Before Read online

  Marjorie moves back to her seat again, and Anna puts a hand over those of the young woman. Jiri watches them: Anna in her light blue sweater and with her glasses on her nose, and Marjorie in her white short-sleeved shirt, the lines of wetness beneath her eyes. Anna says: “It is hard to think of all this.”

  “I’ve had an easy life,” Marjorie says, wiping the back of her hand over her cheek, recomposing herself. “I really see that when I think of what you people went through.”

  “Well,” Jiri says, quietly. He clears his throat, emotional himself, his mouth firm. Marjorie is a good, earnest kid, maybe thirty-two years old, usually fairly jolly, and Jiri always looks forward to the individual and group sessions with her, joking with her, working hard on memory games, on his speech patterns; he isn’t quite sure how to handle this, these tears, and is grateful to look up and realize that she has collected herself.

  “I don’t usually get like that,” she says, smiling, her eyes shining.

  “It’s good,” Anna tells her, still holding a hand over one of Marjorie’s. “It means you care. Believe me, not all medical people are as caring as you are.”

  Jiri nods very seriously and then concentrates again on his paragraph. His writing is even and running straight across the page; it does not seem that he has repeated any words. He looks up at his therapist hopefully. “I think I’ve managed to finish it,” he says.

  * * *

  In March, as he was standing at the garage just behind his apartment building, Jiri’s vision suddenly turned white; he saw his wife, the blue cinder of the drive, the large sumac bush by the chain-link fence, all becoming pale, disappearing. He said, My God, Anna, something is wrong. At St. Leonard’s Hospital he was told he’d had a transient ischemic attack—a ministroke; on his second night there, a blood vessel ruptured in his brain and the pressure of the blood damaged his vision, particularly in his left eye. Two months later, still in recovery, he suffered another stroke that left him with halting language. With Marjorie’s help his speech has steadily gotten better (sometimes now he gets through one or two paragraphs without thinking about them) and his eyesight is stabilizing, though he has trouble with bright light—it can even be painful—and with the letters piling up and hovering weirdly during reading. His short-term memory, too, is still often uncertain.

  Jiri is most comfortable speaking with his wife, and Marjorie Legnini, and his Trowbridge Street neighbor Tika LaFond, a photography student who often takes him walking on their road or at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. Other people, not as familiar with his condition, are more difficult to converse with; he becomes self-conscious and especially does not do so well on the phone. Often he cannot find the precise word he is looking for, as if there is a trickster in his brain, holding up a cloak before the knowledge he needs. The cloak can make him desperate—he must force himself to slow down and think a word or sentence through, using small tricks of his own. He will bend the right side of his mouth down with concentration and wait for a trigger to the word, as Marjorie has taught him (college helps you forever, replace the “v” with an “m,” and Emerson is Tika’s college; a hen would make a nice subject for a painting, so Shelley Henderson’s art gallery on Bow Street is the place where Anna has worked for nearly seventeen years). Occasionally Jiri catches himself being sly and clipping off a phrase at an opportune moment, when in truth he had much more to say and knew—a swift panic—he wouldn’t get it all out. Sometimes the words just will not come, and Jiri will end his subject abruptly and shake his head with disgust.

  * * *

  There is this thing that passes between Jiri and Marjorie—she picks up on his hope, his will to fight, and they are a good team—and now she comes beside him again, wheeling over on her rolling stool, looking at his lines, still wiping her cheekbones. “It is a huge improvement, Jiri. Here and here”—she points with her finger—“the letters are a little cramped. You see how they bunch up? But the rest of these letters here are quite well spaced.”

  Jiri nods. “A least it doesn’t look like they keep jumping off a diving board anymore.”

  “Exactly,” Marjorie says. “This is progress. I told you, it will go slowly, but surely. And no repetitions, all the way through. First time that’s happened since we started.”

  She wheels over to her desk and pulls something from a drawer. “Look,” she says. “See? This was from right after you left rehab.”

