Snow Falls in Prague; I Won't Wait for a Heartless Man novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Pension With the Cat

Freya lands in a snowing Prague and rings the bell of a family pension. Hana feeds her, Jakub fixes her heater at 2 a.m., and when the cramps start he carries her down four flights to a taxi.

Prague was white when the taxi left the airport.

It had been snowing for hours, and the driver took the hills slowly.

I had one bag, a coat over a hospital gown, and eleven hundred crowns from the airport machine.

"Hotel?" the driver asked.

"No hotel. A room. Cheap, and quiet, and with nobody asking anything."

He looked at me in the mirror, at the torn skin on my hand.

He did not ask.

Twenty minutes later he stopped on a steep street of tall gray buildings, in front of a door with a hand-painted sign.

PENSION MAREK. POKOJE.

A cat sat in the lit window beside a plastic geranium.

"Here," he said. "Old lady. Strict. Clean."

I paid him and stood in the snow with my bag against my chest.

It was past midnight.

I rang the bell before I could think about it.

A light came on upstairs, and I heard steps and a bolt.

The woman who opened the door was tiny and white-haired, in a quilted housecoat, with a wooden spoon in her fist.

She looked at me for a long second.

She looked at my hand, my face and my coat.

"Dobrý večer," I said. "Do you have a room? I can pay."

"American," she said.

"Yes."

"Hurt?"

"I'm fine."

"No." She stepped back and held the door wide. "Come. Soup."

I followed her through a narrow hall that smelled of cabbage and coal smoke and old wood.

The kitchen had a black iron stove in it and a table with an oilcloth.

She sat me down and put a bowl in front of me before I had my coat off.

It was clear soup with noodles and something green.

My stomach turned over, and I ate it anyway, every drop.

"Hana Marek," she said, tapping her chest. "You?"

"Freya."

"One night is nine hundred crowns. Two nights, sixteen hundred. You show passport tomorrow." She waved the spoon. "Tonight you sleep."

"You don't need it tonight?"

"Tonight you are tired."

I did not tell her I was afraid of papers.

She seemed to know that already.

The room was on the fourth floor, at the top of a staircase with a red runner worn through at the center.

It had a narrow bed, a wardrobe, a window onto the roofs and a radiator that was stone cold.

Hana laid her palm on it and said something in Czech that was not polite.

"Broken," she said. "My grandson fixes. He is asleep."

"It's fine. I'll sleep in my coat."

"No coat." She took two quilts from the wardrobe and stacked them on the bed. "He fixes anyway."

She left me alone with the snow ticking against the glass.

I sat on the edge of the bed with my bag on my knees.

For the first time since the clinic, nobody was coming through a door.

I let myself think it.

I was alive.

I was eight weeks pregnant, on the other side of the world, in a stranger's house, with my name on the news as a dead woman's.

I held my belly in both hands, and I cried without making a sound.

Around two in the morning, a knock came.

A man stood in the doorway with a toolbox and a flashlight in his teeth.

He took the flashlight out of his mouth when he saw me.

"Sorry," he said. "My grandmother says you are cold."

He was about thirty-five, tall, with short dark hair and gray eyes.

His left forearm, below a rolled sleeve, had an old burn scar the size of my hand.

His boots left wet prints on the floor.

"I'm Jakub," he said. "I fix the heating."

"Freya."

He went down on one knee beside the radiator and unscrewed a valve cap.

He did not talk, and he did not look at me again.

Air hissed out of the pipe, and the iron began to tick.

"The pump in the cellar is old," he said, to the radiator. "I will bleed the line. Ten minutes."

"Thank you."

"No thank you. It is my work."

He stood and wiped his hands on a rag.

That was when I felt the first cramp.

It was low and slow, and it pulled.

I bent over my knees.

"Freya?"

"It's nothing. I haven't eaten much. I've had a long day."

The second one was worse.

I stood up to prove I could, and something warm ran down the inside of my leg.

I looked down.

Jakub looked down, too.

There was blood on the floor.

For a second neither of us breathed.

"I'm pregnant," I said. My voice broke. "Eight weeks. Please. I can't lose it. I came so far."

He did not ask who the father was or where I had come from.

He pulled a quilt off the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders.

Then he put his arm under my knees and lifted me against his chest.

"Hold my neck," he said.

I held on.

He carried me down four flights of stairs in the dark, taking each step with both feet, past his grandmother in the hall with her hand over her mouth.

"Taxi," he told her in English, so I would understand. "Hospital. Now."

The street door banged open on the snow.

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