Jaroslav Kalfař - Spaceman of Bohemia

“This is it? This one?”

“This room. Your father’s feet walked upon this floor. Of course, by the time I bought the building, the space had been changed back into a nice office. I had them re-create the room as I knew it from memory. Don’t worry, the blood is fake. But the shoe I think you recognize.”

I pictured myself at nineteen years old, with baby fat still on my cheeks. Men I’ve never seen, never spoken to, coming into my university classroom and taking me away. Taking me here, blacking out the world beyond these windows, a separation like dirt tossed upon a coffin. Causing me pain, hurting me with the full conviction that they were on the right side of history, the moral side, the side of humanity. My father had done this for a living. He had done this and it had kept us in a nice apartment and in nice clothes and with secret Elvis records stashed away.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“I wanted you to see it, the place where I was born. The man I was before I knew this room—he was probably going to become a chemist. A scientist, like you. But once they kicked me out of university, took everything from my family, the only focus of my life became not ending up in this room again.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Don’t you want to know me?”

I turned to the wooden chair and sat down. My knee pain was returning, reminding me I hadn’t taken my medication all day. I removed the bottle from my pocket and swallowed a pill dry.

I slid my foot inside the iron shoe. “Tie it,” I said.

Zajíc bent over and pushed down on the safety, then pulled the heavy leather belt inside a loop.

I tried to lift my foot. I could not.

“That’s the most terrifying thing,” Zajíc said. “It grounds you. It makes you feel like, perhaps, you might never walk again.”

“It’s a comfort now. To be still. Bound.”

“How did you do it, Jakub? How did you come back?”

“We’re not going to talk about that now.”

He nodded and walked toward the window. He opened it, and the black paper ripped at the edges. Sun came into the room for the first time in many years. Without the darkness to lend it isolation, it seemed like a regular sad office keeping human beings away from living wildly, not unlike the office of Dr. Bivoj.

“You made me think I was a curse,” I said. “Like my whole existence was some kind of spiritual stain. The last remnant of Cain’s sperm. Those aren’t good thoughts for a child. For a man. I’ve wished you dead in so many different ways. Before I started shaving I fantasized about what I could do to you with a blade. Your voice has resonated through my head all these years, uninvited. I should throw you out that window, but I no longer see the point in it. I don’t know what to do after we leave this room. I don’t know. When I couldn’t bring myself to speak to Lenka, I thought that finding you would be another mission, the last possible way of living. But I look at you and I know that retribution is not life.”

He turned to face me. He bent low before me and unstrapped my foot. The brief suspension, the release from weight and pressure, felt again as though I was floating in Space, with Hanuš by my side, about to encounter a core that would take us to the beginnings of the universe.

“I’ve built a life around a couple of hours in a room with an unkind stranger,” Shoe Man said. “Jakub, it took me too long to realize it. Your father did what he did to me, but the decision to live as I have—it was still mine. For me, the catalyst was this room. For your father, the catalyst was the day he decided the world was full of his enemies. For you, the catalyst doesn’t need to be anger or fear or some feeling of loss. The significance of your life doesn’t rest with Lenka, or your father, or me. I’ve done heinous things, yes. I’ve watched you, asserted myself into your affairs, but the choices—those were all yours. You’re so much better than your father and I. You won’t let this cripple you. It doesn’t have to end for you like it ended for us.”

Shoe Man remained kneeling at my feet, and I saw that the man who’d walked into my grandparents’ house with a backpack had been gone for some time. The eyes looking at me from beneath these gray brows were dead, like windows leading into a deep, starless night; his limbs and features sagged—victims to both gravity and his lifetime of money.

“Now that you’ve been caught,” I said, “you feel sorry for yourself.”

“I wish it was as simple as that. Being in a room with you now, I’ve ceased even to wonder about my punishment. It seems clear. You are freed of imprisonment and I will face mine.”

“Now you’re a philosopher.”

“We understand each other, Jakub. You know it too.”

“A flash of the old life.”

“A flash of the old life.”

“I miss it. The flow of the river through Středa. It would carry me to the village limits and I would swim against the current to shore. I never wanted to leave there, not for a second.”

“I had a home like that too,” he said. “They took it.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do now,” I said. “She’s gone. I returned for her but I couldn’t bring myself to face her. I know I should chase after her, but I can’t. There’s a life for her outside all of this. Without me.”

“And for you too. There is something you could do, Jakub.”

“You’re advising me.”

“I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”

“No. Advise me, Shoe Man.”

“Shoe Man? Is that what you call me?”

“All my life.”

“The house is still there, you know,” he said. “And it belongs to you. I always kind of knew that you’d come back for it.”

Still kneeling, Zajíc pulled a pair of keys out of his pocket. The originals, the same ones that had once rested inside my grandmother’s purse. The same ones she had used to lock the house after she ensured that my grandfather and I were safely in our beds.

He rested them on my palm. Much lighter now than when I was a child.

“I’ve gone so far, and back,” I said.

“I have too. Why live otherwise.”

“I hope you’ll take the punishment. Go to jail. Do what ought to be done.”

“I can’t promise it, Jakub. The one thing you and I have in common—we love being alive too much to get in line for what’s coming.”

Both of us noticed at the same time that my laces had come untied inside the iron shoe. Zajíc held them, one in each hand. He stopped and stared out the window, his cheeks ruddy, thought finally catching up with instinct, but he was already committed, and so he tied my shoelaces into a neat bow. The cloth of my trousers had ridden up a few inches, revealing a small part of the scar on my calf. Zajíc froze, rolled the cloth up just a bit more.

“Mine has faded,” he said. “You can no longer see the numbers. Just a single white line cutting across.”

When he stood up, he seemed old—ancient and small—subject to the crushing weight of conscience. The finely fitting suit, the reflective surface of his leather shoes, the diminishing gray hair—none of it could fool me any longer about the true state of his being. Zajíc was not a menace. He was a man displaced and looking for a new purpose.

Radislav Zajíc checked his watch and walked toward the door. He turned halfway, without looking at me.

“You haven’t asked what is in the green folder,” he said.

“Well?”

“It’s my poetry against the regime. I did write it, you know. Only as a joke, a dare of sorts, to impress someone I don’t remember anymore. But then my fellow pupils took it seriously, and spread it around. Suddenly I was a published revolutionary. You see. The slightest gesture makes up our history. And so I met your father. And so I met you.”