Before Page 10
“—he was looking up at us and his white shirt was all streaked and Kascha and I were crying,” she says now. “And he could have been just going to town to get away from her for a while but we knew, and I could tell he was crying, too. Because he wanted to come up and tell us, like all the other times, that everything would be all right, that sometimes he and Mom just didn’t get along. But he couldn’t lie to us. And he put his head down and walked across to the car and for a moment I thought that he might be back soon, at least, but then Kascha and I just knew he wouldn’t come back to the house and we couldn’t even fucking speak, we started crying so hard. I mean, they both had affairs. But my mother—it was like she just lived in some other fucking universe when it came to emotions. I can remember how Kascha for a while started playing flute—she really got good at it—but if she picked it up to play anywhere around my mom, my mom just left the room—”
“Why? Jesus,” Jesse says.
“Because it was emotional,” Tika says. “Like anything emotional she walked out on. She still does. Kascha took things like that hard. She won’t admit it, but she did. Who knows how it happens? I mean, my mother’s parents were all right but religious as all get-out, and sometimes my grandmother could be a really cold fish. Shit like that just runs in families, that coldness just goes on and on until somebody stops it—”
Jesse is watching her; his family, blue-collar and close, from Haverhill, is a loving one, and he doesn’t understand this. She watches him think about it. Then he says, “But your dad must have seen something in your mom, early on—”
“Oh yeah.” Tika waves a French fry, dips it into ketchup, and takes a bite. “Oh, my mother was beautiful all right, and I’m sure she was warm once, before the marriage started going south. She’s a good enough actress when she needs to be. And my dad was this handsome tennis professional who had competed at Wimbledon, and she could show him off to all of her society friends. And he tried a few businesses of his own and when they didn’t work out I think my mother saw him as a failure. You could hear it in their conversations. Like she started talking down to him.”
“And suddenly being the handsome tennis pro you could show off wasn’t good enough.”
“Exactly.” Tika has a moment of remembering her father teaching her to serve when she was twelve, the easy toss, the smooth bend of body, his racket back and coming forward powerfully, and people above the court, pressed against glass, watching. There was the father-smell of the place, of newness, plastic and rubber, nylon netting, tennis balls, aluminum rackets, the sound of being within a huge funhouse cave.
“But after the split-up he went to France, and Kascha was already on her first modeling assignment in Milan, and Dad called her and she spent time with his family in Aix-en-Provence—they’re really great people, I want you to meet them”—she imagines this, Jesse being hugged in the living room of the old stone château, seeing this warm part of her family—“and then he called me, and I was pretty angry, ending up in high school in Andover, my sister and my father gone, my sister having this glamorous life and my mother not wanting me to see my father. And my father called me up when he knew my mother would still be at work, and he said, ‘Why don’t you fly to Milan, and I’ll pay for it, and we’ll visit your sister and then the two of us can go to Rome? And you can tell your mother you’ve just gone to see your sister, if she has a problem with it.’ Of course she had no problem with Dad paying the ticket. And I didn’t tell her about seeing him. And Dad knew Rome really well and he took me everywhere. And he was so happy I was there; he’d just spent a week with Kascha, and he was really proud of her and her career, and I could feel he was proud of me, too, even though I hadn’t done anything that year but flunked geometry and advanced biology both—”
“But you were his daughter. None of the rest of it mattered.”
Tika nods, feels her eyes brimming. “Mostly, in Rome, we just talked. There are these steps near the Spanish embassy, and we would sit there for hours together talking, watching the world go by. Things were easy with Dad. He made you feel like anything was possible.”
