Before Page 9

  It was on the next day—wasn’t it? Jiri looks down at the memory book but finds no answers there, for this is the first time he has written of Alena—that they had rescued a Jewish physicist from a cattle train en route to Terezín: Alena was there for that, he knows. And she had been by his side when they had, in the same week, blown an ammunition depot on the outskirts of Plze. A few days later she and the two others from the Resistance group were caught cutting phone lines, and they had chosen to fight and die rather than be captured. Alena took a bullet to the throat. Jiri wept when he heard, turned away from Dr. Kobera and stared out another window of yet another safe house, thinking of the girl he’d hardly known and of how those last moments for her must have been. Dr. Kobera was quiet but stayed in the room; clearly he’d guessed that Jiri liked the girl, though perhaps he did not know that they had made love. Jiri’s leader put on coffee, watched Jiri a few moments and said, with his firm voice, We are living in the time of the demon, Jirko. I have lost loved ones, too, and in horrible ways. It is a tremendous tragedy. But you must listen to me. You are exhausted and in grief, but you must return to thinking coldly. Activity will help you out of this. Jiri swore he would kill every Nazi he saw, just give him the chance. There are many more of them than us, Dr. Kobera said. Musíme bt opatrní a musíme rozhodnout, které bitvy bojovat. We must be intelligent and pick our battles.

  Jiri gets up and goes into the kitchen and makes coffee. He sits at the kitchen table and continues with the writing. He writes into the night. He remembers returning to Lidice in the summer of 1945, the Nazi barbed wire that surrounded his desecrated village gone and only a large cross on the spot where his father and the other men had been murdered. They had been buried there by a detail of Jews from Terezín. There was dander blowing through the air and nothing else but wind and grass. All else completely eliminated—if it were not for the cross, it might have been that Lidice never existed. Jiri knelt and touched the ground and wept for his father and all the Lidice men.

  Jiri writes of being a boy, his father looking with him into a telescope, the two of them exclaiming at the bright, Copernicus crater on the moon, at the rings of Saturn and glowing red Mars. Of his father shot, dead eyes toward the sky, hand in a fist. Marie in the gas truck, Alena shot through the throat.

  And Jana and Helena where? Where disappeared into the demon’s fire?

  EIGHT

  In Harvard Square the fire performers seem to make the night sky dance over the buildings. The torches spin, flames with blue black hearts; faces crowd around, lit in wonder, the orange light and shadows tremble on brick sidewalk and walls. Jesse’s arm is over Tika’s shoulder, and Tika holds those fingers, feeling her lover’s body close. He has showered at the Holy Mackerel and now wears a T-shirt, the Harley jacket, jeans. He looks good this way, his hair catching the lights of the shops; his body feels strong, something to hold on to. Tika runs her fingers, hard, over his knuckles and the guitar-callused tips of his fingers, kneads the base of his thumb.

  There are many people, so many people, in Harvard Square now: cars moving slowly, desperately, through the main intersection as large groups of pedestrians cross. Tika and Jesse walk up the sidewalk past Warburton’s Bakery and the Discovery Channel store, and Tika gives three dollars to a homeless advocate and slides the Spare Change issue she receives into her camera case. They duck into Standish’s—a mob of people waiting at the entrance, so that Tika decides only to wave to her friend and coworker, Pentti Kim, who is just coming back from seating a couple, and Pentti waves and then with her thumb and pinkie raises an imaginary phone to her ear and mouths the words Call me. Tika gives a thumbs-up and she and Jesse step on the sidewalk again. Here is a flood of teenagers, mostly in black. One teenage girl has heavy dark mascara, hair clenched and dyed black and pink, nose and lips pierced. She wears a black, long-sleeved shirt that says, I like you, I’ll kill you last. A pretty woman in a business suit steps by the teenagers, and now an older man with a beard, clutching a beaten leather briefcase. Tika holds Jesse’s hand, watches her boyfriend’s shoulders in front of her, the tangle of his still-damp hair, and all around them is the human river with its sounds: footsteps and radios and cars honking and conversation and the guitars. The old clock outside the Harvard Coop reads 10:38, and above it, over the eighteenth-century buildings of the university, a jet is winking in the black sky.

