The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

* * *

  —

  Get me the World!

  August 20, 1968, just past 11 p.m. Eddie Hadro, city editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, is jabbing his pencil in my direction. He does this every night about this time, the pencil a dart he’s aiming from his outstretched arm.

  The newsroom is straight out of Front Page, bottles of rye stowed in reporters’ desk drawers, an old-timer with a cigarette drooping stereotypically from his lip, writing up the police blotter. Ash falls on his faux silk tie as he rolls a sheet of grainy copy paper over the platen of his Royal. Head cocked, snugging the telephone receiver to his shoulder, he’s growling, “Yeah, yeah, I got that, but spell the last name—some Polack.”

  The rat-a-tat-tat of dusty typewriters, furious swearing when a key sticks, though only the sportswriters in the back by the morgue say fuck, pronounced in lowered, sacramental tones. They mutter an apology if a girl (not yet a woman) is passing by. But everybody, girls and men alike, curses with relish in the newsroom as nobody, then, swore in public. Damn, shit, hell no, bet your ass. In the night newsroom, the practitioners of journalism sliced into the guts of language as sure as surgeons opening up the hidden parts of the body. We talked dirty; it was a professional thing.

  My first job out of college. A job I almost didn’t get because working the night desk meant that at the end of the shift, like everybody else sitting around the horseshoe desk writing headlines and editing copy, I would have to walk in the dark to my car (loaned by my mother who worked days as a file clerk at a college library). A girl walking alone, downtown, past 2 a.m.? Reason to be passed over. I was given the job finally because several of the men on the desk, middle-aged with children close to my age, had said sure, they’d walk the girl to her car. Will someone be waiting up for you at home? the managing editor asked me. How it was in 1968 in St. Paul.

  And how I came to be charged with The News of the World, a boxed quarter page, above the fold inside page one, over the ads. This tidy box, edited from UPI or AP wire dispatches, usually took care of most matters beyond St. Paul. Eddie Hadro signaled with his pencil around 11 p.m., before the copy boy came back with the damp sandwiches from DiGidio’s, and off I trotted, a well-trained retriever. Like a small-time bookie, Eddie Hadro actually wore a green visor and black sleeve protectors he peeled off at the end of the night. “Actually” because it all seems unreal now, the way the past does when it comes back in the sureness of its abandoned details.

  I walked over to the glassed-in room behind us that housed the UPI and AP teletypes. Were these two gray metal machines in this sequestered space, behind a glass door, because they made a lot of noise? Or because they were, in spite of their bulk, terribly delicate mechanisms that required a sterile ICU? It wasn’t clear. But entering the room was a step away from St. Paul, away from the littleness of our concerns, a tiptoe into the vast workings of the World.

  Inside this isolation booth there was no swearing, no furious X-ing out of copy, no yellow copy paper reeled onto pitted platens, no impatient slam of carriage returns. Just the relentless stamping out of disembodied sentences in a rote rhythm unlike real writing. This auto-dictation emanated from a disembodied correspondent way out there somewhere—the World itself sending its implacable communiqués from its Olympian remove.

  Sometimes the world did overtake St. Paul and claimed the front page. A lot had happened in the six months I’d been working at the paper. LBJ had announced he would not run again for president—we had to remake the front page that night. Martin Luther King was murdered, but that happened before Eddie Hadro had made up page one, so doing the banner headline posed no problem. Then, in June, another hard knock from the world—Bobby Kennedy in California was shot. Given the two-hour time difference, past deadline (so to speak)—another front page to be reset. A deep rivalist pleasure: the Minneapolis Tribune didn’t get the story in time.

  But this late August night was quiet, the world apparently on vacation. Europe is asleep, I sometimes thought with a kind of awe as I opened the glass door to the machines. Except for Vietnam where we had no business, to me “the World” was Europe. I spent my days off “clean for Gene,” campaigning for Eugene McCarthy. Of course I was against the war, and hated Hubert Humphrey, to my parents’ dismay—how could I be against Hubert? He’d beat the Dixiecrats.

