In a small, windowless bathroom, I turn on the light. The blood on my hands and forearms and chest and belly and face is drying into a nice shit-brown paste. I strip and ball all my clothes except my boots into a trash bag. Then I scrub at the blood on my body with a stack of hand towels. The only ones within reach are the embroidered kind with little reindeer and snowmen on them, the ones reserved for company at Christmas. I feel bad about that, ruining the family’s good guest towels.
In the cabinet under the sink, I find some barber’s clippers and go to work on my hair, shearing it off to about a centimeter in length, so short I can see my scalp through it. It’s a good, if primitive, disguise; once I put on the stolen clothes, I look like a teenage boy, at least from a few meters away. I’m hoping it’ll be enough to pass through the streets without cops taking a second look.
I collect the hair and wash the blood from the sink with toilet paper and cleanser from the cabinet. Then I retrace my steps, wiping everything I’ve touched. I tell myself it’s to erase the evidence, but it’s more than that. I don’t want this family dirtied by my visit. They’re part of a cleaner world than I am, and the sickness in me might be contagious.
*
I walk north of the little town, figuring the cops will focus on points south, closer to Prague. At a truck stop a few kilometers away, a Polish truck driver named Witold agrees to drive me to Prague for ten euros. We haggle for it in our elementary German, the only linguistic overlap we can find. He is unfailingly polite on the hour-long ride to the city, guilty of nothing more than singing along to Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith on the radio. But even for this he apologizes and offers me half a liverwurst sandwich in compensation.
Witold drops me off just west of the Vltava River within sight of a bridge he says will lead me to the Old Town. “Das Prag, das du dir vorgestellt hast,” he says. The Prague you see in your imagination. He smiles at me as I climb down, wishes me good luck and to be careful. He’s the first normal person I’ve known in months, and I wish I could continue on with him to wherever he said he’s headed.
A trolley wrapped in ads for Samsung shuffles along the bridge, its interior lights pulsing. From somewhere comes the baritone clang of a church bell, eleven times, twelve. Midnight in Prague, and the bridge is still full of teenage couples, somehow still in love after a whole month. A guy offers to sell me weed or coke or heroin, whatever I’m looking for. Another guy lies facedown on the ground, a hat with a few coins in it cupped in his outstretched hands.
There’s a café on the other side, and through the windows, I see warm yellow light and old-fashioned waiters in bow ties and aprons serving plates of steaming food and tall glasses of beer to a well-dressed crowd. Where have they all come from—the opera? A play? The idea of food is, by necessity of my circumstances, an afterthought. But somehow I’m hungry, less for a dinner of duck and dumplings than for the steaming, delicious company of decent people. Briefly, but only very briefly, I consider going in, but I can’t risk being seen. For all I know, I’m famous by now, my face slathered all over television, wanted for murders in two countries.
Flashing lights from a cop car partially blocking the street in front of me. It’s probably something dull and routine, but this new me has to avoid all cops, and so I do, turning down a narrow side street where I disappear into invisibility and stumble back in time a few hundred years. The street here is cobblestone, with narrow ruts worn in parallel lines where centuries of horse-drawn carts and, later, automobiles have passed, each one taking a little of the street away with them. My footsteps echo against the walls of medieval buildings on either side, drowned out only by the grinding motor of a scooter as it flies past.
The street divides, and I take the route on the left, only to circle back to where I started. So I take a right instead, and that street, too, ends up dividing and dividing again. There’s no logic to it, only a complex anarchy, as if the city grew from the ground like a forest, all chaos and organic beauty.
And then I stumble out into a square and very nearly gasp at the sight. Witold was dead right. Here it is, the Prague you see in your imagination. It’s a fairy tale of amber light and stone worn smooth by time and the hands of countless millions of visitors seeking to touch beauty. Damn my luck for seeing it in the context of my circumstances. I’m jealous of the knots of tourists dumbly making their way from outdoor café to outdoor café, of the families posing for pictures, even of the boys drinking beer and leering at the girls.
Somehow I break myself free of the sight and focus on practical priorities, the first of which is where I’ll bed down for the night. A hotel or hostel is out of the question if the police have my identity, and I have to assume they do. I’ll keep an eye out for another version of Marina, but I can’t count on being that lucky two cities in a row.
I wander a bit away from the crowds and discover a tiny, curving side street with a building on one side and a wall about three meters tall on the other. I have no idea what’s behind the wall. Maybe a park or a courtyard, someplace private without junkies or crazies. I look around and see I’m alone on the street, then grab hold of a carriage lamp jutting from the wall and lift myself up. From the top of the wall it looks like a private park, like a smaller version of Gramercy in New York, but it’s hard to tell in the darkness. Not knowing what’s below me, I lower myself slowly, trying to be as quiet and careful as I can.
My feet touch something hard, but as I put my weight on it, it shifts. I feel around with the toes of my boots until the strength in my fingers gives way, and I fall to the ground. Probing around in the dark, I feel narrow slabs of stone jutting up at odd angles from the earth and packed together as closely as crooked teeth.
It’s a cemetery.
I close my eyes, force the little girl fear away, and open them again. It’s just another place, I tell myself, and a private one at that. The yard is dense with gravestones, as if they were a crop in some morbid, overgrown garden. I pick my way over them to an open pathway just touched by moonlight. The stones, I see now, are mostly in Hebrew, and the dates on them are hundreds of years old. The ground is hilly and packed to the point of bursting with the bodies underneath, no doubt stacked five, eight, a dozen high.
For only a moment, I consider climbing back over the wall. But the fact is, I’m not going to find anywhere else more welcoming than this tonight, and I have more real things than ghosts to worry about. I find a place between two rows so close to each other I have to lie on my side. The stones are still warm from the heat of the day and feel almost soft against my body. You’re welcome here tonight, traveler, they seem to say.
I pull my jacket tightly around me and go to sleep among the dead.
*