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Shadowy research organizations can get a lot done, but apparently they don’t have a lot of pull with airlines, because Jen and Eric’s seats are 16 rows apart.
The flight left Logan at 3:55 p.m. and lands in Prague at 6:20 a.m. local time, which gives Jen a lot of time to have an existential crisis at 20,000 feet, and it would be really useful to have Eric within her eye line to confirm that this is happening. Everything has changed so much in the last 24 hours that she needs the assurance that he’s here and experiencing it too. That he’s real.
She has the book, though. Somehow it ended up with her in the shuffle, and now it’s on her lap. She’s got it facing down, since the title on the front is too large to hide with her hand. Throughout the flight Jen opens it up a few times, flips through the pages to see the writing that has become as familiar as her own.
This is where she should write a note (S., his first night on the ship after Corbeau is killed, the feeling that everyone knows more about the adventure that you are on than you do). But a pen never made its way into her bag, and everyone around her is sleeping, so there’s no one to ask. And anyway, she’s worried that like S., anything she wants to write would come out wrong.
So she just flips through the book, taking comfort in the handwriting that is almost as familiar as her own. I used to think one day I’d tell the story of us she sings to herself.
Wait – that’s a breakup song. Jen doesn’t want to be too Obsessed Girlfriend, but she’s pretty sure she and Eric are in this for the long haul. She doesn’t run away to Prague with just anyone.
She settles deeper into her seat, turns on a bad romantic comedy, and uses her finger as a bookmark, always ready to turn to page 423.
By the time they get off the plane, pass through customs, and into the city, it’s a little before eight. The sun is up and the streets are buzzing. It’s a Tuesday, and the morning rush has already started.
They walk from one end of the Charles Bridge to the other. Vendors are already starting to set up their tables and stands, covered in sketches and watercolors. Everywhere Jen looks she sees old buildings with red tile roofs.
Instead of standing in the middle of the bridge and looking at the river, they go straight to the end and look down at the riverbank. The ground’s closer to it on this side of the river, she notices. And there’s a path that runs right up along it.
What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin, Jen thinks, giving into the cliché.
“Ekstrom could have used those stairs after they pulled Vaclav out of the water.” Eric points to some old, graffiti-covered stone steps built into the side of the riverbank, where the path ends. “And the hotel was just a few blocks away. Short enough that they could get there quickly, but far enough away that no one would connect him with the jumper. Of course, we can’t prove anything, but once we get archive access I think-”
Jen interrupts him by reaching over and grabs his hand. “Enjoy the moment,” she tells him.
Eric shuts up, and squeezes her hand. They look out at the water. Vaclav jumped into that river a depressed factory worker with crushed ambitions and came out the hidden face of a secret organization. He (probably) killed people and he (definitely) fell in love and he never got to be himself again.
Now they just have to prove it.
They spend the first few weeks learning each other.
This is not a metaphor for having lots of sex. Or at least, not entirely.
There are all these things that couples learn about each other that they missed out on. How she takes her tea, what time he likes to get up, who’s allergic to what. The sort of information that comes up when you spend a lot of time with a person, in person. They never had time for the getting-to-know you sessions, and now they’re getting a crash course in it.
Jen has several moments when she fears that she’s made a horrible mistake. Not that they ever fight, but Eric will let some basic information slip and Jen’s suddenly hit with the fact that she moved to Prague with a guy and she doesn’t even know his birthday. They know so little about each other outside of Straka and a few childhood traumas. The chances of this going well are not great.
(Jen sends a quick email to her parents when they land. Research opportunity in Prague, not sure how long she’ll be here, no need to worry about money. They never respond. This makes her believe simultaneously that she has made the right and wrong choice.)
Eric seems as freaked out about their situation as she is, always apologizing and tiptoeing around their new apartment. It’s a delicate time. They’re lucky that they don’t fight, but it’s only because they’re always retreating. It’s so strange to be around each other for extended periods of time. Their relationship was based on clandestine meetings, so being together all the time, without having to disappear into steam tunnels, is a change.
They manage to power through the awkwardness via acclimation to one another, but books help, too.
They don’t write in Ship of Theseus, though. The book has become too much like a gospel to them, and they make a mutual decision to put it away for a while and focus on the facts. “We don’t want to get into an ‘Asphodel is H.D.’s totally factual autobiography’ situation,” Jen points out.
