Chapter 34

Prague

December 2008

Robert turned forty less than a month after he moved to Prague, but he felt ten years younger and as if his life, in some amorphous, signficant way, had just begun. He spent most weekday afternoons at a cafe called Meduza, reading and drinking hoppy Czech beer among the hodgepodge of antique furnishings and walls covered with early-twentieth-century photos and lithographs in dark wooden frames. On the weekends, he spent countless hours revelling in the magical city, meandering the grey and white cobblestone sidewalks and feasting on the endless baroque architecture. It was like living in a dream.

Robert and Marlene had arrived in Prague a day apart, though they did not meet for another six weeks. Robert noticed her on the first evening of the Czech class at Charles University. That wild mane of blonde curls and her ice-blue eyes. It was a course for expatriates of myriad professions and interests seeking some understanding of the ridiculously complicated language. Nothing about Czech resembled anything of their native tongues: Finnish, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, English. English was the lingua franca. It did not make learning Czech any easier, but it at least allowed them all to communicate.

Clearly, Marlene was younger than he. All of them were. Robert turned forty the day before the course began and was pained to say it when—as part of the second-night exercise in the names of the numbers—the teacher went around the room asking the students their ages. The closest was a diplomat from Finland—thirty-two—and the youngest the fifteen-year-old son of an American businessman. Marlene was twenty-nine.

They were paired for a conversation exercise for the first time a month into the class.

“What time do you get up in the morning?” Marlene asked in Czech.

“Four forty-five,” David replied. None of the numbers even sounded like numbers, and he recalled them and expelled them from his mouth with difficulty.

“Four forty-five!” Marlene exclaimed, in English.

Robert laughed and answered in English. “Yes, I know. It’s awful. I start work at five. But it’s much better than before I moved here. In the U.S., I had to start at eleven and work through the night.” He was amused by the mixture of horror and disbelief on Marlene’s face.

“Only in America would that be possible,” she said.

“Yes,” Robert agreed in a resigned sigh. “And what time do you get up in the morning?” he added in Czech.

“Nine!” Marlene replied gleefully in Czech. She continued in English: “I could never force myself from the bed as early as you do. It is hard enough at nine.”

Robert had been disappointed when the brief exercise ended but delighted by the several chances they had to chat during breaks and after the class over the next two months. On the Saturday night before the course ended, the students had gathered for dinner at Hlučna Samotá, a traditional Czech restaurant in the expat saturated Vinohrady neighborhood. Only the Dutch landscape architect with a Czech girlfriend had learned much of the language, but the class had bound them into a happy little social band.

“Snow!” Marlene howled like a child when they emerged from the toasty restaurant into the freezing night. At least six inches had fallen during their long, loud repast, and fat, wet flakes still were streaming down.

“Perfect!” the Finnish diplomat declared. “We certainly can’t call it a night already on such an evening. Who’s up for moving this party to the next location?”

Most demurred. It already was past midnight, and they had consumed half-litre glass after half-litre glass of Czech pilsner over dinner and two rounds of shots of the gullet-burning plum liquor called slivovice to cap the meal.

“I’m in,” Robert said. He had never felt so securely part of a sympathetic group as he did with this eclectic gang of expatriates. He had not passed on a single outing with them over the three months they had known each other.

“Ahhh, we can always count on the New World,” said the bulky, redfaced Finn. “Who else will rise to the challenge? France?”

“Non, non, non,” the French software engineer muttered as he rolled his usual post-dinner joint. “I was supposed to be home an hour ago.”

“I’ll go, but just for a little time,” said the twenty-four-year-old Spanish embassy intern. “I’m meeting friends for brunch tomorrow, but not until eleven.”

The others all gave their excuses and bade their farewells. Marlene lingered at the edge of the remaining few, looking undecided.

“Come on, Marlene,” the Finn encouraged her. “It’s too early to go home, and it’s our last night before we all march off to our homelands for Christmas.”

“Okay,” she said with a slight hesitation, and then: “Okay! Yes! Where should we go?”

