George Held, After the Revolution (story)

“As a matter of fact, I do.” “I was sure you were suspicious of me after that, and I told Mirko that I couldn’t . . . spy on you anymore. He got so angry at me and wanted to know if I thought you were C.I.A. or not, and I was confused because I thought it was just like you to joke about it because you really were C.I.A., but I couldn’t be sure. And besides, you would be leaving soon and then what would it matter?” “So?” “So I told Mirko that, yes, I thought you were C.I.A., and that made him very happy because he would have something important to report to his bosses. But then he went too far, and I had to stop seeing you.” “What did he want you to do, sleep with me so you could find out my mission?” “Paul! How did you know?” “You wouldn’t have been the first Czech woman to try it. I went out with the daughter of a diplomat whose pillow talk always turned to what was going on at the Embassy.” “Well, Mirko didn’t exactly tell me to sleep with you—he just suggested that he wouldn’t be jealous if I let you be . . . more romantic with me. But I really cared for you and I knew that I couldn’t go half-way with you. So I told Mirko that you were already suspicious of me and that you had a serious girlfriend.” “That must have been when we didn’t see each other a while. But how come you wanted me to eat at his restaurant before I left?” “Oh, that was his idea. He wanted to win his chess game with you by forcing you to spend a lot of money there. It gave him a lot of satisfaction afterward, but he still scolded me.” “What for?” “Because I couldn’t talk you into cognac after dinner.” “At least you had some, as I recall. But I was so uncomfortable from all we’d already drunk and eaten that I’d have gotten sick at the table if I’d had to drink cognac. And that would have been one more bad memory of our last night out.” “Poor Paul. I am sorry. I have felt terrible about the way things ended between us. That’s why I was so glad you wrote me once or twice a year afterwards, and that’s why I wanted to see you so badly. I thought I might have a chance to make it all right with you.” She looks at me soulfully and reaches across the table to touch my hand. I turn my palm up and her hand rests on it for a moment. I feel torn by my attraction for this old girlfriend who was never a girlfriend and my resentment over the way she had used me, and I wonder what motivates her now. Gently I withdraw my hand from hers and say, “You haven’t told me what happened to Mirko.” “Hah! That is a story in itself. After a while the travel bureau began to send me on trips for days at a time with tour groups from Western countries—to Krkonoše, Morava, Karlovy Vary—and I started to feel uneasy about Mirko when I would return. Somehow he did not seem as eager to see me, and then he sometimes did not come home after work and told me he had had to keep the restaurant open till morning for Party functionaries.” “So you were getting suspicious.” “Yes, but I never had the chance to find out what was the matter before he himself told me that he was getting married to a girl who was eighteen. And four months after the wedding she had a baby.” “That’s the Czech way.” “Yes, unfortunately, you are right.” “So there you all were, living in Mirko’s parents’ apartment?” “Yes, it all seems like a bad joke now, but as you can imagine, I was quite uneasy. I actually worried less about losing Mirko—he turned out to be such a fool—than about losing my bed. As you know, there was no available housing in Czechoslovakia, and sure enough, not long after the baby was born, Mirko’s parents told me I would have to get out. They changed completely their behavior toward me . . . from loving parents to nasty landlords. It was terrible for me.” “What did you do?” “First, I had to find a place to stay, but that was only temporary, for, you see, I had made up my mind to leave Czechoslovakia. My life there was over . . . I could never live at peace there as long as StB controlled me, and the government that supported StB looked like it could go on forever.” “Yes, I remember even my most intelligent, well educated friends in Prague telling me that the situation was hopeless, that the Soviet Union would dominate Czechoslovakia as long as one could foresee.” “How else could we feel? After ’68, our hopes were crushed and Russian soldiers stayed in barracks all over the country. President Husák was Brezhnev’s twin brother, and after Husák there would be another Husák and so forth. So I knew I had to get out.” “And you did. I remember getting a letter from you one Christmas, from Nürnberg, in the late ’70s, telling me that you were now living in the West. But you never told me how you got there.”