He heard the bite and hiss of brakes before the train came into view. Full. Passengers streamed by, reduced in height and composure by the great heat. One family separated just as another was reuniting, strangers maintaining an odd balance between happiness and sorrow.

A beetle-shaped man walked towards Ladislav, followed by a porter wheeling a steamer trunk. Surely such an elegant gentleman would have hotel reservations. But there was no price for asking. He stepped in front of the man.

“Accommodation?”

“Who are you?”

“I have private accommodation. Not far.” What was eight more miles if you had come all the way from Munich? “Nice rooms. Quiet. I show you?” Before the man could respond, Ladislav drew photographs from his jacket. He showed them to the man, then looked at them himself and smiled.

“You say it’s quiet?”

Dogs barked all night—fine dogs from fine families—and old Sedivy kept chickens and rabbits, but Ladislav put these disturbances more into the category of atmosphere. He nodded. “Only the sounds you love to hear.”

“And who is that charming woman in the garden?”

“That is my wife, Hana.”

“I will stay a week,” the man said, shifting his gaze from Hana’s photograph to Ladislav’s ears. Maybe more.”

Ladislav’s jaw and cheekbones were prominent, almost distinguished, but the handles on either side of his face gave him the bewildered expression of a boy listening to seashells. He needed the porter’s help to lift the steamer trunk into his car.

“Will it be miserably hot again tomorrow, or can we look forward to a breeze?” the man asked. When Ladislav shrugged—thinking this trunk weighs a month, a year—the man gripped his shoulder.

“There is more to running a guesthouse than providing a bed. You must study the weather.”

They agreed on a price in dollars that was ten percent below what Ladislav could exchange them for on the street. The black marketers in Old Town Square offered the best rates, but they would tuck one-thousand-dinar notes in with the bills if they thought you couldn’t tell one comrade tilling the fields from another. Worse were the short-haired Czechs posing as tourists who marched across the cobblestones snapping photographs of the transactions. What was the goal of ex-surveillance specialists and break-in artists and wrist-twisters? Stabilize the currency! For dealing with these unreliable elements of the population, Ladislav deserved a small premium.

At noon the next day, he marched up and down the stairs in his garden boots to rouse the new boarder. He paused to adjust the muskets and ice boots decorating the walls, pulling his shirt cuff over the skating blades, sweeping each riser with the water-warped hockey stick Hana had given him for his fiftieth birthday, to which she had added a dense beard of broom bristles. Ladislav wiped cobwebs off the ceiling, hip-checked couches and chairs out of his way, wristed dust out of the corners. A Canadian coach had tried to lure him to Quebec when he was nineteen. Hana’s father countered with a promise to make him an assistant in the housing authority. A portrait of the great Mecir hung inside the foyer to remind him of this dubious honor. Hana’s advice was succinct: “Leave Prague and forget about me.” Ladislav didn’t relish the prospect of waking up alone every morning in a far-away hotel; the smell of baked ice that never left his body in those days his only connection to home. He glided through the house, cherishing the corner of himself that he kept frozen at the precise temperature of tender clueless youth, found a wadded up sock by the staircase, slapped it across the threshold to the kitchen.

Hana found the sock, tossed it out of the kitchen, and positioned herself in the doorway.

“I’ll score again,” he said.

“No.”

The sock rose off his broom. Hana moved her hip to the right, deflecting the sock.

“You must be putting on weight. Normally that shot gets by you.”

Hana, three pounds heavier than the day they married, patted down her dress. She had set out poppy-seed cakes and strawberries and fresh bread and minced eggs with chives. A pot of tea grew strong and cold. Ladislav drummed his feet on the landing, rattled his collection of swords in the brass umbrella bucket at the top of the stairs.

Below, language books dominated the kitchen table in three uneven columns. Ladislav listened to Hana’s staccato recitations from the stairs.

“Good-a-day…You like tea or coffee…The tram is over the street…Come out, come out, wherever you are….” And now in Czech: “Will he ever wake up?

“He’s tired. He’s had a long journey.”

“My bread’s had a long journey.”