His mouth quivered on that last word, and when his brother said she’d died a couple of years ago, rather than taking my husband’s hand and murmuring condolences while he blinked back tears, I started chewing on my lip the way I always did before saying something risky.
How dare you ask about her with me right beside you! I yelled, in front of all my new in-laws, in the backyard surrounded by the grapefruit and lemon trees your grandfather had dreamed about for so long. Get over yourself, I continued, though I wasn’t actually angry, or jealous of a dead woman I’d never met, a woman he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. I was simply filled with an urge to fight, so electric and immediate I felt my face flush. So I carried on, even as your grandfather cleared his throat and looked at his shoes and rattled the ice in his empty glass.
And no, I won’t tell you the rest. You can guess. You can go to the library and read about the sixty-four soldiers killed that night in Haradziec, in a train explosion engineered by an unknown anarchist group. You can waste full days in the research room, ruining your eyes scrolling through microfilm. You can read about the attacks that followed—eight more before the war ended and your grandfather and I missed the quota to Palestine and were loaded instead on a boat to the States: not an option either of us had ever considered, a place that didn’t feel real even as we docked at the immigration port and saw Manhattan glittering in front of us. You can even find stories about Isaac, killed a year after we left for New York when his homemade bomb went off prematurely, still on his way to some unknown mission. One of those kids who couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Europe even once we were allowed to leave. Maybe because he was addicted to the fighting, maybe because he could finally go home but no one was there. Search for his story in the library—for that and everything else. But you won’t learn what happened to that mother and son I robbed, because believe me, I’ve looked and looked and there’s just no way to find out whether those two people survived the coldest winter of their lives.
I don’t understand you. All your life you’ve been like this, pulling someone into a corner at every family party, asking so many questions it’s no wonder you’ve always had a difficult time making friends. It’s a beautiful day. Your grandfather’s on the patio grilling hamburgers, your mother’s new boyfriend is already loud off beer, she’s hooked up the speakers and is playing her terrible records. Why don’t you go out in the sun and enjoy yourself for once, rather than sitting inside, scratching at ugly things that have nothing to do with you? These horrible things that happened before you were born.
The Quietest Man
The news was waiting when I came home from class: my daughter had sold a play. Not the kind she’d put on as a girl, with a cardboard stage and paper-bag puppets, but a real one, Off-Broadway, with a set designer and professional actors—one of whom would portray me, because this was, Daniela said in her breathless phone message, a play about our family.
I set down my briefcase, stuffed with my students’ bluebooks, and hit rewind. Then I called Katka.
“She’s twenty-four!” I said.
“So?”
“So when we were her age we were living under Husák, and we’re not writing autobiographical plays.”
“Your fatherly pride astounds me.”
I wondered how the wife I had known when Daniela was first born—the quiet, sunken woman who read the Czech newspapers in the library every morning and then wrote long letters to her mother in Prague, letters Katka had known would be swallowed by security—could have become this confident voice on the line.
“I’m just suggesting,” I said, “that Daniela may not know what she’s getting into.”
“Well, she’s the one with the play, and you’re an aging man who begins sentences with ‘When we were her age.’”
“Ha,” I said, and after we hung up I spent the rest of the evening calling Daniela, getting her voicemail each time. Finally, just before eleven, she answered.
“Congratulations!” I said. “I hope I’m not waking you.”
“No, now that people are actually going to see the thing, I’m up trying to fix it.”
So there was still time for revising.
“Why don’t I fly down this weekend to take you out?” I said. “Dinner, a show, whatever you want.”
“What about July?”
My yearly New York trip. “I’ll come then also.”
“You don’t want to be down here,” she said. “It’s a hundred degrees and pouring.”
I told her I’d fly her up to Maine, then. It was humid here for May, too, but being on the water was almost pleasant. She’d never been up and it was an easy ninety-minute flight; we could make a leisurely weekend of it, driving along the jagged green coastline, stopping at Ocean Street Pier for taffy. “They have this big machine,” I said, “where they’ll make your own flavor right in front of you.”
“Sorry,” she said, and my heart flopped: didn’t she used to have a sweet tooth? I had no idea what she did like. I pictured her in her apartment on 103rd Street, a glum matchbook studio she had brightened up by painting it yellow and lining the sill with ferns. She would be on her bed, doing ballet stretches, and her hair, long and thick and the color of cola, would be falling into her mouth. “I’ve got a lot of work.”
“So?” I said. “Me, too.”
“I figured as much.”
Ah, this directness was new. The young artiste emboldened by a sale. “I’m so proud of you, Daniela. I just want to celebrate,” I said, and finally her voice softened and she said okay. I knew I was laying it on thick, but what were my options? I pictured a velvet curtain pulled open to reveal the stage. I saw that Queens backdrop: the low huddle of brick tenements with the metallic sparks of the city beyond. Under the spotlight sat a girl on her stoop, pudgy and pale with dark brown bangs cut straight across. She was waiting for her father. It was his weekend; he should have arrived an hour ago. She waited and waited. The theater lights brightened as the afternoon got hotter, and when the mother returned from the third house she’d cleaned that day, she took one look at her daughter and led her inside. The mother, tired and tall in bleach-stained sweats and sneakers, called the father long-distance as her daughter slumped on the sofa, still clutching her lavender suitcase with both hands. And when the father told the truth, that somehow the Saturday pickup had become Sunday in his mind, the whole strained story of their relationship was revealed in the way the mother drew in a breath to stop from yelling, before ripping open a package of cold cuts and making their lunch.
