We Listen for Milena
I started to believe in ghosts when I moved to San Francisco. My apartment was right on the edge of Chinatown and cheap. As a gift, my parents bought me a whole living room set of new furniture. It was really nice—a couch, a recliner, a coffee table, even a tall lamp with three different brightness settings. My brother, Charlie, drove it all down to the city in his pickup and helped me move in.
As we hauled the furniture up the fire escape, we passed an old couple arguing animatedly next to the aluminum trash cans. They were bickering in some foreign language so we couldn’t understand a word. I thought they were speaking Russian, but Charlie said, “Nah. If they’re Russian, where are their big furry hats?”
They argued over something in one of the trash cans. The man kept reaching into the bin, and the woman would slap his arm or hit his back with a rolled-up magazine and sternly point her finger at him.
“It’s his porn,” Charlie said as we set down the coffee table in my new apartment.
“What?”
“After twenty-five years of marriage,” Charlie raised the pitch of his voice to mimic the woman, “You still keep that disgusting stuff around! And in our bedroom, no less!”
“But baby,” I said in a botched accent, “I don’t think of those girls the way I think of you.”
“Clearly!”
We laughed, and when we went back outside the couple was gone.
“Let’s take a look,” Charlie said.
“What?”
“Dude, old guys always have the weirdest porn. It’s like part of the aging process. Once you’ve seen so many naked girls, only really freaky stuff gets you off.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that. C’mon let’s look.” Charlie lifted the lid off the trash can, “Looks like he won.” There was no porn.
“What’s this?” I pulled out an old radio that was perched on top of a couple knotted-up plastic bags. Its black surface was worn smooth from use, and it was about the size of a Tolstoy novel.
“What do you want that for?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a TV yet, maybe I can listen to the news or something.” I turned it over in my hands and clicked the worn-out dial. In truth, I had never listened to the news on the radio in my life, but there was something familiar about the old radio, something charming.
Charlie and I used to visit our Grandpa in his old house where our dad grew up, north of the wine country. Grandpa used to sit in his old white wicker chair on the porch, looking out over the garden in the front yard. Whenever we came for a visit, he would start waving from that chair as soon as he could see us down the road, and he wouldn’t stop until he caught us up in a hug. He held us tight and close and said, “My boys, my boys, God is smiling on us today.” I remember the first time we visited that he couldn’t get up out of that chair, and the last time we visited when he wasn’t in the chair at all. Even now, I can picture that chair vividly and I can’t picture my Grandpa sitting anywhere else.
After we cleaned out his house on that last visit, I went out to the porch and sat in the chair for the first time and waved at a car only I could see, leaving a trail of dust as it drove out of sight.
I couldn’t explain it to Charlie, but holding that radio felt like sitting in Grandpa’s old chair. I could feel that the radio belonged to somebody else, in the deepest sense of the word--where being cannot escape longing. Like the way a tree belongs to the forest, or a painting belongs to the artist, or a shoe belongs to the runner. I could feel this in the radio, a current of connectivity. It felt warm in my hands.
“I’m going to keep it,” I said. And I did.
And I was right; there was something strange about the radio. But for all the peculiar things that happened those first weeks in my new apartment just on the edge of Chinatown, I didn’t think of the radio.
The first peculiar thing was the coffee mug on Tuesday morning. The mug itself was quite ordinary, maroon with a chip on the rim. It sat empty and still on my kitchen counter, its behavior not extraordinary for a mug, except that it was in my kitchen at all. I had never seen this coffee mug before.
I paced back and forth in front of it, rattling my memory for any hint that I had gone out for a midnight java or robbed a Pottery Barn in my sleep, but nothing. The mug just sat, indifferent to the anxiety it caused me, and I decided a hot shower would clear my mind. When I returned to the kitchen, my hair dripping, the mug had vanished. I searched every cupboard, but there was no sight of it. I shrugged it off to sleepiness or my weird imagination, but passed on my usual morning Cappuccino.
The second peculiar thing was the bookcase. I kept all my books on a tall wooden bookcase in the living room, meticulously alphabetized. I liked my living room to feel like a library. On Wednesday, I brought home a new novel and when I went to my bookcase to put the new book in its alphabetical place, I realized the books had all been rearranged to no semblance of order. Instead of feeling annoyed at seeing Vonnegut shelved carelessly next to Faulkner, I felt a shiver run down my spine.
On Friday morning, there was pee in the toilet though I swore I hadn’t gone since brushing my teeth the night before. And I always flushed.
On Monday, Charlie called.
“I think my new place is haunted.”
He laughed.
“I’m not kidding, my books were all out of order, there was a disappearing coffee cup, somebody peed in my toilet. It’s really spooky.”
“You’re just stressed from your new job, man,” Charlie said. “Or you need to stop bringing home hookers who don’t know how to clean up after themselves.”
To fill up the quiet hours that evening, I turned on the old radio to actually listen to the news while I cooked dinner. I happily let my mind wander through the world outside. With the news coming through the crackly speaker, I imagined I was back in a time before television or computers or cell phones, when people relied on the radio for news, when people trusted everything they heard and lived in small towns and knew their neighbors like family. I had yet to meet any of my neighbors and my family was a hundred miles away. I suddenly felt very alone. I turned off the radio. That was worse.
