After those two unsettling tours, I joined townsfolk lunching under maple trees at a pizza restaurant. Biting into a slice of thin-crust basil and cheese, I counted myself lucky not to have lived in a time of rich Burghers and poor peasants staving off the plague as crazy monks concocted macabre art installations.
By five o'clock the autumn air cooled, the robin's-egg blue sky had deepened into navy, and I zipped up my sweater. It was time to return to Prague. Reading on an outdoor train station bench while occasionally checking the track for oncoming engines, I regretted not bringing a heavier jacket.
After an hour, I hopped on to a warm train car. A dark landscape passed by outside my window. Home, home, home to Prague, the wheels rumbled....Home, home, home to my little apartment. Good day. Weird but interesting.
A young blonde conductor moved down the row, clicking her metal hole-punch on passenger tickets. She smiled and took mine. I was so content thawing out my chilled body and fantasizing about a hot bowl of borscht that I didn't notice her expression until she rattled off something in decidedly stressed Czech. She shook both her head and my ticket in my face. I was on the wrong train, barreling off in the wrong direction.
Hovno.
The train stopped to kick me off into the middle of God-knows-where in the Czech Republic. A station sat empty but for a lonely ticket seller, a young man with about three words of English to match my three words of Czech. His few were mostly taken up chastising himself. Apparently, his wife had been nagging him. She say, learn English! He wore a pained look and banged his fist on the counter. I consoled him and considered patting his hand, but that seemed a tad forward. The guy really needed a hug, but we weren't going there.
Okay, look...we'll figure this out. I need a ticket to Prague. I have to get to Prague...Praha...tonight. My finger tapped at my watch. He attempted to explain that it would be two tickets, two trains, and not for another hour.
Travel is a leap of faith. Despite being cold and tired, and despite the nightmare visuals from Kutná Hora in my brain, I trusted somehow, some way, this young man would get me back to Prague.
For an hour, no one else came in or out of the station. What a lonely job for this guy...late at night in the middle of...where, exactly? We occasionally eyed one another and shared the self-conscious smiles of people who do not speak the same language. We bobbed our heads like popinjays until I heard the welcome squeal of train brakes. My friend pointed and nodded and I danced an international goodbye polka before jumping aboard.
I finally arrived back in Prague later that night, my travel confidence soaring with the surefootedness borne of surviving on foreign soil. I remembered my trepidation back in my Los Angeles apartment. And I thought of William back in our Berlin apartment.
Was he eating a sausage with mustard before going to sleep? Was he wondering where I was? I wanted to say Guess what I saw today and I got so lost in the dark of night and it was so cold and the language undid me but I made my way back and here I am in a Prague restaurant eating pork medallions in cognac sauce with boiled potatoes and a glass of red wine all for seven dollars. And I miss you so, so much.
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