All That Man Is

1

Berlin-Hauptbahnhof.

It is where the trains from Poland get in and the two young Englishmen are newly arrived from Kraków. They look terrible, these two teenagers, exhausted by the ordeal of the train, and thin and filthy from ten days of Inter Railing. One of them, Simon, stares listlessly at nothing. He is a handsome boy, high-cheekboned, with a solemn, inexpressive, nervous face. The station pub is noisy and smoky at seven in the morning, and he is listening, with disapproval, to the men at the next table — one of them American, it seems, the other German and older, who says, smiling, ‘You only lost four hundred thousand soldiers. We lost six million.’

The American says something which is lost in the din.

‘The Russians lost twelve million — we killed six million.’

Simon lights a Polish cigarette, sees the word ‘Spiegelei’ on a laminated menu, the money on the table, waiting for the waiter to take it — euros, nice-looking, modern-looking money. He likes the fonts the designers have used, plain, unornamented.

‘A million died just in Leningrad. A million!’

People are drinking beer.

Outside, drizzle is starting to dampen the grey environs of the station.

There was an altercation with the waiter — whether it would be possible to have two cups with a single Kaffeekänchen. It was not possible. They had to share one, Simon and his friend, who is now at the payphone — their mobiles don’t work here — half-hidden under its smoked plastic hood, trying to speak to Otto.

The waiter, in his stained scarlet waistcoat, had been insolent with them, Simon thought. Obsequious to others, though — Simon’s wary eyes follow him as he moves around, moves through the smoke and noise — to men in suits with newspapers, like that one, looking up with a sudden tight smile, looking at his watch as the waiter unloads the tray.

A voice starts to spew information about trains. A hard-edged voice penetrating from somewhere outside where the wind invades the spaces of the station. The voice is like a tap of sound — turned on, turned off.

Simon is familiar now with the facile snatch of tune that precedes each irruption of this voice

of this voice, and its echo.

And the facile snatch of tune, when it sounds, has started to seem like an extension of his exhaustion, like something inside him, something subjective.

The waiter literally bows to the suited man.

The life of the station plunges and swirls like a dirty stream. People. People moving through the station like a dirty stream.

And that question again –

What am I doing here?

He sees his friend Ferdinand hang up the payphone.

They have been trying to speak to Otto for days — he is someone Ferdinand met in London a few weeks ago, a young German who said, probably drunk, probably without expecting it ever to happen, that if he was ever in Berlin he was welcome to stay.

Ferdinand returns to the table with a worried expression.

‘Still no answer,’ he says.

Simon, smoking, says nothing. He secretly hopes that Otto will never answer. He has never been keen on the idea of staying with him. He did not meet him in London, and what he has heard about him he does not like.

He says, ‘What are we going to do then?’

‘I don’t know,’ his friend says. ‘Just go to the flat?’ He has Otto’s address — Otto is expecting them at some point this April, that much was arranged from London, sketchily, with messages on Facebook.

They travel two stops on the S-Bahn, and spend a long time looking for the flat, and when eventually they find it — unexpectedly, it is in a dirty little side street — there is no one there except a green-uniformed policeman. He waits on a landing where the stairs turn, one flight down from the door of the flat, in the murky light of a window.

Unsure why the policeman is there

Has Otto been murdered?

they hesitate.

‘Tag,’ the man says. From his voice it is obvious: no one has been murdered.

They say they are looking for Otto, and the policeman, who evidently knows who Otto is, tells them he is not there. No one is there, he says.

They wait.

They wait for over an hour, Ferdinand making a few trips to a payphone in the street to try people who might know where Otto is, while Simon sits on the tiled floor in the huge space of the downstairs hall, and tries to make progress with The Ambassadors, a dog-eared Penguin Classics edition that lives in one of the zip-up side pockets of his backpack. His tired eyes find these words –

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what

have

you had? I’m too old — too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it

was

a mistake. Live, live!

He takes a pen from the same pocket of his pack where the novel was and with it makes a vertical line next to those words. Next to the vertical line, in the margin, he writes, MAIN THEME.

Ferdinand returns, damp with playful rain, from the street.

‘What should we do?’ he asks.

The S-Bahn again.

The rain has stopped. From the windows of the train they see things. A memorial stretch of the Wall, thick with psychedelic graffiti. They don’t remember that world. They are too young. Sunlight out there on the empty land, shining through the spaces where the Wall used to be. Sunlight. Through the windows of the S-Bahn train, through their lace of impurities, it touches Simon’s shrinking eyes.

What am I doing here?

What am I doing here?

The train whacks over points.

What am I

The train slows

doing here?

into a station, open to the air — Warschauer Straße. Windy platforms, a waste land all around.

A waste land.

April is the…

They are in love with Eliot, with his melodious pessimism. They are in awe of Joyce. He is what they want to be, a monument like him. These are the writers whose works made them friends. And Shakespeare’s tragedies. And L’Étranger. And the plight of Vladimir and Estragon, which they like to think of as their own. Waiting for Otto.

Warschauer Straße. Trains move among the lusty weeds. Spring showers strafe the peeling hoardings, the overpasses spilling the sound of unseen traffic.

In Kreuzberg they sit down exhaustedly to lunch.

Kreuzberg is a disappointment. It was supposed to be the hipster district, the Alternativ quarter. Ferdinand, in particular, is disappointed. Simon puts food into his shapely mouth. He had not expected anything from Kreuzberg. He had no interest in it, and finds his friend naïve — though he does not say so — for thinking it would be interesting.

There is some discussion, as they eat, of how much more expensive everything is than in Poland (they did Warsaw, Kraków, Auschwitz) though the higher prices are justified, is their feeling, by the superior quality of everything in Berlin. The food, for instance. They eat hungrily.

Somehow they start talking about people at school. They are in their final year, are taking their A levels this summer, hoping to start at Oxford in the autumn. (Which is why Simon is ploughing joylessly through the works of Henry James, on the lookout for material pertaining to the ‘International Theme’.)

So they talk about various people — what twats they are, mostly — and then Ferdinand mentions Karen Fielding.

He has no idea, throwing the name out like some mundane object, that his friend frequently dreams about Karen Fielding — dreams in which they might speak, or exchange looks, or in which their hands might momentarily touch, and from which he wakes, still seeming to feel the touch of her hand, to a single moment of overwhelming joy. He transcribes these dreams to his diary, very earnestly, along with pages and pages on what they might mean, and on the nature of the dreaming process itself.

