Nineteen eighty-nine saw Josef in the hospital. He had been feeling tired, then a little confused, and all of a sudden the left side of his mouth stopped obeying him. When he woke up a few days later, he discovered he’d had a stroke. As a result, it took at least another year before he realized that the government of the country had changed. Kryštof, meanwhile, found himself a girlfriend who sometimes stayed over with him in Lhotka. When Josef came home from the hospital, he discovered he didn’t need to take his laundry to Prague anymore, since Kryštof and Libuše had bought a washing machine. At first the sudden interruption of laundry packages back and forth from Lhotka to Prague took Alice by surprise, and then she found out her father had had a stroke. She gave her son, who now stood several inches taller than her, a long talking-to, to which he coolly responded by saying that Grandpa just didn’t feel like telling anyone.
Aunt Anna was so captivated by the Velvet Revolution, which happened that year, that she broke off her preparations for death and for the first time in years went to an eye doctor for stronger glasses. After that, she started reading the newspapers again, listening to television and radio programs, and reveling in the endless supply of new magazines that had suddenly appeared. In order to make sure her aunt received the pension increase she was entitled to that year, Květa had to obtain new documents for her, and to her astonishment she discovered that in fact Aunt Anna wasn’t her aunt at all. She spent a few days trying to decide how to tell her, and when she finally did, her aunt just waved her hand and said that according to the latest research everyone on Earth was related to each other, and the whole human race most likely came from Africa. Either present-day Ethiopia or Mozambique, she wasn’t sure. When Květa asked how she knew that, her aunt replied that she should be less concerned with herself and pay more attention to the world around her, and it was about time she got herself a proper man. When Květa said she had been married nearly her whole adult life, her aunt just raised her eyebrows and said she certainly hoped to be introduced to her husband someday. Although she couldn’t walk as well as before, ever since November 1989 Aunt Anna had been faring better and better. Květa watched with amazement as her aunt became well informed on global affairs, and if every now and then she couldn’t remember someone’s name, she agilely came up with a nickname to replace it. For example, she had started calling the president the scooter king. King because he lived in the castle, scooter because he had revealed in an interview that he used a scooter to wheel down the castle’s lengthy corridors so he could get as quickly as possible from one office to another. Květa could hardly find fault with her aunt’s choice of nickname, since it had a certain logic to it and it accurately described the bearer’s features, as he appeared to Aunt Anna at least, if not to the world. Little Kryštof saw his father only once or twice a year, when Maximilian would turn up unexpectedly and unannounced. The meetings were more to satisfy his own conscience than out of any interest in his son’s present, past, or future.
One day in March 1991, Aunt Anna received a letter in a yellow envelope that was slightly more elongated than the state-approved standard. The stamp had a little queen with a crown on her head and the postmark said London. She thought it over a minute, then remembered that she had some relatives who had gone overseas to work before the invasion in ’68. They had had some children while they were there, who had never been back to the Czech lands. Reading the letter she gathered that their son was planning to come to Prague, though she promptly forgot his name and from that point on referred to him only as the cousin. The letter said he would be arriving sometime in the next few days but didn’t need anything from Aunt Anna, so she didn’t understand why they had bothered to send the letter. “Everyone needs something,” she insisted. “Everyone! You need your man back, even though you won’t talk about it in front of me. You keep it a secret from me, and damned if you aren’t ashamed of it too!”
14. THE COUSIN’S ARRIVAL — A LETTER — CONVERSATION WITH JOSEF
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The cousin flew into Prague’s Ruzyně Airport equipped with perfect Czech and a detailed knowledge of Czech and East European history. It was his second visit to the city. He didn’t remember the first, which had been fifteen years earlier, when he was ten, and consisted of a single-day stopover in Prague on the way from Helsinki to Vienna with his mother, who had traveled to many countries around the world in her life, in search of landscapes that were typically Czech, in particular ones that reminded her of the Elbe Lowlands region where she had grown up. On their arrival in Prague she was immediately informed that she, being an emigrant, had the wrong visa and that of course no one there could issue her the one needed for a longer stay. So, to the officials’ displeasure, they spent one night in a hotel, since the airplane that was to take her and her child back to where she belonged — that is, back to the capitalist West — had no more flights scheduled that day. All the cousin remembered about the visit was what his mother told him later on. The airport in Prague was more or less interchangeable with any other. It had no particular atmosphere of its own, the sole attempt at ambience being the same decorative flowers arranged in the same parts of the same-looking check-in areas in the same portable planters by the same glass doors of the arrival and departure halls. His mother had told him that a distant relative of his aunt would be waiting for him at the airport, a lady by the name of Květa. They had sent a photograph of Jiří in a letter to Aunt Anna in advance.