“The carp is outside the capitalist system,” said Katie from International Study Programmes.
“Since no monetary value is derived from his work, he is expendable,” said Bob the professional translator. Bob was twenty years older and had bad hair and bad teeth and bad clothes; I sensed that Amanda might adopt him.
“Then I rest my case,” said Valerie. “The carp is very Christlike.”
“But we’re not eating carp,” said Sonja.
“If we were you could gaze into its mournful compassionate eyes,” said Valerie.
“If we were, the carp would be dead,” said Dave.
“Christ’s love is eternal,” said Valerie. “Obviously. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here wishing him a happy birthday.”
“Does your working carp walk on water?” said Amanda.
“When his throat is slit and his intestines jerked out, parts of him float a little bit,” said Valerie.
“I have never understood,” said Katie, “how vegetarians celebrate without something sacrificial in the middle of the table.”
“You’re right,” said John, the international conference man. “That goes against all of Western history.”
“Bread can be sacrificial,” said Amanda. “Some people consider it to be human flesh.”
“Fortunately this,” said Katie, serving herself more Texas corn bread, “is not very convincing.”
“I’ve never understood,” said Dave, “how transubstantiation and defecation can be squared.”
“Perhaps,” said Sonja, “Martin Luther had this question, too.”
“He was the first German to examine his stool,” said Dave. “Searching for the presence of the divine.”
Sonja scowled.
“Holy shit,” said Valerie.
“More wine?” said Amanda. Everyone assented. There was something sacrificial in the way she split the bottle’s throat with the blade of her corkscrew.
After dinner those of us who smoked took turns on the rickety balcony. Snow fell fast and thick, piling on the black grates and railings and the ground, turning the courtyard into a photo negative of itself. For a moment I thought that if I kept watching some vital clue would emerge and explain the death of our elderly neighbor. But it was cold and inside someone inevitably found ABBA Gold and pressed play.
* * *
—
Amanda was on the toilet four times before breakfast the next day while I hopped up and down on the other side of the door. Breakfast for each of us consisted of one sip of coffee and one spoonful of muesli. Then we took turns vomiting onto the splashy horizontal ledge of porcelain. Once our bodies had expunged all solids and liquids we each endured an hour of dry heaves. Both of us were trembling and sweating, wrapped in every available blanket, when we thought it might be safe to go back to bed and sleep it off. But my phone began to vibrate with all the Christmas guests reporting similar symptoms. We never identified the offending ingredient. We never had a dinner party again.
REVOLUTION
We began spending more—meals out, new clothing, and things for the flat. It was an era when things available elsewhere were becoming available in Prague, but with distinctly retro presentation. Fresh produce and lingerie both call for decent shop lighting. The department store nearest us, Kotva, was an enormous building that suggested a stealth bomber meeting a trash compactor. The interior layout was full of abrupt turns leading to surprising merchandise: teddy bears from Asian sweatshops in T-shirts that said I’m love you, Russian skis and skates and snowboards sporting inscrutable Cyrillic, American jeans at American prices.
Amanda had a talent for finding offbeat things—like an ankle-thick candle with an enormous painted wax scorpion climbing one side, a gaily painted life-sized wooden armadillo from Mexico, drinks coasters and place mats with stylized illustrations of bicycles and captions in twelve languages, wrought-iron bookends in the shape of grazing sheep, tea towel maps of obscure Scandinavian regions—so that Graceland quickly became a kind of personalized end point of globalization, as though all of history had led to us and only us living there. Some other tenant or tenants would have had less appealing champagne flutes and corkscrews.
Recycling at the time was for Czechs like some strange heathen ritual practiced in faraway lands. Instead a plastic crate lived behind the front door and when it was full of empty beer and wine bottles—every four or five days—I hauled it perspiring to the nearest shop (lahůdky or potraviny) and fed each bottle individually to a machine through a conveyer belt so that it could be rinsed, sterilized, and reused by whichever brewery or vineyard it belonged to. I thought it tiresome yet much more enlightened than creating whole recycling centers where everything gets smashed up and reconstituted. At times, hauling my individual burden of bottles around in the interest of the common good, I thought of recycling programs as exactly the kind of counterproductive capitalist hysteria that doomed capitalist ecosystems to begin with.
