Gypsy Hearts

by Robert Eversz

  The total stretched the limit on my last credit card. Monika’s return ticket to Prague claimed the last of my ready cash. That left nothing but a dwindling reserve of counterfeit bills between me and the abject poverty of a phone call to my father, who would make my untimely return a condition of any release of funds. Money concerns humiliated the aristocrat in me, using that word in the American sense of being born from money, even used-car money such as mine. It seemed I was rapidly accomplishing nearly everything I had planned and was dangerously close to having nothing. While Monika slept on the train, I paced the corridor, the din of wheels on track as effective a stimulant as a jolt of caffeine. Dark shapes of Central European countryside scrolled across the window. One idea jutted into the next until the rudiments of a script emerged. My adventure in Prague and incipient affair with Monika would come to a halt without a quick financial success, and I hoped the little drama I planned would bring just that.

  We arrived at the main train station just after 6 A.M., Monika fuzzy with sleep and content to be led to my apartment, where she immediately slipped into my bed and a deep slumber. We hadn’t spoken on the train, and when awake she seemed on the verge of tears for reasons unconnected to the moment. We hadn’t talked about the deeper meanings of her coming to Prague, other than the financial considerations of a partnership. I knew she mourned Sven, her accompanying me admission that he had abandoned her. I also knew that unless I took care, she would hate me for being her only alternative to his abandonment. I watched her sleep for some time, astonished by the childlike innocence of her face when not animated by the devious turns of consciousness. The sinuous links of thighs and hips, the crescent of belly and carved whorl of navel, the delicate clasp of wrist bones and fingers thinly curved like bracelets: I absorbed her perfections as she slept, like a man who has acquired after hardship a great treasure, which he hesitates to tarnish by touching. Soon, not even the beauty of her on my bed could keep me awake. I slept on the floor.

  16

  In those first few years after the revolution of 1989, Prague had yet to become money-friendly. With the notable exception of public transportation, nothing and no one worked. There were few shops and fewer goods. Restaurants served food no more sophisticated than pork and dumplings, offered everywhere for less than two dollars a meal. Hotel rooms were criminally overpriced, but beyond that it was impossible to spend money because there was nothing to buy. The only expendable not in short supply was beer. What little money tourists needed they changed at hotels or the State travel agency, where English was spoken, or at banks, where it was not. Money was an alien concept to Czech society. None of the modern technologies for handling it existed east of Germany. When money didn’t exist independent of the State and crime was nearly nonexistent, the lack of mechanisms to transfer it safely posed few problems. Credit cards were strictly a foreign phenomenon. The biggest joke of all: There were no checks in Czechoslovakia. It was this weakness in the new capitalism of the East I decided to exploit, happy at the irony of having been given the idea by Inspector Petr Zima the afternoon he threatened to arrest me for robbing tourists.

  The man I selected for my first project had the ample, ruddy flesh characteristic of a pork, dumpling, and beer diet. I had noticed him the month before, hovering behind two employees in his newly opened money-changing booth on the edge of Staroměstské náměstí. Every tourist visiting Prague came to the famous medieval clockworks in the tower of the old town hall, and the crowds that gathered at the turn of every hour to gape at the pirouette of clock characters passed his cashiers either coming or going. I speculated he was the son of a Communist Party official who had abused the public trust. Most of the first Czech entrepreneurs were Communists or their relatives, as the rumor went, because the Communists had so long looted the country, they were the only ones with any money.

