Bye for now,
George
16. ALICE AT HER FATHER’S — THE DISPLAY CASE — ATTEMPT AT RECONCILIATION
(1)
Alice took a train to Lhotka that was supposed to arrive Friday afternoon at one thirty-seven, but due to a track closure, rail service was replaced by special buses for part of the route. There were two buses and not all of the train passengers fit onto them. This resulted in several heated arguments between the passengers and the dispatcher, who adamantly insisted that the whole business had basically nothing to do with him. After twenty minutes of waiting, another bus finally showed up to carry the passengers who didn’t fit on the first two. Alice arrived two hours later than she had planned. She wouldn’t have seen Kryštof and Libuše in any case, since they had left already that morning, but the loss of time annoyed her. On her way to the cottage from the station, she stopped at the drugstore and bought several brands of powerful cleaning fluid in plastic bottles of various shapes and colors. Failing to recognize the woman who rang up her sale, Alice concluded that she must not be from Lhotka. While paying she was surprised to discover that the cashier had a foreign accent. What kind of person came to seek her fortune in Lhotka? Alice wondered. In a city, sure, even a town, but out here in a village? She came to the cottage, walked through the garden, and finding the door unlocked, went inside. Her father wasn’t there. She set the bags down in the entryway, took off her coat, and went outside. She found her father in the shed in back of the house. The door was ajar, and he was shifting a wooden workbench with a vise attached to it toward the window. “Hi, Dad,” Alice said. He didn’t hear her. She repeated her greeting, but he went on sliding the workbench across the floor of unplaned boards. She stood watching until finally he managed to get it directly beneath the window. He bent down over it, laying his head to the benchtop and looking up through the open window. She couldn’t figure out why. She walked up to him and gently gripped him by the arm. Startled, he wheeled around and said, a little more loudly than necessary, “Howdy, daughter.”
“Hi, Dad,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
“Wait,” said Josef. “Wait here a minute,” he ordered her, and ran off to the house. “Now I can hear you,” he said when he returned.
“That’s good,” said Alice.
“Yes sir, it’s a fine little device,” Josef said. “Have a look.” He took it out of his ear, laid it in his palm, and raised it to her face.
“Hmm,” said Alice.
“You see,” he said, still speaking a little too loud.
“I see,” said Alice. “Tiny, huh?” Her father held it up in front of her eyes a moment longer, then carefully placed it back in his ear.
“Really tiny, and lightweight,” her father said. “It isn’t uncomfortable at all, you know. Being that it’s so light.”
“That’s great,” said Alice.
“Well, you know. That’s progress for you. No stopping it,” her father said with a grin. He wrapped his right arm around her shoulders and they walked toward the house. “Kryštof says you’ve been overdoing it on the job, so I’m supposed to keep an eye on you and make sure you don’t do any work.”
“I see,” said Alice. “Well, I guess that’s about right.”
“Well, you won’t get to see much of him. He just left today on vacation with that blonde of his.”
“At least I’ll get to see you!” Alice said, clutching her father under the arm.
Alice spent two weeks at the cottage in Lhotka, during which she discovered that her father was still surprisingly strong, though occasionally, especially when he was tired at night, he limped on his left leg. He asked after her cousin and Aunt Anna, and when she asked him about Libuše, he grimaced: “Just please don’t treat her like a mother-in-law, Ali.” The way he looked when he said it, like a big hissing tomcat, all of a sudden she realized he was defending Libuše. She asked how much they knew about her, without any awareness that she was acting the same way her mother did when she found out Alice’s relationship with Maximilian was starting to get serious. Josef said it wasn’t entirely clear who her father was, and her mother was nothing much either. “The main thing,” he concluded, “is not to get mixed up in it. The last three days the poor girl’s been cleaning like a madwoman. She didn’t say anything, but it was obvious it was for your sake. She doesn’t care about me — she’s used to me by now — and, well, you know Kryštof, he couldn’t care less.”
Alice could tell, of course, in the first three and a quarter seconds after she set foot in the door that somebody had been cleaning. Within the next few seconds, both the strengths and weaknesses of her likely future daughter-in-law were obvious to Alice from her achievements and deficiencies in the cleaning department. Deep down inside Alice knew the way her son’s girlfriend cleaned shouldn’t be the decisive criterion in his choice of partner, yet she couldn’t tear her thoughts away from the sloppily cleaned windows on the second floor and the unwiped dust on top of the wardrobe in her father’s room, which she had examined while he spent the afternoon in the shed. She didn’t realize it, but she had been irritated by her phone conversation with Kryštof in which he’d told her it would probably be a good idea for someone to spend the two weeks with Grandpa while they were away on vacation, since he had the feeling something wasn’t quite right, even though all the test results from the doctor came back fine. It took two days for her to realize how irritated she was, watching with disapproval as her father made his coffee too strong and observing herself as she began to hector him with pointless sermons. He stared at her a moment in amazement, saying nothing, making no attempt to argue, and then, when she was done, he said: “Kryštof was right, as usual. Just calm down and try to relax, Ali. You need it.” Then he calmly went back to drinking his overly strong coffee and building some kind of display case out in the shed. That afternoon it dawned on her how she was behaving. Her father was more relaxed than she was. The next morning she noticed he had begun shaving with an electric razor, which surprised her, given how much he had always hated them. When she asked him about it, he said that even he was fallible and that every day he realized how much he was selling out to the present. The real reason, however — that he didn’t want her to see the way his hands shook when he shaved — he kept to himself. After a few days Alice calmed down a bit and adapted to his daily routine. In the morning, around seven, he got up and went out to the shed to work. At eleven he stopped, walked out to the mailbox to pick up the newspaper, and went to wash up in the bathroom. Depending on the weather, he would sit and read the paper on the bench out in the garden or take it inside to the kitchen with him. At first Alice tried to have lunch ready around noon, but on Tuesday her father said that from now on they would walk to the pub in the village together for lunch. When she objected that her food was healthier, he dismissed her with a wave of the hand. “I guarantee I’m going to die absolutely healthy, and besides, I want to take you out and show you off a bit.” When the weather was nice they sat at one of the tables outside, underneath the boughs of the chestnut trees. Every now and then her father would exchange greetings with someone, and Alice had no recollection of at least half the people he said hello to. She also realized at one point that to call the house her father lived in a cottage was actually inappropriate, given that over the past more than twenty years he had been there he had made it into a proper home. Sometimes their conversation meandered from Alice’s childhood memories to stories from Josef’s time in prison. At others, especially when it touched on Libuše, whom Josef stubbornly insisted on referring to as the blonde, their conversation went nowhere. Even once Alice accepted that Libuše was a balanced, capable girl, she wasn’t entirely able to let go of her concerns. As Josef thoughtfully studied her face, she studied him right back, saying: “I know there’s nothing I can do. I’m just a little scared, that’s all.” Then her father would remind her how happy he and her mother had been when she introduced Maximilian to them. How impressed they had been. “And we know how he turned out, don’t we, Ali? Speaking of which, what’s going on with him, anyway?” Ever since he had stopped having to pay alimony, nobody knew. Once Kryštof became an adult, Maximilian stopped seeing him. Sometimes Alice would also talk about how she never entirely understood what went on between her father and her son. She only knew that each of them always stuck up for the other. She also finally had the chance to tell her father off for making Kryštof wait to tell her and Květa that he’d had a stroke. “It’s simple, Ali,” said Josef. “He gave me what I could never have with you. He made up for it all. When I came back from prison, you know, you were almost a grown-up woman.”