Bartolomějská
Nell had no idea Prague had hippies. Perhaps that was not the right term, but she could think of no other to describe skinny girls with flowers in their hair and diaphanous dresses, and boys in flared jeans with paisley and velvet inserts sewn in below the knee to fluff them out to fifty centimetres. Every footstep set their jeans flapping around their ankles.
“I thought you meant it would be just boys.”
“It’s OK, Nell. We won’t be fucking on the floorboards. Not tonight anyway.”
Nell thought she should take that as a warning, but curiosity got the better of her. Jiří was a joker, perhaps that was one of his jokes? Jiří was a prankster. She hoped fucking on the floor was not one of his pranks.
There were no chairs. Everyone sat on the floorboards, getting covered in ancient dust. The light was dim, half a dozen unshaded bulbs dotted around the high ceiling. On the far wall myriad colours swirled across the brickwork as one of the boys fed projector slides with drops of tinted oil which boiled and bubbled on contact.
A record played faintly in the background … something about chasing rabbits.
A boy in thick spectacles got up to read, standing in the window, where a streetlamp lit him up as though in limelight.
“When the days are grey,
The rain is purple.
I sit at the feet of the stone Buddha
And try to kiss the sky.”
Nell had no idea what to make of it. “Nonsense” might be a reasonable reaction.
Into night’s black mouth.
I wait for starlight.
And in the morning,
The rainbow has frozen.”
Nell looked at Jiří for a sign of comprehension. He was pulling on a roll-up cigarette. It stank. He passed it to her.
“I do not smoke tobacco.”
“S’OK. It isn’t just tobacco. It’s a good Red Leb.”
“What?”
“Oh Nell … where have you been the last year? … Red Leb. Hashish from Lebanon.”
Fed up with waiting, the girl next to her took the joint from her fingers and inhaled.
And when she breathed out, the smell of hash seemed to Nell like a Berlin mist enveloping her. Foul and all-pervasive.
A second poet got up to read, a third, a fourth and a fifth.
Nell had had enough, but then so had everyone else, it seemed.
Mopslík produced an LP in a vivid cardboard sleeve. Jiří opened two windows and placed a loudspeaker in each.
“We just got this from England.”
“Got what?”
“Patience, Nell—it’s time Prague heard this. Time we all heard it.”
“It’s half past ten. People will be trying to sleep.”
“Well—we won’t let them.”
And the music blared out loudly, just shy of distortion—and Nell learnt that it had been twenty years ago today that Sergeant Pepper had taught his band to play.