“What’s that area like? What did you see?” Karel asked. When his father wasn’t looking he binked a sugar cube across the table toward him.
“We were bused in, bused out,” his father said. “No stops, no talking. The only thing I saw on the whole trip was an oxcart with a dead driver alongside it. Is there any sugar?”
Karel indicated the cube near his cup.
His father put his concentration into the coffee, stirring by swishing the cup around. Karel went to the window and leaned out on his elbows. He didn’t work at the zoo today, and the morning felt empty with possibility. Near the flybag an almond-shaped horned lizard stirred its camouflage and resolved itself back into sand. Some puffballs trembled in the heat.
He turned from the sill, and his father sighed and eased up and down in his chair. He had a hernia, which had been aggravated when he’d been taken into custody. He refused to say how. He had disappeared for three days and then had been returned. He refused to talk about any of it. One of the policemen had jingled coins in his trouser pockets while waiting for him to get dressed. It occurred to Karel, standing there, that his father was always intentionally and unintentionally creating absences or leaving them behind him.
They were both looking at one of Karel’s study sheets on the kitchen table. It was crosshatched with lined columns for each reptile’s common name, scientific name, size, description, voice, range, and habitat. He could make out a column: Banded Gecko. His father said, “I’ve asked you about finding me something over there. I could handle animals. Of course, that’s too much to expect.”
It was. Sometimes he felt more guilty at not having tried to land his father a job at the zoo. But he worried too much about his own position, and they wouldn’t have hired his father anyway. There was something else, too: he couldn’t imagine the reptiles in his father’s care.
His father clearly didn’t intend to look for a job today. He spent the morning wandering the house in his shorts with the sock still around his neck, eyeing Karel and making sad clucking sounds. He was in the dark little bathroom wrestling with the window sash and talking to himself when Karel left.
The sun was blinding. In the next front garden Mr. Fetscher sat hatless despite it, scraping potato peels into a metal bucket as if scraping potatoes were precision work. They nodded to each other, and Karel walked down the street to the Schieles’. When he got there he peered over the tall and prickly hedge but did not see Leda. Her mother came into view instead with clothespegs in her mouth. She caught his eye and he ducked below the hedge line, embarrassed to be so often caught hanging around. He headed instead toward the square, reminding himself to walk with some show of purpose. His father always complained that he seemed to just drift around when outside.
He believed himself to be in love with Leda. She wasn’t really his girlfriend. When she wasn’t home on weekends she was usually in the square, trapped with other girls her age in the semicompulsory League of Young Mothers. It was organized locally by a dim-witted farmer’s wife whose main qualification to the regime, besides her ferocious belief in everything she was told, was her having had eleven children. They were all glumly present at the meetings, pressed into service to swell the crowd when they would rather have been anywhere else. The league was composed otherwise of twelve-to-sixteen-year-old girls. They stood around and itched and squinted in the heat. The farmer’s wife performed for them household chores as they’d been done before the people had lost their sense of their own heroic history, their special characteristics and mission. She beat clothes on a rock. She threshed grain by hand. The girls were not the best audience. Whatever their enthusiasm (or lack of it) for the new regime there was a universal sense that in terms of household chores the glorious old ways were backbreaking and idiotic.
Boys loitered around the square to hoot and show off and otherwise establish themselves as annoyances. Karel usually found an unobtrusive position across from Leda where he could watch her in peace. She saw him sometimes and half-rolled her eyes to communicate how dreary and pointless she found all of this. At other times she didn’t notice him. At no point did she seem to recognize or acknowledge that she was the sole focus of his attention.
She wasn’t there. She’d been missing more of these things. He admired and envied her independence even as he regretted the lost opportunities to see her.
Old men contemptuous of the regime sat under the café awnings and followed the farmer’s wife’s efforts with head shakes and derisive low comments, hawking and spitting in the dust. She was holding up a whisk, to a purpose Karel could not make out. He decided to wait around on the chance Leda would show up late, and because he had nothing else to do.
Besides the old men in the café he could see three uniformed men lounging around a table. They wore the pale gray uniforms with black-and-white trim of the Civil Guard. The one clearly in charge was a handsome man with impressive cheekbones. They seemed uninterested in the league. One of the old men bumped the one in charge, and then said something. The other two uniformed men looked away. The one in charge seemed composed. He stood, took the old man’s hand in his, and flexed it back onto itself, so that Karel could hear the cracking where he was. The old man howled and went down on his knees, and the one in charge let him go. There was a small uproar. The other old men surrounded the one in charge, who turned from them and took his seat as if he had no further interest in the incident. Karel thought something would happen but the uniformed man turned, again, and looked at the old men, and they stopped what they were doing. They helped the hurt one up. They escorted him across the square. He held his hand out in front of him and made small outcries. The uniformed man looked over at Karel and saw him watching. He did not look upset or surprised. The other two uniformed men leaned closer to say something to him, and he nodded, still looking at Karel.
Karel’s face heated, and he backed into the shade. Some children on the other side of the square were playing a game involving beating each other on the arms with whip-like reeds. The dust rose at their feet like miniature weather patterns. Where the road began to lead out of town, passersby swerved to touch a begging midget for luck. Under the awning near the uniformed men a large dog, tawny in the sunlight, placed a paw on a smaller dog’s back, as if to hold it still for contemplation.
He moved farther from the café and the uniformed man’s gaze. With Leda gone he tried eyeing other girls. He felt the uniformed man watching with him. A blonde too old for the meeting sat on a bench in the shade with a vacant expression and her hands crossed on her knees. Her lower lip was drawn slightly into her mouth. She bobbed her head every so often against the occasional flies. He looked back at the café, and the uniformed men were gone.
He had written on his last school essay that he was not unhappy never talking to anyone or getting to know anyone well. His teacher had disapproved and commented on his unhealthy attitude. He’d thought of explaining later that like everyone else he wanted to be part of things, but had not. He was not popular in school. He had his reptiles and the Reptile House, but besides Leda, no friends. He had at some point become a hesitant, stammering speaker, and he blamed his father. He was excluded from all cliques, including the outsiders’ clique. At times he would stand in a group listening to the talk and someone would say something incomprehensible or meaningless and the group would break into noisy laughter, leaving him standing there like an imbecile, like a tourist subjected to obscure jokes by the natives.