Czech Trek: Space

Over Descartian vortices you hover.
–Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

The sun finally poked over the Sudetenland Mountains just as we entered the country, the land dotted with Slavic shacks and stacked hypermarkets.  I couldn’t spend too long staring at the former, nestled in the slopes and shade, without missing the gleaming capitalism immediately around us as we switched highways.  We were going parallel to a river for some time, cutting through a valley, and along the opposite bank a train was running alongside us.  A duck suddenly glided down just above the water’s surface, equidistant between bus and train.  Eventually the train cut away to trace the foothills, the duck hit the waves, and we sped off into the countryside towards Prague.

The city itself features surprisingly wide avenues and streets, including the famous Wenceslas Square, as well as voluminous pavements such as the Old Town Square, the grandiosely turgid Charles Bridge, and Prague Castle itself, which sticks above the horizon like a wen after a buzz cut.  You don’t feel confined in Prague.  Rather, everything seems to have been pried apart with a crowbar, the festering history concealed beneath a broad façade telling you that it is so very, very happy to see you here.

It was a short walk to the metropolitan heart from our hotel, and indeed we managed an extensive walk of the city on our first day without much trouble, stopping every 5-10 minutes to hear student presentations.  We had fortunately been able to drop off our luggage beforehand; the never-ending bus ride had been hard on some of the luggage, including Caitlin’s, whose zipper had been shot to shit.  She shut the thing using heavy plastic tape, but scraps of clothing still stuck out whenever we had to move our stuff to a new location.

Our seating at meals also betrayed certain insecurities that weren’t packed away so well.  Our five-hour dinner the first night was a prime example; I had made sure to sit with our two Czech guides from earlier that evening, eager to learn more from them about the country, while a swollen corner of students to my left huddled inward over beer after beer, growing ever larger as their inebriation increased.  A few of them would remain on the periphery of my political conversation with Barbara, but remained close enough to their peers to laugh over the absurdity of the restaurant service, and to swarm like locusts over each dish as it arrived, erasing it after five seconds.

By the third day John’s posse had become experts on the Prague public transportation system, whether trolleys or trains, and if I ever felt uncomfortable journeying back to Hotel Harmony I tagged along, swaying in time to John’s walking stick and the river-esque curves of the trolley routes.  Caitlin tagged along too, I suspect enamored with John, who had twisted his ankle the day before but adapted by fashioning a walking stick from a Czech tree.  There is something powerfully put together about a man harmonizing a physical liability with his character, so that John’s limps seemed an effort to strain against the magnetic pull of his new staff rather than a deficient state.  Watching him lumber up and down the streets of Prague, then Lidice, then Cesky Krumlov, with such Ahab-esque consistency, did inspire admiration.

But the Jewish quarter afforded no spacious walks: no guilty revisionism could renovate or expand it after the centuries of hatred that relegated the residents to assimilation at best, claustrophobic isolation at worst.  Hitler’s hope for “living space,” besides securing the Sudetenland, spelled the final fate of Prague’s Jews.  Once the Jewish capital of Europe, Prague now has only 1,600 Jews, the rest either dead or Israeli. We visited a part of the cemetery in that part of the city, enormous in its entirety but which felt absolutely confining as you careened through the schizophrenically-placed tablets and tombstones, jagged unto themselves and to each other.

There were bikes in Prague but no bike lanes like there are in Copenhagen; I relearned the careful awareness of bikes passing me on the sidewalk that I had cultivated in the States.  The metro, also, lacked the sense of societal support it enjoyed in Denmark; it was moderately spacious but grimier, the tunnels far more spacious and entertaining than the cars.  On top of that we had pickpockets to worry about, whose hands could navigate the folds and crevices of our garments better than even we, who could barely navigate the city routes.  Probably if we had the same odds of finding a free cell phone or wallet at our destinations, we would’ve taken our task as seriously as they do theirs.

Cesky Krumlov is remarkably well preserved despite having fallen into disrepair under Communism, with its streets, formerly like grandmother neck-wrinkles, pulled taught and glossy after the facelift of Third Way capitalism.  Having finally found my groove of Kyle, Nadia, Kelley, Scott, and Sylvia, we explored the restaurants and bars with a nascent security from one week in the new country.  The facilities were snug but not claustrophobic, centuries of provincial history tightening but still respecting a business’s sovereignty.  We spent our one free dinner at a boxy place whose walls were lined with advertisements from the 20s and 30s—they were beautiful kitsch but reminded me of the yawning space between then and now, from Great Depression to Great Recession, especially as Kyle and I discussed our theories on the coming collapse of the capitalist world-system.

“It’s like earthquakes…you can’t predict exactly when these crises or revolutions will happen, you can only give ballparks in the span of decades,” I said.  As much as I believed that I was afraid I was hiding in a predictive generality, as surely a seismologist would be laughed out of the room for suggesting a 50-year-window for his predictions.

But Kyle seemed in agreement.  “Unless we start writing everything down on stone we’re screwed, because all of this technology is predicated on unsustainability,” he related.  Yeah, I thought, an anthro major would say that.  Of course I, in epistemic doubt, left myself space for being wrong on the timing, while he just wanted more Stonehenge’s.  It is astonishingly easy to talk past one another.

After dinner we wandered out into the black streets, only occasionally lit by street lamps or neon bar signs, before locating the castle through happenstance, scheduled to visit it the next day.  I could not see how it was lit so strongly, but the rock face transitioned seamlessly into the sheer smoothness of its handcrafted walls, rising up almost absurdly into the stars.  I raised the flash on my camera but I understated the width of the river between the façade and us, so that my camera’s feeble light did nothing more to illuminate it.  I could accept only that lighting provided us, illuminating simply what it did, with us not knowing how much remained concealed in nighttime ambiguity.  I thought about how dependent we all are on the given, or the few objects we can carry with us, and how presence develops from our ability to differentiate those categories.  The vast town square of Cesky Krumlov, where our hotel was located and where Hitler once stood, remained in the back of my mind as we walked.