Signs and Markings

Gina Ochsner

Men dream of flying because they thirst for a state of mind where they need not worry about the placement of their feet.
—Richard Grossman, The Book of Lazarus

AS long as I don't think too much, I like my job. In the very early morning, before you can even get a beer to start the day off right, you can hear a pure and willing emptiness throughout the streets of Prague and then it's Pavel, Janusz, and me all making small talk on our short-wave radios as we hold our city-issue utility signs and try to look busy. Occasionally, Pavel or I will direct traffic, but most of the time we hold the signs and let the traffic run where it will because, frankly, no one follows the directions anyway, and no one cares. I've learned, too, that it's best to apply my attention to the ground beneath my feet, wondering if it were true that God created the entire universe by simply uttering the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Sometimes, my eyes play tricks and I see glimmers of light, shiny flashes at my feet glittering then winking out. I'll bend over and find a piece of gold filling gummed around stone, re-fashioned by the heat and the weight of vehicle tires and human feet. Thinking about tanks and riots, the terrible ways someone's dental work could have ended up stuck in the mortar, I'll feel my stomach turning. Then I'll take a better look and discover it's just gold foil, a wrapper from a piece of candy that someone has dropped.

The best days are when Janusz drinks too much and comes to work with a hangover. Then all he can manage is holding a sign and I get the cans of paint and spray markings on the roadway, cryptic messages for the engineers, power and water workers. The surveyors get on my nerves every now and then. They think they have something on us because their transits and theodolites cost more than our spray guns and signs. They make such a big deal out of rolling and unrolling the blueprints, adding scribbles, frowning and cursing the city architects. Still, my heart catches at the sight of those inky papers rolled up in tubes. I like to think the blueprints are maps to America, a land of strange rumors. I'd heard the signs there had water bottle holders attached to them. Even stranger: radios without hand held receivers, just a thin wire hovering next to the mouth like an unfinished sentence, the words flying through the brave and cluttered air. I'll think these things, feel the blood in my veins move a little differently, but then the surveyors will unroll the paper and I'll see it's just another section of the city in cobalt blue, laid out in lines that make sense only to them or maybe the sewer guys. Owing to all of this, I've become a professional shrugger and have learned to dismiss the absurdity of my job and how I do or don't do it and the insult of fate that determined a man did not get to do what he wanted, but what he found least despicable.

When I was eighteen, I wanted to go to university and train for something big and vital like law or poetry. But then the Soviet years fell upon us and anyone with an inkling of imagination got assigned to the most mind-numbing jobs. Physics professors worked as window washers, and top scholars could be seen sweeping the trash and soot from out of the streets. University applicants from families of little standing were advised to make careers in the military, which back in 1967, seemed a good thing to do. You could feel unrest in the air, discontent breeding, and I thought for all its ills, the military would be stable.

After boot camp, owing to some incredible luck and my large frame, I was transferred to Special Forces where I trained alongside the Russians, our liberators. At night, while we slept in the bunkers, we would murmur strange litanies in our sleep: the parts of machine guns and their maintenance, tank defenses and formations, the proper dismantling procedures of a munitions dump, all spoken in a loving mixture of camaraderie and slurry Russian. Lulled by the soft sounds of a language that shared so many words with our own, I told myself that the Russians could our brothers. I believed in utopia. Then one summer in '68 the Russians came down White Mountain in tanks, over bridges and into the squares.

"You sons of bitches," my mother cried from the rooftop of our apartment building. We were watching a swift betrayal, a bad joke that even now we are still learning how to take.

Every historian I have ever met assures me that history is one big loop, a bad rerun. On the kind of day the sun boils the sky, I stood near Jana Palacha Square, the place where a young student was selected lottery-style to burn himself in an effort to make a lasting point. I began to think the historians were right. For once again, I was seeing everything that I had seen during the protests of twenty years earlier: huge blocks of young people, students and nurses mostly, crowding the square and holding signs calling for freedom and self-determination. The difference was that on this day I held a sign, too, though mine simply said YIELD which could be interpreted as a political statement but with my city-issue hard hat and work order, I had no reason to fear. Still, I knew how disposable bystanders could be here in occupied Prague, especially sign-holding bystanders, and I was afraid for the protestors.

