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1
Twenty years ago, before their trips became political, Sophie and Emmett honeymooned in Eastern Europe. Their parents questioned this choice, but Harvard had taught them to care about what happened on the other side of the planet, and from the TV rooms in their dorms they’d watched the crumbling of the USSR with the kind of excitement that hadn’t really been their due. They had watched with the erroneous feeling that they, along with Ronald Reagan, had chipped away at the foundations of the corrupt Soviet monolith. By the time they married in 1991, both only twenty-two, it felt like time for a victory lap.
Unlike Emmett, Sophie had never been to Europe, and she’d longed to see those Left Bank Paris cafés she’d read so much about. “But this is where history’s happening,” Emmett told her. “It’s the less traveled road.” From early on in their relationship, Sophie had learned that life was more interesting when she took on Emmett’s enthusiasms, so she didn’t bother resisting.
They waited until September to avoid the August tourist crush, gingerly beginning their trip with four days in Vienna, that arid city of wedding-cake buildings and museums. Cool but polite Austrians filled the streets, heading down broad avenues and cobblestone walkways, all preoccupied by things more important than gawking American tourists. Dutifully, Sophie lugged her Lonely Planet as they visited the Stephansdom and Hofburg, the Kunsthalle, and the cafés Central and Sacher, Emmett talking of Graham Greene and the filming of The Third Man, which he’d apparently researched just before their trip. “Can you imagine how this place looked just after the war?” he asked at the Sacher on their final Viennese afternoon. He was clutching a foot-tall beer, gazing out the café window. “They were decimated. Living like rats. Disease and starvation.”
As she looked out at shining BMWs and Mercedeses crawling past the imposing rear of the State Opera House, she couldn’t imagine this at all, and she wondered—not for the first time—if she was lacking in the kind of imagination that her husband took for granted. Enthusiasm and imagination. She measured him with a long look. Boyish face and round, hazel eyes. A lock of hair splashed across his forehead. Beautiful, she thought as she fingered her still unfamiliar wedding band. This was the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with.
He turned from the window, shaking his head, then caught sight of her face. “Hey. What’s wrong?”
She wiped away tears, smiling, then gripped his fingers so tightly that her wedding ring pinched the soft skin of her finger. She pulled him closer and whispered, “Let’s go back to the room.”
He paid the bill, fumbling with Austrian marks. Enthusiasm, imagination, and commitment—these were the qualities she most loved in Emmett Kohl, because they were the very things she felt she lacked. Harvard had taught her to question everything, and she had taken up that challenge, growing aptly disillusioned by both left and right, so uncommitted to either that when Emmett began his minilectures on history or foreign relations, she just sat and listened, less in awe of his facts than in awe of his belief. It struck her that this was what adulthood was about—belief. What did Sophie believe in? She wasn’t sure. Compared to him, she was only half an adult. With him, she hoped, she might grow into something better.
While among historical artifacts and exotic languages she always felt inferior to her new husband, in bed their roles were reversed, so whenever the insecurity overcame her she would draw him there. Emmett, delighted to be used this way, never thought to wonder at the timing of her sexual urges. He was beautiful and smart but woefully inexperienced, whereas she had learned the etiquette of the sheets from a drummer in a punk band, a French history teacher’s assistant, and, over the space of a single experimental weekend, a girlfriend from Virginia who had come to visit her in Boston.
So when they returned to their hotel room, hand in hand, and she helped him out of his clothes and let him watch, fingertips rattling against the bedspread, as she stripped, she felt whole again. She was the girl who believed in nothing, giving a little show for the boy who believed in everything. Yet by the time they were tangled together beneath the sheets, flesh against flesh, she realized that she was wrong. She did believe in something. She believed in Emmett Kohl.
The next morning they boarded the train to Prague, and not even the filthy car with the broken, stinking toilet deterred her. Instead, it filled her with the illusion that they were engaged in real travel, cutting-edge travel. “This is what the rest of the world looks like,” Emmett said with a smile as he surveyed the morose, nervous Czechs clutching bags stuffed with contraband cigarettes, alcohol, and other luxuries marked for resale back home. When, at the border, the guards removed an old woman and two young men who quietly watched the train leave them behind, Sophie was filled with feelings of authenticity.
She told herself to keep her eyes and ears open. She told herself to absorb it all.
The dilapidated fairy-tale architecture of Prague buoyed them, and they drank fifty-cent beers in underground taverns lit with candles. Sophie tried to put words to her excitement, the magnitude of a small-town girl ending up here, of all places. She was the child of a Virginia lumber merchant, her travels limited to the height and breadth of the East Coast, and now she was an educated woman, married, wandering the Eastern Bloc. This dislocation stunned her when she thought about it, yet when she tried to explain it to her husband her words felt inadequate. Emmett had always been the verbal one, and when he smiled and held her hand and told her he understood she wondered if he was patronizing her. “Stick with me, kid,” he said in his best Bogart.
On their third day, he bought her a miniature bust of Lenin, and they laughed about it as they walked the crowded Charles Bridge between statues of Czech kings looking down on them in the stagnant summer heat. They were a little drunk, giggling about the Lenin in her hand. She rocked it back and forth and used it the way a ventriloquist would. Emmett’s face got very pink under the sun—years later, she would remember that.
Then there was the boy.
He appeared out of nowhere, seven or eight years old, emerging from between all the other anonymous tourists, silent at Sophie’s elbow. Suddenly, he had her Lenin in his hands. He was so quick. He bolted around legs and past an artist dabbing at an easel to the edge of the bridge, and Sophie feared he was going to leap over. Emmett started moving toward the boy, and then they saw the bust again, over the boy’s head. He hurtled it into the air—it rose and fell.
“Little shit,” Emmett muttered, and when Sophie caught up to him and looked down at the river, there was no sign of her little Lenin. The boy was gone. Afterward, on the walk back to the hotel, she was overcome by the feeling that she and Emmett were being made fools of. It followed her the rest of the trip, on to Budapest and during their unexpected excursion to Yugoslavia, and even after they returned to Boston. Twenty years later, she still hadn’t been able to shake that feeling.
Copyright © 2014 by Third State, Inc.
