* It seemed so easy to follow Volodya home, to learn his address and to lose herself in the irregular queue at a liquor vendor’s kiosk: where men bought walking bottles of vodka, brandy, and cheap local variants of hazelnut nastoyka. She simply blended in, and watched as Volodya let himself into an old and ornate building, encumbered with a growth of scrolls and garlands, and implications of ancient, pre-Revolutionary money. There was more to Volodya than he ever said, but his silence was eloquent enough to reveal the presence of another job: the one at the American Embassy, where he translated documents, and occasionally, live speech. The other job was the source of his income, and if Olga sought some indication of it now, she would most surely have found it in this neighborhood, with its restored Italianate architecture: Venice without water, Prague in the wrong country. There were expensive hotels, not very far away, and there were off-season tourists, staying in famous and prohibitively expensive hotels with names like Hotel Ganymede, Three Golden Doves, and Cockerel…The Cockerel as Westerners called it, burdened as their neurotic languages were with an infestation of articles. She sought some indication of Volodya’s apartment, now: the balcony he spoke of: reddened with clumps and clusters of geraniums, but every balcony was complex and colorful with flowers, brilliant in the deepening twilight, and washed out—only slightly—by the jaundiced orange of sodium vapor streetlamps. There were geraniums in pots on at least four balconies. There were lights on in all of the apartments. It seemed easy, the following day, to re-trace her steps; it was easy to walk by the liquor-vendor’s kiosk, and occupy herself with a few long moments in a nearby park. The resident pigeons ignored her as she picked her way along a gravel path. Earwigs scurried from path to manicured grass: dozens of them, dozens more, and Olga felt twinges of unrest at the sight of them. For an instant, she was in that attic again, with Volodya in his incongruous, American-casual outfit. She thought of the lone, dark insect in, scurrying across the pale exposure of Volodya’s toes, as if it had nested between them all day, but felt the need to accomplish some cryptic deed, right then and right there. She’d thought of dragons, then; she thought of dragons, now. She thought of those photographs, and how all of them focused on shirtless young men; some smiled, some wore somber expressions of bland, almost feline detachment. They were all handsome, all virile she thought, and a few of them were of African origin, not surprising here, given the history of this city, this country, and the ways in which local mentalities clashed with the rest of Europe. She left the park, after a while, and walked along the curving length of Žižkóvá Street, working up the nerve to approach Volodya’s building. She needed to understand something, though she couldn’t name it. She paid scant attention to the architectural opulence surrounding her and scarcely felt the cobblestones underfoot. More than once, however, she sensed the scurry of insects at the feet of buildings. She saw more than a few earwigs with their terrifying, backwards-pointing calipers, and for a moment, it seemed as if they recognized her. It seemed as if she could hear them, beneath (or above) the sounds of the city, whispering to her. Yes. That’s right. Go this way. Don’t worry, just keep going; it’ll all be fine. Yes. Yes. Just keep walking. And she found herself at the entrance to Volodya’s building. The read the names on glass-encased card stock beside the corresponding silver beads of the door buzzers themselves. It was easy to find the surnames: Mášá and Halloway. She buzzed once. Again…and a third time, but there was no answer. They were gone, as Volodya said: away from it all…out in the country, with the mushrooms and babble of a river in conversation with the pebbles in its bed. They were taking time off. Relaxing. On impulse, she pressed another buzzer button. Another. And another, asking for Vladímír Mášá to the disembodied voices interrogating her from the speaker grille. After a while, someone buzzed her in, and she made her way into the cramped elevator (one of two) at the far end of the vestibule. She knew that Volodya lived on the top floor, and so she pressed the button emblazoned with a gilt-edged 3-pátró in ornate, Italianate script. She felt the flutter of some small and nervous thing, beating against her ribs. She flinched at the sight of an earwig, scurrying up the elevator wall, and again, she heard that subjective, unreal whisper. Yes. Don’t worry. It’s fine. You did the right thing in coming here. It’s okay. Just get out of the elevator when it stops. Just walk down the hall. You’ll know their apartment. It’s easy. You’ll see. It seemed, for a moment, that she’d simply stopped thinking. It seemed, for a moment, that someone else had control of her body. Olga could feel her legs moving, and her weight shifting from foot to foot. She knew—in this