by Tyler Keevil
You are still standing there, shaking hands, the gesture elongated into a strange pose, when something hits the ground between you. Landing partly on Mario’s foot, in fact – on the toe of his alligator-skin shoe. You both look down. It’s a white dollop of bird shit, from one of the gulls. The mess appearing so incongruous against the polished leather.
Mario lets go of your hand, staring dismally at the mess.
‘That,’ he says, ‘is very unfortunate.’
gyrru gyrru gyrru
In the Octavia you bore through the smog enclosing Prague, before abruptly tearing free of it, emerging into the surrounding countryside. The transition is startling, striking; something you recall from your boat ride. Though the inversion layer seems so pervasive, so all-encompassing, it’s not everywhere – just restricted to the city centre, a product of the heat generated by bodies, lights, engines, space heaters, furnaces, radiators, chimneys, fireplaces: the warm air causing the cold to coalesce, creating a stifling bubble of life. Escape is a relief. Like a wasp bursting out of its nest, taking flight – the sense of space vast, the sense of freedom overwhelming, the sense of possibility alluring.
Here, the air is clear, the winter sky a hard, marbled blue, glinting with sunlight – like the ceiling of an ice cavern. And the sun: bright, brutal, blinding. Sitting low in the sky, even at midday. So strange, but not unpleasant, to feel the heat of it through the car windows – on your forearm, your lap – when you know the world outside is cold, the temperature well below freezing. The surrounding fields crusted with frost. The birch trees at the roadside barren and leafless, their grey bark sculpted smooth, standing staunch and still as stone. Frozen angels. Feathers of hoarfrost sprouting from the outstretched branches.
You head southeast, towards Slovakia. There’s no formal border between the Czech and Slovak Republics. Both are part of the EU. The border – the real border – will be at the eastern edge of Slovakia, in the town Valerie specified in her note to you. Ubl’a. You’ve punched in the coordinates on your satnav. The route is straightforward enough – mostly dual carriageways or dálnice, the Czech motorways. The blue line on the screen representing your path stretches straight as a spear, and the mileage counter in the bottom right-hand corner signifies that you’ll be on this motorway, the D1, for hours, until you reach Slovakia. Another three hundred kilometres. Every so often, the voice pipes up, reminding you. It has defaulted to Czech. You’re sure there must be a setting to change to English – it’s for tourists, after all – but numbers and directions aren’t hard to understand; you retained that much, from your language class. Zůstaňte na této silnici dvacet devadesát kilometrů. The voice of your satnav sounds just like the voice coach from the dialogues your teacher used. Perhaps the producers even hired the same person, his soothing, encouraging tones being in high demand.
You can put up with the Czech satnav voice, but not the Czech radio. The stations you find are filled with frantic, intense hard dance and house tracks, often imitating or using English language hits, but cut up and remixed, a roaring blender of multi-lingual noise. You switch it off, put in your earbuds instead, listen to your MP3 player shuffle through a ‘travel’ playlist Tod had put together for the two of you. Already the music on it seems dated, capturing an obsolete period in your life. Without Tod’s constant updates, his monitoring and tinkering and purchasing, the music has become a time capsule of before, of the period you have begun to think of as ‘then’ rather than ‘now’. When you were a wife, not a widow. Part of a couple, not a person.
You have told Marta that you are going on a trip for a few days, to clear your head, find some perspective. It seemed sensible to tell her something, to provide yourself with an alibi of sorts, rather than have her notice your absence, begin to worry, and perhaps ask around. She grunted, nodded, told you she thought it a good idea. Said the countryside around Prague is very beautiful.
