Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [1]
But the beauty of Prague’s youth almost excuses their penchant for vandalism. Preternaturally appealing creatures with sculptural faces, creamy skin, and long, supple limbs, they lean against buildings, cigarettes dangling from their lips.They sip slow drinks in cafes; they spill onto the streets in acid-washed jeans. They cultivate looks of boredom that highlight their full lips and Slavic cheekbones. Their attractiveness is alarming in its universality and in its disappearance at the earliest intimation of middle age. Prague’s denizens breathe coal-laced air, drink polluted water, and live on boiled dumplings and pork cutlets, beer and cigarettes—a diet that generally allots a person only three good decades. Faces become haggard and loose-skinned; bellies grow and arms become flaccid; spines curve; strange lumps and moles appear.
In Prague there is no culture of continuing care facilities or retirement communities. The old are not shunted away, nor do they move to sunny locales with more golfing opportunities. Prague is home to stooped old ladies with necks crooked like canes, and old ladies with perfect posture.There are old ladies in sensible, square-toed shoes and old ladies with sagging pantyhose stuffed inside bright red Mary Janes, old ladies with large handbags and fuzzy wool caps they knit themselves, and old ladies in ratty fur coats. In Prague the blue-haired old lady is no less common than the violet-haired old lady or the scarlet-haired old lady—punk rock dye-jobs hallucinatory in their vibrancy, and which are still commonplace a decade after the arrival of Western cosmetics might have been expected to impose a certain refinement of hue. Sometimes old ladies are in the company of old men but mostly old ladies are alone, or with old lady friends, or with small, unfriendly dogs. Husbands die, and perhaps there is a small pension, but old ladies still carry baskets filled with groceries. They still make their painstaking way down sidewalks and hold their breath as they risk the first stair of a speeding escalator.
The velocity and intensity with which Prague’s inhabitants age merely mirrors time’s unlikely acrobatics from one city block to the next. A street frequently occupies two centuries at once. In the city center, a T.G.I. Friday’s inhabits an eighteenth-century mansion; signs posted on elegant antique streetlamps display the word CASINO in Czech, English, Japanese, and Hebrew; a fourteenth-century boulevard contains a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, and numerous discos, its sidewalk hucksters proclaiming the virtues of nearby strip clubs.
Prague’s magpie instincts are not strictly temporal. The mad rush toward Westernization has resulted in a spectacular street mélange of consumer culture, international tourism, and incipient capitalism. In Old Town, a restaurant tout sports an oversized sombrero and a Mexican poncho on which are emblazoned the words PIZZA and FALAFEL, while a restaurant named Chicago advertises Mexican cuisine. A gaggle of schoolgirls squawks, in accented English, “We’re from Belgium, mighty mighty Belgium . . . ” their voices echoing through the streets. A flock of Japanese tourists photographs the clock tower from the opposite side of Old Town Square, their flashes impotent against the deepening night. Kerchiefed, thick-fingered snack-stand proprietors vend—in addition to the traditional sausages and fried cheese—a frozen treat called Rentgen, a fluorescent yellow Popsicle on a black skeleton-shaped stick, with a radioactive symbol on its wrapper. On a pedestrian plaza, a street vendor waves a crumpled piece of paper at a cop in desperation, blocking his briefcase of fake Soviet artifacts with his body. From a loudspeaker fronting a downtown bingo hall, a voice drones each successive number in a robotic monotone that suggests imminent death from boredom. At a tram stop, a stray mutt trots back and forth before a woman eating a roll until she feeds him some crumbs. Prague’s