  They cross the street to the island, to Out of Town News, and while Jesse looks over an issue of Musician, Tika picks up Rolling Stone. She feels the heat of a man staring at her and turns and he is older, perhaps in his late thirties, with a mustache and long hair and tweed jacket, and he quickly switches his interest back to a magazine. It is so transparent, this interest of men—it feels sometimes like a heat-seeking missile. It then becomes a question of their intentions and how to react; a man on the subway, a week ago, insisted on sitting next to Tika as she came on the Red line from Emerson, and by the time they were crossing the Charles River he was handing her his card. He was older, in his forties, overweight and aggressive. They went underground again, and at the next stop she got up and walked out the doors and, in full view of the man, deposited his card into a Dumpster. She’d been furious that she’d had to get off at a stop she normally wouldn’t depart at; furious that he’d altered her routine. But you could tell, with some men, that they wouldn’t get the hint, even if you dropped word about your boyfriend, and sometimes you just didn’t feel like laying down the law and asking them to leave you the hell alone. This man is no problem—he’s just been caught staring—but she moves a little toward Jesse, and when she feels the man looking again, she turns her back on the stranger and engrosses herself in the magazine.

  Tika flips open the pages of Rolling Stone, landing on a two-page spread for the movie O, with the faces of Mehki Phifer, Josh Hartnett, and Julia Stiles. Trust. Seduction. Betrayal … Everything Comes Full Circle, the ad promises. Tika imagines herself in the new, glitzy Loews Theatre near Emerson with Jesse, the two of them close in the steep darkness, having salty popcorn and Pepsis, the story unfolding before them. She looks up to tell Jesse that she wants to see the movie, sees he is engrossed in his magazine, and so does not disturb him.

  She turns the page and finds Kascha, in an Armani Exchange ad, posing with a dark, Italian male model, the two of them caught as if on a forbidden date, the lights of a city blurred behind them. Kasha’s hair is dyed to a dark shade and her bangs are cut to fall just over her eyebrows. Both models look at the camera warily, as if caught in an affair, in something illicit. “Hey,” Tika says to Jesse, who is flipping pages again. “Here’s sis. She told me she would be in the Armani this week.”

  Jesse leans over and smiles down at the photograph. He kisses her at the temple. “Pretty cool,” he says, nodding. “I can’t get over how strange it must be to see your sister in these things.”

  “It’s usually pretty cool,” Tika says quietly.

  Sometimes it had been frightening in New York last year, though, during fashion week, seeing her sister on the catwalk, so famous now, in the center of all that, all of those eyes of yearning. Tika will be used to it this time—flashbulbs so intense that they seem to stop Kascha in time, to make even the live Kascha into a series of photographs. People stopping Kascha on the street, pressing in for autographs. Tika and Kascha will stay at the Barbizon, a great escape; in the room it will be as if they are teenagers again, and Tika will recover a part of herself. There will be the windows over glittering New York, and it will be as though she and her sister own the world.

  She goes with Jesse to the Indian vendor, and they buy the magazines.

  * * *

  Later, in the 24/7 Burger Palace a few blocks down, earnest Jesse questions Tika. They sit close together in a booth, a hanging light above them, waiters and waitresses moving constantly by to the kitchen. Tika holds Jesse’s hands, massages the heaviness of them with her fingers. Neil Diamond sings about being lost between two shores, and in Jesse’s eyes is the lig
ht of concern for this intrusion into her world.

  “She seems to be going to a lot of trouble,” he says. “Why this Australian, Tike? Just for the thrill of it?”