In the waking world, he and Karen Fielding have hardly spoken to each other, and she is unaware of how he feels — unless she has noticed the way his eyes follow her as she moves with her tray around the dining hall, or tramps back from lacrosse in her muddy kit. Practically the only thing he knows about her is that her family live in Didcot — he overheard her telling someone else — and from that moment the word ‘Didcot’ started to live in his mind with a special, mysterious promise. Like her name, it seems almost too potent to put down in writing, but in a youth hostel in Warsaw, one evening, while Ferdinand was showering, he wrote, and it made his heart quicken: It seems pointless to travel Europe when the only where I want to be is humble, suburban, English

His pen hovered.

Then he did it, he wrote the word.

Didcot.

Her name, more potent still, he has never summoned the nerve to form.

Now, when Ferdinand says it Simon just nods and pours more sugar into his coffee.

He longs to talk about her.

He would like nothing more than to spend the whole afternoon talking about her, or just hearing her name spoken aloud again and again, those four syllables that seem to hold within them everything worth living for in the whole world. Instead, he starts to talk, not for the first time, about the impossibility of achieving any sort of satisfaction as a tourist.

Ferdinand lowers his eyes and, stirring his coffee, listens while his friend holds forth ill-temperedly on this subject.

What was the tourist trying to do? See things? See more of life? Life is everywhere — you don’t need to traipse around Europe looking for it…

the only where I want to be

Withdrawing from even the pretence of listening, Ferdinand starts to write a postcard. The picture: Kraków Cathedral, black and jagged. The postcard is to a girl in England with whom he is involved in a vague flirtation, who he quite likes sometimes — who he thinks, anyway, he ought to keep in play. He smiles and feels the bristle of his strong chin as he writes, We’re both growing beards — it sounds pleasingly manly. When he has finished, he reads out what he has written for his friend’s approval. Then he stands up to look for the loo.

He is away for some time and sitting in the sun-filled restaurant Simon watches the smoke climb from the tip of his cigarette.

It is the tiredness, maybe, that makes him feel like crying.

What am I doing here?

The feeling of loneliness is immense as a storm front. His friend, after ten days of travel, he finds irritating most of the time. He struggled to muster a smile when he read out that postcard, and showed him the little sketch he had done in green ink of a bearded man. And the way he had sprayed himself with his Joop! before putting his pack in the locker at the station. The way he had ostentatiously lifted his T-shirt to spray the Joop! to show the world the whorl of hair on his chest…At that moment…And this is supposed to be his friend he is with. As immense as a storm front is the feeling of loneliness that overcomes him.

As he watches the smoke climb from the tip of his cigarette.

In the sun-filled restaurant.

—

In the evening, they present themselves at the flat again and find Otto’s sister there with two male friends in leathers, one small with a faceful of piercings — Lutz — the other much taller with a walrus moustache — Willi. Otto’s sister has no idea who Simon and Ferdinand are, but when they explain she suggests they make themselves at home and wait for Otto — he is sure to turn up eventually. She and her friends, she says, are just leaving.

Left alone, Simon and Ferdinand do make themselves at home. The flat is surprisingly large and they wander through it taking minor liberties, helping themselves to some expensive-looking whisky, and opening drawers. In one drawer Simon finds an odd pack of cards. They must be tarot cards, he thinks. Idly, he turns one over — a picture of a hand holding some sort of stick. As der Stäbe, it says. Ace of Staves? A phallic symbol, obviously. Not exactly subtle. Whatever. Nonsense. He shuts the drawer.

—

It is about two o’clock in the morning when Otto storms in and finds them in their sleeping bags on the living-room floor.

He switches on the light and screams.

Then he notices Ferdinand, who has just lifted his head and is squinting up at him, and shouts, ‘Fuck, man, you made it!’

‘Otto…’

‘Fuck!’

‘I hope you don’t mind…’ Ferdinand starts.

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Otto screams at him.

‘I hope you don’t mind that we’re here…’

‘Do you think I mind?’ Otto shouts.

‘I don’t know…’

‘I was waiting for you.’ Someone else is standing there, at Otto’s shoulder, peering over it.

‘Listen, we tried to phone you…’

‘Yah?’

‘You weren’t here.’

‘I wasn’t here!’ Otto explains, still shouting.

‘And you weren’t answering your mobile…’

‘I lost it!’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, I lost it,’ Otto says, suddenly in a quiet, dismal voice. ‘I lost it.’

Having sat down on one of the sofas, he starts to make a spliff, disappointing Simon who had hoped he would immediately turn off the light and leave.

Otto is wearing a silly hat and his jacket sleeves stop well short of his wrists. His Adam’s apple goes up and down as he works on the spliff. It turns out that he and his friend have jobs all week serving drinks at an event somewhere outside Berlin. While he makes the spliff, Ferdinand thanks him again and again for letting them stay.

‘Listen, again, thank you so much,’ Ferdinand says, sitting up in his sleeping bag.

‘Hey, fuck, forget about it,’ Otto says, with lordly indifference, from the sofa, still wearing his hat.

‘What, er, what about the policeman?’ Ferdinand asks.

Otto doesn’t seem to hear the question. ‘What?’

‘The policeman. You know.’ Ferdinand indicates the spliff that is taking shape in Otto’s lap.

Otto is dismissive. ‘Oh, fuck that man!’ Then he adds, ‘He doesn’t care.’

‘What’s he doing there anyway?’

‘My father,’ Otto says. ‘It’s bullshit.’

‘Your father?’

‘Yeah, it sucks.’ Putting the finishing touches to the spliff, applying saliva with the tip of his little finger, Otto says, ‘He’s in the government. You know…’

‘In the government?’ Simon says suspiciously, speaking for the first time.

Otto ignores him and sparks the spliff.

Simon has taken an immediate dislike to Otto. He wishes Ferdinand would stop thanking him. For his part, he says almost nothing and when, after the first spliff has been smoked, Otto encourages him to make another, he takes the materials without a word. Otto keeps telling him to use more ‘shit’. He and Ferdinand are talking hysterically about people they know in London. Later, Otto says Simon should make another spliff, and again keeps pressing him to use more shit. They are all quite stoned. Someone has turned on the TV and found something possibly pornographic — some naked women in a wheatfield, it seems to be. Simon ignores it. The others are laughing at it. Otto’s friend, Simon suddenly notices, has left. Simon has no memory of him leaving. He has an unpleasant feeling that he imagined him, that no one else was ever there. The others are laughing at the women in the wheatfield, Otto staring eagerly at the screen, his eyes shining, his tongue half-out, transfixed.

Simon himself feels very shaky. Without saying anything he stands up and wanders off to find the bathroom. There, forgetting where he is, he spends a long time staring at some shampoo bottles and a wind-up plastic frog on the tiled edge of the bath. He just stands there for a long time, staring at them. He is staring at the wind-up plastic frog, its innocent green face. The hum of the extractor fan sounds more and more like sobbing.

