THE STUDY OF STREETS * The cheapest way to travel is to take a walk along Christmas Street, to find a cheap café, and to listen to the conversations of passing tourists. There are plenty of cafes and restaurants with outdoor seating. There are plenty of tourists: from the distant shores of America, from Canada, from Italy, Spain, and Japan, from Australia and from Brazil—tourists from large cities and small towns, from places named easily and others that are harder to identify. There are locals on Christmas Street: apartment-dwellers and waitresses, cigarette-vendors, sullen in their kiosks, and tour guides with gaggles of foreigners behind them, like a mother duck and her waddling chicks, all trained to follow the yellow umbrella, the red one, the blue, or the raised baton, lurid with streamers in the colors of rainbow mylar or magnesium flares set off at midnight. To talk to a tourist is to travel farther than any holiday might take you; that is how Kaspar went to Czechoslovakia, though it had vanished from the map a long time before his first trip. He has been to Prague and to Brno nearly a dozen times since then, to Plsen and to small towns with castles at their hearts. He has been to all of those places, but never—again—to Czechoslovakia. He can only get there—now—on Christmas Street, if he finds the right tourist: one old enough and willing to remember. There are a few, always a few, but their memories and their willingness to speak are harder to come by. “I’m quite sure you’re over the novelty of it all,” his companion says in soft, dulcet tones. Her voice draws Kaspar out of his thoughts. There is a comforting lilt to her voice: a sound that reminds him of robins. “All streets have their novelty,” he says, shrugging with his voice. He has seen novel streets, and famous ones: in Paris and in Berlin, in Prague and in Moscow. “Not in America,” the tourist-woman says. She wears a German name: Heidi; and the voracious gleam in her eyes is a familiar thing to him. She is hungry for something exotic, something historical, and maybe a little atavistic. It’s all there, in the ice-and-glass color of her gaze: as blue as the American Dream or its cold, Aryan cousin. “Especially in America,” he says. “Route 66,” he adds. “That’s not exactly a street…not a single street, at least.” Her dismissal is shocking. “But, I see your point,” she says. “It’s a myth, one of the few that Americans have, and I supposed myths are different over here, where everything is older…dense…compacted. You’re closer to the past, here, and to a future that is always just about to happen. It’s not the same…over there. I was already alive when Communism died, but for me, it wasn’t a local phenomenon. It died, though, and a new future opened up in the hole that it left. Even if you’re too young to remember the details of that change, you were there…here…and so it is a part of you. Now, you’re a part of the EU. Your currency is local but will switch in less than a decade, to the Euro, unless everything implodes, and another future is born. That’s a lot, Kaspar, but probably nothing as well. You live in the only city I know where Christmas is a place. Route 66 is something and was something else, once upon a time, but it never went from a royal possession to an independent republic, to a Nazi trophy before becoming a Soviet-invaded buffer against the wild, wild West. Now you’re a part of the EU, an emerging economy with a pretty big stake in the green industries, and things are still changing.” Here, she shrugs and contemplates the depths of her iced drink. “That’s a lot, Kaspar, and it’s more than I could ever hope to imagine, more than I could ever dream of.” Something in her voice makes him profoundly uncomfortable. Her words, as they echo through street-sounds and the muddle of his own thoughts, carry the pendulous weight of a confession: as if she’s getting something off of her chest. He can see the way she knits her brow, staring deep into herself, into her own thoughts; she’s groping for something, reaching down into the very marrow of her soul and coaxing it, pulling it out so that she can look at it and show it to him. It resists her and with good reason, he thinks. It is, he imagines, a terrible thing he cannot envision…a thing, he thinks that should remain unspoken, even as she struggles to name it. He sits with her at an outdoor table, beneath the green, canvas awning and against the front wall of glass that serves as the café’s all-important front window. The name of the place—НИКОТИН—evokes strange nostalgia among the American expatriates who know the differences between local Cyrillic and its Russian or Bulgarian cousins. They come to drink pear brandy, to call themselves poets or musicians, and to smoke—as is fitting—at a café named Nicotine. They come here, to be here. He comes, to travel with his ears: to listen to words and to laughter from France or Germany, the USA