  I closed the door behind me and approached the UPI machine, positioned against the back wall, silent and broody in its glass room. How long did I stand there? It could not have been long, but a spacious caesura of time as I waited before the bulky machine, looking through the cloudy glass over the roll of gray paper, poised for it to say something.

  And then it spoke, a Ouija board spelling out its occult message. To me, alone, locked in our séance:

  PRAGUE, Aug. 21, 1968 (UPI)—Invasion forces from Russia and its satellites occupied Czechoslovakia with troops, tanks and jet planes against sporadic resistance today and snuffed out the country’s experiment in liberal reform.—Street fighting in Prague left some dead and wounded as thousands of Czechoslovaks surged into the streets and shouted defiance of the invaders.

  Cannon, machine-gun and small arms fire crashed and rattled through the night in the capital and in Bratislava, where two weeks ago the Russians agreed to let Czechoslovakia have its liberal regime.

  Except I wasn’t reading the dispatch in these complete sentences and paragraphs. The machine had a peculiar tic, clearing its mechanical throat before speaking. It whirred and clicked in place for a moment, as if deliberating how to say what it had to say. Then the letters began to jerk in staccato onto the soft gray paper, pausing now and again, and jolting forward again. Standing there, I had the sensation not of reading a written report, but of watching it being composed before my widening eyes from a great, impenetrable distance.

  The first word—the dateline Prague—startled me even before the rest came tapping out. Prague, where my family had come from, my grandmother, the Czech peasant, whose letters in English I began ghostwriting in grade school as soon as I commanded cursive. My first freelance job.

  Prague, I understood, was not part of the World. It was out of the running as a location. We called it, as my grandmother did, the old country, a former place. Anyway, it was unreachable. Prague was behind the Iron Curtain, a metaphor so profound it was not a figure of speech, but a feature of landscape more real than the forests and mountains that divided Bohemia from West Germany, Moravia from Austria.

  News of Dubček and the Prague Spring had penetrated this iron impasse, and it seemed there was going to be something called “socialism with a human face.” But on this August night, standing alone as the invasion of Czechoslovakia jittered onto the gray paper, what mattered was that I knew something of the world—the World—that no one else in St. Paul, not even Eddie Hadro, knew.

  I tore the sheet from the machine, walked out of the glass room to the city desk, past the slot man in charge of the copy desk. I held out the UPI dispatch to Eddie Hadro. As he reached for it I said, “We’re going to have to remake page one.” This in a voice of authority I had never before possessed in the newsroom or anywhere else for that matter.

  I had Eddie Hadro’s full attention, another first. “The Russians have invaded Prague,” I said neutrally, a woman privy to the secret movement of troops and the intentions of empire, standing tall before this local working stiff in his green visor, as I offloaded intel from my position behind enemy lines. In my hand I held the World.

  * * *

  —

  Was that the moment that decided I must go there—behind the Iron Curtain? It wasn’t really a decision, more a response to a call. Listen to your inner voice, children. It will guide you. That stern invitation to follow the directives of the inner self is the deepest, most enduring aspect of a Catholic childhood. The sovereignty of it, the command given over to the still unformed child. The power of it. It’s a more decisive legacy than the much invoked “
Catholic guilt” I’m often told I suffer from as from a congenital illness, a judgment offered with amused certainty by almost complete strangers.

  It took some years after that August night to get there, to follow the inner voice—graduate school (poetry instead of journalism, another inner voice directive), then back working in journalism again. But in 1975, I quit a good editing job (everyone said) at the local public radio station. With a marine blue backpack meant for tenting in the Boundary Waters humped on my back and the cheapest transatlantic ticket I could find—Winnipeg to London, and then by “boat train,” as the old novels put it, to the Continent—I finally reached Cheb, the Czech border town featuring a rickety Cold War guard tower right out of an early Le Carré novel.