(This leads to a discussion of whether or not H.D. was a member of the S. They decide that she wouldn’t have been a full-time member, but she traveled so much during that inter-war period that she might have been an affiliate.)
Instead, they start writing in Eric’s books and leave post-its in the ones from the library. Some of it is speculation too unsteady to say aloud, but most of it is just notes to one another.
Breathless at the English-language theater on the 24th. Interested?
Have you seen my green flats?
I love you.
Let’s take a day off from research and explore the Castle.
Eventually, they get better at saying these things out loud. But Jen never wants to break this habit.
Jen tries to keep her paranoia at not-crazy levels.
This is difficult: there were definitely people following them on campus, there was a lot of circumstantial awful shit happening, and there is probably a New Bad S. around that would love to stop them through any means necessary.
She and Eric try to take steps to prevent that. They do not change their names – neither of them is willing to commit international fraud, and anyway, Serin used their real names on their visas – but they do lie about why they’re in Prague.
In late summer, Jen joins a book club made up of American expats. It’s a way of getting out of the apartment so she and Eric can have a break from each other, but after everything she’s been through, it feels risky to re-enter the world.
So she tells them her boyfriend is working on post-doctoral research on the Habsburg Empire’s economic policies towards Hungary in the post-Ottoman period. She spends a night on Wikipedia memorizing some particularly dull details that keep people from asking follow up questions.
“Remind me,” someone will always ask after a meeting, “What do you do?”
Jen has cast herself as the dutiful girlfriend, just along for the ride. It grosses her out whenever she tells someone this, because it is so close to being true. Every time she says it, she finds herself working twice as hard on research the next day.
Dull is safe, she reminds herself. Dull keeps you from becoming another Santorini Man.
So she stays with the group, partially to establish her and Eric as Dull Couple With No Interest In 20th Century Literature or History, but also because she loves the people. Her last semester at Pollard notwithstanding, Jen is fundamentally an extrovert. She loves being around people, and these people -- a mix of students, staffers at NGOs, the occasional State Department affiliate – are the sort that Jen wants to surround herself with now.
One night a bunch of the women go out dancing, and Jen gets properly drunk for the first time in longer than she can remember. They go to a club, an experience that is as fun in the moment, but blah afterwards as it is in the U.S. There is one too many shots, and afterwards they sit on the street and split sausages and fried cheese sandwiches.
It’s after two by the time she gets home, but Eric is still up, lying on the couch and reading The Painted Cave.
“Hello,” she says, drunkenly chipper when she falls on the couch.
Eric sits up so she can better lean against him. “Is this Drunk Jen? I don’t think I’ve met her before.”
“Yup,” and she pops the ‘p’ as she says it. “Don’t get used to her though, Drunk Jen is a college graduate and too mature for this sort of thing. Except for tonight. And potentially on my birthday. But other than that she is gone forever!”
Eric laughs softly. “Drunk Jen didn’t mention Straka, did she?” It’s half-joke and half-not.
If Jen were sober, she would have told him that it was too loud to talk in the club, and outside the club she and her friends mostly talked about restaurants and good places to take day trips.
But instead she sits up and tells him very sternly “I’m capable of talking about other things. I had a life before all this, you know. I know I made it sound miserable in the book, but I was mopey and what I wrote was misrepresentative. I am more than VMS.”
“Hey, hey,” Eric says, pulling her back down to him. “I know that. I’m just being paranoid.”
“I would have asked it too,” she concedes, settling into his lap. “We do have trouble not talking about it. But you should trust me.”
They’re both silent for a moment, and Jen starts to fall asleep when Eric’s voice brings her back. “I am just VMS, though,” he says softly. “You know that, right?”
“As long as there’s room for me,” she tells him, and kisses him.
By the fall, they have a routine.
They wake up by nine at the latest, eat kolachs for breakfast, and then start their research. The apartment is filled with books and they’re constantly on their laptops to read journal articles. They usually break midday for lunch, and Eric goes for a run afterwards. Some days she’ll take a tram to the library to pick up more books, and there’s a bakery she goes to every few days to get more kolachs. In the late afternoon, they both cram in a few more hours of research.
They have yet to get their big break, and some days are more productive than others. Sometimes she finds a Summersby diary passage that puts another piece of the puzzle in place. And then sometimes she just reads a lot of repetitive nonsense about deconstruction of the self. Sometimes lunch at their favorite café turns into dinner.