or Japan. Now, feeling the opposite of comfort, he wants to get up, pay the tab, and walk away. Just like that. He listens—desperately—for a quick trip to Czechoslovakia, but there are no older men or older women walking the near-length of Christmas Street, and if anyone is speaking Czech or Slovakian, they can only promise an auditory jaunt to those border-conjoined countries on this side of dust-coated history. Too near…far too near. He drops his gaze into the iced cherry juice and seltzer water, diluting and warming in his glass. The small bowl from which he has eaten a light, tomato salad gawks at him in its emptiness. Remnants of Italianate spices gleam in thin and even coat of olive oil, and the oil-shiny bowl offers no retreat from Heidi, no way to scamper away from the howling entreaty in her voice. She wants more than the novelty of a place called Christmas: she wants something from him, an intimacy as brutal and as honest as sex, but without the disrupting burden of flesh. He has seen her expression, before: the body’s version of the common American accent. The body’s declaration of hunger. The flesh is untouched by this hunger, but the soul within it shrivels and withers, and it bleeds from the eyes and shades them in the same non-color that Kaspar is always afraid to look at. Expatriates from places over there are tinged with it: a kind of advanced, existential consumption. And Heidi shows it now. Up close. Too close. He sips cherry juice impregnated with carbonation and diluted with melting ice: bad for the throat, as grandmother always said, sniffing in disdain at the Western obsession with ice in drinks…in fizzy, over-sweetened Coca Cola, in bar-drinks for women, with little, paper umbrellas sticking out of them. Bad for the throat, and still, Americans were always loud. He smiles—now—at the thoughts of his grandmother’s logic and her awed fear of loud Americans with ice-numbed throats. He fishes for cigarettes in his front, left pocket, extracts the pack and coaxes a single roll of tobacco out, putting the filter to his lips and searching for his lighter. After a moment, he touches flame to tobacco and paper, and inhales as deeply as he dares. His throat contracts. His lungs sting. Smoking is a decent enough alternative to traveling with his ears. It gives him bravery. It makes him local in a way implied by the very name of this café. He pockets his lighter as casually as he can manage, and cloaked in the moment’s wordless bravery, he cocks a single eyebrow and slides his feet back and out of his sandals. He feels the underpads of his toes dislodging smoothly from the shallow-cup depressions pressed—through sweat and through walking—into his insoles, and out of his sandals, all together, onto the aged limestone paving stones. “Heidi,” he says, with smoke on his breath. “Yes?” “Why are we really here?” She shrugs. She smiles. The hunger on her face fades. “We’ve just finished lunch and you’re smoking a cigarette.” Her smile widens into a silent laugh, shaking in her throat, though he cannot hear it. “It’s a bit early for existential questions, don’t you think?” He can only smile in response to her question. She sits back, considering him. She makes decisions, he thinks, quickly and decisively. She inhales deeply and toys with the straw in her drink. “Back in the square…in Old Town…you spoke to me. You were nice.” “I thought you were lost.” “I thought you were cute.” “And so you spoke…” He smiles faintly, surprised. “I wanted to hear your voice,” she says. “I wanted to walk with you for a moment. It was you who’d asked if I was coming to Christmas Street, and when I said that I was, it was you who offered to escort me…like a perfect gentleman.” He smiles, overcome by a blush. He can feel it warming his cheeks and skating across the crests of his ears. “You don’t regret it?” he asks. “No. Should I?” He shrugs. “You shouldn’t. I hope.” He inhales another drag of smoke. He exhales in the direction of sparrows arguing in overhead eaves. “I’m simply curious. We are strangers sharing lunch, and soon—I don’t know when—you’ll leave, just like any other traveler, but I’ll remember you.” “And that makes a difference? That makes you want to ask existential questions?” “It does.” “Why…?” “Because you’re here. With me. Everything happens for a reason, even if there are no reasons. We make them up, and I’m curious, Heidi…I want to know yours.” “Let’s finish our drinks and settle the bill…take a walk with me. Show me Christmas Street, and as we walk, I’ll do my best to tell you what you want to know.” * “I like the way you walk,” Heidi says, as they cross the Bridge of Cats; the river, below, is as murky as a nightmare, bobbing with ducks. “Are you a dancer?” “No,” Kaspar says. “I’m a veterinarian’s assistant…on my day off.” He shrugs, self conscious and uncomfortable. “Tomorrow,” he says, “I’ll be a veterinarian’s assistant at work, anesthetizing dogs