—

When he sits down on the living-room floor again, about twenty minutes later, Otto asks him, ‘How much shit is left?’

‘None,’ Simon says. The living room — all beige and cream and Oriental art — seems unfamiliar, as if he is seeing it for the first time.

‘You finished the shit?’

Ferdinand, in spite of himself, starts giggling, and then keeps saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’

‘You finished the shit?’ Otto says again, still in the same tone of disbelief.

Ferdinand giggles and says he is sorry.

‘Yes,’ Simon says. He has also hot-rocked the pale, lustrous carpet but he decides not to mention that now.

‘Fuck,’ Otto says. And then, as if it might have been a joke, ‘Really, you finished it?’

‘Really.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ferdinand says, suddenly with an extremely serious expression on his face.

Otto sighs. ‘Okay,’ he says. He has not quite come to terms with it though. ‘Fuck,’ he says a few seconds later, ‘you finished the shit…’

Slowly, Simon inserts himself into his sleeping bag and turns away from them. They are still talking when he falls asleep.

—

The next day he and Ferdinand visit Potsdam. It is the one thing Simon seems to want to do while they are in Berlin — see the Palace of Sanssouci.

From Potsdam station, an ornate green-painted gate. Then an avenue of small trees, and the palace on the summit of a terraced hill. At the foot of the hill a fountain flings high into the air, and white stone statues dot the park — men molesting women, or fighting each other, or frowning nobly at something far away, each frozen in some posture of obscure frenzy, frozen among quiet hedges, or next to the still surfaces of ornamental pools.

Simon wanders through this landscape — the long straight tree-lined walks, the fountains where they intersect, the facades where they end — with a kind of exhilaration.

There is a place to have tea and they sit on metal outdoor furniture and he talks about how the whole landscape, like the music of J. S. Bach, is expressive of the natural order of the human mind.

Ferdinand, eating cake, complains about the acne on his back, that it stains his shirt.

Simon has a similar problem but does not mention it. (He is fastidious, also, about concealing his body from his friend.) Instead, he puts down The Ambassadors, and tells Ferdinand about Frederick William, Frederick the Great’s father, and his obsession with his guardsmen — how they all had to be extremely tall, and how he fussed over the details of their uniforms, and how he liked to watch them march when he was feeling unwell. The story makes Ferdinand laugh. ‘That’s brilliant,’ he says, using his finger to take the last smear of cream from his plate. Complacently, Simon finishes his tea and picks up his book again. It is late afternoon — they had trouble finding the place. The shadows of the statues stretch out over the smooth lawns.

‘What should we do this evening?’ Ferdinand says.

Simon, without looking up from his book, gives a minimal shrug.

Otto’s sister, who was in the flat when they woke up, had suggested they join her, and her friends Lutz and Willi, for a night on the town. Ferdinand now alludes to this possibility. Simon, once again, is studiedly non-committal. The prospect of spending the evening with Otto’s sister and her friends fills him with something not unlike fear, a sort of fluttering panic. ‘They’re twats, aren’t they?’ he says, still in his book. He and Ferdinand have spent much of the day laughing at Lutz and Willi — their leathers, their piercings, Lutz’s shrill laugh, Willi’s morose moustache.

‘They seem okay,’ Ferdinand says wistfully. For ten days, he has had only Simon for company. ‘And Otto’s sister’s nice.’

‘Is she?’

‘Isn’t she?’

‘She’s okay,’ Simon pronounces, turning a page, ‘I suppose.’

‘Anyway, what else are we going to do?’ Ferdinand asks, with a sort of laugh.

‘Don’t know.’

‘I mean, let’s just have a drink with them anyway,’ Ferdinand says. ‘They can’t be that bad.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Time we were getting back.’

‘Really?’ Simon says, turning his head to look at the shadow-filled park. ‘I like it here.’

—

In the end, they do spend part of the evening with Otto’s sister and Lutz and Willi. Simon seems determined not to enjoy himself. He just sits there with a solemn expression on his face while the others talk until Ferdinand is almost embarrassed by his presence — a detached unhappy figure, sipping home-made wine. They are in a hippyish place in Kreuzberg, sitting outside, under some trees whose blossoms have a spermy smell.

‘What’s the matter with your friend?’ Lutz asks Ferdinand, leaning over to whisper it with a jingle of piercings. ‘Is he okay?’ Lutz is sandy-haired and ugly.

‘I don’t know,’ Ferdinand says, loud enough for Simon to overhear him, though he pretends not to. ‘He’s always like that.’

‘Then he must be fun to travel with.’

Ferdinand just laughs.

Lutz says, ‘He’s just shy, no?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m sure he’s okay.’

‘Of course,’ Ferdinand says. ‘He’s very intelligent.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘And very funny sometimes.’

‘Yah?’

‘Really.’

‘I can’t imagine it,’ Lutz says.

His friend Willi, however, is almost as taciturn as Simon, and smiles as little, and for the most part the evening is a matter of Ferdinand, Lutz, and Otto’s sister. They talk, inevitably, about the places Ferdinand and Simon have already been to, and what they have done there — the tourist sites they have visited, mostly ecclesiastical. This outrages Lutz. ‘You can do all that shit when you’re older!’ he protests. ‘You don’t need to do that now! What do you want to do in churches? That’s for when your hairs are grey. How old are you boys?’ he asks.

They tell him — seventeen.

‘You’re so young still,’ Lutz says feelingly, though he is at most ten years older. ‘Have fun, okay? Okay?’

2

Have fun.

An overnight train to Prague. There is not a single empty seat, and they spend the night lying on the floor outside the toilet, where they are frequently kicked by passing feet.

Some time after dawn they stand up and look for something to eat.

Outside, the undulating landscape skims past in lovely morning light.

Pine forests wrapped in smoky mist.

Simon is still thinking of a dream he had during one particular snatch of sleep on the floor. Something to do with something under a lake, something that was his. Then he was talking to someone from school, talking about Karen Fielding. The person he was talking to had used a strange word, a word that might not even exist. And then he had passed Karen Fielding herself in a narrow doorway, and lowered his eyes, and when he looked up she had smiled at him and he had woken saturated, for a moment, with indescribable joy.

‘You look totally fucking miserable, mate,’ Ferdinand says, sitting opposite him at a table in the dining car.

‘Do I?’

‘I mean — are you okay? You don’t look well.’

Ferdinand is, he thinks, making an obvious effort to patch things up.

There was a falling-out the previous day, over the travel plans.

Simon had wanted to take an early train to Prague. Ferdinand had not wanted to do this. He had wanted to take Otto up on his offer of showing them a fun time in Berlin.

