The Flat on Rasinovo Nabrezi
The apartment itself was unremarkable β a narrow hallway, a kitchen from the wrong decade, a bookshelf that had given up and started stacking on the floor. Everything it had, it kept behind the balcony door.
Out there: the Vltava, wide and slow and black, the lit ribs of the Jirasek Bridge to the left, the Dancing House squatting at the corner like an argument nobody won, and beyond the water the long green slope of Petrin with the castle sitting above it, floodlit and entirely certain of itself.
It was the second week of July, the week when Prague simply refuses to cool down after dark. On the naplavka below, people sat along the stone edge with their feet over the water. You could hear the rhythm of their conversations without ever catching a word.
She brought two glasses out and a bottle that had spent half an hour in the sink, because the fridge is never given enough notice.
Two Square Metres
Prague balconies of this vintage are not designed for company. There is room for a small table, two chairs, and one failed attempt at geraniums. If you sit, your knee is against the other person's knee. If you stand at the railing, you stand side by side, facing the river β which is, conveniently, the easiest possible arrangement for saying difficult things.
He chose the railing. The iron was still warm from the day.
"How often do you come out here?" he asked.
"Depends on how the work is going."
"That is not an answer."
"It is," she said. "You just have to translate it."
A boat went past below them, one of the slow sightseeing ones strung with bulbs along the rail. The lights spread across the water into long trembling bars, and the wake spent a long time putting them back together. They both watched the same point on the river, and each knew the other was doing it.
A Conversation About Nothing
They talked about things that lead nowhere, and they did it very carefully.
Whether the island looks smaller at night. Whether it is true that on humid evenings you can hear the trams all the way from Karlovo namesti. A film neither of them had finished. The gaps between sentences grew, and gradually the gaps started winning.
At some point he went for the glass he had left on the table behind her, and had to pass. The balcony is narrow. He passed closer than was strictly necessary and she moved aside less than was strictly necessary, which is a pair of decisions neither party ever admits to. For a second his forearm was along hers, and it was warm, and in that heat there was nothing else it could be blamed on.
Warm stone, river water, diesel from the boats, and concrete finally giving up its heat β those are the three or four things a Prague night on the embankment actually smells of. The one that was not on the list was there anyway.
The Strand of Hair
She turned her back to the river and leaned on her elbows, looking into the flat through the open door β at the collapsed bookshelf, at the circle of lamplight, at the exact line where outside ends and something else begins.
"You have a good place here," he said.
"Out here?"
"Not only out here."
He lifted a hand and moved a strand of hair the river breeze had laid across her face. It took a second longer than the same gesture would take between colleagues. And then he did not take the hand back. He left it against her cheek, ran a thumb along the bone of it, and she leaned into the palm before she had finished deciding whether to.
"You should not be doing that," she said, with her eyes shut, which rather weakened the case.
"I know," he said, and kissed her.
The railing was warm and hard behind her and she put both hands back on it, because otherwise she would have had to hold on to him. She held on to him anyway. A glass went somewhere; one of them must have set it down, and neither could have told you which the next day.
It was hot. It had been hot all week, but this was the other kind of heat, the kind that starts on the inside and works out, and in a Prague July there is nothing whatever to be done about it. His hand went down her neck, along the collarbone, over her shoulder, and the strap of her dress went with it, as though the hand had been navigating there all evening. She breathed in against his mouth and he took the breath.
Somewhere below on the embankment somebody laughed, a long way off and entirely beside the point. Neither of them heard it.
The Balcony Door
She took him by the wrist, lifted his hand off her shoulder, and did not let go of it.
"Inside," she said.
"The view is better out here."
"There is a bed in there."
She went first, by one step, because on that balcony nobody walks side by side. They crossed from heat into heat. Before the door swung shut she reached over and killed the lamp, so that all they had left was what came off the river.
Then he closed the balcony door.
Morning on the Embankment
The bottle stayed outside, half finished, and went completely warm overnight.
At some point around half past four the sky over Petrin turned that unpleasantly honest grey, and for the first time all day the embankment below the building was empty. The river went on as though nothing at all had happened, which from the river's point of view was accurate.
Two glasses stood side by side on the little table. One had a print of lipstick on the rim and the other a thumb mark in the misted dew, and set out like that they looked like a sentence nobody had finished writing.
About This Story
Fiction, obviously. The balconies are not. There are a surprising number of them above the Vltava β narrow, uncomfortable, and completely irreplaceable. Most of the good evenings in this city happen on about two square metres.
More writing is in our blog section. For the non-fiction version, see our companions and the current schedule.
