“THEN MAYBE WE DON’T HAVE TO WASH DISHES!”
I pulled on my cigarette and exhaled dramatically in the girls’ general direction.
The small crowd of stern assembled Czechs did not get the dishes joke, because the Czech penalty for not having enough money to pay for a meal probably involved being locked in a dungeon, like Václav Havel.
I removed my Walkman (in which I was enjoying a rare respite from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack thanks to Layla’s They Might Be Giants tape), now not even pretending to avoid the Schadenfreude of watching my countrywomen probably get thrown off a Czech train in the middle of nowhere. Freddie raised his head, clad as ever in the multicolored beret that covered his ponytail (don’t judge; every other guy had a ponytail in 1995), and peeked over the row in front of us to get another look.
“That is an affront against corduroy,” he declared, regarding the How Many Hours girl’s wide-wale skirt. I took Freddie’s comment as a personal validation of my own sartorial choices, given that I was at that moment also clad in corduroy, namely a pair of cutoffs with an approximately three-inch left-right length disparity, the result of my own recent hasty intervention with a pocket knife in the girls’ room at the Münster high school where we took our language classes. Ordinarily I would have doubted the sincerity of Freddie’s derision of what was quite clearly an attractive young lady, but he only had eyes for Layla, whose deep-olive complexion, waist-length black hair, gargantuan eyes, and teeny-tinyness made her a dead ringer for Princess Jasmine (albeit one who elected not to shave her legs or armpits).
Freddie and I continued pulling on our respective cigarettes. Ever the astute poseur, when at last my foul pouch of Drum ran out, I had begun alternating between L&M, his own preferred brand, and Gauloises, which came in a chic blue box and were heavily favored by Justin, who was currently doodling a map of Scotland. He was planning to go there at the end of the trip, because that was where, as he’d reminded us for the entire summer, he was possibly ironically and possibly seriously convinced he’d be locating and retrieving Excalibur.
“Justin, I hope before you go looking for your sword, you finally wash your hair,” I said. “It would be a shame to be so unkempt when you assume your destiny.”
I actually understood Justin’s plight better than anyone might have suspected, given that my own motives for going on the Münster summer program were similarly oblique and destiny-related. Sure, I wanted to goose my language level so that I could actually fulfill the terms of my hastily declared German major upon my glorious return to campus. (And that had clearly gone great.) But again, this was for the sole purpose of dedicating as large a portion of my remaining studies as possible to Franz Kafka, a collection of whose diaries and parables (still, alas, in translation) I was reading reverently while smoking and listening to “Particle Man.” I had at that point, thanks to four weeks with the Herrmanns, developed some doubts and insecurities about hanging around Germans. But I was still committed to learning enough of the language that I could read Kafka—who, as every Herrmann took turns to tell me, was not German—in the original.
Kafka in translation, I’d decided, was akin to carnal relations impeded by an industrial-strength prophylactic (which happened to be the only type of relations in which I had heretofore ever partaken, being a savvy nineties woman. I took the TLC “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” video very seriously). But with him, I wanted an absolutely pure experience of Schriftverkehr (“correspondence,” but literally “textual intercourse”). I wanted to absorb the words exactly as he wrote them, and I wanted to commune with his spirit. This would only happen via the twofold accomplishment of my learning German (which would, alas, take protracted effort), and my embarking on my own pilgrimage, in that summer of 1995, to the city where my deceased soul mate had spent the overwhelming majority of his life. I would pay homage to his birthplace (or, more accurately, the edifice that stood on its footprint); I would walk the path from his home to his office at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Union; I would take long, mournful Kafkan ambles in dark alleys at twilight and be visited by the ghosts that haunted his pages (Kafkan, obviously, since Kafkaesque was a word that people who’d never read Kafka used to pretend they had, and Kafkan was the word I’d read in the literary journals); I would pay my respects at his gravesite. Prague might not have held any stone-encased weaponry for me to extract, but it held my destiny nonetheless. And that destiny was, at this point, having its style severely cramped by the mere fact that I hailed from the same country as those girls at the other end of the car, who had spent the Germany-side portion of the journey extolling the literary superiority of V. C. Andrews’s work of incest-porn, Flowers in the Attic.
My patience for what was, in hindsight, a perfectly ordinary group of young women on the train was admittedly already worn thin due to my general American fatigue. Before being sprung to ride the rails of my own volition, I’d been sequestered on another infernal bus for two more weeks of Teutonic tourism amid the rankling homesickness of our Münster group. One socially maladapted Virginian, Wallace, was so distraught about the lack of “real food” in the Vaterland that he was almost in tears by the time we pulled into Berlin, our final stop—and, in his distraught state, he came to fisticuffs with the far more diminutive Ephraim, our trip’s only other Jewish participant, after referring to our hostel’s rudimentary bathing facilities, quite unfunnily, as “gas chamber showers.”
