We retreated to the entrance, still pinching our noses and trying not to retch until it was safe. Then we moved to stand under a tree instead. Pavel offered me a cigarette and lit mine before his.
“I hate my Zippo,” he said. “I always taste the fuel.”
* * *
—
As planned we mustered in the orchard at noon. At first it was a joyful scene: Šarka had gone to the car and returned with beer and baguettes and meat and cheese and a picnic blanket. Everyone was decked out in mud and soaked through. But Ismail had found a cluster of waterwheels—eight of them were laid out to dry on the blanket, side by side, each about six inches long and looking like rosemary. We were unable to admire the plants’ hunting prowess since the traps had closed upon harvesting. Dave the Canadian described hilariously how Russian Pavel had cleaned a whole muddy hillside with his ass. Italian Delia had a hot date with a lonely beer. Amanda and Šarka appeared to be fast friends, tapping each other’s arms as they spoke.
I told our story. Nobody knew anything about boars except where to order the tasty kind. Jokes were made, but Šarka’s face crumpled.
“We were careful about bats,” she said.
UNESCO’s chief concern lay in preserving views that glorified humanity; they stipulated streetlight placement to the millimeter. Šarka’s chief concern was doing what UNESCO told her to. The cement had been poured from above with only temporary braces erected within possible exits like our cave. There was no environmental auditor of Kutná Hora conservation. Šarka was unlikely to face consequences, at least.
Delicate diplomacy ensued. Russian Pavel applied Šarka’s portable hair dryer to the waterwheel plants and proposed that we smoke them in tribute to the boar, a mighty warrior who scoffed at death. Šarka thought he wasn’t taking things seriously enough. Delia thought that if they could end the stupid ritual now she wouldn’t have to get up at 5:00 a.m. next time. Polish Pavel argued that tradition must be maintained and that Russian Pavel’s proposal was the thoughtful way to do it. Amanda chipped in to say that she would smoke or abstain at Šarka’s suggestion. Even though she wasn’t even a member of the Board.
Solidarity or beer ultimately prevailed, and Šarka rolled a spliff. Amanda seemed to love it. To me it tasted like any other cigarette.
STANDING RULE
Amanda looked like azaleas in May and she spoke like the BBC World Service. While I still held court at the bar of the Golden Lion, she now had students who referred to themselves as clients. Amanda’s clients were lawyers overseeing the expropriation of wealth, or finding creative ways for wealth to misbehave, or alleviating the suffering inflicted on wealth by the shocking and abhorrent practice of taxation. They gave her gifts and bottles of wine, and she came home more than once in somebody’s Porsche, but never the same Porsche twice, which I thought very considerate.
We envied each other. She would have enjoyed a pint with my students, and I wanted to play weekend paintball with the lads.
One of her many talents was to go to any restaurant in Prague, take three bites of any dish, and say that she could do better at home. Two or three days later, she did. In contrast, when I cooked she complained that I couldn’t really expect her to regard sautéed potatoes as a main course, or that I had clearly mistaken a cup of salt for the cup of sugar the recipe called for. Somehow we ate well anyway. After washing up we took to the sofa or bathtub with books unless there was a movie in English with Czech dubbing on television, and by some strange accident we watched a lot of Clint Eastwood movies in German. At one point President Clinton appeared on the screen with a Czech voiceover.
“It’s clear,” said Amanda, “that he is saying the villagers have run out of food and the wolves are beginning to howl and tall dark masts have appeared on the horizon. Yet I have no idea what he’s talking about.”
Some weekends we would go to the main train station to catch the first departure to anywhere but Auschwitz, Amanda’s standing rule. A year on and we were mildly irritated and bored with Prague, with Graceland, and perhaps with each other. We disembarked at whim, visited the nearest castle or cathedral if we found it, ate Czech pub grub, always mysteriously superior in the provinces, and took a late train back to Prague or stayed somewhere if we felt like it. The fountain in Mariánské Lázně ejaculates and none of the elderly German tourists seem to find it funny. The Egon Schiele museum in Český Krumlov meant more to Amanda than to me. I can’t remember the name of the place where we accidentally stayed in a brothel.
