Chapter 9 Šíma
Dinner is quiet, the squad half inside itself the way squads get when the match starts getting bigger. Horak sits down across from me with his tray and the face of a man carrying a question.
“Your first semifinal,” he says. “What was it like?”
“Loud. I was twenty-three. I warmed up so hard I was tired by kickoff.”
“That’s not encouraging.”
“We lost. Also not encouraging. Here’s the encouraging part.” I point my fork at him. “I remember every minute of it, and I remember nothing about the flight home. The match stays. The rest evaporates. So be present in the match.”
“Be in the match,” he repeats, as if it’s scripture.
“And eat the fruit.”
He holds up a banana on his way out later. I stamp my approval with a nod.
Down the table, Novotny is negotiating with Polá?ek for his family’s ticket allocation. Polá?ek is up to eleven relatives and calling it a delegation. Ková? eats what the plan says, exactly that, nothing else, and is gone before the fruit.
Upstairs, our hotel room looks like a customs checkpoint. Damián is organizing. He’s organizing the way other men think, a shirt at a time, and I’m on my bed officiating with a water bottle because that’s the traditional seating.
“Rate the piles,” he says, points to the left one. “Tournament pile, and the one on the right is the non-tournament pile.”
“Tournament pile is winning. Non-tournament pile has no depth.”
“The non-tournament pile is essentials.” He holds up the shirt from Kyiv, the terrible yellow one. “Essential.”
“That shirt has been banned in three countries.”
“Essential,” he says, and folds it like it’s a flag.
He holds up a hotel robe.
“That’s theft.”
“It’s from Doha. It was a gift.”
“From whom?”
“The room.”
We’ve organized like this on three continents.
Years of rooming together, and the ritual is always the same: he sorts, I commentate, and somewhere in the middle of it, the genuine conversation happens by accident, sideways, while our hands are busy with other things.
That’s how we built a friendship. Nobody ever sat down and said anything.
“You know what I did today? I bought hooks.”
“Hooks?”
“For the apartment. Wall hooks. A man at the shop asked how many, and I said twelve.” He grins at the memory, genuinely, all the way. “Twelve hooks. I stood in the aisle like it was a jewelry counter.”
“This is what freedom does to a man. Hardware.” I laugh.
“Laugh at me, but I’m serious.” He isn’t offended. He’s never been offended by me in his life. “In hotels. you drape. You fold over chairs. Everything’s temporary, so nothing gets a hook.”
“Twelve hooks, though,” I say. “What hangs on twelve hooks?”
“Coats. Keys. An umbrella.” He counts on his fingers, a man doing sums that finally add up. “I’m hanging a picture, ?íma. I bought one. First picture I’ve owned since I was twenty-two.”
“Of what?”
“The beach. The man at the market said it was hand-painted.” He shrugs, delighted. “It’s mine and it’s going on a hook.”
He’s not looking at me. This is a man talking about hardware.
“And I’m looking forward to being here. For years, my place in Munich was a place to eat and sleep. A place I lived but didn’t live in. But now, with Tobik, I can make a home. A place I want to live in.” He says it happily, like a weather report from a better country.
His sentence hits me.
A place I want to live in.
Five years of hotel doors closing behind me. A washbag packed for exits. A space no one would want to live in. A space where you live temporarily.
“And you will miss out on authentic knedliky,” I say. “Tobik can negotiate all he wants but it won’t be the same.”
Zero seconds. No gap. The bit arrives on time, that’s what it’s for.
“The knedliky,” Damián says. He gives me a look but lets it go, the way this room has always let things go. We don’t push each other. It’s the whole treaty. It occurs to me though, watching him get ready for a life where he pushes himself daily, that the treaty might have been the problem.
The moment goes by. He’ll remember tonight as organizing and jokes. That’s the service I provide. That’s what the broadcast is for.
The broadcast didn’t cost anything before.
But now there’s a man across the room describing hooks and hardware, and I have to catch the sentence mid-air, assess it, and send back a joke about dumplings in under a second, and nobody anywhere claps, because the whole event was invisible, which was the point.
Damián puts the piles in the dresser drawer and sits on the bed, satisfied, a man whose organization matches his life.
“You’ll come see it,” he says. “The apartment. The hooks.”
“I’ll inspect the hooks.”
The team chat gets its minutes at ten.
?íma
minutes. training was sharp and the bibs remain under civilian control. hydrate like it’s your religion
Novotny
the archer is ready
Polá?ek
the archer is banned by the committee
Hájek
bus at nine forty. lights out by eleven
?íma
the captain has spoken. minutes concluded. sleep like professionals
Output technically perfect. Load rising. The committee looks every night and finds nothing, because the committee is me.
Damian goes to shower. I go for ice, because the room has run out and because the corridor at eleven is a good place to think, which is a sentence I don’t look closely at.
Ková? is at the ice machine.
He’s been at the ice machine a while, is my read. The bucket’s full. He’s holding it and looking at the wall above the machine the way men look at departure boards, and the machine’s already done rattling, and he hasn’t moved.
“It’s good ice,” I say. “But it’s not that good.”
He surfaces. Half a second late. Everything half a second late this week.
“?íma.”
He looks at the full bucket like it’s evidence someone planted on him. A defender with ice, standing in a corridor at eleven at night, and I know the shape of this the way I know my own kit. It’s a man who left his room to be somewhere, and there’s nowhere, so he’s here.
“Number four’s stepping early,” he says, as if it’s normal to have a strategy session at the hotel ice machine. “In their build-up. If he does it during the match, I’m playing the channel behind him.”
“I’ve seen it. Third clip confirms it.”
“Good,” he says. “Good.”
And nothing else. The old Ková? would have run the whole back line for me right there, four minutes of positions, the full case. This one gives me two sentences of semifinal and goes back to the wall.
He takes the bucket and goes.
“Play the channel,” I call after him.
“I’ll play the channel.” A nod, correct.
“Night, Ková?.”
“Night.” His hotel door clicks itself shut behind him, because they all do.
I file it, because filing it is the whole of what I’m allowed to do. My friend is drowning, an acute case, sudden onset, somewhere around the quarterfinal by my timeline. And I recognize the water he’s drowning in, and that’s the finding I keep off the books.
The mirror gets held up twice in one night, and twice I look away.
Back in the room, Damián’s asleep. An easy, unburdened man with hooks for his walls.
My phone is dark on the nightstand. I check it anyway. Still dark. After the tournament ends, the flights take everyone somewhere, and the doors start clicking shut. Everything shuts itself automatically. That’s the feature.
I sleep eventually, and I don’t dream about doors, and I’d testify to that.
I’d be tried for perjury.
?