Alternate titles: A Scandal in Bohemia, innumerable Czech/Check puns, Romany Pilgrimage.
My travel arrangements always begin very early in the morning. I have made my peace with that, and I have come to relish the 4 AM train stations and feeble pools of florescent light that I begin my travels in. This trip started with a ticket purchased in the Uppsala bus station from a girl who had buttoned the first and fourth buttons of her shirt, leaving about a two-hundred-and-ten-degree arc of cleavage spilling out in between. Like Romans spotting an eagle circling their camp before battle, I considered it a good omen.
My next encounter was an old, grizzled, dumpy man in the echoing garage of the Stockholm bus depot. Out of the thirty-odd Czechs standing around smoking and waiting for the bus, he approached me and began telling me about his girlfriend, who, he said, was in her sixties and enjoyed browsing through dumpsters.
“Getting rich off of garbage,” he said. “You know how it is.”
“How’s that working out for her?” I asked.
“It’s a work in progress.”
He began asking me who had killed JFK and told me that he was in close contact with several LaRouche cultists in the States. He said he was Australian but he went to the Czech Republic three hundred years ago.
“I like water,” he said. “Water. Water. I used to say it wrong, I had to have an Arab teach me to say it right. Waowt-ah. Wah-tah. Heh heh. Blue water.”
I remembered a line from a play I was once in, which has served me well over the years in situations like these. Match not madness with wits, it advises. Pursue it as it plays. I have found this invaluable, since attempting to reason with people you meet at 4 in the morning in bus stations is quite hopeless, but if you seize on an aspect of their madness and build on it, you provide them with perhaps the only human connection they have had in years. It is for this reason that innumerable tramps, hobos, and bowery bums across Europe think I’m a hell of a guy.
So I posed to this man a quandary which I once overheard the local madman in Media, Pennsylvania telling to the apple core he used to keep in his beard:
“Speaking of blue, you know what you don’t see every day? Blue food. Blueberries don’t count. They’re purple.”
That blew the guy’s mind. His eyes widened so that the whites showed all around his irises. His mouth dropped open. He pointed at me, and backed away slowly, then turned and rushed away, muttering.
A Momentary Digression Concerning Bums
I tend to mentally separate bums into two categories. The first are the sort I began encountering as a child on trips to San Francisco. They are aggressively inventive and inventively aggressive, and hit you up for money when you’re at Willy’s hamburger joint across from the Tower theater in the middle of the night, breathing secondhand smoke and talking about zombie movies. These are the sort which, frankly, annoy me. What are you doing here? I want to demand. Go somewhere where the weather’s better! Know what I would do in your position? I’d hitchhike, stow away, or hop trains to South Miami Beach, where I’d lay in the sun all damn day, watching topless tourists. Leave me alone, you damn sedentary bums!
The other sort are the kind you meet in bus stations and border posts, the sort of rootless, traveling, meandering bums who are always on the move, always planning to head out other places, who have been around and seen a lot. There is a strong sense of the Vladimir and Estragon about them, and I find the weary absurdity of their conversation to be far more interesting. I’ll talk to these guys, and sometimes the things they say are truly amazing. A guy I met at the bus stop in Dresden, for instance, looked me in the eye and asked, “What was God thinking when He made my ass sweat?”
Easily the most convincing argument for atheism ever constructed.
I realize this is all quite backwards, and that the sedentary city bums are mainly those suffering from substance addiction and mental disorders who have been turned out of facilities when the funding was slashed and are therefore far more worthy of my understanding and compassion, and further that the traveling bus-station bums are those more rational sorts who are bums by habit or circumstance at least somewhat within their control, but…what can I say. I have an unfair taste in bums.
Anyway. It was a twenty-six hour bus ride to Prague. A shocking eleven hours of that was spent getting out of Sweden—apparently, Sweden is the most enormous country on the planet. Here I thought I was sort of near the bottom, but it turns out Denmark is an endless trek away.
