Your Still Beating Heart

by Tyler Keevil

  Denis is here to stay. He shows that in his posture, hunched over the chair like a gargoyle, in the obvious and belligerent way he is staring at you. He’s drinking from a battered metal stein and when not taking a swig he keeps his fingers wrapped around the handle, holding it on the table as if gripping a mallet. His knuckles are red, swollen. A small star tattooed on each. At first you and Mario keep up pretences, continue talking, as if Denis’s presence isn’t disruptive, hasn’t completely changed the dynamic of the situation. Denis speaks very little – only commenting when Mario tries to include him, tries to loosen him up, and even then doing so aggressively. At regular intervals, Denis checks his watch, barks something short and sharp at Mario in another language. Not Czech. You don’t think it’s Czech. To these queries, Mario merely shrugs, responds demurely.

  You ask Denis if he is Slovakian – an innocent question, meant to show him you’re not scared of him. Not intimidated. He looks at you as if you’ve slapped him, so startled to hear you speak to him, rather than around him. Rather than adopt that policy of avoidance. Then his lips twist into a smile and a sneer. ‘I am not Slovak, pretty lady.’

  Mario laughs, a little too loudly. ‘No, Denis is not Slovak. He is just crazy. He is like your British comic, no? Dennis the Menace.’

  As if to prove the point, Denis picks up Mario’s glass, brings it to his mouth, fits the rim in his teeth, and bites it off, cleanly. The glass cracking in a perfect crescent, which he then removes from his mouth, places delicately on the table. ‘I am out of beer,’ he says.

  Mario looks to you, somewhat apologetically. For more money, presumably. You reach for your wallet again. You keep it under the table, trying to conceal from Denis the amount in there, and slide another two hundred over to Mario. He palms it discretely, and assures you he will be right back.

  You’re left with Denis. The piece of glass in the shape of his mouth glinting on the table. Shining in the murk of the bar like the Cheshire Cat’s grin. Mirroring the one on his face. He’s staring at you, in his deliberately menacing way. You stare back. You feel something in you that isn’t fear, and isn’t even aversion, but a kind of cold, hard hate. It surprises you to find it there. Hidden like a pearl, growing around the shrapnel of bitterness left by Tod’s death. Maybe some of that is reflected in your gaze. You wait till Denis breaks eye contact, reaching for a cigarette, and then tell him you’re going to the bathroom.

  You head for the back of the bar, not knowing if it’s the right direction. There’s a door and you push through it. It opens into an alleyway: cold, frosty, the cobblestones glittering with ice like flecks of mica. Against the walls, dumpsters and bin bags. A few fire escapes, frozen drain pipes. One end of the alley is solid brick. The other is a main road – you can see traffic down there. You consider walking away, simply leaving. But you left your bag inside, tucked under the table.

  As you hesitate, trying to decide, the door opens. And, of course, it’s Denis. Having followed you, to make sure you don’t do exactly what you’re considering doing. He doesn’t ask, doesn’t even pretend to want an explanation. He grabs you by the shoulders and shoves you against the wall. He tells you to give him your wallet, and passport. It strikes you as slightly comical – the ease with which those things can be taken. He doesn’t even need to threaten you. He just has to say it, and expects it to happen, to be obeyed. This is how such scenarios must always play out, for him.

  Then Mario is there, too. He sees what’s happening, shakes his head remorsefully. ‘Ah, Denis.’ Then, to you, he adds, ‘I am sorry about this.’ But he doesn’t make a move to stop it, to intervene on your behalf. He merely acts as if it’s unlucky, this turn of events, this situation you’ve gotten yourself into. As if you’ve fallen into a pit of quicksand, or a pool of piranhas. Unfortunate, yes. But what’s to be done?

  Except: you tell Denis that you won’t give him any money, anything.

  Denis blinks, startled – that same look he gave you when you spoke to him inside.

  ‘You have none?’

  He knows you do, so you admit it – but explain that you won’t give him any. Mario finds this very funny. He laughs, impressed, content to observe the show. He is so nonchalant he actually still has his drink in hand – a fresh půllitr of beer. He sips at it, wipes foam from his lips.

