Before (6 page)

She was just a little younger than you,
Anna said.

He never found them?
Tika had asked.

He looked for years,
Anna said.
When he worked with U.S. intelligence, in Germany. Most of the women went to Ravensbrück. But Jana and Helena were never there.

Why did the Nazis do it?
Tika asked.

It was just insanity
, Anna told her.
Hitler taking revenge for the Resistance killing of his general Heydrich. But no one in the village was involved. No one. Everyone in the village was innocent.

Tika had gone home and looked up Lidice in the encyclopedia. There was a photograph of three Nazi soldiers, standing with odd smiles on their faces and with the town demolished and in rubble behind them. One of the Nazis had a boot set on a concrete girder, and looked as if he were simply at work on a construction site. Tika had felt her fingers cold on the pages of the book.

Anna, too, had lost her father in that war, in the uprising in Prague, in 1945. Tika imagines Jesse in combat, running by a barbed-wire fence at night, explosions lighting the sky behind him. It is the image that comes to her when she thinks of war. Barbarism, insanity—human bodies scattered like bloody dolls, as in today's film. She could never let her lover go into such a thing.

“I never spoke with Jiri about his town,” Tika says quietly. “I didn't know if he wanted to be reminded of it. But it looked to me like he wanted to talk about something the other day, when we were at the Arboretum.”

“I know,” Anna says, whispering over the sound of the cooking. “He does not even speak to me much about it, even in fifty-two years of marriage. But he is remembering much more now, because of the therapy.” She puts plates on the counter, and Tika gets up and takes them to the dining room. When Tika comes back into the kitchen Anna asks, a little more loudly, “So how is the project?”

“I did a lot of darkroom stuff today,” Tika says. “I'm pretty far ahead on my photographs.”

Anna nods. She stirs tomato paste, then begins adding paprika, thyme, rosemary, red and green peppers, and mushrooms into the mix. She shakes the pan expertly and stirs again. The pan sizzles anew. She says, “I like your photographs very much. When you brought them over. You have a real talent.” She lowers her voice again. “I'll go back to the studio for a few hours tomorrow.”

“I have time tomorrow in the afternoon, Anna,” Tika says softly. “Do you want me to come stay with him?”

“Nay—”
Anna waves her spoon. “I want him to be by himself for a while. I feel he needs this.”

Tika watches Anna in her print dress, small blue and red flowers on a wild field, the apron about her, her glasses hanging on her chest. Since the first stroke, and especially since the brain hemorrhage in June, the old lady has lived on the tightrope with Jiri, trying to make sure his Coumadin doses strike the balance between dangers—too little of the drug and he might have a stroke again; too much and there might be bleeding on the brain again. Anna has had, constantly, to attend to his spirit—getting him out, conversing easily with him and hiding her worry, joking with him. Tika feels, looking at her, the months of struggle in the small, busy frame. She says: “I have to learn to cook like you, Anna.”

“I learned from my mother,” Anna says, adding beef stock, then Worcestershire sauce. “Markéta did not want to learn from me, so I shall teach you.”

“It smells delicious.”

“
Ano
. I shall teach you.”

Tika nods. She gets up and takes herb croutons in a box from one of Anna's cabinets, and two wooden forks from a drawer. She brings her bowl of salad back to the table. She unwraps the plastic covering from the salad bowl, and opens the box and pours in the croutons and stirs them into the salad with the wooden forks. Anna hands her vinaigrette sauce to work into the mix. The long rooftop of the garage is dark now below Tika, leaves stretching over the moss-covered shingles, and she can see the lights of Irving Street blinking through the trees. She thinks of Professor Corliss speaking today about how, after the Civil War, thousands of Matthew Brady's glass negatives were thought abandoned and used for greenhouse windows, history slowly, over years, disintegrating in the sun. Maybe that is like what is happening to Jiri.

When she looks up again Anna is nodding to her, saying quietly, “I think he is better. You can go to him if you wish.”

*   *   *

From the balcony doorway Tika sees the creases of Jiri's neck, the side of his face in shadow. He sits very still with the old Grundig radio on beside him. A broadcaster is talking about the intern in Washington; she has been missing now for four months and the congressman, Condit, is insisting that he had nothing to do with her disappearance.

Tika thinks Jiri might be asleep, but he senses her there when she has taken a few more steps and he turns and holds out a hand. She slips into the rocker beside him and takes his hand and his gray-blue eyes sparkle with charm. He clicks off the radio. He is a handsome man; she has seen pictures of him in his late twenties, when he worked in Germany: tweed coat and silk tie—devastating, really. His face still has that easy confidence, and there is no hint of the agony and confusion she saw there when she came in.

“So,” Jiri says. “Is she nearly ready for us?”

“I think so,” Tika says. “She says she will teach me to cook.”