  He does not remember these pages as he takes them from her. He had simply been writing his address for her, apparently, for here is his manic scrawling (could it be? could he have been so screwed up?), reading 39 Trowbridge Street, #5, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Some of his first efforts were crossed out with great frustration. Marjorie sets these examples next to his more precise writing now, and she and Anna try to encourage him, saying, “Look how far you’ve come, Jiri.” But Jiri’s jaw grows tight at the thought of how incapacitated he was, of what can happen to him so suddenly. Marjorie, seeing this, tactfully puts the old writing back into her drawer and takes the Lidice memory he hands to her and places it, chronologically, into the three-ring memory book that Jiri has with him always now, June 1942 after September 1933.

  On Brattle Street a few minutes later, walking to the parking garage, Anna’s hand is tight on Jiri’s arm, guiding him through the crowded sidewalk; he steadies himself with his cane. The memory book is firmly in his other hand. Somewhere there is a smell of fried dough in the air, the sound of someone singing off-key. He wears dark wraparound glasses; still, the sun shining into windows above is too much for him, and he turns his eyes down to bricks, hearing footsteps, voices, all around him. In crowds he must always walk with Anna’s help, as if he is some old damn horse.

  “All right, Jirko?” Anna says.

  Jiri nods, but his wife stops him and adjusts his glasses, which are starting to fall down his nose. “There,” she says. “Pretty cool character.”

  “Still can’t see a hell of a lot,” Jiri says. The street seems to be punctuated with glowing light: on this passing woman’s pastel hat, on the silver buttons of this man’s shirt. A group of teenage girls laughs as, to the angry honking of automobiles, they cross the road and go into Wordsworth Books. They have oversize jeans that are torn and scuff the street, and Jiri mutters for Christ’s sake that someone should get them some decent pants.

  “That’s just what the youngsters are wearing, for goodness’ sakes,” Anna says. “It’s the fashion.”

  “On je nedbale obleeny. It’s no good,” Jiri says. “Their parents shouldn’t let them go out like that. They must be just fourteen.”

  “That is old in this country. Where have you been?” Anna says.

  Jiri grunts. He taps with his cane, and they walk again. Two women pass in white chadors, speaking in rapid Farsi. Buildings here have fallen a little into shadow, and Jiri sees more clearly, though if the shadows get too dark his left eye will be blind and his right not much better. There is music nearby, on the brick sidewalk to the left—gypsy guitars and some sort of percussion—and people are gathered, clapping: Jiri and Anna slow down and ease into the crowd. Anna’s hand pulls: Some college students, seeing Jiri’s slow condition, his large sunglasses, make room. At the center of the gathering acrobats whirl batons of fire against the brick buildings and late blue sky. Jiri must study the scene a moment to take it in. The flames dance with the rhythm, and to Jiri’s difficult eyes and brain suddenly look as if they occupy the horizon, a terrifying trembling of fire that constricts his chest. The drums grow louder, and the performers plunge the torches into their throats. Anna exclaims with the crowd, but Jiri leans toward her and says, “Let’s go, Anna,” his voice hoarse with despair. Anna immediately puts her left hand on Jiri’s arm and the college students part, their faces a little bewildered and worried for him, and Anna says, “Ano, Jirko, let’s go.”

  * * *

  It is peaceful, darkly shaded, in their building on Trowbridge Street. Jiri and Anna go up the elevator to their thir
d-floor flat, a place decorated with paintings of Prague: of the Little Quarter or “Venice” area of the city, of Tn Church and the National Theatre and Charles Bridge. There are paintings of the Slovak and Bohemian countrysides, too, and, within a mahogany-and-glass case in the living room, small Bohemian glass jars and figurines, many of these smuggled out by relatives in the straw bodies of dolls during Communist years.

  Their daughter, Markéta, newly married and living in a Seattle suburb, stares out with her husband from a photograph on the living room wall. Jiri can see this clearly and he smiles: Markéta is thirty-five now, and he had been quite worried for her—all career and no personal life—until last year. Time soon for children, he thinks. He imagines Christmas, small blond Markétas running about him in the flat.

  On an end table beside the living room couch is a framed pencil drawing that Jiri once did, with his sister, of his childhood home. In it, you see the back of the family building, tall and thin yellow pastel and with the steep, red clay roofing shingles, and in the garden that is the foreground are large sunflowers beneath the light of the sun. A broken mortar wall is at the edge of the rendering, where Jiri as a boy could sit and read books well into the summer evenings. Jiri, aged fourteen, had done a group of these drawings with his sister, and his mother had given them as gifts to relatives in Prague. He did the pen-and-pencil work, and Helena painted the pieces with bright watercolors.

