And the men they dance on polka-dots
And it’s partner found, partner lost
And it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops:
It’s Closing Time.”
Leonard Cohen, Closing Time
During the course of our wanderings from neighbourhood to
neighbourhood exploring the inside of one pub after another, we
heard about a youth hostel which would be infinitely cheaper to
stay in.
The sole criteria wasn’t that it be cheap of course. There was also a pub on site where we could, if induced, or so compelled, provide free entertainment to the visiting hordes and even the locals who came sniffing around. We entertained ideas of becoming the house band for the hostel and once registered and having discussed the possibility with the manager, were sufficiently encouraged by the prospect that we naturally found it compelling to drink the night away in excess to celebrate.
Yes, predictably, that was how we passed our time the first few weeks
in Prague. There was no reasonable explanation other than the city
itself. The natives, it appeared from simple glances into the
neighbourhood pubs which on the street the hostel was located,
numbered more than any other street in Prague, that there was never a shortage of customers.
Czechs populated those pubs religiously, drinking, smoking talking
and above all, laughing, giving every appearance of fun. Why
wouldn’t we join in?
Of course the general euphoria associated with living in a new
country with a city renowned for the dangerous vortex of its hedonistic frenzy was undoubtedly a contributing factor; there was never a shortage of places to go, excuses to stop in somewhere and have a beer or two and once settled, fewer excuses still to get back up again and head back to a hostel bunk.
These people were appeased with cheap beer for generations, Albert
opined one of our first nights out, sitting quietly at a table of locals.
You can gloss over a lot of tyranny and misery with the proper
application of cheap beer. These people have rioted in the past when
the government tried to raise the beer prices so you can see this is
something they take quite seriously.
Despite the lethargy of the first week or so upon arrival we were
acutely aware, upon return to the hostel each evening that our
living situation, while tolerable, was no long term solution. Prague,
being infinitely larger than Utrecht, presented not only its own
infinity of housing problems but also a plethora of potential solutions.
The one strategy we could easily agree after only a few days was that
we had no desire to move to the expat ghetto outskirts of Prague, home of the dreaded panelaks, which to us symbolised failure, to live far from the centre in the cold, heartless concrete buildings.
You can thank, in part, Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the precursor
to the simple and efficient Functionalism movement of the 1920s and
30s, for the existence of panelaks because in many ways, they were
modelled after that design, deformed over the years by Communism
into the symbolism of the alleged material equality and collectivist
style they were peddling. They'd always been a source of cheap
housing in a city notorious for its lack of living space, a simple
answer to the question of how to be quartered in thin walled,
cheaply built edifices glorifying communism.
Ironically, they were now the great weigh station of the ex-pat life for
those living on the thin of their wits who didn't mind long bus or tram
rides back in the middle of a cold, bleak night. Communism was dead
and the foreign hedonists and pseudo intellectuals were moving in.
We decided by straw poll, the two of us in an empty non-stop bar
near the banks of the Vlatava one night, that budgeting money would
come elsewhere, not in housing. We couldn’t cheat ourselves the
experience of living in the city rather than in its suburbs. In those
dreaded paneloks.
The only place we could imagine living was in the neighbourhood
of Zizkov, which had become our headquarters, our oasis from
tourism and again, home of the street called Borivojova, which
contained the most pubs per square metre than any other city in Prague. The street our hostel was on. Zizkov, once a communist stronghold, the home of the local KGB headquarters, was named after Jan Žižka, the famous general who in 1420 had led peasant rebels, along with Hussite troops from Prague to victory over the Bohemian King Sigismund in the Battle of Vitkov Hill.
Another strong point in favour of Zizkov was that there weren't many
places you could actually escape the disease of people gathering in what would otherwise be pristine pockets of Pragueness, the local pivnices still holding on to their blue collar perspectives and prices, unwilling or perhaps incapable of surrendering to the mass collection plate of consumerist tourism, the parasitic nature of all tourism in fact.
Nearly everywhere you turned you would find a collection of dead-enders who had fled their respective countries to find not only hedonism but jobs in Prague. Jobs so they could stay longer, drink more, pretend to be on the cusp of something very important. In the early and mid 90s they liked to regurgitate the notion created by foreign media that they would one day constitute a movement of some kind, literary, artistic and glorious, fancying themselves post-Communist Hemmingways and Joyces and Steins.
I suppose it was to be expected in a way, Westerners flooding in,
held back and out precisely for their decadence, their unseemly
wealth, insatiable greed. The Americans held a disproportionate
majority of these temporary immigrants as though the word had been
disseminated solely through college radio so that the population
of semi literate American university students led the charge.
And if that weren’t enough, there was such heavy media coverage thatyou were almost guaranteed back then, if you stayed a few months, to be interviewed by someone for something but always with the same particular angle, conjuring up Paris of the 20s and 30s.
