Before (3 page)

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 for
ever,
replace the “v” with an “m,” and
Emer
son is Tika's college; a
hen
would make a nice subject for a painting, so Shelley
Hen
derson'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.”

“Ex
act
ly,” 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
oble
eny
.
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 third-floor flat, a place decorated with paintings of Prague: of the Little Quarter or “Venice” area of the city, of
T
n
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
polep
í,
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.