“No,” Daniela said. “Let’s check out the town.”
But she didn’t move. Instead we both sat there holding our mugs and staring at our laps, and suddenly it was like this could have been any one of our visits—in Burlington, Durham or, the last time she was allowed to stay with me as a kid, when she was ten and I still lived in Albany.
It was one of those interminable winters like the kind I’d known in Prague, where you don’t see the sun for months and your life seems like it’s being filmed in black and white. That year had been especially hard: Saul Sandalowski was hosting a South African performance poet, always apologizing for losing touch but things were just so busy. Even my old friend Ivan, who had immigrated to Toronto that fall, would go silent when I called and tried to talk politics. We’d been close friends since university and saw each other every week to work on the Chronicle, and at first I’d thought his silence on the phone was the residual fear of tapped lines. But after a few conversations I sensed he just wasn’t interested—he was working double shifts at a sporting-goods store, trying to save enough to move his wife and sons to the suburbs, and after we joked around and updated each other, our calls grew shorter until they finally ceased altogether.
But in the midst of my self-pity, a small press in Minneapolis had asked me to write an introduction to a new anthology of dissident writings. It felt good to be on a tight deadline again, and what I really wanted to do the Sunday of our father-daughter weekend was brew a pot of coffee and stand at the sink eating cereal straight from the box, thinking aloud. But every time I walked into the kitchen Daniela was there, wanting a push-up pop or a cheese-and-cracker pack or some other kid-friendly snack I’d forgotten to buy. Or to show me the imaginary city she’d built out of water bottles and paper-towel rolls and my coffee canister, the grounds of which she’d spilled all over the linoleum. And when I snapped that I was busy, she followed me into my cramped office and said she’d work then, too.
So she crouched on the carpet with her Hello Kitty pencil case and began, amid my piles of papers, a story. It was hard to stay annoyed while she sat writing with an eraser tucked behind her ear: her vision of an academic. I loved watching her bent over those pages, and I even loved the smell: the room smelled fresh with pencil shavings. We were quiet for hours. Every so often she’d sense my presence and look up, but then, just as fast, she’d return to her story, and I loved that, too. I loved it because I got it. I knew that feeling of wanting more than anything to stay uninterrupted in your head, because there your thoughts came out with confidence and ease, as if, at that moment, a little bit of your life was lining perfectly into place.
But when I looked at her story that evening, I was disappointed: she was merely writing her way into a book that already existed—Daniela, the Witch and the Wardrobe—without even changing the other characters’ names. And I was more than disappointed when I discovered that the paper she’d used to write and illustrate it on were the first eighteen pages of my introduction. These were still the typewriter years; I’d have to retype the entire piece before the morning deadline, and I still had a stack of student essays to grade.
Daniela saw my frustration and crawled onto my lap, still in her pajamas, her breath warm and a little milky. But she was too big, and beneath her weight I felt hot and crowded, and at that second I’d known what I had feared all along: I just didn’t have it in me to take care of another person.
“Get out,” I said, pushing her off. “You just gave me about five more hours of work.”
But Daniela didn’t move. Instead she stood there swallowing as if willing herself not to cry. Her hair was falling into her face and she kept pushing it back with her hand. I carried her into the spare bedroom and slammed the door, then walked into the study and slammed my door, and I didn’t emerge until Katka’s headlights glowed through the window. Daniela stood in the doorway of her room. She had changed into corduroys and a sweater, and when her mother walked inside, she seemed to express everything that had happened just by blinking. It was deeply uncomfortable watching my daughter wordlessly tattle on me. I’d only ever seen that kind of unspoken closeness once before, between my father and the other men out in the dairy in Moravia. They’d survived ice storms and village raids together, and though they rarely said a word to each other, even as a boy I knew an understanding existed between them that I would always be excluded from.
“Give us a couple minutes, Daniela,” Katka said, flicking on the television for her and following me into the kitchen. Usually during these Sunday night pickups I’d turn on the kettle and Katka would drag a chair to the table and fill me in on Daniela’s friends and parent-teacher meetings and any news she heard from her family in Prague. She always had good stories from the brownstones she cleaned, about the arguments she overheard and the untouched cartons of yogurt and juice those rich people let rot in their refrigerators. We’d laugh as though we were above them in some way, and sometimes, sitting together long after our tea mugs were empty, it would feel as though Katka weren’t talking with me simply for our daughter but because she truly enjoyed my company.
This time Katka stood against the refrigerator with her arms across her chest, and before I even opened my mouth I knew anything I’d say, even “You want something to drink?” would sound loud and defensive.
“Daniela’s not staying here again,” she said.
“You don’t even know what happened.” I went into the study and came back with Daniela’s scrawlings all over my introduction. I fanned the evidence across the table. “Tell me you wouldn’t have yelled.”
Katka began to gather Daniela’s things from the floor—her backpack, her schoolbooks, her socks, balled beneath the table—saying that from now on I could come to New York to see our daughter. “Do you have any idea how much Daniela looks forward to these weekends?” she said. “All her friends have birthday parties and softball games back home and she never cares about missing them when she’s coming here. I’ve always known you saw her as a burden, but you had to let her know that, too?”