It was only a joke if you took it seriously and by the time we'd
arrived, this crowd had eventually, like a shifting tide, begun to
trickle away, replaced by a newer corps even more intent on quantity
over substance. Yet you could still find hard-boiled Expats, lording
over some collective of artistic wanna-bes with misguided senses of
cool, all trying to out-hip each other as if it were they were doing the
bump in unison.
So eventually we came to the agreement that we would stay in the
hostel for as long as it took to find housing in Zizkov and in the
evenings or afternoons, when possible, we would rehearse in front
of hostel patrons.
*****
One night we were in U Stare Pani killing time with cigarettes and
no particular goal in mind once the time had been killed other than
staring at the bar maid, a particularly engaging Moravian champagne
of a woman with flowing chestnut curls, dimpled cheeks, bright brown
eyes and a careless smile that whispered into every male heart it
was pointed at.
It was quite some time before the first act was coming on and we
weren't even certain we would stay long enough to hear the initial chords when a foursome of performance artists arrived - we could sense they were performance artists, dressed as they were in a variety of costume but carrying no musical instruments thus clearly not the opening act.
They took a table near us and set about their little gag: Milos,
Jaroslav, Robert and Ivo, all of whom shared a spacious attic duplex
in Prague 6, Bubenec, each speaking in character of their chosen
character: Milos as T G Masaryk, the Czech ideologist and
politician, dressed in an overcoat with woollen collar open at the
neck covering a white shirt, wearing a distinctive pince-nez,
whitish goatee covering the area around his mouth and chin.
Jaroslav as 1984 winner of Nobel Prize for Literature and poet,
Jaroslav Seifert, native of Zizkov, dressed in simple peasant clothes,
flannel shirt and stained grey sweater his large face surrounded by a mane of white hair, the only one of the foursome without facial hair, so chosen Jaroslav later confided because he had difficult, with his light complexion and fair hair, at growing facial hair at all.
Robert as Jan Hus, populist reformer, most imposing of them all with
his hair in typical medieval tonsure, long, almost triangular white
beard (although this was a sticky point, Robert admitted that
although oft depicted as such, he wasn’t entirely certain Hus had a
beard) dressed in a burlap robe and wearing a paper hat with pictures
of the devil drawn on it, which is what was alleged he was made to
wear whilst imprisoned, speaking Bohemian rather than Latin, which
was translated for us sotto-voce along the lines of Lord Jesus Christ,
I am willing to bear most patiently andhumbly this dreadful,
ignominious, and cruel death for Thy gospel and for the preaching of
Thy World.
And finally Ivo as Antonin Dvorak, flowing handlebar moustache
speckled with grey and white, waistcoat, bow tie, black overcoat and
holding of course, a baton.
It doesn't make any sense, Albert protested, shaking his head and
wagging his finger simultaneously. Firstly, you're all of different eras
and save for Seifert over there, you'd all be dead so such a gathering
would be physically impossible.
Oh no, Seifert corrected, I'd be quite dead as well.
Well, it's artistic and tourist-oriented, Jan Hus explained. You see this
is primarily a method of promoting cultural awareness for both Czechs and tourists alike, dressing up like this we promote Czech history and culture. Of course, we aren't always IN character but on the other hand, it is rather enjoyable to gauge peoples' reactions when for example, after a long day of socialising with the hoi polloi, working hard for our grant from the Czech Tourism Authority, we enter a palace such as this eager to quench our collective thirst and forget about the burdens which harangue our mutual characters.
Seifert, or I, rather, have nearly 30 volumes of collected poems,
born in Zizkov 1901, journalist until 1950 when I started being
respected and paid enough as a poet to earn a living on that alone.
Never toeing the party line. Want to hear my acceptance speech from
December 1984 in Stockholm? He cleared his throat, but we protested
we didn't have enough time…Of course, he interrupted, by then I was
very old and very weak, not like now…
Of course, it's not all about government grants or even eccentricity,
Antonin added patiently. In order to understand those with whom we want to identify, we mimic them. I love Dvorzak's music and yet can't
play any musical instrument, have no talent or inclination towards
composing myself and of course, philosophically I would add that I
could never assimilate entirely, just as we are alive acting as dead
people who were once alive, Albert. It would create a split
personality, a duality between the person I am imitating and myself
and I would honestly struggle to delineate the difference between
myself and Dvorak.
Oh, c'mon! Masaryk laughed, slapping his palm on the table. No
amount of imagination, no costume, no nothing could ever create the
illusion that you were he or as talented or frankly, anything. Face
it, you're out of work, not composing. Instead of creating software
programmes, or sweeping crumbs off of a white linen table in a fancy
restaurant populated by politicians or cultural icons or German
tourists you have placed yourself in this vortex of character
imitation, not enough yourself so why not be someone else, correct?
