The Visa Chronicles
by James Tressler
I
Sugit left for the migrant camp in Ostrava this morning. When he left it was very early and even though I was really awake I pretended to be asleep as he dressed and packed his overnight bag. Sugit is not happy about going. Islam has already been at the camp for three weeks, still waiting to be issued a visa. Sugit came to the flat after Islam received orders to report, and now he too had to go.
His brother, Nikash, is at the flat now. This morning when I finally got up, after Sugit had gone, he was in the bedroom checking the news from Bangladesh on Sugit’s laptop (Sugit left his laptop and mobile phone because they aren’t allowed at the camp).
“Ah, today you fight!” Nikash said cheerfully.
“Fight” is a term we use for work. It was Islam who started it. “Every day we must fight,” Islam would say. “Without fight everything is finished.”
Usually Islam said this in the afternoons, when he headed up the street to the bar where he worked as a cook. He never had a day off and usually worked until midnight, though it’s true his work in the kitchen wasn’t too demanding. Most of the customers at Konspirace were young people from the neighborhood who went to the bar to drink beer and smoke joints of marijuana mixed with tobacco.
It’s too bad really because Islam is a good cook. It’s not his profession (in Bangladesh he had a mobile phone business, and has traveled to China, Russia and Singapore; the business, he told me, went under because of taxes), but he is capable of making very good simple curry dishes, chicken or beef or fish over rice. At the flat he always invited me to share whatever he cooked.
I’m not much of a cook myself, but when I tried offering my own dishes, usually canned goulash or take-away Mexican from a restaurant on Krymska, Islam always politely refused. Sugit and Nikash usually refuse as well. “We prefer eating food from our own country,” they said.
Nikash just returned the other day from the migrant camp, where he was issued a 30-day visa. I’ve never actually seen the camp myself. It’s a few hours’ train ride east of Prague , near the Polish border. The detainees are of varied stock, Russian, Ukraine , Mongolian, Vietnamese, Southeast Asian. There is one pay phone at the camp, so you call there and whoever answers takes the name you request and goes and finds the person. Usually we called Islam from Sugit’s laptop and took turns talking to him. Once I asked Islam about the camp and he said it wasn’t too bad. They had volleyball and other sports, and there was plenty of space and it wasn’t overcrowded. But still, you’re not allowed to leave and, except for the pay phone, had no contact with the outside world. The thing Islam hated really was the food. He doesn’t really care for Czech food.
“Ah, James, life is very difficult,” Islam said. “Every day we must fight. Fight for oil, fight for food, fight for visa. Home is best.”
I first met Islam at Konspirace, a pub in Prague ’s Vršovice neighborhood. It’s interesting to look back at the circumstances in which we met, interesting because so much of what I like about Prague , as well as the many problems I had there, began in pubs, Konspirace in particular. So you could say meeting Islam there, especially since he doesn’t drink, was if not ironic at least a happy accident, like two people caught in a fast-moving stream. You might not share the same destination, but for a little while, before the current shifts, you help carry each other along.
I had been sharing a flat with a Czech woman who worked for an Irish real estate company in Prague . One day, after I’d been living there nearly a year, I came home and found all of our possessions sitting out in the hallway. The locks of the flat had been changed. The woman it turned out had not paid any of the rent. The money I had given her evidently went to pay her other debts. To her credit, the woman gave me back my deposit and tried to help find me a place to stay temporarily.
That night I went to Konspirace to have a few beers and forget about everything for the evening, and when Islam heard about my situation, offered to let me stay with him. He arranged to have a bed put in the kitchen. The rent was 10,000 crowns per month, which we split fifty-fifty.
“It is good,” Islam said. “I helping you, and you helping me.”
Most Americans you meet in Prague are English teachers. Thanks to globalization and the collapse of Communism in Central Europe , a real and constant demand for teachers has held steady for the past two decades. So you’ll find old-timers, who arrived in Prague in the early Nineties, just after the revolution, and those who came in later waves. Only a small core stay; the majority are young people fresh from university who are looking for a gap year of travel before applying to grad schools at Columbia or UCLA or the London School of Economics, wherever. The ones who stay tend to be types like me – drifters, restless thirty-somethings who are usually running away from something back home (debt, a broken relationship, mid-life crises) or else desperately in pursuit of the great European expat experience – to the envy of married, job-bound colleagues and friends back in the States.
Take me, for instance. I was a journalist at a small daily in Northern California before applying to a school in Prague that trained teachers. I’d found the school on Google, applied, and was accepted. Five years on, I was still in Prague.
Islam couldn’t understand why.
“You are from America ,” he would say. “There you can work. There you can make money. If I am you I would America. Home is best.”
Of course he knew about the recession, the crisis. We often spoke about it in the evenings at Konspirace, when he came out and sat at my table, especially after Lehman Brothers and later GM filed for bankruptcy. But still, in Islam’s eyes, one left one’s home if it was a country like Bangladesh, very poor and saddled with a corrupt, inefficient government. To him, America represented an ideal destination, a place you went to not away from.
But he liked Prague .
“Here you can turn on cooker and everytime working,” he said. “Electric, fine. In my country, maybe working one day, maybe not. Very difficult life.”
Islam’s goal was to live in Prague a year or two, a few years, start a business, a restaurant, hostel, make money and eventually return to Bangladesh . He has a wife and daughter there, and he sends them money. Recently his wife filed for divorce. Islam had a Czech girlfriend who he was hoping to marry because he hoped it would expedite getting permanent residence, which would allow him to get a business license. But in the end his girlfriend wouldn’t do it. She said she had been married before to an Italian man who left her and ran up a lot of debt on her credit cards, debt Islam has helped her repay. She also had bad kidneys and spent a lot of time in and out of hospitals. Islam helped pay those bills too.
“Ah, life is life,” he said. “Every day must be fighting. Without fighting all is finished.”
But then Islam had a falling out with the owner at Konspirace. The owner, who was usually content to smoke joints behind the bar, seldom paid Islam in full. Instead each day he gave Islam a portion, whatever he could manage. Islam, easy-going as always, had kept track of what was owed. In time, pressured in part by his other problems, he presented the manager with a bill for 16,000 crowns in unpaid wages. The manager put him off and put him off, and finally, in frustration, Islam quit. He went back a few times after that but was never able to collect any of it.
And then, not long after that, he got orders to report to the migrant camp.
Sugit returned from the camp late that same day. I was asleep when he came in and didn’t actually know he was there until the next morning. Sugit and Nikash, the two brothers, shared Islam’s bed, while I kept the bed in the kitchen. A thin curtain covered the door to the bedroom.
The brothers are very similar in height and build, short and compact. Also they are very close. “Nikash is for me like my right arm,” Sugit once told me.
Their personalities were different. Sugit, the older brother, had a reserved, serious demeanor (unless he had a few beers) while the younger brother, Nikash, had a bright smile and playful eyes and liked to laugh a lot. They were both Buddhists, though not strict practicioners. Nikash studied Buddhism at a university in Sri Lanka and later became a professional hair dresser. Occasionally he cut my hair. In Prague he was working at a hotel until he began having problems with his visa. Sugit worked for a Korean potraviny near Naměstí Míru.
Sugit worked everyday, although every now and then he had Monday off. On his free day he usually met with his girlfriend, went out for a meal at an Indian restaurant, and then got drunk at the flat. Nikash also had a girlfriend. She was from Thailand and was really shy and sweet. They communicated in English and he called her “Honey” and she called him “Honey.”
That morning the brothers were in a good mood.
“James!” Nikash called from the bedroom. “Today you fight?”
I had a couple of lessons in the afternoon.
“Everyday must be fight!”
I asked Sugit about the camp.
“Very bad,” Nikash said, answering for him. “Communists here come back to power. They don’t want foreign people. They want us go out.”
This was Nikash’s theory. Recently in the news the Czech government had suspended issuing visas to Vietnamese applicants, and there were also reports of expulsions of illegal workers in some of the factories. A lot of that had to do with the economic crisis, perhaps, and to stem the tide of foreign workers; but also since joining the EU a few years back, and then the Schengen area, the Czechs were looking to crack down on illegal immigrants. Nikash’s reference to Communists came from the recent appointment of the new prime minister, Jan Fischer, a former Communist.
That morning I got up and showered and dressed for work. Sugit and Nikash were heating up rice left over from the night before. They invited me to eat but I was on my way out.
“Every day fight!” Sugit said. “Without fight there is no food. No beer. Nothing! Without fight -- homeless!”
The other place I went in the evenings on Donská Street was u Rozjětý Zabý, or “Squashed Frog.” Most people just called it Zaba. It’s a dark cellar-type pub with four rooms, table football, and a computer at the bar where we usually opened YouTube and selected music videos. There was also a juke box and sometimes the owner, Jirka, told us to use that, especially when once in a while a man from the juke box company dropped by. On Sunday nights there were movies, and on other nights we watched hockey and football matches, and occasionally there were table football tournaments, which were very popular.
That night after finishing teaching I dropped by. Jirka wasn’t working. Instead it was Adela, a plump, sweet-natured girl from the neighborhood. My friend Kuba and his girlfriend Lenka were sitting at the bar playing hip hop and reggae videos on YouTube. Sandra and her brother Zdenda were seated at the big booth with some people I didn’t know. A giant black dog sniffed the floor at their feet.
“Hi man,” Kuba said as we shook hands. He worked at a computer and television shop near Strašnice, and Lenka worked in a small shop up the hill near the park in Vinohrady. We liked to meet and listen to music and drink beer after work. Often Kuba bought shots of rum or slivovice and passed them around. He was really easygoing, and had learned English through movies and listening to hip hop. Adela brought over a pint of Svíjany, a good draft beer, and then other people came in; Ondrej, who worked at a car parts company; Honza and his long-time girlfriend. They’d broken up and she was engaged to another guy, but they were still good friends. Then Alex came, and a young girl with long dark dreads. Her name was Jana.
“So what about your visa?” Ondrej asked, taking off his jacket and hanging it on a hook near the bar.
“Still waiting,” I said. I’d recently been to Dresden to reapply. My visa woes were common knowledge in the neighborhood. A year or so before, on a night partying near Karlin, I’d got too drunk and kicked a passing car. The guy’s girlfriend called the police on her mobile, and I was taken to the local jail for the night. After having paid a stiff fine, my visa renewal application had also been rejected. Since then, I’d launched an appeal with help from one of my students who was a lawyer for the government, and had also on a parallel level started at the beginning and applied for a new visa. That’s why I’d gone to Dresden .
“Do you think there is any chance?” Ondrej asked.
“Uvidime.” In Czech that means we’ll see.
“Yes, I hope so. If not, you will go back in America ?”
“Probably. Uvidime.”
Honza came up to the bar to get beers. He said hello and went to the computer and requested one of his favorites, “Black Betty.” Lenka put it in the YouTube pipeline. There were two or three other requests ahead. The weather had been good the past few days, and everyone looked sun-flushed and healthy. Summertime in Prague means that a lot of people go to festivals outside the city, or else camping in the countryside or time at their weekend cottages.
“I have been at my country house,” Ondrej said. He was not drinking beer that night. Instead he ordered a lemonade and rolled a joint.
Kuba and Lenka went over to the table football for a game. Ondrej and Zdenda joined them, so I sat at the bar and drank beer and listened to music. “Last Song,” by the Swedish hip hop band Loop Troop, was playing. It was a Zaba favorite, and Kuba and Lenka, myself and some others sang along. “If I die tomorrow yeah, yeah, yeah/Feel no kind of sorrow, no, no, no, no, no/Smile at my memories, yeah, yeah, yeah/And pray for my enemies!”
The bar was pretty crowded. A party was going on in the back room, and Adela was busy serving beers and plates of pickled cheese and bread and hot wings. I got up to watch the table football. Kuba took his play very seriously and kept his eyes intent on the action.
The bar felt warm and friendly, like in the villages outside Prague . Adela brought me a fresh pint and I drank the beer and watched the game awhile and then went back to the bar.
Presently there was a tap on my shoulder:
“I thought you might be here.”
It was Liam, an Englishman about my age who also taught English in Prague . He grinned.
“Back on the piss,” he said. “Managed to stay off it six months this time ‘round.”
“Yeah, long time!” I was glad to see him. “How you been?”
“Good.” His eyes roamed the bar. “Been exercising, working. But now the spring is here and I get the urge. I’d like to have a holiday.”
“You’ve been saying that for two years.”
“I know but I mean to this time. Been studying to get my driver’s license. If I can I’d like to rent a car and maybe drive down to the coast. Italy maybe, or get over to Greece . We’ll see. So what’s new with you? Didn’t get over to Turkey , I see.”
“That fell through. The crisis.”
“Ah ha. Right. You were probably just sitting in the pub and couldn’t be bothered, I’ll bet. Did you ever get your visa sorted?”
“Still waiting.”
“Uh hm.” He signaled to Adela and when she came over Liam ordered a pint. “So have you given any thought to going back to America then?”
“Sometimes. I may have to go back if I can’t get the visa.”
“So they denied you then. Something about kicking a car, wasn’t it?”
“You remember.”
Liam was half listening. His eyes worked around the room.
“Know if anyone’s got any weed here?”
“Not here. There’s a place down the street though.”
“Konspirace didn’t have any. You say there’s another place? Well, if I gave you some money would you go down there and get me a gram. I mean, they know you, right?”
He gave me 250 crowns and I shuffled down the street to the other bar. It was a tiny, very smoky place and I generally didn’t like going there. The owner was my neighbor, but he wasn’t there. A young girl was working and she just took the money and handed me a small bag without saying anything.
Back at Zaba I saw that Vick and Danny Boy had arrived. Vick was born in the Czech Republic but his parents emigrated to Canada when he was a child. But eight years ago he returned to Prague and was working in the mail room at Exxon’s office at Flora. Danny Boy used to work in the mail room too but when his contract expired it had not been renewed.
The big booth had just been cleared and we sat down there, along with Liam.
“Did you hear?” Vick asked. “The doctor called today,” Vick said.
“And?”
“The test was positive. Just barely over the limit.”
“Oh!”
“Yeah. He said I probably had a smoke three weeks ago.”
“I told you it stays in your system thirty days. So what happens?”
“Tomorrow I’m going to talk to my new supervisor. Be honest and just tell them, ‘Hey, OK, sometimes I smoke a little,’ but I really need this job, I want to be with the company long term …”
“It is an insanity!” Danny Boy broke in. “This is for me biggest problem in Czech Republic . Our laws here have any insanity! I want to leave for other country.”
“It would happen in other countries too,” I said. “Like with me and the visa.”
Vick was rolling a joint and thinking.
“Can you keep your job in the podatelna?”
“No. Contract’s already expired. I don’t know … maybe they could give me some kind of probation, with testing every few months.”
Liam, who had been listening while rolling his own joint, broke in with a chuckle.
“Right and here you are skinning up and smoking spliffs!”
“I know, right?”
Danny Boy laughed too. He had a face that vaguely resembled the young Ringo Starr.
“Ah Vick,” he said. “The answer is perfect for you!” He was quoting his favorite Bad Religion song.
The joint, or rather, joints, went around and even up to the bar. Ondrej had rolled another one too and was looking to pass it. Vick took it and hit it. The bar was very smoky and crowded. Adela got up on the counter and opened a window. It was early evening outside and though nearing nine o’clock, it was just starting to get dark.
Vick looked at his watch when the joints were dusted.
“I’m out of here,” he said. Danny Boy rose with him, so I got up too.
“Oh, we’re all leaving together then?” Liam asked. He went to pay at the bar and I followed him.
Outside the guys were already heading up to the tram stop. My flat was down the hill near Grebovká Park . I waved the guys good night and headed home.
Sugit and Nikash were cooking together. Sugit had just got home, and Nikash had cooked a chicken. The flat smelled warmly of curry and boiling rice. They invited me to eat with them, but I was sleepy. They made an effort to be quiet as they finished preparing the meal while I undressed, got into bed and closed my eyes. I wasn’t really drunk, just full of beer and feeling heavy-eyed. The brothers took their food into the bedroom and shut off the light in the kitchen, then drew the curtain over the door. In the dark I tried to sleep but couldn’t stop thinking. It was at night that I thought most about the visa problem. In the next room I could hear the brothers talking in Bangladeshe on one of the free Internet calling services. They were calling the migrant camp. I heard them ask for Islam, explaining in Czech and English. They had to make the request many times. Finally Islam came on the line. I got up and went into the bedroom.
“James is here,” Sugit said, and handed the headset to me.
“Islam!” I said, feeling the need to speak loudly.
“James!” he sounded far away. “How’s going your life?”
We talked for a minute or two. There was nothing new to report. Islam was hoping to be back in Prague soon.
“I coming, I don’t know, one week, maybe two weeks. Waiting for court. Maybe they give visa, and then I coming. And you? Fighting is good?”
“It’s OK.”
“Difficult life, James,” Islam laughed, his voice still faint.
“OK. Here is Sugit now.”
“Sugit? OK, James. Take care!”
“See you.”
II
The next morning went quickly. I had an early morning class at a government office near the Dancing House, then afterward had lunch at the Globe. Aiden Greenworth, an Englishman from Hull City and long-time Prague denizen, was there with a plastic bag of white poker player hats. The visors were tinted a garish red. As always, Aiden had bags under his eyes, and a look as though he’d slept in his clothes.
“Guy’s giving me 50 crowns for every one,” Aiden said, joining me at the table. “Sold seven yesterday.”
“Where?”
“Karlovo Lazne. But you know, I think the guy just gets them at a Chinese or Vietnamese market. I’m a little worried they’ll give me trouble. That’s just it, you know. I could’ve done it myself, but instead someone else did and is paying me 50 crowns a visor. The Chinese, speaking of which –“ he laughed. “I used to say this about the Americans. I have an idea and then sit on it and, and – well, now it’s the Chinese.”
“I saw Grub yesterday with his dad over visiting," I said. "Told his dad he should help Grub buy a new passport. His dad was like, ‘I’m afraid he’ll just blow it on booze and dope. Grub has chosen to live the life he leads, even if others don’t approve,’ you know …”
“Yeah, that’s where I understand where Grub’s coming from,” Aiden said, rubbing his eyes. “I mean, when I finally got my passport I said, ‘OK, I got a passport! Great! And? And?” He looked at me. “And? I’ve got no food!”
“A rohlík costs one crown apiece,” I offered.
Aiden looked toward the entrance. There’s a book shop in the front part of the café.
“True,” he said, still watching to see who was coming in. It was somebody he recognized from the Prague Film College , where Aiden has acted in numerous student films. Aiden waved at the guy and said something, then turned back to me.
“Did Grub ever tell you about this Israeli bloke we met? Dressed in a real nice suit. I mean, one of his shoes could buy Grub a new passport.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Oh, just a place near Chapeau. But listen, man! He’s dressed like that and he’s ordering Grub and I around! ‘Get me a cigarette.’ ‘Give me another.’ ‘Give me a roll.’ Yeah right! Me? I had 37 crowns! Grub had nothing, and I bought 10 rohliky and some ham and we had this little meal. This Israeli guy kept saying, ‘I’ll buy you a beer.’ And he never did! Finally I said, ‘Man! Forget the beer, just give me some money. And he said he doesn’t have any! I said, ‘Grub, you know, man? Let’s get out of here.”
“So where are you sleeping?” I asked. I had only paid half attention to Aiden’s story. If you knew him long enough, the stories were all like that, diatribes, agitated rants, all delivered in his deep, cigarette-rusty Hull City accent, which in certain moods he traded for an exaggerated Cockney.
At my question, Aiden looked at me knowingly.
“Where do you think, man? The same place.”
“Where’s that?”
“ Prague .” He made a vague sweeping gesture. “The whole place. At least there’s nice weather.”
I had ordered a cheeseburger and home potatoes for lunch. When it came, I cut the cheeseburger in half and offered half to Aiden.
Later Aiden paid for his coffee and left, with the bag of cheesy poker hats, which he was going to try and sell over near the Charles Bridge . He returned a few minutes later because he’d forgotten his mobile phone, which the manager had let him recharge at the bar.
I went up to pay. The manager was an American guy, relaxed, late twenties.
“I’ve known Aiden a few years,” the manager said, in answer to a question I had as we watched Aiden leave again.
“He’s crazy sometimes,” I said.
“Yeah, but I like him though. I mean, he’s resilient, funny. Even if he is a bit crazy.”
In the evening I called up Vick to ask how work was going. He invited me to his flat, which just up the street from mine. We watched a Coen Brothers movie, ‘Burn After Reading.’
‘The offer for the promotion has been withdrawn,” Vick said. They sent him an email that day. A manager he’d hoped to talk to, to sort of throw himself at the mercy at, was out of town.
“So what now?” I asked.
Vick shrugged.
“Oh, look for work.”
We watched the movie and Vick rolled a joint. After the movie I could see he wanted to relax by himself, so I went out for a walk. It was a fine spring evening. After I left Vick’s I wandered over to the vineyard at Grebovká Park . There had been rain the week before and the grass and trees in the park were a rich, jungle green. The tentative vines on the iron stakes already looked well on their way. It was hard to believe that a month or so before the same place had been icy , bleak, desolate. A new stone pathway cut into the gently rolling earth, and a freshly plastered wall had been built. Two wheelbarrows presented a still life of that expired labor. I walked up and looked out and down the slope of the vineyard. You could see all the way to the Corinthian Towers , the glass of the towers shining in the dusk, near Vyšehrad. You could see further to the flat office buildings at Pánkrac. In the foreground a tram snaked through Nusle and disappeared. People – young people, sat on benches in the park or in the grass in circles, talking animatedly, and even far down the hill the echoes of the voices could be heard. You wanted to gather it all in; the whisper beneath the voices, the svetluska as they hovered and twinkled in the grass, the slope of the hill described by the growing vines, the wheelbarrows at rest, the fine mellow undying air.
I went and sat in the vineyard. The workers had all gone home for the day, and a gate had been left open.
“This is how things should have been,” I thought aloud, sitting with the vines around me. “This is how you should have gone about things from the beginning.” I was a bit stoned, but felt calm and rested. “Instead of hurling yourself everywhich way and at everyone and everything.”
But you can’t take it all in anyway. Selective elimination – isn’t that one of the secrets of life and art? Really, look at the stones there on the new pathway, the stark strangeness of the new wall, it’s almost perverse nakedness. It could use some grafitti to fit in with the neighborhood. Don't look at it then, look out at the fading dusk, listen to the voices and laughter up the hill, the echo of your loneliness. Think about your story, the one you’ve been working on the past few months, “The Man Called Paquito Montana,” you’ve been working on it off and on during the day, during breaks between classes. It’s not a bad story, though you’re pretty sure it’s not all that original, but you feel it explains something about your situation. You think about the opening scenes, go over them again, from the first time you saw Paquito Montana in Old Town Square, the rapier hanging from his waist, the missing button on his jacket. You were arriving in Prague, he was leaving, or, as with Islam, you were both passing through ...
The Man Called Paquito Montana
These relics I preserve with care,
My comfort in disastrous fate;
For, steel’d and whetted by despair,
My love, and new force acquires from hate.
Unhappy those! who darkling, sail
Where stars and ports and pilots fail.
-- ‘Don Quixote’
“That’s beautiful, man! You want to make a movie?’
