Before (4 page)

His wife, too, has a full section of library wall—books on art, some of these volumes so large that Jiri built a special area into the bookshelves to house them. Above the ottoman, on the only space of white wall in the room, is a framed letter from Václav Havel, thanking Jiri for a 1991 translation of a book of the president's essays.

Jiri turns to the right suddenly, startled. From Robert Payne's
The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler,
an old volume with the glossy spine torn and creased, a white swastika hovers at him in triplet, spins. The spider moves toward him. He steps back, shaking his head. The figure keeps coming at him. He goes into the living room, his cane tapping at the floor angrily. He turns on lamps, and there is a nagging, arthritic pain just below his kneecaps. Jiri paces, closes his eyes, then opens them, grateful for the sudden clarity with which he can see the Oriental rug, the floorboards of wide pine.

He thumps back into the library, his jaw set, and the swastika still hovers, but not as dramatically.
What a goddamn thing, this brain of mine, these goddamn eyes.
He stares the swastika down, tries to make it still; it spins, slowly.

*   *   *

Jiri steps again into the living room, listens to the sounds of his wife. He opens the screen doors and goes out onto the balcony. September evening here, leaves: Trees blacken to his left now nearly into blindness; the air is crisp, cool. He moves to one of the rockers, sits, lets his knees ease from all of the walking.
Close your eyes, just for a bit,
he thinks.
Don't think of the swastika. The more angry you get the more damn confused you get.

Trowbridge Street lies beneath a canopy of leaves. He can see the steps to Tika's apartment building across the road, the glass window of her door like dark mica. The chain-link fence there is the boundary of Trowbridge Academy, a small secondary school. The leaves whisper around him, making him think that he is in a boyhood tree house.
Close your eyes.
When he closes his eyes the white spider still seems to be hovering at him, against his eyelids. He tries to imagine other things, but the swastika imposes itself over all memory. Somewhere nearby, as he begins to sleep, there is a sound of wings.

There is a high-pitched cry of birds, the slant of rain through the forest. He runs four days, following the Berounka River, watching the stars. With his footsteps, he repeats the address his father has had him memorize for just such an emergency:
K
ivoklátská
148,
Plze
,
K
ivoklátská
148 … When he sleeps, once, in the ruins of a castle, he dreams that German shepherds are coming up the slope at him, a few feet away, straining at leashes held by SS soldiers. Helena is yelling a warning at him,
Tvůj
ivot
je v
nebezpe
i,
Ji
í!
And he wakes and spits and keeps up his flight, moonlight down the riverbank, water like white knives flickering. His throat tastes of vomit, and it is difficult to swallow; he goes to the river and drinks water and spits and runs again, steady sharpness of pines against the night sky, hears the
huh huh
of his body fighting.
K
ivoklátská
148,
K
ivoklátská
148 …

He keeps in the thick trees wherever he can, branches snapping at his face—or he runs in water shallows over small stones. Railroad tracks go along the other shore of the Berounka, and sometimes he watches the Czechoslovak Railways cars hurtle through the night, the dark succession of freight cars, flatbeds coming from the
koda
Works with huge tarpaulin-covered tanks and guns; he listens to the rolling heaviness of wheels on steel.

He finds himself standing in his living room, knees aching. The display case is before him, small Bohemian crystal vases behind glass. He does not know when he got up from the rocker. His eyes focus; his cheeks are soaked. On the end table beyond the couch, in its small, gilded frame, is the picture he drew of his home in Lidice. For a moment he imagines Helena there, in the garden, in the shadows of sunflowers, smiling at him.

But someone has been knocking on the door, and Anna is calling him, anxiously:
“Jirko, podivej se kdo to je.”

His wife comes into the living room, a towel in her hands, glasses hanging from her neck, and now she is before him, looking at him, saying, “Jirko, my God.” Looks at his eyes; she touches his face, his wet cheeks, with her cupped hand. She holds her fingers on his jaw and then there is the soft knocking again and Anna turns to answer the door.

TWO

Tika LaFond's roommate, Susan Bristol, is having an affair with a married man she met on the Internet. He is Stuart Livesy, an economics professor from the University of Sydney, who told his wife, legitimately, that he would be attending a conference in Boston. Tika thinks about it now, stepping into her Trowbridge Street apartment; about how she has been avoiding coming home ever since Susan picked Stuart up at Logan four days ago—bending over her photographs in the red light of the Emerson darkroom or working at Standish's Pub in Harvard Square, leading people to tables, handing them menus, taking orders. Usually Susan and Stuart go off to Stuart's hotel room in southern New Hampshire, but last night they were here when Tika got home from work. She could smell marijuana from Susan's bedroom, and she tried to go to the refrigerator quietly for a snack, but they had come out to greet her. Short, smiling Susan with her dark eyes, dark curly hair. Her lover in his late thirties, smiling.
Nice to meet you, Tika. I've heard nothing but good things.
Tika wasn't sure what to say, what to do with her hands, how to act,
like maybe I'm just meeting him for the first time at an art gallery or something and not like they were fucking ten minutes ago?