The Prodigal Spy (26 page)

Anna found this funny, or chose to, and laughed, and Nick suddenly saw her as she must have been, bright and attractive, before weight and time had drawn her face closed. When had they met? Did they have jokes together? Nick thought of his parents, laughing downstairs after the guests had gone. He had been looking at Anna as a kind of nurse, dispensing pills and telling his father to rest. Now he sensed a different intimacy. Not a nurse, a wife. Who broke her nails pulling weeds.

So, improbably, they talked about gardens, about temperamental peas and what to do when the squash came in, as if the morning with his father had never happened at all. Anna passed plates. Molly asked the names of things in Czech. Small talk, a conspiracy of cheerfulness. He found himself slipping into the easy familiarity of a family lunch, where nothing important was said because everything was already known. He sat back, listening to his father’s voice telling stories about the neighbors, feeling oddly at home. It was the last thing he’d expected here. Maybe things really were the same everywhere, fresh produce aside.

The room had been dim when they’d first come in, but now he could see it clearly, and his eyes moved lazily from the pantry shelf to the sitting area, the usual heap of books next to the couch. The side table with the Order of Lenin in its velvet box. The shelves on either side of the fireplace–no, not a fireplace, a wood stove, but framed by the same kind of shelves. He glanced toward the record player in the corner, then back to the couch, facing the easy chairs, each glance like a snapshot. He stopped. It felt the same because it was the same. The desk under the window with its portable typewriter, the table behind the couch for lamps and messy piles of books, even the radio on the windowsill–all the same. For a moment the slipcovers and crocheted doilies, Anna’s touches, disappeared. Arranged exactly the same, all of it. His father had recreated the cabin.

Nick stared at the room, half hoping to see the fishing poles near the door, and sank back into the old photograph. Did his father know? Or was it a longing so unconscious that even furniture fell into place, just part of the natural order of things? He’d never left. And what about Anna? Did she fall into place too, curled up on the sofa with a book in his mother’s spot? Maybe she liked it. Maybe she didn’t know she was living in someone else’s house.

“Did you have a place in Russia?” Nick said, clearly a question out of the blue, because they all looked at him, surprised he hadn’t been following their conversation.

“In the country?” Anna said. “Yes, a dacha. Small, like this. We had to bring everything with us. You can see the condition. So old. But new furniture–who can get it? Of course, your father didn’t mind. Men,” she said to Molly. “They like everything the same.”

“Hmm,” Molly said. “Like dogs.”

Anna laughed again, covering her mouth with her hand, a girl.

Afterward, Nick helped with the dishes while Molly and his father sat out in the sun in fading canvas chairs like the ones in Green Park. His father had taken another beer from the tiny fridge, hiding it from Anna and winking at him.

They worked at an old pedestal sink, Anna slipping wet plates into the drying rack, Nick wiping and stacking. She seemed preoccupied, uneasy now that they were alone, as if the others had taken the high spirits of the lunch table with them.

“How did you meet?” Nick asked to break the silence.

“Meet?” she said, surprised. “At work.” She brushed it away like a fly. She took a second, then turned to him, her hands still in the water. “He’s very ill. Did you know?”

“Yes. He told me.”

“It’s not good for him, to be excited.”

“He doesn’t look very excited.” Nick nodded toward the lawn chairs, trying to be light.

“He is,” she said flatly. “To see you—” She hesitated. “When he told me, I was afraid. That you would quarrel. So many years. But it’s all right, isn’t it?” She looked at him, more than a question.

“Yes. It’s all right.” He smiled. “No quarrels.”

“You think I’m foolish to worry like the mother hen. But I know him. All this month he’s waiting. What if he doesn’t come?”

“But I did.”

“Yes.” She turned back to the sink. “Your mother–she didn’t object?”

He glanced at her. “I didn’t tell her,” he said cautiously, not offering any more.

“Ah,” Anna said. “You thought it would upset her? Still?”

“I don’t know. She never talks about it.”

She nodded to herself. “Like Valter,” she said, translating his father’s name, making him foreign, hers. “Never of her. Only you.” Then, unexpectedly, “She’s a woman of fashion.”

It was another trick of language, the archaic phrase wrapping his mother in gowns and powdered wigs, a figure in a Fragonard swing. Nick smiled.

