Worst-case scenario, I hope to be there when and if Dr. Bivoj makes this breakthrough, a trusty assistant who can use the credentials to jump-start a brilliant career of his own. Best-case scenario, I will fulfill the ancient cliché of a student dominating his teacher, and make the discoveries he failed to achieve on my own. But these days in his office are the key to the future I need. I did not take the job for the measly stipend or the glamour of grading freshman science papers that make the professor “bloated and existentially desolate.” I took it because, like Dr. Bivoj, I want my obsession with the particles of the universe—the small clues to the very origin of Everything—to become my lifelong work.
“He was a good one, your grandfather?” Dr. Bivoj asks.
“Yes. He was good.”
“Was he proud?”
“Of me?”
“In general.”
“He was proud of loving the same woman for fifty years. Proud of working with his hands. Made great rabbit stew.”
Dr. Bivoj opens his slivovitz drawer. I expect the usual blue label, but instead he holds an unmarked bottle filled with yellow liquid. Small black particles float around as he pours. “I have a cabin in Paka,” he says, “a small village in the mountains. I go whenever I can. A man lives there who has no teeth and keeps chickens in his living room. He makes this apple brandy in his backyard from the rotten apples that fall on his property. He hands it out to his neighbors every summer. They’ve actually turned the whole thing into an event, a party to welcome the fall. They roast potatoes and sausage while they drink themselves stupid with this stuff.”
“I didn’t know you took vacations,” I say. “You’re always here.”
“Weekends are for freedom and chaos. Of my weekends, you know nothing, Jakub. You only know my routines of the week. My academic grind.”
I swallow the liquor and feel snot melt inside my sinuses and drip down my nostrils. The brandy tastes like tonic water mixed with vinegar and dirt. I hold my glass out for more.
“I went to the spring celebration a few years back,” Dr. Bivoj says. “I could see the stars, dew on the grass, and I felt an irresistible urge to remove my shoes. A woman I didn’t know kissed me on the cheek. I’m telling you this because I imagine that by knowing these people, I also knew your grandfather. People who have a different idea of ambition. Of building houses with their own hands and living off simpler things. They made me realize that the way I viewed ambition had been a cancer, killing me since the day I was born. Do you want your name to be known, Jakub? I used to. I wanted people to pronounce it in classrooms after my death. I’ve made myself unhappy most of my life so a professor could write my name on the blackboard and punish students for not memorizing it. Isn’t that something?”
He drinks. And again. And again. The liquor smells sour on his breath.
“Ah, I am rambling. Your grandfather was a happy man, Jakub. I know it. I never told you about my relationship with President Havel. Would you like to hear it?”
“Havel? You knew him?”
“Yes I did. We used to run in the same dissident circles, back when all of us were followed by the secret police and could only congregate with each other. Havel, he was a writer to the core, he was never happier than when he could hide away in his country house and type, morning to night, left alone by people and the larger problems of the world. But he couldn’t help himself—he wanted the world to be better, and so he got involved with the Charter, wrote letters to the wrong people, and his arrest established him as the face of the regime’s enemies. He was so unhappy about this, Jakub. He didn’t want to be in the spotlight. But we got our happy ending. We overthrew the Party, he was elected, and what I don’t tell people often, Jakub—please, keep it to yourself, I must be able to trust my assistant, right?—I was to be a part of his cabinet. I was to be a politician, to help build a democratic Czechoslovakia from the ground up. We arrived at the Prague Castle after New Year’s Eve, hungover as all hell, and we had to make phone calls to get inside, as none of us even had the key. And when inside, Jakub—and this isn’t known to history—when inside, Havel’s face turned the color of the dead, and he sat on the ground in the middle of those never-ending halls, with fifteen million people waiting for him to say what’s next, and he knew he would never get to sit alone and type away in that country house again. He was known, the face of the nation, and there would never again be rest, peace, comfort. His every move, every decision—from his breakfast to his love of cigarettes to his foreign policy—would be ripped apart, glued back together, then ripped again. I resigned immediately. I have been in this office since. My own castle, suited to my own needs.”
