Learning that his daughter has written an Off-Broadway play about their family, Tomás Novak’s response is ambivalent, to say the least: “I knew any good parent would be thrilled. And I wanted to be.” Fearing how he may be depicted, dissected, in Katka’s play, Tomás turns the lens on himself in anticipation, castigating himself as a remote or aloof father, a bad husband, even – as he recalls his youth as a dissident writer in Prague, and the four-day interrogation where he refuses to sell out his fellow dissidents – as a traitor. His unease only grows after he arranges for Katka to visit him in the small college town where he now lives: uninterested in the childish activities he proposes, taciturn to the point of monosyllabic, she seems to him to have become something powerful and unknowable, who is preparing to air his darkest secrets in public. This remarkable story takes two turns: one I find deeply moving, as Katka finally reveals what her play will say about her tormented, self-doubting father; the other – which clinches it as a classic for me – a far stranger twist that transforms the reader’s understanding of how Tomás accounts for himself.
First published by One Story, March 2010; collected in The UnAmericans, Picador, 2014
A Personal Anthology 