“A flash of the old life.”
“A flash of the old life.”
“I miss it. The flow of the river through St?eda. It would carry me to the village limits and I would swim against the current to shore. I never wanted to leave there, not for a second.”
“I had a home like that too,” he said. “They took it.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do now,” I said. “She’s gone. I returned for her but I couldn’t bring myself to face her. I know I should chase after her, but I can’t. There’s a life for her outside all of this. Without me.”
“And for you too. There is something you could do, Jakub.”
“You’re advising me.”
“I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”
“No. Advise me, Shoe Man.”
“Shoe Man? Is that what you call me?”
“All my life.”
“The house is still there, you know,” he said. “And it belongs to you. I always kind of knew that you’d come back for it.”
Still kneeling, Zajíc pulled a pair of keys out of his pocket. The originals, the same ones that had once rested inside my grandmother’s purse. The same ones she had used to lock the house after she ensured that my grandfather and I were safely in our beds.
He rested them on my palm. Much lighter now than when I was a child.
“I’ve gone so far, and back,” I said.
“I have too. Why live otherwise.”
“I hope you’ll take the punishment. Go to jail. Do what ought to be done.”
“I can’t promise it, Jakub. The one thing you and I have in common—we love being alive too much to get in line for what’s coming.”
Both of us noticed at the same time that my laces had come untied inside the iron shoe. Zajíc held them, one in each hand. He stopped and stared out the window, his cheeks ruddy, thought finally catching up with instinct, but he was already committed, and so he tied my shoelaces into a neat bow. The cloth of my trousers had ridden up a few inches, revealing a small part of the scar on my calf. Zajíc froze, rolled the cloth up just a bit more.
“Mine has faded,” he said. “You can no longer see the numbers. Just a single white line cutting across.”
When he stood up, he seemed old—ancient and small—subject to the crushing weight of conscience. The finely fitting suit, the reflective surface of his leather shoes, the diminishing gray hair—none of it could fool me any longer about the true state of his being. Zajíc was not a menace. He was a man displaced and looking for a new purpose.
Radislav Zajíc checked his watch and walked toward the door. He turned halfway, without looking at me.
“You haven’t asked what is in the green folder,” he said.
“Well?”
“It’s my poetry against the regime. I did write it, you know. Only as a joke, a dare of sorts, to impress someone I don’t remember anymore. But then my fellow pupils took it seriously, and spread it around. Suddenly I was a published revolutionary. You see. The slightest gesture makes up our history. And so I met your father. And so I met you.”
He left. The sound of his steps, larger than life, lingered for minutes, until at last the front door, eight stories down, thundered shut and I was alone with the afternoon sun. The rusting shoe defiantly eyed me with its mouth agape, as if in shock at being so suddenly abandoned by its loyal keeper. I picked it up and, once again, like so many years before, I considered whether any part of it still held genetic leftovers of my father, physical evidence of the encounter that had defined my family’s fate.
I cast the thing out the open window facing the courtyard, and it screeched hideously along the stone walls until it too faced the inevitability of being forgotten, its pieces split apart, guts disemboweled along the grass and dirt, the shoe finally drained of evil and rid of purpose. A fat pigeon hopped around with its brothers, searching for parts to satiate their instinctual greed. Finding nothing, the birds arose, bound to scavenge in greener pastures, but the fat one, which I imagined to be the flock leader, performed an elegant pirouette against the iron shoe’s corpse, and, as it soared away, dropped thick, cream-white phlegm, the liquid forming a petite dumpling that splattered with crude efficiency all along the metal scraps.
For a moment, the leap looked soothing. I could jump after the iron shoe and my aches would split apart like the shoe. No more thoughts of Lenka, no more knee pain, but the body must not be violated. The body was the most important thing, carrying within it the code to the universe, a part of a larger secret that was significant even if it was never to be revealed. If the body mattered to Hanu?, it mattered to me, and I would worship it as he had. I would never cause the body harm.