It was easy to lie to her; you have always been a skilled dissembler. Seamlessly stitching over fabrications with patches of truth. Maybe that’s why you were a good actor, since dissembling isn’t just part of the job criteria, it is the job. To convince the audience that the scripted dialogue is natural, the rehearsed actions spontaneous, the simulated emotions authentic. All through pretence and fakery. Making lies feel real. Then again, sometimes that’s the case in life, as well. You lied to Tod. No more so than anybody in a long-term relationship. But lies, all the same. Little white lies, the lies that get us through the day. Lies about how money had been spent (on groceries, not a night out; bills, not a new top). Lies about the wing mirror you’d smashed on the car – somebody else had done it. Or lies about being held late at work, when really you wanted a drink, to be alone. Lies about getting stuck in traffic, or being late to pick him up, drop him off. So many lies based around time, and timings. He was fixated on scheduling, to such an extent that if one of you wasn’t on time you needed a reason, an excuse. You couldn’t just say: I’m late because I couldn’t be bothered to get here on time.
Little lies like that. And bigger lies. About being happy in London. About being content in your job. About not regretting giving up acting. Lies about all those aspects of your life, which you pretended were okay. You were lying even when you weren’t lying.
You were lying to yourself.
And, of course, you lied about cheating on him. About getting near black-out drunk with your girlfriends and picking up some guy and going back to his place and fucking him, or letting him fuck you – slobbering, quick, raw, hungry, hot, rough, clutching – while Tod was away at some academic conference, presenting a paper on one of his Russian novelists. Talking so knowledgeably about those tragic heroines, engaged in extramarital affairs, not knowing what his own wife was up to. Irony suited to the books themselves.
Of course, you lied about that. Not about doing it. You did tell him, eventually. Part of the point of doing it was to tell him, to blast things wide open. An ultimatum. Let’s make this relationship work or end it, put it down like a dog. And so, you ‘talked things through’ and ‘worked it out’ and took all the steps couples are supposed to take: you made more time for each other, left your work in the office, scheduled date nights, bought expensive wines and tried new things in the bedroom. You pretended it got better, was getting better.
So you didn’t lie to him about the fling. You lied about when it happened, and how far it went, and you lied about how much you enjoyed it – claiming that you hadn’t, that it was terrible, hideous, repellent. Only it wasn’t. It was a thrill, an intoxication. Even now, thinking back, you feel something like lust, or the echo of it. A shiver.
All these thoughts, skimming through your head as you drive.
You light a cigarette, as if the memories of sex have triggered that after-sex instinct. Smoking is definitely against rental car policy, but you can’t be the first to do it. You press the button on the armrest to roll down your window. The blast of cold is shocking, exhilarating. The air screaming by like a jet stream. You hold your hand out in it, feeling the pressure of wind, spreading your fingers until they’re numb.
When you pull your hand back in, put it on the steering wheel, your fingers are frozen, cramped. A tingling sting as the sensation comes back into them. Both pleasant and painful. Despite all the lies, big and small, you still believe you and Tod had something worth keeping. Or maybe worth maintaining is the better phrase. Maintaining a relationship, like you might a cooker or a washing machine. Another vital, domestic appliance. A mod con.
Cooker not working? Call the repair man.
Marriage not working? Call the marriage counsellor.
You tried that too, in the wake of ‘what happened’ – as Tod referred to it.
On your MP3 player, the track ends, and another kicks in. It’s one of yours – a rarity, on Tod’s playlists. A Welsh song, a driving song. The words Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru simple enough: it means Driving Driving Driving. Tod hated it, hated anything that left him out, left him feeling alienated.
But he’d put it on your travel list because you’d insisted. You remember driving with him, singing it again and again until finally, grudgingly, you got him to sing too.
Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru. Driving Driving Driving.
You pass a small group of magpies, perched on the fence at the roadside. Huddled together against the cold. You’re moving too fast to count them, and can’t remember what they mean. Something about sorrow and joy, a girl and a boy. You’ve never put much stock in maxims, proverbs, and old wives’ tales. That was Tod’s territory. He was endearingly superstitious.
There. You feel it then: a flicker of longing, something like love. What you were hoping for, trying to cultivate in yourself. Like cupping a match, breathing on the flame.
Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru. Driving Driving Driving.
