It was out before I could check myself. I saw his eyes staring at me and then they slid away to the photographs on his desk. ‘But you are free,’ he said. ‘Free to run your life as you wish to run it.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ He meant I was free of the constant supervision that surrounded him. But I wasn’t free. You can never get free of the past. ‘Those pictures,’ I said to change the subject. ‘Are they of your family?’
‘Yes. My wife and daughter.’ He sighed and picked up the larger photograph. ‘That is my wife. She is dead. The Nazis kill her. She was held up on the Swiss frontier the night I fly to England in 1939. I do not see her again.’ He set the photograph down gently on the big mahogany desk. ‘That other is my daughter. She is now in Italy with the Czech table tennis team.’
He held the photograph out towards me and I found myself looking at the face of a girl with a broad forehead, high cheekbones and a friendly smile. Her auburn hair fell to her shoulders and gleamed where it caught the light. Something in her expression, in the way she held her head reminded me that Jan Tucek had not always looked tired and drawn. ‘Her mother was Italian,’ he said. ‘From Venice.’
So the hair was real titian. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘The photographer has been kind to her, I think. You cannot see the freckles.’
It didn’t matter to me whether she had freckles or not. It wasn’t the face so much as the person behind the face that was beautiful. Something about the expression of the eyes, the curve of the mouth, the defiant tilt of the chin seemed to reach out to me from the plain silver frame. It was the face of a girl who possessed sympathy and understanding — and something else; self-reliance, an ability to stand on her own feet. Somehow, in my loneliness, I felt the expression on her face was something that touched me personally through my old friendship with her father.
Tucek put the photograph down again. ‘Fortunately she play table tennis very well.’ The way he said it, the words seemed to carry a message, and again, for a moment, I was conscious of the resemblance between his face and the face in the photograph.
‘I’m sorry I shan’t see her,’ I said.
‘Perhaps you will — in Milan.’ Again his words seemed to carry additional meaning. Then, as though he were afraid I might make some comment, he glanced at his watch and pushed back his chair. ‘I am sorry. I have a conference now. I will send you to the head of our retooling section. Also I will ring him so that he know who you are. I have no doubt there are things we need that you have.”