---Napolean Bonaparte, French general and Emperor
November gradually bled into December.
Along the way I'd finally managed to find a job after all my weeks of
seemingly pointless research of translating job adverts and applications. As it turned out, one evening I opened the usual paper expecting the usual adverts and like a beacon of light, there it was in blatant, magical English, an ad for a position at the American Business College, teaching basic English Literature. I nearly spat up my maintenance beer in surprise.
You have to understand, most expats looking for work took jobs waiting tables, bartending in the handful of expat bars that littered Prague, or they taught English. Some were lucky enough to get English teaching positions in elementary or secondary schools and others scratched out their existences flittering from one bored student to the next on a private tuition basis. A job like this would be a miracle score, a dream.
On Albert’s recommendation we immediately set out the following morning to visit Vaughn, an American we’d met through the expat scene who was the only person we knew who had access to a computer. That’s how it was back then; no laptops, no buzz of enchanting internet cafes. We were lucky we knew Vaughn or we’d be limited to spending the day trying to find a second-hand typewriter. We told Vaughn it was for a teaching position in Bratislava, a place we knew no one in our circles had much interest in living. We didn’t want unnecessary competition.
With Albert’s assistance I typed up a completely fictitious CV which
included a master’s degree in literature from NYU and a few teaching
assistant jobs in Brooklyn high schools we weren’t even sure existed.
You’ve read enough novels and poetry to pull this off, Albert coached. Nobody is going to check your background, you’ve seen how things work here. You’ll probably have an oral interview with a professor or two and you’ll only need to be able to bullshit your way through it. Trust me. This is attainable.
That afternoon, with the CV freshly fictionalised and printed, I rang the
offices of the American Business School and set up an interview. I bought
a cheap dress shirt and a hideous tie from a street market vendor and set off.
The American Business College was the spawn of the new independence of the Czech Republic, driven mad by the market to create English-speaking managers and automaton employees for multinational companies hungry for new human flesh in the new world. It had been spawned by a little funding from the Czech government and many private donations and that was in essence, all I knew about the place. As I neared it, seeing for the first time it was housed in what looked like a refurbished barn, my mind eased its panic. This was hardly upper establishment. The standard would not be set too high.
The interview was with Geoffrey, an Englishman who acted as the school’s dean of admissions and Linda, an American woman who currently had the position but was leaving to go back to California. What we’re looking for, in essence, Geoffrey began, is someone who can run through a rudimentary review of English literature for first year business students towards an interdisciplinary programme Of course, you may have a specialisation that you may want to emphasise but by and large you will be adhering to a curriculum we’ve outlined as a guide.
He led me through a series of predictable questions about my academic background which I fictionalised with great aplomb, figuring if I was going to lie I should to so flagrantly, spectacularly. I recited a variety of made-up literary magazines I’d published in, gave accounts of teaching in chaotic Brooklyn high schools that mesmerised them both, the violence and difficulty in reaching these difficult students, gang members, the experience of teaching in the worst sorts of backgrounds imaginable. Through it all, I gauged their reactions, knowing when to ease off on a particular tale, watching their eyes for recognition and acknowledgement, probing to see what sort of information worked on them and which didn’t.
In the end, Geoffrey stood up. There are a few other candidates of course, Witold but I must say, I’m impressed with your background, particularly the experience of these Brooklyn high schools, which sound quite challenging. I think you would make an excellent candidate. If you could call me back say, sometime tomorrow afternoon, I think I will have a definite answer for you regarding this position.
Two days later, I was in, officially. They were going to set up the
appropriate visa for me but, they explained, Czech bureaucracy would likely turn the process into a long one and they were happy for me to start working, even whilst my application, a formality, was ongoing. I was to start at the start of the new term, just after the beginning of the New Year.
*****
One night, shortly after Christmas, I headed out to make my way for a Sunday evening open mic poetry reading I’d seen advertised. Albert,
usually in tow for these sorts of outings, was nursing an ailment of sorts, an ailment he suffered with recurring frequency. It wasn’t precisely a hangover; he was immune to those symptoms, but something which came after heavy stretches of drinking and smoking. But neither of us worried. The burden of a chain-smoking, beer-guzzling, slob, he shrugged. Fuck it.
This night it was a poetry reading but consisting primarily of local
Czechs, few if any of the dreaded expatriate blood spilling silly
lines about drunken nights swimming in the Vltava or some secret
romance with a Czech girl in a short skirt of questionable legal age, often
the typical sort of drivel they spouted.
I had spent the afternoon reading an essay written by Havel for the
underground cultural journal Jednou nohu wherein he describes people
under the Communist regime as "nervous, anxious, irritated, or else
they are apathetic."
