And so, over glasses of Borelo, I told them about the two StB officials waiting outside the political science department on U K
íže Street. “Tomás Novak?” one had said, and I had said, “Why do you need to know?” and they dragged me into a black service car. It was late April, sunny but cold, and as we pulled away from the curb, I saw people outside the university, staring away or feigning conversation so they wouldn’t be witnesses. In the headquarters, the officials led me down a long hallway into a windowless room with white walls and a steel desk with a green-eyed, round-faced man behind it. He calmly asked me to name the other writers involved in the journal. I refused. He asked again. He asked again and again, so many times that the hours began to blur and I couldn’t tell if we’d entered the next day. All over Czechoslovakia, writers were breaking down and naming names. But did they really believe sleep deprivation would crack a father with a newborn? I joked to Saul’s guests — though I remembered the moment I’d started to cry, sitting in that hard-backed chair as I recalled stories of people brought in for questioning and never heard from again. The lights were bright and one of the chair legs was shorter than the others so I felt as if I was perpetually sliding off, and every time I nodded into sleep the man would slam his desk drawer shut, jolting me awake. But I continued to refuse. And when one of Saul’s guests would ask where that bravery came from, as someone always did, I’d tell them we all had a reserve for when we needed it most. I believed that, though sometimes I wondered if I could ever depend on it again. When I was finally released, word spread and I became famous among other writers — they called me the Quietest Man.
Yet as I circulated Saul’s living room, with Brubeck on the stereo and little salmon crudités being passed around, I understood I could finally name the names of the Chronicle writers without consequence. So I told them about Ivan and Michal and Dita, and most of all about Katka Novak. My brave, brilliant wife who unfortunately wasn’t here this evening because we couldn’t find a sitter, I lied — when in truth she rarely wanted to leave the apartment except to take Daniela out in the afternoon. My wife who, for the four days I remained quiet in the interrogation room, was anything but. With a newborn on her hip, she led rallies outside the university, marching through Nové M
sto and up to a podium in Wenceslas Square. She spoke with such force that she persuaded an American reporter to write a piece about me. So while people with less evidence against them were jailed, enough support came through that my family and I were given emergency clearance — and when I described Katka to Saul’s guests, it was like she was back up on the podium, drawing so large a crowd that children climbed the trees to glimpse her.
But then Saul’s dinners would end and I’d tiptoe into our silent apartment and find the new Katka in bed with the lights off. “You awake?” I’d whisper, a little drunk off the Borelo as I ran a finger along her pale, freckled arm. “No,” she’d say, rolling over, and it was only hours later as the sun came up and I walked her through campus that she’d unlock the lecture hall with her ring of janitor’s keys and say, “Imagine eating alone while I was at dinner parties.” That’s how Katka was: she’d pick up a conversation I thought had ended eons ago without ever reintroducing the topic. “I’m not saying we go home, I know we can’t,” she’d say, “but maybe New York.” Somewhere, she said, with people like us. Somewhere that didn’t feel like the edge of the earth. But before I could answer, the first students of the day would breeze past as if we were no more significant than the chalkboards and long wooden desks that filled the room.
Katka continued to push the idea of moving to New York, but things were changing for me, and fast: my two books of essays were translated and published by a university press, and I was invited to speak at colleges all over the Northeast, in Hartford and Amherst. Katka said I was being selfish. I told her I was working hard for all of us. She said I owed it to our daughter to be home more, that if I didn’t consider her feelings she’d leave me and take Daniela to stay with her second cousin in Queens. I begged her not to, but there was a secret part of me that wanted her to go, that longed to be free from the responsibility of my family. I wasn’t ready to leave Vermont — not when I felt my life there opening up, wider and wider.
Of course I didn’t really expect a woman with no money and next to no English to leave, and it was only when I made the first custody drive down the Taconic that it actually felt real. Of course I didn’t expect Katka to find steady enough work cleaning houses in New York, or that she’d parlay it into her own business with a dozen employees before eventually selling it and enrolling in business classes. And of course I didn’t expect that three years after Katka left, communism would collapse and the work I’d dedicated my life to would be done. That the dinner discussions at Saul Sandalowski’s would suddenly revolve around Bosnia and that a young female Serb would become Saul’s newest honored guest — and I certainly didn’t expect that same woman to win tenure over me. That my thirties and forties would be about mastering the delicate, tricky dance of pleading for adjunct work up and down the east coast — Albany, Durham, Burlington — and now, for the past two years, in Harpswick, Maine, which, if Katka thought of Vermont as the edge of the earth, would have made her feel she’d fallen off completely.
DANIELA LOOKED different than I remembered. When I’d seen her the previous summer, she still had that self-consciously sloppy, post-college look. Gone now were the flip-flops and baggy hooded sweatshirt, and with that change I would have hoped — and, deep down, expected — that she’d have continued to take after her mother. I had expected her dark hair to be wavy and loose like Katka’s. I had expected that she too would straddle the precarious line between fatness and fullness, settling on the latter, and that she would have the same thick black eyelashes that first caught my attention, more than thirty years ago, on the street outside the Clementinum Library.
The sad fact was that Daniela was turning out plainer than her mother, but she was certainly more polished and put together. Though the afternoon was hot and gray, she wore a white button-down, pointy sandals and creased jeans cuffed at the ankle. Her long hair was so flat it looked ironed, and her pale blue eyes — she had my eyes — were hidden by thin-framed glasses. Standing outside the arrival gate, she could have easily passed for one of the students who used to trudge slush into the classrooms Katka had just mopped. I’m certain that to anyone else Daniela would have appeared exhausted from her flight; rumpled, nervous and probably overwhelmed to be seeing her father after almost a year. But to me she looked like one of those girls, who, with one quick toss of her glossy hair, used to make me feel like an awkward foreigner with an ill-fitting sweater and tangled teeth.
“Daniela!” I got out of the car. I wondered if I should hug her. “You look. older.”
“Thanks. You, too.”
I glanced at my shorts and striped shirt, my stomach puffing over my belt. “You got in early,” I said.
“There was a delay at JFK but the pilot said he made up for it in the air.”