Péefko

I remember Jiri Tibor Novak. In conversation, when I named a person or thing that caught his attention, he would repeat that name or thing, then give a small disquisition about said person or subject. He confirmed a shared interest and extended our mental image. He sat at the long kitchen table with homemade coffee. He wanted to know what people made with their hands. He wanted to know not what they were thinking in passing, the usual thing, but their own thought. JTN sent new year’s cards with his initials. They were Czech péefko (PF), a Bohemian Christmas-New Year custom derived from the French ‘pour féliciter’ (felicitations). It is with this in mind that I ponder the poignancy (if that’s the word) of him dying between Christmas and New Year. I had not seen him for a few years, so the news was an unhappy surprise. I wished I’d visited him lately. I have a collection of PFs. Years ago he invited several poets to write about ladders. Poems are ladders, especially quatrains where each pause is a rung. We scale down them, then climb slowly up again, checking the more interesting or unusual views. I sent twelve ladder poems, I like writing cycles, but JTN’s ladder project never took off and we never raised the subject again. Ladders were one of his vehicles. Others were tents, flowerpots, boats, caravans, sandcastles, birds, chrysanthemums. They betokened connections between the two big worlds of his world, well summarised by the poet Jan Pieklo as his “toy Prague bush house/ near Vaclavske Namesti/ in Angahook Lorne State Park/ of Victoria.” Vaclav, or Wenceslaus, is the same Wenceslaus of the carol sung each Christmas. After 1983, JTN installed a sealed room in his bush house to protect his artworks from more bushfires. He kept dozens of notebooks and sketchbooks. He made many kinds of handwriting. He put me on to Bohumil Hrabal, for which I am annually grateful. He loved Maurice Sendak and would have enjoyed the valedictory ‘My Brother’s Book’: “While Guy wheeled round in the steep air/ A crescent in the sky,/ Passing worlds at every plunge-/ Dropping down and down/ On soft Bohemia.” That landlocked land is many passing worlds from the Great Ocean Road, with its ever-present strait of blue on one side of the motional car. Lighthouses were another of JTN’s constant vehicles. There are many of his paintings, prints, and drawings in our house. There is a set of five of his boat prints, set somewhere off the coastline: inkwell boat, semicolon boat, fire boat, hillside town boat, angel wing boat. The painting everyone sees upon entering the front door is one of his caravans, at rest after many journeys. The hillside painting on the caravan could be Prague or it could be the Otways.

Hachek (February)

Prague in October, where Seifert fantasises Mozart’s ‘effortless’ efforts at hacheks. Prague in February where an anonymous hachek like Kafka at the stroke of a pen condemns Kafka, would have all his ever-ever-ever words disappear. Prague in April where nature’s packet of hacheks breaks the soil so some fortunate like Nezval can flower forth brief showery beauties. Prague in June where Hrabal once more is the king of all hacheks, laughs at the summer sun from his window. Prague in August where war again is a word that Hašek may line up and fire at a hundred rounds of hacheks.

Zličín (Prague Metro)

