The Prodigal Spy (22 page)

Nick realized that the answer, easy and smooth, was what he wanted to hear, and for the first time he wondered if his father could be lying. Had he really done so little? For an instant he felt as if he were back at the hearing. So plausible and persuasive, and all the while— Nick stopped. Was he Welles now? The inquisitor to outflank? Who cared whether they listened to him or not? And it might after all — which was worse?–be the truth, a glib answer to mask a marginal life.

“Seems a shame–for them, I mean,” Nick said.

“Not taking advantage of my wisdom? Who knows? I was wrong about Cuba. I never thought we’d go that far.”

Nick paused. “We who?”

“We Americans,” his father said softly, clearly thrown by the question.

There was nothing to say to that and Nick drove quietly, skirting the top of Wenceslas to follow the streets behind the university. The mood in the car was uneasy now, as if, improbably, they had nothing more to say.

“Tell me about your mother,” his father said finally. “Tell me about Livia.”

“She’s–fine. Busy. Lots of parties. You know.”

“Yes, she loved parties.” A beat. “Does she ever talk about me?”

“No.”

The word, blunt and final, hung between them, and the instant Nick heard it he wished he had lied. Another door closing, louder this time. The silence, as leaden as the sky, was its own response, and there was nothing to break it but the sound of the car. At a corner, Nick stopped and reached into a back pocket for his wallet. He pulled out a photograph and handed it to his father, then put the car back in gear and drove on, allowing him to look in private.

“She’s cut her hair,” his father said quietly. “She used to wear it longer.”

Nick kept driving, not wanting to intrude. From the corner of his eye he saw his father holding the picture, absorbed.

“I may have this?” he said finally, a foreign intonation. Nick nodded. “She’s the same.” He put the picture in the breast pocket of his jacket. “Don’t tell Anna,” he said, and Nick felt drawn against his will into some odd complicity. Why was even the simplest gesture tangled?

“Would she mind?”

“It’s better this way,” his father said, not answering.

“Sometimes the way she looks at me,” Nick said, “I think I remind her of you.” A small offering, to soften the no.

But his father wanted to move on. “No. Just the eyes.” He was looking at Nick now. “So tall.”

“We’re the same height.”

His father smiled. “Well, you used to be smaller. And now. You still bite your nails.” Involuntarily Nick moved his hands on the wheel, turning in his fingers. “Always something going on inside.”

You were going on inside, Nick wanted to shout. Instead, he said, “Do you have children? You and Anna.”

“No, there’s only you. We’re not so young.” He paused. “She’s nervous, you know, about you.”

“Why?”

His father shrugged. “She thinks you’ll change things.” He took out another cigarette. “But what is there to change?”

“Are you supposed to smoke those things? With your heart?”

“No, of course not. I’m not supposed to do anything. No excitement. If you listened to them, you’d be so careful you’d go without knowing the difference.”

“Is it bad for you? My being here?” A new thought.

“Very bad,” he said, teasing gently. “It’s the best thing in the world.”

The houses–smaller now, with patches of garden–were thinning out, and they could see the country ahead.

“Is this right?” Nick said.

“Yes, keep going. I want to show you something.”

“Are you going to tell me what?”

“It’s not a mystery,” he said, making it one. “Everything in its time.”

Nick glanced at him. There was an agenda, everything planned. And what was at the end? The Wallenstein, the switch of cars, the country. Step by step. Even their conversation now seemed to him a kind of testing, his father leading him further into his life, where nothing was open. Secrecy became a habit. He saw now that his father wanted to be sure of him somehow, and he felt unexpectedly wounded. Wasn’t it enough that he had come?

In the woods there were still blossoms on the trees, not the lush flowering of Virginia but a thin sprinkling of white, a Bohemian lace.

“Remember the dogwood,” his father said, seeing them too. “On 2nd Street? I wonder, is it still there?”

“Magnolia. I don’t know. The neighborhood’s changed.”

“But not the trees,” his father said, not hearing the shift in Nick’s tone.

“I’ve never been back. We sold it. Right after.”

“Ah. What became of Nora? Do you see her?”

“Just Christmas cards. She’s still there somewhere. Arlington, I think.”