The man called Paquito Montana just appeared out of nowhere with this fabulous pronouncement. It was an afternoon in June, and I’d just set down my coin cup and started playing my guitar in an archway near the Tyn Church.
It’s an action movie, but with spirituality, too,’ he continued, shaking hands with a certain flourish. ‘ I am the director, writer and star. Systema! Situation interesanche! Come, my friend. We get and drink and talk business.’
I took him in at a glance, and was taken aback. He stood just over six feet, but seemed taller, his chest and shoulders thrown backward and up in a cavalier pose.. His face was dark, haggard and remotely handsome, a broad perpetual grin covered by a scraggly goatee and shiny black hair fell over his shoulders and over the great long black coat he wore. The coat resembled an old-fashioned military jacket, perhaps a French officer’s coat, with shining gold buttons, one of which was missing. He wore knee-length black boots, the tips a shining gold metal. Most astounding of all was the rapier, complete with a curved, ornamented scabbard, that hung at his waist.The overall effect was startling - so incongruous was he with the mass of tourists who streamed by in Prague’s Old Town.
He called me ‘El Gabacho.’
‘What does it mean?’ I asked him once. He tried to explain something about a long black coat like gaberdine but we were at a loss for a perfect translation. In the end he just patted me on the shoulder and said reassuringly. ‘It just means, you know, American, no offense homey.’
I followed him to Valentynos, where he’d already run up a sizeable tab that afternoon. That’s how I met Gino and Dana. There were other people - a young Czech couple, Milos and Zuzanna sitting out on the patio under tables with green umbrellas. Milos spoke very little English, and had a cross-eye that was disconcerting because you could never tell if he was looking at you or not. Zuzanna was dressed all in black, with a pierced tongue and two-toned spiky hair. She spoke good English and was quite pleasant. Paquito Montana, his hands in a flouirsh, introduced us.
‘This man is a great artist,’ he said, meaning me. ‘You might have heard his recordings. He is quite famous in America .’
Homey, you want a beer?’ I said yes, and the rapier swinging at his side Paquito Montana disappeared into the café.
‘Can you play Nirvana?’ Milos asked.
I played ‘Come as you are,’ the only Nirvana tune I could play. It went over well, Milos quietly sung along. There was a burst of polite applause, from some middle-aged English tourists at the next table and from Paquito Montana and a beefy Italian man in white short sleeves who were coming outside.
‘I told you!’ Paquito Montana exclaimed, his dark eyes shining. ‘What did I say? Muy famoso! Situacion interesanche!’ he proclaimed full of an inquisitive bravado.
‘My friend! My friend!’ This was the beefy Italian man who introduced himself warmly as Gino. He was the owner. Gino also proclaimed me a great artist, and insisted my beer was on the house. ‘Anything you want,’ he added. ‘But one thing - ‘Let it Be.’ You know this song. ‘Let it Be?’ Please, my artist friend, ‘Let it Be - for me. Please.’
I felt embarrassed, but also glorious in a way. It was hard to imagine that just a few minutes before I’d been busking under the archway not fifty meters away.
I think by then Paquito Montana had already shown me a few of the pictures, as he did again later that afternoon with the English tourists, as well as Zuzanna and Milos, who were very curious and asked lots of questions. Gino was proud of the pictures. He even presented them to other customers who came in, enthusiastically waved Paquito Montana over to the tables and perhaps sit for a drink.
Occasionally Paquito Montana disappeared out into the street. Once it was with Milos and Zuzanna on a pot errand. They came back after a half hour and a joint was rolled, lit and passed. More beers were brought. I gathered from Gino not to worry about my drinks. The tables were littered with empty pint glasses by then and near dusk dinner was served. It was a wonderful fettucini with fresh spicy vegetables and a chocolate mousse pudding for dessert brought out by Gino and a pretty, silent young woman who I soon learned was his wife.
‘This is my mama,’ Gino said, introducing me to Dana. ‘My mama she is a great cook!’
It was funny, hearing Gino introduce his wife as his mama, but it fit strangely enough. I called her Dana. They insisted I take a break and everyone sat down to dinner, this assemblage of Paquito Montana , Milos , Zuzanna and Gino and Dana. Gino put up a closed sign outside so we could eat in peace. He came back to the table brandishing a cane with an erect phallus made of ivory for a handle. Gino waved the cane, strutted proudly. ‘I am a man!’ he cried, his thick Italian voice booming. ‘Homey, how about it?’ Paquito Montana looked at me, referring to the afternoon in general. He’d hardly touched his food. He was too busy talking.
‘It’s great,’ I said.
‘The best, homey! Me and you. Partners, bro. Systema! Systema! We make the movie. I am the star, you the composer.’ He turned to the table. ‘We’re going to have it all in this movie. Action. Drama. Suspence. Emocion. Comprende?’
‘Bene,’ Gino said, cupping his hand in a gesture of praise.
They spoke a strange language, Gino and Paquito Montana . It wasn’t quite Italian and not quite Spanish, but something unique to them, born of their rapport.
‘I too am a man,’ Gino said.
‘Hermano,’ Paquito Montana said.
‘I am a man!’ Gino said, adding an ornament I didn’t quite catch.. ‘Like Al Pacino. You are like Antonio Banderas, and I am Al Pacino.’
Paquito Montana suddenly leaped back from the table, brandishing the rapier. His knee-high black boots made a big thud as he leaped again, into an action pose, the gold buckles on the sides of the boots shining.
Gino also leaped from the table. He turned the cane upside down and waved the big white cane threateningly. With shouts and curses the two men clashed swords, scattering across the small courtyard patio. Gino made a bold thrust, which was blocked magnificently by the man called Paquito Montana , who in turn spun, rolled sideways and turned a somersault.
‘Bravo!’ Gino said.
We all clapped enthusiastically. It was impressive, the agility and grace and strength, all of it coming so suddenly.
The two men embraced, shook hands and returned to the table. I was happy now, not just because of the food and beer, but because I felt some kind of gratitude for the way the day had turned out. It was all so unexpected, surreal. Later they broke into loud disputes again, and Paquito Montana disappeared again. When he returned, with his usual flourish presented Gino with a crisp bill. I couldn't see how much it was, but judging by the broad grins they exchanged it must have been enough. They patted each other warmly and sat again.
As it grew dark, cigars were brought out and a nice red wine. Dana didn’t talk much; but I could tell she liked and approved of the evening . The talk went round, with Paquito Montana keeping it going most of the time. He took out the photos again, discussing fine points of different situations in the pictures. ‘Here we were filming in Caracas ,’ he explained. ‘This one? Oh, we were in Gibraltar . Three years ago?’ ‘You see that girl? Que bonita, eh? She is a model from Mexico . She comes from my village, we’ve been in love for twenty years.’
‘Are you getting married?’ Dana asked, one of the few questions I remember her asking.
‘I was in Miami this winter (I have a winter house there,' Paquito Montana went on, not hearing the question. '- Elton John - you know, he is my neighbor. On the other side? David and Victoria Beckham.’--
‘I thought they lived in England ,’ Zuzanna said.
‘Systema. They do - but they like to spend a few weeks in Miami . But listen, I was there last week and Elton, he says to me - interesanche - ‘My friend, you are too great for love!’
I think he’d forgotten me by then, because when Paquito scanned the room and saw me, he burst into a grin.
‘What do you say, homie? How about some music?’
Everyone turned to me nodding.
‘My friend, my friend,’ Gino said. ‘Let it Be - for me.’
‘Whatever you want,’ Paquito Montana said. ‘Systema.’
‘Let it be,’ Gino said, looking around. ‘But at the right moment. Everything at the right moment.’
Sometime after midnight (I think I passed out for a while), I left, feeling disoriented. The café was closing. Paquito Montana wasn’t there. Gino and Dana shook hands with me warmly, and told me to come back. Outside near the square I ran into Paquito Montana .
‘Where you going, homey?’
‘Home.’ I smiled.
‘Well, come here tomorrow. We talk more business.’
‘Not tomorrow. I have to look for work.’
‘Saturday morning then. You’re free, yes?
A little hesitantly, I agreed to meet him at the Jan Hus statue.
III
Nikash was at the flat when I got home.
“I talk with Islam. He coming tomorrow.”
The whole place was clean. Even the mess of papers and books I’d left on the kitchen table for weeks had been carefully arranged and placed on my night table.
“Islam ask if flat is clean,” Nikash said. “You know he is like our big brother. We must give respect.” Having felt refreshed by the walk in the park, on the way home I’d stopped for groceries. I cooked spaghetti, with fresh bread and cheese, and invited Nikash to join, but he’d already eaten.
He looked into the pan.
“Very good,” he said. “From America ?”
“ Italy .”
“Ah, yes. Spaghetti. Italian. I talk with girlfriend today. She say I don’t coming anymore. I have no flat. She say she no come. Today I call to her three times and she don’t call to back. I am very sad. I have a pain in head. I want kill myself! All will be finished everything.”
I grabbed his shirt (I was still stoned and full of my thoughts from the walk)
“Shut up, Nikash. You don’t mean that.”
He smiled his bright smile.
“No, but no one understand. Thank you. Here I lose everything. Lose flat, lose job, lose visa, lose girlfriend. Lose everything! What to do? Life is very difficult!”
“Must fight!”
“Yes, but always must fight. That is my problem. Here I must always fight. At home no need fighting. Only work. Here fight all the time!”
“It will be better,” I said. “Don’t think about your girlfriend.” That was easy to say. “Don’t call her. Wait for her to call.”
Nikash looked at me eagerly. He hadn’t considered this.
“You think? OK.” He nodded. “OK, I no call to her. You are free Sunday? We go to disco?”
Islam returned from the migrant camp. The authorities issued a visa for only seven days. He was very down about it. “Must go out,” he said.
Still, it was good to see him. The brothers prepared a whole chicken and a large pan of rice and curry. I picked up some strawberries and a couple bottles of wine. When Islam arrived the brothers joyfully addressed him as “Buriam,” big brother, and embraced him. Islam of course wouldn’t join in on the wine but it pleased him to see us enjoying it. We all had dinner. The camp life had been hard on Islam, not being able to leave, but he looked good. Since he didn’t like the food he hadn’t eaten much, but in his case it wasn’t bad. Normally he had an oversized belly that now looked almost flat, and the sports and daily contact outside had given him a hardier appearance, and his gaze had a more alert, less listless quality than before.
“James, we go to Italy ,” Islam said during dinner.
“ Italy ?”
“My brother he working there. I go maybe.”
“But don’t you need a visa?”
“My brother work there seven years and no have visa.”
He seemed tentative though. Perhaps all he had gone through the past few months, the falling out with his girlfriend, the loss of his job, the collapse of his business plans, the visa problems, had understandably shaken his confidence.
As for myself, I was not at all sure about Italy, not with the crisis setting in everywhere. Across Europe unemployment rose, there were demonstrations in England to protect jobs against illegal or unwanted immigrants. A few months before in Italy there had been massive police raids on immigrants, particularly Romanian and Bulgarian. In the Czech Republic hundreds of Korean workers at a car factory were laid off. The state was even offering a free plane ticket and 500 euros in cash to demonstrably needy immigrants who volunteered to return to their own countries. Some 1,500 had already left, mostly Mongolian workers.
Islam had considered the program, but as a last option. He really wanted to stay in Prague , or somewhere in Europe . Despite all his words about “Home is best,” sometimes I felt he didn't really want to go back there.
I understood. It was the same with me. Having had the visa rejected, I saw my comfortable position in Prague threatened. The thought of heading back to the States, where a lot of people I knew were on unemployment, or else on unpaid furloughs, was not what I had in mind. The irony was that in Prague I had more than enough work. I could have worked even more if I didn’t devote so much time to my evenings in the pubs. On one hand, I could be philosophic, and say, well, almost five years is long enough, change is good, etc. But the truth was I wasn’t ready to leave, which in truth meant having to face the hard facts that had closed in around my life. I had lost direction, was broke, no longer in the best of health, afraid.
“You go to America ?” Islam asked. “You should. At camp they are checking everybody now. Without visa you can go prison six months.”
He had heard that at the camp. I wasn’t sure if it was true (my experience at the foreign police was enough to know that in a large group of immigrants you hear just about everything). But it frightened me. I wanted nothing to do with prison. It would be better to go home. Vaguely, uselessly, I pictured venturing off to Italy with Islam, winging it on the streets of Rome or Milan or Venice (where Islam’s brother lived). In truth I’d had other high-flown, unrealistic notions of fleeing to Paris and passing myself off as a kind of half-assed Hemingway character. But this wasn’t Hemingway or Fitzgerald’s Europe anymore. The EU and the war and Schengen ended all that. Of course that sounds melodramatic and prosy – watery phrase-making. Americans are still welcome in Europe, but there’s just less to go around these days. A European firm finds it easier, or at least less hassle, to hire an EU national. Even so, Americans can still make a life here. Just as long as they don’t kick cars. Think about Paquito Montana, how things added up with him, even he got a bill eventually.
The Man Called Paquito Montana (cont’d)
That Saturday Paquito Montana was already there when I arrived. It was very early and the square was virtually empty.
He was still wearing the same ragged glorious outfit from the first night, and was literally standing up on the statue of the 13th Century martyr, the rapier drawn. He rested his weight on it in a grandiose pose. ‘My lord!’ he called, by way of greeting, but then continued with his mediation. I smoked a cigarette and regarded the square. Presently, he rose and with an energetic leap, landed on the ground. I asked what he was doing up on the statue.
‘It’s like a tower, El Gabacho,’ he said. ‘You must have the perspective. Systema!’
‘I see. Where are we going?’
‘To scout locations. For the movie, homey.’
We set out, crossing the quiet square and down to the river. All the while Paquito Montana gave forth to his musings, murmuring ‘Situacion interesanche,’ now and again, or ‘this is no movie, I’m the real thing. Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie all rolled into one … you hear me, El Gabacho? Must remember El Gabacho.’
I couldn’t piece together the meaning of what he was saying. Instead I detected a certain rhythm, a pulse to his fancies, a meter. He had a distinct voice, characterized I’d say by a ringing, inquiring tone, as though every word were being addressed directly to the heavens. I was content to follow along - what else had I to do? I’d brought my guitar along in case there was a chance to busk.
We arrived at a restaurant near the Charles Bridge . Inside it was a dark, swanky tourist trap. Paquito led the way. He returned the rapier to his hip and walked in tall and full of purpose. He ran his fingers admiringly over the polished wood surfaces and encouraged me to do the same, then turned his head upward and inspected a chandelier, which was truly impressive. “We can film one of the assasination atttempts here,’ he said. ‘Paquito Montana arrives here for the meeting with the head of the Columbian cartel, but he is betrayed…’
‘By who?’ I asked.
‘The Columbians, homey. Systema.’ He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Ah homey, action, suspence, drama, spirituality, emocion. The movie’s going to have it all. And Paquito Montana , like Tony Montana, he’s there to fight the people trying to take his money and power. You fuck with me, you fuck with the best!’
‘I thought he was done in by greed,’ I interposed. ‘You know, don’t get high off your own supply and all that.’
‘Listen to El Gabacho,’ Paquito Montana murmured. ‘Maybe on a certain level. But you see, El Gabacho, guys like Tony and Paquito Montana , they -‘ He struggled with his words as we walked. ‘To you, El Gabacho, maybe Tony is ‘done in’ as you say by greed. Systema. But -‘
Suddenly he broke off and veered into the dining area. It was almost empty. A beautiful young woman was sitting alone at a table. We sat down, or rather Paquito Montana did and I followed. The woman looked up and Paquito Montana leaned over and kissed her. ‘This is Lenka,’ he said, introducing us. Two plates of breakfast, scarcely touched, languished on the table.
‘Where did you go?’ Lenka asked.
‘I told you I would be back. I had to meet El Gabacho here for business.’
‘But you were gone nearly one hour.’
‘Sorry baby. Systema.’
They talked for awhile and Paquito Montana offered me the breakfast, which looked good - biscuits and gravy. While I picked at it the waiter came and I ordered coffee. The waiter brought it, made a scratch on the bill, and disappeared.
Lenka didn’t look too pleased - I can imagine we looked pretty devilish - but after a few minutes she relaxed under Paquito Montana ’s insistent soothing voice and endless supply of words.
‘She’s beautiful, eh homey?’ he said to me. ‘You like her? Only the best, homey.’
He produced the pictures again, from the album in his coat. You’ll have noticed by now his tendency to produce the photos often. By then I’d begun to notice too, and too look at them more carefully than I had before at Valentynos. Nearly all showed handsome incarnations of our strange friend. There was undoubtable starshine in some of the pictures, especially in the ones that looked like authentic movie sets. Privately I tried to reconcile the handsome person in the photos with its present incarnation. He later told me he was close to fifty, and the person in the photos was youthful and attractive. His features, though striking, were now puffy and haggard and a slight paunch poked out from between the layers of his long, black coat.
Presently he produced a photo I hadn’t seen before, a white yacht floating in an azure sea under a cloudless Carribbean sky. Upon closer inspection I noticed the photo was a carefully clipped magazine ad for Absolute vodka.
‘I had one just like it, homey,’ Paquito Montana said. ‘Down in Mexico .’
‘I thought you lived in Miami .’
‘Yes but I also have a villa in Oaxaca .’
‘What happened to the boat?’
He laughed.
‘Had to pay the government. Systema.’
After a while Paquito Montana rose, planted a kiss on Lenka’s cheek, then with a stream of courtesies he was off. I started to follow but he stopped me. ‘Stay here with Lenka, homey. I be back. Thirty minutes. I told her you are a great famous American composer. Relax, homey. I will return.’
I went back in, feeling uncertain, and sat with Lenka. She was sending a text message. The waiter came and asked if I wanted anything. I ordered a small beer. The waiter said something to Lenka in Czech and they both laughed.
‘Sileni!’ the waiter waved in Paquito Montana ’s direction. ‘Crazy.’
‘He says he is crazy,’ Lenka said.
I laughed.
‘Everyone is crazy,’ Lenka said faintly.
We talked for a while. She was 23, originally from a village in Moravia , and was studying economics at university.
‘And you?’ she asked. ‘You are from America ?’
‘ California .’
‘ California ? And why you come to Czech Republic ?’
‘To see the world.’
She laughed.
‘That is what all Americans say. I never understand why they come to Czech Republic .’
‘You don’t like it.’
She shook her head.
‘I would like to live maybe in New Zealand - or California . And what are you doing in Czech Republic?’
‘Teaching.’
‘English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Another English teacher.’ Lenka laughed. And how long are you here?’
‘It’s my first year.’
‘And you want to stay?
‘I don’t know.’
‘And will you go back to America ?’
‘Someday. How do you know Paquito Montana ?’
She laughed again, and I saw she had nice even white teeth that set off her rich gold-toned skin.
‘I was just walking near Narodni Trida and he just started talking to me. Ah, you are so beautiful, he said, come have dinner with me.’
I laughed this time.
‘It was the same with me. He just started talking to me out of nowhere.’
We ended up waiting nearly another hour before our friend finally returned, his face glowing as though from some fresh triumph. With his usual flourish he whipped out a thousand-crown note and stuffed it into the waiter’s pocket. The bill had totalled only about 400 crowns.
I decided to get going. It was a good day for tourists to be out and I hoped to make some money busking near the castle. Paquito Montana protested.
‘Come El Gabacho - we go with Lenka. Talk more business.’ I looked at Lenka, then shook my head.
‘It’s OK, I have some things to do.’
‘Well, call me tomorrow. We will scout more locations’
‘How will I reach you?’
‘You can call Lenka.’
I got her number, and they waved and disappeared around the corner.
We passed many evenings at Valentynos. I gathered it was a home base for my strange new friend. Each night was the same, with variations. Paquito Montana blazed back and forth, disappeared for long intervals, came back and gave demonstrations with the rapier and even a pair of nunchucks, and whatever other customers there were were shown the pictures and sometimes he and Gino got in loud disputes about the bill.
Gino was always extremely polite to me for some reason. He would insist on ‘Let it Be - at the right moment,’ and at the right moment I complied. He was fond of displaying to us the wall inside the bar, which was decorated with currencies from all the countries he and Dana had traveled and lived in: Chinese yuan, Japanese yen, American dollars, British pounds, French francs, Canadian dollars, even Russian rubles and some Indonesian currencies I’d never seen before.
It was never really busy at Valentynos, maybe because it was tucked away in one of those narrow streets behind Tyn Church . It wasn’t the kind of place you noticed. One night a couple of teen-age Czech girls wandered in. They were both naked except for bra and panties, and both had various markings drawn on their bodies. They said it was all part of some joke they were playing. Another evening actors from a traveling theater company passed through, all of them dressed as hobos, their faces painted in white greasepaint, and Paquito Montana traded a small Bowie knife for a black cowboy hat, which he then wore the rest of the evening.
There are perhaps little pockets, cabinets of the world which you fall upon without expecting. I felt tucked away into one of these corners. True, I was broke most of the time. My busking adventures during the day were slim, and I spent most of the time evading police, who’d ask me to show a permit or move on, or else finding a spot where the homeless guys or other buskers hadn’t already claimed. I’d also answered a couple of ads on the expats websites from Czechs looking for English lessons, but hadn’t received any replies. It was dead of summer, not the best time to look for work. So in a way, I felt tied to this strange new adventure. It was the only thing I had going. There was the occasional email from a colleague or two back in the States, an anxious note from the parents, but on the whole I felt disembodied. The romantic adventure I’d set forth in search of appeared always to be just around the corner.
IV
The night of the Champions League Final between Manchester United and Barcelona was a cool night in Prague. Liam was watching the match at the Gold Star sport bar near Wenceslas Square . I thought about going up the hill to Riegrove sady but knew it would be too crowded. The lines for beer would be too long. So I went to Konspirace.
I’d sent Tomáš a text and he said he’d be there, and he was at the bar when I arrived shortly before gametime. It was always good to see Tomáš; a young Czech guy who taught English and was working on his master’s degree in teaching, Tomáš was universally liked, a soft touch, easy-going.
“So what about your visa?” he asked after I sat down. “No? So they said no. So what are you going to do?”
“I guess go back to the States. It’s been nearly five years, maybe it’s time.”
“It’s a pity really. Nothing more can be done?”
“No. Did I tell you Islam is back?”
“Really?”
“They gave him a visa. For seven days.”
“What? My God!” Tomáš was rolling a joint. He looked up wide-eyed. “So what is he going to do?”
“He’s not sure. Maybe go back to Bangladesh . He’s got a brother working in Italy .”
“Ah, I see. You could go to Italy !”
“You think?”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know if they’re looking for teachers. The recession’s hit there bad too.”
“Oh, I think yes,” Tomáš licked his paper and offered me a wink. “You know,” he said, “I think even with the recession …they need English too, but I think sometimes they are a bit proud.”
“Like the French. I thought about going there. So you think I ought to just skip town and head to Italy then?”
“Sure.” Tomas ordered a shot of rum from the bar and lit his joint. “Or,” he considered, “You could just stay here.”
“Illegally?”
“Sure. I don’t think anyone would check.”
“Islam says he heard at the camp it could mean six months in prison.”
“Six months!” Tomáš' face changed, and he was quiet as he smoked. On the TV the players were coming out side by side onto the field, and the national anthems were played.
