There's Something I Want You to Do

“Really, Eli. Please. I’m fine. I’ve never been finer. Can’t we go now?” Strangers were still muttering to her, and someone was translating. When they calmed down and went back to their business after a few minutes, she felt a great sense of relief. She didn’t want anyone to think of her as a victim. She was no one’s and nothing’s victim ever. Or: maybe she was in shock.

“So here we are,” Eli said. “We’ve already been to a chapel, seen a baby, talked to a crazy person, had an accident, and it’s only eleven.”

“Well, all right, let’s have coffee, if we can’t have lunch.”

He held her arm as they crossed the street and made their way to a sidewalk café with a green awning and a signboard that seemed to indicate that the café’s name had something to do with a sheep. The sun was still shining madly in its touristy way. Ashtrays (theirs was cracked) were placed on all the tables, and a man with a thin wiry white beard and a beret was smoking cigarette after cigarette nearby. He gazed at Susan and Elijah with intense indifference. Susan wanted to say: Yes, all right, we’re stupid American tourists, like the rest of them, but I was just hit by a tram! The waiter came out and took their order: two espressos.

“You didn’t see that thing coming?” Elijah asked, sitting up and looking around. “My God. It missed me by inches.”

“I wasn’t hit,” she said. “I’ve explained this to you. I was nudged. I was nudged and lost my balance and fell over. The tram was going about two miles an hour. It happens.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t happen. When has it ever happened?”

“Eli, it just did. I wasn’t thinking. That woman, the one we saw, that woman who was shouting at us…”

“She was just a crazy old lady. That’s all she was. There are crazy old people everywhere. Even here in Europe. Especially here. They go crazy, history encourages it, and they start shouting, but no one listens.”

“No. No. She was shouting at me. She had singled me out. That’s why I wasn’t looking or paying attention. And what’s really weird is that I could understand her. I mean, she was speaking in Czech or whatever, but I could understand her.”

“Susan,” he said. The waiter came with their espressos, daintily placing them on either side of the cracked ashtray. “Please. That’s delusional. Don’t get me wrong — that’s not a criticism. I still love you. You’re still beautiful. Man, are you beautiful. It just kills me, how beautiful you are. I can hardly look at you.”

“I know.” She leaned back. “But listen. Okay, sure, I know it’s delusional, I get that, but she said I was going to be jealous of you. That part I didn’t get.” She thought it was better not to mention that they would have a son.

“Jealous? Jealous of me? For what?”

“She didn’t…say.”

“Well, then.”

“She said I’d get pregnant.”

“Susan, honey.”

“And that I’d dream of a giant raspberry on the night of conception.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. A raspberry. Please stop.”

“You’re being dismissive. I’m serious. When have I ever said or done anything like this before? Well, all right, maybe a few times. But I can’t stop.”

The man sitting next to them lifted up his beret and held it aloft for a moment before putting it back on his head.

“Yeah, that’s right. Thank you,” Elijah said to the man. He pulled out a bill, one hundred crowns, from his wallet and dropped it on the table. “Susan, we need to get back to the hotel. Okay? Right now. Please?”

“Why? I’m fine. I’ve never been better.”

He gazed at her. He would take her back to the hotel, pretending to want to make love to her, and he would make love to her, but the lovemaking would just be a pretext so that he could do a full hands-on medical examination of her, top to bottom. She had seen him pull such stunts before, particularly in moments when the doctor in him, the force of his caretaking, had overpowered him.

—

What she saw in her dream wasn’t a raspberry. The crone had gotten that part wrong. What she saw was a tree, a white pine, growing in a forest alongside a river, and the tree swayed as the wind pushed at it, setting up a breathy whistling sound.

—