T?ma sat back behind his desk and cleared his throat.
“We pushed against the Austro-Hungarians when they tried to burn our books and ban our language. We were an industrial superpower before Hitler took us for serfs. We survived Hitler only to welcome the economic and intellectual devastation by the Soviets. And here we are, breathing, sovereign, rich. What next, Jakub? What is the vision for us, what will define us in the future?”
“I heard that milk prices will be through the roof next year,” I said.
“Ha, a skeptic! I love skeptics. They keep a democracy honest, but they don’t always think big. Think bigger. What makes a country great? Wealth, army, healthcare for all?”
“I leave that to the professionals.”
“The greatness of a nation is not defined by abstracts, Jakub. It’s defined by pictures. Stories that carry by mouth, by television, immortalized by the Internet, stories about a new park being built and the homeless being fed and bad men being arrested for stealing from good men. The greatness of a nation is in its symbols, its gestures, in doing things that are unprecedented. It’s why the Americans are falling behind—they built a nation on the idea of doing new things, and now they’d rather sit and pray that the world won’t make them adapt too much. We won’t be following the Americans to that place. We won’t be following anyone. We’re going to take this spacecraft and send it to Venus. A nation of kings and discoverers, yet the child across the ocean still confuses us with Chechnya, or reduces us to our great affinity for beer and pornography. In a few months, the child will know that we are the only ones with the stones to study the most incredible scientific phenomenon of this century.”
I remained expressionless. I did not want him to know he had me, not yet.
“You think the public will agree?” I said.
“What do our people want the most right now? They want to know we aren’t the puppets of the EU, or the Americans, or the Russians. They want to know that politicians are making decisions on their behalf, not on the behalf of businessmen and foreign governments. This is the growth they crave. We defeated the communists decades ago, Jakub. We can’t ride that wave forever. The republic will never have the agriculture of Latin America or the natural resources of Ukraine. We don’t have America’s megamilitary or the fish monopoly of the Scandinavians. How do we get ahead in this world? Ideas. Science. This country needs a future, and I will not lie comfortably in any deathbed until I get it.”
I sipped on the cola and looked around the office. Not a single item was out of place, as if no one ever walked around and picked up the hockey trophies, the pictures of his wife, no one ever napped on the leather sofa underneath the window overlooking downtown Prague. The office was arranged as neatly as the man’s life.
“And what do you need from me? Counsel?”
“From what I understand, in front of me sits perhaps the most qualified cosmic dust researcher in Europe. You discovered a brand-new particle of life! That must feel extraordinary.”
His assistant entered the room with a bowl of garlic soup and a plate of blood sausage, fried potato croquettes, and aromatic horseradish. The senator cut into the sausage and some grease landed on his ashy tie.
“Sure, sure, counsel is good, Jakub, but we are looking for more.” He set his utensils down and took his time chewing, swallowing all of his food and smirking at the impatient hand tapping my knee. “We want you to be the first Czech to see the universe,” he said.
I felt light-headed. I drank some of the cola, regretting I hadn’t asked for alcohol.
“You’re a vegetarian,” I said.
“In my office, I’m a man. I trust you’ll keep the secret. I trust we’ll trust each other. What do you think of my proposition?”
“It’s hard to believe a single word.”
“Extraordinary, Jakub, is not only your discovery on Saturn. I know who you are. You and I, we need to do this together. Your father was a collaborator, a criminal, a symbol of what haunts the nation to this day. As his son, you are the movement forward, away from the history of our shame. Jakub Procházka, the son of a loyal communist, the glowing example of a reformed communist (you’re not still a communist, are you? Good, good). A man who grieved through the death of his parents, who grew up in a humble village on the humble retirement pay of his grandparents, and despite all odds unleashed his brilliance upon the world, becoming a heavyweight best in his field. The embodiment of democracy and capitalism, while also a humble servant to the people, a seeker of truths. A man of science. I want to put a Czech in Space, Jakub, and that Czech will be you. Europe will scoff at us, burdened taxpayers will cry out in skepticism. But there is a future here, meaning for the country, and we can sell it as such with you on the packaging. The spaceman of Prague. The transformed nation embodied, carrying our flag into the cosmos. Can you see it?”
I saw it. I saw it and I bent over as something groaned deep within my gut.
The senator’s canines once again sank into the pork as horseradish sweat broke out on his forehead. He was so different from his television appearances, animated, loud, uncontrolled, ruddy-cheeked, and I thought, here is a man who devises a different identity every time he enters a room, and I shouldn’t trust such a man. But I did anyway.
I straightened my shoulders and cleared my throat, steadying a shaky hand on my knee, heavy with the destiny this stranger had just offered. Deepening my voice to match the seriousness of the moment, I said, “Well, shit.”
The government had approved the mission almost unanimously within the next three days. Within the week, I was seeing the skeleton of JanHus1, its side still marked by the Swiss white cross in its sea of red. I shook the hand of the man with an Iron Maiden tattoo. Within two months, the world knew who I was and where I was headed. The shuttle had been completed. Lenka wore a black dress to the unveiling party and shook hands with the president. She gracefully carried on the conversation when I ran to a bathroom stall to retch. And within six months, I was waking up aboard JanHus1.