He blinked. He could feel pressure in his throat, like the impulse to swallow. “Is this my mother?” he asked.
Kehr nodded. He had had it sent, he said. It had been in one of the old files.
Karel held it before him, trying to overlay the image on his blurred and incomplete memory. Kehr put a hand on Karel’s shin and then took it away. The face was so concrete and open to study that it was disorienting and made him suspicious, even as he recognized how moved he was by its revelatory power: this is her, this is what she looked like.
“This is my mother,” he said, to himself, and while he continued to look Kehr stood up and left the room, closing the door behind him.
He stood the photo against the wall and turned off the light. The face gazed down at him whitely from the darkness. It was as if he had somebody else now to think about, his father, Albert, Leda, his mother from the tiled floor, and now this woman. When he slept that night they all mixed together in ways his dreams didn’t make clear.
The next morning he heard a banging in the kitchen and went downstairs. Kehr was on his back under the sink with a huge range of tools. The others were out. The ringtail was cowering under the kitchen table from the noise.
“Good morning,” Kehr said. “Time to fix the plumbing. I made some coffee.”
Karel poured himself a cup and sat down. The ringtail scrabbled away at his approach.
Kehr clanked and banged away unseen. Karel sipped his coffee. This was better than the stuff he made. Someone had cleaned the pot. “Time to put a little work into this house,” Kehr said.
Karel rubbed his eyes, disoriented by the attempted domesticity. “Don’t you have people who could do that?” he asked.
“Give me a hand,” Kehr said. “Hand me the wrench.” His hand waved and flopped around outside the cabinet to indicate its search.
Karel took another sip and then got up and brought the mug with him. He knelt on the floor by Kehr’s legs. He could smell urine from the ringtail somewhere when he got this low. He surveyed the tools in front of him and picked up something plausible. “Is this it?” he asked.
Kehr leaned his chin on his chest from inside the cabinet to look. “That’s it,” he said. “You know your tools.” He took it and went back to clanging. Why specific tools were important if he was just going to bang away, Karel didn’t know.
Nobody’d done anything about this plumbing for a while, Kehr remarked.
“My father always said he was going to,” Karel said.
Kehr didn’t answer. There was the high metallic wrenching sound of the threading on the pipes going.
“You’re going to have to hold the catch basin here a minute,” Kehr said. He guided Karel’s hand to the piece and showed him where to support it. Karel braced his other arm on the floor. The ringtail had curled around a kitchen chair in the far corner of the room and was working on one of the legs with its fine, saw-edged teeth.
“We’ll handle this,” Kehr said. “The two of us will straighten this out.”
“I wanted to thank you for the picture,” Karel said. He got a better angle under the catch basin. “Do you have anything else like that?”
Kehr made an appreciative noise and shifted around on his back. “Look at this,” he said. “Come in here a little farther.”
Karel shifted hands on the basin and edged into the darkness under the cabinet. He was stretching over Kehr in the tiny space. He waited for his eyes to adjust.
Kehr pointed with a hand near his cheek at the part of the wall laid open for the feeder pipe. Karel waited and then could make out coiled movement inside. He looked closer. It was a thin black snake with a long head. It opened its mouth at them, and Karel could see the pale eggs it encircled.
“Whip snake,” Kehr said. “A striped whip snake.”
“That’s right,” Karel said. “How’d you know that?”
Kehr snorted. “Zoology is a school for precise feeling,” he said. “‘The eye of the naturalist is as penetrating and as scrupulous as the eye of the sniper.’”
Karel made a puzzled face for his own benefit in the darkness. He asked what that meant.
“That means there’s a lot to be gained by doing what you do, by learning what you know,” Kehr said.
“There is?” Karel said.
“There is,” Kehr said. He was unwrapping old joint-sealing tape from an S-shaped piece he wanted to extract. “I’m always interested in people who take the time and effort to study what’s around them. They’re practicing seeing with clarity and precision.”
“I guess that’s true,” Karel said.
It was true, Kehr said. It was both a gift and a discipline. There was a thump and a light clatter, and then a tiny lapping sound: the ringtail had turned over the dish of water and was drinking off the floor. It was what his country required of him, Kehr said. And it was what his country needed: more people who could do that.
“How’d you know I knew about stuff like that?” Karel asked.
“Abilities like that are hard to hide,” Kehr said, and Karel felt flattered. Then it occurred to him that there were nine thousand books and study sheets on reptiles up in his room.
“I grew up almost completely alone,” Kehr said.
“You did?” Karel said. As close as he was in the darkness he couldn’t see Kehr’s eyes.
“I did,” Kehr said. “Nature for me was something I could learn about and lose myself in, something that demonstrated order and reason: comparative study, classification, the relations of the total design.”
“I don’t know,” Karel said uncomfortably. “I think I just think reptiles are great.”
“And so they are,” Kehr said. “Look. Look at the way her head scales are edged in white. Little crescents.” The whip snake raised its head farther, watching them with sidelong intent.
Karel saw. Kehr was not quizzing him and not judging him. “See the way she tries to distract you from the nest?” he said.
Kehr murmured he did. They were still close in the darkness under the cabinet, and Karel began to register the heat and stillness. His arm ached. He was still supporting the catch basin.
“Let’s finish this and leave Mother alone,” Kehr said.
The threads on the pipe section that was the problem were now stripped and had to be refiled. Kehr had him let the catch basin down, and they climbed out from under the cabinet. He gave Karel a part of the filing job and showed him how to use the reamer and how to smooth and clear the diagonal grooves.
“Do you work with animals?” Karel said.
“Not technically,” Kehr said. “I work with people. But the training with one helps me with the other.”
“How?” Karel said.
“I’ll tell you sometime,” he said. “What I do is a lot of questioning.” He hesitated before the word. He nodded toward the door. “If you and I walked into your shed, we could see certain things in some of the rabbits, couldn’t we? Which ones were like this, which ones were like that.”
“I guess,” Karel said. “You mean like who’s most scared and stuff.”
“That’s what I mean,” Kehr said. “And when you pick one out for dinner, you don’t do it randomly, do you?”
“No,” Karel said, realizing that fully for the first time. While Kehr worked he thought about that.
“So you had no interest in joining the Party,” Kehr said, as if summarizing an old story. He was absorbed in the pipe. “Did you ever consider joining the partisans?”
Karel was immediately alert. “No,” he said. “Nobody asked me. I don’t know any partisans.”
Kehr arched his eyebrows. “I don’t have much against the partisans,” he finally said. “They’re simply activists, like me. They act. If I weren’t doing what I am doing I’d probably be doing what they’re doing. If their fathers hadn’t been Republicans they’d probably all be in the Civil Guard right now.”