Gently, regretfully, you lower your foot on the accelerator. Stamping that feeling out. Leaving it behind. Making the cold world blur.
borders
Just before noon you cross the Slovakian border, though it doesn’t seem like much of a border. Marked only by a small white road sign, with a crest of some sort – perhaps the same as on the national flag – and the words Slovenská republika. As innocuous as the signs marking the crossing between England and Wales, and vice versa. No check points, no guards – just a truck stop, off to the left. The motorway you’re on continues right into Slovakia, a route that runs east-west across Europe. A ‘soft’ border between EU countries. A term you’ve always accepted, but which now strikes you as odd. As if a border can be spongy, malleable, semipermeable: more like a cell membrane, or Alice’s looking glass. You can pass through by osmosis.
And, as in a looking-glass world, on the other side differences aren’t immediately apparent. The road signs look similar, the nuances between the languages too subtle for you to pick up, and the landscape and scenery are unchanged. Near the highway, a perpetual series of telephone poles, the occasional cottage or farmhouse. Beyond, low hills covered with deciduous forest, the trees all bare and stark and unrecognisable – merging into a tangled mass. And, ahead, a long banner of grey tarmac that endlessly unfurls. It carries you to the outskirts of Trenčín, where you loop north on the D1, now – confusingly – also part of the E50 and the E75 at the same time, and shortly after you spot a turning for a services and petrol station.
Your instructions were explicit on this aspect of the trip: stops are only allowed when necessary. Is it necessary? You have enough fuel to drive another hour or two. But Prague and the menace of Valerie and Pavel seem far off, and after a morning of driving you want a break. You pull in, to grab a coffee, use the toilet, fill up the fuel. Do all the things people do on long trips. And it’s now you notice some slight differences between here and there, where you’ve been and where you are. The license plates have changed – different layout and demarcation – and petrol prices are in Euros, not koruny. The envelope of cash Mario gave you contains both, as well as Ukrainian hryvnia, so you have no issues paying, but the changes do generate a subtle feeling of dislocation. At the counter, you’re overly relieved to see they still sell Smart here, having invested in your choice of brand with a bias that verges on superstition.
You buy a fresh pack, light one for comfort, and keep driving. For the most part, you travel on various sections of the E50, as it heads northeast towards Žilina, then southeast, first in the guise of route 18, then on to the D1 again. Regardless of name, the road remains unvaried, the journey monotonous. You follow the satnav, tune out, switch off. The sense of having a destination and new purpose breaks apart, and time reverts to its crystalline state for minutes, hours, the only sign of its passage the ticking digits on your dash.
Even if it doesn’t feel like it, you still must be making progress, going somewhere.
And then you are there. The border.
Arriving at it, you are underwhelmed. The international borders you have seen, the borders you are used to, are seemingly indomitable: the border on either side of the English Channel, or the one between Canada and the States, which you and Tod crossed by car, during your trip to visit his family. It had been near Niagara: half a dozen lanes, hour-long queues, armed guards with sniffer dogs roaming between the vehicles, looking at drivers, at vehicles, at number plates. Maybe it had been a critical day. Maybe there’d been a fugitive. Or a terrorist alert. The atmosphere tense, edgy. The border marked by what looked like a military compound, through which all traffic had to pass. As solid and permanent as a part of the landscape.
And perhaps since the border between the Czech and Slovak Republics was so underwhelming – practically negligible – you expected something more intimidating or impressive at Ubl’a. The first indication that this may not be the case is the town itself, which you drive through en route. It consists of a hairdressers, a boarded-up petrol station, a café with the words Vyprážaný Sýr scrawled on the awning, and a fishing and hunting store – rods and reels and rifles hanging in the windows, alongside a large mounted carp and a stuffed bear rearing up on its hind legs, wearing a hunting cap of its own. You wonder where they shot the bear, and if there are even any bears left in Eastern Europe. You wonder, too, who had the idea of dressing the bear up like his own killer, adding insult to its demise.
