I approach one of the vendors, a pale man with an honest black mustache, and ask if he sells whiskey.
Without acknowledgment of my presence, he reaches into the depths of his cart and produces a black plastic cup. “Hundredandeighty,” he says.
I hand the money over and ask for a sausage, horseradish, spicy mustard.
This is Wenceslas Square almost thirteen years after the revolution. The place where we took our nation back. Where the heart of the Czech resistance launched its assault on the Nazis, building barricades and running at the German soldiers to rip the weapons out of their hands while Soviet liberator tanks were still a world away. Where in 1989 women and men shook their keys as the headless-chicken corpse of the Soviet-installed government pleaded with Moscow to order their tanks to shoot, for Chrissake, shoot these people before they establish a democracy.
The cube bricks that form the road and oblique rooftops, once witness to thronging crowds of revolutionaries, to bullets, to heads cracked by police batons, now provide a historical feel to a shopping experience. Clothing stores, cafés, strip clubs. Promoters stand in front of the shiny entrances and hand out colorful flyers with pictures of girls and happy hour specials. It is four thirty in the afternoon and already these campaigners of sin stand in the trenches, their chins stinking of vodka from the previous night.
I drink the whiskey and wonder if the square isn’t a bit colorless despite the neon, perhaps ripe for another climax of history. Will we ever again march on these bricks in national unity, fighting yet another threat to Europe’s beating heart, or will this new Prague become an architecturally brilliant strip mall?
My sausage is ready and I order another whiskey.
Then, I smell perfume.
“Vodka and sausage,” a woman says.
The vendor denies her.
I turn. Her hair is short and dark, her thin lips emphasized, not enlarged, by a line of dark red lipstick. A gray dress fits tightly around her hips. She is small, so very small, but she doesn’t wear heels to position herself higher, nor does she look in any way anxious while speaking to the broad man in front of her. In fact, she doesn’t even lift her chin. She meets the vendor’s eyes with her own, as if suggesting that she has nothing to apologize for and that, if anything, he should be shorter to accommodate her. She seems a presence unaffected by the square’s chaos and hostility, like one of the surly statues of saints and warriors who’d been there when Prague was still barely a trading post. She invites love. Right away I want good things to happen for her.
“Why not?” she asks.
“No sausages, no alcohol. He cleaned me out for the night,” the vendor says.
She looks at me and the evidence of my crimes, the plate heavy with sausage in my left hand and a freshly poured cup in my right.
“My fucking luck,” she says.
I extend both arms toward her, peace offerings. She measures up the shaking plate and smirks.
“I’ll take the whiskey if you’re really offering,” she says.
I nod.
“Is he mute?” she asks the vendor, who cuts his thumb while slicing an onion.
“Bag of dicks,” he roars.
I give her the whiskey. “You can have a bite,” I say.
“A gentleman,” she says.
The vendor starts kicking the cart while blood drips onto his utensils. The cart shakes and seems as though it could fall over at any minute. Already witnesses are gathering around for photos, and a skinny policeman strolls over at a leisurely pace, munching on chicken nuggets.
The woman in the gray dress gestures toward some benches across the street, then walks off without looking back to see if I’m following. She sits, crosses her legs, and downs the entire cup of whiskey in one gulp, finishing up with a soft belch. She appraises me as I consider sitting down beside her. Finally, the vendor upends his cart, and the buns and condiments spill on the sidewalk. The policeman tosses his chicken nuggets aside and pulls out a baton, whereupon the vendor points a pair of tongs at him.
“Well, sit down, share the food,” the woman says. “Let’s enjoy the show.”
“I’m Jakub,” I tell her as I obey.
“Lenka,” she says. “Thanks, I needed a drink.”
The vendor snaps at the policeman with his tongs, like an emaciated crab leg, and the policeman backs away, switching his baton for a Taser.
“That’s what happens when you force people into lives they hate,” Lenka says. “They snap. Come at you with kitchenware.”
“How do you know he was forced into anything?” I say.
“Do you think he’d be frying pork in this tourist trap if he had better choices?”
Reinforcements arrive. Four officers circle the crazed vendor now, hands on their pistols. Spectators mumble with delight. At last the vendor hurls the tongs into the air, and falls to his knees, right in the pool of ketchup and mustard. He dips his hand into it, and smiles, drawing shapes, like a child playing with crayons. The cops and bystanders all look on, uncertainly.
“I feel like this is our fault,” I say.
“It is possible our demands ruined the man’s life,” she says.
“He must’ve been craving this kind of self-destruction for a long time now.”
“I don’t blame him. I feel like self-destructing today too.”
“Bad day on the job?”
“Funny thing,” she says. “The other day, a man on TV said that unemployment makes people unhappy because they lose meaning in their lives. He went on to say that jobs are a source of meaningful pleasure. Who is this guy? Coffee is pleasure. Vodka melon balls and theater. Waking up with a strand of your lover’s hair in your mouth. Those are pleasures. Tell me, if robots did all of our work for us, do you think we’d all plunge into depression and form suicide pacts? If we could all pay attention to art, spend our days climbing mountains or diving into oceans, all of us wealthy and satiated because our robots have things covered, would the world be overrun with maniacs shooting at each other because their lives lack meaning? Dignity is attached to money, they say. So, a person with a decent job making decent money is supposed to have reached nirvana. According to this man’s theory, I’m supposed to have dignity because I pick up the phone in hotel reception. Well, here I am, dignity nowhere to be seen, rambling drunkenly to a stranger. Let me have a bite.”
She pulls her hair behind her ear as horseradish and black grease spread on her chin. She chews and checks her watch.
“So, what’s your deal?” she says. “Drunk at six, bumming around the square.”
“I want to know more about your theory. This robotic communism.”
“Let me guess,” she says. “You go to university. You’re determined to deconstruct my ramblings, to align me with a theory. And you are so clean-shaven. All you student boys shave so carefully, yet your idols were all bearded men!”
“I study astrophysics. Though, today, I’m not sure why.”