George Held, After the Revolution (story)

“Oh, my God, I don’t believe it! I never thought I would see you here in America!” Mlada Dvořáková cried, throwing her arms around me and kissing me on both cheeks and then the lips. I hadn’t seen her for fifteen years, since 1976, when I finished my year of teaching at Charles University in Prague. Mlada was then twenty-three, a fifth-year student taking a combined German and English concentration, and I was thirty-three, an assistant professor on a Fulbright, giving my version of American literature to Czech English majors. We were standing at the top of the stairs under the departures board in Penn Station in the midst of the noontime crush as Mlada’s fellow passengers on the Amtrak train from Washington swept around us. Despite the passage of a decade and a half and the swirl of traffic in the stairwell, we had instantly spotted each other’s face as I waited at the top of the stairs and she climbed them. “Thank God for the Velvet Revolution,” I said. “I don’t remember ever seeing you smile so broadly when I was in Prague.” Mlada had not been in any of my classes, but we had met in the English Department library at the university. Her combination of bookishness and soulfulness had captivated me as much as her somber beauty. Somber was the rule in those days. No woman in Prague, no matter how attractive, had looked radiant, the way Mlada did now. For that was the Brezhnev Era, when hard-liners in the Czechoslovak government tried to outdo their Kremlin comrades in exercising neo-Stalinist repression. “I never felt so happy then as I do now. It’s fantastic to see you, Paul. But where is your wife?” “She sends her apologies. The children are on a school trip and Sarah is chaperoning, so she couldn’t join us. I take it your husband has returned to Prague?” “Yes, Karel flew back from Washington right after the conference. I told him I just had to see you after all these years and all those letters.” “Right. Who ever thought we’d wind up as pen pals?” We were edging our way toward the Seventh Avenue exit to catch a taxi. I had promised Mlada lunch at a Greenwich Village restaurant. When I went to Czechoslovakia, I was divorced and lived in the Village, and I had told her all about its history in American arts and letters. Now I gave the cabby directions to the Cedar Tavern, where a recent version of that history had played out. Twenty minutes later we left the cab at The Cedar, and I asked Mlada if she remembered my having mentioned the place. “My God, yes!” she replied. “This is the pub of Jackson Pollack and that poet you like so much . . . O’Hara. How could I forget? You were always so proud of your New York School of painters and poets, and mostly we Czechs had never heard of them.” “Neither have the people who come here these days—Yuppies, and the bridge-and-tunnel crowd—people from outside Manhattan. I hope I wasn’t too much of a chauvinist in Prague. Even if I was, I thought you’d like to see The Cedar. Of course, we could have gone to The White Horse, but it’s so gentrified Dylan Thomas wouldn’t be caught dead there now.” “Isn’t that where he . . . ? Oh, one of your terrible puns. I can see you haven’t changed . . . still the same old satiric Paul.” After we had taken a booth and given our order, Mlada said, “You know, you really haven’t changed. I’d have recognized you anywhere. Years ago we students said you looked twenty-one, and now you hardly look thirty-five.” “Thanks, but I feel like I’m pushing fifty, which I am. And my wife doesn’t appreciate compliments about how young I look. She says they make her feel like Barbara Bush, saddled with an eternal adolescent. You haven’t changed much either.” “Do not lie to me, Paul. I have more wrinkles and grey hair than you do. And do women still throw themselves at you the way they did in Prague?” “I’m surprised to hear you say that, since you made sure to keep your distance from me.” “Paul, you know I was seeing Mirko then, and you had Petra, after all.” “Yes, and I liked you because you never seemed to want anything from me, unlike many of the others.” “Even Petra? Do you ever hear from her?” “Not for the past few years, after her children got old enough to go to school and she was working full-time again. I guess she doesn’t have the time . . . or maybe the interest.” “So she married someone else. I thought you two were going to get married before you returned to the States.” “We were, but I couldn’t get the papers to prove that I was single—to ‘superlegalize’ my divorce, which your bureaucracy required in those days. Otherwise, Petra and I would have gotten married the summer before I left. As it was, my papers weren’t validated until a few months after I’d returned to America. For a few months we wrote love letters, but then they cooled off, and a year later I got an announcement that she had married an old flame, an engineer, as she said in a letter she wrote me after their honeymoon.”