She wipes her cheekbone with the back of her hand, and Jesse takes the hand and kisses it. Billy Joel is singing about how it is such a lonely world, and Tika is imagining a week after she left Rome, her father driving in the Italian Alps. There was a woman with him. In newspaper accounts afterward the woman looked stunning, with long dark hair, demure eyes and lips—nothing like Tika’s blond mother. Tika feels—she always does when she thinks of this—the highway blurred in front of the Citroën, clouds over the breathtaking valley. Then bikers there, by the side of the road, one of them falling and others swerving and her father swerving the car and another car rushing up around the curve and hitting the Citroën solidly in the back right side, sending it into a spin, and how it must have sounded when they went through the guardrail and the tires lost the ground and the car went into space: light, a moment of sun spinning above and the rushing in your ears, the screaming of the woman.
Tika stood there, at that curve in the mountains, a few days later, with Kascha, the two of them holding each other. The light was flat and together they’d watched the mountains, the valley.
Jesse is holding her hand tight against his forehead, his eyes closed, as if joined with her in prayer. Then he opens them and looks very directly at her. In Aix-en-Provence it was snowing, the flakes landing on the backs of her fingers as she touched the earth, her father’s grave. Kascha beside her. Her French family, her mother, standing around the girls.
“Some cousin of my father’s—she didn’t know better, but you know the French, scared of silence, always creating conversation,” Tika says, her throat tight, “said at the funeral reception to my mother, ‘But isn’t it fortunate that Jean-Louis could spend those last weeks with his daughters?’ And my mother waited until we got on the plane before she went ballistic on me. It was so fucking bad that when we were flying over the sea I went to another part of the plane to sleep, just to get the hell away from her. Hell, Jess, I’m never going to live in fucking Andover again.”
“It wasn’t right of her,” Jesse says, stroking her hand on the table. “Doing that after you just lost your father.”
Tika is remembering. “It didn’t seem to affect her much at all, his dying. She just seemed more angry at him. I don’t know. Maybe she fucking cried at night when nobody was looking.”
“It sounds like that is how she would handle it.”
“One of the last things my dad told me,” Tika says, “was, ‘Your mother has a lot of sadness in her, and when she goes crazy just think of the sadness and let your anger go, if you can.’ To tell you the truth, I was glad it came out that Kascha and I saw him, because it would have been hard for me to keep the lie going. I’m not very good at lying. Kascha was living in Italy, but I was seeing Mom every day.”
“Jesus, Tika. I didn’t know about this part of it, seeing your father and hiding it—”
“Yeah, well,” Tika says, “like I was thinking at the show. We all have these ghosts, right?”
“At the show?”
“Elijah. The song you wrote with him.”
“Oh.” Jesse shakes his head. “Poor freaking Elijah. He says he wants to be a star so she’ll see what she missed.”
“Not a good reason to do it.”
Jesse shrugs, smiles. “Makes him ambitious, anyway.” He kisses her fingers. Elton John is starting into “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.” Jesse leaves bills under his glass, and the John song is still in Tika’s head when they walk to the T. Fewer people are out now, the fire performers gone. The Coop clock stands at nearly midnight. The night is exquisite, cool, and some of the kids by the subway, dressed in their baggy prison pants, are kicking around a beanbag, trying to keep it in the air. Down below, the air of the subway is warm and as they wait Tika leans back against Jesse’s chest and then the train is a red, howling rectangle; it slows and stops, and the doors open with a hiss and they step
in and soon they are rolling beneath the Charles River, into the city.
NINE
Ghost-Man hears the Elton John song as he turns, ten paces behind Alison Tiner, into the grocery aisle. She bypasses the wines, for she has a well-stocked wine rack at home, in her pantry. Her bottles there are dusty, so Ghost-Man has not attempted to take them out to memorize them, imagining obvious streaks of his cloth-glove fingers on the glass, or worse, one of the bottles slipping from his hand, shattering on the floor—that would be all he’d fucking need. So he’s read what he could of the bottles as they sat, where the natural kitchen light falls over them at an angle: Wild Vines Blackberry Merlot and Sutter Home and Robert Mondavi whites and Bella Sera Pinot Grigio. He passes some of these now with his cart, bright vanilla colors, deep reds.
