The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  It was the danky deep of the Cold War, but this May was also (as garish red-and-yellow placards and banners hoisted over streets and soot-grimed buildings barked) the thirtieth anniversary of the Liberation of Prague by “our Soviet brothers.”

  Everything in Prague seemed ruined, lost, or at least damaged. Hence the high poetry quotient. But the Obecní Dům kavarna also winked an ironic wink—that wild art nouveau excess, the glints of gold in the grimy mosaics, the happy and entirely unnecessary creamy feel-good art, the invitation to laziness—it was all a rueful Czech rebuke to the brittle demagoguery of the Husák regime that had its boot on the country’s neck since the Prague Spring of 1968 had been trashed.

  There was no imagining what lay ahead: November 1989, the collapse of the regime that would bring about, among other more fundamental changes, the temporary closure of this kavarna for several years of massive reconstruction so it could reopen to cater to the new world order—ourselves in massive, hard-currency-spending tourist droves who would take the Mucha mosaics, thanks, but hold the unfiltered cigarette smoke.

  In April 1989, Václav Havel was in jail (again—this time for laying flowers at the site of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, the philosophy student who protested the Warsaw Pact invasion with his life). By December 1989, Havel was president of the country. Crazy. Not possible to imagine in 1975—or even a week before the regime collapsed in November 1989.

  None of that could be imagined in 1975 because the most curious aspect of the Cold War standoff was that both sides thought the Curtain was, truly, Iron. A metallic fact that would never rust, never flake away. The blackest magic of the Cold War in retrospect was that people accepted it as permanent—with the exception, of course, of the only alternative scenario: the apocalypse of atomic war that shivered everyone’s timbers. That scary alternative no doubt contributed to the illusion of permanence in the stalemate of those forty-some postwar years. If the only possible other thing is annihilation, the mind accepts without hesitation an eternity of stasis.

  In those Cold War days, the whole juicy art nouveau business of the Obecní Dům kavarna was held together by nothing more substantial than the grimy smoke of ages from three hundred years of the Hapsburg Empire, through the First Republic’s scant twenty years and the Nazi occupation, to now—almost thirty years of stale gloomy-Gus socialism.

  You didn’t just sit in this murky place—you were slightly levitated off the cracked leather on a billow of historical ash, the smoke of national humiliation and endurance bearing you up, eyes smarting. I bought my coffee, a pack of cigarettes, and set up shop with my notebook and my ardor. I was finally down the rabbit hole of history after a youth atop the stainless steel of American self-idealization and historical amnesia.

  I was determined to describe what was before me. I felt powerfully alone and in charge of things. Even—especially—my language belonged only to me in this place where I never heard it spoken. Czech, though the language of my grandmother who had lived with us, was not my language. My attempts to learn it had only persuaded me of the revenge possible to the small nation.

  It seemed I was the only American in Prague. Not possibly true, but it felt that way amid the busloads of Bulgarian and Ukrainian factory workers carted to a fellow worker state for their holiday and the small bands of West Germans driving over the border in their Mercedes, slouching around the hotel bars in their furs, coming for the music and cheap beer. I had never felt—and never felt again—so surely that a world lay before me and required my descriptive efforts.

  Strange that I would assume that describing in my notebook a smoky café abandoned by the rest of “the free world” would somehow be an act of historical documentation, useful to others. But that was what I was doing—describing the kavarna with a ballpoint thick with poetic ink—when he approached my table, my watchtower on this other world that, I saw in an instant, was not his world either.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t remember his name. Or rather, I never mastered it in our brief encounter (he repeated it more than once, carefully, courteously, thoughtful of my incomprehension). And then I was too embarrassed to ask again. So, not forgotten—never absorbed.

  He had detached himself from a group of students (all male) at a table not far from mine. A foreign student—I understood that immediately, as I looked up to see his chiseled Omar Sharif face bending toward me. Handsome, big soft animal eyes, a natural eagerness overlaid with winning shyness—all that in an instant. Not the shyness that requires tending and coaxing—his was the shyness of good manners, of not wanting to intrude while wanting, very much, to intrude. I felt—I was meant to feel—flattered and intrigued. Would I mind if he joined me?

