The Prague we finally reached that night existed in the fleeting decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of the Czech capital as a tourist destination. Today, the booming vacation rental industry has converted the entirety of Prague’s enchanting medieval center into temporary housing for well-to-do vacationers and foreign businesspeople. The Czechs who actually remain in their priced-out metropolis—now so crammed with tourists that it is difficult to see a cobblestone under your feet or hear a word of Czech in the out-of-doors—live in the substantially less postcard-friendly outer districts. These are often the Soviet-constructed paneláky, or “panel-housing,” veritable forests of cement and cinder-block high-rises, erected in great haste and constructed primarily out of asbestos and frigid resignation.
Prague’s metamorphosis since the end of the Cold War has, in many ways, been as visceral and grotesque as Gregor Samsa’s. The very qualities that make the place a must-visit have made it all but unrecognizable to its own people. In the “city of a thousand spires”—famous for its buildings dating back to the eleventh century, its stunning castle on a hill, its mist-shrouded bridges and narrow, haunting maze of winding alleys—precisely all of these seductive elements have enticed all manner of overpriced tourist traps into the prime real estate (including but not limited to a TGI Friday’s). Many an astute literary theorist has suggested that in The Metamorphosis, it’s the Samsas’ gleeful participation in the dehumanizing capitalism of the industrializing continent that causes Gregor’s transformation in the first place—and so it is only fitting that the haunting city of Gregor’s creator has itself in recent decades transformed into a monstrous creature of post–Cold War commerce, a shell of its former self, all but uninhabitable by its inhabitants.
This live-action Disney postcard was but a far-off glimmer in the EU’s future when Freddie, Justin, Layla, and I finally disembarked at the main train station—in true Prague form, half art nouveau masterpiece and half squat concrete Soviet terror—and bade our corduroy-blaspheming compatriots a silent, glowering farewell (in my case). We had no place to stay. But, despite the incredulous protestations of my friends, I knew we would soon. The tourist trade in what had until only very recently been the iron-curtained-off capital of Czechoslovakia was in its infancy, and as such the youth-hostel scene was largely limited to official Hostelling International setups, complete with curfews, lockouts, sex separation, and, most importantly, an average occupant age of eleven due to the omnipresent school groups (who were always accompanied by mid-forties teachers of each sex, who looked like they were about to die).
While the city’s bevy of old-school one- and two-star hotels would have been a boon to a group of functioning adults, our five-dollar-a-day housing budget precluded such luxury, and we were left with Prague’s only true bargain hospitality option, an analog precursor to Airbnb that has sadly gone the way of other vestiges of post-Soviet underground commerce. What I mean is, if you were a nineties university student traveling on a shoestring to any recently “opened” jewel of the former Eastern Bloc, you disembarked from your train to find a row of earnest, shabby-looking guys brandishing reasonable command of English and incomprehensible maps, asking if you needed accommodation. And you said yes, because this was actually a safe, economical, and culturally appropriate form of lodging. And, after a guy showed you a few generic pictures of a flat all decked out in 1970s-issue Communist finery, and quoted you a price of twenty U.S. dollars per night for quadruple occupancy (cash only, and please do pay in dollars or deutsche marks; our currency is unstable), you got into a tiny car with this complete stranger and let him drive you through a strange city in the pitch dark until you reached an ancient, crumbling apartment building, and hiked up seven flights of stairs to a flat belonging to a local family, who had sequestered themselves in a few out-of-sight rooms.
Although the stay-with-a-stranger scheme was generally safe, there were still a few ways the Czechs took advantage of Western idiots such as myself. Pickpocketing had not yet reached the celebrated Prague art form it is today, but only because there were already so many other legitimate avenues for ripping off tourists, such as tacking on massive “bread charges” and service fees to restaurant meals of fried cheese and beer (in Czech on the bill, of course), or pricing souvenirs at random. But the exchange rate was so brutally in our favor that getting ripped off in Prague for three days straight still cost less than one meal in Germany, and so, like the tacky Western idiots we were, my friends and I bought up the whole town, crowing all the while about just how cheap everything was.
