Word: gabrielic
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LEAFSTORM AND OTHER STORIES by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 146 pages. Harper...
August 1968 was a traumatic month for all Czechs, but it was piquantly and privately so for Vlasta Gabriel, the young mother of two small children. Ten days after Warsaw Pact armies rumbled into Czechoslovakia. Vlasta's husband Bedrich, an electrician and occasional truck driver in Decin, bundled the couple's children into the family car and defected to the West. He eventually settled with his émigré mother in Yucaipa, Calif., (pop. 26,000) and died of lung cancer not long after. Vlasta plunged into a lonely, uphill custody battle for her son and daughter...
...During Gabriel's illness, the children-named after their parents, Bedrich, now 7, and Vlasta, 8-were often cared for by a local couple, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Smith. Smith, an Air Force Reserve sergeant, and his wife, a nurse's aide, eagerly added them to their own household of three children upon Gabriel's death and filed suit for legal guardianship. The couple's claim was based on Gabriel's deathbed wish that the children remain in the U.S., and also on the argument that they were too Americanized to return home. Vlasta pressed...
Meanwhile, the debate over the children has grown emotionally supercharged. The story is circulating in Yucaipa that just before he died, Gabriel told several people that he was a political prisoner and was being used as a human guinea pig in a Czech cancer-research center prior to escaping-events that Vlasta hotly denies and indeed seem unlikely. Last November the children appeared on an NBC television news program expressing their wish not to go back to the place where "they put daddy in prison because he believed in God." That appeal generated considerable response from the people of Yucaipa...
...have found since his release ten months ago that more marriage is less happiness. "Living together is getting in the way of our relationship," David has told his friends to explain the split. "I agreed with that," says Joan. "We're continuing to work together, and our son Gabriel is thriving, and that's all that matters anyway...