Rameau's Niece (12 page)

For her talk in Prague, Margaret had prepared a short selection of anticlerical, antiaristocratic pornographic poems popular at the time, with lines like "Watch the scrofulous count / Upon his trembling sister mount." You see? she would say. Enlightenment philosophy, the search for scientific and moral truth, was as unsettling as incest and debauchery. Truth threatened an unjust and hypocritical rule. Truth was revolutionary. And always must be revolutionary.

Yeah. That sounded good. In Prague. Now. But then what, Margaret thought. Freedom of expression and freedom to make a living, those Enlightenment bequests, were revolutionary ideas, but once realized, those freedoms turned away from revolution, didn't they? Revolution, democratic revolution, fought to make itself obsolete.

Margaret stared at one of the translations she had made, a sort of porno-limerick-libel.

The king's weenie
Is so royally teeny
That the poor queenie

Does not know where to turn.
Says the cardinal, asked for succor,
"
Sooth! My vows do bid me fuck her.
So, first this frontal liturgy,
Then the sacrament of buggery!
"

Ah, freedom, Margaret thought. Freedom from debauchery. Freedom for debauchery. Confused, she leaned her head against the little oval window and faded back to sleep.

When she woke, Margaret read an essay by Havel she had brought along and felt sheepish and ashamed. For so far from living in truth herself, she lived in a fog, and liked it like that. In Czechoslovakia, where until a few months ago scholars had stoked boilers and writers washed windows, she would be just a gaping voyeur. But then, encouragingly, in Czechoslovakia, Frank Zappa was a major cultural figure. They landed, not too far from a large mound of hay. Margaret saw that the plane was being guided past other aircraft to its parking spot by a small car, its orange paint dull and chipped. There was a red light on the roof of the car and a large sign that said, in English,
FOLLOW ME.

In the little airport, she stared in fascination at the big gold stars on the shoulders of the bored customs officers. She waited for her luggage, surrounded by French and German businessmen. In the taxi, as they drove past blocks of Stalinist housing developments, the Castle in the distance, she listened in inattentive confusion to the driver's tape of a choral group singing, "'Cause you've got personality! Smile! Personality! Charm! Personality..."

The hotel was a large, slightly run-down place built in the twenties. Her room was heavy in spirit in spite of its being both clean and nearly empty, the windows enormous and facing a building from the turn of the century, judging by the medallions of rather mournful Art Nouveau ladies who stared from the facade.

"Cheer up, girls," Margaret said to them, as she had no one else to talk to.

She herself was almost giddy. Without Edward, she felt off-balance, as if one eye were covered. She walked carefully down the wide steps to the dining room, drunk with solitude.

Dinner alone in a restaurant was a novelty for Margaret. When she somberly spread her napkin on her lap, she noticed its size and how severely starched it was; when she held the large, heavy menu, she consciously experienced its proportions, the sensation of its weight. She wondered what Lily, the menu maven, would have made of Margaret's almost awed response to the leather-bound multilingual price list. But alone, one took nothing for granted, not even the feeling of a menu in one's hands. One sensed everything: for, after all, there was nothing else to do.

Cabbage and dumplings and goose! At her round table, sitting in her soft, padded chair, Margaret rejoiced. She flipped through her
Baedeker's Prague,
which she had brought to dinner with her as company, leaned back, and was comfortable and content. They would cook her goose, and she would eat it. Ah, to be on one's own and make such feeble jokes to oneself! It was good that Edward was home, titillating his students with dirty poetry by Walt Whitman, perhaps, but never mind, for she was an authentically isolated soul being served stale rolls by a man in tails in the shadow of a towering bronze statue of a nude woman, her arms flung out dramatically, as if she were taking a bow, Ethel Merman's bow, a bangle bracelet high on each arm emphasizing her nakedness.

After dinner I will take a walk, Margaret thought. A short walk to the Old Town Square. I am in Prague. I am free in a free city. I am on my own. No one knows I'm here. I can do as I like. No one cares about me. They're too busy being free. I can stare at people and dress badly, and no one will care, no one will even know, because no one knows me.

