‘What is your worst nightmare?’
‘I don’t know. Let me think. I don’t have any nightmares. I’m a lucky guy I guess.’
‘His worst nightmare is kissing a gay.’


‘What was that yesterday?’
‘What?’
‘You told my friends you’re grandfather was a Nazi.’
She laughed. ‘Wasn’t it a great joke?’
‘No it wasn’t. And you told them that my worst nightmare is to kiss a gay?’
‘Yeah,’ she laughed again.
‘Now, all of my friends will think I am a homophobic person dating a Nazi girl,’ he grabbed his phone and lay down on a bed. 
She found it hilariously funny and could not stop laughing. The girl was thirty years old and yet, she saw the world as a beautiful place to be born into, like a life one can put on a table in the sunny morning with sweet hot cocoa.
The wind blew through the window. If they opened it wide, the room would disappear in fog that consumed the city every night. The girl could not understand how the fog could hide tops of the buildings first and only after that descend onto the pavements.
She was sitting at the chair by the piano in the kitchen.
The piano was in the kitchen. She would never admit that that was one of the reasons she fell in love with the boy.
He looked frightened.
‘They are your friends, they sure know it’s not true,’ she smiled and stroked his burning cheeks.
‘I know. But you should’ve finished the story.’
‘I didn’t realize they don’t know anything about European history. And when I did, I didn’t want to finish the story anyway. It’s a great joke.’
‘It’s a great joke for you but now I look like an idiot.’
‘Well, tell them the rest of the story then.’
‘I won’t tell them anything. I won’t censor you. Say whatever you like to say. It’s your life. But you should’ve finished the story.’
‘It’s not my fault we have different kind of jokes,’ she said loud. ‘People in Europe make fun of Nazis this way. They even hail in the streets, when they’re drunk. They don’t mean it it’s just our way of ridiculing those assholes.’
‘You have to understand that it’s different for Americans. All my friends’ grandfathers fought in the Second World War and they are very sensitive about it. This is the subject Americans are silent about. We don’t talk about it.’
‘And you certainly don’t make jokes out of it.’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘There were much more people involved in fighting Nazis on the European side and yet, we can make fun of it.’
‘I know. I was raised in Europe. But this is how it’s here. I had to learn it and you have to learn it as well.’
It sounded almost like an order. She hated orders, rules of any kind, refusing to enter prisons of other people’s minds.
‘How about they learn something new? It’s not my fault they don’t know that we were part of a Nazi regime. That by the Munich Agreement Czechoslovakia ceased to exist and in a way we were nothing but a puppet country. And anyone who got enlisted in the army in 1939 was enlisted as Hitler’s fighter. Though, at the very first opportunity they deserted the army anyway. My grandfather did so after six weeks of marching. They were in a small village thirty miles from Leningrad, when he and twenty other soldiers decided to join Russians. There was a church there and my grandfather told them ‘Let’s hide in the church’, but everybody said that would be the first building to be searched and bombed by Nazis and they refused to go there. Just my grandfather and two other soldiers hid there.’
‘And,’ he interrupted her, ‘the church was the only building that was not destroyed, otherwise the whole village was burnt to the ground. I know. And it’s a wonderful story. I just wished you would’ve finished it.’
She fell silent.
‘It was a joke. It was a European joke, it was a joke anybody would make and moreover it is a joke that runs in my family and that’s it.’
He sulked and grabbed his telephone, which he did not call telephone anymore, because it was not only telephone, it was a computer and a guitar and a television and a fish pond and all you could imagine, but not a mere phone and he was annoyed every time she called that tiny black box a telephone and she kept calling it telephone because she liked to tease him.
She got up and made herself a tea, leafing through the newspapers she bought last night after drinking her second absinth.
‘And you’re obsessed with absinth,’ he added.
‘It’s the only drink that doesn’t make me sick. I am sick from any other alcohol and I hate being sick. Wine makes me sick, whisky makes me sick, and I can stand only two bottles of beer at most. Absinth is the only alcohol that doesn’t make me sick.’
He kept staring at the phone as if deciding who to call.
In the next half an hour, while she had her breakfast, read the world news and took a shower, he called about twenty friends, with every number dialled pushing her further and further away from his mind.
All of a sudden she felt free.
‘What do you want to do?’ he asked, with his phone pressed to his ear.
