by AnonYMous
A white-haired man in the back of the room led the applause, a little too enthusiastically. Grace turned and recognized him from somewhere. At first she thought television and then she remembered: Montreal.
The MC replaced Elena at the microphone. “There will be samples for everyone.” Then he repeated himself in Czech. “Any questions about the fragrances?”
Two hundred arms went up at once.
“Lester Allan, New York Times. As a foreign-born American yourself, Ms. Craig, how do you feel about your ex-husband’s proposals on immigration?”
“Fragrances?” The young MC looked about the room. A number of hands were still up. “All right, you.”
“Anna Rocard, Agence France-Presse. As a feminist, and a woman in business, do you take exception to Monsieur Craig’s words about women and the most recent harassment allegations against him? I mean, you yourself, during the divorce proceedings—”
“Fragrance questions?” The young moderator tapped the podium with his pen.
When Elena smiled, Grace could tell it took genuine effort. The man in the row behind Grace snorted. “We wouldn’t be here, not her, not us, if it weren’t for her goddamn ex-husband. It’s perfume, for Christ’s sake.”
There were only a few hands up now. “Garrick O’Byrne, BBC. Will you be taking a role in the White House if your ex-husband wins? He calls you one of his most trusted advisors. What exactly do you advise him on?”
A man near the front shouted, “Deodorant!” The journalists laughed and applauded.
Agence France-Presse, BBC, New York Times: in university, and even in her twenties and early thirties, these were the sorts of companies where Grace had most wanted to work, terminal destinations for serious journalists. Despite just about everything she had done since graduation, this was still how she saw herself. She was still on her way.
The episode in Montreal, with Violet Rain, had kicked her to the gap between her ambitions, what she still considered her truest and finest self, and what she actually did for a living. The National Flash was supposed to be a brief bridge to a better future. But soon it would be twenty years. Twenty years! It was a long time to feel temporary, to feel ashamed. Whenever she was in the States now, and someone asked what she did and where she lived, Grace lied.
She looked around the room. A few of the journalists were still pleasing one another by repeating, “Deodorant.” There were no more hands up. Some of the reporters were standing to leave. There was probably a million dollars’ worth of travel budget in the room, all of it wasted on “no comment.”
“Grace Elliott, National Flash.”
More laughter. A trickle of sweat eased down her spine.
“Can you elaborate a little bit more, Ms. Craig, on why you think now is the right time for a renaissance in the perfume industry?”
“Thank you. Thank you, Grace. Do any of you get a headache when you walk into the fragrance section of Saks Fifth Avenue? I do! And let me tell you…”
By the end of her long answer about organic herbs only a few of the journalists remained. The moderator asked if there were any other questions about the new fragrance line, in English and Czech, but by then it was clear the party was over. He led Elena out the side door.
Grace smiled at the last four women who remained in the room, as they gathered up their recorders and notebooks and phones and bags. None of them smiled back. The hallway had a coffee stand and some biscuits, but by the time Grace made it out the coffee was gone, the biscuits were gone, the perfume samples were gone.
In the women’s restroom, a large group of journalists in line for the toilets made fun of Elena: her clothes, her accent, her hair, her enhanced eyes and lips, the way she referred to herself in the third person. But mostly her ex-husband. When she couldn’t take it anymore Grace ditched the lineup and returned to the lobby where the handsome white-haired man from the back of the room stood waiting for her.
“Ms. Elliott. Let me escort you upstairs.”
She remembered his name: Josef Straka. He had been on the symphony orchestra board with Steadman Coe, and he came to the National Flash Christmas party every year. Both men were powerful outsiders in Québécois culture. “Monsieur Straka. I didn’t know you were Elena’s friend.”
They stepped onto the elevator. He wore a navy suit with a crisp, exceedingly white shirt and smelled faintly of La Cure Craig. His top two buttons were undone. He held eye contact longer than a normal person would in an elevator, though Grace could not decide if it was unsettling or fatherly. She wondered if it was Straka who had made the original introduction to Steadman Coe, in 2014, to get their Ask Elena column going.
He just stared. Definitely unsettling. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a calling card, handed it to her.
When Kafka had seemed too much, in the lobby, Grace had read a brochure about the hotel. The Four Seasons was a marriage of four architectural eras that match the great eras of the city: Baroque, Renaissance, Neo-Classical, and modern. Grace tried to figure out which eras they were passing through, on the way to the presidential suite.
Elena stood at the large window, overlooking the river. Like Josef Straka, she stood with perfect posture and it was easy for Grace to see them together, these two aristocratic Central Europeans. Through the window, Grace could see the castle, the Charles Bridge, and Petřín Hill. A few streaks of afternoon sun made it through the clouds and lit up the red roofs of Malá Strana. Classical piano music played quietly from an elegant Bose speaker in the corner of the room. On the table a bottle of vodka was open and half finished, with a can of tonic and a quartered lemon. Elena held a glass, took a sip. She did not turn around. “Duše moje.”
“I’m sorry about that, what happened down there.” Grace spoke freely, but she wished she were alone with Elena. They weren’t quite friends but she wanted to be. This was the upside of the Violet Rain story falling apart; she had not betrayed Elena’s trust. Instead of fussing in the suite’s kitchen or at least looking at his phone, Straka stared at them.
