“True. But you can’t trust the American use of ass, because badass means excellent.”
“Can an ass be good?” asked Vlasta.
“Well, it can, but it’s unusual. This is some good-ass beer, I suppose.”
“I don’t typically want my beer to have an ass,” said Ivan.
“But Milan is a badass, not a good ass, on the tennis court,” I said. Milan was obsessive, often playing or practicing on his lunch hour. Often he doodled during lessons, and at a glance I thought he was doing some kind of freestyle geometry. When I finally asked what he was drawing it turned out to be endless exercises in Euclidean tennis, calculating the range of possible returns from a given position on the court, juxtaposing angles and contrasting parabolas to gauge the likelihood of scoring.
“Thank you,” said Milan.
“Moreover, a smart-ass is a bad thing,” I said.
“I’m very confused,” said Milan. “I want to ask if there are other bad asses, but you just told us bad asses are good.”
“A wise-ass is also bad,” I said.
“How can that be?”
“It thinks itself superior,” I said.
“It’s very like communism,” said Ivan. “The workers are good. The professions are bad. Things mean the reverse of what they mean.”
“Truth is in dogs,” said Vlasta.
“The new regime is the same as the old,” said Milan.
“Hard to disagree about dogs,” I said.
“I do not understand,” said Vlasta, “how a bad ass can be good.”
“The corruption of the system runs that deep,” said Ivan.
“If you see an ass that is actually bad you have no way to describe it,” said Milan.
“You can say that it’s a terrible ass,” I said, “but that wouldn’t be very polite.”
“The manners of the bourgeoisie have perverted the very language,” said Ivan.
“Can I use it to describe things that are just okay?” said Vlasta.
“Not really,” I said.
“So how good or bad must a thing be to have an ass?” she asked.
“Think of it as comparatives and superlatives. Big, bigger, biggest, big-ass, biggest-ass.”
“Verbal hyperinflation,” said Milan.
“You won’t need this for insurance, either,” I said. “But for understanding American movies it might help.”
With my black ballpoint pen on the same sheet of paper I wrote:
FUCKING BIG-ASS SPIDER
FUCKING SLOW-ASS TRAIN
FUCKING GREEDY-ASS FUCKING POLITICIAN
“It’s used indiscriminately for emphasis, more so coastally than where I am from,” I said.
“What part of speech is this, technically?” said Milan.
“I’m not sure. Meaningless modifier. Historically I can only speculate. It’s common where I’m from to drop the final g.”
“I fuck like my bicycle,” said Ivan.
Fearing an outbreak of ill-considered usage, I ran some drills. They spoke every word with equal emphasis, which was maddening to listen to. They became increasingly vexed and perplexed. Milan wanted to know if the word was a gerund. I had to encourage them all not to run around saying I like the fucking. Vlasta lost it.
“We want to know which rules we can break,” she said. “In Czech, it’s easy. None.”
“You people,” said Ivan. “You make rules for the express purpose of breaking them. Speed limit fifty-five? Absurd. Drinking age twenty-one? Ridiculous. Now you are telling us we can use a word to mean anything except what it means.”
Their sincere interest was heartbreaking, and I felt that I was doing a terrible job of teaching them the wrong things. I heard my voice cracking, and Vlasta put an arm on my sleeve and asked what was wrong. I said that clearly that famous fucking iron curtain was made of muslin.
Ivan earned an A+.
“You’re kind of a sensitive plant, Elliott,” he said. “There was also a famous fucking wall.”
GOULASH
I walked home from the Golden Lion feeling frustrated and jaded, in particular because I knew that all my friends in America were shoving numbers around on screens in office cubicles, and I should be content drinking beer for pay in excellent company. Yet I also felt that I had gone from a standard American student lifestyle to something even looser, less purposeful, and less meaningful. The next step was sea sponge. Other expats I knew all styled themselves writers, but their chief ambition was manifestly matching Hemingway’s alcohol consumption. Aside from downing absinthe in the literární kavárna, I didn’t know where to go, what to do, or who to hang out with. I was homesick. I had imagined myself as a sort of fearless Jesuit bringing compassion and enlightenment to the downtrodden; reality consisted of hangovers and conjugation exercises. An old roommate, Marty, was doing missionary work for real, teaching kids and living on the South Side of Chicago, where he had learned to distinguish firearms by the sounds they made, like birdsong.
I passed my shoes, still in the gallery window mingling with Marx and Nietzsche. After ten minutes’ further walking, I saw plumes of cigarette smoke unfurling from the open metal shutter near the garbage cans where I had seen the first shattered statue. The smoker of the cigarette may have identified me before I identified him. He did not seem at all surprised to see me.
“Good evening, Mr. Black.”
“You’re not in jail,” I said. I was delighted to see him for some reason, possibly that he was the only person in Prague I knew who was not my student.
“In our country only good men go to jail,” he said.
“Do you have a real name?”