Simon had, as usual, silently insisted on having his own way — and then it turned out he wanted to stop in Leipzig to visit the tomb of J. S. Bach.

He had more or less tricked him into the Leipzig stopover, Ferdinand felt, and it had been an awful experience. Ten hours in the station and the diesel-stained streets that surrounded it — the next train to Prague did not leave until the middle of the night — all for the sake of a few minutes in the frigid Thomaskirche, which Simon himself had described as ‘intrinsically unimpressive’.

Finally, at about midnight, no longer speaking, they sat down to wait on the station platform, where some young German Christians were singing songs like ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Blowing in the Wind’ as the rain fell past the tall lights and out on the dark tracks.

Simon seems not to have noticed the falling-out, let alone his friend’s efforts, in the morning, to patch things up.

He is looking out of the window, the low sun on his handsome profile, his hands shaking slightly after the dreadful night.

‘We get to Prague in about an hour,’ Ferdinand says.

‘Yeah?’ From somewhere an image has entered Simon’s head, an image of human life as bubbles rising through water. The bubbles rise in streams and clouds, touching and mingling and yet each remaining individually defined as they travel upwards from the depths towards the light, until at the surface they cease to exist as individual entities. In the water they existed physically, individually — in the air they are part of the air, part of an endless whole, inseparable from everything else. Yes, he thinks, squinting in the mist-softened sunlight, tears filling his eyes, that is how it is — life and death.

‘Where do you think we should stay?’ Ferdinand asks.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hostel?’

‘Okay,’ Simon says, still watching the landscape, the lifting mist.

—

It all happens very fast. Desperate-looking men wait on the platform when the train pulls in. Their upturned faces pass in the windows smoothly as the train sheds the last of its speed. The English teenagers are the subject of a tussle as they are still descending the steep steel steps, and a few minutes later are in a Skoda which is older than they are, whose engine sounds like a wasp and blows prodigious quantities of blueish exhaust. The fumes have a heady, sweetish smell. The flowering trees also. Their driver, other than his native language, speaks only a few words of German. ‘Zimmer frei, zimmer frei,’ he had insisted at the station, physically seizing their packs and making a dash for his vehicle.

They drive for twenty minutes or so, mostly uphill (and thus very, very slowly), into a spring-greeny suburb of disintegrating tarmac and faded dwellings in small plots of land, until they pull up, finally, in front of a single-storey house with a tree in front of it, the path underneath littered and plastered with fallen blossoms. This is where their driver lives with his wife, and she speaks some English.

Birdsong meets them as they emerge from the Skoda, and she is there too, opening the squeaky front gate with enthusiasm, even a kind of impatience. She is probably about forty and looks as if she has just got out of bed. Her hair — a sort of aureate beige — is loose and unkempt, and she is wearing a yellow towelling dressing gown and blue plastic sandals. She comes forward over the blossom-thick pavement in her blue sandals, through the shattered shade that leaves flecks of light on her smooth-skinned face, smiling, and sticks a pair of kisses on each of the young visitor’s faces. Then she hurries them inside and shows them to what will be their room — a single bed, a stained foam mattress on the floor, a leaf-filled window. She smiles at them as they take in the room tiredly. ‘Is okay?’ she says.

She tells them to leave their things there and join her for breakfast, so they follow her along a passage with a washing machine in it, past what seems to be a nasty bathroom, and into a kitchen.

Simon is still thinking of the dream he had on the train as he follows her into the kitchen with his friend. It seems more present to him than where he is, than the washing machine he has just walked past, than the sunny kitchen where he is being told to sit down.

the only where I want to be

She is doing something now, at this moment, she is doing something as he sits down at a small square table in the sunny kitchen. And the smile she showed him in his dream seems realer than the woman now taking things from the fridge and explaining to them why, in opting to stay with her, they have made the right decision.

The smile she showed him in his dream. It is possible he just inferred it. Her face was not actually smiling. Indeed, it had a serious expression. Pale, framed by her dark hair, it had a serious expression. Yet her doll-blue eyes were dense with tenderness and somehow he knew that she was smiling at him. Then he woke to the first daylight filling out the interior of the train, and the feverish sound of the train’s wheels.

She says she isn’t interested in money — that isn’t why she takes people in. She just likes people, she says, and wants to help them. She will do everything she can to help them. ‘I will help you,’ she says to them. The house, she admits, is not exactly in the centre of town, but she promises them it isn’t difficult to get there. She will show them how, and while they eat she does, spreading a map on the kitchen table and tracing with her finger the way to the Metro station, though most of the route seems to lie just at the point where the map folds and the paper is worn and illegible.

They are drinking slivovice from little cups the shape of acorns and the air is grey and stinging with cigarette smoke. She is also, as she leans over the tattered, expansive map of Prague with its districts in different colours, being somewhat negligent with her dressing gown, and it is not clear what — if anything — she is wearing underneath it, something that Ferdinand has noticed, and to which he has just tried to draw his friend’s attention with a salacious smile and a movement of his head, when her husband steps in, takes the cigarette out of his small mouth and says something in Czech.

She tries to shoo him away, not even looking up from what she is doing — tracing something on the map, a sinuous street, with her chipped fingertip — and they have what seems to be a short, fierce dispute.

Ferdinand is still smiling salaciously.

She is still leaning over the map.

Her husband stands there for a moment, simmering with displeasure. Then he leaves, and she tells them he is off to work. He is a former professional footballer, she explains, now a PE teacher.

She sits down and lights another cigarette and lays a hand on Simon’s knee. (She seems, in spite of his silence, to have taken a particular liking to Simon.) ‘My hahs-band,’ she says, ‘he know nah-thing but football.’ There is a pause. Her hand is still on his knee. ‘You understand me?’

‘Yes,’ he says.

Drinking spirits so early in the morning, and after such a terrible night, has made him very woozy. He is not quite sure what is happening, what she is talking about. Everything seems unusually vivid — the sun-flooded kitchen, the pictures of kittens on the wall, the blue eyes of the footballer’s wife, her fine parchment-like skin. She is holding him with a disquieting stare. His eyes fall and he finds himself looking at her narrow, naked knees.

Her eyes again.

‘He know nah-thing but football,’ she says. He is looking at her mouth when she says that. ‘You understand me.’ It does not seem to be a question this time. It sounds more like an instruction.

‘And you young boys,’ she says, smiling happily, taking up the brandy bottle, ‘you like sport?’

‘I do,’ Ferdinand tells her.

‘Yes?’

‘Simon doesn’t.’

‘That’s not true,’ Simon mutters irritably.

She doesn’t seem to hear that. She says, turning to him, ‘Oh, no? What do you like? What do you like? I think I know what you like!’ And, putting her hand on his knee again, she starts to laugh.

