My Prague

Prague. A gemstone in the heart of Europe. So haunting in its beauty that Hitler, the great sensitif, could not bring himself to ravage it, choosing instead to add the city, untouched, to his collection of architectural treasures. If cities can be said to have a gender, Prague falls into the feminine column and is best described in terms that are politically incorrect--languorous, coquettish, alternately sly and accommodating. Landlocked, surrounded by covetous and historically unreliable neighbors, the gray enchantress has had to use what once were called feminine wiles in order to survive.

I arrive at a time of crisis. Václav Havel, the great Czech playwright who took a reduction in status to become Czechoslovakia's president, has resigned his position. Slovakia, bursting with ethnic pride--some say misguidedly--has made known its intention to become an independent country. I've barely checked into the Palace Hotel and half the country I've come to visit is gone. But the mood in the lobby is philosophical. The Czechs feel that Slovakia doesn't have much to offer and the country will be better off without it. An engineer from Seattle assures me that I'm not to worry. He's there to buy up a shipment of the fabled L-39 Albatross jet trainers and feels confident that the tiny Czech nation, with its pool of brilliant scientists and craftsmen, will rival Germany and France as an economic power within ten years.

"Just leave them to their own devices."

But will they be left to their own devices? All about me, hustlers and schemers from around the globe have arrived in force: Americans to buy up buildings, Canadians to swallow up farms, Germans to snatch up breweries. An Australian pulls me aside and tells me to stay away from crystal and get into light manufacturing. Then he describes an advertising campaign he's concocted that will take Prague by storm: The (continued on page 156)My Prague(continued from page 114) Rainbow Man Is Coming to Town.

"What product are you selling?" I ask.

"What difference does it make?" he says snappishly. Then, retreating a bit, he adds: "In Sydney, it was bread."

I visit Wenceslas Square in the center of the city. Its grandeur and size hit you in the face with an almost physical force--much in the manner of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. I'm drawn into a great multinational orgy of buying and selling. Shoppers from all over the world have come to join the Czechs in buying imitation Seiko watches, Led Zeppelin T-shirts and dresses that look as if they've been taken from a truck in Passaic, New Jersey. Havel has described the velvet revolution as being "a revolt of color, authenticity, history in all of its variety and human individuality against imprisonment." But here on the square, it's as if the Czechs revolted so that they could shop for discontinued jogging suits.

The shopping is eerie and silent, since there is no automobile traffic on the square and theenormous cobble-stoned space (about half a mile long, 60 yards wide) absorbs the shouts of a thousand hawkers. There may never have been such a vast international stewpot. Icelanders and Uruguayans line up to buy U.S. popcorn and pizza from Bosnians who've managed to escape the carnage in Sarajevo and set themselves up in stalls. Bolivian Indians serenade French teenagers as they have their hair braided with colored cotton by spike-haired Boy George look-alikes. Black softball stars from the Netherlands, cash in hand, circle the square, asking where the girls are (they are told to check the hotel lobbies at night). Czechs, who've been known to get in any line no matter where it leads, queue up to pay 30 crowns for a look inside a stretch limousine whose occupants, a pair of Brits, are presenting themselves as rock stars.

Kafka merchandise is in hot demand, the brooding novelist having become an unlikely pop icon. T-shirts, beer mugs and even cuff links bearing his likeness disappear quickly from the shelves. There may be an explanation in the Prague Baedecker that points out that "two of his novelswere made into films." Close on Kafka's heels as the James Dean of Prague is Mozart, whom the Czechs have seized as one of their own, though, strictly speaking, the composer spent only a short time in the city, having gone there to have his operas produced after they'd received poor reviews at home. Gorbachev T-shirts fly out of the stalls along with hats said to have been leftbehind by Soviet military commanders (all, mysteriously, in small sizes).