  God help me, I minded. For all my backpack toting, see-the-world bravado, I was paralyzed by homegirl habits, a deep provincialism that had already morphed on my first big trip into a phony Woman Writing Alone in cafés. I thought of myself as a fly on the wall, not a girl to be picked up. Are you a lover or a fighter? they ask in the Marine Corps. I knew I was a fighter—that is, a writer. And yet . . .

  It was impossible not to smile back at him. And he was speaking English. English, my true home, my only friend. I closed the notebook and turned to face him, glad to hear my language, though inwardly fearful. I looked at the table where his friends sat—maybe he’d come over on a dare. But no, they were busy with their engineering text. He seemed to be on his own. And he seemed to like me.

  I liked him too. Right away and for no reason. Well, he was outrageously handsome, but that, in my odd little feminist book, could have worked against him. I liked him because he seemed so unreservedly to like me, and because he seemed . . . free. I liked the inner eagerness I sensed too, eagerness for nothing in particular, just life itself, the next thing. Which at the moment was me. Come to think of it, I liked him a lot.

  What did we talk about? Hydrology comes faintly forward as a memory trace. He was probably studying hydrology at Charles University. He laughed when he spoke of his studies, as if hydrology were comic, but there it was. He said he had had to learn Czech, and shrugged his shoulders as if giving room in his brain to this otherwise unusable language were just another of life’s comic turns. I liked him, I think now, because he didn’t have a depressed nerve in his beautiful body. My boyfriends had been, thus far, poetically morose. He took life as it came. He would be fun.

  We were still of an age to ask immediately about our families—mother and father, sisters (of course he had several—that ease with girls), brothers. That took some time. It seemed his family was scattered all over the place, his siblings mostly in other parts of the Soviet empire doing what he was doing—studying, improving their lot. I had only a brother, a dentist, to offer, a mother and father in Minnesota. Minnesota? He’d heard of it, he said immediately. But that was probably his good manners speaking.

  I allowed that I was—or rather, I wanted to be—a writer. Novels? he asked eagerly. Poetry, I said. Ah!—and I sensed that Ah! meant even better than novels. He would like to read one of my poems, he said. I demurred, but I liked that he asked. Later, I said.

  He smiled. He liked “later.”

  His friends had left their table without saying goodbye, without looking our way. Good. I was beginning to feel the wallflower me fade from the scene, some other self lunging forward like one of the Mucha girls on the walls around us, creamy gardenias in my hair, eyelids at half-mast. What my mother called the come-hither look. It was understood we would have dinner somewhere nearby, though nothing had been said to confirm this.

  But we didn’t rise to go. We were happy, we didn’t feel like moving. We had all the time in the world. Besides, then and now the coffeehouses of Central Europe invite timelessness, the illusion of long life and endless talk. Why move? Why do anything? The intellectual life of the early twentieth century that remains a dream state—newspapers on wooden dowels, hours frittered in conversat
ion—was strong in the air.

  I still think if we’d left the kavarna and walked down Dlouhá to some dumpy pivnice for a dumpling-and-gravy dinner, if we had not made the particular left turn in our conversation we made at that table in the kavarna—if, if, if.

  But we sat on, happy in our timelessness. I asked him (because it suddenly occurred to me I had not asked) where he was from. He had asked or rather confirmed early on that I was an American. He had pretended to know where Minnesota was. He had a brother in California. But now I asked where he was from.

  From nowhere, he said. People like me are from nowhere. He became, in an instant, a different person, not the eager, easy face I had so uncharacteristically permitted to sit at my table. A shroud of grief descended on the beautiful dark features. I’m Palestinian, he said. And waited a bit fearfully for me to respond, as if I might turn on him for this admission.