The sky was humid, equal parts air and water and a strange stillness settled over the crowd. They didn't shout slogans or throw rocks. No one yelled into a microphone. The heavy closeness of the air that pressed us all into shifting postures, into people waiting for the idea they had carefully inked onto banners and placards: TRUTH. FREEDOM. Still, I felt as if I were watching a newsreel unspool with the sound muted, sure that something terrible and important would happen. Then the lorries arrived with the water cannons mounted over the cabs and I thought: This is it. They're going to blast them right out of the square. But to my surprise, the protestors dispersed peacefully.

That's when I first saw her. Moving with the crowd of students and fellow nurses, she wore a nurse's white hat stuck like a starched hankie on her head. To this day, I'm still not sure how, but across the distance of the square and all those people, still waving their signs for truth, the most beautiful woman in Prague spotted me. I'm not a good-looking man. I had never been very lucky with girls and I was genuinely surprised to see this woman thread toward me through the crush, walking with her back rod straight, her knees lifting into a near regulation march. I knew, then, that walking for her was some sort of resolution or act of defiance, and I wondered what she might be like in bed.

She smiled at me, a quick smile, a flash at the mouth, and then gone.

"Your back isn't straight," she said, dropping her placard on the pavement. It said TRUTH, and I liked the idea that a person might be summed up by one word, and if this were so, her word was truth.

"I'm a sloucher by nature. It's nothing serious," I said, straightening.

"Here." She took a step forward, placed one hand on my shoulder, another just below the curve of my spine. "Let me help you."

She had Ukranian eyes, a blue so steep they bordered on purple, and I stood there mesmerized.

"Relax," she said, pushing and pulling on me at the same time. I heard some popping from deep within my back and for a second, I was afraid to move.

"Better?" She pulled the pins out of her hair and wound a thick red braid around her finger. She tucked her braid back under her nurse's hat and wiped her hands against her hips.

I nodded and rubbed my back. "It's Zdena, by the way," she said holding out her hand. I have very large hands and a great fear of accidentally breaking people with them, so I closed my hand carefully around hers, which seemed as I held it in my palm, too small, even for her.

"I'm Mirek," I said, bending to retrieve her sign for her. "You're very courageous," I said.

"Ultimate truth—political and spiritual truth—is worth dying for."

I nodded and handed over her sign. I liked the idea that there were little truths and bigger, more important ones. Still, I remembered boot camp, what happened to some of the courageous Czech nationals who were good fighters but bad soldiers. I remembered, too, my mother raining rocks down on former comrades, and women, beautiful women like my sister, dancing in front of those tanks in '68, removing their clothes one garment at a time. At the foot of the St. Charles Bridge, in Karlova Street, in the Old Town Square, they seduced the tanks, stopping them to the strains of Swan Lake, and the Russian soldiers, most of them still boys, blushed in shame and excitement and confusion. But after those initial protests, we resigned ourselves to occupation: after all, it had become a well-practiced habit, a habit that suggested a tradition.

"Maybe so," I said at last, hiding my own sign behind the bulk of my body.

Zdena gave me another quicksilver smile and we agreed to meet for drinks after my shift. I could feel my crew boss, Janusz eyeing us, could almost hear him, sniffing the wind like a bloodhound on the scent of an unfamiliar idea: Mirek with a woman.

Over the next three months Zdena and I met as often as we could for drinks. She had Karel, her eight-year-old boy, to take care of and her shifts at the hospital were sporadic: frequently nurses and orderlies didn't show up for work and there was no compensatory pay those who filled in extra hours.

"If you only knew what went on in there," Zdena said one evening, wrinkling her nose. We were at a bar and Karel was at a soccer match with Max, Zdena's ex and Karel's real father. "Someone's been raiding the pharmacy. And then yesterday we ran out of anesthetic in the middle of an appendectomy. Fortunately, the patient was unconscious from the pain and later we rounded up a little extra morphine for her IV drip. After all, a person should only have to suffer so much," Zdena said, measuring a few centimeters of air between her forefinger and thumb.

