Long As I Can See The Light

Long As I Can See The Light

By Bob Sennett

I.

The first time I saw D.J. Bogdanovich I was in a bar on Mánesova Street in the Vinohrady district of Prague. I knew the bar well, although I visited it infrequently; the place was a ten-minute walk from my flat on Jana Masaryka, and I passed it on my way home from the academy whenever I needed to make a stop on Vinohradská to pick up things for my dinner.

The bar was crowded that evening; it was one of those warm but wet spring nights and the crowd was in good spirits despite the damp from the drips and the umbrellas. The room had a name – Kosmos – although there was nothing at all cosmic about it, and I’d never heard anyone refer to it as anything other than ‘the place on Mánesova’. There might have been other gay bars in Vinohrady -- there might have been other gay bars on Mánesova for all I knew – but this was the one in which I felt most comfortable, with its safe mix of expats, young Czechs, and a smattering of working men too lazy to be bothered by the clientele.

I grabbed a Kozel and took my usual place in the back of the room, leaning up against the wall next to a frayed Jimi Hendrix poster. I surveyed the room to see if any of my friends were around – not that I had enough gay friends to make the odds acceptable – and tried to relax under the spell of the music and the intermittent sips of my beer.

I looked up and spotted a man sitting by himself at the bar. He wasn’t drinking or smoking, the things one usually does when alone in a pub. The first thing I noticed was his hair: it was long, black and very shiny, even in the shadows of the room. His face held an expression of either caution or disinterest which immediately placed him apart from all the other men (and a few women) around him; they were vivacious and conversing loudly over the drone of the jukebox. This man was being ignored, despite sitting almost literally in the middle of the throng. He was handsome, and the polite thing for me to do, of course, was to relieve him of his oblivion. I picked up my Kozel and headed in his direction.

The song that had failed to distract the crowd was an old Bonnie Raitt song called ‘Something To Talk About’. I had grown used to the incongruousness of hearing American pop songs – even modestly obscure and decades-old ones – in Czech pubs and restaurants, and so I thought nothing of it, at first, when the Bonnie Raitt number ended and one of my favourite songs came on: ‘Long As I Can See The Light’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

My indifference ended, however, when D.J. – I didn’t know his name yet, of course, but I shortly would – started singing along with John Fogarty:

Put a candle in the window

’Cause I feel I’ve got to move

Though I’m going, going

I’ll be coming home soon

Long as I can see the light…

As I approached him, I could just make the low sound of D.J.’s voice hovering an uneven octave below the singer on the record. He had a sweet, untrained voice (as a music student, I am trained to recognize untrained voices) that cried out for harmony. What were the odds, I thought, that a stranger in a bar would just happen to know the words to one of my favourite songs? I edged my way next to my hoped-to-be new friend and cast an obvious opening line in his direction:

“Do you like Creedence?”

D.J. had been lost in the dream of the song, and he turned to me as if startled by the sound of my voice.

“Were you talking to me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

A first victory: he speaks English. His voice, or at least as much of it as I could make out over the saxophone solo, was deep but relatively unaccented. Perhaps he was a foreigner, like me?

“I like this song,” he said.

That line could have been interpreted in a variety of ways, and in my nervousness about meeting new people – especially people who might turn into pick-ups – I allowed my imagination to rummage through all of them: ‘I like this song, but don’t think I like any others,’ or ‘I like this song, but I don’t care if you do or you don’t,’ or even ‘I dare you to like it, too.’ D.J. looked surprised to be spoken to, and I wondered why he had wandered into a gay bar if he preferred to be left alone. But then he said:

“My name is Dušan, but my friends call me D.J.”

“Then I must call you D.J,” I replied, offering my hand. “I’m Monty.”

D.J. smiled and shook my hand. The song ended, and we started to chat with an unexpected and – on my part, at least – quite satisfactory ease. There is always a moment near the beginning of a pick-up when you sense the click that is going to link you to everything that is about to happen. That ease was the click.

It wasn’t particularly difficult for me to make friends that spring. I was in my first year at the Czech Academy of Music, studying composition with Jan Balich, one of the best teachers in Europe. Prof. Balich was no snob, and he encouraged his students, most of whom were international like me, to balance their study of staves with spelunking expeditions into the heart of Prague culture. My fellow classmates liked exploring. That’s how I became familiar with golems, and alchemy, and – the memory of the sharp and bitter taste sends shivers up my spine – Slivovitz, a locally produced plum brandy.

But I was falling short in the romance department. When I was in college in London (and I was a few years younger) I successfully balanced my studies with my ardour, and – until I settled down with Tom Fulham – I enjoyed my affairs. When I quit London and Tom for Prague, I apparently left my mild promiscuity behind. A few of my colleagues at the academy were gay, like me, and all of them were willing to act as my Vergil had I shown interest in the lower circles of Hell, but my intrinsically shy nature – and my desire to properly impress Prof. Balich – minimized my escapades.

I can recall two. There was Brutus, who despite his formidable Roman name turned out to be Scottish and as gentle as a honey bear. We met in the Marks & Spencer in Wenceslas Square – not in anyplace sordid like the changing room, but in the men’s department. I needed help choosing a shirt: he charmed me into settling upon (naturally) a Scotch plaid, and we spent the following two weeks together in blissful ignorance of our incompatibility.

Then there was Pavel. Pavel was Czech, and eighteen (so he said), which was right at the border of respectability for a twenty-five-year-old like me. I met him at Kosmos – so you see, I did come here with explicit desires in the past – and our affair lasted long enough for the words ‘friend’ and even ‘love’ to enter our joint vocabulary – prítel and milovat. But youth has its flaws, and Pavel hadn’t yet conquered several of them: he was addicted to painkillers, he was abused by his older brother, and he liked gambling with his health. He was broken, and I couldn’t fix him.

