He was seized by an intolerable fear. He sat in the empty house, watching vermin feasting on breadcrumbs. Would she come again? In fear, he hid from the question’s terrifying answer, remaining awake and delaying the inevitable. —Franz Kafka/Three Nights * “Are you anywhere?” It might have been a tourist’s question; it might have been a cop’s. There were ways to tell one species of inquisitor from the other. Sometimes. Honza stood, frozen, recognizing the illicit street-code. The woman who asked seemed displaced and incomplete: a little bit too tall for her body. Her eyes—blue-gray and shadowed beneath dark, heavy eyebrows—carried an expression of dream-locked abstraction. Her gaze, Honza thought as he looked at her, took in sights no one could understand. He shuddered, wondering—for only an instant—if he stood before a madwoman. She’d made eye contact. She’d read something in his bearing and saw—Honza thought—someone she could trust. “Are you anywhere?” In a moment of subjective telepathy, she seemed to beam that question directly into his thoughts. She spoke; he knew that she spoke, but her voice was soft and it drew him to her. To listen, to ascertain whether or not he’d heard her clearly. There was something American in the way she dressed—some deep body verb that spoke of clear skies in a land too new for history. It was there in the way she held her shoulders, and in the way she balanced on the perilous treacheries of high heels, shaped to non-local standards. It was an hour past twilight and she wore a dress suited for Duplex or the five-story decadence of Karlový Lazné: a shallow-night’s dress for dance-floor adventure and later, perhaps, sex in her hotel room, or in the apartment she rented for a week, its double-pane windows inhaling the non-stop redolence of sausage vendors’ kiosks flanking the long, long peripheries of Václavské náměstí. She skewered him with an unblinking expression of bewildered entreaty. “I’m looking for a book,” she said. “It’s a rare work, published locally. I’ve only just learned of it, but I’m an avid reader. There’s an English translation, but only one. I’d really like to find a copy, even a copy in Czech. It’s Kafka. His last novel. Three Nights. Honza shrugged, affecting a look of vague disinterest. He felt the insincerity of it and flinched. “You must to go to Prague to find it,” he said. “I know,” she said. “Can you take me there?” *** Jared would have preferred the lively vibe common to the cavernous cellar—losing himself with Honza in the younger crowd, the thicker smoke, and music with a heavier bottom than the stuff they played up here. Honza needed the sedate upstairs quarter of bar-space, tonight. He needed a clear view of the door. It wasn’t so bad here: upstairs. Ingrid had command of the main bar. She was a friend, one of the best: comfort on a night of half-substantial existential threats. “Meet me,” he’d said to the woman on the street. “At the bar four doors down from here.” He pointed the way. “Give me time to change,” she said. “I’ll be there in an hour. It won’t be too late, will it?” “No,” he’d said. Jared took a generous gulp of beer, and then played his fingertips through the beaded sheet of condensation gleaming on the glass. His fingernail dug into the contours of the Pilsner Urquell crest molded into the glass. He was an expatriate, four years in Prague. He taught English. He helped Honza’s father on weekends, selling antiques to rich tourists hungry for dusty remnants of Czechoslovakia. Now, he sat—like a brooding drow from someone else’s mythology—listening to what his thoughts told him. A look of pensive contemplation masked his keen, narrow features. Honza took a gulp of his own beer, afraid to lag too far behind; it was rude—in personal custom—to force a compatriot to drink alone. “I think,” Jared said, “I know the woman you’re talking about. I’m sure I saw her last Saturday.” Today’s issue of Dnes lay folded on the table beside him. A box of cigarettes rested on it—Start: a local brand. Jared had gone at the label with a marker and the name emblazoned in bold, black ink declared Stop in the shape of his personal little joke. He shrugged, shuddered, and stole another nip of beer. “She gave me the creeps,” he said. “You think she’s dangerous?” Jared shook his head, as if to clear it of unwanted thoughts. “Prague is a dangerous city that attracts lost wanderers. She isn’t dangerous, Honza, but she’s looking for three nights with Kafka. Only someone lost, truly lost, would do something like that.” “You did it,” Honza said. Jared laughed. “Yeah…and look where it got me: selling antiques with my boyfriend’s dad.” “This is a bad thing?” “No. It’s good, Honza…the best thing I could imagine—well, the boyfriend part; the antiques are kinda boring…kinda spooky, you know, since a lot of them are from...well, you know. Your dad’s cool…funny. But sometimes, when I’m sitting there with him, I remember reading Kafka in that cramped little apartment on Biskupcova Street, listening to drunk guys coming out of that bar I was afraid to go into. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t speak Czech well enough for casual bar talk. I don’t know if your woman’s an expatriate, a tourist, or something else, but if she’s the one I saw last Saturday, she’s lost…and it’s not Kafka she’s looking for, it’s what he promised in the hopelessly grim ending of Three Nights.” “I hate that novel,” Honza said, after a swallow of beer. “I wish he’d never written it.” “But he did.” She arrived. The woman. Honza stiffened. She stood, blinking in the doorway with trams and traffic making the oblique curve from Vodičkova Street, to Lazarská. She was taller than Honza remembered: less substantial. She’d changed into jeans (black) and a thin, green sweater to guard her against the night’s damp chill. She’d applied lipstick and wore flatter shoes. A look of brief panic lit her gaze and faded when she saw Honza. She smiled. Ingrid threw a casual greeting at her. In Czech. The woman nodded, as if accepting a gracious and expensive gift. Jared, his back to the door, sensed her presence—an ethereal disturbance, Honza thought as Jared reached across the table and clasped his fingers. He stepped to his feet and to Honza’s side. He planted a kiss on Honza’s forehead, pausing for a moment to inhale the scent of his hair. He straightened and grabbed newspaper and cigarettes from the table-face. “I’ll be downstairs, playing foosból, probably with Radek and with Kača.” Honza laughed. “You’ll be drunk by night’s end.” “I’ll be careful,” Jared said. “You be careful, too.” Jared departed, speaking casually to Ingrid and pretending outrage when she slapped him across the bottom with her bar rag. Ingrid laughed. Jared laughed, and made his way to the stairs. The woman approached and nodded to Honza’s gesture to sit. A mask of bewildered alarm shadowed her face. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.” “You’re not,” he said. “You want something to drink?” “Wine. White.” Honza finished his beer and stepped to his feet, giving the order—and friendly small talk—to Ingrid. He returned to the table, Ingrid a few steps behind him. The bar was largely empty. The hour was still early, and so the normal crowds had yet to arrive. With wine and a small beer on the tabletop, Ingrid left. The woman took a nip of her wine. Honza took a sip of his own foamy brew. “He kissed you. That man. And he speaks Czech.” “Yes.” “But he’s…—” she interrupted herself. “Black,” Honza offered. She blushed. “I’m sorry. It’s just…I thought he was American. I’ve seen him. I thought I could find…I thought he could help me. We spoke, briefly. In a shop near the church in Old Town. His accent…it’s American. Ohio, maybe. Or even Canadian. I didn’t imagine....” she didn’t continue. “Prague is a small city. Every face you see becomes familiar at one point or another.” “Has he lived here long?” “Four years.” “I’m from Boston. It’s also a small city, but there’s only one and nearly everyone’s a stranger. Prague is different, but I don’t get the feeling that anyone here cares very much. Not even him I’d guess. Or do they?” “We live here,” Honza said quietly. “It is boring, sometimes.” “Do you travel?” “Sometimes.” “To Prague?” “Sometimes. We have friends there.” “Strange,” she said, half whispered. “How do you know the difference? How can you tell when you’re in Prague and when you’re in Prague…?” “They are different,” Honza said. They spoke in low voices after that. She’d breeched the topic, after all, as any tourist might, in asking about Prague and Prague…Prague and his Prague, secret Prague, or the Prague of alchemists and heretics. And so, he explained the borders and how they worked: which passages were safe, and which were Gordian knots leading only into themselves. He told her how to avoid those, how to see them, and when to step away from their cunning, predatory seductions. He told her how a stupid tourist thought it was safe and that the warnings didn’t apply to them. Jared and his father sold antiques, he told her—from Prague and from Czechoslovakia as well—and so it was possible to buy things there, to bring them back and even sell them. He explained it all as honestly as he could, and in his best English. Yes, it was a matter of maintaining coherence, a matter of focus. Yes there were extreme and unsettling differences, and no—no matter how far they went—they’d never reach Czechoslovakia. It didn’t exist anymore, not even there. Prague was Prague and Prague was Prague, there was only one reality and here and there were both parts of it. There were no alternatives, no other dimensions. “Kafka,” he said, “is dead in both cities.” She paid him. He finished his beer. She finished her wine, and followed him to the door. “Jared,” Ingrid said from behind the bar, “is a compass. You are his lodestone.” She spoke quietly but he heard her clearly and stood—frozen—at the door. “Remember where you’re from, Honza…and remember how many people love you.” *** He walked with her, flowing with quiet footsteps with the crowd tracing the precise, linear stretch of Vodičkova Street. He led her past the cobalt-glare of a massive Art Nouveau casino, proclaiming FORTUNA in garish Alphonse Mucha