She's right, I thought: A person should only have to endure so much. And I considered myself, then, how fate owed the ugly man something, a little happiness, some beauty even. But then I wondered what I would have to pay in return for it.

You don't plan to fall in love; you just do. Even better, love makes you stupidly, wonderfully blind—a medium-sized universal truth I was thrilled to discover. Because I loved her, I didn't care if Zdena entertained visions of being some kind of tireless activist in her off-hours. I didn't care that she already had an eight-year-old son, and with him, a permanent connection to Max who had broken clock lodged in his chest that unerringly prompted him to come around for Karel when it was least convenient. The heart is large enough for anything, I reminded myself. And I liked Karel. I liked that he looked more like Zdena than Max, and that there was something in Karel that reminded me of myself at his age. I imagined that over time, if I worked hard enough, we would have one of those father-son friendships everyone talks about but no one has. I wanted to teach him to fly-fish, on the Ledhuje, maybe, or the headwaters of the Vltava, tell him about girls, or be necessary in his life.

"I love kids," I said to Zdena on a date. We'd only gone out for about four months and it was one of those dates that could have gone either way. Still. I was feeling good enough to mention kids. We were at a pub and Karel was building a tower out of the beer mats.

Zdena crossed and re-crossed her legs, a gesture that meant she either needed to use the bathroom or wanted to go home.

"I mean that," I said.

Zdena didn't say anything. She probably had heard men say things like that all the time. Anything to get into her pants.

"Kids are wonderful."

Zdena studied Karel. "Sometimes," she said, reaching for her purse.

I took a gulp of beer. "Still. I wish I had a kid like Karel."

Zdena laughed. "Maybe you should drink less. Or maybe drink more."

We left then, Zdena and I holding hands, Karel jumping puddles along the curb. When we reached her apartment building, I opened the front door. Karel ducked under my arm and skipped down the corridor to their flat while Zdena stayed with me at the door. Her eyes shone silver in the blue darkness and I couldn't help myself. I got sentimental.

"Marry me." I said, backing her up against the wall. I bent down to give her a kiss.

Zdena smiled and dodged. "Sorry," she said.

"Okay. Then let's go inside. Together, now, and make kids like people should."

Zdena laughed and kicked my shin—hard—too hard to be teasing. "Sorry," she said again.

"Okay," I joked, stepping back. "Last chance. Move in with me, at least."

Zdena fumbled in her purse for her cigarettes. "You're crazy," she said, tossing her thick braid over her shoulder. "But OK. I'll do it."

Though Zdena assures me she is happy, she is as stingy as ever with her smiles, rationing them out for only special occasions. I used to think she was paying living tribute to the old Czech belief that a smile might be giving something away as joy on the face indicated sorrow in the soul. But then I realized one morning when I saw her in front of the mirror, pushing upward on her face with the heels of her palms that she was really just afraid of wrinkles. Because Karel is in primary school already, Zdena seems to think this makes her old even though she's got the face of a school girl and the kind of body that will never run to fat. Still, her thirty-fifth birthday, a time for taking inventory, was just a day away. I could tell by the way she ran her fingers over her face, noting her personal history bunching at the eyes and mouth, that Zdena didn't approve of what she saw.

"Don't throw me a party," Zdena warned.

"Too late," I said, wincing. Pavel's wife, Lujza, a woman whose voice could break rocks, had rung me up a few days earlier. Her voice had set a headache instantly brewing behind my right eye and so, as I held the receiver out from my ear, I simply nodded and made the clucking noises of agreement. "She's making a big Chinese dinner here and has already invited a bunch of girlfriends over for tomorrow night."

"That's all I need," Zdena said with a loud sigh, switching off the light and climbing into bed.

The next day, after work, I went for Zdena at the hospital. I walked past the nursing station, where an orderly and nurse fought with the plastic tubing of a plasma pack tangled around the IV pole. The mere sight of the pack, the color of bone marrow, made me go weak in the knees and I decided to wait for her outside. Finally, at six-thirty, Zdena appeared her hands wet and rubbed raw from the sanitizer. I could tell from the way she uncapped a tube of bright red lipstick, ran it over her lips in one quick movement, that she was upset. And now the party. I took her hand in mine and ran my thumb over the bones of her fingers.

