The Academy of Sciences

There are times I think the past is nothing more than a room attached to ours. We enter it a hundred times a day, argue with whoever's there; we flatten a cowlick, move the vase, true the picture on the wall.

I was looking out at the garden the other day (something I tend to do in November) when I thought of my father. For just one second it seemed impossible that he should be eighty-nine and living in Prague—where they were having an early winter, he said—while I found myself six time zones back, renting a house no more than five minutes from where we'd once lived as a family. It felt like I could just walk over, find us there.

A cat appeared on the fence and a gust of sparrows rose against the neighbor's house. I'd cleared the beds the day before, hauling off long armloads of pea vines segmented like the legs of sea creatures; for the first time in months I could see the wooden borders framing the dirt.

Zdenek Slouka. When I say my father's name out loud, I hear his voice coming out of my mouth. Years ago I stopped using my middle name—his first. He never mentioned it. He's remarried now, but it doesn't matter: we're the only ones left, and we both know it.

It's hard for me to see his life as anything but a column of subtractions, as if God, picking flowers for the celestial vase, decided out of curiosity to pluck one bare—he loves me, he loves me not. His parents, whom he had to leave behind when he escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1948, died before the regime that had exiled him fell. He never saw them again; I never met them. His sister, Luba, my only aunt, threw herself out of a window in 1950, though my father wouldn't know about it for two years, imagining her all that time walking to school or lying in the grass above the athletic stadium in Brno with her friends—a temporary afterlife, like an image in a bubble. When a letter finally got through in September of 1952, the knowledge that she'd been gone so long made for a grief both slightly uncanny and tinged by insincerity—like going under anesthesia, I imagine, watching your own leg being removed.

And so it went, petal by petal. An old friend, a Latinist reduced to doing manual labor for refusing to join the Party, sat down to dinner the day before Christmas 1966, cracked a walnut, and died. Eventually there were just the three of us: my father, my mother, and me. The nuclear unit, famously unstable.

Whatever the question, my mother, whom he must have made love with at least once, was not the answer. An only child herself (capable of the most spontaneous joy I've ever known in an adult), she was broken by fifty, battered by gusts of sadness and rage. When she finally divorced my father in 1991 after forty-three years of marriage, she moved, along with the uncomfortable suburban furniture that had filled our home, to a mold-ridden farmhouse in Moravia where she re-created the rooms she'd been so miserable in, then gradually forgot everything: our cabin at Lost Lake, the days we laughed, the hot afternoons at the station when we'd wait for my father in the burnt electric smell of the ties and the steel—everything. A mercy for someone infatuated with regret. "Zdenek? Zdenek who?" she asked me, the last time I saw her, still here but not.

Which left just my father and me to carry all that history. We carried it well enough—my father especially. Wedded to reason, inclined like a heliotrope to whatever could be known (author of the monograph The Intercontinental Shelf and International Law), he had the gift of being able to accept the gavel coming down, of being able to bear the sentence: "It wasn't." The comma and the conjunction he left to...