by John Klima
Well, that’s nothing to do with me.
You can go back and look for them.
I have to go to an opening sale,
To buy more exquisite, delinquent things than you
Or your dark bird dreamed
In chalk-cut twilight.
But we must wind down to the corner again;
By all means, we must go home
And take a turn around the question of the decorations
And your plans for a rocket.
We must get out the melodica,
Ten times blow into the dirty hose,
Wish upon the black Porsche;
Salaam the dog’s grave under the apple tree,
Do penance for violence—
Then what rompish, darksome, magic character
Might spring, high-stepping,
Out of the cobra box on the summer lino?
And then what hordes, departing through the snow,
Dressed as bears and lords,
Might draw whoever needs some convalescing
Time, or sexual leave, to holiday shores
Once painted by Watteau?
I prefer Epping Forest, or even the Augarten—
Best of all the Jardin du Luxembourg
As it was in the master’s time,
Dreaming, and silvan-haunted.
That is to say, I want to go in, not over. But look,
I would paddle a boat in the shape of a swan
For a thousand and one diaphanous afternoons
To hear one reed from the isle of Pan
Amongst the rumours bleating through the crowd
And the music blasting from the stores
Or lose my shoes once in the park, twice in the street, thrice in the sea—
And your Hessian boots, dear Excellence, and your sealed books—
those too
Will have to go—and your servants, and the plans—
And yes, even you, Milord—
The diamonds you hoard in your navel, your title, your hand . . .
We have to part, like the red balloon and the world.
Daughters of Fortune
Cyril Simsa
The thing is, I never expected to fall in love.
Not in Prague. Not really.
I had always considered myself far too cynical for that, which only goes to show how little I knew back then—how naïve I had been to think myself a connoisseur of life and art and contingency . . . Of the strangely intoxicating whims of beauty and sadness, of the tendency of the world to play the fool with our best intentions.
I had come to Prague to escape from Paris, which, I know, must sound like the words of a madwoman. But living in a third-generation community of self-proclaimed artists in a fifth-generation sublet on the far side of Montmartre, can get to be rather like taking the waters in a goldfish bowl after a while. I mean, let’s be honest here, how many second-hand Ernest Hemingway anecdotes do you truly want (or need) to establish your artistic credentials? How many parties and jazz-bands and drunken brawls on the frozen embankments of the Ile de la Cité? How many tired conversations on the ineffable genius of James Joyce and the book-buying policy at Shakespeare & Co.? Oh, the novelty is all well and good the first few weeks, but there comes a time when it starts to turn your brain into molasses.
Not that I hadn’t achieved a certain notoriety in my short, breathless life. I had been photographed by Van Vechten in New York, and Man Ray in Paris—but then, who hadn’t?—and I had published two slim volumes of poetry, Unnatural Selection and Lepers of the Moon, with the justly-forgotten Invocations Press of rue Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Marais. Perhaps my greatest claim to fame, though, had been the nude photograph—backlit and solarized—which had had to be withdrawn from export copies of This Quarter for fear of running foul of HM Customs. (It was not the nudity as such, apparently, but the glowing tip of the cigarette, with which I had chosen to highlight the blurry darkness of my shadowy crotch. It seems we British were not, as yet, ready for any such thing as a woman’s brazenly concealed pudenda—at least, not in Dover. And who can blame us, given our schooling?)
Anyway, this is just to explain why, in the spring of 1932, I decided to go to Prague. I was twenty-three, though there were times I felt decades older. And while I was sure that Prague must also have its writers and cabarets and artists’ ateliers, I didn’t know where to find them, and I thought I might be protected by not speaking the language.
Well, it wasn’t that simple, of course. Partly because curiosity got the better of me, but mostly because men are incorrigible. I don’t know what it is about those strange creatures with their Y chromosomes. Maybe they have some kind of congenital aversion to rationality, or maybe they just have toxic physiologies. Whatever, they always assume love will find a way—or failing that, lust—even if they have nothing to say to a woman, nor so much as a viable way of saying it. Somehow, in their strangely illogical gender algebra, perfume and roses and cheap champagne are supposed to transmute into a Shakespearean sonnet or an ode by Andrew Marvell, while flashing eyes and jittery hands assume the deceptive simplicity of haiku. As if all our social interactions could be boiled down to a kind of solipsistic, primal semaphore, like the dance of the honey-bees.
