Rameau's Niece (14 page)

Margaret reached into the large pocket of her parka for her
Baedeker's.
But her
Baedeker's
was not in her pocket, nor was it in her other pocket. It was not in her bag. It was not in her hand. It was in the hand of the man from New Jersey. He had forgotten to give it back. Margaret stood miserably in the cold, her day of sightseeing ruined. By an act of offhand generosity, her
Baedeker's,
its pages elaborately marked and turned back, was in the possession of another. She had been forgetful, as usual. Now she would be ignorant, as usual.

She looked up at the gate. Huge pillars stood on either side. On top of the left one rose an enormous statue of a naked man pushing another naked man to the ground, about to plunge a dagger into his throat. On the right, an even larger, stronger-looking man stood poised to club to death his fallen enemy. Who were these nude, sinewy bullies, and why were they guarding the Castle? Who made them? Who ordered them put there? She would never know, and the statues, unexplained, writhed above her in an insinuating, eerie mystery. The violence and heft of the tangled limbs, the sparkle of the gilded dagger and club against the coal-darkened bodies, all looked wildly incongruous against the rather subdued, refined building within.

Who would tell her now from what window the defenestration of Prague took place? Margaret walked reluctantly through the gate, past a stiff, ruddy-faced young guard, into the unknown.

In a cold gray fog, Margaret wandered from unidentified courtyard to unidentified courtyard; through large rooms, empty except for a throne or a metal folding chair; past fountains held aloft by contorted bulging bodies. Sometimes there were signs in English, but often there were not. In St. Vitus Cathedral, an endless, ice-cold barn, an impossibly gaudy silver casket stood on a pedestal surrounded with thick, bulging silver babies and garlands—an imperial tomb, obviously, only whose? Margaret had no one, and no book, to tell her. She glanced at it sadly, longingly, a soul robbed of certainty.

Heaven help me, Margaret thought. There is no truth, no objectivity, no disinterested knowledge. Prague, sweet Prague, has been unwittingly deconstructed by a careless man from New Jersey. Barely registering the tomb's truly magnificent ugliness in her despair, she moved on.

Edward's silly, girlish students could have lived without him for a week. And Edward would have known who was buried in the silver bauble, who built the Eiffel Tower, who was buried in Grant's tomb. Edward would have memorized the guidebook, or at least not lost it, or he wouldn't have needed it in the first place, devouring the sights raw. Margaret missed him terribly; she missed his loud voice.

Gloomy, benighted, and cold, Margaret sat in a taxi and passed all the buildings she could not identify, through the wood the name of which she no longer remembered, to the bank of the River Whatever.

Before her stretched the Charles Bridge, its cobblestone path not at all straight, but curving slightly this way, then that, leading eventually to slender Gothic towers, to Renaissance domes, to tilted red-tiled roofs. In the dark gray sky, gulls shot by, screeching, floating upward, then coasting down again, graceful and swift. Statues, dozens of dignified figures in flowing, stony robes, stood at intervals, rising on either side of the bridge. Margaret leaned over the side and saw the grim, slate water turn suddenly golden with a shaft of sunlight. Swans plunged upside down to feed, their tails pointing up comically. Above the harsh strumming of a guitar, an American voice sang, "Git out of my room, girl. You're as crazy as the moon, girl. Oh! The world is full of garbage. Don't throw me away!"

Margaret turned and saw, perched at the foot of a statue, a long-haired boy in jeans and a fringed leather jacket. Several teenage boys, clearly not Americans, stood around him, nodding their heads in approval. The sun was pouring through the clouds now, and the boys and the statues and the red rooftops and the golden spires of the Castle glowed, warm and vibrant.

Margaret watched the sun light up the city. Each building it shined on, she thought, had some name, some prominent place in the history of Western culture, a name and a place she would never know. The sun and the gleaming city mocked her.

I am a failure as a sightseer, Margaret thought. Why didn't Edward take off some time and come here with me? But her husband was home seducing shapely but intellectually unformed girls with dramatic readings of poetry, and this city was sparkling and beckoning, a coy temptress, forever beyond her reach.