“I always wondered, was she working for the FBI?” his father said easily. “Old Edgar had a real fondness for housekeepers.”

The words, like a trigger, exploded something in Nick. This was
crazy
, yet another descent through the rabbit hole. Even Nora. Who
cares
? It’s not important. He felt things fall away until there was nothing but the gulf of all the years between them. Why were they talking about this? The realtor view from Holečkova. Two bathrooms. Moscow in the snow. Surreal, all of it. They gave me a medal.
Talk
to me.

“I loved that house,” his father said dreamily.

It snapped again. Everything in its time. Now. He felt his breath shortening and gripped the wheel, bringing the car to a stop on the side of the road, his foot on the brake. He heard the motor, his own breathing, sensed his father turning in alarm.

“Why did you do it?” he said, his voice wavering, staring straight ahead, pulling the words out of himself, not enough breath for a wail. “Why did you leave me?”

Then there was no sound at all, a suspension even of air.

“I didn’t leave you,” his father said finally, in a whisper. “I left myself.” A distress real enough to touch. Nick knew it was true and knew that if he reached out for it they would lose the moment, put everything aside in some evasive forgetting.

“No,” he said, still looking at the wheel. “Me. You left
me
. Why did you?”

His father said nothing. Nick kept his eyes ahead, afraid to look. What could there be on his face but loss?

“I want to explain—” his father said weakly, then stopped.

“Why did you ask me here? What do you want from me?”

At this his father stirred, flustered. “If we could wait,” he said hoarsely. “The right time. So I can explain.”

“Now,” Nick said angrily, finally turning to him. “Tell me now. What do you want?”

His father met his eyes, the nervous fluttering gone, giving in. “I want to go home.”

Nick started driving, too stunned to do anything else. “Please, let me explain in my own way,” his father had said, and then, when he didn’t, Nick didn’t know how to press. The outburst had unnerved them both–they were afraid of each other now–so that driving seemed a form of apology. Don’t worry, I won’t do that again. It was safer to concentrate on the road.

“You know that’s impossible,” Nick said. But it had been impossible for him to come, and he had driven right in. A two-lane road, through the wire.

His father said nothing, determined to follow his own timetable, and Nick went back to the road, the ragged asphalt and lacy trees. Had he actually worked out the logistics? Nick’s imagination couldn’t take it in. Passports and border crossings and newsmen at the end, like the men in hats. No. Not that. It was a kind of metaphor, a way of talking, one of his father’s riddles.

“Turn up here.”

Nick saw the sign. “Terezín?”

“In German, Theresienstadt.”

“The model camp. Where they took the Red Cross.”

His father nodded. That’s right. The model camp. In the museum, by the Jewish cemetery in Prague, they have the children’s drawings. They are–well, you’ll see them.“

They parked outside an old fortress, the walls of a castle town.

“Why are we doing this?” Nick said. “I don’t want a history lesson. I want to talk to you.”

“This is what we’re talking about. I want to start at the beginning. So you’ll understand.”

There were no other cars, and when a guard appeared, grumbling in Czech, Nick thought it must be closed, but his father flashed some card in his wallet and the guard, straightening himself, nodded a salute and passed them through.

The air was utterly still, not even moved by birds, and it carried the crunch of their shoes on the dirt. All the buildings were not just empty but abandoned, like a western ghost town whose mine had played out. There had been no attempt to turn it into a museum park, no flower beds or lawns, as if the ground itself had resisted any signs of new life. Just the graveyard stillness. The buildings, some of them old, pieces of architecture, had been left to rot, exhausted by their own terrible history. It was not the kind of concentration camp Nick had seen in a thousand photographs–the railway tracks to the smokestacks, the long barracks, wrought iron twisted into messages–but there was no mistaking the stillness. They had left their dread behind, and it still hung in the air, as real as blood.

“People have the idea that it wasn’t so bad here,” his father said, taking them farther into the compound. “You know–the orchestra, the children’s drawings. Like summer camp. But sixty thousand died here. The rest they sent to Auschwitz, the other camps. Everybody died. You see the bunks.” He gestured toward an open door, where Nick could see bunk beds stacked to the ceiling. “Nine in a bunk. Sometimes more. You can imagine. Typhus. Dysentery. Well, you can’t imagine. Nobody can. People think that because there were no ovens–but over sixty thousand. Here, not shipped out. They didn’t need gas chambers. They just shot them, one by one. Or the gallows. Not very efficient but maybe more satisfying. They could watch.”