Needless to say, it was a man who led me to be, alone, at the Kino Metro, that particular night. Some polished jackal of an accountant from the bank where I had changed my francs had invited me to an early screening, and stood me up. Which, to tell the truth, was almost relief, as it was obvious he had a wife somewhere (to say nothing of an attractive house maid, an elegant mistress, and an addiction to underage show-girls . . . ) These predatory guys always do.
So there I was in the basement of this rather overbearing pseudo-Classical shopping arcade, waiting for my non-existent host and a much-delayed screening of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. The original idea had been that, seeing as the film was a silent, we would not have to deal with the issue of language. However, before it started, this fat man got up to make a speech—a very fat man, and a very long speech. (I later found out he was some kind of surrealist poet.) He spoke in Czech, of course, and though he was passionate, he was incomprehensible. All I managed to catch were a few names: Edgar Allan Poe, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, the Marquis de Sade, Max von Kastell . . . All the usual suspects. Then there was a supporting program of jumbled scenes from some bizarre Czech melodrama to the accompaniment of a middle-aged lady in a shocking pink frock, who somehow managed to produce unearthly warbling sounds by waving her hands between the twin antennae of an RCA Theremin. And after that, there was an interval.
By the time Max Schreck and his Melody Boys were due to come on, I must admit I was feeling more than a little jaded. But then Murnau’s magisterially spooky images finally took their place centre stage, and I was carried away once again by his grimly translucent skies; his haunting, shadowy cityscapes; and by the mysterious Schreck, with his curious mixture of menace and vulnerability—his strangely deformed head and his wasted body—his wounded eyes, his feral claws and his dangerously sensual mouth . . .
I was elated afterward, and it must have shown, for a woman came up to me and smiled.
“It is wonderful, is it not?”
She spoke in that strangely-accented, under-emphatic English so typical of Prague, and for a moment I wondered how she could possibly know I was foreign—because, like every other traveller, I like to think of myself as invisible. But there is always something . . . An unfamiliar item of clothing. A peculiar manner of sitting or walking. A way of looking that is too direct, or just the tiniest shade too evasive. In my case, I realized belatedly, it was probably the week-old copy of the Paris Herald-Tribune that was still rolled up in a clump in my shoulder-bag.
“This film,” she continued, “I think it helps me to understand what it must feel like to be persecuted and outcast . . . To be so completely beyond society’s norms that you are automatically judged evil.”
She held out her hand.
“I am Frida, by the way,” she said. “Frida Hroznysova . . .”
“Zora,” I replied automatically. “Zora Dienstbier.”
Her grip was firm.
“But Frida, surely that is not a Czech name?”
She shrugged. “Outside society’s norms, does it matter?”
Her answer surprised me, for at first glance she seemed unexceptional enough. What, with her long, olive-green dress, and her matching silk wrap, she was elegant to the point of vanishing. I would have guessed her to be solidly middle-class, perhaps even a bit of a blue stocking. Only the hooded eyes, and an almost sculptural quality about the face, hinted at anything more dynamic. Her chin had the sort of angularity that an African mask might have had, after a Picasso or a Gaudier-Brzeska had remodelled it.
“So . . .” She resumed, pulling long, brown gloves of a completely impractical filmy material out of her hand-bag. “Would you like to go for a coffee?” And she smiled so disarmingly, from her translucent, greenish-blue eyes to her luminous, gray-stockinged feet, that I nodded my shocked acquiescence.
