Lítost * The thing. It is invisible: sinuous and coiled like an asp’s lethal promise; it glares at her with imagined eyes as hungry as an angel’s. Fallen. It speaks, and the words—as they unravel in her mind—bear the acute, red flare of fresh, stinging blisters. Sweetness lingers: the fading, chilly redolence of hops and tobacco-smoke, of damp, moldy stone and an echo of juniper. It touches her, sometimes, with snow-cream skin and the memory of something dark and shiny in the moonlight: a clumsy thing. It is not human. It is invisible, now. But she can see it… When she closes her eyes. * Fat memories throb and squirm behind everything that she sees. Her gaze burns. The air is indolent and smoggy; the pavement beneath her feet is little more than the absence of ancient and weathered cobblestones. Moss and mold are scarce here. Begonias do not riot in clumps of red and white in clay pots stuck on shallow balconies though prairie grasses may wave their tassels in the wind. Bottles of wine do not chill (in winter) between panes of window-glass. There are no granite cobblestones. No trams, dinging their antique, brass bells at every intersection: where streets change names; no cables stretch overhead, feeding electricity to the trams. There is no awkward, long-haired guy named Ondreij looking at her through a mask of confusion and the vague, restive stir of sudden mistrust. * “I’ll be leaving soon,” she said, one day. To Ondreij. It was easy to voice that admission to her glass of golden beer rather than to the spooky, angelic figure seated across the table from her. He toyed with a packet of cigarettes, amused—it seemed—by the faint crackle of cellophane beneath his thumb as he rubbed at the name START, emblazoned in bold, red lettering. It was easy to ignore his fingers, their bitten nails, their blind precision as they flipped the box open and teased a neat, white cigarette into the open air, found a cheap—blue—lighter, and— “I’ll need someone to keep Josef.” —paused before touching the tip of the cigarette with a diminutive lick of flame. “Your golem?” Ondreij asked. She shrugged. She might have seen the question in his eyes, had she looked, but there was no way to bring herself to that intimacy. Not now. “I can’t take him back to America; he wouldn’t make it through customs. They’d never let him out of quarantine; he would die there. He has to stay here, Ondreij, and I trust you with him.” “Me?” he asked. She shrugged. “Your golems are among the best in Prague; little Josef is nothing compared to them; he’s just a clumsy, uncoordinated little homunculus. Insignificant. But I raised him from a thimble-full of pre-biotic mud. I trained him, as best I could; the way you taught me, though I’m afraid he understands Czech only as well as I do, and that isn’t much. He’ll be no trouble to you, though. He’ll be useful to you in whatever way you’re likely to want.” “And that’s it?” Ondreij asked. The question—it’s tone—was enough to snag her gaze and raise it to his grayish-green eyes. They sat—face to face—in the cool, smoke-tinged darkness of an old, barrel-vaulted cellar: one of the intimate, ant-hill chambers hollowed out of an obscure layer of ancient and forgotten Prague. There were rumors of a cellar beneath this one: catacombs, perhaps, or the remains of something steeped in the fossilized aethers of a forgotten alchemy. Ondreij seemed at home here. A sudden, glowering cast hardened the delicate, angelic lines, planes, and curves of his face. Sharpness etched the slope of his nose and cupped the curve of his nostrils. His cheekbones grabbed light from above, and shadow from everywhere else in the windowless subterranean room. A pool of halogen light spilled through the sand-colored cascade of hair he normally kept pulled back into a ponytail. He wore it unbound, now and it framed the delicate, acute lines of his face. There were ways, she imagined, to tell the differences between Bohemian and Moravian features, but she couldn’t read the clues. She didn’t know the language well enough. Ondreij was Bohemian, because he said so, because his family name—Prážkov—spoke of some intimate link with Prague itself. He’d said so: once, and in the spooky dance of subterranean light and shadow, she tried to find some clue to that, an echo of his words. And maybe it was there: in the way he spoke the name of his city—Praha—and in the way he seemed to steal substance, now, from the cellar-bar itself: in the way he glowered, as if mulling over the most distasteful of existential revelations She couldn’t look away from him. She cringed at the sight of him, at his aloof, almost feline mien. “A golem,” he said, after drawing on his fresh-lit cigarette. He shook his head. “A golem,” he repeated, “is not something you can just leave behind. They are not disposable.” Stung. “I know,” she said. She touched her finger to the rim of her glass, clasped it—after a moment—and raised it to her lips. She stole a generous swallow of beer. “If I believed they were disposable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” Ondreij nodded with something harrowing and sad in his expression. “And there’d be another feral golem in Žižkov.” “I don’t want that, Ondreij.” “Neither do I.” “Will you take him, then? Will you keep him for me?” * The promise of rain. The promise of