Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [23]
Just as the interior of a Prague taxi furnishes no information about the cab or its driver and therefore provides no defense against being ripped off, the Prague police uniform exhibits neither name nor badge number. Not only does this make lodging a complaint impossible but it forces me to invent names for my two Malá Strana companions. I’ll call the taciturn one Dim, for his alarming resemblance to Alex’s droog in A Clockwork Orange, and the younger, talkative one The Mole, for the round black birthmark on his left cheek.
Dim and The Mole were extremely pleased to have stopped me; perhaps I was the day’s first quarry, or perhaps they particularly enjoyed detaining female tourists. In any case they smiled like schoolboys who had just scored a hall pass. I would need to pay a fine, The Mole informed me, which was Dim’s cue to request identification. I handed over my American driver’s license, which provoked an even wider smile, knowledge of my nationality opening a bright green door onto a world of inflated fines. The Mole produced from one of his many pockets a thick pad and, reading my name off my license, slowly copied my information onto what was, ostensibly, some sort of official police form.
Czech fines and American fines work along starkly different principles. As almost every American over the age of sixteen knows, minor American infractions take the form of a ticket. The ticket serves as an official record of the violation, and grants the offender time in which to protest their innocence or pay the stipulated amount, a choice so inherently American that most Americans take it for granted. The dual concept that a fine is not paid immediately, but within a certain time frame, and that one can appeal a policeman’s judgment to a higher authority is both as natural and intuitive to an American as it is antithetical to a Czech.
The administration of a Czech fine is typically an entirely verbal transaction, with no accompanying paperwork, to be paid immediately and in cash to the policeman requesting it. While such a method obliterates the possibility of an appeal, this system offers one small compensation: haggling. Since the “fine” being levied is going straight into the policeman’s pocket, there is no legislated price for freedom. Someone willing to dither can walk away with a relative bargain.
As Dim continued to make a show of scribbling into his pad—though by now he had surely exhausted the data provided by my license—I expressed to The Mole in broken Czech my belief that an honest mistake such as mine did not merit a fine. I said this in a friendly, lighthearted manner; interactions with the Prague police often take on an air of false jollity, as if everyone is acting in a hastily written play that might at any moment be called off, but which is never called off. The Mole assured me in a similarly jovial tone that mine would not be a large fine like a thousand crowns (approximately thirty-five dollars—enough to keep Dim and The Mole in beer for a week), but a small fine, like three hundred crowns (approximately ten dollars—enough to buy Dim and The Mole steak dinners). Almost every time The Mole finished speaking, there wavered between us a moment when it seemed possible that my predicament would be revealed by The Mole to be a practical joke—there was no infraction, no fine to pay, in fact he and Dim weren’t even police, they’d found the uniforms secondhand—but then the moment would dissolve and The Mole would still be standing there, still acting like a policeman, and it would be my turn to speak