Jaroslav Kalfař - Spaceman of Bohemia

Kuřák:Do you think he chooses to be oblivious?

Lenka P:Jakub is smart. Brilliant. But he never understood the work it takes. He always thought, we fell in love, we had this story of us, and that would sustain us for the rest of our lives. It’s not that he didn’t put the work in. But he thought that just showing up, just being there, would be enough. He put his research first, poured himself into everything else. When it came to us, he thought the marriage could be fueled by nostalgia and physical presence. Sealed by having a child.

Kuřák:You sound like you’ve made up your mind about some things.

Lenka P:Well, I’ve been asking the right questions. What would things have been like had Jakub not agreed to go? Would we be together for much longer? How do I welcome him when he returns home? I’d want to feel his body on mine, of course, because I love him, but I’d also want to beat him over the head, shout at him.

Kuřák:Perhaps, if he hadn’t gone, you wouldn’t have the catalyst for these thoughts. You would have gone on, just living one day at a time, without tackling the things causing your unhappiness.

Lenka P:Well, the catalyst is here. Now I have to decide what to do with it.

Kuřák:And?

Lenka P:I want to take long walks without anyone expecting anything from me. I want to be blank. Ithaca no longer expects Penelope to sit and wait. She gets on a boat and sails toward her own wars. Is it so terrible for her to want her own life?

Kuřák:Not at all.

Lenka P:I love him. But I just don’t see the way ahead anymore. I’ve lost it.

Kuřák:It’s okay for human beings to change their minds. You can love someone and leave them regardless.

Lenka P:I keep thinking about his sweet face. His voice. How it will sound if I tell him any of this.

Kuřák:Waiting until he returns is an option.

Lenka P:I need to be away now. I need to leave Prague, leave these people who won’t stop calling, emailing, taking pictures of me without asking. Like I’ve done something special by getting left behind.

Kuřák:What will you do?

Lenka P:I have a phone session with him this afternoon. I’m going to try to explain. Oh God, his voice, what this will do to it.

Kuřák:It will distress him. But it seems that leaving all of this behind is what is necessary for you now.

Lenka P:I’m surprised you’re not talking me out of it. For the sake of the mission and all.

Kuřák:The timing, admittedly, is not great. But such things cannot be avoided.

Lenka P:Such things?

Kuřák:Unhappiness. Wanting to do something about it. And you are now my patient, just as Jakub is. The context doesn’t matter—my work is to bring you to realizations that are the best for your well-being.

Lenka P:And Jakub’s well-being?

Kuřák:Our unique situation presents some conflicts of interest, of course. I’m doing my best to take care of Jakub, considering he will barely speak with me. To be honest, effects of your marriage worry me less than the memories he has buried. The old life he tries to outrun. I would like for him to liberate himself.

Lenka P:You are not a bad man. It is harder and harder for me to see why Jakub dislikes you so much.

Kuřák:I have a theory. Perhaps I remind him of someone he does not like to be reminded of. Or perhaps it is because I made him speak of things he’d rather not have spoken about.

Lenka P:He keeps his secrets.

Kuřák:Clutches them to his chest.

Lenka P:I tried. I am trying.

Kuřák:I know that. So does he.

PLZENŇ. The town that served as a frontier to many Bohemian wars and produced a beer that soon became a worldwide sensation, featuring ads with half-naked women holding the ale above their heads like an ancient artifact, as if the green glass bottles contained the Fountain of Youth. Plzeň is colorful, with magnificent architecture of the Old World, but modest about the culture and history pulsing within the veins of its streets. A challenger to Prague in many ways, and no Bohemian says such things lightly.

This was Lenka’s new home. We arrived as the town woke up with the sun. Petr parked his car in front of a cake shop in Plzeň’s downtown. As I slid off the Ducati, I felt as though gravity might once again give up on me. Even the heavy cube bricks lining the street could not force the numbness from my calves.

“Her building is around the corner. Number sixty-five. Apartment two. It has a black roof—”

“Petr, I have to do this alone now.”

Hesitant, he handed over the bag of clothes. I turned to go but he grabbed at my sleeve, then pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a single hand. “You’re saying I won’t see you again,” he said.

“Don’t think about it anymore,” I said. “You did everything you could. I made my own decisions. I wanted to go.”

“What do you think will happen with her?”

“You know, on the bad days, I thought I made her up. This great love of mine. And you, frankly, and Central, and many other things. When you wake up in a room you don’t recognize, you feel lost, right? What about walking to an outhouse in perfect darkness, using only muscle memory. Chickens pluck at your feet. You walk until the senses catch on to familiar clues. Until you feel the spiderwebs upon the wooden door and the rabbits stirring as you interrupt their sleep. You walk into the darkness until something becomes familiar. I don’t know what should happen, Petr. Please keep me in your thoughts.”

Petr put his arms around my shoulders, then returned to his car and drove off.

I STOOD IN front of Lenka’s apartment door, lacquered in a brown similar to the color of my grandparents’ gate in Středa. There was no doormat, that usual square pancake serving to cleanse one of the dirt of cities before entering a sacred space. I knocked, listened, knocked again, waited with my cheeks hot and sweat soaking through my shirt. I leaned on the door, rested my forehead, knocked once more. What would Lenka say when she opened the door? Surely I looked appalling, perhaps unrecognizable even to her, in comparison to the man she’d married. I pushed myself off the door, straightened my spine. Maybe I wouldn’t need to say a word. Maybe she would be so ecstatic to see me alive that she wouldn’t expect a thing. No answer.

I reached above the doorframe, where Lenka had always left a key during our years together, terrified she would lose hers and lock herself out as she had done when she was a little girl, with her parents out of town and the streets full of unknowns. Under my fingers I felt the coldness of brass, took the key down, and slid it into the lock. I entered Lenka’s world.

It was a railroad apartment, four rooms locked together in a single line without doors. I walked into an office in which bookshelves held books that were only hers, novels from all over the world, while my nonfiction tomes of theories were gone. Even our literature proved that I’d wanted to conquer everything outside Earth, while she wanted to know every inch of the planet I desired to leave. I put my hands upon these books, remembering those nights of silence when our forearms had touched and we had read until sleep took us, the pages mixed between limbs and sheets.

The next room, her bedroom. The bed was not ours. It was hers, smaller, and a crater in the middle suggested that Lenka had slept comfortably without having to choose a side. The sheets were folded neatly, another morning ritual of hers. Above the bed was a painting I had never seen—cormorants rising over a river, a sunset with hues so orange the beams looked like napalm. Lenka’s signature in the corner.