mud. Inert. When the shower comes, no one will collect a thimble-full of muck and leaven it with a small packet of pre-biotic agents like lumps of dried yeast. No one will let it incubate, take shape, and learn to feed as any necrophage might. * Sheridan Road is a loud stretch of apartments, restaurants and cafes. Convenience stores dot the corners. A used bookstore advertises itself with purple neon and pulp science fiction centered in its window display. There is an ebb and flow of frantic, animal rhythms, litter, and the waft of smoke from cookouts in the lakeside park. Gray clouds above are heavy with the promise of unctuous rain. There are no golems. Not here. Not on this continent. Little Josef is far away now: an invisible memory. Gone. A ghost. Thunder rolls over itself in the east. She remembers— * —another day, when the hissing whisper of rain-remnants fell from the light-dappled canopy of chestnut leaves and the occasional, naked branch. Birds twittered to one another in notes of territorial warning and cryptic, avian entreaty. She picked her way along the elongated perimeter of Strelecký ostrov, listening to Ondreij’s almost supernatural silence, as he skirted puddles and read the dark, irregular smudges of golem tracks. There had been a time—long, long ago—when the islands (Strelecký, Slovanský, and maybe a few of the others) were home to the city’s abandoned golems. Now, the only island golems were municipals, the occasional visitor, and—rarely—an escapee. Ducks chattered quietly to one another and to their chicks. Traffic growled along Smetanovo nabraži, and across Legii Bridge, where tourists flocked for photos of the National Theater, or for ice-cream across the street. They had the nearly-swamped island to themselves. The island’s grass was half-submerged, and a draw to ducks. Little Josef ambled on the curved path ahead of them, as curious as a cat, but with the shambling, rolling gait of something far less graceful. By law, no golem might exceed the size of a useful domestic toy and Josef was no larger and no more elegant than a child’s plush teddy-bear. It walked in a curious, simian manner, pivoting its barrel shaped body in the manner of a puppet-monster, lumbering across the rumpled landscape of an unmade bed. “He’s taken well to you,” she said, quietly. “He’s well made,” Ondreij said. “You’ve found a use for him?” “No. But I like him. He’ll make his own use.” It had been a week since Ondreij said yes to her plea: a week since she said her quiet good-byes to the bulbous, hairless thing. In watching it now, she saw that it held the vague shape of a dark, cartoon baby. It was not entirely the golem she knew, the one’s she’d raised from a thimble-full of mud and whatever freeze-dried alchemy she’d dumped out of that little foil packet with printed instructions in Czech. It was still Little Josef, but Ondreij—always one to tinker, it seemed—had changed the thing in maybe a hundred, tiny ways. It moved in a bolder manner than she remembered; it seemed a bit more inquisitive, a bit more precocious. “Will you write to me, when I’m gone?” she asked. “Will you send pictures of him to me?” “Of course,” Ondreij said. There was laughter in his voice. “And you know that I would take him with me, if I could,” she said. “You know that I’d keep him, and care for him.” The words, as she spoke them, carried no taste, no clue as to whether she spoke inquisitions or bland, simple statements. She braved a glance at Ondreij, to gauge his interpretation, but his pale, angular, angelic profile offered nothing but the hint of a shrug and the casual and unthinking gesture of fingers tucking an errant lock of hair behind one ear. “He is happy here,” Ondreij said, nodding. She followed the forward-bobbing motion of his head and saw little Josef stooped at the edge of the largest, messiest puddle. There were lifeless things in the water: drowned slugs, floating twigs, and more than a few deposits of duck shit. Little Josef examined them with his shadowy, comical eye-dimples. He pawed at them like a child rummaging through a junk drawer filled with a treasure of buttons and paperclips, an odd number of marbles, rubber bands, and a grandmother’s forgotten postage stamps gone brown and brittle. “Are you?” she asked, unsure of the impulse behind the question. “Am I happy?” “Yes,” she said. “Here.” Ondreij shrugged. “Praha is my home. I was born here. I’m safe. I have a job. I have friends and a life. And you. Are you happy?” “I am,” she said. “When I’m here.” “And when you are not?” “I’m coming back. When I can. It may be a while. But I need to do that. I want to do that.” “And until then?” “I’ll expect letters from you. Email. Photographs. Tell me everything. Make me feel Praha. Keep me from missing you and little Josef too much.” Ondreij nodded. “I can do this,” he said— * —and his voice echoes a whole world away, beneath the promise of rain. In another city. She touches the softening, dying echo of his voice. She traces it as gently as memory allows and it hardens into a crystalline thing. Sharp. She feels the edge of it. It is a blade in the shape of a single, immense word. Lítost. * “What does it mean?” she asked. Ondreij shrugged. “Nothing specific,” he said. “It’s precise: an emotion, but even still, it can be different each time.” “That doesn’t tell me