Goulash Read online

  Ivan mentioned a major sculpture contest or contests upcoming. Thanks to communism there were all sorts of horrible things to commemorate. A major exhibition was scheduled in a Žižkov park. Prague’s finest would contribute their best. We made plans to go.

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile to satisfy my curiosity about D.K., I thought perhaps I should duck into some art galleries. My interest in visual art did not usually extend beyond Daffy Duck.

  I looked into other galleries full of inscrutable items—dead bees in small lightbulbs arranged to spell GUILE in English, screen-printed close-ups of fingers, lips, and cigarettes, and a whole photography exhibition called Forty-Two Breakfasts in Dresden, in which all the photos were taken after the breakfasts had been eaten. I found no further trace of D.K. I still wanted restitution for my shoes: money, an explanation, some form of shoe justice. Eventually I returned to the first gallery to find an altogether different man at the desk, an older man in jeans and a jacket with no tie. His mustache looked laser trimmed. I explained that I had visited once before, when I spoke to Mr. Cimarron.

  I could see from his face that I had just told him a fantastic joke.

  “Oh, you did?”

  “I did.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “You would know that since he claimed to be the manager.”

  “I am the manager,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. “I came in to ask how my shoes came to be part of that thing in the window. Mr. Cimarron was very evasive.”

  “Mr. Cimarron sat where I sit now?”

  “Yes.”

  “What day was this?”

  “I don’t know. Two weeks ago, maybe.”

  “Your shoes are almost certainly part of the thing because Mr. Cimarron put them there.”

  “Mr. Cimarron and the artist D.K. are the same,” I suggested. My mystery was simply a prank.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Cimarron is not a name in Czech, but Mr. Cimrman is a great Czech hero. There is an asteroid named after him between Mars and Jupiter.”

  * * *

  —

  Over the next few days the park filled with crates and tarpaulin-shrouded lumps; an invisible brigade of sculptors had clearly unloaded, installed, covered, and padlocked dozens of striking novelties. Two men in private security uniforms patrolled. The effect was exactly as though a secret playground lay under the tarps and children were absolutely prohibited from having any fun there. I tried to guess from sizes and shapes, and I looked for a loose tarp that I could peer under without attracting attention. While under wraps it was the most intriguing exhibition in the world. After nightfall it resembled a graveyard, plastic headstones gleaming in the moonlight. Scattered trees stood guard to keep down the jealous dead.

  Eventually I dutifully scaled Vítkov Hill, past charming stone walls afflicted with the new Western scourge of graffiti, to see the great national monument. It’s true: Jan Žižka rides a monster horse.

  GOOD SOLDIER

  Saturday morning, 10:00 a.m., Ivan knocked on my door. He wore shorts and a T-shirt and brought beer, which we opened.

  “This is it? This is your whole flat?”

  I had a single room adjacent to the landlady’s, with whom I shared a bathroom and a hallway lined with the sort of cooking equipment I associated with camping expeditions. As far as I knew these were standard Czech living arrangements. I did have—through a vast window—a good view of the monstrous space-age architectural experiment alleged to be the Prague TV tower, and I got plenty of sunlight when there was any. Once a week the landlady cleaned and left a dry, inedible pastry for me. I had to dispose of it elsewhere since she also emptied the trash.

  “This is it,” I said.

  “It has great location,” he said. “Great location.”

  “Brooklyn, I’m told.”

  “I don’t know what you’d do with a TV anyway,” he said. “Maybe learn Czech.”

  I sat on the edge of my threadbare red communist sofa, which folded out into half a bed full of springs, spikes, and needles. He sat in my one rickety wooden chair and looked worried my table might not take the weight of his beer.

  “Some advice, though,” he said. “If you meet a nice girl, go to her place.”

  Such advice was not covered in the teaching abroad handbook.

  I filled Ivan in on the disappointing solution to my mystery. Ivan said that he could have spared me some embarrassment had I told him the story of the shoe thief earlier. Jára Cimrman was a fictional Czech entity who showed Thomas Edison how to change a lightbulb, personally fertilized Chekhov’s cherry orchard, and accomplished many other laudable things. He once missed the North Pole by just twenty-three feet, and instructed Mendeleev to remove the element of surprise. He scribbled some notes while Darwin sailed the Beagle, and later he loaned some money to Mr. Dunlop to develop his pneumatic tire. He was a philosopher, playwright, inventor, musician, advisor to American presidents, and more.

  “Possibly,” said Ivan, “the grandfather of one Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota.”

  “Not my quarry then.”

  “What’s quarry?”

  “Something you want to turn into dinner.”

  “Remind me which state you are from?” said Ivan. “I know it begins with an I.”

  “That gives you Idaho, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. Indiana is the state that takes longest to drive through, psychologically. Roads that never end or bend. Dead flat.”

  “Not to mention the people,” said Ivan.

  “Quite.”

  “In school we all learned to use a watch as a compass so we could hide in the woods when the Americans came,” he said.