I KNEW ANY good parent would have been thrilled. And I wanted to be. In some ways it would have been easier if I’d been a monster—at least I’d know what was coming. Instead, I just hadn’t been around much. And so, for the next few days, sitting through office hours or doing laundry in preparation for Daniela’s visit, all I could think about was being written into her life story—especially because I knew just where she had gotten her facts.
Daniela was two when Katka and I separated; she was bred on a lifetime of her mother’s tales about me. Katka, I imagined, would begin by saying that I was the one who dragged her to America in the first place. In Prague we had written anonymously with our colleagues for the journal the Chronicle of Our Time. We wrote by hand—the government had a record of everyone who owned typewriters—and late at night I’d sneak into different university buildings to type the materials. Every time we finished an issue, we’d distribute it to people we knew, who then passed it along to people they knew, until we had thousands of readers throughout the country. But when the StB still managed to link me to a typewriter, I was brought in for questioning and fired from my teaching post in the political science department. At the time Katka had seemed like the lucky one: she was on maternity leave from the economics department that term, and so avoided suspicion. But it was my name people chanted outside the university. It was my name that made international headlines and reached the desk of Saul Sandalowski, the Collins College professor who camp
aigned to get me a visa and a teaching job to avoid imprisonment.
She’d tell Daniela about packing our entire flat in three days before boarding the long flight to the States. She’d talk about the brick faculty apartment that awaited us in Vermont: boxy and carpeted and new; a million times nicer than our flat on Boivojova Street, but dimly quiet without our friends crowded around the living room, chatting away the evening. She’d talk about how my assistant professor’s salary barely covered our rent, let alone food or doctor’s bills—and she’d talk about working the early morning shift as a janitor at the college, mopping the same mahogany classrooms I lectured in, emptying the garbage can full of my students’ crumpled napkins and paper coffee cups.
Katka came from a long line of intellectuals. She was the one who was supposed to be offered a professorship in America. Her father had been shipped to a psychiatric prison for writing his own anti-government pieces when Katka was still a baby, and an enormous part of her childhood was watching her mother devote herself to getting him out. I remember meeting Katka back in university and trying to impress her with my big ideas, only to realize the political books I was reading for the first time were ones she had already dissected and gleaned an understanding of years ago. There was something so exciting, almost romantic, about watching this brawny college girl reduce my ideas to a lumpy pile of porridge, making me feel not like a rising star at the university but what I really was, deep down: a skinny kid from a family of uneducated dairy farmers in Moravia. A big part of me had always believed I was destined to ride her coattails. The only thing I had over her was fluency in English; I’d studied in London after college. I could see how hard the move to Vermont was on her. I could see it in the way she closed into herself when I dragged her to cocktail hour at the provost’s house, the way even meeting me for a quick lunch before class made her anxious. The woman who had once stood outside Party headquarters, chanting “StB Equals Gestapo,” was suddenly afraid to order at the campus sandwich shop because she didn’t understand the menu.
At this point, Katka would say the transition would have been difficult no matter what, but that I certainly didn’t help. She’d say even when I was home I wasn’t really there—at the dinner table, or lifting a crying Daniela from her crib, I always seemed to be silently working on another essay. How I ducked into my study at every possible moment, how birthdays and anniversaries slipped into a murky, irretrievable place in my mind—but how I never seemed to forget the dates of Saul Sandalowski’s dinner parties. And she would be right. But those dinners! Saul, with his floppy, wheat-colored hair and shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, clamping a hand on my shoulder as he led me inside. His stone house on Seminary Road, so mazy and grand I always got lost looking for the bathroom. I was the honored guest, the man with the stories scholars and journalists and philanthropists wanted to hear.
And so, over glasses of Borelo, I told them about the two StB officials waiting outside the political science department on U Kíže Street. “Tomás Novak?” one had said, and I had said, “Why do you need to know?” and they dragged me into a black service car. It was late April, sunny but cold, and as we pulled away from the curb, I saw people outside the university, staring away or feigning conversation so they wouldn’t be witnesses. In the headquarters, the officials led me down a long hallway into a windowless room with white walls and a steel desk with a green-eyed, round-faced man behind it. He calmly asked me to name the other writers involved in the journal. I refused. He asked again. He asked again and again, so many times that the hours began to blur and I couldn’t tell if we’d entered the next day. All over Czechoslovakia, writers were breaking down and naming names. But did they really believe sleep deprivation would crack a father with a newborn? I joked to Saul’s guests—though I remembered the moment I’d started to cry, sitting in that hard-backed chair as I recalled stories of people brought in for questioning and never heard from again. The lights were bright and one of the chair legs was shorter than the others so I felt as if I was perpetually sliding off, and every time I nodded into sleep the man would slam his desk drawer shut, jolting me awake. But I continued to refuse. And when one of Saul’s guests would ask where that bravery came from, as someone always did, I’d tell them we all had a reserve for when we needed it most. I believed that, though sometimes I wondered if I could ever depend on it again. When I was finally released, word spread and I became famous among other writers—they called me the Quietest Man.
