Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [14]
The neighborhood of Karlín lies two miles northeast of the city center and just below the crook of Prague’s liquid question mark. Karlín was Prague’s first suburb, the nineteenth-century home of the city’s manufacturing middle class. In the century to follow it devolved into a working-class neighborhood split between residential streets dotted with old, pretty buildings and former factories that once produced everything from trains and steam engines to hats. After the Velvet Revolution, gentrifiers envisioned reclaiming the neighborhood’s middle-class roots: former factories were converted to office space; newly minted realtors spun Karlín as up-and-coming. Though Karlín could claim nothing noteworthy enough to draw the tourist crowd, it had aspirations of its own. This was before the flood.
Karlín’s silence is more noticeable than its smell. The smell is a subtle thing, creeping into the forefront of consciousness only gradually, its familiarity at first fooling the brain. Karlín smells like an old basement after it rains, when water has seeped through the walls and up through the floor to take hold of the old couch and boxes of discarded books and magazines. The smell belongs to memories of rain-soaked tree houses and dank crawlspaces; it should not belong to an entire neighborhood. In Karlín, this smell hangs in the air like strange pollen from a water-choked flower. Gaping doors and glassless windows exude the scents of wet plaster and rotting wood, smells that combine to enclose the neighborhood in invisible decaying walls, imparting a sense of claustrophobia to even a deserted street.
Karlín’s silence is an outright assault. The sound of Prague is the sound of its street traffic: the rubber burble of car tires against cobblestone, the screech of tram wheels grinding against the rails, the clomp of a babushka’s heavy shoes against the sidewalk, and the murmur of manifold conversations. Six months after the flood’s subsidence, the majority of Karlín’s streets still remain closed to vehicles and there are no trains, the rails having collapsed along with the roads they traversed. Only half of the neighborhood’s twenty thousand residents have returned to their homes. On a weekday afternoon, the sidewalks should be filled with women running errands and children returning from school; there ought to be old ladies waiting for buses. Occasionally a few stragglers appear—a woman walking her dog, a man sitting on a bench—but these lone figures only serve to magnify the neighborhood’s emptiness.They are a reminder of all the other people who aren’t here with them.
Even to a curious stranger for whom Karlín is a novelty and not a neighborhood, the urge to flee is strong. Karlín controverts some very basic urban assumptions. Histories of cities are read with a degree of wide-eyed wonder: it is difficult to envision a time when Manhattan was an uninterrupted expanse of green, when Rome was seven hills. The youngest of the world’s great cities are found in America and these upstarts still assert themselves as foregone conclusions, even though the oldest among them are barely two centuries old. A city as old and retentive as Prague evinces its long history with the certitude of a natural formation. Its streetscapes impart inviolability; its buildings appear immutable. Such illusory notions play an important part in feeling at ease in a city. But in Karlín sidewalks are obstacle courses of metal barricades blocking off deep holes and piles of stones and mounds of earth. Decaying façades stretch from the pitted sidewalks to the archways of ground-floor doors and windows. Phone booths stand empty, gutted by flood. Most storefronts are still dark, gaping spaces, anonymous save for water-damaged signs over doorways