  “We hid under our desks to prepare for you guys dropping bombs.”

  “Wow,” he said. “Either you had a low opinion of our bombs or a high opinion of your desks. Sorry. We’re just very aware of being a faraway country of which you know nothing, as Neville Chamberlain called us shortly after authorizing our destruction. How long do you think you’ll stay?”

  “The idea is to burnish a grad school application with teaching experience,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Why burn an application?”

  “Burnish is more like shine than burn.”

  “In which subject?”

  “History.”

  “No offense, but does anyone in America just go get a job? Or is that a kind of barbarian practice you’ve evolved through?”

  There were thirty thousand of us in Prague at the time, either teaching English or living off trust funds. I had, if I got into trouble, the Bank of Mom.

  “What do your parents do?”

  “Well, they’re divorced. My mom is the sort of seemingly easygoing librarian who keeps things exactly in order. My dad is a philosophy professor and a complete mess.”

  “Librarian is kind of a job,” he said.

  “I assume there was no such thing as private insurance under communism,” I said. I didn’t know how Ivan or anyone else had become qualified for their new capitalist jobs. “What did you do before?”

  “I was a soldier,” he said. “Sort of. I did my national service and stayed on afterward, but I mostly sat at a desk doing risk evaluation. Much the same as I do now but in a different context. If we have fifty helicopters that explode twenty-five percent of the time, how many pilots are we going to go through before we can get a mission done?”

  “And now?”

  “I determine who is at fault in horrible industrial accidents,” he said. “Beer helps.”

  He told me at length about gruesome transactions between heavy machinery and human hands and feet. It was unclear why Ivan was required to take English lessons, particularly since he had spent six months attached to a Massachusetts emergency clinic while completing a diss
ertation on necrosis. I suspected that he liked English lessons as a way of avoiding the ceaseless pain and misery pervading every aspect of his job, and his complicity in keeping intact the system that tolerated it.

  Ivan’s hair was glaringly orange, but it was receding tragically, too. He appeared to have received instructions to proceed straight to middle age. Powerful shoulders and arms were offset by a paunch that refused to comply with his shirts. He shifted positions often with a wince at whichever joint was troubling him at the moment. His blue eyes were both pale and piercing, but his long, pointed nose and downturned mouth gave him the look of a puzzled, avuncular fox.

  “There are three prizes today,” he told me. “I looked into it. The first is in reproductions. Everything original must be replaced eventually. Someday the Charles Bridge and all its statues will all secretly live in a big American warehouse with the Ark of the Covenant. The winner or winners of that contest will be in work for life. The communists didn’t care about statues. All kinds of arms and legs and heads need to be fixed or fitted around Prague.”

  I imagined a vast stew of stone body parts.

  “The second thing I had to look up in English. Memorials. This one is potentially controversial since most of us would just like to forget those forty-one and a half years. But it’s open-ended. Anything can be memorized.”

  “Memorialized.”

  “Yes.”

  “Commemorated is even better.”

  “OK. It’s Saturday.”

  “I know.”

  “The winner of that prize will probably get to show tourists how we suffered at places like Prague Castle and Wenceslas Square.”

  “I should enter my sofa for it.”

  “I had one just like it. I took it out to the country cottage and gave it new life as firewood.” He paused thoughtfully. “After the revolution I bought a second freezer so I could put a whole cow in it. Meat was that cheap. We had been sending all of ours east. The third category is the open-ended contest with a sort of note about future. We can’t just be this backward people looking backward at all times.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The American South manages that fairly well.”

  “Can you teach me to speak with a twang?”

  “Just give every syllable an extra syllable.”

  We practiced for a while until his English was perfectly unintelligible.

  The sound of a brass band reached us from the park three streets away, so we finished our beers and made our move.

  The park was ringed by beer vendors and sausage stands. The band played on a tented stage beneath the television tower while a few hundred men, women, and children ignored them. The new sculptures were still covered but they had attendants. I could see for the first time that they formed three groups, but I was distracted. There were creepy giant bronze babies scaling the TV tower. From their vantage all of Prague’s roof cover was laid out like a terra-cotta tarpaulin over strange undulations, punctuated by a hundred spires.

  The band stopped and a man in a pale blue linen suit spoke ceremonial Czech for ten minutes. It was indistinguishable from any other variety of Czech. He raised an arm and signaled that the work should be unveiled.

  The reconstructions area was populated almost entirely by gargoyles of every size, kind, and material: demons, dragons, leopards, and fish all glaring at each other with otherworldly contempt. Some of them were fanciful hybrids of reptile and mammal or mammal and mineral. Ivan observed that all of them were functional waterspouts.

  In memorials we found a female figure identical to the one I had seen in the garbage can, except she had been chipped and battered tastefully so that her torso and her dignity remained intact. A small card indicated that she was fashioned from Cimint Fondu.

  We came in the future section to a life-sized and realistic female nude in wood, except that through a cutaway from behind you could see she had a miniature bedroom in her left breast and a kitchen in her right. Where her womb should have been several miniature men were comparing tennis rackets next to a well-stocked bar.

