She asked what I liked and I admitted that I had read every book Louis L’Amour ever wrote—a form of rebellion, since they were all available at the library, and in my dad’s collection Being and Nothingness had mated with Being and Time with predictable results.
We talked about money. The Czech government was always a day away from collapse, Ivan had told me, and political and economic crises and scandals, along with corruption, fraud, and skullduggery, kept the Czech crown in freefall all year—fantastic news for anyone with a British or American bank card. Everything got cheaper and cheaper. When the crown shed ten percent in a single day all the foreigners rushed out to buy new sofas and holidays in Japan. Amanda said that perhaps profiting gleefully from the suffering of millions of people was not a good look. I didn’t have a rebuttal for that, and we weren’t ready to start talking about real estate yet. I dug the smallest of Czech coins, the heller, from my pocket and bet her that I could make it float on top of a pint of beer.
After a couple of drinks she let her hair down over her face and looked just like Chewbacca. I hoped we could have the sort of living room where the TV is not a combination of altar and eyeball. The sofa on which I rubbed her weary feet should be purple or orange. Sadly I would be compelled to watch Raise the Red Lantern.
On a napkin I scribbled some Czech phrases and we practiced saying ř, a combination of r, z, s, and h, as in Dvořák. It was like a strange mating ritual between hostile proto-literates. Both of us, fond of vowels, said urge. Czech is a spiky language orthographically, and it sounds like some intricate artillery being primed. “Strc prst skrz krk” is a vowel-less sentence meaning “stick your finger through your neck”—it is illustrative, and onomatopoeic, and, at half speed, exactly what Clint Eastwood’s gun says when he is about to deliver a memorable line. Yet when Amanda spoke Czech she sounded like some great Slavic goddess who was more generous toward men than were the deities of other cultures.
We talked about past entanglements. I had once flown to Japan to see a girl who dumped me on arrival. I was there for ten days anyway, and I hit my head on everything. Amanda had a boyfriend in England still, but had snogged a male model on the flight to Prague just for fun. Our garden would be rife with marigolds, with passionflower spindling the trellis on one side, and a sundial that doubled as a birdbath.
I could not quite figure out which country or for that matter continent or hemisphere we were going to grace with our sublime abode. After we made out against a marble pillar in the music bar built by the president’s grandfather, she came back to my Žižkov flat, where, for a while, there had been gold leaf on the ceiling, Art Nouveau on the walls, and beeswax on the floorboards, applied by a diligent household help in splendid livery.
EROTIC CITY
Three or four times Amanda joined us for lessons at the Golden Lion, and my students paid me no attention whatever. Ivan said she was like a south coast sunbeam, while all the other British people he knew had grown up in the same desk drawer. Vlasta shyly suggested places to shop for clothes, as if anticipating that her suggestions would be met with English derision; I think that between lessons Amanda bought a cheap black Czech cardigan just to reassure Vlasta. With Amanda present even Milan looked like a dog watching somebody juggle three tennis balls.
Ivan observed once that preserving Native American place names implied a value system distinct from that in which ancient cities were rechristened Stalingrad and Leningrad. Slavic languages and Slavic mind-sets were, he said, inherently totalitarian—whether I was Elliott, Eliottu, Elliottove, et cetera, depended on which department of a vast grammatical bureaucracy had authorized my existence in a sentence. My experience of speaking Czech was like that: Well, I need a noun. No, you must have a verb first. Okay, I’d like a verb. No, first you must furnish evidence of an object or a subject or both, without neglecting the small print affixed to these choices. But I just want a beer. You may consult your phrasebook for that, but don’t imagine that you know what you’re doing.
Amanda reassured him that English was just as oppressive.
* * *
—
Ivan and my other students were, I think, predisposed to think of things in world-historical terms partly because their destinies had been abruptly transferred from an all-powerful state to an even more powerful corporate accounting department in a clash of equally inhumane ideologies. He joked moreover that Normans slaughtering Saxons slaughtering Romans slaughtering Celts slaughtering Picts helps explain the violence that English grammar and spelling inflict on logic and common sense. He thought the capitalized first person pronoun might have given rise to the sense of smug entitlement that inspires a lust for private property, too.
Amanda wondered why Ivan needed lessons in English or anything else for that matter. I told her that he had spent some time in the States, but that he seemed very lonely to me, as in fact all my students did, and that probably he came to lessons for the ephemeral sense of companionship.
* * *
—
Amanda began teaching, too, but not in a pub, and I didn’t get to go to her lessons. By luck or hard work or charisma or good looks or some combination thereof, she was dispatched to more demanding clients than mine: working on the top floors of investment banks and the basement offices of international law firms.
Evenings and weekends we did the standard things together: drinking to excess with other expatriate English teachers; curing our hangovers the next day with stacks of blueberry pancakes from an ostensibly American joint called Radost FX. Radost means “joy” in Czech, and they served Radegast beer, named after the ancient Slavic deity in charge of hospitality and merriment. Saturday mornings were devoted to museums and rampart views of all the Prague Castle outbuildings erected for wives by emperors and later inhabited by mistresses.
