As I looked down at the drawer I wondered if K had left it open in compensation for not letting me have Dora’s letter. So there were two ways of looking at this: as test and as gift. If I passed the test and touched nothing, my reward would be a photocopy of Dora’s letter. I wanted…
I wanted, oh how badly I wanted to resist.
I wanted, oh how badly I wanted Jiri’s letter to his father.
I compromised. I didn’t take the top letter. I carefully removed one letter from the middle of the stack. I left the drawer open precisely as K had left it.
I was calm. My heart did not burst with fear as I took the letter, folded it once, and placed it in the inside pocket of my jacket.
The twenty minutes were up. K still had not returned. I rose and left his room.
At the front door of the apartment I said loudly:
“I’m leaving now, Eva. Goodbye.”
By the sound of my voice bouncing off nothing except walls, I could tell no one was at home. The stillness in an empty house is different from the absence of sounds when people are present.
I went down the stairs to the front of the house. As I stepped outside a girl emerged from another door at ground level at the corner of the house.
I don’t know if I said No! aloud or to myself. It cannot be. I must be dreaming. Are prayers really answered in this world? Just as I was lamenting the wasted hours, the useless trip, in one instant my lost time, my irretrievable hours, turned to gold — but it was not the gold of the earth; it was the gold of heaven. So the old lady was right again. The extra minutes I had spent staring at K’s print in his room were not only beneficial; they were as golden as the wheat on the framed picture.
For before me, immobile now, not gliding, stood the girl who had swooshed by me before, seen only from the back, like the vision presented to Moses as God’s glory passed before him. The girl with the oval face, alluring smile, and one dimple, and one dimple only, when she smiled. The girl whose long green eyes were sunshine. She had changed into slacks, the way she usually dressed when on the square, the girl from faux Georgia, the girl in the blue beret.
“What?” she and I cried out.
“You?” I and she exclaimed.
“Is it?” said either she or I.
Then we both said, “What are you doing here?”
“This is incredible,” I probably said, because it’s one of my favorite words.
Her mouth was open.
“Let me see,” and I took out a make-believe book from my pocket, licked my forefinger in the European manner as I turned nonexistent pages. “Let’s see on which page of the novel this astonishing, surprising, incredible meeting takes place, for it can happen only in a novel where a guy looks all over town for a girl and finds her in the house he’s been visiting for quite a while.”
I looked at Katya.
We both stood still.
So many questions burbled in my mind, I didn’t know where to begin. I put the book back into my pocket.
We faced each other. Now, for the first time, she wasn’t wearing a placard, demonstrating a marionette, or acting. Now we weren’t on the square but in the flowering little garden in front of the house, far from the tumult of town. Who had ordained that here, in K’s house, I would meet my lost rainbow, the girl in the blue beret?
Then, like out of a teenagers’ handbook, came simple, tentative, halting questions.
“Do you live here?”
“I have a little room on the ground floor.”
“But I saw you passing by upstairs. At least the back of you.”
“I was getting some milk from the refrigerator.”
We both started saying something at the same time, then fell silent for a long moment.
Then Katya asked:
“And you? Do you live here?”
“Well, I spend enough time to qualify as a resident.”
“I don’t mean in this house. I mean in Prague.”
“I’m renting a studio in an apartment hotel for a couple of months while I’m working on my film.”
“But where do you really live?”
“In New York.”
“Oh,” she said.
I looked straight into her eyes long enough for her to lower her eyes.
“You’re not from Georgia, are you?”
Said, still with her eyes down, “No…but you already guessed that.”
“Then why did you say that?”
“Do you know how many dozens of men, young and old, stop to chat with me? Everyone wants to take me out. Few are interested in concerts.”
“That’s what they get when they hire a beautiful girl.”
“I have neither the interest nor the time to meet and befriend strangers. So that’s why I said Georgia. When they ask to meet me after work, I say I’m going back to Georgia in a couple of days.”
“No wonder you weren’t impressed by my Georgian dishes…. Don’t people see you a few days later and ask how come you’re still here?”
“Do you know what the average stay in Prague is? Two-three days. And if by chance someone does see me again, I make up a wild story.”
“Why don’t you just say no?”
“I don’t want to hurt their feelings. Maybe there’s still a chance they’ll buy a ticket to a concert.”
Maybe she also makes a little commission on sales, I figured.
“I’ve come here quite a number of times. How come I haven’t seen you before?”
“I work during the day.”
“Which is now. During the day.”
“On Wednesday I have a few hours off. And anyway, I was away for a while. I had to return home.”
“Am I interrupting your plans?”
“No. Not really. I was going to the museum. And what are you doing here with the old man?”
I noticed she didn’t call him by name.
“I love talking to him.”
She said something like, “Uh-huh, mm-hmmm.”
Again we were silent for a while. It was a nice crisp fall day. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. I was happy. My rainbow had returned.
“By the way, I bumped into Michele Luongo the other day. I thought he would be furious at me but he wasn’t at all. In fact, he wondered why I ran off.”
“He told me all about you. Why didn’t you tell me you’re famous?”
“First of all, I’m not famous. And second, famous people don’t go around telling people they’re famous. And anyway, you never gave me a chance. You kept disappearing.” I stopped for a moment, cleared my throat. “The four days are up.”
Katya smiled.
“I had an emergency. I was called back home to Brno.”
“That’s the capital of Georgia, isn’t it?”
“You’re funny,” she said affectionately.
“Is everything all right at home?”
“Now, yes. My father wasn’t well.”
Why did Brno sound familiar? Yes, K had told me that’s where Eva Langbrot had gone, to visit relatives.
“Curious, that’s where the landlady Eva went too.”
“Why curious? Why shouldn’t she go there?”
“How should I know? It’s just curious that both of you went to that same little town.”
“But that’s where my parents live. That’s where I grew up before I moved here to continue my university studies and seek work.”
“But what about Eva?”
“Eva also went to Brno to help tend to her son who wasn’t well.”
Maybe I was thick but I still didn’t understand.
“But wouldn’t you say it’s curious, or coincidental, that two women who live in the same house travel to the same town to help with two sick men, in one case the girl’s father, in the other the woman’s son?”