I saw Copenhagen around nine at night, and it looked a lot like a lot of other cities. There was a two-hour ferry from the southern coast of Zealand (the island Copenhagen is on) to Rostock, on the northern coast of Germany. From there it was Berlin at 2 AM, then Dresden, then the border post at Altenberg. It was dark and foggy and deserted and I had the feeling of great altitude, as though we had pulled into heaven’s abandoned waystation. It took three hours to check all of our passports—three hours of watching the frail wisp of smoke trail out of the guard’s shack and dissipate into the fog. When you’ve ridden a bus all day, then all night, and then are still on it the next day, there comes a certain point at which the bus is less a mode of transportation and more a mobile Bedlam, a sardine can for lunatics, and you get the sense that perhaps the plump old lady next to you was actually the smoking-hot German chick you noticed, and that you’ve been on the goddamn bus so long that you have all aged irrevocably. It is, I assure you, a harrowing experience.
Katka, my former classmate and my contact in Prague, was waiting for me when I finally staggered off the bus. Gone was he oddly Barbra-Streisand-look: she was wearing thigh-high black leather boots with stiletto heels. I put it down to hallucination.
She led me onto a subway, then a tram car, then down some streets by a river and into a building. We went down possibly the dodgiest corridor in Europe, then up six flights of stairs to a dark landing where she rang a doorbell. A small, diffident guy with glasses answered, standing awkwardly, not sure what to do with his hands, stuttering on consonants, which seem to be all Czech consists of. This was Jan, the guy I was to be staying with. And this is the entirety of his flat:
Yeah, I know.
Jan and Katka produced a rickety cot which they put up in what I have decided to charitably refer to as “the living room.” They warned me that Jan’s friend, a Mexican sculptor, may wander in occasionally, but that I shouldn’t be alarmed. And then they said we should go for lunch.
Lunch, however, first required a walking tour of Prague. For one of you, the following will make sense. For the others, suffice it to say: LOTS of walking after 26 hours on a bus and no sleep.
Jan lives about two blocks south of the Dancing House, by Karlovo Namesti.
We walked along the river as far as the Charles Bridge, then cut over past the old Jewish Quarter to the Old Town Square, where they have both a Christmas market, and the most sinister goddamn cathedral I’ve ever seen in my life:
From there we meandered down to Wenceslas Square, sight of mass riots and Soviet tanks and college students burning themselves to death in protest:
We finally drifted into a restaurant, which (like every restaurant I went to in Prague) filled an immense basement warren of passageways and staircases and little hidden grottos and stuff. We sat down and I perused the menu of cryptic Czech dishes, each of which clocked in at about seven or eight bucks.
Jan stood up in horror. “It’s t-t-t-t-too expensive,” he said. “We must go.”
So we beat a hasty retreat, and wandered some more until we found what looked to me like an identical basement warren restaurant close to Karlovo Namesti. I had THE traditional Czech dish, which I won’t begin to attempt to spell.
Traditional Czech food seems to consist largely of slabs of meat in a heavy brown sauce which is sort of like Vietnam in that whatever you are looking for you will find there. There’s usually bread or dumplings on the side which are wholly inadequate to sop up the lake on your plate. They huddle, resigned to their fate, as though bravely stating in their little dumpling-voices, “It is a far better thing that I now do than I have ever done, and a far better sauce that I now sop up than I have ever sopped.”
I also had two half-liters of fine Czech beer, for about fifty cents apiece. Truly, Prague is the land of opportunity.
Jan buggered off after that, and Katka, apparently convinced we had not done enough walking, took me back along the river, across the Charles Bridge, up quaint, touristy, winding streets, to the castle, which is the largest in the world. She showed me the cathedral, the national Christmas tree, the little street the jewelers used to live on, the National Gallery, and a place where they perform Shakespeare in the summer. And then (pitch dark night) we walked back home.
How far would you say all of that is, Len? A gazillion miles?
Whatever the case, they both disappeared immediately when we got back to Jan’s place, and I collapsed on that goddamned little cot.
The next day was the 24th, which is the day Czechs do most of their Christmas celebrating. Most things were closed, so I spent the day wandering the city with more coherent eyes, taking pictures, and generally being impressed by everything. Prague is a gorgeous city. Every building is seemingly festooned with statues and gargoyles and spires and balconies and all manner of artistic things which make the city far more elaborately gorgeous than it has any need to be. It’s a fairly small, compact city, with a lot to see in a small area, sort of like if Budapest was twice as interesting in half as much space.