Amanda also pointed out, very early on, that there was something artificial in our arrangements in Prague. The president was a playwright who lived in a hilltop castle, and none of us had cars or children; we lived in a sort of up- or downgraded version of the set from Friends. She refused to buy IKEA furniture because she didn’t want to live like a student anymore. Fresh teaching blood arrived once a month from New York or California and spent a few weeks inflicting a vast and suppurating wound on Daddy’s credit card before going home broken and desolate. What we had profuse wealth in was time.
* * *
—
I was surprised and disappointed in Prague by a seeming dearth of ghost stories. I solicited them from students and asked Amanda to do the same. The headless knight of Týn church was so generic he had to be tourist fare, and the water spirit who keeps souls in jars beneath the Vltava exists only to frighten children. It seemed to me that any sufficiently spooky hole in British or American ground necessarily has some story attached to it, even if it is just Elvis Lives Here scrawled in graffiti nearby. The Czechs, I thought, evinced remarkably little need to feel haunted.
Amanda’s English childhood and youth always struck me as profoundly dull, as if no mere event could possibly disrupt the placid, stable, exploitative society she grew up in, or alter her own predestined trajectory. Britain was the land of eternal recurrence, where things happened the same way over and over and over again. Nothing terrible or traumatic had happened to her or her family—it was her understanding that every American had an uncle in prison. She was deeply frightened by nuns after three years at a Catholic school for girls. She had also been sent, age six, for elocution lessons with a mad Canadian woman who insisted that she throw her voice over the bridge, whatever that meant. The idea was that a regional accent might, later in life, damage her social standing or even employment prospects; the unforgivable sin in Britain was coming from somewhere.
Perhaps there were cracks in the edifice, subtle and insidious. Her grandfather had played rugby for England until his career was cut short by injury. She showed me old photos of the rugby men on s
easide holidays with their families, each one clean-shaven with pressed socks up to the knee and crisply parted hair. They were all, she assured me, very drunk most of the time, yet unfailingly kind and firm with the children. Then she flipped open her laptop and showed snaps on the Bristol team’s new website of men in their underwear falling off bar tables in Ibiza. Women and children were nowhere to be found. Compared to their predecessors, Amanda observed, these men’s physiques were much improved by sports science.
Otherwise, I detected a childhood spent in the mud. Her parents, inveterate ramblers, had marched her up hill and down dale from an early age, and she got her physique the honest way. It was not always raining, but never entirely dry either, and every childhood holiday story involved some combination of a creepy country pub landlord objecting to the perfect camouflage worn by all three of them. She was an only child. I had the impression that when she was not working, displaying her flawless manners and exquisite elocution, she not only hailed from Somerset; she wore it: mud, leaves, wind-blasted wool caught in her hair and all. She had never been happier than when stranded on a Bristol Channel island with a lighthouse and a monastic library where two minutes outdoors got you slathered in gull poop.
What meeting Amanda meant for me was that at last I had a walking companion. She was happy to go anywhere in any weather for the express purpose of getting lost.
During one early stroll Amanda felt a tug on her shoulder and looked up to see her handbag gaining speed in the hand of a youth riding past on a moped. There was not even a moment when anything could be done about it but listen to the moped engine revving and receding simultaneously like a can of angry bees hurled through the air. A red-and-white tram rattled through our field of vision and it was as though the handbag had never existed.
Amanda blamed herself and said, through tears, that anyone so stupid and careless deserved to be robbed; all the guidebooks warned of pickpockets. I asked what was in the handbag, and she said she had a lot of phone calls to make. Passport, driving license, credit card, to start with. I suggested making a list right away and she rallied. We dived into the nearest pub where I asked for two beers and paper and pen (miming for these as my Czech was inadequate), and Amanda told me that her handbag itself was the real loss, a stylish and capacious maroon old soldier who had never complained.
She would need to contact her parents first to get the number for her bank in England, the British Embassy for a replacement passport, some number in Swansea for the driving license. She required a new National Insurance number card, a library card if she ever returned to live in the UK, two thousand Czech crowns meant to last until payday—fortunately she had already paid that month’s rent—some new sunglasses, a new Czech phrase book, her keys, a couple of pens, an address book, and a shade of lipstick probably not available in Prague. Compiling the list cheered her up. I sensed that she was a woman of action, and I said so. She thanked me and said she was glad I was there.
Meanwhile her credit card took a thrilling illicit tour of some of Prague’s sleazier districts. She was informed of this by her bank in England the following morning. It had gone to a liquor store, visited an ATM at a nightclub called Erotic City, and dined at a nearby Chinese restaurant. When I asked about the cashpoint, she said she’d told me already that she was stupid. She kept her PIN on a folded square of paper in an inside pocket of the handbag, because she had forgotten it more than once. I had a momentary vision of her as a tremendous liability to be dragged and heaved through life, forgetful and unconcerned. She totaled the car, misplaced the children, and got indicted for tax fraud while I was condemned to be the person knowledgeable about things like home insurance, plus which I never got a birthday card.