Beside her, a young man was setting Soviet officer caps and belt buckles on the stone railing. A cardboard sign in English said
CLEARANCE ON TOTALITARIANISM
!!

"So!" said an American tourist, pointing his miniature video camera at the man selling the Red Army castoffs. "May I ask you a few questions, sir?"

His voice had the tone of a father at a birthday party for three-year-olds. Margaret felt ashamed.

"First, sir, could you tell me, what do you think of the Russians?"

"I don't like," said the man, facing the camera, then grinning and looking down.

"You don't like them. I see. And why is that?"

"They are Communists."

"And why are you selling these things, sir? Would you say it was because you prefer capitalism?"

"I would say, yes."

"Thank you, sir, for your candor," said the officious tourist, turning suddenly to Margaret, aiming his little machine at her. "And you?"

"I would say, yes," Margaret said.

"You're an entrepreneur," said the tourist, turning back to the Czech. "Do you understand? En-tre-pre-neur." With his free hand, he patted the man's arm. "You will do well."

Margaret, in penance for her people, bought a pin from the entrepreneur, a red star with a white enameled portrait of Lenin, in shoulder-length curls at the age of five, in the center.

What a horrible man, Margaret thought, watching the tourist, who was now interviewing the folksinger. And yet I am no better. A voyeur. Not even a voyeur. I'm too inept to be a voyeur unless I have a narrator, a book of instructions, a
Baedeker's.
I'm too insensitive to sightsee.

But the city glowed delicately all around her. The river was wide beneath the bridge. The gulls laughed above in the new sunlit sky. Oh well, fuck
Baedeker's
, she thought. What do I care who built what? I'll only forget it tomorrow. What do I care who lived where? They're all dead now, anyway.

She gazed around her with new determination. She, Margaret Nathan, pedant, scholar, seeker of truth, was in Prague, city of truth. Observe! Experience! Know! Dare to know? said Kant. Dare to sightsee! says Margaret.

The quick little gulls were oddly stubby, their heads black, their black beaks as straight as needles. Chilly, pallid vendors in thin parkas sold glasses painted with red flowers. A skinny man offered elongated tin soldiers in World War I uniforms, painted by his mother. There were thirty statues along the bridge—she counted—all black with coal dust. Above the American folksinger, the statue was of an anguished Christ on the cross, a woman facing him, her hand gently pressing his leg. Around them fluttered a mountain of curly-haired cherubs, lips parted. The woman's face lifted toward his.

Carefully Margaret observed the statue, the woman's upturned face and parted lips, the gentle insistence of her fingers resting on his leg, her thumb reaching almost to his thigh. His head sank toward hers. His muscles strained.

She's trying to kiss him, Margaret thought. He's trying to kiss her. They long to embark on the pursuit of pleasure. What I am observing is a highly charged, erotic moment. This is a religious statue depicting desire. The woman's hand pressed against the flesh of his leg, an insistent caress. Their faces reached, hopelessly, toward each other.

I am going insane, Margaret thought.

But her observations continued to yield the same sort of data: on every side of her, statues rose up, statues of bodies, the curves of their legs and shoulders outlined by the clinging drapery of their long garments. Men lifted their hands imploringly to women standing magnificent atop cherubs piled up in fleshy heaps. These are
saints,
Margaret reminded herself. Saints praying to the Virgin. If Jesus looks like his muscles are straining toward a woman below him, perhaps it's because he's
dangling from a cross.

Their robes flowed, sweeping across their limbs, across their stomachs. The sun was shining on the city, lighting up the thirty statues of men and women entangled in their clothing and their passions.

Margaret hurried from the sunny bridge, from the Red Army caps and the singing hippie, from the swans upside down in the sparkling waters of the River Whatever. She hurried into the refuge in the dark and crooked streets of the Old Town. Children waited in line at an ice cream shop. The windows of a rare book store displayed eighteenth-century manuscripts and three fairly recent issues of
The New York Review of Books.

She walked on as if she knew where she were going. She followed the curves and dodges of the little street. The statues had been left behind on the bridge, but here were more figures, mounted on the walls, over the doorways, great arched doorways opening along a street so narrow it was almost an alley. Neoclassical men flanked one doorway, baring their perfect chests, every muscle just visible beneath the skin, their arms lifted in graceful, balletic poses. What are their legs like? Margaret wondered, for the statues ended just above the groin, below each lovely manly man a decorative pedestal.