"Don't worry so much," I said walking her toward our flat.

When we got there, I opened the door and saw that Lujza had rearranged all the furniture.

"Finally. You're here," Lujza said, spinning in a little circle with her arms outstretched. Pavel was there in the kitchen, handing out beers and a few of Zdena's girlfriends, women whose names I could never remember, were milling around drinking and comparing photos of their children. Pavel and Lujza's children were there as well, running around, playing hide and seek with Karel and making so much racket, the neighbors on both sides of the flat knocked on the walls. Zdena smiled, a long tight smile that gripped at her face and never left, the kind of smile that could be mistaken for a grimace of pain. She watched the children running and I knew she was counting to ten and then twenty and then a hundred, counting her way toward calmness.

We ate kneeling at our listing three-legged coffee table, our legs knuckled under, and our fluids gathering at the joints. I had never so badly wanted a party to end. I thought about the localized apartment thunder of the next-door women clomping up and down the stairs in their block-heeled shoes and how it was nothing compared to the sound of Lujza's children.

Lujza noticed Zdena's eyes following the children.

"Don't worry. You'll hear the patter of little feet soon." Lujza said, with pity, that miserable salve, and with a touch to Zdena's elbow. Zdena coughed and studied the ceiling.

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah," I piped up. "We're getting a pet dog next week." At the mention of a dog, the children grew quiet and Zdena forced a laugh. We're trying, dammit, I wanted to say. But why should I have to tell Lujza that? Whenever I think about it, I get a mental image of myself and Zdena, copulating in a mad frenzy, trying, but not getting it right, her friends sitting bedside with Olympic style placards with numbers on them, rating us on technical and artistic merits.

After our guests left, Zdena started cleaning up the flat, collecting a huge mound of uneaten fortune cookies. I sat at the kitchen table, depressed.

"We're not so young," Zdena said.

"You're thirty-five and I'm thirty-nine. That's not so old, either." I rubbed my forehead. The sound of Lujza's voice still rang in my ears. "Maybe there's something wrong with me," I said at last.

"Maybe so," Zdena said, slinging the sack of fortune cookies on top of the ancient refrigerator. "I've heard good things about a specialist whose office is just next to the hospital. He's very progressive, Mirek. Very Western," Zdena said, and I took her complimentary description as a sign I should go see him.

The next day, after work, I went to see Dr. Jindra, the doctor who specialized in man problems. I waited in his outer office heavy with smells of alcohol and sterilizer. I couldn't find anything good to read and imagined instead what kinds of questions he might ask me and how to tactfully answer them without acknowledging defeat.

When the nurse showed me in, I saw a treadmill next to the window and remembered what Zdena had said about Western technology and the mere presence of a machine launched a buoy of hope inside my chest. Dr. Jindra rose from behind a massive desk and gave me his hand.

"Whatever the problem, we'll get to the bottom of it." Dr. Jindra smiled and I noticed a gap in between his front teeth. We went through the whole routine then: blood pressure, temperature, turn your head and cough. "It's best to keep a light heart about all of this labor of love," Dr. Jindra said, pulling off the surgical gloves with a loud snap. "You don't want to get saddled with performance anxiety on top of everything else." Dr. Jindra said, smiling again.

I stood there thinking for a moment, waiting, I suppose, for Dr. Jindra to offer more cheer. The nurse returned, all crispy in her whites and handed me a cup with a twist-top lid and a packet of sanitized hand wipes. She had a funny pinched look on her face, like she was trying not to have an expression. Still smiling, Dr. Jindra shifted his weight from one foot to the other. "O.K., then," he said and I realized he was waiting for me to go fill the cup.

I followed the nurse to a small examination room, noting the swishy sounds her stockings made as they rubbed between her thick thighs and against the fabric of her starched uniform.

She opened the door for me. "Well. You know what to do. Some patients ran off with our reading materials last month, so I'm afraid I don't have anything interesting for you to look at." The nurse shrugged and I watched her face slide into that expressionless look again and I realized she was bored.

