My students appreciated the new phrases, though none of them could keep each one straight. Vlasta wanted to know more about the woman who supplied them. Since Uncle Joe was my mother’s brother, Donna had married into the family, and therefore, said Vlasta, it was okay if I had a crush on her. Donna had decades of practice peering over her bifocals at entitled Nashville school brats to make a point; to this day anyone peering over glasses at me seems to be admonishing me. She was five foot one and built like an insect, with a middle Tennessee drawl that turned every utterance into a musical composition.
VIP
I went back to Indiana for two weeks without Amanda. Predictably on the first full day my mother scheduled a haircut and a dental appointment. During the rest of the week I also got a lot of new clothing and a string of lectures on alcohol consumption. I didn’t smoke and I meant to stick to it. I saw my dad as little as possible—I found his midlife two-stroke Honda embarrassing, along with the chest hair spilling from rumpled linen shirts and the latest girlfriend whose high-heel-weary feet he rubbed obscenely in front of the television. She was or had been his postdoctoral student, thus I suppose a philosopher, too, which was no recommendation.
When my parents split up my mom spent a month on retreat at an archabbey in Indiana, one of only two in the U.S. and eleven in the world. He told his friends she’d gone to stay in a lesbian commune. She forgave him before I did.
Larry had cut my hair since I was old enough to climb into a barbershop chair, just as he had always cut my father’s hair. His business partner, Jim, kept the books, I’m sure, but Larry in engineer boots and a perennial pompadour gave the barbershop its distinctive air. He chose the sports to display on TV, and I’m sure he arranged the stack of Playboys at the far end of the counter, which I was always shocked to see grown men looking at openly while waiting their turn. Larry ran the place as he might have run a Paris salon. In context that meant making jokes about Kentuckians and women, but he gave me jelly beans after every haircut until I graduated to Ski sodas, and when the price of a bottle of Ski jumped from 35 to 50 cents he took it like a man.
“So where you at?” he said, sweeping the apron around my neck.
“Czech Republic.”
“Oh, Czechoslovakia,” he said, correcting me. “You be careful. They got a lot of dictators over there.”
“Not now,” I said. “The president is a playwright.”
“Now that’s even worse,” he said. “Imagine me running this country.”
“We’d all have fabulous hair,” I said.
“Thank you. That is true. Europeans might get quite jealous.”
“Put the French right off their snails. Also, sports commentary would improve.”
“Also true. I’d take executive action on that. You speak the language?”
“Not really,” I said.
“My bank machine asked me the other day what language I speak,” he said. “I do not like that at all.”
“What do you tell it?”
“American is not an option. Is the food over there good?”
“Helps if you like cabbage.”
“Women pretty?”
“Without exception. It’s like wandering around in a wildly successful genetic experiment.”
“Maybe it is,” he said. “How come you don’t have one with you?”
“I live with an Englishwoman who teaches English like me,” I said.
“You went to Czechoslovakia to meet an Englishwoman? How come you didn’t go to England for that?”
“They don’t really need English teachers.”
“Well, I’m going to make sure she likes your hair.”
It occurred to me only after I left that he hadn’t asked and I hadn’t told him what sort of cut I wanted; by some ancient agreement I was always given one of the cuts appropriate for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Hoosier hair. Shorn of my Bohemian identity I went to the dentist. I had been his patient for about ten years. I had chipped a molar in Prague months earlier, nothing painful, but it was best to get things like that seen to on my mother’s nickel. My conversation with Dr. Sanders was necessarily short since there was Novocain involved. He didn’t ask where I’d been.
“So what’s it like,” he said, “sitting around drinking wine all day in Europe?”
“Well, I work,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Open up.”
I complied, and remembered that having large fingers is one of the more advanced forms of rudeness available to a dentist.
“I see they have plenty of coffee in Europe,” he said.
I tried to explain while he loaded a vicious needle that I lived in a beautiful city in a nice apartment with a charming woman and an adequate income.
“I guess everyone’s got their problems,” he said.
PART III
SMETANA
Amanda continued her upward drift in Prague society, teaching several officials at the Ministry of Finance and the Maltese ambassador to the Czech Republic. What the ambassador did all day was something of a mystery. At the embassy, however, she met an older couple—the first violinist of the national philharmonic and his wife, a cellist in the same orchestra. Prague’s musicians earn their dinners playing embassies, she was told. She was invited to bring her American companion to lunch at their apartment on the following Saturday.
“You’ll be invited to Prague Castle next,” I said.
“Are you free?”
At the appointed hour we pressed a button next to a fourteenth-century gate and mounted a worn thirteenth-century staircase to a twelfth-century flat—all details relayed to us over lunch. Mrs. Radovan greeted us in a well-floured apron. She did not look tall enough to carry or play a cello. She was lean as a doe and her face, I sensed, was lined more by laughter than by worry. I judged her a youthful sixty. She led us into a living room with a fireplace, the mantle of which could have slept a family of five comfortably, also black from six centuries of soup preparation. It was not a large room—whatever palace it was part of had been ruthlessly partitioned into flats.
