“So,” I said, “how’d the whole not-paying-for-the-S-Bahn thing go?”
He ran a hand across his forehead; it was a sweltering day and it seemed as if not a single one of the thousand spires cast a shadow.
“Oh,” he said. “I totally got caught. They came right for me. I guess they have cameras by the ticket machines or something.”
“Bummer,” I said. “How much did they fine you?”
“I got away with it. I just played it really, really dumb.”
“That must have been a challenge.”
He didn’t seem insulted, but largely because his attention had wandered to a giant ticket booth in the middle of the square, advertising an R.E.M. concert.
“Wait,” he said. “Is that tonight?”
“It looks like it,” I said. “I’m sure it’s sold out.”
But it wasn’t. The show was being held in the 220,000-capacity soccer stadium, and apparently the tour booker had overestimated the post–Velvet-Revolution appetite for mournful nasal ballads. The Schwarzfahrer and I each bought a ticket for an extravagant fourteen dollars, and thereby inadvertently agreed to attend in tandem.
“So,” he said, “we’ve got about five hours to kill. We might as well walk around together.”
A five-hour-time limit; a stranger with a scraggly mushroom bowl cut, whom I met in the general vicinity of a train. A stunning foreign cityscape; a spaghetti-strap dress over a T-shirt (just like Julie Delpy!). Richard Linklater, I hear you loud and clear.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
Tschüss, writerly solitude. Na shledanou, quiet introspection, as the Czechs would say (maybe; my five phrases didn’t yet make me an expert). But, I countered to myself as the two of us set off toward the winding river that bisects the old city, was this choice to spend the day with a gentleman stranger not itself the filling-up of my life with precisely the kind of adventurous, grown-up anecdote that would fill later writerly solitudes? (Yes?) As we started across a bridge a few down from the Charles, I looked behind me and noticed the towering brutalist monolith that was the Hotel InterContinental. This unsightly concrete-and-glass edifice was once the Communists’ prime location to house visiting dignitaries, due to its majestic view of the Vltava River and the gorgeous tile-roofed buildings on the opposite side. But for me, thanks to an edifying paragraph in my Let’s Go that I had indeed dutifully memorized, the site of the InterContinental held something even more important.
“Hey,” I said to the train-station guy. “Do you know where we are? Do you know what that is?”
“An ugly building?”
“Yes,” I said, “but before that ugly building was built, there used to be some apartment houses there—and guess who lived in one of them? Franz Kafka and his family. He lived with his parents until he was almost forty. Before he died, he shacked up with his girlfriend in Berlin for like a year. But other than that, he pretty much never left their house, even though he hated his dad.”
“Huh,” said the train-station guy.
“And guess what? This bridge that we are walking across right now is the bridge that Georg Bendemann jumps off at the end of ‘The Judgment’! Can you believe that? I can’t believe I’m here.”
“I’m not familiar with GAE-org Bendemann.” The train-station guy was looking to our left, at the spikes of the cathedral in the middle of the Prague Castle, which sits on top of a giant hill.
Georg Bendemann, I explained, was only the protagonist of a terrific—by which I meant horribly disturbing—short story, about a guy who lives with his aging father in an apartment by a river. A story whose entire first page I could now read in the original German, all by myself! Georg and his father get into a very weird argument about Georg being engaged, and then the father insinuates that Georg only loves his fiancée “because she lifted up her skirts”—you know, for the sex—and then, the story goes fully off the rails when the father goes on a very strange rant that gets deadly serious. “Finally,” I explained to the train-station guy, “the father goes: ‘You were actually an innocent child, but more actually you are a devilish adult—and now hear this: I sentence you to death by drowning!’ And then Georg actually runs out of the house and jumps off a bridge.”
“Cool,” said the train-station guy. “But it wasn’t really this bridge.”
“No, obviously not,” I said, “because the story was made up. Although pretty much everything Kafka wrote was about his shitty dad, I guess.”
“Wow,” said the train-station guy. “Do you have issues with your dad, too?”
“Actually,” I said, “my dad and I are best friends.”
“Even weirder.”
“I didn’t even get to the best part! The best part is that the story ends, ‘Just then an unending stream of traffic went over the bridge.’ But in the German,” I said, having not technically yet read the end of “The Judgment” in the German but parroting Prof. James Martin, “the word they use for ‘traffic’ is Verkehr, which literally means ‘intercourse.’ So the story basically ends by saying just then an ‘endless fucking’ went over the bridge. And—you’ll never believe this—Kafka dedicated the story to his fiancée. ‘Eine Geschichte für F. B.’ How fucked up is that?”
I had to stop here, because I was out of breath from walking, talking, and smoking at the same time, and because I was way too overexcited to be not only treading in the footsteps of greatness, but sharing that greatness with a male human my own age, albeit a sweaty one who did not seem angst-ridden or brooding at all, and who had a strange rash on his chest, and who felt himself above the act of paying to ride the train. But aside from that, this was pretty much a perfect serendipitous and peripatetic date. I stopped in the middle of the bridge to light another cigarette, and to preserve the moment I assumed we were having.
“I don’t really like Kafka,” said the train-station guy. “All that German stuff is too cloying in its darkness.”
“I’m a German major,” I said.
“Eech,” he said. “Why?”
“I enjoy the cloying darkness, for one thing.”
“I only like the Victorians,” he said.
I took a swig from my water bottle.
“Hey,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. What’s your name?”
We’d been walking together for an hour, and neither of us had managed this gesture.
His name, it turned out, was ridiculous. A three-surname WASP conflagration with a roman numeral after it. No name I could fabricate could possibly be as self-parodic as his actual name was. “By the way, I do not usually look like this,” he said, pointing to his threadbare T-shirt, worn shorts, Tevas, and scraggly, growing-out version of the dread mid-part mushroom, a.k.a. the omnipresent haircut favored by any mid-nineties white guy who didn’t have a ponytail. “It’s just because I’m trying to fit in while I travel for the summer.”
You’re traveling, are you? You don’t say.
“I’m from Connecticut,” he continued. Of course he was. “But I go to school in England.”
“Interesting,” I said. That would explain the Victorians. “Where?”
