The Collaboration
The narrator’s father is a collaborator with the oppressive Soviet government in control during the Cold War. His actions wind up sending an untold number of people to brutal interrogations and whatever proceeds from there. After the Velvet Revolution, the tables turn, and he is now targeted. Only one example of his collaborative actions is detailed with an eyewitness account by the narrator when he was a child. The irony is that this “dangerous” collaborator ratting out “dangerous” subversives is intimated to have consistently been at the level of what the narrator recollects witnessing as a child. His father eavesdropped on the neighbors by using a drinking glass to listen through a cheap wall and then calling in a report that the neighbors were listening to a Radio Free Europe report blaming a potato shortage on Russian mismanagement.
Elvis
The narrator’s father turns in his neighbors for listening to a radio program about a potato shortage. In a typical example of hypocrisy, he is also a man who buys Elvis Presley records smuggled through the Berlin Wall to be sold on a black market. This subterfuge is necessary because listening to Elvis Presley is every bit as subject to being dragged off by the secret police as listening to Radio Free Europe.
Terrorists and Freedom Fighters
The great irony of revolution is that whether one is a heroic freedom fighter or a demonic terrorist comes down not to actions, but perception. This duality is recognized in the book relative to the opinions expressed about the narrator’s father. “In one book, your father is a hero. In another book, he is a monster. The men who don’t have books written about them have it easier.” For Americans, the Founding Fathers were freedom fighters while to the British they were traitors. For Americans, the 9/11 hijackers were terrorists while too many Muslims were freedom fighters. The secondary level of irony in the quote above is that it may be better to go through life anonymously than to attain fame.
