Karel looked at the counter, not seeing clearly.
“Your mother was right about you,” his father said in distaste, as if that settled the matter.
The emotional swing from Leda to this was too abrupt, and Karel could not help tears. “What did she say?” he challenged. “She never said anything.”
His father didn’t respond. He seemed to have the ability to say anything he wanted and then forget he’d said it. He seemed as well not to realize Karel remembered. Karel knew when he hurt his father, he couldn’t control himself and was sorry even as he did it, but his father wasn’t sorry for anyone, either when they fought or afterward.
They remained where they were, wishing they had someone other than each other. “We don’t have anything to eat,” Karel said. “For supper.” He intended it as an indictment.
His father ignored him. He folded a paper napkin into a little boat and set it on the table. “I don’t want to have meals with you,” he said. “For the next few days, you eat before I come home.”
“Fine,” Karel said. He shoved the cheese grater into the pot with a crash and left the room.
Once upstairs he heard the pop and crackle of a radio and he shouted, his anguish making him reckless, “Where’d we get money for a radio? Who has money for a radio?”
His father walked softly to the bottom of the stairs, dangerously close to coming up. “I bought it,” he said. “I thought we were coming into some good luck.”
Karel lay on his bed without moving, terrified. After a moment his father returned to the kitchen.
A voice furry with static spoke for the Committee for Popular Enlightenment.
“You couldn’t even buy a good one,” Karel said, as loud as he dared.
There was more popping and snorting of the radio being tuned. We call on our people, the voice said, for simple enthusiasm and simple pride in their national destiny, not for melancholy and sophistication.
The voice reported, as if its limitless patience were about to be overtaxed, even more provocations to the north, and added that listeners could rest assured that the government in their name intended to brook no more nonsense and to defend the country offensively along those borders.
The radio was off. There was a muffled squeaking sound, and a dull clank. Was his father eating the yams?
“Do you want help?” he called, despite himself. “Do you want something warmed up?” His voice rang on the bare walls.
There was no answer. There was a small crash. His father rarely got cans opened without incident, never uncorked wine bottles without picking to bits half of the cork, never built things, never took things apart. Karel remembered him gazing at the flybag while Karel built it. He imagined his father downstairs, standing with dull lassitude before the yams, unable to understand the unfairness of things, unable to understand his own inertia, unable to understand at this point how his life could have gotten away from him. Years ago he’d watched his father go through the first stretch of unemployment. For whole afternoons he’d lain in bed looking at his hands or something ordinary like a chair. Karel had poked around the house, frightened and depressed, and had thought even then that if it happened again he’d leave. He hadn’t gone anywhere yet. Oh, Leda, he thought melodramatically, and didn’t finish, feeling selfish and childish.
He went up to the storage space above the house. The heat was stifling and close, and the single covered window seemed darker than the rest of the room. In a box for machine parts he found a woman’s sun hat he didn’t recognize, and a pair of shoes. His father kept his mother’s things packed away. That was another reason they had moved: his father had told him once that the city had been his mother’s place, their house had been his mother’s house, and his father had gotten tired of trying to stick it out, and for what? The Schieles had moved after Mr. Schiele’s death, and Karel, who’d been resisting his father’s periodic threats to leave the city, had performed a complete about-face. He’d spoken, with some guilt at his own deceitfulness, about the possible opportunities and the lower cost of living in the desert. He had not mentioned the Schieles.
He had very few memories of his mother. One of his earliest, possibly spurious, was of a woman in warm gray and pale blue huddled near him on a tiled floor. There were snatches remaining from her funeral — an unpleasant-smelling man leaning close and telling him not to worry, another woman saying there was no doubt where his mother had gone, but not mentioning where, and a decision on his part, staring at the coffin, that she would be back by Saturday — but most of the rest was lost. He pulled a photo from a box of train and ferry tickets — why had his father saved train and ferry tickets? — and the photo, curled at the edges like a proclamation, was of the seashore, with a grainy woman by a café table in the middle distance gazing out at some boats. Her face was hidden by a hat. She was in a perfect circle of shade. The hat was not this hat, but something about it, the brim or the spray of flowers near the band, was familiar. There was nothing else in with the tickets.
He set the smaller box aside and rummaged a little more. He thought of Leda and her mother, Leda remarking distantly once while walking with him that they were happy enough in their own separate ways. He found a postcard of the desert — his mother had visited here! — sent back to the city and his father.
He knelt beside the box and turned the card over once or twice in his hands. The handwriting was careless and very adult. It was dated with the year, and he calculated he’d been two at the time. Had she left him with his father? The card read: Simon: It’s hot and glorious here, as we expected. I find blue lizards in my overnight bag. There are mineral springs and ruins to visit and travel is arduous but very inexpensive. This drawing is of a great gate from the early Empire, not nearly so impressive in person. Hope all is well—
He sat with his back to the box for a long time, the sadness of not having been mentioned at all in a card from his lost mother growing in him like a bubble. When his father called him, he went downstairs, trailing his hand on the wall, acknowledging the truce.
Hiring was announced for a Public Works project in the area and Karel was sent to Naklo, a little town near the border, to pick up an application for his father. The zoo was not open, and he found when reporting there in the morning only a note to the staff on the outer gate: Lights out in the Reptile House. The Civil Guard has decided to carry on a political inspection. We must, they suggest, be patient. — Albert. So he had no convincing reason for avoiding the trip.
The noon bus dropped him at his stop an hour late. His father had gotten instructions by telephone on how to proceed from there, and Karel stood in an unfamiliar square peering at his father’s scrawl. He took a numbered trolley to another part of town. He found himself growing anxious as less and less of what they passed seemed to coincide with the instructions. To double-check the number he asked a man across the aisle. The man shrugged before he finished the question.
The trolley stopped with a sway and a jolt at a narrow side street to allow a small convoy of Civil Guard buses to pass. A young man scrabbled half out of the open window of the last one, hanging upside down and waving his arms to try to get his balance. Someone had him by the belt loops. He dropped lower suddenly with a jerk and then tumbled onto the road. The woman next to Karel gave an exclamation as if she’d seen something acrobatic at the circus. The young man pulled himself onto the trolley and clambered inside. He was bleeding from the top of his head. The buses on the side street were stopped and guards were trying to get off. The trolley pulled away into traffic.