And virtually everything that has happened in the past half-millenium in Europe has left its mark on Prague. You can see where the Catholic electors were thrown out of the castle window in the Second Defenestration of Prague, which started the Thirty Years War. The rear of that same building is far newer than the façade, since it was accidentally bombed by American planes during the Second World War—they were looking for Dresden and missed. The Jewish Quarter dates to the 17th century, and is essentially the origin of the Ashkenazic community. The Charles Bridge (and damn near half the city, as far as I could tell) were built by Charles IV after 1346, when Prague was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Wenceslas Square seems made for riots and tanks, and as you reel at the sight of the cathedral in the castle complex, (the largest castle in the world, which was begun in the year 870, was looted by Swedish armies in 1648, you pass the balcony from which the Velvet Revolution was proclaimed in 1989.
I stopped in a little Chinese joint for lunch and scribbled down my impressions. They were: “you can’t throw an infant in this city without hitting nine statues, four towers, a great pub, and eighteen tourists, half of them British, the other half Japanese.” I also ate this:
The "strange taste" turned out to be "lemon."
Spent that evening alone in Jan’s flat, reading Richard Reeves’ excellent account of Kennedy’s presidency and Walter Isaacson’s masterful biography of Henry Kissinger, from which I learned a great deal, and about which I am going to blog at some tedious length quite soon.
Check the political blog.
The next day being Christmas day, I decided (like any rational man) to begin by going to the Museum of Communism.
How could I resist?
It didn’t turn out to be that great. My favorite part was the simple fact of its location: next to a McDonalds, in the same building as a casino. They had a few cool propaganda posters and this giant statue of Lenin with a superhero physique, but otherwise it was rather disappointing. Of the legion of criticisms that can be, should be, and have been leveled at the Soviet Union, I felt like they left out all the good ones.
I drifted down to the National Museum after that, which is in an impressive building at the end of Wenceslas Square. The building, however, was the most impressive aspect of it—say what you like about the British and the Americans stealing all the contents of their museums from other people, at least it gives you something to see. I’d never visited a museum in a non-imperial power before, and it wasn’t that fascinating an affair.
After that, I was struck by an worrisome and disgusting sense of being American, and was driven (perhaps by voodoo) to seek out some trapping of my objectionable heritage.
So it was that I had my Christmas dinner at a KFC on Wenceslas Square. I didn’t feel too bad about it, since pretty much all of the real Czech places were closed so I wasn’t missing out on anything better.
I got home and was surprised to find Jan there. I had bought some absinth, since that’s one of the things you sort of do in Prague, so he demonstrated for me the elaborate ritual of how to prepare it (the traditional one with the slotted spoon and the special glass, not the kind where you light it on fire, which is a far more recent invention) and we spent the late evening drinking the vile stuff and trying to communicate.
Absinth, in my experience, doesn’t actually make you hallucinate. The stuff is damn near as potent as 151, however, so it gets you quite drunk quite fast, and it provides an oddly clear-headed lucidity in which you take the speeding nonsense of your brain quite seriously. In my case, this consisted largely of giving up on the attempts to talk rationally with Jan about the absurdities of Czech politics and instead sitting back on the little couch, saying things like:
“The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner- ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur- nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the1 offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-linsfirst loved livvy.”
Jan found this hilarious.
We ventured out quite late, since Jan knew of a place he was sure would be open. Indeed it was, and we helped ourselves to a heroic dose of fine Czech pilsner, and began to attempt to walk back home. This led to me greeting the 26th of December, 2006 in an alley somewhere near Karlovo Namesti, with Jan bent over in that classic 6 AM pose: hand splayed on the cold wall, head bowed in supplication, knees bent as though threatening to cut and run from the whole operation.
We made it home eventually, and Jan was gone when I woke up midafternoon. In his place was what seemed to be a marching band full of timpanis playing Wagner in my head.
Jan also, incidentally, had no hot water from then on, much to my great sadness. I got out into the streets by about three, and walked up the river, across the bridge, to the castle, where I wandered around and took pictures of people taking pictures of spectacular buildings.
