Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Invisible City
Library, Interrupted
The Noon Signal: A Speculative Tale
Welcome to New Karlín!
The Museum of Monastic Technology
Political Theatro
Ped Trap
Visiting the Dead
Park Redux
Through a Tram Darkly
Acknowledgments
ALSO IN THE CROWN JOURNEYS SERIES
About the Author
ALSO BY MYLA GOLDBERG
Copyright Page
To Jason, who went with me, and to
Zelie, who came back with us.
You should travel to Prague when the days are long, so you will be rewarded by a fair view as the train crosses the placid River Vltava....You have had your first glimpse of Prague, and it was beautiful, so you set about endeavoring to enter into the spirit of the place, to absorb its atmosphere and to study its character. For every ancient city that has stood up against adversity and overcome it has a very definite character of its own. And it is a mysterious and wonderful thing this character, this cachet of a great city. . . .
—B. GRANVILLE BAKER, From a Terrace in Prague, 1923
FORGET THE LONG DAYS. WHEN THE DAYS ARE long, bands of Germans and Italians and Japanese and British mob the narrow streets of Old Town, and herds of American college students in velvet jester hats and PRAGUE DRINKING TEAM T-shirts stampede across the Charles Bridge singing Pearl Jam songs. But in March or April, the worst of winter is over and the tourist hordes have yet to descend; by early September the summer crowds have dispersed. On the edge of a season it is still possible to duck onto a narrow, cobbled side street to find it deserted and to feel time straddling centuries the way Prague straddles its river. So many of Europe’s cities have been bombed and burnt and torn down and rebuilt again that their physical history survives in stray fragments or not at all, but Prague is time’s magpie, hoarding beautiful, eclectic bits from each successive era. In Prague, Gothic towers neighbor eleventh-century courtyards, which lead to Baroque and Renaissance houses with twentieth-century bullets embedded in their walls. Art Nouveau hotels abut formerly socialist department stores that now sell French perfume and American sneakers. Through a combination of luck, circumstance, and obstinance, Prague has stockpiled ten centuries of history.
The city’s unrelenting profusion of stimuli forces the brain to screen things out, until one day a new sort of detail will ambush an unconscious filter and then appear everywhere, remaking once-familiar streets. Almost every city block displays a plaque commemorating Prague’s countless martyrs from across the centuries—resistance fighters and outspoken nationalists, religious heroes and fallen soldiers. Usually these plaques are placed over doorways, or just above eye level on a building’s edge. Small and made of dark, weathered metal, they are easily overlooked but upon noticing one the rest appear, Prague’s long, sad memory emerging with each additional step. It becomes impossible to go anywhere without noticing more names; Prague becomes a city overrun by death. Then, the eye will be diverted from the funereal by an ornamental frog decorating a doorway, or a marble frieze of a violinist fronting an apartment building that was a music school a century before. It becomes apparent that almost every building is charmingly adorned—even in the shabbier neighborhoods lion heads roar above doorways or cherubs recline below windows. The memorial plaques fade into the background.
The nemesis of ornament, Prague’s graffiti also exists at first as visual static, soft and persistent and easily glossed over. Spray paint crawls across delicate Art Nouveau façades; black tags mar eighteenth-century marble; names are keyed into granite landings and wooden windowsills. In the wake of the Velvet Revolution, graffiti has spread like mold along the city’s edifices, leaving practically no surface untouched. Here, where old beautiful buildings are the default rather than the treasured exception to time’s entropic rule—and where rich architecture belies an impoverished budget—it’s