by Joseph Kanon
“So you never went back?”
“What’s to go back for? Last year-well, she went. I didn’t have money for all of us. Maybe someday. Anyway, it’s all different, isn’t it? I mean, they don’t even have the Giants anymore. What’s New York without the Giants?”
“What do you do here?” Nick said, intrigued now.
“Radio. I monitor the VOA broadcasts. Well, I did. But now I’m American again. You know, after last year. Even the old Reds. But that’ll change. We’re going through an adjustment now. You have to expect that.”
A believer’s rationale, still. Nick thought of the index cards in Wiseman’s study, all the facts of the witch-hunt, which had somehow overlooked Marty Bielak in a misplaced file. This is where some of them had ended up, perched on a barstool, stranded, like debris swept up on the beach by a storm.
“Can I ask you something?” Nick said impulsively. “Why did you? In the first place?”
“What, become a Red?” He looked back at his beer. “You think we have horns? Let me tell you, we didn’t. Who else was there? You think anybody cared about the working man? Anti-Semites playing golf. That’s what it was then. Anti-Semites playing golf.” He stared at the glass, then caught himself. “It’s the beer talking,” he said, trying an apologetic smile that stopped midway. “You ask me, you know what I’d have to say? Who else was there? That’s it.” He picked up the glass. “Anyway, here I am talking — it’s good, you know, the English-and you’ve got a pretty girl to go to. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Just seeing the sights,” Nick said easily. The man nodded. “Not so many come now. Unless they have family. You have family here?”
“No.” He shook his head. “My grandmother was Polish, though,” he said, improvising. Molly was right. You could learn to do it fast, part of the other game.
“And that’s close enough,” Bielak said, laughing to himself. “You’d have to be American. They’re the only ones who think it’s the same thing.” He paused, then looked up at Nick. “Let me ask you, could you use a guide? I know this town inside out. I could use a little cash.” His voice, the brash sound of the Polo Grounds, had dropped an octave, suddenly older. Nick caught the embarrassed pleading in his eyes, still shiny with beer. “Dollars, if you have them. My sister, she still sends, but these days-I have the time.”
Nick looked at him. Not an index card. “I don’t think so. We’re only here a little while. Thanks, though.”
“Just see the castle and on your way. Okay. Don’t miss the Jewish cemetery-it’s the best thing. Sounds crazy, but it is. Well, think about it.” He reached for a pen, wrote a number on the coaster, and handed it to Nick. “If you change your mind, I can show you the stuff the tourists don’t see.” Nick heard his voice begin to slur. “A special tour. You want to see all the old Reds? That might be interesting,” he said, his voice suddenly sarcastic.
Nick stood up, putting the coaster in his pocket. “Night,” he said, almost a mumble. He threw some crowns on the bar, not bothering to count them. “Good luck.”
“Luck.” Marty Bielak winked. “We don’t need luck here. We have socialism.”
When he got to the room, Molly was still up, reading by one of the two dim bedside lamps. The flannel nightgown was back and her face glistened with cold cream, an almost comic body armor. The heavy drapes, drawn tight by the maid, still sealed the room, and he crossed to open them, hungry for air.
“What happened to you?” she said. “I was about to give up.” She closed the book and snapped off her light, leaving only the small glow by his side of the bed.
“You were wrong about that guy,” Nick said, opening the windows. “He’s an American. He lives here. It was your English.” He began unbuttoning his shirt, looking down at the street lamps.
“Lives here? You didn’t tell him anything, did you?”
“No. Why?”
“Oh, Nick,” she said in mock exasperation. “Who do you think hangs around the Alcron bar talking to foreigners?”
He stopped, his hand still on the button. “You think?” he said quietly.
“Who else could afford it?” When he didn’t answer, she turned over. “Goodnight.”
He continued staring out the window, not wanting to turn around. What if she was right? What was that like? He saw Marty Bielak writing up reports on tourist conversations, taking another step for the working man. Do you have family here? Did that make it easier? Maybe cadging dollars for a tour was worse, a seduction without even the self-respect of betrayal.
The protesters had gone, just as the desk clerk had predicted, leaving behind their candles. Now the police were clearing them away, tipping over the lights until the space under the good king was empty again, a patch of dark. He’d set himself on fire. How many ways are there to take away your life? A lost family, as irretrievable as childhood. A careless exile, eavesdropping in bars. At least Jan Palach had only done it to himself. But you always take somebody with you. There must have been parents, left with a martyrdom and an empty house. And sometimes somebody did it for you, flinging you out the window before you had a chance to hold on.
Molly moved in bed, and the sound carried to him, a disturbance in the air. It pricked at him, not letting him drift, and as he raised his hand to draw on the cigarette he suddenly saw her at the window in Bern, a reverse image. Maybe she had felt it then, the same disturbance, something right here, not some feint with ghosts. Now it was his turn. He thought about her in Durnstein, then down in the bar, and he saw that they kept colliding and moving on, like electrons. What if he made the same mistake as the others? Losing everything for an idea. He stood still. In the courtyard with his father, he had felt that his life had come back to him, but it was only a piece of the past that had come back. It was the side street that had been alive with an adrenalin touch. Maybe there was no idea. Maybe it was as simple as a rustling of bedclothes that wouldn’t leave you alone, a disturbance.
