Day five. You go in the morning because the cemetery closes early in November. Your period is on the third day and your body wants the walk and does not want the walk, and you take the walk. The walk from Old Town Square to Josefov is six minutes on cold cobbles past a pretzel seller warming her hands over the steam of her own cart. You pay the seller for a pretzel you do not eat. In a small café on Maiselova you use the bathroom and change what needs changing and wash your hands in water that is the exact temperature of the stone of the city. The proprietor nods at you as you leave because he understands that some women come in to use the bathroom and not to buy coffee. You would have bought coffee if he had asked you to. He did not ask.
Three hundred crowns at the ticket window for the circuit ticket that includes the cemetery and four synagogues. The clerk slides your change across without looking up. Audio guide? he asks, in English, not raising his eyes. You shake your head. He nods, already looking past you.
You enter the Old Jewish Cemetery.
The walls keep the sky small. Inside the walls the ground has been re-used for three hundred years because Prague did not allow the Quarter to expand and so the dead were buried on top of their own kin, twelve layers deep in places, and the result is a density that the body registers before the eye does. Stones lean toward each other. Stones lean against each other. Inscriptions worn past reading in three centuries of weather. A family name that the Hebrew alphabet makes you pronounce slowly in your head. A date from the fifteen hundreds. A date from the seventeen hundreds. A date from the eighteen hundreds.
You walk the narrow path between the stones. Your boots are on ground that is ground above ground above ground. I do not think of this first. My lower back thinks of it first.
A name you do not know. You read the stone and then you move past it. A woman.
A name you know by family trace. Not your family. The field is small enough that the names of scholars of the period overlap with the names on some stones. You read the name and you do not stop and then you stop. Her scholarship was in my footnotes six times. She died in 1621 and she is under my boot in a way that is not metaphor.
Your breath is visible.
You walk on. A woman ahead of you on the path, an older tourist in a grey coat, is weeping quietly without explanation. Her husband is not trying to console her. He is holding her elbow and letting her weep. You go past them and you do not look at her directly because whatever grief she is having is hers.
The cemetery ends. You walk a short path toward the Pinkas wall. A tourist in a grey coat on the path before you says to her husband, in English, looking at the stones: Alas, poor Yorick. She says it the way someone says a thing they meant to say before they got there. He does not answer. You pass them.
The Pinkas Synagogue wall begins. You do not enter the wall of names — I have entered it before as a reader and I do not want to enter it as a visitor today — but you stand at the threshold long enough to see the interior lit yellow from inside and the names on the plaster making a field the eye cannot edge.
You keep walking.