Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [10]
However, beyond the windows lining the hallway’s left-hand wall, there is a square courtyard and while the hallway is clearly maintained on a regular basis, there is no sign that anyone has set foot within this courtyard since the Jesuits’ expulsion. What at first glance appears to be a square of well-tended grass proves on closer inspection to be pale green moss that, in the absence of foot traffic, has overcrept the paving stones. At the center of the moss-covered square stands a dry fountain for which even the idea of water seems a distant memory. The stone of the fountain is dark with the accumulated soot of countless Prague winters. It may have been white once but there is no way to tell. The courtyard’s walls crawl with leafless ivy branches thick and numerous enough to evoke networks of veins in a vast circulatory system, lending the architecture itself the air of an ancient hibernating creature. In such a setting, in a place where time’s passage has taken on the sticky consistency of maple syrup, the painted solar clocks that appear between the thick swags of ivy feel absolutely contemporary: within this overlooked square of neglected moss and stone, no other timepiece has yet been invented.
Along the right side of the front hallway, the first door opposite the time-trapped courtyard leads to a room that was originally the Jesuits’ refectory but which for over two centuries has served as the library’s main reading room. The door that leads to the reading room is fitted with a medieval lock, its complex iron fittings stretching menacingly across the door’s width. That the Jesuits were not the first to inhabit this place is made abundantly clear by this door, which could just as easily have been installed when the Clementinum served as Prague’s headquarters for the Inquisition, four hundred years prior to the Jesuits’ sixteenth-century arrival. It’s the sort of door more commonly seen behind glass in a museum. The idea that it is meant not only to be handled but opened feels illicit, but the feat is easily accomplished, triggering no alarms, and then the reading room is revealed.
The library’s reading room is much deeper than it is wide and is lined on one side with massive cathedral windows. Entering at one narrow end and gazing down the room’s length, it is easy to picture rectangular wooden tables lined with hungry Jesuits, the air echoing with the sounds of priestly mastication. A few steps beyond the entrance, what looks like an eight-foot-tall ceramic funerary urn containing the ashes of the Inquisitors’ unfortunate victims is in fact the very Rococo stove that warmed the Jesuits during the room’s previous incarnation.
Just above the medieval door and its twin at the other end of the wall hang two small paintings, darkened and yellowed with time, that attest to the priests’ continuing presence. Illuminated triangles contain an eye and an ear. The respective words OMNIA VIDET and OMNIA AUDIT are still clearly legible beneath the sense organs. Though the silence that reigns here is as potent and welcome as a familiar smell, appreciable to anyone who has spent concerted time in a library, there is an underlying sense of tension unique to this place, as if at any moment a robed monk might materialize to slap the back of a dozing neck with a ruler and grill the poor soul on the finer points of catechism.
Time’s uneven passage in the reading room mirrors the flow of Old Town’s teeming foot traffic: it progresses most quickly down the room’s center and dawdles at the edges. The high, vaulted ceiling is so extensively frosted in stucco that it resembles the surface of an elaborate and eccentric wedding cake. Above the wall of windows, plaster reliefs depict angelic and mortal figures in varying degrees of agony, as if their forms are not decorative but load-bearing and after hundreds of years they aren’t sure whether they can still manage the ceiling’s weight. The ceiling cherubs are at first