Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [2]
In the years since Communism’s demise, gambling has become as common as graffiti. Along neighborhood streets, twenty-four-hour hernas advertise the day’s accumulated jackpot on digital street displays, while inside the door, catatonic men feed coins into slot machines. Off-track betting parlors inhabit every major subway station. It’s easy to become disheartened. Hopefully, discouragement will cast the gaze downward to Prague’s sidewalks. They are not concrete or slate, but marble mosaics that stretch from the city’s touristed center to its most ordinary neighborhoods; they are part of the city’s fabric, nearly daring to be overlooked.There are never more than two colors of stone to a sidewalk, but those colors change. Sometimes the stones are gray and white, sometimes roseate and white, marble cubes the size of children’s blocks forming patterns that shift, block to block, from diamonds to checkerboards to squares of varying size. Who decides the pattern? Is there a plan in a municipal building somewhere mandating which city block receives nesting squares and which lines of diamonds? Occasionally small piles of marble cubes rest beside a patchy sidewalk, waiting to be set in place by a sidewalk fixer in blue overalls. Oblivious to the street traffic, he will patiently tap each stone into place with a metal mallet and a bricklayer’s hammer, his methods no different from the pavers of 1763. In the intervening years, empire has been replaced by Communism, which has been supplanted by capitalism, each passing era leaving its mark but not obscuring what came before. The sidewalks persist in their mosaic geometrics.Whether ruled by emperor or dictator or venture capitalist, Prague is simply too old and its habits too engrained not to remain faithful to itself.
Invisible City
PRAGUE’S MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM LIES ON A pedestrian shopping concourse a few blocks northeast of Wenceslas Square, steps away from a building that once housed Gestapo and then Communist Party officers before its post–Velvet Revolution conversion to an upscale shopping mall. Advertising for the Museum of Communism has taken over most of the city’s subway escalators; each ascent and descent is accompanied by smiling images of the 1980 Moscow Olympic bear toting a machine gun or nested Russian dolls bearing sharp, menacing fangs, with the English words MUSEUM OF COMMUNISM printed beneath. It is no coincidence that the advertising campaign smells American: the Museum of Communism was opened by an entrepreneurial American expatriate who also owns a successful jazz bar. When the museum opened a year ago, the Czech press complained that the creation of such a museum ought to have been left to Czechs. The American jazz bar owner responded that the Czechs, after ten museum-less years, had blown their chance. The museum proclaims itself to be the only one of its kind in the world—a statement sure to inspire budding entrepreneurs expatriated across the former Eastern bloc to start museums of their own. Until that inevitable moment, however, Prague’s remains unique.
The Museum of Communism shares the first floor of an elegant nineteenth-century building, which it shares with a casino. A sign on the building’s stairwell directs all comers either left, toward the museum, or right, toward the card tables. The only Czechs who choose the former path are museum employees. These employees are exceedingly polite, speak excellent English, and are perfectly happy to sell, in addition to museum admissions, Lenin candles in a variety of attractive colors, Lenin paperweights, and reprints of Communist-era propaganda posters handily outfitted with English slogans for the convenience of their purchasers.
Considering Prague’s nascent penchant for tourist traps—in recent years the city has inaugurated a Wax Museum, a Sex Machine Museum, and a Museum of Torture Instruments—the