  Jiri walks through his living room now, still clutching the memory book; the last sun dancing through the screened balcony doors takes a moment to organize in his vision. Shards of light from the crystal pieces are an unbearable kaleidoscope, and then finally begin to separate into their respective shapes. He closes his eyes and waits. Anna is in the kitchen: taking herbs from the shelf, opening the oven; roasting sounds, pan sliding and water hissing on the burners. In July, at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Anna said to him, Ono se to polepí, it will get better, the doctors say it, Jirko, it is just a matter of time. He imagines the pocket of blood on his brain, slowly dissipating, allowing his eyesight to return properly. He opens his eyes. The light is still dancing, but not blinding him; it is more pronounced out on the balcony: hardwood slats and ribbons of white. The blond-wood grandfather clock here in the living room is tocking. The doorway into the small library is shadowed, and Jiri steps through it.

  Here, books run foot to ceiling, with only an ottoman and lamp and a small table and a window onto Trowbridge Street for companions. Beyond, through the next doorway, he can see the large bed and his desk with his computer, a black, unused brain against varnished mahogany. He puts the memory book on the small library table, straightens. Here are books on the art of translation and many other volumes that he himself has translated into English from German and Czech; histories of the Third Reich and Communism, and prose by authors of Czech and German literature and philosophy—apek, Havel, Kafka, Macek, Masaryk, Rilke. There is a section for his own reading and research, detailing the Germany and Czechoslovakia of the past thirty years, picking up from when he left the American intelligence services in Munich in 1969. Two large filing cabinets are built into the shelving, filled neatly with manuals and pamphlets that Jiri has translated for the Boston Guild, the firm that has been his most steady client for thirty years. One entire drawer contains copies of contracts, dating back to 1970, that ensured he would be paid for his work.

  When he was hit by the strokes, he’d just finished projects for Michelin Tires and the Pacific World Bank of California—he and Anna thankfully are still getting checks from these jobs. Anna earns a small income at Shelley Henderson’s art gallery. Medicare is taking care of medical bills, and the Posselts have found a pharmacy in Quebec where they can order the drugs Jiri needs, in bulk, at one-third of American cost. Jiri hopes that he and Anna shall not have to dig too deeply into their savings for their other responsibilities before he is able to make a decent enough recovery to go back to work. He steps to the ottoman and holds the back of it and looks out the window at the shifting leaves, the shard of Trowbridge Street below, until the feeling of dread sweeping him passes.

  His wife, too, has a full section of library wall—books on art, some of these volumes so large that Jiri built a special area into the bookshelves to house them. Above the ottoman, on the only space of white wall in the room, is a framed letter from Václav Havel, thanking Jiri for a 1991 translation of a book of the president’s essays.

  Jiri turns to the right suddenly, startled. From Robert Payne’s The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, an old volume with the glossy spine torn and creased, a white swastika hovers at him in triplet, spins. The spider moves toward him. He steps back, shaking his head. The figure keeps coming at him. He goes into the living room, his cane tapping at the floor angrily. He turns on lamps, and there is a nagging, arthritic pain just below his kneecaps. Jiri paces, closes his eyes, then opens them, grateful for the sudden clarity with which he can see the Oriental rug, the floorboards of wide pine.

  He thumps back into the library, his jaw set, and the swastika still hovers, but not as dramatically. What a goddamn thing, this brain of mine, these goddamn eyes. He stares the swastika down, tries to make it still; it spins, slowly.

  * * *

  Jiri steps again into the living room, listens to the sounds of his wife. He opens the screen doors and goes out onto the balcony. September evening here, leaves: Trees blacken to his left now nearly into blindness; the air is crisp, cool. He moves to one of the rockers, sits, lets his knees ease from all of the walking. Close your eyes, just for a bit, he thinks. Don’t think of the swastika. The more angry you get the more damn confused you get.

  Trowbridge Street lies beneath a canopy of leaves. He can see the steps to Tika’s apartment building across the road, the glass window of her door like dark mica. The chain-link fence there is the boundary of Trowbridge Academy, a small secondary school. The leaves whisper around him, making him think that he is in a boyhood tree house. Close your eyes. When he closes his eyes the white spider still seems to be hovering at him, against his eyelids. He tries to imagine other things, but the swastika imposes itself over all memory. Somewhere nearby, as he begins to sleep, there is a sound of wings.

