Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [15]
Devoid of inhabitants and window glass, a building’s internal life becomes uncomfortably public. Because Karlín’s apartment buildings are old-fashioned, highceilinged affairs, the river was unable to fully conquer their ground floors. Remnants of their antediluvian lives remain in thin bands along the rooms’ upper edges. Through one gaping window there is a ragged stripe of parlor with a white archway and creamy yellow wallpaper. Through another is an ornamental plaster molding and a decorative chandelier, but below each of these narrow bands of normalcy, bare, crumbling brick walls descend from the tops of doorways to rough, cavelike floors. The violence of the flood lies in the jagged scar separating smooth plaster from raw brick, evoking a face from which not quite all the skin has been torn away. Building façades display the same uncanny ruptures, delicate Art Nouveau vines and thistles hanging incongruously above blasted expanses of stone and cratered brick.
Karlín’s current populace is composed largely of workmen. Workmen in dirty overalls trudge past empty parks and closed schools and underneath a large banner strung across the front of a real estate office that reads, WELCOME TO NEW KARLÍN! Workmen emerge from dank entranceways and walk down ruined sidewalks carting wheelbarrows. Along a half-finished street, two men labor on their hands and knees pounding heavy oblong gray paving stones into place with metal hammers while two others stand beside them, wrestling successive stones into position with metal tongs. The sound of metal against stone is surprisingly musical. The hammers bang out a delicate two-note melody that comprises the only sound along the otherwise deserted street. The workmen do not walk the streets the way a resident would. It is clear by the way they carry themselves—their faces bored or tired or merely blank—that they have no connection to this place. To them Karlín is not a neighborhood; it is simply a broken thing they have been hired to fix.
Karlín’s physical rehabilitation is slowly progressing. Streets are being reopened, buildings restored. Toward the end of March, the red X’s that had obscured Karlín’s metro stations on the city’s subway maps since the previous August disappeared as if by magic. The reinstated stations are virginal in appearance, their surfaces free of scratches, dirt, and spray paint. They likely have not looked this good since the collapse of Communism over ten years before. Prague’s other metro stations clamor with snack vendors, newspaper salesmen, and the occasional religious proselytizer. Teenagers loiter near phone booths; young mothers buy their children candy. The Karlín metro stations are empty of crowds and commodities. Their few patrons move quickly and silently from the trains and up the escalator to the empty street outside.
There is talk of people moving back. Whether encouraged by political forces or by their own predilection for underdogs, Radio Prague is fond of airing optimistic pieces proclaiming Karlín’s beauty, historical importance, and ideal location.These pieces neglect to mention that Karlín lies on a flood plain, that most of its buildings were uninsured, that their owners lack the money for repairs. Under duress, a city like Prague, richer in history than in pecuniary assets, is necessarily forced to stage selective rescues. When the river rose cranes were rushed to the Charles Bridge—Prague’s foremost symbol of urban immutability—fating Karlín to become an urban portent, a small persistent question mark lying in the crook of a much, much larger one.