CHAPTER 4 – Rokytka

The first walk to Rokytka was not planned.

It came on its own, the way things come that end up repeating for years — someone planned them for you and you simply arrived at the place where you were supposed to be.

It was a Saturday morning.

Harjin had no work. He woke up with Amaril by the bed. She was sitting next to him in her usual spot, her dark eye wide open, her milky one half-closed. When he poured her food and made himself tea, he stood in the kitchen, not knowing what to do with the free time ahead of him.

The apartment was tidy.

Nothing was waiting to be fixed.

A weak October sun was shining outside, gentle, without strength, but present.

Harjin took the leash.

Amaril recognized it before he put her harness on. She got up from the pillow by the radiator—the beige fleece one—and came to the door with an expression wondering if she was right in guessing they were in for a walk.

Harjin knelt down and attached the leash to the ring on the harness.

Amaril waited.

Then they went.

Front garden, gate, street.

Amaril walked beside Harjin, low to the ground, her snout almost against the pavement, sniffing every crack, every leaf, every spot where another dog had stood a few days before. Harjin didn't rush her. He walked at her pace, which wasn't slow because she couldn't manage otherwise, but because the world was dense for her and had to be walked through carefully.

He took the long way around.

Past old small houses with gates, where mailboxes hung with worn-out nameplates. Past the linden tree under which chestnuts lay. Amaril stopped at one, sniffed it, and left it be. Past the intersection where an old telephone pole stood with a single cable that led nowhere.

Then the viaduct.

Harjin knew it. He knew the rumble that came before a train passed, lingering long afterwards, stored in the bridge's walls. He knew the dampness beneath the arch, the smell of concrete and old stone, the shadow that did not vanish even on a sunny day.

But Amaril did not know him.

She stopped at the edge of the shadow.

She sniffed.

Then she took a step under the arch, slowly, with her paws spread as if in case the ground should give way. Harjin followed her.

The sound changed under the viaduct. Footsteps sounded different. The air was thicker, more enclosed, with the smell of moisture and rust from the rails overhead. Amaril stopped in the middle and raised her head.

She looked up.

Harjin also raised his eyes.

The concrete arch was dark. Moss grew in the cracks, soft and deeply green. In one place water was seeping through—a thin streak of moisture ran down the concrete rib, leaving a pale track behind.

Then came the train.

At first just a distant tremor.

Then the roar.

It rose and came from one side, growing, shaking the arch, choking the air, filling the ears—and was gone. Ten seconds later, only the echo and a slight tremor of dust in the concrete cracks remained.

Amaril didn't even move.

She didn't pin her ears back, didn't tremble, didn't run. She stood right where she was, head still up, watching the passing noise as if absorbing it and sorting it out.

Harjin watched her.

Then Amaril lowered her head, turned, and walked out from under the viaduct.

Harjin followed her.

Beyond the viaduct was a hill.

Harjin used to see it from the garden, over the rooftops, like a green hump behind the tracks. He had never been there, had no reason to. It simply wasn't his path; he went other ways. It belonged to a different part of the day or a different part of town that hadn't drawn him before.

Now they were walking toward the hill.

The grass was thick and wet. Harjin soaked his boots. Amaril walked low to the ground, her snout almost in the grass, sniffing at things Harjin couldn't see — at tracks, scents, records of a world that lived in the earth and in the roots.

It wasn't far to the top.

The hill wasn't high. More of a built-up terrain, perhaps an old spoil tip, perhaps a natural elevation. Harjin didn't know. At the top was a small flat area with a few stones overgrown with moss and grass and one old leafless bush.

Harjin looked around.

Rokytka below.

Viaduct.

Roofs of Hloubětín.

Beyond them, Prague like a raised gray horizon.

Harjin stood there for a moment.

Amaril examined every stone.

She paused longer by one of them. She ran her snout across it, then walked around it and ran it across again from the other side. Harjin looked at the stone. It was larger than the others—flat, clinging to the ground, with moss on top and lichen on the side. The moss was dark green, damp, and in places scuffed where someone or something had rubbed against it.

Amaril sat down by the stone.

She looked at the Rokytka.

Harjin sat down in the grass beside her.

The stream below flowed slowly. The autumn water was dark and calm, with tiny ripples where it hit the pebbles along the bank. The light on it was cold and silvery, not like in summer when the sun bathed in it all afternoon.

Harjin watched the light.

It was peculiar. It moved with the surface, slightly, only in gusts of wind, otherwise standing almost motionless. Like a thin layer of silver dust.

Amaril sat beside him.

She hadn't gone to the pebbles or the edge of the hill. She sat here, in her place, which she had chosen without thinking, and looked at the water.