  During my first few days of reconnaissance, I loitered among the tourists, baseball-capped and map in hand, observing his business and habits. Monika slept late each morning, content to wake just long enough to eat and wander the city before returning to bed and sleep. We said little to each other. Silence seemed appropriate to this in-between period, when she worked through the emotional process of leaving Sven and joining me. The Czech, who had the unpronounceable name of Zdeněk, appeared a man of strict habits. Every morning at eight thirty he approached Staroměstksé náměstí from Melantrichova Street, unlocked the door to the booth, and disappeared into a room hidden from view. At nine forty-five the employees arrived, one young man and one young woman, dressed in matching white and blue. At five minutes before ten, Zdeněk left the change booth carrying a brown satchel and walked up Melantrichova to the bank on Na Příkopě, less than a mile distant. I followed him into the bank on the pretense of needing to change money. He walked to the teller at the far end of the counter. Rainbow bundles of notes flashed across the counter. I glanced into the nearest cage, where another teller sat surrounded by money stacked on the floor by nationality and denomination. Not a single computer in sight. She worked sums on a calculator and scratch pad.

  Zdeněk’s banking required about half an hour each morning. When finished, he ran various business and personal errands of little interest to me. He returned to his change booth at 2:30 P.M., disappeared again into the back room, and reemerged at three forty-five, bearing his satchel along the now-familiar route to the bank on Na Příkopě. I considered borrowing a motorcycle to snare the bag as he walked, but discounted the idea as not sufficiently clever and, as I had never driven a motorcycle before, too risky. My attention instead focused on the hours between 4 and 8 P.M. The banks closed at four, reducing his competition to hotels and black market money changers. Zdeněk’s business doubled to about thirty customers an hour, most changing middling sums to the nonconvertible Czech crown. At eight the stainless steel shutters raked down. He was always careful at that hour to glance warily about when locking up, but he was well in public view and I doubt anyone would have tried to rob him there. From habit he dropped his keys into the outside left pocket of his rose suit coat. He carried nothing in his hands. Most evenings he walked briskly to Marketa’s New York Famous Bar, where he stopped to chat up the proprietor and enjoy a quiet drink before departing in a 300 series BMW parked nearby.

  When secure in my plans, I brought Monika along to share my observations. Though she had done little the past three days except sleep, she seemed listless, hollowed out. The details of timing and money bored her. Prague bored her. I bored her. Only when I began to discuss her role in the drama did interest spark her glance. What she would wear, the story she would use to mislead him about her identity—the more I explained the details of her performance the more animated she became, as if role and character expanded within her absences to give purpose to her being. The only bit of action at which she balked was the acquisition of his keys.

  “I’m not a pickpocket,” she said.

  “Would you prefer I knock him over the head, like Sven?”

  This led to a brief but fierce argument regarding the relative merits of Sven and myself, in which I did not compare favorably. I bit my tongue. It’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead. When we returned to my apartment, I donned a sport coat and suggested, “I’m Zdeněk. My keys are in the left pocket of my sport coat. How are you going to get them out?”

  Monika slumped on the couch, lit a cigarette, said, “I don’t know.” She was smoking heavily then, fouling the air of my apartment with a smokestack stream of nicotine and tar. A vile habit, but as one of Prague’s few nonsmokers, indeed with all of Europe addicted to smoking, I hadn’t the same rights as nonsmokers in California and silently suffered the minutes, hours, and days subtracted from my life with each breath of secondhand smoke. I sat in a chair across the room and focused my entire attention on Monika, watching and waiting, a technique I learned from another director in handling temperamental actresses.

  “What are you looking at?” Monika said, annoyed.

  “I’m just waiti
ng for you, babe. We can sit here and sulk or we can go to work. Your choice.” His words exactly, which I parroted, down to the clipped syllables.

  Monika stubbed out her cigarette, said, “You can be a real asshole sometimes.”

  “I’ll make a deal with you.”

  “What.”

  “You stop being a bitch, I’ll stop being an asshole.”

  Monika flicked her stub at me with a sexually explicit epithet. For a moment, I wanted to hit her. But I kept my temper, marveling how completely she lost hers. I don’t remember everything she called me in the following outburst. The general thrust was regret at having come to Prague with me. I stared dispassionately at the ceiling, ignoring the abuse she hurled, even staging at one point a stifled yawn, which infuriated her to tears. When her rage blew itself out, I asked if she had finished and received a contrite affirmative nod.

  “Let me see your hand,” I demanded.

