I don’t remember my dreams. I can’t. They’re simply not there, not to be found when the morning sun and neighbor’s dog’s incessant yapping—a dog intentionally bred, for all I know, to be just the right size for practical folks in small walkups—first make their way, hand in hand, through the bedroom window. The dog’s name is Peggy, or some Czech name that sounds remarkably similar. C. and I are living in Brno, in the basement of a kind and patient woman’s house (widow or divorcée we don’t know, haven’t yet figured out how to ask), who says and re-says her simple sentences, pantomiming all the while, until we understand, or at least pretend that we do. Once she pantomimed a chicken laying an egg, but we didn’t understand, worrying that she graphically meant to indicate some toilet function or another. Only hours after she had taken the eggs from our refrigerator did we finally connect the two.

We have our own entrance in the back, near the door of the woman’s other boarder, Peggy’s owner, a night nurse in her 30s. When we came here to look at the apartment, and again when we returned to sign the lease, we never once heard Peggy, or the huge German shepherd next door. It seemed we had found an ideal place, a place to practice our Czech with someone who only knows Czech, a place away from the street noise that had plagued our sleep at the sublet where we stayed when we first arrived, which had been a fifth floor efficiency without kitchen appliances, only one room really, a block away from a very audible beer garden and much closer to loud traffic and young men with old mufflers. It belonged to a friend of the guy we’ve still not met, the guy whose recommendation got us our jobs teaching English at the university. Our new place, our home, is out of town, a decent bus ride away from anything, but with views of sky and windowsills for growing herbs, on the outskirts of an honest-to-god red-terra-cotta-roofed Czech village called Holásky. We don’t live in Prague, where all the Americans live, where all the tourists go, or even in Brno, the second city. We live in a village, and when I walk through the streets of that village I am the first foreigner they have ever seen. I am exotic, famous and foreign, straight from the pages of National Geographic. But I try to blend in, try not to advertise myself as foreign. A rock star should not wear leather pants in public. Goldie Hawn should wear sweat pants and a baseball hat when she goes jogging on the beach. I get off on the fact that my blond hair and blue eyes often cause people to walk up to me and start chatting away in Czech. I am forced to respond, of course, by saying, “Omlouvam se. Nemluvim cesky,” which means, “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Czech.” I have said it so often, and it contains none of the strange Czech sounds that I can’t say, and it is short enough that I have the intonation and stress of all the syllables down, that I dream that it might almost sound accentless to the people asking. They know better.

Our landlady has a nice backyard, with easily half an acre of functional garden. There is just a small shaded sitting area near our window, which is at ground level. Peggy, finally eye-to-eye with someone, sometimes barks in our window at us, as though we’re intruding. I fantasize about the various ways I could kill her to silence that constant squealing yelp of a sound that comes out of her mouth. C. says it’s horrible to think such things, but secretly I think she agrees that smashing the dog’s head between cinder blocks would make our mornings much more pleasant. We open our door in the morning at least once a week to find a basket of fresh fruits or vegetables waiting there: plums, pears, tomatoes, parsley, pounds and pounds of potatoes. We are waiting for the kohlrabi (quite popular here despite its ugliness) and the peppers (not nearly as hot as those we are used to from New Mexico, but still beautiful to look at) to get harvested, hoping she will make gifts of these to us as well.