A week after my first visit, I reported in at Dr. Jindra's office of man troubles. The nurse at the desk in the outer office, a different one from the last time, gave me an ingratiating smile that gummed at the eyes and I wondered if that's why Zdena so rarely smiled: she had used them all up on the hospital patients. The nurse ushered me into Dr. Jindra's office and closed the door. Outside, in the corridor, I could hear Dr. Jindra rustling some papers. I paced around his office, hoping to find a sign of promise, an omen, in his careful grouping of licenses and the framed pictures of his children. I ran my hands over the smooth machinery of his treadmill. I noticed the belt was slack and saw that the treadmill was broken. Just then Dr. Jindra opened the door and made his way to his desk.

"Well, Mirek, your problems don't appear to be of a medical nature. Still, sometimes the parts rebel against the whole."

"So I'm not sterile?"

Dr. Jindra rubbed his neck and grimaced. "Your sperm count is normal, so it could just be a matter of timing. Maybe a change in the routine, a change in diet even, might help."

I pinched the bridge of my nose between my forefinger and thumb. "Diet?"

Dr. Jindra nodded. "One of my patients insists that when he started drinking more beer and eating less cabbage, things happened." Dr. Jindra rummaged around in his desk drawer. "So. You're probably just fine, unless, of course, it's psychosomatic. Either way, you might want to give this number a ring." He said, slipping a business card into my palm. It was the number of a support group for childless men. I had never known such groups existed.

"You know, Mirek, some couples buy pets and are just as happy, maybe even happier," Dr. Jindra said with a shrug.

"Pets?"

"It's just a suggestion," Dr. Jindra cleared his throat. I slid the card on the edge of the desk and stood up. I did not want any more smiles or counsel by despair.

The next day, a rainy day, one of those truly miserable days when you learn to know each raindrop by name, I stood mesmerized by the way water gave each stone a shine. I couldn't help but stare, looking for each of the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, looking, I suppose, for a sign, or for the unseen face of God in the fan shaped patterns of the stones. We were in Hradcany on Trziste, near the hostels, cutting concrete and enjoying the mess of traffic we were making. We had to block off half the street and the sidewalk, which gave us good opportunity to study some of the strange tourists they were letting in these days. As we were picking up for the day, a skinny teenager with spiky orange and purple hair and a razor blade dangling from a paper clip in his earlobe stood on the curb, finishing a smoke. His leather jacket had slogans and symbols painted on the back, and though I didn't know what they meant, I couldn't mistake the swastika tattooed on the back of his neck.

Pavel eyed the kid. I wanted to act like I didn't care, pretend that in this town of invisible Jews a swastika held no power. But I was afraid. I was afraid that terror would be as fashionable today as it was thirty years ago. I could see this kid, in another time with a different haircut shouting slogans in German and goose-stepping. The kid felt our eyes on his back and spit into the gutter. Then his shoulder dropped slightly and he turned to Pavel. He pulled a hand out of the coat pocket and ran his palm over the points of his spike.

"Haven't you ever done anything stupid?" He asked in English, and then I knew he wasn't out to destroy anyone, but was, instead, trying to make a statement, though he probably had no idea what he wanted to say.

Pavel rolled his eyes. "Yeah. I fucked a parrot once and thought you might be my kid." Pavel pulled out a cigarette and lit up, dismissing the skinhead or punker or whatever the hell he was with a quick flick of his silver snap-lid lighter.

We finished packing up then and went to drink where we always drink—Tamaren's, a pub tucked on a side street few people find, which is how, I think, Tamaren preferred it. We walked in past the bar, where Tamaren had his suitcases behind the counter, packed and ready to go. For as long as I had known him, Tamaren brought his suitcases stuffed full of shirts, underwear and socks to work with him, ready for sudden evacuation.

We found a table and Libuse, Tamaren's wife, brought over a couple of pints. From the contents of his suitcases and the remarks he made about her spreading ass, I'd gathered that Tamaren had no plans of taking his wife along if such an evacuation ever occurred.

"I'm thinking of hiring on at the plastics factory. They need fork lift drivers." Pavel said.

