Lights Out in the Reptile House (28 page)

There was news for him. The war was as usual but there were reports of troubles inside the army and there'd been in the city alone in the last month nine explosions, set by God knew who. There had been two bombs left at municipal offices in bookbags, and in one of the markets a donkey had exploded; down by the waterfront a blond boy had walked into a hotel foyer and had blown up. They were now in a special state of emergency, which Leda's mother confessed she thought they'd
been
in, though officially the explanation was still that these were not partisans but delinquents.

The hotel explosion had destroyed the front of the building housing the nursery center, so now Leda was out of a job.

When he looked at her she arched her eyebrows and shrugged.

Which didn't help financially, but still, her mother said.

Did he have a place to stay? she added.

“Can't he stay with us?” Leda asked. “After all he's done for us?”

Karel looked away in genuine embarrassment. “Of course,” Leda's mother said. “I was just curious. I'll fix it somehow.”

“I can get a place,” Karel said. “I've got money.”

“Plenty of time for that,” her mother said. “For now you're our guest.”

They were all awkward and silent and then Karel said that what he wanted most was to have some real seafood again, and would they let him take them out for dinner? Leda's mother graciously vetoed the idea, to his relief, over the protests of David and Nicholas. She suggested slyly that the two of them go. Leda colored when he asked and said she'd love to.

In the street she took his hand. She was wearing the red linen dress and he considered it a good sign. She'd glossed her lips with something even though he'd heard her complaining to her mother when getting ready in the bedroom that there was no lipstick or anything else she could use anywhere.

She said she knew a restaurant and led the way. She asked if he was sure he could afford it, if maybe this was irresponsible of them, considering. Then she squeezed his arm and said she thought celebrating his being here was not going to hurt anything, really.

They passed cinnamon and cypress trees that made the air fresh and fragrant. Down a side street people were being made to scour slogans off a wall with wire brushes while soldiers looked on. Leda didn't notice them and Karel didn't point them out. They passed wide yards of washing, and ahead of them on the street from the backseat of a car a woman's hand stretched to caress a man on the sidewalk who leaned toward her. Karel began to recognize where he was. Leda crouched and spread a finger and thumb around a cricket, but it shot ahead and disappeared into a hedge. Everything seemed suddenly touching to him, his return, the city, Leda, the shadows of the leaves on the streets, and he felt the need to stop and put his hand on his heart and look around. As they turned a corner he imagined himself imprisoned or stranded on a far-off island and remembering the ordinariness of this walk with her as the perfect walk and the perfect happiness.

The restaurant was the Sea's Trade.

They sat in the open-air section, furnished now with new wire café-style chairs and smaller tables. They could see down into the harbor and the sun flashed off the water around the boats. The gulls he remembered still circled and settled endlessly.

“This is so nice,” Leda said.

They ordered wine and melon. Karel told her he loved her letters and quoted passages from them, and she was pleased. She apologized for always being so mopey and pessimistic in them and he said not at all, they were wonderful, and she was even more pleased. She asked him if he was getting taller and he sat up straight and said he thought he was. She asked if he was okay considering everything, and he looked away, guilty, and said he was, though he was worried he wouldn't see her enough even here in the city.

Was that a major worry? She wished she had his problems, she said, but she smiled to indicate she was flattered.

How about her? he wanted to know. Was she okay?

Much better now, she said. The menu was on a chalkboard, and the waiter brought it by. She ordered ocean catfish with dates and turmeric and he got fried brislings or sprats, tiny and plump fish he hadn't seen since he was six or seven.

It was hard, though, she said when the waiter went away. He could see she was delighted at the sophistication of eating out, of the two of them here alone. Today he had perked everyone up, but it wasn't always like that. It seemed as if everyone had lost his enthusiasm for everything, which was understandable. She put her hands down and touched her silverware and plate with appreciation. It had been hard on her mother especially. Not all the girls where Leda had worked had been let go, and her mother was convinced Leda's attitude had had something to do with it. She smiled at him. She said, “Nicholas meanwhile has gotten completely quiet, and David I really worry about—he's getting like the dog from across the street, Eski, full of all these terrors that just come and go. He's always waking us up, and he sits there during the day saying these little wild things to himself. But maybe the scariest thing is that I can feel it wearing
me
down. I'm getting slower mentally. I can feel it. Sometimes when I'm reading I have to go back and read the words aloud, and still they just lie there and it's like I don't absorb them or something.”

Karel stroked the top of her hand sympathetically.

“It's scary,” she said.

They were quiet, though they smiled at each other occasionally to show they were half sorry the conversation had gone in that direction.

She asked if it had been harder than he thought seeing his father, and he was surprised by how sad it made him even now. He told her that over and over again he thought he understood how little he meant to his father, and over and over again he found out he meant even less.

“He just doesn't like me,” Karel said. He shrugged helplessly.

He told her how much his father had always mistrusted him—him! What was he going to do? Who was he going to betray his father
to?
—and the way he'd always been amazed that all that suspicion had never seemed a burden for his father to carry. He gave her examples, and the food arrived. She said quietly that in the case of her and her mother she was beginning to realize how much alike they were. “My aunt says I'm turning into her,” she said.

The notion bothered him and he thought she was leading him to something, that she thought it was true in his case. Maybe she was right: if things were bad between him and his father, did he really think it was all his father's fault? He remembered the way even as a small child when he watched his father doing something wrong he would think, I'll always be able to use this against him. He had collected and exaggerated his father's faults. They were always reacting to each other, and that had something to do, he realized, with their helplessness together.

Leda saw his sadness and leaned forward and whispered something he didn't hear. He was grateful and reminded of an early memory of one of his mother's quiet counter-demonstrations of sympathy on his behalf.