Yet as I circulated Saul’s living room, with Brubeck on the stereo and little salmon crudités being passed around, I understood I could finally name the names of the Chronicle writers without consequence. So I told them about Ivan and Michal and Dita, and most of all about Katka Novak. My brave, brilliant wife who unfortunately wasn’t here this evening because we couldn’t find a sitter, I lied—when in truth she rarely wanted to leave the apartment except to take Daniela out in the afternoon. My wife who, for the four days I remained quiet in the interrogation room, was anything but. With a newborn on her hip, she led rallies outside the university, marching through Nové Msto and up to a podium in Wenceslas Square. She spoke with such force that she persuaded an American reporter to write a piece about me. So while people with less evidence against them were jailed, enough support came through that my family and I were given emergency clearance—and when I described Katka to Saul’s guests, it was like she was back up on the podium, drawing so large a crowd that children climbed the trees to glimpse her.
But then Saul’s dinners would end and I’d tiptoe into our silent apartment and find the new Katka in bed with the lights off. “You awake?” I’d whisper, a little drunk off the Borelo as I ran a finger along her pale, freckled arm. “No,” she’d say, rolling over, and it was only hours later as the sun came up and I walked her through campus that she’d unlock the lecture hall with her ring of janitor’s keys and say, “Imagine eating alone while I was at dinner parties.” That’s how Katka was: she’d pick up a conversation I thought had ended eons ago without ever reintroducing the topic. “I’m not saying we go home, I know we can’t,” she’d say, “but maybe New York.” Somewhere, she said, with people like us. Somewhere that didn’t feel like the edge of the earth. But before I could answer, the first students of the day would breeze past as if we were no more significant than the chalkboards and long wooden desks that filled the room.
Katka continued to push the idea of moving to New York, but things were changing for me, and fast: my two books of essays were translated and published by a university press, and I was invited to speak at colleges all over the Northeast, in Hartford and Amherst. Katka said I was being selfish. I told her I was working hard for all of us. She said I owed it to our daughter to be home more, that if I didn’t consider her feelings she’d leave me and take Daniela to stay with her second cousin in Queens. I begged her not to, but there was a secret part of me that wanted her to go, that longed to be free from the responsibility of my family. I wasn’t ready to leave Vermont—not when I felt my life there opening up, wider and wider.
Of course I didn’t really expect a woman with no money and next to no English to leave, and it was only when I made the first custody drive down the Taconic that it actually felt real. Of course I didn’t expect Katka to find steady enough work cleaning houses in New York, or that she’d parlay it into her own business with a dozen employees before eventually selling it and enrolling in business classes. And of course I didn’t expect that three years after Katka left, communism would collapse and the work I’d dedicated my life to would be done. That the dinner discussions at Saul Sandalowski’s would suddenly revolve around Bosnia and that a young female Serb would become Saul’s newest honored guest—and I certainly didn’t expect that same woman to win tenure over me. That my thirties and forties would be about mastering the delicate, tricky dance of pleading for adjunct work up and down the east coast—Albany, Durham, Burlington—and now, for the past two years, in Harpswick, Maine, which, if Katka thought of Verm
ont as the edge of the earth, would have made her feel she’d fallen off completely.
DANIELA LOOKED different than I remembered. When I’d seen her the previous summer, she still had that self-consciously sloppy, post-college look. Gone now were the flip-flops and baggy hooded sweatshirt, and with that change I would have hoped—and, deep down, expected—that she’d have continued to take after her mother. I had expected her dark hair to be wavy and loose like Katka’s. I had expected that she too would straddle the precarious line between fatness and fullness, settling on the latter, and that she would have the same thick black eyelashes that first caught my attention, more than thirty years ago, on the street outside the Clementinum Library.
The sad fact was that Daniela was turning out plainer than her mother, but she was certainly more polished and put together. Though the afternoon was hot and gray, she wore a white button-down, pointy sandals and creased jeans cuffed at the ankle. Her long hair was so flat it looked ironed, and her pale blue eyes—she had my eyes—were hidden by thin-framed glasses. Standing outside the arrival gate, she could have easily passed for one of the students who used to trudge slush into the classrooms Katka had just mopped. I’m certain that to anyone else Daniela would have appeared exhausted from her flight; rumpled, nervous and probably overwhelmed to be seeing her father after almost a year. But to me she looked like one of those girls, who, with one quick toss of her glossy hair, used to make me feel like an awkward foreigner with an ill-fitting sweater and tangled teeth.
The UnAmericans: Stories Page 8