End of the Jews (6 page)

Despite her father's rhetoric, and the schoolyard gossip of her classmates, who huddle together during recess and discuss politics in the same hushed tones they use to talk about sex, Nina's understanding of the plague of agents is thin. She knows to hate and fear them, but these things she has known since kindergarten. Agents are the bogeymen of the Prague playground, the source to which any misfortune or inexplicable phenomenon is linked. If a classmate is mean to you, the cruelest revenge is to float a rumor that his father is an agent. The child will be shunned, and by his best friends most intently.

And yet Nina has never bothered to understand what kinds of things these agents listen for, or say, or to whom they say them, or what consequences follow. Is agent a job, or does reporting something make you one? Do agents really take over the homes of their victims? Why would an agent not want her to see her father?

“It is wrong to leave the country, Mama?”

Rayna smoothes the top of Nina's straight brown hair with a dry palm. “It's not wrong. But if you don't plan on coming back, leaving is not allowed.”

Nina looks up at her. “But we are coming back.”

Rayna sits down on the bed. “No, sweetheart, we're not. I didn't want to tell you this yet. Your father has a new house for us in America. We've been planning this for years. And now that he's gone, he can never return. They'd put him in jail.”

“But I don't want to go.” Nina bursts into tears.

Rayna studies her, just long enough for Nina to register her mother's distance, her hesitation, then gathers Nina into a hug. “Don't you want to see Daddy?”

Nina sniffles into Rayna's shoulder. “Yes.”

“Well then, we've got to go.”

Nina steps back, out of the embrace. “But we
can't
go.”

Rayna's mouth opens, then shuts, and Nina recognizes the new emotion flickering across her mother's face. Panic.

Now Nina feels it herself: a fluttering rush of knowledge, overwhelming as a flock of bats. Her family has been attacked, betrayed by an enemy whose identity remains unknown, who might be watching them right now. They are impotent and stranded and the plan has failed. Her mother is as scared as she, and can't even pretend otherwise.

“We'll find a way,” Rayna tells her. Nina nods, but not because she believes it.

Before exhaustion claims her at 4:30 that morning, she begins and abandons a letter to her father, indulges herself in two long, pillow-muffled bouts of sobbing, spends an hour in systematic but fruitless contemplation of the agent's identity. Sometime around two, Nina starts to feel herself anneal with resentment for her parents, for their incompetence in carrying this off. She wakes up headachy, grouchy, in no mood to sit through class, but Rayna claims it's crucial that they go on as if nothing is wrong. She brings the girl a mug of hot chocolate, flings the bedroom windows wide.

They walk together toward their schools, weaving through cobblestone alleys that seem newly dark and narrow. Nina remembers Miklos explaining that the Staromák was built this way on purpose: if Prague's people are its blood and Staromestské Námesti its majestic heart, rimmed with sky-piercing Gothic church spires and baroque terracotta-roofed hotels and beating to the rhythm of its famed astronomic clock, then quelling an uprising is as simple as blockading the veins. And thin, winding streets are easier to cordon off than open boulevards.

The autumn air is cold enough to icicle the tips of Nina's just-washed hair. Rayna wears a scarf around her head. She hasn't showered. “What we talked about last night we shouldn't talk about again at home. Only outside.”

Nina glances over, full of scorn and fear, and finds her mother staring straight ahead.

“Why? Is someone listening? Can they do that?”

“I don't know. They're watching very closely now. We must be careful. All right?”

Nina nods, endures seven interminable hours of lessons, learns nothing, returns to a house that has changed completely in the time she's been gone. She cannot trust it anymore: imagines microphones in the walls, cameras in the bathrooms, ripe-smelling men huddled in vans, watching her shower. She begins to do her homework at Café Vasek, a small restaurant owned by a friend of her father, heading home only at dinnertime.

The meals that await her are simple and bland, as if Rayna has forgotten how to cook, or no longer cares enough to season anything. The only topic worth discussing is forbidden, so they eat in silence—broken only by Rayna's inquiries into the mundanities of school, and restored by Nina's monosyllabic responses.