This was, he described, the stress of people living under the
constant threat of Communism, people dealing with absurdity and
nothingness brought on by totalitarianism.
And yet where was anyone different at any moment now? The
foreigners were still the relaxed crowd, those unharried by the thought of
waiting for someone to turn you in for an overheard conversation or
an act of sabotage – the Czechs were eased in some quarters but the
reality is that it is a hard yolk to shrug off, those years of history that
never really officially existed. And how did that go on to explain my
own certainly stressed-out face, my own preoccupation, not with a
totalitarian regime, far from it, but the regime in my mind, the mind
rotten without stories, simply filled with obsessions, destroying any
semblance of peace waiting for the next postcard from Anastasia or
another day to pass without one.
Before the reading I stopped off in a blue collar bar, a run down place populated by Czech drunks and Slovakians living in Prague for the
higher wages. They were all dirt and grunge, instruments of trade. I
knocked back a few beers and surveyed the scene around me: filthy
alcoholics miserable for another crown, drinking away the little pay
they'd earned, those dream destinations of saving for home sewn into
their livers like embroidered histories of failure.
It isn't at all unusual to find a foreigner furloughed out to Prague
who speaks barely any Czech. But I was unusual for the locale simply
because tourists didn't stray into pits like this, they remained the
denizen of forgotten dark and dirty souls squelching tiny peeps of
forgiveness as they drank away not their sorrows but the memories of
the sorrows which ironically only led back up the same path back to
the sorrows again. Some of them spoke broken English. Some of them
spoke enough to ask me to buy them a beer knowing as they would
immediately that I wasn't one of them. But I wanted to protest that
I was and couldn't. Yes, my soul was ragged, yes, my stomach filled
with drink, yes, misery and fatigue were also my companions but the
difference that no time or place could overcome was that I was there
by choice. It was no courage to summon up a few tales of infatuation
hitting sour notes. It meant nothing to piss and moan my salary was
barely enough to scratch out a living. I was there by choice, they
by a destiny far deeper than mine. After all, what the hell would I
be crying about, playing at the destitution of others, standing
there pretending my heart sick was equal to their life sick that I
had a chance and threw it out whilst they could only stand and
watch, chanceless all along.
I bought beers for everyone to make up for it. Guilt, yes. I destroy
myself for fun and what would these characters have given for half
the chance to throw away? I held court via broken conversations of
gibberish, half-English, half-Czech, with a little Dutch and German
tossed in like kindling to a bonfire.
Gradually I was drawn in by Antonín, a man with a wife and two kids
lost somewhere in the paradigm of time in a village called Vlkolinec
where his father's house had been burned down by Nazis in 1944. So
he said. Why would he lie? And what was he doing here? Labour. Hard
labour, dirty labour, honest labour for dishonest pay tossed away
into the coffers of parasitical bar owners preying on the suffering
of others. The pure misery of loneliness. I suppose that's what
attracted me to him, the filthy fingernails, unwashed hair,
haphazard, cheap and dirty clothing and above all the eyes of
misery, clouding from time to time with tears recounting how much he missed his family, how much he missed his village, how much he hated Prague, the slave chasing a dream he was drinking away even as he spoke.
Why should I feel sorry? For example, you come here to make a
living, send the money home to the family and eventually, as the
dream goes, return home a wealthier man or at least wait it out
until another factory reopens. He hates the Czechs yet wanted his
own country. Thus the split between the Czechs and the Slovaks. The
haves and the have nots. And imagine the irony. Here is your freedom without even the consideration of making it a revolutionary struggle. Here you go, you Slovaks. Have your freedom and we'll own the factories anyway, those that don't get closed down and you'll be stuck, thumbing your way to Prague looking for work, crying in your beer about the family you've lost never thinking for a moment that by overcoming misery you might find your future.
More disgusting still, where was my misery to match his? Missing
parents who had the foresight at least to leave me a flat and enough
money for rent to allow me to piss away an existence and drop out of
school, lounge my afternoons in libraries pretending I wasn't
bourgeois, pretending my indifference was cool? What did I have to
compare, as I matched him beer for beer in a hallucinogenic blur? An
infatuation gone sour? What could I possibly offer by comparison as
an excuse to piss it all away? Nothing, that's what. Nothing and so
I drank all the faster and bought him a beer along each time to
match me. Goddamnit. One of us was going to be miserable and yet both of us were going to end up happy. For an hour or two anyway.
Several hours later we were standing in each other's arms singing
songs neither of us could remember, generations apart, lifetimes
away, just two disgusting drunks consoling each other on the way to
finding our own particular paths through the misery, real or
imagined, actual or artificial.
