The quick little gulls were oddly stubby, their heads black, their black beaks as straight as needles. Chilly, pallid vendors in thin parkas sold glasses painted with red flowers. A skinny man offered elongated tin soldiers in World War I uniforms, painted by his mother. There were thirty statues along the bridge—she counted—all black with coal dust. Above the American folksinger, the statue was of an anguished Christ on the cross, a woman facing him, her hand gently pressing his leg. Around them fluttered a mountain of curly-haired cherubs, lips parted. The woman's face lifted toward his.
Carefully Margaret observed the statue, the woman's upturned face and parted lips, the gentle insistence of her fingers resting on his leg, her thumb reaching almost to his thigh. His head sank toward hers. His muscles strained.
She's trying to kiss him, Margaret thought. He's trying to kiss her. They long to embark on the pursuit of pleasure. What I am observing is a highly charged, erotic moment. This is a religious statue depicting desire. The woman's hand pressed against the flesh of his leg, an insistent caress. Their faces reached, hopelessly, toward each other.
I am going insane, Margaret thought.
But her observations continued to yield the same sort of data: on every side of her, statues rose up, statues of bodies, the curves of their legs and shoulders outlined by the clinging drapery of their long garments. Men lifted their hands imploringly to women standing magnificent atop cherubs piled up in fleshy heaps. These are saints, Margaret reminded herself. Saints praying to the Virgin. If Jesus looks like his muscles are straining toward a woman below him, perhaps it's because he's dangling from a cross.
Their robes flowed, sweeping across their limbs, across their stomachs. The sun was shining on the city, lighting up the thirty statues of men and women entangled in their clothing and their passions.
Margaret hurried from the sunny bridge, from the Red Army caps and the singing hippie, from the swans upside down in the sparkling waters of the River Whatever. She hurried into the refuge in the dark and crooked streets of the Old Town. Children waited in line at an ice cream shop. The windows of a rare book store displayed eighteenth-century manuscripts and three fairly recent issues of The New York Review of Books.
She walked on as if she knew where she were going. She followed the curves and dodges of the little street. The statues had been left behind on the bridge, but here were more figures, mounted on the walls, over the doorways, great arched doorways opening along a street so narrow it was almost an alley. Neoclassical men flanked one doorway, baring their perfect chests, every muscle just visible beneath the skin, their arms lifted in graceful, balletic poses. What are their legs like? Margaret wondered, for the statues ended just above the groin, below each lovely manly man a decorative pedestal.
Margaret stopped and tried to gain control of herself, for surely one did not come to Prague to ogle nude architectural decoration. These were the streets where, only a year ago, people walked in fear of Soviet tanks, and now they crowded around vendors selling copies of Ameriky Sen, by Norman Mailer, on the sidewalks. This was where Kafka walked, where the story of the Golem was invented. This was where Don Giovanni premiered. This was central Europe!
Above, art deco maidens, broad and bland in an oddly alluring way, giants of women, stared down at her from a rooftop. Their breasts, circular emblems of breasts, stood out above their Egyptian skirts, stood out above the central European city.
Margaret turned and turned again, up one street and down another, again and again, each turn bringing her face to face with yet another man of stone, another woman. Before her, their massive feet nearly at the level of Margaret's eyes, stood two titans, two Herculean males groaning beneath the weight of the building they strained to hold on their bulging shoulders, lion skins flung carelessly across their magnificent nakedness. On the other side of the street, an impassive woman in bas-relief fanned her own flat breasts and taut, flat stomach. Two giantesses in Edwardian hairdos framed a doorway, their arms outstretched, each having only a belt with a round medallion just above the navel to clothe them; an awful owl, its wings spread threateningly, stood between them. Their feet were big masculine feet, with prominent toes.