"Don't do it." I said, reaching for my beer. The beer was almost the exact shade as the vinegar in their bottles, all in a row in the middle of the table. Tamaren liked to keep the lights low and save on fuel and in the dim light of the pub, I noticed it was easy to mistake things. More than once, I'd winked at women sitting across the bar and lived to regret it.

"It's double what I make now, plus hazard bonuses." Pavel reached for the bottle of vinegar.

I had heard stories of the plastics factories, of the many explosions and the expendable workers. "That won't mean much when they find your arm two kilometers away. Or maybe it'll be your watch and nothing else."

"I don't care if I die from it. After all, you have to die sometime." He said at last, reaching for a bottle of vinegar.

Hearing Pavel talk like that made me want to throw up my hands and protest. To stamp my feet and say, No, and say it loudly with a confidence I didn't feel.

"What's this life for, anyway?" Pavel turned to me.

I scratched my head and shrugged again. "I don't know. I used to think it was all about procreation."
Pavel planted his elbows on the table and leaned in toward me. "You can have my kids. All three of them. And I mean that."

After drinking, I came home, depressed. Zdena met me in the kitchen. "So?" She asked.

"So nothing. We're in a rut, maybe. The doctor suggests a change in diet or buying a pet."

Zdena licked her forefinger, pressed it on the crumbs on the tabletop and went to the sink and rinsed her finger. "A pet might not be a bad idea," she said, turning the tap off.

"What?" I felt my stomach catching.

"Especially since everything's so uncertain now."

I had to work hard to resist the urge to press my palms hard into my eye sockets.

"It's not the end of the world." Zdena continued, wiping her hands on her skirt. "We have Karel, after all."

I put my elbows on the table and rested by face in my hands. Maybe I wanted a kid for all the wrong reasons and God, who knew better, was punishing me for my incredible selfishness. I wished, then, I had a cause to give myself over to, could sacrifice my body, but good causes were hard to come by. Still, I wanted to count for something or to someone. A freshly harvested lung could go for fifty thousand American dollars, I'd heard from Zdena.

"I want to do something that matters." I said, my voice muffled in my hands.

Zdena turned the tap on and started scrubbing the skins off the vegetables.

"Why not give blood?" She asked. I felt movement in my stomach and the taste of bile at the back of my throat. I swallowed hard and rubbed the back of my neck.

Zdena turned off the tap and dried her hands on a towel. "Let me help you, Mirek." Zdena approached her hands outstretched.

"No. Please. Please don't," I said, putting my hands on the table and rising.

"Hold still!" Zdena moved in and pushed me back into the chair, and facing me, ground one knee into my thigh and wrenched on my shoulders. I held my breath and waited for the popping to stop.

"That's better now, isn't it?"

"Yes. OK. Better." I stood up and limped toward the toilet, locking myself in behind the door. I unbuckled my belt, pulled down my trousers and sat on the toilet and thought about household pets. Though I'd heard they smelled funny, I liked the idea of a turtle. I envied the turtle for his half-shell. What would it be like to be built of bone so thick it could withstand the weight of water and the force of wind, of threats real and imagined? And turtles tended to live long, I'd heard. They could coax a grace from their thick muscled bodies so long as they stayed in water. They could afford to be fractious if they wanted to, those snapping turtles that could still bite even after they were dead.

After a few minutes I could hear Zdena's footfalls in the hallway. "What are you doing in there?" She knocked at the bathroom door and I sighed, imagining my neck disappearing into a hollow cavity of chest.

There was no paper on the toilet roll. I twisted toward the cabinet under the sink and fished for some tissue. I could feel little tubes and bottles and way in the back, a paper sack. I pulled it out and ripped the brown paper into long strips. As I did, a thin round plastic case fell out and I opened it up. Inside the case were tiny numbered compartments, thirty-one of them, each compartment large enough for one small pill, most of them empty with just a few tiny pills left for the last days of the month. What an idiot I had been. Zdena had been dropping clues all along, but with my eyes at the cobblestones, I hadn't seen them. She had never stopped using her birth control. I wanted to bash my head against the bathroom wall and bray like a donkey, like the ass I was for putting myself though the humiliation of Dr. Jindra's office visits. I wanted to cry, too, for all the little people who'd been lost inside of Zdena.

