A quiet, dreamless night passes, as if I were just one more of the lifeless bodies here. The ground is soft and the tombstones’ embrace tight, allowing me a cleaner, deeper sleep than I’ve had since Paris.
I wake up to sunshine and the prodding end of a shovel tapping the bottom of my boot. As my vision clears, I see that the shovel is held by an old man with white hair wearing blue workman’s overalls. He addresses me in what I take to be Czech, then in slow English. “No drunks here, okay? Go back to where you come out.”
“I just needed a place to sleep,” I say slowly, showing him my hands so he sees I’m not a danger. “My money and passport were stolen. Understand? Stolen?”
“You are English? American?”
“Yes,” I say. “I mean no. I speak English. A little.” I’m not sure who I should pretend to be.
He squints at me as if peering past the short haircut and teenage boy’s clothing. “You are a girl,” he says, more to himself than to me.
“I meant no harm, sir,” I say.
“If your money and passport are stoled, maybe I call police for you.”
“No,” I say too quickly, then force a smile. “No thank you. I will call them myself. Later.”
The deep wrinkles around his mouth purse up, a decision being made inside his head. “Maybe you need food?”
“I’ll be okay,” I say. “Thank you anyway.”
“A little breakfast,” he says. “Then you go.”
*
He’s the caretaker of the place with a little apartment above the museum attached to the cemetery. It’s Saturday, he tells me, the Sabbath, so there will be no visitors today.
I sit at a little table while he fusses with some bread and cheese at a wooden counter. There’s a boxy old TV on the table next to me; it’s playing the morning news. I can’t understand the reporter, but they cut to a shot of my train the evening before and a police crew with dogs working down the hillside where I’d fled. Don’t turn around now, I will the old caretaker. Wait for the weather report. The shot cuts to two men carrying a stretcher bearing a body beneath a black plastic sheet.
The caretaker sets a platter of thick orange cheese and rough rye bread on the table. He sits, then tucks a napkin into the collar of his coveralls and makes a sandwich. “You hear about this, maybe?” he says, tilting his head to the TV. “A killing, some man on the Berlin train.”
“Do they—know who did it?”
“Who make the killing?” The caretaker shrugs. “If they know, they do not say.”
My shoulders relax a little with relief. Maybe they really don’t know who did it. Or maybe they just aren’t letting on. Either way, I’m in the clear for the moment.
“About your passport,” the caretaker says. “More easy if I call police for you. You have not Czech.”
I smile politely. “You are kind, but no thank you.”
The furrows around his eyes deepen as he chews. Is it suspicion or something else? Then he smiles a little. Crooked yellow teeth, two of them capped with gold. “Are you Jewish?” he says.
“My parents were.”
“Jews understand sometimes no police is better,” he says. “It is, for us, bad history.”
“I’ll be fine on my own,” I say.
“In Praha, many criminals,” the caretaker says, using what I assume is the Czech name for Prague. “Criminals hitting, taking, you know?” He gestures broadly, as if to encompass the whole world. “But bad for alone womans most.”
“Thank you for the warning.”
“I know someone. Hedvika. She is in Praha 10, Vrsovice—not far. She has place. You take, maybe. Small money only. You have small money?”
“I do.”
The caretaker rummages through a pile of papers until he finds a torn envelope and a pencil. “Maybe Hedvika is good for you. Not too much questions. For her, no passport, no problem.”
The caretaker, I think, is no stranger to this world where sometimes no police is better. He hands me the paper with the address scrawled across it. From his description, it seems like precisely what I need: a room in an old woman’s house, cheap and on the down low.
When breakfast is finished, I clean the dishes, the only thing I can offer him in return for breakfast and his kindness. As the caretaker sends me off, I shake his hand stiffly.
“Thank you,” I say.
He nods gravely. “Careful in Praha.”
Nineteen
From a cigarette kiosk I buy a transit pass, along with three new SIM cards. The directions the caretaker gave me are easy enough to follow, and soon I find myself in a little neighborhood of little apartment buildings in Prague 10, old but well kept.
The woman, Hedvika, is ancient and has the globular body of a snowman. In her colorless smock that is either a dress or a nightgown, she shows me around the small three-story building she runs as a rooming house. It’s an old place but scrubbed to within an inch of its life. Here, she explains in German—a good lingua franca in this part of Europe—is the kitchen. All may use the icebox, but stealing is grounds for eviction. Here is the sitting room, no smoking, no loud television. Here is your room, no overnight guests, payment in advance every Monday by noon. We work out an agreement: twenty-five hundred crowns or a hundred euros a week, either currency is fine. I pay her for the first week, and she leaves me alone. She never even asks for a name.
There’s not much space in the room and not much furniture. It’s little more than a cell, really. A bed built for one, a wooden chair, a wooden table, and a small, three-drawer bureau for clothing. The bathroom is down the hall, and I’ll have to share it with the men, Hedvika says, so always lock the door and don’t leave my underwear lying about.
Guys who look like they might be Vietnamese and Syrian and Latino mumble hello as they pass me in the hallway. Workers with no papers, maybe. But hard to tell. Just people who need a room, no passport, no problem.
I’m exhausted and want to sleep, but I won’t let myself. There’s too much to do. I’ve jumped to the conclusion that my dad is in Prague, but the evidence is only circumstantial. A few bits of conversation with Veronika and Christian. A note to Paulus signed BK. Some crates of guns. The claims of a man who believed I was going to kill him if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. After only a few unproductive minutes of sorting it out, the tiny room starts to feel claustrophobic, and I head out to wander and think.
A sky the color of a battleship weighs down over Prague, putting a steel shield between the city and the sun. It might rain, or the sky might just collapse down on us, hard to tell which. I have a soul-deep desire for something, but I don’t know quite what: a ray of sunlight or a glass of orange juice or just a goddamn flower.