And when I said that was ridiculous, Katka looked around, at the coffee grounds on the table; at the dishes, sticky with food and littering the counter; then back at me, as if I were just one more thing preventing this small, dirty apartment from being childproofed, and started using words like “selfishness” and “neglect” with the same force that had drawn people from all over the city into Wenceslas Square.
HARPSWICK WAS small, just under a thousand excluding the students, and I felt its size even more now with Daniela beside me. We’d exhaust my entire afternoon of activities in under an hour, once we made our way down the two blocks of shops, circled the tiny college, and there was nothing to do but look at the bay. I walked slowly and feigned interest in the window display of a bookshop. “Pretty lamp,” Daniela said, and I followed her in.
It was one of those stores designed to rip off weekenders, with more overpriced nautical picture books than novels and Tiffany lamps like the one Daniela had pointed out. I watched her scan the bestsellers, then poke through the tiny classics section. As she made her way to the even smaller political science shelf, I watched her eyes move through the N’s. I always reflexively looked for my books, too, though they’d gone out of print fifteen years ago and I had trouble even special-ordering them online. It touched me to think that every time Daniela walked into a bookstore she thought of my essays, but it also struck me as pathetic that she’d probably never once found them, and I flushed at her witnessing another of my failures. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere but in the N section where my books were not. I lifted the Tiffany lamp out of the display window and brought it to the counter. “We’ll take this.”
“You don’t need to buy that,” Daniela said.
“It’s a gift.”
“How am I supposed to get it on the plane?”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said. “You see anything else?” I tried to remember the setup of her apartment.
“I don’t want any of this
stuff.”
“You said the lamp was pretty.”
“Would you just put it back?”
But I couldn’t stop. I pulled a mug off the shelf. I grabbed a globe. What a perfect, fitting end to the play: the aging man darting around this store while his daughter slunk back, embarrassed and ashamed. I wanted to buy Daniela the lamp and a stack of books and the plastic reading glasses dangling near the register and anything else if she would only stop writing this play, and as I watched her move through the shop, putting things back where they belonged, I felt myself starting to spin and finally I blurted, “Do you really have to do this?”
“What?”
“Write about our family.”
She stared at me. “Amazing,” she said, “that you of all people would tell me what to write.”
She swung the door open and headed toward the water. She was walking swiftly, purse thumping her hip, her long dark hair ribboning out behind her. I caught up with her at the dock. She sat on a bench and put her face in her hands. She was right. I had asked her to do the one thing that went against everything I knew about myself, and yet I still wanted to destroy every copy of her play.
“Listen,” I said, “I know what you wrote.”
“How could you?”
“Your mom.”
“She doesn’t know.”
“She told me everything,” I said, and it was only when the words were out that I understood what I was doing. “So you might as well come clean.”
“But she doesn’t know,” Daniela said. “You’re lying,” she said slowly, almost like a question.
“She told me all about it,” I said. “Last night on the phone.”
And right then I remembered how I’d felt in that hard-backed chair in the interrogation room, when the StB agent sat behind his desk and told me things I never would have believed about the people I was closest to, that my friend Ivan from the Chronicle was the one who had linked me to the typewriter, that the rest of the group was quick to name me the ringleader. So much of me had known to trust my instincts, but the betrayal had felt so real in that bright, windowless room. “We had a good long talk after you went to bed.”
“But she never read it.”
“Maybe you left a copy lying around her house. Maybe she found it on your computer.” I met her eyes. “Or maybe she went into your apartment when you were at work one day, just to have a look around. She has a key, right?”
When Daniela nodded, I said, “Then that’s probably it. Mothers have their ways. Your mother certainly does.”
Daniela was gazing down at the row of shops, then behind us at the water, as if searching for a way out of this, and I said, “So tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Say it, Daniela,” I said. “The play isn’t about our family. It’s just about me, isn’t it?”
And that was when her eyes filled up, and there she was, the Daniela I’d always known, whimpering and vulnerable and small. “Just tell me,” I said, and when she didn’t respond, I said it over and over, until finally her voice broke and she said, “Yes.”
I watched a fisherman sift through his bait bucket and pull out a frozen minnow. The air was salty and humid and behind us boats bobbed silently in the harbor.
“Daniela,” I said.
But she wouldn’t look at me, and I couldn’t blame her—I didn’t want to look at myself then, either. Suddenly I had no idea what to say next. Part of me was saddened that my daughter was the kind of person who would crack so quickly, that the wall she’d built around herself could be so easily kicked down, but a bigger part just needed to know how the play would begin. Would it start with the time I forgot to pick her up in Queens, or when I missed her birthday because I was giving a talk in Hartford? Would it start with that last visit to Albany?
Daniela turned to me then and said, “It’s called The Quietest Man. It’s set during your last year in Prague, and how when you were brought in for questioning, you were too fearless to name names.”
I was so stunned I just kept standing there, wondering if I’d heard her correctly. Finally I sat beside her on the bench and said, “I’m floored, Daniela.”
