Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  They’d met the night before at one of the bars George’s landlord had suggested. He’d pulled a pile of pamphlets and maps out of a drawer in the apartment kitchenette and penned little red Xs on popular expat clubs, hospodas, and restauraces. The landlord was Austrian, friendly but businesslike; he knew how extortionate his weekly rates for the studio apartment in the Malá Strana were. He assumed George was a tourist vacationing in style. George didn’t know what he was, what he was doing, or how long he might stay. It was mid-November, and the landlord attempted some commiseration about how the American election still didn’t have a clear winner.

  “Still? I’ve been trying to avoid the news, honestly.” The landlord looked at him with disapproval, and George felt the need to explain. “I don’t see it making much difference, really, whichever way things go.”

  It was the same thing he’d said to his wife, Maria, about the absentee ballot he told her he’d cast for Bush II. He hadn’t actually voted for Bush. He’d forgotten that he’d be out of the country for the election—he’d never been out of the country—so he hadn’t remembered to vote at all. He’d thought of how annoyed the fact that he hadn’t voted would make her, and then he’d seized the opportunity to annoy her even more by saying he’d voted for Bush. Except she hadn’t been annoyed; she’d been furious, and when he’d said it didn’t matter—they lived in Texas, for Christ’s sake, land of foregone conclusions—she was scornful.

  “I guess you’re the kind of guy who gets to think that,” she said. “I guess you’re the kind of person who can pretend that’s true.”

  What kind of person is that? he’d almost asked her but held his tongue. Their couples counselor had recommended they try to save “charged discussions” for their weekly appointments.

  The bar had been packed, the music painful, and George had felt a decade too old for the place until Thereza asked him to dance, at which point he’d felt even older. George didn’t like to dance, had never been able to dance, but was unsure how to explain that to this woman half his age, fully his height, half again more attractive than anyone who’d ever stood this close to him at a bar. Her hair was long and black and her eyes deliberately sleepy, outlined in dark makeup. He tried to extricate himself from the dancing but still get her number. He had to explain that he didn’t have a Czech phone yet—yet, he emphasized.

  She asked if he was American and when he said yes she said, “I thought so.” George asked if it was a good thing or a bad thing and Thereza said it was just a thing.

  “I didn’t vote for the idiot. I voted for the other guy,” George lied.

  She didn’t look up from her purse, from which she fished out a business card.

  He held it right in front of his face but still couldn’t read it in the dim light. “Can I take you to dinner? Drinks?”

  They were shouting over the music, and George felt like a caveman, his courtship reduced to its most basic elements: You pretty. I provide food.

  “Sure. Call me. We don’t have to dance.”

  Any further attempts at conversation would have just left them hoarse, so she eased her way back into the crowd, her fingertips touching his arm and then sliding away in a whisper he imagined he could feel the rest of the night. When he staggered out of the bar into the chilly air of the Staré Město, he found a streetlight bright enough to read the card. Thereza Lenhártova, he read, Feasibility Analyst. The breathy T and Z slid down his tongue like Thereza’s fingers on his arm, but the job title was so opaque it prompted him to wonder suddenly if Thereza was an escort, this whole exchange part of some well-heeled come-on. Walking back to his apartment, he found an internet café still open, nobody but tourists inside, and bought ten minutes. He searched the firm listed on the business card and found a staff page with thumbnail pictures. There she was, Thereza Lenhártova in slightly pixelated glory, her business degree and contact information listed below. Along with relief, George allowed a breath of excitement to enter into him, a sweaty-palmed, quick-hearted thrill for his first date in almost thirty years. Thereza Lenhártova was not a prostitute. She was a feasibility analyst with Novak/Hrbac and Associates, and she had for some as yet unidentified reason found George feasible.

