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  There were two exceptions. One was when Paloma drank. She didn’t drink to escape, nor to forget. She drank to experience the moment she was living with the same sweetness with which she would remember it. The other exception was endings. At graduations and farewell parties, Paloma could call the sensations of nostalgia for the present to her body quite easily. What was the point, though, in recognizing the loveliness of an era just as it ended?

  She wanted instead for her whole life to feel this way—significant, marvelous, full of meaning and connection, but stripped of the knowledge of imminent dissolution. She wanted for her life an endless carnival of substance and sentiment.

  Paloma took another step, watching the stones as she walked. She could smell the earthy freshness of the river below. When she’d first arrived in Prague, the activity on the bridge had been organic and spontaneous. People laid out blankets, made pencil sketches, and put on odd little performances. Soon after, it had grown crowded and predictable.

  On that day, two meters ahead of Paloma, a man stood behind a table, a huge crowd gathered around. “Step right up and see for yourself!” he called in heavily accented English. “The incredible, the one and only, the Veg! O! Matic!” The crowd oohed as he produced the gadget and proceeded to demonstrate its abilities. Paloma approached, hovering at the edge of the group to observe. While most of the onlookers’ faces were awash with astonishment, several, she saw, were distressed. One man looked particularly ghostly—stricken. As Paloma drew closer, she heard him muttering to himself in Czech. She still had to translate the language in her head to grasp its meaning; she’d not yet started thinking in its chewy syllables.

  “This is all. No destruction,” he said. “They told us forty years, America would destroy. This is it. This is the West. A Veg-O-Matic.” The product name, which he said in English, sounded vulgar beside the palatal consonants of his native tongue.

  The man was right—something had been destroyed. Paloma could see the loss all around her. It had been a liberation, of course, but the inhabitants of Prague were grieving, too. All they had been told to fear for four decades had come to fruition, and they were learning that the years of scarcity, of hunger and strict adherence to the party’s rules, had all been a game of make-believe. It had all been in vain.

  Paloma wandered away from the crowd and floated farther down the bridge, her long skirt brushing the cobblestones. Away from the obscene capitalist demonstration, she regained her yearning to capture the ephemeral beauty of the place, and she was pleasantly surprised to find she was able to. The demonstration had done it, she understood with twin stabs of gratitude and alarm. This was an ending after all. She had come with the first wave of English teachers, before the country had held its first elections, when one could still run into a drunken Václav Havel stumbling out of the Golden Tiger. Now the feeling of freshness—the newness of freedom she had felt so acutely when she’d arrived in the city, was fading.

  Paloma was thinking these thoughts when she saw him, directly under the statue of Saint Anne, with the holy infant balanced on her hip. A live pigeon rested on the Christ child’s tiny stone finger, purring its commentary on the scene.

  The position of the pigeon, directly over the man on the bridge, looked precarious. Pigeons, unlike Pražáks, were unconcerned with privacy. Paloma moved closer to see what this stranger was selling and to warn him. She approached his open suitcase. Inside were tiny gold charms—hybrid animals—a giraffe with a lion’s head atop its long neck, a fish with the outstretched wings of an eagle.

  “You should move this,” she said in Czech. “If you want to keep it clean.”

  The man smiled. “Promiňte,” he apologized. “English.”

  “Ah. I was saying you should watch out for the pigeon.” Paloma pointed toward the bird.

  “We have an agreement,” the man said, winking. “Where are you from?”

  “Long Island. You?”

  “West Virginia.”

  “Wow. All the way to Praha,” Paloma said, thinking that this fellow American may be as bewildered by the bustle of Prague as its native inhabitants, given his roots. He, too, might be overwhelmed by a choice of markets and sneakers. How diverse her own country was.

  “These are pretty,” she said, fingering a bird with the head of a cat.

  “You can have that one,” he said, and ran his fingers through a halo of fluffy blond hair. “If you’ll go out with me.”

  He was older than Paloma, but he had a boyish charm, a stubborn immaturity. His thin plaid button-down was open at the top, revealing a mess of curls on his chest, slightly darker than those on his head.

  “Did you come to Prague for the prostitutes?” Paloma asked. “Gifts don’t usually come with conditions.”

  He grinned an openmouthed grin that revealed a golden molar, shook his head, and looked over his shoulder at the green Vltava. “Mostly for the beer,” he said, turning back to Paloma and looking up at her coyly through his thick eyelashes.

  “How much?” Paloma asked.

  “Take it. No strings attached. Here’s a chain.” He used a small pair of jewelry pliers to open the charm’s jump ring and attach it to a link.

  “Thank you.” Paloma clasped her fingers around the piece and felt the cool metal in her palm. “Ahoj.”

  She started to walk toward the fakulty, where her English lesson was due to begin in an hour. She had gone only a few steps when she paused and turned back to the man. “I was thinking of going out tonight. Do you want to come?”

  He grinned devilishly. “Where?” he asked. “And when?”

  “I hadn’t made plans.”

  “Come to Beef Stew,” he said. “In the basement of Radost. People read poetry.”

  “What time?”

  “Nine? Ten?” He waved his hand as if time were inconsequential.

