Úsměv (Smile) * When she went away it was as if a witch had been tied to a pole and set on fire. Her eyes wore a shimmering, saline glaze. She held her lips tight-pressed, like a gash only just beginning to heal. Her posture was rigid and like a plank: uncomfortable with itself and brutal in its rejection of whatever comforts Ondrej might have offered from his own meager supply: an embrace, a caress, a kiss. He’d given her all three, in the end. It was what one did in airports when saying goodbye. Good-bye. Maybe forever, despite good intentions. That last day wrote its name in four final gestures: —caress… —embrace… —kiss… —depart. “I’ll miss you,” she said. “I’ll keep my promise.” “I know you will.” Neither of them had spoken of little Josef by name, but he was there in Ondrej’s promise and in the promise to keep his word. Neither of them cried. * Money gives way to beer. Beer yields to quiet conversation in a bar too loud for whispers. A tram makes the curve from Lazarska Street to Vodičová; the brass rattle of its bell clears traffic from the tracks, and from where he sits, Ondrej watches an old, white beater (with a ski rack on top) following the tram. A ghost car: a ramshackle Škoda tinged with the hints and whispers of haphazard repair and slap-dash reconstruction. Clumsy retrofits. The bar is crowded and from the tiny table near the door, Ondrej hears someone at the piano in the back room. The tune is half-familiar. It is a Norwegian melody: like someone crying alone. In a field of snow. They played it, once, in an American movie. Vodičková Street is a meandering patchwork of mood and history. This bar—like an iceberg—exists in greater mass beneath street level than above. Memories lurk in the underground chambers. Echoes live there: fragments of words, spoken in her voice and in the pinched, nasal shape of her accent. They rest in shadows, hanging like bats from the barrel-vault ceiling, stealing occasional substance from exhaled smoke, conversation, and laughter. It is safe. Here. Upstairs. At a small table of thick, heavy wood as blond as honey. * “Your friend. She is American?” Ondrej is brought into the physical intimacy of the present; the sullen mood he has wrapped around himself frays and comes unraveled; and for an instant, he feels as naked as a mummy robbed of its dusty linen cocoon. He shrugs to hide his flinch and takes a sip of beer because he needs something to do. The man seated across from him is earnest in his visible desire to keep up his end of the conversation. He is vaguely anonymous behind his ice-blue gaze. He might be handsome, after enough beer warming in the belly. Now, with only a few sips in Ondrej’s gut, he’s just some familiar stranger…the guy everyone recognizes as friendly enough: a bar face, a street face worthy of nodding acknowledgement on the metro, on a bus or a tram, on number of busy thoroughfares. His hair is short. It is the color of sand, though a few strands of it have gone gray. He wears a neat goatee with gray hairs in it too. “Yes,” Ondrej says. “A student?” “In a way,” he shrugs. “A student of golems.” “And you,” the man says. “Were her teacher?” “Her friend,” Ondrej says. “I helped her grow her first—her only—golem, but now she’s gone back to America.” “And her golem?” Little Josef. Ondrej shrugs. “He remains here. With me.” The man nods and raises his drink to his lips. There is something comforting in the shape of his body, his proportions. Maybe it’s beer-sight, Ondrej thinks, finding a faint smile in his recognition of something cuddly in the man, like a teddy bear or like a plush, toy hedgehog with blue-button eyes and a smiling face. His gestures snag on something in Ondrej’s past. A gesture. A smile. A caress. A frown masking a blush because he’d been caught looking. For an instant, the man seems as if he is elsewhere, elsewhen. Maybe someone has touched him, has kissed him; there is soul-clenching nostalgia in the expression set in his softly squared features. As it flares and fades, Ondrej is seized by the sudden impulse to reach across the table and clasp his fingers or to caress his cheek in wordless, affectionate solidarity, wordless recognition, or reciprocation of— The man’s name… —Zikmund— …shapes itself in the back of Ondrej’s throat, but dissolves (unspoken) in his exhaled breath. It is as jarring and as haunting as an unexpected and accidental kiss: moisture on the butt of a cigarette, the unwiped rim of a communion chalice, or the mouth of a flask of home-distilled brandy shared in a park, on the street, or beneath the arches of an ancient, blackened bridge. “It’s a happy burden to keep someone’s golem when you love them,” Zikmund says. “When they are gone. You’re a gentleman.” Ondrej shrugs. “It’s complicated.” Zikmund nods. “You have regrets?” “No.” “You love her?” There is platonic affection. “She’s a friend.” Nothing more. Zikmund took another sip of beer and replaced the thick, heavy glass on the coaster emblazoned with the crest of Plsen’s famous brew. “I loved him,” he says, staring into the past, trapped like an insect in amber, perhaps, in the bubbly-gold liquid with remnants of foam on top. “He left?” Ondrej asked. Zikmund