Your Still Beating Heart

by Tyler Keevil

  That’s where you go.

  Once up the opposite slope of the ravine, you cut back towards town. You can only see the road intermittently – occasional glimpses of grey pavement between trunks, branches, pine needles. As you walk, you explain to Gogol your goal, more for your benefit than his. Talking it through. Telling him that you’re heading for the train station, in the centre of town. There’s a minor station, Sedlec, that’s closer, but it’s only for a local line – you’d have to transfer at the main station anyway. Safer just to go straight there. You’ve got your innate sense of direction, which Tod always envied and admired, and you know Kutná Hora station is on this side of town. You’re confident you can reach it by working your way through these woods overlooking the road.

  All this you explain while pulling Gogol along, and not once does he falter, tug on your hand, lag behind. You have the feeling that, loyal as a dog, he would keep going until his legs gave out, until he collapsed from cold, from exhaustion, from dehydration. He may be hindered by his leg, but he isn’t weak. He is, on the contrary, stubborn and resilient and tenacious. As much bulldog as duckling.

  The hike goes on longer than you expect and you wonder if you’ve misjudged, if in your fear and panic and the rush you’ve got turned around, somehow. If the town centre is back in the other direction, and you’re heading away from the station, out of the suburbs and into the wilderness. Yet another mistake, on your part. Yet more wasted time. The time they need to find you.

  But the fears are unfounded. Through the trees you glimpse buildings now. Houses. A hotel. And behind you the steeple of the Ossuary. It helps guide you, provides a means to get your bearings. That monument of death that seems to preside over the whole town. Possibly the whole country, the whole world. These crazed thoughts flutter up, frantic and frenetic. Using the Ossuary you can work out how close you are to the town centre, the train station, and turn downslope in that direction. You emerge on a one lane track that winds through the woods, then connects with a side road that skirts a residential area. End up a few hundred metres from the station. Just a brief walk past a junction and some shops.

  It’s very early. Hardly anybody is about, aside from a man opening his café, scattering salt on the cobbles out front, huffing in the cold, and a woman in a high-vis bib, plucking a can from the gutter with a litter-picking stick. You walk cheerfully with Gogol, swinging his arm, acting as if you don’t have a care in the world. A tourist mother with her son. Brisk and ambitious Brits, setting off for a day of sightseeing. Heading to the station, to catch an early train. Ta-ta. Cheerio.

  When you get there, you mount the steps, risk a backwards glance. Nothing. Nobody watching. Nobody that you can see, at least. You wonder if you will spot them, before they find you. Or if it will simply happen, if they’ll blindside you, kidnap you. A black hood over your head. A Kleenex full of chloroform. A discreet blow with a sap. Or however it is they do it; the same way they might have got Mario.

  Inside the station, a few old-fashioned monitors display train departure and arrival times. It takes you a moment to differentiate, decipher the Czech. When you do, as far as you can tell, it looks as if all the destinations are local: somewhere in the Czech Republic. Which isn’t what you want. You go to the ticket booth (there are no other passengers) and ask the clerk – a young man, dopy, bleary-eyed, smelling faintly of last night’s beer – if any international trains run through Kutná Hora.

  He shakes his head, yawns. Explains you have to go to Brno, or Prague. All the high-speed, inter-city European trains run from one or the other. They don’t stop here.

  Brno, or Prague. Both places where they will be looking for you. Closing in.

  You ask the man when the train for Prague departs, and he tells you they run every half hour, the next being in fifteen minutes, at quarter past eight.

  You buy two tickets. Stand with Gogol at the far end of the platform: him wearing his winter hat, you wearing your baseball cap. There’s no shelter, no waiting room. Out there, in full view, your little disguises don’t feel so effective. Your haircuts and dye jobs seem comically inadequate, rather than clever and deceptive.