Jen realizes that this is standard grad student life, but she loves it. For the first time she is free to make her own schedule and do whatever she wants.
She also realizes it can’t go on forever. She is still deeply suspicious of Serin and has no doubts that they will have her and Eric on a plane back to the States if they don’t produce results at some point.
Serin hasn’t asked to see their work, of course, but Jen finds that even more suspicious.
“Maybe they are just genuinely good people,” Eric says one day when Jen brings this up.
Eric trusts Serin a lot more than she does, and Jen should trust his judgment. He’s been doing this longer than she has, and after getting fucked over by Moody, one would think he would be more alert to these things.
“Filomela didn’t know who she was working for,” Eric reminds her. “She took a leap and it worked.”
“She also lived in secrecy for years and never had the life she dreamed of,” Jen points out. “Are you signing us up for that?”
“What have they done that’s untrustworthy?” Eric asks.
This stumps her. There hasn’t been anything specific, really. They didn’t burn down the barn at her parents’ house. But she has no way of knowing that it wasn't them, either.
“It’s just that we don’t know who they are,” she says. “They could be the New Bad S. and we’re handing over everything we know to them.”
“But they haven’t asked us for anything,” Eric points out. “And when they do, we’ll be very, very careful.”
She wants to have the faith that he has, but she can’t. “I bet Welscher said the same thing.”
It’s a low blow. But they can’t be sweet idealists anymore. They know how that story ends.
In October the temperature goes from “pleasantly chilly” to “oh my god, why is it so cold” in a day.
Eric swears that it was actually much more gradual change in temperature, but that doesn’t change the fact that Jen went from being fine wearing cardigans all the time to needing to buy two coats and a sweatshirt from a store on Wenceslas Square.
She and Eric are in bed a lot. (Again, it’s not just having sex.) She keeps a stack of books next to her that are taller than the bedside table. The apartment, which had seemed so pleasantly cool in May, is now drafty and freezing. She spends more time than she should trying to figure out how to read and take notes while under the covers.
“Why couldn’t Vaclav have been from Florida,” Jen complains one day. She mostly doesn’t mean it.
One afternoon they take some time off from research and visit St. Vitus Cathedral. They’ve been meaning to for months, but it’s so hard to do the tourist thing when you actually live in a city.
They sign up for a tour, and the group is almost entirely retirees from Scotland. “Not feeling so old now, are you?” Jen teases Eric.
The tour is lovely, and Jen spends a blissful hour thinking about Good King Wenceslas and walls inlaid with amethyst instead of Straka.
They walk the Golden Lane home, Jen keeping an eye out for Kafka’s house. Eric keeps turning around, and thinking that he’s looking for it too, she says “I’ve seen pictures, the house is bright blue.”
“That’s not what I’m looking for,” he mutters. He leans into her as if to kiss her cheek, but instead he murmurs into her ear “I think we’re being followed.” She freezes up instantly, but he pushes her forward. “Act natural.” She rolls her eyes at that total cliché of a reaction, but he laughs a bit too loudly and says “Yeah, I guess that counts as natural for you.”
“We can’t go home,” she says, trying to keep her voice light. “Unless we could lose him on the subway?” It’s Eric’s turn to roll his eyes: the subway only has three lines and never looks crowded. “Fine, let’s just keep walking.”
They walk down from the castle and into the city. Jen’s not sure if she’s thankful for how windy Prague’s roads are. On the one hand, it makes her feel like they’re putting distance between them and their potential stalker, but it also makes her feel like she’s working her way into a trap.
They keep talking, going nowhere in particular. Eric occasionally glances behind him and squeezes her hand to indicate that they’re still being followed.
It starts to get dark. Her feet are hurting. If she had known she was going to walk 3 miles on a slow-speed pursuit, she would have worn sneakers.
Eric pulls her to the window of a bakery. “We should get breakfast here sometime,” she says brightly.
Eric nods, looking into the window. “There he goes,” he whispers while they look at pastries. The man following them passes by the window, and Jen catches his reflection.
She’s very freaked out to see that he’s wearing a fedora. Lots of people wear fedoras now, for some reason, and it’s not like the New Bad S. would be that into costuming. Although they do like things to be dramatic…
The next day, they get new locks for the doors.
Serin handled their visa applications, Serin found an apartment, Serin is providing living expenses, Serin seems a little miffed at having to do this for a woman who (probably) only has a bachelor’s degree in English, until Eric tells them that without Jen, there wouldn’t be a project to fund.
