“It’s beautiful.”

“Hitler thought so too. He made it an open city. That’s why it’s still beautiful–no bombs. Imagine, having Hitler to thank for this.”

“What’s Moscow like?”

“It’s like Brooklyn. Everyone there thinks it’s special and you can’t imagine why.”

Nick smiled. The same rhythm.

“At first I couldn’t get used to the quiet,” his father said. “It’s very quiet for a big city. You never hear an ambulance or a fire truck. I don’t know why. Not much traffic. And then in the winter the snow muffles everything. Sometimes I used to open the window and just listen to the quiet. It was like being deaf. You think you want quiet, and then when you get it—” He paused. “But after a while you get used to it. Like everything else.” He took out a cigarette and rolled down the window. “The funny thing about that was in the bad old days, they used to send the cars at night, so no one would know. But it was so quiet everyone did know. You’d hear a car in the street–you couldn’t miss it–and you’d know it was an arrest. The whole block. Maybe they planned it that way. You didn’t go back to sleep after that. You’d just lie there, waiting to hear the next car. But that was before, when Stalin was alive. Turn here by the church. We’ll swing around the Strahov.”

Nick said nothing, imagining the nights, now just an anecdote. People talked about the knock on the door, but it had been something else, a car motor idling in a quiet street. No screaming, no people being dragged out, just the faint sound of a car door being shut, a deaf man’s terror.

“Were you ever arrested?”

“No. Of course, I was debriefed. That took months. I still don’t know where. But after there was a flat. In the Arbat. Two rooms–a palace, then. And a job. They gave me a medal.”

Nick heard the tone, a hint of pride, and was disconcerted. Was he supposed to congratulate him?

“What kind of job?” he said, not sure again how to ask. “Did you–work for them?”

“As an agent, you mean?” his father said, almost amused. “No. Who would I spy on? The diplomats, the journalists –they were already taken care of. There wasn’t anybody else. Just the defectors. We kept to ourselves–maybe we were kept to ourselves, I don’t know. For a while I worked with Maclean on International Affairs. The magazine,” he said to Nick’s unspoken query. “Like your Foreign Affairs. I think with the same level of accuracy. A nice man. A believer, you know. Still. But the others—” He let the phrase drift off. “Not exactly people you want to spend the weekend with. Besides, I was trying to learn Russian, not speak English. I was never very good at languages. I still can’t speak Czech, not really.”

“I thought you could.”

“You did? Oh, the committee. No, I never could. I picked up a few words from your grandparents. But they tried not to speak around me. They wanted me to be—” He paused, framing the words. “An all-American boy.” Nick said nothing, letting the thought sit there. “I was, too. I had a paper route. I still fold a paper like that, like I’m going to throw it on a porch. Sixty subscribers–a lot for then. The things you remember.”

Nick heard the fade in his voice and resisted its pull. “Too bad about the language. It would have come in handy,” he said lightly, indicating the street.

“Well, Anička takes care of all that. That’s a little like being deaf too, when you can’t speak the language. People talk to you and you just look. You even get to like it, not hearing things. When I first got to Moscow, I would spend days not hearing anything. It was quiet. Like the streets.”

The sound, Nick thought, after a door had closed.

They had made the circle and were coming back down Holečkova. “Slow down a little if you want to see it. Where I live. Third building there on the left. The white one. Not too slow,” his father added, automatically putting his elbow on the window to cover the side of his face.

It was a multistory apartment building with simple art moderne lines in a section of the street that must have been developed before the war, when straight edges and glass were still a style. The white was tired now, but had escaped the cracks and watermarks of the newer buildings across the river, put up on the cheap. It was set back from the street, reached by a flight of concrete steps set into the hill. There was nothing remarkable about it at all, except that his father lived there.

“We were lucky to get it,” his father said. “The views are wonderful. Not the Old Town, but then the plumbing’s better. Two bathrooms.”

Nick glanced quickly at him, feeling again a peculiar sense of dislocation. He was in Prague with a ghost, discussing real estate. He noticed the hand at the side of the face.

“Does someone really watch the house?”

“Or do I just imagine it?” his father said wryly. “No, the Czechs take a look from time to time. The STB. You see, to them I’m a Russian. They want to know what I’m doing here.”

Nick took this in, toying with it. A Russian. They passed the Soviet tank again and headed across the river.

“What did they give you a medal for?”

“Services to the state. All of us got one. Mostly for going there. Once they’ve brought you in, they don’t know what to do with you, so they give you a medal. It’s cheap and it gives you something to hold on to. So you don’t wonder why you’re not doing anything anymore. They don’t trust foreigners–they can’t help it, it’s in the bone. After the magazine, I got the job at the institute, so at least they thought I wasn’t going to do any damage. Some of the others–English lessons, make-work.”

“What did you do?”

“Policy analyst. American policy. Of course, by the time they trusted me to do that, I’d been away from Washington so long I didn’t know any more about American policy than the next man. They have a habit of defeating their own purpose. But maybe that’s what they wanted all along. Anyway, they never listened to anything I had to say.”

Nick realized that the answer, easy and smooth, was what he wanted to hear, and for the first time he wondered if his father could be lying. Had he really done so little? For an instant he felt as if he were back at the hearing. So plausible and persuasive, and all the while— Nick stopped. Was he Welles now? The inquisitor to outflank? Who cared whether they listened to him or not? And it might after all — which was worse?–be the truth, a glib answer to mask a marginal life.

“Seems a shame–for them, I mean,” Nick said.

“Not taking advantage of my wisdom? Who knows? I was wrong about Cuba. I never thought we’d go that far.”

Nick paused. “We who?”

“We Americans,” his father said softly, clearly thrown by the question.

There was nothing to say to that and Nick drove quietly, skirting the top of Wenceslas to follow the streets behind the university. The mood in the car was uneasy now, as if, improbably, they had nothing more to say.

“Tell me about your mother,” his father said finally. “Tell me about Livia.”

“She’s–fine. Busy. Lots of parties. You know.”

“Yes, she loved parties.” A beat. “Does she ever talk about me?”

“No.”

The word, blunt and final, hung between them, and the instant Nick heard it he wished he had lied. Another door closing, louder this time. The silence, as leaden as the sky, was its own response, and there was nothing to break it but the sound of the car. At a corner, Nick stopped and reached into a back pocket for his wallet. He pulled out a photograph and handed it to his father, then put the car back in gear and drove on, allowing him to look in private.

“She’s cut her hair,” his father said quietly. “She used to wear it longer.”

Nick kept driving, not wanting to intrude. From the corner of his eye he saw his father holding the picture, absorbed.

“I may have this?” he said finally, a foreign intonation. Nick nodded. “She’s the same.” He put the picture in the breast pocket of his jacket. “Don’t tell Anna,” he said, and Nick felt drawn against his will into some odd complicity. Why was even the simplest gesture tangled?