  There is a high-pitched cry of birds, the slant of rain through the forest. He runs four days, following the Berounka River, watching the stars. With his footsteps, he repeats the address his father has had him memorize for just such an emergency: Kivoklátská 148, Plze, Kivoklátská 148 … When he sleeps, once, in the ruins of a castle, he dreams that German shepherds are coming up the slope at him, a few feet away, straining at leashes held by SS soldiers. Helena is yelling a warning at him, Tvůj ivot je v nebezpei, Jií! And he wakes and spits and keeps up his flight, moonlight down the riverbank, water like white knives flickering. His throat tastes of vomit, and it is difficult to swallow; he goes to the river and drinks water and spits and runs again, steady sharpness of pines against the night sky, hears the huh huh of his body fighting. Kivoklátská 148, Kivoklátská 148 …

  He keeps in the thick trees wherever he can, branches snapping at his face—or he runs in water shallows over small stones. Railroad tracks go along the other shore of the Berounka, and sometimes he watches the Czechoslovak Railways cars hurtle through the night, the dark succession of freight cars, flatbeds coming from the koda Works with huge tarpaulin-covered tanks and guns; he listens to the rolling heaviness of wheels on steel.

  He finds himself standing in his living room, knees aching. The display case is before him, small Bohemian crystal vases behind glass. He does not know when he got up from the rocker. His eyes focus; his cheeks are soaked. On the end table beyond the couch, in its small, gilded frame, is the picture he drew of his home in Lidice. For a moment he imagines Helena there, in the garden, in the shadows of sunflowers, smiling at him.

  But someone has been knocking on the door, and Anna is calling him, anxiously: “Jirko, podivej se kdo to je.”

  His wife comes into the living room, a towel in her ha
nds, glasses hanging from her neck, and now she is before him, looking at him, saying, “Jirko, my God.” Looks at his eyes; she touches his face, his wet cheeks, with her cupped hand. She holds her fingers on his jaw and then there is the soft knocking again and Anna turns to answer the door.

  TWO

  Tika LaFond’s roommate, Susan Bristol, is having an affair with a married man she met on the Internet. He is Stuart Livesy, an economics professor from the University of Sydney, who told his wife, legitimately, that he would be attending a conference in Boston. Tika thinks about it now, stepping into her Trowbridge Street apartment; about how she has been avoiding coming home ever since Susan picked Stuart up at Logan four days ago—bending over her photographs in the red light of the Emerson darkroom or working at Standish’s Pub in Harvard Square, leading people to tables, handing them menus, taking orders. Usually Susan and Stuart go off to Stuart’s hotel room in southern New Hampshire, but last night they were here when Tika got home from work. She could smell marijuana from Susan’s bedroom, and she tried to go to the refrigerator quietly for a snack, but they had come out to greet her. Short, smiling Susan with her dark eyes, dark curly hair. Her lover in his late thirties, smiling. Nice to meet you, Tika. I’ve heard nothing but good things. Tika wasn’t sure what to say, what to do with her hands, how to act, like maybe I’m just meeting him for the first time at an art gallery or something and not like they were fucking ten minutes ago?

  The hallway is dim and smells of onions and tomato sauce—Susan and Stuart’s recent spaghetti dinner. Tika turns on a lamp: dark paneled wood, a mirror in which she is startled by her newly shorn hair. She has the wide, fortunate eyes, the high cheekbones of her sister, Kascha, though something in Tika’s face is not as arresting, she knows—there is a rare type of face, determined by mathematical, incremental certainty, that can light up film, sell to humanity; she does not have that type of face. This does not matter to her: she would rather be behind a camera than in front of it. But she has a good face that draws men and the attention of women to her; she is fortunate in this, and she is grateful if her boyfriend, Jesse McKye—a rock musician and salesman at the Strings & Things store on Brattle Street—finds her attractive. The new haircut, close to her head, emphasizes the wideness of her eyes. She brushes her hair back away from her forehead and looks at her eyes a moment, the green-dark of them in this hallway.