Amanda became very adept at inconveniencing me, with the usual things like blanket sharing and bathroom time allocation but more important with sets of unassailable priorities about which I had not been consulted: holiday plans and changes in the décor at Graceland. One Monday morning she seemed glum; in the afternoon after work I bought her some flowers. It was a favorite feature of Prague for me that every bus stop, tram stop, and Metro station had its own florist, so anybody off visiting anybody else could equip themselves conveniently. I took her progressively more elaborate foliage through the rest of the week, culminating in a small olive tree. She never cheered up, and the tree lived and died on the balcony while she waited patiently for all the rest of the stuff to wilt. Later we had a gay cleaner once a week who ironed and folded my underwear while color-coordinating everything else. It may have been the nearest I saw Amanda to happy.
I also never understood how the British could take such a relaxed stance on coffee and timekeeping, among other things; Amanda could with evident ease greet the morning over a cup of mere tea and meet me somewhere a half an hour late with a smile. She smoked West Red, a Czech brand that caused me to retch, but refused to consider switching to a mutually agreeable brand, while pinching my Camels on the flimsiest of pretexts. She was always happy to relieve me of some portion of whichever variant of steak and potatoes I ordered when we were eating out, but she meanwhile cleaved to the dubious end of the shellfish spectrum. I once made the mistake of popping corn at home, and was prohibited from adding salt or butter.
Meanwhile she accused me of having a neurological condition that made me always do the wrong thing on purpose. If, for example, I said I’d be back at 10:30 Amanda knew nothing except the precise time I was guaranteed not to be back. If I promised to pick up some After Eights I was bound to return with a cheap Czech knockoff. When I promised tacos I made soup. None of these things was disastrous in isolation, she said. I pictured a secret notebook with all my transgressions logged by date, with illustrations.
She became distressed that The Relationship had become an independent entity and that she was often accused of leaving it out in the rain, or pinching its fingers in doorways; she felt when ordering coffee or withdrawing money from cash machines, that The Relationship was there, watching her, privately passing judgment on her choices and movements, and possibly filing reports for me on which areas of her conduct and deportment could use improvement. The Relationship was endlessly elastic, and assumed no definite form for more than a moment, and The Relationship was not gendered, yet not androgynous either, because it wore dark menswear and smoked Gauloises. If I went out and she listened to Louis Armstrong while folding laundry The Relationship wanted to know why she was not listening to Ella Fitzgerald instead. In her dreams The Relationship had a clown face and rode a bicycle while she trudged slowly uphill; on the far side she watched in horror as it zipped past her without brakes, but she always woke up before the crash. She felt that Graceland had a vulnerable t
hird resident with unclear intentions.
I thought she was being silly. There was, I said, an ongoing stream of words between us, some shared experiences, and nothing else but an understanding that the arrangement should continue. She demanded to know why I couldn’t come up with something a little more persuasive than that, and I said that if I mentioned love she might get mauled by The Relationship again. I asked why The Relationship couldn’t just be a lovely sofa she could rest her lovely bottom on while reading about people less fortunate than she was or seeing them flick by on the evening news. I was happy to reupholster. She said, But what if there is a small fire under the sofa?
