Margaret scurried guiltily beneath the breasts and buttocks and feet. She could not take her eyes off them, and stumbled stupidly against the mere mortals on the street. She passed a butcher shop and looked in horror and fascination at a display of sausages—long white ropes coiled thickly; pale pink wieners hanging in bunches; skinny, wrinkled sausages drooping white and sad; a burst of fat, greasy, stubby ones; others mottled red and white, protruding from their pile in grand eighteen-inch curves. Blushing, Margaret continued on, through the Old Town Square again, this time past what seemed to be a wedding party with cars decorated in garlands, a doll in a top hat on one, a doll in a white dress strapped to the fender of the other, a clownish man leering and playing the accordion.
She came at last to a large baroque church squeezed incongruously into a small area not even large enough to be called a square. Three doors opened into the church, each topped by a hill of tangled naked bodies—cherubs with round, open mouths, youthful angels smiling flirtatiously, men reaching out toward one another, their bodies turned and twisted impossibly, a great, writhing monument to flesh.
Margaret rushed on, past a fountain of three thick-lipped fish, their tails fat and entwined. Was this the way back to the hotel? Was there a way back to the hotel? What hotel was it, anyway?
Her footsteps clattered in the cramped street. She had no idea where she was, where she was going. Just visible, peeking out around the corner of an art nouveau building, were a pair of round plaster knees and slender calves and gently, slightly curled white feet.
Margaret stared helplessly at them, disoriented and tired and defeated. She heard a violin, and then noticed against the wall a young man playing, Mozart maybe, and playing beautifully. A few people had gathered around, including some rather tough looking teenage boys and a bent old woman carrying a mop handle as a cane. The violinist finished. There was clapping. The woman began to sing suddenly in a high-pitched, wheezing voice. The teenage boys were looking at each other, smirking. As the woman sang, on and on, tapping her mop-cane on the ground for rhythm, and the boys nudged each other and whispered and smirked, Margaret felt suddenly afraid. What kind of boys were they? Thugs? What did Czech thugs do? Were they like American thugs? Would they knock down a cracked old lady? Kafka crazy? Kafka was a realist.
Margaret felt ill. She'd been going for hours, through the streets, the twisted streets beneath the flesh of statues. It was getting dark. She would be lost forever in the alleys of this horrible, narrow, dark, obscene little city.
She took a few steps backward. She bumped into someone. "Oh!" cried Margaret.
"Mon Dieu!" cried the someone.
"Excuse me," Margaret said as she turned around.
"It is you!" cried the someone, who was the Belgian judge.
"Oui! Oui!" said his wife.
"Oui!" said Margaret.
The old lady stopped singing.
The thuggish boys looked at each other.
Margaret bit her lip and looked away.
The boys began clapping politely.
Led to the hotel by the little Belgian judge and his little Belgian wife, Margaret wearily walked up the steps to her room. On the landing, she stopped to look at a large painting, so dark that in the daytime it appeared to be all black. But now, in the evening, it was lit up to reveal itself as a scene of an Edwardian man at a table. Beyond the French doors was a pink sunset.
That's nice, Margaret thought as she passed it. A nice, conventional turn-of-the-century bourgeois scene. She smiled and then noticed something under the table in the painting, something large and bluish white, soft and voluptuous, female and naked—a big, curvaceous gal, stashed beneath the table as if an afterthought, no allusion to it anywhere else in the painting, the man above looking out the window, unperturbed, oblivious, beneath him a drift of snowy flesh.
Margaret drew herself a bath. The bathtub was long enough for her to stretch out in, and only her head and feet protruded from the water. In the steamy tub, Margaret closed her eyes. Edward, Edward, she thought. The tub was big enough for two. But her husband was home. Twenty-four young men bathe by the shore. Or was it twenty-eight? "Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore," he was reading, reading Whitman to the students who watched him with slightly parted lips and half-closed eyes. And Margaret bathes alone.
She opened her eyes. Her feet stuck up from the water like plaster feet, large, white plaster feet. Plaster feet hung from the ledges of doorways, doorways of pale lemon-colored buildings. Margaret closed her eyes to rid herself of these images. Feet begone. But what now? What were these? Thighs? Thighs, startlingly clear, white plaster thighs of large and impressive proportions.
Is corporeal sensibility the sole mover of man? The sole mover of Prague? The sole mover of Margaret?
Edward is not here. He is home with his girls. You never heard the Czech Philharmonic. They are in New York. With Edward. You are in Prague. You are alone. Your search for knowledge has led you here, to this bath, to this revelation: alone, you see a perfectly respectable city as a throbbing, eroticized house o' weenies.
God, she thought. I was right all along. The desire to know really is desire.