I finished with the paper strips and washed my hands. But I couldn't decide what to do with the pill case. I could pretend I'd never seen it, could stuff it in the back of the cabinet in a new paper bag. I could flush it down the toilet. I played out the various scenarios and no matter how I played them, I always came out looking like an idiot. I wondered, then, why Zdena had even bothered suggesting a visit to Dr Jindra. I wondered too, about the distinction between the little and the big truths, even more importantly, all the different kinds of lies people can tell. Then I thought, this is bullshit, all this thinking, and finally decided to leave the case out in plain sight, there on top of the commode tank. Without a word, I left the bathroom and went to bed, determined to fall asleep and snore loudly.

The next day I went to work earlier than usual. That was the day I forgot about looking for God in the streets and about asking difficult questions that have, at best, half-answers. In my thirty-nine years, I've discovered that, usually, that's the most you ever get to any important question. Still, you'd think for all the red, blue and yellow hatch marks, stripes and arrows I've painted, that I would be able to read the signs, to look and understand what it is I'm seeing or achieve some sort of special clarity—but I haven't. I just hold a sign and shout into a hand held radio that spits back static, and am finding it harder to believe in unseen things, to believe that the invisible ear of God hears. I hadn't given up though—not yet—and for this little show of courage I congratulated myself. I'm doing pretty good, I told myself. But then I remembered all the people I've known, some of them friends and family, who used to think that way and I wondered for how much longer I would hold out.

After work, I sat at the kitchen table where Karel was gluing his science project together: a model of a globe with interlocking tectonic pieces he'd cut out from cardboard. Zdena was due home soon and I wondered which way it would go: a quiet and determined break-up that was swift and clean, or a bitter and loud one with shouting and accusations and many tears.

I watched Karel juggling the pieces and trying to force the fit. I didn't want him to know his mother and I were at odds. There is no such thing as a second childhood, though I've seen grown men tire trying to find it, and I didn't want to ruin his world of science projects and schoolboy intrigues. Still, I wanted us to be friends. I drummed my fingers on the tabletop then leaned over and reached for his football. "You want to kick the ball around?" I dribbled and trapped the ball against the side of his chair.

"No. Maybe later." He said without looking up. I thought I could detect a note of pity for me in his voice. "Max bought a black and white TV last week and I'm going to his house to watch it." Karel snapped the polar caps into place and slid off his chair for his room leaving his cardboard globe to weep glue on the tabletop. I slid some newspaper underneath the dripping mess and pinched the bridge of my nose. I could feel a headache sparking behind my eyes and decided to help it along with some slivovice I kept on top of the refrigerator. I saw the bag of fortune cookies up there, too, and brought the entire bag to the table and crumbled them, looking for that one fortune that would tell me how a man should live.

Just then I heard Max's tentative knocks at the door. "Come on in," I called. Max opened the door carefully, as if he were afraid of what he'd find waiting behind the door.

"Hey, Mirek." Max took a few steps. I crumbled another fortune cookie between my fingers and pulled out a tiny slip of paper.

"The purpose of the life is to die with purpose." I quoted, reaching for another cookie.

"Sorry?"

"Those who give, live," I read.

Max spotted Karel coming through the hallway with his coat. "I'm just here to pick up Karel."

"Sure. Why not." I said. "You are a kind-hearted person, intent on others." This one I crumpled into a tiny ball and threw towards Max. "Want a drink?" I held up my shot glass.

"No thanks," he said, backing though the open door and into the corridor. Karel followed without a word.

The light through the windows made slanting bars on the kitchen wall and table Zdena came in with a clattering of keys. She held the plastic disk of pills in her hand and set it on the table in front of me.

"So you know." Zdena pulled a cigarette out of her purse.

I nodded. Then I laughed, a strange laugh stuck at the back of my throat. "I really thought there was something wrong with me." I said and pointed to my crotch.

Zdena pursed her lips and exhaled in a series of small puffs, a smoker's soundless laugh.

"I'm sorry, Mirek."

I shrugged.

