Day seven. You go out at dusk. The body asks for the dusk, not the night and not the afternoon. You cross Charles Bridge from the Malá Strana side starting at four-fifty. The cold is the kind that does not let up and also does not get worse. A wind is moving along the river at a height that finds the back of your neck. You pull the jacket closed against it. Your hair blows back once. You lean into the wind and keep walking.
The statues on the bridge are mostly black with age and the saints on them have the faces of saints who have stood in November for three hundred years. Below the stone the water is grey-black. A swan on the upriver side is idle.
You walk at the pace a walker walks who is walking to think. A man at the middle of the bridge is playing a wooden flute for tips. He is very good. The tune is a fragment of Smetana's Vltava, the river-theme, slowed, softer than the concert-version. A small girl, maybe six, stops with her mother to listen. The mother drops a coin into the open case and the flute-player tips his head to the child and keeps playing.
Past the flute the bridge is quieter. You get to the middle and you stop at the rail. You lean your forearms on the stone. The stone is cold through the jacket. Across the water, Old Town glows in a way that is almost pretty, which you register and set aside.
A phone behind you: — anger and fear / nad jasným a ztemnělým — someone's podcast, or the radio, spilling out of a woman's open bag for two seconds as she walks past and then fading. The Czech is not yours to catch fully but the rhythm is. Something Auden. Something the decade is still saying on the podcasts because the decade can't stop saying it.
A gull complains overhead.
Who are you talking to when you talk to yourself, I think, for the first time in the years since Carmen asked it, and I think it in Carmen's cadence, which my mind has kept intact with very specific precision. The question has traveled from Bleecker to Prague in your head without you tracking it. You do not answer it. It is not a question that gets answered.
Your phone vibrates in your pocket.
Carmen.
You answer.
You there? she says. Kitchen behind her — fryer, somebody saying something in Spanish, a plate landing, the swing door to the dining room. You been quiet.
I'm in Prague.
You said Prague. Okay. You eating?
I just finished walking.
You eating tonight?
I will. I'll find something.
Find something hot. Pause. You call me when you come home.
I will.
Alright. Another pause. She has a question in her she is not asking; she has always had one question in her she has not asked. Alright, baby.
She hangs up. You put the phone away. The bridge is quieter. You walk the second half.
At the Old Town end you turn downstream along the embankment. You pass a bar, lit, inviting, that you do not go into. You pass a second bar. At the door of the second a man stands smoking, his gaze holding you one beat longer than ordinary, then returning to his phone. You keep walking. You walk past the opera. You reach the corner where the bench is, the bench you clocked on day three without admitting to yourself that you were clocking it, and you sit down on the bench.
The argument of six years ago had happened on this bench. You had been seventeen. The other person had been a man of twenty-six who had told you he was twenty-two, a fact that had surfaced only later, and the argument had been about language and it had been about something else, and whatever the something else had been had been the reason you had not come back to Prague until the week the photograph from your grandmother made you come back.
I had been seventeen. I am twenty-three. The cold of the bench through my jeans is the same cold this bench has always been, because the wood does not know I came back. I am.
Your hand is on your knee. The knee remembers something the mind is not putting into words yet — a folded tissue received across an aisle two days ago, the hand of a woman who had opened her bag without speaking, the tram. You do not name it to yourself.
Your jaw works once before you register that it worked.
I was right to avoid this, you think. Six years was right.
The coming back is right too.
You sit on the bench until the cold makes the sitting no longer useful. You get up. You cross to a tram stop. You wait for the 22 because it goes back up to Malá Strana and up Nerudova as far as Malostranská and then you walk the last four minutes.
The pension-woman is behind the beaded curtain. She looks up this time.
Dinner? she says.
I was going to find something.
Polévka, she says. Five minutes.
She goes into the back and brings you a bowl of soup. Potato, leek, a piece of marjoram. Ninety crowns. She waves the ninety crowns away with the back of her hand, which is not about the ninety crowns.
You eat the soup sitting at the small table in the front hallway. She is in the back room watching something on a small television. You hear a laugh-track. You hear a commercial. You finish the soup.
You go up to the room. You do not turn on the light. You sit on the bed in your coat with the window cracked. The street carries its voices up in the stone.
You sleep in your clothes under the extra blanket. It is cold enough for that.