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5.7.07
V PRAZE
PRAGUE
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It was 18 hours by bus to Prague. Cramped seats, dishevelled sleep, casual slugs from Albert’s flask of Oude Ginever, the strong juniper flavoured Dutch liquor from which gin is rumoured to have evolved, fueled my insomnia along with the excitement of the destination ahead of us, and instead of sleep, quietly humming to myself, covered in a barely comprehensible issue of De Volkskrant purchased at the origin of the journey in Amsterdam, a comically coloured weekend edition of USA Today as well as the International Herald Tribune, whose crossword Albert had completed at the journey‘s onset in less than a half hour, I snuck peeks, through the dancing moonlight of a German sky, at Jiri Weil’s Life With A Star, whose reading I’d timed for this trip, this story of Josef Roubicek, a Jewish bank teller who is waiting to be called up for deportation to Terezin whilst his fellow Jews were increasingly persecuted in a Nazi Prague…
Neither of us had known much more than a communist Czechoslovakia in the entirety of our collective existence and the idea of this one-two punch, the Nazis followed up by the Russians, seemed like a positively devastating set of circumstances.
And all this after the promise of the Treaty of St German in 1919, Albert read, upon successful conclusion of the International Herald Tribune without breaking a sweat, from a some notes he’d scribbled in anticipation of our journey, some background fillers, arcania and trivia, solid facts and useful information he’d been gleaning in his spare time for weeks once he’d known in his mind he was ready to leave Utrecht.
You see, he began, warming up to his topic as we left some truck stop somewhere between Belgium and Germany by late afternoon, offloading a few travellers, uploading a few more whilst giving passengers a chance to stuff themselves with cafeteria snacks and junk food for the journey ahead, Czechoslovakia itself was the one of the many offspring of the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War One and with that treaty, the return to the romantic notion of the medieval Czech statehood
Now, how did they lose that statehood to begin with, he smirked, I’m glad you asked. He pulled at his beard, staring out the window.
The Czechs, you see, were in a pretty good position if you go back to the 14th century. Their King Charles IV, King of Bohemia and even Holy Roman Emperor believe it or not, the chief of All-Time Czech chiefs, had set it all up proper-like. Not only that but he’s the one who commissioned so many of the Gothic buildings that still stand in Prague, also started up the University of Prague, etc. You’ll see half the city appears to have stuffed named after him. Anyway, he led this golden age for the Czech Empire and diplomat that he was, later on he established several treaties of his own, of primary importance that with the Hapsburg family in Austria and surprise surprise, surprise, the Arpads in Hungary which, you guessed it, was the foundation of the very Austro-Hungarian Empire that needed to be dismantled some 550 years or so later.
His daughter married Rudolf IV, the Habsburg King and they enter into a contract of mutual inheritance between his family and the Habsburgs wherein if one family became extinct, the other took over.
Another Rudolf eventually became the Czech King but this wasn’t the proper downfall - no, that came because of, yes you guessed it, internal religious wars between the Catholics and Protestants. We’ll save Jan Hus and the Hussites for another day, Witold but suffice it to say that from that point on, the Czechs were no longer their own, they were the Germans’ and it wasn’t until that treaty that they became so again, however short lived.
Hitler once bellowed, sometime in 1937 I think, Czechoslovakia would be wiped off the map! Smashed with military power, he threatened. England, France and Italy helped sign his power to do so in Munich a month later and by the Spring of 1939 not only was so-called Sudetenland under the Nazi thumb, but their troops had entered Prague.
So that, as they say, was that, Albert moaned, rolling his back to me, head against the window, long legs curled inward in a futile effort to fit his frame into a comfortable position for sleep. Not on a bus. I returned to Jiri Weil’s book:
..Ruzena, I said, people are now drinking coffee, well, perhaps not real coffee, but they are sitting somewhere warm, after a satisfying lunch, and I am freezing, Ruzena, and I am hungry…
It was a thoroughly demoralising book about human cruelty and the rooms of mild insanity that thrived within them. By the time I’d finished, I’d temporarily forgotten my fixation with Soviet Prague and resolved to spend one afternoon, like Josef Roubicek, sweeping leaves in a Prague cemetery.
Meanwhile Albert slept from the start, I noted jealously. You have long hours to stare out the window yet most of the journey was made in darkness so even staring out the window gave you the feeling that you were enduring rather than travelling, transported anonymously through historical lands in a god damned bus stinking of the bad breath of two dozen snoozing foreigners instead of riding horses like Sugambrians and the Suebian Tribes raiding along the Rhine.
Morning slowly unveiled and with its unveiling, the countryside danced naked.
But as we made our approach to what we assumed was Prague there was a growing ill ease. Everywhere had a hue of grey, industrial soot, abused and staggered.
Expecting Bohemia, anarchy, surrealism and intoxication, we were disappointed at our dropping point, a bleak bus station on the outskirts of town.
You think you know a place by reading about it, reading the literature spawned from it, listening to the stories of other travellers but ultimately, its like imagining what it would have been like to sleep with the vintage version of Marilyn Monroe or Ingrid Bergman – you might conjure up the face, fill in the blanks of the intimate curves of the body, cobble together personality traits from interviews and photographs but in the end, the imagination is dulled by the inability to make it real.
During his few waking hours, Albert had continued his overview of Czech literature and history on the bus ride out of Amsterdam through Germany, filled me in on the Slavonic liturgy like the 10th century legend of Ludmila and Wenceslas, the break of the monopoly of lecturing in Latin in Prague by Karl Heinrich Seibt in the 18th century, the Age of Reason with its secular focus that condemned the Baroque, affected by mythopoeic patriotism, the birth of neo-Classical literatures influenced by folklorism, the concept of autonomous national culture, , the 19th century Czech Romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha (whose poem Máj, he was even able to spout of few lines in butchered Czech that he’d memorised), the effect of the Ausgleich, which split the Empire into the dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary leaving Czech nationalism to the wayside, the Czech submission to bourgeois Vienna, Hanuman, the poem by Svatopluk Cech about civil war between clothed cosmopolitan and naked nationalist natural apes, Masaryk and the Realists, anarchist utopianism - and that’s as far as I got in my reading so far, he shrugged apologetically as the bus made a dinner stop in some German self-service diner on the Autobahn.
This is Prague? Albert managed to moan, setting down his bag, quickly lighting a long-awaited Winston and pulling the collar of his coat up around his chin and grimacing. Prague's first nucleus was founded in the latter part of the 9th century as a castle on a hill commanding the right bank of the Vltava: this is known as Vyšehrad (high castle) to differentiate from the castle which was later erected on the opposite bank, the future Hradčany. Soon the city became the seat of the Země koruny české Kings of Bohemia, some of whom also later reigned as emperors of the Holy Roman Empire
I think so, I noted cautiously, sniffing the sulphuric air around me and looking around for something familiar. Imagine if we were like, dropped in here in like August 1968 when the troops of the USSR, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were rolling in to douse the Prague Spring. Imagine the euphoria of a greater democracy, economic reforms and the abandonment of controls over mass media doused in a matter of a few nights of occupation.
Jan Palach, Albert muttered, puffing greedily on the Winston and wondering where the first pub might be located even though it was barely seven in the morning. I’ve read this city is loaded with non-stop bars, he explained. Less than five months later, he continued, Jan Palach infamously performed an act of self immolation in protest of the Soviet disbursement of reform. If you want to imagine something, try imagining making the decision not only to protest, but to kill yourself in protest and not only kill yourself in protest but kill yourself by setting fire to yourself in protest. That, he said, tossing the cigarette butt on the ground with hundreds of others, and two historic acts of defenestration, are what Prague symbolises to me before I’ve even had my first Czech beer.
We carried on out of the depot and began the slow, uncertain walk towards what we sensed was the city centre. It was clear from looking up and down the Vinohodská that the east end was a trail of the city trickling away into suburbs and the west direction appeared to be the only other choice. Fortunately for us, unwittingly, it led straight down, albeit after quite a pace, into the centre of town, the Národní Muzeum
So we carried on, Albert lugging his bass with only a small duffel bag over one shoulder and I, with the saxophone in its case, also travelling lightly – clothes we would buy on the cheap – these were third world prices, after all and despite effusions about history and literature, like most others who had come, we were there for the cheap lifestyle.
Ten minutes down the street and the strap on a bag snapped and fell harshly into the slush of the sidewalk as a menacing dog held on a leash by a disapproving old lady began barking at us. Fuck off, Albert growled back at the dog as the old lady shouted something at us incomprehensibly.
So this is the dream? Albert demanded after twenty minutes of walking got us closer to what passed as the skyline. This fucking dreary slum of a city?
Hang tight, I cautioned. First impressions are not always the right impressions. Something tells me we’ve entered from the wrong side of town. Have some faith, we’re going to be dazzled, I guarantee it, I preached boldly, trying to overcome my own trepidation with something resembling optimism despite the bleak surroundings.
And sure enough, by half eleven, through the virtues of an old communist tourist council, we’d quartered our belongings in what seemed after the squalor of Amsterdamsestraatweg, a quasi-posh hotel, had a flyer for a promising youth hostel and had steered ourselves in the direction of what we believed to be a famous watering hole known for it’s jazz musicians and cheap beer.
*****
The religious split between Catholics and Protestants is followed everywhere on an historical trail and Prague is no different. The rationalist reaction against devotional Roman Catholic literature was a constant spasm, like a dodgy sphincter, Albert explained as we strode swiftly now, eager to begin. Sort of on par with the literary rebellion against white males hogging all the good lit publicity for themselves, he added. And look, in the 16th century, the predominately and fevered Catholics of the Habsburgs took over, pushing the Protestants aside, much like the Spanish king did to the Protestants in the Netherlands. See the pattern of Europe during these times? Religious intolerance.
But like the Dutch revolt, the bubble burst eventually when at the Prague Castle, an assembly of Protestants tried two Imperial governors, Wilhelm Slavata and Jaroslav somebody, for violating the right of freedom of religion, found them both guilty, and threw them out of the high castle windows, There you have your first Czech defenestration.
Undeniably, the euphoria of historical partaking in Prague had long since worn away within the last decade between the first intrepid Western youth settlers to today’s overindulged yobs, stag parties and frat boy mentality sweating through pint after pint in one trendy location after another. There were few remnants of Communist Prague to sip on a leisurely afternoon, the aura had been vacuumed and binned and its place cropped up a nihilistic subculture of intellectual sewage who came to Prague much in the same way they came to Amsterdam. Hedonism as an art form.
It was almost as though the old wooden theatre called the Bouda (hut) had never been erected on Wenceslas Square – in fact it had been demolished after a few plays were put on, mostly by Viennese writers.
That isn’t to say Prague didn’t have its charms. And it would be hypocritical to pretend that for determined drunkards like Albert and I, latter day successors to the son of the esteemed Charles IV, King Wenceslaus the Greatest 14th and 15th century drunkard, this wasn’t a sort of Beer Mecca we might have dreamt about once the idea of alighting in Prague became apparent. Not solely because Czech custom, being one of the greatest consumers, per capita of ale in Europe, of imbibing but also because the beers were bigger and cheaper (LOOK UP CZECH BREWING PROCESS & PER CAPITA CONSUMPTION)
And we knew there would also be more exotic yet powerful pit stops along the beer super highway like plum brandy in the form of Slivovice or the herb-laden Beckerovka and even absinthe.
But more importantly there were the Disney-like facades of what remained a sort of fairyland architectural backdrop. There were the working class pivnices in Zizkov where men traditionally supped on gallons of beer in dingy yet church-like reverential quarters. There was the cheap which made life a bearable bargain. There was Vaclav Havel running the country instead of the literary resistance. There was the underlying hum of informality when it came to proving competencies. You didn’t need a sparkling CV to do something, you merely had to do it. And one can barely mention Prague without mentioning the birds of Prague, whorish with deadbeat intellects yet charming naivité, or, as the Czech poet Mácha described them pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
Albert didn’t need much convincing, once we’d established quarters and consulted a guidebook to find an auld jazz hangout near the banks of the Vlatava. Albert judges every place he goes based upon the cost of a pint of beer. Cheap beer in Albert’s mind equals worthy society. Expensive beer means they’re all more than likely just a bunch of yuppies, flesh merchants or worse, snobs. The upper classes lack poetry, he was fond of repeating whenever we were accosted by ridiculous prices. Life in sterility. So when we ordered our very first pints in Prague the first thing he did was a little jitterbug on the way to sitting at a table singing to himself, it’s true, it’s true! The beer is cheaper than water!
Do you understand what we are creating by hopping now to this new location, abandoning incomplete the experience first of New York and then Utrecht? This is a poetics of surprise and variety giving us the illusion of motion and expansion. Our acts are begun and never completed. Our equilibrium is unstable because we are constructing on several levels at once, each level with a different perspective. And now we throw into the blender, the abundance of cheap beer, an even deeper hedonism, a surreal blur of experiences. If this doesn’t emancipate our music, nothing will!
This is better than Mexico, he went on after having his first few sips. I hate Mexican beer, he sneered, even though it’s cheap like this. This, he sang, holding the pint up in front of my face as though I wouldn’t understand his subject without visual aids, is the sign of times to come! And he chugged down the remaining eleven gulps without breathing, placing the glass softly on the table top and wiping his chin with his right wrist.
Take it slow, lad – an old man who had been sitting dead for all we knew, across from us, suddenly came to life, holding out a wrinkled, age-spotted hand in caution. You lads are all the same. Your first beers you drink like the first girl you fuck, quickly and without comprehending what you are doing. If you are to be drinking many beers in my city, eventually you will learn there is no hurry. There is always another beer waiting somewhere just around the corner.
The old man introduced himself with an outstretched hand as Pavel and when he got around after a few puffs on his pipe to asking us what we were doing in Prague, we let it out quite casually that we were here to start a jazz collective and slip into an irredeemable vortex of hedonism in the process. No small feat and his eyes seemed to instantaneously lose their tired sheen and first light brilliantly with memory and then as the memory apparently slipped gears from the pleasant to the unpleasant and back to the pleasant again, he volunteered that his command of English, be patient, he cautioned, this might become a long story, was owed to migration as a boy of 14, just after the Communist‘s final coup for power. Actually, only a few days after Jan Masaryk, he added as an aside, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, was found under the window of the apartment. They called it suicide but we all knew better. We were a drop in a river of emigrants flowing out of Czechoslovakia, disgusted and powerless, carried by the tide of that disgust and powerlessness we went hiked through a thick forest for days and days until finally arriving at the Austrian border.
He paused here, perhaps for dramatic effect or perhaps distracted by a sudden outburst of laughter from three young men seated at a corner table whose heated discussions were incomprehensible to our ears but whose slurring demeanour and loud gesticulations demonstrated them to be clearly in the hold of an early afternoon bender.
During this pause I searched Pavel’s eyes for perhaps a hint of those of perhaps my own grandfather who had emigrated from Poland just after the second world war. For the first time since we’d left New York I was beginning to feel the stirrings of my own heritage, even if this were a different country, a different background the stories were similar. Homelands overtaken by ideologies, oppression and force. Unlike my father, who had been born in America, had set roots in America and had ultimately killed himself in that same America, the same East River he’d grown up around, Pavel had actually seen his homeland before and after the ravages, not once, but twice and then again a third time, the euphoria of the revolution in 1989, as he called it, by then an auld man of 55, resigned to the fate dealt to him and thousands of others…
Well, I say we, he admitted, coughing lightly, but I hadn’t really had a say in the matter. My mother and father wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving me behind, not to mention the fear of what kind of retribution I’d have been exposed to from the government once the disappearance of my parents was discovered. So from the beginning, I was told I was going and that was that.
The problem was, a girl of course. I was in love with a girl, Jitka and we were inseparable and because of the goddamned Communists, because my father worked for Lidove Noviny, the paper whose editor was once Karel Capek and whose publication was banned by the Communists in 1948, my father decided it was time to emigrate.
What that meant of course to me was separation from Jitka. Well not just separation. Not like your summer camp romances. Jitka and I had known each other since we were small children; she grew up in a flat two blocks from our own. We spent all our time together growing up and of course, as the human body and sexuality began to take shape our friendship became one of experimentation.
What you must understand is that if it hadn’t been for the Communists, if it hadn’t been for the decision of my mother and father, fearful of persecution, to leave and to make me go with them, I quite probably would have married Jitka and we would have had a family and life history of our own. But this was not to be our fate. Instead, our fate was sealed by events out of our control and so, no matter how much I cried and pouted and stamped my feet and sulked and screamed and threatened and cursed, my parents were steadfast in their refusal to allow me to stay behind.
Of course, like any young couple in love faced with a forced separation, this only made our will stronger and we decided on our own to run away. We wouldn’t have to flee in the back of a pickup hiding under piles of straw, crossing under the eye of a well-bribed and perhaps even sympathetic pair of border guards. We didn’t care about the Communists, it was my parents we had to escape, not the Communists. The Communists didn’t care if we held hands or made love or got married.
But our escape lasted less than 24 hours before we were discovered and when I was forced back home my father said that was it, that was too close a call, we were leaving that night - no more could the effort be postponed.
There wasn’t much I could do. My father and mother both begged and whispered and cajoled all that day about our having to leave, regardless of what I felt about Jitka, this was our only way of survival. Jitka would still be here when we returned, they promised. But of course, they never returned. I made efforts to write to Jitka but of course do you think for one moment those letters ever reached her? Or even if they had, that any letter she wrote in reply to escaped émigrés living in a foreign land, flouting the failure of Communism, did anyone really come to believe that such letters would be delivered, regardless of how devoid of political content and how utterly overflowing they were with descriptions of painful unrequited love that had been forced from our clutches cruelly? Of course not. The minute my parents had convinced me I had no other options was the minute that I would never see Jitka again.
From Austria, he continued slowly, taking a sip of his beer and accepting a light from Albert whilst sitting back slightly in his seat to see if we were sufficiently captivated, we made our way to England, Slough precisely, where my father got a job in the brickworks.
I suppose the initial excitement about escaping, the boyhood craving for the exotic, allowed me to make the decision I wouldn’t have made otherwise. But once we’d made it out, past the border, a new reality struck me. The reality that I would not allowed to go back, not ever. The problem was of course, Jitka. My heart burned. Every morning I woke up, both in Austria and then in England, my stomach was compelled by bile, a sickness, a longing. Do either of you know what it’s like to have love torn from your clutches like that, irretrievable?
We didn’t need to look each other. And although it was presumably a rhetorical question on the basis of building to a crescendo of disappointment, disillusionment, we both shook our heads solemnly. We needn’t bother with our own silly little tales. Pavel and Jitka, the love which had never been allowed to flourish, eclipsed anything Albert or I might have imagined.
Pavel shook his head sadly, even to this day. He stubbed out a cigarette and took another long swallow of beer. I noted then, perhaps for the first time or perhaps for the second, that Pavel had the kind of pinched, broken blood vessel-lined face that you could instantly recognise in an alcoholic.
Before I was forced to leave, Jitka and I had often discussed how we would be able to reunite. It was out of the question of course, once I with my mother and father had crossed into the West, to return to Prague and thus it would be up to Jitka to escape on her own. We both agreed it was too risky and she too young to attempt something like an escape but agreed we would both wait for 4 years; 1952 when we were both 18 and then she would cross into Austria, just as I had and we would meet on Christmas Eve, 1952 in front of the Sudbahnhof.
For four long, desperate, delirious years I waited for that Christmas even to arrive. In the interim of course we had no true means of communication. About a year and a half after we’d gotten to England, the Zelnices, a family who had lived in our building who had also emigrated, were able to contact us from their new home in Canada and with that contact came a small box of precious, precious letters Jitka had handed to the Zelnices and begged for them to forward on to me once they were settled.
They were letters from her to me, a year’s worth which had been edited and cut so that they would all fit into this tiny box that the Zelnices smuggled out with them as a favour to both families.
I’m afraid rather than making the transition easier, I became even more despondent. I was to have been practicing music, my parents insisting of course that I was a protégé and yes, I admit, the musical studies and hours upon hours of practice were indeed a welcomed distraction. But once those letters arrived and I read them through and through, over and over again, every single day since they’re arrival, the wait to 1952 was becoming unbearable.
I was dying in that home in Slough, I tell you. By the beginning of 1951 it was becoming too much for me and not even the music was a significant distraction. I became a member of the London Schools Symphony that year , as my dedication and need for distraction through music probably turned me into a much more talented musician than I’d have ever become on my own but none of it was enough.
He exhaled a long bluish stream of smoke and rubbed the side of his face nostalgically. Somehow however, I did survive. And do you know why? Jazz. Jazz, he repeated softly and slowly as if it were Jitka’s name, melodic and mysterious, pronounced by the 18 year old Pavel in front of the Ostbahnhof station in Vienna on Christmas Eve 1952.
Well, perhaps I am over dramatising, he chuckled to himself with amusement. Not simply jazz, any jazz. I was a classically trained musician, not a jazz musician, you see. It wasn’t until I first heard of Oscar Peterson that I became fascinated. You see Oscar Peterson had been classically trained, just like myself. He’d studied under Paul de Marky, a Hungarian concert pianist.
The thing is, he also studied under a classically trained veteran of the Harlem jazz scene and was rather enamoured with the swing music of Benny Goodman which he heard via the radio. Rather than pursue the concert pianist route, he chose jazz piano. I had never heard of him although he’d spent several seeming fruitless years in Canada exhausting the jazz scene there.
But in ‘49, Carnegie Hall, as part of a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic, Oscar Peterson made his debut in America as a jazz pianist.
And in 1951, as I was pining away for Jitka and trying to concentrate instead on studying music, the Oscar Peterson Trio was formed with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith. Ah, and this trio, Pavel cooed, was the beginning of my life being saved.
It wasn’t until he paused further still and we were like children sitting at the feet of our grandfather recounting war stories. Like Oscar Peterson, Pavel also traded in his years of classical training at the conservatorium, he explained, because he instantly loved, upon hearing his first bootleg copies, Thelonius Monk and Oscar Peterson and because the music distracted him from Jitka.
Jitka, of course, although she loved music, had no idea that After the Nazi occupation jazz flourished in Prague. Jazz was that yearning for freedom we all craved. Not only did I play, but I read and learned about the history as well. The history, for example, of Bedrich "Fricek" Weiss, who was deported to the concentration camp Terézin, where he led the Ghetto Swingers. In 1944 he, together with his father, was transported to Auschwitz and directly to the gas chamber.
And 1952 was a bad time for Czechoslovakia. I worried increasingly for Jitka’s safety. By then the communist show trials had begun and even from England we could feel the fear bred during the trial of Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist personalities in November and December 1952. Whilst Jitka and I were busy planning our reunion in Vienna, Slánský was executed, and many others were sentenced to death or to forced labour in prison camps.
It was very difficult to obtain a passport in those days, he explained wearily recollecting sadness. You had to apply for official permission and to get official permission you had to have an employer. Well, Jitka was able to convince her employer to deem her a reliable person and she was able to obtain permission but due to bureaucratic twists and turns I had no knowledge of, it was not until February of 1953.
Of course, I was there, Christmas Eve in front of the Ostbahnhof station in Wien. I waited there in the snow and the biting cold expectantly without having had any confirmation that she would in fact be arriving and yet belief, faith, made me wait.
I waited for several days out there, sleeping in the station to keep warm before the idea began creeping into my head that perhaps I should somehow get closer to the border so that she wouldn’t have as far to go. I could imagine millions of scenarios; being shot by border guards, getting lost, starving in the forest, getting frost-bite, dying, a million different things that could happen to her that could have happened to her to prevent her from reaching our mutually agreed destination at the appointed time.
It was insanity of course, to believe this could turn about into reality. After several more days my money was running out and new fears began to play in my head; evil fears of infidelity to the dream. Who was to say, even though she’d written those letters, those letters had been written two years before, who was to say that in the interim she hadn’t met someone else. Someone whom she wouldn’t have to escape her country to meet with. Someone for whom she wouldn’t have to pull up roots and futures to be with. Someone perhaps better looking, more accommodating, anything. Anything anything was possible! He slammed his hand on the table gently as though living through every moment of those days in Wien again.
And what the hell did I know? I was 18. I had no real experience in the world. Not from Slough. But I would not go back, not ever. I decided in the end I would wait and in doing so, I auditioned for a job in a Viennese bar to play piano, jazz piano. And whilst doing so I waited and I waited and I waited.
The problem of course with a lack of communication was that I had no idea of her situation back in Prague and she had no idea that I would have waited for her. Without the confidence of knowing I would be meeting her, the idea of simply getting out and leaving, of disembarking in Vienna and never returning home again, without the sanctity of knowing I was going to be there waiting for her, was too much.
How do I know all this? He laughed bitterly. Because in fact, we were finally reunited one day. 1990. She had married by 1955 and started a family of her own. We weren’t children after all, any more and whatever dreams we had once had of reuniting, they were gone forever. She could never again have the opportunity to escape Prague and even if she did she would have no idea of how to find me. And so that was that.
She married and raised a family of two children, became a grandmother by 1980. And where was I? Still in Vienna.
Teaching kids, he confessed into his waning beer as the barman slid through collecting empty glasses, taking orders and working the room with a beer gathering mania that bordered on shamanism. I was teaching kids who had no interest in learning about the piano but were forced by their parents who saw classicism in them instead of western consumerism. I didn’t play in any more concert halls. I played in pubs and bars around Austria and Germany when the need to move forward fit but by and large, I stayed in Vienna until that one day, that one day that was always a piece of my hypothetical life, that one day…
It took me nearly a year to track her down now with a different surname although the husband had died some time before. And of course by the time I had tracked her down it was 1990, 38 years later than expected, a lifetime’s ocean between us.
I don’t know which made me more sad. That we hadn’t met at all in 1952 or that we were finally reunited in 1990 knowing it had already passed us by.
But enough about these things, he suddenly waved away, digressing into pity and sadness. What instruments do you play and what sort of jazz is it you are conspiring?
I play the bass, Albert volunteered as the barman returned with three more pints and ticked off three little slashes on our scrap paper tally sheet which we watched with amazement. And Witold plays the horn, neither of us very well, I might add.
Lacking astounding talent, Albert continued, we prefer a minimalist approach to music. We don’t play fancy 15 minute solos, we don’t spiral, we don’t necessarily shake or groove or incarnate anything. We try our best not to remind our audience that we struggle with even the most rudimentary of beats and that neither of us could read a music sheet any easier than we could read a newspaper written in Sanskrit. In fact, to call us musicians might even be a stretch. Conceptualists, perhaps. Like children who haven’t yet conquered speech.
Pavel stared at us for a few moments before taking a pipe out of his coat pocket and relighting it, a shot of flame from a match struck on the floor, audible puffs and the Pope-like smoke firing out of the top of the bowl indicating he had finally digested Albert’s words in full. You will be very successful here then, I would suppose, Pavel smiled slyly. This is precisely the kind of place where you could pull something like that off.
We’ve already been a hit in Holland, I added unnecessarily, we are in the middle of a series of six month tours from one country to the next, enough time to ingest the cultural and regurgitate it in our music, all patterned locally.
Unfortunately, most of my contemporaries are long passed, Pavel mentioned, thinking aloud. But if you are interested, perhaps one afternoon you could come by my apartment and we could organise a little session of sorts. It sounds as though it could be very intriguing indeed.
Prague was like that in so many ways. By that, I mean opportunities seemed to fall from the sky. A little initiative, a distinct lack of fear and a modicum of self confidence and there wasn’t very much in Prague that couldn’t be accomplished given time.
For weeks, like in Utrecht, we stuttered in our efforts to find a place to live. It wasn’t our intention to become permanent residents of the hotel we were quartered in, even if there was a sauna in the building with masseurs and masseuses, professionally asexual but imminently competent at squeezing out the aching of alcohol from your bones and muscles every afternoon before beginning the next binge.
And make no mistake, those several weeks of stuttering was primarily owed to a child-like fascination with spending entire afternoons and evenings glued to the same table as customers came in and out, joining tables with complete strangers, becoming acquaintances, beer partners, co-conspirators. When that wasn’t enough there were the Non Stop mini gambling establishments where, incredibly, you could drink 24 hours a day if needed.
During the course of our wanderings from neighbourhood to neighbourhood exploring the inside of one pub after another, we heard about a youth hostel which would be infinitely cheaper, filled with personalities from all over the world and also had a bar on site.
A few days later we were set up in our own double bunk room to ourselves, still not cheaper than finding our own flat, but given the circumstances, housing shortages, need to establish contacts, figure out how willing we were to avoid the moving to the expat ghetto outskirts of Prague, home of the panelaks, the cold, heartless concrete buildings.
You can thank, in part, Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the precursor to the simple and efficient Functionalism movement of the 1920s and 30s, for the existence of panelaks because in many ways, they are modelled after that design, deformed over the years by Communism into the symbolism of the alleged material equality and collectivist style they were peddling. They’d always been a source of cheap housing in a city notorious for its lack of living space, a simple answer to the question of how to be quartered in thin walled, cheaply built edifices glorifying communism. Ironically, they were now the great way station of the ex-pat life for those living on the thin of their wits who didn’t mind long bus or tram rides back in the middle of a cold, bleak night. Communism was dead and the foreign hedonists and pseudo intellectuals were moving in.
We decided by straw poll, the two of us in an empty non-stop bar near the banks of the Vlatava, that budgeting money would come elsewhere. The only place we could imagine living was in Zizkov, which had become our headquarters, our oasis from tourism and centre of the most pubs per square metre of any other street in the city.
There was a collection of dead-enders who had fled their respective countries to find not only hedonism but jobs in Prague. Jobs so they could stay longer, drink more, pretend to be on the cusp of something very important. In the early and mid 90s they liked to regurgitate the notion created by foreign media that they would one day constitute a movement of some kind, literary, artistic and glorious, fancying themselves post-Communist Hemmingways and Joyces and Steins.
I suppose it was to be expected in a way, Westerners flooding in, held back and out precisely for their decadence, their unseemly wealth, insatiable greed. The Americans held a disproportionate majority of these temporary immigrants as though the word had been disseminated solely through college radio, some 20,000 estimated at one point with such heavy media coverage that you were almost guaranteed back then, if you stayed a few months, to be interviewed by someone for something but always with the same particular angle, conjuring up Paris of the 20s and 30s.
It was only a joke if you took it seriously and by the time we’d arrived, this crowd had eventually, like a shifting tide, begun to trickle away, replaced by a newer corps even more intent on quantity over substance. Yet you could still find these morons, lording over some collective of misanthropes with misguided senses of cool, all trying to out-hip each other as if it were they were doing the bump in unison.
This was the point, in large part, of staying in Zizkov. There weren’t many places you could actually escape the disease of these people gathering in what would otherwise be pristine pockets of Pragueness, the local pivnices still holding on to their blue collar perspectives and prices, unwilling or perhaps incapable of surrendering to the mass collection plate of consumerist tourism, the parasitic nature of all tourism in fact.
Jan Hus, a theologian and lector at the University, held his sermons in Prague. From 1402 he summoned his followers to the Bethlehem Chapel, speaking in Czech to enlarge as much as possible the diffusion of his ideas about the reformation of the church. Having become too dangerous for the political and religious establishment, Hus was burned in Constance in 1415. Four years later Prague experienced its first defenestration, when the people rebelled under the command of the Prague priest Jan Želivský and threw the city's counselors from the New Town Hall. Hus's death had spurred the so-called Hussite revolt. In 1420 peasant rebels, led by the famous general Jan Žižka, along with Hussite troops from Prague, defeated the Bohemian King Sigismund (Zikmund, son of Charles IV), in the Battle of Vítkov Mountain.
In the following two centuries Prague strengthened its role as a merchant city. Many noteworthy Gothic buildings were erected, including the Vladislav Hall in the Hradčany.
Albert had no interest in working, even though he’d watched me spend hours some afternoons with a Czech dictionary and the local newspaper’s want ads looking for housing and employment. He spent entire mornings undercover, snoring through breakfast and sometimes lunch even though I would be in the backyard outside the window of our dorm room practicing the saxophone against the walls of the building.
Boleslav The Cruel is notorious for the murder of his brother St. Wenceslaus, the result of which brought him to the Czech (ducal) throne. Wenceslaus was murdered during a feast, and precisely that time Boleslav's son was born. He got a strange name Strachkvas, what meant a dreadful feast. Being remorseful of what had happened, Boleslav promised to devote his son to religion and educate him as a clergyman, and kept his word.
We met Alois, a friend of a friend, outside a pub on Executioner’s Hill and apologies for the pub being shut, led us downhill through finally street after street, a look at the flat, actually a state subsidised flat rented by his girlfriend, Zorka, who was moving in with him to save money.
It’s an old building across from a small, triangular park right on the corner of a pronounced intersection and tram line. The elevator barely fits one so we walk the three flights of stairs, left at the hallway to the end, in the corner, Alois pushes open the door.
Immediately in front is a shower. To the right of the shower a three foot corridor which opened into the main room and to the left, just before the symbolic entranceway of the main room, the kitchenette. Just to the left of the front wall separating the kitchenette from the main room was a tinier corridor which led to a small cubby hole of a room, the size of a closet, really.
Being state subsidised, it was cheap anyway so we weren’t expecting much. There was a mattress set against one wall and behind it a small bookshelf whose half dozen Czech books Alois leaned down to peruse before picking up a copy of Post Office by Bukowski. I love Bukowski, he exclaimed in his very limited English as though suddenly breaking through the hush of our inability to communicate in much more than hand signals, Alois’ English being raw and our Czech being absolutely nil outside of learning the proper case declinations for the word beer as need be.
Bukowski’s great, man, I exclaim, suddenly buoyant, shocked at the discovery, amazed they’d heard of him, not realising the reach of Bukowski in the international subterranean world we were entering.
You like? He asked pointing around the room. Very good. We take. Our English began to mimic his unconsciously as though by speaking in broken English we might be better understood. Like people who talk louder when speaking English to a non Anglophile as if the louder the language is, the easier it is to understand, like talking to a dog.
To celebrate, although we had no idea that was the purpose when Alois led us from the apartment down the wide street to a pub table, we were compelled to get inebriated. The speed and subtle fury with which we drank through Clint Eastwood clenched teeth, the savagery with which we attack first the beers and then, as Alois became emboldened, calling the waiter over, going into a long monologue punctuated with laughter which could only have been asides to more serious business and then waiting expectantly as though the announcement of his first child were eminent, demonstrated to us the liquor and the glass – Becherovka, he taught patiently, draining it in a quick gulp and urging us to do the same.
There weren’t many in the restaurant yet and the few dwindlers carried on their own languages in whispering corners. One shot after another, chased with the beer which the waiter motored back and forth with a speedy predictability. A man was picking his teeth with his salad fork behind us. To the right, a pensioner couple were talking in hushed tones about the dog’s bowel movements and the speakers placed around the room in corners near the ceiling, purred some strange Bohemian folk music.
We were able to converse only by the limitations of the palm-sized Czech-English dictionary Albert carried with him every where. But what did it matter really? We weren’t saying anything important. Bonding like apes before language was invented, simply grunts and hand signals. I faded in and out of these communications, transported back again to Anastasia as though she were my homeland and the faintest whiff of home cooking sent me tumbling backwards down the stairs unable to break my fall.
We were in a café in Amsterdam. Café Hoppe in fact, the brown café I had come to frequent because the book seller across the road was particularly good and one of my favourite coffee shops was just around the corner. We were in Amsterdam for the day on the premise of scouting a few jazz clubs we would enquire about and perhaps line up a gig or two. Albert had stayed home nursing the last stages of a flu that had bedridden him for days.
We were sitting at an outside table as the scenery rolled past us like intricate waves peopled and dazzling with the enormity of anonymous humanity washing by. Anastasia had been recounting a morsel of her past – a recent past of course, I knew nothing about her, no story she told was older than a year as though she had only existed at once, out of nowhere, just beginning that evening in Paris when I’d first met her. But even still, it was a morsel, like a crumb from one of the biscuits they served with the koffie verkeert in the morning when just around the corner a baker was doing a bustling business.
The air was ripe with rain. Only that morning we’d been caught in a sudden downpour, soaked to the bone as we wandered through a museum and later snacked on apple pancakes washed down with black coffee. For hours it had cleared and now the clouds had returned, anxious to begin another hymnal of precipitation.
She was explaining one of the gigs that had gone wrong in Milan. The microphone had started feeding back inexplicably half way through her morose recalibration of Wild Is the Wind and the microphone started crackling briefly before the sound went out all together. She carried on with the song whilst the crowd murmured its distraction and Christ, she said, stirring her coffee absently, I felt as though I had just been fucked in some back alley and left lying in the road. What was I singing for? Nobody was paying attention? Those fucking people in Milan were all like that – transparent and shallow. Wonderful stylish clothes and ghouls lurking on the inside. They couldn’t wait to be distracted, time was wasting. Finally I stopped singing and walked off. A few cat calls followed. It was ok for them to ignore me but for me to ignore them, it was an insult. The manager tried to placate me but I was having none of it. I’ll never play in this shit hole again I remember screaming in French to the dumb Italian who was torn between the now-partisan crowd and me, the diva singer who was packing up her things to leave.
I aware of it, you know, she said coyly. I know how difficult I can be to work with. I’ve got to have everything just right and if there’s so much as a hair out of place on the trumpeter, I simply can’t stay focused. But this club had already had a week of me and a week of problems. Lighting was terrible, the air was damp and smelled like an auld whore with all those fancy women in their fashionable clothes. I felt like I was suffocating up there every night. Do you know what that’s like? Of course you don’t. You and Albert just play, you don’t give a shit. The walls could fall down around you like a poorly constructed theatre set and you probably wouldn’t even notice. Too damned drunk half the time, aren’t you?
Well anyway, that was it for the club. I told my manager I was through with Milan in general. I gave him an earful of the treachery that city had displayed throughout its history. And all the while he would pat my arm and my shoulder as though I were some mangy dog shivering in the cold. I wanted to punch him or scratch his face, leave him with a mark his jealous wife would ask about later that evening when he came home and stripped his sweaty clothes off of his garlic-laced body.
She lit another cigarette then, even though there was still the old one burning and then she stood up. Even thinking about it now brings back the anger. I really hated that place Witold. It’s so much nicer here. The people aren’t such….barbarians.
She took off for the bathroom, powder her nose or stare at her reflection in the mirror, whatever it was women did when they used the bathroom as an escape route. And whilst she was gone I sat there sipping my little glass of Amstel, looking over at the chair she had just been sitting in. I started imagining a day when she would be gone again and I would be seated like this on another sort of day like this in this very same café remembering just this precise moment with the empty chair but Anastasia still here, gone for only a few moments rather than months, sure to return from the bathroom composed again, apologising for worthless emotions and asking that we both have a glass or two of whiskey because she loves so much the peaty taste so and then we’d be taking off on another rollercoaster, drinking and talking until we were both obliterated, obligated to maintaining the high, bouncing from venue to venue as though the motion were the only thing holding us up.
But Alois and Albert were still there at the table, fumbling through conversation. We had our flat again. We had a home. Something for Anastasia to come back to, if she ever decided to come back again.
As for Albert, the nights were hell on him in a way. We were both out doing the business; mixing, drinking, floundering to grasp what people were saying and doing, prodigious and copious amounts of beer consuming led on by locals who only encouraged us with their own habits. Albert took it more to heart, particularly the Absinthe.
The name of this comes from the Greek, Dragan patiently informed us one night out after suddenly ordering a round of it with our beers. Dragan was a Croat who had moved to the hostel to help with the remodelling of the upper floors of the building the hostel was located in with the idea that the upper floors would also be converted into more dorms, more beds, more people. Imagine what those fat old, pinch-faced communist legged ladies thought of this as they snooped and scoffed, sniffed and snorted their displeasure at backpacking hedonists taking over their building, shouting and puking in the hallways on each floor at all hours, every night, year after year. The chokehold of Communism receded only to be replaced by an invasion of loud, boorish drunks who were there solely for the purpose of drinking and sleeping and fucking.
Dragan had been a graduate student in Shakespeare studies in Zagreb and for money, had come to Prague where a small cell of fellow Croats had established this hostel leaving him to ponder sonnets and plays whilst he hammered nails on dreary afternoons. He was sophisticated in a dark, knowing manner. The world around him was just history. He had seen it all in the making, he had loved and hated it. The worst moments were always just around the corner and no amount of brilliant literature or hours of classical music in little beer gardens were going to make those memories go away. Only the Absinthe.
Absinthe comes from from the word absinthion, which my understanding is means undrinkable in Greek, he continued, lighting a Start cigarette and gulping down a mouthful of Mestan . The French used to use it in Algeria in the 1830s to combat malaria.
The shots were lined up in front of us as his preamble continued.
Thereafter, Parisians took to it, moving from one café to the next during Green Hour, stinking of Absinthe. Wine became too expensive because of vineyard destructions created by some sort of insect and thus, the working class stopped drinking wine and moved on to Absinthe, far cheaper industrial alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec was rumoured to have carried a hollow walking stick filled with a draught of it, sometimes adding shit to it like bitters, or wine, or champagne. But here we shall take it in a pure shot, without the boorish traditional burning sugar and spoon – just shots for men, straight down. He raised his thimble like glass of green liquid and urged it down with Albert and I following in dreadful pursuit.
And that night was a hoax, a deep mystery we were buried under. Nothing was recollectable. Dragan took us down all sorts of memory lanes, the ugliest stretches he could remember until even his own words, slurring and weighted, began to lose all meaning and thereafter it was all a blank save for the horrible waking the following afternoon, heads pounded, stomachs acidic and vomiting.
Thereafter, Albert was hooked on it as well, going off the rails several nights claiming it held hallucinogenic properties. He would sometimes sneak a few shots of it down quickly before practicing. My bass is my lover, he would proclaim reluctantly yet proudly. I am a bear and my bass is a bear and we live in this cave of a life, blablabla. Imagine trying to get rehearsals in with the bear and the bass bellowing in the cave of life. It wasn’t easy.
Problem is, Albert is a big man and when he begins to lose equilibrium he is like a tranquilised elephant, capable of crashing down on his side at any moment, regardless of what he crashes down upon. Two coffee tables broken in two that way. No matter how much he drank, Absinthe was the only thing that made him visibly intoxicated. I suppose I was right there along with him, I dunno, it’s hard to remember, ha.
Afternoons reading until the urge to crawl out and begin the night’s gradual unravelling until by early morning, leaning on his bass when the beer grew too heavy, and plucking out notes from his subconscious as the night sputtered to conclusion.
*****
And, as I’d hoped, the distraction of moving, the diversion of a new language, new culture, different people all conspired to rid me of the listlessness of emotion, which were catacombed and awaiting unearthing. Anastasia was in the background for far too many moments.
The flavour was bittersweet. She was there like a vague toothache that at times would throb and remind you of the potential pain and then in an instant gone again – there was too much stimuli around, too much of the culture’s aroma in every room, around every corner. And thus, there could be times when all was forgotten. There could be times when she could have passed through me and I’d not have noticed, committed to forgetting as though the effort itself weren’t a reminder.
On Sundays the little literary gatherings where everyone smugly played their roles as ex-pat geniuses. Albert and I sat in the back, drinking overpriced bottles of Budvar, chain smoking, wondering where all the talent went. Albert was affected by Anastasia’s disappearance almost as much as I was although his heart wasn’t as committed in the rubber room – her singing in Holland had given us instant credibility and without her we were out there, a desultory duet of double bass and tenor sax, insolubly brief, irreconcilably flat and uninspired as though all the confidence we’d gained initially had been punched out of us and there we were, bloodied and crawling in the streets again waiting for another break.
Anastasia had committed to memory all of what we had pandered to, effortlessly. Our confidence was shipwrecked and this remote island in an inaccessible city painted and stripped and painted again each night.
Maybe we should try and find another singer, Albert suggested one dreary afternoon where we’d spent unsociable hours pouring beers down in search of inspiration. Instead, it rained as we sat beneath a canopy and slurped, observant of the shapes passing before us.
What would be the point? We’re not going to find another Anastasia. I hated these sessions of pointless speculation that we so often rounded to on afternoons like this.
Well, I hate to be crass, but you’re not going to find another Anastasia. You’ve got something weird and clichéd invested in it. Infatuation, lost love, longing. I’m only yearning for another singer. It’s much easier. Perhaps if we did so you might find it distracting.
I keep up my writing campaign knowing how well it had worked from Utrecht. Afternoons after work, evading the ticket checkers from tram to tram until I’d made it back to the neighbourhood and slid easily into a chair at a boozy table at the far end of a bar room where the smoke and smut of blue collar fates had collected like a grime on the walls of buildings. The beer would arrive, the piece of paper scored and I would open a Czech study book and another, smaller notebook used to pen these waking thoughts of affairs from far away.
They weren’t devotional letters in word, the act of course bordered on zealotry, but I was careful to couch perceived emotions in innocuous terms as though I were writing to her about two people I knew, lovers I’d seen and deciphered and calculated. These bar rooms were safe. Populated by entirely male faces, there were no couples, no hand holding, no stolen moments of intimacy. And if an auld man would saunter over to my table with a beer in his hand curious about my pecking away in the notebook with a variety of pens, I would add the smudges of our stilted conversation between the lines which I constructed to depict Prague as anything but what it was; debaucherous, homely juxtapositions of insanity and mirage.
The only piece I didn’t hold back on was the truth that it wasn’t only I who wanted her back but Albert as well. We were struggling without her on stage. She knew of course, the legitimacy her vocals lent to our performances. We almost seemed competent once and now we were plucking away at an internal illness we couldn’t define. Colicky moments of inspiration were infrequent. We were lost. We needed her singing to charm as though we were performing in front of a crowd of cobras.
The truth was, we weren’t doing too badly. We’d enlisted a variety of musicians, one night to another, from a range of instruments, to come and play with us, add depth and perspective, round out our sound, however illegitimate it sounded in our ears.
But I didn’t let on in these letters to her. It was a struggle. We were eating crumbs when we weren’t pillaging our brains with beer and circular conversations in a language we didn’t understand. Come back to us and we can really stun this city. But Albert and I alone were bicycle mimes, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere.
And then perhaps like someone rubbing a magic charm over and over every day in the hopes something would come of it with these letters, eventually there was a scrap.
A postcard from Budapest. I am here for a two week tour, was all she wrote.
To me, a clear invitation and I didn’t bother waiting to contemplate it any further. I’d just gotten back from work and Albert was just warming up to a mid afternoon rant about wars and diseases and divine punishment and trying to drag me back around the corner for a few quick pints before we headed out for the night. He was pretending the postcard didn’t exist on the one hand, careful not to become too overanxious about the possibilities and twisting with curiosity on the other hand, wondering if this might be the beginning all over again.
I’ve no idea when the next train for Budapest is, I announced as I quickly threw what few clean clothes I had into a sack and busied myself with trying to calm down. In a matter of minutes I was packed and heading out the door. Good luck, Albert mumbled, waving half heartedly as though he didn’t expect to see me back.
The excitement was short-lived. The last train had departed two hours previous and the next one wasn’t until 7:30 the next morning. I returned to the flat, distraughtly calculating the postmark and a two week tour – how long into had she been when she’d finally decided to write? Where in Budapest would I find her with nary a clue?
*****
It was no simple jaunt, a 7 hour train ride to Budapest that saw me, heart gulping air almost entirely oblivious to the sanctity of arriving in a new city. I didn’t know how much time I had and I didn’t know where I was to begin looking for her. But it had to be fairly simple. Jazz club gigs couldn’t be too a plenty, I reasoned. The only question was finding where they were and who was playing.
The problem is, Anastasia had an odd tendency to sing under different names, depending on her mood. I knew this because she’d mentioned it off handedly one afternoon when we were rowing along the Oude Gracht. She was sat with her arms around her knees, looking up at me as though from an imagined world. Do you know how many different stage names I have, she asked. Of course not. I grunted and shrugged, rowing. Ten? She rolled her eyes and tried to catch a ray of sun that had suddenly showed itself from behind a cloud. Three. Depending on my mood. Do you think that’s how many moods I have, three? I shrugged again. I’ve seen at least five I smirked. But I’m expecting if it’s only three, the categories are rather broad.
They are. Up, down and indifferent.
And what are the names then? I started rowing faster, thinking we were nearing the Ledig Erf and how much I wanted to grab an indoor table before all the cyclists started showing up in their Lycra biking outfits. I could almost taste the wheat beer on my lips and see the chess board between us.
I’ll tell you one, she demurred. See if you can figure out which mood it represents. She closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head as though transforming herself, or preparing to transform herself. I thought how odd it might be if she spontaneously combusted and what I would do to put out the fire before the row boat went up like an aquatic box of kindling and I’d be forced into the canal, treading water and trying to gather up all her ashes.
Flavia Arbessi, she whispered, leaning forward as my body bent and pulled with the motion of the oars. I stopped rowing and the boat continued skimming along the surface with the momentum of my sweat. We drifted like that for a few moments silent as the sun slid back behind the stage above us and I attempted calculating the hidden symbolisms.
Flavia. Well let’s see, I debated. Isn’t the origin of the name Latin, for yellow? A blonde? More fun? Couldn’t be a down name. Yellow, blonde is too optimistic a colour isn’t it? On the other hand, perhaps you’re trying to establish a sense of irony with that stage name. Flavia in a depressive, suicidal mood…
She splashed water at me from the side of the boat. Why not indifferent, she demanded. We were just coming around the bend and I steered the boat towards the bank in preparation for unloading to the Ledig Erf. Because indifference would be symbolised by some sort of unisex name like Francis or Robin or something. I grabbed at the mooring and stood up out of the boat, holding out my hand to pull her up.
Well, I’d never use Francis or Robin for a stage name.
Why not? Robin, singing like a bird? Like little Edith Piaf?
Her nickname was the sparrow, not the robin.
Ok, I’ll guess Flavia is for your up mood then.
I pulled her onto the bank and then yanked the boat up behind her. So what’s the answer? She smiled sweetly, watching an approaching barge distractedly. I can’t say really. I’ll leave it for you to figure out some afternoon when you’re all by yourself and have nothing better to think about…
I didn’t have so much as guidebook to Budapest, knew nothing of the language, had no map and no idea where to begin. Looks like it’ll have to be the auld standby, I amused myself in thinking. The alcoholic’s tour guide, hitting the locals and trying to milk as much information as possible while watering my imagination with Hungarian beer. I didn’t even know what Hungarian beer tasted like. So many bridges to cross.
By evening I’d accumulated a map and the names and address of five different jazz clubs. I’d spent most of the late afternoon wandering around through crowds; picking out faces and noting each one of them was not her. Not surprising. What are the odds after all, to find a familiar face among the hidden random in a city of Hapsburgan bloodlines? For the purposes of distraction, I stepped into a wine bar marked by the dilapidated characters gathered inside.
There was an auld and fat peasant woman standing behind a table holding three different buckets of wine with ladles in them. I merely pointed and she filled up a plastic cup. Around me pensioners were smoking and playing cards. A few gypsy kids hung out by the lone arcade game, begging cigarettes from stragglers and entertaining themselves by imagining making millions in gun running. I drank a watery white wine, smoking distractedly, ignoring the fact I hadn’t bothered trying to find a place to sleep that night. I would put all my eggs in one basket. I would find Anastasia and stay with her. As long as it took.
But there was no Anastasia. I found that out after enquiries at three different jazz and blues clubs that ranged from seedy to opulent. She played here last night, the bartender in the third club informed me as he poured a German lager for me. Unbelievable voice. Haunting. She was here for nearly two weeks but I’m afraid you’ve missed her. Last night was the finale.
Of course the bartender had no idea where she was headed next. Do you know her, he asked suspiciously. A groupie, I explained half-heartedly, stung by the nearness of my miss for fuck’s sake. If I’d only caught yesterday afternoon’s train here, the story would have had a happy ending. Do you know where she was staying, I asked, grasping at straws. He shrugged. No idea, mate. But she sure had a lovely voice.
Back in the flat in Prague I returned empty-handed. Albert regarded me from behind a book with the walls vibrating with a Brahms concerto when I dragged myself home the following afternoon. What did you expect, really, he surmised. What is this, some movie you’re writing the ending to? C’mon. It was rather ingenious of her, wasn’t it? Close enough to smell but too far away to touch. How bittersweet for you.
What difference does it make? If she’s out on gigs that means she’s already doing well enough. Do you really imagine she’s going to come rushing back here breathlessly urging us for the chance to play together again as a trio?
What fucking difference indeed. Only my heart on a skewer. Heart kebab. Care for a taste? Marinated in futility, lightly salted and deep fried in false hope. We really should find another singer, Albert ventured hopefully. And where would we find a singer comparable to her? Are we just going to stumble upon someone as though the streets are lined with them?
We played a gig of our own a week later. My heart wasn’t in it. We’d both had far too much to drink before we’d gone on stage and if we’d been electric, they’d have pulled the plug. Instead, we were ignored. What’s worse than being ignored? Being forgotten? The conversations in the crowd only grew louder, hoping to drown us out.
We really should learn a few standards, Albert remarked one evening after we’d been drinking beer outside all afternoon listening to Coltrane from a small garden next door to us.
Standards?! Why so by comparison everyone will know how bad we are? I think we’re best sticking with being too bizarre to decipher. It’s our only strength.
One afternoon we ran into Pavel again. We hadn’t seen him since our first afternoon in Prague and we greeted him as though we’d grown up as neighbours and hadn’t seen each other since the erection of the Berlin wall. He was taken aback by our disproportionate enthusiasm. We were out of ideas.
I told you we could get together for a recital one afternoon, didn’t I, he reminisced as we bought another beer for him. That’s where all our bated breath was blowing towards, in fact. Anything different. He was game for it. I’ll invite Frantisek and Jiri and yes, we’ll all assemble in my flat like the auld days. Perhaps some Chopin to begin, then Thelonius then I dunno, perhaps some Stan Getz, what do you think?
But the afternoon never materialised. As we were to find out later, Jiri had died many years ago and Frantisek had immigrated to Paris a decade before. They were still in his head as though they were there, delusional. We came to an empty flat. No piano, no furniture. Just old newspapers and a cat keeping him company. Have a seat, he greeted enthusiastic and grateful, pushing the newspapers around as thought they were antique furniture pieces. He made us some tea and we sat quietly listening to the ticking of the clock. None of us mentioned the lack of the piano that had been promised. Albert stewed, still sweating from lugging the double bass all the way from our flat. No old musician friends.
