n. correspondence, from text and intercourse.
ex. The opposite of writerly solitude is Schriftverkehr. (And also regular Verkehr.)
In the opening scene of Before Sunrise—the 1995 film that created outsized expectations in a million heady, angst-ridden college students, or at any rate in one, named me—Ethan Hawke’s character Jesse meets Julie Delpy’s character Celine when they overhear an Austrian married couple scream at each other on a train. Neither Jesse nor Celine speaks German, so the particulars of the fight (which is about how the husband thinks the wife is an alcoholic) are lost on them. Still, they bond over the public display of acrimony and strike up a conversation that doesn’t end until twenty-four hours later—when they part ways as the loves of each other’s lives.
I wonder what would have happened to them if, instead, they’d overheard a nineteen-year-old girl with a well-tended head of American hair shriek at a ticket-taker, “DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” Maybe they wouldn’t even have noticed each other, because Ethan Hawke would have boinked the do-you-speak-English girl instead. I don’t know. What I do know is that I witnessed such a display on a Prague-bound train at the tail end of my first summer in Europe, which also happened to fall some scant half-year after Before Sunrise caused me to assume my future spouse would manifest himself on one or another form of rail transport. And, flanked by my new study-abroad friends from Münster, Layla, Justin, and Freddie, my instinct was to put on hold my search for a soul mate, roll my cosmopolitan eyes, feel superior, and eavesdrop.
The ticket-taker, who was a Czech woman with a mullet, answered the girl in the way all unamused bemulleted Czech ticket-takers do when asked if they speak English in All-Caps American: “A little bit.” That was, of course, far too modest; she spoke English quite well—had, in fact, just done so to my group five minutes prior—and had likely deployed this answer to avoid prolonging this particular conversation. If you wanted to talk to someone who only spoke a little bit of a language, that would be me; I had attempted to memorize five phrases of Czech, with wildly incorrect pronunciation, from my Let’s Go travel guide. Many well-meaning (but misinformed) friends have assumed at different points in my life that because Germany and the Czech Republic are adjacent, German and Czech are similar, or at any rate speaking German in the Czech Republic will get you understood. What it will get you is well-deserved nasty looks for reminding the Czechs of their hundreds of years of Austrian colonization, which were followed near-on directly by two decades of war and genocidal annexation.
Sure, there was once a thriving Prague German dialect and a substantial German-speaking minority (of which the Kafka family, like most Jews, was a part), but that business was all well in the past by the time I boarded the train during this particular summer, practicing those five Czech phrases with unstartling ineptitude, given that Czech, to the untrained Anglophone ear, is about as intuitive as dolphin noises. But still, the simple fact that I was trying at all—that I had wished the self-same questionably coiffed conductor a dobrý den and muttered děkuje (or something sort of like it) in thanks after she checked my ticket—made me, I hoped, a different caliber of traveler than that girl at the other end of the car, who I surmised must have learned the All-Caps technique from her parents condescending to their household employees.
“HOW LONG TO PRAGUE?” said the girl, who had not taken the hint that the conductor didn’t want to hang out.
“I’m sorry?”
The girl pointed theatrically to her watch. “HOW MANY HOURS UNTIL WE GET TO PRAGUE?”
We were about eighty kilometers away, and had in fact just crossed the Czech border, enduring the minor excitement of passport control in the days before the European Union, by which I mean fifteen stern-looking Czech police stormed the train (also with mullets, possibly the new country’s national haircut). They’d sternly checked our passports, then bestowed them with stern stamps full of strange words with too many consonants and accents on letters I didn’t know could have them. To answer the girl’s question, it took about an hour to travel eighty kilometers by rail, but on that day, the train was subject to a fifteen-minute delay, on account of the fact that Ms. How Many Hours and her colleagues attempted to present the conductor with Eurail passes, which were not valid in the Czech Republic in 1995. The train squealed to a halt, the girls surrounded in an instant by the stern-looking border cops and three more conductors. Now this was worth at least a quick scene in the melancholy, atmospheric Linklater rip-off movie I had decided to shoot in my head for the duration of my train travels. Was there an impishly handsome man-boy reading Klaus Kinski’s autobiography anywhere on that car, perchance?
