“What is this?” Albert asked pleasantly.
“Do you have identification?” the older soldier said. He was a corporal and had his breast pocket lined with candy bars.
“To go home?” Albert said. He began halfheartedly to fumble through his pockets.
“You live here?” the corporal said.
“You saw me go by this morning, when you were unloading these things,” Albert said. “I wondered what you were doing. The gun is unnecessary.”
From his wallet he extracted a card, his membership in the Herpetological Association.
“What is this?” the corporal said, after a pause. He held the card as if it were an attempt to humiliate him.
“It’s the Herpetological Association,” Albert said. “I’m an officer. We study animals, reptiles. Lizards?”
“Why are you loafing near here?” the younger soldier said. Karel speculated on his swollen eye.
“Everything can be explained,” Albert said. “I work at the zoo—”
“If you move rapidly like that my friend’ll kill you,” the corporal said. Karel felt a chill at the back of his head. The corporal handed the card back. “And who’s this? This is your son?”
“I was looking for more identification,” Albert said. “No.”
“This is not your son?” the corporal said. This seemed to open whole new vistas of problems.
“He works for me,” Albert said, near despair. “He was coming over for lunch. I’m very tired.”
“Is that a hobby of yours?” the corporal said. “Inviting young boys over for lunch?”
The younger soldier guffawed.
Albert was silent. He peered down his block. The corporal looked over another identification card and speculated to the younger soldier what Albert would do or had already done with Karel. The younger soldier turned his head to use the good eye to listen. He said to Karel, “What are you looking at?” The corporal laughed.
The younger soldier hawked and spat and then moved aside and let Karel and Albert pass.
“Happy hunting,” the corporal called. Albert turned back to look, and then led Karel to his house.
In the entryway Karel cleared his throat and commented, to change the mood, on a fat, flowered tea cozy half covering the telephone. The flowers had smiling faces.
Albert turned on the radio and sat at the kitchen table. He rubbed his eyes with his palms. He said, “You want to know about the tea cozy. So. There’s a man named Kehr. From the Civil Guard. He knows many surprising things about me, it turns out.” He got up and went through the cabinets and pulled out a box of crackers and a jar of olives, which Karel hoped wasn’t his idea of lunch.
“People have been here to look at my phone,” he said. He pointed to his ear, and Karel gaped at the tea cozy, amazed.
“Or it could’ve been a neighbor,” he said, sighing. “I was supposed to have been listening to foreign broadcasts, and the idiot next store could’ve said something. We go at it every so often. She beats her rugs over the fence while I try to nap.”
“You listen to foreign broadcasts?” Karel said.
Albert made a disgusted noise and refused to answer.
Karel considered the tea cozy. Suppose his father had said something stupid or wrong somewhere? The more he thought about it, the more miraculous it seemed his father had stayed out of trouble this long.
“What would they do to you?” he asked. “If they thought something like that?”
Albert dumped the olives into a dish and brought out bread and cheese. When he lifted the bread from the cabinet the shelving lifted with it and Karel saw that it had a false bottom, a secret space. Albert glanced at him, and Karel had looked away in time. “Turn me over to somebody like our friends at the roadblock,” he said. “Or one of the centers.”
“To be reeducated?” Karel asked.
Albert looked at him sharply. “That’s one way of putting it,” he said.
“Suppose that happened to my father?” Karel said.
Albert sliced the bread and then the cheese, and arranged the slices with a hurried sense of the right way to do things. “Your father didn’t seem particularly opposed to this regime,” he said finally.
That was true, Karel reflected. He felt better.
Albert indicated the food and took a piece of cheese to demonstrate.
Karel laid some of the thicker cheese slices on a piece of bread and ate standing up. The cheese was very sharp and the bread was dry, a day or two old. He was thirsty. He asked what Albert thought about the war, and Albert said only that the war was obviously what the majority wanted.
“You think?” Karel said.
“By the majority I mean the Praetor,” Albert said.
When Karel asked him after a pause what he thought the nomads wanted, he said, “To be left alone.”
One of the olives tasted horrible, and he wasn’t sure if he should spit it out. It made him more thirsty. He sat down without being asked, chewing endlessly and eyeing the water faucet. Albert poured himself a glass of water while Karel watched and drank the entire thing and put the glass in the sink.
After lunch they went into the shaded and gloomy living room, and Albert surveyed his sofa. It looked like he was getting ready to nap. He suggested Karel try his neighbor, who was working for the new transportation board and might have issued Karel’s father a travel pass. She’d be home now, for lunch.
So Karel went next door and followed her around like a dog waiting for an answer to his question. She was directing workmen laying in plaster sculptures in her rock garden. When she finally put her attention to Karel she announced she had no idea what he was talking about, and that no Roeder had been through her office, and how had he found out where she worked in the first place?
On the way back he could see from the street Albert talking intently with a young man in the living room, the two of them sitting forward on the sofa and nodding. Albert had his two index fingers together and moved them apart to demonstrate something. When Karel knocked and came in the young man stood up and looked at him and then thanked Albert for the directions. Albert wished him luck, and the man left.
Trying to find the square, Albert said. He asked how things had gone. He said again not to worry, the thing to do was to check at home and give it a little time before getting excited. He’d written a number on his palm, and when he saw Karel notice it he made a casual fist.
The house smelled of mildew. Albert settled back on the sofa and closed his eyes and draped an arm over his face. Karel could see his nose in the crook of his elbow. He said things were a mess everywhere and transportation was impossible. Karel’s father was probably sitting in a café somewhere worrying about him. He brought up the Komodos, which were refusing to reproduce in captivity. He asked Karel if he had any ideas. When Karel didn’t answer he guessed that all of this clumsy coming and going by the Civil Guard wasn’t helping. He talked about Seelie as now so aggressive that the prospects of artificially impregnating her were fading fast. He frowned, finally, and abandoned the subject.
He lay silent for a while, perhaps hoping Karel would leave. He seemed relaxed, but his foot jiggled impatiently. Karel felt he had nowhere to go after this, and looked around the room hopelessly. There was a plaque above the sofa framing a silhouette of a rattlesnake’s head. There was a mounted photo on the lamp table of Albert kneeling beside a netted tortoise. Some skeletons were jumbled together across the room in a breakfront. He’d imagined endless interesting things in Albert’s house, and none of these gave him any pleasure. He stood uncertainly beside the sofa, unhappy where he was and with no idea where he could go.