It’s typical, he spat later on after we’d left and were back riding the tram, Albert crowded the midsection of the tram with his double bass, commuters staring at us angrily. It’s typical that every avenue we turn down, the despair gets wider. You think it’s a coincidence that Pavel as he described himself doesn’t exist? Ephemeral, like our music.
So we decided to forget gigs for awhile and concentrate on rehearsing instead.
I hadn’t left her behind in Paris and certainly not in Utrecht – there was no escaping. Prague was the diversion. My liberation from heartsickness drowned in nightly debauchery. No excuse, we know but at least I had one. Albert’s was more complex yet like a fur ball waiting to be hacked out. For me, it was Anastasia, haunting based on mere weeks of experience, yet haunting as bitterly and painfully as though she had been there all my life.
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 1732
...there was a lasting odour of doubt for months thereafter. Albert's despondent drinking blossomed for days at a time before wilting into empty political rhetoric and finally, asleep, snoring on the sofa, the burnt-out tip of his Winston still clenched between his index and middle finger. It rained for two weeks straight. A cold, gusty rain that turned the middle of October into an aura of bleak autumn dying into its winter that kept even the Shot Out Eye out of walking distance for several days in a row. Then we'd hire Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub for a fill. Jiri, the acne scarred teen who lived above the corner pub and often hung out in front of the Europa Hotel trying to convince tourists into guided literary tours of the old town. When we needed something, we'd stick our heads out the window and yell down at the corner. Since most of the time, Jiri was standing in front of the Europa Hotel smoking, practicing German from a Prague Guide phrase book Auf Deutsch.
We'd already read all the few paperbacks we had in the room twice. The cassettes and CDs had been played raw. Albert had the stand up bass and I had the horn and once in a while, when we'd had just the right balance of beer, cigarettes and instant coffee we cooked using only hot water from the tap, we’d improvise. There was a high-headedness, a mystical dizziness, a general gnawing of boredom like a bone ground within our teeth, a perpetual gloom punctuated by the open window and the hail hitting against the whipping drapes. It wasn't necessary to have been in Prague. A prison anywhere would have suited just the same. We'd outspent our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living on nubs. Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to roll. We had enough left over for several litres of beer, a kilo of sausage, two cups of tepid instant coffee and 11 cigarettes apiece each day for the rest of the month but nothing else. Albert was still decompressing from 12 years of intense television vision and the fact that the only source of entertainment in English he could get was listening to BBC, which he hated and ranted and raved about to no end some evenings, only served to raise the tensions, as though the 11 cigarette per diem didn't create enough tension as it was.
On Sundays we went to the neighbourhood theatre, a large garage-sized building down a winding driveway from a main apartment house with dirt floors and folding chairs run by a wide bodied and hard boiled old fat lady who grabbed at our crowns without preamble more than a grunt without looking up, nodding her head behind her in the general direction of the film. There were never more than three or four people inside. It felt like going to a state fair peep show, creepy and oily. The movie was always terrible. It was as painful as going to church and so in our roundabout way, we were paying our dues along with religious humanity, suffering along with the rest of them in solidarity but skipping masses and séances wherever they arose.
In many ways, it was the lack of events that made it most difficult. We lived like dogs, waiting for hours in anticipation of a ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked sausage with the same jar of horseradish. Then, just as abruptly the pleasure had begun it ended and the wave of euphoria receded and it was still raining and it was only two in the afternoon and there were only 3 cigarettes left. When it wasn't raining, I went out, no matter what time it was. I walked from one end to the other, fast and fogged with the anticipation of reaching the end, turning around and going back, outrunning the trams, looking into the windows with the old women staring back down at me. Fear of cultures clashing, the monuments against the sledgehammers, the pain against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighbourhood, while I didn't even know the nature of myself, the unpredictable actions were unnerving. There was no oasis and no abyss and the movement was meant to keep one afloat in between the two.
*****
One night I was finally able to convince Miroslav to allow us to open for a blues band scheduled to play the following Saturday evening. Most of the regulars in the Shot Out Eye had heard us play and were still confused enough about our talents that they hadn't formed a solid opinion against us yet. The illusion was still working and so long as Miroslav felt assured that our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing to let us try and entertain.
It seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when he opened. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus and we rode down as soon as we woke up.
You know you're not due to play until 10:00 o'clock tonight, don't you? he asked, still groggy, vaguely annoyed. Albert, with his arm around the bass case as though it were a drunken comrade, pushed past Miroslav and dragged the case behind him. I've been in that fucking apartment for eleven days straight. I need a shot of slivovice and a beer as soon as humanly possible.
While we drank beers at a leisurely yet steady pace, we played a best out of five chess tournament against each other. As people began filtering in, we used a clock and played one round after another of speed chess too fast to think, our hands a blur, our eyes, disinterestedly staring into thoughts only the robotic movements of our hands could decipher. The music was already louder than normal. It felt like a Mexican peyote séance with painted faces and dancing in between beers, hopping from foot to foot on the way to the bathrooms, trying not to spill the beer in the hand.
By six o'clock, we were already too impatient to play our normal route of slow and off key, the anti-jazz we wanted to portray it as, too hip and out of place to be anything but they might cautiously consider genius while at the same time weighing the distinct possibility that we had no idea what we were doing. The usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopaedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, had to be shortened considerably given the language barrier. So we had to play more music and talk less, leaving us with considerably fewer options at our disposal. There were the three set pieces we'd learned in Holland. We knew snatches of more traditional standards, snatches we would blend in all together haphazardly, like a tribute to musical sound bytes without any cohesion. But it was stunning. No one knew what we were saying, not even ourselves. I sang Berlitz lines from six different phrase books. I sang obscure American curses, commercial jingles, lines of Edgar Allen Poe. Whatever came into my head with the same organization of watching shit blow across a street on a windy day. Lyrical flotsam. Musical jetsam. By the end of the set, it was clear we'd fooled them. Miroslav slapped us on the back and handed us another shot of slovovice.
I'm relieved my friends. You didn't spoil the party. You didn't drive them away. We've witness a musical miracle! He laughed loudly and bitterly but it was all a show. He liked the sound of it. A musical miracle in the Shot Out Eye. The jazz vagabonds stuck in Prague, unable to extract themselves from a hedonistic scrum, had shown a modicum of worth for the first time in its two month existence. We weren't malingerers and leeches after all, not another pocket of touristic resistance to squelch. Now he wanted us to meet some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a beer, signalling to the waiter for another round. Now we'd never fucking leave.
*****
A few weeks later I'd finally scored a job at the American Business School teaching remedial English to a bunch of Serbian economics majors. This school was the spawn of the new independence of the Czech Republic, driven mad by the market to create English-speaking managers and automaton employees for multinational companies hungry for new human flesh in the new world be ushered in and I was delighted to play a part in wrecking those fertile little minds of future imperialists.
Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the Praha Holesovice train station café next to the school with Marshall, the American who ran the school's library, a patchwork collection of donated textbooks from military bases, socialist non fiction, and a smattering of Updike and detective novels that reflected his own taste's more than the students'.
The train station café served a watery goulash and bottles of Gambrinus and as Marshall would foment rebellions in his mind about library autonomy, unrealistic funding aspirations and snatches of his life as a Berkeley liberal who migrated once and for all out of the slobbering jaws of American capitalism only to find himself faced up against it again in even more sullied and contemptible forms.
A series of budget crisis had left the school in tatters, desperate for teachers of any walk and housed in a converted barn that reeked of cabbage all day long. The caretaker and his wife living on the ground floor and the stench of her gastrointestinal meals that made the thought of food unbearable.
During breaks, I would go outside with the students and smoke cigarettes. For the most part, I was ignored. I didn't like them very much myself and I think they sensed that. There was something about their aura of third world privilege that turned my stomach. They'd come here to find their peasants to look down at. There were plenty where they'd come from, but it must have gotten boring, mistreating the same servants over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at. But I was an anomaly. I wasn't one of them and I didn't step in from the scenery. I'd come from another planet. They didn't know what to make of it. I sensed that if I'd cursed more, if I thrown Yankee slang around in confusion parables about lust and capitalism, they might have warmed up to me a little but it was impossible. Each class was an endurance test. All I could think about was getting out, sneaking back on the tram, and riding around town reading my copy of one of the library's crappy novels for the third time. The other teachers were even worse than the students. They ran the spectrum from podgy, collegial buffoons from England to psychodramatic liberal arts graduates from large metropolitan areas in America. Everybody qualified to teach it seemed. What were my qualifications after all? A few forged documents Xeroxed at a local printers? I could have been a mass murderer on the lam for all they knew. It really didn't matter. As long as the students didn't complain about you, you were fine and as long as you let the students waste their time in whatever way they say fit while giving them the illusion of teaching them something meaningful they could manipulate in the future, they were satisfied.
But there were weird memories of Praha Holesovice station. Getting there was a dream with the names of stations recited mechanically in that sexy, Tolstoy cold female voice as we swept through on the yellow B line towards Northeast Prague: Křižíkova to Invalidovna to Palmovka and then Českomoravská, and at every stop, the pre-recorded chime would go off and then she would speak:
Unkonèit prosim, vystup a nastup, dvere se zaviraji., followed then by Pristi stanice – and then whatever station was next. I would tremble with delight at each word, wondering who this mysterious woman was, if she was an embittered ex-Communist living in a panelak flat somewhere in Zličín, chain smoking filter less Start cigarettes, staring out a rainy window, deep in thought about the wonder years.
After a ten minute walk, across Vrbenského, ending through a strange tunnel which ran underneath the tracks, I would arrive through the portal of Praha Holesovice into a dank corridor which housed the kiosk where the workman would gather in their ragged, blue jumpsuits stained an invisible brown matching the colour of the soot around them, chatting about the night before, some sipping acrid Turkish coffee and some others getting an early start on bottles of Gambrinus or Budvar, all smoking their filterless numbs fighting off the cold, the memory of a day that had already filtered through their subconscious in repetition.
I would order a coffee, find a metal chair and open up a small notebook, scribbling incoherent lines, hunched over like a cripple, pen in one hand, page held down with the other, small plastic cup of coffee steaming in front of me, dreaming lucidly of Anastasia as though she were sitting there across from me, wilting in the deep stench of the train station, patiently waiting for my return.
*****
When we weren’t mired in our own reckless hedonism, stretched out on the floor or sofa too exhausted to move, when we weren’t out drinking ourselves numb and acting like animals, we were actually able to find our pieces of peace during day long periods doing nothing.
Of course even nothing ended up being something. We lacked the creature comforts; the internet, cable television, books or female companionship thus we lived in a time warp of sorts. You can well imagine it shouldn’t be difficult for the average person to get through the day without drinking, but take away their sacred cable television, take away the children to distract and annoy them, take away hobbies to simultaneously dull and amuse their senses, take away the youthful indulgences of going on the prowl in search of mating partners and there really wasn’t a hell of a lot left.
I tried in earnest to kill time more quickly. I don’t even know why, really. Why did I want to kill time? I was in the prime of my life so to speak, expatriated and out in a thrilling city, musically untalented but still able to cobble together enough gigs to maintain a semblance of respectability, reasonably secure in a professorial sort of sense at the Anglo American College, and most of all, most daunting and destabilising – free. There is nothing worse than free time and I had too much of it. Oh sure, some swear they can use more of it, tons more of it – how can someone say they have too much free time? But it was true. Because free time was wasted on me. Idle time was just another excuse to wallow in misery. That’s how it is when you’re all knotted up in unquenchable infatuation waiting for those few moments in between all those hours and months when on an off-hand chance you just might run into Anastasia again. That was me.
Albert had no answer for me. He wasn’t infatuated. He often appeared to have no feelings at all. Fuck it and Who Cares, were his two pet phrases. You could throw the world of worries on his shoulders and he’d shrug it off and let it fall to the ground, fall to eternity. He was no Sisyphus. You’d never catch him pushing a rock up a mountain over and over again. He’d have never bothered. He’d light a Winston and look around for the nearest beer.
Take his beers and Winstons away from him however and I daresay you’d have a different person altogether.
Why would I want to go without smoking and drinking, he asked incredulously when I brought the subject up one day of what he’d do without them. Let’s just say, I said. Let’s just say they weren’t available, for whatever reason or other and you had to go without for a few weeks. What would you do then?
He shrugged, exhaling a long thin bluish stream of smoke as Lester Young’s Sometimes I’m Happy, a live recording, was blasting in the background to the dismay of the upstairs neighbour who occasionally pounded his floor, our ceiling with disgruntled futility. I’d go without drinking and smoking, he said simply. I mean after all, if it isn’t around, it isn’t around. I’d find another diversion. Take up knitting or play cards or go for a jog around the block.
Ha! You go for a jog? You’d collapse of a heart attack after the first half block!
He shrugged again. Then my problem of no cigarettes and no beer would be over.
*****
The other night I headed out to make my way for the Sunday evening open mic night at a different gathering. It was a poetry reading but consisting primarily of local Czechs, few if any of the dreaded expatriate blood spilling silly lines about drunken nights swimming in the Vlatava or some secret romance with a Czech girl in short skirts of questionable legal age. I had spent the afternoon reading an essay written by Havel for the underground cultural journal Jednou nohu wherein he describes people under the Communist regime as “nervous, anxious, irritated, or else they are apathetic.”
This was, he described, the stress of people living under the constant threat of Communism, people dealing with absurdity and nothingness brought on by totalitarianism.
And yet where was anyone different at any moment now? The foreigners were still the relaxed crowd, those unharried by the thought of waiting for someone to turn you in for an overheard conversation or an act of sabotage – the Czechs were eased in some quarters but the reality is that it is a hard yolk to shrug off, those years of history that never really officially existed. And how did that go on to explain my own certainly stressed-out face, my own preoccupation, not with a totalitarian regime, far from it, but the regime in my mind, the mind rotten without stories, simply filled with obsessions, destroying any semblance of peace waiting for the next postcard or another to pass without one.
That night before the reading I stopped off in a blue collar bar, a run down place populated by Gypsies and Slovakians living in Prague for the higher wages. They were all dirt and grunge, instruments of trade. I knocked back a few beers and surveyed the scene around me: filthy alcoholics miserable for another crown, drinking away the little pay they’d earned, those dream destinations of saving for home sewn into their livers like embroidered histories of failure.
It isn’t at all unusual to find a foreigner furloughed out to Prague who speaks barely any Czech. But I was unusual for the locale simply because tourists didn’t stray into pits like this, they remained the denizen of forgotten dark and dirty souls squelching tiny peeps of forgiveness as they drank away not their sorrows but the memories of the sorrows which ironically only led back up the same path back to the sorrows again. Some of them spoke broken English. Some of them spoke enough to ask me to buy them a beer knowing as they would immediately that I wasn’t one of them. But I wanted to protest that I was and couldn’t. Yes, my soul was ragged, yes, my stomach filled with drink, yes, misery and fatigue were also my companions but the difference that no time or place could overcome was that I was there by choice. It was no courage to summon up a few tales of infatuation hitting sour notes. It meant nothing to piss and moan my salary was barely enough to scratch out a living. I was there by choice, they by a destiny far deeper than mine. After all, what the hell would I be crying about, playing at the destitution of others, standing there pretending my heart sick was equal to their life sick that I had a chance and threw it out whilst they could only stand and watch, chanceless all along.
I bought beers for everyone to make up for it. Guilt, yes. I destroy myself for fun and what would these characters have given for half the chance to throw away? I held court via broken conversations of gibberish, half-English, half-Czech, with a little Dutch and German tossed in like kindling to a bonfire.
Gradually I was drawn in by Antonín, a man with a wife and two kids lost somewhere in the paradigm of time in a village called Vlkolinec where his father’s house had been burned down by Nazis in 1944. So he said. Why would he lie? And what was he doing here? Labour. Hard labour, dirty labour, honest labour for dishonest pay tossed away into the coffers of parasitical bar owners preying on the suffering of others. The pure misery of loneliness. I suppose that’s what attracted me to him, the filthy fingernails, unwashed hair, haphazard, cheap and dirty clothing and above all the eyes of misery, clouding from time to time with tears recounting how much he missed his family, how much he missed his village, how much he hated Prague, the slave chasing a dream he was drinking away even as he spoke.
Why should I feel sorry? For example, you come here to make a living, send the money home to the family and eventually, as the dream goes, return home a wealthier man or at least wait it out until another factory reopens. He hates the Czechs yet wanted his own country. Thus the split between the Czechs and the Slovaks. The haves and the have nots. And imagine the irony. Here is your freedom without even the consideration of making it a revolutionary struggle. Here you go, you Slovaks. Have your freedom and we’ll own the factories anyway, those that don’t get closed down and you’ll be stuck, thumbing your way to Prague looking for work, crying in your beer about the family you’ve lost never thinking for a moment that by overcoming misery you might find your future.
More disgusting still, where was my misery to match his? Missing parents who had the foresight at least to leave me a flat and enough money for rent to allow me to piss away an existence and drop out of school, lounge my afternoons in libraries pretending I wasn’t bourgeois, pretending my indifference was cool? What did I have to compare, as I matched him beer for beer in a hallucinogenic blur? An infatuation gone sour? What could I possibly offer by comparison as an excuse to piss it all away? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing and so I drank all the faster and bought him a beer along each time to match me. Goddamnit. One of us was going to be miserable and both of us were going to be happy. Several hours later we were standing in each other’s arms singing songs neither of us could remember, generations apart, lifetimes away, just two disgusting drunks consoling each other on the way to finding our own particular paths through the misery, real or imagined, actual or artificial.
Somehow I struggled to leave and make it to the reading. I was already quite late and when I entered, in the middle of a fragmented paean to the banning of Romanies from bathing in the local reservoir of a neighboring village, everyone looked up from their false reveries as I loudly requested another beer and slumped in the seat in the back. Why was I even here? This cultural yen for discovering the undiscoverable? Who were these poseurs anyway? Were they more valid in another language? Weren’t they all struggling with the same tiny yarn they pulled and pulled at obsessively seeking answers they had no questions for or else pretending they were pulling at the same tiny yarn that like me, might make them feel as though they were really suffering, really and truly suffering rather than standing up there in front of a bunch of put-ons waiting to give their little golf-claps of appreciation in the hopes that someone would recognize their genius, their suffering their uniqueness.
When there was an interim, some snotty intellectual with a robust opinion of himself meandered toward me in a non aggressive way and asked me politely why I was there, reeking of beer and cigarettes with nothing to say save for audible titters of ridicule dispensed like cheap critiques in slanderous sidebars.
I’m here to hear your suffering chirping out of your orifices, I mentioned casually, lighting another cigarette. This was followed by an uncomfortable grimace on this fellow’s face as though I had just loudly farted. I mean really, I stated, standing up, gaining steam. What is this charade; I demanded waving my arm in the direction of everyone and unintentionally slapping him on the side of the head. Then it all erupted. People jumped from their seats to squelch the vagabond I imagined myself having morphed into when in reality they all saw me for what I was: a drunk and cheap tourist taking advantage, killing their excuses, giving them reason to pity or disdain. A human goiter waiting to erupt. They all took turns grabbing at me, shoving me roughly over and over again until I reached the door and they shoved one last time, dumping me onto the sidewalk.
******
Holešice Jazz festival, cahier 1, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski October-November
Mikhail was a little droopy eyed as he stared at me over the chess board. We were hunkered down in the smoke clouds inside U Vystrelenyho oka, racing through .51 glasses of Mestan beer that kept coming and coming interrupted only on occasion by a shot of Absinthe. Mirek and Miroslav, from Uz Jsme Doma, were trying to interrupt our already wobbly match by shouting about Kafka and black humor over and over again in different accents. Uz Jsme Doma, I'd already been assured, had formed in 1985 in defiance of the Communist regime when they played music that was considered antisocial by the government, and for more than four years they performed in the Czech underground. Mikhail, on the other hand, was a jazz guitarist who worked in a music store part time and played around town with a variety of people who adhered to him and then fell away. Only the month before, we'd tried a quintet that failed miserably. Mikhail was really the only studied musician of the bunch. That's why he played around so often. Attracted hacks left and right then shedding them like a winter cold.
Mikhail kept staring at the chess board as if the longer he stared the longer the possibility would exist that the pieces might somehow rearrange themselves to his advantage. His crewcut drenched with the sweat of nausea. HIs face was mangled by a vague vertigo. He was no Zbynek Hrácek, for sure. I was up two pawns, a rook and a bishop. Mate, under the influence of less Mestan, would have probably been less than three moves away. My brain was lost, veering off the fox chase and running for the hills and I'd be lucky if mate was discovered at all. Mikhail pushed his finger out at his pieces and knocked the king over. Are you quitting? I demand about the speculative king down resignation. He looks at me deeper with those droopy eyes and shrugs. There is nothing for me here. he comments, finishing off his glass and standing up. Why don't you come with me to the HolešiceJazz festival? I am already playing and maybe there will be time for you on an alternative stage somewhere... He raises his eyebrows. somewhere where they won't notice you He whispers clandestinely.
**********
A few days later Mikhail, Albert and I are sitting on cold benches with a few bottles of beer at a suburban bus depot waiting for a ride to Holešice. A few old ladies and a school teacher going home for the weekend are waiting with us. The isolation is deafening. So did you hear more about our performance? Albert grumbles, lighting a no filter Start cigarette, coughing, red-faced and veins popping up in his forehead and looks expectantly at Mikhail. Absolutely! he nearly shouts, relieved to have a topic of good news to break the soul dragging silence hanging over us. The old ladies and the school teacher look over at us, accessing the level of our intoxication or insanity. I've spoken with Jiri about it and he is convinced we can promote you as some sort of expatriot avant garde jazz duo of blinding importance. He likes your new name, Stalin's Mother, it sounds more interesting than Deadbeat Conspiracy. He thinks it will draw people at least through the duration of a beer, no matter how horrible you sound. Mikhail says this matter-of-factly as though our ineptitude is so understood that even we should be convinced of it.
Well, it's a relief that I didn't lug this fucking bass with me for nothing Albert growled, giving the 6'5 tall bass carrier beside him an unfriendly jostle. He'd pissed and moaned about it ever since he woke up that morning. This is going to be one heavy fucking thing to drag around with me all weekend. he began while the coffee was brewing. Jesus christ, this thing is heavy! he exclaimed when we'd gotten on to the street and were headed for the tram. Getting it onto the train at rush hour brought even more frustrated fury, angry stares, bitching and complaining and cursing in languages no one was going to bother to try and understand. His only consolation was the kiosk where he bought several large bottles of beer. What a nightmare he sighed finally, gratefully gulping his first mouthful.
************
We got into Holešice as the sun was setting. The first matter of order of course, was to stop at the first pub we found, instruments and all, and kill some time with the locals. Mikhail, as this was his village after all, knew a lot if not most of the people ambling in for their typical Friday night-return-to-the-village-by-train beers before heading back off to their respective homes for dinner.
And as they came in Mikhail would call them over, introducing us as a puzzling jazz duo, a once in a lifetime chance to see jazz taken to its furthest, perhaps strangest parameters. We were in short, musical geniuses. People would nod appreciatively looking at us and our instruments, looking us up and down as though they wanted to touch us, these two masses of American flesh with the strange talents. Touch us to see not if we were real but to see if some of this magical aura of American might rub off on them for better or worse. We were after all, far from the raucous path of Prague overflowing like backed up toilets with expatriates and tourists. We were in this village, a novelty.
But we felt more like circus freaks inevitably. Come, look at the foreigners who will play at our little weekend festival, perform for us like circus bears. It was unnerving enough that Albert was making noises about wanting to go to Mikhail’s place, unload his gear and wash up from the ride in. After an hour or two of this benevolent but eccentric treatment Mikhail, perhaps sensing Albert’s uncharacteristic reluctance at drinking a seemingly incessant supply of beer, finally stood and announced without further preamble that the bill had been sorted and we would now go back to his house where his wife Elena, who had spent the better part of the afternoon brushing up on her English and preparing a vast array of rustic specialty Czech cuisine, would regale our palates and offer desultory conversation.
Upon arrival we met and greeted Elena, a stocky blonde of German/Bohemian origin naturally curious to discover this suddenly revealed spouse we’d never, in all our nights of chess and drinking together, heard mention of previously. It was strange to observe this vaguely domesticated version of Mikhail, who along the uphill march to his house, with a profusely sweating and swearing Albert slowing our march with his bass, had filled us in on the logistics of his past, revealing one breathless layer after another: the marriage and child at 20, the death of the child three years later under circumstances Mikhail did well to steer clear of, the marriage, hanging by a thread over remorse and unspoken accusations until Mikhail had taken the decision, spurred on by the news of a flat of a friend which had become available in Prague when the friend had moved in with his girlfriend, to move to Prague and then the subsequent job he’d found in the music shop, the stepping stone he’d hoped for a career in Prague as either a studio musician or leading a blues band. The subsequent years of drinking and playing music whilst the distance between himself and Elena, supplemented by once-monthly visits back home, narrowed and slowly their original love regained a second, tougher skin and whilst they were not considering living together on a full time basis, they had at least repaired, strand by strand, the initial emotions that had once brought them together in the first place.
It’s not been an easy several years, Mikhail intoned philosophically and reluctantly having let us in to his present by bringing us up to speed on his past as we stood on the crest of the hill overlooking the lights of the village below and smoking reflectively waiting as Albert trudged upward to reach us, huffing and puffing and cursing again our lack of transportation. But I think we’ve overcome the most difficult period we have been presented with and perhaps in a way these experiences have strengthened our relationship.
I looked at his face, imprecisely lit by the cherry of his cigarette, wondering at how different or rather how much more depth people have beneath their surfaces when they chose to let you peer down into the caverns of their histories and reveal to you their pasts, their losses and their fears. I got the impression he’d been withholding this information from us all these months not because he hadn’t trusted us but because matters of this nature were simply not relevant to our encounters and that now, having invited us there was really no way around it. Sure, he could have just revealed he was married and left it at that – perhaps we’d have wondered about the lack of children or why they lived in two different places, but these questions would have remained unanswered had he not taken the opportunity to reveal them voluntarily because it is certain we wouldn’t have thought to ask about them ourselves.
For that matter, all the years Albert and I had known each other had revealed very little about Albert’s past. Perhaps I wasn’t curious enough and had I bothered trying to reach beyond the stoic present I might have found within him as well, troubled pasts from roads beyond which led him to his current personality. We all were in fact, hiding from things or hiding things, information - not intentionally mind you, but all for the same reasons. Unless there was a reason to bring up pain it was better having left it unsaid in the first place. Perhaps that’s what friends are supposed to be for rather than simply revelling in the present but even for myself, the past wasn’t an issue that came up in the mind very often unless prompted. The present was all there was and the past had grown more distant, more obscure, perhaps even less believable as time moved on.
And now as we entered his home there was little we might have discerned about the past from the present. Elena greeted us with a kiss on each cheek, smiling radiantly with anticipation as our noses were filled with the unfamiliar scents of domesticity coming home; Tchaikovsky in the background, meats and dumplings bubbling in spices filling the air around us. Mikhail took us to the room Albert and I were to share, unspoken that this was once the room of the son who had not made it, the empty bunk beds in the corner a morbid reminder of what could have been. After showing off his collection of electric guitars, a Gibson in three of the four corners of the room and a framed Zappa poster from the Freak Out album with The Mothers of Invention, he left us to ourselves awhile, to clean up and unwind as he caught up with his wife and sorted out the evening’s plans.
This whole thing creeps me out, Albert confessed sotto voce as he leaned his bass against the bare wall, his cigarette-choked breath coming in gasps from the exertion and slowly found consolation on the lower bunk, his long legs stretching out over the edge of the bed. I didn’t say anything. Grunting non committally as I took the time to roll a cigarette and digest not just the journey and the history revealed but allowing a certain sudden angst of performing to swim over me.
First in that bar with all those people coming up to us like we were either lepers or gods and then all this business about Mikhail’s wife, the dead kid and shit, look at this, I’m probably lying on his bed. He didn’t move from the mattress in any event, rubbing his eyes and continued muttering, more to himself than to me.
It isn’t such a big deal, I exhaled, looking for an ashtray before realising I probably wouldn’t find one in the room of a dead child. I opened the window and ashed in the garden below. Besides, I’m starving and that food smelled like heaven.
No, it’s not a big deal, Witold. I’m just creeped out thinking about all that family planning going awry and sleeping in the bunk of a dead kid I never knew existed. Not to mention the triathlon of hiking up the fucking hill to this house, carrying that bass and trying to smoke all at the same time. Is it just me or does it feel to you like this weekend is going to be a disaster? I mean this festival is going to be packed with talented musicians and who are we? Two vagabonds with no talent trying to assimilate? What if we’re booed off stage?
I laughed to myself. What’s this emanating from the mouth of the great stoic, a smidgeon of pre show jitters? A dash of apprehension? Don’t go getting all human and sticky with emotions on me, Albert. It’s just a festival. Everyone will be drunk. We’ve played in festivals before. We won’t be booed off stage. The ghost of Mikhail’s child is not going to come haunting you tonight. This is supposed to be fun. We’re going to meet a lot of people, play music, listen to even better music, drink a lot of beer and just outside that door there’s a rustic Czech feast awaiting us. The way I see it, we’re doing just fine.
Albert grunted, hitting his head on the upper bunk as he moved to sit up, cursing and rubbing his head whilst reflexively reaching for his pack of Winstons, tapping out a cigarette and popping it between his lips. He got up gingerly, like an auld man in a nursing home and stood up finally to his full height, lighting his cigarette and joining me by the window. Yeah, I know Witold, I know. It’s no crisis. Just a passing fancy. You know, like once in awhile I want to know what it’s like to feel the illusion of being human. He laughed to himself which induced a brief coughing spasm, spat out a back throat full of bile and put his pork pie hat back atop his head. Then again, such visits are necessarily brief.
The meal was as good as advertised through the nostrils. By the time we’d entered the kitchen Mikhail was already sipping a beer and quickly poured out two large bottles into steins for us to join him. Elena proudly informed us we were about to engage in a typical Czech meal which, after months of a diet consisting primarily of fried cheese with chips from the Shot Out Eye, crunchy street stand sausages and black bread hunks, had our mouths watering before we’d even settled over our plates. First came the tangy meat broth flavoured with garlic followed by a sirloin of beef, which she explained as she filled our plates, was mixed with fried, cut vegetables with the sirloin interlarded with bacon, seasoned with pepper, a bay leaf, thyme, vinegar and a cranberry compote then baked before adding the fresh cream. She served this with dumplings and when it was all over, a combination of fresh berries and apple tart with powdered sugar.
Whilst eating we discussed our rationales for being in the Czech Republic in the first place, how we were finding life in Prague, what life in New York City had been like, and a further wide array of discourse on blues and literature wherein it was revealed by Elena that in addition to working as a physiotherapist, she had also been compiling a translation of Tom Waits lyrics into Czech which she had yet to complete but had already found a publisher for. Although you could sense the anticipation in the air it was not until we were sated and sat around the table in the kitchen puffing cigarettes and sipping her grandfather’s plum brandy with our belts loosened that she allowed herself the luxury of explaining her desire to go through particularly difficult passages of Tom Waits lyrics which she couldn’t possibly fathom a translation for.
Nor could we for that matter. Some phrases were simply untranslatable and even attempting to explain their meaning in English was virtually unthinkable. Imagine explaining the following, for example:
kick me up mt. baldy
throw me out in the fog
tear a hole in the jack pot
drive a stake through his heart
do a 100 on the grapevine
do a jump on the start
hang on st. christopher now don't let me go.
Oh sure, we could explain the context of St Christopher but even that she herself knew. Those little eyeball kick phrases however were simply too much. To counter, I suggested perhaps as difficult as making sense of some of Dylan Thomas’ more elusive phrasings. We felt guilty of course. Perhaps this was the entirety of our worth, an ability to transpose the incoherence of scattershot lyrics into a more palatable English but we were incapable and the plum brandy made it no easier.
All night long on the broken glass
livin in a medicine chest
mediteromanian hotel back
sprawled across a roll top desk
the monkey rode the blade on an
overhead fan
they paint the donkey blue if you pay
Eventually sensing the effort of milking information out of us was more trouble than it was worth, through a secret sign of understanding between even an estranged husband and wife, Mikhail announced that as soon as we finished our glasses we would go out for the evening to meet some of his friends, his fellow musicians, a cacophony of locals in a village suddenly flush with musicians from all over the region.
We trudged along the dark road back into town following Mikhail and Elena blindly relying upon their expertise to guide us through what we supposed would be yet another sullying night of debauchery. Since the meal, Albert had become much more animated as though his brain and mouth had taken that much longer to catch up with the arrival of his body and the inspiration of the food had been the facilitator. Or perhaps it was solely because the walk back to the village was all downhill, it was hard to say but I wasn’t going to interrupt it with questions.
The owner of the pub we went to was a giant of a man who went by the name of Karel. And I mean, literally a giant. He must have been nearly seven feet tall and easily weighed well over 300 pounds. The pub had been his grandfather’s, passed to his father, neither of whom stood over six feet five but Karel had continued to grow and once he’d decided to continue the family line of pub ownership he had the roof removed and the ceiling raised higher to facilitate movement. Otherwise, he stammered in broken English, I’d keep hitting my head and the bumps were growing too big. So as we entered to the right following introductions where Karel had saved us a long, thick wooden table and several of Mikhail’s mates were already supping their pilsners, we could appreciate the rationale behind the height of the ceiling, the addition of the second fire place to add extra heat to the room. In older times the ceilings were necessarily lower both because people were generally shorter five or ten generations before but also because the low ceilings allowed the rooms to heat more quickly and easily as there was less space to heat. Of course another advantage to the higher ceilings was that the room would be less smoky and considering the fastidiousness with which the patrons were chain smoking, this was a good thing indeed.
Pavel, Miroslav and Tomas were waiting along with their girlfriends and/or wives who sat gamely in expectation of meeting the new foreigners and to reunite with Mikhail and Elena who, she had confessed on the way down to the village, rarely went out save for the nights when Mikhail returned. Most of them spoke a smattering of English and when required, Mikhail and Elena could be counted upon to relay enquiries and comments from one language to another but in any event, Albert and I spent large amounts of time just taking the scene in of this homespun beer hall and the chaos of clattering beer mugs, waiters running back and forth adding and subtracting glasses, foreign laughter punctuated by loud expressions we couldn’t decipher and the smell of burning wood and burning tobacco hanging in the air.
As the night wore on it was decided, perhaps silently or perhaps simply in a language Albert and I didn't understand, that then women were all going to head back to their respective homes whilst the men were to continue on through the evening. We were going to a club where several of the festival musicians would be gathering to meet and greet and get drunk with abandon once loosed from the strangle holds of feminine parameters on intoxication and moderation, to obliviate and obscure, wind up and down, spin and crash.
By then my mind was already a flip switch remote control, reality and illusion. The beers had gone on holiday to the head, the others, I dunno, I didn't know, I was aware of the others but aware vaguely so. There were too many carnival attractions in the imagination, too much effort in walking without stumbling, taking in the darkness without any adjustment of the eyes.
And before I knew it we were entering a club, the club; a heaving scene of music and people planted and re-earthed from emerging villages, Slovakian and Bohemian cities, heaven and earth, clouds and graves and instead of settling in slowly taking in the madness, instead of flowing along with the river of new entrants through the front door, rather than holding hands with those that brought me there so as not to end up a simple toast of human flotsam, I made a beeline for a table filled with a mixture of young but grizzled men and leggy, laughter flowing women who radiated, vibrated, seemed itchy for my company.
Certainly this was an optical illusion, a trick of the mind, a boring requiem of the drunken ego singing louder than the internal accoustics would allow but this did not matter in this auto-focused intoxication mind, not infused as it was with the hyperventilation of the new, the congo of the coming festival banging in the mind, the kaleidoscope of unfamiliar faces plump and waiting to be picked from the bough.
Without realising, for that one out of body minute I had finally allowed myself to become disentangled from my near constant preoccupation with Anastasia and figuring perhaps that I owed nothing, I was in essence, free to explore. After all, exploring, as Albert often preached, meant exploring the native women as much as the native beer and perhaps there was particular girl who’d caught my eye but in any case, I’d broken off from the group, oblivious to where they were headed and made myself comfortable at the lone empty chair at this table where sat a particularly stunning brunette whose eye I’d caught and predictably, filled with drink, enflamed by a mixture of excitement and ego, swaying with anticipation, I immediately and perhaps stupidly decided to try out the smattering of Czech I’d learned to try and impress her.
Naturally she had no idea what I was talking about. I suppose I didn’t either. Something about the weather is fine, I’ll have another beer would you care to join me, or perhaps something that sounded far more vulgar, I’ve no idea. Suffice it to say that whatever it was, the manner in which I was addressing her immediately set off alarms in the wolf of the pack who wasted no time in leaping across the table, knocking beer mugs to the floor and grabbing me around the throat, his momentum carrying us both to the floor. I tried to bite at his arms, get a hold of a piece of flesh to ward off the sudden attack and wriggling beneath him I howled curses of incomprehension loudly in English, phrases I’d never uttered myself before but had heard many times on the streets of home.
I could feel my air being cut off regardless of how I struggled or perhaps more so because I did as the grip this guy had around my throat only tightened. And then just as suddenly as this attack had begun, my attacker was pulled off of me from above and it wasn’t until he was fully in the air that his grip around my neck finally loosened and was released and with incomprehension, I looked up to see Karel holding the attacker up by the throat and the attacker babbling apologies as Karel growled in Czech things I had no idea of. I slowly stood to my feet with the assistance of Mikhail and Albert whilst the attacker’s apologies moved from Czech to Karel to English to me.
I had no idea you were American, he effused. I thought you were some drunk trying to break into our table, a threat to us….let me buy you a beer, I’m sorry I attacked you, you must understand…
Relieved to no longer being choked, I shrugged, glancing out of the corner of my eye to the girl who had for a second anyway, been the object of my attention and slapped him lightly on the arm. No problem, I said calmly, cracking my neck with a sudden movement of my head from left to right. I’m sorry for interrupting the table like that without an introduction.
I don’t know what Karel had said to him but perhaps it was merely the shock of being hoisted up by the neck by the village’s infamous giant that calmed him, in any event, we all settled back to our tables and when I went back a half an hour or so later to buy my round, my attacker arrived at my side whilst I stood waiting at the bar, apologising again. He too was a musician, he confided. He would also be playing at this festival and he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea, see. He’d thought I was just some leering drunk causing trouble, you know how they are. I shrugged. You probably weren’t too far off the mark anyway, I confessed. In any event, let’s drink to the brotherhood of musicians. And the rest of the evening when our paths crossed we’d make our mutual apologies, confer about music, exchange favourite songs and generally attempt to remove whatever lingering memories of ugliness.
The following morning, how we got back, I dunno. I recall going back to Karel’s pub before dawn and having a few more beers before falling asleep with my head on the table and had no recollection whatsoever of Mikhail and Albert having to drag me back up the hill to the house, their laughter ringing in my dulled background ears at the attack on the American musician, sure to make all the local papers and fill the town with gossip for the weekend.
And I heard all about the following day as well after we’d had a little coffee, showered and headed back into town to the concert hall. Everyone who passed us seem to know me, waving a greeting or making a joke much to my chagrin. So it goes in a small village filled with strangers where news travels fast. Apparently nearly every performing musician had been in that club last night and every one of them had seen what had happened.
Nonetheless the excitement was tangible as we entered the empty hall with our instruments joining those already on stage, those performing in the early sets were already beginning to tune up, performing sound checks, sipping beer or coffee randomly.
*****
I thought I’d surprise you, she said nonchalantly with a smirk of expectation twisting at the corners of her mouth and what she was wearing, I have no idea – I could only stare at her face with incomprehension, a dream materialised before my eyes. I wasn’t sure how to introduce her to every body. My girlfriend, my muse, this chick I know? Hey everybody, I said clearing my throat to get their attention but also to attempt to mask the quaver in my simultaneously uncertain yet tentatively ecstatic voice which had appeared without warning like a stutter. This is Anastasia.
It’s funny, you think about someone so often and with such yearning that sometimes it’s difficult to conjure up an image of them. Sometimes it takes a moment of not thinking about them to remember their face, for example, not confuse them with someone else. I can’t tell you how often and how longingly I’d thought about her because it would be both boring and encyclopaedic to consider in full depth, but unlike the first time she appeared unannounced in Utrecht, I didn’t accept this arrival without question and unflinchingly. There were too many unanswered questions like what had happened to her in Utrecht that went beyond that stupid letter, how she’d discovered that I’d be in this little village on this weekend, how she’d gotten here and most importantly, why she was here to begin with.
But these questions were to go unanswered for the moment. I can’t say that I didn’t care, I most certainly did, but there are questions you sometimes don’t necessarily want to know the answers to and rather than spoil the surprise of her appearance immediately I preferred to push those questions to the back of my mind and accept her as instinctively I’d know she wanted to me to accept her – without question, without precondition and without asking for more, which is precisely how I played it. As I carried on talking, listening to her escapades in Torino, Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna, to name a few, I tried to imagine a selfless self that could simply wallow in her being here – to be grateful. She wanted to be treated as a crowd would treat her - appreciative for her appearance, mesmerised by her presence, tangled in her web. She preferred to be loved rather than possessed, I could see that plainly for the first time and the stage was the safest place from where to do it. I tried to imagine that if this was going to be the only time I would see her then I wanted it to be a memorable rather than a desperate or confused experience. Notwithstanding the notion that the last thing she’d come all this way and come to all this trouble for would be to listen to a puny man with his puerile notions of possession react in a vain and disdainful fashion instead of simple appreciation.
I wanted desperately to grab at her and caress her simultaneously and yet I felt oddly torn between loyalty and fear in addition to the uncertainty of how I should treat her, not just when we were alone but more importantly, in this public venue. And these thoughts allowed me to consider further the full implications of why she had chosen to appear when she had, here in a public place, a safe place where I wouldn’t intend on mauling her with my selfish, hungry hands or with my probing accusative questions.
I was swaying slightly both from the beer and excitement. I couldn’t very well leave the venue with our appearance due up in a short matter of time. Yes, there would be time later on to discuss things privately but for the moment, neither of us could go anywhere. So, are you here to play with us again, then? I finally managed to ask with a teasing smile but also with a hint of hope. I could tell those around us had been absorbing the entire expressionless encounter as though they’d known as much about us as Albert did and yet as impossible as it was, they too sensed something magical about this appearance. Not just the nature of surprise but the air of expectation.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Why don’t I have a glass of wine while I consider she asked, snuggling unexpectedly into my arms and smiling at the others. It’s been a long journey, she explained.
And so we finally had a few private moments over drink, clearing a table for ourselves in the front of the hall where others were hungrily wolfing down goulash and dumplings, slurping their beers and either revelling in the previous performance or talking excitedly about the one to follow.
In answer to how I knew you were here, I’d actually intended on surprising you in Prague. You see I’m on my way to a performance in Krakow, or I was at any rate. I’d taken the train from Paris and believe me, there wasn’t going to be a lot of time to prepare but once I was on the train I knew there was no way I could forgive myself if I didn’t stop in to see you. So I went to that place you mention being in so much, figuring you were more likely to be there than your own flat. I made a few enquiries about you two and it was then I found out that you would be here at this festival. This morning I woke up and decided to come, even though it’s out of my way and yes, even though it meant cancelling, much to the anger of my manager, the show which was scheduled for this evening. I still have to leave first thing for a show tomorrow night but I thought at least we’d have a little time together. I’ve missed you terribly Witold. I try to make it to Paris once a week just so I can go back to my flat and find all your letters waiting there and as soon as I pick them up, I get back on the train and go wherever the next performance is scheduled for with those letters bundled up to keep me comfort in all those days and nights in between. I’ve dreamt so often of being with you again that I can hardly believe it myself. Why else would I go to this much trouble to see you even knowing you are going to be preoccupied with the festival to properly relax in my arms and tell me more of all those wonderful things you write about in your letters.
But…if you miss me as much as you say, and not that I’m doubting it, Christ knows how often I’ve dreamt of hearing you tell me these exact things, still I can’t help but wonder, knowing as you do how willing I would be to drop everything and follow you, why you don’t just allow me to follow you on tour? That way we could see each other all the time. That way…
She held up her right hand, touching my wrist gently with her left. I could tell you a lot of stories, Witold. I could make up excuses, the strain it would put on me for my performances, the difficulty of the logistics, and yes, I would like nothing better than to have you at my beck and call, but the truth is, I’m far too afraid to allow you to accompany me. Afraid of what? You name it. Afraid of getting hurt, afraid of hurting you, afraid of disappointment, afraid of losing this incredible feeling I have reading your letters, knowing that every day you are somewhere out there thinking of me, dreaming of me. Do you have any idea what a comfort that is to me?
But why would you prefer it to the actual thing?
Quite simply because nothing, no one, not at the moment anyway, could live up to what you’ve created. I certainly am not the person you’ve imagined me to be, god knows, no one is really. I don’t want to discourage such infatuation but there are truths about me that might ruin your illusion of me and to be honest, I’d be crushed to find out that your illusion of me has been shattered. You see, it’s your dream of me that allows me to consider that I might just be worthy of such a dream. It’s what has allowed me to enjoy myself all these months in between. The knowledge that someone out there anyway thinks of me in the way you write about me, in a way no one has ever treated or considered me before. It isn’t your heart or my heart I’m afraid of breaking. It is that dream, yours and the one that yours allows me to hold on to. A tiny sliver of sanity.
Not that I need a definitive answer to this today, or even this month or any time in the near future but just to satisfy my curiosity, do you ever envision a time when you would allow yourself to reveal those things about yourself to me that you think would destroy the purity of my thoughts of you or has this illusion carried me as far as I’m ever going to be able to travel with it?
She smiled crookedly and took a sip of wine, her eyes never leaving mine. Her hand touched mine again. I’m glad you don’t ask that as a definitive question because if it were, I’m afraid I would have to tell you that it has carried you as far as it can but neither of us really wants to believe it and so why should we concern ourselves with killing it off before we’ve ever given it a chance? Are you in that much of a hurry to get on with your life? You see, this vagabond life you and your friend are living seems to fit so perfectly with my own. Had you been a young man on a career path looking for a wife to settle down and have kids with, had you been a man who knew what he wanted and wanted to take it without waiting, had you been childish and demanding, I’d have viewed you as an entirely different entity. But you aren’t. Time appears to be something you have plenty of and I would only ask, perhaps beg of you your patience, your recognition that you do in fact have plenty of time to allow this relationship to find its appropriate path rather than pushing it along ahead of schedule out of necessity or impatience. Can we agree on that for both our sakes? Patience?
I felt myself swelling with emotion – love, infatuation, illusion whatever it was I might choose to call it – I felt my hands quivering with joy and requited expectation. This was no ending, just a beginning. And yes, a strange beginning to be sure, but clearly a beginning and a promise. I squeezed her tiny hand as hard as I dared and kissed each knuckle on that hand gently, feeling that joy in every one sending us both quivering. Of course we can agree that, Anastasia. I will wait for you for as long as it takes.
Her face eased. She held her stare a moment longer before searching out my pack of tobacco and began rolling herself a cigarette. In that case, she said smiling, looking down and then looking back up at me and smiling again, I’d be happy to sing with you two today.
*****
Oh shit, I wanted to get up and dance and sing and hug and kiss every single face around me. I was losing my mind with rapture. Without little further preamble, I took her by the hand and we walked back out into the hall to the table Albert, Mikhail and the rest were sitting watching the performance. We sat down in the space created by several sliding over, hunched over the table in conference with Albert and began discussing the songs we would perform.
*****
A woman falls in love with her heart first, she told me, lighting a cigarette and sliding back in her seat further. Her head catches up with her heart eventually and then she is fully in love. But when she falls out of love, the opposite happens. Her head tells her first and then it is followed swiftly by the heart. One of women’s many mysterious and here I’ve deciphered it for you simply. The truth is, and I know this is going to sound much worse than it really is, yes, you are right. I have been sleeping with my manager. I have been, more precisely, my manager’s mistress. This manager discovered me, deflowered me and promised me the moon if only I would keep sleeping with him and you know, even though I didn’t really believe him, I slept with him anyway because I thought why not take a chance? Sure, he’ll probably forget any one of the hundred promises he made along the way and I’d end up feeling used and with nothing but a night or two of lousy sex but if I didn’t take the chance at least well…
In any case, he actually followed through with his promise. You know I thought all along, foolishly, that because he was married with children he was safe in a way. It would be a business sort of relationship with feckless sex thrown in as part of the deal. But he followed through with his promise not because he’d promised it but because he’d fallen in love with me. And each week he’d have new gigs for me, new excuses to follow me on the road, this is why, you see, that I couldn’t have you coming along on these tours with me – if you had that’d have been the end of it all. I had to carry on the illusion that he was the only one in my life, even if it made no sense logically, simply because he wanted to believe it himself. And then when I met you, this casual arrangement became more of an entanglement. It was almost as though he could sense my heart was in it even less than it had been before. I purposely wrote those postcards with not enough time for you to catch up to me not because I wanted to torture you but because I couldn’t allow you to arrive while I was still there, otherwise the gig would have been up. The manager would have know what he suspected all along, that I was in love with someone else and certainly in a fit of jealousy he would have cancelled all the rest of the performances. But I still wanted you to know I was thinking about you. I wanted you to know it desperately and yet I knew I couldn’t tell you the truth any more than I could tell him the truth. Do you see what a position I was trapped in? He was livid when I’d phoned him from Prague telling him I’d had to get off the train because I was feeling so poorly and had to take a day or two off. He was insane with jealousy. He wanted to come down on the first train and accompany me the rest of the way.
But…if you were good enough to perform in all of these places with him why couldn’t you have just gotten these gigs without him?
Ask yourself, Witold, where I was before I met him. Singing night after night after in the same beat up old places, getting older, going nowhere. I can’t kid myself. I’m not motivated just like that. I have a lot of insecurities about my singing, no matter what people tell me about my voice I can never bring myself to believe them. I simply don’t have the confidence to go out and seek my own venues and not enough motivation to seek out a proper agent or a proper manager. This one you see, just sort of fell into my lap so to speak. I know it’s a cliché to say that I only kept it from you because I didn’t want to hurt you but that in part, was the reason why. Sure, it was selfish on my part as well but I hadn’t planned on meeting you, had I? And I certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love with you.
Falling in love with me, I hissed with incomprehension. You fall in love with me to go on tour fucking someone else? Is that how people fall in love these days?
Unfortunately, that’s how adults fall in love when they’re already with someone else. Someone is always getting hurt in love, let’s not pretend that isn’t the case. It’s just a matter of who gets hurt first.
Billie Holiday- Ill be seeing you.
**********************************************************************************
The dictum from Nietszche goes along the lines of what doe not kill me makes me stronger. Under that premise, I've been growing stronger every day of my life since, to date, nothing has killed me yet. On the other hand, there have been plenty of moments when, placed in situations which seemed to at least hint at death, no strength was gained at all. The event would barely register, other than in the cosmic realm of possible outcomes, where one death resulted somewhere else for your having escaped.
There are times when the dying seems to be a gradually progressive motion as you could, if the mood fit, allow yourself a prolonged battle against the armies of depression. Those are the times when being alone feels the same as being around people because the people are just objects you cling to keep away the dread and panic and little to nothing of what they are saying is registering with you.
When Albert finally demurred, when he'd had enough, grown ill from the constant drinking and home sickness, it took him only a few moments upon reaching that realization, to decide he was going back. At first, I was secretly elated. After all, Albert had become like a sore that wouldn't heal. When he wasn't complaining, he was sleeping and when he wasn't sleeping, he was drinking, which, of course, led to the bitching and then to the sleeping. Traveling with him had become such an endeavor that we'd been rooted in Prague for several months solely in order to avoid relocating, uprooting, starting all over again. It was an easy city to lose track of time in. Hours became weeks and as one month passed into the next, it felt as though we'd only been awake for a few days at a time.
Without having made a conscious decision about it, I realized that even as Albert was planning his departure, I knew there wasn't going to be much left for me in Prague either. There wasn't going to be much of a future for The Deadbeat Conspiracy with just my beer coaster lyrics and lousy saxophone playing. So the question was, failing the excuse of touring around Europe playing music, what the hell was I going to be doing there?
Naturally, it was only a few days after Albert's departure that my descent into the daily dying began in earnest. It was only a matter of time before cash supplies dwindled and being stranded would be a fact of life instead of a romantic luxery. You can worry about money to no end when there is still a little left but once it begins dwindling down to nothing, the concerns seem to evaporate. What difference does it make? You are ready to surrender anyway. You are ready to sit motionless for days eating nothing, getting no visitors, falling asleep with every attempt to read or think.
Suppose… I spoke slowly, choosing my words with care, all of a sudden, just like that, and I snapped my fingers, we quit drinking? I can pour what's left of that little bottle down the drain and we can start from there. We make a resolution and stick to it, see, stay sober from now on, make a fresh start.
Albert stretched, stifling a yawn before placing the lip of the pint to his lips.
We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman Albert noted briefly, replacing the pint between his gnarled fingers with a cigarette.
Anastasia chimes, perhaps disgruntled: We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
I'm appalled: Why wont we sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt? Why wont we note the nocturnal vibrations of our wanderlust through drinks and despair?
*****
Different city, different street.
Otherwise, with half of my mortal coil still sitting in a bus depot in
Los Sueños begging spare change from vending machines, I'll applaud from
the distance.
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook four, page 113.
When you travel enough, spinning through a vortex of languages which have secretly imbedded their meanings in your subconscious there are times when you awake with a start in complete confusion about what it is you’re waking from.
I walk to a window overlooking a street viewed through a prism of rain, half-lit by street lamps, watching a man attempting to walk with a speedy nonchalance, newspaper folded over the top of his head, one arm up to hold the newspaper in place, the other swinging back and forth in desperate propulsion.
And only this morning I’d freed an insect of some sort from a spider’s web just under the bathroom sink wondering if I was doing the humane thing by rescuing it from it’s struggles and the slow, inevitable end to its existence or if I’d only been interfering like the spider’s little nosey neighbour, jobbing up the mechanisms of nature and the balance of the insect world.
