On Fridays, Dr. Bivoj takes out his bottle of slivovitz and pours for two, leans back on his creaking chair, pulls on the suspenders cutting into his soft academic belly, and loudly fantasizes about placing his future Nobel Prize on a handcrafted shelf he will order from an Austrian carpenter.
Though Dr. Bivoj is one of the most respected experts in a field that I would, someday, like to become the king of, I cannot call him my hero. His belief in the work has overshadowed everything else in his life, and the peace of his soul depends entirely on success or failure in science, a field more unpredictable than the moods of Olympian gods. Dr. Bivoj’s lifelong obsession with cosmic dust is unbreakable, a cult of one. He is convinced that he can find new life within it, organic matter carried as a result of dissolving, faraway stars, meteors, and comets. His entire life has been about these journals crowding my desk, publishing in them and going to conferences where colleagues will buy him shots and some impressed intern—male, female, he isn’t picky—will blow him in the bathroom because his wife “doesn’t do that anymore.” Day by day, Dr. Bivoj sits in this office, lurks and farts and eats schnitzel sandwiches, his faithful chair sagging more and more every day under the weight of his self-neglect. He reads, he takes notes, he types his findings into an ancient document on a dusty Macintosh with a cracked screen. Twice a day he lumbers to the classroom one floor above and teaches future masters and doctors about galaxies and rotational patterns—a tribute, this teaching, the dues he must pay to keep the office and the Macintosh. Dr. Bivoj is convinced that before he dies, he will discover alien cells of life within the dust specks we study. His genius is humble and methodical. He takes no issue with the darkness of his office, the stale air, the hum of an old computer. When he returns home from work, his idea of relaxation is more work or, in rare moments of intellectual sloth, watching the Discovery Channel. He is the rare man whose work discipline single-handedly sustains him through life. He makes no further demands. This is what I know about him.
Worst-case scenario, I hope to be there when and if Dr. Bivoj makes this breakthrough, a trusty assistant who can use the credentials to jump-start a brilliant career of his own. Best-case scenario, I will fulfill the ancient cliché of a student dominating his teacher, and make the discoveries he failed to achieve on my own. But these days in his office are the key to the future I need. I did not take the job for the measly stipend or the glamour of grading freshman science papers that make the professor “bloated and existentially desolate.” I took it because, like Dr. Bivoj, I want my obsession with the particles of the universe—the small clues to the very origin of Everything—to become my lifelong work.
“He was a good one, your grandfather?” Dr. Bivoj asks.
“Yes. He was good.”
“Was he proud?”
“Of me?”
“In general.”
“He was proud of loving the same woman for fifty years. Proud of working with his hands. Made great rabbit stew.”
Dr. Bivoj opens his slivovitz drawer. I expect the usual blue label, but instead he holds an unmarked bottle filled with yellow liquid. Small black particles float around as he pours. “I have a cabin in Paka,” he says, “a small village in the mountains. I go whenever I can. A man lives there who has no teeth and keeps chickens in his living room. He makes this apple brandy in his backyard from the rotten apples that fall on his property. He hands it out to his neighbors every summer. They’ve actually turned the whole thing into an event, a party to welcome the fall. They roast potatoes and sausage while they drink themselves stupid with this stuff.”
“I didn’t know you took vacations,” I say. “You’re always here.”
“Weekends are for freedom and chaos. Of my weekends, you know nothing, Jakub. You only know my routines of the week. My academic grind.”
I swallow the liquor and feel snot melt inside my sinuses and drip down my nostrils. The brandy tastes like tonic water mixed with vinegar and dirt. I hold my glass out for more.
“I went to the spring celebration a few years back,” Dr. Bivoj says. “I could see the stars, dew on the grass, and I felt an irresistible urge to remove my shoes. A woman I didn’t know kissed me on the cheek. I’m telling you this because I imagine that by knowing these people, I also knew your grandfather. People who have a different idea of ambition. Of building houses with their own hands and living off simpler things. They made me realize that the way I viewed ambition had been a cancer, killing me since the day I was born. Do you want your name to be known, Jakub? I used to. I wanted people to pronounce it in classrooms after my death. I’ve made myself unhappy most of my life so a professor could write my name on the blackboard and punish students for not memorizing it. Isn’t that something?”
He drinks. And again. And again. The liquor smells sour on his breath.
“Ah, I am rambling. Your grandfather was a happy man, Jakub. I know it. I never told you about my relationship with President Havel. Would you like to hear it?”
“Havel? You knew him?”
“Yes I did. We used to run in the same dissident circles, back when all of us were followed by the secret police and could only congregate with each other. Havel, he was a writer to the core, he was never happier than when he could hide away in his country house and type, morning to night, left alone by people and the larger problems of the world. But he couldn’t help himself—he wanted the world to be better, and so he got involved with the Charter, wrote letters to the wrong people, and his arrest established him as the face of the regime’s enemies. He was so unhappy about this, Jakub. He didn’t want to be in the spotlight. But we got our happy ending. We overthrew the Party, he was elected, and what I don’t tell people often, Jakub—please, keep it to yourself, I must be able to trust my assistant, right?—I was to be a part of his cabinet. I was to be a politician, to help build a democratic Czechoslovakia from the ground up. We arrived at the Prague Castle after New Year’s Eve, hungover as all hell, and we had to make phone calls to get inside, as none of us even had the key. And when inside, Jakub—and this isn’t known to history—when inside, Havel’s face turned the color of the dead, and he sat on the ground in the middle of those never-ending halls, with fifteen million people waiting for him to say what’s next, and he knew he would never get to sit alone and type away in that country house again. He was known, the face of the nation, and there would never again be rest, peace, comfort. His every move, every decision—from his breakfast to his love of cigarettes to his foreign policy—would be ripped apart, glued back together, then ripped again. I resigned immediately. I have been in this office since. My own castle, suited to my own needs.”
He laughs, and seems to mean it.
“And you are happy here,” I say.