He was balding and wore a round-collared raincoat. He shivered and smiled, and even though he was from New Jersey and was, in all probability, a terrible driver, Margaret handed him the guidebook.
"That's the Schwarzenberg Palace?" he said, pointing. "Thanks, thanks so much. I should have brought one of these. You certainly can't get one in Prague. I'm here on business," he said, and Margaret feared he would begin a lecture on how the Czechs didn't know the first thing about making a profit. "But I snuck away this morning. I couldn't help myself. I've never seen a city like this."
"Neither have I," Margaret said.
Then they parted, he heading toward the Castle gate, she to the art museum in a cold, drafty palace staffed by stern, glaring Slavic matrons.
Margaret leaned forward to stare at one painting that struck her as curiously chàotic. A naked, expressionless Mary Magdalene, tresses trailing luxuriously over her breasts, was swarmed by cherubs, winged naked babies perched on her back, straddling her shoulders, fat cherub feet planted on her head. On their identical faces were identical expressions—disappointed, doubtful, tiny mouths all turning down on one side in an odd, halfhearted frown. One cherub pointed up, but toward what, it was not clear.
A thickset museum matron appeared suddenly, from nowhere, waving her heavy arms at Margaret, charging, a round, female, uniformed bull. Her face was closer, close, her nose red from the cold. Fine red veins crisscrossed her cheeks. She will arrest me, Margaret thought. Who now do they put in the jail? the little Belgian judge had asked. Why, tourists!
The matron said something, gesturing toward the painting, then began making noises like an alarm, then melted back into the shadows, where a folding chair draped with a sheepskin awaited her.
Margaret moved on past a Rubens portrait of a mountain of female flesh wrapped in a green snake, to which she was careful not to draw too close; past more matrons glaring dutifully from folding chairs; through large wooden doors and chilly echoing corridors. She bought some postcards from a woman downstairs and walked past a pile of coal, up the steep, narrow alley to the square.
Margaret heard the bleat of a trumpet. Around the gates to the Castle stood a large crowd, many of them schoolchildren. A group of five or six boys, about thirteen years old, their cheeks and the tips of their noses pink in the cold, were laughing and pushing each other. They began to move their arms, their hands, their fingers. They were deaf, Margaret realized, and were speaking to each other in sign language with the speed and exuberance of adolescence, shrieking with laughter, covering their faces in mock embarrassment, punching, shoving, and laughing again.
Margaret reached into the large pocket of her parka for her Baedeker's. But her Baedeker's was not in her pocket, nor was it in her other pocket. It was not in her bag. It was not in her hand. It was in the hand of the man from New Jersey. He had forgotten to give it back. Margaret stood miserably in the cold, her day of sightseeing ruined. By an act of offhand generosity, her Baedeker's, its pages elaborately marked and turned back, was in the possession of another. She had been forgetful, as usual. Now she would be ignorant, as usual.
She looked up at the gate. Huge pillars stood on either side. On top of the left one rose an enormous statue of a naked man pushing another naked man to the ground, about to plunge a dagger into his throat. On the right, an even larger, stronger-looking man stood poised to club to death his fallen enemy. Who were these nude, sinewy bullies, and why were they guarding the Castle? Who made them? Who ordered them put there? She would never know, and the statues, unexplained, writhed above her in an insinuating, eerie mystery. The violence and heft of the tangled limbs, the sparkle of the gilded dagger and club against the coal-darkened bodies, all looked wildly incongruous against the rather subdued, refined building within.
Who would tell her now from what window the defenestration of Prague took place? Margaret walked reluctantly through the gate, past a stiff, ruddy-faced young guard, into the unknown.
In a cold gray fog, Margaret wandered from unidentified courtyard to unidentified courtyard; through large rooms, empty except for a throne or a metal folding chair; past fountains held aloft by contorted bulging bodies. Sometimes there were signs in English, but often there were not. In St. Vitus Cathedral, an endless, ice-cold barn, an impossibly gaudy silver casket stood on a pedestal surrounded with thick, bulging silver babies and garlands—an imperial tomb, obviously, only whose? Margaret had no one, and no book, to tell her. She glanced at it sadly, longingly, a soul robbed of certainty.