Yeah sure, should I also leave my wife while I’m at it?
Why not? Do you love her?
I do, too!
So much that it rhymes, I see. This is where I get off. Bye.
She jumps off the bus. For the next couple of minutes, Andrej is confused. So confused that he almost forgets to get off at his stop. Change something. Sounds really nice. Magical, yet simple. But it also takes courage. While he was coming home from work, he looked for the girl. At the stop. On the bus. In other people. The next morning he asked what her name was.
Megi.
Is that your real name?
What is a real name?
What does your ID say?
Why would a piece of plastic know my real name?
Well, what did your parent name you?
And why would they know my real name?
Fine then, I will call you Megi. Hi, I’m Andrej.
He extends his hand, and they share a hearty handshake.
Did you quit your job?
No.
I assume you’re still married.
Yes.
What have you changed then?
Nothing.
You’re a coward.
I know, but …
… but but but but! She covers her ears with her hands. Start with little things then. Squeeze your toothpaste from the middle.
How did you know I squeeze it from the end?
I know everything. Angels and prophets whisper to me.
In your dreams?
No. On the streets.
How come I never see them?
You don’t have to see them. You only need to listen. This is where I get off. Bye! She jumps off the bus.
You got out on a different stop yesterday, he yells after her.
She shrugs her shoulders. But today this one’s my stop. The doors close. She waves at him. He spends his whole day at work thinking about this miniature hurricane. In the evening, he squeezes his toothpaste from the middle of the tube. That night, he dreams about an exam. But he isn’t scared.
Misty morning. He was drinking coffee and using his free hand to tie his tie, a skill he had acquired over the years, working in a gray firm with gray hallways, where everyone wore gray suits, drank tasteless coffee, and ate free lunches that tasted sort of gray. On his way out of the apartment, his wife reminded him to take out the garbage.
Do you read? Megi asks him at the stop.
I read the newspapers.
I find newspapers too difficult to read.
What do you mean?
All those articles about accidents, embezzlements, murders, spectacles. It makes me sick.
What do you read?
Poetry.
What kind?
She shrugged her shoulders. All kinds.
I haven’t read poetry in a long time.
Come with me to a poetry reading tonight.
Where? And who’s reading?
My friends are reading, in their apartment.
Does that qualify as a poetry reading?
Why wouldn’t it?
Well, it’s not official.
What is official? she chuckled.
OK, I get it. When?
Whenever you get off from work.
Around seven, eight.
Would you like me to wait for you here at the stop at half past eight?
Agreed.
The bus arrived. They got in and continued their conversation. About the fall and the chestnuts. About the morning fog. About the expanding universe. At least that’s what she says. Andrej believes it will shrink in the end. The reverse Big Bang. At half past eight they meet at the stop. To his question of whether the apartment is far away, she answers that it isn’t. After five minutes of walking, they arrive.
Fourteenth floor. It’s not a big place. A room and a bathroom. There were books and candles all over the place, and Andrej had to be very careful not to topple any of the piles of books or vinyl records. There was music coming from the record player (from the speaker, actually, but they only explained this to him later on). He didn’t know the band because he never listened to music. Megi told him it was Gang of Four, and that she thought they were a little overrated. Megi’s friends were drinking wine.
Who’s the fellow, sis? one of them asks. Tall, skinny, with black hair. He looks like he smiles a lot.
Andrej, he says and extends his hand. His name is Pavel. The other boy’s name is Ješu. He’s a bit shorter, with brown hair and green eyes.
Hana is late, as usual, Pavel declares. But I think we can begin.
Ješu reaches for a book with yellowed pages. I saw the best minds of my generation … he begins.
Wait, you can’t always do Ginsberg, Pavel protests. You read “Sunflower Sutra” last time.
I read “America” last time.
Irrelevant, you never let go of the Americans, Megi interferes. The discussion continues, a lot of names are coming up, and Andrej is listening, feeling lost amid all the names. Someone rings the doorbell.
That’s Hana, Ješu says. Hana is a tall girl with black hair. She makes the announcement that she has a new poem.
Let’s hear it, Pavel says, pouring more wine for himself.
Sometimes
halfway through my automated actions
I stop
I look back
as if I’m telling myself
it’s okay
as if I’m telling myself
everything is going to be fine
you’re still here
you’re still in the game something inside me can still alter my direction
one day when you’re no longer here
you won’t even know about it
even ask about it
even look back
That’s true, Andrej says, speaking out for the first time. Nothing ever alters my direction. I never look back. I never ask. I fit perfectly into the machine. I don’t even need maintenance. And the more I talk to Megi, the more it’s becoming clear to me that there are choices, but they can frighten a man, that’s why taking the well-traveled road of routine is the easiest way out.
Silence took over. The record reached its end and the amplifier was letting out a humming sound. Pavel took another sip of his wine. You know, he began, your situation is not as bad as you may think. There are people who go through their entire lives without coming to that realization. And then there are people who live their entire lives thinking they’re free, when they’re really slaves to unimportant things. In the end, all that you need is already in you. That’s hard to grasp. I’ve known that sentence for years, and still I can’t wrap my head around it. My friend had a dream once about the greedy god of all things mediocre and unremarkable, who devoured humans. And some of them had ideas, some of them wanted to change the world, but they sold out their present for a safe future. They entered a bitter race with time. And all of those people, they were happy. Happy and dead.
