And so they locked me up. I was locked up for ten years. Alice was only a few months old when they put me away, and I’m sorry for those ten years. I’m sorry I didn’t see her grow up. When I came home, she was almost eleven and headed full steam for adulthood. And though I tried, I never could make up for those years. When I came home, I was a stranger to her.
But even before then, before I completely gave up on everything, at those moments when I still had some barely quantifiable fraction of hope, I tried to hold on to my dream and at least learn a little bit, as much as I was capable of, about the cultures of antiquity. By the time I came home from jail, Professor Hrozný was dead. I knew he had been trying to decipher another script, called Linear B. From what I heard, he had failed or come up short, but before they released me from prison, an English architect named Ventris deciphered it, in 1956. He was an architect, I was a structural engineer. We were practically colleagues. All that I found out only after my return to freedom. Outside our country, time passed quickly; inside, it had come to a standstill. More out of habit than anything else, as a sort of luxury hobby, every now and then I go to the library and borrow some books on antiquity. I circled around it for a long time, but then it struck me it would be good to learn another language, one that people actually spoke. So I gave it a try, starting with French. I took it slow and steady, and I admit I wasn’t much good. I got the grammar, even the exceptions, and the pronunciation, too, but whenever I studied the vocabulary I would slip into a black hole and get caught up in unwanted memories. The moment I closed my eyes so I could concentrate on the words, I would find myself back at the interrogation, in the dark, sitting on a metal chair with a scarf over my eyes, caked in the blood running down my face, just barely breathing.
After a while I gave up. I couldn’t keep going back to the worst moments of my life. Throughout all my studies I had been able to learn difficult things by closing my eyes and watching them appear in front of me like a series of wide-angle color pictures. I couldn’t do that anymore. I had no choice but to surrender my youthful dreams, and all I had left was my shabby attempt to win back the love of my wife.