Margaret stopped and tried to gain control of herself, for surely one did not come to Prague to ogle nude architectural decoration. These were the streets where, only a year ago, people walked in fear of Soviet tanks, and now they crowded around vendors selling copies of
Ameriky Sen,
by Norman Mailer, on the sidewalks. This was where Kafka walked, where the story of the Golem was invented. This was where
Don Giovanni
premiered. This was central Europe!

Above, art deco maidens, broad and bland in an oddly alluring way, giants of women, stared down at her from a rooftop. Their breasts, circular emblems of breasts, stood out above their Egyptian skirts, stood out above the central European city.

Margaret turned and turned again, up one street and down another, again and again, each turn bringing her face to face with yet another man of stone, another woman. Before her, their massive feet nearly at the level of Margaret's eyes, stood two titans, two Herculean males groaning beneath the weight of the building they strained to hold on their bulging shoulders, lion skins flung carelessly across their magnificent nakedness. On the other side of the street, an impassive woman in bas-relief fanned her own flat breasts and taut, flat stomach. Two giantesses in Edwardian hairdos framed a doorway, their arms outstretched, each having only a belt with a round medallion just above the navel to clothe them; an awful owl, its wings spread threateningly, stood between them. Their feet were big masculine feet, with prominent toes.

Margaret scurried guiltily beneath the breasts and buttocks and feet. She could not take her eyes off them, and stumbled stupidly against the mere mortals on the street. She passed a butcher shop and looked in horror and fascination at a display of sausages—long white ropes coiled thickly; pale pink wieners hanging in bunches; skinny, wrinkled sausages drooping white and sad; a burst of fat, greasy, stubby ones; others mottled red and white, protruding from their pile in grand eighteen-inch curves. Blushing, Margaret continued on, through the Old Town Square again, this time past what seemed to be a wedding party with cars decorated in garlands, a doll in a top hat on one, a doll in a white dress strapped to the fender of the other, a clownish man leering and playing the accordion.

She came at last to a large baroque church squeezed incongruously into a small area not even large enough to be called a square. Three doors opened into the church, each topped by a hill of tangled naked bodies—cherubs with round, open mouths, youthful angels smiling flirtatiously, men reaching out toward one another, their bodies turned and twisted impossibly, a great, writhing monument to flesh.

Margaret rushed on, past a fountain of three thick-lipped fish, their tails fat and entwined. Was this the way back to the hotel? Was there a way back to the hotel? What hotel was it, anyway?

Her footsteps clattered in the cramped street. She had no idea where she was, where she was going. Just visible, peeking out around the corner of an art nouveau building, were a pair of round plaster knees and slender calves and gently, slightly curled white feet.

Margaret stared helplessly at them, disoriented and tired and defeated. She heard a violin, and then noticed against the wall a young man playing, Mozart maybe, and playing beautifully. A few people had gathered around, including some rather tough looking teenage boys and a bent old woman carrying a mop handle as a cane. The violinist finished. There was clapping. The woman began to sing suddenly in a high-pitched, wheezing voice. The teenage boys were looking at each other, smirking. As the woman sang, on and on, tapping her mop-cane on the ground for rhythm, and the boys nudged each other and whispered and smirked, Margaret felt suddenly afraid. What kind of boys were they? Thugs? What did Czech thugs do? Were they like American thugs? Would they knock down a cracked old lady? Kafka crazy? Kafka was a realist.

Margaret felt ill. She'd been going for hours, through the streets, the twisted streets beneath the flesh of statues. It was getting dark. She would be lost forever in the alleys of this horrible, narrow, dark, obscene little city.

She took a few steps backward. She bumped into someone. "Oh!" cried Margaret.

"
Mon Dieu!
" cried the someone.

"Excuse me," Margaret said as she turned around.

"It is you!" cried the someone, who was the Belgian judge.

"
Oui! Oui!
" said his wife.

"
Oui!
" said Margaret.

The old lady stopped singing.