Are you cold? You must be freezing. When it’s really me that is cold.
Drink some water, you need to hydrate. When I am the thirsty one.
These are maternal phrases I don’t even know where I got them from. They are part of my core or my socialization or history and I carry them around and fling them in the kids’ directions on a regular basis. In some ways I even look forward to the eye rolling.
***
I meet my mother at a gallery showing art by women. I am 15 minutes late. I carry a black cross-body bag across my torso and a totebag with an obscure art museum logo. Neither of us has been to the gallery before. The security guard sees me at the gallery door and says your mom’s already here, just around the corner in that other room. My mother is standing in front of a painting. She is wearing a rose-gold cross-body bag across her torso and carries a totebag with flowers on it. I tower over her as I bend down to hug. I am five foot one inch tall.
In my totebag with obscure art museum logo is a notebook I think is full of important things. In my mom’s totebag are Valentine’s Day cards for the kids with five dollars tucked inside each one. We see the women’s art, we go to a park and drink some seltzer, I walk her to the subway.
***
Last week, someone I am related to said to me: but we’re family! and I was surprised at the violence of my response. So were they. Despite my adhering to this maxim, I chafe against it out of principle. Chosen family is just as important, I tell my relative. I mean look at X and Y and how we haven’t talked to them for 40 years, and we never will. They’re family, so what does that even mean?
***
When I was living in Prague in the early 1990s, I shared an apartment with a graphic designer who had been forced to go to engineering school under communism because there were too many graphic designers already. And now that the system had changed, he flung himself full force into teaching himself computer graphic design, learning English, and trying to get out of the country and to the United States. I helped him with English and he helped me with Czech.
At that time the apartment shared a phone line with the apartment upstairs, a common setup. So sometimes you’d pick up the phone and hear their conversation and hang up and wait and try later and vice versa. Nobody had my number because I didn’t give it out and because there was no need for numbers anyway. You told someone when and where you’d meet them and then you met them there. And if not, you’d run into them again. Or not.
I wanted to learn German. I’d already learned Czech from my various doings, studyings, workings, more on that another time. I really wanted to learn German. I was obsessed with Walter Benjamin and wanted to read in the original. I also wanted to move to Berlin someday. I signed up for a German class through the Goethe Institute Prague, even though it was expensive.
For those of you who don’t know, Prague’s plan is concentric, more or less. Each district is numbered. We lived at the beginning of Prague 4 in a neighborhood called Nusle, just where the tram turned the corner. Prague 1, 2, and 3 are in the center, the fancy tourist zones, and then 4-10 are these enormous sections where most people live. These districts go around the center in a counterclockwise order.
I signed up for Beginning German, 7:30am, Prague 6. It couldn’t be that far. I figured I would roll out of bed, do a couple hours of German, then head off to the film school to edit or to another one of my strange freelance jobs. In fact, class was a huge distance from home. It took 90 minutes to get there and I arrived late.
We wrote our names on folded pieces of paper and stood them up like placecards facing the teacher so she could call on us. After class, exhausted, I went home and cancelled my enrollment.
About a week later I came back from work to the apartment and my roommate said you got a call. And my heart started racing. Who called, who knows where I am, who has my number, did someone die? The usual questions.
He said, I don’t know, she says she needs to talk to you, she works for the police, she says she’s a relative. He gave me the number.
Now I’m really panicking. Is this a trap? Did I not register with the police properly when I moved in? My residence permit was still valid, but I had been working some dubious jobs. Was I in trouble?
I call the number. A voice says Jenny Perlin? I say ano (which means yes in Czech, adding to the fun). The voice speaks at a pace I struggle to keep up with: This is Stanya Perlinová. And proceeds to explain all about how she and her family want to meet me and in the flurry of comprehension and information and pen-finding and address-scrawling, me saying you live in Prague 4? Great! and setting an afternoon date to meet, I forget to ask how she found my name or number at all.
The appointed day arrives two weeks later. I am nervous. I take the tram one stop up the road. They’re practically neighbors, I think. I ring the doorbell. It takes a really long time for someone to come. They’ve told me in advance it would take a while because they live in a fifth floor walkup. My heart is racing, meeting new people is always tricky even though I’ve made it my life’s work to do just that.
A not-very-tall, glasses-wearing, bearded man with a huge smile opens the door and shouts Jenny Perlin? I am Radim Perlin!
He charges up the five flights and I am breathless before I even get into their cramped living room which is filled with people: all the relatives, the brothers, the wives, the grandparents, the children.
We are Perlinovi!
They smile and laugh. I am seated and served cakes and coffee and the patter begins.
We decide we are cousins. We guess one great-grandfather, who left Lithuania for America, and the other great-grandfather, who left Lithuania first for Turkey, then back up through the Balkans finally settling in Prague, must have been some kind of relatives. Maybe cousins. But we have no idea if it’s true.
Unlike most Czechs I have met so far, these folks are boisterous, demonstrative, bookish, chatty, and tumble all over one another in speaking. They all wear glasses and laugh a lot. They seem to get along really well.
Radim works at Charles University as a professor of urban planning. I resist the urge to ask about the district numbers. Stanya works as a detective for the police department, she can’t tell anyone exactly what her work is. Radim’s younger brother Ctibor works for a German business newly established in Prague. His girlfriend Alena is there too, along with Stanya and Radim’s kids. The grandparents, Borek and Eja, gesticulate and fling their arms around me before I leave (this time). We see each other a lot more before I move back to America.
Over the past 30 years, the Perlinovi visited my parents in Ohio on a wild road trip they took across the U.S.; we’ve celebrated weddings, birthdays, new years, births and deaths, some encounters from afar and some in person. In the summer of 2013, Dominika, then 17, came to Brooklyn and took care of the kids. A few years later she came back to get her master’s in journalism at Columbia. She wasn’t even born when I was first in that living room full of Perlinovi. If we can swing it, we’ll go to her wedding this summer.
Stanya, how on earth did you find out I was even in Prague and how did you get my phone number?
Stanya answers: That one day you went to that German class, the 7:30am course in Prague 6, remember? You put your name on a piece of paper facing the teacher so the teacher could call on you. Well, a colleague of mine was in that class. And nobody has our name, not anybody in Prague or in the Czech Republic or anywhere. So she called me. And I called the Goethe Institute and explained that I absolutely had to get in touch with the person who might be my relative and I convinced them to give me your number. It was important. And then I called you.
It doesn’t matter to me one bit if we are actually related or not. That’s what it means.
Thanks for reading.
BUNKER can be streamed on Mubi, Amazon Prime, Metrograph-at-Home, and Projectr.tv. It’s also going to be shown in Oslo Norway at Vega Cinema, once as a Norwegian premiere as part of the Architecture Film Festival in Oslo in conjunction with my solo exhibition at Galeri Rom, and every weekend at Vega between March 15-April 15. Last but definitely not least, BUNKER will be screened March 28 in Omaha, Nebraska, at Millwork Commons, hosted by Joshua Labure and KIOS radio.