Because this head won’t leave you alone. Because the past lets loose its bombs, crude as that. Because the inners turn noisome, if not nauseous. Because the noise itself is an unrelent. Because you cannot do anything for them now. Because you must not do anything for them. Because who is to blame but you and they and another. Because the city withholds its care. Because of because. You will want to go away for a while. You know you should stay, or someone tells you that, but the only way out is out. It is more than a hint. Is it just the internet overload does it? The indifference, even of humans, that clicks a switch? Rather than speeches, it’s small words take out the energy? Time to take time out. You go to Zličín, at the end of the line. Zličín, yes Zličín indeed. Of all places, Zličín. Logically and instinctively, Zličín. You go in a daze more than an expectation. You step onto the floor of the carriage as if in a trance, a dream almost not felt since schooldays. Or earlier. The seat beneath you is restful. The carriage and its three strangers is a balm. They look at one another in silence, as if waiting were the norm. It is like going out beyond the end of the alphabet, where there are no more words. There should be more places in your life like Zličín. If only they could be accessed at will. Every day there are troubles. Every day some quirk to flip composure. Sure as the sun rises in all its glory, there will be some business you have to sort out. It can override. It can become every thought. It can take over. It takes over. Places like Zličín, you wish you could remind yourself they are there. And when you arrive you keep going. Out past the Zličín of Ikea and Metropole and Globus and Tesco. Out past the buses and mad motorists of Zličín. You walk into the countryside, by the side of the road, or through a park. The roads are clear and bright. A few strangers are out working for their living in the sun. Three, four, five… They must have their troubles too. You walk out into the green countryside, along old laneways, through woodlands where birds work on their nests. Not that you have ever been to Zličín, or ever will, it is simply there at the end of the Zličín line. It is there to travel to. Writing can make it seem that you have been to Zličín, knowing it is there, which doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Zličín is solid enough, terminus of not pretending. It means too you can dream of Zličíns of the soul, terminus of Line B (Yellow), knowing it is there. Go to places where you are accepted for who you are. To places where you are accepted for who you were and will be. To places where they see and hear and understand. To places where you are newly understood. Not Zličín but more than Zličín. Places you knew of already but could only reach via Zličín. Even places you could never have imagined that only exist out beyond Zličín.

Písnice (Prague Metro)

If the European money comes through they will commence construction of Line D in 2017. Such words trip off the tongue of the documentary maker. This is the proposed line to Písnice. It will travel south. It will be up to the Non-Russians this time, to make it run. It will be the Blue Line. Just as the river flows north in a languorous curve, so the metro will go south in a comical reversal. The fish swim through the pools of translucent water in this remarkable drawing made by a leaky biro. That’s what we see. But Písnice does not turn into Piscine except on the page. Písnice does not mean woodland pools and smooth patterned carp. Písnice means bus depots and supermarkets and schools and medium highrise and squarish houses with swimming pools, and pathways and ponds and parks of ashes and beeches and elms, and dogs and dandelions and lavender and snails to the Czechs. The odds are high the station will always be called Písnice, if it is built. We imagine a station of black-and-gold interiors lined on whitewashed walls with select portraits in oil of great railway men of Prague. A station of constantly changing musical vibrations set up by hundreds of chimes dangling from the roof that are tuned to different frequencies each hour and as each new train comes into the platform, replacing muzak and public announcements. A station, we imagine, of underwater wonder in which features of the Great Barrier Reef that will no longer exist are reproduced in replica for the nautical commuters. A station in which record highs and lows in world temperature are registered on a running digital screen of blue lines. A station unimaginable to either czarists or bolsheviks. They, Prague, must have mixed views about a metro line to Písnice. Who has the money to buy a railway line? Why does it go to their neighbourhood and not ours? What if it never gets finished? That the Prague City Council has not finalised the preferred route would not improve confidence in some quarters. Two options are still under review. The first involves constructing Line D as an eight kilometre seven-station branch off Line C near Pancrác Metro, at a cost of around 24.7 billion crowns (in Australia, $1.3 billion). Alternatively, D could be constructed as an independent route from the city for 29 billion crowns (A$1.5 billion). These figures trip off the tongue of the finance minister. They trip, they slur, they get out of control and inflate. But then, it could all get washed away by 2017 as the river rises, again. Or remain derelict, as economic forces cross the border in the middle of the night. Or stay unbuilt, if a war starts or the climate escalates or the computers collapse. There are plans for Line E, or Line [E], as well. E will be the Purple Line and is said to be a Circle Line. Details are sketchy. Yet the trains will travel to Písnice all going well, and barring better offers, by 2022. Slowly the reality will sink in.

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.

