CHARLOTTE

Her first year in New York City, Charlotte waited tables at a dive bar in the Village at night and shot photographs during the day. It was two years before she allowed herself to pull back, to see more than just a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth; before she became disenchanted with falling into her own pores.

In an art supply store on Houston Street she discovered rows of miniature trees and bushes, tiny people frozen into different positions: housewives, men in business suits, walking, running, little boys and girls, dogs, cats, farm animals. They were cheap. She filled a basket with them.

Charlotte glued them to her skin. Mountaineers climbed her knees. Jack and Jill tumbled down her naked breast. Sheep and cows emerged from her hair. She began playing with the lighting and spraying herself with metallic paint. By the time she was through no one would guess the setting was her own skin.

Loft space was still cheap then. She worked in the small studio she’d cordoned off by hanging a parachute canopy down the middle of the room. Her darkroom was built out of drop cloths she bought at the hardware store, spray-painted black and stretched like gigantic canvases on wooden frames. She lived only for the next iteration of her face, hip, arm, or leg. She never showed those pictures to anyone.

Holidays she took the bus to Buffalo to eat dried-out chicken and gluey mashed potatoes with Hap and Marion.

Her mother always asked, “What it is you’re doing again? Something to do with photography?”

“You ought to try weddings,” her father said. “And school portraits? I hear there’s a good buck to be made doing weddings and school portraits.”

Sundays, Charlotte went to dinner at the Aronson’s. Cece had married Brad, who was putting in eighty hours a week at a silk stocking law firm. Cece worked at a publishing house. They lived in a tiny studio apartment in a high rent district on the Upper East Side. In the beginning Charlotte went alone.

The man at the peephole was short and slim with high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and straight dark hair. He was holding a stack of magazines in one hand and a battered suitcase in the other.

“What do you want?” Charlotte shouted through the steel-plated door.

“You want to buy? Very good prices. Time. Life. Seventeen.”

She opened the door a crack, leaving the security chain on.

“Not interested,” she said, and started to push the door closed.

Behind her the radio piped classical music into the room. It was interrupted mid-concerto by the grandiloquent voice of the show’s host.

“We have a news brief just in.”

There was a pause.

“Remember this date, listeners: August 20th, 1968. The Russian army has just invaded Czechoslovakia.”

The man standing at Charlotte’s door dropped the suitcase and magazines. The noise startled her.

“My country!” he said.

“Your what?”

“On your radio. My country.”

She turned to listen.

“At 9:30 Eastern Standard Time this morning, the Russian government overthrew the government of Czechoslovakia . . . tanks . . . a coup . . . pockets of resistance . . .”

When she turned back, tears were streaming down the stranger’s face.

“You’d better come in,” she said, and opened the door.

She steered him to a chair. He collapsed into it. Charlotte brought his suitcase and the magazines inside.

“Next week. I have to go back to university. These magazines. I found them in the paper. An ad. To make money to pay for school.”

“I’m sure it won’t last. It’s probably just a short-term thing.”

He looked at her like she was crazy. Why wouldn’t he? What was unimaginable to her was happening to him. Tanks and men with machine guns had taken over his country. She remembered grade school duck and cover drills, huddling under her desk, worried. Maybe it wasn’t a drill. Maybe the Russians were coming.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That was an incredibly insensitive thing to say.” Without asking, she poured him a shot of whiskey.

If he hadn’t shown her what was in the suitcase, she wouldn’t have let him stay. There were six of them. Marionettes. A man. A woman. A boy. A girl. A baby. And an old crone. Their names fit their expressive faces, which were carved out of wood and painted. The carving was crude at first glance, their features exaggerated: wide-set eyes and long, sharp noses. There were the couples: Vítek and Vûra, Pavla and Emil. The baby was Zophie. The old woman he called Liba.

His name was Zdenĕk Markovic. He was from a small town outside of Prague, the youngest son of a family of puppeteers performing around Prague since 1583. He demonstrated them for her. The instant he lifted them they came to life. They laughed. They cried. They danced. The baby Zophie did somersaults. The old lady Liba sneezed.

Charlotte called around. There was a sizable Czech community in New York.

Yes.

They had already set up a network to help people like him who held visitor’s visas, but couldn’t go back.

No.

The Russians weren’t allowing traveling Czechs to return.

Yes.

He would have to apply for asylum.

They would send someone to help. Meanwhile, could she put him up for a few days? She made her sofa up into a bed.

Cece’s phone voice sounded far away.

“You know nothing about him. He just materialized out of nowhere,” Cece said. Charlotte adjusted the receiver to a more comfortable position between her shoulder and her ear. She was in the middle of setting up a barnyard scene.

“Don’t worry,” Charlotte said.

She was annoyed. It was Cece’s third call since she told her about the refugee. “He’s harmless,” Charlotte said, sifting through a box of plastic cows. “I probably know more about him than I know about you. I’ve had all these Czechs hanging around and the FBI. The INS made him fill out a pile of forms. Want to know the names of every school he ever attended? How about his grandmother’s maiden name? Inoculations? Childhood diseases? Go ahead. Ask me.”

“Enough. Brad and I just want you to be careful. There are so many weirdos creeping around out there.”

“It’s almost over. He’ll be gone in a couple of days.”

And he was, to an apartment a Brooklyn church rented to house him and some other stranded refugees. He kept calling to thank her, asking when he would see her again. She let him buy her dinner: chili dogs from a cart in Central Park.

“Ah, how I love these,” Zdeněk said, and juggled the chili dogs to a park bench. Everything he did seemed calculated to make her laugh.

Charlotte wasn’t as crazy about chili dogs as he was. She ate only one. Zdeněk downed three. They walked and talked from one end of the park to the other. When there was nothing left to say and nowhere else to go, she took him home. He was great in bed, a sweet, playful, considerate lover. When she finally introduced them, Cece and Brad loved him. Children loved him. Dogs loved him. He was fun. He was sweet. He was kind.

“He loves you.”

“So what.”

“You could love him back.”

“A couple of nights a week is about it for me.”

“Everyone loves him.”

“What if they love him more than they love me?”

“Give yourself a break.”

“You could start by not taking yourself so seriously.”

They fell into a predictable routine, a few nights a week and Sundays. She never expected it to last so long.