Goulash

by Brian Kimberling

  I hadn’t really thought of Amanda for years until one day in a steep-sloped German vineyard, when I was following the winemaker, who had introduced police goats to arrest criminal weeds and deter hooligan birds, up to a favorite ledge of his for a panoramic view of his domain. It occurred to me that if one of those goats disliked a person that person might tumble a long way vertically and fail to wake up. I stared too long into one goat’s eyes and began to doubt my own self-worth. Perhaps our balcony neighbor had experienced something similar with one of his pigeons.

  I asked the winemaker—a tall jovial man in his fifties named Thorsten—if he had ever been to Prague. I was planning to follow through with questions about Moravian wines, because I was sure his opinions would be more charitable than mine, and I could later borrow them. Winemakers crave praise like children crave attention.

  He said that in his opinion, Prague, like Paris, was no longer worth visiting: plagued by tourists, horrifically expensive, with exactly the same standards of food and service you would expect in any other major city; there was nothing you could get in Prague that you couldn’t get from the Internet. Some smaller cities and towns remained Czech and charming, and I should visit Krumlov or Brno instead. Prague was like a giant hotel or cruise ship affixed to an airport overdue for expansion.

  A nearby goat dismantled some pretty pink wildflowers. Thorsten waved his hand over his perfect placid slopes and said I could spend my week there instead if I liked. A week of Moravian wines might damage my palate irreparably.

  As I rolled through Germany on the train I considered time-of-life questions that never troubled me and Amanda: the age and development of children, interest rates paid and years outstanding on a mortgage, career advancement; each of those had impinged on subsequent relationships, and I began to think of the station names that slid past as former lovers, as though I had once been devoted to Lukavec, Keblice, Rochov, and Doksany—lovely and languid with naked laps covered in petals of wildflowers. By the time we arrived at the main station in Prague the train wheels were repeating her name: Amanda, Amanda, Amanda. I could never tell whether she became herself or became who she thought she was expected to be, or whether there was any real difference.

  The station convulsed with young people in bright athletic gear, and the street outside was a menacing shoal of sleek new cars. The elderly and otherwise unsightly had all been banished; health, wealth, and sex were promised from every vertical surface adequate to hold an advertisement, unless it was a historical surface advertising itself. The only obvious distinction between residents and tourists was that the former group talked into their phones while the latter took selfies. I’d have loved to stop for a beer but not on Western terms of satisfaction or contentment. I had only my carry-on luggage so I walked to my hotel within shouting distance of Graceland.

  A receptionist with flawless English showed me to my room on the fourth floor, and it was immaculate, like a prison cell from IKEA. One window looked over a courtyard, but the window was locked and the courtyard was a restaurant garden with trellises and fairy lights and wall decorations at head level and people sampling tapas on tables while sitting in chairs. Somehow I hadn’t known that something so mundane could be so painful to look at.

  I was still in touch with some of my students. Ivan lived in Annecy and worked in Geneva with an hour’s drive each way that did terrible things to his back. Cimarron lived in Stockholm, where he had grown a beard to confuse predators, and had returned to carpentry. I had lost touch with Vlasta, and Milan when last heard from was deep in the Bohemian countryside attempting to finish writing a novel. It seemed that I no longer knew anybody in Prague, or if I did I was uncertain how to reach them.

  Somehow Amanda and I had failed to make or to keep mutual friends. My attempts at contacting her had petered out years before, and it was impossible to go through every Facebook profile under her name. It occurred to me, aimlessly wandering tiny alleys, as alien to me as they were when I first wandered them with Amanda, that perhaps I could by some juxtaposition of guess and memory find the door to the Radovans’ flat. The Sex Machines Museum indicated a likely area, but the baroque architecture there suggested a youthfulness that the Radovans’ building did not share. A gate of undressed stone seemed promising, and on the other side every façade tilted into or away from the street like toys dropped by a child or teeth in need of a dentist. Light pooled timidly under streetlamps and cobblestones moved underfoot. Fleetingly I thought I was back in Real Prague—that Real Prague still existed—but I had merely stumbled into another film set, or so I inferred from a wooden signpost indicating directions to Cambridge and Oxford.

  When I did find the door to the Radovans’ flat there was no longer a forty-foot brunette in a black leather bra presiding over the façade opposite, or any sign of a strip club. I pressed the buzzer. Mrs. Radovan’s voice answered through the door-side speaker, in Czech. When I persuaded her to speak English she couldn’t remember who I was. When I mentioned Amanda Mrs. Radovan buzzed me in.

  The flat looked shabbier than it had, with dust on shelves and cigarette burns in the sofa, and though Mrs. Radovan had not visibly aged much to my eye her movements were slower and her voice less effusive, and she told me immediately that Radovan had died three years previously: an ischemic stroke followed by double pneumonia; but, she said, he had gone swiftly and painlessly before he really fell apart. She did not rate herself a very good widow. His violin and bow still hung on the living room wall above a record player flanked by what must have been a historically significant record collection.

  She remembered me by sight, she said, and apologized for not remembering my name. I was most welcome to a glass of wine.

  The prodigal son had returned for his father’s funeral, and had switched his mobile phone off for exactly the length of the service, then declined to stay overnight. More than a few Swiss girls, she added, had had more than enough of him. I could see that Mrs. Radovan’s dissatisfactions were legion.

