Of all the languages spoken in his house, Karolko prefers the one his mother uses with him. Mama’s tongue could sound abrupt, with too many consonants, or even curt for softer occidental ears tamed by the rounded vocalic melody of Latin. But for Karolko, her words are sweet, jumpy, and flaky as the secret white sugar the women in the family sprinkle only on top of the strudel they present to special visitors like old Aunt Gertrude. Once, when he was much younger, around three years old, Karolko tried to feed a piece of strudel to Aunt Gertrude’s fox stole. What hurt him most from Mama’s scold was not the sharp words coming like angry bees through her crooked teeth, but the fact that Mama was using Papa’s language with him. “Kind!” she uttered, and Aunt Gertrude sipped her pale coffee and removed a crumb of pastry from her front tooth with her pinkie nail, while Karolko was escorted to her younger sister Alena’s room.
Kind is also the word Papa had used some hours or days ago. One of the very few things Karolko remembers. All those images are dancing slices of reality in his mind, enveloped in a silent fur of fever and despondence. He, almost asleep on his father’s torso, was too weak to reach out for Mama. She had the new baby in her arms anyway. Papa shouted something about the two girls, “zwei Mädchen,” he said, having to be protected. The family had to be safe. Something about doing the right thing for everybody in his house. Mama cried softly, little Alena looked at Papa with fear and admiration, and baby Lenka sucked on Mama’s breast with an eagerness that surpassed Aunt Gertrude’s love for strudel.
Karolko has many things. And he is proud of all of them. He has his Mama and Papa, and now two sisters instead of just one. He has ten fingers to count; he has a red tin Ford DeLuxe that was originally black. Arpád, the next-door butcher, painted the toy red for him with some leftover paint from his shop’s new sign. “You see, Karolko, we need both languages now. The new red letters are German. You are lucky you speak both. They say this will come in handy soon.”
Karolko looks at his fingers in the limpid light and counts four. In the language of Mama, a boy is not his age. You have, you own, the years you have lived. Karolko had lived four years, and so he is entitled to this possession of time. He is not four years old, thirsty, and lying in bed with his head on a too soft pillow. He has all those four years of life. He lived them, and he is the happy owner of his past. The idea soothes him. Although he envisions the problematic moment when he is much older, like Aunt Gertrude, and he will not have enough fingers to do the math. He does not care much about having two languages, as the butcher had stated, because he has decided not to use Papa’s language in the future. That language makes Mama cry and Alena shake too often.
Sadly, Karolko has almost nothing in this white place where Papa has left him. But he does feel a growing nest of fear above his belly button. Fear is something one can have. Whenever he is awake, and the dove-like ladies around him have already offered him tepid water and some sandy powders, he looks around. Only men are around him, all in similar big beds. Once in a while, a normal person wearing street clothes sneaks into the long room and tiptoes hesitantly toward one bed. Nobody touches anybody, nobody talks loudly. Karolko doesn’t know if he cannot hear because of his headache or because of the frigid wind from the open windows that the big-mustached doctors refuse to close. Two minutes or two weeks ago, Karolko had a dream. He heard his Mama pleading with a young doctor with a fluff of blond hair to please close the windows so her little boy would not die. But when Karolko opened his eyes to greet Mama, she had disappeared, and only the skinny doctor was drying his hands with a pink cloth as he stormed out, shaking his head with a frustrated look. The look on Papa’s face when he avoids Arpád in the cafe and tells Mama not to buy so much meat that we cannot afford.
Karolko burrows all the cold of the world in his body. The Mama in his dream was right. Someone needs to close those windows. Not only is Karolko coughing in this white, populated room. The older men are coughing too, enacting a strange symphony of modulated throat outbursts, higher and lower like the organ at the city church.
Karolko has a fever, a cough, and little red stars all over his scrawny body. As if snow had been falling under the butcher’s sign before it dried and Karolko had stood beneath the shower of frigid red flakes. Karolko has a yearning for Mama, white sugar, and his crimson tin car that Alena might misplace if he doesn’t return home soon.
