Border Crossings
6 Czech Mate
13 May 2016
I WOUND MY WAY around Central Europe for the next four weeks. Hungary. Croatia. Slovenia. Austria. Slovakia. Little side trips into the country. Baroque concerts in palaces. Long hikes up mountains. Museums, museums, and more museums. Castles. Lots of pretty girls, but none that made me wonder about the world. Beer.
Two things happened as I made my way north. The prices went up. The beer got better. About the time I left Vienna, I’d almost quit drinking wine and was drinking beer every day. By the time I got to the Czech Republic, it wasn’t that unusual to have a beer with breakfast. Or for breakfast. A friend reminded me there was a difference. I saw lots of people standing at the coffee bars nursing a beer in the morning while I was ordering my first cup of coffee.
And that brought me to Brno. Guess how to pronounce that. I had to.
FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON, I’d had a lot of trouble finding a Rent-a-Bed room in the Czech Republic. I’d spot something that looked interesting and request it only to have the request expire unanswered in twenty-four hours. This happened four times before I finally came upon Anna’s apartment. I’d moved my search out from Prague to the surrounding cities. Even tried Expedia, but they were listing ‘nearby’ as being within fifty miles. Anna’s request also expired after twenty-four hours, but she responded the next day that she’d been out of town and had a room if I still needed one. I did and we agreed to meet at the apartment after she got off work at five-thirty. Having a place to stay and nothing else determined my next destination as Brno.
It’s only a three-hour train ride from Bratislava to Brno and border crossings were becoming much more casual. The conductor looked at my ticket and ignored my passport. I didn’t see a border patrol. After all, Slovakia and the Czech Republic had once had their borders forcibly eliminated and only got them back in the revolutions of ’89-’91. That meant that I was in Brno by two in the afternoon. I spent a good hour getting Vodafone to make a tourist SIM work in my phone and in spite of all the fussing around, when I got into the street, I discovered that I had no data access so my maps were worthless. Fortunately, I’d downloaded a Brno map to my tablet, so I could at least see the city, even if I didn’t have the advantage of pinpointing my location.
I’d changed $200 to Czech koruna at the train station and they gave me five 1,000-koruna notes. A koruna is equivalent to about four US cents. I thought it was strange that the Vodafone store couldn’t make change for me but they didn’t have a cash register and I figured it was just a shop that dealt in credit cards only. It happens.
I’d read about a place on TripAdvisor that was supposed to be the best coffee shop in Brno. It took a while of wandering around the rough streets with my pack, but I finally found the coffee shop on the street level of the Grand Hotel. On advice of the website I ordered one of their pastries and coffee. I was not disappointed in the least. I had a feeling I was really going to enjoy this little town—the second largest city in the Czech Republic.
I HAD A LOT OF TIME to kill, so I connected to WiFi at the coffee shop and caught up on email and Facebook. Eventually, I decided I needed to walk around a little more before I found my way to the apartment. My waitress was nothing short of cute, with dirty blonde hair, blue eyes, and slightly crooked front teeth. She cheerfully brought me my bill when I asked for it.
For a long time while traveling in Asia and Central Europe, I thought it was something about me that kept waiters from bringing me my check at the end of a meal. I’d sit at a table for fifteen or twenty minutes waiting for the check. Finally, I’d wave at someone and ask to pay. It had taken me eight countries before I realized that rushing to the table with the check at the end of the meal was an American thing. Even in a busy restaurant, I was never rushed to pay and leave. After all, I might want another cup of coffee… or a beer.
I handed the waitress a thousand-koruna note and she looked at me like she was going to cry. That was not a sight I wanted to see. She’d been friendly and chatty, asking where I was from and what brought me to Brno. “Do you have any coins?” she asked. I hadn’t even seen a Czech coin yet. She checked through her wallet, then went to the bar and the barista checked through his wallet. Then another waitress checked. Finally, my waitress came to the table and said, “We don’t have change for that.” Okay. I did some quick calculating and thought I had it right. My bill was 150 koruna or roughly six dollars. I was offering her the equivalent of a $40 bill. It was obvious that my waitress thought she was going to be stiffed for the bill.
“Do you take a credit card?” I asked.
“Yes!” she bobbed her head up and down enthusiastically. Well, the bank would still charge me a buck for the foreign currency exchange, but it was worth it just to see her smile again. I paid the check with a credit card and added fifteen koruna as a tip. Ten percent is pretty standard through most of Europe. I found that in some countries, if what you tender for a bill is deemed close, the waiters just don’t bother bringing you change.
Well, my waitress was very thankful that I’d consented to using a credit card and touched my arm and my hand frequently as she apologized for the inconvenience. She wasn’t the drop-dead gorgeous type of girl I’d seen through most of Romania, Hungary, and Croatia, but she was pleasant and friendly, and she asked me to please come back again. Well, just for the service, I would do so. Besides… Did I mention she was cute? I made sure I affirmed my pleasure in her service and company by returning her touches on the arm and holding her hand in both of mine as I said goodbye to Karin. In many restaurants, the waitresses don’t wear nametags, but when they do, I call them by name.
I still had five 1000-koruna notes. And a warm hand.
A Long Time Ago: Uptown Guru
THERE USED TO BE A BAR in Uptown Minneapolis called William’s Pub. I saw it go through several name changes, but I’ve lost track and don’t know if the place is still there or not. When I was doing grad work, it wasn’t unusual for me to make William’s my go-to place when I wanted a little treat—like the best burger served in the Twin Cities.
DURING ONE of my frequent trial separations from Paula, I sat in the pub licking my fingers and nursing a beer. That’s when I met Robin. She didn’t hover around my table as a waitress, but she had the same habits as Karin when she was there. She would lightly lay a hand on my shoulder while we talked, or steady my hand as she refilled my water glass. She was sort of cute in a gawky kind of way. It was a bit like she had grown a nice body but didn’t know exactly how all the controls worked. Maybe the body had been possessed by an alien.
By the time I had malingered at the pub for a couple of hours, we had chatted about everything from the weather to the spiritual journey described by Guru Garumnala or some such.
“I feel like I’ve known you a long time,” I laughed as I stood to leave. “Have we met before?”
“Maybe. Not on this plane.” We weren’t flying, so I assumed she meant a metaphysical plane of some sort.
“We should see if we have met somewhere else then,” I said. It was a joke. Sort of. Not like I wouldn’t want to meet her again, on this or any other plane. I wasn’t expecting her to pull her apron off.
“I’m off work now,” she said simply. She followed me out of the restaurant and we walked down by the lake.
‘The Lake,’ in South Minneapolis-speak could mean Harriet, Calhoun, Isles, or Cedar. All were technically within walking distance, but our path led us around Lake of the Isles. Calhoun and Harriet are essentially round lakes. So is Cedar, but unlike the other downtown lakes, most of the land around Cedar Lake is privately owned. The little strip that isn’t functions as a late-night nude beach. Lake of the Isles wanders around with bays and inlets that make the path around much longer than Calhoun’s two miles. There are a lot of little concealed places where two people can sit and ‘talk.’
Robin and I found such a place and settled in facing each other, knee to knee. Some people would simply say she was an airhead. Having been raised around hippies, I chose to consider her a free spirit. Sounds much better, doesn’t it? She was among those who had adopted an aura of mystic contentment under the guidance of a guru instead of the influence of drugs.