and cats before spaying them, neutering them, or maybe—if it’s a normal day—simply injecting vaccines against rabies, or administering medicines for scabies. It’s a problem here. Scabies. At night, I read, or drink with friends, or play on the computer.” It is hot. Gulls wheel overhead, throwing mournful songs through the air and landing—on occasion—on the bridge, to peck at things dropped by tourists. “I know a fetishist, back in Portland. He’s one of my closest friends. We walk, sometimes, not really going anywhere. Just walking. In summer, when everyone is in sandals, he watches their feet. I’ve learned how to do it, like he does, but for different reasons.” They’ve walked for nearly thirty minutes—from Nicotine to the stretch of boutiques flanking the busiest stretch of Christmas Street. They’ve stopped at a kiosk for candied pistachios, and again, for bottled water. Now, where Christmas Street narrows and crosses the Rin, as an ancient, stone bridge (marked at each end, by enormous, bronze cats,) Kaspar unscrews the cap of a plastic bottle, and swallows a gulp of water. He has walked, with Heidi, in near-silence, glad to play no role, as tourists might demand. She isn’t a tourist. He knows that much, but he doesn’t know what she is. A traveler, yes…but he cannot name her species. He is glad, however, for the silences she has granted. Though he thinks that she cares for this city, and cares that she’s here, she hasn’t asked for the tourist’s running travelogue: a guided tour of the places where famous artists might have dined or died, where kings or queens might have ridden in carriages, or defenestrations might have broken windows. She has simply walked, speaking on occasion, as she speaks now. Quietly. Contemplatively. And in a way that is both comforting and spooky. Chilled, though amused, Kaspar touches her with a sidelong glance as a breeze tickles errant strands of hair through the peripheries of his sight. He brushes them away, banishing the soft, black clouds more felt than seen. He needs a haircut and he’ll take one, soon enough. Later. He cocks a half-grin. “Your fetishist friend is watching me through your eyes?” Heidi laughs. “No,” she says. “Then, I’m teaching you the meaning of his complex?” Another ringing peal of laughter: “No,” Heidi says, decisively and with another kind of laughter in her voice. “But you’re telling me things by the way you walk. You don’t lumber around. You don’t pound your heels. Your toes spread and clench and it makes me think of the way a cat walks…carefully, conscious of where one foot rises and another falls…where the toe-pads go, where the claws go. Each step is measured and precise, and that tells me a lot. About you and of this street, and what it must mean to live here, to walk here.” She shrugs and laughs as if dismissing herself. “Maybe that’s why I came: to learn something about walking.” Kaspar tilts his head to one side. “You couldn’t learn this in Portland?” “Maybe. But I’m familiar with it. I live there. I’ve always thought that in order to learn obvious things, you have to leave home, to go somewhere else. Humans, after all, are really good at stating the obvious, but terrible at actually seeing it. We need distance, I think…humans do…and that’s what I have here.” Kaspar nods. “And this is why you’re here? For distance?” “I think so.” “This was always the reason, or you just made it up?” “I don’t know.” “So, you’re not here for Christmas Street, to take pictures of the place that is a holiday and to buy postcards to send to your friends, or maybe to take pictures of post-Communist feet to send to your fetishist? Or you’re doing that as well?” “I don’t know.” “You’re comfortable with not knowing,” Kaspar says, before he’s aware of the words, before he can filter them and turn them into a question. “Here,” Heidi says. “I am. But I think it’s because I have nothing to lose. I can not know things, because no matter how much time I spend with you, I’ll be gone in three days, or a week, if I decide not to go to Croatia, and I know that when I leave here, I might never see you again. I don’t have to hide the things I might have to hide at home, even from a friend with a fetish.” She shrugs. “Knowing people is both a comfort and a burden; you can share things with friends, but they change, their meanings slip sideways, or backwards, or upside down, and what you’ve shared turns into an alien thing that makes you uncomfortable. This happens with strangers, too, I suppose, but it’s gentler, because there’s never the promise of seeing them again and seeing how things might have shifted or turned upside down.” They come to the end of the bridge, with bronze cats on either side of the street, like sphinxes, their mouths full of riddles. They are housecats: scraggly domestics beautified in bronze. A barge approaches the bridge and its motion is slow. Its wake is wide and turbulent where propellers stir the