Before Read Free Page B

and adjusts his glasses, which are starting to fall down his nose. “There,” she says. “Pretty cool character.”
    â€œStill can’t see a hell of a lot,” Jiri says. The street seems to be punctuated with glowing light: on this passing woman’s pastel hat, on the silver buttons of this man’s shirt. A group of teenage girls laughs as, to the angry honking of automobiles, they cross the road and go into Wordsworth Books. They have oversize jeans that are torn and scuff the street, and Jiri mutters for Christ’s sake that someone should get them some decent pants.
    â€œThat’s just what the youngsters are wearing, for goodness’ sakes,” Anna says. “It’s the fashion.”
    â€œ On je nedbale oble eny . It’s no good,” Jiri says. “Their parents shouldn’t let them go out like that. They must be just fourteen.”
    â€œThat is old in this country. Where have you been?” Anna says.
    Jiri grunts. He taps with his cane, and they walk again. Two women pass in white chadors, speaking in rapid Farsi. Buildings here have fallen a little into shadow, and Jiri sees more clearly, though if the shadows get too dark his left eye will be blind and his right not much better. There is music nearby, on the brick sidewalk to the left—gypsy guitars and some sort of percussion—and people are gathered, clapping: Jiri and Anna slow down and ease into the crowd. Anna’s hand pulls: Some college students, seeing Jiri’s slow condition, his large sunglasses, make room. At the center of the gathering acrobats whirl batons of fire against the brick buildings and late blue sky. Jiri must study the scene a moment to take it in. The flames dance with the rhythm, and to Jiri’s difficult eyes and brain suddenly look as if they occupy the horizon, a terrifying trembling of fire that constricts his chest. The drums grow louder, and the performers plunge the torches into their throats. Anna exclaims with the crowd, but Jiri leans toward her and says, “Let’s go, Anna,” his voice hoarse with despair. Anna immediately puts her left hand on Jiri’s arm and the college students part, their faces a little bewildered and worried for him, and Anna says, “ Ano, Jirko, let’s go.”
    *   *   *
    It is peaceful, darkly shaded, in their building on Trowbridge Street. Jiri and Anna go up the elevator to their third-floor flat, a place decorated with paintings of Prague: of the Little Quarter or “Venice” area of the city, of Tn Church and the National Theatre and Charles Bridge. There are paintings of the Slovak and Bohemian countrysides, too, and, within a mahogany-and-glass case in the living room, small Bohemian glass jars and figurines, many of these smuggled out by relatives in the straw bodies of dolls during Communist years.
    Their daughter, Markéta, newly married and living in a Seattle suburb, stares out with her husband from a photograph on the living room wall. Jiri can see this clearly and he smiles: Markéta is thirty-five now, and he had been quite worried for her—all career and no personal life—until last year. Time soon for children, he thinks. He imagines Christmas, small blond Markétas running about him in the flat.
    On an end table beside the living room couch is a framed pencil drawing that Jiri once did, with his sister, of his childhood home. In it, you see the back of the family building, tall and thin yellow pastel and with the steep, red clay roofing shingles, and in the garden that is the foreground are large sunflowers beneath the light of the sun. A broken mortar wall is at the edge of the rendering, where Jiri as a boy could sit and read books well into the summer evenings. Jiri, aged fourteen, had done a group of these drawings with his sister, and his mother had given them as gifts to relatives in Prague. He did the pen-and-pencil work, and Helena painted the