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so gruffly to Françoise just after she and I met. These boys must have been en route between some far shore and the great expansive continent. Perhaps they were Americans, even. Perhaps one of them was the very American who’d given Françoise her mandolin and her records. It was unlikely, I know that now and I’m certain I must have known it then. But it could have been the case. It wasn’t, but I might have believed it. This boy I recognized wasn’t the painter of my mother’s cuckolding, either. But he might as well have been.
    I tried to return to my work. A seabird landed on its perch, returning from wherever it is seabirds are always going to and returning from. It looked at me with its black beady eye. Was I my father in his evasive way eluding my mother’s grasp alongside the Labe, a river he veritably owned? Or was I my own man, newly aloft in a new city I’d now lived in long enough to call home?
    I crawled down from my perch. I found an idle dinghy. The oar left knocking against it was rotted. As I traveled into the harbor gloaming, the boat tossed in the waters of the Nieuwe Maas. Mists rose. Drops sprinkled my face, sending my memory back to the days of my youth by the Elbe, when the mist of the river was lifted to our faces in Schalholstice by the big turning wheel of my father’s factory.
    I pushed on.
    Though for some time I saw nothing but waves, I finally spied the destination Françoise and her friends had reached. For more than a year I’d been unaffected by my knowledge of her profession. Here, faced with the tangibility of this ship, I found a crack I’d known was there splitting into a deep fissure. I found Françoise’s dinghy tied to the ship’s prow. I managed to square mine alongside it. The deck was slick with harbor mist. I stood by the bow. The only sound was the harsh break of waves lapping at the ship’s starboard side. Twenty-five feet ahead of me a portal glowed against the evening’s half-light. Looking down through the window, I saw three women pleasuring three young sailors. Strewn over the arms of a pea green ship bed and two desk chairs were wool sweaters with roll necks bunched up like chastised house pets. On the floor, a white cotton undershirt like spilled milk.
    Françoise was the most active of the three women. She was sitting up atop the insubstantial, hairless body of that same young deckhand I’d observed paddling out to the ship, moving all about with an energy I’d never seen her take on with me. She had on no shirt. She was utterly undressed, naked in a way different from that she’d ever been with me. I saw a guitar leaning up against the wall in the corner of the berth. I allowed myself to be sure now I’d seen this boy speaking to Françoise that first night I met up with her. As I knelt on the deck of that ship watching Françoise on top of this boy, the guitar in the corner, I tried to convince myself it was nothing. Was it nothing? Then Bohemia and all that’s in it is nothing. Seasickness gripped my stomach. Though it went against the most difficult decision I’d made in those months, I resolved at that moment no longer to leave myself subject to the feeling I had then, the same embarrassment my father had so clearly left himself subject to. The facts began to matter less and less. It was what I was feeling that mattered, and I had only one instinct—to flee.
    I turned from the window. Just as had been the case that last day I was in Leitmeritz, there was no decision left to be made. It had been made for me, before my eyes. My body did have muscle memory after all, and it wasn’t the memory of making chords. It was the memory of leaving Leitmeritz that afternoon I saw my mother with her painter. One foot before the other, all the way to the train station. My body knew just how to leave.
    That night I packed. Next morning I left my flat for the British consulate to get