much.” Twilight unraveled above the tree canopy and smeared shades of indigo across the sky. The river was still, with only a few distant boats to stir it into lazy, gleaming ripples. The first signs of nocturnal life had begun to emerge around them. She imagined small amphibians emerging from shelter and making their clumsy way to the banks of the island and into the cool, still waters of the Vltava, parted around the island and rejoined at its ends. Like the amphibians she imagined, she’d made her way to the water’s edge, and sat on the gnarl of tree-roots, as little Josef contented himself with quiet, dim golem-thoughts. He nestled between two enormous roots, nearly indistinguishable from the mud beneath him. He’d eaten a few dead slugs, a few dead things. He’d eaten death itself, which was—as Ondreij once told her—one of the things a golem was meant to do. It was one of the things that kept her flat free of spider webs and dust and signs of domestic entropy. It had been Ondreij’s idea to break from the curving path and pick through mud and grass. It had been his idea to pull off his shoes and his socks and to wade through ankle-deep water. He smoked: the ember of his cigarette stabbed the blue-tinged darkness with a little knot of Hellfire, as only an atheist might conjure in a moment of prosaic need. His shoes rested on knotted tree roots beside her, his dark socks wadded into one of them. After a while, he stepped out of the water and wiped his feet on a bed of rain-wet grass. His feet were ghost-pale with river mud darkened in the spaces between his toes. “Lítost,” he said, in answer to a question she scarcely remembered asking; he flicked ash from his ember, drawing a deep drag, and exhaling a cloud of dragon’s breath. He shrugged. “It is a glimpse of your own unbearable weakness. It is knowing that something must not happen, and it is also knowing that this terrible thing that must never happen has just happened. Lítost is feeling that and acting on it…or not acting on it, which is—itself—a way of acting on it. Lítost is human, and so it is inescapable.” Like going home without little Josef, only to realize that home was a dusty and entropic place, because golems were illegal there. * “Stop it,” she says, as if to anyone other than her own thoughts. —To the stubborn memory of Ondreij standing near her with muddy toes and the ember of a cigarette, burning the twilight. Maybe to the quiet recall of a lumpy, little, earthen homunculus nestled between gnarled and serpentine tree roots, content with his new keeper. It fades, just like that: the memory. It is replaced by the jarring blare of city noise, and the drone of a bus heading south on Sheridan Road. Rain begins to fall while somewhere over Indiana, thunder topples from its perch and rolls over the lake. The first drops are small and cold: the promise of more to come: late-summer rain with a taste of autumn already in it. She quickens her pace. A few blocks remain between her and the dry safety of her apartment. * Lítost It is invisible. She can see it when she closes her eyes, even when she doesn’t want to. It is always there. A reminder. A companion. The most unwelcome of guests. It looks like mud, like the ember of a cheap, foreign cigarette. It looks like a handsome, gentle friend. She keeps her eyes open. THE END **Lítost. (emphasis on the first syllable) The meaning changes depending on who you ask. It is a negative feeling, though this probably too simplistic a way of putting it. Lítost, if anything, is an awareness of the human condition. It is pure, emotional recognition of one’s own failure or the desperation of one’s own situation. It’s a slap in the face and one’s response to that slap. It is remorse or regret for having done wrong (according to some dictionaries). In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera gives lítost its own chapter, and its reputation as an untranslatable word. Other Czech writers make the occasional, nodding, elliptical reference to this emotional construct as well. My friend Jarda described it on different occasions as a dark epiphany, as being creeped-out by your own self-image, and as a pronounced sense of emotional nausea, as Sartre might describe such a thing. Lítost is, I think, everything that people say it is, but after “listening” to Ondreij, I wonder if it is—indeed—unfixed and infinitely mutable: a noun that exists only in the context of the emotional verbs surrounding it. I’d intended for this to be a different story: an answer to this month’s Writer’s Gallery challenge, and that story will, undoubtedly, find its way here before the end of the month. I wonder if, in fact, this is a response to the challenge for this month, if it is—in fact—the story of a smile. If I understand it correctly, then perhaps the only fitting response one may have to lítost is a smile. Or—to stand ankle deep in the Vltava river (Pavel did that with me a few times) while smoking cheap, fast-burning Czech cigarettes. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this odd little trip to Praha. You can actually get little pudgy, friendly-looking golems there. You can walk around with them if you want (and get lots of strange looks!) and it’s unfortunate that they’re just oddly-cute little pieces of tourist-kitsch: they don’t walk around by themselves.