents, my Mami and my Oci, would come back for me.
Grandfather shrugged. He had fights with her all the time but knew he could not win that one.
Grandmother made desserts every day, and let me lick the remnants of milk chocolate or whipped cream from the spoon. She let me play with my mini-cars under the kitchen table while she cooked. She bandaged my scraped knees and wiped my tears. But when she seemed worn down by my incessant questioning about Mami and Oci, I asked about getting a dog, even a small one. She sighed and shook her head, “I have too much to deal with as it is.” She handed me a muffin, still hot out of the oven, and sent me to play in the garden.
One night, after our nightly checkers game, Grandfather cleared his throat. I knew that he had an announcement; he had hugged me hard when he returned from work; his play had been inattentive.
“Slavko, you know how much Grandmother and I love you.”
I nodded.
“We will always love you, always.”
Grandfather’s eyes were tearing up. He petted the top of my head.
“We would like everything to continue the way it has been but your father is back. He was cleared and they released him. He and your mother have an apartment now in the center of town. They are taking you to live with them.” His tears were dropping on the checker board. “But you will come to visit every weekend, they promised me that. We will still be together.”
I hugged him. My chest was tightening, my eyes were welling up. But then, I grinned.
“Maybe we’ll get a dog for the apartment? Maybe it needs to be guarded?”
Grandfather blew his nose and chuckled at my persistence.
Suddenly I did not think the prospect so bad.
The apartment Mami, Oci, and I moved into was on the third floor of a decrepit building in the center of Bratislava. The streets were narrow and winding, most of the streetlights broken by gangs. Tattered Soviet and Czechoslovak flags fluttered from flagpoles; the ever-present banners proclaiming “With the Soviet Union Forever” were covered with graffiti. Scraps of ripped newspapers were blown around, along with greasy cardboard cones, and pieces of chestnut shells. The dark passageways reeked of urine. Wet sand and cement dust crunched underfoot. Grim soldiers marched in formation throughout the squares. People spoke in whispers of robberies, rapes and beatings of pedestrians. Policemen were seen in the daylight, directing traffic, but never at night. After dark no one ventured out. I was frightened, not only at night, but in the daytime as well, unless I was walking with protective adults. Yet I was also happier than I had ever been.I had a Mami and an Oci. I had made friends among the hundreds of kids crammed into the other apartments, in buildings just like ours. All I needed now was a dog.
Mami was not normal like my new friend Jana’s. Mami loathed cooking. She would sooner enter a plane than a kitchen; to her bublanina was a foreign term. All our cooking was done by hired “aunts”.
Oci never carried me on his shoulders; he always got home after I was asleep. But on several weekends he took me into the woods, where we crept through the brush and gathered mushrooms. He carved a slingshot out of a tree branch and supervised my shooting practice. He showed me his old army gun and promised that one day he would teach me how to use it. He did not roll his eyes or laugh at me when I told him I needed a dog. He nodded.
“Of course you need a dog,” he said.
Every night I regaled Mami with the adventures of neighborhood dogs. She took to greeting me with “Not another dog story. Not today.” I did not listen; what else was I going to tell her about, the heroic exploits of Slovak partisans in the war that I learned about in school?
“Maybe a gerbil, one day,” she finally conceded.
A gerbil was a mouse as far as I was concerned. Mice were food for real pets. A big German Shepherd, that was a pet. A husky maybe. A lab. Or, a mixture of all the breeds. Being a pet owner was about a collar, a pink tongue to lick your face, a tail to wag when you walked by. I kept on with my stories.
Then one evening, Oci appeared for the first time ever before supper, whistling one of his endless Slovak folk tunes. My mother was in a foul mood. Her work had not gone well. State Radio refused to air the interview she had been working on for two weeks. “Glorifying the first violin of the State Orchestra is absolutely out of the question,” the Party commander had decreed. “No single musician, even one in the State Orchestra, can be held above the others. Not in the interests of the State.” Even before Oci arrived home, Mami had already raged at me for not getting a perfect score on my Slovak dictation, and was set to storm at him simply for being there.
“What the hell do you have to whistle about, Milos?” she snapped. “There won’t be enough food for supper. You’re never home at this hour.”
Then she noticed the basket, covered with his coat. Presents always warmed her heart. She was beginning to smile when he whipped off the coat.
Mami leaned back to hang onto the sink. “What in Christ’s name have you done now?”
“Now Blanka, before you make up your mind, let’s just talk about it.”
I was already at the basket, having my face licked. The puppy’s short tail was wagging, one of its ears was cocked, its eyes full of hope.
“Oh, look at those spots. Can I keep him, Mami? I can, can’t I? I can, right? Where did you get him, Oci? Can I name him? Can he be mine? Can I go show him to the guys? Isn’t he perfect, Mami? It’s exactly what I wanted.”
My mother glowered.
“Could you have done anything stupider, Milos?”
“Look at the boy, Blanka. Look at him. The dog won’t be any trouble, you’ll see.”
“Yeah, for you, maybe. For you it will be no trouble at all. You breeze in, drop it off. Once in a blue moon you deign to honor us with your presence. Who is going to take care of it, feed it, clean up after it?”
As if on cue, the puppy peed. My father laughed. The dog looked at him and woofed. He smelled his pee, and waved his head around, his tongue flopping out of his mouth. I laughed too.
“Oh, Oci, he peed, he peed in the basket. What do we do?”
Mami glared at me and slammed the door when she stormed out.