I watched the man and his rain-spattered arm-swinging until he was gradually swallowed back up into the night further down the street.
Three days I’d been in this hotel in Bratislava on the mere rumour that Anastasia had been headed this way. And don’t think for a minute I didn’t have to hear an earful from Albert – the old, haven’t you learned your lesson yet speech he brought out every time one of her postcards arrived. She probably doesn’t even send them herself, he’d mused back in our grim and smoky flat on Husitská.
Certain enough, I wouldn’t find her sitting in this hotel room with its drab curtains and filthy carpets. Three days I’d been here already and having left only once since I’d arrived, gathering the strength to face her again, chain-smoking and staring at stains in the wallpaper, I had a good idea the courage was never going to come from anywhere other than a half dozen pints in the nearest pub. Then again, that wouldn’t have been courage, that’d have been drunken bravado, devil-may-care, feigned nonchalance as in oh, fancy running into you here in Bratislava, Anastasia.
There wasn’t any postcard. I dutifully informed Albert. The postcards came sporadically from different towns and cities, little clues and cryptic messages. At first, I’d drop everything and go looking for her, seized with some sudden and inexplicable desperation of knowing that if it wasn’t now, it wouldn’t ever be and how could I throw away that last chance without trying?
But the last chances never evolved, never materialised, never a trace of her. And a lot of these places were villages small enough that the locals would have immediately known who it was I was looking for if she’d been looking to be found or had in fact, been in the town at all to begin with. That’s why Albert had embraced his pet theory that it was all a colossal mind fuck of some kind, some sort of sadistic little game wherein she’d conspired with others, travellers perhaps who she knew would be going through that village or town who could write out these little postcards on her behalf, just to keep the game going.
It might have been a sound theory but for the fact that it was certainly her handwriting on those postcards and how does one after all, buy a tourist postcard from a village or town, write a message on it and post it all without ever having been there in the first place?
So that’s the way it had gone for the last six month, getting these postcards, rushing off to the village or town it came from, hanging around in public places, markets, squares, pubs, news agents, all in the vain hope of timing it just right. Maddening.
You get off the train with a burst of energy but after the first few hours turn up nothing the energy wears away and slowly it sinks in that the chance had been missed again. How could I be expected to stay one step ahead of her, to know instinctively where she would pop up next?
For a few weeks in August I thought I could detect a pattern in the postcards, or perhaps it was merely delusional, still, you have to try. Did the names of the villages and towns fall in alphabetical order, some geographic sequence, some cleverly disguised yet still breakable code? Not in any of the instances. One week it was Hungary, another it was Austria. The following month Slovenia, the month after that, Poland.
I was growing weary of the game, frustrated by my lack of success and then, when I’d overheard a conversation between two Czech Dixieland jazz musicians on the Charles Bridge talking about the little French girl with the beautiful voice having stopped by only a fortnight ago to sing with them, I crudely demanded to know what they were talking about.
After their initial huff at my intrusion they reluctantly shared a few tidbits with me about a little bird with a beautiful song in her voice stopping in for a few songs on her way to the train station for Bratislava.
Surely that couldn’t have been a plant. I never hung around the Charles Bridge any more, rarely even crossed it, so she’d not have left this clue for me here. No, it was certainly unintentional, coincidental, a twisting of fate I was meant to overhear and meant to act on.
But the moment I got off the train in Bratislava had come the crushing realisation that the situation was hopeless, the idea had been hare-brained. What if it hadn’t been her? Oh, certainly I grilled those two musicians on the Charles Bridge but good for details to try and ascertain with certainty that it was in fact her, but they didn’t know her name and who knew anyway, she might be using any name by then.
Even if it had been her, what was she doing in Prague at all anyway? And if she had been going to Bratislava in the first place, who’s to say she’d still be there at all. And if she was in Bratislava, where in the hell was I going to find her?
Nowhere, I thought to myself sitting on the edge of the creaking bed and rolling another cigarette. Not sat indoors never having left the hotel room paralysed by inertia or fear or the knowing futility of it all.
The only logical place to begin looking was music venues. Bars or cafes or pubs which had live music where she might be singing or might be looking for someone to sing with. A bird with a voice like hers had to sing, after all, craved the public attention, yearned for the recognition. It never should have been hard to begin with yet in all the little music venues he’d stormed into expectantly in all the little villages and towns, he had yet to overturn a single worm beneath the rock, had yet, not only to find her but to even find a trace of her having been there at all to begin with.
*************************************************************************************
SCENE AT THEIR MINOR CONCERT DESCRIBED BY AN INTERESTED ONLOOKER
No matter how thoughtful or inspired much of modern jazz is it is increasingly difficult to find musicians who don’t take themselves too seriously – the weight of history and the pressures of constant innovation fighting the fun at every step. One might do well to scan the horizon: the humor apparent in European jazz – Han Bennink tossing wooden kitchen spoons Misha Mengelberg’s way – has been well documented for some time, whether Americans have chosen to listen or not. No such fussy stuff here then, either, as Deadbeat Conspiracy a strange trio with meaty chops rips through a blistering set of high-octane, solo-intensive jazz; the muscular breadth of ideas matched only by the unadulterated exuberance of their execution. Anastasia X and crew have little truck with the spate of style wars currently fashionable, relying instead on the untested yet euphoric water of spontaneity. Often with a capital S.
Thankfully, then, it is with a certain audaciousness that Deadbeat Conspiracy comes out of the gate with fists raised, tempo topped out, tone tightened to an off-kilter acidity, and tongue-tying technical intricacies wrapped in the folds of every phrase. If not the most subtle approach, it is rare to find an opener with as much instant adrenaline delivery as Señor Dada, pistons pumping with sheer verbose force. In a sense, it is reminiscent of a bebop aesthetic in which flat-out fluency had to be proved first before one was given credence on a bandstand; in another very real sense, however, Anastasia X is a consummate enough singer to avoid the pitfalls such bop-based flurries inspired: the mindless, mile-a-minute mechanics of too many straight ahead discs on the market today If Witold comes out of a lineage anchored by Coltrane’s emotional urgency, it is motivated by the revolutions of Jackie McLean’s harmonic keening and tempered by the florid eloquence of Benny Carter’s supple resolutions. On the song Señor Dada,, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and most of all on Mussolini – the most startling virtuosic displays of the day – Witold is tethered around a pole of high tension, clearly inspired by his material and musical companions, playing the game of statement and substitution with such alacrity that the smile is nearly visible spreading across his breathless mouth.
Witold also acquits himself nicely, if less joyfully, on the slower numbers that add pacing to the show. Flanked by Anastasia X and Albert aan de Baas, Witold is able to surrender to a variety of moods, adding a much needed respite from the all-out assault launched during the disc’s most inspired moments.
Deadbeat Conspiracy of sympathetic soldiers is no exception to the club, offering challenging compositions attacked with a straightforward ingenuity, openness and outright joy. If not the most starling release of the year, it ranks among the most enjoyable, proof positive that stern-faced, bulky jazz music can snap to smiling, svelte shape in the hands of the right practitioner.
Wireless Mothers of Jesus
In other words, they only listen if
they've finished talking,
authoritative claptraps, saliva lips,
causing droopy eyes,
changing channels make believe
if they're
outside all day in cafes, sitting
sculpted into leather beneath
the sun, the old Madonnas
on cellphones, cellulite sweating
into the vast universe of important rules
they ignore in all their chatter.
and see something else to pinch himself awake again.
Anastasia was sick of road tours. I’ve been on the road for six months and only just arrived in Prague a few weeks ago. I just want to settle down for a few months, collect my wits, find some sense From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 1.3
The truth of the matter is, since we invested so little time in practicing, not wanting to ruin the momentum, the blossoming fraud of our performances, both on the stage, on the Charles Bridge, in alleyways, hiding from the local police, we had plenty of time to polish our drinking skills. In many ways, it was a test of wills for both of us. What joy we took in watching the waiters scurrying around with handfuls of beer glasses, four handles of four glasses in each hand like two fists of beer punching out towards us whenever our glasses began to take on the image of running low. And certainly we didn't care at all as he marked more little slashes across our scorecard that served as an indication of our bill. Everyone got these little slips of paper and you could always tell, by a glance at the slip of paper of another, just how far along they were in their journey to intoxication by noting how many little slashes they had scratched onto their slips of paper.
Everywhere we went, we drank until the pub closed. There were times, of course, when the pubs didn't close at all. The bartender would doze off sometime after four or five in the morning and we would still be seated, blathering away, drinking the beers, refilling them for ourselves when the need arose. How many Prague mornings we watched sailing over the top of the Vlatava River as we drank our beers, unconcerned, all but oblivious.
You might wonder what purpose it all served: we would have laughed long if you'd have asked us. Purpose? But then again, we might have settled down and told you that we were constantly embarking on an effort to forestall the future. Our days didn't operate like the majority of the people around us. We had nothing to do. No place in particular to go. We were working up a beery theory of the meaningless of time around us. We were burning hours like a pyro lights matches one after another, just for the sheer pleasure of it. We wouldn't be provoked by watches, by history, by futures. We were languishing in a sort of beer o'clock time frame in a hedonist city filled with well-meaning, yet futile drunks. The hand we were dealt. We weren't partaking in the pissing and moaning of life. We weren't comsumed with grocery lists, petty fears about dirty laundry, or wondering where our last meal went. Regardless of the question, the answer was always concise: beer.
The 24 Hour Party
There aren’t any alarm bells that go off when the body’s had enough. We could abuse ourselves five days and nights out of seven and a two day holiday of sofa camping, automotonic television, radio blaring simultaneously, stains accumulating, plates and pans piling up over the kitchen landscape like the blemishes of a skin rash on smooth skin, would be enough, ultimately, to recharge.
When enough’s enough, the signs are subtle yet persistent. The taste of tobacco goes bad and each consecutive roll up perpetuates, in a cycle interwoven of masochistic nihilism, the sense that each roll up is in and of itself a death sentence. It isn’t, of course. But the taste buds need a break. More salt and grease to scratch out the nicotine grime of the palate, like spraying twelve hour oven cleaner in your mouth and letting the foamy particles to do their work
And if it isn’t the tobacco, it’s the vague fatigue of the mind. Sluggish and feeling decades older within days is the way your thoughts shuffle along through the hours. Disjointed and yet feeling collective at the same time. Conversations we’d throw out into the middle of the front room, talking around the empty Chinese takeaway cartons and newspapers, would fold up and blow away before they’d been answered.
I’d go outside and marvel that society was still going on around me. Within the flat, one entombed world existed, punctuated by bouts of another reality going on outside the windows, television news, sirens down the road, the tram’s bell and the grinding of metal on metal as it executed its left turn on to STREET IN ZIZKOV.
Once outside the flat, it came at me in multi dimensions; the odours, the pattern of pedestrian footwork dancing around each other, sotto voce conversations briefly revealed in the brief seconds of passing them. You could be aware of yourself and hope at the same time you were blending in as anonymously as passersby. Who were all these people anyway? From whose wombs did they spring and why?
Usually the premise for leaving the flat was replenishment. Food stuffs, drinkable liquid, toilet paper. Walk past a few pubs and restaurants hoping none of the usual drunks saw you and climbed down from their stools or got up from their tables to chase you down the street inviting you to join them.
You can only mask alcoholism with social drinking for so long. Gradually, the drinking hours lengthen and deepen. And one by one, your compatriots drop off, to eat, to sleep, to coax sexual performances out of their partners, sometimes just to get away, and as these compatriots peel off like dead skin, the pool of drinkers grows smaller until it is merely a puddle of drunks who will carry the task on enthusiastically past dawn.
It is surreal to still be awake and drinking, a survivor of the night before, as workers scurry through their early mornings. If you happen to be trapped on the street, moving from one after hours dive to another, when these commuters let themselves from their houses and head off to the collective misery, it is like being trapped in a maze of somnambulists. Try talking to these people as they march on to their destinations: not a single one will give you the time of day. They are all either disgusted or envious when you confront them with beery breath, dressed in last night’s clothes, as though you were a temporary hallucination of theirs they wanted desperately to avoid facing, shake them from their heads and refill the subconscious with the inner nattering of daily preoccupations.
*****
Typically, on the nights no class was scheduled, I’d leave the office in the afternoon, take the tram back to Zizkov, always keeping a watchful eye out for the tram ticket warden, jump off and head immediately for a café. There was no dinner scheduled. There were no household items to purchase. There would be the paperback or a notebook for company. Set up camp at a table and then, watch the marks on the paper tab scratched off, one by one, beer after beer.
The café itself was of no consequence. I never spoke to the patrons. I never looked around except to stare out the window. I would drink the beer, chased with cigarettes, taking notes, writing letters, occasionally reading from whatever booked I’d nicked out of the school library that afternoon. But for the most part, I’d compose novella length letters to Anastasia, recording the minute details of the day, forcing the obligatory, devotional ramblings out of my pen as though they were written with my own blood through an eye dropper.
And when those events had been exhausted, a few more pints to round it off and then back to the flat. Albert would already be there most afternoons. He worked sporadically, picking up odd jobs around the neighbourhood. Moving and lifting, a scrape and paint job, renovation work that entailed moving rubble, brick and mortar in a wheelbarrow from the inside of a gutted frame to the dumpster in the street.
When he worked, he’d be sat there in the front room, still covered in whatever combination of dust, dirt, grease and paint that had clung to him during the course of the day. The headphones would be on, a small litter of beers would already be on the coffee table and floor and the room would be heavy with the haze of his smoke. Depending on what he was listening to, he’d either completely ignore my entrance as though it were just part of the hypnotic trance of the music that was banging into his eardrums, or take the headphones off and click the speakers back on so we’d both be covered in the music.
My days aren’t tough. Academic life, even the poor excuse for it at the College, was a phantom life in a physical world. Albert’s existence, the fact that he’d been out in the real world, shovelling, hauling, getting down and dirty, merely underscored the ghost-like existence I felt at the College. The only dirt I carried home with me from work was in my head, the filthy thoughts about Croatian co-eds in short skirts and long legs. There was no sense of self-respect in teaching there. It was like whoring in a cheap brothel. You got what you paid for. We weren’t paid much and in turn, we weren’t very astute teachers. There were no standards as there were in the physical world Albert pushed himself through for half the pay.
Albert knew it as well. It was a great theme for his pontificating whenever he’d get foamy-mouthed about the state of the world. Look at you, he’d say as I came through the doorway, my fingernails still reasonably clean, my clothes still reasonably fresh. How do you know you’ve even been working today? You look the same coming in as you did going out. Your shirt isn’t even wrinkled. Didn’t you sweat all day? Wasn’t there even a moment of intellectual anxiety enough to leave furrows of philosophic thought in your brow? You’ve taught future bureaucrats and landowners how to maintain their claw-hold on the throats of the working public, how to bleed them of their pay, how to tax them, how to feel slightly cultured while doing it. You’ve spent the day perpetuating a sick lie.
*****
I’m playing a chess match against Mikhail on the picnic table outside the Shot out Eye and the table is getting beerier as the hours go on. First one to win four matches wins and we’ve already been through eight matches without conclusion. It’s almost dark outside and the board is lit by candles around us. A few stand there in earnest, holding their beers, staring down at the table like gods overseeing a battlefield massacre.
POSTCARD SNAPSHOTS OF PRAGUE:
1. Our first public performance at the open mic night in the basement of Radost-FX. What about it? The room was painted with hangovers. We’d sat in on these Sunday sessions a few times already to get the feel for the place, see whether or not music was welcomed. Musical acts didn’t happen often and when they did, they were usually solo acoustic guitar numbers and usually not very pleasant to listen to so we had no reasonable expectation that our reception would be any worse.
As it turned out, it was met with stunned silence. As usual, no one knew whether they’d just heard something awful or incredible.
2. The crunchy sausages with mustard with a diamond-shaped napkin and a chunk of brown bread, eaten on the main boulevard with the hum of late night intoxicated sexuality dripping in the streets from the gutters and the eaves of clouded minds.
3. Sitting in the park near the hostel on a bench smoking a joint and staring up at the night sky.
4. Local pub we joined in late, four Czechs, one playing the guitar at the table as we sang Beatles songs wearing sun glasses and pounding our beer mugs on the table top like barbarians singing songs of mythology the night before pillaging the neighbouring village.
5.
*****
Most of these events won’t register as memory. Either they’re fed through a haze and don’t have any durable qualities or they become enlarged, poster-sized in the subconscious. They don’t stick for very long as they aren’t really memories at all, just events. Not unlike the walls of a construction site that get covered in concert announcement and new released music advertisements, glued up and then covered over, ripped down, graffiti’d on, spat at. No one remembers what poster was up two weeks ago. And similarly, I can’t remember what happened to myself two weeks ago. It’s not like we sit around a table reminiscing constantly like, remember this, remember that? No one cares because whatever it was, chances are it will be repeated in some form or another later in the day or that week or perhaps the next month and for a moment, a tiny light of recognition might go off and sputter out.
The tendency is to filter events so that they become almost unrecognisable save for those tiny moments. There is no filing system in our memories. It’s all scattered around on the inside like a hotel room that keeps having new guests without a maid to come in and clean up afterwards so that one person’s layer of existence left behind is quickly covered by the next and so on.
Is this how royalty greets the well-wishers that come, one by one, for a handshake and a few words? Imagine all the people who have the highlight of their life, I’ve met the King and here is the photo-moment to prove it, hung on the wall of their front rooms for all guests to ooh and aah over whilst the King has absolutely no recollection at all of having ever met them.
You hang out with your core, the regulars who join you at the table and the conversations begin again as though they’d never left off in the first place.
*****
After all those months of unreturned letters, there was bound to be an answer eventually. I hadn’t expected to just run into her outside the flat though, I have to admit.
Yet there she was, seated regally atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and when I finally returned to Paris, your letters were sitting there waiting for me, like an unfinished novel. For two straight days I read them all, word for word, stopping only to cat nap a few hours here and there. Your presence coursed through me like a hot shower. I decided to take the train here immediately.
*****
Albert wasn’t pleased with the addition of a new flat mate. We’ve barely any room in here as it is, he cringed, waiving his paw around the smoke-filled air of the studio.
But she can cook and she can sing, I rationalised.
Well, I don’t like this at all, he growled. Not at all. This is a fucking disaster.
*****
For several days, it was a lot of walking on eggshells. After all, Albert had found the flat and flats weren’t all that easy to come by. Especially not a cheap one like this. If he deemed the breach severe enough, he might just threaten us with having to find our own place and considering that despite work, the disposable income I disposed of so quickly came in large part from Albert’s personal injury account, this wouldn’t have been a good development at all.
How to pacify Albert was our theme for days. Anastasia suggested sleeping with him but the looming love triangle might prove even more daunting than finding our own flat.
In the end, it was several nights later, after Anastasia had joined us on stage for the first time, that Albert was convinced. The tension eased. Yeah, what the fuck, he explained. She’s a good cook and she even does the dishes afterwards.
*****
At the Shot out Eye, it was a bit of an event when Anastasia arrived. Not only was her presence a little breathtaking in the background of our norm, but her conversations never flowed with any of the others previous. It was like someone riding a bicycle in the middle of a tank parade. For weeks, we had complete strangers trying to join our table, lining up for the opportunity hours in advance, sometimes merely to get a glimpse of Anastasia.
After the first night she’d joined our performance performing the vocals, word spread quickly. Within weeks, we’d had offers for gigs all around Prague, and from as far away as Bratislava and Budapest.
*****
So what are we going to do with all these offers?
The three of us were sat in the train station café just outside the Anglo-American College and the vote was split.
Albert was sick of Prague, he insisted. After so many months, it should be time to move on. Prague was like quicksand and we were sinking rapidly. He had to get out of foundation, even it is just temporary.
My vote was a necessary abstention. I couldn’t side with Albert for risk of driving the newly arrived Anastasia away and I couldn’t side with Anastasia because my poverty level salary at the College wouldn’t afford the two of us our own flat without Albert’s personal injury fund to sustain us.
If I side with staying in Prague, I asked Albert, what would you do? If you are sick of Prague and merely want out, where would you go?
He puffed on his cigarette for several moments in silence. I can stay another month, but that’s it. Either we hit the road together or I hit the road alone.
*****
We didn't need a doctoral thesis to validate it. No one understood anything we said anyway, and we didn't understand them either. It was the perfect relationship.
Of course, when Anastasia would tire of whoring in Amsterdam, she inevitably made her way back to Prague to stay with us and that, I submit, was the only time Albert or I had to defend ourselves or our theories.
You guys look like you haven't left this place since I left she would comment like a disapproving den mother over a scout troop.
Is that supposed to pass as dialogue? Albert would ask. Then Anastasia would make a big show of ordering a bottlr of Moravian wine in a hideous castration of the Czech language, the waiter would look at her blankly, trying to decipher a translation, to what the fuck is she talking about? Albert had mastered the beer vocabulary. He'd even taken the trouble to learn grammatical agreement, depending on how many beers he was ordering, but beyond that, he knew nothing of the language and never bothered to try. But, like all linguistic dilemmas, it was easily solved when he would bring her a beer instead. They're all out of Moravian wine, I'd explain.
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 3.2,
...Is it ever possible? Were we merely illusionists with a talentlessness so relentless that it almost became convincing. What else could explain our presence on these stages, night after night, noisy pub after noisy pub? Was it stunned silence at something so horribly awry, they synapses misfired over and over, convincingly? We certainly couldn't believe it ourselves. And by some strange psychological victory, we'd been able to convince the others. Or confused them beyond healthy criticism. We began to accompany ourselves with three foot high inflatable chess pieces and had two volunteers play out famous matches on a 5 x 5 bedsheet painted as a chessboard. More confusion. The lyrics continued lifted out of foreign language obituary pages and stories of local interest plagerized as stanzas in a bizarre, low key baritone that sounded like scratching sandpaper with a two euro coin. Most importantly, the sax and the bass continued to play as basic and few chords as possible, applying repetition and sometimes extremely slow tempos to cover our lack of skill.
But a style that began with extremely minimalist tendancies slowly began to emerge as a spectacle large enough to divert attention from our increasingly frantic fear that eventually we would be found out. When Anastasia joined us with her compositions, her overbearing bossiness and clarinet, we responded with the chess matches recreated on stage, a few interpretive dancers we'd lifted from their classes with promises of popular relevancy, and a harp player.
May Day Besides the already mentioned beer and grilled bratwursts Czechs have a tradition a very much liked. Every girl and woman should be kissed under a bloomed cherry tree (but nowadays any bloomed tree whatsoever goes, too) so that she would not wither up during the year.
Most people don't belong together, she exhaled patiently. People ARE together because they have to be with somebody, one way or another...too lonely to accept solitude with a warm embrace like a lover coming home from the war...no, these people around us, and here she gesticulated wildly in an arc encompassing, one imagined the whole of humanity, not just the stray passerby who happened to be strolling within that imaginary arc they aren't comfortable being alone. They've seen too much television telling them in too many subtle ways, through sitcoms and chat shows and deodorant commercials, that it is their moral obligation in this society to be with someone, anyone - they've had it drummed into their skulls from the beginning...they won't accept anything less and when they wake up one morning wondering what they've done with their lives, who this person lying next to them is, who they get ready for work in the morning with, who they eat a silent dinner over the telly with is, by then, it's all too late. They realised too late...
She wasn't even talking to me, really, talking through me.
She got like that when the sores of society would bubble on her, get in her eyes, underneath her fingernails. There was always another tirade down the road, with Anastacia, you could predict that much, measure your time in the days between rants.
And it was always a sign that she was getting antsy, that she was preparing herself to start travelling again. Snip, snip, cut the ties.
I sat back silently as though savouring the wine, watching the smoke rings I blew upwards; my head tilted back slightly as I watched them slowly carry themselves upwards toward the ceiling and dissipate, my eyes focusing gradually on the present rather than a visionary's distance.
*****
It was May Day in Prague. Albert and I had a bet on to see who could stay off the piss the longest. Albert made it til ten o'clock that night.
Fuck it, he announced, standing up from the chair and away from the game of solitaire he'd been conducting silently for nearly two hours. You win. I'll buy the first beer.
There weren't many nights we weren't out, frankly. Prague is like that, a vortex drawing in the alcoholics and pretend poets and the blue collar Czechs from Zizkov. We were all there, nearly every night, playing cards, chess, music, holding conversations we imagined we were having only to realise that we were, flirting with drunker foreigners, chain smoking, enjoying the evening with the kind of pre-future nostalgia that made it seem like that evening was our last.
*****
Can I tell you a secret? she asked out of the blue as we were lying in bed, still clothed, the candles burning and the pot smoke hanging above us in a haze. I sat up for a moment, rubbing my eyes as though it were just morning and I'd had a good night's sleep. Sure, I answered non committally.
I want to leave. She didn't move as she spoke, just staring up at the ceiling. I want to leave tomorrow, get on a train and just end up somewhere else.
I hadn't been kidding myself too seriously. I knew this would ultimately be the natural score at the end of this match. She was too edgy to relax, pacing the room sometimes (no mean feat in such small quarters), drinking heavily as if to transport herself somewhere else, always somewhere else.
I can't say I didn't understand it although in my case it was more a case of inertia than any true longing to remain in one place for very long. Even Albert had talked aloud to himself about getting the fuck outta here... a few nights this month.
And I want you to come with me. she concluded, grabbing my hand.
*****
So the following morning, just after dawn and before we'd even had a coffee, we were walking down towards Hlavni Nadrazi to catch a train. Albert was annoyed that he wasn't invited but in the end, decided to go back to sleep anyway.
The gypsies were all out in force having slept off whatever they were on the night before that had them singing and dancing and holding their hungry babies in front of your face with one hand whilst the other hand was either upturned, palmward, or trying to reach into your pockets.
The funny thing is on the way down, we didn't spend a second talking about it. It was as though we were heading down to snatch a few klobasa and a beer first thing in the morning, as though this was yesterday or the day before.
We walked silently inside the station and Anastacia picked a window, mumbled things I couldn't hear from behind, pulled out a wad of unexpected cash and stepped back with two tickets.
So, where are we going? I hint,
Someplace you've never been. she replies with an excitement I imagined she would normally reserve for finding a hidden stash of catnip.
Awww, but I've been there already, like a hundred times! I exclaim just to throw her off guard for a moment and take away her suspicious, ruling hand.
I grab at the tickets and have a look. Low whistle.
Rome.
*****
The very first time the three of us were on stage simultaneously was at Jazz Club Železná.
After the first few times, Albert and I didn't get nervous anymore. We had butterflies and vomited often beforehand, but we weren't nervous.
With Anastasia joining us we were suddenly a trio, Albert and I had another aspect to overwhelm us with. But she had a sweet voice. Our music didn't even matter. We just tried to play as quietly in the background as possible.
And that first night we were all having a shot of slivovice for good luck when suddenly the canned music faded and someone got on the PA to announce, the infamously awkward, Deadbeat Conspiracy.
Muffled, half-hearted applause. Golf claps, really.
Albert stood there holding his bass, leaning backwards as though that bear of a bass would knock him over from the weight and the fourteen cans of beer that proceeded him. (He was done at thirteen but I told him it was unlucky, so he had another.)
I held the sax in front of me, staring at a fixed point above the heads of the crowd because I was terrified suddenly, gasping for water.
But Anastasia stepped out there with the dusty spotlight in front of her and she had her back to me: so when she began to sing, and if you could describe a voice as velvet and chocolate wrapped around a cherry you would have hers, slow and velvet caress, her voice bounced back from the walls past her and to Albert and I.
It wasn't hard to follow at all. I'd hit a low note every ten seconds or so, Albert plucked here and there when it seemed appropriate and before we knew it the place was absolutely silent.
The bartenders and waiters and kitchen help and doormen all stood there, transfixed by Anastasia’s voice.
We'd rehearsed all week at the walls in that little flat and had not even smelled a hint of the reaction. No fumbling with glasses and silverware, no more idle conversations breaking ice over and over, no more bottles opening or glasses slid across the wooden bar counter. Just Anastasia’s voice, like lying down on your back in the grass, closing your eyes to the sun.
When she was finished she just stood there as though waiting for us to start the next song. But before we'd even considered what next, the crowd had suddenly woken themselves, hooting and whistling, shouting, holding up their drinks. She brought the mic stand over in front of me.
Your turn. she announced, turning on her heel and taking a seat off to side of the stage.
ROME AND IN PURSUIT
page 116, cahier 3, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I arrived at Rome Stazioni Termini as dawn was breaking. Outside, the neighborhood sweltered with pickpockets and gangs of thieving children. Signore Antonio Pignatelli was supposed to meet me here and was nowhere to be found. A typical scene. I pulled out my tobacco and was just beginning to roll a cigarette when an English speaking cretin stepped toward me, calling my name gently. In his hand was a small cardboard sign that bore my name. He attempted to shake my hand, claiming he was Chuck, sent by Mr. Pignatelli to pick me up since Mr. Pignatelli had been delayed. Chuck appeared to be in his early thirties, sporting an unhealthy complexion, puny frame, round shoulders and a surprisingly prominent paunch. His hair, which looked as though it has been cropped by a pair of blunt shears, was very greasy. I could have filled a mason jar with the grease in his hair. His clothes were total grunge. A dirty nylon rucksack was crumpled at his feet like an abadoned baby. I wondered out loud why Antonio Pignatelli had sent such a seedy and slovenly looking guy to meet me. I'm the only guy he could find on such short notice who speaks English as my native tongue. he explained as he picked up the rucksack and led me by the elbow toward a cafe where we could sit for an espresso and some bread while we waited for Antonio to arrive.
As we sat there, another broken-English-speaker, who must have overheard our conversation, scuttled in from off the street toward us like a cockroach toward a pile of bread crusts and sugar. 'Allo, my name is Jirko he stammers and then asks us if either can spare a few euros for some paintings of his. He asks us both but of course, he is speaking only to me. Chuck doesn't look like he has any money. He looks like he'd be as likely as Jirko to be panhandling, perhaps more so. Jirko's lustreless hair matted in some kind of grease, or perhaps it is turpentine, judging from the smell. His fingers are paint-stained, the nails long and filthy. He too has a rucksack and from this one, he pulls out a few vague, almost hallucinatory charcol etchings, explaining all the while that he lives in a squalid condominium on the slummy eastern fringes of the city where he rents a small, damp room in the basement; broken down into the submission of poverty teaching haphazard english classes, giving black market tours of Rome to wary english language tourists charging 2 euros for an hour per. I wave him off, spitting to the side of his shoes and looking out for the waiter or someone to chase away these vagrants. Others are beginning to take notice, their vagrant, gypsy antennae picking up the scent of money in the neighborhood at this early hour.
Finally, Chuck loses his apathetic demeanor and waves the butter knife in the direction of Jirko and a few other slowly approaching vagrants. Get away fuckers! Liberty is not a release from all law, from all restraint! Crawl back into your sewers and gutters! Stay away I warn you or this distinguished gentleman with me will be forced to brandish his fire arm and fire it at you indiscriminantly!
He flops down next to me, smiling but a little sweaty. The sidewalks have cleared. One thing I've learned he begins, lighting a cigarette and flagging down the waiter impatiently, is that the consumerist impulse, even in junkies, drives us all toward personal satisfactions that we never quite experience without a solipsistic sense of loneliness hounding us. We may need love and self-opening in order to achieve genuine intimacy and commitment with even a few others.
The waiter arrives glancing at us and having heard the shouting, relieved but curious as to where the vagrants disappeared to. Chuck smiles, You see? he demands of the waiter, lighting a cigarette and coughing heavily. John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, that no one has a right to interfere with me for my own good, but only to prevent harm to others is now generally accepted. The streets are clear of riff raff. So bring us a pair of espressos, a bottle of Pernod and perhaps a few chunks of bread, rapidamente! senza ritardo!
Chuck continues, puffing on his cigarette proudly like a pimp. Signore Pignatelli has been looking forward to your visit. I don't expect this delay should be long. He's had some difficulties lately with potentially destructive ideals but frankly, I think the worst is over. If he hasn't arrived within the half hour, I'll take you to a fine pensione I know of only a few blocks from here.
What exactly are these 'difficulties' you speak of? I ask with only a vague sense of curiosity. The espresso has arrived and it's aroma overtakes me, overtakes the smell of pigeons and unwashed sidewalks. Train station neighborhoods always smell the same. Like poverty and ammonia mixed with illicit sex and stale urine.
Well, I'm no shrink, but I think he has to stop looking for salvation to come to him from somewhere else, from above. Instead, I suggested to him only yesterday, he should seek to reconcile with reality. After all, there is no external measure of the meaningfulness of our lives and practices. He wallows in his insignificance, the meaningless of his life, and it paralyses him at times with terrible fits of depression. I slipped him a mild amphetamine sulphate. I'm sure he'll be ok in a little while. Then he'll come to pick you up and everything will continue on as planned. Chuck stared at his fingernails awhile as I thought about how Mr. Pignatelli's affliction might affect his ability to help me locate some leads about Anastasia. It didn't look good. I cursed loudly to myself, much to Chuck's surprise, who took up a defensive Yang Tai Chi position on the other end of the table.
Sorry about that. I'm just a little annoyed at having come all the way from Kaunas and a meeting with the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin regarding a concert to be performed in the Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, only to find out now that Mr. Pignatelli is suffering from some sort of dysthymia or bipolar disorder. I was urgently counting on his assistance.
Don't worry about it. Chuck assured, picking up his rucksack and rifling through it for a few scraps of paper which he handed over to me. These are the remains of the records of his therapeutic foster home stay. It suggests only a minor depressive disorder brought on by the ill-advised use of estrogen which he'd hoped would improve the somatic and mild depressive symptoms but in the end, only seemed to fuck up his system worse. He should be completely recovered in a matter of days, perhaps weeks, but for the time being, so long as he's jacked up with a little Japanese shabu or alot of caffeine, he's fine for long periods of time. Whatever he's supposed to help you with, I'm certain he'll be functional for long enough periods of time to assist you. Believe me, if he couldn't, he wouldn't have invited you here.
Just then there was a jaunty horn honking from the street as a dioxazine purple Alfa Romeo 156 GTA pulled up to the curb with Antonio's delicate hand waving out the driver's side window. He lept from the car, the engine still idling, and shouted out greetings to both of us. Witold! Chuck! What great fortune that I've finally found you! I was caught up in an accident with a chestnut roaster and got caught up in the irrisistable, musky fragrants of the chestuts on Via Nazionale and then stopped for a few moments of reflection where Mussolini used to harangue the crowds from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. I feel like a tourist again! What a morning!
He quickly grabbed my bags and tossed them into the trunk of the Alfa Romeo and motioned me into the passenger's seat. Chuck! he screeched. Meet us at the New Mississippi Jazz Club on Borgo Angelico tonight around 10! Bring Adriana and Camelia with you! As I carefully folded my legs in the passenger seat, Antonio fell in behind the steering wheel, yanked the car into gear and floored it, yanking me backwards. We were on our way to what Antonio told me in very speedy explanation was his September home in Rome. First, a quick bite to eat, a few bottles of wine, a nap and then we would get down to business...
random page sifting, cahier 2, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I knew the 19 hour ride on the EuroNight car from Roma Termini to Budapest-Deli station was going to be an exercise of endurance, a tag team of piecemeal and useless conversations with peripatetic strangers wandering through the hallways of the cars at all hours having nothing in their own lack of imagination better to converse about than the weather we were unable to experience and an international goulash of political expostulations and petty griping.
When I was able to elude the strangers, I'd stare into the blackness of what seemed an endless, dispassionate tenebrosity Emilia-Romagna countryside staring back at me. For hours I did nothing but chain smoke and cleanse my palate with warm cola. There was, of course, the Buescher Aristocrat, but the moment I'd touch the reed to my lips and begin even the faintest alternations of strident and mellow tones the neighboring passengers erupted into immediate and obdurate, brick wall protests of noiselessness and sleep.
Having anticipated this, especially for those long hours with nothing but the chain smoking and the warm beer preventing me from sleeping, I'd brought along a bookbag gorged with internet cafe printouts on subjects ranging from the Mandelbaum translations of Dante's Purgatorio to obscure American government statistical guidebooks. Nevertheless, the journey was doomed to bring with it an unendearing sense of time and layers of peeling consciousness, through the cosmos and back again all the while fraught with the bristling chaos of the Anastasia restrospective slipping in and out of my vision which could not be escaped.
By the time we'd pulled into Bologna Centrale for a long layover, as a diversion, I'd already begun a laborious, ball-breaking study in thought about time travel and how it could, in some instances, mirror regular, geographic travel. I still had the internet printout of the U.S. Department of Labor Handbook of Labor Statistics measuring the value of money back then using the consumer price index calculated by some strange index of prices paid by Vermont farmers for family living (2002 Price = 1850 Price x (2002 CPI / 1850 CPI).
Taking that equation, I spent many bouncy hours on the rails calculating things like how my 10 cents in 1833 would be worth around $2.00 today until my head hurt. Why 1833, I'm not sure. It seemed to hold some symmetry for me which couldn't be rehearsed. By dawn, as we crept toward the Austrian border, energized by a few swigs of grappa from the flask inside my rucksack, I'd figured that if I take $200 of today's money and travel in time to 1833, I'd have the today's equivalent of about $4,000 to work with.
I wasn't sure where this line of thinking was going to take me. Wishful thinking for four grand was one thing but wondering what I reason I'd have to be on a train a place that wasn't even yet called Budapest yet in 1833, disquisitive about what the hell would be going in 1833 and what my role in it would be. Slowly, wishing I'd printed out deeper history of the breadbasket of the Habsburg Empire, the weaving and rolling had its somnolent effect and it wasn't long before I'd fallen asleep to the lullaby rocking of the train as we moved through the Kärnten province.
Either waking from a dream, or thrust into the middle of it, (difficult to discern through the haze of the morning fog), it seemed Balzac was seated next to me, smirking noiselessly, but staring openly.
Good morning I muttered unsteadily. He looked a little dishevelled himself, a little pudgier than the Louis Boulanger portrait, wild-haired and determined, staring me down his little moustache twitching like the whiskers of a rodent. It was as though I'd interrupted him in mid-conversation with himself as he continued pointing out that while he wasn't deep, he was very wide and how he would create a new style of realism by portraying the present.
Thinking quickly, I remind him that Georg Lukács was to say that he'd passed from the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present as history, and christ, Lukás wasn't even born until 52 years later.
Balzac barely paid me any attention. He went on, giving elegies on the irreparable decay of good society and his idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books.
He gives me a copy of Le médecin de campagne, which he said he would publish that year in Paris. I thumb through it quickly about a doctor who has given up his mistress and then learns that she died giving birth to his son and then decides to devote his life to working with the poor. Geez, I tell him, shaking my head, why are you guys in 19th century France always portraying the peasants as degenerates and cretins? What kind of predictable sociopathological discourse is this?
Balzac stares at me a moment, a vague disgust in his eyes as he speaks: An idiocy of rural life. The rural population was helpless. They needed rational authority which they did not themselves possess, to improve their situation. They were like children. They were hopelessly backwards and required massive state intervention to bring them up to the modern age. he clears his throat and continues: Besides the plot, regard how l am interested in the lives of typical, every day people, like an anthropologist. I don't care about these common histories of nations and political and public figures the world scribbles on about without definition and contrast...Do not all these solve the difficult literary problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?
*********
1833 was also the building of the Petõfi Bridge and when Strauss' father was taking his first concert trip to Budapest.
How many Forints would four grand be? How much pörkölt and gulyás?
It didn't matter. I was going solely for Jazz Days, headed in September for Debrecen where they held Hungary's top jazz festival. Of course, I was hoping Anastasia would change her mind and meet me there. It was a daft hope, devoid of reality.
Czech – Jarmila and Karel.
Pigeon hole Karel Hynek Macha as imitator of Byron.
Macha: Czech girls, pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
GM Hopkins wrote a good deal of spiritual, sensual poems?
Not until 30 years after his death his poems were published. (1918)
no appreciation for the ordinary individual
Czech is the fifth European vernacular language after French, Italian, Catalan and Dutch into which the Bible was translated.
philosophical amazement at undestructability of existence in nature.
Hopkins saw the whole world as barbarous in beauty to him, everything was charged with the grandeur of god.
V PRAZE
V PRAZE
PRAGUE
**************
It was 18 hours by bus to Prague. Cramped seats, dishevelled sleep, casual slugs from Albert’s flask of Oude Ginever, the strong juniper flavoured Dutch liquor from which gin is rumoured to have evolved, fueled my insomnia along with the excitement of the destination ahead of us, and instead of sleep, quietly humming to myself, covered in a barely comprehensible issue of De Volkskrant purchased at the origin of the journey in Amsterdam, a comically coloured weekend edition of USA Today as well as the International Herald Tribune, whose crossword Albert had completed at the journey‘s onset in less than a half hour, I snuck peeks, through the dancing moonlight of a German sky, at Jiri Weil’s Life With A Star, whose reading I’d timed for this trip, this story of Josef Roubicek, a Jewish bank teller who is waiting to be called up for deportation to Terezin whilst his fellow Jews were increasingly persecuted in a Nazi Prague…
Neither of us had know much more than a communist Czechoslovakia in the entirety of our collective existence and the idea of this one-two punch, the Nazis followed up by the Russians, seemed like a positively devastating set of circumstances.
And all this after the promise of the Treaty of St German in 1919, Albert read, upon successful conclusion of the International Herald Tribune without breaking a sweat, from a some notes he’d scribbled in anticipation of our journey, some background fillers, arcania and trivia, solid facts and useful information he’d been gleaning in his spare time for weeks once he’d known in his mind he was ready to leave Utrecht.
You see, he began, warming up to his topic as we left some truck stop somewhere between Belgium and Germany by late afternoon, offloading a few travellers, uploading a few more whilst giving passengers a chance to stuff themselves with cafeteria snacks and junk food for the journey ahead, Czechoslovakia itself was the one of the many offspring of the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War One and with that treaty, the return to the romantic notion of the medieval Czech statehood
Now, how did they lose that statehood to begin with, he smirked, I’m glad you asked. He pulled at his beard, staring out the window.
The Czechs, you see, were in a pretty good position if you go back to the 14th century. Their King Charles IV, King of Bohemia and even Holy Roman Emperor believe it or not, the chief of All-Time Czech chiefs, had set it all up proper-like. Not only that but he’s the one who commissioned so many of the Gothic buildings that still stand in Prague, also started up the University of Prague, etc. You’ll see half the city appears to have stuffed named after him. Anyway, he led this golden age for the Czech Empire and diplomat that he was, later on he established several treaties of his own, of primary importance that with the Hapsburg family in Austria and surprise surprise, surprise, the Arpads in Hungary which, you guessed it, was the foundation of the very Austro-Hungarian Empire that needed to be dismantled some 550 years or so later.
His daughter married Rudolf IV, the Habsburg King and they enter into a contract of mutual inheritance between his family and the Habsburgs wherein if one family became extinct, the other took over.
Another Rudolf eventually became the Czech King but this wasn’t the proper downfall - no, that came because of, yes you guessed it, internal religious wars between the Catholics and Protestants. We’ll save Jan Hus and the Hussites for another day, Witold but suffice it to say that from that point on, the Czechs were no longer their own, they were the Germans’ and it wasn’t until that treaty that they became so again, however short lived.
Hitler once bellowed, sometime in 1937 I think, Czechoslovakia will be wiped off the map! Smash it with military power, he threatened. England, France and Italy helped sign his power to do so in Munich a month later and by the Spring of 1939 not only was so-called Sudetenland under the Nazi thumb, but their troops had entered Prague.
So that, as they say, was that, Albert moaned, rolling his back to me, head against the window, long legs curled inward in a futile effort to fit his frame into a comfortable position for sleep. Not on a bus. I returned to Jiri Weil’s book:
..Ruzena, I said, people are now drinking coffee, well, perhaps not real coffee, but they are sitting somewhere warm, after a satisfying lunch, and I am freezing, Ruzena, and I am hungry…
It was a thoroughly demoralising book about human cruelty and the rooms of mild insanity that thrived within them. By the time I’d finished, I’d temporarily forgotten my fixation with Soviet Prague and resolved to spend one afternoon, like Josef Roubicek, sweeping leaves in a Prague cemetery.
Meanwhile Albert slept from the start, I noted jealously. You have long hours to stare out the window yet most of the journey was made in darkness so even staring out the window gave you the feeling that you were enduring rather than travelling, transported anonymously through historical lands in a god damned bus stinking of the bad breath of two dozen snoozing foreigners instead of riding horses like Sugambrians and the Suebian Tribes raiding along the Rhine.
Morning slowly unveiled and with its unveiling, the countryside danced naked.
But as we made our approach to what we assumed was Prague there was a growing ill ease. Everywhere had a hue of grey, industrial soot, abused and staggered.
Expecting Bohemia, anarchy, surrealism and intoxication, we were disappointed at our dropping point, a bleak bus station on the outskirts of town.
You think you know a place by reading about it, reading the literature spawned from it, listening to the stories of other travellers but ultimately, its like imagining what it would have been like to sleep with the vintage version of Marilyn Monroe or Ingrid Bergman – you might conjure up the face, fill in the blanks of the intimate curves of the body, cobble together personality traits from interviews and photographs but in the end, the imagination is dulled by the inability to make it real.
During his few waking hours, Albert had continued his overview of Czech literature and history on the bus ride out of Amsterdam through Germany, filled me in on the Slavonic liturgy like the 10th century legend of Ludmila and Wenceslas, the break of the monopoly of lecturing in Latin in Prague by Karl Heinrich Seibt in the 18th century, the Age of Reason with its secular focus that condemned the Baroque, affected by mythopoeic patriotism, the birth of neo-Classical literatures influenced by folklorism, the concept of autonomous national culture, , the 19th century Czech Romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha (whose poem Máj, he was even able to spout of few lines in butchered Czech that he’d memorised), the effect of the Ausgleich, which split the Empire into the dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary leaving Czech nationalism to the wayside, the Czech submission to bourgeois Vienna, Hanuman, the poem by Svatopluk Cech about civil war between clothed cosmopolitan and naked nationalist natural apes, Masaryk and the Realists, anarchist utopianism - and that’s as far as I got in my reading so far, he shrugged apologetically as the bus made a dinner stop in some German self-service diner on the Autobahn.
This is Prague? Albert managed to moan, setting down his bag, quickly lighting a long-awaited Winston and pulling the collar of his coat up around his chin and grimacing. Prague's first nucleus was founded in the latter part of the 9th century as a castle on a hill commanding the right bank of the Vltava: this is known as Vyšehrad (high castle) to differentiate from the castle which was later erected on the opposite bank, the future Hradčany. Soon the city became the seat of the Země koruny české Kings of Bohemia, some of whom also later reigned as emperors of the Holy Roman Empire
I think so, I noted cautiously, sniffing the sulphuric air around me and looking around for something familiar. Imagine if we were like, dropped in here in like August 1968 when the troops of the USSR, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were rolling in to douse the Prague Spring. Imagine the euphoria of a greater democracy, economic reforms and the abandonment of controls over mass media doused in a matter of a few nights of occupation.
Jan Palach, Albert muttered, puffing greedily on the Winston and wondering where the first pub might be located even though it was barely seven in the morning. I’ve read this city is loaded with non-stop bars, he explained. Less than five months later, he continued, Jan Palach infamously performed an act of self immolation in protest of the Soviet disbursement of reform. If you want to imagine something, try imagining making the decision not only to protest, but to kill yourself in protest and not only kill yourself in protest but kill yourself by setting fire to yourself in protest. That, he said, tossing the cigarette butt on the ground with hundreds of others, and two historic acts of defenestration, are what Prague symbolises to me before I’ve even had my first Czech beer.
We carried on out of the depot and began the slow, uncertain walk towards what we sensed was the city centre. It was clear from looking up and down the Vinohodská that the east end was a trail of the city trickling away into suburbs and the west direction appeared to be the only other choice. Fortunately for us, unwittingly, it led straight down, albeit after quite a pace, into the centre of town, the Národní Muzeum
So we carried on, Albert lugging his bass with only a small duffel bag over one shoulder and I, with the saxophone in its case, also travelling lightly – clothes we would buy on the cheap – these were third world prices, after all and despite effusions about history and literature, like most others who had come, we were there for the cheap lifestyle.
Ten minutes down the street and the strap on a bag snapped and fell harshly into the slush of the sidewalk as a menacing dog held on a leash by a disapproving old lady began barking at us. Fuck off, Albert growled back at the dog as the old lady shouted something at us incomprehensibly.
So this is the dream? Albert demanded after twenty minutes of walking got us closer to what passed as the skyline. This fucking dreary slum of a city?
Hang tight, mate, I cautioned. Something tells me we’ve entered from the wrong side of town. Have some faith, we’re going to be dazzled, I guarantee it, I preached boldly, trying to overcome my own trepidation with something resembling optimism despite the bleak surroundings.
And sure enough, by half eleven, we’d quartered our belongings in a quasi-posh hotel, had a flyer for a promising youth hostel and were already in a famous watering hole known for it’s jazz musicians and cheap beer.
*****
The religious split between Catholics and Protestants is followed everywhere on an historical trail and Prague is no different. The rationalist reaction against devotional Roman Catholic literature was a constant spasm, like a dodgy sphincter, Albert explained as we strode swiftly now, eager to begin. Sort of on par with the literary rebellion against white males hogging all the good lit publicity for themselves, he added. And look, in the 16th century, the predominately and fevered Catholics of the Habsburgs took over, pushing the Protestants aside, much like the Spanish king did to the Protestants in the Netherlands. See the pattern of Europe during these times? Religious intolerance.
But like the Dutch revolt, the bubble burst eventually when at the Prague Castle, an assembly of Protestants tried two Imperial governors, Wilhelm Slavata and Jaroslav somebody, for violating the right of freedom of religion, found them both guilty, and threw them out of the high castle windows, There you have your first Czech defenestration.
Undeniably, the euphoria of historical partaking in Prague had long since worn away within the last decade between the first intrepid Western youth settlers to today’s overindulged yobs, stag parties and frat boy mentality sweating through pint after pint in one trendy location after another. There were few remnants of Communist Prague to sip on a leisurely afternoon, the aura had been vacuumed and binned and its place cropped up a nihilistic subculture of intellectual sewage who came to Prague much in the same way they came to Amsterdam. Hedonism as an art form.
It was almost as though the old wooden theatre called the Bouda (hut) had never been erected on Wenceslas Square – in fact it had been demolished after a few plays were put on, mostly by Viennese writers.
That isn’t to say Prague didn’t have its charms. For drunks like Albert and I this was a sort of alcoholic’s Mecca. Well, perhaps the more appropriate location would be Munich during Oktoberfest, like a Hajj, but in any event, the beers were bigger and cheaper, they were more natural thus inducing far fewer and certainly less severe hangovers. There were exotic yet powerful pit stops along the beer super highway like Plum brandy and Beckerovka and even absinthe. There were the Disney-like facades of what remained a sort of fairyland architectural backdrop. There were the working class pivnices in Zizkov where men traditionally supped on gallons of beer in dingy yet church-like reverential quarters. There was the cheap which made life a bearable bargain. There was Vaclav Havel running the country instead of the literary resistance. There was the underlying hum of informality when it came to proving competencies. You didn’t need a sparkling CV to do something, you merely had to do it. And one can barely mention Prague without mentioning the birds of Prague, whorish with deadbeat intellects yet charming naivité, or, as the Czech poet Mácha described them pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
Albert didn’t need much convincing, once we’d established quarters and consulted a guidebook to find an auld jazz hangout near the banks of the Vlatava. Albert judges every place he goes based upon the cost of a pint of beer. Cheap beer in Albert’s mind equals worthy society. Expensive beer means they’re all more than likely just a bunch of yuppies, flesh merchants or worse, snobs. The upper classes lack poetry, he was fond of repeating whenever we were accosted by ridiculous prices. Life in sterility. So when we ordered our very first pints in Prague the first thing he did was a little jitterbug on the way to sitting at a table singing to himself, it’s true, it’s true! The beer is cheaper than water!
Do you understand what we are creating by hopping now to this new location, abandoning incomplete the experience first of New York and then Utrecht? This is a poetics of surprise and variety giving us the illusion of motion and expansion. Our acts are begun and never completed. Our equilibrium is unstable because we are constructing on several levels at once, each level with a different perspective. And now we throw into the blender, the abundance of cheap beer, an even deeper hedonism, a surreal blur of experiences. If this doesn’t emancipate our music, nothing will!
This is better than Mexico, he went on after having his first few sips. I hate Mexican beer, he sneered, even though it’s cheap like this. This, he sang, holding the pint up in front of my face as though I wouldn’t understand his subject without visual aids, is the sign of times to come! And he chugged down the remaining eleven gulps without breathing, placing the glass softly on the table top and wiping his chin with his right wrist.
Take it slow, lad – an old man who had been sitting dead for all we knew, across from us, suddenly came to life, holding out a wrinkled, age-spotted hand in caution. You lads are all the same. Your first beers you drink like the first girl you fuck, quickly and without comprehending what you are doing. If you are to be drinking many beers in my city, eventually you will learn there is no hurry. There is always another beer waiting somewhere just around the corner.
The old man introduced himself as Pavel whose command of English was owed to several years in England as a boy, just before, during and shortly after the war. I was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia on October 17, 1934, the son of a Czech father (Rudolph Fischer) and a Viennese mother (Erna Frenkel). The family was living in Prague at the time of the German invasion (March 15, 1939). Although it was difficult for a Jewish family to leave Czechoslovakia, my family managed to leave on August 19, 1939 and arrived by train in Venice, Italy on August 24, 1939. After a short stay in Venice, the family moved to San Remo, Italy which is near the French border.
highly skilled Czechs and Slovaks continued to leave the country despite the risks. From 1950 through 1989, it is estimated that more than 550,000 people emigrated. Emigration meant breaking all family ties and social networks because those who left were not allowed to return. In addition, emigration was considered a criminal offense. The consequences included confiscation of possessions and sometimes the persecution of relatives.
