The Agreement Ran Until Eleven
The agreement had been perfectly clear: one drink, one hour, goodbye at eleven. Agreements of this kind are made in Prague surprisingly often and kept surprisingly rarely.
They were in a cellar bar off Male namesti, one of those places where you walk down eight steps and the entire city stops existing. Above them, the Old Town Square was still full of people photographing the astronomical clock from the one angle that never works. Down here the radio was low and the bartender had perfected the art of not being present.
At eleven she looked at her phone and turned it face down on the table.
"One more hour," she said. It was not a question.
An Empty Square
They came up at half past eleven, and the Old Town Square was nearly empty β a state of affairs no tourist ever witnesses and every local remembers.
The cobbles were still warm. A few people were stretched out around the Hus monument. Somebody near the Kinsky Palace was working through four guitar chords and never arriving at a fifth. The towers of the Tyn Church stood up black and impossibly tall, and the clock was preparing to strike midnight for twenty people instead of two hundred.
They walked slowly, because walking quickly would have turned it into leaving.
"I always assumed this square was loud," he said.
"It is," she said. "You just have to wait for it to stop."
They stopped by the column where the Prague meridian is set into the paving β the line the city once used to tell the time. She put one foot on it.
"It was always exactly noon here," she said.
"And now?"
"Now it is five to midnight and I am standing on noon. Prague never promised any of this would make sense."
The Hour That Does Not Count
The thing about a borrowed hour is that both people know it is borrowed. It changes how they talk in it.
They went down Karlova, that impossible bending street where by day people are bolted to one another and where after midnight you can hear your own footsteps come back off the walls. The windows full of crystal and marionettes were dark, and being dark had made them almost dignified.
At one of the narrow points, where two people genuinely do not fit side by side, she went first and he followed. She turned her head without breaking step, purely to find out whether he was watching.
He was.
This time she stopped.
There was a doorway there, half a metre deep, with iron-bound doors that had not been altered in a century. She stepped back into it and took him with her, and Karlova narrowed behind his shoulders to a strip of blue light.
"How long is left?" he asked.
"Do not ask."
She kissed him first. That mattered, and both of them noticed it. Her fingers were cold and her mouth was not, and he lifted her the small distance she was short by, so that her back came up against wood older than the two of them put together. Her bag slid off her shoulder and hung in the crook of her elbow and she left it there.
Prague after midnight has this property: it permits things that would be embarrassing at six in the evening. Long looks. Unfinished sentences. Hands that stop behaving like company. Somewhere up the street a few tourists went past and their voices bounced off the facades and disappeared again, and neither of them moved.
When she came away from him her breathing did not match how slowly they had been walking all evening.
"That," she said, "was not in the agreement."
Three Minutes at the Bridge
They came out by Charles Bridge. The Old Town bridge tower stood against the floodlights like something cut from black paper, and there were perhaps ten people on the bridge itself β roughly the number that is there about four hours a day.
They stopped at the parapet before the tower, where you can see the weir and the long dark shape of Strelecky Island. He stood behind her, close, and she leaned back against him because by then there was no reason to do anything else. He had a hand on the stone either side of hers, which from any distance looked like a man admiring a view.
"How long is left?" he asked again.
She checked the phone and turned it face down again.
"Three minutes."
"That is not much."
"It is exactly what we agreed on."
He bent and kissed the side of her neck, just above the collar, and she closed her eyes and let the weir below them make the noise for both of them.
The End of the Hour
At a quarter to one the hour was over, and neither of them said so out loud.
They walked back to Krizovnicke namesti, where the statues stand and the air comes damp off the river. She offered him her hand β a gesture that, after that particular hour, was almost absurd, which is precisely why she used it.
He took it. And did not let go.
"If the agreement had been written differently," he said.
"Then it would not have been an extra hour," she said. "It would just have been an evening."
They stood for a while holding hands in the middle of an empty square, two people settling something without words, because words would only have made it official.
"I live three minutes from here," she said eventually. "Which, all things considered, is exactly the time we had left."
They crossed the square back towards the city and did not talk. On Karlova they turned left, and then left again, and after that there was nothing to see.
Afterwards
The astronomical clock had struck midnight long before. Nobody had photographed it.
It struck one as well, and two, and three, which it does every night whether or not anyone is watching. Around four the first delivery van came up Karlova and its headlights swept across the iron-bound doors of a doorway where nobody had been standing for hours.
If you walked up that street in the morning looking for evidence, you would find none. It is eight hundred years old and thoroughly practised at keeping things to itself.
About This Tale
The story is invented. Prague is not. The Old Town Square has two entirely separate identities, and the second one begins at around a quarter past eleven at night. It is worth seeing once, if only for how improbably quiet that place can be.
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