“How are your exams?” I asked.
“Good. Actually I have just one more exam. We’d like to go to Greece for a holiday.”
“You and Jitka?”
“Of course.”
The match started. Shortly before halftime Danny Boy came in. He said Vick would come for the second half. Everyone was excited. Tomáš and I were rooting for United. The bar owner and his girlfriend were rooting for Barca.
It wasn’t much of a game. All the papers had waxed about the contrast in styles, the two titans clashing, etc., but in the end it was a dull match. Ronaldo was neutralized, ineffective, and Barca won going away 2-0. Vick came for the second half and for the most part we smoked and drank beer until the match ended.
I left about 11, promising Tomáš we’d meet again before I left. Outside Donská Street was still alive. I walked by the Zaba and could hear the music inside. Other people were sitting outside at tables at the pizzeria, and there was more music pumping from the tiny club next to my flat.
Islam, Sugit and Nikash had just had dinner. As usual they invited me to join but I wasn’t hungry. A little bit later Islam came out of the bedroom and sat at the kitchen table.
“You fight tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yes, in the morning.”
“OK. We will be quiet.”
“It’s OK.”
“I’m fighting tomorrow also.” He laughed. “But I am fighting for visa. Ah, James. In the world there is too much fight. Fight for oil, fight for food. Everywhere fight.”
“Life is difficult.”
“Life is life.”
“So you will go to Italy ?”
Islam didn’t answer. He stretched and rubbed his short legs.
“Pain?”
“No, not paining. Only a little. I don’t know about Italy . Maybe I go back to camp, try for new visa.”
“When?”
“Four days. It is difficult. I must talk with owner about flat. My things here – bed, computer, kitchen. Here I buy everything. Oh, what to do, what to do …”
Sugit came out of the bedroom. He’d heard the last part of the conversation.
“What to do! What to do! Must fight!” he said, in mock reproach.
“Sugit is luck,” Islam said. “He has visa. You, me, Nikash, no luck. We must go out or must fight.”
In the morning they were up first. Sugit had to work so he went to the shower. Islam and Nikash were on the computer. I tried to sleep a little longer, but then got up and made breakfast. When Sugit came out I went and had a shower. The water was always nice and hot, so I took my time. My early morning class had texted me and canceled. I shaved and dressed, wiped the wet floor dry with a towel, and went out to the kitchen to finish breakfast and have a cigarette.
“Ah, James, you are a fighting man today!” Sugit said with satisfaction. He was dressed for work. “We fight together,” he added.
“That’s right.”
“You are very lucky man. You teach English. Good money. I would like teach but no one want to learn Bangladeshe.”
“Let’s go to Bangladesh ,” I said lightly. “Home is best.”
“Home is best, but at home no money!”
Nikash came into the kitchen. He was still undressed.
“Home is best!” he said. “Home! No need visa, no need nothing! Only work.”
“OK,” I said, grabbing my bag. “I am fighting.”
“Good fight!”
In the hallway a guy was locking his door. He said something to me in Czech.
“Co?” I asked. He switched to English:
“How many people are living there?”
“Three,” I said, stiffening. “Two brothers.”
The guy was young, but had a worn look and ugly teeth.
“I just wondered,” he said. “I saw a Korean or Vietnamese person going in the other day.”
“That was probably Nikash’s girlfriend,’ I said, hating myself for bowing to his questions. I should have just brushed him off.
“It was a man.”
Irritation rising, I hoped to get rid of the guy as we walked up the hill, but it seemed ridiculous to cut him and he walked with me on the way to the tram stop. I relaxed a little; he seemed harmless.
“Are you from England ?” he asked.
“The States.”
“ America ?” He was politely impressed. “And what are you doing in Prague ?”
“Teaching.”
“Teaching? And what are you teaching? English?”
“Of course.”
“No, no! Maybe it could be physics.” He was trying to show his consideration. The tram came then and we got on. I made a point of looking out the window as the tram rolled up the hill toward Náměstí Míru. He stayed on when I got off at IP Pavlova metro station and when I got off, he nodded. The mutterings, the whispers, the speculations, surely he wasn’t the only one in the building who was curious, but then there were other immigrants in the neighborhood, the Vietnamese who ran the potravinys. Actually it was a quite tolerant neighborhood, all things considered. People generally got on well.
The Man Called Paquito Montana (cont’d)
‘You were with Paquito today?’ Dana asked. It was a warm evening in June, about a week after my first meeting with Paquito Montana.
‘He’s staying here now,’ she said. She pointed to a spare room next to the garden which was usually rented out to tourists.
It was a splendid room. Gino had showed it to me that first evening. The interior, which they’d redone themselves, was a plush rose color with a king-size bed, pastel paintings on the walls and there was also a private kitchen and bath.
‘How long?’ I asked.
Dana shrugged. I admired her self-possession. Usually she stayed in the bar while Gino engaged the customers with his garrulous courtesy, and only came out when her husband wanted to show her off, or else to bring drinks or food. She seldom spoke, but like many quiet people she communicated something of herself, a shade or a tone of ambience, that could be pleasing or unsettling, depending on her mood. If she approved of you, she just let you be, but regarded you with the same level of attention as she might a picture hanging on the wall. Through snatches of conversation here and there, I learned she and Gino had met when she was only 16 and living as an au pair in Rome . Gino was nearly 40 then,and had just come back from America . Since there marriage ten years before they’d lived in dozens of countries, the proof of which hung on the wall in bar.
‘Who was Lenka?’ Dana asked.
‘Somebody. She's nice.'
Dana nodded and sipped her tea.
Then we heard the shouts and glorious curses that announced the arrival of our friend. He came into the garden with his usual ceremony. Gino came bustling out of the bar and for the next few minutes the two engaged in their intense mano a mano conversation. It seemed the only way they could communicate. ‘I am a man!’ Gino said. ‘No stress! Everything at the right moment!’ to which Paquito Montana replied, ‘Yes, hermano. Systema, systema. Situacione interesanche.’
After a few minutes of this heated discussion, Paquito Montana turned and left, but first insisted I wait until his return.
There were no other customers. Gino sat with me while Dana disappeared inside and presently came out with dinner, a pasta dish with cucumber salad, white wine and chocolate ice cream for dessert. It was dusk and we ate quietly in the fading light. Then Gino encouraged me to play, ‘something soft.’ ‘It’s good for my heart, my artist friend.’ I knew a traditional Italian song, ‘A Como Buen’ and just strummed it. For a while Gino hummed the melody and Dana took the plates inside. Then the two of them sat and stared into space until I stopped playing. Gino clapped. ‘Precioso,’ he said. ‘Ah, you are a nice young man, my artist friend.’ He insisted I have a beer and relax. ‘More later,’ he said, gesturing toward the guitar. ‘At the right moment. Everything at the right moment! Did I tell you when I was in America ?’ Gino said, as we sipped our drinks and it was getting dark. ‘Many years ago. I was a young man, like you. I wanted to make my fortune. So I went to California - Los Angeles !’
‘What did you do?’ I asked, but he waved the question away.
‘At the right moment, my friend … I was a young man, 20 years old. In California ! I had a motorcycle, big and beautiful, a Harley Davidson. And then one day I had a terrible accident. I was in hospital five weeks. You see?’ He stretched out his legs and pulled up his shorts and revealed a network of cruel dark lines. ‘Scars,’ he said. ‘That is why I move so slow.’
‘So later I came back to Italy and there I meet my Dana.’ He looked at his wife, who hadn’t said anything during the reverie, and then back at me. ‘And now I am old man, you see? But I am a man.’
I lit a cigarette.
‘I mean,’ he went on. ‘I have learned the priorities. You must learn the priorities. Everything at the right moment. No stress. You see?’
‘I think so.’
‘You are American,’ he tapped his head. ‘You understand. You see, I don’t forget. Someone wrongs me. I do nothing. I wait. But I no forget. Maybe ten years, twenty years, fifty years, but I wait and - at the right moment -‘ he pounded his fist on the table. ‘You understand?’
‘Yes.’
Gino laughed.
‘Ah, my artist friend, you must be careful in this city. There are many dishonest people. Many strange people. People here, they will take advantage of you. But I am a man. I know the priorities. At the right moment. Everything at the right moment.’
‘Come again tomorrow,’ Gino said. ‘At the right moment we will have some more music.’
I left, wishing them both good evening. A few minutes later I was crossing the square when I heard my name called. It was Paquito Montana .
‘Where you going, El Gabacho?’ he cried.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come, we talk business. I want to show you a bar I’m thinking about buying.’
‘A bar?’
‘Systema. Why not. It’s going to be lovely homey. I buy the place, you perform, I bring the girls and we make some money, then we make the movie. Situacione interesanche. This is no movie. I’m for real. Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Elton John all rolled into one.’
The bar was a pleasant hole not far from the astronomical clock. It was crowded with tourists, mostly young people. We sat at a table in back. There was an old upright piano, with several keys missing, in a dark corner. Pacquito Montana , with his usual flourish, sat down at the piano, raised the cover and launched into a classical piece which I recognized as Chopin’s Polonaise. The opening notes floated high above the room, blending with many puffs of cigarette smoke. He played passably, though a bit jerky and heavy-handed. His image, especially with the long black coat and rapier, was if not ridiculous eminently dashing. People turned from their conversations and eyed him curiously, exchanged bemused glances. At the end of the piece there was scattered applause and Paquito Montana performed a short bow over the shoulder.
‘El Gabacho, bring the woman.’ I picked up the guitar and joined him at the piano. Just play something, he said.
I strummed chords, which he overlaid with sprinkles off the high keys. I doubt very much he heard or cared what I played, so focused was he with intense life on the trickles of sounds his fingers produced. The effect of our efforts was disjointed but not without moments of melodic overlap. I found myself listening more to what he played, those florid, improbable snippets, oddly composed by his kaleidescopic thoughts. It was here I detected the feverish pitch, the almost desperate tone, of his imaginings. We must have struck a strange chord with the audience, two raggamuffin pilgrims washed up on the old continent, as though survivors from some wholesale El Dorado .
I found myself feeling disoriented, off track. On some level I reflected on my old life back in Calfifornia, the romantic images from books that had led me to give up my life there, and felt melancholy and emptiness - but why? Shouldn’t I have felt a debt of gratitude to my strange friend, to the great city and high night, to the images themselves? I’d arrived spilling over with all these notions and ideas, and set out to find romantic destiny and write about it - in the same cocktail-scented prose of my ancestors.
I laugh sometimes now when I look back at how I was that first summer. Prague that first summer appeared to me as a vast stone square filled with round café tables, a waiter as nimble as a matador, red-checkered tablecloth in hand. I spent the better part of those first few months time idling. I went for long picturesque walks by the Vltava, tried to read into it qualities I admired in the great 1920s writers. I reflected on Mozart and Einstein and Smetana and other great geniuses who’d spent time there. I read books, the classics of my youth as well as Czech authors, and spent innumerable hours in cafes and pubs, scribbling in notebooks and observing people in the manner of my heroes. I can’t read most of the stuff I wrote then - collections of observations and fancies, rough outlines for stories. Not too long ago I threw most of it into the garbage, and didn’t lose a night’s sleep.
The one story I haven’t been able to let go of is the one about Paquito Montana. Nights like that one, where he held forth at the piano, stand out and rebel against my supposed hard-won greater worldliness. I come back to him and that wild, enchanted first summer and he right in the middle of it, the great rapier of his hanging at his side, the black steel-toed boots, the long coat and bristling goatee. Above all, the great cry of, ‘Systema, Systema!’ And the movie, of course. Always the movie.
Lenka arrived, wearing a light summer dress, her gold-colored hair hanging over one shoulder. She sat at our table, ordered a Mattoni and listened. At length some British guys, apparently on holiday, came over and tried to chat with Lenka but she just nodded politely and tuned them out. The guys were drunk and one of them, a beefy, cream-faced fellow led a chorus of ‘Eng-land! Eng-land!’ The chant competed with the music to the point where it became intolerable. Suddenly Paquito Montana stopped playing, turned and faced the sloshed ensemble.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen, but as you can see we are giving a concert.’
‘Ah, piss off, Zorro,’ the big English guy said. ‘You call that shite music?’
‘It is a spontaneous free composition, with much drama and spirituality and emocion,’ my friend said, with dignity.
‘Rubbish!’
‘Throw him out!’
‘Ah, come on, Matthew, let’s take it easy.’
Paquito Montana rose.
‘He’s got a bloody sword, for fuck’s sake,’ the big man, Matthew, roared derisively. The others laughed. ‘Hey, Zorro - do us a favor, eh? Let’s see you wipe that bleedin’ sword with your ass!’
In a flash, Paquito Montana unsheathed the rapier, whirled and lunged, then delivered a series of sharp raps upon the skulls of his drunken abusers, who drew back, more stunned than actually hurt. Then there was a scramble, curses thrown and I thought we were done for when suddenly the bartender, a big fellow himself, came over and told the Brits to leave.
‘What, us?’ Matthew protested. ‘He fuckin’ started it!’
‘You go,’ the bartender said. ‘This is not fucking stag party.’
They left, after first cursing the whole establishment, the Czech people in general and Czech ‘cunts’ in particular, Yank ‘tits’ and David Beckham, several Italian league players, and the indifferent god that had the ingratitude to let the sun set on the Empire.
‘Systema,’ Paquito Montana said, after things had settled down. ‘Situacione interesanche.’
‘Systema,’ the barman echoed., and went back to the bar.
It was nearly midnight. We were still at the bar, Paquito and I nursing beer and Lenka with her water. Paquito had the photos out again (he’d showed them to the bartender, whose name was Zdenek, who was particularly impressed with the yacht photo).
‘This is from ‘Savage Nights,’ Paquito Montana said, pointing at a photo that showed the younger Paquito Montana standing on a sunny, tropical set.
‘Where is it?’ Lenka asked.
‘ Miami . We were shooting there four weeks.’
‘ Miami ?’ Lenka looked impressed.
‘Sure baby. You want I’ll take you there sometime. I show you my house. You know Lionel Richie? A close personal friend. He lives next door.’
I thought he’d said Elton John lived next door, but didn’t contradict him. He went on to another photo showing an Alaskan wolf reposing in a backyard.
‘My baby!’ Paquito Montana cried. ‘Margarita. The picture was taken in Hawaii , when I was there making ‘Tropical Heat.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘With my aunt in Mexico .’
‘Where did you learn to fight like that?’ Lenka asked.
‘I have black belts in several of the martial arts disciplines,’ Paquito Montana replied. ‘You know Jackie Chan - a close personal friend - I studied with him in LA. You know Jean Claude Van Damme?’ He produced a photo. ‘That’s me fighting him in ‘Lionheart.’
I was surprised to see that I recognized the famous French action star, in full combat, with none other than the younger version of Paquito Montana .
‘I remember Lionheart,’ I said.
‘Yeah, homey. And you and me, we make the new movie. It will be the ultimate. I am expecting Al Pacino, a close personal friend, to come see us soon to discuss story ideas.
‘Wow! When?’
‘Next week. Systema.’
‘You’re really serious, Al Pacino?’
‘Systema! Of course I am always serious, El Gabacho.’
Zdenek came back several times, and I had a feeling he was a little worried. Fortunately I still had the money from earlier and this time resolutely thrust two hundred crowns on the table.
‘You can get it?’ Paquito Montana asked. ‘Well, well. What do you know? Saved by El Gabacho. Sitacione interesanche. Thanks, homey. Tomorrow my agent is sending some money by Western Union . We’ll have a nice party.’
‘ Western Union ?’ This surprised me. ‘Why don’t you just use a credit card?’
He waved off my words.
‘No credit cards, no bank accounts, El Gabacho. Systema. Only Western Union .’
The following day was Sunday. I dropped by Valentynos and it hadn’t opened yet. I went over to the room where Paquito Montana was staying and knocked on the door. He answered, looking even more ragged and weary than usual, and his hands trembled slightly. ‘The DTs, homey,’ he said shortly, and invited me in.
The room was a mess. The bed was unmade, the floor littered with the photos and in the kitchen dirty plates lay everywhere and a pot was black, as though left to cook too long and had burned itself out. For some reason, he’d taken one of the green garden umbrellas from the courtyard and set it up over the bed.
‘You hungry, homey?’ Paquito Montana handed me a half-finished plate of eggs and bacon. I shook my head. ‘You should eat it,’ I said. I had already noticed he ate very seldom - so busy as he was with his plans and musings. He told me to relax and then disappeared into the bathroom. I heard the shower go on and over the noise I could also hear Paquito Montana muttering to himself as he showered. Later he came out, dressed in his usual glorious attire and we prepared to head out. The shower was still running, and I asked about it.
‘No, leave it, homey.’
‘But why?
‘It’s like a fountain - for chi, of course.’
We headed through Old Town , which had a quiet, hung-over atmosphere, and then Paquito Montana went into a small shop. Behind the counter sat a short man of Arabic complexion.
‘Systema!’ the man said familiarly.
‘Systema!’ Paquito Montana said. ‘Situacione interesanche!’
‘Interanche!’ the man echoed.
‘Relaxacion!’
‘Relaxacion!’
While Paquito Montana purchased a couple small bottles of absinth (and a pack of cigarettes for me) I quietly marveled at the spontaneous effect he seemed to have over people. We passed a café, where a big Russian guy stood at the door. ‘Systema!’ he called, grinning broadly. Several more shouts greeted us as we passed more shops and cafes on our way toward the river. A couple Nigerian guys, who passed out fliers to the nightclubs, came up and exchanged soul handshakes and whispers. I was introduced as El Gabacho.
Prague has a certain off-brand magic that surfaces at unexpected moments. In that rushing heady atmosphere everything took on a dreamy aspect. So instead of feeling bad, I felt quite the oppposite, perfectly marvelous. It was all so off-kilter, cinematic, unaccountable. My friend Paquito Montana, his gold-tipped boots sparkling, that ridiculous rapier hanging at his side, trailing behind him, seemd the embodiment of a new folk hero, arising from the streets and flashing crowds.
I’ve tried recapturing his speeches, but confess it’s not easy. I apologize to the reader for just offering the same snippets and slogans and mutterings. He talked a lot of ‘the movie,’ of course, famous people he knew, the past, as well as his present plans. As for exact content, I’ll admit much of it went right by me - I was too absorbed in the moment, watching the city, distracted by interesting-looking people, caught up in my own romantic images. I wonder even now how much it mattered to Paquito Montana . Sometimes I felt as though he hardly noticed I was there.
The absinth seemed to revive him. At length he began discussing the movie.
‘I thought of the title last night,’ Paquito Montana said. ‘Are you ready, homey? Scarface II: The Revenge of Tony Montana.’
‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘But Tony was killed in the first one. How can he get revenge?’
‘Systema. I told you, El Gabacho. I will play his son. I will take the revenge. Al Pacino will play an uncle who is carrying on the business.’
‘Is that why Al Pacino’s coming?’
‘Yeah, we’ve got to discuss some possible script changes.’
‘I’d like to read it.’
‘Yes, of course, homey. But it’s in LA right now, where the writers are working on it.’ He became enthusiastic. ‘It’s going to be the ultimate! Action, suspense, spirituality! Situacione interesanche.’
‘I never really thought of Scarface as a spiritual film,’ I said.
‘Listen to El Gabacho!’ Paquito Montana covered his eyes, and shook his head. ‘I mean, the spirit, you know? Systema. Heart. Conviction. Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Generation masturabation!’
He repeated the phrase like a trumpet blast, prompting sleepy breakfasters in the cafes to look up and watch us as we passed. We were getting near the Charles Bridge , and since it was now mid-morning the crowds were beginning to fill the streets. Still full of spirit, Paquito Montana made overtures to a group of girls, who giggled but turned away. Then we entered a café. With his usual flourish, rapier at his side, the man called Paquito Montana seated himself at a table occupied by a middle-aged couple who’d just sat down for crepes.
‘Making a movie?’ said the man, who introduced himself as Jerry Sloan from Pontiac , Michigan . His wife, a plump graying woman, smiled. ‘Call me Claire!’ she said, flashing a smile behind red sunglasses.
‘Wow!’ Claire gushed. ‘Sounds like it will have everything. Will there be a love story?’
‘Madam,’ my friend said. ‘It will be the last word on love, I assure you. Julia Roberts, a close, personal friend, has agreed as a favor to me to play the love interest.’
‘Wasn’t Tony Montana in love with his sister?’ Jerry asked mildly.
‘No in love,’ Paquito Montana said, with patience. ‘It was love of the family. Familia!’ He indicated me. ‘My partner (a very famous composer and good friend, he did ‘Titanic, you know?) is writing the score.’
The Sloans looked at me with polite interest.
‘Titanic?’ Claire said. ‘I just loved that movie. Have it at home.’
‘He’s lying,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I mean, I just helped with the arrangments.’
Don’t ask me why I said that, it just popped out.
‘I see you brought your guitar,’ Jerry said, in a friendly way. ‘Working on something now?’
‘He is composing the soundtrack for the movie,’ Paquito Montana said.
‘Are you on holiday?’ I asked, to change the subject.
‘We’re retired,’ Jerry said, nodding. ‘We’ve been backpacking through Europe . Started in England last month, down through Spain and France and Germany . Next we’re going up to Poland , then swing up to Holland . Like to see Copenhagen and maybe Sweden or Norway before we head home.’
Claire giggled. ‘Actually we’re making a bit of a movie ourselves.’ She reached in a leather bag and produced a camcorder. ‘Action,’ she said gayly, and we saw the red light come on.
As if on cue, the man called Paquito Montana leaped gracefully from the chair, withdrew the rapier and, with much style and composure, waved the sword over the heads of the breakfast crowd. ‘This is no movie!’ he called. ‘I’m for real. Micheal Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Willis all rolled into one. Generation Masturbation!’
Everyone laughed, and several people took his picture. The performance went on for a few more minutes. ‘Play something, homey!’ he called to me. I strummed some Johnny Cash while he went about the performance with the rapier. Then he produced the nunchucks from his jacket and, entrusting the sword to Jerry, went on to amaze the café with various speedy techniques and tricks, twirling the nunchucks between his legs, behind the back, chopping and gliding, whirling and jumping.
He finished, I stopped playing. There was some applause and a few people actually came over and, mistaking us for street performers, gave us coins. When we sat down, we saw Claire stopping the camcorder.
‘Now you’re immortalized,’ Jerry said. ‘Where you guys from by the way?’
‘Originally from Mexico ,’ Paquito Montana said. ‘But now I move back and forth between LA and Miami . My friend here is based in New York City .’
‘That right?’ Jerry asked.
‘That’s right,’ I invented.
‘So you’re not living here?’
‘Well, just for the movie,’ I said. ‘After this I have to head to Hong Kong for another project.’
‘Well, you both sure get around,’ Claire said.
I looked at Paquito Montana .
‘Systema,’ he said.
Walking over the bridge a little later, I felt troubled.
‘I can’t believe I said all that,’ I said aloud to Paquito Montana .
‘Systema.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Look El Gabacho, what are we doing?’
‘What - now?’
‘Yes - now.’
‘We’re walking. Across Charles Bridge .’
‘Right. Walking across Charles Bridge . Are we suffering?’
‘What?’
‘I mean, are we suffering?’
‘No.’