I singlehandedly and with tremendous glee wiped out the entire wares of the Franz Kafka Museum, which at that point was a one-room affair run by two ancient Jewish ladies—probably the two last surviving speakers of the Prague German dialect in the city—whose exhibit consisted in its entirety of German and Czech first editions of The Metamorphosis, plus one hairbrush that might or might not have belonged to Him. The whole lot in the souvenir section—five books each in English and German, three posters, one set of postcards—probably cost me less than twenty dollars, and I could not have been more pleased with myself.
I mean, sure, I was as much of a crass Western colonialist as the other backpackers snickering about one-dollar packs of cigarettes and fifty-cent beers, but at least I was colonizing in the name of the greatest writer in history—whose craggy, Gellneresque visage stared out from coffee mugs, T-shirts, posters, magnets; everything but books, and I bought them all. I also, of course, bought several books, from every slapped-together shop or kiosk I came across, including a stand-alone version of Betrachtung, or Contemplation, a collection of parables that was one of the few volumes Kafka published during his lifetime, and which I quoted with the kind of single-minded piety—and dubious hermeneutics—that fundamentalist Christians use to quote Scripture. So yes, the rest of the tourists treated Prague like their own personal bar. But I was obviously superior to them, since I treated the city like my own personal bar and my own personal literary shrine, and its most famous author like the boyfriend who could never dump me (because he was dead).
And so, although I was enjoying my imperialistic American adventures with my friends, indulging in selectively upcharged cuisine and cheap smokes, I was also off-track from the true purpose of my pilgrimage: my destined communion with Kafka in the city whose claws he could never escape. All of us were enchanted with the architecture and general atmosphere of Prague, but it went without saying that I was the most enchanted. Hence, the furtive entry into my artisanal travel journal wherein I emoted, in what was at the time my adverb-rich prose style of choice: “Sitting on the wall of the Charles Bridge. Prague is truly and undoubtedly the most amazingly, enchantingly, gracefully, beautifully haunting place I have ever witnessed on this Earth.” And what I needed to consummate my relationship with “my” city (“This city, this city,” I helpfully annotated) was to be all by myself, goddammit.
By ten the next morning I got my wish: Freddie, Layla, and Justin had gone on, the former couple to go have sex in some country that took Eurail passes, and the latter to find his sword. I was five thousand miles away from everyone I knew, in what I had recently decreed to be my favorite place in the entire world, with nowhere I had to be, nobody else’s schedule to consider, and nobody to answer to. I had all the thousand spires of the city to myself—just Franz, the shadowy lanes he used to walk, a few million nonplussed Czechs, and me. It was going to be perfect.
Six hours later, I’d become so despondent from not talking to another person all day that I was afraid I’d forgotten how to speak. I was so eager for companionship—so terrified that I had, after half a day, sunk so deep into myself that I had no choice but to regard others, as Kafka had written, “with the gaze of an animal”—that when an old guy (actually a Canadian dad in his early forties) approached me at a café and asked me about my forest-green Waterman fountain pen (you think I wrote in my artisanal journal with a Bic, like some sort of plebe?), it was the undis
puted high point of my day. So chilling was my solitude that the next morning, as I shuffled through Old Town Square, I spied Mr. Lichtenberg-Train-Station-Do-You-Have-to-Pay, gawking up at the famous astronomical clock—and I walked straight up to him, touched him on the shoulder on purpose, and said: “Hey.”
He looked me up and down for a good thirty seconds before he placed me.
“Whoa,” he said. “Berlin train station?”
“That’s me.” The crowd assembled around the clock began to stir.
“So you do speak English,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that. I just really like speaking German in Germany.”
“It’s a terrible-sounding language. Wait, look—I think that clock is doing something weird.” Sure enough, out of a minuscule doorway over the elaborate gold-plated face—one that held three interlocking plates marking the places of the celestial bodies using extremely sound fifteenth-century science—shot a bunch of grotesque little dolls who chased each other around on rails for a few minutes before disappearing whence they came.