“I have several. I’m sure you do, too.”
“Do you have a job?”
He shrugged.
“Bricolage, mostly,” he said. “I am a bricoleur. A bricologiste. A brick.”
“Well, Brick, my first name is Elliott.”
“I see. Have you had dinner?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you will join me after I have cleaned up.” He flicked his filter into the street and turned into the small studio. I couldn’t see anything he was working on, just an enormous assortment of bags and buckets, some flimsy tables and sturdy sawhorses, and a lot of newspapers. Scattered around like toys lay numerous hammers, brushes, and chisels. I asked if he had been responsible for the shattered woman.
Cimarron in a dusty thick apron over T-shirt and jeans was at once more and less androgynous than he had first seemed: muscular yet svelte, graceful but strong. I thought he could probably perpetrate the look he wanted on a given day yet pass through a crowd unnoticed if he liked.
“No,” he said, “that was a friend.” He rolled down the shutter and knelt to fasten it with a padlock. Standing, he put an arm on my shoulder.
“I sold the work you objected to. I am buying. Come.”
We began walking.
“Who bought it?”
“A Frenchman of limited intelligence,” he said. He did not sound very pleased. He pushed at a door two doors along revealing, miraculously, a pub, dark and greasy. Long tables ran the length of the room as if it were a prison mess hall—designed for quick and efficient service of a large population of drinkers. There were not many other customers, though. We took the end of one trestle table. The waitress was with us before we were finished sitting down.
“Can you read a Czech menu?” he said.
“More or less,” I said.
I knew that blocks of deep-fried cheese called smažený sýr were safe. I hadn’t ventured much further afield. Czech fries were always better than the fries of other nations, perhaps because they were required to be commensurate with the beer. For other Czech foods in my experience, taste and nutritional value appeared to be afterthoughts.
“Is there a d
ifference,” I said, “between Czech goulash and Hungarian goulash?”
“Both consist of things that don’t belong together,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound very appetizing,” I said.
“The subject most dear to my heart,” he said.
“Bricolage,” I said.
“But much more. Look where we are. East meets West. Communism meets capitalism. Boys meet girls. All tragic arrangements.”
“We can’t really un-invent any of those things,” I said.
“If they exist,” he said, “as things or entities.”
“Is the goulash here good?” I said.
“Czech onions are very reliable,” he said. “The bell peppers are probably imported. The meat varies and may be imported, too. Perhaps less so since the revolution. Same for the other ingredients.”
“Are you going to answer my question?”
“I have. Czech goulash does not exist. As a thing although possibly as an entity. Therefore I can’t tell you whether it is any good.”
“Do we agree that beer exists?” I said.
“I will agree to that when it arrives,” he said.
I asked for a Velkopopovický Kozel. He asked for the same.
“What’s prsíčka?” I said, pointing at the menu.
“Tits of the chicken,” he said.
“Breast.”
“Ah, yes. I do know that. I spent time in London.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Learning to taste different metals through my fingertips,” he said. “That is how I remember it.”
“You can do that, but you can’t tell me about the goulash?”
The waitress set our beers down and commenced waiting again.
“It’s chili invented by desperate Hungarian cowboys,” he said.
“So the Czech version is like the Hungarian version,” I said.
“Neither exists,” he said.
“They exist in menus and cookbooks and labels or categories for selling things,” I said.
“They do.”
“And you told me during our first encounter that the purpose of your work was to make money.”
“I did?”
“Logically you can’t stand outside the system questioning its existence while using its proceeds to buy me dinner.”
“Unexpectedly right-wing of you, Elliott.”
“Shall I order the right wing of the chicken?”
“That is a great business model,” he said. “Food for purists.”
“Then I should order the goulash,” I said.
“That is an acceptance of fate,” he said.
“I typically go with the deep-fried cheese,” I said.
“That shows a lack of courage and a failure of imagination,” he said. “Also, never trust a vegetarian.”
“What are you having?”
“I haven’t thought about it yet,” he said.
He appeared to contemplate the chicken breast of conviction, the goulash of resignation, and the fried cheese of constipation.
“It is possible we should have gone somewhere else,” he said, before asking the waitress for more beers.
“How does one taste metal through one’s fingertips?”
“It is like perfect pitch. First you must have the gift and second you must practice.”
“But unlike perfect pitch it has no use,” I suggested.
“Use is not the word I would use.”
“Are you going to tell me your name?”
“No. Are you going to order your food?”
The waitress had gone to take somebody else’s order.
“The waitress doesn’t exist,” I said.
* * *
—
I tried the next morning to remember further inanities, or whether he had told me anything meaningful. I did remember that both of us ordered goulash, but otherwise my memory was wiped clean by alcohol. I woke on the sofa still dressed with a throbbing headache and feeling like a form of large vermin. In my jacket pocket I found a crumpled napkin with a phone number beneath the words when you need help. I wonder what I had divulged to him. Anyway, I still wouldn’t know who to ask for.