  “Okay. Ahoj,” she said again, and walked—past a caricature artist and past a man selling patches, key chains, and other trinkets bearing the logo of the Soviet Army.

  A bit farther down, close to the bank, a man with a trumpet and a woman with an accordion played polka. The man lowered the trumpet from his lips and sang, “Hey!” The woman wore new Levi’s, no longer a political symbol or a sign of youth and freedom. She set her accordion on the bridge and began to skip in a tight circle, her Texas trousers jumping, kicking, and spinning as if by themselves.

  What had drawn her to Ken that day? She hadn’t found him particularly attractive, and his presence, like that of most of the newer American arrivals, was presumptuous and intrusive. His gold charms were sweet, yes, but there was no shortage of creative art in Prague. She’d needed some fun, that was all—a way to relax. It hadn’t been about him.

  She arrived that evening at half past nine. The club was an unassuming building from the outside, a black matte facade with its name, RADOST FX, painted above the door in red block letters. Though Paloma had grown used to Prague’s eclectic collection of buildings from across the centuries, she still smiled to see a Western-style dance club in such close proximity to a Soviet grocery, a row of prefabricated concrete paneláky, and a church with neo-Gothic towers.

  “You’re here!” Ken had appeared as if from nowhere, taking her hand and leading her inside, through the dance floor and past the café. “There’s good food here. Like, real food!” he shouted. “You can get a salad.”

  She followed him to a black dungeon-like door, which opened to a stairwell down to the basement.

  Paloma could still hear the muffled throbbing pulse from the dance floor as they descended. By the bottom, it was reduced to a low hum. Opening another heavy door, they emerged in a new dark world.

  A reading group of twenty or so people consciously ignored Paloma and Ken’s arrival instead paying exquisite attention to a waifish woman on a wooden stool reading from a piece of notebook paper. Some sat cross-legged on the floor, others lounge
d in plush chairs upholstered with zebra or dalmatian prints. Each hand held a beer and each head nodded along with the woman’s poetry. Two years earlier, people meeting underground would have been talking about resistance, Paloma thought, then realized that two years earlier, an underground poetry reading would have been an act of resistance.

  They found seats on a blue velour sofa, and a man in a turtleneck took the woman’s place on the stool. “How long have you been in Prague?” Paloma asked Ken as the next poem began.

  “Six weeks. You’re an old hat here, I assume? Practically Czech by now?”

  “Practically.” Paloma liked how this man’s easy smile created space to take herself less seriously.

  “This is it, man,” he said. “Prague is it. This is the place to be. I was in Key West, but I was over it. Tried Woodstock. Tried Colorado, but this is it. It’s beautiful. People are hungry for it—for art, for music, for poetry.”

  Paloma nodded. “It is. And they are.” He awakened something in her—an appreciation for the changes happening in the city. Through him, she could see the magic of it.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Ken said, and she agreed.

  It wasn’t just endings that brought fullness and presence to experience, Paloma had thought as she followed him back up the dark stairwell. Beginnings worked too.

  Now, Ken was dead. There would be no more beginnings for him. He was gone, however impossible that felt, and Paloma was filled with nostalgia not only for their days together, but for the moments after, however imperfect.

  In spite of herself, her aching for Ken swelled into an aching for Prague, and she could not help but imagine what beginnings might lie ahead for her.

  She thought of cafés whose umbrellas donned red Marlboro logos and trams covered in wraparound ads for Camels. She thought of the woman who’d worked at the front desk of her kolej, of her long denim skirt and her white T-shirt with the words David Hasselhoff! scrawled in marker.

  Paloma had felt Czechoslovakia in her blood—Prague in her plasma—and arriving had felt like a homecoming. She saw herself everywhere in the city—in the way people walked and in their reserved, proud nature, in the hairline of the sidewalk fixers in their blue overalls. Even carved faces on buildings seemed to reflect the slope of her own nose.

  In Prague, she’d felt she could play a part in history. Everything there was significant, weighty, and unresolved in the best way possible.

  She had not wished death on her husband. Of course she hadn’t. But the possibilities she’d felt back then—the feeling that she might do something unknown and significant—suddenly lay again at her feet.

  Jane

  Jane couldn’t sleep, of course. Instead she thought of the walk from Philip’s truck to the Civil Service exam for junior clerks. Ding had chattered the whole way across Wesleyan’s campus about the dresses she would buy with her first paycheck. Jane had stared out at the large college quad, which stood empty, save for two women reading side by side on a picnic blanket. As a child, Jane had pictured herself so clearly as a college girl that when Arzella had sat her down at fourteen to tell her they didn’t have the money to send her, Jane had thought she was joking. Her parents had valued education, prided themselves on being learned, and besides, no one had money. If Jane had been able to skip the junior clerk exam and instead plop down right next to the girls with her own textbook, she would have skipped the FBI for college in a second.

  What would her life have been like if she had gone to college instead of Washington? she wondered for the thousandth time. When Jane slipped finally into sleep, she dreamed, as she often did, that she was back in the exam room. In her dream, a voice warned her not to work so hard, not to perform so well, but as always, Jane was incapable of giving anything less than her all.

