I catch a tram and walk and come to a pub overlooking Stromovka Park. I step inside. It is yellow in here. The lights are yellow, the tablecloths are stained yellow, the walls and air are yellow with cigarette smoke; there is a jaundiced man propping up the bar, there are maple-yellow ice-hockey sticks lined up by the door. I take a beer and sit in a corner. I pull from my bag a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It is a Czechoslovakian edition from before the war. This volume means something to me. It belonged to my uncle. Inside the front cover there is an admonition he scrawled in large letters as a child:
Death is a confirmed habit into which we have fallen.
Learn from Pip
I flick through it at random, as the pious do with their Bibles. The paper is yellow. is scrawled on the margin of one page. A few phrases are underlined throughout:
What larks!
And the communication I have got to make is,
that he has great expectations.
I see an exclamation mark in the margin where Wemmick, the law clerk, carries a fishing rod on his shoulder through London, not with any intent of fishing in the River Thames, but simply because he likes to walk with one:
I thought this odd; however, I said nothing,
and we set off.
I shut the book and open it once more and put a finger to a page.
“That was a memorable day to me,” I read, “for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”
I know this passage well. The book often opens to this page. This is where Pip returns home from Miss Havisham’s for the first time. He has come to understand his position in the world. He sees himself anew, as a common boy with coarse manners and laborer’s boots. I read the passage once more. I try to make the words fit my situation.
I cannot. I am an adult, Pip is a child. West Germany is not Miss Havisham’s. My education has been limited by the Communist moment, not by poverty, as Pip’s has been. My manners are not particularly coarse, my shoes are foreign, well soled, not those of a laborer. It is true this has been a memorable day for me. I am bound by a long chain of iron, after Pip’s description. But the links are not of my making; they were formed in the year of my birth, 1948, the year in which the Communists took Czechoslovakia by the neck and wrung it. I close my Great Expectations. I look around this pub. The faces I see, one after the other, are yellow, indistinct, banal. They are bound also. They outwardly conform. There is no solidarity here. Solidarity is as likely, the expression goes, as a fire under a waterfall.
Emil
MAY 7, 1973
THE SKY OVER PRAGUE is dashed, flashing. A sudden warm rainstorm washes down in sweet hyphens over Antonín Dvořák’s grave in Vyšehrad, where I kneel now and lay down flowers. Standing, with Slavonic dances in my head, I see the rain passing over the Soviet military barracks in Smichov and wetting the bronze horses rearing up on the roof of the Národní Divadlo, or national theater, and causing Morse code in the sky over Letná Park, toward the apartment blocks of Obráncu miru.
I am named Emil for Emil Tischbein, the hero in Erich Kästner’s children’s stories, who famously led a band of child detectives through Berlin in pursuit of a thief. I bear an uncanny likeness to the illustrations in those books, as if I am an adult version of Kästner’s boy, grown up in 1960s ČSSR. I have the same mop of golden hair, which falls across my face in the same diagonal way and is pushed back between the fingers of my right hand in just the same manner. I have the same slate-colored eyes, the same button nose. I thrust my hands in my pockets, rock back on my heels, and smile shyly after friends and strangers alike, just as fictional Emil does, in a manner meant to suggest good nature and honesty. I am Czechoslovakian — of course I am; I am bound. But cycling down from Vyšehrad now through Prague in the blushing light of this spring shower, I look more Danish or Pomeranian: The whole of me bears the flaxen mark of the Baltic Sea, which I do not imagine as a dark sea on which a man might walk, indeed not as a sea at all, but as a marine light falling through the unstained windows of a Kaliningrad cathedral flensed of ornament onto the whitewashed grave of Immanuel Kant, while outside, Soviet battleships ride at anchor on vaguely realized swells.
The rain stops. The sun rolls largely over shining roofs. I freewheel on my bicycle down into Dejvice, around the circle, past the tram stop at Zelená Street, past the Hotel International, and on up Baba Hill. This is my hilclass="underline" I live atop it. I cycle or walk it daily and barely notice its incline. My feet dig into the pedals now, my body rises without instruction from the saddle. I pass the red-clay tennis courts. The coach waves to me. I wave back. My bicycle rolls from right to left. I physically loosen and lighten as I ascend, as though my calculations and deceptions weigh something and can be cast off as I near home, although I know this is not so, that gravity is more insistent among those we love.
I step off my bicycle outside the Freymann villa at the end of Nad Pat’ankou Street: my home. The air here is sifted with sulfur smoke drifting in from high chimneys far away. The large windows of the villa glint in the afternoon light. My grandfather commissioned the villa in 1929 to resemble the prow of a big American train running sunlit through the desert down to Los Angeles. Other functionalist villas were built on Baba Hill then to break the pull of Hapsburg Prague, which hovered planetary on the horizon in black and gold. But the Czechoslovakia these villas were erected to celebrate has long since been plowed under. There have been so many departures from this hillside — to death camps, hard-labor camps, internal exile in villages or industrial towns, to New York, London, Munich, and Tel Aviv. Baba stumbles on as Prague stumbles on, as a wasted body in a fine suit.
I open the front door. I call out. There is no answer. I walk on into silence, into cream and mercury. I feel myself to have boarded some train in a desert, for this is a home of passage, in which there is hardly anything of the Communist moment. My father was raised here. My brothers and my sister and I have been raised here. I descend the stairs now by spare walls, untouched but for a few art photographs. I open the windows of my room onto the garden, lined with dark pine trees, which slopes down to the Dukla soccer stadium below. In summer, the shadows of my parents and the trowels and forks they carry about the garden play on the walls of my room, comforting me and keeping alive within me a sense of childhood.
My father read Emil and the Detectives aloud to me as a child. He read tenderly, because he understood the horrors awaiting fictional Emil. If that boy, also with slate-colored eyes, grew into a man and left the pages of the book, he would die fighting in the siege of Stalingrad or drown soundlessly in a U-boat far out in the Barents Sea. If he remained a boy like Peter Pan and lived the same adventure over and over, there would come a time when he was delivered into a Berlin that was burning. And who would care about the money stolen from him — those few notes removed from his jacket while he slept on the train, which made for the adventure — if he had alighted at Berlin Zoo station not in 1930, as the book has it, but in 1944, when the bombs were falling? How many child detectives would fictional Emil have been able to rally to his cause then, when real boys yet smaller than him wore uniforms, carried guns, and died in large numbers?