Somehow I struggled to leave and make it to the reading. I was
already quite late and when I entered, in the middle of a fragmented
paean to the banning of Romas from bathing in the local reservoir
of a neighbouring village, everyone looked up from their false
reveries as I loudly requested another beer and slumped in the seat
in the back. Why was I even here? This cultural yen for discovering
the undiscoverable? Who were these poseurs anyway? Were they more valid in another language? Weren't they all struggling with the same tiny yarn they pulled and pulled at obsessively seeking answers they had no questions for or else pretending they were pulling at the same tiny yarn that like me, might make them feel as though they were really suffering, really and truly suffering rather than standing up there in front of a bunch of put-ons waiting to give their little golf-claps of appreciation in the hopes that someone would recognize their genius, their suffering, their uniqueness?
When there was an interlude, some snotty intellectual with a robust
opinion of himself meandered toward me in a non aggressive way and
asked me politely why I was there, reeking of beer and cigarettes
with nothing to say save for audible titters of ridicule dispensed
like cheap critiques in slanderous sidebars.
I'm here to hear your suffering chirping out of your orifices, I
mentioned casually, lighting another cigarette. This was followed by
an uncomfortable grimace on this fellow's face as though I had just
loudly farted. I mean really, I stated, standing up, gaining steam.
What is this charade; I demanded waving my arm in the direction of
everyone and unintentionally slapping him on the side of the head.
Then it all erupted. People jumped from their seats to squelch the
vagabond I imagined myself having morphed into when in reality they
all saw me for what I was: a drunk and cheap tourist taking
advantage, killing their excuses, giving them reason to pity or
disdain. A human goitre waiting to erupt. They all took turns
grabbing at me, shoving me roughly over and over again until I
reached the door and they shoved one last time, dumping me onto the
sidewalk.
******
Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the Praha Holesovice train
station café next to the school with Marshall, the American who ran
the school's library, a patchwork collection of donated textbooks
from military bases, socialist non fiction, and a smattering of
Updike and detective novels that reflected his own taste's more than
the students'.
The train station café served a watery goulash and bottles of
Gambrinus and as Marshall would foment rebellions in his mind about
library autonomy, unrealistic funding aspirations and snatches of
his life as a Berkeley liberal who migrated once and for all out of
the slobbering jaws of American capitalism only to find himself
faced up against it again in even more sullied and contemptible
forms.
A series of budget crisis had left the school in tatters, desperate
for teachers of any walk and housed in a converted barn that reeked
of cabbage all day long. The caretaker and his wife lived on the
ground floor of the building and the stench of her gastrointestinal meals
made the thought of food unbearable. So we often relied on beer alone.
During breaks, I would go outside with the students and smoke
cigarettes. For the most part, I was ignored. I didn't like them
very much and I think they sensed that. There was something
about their aura of third world privilege that turned my stomach.
They'd come here to find their peasants to look down at. There were
plenty where they'd come from, but it must have gotten boring,
mistreating the same servant culture of what they deemed to be lesser
races over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh
faces to sneer at.
They believed their cultural and racial snobbery was applicable
everywhere yet imagining them struggling as waiters in Chicago or
New York, fumbling with English, dropping this façade of feigned cool,
I realised they were nothing outside of their own bourgeois prisons. Unimaginative, barbaric. Wealthy within their community of privilege
or their country yet impoverished by their minisculity outside of it.
I was an anomaly. I wasn't one of them and I didn't step in from the
scenery. I'd come from another planet. They didn't know what to make
of it. I sensed that if I'd cursed more, if I’d thrown Yankee slang around
in confusing parables about lust and capitalism, they might have
warmed up to me a little but it was impossible. Each class was an
endurance test. All I could think about was getting out, sneaking back
on the tram, and riding around town reading my copy of one of the
library's crappy novels for the third time. The other teachers were even
worse than the students. They ran the spectrum from podgy, collegial
buffoons to psycho dramatic liberal arts graduates from large
metropolitan areas in America. Everybody qualified to teach it seemed.
Even me.
What were my qualifications after all? A few forged documents
Xeroxed at a local print shop? A fictionalised history? I could have been
a mass murderer on the lam for all they knew. It really didn't matter. As
long as the students didn't complain about you, you were fine and as
long as you let the students waste their time in whatever way they say fit
while simultaneously giving them the illusion of teaching them something meaningful they could manipulate in the future, if you could pull off
this little miracle, they were satisfied.
There were weird memories of that Praha Holesovice station which I
stopped in every morning on the way to the school.