She has to remind herself of that, some days. That she is the badass who found out who F. X. Caldeira really was. Scholars spent decades thinking that FXC was a hack, that he was really Straka, the he didn’t exist. No one ever even considered that FXC was a woman. Jen was the first, and she was right.
But they haven’t volunteered this information to Serin yet, so when it’s time to do research overseas, Eric is the only one who gets to go.
This time it’s a four days in Sweden, following a lead at Uppsala University. They have some papers of Ekstrom’s that aren’t open to the public, and the University finally granted Eric’s request to review them.
With four days by herself, Jen should take the opportunity to do what she wants to do. Go to the Museum of Decorative Arts, or spend a day window shopping at the mall in Anděl. Hang out with her friends from book club.
But after the scare with the man in the fedora –an isolated incident, they think – she decides to hole herself up in the apartment while Eric’s gone.
This ends up being a horrible idea. Not that anything happens, just that it’s way too much time for Jen to be on her own without going bonkers.
Jen does the normal stir-crazy stuff – streams a lot of television, doesn’t ever change out of her pajamas – but she also writes ten emails to her sister, without ever sending them. She desperately wants to know how her first semester went, but she doesn’t feel like she has a right to ask, not after she’s been gone for six months.
That doesn’t stop her from writing email after email, always deleting them. She’s drawn to lessons in futility, much like how her research has been going lately. Jen barely makes any progress while Eric’s gone, and she knows that he’s hit a wall recently too. It was why he was so excited to go to Uppsala and get a new angle on things.
So Jen doesn’t get very far during her time alone, but she does come up with a list of books to request from Serin and the library. She’s been on a Garcia Ferrara kick recently and the list has a Spanish Civil War focus. It’s not very relevant to the Vaclav hunt, but if they do take Esme Plunderson-Plummp up on her offer to be the ones to rehabilitate him, it would be good to know where to start.
It’s not a lot, but that list makes her feel like she back into the swing of things, and she manages to psych herself up for putting on real clothes again so she can meet Eric at the airport, when she gets an email from him that his flight’s been delayed and won’t get in till after ten, so he’ll just take the bus home.
Her plans derailed, Jen stays in her pajamas, eats ramen on the couch, and rereads The Winged Shoes of Emyido Alves in one sitting and doesn’t even try to fool herself that it’s for research.
She makes a valiant effort to stay awake until Eric gets home, but her body has other plans, because she wakes up to his face.
“Hey,” she yawns. “Welcome back.”
He leans down to kiss her. “You didn’t have to wait up.”
“You’re in luck, I didn’t.” She sits up and Eric unceremoniously drops his duffel bag on the floor. She rearranges herself so that he can semi-comfortably lie down on the couch with his head in her lap. Her hands automatically go to play with his hair, and the feeling of I missed him hits Jen like a train. “Did you have a good trip?”
Eric sighs heavily, and her heart sinks. “Everything was pre-1910.”
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry. It wasn’t a total waste, was it?”
“I got some stuff about Durand that might be useful later, but no silver bullet.” He sighs again, deep enough that she feels it reverberate into her body. “We’re never going to do it, are we?”
Eric is the more optimistic one about their research prospects, so it’s unsettling to hear him say it. She wants to tell him that everything will be fine. That someone had to screw up somewhere and that evidence that Vaclav lived exists. It’s a needle in a haystack, but between the two of them, they can find it eventually. But it might have been stupid to think they could do it as quickly as they solved Ship of Theseus, and they should be ready to settle in for the long haul.
But she can’t put into words, so she grabs Winged Shoes and her pen, turns to Chapter 11 (the hero and the heroine separated, but determined to reunite), writes in the margin and passes it to him.
It’s only been six months. We can do it.
She hopes.
This is how life works: you complain that you are never going to find something, and then you find it immediately.
It’s an afternoon in December. Jen has spent most of the day struggling with the diaries of a doctor who provided aid during the Spanish Civil War. It doesn’t take long for Jen to realize why it was published by a school that specializes in the medical texts: it’s almost entirely instructions on how to best clean bullet grazes and the impact of different antiseptics. There are barely any people mentioned, much less Garcia Ferrara or Durand. Just body parts.
In a fit of boredom, Jen flips to the front of the book, only to find that the early entries were his physician’s log. She’s ready to give up when a date catches her eye: October 30, 1910.