I craned my neck as How Many Hours and her friends pooled their cash to see if they had enough money to buy Czech Railways tickets for those final eighty kilometers (I’d purchased a thirty-nine-dollar “Prague Excursion” add-on to my own Eurail pass, which was, given the Czech Railways prices in 1995, an obscene overcharge).
“What about DEUTSCH?” she asked. “Will you take DEUTSCH?”
Across from me, Justin snorted.
“Yes,” said the conductor. “We will take deutsche marks.”
“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.
“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?”
“Uh,” he said. “This is going to sound way more impressive than it actually is. But Cambridge.” He said it with the kind of put-upon mortification that people get when they say they went to college “in the Bay Area” or “near Boston.” Oh, for Christ’s sake, just say you went to Stanford or Harvard. We’re all very impressed.
This train-station guy had some nerve, insinuating he was slumming it with me. Didn’t he know I was slumming it with him? I should have preferred my goddamned writerly solitude to hanging out with some Aryan-Master-Race looking preppy-cum-hippie who only read Middlemarch, a work I objected to on principle due to the eight-million-part BBC adaptation that had aired on PBS and caused Sharon Schuman, Ph.D., to monopolize the family television for all of 1994. I should have—I knew I should have—stuck to my café glowering and my artisanal travel journal, but my dirtiest secret turned out to be that I could only stand my own company for half a day.
As the heat of the afternoon finally abated—Prague’s latitude meant the sun wouldn’t set until damn near midnight—the train-station guy and I returned to Old Town Square to find that the R.E.M. poster now had CANCELED scrawled over it. “What happened?” the train-station guy asked.
“Drummer get brain aneurysm,” said the ticket-seller.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Is he dead?”
“No, is fine. But concert cancel.”
“Can we have our money back?” I asked.
The ticket-seller—who had himself sold me the very ticket I held in my hand—feigned a look at the serial number on the side. “I am sorry,” he said, “but you did not buy here.” So Prague.
Now we didn’t even have the pretense of “needing” to kill time together—and yet, the train-station guy looked at me, at my Julie Delpy dress still stuck to my back with the day’s sweat, and said: “Want to go grab something to eat?”
We went to a pub where I did my very best phonetic attempt at the question máte vegetariánské jídlo (“do you have vegetarian food”) and received an excellent plate of butter-drenched potatoes, which I washed down with a fifty-cent Pilsner Urquell. As I was meticulously cutting my fourth potato with my knife and fork (if only the Herrmanns could see me now), the train-station guy took a slug of his beer, set it down on the bare table (I’d already stolen his coaster to add to my collection), and asked: “Have you ever, like, just hooked up with a person you had no intention of being in a relationship with?”
“I guess,” I said. I changed the subject and asked him how he ended up at Cambridge in the first place. “Are you, like, a Rhodes scholar or something?”
“Hardly,” he said. “I went there for my junior year abroad on an exchange program, and then just sort of asked if I could stay, and they said yes. So, through the back door, effectively.”
By the time we finished dinner, it was after nine and the sky was finally beginning its fade from blue to that sort of nebulous blue-gray after the day and before the dusk. Old Town Square had all but cleared out for the day, and as we walked over the cobblestones, the train-station guy looked at me, and then around him, and said:
“Is this such a Before Sunrise moment, or what?”
And the thing is, it was. Technically, I was being handed everything I’d prayed that the Eurail gods would deliver, minus a few middling specifics that might have gotten lost in the cosmos. So why did I feel so weird? Really, Middlemarch fan and Kafka-underappreciator or not, did I have anything better to do at this moment? Were the voices in my head really going to be better to hang out with?
“Ha,” I said. “I guess it is.”
