Chapter 12 Marek
Ihave marked the best attackers in Europe for a decade, and nothing has ever made my hands sweat like typing one sentence to a market vendor’s schedule.
Tonight. I’ll cook. Tell Davide he’s invited to his own kitchen. Meet me at the market at nine.
The reply comes back in four minutes. Three peach emojis. Then, a minute later, a second message, because he can never leave a ball alone.
Bring the list. I know you made a list.
At breakfast ?íma watches me eat with the expression of a man updating a file.
“You’re doing something today,” he says. “You have the face of a man with an appointment.”
“Recovery protocol. Long walk. Real food.”
“Real food where?”
“A friendly kitchen,” I say, and he lets it go with the smallest nod on record.
“Walk well, Ková?.”
It’s the second time in three days he’s let me off easy, and someday I’m going to have to think about what that means, but not today.
Today I have a list in my pocket, in my own handwriting.
The list frightens me more than any team sheet ever has.
A team sheet only asks me to defend. This list asks me to be seen buying marjoram.
What I do not tell him is that the night porter watched me come back through the loading dock at one in the morning, and looked at me for exactly as long as ?íma just did.
The building knows. Buildings always know.
I am running out of people who don’t. That should scare me only because it is a building.
Instead it scares me because ?íma is starting to look less like a locked door and more like someone who has been standing beside the open one the whole time.
He’s waiting at the market entrance, sunglasses, linen, entirely himself. In daylight. On purpose. Because I asked.
“You made a list,” he says, delighted before anything else. “Show me the list.”
“The list is classified.”
“Marek. Show me the list.”
I show him the list. He reads it the way other men read match reports. His whole face does the thing I used to drive two and a half hours to see. We’re standing in a public market in the sun while it does it.
It starts at the left corner of his mouth. It always starts there, one side committing before the rest of the face signs off, and then all of it arrives at once and a year of discipline is worth nothing against it. I could scout every winger alive and never find a tell I’d rather study.
“Brambora?ka,” he says. “Potato soup. You’re making me your mother’s potato soup.”
“I’m making my mother’s potato soup in a foreign country from foreign potatoes, which means I’m making a tribute act. Manage your expectations. There’s also the mushroom problem.”
“What’s the mushroom problem?”
“The mushrooms here are polite. Czech mushrooms have opinions. I’ll have to compensate.”
The peach man sees us from four stalls away and starts waving like we’re rescuing him from a boring party.
“The serious one,” he announces to the entire aisle. “He came back. You brought him.”
“He brought himself,” Enzo says, and there it is, out loud, in a market, with strangers arranging themselves around the sentence. “Piero, this is Marek. Marek, Piero. His trees are in Georgia, his sister is in Bari, and his peaches forgive.”
“Forgive what?” I ask.
“Whatever you did,” Piero says, and hands me one like a communion wafer. “Tell me what you taste.”
Under a market awning, with Enzo watching and a stranger waiting and the whole thing happening in full sun where anybody could see, I do the ceremony. First bite. Hold. Two seconds.
“Summer,” I say. “And it’s not sorry.”
Piero looks at Enzo. Enzo looks at Piero. Money changes hands, and I understand I have just been adopted or purchased.
“Both,” Enzo says, reading my face. “It’s called a market.”
We work the market like a route I’ve been running for years.
He knows every vendor, and they know him, and one by one he hands me to them by name.
This is Marek. Marek, this is Rosa, this is the bread man.
Nobody blinks. Nobody cares. A first name in a market is nothing, and it’s everything, and I collect the nothings all morning like caps.
Strangers are generous because they owe you nothing. They take the name you hand them, use it once, and let you go. A teammate would keep it. A mother would hear the shape of it under every ordinary sentence after.
The potato situation requires diplomacy. The onions are acceptable. The marjoram becomes a regional incident.
“Rosa runs the herbs,” Enzo says. “Rosa, this is Marek. He has a mushroom problem.”
“We all have problems,” Rosa says, and hands me the marjoram like a prescription.
“Not hers,” a second vendor calls from across the aisle. “Her marjoram is for tourists.”
“My marjoram won a prize.”
“A tourist prize.”
Enzo leans into me, glowing. “This is better than derby week.”
The bread man’s name is genuinely Angelo, which Enzo finds theologically satisfying. “Angelo. Bread. Some things the universe just signs.”
“Two loaves,” Angelo says, not asking. “One for the soup, one for the walk home. Don’t argue.”
I buy sausage from a man who smokes it himself. I taste it and adjust the whole soup in my head around what this country thinks smoke is. We leave with potatoes, two loaves, and a paper twist of contested marjoram.
“You’re recalculating,” Enzo says, watching me. “I know that face from the pitch. Somebody switched the winger and you’re reorganizing the back line.”
“The sausage changes the soup. The soup adapts. This is called coaching.”
“It’s called cooking.”
“It’s called both, and both of us know it.”
I say it about the soup. His sunglasses come off. The way he looks at me says he heard it about everything, and I let that stand too. In the sun. On purpose. My heart breaks stride in my chest, and I allow that as well. There’s a lot of new policy today.
Enzo takes the market bags back to the apartment, and I go the other direction to the hotel, which feels correct until it doesn’t.
Training is training. Tape is tape. Lunch is protein and instructions and men pretending not to watch me pretend not to check the time. By five-thirty, I have showered, changed, and failed to invent a reason not to walk four blocks.
So I walk four blocks.
Davide’s kitchen at six is a hostile away venue that slowly turns neutral.