Well for that matter, Dvorak confessed, I'm probably more entitled
to dress as Goofy or Donald Duck at the Euro Disney than I am a
famous composer but character imitation being what it is, guild-less
and free, well, there is no prerequisite and the entire plausibility
of it ultimately comes down to me. I can be prideful of being the
best Dvorak I can be but Goofy? Good or bad or indifferent, I would
be simply lost.
Masaryk scoffed and the conversation was becoming uncomfortably
heated as though all of the petty controversies polluting the daily
life of four grown men who lived together, spent most of their days
together dressed as other people, parading characters for tourists
and countrymen, was finally coming to a head, their frazzled ability
to maintain a semblance of civility between each other, as it would
appear a suddenly famous rock band whose fame had grown their egos to unacceptable proportions and led to their ultimate split up, we could sense the fabric unravelling.
We left them, Seifert warming up to his acceptance speech, Jan Hus
giving speeches about sacrifice, Dvorak waving his baton to an
imaginary orchestra and Masaryk rearranging the ashtray and
straightening the table cloth.
*****
Albert had no interest in working, even though he'd watched me spend hours some afternoons with a Czech dictionary and the local newspaper's want ads looking for housing and employment. He spent entire mornings undercover, snoring through breakfast and sometimes lunch even though I would be in the backyard outside the window of our dorm room practicing the saxophone against the walls of the building.
Our search continued, stuttered, distracted. We asked nearly anyone
we came across if they were aware of any vacant flats. Even a solitary
room would have sufficed. We wanted to end the sense of temporality
living in the hostel provoked. But just like in Utrecht, even with money, finding a place was difficult.
One day we met Tibor, a friend of a friend, outside a pub on Executioner's Hill. Tibor had a girlfriend, Marie, who was staying at his flat and was paying for a flat of her own that she didn’t need any more. So hers was available. He led us from Executioner’s Hill through a labyrinth of hills and side streets we were utterly unfamiliar with until we finally came to an old building across from a small, triangular park right on the corner of a pronounced intersection of Koněvova and Jana Želivského and on a tram line. The elevator barely fit one so we walked the three flights of stairs, left at the hallway to the end, in the right hand corner, of the floor, Tibor pushed open the door to reveal to us our new home.
Immediately in front was a shower. To the right of the shower a three
foot corridor which opened into the main room and to the left, just
before the symbolic entranceway of the main room, the kitchenette.
Just to the left of the front wall separating the kitchenette from
the main room was a tinier corridor which led to a small cubby hole
of a room, the size of a closet, really.
Being state subsidised, it was cheap anyway so we weren't expecting
much. There was a mattress set against one wall and behind it a
small bookshelf whose half dozen Czech books Tibor leaned down to
peruse before picking up a copy of Post Office by Bukowski. I love
Bukowski, he exclaimed in his very limited English as though
suddenly breaking through the hush of our inability to communicate
in much more than hand signals, Tibor' English being raw and our
Czech being absolutely nil outside of learning the proper case
declinations for the word beer as needed.
Bukowski's great, man, I exclaim, suddenly buoyant, shocked at the
discovery, amazed that Tibor had heard of him, not realising the reach of Bukowski in the international subterranean world we were entering.
You like? He asked pointing around the room. Very good. We take.
Our English had began to mimic his unconsciously as though by
speaking in broken English we might be better understood. Like people who talk louder when speaking English to a non Anglophile as if the louder the language is spoken, the easier it is to understand.
To celebrate, although we had no idea that was the purpose when
Tibor led us from the apartment down the wide street to a pub table,
we were compelled to get inebriated. The speed and subtle fury with
which we drank through Clint Eastwood clenched teeth, the savagery
with which we attack first the beers and then, as Tibor became
emboldened, calling the waiter over, going into a long monologue
punctuated with laughter which could only have been asides to more
serious business and then waiting expectantly as though the
announcement of his first child were eminent, demonstrated to us the
liquor and the glass – Becherovka, he taught patiently, draining it
in a quick gulp and urging us to do the same.
There weren't many in the restaurant yet and the few dwindlers
carried on their own languages in whispering corners. One shot after
another, chased with the beer which the waiter motored back and
forth with a speedy predictability. A man was picking his teeth with
his salad fork behind us. To the right, I could almost discern in my drunken hallucination that a pensioner couple were talking in hushed tones about the dog's bowel movements and the speakers placed around the room in corners near the ceiling, purred some strange Bohemian folk music.
We were able to converse only by the limitations of the palm-sized
Czech-English dictionary Albert carried with him every where. But
what did it matter really? We weren't saying anything important.