  Denis doesn’t laugh. As before, you’re not playing along, not reciting your lines according to your script. You wonder how many times they’ve done this, or something similar. To tourists, travellers. Performing their double-act – a vaudeville routine that allows room for improvisation but generally unfolds along pre-established lines. A few drinks, a little scare, and the mark will cough up some cash. It’s so blatant, in such a public location. You can hear the sounds of the bar, see the lights of the main street. And you simply can’t bring yourself to feel the fear and intimidation Denis is demanding, and Mario expecting.

  Denis shakes you, as if you’re a doll that isn’t working.

  ‘The money, you stupid English.’ He puts one forearm across your chest, leaning hard against you, and begins to paw at you with his other hand, feeling for your wallet in a forceful, practical way. Impersonal and roughly invasive, like a body search. That makes it feel serious. That makes it real. You grab his forearm, wrench at it, kick out at his shin. Struggle furiously, viciously, violently. All this catches him off-guard. He tries to adjust, react, and in doing so suddenly falls – slipping on the ice underfoot, his cheap trainers giving him no traction at all. His arms windmilling, his feet flying out from under him. Landing hard and heavy on his back. The dull, hollow sound as his skull hits frozen stone. It is quick, awkward, and comical – fitting to his namesake. Denis the Menace brought low.

  For a second, everything is still: Denis at your feet, Mario paused mid-drink, you standing tense and charged, dominant. Then Denis moans and rolls over and curls up and clutches at his skull. He tries to stand, slips again, goes down again. You and Mario watch this for a time, and then look at each other. Now should be the time to run, call the police – but the impulse simply isn’t there. Instead, when Mario moves to help Denis, you instinctively join him: one of you on each side, supporting Denis in gaining his feet. He is weak-kneed, wobbly. Even once up he can’t support himself. He is half-conscious, punch-drunk as a boxer after a knock-out blow. You have to drag him between you back to your table. This draws a few looks. Some of the men must have known, or suspected, what was going on. And now this – not the usual outcome.

  At the table, Denis sinks into his chair and folds his arms and rests his head on them, drifting into a concussed daze. Mario takes Denis’s new beer and pours half into your glass, half into his own: an olive branch. You drink deeply, savouring the taste, feeling giddy from your triumph – the downfall of Denis. Did all that really just happen?

  Mario apologises, seemingly genuine, and tells you that Denis misunderstood the point of your being there in the bar with him. It is something they do, he explains. But it wasn’t supposed to be that way with you.

  You tell him you appreciate that, but that you’ll be leaving, given the circumstances.

  Mario sinks in his chair, crestfallen, and seeks to delay your departure by lighting a cigarette (his own, this time, which he had all along) and holding out the pack to offer one to you. Another peace offering. You accept it, but not a light. You tuck it in your own pack, for safekeeping, like a business card. After a few drags, Mario seems to cheer up and smiles, saying he can’t wait to tell people about this. About the English woman who knocked out Denis. You remind him that you’re Welsh, and he concedes this. He smiles reminiscently, thinking back, and then guffaws. He holds up his beer to you in a toast.

  ‘If you ever need work, come to me. I will pay. I could use a person like you.’

  You ask him what he means, a person like what? He considers, rubs his jaw. Explains that there is work, for certain types of people, certain travellers. And you know he means the good kind of traveller. The ones with the right
look. But there’s more: it is also that you did not panic, he says. You did not seem afraid at all. Did not lose your cool. Then he moves his cigarette in a circle, tracing a pattern around your head, weaving a wreath of smoke. ‘You are so cool, almost ice cold. Like that fairy tale, yes? You are the real-life snow queen.’

  He declares this proudly, with a flourish. The magician’s last act of the night. It makes you smile. He doesn’t know just how apt it sounds.

  marta

  When you booked your bedsit, the landlady emailed a set of directions. It’s near Náměstí Míru Metro – five blocks over and one block down from the station. Except the Metro still isn’t open yet, and won’t be for another half hour. Rather than wait for further trouble to find you, you decide to walk, and clear your head. Carrying the duffel bag slung over one shoulder, weaving your way beneath its weight. The layout of the city comes back to you: southeast past Národní Museum, down to Anglická, and towards the square with that church – Saint Ludmila, or Ludmily – to the Metro. From there, it’s easy to follow the landlady’s instructions, to reach thirty-five Moravská – a crumbling neoclassical building that might have been an impressive home, a century ago. Now divided up into single rooms and flats – too budget to even be listed on regular sites. The cast iron gate opens, but the front door doesn’t.