way—that she was walking, but the impulse to walk was simply not there. She felt calm. She felt detached. She laughed—inwardly and in silence—at the overwhelming sense of peace that she felt. It seemed, for a moment, that the building was a living thing: a friendly organism that was wholly aware of her presence within it. She sensed the short corridor, adjusting to her footsteps, her presence. And she felt a remote sense of interest in walls, the woodwork edging both floor and ceiling, and the muffled press of her footsteps on a narrow strip of green hallway runner. She’d seen a scant inundation of earwigs since coming to this part of the city, and so it was no surprise when she saw one in front of her, scurrying under the closed door. Another one followed it. And a third. She thought of Nate’s walnut shells, halved and arranged like igloos beneath the shelter of lurid, red geraniums. These earwigs, she thought, were city-dwellers: confused, as Volodya said they were, when they left their municipal boundaries and wandered into the apartment. She thought of picking them up and whispering to them as she cupped them in her hand, but she didn’t know what one said to earwigs. Though they lived here, did they speak the local language? Would they understand her grandmother’s Ukrainian. The sense of detachment remained, and the impulse to try the door came from elsewhere: another Olga, floating somewhere in the aether. She didn’t recognize her attempt to try the door, until she felt the brass handle beneath her palm. The door was locked. Not surprising, since no one was home. An earwig emerged from beneath the door, paused, waving its calipers as if in threat, salute, or entreaty. She stepped back and the earwig scurried back beneath the door, another climbed the door-edge, drawing her gaze as it defied gravity in the way of any insect with adhesive little feet. There was an old fashioned keyhole beneath the ornate, brass handle, and a more modern lock beneath it. The earwig vanished into the keyhole, and for a moment, Olga felt the image of an intelligent thing scurrying into its lair. There was a click: the sound of a lock, disengaged. She tried the door handle again, and the door opened easily: silent, on well-oiled, well-maintained hinges. It was easy to step through the open door; it meant nothing to cross that particular threshold, though an unbidden though invaded the muddle of non-thoughts and sensory impressions boiling in her mind. One enters a dragon’s lair by invitation only, and with an earwig key. One enters a dragon’s lair—sometimes—in the company of a metallic owl. She’d read that, somewhere, in a book of old legends. But did dragons wear superhero tee-shirts and flipy-floppy sandals? Did they work part time at hostels to make a little extra money? Did dragons ever complain about people knowing everything about them, even though everything wasn’t true? Did dragons have American boyfriends? She was careful to close the door behind her. She heard the satisfying click. The apartment was heavy with early afternoon sunlight; silence lived everywhere, especially in the shadows. The furnishings were simple: standard-Ikea, in all of the colors of blond wood and late-season summer. The furnishings were simple, with a preponderance of books. The floors were antique hardwood: restored. The wood was worn, but some clever designer had found a way to weave that tread-worn age into the vague implications of memory, history, and the most elegant manner in which one might be guided from one side of the apartment to the other. The air was still. Everything was neat and free of dust, and arranged with casual nods to comfort and lazy Sundays with newspaper and tea, or quiet nights with brandy, music—from the innumerable CDs, or books. There were implications of other things too, and those activities made her blush; she’d seen Volodya and Nate together; she’d seen how they touched each other, how they held hands, even as they were on opposite sides of a room. Some of the books, she saw, were in English: translations, she saw, of surreal Czech, Russian, Spanish, and Hungarian classics. She’d seen Nate—once or twice—and knew a few things about him. Now, in reading the names of Kafka, Calvino, and the names of more arcane authors, she came to recognize Nate and could almost feel him here. She felt Volodya as well, and the other—more intimate, hidden—aspect of his alter-ego: Vladímír Mášá. There had always been two of him: Siamese twins—Vladímír and Volodya—joined at the soul. She saw photographs—a neatly-ordered stack of them—at rest on the low, blond-wood cocktail table before the Ikea futon-sofa-thing, burdened with an abstraction of leaves and splashes of color that might have been flowers. She could smell their age, and implications of an attic, three floors above Rybáršká Street. She saw shadows and the broken skeletons of dead antiques; she saw an earwig, crawling over the flagrant pallor of neat-pedicured toes, wiggling as if to encourage the insect to avoid any risk of getting squashed. And