Taking us behind the scenes of Better You Go Home, Author Scott Driscoll gives us insights as to the true story that inspired this exciting medical thriller.
From Scott Driscoll, author of Better You Go Home (Oct 2013, Coffeetown Press, Seattle)
The inspiration for Better You Go Home began, really, when I
was twenty-one and in Germany taking a break from college. After working for a
few months in a bowling alley on an American naval base in Augsburg Germany, I
had enough money saved to continue traveling. I booked a tour on a bus from Munich
to Istanbul. The bus detoured through
Prague, where we spent one night at a hotel before driving on to Hungary the
next day. This was the late 70s.
Dinner that night was in the hotel’s ballroom. We were not
allowed to wander outside unescorted. The
ballroom was elegant enough, high ceiling, tall French windows, drapes. We were
the only customers. The wait staff wore
surly expressions and stayed by the kitchen to smoke. The women wore heavy clogs with high support ankles,
unfeminine but good for staying on your feet for hours on end. We were treated
to suspicious glances, until, bored, I took my harmonica out of my daypack and
pretended to blow railroad blues (I am not a musician). Soon a few staff, then more came across the
ballroom floor to our table. American blues fascinated them enough to overcome
their fear of being exposed as decadently bourgeoisie. I only mention this
because it was the first time in Europe that I actually felt a sense of coming
home.
Many years later, at my Aunt’s funeral in Cedar Rapids Iowa,
I heard a cousin of my father’s say: “Too bad Helen has died. Now there is no
one left who can translate the Czech letters.” That one chance phrase started
an odyssey of searching. I knew there was a Czech side to my father’s family,
but no one spoke about them. Eventually I would find out why. But that required
tracking down a priest nearby who was Czech and who was a relative and who
translated our letters. After handing over his information, he said he wanted
never to hear from us on this matter again. There was a suicide, a bigamous
marriage, children born out of wedlock.
In 1994, three years after the Velvet Revolution, I went to
Prague to search for the Bohemian village the Czech side of my family was from.
Merely finding the village was a triumph. There were five villages with approximately
the same name. Stupidly, I did not take a translator with me. In 1999, I went
back, this time with a translator, a terrifically helpful man from Prague who
ran a black light theater company and traveled and spoke excellent English (I
do not speak Czech). We spent the better part of two days visiting the old
farmhouse and drinking Slivovice and pivo and eating sweet pastries and chatting
with an elderly relative who had lots of stories to tell.
The elderly relative pulled out a black pocket-sized spiral
notebook. Through my translator, I was
trying to get him to tell stories about the relatives who’d fled. I wanted him
to tell me what happened. Why the
suicide. Why some left and some stayed. But, no, he kept saying by and by.
First he badly wanted to show us the numbers referring to the produce he’d been
forced to turn over to the Soviet co-op.
He wanted to explain himself, to show that he hadn’t been irresponsible,
he hadn’t abandoned the farm, though he had nearly starved his family.
We visited the town historian and saw our family listed in
the record book and here I made the discovery that a person named Anezka,
mentioned in one of the letters, was listed with no known father. All others were accounted for but not her.
The story began to unfold as a search for Anezka and an
attempt to understand why my father had been told, no, those people are dead.
We do not speak to them.
I took careful notes in Steno pads during those two journeys.
I kept those notes and referred to them when building early drafts of my story.
I read books. Czech
history. Czech novels. Essays by Havel. Before I could actually feel ready to
write chapters, I had to feel like I knew that world.
Thank you so much, Scott. What a journey you've been on. I appreciate you sharing it with us. Now let's take a peek inside the book. Good luck with your new release!
Book blurb…
A married man’s unexpected
departure from Czechoslovakia― with the neighbor woman and her children―is at
the heart of a mysterious trail of true events that has inspired University of
Washington writing instructor Scott Driscoll to write his first novel, Better
You Go Home. “At a family funeral in the early 90s, I learned about a
cache of letters written in Czech to my aunt. I had them translated and learned
that a male relative had left his wife and three children in a remote farm
village in Bohemia prior to World War One.” Driscoll continues, “I learned my
relative and the neighbor woman married bigamously in Iowa. The other fact revealed
was the presence of a child named Anezka―who seems to have simply
disappeared. I suspect she was their illicit child.”
Not long after, Driscoll visited his relative’s
village and began to speculate. “What had become of the unidentified child?