Bonding like apes before language was invented, simply grunts and
hand signals. I faded in and out of these communications,
transported back again to Anastasia for the first time in weeks as though she were my homeland I was dreaming of and the faintest whiff of home cooking sent me tumbling backwards down the stairs unable to break my fall.
We were in a café in Amsterdam. Café Hoppe in fact, the brown café I
had come to frequent because the book seller across the road was
particularly good and one of my favourite coffee shops was just
around the corner. We were in Amsterdam for the day on the premise
of scouting a few jazz clubs we would enquire about and perhaps line
up a gig or two. Albert had stayed home nursing the last stages of a
flu that had bedridden him for days.
We were sitting at an outside table as the scenery rolled past us
like intricate waves peopled and dazzling with the enormity of
anonymous humanity washing by. Anastasia had been recounting a
morsel of her past – a recent past of course, I knew nothing about
her, no story she told was older than a year as though she had only
existed at once, out of nowhere, just beginning that evening in
Paris when I'd first met her. But even still, it was a morsel, like
a crumb from one of the biscuits they served with the koffie
verkeerd in the morning when just around the corner a baker was
doing a bustling business.
The air was ripe with rain. Only that morning we'd been caught in a
sudden downpour, soaked to the bone as we wandered through a
museum and later snacked on apple pancakes washed down with black coffee. For hours it had cleared and now the clouds had returned, anxious to begin another hymnal of precipitation.
She was explaining one of the gigs that had gone wrong in Milan. The
microphone had started feeding back inexplicably half way through
her morose recalibration of Wild Is the Wind and the microphone
started crackling briefly before the sound went out all together.
She carried on with the song whilst the crowd murmured its
distraction and Christ, she said, stirring her coffee absently, I
felt as though I had just been fucked in some back alley and left
lying in the road. What was I singing for? Nobody was paying
attention? Those fucking people in Milan that night were all like that –
transparent and shallow. Wonderful stylish clothes and ghouls
lurking on the inside. They couldn't wait to be distracted, time was
wasting. Finally I stopped singing and walked off. A few cat calls
followed. It was ok for them to ignore me but for me to ignore them,
it was an insult. The manager tried to placate me but I was having
none of it. I'll never play in this shit hole again I remember
screaming in French to the dumb Italian who was torn between the
now-partisan crowd and me, the diva singer who was packing up her
things to leave.
I’m aware of it, you know, she said coyly. I know how difficult I can
be to work with. I've got to have everything just right and if
there's so much as a hair out of place on the trumpeter, I simply
can't stay focused. But this club had already had a week of me and a
week of problems. Lighting was terrible, the air was damp and
smelled like an auld whore with all those fancy women in their
fashionable clothes. I felt like I was suffocating up there every
night. Do you know what that's like? Of course you don't. You and
Albert just play, you don't give a shit. The walls could fall down
around you like a poorly constructed theatre set and you probably
wouldn't even notice. Too damned drunk half the time, aren't you?
Well anyway, that was it for the club. I told my manager I was
through with Milan in general. I gave him an earful of the treachery
that city had displayed throughout its history. And all the while he
would pat my arm and my shoulder as though I were some mangy dog shivering in the cold. I wanted to punch him or scratch his face, leave him with a mark his jealous wife would ask about later that evening when he came home and stripped his sweaty clothes off of his garlic-laced body.
She lit another cigarette then, even though there was still the old
one burning and then she stood up. Even thinking about it now brings
back the anger. I really hated that place Witold. It's so much nicer
here. The people aren't such….barbarians.
She took off for the bathroom to powder her nose or stare at her
reflection in the mirror, whatever it was women did when they used
the bathroom as an escape route. And whilst she was gone I sat there
sipping my little glass of Amstel, looking over at the chair she had
just been sitting in. I started imagining a day when she would be
gone again and I would be seated like this on another sort of day
like this in this very same café remembering just this precise
moment with the empty chair but Anastasia still here, gone for only
a few moments rather than months, sure to return from the bathroom
composed again, apologising for worthless emotions and asking that
we both have a glass or two of whiskey because she loves the
peaty taste so and then we'd be taking off on another rollercoaster,
drinking and talking until we were both obliterated, obligated to
maintaining the high, bouncing from venue to venue as though the
motion were the only thing holding us up.
*****
And so just like that, with sudden discovery of a flat and reasonable
prospects of domesticity, the ache of Anastasia had returned for good
again. I hadn’t escaped it by leaving Utrecht after all. Tibor and Albert were still there at the table, fumbling through conversation. The old pains had returned but we had a flat again. We had a home. Something for Anastasia to come back to, if she ever decided to come back again.
Tibor had held another lengthy discussion with the waiter this time,
unbeknownst to us, to switch our shots from Beckerovka to Absinthe.