The living room where we sat was a matter of exposed brick and beam with timeless plaster between. A long sofa faced the fireplace with a veteran coffee table in the middle. Three mirrors of different sizes hung at different elevations above the sofa. At the end of the sofa stood a cabinet with a record player on top, and above the record player on the wall hung a violin and bow. There were two shabby upholstered chairs, one next to the door leading to the kitchen and the other adjacent to the fireplace. Mrs. Radovan explained that hundreds of years ago the bricks on the side of the fireplace were arranged in a curve to make sharpening knives while cooking convenient. Above the chair adjacent to the fireplace in a special alcove was the bust of Bedřich Smetana in black marble, looking very much like he had lost three daughters in infancy, his wife not long after, and his hearing at the zenith of his compositional mojo. The bust had at least been made before he lost his mind to syphilis. No fortune, success, or genius could compensate for such blows to the heart.
There was no dining room, just a dining table at one end of a large and surprisingly modern-looking kitchen in immaculate white with grey matte work surfaces and brushed steel handles and appliances. The bathroom was awkwardly accessed through the sole bedroom, where, I noticed, Mucha presided over the marital bed.
Mrs. Radovan implored us to sit. She spoke an unconfident English and called for her husband to appear.
Radovan walked with a cane even inside the flat, and his hand trembled visibly when he held it out to shake mine; it seemed to me that his fiddling days were numbered. Yet he was not much past sixty. He had the ear hair and nose hair and tempestuous eyebrows of an older man, and he somehow gave his cardigan the dignity of a waistcoat. He told me straight off the bat that he deplored American music.
“Dvořák wrote in 1893 that for American music
to be great or distinctive or even American it must incorporate African American and Native American culture. And he put ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ into the New World Symphony.”
“So he predicted blues and jazz,” I suggested.
“No,” said Radovan. “He could not have foreseen the rise of the electric guitar, which is responsible for more pollution than anything but the automobile.” He had the look of someone who could be quite savage about Kermit the Frog if provoked.
“When I must endure American garbage,” he said, “which is anytime I leave my home, I try to listen for traces of gospel and sounds of joy.”
He served us each a shot glass of Becherovka.
“All the potential that Dvořák heard was mutilated by the modern age,” he said.
The beer Mrs. Radovan served in that household would have had Trappist monks volunteering for excommunication. The garlic soup was in appearance just croutons floating in hot water, but it lent Cartesian clarity to the mind and powerful curiosity in the gut about what was to follow. What followed was pork from Elysium and cabbage gathered on the slopes of Mount Olympus and bread dumplings kneaded on Paulina Porizkova’s thighs. Radovan mentioned a pianist friend whose left hand drank more coffee than his right. Otherwise the conversation remained broadly derogatory.
The Radovans had one grown son, a mathematical wunderkind who had forsaken family and homeland to amass riches in Zürich; he had Westernized his name, discarded his accent, seldom wrote and never visited. I sensed furious disapproval from the father, but the mother spoke up hopefully for the boy’s Swiss fiancée.
Radovan had no interest in visiting America because he like anyone else could taste the Great Plains just by listening to Dvořák. He had even less interest in visiting Britain, a place in his view historically plagued by musical illiteracy. Yet the more insulting he was the more cheerful he became (which struck me as rather British), and I could not really tell whether we were having a friendly conversation. Mrs. Radovan tried repeatedly to steer him toward more conventional topics like our favorite things to do in Prague, but he took her interventions as cues to hold forth still more. He talked for ten minutes about a culture and education minister in the early communist era who promoted Smetana (who had once lived in this very apartment, hence the bust over the fireplace) and disparaged Dvořák—and punished subordinates who strayed from his line. His point seemed to be that had we not been such ignorant young Westerners this elevation of Smetana over Dvořák would illustrate to us how profoundly perverse communism was. Alas, we could never grasp something so self-evident.
Mrs. Radovan asked where we would like to go that we had not yet been. Amanda mentioned the crypt on Resslova Street and both Czechs fell silent.
We had walked past the crypt several times and had seen the church walls peppered by thousands of rounds of machine-gun fire. We knew, roughly, that some Czech and Slovak paratroopers trained in Britain parachuted behind the lines at the end of May 1942 to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the final solution and dread Butcher of Prague. We knew that the mission was barely successful, and that some days later the paratroopers, hiding in the crypt below Sts. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral on Resslova Street, were discovered and fought valiantly before committing suicide with the last of their ammunition.
“You must understand,” said Radovan, “that for forty-one years every schoolteacher pronounced the assassins’ names with dripping contempt. Then the Americans showed up and said you must build a museum to these great heroes. The British are especially excited about it. What Munich Agreement? Here is a tale of adventure and derring-do!”
He looked Amanda in the eye until she looked down.
