How Else Could It Be?

“Sorry.” He turned with the impact as he said it, to face the woman he’d bumped shoulders with. The woman started and began to turn back towards him, but the rush of the crowd pushed him to turn forward again and push across the street before he saw her face. A voice barked at him and he felt something catch his leg. He hopped wildly, and just managed to extricate his foot from the strap of rolling luggage. He turned to face the suit pulling the luggage passed him, but the face was already turning away with a wordless note of annoyance. He followed the back edge of the crowd to the far side of the street as the crosswalk lights began to change. He stayed there where the crowd was thinnest, moving slowly and focusing on avoiding the other pedestrians so as to avoid dramatic contact and keep to occasional bumps. After some time he made his way the last few blocks without incident. 

The cafe was crowded. 

No one minded more direct navigation inside as everyone made their way to and from the tables, the counter, and the door. He turned sideways and interposed himself narrowly between two people as they passed him and each other, so that one of them had an arm in his back and the other’s face came very close to his head. He didn’t apologize, and no one expected him to. 

“Salut!”

He had not spoken french very extensively in over three years, and felt his face flush with embarrassment. It took him a few seconds to look for the speaker and sit down with them at a crowded table. His friends were there, mostly as he remembered them, and he made his greeting to everyone’s delight in spite of his own embarrassment. The rest of the table recalled him, and warmly drew him in in french, and a little Czech. They all laughed and drank at that. He stumbled through the conversation, offering only the minimum in his rusty French. When the table pressed him, he was just able to put together a vague outline of the research he’d done in the past year and a half. All of them praised him with their smiles, for his work, and for holding on to the French they’d taught him, even though he’d remembered very little of it in fact. 

They asked him if he’d been well, and he said he had although he hadn’t. They asked how his family and his home was, and he said they’d been fine although they weren’t. He told himself that the challenge of expressing his misgivings in French was too great, and that they must already know, but the reason he didn’t tell them was because they were all happy, and he was not. He followed what was said by others better than he expressed himself, and he listened as they explained their lives, in much greater detail than him. They talked about weddings, good homes, hobbies and creations. Many of them were artists. They laughed about divorce and separation, about exhaustion, and about leaving homes behind. They did not talk about fire, cramped spaces, hunger, or crowds.

Stories of their lives turned to their last meeting. It was important to all of them, or else they wouldn’t have come all the way back to Prague. They recalled their misadventures and they decided to revisit their old haunts. It was what they’d all come to do. He reminded himself that it was what he’d come for.

 A pair of them bullied a waiter into taking their money while the rest of them waited outside. He waited with the others, pretending to listen to their conversation and laughing when he was supposed to, but watching the pair with guilt. He was glad that he didn’t need to have the uncomfortable conversation himself, and he was more guilty that he didn’t feel worse about it than that he’d actually avoided it. He knew they should have waited their turn, but it would have been too long. Bullying was the way things were done. 

While they were on the street, he focused on moving past the crowd, and keeping the rest of them in sight. He felt a flush as they queued for the descent into the metro, as the inactivity allowed the conversation to start up. They all laughed that there was no snow like last time, and they laughed at the crowd, remembering the space they’d enjoyed the last time they’d ridden it. He remembered it with fear rising in his throat. The crowds reminded him of everything that was wrong, the places in the world that were now empty, the wars and catastrophes that had emptied them, and the guilt that his home had escaped that fate. He asked them out loud “How else could it be?” But he knew that they didn’t speak English. They didn’t hear him. 

They danced that night in the rafters of an underground bar. The music was loud and live and earnest, and in this place the crowd did not make him feel like something was wrong. They all felt much as they had before, and they drank like they had before. For him, it was the first time in years. 

Outside, when the bars closed and they were told to go home, they stopped at a streetcar station. When the car arrived, one of the others decided not to get on. They explained to the others that they wanted to see more of the city, and they remembered the way. So a few of them walked, and he went with them. That late, the crowds were inside, and they could talk while they walked without needing to focus on the crowd. They talked in their mismatched French about how beautiful the city was, about how much they enjoyed each other's company. They talked about how little had changed, and they sang. It was not the uncontrolled shouts of happiness at the empty square as they’d hallucinated on the steps of the Church of Saint Ludmila so long ago, but it was pleasant and it brought them closer together. They huddled as they crossed the bridge. He was happy.

He could feel himself getting less drunk, and it didn’t affect his mood. He was happy as he hopped up onto the edge of the bridge and put out an arm dramatically to sing down from his impromptu stage. No words came to him though, and he wondered how long he could hold on to happiness. He thought to himself that his loss would be one less person to overcrowd the city, but as he hit the water, he realized it wasn’t true.