So when I met D.J., you could say I was both ready and wary. But I had no idea what I needed to be ready for, and definitely no idea of what I should be wary of.

“You know, Peter Bogdanovich is a famous American film director,” I said. I was on my second beer, and the conversation had flowed long enough for D.J. to determine I was British, for me to uncover his family name was Serbian, and that we had both ended up in Prague – like thousands of others before us – as hungry exiles.

“My full name is Dušan Jaromir Bogdanovich, which is a mouthful for anybody, hence D.J. But I’ve heard of your film director. That’s the only reason anyone – or at least anyone from America – knows how to pronounce my name,” D. J. said. “For most people, it’s the Dušan that causes the stumble.”

“It is an uncommon name, even here,” I added.

“Less so in Serbia, where my mother and father live.”

This was a clear opening for a discussion about parents and siblings, the usual stuff of ‘getting to know you,’ but something stopped me in my tracks, something about the way D.J. looked down to the ground when he mentioned his parents, as if his reference to it was a mistake, a kick in the dust that needed to be quickly smoothed over.

“I’d ask if you come here often,” I said. “Except that I don’t do so myself. Not only that, but I’ve been exceptionally rude. You haven’t anything to drink, and here I’ve been gabbing away right in front of you. Can I get you something?”

“I was waiting for you to ask.”

There was something absolutely demure about D.J.’s reply that charmed me. Charm is often an attribute of the young, but in the intermittent light and with only our conversation to go on, I couldn’t tell D.J.’s age. He might be twenty; he might be thirty-five. His looks were beyond timeless: they seemed to be suspended in the air, as if he were a movie star lit by a key light.

“What can I get you?”

“A Kozel is fine with me.”

I ordered a pair of steins. The barkeep looked at me strangely when he put the glasses down in front of me.

“You expecting someone?” he asked in broken English.

“Do you mind?” I replied. I was annoyed, and I thought he was being unnecessarily rude.

“Leave him be,” D.J. said. “Daleko od očiju, daleko od srca.”

“What’s that?”

“ – an old Serbian phrase, it basically means ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ I often affect people that way.”

“I don’t care how you affect people,” I said. “But he needn’t make a mockery of a paying client.”

“At this moment, you are the only paying client,” D.J. said. “And I appreciate your kindness, no matter the cost to your dignity.”

“Well, then.”

I allowed this slight indentation in the so-far calm surface of our evening pass without further comment, but I thought of it again when a large woman came up to the bar to order a drink and nearly pushed D.J. off of his stool in order to get the keeper’s attention.

“Hey,” I said, as mild an invective as I could come up with on the spur of the moment.

“Hey,” the woman replied. I remembered that the word ‘hi’ in Czech is ‘ahoj’ and pronounced like the English word ‘ahoy’. Under the effect of inebriation, I supposed it could be mistaken for ‘hey’. But still: was my new friend invisible? Did this woman think I was coming on to her? Did she fail to notice I wasn’t alone?

“I don’t mind the crowd,” D.J. said. “But I do mind having to share my time in your company with these mannerless heathens. Is there a place we could go to be alone?”

I had been so fascinated by my conversation with D.J. that I had almost, but not quite, lost the thread of why I had initiated it in the first place: that I was attracted to this man and wanted to kiss him.

“I live on Jana Masaryka, near Námestí Míru,” I said. “Do you live around here?”

I felt D.J. hesitate for the briefest of instants, as if he was either reluctant to reveal where, or perhaps with whom, he lived. But then he replied:

“No.”

“Then let’s go to my place.”

“Yes.”

A man of few words. My kind of man.

I thought I had outgrown student accommodations in my early twenties; I had left behind those under-furnished, underheated garrets with peeling wallpaper and dodgy gas burners. But when it came time to find a flat in Prague I could afford, I quickly realized my choices were limited to something comfortable in a poor neighbourhood or something disreputable in a good neighbourhood. I chose the latter: very few people, I surmised, would ever see my two rooms on a top floor (with no lift), but I would appreciate the fresh markets, the chic cafes, and the leafy streets that characterized Vinohrady and made it such a desirable part of the city in which to live.

It was at most a ten-minute walk from the bar to my flat, but that first time with D.J. beside me felt like one of the longest distances in my life. The experience was not new – I had picked men up before, of course, and several of them could even have been described as ‘handsome’ – but something about the way I felt on that walk and the person I was walking with combined to ignite a new feeling in my soul. My new-found friend was the definitive ‘mysterious stranger’ and I couldn’t wait to begin to investigate his aura.

D.J. made the climb without complaint. I wasn’t drunk, but I felt lightheaded, likely because I was unused to the multiple Kozels, the relatively late hour, and – especially – the stunning beauty of my soon-to-be conquest. In my glimpses of him at the bar and under the failing streetlights, I could see that Dušan Jaromir Bogdanovich was, as they say, a piece of work: generations of strong-willed Serbians had bled into his body. He held the effect of being both stocky and tall (I am neither), and he gave off invisible sparks as if he was pushing a field of static electricity out of his way as he made his way up the stairs. I unlocked the door and we tumbled in.

I kissed D.J. on his lips, and felt the day-old stubble of his beard. I was not surprised by this, for Central European men seemed to like skipping a day’s shave. D.J. returned my kiss and ran his hands down my sides like I was a piece of clay to be shaped.

“My love,” he said, as he pulled off my shirt.

“If you say so,” I replied. I returned the favour; he had on a plain, olive-green pullover with the top two buttons undone, so I didn’t have much work to do.

“I ja kažem.”

“What?”

“It’s Serbian. You will learn. Basically, it means ‘yes’.”

