Anne Johnson, a well-known fixture of Brno’s cultural scene, has won the 2025 Brno Short Story Writing Contest with her story “What Amusement”. We are pleased to publish the story in full for your enjoyment…
A cigarette break at a wedding reception with Brno’s elite leads to a series of reflections on a 10-year relationship.
“I fucked your caterer,” you tell him, leaning closer so he can light your cigarette. A small puff of smoke escapes him with his laugh. He’s somehow both shocked and impressed, the way you like to see him. Slightly off balance. Taken aback and intrigued. The dance you’ve been doing for 10 years now. “The tall one,” you continue. “In the catering van, between courses.”
He’s looking at you. Nothing feels as good as having his attention. “Really?” he asks, his right eyebrow up. He can’t raise the left one, but he does the single sardonic eyebrow very well.
You give it a beat, one long slow exhalation upward. “No,” you say. Might be true, might not; you are the kind of person who might fuck the caterer at your lover’s wedding, and now he’ll never know for sure. Glorious.
Lover might not be the best word for him. Former lover, maybe, since the circumstances have presumably changed in light of his wedding. You have known this man intimately for a decade, but as of today he is married to someone else, so former is correct. But there should be a word for what he is to you besides lover, implying the relationship involved love, which is not entirely accurate.
Fascinated since the day you met, sure. The word “entrance” meaning both to appear and to enchant, which he did at the same time, standing outside your classroom in the social studies department at Masaryk. It felt like he was waiting for you, but he was actually there to see his father, who taught the class. You felt a bolt of electricity go through you the moment you made eye contact, a sensation you would have dismissed as fiction before you felt it yourself. Even your fingers tingled. You followed the two of them down the hall at a discreet distance, thinking: Great voice. Great arms. Thinking: I want that. Thinking: How? But then you didn’t have to do much work, because the next week he was in the hallway again, and you knew it was mutual. “Come here often?” he asked. That eyebrow raised. You wish that your reply had been memorable. You blushed. And it started.
And now you’re standing at the side of the reception hall, two old friends sneaking around the corner for a smoke. On the other side of the wall are a few hundred wedding guests. Also his new wife. She is beautiful, poised, perfect. Good sense of humor. Good family, good genes. She’s going to give him the babies he wants; the family lineage will be carried on. His father, your old professor, now deep in politics. Let’s not say who he is, let’s be subtle, let’s avoid lawsuits. The wedding is attended by the movers and shakers of Prague and Brno, people who want things from his father – and of course by his father, who wants things from him. Everyone is expected to keep any conversations that happen in that room confidential. You’re here in part because you’re good at keeping other people’s secrets; you’re so good that nobody has guessed the truth about this relationship, the biggest secret you have. And you’re here because part of that secret means that everyone thinks you’re just friends, and nothing more than that. Like it couldn’t be anything else. Like you’ve never been naked together, entangled; never woken up to an empty bed and the smell of him on your skin. The taste of him. Like you were really playing tennis on Mondays and that’s why he wanted a shower as soon as he got home. There’s a joke about love somewhere here.
Brno is the best and the worst town for secrets. The best because there’s always so much going on that if you just stay quiet for a few minutes people will lose interest in you and focus on the next gossip. The worst because it’s a village and as soon as anyone knows something, everyone knows it. So you’ve spent ten years keeping this one to yourself. People know that you two have been friends since university, but nobody suspects more. You don’t talk about him much, which people assume is because of his father, but it’s also so that you never risk giving yourself away with an accidental dreamy look, a catch in your breath. And over the years you’ve had other relationships come and go. Nothing that caught your heart, nothing else that made you feel like your blood was mercury, molten and quick in your veins. Just enough to keep people from thinking they should set you up with a friend from work or that something was wrong with you. An online dating profile, some adventures out of town that you relay with varying levels of detail to a wide enough range of people that you appear to be functioning. You have friends to go to the theater or concerts with, and you also enjoy a wide range of things alone. Meanwhile the true story has gone on undetected. Sometimes you wondered if part of the appeal might be the secrecy itself.
There was a time, in the beginning, when you thought it might not have to be a secret. One night you were out late, the wee hours, drinking at Leč with him after going to the movies, laughing as he dissected the cultural impact of Jason Bourne. The little boy enthusiasm that will always be your undoing. It must have been 2016. That’s when the movie came out, so at that point you’d known each other for a year. You’d held hands in the darkness of the theater, and you felt more like yourself than you ever had with anyone. It felt like something had shifted into focus, something new. When a man came into the bar selling roses, he bought one for you and presented it to you with his eyebrow raised so you weren’t sure if he was sincerely making a romantic gesture or making a joke, but you hoped it might be romance, for a moment. Later, outside, he pushed you against the rough façade of St. James Church and kissed your neck, touched you. “My dirty little secret,” he breathed in your ear. You nodded, murmuring assent; you would have agreed to anything as long as he kept his hands on you. It’s been years since that night, but you still see the same man around town selling roses sometimes, and you are still a dirty little secret. You don’t drink in public with him anymore though; he’s too easily recognized. “I remember. I remember everything,” you hear him say in your mind, quoting the movie. You’re not sure now what he remembers.
He holds out his cigarettes to you. “Another?” he asks. You have your own pack, of course. You let him light one for you again, watching his face as he focuses on the task. It’s not like anybody will notice how long you’re gone; you don’t have a date inside and his new wife will be too busy making sure every guest is perfectly happy to notice his absence.
