Before Read online

  Fall coats hang from pegs, and below them she puts Susan’s mail on the small table. Bills for Susan: credit cards, Internet service. An Acoustic Guitar magazine, an advertisement soliciting funds for the local public television station. The strap of Tika’s camera case is heavy on her shoulder, and she shifts it as she looks at her own mail. There is a postcard: Kascha has been working in Rio this week, though Tika is sure that by now her sister has flown back home, to Milan; on the card Christ beckons high over the sea, the city, ocean waves below Him, and on the flip side Kascha has written: Dear Tike, shooting three days here, a lot of men (mostly Americans) gawking on the beach but the Brazilian men are beautiful. Would take one or two back home with me if I had the time and patience. Can’t wait to be with you in NYC next week. XXXOOO.

  Tika walks into her bedroom and puts the postcard and her bills and the case and a slip of photographs on the dresser, beneath the mirror. Above her bed a pencil drawing of John Lennon stares at her: tired genius eyes behind National Health glasses, jeans jacket, and T-shirt. Kascha did the drawing in high school—a sketch of the famous 1968 John Kelly photograph—and Tika has always admired it. Kascha used to do a lot of drawing back then; it was something their father encouraged and their mother did not, arguing that for anyone to make it in the art world, one had to have exceptional talent, as she put it. There were many crying jags over this and other judgments, and Tika defended her sister’s art, her spirit, yelling fiercely at their mother while Kascha slammed doors.

  Tika has left a hairbrush tossed on the bed, her bed unmade. She pulls off the coverlet and straightens the sheets tight, tosses and pulls the coverlet flat, feeling as she does so something ease within her, an anger she has been holding at Susan all day subsiding, shifting where it belongs, to Susan, something Susan needs to deal with. It is strange to think about this thing with the Australian man. Last night, Tika whispered her objections fiercely to her older roommate in the bathroom, for their landlord’s living room was directly above Susan’s bedroom: Don’t you think Joe will smell the grass, Susan? And Susan cocked her head in the strangest way, as if Tika were a distant vision, an acquaintance who needed simple reassurance (a new moment for Tika; since they had been living together—since the moment Tika’d met her after answering Susan’s ad—Tika felt they’d always been close. Now, for a brief moment, that was not so certain). Susan had said, Well, we’ll put it out then, and the moment passed and she said, God, Tike, he fucks like a rabbit. Tika had not said anything to that, but she had imagined the wife at her sink in Australia, peeling carrots, brushing hair back from her forehead with the back of a hand, two children racing by the doorway behind her.

  Susan does alumni relations work for Trowbridge Academy now, basically trying to part wealthy alumni from their funds. She goes through many men, but there is something different, something more serious, about Stuart; she touched her chest and couldn’t stop smiling when she was preparing to get him at Logan. She kept saying, Fuck, man, I can hardly breathe.

  * * *

  In the bathroom Tika pulls down the shade, starts the shower, then undresses, leaving jeans, shirt, underwear, bra, and socks hanging loosely on the large radiator. She steps in and water beats against her chest, her collarbones, a hollow sound; she thinks of Jiri joking two days ago at the Arboretum that he cries in the shower for no goddamn reason at all. He’s been a hell of a sport—so courageous, with his wry humor—about everything that has happened to him. Tika holds him by the inside of his bicep as they walk, feeling the lightness of him there, of his bones, the lightness of age, of the body disappearing. The colors of the Arboretum, the brightness of mountain laurels and azaleas, seem to swallow them both. There was something—in a moment by the roses—that he had wanted to tell her, his face grave, and then the moment had passed. She’d thought perhaps he’d hit the wall he sometimes does, the inability to go on with his sentences. She’d said, It’s okay, Jiri, but he shook his head and looked at the ground and Tika didn’t press it.

  The water comes down now, streaming through her hair. She feels her face lengthen with the image of Jiri in her mind. She has been dreaming, in fear, of Jiri lately, and a nightmare from a few nights ago comes back to her: She was in an old, crowded theater—dark, timeworn wood and heavy red curtains, searching for her friend, seeing him then a number of rows below, sitting with a man she did not know. The man had dark skin and black eyes; he was dirty, as if from some squalid, violent country with unrelenting sun. Tika was trying to reach Jiri, to warn him, but people were blocking her way. There was something more to the dream, but she cannot remember what it was.

