Chapter 8: Too Quiet to Love

Jakub's POV

I knew the tram line better than I knew my own face.

The man in the black coat had two stops to catch us, and he ran for the next tram.

I tracked the route in my head.

"Get up," I said to Freya. "We get off at Florenc."

"He's following us."

"Yes. We go through the depot."

Her hand found my sleeve and held on.

The tram doors opened and I pulled her down into the snow.

The Pankrác depot was four hundred meters away, behind a green gate with a guard hut.

I had worked there nine years.

I went in through the side door with her in front of me and slapped the shoulder of the man on duty.

"Two Americans are following us," I told him in Czech. "Big men, black coats. Do not let them in."

He looked at Freya's belly and at my face, and he reached for the gate switch without a word.

The gate came down with a clang two seconds before the first man got to it.

He stood outside it with his hands on the bars, breathing hard.

"Private property," the guard told him pleasantly, in English, and sat down again.

I took Freya out through the cellar, past the workshop, over a fence, and into the alley behind our street.

She did not say a word the whole way.

She only held on to me, and she did not let go until we were inside the pension door.

That night I did not sleep.

I sat on the top step of the stairs outside her room, with a wrench across my knees and the light off.

Through the wall I could hear her turning over, and over, and over.

I thought about a night two years ago.

My wife stood in this hallway with her suitcase and said, "You are too quiet to love, Jakub. I never know what you want."

I had wanted her to stay.

I had not said it.

I had stood in my own doorway and watched her go down the stairs, because I did not ask, and I did not beg, and I did not know how.

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