You had walked twenty steps past the Pinkas wall when your feet stopped. The threshold had held. You had stood at it long enough to see the yellow light on the plaster and the names as a field, and you had walked on because the wall was a thing you had entered before as a reader and did not want to enter today as a visitor. Your period was on the third day and the back was held and the Josefov was still under the ribs. You had walked twenty steps and your feet stopped.
You turned.
A small gathering at the Pinkas entrance. Four or five people. A woman in a tour-group jacket with her hand up to her mouth. A man with a phone at his ear saying numbers in Czech. A Czech attendant came fast past you with a defibrillator bag, already unzipped. You followed him in.
Inside, the yellow light. Inside, the names on plaster in red and in black, a field the eye cannot edge.
A woman was on the floor at the letter T. She had been reading low on the wall, the way you read low on a wall when you are fifty and looking at names that are at a child's eye-level, and she had gone down knees-first and the shoulder had followed and the side of the face had found the stone where Tausová, Hana, 1931-1944 was written in black below Tausová, Gerta, 1902-1944 in red, and the cheek had settled against the daughter's dates as if it had been looking for them. A folded map of Prague had fallen from her hand and opened on the floor beside her shoulder. One street was circled in red ballpoint.
The attendant was already kneeling on her other side, pulling the pads from the bag.
You knelt.
I never told you I had one.
Heel of hand to the sternum. The body has the training you have never needed. One. Two. Three.
He said something to you in English and you did not hear it. Four. Five. Six. The pads came free of their packaging. Seven. Eight.
At twelve the warmth reached your knees. The trousers darkened. You did not stop the count. Thirteen. The sternum under the heel of your hand had the give a sternum has when the person inside it is not yet dead and not yet alive, and the ribs were waiting for you to decide which. Fourteen. The floor pitched a half-centimeter toward the wall. The warmth found the grout-line. It ran along the grout-line and down, and the last inch it climbed. Her urine is on their names.
Twenty. The attendant was opening the pads.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.
You bent. Two breaths. Her mouth was warmer than her cheek. The lipstick transferred mouth to mouth. You tasted salt and coffee and the specific sweetness of a body whose pancreas works. You bent again. Two breaths.
The names are doing their work without me. I am doing mine.
One. Two. The attendant said analyzing to the machine. Three. The machine told him something. Four. Five. The attendant said shock advised to no one. Six. He shifted you a foot to the left with his hand on your shoulder. The shock came. The body under your hands moved the way a body moves that has been shocked and did not come back. The attendant gestured for you to continue. Seven. Eight.
Thirteen. Fourteen.
The paramedics came in at minute seven. Two of them, in jackets you did not look at. They took over at compression forty-one or forty-two of the second cycle. The older one said klidně to the younger. You sat back on your heels because their hands told you to sit back. Your knees did not want to straighten. You did not straighten them. You stayed on the floor.
They worked for a long time that you could not count. The older one was speaking short sentences to the younger one in Czech and to the woman in English. The younger one was counting. You listened to his count without meaning to. At some point the compressions stopped and at some point they began again and at some point they stopped again. They transferred her to a stretcher. The younger one picked up the map and set it on her chest. The red ballpoint circle was visible for a beat before a grey blanket covered it. They carried her out.
The doors close. You hear the engine. You do not hear the siren yet.
You stood up. Your knees were slow. Your palm went to the wall beside the Tausová names, not to touch them, not to close the eyes. Just to steady the body as the body remembered how to stand. The Czech attendant was still there. He held out a paper cup of water. You shook your head. He nodded. He did not ask you anything. He picked up the defibrillator bag and began, slowly, to coil the cord.
You walked out.
Outside the Pinkas door the sky was the afternoon sky. You walked the path toward the Josefov exit. At the exit-path a small stone was set flat into the ground, inscribed with a date in the nineteen forties and a single Hebrew word you did not translate. You stopped over it for the breath it took to register. You did not stay for the breath to not register.
On the street the cold found your sternum. You walked.
You walked to the tram stop at the end of Pařížská. You did not look down at the trousers. You waited the three minutes for the 17. A man on the bench did not look at you. You boarded. You sat.
The Czech grandmother opposite looked at you. She looked at your knees. She looked away. She opened her bag. She took out a folded tissue and held it out to you across the aisle without speaking. You took it.
You hold the folded tissue. You do not put it away yet. The tram carries you.