Cymbaline

This penultimate story in the completion of Stara Evropa is perhaps second-most important against 'Babi Leto, Babi Yar'. Both these stories took a full year to compose, for quite different reasons. They'd love revision, but they'd also love a relational going-though. Imogen, Diana, Beáta are all fictional, but they absorbed me in the writing--I wept for them even (like Shakespeare's Cymbaline) if couldn't determine if they constituted a tragedy or comedy. Finally, I'm not sure if the upload of Pink Floyd's live cathedral rendition of 'Cymbaline' shows here or not, the ambiance favorable to the mood of the story, but not essential. Would love any and all feedback, especially as I hope to 'publish' in a day or two through the Stara Evropa blog and Facebook community, both rather limited or preoccupied....

High enough up the Spišský Mountains in northeast Slovakia is an apparition site—the first since communism fell, the second since Turzovka on the west side of the Tatry Mountains, even if neither is officially sanctioned by the Vatican. After Pope John Paul II’s goodwill visit, though, these modest villages have grown steadily in the disparate treks of pilgrims and vagabonds alike. Slovaks have an intricate network of trails, somewhat due to their partisan history; a few of them meander the Spišský to the village of Litmanová and the retreat center where Iveta and her sister sat through storms in the 1990s with the Virgin Mary, on a little bench barely made for three.

            

Iveta was not yet alive in 1958, when the Virgin appeared in Turzovka to delineate a world of good and evil in conditionally colored maps. One wonders if she asked much about the world, what color they were in now, amidst the natural mountain storms above Litmanová.

            And below that retreat, twenty-five kilometers along the Poprad River, sat three young women on a town square bench in Podolínec. They were in a celebratory mood, each having matriculated from the places that had separated the girls after nine years at the Podolínec grammar school: Imogen, for her aptitude in math and science, bused north to Stará L’ubovna and its reputable gymnasium; Diana, studious enough, went south to Kežmarok—a better than average placement; Beáta took courses through the town’s convent, renown throughout the region. It remained her choice whether she’d pursue her vows or go some other way.

            They all had such choices. In itself that was reason to celebrate.

            Imogen’s father had died before she was two—her very name was his salvo to beat back the cancer that inevitably sprouted from his exhaustive hours at the Mondi papermill in Ružomberok, the smokestack of the Tatry. He breathed in more than his share of the chemical pulp in order to secure for himself, as a Roma man, and for his bride and baby daughter the hope of a new house in the unpolluted Podolínec, where his mother still lived. He had been a good student during the 70s and 80s, and read more than he was assigned. Cymbeline was his favorite play and, except for his externalities, he would have featured well in a philological faculty in Brno or Bratislava or Košice. The papermill was not for him, but neither were any demographical assumptions of lassitude, lining up for handouts and government housing. In the end he resigned, terminally, to a corner of his mother’s mildewed rowhouse between the cathedral on the town square and the convent with its more spacious sanctuary. Imogen’s mother, unwilling to be a widow, disappeared for another man countless villages or connections away, leaving Imogen to be raised by her grandma and itinerant relatives.

            Roma weren’t regular parishioners at the Catholic churches in town, but Imogen joined Beáta, whose father was a deacon, for every Sunday mass and most of the midweek festivals. Diana, the darkest girl in town, had no interest in the church at all. She’d occasionally meet them afterwards to walk to any of their homes, the playground, the banks of the Poprad River. There were always gulls and ducks to tease, but they shouted down the boys who might throw rocks. Imogen might have been a target alone, but Diana kept boys spellbound with her good looks and verbal fire. Sometimes she’d slink away with them, winking to Imogen and Beáta that it was ambassadorial in nature, and that—riverside or outside the church—she’d be back again. Imogen envied Diana’s independence to a degree, but she was also jealous of Beáta’s reliability and simple nature. As they grew older, they concerned themselves less about what each other was doing and, for Imogen, the most disarming element was Litmanová, where she’d journey alone on Tuesday afternoons, when her lessons ended early. Beáta had been there, of course—Imogen wouldn’t have known about the place otherwise—but wasn’t as inclined to make the trip, which involved a maybe-yes, maybe-no bus from Stará L’ubovna and a four-kilometer hike from the village center. Almost never would Imogen talk about the retreat, but Beáta and Diana sensed it served sort of as an extra friend.

            “Your boyfriend,” the latter teased, and Beáta smiled at the thought.

            Imogen had dated a few times in Stará L’ubovna, mostly through socials put on by the physics club, so she felt experienced enough to shoot back: “well, what boyfriend would take you to the upper reaches of the world?”

            “As a matter of fact, I do have a man in my life now—a manager at Nestville. He’d love for me to be a hostess at the tasters’ hall.”

            Imogen dropped her jaw. “At Nestville? What in heaven’s name are you doing there?”

            “Nothing yet. I just met him a couple weeks ago. Dalibor—”

            “—so he’s Slovak,” Beáta surmised.

            “yes, dear, he’s angel white, just like you Mad’yars.”

            “I happen to be Slovak, too,” Beáta reminded.

            “We all are.”

            “Yes,” Diana swayed, “that’s true: we all are. But Dalibor happens to be my Slovak.”

            “And you happen to be his, yes? What, from a couple of weeks ago? How did you meet?”

            “He’s from Kežmarok, and typically he’d be at work when I’d be done with school, but then he saw me a couple times at the bus stop and, well, I could always wait for the stupid bus, right, but he drives a comfy car—”

            “a BMW, right?”

            “Don’t know. I haven’t bothered to ask.”

            “Have you bothered to ask his age?”

            “Twenty-five. Debonair. He runs the promotional side of Nestville, and that entails some evening events. I’ve been to a few—they’re nice.”

            Imogen collected the information so far. Nestville Whiskey was a celebrated start-up in the rather unlikely town of Hniezdne, smaller than Podolínec but at better market access, sitting just west of Stará L’ubovna. The town based its name on ‘nesting’—the storks atop chimneys—and thus the ‘nest village’ became a natural choice to internationalize the country’s very first whisky company. Ornate woodcarving and promotional visits by Jean-Claude Van Damme, among others, morphed the distillery into a park, requiring more amenities for tourists, a personality like Diana’s, even if ‘hospitable’ wasn’t the most intuitive description for her. Intrepid, for sure, and captivating, perhaps. She could smile people into a suspension of doubts, and she herself had confidence beyond her smile. “So you know what you’re getting into,” Imogen suggested more than asked.

            Diana threw back the notion: “Do any of us know anything? Beáta, you’re gonna be what, a cloistered nun? And you haven’t made any move towards university.”

            Imogen nodded ambivalently. “I have a conditional acceptance in Přesov; so far nothing from Košice Technical. And you’re right, I don’t know that I want either of those, or whether I could afford to live away from here.”

            “Přesov is close enough to commute,” thought Beáta.

            “Not really.”

            “It’s dirty as hell,” Diana put in. “You don’t want to go there.”

            “Fine. So I join you in Nestville! Probably in some corner too toxic for hostesses. Maybe tucked inside that hammer and sickle—”

            “What? What are you ranting about?”

            “I pass it every day on the bus home. It’s the Soviet emblem on one of the fringe buildings, blatant and brightly painted—adds to the nostalgia, I suppose.”

            “I haven’t seen that. And nothing about the place is Soviet.”

            “According to Dalibor.”

            “According to common sense. The place makes whisky, not vodka. And not for cheap. There’s nothing proletariat about the place.”

            “You can join me at the convent,” Beáta offered.

            “Oh, can I?” Diana laughed.

            “Well, I meant Imogen.”

            “Oh, can she? You can do that, you know, fellow Slovak. Since the world is so post-Soviet and such. I’m sure gypsy girls are lining up like ducklings to be nuns. Vows of poverty, lazing around—”

            “Shut your mouth!” Imogen shot out, wishing Beáta would have the nerve or the wit to cut Diana down once in a while. “Don’t throw anybody into baskets.”

            “You just did—‘a corner too toxic’ or whatever you said. And don’t pretend you haven’t thrown me into a basket of whores, even if you have zero clue about that and me.”

            “Sorry. Sincerely…. So, I think we’re done with our post-matriculation well-wishes.”

            “We don’t have to be done, not yet anyways. Let’s take a walk down to the river, just to keep it all real.”

            Beáta didn’t want to, but recognized that the pathworn journey held at least symbolic value. They weren’t little girls anymore. The river would remain generation to generation and always would define their home. Maybe the years ahead would scramble things, regardless of convent securities and whisky wild rides. Both she and Diana hoped Imogen would not go as far away as Košice, which wasn’t a world away, of course, but for all intents and purposes…

            Well into June, and now not constricted to Tuesday afternoons, Imogen continued her blissfully lonesome trips to Litmanová. She never cared if she talked with anyone there, but usually, good-naturedly, she ended up doing so. The four-kilometer hike invited rides up and down by pilgrims in cars who spoke to her in different dialects, and sometimes they wanted to drive her farther, but she made it known: ‘it’s enough to be transported a little ways, and a blessing to walk a little ways alone.’ She never pretended to be a nun—neither did Beáta, she reminded herself—and that balance of private contemplation and public presentation was fascinatingly compatible to the skills Košice Technical might inherit (as her asset) or inculcate (as their assumption): an aesthetic equilibrium that she might develop and contemporize in the everlasting academic infatuation with the music of the spheres.

            One gray afternoon she met a man who seemed nothing of that aesthetic, yet naturally kindled an appeal within her. She had seen him twice before from the window of the bus: a shepherd who tended hundreds of sheep and moved somewhat to their whim, today toward a little stream north of the village. Anticipating a cloudburst, he had corralled the flock to a shelter that appeared abandoned but harbored large roles of hay: a forty-meter pole barn with the stark graffito ‘Love Kills Ю’ on its side. Imogen ran to this refuge in the gathering storm, catching her breath—more necessary than asking pardon or permission. A hard rain pattered the slats of the roof and sides while a fraction of the sheep brayed in their cluster and the shepherd tried to take count, pausing to introduce himself, diffidently, as Gaby. Imogen did likewise and asked if he needed any help. “Not as long as they don’t devour the bales.”