Getting there was like a dream with the names of stations recited
mechanically in that sexy, Tolstoy cold female voice crackling weakly
out of the metro car speakers as we swept through on the yellow B line towards Northeast Prague:
Křižíkova to Invalidovna to Palmovka and then Českomoravská, and at
every stop, the pre-recorded chime would go off and then she would speak:
Unkonèit prosim, vystup a nastup, dvere se zaviraji., followed then
by Pristi stanice – and then whatever station was next.
I would tremble with delight at each word, wondering who this
mysterious woman was, if she was an embittered ex-Communist living
in a panelak flat somewhere in Zličín, chain smoking filter less Start
cigarettes, staring out a rainy window, deep in thought about the wonder years.
After a ten minute walk, across Vrbenského, ending through a strange
tunnel which ran underneath the tracks, I would arrive through the
portal of Praha Holesovice into a dank corridor which housed the
kiosk where the workman would gather in their ragged, blue jumpsuits
stained an invisible brown matching the colour of the soot around
them, chatting about the night before, some sipping acrid Turkish
coffee and some others getting an early start on bottles of
Gambrinus or Budvar, all smoking their filterless numbs fighting off
the cold, the memory of a day that had already filtered through
their subconscious in repetition.
I would order a coffee, find a metal chair and open up a small
notebook, scribbling incoherent lines, hunched over like a cripple,
pen in one hand, page held down with the other, small plastic cup of
coffee steaming in front of me, dreaming lucidly of Anastasia as
though she were sitting there across from me, wilting in the deep
stench of the train station, patiently waiting for my return.
*****
When we weren't mired in our own reckless hedonism, stretched out on
the floor or sofa too exhausted to move, when we weren't out
drinking ourselves numb and acting like animals, we were actually
able to find our pieces of peace during day spackled by long periods of
doing nothing.
Of course even nothing ended up being something. We lacked the
creature comforts; the internet, cable television, books or female
companionship thus we lived in a time warp of sorts. You can well
imagine it shouldn't be difficult for the average person to get
through the day without drinking, but take away their sacred cable
television, take away the children to distract and annoy them, take
away hobbies to simultaneously dull and amuse their senses, take
away the youthful indulgences of going on the prowl in search of
mating partners and there really wasn't a hell of a lot left.
I tried in earnest to kill time more quickly. I don't even know why,
really. Why did I want to kill time? I was in the prime of my life
so to speak, expatriated and out in a thrilling city, musically
untalented but still able to cobble together enough gigs to maintain
a semblance of respectability, reasonably secure in a professorial
sort of sense at the American Business College, and most of all, most
daunting and destabilising – free. There is nothing worse than idle free
time and I had too much of it. Oh sure, some swear they can use more
of it, tons more of it – how can someone say they have too much free
time? But it was true. Because free time was wasted on me. Idle time
was just another excuse to wallow in misery. That's how it is when
you're all knotted up in unquenchable infatuation waiting for those
few moments in between all those hours and months when on an
off-hand chance you just might run into Anastasia again. That was
me.
Albert had no answer for me. He wasn't infatuated. He often appeared
to have no feelings at all. Fuck it and Who Cares, were his two pet
phrases. You could throw the world of worries on his shoulders and
he'd shrug it off and let it fall to the ground, fall to eternity.
He was no Sisyphus. You'd never catch him pushing a rock up a
mountain over and over again. He'd have never bothered. He'd light a
Winston and look around for the nearest beer.
Take his beers and Winstons away from him however and I daresay
you'd have a different person altogether.
Why would I want to go without smoking and drinking, he asked
incredulously when I brought the subject up one day of what he'd do
without them. Let's just say, I said. Let's just say they weren't
available, for whatever reason you were marooned somewhere or stuck
in a perpetual smoke-free sort of Disneyland and you had to go without
for a few weeks. What would you do then?
He shrugged, exhaling a long thin bluish stream of smoke as Lester
Young's Sometimes I'm Happy, a live recording, was blasting in the
background to the dismay of the upstairs neighbour who occasionally
pounded his floor, our ceiling, with disgruntled futility.
I'd go without drinking and smoking, he said simply. I mean after all, if
it isn't around, it isn't around. I'd find another diversion. Take
up knitting or play cards or go for a jog around the block.
Ha! You go for a jog? You'd collapse of a heart attack after the
first half block!
He shrugged again. Then my problem of no cigarettes and no beer
would be over.
*****
(from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 173)
.
..there is a lasting odour of doubt for weeks. Albert's despondent
drinking has blossomed for days at a time before wilting into empty
political rhetoric and finally, asleep, snoring on the sofa, the burnt-out
tip of his Winston still clenched between his index and middle finger.
It has rained for two weeks straight. A cold, gusty rain that turned the
middle of November into an aura of bleak hours dying into their winters
that keeps even the Shot Out Eye out of walking distance for several
days in a row. Sometimes we hire this kid, this little Czech
entrepreneur named Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub
for a refill.
