CHAPTER 2 – The House Under the Spruce

He had bought the basket in the morning.

Wicker, with low walls and a beige fleece cushion that looked a bit kitschy on the shelf. Harjin took it anyway. He held it in his hand and wondered if it was big enough, if it was soft enough, if Amaril would even want to lie in a basket rather than on the floor or on the old blanket she dragged over to the radiator at night.

He stood there thinking for so long that the woman at the cash register began to watch him with mild unease.

Then he paid and left.

He chose aluminum bowls. Two, actually. One for water, one for food. He brought them home and before filling them, he squatted down and just watched them sitting on the kitchen tiles for a moment.

Tiny and practical.

A tiny artifact of the new world.

Amaril came out of the room. She stepped up to the bowls, smelled one, then the other, and looked at Harjin.

„Wait,“ he said.

It was the first word he had spoken aloud today. It sounded a bit foolish in the quiet apartment, but Amaril reacted to it calmly and warmly. She simply turned and went back to the room, as if she had no objection.

Harjin opened the cabinet.

That day unfolded in small details.

Harjin noticed that Amaril moved around the apartment differently than he had expected. She didn't explore it with a puppy's frenzy, didn't run back and forth, didn't make joyful sounds just because she could. She walked slowly, with a certain solemnity, and approached each place with her nose first before getting closer with her feet.

By the garden door, she stopped for a long time.

She had been sitting there the whole time Harjin was unpacking the bags into the locker, looking out through the door frame.

There was a spruce.

Green, motionless, with branches reaching low. At the bottom, its trunk was covered in grey bark with cracks inhabited by tiny creatures—woodlice, caterpillars, moss that shriveled into delicate grey-green flakes during dry spells. Up top was another world. The branches were dense and dark, letting almost nothing through, only shadow and rustle.

Harjin knew about the spruce only what anyone who lived in the apartment knew: that it was large, that in summer it quietly whispered with every breeze, and that in winter it kept the darkness at bay by absorbing it itself. The real estate agent had told him, even before he moved in, that the tree was old. That the owner of the house remembered it, and his predecessors too. That no one wanted to cut it down, even though it cast a shadow over the small garden.

At that time, Harjin looked at the spruce and said he didn't mind.

Now he was looking at it for the second time.

Or seeing it for the very first time.

Amaril was not leaving the doorway.

Harjin came over to her, bent down, and carefully gathered her into his arms—he couldn't do it instantly, his body was still getting used to that small weight—and stepped out into the little garden.

The air outside was cooler than in the apartment. Autumnal, damp, carrying the scent of leaves and soil. Amaril raised her head and sniffed. Harjin stood with her by the threshold, waiting to see if Amaril wanted anything.

She flicked her tail.

Once.

Slowly.

He set her down on the ground.

The first step was cautious. A paw on the paving stone, then the second, then a return to the first stone, as if assuring herself of the firmness of the surface. The little wild strawberries interested her the most. She walked up to them slowly, sniffed, and then wandered among them.

Harjin stood and watched.

The spruce tree stood in the middle of the garden. Amaril walked straight to it. She stopped beneath a branch. She sniffed the bark. The moss. The old pine needles at the base of the trunk, turned brown and soaked through.

Then she sat down.

She sat by the spruce as if beside a being that belonged there. Or as if beside a being to whom she belonged. Her dark eye turned toward the tree, the milky one gazing somewhere above the fence, across the street, over the rooftops, further away.

Harjin didn't move.

A wind came, a gentle draft, and the spruce rustled. The branches moved, their shadows sliding across the grass, across Amaril, across Harjin's boots. Amaril blinked, but remained seated.

Harjin squatted down.

He was an arm's length away from her, but he didn't touch her. He just watched. At the small white figure by the roots of the old tree, with pine needles in her fur and a half-closed milky eye.

The tree was behind Amaril.

Behind the tree was the world.

Harjin didn't understand it, but he felt as though he could see it.

He set the basket down by the wall near the radiator.