  She proffered it, compliant as a child. I demonstrated how she must flatten her palm and feel with the very tips of her fingers, as though each fingernail contained an eye guiding her way. Monika was a natural talent. Long and slender, her fingers quickly learned a touch so light even I could have been picked at an unguarded moment; by that evening I had her picking the threads from my coat pocket without disturbing the cloth.

  * * *

  Nothing in Marketa’s New York Famous Bar was from New York, nor was it famous to any but the nouveau riche, small businessmen, and fledgling mafiosi frequenting it. Marketa herself was in her mid-twenties, attractive and single, and reigned over her small kingdom with the majesty of a spoiled princess. The bar was too intimate to allow my direct observation; I consigned myself to waiting in a darkened doorway across the street, where I witnessed Monika’s arrival at a quarter to nine. She wore a short black cocktail dress and black stockings beneath her flowing bone-and-ash checked coat. Her hair was windblown and her lips an invitational shade of red. When she removed her coat, I imagined every male eye in the bar dilated in response to a sudden release of testosterone.

  Zdeněk arrived punctually at nine. A few minutes later, raindrops sparked through bright circles of streetlight. I huddled deeper inside the doorway, deflected the curiosity of a passing drunk, counted trams wheeling toward the main square. I had instructed Monika to play the role of tourist whose boyfriend is later to join her, but who might allow herself the pleasure of a brief affair before his arrival. I much preferred the role of a jealous boyfriend, arriving early if necessary, than to repeat Sven’s tiresome role of perverted brother. The plan called for a few minutes of suggestive conversation, the promise of a dinner date, and a quick exit. Though I was confident she could play the role to perfection, her performance was beyond directorial control. She could point me out in the shadows, claim I was an unwanted suitor hounding her, convince Zdeněk to hire a couple of mafiosi to waltz me into the Vltava River. Waiting was unbearable. Standing in any kind of line can inspire intolerable anxiety even on my good days. Fifteen minutes passed the deadline, then a half hour. The idea had been to tantalize but not pick his keys until the following evening. Sixty-five minutes late she stepped out of the bar, not alone as we had agreed, but arm in arm with Zdeněk, who trundled her into his waiting BMW and drove off before I had the wits to hail a taxi.

  I walked alone to my apartment, the usual male nightmares tormenting my imagination. He somehow discovered our plan and at that moment Monika was subject to police grilling. He kidnapped her. She had been swept into uncontrollable passion and fucked him in the back of his BMW. She fucked him just to spite me. I had survived the worst of the terrors by the time she swept in, just past one in the morning. She would hate me for weakness if she knew the state I’d been in, so I limited my criticism to a simple observation.

  “You didn’t follow the plan,” I said.

  Monika threw her coat onto the bed and filled a glass from the water bottle. I concentrated, tried to remove the petulance from my voice, said, “If you didn’t like the plan, you should have mentioned it earlier, saved me a long wait in the rain.”

  “I liked the plan,” Monika said. Water glistened on her upper lip when she pulled the glass from her mouth. I guessed she’d been drinking. She seemed oddly exuberant but not drunk, as though high on some other undefined substance. Adrenaline, perhaps.

  “If you liked the plan, why didn’t you follow it?”

  “Nix, you should relax. You take everything far too seriously.”

  When Monika said my name, an intimate shudder went through me. She had never called me by name before; so what if a critique of my character followed? “I’m relaxed,” I lied. “I just want to know why you didn’t follow the plan.”

  “Zdeněk doesn’t always keep his keys in the pocket of his sport coat. Do we have any wine? I need a drink.”

  I pulled a bottle of white out of the refrigerator and poured two glasses. Monika bolted hers and poured another. I said, “Where does he put them, then?”

  “Put your keys in your front pants pocket,” she ordered.

  “You can’t pick the keys from his front pocket. Impossible.”

