“A good day to ask questions,” she says, and finishes the sausage.
The policemen have at last nabbed the vendor, and they load him into the back of a police car. They leave, ignoring the overturned cart, the mess, until soon it becomes just a part of the evening crowd frenzy, pedestrians stepping over without a second thought about its origin.
“I’m still hungry,” Lenka says.
I open my bag and remove Bivoj’s schnitzel sandwich along with a bottle of dirty moonshine. “And thirsty?” I say.
“You are a resourceful man.”
We eat, though I ensure that there’s plenty left for Grandma’s dinner feast. The neon burns the eyes now, drowning out the soft beauty of the Gothic street lamps. We sit for twenty minutes or so, not saying much of anything, until I decide I haven’t much to lose. I ask whether I can see her again, whether we can share more food and more drink, because there has been a clamor inside my head drowning out everything else, but when she speaks, I can hear clearly, and I listen with pleasure. She agrees to meet for coffee on Friday, and we part.
And on Friday we sip cappuccino on Kampa Island. And the following week we go to the Matějská fair and shoot laser guns. She visits me every day on breaks between classes and brings strudel and beer. Lenka. The name comes from Helena, meaning torch or light. Jakub comes from the Hebrew for holder of the heel. My name destines me for always walking upon the Earth, attached to dirt and pavement, while hers destines her for burning and rising into the skies. This makes no difference. We move together like we’ve always known we’d be here someday. We are loners, and thus the fact that we are deciding to be with each other over the safe cradle of solitude says everything we need to know.
Three weeks after our introduction, I tell her about my grandfather’s death, and she insists I must see a place that is important to her. A secret place that could become important to me too.
When we meet, once again by our bench in Wenceslas Square, she’s smoking a cigarette and wearing, for the first time, the yellow summer dress with dandelions, the same dress she will later wear for our last night together on Earth. She does not waste time with a hello.
“Let’s go,” she says.
“Where?”
“To the moon, of course. Is school making you this dense?”
Briskly, we fight a path through the thick cloud of bodies, kicking shopping bags and elbowing the heads of children as we go. I hear a hiss behind us. The light evening breeze coming all the way from the Atlantic, trapped between these hills of Bohemia, is a stark contrast to the recent scorching days. Everyone is layered tonight, mysterious. The sounds of Jay Z, flowing from the boom box of some resting break-dancers, clash with the orchestra of clarinets and flutes spitting awful folk music at old-school pubs. We take a turn into Provaznická, and the sudden silence causes my ears to pop.
The lines of apartment buildings ahead have been untouched by time, war, and regimes. Some blue, some brown, all crowded underneath fading red tiled roofs. Many of these Old Town apartments used to be the bounty of Party officials. Now they belong to citizens with fat wallets. Change is relative. I am six blocks away from the apartment I grew up in, secured by my father’s loyal work.
Lenka leads me to a yellow building, where she presses eight different doorbells. A man’s voice barks a question over the intercom. We are quiet. She rings more doorbells, until the door buzzes and we hurry inside.
“Can’t believe that worked,” I say.
“There is always a person expecting someone who won’t come.”
We make our way up the twisting stairwell, dodging a man who is missing a nose and a woman dragging two fat Dalmatians. These strangers must think of us already as a couple—the revelation hastens my steps. Is Lenka taking me to her apartment? Impossible, otherwise she would have the keys. Is this a trap? She stumbles into me, whispering an apology, my fingertips graze her exposed thigh and she grabs my side for support. At last, we face the attic access, a battered door leaking light around the edges. She jerks the knob and I grimace at the hysterical creak. The attic has all the expected signs of neglect: hesitant light seeping through small windows, migrating globs of dust, a bicycle belonging to a dead child, boxes. A black curtain separates one of the far corners. Lenka leads me to it.
“Are you going to sacrifice me to Satan?” I ask.
“Would that be okay?”
“If it’s you who does it, yes.”
She pulls down all the window shades until I can see nothing but the silhouette of her curves. With the scent of apricot and powder in tow, she passes me and casts the black curtain aside, inviting me in, and she turns on a small lamp in the corner, its shade covered in black sheer fabric. On black wallpaper, shapes of stars and moons shine in gold. Above us hangs a papier-maché moon, its craters and creases emphasized with a pencil. At our feet rest Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, a cutout of the Milky Way, Apollo 1, the Millennium Falcon, faded gum packets, and a disemboweled rat.
Lenka kicks the rat aside and bends over and reaches underneath the gum wrappers. She holds up a figurine of a saluting NASA astronaut. “What do you think?” she says.
“I think I’d like to live here.”