  She works in coconut-smelling shampoo, rinses. The water swirls on chrome, the soap falls in quick coils. She conditions her hair; soaps her underarms, her chest, her neck; scrubs with a Seychelles Islands sponge—Susan picked up a bunch of these with another lover just a few months ago. Somewhere in southern New Hampshire Susan is twisting in bed with Stuart. Tika imagines them, the flesh of it, tongues, light on Susan’s back, then on Stuart’s back; somewhere in Australia the wife now is washing her hands, spraying soap down the sink with the hose. Tika rinses, glad for short hair, for just being able to run your hands through. She shuts down the shower and steps out onto the tightly woven rug. A breeze comes from the window, the shade clicking, the curtains drifting toward her. She takes a large towel and dries herself, rubbing her face briskly.

  She closes the lace curtains in her bedroom and turns on a light and puts shaping gel in her hair and smoothes on skin lotion, then combs and dresses carefully: gabardine trousers, cotton shirt, thin black leather jacket, mules; she will be seeing Jesse later tonight, at a gig of his in Central Square. There is the sound of teenagers going by on skateboards on the street just underneath her window, restless thunder. She takes the photographs she has worked on in the afternoon from the Ilford plastic liner and sets them against the wall beside the floor-to-ceiling window. Other photographs are there, in plastic liners or mounted for her semester project—a retrospective of Jesse’s band—on archival paperboard. Here is a hand of Jesse on a dark ebony fret board, an eye of the other main vocalist, Elijah. Here a full shot of the band at Harborfest, in June—Eric, the drummer, glancing over his shoulder, smiling at her, and the other four guys looking happily up also. They have just finished a song, and ten thousand people are cheering; there are banners for Miller Lite in the distance. Jesse’s hair is tousled black, swept quickly away from his forehead, and his glasses shine in the bright day.

  At her bureau Tika slides open a drawer, takes out her white rope bracelet, slips it on. She takes the Leica from a drawer and from a shelf above five rolls of high-speed Kodak film. These she puts in her camera case and swings it over her shoulder. She turns off the lamp by the bed and the hallway lights, retrieves a salad and tomatoes from the refrigerator, and locks the front door behind her. Then down steps and across the street—Trowbridge Street is quiet now, cavernous in this moment of her crossing; a few of the leaves above her are tinged with early color—and up the brief porch at 39. Now there is a sound of a bird protecting territory in the willow beside her: now a faint heavy rap drum, many streets away, a sound that quickens Tika’s heart with its promise of violence. Three flights up in the old elevator, the smell of this hallway that of cigarettes and vegetable soup: Tika comes to number 5 and knocks. There is no answer and after a few moments she knocks again. She watches the door open, and here are Anna Posselt’s eyes, staring and wet.

  * * *

  “Hi, Anna,” Tika says, tentatively. It is strange that her friend is not opening the door farther. “Vivian Topalka gave us too many tomatoes. I thought you could use some.”

  “Oh, yes. Thank you, honey,” Anna says, pulling glasses up to her nose. She reaches a hand out for the bag that Tika holds: crackling paper. The door opens a little more and Tika sees Jiri over Anna’s shoulder and he looks as though he has come up from some horror—it catches Tika in her stomach and throat. His face is wet with tears, his ch
in struggles; the living room and dark balcony are behind him, and then he recognizes Tika and starts to smile. Tika says to Anna quietly, “Is Jiri okay, Anna?”

  “He is having”—Anna waves her hand for the word, then gestures quickly for Tika to come in—“some emotions. From therapy today. But he is all right, honey. No worries. Thank you for the tomatoes. Come, come.”

