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By Root 814 0

nothing. She’d lived through various political turmoils I had to learn about from books. She was entwined in centuries of cultural, religious, and social networks that proved, when she loved me back, that I must be free of my own past. Heidi separated me from the United States, and now a desire not to be separate, to rediscover with a wife the feeling of my youth with Dana, carried me through compromises and misjudgments. Some part of me thought I had to roam to a land as foreign as possible and find the most unlikely mate to solve this problem. You can wish to be indifferent. Oh, Christ, the unconscious, the psychologizing, the myth, the instinct: I can write and theorize and still not fully explain: I loved Jana. I did.

How long does the geographic solution work? How long can you strive for difference and indifference? Eleven years. Time whips us through each accelerating year, January, Janua, Jan, J, as through a centrifuge, shooting out particles of regret, shreds of memory, a distillate of recalled loss, squandered potential, wasted opportunities, scrambled priorities. Those eleven years—the onset of adulthood at last—brought some of the happiest times of my life: wedding, birth of children, professional success.

“Bohemia!” my father wrote me back in ’94, congratulating me on my wedding, sending his well-justified regrets for the ceremony, where Dana served as my best woman and Sil and Mom were graciously entertained by Jana’s mother, an unwilling tour guide guiding unwilling tourists. “A magical place with a wild sea,” Dad rhapsodized. He preferred, no shock, the imaginary oceanic country of The Winter’s Tale to the landlocked but no less beautiful reality of Kafka, Havel, Kundera, Skvorecky, Stoppard, me. That was okay by then. I could laugh at my father by then. “And Arthur, his wandering and resistance complete, has taken a wife and accepted his crown! It reminds me of a story, and this time it may end well.”

In 1995, genetics, uninspired in its patterns, coughed up twins again, two boys who developed, to my obtuse surprise, into little Czechs who for a while thought their foreign father was okay, but then grew increasingly embarrassed by his accent and general air of not belonging and his stupid answers to their czildhood predicaments. This period has mostly passed, and we understand one another better now. I harbor hopes for their twenties.

I intend to keep my kids out of this except to make three relevant points:

1) As twins, they were fascinating to watch. They were independent of me and Jana in a way monos would not have been. They had that same sense of completion and confidence—visible almost as soon as consciousness flickered on behind their oversized brown Slavic irises, my own blue eyes receding back into the gene pool. Their version of twindom involved more fisticuffs and flaring conflict than Dana’s and mine, but Jana and I learned early that our well-meaning intrusions in their intra-twin broils only made them go on longer and with more fragile conclusions, whereas left to their own violent devices, they would pummel each other only so far and so long as was necessary to institute some closer, still more conspiratorial partnership.

2) They loved their Aunt Dana instantly and with a laughing, un-Czech joviality that began when they were about three. She visited, as she did twice a year for seven years, until her conflicts with Jana made visiting untenable, and the twins would keep her to themselves—in their room, in the garden, in the woods, later in the streets of Prague.

3) They are fifteen now, and though as tightly bound to each other as ever, they will face struggles ahead that I would like to prepare them for, and perhaps a candid explanation of why I no longer live with them will help more than it embarrasses. And so I have written such an explanation for them, but elsewhere. This is not the place.

Except to say that I did not find my lost half in Bohemia after all, try as I did to fit myself against the unique edges of a lovely, kind woman, wounding her in the process with my own incompatible,