Heaven help me, Margaret thought. There is no truth, no objectivity, no disinterested knowledge. Prague, sweet Prague, has been unwittingly deconstructed by a careless man from New Jersey. Barely registering the tomb's truly magnificent ugliness in her despair, she moved on.
Edward's silly, girlish students could have lived without him for a week. And Edward would have known who was buried in the silver bauble, who built the Eiffel Tower, who was buried in Grant's tomb. Edward would have memorized the guidebook, or at least not lost it, or he wouldn't have needed it in the first place, devouring the sights raw. Margaret missed him terribly; she missed his loud voice.
Gloomy, benighted, and cold, Margaret sat in a taxi and passed all the buildings she could not identify, through the wood the name of which she no longer remembered, to the bank of the River Whatever.
Before her stretched the Charles Bridge, its cobblestone path not at all straight, but curving slightly this way, then that, leading eventually to slender Gothic towers, to Renaissance domes, to tilted red-tiled roofs. In the dark gray sky, gulls shot by, screeching, floating upward, then coasting down again, graceful and swift. Statues, dozens of dignified figures in flowing, stony robes, stood at intervals, rising on either side of the bridge. Margaret leaned over the side and saw the grim, slate water turn suddenly golden with a shaft of sunlight. Swans plunged upside down to feed, their tails pointing up comically. Above the harsh strumming of a guitar, an American voice sang, "Git out of my room, girl. You're as crazy as the moon, girl. Oh! The world is full of garbage. Don't throw me away!"
Margaret turned and saw, perched at the foot of a statue, a long-haired boy in jeans and a fringed leather jacket. Several teenage boys, clearly not Americans, stood around him, nodding their heads in approval. The sun was pouring through the clouds now, and the boys and the statues and the red rooftops and the golden spires of the Castle glowed, warm and vibrant.
Margaret watched the sun light up the city. Each building it shined on, she thought, had some name, some prominent place in the history of Western culture, a name and a place she would never know. The sun and the gleaming city mocked her.
I am a failure as a sightseer, Margaret thought. Why didn't Edward take off some time and come here with me? But her husband was home seducing shapely but intellectually unformed girls with dramatic readings of poetry, and this city was sparkling and beckoning, a coy temptress, forever beyond her reach.
Beside her, a young man was setting Soviet officer caps and belt buckles on the stone railing. A cardboard sign in English said CLEARANCE ON TOTALITARIANISM!!
"So!" said an American tourist, pointing his miniature video camera at the man selling the Red Army castoffs. "May I ask you a few questions, sir?"
His voice had the tone of a father at a birthday party for three-year-olds. Margaret felt ashamed.
"First, sir, could you tell me, what do you think of the Russians?"
"I don't like," said the man, facing the camera, then grinning and looking down.
"You don't like them. I see. And why is that?"
"They are Communists."
"And why are you selling these things, sir? Would you say it was because you prefer capitalism?"
"I would say, yes."
"Thank you, sir, for your candor," said the officious tourist, turning suddenly to Margaret, aiming his little machine at her. "And you?"
"I would say, yes," Margaret said.
"You're an entrepreneur," said the tourist, turning back to the Czech. "Do you understand? En-tre-preneur." With his free hand, he patted the man's arm. "You will do well."
Margaret, in penance for her people, bought a pin from the entrepreneur, a red star with a white enameled portrait of Lenin, in shoulder-length curls at the age of five, in the center.
What a horrible man, Margaret thought, watching the tourist, who was now interviewing the folksinger. And yet I am no better. A voyeur. Not even a voyeur. I'm too inept to be a voyeur unless I have a narrator, a book of instructions, a Baedeker's. I'm too insensitive to sightsee.
But the city glowed delicately all around her. The river was wide beneath the bridge. The gulls laughed above in the new sunlit sky. Oh well, fuck Baedeker's, she thought. What do I care who built what? I'll only forget it tomorrow. What do I care who lived where? They're all dead now, anyway.
She gazed around her with new determination. She, Margaret Nathan, pedant, scholar, seeker of truth, was in Prague, city of truth. Observe! Experience! Know! Dare to know? said Kant. Dare to sightsee! says Margaret.