As they entered the apartment, Jiří noticed several smells simultaneously. The first was the fragrance of plants from the garden, wafting in the open window. Next were the faint odor of floating dust particles and a barely perceptible scent of urine. When they walked into the living room, he saw a petite woman with the wrinkled face of a turtle, wrapped in blankets and sitting in a tall armchair. She must have been at least ninety years old. Her white strands of hair stood out against the brown fabric of the headrest. Moving extremely slowly, she removed the layers of blankets one by one, beckoning to Jiří with a wrinkled hand indicating that he was to advance. He had been granted an audience.
“So you’re little Jiří,” Aunt Anna said, seizing the open letter from the dressing table with her right hand while clutching her glasses with the other. “How are your parents? I hope they’re well. They ought to be, with a son like you!” Jiří took a deep breath. “I’m sure they must be glad they have a son,” Aunt Anna went on.
“I have a sister, too,” Jiří broke in, giving everyone a cheerful smile.
“No use having a daughter,” Aunt Anna said. “Look at me. I didn’t have any children, but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted a daughter. Look at us here,” she said. “Three women. Three! You know men don’t have it easy, and they don’t get to have any fun in life.” Ever so slowly raising an index finger, she added, “They don’t live to be as old either. Men, poor devils.”
“Where did you hear that one, Auntie?” Alice asked, listening with half an ear as she helped Květa prepare dinner.
“Everybody knows that! Don’t tell me you never heard it,” said Aunt Anna. “They die six or seven years younger.”
The doorbell rang. Květa ran off and a moment later came back into the room with a slightly balding man twirling a pair of large black glasses in his hand.
“This is Mr….”
“Verner,” the man said.
“Mr. Verner here says you invited him to dinner, Auntie. Is that right?” Květa asked awkwardly.
“Oh, nice to see you, Karel,” Aunt Anna said.
“Will your friend be eating with us?” Alice asked Aunt Anna while her mother stood behind the man’s back shrugging and rolling her eyes.
Aunt Anna ignored her question, tugging on the gentleman caller’s jacket sleeve. “Have a seat, Karel. Sit down, sit. Now you’re not going to believe it, but this young man here is the son of Eva and … God, what is the name of that husband of hers?”
“My father’s name is Jiří, same as me,” Jiří said.
“We haven’t met,” Květa interjected. “My name’s Černá and this is my daughter Alice.”
“Verner,” said the man. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Now stop that, Květa, and get dinner ready. Jiří here must be hungry after such a long journey. Aren’t I right?”
“I could eat a little something,” Jiří said.
“Do you hear that, Karel? You hear how beautifully he speaks Czech?”
“Oh, yes, very nice, very nice,” said Mr. Verner.
“You know, I was thinking, Karel. You’re in insurance still,” Aunt Anna said.
“I haven’t been at the insurance company for a long time now. I stopped working there before the revolution.”
“So where are you now?”
“I’m at that bank. I told you that. We talked about it.”
“Ah, the bank, well, that wouldn’t be too bad either. Maybe you could find something there for our boy here, Jiří. Some kind of employment.”
“Oh, thank you but that won’t be necessary,” Jiří said.
“You be quiet. You don’t know how things work here,” Aunt Anna said. She looked at Mr. Verner. “Just like his mother, isn’t he? Just like Eva, especially the mouth, don’t you think, Karel?”
“I’m really sorry. Here we are talking about you … as if you weren’t even here,” Mr. Verner apologized.
“Never mind,” Jiří said.
“At my age,” Aunt Anna said, “and I’m going to be ninety-five, Karel. At my age I don’t have time for courtesies anymore. You know.”
She gave Jiří a sharp stare and lifted her arm, indicating that he should leap from his seat and support her as she rose from the chair. And so he did. Aunt Anna rewarded him with a fleeting smile and patted him on the arm that she was using to prop herself up. “Karel, please, could you hand me that cane over there … that one, that’s right.”
Mr. Verner handed her the cane, and leaning one arm on it and the other on Jiří, she made her way into the next room for dinner. Jiří struggled to adjust his strides to Aunt Anna’s tiny footsteps as Verner walked behind them, watching attentively lest the slightest shudder of need ripple through her fragile body. In that way, step by step, the three of them proceeded to the table where dinner would soon be served.
At dinner Jiří was pleased to discover that his intellectual labors to decipher the complicated scheme of his family, which in its intricacies surpassed even the filigree fabrics of the ancient Venetian masters, had paid off, and he was beginning to understand who he was actually related to. However, just as he thought he was starting to grasp where one thread ended and the next one began, he found himself once again hopelessly perplexed by the tangled logic of family relationships. Aunt Anna, Květa, Mr. Verner, it made no difference who said what, it all sounded the same — for instance, Aunt Anna sketching out one of the clan’s adjacent lines: “But then after the putsch in forty-eight he got remarried in Germany. Then her sister moved from Canada to Vienna and had another child there with her second husband, and her sister, she lives here in Vysočina, so she wasn’t allowed to go to college. Then her daughter, who can’t be much older than your Kryštof, Alice, she went and married a distant cousin of hers from Opava, and that’s about it.”
Jiří was beginning to realize that historical dates weren’t enough for him to gain a full understanding of the Czech world. He didn’t let it discourage him, but he did conclude that it was going to require a substantially greater degree of energy and ingenuity than he had initially estimated.
(2)
Date: whenever, second day in Prague
Hi sis,
I’m writing like I promised. I hope I have the right address so it reaches you without going halfway around the world before finding its way back to London where it sits for three months, like last time, when I was in Rome. Just for the record, I talked to Mum and Dad. There was a bit of confusion, since they called the hotel but I had canceled the reservation and the staff there didn’t give them the number I left. Then Dad got the bright idea of calling Aunt Anna, but either she couldn’t hear or she forgot. She’s practically a hundred years old and she looks like a sharp-eyed little turtle. Anyway, they tracked me down eventually; she probably gave them the number for Alice, who’s Aunt Květa’s daughter. It isn’t easy working out who’s who, and I still have no idea which ones are actually our relatives. The airport was the usual thoughtless affair. All the flowers are dry and the streets are untidy. Rubbish spilling out of the bins and fag ends all over the place. On the other hand they’ve got this funny apparatus they call a tramvaj. That’s tramway to you, sis. I don’t think they realize it’s an Americanism and that they’re actually little electric trains. They run precisely on time. An odd contrast with the filthy streets. Then they also have the metro here. It’s excellent, truly excellent. I’m sure you’d love it — it’s the answer to all your crazy sci-fi dreams. It runs perfectly and inside it’s spotless, unlike the streets, almost like Germany, but the design is the thing. If you can imagine, the stations look like the inside of a spaceship from one of those old sci-fi TV series, the ones you and Mum and Geoffrey love so much — Buck Rogers and Star Trek and all that. Just picture aluminum foil in all different colors with geometric patterns stamped into it, hemispheres and dimples and such. I don’t know how they came up with it. Brilliant. As Dad would say in Czech: k sežrání. And as if that weren’t enough, the rest of it’s covered in marble. I kid you not. Either artificial stone or marble, like some kind of outer space mausoleum. I just love it!! But you’re better off not telling people here what you think. They’re a bit on the sensitive side. You’d just love it. So those are my first travel notes. Say hi to Geoffrey, and give Mum a call or she’ll start cursing you again. And don’t even think about mentioning what happened in Paris.