‘Simon likes books,’ Ferdinand says.

‘Oh, you like books! That’s nice. I like books! Oh —’ she puts her hand on her heart — ‘I love books. My husband, he don’t like books. He is not interested in art. You are interested in art, I think?’

‘He’s interested in art,’ Ferdinand confirms.

‘Oh, that’s nice!’ With her eyes on Simon, she sighs. ‘Beauty,’ she says. ‘Beauty, beauty. I live for beauty. Look, I show you.’

Full of excitement, she takes him to a painting hanging in the hall. A flat, lifeless landscape in ugly lurid paint. She tells him she got it in Venice.

‘It’s nice,’ he says.

They stand there for a minute in silence.

He is aware, as he stares at the small terrible picture, of her standing next to him, of her hand warm and heavy on his shoulder.

‘Your friend,’ she says to Ferdinand, lighting another cigarette, ‘he understands.’ They are in the kitchen again.

‘He’s very intelligent,’ Ferdinand says.

‘He understands beauty.’

‘Definitely.’

‘He lives for beauty. He is like me.’ And then she says again, unscrewing the cap of the brandy bottle, ‘My husband, he know nothing but football.’

‘The beautiful game,’ Ferdinand jokes.

She laughs, though it isn’t clear whether she understood his joke. ‘You like football?’ she asks.

‘I’m more of a rugby man actually,’ Ferdinand says.

He then tries to explain what rugby is, while she smokes and listens, and occasionally asks questions that show she hasn’t understood anything.

‘So is like football?’ she asks, waving away some smoke, after several minutes of detailed explanation.

‘Uh. Sort of,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Yes.’

‘And girls?’ she asks. ‘You like girls?’

The question embarrasses Ferdinand less than it does Simon, and he says, after a short pause, ‘Of course we like girls.’

She laughs again. ‘Of course!’

She is looking at Simon, who is staring at the table. She says, ‘You will find lot of girls in Prague.’

—

Standing on the Charles bridge with its blackened statues, its pointing tourists, Simon pronounces the whole place to be a soulless Disneyland.

In St Vitus cathedral, wandering around in the quiet light and the faint smell of wood polish, he sees a poster for a performance of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor there later that afternoon which marginally perks him up, and when they have acquired tickets, they sit down on the terrace of a touristy pub opposite the cathedral’s flank to wait.

Unusually for him, Ferdinand is smoking a cigarette, one of Simon’s Philip Morrises. While his friend tells him how much he hates Prague, Ferdinand notices two young women sitting at a nearby table. They are not, perhaps, the lovelies their landlady had promised — they are okay, though. More than okay, one of them. He tries to hear what they are saying, to hear what language they are speaking. They are not locals, obviously.

‘How can you be happy as a tourist?’ Simon is saying. ‘Always wandering around, always at a loose end, searching for things…’

‘You’re in a good mood.’

‘I’m not in a bad mood — I’m just saying…’

The girls seem to be English. ‘What about them?’ Ferdinand says quietly.

‘What about them?’ Simon asks.

‘Well?’

Simon makes a face, a sort of pained or impatient expression.

‘Oh, come on!’ Ferdinand says. ‘They’re not that bad. They’re alright. They’re nicer than the ones in Warsaw.’

‘Well, that’s not hard…’

‘Well, I am, if you know what I mean.’ Ferdinand laughs. ‘I’m going to ask them to join us.’

Simon sighs impatiently and, his hands shaking slightly, lights another cigarette. He watches as Ferdinand, with enviable ease, slides over to the girls and speaks to them. He points to the table where Simon is sitting, and Simon quickly looks away, looks up at the reassuring blackened Gothic bulk of St Vitus. He is still looking at it, or pretending to, when Ferdinand’s voice says, ‘This is my friend Simon.’

He turns into the sun, squints. They are standing there, holding their drinks. One of them is wearing a sun hat. Ferdinand gestures for them to sit down, which they do, uncertainly. ‘So,’ Ferdinand says, taking a seat himself, with a loud scraping noise and a sort of exaggerated friendliness, ‘how do you like Prague? How long have you been here? We only arrived this morning — we haven’t seen much yet, have we, Simon?’

Simon shakes his head. ‘No, not really.’

‘We had a look in there,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Simon likes cathedrals.’ The girls give him a quick glance, as if expecting him to confirm or deny this, but he says nothing. ‘Have you been in there?’ Ferdinand asks, directing his question particularly to the one in the sun hat, who is much more attractive than her friend.

‘Yeah, yesterday,’ she says.

‘Quite impressive, isn’t it.’

She laughs. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, as if she thinks Ferdinand might have been joking.

‘I mean, they’re all the same, I suppose,’ he says. ‘We’ve been to pretty much every one in this part of Europe, so I can say that with some authority.’

‘Yeah?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘So where else have you been then?’ she asks.

And so they start talking — where have you been, what have you seen.

Simon is irritated by Ferdinand’s manner. He thinks of it as a sort of mask that his friend puts on for encounters with strangers, as if there were somehow an intrinsic hypocrisy to it, and thinks of his own silence as a protest against this hypocrisy. And also against the tediousness of it all — when Sun Hat’s plump friend asks him what kind of music he likes, he just shrugs and says he doesn’t know.

Ferdinand is telling the story of the Japanese couple they saw — he in linen suit and panama hat, she in turquoise dress with sparkles — dancing in the main square of Kraków. Then he tells the story of how he and Simon were hauled off the train at the Polish — German border to be searched by moustached German officials. ‘I think they were particularly suspicious of Simon,’ he says, with a smile, successfully provoking mirth in the ladies, and Simon also smiles, palely, without pleasure, accepting the part that has, he feels, been forced on him.

‘Full-on strip search,’ Ferdinand says.

Sun Hat squeals with shocked laughter. ‘What, seriously?’

‘No,’ Simon says, without looking at her. And then he announces, speaking very specifically to Ferdinand, as if they were alone, ‘It’s nearly five.’

‘Is it?’ Ferdinand asks, as if he doesn’t understand why Simon is telling him that.

‘Yes,’ Simon says. There is a short silence. ‘You know, the…’

‘Yeah,’ Ferdinand says. He seems to think for a moment, while the others wait. Then he turns to Sun Hat. ‘Listen, there’s this concert at five. It should be quite amazing. Why don’t you come with us?’

She looks at her friend, who shrugs. ‘Where is it?’

‘It’s here!’ He points to the stone edifice that looms over them. ‘In there. It’s Mozart or something. Mozart, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Simon says, without enthusiasm.

‘Simon’s really into that shit,’ Ferdinand explains.