It was a town of brick buildings so tall and narrow they seemed to shiver in the winter cold, each with high gables concealing some dark secret or creature of dubious origin, and the streets were deserted but the alleys bustled. We did not explore much, because in the center of town we found a small park with a steep slope and half a dozen Czech children zooming down it on plastic sleds.
“I think I have a shopping bag,” said Amanda.
“So?”
She gave me the same look she once gave me for asking if the tide came in at the same time each day. I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and five hundred miles from a really good hill. She took her toiletries out of a plastic shopping bag and dumped them into her rucksack, which she handed to me. Then she sat on her bag and went down the hill as fast as a sneeze, with three heads and five arms and nine legs.
Every Czech child stopped to gape in envy.
She trudged back up the hill with a triumphant smile contested by a serious giggle. She invited me to check the rucksack for another bag, and she set off again to demonstrate improvisational luge. I did find a bag, and when I sat on it my prefrontal cortex was flooded with dopamine and adrenaline. My lumbar vertebrae had some reservations. As I was climbing the hill again I felt sorry for the children proceeding at such safe and stately speeds aboard their high-tech sliders. Amanda took pity on one especially pathetic specimen and offered her the bag. She squealed in gleeful terror all the way down.
Two or three runs later a burly woman was waiting for us at the top of the hill.
“This place is for children,” she said in English, and stomped away before we could reply.
“I’m sure she can’t do that,” I said.
“I’m sure she just did,” said Amanda.
An older boy came through the park gate with a whole flotilla of carrier bags held high in one hand. He distributed them to all of his friends, and Amanda’s own improbable revolution slid raucously downhill. The woman who had discouraged us glared ferociously. We joined the kids.
When we limped eventually from the field we were in dire need of a pub, and the first we came to had two empty easy chairs next to a fireplace. We both ordered grog and draped our wet socks over the iron grate surrounding the fire and aimed our toes at it. From her rucksack Amanda produced a pen and a postcard and asked why I never wrote to my mother.
“We talk on the phone,” I said. At the time that meant finding a pay phone far from a tram line and speaking quickly.
“She writes to you,” she said. She put her parents’ address on the postcard. I tried to think of anything I hadn’t reported home by phone but couldn’t. I made the mistake of saying so.
“You could always tell her how much you drink,” said Amanda. “She’d love that.”
“Are you mad?”
“British mad or American mad?”
“Well, you’re not being American nice.”
“I’m not American.”
By that time we had already had several stupid arguments with no discernible cause or purpose.
“You’re hardly teetotal,” I said.
“You said something really pretentious the day we met about preferring the conversational culture of Europe. You meant that you like to sit around in pubs and bars drinking.”
“I also drink at home.”
“I barely noticed.”
Ev
entually when she had scribbled the correct cheerful and meaningless message on her postcard she got up to fetch us more drinks in her bare feet. When after fifteen minutes she failed to reappear, I went to investigate.
Amanda was standing at the bar in an adjoining room talking to another man. She gave me a bright hello and a lukewarm grog. He gave me a withering scowl.
“This is Dave,” she said. “His girlfriend Valerie has just popped to the ladies’. They are fugitives from Hotel Doom, though they have only recently escaped.”
Dave was a thin Australian, surprisingly short when he stepped down from his barstool. Valerie, when she appeared, was a woman from Iowa a head taller than he even without her messy black curls that were determined not to comply with gravity. We colonized a table near a window after I had gone to fetch our wet things.
