“My son cannot cook. He evaluates. It’s a tragedy.”
“It’s a serious condition,” Enzo agrees. “There’s no cure. I’ve stopped looking for one.”
“Come. Sit. I’ve made too much. It’s the only way I know how to say things.”
“I know that language,” Enzo says. “I speak it fluently. My mother invented a dialect of it.”
And my mother, who has spent five years asking if I’m eating and taking whatever answer I gave, looks at the man who understood her in one sentence. Then she looks at me. Her eyes do a thing. She doesn’t say the thing because we’re Czech and we don’t. But she squeezes my arm once on the way to the kitchen, hard, and the squeeze is a whole speech.
Lunch is loud in the quiet Czech way. A different loud from Naples. More silence between the good parts. The good parts land just as hard.
“So,” my father says to Enzo, with the seriousness of a man conducting a job interview. “Napoli’s back line. Explain to me the left side. I have theories.”
“You have theories about Napoli’s back line?”
“I have theories about everyone’s back line. I’m a history teacher. It’s the same skill.”
“Táta,” Petra says. “He didn’t come here for a tactics exam.”
“He plays for a living. He can survive one question from an old man.”
“I’ll answer it,” Enzo says, “if you tell me the truth about these dumplings. I think they might be the best thing I’ve eaten north of the Alps, and I need to know if that’s disloyal to my mother.”
My father considers this like a man weighing evidence. “It’s disloyal,” he says. “But she’ll never know. Eat another. And the left side. You’re stalling.”
“I’m not stalling. Their left-back steps in too early against a winger who waits. If you hold the run half a second, the whole channel opens behind him.” Enzo tips his head toward me. “Ask your son. He spent five years teaching me the price of stepping early. I got very good at not doing it. It cost him a lot of goals.”
“He put you out of the World Cup,” my father says, not quite a question.
“He did. I’ve made my peace with it. It took me the entire flight to Naples.”
Petra shows him baby photos I would pay money to bury.
“That’s him at four,” she says. “He organized his toys by color and cried when I mixed them.”
“I did not cry.”
“You cried, Marek. You filed a complaint with Mum. You were four.”
“I was thorough,” I say, and Enzo laughs so hard he has to put his fork down, and I would burn Prague to the ground to keep him laughing like that at my parents’ table.
The squad still doesn’t know. That’s ahead of me. The whole Czech NT, Šíma and Tomáš, and the group chat, the men who’ve had me filed as the food guy for a decade. That’s a Novemberconversation. I can feel it coming, and for the first time I’m not dreading it. I’m just going to do it at the break, the way you do a thing you’ve decided is true. Šíma will look at me for a long second and say something dry and pretend he didn’t already know. Because he’s known for a while. In the way Šíma knows things, without needing to be told.
My phone buzzes on the table. The group chat, as if summoned. Šíma.
A photo. Him and Tomáš at some place in Brno, a plate of something between them, Tomáš mid-laugh with his eyes shut. Šíma isn’t really in the frame because he’s holding the phone, and he never gets himself in the frame. The caption is about the food. It’s always about the food with us. That’s the whole tax and the whole tenderness of the Czech NT in one photo of a plate.
But I’ve spent two years learning to read the thing hiding under a photo of a plate.
I know that particular angle. The one where the plate is the excuse and the person across the plate is the point. I know it because I sent a hundred of them, cataloging meals so I didn’t have to catalog the real thing.
I look at Šíma’s photo of Tomáš laughing with his eyes shut. Then, at the caption about the food.
And I think, with the specific fondness of a man who knows that look because he has worn it:Oh. Oh, you too. Not yet. Maybe not for years. But oh.
I don’t say anything. Šíma didn’t say anything to me for a decade. There’s a kindness in the right kind of not-saying. It’s the thing Šíma has always done for me, standing by an open door, never asking. I’ll do it back for him now. I stood in his position for a decade without knowing. Now I know what it’s for. When he finds the end of that sentence, I’ll be around.
I text back about the food, because that’s how you say it in our language until you can say it in the other one.
