Dead-Letter Diplomacy

PRAGUE—The envelope, yellowed like a chain-smoker’s thumbnail, arrived in the Czech postal service’s dead-letter office sometime after the Velvet Divorce of ’93. Addressed simply to “Czechoslovakia,” it sat in bureaucratic purgatory for thirty-one years—long enough for the Iron Curtain to rust into garden trellises, for the euro to replace dreams, and for TikTok to convince…