Harjin felt no need to say anything.

They sat.

The water flowed.

A distant train crossed somewhere beyond the horizon — a deep hum that passed and vanished like the echo of a breath.

Amaril blinked.

The milky eye caught the reflection of the river differently than the dark one. Silvery, mobile, for a moment almost from within.

Harjin caught only a brief glimpse of it.

Then the light shifted.

It was gone.

Harjin looked at the water.

After that, they went to the Rokytka regularly.

Not every day. But often enough for it to stop being an excursion and become part of the rhythm. Saturdays or Sundays, sometimes even a weekday evening when Harjin came back from Kbely earlier and the light was still holding.

Amaril started getting ready for the walks.

Harjin noticed it gradually. At first, he thought it was a coincidence, but Amaril would get up from her basket before he even reached for his jacket. She came to the door before he took the keys. As if she could read the day by something other than the clock.

The leash hung on a hook behind the door.

Amaril didn't look at the leash. But she always came to the door whenever Harjin was putting on his jacket instead of his sweater, his walking shoes instead of his indoor ones.

A minor code that no one explained aloud, but both of them knew.

Harjin would take the leash and Amaril would sit quietly while he clipped it on.

So they walked.

The viaduct was their first threshold.

Beneath it, the air changed and Amaril always paused for a moment. She needed to re-sense the place, even though she already knew it. As if every passage were a little different.

The train always arrived randomly, or almost randomly.

Once, right at the moment they were in the middle beneath the arch. Harjin felt the earth tremble, crouched down beside Amaril, and wrapped his hands around her small body. He wasn't afraid. He mostly wanted to take care of her.

Amaril didn't look at the train.

She looked at Harjin.

Then the train passed.

Harjin let her go.

Amaril turned her head toward the tracks above, as if to verify that it was just what it was. Then she walked on.

Harjin followed her.

The hill was their place.

That had happened slowly, the way things become places—through repetition and silence. They had come there the first time without intent, the second week they came again, the stone was there, the Rokytka was there, and the view was the same, only slightly different in a different light.

Amaril always sat down by that stone.

Not any other.

Not by the edge of the hill where the view was better.

By that single flat stone covered with moss and lichen, embedded in the slope.

Harjin sat down beside her.

Once he brought a thermos of tea. He drank it slowly, holding the warm lid in his palms, and Amaril sat next to him and looked at the Rokytka. The wind carried the scent of wet soil from the bank and leaves beginning to rot in the quiet spots by the water. And frogs were croaking, too.

Harjin took a sip of tea.

He looked at the water's surface.

The light on it was different every day. In the morning silvery and cold. In the afternoon golden, if the sun came out. On a gloomy day almost gray, with a surface dark as soot.

And sometimes — only sometimes, in the evening — there was a light on the surface that belonged neither to the sun nor to the sky. It came from below, or from the side, or from somewhere else, casting a silver dust upon the Rokytka, fine and shifting.

Harjin knew that light from the first night on the ridge.

His grandmother came to mind. Harjin didn't know why. He sat on the hillock with tea in his hand and Amaril at his feet, the stream below them flowing on its way, and suddenly he was in his grandmother's garden.

It wasn't a dream. The scent, the warmth, the light and memory carried him back to her garden.

It was somewhere outside Prague, in a place that Harjin as a child could never quite find on a map. He had to take two trains and then a bus. The bus stopped by an old road from which you turned off across a meadow, and across the meadow the roof of the house was visible.

The garden wasn't large.

But to Harjin as a child, it was enormous.

Grandma had a currant bush whose branches bowed under the weight of the berries, and nettles along the fence that no one pulled because Grandma said the butterflies liked them. She had a patch of dill and parsley, a compost heap behind the shed, and a shed full of things whose names Harjin didn't know, but whose weight he remembered.

And then there was the cherry tree.

It stood in the middle of the garden, a little crooked, with a trunk so thick that when Harjin was small he couldn't even half embrace it, or at least he thought so. The bark was gray and cracked, with a deep texture inhabited by ants, tiny spiders, and trickles of resin hardened into a translucent amber color.

Harjin climbed the cherry tree every summer.

Or rather, to the height of two branches, because any higher he was afraid, but he didn't say that. He would sit there eating cherries straight from the branches, spitting the pits out into the garden while Grandma down below didn't scold him.

Once, when he was at that height, with one leg over a branch and his hand on the trunk, he caught sight of a knot.

It wasn't in the place of a broken-off dry branch. It was higher up, where the trunk began to branch out. A large knot in the wood, darker than the surrounding bark. Oval.

Perfectly oval.