“Oh! Oh! I know,” the Finnish wife of the Finnish diplomat shouted. “I just read the other day about this new, authentic Japanese karaoke bar not far from here, and I’m dying to try it!”

Her husband groaned. “God, no, not karaoke. Anything but karaoke. You’re with me on that, aren’t you?” he pleaded to Robert.

Robert was unsure which position to declare. He felt more selfconfident among this group than he had with any other, but he still reflexively tried to adapt to the prevailing sentiment on the rare occasion a difference of opinion arose. It was a deep, hard old psychic condition to break. He adored both the Finns, and he did not want to alienate either of them. Before he chose a side, the Spanish intern and Marlene leapt in.

“Some friends at the embassy went there last weekend said it’s great!”

“I love karaoke!” Marlene said.

“Well,” the Finnish diplomat said, looking in Robert’s direction. “We must keep the ladies happy. And I’m sure it’ll have slivovice. Karaoke it is.”

They tromped giddily through the slushy snow, found the karaoke bar, and bounded down to their room. Round after round of slivovice. Round after round of bellowing along—microphones clutched in hand—to the lyrics scrolling down the fifty-inch flatscreen TV. At four o’clock, the Japanese waiter poked his head through the door and announced apologetically that they had fifteen minutes until closing time.

Standing again in the cutting wind on the snowy sidewalk, the Finns and the Spanish intern called for taxis. Emboldened by the hours of Czech plum brandy, Robert turned to Marlene, offered his arm and said: “I don’t live too far from here. Do you want to come back?”

“Okay, yes,” Marlene said after a moment’s consideration. They waved goodbye to the others and began slipping and sliding away, the Finnish diplomat grinning at them as they went.

After the always fumbling and uncertain first-time sex, Robert and Marlene spent the next sixteen hours talking in his bed. At around four in the afternoon, as the winter night descended again over the gloomy, grey December Prague day, Marlene fetched paper and two pens from Robert’s desk. “Let’s play Stadt, Land, Fluss!”

“What?” he asked, chuckling.

“Stadt, Land, Fluss!” she reiterated.

“Never heard of it,” Robert said as he pushed upright and gathered the down comforter around him.

“How can that be?” Marlene squealed. “It’s the best game ever.” She explained the details: each player makes columns on his page and labels them city, country, river, and then whatever other topics they want such as books, movies, writers and actors; then they take turns calling out a letter of the alphabet and making an entry to each column as quickly as possible with a word starting with that letter.

Robert generally disliked these sorts of games, but at this moment with Marlene—naked and radiant with her magnificent mane curling and cascading over her shoulders and half-way down her back—he would have gladly agreed to anything. They laughed and played until their pages were full, and Robert won by five when they calculated the points at the end. “Beginner’s luck,” he assured her.

After a second, slightly less awkward go at sex, Robert had said as he held Marlene in the warm cocoon of the comforter and looked out the window at the black sky: “I haven’t spent the whole day in bed in ten years, and that was when I had the flu.”

“The Americans,” Marlene had said, shaking her head. “We won’t wait that long to do it again.”

Now they stood, a week later, amid the festive bustle of the Christmas market at Naměsti Miru. The frigid air was laced with the scent of baking Christmas pastries and mulled wine from the little wooden huts erected for the month around the square. Marlene slipped her hand into his jacket front and placed it flat on his chest over his heart. “I can feel the pain in you,” she said. Her voice carried a profound stillness.

Robert had the sensation of a powerful current flowing between them: from his heart through her hand to her heart and back again.

The red and beige tram rang its flat toned bell as it approached the Naměsi Miru stop. Marlene glanced away to the tram and then back to Robert. “I don’t want to go, but I have to.”

“And I have to pack,” Robert said. He reached into his jacket front and took her hand. “I’ll only be gone three and a half weeks. I can’t wait to see you.”

They kissed as the tram doors clanked open, and then Marlene dashed for the steps as the bell growled again. Robert stood in the cold wind, but did not feel it, as he watched the tram crawl away past the festive market huts, the garish Christmas tree, and the towering Gothic church at the back of the square.