"I think Karel and I should leave. And," Zdena exhaled more smoke, "maybe you should find a woman who doesn't already have all the children she wants." Zdena's eyes were the soft colors of irises over-bloomed, a fading purple I'd never seen before, and likely never would. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

"Yes," I sighed. "That's something to really think about." I didn't care anymore, was tired of caring. I put my palms over my ears.

"Don't be angry with me." Zdena said, and I could tell she wanted me to have hope, to be hopeful for her return and optimistic about her sex in general.

"I'm not angry." I said, but even as I said it, I knew it was a lie. I slammed my fist down hard on the kitchen table and Karel's globe rolled off the edge. Zdena took a step back and I realized that for the first time she had known me, I had frightened her.

"I'm sorry. I'll fix it." I said, pointing to the pieces of the globe. Then I looked at her face, which had become impossible to decipher. And I wondered what it would take for one person to really understand another. Here she was, right there in front of me, so close I could reach out with my hand and touch her hair, or hit her. Either way, it would make no difference because she was already gone. I looked at her purse, that leather, oversize handbag that looked like a goat's bladder, and suddenly I just wanted her to hurry up and go.

Zdena pulled her purse strap onto her shoulder and moved her thick red braid from one shoulder to the other. I think she wanted me to give her a goodbye kiss and I wanted to be able to. It would be so easy, the easiest lie, to tell myself this is just a date, one of those tremulous first dates when you are still learning how to read each other, a date ending a little too early. I could close my eyes, lean in and brush my lips against her cheek, against the bones of her face, which I have memorized the way some people chart stars.

I downed another shot and walked Zdena outside, my arm draped around her shoulders. The sky seemed stuck in a lilac dusk, reluctant to change out for night. Overhead the swifts sliced through the sky, with such speed and grace, I wished I could be a bird. Though winter was passing, had passed, they were still flying South.

"Somebody better get those birds going in the right direction," I muttered, my breath singing with alcohol. Zdena shrugged off my arm.

I turned to her, surprised to see her eyes were wet with unshed tears. I knew well enough they weren't for me, but for the situation itself. She'd return to her mother's, or perhaps move in with Max. I took a quick breath through my nose and turned my gaze to the green stars glowing slowly to life like the engine bulbs of the diesels.

"So. What will you do?" Zdena asked.

"I think I'll buy a pet. Maybe a turtle."

Zdena laughed. "What are you going to do with a turtle?"

"Feed it." I said. I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned my gaze upward.

"Well, that's it then," she said, pulling away.

"I guess." In my mind her bags were already packed and I was flying with the backward traveling birds to places she'd never dreamed of, traveling to a land with no true boundaries.

I could feel an awakening, then, that cough at the balls, and a stirring in the ground, from the river mud and the air above the ground. The season had turned on a hairpin, and with it Zdena. I knew I would miss all the early spring smells of smoke and burning coal, the morning sounds of the arthritic water heater creaking to life, the rain water running down the warped panes that transformed ordinary sights into something surreal and worth looking at, and then of course, I would miss Zdena.

I'm not looking for God in the stones, nor in the stars, either. I've bought a turtle and don't mind the stink at all. Today I put dried insects in a tiny dish for him and while I was waiting for his little head to emerge, I noticed on the back of his shell characters resembling the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph rests above his tail and sweeping upward in overlapping scales are Beth, Gimel, Daleth, and then another Beth.

I traced the lines and shapes carefully, remembering a hidden map of the United States and Canada I'd lovingly folded and unfolded so many times, that entire cities too close to the folds had disappeared. I would like to go to Montana, a place I imagined to be the tea colored water of my dreams, a place where I will feel pangs not at all unlike those of a true-felt religion. Overhead, in the herringbone sky of cloud and blue, I would see the migration of birds to a place without boundaries or lines, to a land of gold fillings, to filaments and stars. Below me the burning mustard, long cool fields of wet and green, sky veiled in water, rust at the beets, and in my lungs, only the tiniest kicks, tickles really, reminders that I am virile, and alive.

Visit Gina Ochsner as Image Artist of the Month for February '03

Issue #31 • Summer 2001