We decamped onto the steps of the monument to proto-Protestant martyr Jan Hus, at which point I realized that according to the Linklater-film playbook it was time to escalate matters by doing something intimate. In Before Sunrise, Jesse and Celine just up and start sucking face on Vienna’s iconic Riesenrad Ferris wheel, but I had something even more intimate in mind. I would let the three-named, Roman-numeraled train-station guy where no man (or woman) had heretofore been: deep into the pages of my artisanal travel journal. I flipped to the entry I’d written during my brief but nevertheless monumentally important moment of writerly solitude the day before. The passage I wanted was a short-story fragment I’d jotted down in emulation of all my favorite writers, who allegedly mixed in their fiction attempts with banal records of their social calls and their shopping lists. My completely original future Nobel-Prize-in-literature contender was about a nameless narrator who enters a mysterious and shadowy house, where (need it even be said) everyone already knows him and nobody likes him. I hoped it would evoke the proper response of mingled awe and trepidation.
Instead, the train-station guy gave a little laugh and said: “Ugh. That is so Kafkaesque.”
My forehead crumpled under my terrible bleached bangs, and my lower lip did the thing it does when my feelings get hurt, jutting out about a foot. How dare he? Sure, what he said was 100 percent true. My precious fountain-pen offerings—the veritable spewing-forth of my innermost writing-guts—were shallowly mimetic drivel, but still, I wasn’t expecting the opinion of some mouth-breathing preppy to cut so deep. Especially someone who used “Kafkaesque” as an insult. In Before Sunrise, a Viennese fortune-teller approaches Celine while she and Jesse are enjoying their fourteenth coffee in a courtyard. (I once did the math, and given Vienna prices, they spent about seventy-five dollars each just on coffee alone—and yet they “had” to walk around together all night, because Jesse “couldn’t afford” a hotel. Weak pretense, Linklater!) And then Jesse has the nerve to condescend to Celine and go, “I hope you don’t take that any more seriously than some horoscope in a daily syndicated newspaper,” as if Celine, a graduate of the Sorbonne, cannot compartmentalize mysticism. Yes, my prose was immature, vague, and too heavily influenced by one writer I probably liked too much. Yes, Celine probably enjoyed the fact that the fortune-teller told her she would become “a great woman” and that’s why she didn’t mind getting fleeced. But so what? Let us be us. Why can’t we be imperfect without reproach from guys who are also imperfect? What is it, I thought as I glowered, about young men and their need to police the expressions of the women they are trying to impress?
After about two minutes of feminist silence, the train-station guy said, “Aw, I feel bad. I’m sorry. Kafka has some really good stories, you know. Although I’ve only read The Metamorphosis,” he said.
“Pfft,” I said. “That’s beginner Kafka.”
“Touché.”
Then the train-station guy slid a clammy arm around my shoulder, and not only did I let him, but I emitted a minor shudder, the kind usually reserved for the acknowledgment of an electric current of attraction.
As the dusk deepened from voluptuous to near-orgasmic, we ambled down to the river for a view of the castle, now lit up gloriously against the violet sky.
“Hold on,” I said. “I have to write about this sky so I remember it.”
“Ew, don’t ever write about the sky,” cautioned the train-station guy. “It’s so trite.”
“Shhh,” I said. “I’m not writing it for you.”
Our location was so impossibly romantic that it made Before Sunrise look like Schindler’s List. The scene was set; the lighting was exquisite—it was a first-kiss moment to make any director proud, and all it lacked was a sincere feeling of romance. Instead, I was just confused: though he didn’t appreciate my art, the train-station guy was a perfectly nice person, actually very smart, and not uncute underneath his affected layer of grime. And, despite his denigration of my taste in literature both received and created, he seemed pretty interested in me. That was what I wanted, right? I would probably never have a moment like this again—young, free, and stupid on the bank of the Vltava River during sunset, with a guy who clearly wanted to kiss me. I basically had no choice but to realize it fully. So we kissed.
And it was monumentally gross.