The two main emigration waves came in 1948, when the communists came to power
Pavel had the kind of pinched, broken blood vessel-lined face that you could instantly recognise as having experience with the drink, some would have even ventured too much experience with the drink, but his head was still sound after all those years and when he got around to asking what we were doing in Prague (start a jazz collective and slip into an irredeemable vortex of hedonism in the process,) his eyes instantly lost their sagging skin quality and shone with remembrances for he too was a jazz musician, pianist who had flung off years of classical training at the conservatorium, he explained, because he instantly loved, upon hearing his first bootleg copies, Thelonius Monk and Oscar Peterson. After the Nazi occupation jazz flourished here. Jazz now served as an expression of opposition to the stupid "deutsche tanzmusik" and as a yearning for freedom. The bands of Karel Vlach, Gustav Brom, and Emil Ludvík, Karel Slavík's Blue Music, Elit Club, and Rhythm 42, a small ensemble were well known names. A first-class arranger, mainly for Ludvík, was Bedrich "Fricek" Weiss, who was deported to the concentration camp Terézin, where he led the Ghetto Swingers. In 1944 he, together with his father, was transported to Auschwitz and directly to the gas chamber. until he heard the music of Armstrong, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Bessie Smith. He recalls the thrill of being present at Duke Ellington's concert in London which left him feeling "captured for ever."
Shortly after World War II was a more intensive and more favorable time for jazz. The leading orchestras in Prague were: Karel Vlach's, with new personnel, Prof. Ladislav Habart's Big Band, and Kamil Behounek Big Band, which played for AFN Pilsen and, later, in G.I.'s clubs and camps in the U.S. Zone in Germany. Gustav Brom's band performed in Brno and Bratislava and for several months in 1947 in Switzerland. In Prague's jazz club Pygmalion that same year and in 1948, Rhythm, the first bebop pioneers here, appeared with legendary trumpet man Lumír "Dunca" Broz, Dr. Jan Hammer, bass and vibes, and singer Vlasta Pruchová, who later became Hammer's wife and mother of keyboardist Jan Hammer.
The first pioneers were bands led by R. A. Dvorský and Jaroslav Jezek, especially the latter, whose Hot Jazz, later Swing Band, was the basis for all following successors. Enthusiasm for jazz sounds was also perceptible in the work of several composers of "serious music," such as Ervin Schulhoff, Bohuslav Martinu, and E. F. Burian.
Soviets saw jazz as a decadent bourgeois art form and advised Communists to stay away from its corrupting influence.
In 1947 Czechoslovakia also was visited by our first guest jazz musicians from foreign countries, such as, the Fud Candrix Band from Belgium, the black Jiver Hutchinson's band, from England and featuring vocalist Frankie Smith, Erik Winstone's Dance Band, also from Great Britain, and Graeme Bell's Dixieland band from Australia.
The two-and-half years from mid-1945 to the end of 1947 was the happiest time for jazz in the former Czechoslovakia. After February 1948 came troubles and the situation did not get better until 1955-56.
During this late-40s period Karel Vlach began to play more dance and popular music. Only Gustav Brom
Monk with his Brilliant Corners(1956) and Oscar Peterson plays Duke Ellington, my, my. I would listen to these recordings in secret at home, out of the earshot of my parents and party members even though Peterson was raised, like myself, as a classical pianist. These were what broke me from the classicists and my automotonic brethren in the Communist party with their authoritarian controls over lucid clarity. Music that was transparent yet enigmatic. Form losing out to chaos, so it seemed.
I was 20 in 1948 – 2000 (now 72) . In Czechoslovakia the Stalinists accused their opponents of "conspiracy against the people's democratic order" and "high treason" in order to oust them from positions of power. Large-scale arrests of Communists with an "international" background, i.e., those with a wartime connection with the West, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jews, and Slovak "bourgeois nationalists," were followed by show trials. The most spectacular of these was the trial of KSC first secretary Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist personalities in November and December 1952. Slánský was executed, and many others were sentenced to death or to forced labour in prison camps. The KSČ rank-and-file membership, approximately 2.5 million in March 1948, began to be subjected to careful scrutiny. By 1960 KSČ membership had been reduced to 1.4 million.
The Ninth-of-May Constitution provided for the nationalization of all commercial and industrial enterprises having more than fifty employees. The non-agricultural private sector was nearly eliminated. Private ownership of land was limited to fifty hectares. The remnants of private enterprise and independent farming were permitted to carry on only as a temporary concession to the petite bourgeoisie and the peasantry. The Czechoslovak economy was subjected to a succession of five-year plans. Industrial growth in Czechoslovakia required substantial additional labour. Czechoslovaks were subjected to long hours and long workweeks to meet production quotas. Part-time, volunteer labour — students and white-collar workers — was drafted in massive numbers. Labour productivity, however, was not significantly increased, nor were production costs reduced. Czechoslovak products were characterized by poor quality.
During the period of communist rule which lasted from February 1948 to December 1989, the interpretation of Jaroslav Jezek's legacy was mixed. His classical compositions and popular songs were allowed by the authorities, yet his work as a jazz musician was not officially recognized. So, Jezek's legacy came to represent different things to different people: he was generally known and sanctioned as a man of popular song, and to the members of the dissident Jazz Section, he served as a model of musical freedom.
It was very difficult to obtain a passport in those days, he explained wearily recollecting sadness. You had to apply for official permission and to get official permission you had to have an employer. Well, I had no reliable employment, let alone an employer. I got drunk for days and slept off work and even though it was difficult getting fired, I found great difficulty maintaining interest in any sort of employment (here Albert’s interest was peaked of course) and thus, getting this official permission was virtually impossible. Fortunately, I had a girlfriend at the time who had an employer and I was able to convince her to steal one of the official papers required from an employer to be deemed as a reliable person. She even stamped it for me, writing that I was a reliable person. A chata – a simple, usually newly built wooden cabin or cottage
typically in a forest or by a river stream – and a chalupa – a renovated old farmhouse in a small
village – became the only destinations for the millions of vacationing Czechoslovak citizens. I
will show that there were several distinct differences between chaty and chalupy and the kinds of
people that occupied one or the other type of these country houses. Chata was logically the more common, and also much cheaper, choice, as the supply of
old farmhouses that could be turned into a chalupa was limited, whereas almost everybody could
afford to build their own new cottage/chata.
Typically, privacy-demanding
intellectuals or artists opted for the more challenging chalupa, while working class masses
settled for an uncomplicated, if crowded, weekend life at a chata. As Bernard Safarik noted,
“the sociable chata owner does not mind the switch from the prefabricated hutch in a city blocks
of flats to a similarly crowded quarters of a chata’s ‘blocks of flats’, whereas the individualistic
chalupa owner a few kilometers away builds a high wall around his weekend house in order to
absolutely isolate himself from the rest of society for these two days.”48 Safarik further argues
that the biggest interest in the chalupa ownership among these people was during the years of
socialism, when it offered the only available escape before the enforced collectivism.
I teach kids now, he confessed into his waning beer as the barman slid through collecting empty glasses, taking orders and working the room with a beer gathering mania that bordered on shamanism. I teach kids who have no interest in learning about the piano but are forced by their parents who see classicism in them instead of baggy pants hip hop and western consumerism. It’s a mild form of hell for me, actually. But enough about these things digressing into pity and sadness. What instruments do you play and what sort of jazz is it you are conspiring?
I play the bass, Albert volunteered as the barman returned with three more pints and ticked off three little slashes on our scrap paper tally sheet which we watched with amazement. And Witold plays the horn, neither of us very well, I might add.
Lacking astounding talent, Albert continued, we prefer a minimalist approach to music. We don’t play fancy 15 minute solos, we don’t spiral, we don’t necessarily shake or groove or incarnate anything. We try our best not to remind our audience that we struggle with even the most rudimentary of beats and that neither of us could read a music sheet any easier than we could read a newspaper written in Sanskrit. In fact, to call us musicians might even be a stretch. Conceptualists, perhaps. Like children who haven’t yet conquered speech.
Pavel stared at us for a few moments before taking a pipe out of his coat pocket and relighting it, a shot of flame from a match struck on the floor, audible puffs and the Pope-like smoke firing out of the top of the bowl indicating he had finally digested Albert’s words in full. You will be very successful here then, I would suppose, Pavel smiled slyly. This is precisely the kind of place where you could pull something like that off.
We’ve already been a hit in Holland, I added unnecessarily, we are in the middle of a series of six month tours from one country to the next, enough time to ingest the cultural and regurgitate it in our music, all patterned locally.
Unfortunately, most of my contemporaries are long passed, Pavel mentioned, thinking aloud. But if you are interested, perhaps one afternoon you could come by my apartment and we could organise a little session of sorts. It sounds as though it could be very intriguing indeed.
Prague was like that in so many ways. By that, I mean opportunities seemed to fall from the sky. A little initiative, a distinct lack of fear and a modicum of self confidence and there wasn’t very much in Prague that couldn’t be accomplished given time.
For weeks, like in Utrecht, we stuttered in our efforts to find a place to live. It wasn’t our intention to become permanent residents of the hotel we were quartered in, even if there was a sauna in the building with masseurs and masseuses, professionally asexual but imminently competent at squeezing out the aching of alcohol from your bones and muscles every afternoon before beginning the next binge.
And make no mistake, those several weeks of stuttering was primarily owed to a child-like fascination with spending entire afternoons and evenings glued to the same table as customers came in and out, joining tables with complete strangers, becoming acquaintances, beer partners, co-conspirators. When that wasn’t enough there were the Non Stop mini gambling establishments where, incredibly, you could drink 24 hours a day if needed.
During the course of our wanderings from neighbourhood to neighbourhood exploring the inside of one pub after another, we heard about a youth hostel which would be infinitely cheaper, filled with personalities from all over the world and also had a bar on site.
A few days later we were set up in our own double bunk room to ourselves, still not cheaper than finding our own flat, but given the circumstances, housing shortages, need to establish contacts, figure out how willing we were to avoid the moving to the expat ghetto outskirts of Prague, home of the panelaks, the cold, heartless concrete buildings.
You can thank, in part, Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the precursor to the simple and efficient Functionalism movement of the 1920s and 30s, for the existence of panelaks because in many ways, they are modelled after that design, deformed over the years by Communism into the symbolism of the alleged material equality and collectivist style they were peddling. They’d always been a source of cheap housing in a city notorious for its lack of living space, a simple answer to the question of how to be quartered in thin walled, cheaply built edifices glorifying communism. Ironically, they were now the great way station of the ex-pat life for those living on the thin of their wits who didn’t mind long bus or tram rides back in the middle of a cold, bleak night. Communism was dead and the foreign hedonists and pseudo intellectuals were moving in.
We decided by straw poll, the two of us in an empty non-stop bar near the banks of the Vlatava, that budgeting money would come elsewhere. The only place we could imagine living was in Zizkov, which had become our headquarters, our oasis from tourism and centre of the most pubs per square metre of any other street in the city.
There was a collection of dead-enders who had fled their respective countries to find not only hedonism but jobs in Prague. Jobs so they could stay longer, drink more, pretend to be on the cusp of something very important. In the early and mid 90s they liked to regurgitate the notion created by foreign media that they would one day constitute a movement of some kind, literary, artistic and glorious, fancying themselves post-Communist Hemmingways and Joyces and Steins.
I suppose it was to be expected in a way, Westerners flooding in, held back and out precisely for their decadence, their unseemly wealth, insatiable greed. The Americans held a disproportionate majority of these temporary immigrants as though the word had been disseminated solely through college radio, some 20,000 estimated at one point with such heavy media coverage that you were almost guaranteed back then, if you stayed a few months, to be interviewed by someone for something but always with the same particular angle, conjuring up Paris of the 20s and 30s.
It was only a joke if you took it seriously and by the time we’d arrived, this crowd had eventually, like a shifting tide, begun to trickle away, replaced by a newer corps even more intent on quantity over substance. Yet you could still find these morons, lording over some collective of misanthropes with misguided senses of cool, all trying to out-hip each other as if it were they were doing the bump in unison.
This was the point, in large part, of staying in Zizkov. There weren’t many places you could actually escape the disease of these people gathering in what would otherwise be pristine pockets of Pragueness, the local pivnices still holding on to their blue collar perspectives and prices, unwilling or perhaps incapable of surrendering to the mass collection plate of consumerist tourism, the parasitic nature of all tourism in fact.
Jan Hus, a theologian and lector at the University, held his sermons in Prague. From 1402 he summoned his followers to the Bethlehem Chapel, speaking in Czech to enlarge as much as possible the diffusion of his ideas about the reformation of the church. Having become too dangerous for the political and religious establishment, Hus was burned in Constance in 1415. Four years later Prague experienced its first defenestration, when the people rebelled under the command of the Prague priest Jan Želivský and threw the city's counselors from the New Town Hall. Hus's death had spurred the so-called Hussite revolt. In 1420 peasant rebels, led by the famous general Jan Žižka, along with Hussite troops from Prague, defeated the Bohemian King Sigismund (Zikmund, son of Charles IV), in the Battle of Vítkov Mountain.
In the following two centuries Prague strengthened its role as a merchant city. Many noteworthy Gothic buildings were erected, including the Vladislav Hall in the Hradčany.
Albert had no interest in working, even though he’d watched me spend hours some afternoons with a Czech dictionary and the local newspaper’s want ads looking for housing and employment. He spent entire mornings undercover, snoring through breakfast and sometimes lunch even though I would be in the backyard outside the window of our dorm room practicing the saxophone against the walls of the building.
Boleslav The Cruel is notorious for the murder of his brother St. Wenceslaus, the result of which brought him to the Czech (ducal) throne. Wenceslaus was murdered during a feast, and precisely that time Boleslav's son was born. He got a strange name Strachkvas, what meant a dreadful feast. Being remorseful of what had happened, Boleslav promised to devote his son to religion and educate him as a clergyman, and kept his word.
We met Alois, a friend of a friend, outside a pub on Executioner’s Hill and apologies for the pub being shut, led us downhill through finally street after street, a look at the flat, actually a state subsidised flat rented by his girlfriend, Zorka, who was moving in with him to save money.
It’s an old building across from a small, triangular park right on the corner of a pronounced intersection and tram line. The elevator barely fits one so we walk the three flights of stairs, left at the hallway to the end, in the corner, Alois pushes open the door.
Immediately in front is a shower. To the right of the shower a three foot corridor which opened into the main room and to the left, just before the symbolic entranceway of the main room, the kitchenette. Just to the left of the front wall separating the kitchenette from the main room was a tinier corridor which led to a small cubby hole of a room, the size of a closet, really.
Being state subsidised, it was cheap anyway so we weren’t expecting much. There was a mattress set against one wall and behind it a small bookshelf whose half dozen Czech books Alois leaned down to peruse before picking up a copy of Post Office by Bukowski. I love Bukowski, he exclaimed in his very limited English as though suddenly breaking through the hush of our inability to communicate in much more than hand signals, Alois’ English being raw and our Czech being absolutely nil outside of learning the proper case declinations for the word beer as need be.
Bukowski’s great, man, I exclaim, suddenly buoyant, shocked at the discovery, amazed they’d heard of him, not realising the reach of Bukowski in the international subterranean world we were entering.
You like? He asked pointing around the room. Very good. We take. Our English began to mimic his unconsciously as though by speaking in broken English we might be better understood. Like people who talk louder when speaking English to a non Anglophile as if the louder the language is, the easier it is to understand, like talking to a dog.
To celebrate, although we had no idea that was the purpose when Alois led us from the apartment down the wide street to a pub table, we were compelled to get inebriated. The speed and subtle fury with which we drank through Clint Eastwood clenched teeth, the savagery with which we attack first the beers and then, as Alois became emboldened, calling the waiter over, going into a long monologue punctuated with laughter which could only have been asides to more serious business and then waiting expectantly as though the announcement of his first child were eminent, demonstrated to us the liquor and the glass – Becherovka, he taught patiently, draining it in a quick gulp and urging us to do the same.
There weren’t many in the restaurant yet and the few dwindlers carried on their own languages in whispering corners. One shot after another, chased with the beer which the waiter motored back and forth with a speedy predictability. A man was picking his teeth with his salad fork behind us. To the right, a pensioner couple were talking in hushed tones about the dog’s bowel movements and the speakers placed around the room in corners near the ceiling, purred some strange Bohemian folk music.
We were able to converse only by the limitations of the palm-sized Czech-English dictionary Albert carried with him every where. But what did it matter really? We weren’t saying anything important. Bonding like apes before language was invented, simply grunts and hand signals. I faded in and out of these communications, transported back again to Anastasia as though she were my homeland and the faintest whiff of home cooking sent me tumbling backwards down the stairs unable to break my fall.
We were in a café in Amsterdam. Café Hoppe in fact, the brown café I had come to frequent because the book seller across the road was particularly good and one of my favourite coffee shops was just around the corner. We were in Amsterdam for the day on the premise of scouting a few jazz clubs we would enquire about and perhaps line up a gig or two. Albert had stayed home nursing the last stages of a flu that had bedridden him for days.
We were sitting at an outside table as the scenery rolled past us like intricate waves peopled and dazzling with the enormity of anonymous humanity washing by. Anastasia had been recounting a morsel of her past – a recent past of course, I knew nothing about her, no story she told was older than a year as though she had only existed at once, out of nowhere, just beginning that evening in Paris when I’d first met her. But even still, it was a morsel, like a crumb from one of the biscuits they served with the koffie verkeert in the morning when just around the corner a baker was doing a bustling business.
The air was ripe with rain. Only that morning we’d been caught in a sudden downpour, soaked to the bone as we wandered through a museum and later snacked on apple pancakes washed down with black coffee. For hours it had cleared and now the clouds had returned, anxious to begin another hymnal of precipitation.
She was explaining one of the gigs that had gone wrong in Milan. The microphone had started feeding back inexplicably half way through her morose recalibration of Wild Is the Wind and the microphone started crackling briefly before the sound went out all together. She carried on with the song whilst the crowd murmured its distraction and Christ, she said, stirring her coffee absently, I felt as though I had just been fucked in some back alley and left lying in the road. What was I singing for? Nobody was paying attention? Those fucking people in Milan were all like that – transparent and shallow. Wonderful stylish clothes and ghouls lurking on the inside. They couldn’t wait to be distracted, time was wasting. Finally I stopped singing and walked off. A few cat calls followed. It was ok for them to ignore me but for me to ignore them, it was an insult. The manager tried to placate me but I was having none of it. I’ll never play in this shit hole again I remember screaming in French to the dumb Italian who was torn between the now-partisan crowd and me, the diva singer who was packing up her things to leave.
I aware of it, you know, she said coyly. I know how difficult I can be to work with. I’ve got to have everything just right and if there’s so much as a hair out of place on the trumpeter, I simply can’t stay focused. But this club had already had a week of me and a week of problems. Lighting was terrible, the air was damp and smelled like an auld whore with all those fancy women in their fashionable clothes. I felt like I was suffocating up there every night. Do you know what that’s like? Of course you don’t. You and Albert just play, you don’t give a shit. The walls could fall down around you like a poorly constructed theatre set and you probably wouldn’t even notice. Too damned drunk half the time, aren’t you?
Well anyway, that was it for the club. I told my manager I was through with Milan in general. I gave him an earful of the treachery that city had displayed throughout its history. And all the while he would pat my arm and my shoulder as though I were some mangy dog shivering in the cold. I wanted to punch him or scratch his face, leave him with a mark his jealous wife would ask about later that evening when he came home and stripped his sweaty clothes off of his garlic-laced body.
She lit another cigarette then, even though there was still the old one burning and then she stood up. Even thinking about it now brings back the anger. I really hated that place Witold. It’s so much nicer here. The people aren’t such….barbarians.
She took off for the bathroom, powder her nose or stare at her reflection in the mirror, whatever it was women did when they used the bathroom as an escape route. And whilst she was gone I sat there sipping my little glass of Amstel, looking over at the chair she had just been sitting in. I started imagining a day when she would be gone again and I would be seated like this on another sort of day like this in this very same café remembering just this precise moment with the empty chair but Anastasia still here, gone for only a few moments rather than months, sure to return from the bathroom composed again, apologising for worthless emotions and asking that we both have a glass or two of whiskey because she loves so much the peaty taste so and then we’d be taking off on another rollercoaster, drinking and talking until we were both obliterated, obligated to maintaining the high, bouncing from venue to venue as though the motion were the only thing holding us up.
But Alois and Albert were still there at the table, fumbling through conversation. We had our flat again. We had a home. Something for Anastasia to come back to, if she ever decided to come back again.
As for Albert, the nights were hell on him in a way. We were both out doing the business; mixing, drinking, floundering to grasp what people were saying and doing, prodigious and copious amounts of beer consuming led on by locals who only encouraged us with their own habits. Albert took it more to heart, particularly the Absinthe.
The name of this comes from the Greek, Dragan patiently informed us one night out after suddenly ordering a round of it with our beers. Dragan was a Croat who had moved to the hostel to help with the remodelling of the upper floors of the building the hostel was located in with the idea that the upper floors would also be converted into more dorms, more beds, more people. Imagine what those fat old, pinch-faced communist legged ladies thought of this as they snooped and scoffed, sniffed and snorted their displeasure at backpacking hedonists taking over their building, shouting and puking in the hallways on each floor at all hours, every night, year after year. The chokehold of Communism receded only to be replaced by an invasion of loud, boorish drunks who were there solely for the purpose of drinking and sleeping and fucking.
Dragan had been a graduate student in Shakespeare studies in Zagreb and for money, had come to Prague where a small cell of fellow Croats had established this hostel leaving him to ponder sonnets and plays whilst he hammered nails on dreary afternoons. He was sophisticated in a dark, knowing manner. The world around him was just history. He had seen it all in the making, he had loved and hated it. The worst moments were always just around the corner and no amount of brilliant literature or hours of classical music in little beer gardens were going to make those memories go away. Only the Absinthe.
Absinthe comes from from the word absinthion, which my understanding is means undrinkable in Greek, he continued, lighting a Start cigarette and gulping down a mouthful of Mestan . The French used to use it in Algeria in the 1830s to combat malaria.
The shots were lined up in front of us as his preamble continued.
Thereafter, Parisians took to it, moving from one café to the next during Green Hour, stinking of Absinthe. Wine became too expensive because of vineyard destructions created by some sort of insect and thus, the working class stopped drinking wine and moved on to Absinthe, far cheaper industrial alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec was rumoured to have carried a hollow walking stick filled with a draught of it, sometimes adding shit to it like bitters, or wine, or champagne. But here we shall take it in a pure shot, without the boorish traditional burning sugar and spoon – just shots for men, straight down. He raised his thimble like glass of green liquid and urged it down with Albert and I following in dreadful pursuit.
And that night was a hoax, a deep mystery we were buried under. Nothing was recollectable. Dragan took us down all sorts of memory lanes, the ugliest stretches he could remember until even his own words, slurring and weighted, began to lose all meaning and thereafter it was all a blank save for the horrible waking the following afternoon, heads pounded, stomachs acidic and vomiting.
Thereafter, Albert was hooked on it as well, going off the rails several nights claiming it held hallucinogenic properties. He would sometimes sneak a few shots of it down quickly before practicing. My bass is my lover, he would proclaim reluctantly yet proudly. I am a bear and my bass is a bear and we live in this cave of a life, blablabla. Imagine trying to get rehearsals in with the bear and the bass bellowing in the cave of life. It wasn’t easy.
Problem is, Albert is a big man and when he begins to lose equilibrium he is like a tranquilised elephant, capable of crashing down on his side at any moment, regardless of what he crashes down upon. Two coffee tables broken in two that way. No matter how much he drank, Absinthe was the only thing that made him visibly intoxicated. I suppose I was right there along with him, I dunno, it’s hard to remember, ha.
Afternoons reading until the urge to crawl out and begin the night’s gradual unravelling until by early morning, leaning on his bass when the beer grew too heavy, and plucking out notes from his subconscious as the night sputtered to conclusion.
*****
And, as I’d hoped, the distraction of moving, the diversion of a new language, new culture, different people all conspired to rid me of the listlessness of emotion, which were catacombed and awaiting unearthing. Anastasia was in the background for far too many moments.
The flavour was bittersweet. She was there like a vague toothache that at times would throb and remind you of the potential pain and then in an instant gone again – there was too much stimuli around, too much of the culture’s aroma in every room, around every corner. And thus, there could be times when all was forgotten. There could be times when she could have passed through me and I’d not have noticed, committed to forgetting as though the effort itself weren’t a reminder.
On Sundays the little literary gatherings where everyone smugly played their roles as ex-pat geniuses. Albert and I sat in the back, drinking overpriced bottles of Budvar, chain smoking, wondering where all the talent went. Albert was affected by Anastasia’s disappearance almost as much as I was although his heart wasn’t as committed in the rubber room – her singing in Holland had given us instant credibility and without her we were out there, a desultory duet of double bass and tenor sax, insolubly brief, irreconcilably flat and uninspired as though all the confidence we’d gained initially had been punched out of us and there we were, bloodied and crawling in the streets again waiting for another break.
Anastasia had committed to memory all of what we had pandered to, effortlessly. Our confidence was shipwrecked and this remote island in an inaccessible city painted and stripped and painted again each night.
Maybe we should try and find another singer, Albert suggested one dreary afternoon where we’d spent unsociable hours pouring beers down in search of inspiration. Instead, it rained as we sat beneath a canopy and slurped, observant of the shapes passing before us.
What would be the point? We’re not going to find another Anastasia. I hated these sessions of pointless speculation that we so often rounded to on afternoons like this.
Well, I hate to be crass, but you’re not going to find another Anastasia. You’ve got something weird and clichéd invested in it. Infatuation, lost love, longing. I’m only yearning for another singer. It’s much easier. Perhaps if we did so you might find it distracting.
I keep up my writing campaign knowing how well it had worked from Utrecht. Afternoons after work, evading the ticket checkers from tram to tram until I’d made it back to the neighbourhood and slid easily into a chair at a boozy table at the far end of a bar room where the smoke and smut of blue collar fates had collected like a grime on the walls of buildings. The beer would arrive, the piece of paper scored and I would open a Czech study book and another, smaller notebook used to pen these waking thoughts of affairs from far away.
They weren’t devotional letters in word, the act of course bordered on zealotry, but I was careful to couch perceived emotions in innocuous terms as though I were writing to her about two people I knew, lovers I’d seen and deciphered and calculated. These bar rooms were safe. Populated by entirely male faces, there were no couples, no hand holding, no stolen moments of intimacy. And if an auld man would saunter over to my table with a beer in his hand curious about my pecking away in the notebook with a variety of pens, I would add the smudges of our stilted conversation between the lines which I constructed to depict Prague as anything but what it was; debaucherous, homely juxtapositions of insanity and mirage.
The only piece I didn’t hold back on was the truth that it wasn’t only I who wanted her back but Albert as well. We were struggling without her on stage. She knew of course, the legitimacy her vocals lent to our performances. We almost seemed competent once and now we were plucking away at an internal illness we couldn’t define. Colicky moments of inspiration were infrequent. We were lost. We needed her singing to charm as though we were performing in front of a crowd of cobras.
The truth was, we weren’t doing too badly. We’d enlisted a variety of musicians, one night to another, from a range of instruments, to come and play with us, add depth and perspective, round out our sound, however illegitimate it sounded in our ears.
But I didn’t let on in these letters to her. It was a struggle. We were eating crumbs when we weren’t pillaging our brains with beer and circular conversations in a language we didn’t understand. Come back to us and we can really stun this city. But Albert and I alone were bicycle mimes, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere.
And then perhaps like someone rubbing a magic charm over and over every day in the hopes something would come of it with these letters, eventually there was a scrap.
A postcard from Budapest. I am here for a two week tour, was all she wrote.
To me, a clear invitation and I didn’t bother waiting to contemplate it any further. I’d just gotten back from work and Albert was just warming up to a mid afternoon rant about wars and diseases and divine punishment and trying to drag me back around the corner for a few quick pints before we headed out for the night. He was pretending the postcard didn’t exist on the one hand, careful not to become too overanxious about the possibilities and twisting with curiosity on the other hand, wondering if this might be the beginning all over again.
I’ve no idea when the next train for Budapest is, I announced as I quickly threw what few clean clothes I had into a sack and busied myself with trying to calm down. In a matter of minutes I was packed and heading out the door. Good luck, Albert mumbled, waving half heartedly as though he didn’t expect to see me back.
The excitement was short-lived. The last train had departed two hours previous and the next one wasn’t until 7:30 the next morning. I returned to the flat, distraughtly calculating the postmark and a two week tour – how long into had she been when she’d finally decided to write? Where in Budapest would I find her with nary a clue?
*****
It was no simple jaunt, a 7 hour train ride to Budapest that saw me, heart gulping air almost entirely oblivious to the sanctity of arriving in a new city. I didn’t know how much time I had and I didn’t know where I was to begin looking for her. But it had to be fairly simple. Jazz club gigs couldn’t be too a plenty, I reasoned. The only question was finding where they were and who was playing.
The problem is, Anastasia had an odd tendency to sing under different names, depending on her mood. I knew this because she’d mentioned it off handedly one afternoon when we were rowing along the Oude Gracht. She was sat with her arms around her knees, looking up at me as though from an imagined world. Do you know how many different stage names I have, she asked. Of course not. I grunted and shrugged, rowing. Ten? She rolled her eyes and tried to catch a ray of sun that had suddenly showed itself from behind a cloud. Three. Depending on my mood. Do you think that’s how many moods I have, three? I shrugged again. I’ve seen at least five I smirked. But I’m expecting if it’s only three, the categories are rather broad.
They are. Up, down and indifferent.
And what are the names then? I started rowing faster, thinking we were nearing the Ledig Erf and how much I wanted to grab an indoor table before all the cyclists started showing up in their Lycra biking outfits. I could almost taste the wheat beer on my lips and see the chess board between us.
I’ll tell you one, she demurred. See if you can figure out which mood it represents. She closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head as though transforming herself, or preparing to transform herself. I thought how odd it might be if she spontaneously combusted and what I would do to put out the fire before the row boat went up like an aquatic box of kindling and I’d be forced into the canal, treading water and trying to gather up all her ashes.
Flavia Arbessi, she whispered, leaning forward as my body bent and pulled with the motion of the oars. I stopped rowing and the boat continued skimming along the surface with the momentum of my sweat. We drifted like that for a few moments silent as the sun slid back behind the stage above us and I attempted calculating the hidden symbolisms.
Flavia. Well let’s see, I debated. Isn’t the origin of the name Latin, for yellow? A blonde? More fun? Couldn’t be a down name. Yellow, blonde is too optimistic a colour isn’t it? On the other hand, perhaps you’re trying to establish a sense of irony with that stage name. Flavia in a depressive, suicidal mood…
She splashed water at me from the side of the boat. Why not indifferent, she demanded. We were just coming around the bend and I steered the boat towards the bank in preparation for unloading to the Ledig Erf. Because indifference would be symbolised by some sort of unisex name like Francis or Robin or something. I grabbed at the mooring and stood up out of the boat, holding out my hand to pull her up.
Well, I’d never use Francis or Robin for a stage name.
Why not? Robin, singing like a bird? Like little Edith Piaf?
Her nickname was the sparrow, not the robin.
Ok, I’ll guess Flavia is for your up mood then.
I pulled her onto the bank and then yanked the boat up behind her. So what’s the answer? She smiled sweetly, watching an approaching barge distractedly. I can’t say really. I’ll leave it for you to figure out some afternoon when you’re all by yourself and have nothing better to think about…
I didn’t have so much as guidebook to Budapest, knew nothing of the language, had no map and no idea where to begin. Looks like it’ll have to be the auld standby, I amused myself in thinking. The alcoholic’s tour guide, hitting the locals and trying to milk as much information as possible while watering my imagination with Hungarian beer. I didn’t even know what Hungarian beer tasted like. So many bridges to cross.
By evening I’d accumulated a map and the names and address of five different jazz clubs. I’d spent most of the late afternoon wandering around through crowds; picking out faces and noting each one of them was not her. Not surprising. What are the odds after all, to find a familiar face among the hidden random in a city of Hapsburgan bloodlines? For the purposes of distraction, I stepped into a wine bar marked by the dilapidated characters gathered inside.
There was an auld and fat peasant woman standing behind a table holding three different buckets of wine with ladles in them. I merely pointed and she filled up a plastic cup. Around me pensioners were smoking and playing cards. A few gypsy kids hung out by the lone arcade game, begging cigarettes from stragglers and entertaining themselves by imagining making millions in gun running. I drank a watery white wine, smoking distractedly, ignoring the fact I hadn’t bothered trying to find a place to sleep that night. I would put all my eggs in one basket. I would find Anastasia and stay with her. As long as it took.
But there was no Anastasia. I found that out after enquiries at three different jazz and blues clubs that ranged from seedy to opulent. She played here last night, the bartender in the third club informed me as he poured a German lager for me. Unbelievable voice. Haunting. She was here for nearly two weeks but I’m afraid you’ve missed her. Last night was the finale.
Of course the bartender had no idea where she was headed next. Do you know her, he asked suspiciously. A groupie, I explained half-heartedly, stung by the nearness of my miss for fuck’s sake. If I’d only caught yesterday afternoon’s train here, the story would have had a happy ending. Do you know where she was staying, I asked, grasping at straws. He shrugged. No idea, mate. But she sure had a lovely voice.
Back in the flat in Prague I returned empty-handed. Albert regarded me from behind a book with the walls vibrating with a Brahms concerto when I dragged myself home the following afternoon. What did you expect, really, he surmised. What is this, some movie you’re writing the ending to? C’mon. It was rather ingenious of her, wasn’t it? Close enough to smell but too far away to touch. How bittersweet for you.
What difference does it make? If she’s out on gigs that means she’s already doing well enough. Do you really imagine she’s going to come rushing back here breathlessly urging us for the chance to play together again as a trio?
What fucking difference indeed. Only my heart on a skewer. Heart kebab. Care for a taste? Marinated in futility, lightly salted and deep fried in false hope. We really should find another singer, Albert ventured hopefully. And where would we find a singer comparable to her? Are we just going to stumble upon someone as though the streets are lined with them?
We played a gig of our own a week later. My heart wasn’t in it. We’d both had far too much to drink before we’d gone on stage and if we’d been electric, they’d have pulled the plug. Instead, we were ignored. What’s worse than being ignored? Being forgotten? The conversations in the crowd only grew louder, hoping to drown us out.
We really should learn a few standards, Albert remarked one evening after we’d been drinking beer outside all afternoon listening to Coltrane from a small garden next door to us.
Standards?! Why so by comparison everyone will know how bad we are? I think we’re best sticking with being too bizarre to decipher. It’s our only strength.
One afternoon we ran into Pavel again. We hadn’t seen him since our first afternoon in Prague and we greeted him as though we’d grown up as neighbours and hadn’t seen each other since the erection of the Berlin wall. He was taken aback by our disproportionate enthusiasm. We were out of ideas.
I told you we could get together for a recital one afternoon, didn’t I, he reminisced as we bought another beer for him. That’s where all our bated breath was blowing towards, in fact. Anything different. He was game for it. I’ll invite Frantisek and Jiri and yes, we’ll all assemble in my flat like the auld days. Perhaps some Chopin to begin, then Thelonius then I dunno, perhaps some Stan Getz, what do you think?
But the afternoon never materialised. As we were to find out later, Jiri had died many years ago and Frantisek had immigrated to Paris a decade before. They were still in his head as though they were there, delusional. We came to an empty flat. No piano, no furniture. Just old newspapers and a cat keeping him company. Have a seat, he greeted enthusiastic and grateful, pushing the newspapers around as thought they were antique furniture pieces. He made us some tea and we sat quietly listening to the ticking of the clock. None of us mentioned the lack of the piano that had been promised. Albert stewed, still sweating from lugging the double bass all the way from our flat. No old musician friends.
It’s typical, he spat later on after we’d left and were back riding the tram, Albert crowded the midsection of the tram with his double bass, commuters staring at us angrily. It’s typical that every avenue we turn down, the despair gets wider. You think it’s a coincidence that Pavel as he described himself doesn’t exist? Ephemeral, like our music.
So we decided to forget gigs for awhile and concentrate on rehearsing instead.
I hadn’t left her behind in Paris and certainly not in Utrecht – there was no escaping. Prague was the diversion. My liberation from heartsickness drowned in nightly debauchery. No excuse, we know but at least I had one. Albert’s was more complex yet like a fur ball waiting to be hacked out. For me, it was Anastasia, haunting based on mere weeks of experience, yet haunting as bitterly and painfully as though she had been there all my life.
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 1732
...there was a lasting odour of doubt for months thereafter. Albert's despondent drinking blossomed for days at a time before wilting into empty political rhetoric and finally, asleep, snoring on the sofa, the burnt-out tip of his Winston still clenched between his index and middle finger. It rained for two weeks straight. A cold, gusty rain that turned the middle of October into an aura of bleak autumn dying into its winter that kept even the Shot Out Eye out of walking distance for several days in a row. Then we'd hire Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub for a fill. Jiri, the acne scarred teen who lived above the corner pub and often hung out in front of the Europa Hotel trying to convince tourists into guided literary tours of the old town. When we needed something, we'd stick our heads out the window and yell down at the corner. Since most of the time, Jiri was standing in front of the Europa Hotel smoking, practicing German from a Prague Guide phrase book Auf Deutsch.
We'd already read all the few paperbacks we had in the room twice. The cassettes and CDs had been played raw. Albert had the stand up bass and I had the horn and once in a while, when we'd had just the right balance of beer, cigarettes and instant coffee we cooked using only hot water from the tap, we’d improvise. There was a high-headedness, a mystical dizziness, a general gnawing of boredom like a bone ground within our teeth, a perpetual gloom punctuated by the open window and the hail hitting against the whipping drapes. It wasn't necessary to have been in Prague. A prison anywhere would have suited just the same. We'd outspent our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living on nubs. Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to roll. We had enough left over for several litres of beer, a kilo of sausage, two cups of tepid instant coffee and 11 cigarettes apiece each day for the rest of the month but nothing else. Albert was still decompressing from 12 years of intense television vision and the fact that the only source of entertainment in English he could get was listening to BBC, which he hated and ranted and raved about to no end some evenings, only served to raise the tensions, as though the 11 cigarette per diem didn't create enough tension as it was.
On Sundays we went to the neighbourhood theatre, a large garage-sized building down a winding driveway from a main apartment house with dirt floors and folding chairs run by a wide bodied and hard boiled old fat lady who grabbed at our crowns without preamble more than a grunt without looking up, nodding her head behind her in the general direction of the film. There were never more than three or four people inside. It felt like going to a state fair peep show, creepy and oily. The movie was always terrible. It was as painful as going to church and so in our roundabout way, we were paying our dues along with religious humanity, suffering along with the rest of them in solidarity but skipping masses and séances wherever they arose.
In many ways, it was the lack of events that made it most difficult. We lived like dogs, waiting for hours in anticipation of a ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked sausage with the same jar of horseradish. Then, just as abruptly the pleasure had begun it ended and the wave of euphoria receded and it was still raining and it was only two in the afternoon and there were only 3 cigarettes left. When it wasn't raining, I went out, no matter what time it was. I walked from one end to the other, fast and fogged with the anticipation of reaching the end, turning around and going back, outrunning the trams, looking into the windows with the old women staring back down at me. Fear of cultures clashing, the monuments against the sledgehammers, the pain against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighbourhood, while I didn't even know the nature of myself, the unpredictable actions were unnerving. There was no oasis and no abyss and the movement was meant to keep one afloat in between the two.
*****
One night I was finally able to convince Miroslav to allow us to open for a blues band scheduled to play the following Saturday evening. Most of the regulars in the Shot Out Eye had heard us play and were still confused enough about our talents that they hadn't formed a solid opinion against us yet. The illusion was still working and so long as Miroslav felt assured that our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing to let us try and entertain.
It seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when he opened. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus and we rode down as soon as we woke up.
You know you're not due to play until 10:00 o'clock tonight, don't you? he asked, still groggy, vaguely annoyed. Albert, with his arm around the bass case as though it were a drunken comrade, pushed past Miroslav and dragged the case behind him. I've been in that fucking apartment for eleven days straight. I need a shot of slivovice and a beer as soon as humanly possible.
While we drank beers at a leisurely yet steady pace, we played a best out of five chess tournament against each other. As people began filtering in, we used a clock and played one round after another of speed chess too fast to think, our hands a blur, our eyes, disinterestedly staring into thoughts only the robotic movements of our hands could decipher. The music was already louder than normal. It felt like a Mexican peyote séance with painted faces and dancing in between beers, hopping from foot to foot on the way to the bathrooms, trying not to spill the beer in the hand.
By six o'clock, we were already too impatient to play our normal route of slow and off key, the anti-jazz we wanted to portray it as, too hip and out of place to be anything but they might cautiously consider genius while at the same time weighing the distinct possibility that we had no idea what we were doing. The usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopaedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, had to be shortened considerably given the language barrier. So we had to play more music and talk less, leaving us with considerably fewer options at our disposal. There were the three set pieces we'd learned in Holland. We knew snatches of more traditional standards, snatches we would blend in all together haphazardly, like a tribute to musical sound bytes without any cohesion. But it was stunning. No one knew what we were saying, not even ourselves. I sang Berlitz lines from six different phrase books. I sang obscure American curses, commercial jingles, lines of Edgar Allen Poe. Whatever came into my head with the same organization of watching shit blow across a street on a windy day. Lyrical flotsam. Musical jetsam. By the end of the set, it was clear we'd fooled them. Miroslav slapped us on the back and handed us another shot of slovovice.
I'm relieved my friends. You didn't spoil the party. You didn't drive them away. We've witness a musical miracle! He laughed loudly and bitterly but it was all a show. He liked the sound of it. A musical miracle in the Shot Out Eye. The jazz vagabonds stuck in Prague, unable to extract themselves from a hedonistic scrum, had shown a modicum of worth for the first time in its two month existence. We weren't malingerers and leeches after all, not another pocket of touristic resistance to squelch. Now he wanted us to meet some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a beer, signalling to the waiter for another round. Now we'd never fucking leave.
*****
A few weeks later I'd finally scored a job at the American Business School teaching remedial English to a bunch of Serbian economics majors. This school was the spawn of the new independence of the Czech Republic, driven mad by the market to create English-speaking managers and automaton employees for multinational companies hungry for new human flesh in the new world be ushered in and I was delighted to play a part in wrecking those fertile little minds of future imperialists.
Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the Praha Holesovice train station café next to the school with Marshall, the American who ran the school's library, a patchwork collection of donated textbooks from military bases, socialist non fiction, and a smattering of Updike and detective novels that reflected his own taste's more than the students'.
The train station café served a watery goulash and bottles of Gambrinus and as Marshall would foment rebellions in his mind about library autonomy, unrealistic funding aspirations and snatches of his life as a Berkeley liberal who migrated once and for all out of the slobbering jaws of American capitalism only to find himself faced up against it again in even more sullied and contemptible forms.
A series of budget crisis had left the school in tatters, desperate for teachers of any walk and housed in a converted barn that reeked of cabbage all day long. The caretaker and his wife living on the ground floor and the stench of her gastrointestinal meals that made the thought of food unbearable.
During breaks, I would go outside with the students and smoke cigarettes. For the most part, I was ignored. I didn't like them very much myself and I think they sensed that. There was something about their aura of third world privilege that turned my stomach. They'd come here to find their peasants to look down at. There were plenty where they'd come from, but it must have gotten boring, mistreating the same servants over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at. But I was an anomaly. I wasn't one of them and I didn't step in from the scenery. I'd come from another planet. They didn't know what to make of it. I sensed that if I'd cursed more, if I thrown Yankee slang around in confusion parables about lust and capitalism, they might have warmed up to me a little but it was impossible. Each class was an endurance test. All I could think about was getting out, sneaking back on the tram, and riding around town reading my copy of one of the library's crappy novels for the third time. The other teachers were even worse than the students. They ran the spectrum from podgy, collegial buffoons from England to psychodramatic liberal arts graduates from large metropolitan areas in America. Everybody qualified to teach it seemed. What were my qualifications after all? A few forged documents Xeroxed at a local printers? I could have been a mass murderer on the lam for all they knew. It really didn't matter. As long as the students didn't complain about you, you were fine and as long as you let the students waste their time in whatever way they say fit while giving them the illusion of teaching them something meaningful they could manipulate in the future, they were satisfied.
But there were weird memories of Praha Holesovice station. Getting there was a dream with the names of stations recited mechanically in that sexy, Tolstoy cold female voice as we swept through on the yellow B line towards Northeast Prague: Křižíkova to Invalidovna to Palmovka and then Českomoravská, and at every stop, the pre-recorded chime would go off and then she would speak:
Unkonèit prosim, vystup a nastup, dvere se zaviraji., followed then by Pristi stanice – and then whatever station was next. I would tremble with delight at each word, wondering who this mysterious woman was, if she was an embittered ex-Communist living in a panelak flat somewhere in Zličín, chain smoking filter less Start cigarettes, staring out a rainy window, deep in thought about the wonder years.
After a ten minute walk, across Vrbenského, ending through a strange tunnel which ran underneath the tracks, I would arrive through the portal of Praha Holesovice into a dank corridor which housed the kiosk where the workman would gather in their ragged, blue jumpsuits stained an invisible brown matching the colour of the soot around them, chatting about the night before, some sipping acrid Turkish coffee and some others getting an early start on bottles of Gambrinus or Budvar, all smoking their filterless numbs fighting off the cold, the memory of a day that had already filtered through their subconscious in repetition.
I would order a coffee, find a metal chair and open up a small notebook, scribbling incoherent lines, hunched over like a cripple, pen in one hand, page held down with the other, small plastic cup of coffee steaming in front of me, dreaming lucidly of Anastasia as though she were sitting there across from me, wilting in the deep stench of the train station, patiently waiting for my return.
*****
When we weren’t mired in our own reckless hedonism, stretched out on the floor or sofa too exhausted to move, when we weren’t out drinking ourselves numb and acting like animals, we were actually able to find our pieces of peace during day long periods doing nothing.
Of course even nothing ended up being something. We lacked the creature comforts; the internet, cable television, books or female companionship thus we lived in a time warp of sorts. You can well imagine it shouldn’t be difficult for the average person to get through the day without drinking, but take away their sacred cable television, take away the children to distract and annoy them, take away hobbies to simultaneously dull and amuse their senses, take away the youthful indulgences of going on the prowl in search of mating partners and there really wasn’t a hell of a lot left.
I tried in earnest to kill time more quickly. I don’t even know why, really. Why did I want to kill time? I was in the prime of my life so to speak, expatriated and out in a thrilling city, musically untalented but still able to cobble together enough gigs to maintain a semblance of respectability, reasonably secure in a professorial sort of sense at the Anglo American College, and most of all, most daunting and destabilising – free. There is nothing worse than free time and I had too much of it. Oh sure, some swear they can use more of it, tons more of it – how can someone say they have too much free time? But it was true. Because free time was wasted on me. Idle time was just another excuse to wallow in misery. That’s how it is when you’re all knotted up in unquenchable infatuation waiting for those few moments in between all those hours and months when on an off-hand chance you just might run into Anastasia again. That was me.
Albert had no answer for me. He wasn’t infatuated. He often appeared to have no feelings at all. Fuck it and Who Cares, were his two pet phrases. You could throw the world of worries on his shoulders and he’d shrug it off and let it fall to the ground, fall to eternity. He was no Sisyphus. You’d never catch him pushing a rock up a mountain over and over again. He’d have never bothered. He’d light a Winston and look around for the nearest beer.
Take his beers and Winstons away from him however and I daresay you’d have a different person altogether.
Why would I want to go without smoking and drinking, he asked incredulously when I brought the subject up one day of what he’d do without them. Let’s just say, I said. Let’s just say they weren’t available, for whatever reason or other and you had to go without for a few weeks. What would you do then?
He shrugged, exhaling a long thin bluish stream of smoke as Lester Young’s Sometimes I’m Happy, a live recording, was blasting in the background to the dismay of the upstairs neighbour who occasionally pounded his floor, our ceiling with disgruntled futility. I’d go without drinking and smoking, he said simply. I mean after all, if it isn’t around, it isn’t around. I’d find another diversion. Take up knitting or play cards or go for a jog around the block.
Ha! You go for a jog? You’d collapse of a heart attack after the first half block!
He shrugged again. Then my problem of no cigarettes and no beer would be over.
*****
The other night I headed out to make my way for the Sunday evening open mic night at a different gathering. It was a poetry reading but consisting primarily of local Czechs, few if any of the dreaded expatriate blood spilling silly lines about drunken nights swimming in the Vlatava or some secret romance with a Czech girl in short skirts of questionable legal age. I had spent the afternoon reading an essay written by Havel for the underground cultural journal Jednou nohu wherein he describes people under the Communist regime as “nervous, anxious, irritated, or else they are apathetic.”
This was, he described, the stress of people living under the constant threat of Communism, people dealing with absurdity and nothingness brought on by totalitarianism.
And yet where was anyone different at any moment now? The foreigners were still the relaxed crowd, those unharried by the thought of waiting for someone to turn you in for an overheard conversation or an act of sabotage – the Czechs were eased in some quarters but the reality is that it is a hard yolk to shrug off, those years of history that never really officially existed. And how did that go on to explain my own certainly stressed-out face, my own preoccupation, not with a totalitarian regime, far from it, but the regime in my mind, the mind rotten without stories, simply filled with obsessions, destroying any semblance of peace waiting for the next postcard or another to pass without one.
That night before the reading I stopped off in a blue collar bar, a run down place populated by Gypsies and Slovakians living in Prague for the higher wages. They were all dirt and grunge, instruments of trade. I knocked back a few beers and surveyed the scene around me: filthy alcoholics miserable for another crown, drinking away the little pay they’d earned, those dream destinations of saving for home sewn into their livers like embroidered histories of failure.
It isn’t at all unusual to find a foreigner furloughed out to Prague who speaks barely any Czech. But I was unusual for the locale simply because tourists didn’t stray into pits like this, they remained the denizen of forgotten dark and dirty souls squelching tiny peeps of forgiveness as they drank away not their sorrows but the memories of the sorrows which ironically only led back up the same path back to the sorrows again. Some of them spoke broken English. Some of them spoke enough to ask me to buy them a beer knowing as they would immediately that I wasn’t one of them. But I wanted to protest that I was and couldn’t. Yes, my soul was ragged, yes, my stomach filled with drink, yes, misery and fatigue were also my companions but the difference that no time or place could overcome was that I was there by choice. It was no courage to summon up a few tales of infatuation hitting sour notes. It meant nothing to piss and moan my salary was barely enough to scratch out a living. I was there by choice, they by a destiny far deeper than mine. After all, what the hell would I be crying about, playing at the destitution of others, standing there pretending my heart sick was equal to their life sick that I had a chance and threw it out whilst they could only stand and watch, chanceless all along.
I bought beers for everyone to make up for it. Guilt, yes. I destroy myself for fun and what would these characters have given for half the chance to throw away? I held court via broken conversations of gibberish, half-English, half-Czech, with a little Dutch and German tossed in like kindling to a bonfire.
Gradually I was drawn in by Antonín, a man with a wife and two kids lost somewhere in the paradigm of time in a village called Vlkolinec where his father’s house had been burned down by Nazis in 1944. So he said. Why would he lie? And what was he doing here? Labour. Hard labour, dirty labour, honest labour for dishonest pay tossed away into the coffers of parasitical bar owners preying on the suffering of others. The pure misery of loneliness. I suppose that’s what attracted me to him, the filthy fingernails, unwashed hair, haphazard, cheap and dirty clothing and above all the eyes of misery, clouding from time to time with tears recounting how much he missed his family, how much he missed his village, how much he hated Prague, the slave chasing a dream he was drinking away even as he spoke.
Why should I feel sorry? For example, you come here to make a living, send the money home to the family and eventually, as the dream goes, return home a wealthier man or at least wait it out until another factory reopens. He hates the Czechs yet wanted his own country. Thus the split between the Czechs and the Slovaks. The haves and the have nots. And imagine the irony. Here is your freedom without even the consideration of making it a revolutionary struggle. Here you go, you Slovaks. Have your freedom and we’ll own the factories anyway, those that don’t get closed down and you’ll be stuck, thumbing your way to Prague looking for work, crying in your beer about the family you’ve lost never thinking for a moment that by overcoming misery you might find your future.
More disgusting still, where was my misery to match his? Missing parents who had the foresight at least to leave me a flat and enough money for rent to allow me to piss away an existence and drop out of school, lounge my afternoons in libraries pretending I wasn’t bourgeois, pretending my indifference was cool? What did I have to compare, as I matched him beer for beer in a hallucinogenic blur? An infatuation gone sour? What could I possibly offer by comparison as an excuse to piss it all away? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing and so I drank all the faster and bought him a beer along each time to match me. Goddamnit. One of us was going to be miserable and both of us were going to be happy. Several hours later we were standing in each other’s arms singing songs neither of us could remember, generations apart, lifetimes away, just two disgusting drunks consoling each other on the way to finding our own particular paths through the misery, real or imagined, actual or artificial.
Somehow I struggled to leave and make it to the reading. I was already quite late and when I entered, in the middle of a fragmented paean to the banning of Romanies from bathing in the local reservoir of a neighboring village, everyone looked up from their false reveries as I loudly requested another beer and slumped in the seat in the back. Why was I even here? This cultural yen for discovering the undiscoverable? Who were these poseurs anyway? Were they more valid in another language? Weren’t they all struggling with the same tiny yarn they pulled and pulled at obsessively seeking answers they had no questions for or else pretending they were pulling at the same tiny yarn that like me, might make them feel as though they were really suffering, really and truly suffering rather than standing up there in front of a bunch of put-ons waiting to give their little golf-claps of appreciation in the hopes that someone would recognize their genius, their suffering their uniqueness.
When there was an interim, some snotty intellectual with a robust opinion of himself meandered toward me in a non aggressive way and asked me politely why I was there, reeking of beer and cigarettes with nothing to say save for audible titters of ridicule dispensed like cheap critiques in slanderous sidebars.