“Thank you darling. I feared it would be terrible and it was. They are right. I want to have it both ways, to be my own woman but also to be that woman. This is what is wrong with me.”
Straka said something in Czech.
“No, Josef, I do mean it. The correct word is wrong.” Elena turned to face them. Grace was expecting tears, or at least sadness—disappointment—but her eyes were not wet, they were defiant.
Their last meeting had been in the Hamptons that spring. Anthony Craig had just become the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party and Elena was staying away, “for the integrity of the campaign.” Together they worked on their six months’ worth of Ask Elena columns on a balcony overlooking the ocean with a bottle of Gosset Grand Blanc de Blancs champagne. It was warm but cloudy, with a hint of drizzle over the beach. The six-bedroom blue-shingled beach house was in a compound owned by people who spoke Slavic languages, wore matching sweat suits, smoked cigarettes, and drove Range Rovers and Porsches, who played techno from the late 1990s and drank and danced until late at night.
Grace had never seen her somber. She had assumed Elena wanted to be a bigger part of the presidential campaign, that she felt cruelly excluded by the professional machine, but after the bottle of Gosset was finished, Elena admitted they had invited her to the convention. They had invited her to speak, but she had turned them down, which seemed unlike her. The people who owned the compound annoyed Elena, but when Grace asked who they were Elena changed the subject. She talked about Anthony Craig’s current wife and about Violet Rain. Grace could not decide if Elena was jealous or if it was something else.
It was, by far, their strangest day together.
Dear Elena,
Your ex-husband is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party and will run for president in the fall. He could, as you once predicted, become the most powerful man in the world. He remains your business partner and something like a friend. Why are you acting as though your do
g just died?
Wondering in Westhampton Beach
Now, in the presidential suite of the Four Seasons, Elena pulled Grace to the window and together they looked out in silence, the piano music a perfect soundtrack to the melancholy scene before them: dusky, autumnal Prague. She wanted to ask about the campaign, but enough people had asked about it today.
In the background, Straka cleared his throat. “Ms. Elliott knows me.”
“From Montreal,” said Grace. “He’s friends with Steadman Coe.”
Elena shook her head. “I worry our Mr. Coe is trying too hard, loving Tony. What do you think? Is it too much?”
“He thinks their audiences intersect.”
Elena took Grace’s hand. “I had hoped to work with you this afternoon and evening on Ask Elena, with vodka and tonic, and something delicious and fattening from room service. But I do not have it in me. Today was a mistake.” She sighed. “When he wins, Tony will rip those satisfied smiles from their faces.”
Straka topped up Elena’s glass with vodka. He did not bother with the tonic or lemon or offer one to Grace.
“Tomorrow, duše moje, I go to my hometown.”
“Mladá Boleslav?”
“Very good, you remember. You will come with me. In the car we will work on Ask Elena. Yes?”
“I would like that.”
Straka put his left hand on Grace’s back and with his right hand motioned toward the door of the suite. It did not feel right to leave Elena alone with him, but she could not say why.
“Are you okay, Ms. Craig?”
“Ten o’clock in the morning, duše moje. I will have recovered.”
Grace had no choice. She allowed the man to lead her out. “If you need anything, I’m in room—”
“She knows where to find you, Ms. Elliott,” he said, at the threshold. “Good evening.”
Grace waited and watched Elena in the near-dark of the presidential suite as Josef Straka closed the door.
4
MLADÁ BOLESLAV, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, 1968
The instant she began to fall off the balance beam at the national championships Elena Klimentová knew her life had already changed. She would not finish in the top three. She would not finish in the top thirty. For her vault she had lacked confidence on the springboard, and then she had botched her routine on the uneven bars.
It had been her dream for years, to travel the world in gymnastics tights. Now that a regular Czech girl, Věra Čáslavská, had won six medals in Mexico City, Elena’s dream felt possible. She stands on podiums in France, in America, in Korea with bouquets of yellow flowers. She lifts an arm, humbly. “Kde domov můj” plays from giant black speakers. Someone opens a bottle of champagne and the crowd says, “Oooh!” and the Czech flag is a shawl over her shoulders.
Driving north now, back to Mladá Boleslav, the wind was so fierce Elena thought the little blue Škoda would fly into the ditch on an icy road. Sleet pounded the windscreen. Her dream, the hundreds of hours, thousands of hours she had spent on it, was now a humiliation.
It nauseated her. Go ahead, she thought, fly into the ditch.
Coach Vacek spoke only to her companion, Josef, who had finished in the top ten in all of his events. Josef leaned back in the front seat and recounted his triumphs in the competition: a boy from Prague, one of his longtime rivals, had fallen off the uneven bars and had cried.
“Aha!” Coach Vacek punched the steering wheel, laughed at the roof of the Škoda, shook his fist.
When they arrived in Mladá Boleslav, the city was dark. December was different now. The new soldiers, who did not speak Czech, had confiscated the Christmas lights because they were signs of Western imperialism, signs of resistance and therefore treason. There were only two market stalls in front of the old town hall and a grim statue of Ded Moroz, old man winter, with his Russian staff.