D.J. spent the night. I hadn’t planned on it, and we didn’t talk about it. All through our lovemaking and our subsequent refrigerator raid (luckily, I had a bowl of olives in there, and a half a loaf of bread on the kitchen counter). Our conversation decorated the edges of the hours and we paid no attention to the time, or the future, or the circumstances of our lives and how they might or might not affect our lives going forward. Whenever you make love to someone for the first time, the clock of the world always stops.

We fell asleep naked in each other’s arms, and when we woke around eight in the morning, it was as if the plug had been pulled on a dream.

“Do you have to get home?” I asked. I still didn’t know where ‘home’ was for him.

“No, but I suppose you can’t spend the whole day in bed with me.”

“I could, but not today. I have a lesson at ten.”

“What instrument do you play?”

“I don’t play. I sing.”

“Then you must have been ashamed of my rendition of ’Long As I Can See The Light.”

“I wasn’t ashamed at all. I was charmed.”

“Could I come with you?” D.J. asked. “I haven’t anywhere else to go.”

“I’d be glad of the company,” I said. “But you can’t come into the classroom with me, and you’d be awfully bored, I think, just waiting around in the lobby.”

“We could meet for lunch.”

“You haven’t had enough of me?”

“Are you kidding? We’ve only just begun.”

“Are you quoting The Carpenters to me?,” I said, laughing. “I admire your knowledge of Creedence, but Karen and Richard are, in my humble opinion, wholly beyond the pale.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Never mind,” I replied. “I often like to speak in clichés. It allows me to live my life like a character in a poorly written play. So, where do you want to meet?”

“How about Kosmos?”

“Again? They hardly make the best burgers in Vinohrady. It looks like the weather is going to clear up. Why don’t we get sandwiches and eat in Riegrovy Sady?” Riegrovy Sady was a hilltop garden a few blocks from my flat.

“No.”

“Don’t be angry with me,” I said. I’ll admit I was a little startled by the definitiveness of D.J.’s answer.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to sound angry. Can’t we meet at the bar?”

I turned around and sat up in the bed and put my arm around D.J.

“If that’s what you want, baby, that’s what we’ll do.”

“Yes.”

“Can you give me your number, just in case?” I asked.

“I don’t have a phone.”

“You don’t…” I cut myself off. This was not the time or the place to start sowing doubt. I remembered that my first glimpse of D.J. at the bar was a recognition of his solitariness. I had sensed that D.J. was, in many ways, a man out of time – apart, unfocused, even aloof -- and I supposed this was just another aspect of it. I thought nothing of it, and left my question unanswered.

We dressed and went downstairs. I never asked D.J. where he was going, or what he planned to do for the next three hours. All I knew was I couldn’t wait to see him again, even if it had to be in the confines of a bar, and that the connection we had made over ‘Long As I Can See Light’ and our Kozel’s and the way that we touched each other in the night was something that was solid and strong and, if burnished over and over again might shine and last like a fine piece of silver.

Romances, like racehorses, run more smoothly with blinders. At first, the little idiosyncrasies one discovers across the natural flow of time hardly seem important; they are lost in the wash of the excitement and adventures of a new love. But as the puzzling details, or lack thereof, of D.J.’s life apart from me began to filter through the dazzling light of novelty, I began to collect them, like trinkets, to save and bring out for explication at a later date. I thought of them as mysterious, broken toys that I needed help putting together.

Luckily, our common love of music was not one of those puzzling details. Many of my best memories of our first times together – after the obvious one of that Creedence song – involve notes, sounds, and staves. Often in the evening after dinner we would walk together to the banks of the Vltava and open our backpacks to take out our sheet music and sing.

We were voracious in our tastes. One night, it was Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am spinnrade’ where I would transpose the soprano part and D.J. would hum the accompaniment; the next night it was ‘All My Loving’ by the Beatles and our celebration would be saturated by a song full of longing. I never minded if our somewhat out-of-tune harmonies were overheard; true love is always oblivious of the world.

D.J. seemed particularly fond of my record collection. It contained actual vinyl discs left over from my days in London when I trolled the second-hand shops in Piccadilly for recordings of Billie Holiday and Barbra Streisand, but also some ‘modern classical’ pieces like Wuorinin’s ‘Christes Crosse’ or Vaughn Williams’ ‘Cradle Song’ (which was not normally my taste, but Tom adored it).

Our concertizing was never so scholarly or eclectic. D.J. and I discovered we shared a joint love of corny pop songs. My disdain for the Carpenters aside, a cloudburst one evening prompted a rendition of ‘Rainy Days and Mondays,’ and a warm lazy afternoon raised a chorus of the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’. The effect we raised together was thrilling, a harmony born out of our love and our passion and the joy of using our voices to underline -- beyond the words and their meaning -- how happy we were when we were together:

But at night, it’s a different world

Go out and find a girl

Come on, come on, and dance all night

Despite the heat, it’ll be alright

And babe, don’t you know it’s a pity

The days can’t be like the nights

In the summer in the city…In the summer in the city…

I could afford to go to concerts and often suggested them to D.J., but he was resolute – we could sing together on the riverbank, or in the privacy of my home, or – and this I found particularly strange – along with the juke box at Kosmos, but the natural haunts of music aficionados – the National Opera, the piano bars, even the modest concert hall of my academy – were an anathema to him. As I said, I didn’t mind, at first – there were plenty of places we could share – but like a steady drip from a leaky faucet as the incidences accumulated they grew hard to ignore,

It was the exception that proved the rule and gave me my first insight into D.J.’s strange behaviour regarding places to listen to music, or to dine, or to do just about anything other than sleep and make love. One Friday night in early May, approximately a month after our first meeting at Kosmos, I managed somehow to entice D.J. to accompany me to a concert at the Muzeum Hudby in the Mala Strana.