  The morning of the sightseeing plans, the morning after the dinner and the nose-kiss, George stood shaving in front of his bathroom mirror and thought, You’re making a fool of yourself. But it wasn’t an organic thought, a judgment he would pass on himself. He heard some other voice saying it, his mother’s, his wife’s. He squared his shoulders, there in his apartment where no one could see him, and tightened the muscles of his runner’s body, the legs he knew were lean and strong. On the weekends he ran 15Ks with graying men whose wiriness had stretched to gristle, bodies gone stringy or soft; that was not George, not yet, anyway, and he was proud that he could say so.

  George’s rental was wall-to-wall Ikea, new and pale and clean-lined. The front windows looked out on Kampa Island, the wooden waterwheel on the Čertovka canal, trees with autumn’s last leaves clinging dead to their branches. A rank of brocaded town houses stretched to the north and south of George’s building. The air was fresh and very cold and George opened the windows and pretended to be an exiled nobleman. He turned on the satellite television and pretended to be rich. He picked up the secondhand phone he’d bought and told himself, You are a rich exiled nobleman. You are George of Nosticova Street. A beautiful girl met you for dinner and she is going to show you her city.

  Jenny-Thereza was indeed a good guide; she paid attention to what interested him most, cutting short the intricacies of baroque architecture and pointing out instead the twenty-seven tiled crosses in the Old Town Square that commemorated the beheadings of twenty-seven Protestant noblemen; she took him to the church where the paratroopers who’d assassinated Heydrich took sanctuary until they were all shot to death by Nazis. They looked down at the black cross bubbling out of the cobblestones at the foot of the National Museum, the spot where a young man had set himself on fire to protest the Soviet invasion.

  “So this is where he died,” George whispered, inching his toes closer. He fought the urge to kneel.

  “This is where he put himself on fire. He died later, in hospital. His friends, they were supposed to suicide too, and he told them no, please don’t, the pain is so much, we did not think it will be so much pain.”

  George was already looking at the charred cross through the lens of his camera when Thereza said this and then he couldn’t decide whether to take the picture.

  They finished the day at the statue of the martyr John of Nepomuk, thrown off the Charles Bridge, where tourists closed their eyes and made wishes.

  “Put your hand here and face north,” Thereza told him. “And it is sure that you will return to Prague someday.”

  George had already laid his hand on the brass cross thinking he got his choice of wishes; he didn’t know how he felt about returning to Prague. He had been here eleven days and some mornings he woke up and never wanted to leave. Other mornings he was convinced that this city had destroyed his life. He had to make a deliberate effort not to pull his hand away.

  “Another day we can see pretty things,” Thereza said. “I would like to show you some. But you seem to like better political things. Dead things.”

  George didn’t know what to say. He felt embarrassed now, exposed as a historical voyeur. But she took the tram home with him anyway.

  “Very posh,” she said as he held the door for her. “How much are you paying?”

  George told her, and she looked both amused and horrified. George took her to his bedroom and she began to undress. She was so pale he could see everywhere the webbing of her veins, trellised up her legs, down her arms, converging on the bottoms of her wrists, the backs of her hands. George closed his eyes and pressed down on her skin with his palms, relieved that the feel of her was unmarred, smooth and anonymous and youthful. He felt awkward but couldn’t tell if he was actually being clumsy or whether, after so many years of only M
aria, he might be utterly suave and still feel strange. If Thereza perceived his self-consciousness, she didn’t let on. She seemed eager and assured, and George could barely breathe under a wave of what he told himself was pleasure but recognized as gratitude.

  George bought a guidebook and researched field trips to take while Thereza wrote feasibility reports for German retailers considering expansion into the Czech Republic. He took the bus to Lidice, where little bronze statues of long-dead schoolchildren huddled in the foundations of their ruined schoolhouse, and to the Terezín concentration camp, where he watched vacationing couples try to decide whether they should smile in their photographs. He wasn’t sure where his new interest in martyrdom had come from. Thereza asked him in front of the penguin exhibit at the zoo the next weekend what he had done all week and he was ashamed to answer, although he did. She seemed visibly disconcerted that George was a man of such insatiable appetites, that the corpses she’d offered last weekend had been insufficient.

