This somehow led to a quotation from Karl Popper, an unfashionable philosopher of science, so far out of the circuit that, just for a moment, Margaret thought her new friend was referring to a children's book about penguins. "Popper once wrote that the greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature perishes, philosophers continue to talk, sometimes cleverly and sometimes not, about the question of whether this world exists." His voice wavered. His complexion was pink and white, as delicate as a girl's. He smiled and patted her hand reassuringly.
"It is the human condition," he said, "to theorize and criticize theory. It is our mechanism of adaptation to the world. Like flippers. Or a sharp beak. Like a giraffe's long neck!" He laughed, almost inaudibly. He coughed for some time. Margaret leaned closer, afraid the old man would die, his lovely white hair tipped forward into the dark espresso.
"To see is not to believe," he said finally, smiling again. "To see is to philosophize."
Margaret was supposed to speak at the Charles University, not under the auspices of the history department (still staffed by professors who had learned their stuff under the Communist regime, while more independent-minded professors swept floors), but by an independent group of students and intellectuals who had organized a series of talks by visiting scholars.
Margaret was shown around by one of the students, a small, earnest girl named Anna, who took her on a streetcar to see "the real Prague," apartment blocks from the twenties, black with coal dust.
"These buildings could be beautiful, very beautiful, if they were restored," said Anna. "But the Communists would rather tear down and build a new, ugly building."
"How capitalistic of them," said Margaret.
Anna looked at her in disbelief. "But why?"
Margaret was silent. How did one answer such a question? It was like asking why people breathe. Why do people breathe? Margaret thought.
Then Anna took out some photos she had in her purse. "This is the trip my boyfriend and I took to Paris," she said.
Margaret smiled as she remembered her first trip to Paris. There would be snapshots of the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, the Seine.
"This is Jim Morrison's grave," Anna was saying. "This is another view of it, and here's the back, and this graffiti we liked very much..."
Jim Morrison was buried in Paris? Well, he would be, wouldn't he? Maybe she, Margaret, could contrive to be buried in Prague. No, no, that was Kafka territory. She'd have to find her own city. Bridgeport, perhaps.
She looked at Anna, to whom Jim Morrison meant something. In Prague, rock still meant something. Not just nostalgia or marketing spin-offs or pretentious videos, but something.
That night Anna took her to the Stalin Monument high on a hill overlooking the Vltava. The monument itself, a statue of Stalin almost as large as the Statue of Liberty, had been torn down in the early sixties. Underneath it, a warren of tunnels and concrete reinforced bunkers had been discovered: a bomb shelter and command center built in the fifties as a home for the elite after Armageddon. The new Czech government had turned it over to a group of students who had turned it into an art gallery and rock club called Totalitarian Zone.
Margaret stood rather uncomfortably in the cold cave of a place. Tomorrow she would deliver her talk. She was supposed to inform a roomful of people who had recently risked their lives in pursuit of the ideals of the Enlightenment about the Enlightenment. To tell a group of Czech students about an erotic bastardization of Locke when they were in the midst of an authentic realization of Locke's ideas—this was absurd, this was preposterous, this was chutzpah!