Promise Me You Will Not Look for Me

I

I board the night train at Praha hlavní nádraží. In my wallet, a handwritten note with a name, a phone number, and an address for my place of employment. The car is divided into small cabins with beds that fold down from the walls and in mine it’s only me and an old man with a bald head, drinking beer from a can. We don’t share a language. He smiles. The old man gives me an apple, a thin white breadroll, and a tin of meat paste. I wonder if I look hungry, or just lost.

In the cabin next to me and the old man, there’s a family. They’re fighting. None of us share a language. They’re yelling at each other. I walk to the bathroom. I peek into their cabin. There’s an old woman sitting silently while her children, maybe, her grandchildren, maybe, scream. She says something but they don’t listen. In my cabin, the old man shakes his head and beats his palm against our shared wall. A train worker talks to the family. He tries Slovak. He tries German. He tries English. He asks if either of us speak French or Russian or Vietnamese. I shake my head. The old man says that he speaks Polish and Russian. This is as much as I know. The family keeps fighting. It’s getting light. I look at my watch.

The old man touches my arm, points outside, says Poprad-Tatry. The brakes squeal. I jump up and say thank you. I reach up to the overhead rack for my suitcase. The old man says no no and lifts my suitcase down from the rack and carries it out into the hall. I follow.

In the cabin next to us, only the grandmother, reading a newspaper.

Through the window I watch the train platform blur and then stop. I step down onto the cement and look for anyone who might be looking for me. The old man reaches through the open door. He hands a gold-embossed blue card to me. I take it. The train pulls away from the platform.

On the side of the train station, a banner for The Original Bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Original, it says, and then, v zmesi 11 byliniek a korením podľa tajného receptu plukovníka Sandersa. I unfold my handwritten note and dial the number.

II

To remain in the country, I need a stamp on my papers. To get the stamp on my papers, I need to go to the police headquarters in the regional capital.

I walk across an abandoned lot pocked with mud toward what must be the police building, although it doesn’t look like how I expected. The ground floor windows are broken. I enter through a door that lilts half open. A sheet of white paper taped to the wall reads imigračná polícia. I took the bus here, two buses, following the route numbers that I wrote on a sticky-note. There’s glass on the floor and a single staircase.

Up the staircase, the walls covered in posters declaring fight human trafficking. At the top, I shake a metal door, say hello and then ahoj and hold up my passport. A man walks toward me. He’s wearing all black with the broken foot-piece coat of arms sewn into his Kevlar, a beret folded onto his left shoulder. I say, dobrý deň, imigračná polícia prosim. The man is silent. I’m out of words. He reaches his arm through the bars and grips my passport. I release it. I set my backpack on the floor. The man watches me. I hand my papers through the bars. He walks away.

I’m alone at the top of the staircase. Pasted to the walls behind and on either side of me, images of naked girls. There’s nowhere else to look.

The man returns. He pulls a key from a pocket on his Kevlar and unlocks the deadbolt. He waves me through the door. We walk past an office and down a hallway lined with empty cells. At the hallway’s end we stop at another metal door. People line the room’s perimeter. The elderly occupy the few yellow chairs. The man motions me inside.

His key scrapes in the door behind me. People speak in hushed voices. No one looks at another, but we’re pressed shoulder to shoulder. It’s early fall and cold outside but the sun is hot through the high windows. Their passports are blue like mine, but they don’t mean the same thing.

I wait.

In the office next to the cell, a woman wearing a black-billed green uniform hat that dwarfs her head looks through my papers. We sit in silence. She writes notes that I can’t understand and tapes them to the top page of my residency application and hands it back. I say yes okay and then the man in black returns to escort me through the gauntlet of bodies, out past the empty cells and the office, and into the girl-lined stairwell. He locks the door behind me.

III

I share a living space with some workers. That’s what Želka calls them. Some workers will stay for some time, one week maybe, two weeks maybe. Želka asks me to tell her if they are loud. There are seven workers. They wear two-tone zip front jumpsuits with large black patches on the knees. Indoors they are mostly in their underwear. They have tattoos of saints and tridents, and jeweled double-crosses on gold chains. At night, when I rewatch L’Avventura, they go to the pub, return late, and rise early. They are very quiet. I hear their footsteps coming up the stairs while Monica Vitti looks at a Roman pot, recently shattered.

In the afternoons, I return from teaching English and walk up the iron spiral staircase to the balcony, and the workers are there, bare tattooed torsos in the sun, with their jumpsuits tied around their waists. They offer me cigarettes and tomatoes. I have accepted this as normal. At school, students bring me apples, plums, pears, carrots. This is from our home. There seems to be a lot of pride in that. In the winter they’ll give me slivka and hruška, always from our home but also for your health.

The worker who looks the oldest speaks to me in German, then a little English. He points at me. Deutsche? He says something to a younger man, who is sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. The younger man asks what is your name, then where are you from. The older man turns to me and repeats what is your name. He points at himself. Sasha. He points at the younger man at the table. Oleg. Sasha picks up an apple from a bag at his feet and puts it in my hand. Where you are from? The United States, I tell him. The older man who is Sasha puts his arm around my shoulder. A real American. Sasha says each sound slowly and carefully. He talks again to Oleg and Oleg says why you are here. Sasha says yes yes why you are here? He smells like tar and onions. On the cover of Oleg’s magazine a nude woman lounges on the hood of an American car. I’m here teaching, I say, at the gymnázium. For a moment Sasha is silent. He speaks to Oleg. Oleg says this is good, je dobré, je dobré, he wants to tell you that this is good and that maybe you will learn something.

The apple is cold and smooth in my hand. Sasha pours three shots from a clear plastic bottle. He hands one to Oleg and one to me. This is our medicine, says Oleg, this will make you strong. We toast. The liquor tastes like honeysuckle smells, then the sweetness morphs into an alkaline burn that travels from my throat to my stomach, my nose, my ears, my eyes. I cough and then sneeze. The two men laugh. Oleg bites into an onion like an apple. He hands the onion to Sasha, who does the same. Sasha hands the onion to me and I bite. My eyes sting. Then the burning stops. See, now you are a real Slav, says Oleg. You will tell this to some students, that you have learned something.

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Harrison F. Dietzman lives in Portland, OR. His writing appears in The Point, Guernica and elsewhere.