Florenc (Prague Metro)

Pronounced Florents. Authorities haven’t deflected our questions about a missing [E] by mounting red and yellow plaques where an [E] could be hidden. Why, is itself an abstract capital in this most ancient of capitals. Is the station paying tribute to the Parisian novelist who wrote a whole novel without the main letter of the alphabet? [E]xcept there is another [E] there already. Remove the [E] and watch the line turn nil. The Tuscan city came before the Prague quarter came before the hotel came before the station. It was Sokolovská during the rain dribbly drab days of normalisation, down below so-called Sokol Street. O the wonder then of somewhere obscure and realist only available by [E]scalator! Hidden behind every plaque is an [E]mergency, the days of clampdown or liberation. They are no longer there but we can kind of see them if we look close enough. There are sober days when it is recalled how it could happen again: tanks, protests, speeches, enforced treaties. For under every Prague plaque is [E]xile, where Italy or England or America contain their own stories, of loneliness and repair. There we notice leaders-in-waiting, their every thought on the undeniable future. Interchange stations are a child’s game for the newcomer, following the yellow line [B] and the red line [C] to find the other platform. Though crowds of Czechs have forgotten what it’s like to be a child. It’s the workday, alone together. Because the thing that is missing is probably [E]xistentialism, no one has time. What is suppressed here is any kind of [E]xtravagance, something they may not need, being surrounded by such architecture, such centuries of [E]xhibition building. Mucha as much a swirl of [E]ffervescence as Kafka a firmness of [E]nergy, ever anxious for [E]rror. Not that I ever exited via Florenc. It was an underground vision from a  Metro window,a golden shrine, a minute of indulgence. I never had to step out there every day. I never had to live with the mundane reality, as the cliché goes, as clichés will. It is other people’s fragile natures must be tested in a place like Florenc. Pronounced Florents, by the Czechs. Dante refers to Bohemia, though he never visited. His whole life was spent piecing together again the city he couldn’t return to. He returned every day of his life, one way or another, in words and thoughts. He went down into the underground, as if that could lessen the pain. He could have filled volumes with the social transgressions of Prague. There is not an [E]book with the capacity to include all Dante had to say, but then it wasn’t his city. The pain is the lesson. He wished to fill the [E]mptiness with the world as he knew it, the world left behind. Not that the plaques at Florenc hide an [E], they are the colours of the two lines of a Metro that cross over at this station, an epsilon meeting at this one place under the one [E]arth.  

Hradčanská (Prague Metro)

So fast, so direct, so immediate, the vehicle of necessity. Under the ground the passengers read and stare inside the tidy carriages. Words in their books and looks of ambition in their eyes animate the spaces below the earth. They are that much closer to the fires inside the planet, that much further away from Baroque-blue sky. Temptation is only a moment distant away, or the resolution to accept what is given. Books close. The carriages come to a standstill. To alight may mean returning to the scene of bureaucratic inertia or the maelstrom of power decisions or the locality of the official crime. There’s always going to be someone with a problem up top, and someone else who has to find an answer to the problem. Those without a problem stay seated. For us, time to alight. What reasons drive educated beings to think it worth going to the top? They are much too busy to ask the question, far too efficient to factor in doubt. The clamour of dozens of unknowns, well, unknown to one another, that is, fills the doorways and rushes over the platform before it is too late. Too late for what, though? It is early in the day. The escalators are not selective. No syncopated step has your name written on it. So it is wise to become friends with the escalator. Its rhythmic rise is purely functional, but we are given to think it is (actually) a great leveller. No one will be particularly sorry, in the long term, at least. Then, what is up above, only what we always suspected? Where one decade is much like another. The king of flowers stands in the gallery of his heated subjects, about to watch the whole thing fall. Suave ambassadors wheedle and outwit who won’t be back tomorrow. The lookouts have more influence than the princes in a city ruled by diamond-eyed invaders. Most anything you care to mention is here in files, ready for questioning, ready to trip the switch. And as they come up into sunlit streets from Hradčanská below, all the windows of the Castle stare silently at the city below. Because as usual it is this year in this story, the first year of the world. The old streets going up there wind and divert, made in an age with more time on its hands. Briefcases fly like drones parallel to the ground. Faces assume the bearing of acquired control, playing on their keyboards like fingers of rain. When will be the day of reckoning? Does it come to us in laughter and tears? Was it always there in signs and wonders? Or is it solemn the way commuters are solemn, going up to the environs of the Castle one morning? Their faces set to the consequences, their demeanour deliberate, their minds immersing in the task. Yet every word for the Castle and environs confounds their individuality: keep, court, cell, juryroom, office, bureau, chamber, labyrinth, purgatory.

