30 June, 8:30 AM, Czernograd, the Niski district
He woke up and he didn’t know where he was.
It wasn’t his hotel room. This one was smaller, darker, with the ceiling painted white or cream and walls covered with burgundy coloured wallpaper with a pattern of lighter swirls. And the bed was cast-iron grey; he could see the bars at the foot of it.
Then his mind registered something else; a woman’s arm across his body, a head cradled between his chest and his arm, and the feeling of warm skin against his. He raised his head off the pillow, his chin almost touching his chest, as if he really needed to reassure himself the initial impression wasn’t just all a trick of the light. Sensing his slight movement, she stirred and sighed but did not wake.
It came back to him in small untidy parcels of flashing images and scraps of words and it came back to him in the reverse order: the love-making, the visions, the caves, Romeo, the club, the wine bar, the exit from the hotel. The only thing he couldn’t remember at all was the intermediate step between then and there and now and here; he couldn’t recall when they left the underworld, how they got to this room with patterned burgundy walls and what they have done once they got here, except falling asleep.
Once he had all the pieces in his head, he ran them forward, then backwards, and then forward again. Without a doubt this had been the craziest night of his short life. Ruthenia and Galicia would never look the same again. He wasn’t quite sure if he wanted another look. Except at the part of Ruthenia and Galicia lying next to him.
When she finally woke up, he wondered if it will be awkward. It wasn’t. She rolled off him and stretched like a cat, arms thrown wide open, breasts thrust up in the air like a mountain chain erupting from the clash of tectonic plates. A rather delightful mountain chain, he thought, and his hand followed his eyes to explore again. What was this? No, not the breasts. This. A summer holiday fling? Was he taking advantage of his employee? But then he remembered that Marina hasn’t taken one cent for all her translation and guide services. Was she taking advantage of him, the somewhat lost, reluctant tourist, and a fish out of water, a very unmagical American in a magic kingdom? A potentially rich one to that? Or was he thinking too much? And about the wrong things, instead of his unaccomplished mission and those trying to stop it?
“Good morning, sunshine,” she purred. “Rise and shine... Oh, you already did,” she gave him a squeeze.
“What happened last night?” he asked.
“Well, Jake” she rolled on her stomach and propped herself on her elbows, looking at him, “when two people – man and woman – like each other, they-“
“I know that part,” he smiled and silenced her, putting his finger to her mouth, “just not everything before.”
“What happened last night,” she twisted her head to evade his finger, “is that I fulfilled my promise to show you the Czernograd at night that not many people – whether locals or tourists – get to see.”
“I mean the caves,” he said. “What the hell happened there? Aside from Ecstasy that is... What did I see?”
She put her left arm on his chest and started to trace figures on his skin with a finger. “I don’t know what you saw. I know what people generally see. The past and the future, the things they’ve forgotten and the things they’ve never known. That sort of stuff.”
Is that all...
“Sounds about right,” he said. “I just have to decide which is which.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
“I think I need to recreate some of the atmosphere from last night,” he said, reaching for her buttock.
“Do you really?” she laughed and rolled on top of him.
An hour later, back at his hotel room, Jake turned on his laptop and logged on his email. Aside from some spam that still managed to got through – “Russian girlfriends for you”; what about the Ruthenian one, he thought, tapping the delete button - there were a few miscellaneous messages from friends, a non-urgent email from work which he decided to ignore for at least 24 hours, and somewhere in between them all a short note from his sister.
Jake,
Here’s the best I could do. Hope that helps.
Xoxo
J
P.S. Still not sure if you’re full of it or not, but you have always been good as scaring the shit out of me. Just in case you’re serious, please take care of yourself for God’s sake.
Underneath the empty subject line of the email he saw an attached file called “Gramps”. He double-clicked clicked on it.
It was a scanned black and white photo of a young man – in his thirties, perhaps – standing outside an unnamed building. The photo was cropped, so Jake could only see him from the waist up. It must have been taken in summer because the man was wearing just a light shirt and a loosened black tie, holding his coat over one arm and his fedora in his other hand. His hair was parted to the right and neatly combed over a high, creased forehead, his expression serious, verging on impatient, as if he was wondering why he was wasting his precious time posing for a photograph. Jake mentally added four or five decades onto the face, the way he remembered it most clearly. The hair had turned white, and the skin furrowed, but the expression was ageless.
He made sure the photo was saved on his phone and went down to the reception in search of a printer.
Then he called Marina.
Photo by Barrett Ward on Unsplash