  Above your head, a digital display shows the platform number, the destination of the next train due – Praha – and the current time. You have never felt time move like this, so slowly. Each minute seeming to extend, stretch on and on forever. You stand clutching Gogol’s hand, shivering, knowing you made a mistake, an error in judgement, and so deserve this – consigned to a hellish limbo where eight-fifteen seemingly will never come, and trains to Prague never depart.

  backwards

  When the train does arrive, it’s small – just three carriages – and also backwards. The control cab at the rear, pushing it, rather than pulling it as you would expect. This is not unheard of. This is not all that irregular. Still, in your heightened state of fear and alertness it’s disarming and strange. A backwards train. Movement in reverse. The front (or rear?) still glazed with frost, as if it’s only recently come from the trainyard, just awakened from a long hibernation. It trundles to a stop in front of you, sighs, shudders, and falls silent.

  When it’s motionless, the oddness of the carriage arrangement is no longer evident – it just looks like a train and you must get on it. There’s a six-inch gap and foot-high step between the platform and the doors. You put down your duffel bag and lift Gogol up first, placing him directly in front of you.

  You stoop to pick up the bag and, when you straighten, he’s gone. Like that. You feel that panic-surge and leap on to the train, looking first one way – towards the vestibule between carriages, the toilets – and then the other, into the aisle. And Gogol is there. Of course. He simply stepped to the side to make room for you, and the bag. They haven’t taken him, can’t have taken him. How would they have known to get on the train before you? It’s the shock of the shift, from complacency to flight, and your own paranoid brain. Playing tricks on you.

  You reach for his hand, seeking and giving reassurance, and guide him further into the carriage, which is nearly empty. Find seats on the side away from the platform, where you are less noticeable. Watch the station and platform carefully, with Gogol right next to you, the duffel bag cradled on your lap. Willing the train to move, which it does, eventually. Sluggishly. As if it has forgotten its own purpose.

  No pursuers step on to the platform, or peer out of the station and ticket office. They either haven’t arrived in town yet, or they’ve gone straight to the penzión, where they will find only the landlady. Frightened and confused.

  She will tell them everything, that much is a given. They will make sure she does. But she will tell them first that you went to Germany, and then – when forced, threatened – that you’re actually going east. Of course, neither is true. A simple ploy on your part, to feed her that double-lie. But you hope it’s an effective one. Even if it buys you only a little extra time.

  The train is picking up speed now, the platform falling away. Another set of tracks glides along beside you, every so often wiggling left, or right. Shifting. You try to recall which direction the train came into the station, and if it continued on in the same way. You think it did, which means you are now moving backwards with it. It wasn’t merely a case of backing into or out of the depot, as you’ve seen before. Shrewsbury station operates like that. To get to Aberystwyth, on trains from Birmingham. Not in Kutná Hora. Backwards is simply the direction this particular train is running today, it seems.

  You can’t help but feel that time is moving backwards with it. Drawing you back to Prague, the last place you expected to go. You remember a sequence of film clips you saw, during a lesson on time in A-level physics. The specifics are gone, lost, but you recall the shots of a train running backwards, automobiles racing along in reverse. And more: demolished buildings reassembling themselves, the flowering flares of bombs shrinking to brilliant seeds, fallen bridges rising, levitating into place. Then stars, rushing first outwards from each other like firewo
rks, and slowing as if on elastics, and eventually reversing, moving back towards each other. The opposite of the Big Bang. All the elements of the universe rushing towards each other, ultimately neutralising and eliminating one another.

  The Big Crunch. That was what they called it. Maybe that’s what this is.

  Whimsical thoughts. Thoughts you’re better off without. Better to think backward in practical terms. How did this happen? How did you end up like this, on the defensive, fleeing in fear, when you had all the advantages?

  But that’s delusion. You never had the advantages. You just believed you did.

  The man at the bus station. It could be incredibly simple: he did see you. Even though you didn’t think he had. Caught a glimpse of you, noted the number of your bus. Or, if not, how hard would it be to ask around a bit, perhaps check some of the security camera footage. Him and his accomplice posing as police officers. Maybe they are police officers.