Nina tries to be encouraged by the hardening of her mother's features. She tells herself Rayna is preparing for battle. But it's hard to believe. There are skirmishes. One night, the doorbell rings and Rayna rises from the dinner table as if she's been expecting it, runs her napkin across her mouth and drops it on her chair, then stalks out of the room. The visitor penetrates no farther than the hall, where he and Rayna exchange muffled words; the only phrase loud enough for Nina to make out is “traitor to his socialist homeland,” and it ruins her appetite. Within minutes, the door is closed behind him, and her mother is back at the table, hands shaking. She pushes her plate away and pours herself a shot of vodka.

“God only knows how he heard about us,” Rayna says the next day on the way to school. “But he won't be the last of the vultures.”

In the weeks that follow, Nina grows accustomed to dinnertime visits and the low tones of StB agents and counteragents, all of them unseen, distinguishable only by the degree of body odor lingering behind them. They come calling with cagey proposals of assistance and facilitation: offers to guide exorbitant sums into the correct pockets and thus usher the woman and the child onto a train, a bus, a plane. They proffer visas, just as costly, guaranteed to be accepted at the airport for brief windows of time. In return, they want the house.

The agents remind Nina of the suitors waiting for Penelope to make up her mind—occupying the royal palace and feasting on her food and demanding her hand in marriage when Odysseus is really alive, clawing his way back toward Ithaca to set his kingdom right. It is her favorite story in the book her father gave her, and more so after Miklos explained that among the classical heroes, Odysseus alone was a man of cunning rather than brute strength, a modern man in ancient times. That only he was descended not from the line of Zeus, but from that of Hermes, patron god of travelers and thieves.

“Why don't we just give them the house and go?” Nina demands one morning as soon as she and Rayna step outside. Part of her has come to hate their home, to blame it for the insomnia she and her mother share. The only thing worse than wandering the dark house, wide-awake at two in the morning, is running into Rayna in the kitchen. “We'll have a new house where we're going anyway, won't we?”

“This house has been in your father's family for almost a hundred years,” says Rayna, glancing back at it. “I'll be damned before I hand it over to the likes of them. Besides, there's no way of knowing whether a visa will work until you're standing at customs, and then if you've been cheated, it's too late. We'd be in jail and they'd be sleeping in our beds. Are you willing to risk that?”

Nina pauses to consider this. “What's he doing over there anyway?” she asks as they pass through the racket of an accordion player who has been busking for tips on this corner for as long as Nina can remember.

Rayna dons her sunglasses and looks into the distance. “Let's hope he's found a job.”

How would they know if he has? How will they ever hear from him? His letters, if he writes any, will be intercepted. His calls, monitored. For all they know…Nina stops short of completing the thought, afraid to fill in the blank. It feels disrespectful, somehow, to imagine too minutely what her father is doing. She gives herself over to vague ideas instead: Miklos is in New York. Miklos is in Hollywood. Occasionally, momentarily, Miklos is dead—and then he is even more vigorously in New York or Hollywood. Nina watches American movies whenever she can, knowing it's silly but hoping to catch a glimpse of her father in the background, shuffling along in a crowd scene, puffing on his pipe and looking out of place.

As the first year since his departure nears completion, Miklos begins to grow hazy in Nina's mind, and she has to appeal to her mother for reminders. At first, Rayna provides them with enthusiasm, pulling photo albums from the bookcase and narrating the moments immortalized within. Nina listens primly, hands folded. She concentrates on remembering, tries not to notice how much the turning pages and her mother's recitations remind her of the clicking slides and lectures Rayna gives at school. Better is when Rayna merely tells her husband's jokes and apes his mannerisms, brandishing an imaginary pipe and patting her poked-out belly as she mocks a very real professor of moral philosophy, a man who was Miklos's favorite target.