  She stared at my trousers. “That’s where you keep yours, isn’t it? That’s where most men keep their keys.” She set her drink on the dining-room table and stared at me with disconcerting directness. I glanced away. Had I not become accustomed to her indifference, I would have mistaken her expression as sexual. She traced her fingers over the outline of keys in my trouser pocket. I stood as still as possible, aware that one limb involuntarily moved. No doubt she was aware of my discomfort. Her hand slipped deftly into my pocket and probed the jagged teeth and smooth ring and something adjacent grown equally hard.

  “Those are not my keys,” I said.

  “I suppose not,” she answered.

  I ground my teeth together, involuntarily pressed my hips forward, said, “You’re trying to distract me.”

  “I know you’ve been frustrated, baby.” She ran the tip of her nail from root to crown and back again. “Is this what you want me to do? Like this?” I reached to touch her. “You can’t touch me,” she commanded, and clasped my hands behind my back to continue unimpeded her leisurely explorations. “Sven got turned on when I went out with other men. Did it turn you on tonight?”

  I opened my mouth to say I thought jealousy a perverse route to eroticism, but the naughty girl in her voice suggested that she spoke in the character of her own sexual desires. I tried to remember the night we had danced at Club Ubiquity, and whether my fulfillment had been her foreplay, but bright lights strobed behind my tightly shut eyelids, and breathing to the rhythm of her hands I focused on a concentration of genital pressure which blotted out my thoughts altogether.

  Her laughter jerked my eyes open again.

  “What is it?” I blurted.

  “Your face.” She laughed.

  “What about it?”

  “You look so ridiculous.”

  “What?”

  “Like you’re trying to carry a full bucket of water upstairs, without spilling a drop.”

  Again, I wanted to hit her. She saw that I wanted to hit her and stepped back, eyes gleefully luminous. She wanted me to want to hit her. I’d never hit a woman before. I could lie, cheat, steal, and sleep around but I had never allowed myself to strike a woman in anger. In Southern California’s culture of isms—capitalism, feminism, neo-Puritanism, and New Age spiritualism—hitting a woman is the ultimate taboo. What I’d witnessed with Sven proved she liked things rough. Maybe I wouldn’t have to hit her. Maybe all I needed was to grab her forcefully and she’d melt, all coos and kisses. I crossed the room in three great strides, cut off her exit to the front door, and wrapped one arm around her waist.

  A gap occurs in this narrative commensurate with the narrator’s consciousness. A jump cut, if you will, or a cut to black and slow fade-in. I sat on the floor, staring at cigarette butts scattered along the carpet. I chastised my housekeeping habits and reached to pluck the nearest
one. Pain returned me to my senses. I recalled a flash of movement to my left and then nothing. The ashtray that felled me lay upended at my feet. I distinctly remember quipping that I always knew smoking was bad for my health, but a misfiring chain of synapses between brain and tongue reduced the sentence to an inarticulate mumble.

  “Missing something?” Monika asked.

  She pinched my key ring in two fingers as though dangling a used condom. “Don’t ever confuse yourself with Sven,” she advised. “I don’t know yet if you’re smart or just a bullshit artist, but one thing I know, you’re not the man Sven is. If you play the game his way, you’ll lose.”

  I said, “I’m very sleepy. I’m going to sleep now,” and crawled toward the bed.

  Danish and English invective advised me that I wasn’t sleeping in the bed, she was sleeping in the bed, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep anywhere near her.

  I crawled into the bathroom and slept in the tub.

  17

  I woke the next morning soggy from a chronically dripping faucet. Every joint creaked and each bone cracked. A sneeze convinced me that I was on the verge of contracting pneumonia. Memories of the previous evening shuddered me more violently than the chill. Never had I desired a woman more compulsively, and never had I been so cruelly refused. The more actively I desired Monika, the greater her contempt. She was one of those Zen paradoxes the understanding of which would lead me to supposed enlightenment; I could have her only when I ceased desiring her. But what good would having her be when I no longer desired her? Enlightenment, it seemed to me, was a sham concocted by defeatists.