A Passenger With No Ticket
The request, when it came, was not phrased as a request. Father Vojtěch had a way of bending a sentence so that the question inside it arrived after the fact, when the listener was already walking home and had already, without knowing, said yes.
He came down to the landing on a Thursday in the last week of March, a week before Easter, at the quiet hour before the afternoon traffic picked up. He was seventy-one years old and had been the parish priest at Saint Giles since before she was born. He wore the old-fashioned cassock with the small stain on the left cuff that she had first noticed when she was seven, at her First Communion, and which had never been mentioned by anyone in her family although her mother had once offered to take the cassock home and see to it. He had declined, gently, and the stain had become one of the fixed features of her childhood.
He did not come to the landing as a customer. He crossed Prague on the tram. She understood, therefore, before he opened his mouth, that something in the day was not ordinary.
"Zdeničko," he said, using the diminutive she had not heard from him in fifteen years, "I will sit with you a little, if you will allow it."
She moved her coil of rope from the bollard and he lowered himself onto the stone bench with the careful, planned movements of an old man who has learned not to trust his knees. He looked across the water for