  I was behind the Iron Curtain. I had never been “anywhere” before (Canada didn’t count). I thought—I told people—I was going to Czechoslovakia to “find my roots.” I was fascinated—or dogged—by what I thought of as “the lingering life of immigration,” the idea that just because my family had left Europe, they weren’t entirely in or of America. Maybe I wasn’t either—this in spite of the fact that I didn’t speak Czech, and American English was not only my native language, but my métier. I considered myself a writer. I was pretty much alone in this belief, but I didn’t care. I didn’t trust anyone over thirty—I trusted my inner voice. I was making my way. Hot damn, as the guys on the night desk would say.

  Some burr of “the old world” had stuck to me as I walked through my family life. The immigrants themselves were dying off—grandmothers, grandfathers of the Great Immigration spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—taking with them their languages and foreign, fading memories, leaving behind a few recipes and stray words (at home we called beer pivo, and potatoes were brambory).

  Alex Haley’s Roots came out in 1976—I remember being startled by the title, the very word I used (I thought privately) to describe my own impulse to “go back” to Prague the year before, in 1975. Seeking your roots was in the air of the mid-seventies—to locate whatever there was still there, not only for the descendants of slaves, but those of serfs, peasants, whatever we would have been in our various versions of whichever old country our genetic code hailed from. In my case, the serving class.

  How strange, then, that I never searched out my grandmother’s village, never sought my grandfather’s “people.” I’d absorbed, without realizing it, the fact that roots are not meant to be found. They’re buried. Anyway, my roots were deep enough in St. Paul—where else? It was the Great World I was lugging my blue backpack to find, not some long-lost relative.

  But once past Cheb, on the dismal train to the smudged gold of Prague, I had stepped through the looking glass—not into “the Great World,” as I had longed for it on the night desk of the Pioneer Press. This was the Other World. The other side. Our opposite, our opposition.

  It was what I had left my editing job to see. Not, after all, “the old country,” but the flip side of the current coin of the age. This was no root, only the bleak flower bred of blighted peacetime. The American postwar affluence that had benefited even the children of the working class (me) showed its other side now in depresso Prague, where people lined up on a street corner by a makeshift vegetable stand, hoping to score its only product—arthritic knobs of kohlrabi. Passing by in the rattling tram, glimpsing a woman at the end of the queue, wan with care, gazing wistfully at misshapen carrots on an outdoor market table—I was shocked, strangely ashamed of the wealth I hadn’t realized I came from. Was I one of the rich after all? Repellent thought.

  * * *

  —

  I first arrived in Prague the day the Americans gave up the ghost in Vietnam—April 30, 1975. The pictures went swiftly around the world: helicopters whirling up and away from the roof of the white French colonial American embassy in Saigon, desperate evacuees hanging from the struts like aerialists, leaving the city that, within twenty-four hours of the thwack-thwack of the helicopters’ lifting off the embassy’s flat roof, became and remains Ho Chi Minh City.

  Those photographs penetrated everywhere, even behind the Iron Curtain as I solemnly called my location, where I sat in a tatty art nouveau kavarna, ordering burnt coffee and pretending to smoke a cigarette.

  At the time “no one,” as people said, went to Prague or to the shrouded capitals of Eastern Europe (people routinely said “Eastern Europe” though Prague is, was, and always will be farther west than Vienna). A visa was required, and visas, it was understood, were hard to come by for someone traveling alone, without tour guide or group, without affiliation of some kind. I had written on the visa application line for occupation “School Teacher,” which I wasn’t, instead of “Writer,” which I alone considered myself to be. In fact, having quit my radio job, I was unemployed. The visa came through.

  Maybe those Saigon pictures were published speedily in Prague because the Communist regime was glad to report the news: Americans fleeing in disarray, Americans losing. The day I’m returning to must have been early May, a few days after the American defeat—which even now we don’t call defeat. We pulled out—that’s the noncommittal term we use to describe it still. I spent much of my several weeks in Prague that first trip sitting in that café or in others equally shabby and satisfying. The lilacs were in flower on Petr̆ín Hill. When I walked on Kampa island by the Vltava, the chestnut blossoms dropped all around me like bits of bloodstained tissue. May flowers.

