Petr -last seen today at 12:36
“I am here alone,” he says. “There is no person, nobody here.”
Peter Basma-Lord, Berlin
He’s on the office balcony, smoking. I can hear him exhaling, sucking in air and releasing again. He tells me the back yard and car park are empty, and the city is on lockdown. I imagine he can see golden spires from where he stands, castle turrets above red rooftops, perhaps a glimpse of the water. Prague, as I remember it. The Vltava flowing fast, the swell of early spring rains.
That’s something then. There are worse places to be.
I remember looking him up on Google Maps once, to see where his small office was, from an the address printed on a compliment slip with a conference gift, or on his business card. Somewhere. Still there, on safari-something street−the name was unusual, wild- sounding. Exotic.
“Don’t jump, will you?” I say. “Just kidding. But seriously, think about the day, not the debts. What you can do today. That’s all. Apply for that government loan. It’s worth a try, isn’t it? Tell the girls you can’t even afford to live yourself, let alone pay them with no work coming in. Let them both go. You need to look after yourself now, Petr.”
Nothing.
I move my head, check the voice call is still connected. “Petr?” I hear his breath again, heavy into the phone. “I know,” he says, “Don’t stop believing.”
“Exactly.”
“Journey, that’s the song.”
“It is the journey, that’s the thing, that’s right. Now you’re talking.”
“No, Journey. That’s their song, the group. ‘Don’t Stop Believing.’”
“That’s a terrible song. God, I wish you hadn’t said that. Now I won’t be able to stop thinking about it. Like an ear worm.”
I wonder if he knows the word worm in English, if he only understands me half the time.
He’ll send a YouTube link after the call, so I can click on it and remind myself just how much I hate that song. And I’ll scroll back through our WhatsApp chats and see that the last link I sent him was Whitney Houston’s ‘I will Always Love You’. I don’t know why; what brought on that particular pep talk. Under the link I’d typed, This is now, officially, our song by the way. And he’d replied with emojis−a smiley face, a thumbs up, a red heart.
We talk around and around what we mean to say, whatever this call’s really about. We are friends, that’s all I can claim. We might have been nothing now, if whatever else could’ve happened then had happened. I’m grateful for this.
He apologises again for his English. He says it’s been a while since he had any UK conference groups, or clients even. No one like me. “You’re not client,” he says. Not any more, not for a long time.
I remind him I speak no Czech, so who am I to talk. Apart from the few phrases I learned from a school friend over forty years ago−you get on my nerves and up your bum, and cheers. I’ve never forgotten, like the lines from Shakespeare we learned by rote for the nuns, how love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.
“I must have told you, when we first met, that I knew a bit of Czech from a school friend–Alena Pekar. Probably shortened, to fit in−probably Pekarova or something.” I’m thinking out loud and he’s silent, humouring me no doubt. Maybe I am still the client. “I told you that, right? Ya-tu-mill-oo-you. I love you, isn’t that it? I wonder why she taught me that?” Answering my own question, I add, “Guess it’s an obvious one.”
Part of me believes Alena taught me that line so I could tell this man, four decades later in her old country, in his own language, that I love him. Not to jump from the balcony into a sand-covered yard with no views and break my heart. I like to think he won’t, that he never would.
I’ll know exactly what the yard is like because of the photo he’ll send me after the call, of his shit view. Perhaps that’s all he can see right now, beyond the white railings. My life, cancelled by virus. How it feels, he said in the last text before my call. Send cigarettes. XX “Yes, I remember you told me,” he says.
If I were there now, on his balcony, would I reach over and take that cigarette and press it to my own mouth and take a drag, taste his saliva on my lips? I haven’t lit up for sixteen years. And then kiss him again, all smoky, deep and hard like in Soho that time, when we were both so drunk and I was still single, on his last night in town? So urgently, I remember, that the lads passing by told us to get a room.
He had a room and I went back there but didn’t stay. Kept my clothes on, though I still don’t quite know why. What else but naked fear? God, how he could have been.
“I can’t believe you like that song,” I say. “You can’t be a DJ, ever. Not even weddings. That avenue is not open to you. When you’re thinking about that career move, that’s not it. Seriously.”
I laugh, lightly, and he does too.
“You’d get into a groove and when you looked up, all the guests would be gone. Just a swirl of confetti on the dance floor.”
“I would just play records for myself,” he says. Perhaps that’s always been the problem−finding someone to share his tracks. Drinking too much.
“Have I been of any help? Have I lifted you up today?”
“Not really,” he says, amusement in his voice.
“No really, I mean you have.”
That voice. Its low notes, the flat of the accent, the rise of his laugh.
“OK, I won’t go into counselling, be therapist, if you promise−no DJing.”
He’s smiling now, I’m sure of it. But then a lull, a brief pause, our breath.
“I just wish you could see the Petr I see.”
But after it’s said, I know what I’m remembering is the snap in my pictures folder. When we were both something; younger, almost enough for each other.
“I’m definitely coming to Prague,” I say.
“Not now. It’s not a good time.”
“Of course, not now. I know. Later, when all this is over.”
“And I will come to London again,” he says.
I find the picture−Petr, circa 2006. Don’t forget this guy, I text. I attach the photo, then regret it. To prove a point, I search for his road in Maps. It’s Šafaříkova; I was so close. Then I look up the Czech for I love you in Translate and it’s Miluju tě. Something different. And I wonder if what I told him means anything.