“I mean, like wow, we’re all part of the same fabric that makes up all of time and space,” she said with wide-open eyes that would lead you to believe there was someone home inside. “Ravi—that’s Guru Garumnala, but he lets us call him Ravi—says that when we make love, there is no other person. Sex with another is the same as sex with yourself, so you don’t have to be concerned about what society says or about popular convention. It’s like masturbating. It doesn’t hurt anyone and it feels so good.”
I was pretty much speechless. The whole time she was telling me about Guru Garumnala’s pronouncements, she was unbuttoning her shirt and pushing her pants down around her ankles. When she started playing with herself, I decided to help remove the garments. I glanced around to see that we were, indeed, fairly concealed from the path and our area was reasonably free of goose poop. In the low light of a summer’s evening, I was pretty sure no one would notice our brilliant white bodies.
“You see,” Robin continued as she opened her pussy and played with her clit. “No one cares if you play with yourself. Go ahead and try it,” she suggested. She assisted me in removing my clothes. We sat on our shirts, but continued to face each other with our knees touching. I’d been watching an ethereal young woman playing with herself and even though I didn’t object to her pleasuring herself, I still responded to it. “You already got started. But now you can just stroke yourself and experience the pleasure.”
I’ve managed to get myself into some pretty weird situations, but when it comes to downright strange, I hold this encounter with Robin as the gold standard. I’d met my waitress about three hours before and now we were sitting out in a public park, naked, masturbating in front of each other. It was surreal.
“Since we are all one being, you could stroke yourself inside me and it would be just like masturbating, only it would feel better for both of us.” It would… I could… What???
Robin leaned forward and crawled up onto my lap. I didn’t resist as she lifted herself and sank onto my cock with a hot, wet, incredible pussy.
“Sex is the great equalizer. We are one with each other. We are one with the universe. Ravi says sex is the first step to enlightenment. I know that if I have sex enough, one day I’ll become enlightened like Guru Garumnala.”
Fortunately, she lost her train of thought, engine and all. When the drive toward orgasm overcame her, I sort of lost the caboose. Yeah. I could understand being one with the universe when I was coming inside Robin. There were certainly no other thoughts in my head.
Our relationship lasted almost two weeks and included becoming one with the universe daily. It ended when I declined to join Guru Garumnala’s ashram and make a donation to his ministry.
Back to Brno
BRNO IS NOT A BIG TOWN. The old town is only about eight blocks square and was filled with a great deal of activity. Musicians were playing on the town square. On the market square, two blocks away, a huge group of international students, complete with a banner for their conference, posed in front of a statue that had one figure at the top wrapped in blue plastic. I didn’t understand exactly.
Eventually, I made it to Anna’s apartment and texted her that I was at the door downstairs. She met me in a couple of minutes and led me through the entry way to the stairs. Her apartment was on the fifth floor. There was an elevator to the fourth floor. Oh, and in case you aren’t familiar with the European way of numbering, the ground floor is zero. I later found that taking the stairs was 110 steps. This is how I worked off the beer.
ANNA WAS DELIGHTFUL and the room was what I was learning to expect. It was under the eaves. Not as low as the Bohemian attic room, but still a sloping ceiling with a skylight and exposed wooden beams. Most importantly, the bed was comfortable. Anna led me on a tour of the flat and then sat down with maps and brochures to help me plan my visit. When I mentioned my love of coffee, she immediately circled three locations on the map and wrote out the names and addresses of her favorite coffee shops. Her boyfriend joined us and did the same thing for the best places to have a beer.
It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to get much in the way of wine while I was in the Czech Republic. I was told there were some good Moravian wines, but there was such a wide selection of great beers that I would just never get around to them. I was beginning to get hungry, so figured I’d head to the first place on the list before long. Then Anna hit me with the rules of the house.
“Most of our rules are pretty much what you expect. Be quiet at night. Clean up your own mess in the kitchen. Wipe down the tub after you shower. If you have a guest up to your room, remember that you are responsible for his or her behavior in the apartment. And if she stays overnight it’s fifteen euros.” I was nodding along with what she was saying. Then… Guest? Overnight? Was that common? There was another guy who was staying in the room next to mine. Anna and her boyfriend had a portion of the apartment sectioned off and it contained their living room and bedroom which they kept locked. The rest of the apartment was shared by the guests.
BEER IN MORAVIA is an entire culture in itself. The first bar/restaurant I went to had seven taps and a chalkboard that said what beer was in each tap. Not that I could really read the chalkboard, or Czechboard as I started calling it. I just asked the waiter for a dark beer, which was a term he didn’t know. My German kicked in and I said “Dunkel.” He shook his head and said they didn’t have any this evening, but he had a lager I might like. Sure. Nothing against Pils, but I prefer the darker, heavier beers. I asked for a menu and he pointed to another board that had ‘chili’ and ‘schnitzel’ on it. I ordered the chili.
The beer was great. The chili was outstanding. What a surprise! Stefan, Anna’s boyfriend, had told me I’d like this place, but I’d kind of taken that as simply local pride. But this was really good. And conveniently located at the corner of Beethovenova and Dvorakova by the school of music. I was seated at a table that had three nice-looking young women at it, but we didn’t engage. I was too busy with the chili and the huge loaf of crusty bread that came with it. While I watched, one of the waitresses erased from the chalkboard the name of the beer I was drinking. She wrote up another undecipherable name and a guy crawled out from under the bar rolling a keg out the back door.
“We have a dunkel beer now,” my waiter said. “Would you like one?” I swallowed the remains of my lager and accepted the glass of nearly black, foamy liquid. I probably could have used a knife and fork and had the beer for dinner instead of the chili. It was so rich, I sat there sipping at it for nearly an hour. I was glad I assuaged my thirst with the lager. This was not the kind of beer you just downed and ordered another.
I discovered, occasionally chatting with the waiter and other patrons as they shifted around the tables, that it was quite common in Brno for the bars to order just one keg of several different beers and when that keg ran out, they shifted to a different kind of beer. What a difference between that and my first experience ordering beer when Treasure and I visited Germany. That was back in the days when the most important feature in any new town was the quality of the bed we jumped into.
A Long Time Ago: Another Bier, Bitte
BACK IN OUR YOUNG AND FLUSH DAYS, Treasure took a vacation to Europe to pick up a new Volvo in Gothenberg, Sweden. That’s a different story. Suffice it to say that we were still young and newlywed and spent a lot of the trip in bed while driving around Europe. That included a visit to the marzipan capital of the world, Lübeck.
We decided eventually that we were hungry, so we dressed and went to a bierstube we had passed along the way. Of course, we ordered beers. And food. Limited menu. Wurtz and fries. My wife was a vegetarian. She ate the fries. But it was impossible to ruin our mood. We were in a country I’d never been in before and enjoying a beer, food, and each other. We were having such a good time that we decided to have another beer, so I flagged the waitress.
“Ein anderes bier, bitte,” I said in my best German. She scowled at me and then at my wife.
“Wir haben kein anderes bier.” Everyone around us was happily drinking beer and our waitress was telling us she didn’t have any more? I paid the tab and we left with the waitress scowling at us.
We were about a block away when I looked at Treasure and the light came on in her eyes. We started laughing. German/English, English/German. I’d asked for another beer. Perfectly logical in English. But in German, ein anderes or another, means a different one, not ‘one more.’ The bierstube was a brew pub. They only had the beer they brewed and no others. Frau Doktor Meier, my German professor, would have been unhappy with the way I insulted the waitress.