I thought The Relationship was a manifestation of the children we didn’t have. We had discussed it several times. I thought that Louis or Linus could just live in a hammock slung between walls in the bedroom at Graceland for the first two or three years. Amanda countered that we might have a Louise instead, and naming a child Linus was probably abuse. Moreover where would all the stuff go? Was I volunteering to shift a pram up and down two flights of stairs daily, and if so, where did I plan to park it, the kitchen? I said that Louise was fine, or Lola or Lily or Lulubelle. I wasn’t sure about the practicalities yet but I was sure that people in that part of the world had reproduced successfully for at least a couple of decades. Amanda suggested that I use my imagination on the matter of what a confined space might smell like once Larry or Lawrence or Lucy started on solids. I said that we could surely find a bigger place if she agreed on the main point of creating a small human together. She never said no but instead pointed out cruelly that first I would need a stable job.
THE ASTRONOMER’S NOSE
I am not sure when I noticed that Prague’s favorite sons—native and adopted—all met grisly ends. Tycho Brahe’s bladder burst and Mozart was probably annihilated by a contaminated pork chop. Kafka lost his voice first and his ability to eat second. Rilke succumbed to leukemia. The self-styled Mother of Cities is distinctly filicidal. No one is entirely sure what killed Dvořák at the age of sixty-two. I told Amanda perhaps we should move to Lausanne.
I became very interested in Brahe, who lost his nose in a duel, kept a dwarf as a jester and an elk as a pet until the elk died descending the manor stairs drunk—surprising, since the elk was accustomed to doing the same every night. Somehow despite the drink and drama Brahe accumulated forty years of astronomical observations that were more accurate and more meticulously gathered than any that were collected by anyone before him, using instruments of his own design incorporating metal instead of wood. In 1601 he died because, according to legend, he had to pee very badly but dared not interrupt his patron the emperor Rudolf II at one of Rudolf’s Prague Castle banquets.
Modern testing of exhumed hair follicles suggested mercury poisoning, but further tests were needed.
I went one afternoon without Amanda to see his tomb in Prague’s main cathedral. A flat marble slab bearing his name in capital letters lay in the floor beneath a vertical life-sized reddish-brown marble relief of him contemplating his own final resting place. He was, in my mind, the first scientist, although that honor is usually accorded to Galileo. I thought the sculptor had caught something, despite the armor, ostentatious mustache, and trappings of nobility; the expression on Brahe’s marble face was that of a man bent on deciphering some new inscrutable evidence. I moved back to get a better look and stepped on a small child’s toes.
No effort was made to hush the child, though there may have been a coordinated campaign to shame the transgressor, beginning with parental glares, spreading through surrounding bystanders. I apologized to the mother, and when that didn’t work, the father, and when that failed, the child herself—a blonde girl of three or four, now swept into daddy’s arms—who saw or heard me and buried her face in her daddy’s chest, covered both ears, and howled in renewed protest. The vaulted ceiling, acoustically designed to make human voices mimic the chorus of heaven, failed to oblige. Without breaking her glare at me the child’s mother tugged at the father’s sleeve and they left before I knew what language the girl was bawling in.
“Quite a manipulative child,” said a familiar voice in American English over my shoulder. I spun around to find Valerie laughing at me.
“She could have been a good Christian and offered me the other toes,” I said.
“She gets what she wants,” said Valerie.
“Where is Dave?” I said.
“He was an error,” she said. I didn’t press for elaboration.
“Where’s Amanda?” she said.
“Busy,” I said.
“Then you can help me with my implausible mission,” she said.
“Which is what?”
“Investigating death. If Dave can write for The Prague Post, so can I.”
I started tagging along with Valerie while she looked into, and wrote about, Brahe and Mozart, the phantom chimpanzee of Prague Zoo, the medieval monk who slew a prostitute in rage and himself in remorse on Celetná Street, where an outstanding Italian steakhouse now stands, and—at my suggestion—the nexus of floods, climate change, and carnivorous plants. Some of her work was published, occupying a full broadsheet opinion page with a commissioned cartoon. Kepler, she found, probably didn’t murder Brahe for his data. Mozart, she found, almost certainly died from trichinosis. Subsequent generations of chimpanzees avoided an area of their enclosure where a newcomer was murdered by the alpha male thirty years previously because they didn’t know that the alpha had been destroyed, and they were not spooked, wrote Valerie, merely waiting for the return of their once and future king.