Prof. Balich played in an amateur string quartet, and his group were performing a program of Mozart and Brahms pieces in the small anteroom of the museum. The room faced the street: you could stand on Stefaniková and peer through the floor-to-ceiling windows to watch the musicians if you so choose, although of course the sound would be muted. I supposed the semi-publicness of the space was part of the reason the concert was free, but it was also a grand advertisement for the chamber music in Prague, and I was happy to support one of my teachers with my attendance.

D.J. seemed nervous on the tram ride across town, and no amount of reassurance from me about the informality of the occasion and the subsequent unlikelihood of a large crowd seemed to calm him. He seemed ready to bolt out of the tram at every stop, and nervously scanned our fellow passengers as if he suspected an assassin was hidden amongst them.

“Could we go for a walk on the Strelecky Ostrov instead?” D.J. asked as our tram crossed the island. “I’m beginning to feel a bit unwell.”

“But you love Brahms,” I replied.

“No one actually loves Brahms,” D.J. said. “But that’s beside the point. You know I don’t like rooms full of strangers.”

“It never seems to bother you when we’re at the bar.”

“That’s a different kind of anonymity.”

“My teacher is counting on me,” I said.

“I know.”

“Come and see the space. It’s enclosed in glass. You won’t feel trapped.”

“Okay.”

We arrived about twenty minutes before the scheduled start of the concert. I supposed it was the windows and the openness to the street that eventually calmed D.J. down to the point where he could sit in the room with me and listen to the concert. Whatever it was that I said or did, the rest of the evening passed without a further discussion of the reasons for D.J.’s reluctance.

After the encore, I went up to Prof. Balich to congratulate him. I wanted to introduce him to D.J –- it seemed the polite thing to do – but D.J. hung in the back of the room, and Prof. Balich believed, or pretended to believe, that I was alone. I nodded in the direction of the few of my colleagues in the audience that I recognized, and then D.J. and I headed back to Vinohrady. At one point on the tram ride home, I thought I heard D.J. audibly sigh in relief. I knew that D.J. preferred to be left alone, but I felt his behaviour was starting to edge towards the antisocial.

This pattern of strange evenings and comforting nights continued throughout May and into June. By this point, D.J. had memorized my schedule; he would show up at my flat at an hour carefully calibrated to the timing of my last lesson of the day. I’d make something for us to eat, or take out some leftovers from the fridge, and then we’d go for a walk around Námestí Míru, inevitably ending up at the Kosmos for a beer and a nightcap before heading back to Jana Masaryk and bed.

Because I loved D.J., and because I didn’t wish to upset him or – even worse – drive him away, I stopped asking the questions he was unable or unwilling to answer, but that didn’t mean I stopped thinking of them: where did he live, and why wasn’t I invited over? D.J. never spoke of any friends, or any past at all, except for semi-mythical references to Serbia and his childhood.

Why was D.J. so afraid of crowds and public spaces, save for the familiar comforts of Kosmos? My broad musings led to some specific ones: why did he avoid the Riegrovy Sady, when it was the most direct and convenient route to and from my home and my school? And why was D.J. always ignored, and preferred it that way? It was a pattern formed from invisible ink, only seen by a glance, a shadow, or a reflection –cryptic and, because of that enticing as hell.

A confrontation or – if that sounds like too strong a word for a scenario between two committed lovers – a resolution to this problem was inevitable, and it came on an otherwise ordinary Sunday afternoon. D.J. and I awoke to an invitation from the bright sunshine and chirruping birds. In my year plus so far in Prague, I had always longed to visit the top of the Žižkov Tower, and something about the light and the air that morning cried out ‘now!’ I turned over, gently woke my sleeping lover, and told him to get up and get dressed.

“We’re going to Žižkov.”

The Žižkov Tower was, for many years, the tallest structure in Prague, and it is certainly the ugliest. It was built in the eighties (and nineties – it took seven years to complete) as a transmission tower for the Communist-run television station. The architecture is a striking example of brutalism; the structure resembles a rocket losing its parts, and the local joke is that the popularity of the restaurant at the top of the tower comes from the fact that it is practically the only place in the city where you can go and not see its hideous profile.

Because of this infamy, the Žižkov Tower is also de rigueur for tourists. I was not so déclassé as to run up to the top of the tower in my first weeks here, but the incongruity of it, and my romance and my subsequent desire for novelty transformed the place into a worthwhile destination. The tower was a twenty-minute walk from Jana Masaryka, most directly across the Riegrovy Sady, which, of course, we had to avoid. Instead, we walked around the church at Jihiro z Podebrad (another example of admirably ugly Czech architecture) and zigzagged to the site. We paid our admission at the foot of the tower and rode up to the observation deck at the top.

The view was banal, of course; there’s a place in every city -- from the Empire State Building in New York to the Eiffel Tower in Paris – where everyone goes to see pretty much the same landscape: miles of relatively indistinguishable buildings punctuated by a landmark or two, camera-ready and interesting for about ten minutes.

The sights from the top of the Žižkov Tower were just that: a sea of red and cream-coloured bricks interrupted by church spires, impressive but undifferentiated. Only the sky – enormous and blue and spreading out above us like a blessing from heaven – held a promise equal to our imagination.

The best thing about our time up there was that -- for the moment, at least – we were entirely alone. D.J. and I sat down on one of the aluminium benches that encircled the deck. This was my chance.

“I love you, D.J.,” I said.

“But…”

“No ‘but’. But…”

D.J. laughed. “Go on.”

“Why have you never invited me to your flat? Why have I never met any of your friends? I feel at times that you are ashamed of me, or afraid to introduce me.”

“You know that is not true.”

“Perhaps. But now is the time for me to ask these questions, and now is the time for you to answer them.”

“I had hoped not to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I tell you the truth, you might not understand.”

“I love you. I will try.”

“Tell me what you think is going on,” he said.