  Next to her stood Mr. Cimarron. I tried to think up an appropriate query about my shoes, or even decide how to address him. He stood smiling at me. Until suddenly he wasn’t.

  He tackled me with an effeminate but effective shoulder to the gut, so I was already on the grass gazing skyward when something swung audibly in an arc through the air over my head. Mr. Cimarron rolled away, and looking farther back, I saw Ivan, upside down, exercising his combat training against a large blond man wielding a broken pool cue. This netted Ivan a fist on the cheek from one of the man’s confederates, who was duly tackled by Mr. Cimarron. Mr. Cimarron was then hauled from the ground by a fifth pair of hands, but the testicles corresponding to those hands were mashed by a sixth knee. Ivan, as far as I could tell, was enjoying himself, but I thought I should at least stand up. I was enveloped in a cloud of knuckles and boots.

  Time dilated. A gnarly thing like an arm approached my head, but I somehow dodged, and it went off in search of an easier target. My chest met lots of elbows. Several clouts I did receive were not intended for me. The air was thick with the battle snort of the Slavic warrior.

  Articles of black clothing materialized among us, and bright badges flashed as black sleeves began swinging. Black truncheons were applied to the insides of knees, causing the proprietors of the knees to drop instantly. The inhabiters of the black clothing destroyed the festive and fraternal spirit of the thing.

  The Czech language has a special disdain for vowels, even or especially when it is being shouted angrily by fifteen or twenty men simultaneously. The lips of the shouters do not open wide and their faces are not operatic. I couldn’t understand what was said but felt as we all lay bruised in the grass that we were having a very stressed-out picnic. I found myself next to Mr. Cimarron with just a pair of police boots and their standing occupant separating us.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “an artist doesn’t just steal shoes, but the wives of other artists, too.”

  “Well, that sounds traditional,” I said. “Why did you tackle me?”

  “I saw them coming. I thought it best for your safety if we did not appear to be friends.”

  “I think I could have explained that.”

  “They were not in a listening mood. Your friend was most helpful,” he added. “Thanks to him I should have only two black eyes. You don’t look terrible.”

  “Thanks. Where is the wife in question?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really steal them. I borrow them. In pairs. Also traditional.”

  Abruptly, Mr. Cimarron and the man with the pool cue were singled out for questioning and taken aside. The rest of us were permitted to go.

  Something was awry. The assembled crowd wasn’t looking at us.

  Ivan helped me up with a red hand, and around us we found a scene of beautiful carnage: by accident or design, the line of gargoyles on plinths had toppled like dominoes, crashing ultimately into the stone woman and breaking her all over again. The work was much better than anything that could be made on purpose—very lifelike, the way the fish chipped a tooth on the leopard while the dragon stuck a wing in the giraffe’s ear, and the woman was ambushed by a whole army of fantastical creatures while she looked the other way.

  TRUST

  Despite my getting him in a fight, Ivan came to the next class. It was a sunny gathering. Milan and Vlasta were discussing something in Czech, which I strongly discouraged unless it was of vital importance. Finally Ivan nodded and turned to face me.

  “We watch a lot of American movies,” he said. “We have noticed that there are many more black asses than white asses. Not visually. In speech.”

  “Get your black ass in here,” said Milan. I had never heard it in a Central European monotone. The Golden Lion, which had been serv
ing beer since 1499, probably hadn’t heard it either.

  I suspected Milan was a ladies’ man, because he dressed the part with a collection of special boots, rode a motorcycle, and didn’t talk much, just sat there square jawed and squinty, waiting to be free to do something else.

  “In Czech everyone has an ass,” said Vlasta.

  “Like life,” said Ivan.

  My training was woefully inadequate.

  “In America,” I said, “a black ass is a badge of honor, while a white ass is more of a liability.”

  “So how do we say it?” said Vlasta.

  “Well, I just wouldn’t. I don’t think you’ll need it for insurance purposes.” All of them worked in insurance.

  “Also,” said Ivan, “we don’t understand ass as an adjective. Vlasta heard something about an ass spider on TV last night. Milan and me have heard similar things.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a big-ass spider?”

  “It may have been,” said Vlasta.

  I fished for pen and paper, sensing that a napkin was inadequate for the task at hand.

  BIG-ASS SPIDER

  SLOW-ASS TRAIN

  GREEDY-ASS POLITICIAN

  “The hyphens are optional,” I said. “And historically I suppose it was assed.” I wrote that down, too. “The spider had a very large ass, and even the politician’s ass was greedy for money or power. Now it’s just a standard part of colloquial American speech. I guess. Tacked on.”

  “My dirty-ass dog,” said Ivan.

  “That’s perfect,” I said, “but a bit literal. As if you are talking about the dog’s ass, not the dirty dog.” I kept my voice down in view of the subject matter, but my students spoke at a normal volume, as they were simply learning a new language.

  “But the ass for a dog,” said Ivan, “all trust begins there.”