The History Room (24 page)

Dad turned off the engine. ‘We’ll walk the last quarter of a mile. I only ever went to the apartment by foot. The nearest tram stop was a block or so away. So I’m more likely
to remember if we walk.’

He’d told me before that cars had been fairly rare in his youth. I pictured him as a lanky young man, strolling out to meet his girlfriend after lectures. Or perhaps walking her home after
a night out in the beer cellars. Or to one of the cinemas showing avant-garde films. I saw her long hair swinging in the moonlight, her bright tunic dress; I heard her laugh, this woman whose
existence in my father’s life had left its mark so strongly that he’d painted her on the wall at his wife’s family home.

He stopped on a street corner, a frown on his face. ‘This feels about the right distance, but I probably walked more quickly when I was seventeen.’ He scanned the streets.
‘That
potraviny
might be a good place to ask.’ The
potraviny
, corner shop, looked promising: small enough for the shopkeeper to know his clientele and the
neighbourhood.

The shopkeeper was Vietnamese and broke off from opening a box of Czech lager to greet us as we came in. He said something rapid and heavily accented in reply to my father’s question. Dad
shrugged and smiled. I assumed the answer had not been helpful. We walked towards the door. We’d reached the pavement outside when a woman called to us. A tiny Vietnamese woman came outside
and pointed up a street. Dad thanked her. I noticed a look of excitement on his face. ‘She thinks there’s a family down here who might know something. They’ve lived in this area
for years, she says.’

He seemed to slow down as we crossed the road and approached the nineteenth-century apartment block. As he studied the list of names on the intercom I sensed that anything, a single word, a
sigh, would be enough to divert him from this mission. He let out a breath. ‘I’ll try this one.’ He pushed the intercom. No answer. He stepped back. ‘Oh well.’

‘Try another one.’

‘None of the names mean anything to me.’

‘Doesn’t matter. They may still know something.’

He pushed a second button. A man’s deep tones answered. Dad said something in Czech and shook his head at the reply.

‘This is hopeless,’ he said. ‘Let’s go, Merry.’

‘No.’ I stood in front of him so that he couldn’t move from the door. ‘Let me.’ I made a jab at the row of buttons and caught two at the same time. A young-sounding
woman started shouting at me through the intercom.

‘She’s saying she’ll call the police if we don’t go away.’

I held up a hand to stop him talking. ‘What was that?’ A new voice, male, elderly, quavering, was saying something now. ‘What did he say?’

Dad approached the intercom and said something quickly. He shrugged. ‘He says to try the house two doors up the street.’

I tried not to let him see me glancing at my watch as we walked along. Identical to the house we’d just left, this one also had a collection of names on plates. Dad scanned them.

‘I don’t recognize any of these. This is a fool’s errand.’

A woman appeared with a toddler in a buggy. We stepped aside to let them through. Dad asked the woman something. She shook her head and unlocked the front door. The door was almost closed when
she thought of something and spoke.

‘In hospital,’ Dad said. ‘She lives here but she went into hospital.’ He put out an arm to stop the door from closing and asked a question.

The answer came with some hesitation. He said something in reply, then turned to me. ‘We can’t go any further with this.’

‘Which hospital?’ I asked.

The young woman was answering when a door opened above. A voice, elderly, female, called down. The young woman blinked. Shook her head. Said something in obvious bemusement.

‘She’s back,’ Dad told me. ‘She wants this lady to buy her some bread.’

The woman shook her head, turned round and went back through the door, laughing, seemingly unbothered by the request. She pointed up the stairs.

‘I think we have to go up. She wants to see who we are.’

We walked up an ancient staircase with a wrought-iron balustrade. ‘It might be the same place,’ my father said, his voice almost a whisper.

‘You think this is it, this is the apartment itself?’

‘It’s hard to remember.’

The old woman was standing on the landing. She was stooped over a stick but her eyes glittered. She rattled off a stream of Czech at my father and he answered. She looked uncertain. I looked for
a translation but his attention was fixed on the old lady. She started to shout at him, waving the stick. He held out his hands, palms up, and seemed to plead with her. ‘Dad—’

He held out a hand. ‘Wait, Meredith.’

