Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [20]
By two o’clock, around two hundred protesters have gathered, a crowd reportedly twice the size of the previous rally. Though there are a fair number of American expatriates, the diverse crowd is largely Czech. There are young punk rockers and senior citizens, men in suits and men in leather jackets, women in torn jeans and women in knee-length skirts, all waiting quietly and patiently for the speakers to begin. Among them there is no bongo drumming, no chanting, no dancing, no puppets, none of the usual trappings of American protest. Perhaps the lack of excitement can be traced to the lack of policemen: there are only five in evidence. They stand at the edge of the crowd, looking bored. At American protests, one can rely on a large enough police presence to be assured one is behaving in at least a slightly brave or dangerous manner, but these police act as if there is no difference between the protesters gathered near the monument and the tourists waiting for the astronomical clock to chime the hour. Such authoritative apathy is distinctly enervating.
Finally, the protesters are provided a focal point: a young man climbs the tall base of the Jan Hus monument and unfurls an anarchist banner. Three of the policemen walk to the monument’s base to request that he remove the banner and alight from Jan. From his perch the young man unleashes a dramatic physical and verbal tirade weirdly out of place beside the quiet crowd and the reggae soundtrack. When the young man eventually descends, obligingly taking his banner with him, the police try to escort him away but he refuses to cooperate, and so the foursome stalls at the leftmost edge of the statue, attracting a crowd of onlookers. The police convene for a hushed conference, leaving the young man sitting frozen in place before a clutch of curious spectators, resembling a child who has just thrown a tantrum in the produce aisle.
The American woman in the orange T-shirt opens the rally by asserting that the disruptive, banner-wielding, Jan Hus–mounting young man is in no way associated with the protest. Various speakers continue for a little less than an hour. A few try to initiate chants, but these never take. There is often applause and occasionally a shout of affirmation, but for the most part the crowd is attentive and appreciative, but staid. Most among the crowd are old enough to remember the Velvet Revolution; some are old enough to remember Prague Spring. Less than one hundred yards away, a memorial cross made of charred wooden beams commemorates the anti-Nazi fighters who died in the square in 1945. By three o’clock the rally has ended. A march toward the Mánes Bridge and the British and American embassies commences and the area surrounding the Jan Hus statue is once again empty, save for a few abandoned protest posters leaning against its base. Toward the opposite end of the square, the astronomical clock chimes the hour, unleashing its own five-hundred-year-old procession.
The war begins three days later. It is evening in Prague when the first bombs drop on Iraq, and by the following morning signs have appeared all over the city urging people to gather that evening in protest at Wenceslas Square. The half-mile-long boulevard was originally built in the fourteenth century as a horse market; now its shops and hotels serve as a crash course in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. Art Nouveau, Cubist, Functionalist, and neo-Renaissance structures stand in unlikely cohabitation, beautifully ornamented façades neighboring blocky Communist buildings and post–Velvet Revolution constructions.
At the head of the square stands a large equestrian statue of King Wenceslas. Erected in the same decade as the Jan Hus monument, it is one of Prague’s most symbolic sites, having served as a historical staging ground for a century of tumultuous events. The king and his horse witnessed Czechoslovakia’s declaration of independence in 1918, when thousands of Praguers filled Wenceslas Square to weep with joy