Before (14 page)

And the storm winds blow

They're going right through me

'Cause baby I'm a ghost

Of the man I used to be

Tika watches the circle of audience eyes: thinks of Elijah and the woman he still loves. Then of a winter day at the Museum of Fine Arts last year—snow on the eaves of the wonderful old buildings and fog in the streets and going in with Jesse to see John Lennon's guitar. The old Rickenbacker behind glass, a circle of people staring in awe, thinking of the Beatles and history, each lost in some memory of their own.
In orbit around a phantom something.

She removes the telephoto lens and puts it in her case; she reaches in and comes up with a Spiratone fish-eye lens that she snaps quickly onto the Leica, and steps toward the back of the stage, so that she has all of the members of the band in the shot: Eric warped toward the ceiling, lights raining. The circle of shining, audience eyes. The song closes and the thunder of applause goes up and Tika begins shooting, capturing this ring of human light.

SEVEN

Jiri dreams that he is in some old colonial home. It is morning and there is a restful forest surrounding the house and Jesse and Tika have quietly been talking and they apologize for waking him up.
Not at all,
Jiri says; the sun stretches golden over the old wooden walls and immediately he is engaged in a discussion and Lord! how he can talk. He tells them about southern Bavaria and sailing on Bodensee and how the countryside around Immenstadt is emerald green in the spring sun. How one fall he swam completely across Lake Tergensee and how very cold and refreshing it was; that was 1951, and he and Anna had been married almost three years. They skied high in the Alps, at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and took the train back to Munich. He'd put in many intense hours on the job that winter, for all of the intelligence services were trying to catch up with a character they called
Duch,
the Demon-spirit, an East German SSD assassin who was killing exiled Czech and Hungarian leaders with the use of a hydrogen-cyanide gun. The Duch was never found.

I never found my mother and sister,
he tells his young friends,
and the world forgot about Czechoslovakia.
In the films that came out of his old country he saw how decrepit, how gray and worn the buildings and cobblestoned streets were. The faces of his countrymen seemed without hope. There was the brief sunshine, the possibility, of
Dub
ek.
Then in 1969, after the Soviets rolled into Prague, he and Anna decided to leave Europe.
I couldn't watch things disappear anymore,
he says.

In this old, sunlit-filled home Tika and Jesse look at him with great respect, and Jiri knows they are amazed, as he is, at how he can talk: it is as if he is lifting off the ground, beginning to fly. There is so much that he has wanted to talk with Tika about! And now as he thinks of it, he realizes he shall soon be able to work again for the Guild—to take the train to the business district, and the buildings of blue glass will be above him, and he will be free again, walking with his briefcase as he did last March, when he last went there on the T, snow melting, sunshine in the city, the breath of cool air.

And then he is awake, in the darkness beside his wife, and he can think with the same old speed, but he knows he would not be able to bring his thoughts fluidly to his lips. For a moment he feels he might choke with the sadness of it, of what he has lost in the moment from sleep to waking. He snaps the covers away from himself, thinks:
So. I'll heal this somehow, damn it.

Marjorie Legnini told him early, after he lost the speech, that the writing gives him greater access to his thoughts, that whatever the path is between the brain and the mouth is eased with the writing process. The doctors don't quite know why this is, she said, but she had seen it work many times.
So.
He rises and puts on his flannel, threadbare robe over a T-shirt; he gets into khakis, slippers. He takes his cane. Anna sighs, hardly conscious, irritated at her husband's nightly restlessness. He can walk ceaselessly at night these days—through the flat, or to check the Buick for fluids, or up and down the sidewalk before their building. Jiri goes into the library and turns on the light and sits on the ottoman, the window in the nook before him slightly opened to screens. He picks up the memory book, unclips a pen from its cover. The glass is a glossy black stretch, and his fingers are reflected there, turning the pages, the leaves above a collection of dark pressing shapes.

The swastika across the room is less prominent in the light. No hovering now, just a flat symbol on the spine of an old book. Jiri watches it, feels the early fall air circulating from the opened windows of the apartment. Then he begins to write.
It is a sound of laughter that he focuses on—a young woman's laughter—a tourist, perhaps, in this late afternoon. He is in Linz, a few years ago, with Anna, on a stopover to Prague.
It is winter. The yellow, red, and white medieval houses surround them, a frosting of snow on the red-tiled roofs. Niches in the walls parade intricately carved angels and saints, balconies that in summer will weep with flowers and plants. The windows of the baroque shops are frosted with snow and ice hangs from the archways and it is cold, some wind blowing, snow drifting sometimes through the street horizontally. A few people walk about, their footsteps and voices echoing in the strange winter silence. Jiri hears the woman's laughter, and he thinks of a similar sound, ninety-five years before. The anguished boy standing in this very place, understanding that Stefanie cannot be his. Jiri feels he is walking in a graveyard of millions.

He and Anna come to an old dance hall. There are wide steps of marble up from the street, massive balustrades adorned at the entrance by carved lions. The place is being refurbished now to house a business, but Jiri imagines Adolf Hitler walking up these wide steps to one of the large windows. The young Hitler staring in at the dancers: men in uniform, women in wide, sweeping dresses. Faces in there of joy; light from the chandeliers intensely warm on the floorboards. And there, in the arms of a lieutenant—one of those who offered her a flower on the Promenade—dances the extraordinary girl Stefanie. She has a white-gloved hand on the lieutenant's shoulder. Adolf Hitler stands at the window, watching, annihilated.

*   *   *

Jiri is writing in Czech now, remembering words that President Havel wrote and that Jiri translated, sitting in this same chair, ten years before.
Zlo
inci
zůstali na svobodĕ a volnĕ se pohybovali mezi námi
p
edstírali
e
jsou
estní
lidé dvacátého. Století,
kte
í
nev
ĕ
í
ve
zlo
iny.
The demons have been turned loose and go about … confronting this modern world with machine guns in their hands, they believe themselves to be instruments of providence: after all, they are merely meting out punishment in accordance with the ancient prophecy about the desecrator of their Golden Temple
.