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Edited on Thu Feb-23-06 10:19 PM by byronius
Yesterday, I was number 38 in line at the Broadway Post Office. A man in his fifties dressed in an appliance repairman’s uniform argued with the clerk. “But a package coming here from my homeland takes only eight days! Why is my package not arrived there by over one month?” The clerk was irritated by this — and pointing the man to a voluminous form for lost package claims, dismissed him from life.
The man visibly slumped, mumbled, took a form, and walked to the door. I had a Byronius Moment. It Just Happens. “What country are you from?”, I asked him. “I am from Czechoslovakia,” he replied. “You know, we’ve had problems shipping to South America, and Italy, but I don’t ship much to Czechoslovakia,” I said, in my normal method of extracting life pictures. Talk about the mundane, sizing up the general human — and then suddenly shift gears, and not too directly. For instance — I casually mention that I’m reading a history of the KGB, the Mitrohkin Archives. Then I drop the name of Eduard Benes, and the fate of Czechoslovakia at Munich — and — Pow.
He began to speak. Every person in the post office stopped talking and listened, even the clerks. This was his story:
He was born and raised in Czechoslovakia, apparently to parents and a subculture that utterly resented the Communists. Old-time, back to the 1918-creation-type people, probably proud Austro-Hungarians before that. He developed electronics skills, and worked, and started a family. He felt that he was denied access to further education and employment because his family would not declare themselves Communist. He was angry about this. By the 1980’s, his daughter had married, and so he left, and escaped to the U.S. After several years, he decided to risk returning to see his daughter and grandchildren.
He was caught. He spent three years in a prison for political prisoners, at which he was tortured, starved, and beaten. They broke his neck — he has an internal metal fixture which fused the vertebrae. Finally, in 1989, he was released. The new government paid him a small amount for his imprisonment — he returned to the United States, and has been here ever since.
During his story, his eyes began to well up with tears. Everyone in the Post Office stopped breathing. It was a powerful moment for everyone, including him. He had spoken so clearly, so openly –
“What do you think of this country?”, I asked. “If I had the money, I wouldn’t stay here for two seconds. It is just like the Communists,” he replied. We exchanged a few more pleasantries, and he left. The Post Office audience all began to breathe again.
My number was called eventually, and I got the clerk who had served the man. Now — I know this guy’s story, too, totally (Philipino, divorced, tennis player, one kid, surgery on his ankles, 500 days to retirement, former military, strong feelings about the Philipines and the Japanese, conservative), and so I confronted him — having heard the guy’s whole story, didn’t he wish he had treated the guy a little better? After all, the package was one he had sent to his daughter in Czechoslovakia — the same one he had risked imprisonment and torture to see.
“Well, he knew the risks,” says the clerk. “He shouldn’t have gone.” I was taken aback. “O.K., then. If the Japanese still held the Philipines, and you had escaped to the U.S., but your daughter had stayed behind with her husband, you wouldn’t have tried to sneak in to see her?” I was merciless, and he relented. “All right, I would. Put me in that circumstance, and yeah, I would do the same thing. But I’m not in that circumstance. He should have known better,” came the twisty reply.
I smiled. Conservatives. They admit everything, and they deny everything, all at once. All the time. And it sounds good to them, somehow. Logical.
Eduard Benes was a brave, brave man.
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