So D.J. turned the tables on me, again. Instead of answering the questions I was asking him, he wanted me to tell him the answers.

“I’m as fond of Kosmos as you are, D.J.,” I began. “But the place is hardly the apex of fine dining and entertainment in Prague. I pride myself in being somewhat of a decent chef, but every now and then, I would like to have someone make me a cheeseburger or a salad. It’s a most peculiar phobia, this solitariness of yours, and I’d really like to try to get to the bottom of it.”

“I hadn’t thought of it as a phobia,” D.J. said. “Although the way you describe it, I suppose it can sound a little strange.”

“You think? Not only do you not seem to have a home, but – and I say this without a hint of animus, believe me – you never seem to have any money. Plus, we’ve established that you don’t have a phone. Are you a monk? Are you on a sabbatical from some kind of monastic retreat?”

D.J. chuckled, and put his arm around me. Just then, another couple – a middle-aged man and a woman – came around the corner and passed us, nodding politely.

“Dobry den,” the woman said.

“Dobry den,” D.J. said in return. He waited until the couple was out of sight, and then he turned back to me.

“You’ve cut close to the truth,” D.J. said. “In fact, I believe you’ve suspected it all along. You’ve only been afraid to speak it, because when you do, you will no longer be able to pretend to be ignorant. I’m not a monk. I’m a ghost.”

“A ghost?” I said. I laughed. I had imagined all kinds of confessions – a boyfriend, husband, a wife – but this was a word beyond my comprehension. “Like a creature shrouded in a white sheet, the kind that wanders around on Halloween scaring little girls and boys?”

“No, but a ghost, nonetheless. I am here and I love you, and I will always love you, but I am not alive. I died five years ago. My father shot me. It was an accident. We argued; he shot me, and I died. Those are the facts, as simple and unadorned as I can make them.”

I stayed silent.

“I am only visible to people who love me…those who are susceptible to the kind of unconscious currents that flow between two people who were destined to meet. That’s why you were able to speak with me that first night in Kosmos. That’s why I can travel with you, but stay invisible to everyone else. I exist in places where I was happy – your flat, the bar, wherever there is music. And I can’t go to places where I was sad, like Riegrovy Sady.”

“What’s so sad about Riegrovy Sady?”

“That’s where my father shot me.” The sky, which only a few minutes ago had felt so freeing, suddenly crashed over my head. D.J. continued: “Would you like the long version of the story, or the short one?”

“I’m not in a hurry,” I replied. “But I think I need a little more time to absorb what you are telling me, so perhaps you should start with the short version.”

“You know I was born in Serbia, in the city of Novi Sad. As early as the age of ten, I knew I didn’t belong there, but ten-year-olds don’t have much control over their destiny. I was dutifully loved, and I dutifully obeyed, but when adolescence struck, I realized I was different – gay – and I also realized my family, especially my father, would never accept me. I could never be the son he wanted me to be.

“I liked music; my father wanted me to lay bricks. I wanted to touch the boys in my gymnasium; he wanted me to buy flowers for the insipid daughters of his drinking buddies. We argued, we fought; it was impossible.

“When I turned seventeen, I said goodbye to all that and emigrated to Prague. I spent my childhood listening to pirated radio stations, and I wanted to be a disc jockey here and have the chance to play all the records I wasn’t allowed to own or hear in my homeland.”

“But Yugoslavia collapsed years before you were born,” I began. “Surely you could play and listen to what you liked in Serbia.”

“After a decade of the Yugoslav wars, all of the region was a mess. All my friends could talk about was the new freedom in Prague. The temptation was overwhelming, and there was nothing more for me at home. I loved my mother, but that was not enough. I fled. For that first year, I worked in a basement club, spinning the Ramones and the Stones and anything else I could get my hands on.”

“I figured Creedence and perhaps Bonnie Raitt was more your speed,” I said.

“We’ve been a couple for over a month now,” D.J. said. “And you’ve learned nothing more about my taste in music than that? I challenge you to find a genre or an artist that I don’t like.”

“Let’s save that challenge for another time. Tell me about the day you died.”

I tried to remain nonchalant as I said that sentence, as if I was asking D.J. to describe a vacation and not the details of his demise.

“If my mother and my father found my taste in music to be beyond the pale, you can imagine how they felt about my taste in sexual partners. My mother, at least, managed to frame it as a flaw, and forgive it, but my father cut me off completely. We didn’t speak at all for that first year after I left home. Then, right around Christmas, he came to Prague and barged into my flat – a little place I’d rented on Polska Street. He started shouting that he’d come to -- as he put it --‘bring me back to my senses and take me home’. Even a distance of nearly one thousand kilometres was not far enough for him.

“I think he had forgotten that this home that he spoke so fondly of had been war zone from which the three of us had fled when I was still a babe in arms, and that I had grown up in the war’s long shadow, and the even longer shadow of his incomprehension. I think he wanted me to be a bricklayer like him, and to marry like him, and to spend my nights drinking watery beer and eating burek pies like him.

“He had been drinking; I think you English call it ‘Dutch courage’ but from my point of view it was a typical Serbian reaction to a disobedient son. Of course, we argued. The argument turned into a shoving match. So far, it was nothing that hadn’t happened in the past and more of what I was sure was going to happen again and again if I followed him back to Bački Breg.

“I had a ploy. If I could lure him out of the flat and into the park across the street, I could make a run for it. He’d find me again, of course, but by then I could prepare to defend myself in word if not in deed. Feigning innocence, I suggested we go for a walk. We crossed Polska and entered the Riegrovy Sady. We hiked up to what used to be my favourite spot – the hill where you can see the whole of the city. I thought, irrationally, if we went to the beer garden and I plied him with drinks he might pass out and forget about me. But then my father took out his gun.