  Clutching the plastic bowl of salad, Tika follows Anna’s small back toward the kitchen: Jiri is gone from the living room and Tika assumes he has stepped onto the balcony. The kitchen smells strongly, wonderfully, of broiled meat and onion and garlic. Anna hefts the tomatoes onto the center island and motions to Tika to sit, but Tika is already doing so, at the chair that looks out over the garage roof and then back, between trees, to Irving Street. She sets her camera case on the table. Anna leaves the room a moment, and Tika hears her converse in Czech with Jiri, tones, on both sides, of reassurance. The window beside Tika is fully open to the screen. Tika thinks of Jiri’s car in the garage, of how Jiri speaks of driving it again. It represents freedom to him, she knows; he said this once on a journey to the Arboretum, Tika driving Susan’s clunky old Ford. This is a gift for me, Tika, Jiri said. To drive with you. I’m worried about driving with Anna—she gets very nervous behind the wheel because she was always used to me driving. But you drive very well.

  Tika doesn’t know if Jiri will be able to drive again—she has a feeling he will not—but she keeps encouraging him because you never know. His eye doctor at Massachusetts Eye and Ear says it is still a possibility. She’s had it in mind to perhaps take Jiri to the mountains of New Hampshire for an afternoon, to see the early colors of fall. It would be safer for them to go in Jiri’s Buick, and Jiri might enjoy that more. Jiri has said he’s always loved mountains and has told her many stories about his excursions to the Alps of southern Bavaria after the war. Tika imagines her friend’s face, happy, taking in the New Hampshire mountains, the orange and scarlet red of the trees.

  But the image of his face moments ago comes back to her—what happened in the damn therapy? And now she remembers the rest of her nightmare, the red of the old curtains that looked somehow supernatural in the prefilm light. The theater was crowded, people settling in their seats. She had been very concerned for Jiri—where was he? And then she had seen him with the strange, dark man, accepting with considered sadness what the man had to say. She could not make her way to her friend through all of the bodies, people dipping and turning in her way, taking off coats, putting brochures on seats. Laughing (how could they be laughing, she’d thought in her dream; how could they live their simple, everyday, luxurious lives with Jiri in trouble?): She began to shout, angrily, Don’t listen to him, Jiri. Tika had woken, crying, with Jesse holding her, saying, Honey, honey. It’s all right, honey.

  Now Anna bustles back into the kitchen, and Tika smiles bravely at her.

  “So did you have the photography history today?”

  Dr. Corliss had lowered the large blinds; the square of the television had blinked at the class. There had been the sounds of Tremont Street below the window. Tika nods. “We saw a film. On Matthew Brady.”

  “Ano,” Anna says. “He was very important. He made”—she waves her wooden spoon—“a window for everyone, for the whole world—”

  “Some of the Civil War stuff is so sad, when you look hard at it. All these boys—”

  “Ano,” Anna says, shaking her head. “The world has sometimes”—another wave of the spoon—“too many things, too much sadness.”

  She is speaking of her husband now, of course. Once in the hospital this June, when Jiri was sleeping, Anna had told Tika in the hallway that Jiri lost his family to the Nazis during the war, that they had killed the men and children of Lidice and sent the women to concentration camps. They shot all the men, Anna said. Every male over fifteen. Jiri’s father died there. They gassed the children in the back of a truck at Chelmno in Poland—eighty-two children, three of them were only one year old, Anna said, can you believe? Jiri narrowly escaped, but never found what had happened with his mother and sister.

  His sister? Tika had said.

  She was just a little younger than you, Anna said.

  He never found them? Tika had asked.

  He looked for years, Anna said. When he worked with U.S. intelligence, in Germany. Most of the women went to Ravensbrück. But Jana and Helena were never there.

  Why did the Nazis do it? Tika asked.

  It was just insanity, Anna told her. Hitler taking revenge for the Resistance killing of his general Heydrich. But no one in the village was involved. No one. Everyone in the village was innocent.

  Tika had gone home and looked up Lidice in the encyclopedia. There was a photograph of three Nazi soldiers, standing with odd smiles on their faces and with the town demolished and in rubble behind them. One of the Nazis had a boot set on a concrete girder, and looked as if he were simply at work on a construction site. Tika had felt her fingers cold on the pages of the book.