calligraphy. A sharp, left turn carried them into the southeastern flow of tourist traffic as they reached Václavské námestí. Honza ignored the florists and sausage vendors blasting 80s pop from kiosk-mounted speakers. Ukrainian bouncers glowered or grinned outside of casinos and strip clubs as city-light bent in the colors of crystal-refracted halogen, neon, and flashing bulbs in all of the colors of gambling, sex, and disco. There were currents of strange, prosaic energy in the air: tourist vibe and it raised goose-pimples on the nape of Honza’s neck. There were voices in the shapes of Italian and UK-English, German, Finnish, Japanese and Spanish. Kids—on high-tech, bent and bouncy stilts—performed harrowing acrobatics for the clatter of tourist money thrown into a hat, and as Honza angled toward the southeast edge of the square, the night darkened—mercifully—and acquired a more complicated character. “Our threshold,” he said, pointing ahead. “Take my hand,” he said, angling toward a shadow that only he saw. She clasped his hand, and followed him to the lip of the shadow. He stepped sideways. She stepped sideways with him. *** Voices rang in the distance, fewer of them. Puddles gleamed in overhead lamplight, reflections distorted by the expanding ripples of raindrops striking water. The city, in reflection, wavered, as policemen roused vagrants from the florescent-lit entrance to the underground Metro. They’d left Prague. They were in Prague. It was raining. “Stop,” he said, cautioning the woman. She was damp with the night’s chill mist, as if she’d walked it for long, long moments. She flinched, and then smiled, releasing his hand. “We’ve crossed,” she said, something like awe in her voice, something like the rapture of worship. “We’ve crossed,” she repeated, a disturbing gleam in her pale eyes. “Do you know where we are?” she asked. “Do you know the way back?” He knew. And he knew, and so it didn’t take long to walk the winding distance to Old Town Square, where weather-damp tourists caught the famous Astronomical Clock in camera-flash strobes. There was laughter and the babble of random talk, most of it—Honza heard—in English. “Does anyone ever border-cross by accident?” the woman asked, a new boldness in her voice, a new solidity. “Every day,” Honza said. “Tourists?” “Sometimes. Not so often. Most remain in the space of a threshold, thinking that they’re daydreaming, that they’re imagining the magic of Prague. They cross—if at all—for only a moment. They angled through the vast restaurant-rimmed square, making their way to the narrow passage beside the city’s most iconic church. A bookstore stood just ahead, a gold rhinoceros emblazoned above the door. It was Jared’s favorite place, crammed with the undiscovered works of Karel Čapek and the high-tech fever dreams of William Gibson. Kafka’s books lived there, too: Three Nights counted proudly in their famous number. Kafka had written most of his greatest and famous works in Prague. He wrote Three Nights in Prague. “I will wait here,” he said, outside of the bookstore. Something in her poise filled him with sudden dread. She crackled with some strange energy, an excitement he didn’t think possible in so frail and insubstantial a woman. She nodded, stepped inside— —and out again, long moments later. Only it wasn’t her. Not exactly. “Okay,” she said. “I’ve got it.” The book—an expensive hardcover, no doubt—nestled in a black plastic bag, emblazoned with the golden ensign of Rhinoceros Books on its face. She hugged it to her chest, cradled like some obscure treasure. He remembered what she wore when he first met her, bare hours ago. He remembered her in the bar on Vodičkova Street, with Jarred vanishing into the cellar to drink and visit with friends. She wore the same dark jeans, the same green sweater. But her hair was different: shorter. The sharp angles of her body were rounded now: softer, plump in ways a straight man might have seen as friendly. She’d shed her expression of perpetual ill ease and awkward uncertainty, and Honza imagined it, like an insect husk, somewhere in the bookstore, wedged in a corner behind a shelf full of classic and brooding Czech masterworks. “Thank you,” she said, and grabbed his hand. “I’ve been looking for this, forever!” She bent forward and pressed a kiss onto his forehead. “You are welcome,” he said, flustered. She giggled. “The real me,” she said. “I don’t know who or what you saw, back there, but this is me. I can feel it. I had to present so much back there. I don’t know why, but it was wrong. Maybe that’s why I approached you like I did and asked what I’d asked. I knew that you’d understand…somehow.” “You’ve done this before.” It might have been a question. Laughter bubbled from her throat. “No,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to, but transformations only occur in fiction, or on daytime television talk shows. I guess it’s why I came, to touch that experience in a different way. Three weeks vacation, you know, and I wanted to do something real, to…I don’t know…be me and it’s happened. I’d like to think it’s because of a book by a