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and hovering weirdly during reading. His short-term memory, too, is still often uncertain.
    Jiri is most comfortable speaking with his wife, and Marjorie Legnini, and his Trowbridge Street neighbor Tika LaFond, a photography student who often takes him walking on their road or at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. Other people, not as familiar with his condition, are more difficult to converse with; he becomes self-conscious and especially does not do so well on the phone. Often he cannot find the precise word he is looking for, as if there is a trickster in his brain, holding up a cloak before the knowledge he needs. The cloak can make him desperate—he must force himself to slow down and think a word or sentence through, using small tricks of his own. He will bend the right side of his mouth down with concentration and wait for a trigger to the word, as Marjorie has taught him (college helps you for ever, replace the “v” with an “m,” and Emer son is Tika’s college; a hen would make a nice subject for a painting, so Shelley Hen derson’s art gallery on Bow Street is the place where Anna has worked for nearly seventeen years). Occasionally Jiri catches himself being sly and clipping off a phrase at an opportune moment, when in truth he had much more to say and knew—a swift panic—he wouldn’t get it all out. Sometimes the words just will not come, and Jiri will end his subject abruptly and shake his head with disgust.
    *   *   *
    There is this thing that passes between Jiri and Marjorie—she picks up on his hope, his will to fight, and they are a good team—and now she comes beside him again, wheeling over on her rolling stool, looking at his lines, still wiping her cheekbones. “It is a huge improvement, Jiri. Here and here”—she points with her finger—“the letters are a little cramped. You see how they bunch up? But the rest of these letters here are quite well spaced.”
    Jiri nods. “A least it doesn’t look like they keep jumping off a diving board anymore.”
    â€œEx act ly,” Marjorie says. “This is progress. I told you, it will go slowly, but surely. And no repetitions, all the way through. First time that’s happened since we started.”
    She wheels over to her desk and pulls something from a drawer. “Look,” she says. “See? This was from right after you left rehab.”
    He does not remember these pages as he takes them from her. He had simply been writing his address for her, apparently, for here is his manic scrawling (could it be? could he have been so screwed up?), reading 39 Trowbridge Street, #5, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 . Some of his first efforts were crossed out with great frustration. Marjorie sets these examples next to his more precise writing now, and she and Anna try to encourage him, saying, “Look how far you’ve come, Jiri.” But Jiri’s jaw grows tight at the thought of how incapacitated he was, of what can happen to him so suddenly. Marjorie, seeing this, tactfully puts the old writing back into her drawer and takes the Lidice memory he hands to her and places it, chronologically, into the three-ring memory book that Jiri has with him always now, June 1942 after September 1933 .
    On Brattle Street a few minutes later, walking to the parking garage, Anna’s hand is tight on Jiri’s arm, guiding him through the crowded sidewalk; he steadies himself with his cane. The memory book is firmly in his other hand. Somewhere there is a smell of fried dough in the air, the sound of someone singing off-key. He wears dark wraparound glasses; still, the sun shining into windows above is too much for him, and he turns his eyes down to bricks, hearing footsteps, voices, all around him. In crowds he must always walk with Anna’s help, as if he is some old damn horse.
    â€œAll right, Jirko?” Anna says.
    Jiri nods, but his wife stops him