Chapter 21 Šíma
The buzzer goes at ten on a Saturday and I already know who it is, because I gave exactly one person the code to the street door. Then I spent three days checking my phone like the phone owed me money.
I open the apartment door. Tomá? Hájek is standing in my stairwell in Brno with four grocery bags.
Let the record show the location. Not a hotel.
Not a corridor with carpet chosen by an algorithm.
My stairwell. My city. The one rule that outlived all the other rules.
Never at home. I wrote it first and defended it longest, and here it stands in the doorway with its coat on, watching itself get retired.
“You’re here,” I say.
“I’m here.” He holds up the bags. “You have nothing in your kitchen. I checked your kitchen on Thursday. It has salt and a lightbulb.”
“The lightbulb is for emergencies.”
“Move,” he says.
He walks into my flat like a man with a delivery route, and the rule takes its coat off and dies quietly in the stairwell. I stand in my own doorway and watch the best thing that ever happened to me look for my counter space.
Here’s what my brain does, because five years of training doesn’t disperse like fog.
It drafts the cover story. Instantly. Reflexively.
Fully formatted. He’s here to review semifinal film.
The federation asked for a debrief. There’s a coaching course, we’re both enrolled, carpooling is fiscally responsible.
Three options, load-bearing, deniable, drafted between the buzzer and the door.
I stand in my kitchen doorway holding all three like tickets to a demolished theater.
Nobody’s asking. Nobody’s ever asking again.
I throw the whole draft away. The last one. I’d like to say it went with dignity, but the truth is it just went, the way scaffolding goes when the building can stand.
“You’re doing the thing,” Tomá? says, unpacking eggs. “The face. The one where you’re writing.”
“I was drafting the cover story. Force of habit.”
“Which one did you land on?”
“Film review. Debrief. Coaching course. In that order.”
“Coaching course.” He nods, judicious. “That’s the strongest. Plausible, boring, no follow-up questions.”
“That’s why it went in the bin last. Sentiment.”
“Throw it away.”
“Already did. You watched me.”
“I watched your face do a eulogy.” He puts the eggs in my empty refrigerator, where they look like the first settlers of a large and hopeful country. “Where are your pans?”
“I have a pan.”
“A pan.” He opens the cabinet. He looks at my one pan the way he looked at Belgian set pieces. “?íma. You’ve lived here six years.”
“I’ve SLEPT here six years. I live in hotels. You know this. You’ve audited it.”
He stops, half into my cabinet, and looks back at me, and something goes over his face like weather. Because yes. That’s the whole file in one sentence. Six years of salt and a lightbulb, because the road had the plates and the towels and the arrangement, and home was the place I kept the boots.
“Well,” he says, voice level, captain’s volume for an audience of one. “We’re fixing it. Starting with lunch. Sit down.”
There is exactly one chair at my kitchen table.
We both look at it. The chair achieves a significance no chair has ever wanted.
“One chair,” he says.
“I eat standing. Like a horse.”
“Six YEARS.”
“Nobody ever sat there but me. It seemed efficient.”
I watch him absorb this, my beautiful auditor. I can see the itemization running. The couch for Damián. The bakery for the new life. The furnishing gene coming online with a sound like a stadium turning on.
“Don’t,” I say. “Whatever you’re planning, it’s Saturday. The shops are chaos.”
“Paní Vaňková.”
“Who?”
“Your neighbor. Ground floor. I met her Thursday when I checked your kitchen. She has four chairs and lives alone. I’m borrowing one until Monday. On Monday we buy chairs like adults.”
“You met my NEIGHBOR?”
“She thinks you’re too thin. She’s right.” He’s already moving toward the door. “She also has your spare key. You gave it to her in twenty-nineteen. Which means an eighty-one-year-old has been the only person in Brno with access to your life for six years, ?íma. I’m expanding the committee.”
He goes down and comes back up with a chair, a good solid one with a cushion tied on, and a jar of something red that Paní Vaňková sent because apparently I’m too thin.
He puts the chair at my table across from my chair, and now there are two.
If you think a man can’t be undone by furniture, you have never decommissioned an arrangement of your own.
“There,” he says. “Sit. Eat. It’s the fancy scramble. I learned it from room service and improved the economics.”
So we eat lunch, both of us sitting down, in my kitchen, in daylight. It’s the single most radical act of my documented life. Ten years of tables across forty cities, and the destination was this. A table with a wobble. A borrowed chair. A jar of red something from the committee downstairs.
After, he wanders, and he does it like an inspection because he doesn’t have another gear. Hands behind his back. My bookshelf, my window, my one photo of Mami at the caravan. Then he gets to the hallway wardrobe and stops.
The boots are there. Match boots, retired for the season, cleaned, left one on the left, the way they’ve been arranged in every wardrobe and every kit room since before he knew me.
“Ten years,” he says, “I’ve watched you do the left boot first. You fined people for touching them. The whole liturgy.” He doesn’t touch them either. Even now. “You said it was proprioception. Ankle loading. You gave Horak a lecture with diagrams.”
“I did give a lecture.”
“Was any of it true?”
“The diagrams were accurate.” I look at the boots. “It’s not science. I lied about the science.”
“Tell me.”
Here it is. The last locked drawer. The man standing in front of it is the only one who was ever getting the key. So I open it, in a hallway, on a Saturday, in the flattest voice I own. This one doesn’t get the broadcast.
“My debut. Seniors. I was eighteen, terrified, and doing bits about it, obviously, because terror is a walk-in audience. There was a kit man. Standa. Sixty-something, hands like a dock worker. I’m mid-routine, working the room, and the room needed it, everyone was tight.