  I had never seen a chestnut before, I had never seen a European capital, I didn’t speak the language of the place, and I knew no one. I bore my big blue backpack like a penitential burden, no credit card, a small hoard of traveler’s checks I tended with fetishistic care to pay for dark stews I ate in crummy restaurants frequented by Gypsies (not yet “Romany”) or in smoky cafés where I made a meal of heavily sugared coffee. I was alone in that absolute way of untried youth and real travel that causes details—spring blossoms, a faded café—to churn with significance. I felt poetic every single second.

  This, roughly, was the situation, inner and outer, as I sat in the Obecní Dům kavarna—Municipal House coffeehouse—a little less than seven years after the Warsaw Pact troops had rumbled across the Czech border into the streets of Prague and into my hand in the UPI room at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

  It’s possible I wasn’t aware until somewhat later that my country was no longer at war, the very war I had protested so hotly and proudly the length of my twenties. My college boyfriend had been a draft resister (draft dodger—my dental student brother), and gone to prison for almost a year, where I had visited him every permitted three weeks, sitting at a table set low so you couldn’t reach across it. No kissing! No touching!

  And of course I was not aware that this 1975 day in Saigon, half a world away from my perch at an art nouveau outpost behind the Iron Curtain, would be marked as I am marking it now, over forty years later, as the first day in the decline of what until then had seemed the inevitable and eternal ascension of my imperial but nonetheless vastly appealing country and its hot-dog culture. You can’t remember everything, and I don’t remember that. This is how memory works: not as transcription but as an attempt—as an essay is an attempt (and this is an essay)—to locate meaning between the irretrievable then and the equally unfathomable now.

  I do remember—and knew I would remember—the flimsy red-flecked chestnut blossoms and the eloquent café smoke that conveyed, I was sure, much lyric intel for me to decode. Pull out the notebook and describe. Which I did, wherever that notebook is now, wherever that fervent description lies, the aging non-acid-free pages inexorably deconstructing my breathless prose.

  I had purchased the notebook from a surly clerk in a poorly lit Prague papírnictví, a state shop that offered notebooks and toilet paper side by side according to the flat-footed marketing model of the socialist retail sales mind. Paper is paper—for writing poems, for wiping bottoms. I believe I noted that detail. I
was beginning to trust the intelligence of details. It was the beginning of becoming a writer.

  I sat at a banquette in the Obecní Dům kavarna, the seat made of leather the color of a roan stallion, brittle, cracked here and there, just as I expected it to be and approved: old Mitteleuropa. Behind me the banquette rose to a wooden railing. Above it a beveled mirror. The whole wall of the great room alternated these panels of dim mirror with mosaic panels composed of tiny tiles, romantic scenes of peasant life by Alphonse Mucha—winsome girls with opulent bosoms fastening up sheaves of wheat, a young man in a cocked hat sporting a feather flourish, a rook fastened to his gloved arm.

  They were figures from the first decade of the twentieth century, public art in the art nouveau style that some decades later would be reconfigured elsewhere in the city in harsh rectilinear lines representing valiant workers of the machine age, a stolid socialist fantasy set in opposition to the luscious curves of this lazier art nouveau iconography. The glazed glow of the tiles overflowed with bouquets of intricate flowers. Ornament and decoration cascaded, pastel and jewel tones predominated—all viewed through the blue-gray of the place’s primer coat of smoke that delved still deeper into Central European history.

  Waiters in formal attire, dour-faced and balletic, threaded their way through the crowded room, each oval tray outfitted with cup and saucer, and a mingy paper napkin reminiscent of the toilet paper ranked on the stationery store shelves by the notebooks.

  Most of the clientele were students, interspersed with tables of pensioners dressed in the sagging good lines of their once fashionably tailored First Republic haberdashery. Hats abounded on the elderly heads, gracious manners and low murmurs floated around the tables of these former citizens of the Masaryk republic who had lived through the various betrayals of their century. The students, many African or Arab from socialist or “non-aligned” states, spoke Czech in staccato accents, taking their free educations in the only Europe they had a chance for, laughing, bending over engineering problems in their big textbooks, moving from table to table as if in a dorm lounge.