Treasure and I went back to our room and fucked some more.
Back to Brno
I WAS THANKFUL I carried a flashlight with me at night because I couldn’t find the light switch on the stairs when I got off the elevator for the last flight. I crashed quietly in my bed under the eaves.
THE NEXT DAY, I stumbled out to find the next coffee shop on Anna’s list only to find that few places open before noon. Believe it or not, though, there’s a Starbucks in the main square. I explored the market and then headed up the hill to the Spilberk Castle. The old castle had been converted to a prison in the mid-1700s and was legendary for the screams of tortured prisoners. It took nearly an hour to tour the walls of the castle and at the end I knew entirely too much about imprisonment and torture in the 1700s. The castle walls would hold upwards of 250 prisoners the way they stacked them in.
BUT THE MUSEUMS above in the castle proper were nothing short of spectacular. Room after room of artwork and breathtaking views of the city and countryside from the battlements. I even managed a bit of chlebová polévka (bread soup) in one of the cafés, with a welcome beer. I also learned, both here and in Hungary, that goulash was a soup that had absolutely nothing in common with the hamburger and macaroni dish my parents cooked and called goulash!
Back down in the city I managed to find a quiet place to sit and write for a while, getting into my do-over story, Not This Time, with some new twists. I grabbed a nap late in the afternoon, and about eight o’clock, headed out to Vycep Na Stojaka, a popular bar next to St. Jacob’s Church. The name of the bar translates to ‘the standing bar.’ By the time I got there on a Saturday night, it was clear to see why. There was a line in one door and people coming out the other with beer and some food. The choices were even more limited for food than at the previous night’s bar. I got a beer and French fries and was shuffled out the other door. There were no seats. There were half a dozen tall tables outside, but each of those had several people already standing around it. And in the little plaza, there were about two hundred more people—each happily sipping a beer.
There were a couple of other restaurants on the plaza and people could order food at them, but most people were content with their French fries and beer. They stood on the sidewalk, in the street, on the steps of the church. They sat on curbs and steps and leaned against lamp posts. Some musicians were set up on one side and were playing for tips. It was noisy, but because we were outside, it wasn’t all that bad. I was enjoying just being within the crowd and listening to the conversations, often in two or three different languages.
I cycled through the bar again and chose the second tap, which was really the only way I could differentiate what was being offered. I got an unfiltered wheat beer, which isn’t necessarily my favorite kind of beer, but it went down pretty smoothly. I was probably going to have to find a toilet pretty soon, but that could wait until I actually found a restaurant to eat at. I figured I should do that before ten.
A BLONDE BUNDLE stumbled into me and yelled “Ne! No!” at a couple of guys a few feet away. “Jdi pryč!” Apparently, the guy was being a prick. She was pretty well blocked from further progress by the wall of the church where I was leaning and the lead guy got into her personal space, touching her arm and apparently trying to get her to go with him. She shook his arm off and gave him a push, repeating the words. He moved in again.
I stepped between them.
What a fucking, stupid thing to do!
“Hey! She said no!” I snapped at the guy. He answered in what I assumed was Czech. “I don’t care what language you speak. No means no.” I could feel the girl hanging onto my shirt behind and wondered if she was using this distraction to lift my wallet. I was not in a good situation. The guy in front of me was handsome, well-dressed, and young. With backup. I had at least thirty years and thirty pounds on him. Dressed in jeans and my one long-sleeved shirt with hiking shoes compared to his spit-shined loafers. In the very best of times, I’m not really the picture of the guy you want coming to your rescue.
A Long Time Ago: Ground Yourself
KNOW WHO ROBERT BLY IS? Minnesota poet, but also the founder of a men’s spiritual movement that typically involved a bunch of guys running around naked in the woods, drumming, and telling stories. He wrote a book titled Iron John: A Book About Men a few years ago. New Age shit. I’m just new age and pagan enough to have attended a men’s retreat with him once. Hell, I run around naked all the time. And it was great fun. Men together with no women, free to let go of old stereotypes and embrace the Iron John within us.
Robert told us a bunch of stories, recited poetry, and led us through exercises that were supposed to get us in touch with the man inside us who wasn’t ashamed of who he was. One of those exercises was, he said, based on Aikido. He said that one of the reasons that men reacted badly to spouses, bosses, and even police was because those people triggered the shame reflex in us and we didn’t know what to do with it. But by using the Aikido technique of grounding ourselves, we could flush the negative responses out of our body by letting them flow through us and into the ground.
Hey! I already told you this was a bunch of new age crap. But it promised to open up a path of discovery one way or the other, so we were paired up in the room and told that we were supposed to insult and shame each other. When we were insulted or shamed, we were to focus on having our feet firmly on the ground (like they’d be somewhere else) and let the shame and hurt flow out into the earth beneath us.
My friend Bill was my partner for the exercise. We knew each other pretty well as neighbors but it really wasn’t part of my nature to try to hurt people. I made some lame insult up about him giving the needle to more pets than he treated at his veterinary clinic. I knew better than that. There was really no one I knew who cared more about animals than he did. He kind of shook his head and laughed off the weak attempt at an insult.
“Is that the best you can do?” he said. “The only way you’ll ever have a creative bone in your body is if you get fucked by an artist.”
God damn that fucking son of a bitch! I’d written three books and volumes of poetry. I had a degree in playwriting. And awards. And he has the goddamn gall to challenge my creativity! I could feel my stomach tying itself into a knot. It had always been like this. Even my first ex-wife had poo-poohed my goal of getting a degree in playwriting and wanted me to continue in tech theater where I could possibly earn a living. I ended up divorcing that bitch, who couldn’t even go to sleep at night if she had to go to work in the morning. Neurotic, sniveling little bitch. She was just like my mother. Always putting me down.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into Robert Bly’s eyes.
“Let it go,” he said softly. “Let it flow out of your body, through your feet into the ground. The earth is thirsty for your pain. Let it have it.”
Fuck! Zero to sixty in five seconds flat. I’d gone from an insult a friend gave me in an exercise to resurrecting all the pain of my first marriage and right back to the shame my mother inflicted on me in less time than it took to accelerate away from a stop sign. I took a couple deep breaths and felt the anger and tension drain out of me. I guessed I still had some work to do on the shame issue.
“Whenever you feel that hurt—that tension in your stomach that you know will burn a hole through you—let it flow out of your body and into the ground,” Bly said as we wrapped up the exercise.
Back to Brno
I WAS PRETTY SURE Bly was only referring to emotional pain and not the fist that was buried in my stomach.
I felt that hurt, that tension in my stomach that made me want to throw up. I let it flow out of my body.
And heaved.
I’d just drunk a liter of beer. Granted, a lot of it had already moved into my bladder, but there was enough still in my stomach to flush the remains of my lunch out of my mouth and all over the preppy’s white shirt, pressed khaki slacks, and high-gloss sneakers. He backed away from me with a look of disgust on his face, shaking his hands out and moving as far away as he could get as he pointed at me and jabbered away in Czech. There were tears in my eyes and I was only vaguely aware that the girl I’d so nobly saved was still there and had her arm wrapped around my waist to support me.
Then there were the cops and the pain in my stomach took a different tinge. Just what I needed. He started in Czech and I answered that I only spoke English.
“Papers,” he barked at me.