The doctor was Czech, she connects suddenly. A quick glance at the foreword confirms that he was living in Prague at the time.
It’s nothing, she tells herself. It’s nothing.
But then:
30-10-10
Name: V. Straka. Occupation: factory worker. Age: not given (est. 20)
Need: Hypothermia, minor lacerations.
Cause: Fell into Vltava River.
Treatment: Cleaned and bandaged lacerations. Prescribed soothing syrup to ward off any chills caused by the water. Gave instructions to companions regarding care for hypothermia. (Note: companions appeared to be foreign – French woman and Scandinavian male - but understood Czech and consented to the care instructions.)
She rereads it three times before it really sinks in.
It’s proof.
“Eric,” she calls out. “Can you come here for a minute?”
“Be there in a bit, need to finish reading this,” he yells back from the front room.
“I think you should come now.”
She can hear his aggrieved sigh from the bedroom, but he comes in a few seconds later. “What?”
Jen hands him the book. It takes him a few seconds before he notices the date. His face as he reads it is something to behold: it goes from disbelieving to panic to awe in about 30 seconds. He looks up at her and she nods, and he goes back to read it again.
He flips to look at the cover. “What is this book?”
“Czech doctor. Worked in Spain during the ‘30s. I got it hoping for information on Ferrara and Durand, but instead…”
“You got proof,” he finishes for her.
“It’s not perfect,” she starts to qualify. “It’s just one piece of information, and people will try to discredit it, but it’s enough for a book and for us-”
She’s cut off when Eric rushes towards the bed and pulls her to him for a long, hard kiss. After they break apart, he kisses her again, and again, breaking in between to say “You’re a genius. You’re amazing.”
“We’re amazing,” she gasps.
“Nope,” he counters, kissing her neck quickly. “Just you. I don’t know why I tried to get that PhD. I’m going to be your research assistant forever. You’re the brilliant one in this relationship.”
Jen starts to protests but he stops her with another kiss, and she pulls him even closer, keeping one hand at his waist and the other on the book.
Here is what Jennifer Heyward believes:
She believes that a brokenhearted eighteen year-old factory worker named Vaclav Straka jumped off the Charles Bridge with a manuscript in hand. Torsten Ekstrom, a sweet man and a good swimmer, jumped in to save him and brought him back to the hotel room he shared with Amarante Durand. A doctor who kept a very dull diary helped keep him from dying. Reinhold Feuerbach and Tiago Garcia Ferrara joined them the next day.
All four had strong beliefs but had long felt that they could not risk their careers on political writing. In Vaclav they had a young writer who desperately wanted to learn, and who had been mistakenly reported dead by the paper. It’s the perfect new identity for the writers. And for Vaclav? It’s the chance to be a part of a family, because they cared about him for more than just his name. They worked on novels together, and over time, Vaclav’s voice became stronger and started to dominate the writing.
The politics started to dominate as well. After the war, after Calais, after the Bouchard speech, things became more serious. Bouchard had agents after them. People were killed. And since Vaclav was the one who gave up his name for the collective, he was the nameless one who killed the agents in return.
But then there was a translator, a woman named Filomela. She was whip smart and funny, and Vaclav was in love with her before he ever saw a picture. She understood his writing and knew how to tease out what he wanted to say in almost every language. Everyone in the group adored and admired her. But as time went on, and more and more members of the group died, it became clear that Vaclav could never meet her. If he did, he would kill her.
At the same time, there was Signe. A little girl who was serious like her mother but laughed like her father. But once they were both killed, she became Vaclav’s child, when she was not with Summersby. And suddenly he realized that his life was nothing in comparison to hers. He did everything he could to keep the world from finding out about her. And every time he looked at her, he tried not to think about the child he never had with Filomela
Finally, there was Havana, and getting up the courage for a meeting he avoided for years. And then nothing.
(Here is the other thing Jen believes:
She believes in a boy who is tall and has a crooked nose and who would protest at being called a boy because he’s almost thirty and acts like that means he’s ancient.
He knows to give her space after a night terror and has memorized exactly how she takes her tea.
He tells her that she is his equal, not just some silly girl who went to Europe to follow a boy, and she believes him now.
She believes in kolachs and drafty apartments and love stories written in the margins.
Jen believes that palimpsest means the same themes repeat, but never the same ending. Because someone needs to have a happy ending, and it’s going to be them.)