The memory sessions invariably end in tears—sometimes Nina's, always Rayna's. “It's okay,” she smiles, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand, “I like talking about him.” But the evidence says otherwise, and Nina initiates the sessions less and less. They're of little help anyway. Her image of her father is being replaced by the image of her mother playing him.

At the two-year mark—the time Miklos should have gained citizenship, with an American university as his sponsor, and been able to come back for his family, divorce Rayna and then remarry her as an American—Nina's mother decides she's no Penelope. She takes on a heavier course load in hopes of earning tenure and begins leaving Nina money for dinner rather than cooking. The doorbell still rings in the evenings, but even if Rayna happens to be home, she doesn't answer. One day, Nina returns from school and finds a selection of bras laid out on her bed, price tags still attached. Rayna runs her eyes across her daughter's chest the next morning, confirms that Nina is wearing one, and nods.

The memory sessions come to an end when Rayna snaps a curdling “I don't want to think about him right now” at the sight of Nina standing at her bedroom door with a photo album in hand, the first time she has taken one down off the shelf in months.

“Sorry,” Nina whispers, the word catching in her throat. She slips off, flips idly through the first few pages, then shoves the book away and spends the rest of the evening wondering whether it is Rayna's rancor that has grown, or her own maturity in her mother's estimation, to the point where Rayna no longer feels an obligation to pretend. Such things go undiscussed, like the bras on the bed or the fact that Rayna has abandoned English, and thus conversations between mother and daughter are conducted in disjointed, lunatic fashion, with each one speaking her preferred tongue.

“He could have contacted us, you know,” Rayna says one night as she and Nina cohabitate her study in silence, Nina reading her history textbook and Rayna flitting from one task to the next, grading papers and sorting laundry and writing in her diary, as if no one chore is sufficient to hold her interest.

“But, Mom, if he tried, they could—”

“There are ways of doing things.” Her mother drops the bedsheet she's been folding back into the basket and stares at Nina the way one gunfighter might another in an old movie. “Your father has abandoned us.”

Her tone is not that of one sharing a revelation or breaking painful news. It isn't sharp or soothing, but weary, and the words are all the uglier for it. “He's probably found himself a new family in America, while we suffer in this miserable place.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” scoffs Nina, but she, too, has caught herself imagining a new wife, a new daughter—no, a new son. All she can bring herself to object to is the most trivial part of Rayna's statement. “Besides, it's not so bad here.”

“How would you know?” Rayna snatches the same sheet up again, clamps the middle underneath her chin, and folds the corners together at arm's length. The action gives her jowls; Nina looks away. “You've never been anywhere else.”

“Not yet.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I'm going to college in America.” She waits for a reaction, but all Rayna does is purse her lips, grab hold of the reading glasses dangling from the chain around her neck, and bend over her desk.

“Sooner if I can.”

“Now you're leaving me, too.”

“No, but I'm leaving here.”

Speaking it out loud is an act of such portent that Nina almost expects magic from the universe in return—as if the declaration might make the Iron Curtain rise, revealing a stage set for the second act of her life.

Instead, Rayna tightens her fingertips around the neck of her red grading pen. “At least you've told me.”

She begins to sort a sheaf of papers, and Nina watches with the special, studious disgust children develop for the mannerisms of their parents. Rayna's posture is meant to constitute dismissal. She expects her daughter to shuffle from the room and go feel guilty and wretched in some distant corner of the house, and so instead, Nina wanders over to the office closet and opens the door.

A forgotten smell meets her: the apple tobacco and sandalwood blend of her father. The deep-set shelves are full of things she hasn't seen for years, objects Rayna has spirited away lest they remind her of the man she can't stop thinking about anyway. There are pipes, unopened pouches of tobacco, cardboard boxes of his correspondence, a triple stack of thin philosophy journals stretching up from the floor. On the highest shelf, barely within reach, sits a tall box packed haphazardly with the contents of Miklos's home darkroom, and next to that his gleaming camera. Nina reaches for it.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking Dad's camera.”

“Put it back.”

Nina holds her prize to her chest, feeling the instrument's bulk and heft, its cool metal and hard plastic.