she saw earwigs—live earwigs, and more real than the memory of them—strolling with ease, across the table and the stacked photographs, and over there on the panes of glass through which sunlight slanted, stealing flashes of red, green, and other floral colors. The flat was immaculate. Spotless. It was full of earwigs, and Olga felt herself laughing at the idea that they were members of the housekeeping staff. They kept the place clean, they kept everything in order. They were impossible to miss, impossible to ignore, but there were casual ways in which they might not be seen. Or perhaps, they weren’t staff at all, but something far more intimate and cherished. Companions. Friends. Shy, reticent little people who could only be seen by those who were welcome here. She approached the bright-colored sofa and perched on the edge of it. She touched the photos: reproductions of the attic-bound originals, though there were others mixed in. They were of the same species: black and white, tinged with mottled wear and the voracious intrusions of entropy. Some of the images were fuzzy and indistinct, others were crisp, clear, and newer if their implications could be trusted. And she recognized all of the human figures, all of guys in nothing but knee-breeches; a few of them wore hats, those wide-brimmed, felt hats, favored by the eternal armies of young men who worked underground, tending to the gears, the cogs, and the arcane components of The Machine, as it squeezed history out of its guts. She touched one of the photos, two of them, and for an instant, she thought she saw Volodya there, in black and white, grinning like someone proud of his naughtiest, most playful secret. Someone had written a date across the bottom of the photo, in Cyrillic, rendered by an antiquated, Italinate hand. Léto v rošné 1902. Summer, it delcared. 1902. The pale, grinning young man could not have been Volodya, and yet... …She recognized those eyes. …She recognized the smile, the cut of the hair, that meager thatch at the center of his chin. But there were differences as well: a slight shift in the set of his muscles, a different sharpness to his cheekbones. An ancestor, then…not Volodya, himself…but his father’s father…his mother’s father…someone for whom he might have been named. A chill spilled down the length of her spine; she felt the curve of her body; she squared her shoulders, as if gathering strength for— And rose to her feet. There were other things to see: glimpses into something more modern than photographs of young men who were—invariably—dead by now, and if not dead, then unbelievably ancient. The kitchen was clean; it was spotless and crowded with German appliances, a coffee-maker like something out of Star Wars, and something else—a microwave oven, no doubt—that made her think of something she’d find, if she ever made it to the International Space Station. The refrigerator was a stark, Scandanavian thing: burnished steel. It wore a dozen earwigs on its face, like dark, ambulatory magnets. The bathroom was devoid of insects. And the bedroom was still and crowded with silence. Beneath it she could feel a rhythmic pulse in the air, as if she’d just entered the blood-bearing chambers of a living, beating heart. The room was as clean as the rest of the flat, as bright as the sunlight slanting in through its closed, double-pane windows of classic, pre-Revolutionary woodwork and glass. Her own apartment had similar windows; mold grew on her northern sills, and every spring, she had to spritz them with bleach. Beneath the sensation of that disembodied, beating heart, she heard the hints and whispers of an echo: the kind you’d hear in an ancient bedroom, with a marriage bed at the emotional core of it. The ghostly sounds were fleeting and complicated with the music of conversation and laughter in two distinct voices. There were breath sound and the succulent smack of kissing noises; beneath it all, she heard—at least subjectively—the language of one body, speaking to another, not with sound at all, but with its own sweat and its own flesh and its nerves. She ignored that intimate revelation, and the alarm clock blinking the time at her from beside the bed. She stepped around Volodya’s sandals on the floor, at the foot of the bed. She stepped toward the closet and opened it. There were shirts inside, and pants; there were shoes on the floor, arranged with military precision. She touched the shirts, like the pages of an enormous, fabric-woven book. Volodya’s shirts. Nate’s shirts. There were jackets, and as her hand wandered, she felt something like chain-mail for its texture, but papery and pliant, like the membranes of living leaves. In the sunlight filtering into the closet’s darkness, she saw the complicated pallor of a shirt, and hundreds upon hundreds of waving antennae; she withdrew her caressing hand at the realization of what she’d just touched, and she saw it clearly now. Hundreds and hundreds of insects—infant, nymph earwigs—clasping one another with their legs and their yellowish, brownish