All in all, the town of Ubl’a is not particularly memorable, or impressive. The border, even less so. Passing through forests beyond Ubl’a you round a bend and see what looks like a pair of shacks, one on either side of the road. They’re about the size of log cabins, but layered with clapboard, painted white. From a distance they look like ice cubes. It’s only when you spot the flag poles atop them that you’re certain this is the border, an actual ‘hard’ border. The flags aren’t flapping, and as a result aren’t recognisable. They hang limply like dish cloths, barely twitching in the scant wind. To either side, empty fields stretch far away. The fields, like the roadside, are crusted with frost, but it hasn’t begun to snow properly yet. There is no fencing across the fields and you wonder if they’re barren or fallow, if somebody owns them and uses them. To farm livestock, or for growing wheat, hay, barley. The government must own them. It would be too odd for a farmer to be ploughing or tilling the fields, crossing from one country to the other on one row, then back again on the next. It would undermine the whole concept of the border if a farmer were to do that, in plain view of people waiting to cross.
As you get closer, you see that the huts do have barriers. Those yellow and black booms that extend across the road, and can be raised and lowered. The sight inevitably reminds you of a film you saw as a child – watching late-night TV with your father – in which a motorcyclist tried to duck beneath such a barrier and smashed his head into it. The helmet shattering, the wooden bar snapping, the splintered remnants hanging, dripping blood. You can’t remember if the scene was set at a border. Only the image has stayed with you. As a reminder of attempted transgressions, of the consequence of stepping outside designated boundaries. Of crossing over.
You, of course, are not going to attempt anything so dramatic. This is supposed to be the straightforward part. You don’t even have your cargo yet. Your real cargo. Your flesh-and-blood cargo. Just the suitcase you were given, tucked in the boot. You’ve placed your duffel bag on top of it, though not in such a way that it might seem as if you were deliberately trying to hide or conceal it, should they ask to check the boot. Which they won’t. You are almost positive they won’t. You believe they won’t.
As you pull up to the queue on the eastbound side – which is only half a dozen cars long – you idly consider what you would say or do if they did. The guard, who in your mind is a man, a burly Eastern European with a dark beard, might ask you what the locked suitcase contains, and at that point you would either have to admit you don’t know, or you would have to lie, inventing something that seems plausible. Something that needs to be locked away, kept discrete. Your personal effects. Private files. Bondage gear. By that point it probably wouldn’t matter. You doubt they would ask and then not check, a
nyway. No, if it reaches that stage you’ll be caught out, for sure.
Still. You wonder at the fact that your employers didn’t seem concerned about this part of the journey. They didn’t give you specific guidance or instructions. Not like the return crossing, about which they were very particular. And wondering that makes you wonder more, about what might be in the suitcase, about why it isn’t worth protecting.
The car in front of you is a rental, like yours. You can tell because it has the same Czecho-go logo in the bottom left-hand corner of the back window. It’s not an Octavia, but a Corsa – the make that you were originally meant to acquire. For a minute you consider the fanciful idea that this is the exact car you almost had. How surreal that it has ended up out here, waiting to cross in front of you. You imagine getting out, walking up to the driver’s side door, knocking on the window, which rolls down to reveal a woman with your face. Oh, it’s only you, she might say, or you might say. Both of you relieved to meet your double, your doppelganger, in this looking-glass realm.
But no. The car has two people in it. The driver has her arm looped behind the passenger’s headrest. A couple, on a little vacation, or a romantic getaway. Ghosts of your past.
You smoke to kill time, the smoke slipping away through the barely open window in slow ribbons. You don’t flick your ash outside, on to the tarmac. You don’t want to offend the guards, by acting too casually. They might decide to search you, just to put you in your place. Just to show that they can. Who do these Westerners think they are?
By the roadside, a raven is pecking repeatedly at something frozen and dead and flat, and as limp and unrecognisable as the flags. Whatever it is, the raven seems grateful to have found it. A gift from the roadkill gods. The raven continues pecking away – tick, tick, tick – as you move past it, to the front of the queue.