Hana

This essay appears online in TELEPHONE Whispering a message among art forms.

It is true. Today she has been dead far longer than I knew her while she was alive. But there are these afternoons when I sit inside the silence of a room after my children leave it—the air concussed by their absence, the winter or summer or autumnal sun framing the windows, bathing the space with a resuscitating light, the architectures of cities returning, the bodies and the rooms I’ve known: maps upon a past that is and is not my own. Or, when I see the figure of her in the crows that alight in the branches of the oak tree behind my house and on the wires over the streets that I walk with my dog in the evenings, the glow of the sky in the West and the crows silent and watching except for when something is wrong and they go wild with rage, or whatever it is that crows feel where there is something to say. Her sharp, ivory clavicles. The bones of her spine naked in the daylight. 

I was 28 years old when I moved to Prague from Chicago. October. My first bed in the city was made from particleboard wrapped in a rough, sallow carpet and a bedsheet that Jason found rumpled in the corner of the kitchen. The apartment—we called it a “flat,” though I had never before used that term—sat a couple of blocks from the main square, Václavské Námĕstí, epicenter of Prague’s tourist trade. Vendors tended klobasa the size of baby arms and sweaty fronds of bramboračky. From the balcony, Jason and I could smell the fat and hear Germans and Italians haggle the prices of “Czech Me Out” t-shirts and furry Bolshevik caps with Soviet Stars. Soon it was winter. The pimps wore Timberland boots and heavy parkas and steel-billed baseball caps that glinted meanly in the light. Gold rings. Rubies. Medallions flashing at the neck. We called them “The Harolds.” The girls were thin. Skinny jeans, pink boas. Sharp, milky jaws. Puffy coats shiny as rain. The Harolds shouted out adverts.

Veronika’s your Nikita 

Jana blows like Al Quaeda 

Get a nut off on Anezka 

Only 2,000 koruna 

Jason and I would look once or twice and push our faces into the upturned collars of our winter jackets, thinking some things but saying nothing. In this way we blended into the city. Two more figures in winter moving past the windows of cellphone shops and boutiques filled with Russian crystal, shot glasses stamped with Union Jacks. The spires and the cobble dark with time. Butchers set up shop and gutted carp in the streets at Christmas, the fish moving in buckets like slugs of black muscle. The cold smelled of water and blood. Salt on the ice beneath our boots. Seven weeks of dog piss frozen in the drifts beside the trams. 

The winter before this one, I watched the shore of Chicago freeze in giant bones of jags and ice, wind swords and knives, sky ashen. The neighbor I never met played piano in the mornings, and closing my eyes I would imagine a person without a face at their window looking past the notes of Chopin to the white fields of the lake—hands thick with playing, imbricated in veins. The sun stuck at the horizon, smeary with snow. 

Today, my daughter tells me of a dream she keeps having, as if the dream were a dish served time and again by the exhaustion of a father. “I’m with my friends,” she says. “We are running in a field. There’s a void,” she uses words like this now, “that takes us up, one after another. And right as the void is getting ready to take me, too, I wake up.” I’m listening now, pulling my gaze back to her face that is made with parts of my face. “My friends,” she says, “we’re all having the same dream. We share it, Daddy. I think that’s what makes it a dream.”

Hana and I kissed on the fancy red sectional couch in her writing studio. I called this particular piece of furniture “Amsterdam” because it looked like something a person would buy in Amsterdam. Also, the sectional was clearly expensive. I had no money. This was nothing new for me but it was, for the first time in my life, an embarrassment, and so I fuzzed over this strange, new shame with a joke, a diss. Amsterdam was beautiful. And on the internet, you’ll find a portrait of Hana on Amsterdam wearing a black sweater and looking not unlike herself on the day we kissed and I made my joke, and she bent her face into mine as her way of saying, “Okay, yes.”  

I’m older than Hana now. But when we met and fell eventually into love, she was 39 and I was 29. The decade between us was not the only difference. She was wealthy and stunning and her writing made her famous in Czech literary circles. I taught conversational English two days a week at a pharmaceutical company on the outskirts of Prague, I didn’t have a bank account, and the most I had published was a short story in The Massachusetts Review and another in a zine printed in Paris. Other differences included my sexual disquietude and shy undressing and cock failing, for a time, to rise until I could trust her hands on my body. There was my monolingual stutter. My inability to competently order dinner in a restaurant with her friends, one of the fourteen declensions of Czech stuck in my mouth like a splinter. My dearth of vocabulary—glossing over the language in the complex novels I read. My literary explications that were, pretty much, total horseshit. God, what else? Her ex-boyfriend, the New York investment banker turned professional opera singer. Her cooking with exotic oils and tempeh. Her sobriety and symmetry. Her posture. My love of beer. Her just-about-everything that I measured everything about me against, instead of just seeing her as a person I loved and was lucky to know. 

