“Her building is around the corner. Number sixty-five. Apartment two. It has a black roof—”
“Petr, I have to do this alone now.”
Hesitant, he handed over the bag of clothes. I turned to go but he grabbed at my sleeve, then pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a single hand. “You’re saying I won’t see you again,” he said.
“Don’t think about it anymore,” I said. “You did everything you could. I made my own decisions. I wanted to go.”
“What do you think will happen with her?”
“You know, on the bad days, I thought I made her up. This great love of mine. And you, frankly, and Central, and many other things. When you wake up in a room you don’t recognize, you feel lost, right? What about walking to an outhouse in perfect darkness, using only muscle memory. Chickens pluck at your feet. You walk until the senses catch on to familiar clues. Until you feel the spiderwebs upon the wooden door and the rabbits stirring as you interrupt their sleep. You walk into the darkness until something becomes familiar. I don’t know what should happen, Petr. Please keep me in your thoughts.”
Petr put his arms around my shoulders, then returned to his car and drove off.
I STOOD IN front of Lenka’s apartment door, lacquered in a brown similar to the color of my grandparents’ gate in St?eda. There was no doormat, that usual square pancake serving to cleanse one of the dirt of cities before entering a sacred space. I knocked, listened, knocked again, waited with my cheeks hot and sweat soaking through my shirt. I leaned on the door, rested my forehead, knocked once more. What would Lenka say when she opened the door? Surely I looked appalling, perhaps unrecognizable even to her, in comparison to the man she’d married. I pushed myself off the door, straightened my spine. Maybe I wouldn’t need to say a word. Maybe she would be so ecstatic to see me alive that she wouldn’t expect a thing. No answer.
I reached above the doorframe, where Lenka had always left a key during our years together, terrified she would lose hers and lock herself out as she had done when she was a little girl, with her parents out of town and the streets full of unknowns. Under my fingers I felt the coldness of brass, took the key down, and slid it into the lock. I entered Lenka’s world.
It was a railroad apartment, four rooms locked together in a single line without doors. I walked into an office in which bookshelves held books that were only hers, novels from all over the world, while my nonfiction tomes of theories were gone. Even our literature proved that I’d wanted to conquer everything outside Earth, while she wanted to know every inch of the planet I desired to leave. I put my hands upon these books, remembering those nights of silence when our forearms had touched and we had read until sleep took us, the pages mixed between limbs and sheets.
The next room, her bedroom. The bed was not ours. It was hers, smaller, and a crater in the middle suggested that Lenka had slept comfortably without having to choose a side. The sheets were folded neatly, another morning ritual of hers. Above the bed was a painting I had never seen—cormorants rising over a river, a sunset with hues so orange the beams looked like napalm. Lenka’s signature in the corner.
What would happen if Lenka were to come back home, capture the poltergeist lurking in her space? How to explain that I had passed through the core that had seen the beginning of the world? That I had fallen through the atmosphere and crashed into a Russian lake. That I had come for her.
The third room was an undecided space. A yoga mat and weights lay in one corner, while the center was dominated by an easel supporting an unfinished painting on a large canvas. This new project was a night sky above Plzeň’s horizon. One star was particularly thick, glowing, with a tail behind it that suggested movement. This was how Lenka had seen me when I left, guessing at which of the moving reflections in the vast darkness could be her Jakub.
There was also a closet. I opened the doors and leaped into her clothing, sniffing at the familiar detergent, the armpits of blouses still holding traces of sweat mixed with deodorant, notes of her apricot perfume. As I put my face in the clothes, they began to fall, and soon I too fell to the ground, burying myself under the pile until I couldn’t breathe.
The final room was the kitchen, in which I could still smell all of Lenka’s favorites—fried eggs, bacon, the goddamn bacon, mushroom stew. There was a high bar table littered with a week’s worth of newspapers (was she still searching for articles about me, or embracing the new world without me in it?). Above the table stretched a framed photo of the sunset on a Croatian beach.
I walked back to the office at the front of the apartment. There weren’t any photos of me, no photos of our wedding. I considered rummaging through the closets to see if these items still existed, or whether Lenka had scrubbed her life clean of the reminders. Their absence wouldn’t upset me. It would bring clarity.
I exited the apartment and walked outside. If I kneeled down and put my ear to the sidewalk, would Plzeň speak to me, tell me where to search? I turned in all directions with my eyes closed and chose one at random, then embarked, knowing I would scour these streets day and night until I found Lenka.
As I stepped forward, faint music drifted from the direction of the River Radbuza. It came into sight and I realized that Lenka’s cormorant painting had been conceived at its shore. The music grew louder as I walked into the city’s historic center, where the Cathedral of Saint Bartholomew dominated the skyline. A mass of tents, stages, and food stands opened before me, organized into neat rows for the winter festival. A group of Roma musicians unleashed their soothing folk, accentuated by the smacks of steaming grog spilled upon the ground, the sizzle of onion, and above all the cheers of voices unified in the pagan ecstasy of human celebration. I entered the masses, searching above their heads. Lenka had to be here, with her love for ritual and for life. I bought a cup of grog, proof that I too belonged here, that I could still run with my kin, my species. Hours passed, the afternoon sun began to retreat, and the air grew cooler as I circled the square. Then, at a table ahead, a hand picked up a slice of bread smeared with goat cheese. The body belonging to the hand was concealed by the crowd. I tore through the mass, now seeing that those hands which had memorized my own body so thoroughly were not a mirage.