I had by no means been expecting a great frenching session like Celine and Jesse’s epic spit-swap on that Ferris wheel, but the train-station guy’s unfortunate combination of stale nicotine saliva and mealy-mouthed lapping technique was lacking enough in physical chemistry that even the perfectly curated romantic moment couldn’t save it. And yet. Have you ever gotten to the point in an ill-conceived venture when you decided, for whatever reason, that you’d sunk enough time and effort into it that you might as well see it through? (See also: obtaining a literature Ph.D. But I digress.) So, I agreed to wipe the following day clean of plans (I’d intended to venture out to the suburbs to visit Kafka’s grave for the first time, alone, an activity I’d been putting off largely due to my fear of the Prague metro map) and meet up with the train-station guy in the morning. At that point, we would ditch our respective Hostelling International accommodations and, as the kids say, “get a room” together. It was, to this day, the firmest advance commitment to Verkehr that I have ever made.
While the relentless staging of the previous evening had all but coerced me into making out, the next day’s ordeal gave me ample time to think over my decision and back out of it. And yet, as we were turned away from one after another hastily erected tourist-accommodations office because nothing in our budget was available, my determination to see the day’s events through wore on—nay, strengthened, on par with the train-station guy’s increasing perspiration. This despite the fact that I assumed that the attendants everywhere we inquired knew instinctively that we were seeking a spot for a tryst, and heartily disapproved.
“No, idiots,” I imagined them saying to themselves in Czech, “I will not furnish lodgings for your hasty, ill-advised sex-plans.”
After four hours sweating around the city with my “small” secondary suitcase in tow, we finally found ourselves back at the grimy main train station, where the rail-side accommodations office catering to the truly desperate (desperate to have sex, I assumed they assumed) made a reservation for us and armed us with a map and extensive metro directions to what appeared to be an abandoned hospital deep in the boonies (where obvious havers of poorly thought-out sex should well be banished).
“Are you sure this is it?” he asked as we approached a sad concrete building so brutal that even the term brutalism didn’t do its architecture justice.
“Look,” I said, pointing to a small cardboard sign scrawled with HOTEL that someone had stuck in a window diagonally. The receptionist spoke no English, but she did speak about as much German as me, and that was the only way we were able to check in.
“Still think it’s a terrible language?” I asked, as we used our huge old-fashioned key to unlock a pocket-sized, whitewashed room with a twin bed flush against each wall, presumably unmoved since the tuberculosis patients, or unmedicated schizophrenics, or Soviet political prisoners slept there last.
“Well,” he said, “for twelve dollars I don’t think it’s all that bad.”
“Oh holy shit,” I said. “It’s our own bathroom. With a bath!” I’d only been enjoying youth-hostel bathing facilities for a few weeks, but that was long enough that I couldn’t believe this place had seen fit to give us our very own cardboard-stiff washcloth that posed as a towel and a bar of soap. Sure, that soap was so desiccated it almost certainly predated the Velvet Revolution, but at my normal caliber of lodgings, if you didn’t bring it on your person, you couldn’t use it to clean your person.
“Um…” said the train-station guy, reaching out for me expectantly as instead I raced to the tub and filled it, both to kill time and to model excellent bathing-behavior. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” I shut the door behind me.
When at last I emerged and sat, with hesitation, on one of the tiny beds, he squeezed himself in next to me (still, alas, unbathed), and said:
“This is the slowest hookup ever.”
“Christ,” I said, “it’s two in the afternoon, and we’re already bunked down ten miles from anything. What’s your hurry?”
“I just figured,” he said, “that when you wanted to get a room, you really wanted to get a room.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe I just wanted to hang out.”
“Obviously that’s fine, too,” he said, nineties guy that he was. “But are you, like, sure you don’t want to do anything?”
“First things first,” I said. “Where are your condoms?”
“Uh,” he said. “I didn’t bring any.” (Never mind. Worst nineties guy ever.)
I sent him out for a box, and while he was gone I made a list.
Pro: My first one-night stand! How grown-up and cosmopolitan and European and glamorous!
Con: I wasn’t sure I liked this guy enough to have sex with him.
Pro: BUT, this guy liked me enough to have sex with me!
Con: Isn’t that threshold really low?
Pro: Praha, the Czech name for Prague, also means “threshold”! And wouldn’t that be a beautiful name for a baby girl?
Con: Jesus H. Christ, Schuman, concentrate for one second. Do you want to have the sex with this stranger out of some sort of misplaced Before Sunrise longing or no? You can back out and he’s not going to be mad.
