“Well, I suppose it makes no difference to me. My trial is in a month. Unless I decide to flee the country, which I’m still considering. My own quiet life in the Caribbean. Either way, Jakub, it seems that the big missions of our lives are over.”
“What was yours?”
“Helping democracy with heaps of cash.”
“You’re a thief.”
“I became one, yes.”
“What do you think of my father now? You can’t think you are better than him, not anymore. This pain you’ve caused to get revenge on a dead man, the people you’ve ruined in the process. The point of it all.”
“May I show you something? It requires a short trip.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Don’t be stupid, Jakub. I’ve watched you grow up. I wish you no harm.”
What else was there to do? I did not want for this meeting to end, for this man who knew me, the last remnant of my life before the mission, to leave. I followed him through the grass field and between the trees, where we reentered the city and a suited driver opened a door to a black BMW. We sat on the leather seats and Zajíc offered a glass of Scotch. I drank it down without pause. Was it a betrayal to my grandfather that I sat next to this man, spoke to him? He couldn’t blame me for wanting to understand. To know every bit of influence that had gotten me here. The seat cooled my back, I poured another drink, wondering what it was like to be a man who lived such luxuries every day, molding them into a barrier shielding him from the terror of being ordinary. Zajíc studied me and all these decades later I still worried he could read me easily, the gestures of a frightened boy.
We arrived at a building in New Town. The chauffeur opened the door and I stood before a delicatessen storefront. The building was eight stories tall, made in the old republic, before the war and before the communist housing projects. Shoe Man gestured for me to come through the front door to the top of the stairwell. There he removed a set of keys from his pocket and opened a door made of metal. It creaked, and I noticed deep scratches upon it.
As I hesitated, Zajíc entered the room. The windows were covered in black paper, leaving the room concealed in shadow. Something clicked. Lamplight illuminated the room, and Shoe Man stood by a desk stained with blood, its drawers having been removed. The lamp—small, with a rusty neck and harsh, invasive light—and a green folder were the only items on the desk. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a wooden chair covered in thick deep cuts, pieces of duct tape sticking to its legs and back. The chair faced the blacked-out windows. On the dusty stone floor in front of it rested the artifact of my life’s history. The iron shoe.
“Is this real?” I said.
“When I met your father, the basement where the usual torture rooms were located was being fumigated for rats. The secret police kicked a few of the less important bureaucrats out of their offices, and made these provisional chambers. Can’t let vermin get in the way of interrogation.”
“This is it? This one?”
“This room. Your father’s feet walked upon this floor. Of course, by the time I bought the building, the space had been changed back into a nice office. I had them re-create the room as I knew it from memory. Don’t worry, the blood is fake. But the shoe I think you recognize.”
I pictured myself at nineteen years old, with baby fat still on my cheeks. Men I’ve never seen, never spoken to, coming into my university classroom and taking me away. Taking me here, blacking out the world beyond these windows, a separation like dirt tossed upon a coffin. Causing me pain, hurting me with the full conviction that they were on the right side of history, the moral side, the side of humanity. My father had done this for a living. He had done this and it had kept us in a nice apartment and in nice clothes and with secret Elvis records stashed away.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I wanted you to see it, the place where I was born. The man I was before I knew this room—he was probably going to become a chemist. A scientist, like you. But once they kicked me out of university, took everything from my family, the only focus of my life became not ending up in this room again.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Don’t you want to know me?”
I turned to the wooden chair and sat down. My knee pain was returning, reminding me I hadn’t taken my medication all day. I removed the bottle from my pocket and swallowed a pill dry.
I slid my foot inside the iron shoe. “Tie it,” I said.
Zajíc bent over and pushed down on the safety, then pulled the heavy leather belt inside a loop.
I tried to lift my foot. I could not.
“That’s the most terrifying thing,” Zajíc said. “It grounds you. It makes you feel like, perhaps, you might never walk again.”
“It’s a comfort now. To be still. Bound.”