Harjin struck it with his hand.

The wood around it was rough and uneven.

The knot was smooth.

He looked at it.

It was like an eye. An oval hollow in the wood, slightly squinted, with an expression that a piece of wood couldn't have, but did.

Harjin looked at it and the knot looked at Harjin.

Then grandmother came under the tree.

"Come down, lunch is ready."

And Harjin climbed down and went.

But he carried the memory forward, lodged somewhere deep down. A smooth, oval knot in the cherry wood, darker than the bark, open to the garden like an eye.

On the hill, Harjin finished his tea.

Amaril sat by the stone.

The surface of the Rokytka carried silvery light, and Harjin sat with the empty lid of a thermos, being both here and there—by the stream and in his grandmother's garden, with Amaril and by the cherry tree, in October of this year and in the summer when he was a child and did not know that the knots in the wood would one day be something he would return to.

Amaril turned her head.

She looked at Harjin.

Dark eye.

Light.

Harjin realized that for a moment he had lost track of time.

Not for long.

But he had.

„Grandma would have liked you,“ he said.

Amaril blinked.

Harjin looked back at the water.

His grandmother used to tell him, when he was little and didn't want to go to sleep in the bed by the window because he was afraid of a draft:

"Lie down. The window holds the house together. Don't be afraid of things that hold."

Back then, he didn't understand it.

Well, not entirely, either.

Still, he understood that the spruce held the house together.

That the hill and the stone and the Rokytka held this very valley.

And perhaps the cherry tree in his grandmother's garden also held something that Harjin could not name.

Things that hold.

Amaril lay down on the grass next to Harjin's foot.

She tucked her paws beneath her, rested her chin on the ground, and half-closed her eyes.

Harjin neither covered her nor picked her up. It was warm enough. He just sat more comfortably and watched the Rokytka flow beneath the slope, calm and unhurried.

Water didn't care how much of it had passed.

It just flowed.

Then the seasons began to bleed into one another.

Harjin stopped perceiving the year as four separate chapters and began to perceive it differently — as a sequence of walks. Dry walks and wet walks. Walks with rain down your collar. Walks when the air was so clean you could hear Prague all the way from Hloubětín.

They went down to the Rokytka in all weather.

Amaril did not protest.

In the rain she trotted beside him under an umbrella. Harjin didn't buy her outfits, but he treated her considerately. He didn't want to make a little doll out of her.

Under the viaduct, seepage water trickled into a puddle. In summer there were no puddles there, but winter brought them back again. Amaril walked around it every time in the exact same arc, never straight through it.

Harjin noticed it on his fourth or fifth walk.

Right arc.

Two steps to the right.

Then back on track.

Always.

He thought about how precise the map in her body was. He knew it too. From years of walking across specific pavement, across cracks and bumps and spots where it was slippery. The body remembers..

The hill was different in winter.

The grass was flattened and wet, with the first frost on the edges. The stone was darker, soaked with water, with moss that deepened into a darker green. The view of the Rokytka was clearer because the bushes by the bank had lost their leaves and were like translucent dancers.

Amaril sat down by that stone as she always did.

She just curled up deeper — paws closer together, tail tucked beneath her body.

Harjin covered her with the edge of his jacket.

Just a little.

Amaril didn't move.

She looked at the water.

One winter they came to the Rokytka and the stream had frozen near the banks.

Not all of it. Only where the water flowed slower did thin ribbons of ice form, translucent and fragile, with bubbles frozen inside. In the middle flowed a free current of water, dark and calm.

Harjin stayed standing.

Amaril walked over to the icy edge and sniffed. She touched it with a claw—lightly, once—and pulled her paw back.

Harjin bent down.

Through the ice, the water was visible. The pebbles on the bottom were blurred by the icy ripples. One of them was lighter than the others. Round.

Harjin watched it.

Then the water beneath the ice moved. A micro-current, a breath. The light pebble shifted a centimeter, disappeared behind a bottom protrusion, and was gone.

Harjin straightened up.

Amaril stood beside him, gazing at the spot where the pebble had vanished.

Spring brought the first warm Saturdays.

The Rokytka was running much more strongly than in winter, swollen by the thaw. Harjin could hear it from the viaduct already. A living motion, water crashing against the stones at the bends, carrying along twigs and leaves and small things from elsewhere.

Amaril went closer to the water than usual.

Harjin left her, with the leash loose in his hand, long enough for her to reach the edge. She sniffed the water. She touched the surface with her front paw, gently, as if testing the temperature, and pulled back.

Then she did it again.

And once again.

Harjin sat down on a stone by the bank and watched her.

