Authors: Adam Mansbach
They travel the rest of the way in silence, and arrive at UC Davis just before noon. Marcus parks at a two-hour meter, drops some coins into the slot. The hand leaps halfway up the dial.
He hangs his thumbs from his pockets. “You got any change?”
“No. But an hour might be plenty.” Nina squints at him through her shades, then raises the flat of her hand to her brow. The whole climate's different here, seventy miles inland, dry and stagnant and oppressive.
Marcus leans against the driver's door. “Want me to come?”
“I don't know. Maybe I should see him by myself. Noâyeah. I do want you to come. I guess.” She walks over and links her arm through his, as if it's he who needs encouraging. “Come on. Let's just go.”
A campus map directs them to a modern five-story building just off the main quad. Engraved on a low bronze plaque, just left of the entranceway, is
THE ALFRED KRONINBERG LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY. CORNERSTONE LAID May
12, 1951.
“Guess we found it,” Nina says fake-breezily. She waits a moment, as if hoping a boulder might drop from the sky and block the door. When none does, she squares her shoulders, adjusts her skirt, and walks into the cool, dark lobby. Marcus follows, a pace behind, and trails Nina to a directory mounted beside the elevator, a black plastic board with movable white letters like an old-fashioned theater's marquee. The department of philosophy is on the top level, above the two-floor library. Nina jabs the elevator button, clasps her hands behind her back, then tires of waiting and rings for the lift again. She glances back at Marcus, half-expecting him to say something about patience, but he is quiet.
Hello, Father
. That will be her line, Nina decides as they glide upward. She'll say it from the threshold of his office, and she won't move. He'll have to come toward her, carry his disbelief across the room. Perhaps other students will be waiting in the hall to see him. Maybe another professor, even, will be sitting in Miklos's office, chatting with him, when Nina appears.
The elevator opens. Twenty-five feet to the left, linoleum gives way to carpet and the hallway terminates in a circular suite of faculty offices, set behind dark wooden doors. Twenty-five feet to the right is the glass-walled departmental office. Nina can see a wall of mailboxes, some copy machines, a few secretarial types milling about.
She turns left, and by the time the carpet muffles the clunk of her footsteps, the pounding of her heart is just as loudâso strong, she feels the pulsing in her throat. A name is stenciled on each door. Grey, Wilkerson, Glenzâ¦Nina turns away from them and nearly bumps into Marcus.
“What the fuck?” she demands, throwing an arm at the names. “He's not here. There's no Hricek.” Hysteria churns in her stomach. “What the fuck?”
Marcus pats the air in front of her. “It's okay. He's probably just on a different floor. Let's ask.” He points down the hall. Nina nods, stalks off. Pushes open the door, pastes a smile on her face, and bends over the chest-high cubicle of the first secretary she sees.
“Excuse me.”
The woman looks up over a pair of rainbow-framed reading glasses. “Yes?” She sounds about a pack short of a tracheotomy.
“I'm looking for Professor Hricek. Could you tell me where his office is, please?”
The secretary squints at her. “Professor who?”
“Hricek. Miklos Hricek.”
The woman interlocks her knob-knuckled talons, rests them on the desk, and leans forward. “Miklos Hricek works in the library, dear. The circulation desk. Third floor.”
Nina backs out the door, too stunned to answer. Miklos Hricek
works in the library
?
Marcus is waiting by the elevator. “Well?”
“He's not a professor,” she hears herself say in a monotone. “He works in the library.”
“Great!” Marcus presses the button. “Which floor?”
Nina whirls toward him, furious. “What do you mean, âgreat'? He's supposed to be a professor, not some fucking librarian. He had an office in Prague as big as this whole floor!”
“Who cares what he does? He's your father, and you found him. That's the important thing. Right?”
Nina crosses her arms over her chest.
“Shit, Pigfoot. My daddy mopped floors in a nursing home. You think I'm not proud of him?”
The elevator dings and opens. Nina stays right where she is. “You know how many cats who were professors and architects and doctors back in their home countries come here and end up driving cabs?” The doors begin to close, and Marcus blocks them with his foot. “Come on. Go see your old man.”
