Lasko by Catherine Cooper

Author:Catherine Cooper [Cooper, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Autumn

I assumed Kuba’s schedule would slow down as the weather got colder, but instead his work seems to double, and he’s getting invitations to facilitate workshops and retreats abroad, too.

I’m taking a Czech language course, and I’m learning to get around Prague on my own. Sometimes I have coffee with Véra after class. We don’t have much in common, but I like her company. I’ve been weaning myself off makeup. Kuba doesn’t seem to notice. “Someone overcuted you” is his new favourite expression. When he’s home, he’s too tired to do much, so our days are usually peaceful. But if he’s home for more than two days, we enter into a cycle—talk about the future, what our relationship means, his dreams about the farmhouse in South Bohemia, my fear I wouldn’t be happy with that life.

When the credits rolled on Želary, he was crying. He said, “Májenka, I want to ask you to please consider to stay here with me. I am part of this land, I belong here.” I would have thought that being here would help me relate to this kind of sentiment, but if anything it’s only becoming more foreign to me.

His mother tried to find my family’s graves. She called all the administrators in charge of the cemeteries in České Budějovice. It’s a huge city, my family’s names are very common, and people have to pay rent for graves in the Czech Republic, so there’s a strong possibility that the grave was replaced if no one was paying for it, assuming it existed in the first place. Even if it does exist, it’s just a piece of stone. The fact that she tried so hard to find it means more to me than the grave itself would have.

Kuba convinces me to take a few short trips before it gets too cold. We visit his grandmother’s cottage. I make a drum at one of his workshops. We take a bike trip, which is romantic but also a bit stressful, because we sleep in fields and often get woken in the morning by farm machinery.

During the day, we picnic by shrines and rivers and hide from the rain in hunting lookouts. Kuba pushes me up steep hills, makes campfires, and sings me songs. He’s teaching me the words to Kometa. He sent his parents a recording of me saying the most difficult part, which he says I pronounce perfectly.

In Třeboň, he takes me to a fancy restaurant, gives me an envelope and says, “Happy name day, lásko.”

I haven’t celebrated my name day since I was a child. In the envelope are tickets to a Nohavica concert that starts in an hour. It’s weird that I never thought about it before, but I’m surprised Nohavica is alive. Like Leonard, he seems too legendary to be among us.

We ride our bikes to the venue, a park next to a château. In person, Nohavica looks like a dishevelled Václav Havel. His voice has the same deeply reassuring, paternal quality as Leonard’s, and like Leonard’s, his lyrics transmit truths we probably all know but could never put so well.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.