Jiri is the acne scarred teen who lived above the corner pub and often
hung out in front of the Europa Hotel trying to convince tourists
into guided literary tours of the old town. When we needed
something, we stick our heads out the window and yell down at the
corner. Since most of the time, Jiri was standing in front of the
Europa Hotel smoking, practicing German from a Prague Guide
phrase book called Auf Deutsch…
*****
We'd already read all the few paperbacks we had in the room twice.
The cassettes and CDs had been played raw. Albert had the stand up
bass and I had the horn and once in a while, when we'd had just the
right balance of beer, cigarettes and instant coffee we cooked using
only hot water from the tap, we'd improvise. There was a
high-headedness, a mystical dizziness, a general gnawing of boredom
like a bone ground within our teeth, a perpetual gloom punctuated by
the open window and the hail hitting against the whipping drapes. It
wasn't necessary to have been in Prague. A prison anywhere would
have suited just the same.
In addition to the spell of unbearably shitty weather we'd outspent
our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living
on only the barest of essentials.
Yeah, I suppose we could have dipped into the following month’s budget. The budge was an arbitrary, artificial sum in any event but it had been maintained rather religiously leading up to then so we didn’t want to set
the precedent of failing to meet it. The belt-tightening was designed to alter the experience, break the daily pattern of waking, rehearsing, drinking, drinking, walking, drinking more, eating, coming home and sleeping, even
if the need for the belt-tightening was arbitrary and illusory anyway,
it was a little game of the imagination. Well, moreso for Albert. My
financial strain was more reality-based. Yes, the beer and rent was a lot cheaper than Utrecht but my salary at the American Business College was
barely sufficient to pay the rent.
That’s how the fucking Soviets used to fuck it up all the time, Albert
warned one night when we were sitting around playing cards listening to
BBC World on the transistor and I was moaning about being bored and considering blowing the monthly budget off to do something mad and
destabilising in preparation for Spring.
Remember all those five year plans they’d go on about achieving? Sure, they’d allege to meet them, but it was all bureaucracy, all about meeting targets, targets that were never met of course and everyone just fudged
the numbers or cheated outright so they wouldn’t end up in some fucking gulag playing dominoes with frozen fingers and digging ditches all the
time. Of course, those plans were based on productivity and our plan is
based on well, diminishing resources with no planned productivity but nonetheless, the point is if the five year plans had been realistic to begin
with and in theory if everyone had fulfilled their end of the bargain, their quotes, their targets, whatever, the system might have worked. And so
might ours. I’m trying to stay unemployed in case you hadn’t noticed,
Witold. I’m not interested in having to go out and find work. But if I
piss away my monthly budget, eventually it’s going to catch up to me and eventually, I’m going to be fucked. Penniless. Working some horrible job
like you. So there you go. Besides, it builds character, going without!
So that’s basically why and how we imposed these draconian measures. Because of Albert’s thoughts on the flaws on the Soviet Five Year Plan
and because we were building character.
Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to
roll as I’d read in one of Orwell’s books. We had enough left over for
several litres of beer, a kilo of sausage, two cups of tepid instant coffee
and 11 cigarettes apiece each day for the rest of the month but nothing
else. Albert was still decompressing from 12 years of intense television
vision and the fact that the only source of entertainment in English he
could get was listening to BBC, which he hated and ranted and raved
about to no end some evenings, only served to raise the tensions, as
though the 11 cigarette per diem didn't create enough tension as it
was.
On Sundays we went to the neighbourhood theatre, a large
garage-sized building down a winding driveway from a main apartment
house with dirt floors and folding chairs run by a wide bodied and
hard boiled old fat lady who grabbed at our crowns without preamble
more than a grunt without looking up, nodding her head behind her in
the general direction of the film. There were never more than three
or four people inside, probably because it was barely heated. It felt like
going to a state fair peep show, creepy and oily. The movie was always terrible. It was as painful as going to church and so in our roundabout
way, we were paying our dues along with religious humanity, suffering
along with the rest of them in solidarity but skipping masses and séances wherever they arose.
In many ways, it was the lack of events that made it most difficult.
We lived like dogs, waiting for hours in anticipation of a master to come
home then a ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked
sausage with the same jar of horseradish.
I realised then how much time we were spending drinking. Sure, there
were rehearsals and occasionally gigs, paying or otherwise, but usually
non-paying. There was busking in the streets out of the eye of the
police which was sometimes rather difficult considering the best places
to busk were where all the tourists were which is of course where all the
police were. And also considering with Albert’s double bass we weren’t exactly speedy in our attempts to escape.