She shuts her eyes. “Just give me a minute, okay?”
“Sure.” Marcus gives the hands-off sign, spins on his heel, walks across the hall to the water fountain. A moment later, Nina hears his footsteps coming closer, and looks up in time to see Marcus thrust a piece of paper at her, its bottom third fringed into tear-off slips.
Philosophy Tutor Available,
it reads in large hand-drawn block letters.
Undergrad and graduate levels. All topics. Thirty years teaching experience, published author, Ph.D.
On the slips are Miklos's name and what must be his home phone number.
Nina stares at the flyer for a long time, as if she expects this advertisement to account for nine missing years all by its lonesome. She hits the elevator button, then changes her mind and barrels down the stairs.
Nina busts in like a gunfighter entering a saloon, and scans the room. This library has none of the majesty of the one in which she logged so many hours as a girl. It's got more in common with the one at the prep school in Pasadena where she and Devon spent an afternoon last week, teaching the kids about jazz. Students hunch over blond-wood tables, half of them half-asleep. Backpacks dot the ground like gumdrops. Ancient green-screened computers hum; metal carts of books sit marooned in aisles. A white-haired woman in a ratty cardigan pushes a sliding ladder across a wall, about to reshelve the thick tome in her hand.
For the second time in five minutes, Nina approaches a total stranger and asks the whereabouts of her father. “He's in the break room,” the boy behind the main desk tells her, pointing behind him at a closed door labeled
STAFF
.
“May I?” Nina passes before he can answer, curls her hand around the cool brass knob. She takes a moment to collect herself, turns it a fraction of an inch, and stops. Voices murmur on the other side. One male, one female. And they are speaking Czech. Nina yawns to clear her ears, then listens harder. She makes out a few disjointed wordsâ
almost, weekend, movie, napkin
âand throws open the door.
A man and a woman sit opposite each other at a small table in a bare Formica-countered room that smells of stale coffee, both of them biting deeply into what look like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole-wheat bread. A Ziploc bag containing two more lies between them. They look up, startled.
The man swallows, then dabs at his mouth with a paper towel and turns in his seat. It is Miklos all right. He's thinner than she's ever seen him, about ten pounds up from gaunt. A plaid flannel shirt that might once have stretched snugly over his belly hangs baggy instead. A network of thin wrinkles surrounds his caved-in eyes, like minor streets on a road map, and his hair and beard are a dull gunmetal gray, with not a glint of silver. His bifocals are off a drugstore rack.
“Can I help you?” he inquires. The woman takes another bite.
“Hello, Dad,” Nina says in Czech.
He blinks at her, then stands up so fast, his plastic chair falls over backward, clatters against the floor.
“Nina? It's really you? My God!” He laughs the laugh Nina remembers: a big round sound like shouting into an empty barrel, undiminished by the loss of untold pounds.
Before she knows what's happening, Nina finds herself wrapped in a long, airtight embrace, breasts pressed flat against his chest, face buried in the shoulder of his shirt. He smells first of cigarettes, second of sandalwood, and third of old sweat. Slowly, she brings her arms up to his shoulders and hugs back.
“I can't believe it!” He rocks her from side to side, then steps away and clasps Nina's forearms with his hands. The same hands I remember, Nina thinks, looking down at them. She realizes she's seeking out the unchanged in her father, dwelling on what weight and time have not transformed.
He looks her over, then twists at the waist without letting go. “My daughter,” he proclaims to the woman, who is standing now, shaking out the pleats of her long skirt and smoothing down her bunned-up hair. “She is beautiful!”
Miklos turns back to Nina and grins, revealing a row of yellowed teeth. She does not return it, fixing him instead with a hard, expectant look she slapped together while his back was turned.
Miklos sees it, and his exuberance drops away. He picks up Nina's hand, holds it in both his own. “Every day I've wondered where you were, how you were doing.” He stares at her with wide bloodshot eyes, as if imploring her to search them and confirm his sincerity.
Nina switches to English. “Then why haven't you called, or written?”