Pretty soon I found myself in a rather grand cafe-bar just across National Boulevard, with a fake Moorish fountain in the lobby and a marble terrarium full of pygmy alligators—Andalusian chic, as filtered through the sensibilities of a small town with aspirations to Hollywood—and she ordered us both an “Algerian.” This strangely-named cocktail, when it came, proved to be a composed of alternate layers of hot coffee, advocaat and cream, and with a little sugar, it turned out to be surprisingly invigorating. By the time we had switched to wine, she was telling me the story of her life.
Her father was a professor of sociology. Her mother was a society hostess, who had once used to write, but who now invested that same energy only in applauding the works of others, and in discussing the spiritual health of the nation, usually at much greater length than anybody else in their right mind would want to. She had grown up in a sprawling apartment in the Royal Vineyards district, surrounded by servants and a vast library of books, reading Homer at ten and J.G. Frazer by the age of eleven. By twelve she had become one of her parents’ favorite party tricks, being brought out to show off her precociously adult conversational skills, though by fourteen she had usually done her best to avoid this. Still, she had met any number of Europe’s leading artists and writers at a very young age. Gustav Klimt. Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Paul Wegener, hot off the set of The Golem. Even Freud of Vienna had come for a visit once.
It made my own childhood seem extraordinarily provincial, for all that my father had been relatively prosperous. There was really nothing exotic about growing up in Chislehurst, except my American mother and the occasional visits of my American cousins; though perhaps even this minor accident of parentage had been enough to place me outside the pale in the eyes of my schoolmates. Having an absentee father in Natal, or a birth certificate from Calcutta, was, of course, perfectly normal, but cousins in Iowa? No wonder I had felt such a need to escape to New York, and then to Paris.
I tried to tell Frida all this, and how I envied her, but she laughed.
“Ah, if only you knew . . . No-one in the world is more petit-bourgeois than we former Austrians. No-one is better at superficially observing the social niceties, while stealing the turf off your lawn and denouncing your daughter to the chief of police for wearing just the wrong shade of lipstick. And we can give you a certificate with two different duty stamps, and the seals of three different government offices to prove it—one circular; one rectangular, in exact mathematical proportion to the spire of St Vitus’s cathedral; and one with a bad representation of the Czech lion of state rampant—one scarlet, one indigo, and one a very particular tone of violet, as if that color alone were enough to grant us a heritage stretching back to Imperial Rome.”
She took a vicious sip at her drink.
“Where did you say your cousins are from?”
“Oh, they live in this little regional centre called Cedar Rapids.” After all the incomprehension and sarcasm I had experienced in the past on account of my parentage, I deliberately played it down. “You’ll never have heard of it . . .”
But I underestimated her, because her face opened up into a smile of knowing amusement.
“Yes, of course . . .” Her eyes watched me intently, as if searching for signs of a long-extinct matrilineal civilization on the distant steppe. “Isn’t there a big Czech community out there?”
I had to concede that there was.
“So that’s what you’re doing here. Subconsciously, I mean . . . I wondered. You’ve come to Prague in a quest for your roots.”
I started to protest—to tell her that I had never been any further west from Manhattan than Buffalo, and that only to see the Falls—but then I realized that she might, after all, have a point. Throughout my childhood I had heard my cousins describing their peculiar neighbors in what they still called “Bohemytown.” The distressingly neglected roads, pot-holed and dirty, lined by beautifully ordered kitchen gardens and ramshackle country cottages . . . The wiry, mustachioed men, and the wrinkly old grandmothers, sitting out on their porches in their embroidered skirts, watching their pumpkins grow fat in the late summer sun, and tending their chickens . . . All those family histories about Sara Hurok, our cousins’ favorite servant girl, and Miss Wokoun, the banker’s daughter, who years ago went to Coe College with my mother . . .
Perhaps it was true I might have been curious. Subconsciously, that is. Of course, it’s much more romantic to believe that our lives are governed by chance, or by the blind twists of fate—by the gods playing dice, or by Nature picking us up in her bloody maw and spitting out only the fittest—but human psychology is trickier than that. It likes to create order, patterns, connections . . . Meanings. Explicitly or implicitly, our lives have resonances.
“So what do you do?” I asked, trying to redirect our conversation to a more conventional channel, though by now I should perhaps have known better.