I’m here to hear your suffering chirping out of your orifices, I mentioned casually, lighting another cigarette. This was followed by an uncomfortable grimace on this fellow’s face as though I had just loudly farted. I mean really, I stated, standing up, gaining steam. What is this charade; I demanded waving my arm in the direction of everyone and unintentionally slapping him on the side of the head. Then it all erupted. People jumped from their seats to squelch the vagabond I imagined myself having morphed into when in reality they all saw me for what I was: a drunk and cheap tourist taking advantage, killing their excuses, giving them reason to pity or disdain. A human goiter waiting to erupt. They all took turns grabbing at me, shoving me roughly over and over again until I reached the door and they shoved one last time, dumping me onto the sidewalk.
******
Holešice Jazz festival, cahier 1, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski October-November
Mikhail was a little droopy eyed as he stared at me over the chess board. We were hunkered down in the smoke clouds inside U Vystrelenyho oka, racing through .51 glasses of Mestan beer that kept coming and coming interrupted only on occasion by a shot of Absinthe. Mirek and Miroslav, from Uz Jsme Doma, were trying to interrupt our already wobbly match by shouting about Kafka and black humor over and over again in different accents. Uz Jsme Doma, I'd already been assured, had formed in 1985 in defiance of the Communist regime when they played music that was considered antisocial by the government, and for more than four years they performed in the Czech underground. Mikhail, on the other hand, was a jazz guitarist who worked in a music store part time and played around town with a variety of people who adhered to him and then fell away. Only the month before, we'd tried a quintet that failed miserably. Mikhail was really the only studied musician of the bunch. That's why he played around so often. Attracted hacks left and right then shedding them like a winter cold.
Mikhail kept staring at the chess board as if the longer he stared the longer the possibility would exist that the pieces might somehow rearrange themselves to his advantage. His crewcut drenched with the sweat of nausea. HIs face was mangled by a vague vertigo. He was no Zbynek Hrácek, for sure. I was up two pawns, a rook and a bishop. Mate, under the influence of less Mestan, would have probably been less than three moves away. My brain was lost, veering off the fox chase and running for the hills and I'd be lucky if mate was discovered at all. Mikhail pushed his finger out at his pieces and knocked the king over. Are you quitting? I demand about the speculative king down resignation. He looks at me deeper with those droopy eyes and shrugs. There is nothing for me here. he comments, finishing off his glass and standing up. Why don't you come with me to the HolešiceJazz festival? I am already playing and maybe there will be time for you on an alternative stage somewhere... He raises his eyebrows. somewhere where they won't notice you He whispers clandestinely.
**********
A few days later Mikhail, Albert and I are sitting on cold benches with a few bottles of beer at a suburban bus depot waiting for a ride to Holešice. A few old ladies and a school teacher going home for the weekend are waiting with us. The isolation is deafening. So did you hear more about our performance? Albert grumbles, lighting a no filter Start cigarette, coughing, red-faced and veins popping up in his forehead and looks expectantly at Mikhail. Absolutely! he nearly shouts, relieved to have a topic of good news to break the soul dragging silence hanging over us. The old ladies and the school teacher look over at us, accessing the level of our intoxication or insanity. I've spoken with Jiri about it and he is convinced we can promote you as some sort of expatriot avant garde jazz duo of blinding importance. He likes your new name, Stalin's Mother, it sounds more interesting than Deadbeat Conspiracy. He thinks it will draw people at least through the duration of a beer, no matter how horrible you sound. Mikhail says this matter-of-factly as though our ineptitude is so understood that even we should be convinced of it.
Well, it's a relief that I didn't lug this fucking bass with me for nothing Albert growled, giving the 6'5 tall bass carrier beside him an unfriendly jostle. He'd pissed and moaned about it ever since he woke up that morning. This is going to be one heavy fucking thing to drag around with me all weekend. he began while the coffee was brewing. Jesus christ, this thing is heavy! he exclaimed when we'd gotten on to the street and were headed for the tram. Getting it onto the train at rush hour brought even more frustrated fury, angry stares, bitching and complaining and cursing in languages no one was going to bother to try and understand. His only consolation was the kiosk where he bought several large bottles of beer. What a nightmare he sighed finally, gratefully gulping his first mouthful.
************
We got into Holešice as the sun was setting. The first matter of order of course, was to stop at the first pub we found, instruments and all, and kill some time with the locals. Mikhail, as this was his village after all, knew a lot if not most of the people ambling in for their typical Friday night-return-to-the-village-by-train beers before heading back off to their respective homes for dinner.
And as they came in Mikhail would call them over, introducing us as a puzzling jazz duo, a once in a lifetime chance to see jazz taken to its furthest, perhaps strangest parameters. We were in short, musical geniuses. People would nod appreciatively looking at us and our instruments, looking us up and down as though they wanted to touch us, these two masses of American flesh with the strange talents. Touch us to see not if we were real but to see if some of this magical aura of American might rub off on them for better or worse. We were after all, far from the raucous path of Prague overflowing like backed up toilets with expatriates and tourists. We were in this village, a novelty.
But we felt more like circus freaks inevitably. Come, look at the foreigners who will play at our little weekend festival, perform for us like circus bears. It was unnerving enough that Albert was making noises about wanting to go to Mikhail’s place, unload his gear and wash up from the ride in. After an hour or two of this benevolent but eccentric treatment Mikhail, perhaps sensing Albert’s uncharacteristic reluctance at drinking a seemingly incessant supply of beer, finally stood and announced without further preamble that the bill had been sorted and we would now go back to his house where his wife Elena, who had spent the better part of the afternoon brushing up on her English and preparing a vast array of rustic specialty Czech cuisine, would regale our palates and offer desultory conversation.
Upon arrival we met and greeted Elena, a stocky blonde of German/Bohemian origin naturally curious to discover this suddenly revealed spouse we’d never, in all our nights of chess and drinking together, heard mention of previously. It was strange to observe this vaguely domesticated version of Mikhail, who along the uphill march to his house, with a profusely sweating and swearing Albert slowing our march with his bass, had filled us in on the logistics of his past, revealing one breathless layer after another: the marriage and child at 20, the death of the child three years later under circumstances Mikhail did well to steer clear of, the marriage, hanging by a thread over remorse and unspoken accusations until Mikhail had taken the decision, spurred on by the news of a flat of a friend which had become available in Prague when the friend had moved in with his girlfriend, to move to Prague and then the subsequent job he’d found in the music shop, the stepping stone he’d hoped for a career in Prague as either a studio musician or leading a blues band. The subsequent years of drinking and playing music whilst the distance between himself and Elena, supplemented by once-monthly visits back home, narrowed and slowly their original love regained a second, tougher skin and whilst they were not considering living together on a full time basis, they had at least repaired, strand by strand, the initial emotions that had once brought them together in the first place.
It’s not been an easy several years, Mikhail intoned philosophically and reluctantly having let us in to his present by bringing us up to speed on his past as we stood on the crest of the hill overlooking the lights of the village below and smoking reflectively waiting as Albert trudged upward to reach us, huffing and puffing and cursing again our lack of transportation. But I think we’ve overcome the most difficult period we have been presented with and perhaps in a way these experiences have strengthened our relationship.
I looked at his face, imprecisely lit by the cherry of his cigarette, wondering at how different or rather how much more depth people have beneath their surfaces when they chose to let you peer down into the caverns of their histories and reveal to you their pasts, their losses and their fears. I got the impression he’d been withholding this information from us all these months not because he hadn’t trusted us but because matters of this nature were simply not relevant to our encounters and that now, having invited us there was really no way around it. Sure, he could have just revealed he was married and left it at that – perhaps we’d have wondered about the lack of children or why they lived in two different places, but these questions would have remained unanswered had he not taken the opportunity to reveal them voluntarily because it is certain we wouldn’t have thought to ask about them ourselves.
For that matter, all the years Albert and I had known each other had revealed very little about Albert’s past. Perhaps I wasn’t curious enough and had I bothered trying to reach beyond the stoic present I might have found within him as well, troubled pasts from roads beyond which led him to his current personality. We all were in fact, hiding from things or hiding things, information - not intentionally mind you, but all for the same reasons. Unless there was a reason to bring up pain it was better having left it unsaid in the first place. Perhaps that’s what friends are supposed to be for rather than simply revelling in the present but even for myself, the past wasn’t an issue that came up in the mind very often unless prompted. The present was all there was and the past had grown more distant, more obscure, perhaps even less believable as time moved on.
And now as we entered his home there was little we might have discerned about the past from the present. Elena greeted us with a kiss on each cheek, smiling radiantly with anticipation as our noses were filled with the unfamiliar scents of domesticity coming home; Tchaikovsky in the background, meats and dumplings bubbling in spices filling the air around us. Mikhail took us to the room Albert and I were to share, unspoken that this was once the room of the son who had not made it, the empty bunk beds in the corner a morbid reminder of what could have been. After showing off his collection of electric guitars, a Gibson in three of the four corners of the room and a framed Zappa poster from the Freak Out album with The Mothers of Invention, he left us to ourselves awhile, to clean up and unwind as he caught up with his wife and sorted out the evening’s plans.
This whole thing creeps me out, Albert confessed sotto voce as he leaned his bass against the bare wall, his cigarette-choked breath coming in gasps from the exertion and slowly found consolation on the lower bunk, his long legs stretching out over the edge of the bed. I didn’t say anything. Grunting non committally as I took the time to roll a cigarette and digest not just the journey and the history revealed but allowing a certain sudden angst of performing to swim over me.
First in that bar with all those people coming up to us like we were either lepers or gods and then all this business about Mikhail’s wife, the dead kid and shit, look at this, I’m probably lying on his bed. He didn’t move from the mattress in any event, rubbing his eyes and continued muttering, more to himself than to me.
It isn’t such a big deal, I exhaled, looking for an ashtray before realising I probably wouldn’t find one in the room of a dead child. I opened the window and ashed in the garden below. Besides, I’m starving and that food smelled like heaven.
No, it’s not a big deal, Witold. I’m just creeped out thinking about all that family planning going awry and sleeping in the bunk of a dead kid I never knew existed. Not to mention the triathlon of hiking up the fucking hill to this house, carrying that bass and trying to smoke all at the same time. Is it just me or does it feel to you like this weekend is going to be a disaster? I mean this festival is going to be packed with talented musicians and who are we? Two vagabonds with no talent trying to assimilate? What if we’re booed off stage?
I laughed to myself. What’s this emanating from the mouth of the great stoic, a smidgeon of pre show jitters? A dash of apprehension? Don’t go getting all human and sticky with emotions on me, Albert. It’s just a festival. Everyone will be drunk. We’ve played in festivals before. We won’t be booed off stage. The ghost of Mikhail’s child is not going to come haunting you tonight. This is supposed to be fun. We’re going to meet a lot of people, play music, listen to even better music, drink a lot of beer and just outside that door there’s a rustic Czech feast awaiting us. The way I see it, we’re doing just fine.
Albert grunted, hitting his head on the upper bunk as he moved to sit up, cursing and rubbing his head whilst reflexively reaching for his pack of Winstons, tapping out a cigarette and popping it between his lips. He got up gingerly, like an auld man in a nursing home and stood up finally to his full height, lighting his cigarette and joining me by the window. Yeah, I know Witold, I know. It’s no crisis. Just a passing fancy. You know, like once in awhile I want to know what it’s like to feel the illusion of being human. He laughed to himself which induced a brief coughing spasm, spat out a back throat full of bile and put his pork pie hat back atop his head. Then again, such visits are necessarily brief.
The meal was as good as advertised through the nostrils. By the time we’d entered the kitchen Mikhail was already sipping a beer and quickly poured out two large bottles into steins for us to join him. Elena proudly informed us we were about to engage in a typical Czech meal which, after months of a diet consisting primarily of fried cheese with chips from the Shot Out Eye, crunchy street stand sausages and black bread hunks, had our mouths watering before we’d even settled over our plates. First came the tangy meat broth flavoured with garlic followed by a sirloin of beef, which she explained as she filled our plates, was mixed with fried, cut vegetables with the sirloin interlarded with bacon, seasoned with pepper, a bay leaf, thyme, vinegar and a cranberry compote then baked before adding the fresh cream. She served this with dumplings and when it was all over, a combination of fresh berries and apple tart with powdered sugar.
Whilst eating we discussed our rationales for being in the Czech Republic in the first place, how we were finding life in Prague, what life in New York City had been like, and a further wide array of discourse on blues and literature wherein it was revealed by Elena that in addition to working as a physiotherapist, she had also been compiling a translation of Tom Waits lyrics into Czech which she had yet to complete but had already found a publisher for. Although you could sense the anticipation in the air it was not until we were sated and sat around the table in the kitchen puffing cigarettes and sipping her grandfather’s plum brandy with our belts loosened that she allowed herself the luxury of explaining her desire to go through particularly difficult passages of Tom Waits lyrics which she couldn’t possibly fathom a translation for.
Nor could we for that matter. Some phrases were simply untranslatable and even attempting to explain their meaning in English was virtually unthinkable. Imagine explaining the following, for example:
kick me up mt. baldy
throw me out in the fog
tear a hole in the jack pot
drive a stake through his heart
do a 100 on the grapevine
do a jump on the start
hang on st. christopher now don't let me go.
Oh sure, we could explain the context of St Christopher but even that she herself knew. Those little eyeball kick phrases however were simply too much. To counter, I suggested perhaps as difficult as making sense of some of Dylan Thomas’ more elusive phrasings. We felt guilty of course. Perhaps this was the entirety of our worth, an ability to transpose the incoherence of scattershot lyrics into a more palatable English but we were incapable and the plum brandy made it no easier.
All night long on the broken glass
livin in a medicine chest
mediteromanian hotel back
sprawled across a roll top desk
the monkey rode the blade on an
overhead fan
they paint the donkey blue if you pay
Eventually sensing the effort of milking information out of us was more trouble than it was worth, through a secret sign of understanding between even an estranged husband and wife, Mikhail announced that as soon as we finished our glasses we would go out for the evening to meet some of his friends, his fellow musicians, a cacophony of locals in a village suddenly flush with musicians from all over the region.
We trudged along the dark road back into town following Mikhail and Elena blindly relying upon their expertise to guide us through what we supposed would be yet another sullying night of debauchery. Since the meal, Albert had become much more animated as though his brain and mouth had taken that much longer to catch up with the arrival of his body and the inspiration of the food had been the facilitator. Or perhaps it was solely because the walk back to the village was all downhill, it was hard to say but I wasn’t going to interrupt it with questions.
The owner of the pub we went to was a giant of a man who went by the name of Karel. And I mean, literally a giant. He must have been nearly seven feet tall and easily weighed well over 300 pounds. The pub had been his grandfather’s, passed to his father, neither of whom stood over six feet five but Karel had continued to grow and once he’d decided to continue the family line of pub ownership he had the roof removed and the ceiling raised higher to facilitate movement. Otherwise, he stammered in broken English, I’d keep hitting my head and the bumps were growing too big. So as we entered to the right following introductions where Karel had saved us a long, thick wooden table and several of Mikhail’s mates were already supping their pilsners, we could appreciate the rationale behind the height of the ceiling, the addition of the second fire place to add extra heat to the room. In older times the ceilings were necessarily lower both because people were generally shorter five or ten generations before but also because the low ceilings allowed the rooms to heat more quickly and easily as there was less space to heat. Of course another advantage to the higher ceilings was that the room would be less smoky and considering the fastidiousness with which the patrons were chain smoking, this was a good thing indeed.
Pavel, Miroslav and Tomas were waiting along with their girlfriends and/or wives who sat gamely in expectation of meeting the new foreigners and to reunite with Mikhail and Elena who, she had confessed on the way down to the village, rarely went out save for the nights when Mikhail returned. Most of them spoke a smattering of English and when required, Mikhail and Elena could be counted upon to relay enquiries and comments from one language to another but in any event, Albert and I spent large amounts of time just taking the scene in of this homespun beer hall and the chaos of clattering beer mugs, waiters running back and forth adding and subtracting glasses, foreign laughter punctuated by loud expressions we couldn’t decipher and the smell of burning wood and burning tobacco hanging in the air.
As the night wore on it was decided, perhaps silently or perhaps simply in a language Albert and I didn't understand, that then women were all going to head back to their respective homes whilst the men were to continue on through the evening. We were going to a club where several of the festival musicians would be gathering to meet and greet and get drunk with abandon once loosed from the strangle holds of feminine parameters on intoxication and moderation, to obliviate and obscure, wind up and down, spin and crash.
By then my mind was already a flip switch remote control, reality and illusion. The beers had gone on holiday to the head, the others, I dunno, I didn't know, I was aware of the others but aware vaguely so. There were too many carnival attractions in the imagination, too much effort in walking without stumbling, taking in the darkness without any adjustment of the eyes.
And before I knew it we were entering a club, the club; a heaving scene of music and people planted and re-earthed from emerging villages, Slovakian and Bohemian cities, heaven and earth, clouds and graves and instead of settling in slowly taking in the madness, instead of flowing along with the river of new entrants through the front door, rather than holding hands with those that brought me there so as not to end up a simple toast of human flotsam, I made a beeline for a table filled with a mixture of young but grizzled men and leggy, laughter flowing women who radiated, vibrated, seemed itchy for my company.
Certainly this was an optical illusion, a trick of the mind, a boring requiem of the drunken ego singing louder than the internal accoustics would allow but this did not matter in this auto-focused intoxication mind, not infused as it was with the hyperventilation of the new, the congo of the coming festival banging in the mind, the kaleidoscope of unfamiliar faces plump and waiting to be picked from the bough.
Without realising, for that one out of body minute I had finally allowed myself to become disentangled from my near constant preoccupation with Anastasia and figuring perhaps that I owed nothing, I was in essence, free to explore. After all, exploring, as Albert often preached, meant exploring the native women as much as the native beer and perhaps there was particular girl who’d caught my eye but in any case, I’d broken off from the group, oblivious to where they were headed and made myself comfortable at the lone empty chair at this table where sat a particularly stunning brunette whose eye I’d caught and predictably, filled with drink, enflamed by a mixture of excitement and ego, swaying with anticipation, I immediately and perhaps stupidly decided to try out the smattering of Czech I’d learned to try and impress her.
Naturally she had no idea what I was talking about. I suppose I didn’t either. Something about the weather is fine, I’ll have another beer would you care to join me, or perhaps something that sounded far more vulgar, I’ve no idea. Suffice it to say that whatever it was, the manner in which I was addressing her immediately set off alarms in the wolf of the pack who wasted no time in leaping across the table, knocking beer mugs to the floor and grabbing me around the throat, his momentum carrying us both to the floor. I tried to bite at his arms, get a hold of a piece of flesh to ward off the sudden attack and wriggling beneath him I howled curses of incomprehension loudly in English, phrases I’d never uttered myself before but had heard many times on the streets of home.
I could feel my air being cut off regardless of how I struggled or perhaps more so because I did as the grip this guy had around my throat only tightened. And then just as suddenly as this attack had begun, my attacker was pulled off of me from above and it wasn’t until he was fully in the air that his grip around my neck finally loosened and was released and with incomprehension, I looked up to see Karel holding the attacker up by the throat and the attacker babbling apologies as Karel growled in Czech things I had no idea of. I slowly stood to my feet with the assistance of Mikhail and Albert whilst the attacker’s apologies moved from Czech to Karel to English to me.
I had no idea you were American, he effused. I thought you were some drunk trying to break into our table, a threat to us….let me buy you a beer, I’m sorry I attacked you, you must understand…
Relieved to no longer being choked, I shrugged, glancing out of the corner of my eye to the girl who had for a second anyway, been the object of my attention and slapped him lightly on the arm. No problem, I said calmly, cracking my neck with a sudden movement of my head from left to right. I’m sorry for interrupting the table like that without an introduction.
I don’t know what Karel had said to him but perhaps it was merely the shock of being hoisted up by the neck by the village’s infamous giant that calmed him, in any event, we all settled back to our tables and when I went back a half an hour or so later to buy my round, my attacker arrived at my side whilst I stood waiting at the bar, apologising again. He too was a musician, he confided. He would also be playing at this festival and he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea, see. He’d thought I was just some leering drunk causing trouble, you know how they are. I shrugged. You probably weren’t too far off the mark anyway, I confessed. In any event, let’s drink to the brotherhood of musicians. And the rest of the evening when our paths crossed we’d make our mutual apologies, confer about music, exchange favourite songs and generally attempt to remove whatever lingering memories of ugliness.
The following morning, how we got back, I dunno. I recall going back to Karel’s pub before dawn and having a few more beers before falling asleep with my head on the table and had no recollection whatsoever of Mikhail and Albert having to drag me back up the hill to the house, their laughter ringing in my dulled background ears at the attack on the American musician, sure to make all the local papers and fill the town with gossip for the weekend.
And I heard all about the following day as well after we’d had a little coffee, showered and headed back into town to the concert hall. Everyone who passed us seem to know me, waving a greeting or making a joke much to my chagrin. So it goes in a small village filled with strangers where news travels fast. Apparently nearly every performing musician had been in that club last night and every one of them had seen what had happened.
Nonetheless the excitement was tangible as we entered the empty hall with our instruments joining those already on stage, those performing in the early sets were already beginning to tune up, performing sound checks, sipping beer or coffee randomly.
*****
I thought I’d surprise you, she said nonchalantly with a smirk of expectation twisting at the corners of her mouth and what she was wearing, I have no idea – I could only stare at her face with incomprehension, a dream materialised before my eyes. I wasn’t sure how to introduce her to every body. My girlfriend, my muse, this chick I know? Hey everybody, I said clearing my throat to get their attention but also to attempt to mask the quaver in my simultaneously uncertain yet tentatively ecstatic voice which had appeared without warning like a stutter. This is Anastasia.
It’s funny, you think about someone so often and with such yearning that sometimes it’s difficult to conjure up an image of them. Sometimes it takes a moment of not thinking about them to remember their face, for example, not confuse them with someone else. I can’t tell you how often and how longingly I’d thought about her because it would be both boring and encyclopaedic to consider in full depth, but unlike the first time she appeared unannounced in Utrecht, I didn’t accept this arrival without question and unflinchingly. There were too many unanswered questions like what had happened to her in Utrecht that went beyond that stupid letter, how she’d discovered that I’d be in this little village on this weekend, how she’d gotten here and most importantly, why she was here to begin with.
But these questions were to go unanswered for the moment. I can’t say that I didn’t care, I most certainly did, but there are questions you sometimes don’t necessarily want to know the answers to and rather than spoil the surprise of her appearance immediately I preferred to push those questions to the back of my mind and accept her as instinctively I’d know she wanted to me to accept her – without question, without precondition and without asking for more, which is precisely how I played it. As I carried on talking, listening to her escapades in Torino, Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna, to name a few, I tried to imagine a selfless self that could simply wallow in her being here – to be grateful. She wanted to be treated as a crowd would treat her - appreciative for her appearance, mesmerised by her presence, tangled in her web. She preferred to be loved rather than possessed, I could see that plainly for the first time and the stage was the safest place from where to do it. I tried to imagine that if this was going to be the only time I would see her then I wanted it to be a memorable rather than a desperate or confused experience. Notwithstanding the notion that the last thing she’d come all this way and come to all this trouble for would be to listen to a puny man with his puerile notions of possession react in a vain and disdainful fashion instead of simple appreciation.
I wanted desperately to grab at her and caress her simultaneously and yet I felt oddly torn between loyalty and fear in addition to the uncertainty of how I should treat her, not just when we were alone but more importantly, in this public venue. And these thoughts allowed me to consider further the full implications of why she had chosen to appear when she had, here in a public place, a safe place where I wouldn’t intend on mauling her with my selfish, hungry hands or with my probing accusative questions.
I was swaying slightly both from the beer and excitement. I couldn’t very well leave the venue with our appearance due up in a short matter of time. Yes, there would be time later on to discuss things privately but for the moment, neither of us could go anywhere. So, are you here to play with us again, then? I finally managed to ask with a teasing smile but also with a hint of hope. I could tell those around us had been absorbing the entire expressionless encounter as though they’d known as much about us as Albert did and yet as impossible as it was, they too sensed something magical about this appearance. Not just the nature of surprise but the air of expectation.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Why don’t I have a glass of wine while I consider she asked, snuggling unexpectedly into my arms and smiling at the others. It’s been a long journey, she explained.
And so we finally had a few private moments over drink, clearing a table for ourselves in the front of the hall where others were hungrily wolfing down goulash and dumplings, slurping their beers and either revelling in the previous performance or talking excitedly about the one to follow.
In answer to how I knew you were here, I’d actually intended on surprising you in Prague. You see I’m on my way to a performance in Krakow, or I was at any rate. I’d taken the train from Paris and believe me, there wasn’t going to be a lot of time to prepare but once I was on the train I knew there was no way I could forgive myself if I didn’t stop in to see you. So I went to that place you mention being in so much, figuring you were more likely to be there than your own flat. I made a few enquiries about you two and it was then I found out that you would be here at this festival. This morning I woke up and decided to come, even though it’s out of my way and yes, even though it meant cancelling, much to the anger of my manager, the show which was scheduled for this evening. I still have to leave first thing for a show tomorrow night but I thought at least we’d have a little time together. I’ve missed you terribly Witold. I try to make it to Paris once a week just so I can go back to my flat and find all your letters waiting there and as soon as I pick them up, I get back on the train and go wherever the next performance is scheduled for with those letters bundled up to keep me comfort in all those days and nights in between. I’ve dreamt so often of being with you again that I can hardly believe it myself. Why else would I go to this much trouble to see you even knowing you are going to be preoccupied with the festival to properly relax in my arms and tell me more of all those wonderful things you write about in your letters.
But…if you miss me as much as you say, and not that I’m doubting it, Christ knows how often I’ve dreamt of hearing you tell me these exact things, still I can’t help but wonder, knowing as you do how willing I would be to drop everything and follow you, why you don’t just allow me to follow you on tour? That way we could see each other all the time. That way…
She held up her right hand, touching my wrist gently with her left. I could tell you a lot of stories, Witold. I could make up excuses, the strain it would put on me for my performances, the difficulty of the logistics, and yes, I would like nothing better than to have you at my beck and call, but the truth is, I’m far too afraid to allow you to accompany me. Afraid of what? You name it. Afraid of getting hurt, afraid of hurting you, afraid of disappointment, afraid of losing this incredible feeling I have reading your letters, knowing that every day you are somewhere out there thinking of me, dreaming of me. Do you have any idea what a comfort that is to me?
But why would you prefer it to the actual thing?
Quite simply because nothing, no one, not at the moment anyway, could live up to what you’ve created. I certainly am not the person you’ve imagined me to be, god knows, no one is really. I don’t want to discourage such infatuation but there are truths about me that might ruin your illusion of me and to be honest, I’d be crushed to find out that your illusion of me has been shattered. You see, it’s your dream of me that allows me to consider that I might just be worthy of such a dream. It’s what has allowed me to enjoy myself all these months in between. The knowledge that someone out there anyway thinks of me in the way you write about me, in a way no one has ever treated or considered me before. It isn’t your heart or my heart I’m afraid of breaking. It is that dream, yours and the one that yours allows me to hold on to. A tiny sliver of sanity.
Not that I need a definitive answer to this today, or even this month or any time in the near future but just to satisfy my curiosity, do you ever envision a time when you would allow yourself to reveal those things about yourself to me that you think would destroy the purity of my thoughts of you or has this illusion carried me as far as I’m ever going to be able to travel with it?
She smiled crookedly and took a sip of wine, her eyes never leaving mine. Her hand touched mine again. I’m glad you don’t ask that as a definitive question because if it were, I’m afraid I would have to tell you that it has carried you as far as it can but neither of us really wants to believe it and so why should we concern ourselves with killing it off before we’ve ever given it a chance? Are you in that much of a hurry to get on with your life? You see, this vagabond life you and your friend are living seems to fit so perfectly with my own. Had you been a young man on a career path looking for a wife to settle down and have kids with, had you been a man who knew what he wanted and wanted to take it without waiting, had you been childish and demanding, I’d have viewed you as an entirely different entity. But you aren’t. Time appears to be something you have plenty of and I would only ask, perhaps beg of you your patience, your recognition that you do in fact have plenty of time to allow this relationship to find its appropriate path rather than pushing it along ahead of schedule out of necessity or impatience. Can we agree on that for both our sakes? Patience?
I felt myself swelling with emotion – love, infatuation, illusion whatever it was I might choose to call it – I felt my hands quivering with joy and requited expectation. This was no ending, just a beginning. And yes, a strange beginning to be sure, but clearly a beginning and a promise. I squeezed her tiny hand as hard as I dared and kissed each knuckle on that hand gently, feeling that joy in every one sending us both quivering. Of course we can agree that, Anastasia. I will wait for you for as long as it takes.
Her face eased. She held her stare a moment longer before searching out my pack of tobacco and began rolling herself a cigarette. In that case, she said smiling, looking down and then looking back up at me and smiling again, I’d be happy to sing with you two today.
*****
Oh shit, I wanted to get up and dance and sing and hug and kiss every single face around me. I was losing my mind with rapture. Without little further preamble, I took her by the hand and we walked back out into the hall to the table Albert, Mikhail and the rest were sitting watching the performance. We sat down in the space created by several sliding over, hunched over the table in conference with Albert and began discussing the songs we would perform.
*****
A woman falls in love with her heart first, she told me, lighting a cigarette and sliding back in her seat further. Her head catches up with her heart eventually and then she is fully in love. But when she falls out of love, the opposite happens. Her head tells her first and then it is followed swiftly by the heart. One of women’s many mysterious and here I’ve deciphered it for you simply. The truth is, and I know this is going to sound much worse than it really is, yes, you are right. I have been sleeping with my manager. I have been, more precisely, my manager’s mistress. This manager discovered me, deflowered me and promised me the moon if only I would keep sleeping with him and you know, even though I didn’t really believe him, I slept with him anyway because I thought why not take a chance? Sure, he’ll probably forget any one of the hundred promises he made along the way and I’d end up feeling used and with nothing but a night or two of lousy sex but if I didn’t take the chance at least well…
In any case, he actually followed through with his promise. You know I thought all along, foolishly, that because he was married with children he was safe in a way. It would be a business sort of relationship with feckless sex thrown in as part of the deal. But he followed through with his promise not because he’d promised it but because he’d fallen in love with me. And each week he’d have new gigs for me, new excuses to follow me on the road, this is why, you see, that I couldn’t have you coming along on these tours with me – if you had that’d have been the end of it all. I had to carry on the illusion that he was the only one in my life, even if it made no sense logically, simply because he wanted to believe it himself. And then when I met you, this casual arrangement became more of an entanglement. It was almost as though he could sense my heart was in it even less than it had been before. I purposely wrote those postcards with not enough time for you to catch up to me not because I wanted to torture you but because I couldn’t allow you to arrive while I was still there, otherwise the gig would have been up. The manager would have know what he suspected all along, that I was in love with someone else and certainly in a fit of jealousy he would have cancelled all the rest of the performances. But I still wanted you to know I was thinking about you. I wanted you to know it desperately and yet I knew I couldn’t tell you the truth any more than I could tell him the truth. Do you see what a position I was trapped in? He was livid when I’d phoned him from Prague telling him I’d had to get off the train because I was feeling so poorly and had to take a day or two off. He was insane with jealousy. He wanted to come down on the first train and accompany me the rest of the way.
But…if you were good enough to perform in all of these places with him why couldn’t you have just gotten these gigs without him?
Ask yourself, Witold, where I was before I met him. Singing night after night after in the same beat up old places, getting older, going nowhere. I can’t kid myself. I’m not motivated just like that. I have a lot of insecurities about my singing, no matter what people tell me about my voice I can never bring myself to believe them. I simply don’t have the confidence to go out and seek my own venues and not enough motivation to seek out a proper agent or a proper manager. This one you see, just sort of fell into my lap so to speak. I know it’s a cliché to say that I only kept it from you because I didn’t want to hurt you but that in part, was the reason why. Sure, it was selfish on my part as well but I hadn’t planned on meeting you, had I? And I certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love with you.
Falling in love with me, I hissed with incomprehension. You fall in love with me to go on tour fucking someone else? Is that how people fall in love these days?
Unfortunately, that’s how adults fall in love when they’re already with someone else. Someone is always getting hurt in love, let’s not pretend that isn’t the case. It’s just a matter of who gets hurt first.
Billie Holiday- Ill be seeing you.
**********************************************************************************
The dictum from Nietszche goes along the lines of what doe not kill me makes me stronger. Under that premise, I've been growing stronger every day of my life since, to date, nothing has killed me yet. On the other hand, there have been plenty of moments when, placed in situations which seemed to at least hint at death, no strength was gained at all. The event would barely register, other than in the cosmic realm of possible outcomes, where one death resulted somewhere else for your having escaped.
There are times when the dying seems to be a gradually progressive motion as you could, if the mood fit, allow yourself a prolonged battle against the armies of depression. Those are the times when being alone feels the same as being around people because the people are just objects you cling to keep away the dread and panic and little to nothing of what they are saying is registering with you.
When Albert finally demurred, when he'd had enough, grown ill from the constant drinking and home sickness, it took him only a few moments upon reaching that realization, to decide he was going back. At first, I was secretly elated. After all, Albert had become like a sore that wouldn't heal. When he wasn't complaining, he was sleeping and when he wasn't sleeping, he was drinking, which, of course, led to the bitching and then to the sleeping. Traveling with him had become such an endeavor that we'd been rooted in Prague for several months solely in order to avoid relocating, uprooting, starting all over again. It was an easy city to lose track of time in. Hours became weeks and as one month passed into the next, it felt as though we'd only been awake for a few days at a time.
Without having made a conscious decision about it, I realized that even as Albert was planning his departure, I knew there wasn't going to be much left for me in Prague either. There wasn't going to be much of a future for The Deadbeat Conspiracy with just my beer coaster lyrics and lousy saxophone playing. So the question was, failing the excuse of touring around Europe playing music, what the hell was I going to be doing there?
Naturally, it was only a few days after Albert's departure that my descent into the daily dying began in earnest. It was only a matter of time before cash supplies dwindled and being stranded would be a fact of life instead of a romantic luxery. You can worry about money to no end when there is still a little left but once it begins dwindling down to nothing, the concerns seem to evaporate. What difference does it make? You are ready to surrender anyway. You are ready to sit motionless for days eating nothing, getting no visitors, falling asleep with every attempt to read or think.
Suppose… I spoke slowly, choosing my words with care, all of a sudden, just like that, and I snapped my fingers, we quit drinking? I can pour what's left of that little bottle down the drain and we can start from there. We make a resolution and stick to it, see, stay sober from now on, make a fresh start.
Albert stretched, stifling a yawn before placing the lip of the pint to his lips.
We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman Albert noted briefly, replacing the pint between his gnarled fingers with a cigarette.
Anastasia chimes, perhaps disgruntled: We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
I'm appalled: Why wont we sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt? Why wont we note the nocturnal vibrations of our wanderlust through drinks and despair?
*****
Different city, different street.
Otherwise, with half of my mortal coil still sitting in a bus depot in
Los Sueños begging spare change from vending machines, I'll applaud from
the distance.
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook four, page 113.
When you travel enough, spinning through a vortex of languages which have secretly imbedded their meanings in your subconscious there are times when you awake with a start in complete confusion about what it is you’re waking from.
I walk to a window overlooking a street viewed through a prism of rain, half-lit by street lamps, watching a man attempting to walk with a speedy nonchalance, newspaper folded over the top of his head, one arm up to hold the newspaper in place, the other swinging back and forth in desperate propulsion.
And only this morning I’d freed an insect of some sort from a spider’s web just under the bathroom sink wondering if I was doing the humane thing by rescuing it from it’s struggles and the slow, inevitable end to its existence or if I’d only been interfering like the spider’s little nosey neighbour, jobbing up the mechanisms of nature and the balance of the insect world.
I watched the man and his rain-spattered arm-swinging until he was gradually swallowed back up into the night further down the street.
Three days I’d been in this hotel in Bratislava on the mere rumour that Anastasia had been headed this way. And don’t think for a minute I didn’t have to hear an earful from Albert – the old, haven’t you learned your lesson yet speech he brought out every time one of her postcards arrived. She probably doesn’t even send them herself, he’d mused back in our grim and smoky flat on Husitská.
Certain enough, I wouldn’t find her sitting in this hotel room with its drab curtains and filthy carpets. Three days I’d been here already and having left only once since I’d arrived, gathering the strength to face her again, chain-smoking and staring at stains in the wallpaper, I had a good idea the courage was never going to come from anywhere other than a half dozen pints in the nearest pub. Then again, that wouldn’t have been courage, that’d have been drunken bravado, devil-may-care, feigned nonchalance as in oh, fancy running into you here in Bratislava, Anastasia.
There wasn’t any postcard. I dutifully informed Albert. The postcards came sporadically from different towns and cities, little clues and cryptic messages. At first, I’d drop everything and go looking for her, seized with some sudden and inexplicable desperation of knowing that if it wasn’t now, it wouldn’t ever be and how could I throw away that last chance without trying?
But the last chances never evolved, never materialised, never a trace of her. And a lot of these places were villages small enough that the locals would have immediately known who it was I was looking for if she’d been looking to be found or had in fact, been in the town at all to begin with. That’s why Albert had embraced his pet theory that it was all a colossal mind fuck of some kind, some sort of sadistic little game wherein she’d conspired with others, travellers perhaps who she knew would be going through that village or town who could write out these little postcards on her behalf, just to keep the game going.
It might have been a sound theory but for the fact that it was certainly her handwriting on those postcards and how does one after all, buy a tourist postcard from a village or town, write a message on it and post it all without ever having been there in the first place?
So that’s the way it had gone for the last six month, getting these postcards, rushing off to the village or town it came from, hanging around in public places, markets, squares, pubs, news agents, all in the vain hope of timing it just right. Maddening.
You get off the train with a burst of energy but after the first few hours turn up nothing the energy wears away and slowly it sinks in that the chance had been missed again. How could I be expected to stay one step ahead of her, to know instinctively where she would pop up next?
For a few weeks in August I thought I could detect a pattern in the postcards, or perhaps it was merely delusional, still, you have to try. Did the names of the villages and towns fall in alphabetical order, some geographic sequence, some cleverly disguised yet still breakable code? Not in any of the instances. One week it was Hungary, another it was Austria. The following month Slovenia, the month after that, Poland.
I was growing weary of the game, frustrated by my lack of success and then, when I’d overheard a conversation between two Czech Dixieland jazz musicians on the Charles Bridge talking about the little French girl with the beautiful voice having stopped by only a fortnight ago to sing with them, I crudely demanded to know what they were talking about.
After their initial huff at my intrusion they reluctantly shared a few tidbits with me about a little bird with a beautiful song in her voice stopping in for a few songs on her way to the train station for Bratislava.
Surely that couldn’t have been a plant. I never hung around the Charles Bridge any more, rarely even crossed it, so she’d not have left this clue for me here. No, it was certainly unintentional, coincidental, a twisting of fate I was meant to overhear and meant to act on.
But the moment I got off the train in Bratislava had come the crushing realisation that the situation was hopeless, the idea had been hare-brained. What if it hadn’t been her? Oh, certainly I grilled those two musicians on the Charles Bridge but good for details to try and ascertain with certainty that it was in fact her, but they didn’t know her name and who knew anyway, she might be using any name by then.
Even if it had been her, what was she doing in Prague at all anyway? And if she had been going to Bratislava in the first place, who’s to say she’d still be there at all. And if she was in Bratislava, where in the hell was I going to find her?
Nowhere, I thought to myself sitting on the edge of the creaking bed and rolling another cigarette. Not sat indoors never having left the hotel room paralysed by inertia or fear or the knowing futility of it all.
The only logical place to begin looking was music venues. Bars or cafes or pubs which had live music where she might be singing or might be looking for someone to sing with. A bird with a voice like hers had to sing, after all, craved the public attention, yearned for the recognition. It never should have been hard to begin with yet in all the little music venues he’d stormed into expectantly in all the little villages and towns, he had yet to overturn a single worm beneath the rock, had yet, not only to find her but to even find a trace of her having been there at all to begin with.
*************************************************************************************
SCENE AT THEIR MINOR CONCERT DESCRIBED BY AN INTERESTED ONLOOKER
No matter how thoughtful or inspired much of modern jazz is it is increasingly difficult to find musicians who don’t take themselves too seriously – the weight of history and the pressures of constant innovation fighting the fun at every step. One might do well to scan the horizon: the humor apparent in European jazz – Han Bennink tossing wooden kitchen spoons Misha Mengelberg’s way – has been well documented for some time, whether Americans have chosen to listen or not. No such fussy stuff here then, either, as Deadbeat Conspiracy a strange trio with meaty chops rips through a blistering set of high-octane, solo-intensive jazz; the muscular breadth of ideas matched only by the unadulterated exuberance of their execution. Anastasia X and crew have little truck with the spate of style wars currently fashionable, relying instead on the untested yet euphoric water of spontaneity. Often with a capital S.
Thankfully, then, it is with a certain audaciousness that Deadbeat Conspiracy comes out of the gate with fists raised, tempo topped out, tone tightened to an off-kilter acidity, and tongue-tying technical intricacies wrapped in the folds of every phrase. If not the most subtle approach, it is rare to find an opener with as much instant adrenaline delivery as Señor Dada, pistons pumping with sheer verbose force. In a sense, it is reminiscent of a bebop aesthetic in which flat-out fluency had to be proved first before one was given credence on a bandstand; in another very real sense, however, Anastasia X is a consummate enough singer to avoid the pitfalls such bop-based flurries inspired: the mindless, mile-a-minute mechanics of too many straight ahead discs on the market today If Witold comes out of a lineage anchored by Coltrane’s emotional urgency, it is motivated by the revolutions of Jackie McLean’s harmonic keening and tempered by the florid eloquence of Benny Carter’s supple resolutions. On the song Señor Dada,, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and most of all on Mussolini – the most startling virtuosic displays of the day – Witold is tethered around a pole of high tension, clearly inspired by his material and musical companions, playing the game of statement and substitution with such alacrity that the smile is nearly visible spreading across his breathless mouth.
Witold also acquits himself nicely, if less joyfully, on the slower numbers that add pacing to the show. Flanked by Anastasia X and Albert aan de Baas, Witold is able to surrender to a variety of moods, adding a much needed respite from the all-out assault launched during the disc’s most inspired moments.
Deadbeat Conspiracy of sympathetic soldiers is no exception to the club, offering challenging compositions attacked with a straightforward ingenuity, openness and outright joy. If not the most starling release of the year, it ranks among the most enjoyable, proof positive that stern-faced, bulky jazz music can snap to smiling, svelte shape in the hands of the right practitioner.
Wireless Mothers of Jesus
In other words, they only listen if
they've finished talking,
authoritative claptraps, saliva lips,
causing droopy eyes,
changing channels make believe
if they're
outside all day in cafes, sitting
sculpted into leather beneath
the sun, the old Madonnas
on cellphones, cellulite sweating
into the vast universe of important rules
they ignore in all their chatter.
and see something else to pinch himself awake again.
Anastasia was sick of road tours. I’ve been on the road for six months and only just arrived in Prague a few weeks ago. I just want to settle down for a few months, collect my wits, find some sense From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 1.3
The truth of the matter is, since we invested so little time in practicing, not wanting to ruin the momentum, the blossoming fraud of our performances, both on the stage, on the Charles Bridge, in alleyways, hiding from the local police, we had plenty of time to polish our drinking skills. In many ways, it was a test of wills for both of us. What joy we took in watching the waiters scurrying around with handfuls of beer glasses, four handles of four glasses in each hand like two fists of beer punching out towards us whenever our glasses began to take on the image of running low. And certainly we didn't care at all as he marked more little slashes across our scorecard that served as an indication of our bill. Everyone got these little slips of paper and you could always tell, by a glance at the slip of paper of another, just how far along they were in their journey to intoxication by noting how many little slashes they had scratched onto their slips of paper.
Everywhere we went, we drank until the pub closed. There were times, of course, when the pubs didn't close at all. The bartender would doze off sometime after four or five in the morning and we would still be seated, blathering away, drinking the beers, refilling them for ourselves when the need arose. How many Prague mornings we watched sailing over the top of the Vlatava River as we drank our beers, unconcerned, all but oblivious.
You might wonder what purpose it all served: we would have laughed long if you'd have asked us. Purpose? But then again, we might have settled down and told you that we were constantly embarking on an effort to forestall the future. Our days didn't operate like the majority of the people around us. We had nothing to do. No place in particular to go. We were working up a beery theory of the meaningless of time around us. We were burning hours like a pyro lights matches one after another, just for the sheer pleasure of it. We wouldn't be provoked by watches, by history, by futures. We were languishing in a sort of beer o'clock time frame in a hedonist city filled with well-meaning, yet futile drunks. The hand we were dealt. We weren't partaking in the pissing and moaning of life. We weren't comsumed with grocery lists, petty fears about dirty laundry, or wondering where our last meal went. Regardless of the question, the answer was always concise: beer.
The 24 Hour Party
There aren’t any alarm bells that go off when the body’s had enough. We could abuse ourselves five days and nights out of seven and a two day holiday of sofa camping, automotonic television, radio blaring simultaneously, stains accumulating, plates and pans piling up over the kitchen landscape like the blemishes of a skin rash on smooth skin, would be enough, ultimately, to recharge.
When enough’s enough, the signs are subtle yet persistent. The taste of tobacco goes bad and each consecutive roll up perpetuates, in a cycle interwoven of masochistic nihilism, the sense that each roll up is in and of itself a death sentence. It isn’t, of course. But the taste buds need a break. More salt and grease to scratch out the nicotine grime of the palate, like spraying twelve hour oven cleaner in your mouth and letting the foamy particles to do their work
And if it isn’t the tobacco, it’s the vague fatigue of the mind. Sluggish and feeling decades older within days is the way your thoughts shuffle along through the hours. Disjointed and yet feeling collective at the same time. Conversations we’d throw out into the middle of the front room, talking around the empty Chinese takeaway cartons and newspapers, would fold up and blow away before they’d been answered.
I’d go outside and marvel that society was still going on around me. Within the flat, one entombed world existed, punctuated by bouts of another reality going on outside the windows, television news, sirens down the road, the tram’s bell and the grinding of metal on metal as it executed its left turn on to STREET IN ZIZKOV.
Once outside the flat, it came at me in multi dimensions; the odours, the pattern of pedestrian footwork dancing around each other, sotto voce conversations briefly revealed in the brief seconds of passing them. You could be aware of yourself and hope at the same time you were blending in as anonymously as passersby. Who were all these people anyway? From whose wombs did they spring and why?
Usually the premise for leaving the flat was replenishment. Food stuffs, drinkable liquid, toilet paper. Walk past a few pubs and restaurants hoping none of the usual drunks saw you and climbed down from their stools or got up from their tables to chase you down the street inviting you to join them.
You can only mask alcoholism with social drinking for so long. Gradually, the drinking hours lengthen and deepen. And one by one, your compatriots drop off, to eat, to sleep, to coax sexual performances out of their partners, sometimes just to get away, and as these compatriots peel off like dead skin, the pool of drinkers grows smaller until it is merely a puddle of drunks who will carry the task on enthusiastically past dawn.
It is surreal to still be awake and drinking, a survivor of the night before, as workers scurry through their early mornings. If you happen to be trapped on the street, moving from one after hours dive to another, when these commuters let themselves from their houses and head off to the collective misery, it is like being trapped in a maze of somnambulists. Try talking to these people as they march on to their destinations: not a single one will give you the time of day. They are all either disgusted or envious when you confront them with beery breath, dressed in last night’s clothes, as though you were a temporary hallucination of theirs they wanted desperately to avoid facing, shake them from their heads and refill the subconscious with the inner nattering of daily preoccupations.
*****
Typically, on the nights no class was scheduled, I’d leave the office in the afternoon, take the tram back to Zizkov, always keeping a watchful eye out for the tram ticket warden, jump off and head immediately for a café. There was no dinner scheduled. There were no household items to purchase. There would be the paperback or a notebook for company. Set up camp at a table and then, watch the marks on the paper tab scratched off, one by one, beer after beer.
The café itself was of no consequence. I never spoke to the patrons. I never looked around except to stare out the window. I would drink the beer, chased with cigarettes, taking notes, writing letters, occasionally reading from whatever booked I’d nicked out of the school library that afternoon. But for the most part, I’d compose novella length letters to Anastasia, recording the minute details of the day, forcing the obligatory, devotional ramblings out of my pen as though they were written with my own blood through an eye dropper.
And when those events had been exhausted, a few more pints to round it off and then back to the flat. Albert would already be there most afternoons. He worked sporadically, picking up odd jobs around the neighbourhood. Moving and lifting, a scrape and paint job, renovation work that entailed moving rubble, brick and mortar in a wheelbarrow from the inside of a gutted frame to the dumpster in the street.
When he worked, he’d be sat there in the front room, still covered in whatever combination of dust, dirt, grease and paint that had clung to him during the course of the day. The headphones would be on, a small litter of beers would already be on the coffee table and floor and the room would be heavy with the haze of his smoke. Depending on what he was listening to, he’d either completely ignore my entrance as though it were just part of the hypnotic trance of the music that was banging into his eardrums, or take the headphones off and click the speakers back on so we’d both be covered in the music.
My days aren’t tough. Academic life, even the poor excuse for it at the College, was a phantom life in a physical world. Albert’s existence, the fact that he’d been out in the real world, shovelling, hauling, getting down and dirty, merely underscored the ghost-like existence I felt at the College. The only dirt I carried home with me from work was in my head, the filthy thoughts about Croatian co-eds in short skirts and long legs. There was no sense of self-respect in teaching there. It was like whoring in a cheap brothel. You got what you paid for. We weren’t paid much and in turn, we weren’t very astute teachers. There were no standards as there were in the physical world Albert pushed himself through for half the pay.
Albert knew it as well. It was a great theme for his pontificating whenever he’d get foamy-mouthed about the state of the world. Look at you, he’d say as I came through the doorway, my fingernails still reasonably clean, my clothes still reasonably fresh. How do you know you’ve even been working today? You look the same coming in as you did going out. Your shirt isn’t even wrinkled. Didn’t you sweat all day? Wasn’t there even a moment of intellectual anxiety enough to leave furrows of philosophic thought in your brow? You’ve taught future bureaucrats and landowners how to maintain their claw-hold on the throats of the working public, how to bleed them of their pay, how to tax them, how to feel slightly cultured while doing it. You’ve spent the day perpetuating a sick lie.
*****
I’m playing a chess match against Mikhail on the picnic table outside the Shot out Eye and the table is getting beerier as the hours go on. First one to win four matches wins and we’ve already been through eight matches without conclusion. It’s almost dark outside and the board is lit by candles around us. A few stand there in earnest, holding their beers, staring down at the table like gods overseeing a battlefield massacre.
POSTCARD SNAPSHOTS OF PRAGUE:
1. Our first public performance at the open mic night in the basement of Radost-FX. What about it? The room was painted with hangovers. We’d sat in on these Sunday sessions a few times already to get the feel for the place, see whether or not music was welcomed. Musical acts didn’t happen often and when they did, they were usually solo acoustic guitar numbers and usually not very pleasant to listen to so we had no reasonable expectation that our reception would be any worse.
As it turned out, it was met with stunned silence. As usual, no one knew whether they’d just heard something awful or incredible.
2. The crunchy sausages with mustard with a diamond-shaped napkin and a chunk of brown bread, eaten on the main boulevard with the hum of late night intoxicated sexuality dripping in the streets from the gutters and the eaves of clouded minds.
3. Sitting in the park near the hostel on a bench smoking a joint and staring up at the night sky.
4. Local pub we joined in late, four Czechs, one playing the guitar at the table as we sang Beatles songs wearing sun glasses and pounding our beer mugs on the table top like barbarians singing songs of mythology the night before pillaging the neighbouring village.
5.
*****
Most of these events won’t register as memory. Either they’re fed through a haze and don’t have any durable qualities or they become enlarged, poster-sized in the subconscious. They don’t stick for very long as they aren’t really memories at all, just events. Not unlike the walls of a construction site that get covered in concert announcement and new released music advertisements, glued up and then covered over, ripped down, graffiti’d on, spat at. No one remembers what poster was up two weeks ago. And similarly, I can’t remember what happened to myself two weeks ago. It’s not like we sit around a table reminiscing constantly like, remember this, remember that? No one cares because whatever it was, chances are it will be repeated in some form or another later in the day or that week or perhaps the next month and for a moment, a tiny light of recognition might go off and sputter out.
The tendency is to filter events so that they become almost unrecognisable save for those tiny moments. There is no filing system in our memories. It’s all scattered around on the inside like a hotel room that keeps having new guests without a maid to come in and clean up afterwards so that one person’s layer of existence left behind is quickly covered by the next and so on.
Is this how royalty greets the well-wishers that come, one by one, for a handshake and a few words? Imagine all the people who have the highlight of their life, I’ve met the King and here is the photo-moment to prove it, hung on the wall of their front rooms for all guests to ooh and aah over whilst the King has absolutely no recollection at all of having ever met them.
You hang out with your core, the regulars who join you at the table and the conversations begin again as though they’d never left off in the first place.
*****
After all those months of unreturned letters, there was bound to be an answer eventually. I hadn’t expected to just run into her outside the flat though, I have to admit.
Yet there she was, seated regally atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and when I finally returned to Paris, your letters were sitting there waiting for me, like an unfinished novel. For two straight days I read them all, word for word, stopping only to cat nap a few hours here and there. Your presence coursed through me like a hot shower. I decided to take the train here immediately.
*****
Albert wasn’t pleased with the addition of a new flat mate. We’ve barely any room in here as it is, he cringed, waiving his paw around the smoke-filled air of the studio.
But she can cook and she can sing, I rationalised.
Well, I don’t like this at all, he growled. Not at all. This is a fucking disaster.
*****
For several days, it was a lot of walking on eggshells. After all, Albert had found the flat and flats weren’t all that easy to come by. Especially not a cheap one like this. If he deemed the breach severe enough, he might just threaten us with having to find our own place and considering that despite work, the disposable income I disposed of so quickly came in large part from Albert’s personal injury account, this wouldn’t have been a good development at all.
How to pacify Albert was our theme for days. Anastasia suggested sleeping with him but the looming love triangle might prove even more daunting than finding our own flat.