  You allow your bag to drop. Slump down beside it. Feeling like a sack of books yourself. The landlady said she could meet you by seven. You light a cigarette, let it trickle smoke without taking many drags. Feel your eyes go heavy. Lean up against a faux-doric column. Drift and doze. Waiting for her, and for dawn.

  Then there is somebody there with you. Squatting on the steps, smoking, gazing into the middle distance. An older woman, with a birthmark on her left cheek. Her hair is short, coarse, black, bristly. Cut close to her scalp. Patchy in places, mottled in others, going grey. She has a solid, muscular build. She’s dressed in jeans and boots, a flannel shirt and fisherman’s slicker. This must be your landlady. Marta.

  Seeing you’re awake, she lets her cigarette drop, stamps it out. Extends her hand – the fingers tawny, yellowed from a lifetime of smoke and nicotine, the nails blunt and brittle.

  ‘You are Eira.’

  The curt declaration startles you – makes you doubt the accuracy of the statement. Are you still Eira, still yourself? You say that you are, because it’s expected. She asks you about the journey from Wales, which confuses you, until you remember your credit card billing address is still the old house in Llandinam, where you and Tod lived before he got the postdoc in London. You don’t correct her, tell her the journey was uneventful.

  With this formality out of the way, Marta stands and unlocks the door to the property, leading you inside. What would have once been an entrance hall is now a shared foyer for all the tenants, the wainscoting stained, the linoleum peeling. A central staircase, carpeted in brown, winds upwards in rectangles, allowing you to see to the roof, four or five floors above. Your room, Marta explains, is at the top.

  It takes a while to climb the stairs. Marta stops frequently to turn back and talk, as if she cannot walk and talk at the same time. She tells you that she recently had cancer, that this (motioning to her hair, holding a hand above it) is because of the treatment: it did not grow back the same. She tells you she owns a boat, kept on the Vltava. Her husband was a fisherman, but he died. A heart attack. Now she runs tours on the river, but business is not good. You listen to all this dreamily. You are drunk, and sleep deprived, and near exhaustion. The morning has a hazy, hallucinatory feel, and Marta’s words – blunt and clipped as her hair – come to you from a distance.

  You murmur apologies, for the cancer, the dead husband, the failing business. You tell her you are a widow, too, and she grunts. It sounds somehow approving, or at least respectful. As if you are set apart, the two of you, and made closer by the fact of your widowhood. She tells you she will take you on a boat tour, show you the city from the river. Any time. Just let her know the day before. You say that you’re interested, that you will.

  Your apartment is cramped, even smaller than the photos on the website made it look. A single room, with a single bed, a single chair at a small desk, a single hotplate, the metal burner rusted and bubbled. A single window, overlooking the street. Lime-green walls, the paint cracked and flaking. In one corner, a shower cubicle has been installed, but the toilet is outside in the hall, accessed by another door. Marta doesn’t attempt to explain or justify any of this. She simply opens the door, steps in, and the two of you stare at it in silence.

  You tell her it’s fine, and she says, ‘Dobře.’

  She needs the first month’s rent up front. Once you count it out in cash – five thousand koruny, or about one hundred and sixty pounds – she gives you the keys. Tells you there’s a shared fridge on the first-floor landing. She turns to go, then seems to remember something, and glances back. ‘You can have guests. Men, women. Is fine. But if they stay long, is extra.’

  She doesn’t specify what she means by ‘long’. A few hours? A few days? You don’t ask. It doesn’t seem to matter, to her or to you. When she’s gone you shut the door, drop your duffel bag, lie back on the bed, fully dressed, atop the covers. So this is your home. So this is where you are. A widow like Marta, but at the age of thirty-one. You still feel too young to be a widow. You still feel as young as you did ten years ago, when you and Tod met at university. You feel that you could roll over, reach for him, palm his chest, feel the heat of his body, the beating of his heart.

