Prague Sketches
By Slaven Svetinovic
I spent the last fall and winter in Prague. How it came about is not a big surprise: books have been written about twentysomethings quitting corporate jobs to teach and backpack around Europe, and I certainly do not want to add another story to the tired cliché. Yet as someone born behind the Iron Curtain, and having a sense of pride about it, I felt that there was a greater force guiding my return than your average mid-twenties existential crisis and a few thousand dollars in the bank.
“I need to reconnect with my roots!” I told my friends. “I have become too Americanized during the last ten years. My ancestors fought against the Ottoman occupation and endured Nazi bombings, and here I am, stressing about court filings and working ten-hour days.”
I quit my job at the law firm and bought a plane ticket to Europe. I promised everyone that I would return with expert accordion skills and amazing stories of busking the streets of Bucharest with roving gypsies.
Before I continue I should mention that the ending of this story is somewhat anti-climatic, as here I am writing this in an empty room, half-opened storage boxes scattered across the floor, browsing the legal/paralegal job section of Craigslist. However, soul-searching is not an easy task and though we live in a terribly materialistic society, I believe that personal success should not be measured on the number of things in one’s possession or the ability to pay the bills. (Having said all that, if you know anyone who is hiring, aside from Trader Joe’s, please let me know.)
But I digress.
Somewhere along the line, I was offered a job to teach English at a university in Prague, and after spending a few grueling and emotionally draining months in my hometown in Bosnia, seeing relatives and friends I had not seen in fifteen years (another story for another time), I decided to take it. I was not ready to go back to America and I thought that spending six months in Prague with a lot of free time would be a great way to postpone my return. Plus, the idea of letting an ESL kid like me teach English seemed like the biggest coup of my life that I had no choice but to accept.
Oh, the magical Prague! Like Kafka or Rilke, I will spend my nights wandering the labyrinthine streets of the Old Town, and writing my Bildungsroman in smoke-filled cafes. I hopped on a train in Croatia and arrived in the Czech capital some twenty hours later.
The first few days felt claustrophobic. I had visited Prague two years earlier, yet this time the city seemed to be engulfed in a consumerist frenzy, with shopping malls and department stores bustling on every corner. I wandered aimlessly around the center trying to avoid hordes of Italian tourists hauling shopping bags and souvenirs. I could not walk a few blocks without being invited for a good time at a “cabaret” by scantily-clad women with sexy eastern European accents, or coming across drunken English blokes singing football anthems and throwing beer bottles over the street.
Things were different from what I had expected. I heard a rumor about a scam involving foreigners, most of them Americans, of course, being asked by attractive women in bars to buy them drinks and later being presented with a bill of up to a thousand dollars per round. A friend told me a story about his buddy getting his leg broken by a bouncer wielding a crowbar in front of an ATM outside of a strip club in Budapest. His friend had stumbled inside innocently enough, ordered a beer, only to be given a bill for three hundred dollars some time later. When he explained that he did not have enough money to pay, he was escorted to the nearby ATM by three large Hungarian men with shaved heads, one of whom was holding a crowbar, who politely asked him to withdraw the required amount. Unfortunately, he refused. Suffice it to say, the night did not end well for the friend, who ended up limping to the nearby hospital, his shinbone jutting out of his leg.
How disappointing! I thought I had escaped the over-stimulation, the rampant consumerism of the West and the sinful ways of the flesh, and here I was, tempted by the devil on every corner! Where was the magic? The Eastern soul? I grumbled, standing in Wenceslav Square smoking a cigarette, with people rushing past me. It’s all the damn signs! Why is it that every city in central and eastern Europe has to have these Phillips and Sony neon signs on almost every old, Baroque building in the center?
During most of the first month, I avoided the tourist traps, staying away from the castle and the bridge and walks by the river. Instead, I took the bus from the university to the center almost every night and walked the twenty minutes to the Globe, an English bookstore and café in the newer part of the city. I would pick up a few novels – Hemingway for the wistful days, Czech folk talks for the more cheerful – and sit in the café for hours, drinking coffee and reading.
I continued this routine for a few weeks until one day, while sitting in the back and reading “The Sun Also Rises” for the fifth time in my life, I realized how much the café resembled the San Francisco coffeehouses I used to frequent: customers chattering in English, English newspapers and magazines strewn across tables, bespectacled hipsters typing away on laptops…
I had crossed an ocean to end up at…Ritual?
Depressed and defeated, I took the next bus home.
………….
Oh Jesus Christ Almighty is there anything more serene than walking around the Letna park on the banks of the Vltava River overlooking the city! The bells of the ancient church towers, the rooftops a shade of red straight out of a Caravagio painting. The color of blood-soaked cherries. Elated, I stroll among the trees, leaves rustling underneath my feet and sticking to the soles of my shoes.
Autumn! I rush home in a daze and pretentiously scribble down a poem by Rilke in my journal:
The leaves fall, fall as if from far away,
like withered things from gardens deep in the sky;
they fall with gestures of renunciation.
And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.
And we all fall. This hand must fall.
look everywhere: it is the lot of all.
Yet there is one who holds us as we fall
eternally in their hands’ tenderness.