She lowered the stick but her eyes still flashed. He shook his head, muttered something in a low tone. She snapped a reply, brushing her spare hand over her eyes. He said something else to her.
Then she was shouting again, pushing the stick against his shoulder as though she wanted to stab him.

I stepped forward. ‘Stop this.’ She had enough English to understand. ‘She’s clearly not well. She’s . . .’ I didn’t know how to label the fury. Perhaps
the old lady was suffering from some kind of dementia.

‘She has every right to be angry with me.’ He said something again in Czech, holding up his hands as though she were facing him with a pistol.

She studied him for a few seconds. Then she was brushing us towards the flat, ushering us into a stuffy room filled with bamboo furniture, a cage of canaries at one end, beside the balcony.
‘She says to sit,’ Dad whispered. He stared at the old-fashioned television set in the corner. ‘We used to watch cartoons. There was one about a mole, I remember.’

‘What was all that about?’ I asked. ‘Is she demented?’

‘Hana,’ he said, simply.

‘It wasn’t your fault she left you in the forest.’

He made one of the central-European gestures with his shoulders.

I perched on a cushioned chair. The old lady asked him something.

‘She doesn’t really know who I am,’ he said.

‘Did she say what happened to Hana after you left the country?’

He shook his head. But then the old woman spoke again.

‘Karel?’ she said slowly. ‘Karel Stastny?’ As though she hadn’t heard his name properly before.

He nodded. She asked something else rapidly. He answered, gesturing that we should leave. Her hand was on the apartment door, ready to show us out. She paused. I could almost see doubts, fears,
questions passing through her mind. She nodded back in the direction of the sitting room. I returned to my chair. Dad said something else and she answered slowly, shaking her head, wiping her eyes.
He blinked. Rested his forehead on his hand.

‘Hana died,’ he said, letting out a long sigh. ‘Years ago. I didn’t know and nobody knew how to tell me.’

‘I’m so sorry, Dad.’ I was surprised that I did feel sorrow for him. Before this morning I’d have classed this loss as very minor in comparison with the loss of my
mother. Its scale might be smaller but a sorrow it was, all the same.

‘Well, there we are.’ He started to get up. ‘At least I know.’ He managed a smile. ‘Better to know than to wonder.’

The old woman brushed her hand over her eyes again. He put a hand on her shoulder. I saw her eyes soften. She looked as though she might take a chance on a pair of strangers from a faraway land.
Though Dad wasn’t a true stranger to her, of course. She’d have met him when he was Hana’s boyfriend, in the happy days just before the Russians invaded the country.

‘Stay there,’ she said, and I understood her perfectly now even though she was still speaking Czech. She went to a drawer where she rifled through papers and opened boxes. Whatever
it was she was looking for didn’t seem to be in its place. She hobbled off into another room.

I heard her sighing and muttering and the sound of drawers and cupboards opening. I hoped she was all right. She was only just home from a hospital stay. A smell of mustiness wafted through into
the room where we waited. She brought in an old photo album and handed it to Dad, stabbing at the pictures with a wrinkled finger. He sat straighter and asked her a question. As she answered he was
reaching into his inside pocket for his reading glasses. He studied what seemed to be a faded colour photo and nodded slowly. Then he lowered the album and met the gaze of the old woman and told
her something. Some of the hostility I’d noticed in her seemed to soften. He asked her something urgently and she shook her head. He asked another question in a less urgent, softer tone, and
she answered, wiping her eyes. Then he lowered his eyes to the photograph and stared at it without speaking, a hand over his eyes so that his expression was hidden.

‘Who is it?’ I reached for the album and pulled it to me. A young schoolkid in seventies-style shorts, short brown hair, some kind of uniform with a knotted scarf, and a determined
expression. He, or she, it was hard to be sure, reminded me of someone I knew very well.

He turned to me. ‘My eldest child.’

Meredith

‘Clara?’ I peered at the photo again. Then I saw it wasn’t my sister. It was a boy in a uniform a bit like a scout’s. The firm set of the jaw and the
directness of the gaze were very like Clara’s.

‘Jan.’ My father spoke the name almost in a whisper. Realization was starting to sweep through me. I think the cells of my body began to comprehend before my brain had registered
what this meant. My
brother
. Jan.