In the end, it was several nights later, after Anastasia had joined us on stage for the first time, that Albert was convinced. The tension eased. Yeah, what the fuck, he explained. She’s a good cook and she even does the dishes afterwards.
*****
At the Shot out Eye, it was a bit of an event when Anastasia arrived. Not only was her presence a little breathtaking in the background of our norm, but her conversations never flowed with any of the others previous. It was like someone riding a bicycle in the middle of a tank parade. For weeks, we had complete strangers trying to join our table, lining up for the opportunity hours in advance, sometimes merely to get a glimpse of Anastasia.
After the first night she’d joined our performance performing the vocals, word spread quickly. Within weeks, we’d had offers for gigs all around Prague, and from as far away as Bratislava and Budapest.
*****
So what are we going to do with all these offers?
The three of us were sat in the train station café just outside the Anglo-American College and the vote was split.
Albert was sick of Prague, he insisted. After so many months, it should be time to move on. Prague was like quicksand and we were sinking rapidly. He had to get out of foundation, even it is just temporary.
My vote was a necessary abstention. I couldn’t side with Albert for risk of driving the newly arrived Anastasia away and I couldn’t side with Anastasia because my poverty level salary at the College wouldn’t afford the two of us our own flat without Albert’s personal injury fund to sustain us.
If I side with staying in Prague, I asked Albert, what would you do? If you are sick of Prague and merely want out, where would you go?
He puffed on his cigarette for several moments in silence. I can stay another month, but that’s it. Either we hit the road together or I hit the road alone.
*****
We didn't need a doctoral thesis to validate it. No one understood anything we said anyway, and we didn't understand them either. It was the perfect relationship.
Of course, when Anastasia would tire of whoring in Amsterdam, she inevitably made her way back to Prague to stay with us and that, I submit, was the only time Albert or I had to defend ourselves or our theories.
You guys look like you haven't left this place since I left she would comment like a disapproving den mother over a scout troop.
Is that supposed to pass as dialogue? Albert would ask. Then Anastasia would make a big show of ordering a bottlr of Moravian wine in a hideous castration of the Czech language, the waiter would look at her blankly, trying to decipher a translation, to what the fuck is she talking about? Albert had mastered the beer vocabulary. He'd even taken the trouble to learn grammatical agreement, depending on how many beers he was ordering, but beyond that, he knew nothing of the language and never bothered to try. But, like all linguistic dilemmas, it was easily solved when he would bring her a beer instead. They're all out of Moravian wine, I'd explain.
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 3.2,
...Is it ever possible? Were we merely illusionists with a talentlessness so relentless that it almost became convincing. What else could explain our presence on these stages, night after night, noisy pub after noisy pub? Was it stunned silence at something so horribly awry, they synapses misfired over and over, convincingly? We certainly couldn't believe it ourselves. And by some strange psychological victory, we'd been able to convince the others. Or confused them beyond healthy criticism. We began to accompany ourselves with three foot high inflatable chess pieces and had two volunteers play out famous matches on a 5 x 5 bedsheet painted as a chessboard. More confusion. The lyrics continued lifted out of foreign language obituary pages and stories of local interest plagerized as stanzas in a bizarre, low key baritone that sounded like scratching sandpaper with a two euro coin. Most importantly, the sax and the bass continued to play as basic and few chords as possible, applying repetition and sometimes extremely slow tempos to cover our lack of skill.
But a style that began with extremely minimalist tendancies slowly began to emerge as a spectacle large enough to divert attention from our increasingly frantic fear that eventually we would be found out. When Anastasia joined us with her compositions, her overbearing bossiness and clarinet, we responded with the chess matches recreated on stage, a few interpretive dancers we'd lifted from their classes with promises of popular relevancy, and a harp player.
May Day Besides the already mentioned beer and grilled bratwursts Czechs have a tradition a very much liked. Every girl and woman should be kissed under a bloomed cherry tree (but nowadays any bloomed tree whatsoever goes, too) so that she would not wither up during the year.
Most people don't belong together, she exhaled patiently. People ARE together because they have to be with somebody, one way or another...too lonely to accept solitude with a warm embrace like a lover coming home from the war...no, these people around us, and here she gesticulated wildly in an arc encompassing, one imagined the whole of humanity, not just the stray passerby who happened to be strolling within that imaginary arc they aren't comfortable being alone. They've seen too much television telling them in too many subtle ways, through sitcoms and chat shows and deodorant commercials, that it is their moral obligation in this society to be with someone, anyone - they've had it drummed into their skulls from the beginning...they won't accept anything less and when they wake up one morning wondering what they've done with their lives, who this person lying next to them is, who they get ready for work in the morning with, who they eat a silent dinner over the telly with is, by then, it's all too late. They realised too late...
She wasn't even talking to me, really, talking through me.
She got like that when the sores of society would bubble on her, get in her eyes, underneath her fingernails. There was always another tirade down the road, with Anastacia, you could predict that much, measure your time in the days between rants.
And it was always a sign that she was getting antsy, that she was preparing herself to start travelling again. Snip, snip, cut the ties.
I sat back silently as though savouring the wine, watching the smoke rings I blew upwards; my head tilted back slightly as I watched them slowly carry themselves upwards toward the ceiling and dissipate, my eyes focusing gradually on the present rather than a visionary's distance.
*****
It was May Day in Prague. Albert and I had a bet on to see who could stay off the piss the longest. Albert made it til ten o'clock that night.
Fuck it, he announced, standing up from the chair and away from the game of solitaire he'd been conducting silently for nearly two hours. You win. I'll buy the first beer.
There weren't many nights we weren't out, frankly. Prague is like that, a vortex drawing in the alcoholics and pretend poets and the blue collar Czechs from Zizkov. We were all there, nearly every night, playing cards, chess, music, holding conversations we imagined we were having only to realise that we were, flirting with drunker foreigners, chain smoking, enjoying the evening with the kind of pre-future nostalgia that made it seem like that evening was our last.
*****
Can I tell you a secret? she asked out of the blue as we were lying in bed, still clothed, the candles burning and the pot smoke hanging above us in a haze. I sat up for a moment, rubbing my eyes as though it were just morning and I'd had a good night's sleep. Sure, I answered non committally.
I want to leave. She didn't move as she spoke, just staring up at the ceiling. I want to leave tomorrow, get on a train and just end up somewhere else.
I hadn't been kidding myself too seriously. I knew this would ultimately be the natural score at the end of this match. She was too edgy to relax, pacing the room sometimes (no mean feat in such small quarters), drinking heavily as if to transport herself somewhere else, always somewhere else.
I can't say I didn't understand it although in my case it was more a case of inertia than any true longing to remain in one place for very long. Even Albert had talked aloud to himself about getting the fuck outta here... a few nights this month.
And I want you to come with me. she concluded, grabbing my hand.
*****
So the following morning, just after dawn and before we'd even had a coffee, we were walking down towards Hlavni Nadrazi to catch a train. Albert was annoyed that he wasn't invited but in the end, decided to go back to sleep anyway.
The gypsies were all out in force having slept off whatever they were on the night before that had them singing and dancing and holding their hungry babies in front of your face with one hand whilst the other hand was either upturned, palmward, or trying to reach into your pockets.
The funny thing is on the way down, we didn't spend a second talking about it. It was as though we were heading down to snatch a few klobasa and a beer first thing in the morning, as though this was yesterday or the day before.
We walked silently inside the station and Anastacia picked a window, mumbled things I couldn't hear from behind, pulled out a wad of unexpected cash and stepped back with two tickets.
So, where are we going? I hint,
Someplace you've never been. she replies with an excitement I imagined she would normally reserve for finding a hidden stash of catnip.
Awww, but I've been there already, like a hundred times! I exclaim just to throw her off guard for a moment and take away her suspicious, ruling hand.
I grab at the tickets and have a look. Low whistle.
Rome.
*****
The very first time the three of us were on stage simultaneously was at Jazz Club Železná.
After the first few times, Albert and I didn't get nervous anymore. We had butterflies and vomited often beforehand, but we weren't nervous.
With Anastasia joining us we were suddenly a trio, Albert and I had another aspect to overwhelm us with. But she had a sweet voice. Our music didn't even matter. We just tried to play as quietly in the background as possible.
And that first night we were all having a shot of slivovice for good luck when suddenly the canned music faded and someone got on the PA to announce, the infamously awkward, Deadbeat Conspiracy.
Muffled, half-hearted applause. Golf claps, really.
Albert stood there holding his bass, leaning backwards as though that bear of a bass would knock him over from the weight and the fourteen cans of beer that proceeded him. (He was done at thirteen but I told him it was unlucky, so he had another.)
I held the sax in front of me, staring at a fixed point above the heads of the crowd because I was terrified suddenly, gasping for water.
But Anastasia stepped out there with the dusty spotlight in front of her and she had her back to me: so when she began to sing, and if you could describe a voice as velvet and chocolate wrapped around a cherry you would have hers, slow and velvet caress, her voice bounced back from the walls past her and to Albert and I.
It wasn't hard to follow at all. I'd hit a low note every ten seconds or so, Albert plucked here and there when it seemed appropriate and before we knew it the place was absolutely silent.
The bartenders and waiters and kitchen help and doormen all stood there, transfixed by Anastasia’s voice.
We'd rehearsed all week at the walls in that little flat and had not even smelled a hint of the reaction. No fumbling with glasses and silverware, no more idle conversations breaking ice over and over, no more bottles opening or glasses slid across the wooden bar counter. Just Anastasia’s voice, like lying down on your back in the grass, closing your eyes to the sun.
When she was finished she just stood there as though waiting for us to start the next song. But before we'd even considered what next, the crowd had suddenly woken themselves, hooting and whistling, shouting, holding up their drinks. She brought the mic stand over in front of me.
Your turn. she announced, turning on her heel and taking a seat off to side of the stage.
ROME AND IN PURSUIT
page 116, cahier 3, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I arrived at Rome Stazioni Termini as dawn was breaking. Outside, the neighborhood sweltered with pickpockets and gangs of thieving children. Signore Antonio Pignatelli was supposed to meet me here and was nowhere to be found. A typical scene. I pulled out my tobacco and was just beginning to roll a cigarette when an English speaking cretin stepped toward me, calling my name gently. In his hand was a small cardboard sign that bore my name. He attempted to shake my hand, claiming he was Chuck, sent by Mr. Pignatelli to pick me up since Mr. Pignatelli had been delayed. Chuck appeared to be in his early thirties, sporting an unhealthy complexion, puny frame, round shoulders and a surprisingly prominent paunch. His hair, which looked as though it has been cropped by a pair of blunt shears, was very greasy. I could have filled a mason jar with the grease in his hair. His clothes were total grunge. A dirty nylon rucksack was crumpled at his feet like an abadoned baby. I wondered out loud why Antonio Pignatelli had sent such a seedy and slovenly looking guy to meet me. I'm the only guy he could find on such short notice who speaks English as my native tongue. he explained as he picked up the rucksack and led me by the elbow toward a cafe where we could sit for an espresso and some bread while we waited for Antonio to arrive.
As we sat there, another broken-English-speaker, who must have overheard our conversation, scuttled in from off the street toward us like a cockroach toward a pile of bread crusts and sugar. 'Allo, my name is Jirko he stammers and then asks us if either can spare a few euros for some paintings of his. He asks us both but of course, he is speaking only to me. Chuck doesn't look like he has any money. He looks like he'd be as likely as Jirko to be panhandling, perhaps more so. Jirko's lustreless hair matted in some kind of grease, or perhaps it is turpentine, judging from the smell. His fingers are paint-stained, the nails long and filthy. He too has a rucksack and from this one, he pulls out a few vague, almost hallucinatory charcol etchings, explaining all the while that he lives in a squalid condominium on the slummy eastern fringes of the city where he rents a small, damp room in the basement; broken down into the submission of poverty teaching haphazard english classes, giving black market tours of Rome to wary english language tourists charging 2 euros for an hour per. I wave him off, spitting to the side of his shoes and looking out for the waiter or someone to chase away these vagrants. Others are beginning to take notice, their vagrant, gypsy antennae picking up the scent of money in the neighborhood at this early hour.
Finally, Chuck loses his apathetic demeanor and waves the butter knife in the direction of Jirko and a few other slowly approaching vagrants. Get away fuckers! Liberty is not a release from all law, from all restraint! Crawl back into your sewers and gutters! Stay away I warn you or this distinguished gentleman with me will be forced to brandish his fire arm and fire it at you indiscriminantly!
He flops down next to me, smiling but a little sweaty. The sidewalks have cleared. One thing I've learned he begins, lighting a cigarette and flagging down the waiter impatiently, is that the consumerist impulse, even in junkies, drives us all toward personal satisfactions that we never quite experience without a solipsistic sense of loneliness hounding us. We may need love and self-opening in order to achieve genuine intimacy and commitment with even a few others.
The waiter arrives glancing at us and having heard the shouting, relieved but curious as to where the vagrants disappeared to. Chuck smiles, You see? he demands of the waiter, lighting a cigarette and coughing heavily. John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, that no one has a right to interfere with me for my own good, but only to prevent harm to others is now generally accepted. The streets are clear of riff raff. So bring us a pair of espressos, a bottle of Pernod and perhaps a few chunks of bread, rapidamente! senza ritardo!
Chuck continues, puffing on his cigarette proudly like a pimp. Signore Pignatelli has been looking forward to your visit. I don't expect this delay should be long. He's had some difficulties lately with potentially destructive ideals but frankly, I think the worst is over. If he hasn't arrived within the half hour, I'll take you to a fine pensione I know of only a few blocks from here.
What exactly are these 'difficulties' you speak of? I ask with only a vague sense of curiosity. The espresso has arrived and it's aroma overtakes me, overtakes the smell of pigeons and unwashed sidewalks. Train station neighborhoods always smell the same. Like poverty and ammonia mixed with illicit sex and stale urine.
Well, I'm no shrink, but I think he has to stop looking for salvation to come to him from somewhere else, from above. Instead, I suggested to him only yesterday, he should seek to reconcile with reality. After all, there is no external measure of the meaningfulness of our lives and practices. He wallows in his insignificance, the meaningless of his life, and it paralyses him at times with terrible fits of depression. I slipped him a mild amphetamine sulphate. I'm sure he'll be ok in a little while. Then he'll come to pick you up and everything will continue on as planned. Chuck stared at his fingernails awhile as I thought about how Mr. Pignatelli's affliction might affect his ability to help me locate some leads about Anastasia. It didn't look good. I cursed loudly to myself, much to Chuck's surprise, who took up a defensive Yang Tai Chi position on the other end of the table.
Sorry about that. I'm just a little annoyed at having come all the way from Kaunas and a meeting with the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin regarding a concert to be performed in the Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, only to find out now that Mr. Pignatelli is suffering from some sort of dysthymia or bipolar disorder. I was urgently counting on his assistance.
Don't worry about it. Chuck assured, picking up his rucksack and rifling through it for a few scraps of paper which he handed over to me. These are the remains of the records of his therapeutic foster home stay. It suggests only a minor depressive disorder brought on by the ill-advised use of estrogen which he'd hoped would improve the somatic and mild depressive symptoms but in the end, only seemed to fuck up his system worse. He should be completely recovered in a matter of days, perhaps weeks, but for the time being, so long as he's jacked up with a little Japanese shabu or alot of caffeine, he's fine for long periods of time. Whatever he's supposed to help you with, I'm certain he'll be functional for long enough periods of time to assist you. Believe me, if he couldn't, he wouldn't have invited you here.
Just then there was a jaunty horn honking from the street as a dioxazine purple Alfa Romeo 156 GTA pulled up to the curb with Antonio's delicate hand waving out the driver's side window. He lept from the car, the engine still idling, and shouted out greetings to both of us. Witold! Chuck! What great fortune that I've finally found you! I was caught up in an accident with a chestnut roaster and got caught up in the irrisistable, musky fragrants of the chestuts on Via Nazionale and then stopped for a few moments of reflection where Mussolini used to harangue the crowds from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. I feel like a tourist again! What a morning!
He quickly grabbed my bags and tossed them into the trunk of the Alfa Romeo and motioned me into the passenger's seat. Chuck! he screeched. Meet us at the New Mississippi Jazz Club on Borgo Angelico tonight around 10! Bring Adriana and Camelia with you! As I carefully folded my legs in the passenger seat, Antonio fell in behind the steering wheel, yanked the car into gear and floored it, yanking me backwards. We were on our way to what Antonio told me in very speedy explanation was his September home in Rome. First, a quick bite to eat, a few bottles of wine, a nap and then we would get down to business...
random page sifting, cahier 2, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I knew the 19 hour ride on the EuroNight car from Roma Termini to Budapest-Deli station was going to be an exercise of endurance, a tag team of piecemeal and useless conversations with peripatetic strangers wandering through the hallways of the cars at all hours having nothing in their own lack of imagination better to converse about than the weather we were unable to experience and an international goulash of political expostulations and petty griping.
When I was able to elude the strangers, I'd stare into the blackness of what seemed an endless, dispassionate tenebrosity Emilia-Romagna countryside staring back at me. For hours I did nothing but chain smoke and cleanse my palate with warm cola. There was, of course, the Buescher Aristocrat, but the moment I'd touch the reed to my lips and begin even the faintest alternations of strident and mellow tones the neighboring passengers erupted into immediate and obdurate, brick wall protests of noiselessness and sleep.
Having anticipated this, especially for those long hours with nothing but the chain smoking and the warm beer preventing me from sleeping, I'd brought along a bookbag gorged with internet cafe printouts on subjects ranging from the Mandelbaum translations of Dante's Purgatorio to obscure American government statistical guidebooks. Nevertheless, the journey was doomed to bring with it an unendearing sense of time and layers of peeling consciousness, through the cosmos and back again all the while fraught with the bristling chaos of the Anastasia restrospective slipping in and out of my vision which could not be escaped.
By the time we'd pulled into Bologna Centrale for a long layover, as a diversion, I'd already begun a laborious, ball-breaking study in thought about time travel and how it could, in some instances, mirror regular, geographic travel. I still had the internet printout of the U.S. Department of Labor Handbook of Labor Statistics measuring the value of money back then using the consumer price index calculated by some strange index of prices paid by Vermont farmers for family living (2002 Price = 1850 Price x (2002 CPI / 1850 CPI).
Taking that equation, I spent many bouncy hours on the rails calculating things like how my 10 cents in 1833 would be worth around $2.00 today until my head hurt. Why 1833, I'm not sure. It seemed to hold some symmetry for me which couldn't be rehearsed. By dawn, as we crept toward the Austrian border, energized by a few swigs of grappa from the flask inside my rucksack, I'd figured that if I take $200 of today's money and travel in time to 1833, I'd have the today's equivalent of about $4,000 to work with.
I wasn't sure where this line of thinking was going to take me. Wishful thinking for four grand was one thing but wondering what I reason I'd have to be on a train a place that wasn't even yet called Budapest yet in 1833, disquisitive about what the hell would be going in 1833 and what my role in it would be. Slowly, wishing I'd printed out deeper history of the breadbasket of the Habsburg Empire, the weaving and rolling had its somnolent effect and it wasn't long before I'd fallen asleep to the lullaby rocking of the train as we moved through the Kärnten province.
Either waking from a dream, or thrust into the middle of it, (difficult to discern through the haze of the morning fog), it seemed Balzac was seated next to me, smirking noiselessly, but staring openly.
Good morning I muttered unsteadily. He looked a little dishevelled himself, a little pudgier than the Louis Boulanger portrait, wild-haired and determined, staring me down his little moustache twitching like the whiskers of a rodent. It was as though I'd interrupted him in mid-conversation with himself as he continued pointing out that while he wasn't deep, he was very wide and how he would create a new style of realism by portraying the present.
Thinking quickly, I remind him that Georg Lukács was to say that he'd passed from the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present as history, and christ, Lukás wasn't even born until 52 years later.
Balzac barely paid me any attention. He went on, giving elegies on the irreparable decay of good society and his idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books.
He gives me a copy of Le médecin de campagne, which he said he would publish that year in Paris. I thumb through it quickly about a doctor who has given up his mistress and then learns that she died giving birth to his son and then decides to devote his life to working with the poor. Geez, I tell him, shaking my head, why are you guys in 19th century France always portraying the peasants as degenerates and cretins? What kind of predictable sociopathological discourse is this?
Balzac stares at me a moment, a vague disgust in his eyes as he speaks: An idiocy of rural life. The rural population was helpless. They needed rational authority which they did not themselves possess, to improve their situation. They were like children. They were hopelessly backwards and required massive state intervention to bring them up to the modern age. he clears his throat and continues: Besides the plot, regard how l am interested in the lives of typical, every day people, like an anthropologist. I don't care about these common histories of nations and political and public figures the world scribbles on about without definition and contrast...Do not all these solve the difficult literary problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?
*********
1833 was also the building of the Petõfi Bridge and when Strauss' father was taking his first concert trip to Budapest.
How many Forints would four grand be? How much pörkölt and gulyás?
It didn't matter. I was going solely for Jazz Days, headed in September for Debrecen where they held Hungary's top jazz festival. Of course, I was hoping Anastasia would change her mind and meet me there. It was a daft hope, devoid of reality.
Czech – Jarmila and Karel.
Pigeon hole Karel Hynek Macha as imitator of Byron.
Macha: Czech girls, pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
GM Hopkins wrote a good deal of spiritual, sensual poems?
Not until 30 years after his death his poems were published. (1918)
no appreciation for the ordinary individual
Czech is the fifth European vernacular language after French, Italian, Catalan and Dutch into which the Bible was translated.
philosophical amazement at undestructability of existence in nature.
Hopkins saw the whole world as barbarous in beauty to him, everything was charged with the grandeur of god.
PRAGUE
**************
It was 18 hours by bus to Prague. Cramped seats, dishevelled sleep, casual slugs from Albert’s flask of Oude Ginever, the strong juniper flavoured Dutch liquor, from which gin is rumoured to have evolved. Covered in newspapers, I snuck peeks, through the dancing moonlight of a German sky, at Jiri Weil’s Life With A Star, whose reading I’d timed for this trip, this story of Josef Roubicek, a Jewish bank teller who is waiting to be called up for deportation to Terezin whilst his fellow Jews were increasingly persecuted in a Nazi Prague…
Ruzena, I said, people are now drinking coffee, well, perhaps not real coffee, but they are sitting somewhere warm, after a satisfying lunch, and I am freezing, Ruzena, and I am hungry.
It was a thoroughly demoralising book about human cruelty and the rooms of mild insanity that thrived within them. By the time I’d finished, I’d temporarily forgotten my fixation with Soviet Prague and resolved to spend one afternoon, like Josef Roubicek, sweeping leaves in a Prague cemetery.
Meanwhile Albert slept from the start, I noted jealously. You have long hours to stare out the window yet most of the journey was made in darkness so even staring out the window gave you the feeling that you were enduring rather than travelling, transported anonymously through historical lands in a god damned bus stinking of the bad breath of two dozen snoozing foreigners instead of riding horses like Sugambrians and the Suebian Tribes raiding along the Rhine.
Morning slowly unveiled and with its unveiling, the countryside danced naked.
But as we made our approach to what we assumed was Prague there was a growing ill ease. Everywhere had a hue of grey, industrial soot, abused and staggered.
Expecting Bohemia, anarchy, surrealism and intoxication, we were disappointed at our dropping point, a bleak bus station on the outskirts of town.
You think you know a place by reading about it, reading the literature spawned from it, listening to the stories of other travellers but ultimately, its like imagining what it would have been like to sleep with the vintage version of Marilyn Monroe or Ingrid Bergman – you might conjure up the face, fill in the blanks of the intimate curves of the body, cobble together personality traits from interviews and photographs but in the end, the imagination is dulled by the inability to make it real.
During his few waking hours, Albert had given me an overview of Czech literature and history on the bus ride out of Amsterdam through Germany, filled me in on the Slavonic liturgy like the 10th century legend of Ludmila and Wenceslas, the break of the monopoly of lecturing in Latin in Prague by Karl Heinrich Seibt in the 18th century, the Age of Reason with its secular focus that condemned the Baroque, affected by mythopoeic patriotism, the birth of neo-Classical literatures influenced by folklorism, the concept of autonomous national culture, , the 19th century Czech Romantic poet, Karel Hynek Mácha (whose poem Máj, he was even able to spout of few lines in butchered Czech that he’d memorised), the effect of the Ausgleich, which split the Empire into the dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary leaving Czech nationalism to the wayside, the Czech submission to bourgeois Vienna, Hanuman, the poem by Svatopluk Cech about civil war between clothed cosmopolitan and naked nationalist natural apes, Masaryk and the Realists, anarchist utopianism - and that’s as far as I got in my reading so far, he shrugged apologetically as the bus made a dinner stop in some German self-service diner on the Autobahn.
This is Prague? Albert managed to moan, setting down his bag, quickly lighting a long-awaited Winston and pulling the collar of his coat up around his chin and grimacing. Prague's first nucleus was founded in the latter part of the 9th century as a castle on a hill commanding the right bank of the Vltava: this is known as Vyšehrad (high castle) to differentiate from the castle which was later erected on the opposite bank, the future Hradčany. Soon the city became the seat of the Země koruny české Kings of Bohemia, some of whom also later reigned as emperors of the Holy Roman Empire
I think so, I noted cautiously, sniffing the sulphuric air around me and looking around for something familiar. Imagine if we were like, dropped in here in like August 1968 when the troops of the USSR, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were rolling in to douse the Prague Spring. Imagine the euphoria of a greater democracy, economic reforms and the abandonment of controls over mass media doused in a matter of a few nights of occupation.
Jan Palach, Albert muttered, puffing greedily on the Winston and wondering where the first pub might be located even though it was barely seven in the morning. I’ve read this city is loaded with non-stop bars, he explained. Less than five months later, he continued, Jan Palach infamously performed an act of self immolation in protest of the Soviet disbursement of reform. If you want to imagine something, try imagining making the decision not only to protest, but to kill yourself in protest and not only kill yourself in protest but kill yourself by setting fire to yourself in protest. That, he said, tossing the cigarette butt on the ground with hundreds of others, and two historic acts of defenestration, are what Prague symbolises to me before I’ve even had my first Czech beer.
We carried on out of the depot and began the slow, uncertain walk towards what we sensed was the city centre. It was clear from looking up and down the Vinohodská that the east end was a trail of the city trickling away into suburbs and the west direction appeared to be the only other choice. Fortunately for us, unwittingly, it led straight down, albeit after quite a pace, into the centre of town, the Národní Muzeum
So we carried on, Albert lugging his bass with only a small duffel bag over one shoulder and I, with the saxophone in its case, also travelling lightly – clothes we would buy on the cheap – these were third world prices, after all and despite effusions about history and literature, like most others who had come, we were there for the cheap lifestyle.
Ten minutes down the street and the strap on a bag snapped and fell harshly into the slush of the sidewalk as a menacing dog held on a leash by a disapproving old lady began barking at us. Fuck off, Albert growled back at the dog as the old lady shouted something at us incomprehensibly.
So this is the dream? Albert demanded after twenty minutes of walking got us closer to what passed as the skyline. This fucking dreary slum of a city?
Hang tight, mate, I cautioned. Something tells me we’ve entered from the wrong side of town. Have some faith, we’re going to be dazzled, I guarantee it, I preached boldly, trying to overcome my own trepidation with something resembling optimism despite the bleak surroundings.
And sure enough, by half eleven, we’d quartered our belongings in a quasi-posh hotel, had a flyer for a promising youth hostel and were already in a famous watering hole known for it’s jazz musicians and cheap beer.
*****
The religious split between Catholics and Protestants is followed everywhere on an historical trail and Prague is no different. The rationalist reaction against devotional Roman Catholic literature was a constant spasm, like a dodgy sphincter, Albert explained as we strode swiftly now, eager to begin. Sort of on par with the literary rebellion against white males hogging all the good lit publicity for themselves, he added. And look, in the 16th century, the predominately and fevered Catholics of the Habsburgs took over, pushing the Protestants aside, much like the Spanish king did to the Protestants in the Netherlands. See the pattern of Europe during these times? Religious intolerance.
But like the Dutch revolt, the bubble burst eventually when at the Prague Castle, an assembly of Protestants tried two Imperial governors, Wilhelm Slavata and Jaroslav somebody, for violating the right of freedom of religion, found them both guilty, and threw them out of the high castle windows, There you have your first Czech defenestration.
Undeniably, the euphoria of historical partaking in Prague had long since worn away within the last decade between the first intrepid Western youth settlers to today’s overindulged yobs, stag parties and frat boy mentality sweating through pint after pint in one trendy location after another. There were few remnants of Communist Prague to sip on a leisurely afternoon, the aura had been vacuumed and binned and its place cropped up a nihilistic subculture of intellectual sewage who came to Prague much in the same way they came to Amsterdam. Hedonism as an art form.
It was almost as though the old wooden theatre called the Bouda (hut) had never been erected on Wenceslas Square – in fact it had been demolished after a few plays were put on, mostly by Viennese writers.
That isn’t to say Prague didn’t have its charms. For drunks like Albert and I this was a sort of alcoholic’s Mecca. Well, perhaps the more appropriate location would be Munich during Oktoberfest, like a Hajj, but in any event, the beers were bigger and cheaper, they were more natural thus inducing far fewer and certainly less severe hangovers. There were exotic yet powerful pit stops along the beer super highway like Plum brandy and Beckerovka and even absinthe. There were the Disney-like facades of what remained a sort of fairyland architectural backdrop. There were the working class pivnices in Zizkov where men traditionally supped on gallons of beer in dingy yet church-like reverential quarters. There was the cheap which made life a bearable bargain. There was Vaclav Havel running the country instead of the literary resistance. There was the underlying hum of informality when it came to proving competencies. You didn’t need a sparkling CV to do something, you merely had to do it. And one can barely mention Prague without mentioning the birds of Prague, whorish with deadbeat intellects yet charming naivité, or, as the Czech poet Mácha described them pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
Albert didn’t need much convincing, once we’d established quarters and consulted a guidebook to find an auld jazz hangout near the banks of the Vlatava. Albert judges every place he goes based upon the cost of a pint of beer. Cheap beer in Albert’s mind equals worthy society. Expensive beer means they’re all more than likely just a bunch of yuppies, flesh merchants or worse, snobs. The upper classes lack poetry, he was fond of repeating whenever we were accosted by ridiculous prices. Life in sterility. So when we ordered our very first pints in Prague the first thing he did was a little jitterbug on the way to sitting at a table singing to himself, it’s true, it’s true! The beer is cheaper than water!
Do you understand what we are creating by hopping now to this new location, abandoning incomplete the experience first of New York and then Utrecht? This is a poetics of surprise and variety giving us the illusion of motion and expansion. Our acts are begun and never completed. Our equilibrium is unstable because we are constructing on several levels at once, each level with a different perspective. And now we throw into the blender, the abundance of cheap beer, an even deeper hedonism, a surreal blur of experiences. If this doesn’t emancipate our music, nothing will!
This is better than Mexico, he went on after having his first few sips. I hate Mexican beer, he sneered, even though it’s cheap like this. This, he sang, holding the pint up in front of my face as though I wouldn’t understand his subject without visual aids, is the sign of times to come! And he chugged down the remaining eleven gulps without breathing, placing the glass softly on the table top and wiping his chin with his right wrist.
Take it slow, lad – an old man who had been sitting dead for all we knew, across from us, suddenly came to life, holding out a wrinkled, age-spotted hand in caution. You lads are all the same. Your first beers you drink like the first girl you fuck, quickly and without comprehending what you are doing. If you are to be drinking many beers in my city, eventually you will learn there is no hurry. There is always another beer waiting somewhere just around the corner.
The old man introduced himself as Pavel whose command of English was owed to several years in England as a boy, just before, during and shortly after the war. I was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia on October 17, 1934, the son of a Czech father (Rudolph Fischer) and a Viennese mother (Erna Frenkel). The family was living in Prague at the time of the German invasion (March 15, 1939). Although it was difficult for a Jewish family to leave Czechoslovakia, my family managed to leave on August 19, 1939 and arrived by train in Venice, Italy on August 24, 1939. After a short stay in Venice, the family moved to San Remo, Italy which is near the French border.
highly skilled Czechs and Slovaks continued to leave the country despite the risks. From 1950 through 1989, it is estimated that more than 550,000 people emigrated. Emigration meant breaking all family ties and social networks because those who left were not allowed to return. In addition, emigration was considered a criminal offense. The consequences included confiscation of possessions and sometimes the persecution of relatives.
The two main emigration waves came in 1948, when the communists came to power
Pavel had the kind of pinched, broken blood vessel-lined face that you could instantly recognise as having experience with the drink, some would have even ventured too much experience with the drink, but his head was still sound after all those years and when he got around to asking what we were doing in Prague (start a jazz collective and slip into an irredeemable vortex of hedonism in the process,) his eyes instantly lost their sagging skin quality and shone with remembrances for he too was a jazz musician, pianist who had flung off years of classical training at the conservatorium, he explained, because he instantly loved, upon hearing his first bootleg copies, Thelonius Monk and Oscar Peterson. After the Nazi occupation jazz flourished here. Jazz now served as an expression of opposition to the stupid "deutsche tanzmusik" and as a yearning for freedom. The bands of Karel Vlach, Gustav Brom, and Emil Ludvík, Karel Slavík's Blue Music, Elit Club, and Rhythm 42, a small ensemble were well known names. A first-class arranger, mainly for Ludvík, was Bedrich "Fricek" Weiss, who was deported to the concentration camp Terézin, where he led the Ghetto Swingers. In 1944 he, together with his father, was transported to Auschwitz and directly to the gas chamber. until he heard the music of Armstrong, Ellington, Fletcher Henderson and Bessie Smith. He recalls the thrill of being present at Duke Ellington's concert in London which left him feeling "captured for ever."
Shortly after World War II was a more intensive and more favorable time for jazz. The leading orchestras in Prague were: Karel Vlach's, with new personnel, Prof. Ladislav Habart's Big Band, and Kamil Behounek Big Band, which played for AFN Pilsen and, later, in G.I.'s clubs and camps in the U.S. Zone in Germany. Gustav Brom's band performed in Brno and Bratislava and for several months in 1947 in Switzerland. In Prague's jazz club Pygmalion that same year and in 1948, Rhythm, the first bebop pioneers here, appeared with legendary trumpet man Lumír "Dunca" Broz, Dr. Jan Hammer, bass and vibes, and singer Vlasta Pruchová, who later became Hammer's wife and mother of keyboardist Jan Hammer.
The first pioneers were bands led by R. A. Dvorský and Jaroslav Jezek, especially the latter, whose Hot Jazz, later Swing Band, was the basis for all following successors. Enthusiasm for jazz sounds was also perceptible in the work of several composers of "serious music," such as Ervin Schulhoff, Bohuslav Martinu, and E. F. Burian.
Soviets saw jazz as a decadent bourgeois art form and advised Communists to stay away from its corrupting influence.
In 1947 Czechoslovakia also was visited by our first guest jazz musicians from foreign countries, such as, the Fud Candrix Band from Belgium, the black Jiver Hutchinson's band, from England and featuring vocalist Frankie Smith, Erik Winstone's Dance Band, also from Great Britain, and Graeme Bell's Dixieland band from Australia.
The two-and-half years from mid-1945 to the end of 1947 was the happiest time for jazz in the former Czechoslovakia. After February 1948 came troubles and the situation did not get better until 1955-56.
During this late-40s period Karel Vlach began to play more dance and popular music. Only Gustav Brom
Monk with his Brilliant Corners(1956) and Oscar Peterson plays Duke Ellington, my, my. I would listen to these recordings in secret at home, out of the earshot of my parents and party members even though Peterson was raised, like myself, as a classical pianist. These were what broke me from the classicists and my automotonic brethren in the Communist party with their authoritarian controls over lucid clarity. Music that was transparent yet enigmatic. Form losing out to chaos, so it seemed.
I was 20 in 1948 – 2000 (now 72) . In Czechoslovakia the Stalinists accused their opponents of "conspiracy against the people's democratic order" and "high treason" in order to oust them from positions of power. Large-scale arrests of Communists with an "international" background, i.e., those with a wartime connection with the West, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Jews, and Slovak "bourgeois nationalists," were followed by show trials. The most spectacular of these was the trial of KSC first secretary Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist personalities in November and December 1952. Slánský was executed, and many others were sentenced to death or to forced labour in prison camps. The KSČ rank-and-file membership, approximately 2.5 million in March 1948, began to be subjected to careful scrutiny. By 1960 KSČ membership had been reduced to 1.4 million.
The Ninth-of-May Constitution provided for the nationalization of all commercial and industrial enterprises having more than fifty employees. The non-agricultural private sector was nearly eliminated. Private ownership of land was limited to fifty hectares. The remnants of private enterprise and independent farming were permitted to carry on only as a temporary concession to the petite bourgeoisie and the peasantry. The Czechoslovak economy was subjected to a succession of five-year plans. Industrial growth in Czechoslovakia required substantial additional labour. Czechoslovaks were subjected to long hours and long workweeks to meet production quotas. Part-time, volunteer labour — students and white-collar workers — was drafted in massive numbers. Labour productivity, however, was not significantly increased, nor were production costs reduced. Czechoslovak products were characterized by poor quality.
During the period of communist rule which lasted from February 1948 to December 1989, the interpretation of Jaroslav Jezek's legacy was mixed. His classical compositions and popular songs were allowed by the authorities, yet his work as a jazz musician was not officially recognized. So, Jezek's legacy came to represent different things to different people: he was generally known and sanctioned as a man of popular song, and to the members of the dissident Jazz Section, he served as a model of musical freedom.
It was very difficult to obtain a passport in those days, he explained wearily recollecting sadness. You had to apply for official permission and to get official permission you had to have an employer. Well, I had no reliable employment, let alone an employer. I got drunk for days and slept off work and even though it was difficult getting fired, I found great difficulty maintaining interest in any sort of employment (here Albert’s interest was peaked of course) and thus, getting this official permission was virtually impossible. Fortunately, I had a girlfriend at the time who had an employer and I was able to convince her to steal one of the official papers required from an employer to be deemed as a reliable person. She even stamped it for me, writing that I was a reliable person. A chata – a simple, usually newly built wooden cabin or cottage
typically in a forest or by a river stream – and a chalupa – a renovated old farmhouse in a small
village – became the only destinations for the millions of vacationing Czechoslovak citizens. I
will show that there were several distinct differences between chaty and chalupy and the kinds of
people that occupied one or the other type of these country houses. Chata was logically the more common, and also much cheaper, choice, as the supply of
old farmhouses that could be turned into a chalupa was limited, whereas almost everybody could
afford to build their own new cottage/chata.
Typically, privacy-demanding
intellectuals or artists opted for the more challenging chalupa, while working class masses
settled for an uncomplicated, if crowded, weekend life at a chata. As Bernard Safarik noted,
“the sociable chata owner does not mind the switch from the prefabricated hutch in a city blocks
of flats to a similarly crowded quarters of a chata’s ‘blocks of flats’, whereas the individualistic
chalupa owner a few kilometers away builds a high wall around his weekend house in order to
absolutely isolate himself from the rest of society for these two days.”48 Safarik further argues
that the biggest interest in the chalupa ownership among these people was during the years of
socialism, when it offered the only available escape before the enforced collectivism.
I teach kids now, he confessed into his waning beer as the barman slid through collecting empty glasses, taking orders and working the room with a beer gathering mania that bordered on shamanism. I teach kids who have no interest in learning about the piano but are forced by their parents who see classicism in them instead of baggy pants hip hop and western consumerism. It’s a mild form of hell for me, actually. But enough about these things digressing into pity and sadness. What instruments do you play and what sort of jazz is it you are conspiring?
I play the bass, Albert volunteered as the barman returned with three more pints and ticked off three little slashes on our scrap paper tally sheet which we watched with amazement. And Witold plays the horn, neither of us very well, I might add.
Lacking astounding talent, Albert continued, we prefer a minimalist approach to music. We don’t play fancy 15 minute solos, we don’t spiral, we don’t necessarily shake or groove or incarnate anything. We try our best not to remind our audience that we struggle with even the most rudimentary of beats and that neither of us could read a music sheet any easier than we could read a newspaper written in Sanskrit. In fact, to call us musicians might even be a stretch. Conceptualists, perhaps. Like children who haven’t yet conquered speech.
Pavel stared at us for a few moments before taking a pipe out of his coat pocket and relighting it, a shot of flame from a match struck on the floor, audible puffs and the Pope-like smoke firing out of the top of the bowl indicating he had finally digested Albert’s words in full. You will be very successful here then, I would suppose, Pavel smiled slyly. This is precisely the kind of place where you could pull something like that off.
We’ve already been a hit in Holland, I added unnecessarily, we are in the middle of a series of six month tours from one country to the next, enough time to ingest the cultural and regurgitate it in our music, all patterned locally.
Unfortunately, most of my contemporaries are long passed, Pavel mentioned, thinking aloud. But if you are interested, perhaps one afternoon you could come by my apartment and we could organise a little session of sorts. It sounds as though it could be very intriguing indeed.
Prague was like that in so many ways. By that, I mean opportunities seemed to fall from the sky. A little initiative, a distinct lack of fear and a modicum of self confidence and there wasn’t very much in Prague that couldn’t be accomplished given time.
For weeks, like in Utrecht, we stuttered in our efforts to find a place to live. It wasn’t our intention to become permanent residents of the hotel we were quartered in, even if there was a sauna in the building with masseurs and masseuses, professionally asexual but imminently competent at squeezing out the aching of alcohol from your bones and muscles every afternoon before beginning the next binge.
And make no mistake, those several weeks of stuttering was primarily owed to a child-like fascination with spending entire afternoons and evenings glued to the same table as customers came in and out, joining tables with complete strangers, becoming acquaintances, beer partners, co-conspirators. When that wasn’t enough there were the Non Stop mini gambling establishments where, incredibly, you could drink 24 hours a day if needed.
During the course of our wanderings from neighbourhood to neighbourhood exploring the inside of one pub after another, we heard about a youth hostel which would be infinitely cheaper, filled with personalities from all over the world and also had a bar on site.
A few days later we were set up in our own double bunk room to ourselves, still not cheaper than finding our own flat, but given the circumstances, housing shortages, need to establish contacts, figure out how willing we were to avoid the moving to the expat ghetto outskirts of Prague, home of the panelaks, the cold, heartless concrete buildings.
You can thank, in part, Swiss architect Le Corbusier, the precursor to the simple and efficient Functionalism movement of the 1920s and 30s, for the existence of panelaks because in many ways, they are modelled after that design, deformed over the years by Communism into the symbolism of the alleged material equality and collectivist style they were peddling. They’d always been a source of cheap housing in a city notorious for its lack of living space, a simple answer to the question of how to be quartered in thin walled, cheaply built edifices glorifying communism. Ironically, they were now the great way station of the ex-pat life for those living on the thin of their wits who didn’t mind long bus or tram rides back in the middle of a cold, bleak night. Communism was dead and the foreign hedonists and pseudo intellectuals were moving in.
We decided by straw poll, the two of us in an empty non-stop bar near the banks of the Vlatava, that budgeting money would come elsewhere. The only place we could imagine living was in Zizkov, which had become our headquarters, our oasis from tourism and centre of the most pubs per square metre of any other street in the city.
There was a collection of dead-enders who had fled their respective countries to find not only hedonism but jobs in Prague. Jobs so they could stay longer, drink more, pretend to be on the cusp of something very important. In the early and mid 90s they liked to regurgitate the notion created by foreign media that they would one day constitute a movement of some kind, literary, artistic and glorious, fancying themselves post-Communist Hemmingways and Joyces and Steins.
I suppose it was to be expected in a way, Westerners flooding in, held back and out precisely for their decadence, their unseemly wealth, insatiable greed. The Americans held a disproportionate majority of these temporary immigrants as though the word had been disseminated solely through college radio, some 20,000 estimated at one point with such heavy media coverage that you were almost guaranteed back then, if you stayed a few months, to be interviewed by someone for something but always with the same particular angle, conjuring up Paris of the 20s and 30s.
It was only a joke if you took it seriously and by the time we’d arrived, this crowd had eventually, like a shifting tide, begun to trickle away, replaced by a newer corps even more intent on quantity over substance. Yet you could still find these morons, lording over some collective of misanthropes with misguided senses of cool, all trying to out-hip each other as if it were they were doing the bump in unison.
This was the point, in large part, of staying in Zizkov. There weren’t many places you could actually escape the disease of these people gathering in what would otherwise be pristine pockets of Pragueness, the local pivnices still holding on to their blue collar perspectives and prices, unwilling or perhaps incapable of surrendering to the mass collection plate of consumerist tourism, the parasitic nature of all tourism in fact.
Jan Hus, a theologian and lector at the University, held his sermons in Prague. From 1402 he summoned his followers to the Bethlehem Chapel, speaking in Czech to enlarge as much as possible the diffusion of his ideas about the reformation of the church. Having become too dangerous for the political and religious establishment, Hus was burned in Constance in 1415. Four years later Prague experienced its first defenestration, when the people rebelled under the command of the Prague priest Jan Želivský and threw the city's counselors from the New Town Hall. Hus's death had spurred the so-called Hussite revolt. In 1420 peasant rebels, led by the famous general Jan Žižka, along with Hussite troops from Prague, defeated the Bohemian King Sigismund (Zikmund, son of Charles IV), in the Battle of Vítkov Mountain.
In the following two centuries Prague strengthened its role as a merchant city. Many noteworthy Gothic buildings were erected, including the Vladislav Hall in the Hradčany.
Albert had no interest in working, even though he’d watched me spend hours some afternoons with a Czech dictionary and the local newspaper’s want ads looking for housing and employment. He spent entire mornings undercover, snoring through breakfast and sometimes lunch even though I would be in the backyard outside the window of our dorm room practicing the saxophone against the walls of the building.
Boleslav The Cruel is notorious for the murder of his brother St. Wenceslaus, the result of which brought him to the Czech (ducal) throne. Wenceslaus was murdered during a feast, and precisely that time Boleslav's son was born. He got a strange name Strachkvas, what meant a dreadful feast. Being remorseful of what had happened, Boleslav promised to devote his son to religion and educate him as a clergyman, and kept his word.
We met Alois, a friend of a friend, outside a pub on Executioner’s Hill and apologies for the pub being shut, led us downhill through finally street after street, a look at the flat, actually a state subsidised flat rented by his girlfriend, Zorka, who was moving in with him to save money.
It’s an old building across from a small, triangular park right on the corner of a pronounced intersection and tram line. The elevator barely fits one so we walk the three flights of stairs, left at the hallway to the end, in the corner, Alois pushes open the door.
Immediately in front is a shower. To the right of the shower a three foot corridor which opened into the main room and to the left, just before the symbolic entranceway of the main room, the kitchenette. Just to the left of the front wall separating the kitchenette from the main room was a tinier corridor which led to a small cubby hole of a room, the size of a closet, really.
Being state subsidised, it was cheap anyway so we weren’t expecting much. There was a mattress set against one wall and behind it a small bookshelf whose half dozen Czech books Alois leaned down to peruse before picking up a copy of Post Office by Bukowski. I love Bukowski, he exclaimed in his very limited English as though suddenly breaking through the hush of our inability to communicate in much more than hand signals, Alois’ English being raw and our Czech being absolutely nil outside of learning the proper case declinations for the word beer as need be.
Bukowski’s great, man, I exclaim, suddenly buoyant, shocked at the discovery, amazed they’d heard of him, not realising the reach of Bukowski in the international subterranean world we were entering.
You like? He asked pointing around the room. Very good. We take. Our English began to mimic his unconsciously as though by speaking in broken English we might be better understood. Like people who talk louder when speaking English to a non Anglophile as if the louder the language is, the easier it is to understand, like talking to a dog.
To celebrate, although we had no idea that was the purpose when Alois led us from the apartment down the wide street to a pub table, we were compelled to get inebriated. The speed and subtle fury with which we drank through Clint Eastwood clenched teeth, the savagery with which we attack first the beers and then, as Alois became emboldened, calling the waiter over, going into a long monologue punctuated with laughter which could only have been asides to more serious business and then waiting expectantly as though the announcement of his first child were eminent, demonstrated to us the liquor and the glass – Becherovka, he taught patiently, draining it in a quick gulp and urging us to do the same.
There weren’t many in the restaurant yet and the few dwindlers carried on their own languages in whispering corners. One shot after another, chased with the beer which the waiter motored back and forth with a speedy predictability. A man was picking his teeth with his salad fork behind us. To the right, a pensioner couple were talking in hushed tones about the dog’s bowel movements and the speakers placed around the room in corners near the ceiling, purred some strange Bohemian folk music.
We were able to converse only by the limitations of the palm-sized Czech-English dictionary Albert carried with him every where. But what did it matter really? We weren’t saying anything important. Bonding like apes before language was invented, simply grunts and hand signals. I faded in and out of these communications, transported back again to Anastasia as though she were my homeland and the faintest whiff of home cooking sent me tumbling backwards down the stairs unable to break my fall.
We were in a café in Amsterdam. Café Hoppe in fact, the brown café I had come to frequent because the book seller across the road was particularly good and one of my favourite coffee shops was just around the corner. We were in Amsterdam for the day on the premise of scouting a few jazz clubs we would enquire about and perhaps line up a gig or two. Albert had stayed home nursing the last stages of a flu that had bedridden him for days.
We were sitting at an outside table as the scenery rolled past us like intricate waves peopled and dazzling with the enormity of anonymous humanity washing by. Anastasia had been recounting a morsel of her past – a recent past of course, I knew nothing about her, no story she told was older than a year as though she had only existed at once, out of nowhere, just beginning that evening in Paris when I’d first met her. But even still, it was a morsel, like a crumb from one of the biscuits they served with the koffie verkeert in the morning when just around the corner a baker was doing a bustling business.
The air was ripe with rain. Only that morning we’d been caught in a sudden downpour, soaked to the bone as we wandered through a museum and later snacked on apple pancakes washed down with black coffee. For hours it had cleared and now the clouds had returned, anxious to begin another hymnal of precipitation.
She was explaining one of the gigs that had gone wrong in Milan. The microphone had started feeding back inexplicably half way through her morose recalibration of Wild Is the Wind and the microphone started crackling briefly before the sound went out all together. She carried on with the song whilst the crowd murmured its distraction and Christ, she said, stirring her coffee absently, I felt as though I had just been fucked in some back alley and left lying in the road. What was I singing for? Nobody was paying attention? Those fucking people in Milan were all like that – transparent and shallow. Wonderful stylish clothes and ghouls lurking on the inside. They couldn’t wait to be distracted, time was wasting. Finally I stopped singing and walked off. A few cat calls followed. It was ok for them to ignore me but for me to ignore them, it was an insult. The manager tried to placate me but I was having none of it. I’ll never play in this shit hole again I remember screaming in French to the dumb Italian who was torn between the now-partisan crowd and me, the diva singer who was packing up her things to leave.
I aware of it, you know, she said coyly. I know how difficult I can be to work with. I’ve got to have everything just right and if there’s so much as a hair out of place on the trumpeter, I simply can’t stay focused. But this club had already had a week of me and a week of problems. Lighting was terrible, the air was damp and smelled like an auld whore with all those fancy women in their fashionable clothes. I felt like I was suffocating up there every night. Do you know what that’s like? Of course you don’t. You and Albert just play, you don’t give a shit. The walls could fall down around you like a poorly constructed theatre set and you probably wouldn’t even notice. Too damned drunk half the time, aren’t you?
Well anyway, that was it for the club. I told my manager I was through with Milan in general. I gave him an earful of the treachery that city had displayed throughout its history. And all the while he would pat my arm and my shoulder as though I were some mangy dog shivering in the cold. I wanted to punch him or scratch his face, leave him with a mark his jealous wife would ask about later that evening when he came home and stripped his sweaty clothes off of his garlic-laced body.
She lit another cigarette then, even though there was still the old one burning and then she stood up. Even thinking about it now brings back the anger. I really hated that place Witold. It’s so much nicer here. The people aren’t such….barbarians.
She took off for the bathroom, powder her nose or stare at her reflection in the mirror, whatever it was women did when they used the bathroom as an escape route. And whilst she was gone I sat there sipping my little glass of Amstel, looking over at the chair she had just been sitting in. I started imagining a day when she would be gone again and I would be seated like this on another sort of day like this in this very same café remembering just this precise moment with the empty chair but Anastasia still here, gone for only a few moments rather than months, sure to return from the bathroom composed again, apologising for worthless emotions and asking that we both have a glass or two of whiskey because she loves so much the peaty taste so and then we’d be taking off on another rollercoaster, drinking and talking until we were both obliterated, obligated to maintaining the high, bouncing from venue to venue as though the motion were the only thing holding us up.
But Alois and Albert were still there at the table, fumbling through conversation. We had our flat again. We had a home. Something for Anastasia to come back to, if she ever decided to come back again.
As for Albert, the nights were hell on him in a way. We were both out doing the business; mixing, drinking, floundering to grasp what people were saying and doing, prodigious and copious amounts of beer consuming led on by locals who only encouraged us with their own habits. Albert took it more to heart, particularly the Absinthe.
The name of this comes from the Greek, Dragan patiently informed us one night out after suddenly ordering a round of it with our beers. Dragan was a Croat who had moved to the hostel to help with the remodelling of the upper floors of the building the hostel was located in with the idea that the upper floors would also be converted into more dorms, more beds, more people. Imagine what those fat old, pinch-faced communist legged ladies thought of this as they snooped and scoffed, sniffed and snorted their displeasure at backpacking hedonists taking over their building, shouting and puking in the hallways on each floor at all hours, every night, year after year. The chokehold of Communism receded only to be replaced by an invasion of loud, boorish drunks who were there solely for the purpose of drinking and sleeping and fucking.
Dragan had been a graduate student in Shakespeare studies in Zagreb and for money, had come to Prague where a small cell of fellow Croats had established this hostel leaving him to ponder sonnets and plays whilst he hammered nails on dreary afternoons. He was sophisticated in a dark, knowing manner. The world around him was just history. He had seen it all in the making, he had loved and hated it. The worst moments were always just around the corner and no amount of brilliant literature or hours of classical music in little beer gardens were going to make those memories go away. Only the Absinthe.