But in the absence of having the money to simply drink as much as we
could handle or spend as much time in the pubs and cafes as we felt like
seemingly without consequences, we became acutely aware of how little
we actually did.
One night out in Akropolis, after we’d gone two days subsisting on little
bread rolls and the shittiest, cheapest canned beer we could find from the
local market just so we could save enough of our remaining budget money
to have the opportunity to spend a night of fairly free drinking where we
weren’t pinching every Heller and worrying over the prohibitive cost of
every sip we took, Albert spied a pair of young women sitting by
themselves casually drinking a bottle of Moravian wine.
Now, it certainly wasn’t difficult meeting or chatting up the local girls.
By and large they were pretty interested in Americans, maybe because they
represented a ticket out, maybe because the mini invasion of Prague had piqued their curiosity, maybe, who knows. It was certainly no doing of
Albert and I and more often than not we must have seemed quite invisible
to them.
I was far too preoccupied thinking about Anastasia to bother chatting them
up or responding positively to any efforts they made inroad to holding a conversation and Albert was, well, older than most of the other Americans who were living in Prague or hanging out. It didn’t disqualify him but it meant he was forcing himself to learn a little more patience than he’d demonstrated when he was frequenting whores in Utrecht.
In any event, we were both pretty drunk by the time Albert had spotted
them, not much of an accomplishment considering our minimalist diet
of the last two days to that point and the usual non verbal banter,
eye-play started going on between our two tables at Albert‘s
uncharacteristic curiosity. Eventually, Albert decided we should toddle
over with our beers and have a go at speaking to them. I dunno why
exactly. It’s not like we unaccustomed to being drunk suddenly veering
out of control and it wasn’t like we were particularly desperate. It was just
one of those things, you know, things falling together a certain way and
well, you just follow.
We got around to chatting them up, inviting ourselves to sit down at their
table, carrying over our beer tally sheet and making ourselves at home
despite the seemingly lukewarm response we received from them. That
they hadn’t told us to fuck off or called security encouraged us even more.
We ordered more beer and asked after their wine. We were talking about
the feeling that there nothing going on in Prague other than hanging out in pubs and sleeping or riding trams and shopping. We were well aware there was plenty of going on, but it all seemed related in some way to tourist shit. Did the Czechs ever go to these operas or plays or recitals in the old town
or was it all just for show, just creative little things to keep the tourists busy?
Needless to say the two girls were a bit put off by our ignorance. That we slurred our words and laughed hysterically at our own jokes probably didn’t aid our cause either. But to the credit of these girls, they were troopers of sorts, not easily scared off or annoyed, willing to endure us on the premise
that we might say something interesting eventually. One of them mentioned having seen us near the Charles Bridge busking, remarking casually that she recalled it in particular because she thought only the old Czech men played jazz. Most of the other buskers played acoustic guitars and sang cover songs.
If you’re bored all the time, or tired of wasting all your time in pubs, why don’t you do something else, one of them volunteered. Albert just
harrumphed and waved the waiter down for another round. Something else
that doesn’t involve beer, the other continued like a tag-team nag all of the
sudden. Like what, have a nap in the National Museum? Albert wasn’t in
the mood for discussing non-drinking activities.
Have you ever even BEEN to the National Museum, the other ventured, leaning in toward Albert and pointing a finger accusatorily.
The National Museum? He laughed. Why the fuck would I want to go
there?
It’s unbelievable, really, they muttered to each other. People like you come here and get fucked off your head like there’s nothing else going on in this country, like this is just some cheap drinking society you come to for hedonistic lust. I don’t know why, but for some reason, I find something appealing beneath this phoney nihilistic façade of yours. Enough so I’d say that I’d see you again, Albert, if you were to say, meet me at the National Museum in two days around noon and if you were to say, show up sober
and stay that way for let’s say six hours.
The other girl looked somewhat astonished at her partner’s sudden challenge
to Albert and then looked over at me, terrified that I might anticipate a
similar such offer. I shook my head. My heart was still pickled in the bitterness of missing out on Anastasia.
Albert on the other hand, managed to find it all quite amusing in an incredulous sort of way, as if it were happening to someone else or he were watching it in a movie, impassively from his seat.
What is this, some kind of dare?
Take it however you like, Albert. The thing is, people like you make me a little sick, the way you treat my city, my country. If you’re going to live
here and drink here for crissakes, at least take some time to learn about
where you are. Look at you, you don’t speak a word of Czech, you know
probably nothing about the literature, probably very little about the music despite professing some sort of affinity for both literature and music, and
you spend most of your time either drunk or recovering from being drunk.