‘And them back there? Homer and Marge Simpson - are they suffering?’
‘No.’
‘So what are you worried about, homey? Systema! Come. We scout some more locations.’
But something else nagged me. How long could it last? I thought of my editors back at the newspaper. ‘You’re too trusting,’ they said. ‘Learn to be more skeptical. Ask the hard questions.’
But I didn’t feel like asking the hard questions. Somehow I felt, at the time, that it would have been unseemly, intrusive. It would have interupted the flow, the river of glittering ideas and illusions. Besides, I wasn’t picking up the bills, so what right had I to question? I wanted to feel that anything was possible -, that Al Pacino was on his way, that the movie would be made and it would have action, suspense, spirituality, emocion. I suppose that’s what I meant by enchantment.
Paquito Montana slapped me on the back as we crossed the bridge.
'This is no movie, Gabacho!' A group of girls passed, he turned and said something and they turned back. He talked to them for a few minutes, introduced 'El Gabacho,' and tried convincing them to accompany us. They smiled shyly, but shook their heads and walked away.
'Systema,' Paquito Montana said. He watched them a moment, waved a little in farewell, then turned and continued in big strides across the bridge.
The Kampa is a lovely park on the other side of the river. In the spring and summer there sometimes are outdoor art exhibitions, and many people go there to lay in the grass or sit on benches and look out at the river.
‘This is an important scene,’ Paquito Montana said, when we arrived. He walked over to a tree-shaded bench with a view of the river and the bridge on the left. ‘It is here I will meet with Anselmo Montana (Tony’s uncle) and he secretly turns over the family business to me. The Columbians are conspiring against the Montana empire so we meet in Prague , nice, out of the way place, to discuss a secret counterattack. Systema. Situaction interesanche, eh homey?’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Now I understand why Prague .’
‘Prague is perfect, El Gabacho. Nobody knows it’s here? Like your man Osama, he’s probably over on the Charles Bridge taking pictures. You think the Montana family can do a deal like this at the Miami Hilton? Too visible, El Gabacho. Systema!’
‘So you’ll meet Al Pacino here?’
‘No, at Karlovy Vary . He will be at the film festival.’
Paquito Montana sat down on the bench and looked out at the river.
‘Perfect, eh?’ he spread his arms. ‘We will sit here, the cameras will be behind us so we’re in shadow and you will hear our plans … Anselmo says, ‘There is much to be done in the coming days, Paquito. It is time for you to step into your father’s position. It is up to you now. And I say, ‘Don’t worry, dear uncle. They fuck with me, they fucking with the best!’
‘Avenge his death,’ Anselmo says. ‘We will do it together. Avenge the death of Tony Montana!’
I admit I could picture the scene was impressed with the emocion in Paquito Montana ’s voice. I really wished Al Pacino was there at that moment. The story even sounded plausible, if a trifle familiar.
‘Of course, El Gabacho, the studio is still unsure about the script, so nothing is finalized. You must swear to me that you will keep these important plot points secret for the time being.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
V
It was a good workday. I taught four classes, finishing up at the Prague Energy Company at five thirty. I texted Liam and we met for a drink at Zaba. The news was on the TV. There was a story about the big storm that hit late the night before. Footage showed lightning flashing over Prague castle like in a horror movie. Then a story about demonstrators throwing eggs at Paroubek, the head of the socialist democrats. Paroubek was angry and said the demonstrators were pathetic, that they had no aim. One demonstrator, trying to spare Paroubek, brought up a whole carton of eggs and just sat them on the stage, whereupon Paroubek kicked the carton to the ground.
With Liam I talked about the United-Barcelona match, or tried to. Liam waved me off.
“I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “We lost. They outplayed us. That’s it.”
“It was still a good year.”
“Yeah, it was. Can’t forget that.” He was doing something with his mobile.
“Nothing,” he said. “My brother won’t return my calls.”
“Why?”
“We had an argument last time we talked.”
“When was that?”
Liam shook his head, not answering.
“Is he older or younger?”
“He’s a year older.”
That made me think of my older brother, whom I hadn’t seen in five years. The last time was for our parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, and I’d flown in from California and we all drove out to Ohio , where he was living, and picked him up. Then we surprised our folks with a party, which our sister had secretly organized.
“My brother is just a control type,” Liam said. “He’s got a good job. Environmental clean up, monitoring. He was the smart one. Studied something with a job waiting at the end of it. Me, I studied humanities. I was visiting his home for Christmas, the whole family was there. But they’ve all learned to live with him, let him have his way, tip toe around his mood changes. I’m just not used to it. I sort of did this …you know –“ he made a gesture of throwing his hands up, flustered, uncomprehending. “So I did that and – he took offense! Because I, you know, … questioned him.
“The next morning,” Liam continued, “I made coffee in the kitchen and he burst in, ‘What’s this? You’re using too much coffee!’ Everybody else liked the coffee, but – you know, he just –“
“—yeah.”
“So you were with Tomas then? How is he?”
“Good. Finishing his exams.”
“Is he? And what’s he study?”
“Linguistics, I believe. Or methodologies.”
“Yeah? And what does he intend to do with it?”
“Teach. Anyway, we had a rum together and watched the match.”
“Rum? What kind?”
“Something from the West Indies . It was good.”
“Yeah, it was some of that cheap spiced shit. I’m going to have a rum. Will you have one?”
“Sure.”
Liam went to the bar and came back with two shots.
“There, now that’s Captain Morgan. None of that cheap shit.”
I noticed he was rubbing his chest. He did it again, then stood up and stretched, walked around.
“Just my arthritis,” he said, shaking it off. “It goes away when I exercise, but when I’m doing this a lot, sitting in the pub, it comes back. Now that the season’s over it might be a good time to get off the piss again. Maybe have –“ he caught himself with a wry smile. “And I mean it – finally have a holiday.”
“Right. You keep saying that.”
“I know. But I pick up me driving license on Tuesday. Did I tell you that? I passed the test. That’s what I’d like to do. Rent a car, go somewhere in the countryside. That’s what I need: to get out of Prague for a few days.”
Friday afternoon heavy rains fell on the city. The trees along the river swirled and tiny white breakers churned the swollen, muddy Vltava . People ran to catch the trams and got on windblown, breathless, wet hair sticking to their faces. It was the end of the month and I had paperwork to do, so I canceled an afternoon class and did the paperwork over a glass of ginger ale at the café inside the Comedy Theater on Vodickova Street . At three o’clock I went to my last class of the day, just down the street at the government office.
My student, who I’ll call Karel, was a lawyer who specialized in EU affairs. Often he traveled to Brussels on business. Privately he had also traveled widely, through most of Euope, and to China and India . He had two dreams: to ride a motorcycle across America on Route 66, and to settle down to a house in the Czech countryside. He achieved the second dream that same year, and showed me photos of the cottage he and his girlfriend had bought and were restoring.
“Unfortunately the law in this case is very clear,” Karel told me that afternoon. He had spent some time the past week talking with colleagues and researching Czech law concerning my case.
“I talked with people at the Ministry of Justice,” Karel said. “And they said you could file a legal action, but only in extreme cases, like if you were married or had a child here in Czech Republic , is such an action successful.”
We were both quiet for a moment.
“I guess that means I have to leave then,” I said, to break the silence.
“And where will you go – to America ?”
We talked for a while about the Stanley Cup final and the egg throwing at Paroubek and then circled back to my visa. Karel was sympathetic; we get on well, and the year before I’d helped him pass his Cambridge exam. Before I started teaching him, he’d had an another American, a guy in his sixties, but he had died suddenly from a brain aneuryism.
“It’s a pity you have to go,” Karel said. “Because you are a good teacher and you have been in Czech for a few years. You have friends here. But unfortunately the law in this case is very clear …the law must be the same for all, and I think it would be the same in many countries."
The Man Called Paquito Montana (cont’d)
We left for Karlovy Vary on a Thursday. That morning I met Paquito Montana and Lenka at the train station. The train was crowded with festivalgoers and tourists. We sat in a compartment with a group of middle-aged Germans who spoke very good English and were very polite. They told us they were from Bonn and were coming to the festival.
They were somewhat astonished by the appearance of Paquito Montana. He’d bought a handsome white dinner jacket, which he now wore, but with the same black trousers and knee-length gold-tipped boots, and of course the rapier ever-present at his side. As a special touch he’d added a pair of white gloves to match the jacket. While Lenka and I looked out the window at the passing countryside our friend entertained the Germans with the photos, which they carefully passed around, and with his talk of the movie.
‘You are a famous actor?’ of the Germans asked. ‘Why do you take the train and not some private car?’
‘No private cars. Only trains.’ Paquito Montana reply had a note of contempt, as though a private car in these circumstances would be the hallmark of foolishness.
‘I saw ‘Lionheart,’ the same man said. ‘I don’t remember you in the film.’
‘He really was in it though,’ I broke in. ‘I’ve seen the picture.’
‘Well, it must be my mistake,’ the man chuckled politely.
‘Systema,’ Paquito Montana said. He rose from his seat and took the photographs, leafing through until he found the one he’d shown me. ‘It was a longer scene but they had to cut it.’ He handed the picture to the German, who eyed it closely, then with an air of surprise handed it back. ‚Systema.’ A grin broke across his raggedly handsome face.
He disappeared for a little out into another car. The Germans fell to talking among themselves. Lenka closed her eyes and after a while she fell really asleep and I enjoyed looking at her as she slept, her gold-colored hair trembling slightly with the persistent movement of the train.
Then I looked out the window for a while. It felt good to be out of the city, the first time since my arrival the previous autumn. There had been a lot of rain that week and the Bohemian rolling hills soaked to a damp, rich green. Someone had left an old copy of USA Today under the seat. I picked it up and tried reading it, but the news was old and stale. There was the usual junk about the war, titters about the market. I flipped to the entertainment page and read an interview with Tom Cruise. It wasn’t a very interesting interview but I read all of it for something to do. After a while I went to shove it back under the seat but one of the Germans asked to see it so I handed it over, then pretended like I was going to sleep so I wouldn’t have to talk. For a few minutes I actually did fall asleep. The train came to a stop, and the announcements startled me awake. We were in a village about half way to our destination. Then the door opened and Paquito Montana, with his usual flourish, stepped in. He was carrying a bottle of wine. ‘Only the best, Gabacho!’ He’d picked up an umbrella somewhere in his exploration of the other cars. He presented it to the Germans as a gift. ‘My lady,’ he said, handing to one of the wives, who looked confused but accepted it with a smile.
Seeing Lenka was still asleep, Paco waved to me to come with him. ‘Come, I introduce you to some people.’ We passed through three cars, the floor rattling beneath us. The compartment Paquito Montana led me to was noisy and filled with students, a mixture of nationalities. They were on holiday and going camping in near the German border. Everyone was drinking and smoking and watching some American comedy on a laptop. Paquito Montana waved off the film.
‘Teenager movies. I cannot watch these. Generation Masturbation.’
The phrase caught hold with the students, who enjoined him in repeating the phrase several more times. They also liked that I was called, ‘El Gabacho,’ and a beer and joint were pressed into my hands. It was this afternoon that Paquito Montana explained to me the meaning of the nickname.
‘It’s OK, right?’ he said to the others. ‘In Mexico, everything is in how you say it.’
One of the young men, a Valencian by the name of Alejandro, concurred that it was possible that a single phrase could be interpreted as an endearment or insult.
‘It depends on the situation.’ He had the way, like a true Spaniard, of pronouncing his hometown, ‘Valen-thia.
‘So El Gabacho - it just means American?’ This from Bernard, a medical student from Norway.
‘Yes.’
Bernard laughed. He had a rich, deep laugh.
‘It is very interesting,’ he said.
‘Situacione interesanche! There’s a good example,’ the man called Paquito Montana broke in. ‘Yes, another example. Do you not agree that it too has many meanings? If I say, as you do, ‘it is very interesting?’ with a bit of a laugh, as you do, does this not mean something different then if I -‘ he rubbed his goatee and nodded slowly ‘Ah! Very interesting.’
‘Yes, of course. This is obvious. Every one knows this.’ Alejandro said.
‘So, homey,’ Paquito Montana turned to me. ‘You see.Systema’
Bernard raised his beer to me.
‘Systema! El Gabacho!’
There were several more raised glasses, cries of ‘Systema!’ and toasts for ‘El Gabacho.’
We sat drinking and smoking and talking for until the train pulled into Karlovy Vary
The festival began the following day. Paquito Montana had bought tickets in advance, which saved time. Paquito Montana was right in leaving everything to him, for we’d hardly stepped off the platform when he disappeared into the crowd of people awaiting the train, entered a café, and came out engaged in familiar conversation with a Russian guy who he introduced to us as Alexey, who in turn introduced us to two lovely girls, Anna and Allah. They were all from Moscow. I could see they were astonished at the appearance and style of Paquito Montana. They immediately invited us for drinks and later offered to put us all up for the night. They’d rented a villa just outside town.
That first day we saw a Czech film and one classic Western, The Good The Bad and The Ugly. They were having a tribute for Sergio Leone. Paquito Montana enjoyed the last film immensely. ‘Hombre Sin Nombre! Man with no name! Excellent. Systema!’ he enthused. ‘I have plans to do a remake. Clint Eastwood, a close, personal friend, has agreed to appear in it. He will be El Viejo sin nombre and I his lost son, El Joven sin Nombre.’
The Russians invited us all for lunch at a pub off the main square. It was crowded and hot in the restaurant aand the staff looked sullen and overworked. We all had sausage, dumplings and cabbage, along with several pints of Pilsner. Paquito Montana entertained the table with more stories, and even won over the waitstaff with some of his photos. They seemed convinced he was insane, but in a way that was charming. Alexey asked if he could be instructed on the use of the rapier, so while the rest of us had coffee, Paquito Montana rose and demonstrated how to properly hold the sword, to excecute nimble twists and thrusts, and handed to the Russian, who held the rapier gingerly, his face a study in concentration.
‘You must come to Moscow,’ Alexey said. ‘I will introduce you to my friends. We will go to discos such as you have never before seen!’
I was sitting between Lenka and the two Russian girls, and thoroughly enjoying myself. I’d already been asked to play and had complied. Most of the people in the café, well-dressed, attractive jet setters in for the festival, either came swaying over beerily to listen in or else pointedly ignored us. At the next table an old Czech man sat alone, staring hard at our table for a quarter of an hour until a waitress finally came and we overheard him complaining. The waitress returned and served him a pint.
‘He says he lives here and he can’t even get a beer in his pub,’ said Lenka, who translated. ‘And he says he is very thirsty now.’ She turned and flashed a smile and said something I couldn’t catch. The man appeared mollified and attended to his beer.
‘I said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy. Enjoy your beer.’
After lunch we went walking through the town. Everwhere there were people walking, sitting in cafes enjoying the festival atmosphere. Paquito Montana led the way as usual, with Alexey at his side asking questions about the movie business, while Paquito Montana answered with his customary speeches and oblique murmurings. The girls broke off from time to time to look in the shop windows and talk among themselves. I was content to drift along and enjoy the sensation of being of Prague and moving in the crowd.
At four we went to another Sergio Leone film, ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’ Afterward, over dinner, once again on the visiting Russian, Paquito Montana launched into a discourse on ‘contemporary violence,’ which he exalted as‘the spirituality of a sexualized planet.’ ‘It’s pure Systema,’ he said. He was much impressed by the character played by De Niro (a close personal friend). It was a warm, fragrant evening, and I was enjoying the company so much I was almost sorry when around eight thirty and the dinner had been paid for, Paqutio Montana leaned over and told me it was time to ‘talk business.’
We headed to the center of the town. Outside the cinema a great red carpet had been been rolled out under peach-colored awning. Already a great mass of people were crowded in and around the entrance, which was cordoned off by security. Paquito Montana led us confidently through that well-heeled, gaping throng, the rapier at his side. People looked at us questioningly, but we ignored them, and they moved aside. They seemed to take Paquito Montana for an important personage, and us as his entourage. We got up close to where the press photographers were waiting, checking their cameras, and we mingled for a while. Paquito Montana characteristically began chatting with all persons within range, including some of the security guys. For a moment I thought he was going to break out the photos and show them the picture of the yacht, but he didn’t. The rest of us, having nothing else to do, kept our eyes on the entrance and now and then flicking our glance out down the street, waiting for something to happen. It was past nine by then but still bright out, the sky bathing the village to a lovely, bewitched gold, and light music, presumably from a car stereo, played on the air.
A group of black cars approached and came to a stop at the curb in front of the hotel. Elated, the crowd rushed toward the cars, but then fell back again or were pushed back by the security. It was hard to see. A feeling of disappointed came over everyone after a couple minutes as we saw the people getting out of the cars one by one, all immaculately dressed, but none of them possessing the essential starshine we were looking for. They were probably producers, Paquito Montana shouted to me. A few minutes later more cars arrived and more dignitaries and their wives got out, all of them walking matter-of-factly past the flicking cameras and, acutely aware of their importance, largely indifferent to the crowd. A leonine attractive woman, her platinum hair piled into a mass of miniature curls, and wearing a red satin evening dress and escorted by a man in tuxedo, stepped onto the carpet. ‘She is very famous Czech actress,’ Lenka told me. The Czech actress, whose name I don’t remember, paused while the press took pictures, and someone brought her a bouquet of flowers. She smiled brightly and the cameras flashed and then with her date disappeared into the hotel.
Finally a white van arrived and there was a great cry and much jamming forward. Over the heads of people I recognized Al Pacino. He looked haggard as usual but trim and fit in a silver evening suit, his famous pensive gaze covered by a pair of dark shades. I looked around for Paquito Montana and suddenly I spotted him standing on the red carpet in front of the hotel entrance. He stood magnificently poised, one hand over the rapier, an ecstatic grin lighting up the ragged face. A couple security guys were making their way over and I could see they were getting ready to move him back when something amazing happened. Al Pacino, who by this time had passed onto the carpet, had stopped, looked at Paquito Montana. A broad, friendly smile spread over the face of the famous actor. He walked forward, his hand extended.
'Systema!' he shouted in his gruff voice.
‘Situancion interesanche!’ my friend replied.
They shook hands, and Al Pacino put a hand on Paquito Montana’s shoulder while and they spoke for a moment, their heads bent closely together. I could see Paquito Montana saying something, but it was too loud to hear anything and he made several big gestures while Al Pacino laughed and patted him again. Then Al Pacino and Paquito Montana shook hands and the great actor waved to the crowd and went into the theater.
Afterward we went to a garden café for beers.We were all buzzing with excitement.
‘So what did he say?’ I asked.
‘Systema, Gabacho.’ He was full of a warm sense of purpose and an easy confidence flowed from him as he sat back in his chair, as though a great weight had been taken off his shoulders. I felt a curious relief too.
‘Didn’t I tell you, homey?’ Paquito Montana said. ‘We worked together briefly on ‘Serpico.’ I was a stunt double in several scenes.’
‘Did you get a chance to ask him about the new movie?’
‘Relax, Gabacho. At the right moment, as our Italian friend says. He says he has to be in New York tomorrow. No problem, I told him. Systema. I’m flying to New York myself. Anyway, we’ll discuss it later.’
It was a fine evening. The spirit of Paquito Montana’s triumph cast a spell over the whole party, imparting in each of us a sense of a tangible and rare mystery, a feeling of arrival on a luminous shore. We went from bar to bar, drinking and talking, and even took our glasses out with us into the streets. Anna and Allah, their faces flushed because of the heat and drinking, linked arms with me and Alexey and we toasted each other and exchanged kisses and felt very close together and happy. Several times we all shouted, ‘Systema!’and that made us feel even better, and all around us the other festivalgoers passed, with their own battle cries, on the way to their own secret communion with the night. A star had passed through their lives, and conscious of the rarity of the evening, they hurried on in a determined way, or else joked of their happy disenchantment. But we had among us our own star, who floated along with us and we stayed close to him, and to each other, and let him lead the way, rapier withdrawn.
VI
It rained all weekend. I didn’t feel well and spent a lot of time in bed. Islam gave me a couple aspirin and after tossing and turning at night, woke on Saturday feeling better. Islam and Nikash were heading back to the camp on Sunday. I heard them talking on Skype to people they knew at the camp.You could hear, from the enthusiasm in Nikash and Islam’s voices, that people at the camp looked forward to seeing them. Nikash told me at the camp you couldn’t get good food, but he had sweet-talked a girl in the shop at the camp and she had gone out and smuggled in some meat and they cooked it in their rooms.
Islam was still hoping to go to Italy . His brother was in Venice .
“Ah, James,” he said. “You go with us to camp and then we go to Italy .”
It sounded great – Venice ! – but I thought about what Karel said and it was doubtful the camp officials would view my situation any differently from the Czech courts. Perhaps they would issue a visa, but one like Islam’s, only for a few days, enough time to get out of the country and allow passage through the Schengen area to Italy . But what would I do in Italy ?
Islam and Nikash were worried about the police. That’s why they were leaving on Sunday: less chance of being stopped on the train to Ostrava .
By Saturday evening I felt well enough to go up the street to the Zaba. I saw Vick and Danny Boy. Vick had spent the week job hunting, but had had no luck so far. I noticed when Danny Boy wasn't drinking that actually he was a fairly quiet, almost withdrawn guy. The beer brought him out of himself, which is what I think he wanted.
That evening he drank slowly, and we talked about his new job at Sazka.
"I'm not happy with Sazka," Danny Boy said. “I think really I need to find work that is suitable for me. Like in music, performance. Concerts.”
“What do you mean?”
“Working at the concerts.”
“That would be fun.”
We both smiled, picturing this work. I could relate to what Danny Boy was sayıng; he’s a friendly, social guy, but you can’t picture him as an oddsmaker, which is sort of what he is at Sazka. He was too unstable, distracted by nature to have a job like that.
“But Sazka, this work, I am not sure if I am good.”
I didn't know what to say; we'd had conversations like this before about his other jobs.
“Do you have a good boss?" I asked, just for something different to say. "Someone who can give you direction?”
“No.”
We drank our beers and ordered another round. Suddenly Danny’s face lit up. A Suicidal Tendencies song popped into his head.
“Sanity –“ he sang, his eyes glowing. “-- is a a full time job … in a world that is always changing.” He repeated, his voice rising several decibels. “SANITY! IS A FULL TIME JOB –“
It rained off and on all the next week, and the air was chilly – cinema or reading weather. I didn’t feel like teaching, and I didn’t feel like going to the cinema or reading. I spent a lot of time during the day at places like the Globe or Bohemia Bagel. Sometimes I’d run into Aiden Greenworth at the Globe and we’d talk and drink coffee. In the evenings the Zaba was busy. Jirka the owner finished his A-level exams and there was a big party. He was qualified to be a teacher but told me he wanted to focus on the Zaba. Another evening there was a double birthday party for Ondrej and a pretty girl I didn’t know named Iveta. It felt warm and cozy in the Zaba and you didn’t want to leave. Ondrej on his birthday said he’d have three beers, a shot of rum, then head home. When I left at 11 he was on his fourth beer and rolling a joint at the bar. It’s like that. In Czech someone once told me there are three lies: jdeme na jedno (we go for one); poslední (Last one), and Nikde jdo na hospodu (I wont go to the pub anymore).