She smiled again and this time the expression seemed to make her face softer.
“Oh, I’m what you might call a folklorist . . . I travel the country making a record of people’s beliefs and customs. Not the things they’re supposed to believe and do, of course—the way they act when they’re summoned by the priest or the lord of the manor—but what they really do, when they think nobody’s looking. Folk etymologies, traditional remedies, popular explanations of natural phenomena, the kinds of thing that less enlightened observers might call superstitions . . . I’m sure you know what I mean. You British pioneered the whole field of enquiry, back in the days of the great antiquaries.”
I wondered for a moment if I should tell her that my Britishness was just as uncertain as the folklore taught in a suburban schoolroom, but the impulse passed.
“Last year, for instance,” she continued, “I spent a fair part of my summer cataloguing the menhirs of Central Bohemia. You wouldn’t believe how many Stone Maidens and Enchanted Monks there are in our much-vaunted Bohemian woods and meadows: Petrified Capuchins, Frozen Shepherds, Hags of ironstone and Commanders of ferrous conglomerate . . . The nearest one is just north of Prague, in a village called Chabry. That one’s a Petrified Chamberlain, though judging by his height, he could never have served anywhere but in the chambers of Faerie . . . And then I’ve been chronicling the habit of well-dressing at the healing spring in Lysolaje. They have this little round chapel, plastered with icons, which they cover in candles and flowers, and on a good day, a group of nuns will come to perform a hymn just before sundown. Really, the most eerie of plainsongs . . . But I suppose my most famous piece of work is this . . .”
She reached into her handbag and pulled out a slightly dog-eared book in a stiff paper cover.
The Natural History of the Rusalka, it said in bold red type on a salmon-pink background, by Bedriska Hroznysova. Bedriska, the Czech version of Friedericke . . . No wonder she preferred Frida.
But what kind of narcissist was she to carry her own book arou
nd in her handbag?
Somehow, she must have guessed the direction of my thoughts, because she started to blush a deep shade of crimson, from her throat to her cheeks.
“I know . . .” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “I always carry one around, when I go to the cinema. You never know when you might run into an admirer . . .” She held out the book, and strangely, I found I liked her all the more for the odd mixture of pride and diffidence that had taken hold of her.
Inside were columns of stylishly modern type, interspersed with reproductions of historical illustrations and footnotes. Only later did it dawn on me that the book was written in English, not the more predictable Czech or German. The woman was full of surprises.
“ ‘At dusk on a clear summer night,’ ” I read at random, “ ‘the rusalkas may sometimes be found running around under the stalks of the cornfields, causing the corn to wave. And when the moon is full, they climb out of the depths of the millpond onto the weed-choked frame of the miller’s wheel, jumping down into the water to play in the treacherous millstream with noisy cries of kuku . . .’ ”
I flipped a few pages.
“ ‘They dance in circles on the open riverbanks, leaving patches of trampled grass, and tempting young men to join them. But pity the man who allows himself to be seduced, for they will dance him to death; and woe betide anyone who so much as blunders into the bounds of the rusalkas’ ring the following morning for they will be dead in a week. In the eleventh century they were often associated with vampyres . . .’ ”
There was Max Schreck again.
“ ‘. . . for the rusalka, like the vampyre, through the promise of fleeting intoxication, tempts the virtuous young man or woman to certain death. It is not surprising, then, that the burial rites of the ancient Slavs, from the ninth century onwards, show many protections against the threat of revenants. The peculiar horror of the early Slavonic burials at Celakovice, and elsewhere—their bodies variously shackled, beheaded, pierced with stakes, weighed down with boulders, or buried face-down, so that the monster, on waking, digs itself further down into the earth—lies in our fear of losing control of our own bodies at the behest of an uncomprehending society, and in the suspicion that these particular “revenants” may have been operated on preventively while they were still alive. To say nothing of our uncertainty whether we, too, in those dim and dangerous times, might not have sold ourselves to the rusalky, and gladly, for no more than a few minutes’ ecstasy . . .’ ”