She was prompt and diligent with her phone calls and filling out forms for replacement cards; her parents undertook to cover damage to her credit card balance that the bank declined to absorb, and to send some interim cash at the earliest. The aftermath of the theft turned out to be ninety-five percent bureaucracy. And yet for the first time since landing in Prague I felt useful somehow, though I’d done nothing but lend her a few thousand crowns and make comforting sounds at appropriate intervals. Amanda continued to blame herself. Gradually it dawned on me that she had depended on me in some vital way that was unlike showing up on time or returning a library book, and that being each on our own in a strange city, in any sort of crunch we might as well be the only two people alive.
* * *
—
Northwest of the city—where I had walked before losing my shoes—lay a small area called Divoká Šárka, “wild wood,” composed of slopes swathed in pine trees, with all the silence that implies: dramatic limestone cliffs and manic streams of snow melt; isolated quaint cottages with billowing chimneys and the reek of marijuana; and small hidden pubs to which it was unclear how supplies of beer and food were delivered. I took her there in the afternoon to distract her and clear her mind of the missing handbag.
Each of these pubs had a garden in which some item of industrial detritus had been repurposed as art. At my favorite, vast iron hinges gathered like birds on railway sleepers; we supposed they were trying to keep each other warm. Elsewhere sprockets and pulleys mustered like hostile militias; hooks and chains winked and flirted; and brackets, ferrules, spigots, and grommets formed an awkward queue inside at the bar.
“Everything here makes sense,” said Amanda. “Some horrific event in living memory abides in the air and presides over subsequent proceedings. In England we only care about Eurovision.”
The owner/proprietor spoke in an alien dialect so it was best to point at the beer or the menu and signal quantities with fingers. The other patrons, all men, looked as though they had preferred prison. They did not even grin when a girl of no more than ten began driving her drunken father home aboard a yellow Zetor tractor.
While we were there the president stopped by for an improbable pint between meetings with world leaders. The pub was so remote that he must have gone on purpose to escape public scrutiny, or to indulge in some sentimental simulacrum of privacy. His entourage screened him largely from view while they annihilated silence with heated consultation, and the impression we had was of governance by smoke signal—he aimed the plumes from one cigarette after another toward the ceiling, and although we could not see the man, his thoughts and instructions seemed to dissipate visibly over the heads of his inferiors. Their voices where hushed and in Czech, yet it seemed to us obvious that some sort of power struggle was occurring, with each advisor, counselor, or minister vying to sweep the field, and the president’s job consisted largely in knowing when to speak. Leading a free country and managing an unruly classroom were likely one and the same thing. A similar scene in the West would have entailed handshakes and babies and cameras and sound bites, but the president’s constituents ignored him respectfully.
Amanda went slowly without sudden movements to and out the door to investigate how the president traveled; when she returned she described two gleaming porpoiselike Mercedes sedans flanked by scowling men the size and shape of refrigerators. The cars were up for any frolic but their handlers weren’t. I had the same sense of the invisible president: he would have envied us exploring his beautiful homeland whimsically without destination, but his thankless task was to run it.
What followed was inexplicable at the time and surreal on reflection. A door adjacent to the bar opened and four partially attired young ladies emerged—this at four in the afternoon. The president’s men formed a human shield instantaneously—as though any one of the ladies might possess a lethal weapon, though no obvious place to conceal it. The ladies, all smiles and eyelashes, made for tables of grumpy men, who paid them no more attention than they had to the president or anyone else. We were not approached. The president’s men implored him urgently to action. I hallucinated the sound of spurs on a boardwalk and wondered why there was no piano player. The president, judging from the roili
ng cloud overhead, had decided to finish his cigarette. The girls, rebuffed, looked lost and hurt, unsure where to turn. The president’s men formed a gauntlet to the door and propelled him—the president of love and truth—to the safety of his car.
A man emerged from the door by the bar, around his neck the sort of camera that could distinguish the eyelash hairs of a honeybee. We could see that the course of history had nearly swerved. He tried to explain to the girls in polite British English that they would not be paid after all. They refused to be soothed. Amanda was despondent afterward, as if something she had fled had pursued her to the most nondescript, nonsensical, and innocent place on any map.
PIGEON 1 (A)
I lived, when I was seven, for a year in Lincolnshire, which is very flat and much like Indiana, with cabbage instead of corn. It was a perfect place to invade; just roll your tank off the boat and ask for directions. There was an RAF base nearby and pillboxes everywhere filled with moldering pornography and wholesome graffiti like KILROY WOZ ERE—very civilized vandalism by later standards. Dad taught in a huge manor house that functioned as the overseas campus of his university. Mom was invited to lots of different houses for afternoon tea. My brother went to Isaac Newton’s old school in Grantham, and on his first day the other boys threw him in the River Witham with his school uniform on. My sister went to Margaret Thatcher’s alma mater, where the other girls made her cry every day for sport. My school was walking distance from our cottage. On my first day, the other kids said, “Hey American, we could have won the war without you.” I didn’t know what they were talking about. There were Harrier jets prepping for the Falklands overhead, and I would have preferred talking about those, because I thought Harrier Jump Jets were pretty fucking cool.
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