Karel rode home through the creosote feeling hot and cold together at the slapping, and his reaction to it, and said he did.
Kehr brought an envelope upstairs to his room after dinner and flipped it to him on the bed. “Mail call,” he said.
The envelope had Karel’s name and address on it, in Leda’s handwriting. There were no postmarks or stamps.
“Hand-delivered,” Kehr said. “Some of our men shuttle between here and the capital and one of them was kind enough to do me a favor.” He smiled helpfully and nodded at the letter, as though Karel probably wanted to get at it. He left the room and shut the door behind him.
The letter was in her handwriting as well.
Dear Karel,
How are you? How is the Reptile House? Have you heard anything from your father?
I’m writing to thank you for your help in getting my family here: your house guest told me about your persistence with Albert concerning the travel passes. I didn’t believe him at first but he showed me the passes. Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you act so strange?
It dawned on me (well, my mother helped it dawn on me) how mean I’d been to you that night, considering. What kind of impression could I have left you with? I can be so nasty and sure of myself sometimes. I hereby apologize. Do you accept a long-distance kiss and hug?
We’re staying here with my aunt. We’ve got the whole third floor of her apartment and we need it! — Nicholas and David are in one room, Mother and I in another, and we have a little sitting room piled with boxes to go get away from people in. She’s happy enough to see us though Mother’s concerned about becoming independent as soon as possible and so am I. She’s hoping for a position as a housekeeper and is wearing out all my aunt’s friends looking for useful connections to wealthy families. I meanwhile was immediately signed up in the youth work study program in a nursery care center for mothers working in vital industries, which doesn’t pay much but allows discounts on food. I’m hopeful, but I don’t know what to expect from our boss, who has the brain of a chicken and considers herself a beauty. I start Monday.
Otherwise, life in the city isn’t so much right now. You can smell the sea everywhere, though, and that is wonderful.
Everyone seems meek and willing to go about their business. Nicholas and I have a game on streetcars where I try to make men blush by staring at them, because he said once that girls blush if men look at them long enough. I used to play a game like that with Elsie.
People here follow the war news more closely than they do at home. You see little crowds around the kiosks all the time after announcements are posted. Even though there’s nothing new there, either.
What else? All the big shots show off like idiots driving around in their requisitioned cars and occasionally bang into each other in the process. I think there are as many casualties here as on the front. Mostly we stand in line for everything (yesterday for a piece of cheese the size of your finger). Two days in a row the same married couple stood behind us and asked us where our Party pins were. We couldn’t stand them. When the wife got sick on the second day and started throwing up right there in line we started pinching each other so we wouldn’t burst out laughing.
You’ll have to forgive me if this rambles. I’ve lost my journals so you’re in some ways standing in for them.
Have you seen the new language rules for writing letters? You get them handed to you when you go to buy stamps. Euphemisms, and launderings of less pleasant and more precise words. All correspondence is supposed to be subject to them. Have you noticed there are no unpleasant words in this letter? Mother insisted, and I suppose she makes sense. Still, I worry daily that I’m becoming too sensible.…
Do you miss me? I miss you. Though sometimes I think it’s good we’re apart, because I couldn’t take one person’s company for too long. Don’t misunderstand, but I think sometimes if you spend a lot of time with one person he or she might exert too great an influence on you. Have you ever felt like cutting adrift from everyone? I think I get very touchy when someone makes a lot of demands on me. As you must know yourself, there are hours of solitude that make up for the days you spend pining for someone.
Anyway sometimes I think if we keep in touch it could be nice this way, with two people keeping each other company w/o promising to meet up at such and such a place or stay together forever. They travel the way they’re going together for a while, and then if their routes diverge they understand. But I suppose that’s mostly wishful thinking on my part. A lot of times everything takes a less pleasant and rational course, and there’s a lot of sadness and tiredness and inertia and hurt.…
This whole letter will probably strike you as odd in the extreme. Maybe you’re sitting there thinking, Who is this person? Do you think about me? If you do, don’t just think about me as I am — think about me as I’d like to be. We don’t know each other well enough, I think, and I’m a lot to blame. Do you know what I’m thinking? Do you know what I’m thinking about? Will you write?
Leda
The next day they went through another set of double doors past the holding cells and interrogation room. They were going to what Kehr called a prisoner assessment room. On the way he showed Karel the punishment cells they called “the tubes.” He showed him the infirmary. He showed him some of the converted kennels. They passed a grating covering a small set of stairs leading to a subbasement. Somebody had taped a paper handwritten sign next to it that read Juvenile.
The prisoner assessment room was a white room like the interrogation room, with cement floors and walls and a wooden lattice screen with small desks behind it. The overhead lights flickered and buzzed. The desk and chairs were undersized, as if they’d been taken from a grammar school. There was a long unpainted metal table with two chairs. There was a metal bedframe with shackles on its four corners, hooked up improbably to a field telephone. There was a mop and pail in the corner. There was a big wooden box like a toy chest beside it filled with instruments. There were no windows.
“This is a torture room,” Karel said. He felt the way he had when giving Albert’s name, hyperaware, and he could feel his insides racing.
“Torture is what we do here, yes,” Kehr said.
Karel backed up a step. This was like a blank wall. He’d imagined when he’d imagined anything at all dungeons and chains, fire and darkness. This was dirty, it was empty, it was ordinary. “I don’t want to be here,” he said. “I don’t want to see this. What are you going to do?”
“It’s the next step for our young man from yesterday,” Kehr said. “It’s the next step for you.”
“What’re you going to do?” Karel asked.
Kehr sat in one of the chairs. His jacket bunched and creased, and he sat forward and straightened it. Karel put his hands behind his back and leaned his shoulders against the wall and did not look around, his stomach feeling emptied and urgent. He looked at the far wall near the ceiling, at a short row of iron grappling hooks. Below them there were fanlike patterns of scratchmarks on the concrete.
The door opened. The young man from the day before came in escorted by two others. The young man was naked except for his underwear, which bagged in an oversized way like a diaper. He looked rapidly around the room and didn’t recognize Karel, but then, Karel remembered, he’d been blindfolded. Each of the other men had one of his arms.