“Don’t be stupid, Jakub. I’ve watched you grow up. I wish you no harm.”
What else was there to do? I did not want for this meeting to end, for this man who knew me, the last remnant of my life before the mission, to leave. I followed him through the grass field and between the trees, where we reentered the city and a suited driver opened a door to a black BMW. We sat on the leather seats and Zajíc offered a glass of Scotch. I drank it down without pause. Was it a betrayal to my grandfather that I sat next to this man, spoke to him? He couldn’t blame me for wanting to understand. To know every bit of influence that had gotten me here. The seat cooled my back, I poured another drink, wondering what it was like to be a man who lived such luxuries every day, molding them into a barrier shielding him from the terror of being ordinary. Zajíc studied me and all these decades later I still worried he could read me easily, the gestures of a frightened boy.
We arrived at a building in New Town. The chauffeur opened the door and I stood before a delicatessen storefront. The building was eight stories tall, made in the old republic, before the war and before the communist housing projects. Shoe Man gestured for me to come through the front door to the top of the stairwell. There he removed a set of keys from his pocket and opened a door made of metal. It creaked, and I noticed deep scratches upon it.
As I hesitated, Zajíc entered the room. The windows were covered in black paper, leaving the room concealed in shadow. Something clicked. Lamplight illuminated the room, and Shoe Man stood by a desk stained with blood, its drawers having been removed. The lamp—small, with a rusty neck and harsh, invasive light—and a green folder were the only items on the desk. The only other piece of furniture in the room was a wooden chair covered in thick deep cuts, pieces of duct tape sticking to its legs and back. The chair faced the blacked-out windows. On the dusty stone floor in front of it rested the artifact of my life’s history. The iron shoe.
“Is this real?” I said.
“When I met your father, the basement where the usual torture rooms were located was being fumigated for rats. The secret police kicked a few of the less important bureaucrats out of their offices, and made these provisional chambers. Can’t let vermin get in the way of interrogation.”
“This is it? This one?”
“This room. Your father’s feet walked upon this floor. Of course, by the time I bought the building, the space had been changed back into a nice office. I had them re-create the room as I knew it from memory. Don’t worry, the blood is fake. But the shoe I think you recognize.”
I pictured myself at nineteen years old, with baby fat still on my cheeks. Men I’ve never seen, never spoken to, coming into my university classroom and taking me away. Taking me here, blacking out the world beyond these windows, a separation like dirt tossed upon a coffin. Causing me pain, hurting me with the full conviction that they were on the right side of history, the moral side, the side of humanity. My father had done this for a living. He had done this and it had kept us in a nice apartment and in nice clothes and with secret Elvis records stashed away.
“Why did you bring me here?”
“I wanted you to see it, the place where I was born. The man I was before I knew this room—he was probably going to become a chemist. A scientist, like you. But once they kicked me out of university, took everything from my family, the only focus of my life became not ending up in this room again.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Don’t you want to know me?”
I turned to the wooden chair and sat down. My knee pain was returning, reminding me I hadn’t taken my medication all day. I removed the bottle from my pocket and swallowed a pill dry.
I slid my foot inside the iron shoe. “Tie it,” I said.
Zajíc bent over and pushed down on the safety, then pulled the heavy leather belt inside a loop.
I tried to lift my foot. I could not.
“That’s the most terrifying thing,” Zajíc said. “It grounds you. It makes you feel like, perhaps, you might never walk again.”
“It’s a comfort now. To be still. Bound.”
“How did you do it, Jakub? How did you come back?”
“We’re not going to talk about that now.”
He nodded and walked toward the window. He opened it, and the black paper ripped at the edges. Sun came into the room for the first time in many years. Without the darkness to lend it isolation, it seemed like a regular sad office keeping human beings away from living wildly, not unlike the office of Dr. Bivoj.
“You made me think I was a curse,” I said. “Like my whole existence was some kind of spiritual stain. The last remnant of Cain’s sperm. Those aren’t good thoughts for a child. For a man. I’ve wished you dead in so many different ways. Before I started shaving I fantasized about what I could do to you with a blade. Your voice has resonated through my head all these years, uninvited. I should throw you out that window, but I no longer see the point in it. I don’t know what to do after we leave this room. I don’t know. When I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Lenka, I thought that finding you would be another mission, the last possible way of living. But I look at you and I know that retribution is not life.”
He turned to face me. He bent low before me and unstrapped my foot. The brief suspension, the release from weight and pressure, felt again as though I was floating in Space, with Hanu? by my side, about to encounter a core that would take us to the beginnings of the universe.
“I’ve built a life around a couple of hours in a room with an unkind stranger,” Shoe Man said. “Jakub, it took me too long to realize it. Your father did what he did to me, but the decision to live as I have—it was still mine. For me, the catalyst was this room. For your father, the catalyst was the day he decided the world was full of his enemies. For you, the catalyst doesn’t need to be anger or fear or some feeling of loss. The significance of your life doesn’t rest with Lenka, or your father, or me. I’ve done heinous things, yes. I’ve watched you, asserted myself into your affairs, but the choices—those were all yours. You’re so much better than your father and I. You won’t let this cripple you. It doesn’t have to end for you like it ended for us.”
Shoe Man remained kneeling at my feet, and I saw that the man who’d walked into my grandparents’ house with a backpack had been gone for some time. The eyes looking at me from beneath these gray brows were dead, like windows leading into a deep, starless night; his limbs and features sagged—victims to both gravity and his lifetime of money.
“Now that you’ve been caught,” I said, “you feel sorry for yourself.”
“I wish it was as simple as that. Being in a room with you now, I’ve ceased even to wonder about my punishment. It seems clear. You are freed of imprisonment and I will face mine.”
“Now you’re a philosopher.”
“We understand each other, Jakub. You know it too.”