  Something decisive had been said. I got that, something grave and immense, unbridgeable. Something I could not describe in the notebook that lay closed on the table between us. I didn’t know what the word he had pronounced signified, and I sensed that not to know what “Palestinian” was indicated that I, not he, was the nobody in this conversation. I was instinctively aware that I could not let him know I had no idea what a “Palestinian” was. Something out of the Bible?

  It’s hard to believe now that I, who fancied myself “political” with my antiwar passion, my feminist this and that, my civil rights talk (I had taken the train to Chicago to hear Martin Luther King speak—wrote it up for the paper), my general Sixties Generation assumptions and “positions”—that this person, me myself, did not know what he was talking about. There was Israel and there were Arabs over there and they were fighting—or not fighting but not friends. I knew nothing, nothing. This wasn’t the World. This was the Unknown.

  He was speaking ardently now. I must understand that his people (he said “my people,” a deep affirming designation of solidarity I had never heard an American use to describe our fellow citizens) were good people, ordinary people (he wasn’t ordinary to me). We only want a home, he said. You must understand this.

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  The panic that coursed through me was the panic of cowardly ignorance. I had to get out. Get away. No dinner in a little hospoda for him and me. No poem “later.” No Omar Sharif eyes gazing into mine, his face coming nearer, nearer in the dark.

  I knew nothing, nothing about the world that he assumed any conscious being would know. My roots—ha! I had come to Prague after everyone in my lineage was dead or gone. I had no roots. I was an American. I had only dreaminess and the holy scripture of my notebook to affirm my illusions, my basket of plucked details, my descriptions. Most of all, my cool blue American passport, my traveler’s checks, my imperial security. My ignorance.

  I gathered up my gear from the campsite I’d made of the table—postcards, map, book (Kundera in English, which like a visitor from First Amendment land I had showily brought as my reading material), the notebook. I have to go, I said.

  He looked confused. Had he read me wrong? I had seemed so sympathetic. We were having such a wonderful talk. Was it that he was Palestinian? Was I—he hadn’t thought of this—was I Jewish?

  No, I muttered. Catholic. I just have to go, can’t stay, can’t go to dinner.

  If I were Jewish, I thought much later, I would have known what he was talking about.

  Please, he said, pleading in the word. He reached across the table, touched my arm. Please—he wanted me to convey to my people (my people!) how simple were the hopes and dreams of his people. Please take our story back to your people—you’re a writer.

  A smoke-grimed Prague café, filled with foreign students from the “non-aligned” countries of Africa and the Middle East. This one a Palestinian who presents himself to me with a poetic and ardent face, asking me to understand—we only want a home like everyone else. Go home and write that. You’re a writer.

  What do you do with such moments, flashes that don’t even amount to episodes, bare proto-encounters? Another tattered vignette, tossed in the unsorted shoebox. That’s what I did. I wrote the book about my travels to Prague, but he isn’t in it. The kavarna is there, heavily described, but no Palestinian.

  But here he is, sprung from the dark of his unwritten chapter. I was so grotesquely ignorant that even though I found him adorable, I could not continue our tentative flirtation. It would come out that I didn’t know what a Palestinian was. And this, I sensed, was a terrible abyss. I could not comprehend his grief. I never felt so American.

  * * *

  —

  Now, all these years later, having had plenty of time to learn what a Palestinian is, I sit across Vlasta’s table from my old friend Anna, waiting for dinner, both of us sipping Becherovka. Anna has done more good in the world than anyone I know, braving impossible situations, harrowing conditions in Africa, Bangladesh, traveling as a doctor, her passion and curiosity for other people and other cultures still evergreen in spite of a botched hip operation (she walks now with a cane), a bad heart, a body broken by care for others and carelessness for herself.

  We have had “words” about Israel and Palestine. Also about the Syrian refugees who, she says with dismay, are “overwhelming” Europe. I am now full of feeling for Palestinians. I’m a veritable expert on Palestine and Palestinians. Israel—of course Israel, I say. Of course. But what about the Palestinians, what about the occupation of their land?