This isn’t a country called Cheap Beer Land, she chastised. It’s called
the Czech Republic! Amazingly despite this harangue Albert was content
to continuing playing the crass instrument he’d suddenly become an expert
on. Perhaps he thought if by preaching ignorance he could get somewhere
more interesting than he’d already found himself, he’d preach it all the
more. Of course initially he was simply taking the piss but as she went on,
he simply assumed the role of cultural ignoramus. A little cheap
entertainment for the natives.
And by the end of her impromptu lecture, she took her friend’s elbow and
the pair of them stood up in disgust, not even bothering putting on their
coats before leaving.
So do you think she was serious about meeting at the National Museum in
two days at noon? Albert asked suddenly, somewhat sincere.
Ha, what do you care?
I might just show up and see what happens.
*****
Perhaps it was an indication of how bored he truly was but two mornings
later, Albert was up early making a large cup of instant coffee from the hot water tap, smiling smugly when he saw me emerge eventually from sleep
and fog.
Bear in mind that other than that a string of 20 or 30 minute flings with a string of various whores in Utrecht, I’d not only not seen Albert with
another girl before, I hadn’t even heard him talk about one. I mean most people, even stoic friends, might let slip after all these beery evenings
together, the name of one or two former flames, maybe recount some
maudlin tale about some love gone awry. Something.
Hell, even though I spent most of my time prior to meeting Albert by myself, I’d still managed to work up a brief infatuation or two. Sure, I’d never actually screwed up the courage to talk to them let alone have a relationship
with them before Anastasia, but at least I’d had a history that I’d divulged of showing some interest.
So do you know what today is, he smirked, handing me a cup for myself.
Yeah, today’s the day you’re supposed to meet that girl in front of the
National Museum at noon. Sober.
His face fell a little. Well, yes, that too. But never mind about that for
a minute. In two days it will be first of the month! Meaning of course,
our little budgetary crisis is over and we can go back to eating like humans
instead of dogs or homeless people and most importantly, we have plenty
of reserves to see ourselves through several nights of the Shot out Eye!
Oh, I get it. It’s nothing to do with this girl at all then is it? Just the first
of the month and carefree times ahead again? Pshaw. Admit it, you’re
excited about meeting her again, aren’t you?
Ah fuck, I dunno, Witold, he told me with sudden, inexplicable candour.
You know I don’t have much use for women. I mean yeah, I like women.
I like having sex with them, it’s just that I’m not particularly fond of all
the chit chat I have to endure leading up to the good stuff. You know how
I feel. But yeah, I’ll admit I was a little intrigued by her. I like a woman who’s not full of shit, who gets right to the point. And besides, who knows, maybe she’s got a good singing voice….
*****
Then, just as abruptly the pleasure had begun it ended and the wave of euphoria receded and it was still raining and it was only two in the afternoon and there were only 3 cigarettes left, Albert returned.
The girl never showed for the National Museum. After all that subliminal foreplay by Albert, (I knew he’d had high expectations despite the transparency of his denials) he showed up at the appointed hour with the requisite sobriety, under the influence of nothing but belief, and she
hadn’t bothered to get there.
I figured as much, Albert confided. I mean my real intention, since she’d made such a big deal about being sober and checking out this cultural nonsense, was to try and convince her to have a drink at a café before we
even went inside. I’d been all prepared to catch her off guard, astound
her with my knowledge of Czech history and literature, stun her into
silence before suggesting we go off to have that drink to celebrate her
defeat.
But I stood out there and stood out there until I couldn’t look casual
standing there any more. So I figured fuck it. I’ll go have a drink. I know
the budget’s fucked but I figured after that kind of humiliation, the least I could do would be to treat myself to a drink, right?
So I decide to go to Café Louvre, you know that snobbish sort of place on
the main drag, Narodni, near the museum? So I’m sitting there, the waiter’s just brought the beer over and who shows up but this girl, can you imagine?
I’m like where the fuck were you? You know what she says to me? She
says, get this, “I knew it. I knew you couldn’t go six hours without a drink.”
I’m like how the fuck do you know when the last time was I had a drink and how did you know I was in here having a beer? So she tells me, simple. She waited from a distance - she’d been there all along, see. She’d been there all along getting some kind of weird, sadistic pleasure out of watching me wait. Or seeing how long I’d wait before I’d give up. And then when I’d given up, how long before I had a drink.
So, I was pretty fucking shocked as you can imagine but I was still thinking
on my feet so to speak so I asked her, what would you have done if I’d just walked away, just turned around and walked back to my flat and didn’t stop anywhere for a drink?