“I suppose. She thinks so, anyway.” There it was again, the easy disloyalty.

“Yes. I saw photographs. Beautiful. I was maybe a little jealous,” she said shyly.

“Jealous?”

Anna laughed. “When we get old, we become invisible to our children. But we still see. He was in love with her, I think.”

“That was a long time ago,” Nick said, embarrassed. Did she want to be reassured, this thick-waisted woman with her hands in the sink?

“Sometimes it’s easier to love a memory. In life, things change. What would Zdenek be like now, I wonder sometimes.”

“Who?”

“Excuse me. My first husband. It was a long time ago.” She smiled, echoing Nick’s words. “He was killed.”

“In the war?”

“No, when the Germans first came. They arrested him. They arrested all the Communists.”

Another life, closed to him. More than his father’s wife. Why had he thought she had no history?

“So to me he’s always young, like then. Now what would he be? An old man at the Café Slavia, arguing politics. Well, who knows? We change.” She turned and dried her hands on the towel, her eyes soft and concerned. “Even your father. Sometimes, you know, when a memory comes to life, it’s not what we expect.”

“You don’t have to worry,” Nick said. “I don’t expect him to be the same.”

She shook her head. “No. Him. What does he expect? All these years, he sees you as you were–not a man, not different. And then—” She reached over and touched his arm. “You’ll be careful. You won’t–excite him.”

Nick looked down at her hand. “You didn’t want me to come,” he said simply.

She sighed. “The wicked stepmother? No. It’s good for you to see each other. But perhaps Valter’s right, I am always looking for the rain. Why now? What does he want?” Nick moved his arm away, afraid of the question, but she had her own answer. “I think he’s getting ready to die. So, this meeting. But I’m not ready for that. We have a life here. Not rich. Not–fashion,” she said, almost spitting the word. “Quiet. But you don’t know what it means to have this. What it was like before.”

She shopped, turned back to the draining board, picked up a kettle, and held it under the faucet. For a minute the only sound was running water.

“I’m not trying to upset anything,” Nick said lamely.

“No,” she said quickly. “Excuse me. Such foolishness. How happy he is–you can see it in his eyes. So maybe it’s good.” There was a popping sound as she lit the gas ring.

“Two days. That’s all,” Nick said, as if they were bargaining for time.

She nodded. “Go talk to him. I’ll bring the tea.” She glanced out the window, a caretaker again. “It’s too much beer–he’ll fall asleep.”

But he was animated, talking with Molly in a patch of sunlight. In the low-slung canvas chairs they looked like a Bloomsbury photograph, droopy sun hats and cigarettes, waiting for tea.

“Nick. KP finished?” he said. “You’ll make someone a good husband. What do you think, Molly?”

She looked up at Nick. “Hmm. A catch.”

“I was telling Molly about when they took down Stalin’s statue here, in Petrin Park. Crowds kept coming–cheering, you know?–so they had to do it at night. But you could hear the dynamite way over Holečkova. All those years, and he still wouldn’t go quietly.”

“Chair?” Molly offered, but Nick sat down next to them on the grass.

“What’s down there?” He pointed to the clump of trees below. “Where the mist is.”

“Water. What we used to call a crick,” his father said, smiling at the word. “There’s always mist here, all over this part of Europe. It’s the cloud cover, I think. No wind, unless the
föhn
comes up from Vienna. Then everybody gets headaches. Maybe it explains the politics.”

Molly giggled. “And Freud.”

His father shot her an appreciative glance. “Yes, and Freud. Maybe it was the weather all along.” He lit a cigarette. “So, Nick, what will you do now?” A father’s question, innocent. “After LSE.”

Molly turned to him, frankly curious.

“Larry wants me to go back to law school.”

“Well, he would. And you?”

Nick shrugged. “We’ll see.”

“All the time in the world,” his father said. “Well, why not? Of course, someday you’ll have to earn a living.”

The tone, so unexpectedly paternal, annoyed Nick. Maybe Anna was right–he’d always be as he had been, a child.

“Larry settled some money on me,” he said bluntly.

His father was quiet for a second. “Did he? That was generous.”

“I told you he was a catch,” Molly said.

