“Is ten koruna too much?”

“Not at all,” I said. I found a pair of five-koruna notes in my wallet and gave them to him.

“It seems perfectly fair.”

“Well,” he said, and took the money. His wife turned from the stove and smiled tentatively at me. She brought over a plateful of eggs and potato dumplings, all scrambled together.

“There is coffee,” she said. “And I will bring you some rolls, and I will heat some sausages. Have you come from very far away?”

“From Ruzomberok.”

“I do not know it. Is it far?”

“It is to the east, in Slovakia.”

“Ahh, that is very far. And you have come all this way?”

“He is hungry, Frida,” the man said. “Let him eat.”

I was even hungrier than I had realized. The eggs were fresh and had been cooked to just the right turn, neither too wet nor too dry. They were seasoned nicely with paprika. The bits of potato dumplings were light and fluffy. The sausage, thick red-brown blood sausage, was delicious. The coffee was hot and strong, almost as strong as the Greeks and Yugoslavs drink it, but tempered with a healthy dose of sugar and fresh cream.

“You have hurt yourself,” the man said. “Your leg and your hands. You will want to dress your wounds, perhaps to bathe. We have a tub with hot water; we got it just last year.”

“The year before,” Frida said.

“Whenever it was. And afterward my wife can patch your trousers. It is a bad rip there. You must have fallen down.”

“Yes.”

In the bathroom I cut all the labels out of my clothes, burned them, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. I took a hot bath and used some tape and gauze from the medicine chest to bandage my knee. The other bruises were just surface nicks and didn’t need more than a good cleaning. The palms of my hands were already healing nicely.

I dried off, dressed, and rejoined my host. “These pants are too badly worn to repair,” I said. “Perhaps you have an extra pair you could sell me?”