Prague in November. You land at Václav Havel Airport at 15:40 on a Monday and the cold is waiting on the jetway. Twenty-three. Post-Lviv by five weeks, post-Tamiment return by four. The line for non-EU passports moves faster than you have remembered from the last time, which was not in this airport but in another airport in another year when you were nineteen and the word for what you were doing was still visiting.
You show the passport. He stamps it without looking at you. He says Dobrý den in the flat official way and you say Dobrý den back in the flat unofficial way, and he hears that you are American and he does not say anything else.
PRAGUE — NERUDOVA STREET, 17:20.
You take a taxi to Malá Strana because the bus is long and the light is going. Four hundred crowns on the meter, then four hundred and twenty. The driver is from Ostrava. He talks at you about a football match last night and about the weather and about the new toll at the airport. He does not ask why you are here. He drops you at the bottom of Nerudova because nobody drives up Nerudova. You pay him in cash. You carry your own bag.
The street climbs. November afternoon in Prague at five o'clock is a kind of failing light the body gets used to or does not. The cobbles are wet though it has not been raining. A woman with a pram goes past you downhill, the pram's wheels clacking at the wrong rhythm. You climb.
The pension is three-quarters of the way up, on the left, under a painted sign of a violin. U Modré Housle. Seven hundred and fifty crowns a night, confirmed in an email you read on the plane. The outer door opens on a narrow hall. A small woman of maybe sixty comes out from behind a beaded curtain. She has the face of a person who has run this pension for twenty years and before that worked in one. She looks at your jacket, at the bag, at your shoes, at your face.
Vera, she says. She gets the V right. Room four.
She gives you a key on a wooden fob carved with what is maybe a violin. She does not give you a breakfast time. She tells you to close the outer door carefully because the latch sticks.
For dinner, if you want, she says, down Nerudova two doors, the one with the red light over. She does not write it down. You nod. After seven, she says.
The stairs up to the room are wooden and loud. Each tread announces you, which is, at a pension at five in the afternoon in a city you have avoided for six years, a sort of announcement the body hears as a small offense. The bag is heavier than it was when you started climbing. You catch your breath on the landing. You climb them anyway.
Room four is narrow and cold. A radiator under the window has just been turned on; you can hear it tick as the water works through it. A single bed. A wooden chair with a woven seat. A washbasin, a towel, a small bar of soap in a paper wrapper. Window looking over the cobbles. You put the bag on the chair and you put your jacket on the bag and you sit down on the bed with your shoes on. You do not unpack. You do not open the curtain further. You sit for a minute with your palms on your knees.
You do not lie down.
The radiator ticks. Below the window a man and a woman go up the hill speaking Czech and then laughing, and you can hear the laugh at the turn because the stone carries it up the way stone carries sound. There is a lightweight smell of coal that is not coal any longer, coal-memory in the stone where old stoves used to vent.
Your period began on the plane. You had known it would. You had brought what you needed and you had used the airplane bathroom at an angle that told your hips you had been sitting too long. Now, in this room, the warmth begins to reach your pelvis through the radiator and your body settles against itself. You count your breaths down from ten and at three you feel the shoulders drop. The body has been asking for this room for four weeks. The body does not know yet that the room is the place you avoided for six years. The body has arrived first.
You open the window an inch. Cold. Below, a man carrying a violin case walks uphill. It would be too literal a joke if the pension had not been called U Modré Housle for forty years before this man and his case walked past.
You close the window. You eat half a roll you have kept from the flight. You do not check your phone. You do not take the photograph out of your bag. You lie down finally with your shoes off and your clothes on and you close your eyes and you hear the stone again carrying somebody else's voice up from the street, and somewhere in you, at the edge of what cognition can reach, a summer other than this one surfaces and then does not.
Maybe Jana will not be home tomorrow. Maybe the staircase will turn out to be a different staircase and the window will not match and the whole thing will come apart into an afternoon in Old Town and nothing. Maybe that would be fine. You want that to be fine.
You sleep for maybe an hour and a half.
When you wake it is fully dark. Six-fifty by the phone. The radiator has reached its proper heat. You are in Prague. You are here. Day one.