“No, no,” Bouboule insisted, “you keep them. I’ll find you nicer ones. What’s your address?”
“No fixed address. No net address. Really, I’m just passing through.”
“Come and stay with me, if the wanderjahr takes you to Stuttgart. There’s plenty of room at my uncles’.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” said Maya. “You’re both so kind and generous to me—I scarcely know what to say.”
Benedetta and Bouboule exchanged the oddly guileless glances of young sophisticates. “Not at all,” said Benedetta. “We have our own little ways. We can always tell when we discover a sister spirit.”
“In the scene we are modern women,” declared Bouboule somberly, “who have made the decision to live free! We all have desires that don’t accord with the status quo. We are contemporary women! We gaze at the stars all together, or we die one by one in the gutter.”
Bouboule bent over suddenly. “What’s that? Oh, look, Patapouff found a nice mosquito! It’s a lucky sign. Let’s test our blood and do some stickers to celebrate. Something very warm and cozy.”
“I don’t know,” Benedetta demurred, “my lipid levels are so low lately.… Maybe a mineral water.”
“Me, too,” Maya said.
“Let’s get some nice boy to fetch us a drink,” said Bouboule. She plucked up the inert fabric computer and flapped it over her head.
“Who’s that guy that brought you?” Benedetta said to Maya. “Eugene?”
“I didn’t come here with Eugene.”
“Eugene is an idiot, isn’t he? I hate people who confuse algorithms and archetypes. Besides, he’s from Toronto.”
“
“Toronto’s not in Quebec,” Maya said.
“
“You’ve stolen the party, Benedetta,” said Paul, smiling. “This is Emil, from Praha. He’s a ceramicist. Emil, this is Maya, a model, and Benedetta, a programmer. And this is Bouboule. She’s our industry patroness.”
Emil bowed to Bouboule. “I’m told that we have met.”
“In a way,” said Bouboule, her face clouding. She rose, kissed Emil’s cheek briefly, and walked away. The marmoset ran after her and bounded onto her shoulder.
“They were lovers once,” Benedetta explained, wrinkling her nose.
Emil sat down mournfully. “Was I really that woman’s lover?”
“Don’t talk scandal, Benedetta,” Paul chided. “Let me see the furoshiki.” He set his notebook down. “Emil, this device is fascinating, you should watch this closely” He rolled up his sleeves.
Emil glanced at Maya. He had lovely dark eyes. “Were
“Why do you ask?” Maya said.
Emil sighed bitterly. “Paul is so persuasive,” he muttered. “He always convinces me to attend these parties of his, and then I commit some terrible faux pas.”
Paul glanced up from his screen. “Stop whining, Emil. You’re doing fine tonight. Come look at this device, this will cheer you up. It’s marvelous.”
“I’m not a digital person, Paul. I like clay. Clay! The least digital substance on earth.”
“You have really good English,” Maya said, moving closer.
“Thank you, my dear. You’re certain we’ve never met?”
“Never. I’ve never been to Praha.”
“Then you should let me show you the city.”
Maya glanced at Paul and Benedetta. They had launched into furious Italiano, enraptured by the fabric machine. “That might be very nice,” she said slowly. “What are you doing after this party?”
“What am I doing at this moment?” countered Emil. “Embarrassing myself and everyone, that is what. Let’s go for a walk. I need fresh air.”
Maya gazed slowly around the subterranean bar. No one was watching them. No one cared what she did. She was perfectly free. She could do whatever she pleased. “All right,” she said. “If you like.”
She found her red jacket. Emil found a long dirty coat and a slouch hat. There was no sign of Klaudia. “I have a friend here at the Tete,” she told Emil. “We’ll have to come back for her. Just a little walk around the block, all right?”
Emil nodded absently. They left the Tete. Emil stuffed his large bony hands in his coat pockets. The night was clear and still, and growing colder steadily. He began walking up Opatovicka Street.
“Are you hungry?” Emil asked.
“No.”
Emil walked on silently, staring at the pavement. They passed streets with utterly impossible names: Kremencova, Vjircharich, Ostrovni.
“Shouldn’t we be going back?” Maya said.
“I’m having a crisis,” Emil confessed wearily.
“What kind of crisis?”
“I shouldn’t tell you. It’s a complicated story.”
Emil had a Czech British accent. She could scarcely believe she was walking through such a lovely city, on a cold clear night, hearing such a touchingly exotic version of her own language. “I don’t mind. Everyone has troubles.”
“I’m forty-five years old.”
“Why is that a crisis?”
“It’s not my age,” said Emil, “it’s the steps I took to evade my other difficulties. You see, I was a potter. I was a potter for twenty-five years.”
“Yes?”
“I was a bad potter. A wheel kicker, a mud dauber. Technically adept, but lacking the holy fire. I couldn’t commit myself wholly to the craft, and the better I became at technique, the less inspiration I felt. I was sickened by my own inadequacies.”
“That sounds very serious.”
“It’s all right to be a happy amateur. And it’s all right to be truly gifted. But to be competent and middling bad at an artifice that you care about—that’s a nightmare.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Maya said.
This remark seemed to crush Emil completely. He pulled the slouch hat down over his eyes and trudged.
“Emil,” she said at last, “would it help you to talk in Czestina? I happen to have a Czech translation unit with me.”
“Maybe you can’t understand, but my life was untenable,” Emil said. “I decided I had gone too far. I had to erase my mistakes, and try to start again. So, I talked to some friends. Tincture people. Very hard-case tincture people. I got them to give me a very strong broad-spectrum amnesiac.”
“Oh, dear.”
“I injected it. When I woke up next morning, I couldn’t even talk. I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, or even what I was. I didn’t know what a potter’s wheel was. All I saw was that I was in a studio and there was a wheel and a lump of damp mud in a bag. And broken pots. Of course I’d broken all my worthless ugly pots the night before, before,” he smacked his skull with the flat of his hand, “before I broke my own head.”
“Then what?”
“I put the mud on the wheel, I spun it, and I could work clay. It was a miracle. I could do clay without any thought, without any doubt. I knew nothing about clay and yet the skill came out of my hands. Clay was all I had— all that I was. Clay was all that was left of me. I was an animal that made pots.”
Emil laughed. “I made pots for a year. They were very good pots. Everyone said so. I sold all of them. To big collectors. For big money. I had the gift now, you see. At last I was good.”
“That’s quite a story. What did you do then?”
“Oh, I took my money and learned again how to read and write. Also, I took English lessons. I never could learn English properly before, but, in the state I was in, English was easy. Bit by bit, some of my old memories came back. Most of my personality is gone forever. No great loss. I was never happy.”