The girls look at each other again — something unspoken passes between them.

Their excuse is they don’t have much money.

Ferdinand says, ‘Well, why don’t we meet afterwards?’ He is still smiling. ‘It won’t be that long, I don’t think. How long will it be?’ he asks Simon, as if he were his secretary.

‘I don’t know,’ Simon says. ‘Not more than an hour, I wouldn’t have thought.’

‘We could just meet here when it’s over,’ Ferdinand suggests. ‘In an hour or so?’

They agree to this, and Ferdinand and Simon set off.

‘She’s really quite nice, the one in the hat, isn’t she?’ Ferdinand says.

‘She’s okay.’

‘She’s more than okay — she’s hot. What about her friend?’

‘What about her?’

Ferdinand laughs delightedly. ‘Yeah, I know what you mean,’ he says.

He is humming happily to himself as they take their seats in a pew.

‘So what is this again?’ he asks.

‘Mozart’s Mass,’ Simon says without looking at him, ‘in C Minor.’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’ And as if wanting to extract everything he can from the experience, Ferdinand folds his hands in his lap and shuts his eyes.

The music starts.

The music.

Later, when they return to the pub terrace, swamped by the cathedral’s shadow now, they find that the girls have gone. Simon still seems to be hearing the music while his upset friend asks the waiter whether anyone has left a message for him, still seems to be hearing the voice of the unseen soprano, somewhere far up at the front, filling the high stone space. And while they wait on the terrace in case the girls come back, while his friend stands at the edge of the terrace peering into the tourist-filled dusk, Simon sits there smoking and hearing it still, that voice. Something holy about it.

Ferdinand, turning from the edge of the terrace, looks distraught.

Something holy about it.

‘Fuck it,’ Ferdinand says.

Summoned holiness into the high stone space, that luminous music.

‘They’re not coming back.’

That luminous music, the voice of the unseen soprano.

Filling the high stone space.

‘No,’ Simon says.

His friend sits down and takes, without asking, one of his Philip Morrises. He tries to seem okay. ‘What shoul’ we do?’ he says.

They leave the terrace and look for somewhere to eat.

Lost, they wander through little streets.

Ferdinand stops at a stall selling magazines to ask for directions.

While his friend is trying to make himself understood, Simon notices that some of the magazines are pornographic — his eyes find enormous nipples, naked skin, open mouths. The entire stall in fact is devoted to porn. The stallholder, a tired-looking little man, speaks no English and, indicating that Ferdinand should wait there, disappears into a shop with an empty window display.

He emerges a few moments later with a middle-aged woman in a simple blue dress. Simon feels sorry for her, that she has to put up with a stall of filth in front of her shop. ‘Yes?’ she says, smiling shyly as she approaches them.

Ferdinand explains that they are lost and looking for somewhere to eat.

She tells him how to find their way back to the places they know, and says, apologetically, that she does not know of anywhere to eat nearby that would be open. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘No, no, don’t be silly,’ Ferdinand tells her. ‘Thank you so much for your help…’

‘And you buy magazines?’ she asks.

The question seems to be mainly for Simon, who is still standing near the stall, smoking a cigarette. He looks at her as if he does not understand it.

‘Sex,’ she says, indicating the stall.

She starts to smile and her face, when she does, suddenly seems hideous to him — like some evil little animal’s, with tiny yellow teeth.

‘No,’ he says quickly.

‘You have a look,’ she says, still smiling, and, freeing one of the magazines from the string that holds it, she offers it to him in its plastic sleeve. ‘Have a look.’

‘We’re not interested, thank you,’ Ferdinand says.

‘Why not?’ she asks with a little laugh.

‘We’re just not,’ Ferdinand says, following his friend who is already halfway down the street. ‘Thank you.’

They eat at Pizza Hut, and then take the metro all the way out to its suburban terminus.

—

Spread out on the foam mattress on the floor of the room where they are staying, under an orange-and-khaki floral-pattern sheet, Simon struggles to focus on his diary. Ferdinand is showering. Simon is able to hear the hiss of the shower, and while it goes on he knows that his friend will not return. He is also able to hear the shouts from the kitchen as their landlady and her husband argue. He has time — it would not take long. It has been nearly a week since he last…That was in the noisy, swaying train toilet as it made its way from Warsaw to Kraków. His fingers have just taken hold of the thrilling solidity under the sheet when he hears the shower stop with a squeaky jolt of the pipework and, pulling up his shorts, he starts to write again, or seem to, is holding only his pen when Ferdinand enters wrapped in a small towel.

‘They still at it?’ Ferdinand says, of the shouting.

Something smashes, they hear, in the kitchen.

Simon, holding only his pen, says nothing.

‘Not a happy bunny,’ Ferdinand says. Standing near a small mirror, he is trying to look over his own shoulder at his seething, scarified back. ‘It’s worse,’ he says. ‘Have a look. It’s worse, isn’t it?’

Simon looks up momentarily from his diary and says, ‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s worse,’ Ferdinand says.

He sighs and takes his place on the bed with his heavily annotated volume of Yeats. After only a few lines –

The young

In one another’s arms

— he sighs again and stares for a minute or more at the whitish ceiling.

The young

In one another’s arms

He puts the volume of Yeats on the shiny yellow parquet. He pulls the thin quilt over him, and turns to the wall.

Having written nothing, Simon sets aside his diary and switches off the light, a table lamp on the floor next to the mattress on which he is lying.

3

‘My husband,’ she says the next morning, taking things from the fridge and putting them on the table where they are sitting, ‘is in Brno. Football. He will be in Brno three days.’

‘Some sort of tournament?’ Ferdinand asks.

‘What?’

‘Is he in Brno for a tournament?’ She doesn’t seem to understand. ‘A match?’

‘Match, yes. Important match. Football.’

There is no slivovice. There is coffee and cigarettes. Stale bread if anyone wants it. She is cheerfully hungover. She asks Simon, sitting down next to him in her knee-length yellow dressing gown, ‘You find some girls?’

He looks embarrassed, unsure what to say. ‘Uh…’

‘No?’ she asks, in a tone of surprise. ‘It should be easy for you, I think.’

‘Well, we did meet some,’ Ferdinand says.

‘You like girls?’

Though the question was addressed to Simon, it is Ferdinand who answers. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘very much so.’

She is still looking at Simon, smiling. ‘And you?’

He takes a worried pull on his cigarette. ‘Yes,’ he says.

She studies him, his long frowning profile, as he in turn seems to study the table, as if trying to memorise all the objects that are on it — a carton of milk — mléko — of very simple design

his Philip Morrises, the health warning in German

her Petras, in a paper packet with a red sash

a Cricket lighter

‘You are very handsome boy,’ she says.

a glass ashtray, full

a plastic bowl with a few slices of stale bread in it

‘When I was young,’ she says, ‘I would like very much to meet handsome boy like you.’

a small plate with a piece of whitish butter on it

When I was young…

She tells them about her own youth.