~~
Alena turned out to be smarter than Karolko ever thought. When the block leader of the street came to their house to request that all Karolko’s possessions be burned, she, as a responsible oldest sister by fortuity, hid the red car under the corn skirt of her biggest kukuričné doll, an innocent figure without eyes and a flowery handkerchief on its head whose tails reached all the way to its waist.
Eight years after her sin, Alena hid the red car again. This time, in the little cardboard case, where she would take her meager clothes, two dolls, and one pair of shoes from Slovakia to Vienna. The Ford DeLuxe returned to its homeland two years later. At the pace of Mama’s tears in front of the Statue of Liberty, Alena said, “Don’t cry for him, Mama. I brought Karolko’s car with me. We have him in our hearts.” Over the next six decades, among laughter and success and yearning and oblivion, Mama repeated like a soothing litany, “At least he never saw the war.” Papa answered every time in German, “He did not see the arrival of penicillin either.”
What neither Mama nor Papa nor Alena ever imagined is that the short-lived echoes of a four-year-old can cross a sea and still be honored.
Hungry baby Lenka never remembered her brother’s face, the pitch of his voice, or the rhythm of his steps. But she secured for him one final asset after all the other members of her family, wrinkled and tired, joined him. Because Karolko has a tomb and red flowers over it at the beginning of each month, and a gravestone with his sweet name that offers to the passersby the ephemeral extent of his life in Slovak and English, but not in German. Beneath the stout marble, there are no bones, no teeth, no shreds of flesh. Beneath the foreign soil, there is a toy, red and silent like a deep memory when we close our eyes shut.
~~
Fabiana was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a linguist, a language teacher, and a writer. She speaks five languages: Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Italian. She has lived and worked in Dallas, Texas, for more than twenty years. She is the author of the short story collection 12 Random Words, her first work of fiction, the short story Stupidity, published as an independent book by Pierre Turcotte Editor, the collection of short stories Conquered by Fog, also published by Pierre Turcotte, and the grammar book series Spanish 360 with Fabiana.
12 Random Words, in its three bilingual versions, has won ten awards, and two of its stories were selected to be read in February 2017 as part of the Dallas Museum of Art’s distinguished literary series Arts & Letters Live. The book was also among the six finalists of the Eyelands Book Awards 2022 and won the First Prize.
Six months after publication, Conquered by Fog became a finalist in the 2023 Global Book Awards, the 2023 Eyelands Book Awards, the Independent Author Network Award, and the Royal Dragon Fly Book Awards
Other short stories of hers were published in Rigorous Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Ponder Review, Hindsight Magazine, The Good Life Review (UK), The Halcyone, Rhodora Magazine (India), Mediterranean Poetry, Writers and Readers Magazine (UK), Libretto Magazine (Nigeria), Automatic Pilot (Ireland), Lusitania (Buenos Aires), The Pilgrims of the Plate (Buenos Aires), Heartland Society of Women Writers, Egophobia Journal (Romania), Defunkt Magazine, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Freshwater Literary Journal, Syncopation Literary Journal, The Raven’s Perch, Write Now Literary Journal, Defuncted Journal, The Wild World, Ariel Chart, The Gravity of the Thing, Acentos Review, The Stygian Lepus, The Darkness Within, Roi Fainéant, The Hooghly Review, Hedge Apple Magazine, Verdant Journal, Bull, Sophon Lit, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Short Beasts, Willow Review, Shadowplay, Lilomul Journal, Ultramarine Literary Review, Sangam, San Pedro River Review, The Bluebird Word, Seems Magazine, and the anthologies Writers of Tomorrow, Pure Slush-Love, Lifespan 4 Anthology (Australia), the 2022 Wordrunner Anthology, the Crossing the Tees Firth Short Story Anthology (England), The Pure Slush-Marriage, Lifespan 6 Anthology and The Pure Slush-Loss, Lifespan 9 Anthology (Australia), The Limits of Language, and Sanctuary Anthology by Scars Publications. Two short stories were read as part of the Manawaker Flash Fiction Podcast.
