Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [4]
Today, the sloping steel medians between Prague’s up and down escalators are lined with metal studs. As late as 1993, however, the metal dividers were smooth, providing gleaming, uninterrupted slopes of lunatic speed to anyone reckless or rebellious enough to hoist herself over the handrail. Riding the escalator at least halfway before sliding down provided a ride that did not necessarily guarantee death or dismemberment and was extremely fun, if unambiguously illegal. Sliding down escalator medians—like speaking candidly or playing rock music—was forbidden under Communism, a system ominous enough to prevent generations of teens from exercising their hormonal mandate to defy authority. Communism cast a long and dark enough shadow that even in 1993, four years after the regime’s demise, median sliding was still a rare behavior. Ten years later, authoritarianism’s final defeat should be measured not in the profusion of shopping malls and McDonald’s restaurants, but in the ubiquity of the metal studs that now line every metro escalator median, for these signify a deeper change: the lure of the most fantastic slides ever constructed finally became stronger than fear of state reprisal. The young and the reckless began to heed their call, and the metal stud was born.
The reform symbolized by the metal stud, however, is limited. The ghost of deposed regime still haunts the subway tunnels in the form of a subterranean secret police force established at the subway’s inception. The undercover metro man is the authoritarian alternative to the turnstile. He resembles everybody else and is impossible to detect until there’s a tap on your shoulder—and it’s the guy in the battered leather jacket, the one who looks like he’s on his way to meet his buddies for a beer. He’s got a fleshy pink face, thinning hair, and watery blue eyes. He’s got a badge, but it’s so small that at first glance you may think you have been approached by one of the city’s many vendors of fake Soviet artifacts. The badge seems to have been manufactured from gold-colored plastic and is much smaller than a legitimate badge ought to be—authority should not fit so easily within the palm of a hand. However, this man is no vendor, and his badge’s legitimacy can be intuited from the grave panache with which he wields its dinkiness. The badge means if you don’t have a metro ticket, you will pay.
No two metro men reveal themselves the same way: perhaps they teach the rudiments at the academy, but the little touches are their own. This one draws out the moment, extending his hand palm downward; then, with a twist of his wrist he reveals his ace, the trick card he has been palming all along. This one’s no dramatist: he prefers a straight-ahead approach, the badge already out and waiting. Sometimes the badge is retrieved from a jacket pocket, or pulled from a waistband like a gun. Sometimes it is revealed in the flash of an opened overcoat, a publicly sanctioned form of exposure. At the next subway stop, the metro man marches his quarry onto the platform to collect their fines and every head in the car turns to watch: these are the ones caught passing notes during class; the ones caught fighting during recess; the ones suspected of harboring anti-socialist sentiments. The context of capture may change, but the moment of revelation is always the same, essentially unaltered from its childhood predecessors of Tag and Duck Duck Goose. Growing older does not provide escape, only a game with graver consequences. In the metro, Tag you’re it becomes Ticket please, and escape from this stewpot must be purchased.
Perhaps he’s the guy with the blue bulky jacket that needs laundering; perhaps he’s got jowls and small gray eyes. Maybe the undercover metro man is your neighbor; maybe he’s the man at the head of the platform. Maybe there is no metro man, at least not this time, but one can never be certain and so it is better to buy a ticket. To any citizen of the former Eastern bloc, such reasoning is crushingly familiar, and so—over a decade after the city’s eager embrace of the West