Most evenings it was the same crowd. Liam usually dropped in after his day of teaching and we sat and talked together, and others, usually Vick and Danny Boy, or Ondre or Kuba, joined us.
Speaking of Liam, I should probably try to draw a better portrait. He was forty, but generally a young forty, except some graying around his trimmed beard; on the piss his features aged noticeably. Before coming to Prague a decade before he had taught in Qatar and Greece. He understood my situation about the car because while in Greece, he came home one night from the pub pissed and didn’t have his keys. After trying (it was very late) to wake the neighbors, in frustration he kicked the glass in on the front door. He let himself in and went to sleep. Hours later he was awoken by the authorities and ended up having to pay for the window.
In Prague he had managed to put together a fairly prosperous and respectable existence. He had his zivnostensky list, a contractor’s license, and so he did not teach at a school, but rather went directly to the companies. This meant that he made considerably more than I did.
When he wasn’t on the piss, he was responsible with his money; he actually saved, dressed professionally in a suit and tie and carefully administered his business and personal affairs. Though he spoke often of women, and tried, bolstered by a beer and weed, to hook up with the much younger women who came in the bar, you got the sense that he was essentially a permanent bachelor; that he too jealously guarded his space. I visited his flat once and this assessment was confirmed: it was the home of an educated but definitely private man; the walls were lined with bookshelves, DVDs, and the furniture was adequate but not extravagant. Each morning he prepared for lessons on his laptop in the kitchen, read the BBC news, checked the football scores, and in the evenings was fond of cooking for himself. He had a bicycle and in the nice weather went for long rides, and he often went swimming at the public pool near Slavia Stadium, and took pride in his exercise.
He lived alone and one sensed he preferred it; even so, he told me he would like to settle down one day with a family, but it’s hard to picture it, just as it was hard to picture Danny Boy as an oddsmaker.
Of course if he read this, Liam would take issue with probably everything, say I had set off to cast him as disagreeably stuffy or “English.” But then he could at times be both, just as I could often be overbearing, manic and ‘American.”
Our conversations, in this light, occasionally turned sour, owing to drink and the vague hostility that sometimes develops between people who have similar problems, or who are thrust by whatever forces or reasons, into similar circumstances. We were both more or less in a rut, the same rut.
“Your problem, James,” Liam said once, as we had beers at a garden in the park on the hill above Donska Street , “is your world is too small. “I mean, you go to work, and you spend the day wandering Old Town or Mala Strana, and then in the evenings it’s Zaba or Konspirace. You sit too much. You never exercise.
“You’ve got a drunkard’s mentality,” he said, on the same occasion. “You’ve always got the same problems. Like not getting your zivnostensky, because you said it was too much bureaucracy rather than put your head down and just do it. Or with your visa. You sit on the same problems and expect other people to solve them for you.
“And then you get on the piss and you’re off on Islam’s problems, or else Muhammad Ali or Obama. You talk about writing, or going to Istanbul , but you never do anything about it. You’d rather just sit in the pub.”
Actually I agreed, then and now, with what he said, most of it. We had our arguments but they were seldom serious. Like many Englishmen, he enjoyed ‘taking a piss,’ as Liam said, and I, like many American, sometimes lack a sense of irony and end up taking offense. Also perhaps I resented the periods when he got clean and then you wouldn’t see or hear from him. But as time passed a truce of sorts had been made and we got on fine.
I suppose the truth was, as I said, we were both in the same rut, and both would have liked a woman, but weren’t willing to make the effort. Being foreigners we were naturally drawn to each other’s company for the comfort of speaking English and familiar references.
If you needed money, as I sometimes did, Liam would spot you without a lecture – as long as you paid him back. Also he made an effort to be balanced. Once we were sitting in the beer garden at riegrove sady with some other English teachers, they were from England , and everyone was drunk. One of them began aggressively taking a piss out of America , the war, Bush, etc. On another night I might have got into an argument, but that afternoon I was mellow and not looking for a debate. To my surprise, it was Liam who, I guess you’d say for “form’s sake,” put up an argument for me.
Islam left for Italy one Sunday at the end of June. His going was both sad and anticlimactic. Most of the weekend I was out at the pubs as usual with Liam and the Zaba crowd, and so in the mornings and afternoons was too tired to spend much time with Islam. I’d wanted to do something for him, take him out to dinner or get him a present of some kind, but in the end I didn’t. He spent most of the last Saturday packing (he bought a new suitcase and trolley from one of the Vietnamese markets) and playing chess on Sugit’s laptop.
I was still rolling around in bed Sunday morning when he and Sugit left.
“OK, James,” Islam said. “I going.”
“Islam leave us forever,” Sugit said. He was accompanying Islam to the train station.
I got up from the bed to shake hands.
“I call you,” Islam said.
“—and you have my email.”
I remembered on one of Islam’s last nights he had sat in the kitchen and talked. “This is not living,” he said, looking around at the small flat. “Must have own flat, must have girl, must have family. Here it is not living only fighting. Home is best.”
The Man Called Paquito Montana, cont’d
He was born Juan Francisco Prieto in a remote village in southern Mexico - I remember his brother Eduardo told me it was somewhere near Oaxaca. This I learned later, the night Paquito Montana was almost arrested.
Apparently the journey of the Man called Paquito Montana began on a spring afternoon in 1962, when word spread through Los Santos that a Hollywood film crew was in town making a picture. Juanito, as he was known in the village, couldn’t have been more than ten at the time. He was already tall then, and athletic, with a charming way of expressing himself that made him something of a favorite. His parents were farmers, and he had a little brother Eduardo. Usually he and Eduardo accompanied their father to the market on the weekends. It was here he heard the news, from ‘El Boracho,’ or the drunkard. Juanito begged his father to go and the old man indulged him (he was probably curious too).
The filming went on in the outskirts of the town. It was some kind of spaghetti western, from what I gathered, starring John Wayne. One afternoon Juanito and his father, and others from the village, watched while a shootout was filmed between cowboys and Mexican bandits clad in sombreros and heavy woolen ponchos.
He spent two weeks hanging around the set. His brother Eduardo went with him, but was shy in front of the foreigners and preferred to watch from the shadows. The crew were all friendly to the brothers. There were meals and snacks set out on great white-linen tables for cast and crew and each day the boy was invited to ‘help himself.’ It was there Juan had his first taste of Coca-Cola, of Hershey bars and strawberry shortcake. All of it he consumed ravenously, feeling in them that exotic and marvelous taste of another world.
The highlight lay a few days later though, near the end of the shoot. During the filming of the climactic scene, a high noon duel, the director said he wanted Juan and Eduardo in the scene, which involved the John Wayne character, on his way to the high noon duel, arriving in town and asking the Mexican village boy to send a message to his girl, the daughter of the Sheriff.
The scene was done in two takes. Everyone was kind to Juan, said he was ‘a natural.’ Even John Wayne seemed impressed.
It was a hot, sunny afternoon and after the scene the crew broke up and went for lunch under cool, shaded awning.
Juan was paid $50, and given a white cowboy hat by the director. He gave the money to his parents, who marveled at so much money earned for so little. They saw it as a kind of omen even, and so put the money away instead of spending it.
He and Eduardo followed the crew’s trucks on foot as they wound through the town one last time, departing with a toot of horns and waves.
He never saw the film. There were no cinemas in the village, and it’s doubtful if the film even made it to Mexico City . One day a few weeks after the crew left a couple of village boys accused him of being a ‘filthy gringo.’ He got in a fight and in the confusion lost the white cowboy hat. He suspected one of the boys had taken it, but there were too many people around. Still, he was left with the singular vision, the memory of that other world he’d seen.
He left school early - 16 - he just couldn’t sit still in classes, and even then he was a talker, full of energy and imagination. He had plans of his own. It was around this time he met Claudia as well. She was only 14 and already a great beauty. They were engaged secretly for a short time, and Claudia really wanted to be married, but from what Paquito told me they probably were more in love with love than each other. I wonder if it’s possible for him to really love anyone. His world, or the one he had built for himself, seemed large enough - for ‘love’ ‘drama’ ‘suspense’ ‘emocion’ but really only as ideas or plotlines and not in their tangible, mundane forms.
One of his friends, Miguel, had said he knew of some people who, if you had a little money, would help get passage over the border to Los Angeles . It was an idea he’d heard a few times, and kicked around in his gut. One long evening he spent the night with Claudia. It was a strange evening, at times tearful and angry, then sentimental and romantic. Sometime near dawn he crept out. He went to his parents house, found the money stored at the top of his mother’s kitchen cabinet, packed a small bag and headed out.
He hated LA, at least in the beginning. Upon his arrival he found himself -- like his eventual hero Tony Montana -- working as a dishwasher at a steakhouse that catered mostly to conservative old businessmen and their wives. Thanks to his good looks and persevering charisma, as well as a flair for picking up English, he eventually moved up to waiter. All his wages went for rent and food, nevertheless he did make a point of presenting himself well. He had two white dress shirts and corresponding black trousers, which he kept washed and brushed. He tried talking to customers. Most ignored him, but a few found him charming and those who did came back regularly and insisted on him serving them. The hours were long -- his shift ended after midnight. The night was his time. He'd walk up and down Sunset Boulevard, enchanted by the phantasmagoric shimmering lights and parade of color and shifting, restless faces. His one day off, Sundays, when the restaurant was closed, he treated with the reverance of a holy day. It was then he went to the Studios. He had met a young girl from Illinois, she was maybe 17, and who had come to be an actress but worked as an escort and in occasional stag films. She had changed her name to Persephone Watkins (her parents were Polish immigrants, her real name was something like Hana Radlackova). It was she who convinced our friend to change his name. Initially he tried a Western name, true to his heroes, so he became Doc Fernandez. He grew a randy mustache, which he kept waxed, and he slicked his hair back and took to walking with a swagger and a toothpick jutting from one side of his mouth. Persephone instructed him on how to prepare a resume, and through a friend photos were taken. I asked to see the photos but he told me they had long since been lost.
He got to go on tours a few times. You hear legendary stories of great stars sneaking onto sets, or being 'discovered' working in a diner, and of course it has become a cliche, the whole city of lost dreamers theme. It was a cliche even then I suspect. But our friend was in luck. This would have been the late Sixties, early Seventies. Times were changing. Many of the studios were in trouble or closing. Audiences were staying at home watching TV, tired of the spaghetti westerns and musicals. There were the new directors coming, the renegades like Coppolla and Scorcese who would revolutionize the medium. There were new stars too, and one particular star attracted his attention. One Sunday he went to the cinema and saw 'The Godfather.' He was fascinated by the character of Michael Corleone, and even more astounded by the actor who played him, Al Pacino. I suspect what attracted him most was the fact that Pacino was what Hollywood then called, 'ethnic.' He tried communicating to me the effect the performance had on him, but mainly through his usual channels. Pacino's rise convinced him the tide had turned, the moment he'd been waiting for. The following week he called in sick to work, shaved the mustache, got a haircut and a new red silk shirt, changed his name back to the original Juan Francisco Prieto (part of his reaction to Pacino was a sense that 'authenticty' was in)and walked to Universal Studios. The guard at the gate wouldn't him past. Instead he directed him to a phone, dialed a number, and handed the phone to him. A voice on the other end of the line was polite was hurried. He asked to see Pacino. 'Well, he doesn't exactly see people,' the voice answered. He was told to submit a resume and photo at the front desk and the information would be relayed to the director. That call never came, but he was encouraged enough by the simple contact that he went around to the other studios on similar errands. These efforts too were unsuccessful. But one night Persephone took him to a party in Santa Monica with one of her girlfriends who was dating a B-movie actor. It was this guy who took a strange liking to him and introduced him into the circle of other low-grade actors. This friendship eventually landed him his first acting job, as a waiter, in a forgotten exploitation comedy called Hot Stuff! He was paid a couple hundred dollars -- more than he earned in a week at the restaurant -- for the two-minute scene, and promptly quit the restaurant. His luck held, and the following month the friend got him a slightly more substantial role as a tough in a Steve McQueen movie. He even got to meet the great actor, who asked him for a cigarette during a break.
A few years passed, and by the mid-Seventies he had become quite acclimated with life as an aspiring young actor. He grew his hair out long, as it was fashionable in the counter-culture spirit of that time, and took to smoking weed at parties and occasionally doing coke, but as for that he could take it or leave it. The work was in bit parts and even extra work but steady enough that he was able to get by, enough to enroll in martial arts classes at the city college. He got a black belt in karate, and his physique, always good, became even toned enough so that he even got some modeling work.
His 'big break,' if you can call it that, came late. This is when, by a stroke of luck, he landed the job on 'Serpico,' the Al Pacino film, which led to a strong supporting role in a low-budget action film called 'One to One,' where he played a drug dealer. He was paid $3,000, his largest pay check to date, but the film was shelved and never released, but he made an important contact. The film's producer, who liked his performance, went on to use him regularly over the next decade, the Eighties, when our friend enjoyed his most productive period. By then he was in his thirties but had retained his boyish looks. He had also continued his martial arts training (it was around this time he began learning weapons like the sword), and had developed enough expertise that when calls when around looking for stunt doubles and toughs his name was often given. He did well enough to afford a brand new black Z28, a decent sized apartment, and a stable of girlfriends attracted to his dark good looks and masculine physique.
He continued to go to films, never missing a Pacino performance. Just why 'Scarface,' and its leading character meant so much to him I don't know. We all have that certain film we see at a certain time in our lives, that goes on to define us in some way. Perhaps that film epitomized his own hopes as an actor, what he hoped to achieve and what so far had eluded him. Years in America, and his actor's sensibility, had long evened out his Mexican accent, and his mannerisms had also become tanned to a different hue under LA's sun. After seeing the film, he revived the accent, and copied the style and manner of the characters in Scarface. Unfortunately it was during this time he also began emulating the more sinister aspects. He drank more, went to parties too often and the drug use got heavier, and fell in with bad company. A girlfriend dragged him to court on a charge of assault; he pleaded no contest but was stuck with a hefty fine. His name of course wasn't big enough to make gossip columns, but nevertheless a black cloud began to hover that would within a few years release a downpour of misfortune and disappointment. It didn't come immediately. For a while his career continued at the same small, but regular pace. He appeared in a half dozen low-budget action and suspence films, most of which he already talked about at Valentynos, and then of course there was the famous 'Lionheart' scene.
He received a letter from Eduardo that his mother had died. The letter came as a shock. He had kept in regular touch with his family, who'd long since reconciled to his decision. He sent money, as well as photos of him on various sets, to ease an elusive feeling of guilt. Eduardo was then a clinician working in Mexico City at a hospital. He flew to Mexico and spent a miserable week with his father and Eduardo, a visit that was enlivened only when he told stories about Hollywood, and then their faces lit up with pride and longing. On the way back he was hassled at the border. He never found out what the exact problem was, but he was refused entry. The following day he went over illegally, wound up getting arrested and deported. All his money and most of his belongings were still at the flat in LA. He got a friend at one of the studios to call a lawyer, who took on the case, since his rights had apparently been violated. He was allowed a temporary visa long enough for the case to go through. Unfortunately he got drunk at a party soon after and arrested on a DUI. This second arrest didn't help his case. Faced with deportment, he convinced Eduardo to ‘loan’ him $5,000. With that money he bought a ticket to Paris. He spent a year there, living at first on the money but then on various women he came into contact with. He lived for three months with an Iranian woman -- ‘She was crazy,’ Eduardo said -- until he grew tired of her tears and scenes whenever he went out, and then with a 20-year-old girl New York who was there in an exchange program. There were efforts, meager and forced, to look for acting work. Once he was hired by a British company to appear in a beer commercial, which paid well, and by an artist to pose, which didn’t but at least got him drunk. It was the artist, an Irish fellow, who gave him the idea of going to Prague. ‘It’s like paradise,’ the artist said. ‘You’ll fit right in.’
He arrived in Prague not long before I did, as it turned out, and had been there ever since. As for the name change, well, I’m not sure. I never asked about it.
VII
There was another place in the neighborhood where I often went. Shakespeare and Sons, a café and bookshop on the next street around the corner. The staff were all relatively young and laid-back, and they didn’t mind if you sat in the back for hours reading a book you didn’t intend to buy or surfing the Net for free on their computer.
It was there that I met Vratislav Brabenec, saxophonist for the Czech group Plastic People of the Universe. They were a popular and controversial underground jazz group in Czechoslovakia under Communism. Vratá, as he is known in the neighborhood, and other members of the group were actually arrested and spent some time in prison in the 1970s for having a concert. After that he emigrated to Canada , where he spent more than 20 years, and had a wife and daughter. Sometime after the revolution he moved back, but his wife and daughter had stayed behind in Canada .
When I met him at Shakespeare’s Vrata was in his mid-sixties, and, and for the most part a tired old man, but after a couple drinks could summon a mischievous twinkle behind his owl-eyed spectacles. He had thin, grey hair that hung to his shoulders and was fond of brown corduroy jackets. I enjoyed talking wıth him about jazz, politics and literature, all of which he could talk well about. When Coltrane or Miles Davis, or, his favorite, Duke Ellington, entered the conversation, a dreamy look of ecstasy lighted his face.
“Ah, ‘Sophisticated Lady,’” he mused. “’In My Solitude.’”
I’d seen him many times in Shakespeare and Sons. Often somebody was sitting with him. At times it was a journalist, a guy who wrote for Respekt, I think; other times I saw him with various women, several of them American, and he spoke to them in English. Someone had told me he played for Plastic People and for a long while I was intimidated at the prospect of talking to him, reluctant to sort of pay tribute.
When we finally did meet it was after I returned from President Obama’s visit to Prague . After going to the hear Obama’s speech, I came in, still excited, and Vráta and one of the bartenders and his girlfriend were the only ones there. Vráta, seated at the bar, overheard me talking to the bartender and then Vratya himself asked me a few questions. I could see he was fainty, ironically, amused at my enthuasiam. ‘You are an optimist,” he said. And it was that afternoon we sat and had drinks and talked for the first time, and we talked about the days of the Communist regime and the Prague Spring (“Yes, we were very optimistic then,” he recalled. “But it turned out to be false optimism.)
Those were the good times; when he had too much to drink (he generally was drinking wine on those summer afternoons), a different look came into his eyes, harshness, anger. Or he was just tired and lonely (lonely, I don’t know why; he had a girlfriend, I was told, and still played regularly with the Plastic People, not to mention the people who always wanted to sit down and talk to him. Sometimes I got drunk with him and once even took him and one of his friends to Zaba and introduced him to Kuba and Lenka and Jirka and the rest of the crowd. Other days I avoided him. He would see it and, if he’d been drinking, became insulted, called me “Čurak!” or “Vole.”
On other days, he was mellow, melancholy. “Ah, I am an old man,” he would say. “I will die alone.”
One night, I think it was the night I took him to Zaba, Vrata turned and regarded me. “You want to belong here, I can see that,” he said, looking at me drunk but grave-eyed. “You want to be friends with everyone. But you must find your own way. You must take care about yourself.”
There was a lot of rain in June. But there were also days when it was sunny and hot and the trams were stuffy unless the windows and roof hatches were open. On nice days the young Czech women wore shorts and cut tops that showcased their tanned bellies. There weren’t that many tourists, not like a few summers ago; the crisis was starting to be felt in Prague , too. Cafes on Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square now had many empty tables, and waiters looked bored and anxiously at the people who passed.
I’d lost a few classes but nothing drastic; I was holding steady. That’s one reason why it was a shame to leave. But more than that, after so long Prague had really taken hold of me; certain dim backstreets, unknown and mysterious five years ago, were now named and known, even a little dull, and yet nuanced by memories of long ago days and nights. The language, initially an audio tidal wave, crashing against the ear, had calmed and resolved into a somewhat clear, if trembling, picture, and I had that sentimental fondness for people and places that comes when you know you will soon leave them (fair and fading). I could almost see people and places in a singular flash of transparent light, the figures already beginning to recede and evaporate before my eyes.
Take Kuba, for instance. Once, while drunk and overheated, I’d become belligerent and insulted Kuba, called him, as he reminded me later, “The Son of Stalin.” For a long time we didn’t speak, but I apologized and over time we became friends again. He was one of those guys who’s impossible not to like: easygoing, quick and full of energy. He played a good table football game, actually he was good at almost all games. Usually he teamed up with Lenka, who was also pretty good, and I liked to watch them play together. He was always bringing something new into the bar, something he’d purchased during the day: a video game, a movie, or else some new joke or song he’d heard and he’d rush to tell you or go to the computer at the bar to show you.
I liked Kuba’s ear: he had a marvelous ear for language. He’d learned English mostly from all the hip hop artists he loved, and his conversation was always sprinkled with the slang and posturing phrases he’d gathered from their records. He wasn’t boring. And he was generous. Often he’d buy you a shot, or invite you to come visit him and Lenka at their flat in the neighborhood, and there would be alcohol and food and an evening’s worth of movies and games.
Kuba was one, but there were others. Tomáš, the girls at Oriflame where I taught, then there was Hana, Mika, the Japanese student Mitoda and his wife Naomi …
… Or Standa! Yes, he just walked into Bohemia Bagel, the one on Veletržní Street near the national gallery and the Holešovice fairgrounds.
I was sitting there waiting to go to a morning class nearby when Standa walked in. I knew him, a tall, thin, prematurely balding guy in his early twenties, from my first winter in Prague . He worked at the Bohemia Bagel in Old Town , and he was one of the guys who manned the Internet counter. In those days, new to Prague , chronically broke, cold and lost, I often spent hours at the Bagel (you could smoke inside then), drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, reading and writing while it snowed outside. Last time I saw him it was a few months before, and he had finished university, quit Bagel, and was preparing to pass his Cambridge English exam.
That afternoon, Standa saw me and came over to the table.
“Thank you,” he said, after I asked about his exam. “Yes, it his finished. So you changed restaurants?” He smiled a smile that brought back the old days. “You didn’t know about this Bagel before? Yes, this one is better, I think. The menu has more Czech food.”
“And Russian, too,” I said.
He said he’d get his exam results in October, and was nervous about it. Some parts of the exam he was sure he passed, but other parts he didn’t feel as well about.
I wished him luck. “Still on break?”
“Sorry?”
“Your break from work.”
“Yes, this was like a milestone in my life. Stop work, focus about the exam, but now –“
“You working here?”
“Part time. Delivery.”
It was good to see Standa, and to see that he remembered me. But it was also a bit sad, knowing that those old days were gone.
That’s what I liked about Prague , though. It’s a city of more than a million and a half people, but the people you encountered remembered you. Of course this had its downside, but overall it was good.
“How can we dance when our earth is turning/How do we sleep while our beds are burning?”
A techno cover of the old Midnight Oil song was playing in the café. A couple of good-looking girls came in and sat in a booth behind me. They ordered the borscht with cream; the tall, dark one ate while her friend, a blonde, sat and talked without touching her food. The manager, a stout woman with deep black Slavic eyes, and her daughter, were both behind the bar pouring drinks for the lunch crowd. Outside the streets were beginning to dry after the morning rain. A yellow taxi passed; a priest, carrying a white package, walked by past the restaurant without looking in. Across the street at the pizzeria a delivery truck sat parked. After Standa left I watched the people eat and talk over lunch. It was Friday, just after noon, and there was that pleasant weekend anticipation despite forecasts for more rain.
