And, in fact, lunch was pleasant. The round dining table, set near the window corner of the room, was draped with a crocheted tablecloth anchored with a porcelain jug of fresh wildflowers. Across the table Anna had spread plates of pickles and hard-boiled eggs and salami arranged in pretty concentric circles. Nick glanced at the larder shelf, just like the one in their old cabin, but filled here with glass jars of cucumbers and tomatoes and beets, a garden preserved all year in vinegar and dill. He looked for the rainy-day snacks of his youth-peanut butter and saltines and cans of tuna-but this was a serious pantry, with real food to last a season. Anna ladled some form of borscht, beet red, from a decorated tureen and poured tall glasses of beer.
“Did you do all this yourself?” Nick said to her, indicating the shelves.
She nodded. “In the winter it’s difficult for vegetables. We are fortunate to have the garden.”
“Difficult. Nonexistent,” his father said. “Carrots-that’s it. Of course, the Americans have lettuce. Once a week the car goes to Germany. The lettuce run. Sometimes they share with their friends-the British, the Czech staff. Everyone in Prague knows someone who can get a German cabbage from the Americans. But Anicka doesn’t like to do that. She thinks it’s disloyal,” he said playfully.
“Not disloyal. Illegal. Ruzyne for a salad? No.”
“Ruzyne,” Nick said. “The airport?”
“A prison,” his father explained. “Nearby. Same name.” Then, smiling at Anna, “Where they put you for groceries.”
“In the summer it’s different,” Anna said, ignoring the tease. “We have cherries down below. Plums. For jam.”
“Jam,” Nick said to his father. “Remember the time Mom tried with the blackberries?” It had slipped out before he could catch it and now it hung there, an embarrassment, but Anna smiled.
“Your mother was a gardener too?” A figure of the past.
“No. She said it would ruin her nails.” A half-truth, making her seem frivolous. Why had he said it? To make one feel comfortable at the expense of the other? But Molly was right-Anna didn’t miss much, and sensing his discomfort, she examined her hands and sighed.
“It’s a price, yes. She was right, I think.”
“But look how we eat,” his father said, pointing to the array of pickles. “Anna can make anything grow. A magician.”
“Oh, a magician. With peasant hands. That’s the price. For the planting thumb.”
“Green,” Molly said. “Green thumb.”
“Yes?” Anna giggled. “Green thumb. English-why do you make it so difficult?”
“You should try Czech,” Molly said.
Anna found this funny, or chose to, and laughed, and Nick suddenly saw her as she must have been, bright and attractive, before weight and time had drawn her face closed. When had they met? Did they have jokes together? Nick thought of his parents, laughing downstairs after the guests had gone. He had been looking at Anna as a kind of nurse, dispensing pills and telling his father to rest. Now he sensed a different intimacy. Not a nurse, a wife. Who broke her nails pulling weeds.
So, improbably, they talked about gardens, about temperamental peas and what to do when the squash came in, as if the morning with his father had never happened at all. Anna passed plates. Molly asked the names of things in Czech. Small talk, a conspiracy of cheerfulness. He found himself slipping into the easy familiarity of a family lunch, where nothing important was said because everything was already known. He sat back, listening to his father’s voice telling stories about the neighbors, feeling oddly at home. It was the last thing he’d expected here. Maybe things really were the same everywhere, fresh produce aside.
The room had been dim when they’d first come in, but now he could see it clearly, and his eyes moved lazily from the pantry shelf to the sitting area, the usual heap of books next to the couch. The side table with the Order of Lenin in its velvet box. The shelves on either side of the fireplace-no, not a fireplace, a wood stove, but framed by the same kind of shelves. He glanced toward the record player in the corner, then back to the couch, facing the easy chairs, each glance like a snapshot. He stopped. It felt the same because it was the same. The desk under the window with its portable typewriter, the table behind the couch for lamps and messy piles of books, even the radio on the windowsill-all the same. For a moment the slipcovers and crocheted doilies, Anna’s touches, disappeared. Arranged exactly the same, all of it. His father had recreated the cabin.
Nick stared at the room, half hoping to see the fishing poles near the door, and sank back into the old photograph. Did his father know? Or was it a longing so unconscious that even furniture fell into place, just part of the natural order of things? He’d never left. And what about Anna? Did she fall into place too, curled up on the sofa with a book in his mother’s spot? Maybe she liked it. Maybe she didn’t know she was living in someone else’s house.
“Did you have a place in Russia?” Nick said, clearly a question out of the blue, because they all looked at him, surprised he hadn’t been following their conversation.
“In the country?” Anna said. “Yes, a dacha. Small, like this. We had to bring everything with us. You can see the condition. So old. But new furniture-who can get it? Of course, your father didn’t mind. Men,” she said to Molly. “They like everything the same.”
“Hmm,” Molly said. “Like dogs.”
Anna laughed again, covering her mouth with her hand, a girl.
Afterward, Nick helped with the dishes while Molly and his father sat out in the sun in fading canvas chairs like the ones in Green Park. His father had taken another beer from the tiny fridge, hiding it from Anna and winking at him.
They worked at an old pedestal sink, Anna slipping wet plates into the drying rack, Nick wiping and stacking. She seemed preoccupied, uneasy now that they were alone, as if the others had taken the high spirits of the lunch table with them.
“How did you meet?” Nick asked to break the silence.
“Meet?” she said, surprised. “At work.” She brushed it away like a fly. She took a second, then turned to him, her hands still in the water. “He’s very ill. Did you know?”
“Yes. He told me.”
“It’s not good for him, to be excited.”
“He doesn’t look very excited.” Nick nodded toward the lawn chairs, trying to be light.
“He is,” she said flatly. “To see you-” She hesitated. “When he told me, I was afraid. That you would quarrel. So many years. But it’s all right, isn’t it?” She looked at him, more than a question.
“Yes. It’s all right.” He smiled. “No quarrels.”
“You think I’m foolish to worry like the mother hen. But I know him. All this month he’s waiting. What if he doesn’t come?”
“But I did.”
“Yes.” She turned back to the sink. “Your mother-she didn’t object?”
He glanced at her. “I didn’t tell her,” he said cautiously, not offering any more.
“Ah,” Anna said. “You thought it would upset her? Still?”
“I don’t know. She never talks about it.”
She nodded to herself. “Like Valter,” she said, translating his father’s name, making him foreign, hers. “Never of her. Only you.” Then, unexpectedly, “She’s a woman of fashion.”
It was another trick of language, the archaic phrase wrapping his mother in gowns and powdered wigs, a figure in a Fragonard swing. Nick smiled.
“I suppose. She thinks so, anyway.” There it was again, the easy disloyalty.
“Yes. I saw photographs. Beautiful. I was maybe a little jealous,” she said shyly.
“Jealous?”
Anna laughed. “When we get old, we become invisible to our children. But we still see. He was in love with her, I think.”
“That was a long time ago,” Nick said, embarrassed. Did she want to be reassured, this thick-waisted woman with her hands in the sink?
“Sometimes it’s easier to love a memory. In life, things change. What would Zdenek be like now, I wonder sometimes.”
“Who?”
