by Pavel Mandys
“No. Neither have you. Chop-chop—get up!”
I managed to push him out the door in record time, despite the hangover and the impatient dog. Luckily, I kept the guy in my bed hidden—I have no idea how I could possibly explain him away to my son.
It has been raining all morning. Pete splashed in his raincoat and boots with the dog—both of them jumping into puddles like they were nuts. At that moment, I did not care. I was focused only on the banging hammers in my head and trying in vain to piece last night together out of my fractured memories. I brought Pete to kindergarten and got excited by the idea of falling back into bed when I got home. But the reproachful look the dog gave me and the strange drunk in my bed pushed me farther into the rain instead of back home. I traversed Vinohradská and entered Olšany Cemetery through the main gate.
* * *
It may seem peculiar, but graves are linked to many significant and happy events in my life. Olda and I had our first rendezvous right here, he asked me to marry him here, and it was here I told him I was pregnant. During our divorce last year, I spent a lot of time in the cemetery contemplating many things, Pete asleep in a stroller parked beside one of the shabby benches. I have been walking this terrible pooch here for the past five years—from the moment Olda brought him home as a puppy. I feel good in this place, it’s quiet and peaceful—you don’t even hear or feel the rain as much inside. As if one has found oneself completely away from Prague in an otherworldly dream shrouded in ivy and spiderwebs, where sidewalks are covered in bugs and lined with unending rows of tombstones.
The dog happily runs between the gravestones, being surprisingly respectful toward the actual graves, as if he knows it’s not polite to step on them, pee on the baroque angels, and gnaw on the flowers. I walk on the center line and do not take much notice of him. Here and there, he finds a stick and fights for it with an imaginary foe, throws it on the ground and then proudly takes it a bit farther until he finds a new and better one. It’s after the rain, drops of water dripping down from the treetops above me, one or two falling right into my collar and stinging unpleasantly like a persistent memory.
Of course the divorce is still weighing on me. I never thought I would ever go through this, the hell of absurd accusations, petty fights, the subtle tugging for our child and our accumulated possessions of which there are not so many. But—it has happened, I cannot change it, and actually I do not want to; I am doing well being only with Pete and having periodic babysitting offered by my mom. I hope that Olda will finally come and take this idiotic poodle too. He keeps promising that once he has better accommodations he will immediately free me of the dog, but I have a tiny suspicion that he will leave it with me forever. I call the dog when I notice an alarmed look on the face of an old woman walking by with a water can and a dirty sickle in her hand. Why would she water anything when the rain has just stopped? I look back at her but she’s disappeared behind the tombstones like a ghost, so I free the dog again and walk on.
Between the treetops with leaves glistening from the rain, the television tower lights up—it has broken through the mist and shines as far as here. Mist is like alcohol—it mercifully hides a lot, but once it’s gone it reveals even more. I feel pitiful, like a small kid lost on her way home from school—damn, I’m thirty-five but it feels like what’s inside my head hasn’t changed. I look around, searching for the dog—everything is eerily static, only those slow raindrops drip on the tombstones. I call the dog, but not even the smallest branch moves. I stop and listen—I can hear the trams jingling on Vinohradská, but my dog (well, Olda’s dog to be precise) is nowhere to be found. For a moment I ponder whether I wouldn’t be better without him. I would not have to clean his stinky paws in my bathtub and suffer his licking and stale breath. Dogs are like men—they are so much work and it’s all for nothing; they only occasionally smile at you, and quite stupidly.
Again I look around, and suddenly I’m gripped with anxiety. Cemetery anxiety mixed with a bit of fear—who wouldn’t be afraid in the midst of thousands of corpses even if they’re covered with wet dirt and riddled with earthworms and God knows what else? I turn toward Vinohradská and start to walk back, with a spring in my step which soon shifts into a gentle run; one more look back—of course nobody’s there, but just in case. From one of the graves, the woman with the water can lifts her head and gives me a penetrating look—perhaps disapproving of my undignified running in this sacred place. She chops the overgrown grass on the grave with her sickle. I smile at her idiotically and keep running.