  Mrs. Radovan thought it splendid that I worked in wine. Knowing the histoire of a terroir and appreciating its fruit was the job of a real historian, she said, and it was good that I had not become a scholar buried alive in some archive. It was a special thing to divine the provenance of an organic thing in a world of synthetic garbage, to understand the mere contingencies of which all things ultimately consist, to grasp equations rather than algorithms, whereby terrain and time and weather and labor yielded a unique value also confined by time and circumstance and the unique characteristics of an individual’s palate and sensibilities. In that line lay everything. I thought she was overstating the case.

  I expected her to ask me how Amanda was doing, but instead she told me. Amanda had visited Prague within the past twelve months, and had visited once before that, too, when Radovan was still alive.

  On the most recent visit Amanda had brought an infant girl, named Lily May after a boat her mother had seen a week before Amanda was due. The child was sixteen or eighteen months old at the time, screamed on public transport, rarely slept, and hated food, even Mrs. Radovan’s. Amanda had not, she said, looked good. On the previous visit Amanda had traveled with a man Mrs. Radovan later presumed to be the child’s father.

  She paused to ask if I would like more merlot, and I assented.

  Mrs. Radovan and her husband had both sensed trouble on that earlier visit. Amanda’s companion was handsome, courteous, older, and employed as the commander of a destroyer in the Royal Navy or some such dashing thing. But his manner, said Mrs. Radovan—the way he touched things like books and forks like he was mad at them—augured ill, and the umbrage he took at Radovan’s jokes at his expense would have got him evicted had he not been Amanda’s guest. Mrs. Radovan said, in perfect sincerity, that she did not understand couples who fight, as she and her husband had done so very seldomly, and while she was talking I became absurdly overwhelmed by a feeling of moral responsibilit
y for and toward a little English girl named after a boat.

  Mrs. Radovan began to yawn and I began to fret about the etiquette of keeping an old widow awake past her bedtime. She insisted that I stay for one more drink, and I thought that was the most human beings should ever expect from each other anyway. Mrs. Radovan’s wine was the only real thing and Mrs. Radovan and I the only real people in Prague just then. Smetana looked as though Dvořák had just pinched his ear. The great black fireplace was a gilded theater, the violin opposite Smetana gleamed on the wall. Mrs. Radovan laughed at my jokes for some reason, while I got immersed in her stories—how dashing the SS men were and how courteous the Nazi officers handing out chocolates to Czech children in 1938, and how poorly the smelly spotty Russian boys of 1968 stood up to comparison.

  I left the room to use the toilet and when I returned I thought Mrs. Radovan had been attacked. She slumped halfway along the sofa, eyes closed, mouth open, as if she had been toppled there by some unseen but powerful force. I moved closer to check if she was still breathing, but it occurred to me that whatever had assaulted her must still be in the room. I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing but felt exposed: as if the nothing that was not there would be something sometime, and the room though perfectly empty and quiet seethed with thieves and informants and murderers and madmen, each of them assailed and animated themselves by demons and maladies, stretching from that room to the next to the next through all of Prague and all of Bohemia and beyond Bavaria and from Mount Fuji to the Golden Gate Bridge and across and throughout and beyond time.

  I could see her shoulders moving, I thought, so I began instead to think about what I knew of symptoms of strokes or heart attacks—nothing—and whether there were particular tricks and skills for dealing with the elderly, or if there were things a trained eye would look for. I decided to try shaking her shoulder gently, but as I edged around the coffee table she issued a tremendous snort.

  I stood still watching as she slowly exhaled, and grew mesmerized by a thin strand of saliva dangling from the corner of her mouth. Her next stallionesque inhalation broke the spell, and I sat down. As she settled more deeply into sleep, the rhythm of her snoring suggested some esoteric industrial machinery grinding out items of obscure purpose. It seemed wrong to wake her up.

  She woke me at around 3:30, because I had drifted off in my chair. I had a recurring dream of a beautiful city covered in mud, and all the residents blamed me for putting it there. In this dream Amanda slid past laughing, because that was what mud was for. Yet whichever way I turned, the only way was uphill. Mrs. Radovan said I could take the sofa if I liked but that she needed to get to her bed. We each said farewell in Czech and I stepped out the door and downstairs.

  Outside the air was pristine and cool, and the streets empty, as though I had arrived the moment after everyone was summoned to the Last Judgment. I didn’t go straight back to my room. I just walked around by myself, waiting for sunlight to make everything bright and clean and new.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Děkuji moc for many reasons to Tim O’Connell, Mary-Anne Harrington, Anna Kaufman, Will Francis, Margaret and Clark Kimberling, and Sandra Niedersberg.

  Na zdraví to Andreea Petre-Goncalves, Carolyn Baugh, Shefali Malhoutra, Hana Komanová, Šárka Tobrmanová-Kühnová, Lola Estelle, Phil Rose, Joanne Dexter, Sean Connolly, Denis Fourré, and Géraldine Carvello.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Kimberling grew up in southern Indiana and spent two years working in the Czech Republic, Mexico, and Turkey before settling in England. He received an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University in 2010, and his first novel, Snapper, was published in 2013.

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