The radiator was an old cast-iron one, with paint applied so many times that it had the color of gray-green mud. In winter it hissed and ticked as it warmed up. Now it was cold—the heating hadn't been turned on yet—but the spot next to it was sheltered. Harjin brought an old small pillow, adding a piece of flannel fabric over it. Amaril watched him from the doorway of the room.

"Here," he said, and pointed.

Amaril came in. She sniffed the edge of the basket, then the cushion, then the flannel fabric. She turned in a circle — once, twice — and lay down. Not immediately. First she just lowered the front part of her body, as if she still wanted to change her mind, and only then did she lie down fully, with her chin resting on the edge of the basket and her eyes fixed on the door.

Harjin sat down on the floor and leaned against the bed.

After a moment Amaril closed her eyes.

Harjin stayed sitting and watched her breathe. Her chest rose and fell in small, almost imperceptible movements. He watched her like a fragile creature, of whose fragility you are aware, even though no one has named it yet.

The air in the apartment was calm.

A distant sound of a car came from the street.

Then silence.

The third floorboard from the door, on the left, creaked.

Amaril flicked her ear.

But she didn't open her eyes.

Harjin didn't smile, because it was serious, but inside him something released that he hadn't known was taut until now. It was easing up slowly, like a weight lowered on a long rope.

Amaril will live by the heater.

She will drink from the aluminum bowl and eat from the other one.

She will sit by the spruce tree and stand by the garden door.

She will keep watch over who comes and who goes.

And Harjin will return home differently than before.

Not home.

For Amaril.

On the morning of the second day, he went to work for the first time since that night.

He got up carefully, but Amaril woke up anyway. She opened her eyes before Harjin took his feet off the bed, and sat upright in the basket as if she had only slept lightly and was waiting for a movement.

Harjin sat down by the basket. He reached out his hand. Amaril leaned her head toward it, sniffed, and then pressed her temple against his palm.

It lasted five seconds.

Then she stood up, stretched, and walked over to the water bowl.

Harjin got up too.

In the kitchen, he prepared food for her. He opened a small can, put it in the bowl, added a little warm water, and placed it on the tile. Amaril ate slowly, with pauses. Harjin made tea and stood by the window, with his mug in hand, looking across the small garden toward the spruce tree.

Nothing moved the tree. No wind passed through the branches. But in the morning light — gray, wet, autumnal — he was different than at night. Less like a guardian, more like a presence. Like someone who had been sitting there so long they stopped counting him.

Harjin finished his tea.

Amaril came to the hallway door and sat down by it.

She looked at him.

„I have to go,“ he said.

The words sounded a bit foolish too.

But less than before.

He took his jacket and keys. Slung his bag over his shoulder. At the door he stopped, leaned down, and touched Amaril behind the ear with one finger. She stood still, let herself be touched, but didn't lean in. She just stood there.

Harjin stepped outside.

The hallway was cold, slightly damp, with a smell of old paint and concrete. He walked toward the stairs. On the third step, he stopped.

No sound came from behind the door.

No whining, no restlessness, no scratching at the wood.

Just silence.

Harjin let out a breath and walked on.

He worked in the Kbely hangar until late afternoon.

His hands moved on their own. A screw here, a wrench there, a palm over the metal surface to feel what eyes in the dim light could not see. The smell of gasoline and oil had grown into his skin so long ago that he stopped registering it as an odor. It was the air in which things worked or stopped working, and it was necessary to tell the difference why.

Tarn was two planes over.

Harjin saw him out of the corner of his eye. Hunched over the nose, wrench in hand, with that way of working of his: slow, methodical, without unnecessary movements. Once, he straightened up and ran a hand across his forehead. He left a gray streak of grease there.

He said nothing.

Neither did Harjin.

Around four, Tarn brought two mugs of coffee. He set one on the crate behind Harjin without interrupting what Harjin was doing. He came, set the mug down, and left again.

After a moment, Harjin stopped, picked up the mug, and drank the coffee slowly.

A distant airplane could be heard beyond the hangar doors. He raised his eyes and looked through the half-open doors into the gray afternoon sky. The plane crossed the sky, left a thin trail of condensation behind, and disappeared beyond the horizon.

Harjin thought of Amaril.

With love, like someone at home, waiting quietly.

He finished his coffee.