He laughs, and seems to mean it.
“And you are happy here,” I say.
“I love science. I have never truly loved anything else. Why pretend otherwise? Václav Havel lost his typewriter; I won’t let them take my microscope.”
“I want to do big things,” I say, “things that are tangible, like the big discoverers. Tesla, Niels Bohr, Salk. No one cares for the names of the people shaping things anymore. The people who found out that the expansion of the universe is accelerating? You could walk out on the street and ask strangers all day long, but no one could tell you their names.”
“But one has to ask: why do the big things at such a high cost? I chose the quiet life. I like the idea of being recognized by my field and no one else. This way I have a purpose, one I believe in, but I’m not burdened by the constant idea of putting on a public image, a view of myself the masses can accept. Nobody cares whether I am fat or cheat on my taxes. It is not the only right kind of life, of course, but it is the honest life for me. What I’m saying is, I make the right choices for myself. Being of use to the world doesn’t always mean having your name in the papers. Politicians, movie stars… You know, I keep waiting for someone to say, ‘Those Czechs, impressive people! Only ten million of them and look at how they shape the world.’ Not because we have beautiful models or talented football players, but because we have advanced the civilization in a real way, a way that doesn’t interest the paparazzi. My plea to you is, think beyond celebrity. Do you think Tesla cared if he had his picture taken? Think of whether you’re any good to anyone, truly.”
His voice is gruff but quiet, uncharacteristic for this usually boisterous man. I figure it must be the brandy, and thanks to the brandy, I almost tell him about my father, about the curse of my family, about my desire to become the very definition of good to everyone, and to carry my family name back to the favorable side. One week ago, three uniformed men carried my grandfather’s body out of the apartment and my grandmother took a glass full of water out of my hand. She asked if potatoes with sour cream were okay for lunch. I have to be a person. These words accompany me to bed and wake me from pleasant dreams. I don’t know the difference between coming up short or becoming too much of a person and ruining my life with the ambition Dr. Bivoj warns about. Was Havel truly unhappy at the end of his life? He’d changed so many destinies. Some hated him but most adored him. There had to be happiness in that, somewhere.
“Tesla,” Dr. Bivoj murmurs, “never got laid and never got a good night’s sleep. A man to aspire to.” He stares at his glass and soon his eyes begin to close.
I take my place at my desk and I study the latest journals, distracting myself with thoughts of how I might differentiate myself from Dr. Bivoj. Is he, after all, of any good to anyone? A lecturer with a toxic addiction to food. Is his commitment to his own satisfaction wise, or selfish, or simply impossible to categorize? I think of the photographs I’ve seen from those dissident days. Rebels with long hair, penning revolutionary essays and changing the course of a nation by day, drinking and fucking and dancing by night. Beaten, interrogated, imprisoned, alive, so goddamn alive every day, though they would probably scoff at me for glorifying the struggle. And now here is Bivoj, in the chair that will surrender to his growing mass any day. Breathing frantically through his mouth, working up a snore. The
choice between remaining a person from those photos or becoming the modern Dr. Bivoj seems clear. Does he doubt his choices, does he weep over them in the shower? He could’ve been president by now. Or maybe he did exactly what he should have. Kept to small pleasures and daily routines of work.
At four in the afternoon he staggers out of the office as he whispers that he has to take a piss and go home to nap. He turns the light off on his way out as though he’s already forgotten that I am there. I take another swig from his bottle and the burn brings on an idea. In the booze drawer I find two full bottles of slivovitz along with the dirty moonshine. I open the office minifridge, a territory extremely off-limits to anyone but Dr. Bivoj. There rest three schnitzel and pickle sandwiches wrapped in foil, an entire roll of salami, and a brick of blue cheese—to Bivoj, about two lunches’ worth of provisions. I take all of it, and stuff the bottles and food inside my bag. No more potatoes and sour cream. Grandma will eat like a queen tonight.