carp-filled murk of the Rin. Kaspar can see the cathedral of Saint Boromir ahead, at the end of Christmas Street and nested at the heart of its own crowded square. In long-vanished days, mass was held there and it was Christmas Mass that lent its name to the street before the church. The street-name remains, even as the faithful make their homes elsewhere: anywhere but here. History lives there, or lies, desiccated in the catacombs that aren’t open to tourists. “We can sit there,” Kaspar says to Heidi. “On the steps.” “If you’d like.” They walk in silence for a time: Heidi in her own thoughts and Kaspar in a quiet muddle of emotions, thoughts, impressions, and wordless things that might be feelings, or something else. He is traveling. He is in America as it lives and breathes in Heidi’s voice. He is walking beside her and her fetishist, all-too-conscious of his sandals, his feet, the roundness at the ends of his toes and the shape, depth, color of their nails. There are faint, black hairs on the knuckle-joints of each, like grass and—for a moment both harrowing and hilarious—he wonders if goats graze there. He has traveled many times before, seeing what voice-sounds, accents, and languages have revealed to him: going wherever they might take him. He has seen the giant, wooden proclamation on a California hill, announcing Hollywood to the entire planet in crisp, white glamour. He has seen cowboys and rodeos with angry bulls and graceful, wild horses throwing their riders into vast clouds of acrid, Texas dust. He has been to Czechoslovakia, and once—through the voice of a drunken Bosnian poet—to the moon, where American footprints linger, as if placed there—yesterday!—by the astronauts of Apollo. He has been to Mecca. He has been to Cairo. He has been to the pyramids of Mexico, and to markets in Ghana. Now, on Christmas Street, with Heidi, he is on Christmas Street, visiting his own toes as if they are a roadless place, a mapless place: five islands to the left and five islands to the right, with narrow sea-chasms in between. The only water is his own sweat, as salty as his blood. The front tips of his feet are his own mysterious and unexplored geography and the streets he has walked, and now— —Now— —there is nowhere to go. Not today. And so resigned to the fact that he has gone nowhere, he walks—with Heidi—to the cathedral at the end of Christmas street and climbs the steps. At the top, he sits with her in silence, watching tourists, watching flies investigating the steps, the shadows, his arms, for tasty things. Crumbs. Smears of ice cream. Dabs of honey. Salt from sweat. Anything that might interest dumb, scavenger flies. Kaspar fans them away. He never swats at flies, never attempts to kill them: their annoyance is innocent. They don’t know any better. After a while, he stands, urging Heidi to her feet. He stands beside her, gesturing along the length of Christmas Street, bidding her to look. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I like these steps,” he says. “I like to climb them and turn around and see all of Christmas Street stretching out in front of me. It’s the longest street in the city, the most famous street, and on the steps…especially at night, when I am alone, I can see the street and think of it as my own. I don’t do that now. I did it more, when I was younger. A child. I did it because I wanted to live somewhere else, in another city. Maybe on the side of a wider and more exotic street.” “Like Route 66…?” “Yes. Or State Street. Is it true, that in every American city, there is a State Street?” Heidi nods. “In most, yes. I can’t say for absolute certain, but I know that there are State Streets in large cities and more commonly, in small towns.” “Different streets with the same name?” “Yes.” Kaspar smiles. “Perhaps you should walk them, with your fetishist. You can pretend they are all the same street: the longest street in the world. I am sure that in summer, in many summers, he can see many people in many sandals. You can discuss the philosophy of feet with him…and maybe if there is any truth to fairy-tales, you can follow the longest street in the world, State Street, and walk all the way to Christmas.” Heidi laughs as if letting go of something, clasps his hand—fingers clenching as if punctuating words with the eloquent emphasis of touch—and regards Christmas Street, and its throngs of tourists. She says nothing. The possibility of travel is closed. And so Kaspar, on the steps of an old and unused cathedral, allows himself to remain where he is. THE END Though there are no direct links, this story is actually a companion to The Study of Pornography, and to Aftermath in a Northern Town. All of the stories take place in a so-far-unnamed country; all three stories are a part of a larger project, but they stand well-enough on their own, and so they’ve found their way here. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.