He returned the mug to its place and went back to work.

It was quiet at home.

It always took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light of the basement apartment. Harjin stood by the door and waited. Then he felt movement. Amaril came from the radiator—slowly, without haste—and stopped in front of him.

She sniffed his shoes. The shoe rack. The satchel that Harjin had tossed over the hook.

Finally, she raised her head to his face.

Harjin squatted down.

„I was at work,“ he said. „Nothing special.“

Amaril tilted her head slightly to the left.

„Tarn brought coffee,“ he added.

Amaril tilted her head back.

Harjin didn't know why he was saying it. Maybe because the apartment was small, the silence in it was thick, and words made the air a little lighter. And Amaril listened without demanding that what he said made sense. She was there in her quiet presence.

He stood up, took off his shoes, and walked across the kitchen.

Amaril right behind him.

Always behind him.

Harjin began to notice it on the third or fourth day. The pattern, established with such naturalness that he hadn't seen it before. Wherever he went, after a moment there was also the small sound of claws on the floor. Not right behind him, not intrusively. Always with a pause, as if Amaril waited for him to settle down, and only then came.

At night Amaril slept in a basket and Harjin in bed. But not always. Roughly once every three nights — Harjin began to realize this after a week — he woke up to find Amaril sitting beside the bed in her spot. As if she had chosen him.

She sat upright and watched Harjin while he slept. Or guarded him. Harjin didn't know for sure. Whenever he woke up at night, he felt that presence beside him. Tiny, silent, awake. As if someone stood guard so he could return from the places where dreams carried him.

The little garden became their first shared outdoor place.

There was nothing grand about it. Four by five meters of bark-covered space with pine needles, a bit of grass by the fence, and a spruce in the middle. By the wall grew something that in summer was likely a herb spiral, but now it was just browned stalks.

Harjin hadn't been there much before. He walked through the garden in the morning when taking a shortcut to work, and back in the evening.

That was all.

With Amaril, it was different.

The first morning he let her out there alone — without carrying or leading her — she stood by the door and waited. Amaril stepped out of the apartment onto the threshold and paused for a moment. With one paw, she touched the cold outdoor tile. And finally, having taken it all in, she headed straight for the spruce tree.

She sniffed the bark. She circled the trunk. Then she returned to the paved section and sniffed the cracks between the stones where dark strips of moss were growing. She went over to the fence, the wood, the nails, the wire mesh.

Systematically.

Calmly.

Without rushing.

Harjin drank his tea by the door and watched her.

After about ten minutes, Amaril returned to the door and sat down on the threshold — right on the boundary between the outside cold and the indoor warmth.

She looked at Harjin.

“Done?” he asked.

Amaril got up and went inside.

Harjin turned and watched her cross the room to the basket and lie down. He crouched down beside her. Amaril had a pine needle in her fur—one stuck behind her ear—and slightly wet paws.

He took an old towel and wiped her paws, one by one.

Amaril sat quietly.

"It's wet outside," he said.

He didn't know why he was saying it. Maybe just so he wouldn't hear the silence until he got used to being able to be quiet with her too.

Harjin hadn't rearranged anything, hadn't bought anything major except for bowls and a basket. And yet by the end of the week, the apartment was different. Like when a room changes just because someone comes into it, simply by bringing air, movement, body heat, the sound of breathing.

Amaril's spot by the radiator had an order to it: the basket on the left, the bowl on the right, the paw cloth around the corner. In the morning, people went there to find Amaril. In the evening, Amaril went there on her own to sleep. Harjin hadn't noticed for a while. It wasn't until one morning that he realized he was getting up, walking over to the basket, seeing if Amaril was asleep or awake, and only then going to the kitchen.

This journey — bed, basket, kitchen — was new.

A month before, he had gone straight from the bed to the kitchen with no stops along the way.

Now Amaril was there.

And only through her did he go further.

Harjin didn't dwell on it.

The spruce was a being his gaze returned to. At first only in the morning, from the window, with a mug in hand. Harjin began to perceive its shadow as a touch. The green shadows that the branches shifted across the room's wall — slowly, only when there was wind, and other times standing motionless as if painted — felt like the tree's presence inside the apartment. As if the spruce knew about Amaril and Harjin and had quietly accepted what had changed.