No more than that. So that if you didn’t hear, it came and then, like the luck Marty Bielak didn’t need, slipped away for good.
Chapter 8
The day began with sun, but by the time he’d finished coffee the clouds of middle Europe had rolled in, a lead weight pressing down on the city, turning everything gray. They crossed the Vltava over a different bridge, downriver from the Mala Strana.
“Is this the right way?” Nick said. “I don’t remember this.”
“Just keep going to the end. Soviet Tank Square.”
“They call it that?”
“Mm. Namesti sovetskych tankistu,” she said, the accurate pronunciation its own joke. “Of course in those days they were liberating, not invading.”
“How do you know all this?”
“All what? It’s just tourist stuff. I had a lot of time to get to know the city.”
“Are you going to see him, your friend?” Maybe the split hadn’t been as casual as she had said.
“Jiri?” She was looking out the window. “No, not this trip. One reunion’s enough, don’t you think?”
There was no one near the tank and they drove around the traffic circle once, then parked near the corner and pulled out a map, pretending to plot the trip. The place names, brimming with consonants and accent marks, might have been Chinese.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t drive too fast,” Nick said. “I could never follow this.”
But his father had thought of everything. When the Skoda pulled alongside, he got out to switch cars. In the daylight he looked less drawn, more like himself, and Nick felt a jolt again, as if a photograph had come alive.
The woman in the passenger seat was handsome but full-faced, and when she stepped out to change sides he saw that her body was thick, rounded by time and gravity. To his surprise, she was shy and nervous, brushing a stray hair back in to place with the automatic gesture of a girl wanting to look her best, and Nick realized that she was apprehensive about meeting him. She smiled hesitantly, glancing into his eyes.
&nb
sp; “Anicka, this is my son,” his father said. “Nick, my wife, Anna.” So easy. The whole tangled mess reduced to a simple introduction. She held out her hand.
“How do you do,” she said, a formality from a phrasebook, but her eyes were warm, scanning his face now, tracing her husband’s features. “You are very like,” she said pleasantly.
“Miss Chisholm, would you go with Anna? Then no one gets lost.”
“Molly,” she said to Anna, shaking her hand too.
Anna placed her hand on Nick’s father’s sleeve, familiar and affectionate, and said something in Czech. Then she got in the car and started around the tank, noisily shifting gears.
“What did she say?” Nick asked.
“Not to be too long. I thought I’d show you the sights. We don’t want to travel in convoy.” He walked toward the passenger door.
“Why not? Do people follow you?”
“No.” He smiled. “Force of habit, that’s all.”
Nick started the car. “Where to?”
“Just drive around. Head for the castle.”
“Can I see where you live?”
“It’s just up here. Up Holeckova. We’ll come round the other way. We don’t want to surprise anyone.”
Nick drove along the river, then climbed the steep hill to Hradcany. His father said nothing, glancing in the rearview mirror.
“I suppose she’s my stepmother,” Nick said, and then, when his father didn’t answer, “How did you meet?”
“At the institute. In Moscow. She was an archivist.”
“When was this?”
“Well, when? Fifteen, sixteen years ago.” Nick counted backward No, not right away. A decent interval.
“Do you love her?” he said, surprised at his own prurience. But how else could he ask it?
His father looked at him, then back at the street. “I married her. We’ve had a good life. I owe her this.” He motioned his hand to take in the city. “I never would have got out of Moscow otherwise. She’s a Czech national.” He paused. “I loved your mother. It’s different.”
Nick looked straight ahead at a church with several towers, green copper domes. “How long have you been here?”
“Just a year. She retired, you see, so they let us settle here. Kind of a gold watch. Ordinarily you have to stay put. But I guess they knew I wasn’t in any shape to worry about, so why not?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Nick said quietly. “Is it cancer?”
“No, my heart. I’ve had one operation, but it doesn’t seem to have done any good. That reminds me.” He took out a plastic vial and opened it. A different pill from the one last night. “Thins the blood,” he explained. “Of course, if you cut yourself you have a hell of a time, because it won’t clot. Fix one thing and something else goes.” He swallowed the pill without water. “Anyway,” he said, steering away from the subject, “we came to Prague. My gold watch too, I guess.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Hitler thought so too. He made it an open city. That’s why it’s still beautiful-no bombs. Imagine, having Hitler to thank for this.”
“What’s Moscow like?”
“It’s like Brooklyn. Everyone there thinks it’s special and you can’t imagine why.”
Nick smiled. The same rhythm.