  But, of course, such feelings are self-indulgent, inane. His heart was stopped by a slim metal blade; his body and organs incinerated, reduced to ash that was grey and pebbled and reminded you of gravel, of cat litter. Most of it went into that nook in the wall behind his plaque – but some his parents had insisted on taking home, to America, to be kept on their mantel in Boston next to a photo of the real, smiling, handsome, happy Tod. It struck you as strange, to divide the remains – to divide Tod – in this way (who ended up with which parts, you wondered?), but you didn’t argue: apparently it was not uncommon, and it didn’t matter to you. But it mattered to them. They wanted him home, implicitly blamed you for his death, held you responsible. Unfair, but also undeniably true: if he’d never moved to Britain, if he’d stayed in America, he most likely would still be alive. Or if he hadn’t gone to the cinema that night, at your request. All the little choices that lead to one night, one moment, one action.

  The sad, senseless, absurd, pitiable ending of a life.

  You think these things and stare at the ceiling, which is spider-webbed with cracks. Only the patterns are not nearly as symmetrical or purposeful as a spider’s web. They are haphazard, random, inscrutable. Meaningless.

  time

  You quickly come to understand that you have nothing to do, here in Prague. You unpack, of course. Go through all the books you have brought and stack them on the small desk. Some are about grief, about bereavement, about coping. Those optimistic self-help guides, mostly by American authors. They were given to you as gifts, by your mother, your friends, and it was for their sakes, not yours, that you accepted them. At that time, you were still adhering to social graces, doing what was expected of you.

  No more. They go in a pile near the bin, as if in anticipation of that next step.

  You have also brought some of Tod’s books: the ones he studied and wrote about, and encouraged you to read. To give you common ground. To understand his work. You always put off or ignored his recommendations, and have only brought them now out of a residual guilt. Your desire to read them has not increased since his death (if anything it has diminished), so you stack them next to the bereavement books.

  Clothes go in the small chest of drawers, a battered antique painted cream-white. A few tops go on hangers, hooked to the back of the door. In the cupboard beneath the hotplate you find tea bags, half a pack of penne, and a near-empty bottle of vegetable oil.

  You have a cup of tea, shower, and f
all asleep, travel-weary, still half-way between drunk and hungover. Wake up in the early evening, having missed the day, having managed to jetlag yourself, despite it being only a one-hour time difference. You feel jittery, hyper-alert. You watch headlight beams strafe across the ceiling, the movement alarming and intrusive, like a frantically turning lighthouse beacon. Warning you away.

  In the morning, you eat plain pasta for breakfast and then sit on the edge of the bed for a long time, staring at the floor, your hair hanging on either side of your face, creating a tunnel-effect. You have not come with any real plans or itinerary. You do not have a checklist of tourist destinations you’d like to see, things you’d like to do. You and Tod saw them all, did them all, during your previous trips. The Žižkov TV Tower. Prague Castle. The Old Town. Charles Bridge. The Jewish Cemetery. The Astronomical Clock. You have no need, and no desire, to revisit them.

  Instead you wander, in the cold. First up and down the streets of your neighbourhood, and then, in the following days, further – moving out towards the suburbs, where communist-era tower blocks loom like concrete monoliths, or inwards towards the city centre, the bent and winding streets, avoiding the tourist areas whenever possible. The pavements are pebbled with grit, the gutters glazed with ice. No real snow, at the moment. Just this slowly deepening freeze.

  From a market down the street you buy some basic staples that can be cooked on a single hob: eggs, rice, potatoes, canned soup. And the other essentials: coffee, beer, wine, cigarettes. Sticking with Smart, again. When you’re hungry, which isn’t often, you boil something on the hot plate, eat it without pleasure or satisfaction. Breakfast is coffee and a cigarette, breathed out the window to avoid setting off the smoke detector. Then, after you see Marta smoking in her own room, which is one floor down, you simply remove the battery from the detector. The room is saturated with stale smoke anyway – that particular scent that never leaves the carpets, the bed, the walls.