Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [9]
Letná Park’s empty pedestal syndrome does not end there. The most recent personage to succumb to the plinth’s siren call was Michael Jackson. In 1996, a ten-meter-high steel statue of Michael Jackson was erected near the metronome on Stalin’s old pedestal—which shows once again the danger of leaving those things lying around empty—from which Jackson launched what has so far proven to be his last world tour. Today all signs of Jackson, like those of Stalin, have been thoroughly erased. Only Letná’s oldest visitors remember the pedestal’s original tenant. When they die, their memories of Stalin will die with them.
Library, Interrupted
ALONG THE TOURIST-CLOGGED ARTERIES OF OLD Town, a pizzeria advertises CHICKEN COVERED IN CORN FLAKES. A souvenir shop specializing in marionettes displays a puppet of an old Hasidic Jew beside a puppet of Harry Potter. Shoppers dawdle along the edges of the cobbled streets, scanning menus and fingering marionettes, trying on hats and debating the merits of Bohemian crystal, leaving the center of the narrow passageways to the city’s more resolute sight-seers, who forge down the dogleg streets that lead from Old Town Square to the Charles Bridge. Their path takes them past an unremarkable stone archway marked with a discreet plaque that reads NÁRODNÍ KNIHOVNA. The Charles Bridge lies mere steps away; the plaque is not in English; there is no reason to suspect the courtyard contains one of Prague’s greatest time warps. Nothing about the archway or even the anonymous, multi-armed courtyard within betrays the presence of the National Library. Czechs already know where the library is: it’s been in the same spot for over three hundred years. As far as they’re concerned, there’s no need for a tourist to be told.
The Czech National Library inhabits the extensive maze of buildings known as the Clementinum, which served as a Jesuit college until the Jesuits were tossed out in the late 1700s. The best way to locate the library is to look for the smattering of Czech college students intently smoking cigarettes outside its door, as the library is one of the very few places in the entire country where smoking is actually prohibited. The entrance itself, with its cracked plaster and its plain wooden doors, looks more like a modest college library than a national repository. There are no stone lions, no marble stairs, none of the trappings that earmark the famous libraries of great American cities. The foyer is small and beige and unprepossessing; the information counter could belong to any modest student union building. Past the counter two grumpy women staff the coat check, beyond which is the catalog room. Like any research library, the Clementinum’s holdings can only be accessed piecemeal from closed stacks beyond the purview of visitors. But here, a visitor with an ID and twenty crowns (eighty cents) can procure a piece of white card stock the size of a pack of cigarettes, with their name printed in block letters below a bar code sticker and above a rubber stamp whose ink bleeds into immediate illegibility upon its application. That this charm-less, flimsy object permits its bearer access to a vast collection of books older than the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock is tangible proof of the National Library’s intrinsic powers.
Just beyond the entrance to the coat check, a uniformed guard sits sentry in a small booth that resembles the concierge desk of an old-fashioned hotel. Beyond are dusty glass cases displaying photos and pamphlets, once arranged with care by some anonymous staff person. Utilitarian light fixtures and an interior slathered in thick coats of institutional beige erase all sense that this was once a monks’ cloister. There is no whiff of Jesuit here; the centuries have been painted