“The Nazis had other monsters, of course. Things carried on exactly as they had, except for the thousands of Czech men, women, and children who were executed in reprisal. The entire operation was a stupid British publicity stunt.”
“The men were brave,” said Mrs. Radovan doubtfully.
“They were,” said Radovan. “We built the museum. Selling fantasies to foreigners is what we do best. This is all ancient history, of course. Now you are free to send squadrons of young men here to decorate Czech cobblestones with English vomit every night on their stag party missions, so I have read, to find steak and tits.”
I thought we were going to have to leave, or that I might have to challenge the old man to a duel for besmirching my lady’s honor, or that perhaps sweet Mrs. Radovan had laced the dumplings with arsenic and we’d be under the floorboards by dusk with several centuries of other unwelcome guests. Yet Radovan’s face was that of a man swearing he can’t stand puppies, and he poured us more Becherovka.
“I’m afraid Dvořák just reminds me of sliced bread,” said Amanda. “Old British TV adverts.”
“What Munich Agreement?” cried Radovan. We all clinked.
SUICIDE
Two weeks later Amanda’s parents came to visit from England. Mrs. Radovan kindly offered the flat to Amanda since the Radovans were going to be traveling at the time. Amanda’s parents were thrilled to be staying not just centrally but at the pinnacle of continental high culture, the home of a great violinist and the former home of a great composer. They were also disappointed they would not get to meet the Radovans.
Every effort was made to ensure that I did not feel Amanda’s parents were coming to inspect me. I had contributed a few words to some of her letters home, and I had spoken to each of them on the phone a few times, so it was not like meeting them cold. On the other hand, it was not like going to their house for a lovely home-cooked meal, either. They were coming to us for a week. Amanda said that my best behavior was just like all my other behavior. I replied that this was no reflection of how I felt on the inside. I might spend the next twenty Christmases with them and go bird-watching with them every spring. They were bound to think I was an idiot from the middle of nowhere, because I was. My prospective earning capacity could be measured in hellers. “That’s true,” said Amanda. “I’m not sure what I’m doing with you.”
Amanda’s mother was a sharply dressed, sharp-minded woman who muffled her opinions in irony; her father, a genial man with a fantastically reassuring voice. Yet I felt I hardly got to know them, or they me, because of sleep deprivation.
We greeted them at the airport and took a tram into town, then cheerfully cursed the wheels on their suitcases as we navigated cobbled medieval alleys. Amanda’s parents were both retired from some obscure corner of the British film industry. When they weren’t traveling somewhere they were busy planning to travel somewhere else. All of us were looking forward to the next five days.
Inside the flat the Radovans had left two sets of earplugs in plastic packaging with a note stating that things could get noisy in the city center at night. At just after 8:00 p.m. techno began thudding from a building across the narrow medieval street, and at 9:00 p.m. a forty-foot video projection of alternating strippers appeared on the opposite façade—strangely unappealing, because the various windows and windowsills meant that one woman appeared to have her head sewn back on six feet off-center, and another had her torso badly spliced down the middle.
Amanda discovered the heavy blackout blinds behind the curtains and drew them. The sounds of British stag parties trooping in and out and around began and intensified. We put on some of Radovan’s Moravian folk music and sat around a table playing cribbage like a wholesome family unit living through some strange wartime occupation.
* * *
—
After her parents went home, Amanda announced that she was tired of living like a student.
“But you don’t live like a student at all,” I said. She was in the kitchen making paella, a phase she went through when she discovered that Kotva carried squid ink. “Look at the spice rack,” I added. “We have turmeric and sage and bay leaves. I remember when we were just an oregano family.”
“The spice rack itself is not very fulfilling,” she said.
“It’s probably not like having a child,” I said. “But there’s value in making a home.”
“I’m not sure the spice rack is up to the job of making a home, either,” she said.
“There’s thyme. Cloves. Ground ginger. These are how you make the smells of home, at least.”
“We have cayenne pepper, too. We can sneeze.”
“If we got married we’d haul in loads of domestic presents,” I said.
“We wouldn’t have room for them,” she said, the nearest she had come to taking marriage seriously. “We’d need a much bigger place to put them.”
“Are you now aspiring to a mortgage?”
“No. You forgot to mention the saffron.”
“We could always go live in Britain or America,” I said.
“Oh, no,” said Amanda. “Americans in Britain and Brits in America have the highest suicide rates in the world.”
“Where did you hear this?”
“I read it somewhere. Each group thinks for years that they understand what is going on around them only to discover one day that they haven’t understood a thing. Their marriages, jobs, and friendships all mean something entirely alien. You can no longer live in truth.”
“Like if we woke up in Graceland but we were actually in Tennessee,” I said.
“We’re all fine in Japan, apparently. Crowded island with a rigid class system. But I can’t help ascribing your accent a certain number of sincerity points,” she said. “I could move to Indiana and discover that everyone is a complete wazzock. I’d have to move to Wisconsin.”
“It’s true that if I hear something in a British accent I have to repeat it in a Southern drawl to check if it really was smart.”
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