Nick followed him down the dusty street, saying nothing. This happened in my lifetime, he thought.

“At the end there, through that gate, is where they shot them.”

“I don’t want to see this,” Nick said, claustrophobic.

“There’s just one thing.” He stopped at a house near the end. Next to it was an empty swimming pool, with bunches of old leaves stuck in rain puddles on the cracked concrete. “This was the commandant’s house.”

“He had a swimming pool?”

“For his daughters. Little girls. The prisoners would march by here on their way to the firing range.” He pointed again to the open area through the gate. “They shot them over there.”

So close. The sharp crack of gunfire. Not once. All day.

“They would hear,” Nick said, picturing it.

“Yes. While they were swimming. The first time I saw this–what kind of people were these? Little girls swimming, and all the time—”

“Maybe there was a fence,” Nick said dully. “So they couldn’t see.”

“No. No fence.”

Then the prisoners would see them too, Nick thought. Splashing. The last thing they would see.

“Why are you showing me this?” he said, turning away from the pool.

“I want you to understand what they were. Nothing will make sense without that.”

Nick looked at him, sensing where he was heading. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“No? I think I do. The politics of another generation –they’re never real, are they? What was the point? Thirty years from now, they’ll ask you. What was so important? But it
was
important.”

Nick thought of Jan Palach. Important enough to light a match.

“In Prague,” his father said, “you see all the statues. Hussites. Catholics. What was that? Nobody remembers. But at the time, if you
lived
then.”

Nick looked down, moving his shoe across the dirt like a visible thought. “You didn’t know about this. Not then.”

“The swimming pool, no. But we knew what they were. All you had to do was listen.”

“And?”

“And no one was stopping them. No one. America First. It’ll all just go away. Or maybe it’s a good thing. People thought that then, you know. We had our own Nazis. My God, Jim Crow. People with sheets over their heads. That doesn’t seem real anymore either, does it? Father Coughlin on the radio, that prick.”

Nick glanced up, oddly reassured by the familiarity of his father’s scorn. Still an anticleric. But his father was racing now.

“And you could see what the Nazis were doing. Austria–just like that. They weren’t going to stop. Then Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten, but we knew it meant the whole thing. Why not just hand it over? The English,” he said, waving his hand. “And nobody in Washington lifted a finger. Couldn’t. It would have been bad politics. Nobody was trying to stop them.”

“Except the Communists,” Nick said quietly, following his logic. “That’s when you became a Communist.”

“Yes. After Munich. That was the last straw. Strange, in a way. I didn’t have any special feeling for the Czechs. Your grandparents had family here–in the Sudeten, in fact -but I never felt Czech. I don’t feel Czech now. I think it was the helplessness, the feeling that you had to do
something
.” He stopped, then managed a shrug. “Another generation’s politics. How do you explain it? Maybe I was ready, and then Munich came along.” He glanced up at Nick. “I wasn’t the only one, you know. A lot of people joined in the thirties. There were good reasons then. Well, we thought there were.”

Nick looked at him. “They didn’t become spies,” he said. He turned back toward the entrance gate. “Let’s go.”

His father followed him. Outside the walls, near the car, he touched Nick’s elbow. “Let’s walk for a bit.”

Involuntarily, Nick drew his elbow in. “Not in there,” he said, but he began to walk. “What made you ready?”

“I was impatient.” Nick caught the tiny barb and slowed to his father’s pace. “The times,” his father said vaguely. “You can’t imagine what things were like then. You remember where Grandma lived?”

They had visited a few times when Nick was a child. Collieries and slag heaps and cookie-cutter company houses. The big coal stove in the basement kitchen, where his grandmother seemed to live, held by the warmth. A photograph of Roosevelt on the wall. The Last Supper, draped with a frond from Palm Sunday. Upstairs, the parlor with doilies where the priest visited once a year and no one sat.