foreceps: baby earwigs, convincing her that they were an expensive shirt, as pale as scrimshaw, carved from the bones of an angel. For an instant, she felt as if she was in that attic again: the one above the hostel, the one—she realized—that was filthy with history scattered across its floor in the grime and the broken furniture. When he was younger, there didn’t seem to be anyone in Pekkúr that he could say anything to, because everyone thought they knew all about him: little Volodya, funny Volodya, and—she was sure—cute and inaccessible Volodya. They didn’t care what he might have had to say about himself; the facts of his life were accepted only as long as those facts echoed the truths they’d made up to convince themselves that they knew him. There was never anything to say in sight of such woefully-human delusions. “That’s why you invited me up into the filthy darkness,” she said, as if Volodya stood beside her, in that goofy shirt and that knee-length denim, recalling ancient, knee-breeches in sepia stained monochrome. “You wanted to tell me something, because I don’t know you, and someone other than your lover needs to hear what you have to say.” And it was all, right there, surrounding her: a muddle of facts and impressions, and snippets from old, dusty fairytales. —Because everyone thought they knew all that there was to know about dragons… —Because everyone knew that dragons were large, evil reptiles with a taste for medium-rare princesses and a habit of hoarding treasure… —Because everyone would assume that photos of nearly-naked young men were some kind of Victorian influenced pornography, full of bare chests, strong, muscular arms, and sexy, well shaped legs. And no one would ever assume that those men were dragons, devoid of their fine earwig garments, because it was important for them—in those moments—to be seen as something else that they were: humans who wanted you to like them. Humans who were dragons, but it didn’t matter, since they were conspicuously devoid of their beautiful, crawling shirts. She reached forward, touched the earwig attire again, and thought of Volodya now, and as she’d seen him yesterday, in the attic. In knee-breeches, sandals, and a superhero tee shirt. She heard him again, telling her how he simply wanted a stranger to listen to him, and to not assume some untrue convenience that only they recognized. Now, with the echo of his voice in her head, she heard the naked, wrenching plea embedded in his invitation, and in his pointed, intentional reference that he’d be gone today. He knew that she was here, she thought, and he left it up to her to decide what should be done next. He was lonely, in a way, because even with a lover as profoundly right as Nate, one person was never enough. There was always a need for strangers to listen and to see what you showed them, instead of what they told themselves that they saw, whether it was true or not. He’d said something, and now it was time to listen. She withdrew her hand and closed the closet door. She stepped out of the bedroom, and crossed the living room in quiet, easy strides. She careful of her steps; it wouldn’t do to tread on an earwig, no matter how frightening they looked, with those pliers on their bums. She touched the door-handle, opened the front door, and stepped out. She closed the door behind her, and in the silence of the hallway, heard it lock—click!—silently, behind her. She called the elevator and waited—patiently—for its arrival, and when the doors slid open, she stepped in and pushed the button for the lobby. As the cramped, little elevator descended, she drew a deep breath. “Thank you, Vladímír Mášá,” she whispered. “Thank you Volodya, for showing me who and what you are. You can trust me, I hope. You can talk to me. I promise to listen.” She was sure that she didn’t hear him, but an earwig scuttled up the wall beside her; he was sure that the little creature heard her voice, her whisper. She was sure that the creature lived in a little city made out of walnut shells, and that it was returning there, with news for others of its kind, and to Volodya as well. Perhaps, upon his return home, the creature would crawl into his ear, and tell him what she’d just said, right here, in the silence of the elevator. When the doors slid open, she stepped out, crossed through the vestibule, and made a right-hand turn onto Žižkóvá Street, walked in wordless contemplation of what she’d just discovered, and waited for the Number-18 tram to arrive, and take her back to the other side of the city. END I made references to Agaran folklore in an earlier post, and the the thought of dragons and earwigs in close association stuck with me. I was curious about that relationship, and because of Volodya, I learned that dragons wear living garments made out of earwigs, holding on to each other. How could I not write about that? It would seem that Agara is even weirder than I first imagined. Thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you've enjoyed this and are also having a great week.