Absinthe comes from from the word absinthion, which my understanding is means undrinkable in Greek, he continued, lighting a Start cigarette and gulping down a mouthful of Mestan . The French used to use it in Algeria in the 1830s to combat malaria.
The shots were lined up in front of us as his preamble continued.
Thereafter, Parisians took to it, moving from one café to the next during Green Hour, stinking of Absinthe. Wine became too expensive because of vineyard destructions created by some sort of insect and thus, the working class stopped drinking wine and moved on to Absinthe, far cheaper industrial alcohol. Toulouse-Lautrec was rumoured to have carried a hollow walking stick filled with a draught of it, sometimes adding shit to it like bitters, or wine, or champagne. But here we shall take it in a pure shot, without the boorish traditional burning sugar and spoon – just shots for men, straight down. He raised his thimble like glass of green liquid and urged it down with Albert and I following in dreadful pursuit.
And that night was a hoax, a deep mystery we were buried under. Nothing was recollectable. Dragan took us down all sorts of memory lanes, the ugliest stretches he could remember until even his own words, slurring and weighted, began to lose all meaning and thereafter it was all a blank save for the horrible waking the following afternoon, heads pounded, stomachs acidic and vomiting.
Thereafter, Albert was hooked on it as well, going off the rails several nights claiming it held hallucinogenic properties. He would sometimes sneak a few shots of it down quickly before practicing. My bass is my lover, he would proclaim reluctantly yet proudly. I am a bear and my bass is a bear and we live in this cave of a life, blablabla. Imagine trying to get rehearsals in with the bear and the bass bellowing in the cave of life. It wasn’t easy.
Problem is, Albert is a big man and when he begins to lose equilibrium he is like a tranquilised elephant, capable of crashing down on his side at any moment, regardless of what he crashes down upon. Two coffee tables broken in two that way. No matter how much he drank, Absinthe was the only thing that made him visibly intoxicated. I suppose I was right there along with him, I dunno, it’s hard to remember, ha.
Afternoons reading until the urge to crawl out and begin the night’s gradual unravelling until by early morning, leaning on his bass when the beer grew too heavy, and plucking out notes from his subconscious as the night sputtered to conclusion.
*****
And, as I’d hoped, the distraction of moving, the diversion of a new language, new culture, different people all conspired to rid me of the listlessness of emotion, which were catacombed and awaiting unearthing. Anastasia was in the background for far too many moments.
The flavour was bittersweet. She was there like a vague toothache that at times would throb and remind you of the potential pain and then in an instant gone again – there was too much stimuli around, too much of the culture’s aroma in every room, around every corner. And thus, there could be times when all was forgotten. There could be times when she could have passed through me and I’d not have noticed, committed to forgetting as though the effort itself weren’t a reminder.
On Sundays the little literary gatherings where everyone smugly played their roles as ex-pat geniuses. Albert and I sat in the back, drinking overpriced bottles of Budvar, chain smoking, wondering where all the talent went. Albert was affected by Anastasia’s disappearance almost as much as I was although his heart wasn’t as committed in the rubber room – her singing in Holland had given us instant credibility and without her we were out there, a desultory duet of double bass and tenor sax, insolubly brief, irreconcilably flat and uninspired as though all the confidence we’d gained initially had been punched out of us and there we were, bloodied and crawling in the streets again waiting for another break.
Anastasia had committed to memory all of what we had pandered to, effortlessly. Our confidence was shipwrecked and this remote island in an inaccessible city painted and stripped and painted again each night.
Maybe we should try and find another singer, Albert suggested one dreary afternoon where we’d spent unsociable hours pouring beers down in search of inspiration. Instead, it rained as we sat beneath a canopy and slurped, observant of the shapes passing before us.
What would be the point? We’re not going to find another Anastasia. I hated these sessions of pointless speculation that we so often rounded to on afternoons like this.
Well, I hate to be crass, but you’re not going to find another Anastasia. You’ve got something weird and clichéd invested in it. Infatuation, lost love, longing. I’m only yearning for another singer. It’s much easier. Perhaps if we did so you might find it distracting.
I keep up my writing campaign knowing how well it had worked from Utrecht. Afternoons after work, evading the ticket checkers from tram to tram until I’d made it back to the neighbourhood and slid easily into a chair at a boozy table at the far end of a bar room where the smoke and smut of blue collar fates had collected like a grime on the walls of buildings. The beer would arrive, the piece of paper scored and I would open a Czech study book and another, smaller notebook used to pen these waking thoughts of affairs from far away.
They weren’t devotional letters in word, the act of course bordered on zealotry, but I was careful to couch perceived emotions in innocuous terms as though I were writing to her about two people I knew, lovers I’d seen and deciphered and calculated. These bar rooms were safe. Populated by entirely male faces, there were no couples, no hand holding, no stolen moments of intimacy. And if an auld man would saunter over to my table with a beer in his hand curious about my pecking away in the notebook with a variety of pens, I would add the smudges of our stilted conversation between the lines which I constructed to depict Prague as anything but what it was; debaucherous, homely juxtapositions of insanity and mirage.
The only piece I didn’t hold back on was the truth that it wasn’t only I who wanted her back but Albert as well. We were struggling without her on stage. She knew of course, the legitimacy her vocals lent to our performances. We almost seemed competent once and now we were plucking away at an internal illness we couldn’t define. Colicky moments of inspiration were infrequent. We were lost. We needed her singing to charm as though we were performing in front of a crowd of cobras.
The truth was, we weren’t doing too badly. We’d enlisted a variety of musicians, one night to another, from a range of instruments, to come and play with us, add depth and perspective, round out our sound, however illegitimate it sounded in our ears.
But I didn’t let on in these letters to her. It was a struggle. We were eating crumbs when we weren’t pillaging our brains with beer and circular conversations in a language we didn’t understand. Come back to us and we can really stun this city. But Albert and I alone were bicycle mimes, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere.
And then perhaps like someone rubbing a magic charm over and over every day in the hopes something would come of it with these letters, eventually there was a scrap.
A postcard from Budapest. I am here for a two week tour, was all she wrote.
To me, a clear invitation and I didn’t bother waiting to contemplate it any further. I’d just gotten back from work and Albert was just warming up to a mid afternoon rant about wars and diseases and divine punishment and trying to drag me back around the corner for a few quick pints before we headed out for the night. He was pretending the postcard didn’t exist on the one hand, careful not to become too overanxious about the possibilities and twisting with curiosity on the other hand, wondering if this might be the beginning all over again.
I’ve no idea when the next train for Budapest is, I announced as I quickly threw what few clean clothes I had into a sack and busied myself with trying to calm down. In a matter of minutes I was packed and heading out the door. Good luck, Albert mumbled, waving half heartedly as though he didn’t expect to see me back.
The excitement was short-lived. The last train had departed two hours previous and the next one wasn’t until 7:30 the next morning. I returned to the flat, distraughtly calculating the postmark and a two week tour – how long into had she been when she’d finally decided to write? Where in Budapest would I find her with nary a clue?
*****
It was no simple jaunt, a 7 hour train ride to Budapest that saw me, heart gulping air almost entirely oblivious to the sanctity of arriving in a new city. I didn’t know how much time I had and I didn’t know where I was to begin looking for her. But it had to be fairly simple. Jazz club gigs couldn’t be too a plenty, I reasoned. The only question was finding where they were and who was playing.
The problem is, Anastasia had an odd tendency to sing under different names, depending on her mood. I knew this because she’d mentioned it off handedly one afternoon when we were rowing along the Oude Gracht. She was sat with her arms around her knees, looking up at me as though from an imagined world. Do you know how many different stage names I have, she asked. Of course not. I grunted and shrugged, rowing. Ten? She rolled her eyes and tried to catch a ray of sun that had suddenly showed itself from behind a cloud. Three. Depending on my mood. Do you think that’s how many moods I have, three? I shrugged again. I’ve seen at least five I smirked. But I’m expecting if it’s only three, the categories are rather broad.
They are. Up, down and indifferent.
And what are the names then? I started rowing faster, thinking we were nearing the Ledig Erf and how much I wanted to grab an indoor table before all the cyclists started showing up in their Lycra biking outfits. I could almost taste the wheat beer on my lips and see the chess board between us.
I’ll tell you one, she demurred. See if you can figure out which mood it represents. She closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head as though transforming herself, or preparing to transform herself. I thought how odd it might be if she spontaneously combusted and what I would do to put out the fire before the row boat went up like an aquatic box of kindling and I’d be forced into the canal, treading water and trying to gather up all her ashes.
Flavia Arbessi, she whispered, leaning forward as my body bent and pulled with the motion of the oars. I stopped rowing and the boat continued skimming along the surface with the momentum of my sweat. We drifted like that for a few moments silent as the sun slid back behind the stage above us and I attempted calculating the hidden symbolisms.
Flavia. Well let’s see, I debated. Isn’t the origin of the name Latin, for yellow? A blonde? More fun? Couldn’t be a down name. Yellow, blonde is too optimistic a colour isn’t it? On the other hand, perhaps you’re trying to establish a sense of irony with that stage name. Flavia in a depressive, suicidal mood…
She splashed water at me from the side of the boat. Why not indifferent, she demanded. We were just coming around the bend and I steered the boat towards the bank in preparation for unloading to the Ledig Erf. Because indifference would be symbolised by some sort of unisex name like Francis or Robin or something. I grabbed at the mooring and stood up out of the boat, holding out my hand to pull her up.
Well, I’d never use Francis or Robin for a stage name.
Why not? Robin, singing like a bird? Like little Edith Piaf?
Her nickname was the sparrow, not the robin.
Ok, I’ll guess Flavia is for your up mood then.
I pulled her onto the bank and then yanked the boat up behind her. So what’s the answer? She smiled sweetly, watching an approaching barge distractedly. I can’t say really. I’ll leave it for you to figure out some afternoon when you’re all by yourself and have nothing better to think about…
I didn’t have so much as guidebook to Budapest, knew nothing of the language, had no map and no idea where to begin. Looks like it’ll have to be the auld standby, I amused myself in thinking. The alcoholic’s tour guide, hitting the locals and trying to milk as much information as possible while watering my imagination with Hungarian beer. I didn’t even know what Hungarian beer tasted like. So many bridges to cross.
By evening I’d accumulated a map and the names and address of five different jazz clubs. I’d spent most of the late afternoon wandering around through crowds; picking out faces and noting each one of them was not her. Not surprising. What are the odds after all, to find a familiar face among the hidden random in a city of Hapsburgan bloodlines? For the purposes of distraction, I stepped into a wine bar marked by the dilapidated characters gathered inside.
There was an auld and fat peasant woman standing behind a table holding three different buckets of wine with ladles in them. I merely pointed and she filled up a plastic cup. Around me pensioners were smoking and playing cards. A few gypsy kids hung out by the lone arcade game, begging cigarettes from stragglers and entertaining themselves by imagining making millions in gun running. I drank a watery white wine, smoking distractedly, ignoring the fact I hadn’t bothered trying to find a place to sleep that night. I would put all my eggs in one basket. I would find Anastasia and stay with her. As long as it took.
But there was no Anastasia. I found that out after enquiries at three different jazz and blues clubs that ranged from seedy to opulent. She played here last night, the bartender in the third club informed me as he poured a German lager for me. Unbelievable voice. Haunting. She was here for nearly two weeks but I’m afraid you’ve missed her. Last night was the finale.
Of course the bartender had no idea where she was headed next. Do you know her, he asked suspiciously. A groupie, I explained half-heartedly, stung by the nearness of my miss for fuck’s sake. If I’d only caught yesterday afternoon’s train here, the story would have had a happy ending. Do you know where she was staying, I asked, grasping at straws. He shrugged. No idea, mate. But she sure had a lovely voice.
Back in the flat in Prague I returned empty-handed. Albert regarded me from behind a book with the walls vibrating with a Brahms concerto when I dragged myself home the following afternoon. What did you expect, really, he surmised. What is this, some movie you’re writing the ending to? C’mon. It was rather ingenious of her, wasn’t it? Close enough to smell but too far away to touch. How bittersweet for you.
What difference does it make? If she’s out on gigs that means she’s already doing well enough. Do you really imagine she’s going to come rushing back here breathlessly urging us for the chance to play together again as a trio?
What fucking difference indeed. Only my heart on a skewer. Heart kebab. Care for a taste? Marinated in futility, lightly salted and deep fried in false hope. We really should find another singer, Albert ventured hopefully. And where would we find a singer comparable to her? Are we just going to stumble upon someone as though the streets are lined with them?
We played a gig of our own a week later. My heart wasn’t in it. We’d both had far too much to drink before we’d gone on stage and if we’d been electric, they’d have pulled the plug. Instead, we were ignored. What’s worse than being ignored? Being forgotten? The conversations in the crowd only grew louder, hoping to drown us out.
We really should learn a few standards, Albert remarked one evening after we’d been drinking beer outside all afternoon listening to Coltrane from a small garden next door to us.
Standards?! Why so by comparison everyone will know how bad we are? I think we’re best sticking with being too bizarre to decipher. It’s our only strength.
One afternoon we ran into Pavel again. We hadn’t seen him since our first afternoon in Prague and we greeted him as though we’d grown up as neighbours and hadn’t seen each other since the erection of the Berlin wall. He was taken aback by our disproportionate enthusiasm. We were out of ideas.
I told you we could get together for a recital one afternoon, didn’t I, he reminisced as we bought another beer for him. That’s where all our bated breath was blowing towards, in fact. Anything different. He was game for it. I’ll invite Frantisek and Jiri and yes, we’ll all assemble in my flat like the auld days. Perhaps some Chopin to begin, then Thelonius then I dunno, perhaps some Stan Getz, what do you think?
But the afternoon never materialised. As we were to find out later, Jiri had died many years ago and Frantisek had immigrated to Paris a decade before. They were still in his head as though they were there, delusional. We came to an empty flat. No piano, no furniture. Just old newspapers and a cat keeping him company. Have a seat, he greeted enthusiastic and grateful, pushing the newspapers around as thought they were antique furniture pieces. He made us some tea and we sat quietly listening to the ticking of the clock. None of us mentioned the lack of the piano that had been promised. Albert stewed, still sweating from lugging the double bass all the way from our flat. No old musician friends.
It’s typical, he spat later on after we’d left and were back riding the tram, Albert crowded the midsection of the tram with his double bass, commuters staring at us angrily. It’s typical that every avenue we turn down, the despair gets wider. You think it’s a coincidence that Pavel as he described himself doesn’t exist? Ephemeral, like our music.
So we decided to forget gigs for awhile and concentrate on rehearsing instead.
I hadn’t left her behind in Paris and certainly not in Utrecht – there was no escaping. Prague was the diversion. My liberation from heartsickness drowned in nightly debauchery. No excuse, we know but at least I had one. Albert’s was more complex yet like a fur ball waiting to be hacked out. For me, it was Anastasia, haunting based on mere weeks of experience, yet haunting as bitterly and painfully as though she had been there all my life.
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 1732
...there was a lasting odour of doubt for months thereafter. Albert's despondent drinking blossomed for days at a time before wilting into empty political rhetoric and finally, asleep, snoring on the sofa, the burnt-out tip of his Winston still clenched between his index and middle finger. It rained for two weeks straight. A cold, gusty rain that turned the middle of October into an aura of bleak autumn dying into its winter that kept even the Shot Out Eye out of walking distance for several days in a row. Then we'd hire Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub for a fill. Jiri, the acne scarred teen who lived above the corner pub and often hung out in front of the Europa Hotel trying to convince tourists into guided literary tours of the old town. When we needed something, we'd stick our heads out the window and yell down at the corner. Since most of the time, Jiri was standing in front of the Europa Hotel smoking, practicing German from a Prague Guide phrase book Auf Deutsch.
We'd already read all the few paperbacks we had in the room twice. The cassettes and CDs had been played raw. Albert had the stand up bass and I had the horn and once in a while, when we'd had just the right balance of beer, cigarettes and instant coffee we cooked using only hot water from the tap, we’d improvise. There was a high-headedness, a mystical dizziness, a general gnawing of boredom like a bone ground within our teeth, a perpetual gloom punctuated by the open window and the hail hitting against the whipping drapes. It wasn't necessary to have been in Prague. A prison anywhere would have suited just the same. We'd outspent our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living on nubs. Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to roll. We had enough left over for several litres of beer, a kilo of sausage, two cups of tepid instant coffee and 11 cigarettes apiece each day for the rest of the month but nothing else. Albert was still decompressing from 12 years of intense television vision and the fact that the only source of entertainment in English he could get was listening to BBC, which he hated and ranted and raved about to no end some evenings, only served to raise the tensions, as though the 11 cigarette per diem didn't create enough tension as it was.
On Sundays we went to the neighbourhood theatre, a large garage-sized building down a winding driveway from a main apartment house with dirt floors and folding chairs run by a wide bodied and hard boiled old fat lady who grabbed at our crowns without preamble more than a grunt without looking up, nodding her head behind her in the general direction of the film. There were never more than three or four people inside. It felt like going to a state fair peep show, creepy and oily. The movie was always terrible. It was as painful as going to church and so in our roundabout way, we were paying our dues along with religious humanity, suffering along with the rest of them in solidarity but skipping masses and séances wherever they arose.
In many ways, it was the lack of events that made it most difficult. We lived like dogs, waiting for hours in anticipation of a ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked sausage with the same jar of horseradish. Then, just as abruptly the pleasure had begun it ended and the wave of euphoria receded and it was still raining and it was only two in the afternoon and there were only 3 cigarettes left. When it wasn't raining, I went out, no matter what time it was. I walked from one end to the other, fast and fogged with the anticipation of reaching the end, turning around and going back, outrunning the trams, looking into the windows with the old women staring back down at me. Fear of cultures clashing, the monuments against the sledgehammers, the pain against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighbourhood, while I didn't even know the nature of myself, the unpredictable actions were unnerving. There was no oasis and no abyss and the movement was meant to keep one afloat in between the two.
*****
One night I was finally able to convince Miroslav to allow us to open for a blues band scheduled to play the following Saturday evening. Most of the regulars in the Shot Out Eye had heard us play and were still confused enough about our talents that they hadn't formed a solid opinion against us yet. The illusion was still working and so long as Miroslav felt assured that our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing to let us try and entertain.
It seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when he opened. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus and we rode down as soon as we woke up.
You know you're not due to play until 10:00 o'clock tonight, don't you? he asked, still groggy, vaguely annoyed. Albert, with his arm around the bass case as though it were a drunken comrade, pushed past Miroslav and dragged the case behind him. I've been in that fucking apartment for eleven days straight. I need a shot of slivovice and a beer as soon as humanly possible.
While we drank beers at a leisurely yet steady pace, we played a best out of five chess tournament against each other. As people began filtering in, we used a clock and played one round after another of speed chess too fast to think, our hands a blur, our eyes, disinterestedly staring into thoughts only the robotic movements of our hands could decipher. The music was already louder than normal. It felt like a Mexican peyote séance with painted faces and dancing in between beers, hopping from foot to foot on the way to the bathrooms, trying not to spill the beer in the hand.
By six o'clock, we were already too impatient to play our normal route of slow and off key, the anti-jazz we wanted to portray it as, too hip and out of place to be anything but they might cautiously consider genius while at the same time weighing the distinct possibility that we had no idea what we were doing. The usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopaedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, had to be shortened considerably given the language barrier. So we had to play more music and talk less, leaving us with considerably fewer options at our disposal. There were the three set pieces we'd learned in Holland. We knew snatches of more traditional standards, snatches we would blend in all together haphazardly, like a tribute to musical sound bytes without any cohesion. But it was stunning. No one knew what we were saying, not even ourselves. I sang Berlitz lines from six different phrase books. I sang obscure American curses, commercial jingles, lines of Edgar Allen Poe. Whatever came into my head with the same organization of watching shit blow across a street on a windy day. Lyrical flotsam. Musical jetsam. By the end of the set, it was clear we'd fooled them. Miroslav slapped us on the back and handed us another shot of slovovice.
I'm relieved my friends. You didn't spoil the party. You didn't drive them away. We've witness a musical miracle! He laughed loudly and bitterly but it was all a show. He liked the sound of it. A musical miracle in the Shot Out Eye. The jazz vagabonds stuck in Prague, unable to extract themselves from a hedonistic scrum, had shown a modicum of worth for the first time in its two month existence. We weren't malingerers and leeches after all, not another pocket of touristic resistance to squelch. Now he wanted us to meet some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a beer, signalling to the waiter for another round. Now we'd never fucking leave.
*****
A few weeks later I'd finally scored a job at the American Business School teaching remedial English to a bunch of Serbian economics majors. This school was the spawn of the new independence of the Czech Republic, driven mad by the market to create English-speaking managers and automaton employees for multinational companies hungry for new human flesh in the new world be ushered in and I was delighted to play a part in wrecking those fertile little minds of future imperialists.
Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the Praha Holesovice train station café next to the school with Marshall, the American who ran the school's library, a patchwork collection of donated textbooks from military bases, socialist non fiction, and a smattering of Updike and detective novels that reflected his own taste's more than the students'.
The train station café served a watery goulash and bottles of Gambrinus and as Marshall would foment rebellions in his mind about library autonomy, unrealistic funding aspirations and snatches of his life as a Berkeley liberal who migrated once and for all out of the slobbering jaws of American capitalism only to find himself faced up against it again in even more sullied and contemptible forms.
A series of budget crisis had left the school in tatters, desperate for teachers of any walk and housed in a converted barn that reeked of cabbage all day long. The caretaker and his wife living on the ground floor and the stench of her gastrointestinal meals that made the thought of food unbearable.
During breaks, I would go outside with the students and smoke cigarettes. For the most part, I was ignored. I didn't like them very much myself and I think they sensed that. There was something about their aura of third world privilege that turned my stomach. They'd come here to find their peasants to look down at. There were plenty where they'd come from, but it must have gotten boring, mistreating the same servants over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at. But I was an anomaly. I wasn't one of them and I didn't step in from the scenery. I'd come from another planet. They didn't know what to make of it. I sensed that if I'd cursed more, if I thrown Yankee slang around in confusion parables about lust and capitalism, they might have warmed up to me a little but it was impossible. Each class was an endurance test. All I could think about was getting out, sneaking back on the tram, and riding around town reading my copy of one of the library's crappy novels for the third time. The other teachers were even worse than the students. They ran the spectrum from podgy, collegial buffoons from England to psychodramatic liberal arts graduates from large metropolitan areas in America. Everybody qualified to teach it seemed. What were my qualifications after all? A few forged documents Xeroxed at a local printers? I could have been a mass murderer on the lam for all they knew. It really didn't matter. As long as the students didn't complain about you, you were fine and as long as you let the students waste their time in whatever way they say fit while giving them the illusion of teaching them something meaningful they could manipulate in the future, they were satisfied.
But there were weird memories of Praha Holesovice station. Getting there was a dream with the names of stations recited mechanically in that sexy, Tolstoy cold female voice as we swept through on the yellow B line towards Northeast Prague: Křižíkova to Invalidovna to Palmovka and then Českomoravská, and at every stop, the pre-recorded chime would go off and then she would speak:
Unkonèit prosim, vystup a nastup, dvere se zaviraji., followed then by Pristi stanice – and then whatever station was next. I would tremble with delight at each word, wondering who this mysterious woman was, if she was an embittered ex-Communist living in a panelak flat somewhere in Zličín, chain smoking filter less Start cigarettes, staring out a rainy window, deep in thought about the wonder years.
After a ten minute walk, across Vrbenského, ending through a strange tunnel which ran underneath the tracks, I would arrive through the portal of Praha Holesovice into a dank corridor which housed the kiosk where the workman would gather in their ragged, blue jumpsuits stained an invisible brown matching the colour of the soot around them, chatting about the night before, some sipping acrid Turkish coffee and some others getting an early start on bottles of Gambrinus or Budvar, all smoking their filterless numbs fighting off the cold, the memory of a day that had already filtered through their subconscious in repetition.
I would order a coffee, find a metal chair and open up a small notebook, scribbling incoherent lines, hunched over like a cripple, pen in one hand, page held down with the other, small plastic cup of coffee steaming in front of me, dreaming lucidly of Anastasia as though she were sitting there across from me, wilting in the deep stench of the train station, patiently waiting for my return.
*****
When we weren’t mired in our own reckless hedonism, stretched out on the floor or sofa too exhausted to move, when we weren’t out drinking ourselves numb and acting like animals, we were actually able to find our pieces of peace during day long periods doing nothing.
Of course even nothing ended up being something. We lacked the creature comforts; the internet, cable television, books or female companionship thus we lived in a time warp of sorts. You can well imagine it shouldn’t be difficult for the average person to get through the day without drinking, but take away their sacred cable television, take away the children to distract and annoy them, take away hobbies to simultaneously dull and amuse their senses, take away the youthful indulgences of going on the prowl in search of mating partners and there really wasn’t a hell of a lot left.
I tried in earnest to kill time more quickly. I don’t even know why, really. Why did I want to kill time? I was in the prime of my life so to speak, expatriated and out in a thrilling city, musically untalented but still able to cobble together enough gigs to maintain a semblance of respectability, reasonably secure in a professorial sort of sense at the Anglo American College, and most of all, most daunting and destabilising – free. There is nothing worse than free time and I had too much of it. Oh sure, some swear they can use more of it, tons more of it – how can someone say they have too much free time? But it was true. Because free time was wasted on me. Idle time was just another excuse to wallow in misery. That’s how it is when you’re all knotted up in unquenchable infatuation waiting for those few moments in between all those hours and months when on an off-hand chance you just might run into Anastasia again. That was me.
Albert had no answer for me. He wasn’t infatuated. He often appeared to have no feelings at all. Fuck it and Who Cares, were his two pet phrases. You could throw the world of worries on his shoulders and he’d shrug it off and let it fall to the ground, fall to eternity. He was no Sisyphus. You’d never catch him pushing a rock up a mountain over and over again. He’d have never bothered. He’d light a Winston and look around for the nearest beer.
Take his beers and Winstons away from him however and I daresay you’d have a different person altogether.
Why would I want to go without smoking and drinking, he asked incredulously when I brought the subject up one day of what he’d do without them. Let’s just say, I said. Let’s just say they weren’t available, for whatever reason or other and you had to go without for a few weeks. What would you do then?
He shrugged, exhaling a long thin bluish stream of smoke as Lester Young’s Sometimes I’m Happy, a live recording, was blasting in the background to the dismay of the upstairs neighbour who occasionally pounded his floor, our ceiling with disgruntled futility. I’d go without drinking and smoking, he said simply. I mean after all, if it isn’t around, it isn’t around. I’d find another diversion. Take up knitting or play cards or go for a jog around the block.
Ha! You go for a jog? You’d collapse of a heart attack after the first half block!
He shrugged again. Then my problem of no cigarettes and no beer would be over.
*****
The other night I headed out to make my way for the Sunday evening open mic night at a different gathering. It was a poetry reading but consisting primarily of local Czechs, few if any of the dreaded expatriate blood spilling silly lines about drunken nights swimming in the Vlatava or some secret romance with a Czech girl in short skirts of questionable legal age. I had spent the afternoon reading an essay written by Havel for the underground cultural journal Jednou nohu wherein he describes people under the Communist regime as “nervous, anxious, irritated, or else they are apathetic.”
This was, he described, the stress of people living under the constant threat of Communism, people dealing with absurdity and nothingness brought on by totalitarianism.
And yet where was anyone different at any moment now? The foreigners were still the relaxed crowd, those unharried by the thought of waiting for someone to turn you in for an overheard conversation or an act of sabotage – the Czechs were eased in some quarters but the reality is that it is a hard yolk to shrug off, those years of history that never really officially existed. And how did that go on to explain my own certainly stressed-out face, my own preoccupation, not with a totalitarian regime, far from it, but the regime in my mind, the mind rotten without stories, simply filled with obsessions, destroying any semblance of peace waiting for the next postcard or another to pass without one.
That night before the reading I stopped off in a blue collar bar, a run down place populated by Gypsies and Slovakians living in Prague for the higher wages. They were all dirt and grunge, instruments of trade. I knocked back a few beers and surveyed the scene around me: filthy alcoholics miserable for another crown, drinking away the little pay they’d earned, those dream destinations of saving for home sewn into their livers like embroidered histories of failure.
It isn’t at all unusual to find a foreigner furloughed out to Prague who speaks barely any Czech. But I was unusual for the locale simply because tourists didn’t stray into pits like this, they remained the denizen of forgotten dark and dirty souls squelching tiny peeps of forgiveness as they drank away not their sorrows but the memories of the sorrows which ironically only led back up the same path back to the sorrows again. Some of them spoke broken English. Some of them spoke enough to ask me to buy them a beer knowing as they would immediately that I wasn’t one of them. But I wanted to protest that I was and couldn’t. Yes, my soul was ragged, yes, my stomach filled with drink, yes, misery and fatigue were also my companions but the difference that no time or place could overcome was that I was there by choice. It was no courage to summon up a few tales of infatuation hitting sour notes. It meant nothing to piss and moan my salary was barely enough to scratch out a living. I was there by choice, they by a destiny far deeper than mine. After all, what the hell would I be crying about, playing at the destitution of others, standing there pretending my heart sick was equal to their life sick that I had a chance and threw it out whilst they could only stand and watch, chanceless all along.
I bought beers for everyone to make up for it. Guilt, yes. I destroy myself for fun and what would these characters have given for half the chance to throw away? I held court via broken conversations of gibberish, half-English, half-Czech, with a little Dutch and German tossed in like kindling to a bonfire.
Gradually I was drawn in by Antonín, a man with a wife and two kids lost somewhere in the paradigm of time in a village called Vlkolinec where his father’s house had been burned down by Nazis in 1944. So he said. Why would he lie? And what was he doing here? Labour. Hard labour, dirty labour, honest labour for dishonest pay tossed away into the coffers of parasitical bar owners preying on the suffering of others. The pure misery of loneliness. I suppose that’s what attracted me to him, the filthy fingernails, unwashed hair, haphazard, cheap and dirty clothing and above all the eyes of misery, clouding from time to time with tears recounting how much he missed his family, how much he missed his village, how much he hated Prague, the slave chasing a dream he was drinking away even as he spoke.
Why should I feel sorry? For example, you come here to make a living, send the money home to the family and eventually, as the dream goes, return home a wealthier man or at least wait it out until another factory reopens. He hates the Czechs yet wanted his own country. Thus the split between the Czechs and the Slovaks. The haves and the have nots. And imagine the irony. Here is your freedom without even the consideration of making it a revolutionary struggle. Here you go, you Slovaks. Have your freedom and we’ll own the factories anyway, those that don’t get closed down and you’ll be stuck, thumbing your way to Prague looking for work, crying in your beer about the family you’ve lost never thinking for a moment that by overcoming misery you might find your future.
More disgusting still, where was my misery to match his? Missing parents who had the foresight at least to leave me a flat and enough money for rent to allow me to piss away an existence and drop out of school, lounge my afternoons in libraries pretending I wasn’t bourgeois, pretending my indifference was cool? What did I have to compare, as I matched him beer for beer in a hallucinogenic blur? An infatuation gone sour? What could I possibly offer by comparison as an excuse to piss it all away? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing and so I drank all the faster and bought him a beer along each time to match me. Goddamnit. One of us was going to be miserable and both of us were going to be happy. Several hours later we were standing in each other’s arms singing songs neither of us could remember, generations apart, lifetimes away, just two disgusting drunks consoling each other on the way to finding our own particular paths through the misery, real or imagined, actual or artificial.
Somehow I struggled to leave and make it to the reading. I was already quite late and when I entered, in the middle of a fragmented paean to the banning of Romanies from bathing in the local reservoir of a neighboring village, everyone looked up from their false reveries as I loudly requested another beer and slumped in the seat in the back. Why was I even here? This cultural yen for discovering the undiscoverable? Who were these poseurs anyway? Were they more valid in another language? Weren’t they all struggling with the same tiny yarn they pulled and pulled at obsessively seeking answers they had no questions for or else pretending they were pulling at the same tiny yarn that like me, might make them feel as though they were really suffering, really and truly suffering rather than standing up there in front of a bunch of put-ons waiting to give their little golf-claps of appreciation in the hopes that someone would recognize their genius, their suffering their uniqueness.
When there was an interim, some snotty intellectual with a robust opinion of himself meandered toward me in a non aggressive way and asked me politely why I was there, reeking of beer and cigarettes with nothing to say save for audible titters of ridicule dispensed like cheap critiques in slanderous sidebars.
I’m here to hear your suffering chirping out of your orifices, I mentioned casually, lighting another cigarette. This was followed by an uncomfortable grimace on this fellow’s face as though I had just loudly farted. I mean really, I stated, standing up, gaining steam. What is this charade; I demanded waving my arm in the direction of everyone and unintentionally slapping him on the side of the head. Then it all erupted. People jumped from their seats to squelch the vagabond I imagined myself having morphed into when in reality they all saw me for what I was: a drunk and cheap tourist taking advantage, killing their excuses, giving them reason to pity or disdain. A human goiter waiting to erupt. They all took turns grabbing at me, shoving me roughly over and over again until I reached the door and they shoved one last time, dumping me onto the sidewalk.
******
Holešice Jazz festival, cahier 1, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski October-November
Mikhail was a little droopy eyed as he stared at me over the chess board. We were hunkered down in the smoke clouds inside U Vystrelenyho oka, racing through .51 glasses of Mestan beer that kept coming and coming interrupted only on occasion by a shot of Absinthe. Mirek and Miroslav, from Uz Jsme Doma, were trying to interrupt our already wobbly match by shouting about Kafka and black humor over and over again in different accents. Uz Jsme Doma, I'd already been assured, had formed in 1985 in defiance of the Communist regime when they played music that was considered antisocial by the government, and for more than four years they performed in the Czech underground. Mikhail, on the other hand, was a jazz guitarist who worked in a music store part time and played around town with a variety of people who adhered to him and then fell away. Only the month before, we'd tried a quintet that failed miserably. Mikhail was really the only studied musician of the bunch. That's why he played around so often. Attracted hacks left and right then shedding them like a winter cold.
Mikhail kept staring at the chess board as if the longer he stared the longer the possibility would exist that the pieces might somehow rearrange themselves to his advantage. His crewcut drenched with the sweat of nausea. HIs face was mangled by a vague vertigo. He was no Zbynek Hrácek, for sure. I was up two pawns, a rook and a bishop. Mate, under the influence of less Mestan, would have probably been less than three moves away. My brain was lost, veering off the fox chase and running for the hills and I'd be lucky if mate was discovered at all. Mikhail pushed his finger out at his pieces and knocked the king over. Are you quitting? I demand about the speculative king down resignation. He looks at me deeper with those droopy eyes and shrugs. There is nothing for me here. he comments, finishing off his glass and standing up. Why don't you come with me to the HolešiceJazz festival? I am already playing and maybe there will be time for you on an alternative stage somewhere... He raises his eyebrows. somewhere where they won't notice you He whispers clandestinely.
**********
A few days later Mikhail, Albert and I are sitting on cold benches with a few bottles of beer at a suburban bus depot waiting for a ride to Holešice. A few old ladies and a school teacher going home for the weekend are waiting with us. The isolation is deafening. So did you hear more about our performance? Albert grumbles, lighting a no filter Start cigarette, coughing, red-faced and veins popping up in his forehead and looks expectantly at Mikhail. Absolutely! he nearly shouts, relieved to have a topic of good news to break the soul dragging silence hanging over us. The old ladies and the school teacher look over at us, accessing the level of our intoxication or insanity. I've spoken with Jiri about it and he is convinced we can promote you as some sort of expatriot avant garde jazz duo of blinding importance. He likes your new name, Stalin's Mother, it sounds more interesting than Deadbeat Conspiracy. He thinks it will draw people at least through the duration of a beer, no matter how horrible you sound. Mikhail says this matter-of-factly as though our ineptitude is so understood that even we should be convinced of it.
Well, it's a relief that I didn't lug this fucking bass with me for nothing Albert growled, giving the 6'5 tall bass carrier beside him an unfriendly jostle. He'd pissed and moaned about it ever since he woke up that morning. This is going to be one heavy fucking thing to drag around with me all weekend. he began while the coffee was brewing. Jesus christ, this thing is heavy! he exclaimed when we'd gotten on to the street and were headed for the tram. Getting it onto the train at rush hour brought even more frustrated fury, angry stares, bitching and complaining and cursing in languages no one was going to bother to try and understand. His only consolation was the kiosk where he bought several large bottles of beer. What a nightmare he sighed finally, gratefully gulping his first mouthful.
************
We got into Holešice as the sun was setting. The first matter of order of course, was to stop at the first pub we found, instruments and all, and kill some time with the locals. Mikhail, as this was his village after all, knew a lot if not most of the people ambling in for their typical Friday night-return-to-the-village-by-train beers before heading back off to their respective homes for dinner.
And as they came in Mikhail would call them over, introducing us as a puzzling jazz duo, a once in a lifetime chance to see jazz taken to its furthest, perhaps strangest parameters. We were in short, musical geniuses. People would nod appreciatively looking at us and our instruments, looking us up and down as though they wanted to touch us, these two masses of American flesh with the strange talents. Touch us to see not if we were real but to see if some of this magical aura of American might rub off on them for better or worse. We were after all, far from the raucous path of Prague overflowing like backed up toilets with expatriates and tourists. We were in this village, a novelty.
But we felt more like circus freaks inevitably. Come, look at the foreigners who will play at our little weekend festival, perform for us like circus bears. It was unnerving enough that Albert was making noises about wanting to go to Mikhail’s place, unload his gear and wash up from the ride in. After an hour or two of this benevolent but eccentric treatment Mikhail, perhaps sensing Albert’s uncharacteristic reluctance at drinking a seemingly incessant supply of beer, finally stood and announced without further preamble that the bill had been sorted and we would now go back to his house where his wife Elena, who had spent the better part of the afternoon brushing up on her English and preparing a vast array of rustic specialty Czech cuisine, would regale our palates and offer desultory conversation.
Upon arrival we met and greeted Elena, a stocky blonde of German/Bohemian origin naturally curious to discover this suddenly revealed spouse we’d never, in all our nights of chess and drinking together, heard mention of previously. It was strange to observe this vaguely domesticated version of Mikhail, who along the uphill march to his house, with a profusely sweating and swearing Albert slowing our march with his bass, had filled us in on the logistics of his past, revealing one breathless layer after another: the marriage and child at 20, the death of the child three years later under circumstances Mikhail did well to steer clear of, the marriage, hanging by a thread over remorse and unspoken accusations until Mikhail had taken the decision, spurred on by the news of a flat of a friend which had become available in Prague when the friend had moved in with his girlfriend, to move to Prague and then the subsequent job he’d found in the music shop, the stepping stone he’d hoped for a career in Prague as either a studio musician or leading a blues band. The subsequent years of drinking and playing music whilst the distance between himself and Elena, supplemented by once-monthly visits back home, narrowed and slowly their original love regained a second, tougher skin and whilst they were not considering living together on a full time basis, they had at least repaired, strand by strand, the initial emotions that had once brought them together in the first place.
It’s not been an easy several years, Mikhail intoned philosophically and reluctantly having let us in to his present by bringing us up to speed on his past as we stood on the crest of the hill overlooking the lights of the village below and smoking reflectively waiting as Albert trudged upward to reach us, huffing and puffing and cursing again our lack of transportation. But I think we’ve overcome the most difficult period we have been presented with and perhaps in a way these experiences have strengthened our relationship.
I looked at his face, imprecisely lit by the cherry of his cigarette, wondering at how different or rather how much more depth people have beneath their surfaces when they chose to let you peer down into the caverns of their histories and reveal to you their pasts, their losses and their fears. I got the impression he’d been withholding this information from us all these months not because he hadn’t trusted us but because matters of this nature were simply not relevant to our encounters and that now, having invited us there was really no way around it. Sure, he could have just revealed he was married and left it at that – perhaps we’d have wondered about the lack of children or why they lived in two different places, but these questions would have remained unanswered had he not taken the opportunity to reveal them voluntarily because it is certain we wouldn’t have thought to ask about them ourselves.
For that matter, all the years Albert and I had known each other had revealed very little about Albert’s past. Perhaps I wasn’t curious enough and had I bothered trying to reach beyond the stoic present I might have found within him as well, troubled pasts from roads beyond which led him to his current personality. We all were in fact, hiding from things or hiding things, information - not intentionally mind you, but all for the same reasons. Unless there was a reason to bring up pain it was better having left it unsaid in the first place. Perhaps that’s what friends are supposed to be for rather than simply revelling in the present but even for myself, the past wasn’t an issue that came up in the mind very often unless prompted. The present was all there was and the past had grown more distant, more obscure, perhaps even less believable as time moved on.
And now as we entered his home there was little we might have discerned about the past from the present. Elena greeted us with a kiss on each cheek, smiling radiantly with anticipation as our noses were filled with the unfamiliar scents of domesticity coming home; Tchaikovsky in the background, meats and dumplings bubbling in spices filling the air around us. Mikhail took us to the room Albert and I were to share, unspoken that this was once the room of the son who had not made it, the empty bunk beds in the corner a morbid reminder of what could have been. After showing off his collection of electric guitars, a Gibson in three of the four corners of the room and a framed Zappa poster from the Freak Out album with The Mothers of Invention, he left us to ourselves awhile, to clean up and unwind as he caught up with his wife and sorted out the evening’s plans.
This whole thing creeps me out, Albert confessed sotto voce as he leaned his bass against the bare wall, his cigarette-choked breath coming in gasps from the exertion and slowly found consolation on the lower bunk, his long legs stretching out over the edge of the bed. I didn’t say anything. Grunting non committally as I took the time to roll a cigarette and digest not just the journey and the history revealed but allowing a certain sudden angst of performing to swim over me.
First in that bar with all those people coming up to us like we were either lepers or gods and then all this business about Mikhail’s wife, the dead kid and shit, look at this, I’m probably lying on his bed. He didn’t move from the mattress in any event, rubbing his eyes and continued muttering, more to himself than to me.
It isn’t such a big deal, I exhaled, looking for an ashtray before realising I probably wouldn’t find one in the room of a dead child. I opened the window and ashed in the garden below. Besides, I’m starving and that food smelled like heaven.
No, it’s not a big deal, Witold. I’m just creeped out thinking about all that family planning going awry and sleeping in the bunk of a dead kid I never knew existed. Not to mention the triathlon of hiking up the fucking hill to this house, carrying that bass and trying to smoke all at the same time. Is it just me or does it feel to you like this weekend is going to be a disaster? I mean this festival is going to be packed with talented musicians and who are we? Two vagabonds with no talent trying to assimilate? What if we’re booed off stage?
I laughed to myself. What’s this emanating from the mouth of the great stoic, a smidgeon of pre show jitters? A dash of apprehension? Don’t go getting all human and sticky with emotions on me, Albert. It’s just a festival. Everyone will be drunk. We’ve played in festivals before. We won’t be booed off stage. The ghost of Mikhail’s child is not going to come haunting you tonight. This is supposed to be fun. We’re going to meet a lot of people, play music, listen to even better music, drink a lot of beer and just outside that door there’s a rustic Czech feast awaiting us. The way I see it, we’re doing just fine.
Albert grunted, hitting his head on the upper bunk as he moved to sit up, cursing and rubbing his head whilst reflexively reaching for his pack of Winstons, tapping out a cigarette and popping it between his lips. He got up gingerly, like an auld man in a nursing home and stood up finally to his full height, lighting his cigarette and joining me by the window. Yeah, I know Witold, I know. It’s no crisis. Just a passing fancy. You know, like once in awhile I want to know what it’s like to feel the illusion of being human. He laughed to himself which induced a brief coughing spasm, spat out a back throat full of bile and put his pork pie hat back atop his head. Then again, such visits are necessarily brief.
The meal was as good as advertised through the nostrils. By the time we’d entered the kitchen Mikhail was already sipping a beer and quickly poured out two large bottles into steins for us to join him. Elena proudly informed us we were about to engage in a typical Czech meal which, after months of a diet consisting primarily of fried cheese with chips from the Shot Out Eye, crunchy street stand sausages and black bread hunks, had our mouths watering before we’d even settled over our plates. First came the tangy meat broth flavoured with garlic followed by a sirloin of beef, which she explained as she filled our plates, was mixed with fried, cut vegetables with the sirloin interlarded with bacon, seasoned with pepper, a bay leaf, thyme, vinegar and a cranberry compote then baked before adding the fresh cream. She served this with dumplings and when it was all over, a combination of fresh berries and apple tart with powdered sugar.
Whilst eating we discussed our rationales for being in the Czech Republic in the first place, how we were finding life in Prague, what life in New York City had been like, and a further wide array of discourse on blues and literature wherein it was revealed by Elena that in addition to working as a physiotherapist, she had also been compiling a translation of Tom Waits lyrics into Czech which she had yet to complete but had already found a publisher for. Although you could sense the anticipation in the air it was not until we were sated and sat around the table in the kitchen puffing cigarettes and sipping her grandfather’s plum brandy with our belts loosened that she allowed herself the luxury of explaining her desire to go through particularly difficult passages of Tom Waits lyrics which she couldn’t possibly fathom a translation for.
Nor could we for that matter. Some phrases were simply untranslatable and even attempting to explain their meaning in English was virtually unthinkable. Imagine explaining the following, for example:
kick me up mt. baldy
throw me out in the fog
tear a hole in the jack pot
drive a stake through his heart
do a 100 on the grapevine
do a jump on the start
hang on st. christopher now don't let me go.
Oh sure, we could explain the context of St Christopher but even that she herself knew. Those little eyeball kick phrases however were simply too much. To counter, I suggested perhaps as difficult as making sense of some of Dylan Thomas’ more elusive phrasings. We felt guilty of course. Perhaps this was the entirety of our worth, an ability to transpose the incoherence of scattershot lyrics into a more palatable English but we were incapable and the plum brandy made it no easier.
All night long on the broken glass
livin in a medicine chest
mediteromanian hotel back
sprawled across a roll top desk
the monkey rode the blade on an
overhead fan
they paint the donkey blue if you pay
Eventually sensing the effort of milking information out of us was more trouble than it was worth, through a secret sign of understanding between even an estranged husband and wife, Mikhail announced that as soon as we finished our glasses we would go out for the evening to meet some of his friends, his fellow musicians, a cacophony of locals in a village suddenly flush with musicians from all over the region.
We trudged along the dark road back into town following Mikhail and Elena blindly relying upon their expertise to guide us through what we supposed would be yet another sullying night of debauchery. Since the meal, Albert had become much more animated as though his brain and mouth had taken that much longer to catch up with the arrival of his body and the inspiration of the food had been the facilitator. Or perhaps it was solely because the walk back to the village was all downhill, it was hard to say but I wasn’t going to interrupt it with questions.
The owner of the pub we went to was a giant of a man who went by the name of Karel. And I mean, literally a giant. He must have been nearly seven feet tall and easily weighed well over 300 pounds. The pub had been his grandfather’s, passed to his father, neither of whom stood over six feet five but Karel had continued to grow and once he’d decided to continue the family line of pub ownership he had the roof removed and the ceiling raised higher to facilitate movement. Otherwise, he stammered in broken English, I’d keep hitting my head and the bumps were growing too big. So as we entered to the right following introductions where Karel had saved us a long, thick wooden table and several of Mikhail’s mates were already supping their pilsners, we could appreciate the rationale behind the height of the ceiling, the addition of the second fire place to add extra heat to the room. In older times the ceilings were necessarily lower both because people were generally shorter five or ten generations before but also because the low ceilings allowed the rooms to heat more quickly and easily as there was less space to heat. Of course another advantage to the higher ceilings was that the room would be less smoky and considering the fastidiousness with which the patrons were chain smoking, this was a good thing indeed.
Pavel, Miroslav and Tomas were waiting along with their girlfriends and/or wives who sat gamely in expectation of meeting the new foreigners and to reunite with Mikhail and Elena who, she had confessed on the way down to the village, rarely went out save for the nights when Mikhail returned. Most of them spoke a smattering of English and when required, Mikhail and Elena could be counted upon to relay enquiries and comments from one language to another but in any event, Albert and I spent large amounts of time just taking the scene in of this homespun beer hall and the chaos of clattering beer mugs, waiters running back and forth adding and subtracting glasses, foreign laughter punctuated by loud expressions we couldn’t decipher and the smell of burning wood and burning tobacco hanging in the air.
As the night wore on it was decided, perhaps silently or perhaps simply in a language Albert and I didn't understand, that then women were all going to head back to their respective homes whilst the men were to continue on through the evening. We were going to a club where several of the festival musicians would be gathering to meet and greet and get drunk with abandon once loosed from the strangle holds of feminine parameters on intoxication and moderation, to obliviate and obscure, wind up and down, spin and crash.
By then my mind was already a flip switch remote control, reality and illusion. The beers had gone on holiday to the head, the others, I dunno, I didn't know, I was aware of the others but aware vaguely so. There were too many carnival attractions in the imagination, too much effort in walking without stumbling, taking in the darkness without any adjustment of the eyes.
And before I knew it we were entering a club, the club; a heaving scene of music and people planted and re-earthed from emerging villages, Slovakian and Bohemian cities, heaven and earth, clouds and graves and instead of settling in slowly taking in the madness, instead of flowing along with the river of new entrants through the front door, rather than holding hands with those that brought me there so as not to end up a simple toast of human flotsam, I made a beeline for a table filled with a mixture of young but grizzled men and leggy, laughter flowing women who radiated, vibrated, seemed itchy for my company.
Certainly this was an optical illusion, a trick of the mind, a boring requiem of the drunken ego singing louder than the internal accoustics would allow but this did not matter in this auto-focused intoxication mind, not infused as it was with the hyperventilation of the new, the congo of the coming festival banging in the mind, the kaleidoscope of unfamiliar faces plump and waiting to be picked from the bough.
Without realising, for that one out of body minute I had finally allowed myself to become disentangled from my near constant preoccupation with Anastasia and figuring perhaps that I owed nothing, I was in essence, free to explore. After all, exploring, as Albert often preached, meant exploring the native women as much as the native beer and perhaps there was particular girl who’d caught my eye but in any case, I’d broken off from the group, oblivious to where they were headed and made myself comfortable at the lone empty chair at this table where sat a particularly stunning brunette whose eye I’d caught and predictably, filled with drink, enflamed by a mixture of excitement and ego, swaying with anticipation, I immediately and perhaps stupidly decided to try out the smattering of Czech I’d learned to try and impress her.
Naturally she had no idea what I was talking about. I suppose I didn’t either. Something about the weather is fine, I’ll have another beer would you care to join me, or perhaps something that sounded far more vulgar, I’ve no idea. Suffice it to say that whatever it was, the manner in which I was addressing her immediately set off alarms in the wolf of the pack who wasted no time in leaping across the table, knocking beer mugs to the floor and grabbing me around the throat, his momentum carrying us both to the floor. I tried to bite at his arms, get a hold of a piece of flesh to ward off the sudden attack and wriggling beneath him I howled curses of incomprehension loudly in English, phrases I’d never uttered myself before but had heard many times on the streets of home.
I could feel my air being cut off regardless of how I struggled or perhaps more so because I did as the grip this guy had around my throat only tightened. And then just as suddenly as this attack had begun, my attacker was pulled off of me from above and it wasn’t until he was fully in the air that his grip around my neck finally loosened and was released and with incomprehension, I looked up to see Karel holding the attacker up by the throat and the attacker babbling apologies as Karel growled in Czech things I had no idea of. I slowly stood to my feet with the assistance of Mikhail and Albert whilst the attacker’s apologies moved from Czech to Karel to English to me.
I had no idea you were American, he effused. I thought you were some drunk trying to break into our table, a threat to us….let me buy you a beer, I’m sorry I attacked you, you must understand…
Relieved to no longer being choked, I shrugged, glancing out of the corner of my eye to the girl who had for a second anyway, been the object of my attention and slapped him lightly on the arm. No problem, I said calmly, cracking my neck with a sudden movement of my head from left to right. I’m sorry for interrupting the table like that without an introduction.
I don’t know what Karel had said to him but perhaps it was merely the shock of being hoisted up by the neck by the village’s infamous giant that calmed him, in any event, we all settled back to our tables and when I went back a half an hour or so later to buy my round, my attacker arrived at my side whilst I stood waiting at the bar, apologising again. He too was a musician, he confided. He would also be playing at this festival and he didn’t want me to get the wrong idea, see. He’d thought I was just some leering drunk causing trouble, you know how they are. I shrugged. You probably weren’t too far off the mark anyway, I confessed. In any event, let’s drink to the brotherhood of musicians. And the rest of the evening when our paths crossed we’d make our mutual apologies, confer about music, exchange favourite songs and generally attempt to remove whatever lingering memories of ugliness.
The following morning, how we got back, I dunno. I recall going back to Karel’s pub before dawn and having a few more beers before falling asleep with my head on the table and had no recollection whatsoever of Mikhail and Albert having to drag me back up the hill to the house, their laughter ringing in my dulled background ears at the attack on the American musician, sure to make all the local papers and fill the town with gossip for the weekend.
And I heard all about the following day as well after we’d had a little coffee, showered and headed back into town to the concert hall. Everyone who passed us seem to know me, waving a greeting or making a joke much to my chagrin. So it goes in a small village filled with strangers where news travels fast. Apparently nearly every performing musician had been in that club last night and every one of them had seen what had happened.
Nonetheless the excitement was tangible as we entered the empty hall with our instruments joining those already on stage, those performing in the early sets were already beginning to tune up, performing sound checks, sipping beer or coffee randomly.
*****
I thought I’d surprise you, she said nonchalantly with a smirk of expectation twisting at the corners of her mouth and what she was wearing, I have no idea – I could only stare at her face with incomprehension, a dream materialised before my eyes. I wasn’t sure how to introduce her to every body. My girlfriend, my muse, this chick I know? Hey everybody, I said clearing my throat to get their attention but also to attempt to mask the quaver in my simultaneously uncertain yet tentatively ecstatic voice which had appeared without warning like a stutter. This is Anastasia.
