He was sent to the country as some kind of minor bureaucratic functionary, a diplomatic attaché or something like that and it wasn’t long before he saw his chance, looking perhaps at the wide flat horizon of the new place, flat enough to be mistaken for harmless and thinking okay maybe. Waking up nightly beside his sleeping wife and hearing a clock ticking somewhere in the apartment and then thinking yes. In the end it was easier than he had imagined it might be, like anything else you do the first thing and the rest of it rolls downhill from there, gathering a kind of momentum, but nonetheless it was months before he could make his mouth form the word defect let alone put breath behind it to vocalise it.

They gave him a new identity somewhere in Port Credit, what better place to be like everyone else: having a garden, making polite conversation with the neighbours, wondering if anyone knew.

He became a minor celebrity in the country, itself a minor sort of place, like winning a set of coffee filters as a prize on a game show. He wrote a book and then a novel, made several appearances in public under his real name with a bag over his head like a kidnap victim, which, when you think about it, he kind of was, kidnapped out of whatever life he had thought he was going to be living.

Eventually the minor place found other stories, or he was tired of telling his, and the burlap bag became unnecessary. Imagine it sitting on a shelf in the garden shed like an accusation, spiders making homes in it.

Their children thought until they were well into their teens that their family was Czech.