She gently nursed her solitude. The sparkle of the silverware occupied her attention for a considerable period of time. She drank mineral water and heard herself swallow. The other tables seemed far away, insignificant islands in the foggy distance, across an impassable sea.

And then from the shore came a mighty roar, a tidal wave of chatter and exclamations and peals of laughter, a foaming surge of petite elderly women and petite elderly men, a crash of Belgians.

"We may join you, please? The room is so full. We are from Brussels. You are American? My son is visiting America next week. And New York City. Your address, please? New York City! I will pass it to him! First he is in Paris. You have been in Paris? I am from Brussels,
un juge.
" The man, a trim little fellow in a cardigan sweater beneath his suit jacket, smiled serenely. "I put men in jail."

His wife nodded her head and said, "
Oui! Oui!
"

"My son goes to New York City for business, to Manhattan. This is near to you, Manhattan? We have never visited America—"

"
Oui! Oui!
"

Margaret smiled. The Belgians smiled. The Belgians sat down and smiled some more. At one end of the dining room, there was a podium on which stood a piano and a set of drums and a microphone. Margaret watched with foreboding as a man in a tuxedo sat down behind the drums, another behind the piano and, last, a third limped (his tuxedo seemed to contain at least one wooden leg) to the microphone. Was that a toupee? She had never seen one quite like it, combed down in front of the ears to create wide, flat black sideburns. He lifted a violin and began a whine of misery, bobbing and swaying with a resigned heartiness. Turn the pegs! Margaret thought desperately. Tune the instrument! The violinist grimaced in a kind of smile. The drummer too smiled unceasingly. Margaret was relieved she could not see the pianist.

"In America," said the
juge,
"many men are in jail, the black men and the poor men—"

"
Oui! Oui!
"

"Yes," Margaret said politely.

"Ah! You are so well informed about American criminal justice system!" said the man.

"You're American?" said another man excitedly, turning toward her from the next table. "This is very different from America. I know. I've been here two weeks." He paused dramatically, then said, "The people do not know how to make a profit."

The violinist was playing loudly, vibrantly, and quite out of tune. He is doing this on purpose, Margaret thought. He has tuned his violin to be out of tune. He hates us. Are they really playing
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
with a snare drum?

"I'm from L.A.," the man at the next table was saying. "Los Angeles," he explained to the Belgians.

He was a degenerate-looking man who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty-five, his skin leathery and drawn, an alarming, inhuman yellowish tan, and his eyes glowed from deep sockets, lifeless, meaningless, but shining bright, as if someone had gone out and forgotten to turn them off.

"Ah! Los Angeles! In Los Angeles, they put the Mexican people in jail, I think," said the
juge.

The American had turned so far toward them that he was able to put his long tan fingers on their table. "I'm a photographer so I notice things," he said. "Take for example your table setting. Not being photographers, you probably haven't noticed, but I've been trained to notice. Now we're in a nice restaurant, in a classy hotel, right? We're being served by guys in monkey suits. They've got all this silver." He lifted Margaret's fork by the tines, as Margaret watched with stunned attention, held it up for all to see, then lifted her glass. "This is real crystal, I'll tell you," he said, pinging the glass, her glass, with the fork, her fork, then shaking his head. "You ever hear of Bohemian crystal? But what's missing? You don't notice, right? But I pick up on things, and these people don't know how to make a profit. Why? Because for all those years, their bosses said, Just fill your quotas, just fill your quotas. So they'd sell ten shirts, then quit for the day. They don't care that fifty more people are standing in a line waiting for shirts and that they have one hundred shirts left in the store. They don't care. They
filled their quotas!
See my point?" He had returned Margaret's glass, but still held her fork in one hand, thumping it on the white tablecloth. His voice had a thin, droning rhythm, not unlike water dripping from a faucet.

"So," he continued, "what is missing from the table in this elegant restaurant? The salt and pepper! With all their crystal and silver, they leave off the salt and pepper. Then you have to ask for it and then they have to go and fetch it, which keeps the waiter from doing something else, which means someone else has to sit around with no dinner, which means these people are inefficient. I mean no disrespect, of course, they're a decent people. We just have to teach them."

