“At the end there, through that gate, is where they shot them.”

“I don’t want to see this,” Nick said, claustrophobic.

“There’s just one thing.” He stopped at a house near the end. Next to it was an empty swimming pool, with bunches of old leaves stuck in rain puddles on the cracked concrete. “This was the commandant’s house.”

“He had a swimming pool?”

“For his daughters. Little girls. The prisoners would march by here on their way to the firing range.” He pointed again to the open area through the gate. “They shot them over there.”

So close. The sharp crack of gunfire. Not once. All day.

“They would hear,” Nick said, picturing it.

“Yes. While they were swimming. The first time I saw this–what kind of people were these? Little girls swimming, and all the time—”

“Maybe there was a fence,” Nick said dully. “So they couldn’t see.”

“No. No fence.”

Then the prisoners would see them too, Nick thought. Splashing. The last thing they would see.

“Why are you showing me this?” he said, turning away from the pool.

“I want you to understand what they were. Nothing will make sense without that.”

Nick looked at him, sensing where he was heading. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

“No? I think I do. The politics of another generation –they’re never real, are they? What was the point? Thirty years from now, they’ll ask you. What was so important? But it was important.”

Nick thought of Jan Palach. Important enough to light a match.

“In Prague,” his father said, “you see all the statues. Hussites. Catholics. What was that? Nobody remembers. But at the time, if you lived then.”

Nick looked down, moving his shoe across the dirt like a visible thought. “You didn’t know about this. Not then.”

“The swimming pool, no. But we knew what they were. All you had to do was listen.”

“And?”

“And no one was stopping them. No one. America First. It’ll all just go away. Or maybe it’s a good thing. People thought that then, you know. We had our own Nazis. My God, Jim Crow. People with sheets over their heads. That doesn’t seem real anymore either, does it? Father Coughlin on the radio, that prick.”

Nick glanced up, oddly reassured by the familiarity of his father’s scorn. Still an anticleric. But his father was racing now.

“And you could see what the Nazis were doing. Austria–just like that. They weren’t going to stop. Then Czechoslovakia. The Sudeten, but we knew it meant the whole thing. Why not just hand it over? The English,” he said, waving his hand. “And nobody in Washington lifted a finger. Couldn’t. It would have been bad politics. Nobody was trying to stop them.”

“Except the Communists,” Nick said quietly, following his logic. “That’s when you became a Communist.”

“Yes. After Munich. That was the last straw. Strange, in a way. I didn’t have any special feeling for the Czechs. Your grandparents had family here–in the Sudeten, in fact -but I never felt Czech. I don’t feel Czech now. I think it was the helplessness, the feeling that you had to do something.” He stopped, then managed a shrug. “Another generation’s politics. How do you explain it? Maybe I was ready, and then Munich came along.” He glanced up at Nick. “I wasn’t the only one, you know. A lot of people joined in the thirties. There were good reasons then. Well, we thought there were.”

Nick looked at him. “They didn’t become spies,” he said. He turned back toward the entrance gate. “Let’s go.”

His father followed him. Outside the walls, near the car, he touched Nick’s elbow. “Let’s walk for a bit.”

Involuntarily, Nick drew his elbow in. “Not in there,” he said, but he began to walk. “What made you ready?”

“I was impatient.” Nick caught the tiny barb and slowed to his father’s pace. “The times,” his father said vaguely. “You can’t imagine what things were like then. You remember where Grandma lived?”

They had visited a few times when Nick was a child. Collieries and slag heaps and cookie-cutter company houses. The big coal stove in the basement kitchen, where his grandmother seemed to live, held by the warmth. A photograph of Roosevelt on the wall. The Last Supper, draped with a frond from Palm Sunday. Upstairs, the parlor with doilies where the priest visited once a year and no one sat.

“People literally went hungry in those days. I had friends, children, who worked in the breakers. Half the miners were on relief. You picked up coal by the tracks, the pieces that fell off the cars. In a burlap bag. You had to drag it home if it got too heavy. But I was lucky–I got out. I was going to change all that.”

“She never believed you did it,” Nick said. “Grandma. She wouldn’t look at the papers. She said it was a mistake.”

His father stopped and took a breath, as if he’d been punched.

“In the early days we did change things,” he continued, refusing to be distracted. “Washington was exciting. The New Deal.” He pronounced it for effect, like a foreign phrase. “We were just out of law school–what did we know? We thought we could change anything. Nothing could stop us. But they did. I think we just knocked the wind out of them, and then, when they caught their breath, there they were again. The Welleses, the Rankins–they were always there, you know. We didn’t invent them after the war. Defenders of the faith. Whatever it was. Themselves, mostly.”

He turned, looking at Nick. “You know, when I first went to Penn, I remember I had a suitcase. Your grandmother bought it for me, and I saw right away it was all wrong. I hid it in the closet. Embarrassed, you know? And then I thought, what the hell? I’ll catch up. This was my chance. I had the scholarship and the job, and sometimes I didn’t even sleep, there was so much I wanted to do. But what I couldn’t understand–it was the first time I’d met people who thought they deserved their luck. They didn’t know they were lucky. They didn’t think at all about the ones who weren’t there. How can people be like that? Not see they’re lucky? Not have some—” He searched. “Compassion.”

“They’re afraid someone will take it away,” Nick said simply.

“Yes.” His father nodded. “But what makes them think they should have it in the first place? That’s what’s interesting. What do they believe in? What did Welles believe in? I still don’t know. Of course,” he said, a faint smile on his face, “they’re not very bright, are they? Maybe that’s all of it. Kenneth B. Welles. I remember when he first came to town. Not even a lightbulb on upstairs. He never did have anything except his amour propre.”

“And the right suitcase.”

His father glanced at him appreciatively. “Yes, he had that. His father–natural gas, of all things. That certainly ran in the family,” he said, a throwaway. “Anyway, things just–stalled. Maybe we ran out of steam. Maybe Welles and the rest of them learned how to block. Bills just sat in committee. After a while all we were doing was fighting them. Not politics, schoolyard stuff. And meanwhile things kept going to hell–there wasn’t time.” He stopped. “Impatient, you see. So I was ready.”

“What did you do? Walk into some office and sign up? Like that?” Nick said, sounding more sarcastic than he intended.

“No, they come to you,” his father said, ignoring the tone. “They fish. First the bait, then they play the line–it turns out that’s what they did best. In those days, that’s all they were doing, but I didn’t see that. No change. Just recruiting.”

“Who recruited you?”

His father stopped and looked toward the fortress walls. “Names. Well, what difference does it make now? He’s dead. Richard Schulman, a teacher at Penn. He was never exposed. You’re the only one who knows this,” he said, his voice suddenly conspiratorial.

Nick looked at him. “It was thirty years ago,” he said. “No one—”