depressing author, but that’s really just an excuse, isn’t it?” He inhaled and looked around, eyes resting first on the night-time shadows, and then on the soft glow of street-lanterns throwing soft light through globes and panes of frosted glass. “It’s so beautiful here.” “And now what?” he asked. “I go back to my hotel and begin reading.” He nodded. He led the way. They angled through the vast restaurant-rimmed square, making their way to the narrow winding alleys opening into broader pedestrian streets, and at last into the border space between Old Town, and New Town, dominated at this nexus by the gleaming frenzy of Wenceslas Square: Václavské námestí. He found a familiar shadow, held her hand, and stepped sideways. *** He left Prague. And returned to Prague. Alone. He stepped sideways, thinking she’d delayed for a moment, thinking that she paused to look at something, to listen to the marvel of jazz bleeding from the entrance to some cellar bar. A black bag emblazoned with a gold rhinoceros lay on the cubical, granite paving stones. He stooped, picked it up and looked around. The book was an ominous weight in his hand. He wanted to throw it away. He searched for her, as far back as the restaurant-rimmed square, and the fruit market, its stalls closed for the night. She wasn’t there. He stepped sideways, confused and frightened. Rational thought deserted him for a moment, and then reasserted itself in the urge to search more extensively for her. The passage of an hour convinced him of his futile actions. He’d stepped forward, back, sideways and sideways. There was no sign of her, no hint that she’d ever existed. It was drizzling in Prague. It was a clear and cloudless night in Prague. The dampness of one clung to him in the dryness of its twin, and dampened, he shrugged, convincing himself of… …he didn’t know what. There was nothing to do but walk forward and his steps carried him into the northwestern flow of tourist traffic in the restless heart of Václavské námestí. He ignored the florists and sausage vendors blasting 80s pop from kiosk-mounted speakers. Ukrainian bouncers glowered or grinned outside of casinos and strip clubs as city-light bent in the colors of crystal-refracted halogen, neon, and flashing bulbs in all of the colors of gambling, sex, and disco. There were currents of strange, prosaic energy in the air: tourist vibe and it raised goose-pimples on the nape of Honza’s neck. There were voices in the shapes of Italian and UK-English, German, Finnish, Japanese and Spanish. The kids on futuristic, springy stilts were gone. He walked in the direction of Vodičkova Street, and took a sharp, right turn. A voice halted him, from behind: a woman’s voice, soft and timid. “Are you anywhere?” she asked. Chilled, he turned and stared into the searching gaze of a haunted ghost of a woman. She wore dark blond hair, a bit too long. She seemed a bit too tall for her body. Dressed for a night of dance-floor adventure, she tottered in a pair of dangerous high-heels. “I’m looking for something,” she said. “And I need to get to Prague.” “I’ve just been there,” he said. “But I cannot take you.” “I’m looking—” She didn’t continue. “Take this,” he said, handing her the black, plastic bag. “It’s all I can give you, tonight.” He’d mustered what firmness he could, thrusting the bag-shrouded book at her. “Take this,” he said. “And leave me alone.” Her fingers brushed his, as she accepted the book. He turned away from her before she could speak, jabbed his hands into his pockets, and stalked the length of Vodičkova Street, shouldering through gaggles of laughing tourists. He ignored the sounds of trams and traffic, of human voices raised and dancing in laughter. He trudged forward, eyes downcast and ears alert for the sound of her voice. When he was certain that she hadn’t followed him, he turned around, just to make sure. She wasn’t there. He glanced at his watch. It was still early. Jared, he knew, would still be in the bar: drinking with Rudo and with Kača, or perhaps sitting alone, upstairs, talking to Ingrid. He thought of Jared’s face, smiling. He quickened his pace. He needed a beer. He needed to talk. To Jared. To Ingrid. He needed to reach across a table and feel Jared’s fingers entwining with his own. He needed anything, and everything warm and safe, and in opposition to the lost woman he’d lost in Prague. THE END Hmmm...what do you say about a story like this one? I don't know, but the Czech writer, Paul Leppin might have a few ideas...well...if he was alive, which he isn't. He wrote stuff like this--well, in one novel, anyway: only the most surreal elements were limited to one very naughty lady who dressed like a nun, and there were no odd, coexistent cities linked by thresholds you can only cross sideways. Oh well: hopefully you've enjoyed this little romp, and for anyone interested in Czech literature (outside of Kafka, who wrote in German) then I'd suggest Leppin's short phantasm of a novel: Severin's Journey Into the Dark. It's a doozie...to me, anyway. As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you're having a great weekend.