  He had no idea how to explain it to her, didn’t think she’d understand. He kept asking her about what life was like before, under the Communists, and she always told him that she had been a child, that she remembered little, that life after the revolution was very nearly the only life she knew.

  “There was one kind of yogurt in the shops,” she said, “and then there were eight. It was hard to choose.”

  She was impatient with the topic but he kept asking. It was important to him to feel like he was making her life better, like he was an after rescuing her from an inclement before. In truth, he knew she didn’t need him. She wore clothes bought on Národní Třída and owned the slimmest cell phone he’d ever seen. George was unsure what he had to offer, and this seemed like a test, a quiz he could ace only if he had all the relevant information.

  “But what else?” he said. “What else is different now?”

  “I don’t know. The shoes are better. What do you want me to say?”

  What George really wanted were answers to questions he didn’t have the nerve to ask, either because Thereza would be angry or, worse, because she might just shrug, shake her head no. Do you know anyone who was tortured? he wanted to ask. Imprisoned? Informed on? Do you know anyone touched by fire?

  After the zoo they took a tram to the Nové Město so Thereza could do some shopping. George paid for a blouse, a pair of shoes. She didn’t ask him to and he didn’t offer; he simply took her selections out of her arms and carried them to the register. At the Metro station they held hands in the middle of the platform, waiting for trains traveling in opposite directions.

  “I’d like to see you again,” George said. “Soon.” And it was only after Thereza said yes, after her train shouted out of the tunnel and opened its doors, that he handed her the shopping bags.

  The evenings that Thereza was busy with work or with a life she did not care to tell George much about, he did not live in his apartment like a nobleman. He sat at his kitchen table with stacks of receipts, a calculator, his best guesses at the previous balance of his checking account, savings, the limits on his credit cards. He estimated the date SoluMed would have officially stopped paying him and added in Maria’s November pay as an accounts receivable manager. He tried to remember if there was another tuition payment to Texas A&M due this semester or not until January. He tracked the shifting exchange rate between dollars and crowns. It was slipping constantly, in favor of the crown. He looked around at his nobleman’s apartment and no longer felt rich. He left the windows cracked open for the sharp air and the sounds of the river and turned off the game on satellite television, Sparta Praha versus Tottenham Hotspurs. He’d thought maybe, if he stayed in Europe for a while, he should try to get into soccer. He’d gathered from half hearing the news that his country still didn’t have a clear future president. He realized he didn’t know who the current president of the Czech Republic was either, though he could list all the Communist ones in order.

  So maybe he wasn’t a nobleman, George thought. Maybe he was an oppressed citizen of a Communist regime. Maybe he spent an entire winter eating cauliflower and boiled potatoes. George had bought several memoirs from the Museum of Communism and read them carefully. He went to the local market and bought a wedge of rye bread, white cheese, harsh coffee. He ate and read that night about traveling to East Germany to buy oranges for Christmas. He thought about asking Thereza to take the train to Dresden with him. They would go to the German department stores and he would take an escalator to the basement supermarket while she shopped upstairs. He would lift a single orange from the stacks of hundreds and try to feel what had once made it special.

  Maria’s most recent e-mail to him had been about the holidays. Both boys are planning to come home for Thanksgiving, she’d written. What do you want me to tell them? And what about Christmas break?

  He hadn’t replied, because he had no idea.

  It had been two and a half weeks since George let British Airways Flight 807 leave Prague-Ruzyně without him, just let it plow up into the air and sail westward while he sat nursing a beer at the Holiday Inn Congress Center hotel bar, his suitcase between his feet. When he finished the beer, he asked to check back in to his room. “I’d like to buy another night,” he said, and another and another, until the desk clerk had observed that that might not be the best idea, that after all the frantic calls—from his wife, from his boss, from the Houston Police Department, from their couples counselor, Dr. Valenzuela—George had become something of a burden on the front-desk staff. “Perhaps you should make other arrangements,” the concierge had suggested, and George had combed the Prague Post for listings, called the Austrian, counted his money, and packed his suitcase. He had sent an e-mail to his wife from an internet café on a square named after the boy who’d set himself on fire. I’m fine, he wrote. Please stop calling the hotel. I’m not staying there anymore. No phone at present. Love, George.