Along the way Valerie told me or intimated that she came from a screwed-up family in a bad neighborhood of a stupid town, and that growing up, she hadn’t known whether she was going to be a hairdresser or a hairdresser. But she did write and publish original journalism without training.
“You’re a self-made woman,” I suggested one day over coffee in a riverside café.
“Everyone here is self-made,” she said. “There is no system for making anybody. No corporate ladder or law school conveyor belt. That’s what makes it all a colossal waste of time.”
“Are you leaving?” I said, alarmed.
“Not yet. I have a stack of graduate school applications to fill out.”
“Where and for what?”
“Monumental debt.”
“You’re dour,” I said.
“I’m not complaining. I’ve enjoyed it, and it beats spinning pizza dough in Davenport. Realistically, do you want to go live with your parents again? That’s where all this ends. I’d love to train as a scuba instructor in Thailand, but that’s just postponing the inevitable.”
“Let’s distinguish between Davenport and living with your parents,” I said.
“Davenport has a bridge I can throw myself off of,” she said.
“So does Prague.”
COFFEE WITH MILK
I learned from my mother that back in the U.S. my aunt Donna was dying. Like Amanda’s godfather she had some horrific lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, in which tissue slowly but inexorably decayed; she had maxed her oxygen tank out but just kept deteriorating. But she had, said Mom, an e-mail address now, and would surely like to hear from me.
Even before I got in touch, I had e-mails from other family members describing Donna as “difficult”; Aunt Carrie had visited Donna in Nashville and kept track of Donna’s impossible demands on Uncle Joe with one eye on her watch. I pictured Donna on her deathbed, surrounded by treacherous siblings.
She died heroically, e-mailing me every few days until she couldn’t anymore—about two weeks before her funeral, which she told me not to bother attending. When her father-in-law, my grandfather, died, I was twelve. She spotted me looking glum at his funeral reception, crossed the room, put an arm around me, and told me to get used to it. One of her last injunctions to me was to
miss her a little, but not for long.
We didn’t correspond much about her condition, aside from the panic attacks she had, despite the morphine, every time she levered herself off the portable toilet and back onto the sofa in the living room. I had slept on that sofa many times growing up. It was at least eight, maybe nine feet long.
We corresponded instead about me. The cost of living in Prague, she wrote, must be very attractive, but one day, perhaps soon, we’d want more space. Had I popped the question? Get Amanda to tell me the colors in your apartment, she wrote. These things interest women, Elliott. We must be having fine adventures in a place she could never have gone and could never go, she wrote. Make the most of it. But make plans, too.
She gossiped generously about the extended family, material that was particularly surreal to read in Prague. I had cousins I couldn’t pick out of a perp walk, but I knew for a while which of them was getting a driver’s license and who was off to Southern Methodist that fall. If there was one thing on God’s green earth Donna couldn’t see the point of it was a magnolia tree. For two weeks a year it just litters, and the rest of the time it blocks your view of the neighbors. She was lobbying my dad to chop his down. My mother, wrote Donna, seemed to have a new admirer in the shape of an Episcopalian priest. But she seemed to expect him to have God’s own patience, too. Donna was pleased that once she was gone, Uncle Joe would have the sympathy and support of his sister Carrie. Donna told me she knew Joe was hers on the day he began taking milk in his coffee.
The sense of space and time and order implicit in her communication was utterly alien to a Prague dweller; nobody near Graceland had a garden, let alone a tree. Czech youth did not age; they went to sleep as children and woke up as adults sometime near the age of eleven or twelve. There were no priests. Taking Czech coffee black was unthinkable.
Donna sent, among other things, colorful Southern U.S. expressions for me to share with my students: “slicker than snot on a glass doorknob,” “madder than a boiled owl,” and my favorite, “I feel like I been et by a wolf and shit off a cliff.”
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