“How did you do it, Jakub? How did you come back?”
“We’re not going to talk about that now.”
He nodded and walked toward the window. He opened it, and the black paper ripped at the edges. Sun came into the room for the first time in many years. Without the darkness to lend it isolation, it seemed like a regular sad office keeping human beings away from living wildly, not unlike the office of Dr. Bivoj.
“You made me think I was a curse,” I said. “Like my whole existence was some kind of spiritual stain. The last remnant of Cain’s sperm. Those aren’t good thoughts for a child. For a man. I’ve wished you dead in so many different ways. Before I started shaving I fantasized about what I could do to you with a blade. Your voice has resonated through my head all these years, uninvited. I should throw you out that window, but I no longer see the point in it. I don’t know what to do after we leave this room. I don’t know. When I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Lenka, I thought that finding you would be another mission, the last possible way of living. But I look at you and I know that retribution is not life.”
He turned to face me. He bent low before me and unstrapped my foot. The brief suspension, the release from weight and pressure, felt again as though I was floating in Space, with Hanuš by my side, about to encounter a core that would take us to the beginnings of the universe.
“I’ve built a life around a couple of hours in a room with an unkind stranger,” Shoe Man said. “Jakub, it took me too long to realize it. Your father did what he did to me, but the decision to live as I have—it was still mine. For me, the catalyst was this room. For your father, the catalyst was the day he decided the world was full of his enemies. For you, the catalyst doesn’t need to be anger or fear or some feeling of loss. The significance of your life doesn’t rest with Lenka, or your father, or me. I’ve done heinous things, yes. I’ve watched you, asserted myself into your affairs, but the choices—those were all yours. You’re so much better than your father and I. You won’t let this cripple you. It doesn’t have to end for you like it ended for us.”
Shoe Man remained kneeling at my feet, and I saw that the man who’d walked into my grandparents’ house with a backpack had been gone for some time. The eyes looking at me from beneath these gray brows were dead, like windows leading into a deep, starless night; his limbs and features sagged—victims to both gravity and his lifetime of money.
“Now that you’ve been caught,” I said, “you feel sorry for yourself.”
“I wish it was as simple as that. Being in a room with you now, I’ve ceased even to wonder about my punishment. It seems clear. You are freed of imprisonment and I will face mine.”
“Now you’re a philosopher.”
“We understand each other, Jakub. You know it too.”
“A flash of the old life.”
“A flash of the old life.”
“I miss it. The flow of the river through Středa. It would carry me to the village limits and I would swim against the current to shore. I never wanted to leave there, not for a second.”
“I had a home like that too,” he said. “They took it.”
“I don’t kn
ow what I’ll do now,” I said. “She’s gone. I returned for her but I couldn’t bring myself to face her. I know I should chase after her, but I can’t. There’s a life for her outside all of this. Without me.”
“And for you too. There is something you could do, Jakub.”
“You’re advising me.”
“I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”
“No. Advise me, Shoe Man.”
“Shoe Man? Is that what you call me?”
“All my life.”
“The house is still there, you know,” he said. “And it belongs to you. I always kind of knew that you’d come back for it.”
Still kneeling, Zajíc pulled a pair of keys out of his pocket. The originals, the same ones that had once rested inside my grandmother’s purse. The same ones she had used to lock the house after she ensured that my grandfather and I were safely in our beds.
He rested them on my palm. Much lighter now than when I was a child.
“I’ve gone so far, and back,” I said.
“I have too. Why live otherwise.”
“I hope you’ll take the punishment. Go to jail. Do what ought to be done.”
“I can’t promise it, Jakub. The one thing you and I have in common—we love being alive too much to get in line for what’s coming.”
Both of us noticed at the same time that my laces had come untied inside the iron shoe. Zajíc held them, one in each hand. He stopped and stared out the window, his cheeks ruddy, thought finally catching up with instinct, but he was already committed, and so he tied my shoelaces into a neat bow. The cloth of my trousers had ridden up a few inches, revealing a small part of the scar on my calf. Zajíc froze, rolled the cloth up just a bit more.