I walk outside. I feel an unbidden impulse to know my city, to put my ear to its chest. To be with its people in a place they are all forced to congregate in against their will, a fallout of all great human cities. In a place where the city’s contradictions meet and create an entire new biosphere in which one must acquire previously unknown survival skills. I take the metro to Wenceslas Square.
Burnt sausage, air-conditioned linen stench of clothing stores, police car exhaust, the rancid diapers of toddlers in designer strollers, street waffles with salmonella whipped cream, whiskey spilled between the cracks of ancient brick roads, coffee, newspapers just unpacked at tobacco stands, stray marijuana smoke seeping from one of the windows above a Gap, the sneakily abandoned waste from dogs, grease sizzling off the exposed bicycle chains, Windex dripping down the freshly washed office windows, a faint spring breeze barely penetrating the connected buildings lining the square—this chemical anarchy of scents placed in the cradle of every Prague child early on welcomes us home every time, and in this native knowledge we all simply refer to it as “Wenceslas.”
It has been almost a year since I last visited, I realize, while the antibodies inside my olfactory system fight off the invasion of smog. I hold my breath. All around me lives the assurance of our sprint toward capitalism. Few things remain from the old days of the Soviet reign—the only significant remainder being the nineteenth-century statue of Saint Wenceslas, the postcard hero trudging above the masses, green and stone-faced on his trusty horse, the animal’s majestic thighs and ass generously caked with pigeon shit. French teenage tourists, unaware of any history around them, thumb through their phones and catcall women as they surround the statue’s base. Food vendors offer hot dogs and burgers and alcohol illegally sold at significant markup, making a fortune on underage tourists eager for the true alcoholic Prague experience. Alcohol sales keep the vendors in competition with the McDonald’s, the KFC, the Subway, those invaders seducing the populace with the sweet breath of air-conditioning, restrooms free of the toilet paper charge, hot food injected with chemical pleasure. Both tourists and natives face the daily struggle of giving in to the addictive delights of sizzling fats and the Western unity offered by those neon sign giants, or handing themselves over to the old-school exoticism of a slightly burnt sausage served by a man who doesn’t waste words or offer a customer comment card.
I approach one of the vendors, a pale man with an honest black mustache, and ask if he sells whiskey.
Without acknowledgment of my presence, he reaches into the depths of his cart and produces a black plastic cup. “Hundredandeighty,” he says.
I hand the money over and ask for a sausage, horseradish, spicy mustard.
This is Wenceslas Square almost thirteen years after the revolution. The place where we took our nation back. Where the heart of the Czech resistance launched its assault on the Nazis, building barricades and running at the German soldiers to rip the weapons out of their hands while Soviet liberator tanks were still a world away. Where in 1989 women and men shook their keys as the headless-chicken corpse of the Soviet-installed government pleaded with Moscow to order their tanks to shoot, for Chrissake, shoot these people before they establish a democracy.
The cube bricks that form the road and oblique rooftops, once witness to thronging crowds of revolutionaries, to bullets, to heads cracked by police batons, now provide a historical feel to a shopping experience. Clothing stores, cafés, strip clubs. Promoters stand in front of the shiny entrances and hand out colorful flyers with pictures of girls and happy hour specials. It is four thirty in the afternoon and already these campaigners of sin stand in the trenches, their chins stinking of vodka from the previous night.
I drink the whiskey and wonder if the square isn’t a bit colorless despite the neon, perhaps ripe for another climax of history. Will we ever again march on these bricks in national unity, fighting yet another threat to Europe’s beating heart, or will this new Prague become an architecturally brilliant strip mall?
My sausage is ready and I order another whiskey.
Then, I smell perfume.
“Vodka and sausage,” a woman says.
The vendor denies her.