  You imagine it being played out, and reversed, like those clips from your class: black and white footage of you and Gogol, getting on the bus, getting off, getting on, getting off. Freezing it just as your faces are turned in the right direction. The man demanding a close-up of that. That’s her, all right. Both of you looking nervous and uncertain. Furtive. Easy prey.

  From there, how hard would it have been to track down the driver, ask her if she recalled you. Probably she did. The British woman, in the hockey cap? A little boy with her? Seems to walk with a limp. Oh, yes. She would remember you. Could provide the needed information: the two of them got off in Jihlava, transferred to the festival shuttle bus. In the early evening.

  Or maybe the driver didn’t remember. Maybe it was a matter of graft, guesswork. Looking at all the stops on that route. Checking various inns and hotels and penzións. A long series of innocent-seeming phone calls, until they finally struck pay dirt, found the one you were at. You can imagine how Valerie would have sounded on the phone. You’re convinced it was her, personally. It had to be her. Her voice friendly and charming and relaxed. Completely convincing. The owner shouldn’t have told her. If a man had phoned, asking after you, without even calling you by name, would the owner have been so forthcoming? Not that it matters now. It’s on her: she’ll have Pavel to deal with.

  You reach for your Smarts, pinch out the last one. Hold it and tap the filter repeatedly against the cardboard box, making a soft tocking sound. The scenario you’ve come up with – the means by which you were found – seems plausible enough. If not that, a variation on it. And yet you’ve only been able to piece it together in retrospect. Like being able to assemble a puzzle once you’ve seen the finished image.

  Not good enough. You have to be better. You have to think ahead, see ahead. And never assume they aren’t right there, following. Waiting to take him from you and kill him, butcher him, sell his organs like cutlets. Though your mind skitters from such thoughts you force yourself to think them: these are the stakes. And after torturing you in vengeance they’d likely find a similar use for your organs. Valerie strikes you as very pragmatic. Not one to waste an opportunity for profit. Your kidneys going to one buyer, your liver and spleen to another. And, of course, your heart – the real prize. Placed in a case, still beating, on a bed of ice. Like a giant ruby resting amid diamonds. Priceless.

  You squeeze Gogol’s hand. You have not let it go since you sat down.

  You only let go when the conductor makes his way through the carriage. He heads straight for you, having seen you get on in Kutná Hora. He is tall, thin, grey-haired. Smiling pleasantly. Happy to be doing his job, to be so perceptive about noting his customers, finding them, checking their tickets. It occurs to you that all conductors, out of necessity, are good at this – spotting new faces, recalling which passengers they’ve checked, so as not to ask again and potentially offend. You offer your tickets up with a polite smile. Try to keep your head slightly averted, your features shielded with your hat brim.

  An ineffective ploy, really. He will remember you. You must assume that. They will learn from the owner of the penzión that you rushed off. They will be checking bus schedules, train schedules. They will guess, or figure out, that you lied about where you were headed. They will be after you again, or waiting for you at the other end.

  Gogol reaches into his pocket, and pulls out the little stack of memory cards that you created together for your game, the night before. He remembered them, even in your rush to get out, to get away. He lays them down now on the small side table in front of his seat, just below the window. Looks at you hopefully.

  You almost shake your head, no. Your insides wound up too tightly even to humour him. But then you check yourself, nod. Put the duffel bag on the overhead rack and take a different seat, opposite him.

  As the game begins, you focus on the cards, on the symbols. Rub your temples with your forefingers. Hoping for some lucidity, some clairvoyance. As if studying a tarot spread. Trying to determine a way out of this that you haven’t foreseen. Haven’t considered.

  If you haven’t yet, maybe they haven’t either.

  key

  Gogol will provide the key. Unintentionally. A chance occurrence, his natural fascination, his childish curiosity, which inspires the lateral leap you need to solve this locked-room mystery, escape this Schrödinger’s box.