focused on his beer. “He murdered himself.” * “Are you happy?” Ondrej asked her, once. “When I’m here,” she said. “In Praha.” She’d been careful—it seemed—to say the name in something close to local Czech. It had been a year since her arrival and two weeks remained before four final gestures at the airport, bare steps away from the international terminal. You could stay. He’d meant to say that; there were ways around things. Loopholes. Tricks. Little ones. The city was crammed with expatriate Americans: layabout and escapees calling themselves English teachers and poets, musicians, and artists in whatever disciplines they fancied. You could stay. He didn’t say it. The words didn’t hold their shape. They remained unborn. Dead potential. Locked. Frozen. “Will you keep Josef for me?” she asked. It had been the right question, and it stabbed him. “I can’t stay and I can’t take him with me. He’d never make it through customs.” Though he’d meant to say yes, he said nothing consequential until two days later. Yes. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell her that she could stay, that there were ways in which she might make completely legal arrangements. One, at least…unless the laws had changed. He didn’t think that they had. But he said nothing. Instead, he took little Josef, and began shaping him, slightly and subtly. Josef was a good little golem. Josef never asked why he didn’t say something to his expatriate maker. * “I’m not a maker,” Zikmund says. “Not like you. I’m no artist. I fix computers. I found someone to make my golem. My ghost. I don’t believe in ghosts, Ondrej, but I had one made out of mud.” They’ve left the bar. They’ve shared a tram as far as Žižkov. Where Ondrej lives, on Biskupcova Street, and where—Ondrej has learned—Zikmund lives, just a few streets away: closer to the hill, closer to the mausoleum, closer to the gargantuan statue of the hero with only one eye. “I would have made your golem,” Ondrej says, unsure of what compels his admission. Zikmund nods, smiling in the wan, orange sodium vapor streetlight and a muddled wash of florescent, neon, and moody incandescent bulbs. Ondrej remembers how—once, a long time ago—he walked through the tangled meander of streets in Little Town with no real destination in mind. He remembers passing a cheap restaurant, and the sight of an old woman seated at a table by the window. Alone. She could have been anybody’s grandmother, everyone’s grandmother: on display. It didn’t seem to matter that anyone could see her, and maybe the restaurant staff had hired her, to sit there, and be seen…eating borscht. He remembers her stoop-shouldered posture: her hair, thinning on top: her knuckles, as prominent as pebbles beneath wrinkled, splotched skin. He caught a sidelong glimpse of her, at first, and the sight of her froze him in place, though only for an instant. He turned his head; he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. He couldn’t fight, stop, or understand the feeling that had come over him. It felt like sympathy, like the doting obsession of a god in love, and for the eternity of a moment, he watched her spooning borscht into her mouth with meticulous care. Her hand trembled—a little bit—but she ate with grace. All that mattered was the old woman, eating soup. An old woman eating soup, when she doesn’t know that you’re watching her: the purity in that tableau had been overwhelming. It felt as if he’d been the only person on earth to have seen that. He’d cried, that night, and couldn’t understand why, though a gnarled babička, eating borscht, had everything to do with it. He has only ever seen that old woman once. But he thinks of her now, because Zikmund, smiling beside him, has thrown a boulder into his throat: the urge to cry, for reasons he understands but cannot name. He does not cry. He smiles, instead, because—for an instant—he is the only person in the world to see Zikmund’s face in the soft glare of nocturnal city-light. They pass the little convenience shop announcing NONSTOP with flashing blue and red LEDs in a display window crammed with enticements: bottles of liquor, mostly, and a sparse arrangement of chocolates and incongruous necessities. “I wouldn’t have asked,” Zikmund says, quietly. “No…?” “No,” Zikmund says. For a moment, he is silent, and then he cocks a sidelong glance at Ondrej. “What happens when a person dissolves golem pre-biotic activators in tea or in food and then drinks or eats it?” Ondrej flinches. An image flashes before his eyes and he banishes it as quickly as he can. He has seen what happens. “He did that? Your lover?” Zikmund nods. “He did that.” “Then you’ve seen it? You know what happens?” “I know.” “I’m sorry.” Ondrej can think of nothing else to say. * “Thank you,” she said to Ondrej. “For everything.” He shrugged. “It was nothing. But thank you for coming to Praha.” She laughed, as if he’d just told the most subtle of jokes, and he smiled in response. They faced one another. She’d checked her luggage and spent the last of her Crowns on drinks in a small, airport bar. She’d exchanged currency, keeping only a few coins for herself, because she liked the Czech lion standing on his hind legs, the