The name of this comes from the Greek, Tibor attempted to elaborate.
Whilst I’d been day dreaming I’d barely noticed that we’d been joined by Marie, who had a much better facility for English and had arrived to explain some of the nuances of the flat to us but instead ended up translating for Tibor, who thought it suddenly important to explain to us in preparation of drinking that the word Absinthe came from from the word absinthion, which in his understanding meant undrinkable
in Greek. Tibor lit a Start cigarette and gulping down a mouthful of Mestan while Marie translated for us. The French used to use it in Algeria in the 1830s to combat malaria.
The shots were lined up in front of us as his preamble continued.
At some point, wine became too expensive because of vineyard
destructions created by the Phylloxera, insect that had been imported from the English in the mid 1800s and fed on grape roots which in the end, caused great destruction to grape vines in France. As a result, the working class in Paris stopped drinking wine and moved on gratefully, it appeared, to Absinthe, a far cheaper industrial alcohol.
Thereafter, Parisians took to it, moving from one café to the next
during Green Hour, stinking of Absinthe. Toulouse-Lautrec was
rumoured to have carried a hollow walking stick filled with a
draught of it, sometimes adding various supplements to it like bitters,
or wine, or champagne. But here we shall take it in a pure shot, without the boorish traditional burning sugar and spoon – just shots for men, straight down. He raised his thimble like glass of green liquid and urged it down with Albert and I following in dreadful pursuit.
And that night was a hoax, a deep mystery we were buried under.
Nothing was recallable. Tibor took us down all sorts of memory
lanes, the ugliest stretches he could remember until even his own
words, slurring and weighted, began to lose all meaning and
thereafter it was all a blank save for the horrible waking the
following afternoon on the floor of our new flat, heads pounding.
*****
And, as I'd hoped, the distraction of moving, the diversion of a new
language, new culture, different people all conspired to rid me of
the listlessness of emotion I couldn‘t control or appease, which was catacombed and awaiting unearthing. Anastasia was in the background for far too many moments, a longing I once again couldn‘t escape.
The flavour was bittersweet. She was there like a vague toothache
that at times would throb and remind you of the potential pain and
then in an instant gone again – there was too much stimuli around,
too much of the culture's aroma in every room, around every corner.
And thus, there could be times when all was forgotten. There could
be times when she could have passed through me and I'd not have
noticed, committed to forgetting as though the effort itself weren't
a reminder.
Some Sundays we attended the little literary gatherings at Radost where everyone smugly played their roles as ex-pat geniuses. Albert and I sat in the back, drinking overpriced bottles of Budvar, chain smoking, wondering where all the talent went. It was a kinky breed of non fame and non fortune and a lot of people kidding themselves. There were a few interesting writers but certainly no one who was going to jump start a cultural revolution or be remembered fondly a generation later as the patriarch of a literary movement. No matter how desperately the foreign, and primarily American media came in droves attempting to portray it at its birth.
Albert was affected by Anastasia's disappearance almost as much as I
was although his heart wasn't as committed in the rubber room – her
singing in Holland had given us what seemed like instant credibility
and without her we were out there, a desultory duet of double bass and tenor sax, insolubly brief, irreconcilably flat and uninspired as though all the confidence we'd gained initially had been punched out of us and there we were, bloodied and crawling in the streets again waiting for another break.
The same lethargy which had handicapped us before was as simple as a grammar school mathematics problem; dreams plus alcohol equalled dreams and little more.
Yes, we’d made it this far but certainly not down to any hard work on
our part. The cash settlement and boredom had gotten us this far. The
quest for somewhere else, that incessant canary in the mine shaft, got us somewhere else but the need for movement quenched by drinking, was no artistic expression. The dreams of something irretrievable.
What’s there to be motivated by, Albert scoffed in the middle of on of
my frequent guilt trips on drinking too much and playing too little; like a little tour guide I highlighted the historical achievements and disasters.
We aren’t going to be famous, Albert, I would state, writing our obituary aloud. We don’t even have that drive in us. We are alcoholics in search of window dressings. We want to justify ourselves despite there being no justification so we lean on the crutch of being musicians. The irony of course, not even talented musicians, just musicians. Just an excuse to travel, a furthering of drinking which we can justify by the periodic gig, the illusion of being musicians. Otherwise, we’re just glorified drunks.
No dreams, no futures. Hell, maybe even no discernible pasts. Just
existing because we’re too cowardly to even kill ourselves.
Albert sneered, taking a large slurp of beer. Why I think you’re on to something there Witold, no pulling the wool over your eyes, is there?