“I read in my guidebook one of those figurines is supposed to be a medieval caricature of a Jew. Pretty fucked up, huh?”
“I like that you memorized your guidebook,” said the train-station guy. The crowd around us dispersed and then it was just us two.
“So,” I said, “how’d the whole not-paying-for-the-S-Bahn thing go?”
He ran a hand across his forehead; it was a sweltering day and it seemed as if not a single one of the thousand spires cast a shadow.
“Oh,” he said. “I totally got caught. They came right for me. I guess they have cameras by the ticket machines or something.”
“Bummer,” I said. “How much did they fine you?”
“I got away with it. I just played it really, really dumb.”
“That must have been a challenge.”
He didn’t seem insulted, but largely because his attention had wandered to a giant ticket booth in the middle of the square, advertising an R.E.M. concert.
“Wait,” he said. “Is that tonight?”
“It looks like it,” I said. “I’m sure it’s sold out.”
But it wasn’t. The show was being held in the 220,000-capacity soccer stadium, and apparently the tour booker had overestimated the post–Velvet-Revolution appetite for mournful nasal ballads. The Schwarzfahrer and I each bought a ticket for an extravagant fourteen dollars, and thereby inadvertently agreed to attend in tandem.
“So,” he said, “we’ve got about five hours to kill. We might as well walk around together.”
A five-hour-time limit; a stranger with a scraggly mushroom bowl cut, whom I met in the general vicinity of a train. A stunning foreign cityscape; a spaghetti-strap dress over a T-shirt (just like Julie Delpy!). Richard Linklater, I hear you loud and clear.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Tschüss, writerly solitude. Na shledanou, quiet introspection, as the Czechs would say (maybe; my five phrases didn’t yet make me an expert). But, I countered to myself as the two of us set off toward the winding river that bisects the old city, was this choice to spend the day with a gentleman stranger not itself the filling-up of my life with precisely the kind of adventurous, grown-up anecdote that would fill later writerly solitudes? (Yes?) As we started across a bridge a few down from the Charles, I looked behind me and noticed the towering brutalist monolith that was the Hotel InterContinental. This unsightly concrete-and-glass edifice was once the Communists’ prime location to house visiting dignitaries, due to its majestic view of the Vltava River and the gorgeous tile-roofed buildings on the opposite side. But for me, thanks to an edifying paragraph in my Let’s Go that I had indeed dutifully memorized, the site of the InterContinental held something even more important.
“Hey,” I said to the train-station guy. “Do you know where we are? Do you know what that is?”
“An ugly building?”
“Yes,” I said, “but before that ugly building was built, there used to be some apartment houses there—and guess who lived in one of them? Franz Kafka and his family. He lived with his parents until he was almost forty. Before he died, he shacked up with his girlfriend in Berlin for like a year. But other than that, he pretty much never left their house, even though he hated his dad.”
“Huh,” said the train-station guy.
“And guess what? This bridge that we are walking across right now is the bridge that Georg Bendemann jumps off at the end of ‘The Judgment’! Can you believe that? I can’t believe I’m here.”
“I’m not familiar with GAE-org Bendemann.” The train-station guy was looking to our left, at the spikes of the cathedral in the middle of the Prague Castle, which sits on top of a giant hill.
Georg Bendemann, I explained, was only the protagonist of a terrific—by which I meant horribly disturbing—short story, about a guy who lives with his aging father in an apartment by a river. A story whose entire first page I could now read in the original German, all by myself! Georg and his father get into a very weird argument about Georg being engaged, and then the father insinuates that Georg only loves his fiancée “because she lifted up her skirts”—you know, for the sex—and then, the story goes fully off the rails when the father goes on a very strange rant that gets deadly serious. “Finally,” I explained to the train-station guy, “the father goes: ‘You were actually an innocent child, but more actually you are a devilish adult—and now hear this: I sentence you to death by drowning!’ And then Georg actually runs out of the house and jumps off a bridge.”
