“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’ll tell her I knocked it over. Sit in the chair.” She pointed to an undersized folding thing that always seemed to be waiting for him. It looked too small even for David, her little brother. He wondered at his most pessimistic if she intended it as a sly humiliation. He sat in it, and it flexed and tottered as it always did. The trumpets slid slowly over. He drummed a finger on his knee like a simpleton.
“How’s Nicholas?” he asked. Her older brother was institutionalized locally. She thought it was unnecessary. She battled with her mother about it. She said he had a learning disorder, that was all. Karel hadn’t heard her mother’s side of the story. He had tried to visit Nicholas once, unsuccessfully, and remembered small groups of patients standing at the gates, staring mournfully at passing children in shorts.
Leda thanked him and said Nicholas was fine. She was pleased he’d asked.
David came out of the house carrying a comic book and sat on the sandy ground between them, puzzled at the richer color of the spilled soil. He looked over at the trumpets with interest but didn’t say anything. He was seven years old and had round eyes and a thin face. Karel liked him. He had a way when nervous of hesitating with his eyes averted. He had no interest in the comic book and gave it to Karel.
The comic book was titled The Party Comes to Power, and featured the Praetor on the cover in armor, swinging an ax against a horde of cringing demons. Some of the demons had the exaggerated features of the nomads. They’d made the Praetor overly muscular, and he looked silly in armor. The inside had nothing to do with the cover and looked like a pretty boring account of the National Unity Party’s rise to power: the two referendums, the national vote, the Praetor’s appointment as Guardian of the Republic, and the announcement of the Emergency Revolutionary Defense of the Country. That had been the night Karel’s father had been taken away. Karel flipped through it for anything of interest until Leda took it from him and tore it in half. She dropped both halves between them.
David looked at the mess and pinched his earlobe with his forefinger and thumb. He and Karel watched Leda work.
Her hair swayed over the yarn. She was absorbed. He watched the soft motions of her head and the quiet dance of insects behind her, and he felt a fragrant stillness, filling him with expectations of what he didn’t know. He watched her expression. The yarn was speeding back and forth, the sweater vanishing from the earth.
Mrs. Schiele came outside carrying a dark brown radio shaped like an egg halved lengthwise. She said hello. She said she’d brought Leda her radio. She was a gentle and standoffish woman, full of warnings for her children about getting entangled in other people’s potentially dangerous business. She liked Karel and seemed to feel he was no troublemaker, docile and intelligent enough. He wondered if his relationship with Leda could ever survive such a blow.
She complimented his haircut, and he nodded, embarrassed, running his hand over the crown of his head. His father insisted his hair be trimmed close on the sides in the current military style. It left the hair on top in a haylike mat when he washed it.
“It looks nice,” she said.
Leda snorted. David picked something from the spilled dirt and held it to the light like a prospector. The trumpets by now hung horizontally over the lip of the planter. Karel willed Mrs. Schiele not to notice.
“Beautiful day,” she finally sighed, and went into the house.
Leda watched her go. Then she tilted her head and peered at Karel. He was growing, she said. Was he bigger?
He said he was. He was growing fast now that they couldn’t afford food. His father called him the Stork, always with some of the sadness of a poor provider. Karel thought of her questions as opportunities to talk more, and he was squandering each of them, one by one.
She asked if he wanted to hear the radio. She turned it on.
They listened to a show called The Party Has the Floor! The surrounding countries, the nation’s enemies, the whole world could go down in flames, the speaker said. Why should the nation be concerned with that? The nation’s concern was the nation, that it should live and be free.
There were bulletins from the northern border. The announcer spoke of the difficulties, the courage, and the enthusiasm of the special border patrols. They could hear singing. Some men he identified as wounded shuffled up audibly to the microphone and repeated the information that they were wounded, specifying where. One man in a preternaturally calm voice said, “I have lost my feet.”
Leda shut it off. Her smile had disappeared. She said, “I visited the borderlands once, with my father.” Her father had died the night of the Bloody Parade. He’d been crossing the street. She talked about him only as a quiet man who’d been an accountant for a gravel yard, who drank beer and read at night. She loved him very much, she said. She left that in unspoken contrast with her mother.
“Were you scared?” Karel asked. The northern mountains were supposed to be dangerous. They rose like walls on the horizon even from this distance. Every year hikers were lost. They died of cold and falls and snakebite before being discovered. The nomads, cause of the border troubles, were also beginning to be blamed.
She shook her head. It was too beautiful, she said. They didn’t go way up. They saw a few people, but everyone was so poor.
She talked to him about what it was like. There were rounded, blunt, burned hills, between which were plains of intolerable sun glare and narrow valleys up high in the haze. There were hard dry places completely empty that they called dry lakes, and ugly and bitter pools, never dry on the hottest days, dark and ashy and rimmed with crystals. There were broad wastes open to the wind where the sand drifted in thick waves. There was this terrible pure blue of the sky. Karel could see it all and had to restrain himself from touching her. He thought: She’s my age. How is it she’s not amazed at herself?
He got home uncertain of what had happened and shining with the experience regardless. The house was quiet and dark. His father was sitting in the kitchen, clearing his throat in the repeated way he did when he was upset. Karel knew immediately that something involving his job hunt had disintegrated. He said a cautious hello and turned on the light. His father winced.
“You’re sitting in the dark,” Karel said.
His father looked at him to indicate he knew that.
He went about the busy fiction of beginning preparations for supper, with no clear idea what he was making or looking for in the various cabinets. He ended up with an unlikely array on the counter before him: a cheese grater, a large spoon, a shallow pot, a can of yams. His father gazed on the assortment impassively.
“Hungry?” Karel asked. It was dangerous to ask what was wrong, and dangerous not to.
“Look at him,” his father said. The suppressed anger in the voice shook him. “Comes in like there’s nothing wrong, like the world’s a—” He gave up, unable to think of the word. He returned his attention to the table, as though it were the least repellent object in the room.
“What’s wrong?” Karel asked.
“What’s wrong,” his father said.
Karel was peeved, tired of this. He rubbed his face. “Did you get turned down for something?” he asked.
“I got turned down for something, all right,” his father said. He was very close to violence. “You’re an imbecile, you know that? How did I get such an imbecile for a son?” He rode the word with such stress his head bobbed.