Threaded in among the crowd are young Americans (there may be as many as 40,000 living in the city), many of them with a Czech in tow, delivering paid instructions in English on the run. Chris Scheer, formerly of Santa Barbara and editor in chief of the English-language newspaper Prognosis, has defined them as Posties--post-Sixties, postmodern, postndash;sexual revolution, post-Reagan, post-everything--living in something of a moral vacuum with nothing to be for or against. They've come to Prague because the living is cheap (50-cent lunches, ten-cent subway rides) and because there is not much for them in the States at the moment. But to be fair about it, it isn't only the economics that has drawn them to the Golden City. The overthrow of a 40-year-old Communist regime, arguably the most repressive in eastern Europe, had a literary flavor to it, driven as it was by artists and writers and particularly by Havel, who is a hero to the Americans here. Alan Levy, editor in chief of the English-language Prague Post, suggests, perhaps too sweepingly, that the Americans in Prague are the equivalent of the Lost Generation in the Paris of the Twenties and that there are future Isherwoods, Audens and Fitzgeralds among them. He concedes that not a single glittering paragraph has yet been produced but insists that many are holed up in garrets, "working on their novels." Many more have been taken on by government ministers as "consultants."

"What are they consulted about?" I ask a Czech journalist.

"It doesn't matter," he replies. "For many years Americans were held up as the enemy. Now it's fashionable to have one as a consultant."

Although the Czechs have seized private enterprise with a passion, the transition from Marxism has not been an entirely smooth one. Czech women haven't quite learned to negotiate their miniskirts, with the result that there are exquisite blunders on the trams and in the taverns. Czechs in their 60s and 70s shake their heads dolefully at the skyrocketing prices for sausage and cabbage, and there's little question many would welcome a return to the old system. On Národní Street, a merchant, confident of becoming rich overnight, stocked his store with fur coats and gloves and seems puzzled that they are not being snapped up in the suffocating July sun. An American grad student from the Wharton School of Business is proudly taken on a tour of a 1300-employee factory by a 30-year-old Czech who's replaced an old-line Communist Party figure as manager. Suddenly panicked, he takes the American aside and says, "What on God's earth do I do now?"

There is a desperate need to get it right, to get it Western, as though there were a precise mathematical formula that eludes the Czechs. At privatized restaurants, bartenders, with quavering hands, carefully pour vodka as if it's a rare elixir, as supervisors, with folded arms, sternly oversee them. The waitresses and chambermaids seem scared out of their wits, as if one incorrectly positioned saucer would cause the entire new society to crumble.

The Czechs may have engineered a glorious revolution and sent the Soviets packing, but they can't seem to believe they've pulled it off. At night, I ask a cabdriver to take me to a highlyrecommended jazz club on Krákovská Street. When we arrive, the streets are dark and deserted. The cabdriver is nervous about stopping but finally does so. I knock on the door, which opens slightly. I'm scrutinized and then admitted, tentatively, as if we're back in Prohibition days. Inside, several hundred sweating Czech jazz lovers are packed together in a cloud of smoke and haze, listening intently to a trio led by a spin-off Gerry Mulligan. The mood is clandestine, quietly defiant, as if being present at this white-bread performance is an act of defiance, a show of the irrepressibility of the human spirit. Eyes turn from time to time toward the entranceway, anticipating the KGB, which will smash down the door. But this is 1992 and the KGB is long gone. Any prerevolution informers are happily dispersed among the crowd. There's nothing to rebel against. Yet the Czechs continue reflexively to resist a phantom regime.

After dark, the prostitutes come out in force. They are blonde and pretty, for the most part, and no one seems to have made sure they're of a correct age. "The Russians," I'm told by a journalist, "have made off with the really beautiful ones." Droves of couples cross the Old Town Square, hand in hand. It's a city for lovers, but there is also a field day to be had for the lonely, (concluded on page 181)My Prague(continued from page 156) if such is your persuasion. The streets are maze-like and it takes little effort to walk for anhour only to end up at your starting point. There is an aimless quality about the city that is infectious, so that a visitor may start with the intention of having a look at the Schwarzenberg Palace and end, instead, spending hours inspecting antique Czech muskets at a Národní Street gun shop. In the evening, the entire population seems to shift to the 600-year-old Charles Bridge. The city is at its most stunning when seen from that vantage point. A strolling Englishman stops for a moment and is overcome by the massive Hradcany Castle and its surrounding fairy-tale complex of medieval palaces and chapels, all haloed in gray and gold.

