Karel gaped at him for a moment and then broke down.
He could see a blurry father sitting back on the couch, unimpressed. “Here I come back after how long and all you can do is blubber,” his father said.
“Why didn’t you call me or write me?” Karel asked. “Why couldn’t you have let me know you were there? Why couldn’t you have looked out for me?”
His father fumed. He said grimly, “So now this is Dad’s fault, too.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Karel protested. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Let me tell you something,” his father said. “I didn’t tell you because that was the way it had to operate. I didn’t tell you because Kehr told me not to. That was the way we worked it. You think all of this is coincidence? You think all of this just happened?” He spread his hands, and then gave up on Karel and looked away.
Karel could see himself sitting there, open-mouthed. “You let them do all that?” he said, with as much force as he could get into his voice.
“Please,” his father said. He raised his rear up and felt behind the sofa cushions. Karel got out of his chair and went upstairs and slammed his door.
“Very adult,” his father called after him. “Very impressive.”
Karel could hear him banging around in the kitchen. The faucet over the sink went on two or three times and he knew he was testing the plumbing.
He lay on his back in the dark and listened but there were no more sounds. He couldn’t concentrate. His shirt was humid and smelled. He thought how stupid and alone he’d been. The thought of Kehr and his father having done this together made him want to split his head open on the floor.
He’d run away. He’d find Leda. He lay on the floor and starting flexing his knee impatiently, as if leaving in minutes.
Later he heard Kehr come back. Karel’s father suggested they sit on the front steps; the house was like an oven. Ice tinkled in a glass. It was quiet.
He got up and went to the windowsill and peered over. They were just around the corner; he could see their legs.
“How’d our friend handle the reunion?” he heard Kehr say. He couldn’t make out his father’s response.
“Where is he now?” Kehr asked. His father said he was upstairs, asleep.
His father started explaining to Kehr his position, and Karel couldn’t tell if Kehr was listening or not. His father asked in a low voice what people expected him to do. The situation was the situation; was he supposed to change it? The thing to do was to try to protect yourself, keep your mouth shut and do the best you could. Karel listened with his back against the wall and his head beneath the window sill, drained of energy, a marionette.
His father said he’d even figured at the beginning that he could help the Party change for the better, become a little more reasonable, a little more, you know, reasonable. Kehr said something quietly, and Karel’s father answered that his group had had nothing to do with that; it’d been a Security Service deal top to bottom, and whoever said otherwise was lying through his teeth. That was the way it was, anyway, his father added: his group got the dirty jobs, the kind where you got decorated if everything fell right and strung up by your thumbs if it didn’t.
He could hear the ice when his father took a drink. The kid’s mother had left him holding the bag, his father said, and did Kehr think the kid blamed his mother for that? Here she was out working for her Republic without another thought for the kid, and he, Dad, the guy who had stuck around, was the one that was supposed to be worthless. Figure that.
“You have only the most glancing idea of what you’re talking about,” Kehr said, distinctly enough that Karel heard every word.
His father was quiet. He had a way of exchanging a quick smile with someone who’d insulted him, and Karel imagined it now. If he lived long enough, he thought, would he begin to be like that? Would people see through him as easily?
His father said something apologetic, and Karel reflected on his cowardice and the way he saved his courage and bad humor for Karel. There was a long silence and then his father started talking about knots. He told Kehr he’d learned them during his days on the seashore and he liked to trot one out every so often to see if he still had the knack. Karel remembered each of them — the bowline, the pistol grip, the monkey’s tail — and got even sadder, remembering how much being able to pull them off had pleased his father, remembering the way in which in their elaborateness they’d always seemed to him his father’s way of attempting to make his world safer, more controllable.
“Write your father off,” Kehr said. It was the next morning, Karel’s father was gone for the day, and Karel was sullenly cleaning the coffeepot with an abrasive cleanser he hoped would make the coffee taste like paint. He didn’t respond.
Karel shouldn’t allow himself to be so swayed by his father’s example, discouraging as it was, Kehr said. He was not limited by his father’s limitations. Kehr could tell that much even now. Did Karel think his father could’ve handled all this the way he had?
Karel rinsed out the slick residue and stacked the metal pieces to dry.
This was not an opinion, Kehr said. He was not wrong about human behavior.
Karel wiped his hands and left the room.
“I have another letter for you,” Kehr called after him. He followed Karel into the living room.
Karel was sitting where his father had been on the couch. “Where is it?” he asked.
“I’m not finished,” Kehr said. He sat where Karel had sat. Some notes were on the table between them. On top of one was a short sentence: Roeder proposes fire. Kehr collected everything into the folder and closed it. He said, “He has petty ambitions and no real feelings for you. He believes in his own sentimentalities the way third-rate executioners do. He’s denounced two of his colleagues to the intelligence services and he no more firmly believes in what we’re trying to accomplish than your mother did.” Karel looked at him. “He has no family feeling, no loyalties. You should learn from him and move on. He is going under even as he prefers to believe he’s not. You owe yourself a certain ruthlessness in this case.”
“Can I have the letter or not?” Karel asked.
Kehr stood, surveying him, and took it from his jacket. He held it out. “I was told this would be the last one for a while,” he said.
“Why? Has something happened? What’s happened?” Karel asked.
“That’s what I was told,” Kehr said. “This was a favor. I’m sure the girl’s as safe as you are. Try to remember what I’ve been saying.” He left the room, and then after a minute or two the house.
Karel read the letter where he was. The ringtail perched on the arm of the chair Kehr had vacated and cleaned its pinkish paws and blinked at him.
Karel,
Don’t go getting conceited if I write to you again so soon, but I’m bored stiff. Got your short note, which was strange and didn’t help much.
Short note? Who had written her? Kehr?
I’m writing in bed again. Praetor (our cat) is sitting on my stomach. She sits on my head in the middle of the night. Mother hates our name for her and won’t allow us to let her out for that reason.
What’s new around here? Almost nothing. We played so many practical jokes on our old boss that she’s being replaced, and our new one’s a real 150-percenter, so I guess we’re getting what we deserve. (It’s amazing to me how much I like bamboozling superiors.)
This will probably be a short letter. It’s getting harder and harder to keep our spirits up. There’s a lot of the usual whispering about horrible things. We’re no closer to getting enough money together to move into our own apartment. Four people downstairs were dragged off two nights ago and Mother still hasn’t recovered. She’s obsessed with the idea of our family being separated. She watches David all the time and won’t let him outside, either. All he has now is Praetor. At the market I was approached by a small smelly man from the Price Control Board who said I’d just been swindled at a fruit stand and asked if I’d act as a decoy for the police the next time around.