“Mine has faded,” he said. “You can no longer see the numbers. Just a single white line cutting across.”
When he stood up, he seemed old—ancient and small—subject to the crushing weight of conscience. The finely fitting suit, the reflective surface of his leather shoes, the diminishing gray hair—none of it could fool me any longer about the true state of his being. Zajíc was not a menace. He was a man displaced and looking for a new purpose.
Radislav Zajíc checked his watch and walked toward the door. He turned halfway, without looking at me.
“You haven’t asked what is in the green folder,” he said.
“Well?”
“It’s my poetry against the regime. I did write it, you know. Only as a joke, a dare of sorts, to impress someone I don’t remember anymore. But then my fellow pupils took it seriously, and spread it around. Suddenly I was a published revolutionary. You see. The slightest gesture makes up our history. And so I met your father. And so I met you.”
He left. The sound of his steps, larger than life, lingered for minutes, until at last the front door, eight stories down, thundered shut and I was alone with the afternoon sun. The rusting shoe defiantly eyed me with its mouth agape, as if in shock at being so suddenly abandoned by its loyal keeper. I picked it up and, once again, like so many years before, I considered whether any part of it still held genetic leftovers of my father, physical evidence of the encounter that had defined my family’s fate.
I cast the thing out the open window facing the courtyard, and it screeched hideously along the stone walls until it too faced the inevitability of being forgotten, its pieces split apart, guts disemboweled along the grass and dirt, the shoe finally drained of evil and rid of purpose. A fat pigeon hopped around with its brothers, searching for parts to satiate their instinctual greed. Finding nothing, the birds arose, bound to scavenge in greener pastures, but the fat one, which I imagined to be the flock leader, performed an elegant pirouette against the iron shoe’s corpse, and, as it soared away, dropped thick, cream-white phlegm, the liquid forming a petite dumpling that splattered with crude efficiency all along the metal scraps.
For a moment, the leap looked soothing. I could jump after the iron shoe and my aches would split apart like the shoe. No more thoughts of Lenka, no more knee pain, but the body must not be violated. The body was the most important thing, carrying within it the code to the universe, a part of a larger secret that was significant even if it was never to be revealed. If the body mattered to Hanuš, it mattered to me, and I would worship it as he had. I would never cause the body harm.
Pleased in some vulgar fashion over the shoe’s undignified demise, I walked back to Charles Square. Around me, Prague crooned: bike messengers darting along important routes; troopers of business big and small marching with those shining loafers and heels, one two, one two; children with colorful backpacks skipping their way home from the wisdom and enlightenment of institutions (and what disappointment awaited them!) to the safety of their homes. It was exhilarating, all of it—was existence alone not revolution? Our efforts to establish routines in the nature that forbade them, to understand depths we could never reach, to declare truths even as we collectively snicker at the word’s virginal piousness. What a mess of contradictions the gods created when they graced us with self-awareness. Without it, we could run around the woods like wild boars, dig in the dirt with our snouts to find worms, bugs, seeds, nuts. During breeding season, we could howl like wolves in December, alpha females pawing at the backs and ears of alpha males. We could mate for weeks and then toss aside the burdens of sex for the rest of the year. After this, we could hoard food in underground foxholes and sleep, sleep through Leden, Únor, Březen, Duben, no have to go to the office grocery shopping oh God is that person looking at me do I have something on my face my shoes are falling apart is North Korea threatening us again my back pains have returned do any massage parlors actually provide handjobs and are they open to servicing women otherwise that is sexism and I’ve had a stomachache for three years now, should I get it checked out but it is fear and stress and what will the doctor prescribe? There, in our underground paradise, shying away from God’s sun and his fucked-up curse of Eden, the cocktease heaven that never comes, we could be like Hanuš and his race, the floating connoisseurs who do not know fear despite the looming threat of Gorompeds.