The gate into the cheerful and carefree earthly world is right in front of me; I am almost out—except my path is hindered by . . . the dog. Dirty and wet from his ears down to his tail, which he wiggles happily. He runs to greet me, I am dreading that he’s going to jump up at me, but he doesn’t come too close. He stops about a meter in front of me, peers at me somewhat foolishly, and then drops his spoil. In this, Pete and the dog are similar—they keep bringing home sticks. I find them everywhere—in the cutlery drawer, among toys, one was right there with the toothbrushes and another one was cleverly hidden behind the toilet. This latest spoil is unusually small, and I would not have noticed it if it didn’t fall into my hand. A glitter made me stop, bend down, and look at the small stick. Then I straighten up sharply because this is no stick.
* * *
I enter the apartment, put away my keys, soggy jacket, and shoes; I send the dog to the bathroom and put the poop bag with the mysterious object on the chest of drawers in the hall. The dog, as is his habit, leaps into the tub; I clean his paws, so focused that I become startled and jump up a little when I hear a sound behind me. I turn around quickly—in the doorway, the guy from my bed is standing there. What is he still doing here?
“Hi. You’ve been outside?” He asks as a husband would; I suddenly find him obnoxious. He leans toward me, wanting to kiss me—I quickly dodge.
“You’re not gone yet?” I reply coldly.
“I don’t have a shift until ten p.m. so I thought maybe you’d like to have breakfast with me, Marti,” he says, smiling. He acts annoyingly familiar, which is something I hate among even my closest family, let alone a virtual stranger. The dog scrambles to get out of the tub and snorts with disgust. I quickly dry his paws with a towel and let him go; I remain in the bathroom with the man alone.
“What shift?” I ask, and he smiles broadly.
“Do you not remember anything? You berated me for the parking ticket. I said I would help out somehow.” He smiles.
“What am I supposed to remember?” I keep my distance—I am a champion at keeping a distance, especially from my nighttime acquaintances.
“Okay, a recap for you: You were in the bar with a friend; I invited you for a drink and then some more; we went to another place to dance and then we walked home. It was raining and you liked it very much. You danced in the rain, then you fell down, and I carried you all the way here. On the stairs, you were hiding me from your mother, then I put you in bed and fell asleep before my head hit the pillow. Right—and I am a policeman. Traffic unit. Olda.”
“Olda?”
“Like your ex, right? You thought it was so interesting last night. Come on, I found something in the fridge for breakfast.” He strolls out of the bathroom as if he already lives here. Jerk.
* * *
We’re sitting at the table eating breakfast—he did quite well with it. Olda talks about something, laughs, so I smile from time to time too; I bite a roll and mechanically nod my head. Through all that confusion, the thought of the poop bag in the hall flashes in my head. When I took the object from the poodle and stuffed it into the bag—the only thing handy—I had no idea what I would do. I could have left it there, but in the haze brought on by the hangover I felt guilty that it was my dog (Olda’s) that brought the abomination to me, so I quickly hid it. I could have thrown the bag in the first trash bin on the way, but I was worried somebody would see me and immediately become suspicious—of what, exactly?
So now the small bag rests inconspicuously in the hall. I get up in the middle of another one of Olda’s rambling sentences, grab the bag, and push it across the table toward him. He shuts up and looks at me. I watch as he takes it and dumps it on the table. A few clumps of hardened earth fall out. Olda examines them suspiciously.
“Is that a finger or what?”
“Yup. And it even has a ring, see?”
It was precisely that golden circle that had caught my attention at the cemetery—I remembered how Olda and I, a long time ago, exchanged wedding bands and promised each other the moon. All that’s gone now. On the table in front of Olda No. 2 is a strange finger with a wedding band on it. And I have no idea what to do about that.
“Have you noticed that it’s not on a ring finger but a pinkie? Odd, right? And did you look at the ring? Maybe there’s something engraved on it.”
“The poodle found it. In the cemetery. I haven’t even touched it.”
He stares at me, exhales, and then takes the finger into his hand and slides the ring off. It requires some tugging, and I feel quite sick. He cleans the ring using a corner of a napkin. He snickers and hands it to me. I refuse to take it, but I look. On the inside there’s a flowery inscription: OLDA 2015.