I thought about Islam. Sugit said he called him a few days ago and that he was working in his brother’s shop in Venice . Nikash was still at the camp in Ostrava . Sugit had to go there a few days ago but he returned the same day with a fresh visa. I asked about Nikash but Sugit said he hadn’t seen him since visitors aren’t allowed. I had just come back from Zaba, and lectured, rather drunkenly, on the Importance of a Brother, which in Sugit’s case wasn’t necessary, the two were so tight.
There was a new cook at Konspirace, where Islam used to work. The cook is from Nepal . I tried his food at Tomas’ recommendation and it was excellent, much better than Islam’s. Actually over dinner that night at Konspirace several people, while praising the new cook, told me stories. They said that Islam in the last few months before falling out with the owner had just sat at a table doing nothing. Someone ordered French fries and they were served partly frozen. Perhaps it was because he wasn't getting paid, I thought. I told these stories to Sugit and he said after all, Islam was not a professional cook. It wasn’t his vocation and there’s a difference.
I supposed there was. Take me. People in Prague often told me I was a good teacher. Maybe I was sometimes, but most of the time I was lazy, or distracted. In America journalism was my vocation; that doesn’t mean I was good but it certainly meant more to me because I saw it as a calling. Why don’t you do it now, some people asked. Perhaps with time and distance (and beer), the voice just grew dim and faded, or I stopped listening. When I came to Prague I told myself I needed a rest from the daily pressures of journalism. In fact when I came to Prague that first year I wrote a novel, or rather, an attempt at a novel, called, “Beyond the A.M. Crowd.” It was about a young American journalist who, “dismayed by the war, and existentially confused over the break up with his girlfriend,” abandons journalism to become a habitué in Prague ’s cafes and pubs. In the end, the unnamed protagonist, in a fever induced by beer, drugs and his existential confusion, is caught up in a May Day rally and ends up inadvertently assisting in the beating of a local Communist official. Ironically, the ex-journalist finds himself on the front page of the local Czech dailies, and then goes into hiding. This last part, contrived to be sure, was intended to be very Formanesque, something out of “Hori ma Panenko!”
At any rate, some Czech friends help our hero get over the border to Germany , and from there he escapes to Finland , and is last seen in a snowbound, digitally enhanced Scandanavian white night landscape, techo music playing in the background, like at the end of some movies. A woman he knows, not the girlfriend, but another, an intimate stranger, enters. It is his lost love, a love he knew perhaps in another life, returning. She sees him and smiles a silent welcome. The camera rises high above them, turning and turning, getting faster and faster. Where will he go, our unnamed ex-journalist? Has his crisis been resolved?
I couldn’t answer those questions, which was, among other reasons, why the story never really made it. In other versions, the hero considers going to China, or possibly back to America, or, as the rough reads, he sits on the edge of the Zofin island, looking out at the Vltava while a couple of ducks conveniently swim by, allowing the narrator to ponder why the ducks swim upstream, against the current, instead of with it. The text ends with an elliptical statement by our ex-journalist. “Beyond the a.m. crowd,” he whispers. “Into the peripheral world.”
Does this mean he chose the path of obscurity, seeing it somehow more noble and worthy to veer off the main road of life, the vulgar pursuits of the public path? Is this the answer to his existential confusion? Or was the author himself merely unsure of how to end the story, and quickly dashed off a bit of consciously vague words to neatly cap the mess he had made?
A good friend, whom I sent the draft to back in America , gave this assessment: He liked the story (but then he’s a friend), but felt dissatisfied with the ending, felt it left too many unanswered questions. Perhaps, he suggested, it’s possible “you haven’t lived the ending?”
Of course I was deceiving myself: I knew who this mysterious girl was. But the reason I couldn’t write that ending was because I never made it up to Scandanavia to see her, just as I had never been in any May Day Communist beating, just as I had never been to China , or gone back to America . There were only those damned spiritual ducks swimming by, pushing against the current, and the elliptical phrase, “beyond the a.m. crowd, into the peripheral world,” was an attempt at lyricism, a way of saying that the hero wanted to escape the prison that his ambitions had become, and to find a simpler world of love and acceptance, a world that he lacked the courage to seek.
Actually the story was a little different, I’m touching it up now as I look back on it. The original story, one of its problems, was I sort of made it up as I went along, as Prague unfolded before me, and I stumbled here and there in the dark. I did spend one real night in a Prague jail, but as I said that was for kicking a car one drunken night, not for beating a Communist. In the neighborhood and among students, that story of the car has become something of an old joke; my novel has, too, to some degree. I mean to say that after the ’89 revolution swarms of Americans found their way to Prague, bolstered by Alan Levy’s famous ‘Left Bank of the Nineties” proclamation. Unfortunately, though a good many people came and wrote, and many books were written, somehow the Great American Prague Novel (GAPN), never hit the bookstores. The new generation was being cheated of the new Hemingway or Fitzgerald who would capture the essence of a new people and how they spoke and lived.
I heard this, or read about it, gleaned it from various observations and conversations. You’d say you were writing a novel and people would say, “Oh?” and you could see a flicker of amusement in their eyes, as if to say, “not another one.” I felt it, and I suppose I got discouraged; everyone hates being a cliché, even if the cliché is true. Looking back, I could have shown more perseverance, more consistency, which are, to paraphrase Capote, the better part of artistic survival. I could have put my head down and wrestled with that story.
But I didn’t. I knew there was another reason. I was aware that much of what I wrote, even when I was working hard at it, was vain, affected: too self consciously Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al, whoever I happened to be reading at the moment. An Irish friend of mine, who once shared a flat with me in Prague , observed this when I went to visit him in Ireland . He read “Beyond the A.M. Crowd,” (was actually a character in it). Once, after a relationship ended with a girl I was seeing, I said something about how I didn’t expect it, that the girl had betrayed me.
The friend mused over this, and then reflected,“People … do what they are going to do.You can’t mold people.”
I suppose that’s my biggest flaw as a person and a writer. This desire to see people and places the way I want to see them, rather than as they otherwise might be. That, and a lack of curiosity to see this other side to people and things. Take Islam. Over the past year he was one of the best friends I could have had, someone who shared my situation, who constantly helping me out, lent money sometimes, and always sympathy. And I know so little about him, and didn’t bother to see him to the train station when he had to leave.
The Man Called Paquito Montana, cont’d
We left Karlovy Vary on Sunday. Alexey and the girls accompanied us to the train station. We embraced, and in a great burst of emocion the Russian stuffed a 5,000 crown note in Paquito Montana’s pocket. Then they stood on the platform and waved as the train pulled away carrying me and the heroic Pequito Montana. We returned to Prague in triumph, both us happy and full of adventure. I hardly had a chance to rest, for that evening I got a call from Paquito Montana and he instructed me to meet him near the Mustek station. He’d (somehow) met a trio of German businessmen in town on holiday. The Germans took us in a cab to a handsome estate on the outskirts of Prague. There were a group of young women there, escorts hired for the evening by the Germans, and so we passed a wild, memorable evening. One of the Germans even videotaped it with a small camcorder and promised to send us a copy. He never did, of course, but at least you could say we made at least one movie, after all. The party lasted until well past dawn, and I have a strange memory of the big party all wandering through the streets and ending up at Charles Square, where we splashed in the fountain and walked through the park, crying out ‘Systema!’ to passersby, while our friend performed handsome and formidable tricks with the rapier.
Over the next few weeks, there were other adventures. One evening we got to go up in a helicopter around the city, the pilot a guy named Jan that Paquito Montana had met somewhere. It was splendid, and we used the opportunity to outline ‘overhead shots,’ as Paquito Montana said, for the movie. ‘It’s like a chariot, eh Gabacho?’ Paquito Montana shouted over the noise, and I had to agree.
During these adventures I still worked a little during the days, enough to just get by. The evenings passed quickly. Some nights I didn’t see him and went busking on my own, which I was getting better at. I tried acting like Paquito Montana, in his manner I mean, but without success. I just didn’t have his style and flair to pull it off, so after a while I just played the songs and left the style to Paquito Montana.
We also still saw a lot of Gino and Dana at Valentynos. One evening in mid-July they were sitting at one of the patio tables when I arrived. Paquito Montana was off on one of his adventures, ‘business,’ as Gino said, and I sensed they’d just been talking about him. ‘I am a man!’ Gino was saying when I arrived.
‘Ah, my artist friend,’ he greeted me. There were no other customers. He insisted I sit down, and Dana went to get me a beer.
‘You are always welcome here,’ he said. ‘You are a friend. ‘Let it Be,’ please. But at the right moment. I can see you are tired and thirsty. Our friend he will return. The business. Always the business, the systema.’
‘Systema,’ I said.
‘Yes, systema,’ he said. ‘But understand, I am a man. I too know the systema.’
‘Yes.’
‘I also know the systema. But I am a man. You see?’
He fixed me with a gaze.
‘I say to my Dana, we must wait and know the priorities. No stress. Everyone relax. I am old man, I know these things.’ As if to illustrate, he picked up his glass of red wine and sipped it. ‘Everything at the right moment. Come, I show you.’
He got up and I followed him to the room he’d given to Paquito Montana. He unlocked the door and we went inside. He flipped on a light. The whole room was a wreck, worse, if possible, than it had been when I’d seen it before. The radio was on, blaring Latin tunes. I could smell something burning. In the kitchen dishes of all kinds filled the sink, and the coffee maker had been left on - the pot was scorched to a faint grey and cracked from the heat. The floor in the bathroom was soaked from the shower (or ‘fountain’) that was still running, and some of the water had leaked into the bedroom. The umbrella from the patio was still over the unmade bed, the sheets stained with beer and cigarette ash, and the floor was scattered with porn magazines. A classical portrait had been taken down from the wall and stuffed dangerously into a corner. In its place on the wall hung a photo of Paquito Montana, the younger version, in a track star pose.
Without a word, Gino went over and snapped off the radio. Dana had followed us in and I saw her quietly go into the kitchen. I heard the shower go off, and she started cleaning up the kitchen.
Gino waded through the room, his beefy arms describing a circle as he turned around and around, surveying the room. He looked at me to see my reaction.
‘You see,’ he said. He gestured around the room. ‘This room we save for the tourists. Dana and me we spend 10,000 euros on this room. I give it to our friend for nothing, as a present. I say, ‘No, no money. You are a man and friend. I give for you. For the systema, you see? Because I am a man and I know the systema.’
He broke off, wheezing a little. He picked up one of the magazines and opened it to the centerfold.
‘Mama mia!’ he exclaimed. He stopped and faced me, and remembered. ‘I tell you I am a man!’ He threw the magazine down, and stormed out.
Dana was in the kitchen. I saw her put the cracked pot in a paper bag, along with other bruised and battered articles. The dishes were soaking in soapy water, and she had wiped up most of the water in the bathroom. I started to say something, but then we heard sounds coming from the courtyard. It was Paquito Montana, arriving with his customary clamor and high style. The rapier hung at his side, and the steel-toed boots clattered on the patio. He was accompanied by a balding, middle-aged Latino guy.
‘El Gabacho! My Lord!’ he cried, seeing me and Gino. He addressed us with a short bow, his hand over the rapier. My mind was still clouded with the recent scene with Gino, so didn’t react to his arrival. Paquito turned and said something to his companion and they both laughed.
‘My friend!’ Gino broke in, extending his broad arms. He lightly slapped Paquito Montana on both cheeks. ‘My friend, how are you?’
‘Easy, senor,’ Paquito Montana stepped back.
Gino produced from his shirt pocket a yellow card, like the referees use in soccer, and flashed it at Paquito Montana. ‘That’s one,’ he said. ‘One! Let there not be two.’
‘Situacione interesanche!’ Paquito Montana cried. ‘Relax, hermano. Systema.’
‘I too am a man, I am ready to die! You understand me?’ Gino turned to the rest of us. ‘I am ready to die!’
‘Situacione interesanche,’ Paquito Montana giggled. He produced a 1,000-crown note from his great coat and presented it to Gino. ‘Beers for everyone. Gabacho, let me introduce you to Eduardo. He’s also from Mexico! We are brothers. He is a quite famous surgeon throughout Latin America.’
Eduardo blushed and we shook hands.
‘So he will be in the movie too,’ Paquito Montana continued. ‘Eh, homey?
‘My friend!’ Gino broke in again, handing the 1,000-crown note back to Paquito Montana. Paquito Montana made sweeping gestures renouncing claims on the money. He insisted on giving the money back to Gino, who with the same stern oath that he was ‘ready to die!’ refused to take it. The money went back and forth five or six times, before finally Dana came out with the beers and took the money from Paquito Montana and disappeared into the bar and we sat down.
‘No stress!’ Gino said. ‘I am a man! I am ready to die! But at the right moment, everything at the right moment. We relax. Mama! Bring me a wine.’
‘No stress, relaxacion,’ Paquito Montana said. ‘I tell you the business today. I talked with the producers-‘
‘About the movie?’ I asked. The subject of the room had been tacitly put away.
‘-we had lunch,’ he continued. ‘Talked business, we make a deal, back massages, yoga, acupuncture, flight attendants, masturbation,’
‘A deal?’ I asked.
‘A deal, Gabacho!’ He looked at Gino in triumph. ‘Swimming pools, movie stars, Daffy and Donald Duck. I’ll buy this building -‘ he swept his arm around the patio. ‘I buy this building, we put in a jacuzzi …’
‘My friend,’ Gino said. He was quieter now with the wine. ‘My friend’ He exchanged a look with Paquito Montana, who continued his reveries about the meeting with the producers. Later they talked more easily, and the room was brought up, first carefully by Gino, then with a crescendo of emocion. He got up and paced, his beefy arms clasped against his head and making gestures in the direction of the room. He even took all of us, like a group tour, to the room so we could personally inspect. By then, Dana had restored it to something of its former glory.
Gino produced the yellow card, waved it warningly, and we all went back to the garden.
Paquito Montana, still lost in his enthusiasm, asked me to play. A group of tourists, attracted by the sound, came in and listened. Some even took pictures. When I finished there was applause and the group (Polish people) decided to stay for drinks.
‘See, Gabacho - lovely!’ My friend’s face glowed. ‘Beautiful, eh?’ He looked at Gino, who was busy welcoming the new arrivals. Once more, I marveled at his ability to attract and illuminate, and I think even Gino and Dana forgot about the room.
VIII
I’m thinking of the day, a year before, when it was time to renew our visas. Islam, Nikash and I decided to go in the early morning hours together. This was the year the Czechs entered the Schengen Zone; the country was cracking down on illegal immigrants more than in the past and so the Foreign Police, already overworked, was even more crowded as people rushed to get visas. many workers never bothered getting legal, even though many, like myself, did get legal.
The night before Islam finished his job at Konspirace at 1 a .m. and after a short sleep, the three of us set out at 4 a .m. on foot for the Foreign Police. Along the way, Islam hummed an Eastern melody, and Nikash exchanged jokes and grins. Me, impatient as always, walked ahead. Islam had wanted to wait for the night trams, which come once an hour, but I knew a way on foot. We crossed through the park at Reigrovy sady and down the hill, a trip that took about a half hour.
'When we arrived at 4:30, we could see it wasn't good. People were already lined up around the building. A loose conflageration of people, of all nationalities, all looking tense and tired. A few Ukraine or Russian guys were doing crowd control, pushing people back, and one was putting names on a list. We couldn't figure out if he actually worked there (doubtful) or had appointed himself some kind of manager of the scene. You see people like that, and you're never sure if they're really trying to do some good, or just making some kind of scam. Here and there were people with blankets.
'People are coming yesterday,' Islam observed.
After about twenty minutes we decided it was hopeless. Even if we managed to get inside the building when the doors opened, it was highly doubtful there would be any tickets left.
'We come back tomorrow,' Islam said. 'Very early.'
'Tonight,' I said, setting a mental alarm. Midnight. That would mean we'd wait overnight. That was about four hours longer than last year.
The journalist in me thought of doing a write up for the Post on the situation, but another reporter already beat me to it. I eagerly read the story, hoping to see that things will change. But the officials shake their heads. Yes, the system is overworked, deplorable. But there's not much that can be done. The workers are underpaid, there's no money, the usual reasons.
'And think about in ten years,' Islam said. 'Ah, Life is hard.' He laughed in a tired way. We got the metro back to our neighborhood.
'So you can see,' Islam added, back at the flat. 'There is nothing like your mother country.'
'What's that?'
'Your mother country. There we do not need visas.'
'Yeah.'
We both crashed for a couple hours. Then my phone beeped. A message from an old student, Jana. She wanted to know if I'd like to go with her to Slovakia in a couple weeks, spend some time in the High Tatry Mountains. The mountains, in the northwest of the country, are said to be serene and lovely, a real jewel of Eastern Europe, a gateway to the East anyway. And Jana is a good friend, we have had great discussions about literature and politics, so it will be a good chance to catch up, possibly over glasses of Moravian wine.
The message made me feel better. I got up, resigned to make the journey back to the Foreign Police again with Islam that night.
That evening I brought along a notebook, thinking since we had to wait all night I might as well keep a journal. The following are excerpts:
12:55 a.m. When Islam and I arrived there were already about 50 people outside the office. Most were stretched out on make-shift beds, blankets with bits of newspaper underneath. A few Russians and Ukranians drank beer purchased at nearby all-nite shops, and chatted in circles. Somewhere music drifted from a radio. With about seven hours to wait, fortunately it was a mild, clear summer night.
'Ah, the visa fight,' Islam said. 'Everywhere there is war. War for oil. War for food. And now war for visa.' He chuckled to himself.
The majority of the people waiting for visas tend to be from the Ukraine. Many work in construction, and are responsible for the work that's gone into Prague's building boom the past decade. This morning a heavy-set Ukranian man and a couple girls were putting people's names on a list. I didn't like this or trust it. I've been to the Foreign Police before and know that it usually dissolves into a free-for-all when the doors open, and who were these list-makers anyway?
'I think it's pretty corrupt,' said one Australian guy, who was back for a second attempt like me and Islam. 'It's mostly Ukraine people and they try to control the process. But I don't see any way around it.'
Still feeling highly skeptical, I added my name along with Islam's. We were listed at 145 and 146 respectively.
'You should get in,' the Australian guy said. 'Yesterday I was 300 and just missed the cut. They ran out of numbers just before.'
230 a.m. The broad-shouldered Ukraine guy, the apparent leader, is doing a roll call. Islam had decided to go for a walk to stretch his legs, so when our names come up I answer for him. Everyone looks tired, tense, but there are moments of laughter, such as when the Ukraine guy tries to pronounce the Vietnamese names on the list. Not that he does better with English ones. He pronounces my name, 'Yam-ez Treezler.'
430 a.m.Another roll-call. This time, the Ukraine leader, aided by other Ukraines, begins trying to start the actual line. By now there are about 200 people. We're pushed back and back, while names are called. The scene starts to get tense with all the pushing. People step forward, trying to hear their names. 'This is ridiculous,' I say to an African man next to me. He speaks English, and nods in agreement. More shoving, people step forward and try to get the Ukraine man's attention, checking and rechecking the list for their names, insisting. A few of the men are obviously drunk, and they begin gesticulating and cursing in Russian. This is never going to work, I mutter to myself.
At one point, a couple Russians get into a shouting match with the Ukraine leader and he gives a 'hell-with-it' gesture and hands the list over and strolls off. Then dozens of hands are reaching for the papers, and there's more shoving and cursing. One man goes ballistic, chattering and unleashing a volley of orders in screeching Russian.
During the ensuing chaos, I quietly slip through. No one stops me. Islam hasn't come back, or at any rate I don't see him anywhere. I go and join the small group of people already called on the list and have a seat. I go and sit next to a youngish guy who tells me he's from Uzbekistan. He's been waiting for the last two days.
'But today I should get in,' he says. "I'm number three on the list.'
'Two days?' I grow alarmed.
'Some people they are here for five days,' he says.
'The other day the news media was here,' the young man continues. 'They had cameras, there was a story. But still nothing really changes.'
There's no way I'm waiting five days. The thing is to be as close to the front door as possible when it opens. Suddenly a couple of Ukrainians in front of me, tough-looking guys, turn around and start yelling at me. They point toward the back of the line. I pretend not to understand. They start to shove me violently. Luckily at that point a couple of policeman pass by. Someone nearby intercedes and I can see he’s telling the policemen that the Ukrainians were pushing. One of the policemen checks our passports. He issues a stern warning to the Ukrainians. After the police leave, the Ukraine guys don’t bother many more. Someone hands me my papers, which had been scattered during the mess.
6 a.m. The police arrive, a dozen of them in black slick suits. This is a new wrinkle from last year. But I'd heard even with police there were still problems. Recently a couple of the cops were fired because they were found to be taking bribes from people to get places in line. This morning the police spread out and stretch out poles with red tape to control the perimeter of the line. I'm within shouting distance of the entrance, about 30 people ahead. I notice at the very front of the line is none other than -- the big Ukraine guy, our list man, the great organizer. Amazing his ability to combine community and self service, a lesson for us all. Oh well, good enough. I don't know where Islam is, and look around for him but don't see him. Hopefully he'll get in.
7 a.m. The doors open. It's actually much more orderly with the police around. A certain calm has settled over the crowd. The police let in the first dozen or so. After a few minutes the next wave, and so on. Upstairs I get a coveted number and sit down. I'm so tired I'm a little dizzy, mostly worn-down nerves from all the waiting and uncertainty.
830 a.m. Islam comes upstairs. Nikash is with him. They got in! I wave and they wave back, and I remember that I've got one of Islam's documents in my bag, so go over and get it to him. A few minutes later my number comes up on the screen. 'Good luck,' my friends say.
845 a.m. The girl at the desk is young, early twenties. It's her first day, and two other women are training her. 'It's terrible,' one of the older women says. 'It's summer and some of our colleagues have holiday.'
My paperwork is in good order. The women hand me a receipt. 'Come back in 30 days,' they say.
Bummer. Last year they gave me the visa on the spot. This year I have to come back and pick it up. In 30 days. That means another pleasant all-nighter at the foreign police.
I got home and slept for a few hours. I heard Islam come in about 1130. 'I must going back,' he says. 'I am missing some papers.'
'Me too. I mean I have to go back in 30 days to pick up the visa.'
'Ah, the life is hard,' Islam said.
We went in to sleep.
The Man Called Paquito Montana, cont’d
We had dinner later, after the Polish tourists had left. Dana brought coffee, refreshed our pints, then disappeared to finish restoring the guest room. With his usual flair, Paquito Montana kept us amused with his flashes of dialogue and inspiration. He filled Gino in on our recent adventures, while Gino quietly sipped his wine and listened with admiration. He seemed eager to hear the stories, and to see the photos again. We’d taken new ones in Karlovo Vary, so he looked at the snapshots of Alexey and the girls, the villa where we stayed, and of course - the highlight - a single digital, taken by Lenka, showing our friend embracing the one and only Al Pacino.
The picture revived Gino’s adoration of Paquito Montana. He turned, extended both hands, and embraced him warmly. It was Gino’s most endearing quality, this willingness to to praise and forgive, with sincerity and emocion. Paquito Montana offered another 1,000-crown note and was again heartily refused. Gino only insisted that, ‘at the right moment,’ we give him a copy of the photograph, the one with Al Pacino, autographed, so he could hang it on the wall in the bar and show to customers. ‘But at the right moment, everything at the right moment.’