Harjin didn't put that thought into words.

One afternoon, he was sitting on the floor repairing an old garden table — one screw loose, one leg a bit crooked — and Amaril lay down in a strip of sunlight that came through the window and passed through the branches of the spruce. The light within it was different from direct sun. Filtered, greenish, with tiny moving spots.

Amaril lay down in that light, as if she could feel it.

She had one milky eye half-open. The dark one closed.

Harjin looked at her. She wasn't looking at anything. Or she was looking somewhere Harjin couldn't see. The milky eye stared into the light, across the light, through the light.

In a moment, Harjin picked up the screwdriver and continued.

But the image remained: Amaril in the filtered light of the spruce, with an eye that could not see and perhaps therefore saw differently.

On the second Monday, he found a note from the Female Broker in the building's hallway.

She wrote that if anything was needed, he should call. She added a number that Harjin already had in his phone, but had never used. On the other side of the note was a schematic sketch of the cabinet layout in the pantry—evidently a remnant from a previous tenant. Harjin turned the note over and laid it on the windowsill, where it lay for several days before a draft blew it off.

By that time, Amaril had discovered the windowsill.

Harjin didn't know the exact moment. One morning, she was simply there. She was sitting by the kitchen window, her face almost touching the glass, looking out at the small garden and the spruce tree. The window was closed. She breathed on the glass, and for a moment a small cloud of mist caught on it, with a dark nose print right in the center.

Harjin waited to see if she would notice him.

Amaril turned her head, looked over her shoulder, and then turned back to the glass.

Harjin brought his tea and sat down at the table. He ate bread with butter and watched Amaril on the windowsill and the spruce tree behind her. It was like a little painting in the frame of the window: a white Chihuahua, thick glass, green branches behind it.

A wind came up and the spruce rustled.

Amaril blinked, but didn't get up.

Harjin finished his tea, washed the mug, and went to get dressed. When he passed through the kitchen the second time, Amaril was still sitting there. Same posture, same gaze. As if she had an appointed time to sit there by the window.

Harjin left her be.

The landlord appeared in the courtyard a few days later.

An old man with an upright posture and eyes that gave nothing away for free. Harjin knew him only by sight, from a brief nod at the gate, once from a chat across the fence when he told him that in winter the heating worked best starting at seven.

This time he stopped.

He looked at Harjin, then at Amaril, who was standing by Harjin's foot and looking at the stranger without moving.

"You have a dog," the landlord said.

"I do," Harjin said.

The landlord looked down at Amaril. He observed her for a moment. Amaril watched him with her dark eye. Her milky one was half-closed.

"Small one."

"Yeah," Harjin admitted.

The homeowner straightened up, and his gaze swept past Harjin, across the little garden, over the fence to the spruce tree, up to the sky. His hands were behind his back, and on the creases of his knuckles remained a fine smudge that Harjin recognized—oil from machines, from tools, from hands that had done too much work to ever wash completely clean.

"The spruce is old," the homeowner said.

Harjin waited.

"There used to be more dogs here. Before the guy who lived here before you." He hesitated slightly. "And before him, too. Old Brouček was here for seven years. Then two crossbreeds. They went under the spruce every morning."

Harjin looked at his hands behind his back.

"Is it a good tree for dogs?" he asked, just to say something.

The homeowner shrugged slightly.

"I don't know if it's for the dogs, or the dog for the tree. But they went there."

He paused.

"Such a nice day."

He walked away slowly, without any rush.

Harjin looked down at Amaril.

Amaril looked after the master of the house, then up at Harjin, and then toward the spruce tree.

Harjin opened the garden gate and Amaril walked inside.

The third week was different.

Harjin only realized it in small details that piled up like sediment. He stopped perceiving the apartment as empty in the evening when he came home. He started noticing whether Amaril was by the door, by her basket, or on the windowsill.

That was the difference.

Small, but essential.

Before, the flat had been empty, and Harjin had entered the emptiness, and the emptiness had accepted him or not, depending on the mood he brought with him.