            Imogen took in the total atmosphere and then gratefully reclined upon a bale Gaby had swept clean. He went back to counting but soon enough shrugged in the reasonable estimate: where would they wander, anyway? Dumb animals would account for themselves in group-think, and this pathetic hovel would suit the herd. Imogen opined that in the bluster of the afternoon, this was a Godly place to be.

            “You think God takes notice of this pile of sticks?”

            “Well, why not? You must know about the retreat.”

            “Sure. Maybe that’s a holy place. But this?”

            “This is like the Bethlehem inn. Or the stables behind it.”

            Gaby looked out at the intensifying rain. Imogen bit her lip: the analogy was too intimate, as she didn’t intend to seem the Virgin Mary. But Gaby played favorably, noting they had the sheep to fit the scene, and maybe this weather would keep them here ’til nightfall. Then he bit his lip—but she smiled that worry away. There were twenty cars still at the retreat, and she’d surely be able to flag one of them down.

            She let a dozen go by, though, as they talked through the thunderstorm. It was much about the lay of the land, the art of patience with absent-minded creatures, the conjecture of Přesov and other unfamiliar places. She asked him what he knew about this barn, and who would have painted the English and Cyrillic ‘Love Kills Ю’ and why. He admitted his ignorance of foreign languages and things to decipher, generally. Sheep and their habits were hard enough to read, he said, even as complacent as they seemed to be. “What do you think it means?” he asked back.

            “It’s pitiable,” she offered, “and ironic. The smash of languages implies a complication, I guess. I wonder if the ‘Ю’ is meant to be singular or plural, casual or formal—tykanie or vykanie, so to speak—or if love is aware of itself, especially as a killer.”

            “You think someone wrote it as a death threat?”

            “Probably not. But probably not as a joke, either.” A couple more cars passed by. “Maybe it was someone who was jaded, even coming down from the retreat.”

            “A faith-affair not quite working out?”

            “That’s part the reason to journey through it, I believe.”

            Gaby mulled that over. He was named for the angel that essentially transitioned testaments old and new. He had never expressed it that way, but he was aware of the angel’s role to show up in dreams and convince doubtful people to help make this messiah happen. His mother, who lived long enough to see him christened, made his father promise to raise him in the church; that contract lasted more or less until he died.

            “Of what?”

            “Free-basing. I was ten and of course didn’t know much, but I knew how to call the ambulance. He was a gentle man, by nature, and tried really hard to be good, especially to the memory of my mother.” Gaby looked long into the darkening gray. “Maybe he was dying to join her.”

            The rain continued to pelt the place and more sheep gave up the graze to huddle closer inside. Gaby stood as if to give them guidance, but didn’t make a move toward them. His shoulders shook, and Imogen moved her lips involuntarily, despite the breath or syntax to form a prayer. She lifted her face to let him rub his thumb under her welling eyes, and she did likewise for him. All remaining cars went by as darkness fell, and the sheep in their inscrutable instinct, deeper than group-think, kept watch of themselves that night.

            Diana, meanwhile, was ingratiating herself at Nestville. The hostess role was relatively easy, and busloads of tourists tipped her generously, with cause. Not that there were many precedents for this kind of job, both she and Dalibor knew that decades could reasonably pass with this exact formula. A good-looking hostess provided a face more authentic for the franchise than Jean-Claude Van Damme or any other gorilla in the mist.

            At Dalibor’s urging, she rented an apartment on a small street in Hniezdne. He’d spend some evenings there but was cautious about making a public show of their relationship, at least for the time being. They avoided talk of marriage, but mused instead on the supply of steady income to build a decent house, to fly down to the Canary Islands or Red Sea, to think beyond Nestville and toward a little business they could run on their own terms.

            They scoped out the territory of Vyšné Ružbachy, a spa town north of Podolínec; well-established hotels and bars were already there aplenty, and a risky amount of investment would have to go into an already competitive market. When they drove through the lowlier village of Litmanová, however, they saw that the opposite was the case: the lone grocery store in the village had caved in for lack of business. “How could this be?” Diana wondered. “Plenty of cars go through, and people have to eat!”

            “The managers obviously had little imagination. Let’s try to get a look inside.”

            It took an hour to hunt down the owner, especially since his phone number on the ‘For Sale’ sign was out of service. They met a fair amount of locals in the process, though, and that serendipity was every bit as valuable as outwardly sizing up the place. Everyone looked at Diana but talked only with Dalibor, and, while everything was polite superficially, there were no sentiments of good luck, let alone welcome. The owner, when he showed up, was slightly more promotional, naturally. He admitted that he couldn’t compete with the hypermarkets in Stará L’ubovna or even the kiosks in Jarabina, half the distance to that city. He said ski season was better for outside business than anything the retreat brought in. “Those highfalutin folks don’t have food on their mind.”

            But some of them could use a place to stay. Dalibor had no interest in groceries, and was delighted to find out that the upper floor was vacant and available in the total deal—the rooms up there stemmed off a central corridor, in the spirit of a ghost town saloon. Along with the storefront, backroom, cellar and sloped upper floor, the entire place had 790 square meters and would sell for less than the value of Dalibor’s studio apartment in Kežmarok, which was in fact smaller than Diana’s rental. “I thought you didn’t want to live with me, for appearance sake,” she sulked. He kissed that away and all but closed the deal then and there.

            Imogen and Beáta heard of the plan separately, and each intuited how the other would react, demurring distantly through their pursed smiles. When all three of them met together in mid August, the talk was how fast and slow things were going: Diana was admittedly over-her-head in details about the real estate, while the others were still uncertain about their post-secondary plans. Košice had rejected Imogen on the disappointment of her final exams. The convent still had given no timetable for Beáta and would not guarantee that she’d have a permanent place in their community. It all remained with God, she told her friends (as she had been told).

            “Listen—that’s what I mean,” Diana ventured. “You all may know God’s business better than me.”

            “Better than Dalibor?”

            “Yes, better than him, too. And that’s where I’d like to go. He envisions a limited-menu restaurant to generate the potential for an operational bed-and-breakfast. We’d need cooks, waitresses, cleaners, all that. We could use more local knowledge of the pilgrims and their likes and dislikes, so to speak.”

            “You’re asking us to sign on to your project?”

            “I’m inviting you—we’d advertise for outside help anyway, but,.. well…”

            “This is a total crap-shoot! What makes you believe it will work out?”

            “I don’t know! That’s where you two come in. Oh, and Imogen, your shepherd as well—Dalibor is eager to meet him.”

            “Yeah, as we are Dalibor!”

            “Incidentally,” Beáta snuck in, “I’ve met him. At Diana’s flat. He’s very nice.”

            Imogen stared at her for a bit, opened her mouth to say something but then had nothing to say.

            Diana reached her hands across the table. “Let’s meet next week at my place—all five of us. We can bring out a Monopoly board if that helps, but I think we’d all get on fine without that.”

            “You bring the whisky,” Beáta said, trying her hand at a rare joke.

            Actually, six assembled the following week—Diana’s older brother was interested in being a cook. Beáta blushed as she always did around him, then ended up talking more to Gaby, who was excited to meet Imogen’s friends. Dalibor brought all the fixings for a good party and assisted Radovan in the kitchen—they had hit it off immediately a couple months prior, even though Dalibor hadn’t met any of his other ‘in-laws’ yet. Everyone was on cloud nine, especially in the update that the sale included a facilitated transfer of a cooked-food and liquor license, as the previous owner had similar designs on the place way back when. “That means, Rado, you’re good to fry up halušky on October 1^st, our grand opening.”

            “Don’t stop me there,” he swaggered, “I can do a whole lot better than boiled dough!”

            Diana pinched her big brother and suggested he install the new stoves first. Imogen enjoyed the happy mood all around yet couldn’t shake the doubt that their total commitment was hitherto all assumed. She didn’t say so, at first, and wanted to pull Gaby aside at a subtle moment to suss out his own point of view, but subtlety wasn’t built into this evening, or the plan. It took over an hour for her to ask the entire room: “are we doing this, really, everyone?”

            It might have had a leaden effect, but Beáta, of all people, drew up to her best friend and surmised (as if they were just two at the riverside): “we are doing this. At the very least it’s employment—some of us need that more than others; but it’s also a ready part of everybody’s journey. Look, Imogen: you and I have travelled that road to Litmanová, sometimes quite hungry, and everyone else here knows how to manage things.”

            Gaby, who as yet had only spoken with those who spoke to him first, voiced his naïveté: “but what, really, have I managed in life, besides sheep?”

            Dalibor had prepared for this very question, and caged his response strategically. “You, Gabriel, are the most indigenous part of the plan. You stay the shepherd, even if we need to hire an apprentice or two to keep those animals in line while you’re the maître d’. We’ll frame pictures of you and your flock—for that matter, we haven’t discussed the name of our place, which could be (for all I care) ‘Pastier’ or ‘Ovčinec.”

            “Don’t mock,” intervened Imogen.

            “The opposite! I truly wish Gaby would identify the place and nestle in—he needs to be the face of the place.”

            Diana jerked at that. She had it good at Nestville and didn’t need to give up her position there for this new venture to work (neither did Dalibor, who made it clear that this was not a bridge-burning exercise). ‘Socialism with a human face’ had been the nemesis of this extended region since 1966. Not that Diana was a deliberate student of history, she had nevertheless discussed at length the resolve of, say, Imogen’s father to beat all odds, beyond political machinations. “What about your father,” she remembered Imogen challenging, and Diana never answered that. She seemed more interested in where Imogen had come from and how her disappeared parentage had more presence than her own present-but-flat sense of ancestry. Diana looked around: there was no human face in particular to what they embarked upon. There were six attractive physiognomies here—why not take that, she smirked, at face value? Why not blow up this place that had no interest in gypsies to begin with, too much interest in bureaucratic grease lines, middling interest in what any alcohol-induced start-up portended on any negligible level?

            Imogen spoke for the moment that had suddenly consumed Diana. “None of us truly knows what we’re doing here. We’re at a party having fun. We’re knit from lives sprung from eclectic sources. None of us can figure exactly what put us here. We have sheep and Jean-Claude Van Damme and some aptitude here and there. We’ve got a dilapidated place to re-enervate. I agree with Beáta—the employment is worthy in itself. We don’t have plans beyond this point—and yes, we all can go back to point blank. We may be the face of something very good; maybe Iveta was that for the work of the Holy Spirit. We may also be the face of banality. But heart of hearts—beneath our faces—we know we’re trying to do no harm and maybe fulfill some of this world’s hunger. That is all I want to say, except…. God bless us where we are.”

            Beáta, then Diana, kissed her on her cheek. Each man wondered whether to do likewise, and in ‘the thunder of the train’ playing on the stereo, they fell in line to demonstrate their necessary trust of the daughter of Cymbeline.

            That play pits a battered British king against the juggernaut of the Roman armies demanding everlasting tribute. There’s almost nothing that can repel the empire except, strangely, the cave-dwelling Belarius and his stapling sons—unknowingly the kidnapped boys of Cymbeline, who had rashly banished Belarius a generation earlier. Belarius and his grown boys resolve to protect their homeland—from cave to king’s court—and do so out of wilderness wherewithal. Then enters a wandering youth in Roman garb claiming the name ‘Fidele’ (the king’s daughter Imogen, disguised as a boy and absconding from the palace). She’s in fact waging a more personal war to restore the faith of the man she loves, another exile who, like Belarius, proves magnanimously loyal to the land ruled by a foolish king. Imogen observes, by play’s end, that “our very eyes are like judgments—blind.” She might refer variously to the conditions of rage or devotion; of all the figures who skirmish on the stage, she consolidates the hard-to-find comedy in Shakespeare’s denouement.

            Imogen read the play aloud to Gaby, who took on a few speaking parts along the way. He thought the cave-dwelling scenario was rather outlandish but liked the grit of the play on the whole. Imogen, of course, spoke the lines of her namesake and only repeated one line, amused or bemused: “I hope I dream.”

            “I hope so, too,” Gaby chimed.

            “But I’m not sure what Imogen means. Realities have been blurred.”

            “I think that’s what she’s coming to realize.”

            “Let’s get some sleep, Gaby.”

            “But we’re almost done with this scene.”

            She rolled into the folds of the downy blanket. “It’ll stay for tomorrow.”

            October 1^st was rushing toward them, and Dalibor worked non-stop to procure the riggings of the ship they decided to call ‘Ovčinec’—the ‘flock’s fold’, by near consensus (Radovan, claiming the right to prepare veal and mutton, sanguinely abstained). Imogen cut a deal with the gift shop at the retreat to sell at agreed commission little icons and figurines and rosaries and water bottled from the mountain’s taps, and Beáta exulted at the chance to represent such sales. Gaby still wasn’t positive what a maître d’ at such a humble place was supposed to be, but Diana urged him just to man up and do it: there were too many glares from Litmanová locals already in the assumption that she and Imogen were taking claim of the neighborhood. It was a damned shame, they all knew, especially as nobody would dare discuss such bias openly. Dalibor, protecting his day-job at Nestville, wanted little to do with public relations or anything else that would connect him from one place to the other. He put all logistics in the hands of Diana, who in turn assigned Gaby (through Imogen) to the necessary representation of the whole enterprise.

            There were some veiled threats, after all. The upper floor was going through evident changes and some villagers reasonably wanted to know what in the world its purpose would be. ‘God forbid this becomes a brothel!’ Such a thought hadn’t crossed Imogen’s mind, but now that the hint was broached, what was most likely to fill this upper floor? Dalibor whisked away the concern: people will do what they’ll do; we’re not here to direct the whims of human nature.

            “I thought we might, at least, honor the flow of pilgrim traffic,” Imogen reminded him, the two of them alone in a makeshift office at the back of the kitchen. Diana was out at a Nestville event and surely would have weighed in one way or another.

            “Listen, I’m financing the infrastructure—that’s my role here. What you all can do to fill the balance sheet is fine with me. But it would be beyond stupid to refurbish a bunch of rooms that would remain empty. That was the mentality of the former owner who saw this place die to begin with.”

            “So who is supposed to fill those rooms in a way that would be ‘beyond stupid’?”

            “That, my dear, is up to you and your shepherd.”

            “Devil—don’t pose things that way! If we were some Ma-and-Pa business, then yes, it would be nostalgically ‘up to us’. But that’s not our luxury.” She went out to estimate how many hanging lights they’d order, then returned to pose the greater question on her mind: “why don’t you look into all those tour buses that indulge in your whiskey, and maybe a fraction of them would sign up to spend a night or two here.”

            “I’ve told you, Imogen, a dozen times: I’m not going to mess Nestville affairs with what we have here.”

            “Yeah, I get that. And I also get that you could apply your skill set in making things successful here without raising local concerns. They don’t understand who would stay here and why. I’m not going to be the effective ‘face’ to explain things one way or another.”

            “And that’s why Gaby will do so.”

            “Dalibor, c’mon! Give us some of your spillover guests to get things started, and then gradually Gaby will learn these ropes. But don’t thrust him into your arena of abstractions. He’s properly too pure for that.”

            “As you are.”

            “You know me as well as I know you. I don’t have to remind you that we can walk away from this venture in the blink of an eye.”

            “You wouldn’t do that. Not for your friends who need this.”

            “If you’re talking Diana and Beáta—”

            “—I am”

            “Then don’t. I’m not going to form a union against your white man’s designs.”

            “Oh, so you’re going to play that card, are you?”

            Imogen closed her eyes and put her face into his breath. “Yes, I will, if you will. You aren’t fucking me, and I realize that doesn’t sound so typically me.”

            Dalibor clenched to say something more, then let it go. She’s right, he surmised, and more credit to her. She went upstairs to calculate the furniture needs, and this time didn’t come down until she was sure of the order.

            The preparations went forward and they met the last night of September to celebrate, if warily. “I’m prepared to make as many gourmet dinners tomorrow night as come through the door,” Radovan beamed, and his sister promised a number of attendees who’d add to the grand opening. Beáta reserved a table for her father and mother, and Gaby also had some guests in mind. No one from Nestville had any clue about this effort, all according to plan. Instead, some suppliers from Jarabina and Stará L’ubovna had clued in and adumbrated some vested interest. They were among the nebulous circles that could shrug shoulders if the venture failed or swoop in if the first offerings were favorable.

           

            The opening defied expectations, insofar as patrons actually wanted to speak to the occasion, like a banquet would assume, and no one had thought of creating a program as such. Dalibor, from the backroom, prompted Gaby to announce, at the round hour of eight in the evening, that in exactly one week they’d have a second, more ceremonial opening with a dais and microphone and spillover space outside—the terrace that was going to wait for summer, but why not now, when the iron was hot. Rado raced through the evening earning kudos left and right, but he obviously would need assistance for any equivalent traffic flow. Dalibor feverishly wrote all notes from his backroom view and from what Diana, mostly, advised. Gaby, Imogen and Beáta ensured these first customers were happy, and especially when Diana helped her brother with garnishes, everyone ate heartily and drank into the night. Gaby repeated, as prompted, the promise of a grander inauguration of the place on October 8^th.

            Beáta’s father, Alojz, had already prepared to speak the week before, but now, with a dais and a sound system spilling out to the terrace on a temperate autumn night, he addressed the assembled accordingly: “Dear guests, and dear daughter, gathered here again in grace, allow me to express my fullest feelings about this effort to establish Ovčinec in this haven called Litmanová. My wife and I treasure our daughter more than anything, and having now dined here so pleasurably a second time, it is our hope to return often as partisans to this place.” He stopped to encourage with his eyebrows some semblance of applause. “You see, I use this word ‘partisan’ as an anchor to our past. I was born—Beáta, you know this—in Donovaly, admittedly well after the war against the Fascists. My parents, though, were fatefully mired in that mix. During those years they had an apartment in Banská Bystrica overlooking the town square. And for its strategic location, a Nazi commander and his adjuncts decided to settle in for a couple of months, commanding soirees against the Partisans that were sabotaging things beyond their battles in the woods. God bless the Czechs and Croats, but they didn’t have such a network. We did. And Norway—God bless them, too. I realize I’m somewhat tipsy as I raise this glass, but—who can deny—God bless the Partisans who slapped back Hitler’s cause.” And here he didn’t need to pause for due applause. “You may wonder,” he continued, “what my mother and father did during that imposition. Well, they didn’t roll over and play dead. They had, in fact, friends who visited and even stayed the night occasionally in the other guest room that those German swine didn’t take over: a night or two hosting fellow Slovaks. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, right? or, if so, what orders from Berlin would disambiguate a natural night-over from a treacherous threat? Ah, but my parents were steely, and nothing from those paper-thin walls landed them in trouble (prepared as they were)—their guests talked and listened and went away and returned, and in their own wily manner contributed to the Partisan cause which we celebrate, even today.”

            No applause followed, except, suddenly, from Dalibor emerging from the backroom. He proclaimed, loudly, “the Partisans got it right! We’re here, victorious, because the Partisans—”

            “—got it right!” Gaby repeated, with a ready tray of slivovice shots to festoon the speech of Beáta’s dad. For her part, she was busy with Radovan and preparations for dessert. She hadn’t heard anything her father had said, not that anyone was conscious of that fact.

            Dalibor slunk back to his shadows and Gaby held the tray with stable hands as the slivovice distributed itself. A three-piece band that had played modestly throughout the evening now struck up a jig that got the place hopping. Half-finished mutton dinners slid out at the hands of Imogen and Diana, while replacements of chocolate-covered palacinky, along with extra shots of slivovice, quickly followed. Alojz began dancing on the small parquet Dalibor had installed just days before, and his wife, who did not follow, let him have his fun. Neither of them was concerned at this point about Beáta, who had loosened her blouse for Radovan, who had finished the last order of palacinky, and together who had no idea what they were doing, except that the darkened second floor had yet to be christened.

            And in that silent stroke lay the reification of local concerns that—granddaughters of Partisan heroes or not—the village would necessarily have to face changes. Imogen discussed as much with Gaby, that the assumption of Iveta and her bench-side Virgin Mary had already redefined the area, indelibly. Someone could argue that moral grounds (Iveta’s) counted for something beyond laissez-faire, but in this day and age almost anyone could craft a self-serving definition of morality. Beáta was least capable of doing so, yet she compelled the whole question. Radovan, a thin spirit, was the last person who’d want to get involved with social debates, and quietly he resorted to the keeping of a clean, efficient kitchen. Diana rebuked him perfunctorily for crossing a company line, and then rewarded him with two capable cooks she’d vetted out from a surprising source of applicants. Imogen, aware of everything, implored some policy towards the upper floor. Gaby, with Beáta, fronted the place and hosted beyond expectations. And Dalibor, seeing now beyond the shadows of the backroom, couldn’t be more pleased.

            “What an incredible tandem of grand openings,” he declared, in an October 12^th managerial meeting. “The accordion player is enamored with the chance to do this every weekend, and the early revenue indicates a better-than-anticipated interest from local Litmanováns. It means we’re in good shape to keep doing exactly what we’re doing.”

            Imogen responded, frankly, it would be a flash in the pan until a portion of tourist bus clients came through and gave them two floors to manage.

            Dalibor didn’t disagree, but said that upper floor had to emerge organically. Diana, who was wary to follow her lover’s lead, announced what she had been working on to this point: a website she hoped would make all of them proud.

            Indeed, the ‘Ovčinec’ title line had translational feeds to English, Russian, German, Polish and Czech to identify the place and its ammenities. Beáta and Radovan were sheepishly surprised at how neat the upper room photos looked, and how the pricelines seemed so reasonable, despite what they could actually afford. Imogen praised the total layout and link to the retreat, which, both she and Diana knew, was plastic in ways but—she and Diana still knew—not without the skills that their gymnasia taught them, to call a thing what it was.

            Later, after the meeting adjourned, Imogen pulled Diana aside on this very imperative: everyone else was cooking or selling or finding their feet fronting the place, and, wierdly, they had no particular job description. “We’re managing, Imogen,” Diana simply said. “We’re thinking through the dream.”

            “Yes, I get that—brains to the brawn, or, well…”

            “Yes, Imogen, brains to the brawn. Why demur?”

            “That’s not what I meant. We all have brains—”

            “—yeah, yeah, yeah.”

            “and we all have souls.”

            “maybe, maybe not, but… go on.”

            “I was thinking about what Beáta’s dad had said, about Partisans and

Fascists.”

            Diana glared at her friend in a quick effort to shut her up, yet resorted to flitting her eyes to the patterns of the parquet. “Ok, I’m listening,” she said at last.

            Imogen wasn’t sure she had anything worth listening to. “This is an uphill battle,” she slowly surmised, “one that ‘organically’ isn’t ever going to be easy.”

            “Are you being a pessimist right now, or is there something you want me to decipher?”

            “I’m being Roma—”

            “—oh, for fuck sake!”

            “and orphaned, and deemed pretty smart—you’re deemed both pretty and smart, by the way.”

            “Stop this, Imogen! You’re pretty, too, if not at the moment so smart.”

            “I shouldn’t have said that, because my point—”

            “—yes, get on with your point, because despite your claim of our nondescript status, I have plenty of things to do—beyond looking pretty!”

            Imogen pursed what passed as a smile. “I was thinking about those paper-thin walls in Banská Bystrice, and how Nazis had no language-means to understand the other side. I was thinking about why nations hold to what they hope to preserve as pure, and, when sullying factors infiltrate, what these nations do to immunize themselves, rid themselves of viruses, so to speak.”

            Diana sighed, “Are we the viruses in this contemplation?”

            “No, we’re not. We’re part of the marrow. Or maybe we’re the lymph to the more glamorous essentials to the blood-line of the nation—but no one can deny we’re here to stay and not an alien threat.”

            “Imogen, why are you going down this road? Why are you Romanizing this state of affairs—our first shot at making a living in—of all places—this rather placid and carefree corner of the earth?”

            “I’m scared, Diana, of what may happen here.”

            “Like what?”

            “I don’t know. I want to imagine that Iveta was scared to share her brushes with the Virgin Mary beyond those who would want to indulge her. But…”

            “But?”

            “But Iveta is white, unambiguous that way.”

            “And we are dark, so…, ambiguous, spooky?… to whom, Imogen? to Gaby and to Dalibor? to Alojz, let alone Beáta? to villagers here we have yet to really meet? What are you saying, Imogen, and why? I had to tell Gaby to ‘man up’ when he was being a pussy. Do I have to do the same with you?”

            “You most certainly do not. I’m not here to alter you—wouldn’t ever want to, anyway—and you really won’t ‘man-me-up’ anytime soon. You didn’t in 1^st grade and, well, think about it: we’re essentially in 1^st grade all over again.”

            “Imogen, you drive me crazy.”

            “Things may get much crazier here than we expect; and no, I’m not a pessimist. I believe in the salvation God delivers through the cross of Calvary. That’s not a for-nothing belief. That’s not just wishful thinking or a methodical reiteration every step to and from a given retreat—Iveta’s iteration conveniently at our own doorstep. Mine isn’t a parallel account of Beáta’s; it’s different for her every step, or her father’s as deacon, or anyone else’s who might lay claim to this faith. No, I’m not a pessimist when I say things may get crazy. I mean, what is crazier, when you think about it: that God would put on the robes of sweat and congregate with lepers and left-outs and ladies of dubious acclaim? Why would God do that? Why would God assume the literal sinews of mortal pain?—”

            “If you’re trying to proselytize, please—”

            “—don’t. Please don’t toss your white Jesus into things. Don’t—”

            “—really, don’t!”

            “don’t approximate what anyone thousands of years ago would have to account for now, now that we’ve muscled through crusades and Middle Ages and world wars, communist brouhaha and bra-burning and—”

            “I hardly understand you, Imogen.”

            “I take that less sincere than as a compliment. You understand me well enough. You would have a bigger bra to burn than me.”

            “So you’re jaded?”

            “No. I’m equally inclined not to burn my bra, just as none of us would want to join a crusade, a pioneer girls’ event, a truth-and-reconciliation committee on the apartheid here that no one dares to see.”

            “I’m through, Imogen, with this blather. I need to get back to work.”

            “I’m glad you have a sense of work, Diana. As for me, I think my work is to archive all and investigate the strains that may make this work a bit of history.”

            “OK. You be our company historian then….”

            “I’ll be a frond in this history, if that’s what you mean.”

            “I never know what I mean, Imogen, when I speak like this to you.”

            They weren’t in the least bit drunk yet agreed that the next ‘coming-to-terms’ tête-à-tête would require a bit of Nestville’s finest and perhaps a sneak into the city. Diana’s marketing was getting ample attention from Poprad and Přesov, from browser hits to advertisers who wanted in on this newest front, Slovakia’s answer to a deteriorating inner paradise of parklands south and west. Imogen, for her part, massaged some of her ties in Stará L’ubovna to drum up casual customers and wedding parties and expeditions that could be encouraged to pass through Litmanová. The curator at the castle overlooking Stará L’ubovna was particularly pleased to have a regional place to recommend, especially as they, too, made use of grazing sheep to pull the public in. Admittedly, Ovčinec didn’t yet have designs or provisions for grazing sheep, and Gaby had largely left that pasture behind, but pictures of him and other shepherds reminded visitors of the unadulterated, bucolic place that was hosting them for a while.

            New Year’s Day—the festival of St Silvester—fell on a weekend this year, and Dalibor covertly invited a friend to stay three nights to audit things from a client’s perspective. Diana hadn’t met him before, but Dalibor introduced Leander as a buddy from university, here to ski and celebrate the early success of the place. Diana took mental note that he had come alone—all rooms had a queen-sized bed—and wondered if Dalibor was going to vanish with him for three days of skiing (acceptable, of course, but business being so busy...). Leander was urbane and, well, silly for Diana to say, darkly handsome, decidedly not Romany. His eyes seemed to have no whites in the smiling squints that enveloped seal-brown irises. Gaby liked him right away, the two men talking when they were able between the many orders of the late December night. Imogen and Beáta had spent much of the day at the retreat in the round-the-clock vigil for the new year, praying their share but also interacting pragmatically with the sales staff. They hadn’t come to pick up new ware, per se, but to honor the spirit of their agreement, that the bottled water and hand-sized icons would point to the purpose of their source—not Iveta (who’s face was nowhere to be seen), nor Litmanová, but God in the miracles of His manifestations here on earth. The resident priest looked Beáta in the eye as he expressed as much, and Imogen saw that she barely muttered an ‘amen’. The priest, without turning to Imogen for further confirmation, was satisfied enough. Imogen nevertheless uttered ‘amen’, and with that done, the two accepted a ride to accelerate their return to Ovčinec, where their assigned labors were in high demand.

            Seven of the ten rooms upstairs were taken, even though private bathrooms were finished only for rooms 1 and 2. The restaurant, necessarily, had decent toilets and the back room had a shower closet, so the skiiers coming in were more or less satisfied with the amenities. The atmosphere of the place had it that the doors upstairs remained open most of the time, and permissions were rather liberal to use whatever bathroom by anyone who was in need. Leander gencouraged such Bohemian hospitality, if it could be said: “we’re celebrating Silvester together,” he announced at the bar, “and we’re all a part of this start-up. Mi casa es su casa, so to speak, and whoever needs a shower, yours is ready and hot in room 1.”

            The accordion band, by contract, played from 8pm to 10:30, two breaks included. Spillover space in the restaurant was made in the wiping off of five spare tables and their chairs in the backroom, separated nominally by threads of hanging beads. Gaby, Beáta, Imogen, Diana and Lovina, one of the new cooks, spread themselves out to service the nineteen total tables, plus the bar—by necessity, even Dalibor had to tend to some of the mixed drinks. After 10:30, the dinner orders wound down but then a steady flow of spirits kept the staff busy well into the night. On New Year’s Eve, after the accordion band had packed up as usual, Dalibor introduced a shaggy guitarist and his background singer, who, with their synthesizer, played a motley sequence of Slovak and English songs, starting with Zuzana Smatanova’s ‘Don’t Walk In Front of Me’ and ramping it up with ‘Undercover of the Night’; ‘Rhiannon’ followed, then ‘Addicted to You’ before ‘Space Oddity’, its crescendo riveting the place:

                        can you hear me, Major Tom,

                        can you hear me, Major Tom,

                        can you here am I floating round my tin can,

                        far above the moon,

                        planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.

A song from Misha, new on the scene, followed, and patrons tumbled out of their seats to dance, pulling the tables nearest the parquet into their neighboring rows. Lovina lured Rado out of the kitchen at the onset of ‘Where Are We Running’, followed by a slower song called ‘Blue’, then an original about vagrant Poprad life. No one really wanted to dance to that, so the band struck up, just before midnight, ‘1999’. The modest parlay of fireworks over the village and on the horizon could not mute the party happening at Ovčinec, Dalibor and Leander noting everything in their reconnaissance. Outside, some villagers milled around to admire the sky and listen to the muffled sounds about. As circumspect as some proclaimed to be, no one could look askance at what the shepherd Gabriel and his happy hospoda were up to. It was a new year, after all, and why not have a celebration happen once in a while in the meeker niches of the earth?

            As revellers trickled out, Dalibor resorted to Leander’s room to debrief, and soonafter Diana joined—the door was open, as forecasted—and then Beáta. Other doors on the upstairs floor opened and closed with a few more bodies than were registered, if anyone cared to notice. There should have been plenty of trusty stakeholders downstairs to secure the winding down of the place, but Imogen departed hand-in-hand with Gaby, and Rado gave Lovina a chivalrous ride home. That left only the other new cook Oldřich to man the place—everyone’s joke insofar as the real balls were Diana’s, handsome iron-lady who would at 6am dutifully square the output with receipts, plan for the day’s details and preparations thereafter, wipe up whatever stains at the bar, front the next vendor or neighborly enquiry or tax-payer summons…. Front the whole goddamn nonsense, as Dalibor rolls out of somebody’s bed and Beáta is doing everything but her best to make the image of the place worth… while.

            Imogen as well began work pretty early on New Year’s day, mopping the restaurant and bathrooms before joining her friend to record the cash-to-receipt tallies and the tips that were known, the bands’ bar tab (nothing like the Blues Brothers’, Diana quipped) and how they left things otherwise, the slumber upstairs and the invariable trickle for late breakfasts, which Oldřich—sleeping on the storage room cot—would aptly provide, once waked. He was neither clever nor boorish, and somehow Ovčinec needed exactly a figure like him on a morning like this.

            Snow was alighting the country like erstwhile cottonwood spores, the manner in which Ovčinec was spawned. The sun would rise no later than the tilt of the earth would have it, but when it did, the slips between cummulus snowfall and sheer prism light made the Litmanová valley as beautiful as any place on any day in north-central Europe. Naturally the skiers would wake to this glory; for others, the guesswork of snowplowed routes would take second place to any household efforts to shovel or snowshoe out, albeit with the fullness of holiday time to do it.

            Though Gabriel wasn’t tending sheep anymore, he had arranged with old friends and new acquaintences a means to harbor the flock of sheep—numbering some seven hundred—in and around the pole barn that still bannered ‘Love Kills Ю’, not that the message spoke for them. He had found the owner and settled with Ovčinec cash to supply the sheep and passers-by the satisfaction that all would be fed through the success of the restaurant pension. No one asked for the ‘Love Kills Ю’ to be removed (unwittingly, perhaps); instead, Gaby put up an advertising billboard on the easternmost wall, where the road chanced the winter wiles toward the retreat, for the diehard religious or snowboard-bound.

            As morninglight strengthened, the sound of Gaby’s snow shovel scraped meticulously toward the door, which opened when the job was done. He doffed his jacket and looked around for something to do. Diana asked him, “Why not bring a couple ewes and lambs to the terrace? We don’t have any seasonal designs on this space otherwise, and for the small hassle of hauling the hay here or the manure out, we’d have a decent spectacle.”

            “Which is what Beáta was supposed to make happen in the kiosk she’s barely maintained,” reminded Imogen.

            “Yeah,” Diana assented, “she’s sleeping on the job, no doubt—save that sheep shit for another time—but seriously, Gaby, do you think you can you outfit the terrace like—”

            “—of course I can! And we can even do with a chicken coop for fresh eggs, a dozen hens or so, all pretty easy to maintain—”

            Diana turned out her hands, “is this the Gaby I thought I knew?”

            Imogen cut in: “this is the Gaby that knows more about the raw earth than anyone else here. I like the idea: to have the useless terrace serve a Noah’s arc until spring, at which time we can figure out how the animals repopulate the forgiven earth.”

            Gaby’s servile eyes resonated with agreement.

            Diana enjoyed the fact that Dalibor, asleep or not, would not have any veto power as she declared: “then set up the terrace with two-quarter space for ewes and lambs, a quarter for the chicken coop, and another quarter for, say, rabbits—you’ll find them, Gaby, won’t you?—and maybe some ducks and whatever else Radovan can put on the grill. This is, you quite realize, pastoral genius: what’s gone on for centuries in the bowels of all those ruined castles we had to trudge through as pupils—what wouldn’t pass for an idea at business school, if Leander has actually been there as he claims—we should have medieval rabbits and poultry and real trout and pike, not the distant stuff our distributors peddle. What say you, Imogen?”

            “I’d say,” her friend said at length, “that we’re dividing the fish and the loaves like they hope to be rendered, that everyone might be satisfied.”

            “And what say you, Gabriel?”

            Gaby looked to Imogen as a husband would and said, pure as the new year’s snow, “I don’t have any clue if people will be satisfied. But I do care for the creatures, that they’ll have warmth and provisions before your brother—sorry to think it—slaughters them for the folks staying at this place. That means for the time being Leander, and guests in rooms 2, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9. And soon enough guests will rotate. We’ll have creatures, I suppose, to likewise rotate. And all will be for good.”

            Imogen knew the flowchart wasn’t as simple as that, but she let the present logic ring true. “We have terrace space,” she affirmed as a matter of fact, “and a few animals to showcase. What we have for a way forward is anyone’s guess.”

            Diana, respecting her friend’s sense of territory, decided not to pursue things too much in advance; Gaby would do or would not do as shepherds’ visions went, just as Beáta—if she’d just get out of the goddamned bed!—would or would not sell the Litmanová ware. Her brother, she knew, would commandeer Oldřich and Lovina and the backroom in general. The place, far from needing an appraisal from Leander, was in promising shape. Diana willed away any latent dread. “We’re good,” she simply said.

            “Unless,” Imogen hinted, “the neighbors complain.”

            Gaby exited at this point, mumbling a need to split wood.

            “Complain of success?” Diana took up after some moments to think. “Complain that they have a reasonable place to dine, dance or have their relatives stay?”

            “Or anyone stay. I have no relatives to speak of. I don’t have any empathy on the subject. A part of me doesn’t care what Leander and company are experiencing up there. But…”

            “But you better say something when things need to be said,” Diana leveled.

            “Listen, we just talked about the ambiance animals would make on the place…”

            “Yes, animals are easy.”

            “We’re animals. With animal instincts.”

            “If only, sometimes.”

            “Nothing easy about that.”

            “Cut to the chase.”

            “You’re as smart as me,” Imogen said, “in other words, neither of us is dumb. You’re prettier—”

            “—shut up! Cease and desist!”

            “and  that counts for something.”

            “Ok, and you’re whiter, if you want it that way. And holier. And…with a fucking better man. Admit it, Imogen, you’re better—”

            “Better for what?”

            Diana glowered and paced her way to the staircase, but then turned back. “Better for… getting us out of this inevitable mess, ’cause you know you’ve just made it a self-fulfilling prophecy, don’t you, Imogen.”

            Imogen looked long at her. “We’re not talking animals right now, are we?”

            Diana ignored that and pressed the original, “don’t you?” No one was around, and no further work needed to be feigned. “Answer me!”

            “Answer that I’m better with demolition crews?”

            “Yes.”

            The light fixtures hung as if they’d been there for a hundred years, oblivious to the makers and retailers and installers and beneficiaries. “I don’t have a demolition bone in my body,” Imogen finally said. “And frankly I don’t believe you do either.”

            Diana sniffed. “You’re goddamned right I don’t…. So maybe Beáta has it—”

            “—has what?”

            “the capacity to demolish, as you suggested.”

            “demolish Ovčinec?”

            “demolish…our naïveté. Demolish the hand that is, as you say, inevitably going to colonize what we are.”

            “I’ve never been afraid of the cold, Diana,” Imogen contended, “but that prospect of Beáta calling the shots… Well, let’s not let that happen.”

            “I’m not sure we can ‘let’ anything happen.”

            Leander was just coming round the corner of the steps. Imogen swallowed her chance to make an enduring and wise point, but instead flashed a longing look: ‘at least let’s not let this plague of locusts happen.’

            And Diana, with a roosting stork’s instinct, shot back with mercenary eyes, ‘this locust’s mine.’ And Imogen assumed no less from her best friend.

            Lovina was the opposite of her namesake: she complied to the orders of the domicile and wanted nothing to do with a ‘hunt’ for things wild. She and Oldřich managed all the de jour offerings of Ovčinec, assisting Radovan with the more nuanced orders as each day wore on. At about 2pm, however, there was little of that and Lovina accepted the extra contractual duty to clean rooms, all ten now complete and beyond busy. Beata had been the one to clean them in the mornings, but the divergent traffic of early-risers, mid-day hikers and late-night revellers necessitated a second shift. Now that every room had its own bathroom, the doors kept mostly closed, except for room 1.

            Leander had strangely (yet legitimately) paid ahead through February, even covering the cost a second person would have tallied in that room. Indeed, at he ventured out—an extended vacation, it seemed—he’d occasionally bring a friend or two to the bar, go out again, traipse upstairs with or without a guest, come back down for a nightcap, be a bit the life of the party. He’d hint at some hope to write a novel, but wouldn’t reveal specifics. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” he’d joke, and more seriously assert that any creative project ultimately needed to write itself, given time and the unfolding of circumstances. It was all a distant theme—he wasn’t using any of the staff or guests as case studies, his eyes reassured. Dalibor may have endorsed this design, but his existence was by this time solely between Hniezdne and Kežmarok, where he kept his studio flat and crunched all the numbers that would make the enterprise work. Diana, still a full-time hostess at Nestville, could only show up at Ovčinec for a few hours a day, collecting receipts and noting what needed to be ordered, largely on Imogen’s recommendations.

            When Lovina extracted a condom from the bedsheets of Room 5, she had reason to assert the difficulty of her transition from kitchen to upstairs and back. Diana did not hesitate to hire Kristýna, a girl from the village, to clean the rooms from noon onwards, washrooms on the main floor and whatever else lay in waiting. Kristýna was a good worker and a fitting personality for those who’d sleep in or need a diplomatic push out; she had been a barmaid in a Jarabina joint that lacked customers, and here at Ovčinec she felt she might have a better chance for tips. Lovina, also keen on tips, compensated her lost hours by staying later to tend bar. She took the backroom cot for the afternoon lull or sometimes, just because she liked her, she joined Kristýna upstairs with the rooms.

            Beáta would, too, when no one was interested in Litmanová icons. Her role was mainly conversational, anyway: visitors would admire the Bethlehem terrace and want to know the backstory of the place. Gaby could speak for the name but it was on Beáta to recount the story of Iveta, or anyone waiting out storms in faith. Imogen could narrate better, both knew, if narration didn’t depend on audience.

            And the audience was happily demanding. The winter weeks went by with business booming, upstairs and down. Gaby and Imogen retired exhausted every evening to their hovel south of the village, a little less sheep-smelling by this time; Diana and Dalibor continued to finagle the needs of Nestville and her flat and his Kežmarok house further south. Beáta had largely given up on Podolínec insofar as no convent invitation issued from there; she still honored the road to Litmanová, hiking twice a week after rolling out of bed in her parents’ home or from the backroom cot when it wasn’t taken. She always touched base with Oldřich, who alternatively took that cot on busy nights: ‘we’ll do well with that which doesn’t much matter; we’re witnesses to a world incomplete, a hungry and unsatisfied world.’ She liked him, old-looking Oldřich with his high forehead and floor-seeking eyes. She liked Radovan, who liked Lovina more, she realized, and Leander, who liked everyone the same, except Imogen, who kept him at arm’s length. Beáta sometimes tried to relay to her, “he’s not so bad.”

            “He’s not a wolf in sheep clothing, I think you mean.”

            “Yes, he’s not that.”

            “May he not be that.”          

           

            The evening of Ash Wednesday, when Alojz visited Ovčinec alone, he was not in a Partisan-winning mood. “Where’s my daughter?” he demanded, looking less the deacon of his church than the outraged Cain, marked for murder. Gaby had learned the stripes of being a bouncer—a shepherd’s strength could nudge a population into line—and he’d quietly, in character, remove a boisterous drunk from the premises when needed. Alojz was not drunk, however, and Gaby slipped out of the restaurant to see to the animals on the terrace.

            Imogen stepped out from behind the bar. She also had a cross of ashes on her forehead and attested that Beáta had gone with her to the retreat earlier in the day. “She stayed there longer than I did, so I guess she’s still there, though I can’t say.”

            “Well, then where does she sleep most these nights—she says she’s got a room, and I want to see it.”

            “It’s a hotel, you know. Rooms are taken, and some aren’t—I don’t know exactly, but I assume she takes what’s free—”

            “You assume? You don’t know who’s in which room?”

            “She has keys to the place like me and Diana and Gabriel. She’s a manager.”

            “Don’t speak condescendingly—she’s merely a novice.”

            Imogen couldn’t retort that the tone of condescension was his. Instead, she said, “we have lentil soup and unleavened bread today. Won’t you have some with us, and Beáta may turn up.”

            “May turn up? Is this your way of running business?”   

            “She’s off-duty, and just as likely to be on her way to Podolínec—”

            “She hasn’t been home for a week. You must know that!”

            “I don’t. I put in busy days and go home.”

            “So, who runs this place at night, hmm? Diana?”

            Imogen had to calculate. She would not lie, but the question demanded more than a name or a system, and Imogen wasn’t sure either was ready to express. “The kitchen staff is here ’til the restaurant closes, and Gaby is always a short phone call away.”

            “And the hotel? Who mans that desk?”

            “I do.”

            “I mean at night.”

            “Leander,” she couldn’t believe herself uttering, and dreaded further explanation, supplying only with, “a partner of Dalibor’s, who resides in room 1.”

            This appeared to subdue, if not satisfy, the portly deacon, and he mumbled that he’d take the soup and a look at the menu, “I fasted all day, and the fretting didn’t help.”

            “I’m sorry Beáta hasn’t been in better touch. It’s busy here, as blessings would have it.”

            Or curses, as Leander strode in a half-hour later, arms around Kristýna and Beáta, the former laughing into his chest and the latter instantly struck by her father’s glare. She no longer had the ashes on her forehead, as Imogen had seen mid-day. She probably wasn’t drunk—certainly sober at this encounter—and Leander, probably very drunk, released her tense body to lean on Kristýna to climb up the stairs. Gaby followed in the fact they hadn’t shut the restaurant door, and, spotting the horror in his lover’s eyes, proclaimed: “my stupid brother, and his wife, visiting from Bratislava! Thank goodness, Beáta, you saw them back.”

            “And in what room,” Alojz quizzed, “are they staying.”

            “What room?” Gaby puzzled. “I think—”

            “Well, I know,” Imogen called from back of the bar, “it’s—”

            “Room 10,” Gaby remembered. “They were lucky we had space.”

            “Beáta, where were you?”

            “At the retreat, Daddy.”

            “With those two? And for the past week?”

            “No, I ran into these two. And yes, I’ve been busy this week—it’s Lent, after all.”

            “Where are your ashes?”

            “I had them, Daddy—Imogen knows that. And,”

            “Well, and what?”

            “I kept them at the retreat.”

            “What?”

            Beáta braced for what she didn’t understand herself saying: “I know my faith is beyond the buildings of a church. The sacraments go on in such buildings—”

            “Are you trying to lecture me, little lady?”

            “No,” Imogen said, coming toward them. “Keep going, Beáta—I may have kept my ashes on, but understand your point of view.”

            “Which is what?” Alojz pitched in agitation.

            “Which is,” Beáta blushed, “that I’m not just a little lady, or a visible test. If I must be marked to be seen as forgiven—”

            “—and that’s key,” Imogen inserted, even to Alojz’s shush.

            “—instead of being seen as a saint—even Iveta wasn’t a saint—then I’ll take the mark for God’s act of mercy, not my act of faith.”

            Alojz tightened his jaw and invisibly his fists. He didn’t respond but took out his wallet to fish €20 out for the meal half-finished. Imogen put the bill into his coat pocket, but he angrily thrust it out and let it float to floor. “You’re not fooling me,” he said, and torpedoed out of the room.

            Beáta, shivering herself into a sob, accepted Imogen’s embrace and escort to the backroom cot. Gaby, always eying a thing he should do, deciphered his lover’s look to ‘go upstairs and kick your brother’s ass.’ That is to say, he deciphered her look, but peddled back to see again to his useless animals on the terrace.

            Room 10 actually had the stamp of Leander—through Dalibor’s distant accounting, the room had been paid for through March and at the discretion of Leander’s guests, who indiscriminately fed the flow of restaurant orders and bar tabs (or no discernible presence whatsoever). Imogen was aware of the arrangement and disturbed by its cover, but also cognizant of her erstwhile challenge to Dalibor, to ‘give us some of your spillover guests to get things started’—oh, to imagine a Leander then! Not that he upended the place or justified the wrath of community elders. He earnestly did spend time at the tables and bar talking books—his own prospect of publishing something, still sketchy, and his fair reading of new authors trying to make their impact. He’d quote Antoni Libera, for instance, from his Polish novel Madame: “I wandered aimlessly around the rooms and corridors where the party throbbed, playing—for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s—the serious artist who ‘suffered for millions’ and was above the silly amusements of the common folk.” Yes, Leander spent his hours in room 1 or 10, reading or writing, then coming downstairs to the ‘common folk’ who’d cater to his charms. He was no Hrabal, holding court of literature and yarns, but he was integral to how the place had energy, beyond the calorie count of halušky, beer, and mutton.

            Radovan, gaining modest Michelin stars as a chef, also resorted to the backroom cot when evenings drew long. He had the furthest to commute, if Beáta was no longer his regular hitch-mate to Podolínec, and it was a matter of time before designs were made on the unused space of the cellar. It was Oldřich, perhaps naturally, who first slept in that dank, and a couple cots later in the week, the space (equipped with a space-heater) started warming up. There were electrical outlets and raw spigots for water—the heavy-duty water boilers themselves—and thus in little time, with so many faithful employees working the late hours, the cellar came aboard the evolution of Ovčinec.

            Dalibor, making his first appearance in weeks, all but broke a champagne bottle over his plan: we’d renovate the cellar to make habitable rooms—for staff as well—and add to the thriving hotel turnover.

            “But ski season is soon finished,” Imogen reminded, “we may have trouble filling the rooms that we have.”

            Diana didn’t discourage her or Dalibor, who rejoined, “we got more seasons than that.” They vaguely knew this was progress, even as the horse was running unbridled.

            “We need a night manager,” Imogen said, “and don’t say Leander is de facto it.”

            “What’s the worry, Imogen? Have you been roused in the night to attend to a problem?”

            Knowing there was no one else to see, Imogen slapped him hard and instantly turned to Diana, who stepped out of the cellar darkness. “You Kežmaroks come to assert your will, and—”

            “—we’re not living in Kežmarok,” Diana informed. “Dalibor’s put that place on the block—”

            “—convenient semantics! Dalibor’s done what he’s done for the rest of us.”

            “That’s not fair, Imogen! You know he’s bankrolled the whole deal—”

            “And you know—or should we turn to the source?—Dalibor, you know you’ve thrust your secret service Leander at us without any legal clarity or respect.”

            “Are you looking to get fired?” Dalibor challenged from the shadows.

            Imogen kicked him square in the gut and slapped Diana, too, who was barely coming to his aid. “You throw that question back to yourself before you dare emerge into the light. Don’t think there is any ledger here, especially one you can tilt toward your fuck-all designs.” She went up the raw concrete stairs and ran into Beáta, who was wondering what the meeting was about. “Don’t go there,” Imogen staccatoed, “meeting adjourned.”

            Nonetheless, a new night manager named Denis became the one to take the cot from the backroom, put it behind the bar after last call, and preside over the quiet and otherwise of each evening. Oldřich, with traditional first dibs, now had his choice of the best available bed (upstairs or cellar), then Beáta, who sometimes bunked with Radovan, here or at his flat in Podolínec. Kristýna, newest after Denis, had no rights on any space, but sometimes slept in room 10. So did Lovina, if room 4 became her chosen territory as well. It was just easier to stay after work, drink a few rounds, piddle with projects like the skeletal rooms downstairs, shower and sleep where a bed might be.

            It was spring—middle of Lent—and rivulets of mountain water were supplying the tributaries of villages like Litmanová and Jarabina and into the Poprad and all memories the three girls had of their growing up. No one else was there, certainly not Alojz, as they waded in way-too-cold water and talked about boys and other subjects not so serious. Imogen had cut her foot on a sharp rock once, compelling her friends to figure things out. They decided, by consensus, to let the icy water flush the sting out and hope what they only had faith of coagulation to occur, and in the end it did. Imogen still had that scar—a blood-brother prototype—even if the other two had nothing to show for it. Five years older, they’d talk about other ways anyone could be sliced open and possibly salved and probably scarred, if not possibly seen. They’d talk about where they’d go if they’d ever part, and where they’d return—not necessarily to this very riverbank, but somewhere more abstract, like songs they made up about mountain sprites and watchers in the woods.

            Their own fairy tales.

            Denis,  a cast-off from Nestville, it turned out, watched the place from 9pm to whenever dawn would break, when Oldřich was full in swing. He usually arrived with an exhausted Diana at the wheel; she’d stay an hour or two and leave good enough alone. That’s what it had to be, after all: good enough; supplied to the gills; resourced, as long as invoices funneled her way; manned, for what that gender did; womanned,... well, she didn’t want to get into that. Imogen would kill her. No, she wouldn’t. She’d know by now anyhow. God, how did it fall together so easily (and how will it not fall apart)?

            She decided to pull the plug on the website. She didn’t solicit opinions, and there hadn’t been a staff meeting for months—things just happened behind the scenes. Business from those who already knew the place was overflowing, and inquiries and reservations from outsiders (the chief reason for the website) were becoming too much a job. Imogen took on most of those phone calls and emails, and even she hadn’t been aware of Diana’s decision for weeks afterwards, when a caller asked if they had details online. It was embarrassing for her to say ‘of course’, then click on her computer to ascertain the ‘not’. “I’m sorry, sir—we’ll try to get that fixed.”

            “No, Imogen, we won’t,” Diana leveled later on, their first sit down in weeks.

            “Why not? It pays for itself with a single customer.”

            “We’d require a secretary, a bigger office, and frankly the workers we need are for finishing the rooms.”

            “Part of the point of this business was to cater to the pilgrims, give them a place to plan their nights—”

            “You know, better than me, they aren’t the ones booking rooms. They still pop in for lunches and Beáta’s ware—the Ovčinec sign and the terrace still serve them and us well. But notice, Imo, in their evening absence and now that ski season is over, we’re pretty flush when the kitchen closes.”

            “We’ve become a pub, then, and next thing a night club. What the locals guarded against—”

            “What the locals are supplying! They want exactly what we are, Beáta, Gaby, even Leander—”

            “Oh, so you’ve warmed up to the live-in lizard. Dalibor’s ‘friend’.”

            “He’s brought in more customers than the website, by far.”

            “He’s pimping out the place—you know that, Diana.”

            “No one’s complaining.”

            “The walls are paper-thin, remember?”

            “Then maybe we’ll listen to each other better, and all get along.”

            “Or maybe draw up battle plans without talking.”

            “Well, we’re talking now.”

            “Try that with Alojz.”

            It was a matter of time before he’d come back, now with his wife en route to Holy Thursday Eucharist at the retreat. They saw that Beáta was busy behind her booth and waited at an empty table for a chance to reconcile. Imogen brought them tea that they didn’t order, then went over to the booth to nudge her friend out. It was gradual—her parents finished the tea—and then Beáta wordlessly went to them and to the retreat.

            Imogen was also planning to head that direction, more for the night vigil, but reconsidered. There’d be a protracted foot-washing part of the service, and she felt she could metaphorically do the same here, know the evening better at Ovčinec. ‘Who knows?’ she joked to herself, ‘I may even sleep here tonight!’

            When Denis and Diana arrived, surprised to see Imogen still on the job, they had the shaggy guitarist in tow. “He wants to warm up before Saturday’s show,” Diana explained.

            “You’re playing this Saturday?”

            “Yep. New set. I’ve been asked to do some Floyd covers.”

            “By whom?” Imogen didn’t want to sound suspicious, but hadn’t any idea of an event and wanted a line of information.

            “Dalibor likes Pink Floyd,” Diana supplied. “We haven’t used the parquet enough—forgot to celebrate our first half-year, for instance—”

            “No, it’s fine. It’s just that it’s Holy Saturday, a most reflective time…”

            “I’ll bear that in mind,” the guitarist said, and went over to the corner with his guitar and amp.

            “Need anything?” Diana asked.

            “A beer. Eventually some feedback.”

            Imogen drew up the beer—one for herself, too—and indeed settled into a chair to listen to the dulcet, accented English. “Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on, you crazy diamond. Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. Shine on, you crazy diamond. You were caught in the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze. Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!”

            The guitarist used a slide and a whammy but said, self-consciously, “It’ll be more refined with the foot peddles and the synthesizer—give it the whole go.”

            “It’s fantastic,” Leander exclaimed from the stairway corridor. “May I join your company, Imogen?”

            “Only if he keeps on playing,” she half-smiled. And he did.

            Beáta wouldn’t come back that evening, Imogen guessed, and she let Leander know why. He really hadn’t any idea who Alojz was, or how that made the past five weeks a repressed torment. To her surprise, he took his lumps in the story graciously, asking how he might make reparations. The guitarist had segued to ‘Us and Them’, another song he could do on his own and not disrupt the table conversations. Leander said he’d never want to hurt Beáta, partly because he’d never want to hurt Radovan. A big difference, Imogen reminded, was her family… and faith.

            “Yeah, I understand. I also know she’s equally crushed.”

            “Crushable?”

            “Maybe. I think there’s a lot we can do to uncrush her.”

            “Let’s not go too far.”

            The guitarist ramped up rhythmic piece and put half-intensity in a cadence of “run, run, run, run; run, run, run, run; run, run, run, run…” Lovina put two fresh beers on the table and flirted a bit with the guitarist, who kept up his riff. Imogen asked Leander why Dalibor liked this music in particular, and his ‘who doesn’t?’ didn’t quite answer. But he did offer some snippets about Dalibor wanting to be a musician himself back in high school, buying a guitar, being a bust with it, wanting to manage if he couldn’t play. When Imogen probed his own musicality, Leander admitted he too was shit, but appreciated others doing it well.

            “Just like others running a joint like this?”

            “Exactly,” he said, with his glinting eyes.

            Good Friday was a vigil Imogen wouldn’t miss, and Gaby went with her. The weather was chilly and humid, so those who stayed to midnight were a scattered few. Beáta was not among them—she must have taken the day in Podolínec, and Kristýna, of all people, had taken over the booth, which was naturally busier than usual. Imogen and Gaby left the restaurant at dusk to journey up the mountain, and then, by candlelight, journey down to the pole barn, where Gaby had pre-arranged a little tent inside the middle of the bales, with fluffy sleeping bags unzipped and a bottle of red wine. “Our honeymoon will be more glamorous,” Gaby promised, and Imogen promised back she’d want nothing else.

            “’Cause love doesn’t kill Ю anymore than trust or loneliness or hope or despair. Children experience these abstractions and they don’t become killers. Something in hormonal maturity challenges the balance. The Pharisees, the most managerial and mature of the Jews, killed Christ. They didn’t and wouldn’t when they marveled at his acumen in the temple, aged 12. Then they were kids themselves, like their unlikely counterpart in Zacchaeus the tax collector, climbing a tree to see what love is or could do.”

            “Do you want to have kids, Imogen?”

            “Now?”

            “Generally. It’s a common pre-marriage question.”

            “Are you asking to marry me?”

            “Yes.”

            “Good. And I do want kids.”

            “Now?”

            “And forever.”

            Gaby kissed her and stretched his arms behind his head. “It’s been a good Good Friday.”

            “A double positive. Let’s give an extra prayer for Beáta.”

            “Are you worried?”

            “No. And yes. It’s already a new day, technically.”

            “So, here’s our prayer for hers…”

            She didn’t show up until the next evening. Diana was the first to see her and try to convince her it was an ideal window to take a few days off—go to the retreat, or back home… From the unpracticed liner around her eyes, Beáta glared how inimical that suggestion sounded to her now. Dalibor, here for the concert, gave Beáta a hug and called Radovan for a round of drinks. Imogen and Gaby held hands tightly before greeting Beáta and joining the table. It was apparent, however, she did not want to sit, apologizing to the shaggy guitarist and his synthesizer partner. Leander, who had been having a good time at another table, slowly made his way over. Beáta practically fell into him, and he urbanely quipped things nobody remembered even if they quipped back, not at her expense, of course, not to throw the evening into any kind of disarray—we’re properly tired, we’ve earned this, we’ll hear the Floyd through paper-thin walls and sleep peacefully this…what’s it called? Good Saturday? Holy? Our Lady of Solitude…oh, well, let’s fix that. No one tonight shall feel alone. Can we stay through one song? Can we request ‘Wish You Were Here’? Naturally, of course…

            And the concert began with an arching interplay of G major and e minor, Leander standing near the corridor with Beáta, Radovan an assenting nod away, and So,

so you think you can tell

heaven from hell, blue skies from pain?

Can you tell a green field

from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil,

do you think you can tell?

And clearly, at this point, Beáta could not tell. Leander led her upstairs.

            That song finished as it needed, and then the duo, introduced grandiloquently by Dalibor, launched into their set with another G major climb, this time with no minor notes in the singing:

                        You say the hill’s too steep to climb, chiding

                        You say you’d like to see me try, climbing

                        You pick the place and I’ll choose the time,

                        and I’ll climb the hill in my own way—

                        just wait awhile for the right day,

                        and as I rise above the treeline and the clouds

                        I look down, hear the sound of the things you said today.

A subtle solo graced the atmosphere, the lone e minor 9th in the interstice with an open C major, before the next verse about the fearless idiot facing the crowd—in this case a crowd that enlarged with the amplified sound rippling through the house and street. As Diana had established, business here would have nothing to do with the website, and more evenings like this would explicitly prove her point.

            It was time to dance with ‘Another Brick in the Wall, Part II’, which licked rather seamlessly into ‘Empty Spaces’ and ‘Young Lust’, the duo reaching a cathartic peak. Imogen asked Diana if she thought Beáta was ok; “I’m sure she’s better here than at her folks’ house. Anyway, let her have a break. We’re her more authentic family now.”

            The band went to a synthesizer tour de force in ‘Sheep’, replete with the braying of those animals in digital record. Dalibor was beside himself, and forced Gabriel to get up and dance with him an inscrutable shepherds’ jig: it was the whole namesake of the place they were in, for heaven’s sake, the ten minutes that defined the whole effort, including the interpretive Lord’s Prayer, which Alojz entered in upon unawares. ‘He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places, He converteth me to lamb cutlets, lo, He hath great power, and great hunger.’

            “Where’s Beáta?”

            “Alojz,” Dalibor stepped forward, “friend and patriot. We are celebrating our first half-year, founded favorably upon your words about Partisan true-grit.”

            “This is Holy Saturday, not the time for rock-n-roll! Where’s Beáta?”

            “I don’t know where,” Dalibor risked, “but we’ve honored the trek of traffic all through Litmanová, your daughter—our friend—central to that. Please, Alojz, do us the honor to sit and celebrate with us…”

            And taking this sentiment on cue, the shaggy guitarist and his partner expanded the warm-up of two days ago, synthesizing ‘Shine On’ and ‘Us and Them’ to perfection, perhaps forgetting to reassess in their electrifying ‘Run Like Hell’, eagle scream and all. Alojz quaffed a couple beers to take in Dalibor’s running commentary, but stood up impatiently with ‘cuz if they catch you in the back seat trying to pick her locks’—“Where is my daughter!”—‘they’re gonna send you back to mother in a cardboard box, you better run!’ Dalibor again shrugged, and the duo made more noise before quieting down to the strains of ‘Cymbaline’.

            Imogen was prescient but powerless. Gaby chickened out and went home. Diana let Dalibor do her talking. Radovan uncharacteristically took a taxi south to be done with his day. The music had it that

                        ‘The path you tread is narrow

                        and the drop is shear and very high.

                        The ravens are all watching

                        from a vantage point nearby.

                        Apprehension creeping’—and here Alojz revamped his resolve,

                        ‘like a tube-train up your spine.

                        Will the tightrope reach the end?’—Alojz hestitating the foot of the stair,

                        ‘Will the final couplet rhyme’—and he aimed for room 10.

                        ‘And it’s high time, Cymbaline,

                        It’s high time, Cymbaline,

                        please wake me’—Alojz burst in to the unlocked door of Lovina and Kristýna making love, and his nonplussed presence barely made a difference. The band below continued with

                        ‘A butterfly with broken wings

                        is falling by your side’—Alojz collapsed here in the corridor, blurred in the Easter image of wondrous life emerging from cocoons.

                        ‘The ravens all are closing in

                        and there’s nowhere you can hide.

                        Your manager and agent

                        are both busy on the phone

                        selling colored photographs

                        to magazines back home.

                        And it’s high time, Cymbaline,

                        It’s high time, Cymbaline,

                        please wake me.’

He got up to bang on all doors,

                        ‘The line converging where you stand,

                        they must have moved the picture plane.’

Imogen had by this time run to salvage the situation, dying that it was,

                        ‘The leaves are heavy around your feet,

                        you hear the thunder of the train,

                        and suddenly it strikes you’

—room fucking number 1—

                        ‘that they’re moving into range—’

—burst it open,

                        ’Doctor Strange is always changing size,

                        and it’s high time,’

—“Beáta, can you hear me!”

                        ‘Cymbaline,’

—“Get the needle out of her,

                        ‘Cymbaline,

                        please wake me.’

—“Oh, my God, oh my God, oh,

                        ‘please wake me.’

            An ambulance from Stará L’ubovna was called and the concert ground to a halt. It took eternal minutes to measure whatever life might lie in the balance, and Leander stumbled out to finally have a private cry in his canoe-like eyes. Dalibor didn’t follow him, instead appealing to the volcano that was within Alojz, as would be within any reasonable father, yes? Imogen resorted to the booth to pray. Diana stomped up to room 10 to play on what they knew, but no one had a quintessential clue.

            Alojz, meanwhile, skulked the few streets of the village and half way up the dormant mountain, well past the supply of vigils. He found a convenient hovel with a pitched tent just north of town, plush sleeping bags for what would attend his sleepless night, as he prepared to blaze the place, Sodom or Gomorrah, and did so a mere hour before Oldřich would be due to wake. He portioned the hay into Gideon-like torches and figured the cellar would be the theological place to start, if little there was combustible. By chance, no one—not even the guest musicians—had taken the inchoate makings of cellar rooms. He noiselessly set a pile of cardboard boxes on fire. Then, starting with room 10, unlocked and uncoupled, he tossed in a torch doused with extracted benzene from his car then lay another dozen down the corridor—he really hadn’t premeditated this before seeing the syringe hanging from his daughter’s arm—and ‘wouldn’t we all’ chorused through his brain, as he beavered his way through this scorched-earth campaign, pounding at last on a locked room 1, that by this hour had nobody there.

            The whole place by Easter’s dawning would be up in flames, and Beáta safe in the care of Stará L’ubovna nurses that wouldn’t deign to make sense of the night. This had to factor in Litmanová plans, storms sitting with the Virgin Mary or not.

           

            The girls met two months later at the Poprad River—just themselves. Lovina and Kristýna were dead; Oldřich was in physical therapy for severe burns; Alojz awaited trial; Leander continued to be on the run. Gaby and Radovan and Dalibor remained in their circle, if not here today.

            “We went into this,” Imogen started, “trying to empower ourselves.”

            “Hell of a fail,” Diana sputtered, “when friends are dead.”

            “We wouldn’t have known them except for the venture we started,” Imogen insisted; “and the devil of business is that friends come and go—”

            “Like Gaby did that night. Way to be a man!”

            “Yeah, and Dalibor shows up once and… game over.”

            “Stop being divisive,” Beáta let in. “Let’s just go back to what it meant when we were innocent.”

            “Innocent? We still are. Or at least you are—victims aren’t guilty.”

            “I’m no nun material, obviously by now.”

            “That doesn’t matter—you’re alive.”

            “And you still know the way to Litmanová, more instinctively than any of us.”

            “No…. I haven’t rolled in that hay—”

            “Careful, girl—I have, and I can say… it’s pretty bristly, even with a good man.”

            “Hey, I’ll tell you about a not-so-good man who has a comprehensive fire insurance plan, and.., well, wouldn’t you like to give Ovčinec a second try?”

            “I’d like to see it drop off the map. But then again, that’s what you did website-wise…”

            “Indeed, I did.”

            “Would you learn from past mistakes?”

            “Sure, and then make new mistakes.”

            “What say you, Beáta?”

            “Take care of me,” she whispered, “like John 21 says, ‘take care of my sheep.’”

            “Oh, God, Beáta, do you commit that much retreat stuff to memory?”

            “I remember everything worth building upon.”