IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to state precisely when my grandfather’s lungs begin to fail, but Grandma swears that he took his very last breath during the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth seconds of the sixteenth minute of the third morning hour of the second day of the last week in spring. I’m staying at my grandparents’ apartment for the weekend, trading KFC lunches and the funk of a broken sewage pump at the graduate student dorms for pillows expertly fluffed by my grandmother’s hands and noodles baked with lard and ham. My grandmother wakes me and I rush into their bedroom to find my grandfather convulsing and heaving, his head firmly planted in Grandma’s lap. She asks me to get some water. I cannot remember where any of the glasses are, how to turn on the faucet, how to turn it off, how to walk with only one foot at a time, how to open the door, and again I am standing in my grandparents’ bedroom extending the glass, not sure how I got there, and my grandfather is dead. I stand there motionless, still offering the glass, until strange men in uniform enter the apartment and Grandma takes the glass from my hand.
A week later, I ride Prague’s B train and crave the breakfast sandwich I saw in a commercial before leaving the apartment. The smell of morning breath and commuter armpit sweat spreading through the train reminds me of rancid sausage. At least I’m sitting. Guiltily, though: an old woman stands a few inches away from me, fixing the frizz in her white hair with a trembling hand. At last it is spring, and blooming trees canvas the city in white and red, though the season also plunges Prague into a perpetual state of sexual frustration as young men and women, citizens and tourists alike, become minimalist in their wardrobe choices and eyefuck each other across store aisles, buses, streets. We are a hub of tanned stomachs, muscled arms, full lips clinching cigarettes, there among the sweating seniors dragging their groceries and the bulge-gutted beer lovers stuffed into suits, those apostles of capitalism with their clean-shaven chins buried in the business sections of newspapers. I wonder which group I belong to. Can I be with the youth, the hedonists turning Prague into a playground of the Old Continent? Or does my destination, the science department of Univerzita Karlova, put me in with that other dreaded group, the adults, those who get up in the morning and know exactly how their day will unravel, those who live on the exchange system of work, awaiting their grave with quiet politeness?
My body is young, but today I feel old. Too old to become exceptional. I’ve spent the past week listening to my grandmother weep over loud television, episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger pitched at earsplitting levels, with Chuck Norris dubbed by an actor who used to be an avid Party member. I’ve spent the week boiling water for tea and apologizing to my grandmother over and over again about nothing in particular.
It is hard to see why we are here, inside a tin machina carrying us toward whatever places we have chosen. It is hard to see why we are here until we are not. I wish I could make sense of these thoughts and whisper them to the old woman with frizzy hair, who has seen history unfold from one day to the next and who must know so much about grief and about asking the gods for a sign.
I arrive at the offices of the university’s science department and walk into Dr. Bivoj’s office. Before I set my backpack down, I reach inside to ensure the cigar box is still there. Dr. Bivoj is at his desk, bending over one of his books and eating an apple like a rabbit, using his front teeth to shave off tiny bits. I don’t take outside lunches during my workdays because watching him eat delights me—his unawareness, the generosity with which he presents his childish features despite being a man well into his fifties.
He looks up at me with a bit of apple skin caught on his mustache. “Ah, you are here. Truthfully, I don’t know what to say to you.”
I remove the cigar box from my bag. Before my father traveled to Cuba as a representative of the Party to demonstrate Czechoslovakia’s solidarity with Castro’s struggle against the Imperialist, he asked my grandfather to name the most exotic gift he could think of. “A Cuban monkey,” Grandpa said, his first choice. “We can get it a job in government.” My father did not laugh. “Hell, ask the bearded lunatic for some cigars” went over much better. Grandpa would smoke the cigars while he fed his chickens, slaughtered pigs. He would bring them to the pub and blow smoke in the faces of his poker foes. Once the contents ran out, he kept the empty box underneath his bed, and on several occasions I caught him sniffing the inside.
Grandma and I could not afford an urn. The box seems like the next best alternative to contain my grandfather. For now.
“He’s in here,” I say. “I touched it last night. It’s softer than campfire ash.”
“You know you can take the day off.”
“I’ve nothing to do.”
On my desk, significantly smaller than Dr. Bivoj’s, is a pile of astrophysics journals to read, most of them in English. On Tuesdays, I go through the journals and write out any passages that may be related to our research of cosmic dust. I have created dozens of scrapbooks filled with data, cutout photos, graphs. I capture events indiscriminately, anything related to our field, significant or not, and at night I like to think that what I have assembled is the most elaborate and complete collection of its kind in Europe, if not the world.
On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I catalog the cosmic dust samples sent to us by European universities, by private collectors, and by a few companies contracted by our modest departmental budget. I unpack the samples and store them in glass slides until Dr. Bivoj moves his enormous behind onto the slight laboratory stool and gathers his instruments. Often, he invites me to look through the lens of his microscope, but I am not allowed to touch. You can replace me on this chair someday, he says, but it will not be until I am demented or dead.