For a while, the ‘business deal’ was raked over, highlighted by Paquito Montana’s spirited imaginings and speeches. He was full of the incandescent fire he had when I first met him, so much so that he could hardly sit still, though he never sat still for long. He was more comfortable pacing the patio, his boots clattering on the patio floor, his brow bent in concentration, murmuring and plans, or else his shining black eyes turned upward in a supplicating way as though he were addressing the very stars.
‘-Juanito!’ This came from Eduardo, who rose from the table. He looked squarely at Paquito Montana, who started and then giggled. They had a brief conference in Spanish.
‘It’s OK, hermano. I must go. I’ll be back. Then we talk business.’
Eduardo gave a doleful glance, then returned to his seat, watching his brother as he
turned and, the rapier trailing behind, disappeared out into the streets. We could still hear him, shouting his usual cries of ‘Systema’ over the crowds even when he was down the street and well out of sight, clamoring above the crowds and night noises.
It was getting late. At Gino’s request, I played a little while and waited for the man called Paquito Montana to return. Sometime near midnight, Eduardo said he was leaving, so I rose and thanked them both for dinner.Gino had relapsed into thought, so I don’t think he really noticed. Dana went with me to the great wooden front door to let me out.
‘So you have some work tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘Not much,’ I smiled.
‘We will see you at dinner then.’
‘Yes, I hope so.’
‘Yes, come.’
She stood in the doorway, arms-crossed, the light from the patio putting her in silohouette.
‘Sorry about the room,’ I said. She didn’t say anything, but only looked out at the street.
‘He is quite strange.’
‘Yes.’
Dana stood a moment longer, then shivered.
‘Everybody is strange.’
‘Well, Dobry noc.’
‘Cau.’
Out near the square I heard a familiar voice calling.
‘Gabacho!’ Paquito Montana jostled through the crowd. ‘Come, homey. We talk business!’
He disappeared again shortly upon our arrival at a café near the river. ‘Just sit here, drink your beer, Gabacho.’And he was off.
An hour passed. I wasn’t really worried because I had money that night. I’d made nearly 600 crowns busking, and had had a private lesson. Eventually I got bored and went outside. I walked down the street to another café and looked around. In the toilet I encountered Paquito Montana, who was pacing back and forth in front of the mirror, and murmuring to himself.
‘Are we suffering?’ he asked, giggling to himself. ‘Systema. Philosophy. Color TV. Drama and suspence - what’s the difference?’ He giggled again. ‘But of course! … Revenge … only it is just possible … El Gabacho … we must make allowances … yes! Hmm.’
He went on this way, his voice rising and falling, at times dissolving into mutters, other times in a stage whisper.
I finally went in and over to the toilet. ‘El Gabacho, my lord,’ he said, seeing me, then he went back into his private conference. He splashed water on his haggard face a few times, scrubbed his hands and patted his hair and goatee. He repeated these ablutions several times, his voice falling to a whisper again. Then he turned and punched the wall dryer, which roared hot wind in his face. He repeated this process a few times, punching the button with a flourishing, determined fist, the sound of the punching and corresponding roar of hot wind providing a cacaphonic mirror of his frantic, disturbed soul.
A businessman came in. He stared for a moment at Paquito Montana, who saw the man and delivered a short bow, then went back to his drying and philosophic discussion. The man looked over at me, then excused himself and pushed by us into one of the stalls.
It was late. We went walking by the river past the bridge and the nightclub Karlovy Lazy and toward the national theater. Now and again Paquito Montana stopped and chatted with people, including handful of tourists taking romantic photos of the river and castle, and a taxi driver, who hailed him with familiar cries of ‘Systema!’
He seemed urged on inwardly, desperately, and I wondered if it was possible he was feeling pressure from the ‘deal,’ which he still had said very little about. I asked him but all he just nodded eagerly, then went into various ‘plot points.’ He was preoccupied with the revenge scene, he said. I thought it might calm him down to talk about it.
‘So how will you avenge the death of Tony Montana?’ I asked.
‘Systema. This is the problem, Gabacho. I am not sure. I have been thinking long and hard about this scene. It’s going to have it all! Assasinations, conspiracies, complexities, and of course a message with spirituality and emocion. This is no movie!’
I tried offering suggestions, possible alternatives. He listened eagerly, nodding his head and our pace picked up, but his glances out at the river now and again told me he was keeping his own counsel. ‘Give me 200, homey - you got it?’
I gave it to him and he went into a little shop, returning in a moment with a couple tiny bottles of absinth, which he drained quickly. Then he told me to wait and he went over to pay phone. I heard him talking to someone in English, and his gestures were beseeching and exlamatory. Finally he hung up. He checked his reflection in the mirror of a car window, adjusted his black coat, and walked briskly past me. ‘Systema,’ he muttered. I asked what was wrong, and he said something about pre-production problems. ‘There has been a postponement,’ he said.
‘Al Pacino?’ I asked, and he patted me reassuringly on the shoulder.
‘Relax, homey. A few days. Situacion interesanche!’ He giggled to himself.
We went to a Latin bar a few blocks from the Rudolfinium. It was packed, salsa music filled the room. We were greeted with cries of ‘Systema!’ by familiar faces, and a big bearded guy who introduced himself as Carlos came up and patted Paquito Montana on the shoulder. ‘Ah, so I finally meet the famous Paquito Montana,’ he said, with just the slightest irony. ‘Ah! And El Gabacho - ha ha! Nice to meet you!’ He and his ‘party’ were all from Venezuela, and he introduced us around. Paquito Montana, with his usual style, took in the atmosphere, then set about ordering drinks at the bar. There were also some Russians who had joined in and sat drinking on the couches. He came back, exchanged embraces and good-spirited jokes, mostly in Spanish. The photos were brought out as usual, passed around and admired and discussed, even though the salsa music was playing and the whirl and noise of the dancers made it less easy to concentrate. Later he even did a demonstration with the rapier, in time to the music, and performed it with such elaboration, emocion and elegance that all eyes were shining by the time he finished.
‘Systema!’ Carlos cried.
‘Systema! This is no movie!’ returned Paquito Montana.
‘No movie! Systema!’ others joined in.
‘Interesanche!’
‘Interesanche!’
Then there was more dancing, cocktails and shots passed around. I got rather drunk and fell into conversation with some girls, but their dates soon came and invited them to dance so I sort of slumped into a chair and started to fall asleep. A few times I opened my eyes and saw Paquito Montana’s face, shining and haggard, among the streaming faces in the crowd, on the dance floor, always animated and in the midst of discussion. At one point Lenka was there. She said hello but then disappeared, looking upset, but I didn’t see what happened. Then I woke up again and there was something happening. I got up and walked toward the dance floor. There were voices shouting. It was Carlos and a couple of the Russians. They had surrounded Paquito Montana, who was gesturing and protesting, a look of outraged innocence on his face. Several of the women were trying to intervene but others held them back. I worked my way through the crowd. Just then Paquito Montana’s eyes widened, a kind of grin passed over his face, and he made a movement and drew the rapier. The Russians fell back. ‘You know what a hasa is, man?’ He said this to the Russians, who just stared ‘It’s a pig that don’t fly straight. Fuck with me, you fuck with the best! Systema.’
‘You must pay them 1,000 crowns,’ Carlos said, holding back two stone-faced Russians.‘They say you were buying drinks for people and putting on their tab, they will call the police if there is trouble!’
‘Gabacho!’ Paquito Montana saw me for the first time. ‘Tell these hasas about the movie. Spirituality, action, drama, suspence, emocion. It’s going to be the best. I’ll buy drinks for everyone in this bar. I’ll buy this bart, put in ceiling fans, new lighting, wide-screen TV -‘
‘Just pay him!’ Carlos implored, his eyes beseeching. I looked outside and saw one of the Russians, the injured party, talking on his mobile phone and looking up the street.
Just then I noticed Eduardo. I don’t know how long he’d been there. Perhaps he’d showed up while I was sleeping. Anyway he went over to Carlos and handed him two 1,000-crown notes. This money was hurriedly taken outside, while Eduardo and Carlos tended to Paquito Montana. He’d drunk a lot and it was clear in his movements now, which were sloshy and uncertain, but he continued ranting at the ‘hasas.’
The police arrived. We saw Carlos and the Russians talking with them and it appeared everything was going to be all right. But then suddenly Paquito Montana, revived, was outside on the sidewalk, the rapier drawn and he was issuing strong invectives at his antagonists.
‘This is no movie!’ he shouted.
He stood poised with the rapier, issuing challenges. Carlos and Eduardo rushed over to subdue him. One of the policemen walked over. He surveyed Paquito Montana. ‘Passport,’ he said, holding out one palm.
‘It’s OK,’ Carlos said. ‘Too much drinking. Rozumis?’
‘Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie!’ Paquito Montana cried. He stumbled forward. ‘Little Richie, John Wayne, Daffy Duck - all rolled into one!’ he swayed and stumbled, while Carlos and Eduardo went to help him up.
‘You go back to hotel now!’ the officer barked, evidently taking our friend for a wayward tourist.
‘Systema,’ Paquito Montana muttered.
‘What do you say?’ the officer glared.
Paquito giggled.
‘Systema. Situaction interesanche.’
The officer looked sternly at Paquito Montana, and at the rest of us, then shook his head and walked away.
It was with great effort we managed to get Paquito Montana to leave the scene. ‘Systema,’ he kept saying. Suddenly he grinned and broke into a sprint, the rapier out, jumping and dashing onto the roofs of cars, back down to the sidewalk. Then he was far down the street, and we couldn’t see him anymore, but heard his clamor and shouts as they blended into the shadows.
‘Juanito!’ Eduardo called. ‘Juanito!’
We were afraid the police would come back. I half expected to see lights and hear the sirens any moment.
‘Are you guys OK?’ Carlos asked. ‘I have to rejoin my friends.’ We exchanged handshakes and apologies, and he left.
‘Come,’ Eduardo said to me. ‘We must find him.’
We searched the streets for more than an hour. It was past two then. We couldn’t find him. With his usual flourish, he’d just disappeared.
IX
Tomáš was also very sympathetic during that time. That evening the sun disappeared and great black clouds descended on the city. The heat sucked away and evaporated, and the rains came, loud and insistent, followed by thunder. People went hurrying indoors, their shorts and t-shirts soaked through. I couldn't help think -- at least the summer storm held off until we were through with the Foreign Police. Can you imagine sitting outside all night under that downpour?
I went to Konspirace. Islam was already there and mopping the floor. There was no gas for the keg, so we settled for střík, half white wine and half sparkling water, a cool, light summer drink especially popular with Czech women because it saves the waistline some mileage. Tomáš invited me over for a smoke.
'So how was it?' he asked.
'We were there from midnight,' I said.
'Midnight? Jesus! So did you get the visa?'
'30 days. I have to go back.'
'Oh no!' he laughed sympathetically.
'I don't understand it,' I whined. 'A city with a million and a half people, probably at least 50,000 immigrants, and they have just one office to process the paperwork.'
'It's terrible,' Tomáš said.
'But I'm sure it's the same everywhere.' I told Tomas about Lucie, a Czech girl I knew who spent a year in the US, and how she waited all night at the embassy in Washington to get her visa. We also talked about Mexican immigrants in California, and the difficulties they have getting legal.
'But they do the jobs nobody else wants,' I went on. 'And immigrants help drive growth. They're the ambitious ones, the ones who want something better.'
This is in reference to a conversation Tomáš and I have frequently had.
'Here in Czech Republic,' he often says. 'Everyone who grew up under Communism is used to the state taking care of them, and everyone being the same. They cannot imagine taking care of themselves, or imagining something better.'
'Look at what Kennedy said,' I went on, 'Democracy isn't perfect and freedom presents many challenges, but at least in America we don't have to build a wall to keep our people in. Of course it's ironic now, the Bush Administration wants to build a wall between the US and Mexico. They want to build a wall to keep people out!'
'Yes, but don't you think, James,' Tomas said, nodding. 'That for some people such freedom is too difficult to handle. They cannot survive. So in this respect, it's good to have some some controls.'
'But what about when you went to England?' I asked. 'What if the English had said, 'Sorry, Tomas, you cannot come.'
Outside it was still storming, the rain falling in sheets. On the TV there was some French soft-core porn for some reason -- and from the Eighties on top of that -- and everyone was getting a laugh out of it. People came in flushed and streaming with rain, and exchanged 'Ahojs' and either had the wine or waited for the beer. Warmed by the střík, and the cozy feeling of being inside sheltered from the storm, we continued the discussion. Islam came over and shook hands and talked for a while, then he had some things to do in the kitchen, so he got up and left.
Later Tomas’ student Stazka came, along with a tall guy named Lukáš and another guy whose name I forget at the moment. Under the storm, in the warm cafe, we had another of our endlessly circular conversations in varying shades of English and Czech. There were even singing. The beer finally arrived in frothy pints, but since I was already on the střík didn't want to change boats in mid-stream. After a while I forgot about the visa issue and just enjoyed the evening.
That was then … of course, the way things worked out later I didn’t get the visa. Islam actually got a six-month visa and I remember he came into Konspirace that evening and showed me, with the new photo inside and fresh stamp. His face was glowing. Of course, he said, after six months they said they would probably not extend it, but at the moment he was too happy to think about that. I was happy for him too even though I was very disappointed at having been rejected. That evening at the flat we had dinner, Nikash, Islam, Sugit and I. Nikash and Sugit were shocked I didn’t get a visa. I suppose they thought that as an American, I would automatically be issued one, and so I had to explain about my “criminal record.”
Out of consideration for me, the guys all expressed indignation.
“You don’t need be Czech,” Nikash said, vociferously. “America! Home is best!”
“Home is best!” Sugit added, even louder. “Home is family!”
I can see the reader now saying, “Didn’t you ever do anything else in Prague besides drink beer and hang out in pubs and worrying about visas? Why, If I lived in Prague – .” Yes, I did find time for other things. I taught most days, but the hours were irregular and often found myself with great stretches during the mornings and early afternoons, time when I could just drift through Malá Strana to the Wallenstein gardens and look at the gold fish swimming under the fountains. Or on nice days I’d take a book over to the Kampa or the Park just across the Mánesuv Bridge, lay in the grass with students and read and look at the tourists or the old Czech people walking by. It was pleasant too sometimes to just get on a tram and follow it to the end. I liked grabbing the number 17 in Old Town and riding out past the Braník train station, or taking the number 24 at Karlovo Náměsti and going out past the Botannical Gardens, through Vršovice, watching the architecture shift from classical to more blue-collar structures, the functionalist, grey panalaky that hover over the cityscape like towering ghosts of Stalin … and back again to the Vltava, where in spring the boats passed up and down under the bridges.
I even found time for a little bit of journalism, and contributed a few pieces to Provokator and The Prague Post.
Once I remember seeing President Bush’s motorcade. I was teaching at the main government office when it passed by, a helicopter soaring overhead. This was when Bush was trying to convince the Czechs to support a missile defense radar in the Czech Republic and Poland.. Later Condoleeza Rice visited to sign a treaty for the radar. I didn’t see her but the atmosphere in the city was the same.
The evening she was in town I went to Vaclavski Namesti, the city's main square, where some two thousand Czechs gathered to protest the radar. Surveys at the time showed about two-thirds of Czechs opposed the radar. They waved flags and signs that said “'Ne Radar!' 'Dekujeme, Necheceme' (Thanks, but we don't want it!)
I stayed about an hour then went home, just at it was getting really crowded, and police were monitoring for any trouble.
But to get back to Islam. It was in the autumn, a month after he got the six-month visa that he and his Czech girlfriend, the one he wanted to marry, broke up. Part of it was endless separations (she had a kidney stone and spent much of the time in and out of the hospital, and the rest of the time lived in another town). But also, Islam was counting on them getting married (in part to help extend his visa so they could open a business together). As I said before,Monika, claiming a bad experience with a previous husband, an Italian, kept putting him off.
By autumn, Islam was getting a little desperate. He was beginning to nervously eye the end of the year, when his six-month visa was set to expire..
'Can you renew?' I asked.
'No, not this time,' Islam said. 'This was last one.'
He was depressed.
'I must find new girl,' he said, breaking into a smile.
'You must fight,' I said.
'Must fight. Must win! Ah, James, there are many women everywhere. But I must be quickly. By hook by crook.'
'So come with me to Turkey,' I said.
'Yes, but they will not give visa.'
'You're Muslim. They're lots of Muslims in Turkey.'
'Ah, James," he chuckled. "There are two worlds, your world and mine."
The Man Called Paquito Montana, cont’d
It was that night Eduardo told me the story. We went to a café and talked had a couple beers, and to another café for coffee and by then it was nearly six and Eduardo paid for our breakfast. I don’t know why we stayed out so late. I guess we both shared a vague hope that Paquito Montana would just show up, the way he usually did.
'So you see how it is,' Eduardo said, after he'd finished the long story. He looked tired; there were dark circles under his eyes and with a distracted air he kept looking out the window at the streets.
'Maybe he should go home,' I said. 'Back to Mexico, I mean.'
Eduardo shook his head.
'He would never do it. You know, he did come for a short time after the bad business. But he was never the same, never the same after he left America. I suppose it was his dream. The movies, Hollywood. Your dreams, they can break you if you are not careful. But now, he is too proud to return home. He would see that as admitting defeat.'
'But you're his brother,' I said. 'And a doctor. He doesn't seem too healthy now.'
'You've noticed.' He laughed bitterly. 'Ah, Gabacho. Do you have any brothers and sisters in America?'
'Yes.'
'How would you feel if they came here and told you to go home?'
'If I needed help, I would ask them.'
'Yes, but if you didn't?'
'I see.'
'This is what you want, yes?'
It was the first time I'd thought about it in a long time.
'Yes, I guess so.'
'Juan always will be my big brother. I cannot decide for him. Only he knows what he wants.'
He sipped his coffee. 'Systema.'
'Systema.' We both laughed.
'My wife, she says the same thing. 'Why do you not help him? He is your brother.' You know, there were many times he sent us money, when he was making the movies.'
'Really?'
'That is what helped me finish university. I don't forget that. That is why when he calls now and asks I cannot refuse him.'
It occurred to me that perhaps Eduardo was the 'agent' Paquito Montana was calling, but I didn't say anything.
'So do you think he'll be OK?' I asked.
Eduardo looked out the window again. It was starting to get light outside. He didn't say anything.
A little later, we had breakfast, which Eduardo paid for. Then I walked with him to the metro station, and we shook hands, agreeing to meet later at Valentynos.
I woke up late that afternoon. It was sunny, so I grabbed my guitar and headed down to the river.
There were many tourists, and over the course of an hour or so I did pretty well. One group of Italian students sat for nearly a half hour listening, and a retired couple from Sweden offered me a drink of whiskey, which they produced from a backpack.
'Gabacho!' I heard my name called, and stopped playing. Paquito Montana was approaching from across the Cechuv bridge. He waved. Upon closer inspection I noticed another gold button was missing from his great coat, and the steel-toed boots were muddy and scratched. He wore a red bandana gangster style over his head, the black hair tied in a ponytail, and his face was even more ragged than before. He grinned broadly, greeted me with his usual flourish.
'What happened to you last night?' I asked.
'Systema,' he shrugged. 'I met some people, we went to a hotel, got in the jacuzzi, relaxacion, back massages, masturbation ...'
'Your brother was worried. We were afraid the police got you.'
He laughed.
'Don't worry, homey. They have to catch me first. Situaction interesanche. How's the woman?' He indicated the guitar.
'Good.'
I played a little while longer. Paquito Montana joined me on a few of the songs, which he hadn't done before. He whipped out the rapier and, with great style, sang the lyrics haltingly, leering at passersby. Most people looked for a moment, then hurried on.
'Come, Gabacho,' he said presently. 'We must talk business.'
We walked to the stop light at the Rudolfinium.
'Anything new on the deal?' I asked tentatively, thinking about my conversation with Eduardo.
'It's beautiful, homey. Next week I meet some producers, discuss some details, get the contracts, signatures, then we make the movie -'
'-and Al Pacino?'
'Baby, Al Pacino, Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson --'
The light changed. He broke off and began walking across the street into Old Town. We walked for several blocks, not really talking, and suddenly he veered into a dark passageway. I followed as he entered an art gallery. The interior was filled with paintings, picturesque Prague scenes. Paquito Montana walked by the pictures, entreated them with brief gazes, then something in the far corner attracted his attention. He walked over, giving a gasp. It was a suit of armor, mounted on the wall. He inspected it from various angles, and invited me to share in his admiration. Nearby on the wall hung a midieval sword, which Paquito Montana traced with an appraising eye.
We left, and out in the dark passageway Paquito Montana withdrew the rapier and made several flourishing maneuvers, spinning and ducking at the shadows. Presently he put the rapier away and continued browsing in the shop windows. He came to an abrupt halt before one particular shop. 'Look, homey.' He pointed to a large portrait of a beautiful young woman done in oils. The young woman in the painting wore a black velvet evening dress. She stood sideways, her head turned over one bare shoulder and her eyes were cast wistfully down and away into painted gloom.
Paquito Montana gazed at the picture for a long time in reverent silence, his expression mute and reflective. He stood back so that I could take a closer look. The colors of the painting were staid, even dull, washed out, and bled into the vendurous background. The young woman's hands were clasped at the breast, suggesting anxiety or expectation. Her lips were wan and pale, parted slightly, the dark hair flowed along just the faintest suggestion of a neck.
'She's beautiful, eh homey?'
Before I could answer, Paquito Montana was already moving on, the sound of his boots echoing in the passageway.
'Where are we going?' I asked, but he didn't answer, and I wondered if perhaps we were scouting locations again. We came out of the passageway into bright sunlight. We passed a crowded street market, the booths twinkling with souvenirs. Paquito Montana stopped at one booth and admired some pieces of Bohemian crystal, then moved on. Then we crossed a square where pastel canvases swung gently on wooden easels, and then we passed the old Three Golden Lions building, where Mozart stayed during his sojourns to Prague. Finally we were out on National Avenue near the Tesco.
By then I noticed Paquito Montana was much quieter than usual. There were no great proclamations or speeches about the movie. He didn't accost strangers, and even the rapier stayed at his hip. A peculiar dreamy silence hung over him. He seemed content to keep moving, his eyes roving for the glittering and novel offered in the shops and in the streets. One bookshop had in the window a big antique map of the world, circa 1750. We stopped and looked at it for a moment, and then I followed Paquito Montana into the bookshop. He addressed the clerk with a curt 'My lord' and a bow and then went over to the travel section and spent ten minutes poring over big color portraits of azure coastlines and breathtaking mountain vistas, inviting me to have a glimpse now and again. As we were leaving he seemed to have a second thought, and turned to the clerk and asked for the big map of the world. It cost 200 crowns. Paquito Montana paid, then with his usual flourish, presented it to me as a gift. I protested, but he just grinned and waved his hands. 'Take it, Gabacho.'