Like many in Bratislava, we had a little plot of land out in the country, in Koliba, about an hour’s trip by streetcar, where Mami grew tulips, daffodils, and narcissi, and Oci harvested pears and walnuts. We slept in the two-room garden shack with its three decrepit beds, and Mami looked after her beloved flowers. Mami said that the dog, whom I named Napoleon, would be banished there.
On the way to Koliba the first weekend I had Napoleon, Oci told me the story of how his friend Anton had brought the pup to work and plopped it onto Oci’s desk. “You will love it, and so will your boy. You know you both want one.” They shared two shots of slivovica, then one more for the road, and the deal was sealed. My father had borrowed a discarded doghouse that I decorated with blue, red and white crepe and, hand in hand, the two of us set up the doghouse out in the garden where my dream dog would live for a while, until Oci could convince Mami otherwise.
“I didn’t want the damn thing in the first place,” my mother had yelled. “For now, until we decide what to do it stays here in Koliba. You arrange the feeding. You look after it. You set up the dog run on the far end of the garden. I won’t have it in the house.”
My first Saturday with Napoleon was blissful. We crisscrossed the garden on the run. I filled his bowl with water and when no one was looking we slurped out of it together. He grabbed my sleeve in his clenched teeth and would not let go but the rip was only a small one and I knew Mami would not notice. When he started digging holes with his front paws, I did too. His hole was much better, though. Oci, trimming the lilacs, kept looking over, laughing. Napoleon was the best dog ever.
“Isn’t he real smart, Mami, did you see how smart he is? I will teach him to fetch, I will. He is really good at digging holes, isn’t he?”
My mother could not respond. The holes we’d made had dug up bulbs, imported through connected acquaintances directly from Holland.
“Yeah, real smart, real great dog,” she finally sobbed.
When we left, I hugged my best friend and whispered into his floppy ear that I would come see him very soon.
On Sunday, my aunt Zuzka was celebrating her birthday at my grandparents’ house so Mami said we could not go back to the Koliba garden. My father had a good excuse to avoid the party.
“We have a dog and someone has to go down to feed and walk him. That someone is me.”
More than anything I wanted to go with him, to be with Napoleon. But missing a family celebration was not an option.
“We have so few family occasions together anymore,” my grandfather had sighed more than once. “I am not getting any younger.”
Mami said we had to be there and Oci promised I would see Napoleon again next weekend.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be back for supper,” my father assured us, winking at me. “I’ll just feed him, give him a good run, and be back.”
Mami and I travelled to my grandparents’ place, ate my grandmother’s wonderful food: wienerschnitzel, potato salad, her special Sachertorte, and, as always, Mami had a huge fight with her.
My grandfather, normally the most peaceful of men, raised his voice.
“Just for once, can you not let it be?” he yelled. “Can we not have one family celebration in peace?”
My grandmother waddled off into the kitchen in tears, slamming dishes, banging forks against the heavy pot in the soapy dishwater.
My mother sat next to my stretched-out grandfather, brought out the Opoldekl ointment and massaged his forehead.
“Has it been bad recently?” I heard her whispering. He sighed.
We left soon after and came home to wait for Oci.
It was a long wait. Much past our dinner time Mami finally warmed up the meal prepared by one of the “aunts”. The smell of burnt cabbage wafted into the room where I was building a castle. In the kitchen Mami threw something against the wall. “Hnusna mrcha,” I heard her yell at Oci, even though he wasn’t there.
“No, you cannot stay up for him,” she said when I came in to the kitchen.
“But, Mami, he has to tell me about Napoleon. He promised. You promised. Wasn’t Oci supposed to be back already? Are you sure nothing happened to him?”
“Stop your asking. He probably ran into some friends.”
Even at seven I knew that most of my father’s friends wore skirts.
“The two of us will eat without him and then you have to go to bed. You have school tomorrow and God only knows when he’ll be back. I will tell him to kiss you good-night when he gets in.”
I stood staring out the window, trembling, hearing the Blue Church bell outside strike seven.
We were eating when we heard a heavy thump against the front door. The door creaked open and Oci swayed against the frame, sobbing. Stinking of liquor he looked down, hit the door with his palm, and shuddered.
“Dead,” he sobbed. He leaned against the door, slid down, fell over.
“Oci, Oci, what happened?” I cried.
He coughed, hiccupped, coughed again. His eyes shifted from me to Mami and back, saw no easy mercy.
“I bought Napoleon a treat at the butcher’s. Enough of this prepackaged food, I figured. He is a big dog; he needs real food, real nutrition. So I went and bought a hunk of meat on a bone, good meat for a big dog. He was all excited to see me, jumping up and down. I threw him the treat. Still in midair he caught it. Then he gagged, gagged. I could not help him. I tried, I really did. I got my hand into his throat, pulled. He wheezed, wheezed, I could not do it. He just shook. It was too far down.”
I went to my Oci, sprawled on the floor, shirt sleeve torn.
“I know you didn’t mean to, Oci. We loved Napoleon, you and I.” He reeked of distillery, death, and in his eyes there was a drunken appeal for forgiveness. He reached up to put his arm around me. I leaned back. My dog was dead. His arm fell down.
“I am sorry, Slavko, I am so sorry.”
My mother snorted.
“Supper is ruined, too. Get yourselves cleaned up, both of you. We’ll eat together for once, even if it’s burnt.”
Less than six months later Oci was gone, too, moving out to the Koliba shack.
Throughout my visits in subsequent years, the dog house in the far corner of the overgrown garden remained vacant.
