Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [34]
An afternoon spent at Lunapark summons a third pressing question, one concerning the average capacity of the Czech bladder. Hundreds of people are here, but there is only one bathroom, located at the very back of the park. It is a corrugated metal shack the yellow of boiled corn. Urinals cost three crowns and stalls cost five crowns, a price that includes a small rectangle of toilet paper torn from its roll by a bathroom attendant whose nose, one can only hope, has become inured to the smell. Unless Czechs have the urinary capacity of camels, there’s no way everyone who needs to urinate pays the bathroom lady to do it. The terrible yellow lavatory is too out of the way: the lines fronting it are too short. People must be going behind booths and rides. They must be walking to the fair’s edge and going behind bushes, the entire amusement park encircled by a shallow moat of pee.
Such rustic facilities are consistent with the other stray anachronisms that haunt Lunapark, apparitions comparable to Stromovka’s imperial hunting lodge. Primary among these is a shooting gallery that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the grounds of Lunapark’s Coney Island namesake, which opened for business in 1903. The shooting gallery’s hand-cut tin figures are attached to painted tin backdrops in which jungle scenes with exotic animals alternate with village scenes from a pre-mechanized age. There are field laborers, a man in a rowboat, two men on a seesaw, a windmill, and even an interior tableau entitled “Happy Family,” in which the successful shooter is rewarded with a vision of a mother rocking a cradle. Each scene is dotted with black tin targets that effect mechanical rewards for precise marksmanship, but constellations of pockmarks stretching across the backdrops and figures attest to untold years of crooked aim.
Coney Island’s earliest amusement park contained a carousel, but Prague’s retrograde version is even more old-fashioned: a circular open-sided tent edged with ponies that methodically trace the circle’s shit-lined perimeter. A man beside the animals wields a stick to keep them moving, but he doesn’t need to do much. The ponies know the drill and besides, there’s nowhere else for them to go.
The ponies and the shooting gallery may be the only park attractions not adorned with airbrushed women in various states of debauch. Like most of Europe, post-Communist Prague enjoys a relaxed relationship to the female form, but it’s strange to see that relationship embodied on amusement park backdrops. Behind a flying dragon ride, a naked blonde kisses a naked blue-skinned brunette with wings and a tail, their bare breasts colliding. The shirtless, cantaloupe-breasted ladies who grace the games of chance sport bikini tan lines and particularly detailed nipples. Steps away from the pre-modern ponies, an airbrushed young lady appears opposite a portrait of Uncle Sam. She is wearing spangles and an American flag and is gleefully sliding her fingers inside her blue satin hot pants. She makes no impression on the Czech tots who run past her to patronize the kiddie roulette wheel. Meanwhile, the ponies continue to tread their circle, providing the sixteenth century an unexpected olfactory foothold in the midst of the twenty-first. Empires rise and fall, ideologies wax and wane, language evolves and words take on new meanings, but the smell of pony dung is forever.
Through a Tram Darkly
ON A FRIDAY NIGHT A CZECH SKA BAND PLAYS to a packed house at the All Baron’s Society, a fraternal meeting hall whose walls are lined with portraits of its past members, grave men affecting that universal symbol of fraternity, ridiculous headgear— in this case, feathered pillbox hats. These men are all dead now, the most recent club portrait dating from 1958, when the greenest member doesn’t look any younger than fifty. It’s probably best they are deceased: they wouldn’t have been pleased with