  Anna, too, had lost her father in that war, in the uprising in Prague, in 1945. Tika imagines Jesse in combat, running by a barbed-wire fence at night, explosions lighting the sky behind him. It is the image that comes to her when she thinks of war. Barbarism, insanity—human bodies scattered like bloody dolls, as in today’s film. She could never let her lover go into such a thing.

  “I never spoke with Jiri about his town,” Tika says quietly. “I didn’t know if he wanted to be reminded of it. But it looked to me like he wanted to talk about something the other day, when we were at the Arboretum.”

  “I know,” Anna says, whispering over the sound of the cooking. “He does not even speak to me much about it, even in fifty-two years of marriage. But he is remembering much more now, because of the therapy.” She puts plates on the counter, and Tika gets up and takes them to the dining room. When Tika comes back into the kitchen Anna asks, a little more loudly, “So how is the project?”

  “I did a lot of darkroom stuff today,” Tika says. “I’m pretty far ahead on my photographs.”

  Anna nods. She stirs tomato paste, then begins adding paprika, thyme, rosemary, red and green peppers, and mushrooms into the mix. She shakes the pan expertly and stirs again. The pan sizzles anew. She says, “I like your photographs very much. When you brought them over. You have a real talent.” She lowers her voice again. “I’ll go back to the studio for a few hours tomorrow.”

  “I have time tomorrow in the afternoon, Anna,” Tika says softly. “Do you want me to come stay with him?”

  “Nay—” Anna waves her spoon. “I want him to be by himself for a while. I feel he needs this.”

  Tika watches Anna in her print dress, small blue and red flowers on a wild field, the apron about her, her glasses hanging on her chest. Since the first stroke, and especially since the brain hemorrhage in June, the old lady has lived on the tightrope with Jiri, trying to make sure his Coumadin doses strike the balance between dangers—too little of the drug and he might have a stroke again; too much and there might be bleeding on the brain again. Anna has had, constantly, to attend to his spirit—getting him out, conversing easily with him and hiding her worry, joking with him. Tika feels, looking at her, the months of struggle in the small, busy frame. She says: “I have to learn to cook like you, Anna.”

  “I learned from my mother,” Anna says, adding beef stock, then Worcestershire sauce. “Markéta did not want to learn from me, so I shall teach you.”

  “It smells delicious.”

  “Ano. I shall teach you.”

  Tika nods. She gets up and takes herb croutons in a box from one of Anna’s cabinets, and two wooden forks from a drawer. She brings her bowl of salad back to the table. She unwraps the plastic covering from the salad bowl, and opens the box and pours in the croutons and stirs them into the salad with the wooden forks. Anna hands her vinaigrette sauce to work into the mix. The long rooftop of the garage is dark now below Tika, leaves stretching over the moss-covered shingles, and she
can see the lights of Irving Street blinking through the trees. She thinks of Professor Corliss speaking today about how, after the Civil War, thousands of Matthew Brady’s glass negatives were thought abandoned and used for greenhouse windows, history slowly, over years, disintegrating in the sun. Maybe that is like what is happening to Jiri.

  When she looks up again Anna is nodding to her, saying quietly, “I think he is better. You can go to him if you wish.”

  * * *

  From the balcony doorway Tika sees the creases of Jiri’s neck, the side of his face in shadow. He sits very still with the old Grundig radio on beside him. A broadcaster is talking about the intern in Washington; she has been missing now for four months and the congressman, Condit, is insisting that he had nothing to do with her disappearance.

  Tika thinks Jiri might be asleep, but he senses her there when she has taken a few more steps and he turns and holds out a hand. She slips into the rocker beside him and takes his hand and his gray-blue eyes sparkle with charm. He clicks off the radio. He is a handsome man; she has seen pictures of him in his late twenties, when he worked in Germany: tweed coat and silk tie—devastating, really. His face still has that easy confidence, and there is no hint of the agony and confusion she saw there when she came in.

  “So,” Jiri says. “Is she nearly ready for us?”

  “I think so,” Tika says. “She says she will teach me to cook.”

  Jiri nods at this. “It is a good thing to know. A whole universe.” He pauses a moment, searching for words. “I never learned it, beyond a few bachelor, fast things. My mother and my sister were good cooks, but these things the men did not do as much in Czechoslovakia.”