Pro: Dylan Gellner didn’t like me anymore, but this guy did. How would I be sure another guy would ever like me again? This could be it!
Con: You have some serious problems with self-esteem, did you know that?
Pro: You came to Europe for adventure, and this is an adventure, so do it. Do it! Do it.
I stared around the room, which was bereft of all décor save for a single pot of artificial flowers on the tiny table in the corner. I paused in my stare-fest to scribble, with immense seriousness, in my artisanal journal: “I cannot believe what I am about to do.”
The door opened.
“Got ’em. The guy at the cigarette kiosk winked at me, I’ll have you know.”
The consummation that ensued was epic in its badness, due, I am sure, to both parties’ inexperience. At that point I boasted a full history of three sexual partners, thus making me the undisputed Wilt Chamberlain of the encounter: the train-station guy revealed to me that he’d only had sex with one other person, and only one time. This in and of itself is nothing to be ashamed of—except, in my wizened old age, I now know that when a guy tells you he’s “only done it once,” what that means is that he is too ashamed to admit to full virginity. In the end it was academic whether he was an actual virgin or just mostly a virgin—the result was an encounter that felt orchestrated by a seven-year-old who thinks he knows how sex works holding forth on the playground.
“Did you, uh…?” I asked, when, after about fifty seconds, the train-station guy’s herky-jerky force continued but his tumescence did not.
“Yeah,” he said. “I was trying to again.”
“Um,” I said, gently pushing down on his back to bring the motion to a merciful halt, and grabbing with terror at the base of the condom. “That’s not how it works. Did they not have sex education in Connecticut? You could get me pregnant that way.”
Why, why, why did I even think that thing about naming a baby girl Praha? Schuman women are notoriously fertile! Shit shit shit.
The train-station guy rolled off me, and I grabbed my dress to mop his sweat off my stomach. “That was…”
I pretended to be extremely busy procuring a glass of water.
“It was like we were two ill-prepared dancers using different music,” he said.
Excuse me? All I’d done was try my level best to respond to his paroxysms in a manner that might allow me to experience any pleasure—an attempt, by the way, that failed. To top it off, critical or not, the train-station guy had become flooded with postorgasmic bonding hormones, and I had not.
“You know,” he said, “it wouldn’t be impossible for us to continue a thing. You know, travel on together, and then maybe visit at Christmas and breaks and such. Write letters. I love correspondence. It’s a lost art.”
“What happened to have you ever just hooked up with someone?”
“Have you ever just looked at your forearm?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful forearm. I’m going to draw a snail on it.”
“Must you?”
“Yes.” The ball point pen tickled and the snail looked ridiculous.
“Do you know what?” he asked.
“I definitely do not.”
“I just want to sleep.”
Hallelujah. “Oh God!” I said. “Me, too. Those youth hostel beds—”
“No,” he said, “I wasn’t done. What I wanted to say was: I just want to sleep with you in my arms.”
“Uh,” I said. “Aren’t these beds a little small for that? I mean, it’s so hot.”
I barricaded my twin bed against its own wall, and as the train-station guy drifted mercifully off, I simultaneously congratulated and chastised myself for my triumphant new turn as a femme fatale, one who possessed simultaneously excellent and self-destructive decision-making skills. We both woke up from our sweaty, poorly timed naps around eleven. I faked sleep while the train-station guy ate a snack and flipped through one of his Victorian masterpieces for a few hours.
The next morning, the train-station guy and I were at an impasse: he was supremely wounded that I would not even consider altering my plans to accompany him on to Budapest, where, he said, we could have a sensual time at “the baths.” (This repulsed me, but I did not know that Hungarian baths are typically congested with senior citizens and sex-segregated.) I, in turn, was supremely insulted that he did not understand that I had come to Prague almost entirely to visit Kafka’s grave, and would not be leaving without doing so, alone. Finally, he decided that the extent of my inconsiderateness could only be expressed in overly earnest song. Had I ever heard “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right?”
