A YEAR AGO IN AUTUMN when I was about to set off on a journey from Paris to Prague I realised in the car just before reaching the railway station that I’d left my watch at home, under my pillow. I asked the driver to stop and looked for a watchmaker’s in order to buy a cheap nickel watch. There was a shop in the vicinity with handsome-looking watches for a mere thirty-five francs. I bought one and, during the rather long journey, kept an eye on its timekeeping. For the first stretch of eleven hours, it lagged a quarter of an hour behind, but then raced through the subsequent thirteen hours half an hour in advance. When we arrived in Prague though, and I compared it with the large station clock, the watch was virtually at the correct time. I walked to my hotel. I had some time and strolled down to the quay of the Vltava. A small number of muddy-brown fishing boats sail on the still, slate-coloured river. The bridges stretching over it are equipped with damming defences and are indescribably beautiful, old and new ones alike.
I was sorely tempted to hurl my watch down from one of the bridges into the river. However, I decided to hold on to it and, gesticulating to make myself understood, entrusted it to a small watchmaker’s on the left bank of the river; the repair cost only thirty-nine crowns and I got the watch back a few hours later in working order. Well, working order of a sort. It now capriciously charged forward or held back stubbornly rather like a disobedient child who lets itself be dragged along by excessively patient parents, tearing free from their grasp from time to time to chase after other children or a dog or hurtle up to the window-front of a toy shop. The watch amused me just as children of any age, dogs of any breed, enchant me, captivate me and make a fool of me. For only a few francs and thirty-nine Czech crowns this marvel of modern technology and product of efficient mass industry had already provided me with plenty of enjoyment.
Only I shouldn’t have relied on it. Naturally, it let me down and I missed an important appointment arranged from Paris with a business friend at a coffee-house on Wenceslas Square. I’d intended to purchase thirty tons of average grade Bohemian apples from the agent and was counting on the provision to pay off pressing debts in Paris.
It was now late afternoon. I was sitting over my third cup of coffee on the terrace of the café situated on the first floor of a grand building. In front of the museum the statue of Saint Wenceslas and his entourage of knights and magnificent horses was still bathed in warm sunlight. The slanting shafts of evening sun rested on the well-rounded haunches of one of the horses, poised in motionless splendour, its gaze fixed on the gently sloping square bustling with people.
Along the heaving road (Wenceslas Square is in fact just a very wide and elongated avenue with no real equivalent in Europe) street vendors jostled, their wares spread out on the pavement or stacked up on small wooden boards in the entrances of buildings. Travelling merchants hawked a plethora of inexpensive goods: wonderful apples (no middling wares here), frameless mirrors, tin combs, orbs of Slovakian mountain cheeses, red on the outside, honeyed within, cheap neck-ties, oranges, bananas, hand-made lace and bright peasant embroidery. It was children mostly who stopped and tried to cajole their parents into buying; from my terrace I watched well-dressed children in white gloves, tugging at the hands of their mothers or governesses, and their poorer counterparts with small, pale faces.
In a doorway directly opposite, I noticed a street hawker. Still youthful, he was no longer the youngest and his handsomely chiselled face was locked in a rather grim expression. On the ground in front of him he had placed a stripped plank of wood and on it a multitude of little toy birds were weaving in and out of one another, dancing, pecking, driven by an inner mechanism. Their staccato movements indeed reflected that of hens. Their wooden core was hidden beneath the soft, downy plumage of white, black and yellow feathers. Most of the time the trader stood there as if lost in thought but when a child came he would willingly hand over the toy to be examined, for children always want to know precisely what is going on inside their toy. When they then walked away, embarrassed at not buying, he just smiled at them. There was something odd about the fellow, almost bird-like, but far from the endearing restlessness of hens.
Every so often he righted one of the little birds that had fallen over, while never taking his eyes off the street. He was probably afraid of being arrested by the police for unlawful street trading. Frequently he pulled a little spring tucked away in the birds’ feathery chest. Once again the creature struck up its spiky dance, pecking at the ground with its stuck-on beak as though there really were something to be found there. The rays of sun had long since wandered from the ample haunch of Saint Wenceslas’s horse on to the swanlike curve of its neck. It didn’t make any sense to wait for my business friend any longer. My new watch displayed a nonsensical hour.
When I looked up, I noticed that most of the little birds had been sold, only five or six were happily pecking away. Suddenly the man snatched them up, stuffed them into a cloth-bag where they continued to twitch, clutched the plank under his arm and broke into a run. As far as I could see there were no policemen to run from and the other illicit street vendors worked on unperturbed.
Who was the bird trader fleeing from? It surely could not be the hunched, corpulent man in a mouse-coloured coat who was wearing a dignified black bowler hat on a head showing the first signs of grey hair? He was accompanied by a pretty boy of around ten and an ash-blond, rather bitter-looking woman whose hat was rather out-dated. They were walking silently up Wenceslas Square. It seemed to me that they were wholly unaware of the profound effect their appearance had caused. Entering the park behind the museum they vanished from sight.
The street-lamps flared into life lending a magical aspect to the square. I was tired, and left. My watch ticked on. The one thing it was capable of. And I’d relied on it! I was thoroughly irate.