What if my life had deployed on her side of the Iron Curtain? Once that
question lodged in my psyche, like a small wound that wouldn’t heal, I knew I
had to write this story.” The work of literary fiction that trip inspired is Better
You Go Home. The novel traces the story of Seattle attorney Chico
Lenoch, who is diabetic, nearing kidney
failure and needs a donor organ. He travels
to the Czech Republic in search of his half-sister who may be able to help save
his life. What Chico does not count on is unearthing long-buried family
secrets.
Better You Go Home is about a son seeking his father’s secrets,
but in a larger sense it’s about the progeny of exiles. Says Driscoll, “Much
has been written about the survivors of WWII and its aftermath; I want to draw
attention to the lives of their children.”
A peek inside...
Tuesday
Night in Prague: Sept. 13, 1994
Milada’s
flat is on the eighth floor of a twelve-story high rise in a
gray sidliste of concrete
block buildings. The street curb is dammed by
defunct
Skodas, the no-frills tin-can cars manufactured locally. The security
mesh
screening the outer door is rusted and dented. This is the depressing
Khrushchev-era
flat Milada is forced to continue calling home so that her
husband
could afford that Russian mafia loan. Okay, it’s not lost on me that
I’m taking
risks, possibly for no better reason than to salvage my own father’s
dignity. Or
my own. Still, Jiři goes too far. How is his pride any different than
that of his
father’s?
She pushes
the buzzer on the intercom panel to alert Jiři to our arrival.
Jiři’s
family name is listed on the panel. Her name is Kotyza. Her grandfather
was related
to my grandmother. Most lights behind the buttons on the panel
are burnt
out. I avoid looking at hers. I don’t want to see if they’ve troubled
themselves
to replace the bulb behind their butto anymore than I want to
think of
Milada stuck here for the forseeable future.
We bounce
in the elevator up to the eighth floor and walk down a corridor
with
cracked and missing tiles. A decorative strip of plaster above the tile,
painted the
color of mustard, has browned with grime. And the smells.
Sour
cabbage, urine, acrid tobacco. Nose wrinkling neglect has turned this
passageway
into a tableau of the torture I imagine it must have been to raise
her family
here. No wonder she obsessed over the Skagit, the baldies, the
turbulent
water. The stinking salmon carcasses on the flood banks must have
been
ambrosia to her eastern bloc nose.
Prague is
earning a reputation as the world’s black market capital for illegal
organs. I
know this, but I did not anticipate Dr. Saudek’s insinuation—as he
shoved me
away from the shores of Prague this afternoon—that this was the
reason I’ve
come paddling into his little harbor.
Milada
insisted that we phone Blue Cross tonight and request an extension.
Jiři’s
black-light troupe—he’s their business manager—is performing at a local
theater
after dinner. She wants us to attend his show. She admits she is proud
of her
husband’s participation in the revolution. She will always love him for
this.
In the
entryway to her flat we exchange shoes for slippers. Blinds cover
the
windows, an old precaution to prevent paranoid neighbors from spying, a
habit she
admits she finds hard to break. Curious—can’t help it—I lift a blind.
In a
littered lot between buildings is a rusty, partly collapsed play gym. All
the reason
I’d need to keep the blinds closed. Her dark furniture includes a
massive
armoire for coats and shoes and a credenza filled with the obligatory
leaded
crystal. Nothing in the details says Milada.
Where does she keep
her
details? Following her to the kitchen, I ponder the degree to which the
details we
surround ourselves with ought to reflect our desires. To what extent
does a
paucity of details reflect self denial? My father kept his details in the
basement.
That amber bowl he flicked his cigar ashes into. The starched white
undershirts,
the ironed Union work pants. The bar of Ivory soap at the sink he
brushed his
teeth with, in the early days, when he still thought and acted like
an
emigrant. That stack of quarters, weekly replenished, that I was forbidden
to touch. I
liked to think they were savings kept from Mom in order to send
money
overseas to Anezka. What do those details say about him? That he
was caught
between worlds, a man whose heart desired a world that was in
his past,
that he longed for pointlessly? But he was kind. Those quarters, I’m
convinced,
were more than just beer and cigar money.
In the
kitchen, her husband winces at my broad-voweled American accent
when I
politely return his “dobry
den.” Jiři is a short man with an athletic
build
through the
chest and thighs. With his pale eyes, sandy brows, sandy hair
cropped
conservatively short, he looks more handsomely like the Olympic
skater he
once was than a revolutionary. You’d expect to see his face on a
Wheaties
box, not on a prison mugshot. Their fifteen year old son, Martin,
takes my
jacket. His hair is jelled into neon pink and green Mohawk spikes.