Alas, we are what we are, and we need the stories, we need the public transportation, the anxiety meds, the television shows by the dozens, the music in bars and restaurants saving us from the terror of silence, the everlasting promise of brown liquor, the bathrooms in national parks, and the political catchphrases we can all shout and stick to our bumpers. We need revolutions. We need anger. How many times will the Old Town of Prague host the people who’ve been slighted bellowing for a change? And are the people truly speaking to the charlatans of Politik, calling to the bone and flesh of their leaders, or is this a disguised plea to the heavens? For fuck’s sake, either give us a hint or let us perish altogether.
I was not a part of the revolution. I was a slogan left on the side of an abandoned building, a mum witness to changes in weather patterns, moods. I was the statue of Jan Hus, with his sharply sculpted cheeks covered in a finely trimmed beard, his spine straight like a king’s and not like a scholar hunched over his books, quietly observing Prague with turmoil in his heart and peace in his soul, both of which conspired to get him killed. I was the work of Hanuš, the ticking timekeeper of the universe, a jester performing his trick dance again and again to fresh hordes of eager visitors. I was the lion of Bohemia drawn within the crest, the dark eagle of Moravia, the crown jewels resting in a display case inside the castle. I was organic matter transformed into a symbol. My existence would forever be a silent statement.
As I passed Old Town, the protesters gathered by the hundreds, loitering around the statue of Saint Wenceslas upon his horse, holding signs condemning Tůma and Zajíc, condemning all men of power sitting in rooms and designing the future of the world, chanting against systems, chanting for change, chanting for hope, and it was still early in the day and I wished that by nighttime the crowd would grow into the thousands, like in the days of the Velvet Revolution, when our nation was so alive that its outcry thundered across the globe, breakin
g free of the greed and exploitation of men who’d lost themselves. Every single one of these bodies who’d decided to cast aside the ceaseless distractions, who’d decided to put on shoes and take a sign and march around the cobblestones of the nation instead of watching a bit of television, was a single act of revolution, a single particle within the explosion of the Big Bang. I felt confident in leaving the fate of this world in their hands.
I left the revolution behind me. The way horse hooves echo on the cube bricks of the main square. The way languages sing together over beer and coffee with whipped cream. The shivering visitors of the winter markets, their gloves soaked with grog spilling over the edge of a flimsy cup. The excited shouts of boys about to try absinthe ice cream. The bringers of change, actors in their own destinies. Those who love Prague, have always loved Prague, those who stroll every weekend around the same street and project holograms of history onto its physical reality. Those who dream. Those who lean on the statue of Christ crucified and kiss and grope each other with the hunger of dying beasts. Those who hope to die by jumping into the River Vltava, and fail. Those who use the free subway newspaper to wipe the sweat off their brows inside the sweltering train. The massive history, this metropolis of kings, of dictators, of book burning, of bloodstained tanks standing still in indecision. Through it all the city is here, its pleasures small and large cast upon the daily walkers rushing to offices and shops to participate in their habitual existence. They will not quit. God, they’ll never quit, and though I had to leave them, I loved them all the way to hell and back, through peace and through turmoil.
Even the Sun Burns
I RETURNED TO STRŘEDA, the village of my ancestors.
The houses that used to thrive had been scarred by winters, their walls cracking open and rooftops sagging. The old distillery was boarded up, gagged, sprayed over with the bawdy truths of graffiti. As the motorcycle engine sliced through the disturbing serenity of the main road, curtains behind windows opened, eyes on the intruder—a man coming home, perhaps, but they had no idea where he’d been. The old convenience store was shuttered and a few houses away a brand-new Hodovna supermarket stood out like an empty plastic bottle in a field of daisies. Ahead, the sky was morose and sable, and the sour smell of an impending rain shower crawled underneath my helmet. The scar on my leg itched, and I could not scratch it.
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