I followed suit and sat down next to him, albeit with a heavy sigh of my own.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m sorry, alright? And you know what? Fine, let’s go, and try to talk about anything else. How about it?”
Due to my reluctant acquiescence, we sat on the heated terrace of some restaurant in the Old Square that evening, sipping non-alcoholic sparkling wine from tall, elegant flutes.
From the corner of my eye, I could just make out Orloj, Prague’s famous astronomical clock. Night had fallen, but tourists were still posing for photos in front of the dreamy contraption of golden-blue dials and delicate, arrow-like hands which pointed to figures that always vaguely reminded me of magical runes.
“It was nice of you to find a place that serves non-alcoholic bubbly,” I told Petr to break the silence between us.
A silence that was not really a silence at all, owing to the hum and bustle of the other guests, but that was all the more potent when contrasted with so many happily entertained voices around us.
“I try.” He rewarded me with a straight-toothed smile. “You may not always notice, but I do.”
“I do notice,” I assured him, “and I appreciate it.”
“I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his dark hair, momentarily revealing the receding hairline that was a rare blemish on his carefully cultivated visage. “I don’t feel like I make you very happy anymore.”
It was getting cooler, and I moved my chair slightly to be directly underneath the mushroom-shaped heater that glowed warmly above our heads.
“That’s because I’m not very happy right now in general. It’s not your fault.” I traced the rim of my glass with a finger, not quite meeting his eye.
“I just hope it will be alright once we finally have children.”
“Ifwe eventually have children,” I corrected him pessimistically, “and what happened to not talking about it tonight?”
Fortunately, the tuxedo-clad waiter brought our plates at that moment, sparing Petr the obligation to reply. For the next few minutes, I pretended to be fully absorbed by the colourful assortment of roasted duck, red cabbage, and potato dumplings on my plate, steaming with an aroma at once festive and homely, like a celebratory Sunday lunch.
As a girl and then a young woman, how often did I hear the phrase ‘when you have children’ or its equivalent? You’ll understandwhenyou have your own kids. Study now because you will not be able towhenyou have a baby. Travel while you can because it will be harderwhenyou have a family. Life only truly startswhenyou have children ... I heard as much from my relatives, teachers, friends, friends’ parents, colleagues, authors whose work I translated, random people in the tube, labourers hired to install our new walk-in wardrobe, and essentially from almost anyone with whom I ever spoke for longer than a few minutes. And every single one of these people always used the word ‘when’, never ‘if’. As if starting a family were like breathing, something that everybody does almost unconsciously, automatically.
Only if it were supposed to be so matter-of-course, so easy to be practically guaranteed, then what did not being able to do it make me? How could I feel like my life had any meaning if, in the tree of evolution, I was nothing but a dead branch from which no others grew? Nature was correcting an error in my person that she had made when combining genes. I was a mistake, barred from propagating itself any further. It was impossible to see worth in anything I did when the unforgiving process of natural selection made it so abundantly clear that there was none.
Mercifully, a commotion nearby pulled me out of my self-pitying thoughts. A few tables down from us, one of the customers was demanding a Moscow mule in heavily accented English. The young, spotted waiter kept apologising that he did not know what it was. People were turning in their chairs, craning their necks to see. The poor waiter’s pimples appeared to be turning brighter red as blood flooded his face. Disgusted with the scene, I put down my knife and fork and got up to squeeze closer to them between the tightly packed tables.
“It is essentially vodka, ginger beer, and lime juice. I saw on your menu that you have these ingredients, and so you can probably make the cocktail,” I tried telling the young man kindly.
But my voice was drowned out by the ear-splitting, nerve-grating growl from the corpulent, dissatisfied customer. The metal chair screeched unpleasantly on the stone patio as he got up with a speed that seemed improbable given his stature. I backed away instinctively, almost tripping over a leg of the table behind me. The unhappy guest lunged at the thin waiter with a clutter of glasses, cutlery, and candles, knocking the latter to the ground with a mighty, enraged roar. I watched in morbid fascination as the pudgy face inched closer and closer to the youngster’s neck, teeth bared and eyes bulging.
It took four men to pull the assailant away from his victim and to hold him steady before the police arrived, preceded shortly by an ambulance.
“Why and how in the hell did he do that?” Petr wondered, his horrified face illuminated by the rotating beacon of blue and red light.
“He must have been on drugs,” I reasoned, my blood still racing with perverse amazement at the intensity of the offender’s aggression.
2
PIECES OF A DREAM
Two weeks later, I was looking out of our bedroom window at the manicured lawn in our front yard. Watching our street and our neighbours, milling to and fro as they accompanied their small children on tricycles and occasionally stopped to chat to each other.
We lived in a row of newly built terraced houses in the suburbs, and I always saw it as a statement of a kind that we chose to live there. Our address said that we were just like everyone else: nice, normal, family-oriented people. We selected the house precisely because of something that could make others dislike it: its uniformity. All four rows looked exactly the same with their beige facades, French windows, and dark gable roofs. I used to dream that with our neat little house, a neat little life would automatically come too, as if packaged and sold alongside it: marriage, mortgage, children.
Instead, we became the only childless couple in the neighbourhood, excluded from the tricycle strolls around the block, from the weekend barbecues, and from the meet-ups at the nearby playground.
“So, when are you two lovebirds finally going to start a family?” our well-meaning neighbours would ask.
“Oh, we don’t know, hopefully soon,” we would answer lightly, bashfully.
Even when doctors shook their heads at me disapprovingly, as if the state of my reproductive organs was somehow my fault. Even when my abdomen ached with fresh surgery scars. Even when bruises from the injectable IVF medicine covered my stomach like stains.