“Do you have your passport with you?” the girl whispered to me. I nodded and unzipped the secure pocket in my shirt to pull my documents out. After checking it quickly he handed it back and said something in Czech. The girl answered. The cop pointed at the vomit on the steps that everyone else had stepped well away from. My assailant was long gone. The girl answered again and the cop shook his head.
“Five hundred koruna,” he demanded. “Each.”
A shakedown. Damn! The only good thing was that five hundred koruna was only about twenty dollars. If it had been Hungary, I’d probably have been hit for a hundred. He called this a fine for soiling the church steps, but it was really a pay-off for letting him not take us to jail and call the embassy and all the other crap that comes with getting arrested in a foreign country. Friends in Thailand had been stopped on their scooter and shaken down for a thousand baht by the cops because they were driving without an international license—something that isn’t a requirement in Thailand, by the way. My host in Bulgaria had talked her way out of a shakedown when she’d driven with no lights on at night, but she’s insanely cute.
The blonde pushed my hand away from my wallet and pulled a thousand koruna note out of her purse to hand to the cop.
“He doesn’t have any local money. I’m showing him the town,” she said. The cop took the bill and motioned for us to get lost. We stumbled out of the square and down Jakubska. I finally got a good look at the girl.
“Karin?” I said. The blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and crooked front teeth looked at me, startled. It was my waitress from my first encounter in Brno.
“Oh! No coins!” she laughed. “Thank you for coming to my rescue.”
“And you to mine,” I said. “You needn’t have paid the police for me, though. Let me pay you back.”
“Thank you. If he had seen more money in your wallet, he would have demanded more. I just did it to save you some money.” I handed her a five hundred.
“Can I buy you dinner?” I asked. “My stomach seems to be empty now.”
“I was going to meet…” She stopped and reconsidered. “Okay. Dinner.”
“I was just going to this restaurant up the street at the Pegas. Is that good enough?” I asked.
“I love barbecue!” she said. She kept an arm through mine as we walked the two blocks to the hotel/restaurant/brewery. I’d read a bit about it on TripAdvisor and it looked good and reasonably priced. I didn’t think I’d go through all my cash feeding her. We sat at a small table where the menu was printed on placemats. I excused myself to use the restroom where I pissed, washed off my face, and rinsed my mouth. When I returned to the table, Karin was just finishing a call on her cell.
A waiter approached and I ordered a Pegas dunkel. Karin ordered Pils. “Do you like ribs?” she asked. When I nodded, she didn’t give me a chance to order. She rattled off the order in Czech and the waiter rushed off. “Hope you don’t mind that I ordered for you, but it’s a house specialty.” The beers arrived and we started seriously getting to know each other.
It turned out that Karin had moved to Brno from Prague after her divorce to make a fresh start. Jobs weren’t easy to come by in Prague. Here, she’d managed working as a waitress and a part time secretarial job. But prices were cheaper here than in Prague. She’d managed to make ends meet and was even saving some money. She asked about my travel and my ‘work’ as a writer.
“So, I write mysteries and thrillers under one name and erotic romance and adventure under another,” I said.
“Which is this?” she asked.
“Which is what?”
“Tonight. Is it a thriller where the dashing American spy is attacked in front of the church by enemy agents? Or a sexy story where he seduces the barmaid for a night of sexual abandon?” Apparently, she had a pretty good grasp of literature.
“I was afraid earlier that it was going to be a thriller and that the spy might not survive this exchange. Now I have great hopes for a sexy romance.”
“Keep hoping!”
THE WAITER brought a huge wooden platter with four beef ribs, bread, sauces, and a pile of cabbage salad on it. He set it in front of us and placed sets of cutlery for us. That was it. We were going to eat off the same platter. I got to thinking that this was a fun date and we needed places like this in America. Of course, we are way too sanitized in America. We don’t eat off a common plate. We don’t drink from a common cup. We refrigerate our eggs.
“So, what kind of things do you like to do?” I asked. I was doing my best to get to know her. She had an easy way that I found charming, but she’d managed to keep me talking about myself and my writing almost since we sat down.
“Are you asking about my sex life?” she asked. I dropped my napkin. She was grinning at me. I took a breath to recover my senses.
“Not specifically,” I said. “If that’s the main thing you like to do, though, I’m willing to listen to you tell me about it. Or demonstrate.”
“Hmm. Maybe,” she said. “Later. I like to read. I like to travel. I like sex, but I am not promiscuous. I would like to take a drawing class. I sketch a little, but I’d like to improve so that my travel sketchbooks are something I truly want to go back and look at.”
“That would be fun. I’ve done a bit of sketching and drawing, but I found that while I was traveling, carrying around a sketchbook and pencils was more cumbersome than I wanted to deal with,” I said.
“But you carry a camera and a computer,” she said. “I understand that. I’m not a writer. You need the tools for what you do. I don’t need a camera or a computer. When I really want a photo, I just use my cell phone. Usually, I only take pictures so I can draw something later on. And people. I take pictures of people.” She pulled her cell phone out of her purse. I thought she was just showing it to me, but she raised it and took my picture. “Now, if I had your phone number, I could put your picture with it so that every time you called me, I would see your face.”
I handed her my phone.
“Why don’t you put your number in my contacts and call yourself. You’ll have my number then. For a while.”
“Just for a while?”
“Well, I bought a Czech phone SIM for while I’m here. Next week when I go to Germany, I’ll buy a German SIM. They don’t really make it convenient to have cell service in every country unless you are rich. Especially for data service, which is what I mostly use,” I said. “And when I get back to the U.S., I’ll have a completely different number and will have to add international dialing if I want to contact you.”
“Would you want to contact me?”
“I find you delightful company. I mean it when I say I’d like to keep in touch.”
“Why don’t we find out what that is like,” she said. She glanced over at our waiter and he immediately came to the table. I don’t know why they don’t respond to me like that.
“I’d like to pay our bill with a credit card, please,” I said before Karin could speak.
“Certainly.” He left and returned a moment later with a tabulation and a credit card reader. I was warned once years ago not to just give my credit card to a waiter like we do in the US. Frankly, I’d not found any waiters in Europe on this trip who even considered taking the card away from the table. They brought a reader to the table and inserted the card. I approved the charge, which was less than I thought it would be. Twelve hundred koruna. Less than $50 for that huge platter of ribs and four beers. I’d expected as much as $75. I signed the credit card slip and left 200 koruna on the table as a tip. It’s much more difficult to leave a tip on a credit card under this system.
We left the brew pub and Karin slipped her hand through my arm, reaching across herself with her other hand to lightly grip my bicep. Her left hand slid down my forearm and into my hand. I was trying to figure out how to make a move and failing miserably. We walked back toward the central square.
“Where to now?” she asked brightly.
“Shall I walk you home?” I asked.
“I share my flat and my roommates would not approve of me having a male guest. We agreed that our flat was just for us only and we’d entertain elsewhere.” Entertain?
“I’m renting a room. Guests are permitted.”
“Are you inviting me up to your place, Ari?” she asked. Fuck! I am so bad at this. I usually just wait around for something good to happen and then agree. Well, something good was holding my hand. I stopped and turned to her.
“Karin, would you spend the night with me?” I croaked.
“I was afraid I would have to invite myself,” she smiled. She reached up to me and kissed me lightly on the lips. Electric! “Yes, Ari. I’d love to spend the night with you.” She kissed me again, lingering a little, but not letting it become passionate in the middle of the town square. It was a minute before I could breathe again.