The water flowed past her front paws, murmured over the pebbles, and carried silver droplets of light. Amaril had her milky eye half-closed and her dark eye fixed on the surface.

Harjin wondered what she might be seeing with her milky eye, which was looking elsewhere.

Fireflies brought summer.

They arrived like every year — into the grass by the water, into the wetland meadows beyond the hill, at the edge of the forest where the trees began and the fields ended. In June, in the early evening, when the light had not yet sunk below the horizon and the air was warm and heavy.

The first one he saw by the Rokytka.

A single flash in the grass by the bank.

Then another a meter further.

Third.

They didn't turn on all at once. They came one after another, slowly, as if each were waiting for the darkness to be precisely dark enough.

Amaril noticed them.

She came closer to one, low to the grass, with her snout above the spot where the flash had appeared. She waited. The firefly lit up again—a golden flicker, quiet and immediate—and Amaril pulled her head back.

Harjin sat on the slope of the hill and watched.

The fireflies were multiplying. After a while there were ten, fifteen, more. They circled low over the water and the grass, and their light was soft, fluid, like breath.

Harjin remembered the balk.

The night the star fell.

The fireflies that circled in the grass by the depression, one by one, without haste, without direction.

Now they were circling too.

Harjin did not move.

Amaril came and sat down beside him. Close, physically close, her white body pressed against his calf. She looked at the fireflies.

Harjin stroked her side.

They were together.

Fireflies circled.

The stream murmured.

The air smelled of grass, water, and warm stone that had absorbed the sun all day and was now giving it back to the dark.

Harjin called his grandmother one summer.

It didn't happen. The family was distant — through petty arguments, quiet estrangement, a melancholy life that had carried everyone elsewhere. His mother lived on the other side of Prague and called rarely, always pragmatically. His grandmother lived in the same place as before. Harjin had last visited her three years ago.

Now he called without reason.

Grandma answered the phone on the third ring.

"Harush."

It was both a last name and a nickname, shortened to a single syllable that held his entire childhood. Harjin never protested. Not even when he was older. Not even after.

To her, he was simply Harush.

"Grandma."

"How are you?"

“All right.”

Pause.

"You have a dog," grandma said.

Harjin stopped in his tracks.

„How do you know?“

"Don't you want to come over?" said grandmother. "You could bring him."

"He's a Chihuahua," said Harjin. "A small one."

"I know small dogs." Grandmother sounded like people who have been through a lot. "What's his name?"

"Amaril."

Grandmother repeated it. Softly, to herself, as if tasting the word.

"Nice," she said. "Come over."

Harjin arrived at the end of summer.

The bus stopped by the old road and Harjin crossed the meadow with Amaril on a leash. The grass was dry, yellowish, with grasshoppers. Amaril walked low, sniffing every blade.

Beyond the meadow was a house.

Grandmother's garden hadn't changed as much in three years as Harjin would have expected. The currant bush was still there, the stinging nettles along the fence too. The shed still had the same darkness inside and the same smell of old tools.

And the cherry tree was standing.

Crooked.

Strong.

With gray bark.

Harjin walked straight toward it.

He stepped up to the trunk, placed his hand on the bark—on that roughness, that irregularity—and searched.

The knot was still there.

Higher than he remembered. Or rather, in a different place than memory had planted it. But it was there. Oval, smooth, darker than the bark.

Harjin ran his thumb over it.

It was just as smooth as in his childhood.

Amaril sniffed his leg, then moved to the trunk and sniffed the lower part of the bark, the moss in the roots, the soil around the base.

Harjin followed her.

Then he raised his eyes to the trunk.

The knot was at the height of his forehead. Oval, half-closed. Harjin placed his palm beside it. He felt the warmth of the bark.

The tree had stood in the sun all summer and was now giving it back.

Grandmother came from the house.

Small, a little stooped, in an apron with deep pockets. Her hands had traces of soil on them.

She stopped by the cherry tree and looked at Amaril.

Amaril turned to her.

Grandmother cautiously bent down, reached out her hand low, palm down. Amaril sniffed.

Then she came closer and let herself be stroked behind the ears. Grandmother stroked her slowly.

"Nice," she said.

"Yeah," said Harjin.

Grandmother straightened up.

She looked at the cherry tree.

"Remember when you used to climb it?"

"I do."

“You were always afraid of that third branch.”

„Té čtvrté.“

Grandmother smiled.

Uncorrected.

Potom ukázala k záhonu u zdi.

„Pomůžeš mi s tím?“

Harjin went with her.

Amaril walked behind them, slowly, sniffing at every path in the garden. At the roots of the cherry tree she stopped once more. She sniffed the moss, circled the trunk, then left it and walked on.