Jiri nods at this. “It is a good thing to know. A whole universe.” He pauses a moment, searching for words. “I never learned it, beyond a few bachelor, fast things. My mother and my sister were good cooks, but these things the men did not do as much in Czechoslovakia.”

Tika holds Jiri's hand in both of her own. Closes her eyes. Breathes this connection. It is a hand with fine fingers and you can feel that it once had power. A large vein runs across the back of it to the smallest knuckle.

“You will see your boyfriend tonight?” Jiri says.

Tika opens her eyes. “He has a show in Central Square,” she says.

“Well, I like him. But I am jealous.”

“Jiri, you're
funny.
”

“You are working on the project?”

“Maybe I'll get a few shots. You're lucky if you get one or two out of a whole roll of film.”

“How is it with the CD?” Jiri asks.

“They've almost finished it,” Tika says. She told Jiri this the other day at the Arboretum, how the band is finishing up recording at a digital studio in Brookline, but he has forgotten. “I brought the first single to WECR and some other college stations last week, and it is already getting a lot of rotation.”

“Rotation?”

“They're getting a lot of requests for it. Since they've been on the radio they're already recognized a lot more. Tonight's in this kind of funky place a few blocks off Mass Ave. I think they'll have a pretty good crowd there.”

“You have to watch yourself around these places. The alleys around them are not always so safe. You have to stay around the boys.”

“Jiri, I
know
. You don't have to worry about me.”

“They're talking about this girl, this intern. It is a very dangerous world.”

“People are saying the congressman had somebody do it,” Tika says.

“I wouldn't doubt it,” Jiri says. “There are people walking around who would tear down the sun if it would serve them.”

“I'll be all right, Jiri,” Tika says. “No worries. In these things I'm always with Jesse.”

“Well, he's a good kid,” Jiri says.

“Mohu Vás pozvat na
ve
e
i?”
Anna is calling, from the dining room.

“That is my other girlfriend,” Jiri says. “She is asking if she can invite us to dinner.”

The dining room is small and formal and simple. Two windows look through leaves onto Trowbridge Street. A mahogany table with long-backed chairs stands on a deep Oriental rug, and there are no paintings on the cream-colored walls; the large chandelier over the dining table is dimmed and Anna has lit slender white candles. Tika walks with Jiri slowly, her hand on his arm, until he slides her chair out for her and seats her, and he stands at his place until Anna has everything on the table, plates of fettuccine topped with sauced steak and peppers and with Tika's salad to the side (Tika notices that the Posselts never put salad in a separate dish) and wine. Tika reads the label—an Italian red—and she imagines her father walking with her in Rome, when she was thirteen, his face turning to smile at her, gentle and happy, the sky pink behind him.

Then they are all eating, and Tika has to check herself, the dinner is so good, and remind herself not to eat the way she does in the Emerson Café, so fast.

“Z
eho
je to?”
Jiri says.

“With arrowroot,” Anna says.

“It's good,” Jiri says, his eyebrows up. And then to Tika: “I'm asking how she makes the sauce.”

Since the strokes, Anna has been trying to cut down on the fat content of their meals. Sometimes, when Tika comes over, Anna is making fastidious notes from low-fat cookbooks she has taken from the library.

“It's great, Anna,” Tika says. “Amazing that it's
healthy,
too.”

“We must have Jesse to dinner soon again,” Jiri says.

“He would like that,” Tika says, looking down. “He really likes you guys.” For a moment, she feels she might weep at the parental gesture. Her mind is filled with many things: The woman in Australia is brushing hair away from her forehead, and there is the sound of a television from the next room. In New Hampshire Susan's feet are curled around the back of the husband; Stuart Livesy's descending shoulders are valleys and shadows of light. She hears Susan's voice saying,
He fucks like a rabbit
.

“Tika?” Anna says. “You don't seem entirely yourself. Are you all right?”

“I'm sorry,” Tika says, watching the old woman. She pauses. “It's Susan. She's seeing this married man. From Australia. I met him last night. At the apartment.”

There is silence a moment from her hosts. Outside a series of cars goes by on Kirkland, wheels whispering. The protective bird is sounding its repeating, whistling pattern, rising and dropping again.

“That's a problem,” Anna says, as Jiri breathes out heavily. “Nothing good comes from these kinds of things, from lying.”

“That's what bothers me. I'm part of the lie,” Tika says.

In the kitchen last night, Susan kissed Stuart's hand: an expensive Rolex watch there on that wrist, a present, perhaps, from the wife. Tika had tried to strike a nonchalant pose, to smile and converse easily with her roommate's new lover in a way that didn't show her judgment, her concern. She knows that she didn't pull it off. She has met, since last winter when she moved in with Susan, four of Susan's lovers, some of whom Susan was seeing simultaneously. That was Susan's business. But Stuart Livesy is married, and there a wife in Australia, and this is in Tika's home now.