It wasn’t that I knew he was there. It was more that I had an overwhelming sense of him. So much so that more than once I turned around and fully expected to see him there, planned what I would say as I approached him. All I would find on turning was another quietly beautiful street, lined with gracious old buildings which seemed to bless my whimsy, and my own breath crystallising in the cold sunshine.
I explored alone the over-embellished baroque churches, their interiors weighed down with fat gold cherubs simpering at the ceiling, cracking under the weight of the plaster draperies they held. I admired the clock whose maker had had his eyes gouged out by the burghers who had bought his labour, just to ensure that he never again repeated the feat. I gazed up at the window where the famous defenestration had taken place, and wrinkled my brow at St Agatha, patron saint of unhappily married women, carrying her severed breasts on a platter. My eyes were strangely dry as I looked at the tattered photos in Wenceslas Square, protected by plastic bags from the January weather, tethered by sticks to the ground and fluttering sadly, placed there by relatives mourning the loss of their loved ones to the Communist state apparatus. Everywhere I went I took photographs, although even as I framed them I knew they would make an inadequate record of the experience. And I chewed stringy meat in the newly privatised restaurant, wondering that such a tranquil place could have so turbulent a past.
I also thought about him. I had never really stopped thinking about him, but I thought about him in a more immediate, more intense way than the wistful memories that drifted through my mind in a more or less daily basis. I remembered how it felt to be with him, tried from our ancient familiarity to work out what his life would be like, what he would be doing, accepted with some reluctance that he would have moved on, that his life would probably now include a wife and possibly some children. I tempered my planned greeting in the light of this.
Maybe it was the winter sun. Prague in January was much as I remembered Stockholm in September. Wrapped up in the comfort of coat, hat and boots, the warmth of the sun on my face was magical. It was not a feeling I was accustomed to in the dismal grey British year round. Maybe it was as simple as that – sunshine on my face recalling an old love affair that was never really put to sleep. Or maybe it was the fact that I had left my husband behind, and was taking a break while I still could, before we made the big and unavoidable decision as to whether to have children, a decision which would direct us into an indissoluble future together. I did still love him in an abstract way, but it seemed to me that when we took showers together it was to save time rather than for any sexual frisson. In the evenings, tired from work, we watched TV together, or worse, separately. We ate off trays and only held hands in the cinema. We were bored. Maybe that’s why here, alone, I had the sense of my old love hanging about me.
So when I was at home showing my husband the photos from my holiday, and I came to the picture of a little girl and her grandfather feeding the seagulls on the Charles Bridge, her little face enraptured, the birds irreverently standing on the outstretched hands of a statue, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see the figure in the background. My stomach still turned over and my throat was still suddenly dry, but I wasn’t entirely surprised.
The same but older, just as I am probably the same but older; he was still handsome. He still smiled in the same way. He had a little goatee beard; a sad, wispy thing. He’d never have worn it back then, but fashions change. It suited him. His baggy coat billowed out behind him. The disconcerting thing was that he was looking directly into the lens, into my face behind it. Just on the point of turning, he was waving, smiling that still boyish, mocking smile. Could it have been that he hadn’t seen me? No, surely not. The combination of the turn, the wave and the smile was a full stop. The photo shook in my hand a little as I described the little girl and her shrieks as the birds plucked lumps of bread roughly from her hands. My husband Simon laughed, sharing the moment. I put the picture, face down, on the pile of other snaps.
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