Her face relaxed and I thought I saw something real coming to the surface. “I’ve been so nervous all weekend. I thought you’d think it was stupid that I was writing about something I’d never lived through. That you’d see it onstage and think, She got my life all wrong. I kept trying to imagine what it was like for you.”
“It was nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing,” she said. “They starved you. They kept you awake for days. You could have died.”
I decided not to mention the beef and gravy they fed me every day of the interrogation. The guard who pushed an extra chair under my legs so I could sleep a couple hours that first night. Relief was slowly settling in, and what I really wanted was to lie down, right here on this rusted iron bench, and close my eyes for a very long time.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you about it all weekend,” she said. “The hardest thing to get right is the meetings. When you put together the Chronicle.”
I thought back to those days. This I could help her with. This was the one thing I wanted to remember. Daniela was staring up at me, a more captive audience than anyone at my readings had ever been, than all of Saul Sandalowski’s guests combined. I leaned back and started to talk.
We always gathered at Ivan’s after lunch on Sundays to work on the journal, I told her—his was the one flat we were convinced wasn’t bugged—and as Katka and I rounded the corner to Táboritská Street we’d grow quiet and glance behind us. I told Daniela about the stray cats that darted up Ivan’s dim stairwell, and how once inside we’d slip off our shoes and close the curtains and work silently in his kitchen, all five of us cramped around the rickety wood table. We had to be completely silent, I told her, just in case we were wrong about his place being tapped—so much that when I needed to use the toilet I poured water into the bowl very slowly instead of flushing.
“We’d stay at that table for hours,” I continued, “until it got too dark to see.” I told her we wrote by hand, on thin sheets of paper I’d gather at the end of the evening to transcribe at the university, and the more I talked, the farther I felt from the bench where we were sitting. Far from Harpswick and all the other towns on this side of the Atlantic that I had tried so unsuccessfully to make my home, unpacking and repacking my books and dishes so often I finally started flattening my moving boxes and storing them in the garage. As I talked, these places started to look like nothing more than spots on a map I had marked with pushpins, and my memories of those afternoons in Ivan’s flat felt so clear it was almost as if I were back inside, the linoleum floor cool beneath my bare feet, involved in the single most important project of my life.
I was taken the year we were covering the trial of Jií Vondráek, a colleague of ours accused of crafting his syllabus from banned books. The government hadn’t allowed any journalists into the courthouse and none of it was being reported in Rudé právo, so we gathered as much information as we could from Jií’s wife and mother, and every Sunday at Ivan’s we’d write up what we had learned. I remembered Katka beside me at the table, her forehead wrinkled like linen as she worked. I’d never been a quick writer—with the luxury of time I could spend half a day piecing together a sentence—but Katka thought in full paragraphs, and sometimes we’d all stop and watch her small white hand move briskly across the page, rarely crossing out lines. All of us assumed she’d be the writer our children and grandchildren associated with the movement, and that was the thing, I told Daniela—everything she’d probably heard about that time was about surveillance and poverty and fear, and that was all true. But there was also something beautiful about those silent afternoons as long stripes of light came in through the corners of the curtains.
“You could hear the whole city downstairs,” I said, “but it was like nothing outside that kitchen mattered.”
Dan
iela’s knees were tucked beneath her and her hands were clasped. She looked like a girl then, pale and a little eager. “Was I there, too?”
She wasn’t. Bringing a crying baby into Ivan’s flat would have been too risky, and the most annoying part of those mornings was trying to figure out what to do with her when the downstairs neighbors weren’t around to babysit. But I saw how much Daniela wanted to hear that she’d been there. And if not in Ivan’s flat then at least somewhere in the story I was telling—and I deeply wished I could say that she was. I wished I could say I thought about her during those meetings—as much as I wished I could say I remembered birthday parties and pickup times and to stock my house with juice boxes and string cheese before her visits. That I found it endearing that she built imaginary cities and wrote her way into preexisting books, that I had flown her up this weekend not out of fear but from the selfless and uncomplicated pride her mother seemed to feel so effortlessly. I wished I could say I was the kind of person who turned to Daniela then and told her it was her mother’s story as much as it was mine—that it was Katka who deserved the attention, rather than being forced to sit in the audience, yet again, while I took center stage. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. Because I knew that with her play, Daniela was giving me the chance to feel relevant in the world again, and all she seemed to want in return was to hear she’d once been relevant in mine.
So I lied.
“Every Sunday afternoon, I’d bundle you up in a knit blanket and wheel you down Táboritská Street. I’d park your stroller outside Ivan’s flat and stare at you, completely flummoxed. The first time you opened your eyes and focused: it was on me.” The warm afternoon was all around us; in the distance I could hear the calls of the gulls. “Inside Ivan’s kitchen we’d all take turns passing you around. But I loved it when you came back to me. You were so good—you never made a sound. It was like you knew how dangerous a cry could be in that room. I’d put down my pen and whisper the same song my mother did when I was a baby. Tichá Malá Panenka. And you were. You were my silent little doll.”
The UnAmericans: Stories Page 10