After dinner, Margaret and her guidebook went on a walk. She could hear her footsteps. In the middle of a city. She noticed how few cars were on the road. One, and then none. A few minutes later, one. And then none. Just the clip of her footsteps.
The Civic Forum building at the bottom of Wenceslaus Square looked smaller than it had on television. What a good-natured headquarters for a revolution, Margaret thought. A white banner flew with the initials O.F., a happy face drawn inside the O. There was a café on the ground floor.
"Change money? Cambia? Changer?" a man asked her.
She shook her head and followed a narrow street, from which cars were banned, past darkened shops, until an irregular square of pastel buildings opened before her, so delicate in the lamplight that she stood still in wonder.
Kafka, you're crazy, she thought. Well, of course, that's not a very original observation, but look! This city is light and airy and elegant and kind. I've been here nine hours, so I know.
Tourists filled the square. Folksingers with stringy hair strummed guitars. A man in a plumed helmet played the tuba. Margaret walked along the edges, looking up at the surrounding buildings. There were little narrow houses and large rococo palaces, all painted lime green or lemon yellow or shell pink or robin's-egg blue, covered with statues and curls, the decorations white and luminous in the night.
Margaret had almost forgotten the pleasure of being a tourist. No responsibility, except to look. I like to look, she thought. With my guidebook to tell me what it is I'm looking at. She waited with the other tourists for the elaborate cuckoo clock on the medieval Old Town Hall to chime ten. Finally, two windows in the tower above opened, behind which the twelve apostles could be seen parading by. A skeleton rang a bell, his bone arm moving up and down, pulling a string, his head shaking eerily. A golden cock crowed in a harsh squawk.
The breakfast buffet table offered yogurt with a dozen bowls of powdery toppings in different pastel confetti colors, as well as sliced cucumbers, meat soup, and cold brussels sprouts. The musical trio was absent, but Margaret saw the Belgians, who waved, and the photographer, who sneezed extravagantly, then winked at her. She gratefully followed the waitress to a table far from her acquaintances, a table directly beneath the bronze statuess, her arms spread above Margaret like the fronds of a sheltering palm.
Late that morning Margaret met with a white-haired professor of philosophy who spoke so quietly she had to lean very close to hear him. He had studied with members of the Vienna Circle in his youth, established himself as a distinguished university professor in Prague, then become an important dissident, a teacher with no post, an underground writer and translator, a man who chose not to emigrate, a political prisoner off and on for years. Margaret wondered if that was why he spoke softly, out of habit, the habit of not wanting to be overheard. She leaned toward him, grateful to listen to this gentlemanly figure, cultivated and generous. Frail and ancient physically, he was so robust spiritually that his hushed, weak voice was irresistible. He did not blame the Allies for giving Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Why didn't Bene? fight? Bene? had one of the best-equipped armies in the world! Margaret, in her entire life, had never heard anyone say such a thing, not any Democrat, not any Republican, not anyone. He loved "The Star-Spangled Banner," calling it "almost as nice as 'The Marseillaise.'" Margaret had never heard anyone say he liked "The Star-Spangled Banner." He quoted from Shakespeare, from Henry VI, a play Margaret had barely heard of, much less read. He quoted from Henry James and Jane Austen and Balzac and Auden and Wittgenstein. He was funny in a way that forgave the victims of his wit, and easily, comfortably learned, as if these books and these ideas were his chums (hers, too!). He drank his coffee and murmured gorgeously. She wanted to reach out and take hold of his hand. If Americans were tolerant, unaffected, sensible—if Americans were really American, Margaret thought—they would be like him.
Instead of discussing the revolution itself, he seemed to be enjoying the freedom to chat afforded him by his revolution. "Look," he said at one point, pointing to an empty bracket on the wall. "That's where they used to keep their cameras." Then he went back to discussing the state of Czech theater in the seventies. Margaret had spent so many late nights with so many graduate-student revolutionaries that this real revolutionary seemed almost impossible to her. He told stories about a Czech surrealist poet and remarked on Slav theorists between the world wars and their influence on French structuralist thought and then taught her a limerick by Edward Lear.
There was an Old Lady of Prague, whose language was horribly
vague;
When they said, 'Are these caps?' she answered, 'Perhaps!'
That oracular Lady of Prague.