In the water and soda aisle Ghost-Man grasps a six-pack of Poland Spring, tears one of these off, twists off the cap, takes a meth from his pocket and swallows it down with the water. Soon he will feel the almost unbearable soaring, and that thing that the rice has done to his insides will be in retreat. At the end of the aisle, Alison Tiner is considering premade sauces for the chicken. Her man has been coming less frequently of late to visit, and Ghost-Man has seen her shadow pace across the curtain often after their phone calls. This all followed a time when Alison Tiner was gone for a few days (Ghost-Man had been afforded a chance to inspect her apartment closely then); presumably she had decided to stay on top of her lover, to spend whole days with him, as a woman will at an early point in a relationship, and then will realize that her boyfriend is being polite but badly needs some time away from her, some space. How coquettish you have become since, dear Alison, Ghost-Man thinks. Now your phone calls are receptive, rather than assertive. How clever of you!
Alison Tiner glides along with her cart, not nodding at all to the many shoppers who pass her, her head cocked at that odd angle. Ghost-Man knows she is planning. Putting together provincial female plans to draw her man back in: food, sex. He wants to tell her that she needs to exercise some intelligence here and not simply mold herself about the desires of her lover! The world changes according to what you do, Alison! When you decide—when you even breathe! You affect everything! He imagines Alison Tiner’s dirty feet in the air, jerking slightly with the thrusts of her boyfriend, the male ass clenching, her body molding around his penetration.
He follows her past the breads, the bakery, the small in-store bank; she goes to the register, speaking only a few words to the cashier, runs her credit card through, and takes her receipt and groceries. In Ghost-Man’s chute next to her Kascha LaFond stares from a magazine rack—shining lips, eyes of anticipation.
Alison Tiner walks from the store, the small bag in the crook of her left arm, her hair slightly askew, tied at the back of her head, her head cocked a little up and to the left, working her hips, utilitarian. Ghost-Man pays for his groceries, watching her disappear into the glossy window, and puts his cardboard package in the paper bag, slipping it beside the chili and soy milk, and then he is on the sidewalk of Kirkland and out of the bright lights of the store and beneath trees he sees Alison Tiner walking, looking into windows, a small grocery, a Laundromat just closing for the night, a darkened insurance office. She slows, attracted by something in the window of a closed travel agency: Ghost-Man is sailing already, euphoric, and his anger seems to be slipping into his shirt, into the stitching of it—it might be a fluid that escapes his body and hides in this cloth construction. In this lightness he can almost forgive Alison Tiner her stupidity. His knees, his stomach, his shoulders, could lift off the ground altogether, carry him to the height of the trees, where he might look down on the woman staring into the travel office with her longing, might even feel sorry for her in her desperation.
She stares at a poster advertising Rio. Ghost-Man stops a few feet from her, looking at a travel poster himself, feels her glance at him, at his bag of groceries, decide he is not dangerous, go on reading. Ghost-Man gazes at a poster of Greece: white homes on an island, a dark blue sea. He sneaks a look over at Brazil, at Alison Tiner imagining herself there with her man. Ghost-Man wants to tell her that he was on his honeymoon there. He thinks of his wedding to Jenna in Maine, a piano playing, a floor of beautiful hardwood, women whispering to their partners as they danced, their dresses flowing. Large windows of the old inn looking out onto the rocky seacoast. Then the lights of Rio beneath their plane, Jenna asleep on his shoulder. Do you know, he wants to ask this woman (who with her cock of head seems to offer the sense that she knows everything) that on the Brazilian statues of Christ they never hide the whip marks? They tell the truth. They show the streaks of blood, the fucking agony. They don’t sanitize this shit the way we do. Americans in their fear of death sanitize everything, even the blood of the Messiah.
It is hard to concentrate for a moment. He might rise into the trees, his thighs feel so incredibly light. What a moment! He might tell Alison Tiner the truth about Christ! He might do it. In this next moment, or this next. He holds his bag close, feeling his heart beat against it, listens to Alison Tiner breathe.
