*
To make up for the little time I had been devoting to the children, I decided we should take a trip to Lake Erie, the closest of the Great Lakes. We parked in a spot that seemed suitably close to the water and, without suspecting anything ill, set off on a path that seemed to lead to the shore. We did not notice the sign informing us this was private property.
Suddenly, a man appeared out of nowhere pointing a rifle at as and shouting something I took to be: Not one more step or I shoot! As in a scene from a fatuous gangster film, we were told to raise our hands. In vain, I tried to explain to the apparent owner that I was not a criminal but merely a foreigner teaching at the university who wanted to show his children the lake. We made an about-face, were allowed to put our hands down, and, under the constant watch of the man with the rifle, we marched back to our car. Thus we became vividly acquainted with one of the pillars of American civil liberties: the inviolability of private property.
At the beginning of winter, an unfamiliar man called and informed me in Czech that he was a professor at a Catholic college in Saint Louis. He taught drama and invited me to the premiere of my play The Master, which he had been putting together.
Since childhood, I’d loved Mark Twain and, because of him, the Mississippi, the queen of rivers. Saint Louis lay on the bank of this river.
I succeeded in getting away for three days. I traveled to Hannibal, where I visited the house in which the famous boat pilot had spent his childhood and where, for myself and millions of other readers, lived Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
I awaited the premiere of The Master with trepidation. It was supposed to be performed on a small stage belonging to the college. The director was a Czech postwar émigré who confided to me that at home he had been sentenced to death in absentia. The previous spring he was informed that he could be rehabilitated, but the Soviets had invaded before he’d had a chance to reply. I was surprised by how ardently he followed the events back home; he even allowed himself an idiosyncrasy: His wristwatch was set to Prague time, which differed from the Mississippi basin by seven hours. The director enthusiastically talked to me about my plays. He liked The Master because of the image of a fanatical faith in the redemptive role of desolation. Then, with some embarrassment, he admitted that he’d run into a little problem while putting together the play. The college was exclusively women, and there were two female roles in my play and three roles for men. It was this play, however, that he wanted to stage, so he took the liberty of turning one of the male roles into a female one.
He glanced at me and added that he understood my misgivings, but I would see that it worked quite well. To my relief, he revealed to me that he himself would be playing the role of the grave digger, and the woman who would be playing the old male professor was an old professor herself. She was extremely talented, and he was convinced I would be hearing of her in the future.
Armed with this information, I took a seat in the front row of the theater.
To my astonishment — perhaps this was due to my reduced sensitivity to the English language or my expectations of the worst — it really did work quite well.
I consoled myself by imagining that instead of the Three Sisters, I would one day see the Three Brothers (in a men’s university production), and the uninitiated spectators would be none the wiser.
*
Christmas was fast approaching. A compatriot of mine named Timoteus Pokora was on a study trip through the department of Asian languages and literatures. We’d met here in Michigan and knew each other more by sight. He had come here with his wife and son, and his stipend was barely sufficient. He stopped by my office one day with the departmental newsletter, in which he’d circled a small announcement. The members of some sort of Reform church in Midland, Texas, were inviting foreign students to spend the week of Christmas with them free of charge. The application deadline was today. I agreed that it was a generous offer, but Texas was a bit out of the way and, besides, I wasn’t a student. I refrained from mentioning to Mr. Pokora that his half-bald head and elderly appearance did not strike me as exactly boyish.
He objected that they wouldn’t check up on us and, besides, he still considered himself a student, and this invitation was interesting if only because it was Texas. When else would we be able go there?
It slowly dawned on me that he’d be glad to accept the invitation but didn’t have enough money for the trip. It would be cheaper if we went in my car; of course, he said he would contribute money for gasoline. Gas was so cheap, though, that I didn’t need any contribution. It just seemed embarrassing to try to pass myself off as a student.
Mr. Pokora maintained that we were all essentially students until the day we died, and most of the students here had more money than the two of us put together. Could either of us afford a weeklong vacation in Texas? Did I realize what an opportunity this would be for our children?
I said that, in my case, an entire week was out of the question; I’d feel like a fraud.
With this decision, my compatriot left to telephone Midland and in less than an hour delightedly informed me that we were expected — and, of course, we could extend or shorten our stay as we wished. He was of the opinion that my worries were exaggerated. Timoteus learned that Midland was the business center of Texas petroleum production and one of the richest cities in the United States. The Midland church would assuredly not be impoverished.
So a few days later, the seven of us crammed into the Impala and embarked on a trip to Texas.
When you drive through this vast country from north to south, you realize that in addition to the America of extravagant residences, mansions, skyscrapers, slums, farmhouses, and wooden colonial structures, there is another America — an America of freeways, a landscape of gas stations, billboards, and neon, enormous signs providing directions and distances in hundreds of miles, signs with highway and freeway numbers. There are speed-limit signs, signs with telephone numbers in case of emergency, repair shops, fast-food restaurants, rest stops for truck drivers, an America of motels and hotels, where you can spend the night without anyone demanding to see your identity card, just the license plate number of your car, and that’s in case it gets stolen. When I was reading Nabokov’s Lolita, I had the feeling that the author was much more fascinated by this bizarre and colorful world of freeway anonymity — in which you can conceal infidelity and much worse atrocities — than he was by the love affair between a grown man and his underage stepdaughter.
We drove through several large cities which, unlike the freeway subculture, were gray, uninteresting, and usually featureless. The most depressing was Dallas, the embodiment of concrete vacuity, a city well suited to the recent presidential assassination.
We reached Midland on Christmas Eve. Skyscrapers jutted up above the flat countryside; everything here was new and evidently constructed only recently (the city was not founded until the last quarter of the nineteenth century). We had already grown used to seeing skyscrapers, and there was nothing else here that struck us as exceptional. (I don’t wish to do the city an injustice; it had two theaters, a concert hall, and a museum.)
We easily located the enormous church, an establishment that performed many functions. Besides rooms for rent, there was a kitchen, dining room, fitness room, and, of course, several rooms for congregational activities. We were welcomed, housed, and notified when the next religious service was to take place.