CHAPTER 1 – ZAARE

The phone lay on the floor, glowing blue.

The screen showed nothing important. Just the time.

2:45.

Hamburger stared at it from the floor. He lay on his back on the carpet, not knowing exactly when he had ended up there. He wasn't drunk. That was the problem. If he were drunk, he could tell himself it would get better in the morning once he slept it off and drank some water.

But he wasn't drunk.

He tried to get up and the room tilted slightly to the left. He caught himself on the corner of the sofa and stood there for a moment, his hand on the fabric that still—and this was the unbearable part—still smelled.

Of the person who had been sitting there.

Just a moment ago.

Hamburger let go of the sofa and took two steps toward the window. Hamburg outside was as quiet as a stage set. Orange lamps, dark sky, rain like an antiquity. Somewhere down below a car drove past and the red lights stretched across the wet asphalt into a thin streak and disappeared.

He placed his hand on the cold glass. The room behind him remained tepidly warm. That warmth was the worst part of all. The space hadn't registered yet what had happened. The room was waiting for the door to open, for Dominique to return and throw his keys onto the tray by the entrance in that way of his — a little absent-mindedly, a little thoughtlessly, like someone who belonged.

But the tray was empty.

Hamburger walked away from the window because his vision began to blur. The walls were black, golden in the spots where the candlelight fell. A low candle on the sideboard was still burning. He had left it burning in the afternoon, forgotten about it, and now it just kept going as if it didn't know that one day it would burn out after all.

Next to the candle stood an old metal carousel. A childish trinket from a flea market. Dominique had said back then that it looked like something out of a fairy tale. The heat of the candle was slowly spinning it and the shadows of the little horses and trains moved across the wall in long arcs.

Hamburger watched them.

The shadows were bigger than the thing itself. Always bigger. Little horses across the entire wall, a train like a dark streak right across the room. They moved regularly and Hamburger followed their rhythm. For a moment it helped him focus on something outside himself.

Then he realized what he was doing.

Standing in a black-and-gold apartment at 2:45, watching the shadows of childhood memories.

At that moment, it came.

It wasn't weeping.

More like someone had taken something specific, physical, out of his chest, leaving a hollow behind. A space with shape and boundaries. An empty place that the body recognized, because it was swaying from it, as if still trying to balance the weight of something that was no longer there.

„Das ist kein Gefühl.“ (That's not a feeling.)

He said it aloud, softly, into the room.

The room took note, but gave nothing back.

Naming it didn't help anything.

The walls were still standing, completely warped.

He moved into the kitchen because it looked friendlier. Fewer things. Fewer traces.

Except in the kitchen, there was a mug too. His mug. And another one on the drying rack, dry, empty, clean in a way that meant only one thing. It wasn't being used anymore.

Hamburger picked it up.

Then he put it back down.

The cabinet above the sink was slightly ajar, and inside sat Dominique's espresso — a dark tin with a gold lid. Hamburger didn't close the cabinet. He just looked at it. Then he turned around and walked away.

Back to the room.

Back to the shadows.

The candle was still burning.

Hamburger sat down on the floor with his back to the room, facing the wall. The carousel spun and shadows swept across the room like caricatures of motion. The phone on the floor kept glowing blue.

2:45.

Time hadn't moved. Or who knows? Maybe Hamburger had stopped perceiving time altogether. He was there, watching the shadows, knowing that tomorrow everything would be different. Not necessarily better. Just different. Right now it's 2:45, and at 2:45 you mustn't make decisions.

He knew that too.

Yet his body was deciding for him.

He lay on his side and rested his face against the carpet. His hair fell over his eye. The carpet was dark blue, old, a little coarse. He felt it beneath his cheek as the only thing in the room that had no memory. Or at least he wanted to believe that at the moment.

He looked at the candle from the lowland of the carpet.

The little flame was a yellow dot in the blue gloom.

The carousel was turning.

He closed his eyes.

For a moment he fell asleep and was unaware of it. He was at the border where consciousness calms down but does not sleep, where the mind relaxes just enough to let go of the things that otherwise hold a person by the collar.

At that moment, something sounded.