“I’m over on Rooseveltova,” I said. We walked hand-in-hand through the streets of Brno, neither hurrying nor dawdling. I was simply enjoying the company of this delightful young woman. Well, young to me. She’d told me she was thirty-one, though I found it hard to believe. I didn’t even care if we did more than sit and talk all night. I was really just into her. We walked up to my door and I inserted the key to get into the building. Karin looked both directions on the street and then up at the building.
“Oh, my. Don’t tell me you’re renting a room from Anna.”
“I am renting a room on the top floor from a woman named Anna. Is that a problem?”
“Mmm. Not for me. Maybe she isn’t home.”
“I take it you know her.”
“Yeah. You could say that. Don’t worry. I’m sure it won’t be a problem,” Karin said. She leaned more heavily on me in the elevator. Then she reached over and turned on the light switch that I’d not found the previous night so we could walk up the last flight of stairs. I unlocked the apartment door and we went in.
Anna and Stefan were at the little dining table with four other people, including Michael, the other guest in the apartment, and a guy who seemed to be very attached to Michael. I greeted the group and introduced Karin.
“Oh, my God!” Anna said. “What do you do, Karin? Wait at my door to see who my guests are?”
“Anna, that’s not fair!” Karin said sharply. It looked for a minute like it could be an explosive situation. Karin had been up here with guys before?
“I met Karin at the coffee shop and we ran into each other this evening at the standing bar and then had dinner,” I said. I felt like I was giving a report to my mother.
“He rescued me,” Karin said. “You wouldn’t have believed how he took on three guys who were being assholes toward me. And the cops tried to shake him down. You know how they are. And then we kind of hit it off. Really well.” I’m not sure I believed the story the way she told it.
“Is it a problem?” I asked Anna.
“No,” Anna said. “And you’re right, Karin. It’s not fair and I was being catty. We’ve been drinking.” She turned to look at me. “I said you were free to have guests. Michael is taking advantage of it. Hope you don’t mind. Just remember that you owe me an extra fifteen euros for the overnight,” Anna said. “Do you want an after-dinner drink? We’re just having some pálenka.” I glanced at Karin who shook her head minutely.
“I think we’ll just continue our conversation for now. We’ve found a lot to talk about,” I said. Anna laughed.
“Well, don’t ‘talk’ too loudly, okay?” She looked at Michael. “The same goes for you two.”
“SO, I TAKE IT you know Anna pretty well,” I said when Karin and I had entered the room and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d gone immediately to the exposed attic beam and run her hand over it almost lovingly.
“Yeah. She’s my former sister-in-law.” That put everything in a different light. Holy shit!
“Is this too awkward, Karin?”
“No. She’s the reason I moved to Brno when Alec and I split. Anna’s a little caustic at times, but she’s got a heart of gold. She told me when I married him that Alec was a bad choice, then invited me here to live with her when we split.”
“So, you used to live here?”
“In this very room. It’s kind of nostalgic.”
“What’s the thing about waiting for her guests?” I asked.
“When I moved out, Anna decided to list the apartment with Rent-a-Bed to earn a little extra cash. That was eighteen months ago. I came over to visit the next week and this hunky guy met me at the door. To make a long story short, Anna caught me leaving his room in the morning. It was kind of a rebound sort of thing. I hadn’t been with a guy since my husband and this guy seemed nice and I sort of fell right into bed with him.”
“Karin…”
“Don’t worry, Ari. I don’t make a habit of bedding guys I’ve just met. Yes, it’s happened once and with luck it’s happening tonight. I’m just sorry that is all you know about me. I’m not really like that.”
“Karin, do you want to be here?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good because I want you to be here. Kiss me.”
There was nothing hesitant about our kiss this time.
A Long Time Ago: The Kissing Tale
EVERYTHING I KNOW about kissing, I learned from Jill. I might have mentioned her once before. She was the girl waiting for me back in small town, Indiana when I returned from my summer in Colorado for my junior year in high school. I didn’t know where she learned to kiss and I didn’t care. She was a patient instructor. And she loved to kiss.
I don’t think what she did was even covered by the word ‘kiss.’ It was more like playing mouth games. Or maybe painting landscapes with your lips. Whatever you want to call it, one night a week on our dates was scarcely enough to satisfy either of us.
Kissing leads logically to petting and petting leads to sex. Right?
Wrong.
At least it’s wrong when you don’t have a driver’s license and your parents ferry you on all your dates. Most of which were double dates because my friend Jon didn’t have a car. We were creative about what we did. Jill went to a different school than we did, but the same church. So, we had a wide variety of social activities we could indulge in, going to dances at her school and our school. We had church events we could all go to, and Sunday night youth group that didn’t count as an official date. During the early fall, I could bike to Jill’s house about three miles north of town, just across the school district boundary. I did so during September, but it got cold and wet and then snowy in late October.
Well, let’s just say that we spent as much time as possible kissing and never got an opportunity to get any further sexually. I suppose that was good because Jill was a year younger than me and, at fifteen, was already prepared for a life commitment.
One of our favorite games was at Sunday night youth group. We hadn’t yet told anyone at church we were going out except Jon. And our youth group wasn’t very organized. Reverend Dave was pretty laid back and cool, so a lot of the time he’d just show up with a bunch of snacks for us while we sat around and talked in the youth lounge, and then he’d go to his office. We’d furnished the youth lounge with carpet that had been pulled out of someone’s house and furniture we scavenged from people’s attics. It’s hard to believe, but people were throwing out those big overstuffed mohair sofas and armchairs. We managed those, along with some beanbags and a bunch of big pillows. I loved sitting in the big chair because it had enough room for girls to sit on the arms. Jill always sat on the right side.
Okay, so you’ve got fifteen teens dumped in a comfy room together on Sunday night with snacks and no supervision. What could possibly go wrong? Some of the kids were younger and we didn’t want one of them to catch us making out because then everyone would find out and the parents would insist on more supervision or disband the whole group. So, we actually spent most Sunday nights just talking and joking with each other.
Until the night the lights went out. There were a couple screams, but pretty quickly we all settled down to just wait for the power to come back on. Jon went out to see if it was a fuse or if it was all the power. We laughed and a couple girls made comments about keeping hands to yourself, but I was pretty sure there were no guys near where those voices had come from.
And then I felt Jill’s hand slip into mine.
It was risky because the lights could come on at any moment, but it was exciting, too.
Well, the lights did come on and we managed to separate before anyone noticed we’d been holding hands. We went out the back door after youth group when everyone else went out the front and stood in the shadows for a long delicious kiss.
That launched the lights out game. Every week, someone would flip the light switch off, pretending that the power had gone out and then, a random amount of time later, flip it on to see if anyone was caught doing something naughty. It was inevitable that we got caught. They’d always allowed two or three minutes of darkness and Jill and I had reached the point of getting right to a kiss as soon as they went out. Then some smarty decided to flip the lights back on after only about fifteen seconds and there we were with Jill leaning over me and our lips plastered tightly together.
The cat was out of the bag. Not that people were kissing when the lights went out. We all kind of figured that was going on. But that Jill and I were a couple. So, we could hold hands anytime we wanted to. And in the backseat of the car with my mother or father driving us home from a school dance on Friday night, we could kiss all we wanted. And Jill really wanted.
So did I.