  Not knowing this, you have already committed to a plan of action. Logical, obvious, uninspired. Flying is not an option, and your idea of finding a car – buying one, or borrowing one, renting one under an alias – has faded with the knowledge that they’ve found you, could be right behind you, may have figured out already that you’re on this train, going back to Prague. Since you can’t turn yourselves in, put your faith in authority, you’ve reached the simple conclusion that in Prague you’ll have to transfer from this regional train to another train, an intercity train – heading out of the Czech Republic, to Germany, most likely. Dresden or Berlin, or all the way to Hamburg.

  And, from there, you’ll keep going. Either to the Netherlands, the ferries there. Or south into France, up to the port at Calais. And home. There must be a way through. People smugglers do it all the time, and you would have the advantage of a British passport, no criminal record. Rent a car and drive through the Channel Tunnel with Gogol hidden in the back, or perhaps try the ferries. You and Tod did that with cases of wine – so why not a boy?

  All these scenarios flitting through your mind, as you chug past frozen fields, copses of birch and alder. Hurtling towards your fate. You want to believe it can work, this plan of yours – but it still feels too predictable. And even if you make it, will you be safe back in the UK? How far will they follow? How desirous are they, for this boy’s heart? Is it simply for the money, the crass cash sale, or is it a one-off like Mario said? For the daughter of a friend, or family member? Maybe you’ve consigned this other child to death. Maybe Valerie is her aunt, her godmother. Maybe she and Pavel will seek you out, forever and indefinitely, simply for the sake of revenge.

  Those fears can wait. Right now, you just have to get out, and trains seem the only way. A quick change at Praha hlavní nádraží, the central station where this train terminates. Find the first, and fastest, intercity train leaving after you arrive. And simply buy your tickets and hop on. Go. Moving quickly, hoping your disguises are sufficient, hoping they don’t have people watching the platforms, that they have less resources than you fear.

  It’s not much of a plan. Part of you worries this is another misstep, another mistake. Still. It’s all you have. It’s what you’ve decided to do.

  Until you reach the outskirts of Prague. See the spires and domes, shrouded in smog. The inversion layer – with its sensation of stasis – has not dissipated in the few days you’ve been away. It’s still here, waiting. Unchanged. You have the feeling you’ve been drawn back, on this backwards train, into a vortex. Funnelling you right to where they expect you to go, and where they will be waiting for you. One of the men from the inn. Or your old friend Denis. Awaiti
ng a chance to grab you and Gogol. In the chaos of the station, a foreign city. Amid the stamp of passing feet – all those passengers going in various directions, nobody to hear your confusion, fear, strangled cry, or notice a boy and woman being accosted, secreted away. Taken to your fates. The feeling is so strong it’s almost like a premonition: a vision of your future. It’s improbable that Valerie would be there in person, but she would be presiding over it all, the guiding presence. The one you have to ultimately outsmart, outwit.

  And not by doing this. Not by staying on these tracks, doing what’s logical, what she expects. There must be some other way to save Gogol from his grim, macabre, fairy-tale fate. A heart. Bring me his heart. Like the stepmother in Snow White. Wasn’t there something about a heart, in that one? The hunter used a pig’s heart as a decoy. That’s what you need: some ingenious, sideways solution. A curveball.

  But you’re tired, weary, your mind clouded, foggy. Like a dull sow in a cattle car, you are being carried towards your final end reluctantly, resistantly, but without any real hope of escape.

  Not Gogol. He’s sitting up, child-giddy, awed by the sight of this city. What was it that woman on the flight had called it, the one who’d had the fit? The mother of cities. The golden city. The city of a hundred spires. For Gogol it must appear magical. Mythical. He looks back at you, shy and sly, and even before he asks you know what is on his mind. This, surely, must be Disneyland. The real Disneyland, as opposed to the bone church. It even has a castle, visible in the distance, rising above the other buildings, like the photo in his cherished newspaper advert.