Had it been a melody, perhaps he would have managed to remember it. It was more like the after-sound of a tone—like when you touch a key, the tone disappears, but the resonance lingers in the wood for a moment longer and you feel it more in your chest than in your ears.

That sound was in the room before Hamburger started listening. As if it had belonged to the silence the entire time and he only just noticed it.

A word.

Maybe a word.

Maybe multiple syllables together in a language he did not know. It wasn't German, Czech, or English. It wasn't jazz from the docks, the radio, or a neighbor's conversation through the wall. It was foreign, yet familiar.

Vroucnopotir.

Perhaps it sounded different. Perhaps he put it together differently in his mouth, like when a person wakes from a dream and holds the last wet scrap of paper in their palm, the writing already fading.

Even so, some of it remained on his tongue.

Hamburger did not open his eyes.

The sound did not repeat. He continued to feel it as a pressure behind his breastbone, like the first breath after a long time without air. His body acknowledged it before thoughts could beat it down.

Stay, the mind said.

The body refused.

He did not get up. He did not pack his suitcase. He did not make a decision. Something simply rearranged itself in his chest, like a compass needle settling for the first time after a long trembling.

Silence.

Magnetism.

Without instructions.

The hamburger lay on the carpet. It was 2:45, the carousel was spinning, the candle was burning, the room was warm in a way that no longer felt pleasant on the skin. And a feeling that didn't have a name yet had settled in the body.

A word that was only just being born.

Prague as a memory of a street, a face, or the taste of Olomouc cheese that he had hated as a child. It was Prague as a place from which one had once set out. But now it was calling for a return. Something inside the body knew where the floor was real and where one could put one's back against the wall.

The hamburger opened his eyes.

The candle was burning lower. The carousel was still spinning, more slowly because the heat was dropping. The shadows of the little horses moved lazily across the wall.

He stood up.

Slowly, with his hands on the carpet, as if he expected the room to tilt again. But the room stayed level. The hamburger stood with his back to the shadows, facing the window, facing Hamburg outside, the rainy, silent city that he loved and still loves, but which now felt like an empty backdrop behind the glass.

The phone on the floor stopped glowing.

The display went dark and the room was darker. Hamburg outside remained orange and quiet.

Hamburger stood and did nothing.

He just knew—without words, without logic, without having made any decision—that he couldn't stay in this apartment. In this warm, black-and-gold apartment with the empty tray, Dominique's espresso in the cupboard, and the shadows of little horses on the wall.

Not because Dominique was bad.

Simply not.

The body knew it. The sound in his chest told him before he had time to think.

The candle quietly cracked and went out.

The wick was still smoking. A thin white thread of smoke rose to the ceiling and dissolved in the dark. Hamburger stared at it for a moment, just like he had stared at the car outside earlier, which had vanished like a red smear on wet asphalt.

Then he turned around.

He walked over to the sideboard. The merry-go-round was still. Cold, motionless. The little horses and trains at rest. Hamburger picked it up. A small piece of metal, cold, a bit rusty at the bottom of the base.

He put it back down.

He went into the hallway.

The jacket hung on the hook — his jacket, dark, a bit too large, deliberately bought a size up because a bigger jacket hides more and people don't stare as much.

Beneath it, the hook was empty.

Just a few hours ago, another jacket had hung there.

Hamburger looked at the empty hook precisely once. Then he took down his own jacket and walked back into the room.

He sat down on the bed.

He picked up the phone from the floor.

The display lit up.

3:02.

Hamburger turned it screen-down and left it lying on the blanket. He stretched. He closed his eyes. He didn't fall asleep right away. He lay there and heard the rain against the window and Hamburg behind him, and somewhere out in that rain, that thing was still fading away, the tone without a name.

His body knew it.

Morning would come in the morning.

A suitcase, a train, and Prague as a real city and also just a feeling in his chest. All of that belonged to the morning.

Now it was 3:02 and Hamburger was lying in Hamburg in a black-and-gold apartment, in a room that was slowly withering.

For the first time since the afternoon, his body wasn't drunk.

He just lay there.

And waited for the morning.