A moth circles frantically around the candlelight until it finally flies through the flame. It doesn’t die, doesn’t fall to the ground, and doesn’t quiver its tiny legs. It circles on with its wings on fire. Burning. Glowing. Megi opens the window and it disappears into the darkness of the night, turning into an orange spot. For a brief moment, it looks like it might set the dark on fire.
TRANSLATED BY PETRA ŠLOSEL
[CZECH REPUBLIC]
JIŘÍ HÁJÍČEK
Lion Cubs
COACH VAŘECA HAD WANTED to hand the five-hundred-crown note in. But when he returned from Budejovice on the midday bus it was still burning a hole in the pocket of his sport coat. He’d spent that whole Friday morning running from one authority to the next. Each time that he took out the white envelope and explained what was in it he came up against creased brows and shifty eyes. All that time he hadn’t even had the actual note in his hands, because of the fingerprints. At his last port of call, the police station, he’d been laughed at and sent home.
The bus passed the hostel, a lo
ng building that was one of the first in the village. Since midweek this had been fully occupied by some sort of high school excursion, as Vareca had heard someone say that morning at the store. The bus stop was on the square, next to the tavern. The coach was looking forward to getting out of his coat and shirt and back into a T-shirt. There were beads of sweat on his tanned bald patch. The August sun had retreated behind clouds; it had been muggy since early morning. What bothered Vareca most about the affair with the five-hundred-crown note—handed, in the envelope, by an unknown man to the juniors goalkeeper the previous evening—was the fact that it had caused him to miss a whole morning of training on the eve of a game. At the store he bought three bread rolls and a two-hundred-gram slice of meatloaf, which he ate from its paper wrapping as he walked. He reached the sports field in the lunch break. Some of the boys were lying under the tree next to the locker room; they greeted the coach from a distance, with respect. Vareca’s assistant Martin Moravec, who was twenty-eight and formerly a midfielder for a club in the second division, was waiting for him in the office.
“How did it go, Franta?” asked the younger man, whose black curly hair was collar-length. He swung his feet off the desk and walked toward the coach. The two were on very good terms: sixty-year-old Vareca had been Martin’s coach and mentor, making of him the greatest star Semotice and its surroundings had ever produced, and after Martin’s precipitous fall, the coach had brought him back as a colleague.
“I don’t know what to do about it, Martin,” said Vareca, putting the white envelope on the desk. “At the Sports Association they told me they needed more evidence. At the Soccer Association they said it was crazy to think of dealing with corruption among juniors at district-league level—we’d blacken the name of local soccer, and for no good reason.”
“So just forget about it.”
“Then what do I do with the money?”
“You’re too honest, that’s your trouble.”
“I don’t want to hang on to a bribe.”
“It’ll go toward running the club.”
“And will I enter that in the accounts? They don’t have a column for bribes.”
“Funny that. Czech accounting could do with one.”
Rather than laugh at this, Vareca continued to look worried as he scratched his gray mustache. “How did it go with the boys this morning? Did they all turn up?”
“Sure did. Pepík Sháněl was complaining about his right calf, but he managed to run it off. And Šustr came up to me again to ask who’d be first-pick goalkeeper. That kid’s a dimwit. I told him he’d have to wait for you.”
“That boy really bugs me. He’s got the height for it, but what about those four fouls in Nová Ves? And remember what happened when Marek got injured against Ouběnice? Twenty minutes to go and we ended up losing a match we’d basically already won. How can he expect me to put him in the team after that?”
“You need to relax, Franta. Finish your meal at the desk and I’ll see you outside at half-past. In the meantime I’ll get the boys moving. Oh yeah, one more thing. There was a woman here. Wanted to know who’s in charge of training.”
“What did she want?”
“She saw me with the boys and didn’t want to believe I was coaching them. Then I told her you were the senior coach. She asked how old you were and said she’d rather come back when you were here.”
“Someone from the village? Do you know her?”
“No. Apparently she’s the teacher of those girls up at the hostel.”
“There are only girls in that place?”
Training sessions of district-level juniors didn’t usually attract spectators; it wasn’t like they were Juventus. So Vareca noticed the woman standing just beyond the white-lime marking of the touch-line the moment she arrived. Although the afternoon session was still in progress, she stood on doggedly by the locker room. As he took his charges through their paces on the field, at first Vareca paid no attention to the woman. But he began to find something suspicious about her. She was below average height, with short hair of a rich brown, apparently dyed. From time to time he looked over at her: lightly built, she was a little over fifty, he guessed; she was wearing brightly colored knee-length shorts, a loose top, and canvas shoes. The session was almost over before he realized what was bothering him about her. It wasn’t just that she’d been at the stadium for almost an hour; she’d been watching the young players with close, systematic attention. Vareca didn’t know what to make of this.