Josef lived north of the city so Coach Vacek stopped first at Elena’s little house in what her mother called the train station ghetto along the muddy Jizera River. Tonight, filtered through failure, their gray, small, sad house seemed even grayer and smaller and sadder. Elena opened her door before the car came to a full stop.
“Let me help you,” said Josef.
“I can do it.” Elena pulled her bag from the back seat.
Coach Vacek lit a cigarette. “I will come in.”
“No.”
“You were not feeling well. Your balance was off.”
She had felt perfectly well before the competition. She had trained for weeks, all summer and all autumn. There were no excuses that were not lies and in the darkness of the three-hour drive home she had vowed to tell the truth. Elena had turned eighteen. Her chance had come and now it was gone. It was not so bad to have regular dreams. Like her mother, and her grandmother, she would work in the factory.
Coach Vacek followed her to the door. So did Josef.
Elena turned to them. “Please. Go home.”
Coach Vacek and Josef understood what this meant for Elena and for her parents. A daughter who brings glory to Czechoslovakia and the Communist Party also brings comfort to her parents: better food, better jobs, better doctors.
A better home. A place her mother deserved.
Elena shut her eyes for a moment, sighed, and opened the door. Her coach and Josef followed her inside. She was about to turn and order them, again, back to the car to talk about their magnificent success when the temperature in the house, the smell, the electricity stopped her.
“Sweetheart.” Her mother, Jana, wore a red dress and lipstick. She was almost a foot shorter than Elena, she had gone thick around the middle, and her hair—once black as olives—was now streaked with gray. In her day, she told Elena, she had been the most popular and the most beautiful girl in Mladá Boleslav. She was secretly descended from Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, and the beautiful Blanche of Valois, but the communists could not know the truth of this because they would be jealous and make their lives even worse.
Now she took the bag from Elena and dropped it on the kitchen table, which was against every house rule. Gymnastics equipment went in the closet immediately. Jana ignored Coach Vacek and Josef, who stood waiting for a greeting, and whispered into Elena’s ear. “We have a visitor. A wonderful visitor.”
There was something in the oven: meat and dumplings. Elena was hungry, but why were they having a special dinner at 8:00 p.m. on a Sunday night?
She turned back to Coach Vacek and Josef whose faces showed the same bewilderment she felt, and silently they moved from the kitchen into the small salon.
A young man in a prim suit was sitting next to her father, who looked as though half the blood had been drained from him. The young man stood up and extended his hand. He was slim and handsome, with the confident air of a young professor, and Elena immediately felt childlike and ridiculous in her faded blue tights and team jacket.
“Elena.” He spoke with a Russian accent.
“Good evening.” She took his hand, its skin soft and smooth.
“I am Sergei Sorokin. I have come here from Prague to meet you and your parents.”
Stepping past Elena, he shook Coach Vacek’s and Josef’s hands. He knew their names too. “How did it go today?”
Elena wanted all of these people out of the house so she could speak to her parents and, possibly, cry. “Josef got seventh overall,” she said.
Sergei Sorokin clapped and so did her mother. It took some coaxing to get her father on his feet and clapping too.
“And you?” Sergei asked.
Elena had a feeling he already knew the answer. “I did not have a good day.”
“She has a cold,” said Josef.
“It can affect one’s inner ear, the balance,” said Coach Vacek.
“Nonsense. I felt fine. I simply performed miserably. I came in thirty-ninth overall. I’m sorry, Mother. Father.”
There had been two hundred and fifty female gymnasts in the competition. This was not a disastrous resu
lt for a mediocre athlete but Elena was not a mediocre athlete. Up until this point, her life had been powered by the belief—the certainty—that she was an exceptional gymnast, one of the best not only in Czechoslovakia but the world. But she had felt a change as she had run up the hills of Mladá Boleslav earlier that autumn, preparing for the national championships. The younger girls had more power in their legs. They were stronger and more elegant.
The Kliment family lived on the main floor of the house. Another family, the Novaks, who had a temperamental five-year-old boy, lived upstairs. There was a bedroom for her parents and an office or closet that had enough room for a single bed and a desk. Her bedroom.
Elena sighed. Was this finished, whatever it was? Could she go in her little room now, so her parents could continue discussing whatever it was they had to discuss with the young Russian?
“I knew I had come to the right place.” Sergei Sorokin smiled. Russians were not supposed to smile. Hundreds of thousands of them had arrived in the country a few months ago with tanks and guns to “normalize” the country. Many young people had died. Elena knew her father was worried, and that he had wanted to flee to the Austrian border.
Now it was too late. There were soldiers in towers with guns; they had put up electric fences and patrolled the border with trucks and German shepherds trained to tear you apart. Elena knew that if you somehow made it over the fence you entered the minefields.
They were not allowed to speak of it. Any of it. Not here at home, where someone could be listening, and not in school and not in the mountains and not in the town. The police heard everything. They knew.
Yet Sergei smiled. “It takes enormous courage to admit and own our defeats. You do not comfort yourself. You face hard realities.”