Dave lost no time explaining that he had escaped English teaching by landing a job as a business reporter for The Prague Post, a handsome English-language weekly broadsheet with a circulation of thirty thousand. He investigated things like the municipal construction contracts in Prague that all went mysteriously to one French company. He sounded very prosecutorial about it. Valerie did proofreading for an international law firm, which was, she said, amazingly even less interesting than it sounded, but the pay spared her from enduring Doom. Dave bought the next round condescendingly because we were still teachers.
Valerie had glasses pushed up into her hair, the high widow’s peak on her forehead making her look dazzlingly intellectual. She had prominent cheekbones and a jutting chin, yet looked somehow soft and receptive, except that she also looked deeply skeptical and often giggled to herself as if someone had said something stupid, or laughed at her own jokes before she had finished making them. Her dark brown eyes were somehow opaque, as though it were impossible to get in there.
Foolishly I mentioned the Smoking Board.
“Exactly what does this Smoking Board do?” said Dave, reportorially.
“It’s just like a focus group,” I said.
“What do they focus on?”
“My student explained the other day how the feminization of smoking never happened behind the iron curtain, because feminism didn’t happen.”
“So no Vagina Slimes,” said Valerie.
“I beg your pardon?” said Amanda.
“Virginia Slims,” I said, “an American cigarette brand for women.”
“You’ve come a long way, baby,” said Valerie.
“Right. So the board talks about things like how to introduce fashion cigarettes in Central and Eastern Europe.”
“They have a marketing department for that,” said Dave.
“Surely it isn’t difficult,” said Valerie. “Make the cigarettes slimmer with a pink stripe.”
“They don’t smoke full-time,” said Amanda. “They have other normal jobs.”
“It sounds like a secret cabal within a sinister corporation,” said Dave.
“It’s just people going to work every day,” I said.
“Actually,” said Dave, “a significant number of women snipers and fighter pilots hold or held the Soviet medal of honor.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing,” said Valerie. “You could kill people but you couldn’t go to med school or law school.”
“Of course,” said Amanda. “You work with lawyers now.”
“Every woman working there is under thirty except the German brass,” said Valerie.
“Maybe the male workforce was so depleted by war the women had a reproductive deficit to pay off,” I suggested. “Now, comrades: four each.”
“Well,” said Valerie, “Russian women went to work in 1917. All of ’em. Other places, other dates, same policy. It’s why they still don’t like feminism. They got the Vladimir Lenin edition.”
“I very much doubt,” said Dave, “that your Russian sisters all clocked in at 8:00 a.m. on the first day of Red October.”
“My sister is from Davenport,” said Valerie.
“How many members of this Smoking Board are there, and how often do they meet?” said Dave to me.
“Moreover,” said Valerie, “the reason for your sexy Soviet warrior women is that it was important to stay blue collar, particularly if you had children. Education was dangerous.”
“I’d like to pursue this story,” said Dave. I did not like the sound of Šarka turning into a story.
“Furthermore,” said Valerie.
“Jesus Christ,” said Dave.
“Furthermore,” said Valerie, “I can’t help wondering why you’re surprised that women can shoot straight and fly well.”
“Well, historically,” said Dave.
“They weren’t asked,” said Valerie.
“Are you done yet?” said Dave.
“Done with what?” said Valerie.
“You are arguing with me for no reason in front of other people,” said Dave. He stood up and walked out. Valerie snorted with exasperation, shrugged for our benefit, and followed him.
“I like her,” said Amanda.
We finished their drinks when it was clear they weren’t returning. We ordered chicken that we were obliged to barrage with salt, necessitating more beer, and we agreed on a Becherovka nightcap. Amanda found in her British guidebook an apparently respectable place to stay just five minutes’ walk away, although in retrospect I’m sure it had not been inspected.
At the reception desk sat a bald bored bespectacled man of middle age. Convivial sounds emanated from an adjoining lounge, but we didn’t go there. We were tired, drunk, and foreign. The man slid our key wordlessly over his desk and pointed to the stairway. We went upstairs, got undressed, brushed our teeth, and Amanda was already asleep while I was still flossing.