And Standa hands me my left boot. Into my hands, without looking.
My hands were open and his hands were full. That’s it. That’s the whole event.”
“You put it on so you wouldn’t drop the bit.”
“I put it on because it was in my hands. And I scored twice. Afterward Standa said, in front of the whole room, the boy knows the order. They laughed. I had a thing. Terrified eighteen-year-olds keep the thing.”
“And Standa?”
“Died my third season. Heart.” I shrug. It doesn’t need more than a shrug.
That’s the point of it. “I did the left boot first at his funeral. Shoes, I mean. Nobody knew it was a salute. It’s not a superstition, Tomá?.
It’s a man handing me a boot when my hands were open. Everything else is diagrams.”
He’s quiet for a second, and I watch him take it. The auditor, the man who has speculated about this for a decade, who could have traded it in any locker room in Europe, receiving the file at last.
“That’s better than the science,” he says.
“It’s smaller than the science.”
“That’s what I said.”
And that’s all. He doesn’t put it in a display case and he doesn’t make it a wound.
He nods at the boots once, like a man paying respects to a colleague’s colleague, and moves down the hallway.
The ritual goes back in the wardrobe as what it always was.
A boot, and a man, and an open hand. Now one other person on earth knows, and it weighs less.
Nobody tells you that. Told things weigh less.
The afternoon does what Brno afternoons do in late summer, which is arrive through the window sideways. Gold. Unscheduled.
We end up in the bedroom with the light on the floor and no reason to be anywhere.
And this, THIS, is the thing I did not know existed.
Not the act. The tempo. Five years of intimacy conducted like a heist, synchronized watches, exits blocked before entrances.
Now it’s three in the afternoon and nobody’s watch is running.
Tomá? Hájek takes my shirt off slowly and gets distracted halfway through by a scar along my ribs he’s seen a hundred times and never had the clock to ask about.
“Ostrava,” I say. “Fence. I was fourteen.”
“There’s a fence story?”
“There’s always a fence story. Later. Come here.”
Daylight is a different country. I know his body the way I know the fixture list, but I know it in lamplight and half-dark and other people’s rooms. I’ve been reading the away kit all along.
In the sun he’s ridiculous. In the sun he has freckles on his shoulders, and I inform him of each one individually until he pulls me down by the back of my neck to shut me up. The kiss is long and lazy.
My mouth on his throat, above the collar. My name in the room at conversational volume, because volume was only ever about witnesses, and the flat has none.
“Say that again,” he says.
“Which part?”
“Any of it. All of it. We have all day. Say everything twice.”
His hands map my back the slow way, and when I take him in hand he exhales like a man setting down bags at the end of a very long trip.
“There’s the science,” he says.
I laugh into his shoulder. Actually laugh, mid-act, because it turns out you can.
Nobody teaches you that on the road. Laughing was for the bit and this was for the dark, and the daylight merges the accounts.
He’s hard in my hand and grinning at me with the sun on his face and it’s all one thing now.
It was always one thing. We finally have the lighting for it.
Slow hands. His mouth, then mine. When he finishes it’s with my name, the surname, the one he’s always used, said soft into my ear like a password to a door that’s already open.
I follow him with his hand steady on the back of my neck.
The family gesture. The last thing I think before I stop thinking is that nobody is going to knock.
Nobody does.
After, we lie there while the gold goes up the wall. His heartbeat under my ear does its metronome thing.
“The reservation,” he says, to the ceiling. “You said you know a place.”
“I know every place. I’m Brno’s problem, remember.”
“Then call one.”
“Tomorrow, not tonight. Tonight I’m not sharing you with a waiter.”
“Agreed. Tomorrow.”
Evening. The kitchen again. He cooks the second thing he knows, which he claims is a different scramble. I set my table for two people, which requires both plates I own. We eat while the window goes blue.
There’s a bottle of red on the table, open, because dinner gets a bottle. That’s civilization. His glass does its work. Mine sits there, one swallow gone, catching the last of the light, and stays where it is, and the meal goes on around it.
Then I pick up the phone and call U Kastelána, because Ondra runs the floor on Sundays, and Ondra owes me nothing but likes me anyway.
“Ahoj, Ondro. ?íma.” Pause for the noise he makes. “Yes. That one. The medal is bronze, don’t inflate it. Listen. Tomorrow, eight o’clock. Table for two.”
Tomá? watches me from the sink, towel over his shoulder. I hold his eyes while I do it.
“?íma,” I say again, into the phone. “Under ?íma. With the accents, like the footballer. Because it IS the footballer. Two people. No, no occasion.”
His eyebrow goes up across my kitchen. I amend for the record.
“A good table, though, Ondro. It’s a little bit an occasion.”
I hang up. The reservation exists. In a ledger in Brno, in my own name, in my own city, a table for two, tomorrow, eight o’clock. Visible to anyone and legible to no one, because two footballers having dinner is nothing. Is Tuesday. Is invisible.
That was the punchline all along. We could always have done this. The doors were never locked. I checked every one of them personally, for five years, from the inside, holding the key, briefing the guards.
“Eight o’clock,” I tell him. “Wear the blue thing.”
“I know the blue thing.” He hangs the towel like he lives here. Minus paperwork, he does. “?íma. Look at that.”
“At what?”
“Two chairs.”
We look at the table. Two chairs. Two plates. A bottle, one glass working and one standing sentry. And tomorrow at eight, a table in our own city with a real name on it.
“Monday,” I say, “we buy the good ones.”
?