“I’ve been wanting to ask you about it all weekend,” she said. “The hardest thing to get right is the meetings. When you put together the Chronicle.”
I thought back to those days. This I could help her with. This was the one thing I wanted to remember. Daniela was staring up at me, a more captive audience than anyone at my readings had ever been, than all of Saul Sandalowski’s guests combined. I leaned back and started to talk.
We always gathered at Ivan’s after lunch on Sundays to work on the journal, I told her — his was the one flat we were convinced wasn’t bugged — and as Katka and I rounded the corner to Táboritská Street we’d grow quiet and glance behind us. I told Daniela about the stray cats that darted up Ivan’s dim stairwell, and how once inside we’d slip off our shoes and close the curtains and work silently in his kitchen, all five of us cramped around the rickety wood table. We had to be completely silent, I told her, just in case we were wrong about his place being tapped — so much that when I needed to use the toilet I poured water into the bowl very slowly instead of flushing.
“We’d stay at that table for hours,” I continued, “until it got too dark to see.” I told her we wrote by hand, on thin sheets of paper I’d gather at the end of the evening to transcribe at the university, and the more I talked, the farther I felt from the bench where we were sitting. Far from Harpswick and all the other towns on this side of the Atlantic that I had tried so unsuccessfully to make my home, unpacking and repacking my books and dishes so often I finally started flattening my moving boxes and storing them in the garage. As I talked, these places started to look like nothing more than spots on a map I had marked with pushpins, and my memories of those afternoons in Ivan’s flat felt so clear it was almost as if I were back inside, the linoleum floor cool beneath my bare feet, involved in the single most important project of my life.
I was taken the year we were covering the trial of Ji
í Vondrá
ek, a colleague of ours accused of crafting his syllabus from banned books. The government hadn’t allowed any journalists into the courthouse and none of it was being reported in Rudé právo, so we gathered as much information as we could from Jií’s wife and mother, and every Sunday at Ivan’s we’d write up what we had learned. I remembered Katka beside me at the table, her forehead wrinkled like linen as she worked. I’d never been a quick writer — with the luxury of time I could spend half a day piecing together a sentence — but Katka thought in full paragraphs, and sometimes we’d all stop and watch her small white hand move briskly across the page, rarely crossing out lines. All of us assumed she’d be the writer our children and grandchildren associated with the movement, and that was the thing, I told Daniela — everything she’d probably heard about that time was about surveillance and poverty and fear, and that was all true. But there was also something beautiful about those silent afternoons as long stripes of light came in through the corners of the curtains.
“You could hear the whole city downstairs,” I said, “but it was like nothing outside that kitchen mattered.”
Daniela’s knees were tucked beneath her and her hands were clasped. She looked like a girl then, pale and a little eager. “Was I there, too?”
She wasn’t. Bringing a crying baby into Ivan’s flat would have been too risky, and the most annoying part of those mornings was trying to figure out what to do with her when the downstairs neighbors weren’t around to babysit. But I saw how much Daniela wanted to hear that she’d been there. And if not in Ivan’s flat then at least somewhere in the story I was telling — and I deeply wished I could say that she was. I wished I could say I thought about her during those meetings — as much as I wished I could say I remembered birthday parties and pickup times and to stock my house with juice boxes and string cheese before her visits. That I found it endearing that she built imaginary cities and wrote her way into preexisting books, that I had flown her up this weekend not out of fear but from the selfless and uncomplicated pride her mother seemed to feel so effortlessly. I wished I could say I was the kind of person who turned to Daniela then and told her it was her mother’s story as much as it was mine — that it was Katka who deserved the attention, rather than being forced to sit in the audience, yet again, while I took center stage. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. Because I knew that with her play, Daniela was giving me the chance to feel relevant in the world again, and all she seemed to want in return was to hear she’d once been relevant in mine.
So I lied.
“Every Sunday afternoon, I’d bundle you up in a knit blanket and wheel you down Táboritská Street. I’d park your stroller outside Ivan’s flat and stare at you, completely flummoxed. The first time you opened your eyes and focused: it was on me.” The warm afternoon was all around us; in the distance I could hear the calls of the gulls. “Inside Ivan’s kitchen we’d all take turns passing you around. But I loved it when you came back to me. You were so good — you never made a sound. It was like you knew how dangerous a cry could be in that room. I’d put down my pen and whisper the same song my mother did when I was a baby. Tichá Malá Panenka. And you were. You were my silent little doll.”
I knew the second Katka saw any of this onstage it would all be over, but I couldn’t think about that now. Because for this moment Daniela looked as if she believed every word. Or probably just wanted to badly enough. Her gaze was fixed and wide, as if she were watching television. I couldn’t tell which of us had scooted closer or if we’d done it simultaneously. But she was so near our elbows were almost touching, and as I continued to talk, I wondered if any of what I was saying would begin to feel like the truth. It didn’t yet, but I was just getting started.
Duck and Cover
The day outside is hazy and gray; the fan on the counter blows dust. Jell-O spins slowly in a glass case. The radio, always a notch too loud for my taste, is turned up even higher for news hour. British troops have left Egypt, the Army-McCarthy Hearings are in full swing and the man who invented the zipper has dropped dead.
“Can’t you see table six flagging you down?” Alan asks. “You think people like cold coffee?” Alan Mandlebaum. Always behind me ever since we were kids, always watching.
I pick up the coffeepot and move down the aisle of customers. The regulars are at the counter, talking about Roger Maris, as if they’d been the ones up to bat — as if they’d never left the Bronx for Los Angeles. Beside them are their wives: distracted, knitting, fat leather pocketbooks on their laps. And there’s my father, in a red vinyl booth near the back. His head is bent over his lunch, so all I can see are newspaper-stained fingers gripping a turkey melt, even though it’s Tuesday afternoon and he’s promised to go out and look for a job.
HOME IS a pale green duplex dropped onto a patch of dry lawn. My father and the guys are inside, squeezed into our tiny living room and scooping up fistfuls of pistachios from a bowl on the table.
“You heard about Murray Hirsch?” My father’s voice is low, but the way he speaks makes every word sound absolute. “They got him this morning, right in his own yard. Didn’t even let his wife take the kids inside.” The guys groan, setting empty beers on the table. My father eyes the bottles, my cue to bring in fresh ones from the icebox. If I stall a minute he’ll start to fidget and look around the room, so I’m in the kitchen before he can start.
On our kitchen table is a seashell-pink cloth, dotted with daisies. My mother made it years ago, before she got sick. I was five when she died, and a few years later I had the brains to fold up the tablecloth and stick it in a closet: it makes no sense to stare at another person’s things if they’re never going to come back. But when I removed the cloth it was somehow still there, and you could tell how old the table was without it, so I put it back on again.