And it turns out she is not Czech at all. She is Serbian. She and her husband met in Yugoslavia, as it then was — he was there playing football. She was a tall member of the local sports club that was looking after the arrangements for his team. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, talkative, lively, she would shepherd the team to and from meals, travel on the bus with them to matches.

Her husband was one of the stars of his team, she proudly explains. They first made love in a park, at night. Well, she still lived with her parents. He slept in a dormitory with his teammates. Where else could they go?

‘We were young,’ she says. ‘When you are young…Yes.’ She lights a cigarette. Sighs. Then says more briskly, ‘I was young, but it was not first time for me.’

‘No?’ Ferdinand seems interested.

She starts to tell them about how she lost her virginity with a swimming coach, in a hostel in Italy, when she was fifteen.

‘He was older than me,’ she says. ‘That was nice, you know.’

Simon sits with hunched shoulders, not seeming to hear, smoking.

‘It is nice, first time, with someone older,’ she says to him.

And Ferdinand tells her how he, at the same age, was seduced by his sister’s nanny, who was ten years older than he was, and how nice that was.

‘Yes,’ she says, with a serious look in her deep-set eyes, ‘is nice.’

‘It was nice,’ Ferdinand says, looking pleased with himself.

‘Is always the best way,’ she says, ‘with someone who is older, more experienced. Someone who is nice.’

Simon sits with hunched shoulders, not seeming to hear, smoking.

‘You understand me?’

The question is for him. She wants to know whether he has understood her.

They are waiting for him to say something, to indicate that he has understood, that he has heard what has been said.

And then the telephone rings, somewhere else, in some other room. The telephone rings and she stands up and hurries out through the eddying smoke in her knee-length yellow dressing gown, and they hear her answer it and start talking to somebody.

—

They spend the morning looking for Sun Hat. Looking for Sun Hat in the sun. Ferdinand puts some thought into where she is likely to be, into which tourist spots to loiter at, primed to seem surprised if she should make a sudden appearance. It soon seems hopeless. The city is huge, sprawling — even the tourist parts are all jumbled up into cobbled alleys and little hidden squares. He tries to think the way she would think, tries to put himself in the position of a young woman, his own age or a year or two older, not particularly intelligent, frequently lusted after, with turquoise-painted toenails, about to start secretarial school…An Australian pub? They spend two hours there, sinking lagers, hardly speaking.

Simon, too, seems preoccupied.

Sitting there in the Australian pub, he pictures to himself human interactions as the pouring together of liquids. Violent explosions, he thinks, pleased with the way he is elaborating his initial idea, or instant freezing were the worst forms of reaction. A simple failure to mix perhaps the most normal. And love?

Karen Fielding

Well, love, he thinks, would be something like this — a flicker in the middle of the liquids, which mingle so that they seem to be only one transparent liquid

Karen Fielding

the flicker steadying to a point, which strengthens slowly until the whole mixture emits a soft, steady light.

Karen Fielding

Yes, he thinks, that is love.

And the day slips away.

Soon it is late afternoon.

Ferdinand stands on the Charles bridge, in the hard wind, looking at the wide sweep of the banks, the roofs and spires stacking up away from the water. Sun Hat, somewhere, somewhere…Unless she has left the city already. And then how foolishly he has wasted the day, he thinks, while Simon waits for him, facing away from the view.

Simon takes up the subject of tourism’s pointlessness again in the next pub, a subterranean variation, vaulted, with lots of Gothic script.

‘Why did you want to do this then?’ Ferdinand asks, irritably, after a few minutes.

‘Do what?’

‘This trip.’

‘I thought it would be good,’ Simon says.

‘You don’t think it’s good?’

‘It’s okay.’

‘What were you hoping for?’

Simon thinks for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

Still, he was hoping for something. He set out on the train from St Pancras station two weeks ago with some sort of obscure hope.

Prostitutes everywhere in the shadows of the avenue as they walk to the metro station, through the early night.

—

There is something almost nice about being in her kitchen again, under the neon light. It feels almost like home. She laughs through waves of smoke as Ferdinand tells her about the search for Sun Hat, tells the whole story starting with the meeting yesterday under the walls of St Vitus.

‘So you find a girl?’ she says, smiling at him.

‘And lost her again.’

‘And she was Czech?’

‘No, English.’

‘English! You should find Czech girl — she will not run away from you.’

‘Wouldn’t she?’

‘No. She think you are rich.’

‘I’m not rich.’

‘She think you are. And she was beautiful, this English girl?’

‘Well…She wasn’t bad.’

‘You will find beautiful Czech girl. And you.’ She turns to Simon, her expression somehow more serious. ‘You find girl?’

Simon looks down. ‘No,’ he says, and immediately lifts his cigarette to his lips. He looks up again, to find her eyes still on him.

She is looking at him intently, and with a sort of sadness. ‘And you are such handsome boy,’ she says.

Simon shrugs.

There is a silence.

Her eyes are still on him; he feels them even though he is looking at his own knees.

And then Ferdinand stands up and says he is off to bed.

‘Ah, you are tired,’ she says with approval. ‘Okay. You sleep.’

When Simon also stands, which he does a second later, with a sort of panicky swiftness, she takes hold of his wrist.

She frees it immediately when, with an involuntary movement, he tugs it away.

‘I’m tired too,’ he says.

‘You leave me alone?’ she laughs. ‘You leave a lady alone?’

‘I’m tired.’

‘But you are young — you should be wake all night.’

‘Stay and finish your beer,’ Ferdinand says unhelpfully.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘stay.’

‘I don’t want it. Really, I’m tired.’

Simon has started to edge round the table to where the door is when she takes his hand. She does it in a way that is tender, not forceful. Tenderly she takes his hand. ‘Stay and talk to me,’ she says, looking up at him from her seat.

‘Tomorrow.’ He extricates his hand from the warm hold of her fingers. ‘Okay? We’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘Today is today,’ she says enigmatically, as if it were a proverb. Her hand is on his leg, on the denim somewhere near his hip.

‘I’m tired,’ he pleads.

Ferdinand is already leaving.

‘Stay with me,’ she says quietly, her face serious now, her hand moving round to the front of his thigh.

‘Please,’ he says, seeming nearly tearful. ‘I’m sorry. I’m tired.’

And then he just leaves, and follows his friend into the dark, past the washing machine.

—

‘She wants you, mate,’ Ferdinand says. They are sitting at a wrought-iron table in a park where peacocks occasionally shriek and he is talking, of course, about their landlady.