Milada
tells me he is crazy about Seattle grunge. I gave him a Nirvana disc and
a Walkman
to play it in—he’s on his own for the batteries. Do I want coffee?
he asks. I
explain that I’d love it but it’s a problem of fluid retention; I have to
measure
intake. Then I decide why not, I’m going right back home anyway.
Why not
enjoy the little time I do have here?
“Tonight,”
Jiři announces with a dramatic sweep of his arms, “we serve
Czech
specialty, svičkova!”
Pronounced “sveetch-ko-vah,”
the word rolls off
his tongue
with a sumptuous ahhh!
The sauce for the pork roast takes two or
three days
to prepare. It will be too rich and too salty for me, Milada warned
yesterday
when she invited me to dinner, but I said no problem, I’ll take a
spoonful
and appreciate what I am missing. Throwing Jiři a stern watch-your manners
look, she
disappears into a back room to change. While their son
fixes
coffee, I escape to the deck.
Wash is
hung to dry on plastic lines. The deck side of the building faces
the
freeway, which is so close it roars like a thousand sewers draining all at
once. The
unfiltered exhaust makes my eyes water. I ponder the shove I took
this
afternoon from the esteemed Dr. Saudek. No doubt he was only being
sensible
when he said, “Better you go home.” Still, how could I not resent the
insinuation
that I’m here to steal a Czech kidney and that I’d take advantage
of my
father’s country in its desperation? Nothing I could possibly say would
change the
fact that in his eyes I’m an American and that’s that.
At first
Dr. Saudek actually seemed willing to help. Short, wiry, with buzzcut
gray hair,
the head of the Department of Diabetes wore a lab coat and had
a clipped
manner and was more at ease spouting statistics than in offering
encouragement,
but he did seem to take a special interest in my case. He
proudly
showed me a study he’d published in English entitled, “The Effect of
Kidney/Pancreas
Transplantation on Diabetic Retinopathy.”
His
secretary printed a copy. I read it using my magnifier while he watched.
Eleven
years in, more than ninety percent of the patients who received only
a partial
pancreas from a living donor had gone blind. Patients who received
a complete
pancreas from a cadaver are exhibiting a sixty percent rate of eye
stabilization.
“You still
have functional eyesight,” he observed. “If you take only portion
of your
sister’s pancreas, you will certainly become blind.”
“What I
need most urgently is a kidney,” I said.
That’s
where the interview began to sour. To qualify for a legal kidney
here, you
have to be Czech, and I don’t have a Czech passport. When I was a
dependent
my father could have made this possible but he never expected to
return and
so chose not to do it.
“Cost for
surgery,” he went on, I’m sure to scare me, “including mandatory
first year
of care, would be about thirty thousand. In cash dollars. If you have
this
money,” he shrugged elaborately, “maybe we could put you on list.”
I couldn’t
help but notice the contradictory messages and was reminded
that Czech
doctors work for the State and are not well paid. Many take private
patients
who show up bearing envelopes stuffed with cash.
He handed
me a brochure that proudly announced the introduction of the
immunosuppressant
drug program ten years ago, in 1984. This program made
it possible
to transplant organs that wouldn’t be rejected by the recipient’s
immune
system. The annual number of kidney and pancreas transplants has
risen
steadily since then. Twenty-five are scheduled at his clinic for this year
alone.
“Better you
go home,” he said tersely. “Among Czech people, six hundred
thousand
have diabetes. Patients on dialysis is up thirty-one percent from
when we
began our study.” He opened his hands, palms up, as if to say sorry,
what can we
do?
About the author…
Scott Driscoll is an instructor at the University
of Washington Professional and Continuing Education programs where he has taught creative writing for
20 years. He has also taught fiction and creative nonfiction in the Writers in the Schools and Path With Art programs and online
through the Seattle-based Writer's Workshop, as well as at Seattle’s
Richard Hugo House literary center. Scott was awarded the “UW Educational
Outreach Excellence in Teaching Award” for 2006.
Driscoll has been awarded eight Society of Professional Journalists
awards, most recently for social issues reporting. His narrative essay about
his daughter's coming of age was cited in the Best American Essays, 1998. While enrolled in the UW MFA program,
he won the Milliman Award for Fiction. “Writing
for me is about applying form to the mysteries we suffer.”
“Moving, powerful, and
compulsively readable, Better You Go Home is the unforgettable story of a man's journey to save his own life,
and how he discovers himself along the way.”
—Garth
Stein, New York Times bestselling
author of The Art of Racing in the Rain
Better You Go Home will be released by Coffeetown
Press on Oct. 1, 2013
$13.95,
236 pp, Trade Paperback/eBook~ISBN:
978-1-60381-170-5
1 comment:
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