‘Hana was pregnant, not ill, when you headed for the border.’ I spoke the words very slowly. Hana’s sickness and fatigue had been nothing to do with the tainted sausage eaten
on the train.

He nodded. ‘Mrs Novakova here doesn’t know if Hana’d worked out what was happening when she ran away. Maria Novakova is Hana’s cousin, by the way. She’s lived here
all her life.’

I glanced at the old lady, who seemed to be softening by the second. She made some clucking noises at me and bustled off, calling something over her shoulder. ‘Coffee,’ Dad
translated. I glanced at my watch.

‘There’ll always be another flight.’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing my father say this. He smiled at my face. I couldn’t remember my father ever accepting that a
flight or a train should be missed, plans altered, the administration of his beloved school compromised. For the first time in many years Dad was going to let events flow instead of timetabling
them into thirty-five minute slots.

‘We’ll have to pay extra,’ I warned him. ‘We don’t have an open return.’ I sounded like my sister.

He made another of the gestures with his open palms, dismissing the added expense. ‘After Hana had our son she didn’t finish her textiles course but managed to train as an art
teacher. She was worried that the school authorities would remember her involvement with student politics but her father was a bigwig and the Russians approved of him. She worked in a school here
until her death in 1980 from breast cancer.’

‘And she never thought to tell you that she’d had your child?’

‘She died long before the Berlin Wall came down. She probably thought there was little chance that I’d ever get to see Jan, so what was the point?’

‘Where’s Jan now?’

He let out a deep breath. ‘He’s no longer alive.’

‘Oh, Dad.’ The expression on his face was unbearable. He’d found his son. And lost his son. All within five minutes. Did all men, I wondered, have a yearning for a son? What
could Clara and I, female creatures, offer in recompense? I stared at the blue-and-white porcelain coffee cups to give him a moment.

‘Jan trained as a doctor.’ Dad had regained his poise. ‘He did well in life.’

Naturally, I thought. He was your child.

‘He settled down in his late twenties and married.’

The old woman interjected, seeming to emphasize some point. He nodded. ‘They were both working at a paediatric hospital at the time their car was hit by a drunk driver fourteen years
ago.’ He bit his lip. I reached over and squeezed his hand. ‘They both died.’

I waited. There was more to emerge. When it wasn’t spoken I voiced it. ‘Jan had a child, didn’t he?’

He nodded. ‘I’m getting to that part.’ He always insisted on relating events in the right order. ‘I have to backtrack for a moment. Hana had married in her late twenties.
Jan was a lad of about nine or ten by then. Some years after that she had a second child, a daughter, Sofia.’ My skin prickled. Dad turned the pages of the album. ‘Here we are: this is
Hana with her two children.’ A slim auburn-haired woman with a boy in shorts, who must be Jan, and a baby. ‘Sofia, the baby in this picture, has been working abroad for some years.
She’d be about your age now, Meredith.’ We looked at one another.

Mrs Novakova clattered in with a laden tray and I stood up to help her make a space on the low table in front of the sofa. ‘England,’ she said. ‘Sofia work in
England.’

As I already knew.

‘But where is the child?’ I asked Dad, feeling the urgency in my voice. ‘Where is Jan’s girl, your granddaughter?’ But even as I asked the question I already knew
the answer. I turned to the old woman. ‘Do you have a photograph of Jan’s little girl?’

For a moment I thought she hadn’t understood the English. ‘Little girl?’ Her eyes glazed. She said something and walked out of the room, opening another door at the far end of
the corridor, and reappearing with a silver-framed photograph of a toddler sitting on a woman’s lap. I peered and peered at the child’s round features. ‘What’s her
name?’ I asked.

‘Irena,’ said Mrs Novakova, whose understanding of English seemed to come and go in waves, according to the emotional intensity of what was being asked. ‘She in
England.’

Irena. Not Olivia. Disappointment felt like cold water crashing over me.

I stared at Irena. But she just looked like any other little child of that age.

Meredith

We made our plane – with an Olympic sprint to the gate. In his hand, along with his boarding card, my father clutched the photo of Jan; poor, dead Jan who’d never
known his father or half-sisters, and whose own daughter had been orphaned so young.