“To be honest, I didn’t even know he owned one. I can’t imagine he bought it for the sole reason of shooting me. I don’t even think he remembered he was carrying it until he found it situated in his shaky hand. He must have bought it in a second-hand shop in Novi Sad to protect himself from the mythical mercenaries he believed were still afoot from the Bosnian War. He waved it at me and said improbable things like ‘the shame you brought upon your mother’ and ‘I want you to work beside me like a son’ and then he fired it. I remember his scream more than my own. I passed out, and when I awoke, I was here.”

“Here?” I asked. The sound of my own voice startled me; I had been listening so intently to D.J.’s story that I lost track of myself, the time, everything…

“In Prague. In the Riegrovy Sady. In the spot where I died.”

“But…but you’re with me now, you’re here with me, we’re together, we love each other…”

The sentences burst out of me like verbal hallucinations, complete but irrational proof of impossible facts. D.J. continued:

“I tumbled down the hill, dizzy from the apparent truth. There was no blood. I felt no pain. But no one could see me, and I could speak to no one. I was invisible. I stumbled into the first door that looked welcoming to me – it turned out, of course, to be the entrance to Kosmos, on Manesová. I took a seat at the bar. I couldn’t order anything; the bartender couldn’t see me. I wasn’t thirsty or hungry, but I felt I was capable of drinking…of eating. But without a liaison to the living world, I was helpless.

“And I sat there, terrified, stupefied, until closing, and I left, and returned, and so on. I made forays to the places in the city that I knew – Wenceslas Square, Námestí Míru – I could climb on to trams and walk the streets – but I was desperate and lonely. I grew perversely fond of my corner seat at Kosmos; it functioned as my home. I gravitated to it as a new-born to his mother, holding on to its familiarity as the first thing I remember seeing. Night upon night, I put my korunas into the jukebox and played ‘Long As I Can See The Light’ and prayed and prayed for someone to come in and see me – to put a candle in the window, as the song says, and speak to me -- someone capable of loving me. No one came – no one until you.”

“What now?” I asked. It was the only question I could think of that made any sense.

“How about a drink?”

What is it like to make love to a ghost? I thought a lot about this after that morning at the Žižkov Tower and the news I received there. D.J. still behaved like the incorporated entity I thought he was before I knew about his past: apparently, spirits are just as capable as living humans to seduce and satisfy their sexual partners.

There were no dramatic marks on D.J.’s body – no bullet holes, no Frankenstein-like sutures; he had a scar on the inside of his thigh, but he told me that was from an accident on a thresher when he was twelve. When D.J. was in my arms, or under my body -- when he was curled up and sleeping beside me and I felt the gentle rise and fall of his breath -- he was indistinguishable from any of my previous lovers – indistinguishable except for the fact that he was, in every way imaginable, their superior.

I don’t wish to make D.J.’s attributes sound like those of a saint, but believe me, they were as worthy of worship as any man-made idol. His physical appearance alone classified him in an upper echelon: despite being dead, he was in awfully good shape. While he was a living young man, D.J. liked to exercise – jogging and lifting weights and those sorts of things -- and his arm and leg muscles had kept their form. His current ‘predicament’ – his own choice of words – meant his stubble never grew, and his hair stayed forever long and black: no grooming was necessary for this ghost. I had a lot of fun experiencing D.J.’s nostalgia for shaving.

But it wasn’t D.J.’s body or even his unnatural presence that was distracting me when we were making love, but the small and persistent feeling that there was something divided about him. As I think this, I believe ‘divided’ is too strong a word: what I sensed was a much softer emotion, more like an ache buried deep beneath his skin.

I felt as if my time with D.J. was limited, as if – at any moment – some God-like being would reach down and whisk him away from me, or that there was something else going on in his spiritual realm which I was incapable of ever seeing. I didn’t want our romance to turn into a version of ‘Brief Encounter’ but I still was left with the nagging feeling that he – like Trevor Howard – was entertaining me while waiting for a train, one that would pull into the station and take him away from me forever.

These feelings did not only arise out of our lovemaking; the very definite boundaries of his existence served as a constant reminder of the terms of our engagement. D.J. gave me a full run-down of them over breakfast one morning in a sunny, shaded café on Rumunská, a block away from Námestí Míru.

“I can sit with you here, because I can still catch a glimpse of the trees in front of the church, and I know I am settled here,” he began. Our coffee had grown cold, and I was just about to get up and order another. “But if I wander too far away from a place where my spirit is tethered, I lose everything – I wouldn’t be able to talk with you, I couldn’t share your croissant, and there’d be an impenetrable screen between me and the world.”

“You sound like a dog on a leash,” I said. “Albeit a long one. Can I get you something else?”

“No, thanks. But yes, in a way, I am on a spiritual leash. Places where I suffered harm or was mistreated are forbidden – not that there’s a wall around Riegrovy Sady or Bački Breg, but I feel an ache in my heart if I approach them – a literal tremor -- and I start to break apart if I dare to cross a millimetre of their turf.”

“I hope you don’t mean that literally,” I said.

“In a way, I do. It’s hard to explain to a mortal – sorry, I don’t mean to sound as if I’m a god -- but all the time, there’s a vibrating, nearly unfocused aspect to my sense of sight, as if the world was a collection of pixels on a screen and the edges of it are blurring. If I come upon a forbidden place – even if I hadn’t been aware of the prohibition – the blur becomes a swirl, and then a scrabble, and…well, I’ve never hung around long enough to find out what would happen to me, but it’s likely to be the end of my resurrection.”

“All this talk of mortals and resurrection is making me feel a bit of a vibration as well,” I said. “You must imagine how difficult it is for me to believe you.”

“I do.”

“And how many forbidden places are there?”