Pankrác (Prague Metro)

One who knows from the doctor for a certainty it is their last year alive, gazes at everyone and everything with a wonder they cannot express. The man in black could be a priest, a professor, or a secret service agent. A woman is sharpening a knife in her mind. A lonely man in his fifth day of mediation is losing interest in dissembling. While behind him on the down escalator is the shop assistant who has been doing this for too long and should go back to study, or anything, really, other than this stuff, down. Someone else carries the burden of being thought of as just someone else. They go down every Monday and Tuesday to catch the train at Pankrác Metro. The student carries in his head all the confusions that cannot reach a page of his essay. The young man with the downloads of European electronica  in his ears refuses to catch anyone’s eye. The middle man who has replaced his consumption of women with consumption of Pilsner Urquell, waits immobile for the amber state to pass. A woman of independent demeanour is, you would never think it, about to explode any minute with pent-up fury. Every Tuesday and Wednesday they are on the escalator to Pankrác, in English Pancras, after nearby Saint Pancras Church. He misses someone so much that the escalator could be a cloud, a flying carpet. The beauty descends, who may be going to see her new boyfriend or may be going to see the ex or may be just going, somewhere, else. Every Wednesday and Thursday they find themselves again on the platform of Pankrác Metro, Pankrác being where the Pankrác Remand Centre is found, Pankrác being Prague slang for a prison. The woman is beyond caring now the moment of loss has arrived full force. While that man over there is the same difficult individual he was when he was a teenager. Every Thursday and Friday, Pankrác again, Saint Pancras Station, streamlined, neutral; or else a joke prison, a place they share as they stand in line first thing in the morning. The man with too much computer in his fibres is numbly staring at the tracks. The woman with time on her hands lets time fix her hair and paint her lips in a tiny mirror.  The child with her grandmother could solve this knot with a simple twist. In her bag the lifetime resident keeps a packet of of headache tablets and a safety weapon. The man in his newspaper is in the world where chancellors berate and climate change argues, until the red and silver train comes in at his feet. The woman with tactics always finds a window by standing on the same platform tiles where the door opens. A man is wondering how he got into such a stupid argument last night and regrets it all, until next week. 

Dejvická (Prague Metro)