Simon smokes worriedly.

‘Do it,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Fuck her.’

The idea that he might actually do this has never even occurred to Simon and instead of answering he just frowns at his friend.

‘Why not?’ Ferdinand asks.

Simon’s frown intensifies. He says dismissively, ‘She must be forty.’

‘So what?’ Ferdinand says. He turns for a moment to inspect the terrace where they are sitting. ‘She definitely knows a thing or two,’ he says. ‘And you know, she’s really not too bad. Very nice legs. Have you noticed?’

Simon says nothing.

‘She’s quite sexy,’ Ferdinand says. ‘I mean, when she was young, she was probably quite hot.’

‘Maybe, when she was young,’ Simon mutters.

‘What did she say she was?’

Simon waits for a few moments, then says, ‘She said she was almost a champion swimmer…’

‘Except she was the wrong shape, that’s it. That was quite funny.’ Ferdinand smiles. ‘Well, those swimmers are all totally flat-chested. Why don’t you fuck her?’ he asks.

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘She doesn’t want me,’ Ferdinand points out. ‘It’s you she wants.’

‘She was drunk.’

‘She’s always drunk.’

‘What do you want to do this afternoon?’ Simon starts to ask.

‘I think you should fuck her,’ Ferdinand says.

‘Seriously…’

‘I am being serious…’

‘No, I mean what should we do this afternoon?’

‘Don’t you find her attractive? At all?’

‘No,’ Simon says. ‘Not really.’

‘Not really?’

‘No.’

‘I think she’s okay,’ Ferdinand says. ‘Seriously, I think you should do her.’

Simon lights another cigarette. He has been smoking heavily, even more heavily than usual, all morning.

‘You know,’ Ferdinand says, ‘you can tell from a woman’s eyebrows exactly what her pubes are like.’

Simon laughs — a single embarrassed exhalation. He is about to ask, again, what they should do that afternoon, when his friend says, ‘Don’t you want to get laid?’

Simon shrugs and puts the cigarette to his lips. He stares at the paint-thick wrought iron of the tabletop.

‘It’s not a big deal,’ Ferdinand says. ‘I just think you should do her. You might enjoy it, that’s all.’

They sit in silence for a minute, Simon still staring at the metal lattice of the table, Ferdinand turning his head to look around at the other people there. Then he says, ‘So, what are we going to do this afternoon?’

Simon, having found his voice again, suggests something about Kafka, an exhibition.

‘Yeah, okay,’ Ferdinand says.

In the end, though, despite hours of searching, they do not succeed in finding it, the Kafka exhibition, and spend another afternoon rattling around the tram- and tourist-filled centre of an old European capital.

‘Do you really not want her?’ Ferdinand says later.

They are sitting opposite each other on the benches of a beer hall, in a clatter of voices, each with a litre jug of Prague lager, half-drunk.

‘She’s not an unattractive woman,’ Ferdinand says. ‘I wonder what she looks like naked. I mean, don’t you just want to see her naked?’

Simon does not seem to hear. He is looking away. A pinkness, however, suffuses his face.

Finally he turns to Ferdinand. ‘I think we should leave tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I mean, leave Prague.’

‘Really?’ Ferdinand seems surprised.

‘Do you want to stay?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘I don’t,’ Simon says.

‘Okay.’

‘So we’ll leave tomorrow?’

‘If you want.’

They stop at the station to look at timetables. Vienna, they have decided, will be their next destination — Simon, it seems, is interested in some Kunst they have there. There is a train at about ten in the morning.

Then they make their way out to the suburbs again.

They make their way to the smoky kitchen, where she is waiting for them in her yellow dressing gown.

Simon has been hoping all day that her husband will have returned from Brno — that by that simple development the whole situation will be defused.

Her husband has not returned from Brno.

She is waiting for them alone and they take their seats in the kitchen. Simon is hardly able to look at her. It was the same in the morning — he seemed frightened when he finally appeared, still moist from his interminable shower. She does not pay so much attention to him this evening, however. She talks more to Ferdinand, who seems keen to save his friend embarrassment and makes an effort to engage her, to draw her attention away from Simon, who does not speak at all until Ferdinand says, after only half an hour or so, ‘Well, we’re quite tired, I think — aren’t we, mate?’

Then Simon says, ‘Yes,’ and immediately stands up.

‘So we’ll be off to bed, I suppose,’ Ferdinand says, also standing.

She makes them have another slivovice, standing there, and then lets them leave.

—

Simon wakes the next morning to find Ferdinand not there. This is unusual. Usually it is Simon who wakes first. He listens, trying to hear voices from the kitchen, or the sound of the shower perhaps. There is nothing. Shadows from the tree outside the window move shiveringly on the wall. He pulls on his jeans, his T-shirt. He visits the fetid toilet — a flimsy door, ventilated at ankle level, in the windowless passage where the washing machine is.

Then he finds Ferdinand in the kitchen, sitting at the table, eating the sour yoghurt-like stuff she serves, which Simon does not like even with jam in it. Ferdinand is alone. ‘Morning,’ he says.

‘Where is she?’ Simon asks.

‘She’s around somewhere,’ Ferdinand says between spoonfuls of yoghurt.

‘You’ve seen her?’

Ferdinand just nods. Something strange about the way he does that.

‘You’re up early, aren’t you?’ Simon asks him.

‘Not really.’

‘How long have you been up?’

‘Uh.’ With the little spoon, not looking at his friend, Ferdinand scrapes the last out of the yoghurt pot. ‘Half an hour?’

‘Is there any coffee?’

‘She made some. It’s probably on the hob, isn’t it?’

Simon, at the hob, pours himself some. As he turns to take his seat again he sees something on the floor. Though it seems familiar, he is not sure what it is. Only as he sits down again does it strike him — it is her yellow dressing gown. Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor.

‘How’d you sleep?’ Ferdinand asks.

‘Okay.’

Ferdinand says, ‘You still want to leave today?’

‘Yes,’ Simon says.

Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor.

—

And then the train to Vienna. Ferdinand falls asleep immediately, as it leaves Prague, is snoring in his seat as it flows ker-thunking over points, and suburbs pass in the windows. Simon, awake, stands in the corridor and watches the landmarks of the city dwindle.

There is a strange sense of loss, a sense of loss without an obvious object.

He takes his seat.

He looks at his friend, sleeping opposite him, and for the first time he feels a sort of envy. That he…With her…If Ferdinand was willing to…And saw her…

Her dressing gown, there on the kitchen floor.

The Ambassadors makes him sleepy.

He puts it down.

He looks out the window, and the suburbs evaporate in front of his eyes.