It looked unchanged. His reptile study sheets and the long-abandoned scraps of a letter to Leda were the first things he checked. They hadn’t been moved. From two canteens he kept near the bed since his father had left he drank a cup of water, a cup of warm pineapple juice, and another cup of water. He thought he should get one of those sweating metal pitchers with removable caps. He lay on his bed and listened to boxes and furniture being moved below, the noises punctuated by the occasional chicken in distress sounding like one of the laugh boxes from the amusement shops of his old city.
He went back downstairs after a half hour or so wait. “I need to know about my father,” he said.
“Why are you bothering me already?” Kehr said. “Do you want our relationship to get off on the wrong foot?”
Karel sat down. Everything was going wrong. “It’s just that I haven’t heard anything from him at all,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on.” He realized with some horror that he was close to tears.
“You didn’t get a letter from him?” Kehr asked.
Karel looked up guiltily. “No,” he said.
Kehr raised his hands as if standing figurines on his palm. “You feel you’ve been badly treated,” he said. “And maybe you have.”
Karel felt the self-pity well up in him and had to look away. Most of the boxes and both assistants were in the spare room off the living room and the door was shut.
“It’s now one-thirty,” Kehr said. He laid two papers carefully over one another as if matching the edges of puzzle pieces while Karel watched. “The animals have been stacked in the back near your storage shed, which you will clear out for them. At three we’ll talk.”
So Karel spent an hour and a half piling the junk from the shed into a heap behind it and arranging the rabbit and chicken cages so they’d get the most of the light and breeze from the doorway. The rabbits hunkered down and watched him with a blank alertness. He caught Mrs. Witz peeking over at him from across the street, but when he stood up to talk to her she went inside.
At three he came back to the kitchen. Kehr was still sitting at the table. They were alone in the house. There was a large olive field telephone dangling a bundled and corded tangle of wires on the kitchen counter. Beside it there was a stack of thin blue books tied with string. They were titled Psychological Operations in Partisan War. On the cover of the top one the words were placed one under the other with rows of heads between each. The heads had holes in the foreheads.
Kehr was finishing up with some papers held down with a paperweight that looked like a small hipbone. While Karel got a drink of water and then sat opposite him he rearranged other objects on the table (a set of files, the notepad from the Fetschers’, a small cup) as if they were required for what was to follow.
So, he said. Karel put his glass down. Kehr picked it up and took a sip himself. What were Karel’s politics?
Karel said he didn’t have any.
“Tell me the story of your mother,” Kehr said.
Karel stared. His temples and cheeks felt cold. He felt a vista had opened to afford him a view of just how little he understood what was going on.
“What do you know about her?” he said. “Did you talk to my father about her?”
“She left you when you were very young,” Kehr said. “She had artistic ambitions. She died young.”
My father talks to him about her and won’t talk to me, Karel thought.
“She was, I’m to understand, a very intelligent woman,” Kehr said. “Strong-willed.”
“How do you know all this?” Karel asked.
“I know a good deal,” Kehr said. “You talk. Then I’ll talk.”
So Karel talked about his mother, to this Special Assistant from the Sixth Bureau. He told him what he could remember. He withheld his most specific memory, of his mother embracing him on the tile floor. He was surprised how much it distressed him to talk about this.
Kehr sighed, looking at him. He seemed sympathetic. “Your mother was associated with one of the groups opposed to the NUP in the early days,” he said. “Artists’ political collective. Not very astute, not very dangerous.” There were other details, he added, they could talk about some other time.
“That’s it?” Karel said. “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
“Some other time,” Kehr said. “As I said.”
They sat in silence, looking at each other.
“What are you doing here?” Karel asked. “What do you want from me?”
Kehr explained he was organizing Armed Propaganda Teams for the area. He had other duties as well. The patch Karel was staring at with the sword and the snakes was an antipartisan badge.
Karel looked back at his eyes. “Where’d my father go?” he said. “Did you take him away?”
“Your father has not disappeared,” Kehr said. “As far as we’re concerned, no one disappears. We maintain a comprehensive criminal registry. All citizens are recorded there. No one loses himself.”
“The radio’s always talking about somebody you’re looking for,” Karel said.
“They’re like beans in a coffee grinder,” Kehr said affably. “They get stirred around, and sometimes the big ones displace the little ones, but they all move into the grinder.”
Karel pondered the image.
“Your father,” Kehr said, “happily for everyone, chose another route. Your father chose to serve his country and joined the Party. He joined, in fact, the Civil Guard.”
Karel’s mouth was dry. “Why would he do that?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”
“You’re asking me to speculate,” Kehr said. “As for the first question, I imagine he wanted to be part of a movement in which somebody like him — a failure in the eyes of his social class, in the eyes of his family, in his own eyes — can start from scratch. As for the second, I have no idea. But maybe he explains.” He produced a letter from the pile and held it out to Karel.
While he read it Karel felt the same shame he’d felt when Albert had criticized his father. His father’s letter was hand-written, and the penmanship if anything was worse than he remembered:
Karel,
I know I didn’t handle this in the best way possible but it had to be done this way for reasons you will soon see. Special Assistant Kehr has been good to me and you should cooperate with him. I’ve discovered two things I can do welclass="underline" organize and facilitate. Right now I spend a lot of time outside town. I’ll try to visit soon. I’ve given Special Assistant Kehr some money to buy a quarter of a ham or better. Make sure you eat right or you’ll get sick. See you soon—
Your father S. Roeder
“The ham we already bought,” Kehr said.
“This letter was sealed,” Karel said.
“Magic,” Kehr said. He shrugged.
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Karel said. “He didn’t tell me why he did it.”
“He did it for the reason people like him do it,” Kehr said. Karel could hear the impatience and contempt in his voice. “To get a job, to keep a job, to get a better job.”
“He didn’t have to,” Karel said.
“No, he didn’t,” Kehr said. “No one has to display intelligence or ambition. He certainly hadn’t before that.”
Karel stood up. “I don’t want to talk anymore,” he said. Stasik and Schay came out of the spare room and looked in on them both. Kehr nodded at them and they left the house.
Karel was fingering the edge of the table. “He just left,” he said. “He made all sorts of promises, that he wouldn’t do what my mother did, that he’d get a good job. Then he just left.”
Kehr was looking at him silently, as if he’d expected something like this. “Broken promises helped make this country what it is,” he said.