She taught me light little lip brushes, deep, soul-searing French kisses, sweet soft kisses. She taught me about kissing other places than on the lips. Eyelids, ears, neck, fingers. There was a kind of intensity about kissing her that I’ve never found in any other girl, including three wives. When Jill kissed, she was committed to kissing.
I think, as much as anything else, that was what contributed to our never progressing further than kissing. For a fifteen-year-old, Jill had spectacular breasts. I dreamed about them at night. But I never really touched more than the sides while we embraced, or squashed them against my chest. I just wanted to kiss her.
I suppose that was the problem. Like I said, Jill was ready for a lifelong commitment and I wasn’t moving fast enough. She found a fast guy with a red Corvette. I got the word second hand that we were no longer going together. I moved on, but I always missed those kisses.
I wrote that into Redtail, years later. But Genieve had the courtesy to tell Cole it was over face to face before she jumped in the ’Vette.
Back to Karin
MY FIRST TOUCH of Karin’s lips had been electric. The next upped the voltage. I hadn’t been kissed like that since Jill. Karin put her whole self into the kiss and I responded the same. We were sitting on the edge of the bed and just fell back on it, wrapped in each other’s arms. I was lost. There is absolutely nothing that captures my mind, body, and spirit like a great kiss. If anything, Karin’s slightly crooked front teeth just enhanced the feelings.
My trip around the world was a lot more sexually adventurous than I ever anticipated. It had been fun to play with Ani Mai. My mind had been broadened by Char’s bondage. Anastasia was a goddess to be worshipped. Lissette and Rina were an unexpected, and delightful, drunken tumble.
I could fall in love with Karin.
And we hadn’t even made love yet. I just wanted to live on her lips. She could convey more passion just with her soft lips than most women I’ve known could with their whole bodies. And then her tongue tickled my lips open.
Guys talk about all the blood draining from their big head and rushing to their little head. I think the only place in my body that had any circulation going was my mouth. My lips and tongue tingled with the charge of her kiss.
“Ari, you can touch me,” Karin whispered in my ear. “Please, touch me, sweetheart.”
Oh, yes. Hands. Fingers. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been touching her, exactly. We were lying on my bed pressed against each other. I had an arm around her, cushioning her head and holding her arm. My other hand was petting and caressing her hair and her cheek. I let it drift down and followed it with kisses along her jaw and across her throat. I didn’t try to grope her breast through her clothes. That seemed so teenager-like. I unbuttoned her blouse, grazing the inside of her breast with the back of my hand as I moved down the buttons. She sighed and kissed the top of my head as she pulled her arm out of the sleeve. Before I proceeded any further, I kissed from her throat across her shoulders and down onto her chest, tracing the line of her lacy bra with my lips.
I helped her sit slightly so she could finish removing the blouse and found the catch for her bra on the back. It released and she shrugged her arms out of the straps, tossing the garment aside. Now I touched her. I smoothed the strap marks with my fingertips. I circled her breasts and cupped them from beneath as I bent to place the lightest of kisses just at the tips of her nipples. She sighed and cradled my head in her arms, pulling me toward her.
I suppose it is true that the most beautiful breasts in the world are the pair you hold naked in your hands. Objectively… There is no objectively. She was beautiful. I’ve held breasts that were firmer, bigger, smaller, floppier, more uneven, more perfectly matched, and just at that moment I couldn’t remember any of them. While I worshiped them with my lips and hands, Karin managed to unbutton my shirt and get it off my torso. And then there was skin touching skin, her nipples pressed against my own as we kissed again and again.
It took an hour for us to get fully undressed. I had to touch and love each centimeter of skin as it was exposed, giving it my complete attention. Nor was Karin idly waiting for me to finish. I’ve seldom felt such intense attention to my body. I was rigidly hard and wanted to stay that way.
A Long Time Ago: Wang
I WORKED IN AN OFFICE ONCE, supervising a staff that operated a Wang word processor. It was before we became socially aware of the sexist environment we’d created and was the kind of office that was constantly filled with double entendre. Most of us were either single or didn’t care and the women made as many suggestive comments to the men as the other way around. Working in real estate and home building was like that. We had an afterhours bar in the break room and often sat around for an hour or more after work to drink and flirt. Cynthia was my special nemesis, teasing me unmercifully.
“Ari, does your Wang ever go down?” she jibed.
“Not if you don’t fuck with it,” I snapped back. There came a time when she did, but that’s another story.
The point is, I like being hard. I’ve written about it before and I suppose it is a part of my nature. The idea of a four-hour erection is not a medical emergency to me, it’s a medical miracle. So, I don’t rush to orgasm. I want to feel that impending crisis for as long as I can.
Back to Karin
I CERTAINLY WANTED to love on Karin for as long as I could this night. Karin seemed to be of like mind. She explored every minute detail of my body, touching and caressing and kissing and licking. She rose to tremors when I slipped my fingers into her slit and after a moment to recover resumed her explorations. She didn’t complain of me teasing her with my tongue or probing her with my fingers. She had many tiny orgasms as we loved and we both knew it was going to keep getting better. She’d slicked my entire cock with my own lubrication and then took it deep in her mouth, releasing and swallowing again.
Inevitably, so completely caught up in each other that time had ceased to have meaning, I found my cock sliding slowly into her pussy. We stared into each other’s eyes and darted in for little kisses as we basked in the feeling of oneness.
“Am I your first Czech girl, Ari?” she whispered as we pushed fully together.
A Long Time Ago: Parting the Curtains
DAMN! I didn’t want to lie to her—not in this moment of ultimate intimacy. But there was that theater competition years ago while I was in grad school. Going all the way to Athens, Ohio to have my play produced was a real kick. Each playwright/director team was given a six-member cast and two days to produce a fifteen-minute scene from the play. My play was ideally suited for the competition. It was a staged radio drama, so there was very little in the way of blocking. Instead there were a ton of sound effects that the actors had to produce. It was really just storytelling with a cast. Fifteen minutes was the perfect amount of time to get one full story told along with the extra bits of the actors interacting on stage when they were officially ‘off air’.
Jean had been our host at the University of Ohio, Athens. Richard, my director, was singularly uninterested in her as he’d already found one of the actors who was more suited to his tastes. I hadn’t really even considered the social aspects of the competition, except that as a playwright I should be a star and people should fawn all over me.
Well, not so much. All the competitors were playwrights, so it was, at best, a shared spotlight. At worst, we were a dime a dozen. Jean even seemed bored because she had been saddled with hosting one of the competitors rather than one of the really famous playwrights there to judge the competition. I couldn’t blame her, really. Arthur Miller was one of the fucking judges! I was the one who was starstruck.
But Jean executed her duties faithfully. She escorted Richard and me (and Richard’s new actor boyfriend) to the opening night dinner and made sure we met the right people. She was pleasant, but kind of a dark and brooding artiste. Sort of like being around a female Hamlet. The dark Burton one, not the blonde Olivier. I sort of suspected she had a dagger sewn into her sleeve, just in case. She was finishing her MFA in costuming, so that wasn’t out of the question.
I asked her about her about her accent and she told me she was born in Czechoslovakia but she was never going back. Remember, that was pre-revolution days. We all thought everyone there was a dirty communist.
She seemed very sophisticated. Of course, she dressed all in black—it’s a theater thing—but her clothes fit her a lot better than the standard grip. (A grip is a stagehand, always dressed in black.)