‘I think you should spend a day with your friends.’
He nodded.
‘You called about twenty of them,’ she grinned.
‘I always do that on Sundays. It’s one of my other routines. Besides, it’s free calls for me on Sunday, so I always call all of my friends.’
She knew it wasn’t true but she didn’t say anything.
It was Saturday.
And he told some of his friends he called that he did not call them for a month or so.
How can one break through the routines, she thought, through the thick wall of three years of loneliness, Wednesdays in Sears restaurant at Union square, weekends’ breakfast in North Beach, two hours of work in the coffee shop at the top of California street, guitar shop on Van Ness once a week and tapioca drink on Powell street on the way downtown. She was not a part of the routine yet and that was the reason she was there now: to find out if she can do that, if she can become part of his future family that was lost in the past, but strangely enough all the independence he admired before became suddenly nothing but a kite attached to his hands, as heavy as the guilt he felt for everything he had never told her.
And then, then there was the language.
It made everything harder for the girl, speaking about love using the words she has never used before, words she only read in the books or listened to in the songs or watched people say in the movies. Somehow, everything she said in that language seemed untrue and distant and fake, and the only true thing was the joke about her grandfather in the Nazi army, the private joke in her private language invented in the middle of everyone’s English.

The painless permanent smile said the sign on a window on the way to the Ocean beach.
Things like that made her happy, just like the sound of the waves of the ocean and dogs running around.
The day was sunny and she hoped he had spent it with his friends, talking about her stupid joke all over again, about his loneliness and a mistake and that there is only several more days that he has to endure this ordeal, but at least he tried, he tried before he will have dipped back into the routine. She secretly hoped he would find one more Korean girl, finally the one he would grow old happily with, as he almost did four years ago.
She wished nothing more than to break any routines.
She found him in the apartment, a loner playing his lonely tunes on guitar. He spent all day alone with music, which surprised her: she expected him to be happily engaged in some activity outside with his close friends. Seeing him alone like that, she decided to apologise to his friend and sent him a message.
‘What did you do?’ he asked with his eyes wide open.
He sounded as terrified as he did when he was speaking of war. ‘You sent an email to my friend?’
She leaned against the wall and stared him in the eye, confused.
‘I wrote him about the band he has never heard of, sent him the link and than added, I should have explained the joke probably and I did.’
‘Are you serious?’
She nodded. ‘Why? Is it wrong now to explain things? That’s what you wanted, didn’t you?’
‘Well, thank you for twisting a knife.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Can’t do what?’
‘You can’t write to my friends. You wrote them last year too. They were all surprised asking me: your girlfriend sent me an email, what’s that about?’
‘It was only two emails to two of your friends, saying thank you for the nice time and inviting me to a party. That was all. I’ve never written them again.’
‘You’re not supposed to do that. They’ll think you’re a life hacker.’
‘What’s a life hacker? Something like a computer hacker?’
‘A life hacker is a girlfriend who hacks someone’s life: she takes over his friends and relationships and all.’
‘And that’s a bad thing?’
‘Oh, yeah, that’s the worst thing.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
‘No, I’m serious.’
She stopped eating and put the fork on the table. ‘I’ll be right back.’
The restroom was small and she wondered if there were any cameras watching her pacing up and down that tiny place. She remembered August Strindberg and his collection of short stories about men and women she has read about twenty times so far, but she was sure this situation had nothing in common with Strindberg‘s irony, that her boyfriend’s ridiculous anger was real and utterly different, though at the first sight the comparison could be draught: everything was about love, but there was no love present.
And all of a sudden she realised there is only one world in English for love. Love. Just love. Nothing more. Lubit or even milovat somebody was utterly impossible in this country. That would be translated as to love anyway.
 ‘You know, if you were in Czechoslovakia,’ she said sitting back to her place pretending nothing happened, ‘I would be happy if you’d take over all of my friends. If you hacked my life, if that’s how you want to call it. Because that is how we do it. That’s who we are. I would be so glad to see you sending my friends emails and become the best friends with them and remain best friends with them even after we’d split up. How can you live like this?’
‘Your friends are like a family to you.’
‘I thought your friends were the same.’
‘Family is a family and friends are friends.’
‘You mean friends here are more like an acquaintances?’