“Cool,” said the train-station guy. “But it wasn’t really this bridge.”
“No, obviously not,” I said, “because the story was made up. Although pretty much everything Kafka wrote was about his shitty dad, I guess.”
“Wow,” said the train-station guy. “Do you have issues with your dad, too?”
“Actually,” I said, “my dad and I are best friends.”
“Even weirder.”
“I didn’t even get to the best part! The best part is that the story ends, ‘Just then an unending stream of traffic went over the bridge.’ But in the German,” I said, having not technically yet read the end of “The Judgment” in the German but parroting Prof. James Martin, “the word they use for ‘traffic’ is Verkehr, which literally means ‘intercourse.’ So the story basically ends by saying just then an ‘endless fucking’ went over the bridge. And—you’ll never believe this—Kafka dedicated the story to his fiancée. ‘Eine Geschichte für F. B.’ How fucked up is that?”
I had to stop here, because I was out of breath from walking, talking, and smoking at the same time, and because I was way too overexcited to be not only treading in the footsteps of greatness, but sharing that greatness with a male human my own age, albeit a sweaty one who did not seem angst-ridden or brooding at all, and who had a strange rash on his chest, and who felt himself above the act of paying to ride the train. But aside from that, this was pretty much a perfect serendipitous and peripatetic date. I stopped in the middle of the bridge to light another cigarette, and to preserve the moment I assumed we were having.
“I don’t really like Kafka,” said the train-station guy. “All that German stuff is too cloying in its darkness.”
“I’m a German major,” I said.
“Eech,” he said. “Why?”
“I enjoy the cloying darkness, for one thing.”
“I only like the Victorians,” he said.
I took a swig from my water bottle.
“Hey,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. What’s your name?”
We’d been walking together for an hour, and neither of us had managed this gesture.
His name, it turned out, was ridiculous. A three-surname WASP conflagration with a roman numeral after it. No name I could fabricate could possibly be as self-parodic as his actual name was. “By the way, I do not usually look like this,” he said, pointing to his threadbare T-shirt, worn shorts, Teva
s, and scraggly, growing-out version of the dread mid-part mushroom, a.k.a. the omnipresent haircut favored by any mid-nineties white guy who didn’t have a ponytail. “It’s just because I’m trying to fit in while I travel for the summer.”
You’re traveling, are you? You don’t say.
“I’m from Connecticut,” he continued. Of course he was. “But I go to school in England.”
“Interesting,” I said. That would explain the Victorians. “Where?”
“Uh,” he said. “This is going to sound way more impressive than it actually is. But Cambridge.” He said it with the kind of put-upon mortification that people get when they say they went to college “in the Bay Area” or “near Boston.” Oh, for Christ’s sake, just say you went to Stanford or Harvard. We’re all very impressed.
This train-station guy had some nerve, insinuating he was slumming it with me. Didn’t he know I was slumming it with him? I should have preferred my goddamned writerly solitude to hanging out with some Aryan-Master-Race looking preppy-cum-hippie who only read Middlemarch, a work I objected to on principle due to the eight-million-part BBC adaptation that had aired on PBS and caused Sharon Schuman, Ph.D., to monopolize the family television for all of 1994. I should have—I knew I should have—stuck to my café glowering and my artisanal travel journal, but my dirtiest secret turned out to be that I could only stand my own company for half a day.
As the heat of the afternoon finally abated—Prague’s latitude meant the sun wouldn’t set until damn near midnight—the train-station guy and I returned to Old Town Square to find that the R.E.M. poster now had CANCELED scrawled over it. “What happened?” the train-station guy asked.
“Drummer get brain aneurysm,” said the ticket-seller.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Is he dead?”
“No, is fine. But concert cancel.”
“Can we have our money back?” I asked.
The ticket-seller—who had himself sold me the very ticket I held in my hand—feigned a look at the serial number on the side. “I am sorry,” he said, “but you did not buy here.” So Prague.