Czech lion with two tails. Now, in the midst of an awkward pause, she faced Ondrej, reached forward, and clasped his hands. He held her warmth. You could stay. He didn’t say it. He couldn’t despite the need. “I’ll send you something. A piece of my city. I’ll send something for Josef.” Something from a city as alien as Chicago. “I would like that.” “Would he? You never told me if golems could feel things.” “I don’t know,” he said. “But I like to think that they do. I like to think that he will like what you send to him. Something from the outside world, as he’d see it. I would like that.” She nodded. “I should go.” She laughed, as if to dismiss troubling thoughts like. Ondrej smiled. Softly. Stubble, like sand along his jaw, itched. She touched his face. He touched her shoulders, her cheeks. He cradled her chin and burhsed her lips with something friendlier and warmer than a gentleman’s kiss, and they last thing they shared was the silence of a hug. “I should go,” she said, pulling away: forcing herself to do it, if the tension in her shoulders was any indication. Ondrej nodded. “Don’t look back,” he said in as steady a voice as he could manage. “Keep looking forward until you see Praha again.” * “You can stay,” Zikmund says, quietly. Ondrej has accepted his invitation to com up and talk, to share a bottle of clear, plum brandy, and—if necessity makes that demand—to listen to something: music, silence, the sound of their own breathing. They sit in Zikmund’s kitchen: face-to-face with a bottle and small glasses between them. Zikmund has placed a bowl of fresh strawberries on the table too, and there is something incongruously Russian in the way things are arranged: drinks and a snack with enough room for honest conversation. Ondrej nods. “I’d like that. I’d like to stay.” Zikmund fingers the rim of his small glass. “We’ve each lost so much.” “Everyone has.” “We should take something,” Zikmund declares. “For ourselves.” Ondrej feels the warmth of a smile. “We should share something good.” Zikmund smiles, softly, and—for the first time—meets Ondrej’s eyes while doing so. “Stay,” he says. “Please.” * He watched her go. She didn’t look back. Bland announcements told of arrivals, departures, and necessary procedures as she vanished into the distance and kept her shoulders squared. She kept her eyes ahead and her chin up, revealing nothing of the thoughts meandering through her head. She had always been honest, always kept her promises. She had promised—without actually saying so—to never look back. To keep looking forward. Until she saw Prague again. Forward. Forward. After a while, she disappeared. * Night light wafts through the open bedroom window. Hours have passed between this moment and Zikmund’s quiet invitation. You can stay. The silence is a comforting, subjective echo of… …and now, in the aftermath of sweat, laughter, and spermicidal latex, Ondrej feels a sense of profound warmth: Zikmund’s arms around him: Zikmund’s breath on his neck, tickling through his hair. There is a thump in the darkness beyond the bedroom: Zikmund’s golem, moving around in the most mundane of ways. The sound is a comfort, a thread of continuity. Keep looking forward. The words come, unbidden, to mind. He closes his eyes and snuggles back, feeling Zikmund’s chest and stomach pressed against him with something intimate beginning to stir. He cradles his arms to his chest, finding Zikmund’s arms with his fingertips, and he strokes the fine, bronze hairs there. Quietly. We’ve each lost so much. We should share something good. Stay. Please. With eyes firmly shut, he imagines the room and the history of the night’s actions laid bare and spread like a map. He sees the bar, and his avoidance of its cellar, and the way Zikmund kicked unstrapped and kicked out of his expensive, runner’s sandals, upon entering the apartment. He sees their laughing, playful dalliance, and sees both of them now, entwined, entangled, and in the darkness (little obstacle to his mind’s subjective eye) their entanglement (like an old woman eating soup, when she thought no one was looking) shaped itself into something unexpected. The opposite of sadness. A smile. END * Smiles are such a difficult subject to write about; I’ve attempted (twice) to craft a tale embodying the essence of a smile. I wanted to avoid clichés. I wanted to take an oblique approach. I’d planned on writing one story, but instead, two stories came about in an attempt to grasp a slippery thing. This story came about because of a Czech word. Lítost, and that word defined the story posted prior to this one. It’s an easy story to find, as it’s called “Lítost.” This story is another side of that one, and so I thought it fitting to give it a Czech name. Úsměv is the Czech word for “smile.” Stress is placed on the first syllable (unless, of course, it isn’t) and the second vowel is stretched. Golems don’t figure as prominently in this tale as they do in the first, but—if all goes according to the absence of a plan—there may be a third story. I hope you’ve enjoyed this attempt at embodying the principal (though probably not the physicality of) a smile. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.