‘I would never trust anyone except my family.’
‘But how can you live like this?’
‘You get used to it. It’s not that bad. You go to work, you go home, you go out with people and have a dinner or a drink, or you go to a party.’
She fell silent. ‘Painless permanent smile,’ she grinned dryly.
He lowered his voice. ‘That’s how it is and you have to think of what you will be abanDaning if you decide to move here. You get invited to places, they keep telling you we should hang out together, but it doesn’t mean anything.’
‘So that’s why Americans like Czechoslovakia, because we are totally different. We’re open and friendly and we treat you like a family and instantly trust you if we like you and we make great friends.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And that’s why that series about friends in New York was so successful? Because the friends like that actually don’t exist here?’
‘It’s all fiction. Everybody wants it but nobody gets it.’
For the first time that day she smiled. ‘Is there any other word for friends, in the meaning we use it?’
‘No,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s just friends.’
‘What a pity. That would make many things much clearer.’
‘I know. It’s just this one word.’
‚So friend is merely an acquaintance here.‘
‚Exactly.“
‚And kamarad, that would probably a close friend.‘
‚Tak,‘ he agreed using the world he learned in her country.
‚But still, a close friend is not somebody you would trust.‘
‚No. You might trust him, but not a hundred percent. You wouldn’t tell him everything.‘
‚And pritel, that is something you don’t know what is.‘
‚We don’t have that. Somebody you trust a hundred percent is the most often a person who is related to you, someone from the family.‘
She smiled and felt sorry for him and she felt sorry for the whole nation and wondered if the Beat Generation writers were friends or just mere acquaintances to each other trying to succeed together, and she decided she would ask Ferlinghetti, hoping he would say the truth, though you never know with the poets in America.
And next day she walked down to the beach and sat down, thinking about strangeness of friends, watching the families on bikes and all wannabe actors and screenwriters lying on the warm sand with their scripts, taking notes and murmuring their dreams aloud, as if learning them by heart meant not forgetting them in the times of acquaintances where pain is being avoided at all costs and traded for bearable emptiness of permanent smile.
And all of a sudden she knew all the routines were gone and they were both free finally.

2.

At the end of the week Jeremy invited his drummer Dan and his girlfriend Natalie for a dinner, for the second time. Nobody mentioned the joke, nobody said a word about the message she had sent to ‘his friends’.
They all behaved as if nothing of it happened. The girl was growing steadily sad, her eyes lost in a small pub in Prague, where she used to sit with her band drinking beer, laughing and not hiding a single thing from each other.
‘I got the CD from yesterday’s rehearsal,’ Jeremy said to the drummer.
‘It was a great rehearsal,’ the drummer, a slim tall black haired man answered, and opened a bottle of a beer.
Natalie’s voice tinkled with laughter and said something in her Arizona accent, in which every sentence sounded like a piece of operetta.
‘Cool.’
‘Seems to me the bass doesn’t fit there really though.’
‘I thought so too. Ryan plays too many notes.’
‘He should play much simpler.’
In an awkward silence she tried to think of something to say, staring at old meat with no taste on her plate. She asked Natalie about her life, but the only thing she learned was that Nat works sixty hours a week.
‘I would like to save some money and leave for a year or two and just travel the world.’
Dan leaned across the table and poked his girlfriend in the ribs: ‘She’s a very good writer.’
‘Is that right?’ the girl asked with a real interest happy she finally found a secret entrance in the long corridor with no windows or doors, and decided to look inside. ‘What do you write?’
‘Yes. Natalie wrote the whole text on my website,’ Dan said proudly.
The girl did not know what to say about that.
‘I’m trying to write, you know,’ Natalie said. ‘I just can’t write dialogues. I don’t understand how anyone can write dialogues. Oh my god, it is so hard! I mean, I can easily write one page of sentences, but when I tried to write a dialogue, I couldn’t think of anything. I just didn’t write a single word and I thought, fuck, this is so hard!’
‚There are some excellent books with no dialogues in them,‘ the girl tried to encourage Natalie as much as she could.
‚I know, I know. Anyway, I want to take one year off and just write and paint and make music, but I’m not sure I will do it though, you know, I’m one of the top managers in the company, and it took me ten years to get there and I don’t want to throw it away.‘
‚Maybe they could give you a sabbatical year,‘ the girl said.
