Můstek (Prague Metro)

And what if instructions were followed and all the manuscripts were destroyed? The stories of inequitable trials and faceless castle corridors, destroyed. The fantasy fables about country weddings and insect-men, destroyed. The daily records of Habsburg immobility at the end of Empire, destroyed. The underlining of Judaic theory beneath the manners of an industrial city, destroyed. The demand for perfection of the work always meant a work was never complete. Like appointments and trips, he was going to call it off. Major decisions like engagements, he would procrastinate and then cancel. The generations no one, least he, could have imagined? The passengers at Můstek Metro reading his deluxe edition? Complete with stupendous footnotes? Well, one passenger anyway, in the front carriage. Other passengers are not so concerned. “Oh, that guy, the one who thought he was a cockroach.” “I had to do him at school. What a depressive!” “ This is something I don’t need in my life right now.” “Sure, they have a museum for him in Malástrana. They even sell tee-shirts.” Notwithstanding, because we read his words at all, survival is an attribute we know about Franz Kafka. Bohumil Hrabal, ditto. Who in his book ‘Total Fears’ wrote that Czech history is a “constantly postponed beginning, and a simultaneous ending.” He must have had in mind several watershed moments. The breakthroughs of Czech nationalists, the non-stop non-starts of normalisation. His sardonic words speak for the country. An original proud state from medieval times. It is older than Russia, more coherent than Germany, yet Bohemia is in the middle. It is always going to get in the way of other people’s ambitions. They will interfere. It is a nation with a mind of its own. It will change its mind. The reader returns to ‘Total Fears’ as if  a contagion were upon him. Is Hrabal’s own way of writing a “constantly postponed beginning, and a simultaneous ending”? And what if none survived? His taoist tales of living and dying, pulped. His perverse adventures in provincial hotels, shredded. His interminable self-reference, that is a form of high comedy, recycled. His wizardly interviews that mock the occupation, lost. Instead of samizdat and creamy monographs coming at the rate he wrote them, all his published work had been force-fed into a scrap machine? His prolific output of comic genius reduced to pulp? All those nights at the sign of the Golden Tiger, come to nothing, nights of nought. His sceptical view of Russians, Americans, all equally cruel and capable of calculated betrayal, lost in bundles of reconditioned paper. But this especial book was purchased in a handsome imprint from that grand bookshop on Václavské Náměstí. There is a woman in the third carriage reading a copy right now, at  Můstek. These little bridges written by one pontifex minimus or another. They connect us to the Prague we can now imagine, or only imagine.

The medieval bridge found at the metro station and now on permanent display.