Now he arrived, and Amaril was either by the door, or by the basket, or on the windowsill. And by that he knew what kind of mood the day was in. Or Amaril. Or both.

One evening he came home late. Work in the hangar had dragged on, and Tarn and Harjin had stayed longer than they should have. Outside it was already dark, the garden behind the glass black, the spruce within it dark and quiet like a wall.

Amaril was not by the door.

Harjin stopped.

Then he felt movement by the bed. The basket rustled. Amaril came more slowly than usual, a little sleepily, as if she hadn't been waiting for him by the door, but had heard him from a half-sleep and only came after careful consideration.

Harjin knelt down.

Amaril came up to him and sniffed his handkerchief, his keys, the sleeve of his jacket. Then the tattoo on his head. Long and intently, tapping him with her little nose with short pauses.

Harjin let her.

Then he got up, took off his jacket, and went to the kitchen.

Amaril right behind him.

It was a habit so natural that Harjin had stopped paying attention to it.

It was simply the world.

Apartment.

The spruce tree.

Basket.

Paws on the tile.

A bowl by the wall.

Harjin lay and listened to Amaril’s breathing from the basket by the radiator. It was steady, soft, with gentle pauses. He knew it better than the sounds of the street or the train above the viaduct. He knew its rhythm, the length of her breaths, the occasional deepening that came when Amaril fell into a deeper sleep.

On one such night, he lay on his back with his eyes open. The ceiling was dark. Outside the window, a spruce rustled in the wind. A stronger gust passed through the branches and shadows swept across the ceiling like hands.

Quickly.

Quietly.

Movement came from the side of the room.

Amaril rose from her basket.

Harjin did not move. He closed his eyes and quieted his breath so he could hear better. Tiny footsteps across the floor. The third floorboard on the left—creaked. A pause. Then a quiet settling in place.

Harjin opened his eyes.

Amaril sat by the bed. In her place. Beside Harjin's blanket. In the dark he could barely see her. Just the pale outline of her body and the milky eye that caught the light from elsewhere at night.

She did not move.

She sat.

Harjin let out a breath.

He closed his eyes.

He fell asleep knowing that someone who keeps watch was sitting beside the bed.

A small white presence in its place.

With an eye that saw not into the world, but beyond its edge.

At the end of the month, the Broker brought the contract renewal documents.

Harjin met her at the gate. She handed him the envelope, asked if everything was alright, and caught a glimpse of Amaril standing behind him in the garden over Harjin's shoulder.

"Is that your dog?"

“Yeah.”

"She is beautiful."

The Broker smiled. It was sincere, simple, and direct.

"What is her name?"

"Amaril."

The Broker considered the word for a moment, as if tasting it.

“Nice name.”

Harjin nodded.

“If you need anything for the apartment, just let me know.” The real estate agent looked at the spruce tree and then back at Harjin. “The tree casts a shadow on the windows. I know. But the owner doesn't want it cut down. He says the tree holds the house together.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly. She confirmed things she understood.

“It doesn't bother me,” Harjin said.

“All right.”

The real estate agent buttoned up her coat.

“Have a nice day.”

She left.

Harjin turned.

Amaril stood in the small garden and looked at the spruce. Or toward the spruce. Or past the spruce. Harjin could never quite tell. It always looked like a different kind of gaze — not at the surface of things, but right through them.

He walked over to her.

He squatted down.

Amaril looked at him for a moment, then back at the tree.

The spruce stood. Its branches carried needles, clinging moss, a single delicate spider thread between two branches. It was old and motionless, and at the same time there was a deep movement within it.

Harjin placed a hand on Amaril's back.

The fur was warm.

Her chest rose and fell.

The spruce rustled, softly, as if confirming something no one had spoken.

Harjin remained crouched, his hand on the fur, looking at the tree that held the house together, and at the animal that — only now he knew it — held him together too.

The apartment behind them was small and low and sheltered.

The basket by the radiator.

A bowl on the tile.

Flannel cloth.

Third floorboard, to the left.

Pine needles on the windowsill.

A milky eye in the dark.

The house under the spruce.

Only now was it home.