“Every spirit has his or her own roster,” D.J. replied. “It’s a fixed number, of course – once I left the world, no one could hurt me anymore. All of mine are in Prague or in Serbia, but even if they did exist elsewhere, I couldn’t be tempted to see them.”

“Why is that?”

“Because I can only materialize in places and with people who love me, and all of them are here as well. Alas, I have no paramour in Paris…no amante in Rome.”

“But you’ve travelled?”

“In life? Yes. My school choir took a European bus tour, and I got a glimpse through a window of all the old cities. And one summer I worked as a busboy on the Amalfi coast. You would think the situation was highly romantic, but I was a teenager and inexperienced. If I had known I was going to die at twenty-one and never get to kiss my Italian boyfriend on the Spanish Steps or play the gigolo on the Champs-Elysées, I might have been bolder.”

I knew I was due at the academy at eleven, and I knew as well that my day wasn’t going to improve with a third cup of coffee, but something about D.J.’s neediness at that moment – his grand desire to explain everything about him that made him special to me – kept me from making my excuse. The intimacy that we shared when we were in bed together was nothing compared to the vision I was receiving into the depths of D.J.’s soul.

“And then there are your sacred places,” I said. “Are there rules for them, too?”

“You make it sound like I’m in a reformatory. There’s no one going around with a book, checking for infractions. I must act in accordance to my own moral code.”

“Thank God neither of us was raised Catholic,” I said. “We’d be left cowering under a table. But please be patient: spritely love is new to me.”

“Spritely love – what a poetic phrase. If I had any way to remember it -- a book in which to jot it down -- I would do it.”

“Now you’re merely humouring me,” I said. “But I apologize if I came across as arch. Go on.”

“Sometimes I think the rules are made up as I go along. Their efficacy is put to the proof by the testing of them. For instance, I knew instantly that you and I had connected when I saw you at Kosmos the night we met, because you smiled at me, which meant you saw me, which mean you loved me, or at least were capable of it.”

“I would think every man in that bar that night would be equally capable,” I said.

“Capability exists not only in its mechanical form, but in its spiritual corelative,” D.J. explained. “In order for me to move into the world, I have to make a connection with a person who is open to my specific vibration – I think that’s part of what I meant when I talked about how my vision is affected by my condition. I hate to descend into the language of science, but I believe all spirits, myself included, send out something resembling a frequency. And, like all transmitters, my frequency is only picked up by people who have the ability to receive it. Obviously, you do.”

“But what about when we are apart?”

“I believe I am kind of a lost signal,” D.J. continued. “I spent years in purgatory, after I died. The hell of it wasn’t how long I was there – time is endless and all of it happens simultaneously once you are a spirit – but how it never changes. I wandered the streets of Prague, desperately looking for some sort of connection in the places I knew I might find them – not only the bar, but in the islands and the parks where I was happy, in the churches where I prayed, in the tower where I imagined I was conquering all of the city…”

“And then you found heaven.”

“I found you. You are a corollary to heaven.”

“Poetry again,” I said. “You are an endless font of it.”

“A post-mortem skill.”

I felt I had let our conversation drift out of focus. I had lost my impetus, which was to finally understand the terms of our relationship, and what, specifically, I could do to expand them.

“Tell me, D.J., am I doomed to share you with the spirit world?” I asked. “Is there nothing I can do to have you all to myself?”

“Don’t be greedy,” he replied. “The world is wide.”

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine this world: one that didn’t include D.J. I couldn’t see it.

May can be a most pleasant month in Prague: the trees have all shed their flowers, and the heat waves bubbling up from Italy are still weeks away. I had approached the cosmic limitations to my time in D.J.’s company like a temporary schedule adjustment, as if with enough good behaviour on my part I would be granted some kind of bonus.

But June arrived, and there was still no bonus. D.J claimed not to care that his days were monotonous (‘if there was a lack of monotony to being a spirit, there’d be many more of them,’ he said), but I felt myself growing restless, and not just in a summer-is-almost-here way. I had been in love before and I had made commitments to my lovers in the past, but of course these affairs had always existed on the human plane and were subject to the laws of humanity: jealousy, incompatibility, distractions. D.J. was new, and subject to an entirely different set of laws.

My days – at least until the end of the spring session – were filled with lessons and meetings. I might have been an indifferent student, but I turned out to be a pretty good teacher. The academy assigned me three young singers – a lovely Czech girl named Klara who had a fondness for folk music and two German teenagers away for a summer spree from their parochial training in Düsseldorf. Hansel was the cuter of the two boys, and I think his flirting was a part of his need for freedom, but I was too distracted (and devoted) to D.J. to offer any encouragement.

All the while, D.J. would wander about, Kafka-like, disengaged but otherwise unperturbed, safe in the knowledge that sometime around five he and I would meet up again at the Kosmos, sing along with the jukebox (although I backed away from playing ‘Long As I Can See The Light’ every night because it was starting to bother the staff). We would have a beer or two – my treat, of necessity – and then head home to my flat around midnight.

Before I met D.J., I had planned on spending as much of the summer as possible travelling – back to England for a brief amount of time to see my parents, and perhaps try to prop up what remained of my friendship with Tom. Then, if my budget allowed, perhaps I could spend a week alone with my music in the Dolomites, playing the solitary composer I’d imaged myself becoming ever since I read ‘Death In Venice’. Believing that D.J more or less didn’t exist when he was out of my company – strange as that thought was – didn’t reduce my dependence upon him; in fact, it reinforced it. I started to feel responsible for him, and I had never been truly responsible for anyone before – not even myself.

I didn’t have a plan, but I knew I had to look for the boundaries of D.J.’s sacred places and crop the borders of his forbidden places to find the nexus of the two in order to turn as much of the city of Prague into our private playground as possible. D.J. was perfectly happy to go along with me to the point where I felt he might even be humouring me, as if to say ‘silly boy, why do you need to keep trying to go over the rainbow?’ But he was not human – not anymore – and he no longer needed to live by the rules of human nature. I did. I knew that a great part of human nature was to see how far you could let a fire burn before it grew out of control.