But this time his father ignored her. “What do you want to do, work with Wiseman?” He leaned back, smoking. “Of course, it’s the great subject. To know what happened. You know, when I was your age I thought history was–what? Sweeping forces,” he said, his voice ironic. “We were all swept along. Playthings.”

“A dialectic.”

“Yes, like that. The clash of forces. Something almost abstract.”

“And then?”

“Then, I suppose, biography. I saw the effect of one man. What if there hadn’t been a Stalin? Would things have been the same? No, utterly different. What if he’d never existed?”

“Who?” Anna said, coming out to them with a tray.

“Stalin.”

She hesitated, then handed his father a mug and two pills. “Here,” she said, as if nothing had been said.

“The great man theory,” Nick said.

“Great man,” Anna said. She passed out the mugs. “Such talk,” she said to his father, the words a kind of clicking of the tongue. Then she put the empty beer bottle on the tray, looked at them worriedly, and turned back to the house.

“She’s offended?” Nick said.

“No,” his father said. “She thinks the trees have ears, like all good Czechs. Someone’s always listening.” He sipped the tea. “At Stalin’s funeral, several thousand people died. Trampled. In the crowd, to say goodbye. To the man who tried to murder them.”

“There’s no one like that now,” Molly said quietly.

“Now? No. Petty crooks. Bureaucrats. So much for the theory. I was wrong. They were aberrations, the Stalins. Great forces, great men–such melodrama. And all along, what was it? A crime story.”

Nick looked up at him.

“Of course, it’s interesting,” his father said, gazing back to Nick. “To solve the crime.”

“That’s what Wiseman says.”

“Yes, well, he should know.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe it’s a hazard of the profession. He worked for the British, you know. SIS.” He caught Nick’s look. “No, not now, during the war. Everybody did. He must have seen plenty of crimes. All in a good cause, of course. They’re always in a good cause. Even Stalin’s, who knows? People thought that. Sometimes even the victims thought that–it gave them a reason why it was happening to them.” –He shrugged. “History.”

The air was still, not even a rustle of leaves. A crime story. But what if you were in it?

When Molly stirred in her chair, it felt like an interruption. “Well,” she said, pushing herself up, “I’ll let you two figure out who done it. I’m just a farm girl.” She looked toward the garden, where Anna was digging, then up at the clouds. “I’d say about an hour, if we’re lucky.”

They watched her move across the grass, waving to Anna.

“She’s a nice girl, your Molly.”

“My Molly?”

“She likes you,” his father said simply, a matchmaker’s tease that caught Nick off guard.

In spite of himself, he flushed. “Don’t complicate things.”

“A girl like that is never a complication. Your mother had it, that spirit.”

“She doesn’t have it now.” He looked down. Anna had been right. They were quarreling.

But his father sidestepped it, saving nothing. He put his hand on Nick’s shoulder, stroking it lightly, the way he used to when they sat together on the dock, waiting for fish.

“Do you still go to the cabin?” he asked idly.

“No. It was sold.”

His father nodded. “So. Every trace.” Then the hand stopped, just a weight now. “Will she see me, do you think?”

Why hadn’t he thought of this before? “Yes,” he said. They’d all see him. His mother, staring out of windows. Larry, who’d patched up their lives. All the carefully constructed years. Where would they meet, in the apartment? Nick tried to picture it, the tentative first words, but nothing came. And he realized, shocked at himself, that he didn’t want it to happen. He didn’t want him to come back, splintering things again. The old dream. And now that it might be real, like the weight of his father’s hand, he wanted to shake it off, walk away. But the hand was there, pulling him.

His father leaned back and sighed. “I’d like that,” he said dreamily. “What will I say?” A conversation with himself. “Where do you start? I don’t know how to start with you. What do you like for breakfast? What do you read? It seems silly, doesn’t it, not to know these things.”

Nick didn’t say anything. His father, too, seemed to retreat from the day, closing his eyes against the weak sunlight. Nick could hear Anna and Molly talking in the garden, a faint insect buzzing.

“Anna doesn’t know,” Nick said. “What we talked about this morning.”

“No. I told you, no one. It’s too dangerous for her.”

“Why dangerous?”

“If they thought she helped—” He let the thought hang.

“What about Molly?”

“Molly? There’s no danger to her. What does she know? That I wanted to see you, that’s all,” he said drowsily. “It’s good she likes you. It looks better.”