Training over, Martin sidled up to him. “That’s her, Franta.”
Vařeca instructed the boys to leave the field, then bent forward as he got his breath back, palms on thighs.
“Damn it, Martin. She’s sizing up our game and our kids, that’s what it looks like.”
“Before Sunday’s match? Borovnice’s coach is a guy, you know.”
“There’s something fishy about this.”
“Anyway, if Borovnice had sent a woman to spy on our training sessions,” Martin went on, “it wouldn’t make sense for her to be asking for you.”
“Maybe she’s a scout.”
Martin snorted.
“Did she speak Czech?”
Now Martin laughed out loud.
It was five-thirty in the afternoon. Having rushed his lunch, Vareca was hungry. For the past twenty minutes he’d been sitting in the office in his sweaty T-shirt, trying to understand what the woman sitting opposite wanted from him. There were droplets of sweat on her narrow face. As she spoke, she fixed him with her hazel eyes and often clasped her hands together, as if in petition or prayer. A high-school teacher of chemistry. Slightly agitated, he had forgotten her name the moment she introduced herself. All he had managed to grasp so far was the urgency of the situation. There was desperation in her eyes and an appeal in her voice.
“An orientation course, you say?” he was repeating after her. “From the school of nursing. But what does it have to do with our training?”
“The first thing I need to know is where your boys live.”
“Where they live?” He looked at her blankly. “They’re either from this village or another in the neighborhood. They come here on bicycles or motorbikes. Some of them are driven in by their parents.”
Vařeca was fidgeting with the envelope, which he’d left on the desk. When he realized what he was doing, he stuffed it into a drawer. The woman’s gaze darted about the office. In the corner was a net bag filled with balls; under the window were the first-aid kit and stretcher of the club’s medic. The office as a whole was in need of a tidy-up.
“One of our students didn’t spend the night at the hostel, Mr. Vařeca.” This came out in a rush.
Now that the story was out, the lady teacher appeared relieved, although the worry didn’t leave her face, Vařeca noticed.
“At lights-out at ten she was still with the others. This morning she didn’t appear at breakfast. Some of the girls tried to cover up for her, but, as they sleep eight to a room, it didn’t take long for the truth to come out.”
“She went out in the evening, then?”
“Right after lights-out. By arrangement.”
Vařeca shrugged. The teacher wiped her brow with a folded cloth handkerchief.
“She was with one of your boys. Till morning.”
“How do you know that?”
“She told us.”
“Is it really such a big deal, Mrs….?”
“Dvořáková.”
“Mrs. Dvořáková. The main thing is, she’s back now.”
“It was after eight when she got back. We’d been waiting for an hour and a half. We were about to call the police.”
“Whatever for?”
“Mr. Vařeca, when a sixteen-year-old girl goes missing, who knows what might have happened to her? Besides, my colleague and I are responsible for her.”
“But as you see, everything’s fine now, nothing happened to her …”
“Ah, but something did, Mr. Vařeca.”
&
nbsp; Obviously the matter was pressing. The coach sat back in his chair, the sweaty T-shirt cold against his back. The dramatic pause spread out in front of them. Vařeca didn’t care to ask any more questions; Mrs. Dvořáková was looking at him as if he’d done something wrong. When the silence became unbearable, he swallowed dryly and asked: “So what happened, then?”
Instead of answering, she looked from the desk to his eyes and back again.
“Mrs. Dvořáková, you came to me because you want something from me. Please don’t speak in riddles. Just tell what this is all about.”
“I need help, Mr. Vařeca. It’s a delicate matter.”
“So how can I help you?”
“He was blond. Medium build.”
Vařeca detected hope in her voice.
“We’ve got at least two blond kids of medium build in the team,” the coach pondered aloud. “You might even say three. Then there are two blond kids I’d call tall.”
“Tell me about them.”
“One’s a midfielder, the other’s a right back. One of the taller blond kids is a forward—a right winger—and the other’s a goalkeeper.”
“Hang on …”
“So which of those are you interested in?” he asked with impatience.
“All of them.”
“The whole squad? Here it is.” Vařeca pushed a sheet of paper in a transparent sleeve—a provisional teamsheet for Sunday’s game—toward her across the desk.
“I need to see them,” she said, with a patient smile.
“I’ve got the players’ registrations with photos, but I can’t give you those.”
Her eyes flashed.
“I’d only need to borrow them for a little while,” she pleaded.
“No can do, I’m afraid.”
“I’d be so grateful.”
It was almost eight-thirty in the evening. Coach Vařeca, in sneakers and a tracksuit, was locking his cottage before returning to the stadium. He set off slowly, his weariness apparent in his gait. In his mind he was replaying the difficulties of his trip that morning to Budejovice, at the offices of the Soccer Association for the Region of South Bohemia, the district offices of the Sports Association, the Department of Physical Education and Sport at City Hall, and the county police. No one had any idea about what to do with the five-hundred-crown note. So he turned his thoughts to team selection for Sunday’s game.
Best European Fiction 2017 Page 6