By the time my small cohort broke from the ranks of official collegiate tourism, my worldly nineties self had just about had it with culturally insensitive American WASPs (despite being half Anglo-Saxon myself). So when, in our last moments in the grimy Berlin-Lichtenberg rail station, which at the time handled all travel to “the East,” some unshowered blond backpacker heard us speaking English, I was already on guard. He ambled up and asked, “How do you get to the center of town?”
Ugh. It was Berlin, dude, which anyone with a functional knowledge of German geography should know had until very recently been divided by a big-ass wall, and it had an East “Center,” Mitte (which was enormous), and a West “Center,” the Bahnhof Zoo. Did this guy not own any U2 albums?
“Do you mean, like, Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate and such?” Justin had asked.
“Sure,” said the guy.
After we directed him to the correct S-Bahn, he asked: “Do you, like, have to pay to ride?”
“It’s Germany, man,” said Justin. “They’re pretty anal.”
“Ahem,” I said. “Unser Zug fährt ab” (Our train is leaving). I hoped Mr. I-Don’t-Know-Anything-About-Germany-Schwarzfahrer might think I didn’t speak English.
“Sorry,” said Freddie. “We have to go. We’re going to Prague.”
“Oh really?” asked the guy. “I’m headed there next.”
“Ha,” said Justin. “Maybe we’ll see you there.”
“Seriously, you should probably buy an S-Bahn ticket,” said Layla.
As we’d boarded the train, Freddie—being all too aware of what had heretofore been my significant residual summer-long mopeage vis à vis a certain Dylan Gellner—gave me an elbow to the ribs. “Send me a postcard when you run into that guy in Prague.” Ugh, as if. At any rate, as soon as the train got moving, Ms. All Caps and her sorority sisters had started yakking at top volume and I forgot all about that doofus, since I had new Landsleute (literally “country-people”) to stoke my feelings of intracultural superiority.
The Prague we finally reached that night existed in the fleeting decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of the Czech capital as a tourist destination. Today, the booming vacation rental industry has converted the entirety of Prague’s enchanting medieval center into temporary housing for well-to-do vacationers and foreign businesspeople. The Czechs who actually remain in their priced-out metropolis—now so crammed with tourists that it is difficult to see a cobblestone under your feet or hear a word of Czech in the out-of-doors—live in the substantially less postcard-friendly outer districts. These are often the Soviet-constructed paneláky, or “panel-housing,” veritable forests of cement and cinder-block high-rises, erected in great haste and constructed primarily out of asbestos and frigid resignation.
Prague’s metamorphosis since the end of the Cold War has, in many ways, been as visceral and grotesque as Gregor Samsa’s. The very qualities that make the place a must-visit have made it all but unrecognizable to its own people. In the “city of a thousand spires”—famous for its buildings dating back to the eleventh century, its stunning castle on a hill, its mist-shrouded bridges and narrow, haunting maze of winding alleys—precisely all of these seductive elements have enticed all manner of overpriced tourist traps into the prime real estate (including but not limited to a TGI Friday’s). Many an astute literary theorist has suggested that in The Metamorphosis, it’s the Samsas’ gleeful participation in the dehumanizing capitalism of the industrializing continent that causes Gregor’s transformation in the first place—and so it is only fitting that the haunting city of Gregor’s creator has itself in recent decades transformed into a monstrous creature of post–Cold War commerce, a shell of its former self, all but uninhabitable by its inhabitants.
This live-action Disney postcard was but a far-off glimmer in the EU’s future when Freddie, Justin, Layla, and I finally disembarked at the main train station—in true Prague form, half art nouveau masterpiece and half squat concrete Soviet terror—and bade our corduroy-blaspheming compatriots a silent, glowering farewell (in my case). We had no place to stay. But, despite the incredulous protestations of my friends, I knew we would soon. The tourist trade in what had until only very recently been the iron-curtained-off capital of Czechoslovakia was in its infancy, and as such the youth-hostel scene was largely limited to official Hostelling International setups, complete with curfews, lockouts, sex separation, and, most importantly, an average occupant age of eleven due to the omnipresent school groups (who were always accompanied by mid-forties teachers of each sex, who looked like they were about to die).
While the city’s bevy of old-school one- and two-star hotels would have been a boon to a group of functioning adults, our five-dollar-a-day housing budget precluded such luxury, and we were left with Prague’s only true bargain hospitality option, an analog precursor to Airbnb that has sadly gone the way of other vestiges of post-Soviet underground commerce. What I mean is, if you were a nineties university student traveling on a shoestring to any recently “opened” jewel of the former Eastern Bloc, you disembarked from your train to find a row of earnest, shabby-looking guys brandishing reasonable command of English and incomprehensible maps, asking if you needed accommodation. And you said yes, because this was actually a safe, economical, and culturally appropriate form of lodging. And, after a guy showed you a few generic pictures of a flat all decked out in 1970s-issue Communist finery, and quoted you a price of twenty U.S. dollars per night for quadruple occupancy (cash only, and please do pay in dollars or deutsche marks; our currency is unstable), you got into a tiny car with this complete stranger and let him drive you through a strange city in the pitch dark until you reached an ancient, crumbling apartment building, and hiked up seven flights of stairs to a flat belonging to a local family, who had sequestered themselves in a few out-of-sight rooms.