Miklos hangs his head, nods, sighs so hard that his shoulders rise to his ears, then slump almost to his rib cage. It's a ridiculously oversized gesture, and yet one that seems to acknowledge its own failure to convey all it seeks to.
“For a long time,” he says, shifting to English, too, and his accent is stronger than Nina remembers, far stronger than it should be, “I simply could not. It was too much of a risk. And then, by the time it wasn't⦔
Miklos looks up at her, his face so slack with shame that for a moment she actually fears for him, worries with an abrupt, intuitive concern that getting through the next few moments may be more than her father can bear. “Then, Nina, I had nothing to say.”
He looks around, as if this break room is the physical manifestation of his fate in America. “I had failed. Our plans had come apart, and I had trapped myself here, with nothing.” Miklos tries to laugh, but he cannot. “A college kid's job, shelving books. You and your mother were better off without me.”
“We just wanted to talk to you. We just wanted to know you were okay.”
“I was not okay, I'm afraid. I became very depressed. And in my depression, I began to drink. Only when I met Raynaâ” He beckons to her, and the woman steps forward and stands at Miklos's side. “Her name is Rayna, too,” he says apologetically.
The woman extends her hand to Nina and says in Czech, “I have heard all about you.” Nina takes her hand and shakes, stuporously, barely looking at her, waiting for Miklos to go on.
“Only when I met Rayna did I see what I was doing to myself,” he resumes after overseeing the handshake. “She got me in a program. I'm sober three years now.” Miklos looks at the floor as he says it. If he's proud, he doesn't want to appear that way.
“How is your mother?” he asks after a moment, with an awkward formality. “She is here with you, perhaps?” Nina watches Miklos's face brighten and then darken as he gives further thought to what he will be in for if she is.
“No. Mom is still in Prague. She'd kill me if she knew I'd come here.” She pauses, then decides that he deserves it. “You ruined her life. You know that.”
Her father touches his beard, glances skittishly at the new Rayna.
“She is a strong woman.” His eyes shuttle from Nina to his sandwich to his shoes, aimless, like a fly alighting on whatever seems to offer harbor. “I'm sure she is all right. Her fatherâyour Dedaâhe is still alive?”
“He died six years ago. She's not all right. She's fucked-up. How do you even have the balls to say that? How the hell would you know?”
Tears sit in the corners of her father's eyes. He blinks through them. “What I have done is unforgivable. I know that.”
“Nothing is unforgivable,” Rayna chimes in. “God forgives all.”
“Shut up,” says Nina. “Who asked you?”
Rayna crosses her arms, retreats into herself.
“I never meant to hurt you,” Miklos declares. “None of this is how I meant for things to be.”
Nina nods. She wants to be fair. The power she has over him is too much; it's become something she's afraid to wield.
“Please, Nina. I've missed you so much. Tell me about yourself. What you've been doing.”
“Since I was twelve?”
Miklos can't seem to figure out how to respond. “Yes,” he says, opting for a kind of hungry grandiosity. “Yes. Tell me everything.”
“Well, let's see. Mom pretty much went crazy after you left, what with supporting the two of us and worrying about you, and agents trying to swindle her out of the house. I took care of myself, basically. Umâ¦started taking pictures for
Lidové Noviny,
met Devon Marbury when I was seventeen and came to New York with him. Been working as his assistant photographer ever since, and traveling with his band. I'm twenty-one now, in case you've lost count.”
“Of course.” Her father taps his watchless wrist. “Today.”
“Right,” she says softly.
“Is it a happy birthday, Nina? Are you sorry you found me?”
The question is an arrow shot from Nina's childhood, whizzing through time and finding its mark. She remembers her father's habit of presenting her with moral dilemmas, of randomly requesting emotional self-evaluations.
Would it be right to steal a loaf of bread if you were starving, Nina? Do you feel happy today? Happier or less happy than yesterday? How do you know?
He never made her feel that there was any motive behind the questions, or any judgment of the answers. Nina enjoyed responding because it seemed like grown-up talk, reminded her of the way Miklos was in his classroom. How strange that she'd forgotten all about it until now.
“No, Dad,” she hears herself reply. “I'm not sorry.”