When I woke up, Amanda said that at first she had thought she was at Graceland. There was a polar bear rug and a Dalí love seat shaped like lips and a mirror wall. We had slept beneath pink sheets on pink pillows under a bright red duvet, but it all seemed at first no more than a reflection of someone’s eccentric taste. Amanda suggested that we hurry so we could catch breakfast—it was late.
There was no sound in the corridor and almost all the doors were open, all the rooms similarly decorated—just a strange boutique hotel out of season. There was no one at the reception desk and no smell of coffee or sound of silverware.
In the lounge we had not seen the previous night several photo albums sat on various tables. Amanda opened one to find captioned Polaroid photos of mostly young women. Some of the Czech words we understood included Russian, Ukrainian, African, and Thai. It dawned on us both that the place was a brothel. Amanda shut the book and turned to me.
“I don’t think they do breakfast here,” she said.
MAP OF PRAGUE
Šarka was duly harassed by a Prague Post reporter who claimed to have sensitive information about the Smoking Board, though he didn’t. Šarka was in turn instructed to find a new English teacher, someone who showed more discretion and was less likely to prove a liability in a business environment. I couldn’t fathom the force of imagination required to describe the factory thus. More important, my hours were not replaced and I was no longer in good standing with my employer, a teaching agency that placed me in various jobs. Ivan, Milan, and Vlasta swore sideways that they were happy with their tuition, and I continued with them, but I was not earning enough to live on, and I was heavily reliant on Amanda. Worse still, the Prague Post did run an article skeptical of Big Tobacco’s extensive philanthropic activities, and I worried they might stop pouring concrete.
There were scores of job advertisements in the Post each week, largely because recent graduates in a faraway place with no workplace regulation count as cheap labor. I could find work stuffing envelopes, entering data, collating documents, punching holes, answering telephones, or replying to customer complaints, and none o
f it was likely to yield a living wage. Alternatively I could probably wrap bagels or pour beer for tourists. New language schools opened daily, but I didn’t want to teach anymore.
My employment experience consisted, roughly, of getting stoned with my manager at an Indiana pizza parlor, then locking up and playing Frisbee in the street on slow days; opening boxes of new acquisitions at the university library, but mostly just reading them; loading and unloading dishwashers; restocking frozen foods on the night shift at a local grocery store; and occasional summer gardening work for my viciously sociopathic former elementary school music teacher. Worse, I had nothing to show for my time in Prague, no skills or experience to save me from waiting tables in double shifts while struggling to pay the rent if I returned home or went elsewhere. During my underemployed phase I sometimes went shopping for carrots and onions and got hit by a wave of despair. Safer to remain at home on the sofa, except that every evening Amanda asked what I had done that day.
I had a series of humiliating job interviews, like bungled medical examinations. The interviewer or interviewers determined that I was unfit for purpose by asking stupid invasive questions, as though nobody understood that nobody is fit for purpose but everyone must pay rent. I failed repeatedly to show passion, dedication, and enthusiasm over teamwork, time management, and problem-solving. I felt that the people interviewing me could recognize neither a clock nor a correct answer. The first rule of any language, I thought, is that actions speak louder than words. I met a lot of self-important, disorganized prospective employers.
Eventually I had an interview with Terence, who asked how fast I could type and told me to prove it. I started work the next day as a kind of amanuensis in his translation agency. A bilingual Czech woman named Hana dictated while I typed and corrected on the fly. We each got about a penny per word, and we were fast. Terence was a Harvard-educated scion of some dynasty from the U.S. Northeast that reliably produced Democratic congressmen and millionaires, but he was content running his own business in a Prague hovel, getting stoned before breakfast and drunk before lunch while hurling abuse at his wife, his employees, his clients, and his cat, Merunka, which means “apricot” in Czech. He must have harbored some private trauma. I was spared performance reviews and internal e-mails.
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