I couldn’t be bothered to clean the flat. The garbage can was overflowing with the greaseproof paper that came with cheap Polish sausages on Wenceslas Square, the bedroom floor was a Sierra Madre del Sur of dirty laundry, and the kitchen sink looked like the Somme in 1917. The bathroom had developed an overall slime shield to defend itself against whatever I had planned.
If not reading or drinking, I was taking long walks around Prague. I could read if not understand most shop signs I saw, like “Fresh Pet Meat Daily,” and I could identify the languages I overheard, even distinguishing between Czech, Polish, and Russian. I could, if necessary, talk vaguely about hockey in a bar, expressing support for one goalkeeper or team or nation over the other. Yet I somehow didn’t see Prague anymore in my walks, most of the time, only my shoes hitting the pavement or the kitten heads again and again and again. I was sometimes aware of crossing a highway overpass or a river bridge and I sometimes noticed the rain. Often I crossed the famous suicide bridge at Nusle—the communists, Ivan had told me, never installed safety measures, because they respected your decision. To avoid total self-absorption I once or twice fed the ducks at the millrace on an island in the river under the castle hill.
I had to look up at times, though. Prague was designed to confuse medieval invaders—and without Amanda to consult it was all but impossible to reach a given destination even if it could be seen all the while. Turn left, turn right, and go straight were all meaningless, and usually prohibited by signage; drift, amble, and meander were the only means of getting anywhere, which proved on arrival to be more of an elsewhere anyway.
WHEN YOU NEED HELP
I called Mr. Cimarron at last in despair. He asked me if over the following weekend I would like to search for Stalin’s bottom. When I asked what he was talking about he asked if I owned a flashlight. I said I’d prefer not to examine Stalin’s bottom if that was what he was proposing. That was no longer possible, he said. I said that I could probably purchase the required item if he would please enlighten me in the meantime. I had told him what had happened, and I think his main purpose was to distract me.
The largest Stalin monument ever erected, he told me, had stood in Prague on the banks of the Vltava looking over the water toward the Jewish Quarter and the rest of the city beyond. Made of granite, fifty-one feet tall, and seventy-two feet in length, because several workers and soldiers stood behind Uncle Joe, like a full-bodied Mount Rushmore with regular people instead of corrupt oligarchs, and not built on land confiscated from indigenous people whose ancestors immigrated from Siberia twenty-five thousand years ago. Even Stalin’s jacket button was one meter wide. Mr. Cimarron said that granite was used only on the exterior, with reinforced concrete inside, so the whole thing was a kind of cream-filled chocolate bunny for a rock-eating monster at Easter time. The structure was demolished with eighteen hundred pounds of dynamite in 1962, when Stalin worship had gone out of style.
The interesting thing, he continued, was the space beneath it, originally designed to become a mausoleum for some Czech hero sufficiently worthy to spend eternity in a glass coffin beneath Stalin’s boot. It had instead been used to store potatoes for several years. After the explosion, the mausoleum had become a kind of demolition dustbin where Stalin’s ears and eyebrows might have fallen, and a truly intrepid and crafty explorer might uncover the ultimate trophy, a piece of ass.
I pointed out that decades had elapsed, and that, moreover, eighteen hundred pounds of dynamite sounded awfully thorough to me.
“Ah, but the flood,” he said. “Everything must have been rearranged in there. It will be like panning for gold.”
“Surely,” I said. “Stone Stalin was fully dressed. We’re not going to find any telltale anatomical signs.”
“Yet the talismanic power of the thing beckons me from here.”
“I won’t need a flashlight because it will glow,” I said.
“Exactement.”
I bought a flashlight from Kotva as we walked to the site. Mr. Cimarron provided further background.
“The man who designed the Stalin monument committed suicide with sleeping pills on the day before the unveiling,” he said. “It is not known why. He had previously designed monuments to a religious reformer and the first president of the republic. Those were destroyed by the Nazis.”
“He lived at the wrong time,” I suggested.
“Everyone does. It would require extraordinary moral flexibility to honor both Masaryk and Stalin in the same lifetime. I think he concluded that he didn’t have it. And yet the rest of the population did.”
“Does,” I said.
“The designer was one of seven deaths associated with the monument. One fellow opened his skull on Stalin’s knuckle by falling drunk from some scaffolding. Later another took a smoke break next to some dynamite. It’s all a bit like one of your American cartoons.”
“Can you imagine,” I said, “the amount of dust resulting from the marriage of that much granite and that much explosive?”
“Which is why when we find the sacred stone, we must both kiss it.” He was silent for a moment, eyeing me. “I find it usually best, by the way, not to confess. If caught, never apologize. Simply say I am who I am.”
“That sounds like a negotiating position,” I said. “But we are talking about love, not money.”
“One day perhaps you will grow up.”
* * *
—
I had made a point of walking past Mr. Cimarron’s shuttered Žižkov studio every few months, and if he was there, asking him out for a beer. On a previous visit the studio was empty except for some trash bags, a broom, and the artist, who said he was giving up. I fetched a brace of beers from a nearby corner shop and returned to hear why.
