Page 75 of Offside

I caption it and post it to the chat before the svícková lands.

the dumplings in this town remain undefeated

The chat does what the chat does. It has never once been closed. Novotný is typing within seconds, because Novotný is always typing. He asks if this constitutes my formal RSVP to the goulash. Date circled, attendance mandatory, his mother is counting heads. Polášek posts a photo of his twins wearing the horn like a hat, which is apparently allowed now. Horak asks if svícková is real food or captain-approved food.

“Tell him it’s both,” Tomáš says, reading upside down. “Tell him to eat something green tomorrow as penance.”

“You’re not in this chat.”

“I’m above this chat. Tell him.”

I tell him. Horak sends back a salute.

Then Kovár.

looks overcooked. send it back.

I look at the photo again. The sauce is perfect. The sauce is a national argument settled correctly. He knows that. He’s in Prague, if I had to file it, with his mother’s cooking in front of him, issuing the eggs-adjacent verdict from four hundred kilometers. Keeping the bit alive, because the bit is how he waves.

Tomáš reads it over the top of his water glass. “He’s saying hello.”

“I know what he’s saying.”

I send the thumbs up first. Procedure. The committee acknowledges the committee. Then I type the true thing, and I look at it for a second before I send it. It’s the truest thing I’ve ever put in that chat, and it’s going to land as a joke about beef. That’s exactly, precisely, the design.

it’s perfect. we’re staying for dessert.

Send.

Across the table, the man the sentence is actually about tears a piece of bread in half and hands me the bigger half. Unconscious. Housekeeping. The way he’s done at every table since Bucharest.

“What did you tell them?”

“That dinner is perfect and we’re staying for dessert.”

“Are we?”

“We are now. It’s in writing.”

The svícková comes. It’s perfect, which is now a matter of public record. We eat the way we eat, him narrating the room, me doing color. An away kitchen we’ve made a home ground. Somewhere in the second half of it the waiter comes back, and I do the thing that has become my favorite administrative act in professional sport.

“Next Thursday,” I say. “Same table. Šíma, two people.”

“Of course, pane Šímo.” He doesn’t even write it down.

We’re a standing fixture. We’re furniture. The most public secret in the Czech Republic is a table by the wall that’s always booked on Thursdays, and the secret is that it isn’t one.

“And dessert tonight,” Tomáš says. “The strudel and the cake.”

“Both?”

“We’re staying for dessert. It’s in writing. He put it in writing.” He says it to the waiter like a man citing statute. The waiter, twenty years old, no idea, nods like it’s the most reasonable sentence in the world. Which it is.

The strudel comes with two forks. The forks stopped being a code months ago. Now they’re just forks, which no one warns you is the actual prize. All of it demoted to furniture. The forks, the table, the Thursday, the whole apparatus of us, standing around in plain sight. Ordinary. Load-bearing. INFRASTRUCTURE. Tobík should make me a bracket.

Tomáš takes the first bite of the strudel, renders a verdict with his eyebrows, and slides the plate two centimeters toward me. The exact width of a treaty.

“The cake’s yours,” he says. “I’m annexing the strudel.”