We’re drunks with no guidance? So what? Who cares why we’re
sitting here? Who cares how we got here? We are here. We have
enough money to drink and we drink. As far as I’m concerned the music is not a crutch of any kind. It’s an augmentation. I could happily continue on as I had in New York, reading, listening to music, drinking myself to death slowly. This is merely a diversion en route. Don’t kid yourself. Fame, success? Perhaps you should lay off the delusional world you are inhabiting for awhile. Take a vacation into reality. You’re a drunk. I’m a drunk. We could both simply remain drunks, could have stayed right where we were. But it wasn’t enough. So we’re drunks in a different backdrop, a different country, hearing a different language around us. We’re drunks with side interests in music. So the fuck what? Since when did we obtain a higher purpose? You’re beginning to irritate me with this self-righteous self-pitying bullshit. If you don’t like being a drunk, stop being a drunk. If you want to make something of your life, make something of your life. But please don’t insult me, sitting here, wringing your hands about what we “should” be doing. As far as I’m concerned, I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. If you want to elevate yourself to another plane, go for it. I’m quite happy where I am.
I said nothing for some time, turning his words in my head and trying,
like that game where you hold a small board in your hands and shake it around trying to make little steel balls fall into the holes placed strategically around the board, to make sense of them. Albert wasn’t wrong but was he right? I thought back to the years before I’d even met him realising I’d done even less back then. Still drinking just as much but never even considering leaving the neighbourhood. So perhaps he was right. Perhaps I was over complicating a succession of events.
Perhaps having lived so long feeling nothing and having then allowed
myself to feel something, a vague sense of something if that with
Anastasia and then observing it removed, observing myself struggle to find meaning…it had been the better response all along. Let’s just drink more and wait for the end.
Maybe we should try and find another singer, Albert suggested finally, perhaps a tingling of guilt for the bluntness of his appraisal reaching him.
It had started to rain, driving us back and as we sat beneath a canopy and slurped, observant of the shapes passing before us.
What would be the point? We're not going to find another Anastasia.
I hated these sessions of pointless speculation that we so often
rounded to on afternoons like this.
Well, I hate to be crass, but you're not going to find another
Anastasia anyway. You've got something weird and clichéd invested
in it. Infatuation, lost love, longing. I'm only thinking of finding another singer. I’m not too picky. We haven’t got much to offer. Perhaps if we did have more to offer, perhaps if we did find another singer you might find it distracting. So maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all. I’m sorry if I trampled on your dreams by getting drunk incessantly. I hadn’t realised how important the distraction of trying to achieve something was going to be to your sanity. He let the crack of a smile escape him, waving the waiter over and slapping me on the shoulder. Look, it’s not over, Witold. It might feel like it to you, but it’s not. Even the roller coaster has to stop at certain times to let some of the puking passengers off and let more enthusiasts on. Just be patient.
*****
I renewed my writing campaign knowing how well it had worked from
Utrecht. Afternoons after work, evading the plain clothes ticket
inspectors from tram to tram until I'd made it back to the
neighbourhood and slid easily into a chair at a boozy table at the
far end of a bar room where the smoke and smut of blue collar fates
had collected like a grime on the walls of buildings. The beer would
arrive, the piece of paper scored and I would open a Czech study
book and another, smaller notebook used to pen these waking thoughts of affairs from far away.
They weren't devotional letters in word, the act of course bordered
on zealotry, but I was careful to couch perceived emotions in
innocuous terms as though I were writing to her about two people I
knew, lovers I'd seen and deciphered and calculated. These bar rooms
were safe for this exercise. Private. Populated by entirely male faces,
there were no couples, no hand holding, no stolen moments of intimacy.
And if an auld man would saunter over to my table with a beer in his
hand curious about my pecking away in the notebook with a variety of pens, I would add the smudges of our stilted conversation between the lines which I constructed to depict Prague to Anastasia as anything but what it was; debaucherous, homely juxtapositions of insanity and mirage.
The only piece I didn't hold back on was the truth that it wasn't only I
who wanted her back but Albert as well despite his flippant denials.
We were struggling without her on stage. She knew of course, the
legitimacy her vocals lent to our performances. We almost seemed
competent once and now we were plucking away at an internal illness
we couldn't define. Colicky moments of inspiration were infrequent. We were lost. I hinted. We needed her singing to charm as though we were performing in front of a crowd of cobras.
But I didn't let on in these letters to her. Instead, I let her know between the lines that it was a struggle. We were eating crumbs when we weren't pillaging our brains with beer and circular conversations in a language we didn't understand. Come back to us and we can really stun this city. But Albert and I alone were bicycle mimes, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere.
And then perhaps like someone rubbing a magic charm over and over
every day in the hopes something would come of it with these
letters, eventually there was a scrap.
A postcard from Budapest. I am here for a two week tour, was all she
wrote.