Oh, that’s easy she says, I’d have rung your doorbell and apologised for being late for the meeting, say that I got your address from someone at the Shot Out Eye since you told me you frequent that place and we’d probably have had a really good time. I usually sleep with men I fancy on the first date too. So there you go, she says, getting up from the table. I hope you enjoy your beer. That’s it, Albert nearly shouts hysterically over the Sonny Rollins live at the Village Vanguard CD I’d been enjoying. That’s all she said, hope you enjoy your beer. Can you imagine? I mean, what the fuck kind of mental case is
she anyway?
Well Albert, maybe you’re right after all. Maybe you should just stick to whores. Cruel injustice, I know, I cooed afterwards. On the other hand, at least you weren’t in love with her. At least she didn’t come to visit you personally, fill your head with all sorts of off key ideas about emotions, fill you with some sort of hope about your music playing, fill your mate with
some sort of rubbish about upcoming gigs and then just disappear leaving
only a brief note in her wake.
Noted, he muttered, pretending to read a book in Czech, upside down as he ripped open a can of cheap beer and tried to relax.
*****
And so we returned to our rituals When it wasn't raining, I went out, no matter what time it was. I walked from one end to the other, fast and fogged
with the anticipation of reaching the end, turning around and going
back, outrunning the trams, looking into the windows with the old
women staring back down at me.
Fear of cultures clashing, the monuments against the sledgehammers, the pained against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighbourhood, while I didn't even know the nature of myself, the unpredictable actions were
unnerving. There was no oasis and no abyss and the movement was
meant to keep one afloat in between the two.
One night I was finally able to convince Kazimir, one of the owners of the Shot Out Eye to allow us to open for a blues band scheduled to play the following Saturday evening.
Most of the regulars in the Shot Out Eye had heard us play at one time or another at a gig or two or had even seen us busking and were still confused enough about our talents that they hadn't formed a solid opinion against us
yet. The illusion was still working and so long as Kazimir felt assured that
our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing
to let us try and entertain.
So that following Saturday it seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when Kazimir opened the doors to the pub. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus
and we rode down as soon as we woke up, flush with cash now that the new month and new budget had begun.
You know you're not due to play until after six tonight, don't you? He asked, still groggy, vaguely annoyed. Albert, with his arm around the bass
case as though it were a drunken comrade, pushed past Kazimir and
dragged the case behind him. I've been in that fucking apartment for eleven days straight. I need a shot of Slivovice and a beer as soon as humanly possible.
While we drank beers at a leisurely yet steady pace, we played a best out of
five chess tournament against each other. As people began filtering in, we
used a clock and played one round after another of speed chess too fast to think, our hands a blur, our eyes, disinterestedly staring into thoughts only
the robotic movements of our hands could decipher. The music was already louder than normal. It felt like a Mexican peyote séance with painted faces
and dancing in between beers, hopping from foot to foot on the way
to the bathrooms, trying not to spill the beer in the hand.
By six o'clock, we were already too impatient to play our normal
route of slow and off key, the anti-jazz we wanted to portray it as,
too hip and out of place to be anything but they might cautiously
consider genius while at the same time weighing the distinct
possibility that we had no idea what we were doing.
The last week or two of having little money for other activities had
afforded us an unexpected sum of free time to practice and so some of the pieces whilst a little more polished musically, had developed lyrically or verbally, disproportionately enough so we ran the risk of giving away the
fact we had no talent.
So, conscious of having drawn out several bits far too far, the usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopaedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, I tried to coerce was forsaken and we found ourselves in the odd position of being forced to play more and talk less.
This led to considerably fewer options at our disposal. There were the
three set pieces we'd learned in Holland. We knew snatches of more
traditional standards, snatches we would blend in all together haphazardly,
like a tribute to musical sound bytes without any cohesion. But it was
stunning. No one knew what we were saying, not even ourselves. I sang Berlitz lines from six different phrase books. I sang obscure American
curses, commercial jingles, lines of Edgar Allen Poe. Whatever came into
my head with the same organization of watching a plastic bag blow across
a street on a windy day.
Lyrical flotsam. Musical jetsam. By the end of the set, it was clear
we'd fooled them. Kazimir slapped us on the back and handed us
another shot of Slivovice.
I'm relieved my friends, he confided. You didn't spoil the party. You
didn't drive them away. We've witness a musical miracle! He laughed
loudly and bitterly but it was all a show. He liked the sound of it. A
musical miracle in the Shot Out Eye. The jazz vagabonds stuck in
Prague, unable to extract themselves from a hedonistic scrum, had
shown a modicum of worth for the first time in its three month
existence. We weren't malingerers and leeches after all, not another
pocket of tourist resistance to squelch. Now he wanted us to meet
some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a
beer, signalling to the waiter for another round. Now we'd never
fucking leave.
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