My solution was to spring a series of tests, each planned to issue increasingly advanced challenges to D.J.’s rules. I thought if I made a game out of it, it might distract me from my frustration. My first test was the easiest one to for D.J. to pass: I invited him to join me for a picnic supper in Petrin. Petrin was across the river and up the hill from the Mala Strana in the old city. There was a funicular leading to the top of a hill where you could find a brewery run by monks, a botanical garden, and a modestly miniaturized version of the Eiffel Tower that tourists were invited to climb.

We settled on the side of one of the slopes overlooking a vineyard. I brought a basket filled with sliced ham, grapes, and a fizzy wine I picked up at the last minute at a potraviny on Ujzed. The ‘test’ aspect of the picnic was this: D.J. was vulnerable in open spaces; there was an increased possibility of some stranger recognizing his specialness – after all, I did. I was willing to risk another soul falling in love with D.J. if it meant I could share an increasing number of earthly pleasures with him.

“I’ve always felt safer in the smaller city parks,” he said, sipping his wine from a plastic cup and eying something resembling a frisbee tournament starting up in the shade of a maple grove about a hundred metres downhill from our blanket. “I can dodge a single waylayer easily enough, but – like a vampire – bright sunshine and crowds leave me little space for escape.”

“You’re a very different type of undead,” I said, trying to say that utterly preposterous sentence with as much nonchalance as I could muster. “You won’t burn up in the sun, and the brightness of my love will shield you from any interlopers.”

“That’s a hopeful thought,” D.J said. “I’m glad you’re so confidant.”

“I am.”

The wine was good and cold, and as the time passed I almost allowed myself to relax -- an early summer picnic with my lover: what could be more ordinary? And yet this man of mine -- this ghost, invisible to nearly all of humanity, not existing beyond my grasp -- at any moment might be stolen away by a charming glance, a dashing turn of the head, the mythical meeting ‘across a crowded room’. If D.J. was alive, he could be fought for; as a spirit, he could be as evanescent as the air. I felt free to give voice to my fears.

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll be spotted up here?” I asked.

“Spotted? You make me sound like a criminal. I am not an empty-headed fool; the attraction has to flow in both directions.”

“But you can flirt…certainly, you flirted when you were alive…” I said.

“Is my baby jealous?” D.J. asked. “Don’t be. You weren’t there for all those years I was lost…when I felt invisible. My soul is glowing in the light of your love; let me enjoy it at last.”

“As long as it doesn’t burn brighter in someone else’s arms,” I said. “This is all so new to me.”

“You think so? Well, it’s new to me, too. I swear, all the friends I found in the past – anyone who rescued me, or who tried to – that’s nothing compared to you.”

“Thank you, Sinead O’Connor.”

“Very funny.”

“Or should I say ‘Prince’?”

“A prince among men.”

“That you are.”

We finished our repast; the sun began to dive down behind the hill, casting long midsummer shadows across the bourgeoning vines. I picked up our blanket and packed it into the now-empty basket.

“Okay?” I asked. I left it up to D.J. to decide if I were referring to the food, the view, the weather, or his state of mind.

“I am, Monty.”

Something about the way D.J. said my name just then made me want to kiss him. I didn’t care who saw us. I felt like my kiss would protect him, would create a lead shield that would protect him from the poisonous rays of mankind. I stretched up and planted a hard kiss on his cheek.

“Do I deserve that?” he asked.

“Maybe not,” I replied. “but I do.”

D.J. passed his second test – a meeting of three of my fellow students from the academy for coffee and trdelníks at a cafe in front of the Tyn church in Old Town Square. I asked D.J. to meet me there and watch: I bought an extra cappuccino and left it on an empty table next to the one my friends and I occupied. D.J. sat down and drank it, and none of the others saw him, or noticed the hot milk settling into the bottom of an otherwise unattended cup. I was thrilled by my deception, although D.J. thought I was unnecessarily tempting fate. I had prepared some weak excuse for my colleagues about trying out a magic trick, and I was quite glad I didn’t need to use it.

The third test proved the hardest – it was designed that way— and it was also the one that affected me the most. Outside of Tom Fulham, no one in my life had ever occupied as central a place, romantically speaking, as D.J. But I did have a friend in Prague who at one point in the recent past more or less resembled a boyfriend. His name was Karel.

Karel and I met in the gift shop of DOX, Prague’s modern art museum, and dated for about three months. We were very much alike, and that was the problem: we could never move far enough away from ourselves to see anyone else’s point of view. After we stopped dating, we remained friends, and he knew me better than anyone else in town.

When I called Karel and invited him to lunch, I made a point of telling him my new beau was going to join us. Then I asked D.J. to come along. I wanted to see what might happen if someone like me, who would – I knew – be vulnerable to D.J.’s charms – might actually see him.

The plan was to reserve a table for three, put myself and D.J. at it, and see what happened when Karel walked in. D.J. and I got to the restaurant early, and chose a central table with a view of the street. I felt like an assassin planning an attack. Karel came in, greeted me warmly, and then, with the effect of shattering glass, he said:

“Where’s your friend?”

I was not about to begin to attempt an explanation; ex-boyfriends deserve more than wild rants in situations like this. I offered D.J.’s apology and explained that he came down with a cold. Karel accepted my excuse – he was the kind of guy who accepted anything he was told – and we spent the rest of the luncheon reminiscing about an orgy we attended in a garage in Kobylisy and the possibility that we might hook up again in the deliberately undefined future. All the while D.J. sat there, watching us and smiling.

Failure. More frustration. Something had to change. But what?