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Viktor Vasko, born April 16th, 1886 to an agrarian family in the mountains of Pressburg, Austria-Hungary. Yet, despite living his developmental years in the sprawling Slavic mountain tops, he was sent to France to fight and little did he know he would never see that place again. He would never be able to go back home to the family he promised he would see again after the war, and he couldn't even go back to Pressburg, Austria-Hungary because now it was Bratislava, Slovakia.
Even if he somehow made it back to that sacred land, even if he swam across oceans and scaled mountains until he collapsed from exhaustion, everything was different.
His wife was probably with another man, his child having grown up without him. His family was probably scattered across the world, as his other siblings were also fighting or fleeing from the first World War. His parents were probably dead by now, too, what with age or simply struggling during the war.
Regardless, any dream of going back was dead by now. Maybe even back in 1920 he knew that idea was dead in the water.
He had become a dock worker and definitely couldn't afford the trip back with what he made. He was far too busy with the tumultuous labor disputes going on at the time, the ones that cost him an eye. If that group of strikebreakers hadn’t come in to upset the little momentum they already had going, and if the strikers rally hadn’t attracted police, then maybe he would still have two eyes. Nevermind the fact that he was gravely injured, the arrest and subsequent charges meant jail time (if not for one Atlas May) but they also meant risk of deportation. Part of him almost wishes he had been shipped directly back to his home country, because he was tired of this new one. Land of opportunities or not, going home seemed almost like a reward.
Evidently, that wasn’t how it turned out. Even if he did go back, what would he go back to? Go back to do what? To show his mother that the war and subsequent displacement had left him with a bad knee for life (foreshadowing, to say the least), night terrors from the shelling and blood stained hands from the killing? Worst of all, he would have to go back to his mother and show her that even after surviving war, the country he fought for congratulated him by taking his right eye?
When he was little his mother stroked his hair and told Viktor, tvoje oči sú krásne... How could he show his face? He didn’t know if he could go home just to show her what his time away had done, to show her that they took one of beautiful, chartreuse-green eyes that she loved so much. His daughter had been born with blue-gray eyes typical of infants and sadly, he would never get to know if she inherited the green his mother adored. What he wouldn't give to see his mother get to be the doting grandmother she was so excited to be.
Still, life marched on.
Fortunately or unfortunately, Atlas seemed to step out of the fog to bail Viktor out of jail and after not much more than a handshake and an exchanging of words, Viktor had sealed his fate. Even after Atlas’s death, Viktor was basically locked into a life path at the Lackadaisy through his allegiance to Atlas and his eternal conscription to the criminal underbelly of St. Louis. So the years passed; practically a decade of his life had been decided overnight.
He seldom realized how long it had been since he had been away from home. Such a large chunk of his life had passed in what seemed like an instant to him, and although he wasn’t really the sentimental type, he reminisced. He was past the feeling of juvenile home sickness he felt sitting in the trenches of France, the feeling had aged and become stale to him. He didn’t feel nostalgia tug at his heart strings whenever he saw something that reminded him of home, it just made him feel guilty.
Yes, he still considered St. Louis his home now, and he had assimilated as well as he could. He spent a long time adjusting to this place, learning the language and the people, so much so that maybe he was forgetting what his ‘real’ home was like. He had stopped celebrating so many Slovakian traditions because he had no family to celebrate with, he could never eat some of his favorite foods again (at least, not find any good rendition of them, and he certainly couldn’t cook them) and he barely had anyone to speak Slovak to. Most of the time, he only insulted or threatened people in Slovak which earned him the status of “Surly Slovak” and not much else. No one even understood what he was saying, they just assumed it was something as vile as the mouth it came from, curled into a snarl up to his gums with teeth bared. It was the only way he knew to get out the appropriate level of anger, roiling in him like hot bile.
His native language became a gimmick to others and just a way to intimidate his competition. How long it had been since Viktor had said something that wasn’t hateful with his mother tongue. How long it had been since Viktor forgot delicate words, words to describe beauty and to express love and desire. He knew those words, of course, because he grew up speaking Slovak, but how long had it been since he could say them with any meaning behind them? The last time he remembered saying something like that was when he was curled around a certain small tuxedo cat or looking at his eyes through the round eye spectacles his partner wore. So often his face was stained with blood, but the fresh crimson color only served to contrast his emerald green eyes.
Even after watching him mercilessly slaughter hordes of people at a time, Viktor couldn’t help but stare at him. So beautiful was he in that moment, that he let slip the same thing his mother used to say to him,
"tvoje oči sú krásne".
To which Mordecai only asked, annoyed, “what?” before wiping the blood off and readjusting his glasses (in his head he only asked himself, Why would Viktor say something in a language he knows I don’t understand?).
Viktor wished he could have explained to him what his eyes made him feel and how he could stare into them forever, but this sudden pang of nostalgia was rather unbecoming of a supposedly unfeeling gunman covered in bits of someone’s gray matter. He just told Mordecai that it was “nothing, nevermind” and that they should get going before cops came to investigate the sound of gun fire. On the ride home, Viktor could barely focus on the road thinking about how he wanted to stop the car right then and tell Mordecai everything that he loved about his eyes with excruciating detail, almost sickeningly sweet. Mordecai could feel the tension (it could be cut with a knife and spread on his morning rye, actually) but he knew that affection and concern on the clock only led to disasters, so he left it alone.
But Viktor couldn't.
He kept his mouth shut and gripped the steering wheel, white knuckled. He couldn’t have told Mordecai all that he wanted to say because they were coworkers on duty, and it would probably get him fired, or worse. Any display of his deepest affection had to happen behind closed doors, so thank god that Mrs. Bapka never remembered how many times a well dressed tuxedo cat visited his apartmnet. Yet, despite the logistical hurdle being the biggest issue, Viktor was somehow overcome with something that felt like a loss for words. It was surprising to him, as he was a man of few, if any words, but he was still lost.
