There was a hint of rain that late March day in nineteen hundred and seventy-three. I was fishing with my grandfather, who had the patience of Job, and the orange bobber which hung over glass waters hardly moved. If this was a game they’d have called it on account of nothing happening. I was hoping for rain so we’d call it a day.

But Grandma was waiting at home to skin a few bluegills for dinner and we had corn on the cob too waiting too, fresh from Kolstead’s market. We had to hold up our end of the bargain even though I told Papa that all she had to do was buy it from the market but we had to have the skill or luck to catch something. But he warn’t worried.

I stared at the orange blob and my mind would play tricks. I’d thought it moved when it hadn’t. I was trigger-happy, ready to reel something in, not patient at all and wanting to error on the side of being too early rather than too late. Fishing was tense because you had to be alert every second.

Papa, who was drinking Budweiser beers, didn’t seem tense at all though.

“They ain’t bitin’” he said and I told him they sure warn’t. I didn’t know what made them bite one day and not the next. I told him that it maybe we wasn’t in the right spot but he said maybe we weren’t out early enough. I didn’t know what to make of that because it seemed like we got up at the crack of dawn.

“Maybe if we had those boots like real fishermen we’d catch something,” I said, referring to the men who wore hip waders and weren’t limited to the bank like landlubbers.

“Don’t yell, you’ll scare the fish,” he said, although I didn't think I'd yelled and thought maybe he just said that to shut me up. I was always “scaring the fish”, it seemed the thing I was best at. Anything you’d do would scare the fish. Splash the water or spit in it or yell or run up and down the bank, everything scared the fish. I thought the fish were scaredy-cats.

Discombobulated. That’s how I felt, a word whose physicality mirrors its meaning. She wrote to say that she can’t write anymore, that the Soviets had gotten around to banning electronic epistles to any but party members and my official status was dissident. That the news should come as a dull surprise was itself a surprise since the banning of personal correspondence seemed, in retrospect, more appropriate than the banning of public correspondence.

Not that I blame the Politburo. Risks are risks, and there is something unseemly about displays of affection between dissidents and party members. Was I not mostly a distraction? Was I not a fool’s gold to her family’s precious loom? Over time I must’ve fallen in her eyes. Did I not now make the Politburo more palatable by my being seen as less?

When the Prussians moved on Bavaria I was just about to go on a hike. It was a sparkling wine sort of day, the sun ebullient and redolent of spring. I wanted to walk in the “good part of the day”, in the broad One Pm that cast no shadows. But I was taken unduly by the news; I composed a reply and felt the discombobulations that change inflicts...