The night of the awards, she was dressed in a skintight black evening gown with a neckline that plunged all the way to her navel. Richard and I were in our tuxes for the awards (courtesy of the University costume shop back in Minneapolis) and his actor friend was in drag. We made for two striking couples. And placing second in the competition was cause for a celebration. I shook Miller’s hand when he handed me the award. Shit! That was cool. The hand that penned Death of a Salesman!
Well, the champagne flowed pretty freely that night. Richard and his drag queen disappeared long before the bubbly did. The more Jean drank, the friendlier she became. I was pretty blitzed, myself, and when she snagged an unopened bottle and suggested we finish it in my room, I was all for it. All evening long, I’d been getting tantalizing glimpses of her breasts when she shifted and that plunging neckline gapped open. I was thinking entirely with the little head by this time and wanted to slide my hand right under the opening.
We popped the cork and realized all we had were the water glasses in the dorm room I’d been assigned. Nonetheless I poured two full glasses and handed her one.
“Na zdravi,” Jean said over the top of her glass. We downed it considerably more quickly than the champagne deserved. And then we kissed. It was sloppy and wet as it seemed we each tried to see how far we could get our tongues into the other’s mouth. Then, suddenly, Jean was running to the bathroom and sacrificing all that glorious champagne to the porcelain god.
Being the gentleman that I am, I followed her in and knelt beside the toilet with her, holding her hair back out of the way while she purged. In the process, her dress slipped off one shoulder and down past her breast. Like a dream come true. It was round and firm and capped with a rosy nipple that just begged to be sucked. And here we were drunk and incapacitated. I didn’t dare even run my hand over that beautiful round swelling on her chest. It just wouldn’t be right. I was such a Puritan!
That wasn’t the end of the road, though. Jean insisted that it must have been something she ate because she didn’t feel that drunk. We washed our faces and cleaned our mouths. We drank water and Jean had aspirin in her purse that we both took several of. During all that time, the right side of her dress hung off her arm with her breast on display.
“Unzip me, Ari,” she said. “Let’s go to sleep and in the morning, you can have your wicked way with my body.” Sounded like a deal to me. Especially, when that black gown fell to the floor and I discovered it was all she was wearing. We slid into bed and fell asleep, cuddled in each other’s arms.
Waking to a blow job in the morning is a cliché. There’s pissing to do. And rinsing the foul taste of the night out of your mouth. And getting hard again from watching those slim hips and elegant bare breasts. And going back to bed. Jean’s mouth went straight to my cock. Her lithe body stretched out next to me with her hips by my head. I tugged at her a little.
“Can I eat you?” I asked.
“Hell, yeah,” she said, shifting a leg over my head to settle her pussy down toward my mouth. I held her up to look at her before I let her settle all the way down. She had the longest inner labia I’ve ever seen. Not that I’m a gynecologist, so I haven’t seen that many. But these hung down out of her slit a good inch and a half. I wasn’t sure how she managed to get them in her panties. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t wearing any last night. Nonetheless, they were already glistening with her juices and I took the invitation to suck and lick them on the way to the treasures hidden inside. When she came, Jean flooded my face. She scrambled around on top of me and held those lips apart as she settled down onto my cock.
I changed my flight back to Minneapolis and stayed an extra day, most of it buried between the world’s longest labia and sucking Czechoslovakia’s finest tits.
Back to Karin
“AM I?” Karin repeated. “Your first Czech girl?”
“Yes,” I breathed as I moved in her. Jean was an American citizen, after all.
“I’m glad. You are my first American. I’m glad we can be each other’s first. Love me, Ari.”
It was a command I was only too willing to fulfill. As lost as I had been in exploring Karin’s body with my fingers and lips, I was equally lost in the sensation of moving within her. And like the earlier exploration, there seemed to be no immediate climax in the offing that would end this coupling. We moved together, enjoyed the sensations, and kissed some more. We rolled over so she could be on top and I suckled at her breasts. Each time we changed positions, she gasped out another little climax and renewed her lovemaking with vigor.
Sometime—perhaps a minute or maybe an eternity later—I felt the pressure build toward the inevitable.
“I’m going to come, Karin.”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been waiting for you. So good. You feel so good. So perfect.” This time, we built to the peak together and when it finally crashed over us, I admit, I passed out.
WHEN I WOKE in the morning, Karin was still lying mostly on me. She was small enough and light enough that my breathing hadn’t suffered. My cock, though shrunken, was still nestled in her wet folds. I thought we’d only passed out and woken again a minute later, but eventually I realized that it was daylight coming through the skylight that had awakened me. And still, in my arms, was this precious Czech jewel. I was beginning to think that the Czech Republic was my favorite place on earth.
Both of us were sated and emotionally spent. When Karin finally stirred herself awake, she found herself still held in my arms and purred against my chest. We got out of bed long enough to use the bathroom, including a quick shower, and to make coffee. We did toss some clothes on when we left the bedroom in deference to the other residents, but we didn’t see or hear any sign of life from the other rooms. Once we had coffee, we returned to bed, stripped off our clothes, and just held each other as we talked quietly.
It was lovers’ talk. Just idle questions about what life had been like growing up in our separate countries—and times, for that matter. She was born before the Velvet Revolution that ended Soviet control, but didn’t really remember much before the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the sovereign states of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
“I was born and raised in Prague, the most beautiful city in the world,” she said. “You must visit.”
“Mmm. I’m finding Brno to be an awfully beautiful place. I might stay here,” I laughed. “But I planned to go to Prague tomorrow for a few days. I finally found a room there yesterday.”
“Uh… Ari… I know… Well, we’ve only known each other for a little while, but I feel so close to you. Will you… Would you like company in Prague? I could show you the most wonderful things!” she said.
I traced the line of her jaw as I pulled her to me for a kiss and continued my hand’s journey down her neck, shoulder, and breast.
“You have already shown me the most wonderful thing,” I said. “Yes, I would love to have you join me. I’ll send a message to my host that there will be two instead of one.”
“I can cover my own expenses,” she said. “I’m not one of the girls who simply want a western man to take care of her. I… I think I’ve fallen in love with you, Ari.”
“It seems so fast, but I think I love you, too.” My stomach growled and she laughed. “I don’t have any food here. Show me someplace to eat breakfast.” Karin giggled and opened her legs.
“Will this do?” she asked.
“For an appetizer,” I said, moving down between her legs. “But then you need to guide me into the city for some food.”
We didn’t take quite as long with our next round of lovemaking as we had with the first, but it was still well after noon before we made it to a coffee shop for ‘breakfast.’
“I NEED TO MAKE a few arrangements,” Karin said after we’d finished our pancakes and coffee. It was after two o’clock already.
“I suppose you need to make arrangements to be off work,” I said.
“Yes. And I need to talk to my… roommates. How about if I let you go get some writing done and I’ll meet you for dinner. I’ll pack a bag,” she said.
“I want to take a walk along the river and visit the cathedral,” I said. “I’m not into religion, but some of these old churches are amazing bits of architecture.”
I DID GET some writing done. Not This Time was progressing and I wanted to finish it before my journey ended. My big long serial, Living Next Door to Heaven, would end in a month and if I didn’t have a new story going up soon thereafter, my readers would forget about me.
It turned out to be one of those days, though. I probably wrote a total of five hundred words. I just kept fading off into distraction. I felt like a fool. The last time I’d met the love of my life, I was married to her for twenty years. Treasure. I wasn’t sure I’d recovered from that one yet. It was too fast to be feeling what I was feeling.
