A lost American finds the city of Brno a lively place. But danger lurks underneath the surface. Brno was a second city. Seems I always get stuck in a second city.
Brno was second to Prague. I mastered enough of the Czech language to get me in trouble, but the language was hard.
Hard as a turtle shell encased in concrete. Hard as a petrified coconut. I learned to pronounce Brno in the impossible right way, though secretly I still thought of it as Burn-O. Seemed fitting for me. Brno was a great place for burnouts. But it seemed like my Czech utterances were babyspeak, and I reminded myself of the kids back in my grade school, arrived straight from Mexico, making their way in a new language. When things got late and things got loud in The Anchor Bar, when everyone was madly drunk, I used to wait for the fight to break out, because a fight always broke out in the places where I drank in California.
I kept turning around and checking him out, wary of a mugger or worse. It took me a few months to realize how ridiculous I was. Violent street crime was almost nonexistent in Brno. All my healthy alertness and unhealthy paranoia slowly seeped away over the next few months as my first Czech winter made its muddled, insistent approach. Klara was a hard-drinking woman, even for a Czech; thin, somewhere in her thirties with a curly black mess of hair and she would sit with her friends at The Anchor as late as I did.
Full name Klara Klarova, which means her parents must have hated her. But she was as lovely as lager to a thirsty man. One night she caught my eye like a harpoon gun skewers an eel. That first time was a typical hookup for a Brno bar, where whoever stayed the latest while passably holding their booze got the prize. I watched as a succession of males at her table stood up and went home. I sidled over to Klara and made hardly any small talk at all. She lived about five minutes away.