I turn. Her hair is short and dark, her thin lips emphasized, not enlarged, by a line of dark red lipstick. A gray dress fits tightly around her hips. She is small, so very small, but she doesn’t wear heels to position herself higher, nor does she look in any way anxious while speaking to the broad man in front of her. In fact, she doesn’t even lift her chin. She meets the vendor’s eyes with her own, as if suggesting that she has nothing to apologize for and that, if anything, he should be shorter to accommodate her. She seems a presence unaffected by the square’s chaos and hostility, like one of the surly statues of saints and warriors who’d been there when Prague was still barely a trading post. She invites love. Right away I want good things to happen for her.
“Why not?” she asks.
“No sausages, no alcohol. He cleaned me out for the night,” the vendor says.
She looks at me and the evidence of my crimes, the plate heavy with sausage in my left hand and a freshly poured cup in my right.
“My fucking luck,” she says.
I extend both arms toward her, peace offerings. She measures up the shaking plate and smirks.
“I’ll take the whiskey if you’re really offering,” she says.
I nod.
“Is he mute?” she asks the vendor, who cuts his thumb while slicing an onion.
“Bag of dicks,” he roars.
I give her the whiskey. “You can have a bite,” I say.
“A gentleman,” she says.
The vendor starts kicking the cart while blood drips onto his utensils. The cart shakes and seems as though it could fall over at any minute. Already witnesses are gathering around for photos, and a skinny policeman strolls over at a leisurely pace, munching on chicken nuggets.
The woman in the gray dress gestures toward some benches across the street, then walks off without looking back to see if I’m following. She sits, crosses her legs, and downs the entire cup of whiskey in one gulp, finishing up with a soft belch. She appraises me as I consider sitting down beside her. Finally, the vendor upends his cart, and the buns and condiments spill on the sidewalk. The policeman tosses his chicken nuggets aside and pulls out a baton, whereupon the vendor points a pair of tongs at him.
“Well, sit down, share the food,” the woman says. “Let’s enjoy the show.”
“I’m Jakub,” I tell her as I obey.
“Lenka,” she says. “Thanks, I needed a drink.”
The vendor snaps at the policeman with his tongs, like an emaciated crab leg, and the policeman backs away, switching his baton for a Taser.
“That’s what happens when you force people into lives they hate,” Lenka says. “They snap. Come at you with kitchenware.”
“How do you know he was forced into anything?” I say.
“Do you think he’d be frying pork in this tourist trap if he had better choice
s?”
Reinforcements arrive. Four officers circle the crazed vendor now, hands on their pistols. Spectators mumble with delight. At last the vendor hurls the tongs into the air, and falls to his knees, right in the pool of ketchup and mustard. He dips his hand into it, and smiles, drawing shapes, like a child playing with crayons. The cops and bystanders all look on, uncertainly.
“I feel like this is our fault,” I say.
“It is possible our demands ruined the man’s life,” she says.
“He must’ve been craving this kind of self-destruction for a long time now.”
“I don’t blame him. I feel like self-destructing today too.”
“Bad day on the job?”
“Funny thing,” she says. “The other day, a man on TV said that unemployment makes people unhappy because they lose meaning in their lives. He went on to say that jobs are a source of meaningful pleasure. Who is this guy? Coffee is pleasure. Vodka melon balls and theater. Waking up with a strand of your lover’s hair in your mouth. Those are pleasures. Tell me, if robots did all of our work for us, do you think we’d all plunge into depression and form suicide pacts? If we could all pay attention to art, spend our days climbing mountains or diving into oceans, all of us wealthy and satiated because our robots have things covered, would the world be overrun with maniacs shooting at each other because their lives lack meaning? Dignity is attached to money, they say. So, a person with a decent job making decent money is supposed to have reached nirvana. According to this man’s theory, I’m supposed to have dignity because I pick up the phone in hotel reception. Well, here I am, dignity nowhere to be seen, rambling drunkenly to a stranger. Let me have a bite.”
She pulls her hair behind her ear as horseradish and black grease spread on her chin. She chews and checks her watch.
“So, what’s your deal?” she says. “Drunk at six, bumming around the square.”
Spaceman of Bohemia Page 14