It’s funny, you think about someone so often and with such yearning that sometimes it’s difficult to conjure up an image of them. Sometimes it takes a moment of not thinking about them to remember their face, for example, not confuse them with someone else. I can’t tell you how often and how longingly I’d thought about her because it would be both boring and encyclopaedic to consider in full depth, but unlike the first time she appeared unannounced in Utrecht, I didn’t accept this arrival without question and unflinchingly. There were too many unanswered questions like what had happened to her in Utrecht that went beyond that stupid letter, how she’d discovered that I’d be in this little village on this weekend, how she’d gotten here and most importantly, why she was here to begin with.
But these questions were to go unanswered for the moment. I can’t say that I didn’t care, I most certainly did, but there are questions you sometimes don’t necessarily want to know the answers to and rather than spoil the surprise of her appearance immediately I preferred to push those questions to the back of my mind and accept her as instinctively I’d know she wanted to me to accept her – without question, without precondition and without asking for more, which is precisely how I played it. As I carried on talking, listening to her escapades in Torino, Budapest, Zagreb and Vienna, to name a few, I tried to imagine a selfless self that could simply wallow in her being here – to be grateful. She wanted to be treated as a crowd would treat her - appreciative for her appearance, mesmerised by her presence, tangled in her web. She preferred to be loved rather than possessed, I could see that plainly for the first time and the stage was the safest place from where to do it. I tried to imagine that if this was going to be the only time I would see her then I wanted it to be a memorable rather than a desperate or confused experience. Notwithstanding the notion that the last thing she’d come all this way and come to all this trouble for would be to listen to a puny man with his puerile notions of possession react in a vain and disdainful fashion instead of simple appreciation.
I wanted desperately to grab at her and caress her simultaneously and yet I felt oddly torn between loyalty and fear in addition to the uncertainty of how I should treat her, not just when we were alone but more importantly, in this public venue. And these thoughts allowed me to consider further the full implications of why she had chosen to appear when she had, here in a public place, a safe place where I wouldn’t intend on mauling her with my selfish, hungry hands or with my probing accusative questions.
I was swaying slightly both from the beer and excitement. I couldn’t very well leave the venue with our appearance due up in a short matter of time. Yes, there would be time later on to discuss things privately but for the moment, neither of us could go anywhere. So, are you here to play with us again, then? I finally managed to ask with a teasing smile but also with a hint of hope. I could tell those around us had been absorbing the entire expressionless encounter as though they’d known as much about us as Albert did and yet as impossible as it was, they too sensed something magical about this appearance. Not just the nature of surprise but the air of expectation.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Why don’t I have a glass of wine while I consider she asked, snuggling unexpectedly into my arms and smiling at the others. It’s been a long journey, she explained.
And so we finally had a few private moments over drink, clearing a table for ourselves in the front of the hall where others were hungrily wolfing down goulash and dumplings, slurping their beers and either revelling in the previous performance or talking excitedly about the one to follow.
In answer to how I knew you were here, I’d actually intended on surprising you in Prague. You see I’m on my way to a performance in Krakow, or I was at any rate. I’d taken the train from Paris and believe me, there wasn’t going to be a lot of time to prepare but once I was on the train I knew there was no way I could forgive myself if I didn’t stop in to see you. So I went to that place you mention being in so much, figuring you were more likely to be there than your own flat. I made a few enquiries about you two and it was then I found out that you would be here at this festival. This morning I woke up and decided to come, even though it’s out of my way and yes, even though it meant cancelling, much to the anger of my manager, the show which was scheduled for this evening. I still have to leave first thing for a show tomorrow night but I thought at least we’d have a little time together. I’ve missed you terribly Witold. I try to make it to Paris once a week just so I can go back to my flat and find all your letters waiting there and as soon as I pick them up, I get back on the train and go wherever the next performance is scheduled for with those letters bundled up to keep me comfort in all those days and nights in between. I’ve dreamt so often of being with you again that I can hardly believe it myself. Why else would I go to this much trouble to see you even knowing you are going to be preoccupied with the festival to properly relax in my arms and tell me more of all those wonderful things you write about in your letters.
But…if you miss me as much as you say, and not that I’m doubting it, Christ knows how often I’ve dreamt of hearing you tell me these exact things, still I can’t help but wonder, knowing as you do how willing I would be to drop everything and follow you, why you don’t just allow me to follow you on tour? That way we could see each other all the time. That way…
She held up her right hand, touching my wrist gently with her left. I could tell you a lot of stories, Witold. I could make up excuses, the strain it would put on me for my performances, the difficulty of the logistics, and yes, I would like nothing better than to have you at my beck and call, but the truth is, I’m far too afraid to allow you to accompany me. Afraid of what? You name it. Afraid of getting hurt, afraid of hurting you, afraid of disappointment, afraid of losing this incredible feeling I have reading your letters, knowing that every day you are somewhere out there thinking of me, dreaming of me. Do you have any idea what a comfort that is to me?
But why would you prefer it to the actual thing?
Quite simply because nothing, no one, not at the moment anyway, could live up to what you’ve created. I certainly am not the person you’ve imagined me to be, god knows, no one is really. I don’t want to discourage such infatuation but there are truths about me that might ruin your illusion of me and to be honest, I’d be crushed to find out that your illusion of me has been shattered. You see, it’s your dream of me that allows me to consider that I might just be worthy of such a dream. It’s what has allowed me to enjoy myself all these months in between. The knowledge that someone out there anyway thinks of me in the way you write about me, in a way no one has ever treated or considered me before. It isn’t your heart or my heart I’m afraid of breaking. It is that dream, yours and the one that yours allows me to hold on to. A tiny sliver of sanity.
Not that I need a definitive answer to this today, or even this month or any time in the near future but just to satisfy my curiosity, do you ever envision a time when you would allow yourself to reveal those things about yourself to me that you think would destroy the purity of my thoughts of you or has this illusion carried me as far as I’m ever going to be able to travel with it?
She smiled crookedly and took a sip of wine, her eyes never leaving mine. Her hand touched mine again. I’m glad you don’t ask that as a definitive question because if it were, I’m afraid I would have to tell you that it has carried you as far as it can but neither of us really wants to believe it and so why should we concern ourselves with killing it off before we’ve ever given it a chance? Are you in that much of a hurry to get on with your life? You see, this vagabond life you and your friend are living seems to fit so perfectly with my own. Had you been a young man on a career path looking for a wife to settle down and have kids with, had you been a man who knew what he wanted and wanted to take it without waiting, had you been childish and demanding, I’d have viewed you as an entirely different entity. But you aren’t. Time appears to be something you have plenty of and I would only ask, perhaps beg of you your patience, your recognition that you do in fact have plenty of time to allow this relationship to find its appropriate path rather than pushing it along ahead of schedule out of necessity or impatience. Can we agree on that for both our sakes? Patience?
I felt myself swelling with emotion – love, infatuation, illusion whatever it was I might choose to call it – I felt my hands quivering with joy and requited expectation. This was no ending, just a beginning. And yes, a strange beginning to be sure, but clearly a beginning and a promise. I squeezed her tiny hand as hard as I dared and kissed each knuckle on that hand gently, feeling that joy in every one sending us both quivering. Of course we can agree that, Anastasia. I will wait for you for as long as it takes.
Her face eased. She held her stare a moment longer before searching out my pack of tobacco and began rolling herself a cigarette. In that case, she said smiling, looking down and then looking back up at me and smiling again, I’d be happy to sing with you two today.
*****
Oh shit, I wanted to get up and dance and sing and hug and kiss every single face around me. I was losing my mind with rapture. Without little further preamble, I took her by the hand and we walked back out into the hall to the table Albert, Mikhail and the rest were sitting watching the performance. We sat down in the space created by several sliding over, hunched over the table in conference with Albert and began discussing the songs we would perform.
*****
A woman falls in love with her heart first, she told me, lighting a cigarette and sliding back in her seat further. Her head catches up with her heart eventually and then she is fully in love. But when she falls out of love, the opposite happens. Her head tells her first and then it is followed swiftly by the heart. One of women’s many mysterious and here I’ve deciphered it for you simply. The truth is, and I know this is going to sound much worse than it really is, yes, you are right. I have been sleeping with my manager. I have been, more precisely, my manager’s mistress. This manager discovered me, deflowered me and promised me the moon if only I would keep sleeping with him and you know, even though I didn’t really believe him, I slept with him anyway because I thought why not take a chance? Sure, he’ll probably forget any one of the hundred promises he made along the way and I’d end up feeling used and with nothing but a night or two of lousy sex but if I didn’t take the chance at least well…
In any case, he actually followed through with his promise. You know I thought all along, foolishly, that because he was married with children he was safe in a way. It would be a business sort of relationship with feckless sex thrown in as part of the deal. But he followed through with his promise not because he’d promised it but because he’d fallen in love with me. And each week he’d have new gigs for me, new excuses to follow me on the road, this is why, you see, that I couldn’t have you coming along on these tours with me – if you had that’d have been the end of it all. I had to carry on the illusion that he was the only one in my life, even if it made no sense logically, simply because he wanted to believe it himself. And then when I met you, this casual arrangement became more of an entanglement. It was almost as though he could sense my heart was in it even less than it had been before. I purposely wrote those postcards with not enough time for you to catch up to me not because I wanted to torture you but because I couldn’t allow you to arrive while I was still there, otherwise the gig would have been up. The manager would have know what he suspected all along, that I was in love with someone else and certainly in a fit of jealousy he would have cancelled all the rest of the performances. But I still wanted you to know I was thinking about you. I wanted you to know it desperately and yet I knew I couldn’t tell you the truth any more than I could tell him the truth. Do you see what a position I was trapped in? He was livid when I’d phoned him from Prague telling him I’d had to get off the train because I was feeling so poorly and had to take a day or two off. He was insane with jealousy. He wanted to come down on the first train and accompany me the rest of the way.
But…if you were good enough to perform in all of these places with him why couldn’t you have just gotten these gigs without him?
Ask yourself, Witold, where I was before I met him. Singing night after night after in the same beat up old places, getting older, going nowhere. I can’t kid myself. I’m not motivated just like that. I have a lot of insecurities about my singing, no matter what people tell me about my voice I can never bring myself to believe them. I simply don’t have the confidence to go out and seek my own venues and not enough motivation to seek out a proper agent or a proper manager. This one you see, just sort of fell into my lap so to speak. I know it’s a cliché to say that I only kept it from you because I didn’t want to hurt you but that in part, was the reason why. Sure, it was selfish on my part as well but I hadn’t planned on meeting you, had I? And I certainly hadn’t planned on falling in love with you.
Falling in love with me, I hissed with incomprehension. You fall in love with me to go on tour fucking someone else? Is that how people fall in love these days?
Unfortunately, that’s how adults fall in love when they’re already with someone else. Someone is always getting hurt in love, let’s not pretend that isn’t the case. It’s just a matter of who gets hurt first.
Billie Holiday- Ill be seeing you.
**********************************************************************************
The dictum from Nietszche goes along the lines of what doe not kill me makes me stronger. Under that premise, I've been growing stronger every day of my life since, to date, nothing has killed me yet. On the other hand, there have been plenty of moments when, placed in situations which seemed to at least hint at death, no strength was gained at all. The event would barely register, other than in the cosmic realm of possible outcomes, where one death resulted somewhere else for your having escaped.
There are times when the dying seems to be a gradually progressive motion as you could, if the mood fit, allow yourself a prolonged battle against the armies of depression. Those are the times when being alone feels the same as being around people because the people are just objects you cling to keep away the dread and panic and little to nothing of what they are saying is registering with you.
When Albert finally demurred, when he'd had enough, grown ill from the constant drinking and home sickness, it took him only a few moments upon reaching that realization, to decide he was going back. At first, I was secretly elated. After all, Albert had become like a sore that wouldn't heal. When he wasn't complaining, he was sleeping and when he wasn't sleeping, he was drinking, which, of course, led to the bitching and then to the sleeping. Traveling with him had become such an endeavor that we'd been rooted in Prague for several months solely in order to avoid relocating, uprooting, starting all over again. It was an easy city to lose track of time in. Hours became weeks and as one month passed into the next, it felt as though we'd only been awake for a few days at a time.
Without having made a conscious decision about it, I realized that even as Albert was planning his departure, I knew there wasn't going to be much left for me in Prague either. There wasn't going to be much of a future for The Deadbeat Conspiracy with just my beer coaster lyrics and lousy saxophone playing. So the question was, failing the excuse of touring around Europe playing music, what the hell was I going to be doing there?
Naturally, it was only a few days after Albert's departure that my descent into the daily dying began in earnest. It was only a matter of time before cash supplies dwindled and being stranded would be a fact of life instead of a romantic luxery. You can worry about money to no end when there is still a little left but once it begins dwindling down to nothing, the concerns seem to evaporate. What difference does it make? You are ready to surrender anyway. You are ready to sit motionless for days eating nothing, getting no visitors, falling asleep with every attempt to read or think.
Suppose… I spoke slowly, choosing my words with care, all of a sudden, just like that, and I snapped my fingers, we quit drinking? I can pour what's left of that little bottle down the drain and we can start from there. We make a resolution and stick to it, see, stay sober from now on, make a fresh start.
Albert stretched, stifling a yawn before placing the lip of the pint to his lips.
We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman Albert noted briefly, replacing the pint between his gnarled fingers with a cigarette.
Anastasia chimes, perhaps disgruntled: We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
I'm appalled: Why wont we sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt? Why wont we note the nocturnal vibrations of our wanderlust through drinks and despair?
*****
Different city, different street.
Otherwise, with half of my mortal coil still sitting in a bus depot in
Los Sueños begging spare change from vending machines, I'll applaud from
the distance.
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook four, page 113.
When you travel enough, spinning through a vortex of languages which have secretly imbedded their meanings in your subconscious there are times when you awake with a start in complete confusion about what it is you’re waking from.
I walk to a window overlooking a street viewed through a prism of rain, half-lit by street lamps, watching a man attempting to walk with a speedy nonchalance, newspaper folded over the top of his head, one arm up to hold the newspaper in place, the other swinging back and forth in desperate propulsion.
And only this morning I’d freed an insect of some sort from a spider’s web just under the bathroom sink wondering if I was doing the humane thing by rescuing it from it’s struggles and the slow, inevitable end to its existence or if I’d only been interfering like the spider’s little nosey neighbour, jobbing up the mechanisms of nature and the balance of the insect world.
I watched the man and his rain-spattered arm-swinging until he was gradually swallowed back up into the night further down the street.
Three days I’d been in this hotel in Bratislava on the mere rumour that Anastasia had been headed this way. And don’t think for a minute I didn’t have to hear an earful from Albert – the old, haven’t you learned your lesson yet speech he brought out every time one of her postcards arrived. She probably doesn’t even send them herself, he’d mused back in our grim and smoky flat on Husitská.
Certain enough, I wouldn’t find her sitting in this hotel room with its drab curtains and filthy carpets. Three days I’d been here already and having left only once since I’d arrived, gathering the strength to face her again, chain-smoking and staring at stains in the wallpaper, I had a good idea the courage was never going to come from anywhere other than a half dozen pints in the nearest pub. Then again, that wouldn’t have been courage, that’d have been drunken bravado, devil-may-care, feigned nonchalance as in oh, fancy running into you here in Bratislava, Anastasia.
There wasn’t any postcard. I dutifully informed Albert. The postcards came sporadically from different towns and cities, little clues and cryptic messages. At first, I’d drop everything and go looking for her, seized with some sudden and inexplicable desperation of knowing that if it wasn’t now, it wouldn’t ever be and how could I throw away that last chance without trying?
But the last chances never evolved, never materialised, never a trace of her. And a lot of these places were villages small enough that the locals would have immediately known who it was I was looking for if she’d been looking to be found or had in fact, been in the town at all to begin with. That’s why Albert had embraced his pet theory that it was all a colossal mind fuck of some kind, some sort of sadistic little game wherein she’d conspired with others, travellers perhaps who she knew would be going through that village or town who could write out these little postcards on her behalf, just to keep the game going.
It might have been a sound theory but for the fact that it was certainly her handwriting on those postcards and how does one after all, buy a tourist postcard from a village or town, write a message on it and post it all without ever having been there in the first place?
So that’s the way it had gone for the last six month, getting these postcards, rushing off to the village or town it came from, hanging around in public places, markets, squares, pubs, news agents, all in the vain hope of timing it just right. Maddening.
You get off the train with a burst of energy but after the first few hours turn up nothing the energy wears away and slowly it sinks in that the chance had been missed again. How could I be expected to stay one step ahead of her, to know instinctively where she would pop up next?
For a few weeks in August I thought I could detect a pattern in the postcards, or perhaps it was merely delusional, still, you have to try. Did the names of the villages and towns fall in alphabetical order, some geographic sequence, some cleverly disguised yet still breakable code? Not in any of the instances. One week it was Hungary, another it was Austria. The following month Slovenia, the month after that, Poland.
I was growing weary of the game, frustrated by my lack of success and then, when I’d overheard a conversation between two Czech Dixieland jazz musicians on the Charles Bridge talking about the little French girl with the beautiful voice having stopped by only a fortnight ago to sing with them, I crudely demanded to know what they were talking about.
After their initial huff at my intrusion they reluctantly shared a few tidbits with me about a little bird with a beautiful song in her voice stopping in for a few songs on her way to the train station for Bratislava.
Surely that couldn’t have been a plant. I never hung around the Charles Bridge any more, rarely even crossed it, so she’d not have left this clue for me here. No, it was certainly unintentional, coincidental, a twisting of fate I was meant to overhear and meant to act on.
But the moment I got off the train in Bratislava had come the crushing realisation that the situation was hopeless, the idea had been hare-brained. What if it hadn’t been her? Oh, certainly I grilled those two musicians on the Charles Bridge but good for details to try and ascertain with certainty that it was in fact her, but they didn’t know her name and who knew anyway, she might be using any name by then.
Even if it had been her, what was she doing in Prague at all anyway? And if she had been going to Bratislava in the first place, who’s to say she’d still be there at all. And if she was in Bratislava, where in the hell was I going to find her?
Nowhere, I thought to myself sitting on the edge of the creaking bed and rolling another cigarette. Not sat indoors never having left the hotel room paralysed by inertia or fear or the knowing futility of it all.
The only logical place to begin looking was music venues. Bars or cafes or pubs which had live music where she might be singing or might be looking for someone to sing with. A bird with a voice like hers had to sing, after all, craved the public attention, yearned for the recognition. It never should have been hard to begin with yet in all the little music venues he’d stormed into expectantly in all the little villages and towns, he had yet to overturn a single worm beneath the rock, had yet, not only to find her but to even find a trace of her having been there at all to begin with.
*************************************************************************************
SCENE AT THEIR MINOR CONCERT DESCRIBED BY AN INTERESTED ONLOOKER
No matter how thoughtful or inspired much of modern jazz is it is increasingly difficult to find musicians who don’t take themselves too seriously – the weight of history and the pressures of constant innovation fighting the fun at every step. One might do well to scan the horizon: the humor apparent in European jazz – Han Bennink tossing wooden kitchen spoons Misha Mengelberg’s way – has been well documented for some time, whether Americans have chosen to listen or not. No such fussy stuff here then, either, as Deadbeat Conspiracy a strange trio with meaty chops rips through a blistering set of high-octane, solo-intensive jazz; the muscular breadth of ideas matched only by the unadulterated exuberance of their execution. Anastasia X and crew have little truck with the spate of style wars currently fashionable, relying instead on the untested yet euphoric water of spontaneity. Often with a capital S.
Thankfully, then, it is with a certain audaciousness that Deadbeat Conspiracy comes out of the gate with fists raised, tempo topped out, tone tightened to an off-kilter acidity, and tongue-tying technical intricacies wrapped in the folds of every phrase. If not the most subtle approach, it is rare to find an opener with as much instant adrenaline delivery as Señor Dada, pistons pumping with sheer verbose force. In a sense, it is reminiscent of a bebop aesthetic in which flat-out fluency had to be proved first before one was given credence on a bandstand; in another very real sense, however, Anastasia X is a consummate enough singer to avoid the pitfalls such bop-based flurries inspired: the mindless, mile-a-minute mechanics of too many straight ahead discs on the market today If Witold comes out of a lineage anchored by Coltrane’s emotional urgency, it is motivated by the revolutions of Jackie McLean’s harmonic keening and tempered by the florid eloquence of Benny Carter’s supple resolutions. On the song Señor Dada,, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and most of all on Mussolini – the most startling virtuosic displays of the day – Witold is tethered around a pole of high tension, clearly inspired by his material and musical companions, playing the game of statement and substitution with such alacrity that the smile is nearly visible spreading across his breathless mouth.
Witold also acquits himself nicely, if less joyfully, on the slower numbers that add pacing to the show. Flanked by Anastasia X and Albert aan de Baas, Witold is able to surrender to a variety of moods, adding a much needed respite from the all-out assault launched during the disc’s most inspired moments.
Deadbeat Conspiracy of sympathetic soldiers is no exception to the club, offering challenging compositions attacked with a straightforward ingenuity, openness and outright joy. If not the most starling release of the year, it ranks among the most enjoyable, proof positive that stern-faced, bulky jazz music can snap to smiling, svelte shape in the hands of the right practitioner.
Wireless Mothers of Jesus
In other words, they only listen if
they've finished talking,
authoritative claptraps, saliva lips,
causing droopy eyes,
changing channels make believe
if they're
outside all day in cafes, sitting
sculpted into leather beneath
the sun, the old Madonnas
on cellphones, cellulite sweating
into the vast universe of important rules
they ignore in all their chatter.
and see something else to pinch himself awake again.
Anastasia was sick of road tours. I’ve been on the road for six months and only just arrived in Prague a few weeks ago. I just want to settle down for a few months, collect my wits, find some sense From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 1.3
The truth of the matter is, since we invested so little time in practicing, not wanting to ruin the momentum, the blossoming fraud of our performances, both on the stage, on the Charles Bridge, in alleyways, hiding from the local police, we had plenty of time to polish our drinking skills. In many ways, it was a test of wills for both of us. What joy we took in watching the waiters scurrying around with handfuls of beer glasses, four handles of four glasses in each hand like two fists of beer punching out towards us whenever our glasses began to take on the image of running low. And certainly we didn't care at all as he marked more little slashes across our scorecard that served as an indication of our bill. Everyone got these little slips of paper and you could always tell, by a glance at the slip of paper of another, just how far along they were in their journey to intoxication by noting how many little slashes they had scratched onto their slips of paper.
Everywhere we went, we drank until the pub closed. There were times, of course, when the pubs didn't close at all. The bartender would doze off sometime after four or five in the morning and we would still be seated, blathering away, drinking the beers, refilling them for ourselves when the need arose. How many Prague mornings we watched sailing over the top of the Vlatava River as we drank our beers, unconcerned, all but oblivious.
You might wonder what purpose it all served: we would have laughed long if you'd have asked us. Purpose? But then again, we might have settled down and told you that we were constantly embarking on an effort to forestall the future. Our days didn't operate like the majority of the people around us. We had nothing to do. No place in particular to go. We were working up a beery theory of the meaningless of time around us. We were burning hours like a pyro lights matches one after another, just for the sheer pleasure of it. We wouldn't be provoked by watches, by history, by futures. We were languishing in a sort of beer o'clock time frame in a hedonist city filled with well-meaning, yet futile drunks. The hand we were dealt. We weren't partaking in the pissing and moaning of life. We weren't comsumed with grocery lists, petty fears about dirty laundry, or wondering where our last meal went. Regardless of the question, the answer was always concise: beer.
The 24 Hour Party
There aren’t any alarm bells that go off when the body’s had enough. We could abuse ourselves five days and nights out of seven and a two day holiday of sofa camping, automotonic television, radio blaring simultaneously, stains accumulating, plates and pans piling up over the kitchen landscape like the blemishes of a skin rash on smooth skin, would be enough, ultimately, to recharge.
When enough’s enough, the signs are subtle yet persistent. The taste of tobacco goes bad and each consecutive roll up perpetuates, in a cycle interwoven of masochistic nihilism, the sense that each roll up is in and of itself a death sentence. It isn’t, of course. But the taste buds need a break. More salt and grease to scratch out the nicotine grime of the palate, like spraying twelve hour oven cleaner in your mouth and letting the foamy particles to do their work
And if it isn’t the tobacco, it’s the vague fatigue of the mind. Sluggish and feeling decades older within days is the way your thoughts shuffle along through the hours. Disjointed and yet feeling collective at the same time. Conversations we’d throw out into the middle of the front room, talking around the empty Chinese takeaway cartons and newspapers, would fold up and blow away before they’d been answered.
I’d go outside and marvel that society was still going on around me. Within the flat, one entombed world existed, punctuated by bouts of another reality going on outside the windows, television news, sirens down the road, the tram’s bell and the grinding of metal on metal as it executed its left turn on to STREET IN ZIZKOV.
Once outside the flat, it came at me in multi dimensions; the odours, the pattern of pedestrian footwork dancing around each other, sotto voce conversations briefly revealed in the brief seconds of passing them. You could be aware of yourself and hope at the same time you were blending in as anonymously as passersby. Who were all these people anyway? From whose wombs did they spring and why?
Usually the premise for leaving the flat was replenishment. Food stuffs, drinkable liquid, toilet paper. Walk past a few pubs and restaurants hoping none of the usual drunks saw you and climbed down from their stools or got up from their tables to chase you down the street inviting you to join them.
You can only mask alcoholism with social drinking for so long. Gradually, the drinking hours lengthen and deepen. And one by one, your compatriots drop off, to eat, to sleep, to coax sexual performances out of their partners, sometimes just to get away, and as these compatriots peel off like dead skin, the pool of drinkers grows smaller until it is merely a puddle of drunks who will carry the task on enthusiastically past dawn.
It is surreal to still be awake and drinking, a survivor of the night before, as workers scurry through their early mornings. If you happen to be trapped on the street, moving from one after hours dive to another, when these commuters let themselves from their houses and head off to the collective misery, it is like being trapped in a maze of somnambulists. Try talking to these people as they march on to their destinations: not a single one will give you the time of day. They are all either disgusted or envious when you confront them with beery breath, dressed in last night’s clothes, as though you were a temporary hallucination of theirs they wanted desperately to avoid facing, shake them from their heads and refill the subconscious with the inner nattering of daily preoccupations.
*****
Typically, on the nights no class was scheduled, I’d leave the office in the afternoon, take the tram back to Zizkov, always keeping a watchful eye out for the tram ticket warden, jump off and head immediately for a café. There was no dinner scheduled. There were no household items to purchase. There would be the paperback or a notebook for company. Set up camp at a table and then, watch the marks on the paper tab scratched off, one by one, beer after beer.
The café itself was of no consequence. I never spoke to the patrons. I never looked around except to stare out the window. I would drink the beer, chased with cigarettes, taking notes, writing letters, occasionally reading from whatever booked I’d nicked out of the school library that afternoon. But for the most part, I’d compose novella length letters to Anastasia, recording the minute details of the day, forcing the obligatory, devotional ramblings out of my pen as though they were written with my own blood through an eye dropper.
And when those events had been exhausted, a few more pints to round it off and then back to the flat. Albert would already be there most afternoons. He worked sporadically, picking up odd jobs around the neighbourhood. Moving and lifting, a scrape and paint job, renovation work that entailed moving rubble, brick and mortar in a wheelbarrow from the inside of a gutted frame to the dumpster in the street.
When he worked, he’d be sat there in the front room, still covered in whatever combination of dust, dirt, grease and paint that had clung to him during the course of the day. The headphones would be on, a small litter of beers would already be on the coffee table and floor and the room would be heavy with the haze of his smoke. Depending on what he was listening to, he’d either completely ignore my entrance as though it were just part of the hypnotic trance of the music that was banging into his eardrums, or take the headphones off and click the speakers back on so we’d both be covered in the music.
My days aren’t tough. Academic life, even the poor excuse for it at the College, was a phantom life in a physical world. Albert’s existence, the fact that he’d been out in the real world, shovelling, hauling, getting down and dirty, merely underscored the ghost-like existence I felt at the College. The only dirt I carried home with me from work was in my head, the filthy thoughts about Croatian co-eds in short skirts and long legs. There was no sense of self-respect in teaching there. It was like whoring in a cheap brothel. You got what you paid for. We weren’t paid much and in turn, we weren’t very astute teachers. There were no standards as there were in the physical world Albert pushed himself through for half the pay.
Albert knew it as well. It was a great theme for his pontificating whenever he’d get foamy-mouthed about the state of the world. Look at you, he’d say as I came through the doorway, my fingernails still reasonably clean, my clothes still reasonably fresh. How do you know you’ve even been working today? You look the same coming in as you did going out. Your shirt isn’t even wrinkled. Didn’t you sweat all day? Wasn’t there even a moment of intellectual anxiety enough to leave furrows of philosophic thought in your brow? You’ve taught future bureaucrats and landowners how to maintain their claw-hold on the throats of the working public, how to bleed them of their pay, how to tax them, how to feel slightly cultured while doing it. You’ve spent the day perpetuating a sick lie.
*****
I’m playing a chess match against Mikhail on the picnic table outside the Shot out Eye and the table is getting beerier as the hours go on. First one to win four matches wins and we’ve already been through eight matches without conclusion. It’s almost dark outside and the board is lit by candles around us. A few stand there in earnest, holding their beers, staring down at the table like gods overseeing a battlefield massacre.
POSTCARD SNAPSHOTS OF PRAGUE:
1. Our first public performance at the open mic night in the basement of Radost-FX. What about it? The room was painted with hangovers. We’d sat in on these Sunday sessions a few times already to get the feel for the place, see whether or not music was welcomed. Musical acts didn’t happen often and when they did, they were usually solo acoustic guitar numbers and usually not very pleasant to listen to so we had no reasonable expectation that our reception would be any worse.
As it turned out, it was met with stunned silence. As usual, no one knew whether they’d just heard something awful or incredible.
2. The crunchy sausages with mustard with a diamond-shaped napkin and a chunk of brown bread, eaten on the main boulevard with the hum of late night intoxicated sexuality dripping in the streets from the gutters and the eaves of clouded minds.
3. Sitting in the park near the hostel on a bench smoking a joint and staring up at the night sky.
4. Local pub we joined in late, four Czechs, one playing the guitar at the table as we sang Beatles songs wearing sun glasses and pounding our beer mugs on the table top like barbarians singing songs of mythology the night before pillaging the neighbouring village.
5.
*****
Most of these events won’t register as memory. Either they’re fed through a haze and don’t have any durable qualities or they become enlarged, poster-sized in the subconscious. They don’t stick for very long as they aren’t really memories at all, just events. Not unlike the walls of a construction site that get covered in concert announcement and new released music advertisements, glued up and then covered over, ripped down, graffiti’d on, spat at. No one remembers what poster was up two weeks ago. And similarly, I can’t remember what happened to myself two weeks ago. It’s not like we sit around a table reminiscing constantly like, remember this, remember that? No one cares because whatever it was, chances are it will be repeated in some form or another later in the day or that week or perhaps the next month and for a moment, a tiny light of recognition might go off and sputter out.
The tendency is to filter events so that they become almost unrecognisable save for those tiny moments. There is no filing system in our memories. It’s all scattered around on the inside like a hotel room that keeps having new guests without a maid to come in and clean up afterwards so that one person’s layer of existence left behind is quickly covered by the next and so on.
Is this how royalty greets the well-wishers that come, one by one, for a handshake and a few words? Imagine all the people who have the highlight of their life, I’ve met the King and here is the photo-moment to prove it, hung on the wall of their front rooms for all guests to ooh and aah over whilst the King has absolutely no recollection at all of having ever met them.
You hang out with your core, the regulars who join you at the table and the conversations begin again as though they’d never left off in the first place.
*****
After all those months of unreturned letters, there was bound to be an answer eventually. I hadn’t expected to just run into her outside the flat though, I have to admit.
Yet there she was, seated regally atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and when I finally returned to Paris, your letters were sitting there waiting for me, like an unfinished novel. For two straight days I read them all, word for word, stopping only to cat nap a few hours here and there. Your presence coursed through me like a hot shower. I decided to take the train here immediately.
*****
Albert wasn’t pleased with the addition of a new flat mate. We’ve barely any room in here as it is, he cringed, waiving his paw around the smoke-filled air of the studio.
But she can cook and she can sing, I rationalised.
Well, I don’t like this at all, he growled. Not at all. This is a fucking disaster.
*****
For several days, it was a lot of walking on eggshells. After all, Albert had found the flat and flats weren’t all that easy to come by. Especially not a cheap one like this. If he deemed the breach severe enough, he might just threaten us with having to find our own place and considering that despite work, the disposable income I disposed of so quickly came in large part from Albert’s personal injury account, this wouldn’t have been a good development at all.
How to pacify Albert was our theme for days. Anastasia suggested sleeping with him but the looming love triangle might prove even more daunting than finding our own flat.
In the end, it was several nights later, after Anastasia had joined us on stage for the first time, that Albert was convinced. The tension eased. Yeah, what the fuck, he explained. She’s a good cook and she even does the dishes afterwards.
*****
At the Shot out Eye, it was a bit of an event when Anastasia arrived. Not only was her presence a little breathtaking in the background of our norm, but her conversations never flowed with any of the others previous. It was like someone riding a bicycle in the middle of a tank parade. For weeks, we had complete strangers trying to join our table, lining up for the opportunity hours in advance, sometimes merely to get a glimpse of Anastasia.
After the first night she’d joined our performance performing the vocals, word spread quickly. Within weeks, we’d had offers for gigs all around Prague, and from as far away as Bratislava and Budapest.
*****
So what are we going to do with all these offers?
The three of us were sat in the train station café just outside the Anglo-American College and the vote was split.
Albert was sick of Prague, he insisted. After so many months, it should be time to move on. Prague was like quicksand and we were sinking rapidly. He had to get out of foundation, even it is just temporary.
My vote was a necessary abstention. I couldn’t side with Albert for risk of driving the newly arrived Anastasia away and I couldn’t side with Anastasia because my poverty level salary at the College wouldn’t afford the two of us our own flat without Albert’s personal injury fund to sustain us.
If I side with staying in Prague, I asked Albert, what would you do? If you are sick of Prague and merely want out, where would you go?
He puffed on his cigarette for several moments in silence. I can stay another month, but that’s it. Either we hit the road together or I hit the road alone.
*****
We didn't need a doctoral thesis to validate it. No one understood anything we said anyway, and we didn't understand them either. It was the perfect relationship.
Of course, when Anastasia would tire of whoring in Amsterdam, she inevitably made her way back to Prague to stay with us and that, I submit, was the only time Albert or I had to defend ourselves or our theories.
You guys look like you haven't left this place since I left she would comment like a disapproving den mother over a scout troop.
Is that supposed to pass as dialogue? Albert would ask. Then Anastasia would make a big show of ordering a bottlr of Moravian wine in a hideous castration of the Czech language, the waiter would look at her blankly, trying to decipher a translation, to what the fuck is she talking about? Albert had mastered the beer vocabulary. He'd even taken the trouble to learn grammatical agreement, depending on how many beers he was ordering, but beyond that, he knew nothing of the language and never bothered to try. But, like all linguistic dilemmas, it was easily solved when he would bring her a beer instead. They're all out of Moravian wine, I'd explain.
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 3.2,
...Is it ever possible? Were we merely illusionists with a talentlessness so relentless that it almost became convincing. What else could explain our presence on these stages, night after night, noisy pub after noisy pub? Was it stunned silence at something so horribly awry, they synapses misfired over and over, convincingly? We certainly couldn't believe it ourselves. And by some strange psychological victory, we'd been able to convince the others. Or confused them beyond healthy criticism. We began to accompany ourselves with three foot high inflatable chess pieces and had two volunteers play out famous matches on a 5 x 5 bedsheet painted as a chessboard. More confusion. The lyrics continued lifted out of foreign language obituary pages and stories of local interest plagerized as stanzas in a bizarre, low key baritone that sounded like scratching sandpaper with a two euro coin. Most importantly, the sax and the bass continued to play as basic and few chords as possible, applying repetition and sometimes extremely slow tempos to cover our lack of skill.
But a style that began with extremely minimalist tendancies slowly began to emerge as a spectacle large enough to divert attention from our increasingly frantic fear that eventually we would be found out. When Anastasia joined us with her compositions, her overbearing bossiness and clarinet, we responded with the chess matches recreated on stage, a few interpretive dancers we'd lifted from their classes with promises of popular relevancy, and a harp player.
May Day Besides the already mentioned beer and grilled bratwursts Czechs have a tradition a very much liked. Every girl and woman should be kissed under a bloomed cherry tree (but nowadays any bloomed tree whatsoever goes, too) so that she would not wither up during the year.
Most people don't belong together, she exhaled patiently. People ARE together because they have to be with somebody, one way or another...too lonely to accept solitude with a warm embrace like a lover coming home from the war...no, these people around us, and here she gesticulated wildly in an arc encompassing, one imagined the whole of humanity, not just the stray passerby who happened to be strolling within that imaginary arc they aren't comfortable being alone. They've seen too much television telling them in too many subtle ways, through sitcoms and chat shows and deodorant commercials, that it is their moral obligation in this society to be with someone, anyone - they've had it drummed into their skulls from the beginning...they won't accept anything less and when they wake up one morning wondering what they've done with their lives, who this person lying next to them is, who they get ready for work in the morning with, who they eat a silent dinner over the telly with is, by then, it's all too late. They realised too late...
She wasn't even talking to me, really, talking through me.
She got like that when the sores of society would bubble on her, get in her eyes, underneath her fingernails. There was always another tirade down the road, with Anastacia, you could predict that much, measure your time in the days between rants.
And it was always a sign that she was getting antsy, that she was preparing herself to start travelling again. Snip, snip, cut the ties.
I sat back silently as though savouring the wine, watching the smoke rings I blew upwards; my head tilted back slightly as I watched them slowly carry themselves upwards toward the ceiling and dissipate, my eyes focusing gradually on the present rather than a visionary's distance.
*****
It was May Day in Prague. Albert and I had a bet on to see who could stay off the piss the longest. Albert made it til ten o'clock that night.
Fuck it, he announced, standing up from the chair and away from the game of solitaire he'd been conducting silently for nearly two hours. You win. I'll buy the first beer.
There weren't many nights we weren't out, frankly. Prague is like that, a vortex drawing in the alcoholics and pretend poets and the blue collar Czechs from Zizkov. We were all there, nearly every night, playing cards, chess, music, holding conversations we imagined we were having only to realise that we were, flirting with drunker foreigners, chain smoking, enjoying the evening with the kind of pre-future nostalgia that made it seem like that evening was our last.
*****
Can I tell you a secret? she asked out of the blue as we were lying in bed, still clothed, the candles burning and the pot smoke hanging above us in a haze. I sat up for a moment, rubbing my eyes as though it were just morning and I'd had a good night's sleep. Sure, I answered non committally.
I want to leave. She didn't move as she spoke, just staring up at the ceiling. I want to leave tomorrow, get on a train and just end up somewhere else.
I hadn't been kidding myself too seriously. I knew this would ultimately be the natural score at the end of this match. She was too edgy to relax, pacing the room sometimes (no mean feat in such small quarters), drinking heavily as if to transport herself somewhere else, always somewhere else.
I can't say I didn't understand it although in my case it was more a case of inertia than any true longing to remain in one place for very long. Even Albert had talked aloud to himself about getting the fuck outta here... a few nights this month.
And I want you to come with me. she concluded, grabbing my hand.
*****
So the following morning, just after dawn and before we'd even had a coffee, we were walking down towards Hlavni Nadrazi to catch a train. Albert was annoyed that he wasn't invited but in the end, decided to go back to sleep anyway.
The gypsies were all out in force having slept off whatever they were on the night before that had them singing and dancing and holding their hungry babies in front of your face with one hand whilst the other hand was either upturned, palmward, or trying to reach into your pockets.
The funny thing is on the way down, we didn't spend a second talking about it. It was as though we were heading down to snatch a few klobasa and a beer first thing in the morning, as though this was yesterday or the day before.
We walked silently inside the station and Anastacia picked a window, mumbled things I couldn't hear from behind, pulled out a wad of unexpected cash and stepped back with two tickets.
So, where are we going? I hint,
Someplace you've never been. she replies with an excitement I imagined she would normally reserve for finding a hidden stash of catnip.
Awww, but I've been there already, like a hundred times! I exclaim just to throw her off guard for a moment and take away her suspicious, ruling hand.
I grab at the tickets and have a look. Low whistle.
Rome.
*****
The very first time the three of us were on stage simultaneously was at Jazz Club Železná.
After the first few times, Albert and I didn't get nervous anymore. We had butterflies and vomited often beforehand, but we weren't nervous.
With Anastasia joining us we were suddenly a trio, Albert and I had another aspect to overwhelm us with. But she had a sweet voice. Our music didn't even matter. We just tried to play as quietly in the background as possible.
And that first night we were all having a shot of slivovice for good luck when suddenly the canned music faded and someone got on the PA to announce, the infamously awkward, Deadbeat Conspiracy.
Muffled, half-hearted applause. Golf claps, really.
Albert stood there holding his bass, leaning backwards as though that bear of a bass would knock him over from the weight and the fourteen cans of beer that proceeded him. (He was done at thirteen but I told him it was unlucky, so he had another.)
I held the sax in front of me, staring at a fixed point above the heads of the crowd because I was terrified suddenly, gasping for water.
But Anastasia stepped out there with the dusty spotlight in front of her and she had her back to me: so when she began to sing, and if you could describe a voice as velvet and chocolate wrapped around a cherry you would have hers, slow and velvet caress, her voice bounced back from the walls past her and to Albert and I.
It wasn't hard to follow at all. I'd hit a low note every ten seconds or so, Albert plucked here and there when it seemed appropriate and before we knew it the place was absolutely silent.
The bartenders and waiters and kitchen help and doormen all stood there, transfixed by Anastasia’s voice.
We'd rehearsed all week at the walls in that little flat and had not even smelled a hint of the reaction. No fumbling with glasses and silverware, no more idle conversations breaking ice over and over, no more bottles opening or glasses slid across the wooden bar counter. Just Anastasia’s voice, like lying down on your back in the grass, closing your eyes to the sun.
When she was finished she just stood there as though waiting for us to start the next song. But before we'd even considered what next, the crowd had suddenly woken themselves, hooting and whistling, shouting, holding up their drinks. She brought the mic stand over in front of me.
Your turn. she announced, turning on her heel and taking a seat off to side of the stage.
ROME AND IN PURSUIT
page 116, cahier 3, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I arrived at Rome Stazioni Termini as dawn was breaking. Outside, the neighborhood sweltered with pickpockets and gangs of thieving children. Signore Antonio Pignatelli was supposed to meet me here and was nowhere to be found. A typical scene. I pulled out my tobacco and was just beginning to roll a cigarette when an English speaking cretin stepped toward me, calling my name gently. In his hand was a small cardboard sign that bore my name. He attempted to shake my hand, claiming he was Chuck, sent by Mr. Pignatelli to pick me up since Mr. Pignatelli had been delayed. Chuck appeared to be in his early thirties, sporting an unhealthy complexion, puny frame, round shoulders and a surprisingly prominent paunch. His hair, which looked as though it has been cropped by a pair of blunt shears, was very greasy. I could have filled a mason jar with the grease in his hair. His clothes were total grunge. A dirty nylon rucksack was crumpled at his feet like an abadoned baby. I wondered out loud why Antonio Pignatelli had sent such a seedy and slovenly looking guy to meet me. I'm the only guy he could find on such short notice who speaks English as my native tongue. he explained as he picked up the rucksack and led me by the elbow toward a cafe where we could sit for an espresso and some bread while we waited for Antonio to arrive.
As we sat there, another broken-English-speaker, who must have overheard our conversation, scuttled in from off the street toward us like a cockroach toward a pile of bread crusts and sugar. 'Allo, my name is Jirko he stammers and then asks us if either can spare a few euros for some paintings of his. He asks us both but of course, he is speaking only to me. Chuck doesn't look like he has any money. He looks like he'd be as likely as Jirko to be panhandling, perhaps more so. Jirko's lustreless hair matted in some kind of grease, or perhaps it is turpentine, judging from the smell. His fingers are paint-stained, the nails long and filthy. He too has a rucksack and from this one, he pulls out a few vague, almost hallucinatory charcol etchings, explaining all the while that he lives in a squalid condominium on the slummy eastern fringes of the city where he rents a small, damp room in the basement; broken down into the submission of poverty teaching haphazard english classes, giving black market tours of Rome to wary english language tourists charging 2 euros for an hour per. I wave him off, spitting to the side of his shoes and looking out for the waiter or someone to chase away these vagrants. Others are beginning to take notice, their vagrant, gypsy antennae picking up the scent of money in the neighborhood at this early hour.
Finally, Chuck loses his apathetic demeanor and waves the butter knife in the direction of Jirko and a few other slowly approaching vagrants. Get away fuckers! Liberty is not a release from all law, from all restraint! Crawl back into your sewers and gutters! Stay away I warn you or this distinguished gentleman with me will be forced to brandish his fire arm and fire it at you indiscriminantly!
He flops down next to me, smiling but a little sweaty. The sidewalks have cleared. One thing I've learned he begins, lighting a cigarette and flagging down the waiter impatiently, is that the consumerist impulse, even in junkies, drives us all toward personal satisfactions that we never quite experience without a solipsistic sense of loneliness hounding us. We may need love and self-opening in order to achieve genuine intimacy and commitment with even a few others.
The waiter arrives glancing at us and having heard the shouting, relieved but curious as to where the vagrants disappeared to. Chuck smiles, You see? he demands of the waiter, lighting a cigarette and coughing heavily. John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, that no one has a right to interfere with me for my own good, but only to prevent harm to others is now generally accepted. The streets are clear of riff raff. So bring us a pair of espressos, a bottle of Pernod and perhaps a few chunks of bread, rapidamente! senza ritardo!
Chuck continues, puffing on his cigarette proudly like a pimp. Signore Pignatelli has been looking forward to your visit. I don't expect this delay should be long. He's had some difficulties lately with potentially destructive ideals but frankly, I think the worst is over. If he hasn't arrived within the half hour, I'll take you to a fine pensione I know of only a few blocks from here.
What exactly are these 'difficulties' you speak of? I ask with only a vague sense of curiosity. The espresso has arrived and it's aroma overtakes me, overtakes the smell of pigeons and unwashed sidewalks. Train station neighborhoods always smell the same. Like poverty and ammonia mixed with illicit sex and stale urine.
Well, I'm no shrink, but I think he has to stop looking for salvation to come to him from somewhere else, from above. Instead, I suggested to him only yesterday, he should seek to reconcile with reality. After all, there is no external measure of the meaningfulness of our lives and practices. He wallows in his insignificance, the meaningless of his life, and it paralyses him at times with terrible fits of depression. I slipped him a mild amphetamine sulphate. I'm sure he'll be ok in a little while. Then he'll come to pick you up and everything will continue on as planned. Chuck stared at his fingernails awhile as I thought about how Mr. Pignatelli's affliction might affect his ability to help me locate some leads about Anastasia. It didn't look good. I cursed loudly to myself, much to Chuck's surprise, who took up a defensive Yang Tai Chi position on the other end of the table.
Sorry about that. I'm just a little annoyed at having come all the way from Kaunas and a meeting with the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin regarding a concert to be performed in the Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, only to find out now that Mr. Pignatelli is suffering from some sort of dysthymia or bipolar disorder. I was urgently counting on his assistance.
Don't worry about it. Chuck assured, picking up his rucksack and rifling through it for a few scraps of paper which he handed over to me. These are the remains of the records of his therapeutic foster home stay. It suggests only a minor depressive disorder brought on by the ill-advised use of estrogen which he'd hoped would improve the somatic and mild depressive symptoms but in the end, only seemed to fuck up his system worse. He should be completely recovered in a matter of days, perhaps weeks, but for the time being, so long as he's jacked up with a little Japanese shabu or alot of caffeine, he's fine for long periods of time. Whatever he's supposed to help you with, I'm certain he'll be functional for long enough periods of time to assist you. Believe me, if he couldn't, he wouldn't have invited you here.
Just then there was a jaunty horn honking from the street as a dioxazine purple Alfa Romeo 156 GTA pulled up to the curb with Antonio's delicate hand waving out the driver's side window. He lept from the car, the engine still idling, and shouted out greetings to both of us. Witold! Chuck! What great fortune that I've finally found you! I was caught up in an accident with a chestnut roaster and got caught up in the irrisistable, musky fragrants of the chestuts on Via Nazionale and then stopped for a few moments of reflection where Mussolini used to harangue the crowds from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. I feel like a tourist again! What a morning!
He quickly grabbed my bags and tossed them into the trunk of the Alfa Romeo and motioned me into the passenger's seat. Chuck! he screeched. Meet us at the New Mississippi Jazz Club on Borgo Angelico tonight around 10! Bring Adriana and Camelia with you! As I carefully folded my legs in the passenger seat, Antonio fell in behind the steering wheel, yanked the car into gear and floored it, yanking me backwards. We were on our way to what Antonio told me in very speedy explanation was his September home in Rome. First, a quick bite to eat, a few bottles of wine, a nap and then we would get down to business...
random page sifting, cahier 2, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I knew the 19 hour ride on the EuroNight car from Roma Termini to Budapest-Deli station was going to be an exercise of endurance, a tag team of piecemeal and useless conversations with peripatetic strangers wandering through the hallways of the cars at all hours having nothing in their own lack of imagination better to converse about than the weather we were unable to experience and an international goulash of political expostulations and petty griping.
When I was able to elude the strangers, I'd stare into the blackness of what seemed an endless, dispassionate tenebrosity Emilia-Romagna countryside staring back at me. For hours I did nothing but chain smoke and cleanse my palate with warm cola. There was, of course, the Buescher Aristocrat, but the moment I'd touch the reed to my lips and begin even the faintest alternations of strident and mellow tones the neighboring passengers erupted into immediate and obdurate, brick wall protests of noiselessness and sleep.
Having anticipated this, especially for those long hours with nothing but the chain smoking and the warm beer preventing me from sleeping, I'd brought along a bookbag gorged with internet cafe printouts on subjects ranging from the Mandelbaum translations of Dante's Purgatorio to obscure American government statistical guidebooks. Nevertheless, the journey was doomed to bring with it an unendearing sense of time and layers of peeling consciousness, through the cosmos and back again all the while fraught with the bristling chaos of the Anastasia restrospective slipping in and out of my vision which could not be escaped.
By the time we'd pulled into Bologna Centrale for a long layover, as a diversion, I'd already begun a laborious, ball-breaking study in thought about time travel and how it could, in some instances, mirror regular, geographic travel. I still had the internet printout of the U.S. Department of Labor Handbook of Labor Statistics measuring the value of money back then using the consumer price index calculated by some strange index of prices paid by Vermont farmers for family living (2002 Price = 1850 Price x (2002 CPI / 1850 CPI).
Taking that equation, I spent many bouncy hours on the rails calculating things like how my 10 cents in 1833 would be worth around $2.00 today until my head hurt. Why 1833, I'm not sure. It seemed to hold some symmetry for me which couldn't be rehearsed. By dawn, as we crept toward the Austrian border, energized by a few swigs of grappa from the flask inside my rucksack, I'd figured that if I take $200 of today's money and travel in time to 1833, I'd have the today's equivalent of about $4,000 to work with.
I wasn't sure where this line of thinking was going to take me. Wishful thinking for four grand was one thing but wondering what I reason I'd have to be on a train a place that wasn't even yet called Budapest yet in 1833, disquisitive about what the hell would be going in 1833 and what my role in it would be. Slowly, wishing I'd printed out deeper history of the breadbasket of the Habsburg Empire, the weaving and rolling had its somnolent effect and it wasn't long before I'd fallen asleep to the lullaby rocking of the train as we moved through the Kärnten province.
Either waking from a dream, or thrust into the middle of it, (difficult to discern through the haze of the morning fog), it seemed Balzac was seated next to me, smirking noiselessly, but staring openly.
Good morning I muttered unsteadily. He looked a little dishevelled himself, a little pudgier than the Louis Boulanger portrait, wild-haired and determined, staring me down his little moustache twitching like the whiskers of a rodent. It was as though I'd interrupted him in mid-conversation with himself as he continued pointing out that while he wasn't deep, he was very wide and how he would create a new style of realism by portraying the present.
Thinking quickly, I remind him that Georg Lukács was to say that he'd passed from the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present as history, and christ, Lukás wasn't even born until 52 years later.
Balzac barely paid me any attention. He went on, giving elegies on the irreparable decay of good society and his idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books.
He gives me a copy of Le médecin de campagne, which he said he would publish that year in Paris. I thumb through it quickly about a doctor who has given up his mistress and then learns that she died giving birth to his son and then decides to devote his life to working with the poor. Geez, I tell him, shaking my head, why are you guys in 19th century France always portraying the peasants as degenerates and cretins? What kind of predictable sociopathological discourse is this?
Balzac stares at me a moment, a vague disgust in his eyes as he speaks: An idiocy of rural life. The rural population was helpless. They needed rational authority which they did not themselves possess, to improve their situation. They were like children. They were hopelessly backwards and required massive state intervention to bring them up to the modern age. he clears his throat and continues: Besides the plot, regard how l am interested in the lives of typical, every day people, like an anthropologist. I don't care about these common histories of nations and political and public figures the world scribbles on about without definition and contrast...Do not all these solve the difficult literary problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?
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1833 was also the building of the Petõfi Bridge and when Strauss' father was taking his first concert trip to Budapest.
How many Forints would four grand be? How much pörkölt and gulyás?
It didn't matter. I was going solely for Jazz Days, headed in September for Debrecen where they held Hungary's top jazz festival. Of course, I was hoping Anastasia would change her mind and meet me there. It was a daft hope, devoid of reality.
Czech – Jarmila and Karel.
Pigeon hole Karel Hynek Macha as imitator of Byron.
Macha: Czech girls, pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
GM Hopkins wrote a good deal of spiritual, sensual poems?
Not until 30 years after his death his poems were published. (1918)
no appreciation for the ordinary individual
Czech is the fifth European vernacular language after French, Italian, Catalan and Dutch into which the Bible was translated.
philosophical amazement at undestructability of existence in nature.
Hopkins saw the whole world as barbarous in beauty to him, everything was charged with the grandeur of god.
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