“Uh,” I said. “Uh,” I said again, in an effort to force anything, anything at all, into my mind that I could say out loud in order to dissuade this gentleman from breaking into song. “No?” I finally lied. “But did you know that everyone thinks Kafka is buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery, but he’s actually—”
“It’s by Bob Dylan,” said the train-station guy, who would clearly not be waylaid with fun facts about exactly where the sharply dressed but nonetheless fully decomposed corpse of Franz Kafka was currently hanging out. “Man,” he said, “I wish I had my guitar.”
Yeah,” I said, “it’s too bad you don’t! Anyway, the New Jewish—”
“It really sums up how I feel right now,” he said, “and it goes like this.”
He began to sing Bob Dylan’s breakup anthem unto me a cappella, and ruin what is arguably a great song forever. The serenade did, however, make me feel less guilty about kind of wasting his precious time, and after a clammy farewell kiss on a crowded metro back into the hub, my suitcase and I, now twice-liberated from company I didn’t want but sought out anyway, procured yet another bed at a hastily thrown-together hostel (this one consisted of twenty cots shoved into a high-school gymnasium), and I finally—and in requisite writerly solitude—made my way to Kafka’s grave.
Because—and no matter what the train-station guy thought, this is a very interesting fact, goddammit—Kafka died in 1924, thus qualifying him as “old,” many visitors to Prague incorrectly assume that he’s buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery. What they don’t know is that by “old” the Czechs mean older than G-d Himself—the most recent grave in that hot mess of jumbled abutting headstones is from about 1600. No, Kafka is buried in the New Jewish Cemetery—which, like the city’s “New Town,” is still older than the oldest part of the United States. The Jewish organization that runs the operation is fully aware of the telos of most of its foreign visitors, and thus several signs point the way to its most famous inhabitant (using, of course, the honorific warranted by his law degree: DR FRANZ KAFKA). He lies underneath its most famous marker, a striking Cubist masterpiece of light gray marble that sticks out from its staid neighbors. The obelisk-shaped headstone widens as it emerges from the earth, giving the illusion that it is a jewel whose pointing tip is piercing down into the coffin below. It also looks ever so slightly unstable, even though it’s of course quite solid—not unlike the trees in one of Kafka’s little parables, which “seem to lie sleekly, and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. But no,” Kafka’s narrator writes with an almost-audible sigh, “it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that,” he twists back at us, with the winking instability that undergirds so much of what Kafka wrote, “is only appearance.”
There would be no solitude for me here, it turned out. To my right sat two convivial guys from Spain pulling on a massive joint. And to my left sat a pale, slightly scruffy guy about my age, with dark hair, dark eyes and glasses, and a look of sincere, pensive focus, scribbling with a fountain pen in what appeared to be a well-worn journal. I eyed this young man surreptitiously. I did not walk up to him or touch his shoulder. I did not say “Hey.” I did not attempt to curate or direct. I was tired. I sighed, and I scrawled a heartfelt elegy to Kafka in my terrible German, which I ripped out of my artisanal travel journal and stuck under a rock below his headstone, where it joined a few dozen just like it. The guy eventually got up and left. We never so much as made eye contact.
The next morning, as I rumbled my suitcase over the cobblestones in Old Town Square on my way to the train station one last time, I heard the dulcet tones of all-caps American English. Sure enough, right there in my path was the How Many Hours girl from the train, brown corduroy skirt as fetching as ever, hair once again an immaculate cascade of corkscrew curls just grazing the small of her back. She was deep in conversation with a coterie of cute slack-jawed British guys, explaining to them what a “serious dive” her hotel was. I couldn’t help but think that I’d have been better off spending the past few days hanging out with her, skimming her British-guy castoffs, none of whom would dismiss my prose as Kafkaesque (because none of them would give two shits about my artisanal travel journal, or know what that word meant), and all of whom probably knew how sex worked.
Four months later, back at college, I got a curious postcard with a UK stamp. On it was a deftly detailed, Victorian-style narration of an encounter with a prodigious street violinist. The music, the train-station guy wrote, was so enchanting because it “swirled about the unsayable.” I thought twice, but I didn’t answer, and the textual intercourse ended there.