“I’m tired of making comments,” he had explained. “I try to make objects. I specifically try to make objects that don’t and can’t comment. It is impossible. Even if I wanted to comment on things,” he added, “commentary itself has just gone postmodern.”
“The appropriate comment is silence,” I suggested.
“Ganz genau.”
“What are you going to do instead?”
“I don’t know. Talk to small children and remember their names.”
“These children will pay your rent?”
“I like metalwork. Jewelry does not comment very loudly. I will sell trinkets to tourists on Charles Bridge.”
“They’re not going to pay you six thousand dollars per item,” I said.
“As a novelty act I will make jewelry blindfolded while they watch,” he said.
“They’re still not going to pay you six thousand dollars.”
“Money does not exist,” he said. “Only debt exists. Morally, financially, historically, and otherwise. It’s the economy from which all other economies hang.”
“I have no idea what that means,” I said. “It sounds like you are dropping out of the economy.”
“Better than dropping out of the sky.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” I said. “Who lets you out of the house in this frame of mind?”
“I have some entanglements.”
“Sounds dreadful.”
“Traditional. In that and other respects I don’t belong in this century.”
“Nobody does.”
“You don’t belong in this century either, but otherwise you are wrong. Nihilists do.”
“These entanglements of yours. Are they supportive? Do you talk about this stuff?”
“They are all rich.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“I will continue to eat, bathe, sleep, and drink beer.”
“You’re not dropping out of the economy. You’re just becoming a prostitute.”
“Debt is a bitch,” he said.
“Can you please just write some of this stuff down some
where? For your own benefit if for no one else’s.”
“That would be commenting.”
“You are commenting right now,” I said.
“Nothing said over beer really matters,” he had said. “Only that something was said.”
* * *
—
As we approached the failed mausoleum, Mr. Cimarron said it was colloquially called the Grotto, and described it as an integral fixture of his adolescence. It had been for a while a popular trysting place, but portable cassette players ended that: it became a place for building fires and listening to banned Western music, with a sentry to launch a rock into the water if the authorities looked likely to take an interest. Concrete columns, iron joists, and shattered stone became layered in graffiti; the Grotto was an alfresco nightclub with décor that changed every week. Chain-link fences had surrounded the area but holes were cut and trees climbed. Since the revolution the Grotto had been covered and almost sealed by a plaza popular with skateboarders, and at one point an eleven-foot inflatable Michael Jackson had held court there for a month. Veterans such as Mr. Cimarron knew, however, of an airshaft and a wall fissure hidden in trees, and what’s more, he said, I was perfectly cast to play Indiana Jones. The gleeful violence of the river must have stirred the soup of stone and mud inside the Grotto, desperate to erase all memory of anything that had ever happened there.
The river was dappled and placid as we crossed over a bridge; despite the cold there were even young men rowing young women around on rented boats. Frequently they had to dodge the immense barges crowded with tourists who gossiped and drank beer, while a guide recited boring historical anecdotes into a crappy loudspeaker. At the far end of the bridge we crossed a busy ancient road with tram lines slashed into the cobblestones and came to the wide staircase leading to the top of Stalin’s plinth. Mr. Cimarron led me to the right side of the staircase and onto a small trail through the adjacent woods, past Coke cans and beer bottles and filthy sleeping bags on flattened cardboard boxes. The wall alongside us was slathered in graffiti consisting mostly of profanity in English. We reached a rusting iron door mostly shut but bashed ajar enough to squeeze through with determination. Mr. Cimarron switched on his flashlight and slipped lithely through. I struggled and grunted after him.
A short rubble-strewn corridor decorated in used condoms led to a rectangular chamber of about the same dimensions as my high school gym. There was a foul stench of human sewage, rotting vegetation, and fetid/putrid water, but at least it was warm inside. Mr. Cimarron’s flashlight beam moved slowly, methodically, assessing the chunks of rebar, spikes of iron, tree trunks, fire pits, trash heaps, orphaned shoes, vinyl record fragments, vodka bottles, pizza boxes, terra-cotta tiles, clothespins, corrugated tin panels, broken ladders, calendars, dishwashing liquid bottles, wooden planks, aluminum cans, red bricks, plastic guttering, chicken wire, ballpoint pens, dirty magazines, frying pans, lead pipes, postcards, coffee mugs, and other detritus it found. I was sure Mr. Cimarron would consider it some fascinating sort of art, but I felt that we had discovered instead a monstrous and desolate womb.
MOM
It was entirely humiliating when my mother came to Prague to get me. She pretended she was making an oft-promised visit, but she also asked in advance when my lease ran out and what my prospects were, so I knew before she arrived that she planned to persuade me to come home.
We did some sightseeing, but what impressed her most was the way the Czechs seemed very respectful, like Americans of the 1950s, she said, an observation and a comparison that no one else would make. She took endless photos of stained-glass windows, and I pitied the friends who might one day endure them. I frequently lost her in crowds, a little Indiana hen among enormous Czech chickens, but she had a knack for finding me.
She said she was sad never to have met Amanda, but reassured me that someone else would come along. I pointed out that somebody else had come along, and that was the problem. Mom, sounding very like Amanda, said that I was still young.