Margaret lifted her
Baedeker's
to reveal a small crystal salt shaker and a small crystal pepper shaker.

"Hey!" said the sinewy photographer with his dying, smoldering eyes, as if this discovery somehow proved his point. "We're in Eastern Europe."

"No, no," cried the small Belgian man.

"
Oui! Oui!
" said his small Belgian wife, in agreement with whom, Margaret was unsure.

"No, no," the Belgian man continued. "This is not Eastern Europe, you know, but central Europe. Historically, central Europe. Central, central. Here was the home of Kafka and Dvorák of course, but also Rilke and Smetana and, too, Kepler and Einstein and Alphonse Mucha! Central, you see?"

The violinist was clumping painfully among the tables now, asking for requests. Haven't you filled your quota yet? Margaret wondered. A large table of Germans waited while most of the waiters in the restaurant assisted in preparing a preposterously large brandy glass, holding it over a flame, then pouring a thimbleful of brandy in, lighting it, and blowing it out. Why it took so many waiters to perform this ritual, as only one was active at a time—the thimble pourer waited for the glass heater to finish, then passed the glass in turn to the brandy lighter, who gave it to the brandy blower-outer, who passed it on to various servers—was not immediately clear.

"See what I mean?" the American photographer said, nodding his head toward the waiters. "Inefficient."

But no one in the restaurant seemed to mind, everyone watching the procedure in fascination.

"
Oui! Oui!
" said the Belgian man and the Belgian lady together, cheerfully observing the blue flames.

"Nice people," the American said, shaking his head. "Nice little country."

Margaret looked at him, twisted in his chair in his determination to speak to them, and she hoped that suddenly, like a wound-up rubber band when it is at last released, he would spin back to face the other way. But of course he didn't, he simply continued chatting. He had a terrible cold, which he referred to as the Prague Plague, and he sniffed a great deal.

"In Prague," said the Belgian wistfully, "I think only political dissidents are put in jail. That is, they used to be, have been, were put in jail. Who now is being put in the jail? Who now?"

After dinner, Margaret and her guidebook went on a walk. She could hear her footsteps. In the middle of a city. She noticed how few cars were on the road. One, and then none. A few minutes later, one. And then none. Just the clip of her footsteps.

The Civic Forum building at the bottom of Wenceslaus Square looked smaller than it had on television. What a good-natured headquarters for a revolution, Margaret thought. A white banner flew with the initials O.F., a happy face drawn inside the O. There was a café on the ground floor.

"Change money?
Cambia? Changer?
" a man asked her.

She shook her head and followed a narrow street, from which cars were banned, past darkened shops, until an irregular square of pastel buildings opened before her, so delicate in the lamplight that she stood still in wonder.

Kafka, you're crazy, she thought. Well, of course, that's not a very original observation, but look! This city is light and airy and elegant and kind. I've been here nine hours, so I know.

Tourists filled the square. Folksingers with stringy hair strummed guitars. A man in a plumed helmet played the tuba. Margaret walked along the edges, looking up at the surrounding buildings. There were little narrow houses and large rococo palaces, all painted lime green or lemon yellow or shell pink or robin's-egg blue, covered with statues and curls, the decorations white and luminous in the night.

Margaret had almost forgotten the pleasure of being a tourist. No responsibility, except to look. I like to look, she thought. With my guidebook to tell me what it is I'm looking at. She waited with the other tourists for the elaborate cuckoo clock on the medieval Old Town Hall to chime ten. Finally, two windows in the tower above opened, behind which the twelve apostles could be seen parading by. A skeleton rang a bell, his bone arm moving up and down, pulling a string, his head shaking eerily. A golden cock crowed in a harsh squawk.

The breakfast buffet table offered yogurt with a dozen bowls of powdery toppings in different pastel confetti colors, as well as sliced cucumbers, meat soup, and cold brussels sprouts. The musical trio was absent, but Margaret saw the Belgians, who waved, and the photographer, who sneezed extravagantly, then winked at her. She gratefully followed the waitress to a table far from her acquaintances, a table directly beneath the bronze statuess, her arms spread above Margaret like the fronds of a sheltering palm.