  No, no, no. The Jews must have Israel. Don’t I know what they went through? As if I hadn’t heard about the Holocaust. “My” president Jimmy Carter, she says accusingly, had no business comparing the Palestinian situation to apartheid. She knows Israel, she has been there. So have I, I cry, twice! Travel, even tourism, as the tarnished badge of authority.

  Back and forth we went at it the night before in the dark, lying on our adjoining cots in Vlasta’s bedroom (Vlasta herself camped out neatly on her settee, having no worries about the Middle East, plotting the next Central European meal like a military action, the next day’s hike into wine country).

  Both of us admit in the morning, sheepishly, that we couldn’t get to sleep after our—well, fight. It wasn’t a discussion, not even an argument. A fight. She wins—or I let her win. In my experience, a Czech always wins any political argument, even if it’s about American politics. It is impossible for any Czech I’ve met to believe an American has the necessary gravitas to know anything about politics. We are naïve, we are a nation of appealing (often) or dangerous (more often) simpletons. It’s exhausting to engage in political discussion with someone who has not only lived in the backstreets of the impoverished world, but has the lived experience of her own brutalized twentieth-century history at home, her life history radiating authority from wartime babyhood to this tough and tenderhearted woman limping along gamely with her cane, always ready to show me her country. You see, you see? she says, delighted whenever I appreciate something—cherry trees bending with fruit on a country road, Rožmberk Castle in south Bohemia, folk songs in a village hospoda, everyone knowing all the words, the solidarity of national music, the wizened landscape of north Bohemia, soured by the ruinous land use policies of the socialist regime. She insists I see it all, year by year since the end of the Cold War.

  I knew nothing in 1975 in the smoky kavarna. Apparently I know a different kind of nothing now in Vlasta’s new world order panalak apartment.

  We resolve this impasse as we always do: gorgeous meal, then a long walk. Not a hike, but a saunter through Znojmo, Vlasta in the lead. Summer dusk, and we head into the old town. It’s not far away, and it’s more beautiful than I remember from earlier visits. This may be because we have the old town to ourselves, walking the cobbled streets, stopping at a baroque castle lit by a streetlamp and glowing, on to this church, another, finding glorious “prospects,” as eighteenth-century travelers
called scenic views from their coaches. Much has been restored and repainted, returned since 1989 to its Mitteleuropa jewel-like pastels, the Hapsburg mustard yellow prominent. We look out over the dark sash of the river Djye, below the green hills where yet another church is perched, named for Saint Hippolyte, whoever he was, though apparently a big enough saint to earn a cathedral on the distant eminence. Also across the river a smaller, more “Eastern” (Slavic) chapel, its onion dome belonging to some lesser saint. Still farther off, the raised line of a toy railroad arced from our side of the river to the other. The train to Austria. For most of Vlasta’s life, and Anna’s, the unbridgeable bridge dividing East from West. Now just another branch line of the EU, no passport required, no guard tower. Come and go as you wish—except for me, the American. I must show my passport.

  On our return to the apartment, moving from one lozenge of dim light to the next, streetlamp by streetlamp, we pass the gymnasium where Gregor Mendel taught for one unhappy year in 1849.

  Mendel had entered the Augustinian novitiate at St. Thomas monastery in Brno in 1843, a decision he made to free himself, he wrote, “from the bitter struggle for existence.” He had been studying science and philosophy at the university in Olomouc, and it is not clear if this bitter struggle was the plight of a poor boy trying to find his way in academic life without money or support, or something more coiled within. It may have been a question of psychological struggle, the oppression of some private fear or worry.

  He was first assigned to give spiritual aid to people in a Brno hospital, but the sight of so much suffering pulverized his own spirit, and he took to his bed for a month. He was famously “timid.” Or perhaps he had an excess of empathy, a gentleness without any protective personal shield to allow him to act on this fellow-feeling in the face of human misery. He asked to be given another assignment. He suggested teaching. For this he needed more university training. That meant, eventually, he had to mount the barricades of oral exams.