The kitchen surrenders in stages. First the counter, then the stove, and finally Davide’s radio, which learns Czech folk music at seven o’clock and takes it surprisingly well.
Enzo tries to help four times in the first ten minutes. I bench him without ceremony.
“Out of the kitchen.”
“It’s Davide’s kitchen.”
“And tonight it’s mine, and you’re a guest in it. Sit. Drink. Narrate if you must.”
“Oh, I must.” He sits at the counter with wine, narrating like television. Davide comes home to find the Czech Republic’s starting right-back sweating onions in his kitchen while Italy’s left winger provides unlicensed commentary.
“There’s a defender making soup in my house,” Davide says to the room, in the tone of a man confirming the address.
“You’re invited,” I tell him. “It’s your kitchen. There are rules, though. No sauce jokes. No touching the pot. And whatever he says about the marjoram, the marjoram stays.”
“He’s been like this for an hour,” Enzo says, luminous. “He benched me, Davide. In your kitchen. I’ve never been so offended in my life. Don’t touch the pot.”
The soup takes the time it takes. That’s the first thing my mother ever taught me about it. While it takes it, the kitchen fills up with the three of us. Davide sets the table wrong, and Enzo fixes it, and neither of them mentions it. A whole marriage of habits I’m apparently now inside of.
At the halfway mark, I order Enzo to taste. One spoonful. He holds it. Two seconds.
“More marjoram.”
“No.”
“More marjoram, Marek.”
“It’s my mother’s soup.”
“And she’d side with me. Mothers always side with me.”
He’s right, and she would. I add the marjoram and don’t give him the satisfaction of watching me do it, and he watches anyway, satisfied.
I tell the story of the Ostrava away trip and the frozen pitch and Novotny‘s sandwich, and time it right, and Enzo laughs so hard he has to put his glass down, and Davide watches him laugh, and then watches me watch him laugh, and says nothing at all, thankfully.
This is the first witness I have not accidentally acquired. Davide knows Enzo. Davide will remember the face I make when Enzo laughs, and for once I do not reach for a reason to become smaller.
My mother’s soup, when it lands, is not my mother’s soup. The potatoes are wrong and the mushrooms are polite and the smoke is American.
Enzo takes the first spoonful and holds it. Two seconds. I taught him that, and he’s using it against me, the thief.
“Marek.” He puts the spoon down. “It’s good.”
“It’s a tribute act.”
“It’s good. Tastes like somebody’s kitchen. Somebody real. I want to know every single thing about the woman who taught you this, starting with whether she knows what you do with your hands at a set piece, because as a professional I have questions for her.”
“She knows I defend. She thinks I’m careful.” I refill his bowl without asking, the way his father serves people he’s decided to keep, and I watch him watch me do it. “She’s right so far about half of it.”
“What’s her name?”
“Alena.”
“Alena.” He repeats it like a thing being shelved somewhere permanent. “Does Alena know where you are tonight?”
“Alena knows I’m eating well. It’s the truest thing she knows about this summer.”
He hears everything inside that sentence and files none of it against me, which is its own kind of table manners.
Davide has seconds. Davide has thirds.
“Question,” he says, on the third bowl. “Do your lot know you cook?”
“Nobody knows I cook.”
“Good. Wednesday I want him distracted, not fed.” He points his spoon at Enzo, then at me, then thinks better of whatever the spoon was going to say next.
“He gets ninety minutes of my full professional attention,” I say. “It’s all the other days I’m renegotiating.”
“Renegotiate after the match,” Davide says, and goes back in for one more bowl.
Somewhere between the second bowl and the dishes, he stops being surveillance and becomes company. I suspect that was Enzo’s plan all along. Possibly Davide’s too. The Italians have outmaneuvered me in a kitchen, yet the soup was my idea.
We do the dishes in a chain, him washing, me drying, Davide putting away and editorializing. The pot gets left to soak by unanimous vote, with the ceremony of a jersey being retired. At the door, Davide diplomatically discovers something urgent on his phone.
“The soup pot stays,” Enzo says. “Collateral. You’ll have to come back to wash it.”
“That was the plan. The pot is doing exactly what I want.”
“I know.” He grins, and it’s the whole one, the real one, no rationing anywhere in it. “Two years I got the night version of you. The day version alphabetizes his market list. I’m still deciding which one I like.”
“Take your time. Both of them made you soup.”
The walk back is warm and ordinary. Ten o’clock, families out, the city humming its one note. I’m carrying an empty bag and a full one at the same time, which is not a sentence I could diagram for anyone at the hotel. The second loaf doesn’t survive the walk. Angelo knew. That’s why there were two.
?íma is in the lobby with a protein bar and the patience of geology. “Early training tomorrow. Ready for it?”
“Always.”
“Good. Get some sleep,” he says, not asking any other questions. I file it with the rest of today and take the stairs, and I hear the echo of it the whole way up.
Novotny mutes the highlights when I come in. “You smell like somebody’s grandmother’s house.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t…” He gives up and unmutes.
I lie on my bed and take out my phone. I owe a debt from three nights ago, one word delivered when two were promised.
I type two.
Again tomorrow?
The reply comes back before the phone is even down. One word, his turn, the whole ledger balancing itself across four blocks of night air.
Je?tě.
I set one alarm. Just the one. Then I lie in the dark, grinning at a hotel ceiling like an idiot, a professional athlete with wet sleeves, marjoram under his nails, carrying hope, which I understand now is the single most frightening thing I have ever smuggled through a lobby.