“What are the odds—Olda No. 3,” Olda No. 2 laughs, and reminds me so much of Olda No. 1, who in the final stages of our relationship I hated so much that when he laughed I had to leave the room.
“Who could it belong to?” Olda asks ponderingly, playing the role of a hard-bitten detective.
“Perhaps to Olda?” I counter. “You are a cop—so find out!”
“Didn’t the dog unearth it from a grave?”
“The dog doesn’t step on graves, he only runs on the sidewalks. And I find it weird that somebody who got married only last year would already be six feet under, right?” Even hungover, I feel like a champion investigator.
“It takes all kinds,” the folk philosopher says, and glances at his watch. “I will bring it with me and have a look.” He stuffs the finger with the ring back into the plastic bag.
“In between handing out tickets and testing drivers for blood alcohol levels?” I remark, feeling incredibly witty.
“I’ll call you.”
“You want the number?”
“You’ve given it to me—five times already.”
I am embarrassed for my drunk cuddly self until Olda No. 2 and Olda No. 3 leave the apartment. Then I finally lie down and blissfully fall asleep.
* * *
The advantage of working from home is that you don’t need to make any excuses for your hangover. Still, I feel somewhat guilty when I wake up to the ringing of my cell phone. I look at the clock—it’s 12:02; I have three hours before I need to pick Pete up from school. I answer the cell.
“Hello, Marti? Good afternoon. Were you asleep?”
I look out the window. It’s started raining again, drops beat on the glass, the dreary light permeates the apartment, mimicking the dreariness in my head. Olda and I used to call mornings like these “pajama days,” and we had no problem lying in bed all day long. That was, of course, before Pete.
“Who is this?”
“Well now—Olda! Olda No. 2, ha ha.”
I do not laugh—I just silently wait with the phone to my ear.
“Do you have a headache too, Marti? Probably yes, right? What are you doing? Sleeping, right?” It’s marvelous to meet a guy who can answer all of his own questions immediately. So I pigheadedly remain silent, and when the silence becomes unpleasantly long, Olda speaks again: “I don’t want to bother you—but I found your Olda.”
“He is not my Olda!” I snap, and am reminded of my ex-husband yet again. That Olda who used to be mine and who I thought he would be mine forever but . . . that was not to be.
“I am so sorry. I too am divorced, you do know that, so I understand. I am allergic in the same way to the name Judita. Fortunately, there’s not too many of those. There’s not too many Oldas either—but a bit more than Juditas. Do you have a piece of paper handy?”
“Why?”
“So you can write something down, dear. Go get a pen and write: Oldřich Černý, Koněvova 295. Oldřich Strašák, Bořivojova 21. Oldřich Maděra, Lobkowicz Square 9. Got that?”
“Got it. But I don’t understand—”
“Listen, these are all the Oldas who got married last year and live near the cemetery. They all live in Žižkov, just like you. Beautiful, no?”
“And what the hell do I do with them?”
“You’re going to visit them. You still have three hours before you have to pick up Pete; one lives right near you on the square and the other two a stone’s throw away. So go visit them and check out their hands. And then we’ll know.”
“What will we know? Prague is full of married Oldas, why would the finger belong to somebody from Žižkov?”
“The probability is very high, and asking around won’t cost anything, dear,” he says, and it irritates me. The same way it irritates me that I brought him home, that I let him stay until morning, that I went to the cemetery and found the finger belonging to Olda No. 3. It irritates me that I showed it to this idiotic cop and he now gives me orders.
“I am not going anywhere—you find him yourself. Even if I find him—what then?” I watch how the alarm clock hand slowly moves ahead, toward the time when I have to pick up Pete, take him to the playground, cook dinner, and put him to sleep, which takes forever. “Look, give me a break. I want to rest. You look for Olda yourself, I don’t care at all,” I say, and end the call. To make sure, I turn the cell off and fall into the bed again.
