Day two. You walk from the pension to the Karolinum. The walk is the whole point. Down Nerudova, across Charles Bridge at ten in the morning when the cold is clean and the light is trying, over the water, across into the Old Town, through a lane, into a square, into another square, into Ovocný trh, and there it is: the oldest university in Central Europe, still running, still in stone, a Gothic bay window set into the Baroque façade like a body that has agreed with time to be two bodies at once.
You pay one hundred and fifty crowns for the visitor ticket. You have come as a visitor. You walk the inner courtyard. You walk the cloister. The students cross the courtyard without looking up. They do this every day. A woman with a child on her hip, probably a porter's wife or a porter herself, crosses with a set of keys in her free hand. You hear her tell the child in Czech that they will be home in an hour. She does not look at you. She goes through a door that you will never go through.
At the south end of the cloister, where one pillar is a little darker than its neighbors, you stop. Not because you planned to stop. You put your palm to the pillar. It is colder than the November air around it because the stone has been holding its own temperature since thirteen forty-eight.
Marcus, I think, in an office on Washington Square in May, said the Shevchenko name on the Monday of the week I left. He said it as if told the Sunday night before. I had decided, over the next many months of being east of New York and then east of Moscow and then west of Moscow, that someone had told him who knew what the name cost.
Palm on the pillar. It is not the scalp-cold. It is a different cold. A cold behind the ear, interior, the cold of the mind reshuffling a hand it has been holding for too long.
Marcus had been told by someone who had heard the name themselves, from someone else on the Friday, from a chain of senior-enough historians adjacent to the relay. He said it to me because he had been told it. He did not know that to say it was to hand me over.
I close my eyes for one breath with my palm on the pillar. I open them. Marcus has had the weight he was carrying in me for seven months returned to its correct weight. The other weights have shifted.
You move off the pillar. You walk the rest of the cloister. A plaque on a wall commemorating a rector who died in 1971 — which is a date you know, which is why you read the plaque, though the rector is not yours — and you read it.
You leave by a side gate. Outside in Ovocný trh a coffee cart is selling an espresso for fifty crowns. You pay. You drink standing. The man running the cart is from somewhere south — Syrian, possibly, or Lebanese — and he gives you an extra square of chocolate with the saucer. He has read something in your shoulders. Cold today, he says, nodding. Colder tomorrow, you say. He smiles once and looks past you at the next customer. You say Děkuji. He says Prosím.
You walk the river back toward Malá Strana. The summer other than this one surfaces somewhere near the Philosophical Faculty building and you do not look directly at it. You were seventeen that summer. The stones do not know that. Your scalp knows.
The pension at four-fifteen. The woman who runs the pension is behind the beaded curtain. She looks up. Vera, she says, and the V is slightly different than it was yesterday — you hear the difference, you cannot interpret it. The radiator already on. She understands November. You eat a plum from the paper bag on the windowsill. You take off your boots. The mirror above the dresser catches you. You stop. The woman in it has dark hair the length it has been for three years and eyes that are my mother's eyes and were, before the mother, my grandmother's. I did not know I had them. I look until the looking becomes the thing I am doing. I do not look away. You sit on the bed with the curtain open and watch a man on the street below argue with a delivery driver about where to put a crate.
You do not call anyone. You do not take the photograph out of the bag. You read four pages of a borrowed Czech novel in the English translation you brought, and then you close the book.
The pillar was thirteen forty-eight, I think. The stone was enough to change what I carried.