Rather, he had this tremendous surge of emotion when he met those lush, verdant green eyes like he hadn’t in years, but he could not for the life of him form a coherent sentence to describe them. He knew he blatantly didn’t have the lexicon to properly express himself in English, but what worried him most was that he could barely find the words in Slovak.
He was never an extraordinarily well-spoken individual in Slovak, but he could at least find the words when he wanted to. Somehow though he couldn’t even think of a hypothetical sentence in either language, which was an issue unto itself.
Even though he hadn’t been living in the States that long at that point, he realized that he was forgetting his Slovak.
He thought back to the times in the past when he spoke in Slovak, and every interaction had been with the elderly woman upstairs, Mrs. Bapka, and each interaction was brief. Every time he only had to say “yes, i'll fix it soon” or “no, you can’t put those in the drain”. It was common, everyday phrases that were perfectly acceptable forms of communication, but were basically practiced phrases that came to him automatically. He didn’t feel the need to really reach deep into his mental thesaurus to tell her that he could repair her sink in the same way he felt the need to right now.
They never had much more of a conversation than that, and Viktor practically never spoke Slovak with anyone else. He still thought to himself in Slovak, he still understood Slovak, and could speak it fluently when it came to easy conversational phrases.
But still, he was losing it. Slowly, day by day, he was forgetting little bits and pieces of his native language. After all, language was something that required mental upkeep, but he had gone completely rusty. He racked his brain for the words that were at the tip of his tongue, but they never came, which was a completely foreign feeling to him. No matter how hard he tried, the words never came to him, although he knew that only a few years ago, they would come to him like second nature.
Functionally speaking, he had no reason to really know more Slovak than what he could remember, as it was something he barely used. But still, there was something so upsetting to him about not being able to speak his mother tongue like he used to. He never considered it anything special because he spoke it everyday, so he only really missed it in its absence, but he hadn’t realized up until this moment.
For the rest of the drive, the pair were so quiet they didn’t make so much as a peep until they made it back to the Lackadaisy. And from there, Viktor and Mordecai parted ways to go to their respective homes. When Viktor got in the shower to get the blood off his fur, he thought to himself about how he never considered how important his native tongue was to him.
For so long he almost exclusively spoke it, to other immigrants and often to himself, finding that he didn't have enough of a handle on English in the beginning to really be able to say what he meant. He spoke enough English to be hired by Atlas, but it was still new to him. Many people at the Lackadaisy thought he was simply a quiet guy with a temper, and that they ought not to talk to him much. He was some kind of silent killer and mechanic whose glare bore right through you with his one eye.
This meant that barely anyone spoke with Viktor, and when they did, his sparse and choppy responses were often mistaken for disinterest or anger (which he often still felt, but people began to only see him as disinterested or angry). Whenever people would ask him more complicated questions, especially about mechanics, he could only say things like “put here” or “no, that not go there”. It also did not help that he spoke with an accent so thick many of his English words were nigh incomprehensible. Of course, he practiced with people and still had to study a fair amount to be able to communicate properly, but people often regarded him as reserved or outright thick-witted because of how he spoke English.
What many didn’t understand was that he wasn’t stupid, and that he understood English better than he spoke it. He could understand what they were asking, usually complicated mechanical questions, but Viktor was stuck behind an invisible wall of communication where he knew exactly what to say but hadn’t the words to do it. He could only give sporadic and curt bits of advice in broken English, and say basic conversational phrases that he needed often.
For this his Slovak suffered and he used it less and less, like a muscle beginning to atrophy from disuse. He felt guilty about it. This was merely the product of his environment and speaking almost strictly English to those around him, but it still made him sad. He even once bought a Slovak to English dictionary in a fit of anger over not remembering even the simplest words.
He would get home to browse and annotate it, looking for the one word that was just barely on the tip of his tongue since the morning. As he flipped through page after page, he felt a strange sense of nostalgia; he found words that he hadn't heard in years that reminded him of days long gone, and of people that he missed.
But right now, the grief of losing these people was being superseded by the grief of becoming more and more aware of the less and less that he knew. It wasn’t a tangible loss but it hurt just as much to just try and say words he used to know and having them feel unfamiliar in his mouth. He thought back to his mother, his matka, and how he didn’t want to come home missing an eye. Now he wouldn’t dare come home to her and speak in chopped up and sloppy Slovak to her. He could suddenly stomach the thought of returning home to her and telling her that he was a cyclopean criminal who was still shell shocked after the war in which he killed hundreds of men, but not the thought of having to say it to her in his broken Slovak.
For the first time in a long time, Viktor sat in bed and cried a little. He put the side of his head on his pillow and let a small, damp spot form on the cotton. Silently he laid, the hot tears still rolling off his cheek. And for the first time in a long time, he didn't have any anger to spare, not even a drop. He felt a kind of sadness that made the pit of his chest sink into the sheets and rendered him immobile. He only sat there and thought, about everything he had lost all at once. His eye, his family, his wife, his child and now his language. A cocktail of guilt, sadness, regret and outright fear pooled in his heart; He missed home, the country side, and he missed his mother. He felt the word "matka" form at the back of his throat, calling out to someone he knew wasn't there and never would be again, but all that came out was a sort of stifled croak. The sound barely escaped his lips as his mouth simply hung open, sounding closer to a death rattle than a word.
Viktor laid prostrate on his mattress, as limp as a corpse, and quietly cried into his pillow thinking of home. He cried until he was simply out of tears, letting the last bead roll onto his pillow, and promptly fell asleep.
Dobrú noc, miláčik.