…………………………………………
Susi comes for a visit from Krakow. She arrives on the train and as soon as she steps down from the car we embark on a feverish tour of the city, stumbling in and out of pubs and museums, souvenir shops and black light theaters. We cross the Charles Bridge with a pack of tourists then follow the crowd up the hill to the Castle. We stand in awe at the bottom of the St. Vitus Cathedral then wander the rooms of the castle, through the long halls and Queen’s chambers.
On our way back to the center, we come across a kiosk advertising boat tours down the river.
“Let’s do it!” we scream, almost in unison. “Free coffee and cake!”
And then we are on a boat, sitting at a long picnic table covered with white tablecloth. Small white cups filled with coffee line both edges of the table. A waiter brings out a silver tray with a dozen pieces of chocolate cake on white plates.
When we are in the middle of the river, the Japanese couple sitting across asks us to take a photo of them. I snap a photo with an official-looking building in the background, the Parliament or the Ministry of the Interior—the guide told us earlier but I could not discern it through his thick accent.
The boat slows down when it gets to the Charles Bridge and turns around slowly. I squint when the sun comes over to our side and smile blindly at Susi. She smiles back. We take pictures of the tourists on the bridge, the park on the riverbank, and then I ask the man across the table to take a photo of Susi and me with the bridge in the background. I thank him and finish my cake. When we are almost back on land, Susi elbows me, eying the couple across the table.
“Look” she whispers, “they did not even touch their cake or coffee.”
We laugh as we get off the boat and take a stroll along the quay. I take off my jacket and throw it over my shoulder, the index finger of my hand sticking through the hook on the collar.
…………………………….
At the beginning of December, Olya, Milan, Petr and I drive to the Czech countryside. Petr’s family owns a cottage in Novy Bor, a small town near the German border, and in true Czech tradition, we are spending the weekend there for a “Christmas cottage.” Most Czechs spend their Christmas and New Year’s at their cottage outside of town, Petr explains, especially those from Prague because that is when the tourists take over the city.
The winter is dry and there is no snow, yet the wind is piercing and cold. Out in the suburbs we stop by a supermarket to buy food for the big dinner. A sack of potatoes and two large containers of mayonnaise make up the bulk of the groceries. We put the food in the trunk, next to a keg of Krusovice Cerny and a red cooler with three large fish inside. Carp, a staple of the Czech Christmas meal, I’m told.
We spend three days in a small townhouse with seven other friends. We prepare the potato salad: mashed potatoes and three days worth of the daily value of mayonaise mixed in a large plastic tub. It needs to sit for about four or five hours, they tell me, and sure enough, in our drunken reverie, we forget about it and don’t get it out of the pantry until the next day. I find it disgusting, but everyone tries it.
Later we stand around an old wood stove, stirring what is going to be carp soup and drinking beer. Milan points to the fins of the fish and asks for the word in English. Tipsy, I have a sudden mental block, pausing for a few seconds.
“Uh..flappers?” I say sheepishly. Everyone laughs. What if a student asked you that in class! they say.
In the evening we put presents underneath the Christmas tree, sticking a number on each one. Then we draw numbered pieces of paper out of a Santa Claus hat. I win a set of white scented candles.
………………………………………………….
In Prague, you can rent an old red tram made when the country was still known as Czechoslovakia, to take you and your friends, along with a few cases of beer and wine, on a two-hour ride of the city. A Tram Party!
On New Year’s Eve, we climb onto a tram full of international students from Charles University. About forty people cram inside one car, like matches in a matchbox, as the saying goes over there. We hold onto the handrails, onto each other, passing beer and wine bottles up and down and singing Christmas carols. The light in the tram is bright and strong and we can’t see anything out of the window but our reflection. When the tram passes through a crowded part of town, we stick our heads out of the window and yell at the bewildered passerby. Then the tram brakes abruptly at a stoplight and the whole car plunges forward. I land on the floor, with a group of Italian girls on top of me. They spill beer and red wine over my crotch and legs.
About an hour later, we pull into a large park in an isolated neighborhood.
“Nature calls,” the driver announces over the loudspeaker and we all laugh.
We get back inside and the tram takes us through the center and drops us off in the bottom of Petrov Hill, a park on the river bank with a panoramic view of the city. Crossing Wenceslav Square an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve is like entering a riot – the tram makes its way through hundreds of people setting off bottle rockets, fireworks, drinking wine and breaking beer bottles. Again, we stick our heads out of the window, yelling at the crowd, oblivious to the flying bottles and fireworks.
When we finally get off the tram, we are drunk and sweaty and confused and can only follow the crowd going uphill into the darkness. It is crowded when we get to the top and immediately I lose sight of my friends and wander around aimlessly, starting conversations with strangers, Germans, Poles, Australians. I lose track of time and soon people are counting down and it is midnight and everyone is yelling, happy, ecstatic. We congratulate each other and there are pictures and swigs of Champagne and drunken promises and hugs and making out and laughter…
And then fireworks go off down in the city in every color imaginable and it’s absolutely beautiful and I think of the time I visited New York on the Fourth of July and sat on a Brooklyn rooftop with my friends, drinking lukewarm beer and watching the fireworks go off across the East River, all of us just out of college and happy and full of life.
And I remember the story the guide told us at the castle, about princess Libuše, the mythical founder of Prague, who, according to the legend, stood on this hill some twelve centuries later, looking over the fertile valley where the city was going to be, and the vision of “a vast city whose glory will touch the stars” appeared before her, splendid, magical, glorious…
I close my eyes and feel the cold breeze brush against my cheeks.