“At first I couldn’t get used to the quiet,” his father said. “It’s very quiet for a big city. You never hear an ambulance or a fire truck. I don’t know why. Not much traffic. And then in the winter the snow muffles everything. Sometimes I used to open the window and just listen to the quiet. It was like being deaf. You think you want quiet, and then when you get it-” He paused. “But after a while you get used to it. Like everything else.” He took out a cigarette and rolled down the window. “The funny thing about that was in the bad old days, they used to send the cars at night, so no one would know. But it was so quiet everyone did know. You’d hear a car in the street-you couldn’t miss it-and you’d know it was an arrest. The whole block. Maybe they planned it that way. You didn’t go back to sleep after that. You’d just lie there, waiting to hear the next car. But that was before, when Stalin was alive. Turn here by the church. We’ll swing around the Strahov.”
Nick said nothing, imagining the nights, now just an anecdote. People talked about the knock on the door, but it had been something else, a car motor idling in a quiet street. No screaming, no people being dragged out, just the faint sound of a car door being shut, a deaf man’s terror.
“Were you ever arrested?”
“No. Of course, I was debriefed. That took months. I still don’t know where. But after there was a flat. In the Arbat. Two rooms-a palace, then. And a job. They gave me a medal.”
Nick heard the tone, a hint of pride, and was disconcerted. Was he supposed to congratulate him?
“What kind of job?” he said, not sure again how to ask. “Did you-work for them?”
“As an agent, you mean?” his father said, almost amused. “No. Who would I spy on? The diplomats, the journalists — they were already taken care of. There wasn’t anybody else. Just the defectors. We kept to ourselves-maybe we were kept to ourselves, I don’t know. For a while I worked with Maclean on International Affairs. The magazine,” he said to Nick’s unspoken query. “Like your Foreign Affairs. I think with the same level of accuracy. A nice man. A believer, you know. Still. But the others-” He let the phrase drift off. “Not exactly people you want to spend the weekend with. Besides, I was trying to learn Russian, not speak English. I was never very good at languages. I still can’t speak Czech, not really.”
“I thought you could.”
“You did? Oh, the committee. No, I never could. I picked up a few words from your grandparents. But they tried not to speak around me. They wanted me to be-” He paused, framing the words. “An all-American boy.” Nick said nothing, letting the thought sit there. “I was, too. I had a paper route. I still fold a paper like that, like I’m going to throw it on a porch. Sixty subscribers-a lot for then. The things you remember.”
Nick heard the fade in his voice and resisted its pull. “Too bad about the language. It would have come in handy,” he said lightly, indicating the street.
“Well, Anicka takes care of all that. That’s a little like being deaf too, when you can’t speak the language. People talk to you and you just look. You even get to like it, not hearing things. When I first got to Moscow, I would spend days not hearing anything. It was quiet. Like the streets.”
The sound, Nick thought, after a door had closed.
They had made the circle and were coming back down Holeckova. “Slow down a little if you want to see it. Where I live. Third building there on the left. The white one. Not too slow,” his father added, automatically putting his elbow on the window to cover the side of his face.
It was a multistory apartment building with simple art moderne lines in a section of the street that must have been developed before the war, when straight edges and glass were still a style. The white was tired now, but had escaped the cracks and watermarks of the newer buildings across the river, put up on the cheap. It was set back from the street, reached by a flight of concrete steps set into the hill. There was nothing remarkable about it at all, except that his father lived there.
“We were lucky to get it,” his father said. “The views are wonderful. Not the Old Town, but then the plumbing’s better. Two bathrooms.”
Nick glanced quickly at him, feeling again a peculiar sense of dislocation. He was in Prague with a ghost, discussing real estate. He noticed the hand at the side of the face.
“Does someone really watch the house?”
“Or do I just imagine it?” his father said wryly. “No, the Czechs take a look from time to time. The STB. You see, to them I’m a Russian. They want to know what I’m doing here.”
Nick took this in, toying with it. A Russian. They passed the Soviet tank again and headed across the river.
“What did they give you a medal for?”
“Services to the state. All of us got one. Mostly for going there. Once they’ve brought you in, they don’t know what to do with you, so they give you a medal. It’s cheap and it gives you something to hold on to. So you don’t wonder why you’re not doing anything anymore. They don’t trust foreigners-they can’t help it, it’s in the bone. After the magazine, I got the job at the institute, so at least they thought I wasn’t going to do any damage. Some of the others-English lessons, make-work.”
“What did you do?”
“Policy analyst. American policy. Of course, by the time they trusted me to do that, I’d been away from Washington so long I didn’t know any more about American policy than the next man. They have a habit of defeating their own purpose. But maybe that’s what they wanted all along. Anyway, they never listened to anything I had to say.”
Nick realized that the answer, easy and smooth, was what he wanted to hear, and for the first time he wondered if his father could be lying. Had he really done so little? For an instant he felt as if he were back at the hearing. So plausible and persuasive, and all the while- Nick stopped. Was he Welles now? The inquisitor to outflank? Who cared whether they listened to him or not? And it might after all — which was worse? — be the truth, a glib answer to mask a marginal life.
“Seems a shame-for them, I mean,” Nick said.
“Not taking advantage of my wisdom? Who knows? I was wrong about Cuba. I never thought we’d go that far.”
Nick paused. “We who?”
“We Americans,” his father said softly, clearly thrown by the question.