Over dessert she didn't seem bothered by his suggestion that his father had changed. Her mother said if you lay down with dogs you got up with fleas, she said. The comment stung him. He imagined her discovering where he'd been with Kehr.

They walked home in step behind a drunk who seemed perpetually ready to topple over. They balked for a while at the riskiness of passing him and finally slipped by when he collapsed against a fence rail. When they looked back again he'd slid to a sitting position.

It was quiet and the lights were out when they got home, and Leda took off Karel's shoes and settled him into some blankets on the floor. He realized he had drunk too much and he felt vague and slightly paralyzed. She kissed him goodnight and disappeared, and he lay back while the ceiling wavered above him in the dark. He listened to David's breathing and Nicholas's slight snore. He felt with some sadness that even loving Leda as he did he hadn't succeeded in adjusting himself here, to these people, either, and that even in this city that he'd dreamed of coming back to he was still an outsider.

The next morning they went to the beach. He still hadn't met Leda's aunt and was nervous about that. She was out when he got up. They took Nicholas and David, and Mrs. Schiele left with them to look for work. Leda would have to as well in a few days, she warned before they split up. She told Karel in an aside that he should keep an eye on David's cough. Leda told him as they waved goodbye that her mother was becoming obsessed with everybody's health. She speculated that it was her way of dealing with her powerlessness in everything else.

It was a hot day. The breeze off the water made him wonder just what his favorite smell was, if it wasn't this. Leda seemed very happy, and he wondered if in some situations thoughtlessness was justified.

The beach was a startling bone color, and in the shallows offshore the water was an electric blue. Both were crowded. They crossed a paved area to the sand and spread their blanket in the shadow of an upside-down white dory with a shattered keel. Leda warned David about splinters and he and Nicholas whooped-hooped their way across the hot sand to the water's edge.

Leda lay on her back facing the sun. Karel lay beside her, propped up on his elbows. She took his hand. She was wearing a pale gray bathing suit, and he looked down at the water and told her she looked beautiful. Her toes waved in his line of sight, acknowledging the compliment.

The sand was powdery and made him think of hot ash. He dug around with his heels and unearthed a green wine bottle choked with sand. Adults on other blankets were bobbing their forefingers, counting children crouched over tide pools. He closed his eyes. Leda murmured something beside him. They could live here with every day the same as the day before. He'd provide for them all and they'd make him happy and drive Kehr and the image of himself in the cellars of the Civil Guard out of his mind.

They went down to the water to swim. Sandpipers milled around nervously in the glaze of the wave's retreat, and he thought he could hear the suction of their feet on the wet sand. On the reef he could see the shadow of a sea bass lunging at nothing, and at their feet a jellyfish had washed up onto the sand. It trembled in the wind and David poked at it and dropped rocks on it. Karel dove in, and when he surfaced and looked back Leda had her arms out but instead of emulating his dive sat down suddenly at the water's edge and began to splash herself. Her brothers surprised her from behind and threw her in.

He opened his eyes in the underwater silence while she swam to him. Below them in the hazy green light they could see scraps of a fishing net rotting over tin cans and a whelk gripping a holster. Above them the surface rippled like the ceiling of a luminous tent, and they held hands and floated with the dreaming motion of clouds leaving the world behind.

Back on the blankets they watched her brothers and other boys splashing around a tide pool to collect crabs for a crab war. They toweled off and stared at gulls perched on the dory and the gulls looked back at them as if they knew that when these people were gone others would show up and stare at them, too. Leda lay back and settled herself comfortably with her face to the sun again. Beyond her someone was swinging a baby so that its toes skimmed the sand and the baby was screaming in terror and glee. Karel lay with his hand on his cheek and looked at the wet dark hair combed back from her forehead and the grains of sand that glittered in her ears and imagined with a kind of onrushing contentment that his life was starting now, that what he could do now, finally, was figure out the ways to be happy.

When he met Leda's aunt she told him it was nice to meet him and that he had to leave. She made him repeat the story of how he got there alone, and it was clear she thought something was suspicious about all of this and that there might be trouble in it. Leda and her mother protested and argued and claimed they couldn't believe she was acting this way, but in the end it didn't matter and Leda's mother explained to him that this was her husband's sister, and he found himself out on the street with his beltpack and a bag of food, saying goodbye to Leda while the aunt looked down at them from the upstairs window. He still didn't know her name. He was a little frightened but he had money and he told Leda he was going to stay at the Golden Angel, at least until he could find a cheaper place, and that she should look for him there.

It took him longer than he expected to find it. The same manager, the tubby man with the sunburned head, was sitting on a wooden chair in the cool shade of the entrance. He didn't remember Karel. He led him inside.

Karel stood taking deep breaths while the manager fussed with the register. The lobby was the way he recalled it, musty and fragrant with the scent of wood. He went into the common room and visited the painting of the cavalry charge. He had tears in his eyes. For what? he thought. Those days? The situation now? He turned to the manager, who was waiting. He realized he wanted to bring Leda back here and couple an old happiness with the present one, though he wasn't sure why.

It turned out that all the rooms were much too expensive. The manager repeated the price. Karel stood at the desk feeling that whatever sense he'd had that he could get along in the city alone was gone. The manager added that there
was
one room, very small and no view, it was nice enough but no luxury suite, and next to one of the service rooms besides. He could let Karel have it for less than half the standard rate.

It was fine. It looked out on a narrow street. It had an iron bedstead, a desk, a wooden armchair, and a warped chest decorated with phlox and pale trumpets in a clay pot. The bathroom was in the hall. He set his beltpack on the desk and opened it in a parody of someone settling in with his luggage, and the manager handed him his key and left.

He sat on the bed and tried to determine what to do with himself. It occurred to him that he needed long pants, that he stood out and that it would get colder here. He decided instead to see his old house.