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THE GIRL’S father was a puppeteer, and there came a day when he was called to perform in Prague; an honor it would’ve been difficult to disregard. He’d never dreamed of being noticed by the puppeteers at work in that city, let alone considered a colleague. The professor’s wife read this as a sign that she must either break or bend. She told her husband it would be good for him to take their daughter traveling, and checked into a clinic as an answer to her family’s anxieties about her being alone. So the girl found herself living in Prague. Rowan himself has no particular view of Prague, but I know it a little, and it was fitting that the likes of Myrna Semyonova was let loose in a city whose streets combined sepia-filtered rainbows and shapes of nightmarish precision. If I truly remember the street Rowan mentioned, then Myrna and her father lived in a building that looked like an avenue of concrete gallows welded together with steel. Apart from enforcing her school attendance, her father left her to her own devices; she was free to watch his rehearsals and performances or to improve her graffiti skills, aggravate swans on the banks of the Vltava, or anything else that seemed like a good idea. Myrna loved to watch her father with his puppets—he showed her the influence it was possible to have from a slight distance—so she spent a lot of time at the theater that became his second home. But she also began a correspondence with her mother that pleased them and led to the discovery that both strudel and currant buns remain on the edible side after delivery by forty-eight-hour courier service. From time to time they briefly discussed recovery, and Myrna began to hear a change in the language her mother used to describe her pain—they were words that spoke more of bending than breaking.
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MYRNA HAD ASSUMED command over two boys who lived in the flat above her own: Jindrich and Kirill, the Topol brothers. Myrna was both boys’ grand passion . . . they called her “London” and longed for a chance to rescue her from some danger or other. Sometimes one brother would menace her so that the other could defend her, even though she’d emphasized from the beginning that all she required of them was that they both die for her if and when such endeavor became necessary. The Topols were in the process of teaching Myrna some Czech, so her instructions were mostly mimed, but the brothers understood her at once. Death frequently crossed their minds, and why shouldn’t it, when Myrna had become a participant in their Sunday afternoon wrestling matches in Ol?any cemetery? Kirill was ferocious and Jindrich was fleet of foot, but Myrna was nimbler still, and her brutality was fed by her desire not to cheat. Instead of laying hands on her opponent she wove figures of eight until he was exhausted and some obliging tree branch gave her the height to safely grab Jindrich or Kirill with both feet and slam him to the ground, with the additional offense of forcing him to break her own fall.
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WITH ITS TENS OF THOUSANDS of graves, Prague’s Ol?any cemetery is a large village, a small town, in itself. I, Gepetta, have been there, and I know that something travels in that place, something passes among the trees. I cannot say what this traveler is, since we’ve never crossed paths, but what I’ve been able to see for myself is that in some of Ol?any clearings leaves lock together and form shadowy bridges from branch to branch, and the barks of these bridged trees peel back to show a color that glistens with rawness and decay, sap and old bone. The Topols and Myrna followed this trail, switching wrestling arenas for about a month, scrambling through swathes of undergrowth, administering the occasional surprise fly-kick (no matter how many times it’s happened before, it’s always startling to be assaulted by a bush) before they discovered the little wooden devil. The wooden devil had been aware of them for weeks. She was carved of rowan wood, and she retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. “Firstly, they cut us down,” Rowan said. “Secondly they’re all insane, though I suppose they can’t help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.”