As she looked out at shining BMWs and Mercedeses crawling past the imposing rear of the State Opera House, she couldn’t imagine this at all, and she wondered—not for the first time—if she was lacking in the kind of imagination that her husband took for granted. Enthusiasm and imagination. She measured him with a long look. Boyish face and round, hazel eyes. A lock of hair splashed across his forehead. Beautiful, she thought as she fingered her still unfamiliar wedding band. This was the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with.
He turned from the window, shaking his head, then caught sight of her face. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
She wiped away tears, smiling, then gripped his fingers so tightly that her wedding ring pinched the soft skin of her finger. She pulled him closer and whispered, “Let’s go back to the room.”
He paid the bill, fumbling with Austrian marks. Enthusiasm, imagination, and commitment—these were the qualities she most loved in Emmett Kohl, because they were the very things she felt she lacked. Harvard had taught her to question everything, and she had taken up that challenge, growing aptly disillusioned by both left and right, so uncommitted to either that when Emmett began his mini-lectures on history or foreign relations, she just sat and listened, less in awe of his facts than in awe of his belief. It struck her that this was what adulthood was about—belief. What did Sophie believe in? She wasn’t sure. Compared to him, she was only half an adult. With him, she hoped, she might grow into something better.
While among historical artifacts and exotic languages she always felt inferior to her new husband, in bed their roles were reversed, so whenever the insecurity overcame her she would draw him there. Emmett, delighted to be used this way, never thought to wonder at the timing of her sexual urges. He was beautiful and smart but woefully inexperienced, whereas she had learned the etiquette of the sheets from a drummer in a punk band, a French history teacher’s assistant, and, over the space of a single experimental weekend, a girlfriend from Virginia who had come to visit her in Boston.
So when they returned to their hotel room, hand in hand, and she helped him out of his clothes and let him watch, fingertips rattling against the bedspread, as she stripped, she felt whole again. She was the girl who believed in nothing, giving a little show for the boy who believed in everything. Yet by the time they were tangled together beneath the sheets, flesh against flesh, she realized that she was wrong. She did believe in something. She believed in Emmett Kohl.
The next morning they boarded the train to Prague, and not even the filthy car with the broken, stinking toilet deterred her. Instead, it filled her with the illusion that they were engaged in real travel, cutting-edge travel. “This is what the rest of the world looks like,” Emmett said with a smile as he surveyed the morose, nervous Czechs clutching bags stuffed with contraband cigarettes, alcohol, and other luxuries marked for resale back home. When, at the border, the guards removed an old woman and two young men who quietly watched the train leave them behind, Sophie was filled with feelings of authenticity.
She told herself to keep her eyes and ears open. She told herself to absorb it all.
The dilapidated fairy-tale architecture of Prague buoyed them, and they drank fifty-cent beers in underground taverns lit with candles. Sophie tried to put words to her excitement, the magnitude of a small-town girl ending up here, of all places. She was the child of a Virginia lumber merchant, her travels limited to the height and breadth of the East Coast, and now she was an educated woman, married, wandering the Eastern Bloc. This dislocation stunned her when she thought about it, yet when she tried to explain it to her husband her words felt inadequate. Emmett had always been the verbal one, and when he smiled and held her hand and told her he understood she wondered if he was patronizing her. “Stick with me, kid,” he said in his best Bogart.
On their third day, he bought her a miniature bust of Lenin, and they laughed about it as they walked the crowded Charles Bridge between statues of Czech kings looking down on them in the stagnant summer heat. They were a little drunk, giggling about the Lenin in her hand. She rocked it back and forth and used it the way a ventriloquist would. Emmett’s face got very pink under the sun—years later, she would remember that.
Then there was the boy.
He appeared out of nowhere, seven or eight years old, emerging from between all the other anonymous tourists, silent at Sophie’s elbow. Suddenly, he had her Lenin in his hands. He was so quick. He bolted around legs and past an artist dabbing at an easel to the edge of the bridge, and Sophie feared he was going to leap over. Emmett started moving toward the boy, and then they saw the bust again, over the boy’s head. He hurtled it into the air—it rose and fell.
“Little shit,” Emmett muttered, and when Sophie caught up to him and looked down at the river, there was no sign of her little Lenin. The boy was gone. Afterward, on the walk back to the hotel, she was overcome by the feeling that she and Emmett were being made fools of. It followed her the rest of the trip, on to Budapest and during their unexpected excursion to Yugoslavia, and even after they returned to Boston. Twenty years later, she still hadn’t been able to shake that feeling.
2
Her first thought upon arriving at Chez Daniel on the evening of March 2, 2011, was that her husband was looking very good. She didn’t have this thought often, but it was less an insult to Emmett than an indictment against herself, and the ways in which twenty years of marriage can blind you to your partner’s virtues. She suspected that he saw her the same way, but she hoped he at least had moments like this, where warmth and pleasure filled her at the sight of his eternally youthful face and the thought that, Yes, this one’s mine. It didn’t matter how brief they were, or how they might be followed by something terrible—those bursts of attraction could sustain her for months.
Chez Daniel, like most decent French restaurants—even French restaurants in Hungary—was cramped, casual, and a bit frantic. Simple tablecloths, excellent food. She joined him at a table by the beige wall beneath framed sepia scenes of the dirty and cracked Budapest streets that made for hard walking but wonderfully moody pictures. As they waited for the wine, Emmett straightened the utensils on either side of his plate and asked how her day had been.
“Glenda,” she said. “Four hours with Glenda at the Gellért Baths. Steam, massages, and too many Cosmopolitans. What do you think?”
He’d heard often enough about the Wednesday routine she’d been roped into by the wife of his boss, Consul General Raymond Bennett. Always the Gellért Hotel, where Sophie and Emmett had spent part of their honeymoon, back when even students could afford its Habsburg elegance. Emmett said, “Anything exciting in her life?”