Panels on the wall of Dejvická Metro Station

Kingstown was the imperial way of claiming Ireland, with its hints at King’s Own. Anyone coming into or out of Ireland was left in no doubt about the occupying nation. It stood on the east coast of the island like a royal standard, embossed and distinctive. First day in Prague means taking the bus from Ruzyně International Airport, past the green meadows and outlying homes of orange and white, the shady trees sleepy in the warm air. Children talk vividly, teenagers slump and drawl, adults watch with one eye on the time. At the train stop the locals stay put while the plane travellers clamber out for the connection at the metro station known as Dejvická. It is the terminus of Line A, something we find by turning our unfolded maps in circles until the orientation is right. The entrance goes down below the boulevard known as Evropská Třída. How to pronounce all of these words with their quiffs and moustaches and monocles! Spaniards, a mother and her daughter, can see I have no idea which station to travel to, so while we wait on a seat for the next train they turn unfolded maps in clockwise directions and engage in comic Anglo-Hispanic, until the girl points excitedly at Invalidovna. The platform is temporarily populated with representatives of five continents, their languages back to basics as they confront the mysteries of Czech. But it wasn’t always the case. The station was opened ten years after normalisation was introduced, on the 12^th of August 1978. It was called Leninova. No busts of the Bolshevik greet the tourist these days at the top of the escalator, or down in the vaults, or through the closed circuit. Vladimir no longer signs off on the passports. The houses all around look spruce in the lazy day, not scratched and uncleaned when they were part of being normal. The grimaces of wealthy Czechs in Dejvice must have been permanent before the wind changed, taking the metro to work in town. But still it is a wonder how the tunnels were blasted into place by the Russians and Czechs, a subterranean memory of Moscow. The rulers who flew in from that place would have been driven to The Castle in flash cars. But the embossment stayed in place, tribute to the gaunt man with the hatred of what kings owned, until the Velvet Revolution. He was always going to be a problem father-figure, staring balefully and jutting his pointy beard. Leninova was renamed Dejvická in 1990, after the ancient district in which the station is located in Prague 6. Dejvice, site of Roman camps and one of the oldest monasteries in Bohemia became the new home of the Velvet Underground. The Spanish ladies stepped onto the train. We kept on with our Spanglish, wondering the while what sights we were missing many many metres above our heads. 

 

Dejvická Metro under construction in the 1970s

Invalidovna (Prague Metro)

Walls of yellow pressed metal arch over the train tunnel at Invalidovna. The Russians built the metro for the Czechs, maybe as compensation for reclaiming the country in 1968. The authorities called it normalisation. But unlike Moscow, where the Communists constructed underground stations to rival the conquered Romanov palaces, in Prague it was state-of-the-art functional. Through the arches we find the escalators beckon at the end of the hallway. Escalators rattle at top speed as we step lightly and quickly onto the next offering. Their steps click-clack woodenly, their ascent is sharp. Light that must come from the sky is visible up above: it could be Dante by Doré. It’s the weekend in Karlin and no one is in the streets. Long grass barely moves in the stillness of the fields around housing complexes. Grass flowers with prickly leaves dandle in the air. Clever weeds link in to the footpaths. We walk towards what the map says is the hotel but there is no one in sight and summer heat increases. At last, near a chained-up premises stands a policeman, not doing much, what with everyone being asleep or in one of the parks or swimming at the pool. The name of the hotel is on a card. He reads the card and points down the street about one hundred yards. Invalidovna itself is nowhere to seen in this landscape of closed down ruins, commission housing and new hotels. It was Prague’s hôtel des invalids, built in the 1730s as a hospital and dormitory for war veterans. The hotel brochure helps: “Only a ninth of the original design was ever completed. At most, about 1200 inmates lived there. In 1935, all inhabitants moved to another "invalidovna" and the building was used by the Czech army. After this, it was used as an army archive. The building was damaged by a large flood in 2002, and most of the archive materials was destroyed. The building currently awaits an expensive reconstruction. One possible future use is as a part of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University.” On a pillar in the hotel lobby is a plaque with a blue line, showing where the floodwater reached; it is about the height of the reception counter. Slowly the scene comes into our minds, as we imagine it from the upstairs window, after booking in. The Vltava broke its banks at Karlin, the most vulnerable low-lying inner suburb of Prague. It damaged irreparably the lines of nearby shops. They have all been razed and a ‘park’ of unchecked trees grows for a kilometre between the hotels and the river. The water flooded everything in Karlin, so much of the place had to be rebuilt. The water saturated the soil, turning it into a quagmire. The floodwaters raced everywhere as they rose, pouring down into every drain and crevice. Most particularly, the vast escalator shaft that takes us down into the station of Invalidovna. The waters poured inexorably into the underground, making infernal streams and bringing everything down there to a stop. Karlin recovers after ten years. But memory is a trickster. Unlike the other stations on the line, there are no pressed metal arches over the tunnel walls at Invalidovna. That is how it would be remembered, but only the colour is right, when we google image it, home in Australia.