"My God!" he exclaims. "This is more beautiful than Venice. Why wasn't I told about it?"

The huge crowd that comes under the inspection of 31 baroque statues of saints on the Charles Bridge seems to be a Woodstock nation come alive again. It is held together by music, both good and bad. It's irritating to see a guitarist from UCLA hold the locals in thrall with a fraternity-level version of Hotel California while making them feel as if they were on the cutting edge of Western music. But then a mad Czech jazz violinist lures them away and is backed up by a gifted Senegalese percussionist. Still another wing of the crowd falls in behind a Dixieland combo, which pipes it off to an all-night jazz club in Malá Strana. The hope arises that this multination of people in their 20s will never make war on one another, held together as they are by a common music. Of course, Hitler wasn't deterred by his love for Alice Faye movies.

Prague is a study in wild swings and contradictions. The Vltava River, which curls importantly through the city, is decorative but has absolutely no commercial or navigational use. Czech food, with its base of cabbage and duck and dumplings, is numbingly routine--but then one is presented with a masterful and possibly life-changing goulash at Vladimir Vacek's spectacular restaurant adjacent to the Old Town Square. A bloody mary will cost $11 at one bar and less than a dollar at a more attractive spot across the street. Caviar, prohibitively priced at one restaurant, is practically given away by the bucketful at another. The entire world seems to be trooping to Prague at the moment. Much of the city is under construction, yet the streets are somehow immaculately clear of litter. Czechs are tremendously polite to one another, but the result is often chaotic. A young man on a crowded tram will yield his seat to a young woman, who in turn gives it up to an older man, who immediately offers it to someone he insists is more decrepit than he is. The resulting disorder is greater than it would have been if everyone had stayed in their places. The ultimate irony is that many of the Czechs who supported the velvet revolution are still in $100-a-month jobs, while the evil Communists of the old regime are cheerfully ensconced in their old government and managerial jobs. Banned from government, the dreaded secret-police functionaries have grown prosperous in private security firms. Is this the picture of a society in transition, or has Prague always been the city of irony, taking for its saints and heroes individuals who have thrown themselves from balustrades in defense of some forgotten principle?

I decide to stop chasing after Prague and take up shop outdoors in a pivnice, or beer bar, on Na struze Street to see if the city will come to me. Before long, I'm joined by a middle-aged Czech who describes himself as a financial consultant. He is 50 and looks 70, a condition I've noticed in many residents of this much-traumatized city. He points toward a villa in the hills that he has been able to build with the single word of advice he's given to foreign investors: wait.

"For what?" I ask, always the dogged investigator.

"For stage three," he says. "In stage one, right after the revolution, outsiders arrived with ten thousand dollars in hand, pointed to a building and asked: How much for that one? In stage two, we politely showed them to the airport."

"And stage three?"

"The good stuff," he says, and then quickly calls over a textiles salesman he describes as "the most sophisticated man in Prague."

He joins us just as a woman with a substantial bosom passes by.

The world-class sophisticate winks. "It's what's up front that counts, no?"

The two men--as do all the Czechs I meet--begin to list their grievances with the current government. Prices are too high; the man who pushed a broom under the Communists is still pushing a broom. The bureaucracy is worse than ever, one big game of musical chairs. The minute you make contact with a minister, he's replaced by some new idiot. Drugs now flood the city--though, in a sense, this is a good thing, since the laboratory-produced concoctions under the Soviets caused more havoc than the currently available heroin and cocaine.

A beautiful young dancer joins us and adds her litany of complaints. Her rent has been raised and she's about to lose her apartment. Yes, she's free to travel abroad now, but where will she get the money to do so? The arts--music, ballet, theater--have shriveled up. At least under the Communists they were state-supported and there was always money.

She seems defeated by the system. Yet when I ask her if there's anything she has now that she didn't have before, she looks at me with surprise, her shoulders straighten and she breathes freshness and passion into a single word I would have thought had become stale through its overuse by politicians and ninth-rate patriots: "Freedom."

"The Czechs may have engineered a glorious revolution, but they can't believe they've pulled it off."

"Is this the picture of a society in transition, or has Prague always been the city of irony?"