Why don’t you have a date? The “plus one” invitation has become as firmly embedded in Czech culture as the rest of the lavish wedding concept. Katka and her family nodded to tradition with the open-faced chlebíčky, but there’s also prosecco on tap, something you’re pretty sure nobody’s parents had at their own wedding. They fed each other soup, but they also did all the dancing (bride with father, bride with groom, groom with mother) and costume changes that have been imported from wealthier countries. Katka’s currently on her third outfit of the day, a summery coral dress that makes the seaglass green of her eyes sparkle like emeralds, as she certainly intended. Shiny new traditions for the new elites, just add water. Or prosecco. You don’t have a date because Katka knows just enough about you to believe the stories about your wild dating life, and she’s afraid you’d bring someone who’d cast a dirty shadow over the festivities.
You’re not mad at her. The stories are, after all, mostly true. You put yourself in the way of casual and brief encounters so that you’d be easily available for the only person who really mattered, and you have never truly permitted yourself to consider anything more serious. Did you fly to London to spend time with a dancer you’d met when the Royal London Ballet visited Brno, enjoying an increasingly athletic and enthusiastic weekend in a luxury hotel overlooking the Thames? You did, you did. It was one of the most fun vacations in your life, though you didn’t see much beyond the hotel. But the best thing about it was telling him, after. His face. His eyes a mix of – what? Jealousy? Envy? Both of those. Longing. And maybe also pride. But Katka wouldn’t want her perfect reception spoiled by your pas de deux shenanigans, and you understand.
“We should go back inside,” he tells you, here in reality. He puts his jacket back on and you notice how he always does the button the same way as his father does, left-handed. Does anyone else know this, this detail; would anyone care if they noticed? You’ve spent so much time paying attention and you don’t know what it’s gotten you.
If it had been public, would it have meant more or less to you? You’re as tired as anyone of Kundera, Brno’s prickly native son, but you see his point about bearing the burden of things that are real and truthful in comparison to the lightness of simply being. But is this relationship, this secret, heavy or light?
One time he was in Vienna for a conference and you went down to stay for a night. He was busy during the day, so you wandered through the museums, letting your eyes trace the outlines of Egon Schiele’s nudes. Schiele’s mother was Czech, and Egon lived in Český Krumlov with his muse Wally for a while, but they couldn’t escape people’s expectations and judgment. You thought about bohemian lifestyles and about muses. You have wondered if that’s what you are for him: a muse, an inspiration. How many of his ideas – ideas presented at the conference, for example – were originally hatched when he was with you? How often he paced the room working through a concept and you sat in the rumpled sheets and watched him move (thinking, even years later: Great voice. Great arms.) and asked a question when it seemed right and smiled and listened and asked another question and then stubbed out a cigarette and told him to come back to bed. Did you help him create who he became? Maybe a little. And if you hadn’t been a muse, would you have been more of a creator yourself? Maybe a little. You have, after all, created this persona, a person who can wake up in an empty bed without minding it. Part hedonist, part introvert; you have made it so convincing that even you yourself often believe it, and isn’t that art? In the hotel, you lay on your back with your head upside down over the edge, watching him make coffee with the kit he carries with him when he travels. Strong coffee, precise measurements. A morning sunbeam danced across his back as he moved. “I wish I could paint you,” you said, finally raising yourself onto one elbow, the world coming back into an upright view. You have held an open space in your life for him to occupy whenever he wants, once a week or – since his engagement – once a month, if that. Sometimes these crumbs of attention are insufficient, and if you think about it too long your hunger for him can feel like starving. But whenever he was with you, his focus was complete. Nobody knows him like you do, but nobody else knows you that well, either. He handed you the coffee, steam rising from it in delicate tendrils, cream and two sugars, perfect. Away from his family and the pressure to be what Brno expects of both of you, there were moments when it felt like the ideal relationship.
But such moments are only raindrops in an ocean of who he has to be and who you have to be if you want him at all. Not that you’ve ever discussed it; it seems like the magic was always that he asked and you said yes, over and over, without ever questioning whether it meant more than what it appeared to be. To be with him, you became a version of yourself that existed fully and only in relation to him. And now you’re pretty sure that not even that version of you will be enough. He has a wife now. There will be kids. The wedding forms a natural end to the decade you’ve spent living a double life: surely the late-night phone calls, his arrivals after midnight, his need for you, still so raw and breathtaking and absolute – surely all that stops now. He holds the door open as you go back into the hall where everyone is waiting: his father, his family, the Brno big shots. He leans close to your ear to whisper the answer to the question you didn’t dare to ask: “Nothing has changed for us,” he says. “Nothing has to change for us, ever.”
You follow him into the hall and think about it, think so intently that you stop moving. If nothing has to change, then why change anything? You have never felt this way with anyone else, and this may be the last time you feel this way, ever. But you’re tired of living in the sordid shadows of Brno. You feel as though a curtain has been pulled back to reveal a truth that has always been there. This is what you know now, and you know it with greater certainty than you’ve known anything: If you let him go, you might never meet another person who can reach you the way he can. At the same time, you know you’d rather be alone for the rest of your life than pretend you don’t feel hurt for not being enough. You’d rather starve than live on increasingly smaller servings, no matter how delicious the food. He has walked ahead of you while you stood next to the door, thunderstruck with revelation. He turns around to look at you, the eyebrow up, quizzical. Whether he wants things to change doesn’t matter; what matters is that what you had with him was always your choice, and you want to make a different choice now. You smile at him, truly and certainly happy, and turn and walk back out through the door. You are free.
Also, you have the caterer’s number in your pocket.