I almost lost the call when it came in. When had she taken that picture of herself to attach to her profile in my contacts? I was staring at it when I realized I should be saying hello.
“There aren’t too many places open for dinner on Sundays,” she said. “Let’s meet at da Vinci’s and then we can do something else if you want.” Hmm. Something else. As long as it included sleeping together and waking up next to her, I was fine with something else.
“I’ll see you there.”
Dinner was pleasant and low key. I had a bowl of their gulášovka, the Czech version of goulash soup. Washed down with a beer, of course. I shouldered Karin’s bag and with one arm wrapped around her, we returned to the room at Anna’s. Before we slipped into the little room under the eaves, I left an envelope with thirty euros and a note of thanks on the kitchen table.
We made love. There is nothing I can add to that statement that would make it any sexier, any more thrilling, any more deeply emotional. We loved.
In the morning, we went to the train station with our bags like honeymooners, laughing and giggling as we tried to explain to the ticket agent that I had a ticket but she needed one and that we wanted to have seats next to each other. We ended up with an entire first class compartment to ourselves for the short trip to Prague.
WE STRAIGHTENED OUR CLOTHES and got off the train two and a half hours later. We had talked, looked at maps, and made out. We’d reserved two seats, but we really only used one, much to the amusement of our waiter, who brought snacks and drinks to the compartment for us. It seemed he didn’t have nearly enough to do, since he kept returning to our compartment to hang out. I think he just wanted to look at Karin.
“You want to what?” Karin asked.
“To walk to the apartment,” I answered. “It’s only a couple miles and I’ll get to see the heart of Prague.”
“Do you know what is between here and that apartment?”
“There’s a bridge, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the Vltava River. My guidebook said it had a pedestrian walkway,” I said. I wasn’t sure what the problem was. I walked everywhere.
“There’s also Letenske Park.”
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to walk. We go right up Revolucion and then it’s a walk in the park. Come on, your suitcase isn’t that heavy. I’ll carry it if the sidewalk is too rough to roll it,” I teased. She looked at me like I was crazy, but agreed.
Well, the cobbles of some of the streets were pretty rough, but her little roll-aboard bounced over them without much problem. It was when we crossed the bridge and I faced Letenske Park that I realized why she had tried to get me to take a bus. The park was at the top of the bluffs overlooking the river and we were at the bottom of said bluffs. Oh, well. Twenty minutes later, she was pulling me by the hand as I puffed to the top and turned around to look back down on the river. I sat down on my pack and pulled Karin onto my lap. I didn’t have the wind to kiss, but sitting with her there as we looked out over what was certainly one of the most beautiful cities in the world was worth the effort.
ROBERT MET US at the flat half an hour later. My host was a quiet man who rented out a single bedroom with a large double bed—on the fifth floor. I was beginning to feel like all the B&Bs I had found were on the top floor of old apartment buildings that had no elevators. This flat, I discovered, also had no kitchen and no WiFi. It had been the best I could do when I tried to find a room. Besides, the bed was big and comfy and I just had to have a little nap before we went out to explore.
We were like newlyweds. It seemed that every chance we had to be naked together was a chance we had to take. I could just make love to this girl for hours.
As it happened, we only made it until dinner time and then went out to find a taverna. Two ‘meat platters’ cost a total of about $20 and we each enjoyed our beer. When we’d eaten, Karin took me back to the park and we sat on the bluff watching the lights of the City of Spires come on.
Prague was considered to have no significant manufacturing or strategic military importance during World War II. As a result, there was a tacit agreement by both Germans and Allies not to bomb it. It is one of the few major cities of Europe that escaped the war unscathed. After sitting for more than an hour, we moved back to our room and resumed our love affair.
FOR THE NEXT three days, Karin was like a child showing me her favorite toys. She loved the city of her birth and wanted to take me to all her favorite places. It was the middle of the week and still the old town square was packed with tourists. Walking through the narrow streets to see the Sex Machines Museum was a hoot. There were devices there that I still had no idea what they were for. I did take her picture next to the six-foot penis on the top floor, though.
On the more serious side, we toured the botanical gardens and bought the full admission to the Prague Castle, which included the old village known as Golden Lane, the National Gallery, and the Cathedral of St. Vitus. The gallery was filled with paintings by the likes of Titian, Rubens, Reni. Say what you like about how overdone the Baroque arts were, those guys could really paint tits.
IN FRONT of the Toy Museum is a statue of a young man. His flaccid penis is just at a height that visitors—usually female—pose to have their pictures taken stroking it. Karin was no different and that small area of the bronze statue’s patina was polished until it shone like gold. We laughed and toured St. George’s Basilica. I have a bit of a thing for St. George as I wrote a book of fairy tales titled Steven George & The Dragon some years ago. It was when we saw the iconic statue of St. George in the courtyard of the cathedral that I started puzzling something. I walked around and around the bronze fountain, noting the youthful—almost feminine—quality of the saint’s face, the extra snake head in front of the horse for water to spout from, and the dragon being speared.
“What?” Karin asked. “It is only a statue.”
“Has anyone ever noticed that he’s stabbing the dragon with the blunt end of his spear and the point is up there with the flag on it?” I asked. She looked and we both burst out laughing. It seemed so incongruous.
LATER THAT EVENING, we attended a concert by a string quartet in St. George’s Basilica and listened to Prokofiev’s Canon and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I was swept away by the music as I held Karin next to me. This was a life I could stay with for a long time.
“COME WITH ME,” I said as we made love later that night. I was headed for Munich the next day and a friend, a reader of my stories, had invited me to take a driving tour of Bavaria on Sunday to see Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles. I was sure he wouldn’t object to the added company of a beautiful young Czech woman. And it was the first step to getting her to come with me long term. I had visions of convincing her to return to America with me.
“I can’t, Ari,” she whispered.
“I know I’m not wealthy and I live a life that would be considered a gypsy here in Europe, but we can make it work. Karin, I’m in love with you. I don’t want to leave you,” I said. Damn it! This was not something planned for my trip around the world. See the Parthenon, swim in the Aegean, fall in love. I really didn’t know how I was going to get on a train tomorrow.
“I love you, Ari. But I can’t come with you. I wanted to just be in your arms and imagine that you were my Prince Charming and we’d ride away into the sunset. But I have obligations. My roommates…”
“Please don’t tell me that you live with a man and this is just a fling,” I spat.
“No! Please, Ari. Don’t make it more difficult. My roommates are my mother… And my daughter,” she whispered. “Even if I could get a visa to come join you in America, I could never bring them with me and you couldn’t support us in your little trailer.” Tears were running down her cheeks. “My daughter is nine years old. My mother cares for her while I’m working and agreed to let me come on this little trip with you. But I can’t just leave them. By the time my daughter is old enough to take care of herself, my mother will be too old to be left without support. I love you, Ari, but I can’t leave them and you can’t stay.”
Oh, fucking shit! I felt the hurt as it entered my stomach and began tying it in knots.
Whenever you feel that hurt—that tension in your stomach that you know will burn a hole through you—let it flow out of your body and into the ground.
WE PARTED at the train station when she boarded the train back to Brno in the morning. Half an hour later, I stood at the back of the train that carried me to Munich, watching the tracks stretch out taking me farther and farther from a brief dream that left me weeping in the dawn.
I fall in love too easily. I’m not going to do that again.
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