“Really?” Alice said. “That never occurred to me. I mean, how old could I have been? Ten? Eleven?”
“That’s not the point,” Josef said with a wave of the hand. “The point is you were almost all grown up. I’m really sorry I couldn’t be with you more when you were little. It’s all my fault. When you have a child, you should just keep your mouth shut and stay in line.” Alice argued back that she had always respected him for his courage and bravery and that he had made her proud. “Pride?” Josef said. “What use is that?” At the end of the week the temperature dropped, so he moved indoors from the shed to the house, where he continued work on his display case. It also meant that they spent a few hours more together each day. At the end of the week a visitor came from Brno to see Josef, a grizzled man who looked to be around fifty years of age. It was the journalist who had written the articles about political prisoners before the Russians invaded. Alice’s father had forgotten to tell her he was coming and only remembered half an hour before that he was supposed to meet him at the train station in Lhotka. She managed to persuade him to change his pants at least, though she failed to convince him that a flannel work shirt wasn’t the most appropriate attire for receiving visitors. That day, for a change, Josef allowed Alice to make lunch. When the journalist arrived, he ate with them, and then the two men closed themselves up in Josef’s room.
The journalist had changed. First of all, he wasn’t a journalist anymore. He had moved back home after spending years in exile and now worked for an organization that helped people like Josef. Josef had exchanged a few letters with him and at his request had visited the office in Prague that was looking into his arrest, imprisonment, and conviction. The man had put on weight over the years. He had gray hair and crow’s feet around his eyes. He didn’t look at all like the young man who had come to see Josef more than twenty years ago. Asked why he was still doing basically the same thing, the man said nearly half his relatives had met the same fate as Josef. “Why didn’t you tell me that then?” Josef asked.
“I guess I was a little embarrassed,” the man replied.
“Embarrassed?”
“Yes. Not for my relatives, but that I might not be objective enough. Or, as they say now, impartial.”
“So where were you all this time?” Josef asked, and the man hesitantly told him about all the foreign countries he had been in. When he left, Alice could see that her father was in a good mood.
“Now I can finish that display case. Maybe they’ll finally do an investigation, and then once the whole thing’s under way, I can bring it to your mother — my wife — in Prague,” he said in a meaningful voice. Alice knew she hadn’t misheard, but she felt the need to act as if he hadn’t said anything.
“What are you saying, Dad!” she said after a moment’s delay. “What are you talking about?” Her father gave her a brief, casual glance, almost as if he hadn’t heard. “You and Mom broke up more than twenty years ago.” Her father looked at her again.
“In fact it’s been twenty-five years, three months, and seventeen days. Assuming you mean the length of time we haven’t been living together.”
“You’ve been keeping track?”
“Well, I’m not entirely sure, since after the time I spent in the hospital, you know — I was unconscious for a few days, so I have to check the calendar every now and then. I get mixed up.”
“So you’ve kept track this whole time?” Alice repeated.
“I’ve kept track all my life. I’m an engineer. I’m used to it from work,” Josef said. He looked at Alice, who stared back at him, nodding her head the way she always had, ever since she was a little girl, when something intrigued or surprised her, or she was trying to make sense of something.
“Twenty-five years, three months, and seventeen days,” Alice said. Her father turned to walk away.
“How do you know, Dad? How do you know that Mom will take anything from you? How in God’s name do you know, when for all those years you treated her so … so dismissively, with such contempt. How do you know? How in the hell do you even dare!”
By the time Josef sat down in the chair, all his ideas, strength, energy, and authority had drained out of him, leaving only a numb, sick old man.
“Well, sweetie,” he said, “the truth is … the truth is … I … I don’t know anything, I really don’t. I can only hope that she’ll … eh-hem … somehow … forgive my behavior. That’s it … that’s all I’ve got.”
“That she’ll forgive you?”
“I can only hope, sweetie. It’s all I can do.”
“All right,” Alice said.
“It’s just a display case.”
“Just a display case, right,” she said, nodding with clenched lips. “Yes, just a display case.” As she repeated his words, she was glad she had nothing important she needed to do that day, since she was sure she would have made a mess of anything that required even a drop of concentration. In her memories she had looked back more than once into the maze of her parents’ curious relationship. A bizarre maze littered with traps and taboos, with insidious snares and pitfalls.
“So you won’t tell her about the display case?” Alice’s father asked.
“Tell her?”
“I’d kind of like it to be a surprise, you know. Can you keep it a secret?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know,” Alice said.
“You don’t know, sweetie?”
“I don’t know, Dad.”
(2)
The whole time Alice was in Lhotka, her father spent repairing an old wooden display case from the turn of the twentieth century, as 1900 came waltzing in, adorned in Art Nouveau. Kryštof had bought it once upon a time to store his tools in. But then, together, he and Josef had built a long wooden shelf that was a much better place for storing his pliers, screwdrivers, saws, hammers, screws, and nails. The display case stood on four legs, more than four feet in height. The case itself was three feet tall and roughly twenty inches deep. Inside, it boasted a sophisticated system of wooden brackets for holding shelves in place at variable heights just a few inches apart. After it had stood for years, dirty, old, broken, and hobbled in a corner of the shed, Josef found a new use for it. During the cleaning he undertook when he came home from the hospital, he had opened up a few old boxes containing objects that he and Květa used to collect. Some potsherds excavated near Olomouc. A handful of Celtic agates. Some clam and mussel shells, two Czech groschen, four pieces of moldavite, one trilobite, a large specimen of rose quartz, some garnets from Kozákov, pebbles from Bojkovice, a bronze ax, and several miniature copies of seal casts from India. They had accumulated the items as a couple before Alice was born, when the two of them used to go on trips and scour antique shops. Their value was doubtful. Combined, they probably weren’t worth any more than the scattered memories they evoked, but the unused display case, Josef decided, was exactly the thing to show them off to maximum effect, and so he set out to repair it. First he burned off the old varnish, then he sealed it, sanded it, restained it, impregnated it with wax, polished it, had the windows cut, installed them, cleaned and repaired the lock, mounted a large photocopy with images of cuneiform on the inner back wall, dusted and cleaned the objects, arranged them on the three glass levels of the display case, then packed the objects back up in the boxes, dismantled the case, and began to pack and prepare it for the trip to Prague. All of this he did piecemeal over a period of several weeks, as if trying to make the job last. Alice witnessed only the final procedures, impregnating the wood with wax and polishing. Her father was worried about the polishing and asked Alice several times what she thought of it. But she didn’t give it much thought. She liked the way it looked, and when her father asked for the umpteenth time what she thought, she just said she didn’t know. “Nobody knows,” he replied, “but you’re the only one I can use to judge whether or not your mother will like it.” “It could use some varnish,” she said finally, recognizing how important it was to him. “I would give it some varnish, but leave it for now. Once you get it to Prague, I’ll find some discreet way to ask Mom about it.” Her father didn’t say anything, but he seemed satisfied.