KITTEN HEADS
Later that day I was introduced to Amanda Smith beneath the astronomical clock. She was a new recruit from Britain, phenomenally good-looking, and another teacher named Jayne whom I knew slightly was showing her around town. We were formally made acquainted.
“What happened to your eye?” she said.
“I just live in a really dangerous neighborhood,” I said. “It’s like living in the Bronx.”
“I’ve been to New York,” she said.
“I haven’t.”
“I had duck a l’orange on top of the World Trade Center,” she said.
“I’ve never had duck a l’orange either,” I said.
“Where in the States are you from?”
“Indiana.”
“Oh, is that a real place?”
“Good question. It might be the only real place. It’s like the South’s middle finger. Which corner of Britain are you from?”
“Somerset.”
“What do you know?” I said. “I’ve never been there either. I lived in Lincolnshire when I was ten though.”
Her abundant blond hair was tied back from her face with two strands from the front. Her face was as wholesome as an apple, and her hazel eyes were tinged with orange. She wore the sort of turquoise jacket bought in a shop nobody else knows about, and under a long tight black skirt she had hips and thighs that looked ready to go bounding across the savannah. She wore sturdy brown English boots.
“Where else have you never been?” she said.
The clock stopped.
“Alphabetically? That could take a while.”
“I have time.”
“My passport is fairly empty,” I said.
“You’re young.”
We looked at the clock. For six hundred years the sun has dawdled across the clock face while the moon swings around and a large zodiac rolls the other way, casting an ominous shadow over the pale blue background panel representing daylight. The clock face is flanked by carved figures—to the left, Vanity regards a mirror, while a miser guards his gold; to the right, a half-dressed skeleton who strikes the hour stands with a bearded Turk playing a lute or at least an instrument with four strings and a scrolled neck. Clock is an inadequate word for it; it’s a planetarium and an astrolabe and a music box: serious town square bling. I could never work out the time from it, and I never met anyone who could.
We had already turned Jayne into a third wheel. Showing new teachers the sights was okay, but represented an unpaid use of a Saturday, and it looked as though the ladies were not going to make friends due to some uncanny ability among the British to divine the other’s origin and socioeconomic stratum by accent alone. Jayne suggested that since I was clearly up to no good, perhaps I might show Amanda around that day, and Amanda might keep me out of trouble.
Our first stop was some Allied bomb damage on the city hall—one of very few scars left by the war. I explained that Czechs were very proud of their pacifism, to the great annoyance of the Polish. I told her that cobblestones are called “kitten heads” in Czech, and we commenced the first of many walks. I asked what had brought her to Prague.
“I just aspire to something other than a mortgage,” she said.
“Are mortgages compulsory in Britain?”
“Just mammoth debt.”
“What other things besides mortgages are there?”
“Is this a list you’d like by Tuesday?”
“Is contemporary art on it?”
“In what
sense?”
“Not acquiring it. Giggling at it.”
“Oh, certainly.”
“I could show you some outstandingly ridiculous things,” I said.
“We just met,” she said.
“Where do you live?” I said.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Doom.”
Hotel Dům was a notorious rectilineal excrescence in the communist outskirts. The top three floors were all occupied by oddball English teachers. The building was visible from nearly anywhere, like a tombstone for human promise and ambition.
“You should have seen last night’s dinner,” she said. “I think it was meat from a meat farm where they grow meat. Three eyes, two tails, whatever.”
“Deep-fried cheese is usually safe,” I said.
“I have a Canadian roommate,” she said. “And she has about five posters of Siouxsie Sioux staring menacingly at my bed.”
“Can you retaliate? We could go poster shopping.”
“I’d rather avoid an arms race. I don’t really care about the posters, but she’s nuts.”
“Bit worried about you,” I said.
“Oh, the other residents of Doom are much worse. There is this Matterhorn of recycling in the communal kitchen. And the kitchen tap spouts human hair.”
“How long have you been here?” I said.
“Four days.”
“Well,” I said. “It just gets weirder.”
“In my copy of The Good Soldier Švejk,” she said, “the translator’s note says that justice can’t be done to Czech profanity using only the hackneyed obscenities available in English.”
“Wow,” I said. “The world’s filthiest tongue. That’s some compliment.”
We talked about books. She leaned heavily toward contemporary British domestic fiction, which set off a whole train of paralyzing speculation: what if she preferred tea to coffee? That could compromise all my own domestic fantasies, which also involved jazz, newspapers, and scrambled eggs on Sunday mornings. What if she took milk and/or sugar in her tea or her coffee? How many hours of my life would I lose servicing that preference over the next seven decades? Would our children play by themselves? Would I appear in fresh flannel at the top of the staircase when the guests arrived for dinner even though I had spent all afternoon sinking fence posts shirtlessly in the summer sun? I missed the names of her favorite authors.
Goulash Page 3