* * *
The alarm clock lifts me from a sleep filled with confused dreams shortly before three p.m. I just have time to go pick up Pete and take him to the playground, listen to all the mothers talk, go nuts inside from all that talk while nodding my head sympathetically. When I step outside, I glance up at the sky. It is overcast again, it looks like rain, and like spring may never start. A drop falls on my nose, and from the road there sounds a horn blast. I flinch and peer straight at Olda No. 2 in the car in front of me. I walk up closer to him.
“What do you want now?”
“I found him. Look, he lives on the same square as you, isn’t that a coincidence?”
“How about the other two?” I cannot hide my curiosity, silly woman that I am.
“Intact fingers.”
“I have to go to the school,” I say, and turn my back to him.
“I’ll wait at the playground—you’re going there right afterward, aren’t you?”
“Not when it’s raining,” I say.
“It’ll stop.” He smiles broadly again.
He irritates the hell out of me; still, his interest in this crap with a stranger’s pinkie (and in me) is also entertaining. Olda No. 1 was never this interested, not even in the beginning. So I look at Olda No. 2 again, nod my head, and his smile brightens. I turn and go to pick up Pete.
* * *
Pete suspiciously gauges Olda sitting beside me on the bench. Olda is the only adult man on the playground, so he attracts quite a lot of attention. We probably look like some happy family even with Pete’s scowl. He walks up with his truck full of sand and dumps it right in front of us.
“This is a tractor that will drive over you,” he says to Olda.
“This one couldn’t run me over me, Pete. Try a bigger one, okay?” Olda replies.
Pete looks at him challengingly, then walks off. I watch him—his slender back touches me, probably the vestiges of the hangover. Then I examine the sky above us even more earnestly, and a moment later I examine Olda No. 2.
“So what do we do about that Olda?” I ask the cop beside me, and he shrugs.
“I rang his doorbell, but nobody was home, I guess. We can try again later—it’s that white house over there.” He points through the blossoming treetops at one of the unassuming tenement houses across the way.
“And if it turns out t
o be him? What then?” I watch him, his profile, and suddenly I remember him sitting beside me at the bar last night with the same expression on his face—staring straight ahead, with a slight smile on his lips. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“We will know that he’s alive and that nothing bad happened to him—other than losing his finger. It’s good to calm one’s soul, right?” He turns toward me. And then we look at each other for a while and then we kiss. And it is a long kiss, so long that my head spins. And then Pete throws one of his sand patty cakes from his truck into our faces; suddenly, there’s sand in my eyes and it makes me cry; I cry grains of sand and that empties an entire boulder from my head.
* * *
We are at Lobkowicz Square 9, an unassuming tenement house like all the others, like the one where I live right across the way. The three of us stand there—me, Pete, and Olda No. 2—and we ring the bell with the name Madera. And nothing happens. So we turn to leave, when the speaker rattles and a female voice sounds.
“Hello?”
We look at each other—what now?
Olda coughs. “Good day, is Olda home?”
The speaker transmits silence, it feels almost oppressive as it flows through the cables from who knows which floor down to us.
“He’s at work—but he’ll be back any minute. Should I leave a message?”
“You don’t have to. Thank you, we’ll come back later,” Olda says, and his deep voice soothes me; pushes away a peculiar hunch that’s overtaking me. The voice from the apartment goes silent and we’re walking out through the square toward my apartment when I poke Olda’s shoulder. An old Škoda has just pulled up to the sidewalk from Vinohradská. A man disembarks and locks the car. On one hand, there’s a dingy bandage covering his fingers. I stop breathing and grab Pete’s hand, as if I just saw a ghost.
“Police—your driver’s license and papers, please.” Olda No. 2 shows Olda No. 3 his badge.
“Me . . . what? Why?”
“The vehicle seems unsafe to drive, I’m going to check it in the database. Your documents, please,” Olda repeats, and he’s terribly sexy—like a cop from an American movie. Olda No. 3 starts to reluctantly pull out the documents and gives me a quick glance. Maybe he thinks I’m another victim of police coercion. I smile at him guiltily. I glimpse the name Madera on his driver’s license. Olda No. 2 walks to his car and I look at the bandaged hand of his victim.