‚Sabbatical what?‘
„Sabbatical, just like the professors at the universities get, one year of paid leave every seven or six years.‘
‚Maybe,‘ Natalie smiled. ‚Maybe I could ask them.‘
‚How old are you?‘
‚Thirty two. Dan is thirty six.‘
Dan, hearing that, put a bottle of beer on the table and looked at Natalie. ‚Listen, I was just thinking. We’ve been together for four years.‘
Natalie held her breath with her eyes wide opened.
The girl wished he’d say what Natalie wanted to hear.
‚I mean, we’ve been together for four years now and we haven’t tried shrooms together.‘
He sounded surprised.
Natalie looked surprised. Then she winked and laughed timidly. ‚That’s true, that’s true.‘
Then they both fell silent.
‚Well, next week we could play again,“ Dan said finally.
‚We will,‘ Jeremy answered.
‚You could bring the piano.‘
‚I could.‘
‚I love experiments.‘
The dialogue repeated every two minutes.
The girl got up seven times and seven times she filled her tiny plate with a spicy sauce. Yet, everything was without a taste.
At least absinth was good there.
‚You know what I’ve just realised? We have no therapists in Czechoslovakia. We don’t need them,‘ the girl said all of a sudden and she knew she crossed some invisible border again.
‚You don’t?‘ Natalie asked with a disbelief.
The girl kept using the word Czechoslovakia, because that was the country where she was born and the country she decided to be faithfull to all her life.
‚I studied psychology and I remember several of my schoolmates wanted to become psychoanalysts, but they soon realised they couldn’t make living out of it. Nobody uses therapists there, really. They are absolutely redundant in our country. We tell everything to our close friends anyway, we tell our close friends all the things you usually tell only to therapists or your family here. When I think about it you actually have to pay to tell the truth,‘ she grinned and went on. ‚And we don’t have stand-up comediants either. In the pubs people make fun of themselves, mostly fun of oneself, and what you see on TV here, everybody would tell you while drinking beer. Fifteen million comediants. That could be the name of the book about Czechoslovakia.“
Dan lifted the empty bottle and asked the waiter for the bill.
‚You’ll bring over the keybord next week?‘ he asked Jeremy nonchalantly. ‚I could try some delay on drums.‘
‚That’s a great idea, absolutely great. I would love to have delay on drums.‘
The girl finished her absinth.
Then they all stood up and gave each other a hug. It was awkward for the girl to hug people that were not her close friends. She wanted to say aloud all the things they feared to talk about, she wanted to break their shells, bang them against the wall and keep pouring absinth into them until they would open wide and never return back, just like some sea creatures. But everything was so perfectly wrapped in a plastic bag one could touch only with a plastic fork, the type of fork she used only once in her life when she was five years old, the one from a Bulgarian airplane, that her parents had brought her from their holiday.
‚What’s wrong?‘ he asked her on the way home, not mentioning the last sentences.
Did she really say them or just imagined saying them?
‚Nothing. I’m just sad.‘
‚Homesick?‘
She shrugged. ‚No, I’m not homesick at all.‘
‚You miss your friends?‘
‚I don’t.‘
‚You miss your family?‘
‚You are my family now.‘
‚Does my life make you sad?‘
She bit her lips.
‚I don’t want to know it. I don’t want to think about how empty my life is, that I have no real close friends and I don’t want to feel sorry for myself and be sad,‘ he said in a tough voice and she did not feel like arguing at all.
‚Let’s open some wine,‘ she said when they got home and then, in a light of cherry candle, she told him what she was thinking about all night: ‚Maybe I didn’t come here to find out if I can live here. Maybe I came here to save you.‘
‚How do you want to save me?‘
I’d take you to Europe, she thought. You would be so happy there, I know it.
‚Save you from this emptiness,‘ she answered. ‚From this nothingness you all live here. It scares me.‘
He sighed, but did not say a word.
‚You’re not drinking,‘ she moved his glass towards him, but when he moved it back, she did not insist and later, in the middle of the night when they were making love she felt the iron gate in front of her heart falling apart and saw the black pond of his past with strange fish nobody has ever seen. Here comes the soul fisher, she thought before she slipped into unconsciousness, here comes the soul fisher. And if I’m wrong then you may as well just forget me.