After she left me, I took a job in Baku, Azerbaijan, and moved into a sweeping three-bedroom apartment on the shores of the Caspian. The morning like light off an old reel of film‚ blinking and granular—a moth in the aperture. The punctuation of harbor cranes and tankers in the port. Cyrillic, Azeri. Dust. Concrete and steel rebar ripped upward toward the sky. Prayers blaring from loudspeakers in the peaks of the minarets. Seagulls perched dirtily in the alleys. A city of sprawl and stone, anchored to the sea with pipe and wire.  

I wrote her letters that she didn’t answer. “Dear Hana. Street lamps light up the sandy motes on the leaves, an undercarriage of fire and shadow in the trees. They say Baku means Black City, and Azerbaijan is Fire Ground or Fire Earth or Place of Fire. Towards Qobustan cows graze in the grass between the broken medians of the highway. Rigs rise like silos out of the sea. Oil seeps through crags in the orogen, wetting the rock. I think of Prague—of the cobble and the spires and The Harolds, the cold bundling the city like a jacket. Here in Azerbaijan fires light spontaneously on the roadsides and old women are paid by the government to beat at the flames with wet rags, and still everywhere your face your fire your hands your name—the mouth that you put here, and here, and here.” 

The truth is I hardly remember any of this. And that if it wasn’t for the files on my computer or the internet where Hana is still alive, I could never recompose her or our words or the archipelago of images that puzzle together my memories in peripatetic motion. 

I know that after Hana left, I cried for weeks in a basement apartment on a hillside in Prague before taking that job in Baku. And later, Hana got breast cancer, traveled to the Amazon, came home, wrote a book, and died. And later, my wife got breast cancer, too, and survived. 

I know the sounds the crows make in the trees of my neighborhood. I know the city where I live with my family is living with heatwaves, wildfires, and way-too-expensive housing. Fentanyl. Trash. Plywood in place of glass. The shape of things to come. 

And I know the last time Hana and I kissed. It was here in Portland, Oregon. She was returning from healing in the Amazon, having forgone chemo. Her bones were sharper, her skin like a synthetic sheen keeping her safe from the elements on a distant moon. 

She was staying with my parents a few days before traveling to Arizona for more healing. We took walks through the expensive neighborhood where I was living now with my girlfriend. We talked about my job at the university. I remember her smiling and saying that maybe if she had known how all of this would have worked out, gesturing to my figure in these surroundings, she would have stayed. But maybe I remember that wrong. 

Maybe it’s not even right to remember how later that evening, in the home where I grew up, sitting next her on the couch in the basement, a shitty green American couch, the late summer radiating through the garden, the windows, touching faces, then lips, then tongues—then hot, wet tears bursting on my face. 

She was crying, too. 

“What a mess we make,” she said. 

And we laughed, I think. 

I don’t know. 

And I don’t know what happened next. Did we say something about place, love, time? Did we just sit there? 

It must have been hard for me to hold her gaze. Those fierce orbs chasing me down. Death inside each us. Hers now closer to emergence than my own. Out there. Somewhere. Impersonal. Waiting for me to pass it in the street light. 

We lost touch. I got married. She kept traveling for healing. She went home to Prague. Did chemo. Wrote a book. Wrote a play. Won awards. Died in pain with her mother by her side. There was no last thing that I heard her say.

When I ask my daughter now about the void in her dream, she doesn’t remember. 

“Do you know when you wake up and there’s an after-vision on the wall beside your bed?” she says. 

“What’s an after-vision?” I ask. 

“Oh,” she says, surprised that I don’t know, “that’s when the dream stays in your eye and you see it in life before it vanishes back into a dream.” 

Time is unthinking. Memory is brokenness. And I don’t know why I decided to walk into the old quarter of Baku, one day in November, all those years ago. 

I was going to light a small fire at the far end of the harbor. I carried kindling. Handwritten addresses and phone numbers, a few pages of a Czech/English dictionary, a tourist map, a bookmark from Anagram, and a letter I never sent to Hana. 

I waited for Isha to wail out of the mosques before spinning the hammer on the lighter. Ablution, maybe. Something sacred. An after-vision that makes the fire more than the burning of paper against the stone of a seawall far from home and the crows I would find waiting when I returned.