To me, a clear invitation and I didn't bother waiting to contemplate
it any further. I'd just gotten back from work and Albert was just
warming up to a mid afternoon rant about wars and diseases and
divine punishment and trying to drag me back around the corner for a few quick pints before we headed out for the night. He was pretending the postcard didn't exist on the one hand, careful not to become too overanxious about the possibilities and twisting with curiosity on the other hand, wondering if this might be the beginning all over again.
I've no idea when the next train for Budapest is, I announced as I
quickly threw what few clean clothes I had into a sack and busied
myself with trying to calm down. In a matter of minutes I was packed
and heading out the door. Good luck, Albert mumbled, waving half
heartedly as though he didn't expect to see me back.
The excitement was short-lived. The last train had departed two
hours previous and the next one wasn't until 7:30 the next morning.
I returned to the flat, distraughtly calculating the postmark and a
two week tour – how long into had she been when she'd finally
decided to write? Where in Budapest would I find her with no clues?
What twisted game inspired her?
*****
It was no simple jaunt, a 7 hour train ride to Budapest that saw me,
mind racing with possibilities and scenarios, each mile a prolonged
torture of expectation, each mile closer to what I hoped or expected
might be an answer of some kind.
I didn't know how much time I had and I didn't know where I was to
begin looking for her. But it had to be fairly simple. Jazz club gigs
couldn't be too a plenty, I reasoned.
The only question was finding where they were and who was playing.
The problem is, Anastasia had an odd tendency to sing under
different names, depending on her mood. I knew this because she'd
mentioned it off-handedly one afternoon when we were rowing along
the Oude Gracht in Utrecht.
She was sat with her arms around her knees, looking up at me as though from an imagined world. Do you know how many different stage names I have, she asked. Of course not. I grunted and shrugged, rowing. Ten?
She rolled her eyes and tried to catch a ray of sun that had suddenly showed itself from behind a cloud.
Three. Depending on my mood. Do you think that's how many moods I have, three? I shrugged again. I've seen at least five I smirked.
But I'm expecting if it's only three, the categories are rather broad.
They are. Up, down and indifferent.
And what are the names then? I started rowing faster, thinking we
were nearing the Ledig Erf and how much I wanted to grab an indoor
table before all the cyclists started showing up in their Lycra
biking outfits. I could almost taste the wheat beer on my lips and
see the chess board between us.
I'll tell you one, she demurred. See if you can figure out which
mood it represents. She closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her
head as though transforming herself, or preparing to transform
herself. I thought how odd it might be if she spontaneously
combusted and what I would do to put out the fire before the row
boat went up like an aquatic box of kindling and I'd be forced into
the canal, treading water and trying to gather up all her ashes.
Flavia Arbessi, she whispered, leaning forward as my body bent and
pulled with the motion of the oars. I stopped rowing and the boat
continued skimming along the surface with the momentum of my sweat.
We drifted like that for a few moments silent as the sun slid back behind the stage above us and I attempted calculating the hidden symbolisms.
Flavia. Well let's see, I debated. Isn't the origin of the name
Latin, for yellow? A blonde? More fun? Couldn't be a down name.
Yellow, blonde is too optimistic a colour isn't it? On the other
hand, perhaps you're trying to establish a sense of irony with that
stage name. Flavia in a depressive, suicidal mood…
She splashed water at me from the side of the boat. Why not
indifferent, she demanded. We were just coming around the bend and I steered the boat towards the bank in preparation for unloading to the Ledig Erf. Because indifference would be symbolised by some sort of unisex name like Francis or Robin or something. I grabbed at the mooring and stood up out of the boat, holding out my hand to pull her up.
Well, I'd never use Francis or Robin for a stage name.
Why not? Robin, singing like a bird? Like little Edith Piaf?
Her nickname was the sparrow, not the robin.
Ok, I'll guess Flavia is for your up mood then.
I pulled her onto the bank and then yanked the boat up behind her.
So what's the answer? She smiled sweetly, watching an approaching
barge distractedly. I can't say really. I'll leave it for you to
figure out some afternoon when you're all by yourself and have
nothing better to think about…
I didn't have so much as guidebook to Budapest, knew nothing of the
language, had no map and no idea where to begin. Looks like it'll
have to be the auld standby, I amused myself in thinking. The
alcoholic's tour guide, hitting the locals and trying to milk as
much information as possible while watering my imagination with
Hungarian beer. I didn't even know what Hungarian beer tasted like.
So many bridges to cross.
By evening I'd accumulated a map and the names and address of five
different jazz clubs. I'd spent most of the late afternoon wandering
around through crowds; picking out faces and noting each one of them was not her. Not surprising. What are the odds after all, to find a familiar face among the hidden random in a city of Hapsburgan bloodlines? For the purposes of distraction, I stepped into a wine bar marked by the dilapidated characters gathered inside.
