“The Berlin Wall had come down. All the countries in Eastern Europe were declaring themselves free. A crowd had gathered in Wenceslas Square. It isn’t a square. It’s more like a boulevard, like Park Avenue, but shorter, about half a mile long, and the center portion is much wider, about two hundred feet. There was a demonstration in memory of a student who had burned himself to death, there, in the square, back in 1968, to protest the Russians coming in with tanks to crush the Prague Spring. It was also because Václav Havel had become the new president. He’d just been in Washington to address the U.S. Congress…back when that was still a good thing…he was in Prague…on his way to Moscow, to tell the Russians to pull their troops out. There were TV sets in the shop windows and they were playing videos of the old Communist leaders. I say old, but they’d been running the place just three or four months earlier and they were feared because they had their secret police and political prisons. But now people were standing outside those store windows, watching reruns of those guys giving speeches, and laughing.

“Wenceslas Square was full. A hundred thousand people, maybe two hundred thousand. They were singing. It was in Czech, but I kept thinking, I know this song, I know this song. Then I realized, it was ‘We Shall Overcome.’

“It was a time of hope,” I said, trying to convey some of what I’d felt. “Such as I’d never seen before. That I’ve never seen since.

“I hope that once in your lifetime, you get to see such a time.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

HEAVEN

“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

MARK TWAIN

THE WEATHER WAS GOOD. THE snow was good. The sun shone and reflected back from the mountains, roofs, and byways, all covered in white. The lift system was extensive, well-maintained, and very reliable. The skiing was good. The hotel was excellent. Four stars. All necessary amenities and many unnecessary ones. When I was last in the region, way back in 1990, the food was very mitteleuropäische, sausages, stews, and schnitzels, dumplings, strudels, and tortes. It still mostly was, but with international, nouvelle, foodie influences. That was good, too. If you liked wine, the more expensive hotels and restaurants had world-competitive wine lists. Doing it on an expense account with no apparent top end or any real accountability made it all infinitely better. It struck me that if I put that all together, it was what people imagined heaven would be: clean, luxurious, orderly, your beds made for you and your tables bussed, with never a bill to pay.

The only thing wrong was the job.

The Voloshin family was there for two weeks, fourteen days.