When that bored me, I crossed the river and went to Jama’s, where I had the finest onion rings any human being has ever tasted in the history of all creation. They were the alpha and omega of onion rings, the onion rings from which all other onion rings originated.
I took my time there, and walked slowly down to Karlovo Namesti, where I tracked down the pub across from the Sony Center, which, incidentally, is called “Kurlův Sklep” and spent several hours drinking dollar-a-liter beer in that dark, awesome little place. There were probably three or four Czechs sitting around in there, staring morosely into their beer as though they’d just gotten the bad news that Germany does, in fact, exist after all, and they’re facing the alarming prospect that there could be a whole goddamn world of weird people out there, just waiting to storm in and turn on lights.
I loved it.
After that, crossing off items on an excellent list, I drifted up to Nebe’s, which is in a sort of vaulted cellar and was full of the sort of people that are pretty interesting to see on a safari, but who you probably wouldn’t want to touch or smell. I guess they have a whole lot of crazy themed nights and stuff, but since it was still Christmas time, and since I guess they’re going to be renovating soon, they didn’t have any of that going, just cheap liquor and good atmosphere.
At that point I realized I really should have gone to the Marquis de Sade first, since it was way up at the other end of the city, so I headed out into the fog and was pretty much stone-cold sober again by the time I got there. Most bars are like certain kinds of people—bars in the States are often like frat boys, loud and mindless. Bars in Sweden are like neurotic middle-aged women: too clean, too apologetic, too skeptical. The Marquis de Sade is like Jack Nicholson. It’s a big, loud, friendly, raucous place with beat couches and a place where they obviously sometimes have live jazz. It was my kind of place.
By then it was late. I had little time left. I had to choose wisely. So I went to Le Clan.
Clan, the last and most lauded spot on a list which otherwise consisted of dark, timeless basement pubs with smoky atmosphere and cheap beer, was not quite what I expected. It’s difficult to spot on a rather dodgy street in the bottom corner of Prague, and you go up the stairs and knock on the door and this big-ass guy who’s obviously in the Russian (or Czech) mob answers.
Now, my plan was to nonchalantly say, “Good evening,” in Czech. Unfortunately, while I am apparently able to mimic Polish brilliantly, I inexplicably mangle Czech beyond all comprehension. The words emerge from my mouth in the manner of Lavinia’s entrance towards the end of Titus Andronicus: ravaged, with their hands cut off and their tongues cut out, incapable of all but the most primitive means of communication.
The guy didn’t seem that concerned. He jerked his head like I was supposed to go in, so I did.
Clan was full of a lot of blue light and shadows and comfortable couches and what looked like the Czech equivalents of Patrick Bateman. There were mirrors mounted horizontally in the bathroom (all the better to snort your coke off, my dear) and I think some people were having sex under the ping-pong table in the basement. I got the impression that it’s probably a hell of an after-hours club; the kind of place you go with a group of friends after you’ve already been to three other bars and you’re beginning to experience a mild inability to stand up. But alone and on your first drink of the night, it’s sort of like having a beautiful woman try to rape you: oddly unsettling, but you know that under other circumstances, you’d be all for it.
So I had a half-liter of beer and got out of there, vowing to go back one day in the company of a native, so that I may be inducted in their strange ways, and perhaps be made their chief.
I met Len’s friend Andrea for lunch the next day. She led me on a brisk, disorienting walk through the warren of central Prague to a big, empty restaurant where I got some sort of rabbit dish for about four bucks. She is almost improbably good-looking, as though her cheekbones don’t entirely exist within the realm of Euclidian geometry, and her accent combines the sliding vowels of a posh English with the skidding consonants of a native Czech speaker, and the result is quite startling. I finally got to have that discussion about how silly Czech politics are at present, and we talked about how of all the endless possibilities extolled in childhood, you eventually reach a point in your life where you realize that you are really but one actuality.
After that, there was nothing left to do but return home, pack up my stuff, and head out to the bus station. It was cold and foggy there, and I shared a Twix bar with a man from Kowloon. I was seated on the bus next to a massive black man from Romania who promptly fell asleep on my shoulder.
It was a long ride back home.
What I’m Reading
Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile in Power
Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography
Richard Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1960-1969.
