Nick felt the guard straighten before he saw the smudge in the distance. It grew into a bus, and the guard alerted the soldier in the watchtower, shouting up in Czech. The soldier answered, then another came out of the guardhouse. Something was going on. The guard next to Nick noisily drew in the last of the American smoke, stubbed it out with his boot, and stood straighter. The second guard joined him, and Nick had the feeling that the others inside were watching too.
The bus drew up at the Austrian crossing and pulled to the side of the road. The Czech guards were talking back and forth. People began filing out of the bus, and even at this distance Nick could see the tennis shoes and bright colors that meant a tour group. He imagined them crowding the interrogation room, exchanging money, flooding the counters with passports. The guards were imagining it too, their conversation a mix of groans and anticipation. The tourists stood to one side of the striped crossing gate, taking out cameras and aiming them directly up the hill at the iron curtain. Nick and the guards stood there, zoo animals. Then, pictures taken, the tourists got back on the bus. In a few minutes it turned around and, like a mirage, was gone.
Nick saw the disappointment on the guards’ faces and wanted to laugh out loud. Nothing was wrong. An American passport, an English car-they had been the only event of the day. The tourist buses, memories of the busy months last year when the border was porous, passed them by now. It wasn’t about him and Molly. Here, in this Cold War diorama, dressed up with the old symbols, the players had nothing to do.
At last they were allowed to pass. Beyond the Czech frontier, Nick could tell the difference immediately. The road, a major one, developed ragged shoulders, asphalt crumbling away at the sides. There were no houses, no billboards, few road signs of any kind, and even the landscape itself began to look rundown, dingy and ill kept around the edges. In only a few miles they were in another world. The road became the main street of villages, the way roads did before they were highways, passing mud puddles and ducks and women in babushkas, the timeless Eastern Europe of the folk tales. There were few cars. The villages depressed Nick-peeling plaster and old electric wires and a rim of dust extending up from the bottoms of the buildings, as if the whole town had been in a bathtub that drained, leaving a ring. People looked up as the car passed. The propaganda was true — nobody smiled.
“Do you want me to drive?”
“What?”
“I said, do you want me to drive? You seem a little preoccupied.”
“I’m fine,” he said, brushing it off. “How do we contact him?” He was staring straight ahead, edging away from an oncoming truck.
“We call him up,” she said, smiling. “It’s a city. Phones. Garbage. Everything.”
But he didn’t want to play. “I thought you said all the phones were tapped.” He drove quietly for a minute. “What if he’s not here? I mean, it’s been a month. What if he left?”
“Where would he go? You can’t just walk down to Cook’s and buy a ticket.”
“Back to Moscow. He could go back to Moscow.”
“Will you stop?” she said, rolling down the window. “Look, the sun’s coming out. Spring.”
There were in fact blossoms now, not just buds, and the countryside was coming to life, as if the border had been a poison leaching into the soil. Here and there Nick saw an old manor house, a steepled church, left over from engravings of old Bohemia, but he found it impossible to imagine himself back in time. The grim present was always around them-the housing blocks of damp concrete, the dusty streets, the pervading sense that he was somewhere foreign, on the other side. He knew this was silly-an American wouldn’t be in any danger-but he felt vulnerable and aware at the same time, as if he were walking down a dark street at night. Things were different here, as arbitrary and whimsical as a policeman’s goodwill. He felt like a child. Maybe the Czechs did too, made wary and fretful by unpredictable authority. Even in the spring sunshine it seemed to him a country of shadows. They were in Prague before they realized they had entered it. In America, the skylines offered a sense of arrival, but here there were simply more houses, then street signs, red with white lettering, and tram rails, everything getting denser as they moved toward the center. They came down a long hill, running along the wall of a park, and found themselves circling a World War II Soviet tank at the bottom before the road shot off toward the river. It was here, finally, that the city opened up to a vista, Kafka’s castle high on the hill to their left, yellow buildings with tile roofs, the graceful bridges, the sky spiked everywhere by steeples.