  “It’s complicated with Susan,” Tika says. She lays one hand over Jesse’s fingers, uses the other to sip her lime rickey. The restaurant is crowded, a small ocean of conversations just beyond their island. A waitress slips their burgers and fries onto the table, and Jesse and Tika thank her, and Tika goes back to the massage; after gigs, Jesse is always grateful for the pressure on his fingers. Tika says, “The truth is, like Jiri and Anna said, it shows me how I don’t know her very well. I mean, I moved in and I didn’t know her except through her ad. And Kascha was happy I was just living with somebody. And we’ve gotten along okay up to now. But I think I know what’s happening. This is something some men are kind of thick about”—she smiles and runs the pad of her forefinger over Jesse’s wrist—“present company excluded, of course. But you want to be with a guy who understands you, who lets you be who you are unconditionally. Women are always being contained or put on some pedestal and you want to be in a situation where you know you can mess up and still be accepted. Susan’s mom is this uptight bitch, honest to God. So I’m doubting Susan gets any real understanding from her family. Her father is like, long gone, living in California, and she just talks to him sometimes long distance. I’ve met a couple of her sisters, and you can see that the mother is this incredible chore for them, too. I went to this concert at Jordan Hall last year? With Susan and her mom? And Evelyn was driving and we dropped Susan off to get the tickets, and I’m in the car with Evelyn and we pull into this handicapped space and Evelyn whips out this handicapped card and I guess she sees the way I’m looking because she says, ‘They’re easy to get.’ She totally misunderstood my look. I mean, I dunno, maybe she is handicapped somehow, but I’ve never seen her have trouble walking or anything. And I was going to say something, but then I’m thinking, This is Susan’s mom, and maybe she’s got some problem I shouldn’t meddle into, maybe she is handicapped. But it just seemed consciously selfish to me, you know? I asked Susan about it later and she said, ‘Oh, Mom, man, she’s got the system rigged.’”

  Tika remembers Jordan Hall, the great egg shape of the place, the hush in musical silences, the “Hallelujah Chorus” being sung beneath them, and the opened choir books looking like a flock of birds wanting to fly. The thing with the handicapped space still bothering her. Evelyn Bristol’s face intent, glasses on her nose, and Susan’s profile looking already like her mother’s.

  “Evelyn’s always asking Susan these questions, you know, ‘Susan, do I look good in this blouse, should I get my lips Botoxed, should I lift my chin, should I have had sex with this guy on the first date?’ Just like, this narcissist. Susan just laughs about it after and says her mom is so whacked, but I can tell it fucks her up. It seems to me some of this is stuff a mother should never be talking to her daughter about; then she mixes that with the normal criticism, you know, ‘Susan, you ought to be more careful with your money; Susan, you look heavy in that color,’ shit like this. I don’t know what happened with Susan’s dad but I can see why he didn’t hang around.”

  Jesse nods thoughtfully, then disengages his hands, saying, “Thanks, Tike.” He takes a bite of his burger. He’s ordered the Macho Burger—it is the only thing he ever orders—and he can barely get his mouth around it. His eyes through the glasses, so busy concentrating on the burger, make Tika smile. When he’s swallowed and brushed his lips with a napkin he says, “So you mean Susan feels like she has to go to extremes to find her own world, her own, what did you say? Unconditional—”

  “Yeah, and probably she gets it, somehow, from Stuart. That’s what Anna says.”

  “Well,” Jesse says, dipping a fry into ketchup, “I’ll guess he loves up a good game, Tike. Men are good at it. You act a little caring and get the girl in bed as long as you want, and then you say you need some space and go through like a week of her bitching at you and then it’s freaking over. Some guys don’t even bother listening to the bitching. And this guy’s got it good. Because he can come here and have the sex whenever he wants and when it gets too heavy, pow, he just goes to Australia. And what can she do to him? Well, I guess she could call his wife?”

  Tika considers. “A few days ago I would have said she wasn’t capable of it, of breaking up a family. But she’s doing it anyway, right? And like Anna told me, I’m realizing that I just don’t know her. That’s the saddest part of this. I had a friend, and now I don’t know who the hell she is.”

  Jesse and Tika watch each other, holding their burgers. Neil Diamond is ending his song, “leaving me lonely still…,” and Tika knows that Jesse is thinking about her own father, wondering what he can say.

  “He was the most romantic,” Tika says, and her father is here with her, walking a cobblestoned street, ancient tenements of Rome behind him, a dry evening wind whisking his tie over his shoulder.

  “Who?”

  “My father. You were thinking about him.”

  “I was thinking about how close you were to him.”

  “Oh, we were close,” Tika says. “You always felt closer to yourself after being with him.”

