Evgeny squinted into his espresso and grimaced.
“Just one of those days,” he said unconvincingly. “Everyone gets them.”
A jingle sounded and a tram rumbled past, the noise competing with the clang of bells from a nearby church.
“It’s beautiful here,” said Lydia, changing the subject. “Have you been before?”
“Not with Milan.”
“It’s like stepping back in time. Everything’s so perfectly preserved.”
“We care about our heritage in Eastern Europe,” said Evgeny, somewhat aggressively. “History and culture is for everyone, not just the wealthy, like in England.”
“It isn’t like that in England,” protested Lydia, though she wasn’t quite sure Evgeny was entirely wrong in his statement.
The argument was pre-empted by Milan’s arrival. He sauntered across the tram lines with the insouciant air of a true native.
He called something in Czech to the waiter, who laughed and scurried inside the cafe to do whatever Milan had asked.
“My home,” he said, sinking into a chair with an air of beatific joy. “What do you think of it?”
“I was just telling Evgeny how beautiful it is. How unspoilt. It’s much less urban than a lot of cities, isn’t it? Less polluted, cleaner.”
“We Czechs take care of our pretty things,” said Milan, echoing Evgeny’s earlier words. He smiled seductively. “You know that, Lydia.”
“When it suits you,” muttered Evgeny.
Milan chose to ignore the barb, welcoming the waiter back and chatting to him unintelligibly for a good ten minutes. Evgeny used the free time to glower while Lydia sipped delicately at her coffee, watching trams and tourists pass by in an unending stream.
But the waiter had work to do, and Milan’s clear enjoyment of being able to speak his mother tongue at last was cut short. Lydia was vaguely disappointed. Hearing Milan speak his language, with its curious combination of hard and soft, had been rather arousing. Still, she supposed she would have plenty more opportunities to hear it over the course of the next few days.
“Can you teach us some Czech?” she asked, once his attention was refocused on his companions.
“It’s not an easy language,” he said. “There are eight cases, you know.”
“Eight?”
He nodded, grinning.
“Okay, maybe just ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’, then. You can usually go pretty far with those two.”
“‘Hello’ is ‘ahoj’. Say it after me. Ahoj.”
Lydia giggled. “Ahoy there, sailor,” she said.
“No, the emphasis is different,” said Milan severely. “I won’t teach you if you can’t take it seriously.”
“Sorry. What about ‘thank you’?”
He said something that sounded like ‘day kooay’ and she repeated it faithfully.
“Good. Anything else?”
“‘I love you.’”
“Thank you,” he said, a little coldly.
“No, what’s Czech for it?”