Once her daughter had fallen asleep, Květa left the building without saying good-bye. It wasn’t until she was out on the sidewalk that she realized she had no idea where to go to look for Josef. She walked the city till nightfall. With no destination, no companion, no reason. As the streetlights came on, she suddenly looked up and saw the statue of St. Wenceslas, surrounded by four saints. Looming behind them was the edifice of the National Museum, filled with fossils, stuffed birds, and rocks, and the skeleton of a whale. Květa stood there on Wenceslas Square, gazing up at the patron saint of the Czech lands with the giant gilded stone box behind him, its contents plundered and snatched from nature. Then she heard a newsboy and realized he was offering her a paper. She took it, paid, and put her wallet back in her purse. When she heard his voice assailing her again, she decided to ignore him, quickly turning off into Krakovská Street and entering a shopping arcade. Suddenly somebody put a hand on her shoulder. She turned and saw an elderly woman. “Miss … miss, your newspaper. Your paper.”
“Ma’am,” Květa said. “It’s ma’am, not miss. Ma’am.”
“You dropped your paper,” the woman said, handing it to Květa. Květa nodded thanks. The newsboy’s voice was out of range now. She unfolded the paper. The front-page story was on the latest census. The headline said as of March 1, 1950, there were a total of 12,338,450 people in Czechoslovakia, of whom 8,896,133 lived in the Czech lands, comprising Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. Květa walked silently through the arcade, her mind empty. She stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked at the numbers again. How could anyone figure that out? she thought. Such a big number. So many people. Too many to visit them all, she mused. I’m sure there’s some office that does it. I wonder which of those numbers is me? And which ones are Josef and Alice? Eventually Květa decided the last three of the 8,896,133 residents must be them. Definitely, she thought. Those last three must be us, and there must be an office somewhere that does it.
After a few days, her mother came to visit. Before she even stepped in the door, she pressed a piece of paper into Květa’s palm. On it, in big shaky grandmotherly letters, it said: Hynek Jánský, J.D. Below it was a street address and the name of some office she’d never heard of. “He’ll definitely help us,” her mother said, draping her coat on a hanger. “He’ll definitely help us,” she said again, walking into the kitchen. “He’s always been partial to you,” she added, before turning her attention to her grandchild.
Květa knew that Josef was being investigated for something he clearly couldn’t have done. What could he be guilty of, when all he ever did was sit at home or in the office doing calculations? Besides, as he used to say, a structural engineer is the kind of expert the communists are going to need, because statics, my dear Květa, statics is part of the science of engineering. It’s got nothing to do with politics. It’s what keeps buildings from falling down, and bridges and dams and towers and factories, it’s what keeps all of them standing. That’s what he used to say, but now she wasn’t so sure anymore, and it had occurred to her several times, no matter how hard she tried to suppress the thought, that even the impossible was possible, and Josef may have been mistaken, he may have made a grave miscalculation on that beautiful new-looking snow-white plastic slide rule of his. And now, as a result, Květa stood before Hynek Jánský, doctor of both laws, best buddy and friend. A skilled tennis player and, once upon a time, a member of the same tennis club as she and Josef. Hynek wore a smile and, as usual, a perfectly tailored pinstripe suit. A small vase of primroses stood on a table in the middle of the office, and a young man with documents under his arm rose from a small table in the corner of the room, probably a clerk. Hynek nodded to him and he left. After several days of trying to find her husband and failing, she had ended up at Hynek, which in that crazy time of confusion was probably the best thing that could have happened. “Květa, honey, come in, you don’t have to stand over there by the door,” he said, holding out his hand. His handshake was brief, firm, friendly, and dry, and he smelled of aftershave. After his clerk or secretary or whatever he was had closed the door and the spring in the lock clicked shut, he brought her hand to his mouth as if he were going to kiss it, as had been the custom prior to the war, but he didn’t, because the communists had been in power for well over a year now, and any gesture as bourgeois as that would have been foolishly compromising, and yes, in fact dangerous. It would have been less risky to kiss her on the mouth than to kiss her in any overly sophisticated fashion.
She was still the same, yes, almost the same, Hynek noted. She may have put on a little weight since having her child. He gripped her hand the way he had learned to do at meetings when welcoming and parting with his political partners, matter-of-factly, without hesitation. His secretary-cum-clerk knew what to do next, rising, bowing first to him, the commissioner, then to the woman he’d never seen but the commissioner clearly knew, the woman with the deep green eyes. Eyes so green the secretary nearly gasped. Luckily he didn’t have to say anything, so he was able to hide it. He bowed, closed the door behind him, and went off to jot down in his semiofficial diary that today Comrade Commissioner Dr. Hynek Jánský had received a visit from a woman of about twenty-eight. He hurriedly looked up her name in the visitors log at the reception, where the green-eyed brunette in a suspiciously elegant skirt suit had signed in as Květa Černá. In the next column she had put her date of birth and ID number, and the secretary was pleased to see he had guessed her age correctly.
Once they were alone, Hynek could no longer contain himself, lifting Květa’s hand to his mouth, until he was nearly kissing it. In the end, however, he was constrained, almost against his will, by his ruthless self-control, the same quality that made him such a fearsome tennis opponent, his lips stopping precisely 1.45 inches short of her fingers in the lightest intimation of a kiss. He smiled, taking cognizance of the fact that Květa had indeed gained weight since having had her child. As he raised his eyes from her hand, he couldn’t fail to register the undulation of her body, dominated by the peaks of her breasts, the whole package hidden beneath her dress like a landscape blanketed in snow.
He slid one chair away from the table, she sat down, and he pulled around another chair, directly across from hers, so it was at her side. Then he let her tell her story. Her husband was locked up, yes, he was in investigative detention, but the word investigative didn’t mean anything. Uncle Josef Vissarionovich was on the throne in the Kremlin, and the phrase merely meant that Josef was locked up. Nothing more, nothing less. It didn’t actually mean that anyone was investigating anything. It was just a humble, fawning expression of the geometry of power. Nothing more, nothing less. He said he would find out whatever he could about Josef. He didn’t say his boys had already ridden roughshod over him. He said he would try, and he said he didn’t want to get her hopes up. All this he said with a serious, sincere expression, brightened only by momentary flashes of happiness at the fact that he was seeing her again.