I flip through a folio of 112 color photographs. Thousands of acrobatic women, pyramids of men in the mud, stars and fountain shapes created by dancing children, words discernible only to those with a bird’s eye from the stands. Spartakiada-a mass gymnastics event, initiated by the esperanto enthusiast Jiří František Chaloupecký-was held in a stadium in former Czechoslovakia. I am trying to find my mother at the banquet of the collective.
In 1980, my mother had long black hair. My uncles say she looked exactly like how I look now. I scan hundreds of printed faces with the likeness of each other, looking for the likeness of myself. Purple uniforms. White pom-poms. I imagine something that would give her away-a daisy beret, nail polish to match her eyes-but there is no prying apart Spartakiada’s synchronicity. My mother and all the other girls in elementary school were taught to have the same handwriting, like a typewriter. If she’s not in the photographs, she’s just outside them, moving with the group, thinking about something outside the stands. I want the individual, every time.
The men are even harder to distinguish, lean and shirtless with less hairstyle variety. One has an aquiline nose, but they all do, when I unfocus my eyes. There are photographs of a complicated-seeming wheel-gymnastics act: men in blue uniforms roll and climb on big yellow wheels. The routine, mesmerizing and organic, is like murmating swallows, yet I recall being in an arts warehouse in Bratislava, where a high documentarian showed me Spartakiada footage overlaid with heavy metal music. “Eerie,” he muttered. His loft was traced with cords and wires, like my father’s garage. Everyone I know is conducting some mass gymnastics event of breath and death. I ask my mother what she remembers of Spartakiada in 1980. “Knitting a sweater on the crowded train, a breakfast cart, I forgot lotion on my nose and there was nowhere to hide from the sun.”
Recommended reading: Spiritual Diary by Sergius Bulgakov (trans. Roberto J. De La Noval, Mark Roosien), Chess Story by Stefan Zweig (trans. Joel Rotenberg), Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky, The Novelist by Jordan Castro, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek
