‘The Spoils’ by Sydney Weinberg

Years ago, I returned to Prague for a weekend in October and stayed with my old friend Mick, and although we’d never been attracted to each other before, we slept together my first night at his place. Earlier in the evening we’d visited a handful of our favourite bars and talked about sex for hours, so by the time we staggered back to his flat, the hook-up felt inevitable. Even still, when I woke the following morning I was suspicious on two counts: one, that seducing me had been his plan all along, and two, that seducing him had been mine. For the rest of the weekend I slept on the couch, and we never once mentioned what had happened.

The morning after, Mick assembled breakfast while I rummaged through the suitcase of clothing and paperwork I’d left six months before with another friend, Matilda, when I’d abandoned Prague abruptly for Paris. At the time of my return trip, I was living in Amsterdam. By then I’d forgotten what the suitcase contained, but soon a crop of familiar things flourished around me.

‘Hey, remember this hat?’

I held it up. Mick was eating goat’s cheese on crackers and watched me indifferently, a white fleck marooned above his lip. When we slept together, his room had been so dark that we couldn’t even make out the outlines of each other’s faces. My first day back in Prague, the preposterous sunshine pouring through Mick’s windows, we both felt a little beaten down, a little daunted by the long, unfortunate weekend ahead of us.

*

When Matilda gave Mick the keys to her flat, she’d said that she didn’t need them back. ‘It’s a stealth mission,’ I’d instructed him, and he duly snuck in, retrieving my suitcase and poking through all the rooms. Matilda’s, he said, was a wreck, still strewn with her things. He looted some dishes and her bass guitar.

‘I’m glad you got something out of it,’ I said. I always said this, it was nearly a verbal tic: ‘I’m glad.’

Matilda’s flat was on Pstrossova, across from a famous expat bookstore. It was beautiful, her flat: the ceilings were high, the crown moulding regal, the rooms spacious and bright. Vampire teeth adorned the buzzer by the front door. All the other flats were identified by surnames – Malinová, Halíček – inked onto rotting labels. Matilda always used to talk about buying that flat. It was a favourite fantasy of hers, and I willingly participated. In the beginning, I really thought I might settle in Prague forever. Matilda and I talked about opening a café, and sometimes I dreamed of mastering Czech and translating Bohumil Hrabal’s early stories. I spent a lot of time in Matilda’s flat and could picture her owning it. She lived with an Indian neuroscientist with a subversive sense of humour; he was probably her best friend. In another room lived an old, fat, sad American man, who taught English and hung out with kids half his age. He was taciturn about his life before Prague, not as if he were hiding something, but as if he’d forgotten it all, bleached his memory.

Matilda was short and pudgy, with a spellbinding cascade of red, curly hair that fell to the small of her back. Like me, she was half-Jewish, though I only found out after I’d known her for a few months, because her mother had cautioned her since childhood not to advertise the fact. I often had the sense that Matilda was keeping me at arm’s length, and in retrospect I see her as a private and rather impenetrable person. She used to hold monthly ‘creativity meetings’ in her living room, which brought together a ragtag community of failed or lecherous artists. I attended these events partly because Matilda was my friend and partly because I feared her loyalty to me might vanish if I didn’t stick around.

*

My most vivid memory of Matilda, which also marks the apex of our friendship, crystallizes at a brunch I went to one morning in her flat, not long after we met. The night before, she and I had gone out with the Indian neuroscientist, Aadi, and a mutual friend of theirs, a Frenchman named Michel. We stayed out till six am, and in the last bar we went to, seedy as all late bars are, Michel had groped my legs under the table. Later, we kissed on the street corner two blocks away from the gothic church at Jiřího z Poděbrad, as above us the sun broke yolk-like in the sky and streaked down behind the candy-coloured buildings. He chanted, ‘I want to be with you. I want to be with you,’ but I went home alone.

At noon, the four of us reassembled in Matilda and Aadi’s flat. Matilda mixed Bloody Marys and Aadi prepared butter chicken, which took forever and smelled incredible. By the time we finally sat down to eat I was gutted with hunger, my nose and itchy eyes running from the spices as I ravenously ate. I kept gulping water and wiping my nose with paper towels. It was one of the greatest meals of my life. When we were nearly finished, Aadi said that in India people ate with their hands, and then he cupped his fingers into a deft shovel and showed us with an elegance I can still picture.

I also remember sitting on the kitchen windowsill, smoking, chatting to Matilda, and gamely drinking my Bloody Mary, even though I’ve never liked tomatoes. I watched Michel hover at Aadi’s elbow from the corner of my eye, wondering why he was ignoring me after our kiss, when he’d held me to his coat and repeated so plaintively, ‘I want to be with you.’ But already my pride, which was a regiment, stood on guard, and I thought oh well, does it really matter? I blew smoke out the window and shivered because it was already October and the trees in the courtyard far below had shed the bulk of their yellow leaves. Matilda and I talked about inconsequential things, because I had a premonition of tact needed. Eventually I climbed out of the window and Matilda and I set the table. That was when we all sat down to eat, and despite everything I was extraordinarily happy. 

*

I’d arrived at Mick’s on a Friday, so the next day I left him to grade papers or fiddle with his stolen bass and went touring Žižkov where I used to live. By the end of the day I’d walked to Staroměstská and back, gliding down familiar streets in the cold just as I used to, dressed in the same clothes I used to wear, perfectly preserved in my rescued suitcase. Without really intending to, I wound up queuing for the funicular at the base of Petrin Hill and rode it to the top, just as Matilda, Michel, Aadi and I had done the day we’d eaten the butter chicken. The ride was quick – both times – and both times I was dazzled by the sight of Prague below, all ochre, tile, and spires, the river sharp and glittering through the centre like an open vein in a magic body.

Then the ride stopped and I got out.

I remember the four of us walking for hours, particularly through an avenue lined with trees, the bark matte black from a recent downpour. The leaves above us were the colour of cats’ eyes and made a million stains upon the blue sky. The air smelled of earth and rain. Matilda said, ‘I hope I never forget this,’ which had been my exact thought at that moment. It took hours to get down from Petrin Hill on foot that day, and when we finally did, night had fallen. We ducked into a busy bar tourists didn’t know about, and drank Staropramen standing up in the vestibule.

When I got out of the funicular on Saturday, alone, I followed the signs meant for tourists, and soon Prague’s miniature, imitation Eiffel Tower came into view. I’d never visited it back when I lived in the city, but I went in now to use the toilet, and when I came out I discovered I was in a small museum devoted to Jára Cimrman, hapless genius. I wandered through the exhibit, baffled and charmed by this bumbling inventor who’d been raised as a girl, grew up to convince Louis Eiffel to set the legs of his tower at an angle, and according to a plaque, had every one of his patents rejected. Circling around, I arrived at the glass case that displayed Cimrman’s famous ‘famine spoon.’ A neat hole pierced the rounded part. I  bent down until I could see my breath on the glass. Then I smiled and my heart turned over in my chest like a turtle in a pond and I wondered what in Cimrman’s life, exactly, had gifted him such a callous sense of humour.

The museum was small and I walked behind a slow-moving Spanish pair who looked like father and daughter, unaware they were blocking the stairs. Because I’d spent my teenage years in Panama, I understood perfectly when the daughter turned to the father and said, ‘The Czechs voted him the greatest Czech of all time in a contest held several years ago, but then the organisers changed the rules of the contest. They didn’t want a fictional character to win.’

*

When Matilda, Michel, Aadi and I left the bar where we’d drunk pints standing up, we walked all the way to Vinohrady, shivering in our thin sweaters. On the way, Michel pointed out the sprawling pink complex where, under Communism, people who’d been reported by their neighbours were tortured. In Vinohrady, Michel led us to a cheery restaurant with a moustache theme: moustaches on the menus, moustaches on the water jugs, moustaches on the waiters. The food was good but unmemorable. I shared a pitcher of sangria with someone, maybe Michel, or maybe I’m making that up. Afterwards we went to a nearby čajovna I knew of, where we were shown to a private corner and brought a hookah, then sweet, milky tea.

‘You’re very quiet,’ said Matilda to Michel, in English. Matilda was a Swiss national who’d grown up in Maine and spoke with an American accent, but she had some French and would often practice with Michel.

Michel shrugged. ‘I don’t feel like talking.’

At this moment Aadi, who’d been fussing with the hookah, sent the top of it crashing to the floor. He screamed and then we screamed too, twisting out of the way of the bouncing coal, which fell still and smouldered on the carpet. Choking with laughter, we flapped our hands at the coal until the servers rushed in and doused the floor with water and the whole thing was over in seconds. Even after we calmed down, the laughter kept resurging in hysterical waves.

At one point, Matilda said, ‘I feel like this could be purgatory – the tea that never ends, the interminable hookah.’

I looked at her. I would’ve happily stayed there forever. We were all so full and woozy from our lack of sleep, the walking in the cold, the heavy food, the wine with dinner, the flavoured smoke and the hot tea, that I couldn’t understand why Matilda wasn’t content just to sit still and exchange jokes.

Eventually, we left and trekked across Vinohrady to Poco Loco, a basement bar Matilda loved. As soon as we opened the door, we faced a spiral staircase descending into a fog of trapped cigarette smoke. This was my first visit to Poco Loco, though I’d return many times for pints of Svijany and games of darts in the decrepit back room. I didn’t stay long that night, however. Matilda, I understood, could drink and smoke night after night like a debauched vampire, but I was flailing. I went home and slept dreamlessly.

*

Michel called the next day, a Sunday, and gave me the address of a vinoteca nearby. ‘The owner is a monarchist,’ he whispered, indicating a few framed pictures of royalty decorating the shabby walls. We were the only customers. The owner knew Michel by name and it all seemed very glamorous to me.

‘I must kiss you,’ Michel declared, reaching across the table. When he covered my hands with his, I asked him what was going on between him and Matilda.

Michel kissed me again and then explained that he’d been sleeping with Matilda for months, but she meant nothing to him. That was his exact phrase. He said all of Saturday had been ‘a false day.’ I explained that Matilda was the first good friend I’d made in Prague, and that I didn’t want to lose her. He seized my hand again and cried, ‘She is the same. She has no female friends.’

He swore that Matilda wasn’t angry with me, that in fact she liked me very much. By the end of the night, we were making out against the brick wall of the vinoteca. He hadn’t slept since Saturday morning and his mouth had a pungent, unpleasant taste, like asparagus.

The whole next day I was assailed by a righteous devotion to Matilda – my desire to do the right thing – juxtaposed against a womb-melting lust for Michel. I felt as though I’d gulped ten cups of coffee. I arranged to meet Matilda in a bar close to my house called Bukowski’s, famous for serving free sangria to women on Tuesdays, and for two hours we spoke about everything we had in common: our families from whom we were semi-estranged, our artistic interests, our desire to travel, our love for Prague. When I brought up Michel finally, she said, ‘He’s a photographer, you know. I’ve seen him walk over to a table of people and ask to take pictures of them, and when they said no, he said, Fuck you, and started shooting anyway. I’ve never been so uncomfortable in my entire life. He was living in New York on September 11 and he went downtown with his camera. He said it was like a war. I’ve seen the pictures.’

I told her what had happened and she said that she knew. She’d confronted him, but he’d told her a different story – that I’d thrown myself at him. We delved into the nitty-gritty details, the analysis of his duplicity drawing us closer together. By the time she admitted she was in love with him, I understood I’d have to choose between them.

Matilda sipped her sangria.

‘Would you mind if the thing with Michel … wasn’t over?’ she asked, her voice quiet and practical, like a math teacher’s. ‘If we both see him?’

I pictured another weekend in which Michel, Matilda, Aadi and I all went out together. At the end of the night, whom would Michel accompany home? How would Matilda and I feel about the decision? Would we fall into a tacit hierarchy, like Mormon wives? Would it bring us closer as friends, knowing him intimately, making derisive allusions to his quirks?

The night Matilda and I met at Bukowski’s, I’d been in Prague three months. I was still adjusting to my job at an international preschool, washing the smell of cigarettes and beer out of my hair every morning. Not long after Matilda and I talked in Bukowski’s, I told Michel I couldn’t see him anymore. It seemed more rewarding to pick an enduring friendship over a romance with a man I couldn’t trust. He was very embittered, swearing never to see me or Matilda again, and he was true to his word.

*

My second night back in Prague was Halloween, and Mick and I had dinner with a mutual friend. We talked about movies. The restaurant was full of smoke and glowering old men. Only our waitress was young. It surprised me to hear my two friends speaking and understanding Czech so well. We ate svíčková and fried mushrooms and drank enormous, frothy pints. Afterwards we ended up in a small bar on the Žižkov/Vinohrady border that was staffed by two very friendly servers, who brought out a plate of meat, olives and cheese, and shared it with us free of charge. I drank something very sweet called ‘blood punch.’ Cobwebs and big plastic spiders hung from dark corners, and a small television showed a minor ice-skating competition on mute. Mick and I listened in amazement as our friend expertly critiqued each performance. At midnight, we put on our coats and hugged and I understood this was the last time I would ever see that friend. 

*

Sunday was my final day in Prague. I slept badly and in the morning drank only coffee. Then I went over to Matilda’s abandoned flat. When Mick went in to retrieve my suitcase, I’d forgotten to tell him to look out for a red bag filled with books. I hadn’t remembered packing my books separately until I opened the suitcase and the books weren’t there. I kept remembering their titles at night, or when I was alone. Cosmicomics. Vertigo. Tom Jones. Dubin’s Lives. Total Fears. Despair. Middlemarch. Steppenwolf. Helena. Henry and June. Wise Children. Candide. Others remained forgotten.

On the tram over, I worried that perhaps Matilda’s landlord had gone in and cleaned the place up. I thought there might be strangers living there now. I got off at Lazarská and walked the three blocks over. None of the keys stuck and I was inside the building in seconds. In the flat across the landing from Matilda’s, I heard thumping and children’s voices. I had a flashback of an old man I’d met in a bar once, who told me all about smuggling a costly ring in his ass when the Russians invaded and he’d escaped to Canada. ‘Czechs always watch,’ he’d added, with disgust. ‘It’s a habit or a national trait.’ I shut Matilda’s door as quietly as I could. 

The flat was deserted. For whatever reason, the landlord hadn’t yet cleaned up. There were still pots and pans in the kitchen, and exotic spices that must’ve been Aadi’s. I glided through the living room and into Matilda’s.

I’d been in her room once or twice before and remembered the mess, but what greeted me now was worse than I expected. The bed was unmade, with books and plates bearing the desiccated remains of meals tangled up in the sheets. The doors of her wardrobe hung open at crazy angles, and inside, a purple top clung by one shoulder to a white hanger. The rest of the clothes lay in a defeated heap on the bottom of the wardrobe, half spilling out onto the floor. In the corner, a desk overflowed with papers that cascaded down onto the chair and the floor, where they lay ankle-deep and spattered with some long-dried reddish liquid. On the mattress itself, the covers thrust back as if she’d hopped out of bed just that morning, rested a sooty ashtray crammed with butts. At the foot of the bed, Matilda’s boots stood upright in such an uncanny way it was as though she stood in them right then, invisible.

I found the bag of books in the room that had belonged to the old American. I didn’t know what had happened to him. The person who emailed me, having found my contact details on the tag attached to my suitcase, was a new housemate I’d never met. When I called the number he provided, he said, ‘Matilda hadn’t paid rent in six months. Nobody’s seen her for two. We’re all leaving today, and you should come get your stuff.’ It was then that I’d emailed Matilda in a panic. What could explain this? Had she fallen in the Vltava and drowned? But she wrote back instantly, saying only that things had ‘gotten bad.’ Now she was living with a new boyfriend in a village outside Prague, and would give her keys to any one of my other friends.

It was still a beautiful apartment, I thought, standing in the stripped room with the bag of books at my feet. I had a sudden urge to wash my hands and went to the sink unthinkingly and discovered that the water still worked. I thought of making myself a cup of tea, of reading in the flat to kill time, but ultimately I took some of Matilda’s books – she wasn’t coming back for them – listened at the door, and made my escape while the neighbours were silent.

*

Back at Mick’s, I told him that the flat was as he’d found it.

‘I might go back again,’ he said.

‘I’m glad,’ I said, a little insanely. ‘I’ll leave the keys with you, anyway.’

‘Was the eviction notice still on the door?’

‘There was just a note from the landlord, saying for Matilda to call him immediately.’

‘Funny, when I went there was an official notice.’

Mick and I stared at each other, having run out of things to say.

‘Are you going to call her?’

‘Who? Matilda?’

‘Of course. Are you going to tell her you’re here?’

‘She knows I’m here, more or less.’

‘I thought you would.’

‘It’s strange,’ I said. ‘Being in Prague and not seeing her.’

‘I never knew her that well,’ said Mick.

‘She was my best friend here.’

‘Well,’ said Mick, filling a glass of water, ‘she wasn’t a very good one.’

Mick drank. I closed my eyes. I didn’t really know how I felt about Matilda. It angered me that she’d looked after my things so poorly, but what right did I have to that anger, without any idea of what she’d been through in the months since I left? If I’d lost the suitcase, it would’ve been my own fault, for leaving treasured things behind. But then, weren’t friends supposed to be people you could count on? In some unspeakable way, I suppose I felt she owed me, for choosing her over Michel. I thought of the last time I’d seen her. We were hugging at the mouth of a metro station. I was eager to go to Paris. Even though my decision to leave was sudden, I hadn’t worried about Matilda. I felt certain she’d be fine, that we both knew she didn’t need me. And yet, when I’d told her I was leaving, I’d seen a flicker of discomposure briefly disturb the impression she always gave, of never really needing anyone.

At noon, Mick and I headed to the café where we always used to meet on Sundays. Usually we’d gossip about the people we’d done our TEFL course with, and then he’d indulge me as I raved on about Wuthering Heights or whatever I was reading then. One time, I’d met him at the café when I had food poisoning but didn’t know it yet. I told him I didn’t feel well.

‘You don’t look well,’ he said. ‘Want to get some fresh air?’

We spent the whole of that day together, talking and strolling around Vinohrady. Every so often, I threw up in a bar toilet or behind a tree. We tried having dinner in an Indian restaurant, but I couldn’t keep it down. When I came back from the bathroom, Mick said, ‘Some guy asked me whether you were all right. I was going to say I told you that you looked fat.’ I think I grinned. As we walked out, I recalled a friend of a friend who said Mick had no respect for women. I saw his unsavoury side too, but it had never really bothered me before. I guess I just thought he was funny.

My last day, as Mick and I sat in our customary café drinking coffee, he told me a story about a fellow TEFL student who’d gone to teach in Russia. He was a good-looking former baseball player who hobnobbed with bankers and blazed through beautiful Russian girls who, Mick said, cooked and cleaned for him, all with the expectation (and here Mick’s voice flushed meaningfully and he spoke in the first-person, as if he were the Russian girl in question) that, ‘If we get married, you take care of everything.’

‘Well,’ I said, understanding that the story thrilled Mick and becoming nauseous for the second time in that café, ‘why would anyone cook and clean for nothing?’

Later we walked back to his place, arguing. On the way, Mick stopped in a bakery and bought a small cake for himself, which I dropped accidentally when he asked me to hold it. It was so funny – his face, and the cake squashed on the pavement – that I kept laughing unforgivably even as I swore I was sorry. To prove it, I ran back and got him another cake. As we approached his flat, I suddenly remembered one time back when I still lived in Prague, him saying that if we ever dated, one of us would kill the other. And I’d been surprised – appalled, even – because never had it occurred to me that between us the stakes were so high.

*

At Mick’s, I repacked the suitcase. In a couple hours, I would board an overnight train back to Amsterdam. Besides clothing and books, the suitcase had contained my birth certificate, my Bachelor’s diploma, several notebooks and diaries, my spare pair of glasses, and a box of miscellaneous jewellery I kept for sentimental reasons. Altogether, it was remarkably heavy, the inverse of how I felt – emptied out, with a residue of bitterness in me like the salt that’s left when water evaporates. You live in a place and in the end, all you have is a list of bars and restaurants where you used to go – good for passing on recommendations to travelling friends, but little else. I moved to Prague in the first place because I wanted to see Národní třída where Milan Kundera once strolled, turning all the girls’ heads, as Hrabal wrote. There’s a tram stop and a big Tesco at Národní třída.

One day, I think I was living in Edinburgh by then, Matilda resurfaced on Facebook. She’d posted a recent picture of herself, in which she posed on a radiator like a starlet on a piano and she’d lost so much weight that she looked like a different person. Actually, I realized, she was a different person, a stranger, and sometimes in life that happens: you lose people for good. Worse, sometimes your luck or judgement or even your own behaviour is so poor that you lose a lot of people at once, all your friends slipping like grains of rice through the hole in the famine spoon.

I moved around a lot, after Prague. No matter how much stuff I got rid of, there were often suitcases I had to leave behind and come back for. This is what’s known as tempting fate. Now my years of travelling are a private museum with locked doors, and I wear its keys invisibly, sometimes like a token of fossilised love and other times like the spoils of war.

From issue #2: spring/summer 2016

About the Author
Sydney Weinberg is an American writer living in Dublin. Her writing has appeared in colony, Long Story, Short, minor literature(s) and The Dublin Review. One of her short stories was also included in the 2015 anthology Young Irelanders (New Island).