Although the stay-with-a-stranger scheme was generally safe, there were still a few ways the Czechs took advantage of Western idiots such as myself. Pickpocketing had not yet reached the celebrated Prague art form it is today, but only because there were already so many other legitimate avenues for ripping off tourists, such as tacking on massive “bread charges” and service fees to restaurant meals of fried cheese and beer (in Czech on the bill, of course), or pricing souvenirs at random. But the exchange rate was so brutally in our favor that getting ripped off in Prague for three days straight still cost less than one meal in Germany, and so, like the tacky Western idiots we were, my friends and I bought up the whole town, crowing all the while about just how cheap everything was.
I singlehandedly and with tremendous glee wiped out the entire wares of the Franz Kafka Museum, which at that point was a one-room affair run by two ancient Jewish ladies—probably the two last surviving speakers of the Prague German dialect in the city—whose exhibit consisted in its entirety of German and Czech first editions of The Metamorphosis, plus one hairbrush that might or might not have belonged to Him. The whole lot in the souvenir section—five books each in English and German, three posters, one set of postcards—probably cost me less than twenty dollars, and I could not have been more pleased with myself.
I mean, sure, I was as much of a crass Western colonialist as the other backpackers snickering about one-dollar packs of cigarettes and fifty-cent beers, but at least I was colonizing in the name of the greatest writer in history—whose craggy, Gellneresque visage stared out from coffee mugs, T-shirts, posters, magnets; everything but books, and I bought them all. I also, of course, bought several books, from every slapped-together shop or kiosk I came across, including a stand-alone version of Betrachtung, or Contemplation, a collection of parables that was one of the few volumes Kafka published during his lifetime, and which I quoted with the kind of single-minded piety—and dubious hermeneutics—that fundamentalist Christians use to quote Scripture. So yes, the rest of the tourists treated Prague like their own personal bar. But I was obviously superior to them, since I treated the city like my own personal bar and my own personal literary shrine, and its most famous author like the boyfriend who could never dump me (because he was dead).
And so, although I was enjoying my imperialistic American adventures with my friends, indulging in selectively upcharged cuisine and cheap smokes, I was also off-track from the true purpose of my pilgrimage: my destined communion with Kafka in the city whose claws he could never escape. All of us were enchanted with the architecture and general atmosphere of Prague, but it went without saying that I was the most enchanted. Hence, the furtive entry into my artisanal travel journal wherein I emoted, in what was at the time my adverb-rich prose style of choice: “Sitting on the wall of the Charles Bridge. Prague is truly and undoubtedly the most amazingly, enchantingly, gracefully, beautifully haunting place I have ever witnessed on this Earth.” And what I needed to consummate my relationship with “my” city (“This city, this city,” I helpfully annotated) was to be all by myself, goddammit.
By ten the next morning I got my wish: Freddie, Layla, and Justin had gone on, the former couple to go have sex in some country that took Eurail passes, and the latter to find his sword. I was five thousand miles away from everyone I knew, in what I had recently decreed to be my favorite place in the entire world, with nowhere I had to be, nobody else’s schedule to consider, and nobody to answer to. I had all the thousand spires of the city to myself—just Franz, the shadowy lanes he used to walk, a few million nonplussed Czechs, and me. It was going to be perfect.
Six hours later, I’d become so despondent from not talking to another person all day that I was afraid I’d forgotten how to speak. I was so eager for companionship—so terrified that I had, after half a day, sunk so deep into myself that I had no choice but to regard others, as Kafka had written, “with the gaze of an animal”—that when an old guy (actually a Canadian dad in his early forties) approached me at a café and asked me about my forest-green Waterman fountain pen (you think I wrote in my artisanal journal with a Bic, like some sort of plebe?), it was the undisputed high point of my day. So chilling was my solitude that the next morning, as I shuffled through Old Town Square, I spied Mr. Lichtenberg-Train-Station-Do-You-Have-to-Pay, gawking up at the famous astronomical clock—and I walked straight up to him, touched him on the shoulder on purpose, and said: “Hey.”
He looked me up and down for a good thirty seconds before he placed me.
“Whoa,” he said. “Berlin train station?”
“That’s me.” The crowd assembled around the clock began to stir.
“So you do speak English,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that. I just really like speaking German in Germany.”
“It’s a terrible-sounding language. Wait, look—I think that clock is doing something weird.” Sure enough, out of a minuscule doorway over the elaborate gold-plated face—one that held three interlocking plates marking the places of the celestial bodies using extremely sound fifteenth-century science—shot a bunch of grotesque little dolls who chased each other around on rails for a few minutes before disappearing whence they came.
“I read in my guidebook one of those figurines is supposed to be a medieval caricature of a Jew. Pretty fucked up, huh?”
“I like that you memorized your guidebook,” said the train-station guy. The crowd around us dispersed and then it was just us two.