There was an auld and fat peasant woman standing behind a table
holding three different buckets of wine with ladles in them. I
merely pointed and she filled up a plastic cup. Around me pensioners
were smoking and playing cards. A few gypsy kids hung out by the
lone arcade game, begging cigarettes from stragglers and
entertaining themselves by imagining making millions in gun running.
I drank a watery white wine, smoking distractedly, ignoring the fact
I hadn't bothered trying to find a place to sleep that night. I
would put all my eggs in one basket. I would find Anastasia and stay
with her. As long as it took.
But there was no Anastasia. I found that out after enquiries at
three different jazz and blues clubs that ranged from seedy to
opulent. She played here last night, the bartender in the third club
informed me as he poured a German lager for me. Unbelievable voice.
Haunting. She was here for nearly two weeks but I'm afraid you've
missed her. Last night was the finale.
Of course the bartender had no idea where she was headed next. Do
you know her, he asked suspiciously. A groupie, I explained
half-heartedly, stung by the nearness of my miss for fuck's sake. If
I'd only caught yesterday afternoon's train here, the story would
have had a happy ending. Do you know where she was staying, I asked, grasping at straws. He shrugged. No idea, mate. But she sure had a lovely voice.
Back in the flat in Prague I returned empty-handed. Albert regarded
me from behind a book with the walls vibrating with a Brahms
concerto when I dragged myself home the following afternoon. What
did you expect, really, he surmised. What is this, some movie you're
writing the ending to? C'mon. It was rather ingenious of her, wasn't
it? Close enough to smell but too far away to touch. How bittersweet
for you.
What difference does it make? If she's out on gigs that means she's
already doing well enough. Do you really imagine she's going to come
rushing back here breathlessly urging us for the chance to play
together again as a trio?
What fucking difference indeed. Only my heart on a skewer. Heart
kebab. Care for a taste? Marinated in futility, lightly salted and
deep fried in false hope. We really should find another singer,
Albert ventured hopefully. And where would we find a singer
comparable to her? Are we just going to stumble upon someone as
though the streets are lined with them?
We played a gig of our own a week later. My heart wasn't in it. We'd
both had far too much to drink before we'd gone on stage and if we'd
been electric, they'd have pulled the plug. Instead, we were
ignored. What's worse than being ignored? Being forgotten? The
conversations in the crowd only grew louder, hoping to drown us out.
We really should learn a few standards, Albert remarked one evening
after we'd been drinking beer outside all afternoon listening to
Coltrane from a small garden next door to us.
Standards?! Why so by comparison everyone will know how bad we are? I think we're best sticking with being too bizarre to decipher. It's our only strength.
One afternoon we ran into Pavel again. We hadn't seen him since our
first afternoon in Prague and we greeted him as though we'd grown up
as neighbours and hadn't seen each other since the erection of the
Berlin wall. He was taken aback by our disproportionate enthusiasm.
We were out of ideas.
I told you we could get together for a recital one afternoon, didn't
I, he reminisced as we bought another beer for him. That's where all
our bated breath was blowing towards, in fact. Anything different.
He was game for it. I'll invite Frantisek and Jiri and yes, we'll
all assemble in my flat like the auld days. Perhaps some Chopin to
begin, then Thelonius then I dunno, perhaps some Stan Getz, what do
you think?
But the afternoon never materialised. As we were to find out later,
Jiri had died many years ago and Frantisek had immigrated to Paris a
decade before. They were still in his head as though they were
there, delusional. We came to an empty flat. No piano, no furniture.
Just old newspapers and a cat keeping him company. Have a seat, he
greeted enthusiastic and grateful, pushing the newspapers around as
thought they were antique furniture pieces. He made us some tea and
we sat quietly listening to the ticking of the clock. None of us
mentioned the lack of the piano that had been promised. Albert
stewed, still sweating from lugging the double bass all the way from
our flat. No old musician friends.
It's typical, he spat later on after we'd left and were back riding
the tram, Albert crowded the midsection of the tram with his double
bass, commuters staring at us angrily. It's typical that every
avenue we turn down, the despair gets wider. You think it's a
coincidence that Pavel as he described himself doesn't exist?
Ephemeral, like our music.
So we decided to forget gigs for awhile and concentrate on
rehearsing instead.
Changing venues from Utrecht to Prague had been like this
renewed enthusiasm for music, a diversion. My liberation from
heartsickness was sadly drowned in nightly debauchery. Nothing
seemed appealing. As November strode on, oblivious, Anastasia
haunted me, ridiculous, it seemed knowing someone only a few
short weeks yet allowing them to enter the blood stream, become
part of the breathing patterns. It didn‘t matter how long I‘d
actually known her. The experience of loss was as obsessive and
excruciating as if she had been there all my life.
No comments:
Post a Comment