They had been working for less than an hour.

Grandmother knew precisely what she wanted and moved through the garden with the same natural ease as Amaril on her walks. Thing by thing into its proper place.

Then they ate outside at the old table under the walnut tree.

Bread.

Tomato.

Salad.

Soup that had been simmering since morning.

Grandmother placed the food on the table without a word. Harjin ate. Amaril was given a small bowl of soup on the side.

Grandmother watched her.

“That milky eye,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“How does she see?”

Harjin thought about it.

“I don't know. Differently, I suppose.”

Grandmother nodded.

She asked for nothing more.

After the meal they sat at the table in silence. Harjin drank tea and looked out at the garden, the cherry tree, the bushes, the shed. Grandmother sat with her hands in her lap and a gaze that was in no hurry to go anywhere.

Amaril lay by Harjin's foot.

Beyond the garden was the countryside. A distant field, the edge of the forest, the bluish horizon. A single bird circled above the cherry tree and disappeared behind the roof.

Grandmother said:

"Do you remember the knot?"

Harjin turned.

Grandmother was looking at the cherry tree.

“On the cherry tree?”

“Yes.” She raised her hand and pointed directly to the spot where it was. “There. You always used to look at it when you climbed. You said it could see.”

Harjin was silent for a moment.

“Did I say that?”

“As a little boy. You were about five.” Grandmother folded her arms. “You said: the tree has an eye.”

Harjin looked at the cherry tree.

The knot was almost invisible from here. Distance and light blended it into the bark. But Harjin knew where it was.

“And was I right?” he asked.

Grandmother smiled again.

“Who knows,” she said. “Trees remember what they see.”

Harjin drank tea.

Amaril sniffed his boots and sat down again.

The cherry tree stood motionless, with a knot in the wood, bark full of cracks, and a shadow cast across the flowerbed.

Harjin perceived it, and it settled in his memory alongside other things.

Beside the silver light on the Rokytka.

Beside the fireflies in the grass.

Beside the milky eye of Amaril, which looked elsewhere.

Autumn came a second time.

Harjin knew it by the tree. The linden on the corner began to shed its leaves—first yellow, then brown, and in the end only the remaining gray leaves, which the wind scattered across the street. The spruce behind the garden stayed green, as always, and that made it different. The only green spruce in the whole street, while everything else faded.

They kept going to the Rokytka.

Amaril walked a little more slowly.

Harjin began to notice. The walk took longer. By the viaduct, Amaril stopped more than once and Harjin waited.

He waited patiently.

The hill was steeper.

Or at least that was how it looked when Amaril walked up more carefully, with her front paws spread wider apart, as if she were looking for firmer footing.

Harjin carried her.

At first only from the viaduct to the hill. Later all the way to the stone. She was carried lightly — she was always carried lightly — and never protested. She neither fidgeted nor tried to jump down. She just sat in his arms and looked ahead.

On the hill, Harjin set her down by their stone.

Amaril sat down.

She looked at the Rokytka.

Harjin sat down next to her.

The water flowed. The light was October’s, low, with a golden tinge, transforming everything around them into that brief autumn moment when the world looks older and more beautiful all at once.

Harjin remembered the summer.

To the fireflies over the water.

To Amaril, who touched them with her muzzle and pulled her head back.

To grandmother, who stroked her behind the ears and said pretty.

To the knot in the cherry wood, smooth under the thumb, pinched and darker than the bark.

He looked at Amaril.

Her milky eye was half-closed.

The dark one stared at the surface.

Harjin ran his hand across her back — once, slowly, from her neck to her tail. Amaril didn't move. She only exhaled in that way of hers, which was like consent without words.

Water kept flowing.

A distant train passed beyond the horizon.

Amaril did not raise her head.

Harjin suddenly adjusted his hands, even though he was not carrying her yet.

He felt her weight in them beforehand.

That small, familiar weight, now as if demanding greater attention.

He said nothing.

Harjin squatted down and took Amaril into his arms.

Lightly.

Without haste.

She settled down, rested her chin on his forearm, and closed both eyes.

Harjin got up slowly.

He stood on the hill with Amaril in his arms and looked at the Rokytka, which flowed as always—regardless of summer or winter, regardless of walks or the lack of them, regardless of whether Harjin would return or not.

Water doesn't wait.

Water just flows.

Harjin turned away from the stream and began to descend the slope.

Amaril didn't open her eyes.

She breathed.

And Harjin carried that small body down to the viaduct, across the viaduct, across the street, through the gate, home under the spruce.

One step after another.

Carefully.

Like something she wants to safely bring where it belongs.