  Which of the following would come second if arranged alphabetically for filing?

  albatross

  actionable

  assessment

  allied

  arrested

  Jane knew her alphabet, of course, but she second-guessed herself as she moved to mark her answer. Had it said second? Had she missed one of the words? She reread the question, trying not to focus on the minutes passing. The bright pink bloom of a rhododendron tapped on the window.

  There are four typists at the Better Company Office. Working together, they can complete the office’s typing duties in ten hours. If the manager wants to reduce their time to eight hours, how many additional typists must he hire?

  The paper was rough under Jane’s wrist as she scrawled her calculations. The pencil slipped between her sweaty fingers. Were the new typists as efficient as the others? One by one, girls stood and exited the exam room.

  Finally, shaking, exhausted, and uncertain, she handed her completed exam to the proctor. A church bell rang. If you’re out there, God, a little luck would be lovely, she thought.

  “You should receive your results in the mail in the next few days,” the proctor said. Jane thanked him and rushed out to the hall, where Ding had been waiting, back against the wall, blowing a pink bubble. The bubble popped and Jane woke with a start, forgetting where she was. “Ding?” she called, but it was an aide who rushed in.

  “Are you all right? It was a hard day. I can sit with you if you’d like.”

  Jane looked around, registering the chair, the walker, the wheelchair, the air conditioner. She was here, at the old folks’ home. The exam, Washington, it had all passed.

  “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” she said, and the aide smiled and left. Something weighed on her—something awful, she knew—but she could not recall what it was. It was the dream, she told herself, just a bad feeling that lingered from the dream.

  Paloma

  Paloma lay in bed alone, without Ken for the first time in two and a half decades. There had been many nights she’d felt alone in spite of the warm body beside her, but now the absence of that body felt tangible, an eerie presence against her bare skin. She’d felt alone their first night together, in his apartment in Žižkov, which would later become their apartment in Žižkov, furnished only with a futon on the floor and decorated with stacks of notebooks and rows of empty beer bottles. She hadn’t been surprised he lived in the rough working-class district. All of the artists and writers who hoped to be the next Hemingway lived in these concrete boxes by the television tower.

  In the metro station on the way there, Ken had hoisted himself onto the shining metal median between escalators. Leaning back, he’d slid, as Paloma watched in horror and the Czechs around them made a show of suppressing their disapproving looks, staring straight ahead or continuing their conversations.

  Paloma had been mortified—he had given them away. He was unmistakably American, and so was she by association.

  Paloma had seen Ken’s face, ecstatic with joy, for only a moment before he disappeared from view. At the bottom a few moments later, Ken was waiting for her, shaking and giddy with adrenaline. When he embraced her, she felt his heart drumming against her ear, flooding her with excitement in spite of herself. As much as a tram rocking wildly through the city at night, this man felt palpably like the freedom she had hoped to find here. Prague was on the verge, and so was she.

  The metro arrived a short minute later. Inside the tidy car, a steady buzz filled the air, just like the murmur all around the city—the sound of habitual cynicism, people occupied and then occupied again, meeting a cautious optimism. Paloma felt that same tension between her and Ken.

  Ken’s apartment building was incredibly close to the tower. The structure’s protruding concrete rectangles bubbled out like a bizarre Soviet spaceship, separated from Ken’s window by only a small strip of grass, a sidewalk with some benches, and the street.

  “Víno or pivo?” Ken asked, motioning for Paloma to take a seat on the futon.

  “So you have learned some Czech!” Paloma sat. “Víno prosim.�
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  After a few long sips, the futon became more comfortable and Paloma set her glass on the floor beside it, stretching out as she looked at the bare concrete walls. Ken lay beside her and, still holding his beer, put a hand on her stomach. Paloma left it there. He sat up then, and Paloma followed, allowing him to pull the shirt over her head and cup her breasts in his hands. He seemed to be observing them more artistically than sexually. Paloma kissed him, more comfortable as an object of desire than an object of aesthetic admiration.

  They traveled that night through the air—still haunted by the ghosts of revolution, and backward through occupation, victory, occupation, and war, history turning on and on around them in repeating spirals. Somehow, even through all the tender intimacy, their journey felt solitary. They covered distances through the entangled movements of their bodies, but they did not meet. Paloma, though her body was satisfied, was left feeling sentimentality for something she had not quite experienced. She could not escape her own head, could not see Ken fully, and certainly could not show herself to him. She ached for a wholeness she was not sure existed.

  Paloma fell asleep to the pulse of wine and blood in her head and her genitals. She woke before Ken, who remained snoring, one hand over his head, fingers folded down. She rose and tiptoed into the kitchen, which she could see in the morning light was sticky with beer and dust. The sun shone in the window, yellowing the walls and floor, and looking out, Paloma saw the highest pillar of the radio tower extending toward the sky like a middle finger. The optimism of the night before felt dulled and naive in the gritty reality of dirty linoleum, and Paloma could not imagine she would return to this filthy apartment. Still, she thought, it would be nice to have something to remember the starry-eyed dreaminess of it all, the way it had opened something in her. She wanted a talisman.