TEN
Jiri is with Helena in the garden, towering heads of sunflowers over them, sunlight on cabbage leaves, smells of oregano, scallions, basil. His sister walks out through the break in the wall and Jiri follows, toddling on the path to the Horák hill, imitating Helena’s fingers as she picks blackberries there. See, taste, she says, and the blackberries fall apart easily, tart in his mouth. There is the thick smell of wild grass and trees, the smell of Bohemia, and when she moves the sunlight seems to whiten her face above him.
But now he is an old man on Trowbridge Street again and the memory book is open on the table. There is sweat at his cheeks, and under his T-shirt. He has written two and a half pages of Czech and English and some German; sometimes just a few words represent whole thoughts—the writing abandoned when he got lost in memory. These sections are frustrating to read over, but rather than correct them he presses on. Near the window a crow is cawing, an ancient assault on the night. Dark leaves brush against the screen.
Jiri blinks. His lover Alena is somewhere in his memory, too, and he remembers that he wanted to say more about her. He can hear the sounds of insects and a car door, perhaps on Irving Street, slamming. The garage roof is below him, and his brow creases at what he is unable to do. He closes his eyes and concentrates, then opens them again to the light. He takes one of Marjorie’s fresh sheets. He writes in Marjorie’s ovals first:
Who: Alena
What: stopping the train
Where: in the forest outside Plze
When: 1943
Start with a sound, he thinks—Marjorie Legnini often emphasizes this—of kestrels in trees. It is November, sky gray, very late afternoon. The birds call and slip from tree to tree above him. Jiri lies on the forest floor, his submachine gun beside him, looks down through branches at the railroad, black-and-silver rails. There are more trees on the opposite side of the tracks, and then the trees clear and there is a stretch of wild grass on both sides, bled nearly white by cool autumn, and about two hundred meters away an abandoned warehouse and, distantly, a steel bridge and warped loading dock, and the tracks curling south. The sun above is a flat white coin behind clouds.
On the train that is coming, according to Resistance members working with Czechoslovak Railways, there is a physicist named Jedlika, formerly of the Prague Technical University, who must be taken alive, along with his wife and as many Jews as they can save; Jedlika and the other Jews shall arrive in a single cattle car, eighty strong, at the end of a string of twelve freight cars that will be carrying munitions from the koda Works (these must be blown, quickly, with plastic explosives) and supplies for the Russian front. There will be extra guards on the train; they will be killed or incapacitated. This, along with getting to and opening the car with the Jews, is Jiri’s job. Jiri checks his watch: twenty-three minutes left.
Four other Resistance men lie beside him, along with Alena and Hana Kráso
vá, a Jewish woman in her forties who has joined them recently. There are another eight Resistance members directly opposite, on the other side of the tracks, hidden well behind large stones and brush. The forest floor is cold and you can feel the early breath of winter coming from it.
Now, from behind the abandoned warehouse, three men, headed by the figure of Dr. Kobera, jog quickly down the opposite side of the tracks. The men bend over the rails and organize sticks of dynamite there, where the rails are curving, and then run back toward the warehouse, their heads down, crouching, and they are gone behind the wall and corrugated tin roof and Jiri ducks and there is a massive crack splitting the air, cinder and wood debris settling like a harsh shower of rain, and when he looks up some of the debris is still floating over the milky sun. Jiri brings the submachine gun close to him; it smells of oil. He has three of these German egg grenades, also, hanging over his shoulder, resting on the ground now between him and a man in his thirties named Mulák. Jiri glances out at the fresh destruction on the tracks, a rail twisting savagely away from the smooth curve, two of the ties upended; one of the men—it looks from here like tĕpán Petík—has run out and is kicking the ties, to no avail, to at least lay them flat, and the other two men run out and try to help, but the upended wood is stubborn and they give it up and jog again behind the warehouse.