Day three. You walk to Café Slavia at half past two because you cannot sit in the room anymore. The light outside is the November afternoon light which is its own thing and you want to be inside somewhere that has always been inside that light. Slavia faces the river and the Castle. Mirrors on the walls because the room has been a room that wants its patrons to see themselves since the eighteen eighties. You take a table at the window.
You order a pot of black tea. Sixty-five crowns. The waitress is in her forties, in the black skirt and white shirt, with a red enamel pin on her collar shaped like a raspberry. She puts the pot down and goes. She does not ask you where you are from. She has been asked that question a thousand times.
The tea is strong. You pour. You sit.
At a table by the window-mirror two people are speaking Czech faster than the Czech you can catch. The tone moves toward argument for a moment and then does not. You turn your head half an inch. They are an old couple deciding between places for dinner. The waitress crosses between you and them. You turn back.
The photograph is in the bag on the chair opposite. You know where it is. You do not take it out. The scan of the photograph is there also, folded in the notebook. You do not take the scan out either.
I am not thinking about Jana, which is the strange thing. I am thinking about the hour before meeting Jana. I am thinking about the walk from the pension down into Old Town and across into the street where her building is. I am thinking about the first-floor landing, the second-floor landing. I am not thinking further than that.
The body does not trust the scripts the mind has prepared. I know what I am going to say when Jana opens the door — I have rehearsed three versions — and the body has already told me that none of the three will survive the door opening. The body's confidence, in this, is not reassurance. It is information.
A man at the next table is writing in a Moleskine notebook with a fountain pen. He is maybe sixty, Czech, solitary, and nothing in the way he writes or the way he sits says he is a writer; he is a man with a notebook. You have been at enough tables in enough cafés to know the difference. He looks up once in the half-hour you sit and he does not look at you; he looks past you at the window; and he goes back to writing.
You take the photograph out after all.
You do not lay it on the table. You hold it in your lap under the table edge, angled down. You look at the nine-year-old you with the too-long velvet sleeve and the expression on her face that the adults always called grave when they wanted to call it something else. The staircase behind her. The edge of a different adult's leg at the margin. The window just visible at the top of the frame, a window you know now to belong to a third-floor flat in a building you will stand in front of tomorrow morning.
You put the photograph back in the bag.
You drink the tea. The waitress brings a second small jug of hot water you did not order. She does not stop to be thanked. She is good at her job in the way that a woman who has been at it for twenty-five years is good at it. Later, passing again, she pauses. Ještě? she asks — anything else? You shake your head. She switches to English. The bill when you're ready. She goes.
You look out at the river. There is a tour boat at the far bank, idle, waiting for the summer it will not see for another six months. A rower in a narrow boat comes under the bridge heading upriver at a steady pace and you watch her pull through to the next bridge before you turn your eyes away.
The afternoon I avoided Prague for was six years ago and it was a different river and a different light and the argument I had in English with someone who was learning English was on a bench a fifteen minutes' walk from this window. I do not think about it. I know the bench. I know the bench is there.
You finish the tea. You leave ninety crowns on the saucer with the bill. You round up. The waitress, at another table now, lifts a hand at you without looking and you lift a hand back.
Outside, you walk along Národní for a block. You like the stretch even though everybody likes it and then you turn up toward the place where you will stand tomorrow. You do not stand in front of the building yet. You pass the end of the street once, at the corner, and you look up at the façade from an angle that does not identify you to anyone on any floor as someone standing in the street, and you clock the doorway, and you keep walking.
On the walk back to the pension the cold has come in. You stop at a small bakery on Jilská and buy two koláče, thirty crowns each, for breakfast tomorrow. The girl at the counter is maybe twenty-one, studying, doing her afternoon shift. She wraps the pastries in waxed paper and ties them with twine. An open textbook behind her — state exam tomorrow, she says when she catches you looking. You wish her luck. She smiles for the first time.
Back at the pension the pension-woman is behind the beaded curtain, doing a crossword in what looks like a Slovak magazine. She nods at you without looking up. You go to the room and put the pastries on the windowsill and you do not take the photograph out again.