The UnAmericans: Stories (15 page)

And when I said that was ridiculous, Katka looked around, at the coffee grounds on the table; at the dishes, sticky with food and littering the counter; then back at me, as if I were just one more thing preventing this small, dirty apartment from being childproofed, and started using words like “selfishness” and “neglect” with the same force that had drawn people from all over the city into Wenceslas Square.

H
ARPSWICK WAS
small, just under a thousand excluding the students, and I felt its size even more now with Daniela beside me. We’d exhaust my entire afternoon of activities in under an hour, once we made our way down the two blocks of shops, circled the tiny college, and there was nothing to do but look at the bay. I walked slowly and feigned interest in the window display of a bookshop. “Pretty lamp,” Daniela said, and I followed her in.

It was one of those stores designed to rip off weekenders, with more overpriced nautical picture books than novels and Tiffany lamps like the one Daniela had pointed out. I watched her scan the bestsellers, then poke through the tiny classics section. As she made her way to the even smaller political science shelf, I watched her eyes move through the
N
’s. I always reflexively looked for my books, too, though they’d gone out of print fifteen years ago and I had trouble even special-ordering them online. It touched me to think that every time Daniela walked into a bookstore she thought of my essays, but it also struck me as pathetic that she’d probably never once found them, and I flushed at her witnessing another of my failures. Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere but in the
N
section where my books were not. I lifted the Tiffany lamp out of the display window and brought it to the counter. “We’ll take this.”

“You don’t need to buy that,” Daniela said.

“It’s a gift.”

“How am I supposed to get it on the plane?”

“We’ll figure it out,” I said. “You see anything else?” I tried to remember the setup of her apartment.

“I don’t want any of this stuff.”

“You said the lamp was pretty.”

“Would you just put it back?”

But I couldn’t stop. I pulled a mug off the shelf. I grabbed a globe. What a perfect, fitting end to the play: the aging man darting around this store while his daughter slunk back, embarrassed and ashamed. I wanted to buy Daniela the lamp and a stack of books and the plastic reading glasses dangling near the register and anything else if she would only stop writing this play, and as I watched her move through the shop, putting things back where they belonged, I felt myself starting to spin and finally I blurted, “Do you really have to do this?”

“What?”

“Write about our family.”

She stared at me. “Amazing,” she said, “that you of all people would tell me what to write.”

She swung the door open and headed toward the water. She was walking swiftly, purse thumping her hip, her long dark hair ribboning out behind her. I caught up with her at the dock. She sat on a bench and put her face in her hands. She was right. I had asked her to do the one thing that went against everything I knew about myself, and yet I still wanted to destroy every copy of her play.

“Listen,” I said, “I know what you wrote.”

“How could you?”

“Your mom.”

“She doesn’t know.”

“She told me everything,” I said, and it was only when the words were out that I understood what I was doing. “So you might as well come clean.”

“But she doesn’t know,” Daniela said. “You’re lying,” she said slowly, almost like a question.

“She told me all about it,” I said. “Last night on the phone.”

And right then I remembered how I’d felt in that hard-backed chair in the interrogation room, when the StB agent sat behind his desk and told me things I never would have believed about the people I was closest to, that my friend Ivan from the
Chronicle
was the one who had linked me to the typewriter, that the rest of the group was quick to name me the ringleader. So much of me had known to trust my instincts, but the betrayal had felt so real in that bright, windowless room. “We had a good long talk after you went to bed.”

“But she never read it.”

“Maybe you left a copy lying around her house. Maybe she found it on your computer.” I met her eyes. “Or maybe she went into your apartment when you were at work one day, just to have a look around. She has a key, right?”

When Daniela nodded, I said, “Then that’s probably it. Mothers have their ways.
Your
mother certainly does.”

Daniela was gazing down at the row of shops, then behind us at the water, as if searching for a way out of this, and I said, “So tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Say it, Daniela,” I said. “The play isn’t about our family. It’s just about me, isn’t it?”

And that was when her eyes filled up, and there she was, the Daniela I’d always known, whimpering and vulnerable and small. “Just tell me,” I said, and when she didn’t respond, I said it over and over, until finally her voice broke and she said, “Yes.”

I watched a fisherman sift through his bait bucket and pull out a frozen minnow. The air was salty and humid and behind us boats bobbed silently in the harbor.

“Daniela,” I said.

But she wouldn’t look at me, and I couldn’t blame her—I didn’t want to look at myself then, either. Suddenly I had no idea what to say next. Part of me was saddened that my daughter was the kind of person who would crack so quickly, that the wall she’d built around herself could be so easily kicked down, but a bigger part just needed to know how the play would begin. Would it start with the time I forgot to pick her up in Queens, or when I missed her birthday because I was giving a talk in Hartford? Would it start with that last visit to Albany?

Daniela turned to me then and said, “It’s called
The Quietest Man
. It’s set during your last year in Prague, and how when you were brought in for questioning, you were too fearless to name names.”

I was so stunned I just kept standing there, wondering if I’d heard her correctly. Finally I sat beside her on the bench and said, “I’m floored, Daniela.”

Her face relaxed and I thought I saw something real coming to the surface. “I’ve been so nervous all weekend. I thought you’d think it was stupid that I was writing about something I’d never lived through. That you’d see it onstage and think, She got my life all wrong. I kept trying to imagine what it was like for you.”

“It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing,” she said. “They starved you. They kept you awake for days. You could have died.”

I decided not to mention the beef and gravy they fed me every day of the interrogation. The guard who pushed an extra chair under my legs so I could sleep a couple hours that first night. Relief was slowly settling in, and what I really wanted was to lie down, right here on this rusted iron bench, and close my eyes for a very long time.

“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 Ji
í’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.