She had a list of people to buy gifts for, so we trawled the open-air markets examining wooden chess sets, Bohemian crystal, Russian dolls. I made sure that she was very careful with her handbag.
She was somehow less maternal, as if it was time to accept that I screwed up sometimes, and she made jokes she wouldn’t have made to me before (“The first time your child says ‘Mama’ is priceless. The 100,000th time is torture”), and above all, she seemed genuinely interested in Prague, not preoccupied with her mission. We took long leisurely strolls, which delighted her at every turn, passing a Carpathian church in the woods under Prague Castle, seemingly assembled from gingerbread matchsticks and transported intact from Ukraine half a century previously. Above the entrance gate of the Slovenian embassy we found a man-sized marble vulture just waiting for someone to die in the street.
I took her to the Golden Lion, which was an emotional mistake for me, because the décor had been Westernized. A wagon wheel chandelier hung from the ceiling and rusty farming implements dangled from the walls. An upright piano darkened one corner, and rag dolls and miniature barrels and willow bouquets lay arrayed artfully in baskets where there were lees and eddies in food and drink traffic, with a kind of ambience that said, Relax, you’re not in Europe anymore. I found myself appalled by innocence again.
“You may find it difficult going home,” she said, after we had both ordered pasta. “Like a terrible English lesson in your head. Looking around at Americans and saying, Why do these people do this? Why did they do that? What the hell are they doing now?”
She asked if I was still thinking of graduate school, but I told her I had gone off history altogether.
“She sounds to me,” said Mom, changing subjects abruptly, “a tad selfish. You have not had an easy time.”
“I haven’t?”
“And you helped her with her work.”
I could not imagine my mother approving of Mr. Cimarron, or for that matter Milan, and the way he usually sat glowering without saying much. She insisted on meeting everyone, though, so we convened along with Vlasta around a table in a beer garden on the sort of day when the sun renders the architecture completely irrelevant. I quietly hoped that my former students would not practice any of their American slang. We had an hour of awkwardly swirling small talk. Only afterward did I grasp that my mother had been gathering witness testimony in the investigation of a crime.
“You had sympathy,” she said, “everywhere but at home.”
TENNIS
Milan had decided to compete in an international tennis tournament held in Prague, even though he would be five years older at least than his nearest competitor, and moreover the tournament was intended for young talent hoping to turn professional on the strength of their performance. Nothing in the paperwork said that Milan was ineligible, although he did expect to get knocked out in the first round. I wanted to stay to watch, but my mom had already booked return tickets, and I felt that I was a failure as a friend and teacher and a witness to Milan’s story.
Hundreds of parents, dozens of coaches, and scores of hopefuls descended on Prague, and in many, most, or all cases, spent more than the $10,000 prize money on training, hotels, food, and tickets. Ivan e-mailed that he noticed in the sports pages of his newspaper that there was some grumbling about a local man, older, described variously as grumpy and savage, progressing through the tournament, and evidently shattering dreams and aborting careers in the process. The Czechs were proud to see their colors honored, but it was universally agreed that the man’s style of play was disturbing, and amounted to a form of psychological warfare that disconcerted each opponent’s every move. Stronger, faster, nimbler, sprier opponents were systematically dispatched.
Milan did not claim the prize, although he reached the quarterfinals, which he lost in straight sets to a nineteen-year-old from Japan. Back home in Indiana, I watched it on TV. I knew nothing about tennis,
but Milan had told me that he served at 120 miles per hour, and it looked to me as though he didn’t need to do much more than that. His black shorts and shirt bore no logo, his shoes were black, and his racket had no design on the face that I could make out; he was a man out of patience with the pieties and proprieties of tennis.
In play he was powerful with moments of grace but nothing of flair or style; he was like a hulking backwoodsman with a claymore swinging at some effete rapier-wielding metropolitan. When he served or returned he did so convincingly, and sometimes unanswerably, and he was not slow, but he expended tremendous energy with every swing of his racket and held nothing back to respond or persevere with. In the third set I could hear his breathing even over the airwaves, as I watched him succumb not so much to his adversary as his own age, lack of training, and inefficiency.
Yet I saw why he had made the papers, and why he had made the quarterfinals. Whenever the ball was not in play he studied his racket, rapt and oblivious, caressing the handle or touching the strings, lost in interstitial mysteries: as though his racket were really a mirror, and the mirror posed an overwhelming question. His serve was what necessarily followed when he tossed the question lightly into the air.
EPILOGUE
Years later, when I had the best job title of anyone I knew—sommelier—I was invited to visit Moravia at the end of a week spent evaluating Rieslings in the Mosel and writing my impressions for a trade magazine. I had been married, then divorced, and I lived in Nova Scotia after stints in Colorado and California. My parents still lived in Indiana, where I had worked my way conventionally up from waiter to shift manager to wine steward with a certification earned at a three-week course in St. Louis. Even then it took years for me to look old enough to be trusted. In any case the job had always consisted of about ninety percent making decent conversation. I discovered by accident that if I grew a beard, two entirely white tufts emerged on either side of my chin. I was told that I looked like I belonged on a horse. From that point on I was an asset to any restaurant with pretentions.
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