  In his previous life, the one he’d spent as a medical-equipment sales representative in Houston, George had found himself vibrating. He would take a paper out of the fax machine and watch it tremble. His coffee shivered in his mug and he wedged his knees under his desk as if he might otherwise float into the air. His elbows quivered like dragonfly wings; his fingers twitched like antennae. He drafted catalog copy for the direct-consumer mailing, gently describing devices that could help caregivers perform what a loved one’s body no longer could. George did this so well that SoluMed had signed him up months ago to present at an industry conference in Prague. He had counted the days until the trip. He was a bird, a mosquito, a balloon, a zeppelin. He was rising.

  It would be his first time in Europe. He and Maria had met young, married young, had the boys before they were thirty. He’d been working flat out since graduating college, mostly jobs that bored him, though neither he nor Maria had grown up with the idea that work should be interesting. Work was work, and there’d been enough of it to cover the bills, but by the time there was enough left to travel, the versions of themselves that would have known what to do on a romantic trip with each other were long gone. The prospect of a long-haul flight beside her was a terror; what would they talk about, those nine hours in the air to Heathrow? He was relieved when she expressed no interest in coming with him, even when Dr. Valenzuela suggested that it might be a good opportunity to reconnect. He was less relieved when he started to piece together that she was almost definitely having an affair. They hadn’t talked about it because he hadn’t wanted to know for sure, because then he would have needed to have some reaction, some idea of whether what they had was worth fighting for, which meant having some idea of what they still had. Instead, he’d done things like fail to take out the garbage or bait her about his vote, feeble little rebellions. Refusing to come home—he didn’t know quite what he was doing or why, but the scale of it, at least, felt right.

  One Sunday morning George went for his run, down cobblestoned Nosticova Street and through the park on Kampa Island. Thereza was still in bed when he ret
urned, sleepy but waking, and he showered and crawled back under the covers with her. He wished he had coffee, a doughnut, the paper, in English. He settled for tracing the veins at Thereza’s temples, the way they spread like fingers from the edge of her eyebrows into her hair.

  “Why?” he asked her. “Why are you with me?”

  “I like you?” she said, the question mark palpable.

  “I’m too old.”

  “You’re not too old.”

  “I’m ugly.”

  “You’re not ugly.”

  “I’m out of shape.”

  “Ha. You want compliments. You are as bad as a woman. Shall I tell you your legs—no, thighs, they are nice and slim?”

  “Seriously. Why?”

  “Men your age, you are always so polite.”

  “That’s an explanation?”

  “You like nice things. Good wine and food. Not always pivo and a smažený sýr at two in the morning.”

  “I like fried cheese as much as the next guy.”

  “No, you don’t. You like your clean apartment and your nice food. It’s a good life, the things you like.”

  George made lists in his head of things his life no longer contained: a job, a house, two dogs. He missed his dogs, their uncomplicated, eager love, their excitement over their unexciting lives. In Texas right now, his mother-in-law was saying, “You were always too good for him.” The neighbors were saying, “I haven’t seen George lately, have you?” His sons probably weren’t saying anything at all, being loving but oblivious boys who let weeks pass between phone calls or e-mails. He didn’t know what Maria might be saying.

  Thereza had tried to talk him out of Letenská, but he’d insisted on visiting; the world’s largest statue of Stalin had once stood there on a concrete platform the size of a football field high above the city. Now it was simply a concrete platform the size of a football field, covered in graffiti and teenagers smoking weed. Thereza was visibly annoyed to be there, and George tried to conceal his disappointment, staving off any I told you sos. They sat with their feet swinging off the end of the platform that overlooked the river, and he confided in her about the affair.