The Visible World Read Online Free PDF Page B

many years later, I ran into a man I recognized vaguely from childhood. He sat by the window in the winter light, busy with shadows. A sculptor from Prague, older than my parents, he had come to our apartment half a dozen times in the late 1950s, then disappeared. He was in pharmaceuticals now. He had a house in Rhinebeck. And so how were my parents? I told him. He had liked them, he said, he had liked them both very much, they had been very kind to him when he had arrived in this country. And yet every time he had come to our apartment he would get the feeling that everybody there was slowly suffocating, but too polite to mention it. At some point he just couldn’t stand it anymore.
    “It was a new world out there,” he cried as small ice floes on the river behind him disappeared into his head, passed through the back of the seat, and reemerged on the other side. “All they had to do was take it. And what did they do? They sat there, even though they were still young and full of...possibilities, mourning what was lost. Reading the old books. Singing the old songs.
Kde domov můj?
—Where is my home? I’ll tell you where it is—right here,” he said, slapping the cracked leather seat next to him.
    “In Rhinebeck,” I said.
    “Yes, in Rhinebeck,” he said. “Or in Riverdale. Or Larchmont. But
here.
In America.” He shook his head. “But your father understood all this. He had a poetic phrase for it—
sklerosa duse.
Do you know what that means? Sclerosis of the soul. We all suffer from a kind of sclerosis of the soul, Vašek, he would say to me, brought on by a steady diet of fatty songs, one too many rich regrets...but here, have some wine, they say it’s good for these things. Laughing at it. Making a joke out of it. Nostalgia, he’d say, was the exiles’ hemophilia, though contagious rather than hereditary. Oh, he could be charming, your father. And your mother, so lovely.”
    He’d never forget them, he said, but at some point he’d realized he could have nothing more to do with them. Why? Because they understood the trap they were in but did nothing to get themselves out of it. And not only did nothing to get out of it, but spent their days caressing it, polishing the bars, so to speak. Sad, really. A tragedy, in its way.
    The train had stopped. It had been nice to see me again, he said. And giving me his card, for some reason, he picked up his coat from the rack and hurried out into a snow flurry descending from a clear blue sky.
     
    When I think back on that close little apartment with the Kubelius sketches in the hallway and the bust of Masaryk by the door and the plastic slipcovers on the new sofa, it seems to me that even when the living room was full of people eating
meruňkové koláče
and drinking, they were somewhere else as well. I don’t know how to describe it. They seemed to be listening to something...that had already passed. And because I loved them, I grew to love this thing, this way of being, and listened with them.
     
    As a child, my bed was pushed against the wall, blocking off a door to the living room. A matter of space. My father unscrewed the doorknob and covered the hole with a brass plate and then, because the frame of the door looked so ugly rising up behind my bed, my mother hung a bamboo mat over it to hide it. It was this makeshift curtain, which smelled like new-mown grass, that I would move aside so that I could spy on them as they talked: the Jakubecs and the Štěpáneks, Mr. Chalupa and Mr. Hanuš with his two canes...It’s odd for me to think, simply by adding the years, that they must be gone. Only pieces of them remain: a genteel, tremulous voice; white fingers tightening a bow tie; a musty, reassuring smell, like cloth and wool and shoe polish, which reminded me, even then, of the thrift shops on Lexington Avenue...How quietly, like unassuming guests, they slipped from the world. How easily the world releases us.
    Mr. Štěpánek was a small man who always sat