The radio news became my nightly routine. It was comforting, but it didn’t seem to ward off the ghost. A muddy footprint was left by the door. An empty Chinese food box from a restaurant I had not been to was in my refrigerator. I cleaned up, threw away, and determined I would win against the ghost. It was harmless haunting anyway. But what was I thinking? All this and I had never actually seen the ghost. I didn’t even believe in ghosts. I left the radio on loud until I fell asleep.
At 2:15 AM on the Tuesday morning of the third week in my new apartment, just as I had drifted off, there was a loud knock at the front door. I jumped out of bed, scurried to the living room, shut off the radio, and tip-toed to the door.
“Who is it?” I called. Through the peephole I could only see the top of a grey hat, the stranger was looking down.
“Your friend,” a man’s voice called. His accent flicked the “d” of friend into a “t.”
“What do you want?”
“You half mine,” he said.
“What?”
“I half come here before,” he sounded impatient but his words were slow, “I know you half mine. I half come for it.”
Was this the ghost?
“I half lost my key. May I come in?”
I opened the door a crack, and I recognized the small build at once. The man removed his grey hat to reveal a thin face with pointy cheekbones that seemed dangerously close to poking through his thin, pale skin. His cheeks were peppered with stubble, and the only thing well-groomed about him was his mustache.
“You half my radio.”
When I let him in, he took off his boots and held out his hand which I shook timidly—a handshake that would have embarrassed me at a job interview.
Without a word, he walked straight to the bookcase in the living room where the radio sat. He picked it up with both hands, as gently as one might lift a sleeping baby from crib, and said to me, “Rah-dee-o.”
I said, “Yes.” And he nodded to affirm this was his radio, not mine. He clicked on the volume, just audible even in the stillness of the dark living room. A woman’s voice came across the airwaves with the story of local jazz singer. It was the story I had been listening to while I fell asleep.
“Bleh!” he said, shooting me an accusatory look. He delicately turned the tuning knob, painstakingly passing over loud breaths of static and several music stations, until he settled on the murmur of voices—unintelligible to me.
“Her,” the old man said, pointing at the spot on the tuning dial. “Her is Praha.”
I moved closer to him, and leaned an ear to the low voices. In a moment, it was clear they were not speaking English. There were two voices, a man and a woman. The language sounded choppy, like the words did not fit easily together. They seemed to speak deliberately and purposefully. It was the language of people who could afford to waste nothing, not even words. The steady rhythm of the voices reminded me of a cold wind beating tirelessly against a window.
We listened for several minutes like this, and then a horn sounded over the voices and they laughed. The old man chuckled too and switched off the radio.
“This is Praha,” he said again, “This is the most beautiful voice of the world. This is Milena.”
“Who is ‘Praw’?” I asked.
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Praha is not who. Praha is where I am born from. Milena is who. Milena is who for I listen.” He tapped the radio with a finger.
“Come,” he said, “make tea.” He set the radio back on the bookcase, and pulled down two books—a large Steinbeck collection I had never opened and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. To my astonishment, behind these was the chipped maroon coffee mug.
He smiled at the surprised look on my face. “You never know I am here.” He plucked the mug off my shelf, replaced the books and said sternly, “Kafka is born from Praha.”
“I know.”
He nodded, then marched to the bathroom and removed the porcelain lid from the toilet cistern.
“What are you doing?”
“I never wake you,” he said. “I never run water. The water is her.” He dunked the mug in the tank and scooped it full of cold water.
“I think I’ll use the sink.”
They say there’s one of everything in San Francisco. As I discovered from my neighbor that night, one of those things is a radio station which broadcasts in a dozen a different languages in two-hour blocks all day and night. Every two hours the programming language changes, and from 2:00 to 4:00 each morning they broadcast in Czech with much news from Praha, or Prague. Of course, in his faulty English, my neighbor could not describe this to me precisely. Instead, he told me about Milena.
“My wife,” he said over the top of his steaming maroon mug, “is not my love.”
“No?”
“No. Milena is my love. I half left her in Praha, many years ago.” He stuck his finger into his tea and worked out a speck of something.
“Milena half the most beautiful voice of anybody you hear. When I was much young, I sat and listen to Milena tell stories. Stories and stories and stories of everything she know. She made me laugh always. But she made me cry also. Stories, so many stories.” He spoke gently as if he were threading his words together with fine lace.
“Milena loved the radio. She dream of telling stories on the radio always. And finally, after so many days she found a job at the radio in Praha. This made me very sad, because the same day my brother buy a ticket for me for America. It is the greatest gift he could give me.
“So, I half to leave Milena, because you see in those days nobody can say no to a ticket for America. My brother tell me, ‘In America you can half anything you like’ and I say, ‘Not Milena.’
“But then, not so long ago, I come here to beautiful California, and I half brought my radio which was the first thing I bought with American dollars, and I half found the program of Praha. I am so surprised when I half found this, I wake up my wife and we dance for the sound of the words. She is not Milena, but she is also born from Praha and she love the sound the same as me.
“But then, she found out that I listen to the radio in the night not just for love of Praha, but for love of Milena.”
He took a long sip of his tea and swished it around in his mouth before swallowing.
“So, I watched you take my radio from the trash and I watched where you go, and I half a key to this place so I come here to listen for Milena while you sleep. But you never know I am here. This is my home at night.”
We are both far from home, I thought. Then I said aloud, “How did you get a key to my apartment?”
“My friend,” he replied, “I tell you that story tomorrow after we listen for Milena.”
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