  “I know what you mean,” Jesse says. “Some people are like that. Some people you hang out with, and when you leave them, after being at a party or whatever—”

  “You feel better about who you are. Because they care about being with you instead of showing off how great they are. Dad was just like that,” Tika says. She is quiet a few moments as Jesse goes after his burger again; she remembers her father meeting her in Italy, bundling her into his arms. Happily buying her the Leica set in Rome, saying, You will love the photography, it will help you see the world, honey. Remembers him on the Spanish Steps and at the Fountain of the Naiads; mornings that autumn when he said a cheery, Hello, pretty lady, to the heavy woman who owned a market near their hotel and how the woman smiled and peered out at them from her doorway, vegetables and hams and sausage hanging from her walls with twine; the women vendors on that street joked and flirted shamelessly with Tika’s father.

  Her father: Jean-Louis LaFond. A former French tennis ace with a quick, warm smile. A rainy evening, looking from the Gardens of Lucullus over the Piazza del Popolo to St. Peter’s Basilica, the wetness on the tar making lights glow, the dome against a pink and purple sky. October. The clean-shirt-cologne smell of him as Tika leaned against him, closed her eyes. Her father’s lips on the crown of her head, his hand across her forehead. Now in her memory it is the September before Rome, when her father still lived at home, in Andover, in northern Massachusetts. Around now, around this time in September, she will tell Jesse. She will tell him now, and she will tell him again much later, in darkness, in more detail, after they have made love. I looked down at the light with Kascha. Tika was thirteen, Kascha sixteen; after school they had gone to the nearby lake on bicycles—swum to rafts that had not been taken in yet, up the ladder and dripping over those dry boards, adjusting bathing suits and then lying out on warm wood, watching the sun drift through clouds. Clouds darkening and a light rain starting, and they rode home, laughing, through increasing downpour. Then they showered, Tika after Kascha, and when Tika came out of the bathroom she expected to hear her father and mother downstairs, getting ready for dinner, but what she saw instead was her sister, in the darkened bedroom, at the window. Tika joined her there, looking through rain at the pool house where her parents were, the light blazing through the dark evening, white squares of evening grass, the pool a long, dark rectangle. The rain made a steady, hushing sound but Tika heard her mother’s raised voice sometimes, a sound of betrayal, and in that sound Tika saw her father at the club where he taught most of his tennis lessons, that place that smelled so clean, outdoors and in, smiling at other, younger women. This had never surprised her, for she knew the way that women changed around her father; the way their voices grew light with him, as though they would never offer a bur
den to him with their presence. And she had seen her mother for years move away from her father’s touches in the kitchen, sometimes brushing away his hands; it had always disturbed her. She saw her parents now walk across the window of the pool house, mostly her father in motion, his hands making gestures as if to the sky and then dropping to his sides in futility, their mother’s voice, briefly rational, steeping into that sound of betrayal, and the circus of her father’s arms would begin again, and her mother’s voice would drop low, always putting in the last word.

  Then her father stepped out into that straight rain. Not caring about it, raindrops drowning his khaki slacks and white shirt. That rain coming down as he walked to the driveway, to his car; once he looked up at the window and saw his daughters there. What did we look like to him at that moment? Tika wonders now, speaking into Jesse’s eyes. That last moment, my dad must have known, when we would be together on the same ground, in the same home. For even if the bond between Tika’s mother and father had been tenuous, and you’d had to force yourself to believe the circle was complete, they had been a family. Now that had been broken; they had ceased being a family a few minutes before, in the pool house, when something her mother said convinced her father that he’d had enough, his spirit could not live with her cloying coldness, a woman who wanted him to stay for appearances but who no longer wanted him. Tika thought that, on some level, her mother had still needed a certain intimacy, but it was some complicated, unstated intimacy that her father had no hope of creating for her. Maybe in the pool house her mother and father had simply formalized, or recognized, years of lying, of waking in the morning and going through the motions before the liberation of jobs: her mother driving to her job at the public relations firm in Newburyport, her father to the Andover Racquet Club—work neither had to do, for they had come from extremely well-to-do families.