“So you’re going to go by this Sunday?” Karol asked incredulously.
“Yes,” Leda said. “Yes.”
“What if I can’t get any stuff by then?” he said, panicked. “Information?”
“Then I’m going anyway,” she said.
“But they’ll pick you up,” he said. “How will you get anywhere?”
“Do you understand what’s going to happen to Nicholas?” she said.
The metal table rang with the question. They shifted in their chairs, and noticed the quiet. The older couple listened in for a minute more, and then the man cleared his throat.
“I better go talk to this guy,” Karel said. “I better go now.”
“Why do you call him ‘this guy’?” Leda said. She was looking at him suspiciously. “What’s his name again?”
“Kehr,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
She continued to look. “Nothing,” she said finally. Then she said she didn’t want to call and they should meet back here tomorrow.
“I need more time, I think,” he said.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” she said, getting up. “Just find out what you can. If you’re not going I have to start figuring out what I’m going to do.”
She waved, once, from across the street. The waiter came and asked if he was ready to order. The older couple at the next table chuckled together. They were sharing a piece of honey cake. He got up while the waiter waited and pushed in his chair before he left the table, to make up in a small way for his not having bought anything.
He had two days. On top of that he had to meet with her tomorrow, too. No one was home when he returned. The spare room was locked. He sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and looked at two spoons crossed and balanced over a coffee cup as if the configuration meant something and had been arranged for him to find. The ringtail tracked by in a jaunty trot.
It was what he wanted, to run away with her. But now he was confused and frightened, as if he’d been asked to do something terrible. He owed Kehr something. He owed his father something. He had the impression they were both out there somewhere waiting for him to make a disastrous mistake. But he remembered too Leda’s face at the restaurant: she was equally convinced he’d fail in the opposite way.
He snorted, his hands over his mouth. Was there anybody anywhere who thought he might do the right thing? The ringtail sat on its hind legs near the door and licked its paws.
What was this Kehr stuff? What about Kehr? There was nothing there. Who knew what the man wanted? But the idea of him stayed with Karel, like the idea of his father coming back. It was as if Kehr had demonstrated how even lives like his could have developed assurance and focus.
He went upstairs and dug out his father’s letter. He kept it hidden; he wasn’t sure why. He brought it downstairs and reread it.
If he loved Leda there wouldn’t be any hesitation, he thought.
That was true. And here he was hesitating. He was the King of Hesitation, he thought bitterly. That’s what he should do for his country: hesitate. He slapped his cheek in disgust, and the ringtail looked over with interest.
Kehr had cleared the table of his papers. Someone had set a dish of plums out, recently enough that they were still beaded with condensation. Against the wall there was a copy of the book he’d seen before: Psychological Operations in Partisan War. He picked it up. He had the sense the table had been arranged for him, like someone setting out milk and cookies. Outside the window something was startled into flight, the concussion of wings frightening him.
He tried to guess the idea behind the holes in the heads on the cover: bullet holes? The place the information went in? On the first page it said:
Partisan warfare is essentially a political war. Therefore its area of operations exceeds the statutory and territorial limits of conventional warfare, to penetrate the political entity itself, the political animal. In effect, the human being should be considered the primary objective in a partisan war. And conceived of as a military target, the human being has his most critical point in his mind.
He closed and opened his eyes and read the sentence again. He got frustrated after a third try and kept going.
Once the mind has been reached the political animal has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.
This book is a manual for the training of low-level counterinsurgency and antipartisan units in psychological operations, with specific application in the concrete case of the current national struggle with partisan groups and undesirables, both within and outside our present boundaries. Welcome!
Stasik came in, causing the ringtail to circle on itself and show its teeth. Karel put the book back against the wall. Stasik ignored him. Karel stretched and asked about Kehr, and Stasik had no idea when he was coming back.
Kehr never did. Karel waited up, lying on top of his sheets in the darkness, listening.
The next morning Karel found him back at the kitchen table, which was again covered with papers. Someone had made hard-boiled eggs and there was more coffee.
Karel sat at the table in his shorts, and Kehr said something without looking up about the laziness of cooks and teenagers. He finally stopped what he was doing. “Can I help you?” he said.
Karel nodded, and Kehr waited.
“I had a question about traveling,” Karel said.
Kehr looked at him with stone eyes. “Are you going somewhere?” he said.
“No, not me,” Karel said. “Well, I was thinking about it. I have a friend who wants to go somewhere. To the capital. I know travel passes are hard to get right now.” This, he thought, was a real big mistake.
“I thought you were going to continue to work at the zoo,” Kehr said quietly. “I thought you liked to work at the zoo.”
“I did,” Karel said. His stomach felt as it did when he finished pots of coffee himself. “But Albert over there told me he didn’t need me for a while. Albert Delp. We had sort of a fight. Or something.”
Kehr’s expression didn’t change. Karel thought of the rabbits in his shed before dinner, watching him all the way from the door to whatever cage he stopped at. Kehr said, “Nobody’s going anywhere right now that’s not official business. Nobody’s getting travel passes. Unless somebody like me arranges it, as a special favor.” He took out a small pass card, with an antipartisan symbol printed on it, and held it up for Karel to see. Then he pocketed it, and looked back down at his work.
Stasik touched Karel on the shoulder to signal it was time to go. Karel stood up.
“A friend?” Kehr asked, his attention on his work.
“Yes,” Karel said. He waited, but Kehr didn’t ask. Stasik led him out.
He told Leda at the restaurant, and she nodded quickly and told him she’d talk to him and left. They hadn’t even sat down. She hadn’t asked if he wanted to go. He was convinced he’d lost her and broke broom-handle-size sticks on tree trunks all the way home.
He stopped by the Reptile House in desperation, but Albert was out, or wouldn’t see him.
He paced his room and haunted Leda’s street the next day, unable to approach Kehr to try again or Leda to tell her he was going. He sat in his room that night and thought, I should be packing. Saturday morning he helped Stasik and Schay unload boxes and odd folding frameworks of wood and metal that neither of them would comment on, and then made their lunch. In the afternoon they sent him to the market. At one point while dragging his baskets from vendor to vendor he held up a melon and thought, She’s doing it right now. He imagined her leading Nicholas through the gates, Nicholas looking over his shoulder at that place for the last time. He hand-washed Stasik’s uniform cap, which had a thin looping arc of a bloodstain across the brim. He made dinner. He cleaned up with water and ammonia some hard-to-reach messes the ringtail had left. Finally he got away in the early evening, and ran all the way to her hedge. Lounging soldiers watched him go by and tried to lead him with pebbles, arguing over whose came closest.