I wish I still had that map, for it was the only thing he ever gave me. A few months after that I moved, and it got lost somewhere. But now I still like to look back and remember that afternoon, Paquito Montana randomly placing the map in my hands, as though communicating to me a lost message, just as he did with the photos. Both offered windows into something enchanting and inscrutable -- the past perhaps, or maybe something even more luminous and unrecoverable. Perhaps Paquito Montana himself wasn't even sure how to decode this lost message, but like someone possessed of a concert ticket but who couldn't attend, willingly passed it on. So for me the actual map itself isn't so important, even though I'd love to have it, but rather the gesture itself, communicated in his usual style and flourish.
It's tempting to say now that he didn't know -- the mounting debts, bar tabs and bills scattered in dozens of cafes and restaurants around the city, the mounting isolation, the growing distance between the photos and trembling hand that passed them around. Twice that afternoon we were turned away from cafes, the barmen shaking their heads firmly and ignoring our protests. Paquito Montana took the ejections with formidable grace. 'Systema,' was all he said.
At four-thirty, after we'd walked for several hours, we went to the park at Charles Square and sat on a bench. Paquito Montana entreated me to play while he went over to the fountain, took off his boots, and washed them. He took off the great coat too, laid it gently in the grass. He took the photos and carefully rearranged them. Finally even the rapier was brought out and polished with the red bandana until it shone gold-red in the late afternoon sun. He performed all of these duties with concentration, like a priest attending to a ritual, sometimes humming along to the music.
Several homeless people slept on nearby benches, and in the grass a small theater company performance was going on. Of course it was in Czech so I didn't understand much of it. Nevertheless I enjoyed watching the actors perform their antics, and the small audience, which sat or laid on the grass, was pleasant and shook some of the lonely feeling out of the afternoon. Later I went over and asked a young man, a student, about the performance. He said it was a scene from Doestoyevsky's 'Demons,' the scene when the vicious conspirator Verkovensky is urging the disenchanted athiest to commit suicide and in his suicide note to take responsiblity for all the horrendous crimes the conspirators are about to commit. I'd read it in college. Surprisingly, Paquito Montana didn't appear interested in the performance. I think he scarcely noticed it, so preoccupied he was with his cleaning and polishing and arranging.
'Some of us are going over for a few drinks,' said the student, who introduced himself as Pavel. 'Why don't you come along?'
I wanted to go. I went over to Paquito Montana and urged him to come, but he declined.
'You go, homey. I have some business.'
'You sure?'
'Systema.'
'Well, I'll see you at Valentynos later?'
'OK, Gabacho.'
X
I realize Islam’s portrait comes across as thin and skewed. Maybe we can fill in the lines a bit more: As think I said earlier, he had been in Prague about two years, leaving behind a wife and daughter in Bangladesh. The wife later filed for divorce. When I asked Islam about it he said she had a new boyfriend. Islam met the owner of Konspirace by chance and got a job cooking in the kitchen. He was paid about 100 crowns an hour, which is about minimum wage (about $5). Islam's plan was to work long enough and save money to start his own restaurant.
'Working for yourself is best,' he said, recalling the days he had the phone business. 'There is freedom, I need freedom. It's no good work for somebody else.'
It's hard to believe sometimes that he was actually younger than me. He seemed older. Part of that was his health. He suffered from diabetes, how serious I didn’t know, except that there were nights he couldn’t sleep because of pain in his legs. By then I’d known him for a year now and had never seen him take a day off from work. But then it wasn’t that his job was that hard. In fact, that was part of the problem. Most people go there to drink and smoke marijuana, so he spent too much time sitting in the kitchen, where he had a computer, and chatted with his girlfriends (at one point he had several, most of them married, he had met through various online chat groups) or listened to music from Bangladesh or read the news (he read the BBC translated into Bangladeshe).
I encouraged Islam to take a day off, now and again, but he said he couldn’t afford it. Every now and then, though, on a Saturday or Sunday morning, we grabbed a bus -- any bus -- or tram and just rode it all the way to the end. One time we rode the tram 22 up to Prague Castle and walked through St. Vitus together. Islam personally bought all the ingredients he used at work, and sometimes on our tours he'd find a market with super cheap deals and load up.
One weekend I went with him on one of his errands. We took a tram to Michle, one of those unsung, out of the way districts of Prague, and there we found a 60-pound sack of potatoes for something like four bucks. The sack was heavy, but Islam had brought with him all these spare plastic grocery bags. So we opened the sack and distributed the potatoes among the bags, and split the load to carry home. It was a heavy, grey afternoon in October and the leaves were all over the sidewalk, and people looked at us as we got off the tram, carrying all these sacks of potatoes.
There were times when I was short of cash, and Islam said: 'You need money? No problem.' Once he had 300 crowns. He handed 200 to me and kept 100 for himself. Of course I've lent him money as well, but I admit it's harder for me to be philosophical about it. 'Money, always coming and going,’ Islam said. ‘Money can never be in one place, it must always going somewhere. This is the system of money.'
What else? There are other things, things I'll probably remember later. But I remember thinking after what happened later, after we both left Prague At that time it still was not clear; in theory yes, but on the day to day level it seemed we could avoid that fate, even though in the end it probably would be beter. From time to time Islam still considered moving back to Bangladesh, just as I considered America. We both agreed ‘Home is best,’ as always, but in truth I think, looking back now, that he had reservations, as I did, about going home. Why? Many reasons – Money, the difficulty of starting over, perhaps. In my case, I had just grown attached to Prague, which represented to me ‘the adventure,’ I had set out on, even though in all honesty by then I the feeling of adventure had long worn off and in truth I was stagnant, bored, tired of living in suspended animation. The Zaba and Konspirace, the conversations with people there, helped me sort my feelings and forget for awhile, but in the long run that couldn’t sustain me or anybody. It was not easy to talk about these things with Islam, or with the two brothers, Sugit and Nikash. I think that’s why we employed the language we did, all this “Life is fight!” and “Home is best!” It was a kind of coded language that brought solidarity and comfort; they sufficiently communicated the other complex stuff that one wanted really not to talk too much about, like a confession of defeat. Or talking about the war, or terrorism. If something happened in the news, like with Obama, or Bush, or Iraq, we talked but in the same kind of language. “Too much killing in the world,” we said. “Bombing is not only solution.” There was no point going further than that. The flat was too small for disagreements. We had disagreements, but in our universe these disagreements were over things like cleaning. Islam, Nikash and Sugit were all fastidious, tidy. I was careless, messy. “Must clean,” Islam would say. “It is important for the health.” “Without clean flat,” Sugit added. “In one week it will be dogshit!” Or on my side, I’d sometimes get sick of the smell of curry (even though I love curry) cooking every time I came home. “Can’t you guys try something else?” I’d ask, only half joking. Actually later on, especially when Nikash’s girlfriend came over, she made Thai food for a change.
But overall it was pretty mellow at the flat, the days and nights falling in very much the same pattern. At times life seemed suspended, as we waited to see how much longer our days in Prague would last. “Ah it is not living,” Islam would say. “Without work, without girl, every day the same.” This was in those last weeks before he finally left for Italy.
One morning in mid-summer I ran into Aiden Greenworth again. I was on the tram going down Francouzka Street when I saw him going through some trash bins outside the Czech Inn. I got off at the next stop and walked up the hill. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked. “Just separating these,” Aiden said. I looked and noticed he was separating the paper from the plastic, the glass. Aiden made a disgusted face and gestured upward toward the flats. “When people, in those buidings there, they just dump the shit. Man.” “You should have gloves,” I said. “I know,” said Aiden. “I think Pat said he was bringing some.” Pat was the manager of the inn. I asked Aiden how things were going and he just gave met his tired sideways look. “What do you think? Same as always, man.”
“Oh, but I found a place to live, man! You know the Pension Florida. Or at least, I was living there. ‘Til this morning. The old lady who works there said, “Aiden! You gotta pay rent!” I’m like … uh … Me? I mean, I try, when I can, you know, to pay a little something. But … Man. I’m the only one who’s been doing all the work around there! The place is a shithole man. I cleaned the whole kitchen. Opened the cupboard and it was just like, ‘Ugh!’ And the past week or so there have been about maybe eight raids by the police. Checking for drugs. Checking passports. You know a lot of Ukrainians live there. So the old lady, she comes to me and says, ‘You gotta pay rent!’ and I’m like, ‘Me? I wouldn’t pay a bloody penny to live here!”
Anyone who knew Aiden for any length of time had heard these kind of rants before. Most of them revolve the three main, perpetually unresolved crisis points in his life. Chiefly these were: a) his ex, who was constantly hounding him for child support, b) his inability to hold down a regular job and c) to pay all the people who loaned him money, who sustained him on a daily basis.
Actually Aiden worked as often as he could, and no one worked harder at being unemployed than he did. At one point when I knew him he was doing fairly well with his acting. He had found a well-paying small role in a Hollywood production filmed in Prague, I forget the name of the film, it was some kind of “Lord of the Rings” knock-off and Aiden played a swashbuckler or something. With his wild personality and hard Hull City accent, it wasn’t difficult to imagine him in the part. He also found a number of smaller acting jobs, for instance as a rowdy football fan during a bus scene in “Eurotrip,” TV commercials, student films at the Prague Film School, which was not far from the Globe. In the ten years he lived in Prague, he had been, besides an actor, at turns short-order cook, bar man, waiter, English teacher, construction worker, and, as you saw earlier, even hat seller. For a long spell he wasn’t able to get work because he had lost his passport. A friend loaned him the money for the passport, but then the financial crisis hit, and people in Prague just weren’t hiring.
I liked Aiden; most people did, if they were willing to put up with his manic personality and trunkload of unsolvable problems. He was always ready for conversation; speaking for him seemed at times like his ball and chain. Even when there were times when he was clearly tired, beat, when he seemed to hit a new low, and when you clearly were not the company he’d prefer to share his troubles with, he’d still gradually, then like a fast-moving stream, engulf you with whatever consumed him at the moment.
He was really into fantasy books, and from time to time appeared to be hard at work on his own fantasy series. I couldn’t tell you what it was all about; an elaborate fantasy kingdom full of magic and sorcery and ancient races, all of which he related to me over beers or coffee, at the Globe or Conspirace, or wherever I happened to run into him.
He and Liam had a testy relationship, though they usually got on fine when the football was on, other than the fact Aiden couldn’t resist rejoicing whenever United lost or Liverpool won. Liam generally disapproved of Aiden though and Aiden knew well enough that Liam was one person he couldn’t expect to borrow money from, since there was no guaranteeing when he could repay it. Though in Aiden’s defense, in my case anyway, he always eventually paid me back.
That morning as he sifted through trash at the Czech Inn I couldn’t help but feel sympathy. His problems, though many of them self-created, could be tiresome but you had to admit that here was a guy who was a survivor. After all, he had one sister back in England who had spent years in a psychiatric hospital, and mental illness ran in the family. I think that’s why it bothered him when people around Prague who knew him always jokingly referred to him as “Crazy” Aiden. If you called him that, he’d look at you: “Really?” he’d say, mock astonishment on his face. “Wow. Man. I have never heard that before. Man. You are the first to ever call me that.” His reaction would be the same, doubtless, if any of the people passing by at that moment had said anything about him sifting the trash. If you told him he needed to find a job, he’d say, “Wow, man. I never thought of that. I just love digging through trash, you know. It’s my dream, man.” The last image I have of him that day is he finished sifting the trash, then reached down and lifted up a giant toaster. “Industrial size,” he said. “They use them in restaurants.” Aiden wanted to know if I knew anyone interested in buying it. I told him to try Konspirace.
Aiden could be all right. Actually it was he he who saved my ass the night of the Obama victory. I went into Zaba completely trashed and started my own celebration. Everyone there that night was basically just in the mood to relax, and when they failed to register the "proper" enthusiasm, I became belligerent. That was the night I called Kuba "the Son of Stalin." Kuba just kind of looked at me and said, "I'll remember that!" And then I insulted a few other people, and there might have a fight, but Aiden, who just happened to arrive, stepped in and took me outside. Yes, the guy who saved my ass that night was none other than Aiden Greenworth, “Crazy Aiden.”
“Man,” Aiden said, a few days later. “You should have seen the look in your eye the other night!” He looked at me with a strange admiration. “People say I’m crazy! I wished I had a camera! I was thinking, ‘Man, this ‘Jim.’ That’s who it is you know. You’re a nice guy and all, but there are times like that, when you’ve been drinking, and I see it. It’s not you, it’s Jim. He just comes roaring out of you man like a freight train and…! Wow! We both can be that way! I think in your case your problem is you’re too nice. You’re a doormat. You let people walk over you and then when you get to drinking, you overcompensate. This ‘Jim’ comes out and wants to knock everyone over. Really, really! You know what I think? You should stand up for yourself more. Stand up and say, “I’m a badass motherfucker, man!” Then people wouldn’t walk over you so much and Jim would be happy. He wouldn’t want to come out so much.”
Like that night I kicked the car, or the night with L-, a Slovak girl I was seeing for awhile. One night after too much too drink I got agressive and pushed her. She fell right on the platform while the metro was coming. I had already left in a kind of fog. When I came to my senses and went back she was already gone. The next day she met me and she was surprisingly fine, a bit subdued. We spent the day walking together through the city and at one point sat on a bench by the Vltava and looked out at the castle. I had already apologized for what happened and she understood, but in that moment I remember watching the feelings she had for me evaporate in the sunlight. She stared straight ahead, at one point breaking into tears as she recalled how some people helped her to her feet and she was crying, and they asked if she wanted them to call the police and she had told them no. And for me, listening to her, and feeling as sorry as I had ever felt about anything, looked out at the castle, the river. It all looked so beautiful, and on that morning we should have been enjoying it together, instead of sitting at a funeral, which is what our relationship had become in that one moment.
Looking back, I think that’s where my dream of Prague came to an end. Not getting the visa, which came later, was just an afterthought. Perhaps too that is why I eventually sought out, or found my way, to Donska Street. There, in Islam’s calm presense, in the regular anonymity of the Zaba and Konspirace, I could hide from all those things, drown the pain and disappointment that had replaced the first bright hopes upon my arrival in the city.
Yes, maybe “Jim,” as Aiden said, was behind it all. A hungry, frustrated soul, capable of violence, that came out from time to time. Ironically, Jim always seemed to break out on evenings when I was having a really good time. Like a doppelganger, Jim would burst in and smash everything just when the evening had acquired a rosy glow.
There were times when Jim even made his appearance at the flat. Once Islam and his girlfriend Monika were in the bedroom and I came home drunk and for some reason began yelling about not ever having any privacy. Islam came out, it’s one of the few times I recall him ever becoming angry. He said I could leave the flat at the first of the month. In the end I apologized and he changed his mind, partly out of need but also because we were friends. “James, you must leave drinking. It is not living. This drinking and fighting.”
The Man Called Paquito Montana, conclusion
I dropped by Valentynos just after eight. Something was wrong. The big wooden front door was slashed in several places, and one of the tables had overturned. The restaurant was closed, the patio deserted. Then I heard voices. They were in the bar. Gino came out and told me to wait. His wife was with Eduardo talking to Paquito Montana.
You are witness,” he whispered in his thick Italian accent. “My wife, she want to try to talk to him. I give her 10 minutes. But I say her, ‘You cannot talk with him. It is like talking to a wall.’ But she insists. She thinks she can make him understand.'
Whispering me to be quiet, Gino had me follow him over to the wooden door. 'You see?' he asked, then pointed to the overturned table. He then had me follow him back to the patio. Out of his pocket he produced a red card. 'I am a man, I am ready to die,' he said, his voice wheezing. 'I tell our friend, 'One card, no problem. But let there not be two.' So tonight I say, my friend! That's two. Understand? Two!' He flashed the red card. 'I am a man. I know the situation. At the right moment, everything at the right moment.
“He thinks this is a movie,” he continued, looking to me for agreement. “A movie! This is no movie. He needs to realize he is part of the systema. I give him notice. He must leave. Am I right? He can kill me if he wants.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t need this. I am a man! I am ready to die!’ Gino went on, the words pouring out now. Dana’s brother, a Prague policeman, had been by that afternoon. He'd just left. Gino showed me the table where the plates still sat.
We could hear Paquito Montana talking.
“Listen, I know, I know, and it doesn’t matter,” he was saying. “I tell you, I will buy this building, put in a Jacuzzi for the neighbors. I’ll pay the water bill, I’ll pay the water bill for the whole building. Systema! Situation interesanche.”
Gino shook his head.
“I tell you, he will not listen,” he whispered. “Come, we go inside.”
Paquito Montana, Eduardo and Dana were sitting at one of the tables. It looked like a still life, or a scene in a stark one-act play. Dana was wiping tears of frustration away. Paquito Montana, for some reason, had his rapier out and was resting his hands on it.
“Senor, Senor,” he greeted Gino. 'My lord. Gabacho.'
It's not much use reporting what happened. The argument dragged on for another half hour in much the same manner as it had before, Paquito Montana and Gino occasionally embracing, calling each other brother, then in a great crescendo of emocion nearly coming to blows.
“I’m homeless,” Paquito Montana finally said. “But it doesn’t matter. I am Dick Van Dyke, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder all rolled into one.”
“You are part of systema,” Gino said.
“I’m homeless, I serve everybody. Systema.”
With that, the man called Paquito Montana turned and walked out of the bar, the rapier hanging from his belt.
He was to leave the next day. Gino and Dana were leaving Saturday for a week in Italy. Gino felt bad and wanted to give Paquito Montana an extra day, but Dana insisted on Friday. They had me sign a typed notice as a witness.
When we went out onto the patio to put the notice on the flat door it was quiet. They locked up the bar and we all headed out into the street. I liked them both and felt bad about everything.
“I know what I must do,” Gino said. “But at the right moment. Everything at the right moment.”
I turned to leave, but Gino stopped me.
“You go and find him. Explain to him the situation. You are American. Make him understand. He must go. This must end. It’s not the money. I need peace. No complications.”
“You will find him,” Gino said. “If you want to you will find him. You know you are always welcome here as a friend. But alone. If you bring friends I don’t know you. Come alone and it will always be as it was before.”
We shook hands, and Dana smiled and waved as they walked away.
Eduardo and I went looking. We looked in a half-dozen places Paquito Montana had taken me. I went into the little grocery store and asked the Middle Eastern guys. At the mention of Paquito Montana's name they shook their heads and said a few words of retribution. He had been convicted in their eyes as well. His reign had ended.
Down the street I asked one of the big Russians. He shrugged. “Paquito Montana is everywhere and nowhere,” he said, waving his arms about.
I walked back toward Old Town Square. By then it was past nine, but it was a bright, pleasant summer evening. The square was packed. Lots of people were out snapping pictures. I watched a middle-aged Czech carrying a sketch pad from table to table at the cafes.
'What should we do?' I asked Eduardo.
He suggested we get something to drink. We went to one of the tables in the square, expensive, but we reasoned it would give us a good view in case Paquito Montana should return, clamoring across the square. We sat there a good hour, but there was no sign of him.
'When will you go back?' I asked.
'Tomorrow,' Eduardo said. 'That's why I hope he comes back. I'd like to see him once more.'
But he didn't come back. He'd disappeared again into the city. As it got dark, the square grew more crowded, and we sat watching the people clicking pictures of Tyn Church and waiting in front of the clock for the hour to strike. Finally we rose. I insisted on paying the bill, but Eduardo waved me off.
'If you see him, tell him don't worry. He can call me if he needs anything.'
'Sure,' I said. 'Well, take care.'
'You too.' He smiled. 'El Gabacho. How long do you think you will stay here?'
'I don't know.'
'You must go back to America someday.'
'Yes.'
'And Mexico. You can come. I'll introduce you to my wife.'
'I'd like that very much. Salud.'
'Systema, Gabacho.'
'Systema.'
We shook hands, and I watched him as he drifted into the crowd, then walked to the metro station.
XI
The world's in the middle of a crisis, and you're starting a business!"
I remember saying this to Reve sometime over his first year when he opened his club in Prague. I don't remember what his reply was, but then knowing Reve, who has a sense of irony, he probably just laughed. He always had bad timing. I’ve thought of naming the club for this story Prodigal (if Reve knew I was writing about him he'd kill me, so I’m leaving the real name out). I’d call it the Prodigal for several reasons. For one, because of the theatre itself. It was this old theatre built back in the 1930s and during the Second World War the Czech pilots used to go there with their dates – the idea of a nation’s sons going off to war has a kind of prodigal ring to it, doesn’t it? Another reason is because Reve himself was an orphan, an adopted child who took the place over, and all orphans are, to a degree, prodigals. They just don’t have a home to return to, that’s the sad thing. I met Reve sometime in the fall of 2007. Born to Dutch parents (Reve once confided they were in a witness protection program; why I didn't ask), Reve was raised in Australia . He came to Prague sometime in the late Nineties and worked for a long time in various clubs and bars in the center, one of them being the George and Dragon. At that time I met him, he had a start-up tour business he was trying to get going. He had a brother who came over and originally that's why he took over the old theater. It was in his neighborhood and had sat vacant for several years. Reve thought he could buy the place, create a bar or club, and his brother could run it. Well, things happened. Over the next few months, the tour business stalled (it never got off the ground); there was a dispute between Reve and his brother, and the brother ended up going back to Australia . Reve suddenly found himself with an empty dilapidated old building on his hands with a sizeable rent, and rapidly mounting debt. That's when he got the idea to create what he finally called "a multi-cultural meet point," a place where people could put on shows, parties, exhibitions, whatever. He provided the space and the bar, and the clients provided the show.
It was slow going the first year. In some ways it was exciting -- I mean, there were punk bands from England , French jazz musicians and interpretive dancers, a blues band from Detroit -- Al and the Black Cats (see the photo above) -- as well as local Czech groups, so it really was international. The music was good, and, thanks to a lot of work that Reve himself did by hand, guests were pleasantly surprised when they went downstairs into the resurrected old theater, with it's high majestic ceiling and dim, drafty ambience.
That was all to the good: Except that people didn't come. I went to perhaps a half dozen shows and on average there would be 15, 20 people. With his debts and bills piling up, Reve I know had a lot of sleepless nights. Why didn't they come? Some said it was marketing, he needed marketing. So for some shows, fliers were distributed; efforts were made to get a web site up (he got a good one), and there were even ads on Prague radio stations. One night a Czech TV news crew came by and did a story, and I thought that would really do something. It didn't.
In an effort to get some cash, Reve opened the upstairs bar during the week nights, and I took to hanging out there some nights, hoping some of the people from Zaba and Konspirace would drop by as well. Except they didn’t. It was nothing personal against Reve, it’s just that they were cozy at Zaba and Konspirace. Actually Ondrej dropped by a few times, and Danny Boy and Vick did too, now that I think about it. Vick even worked the bar for a few shows, but then I think Reve was slow about paying him and so Vick stopped doing it.
It was when I began having problems with the Czech authorities over my visa, and I began facing the reality of having to leave Prague, that I got to know Reve better. He liked the beef over rice dishes that Islam cooked, so he was one of Islam’s few customers. But even though he was always civil, I got the feeling Reve had no great feelings for Islam.
When I asked, Reve just shrugged.
“One day he (Islam) came up to the table and asked me if I’d lend him 200 crowns. I told him no. Ever since then he doesn’t even look at me.”
It was kind of funny to be honest, Reve and Islam being so different. You couldn’t explain to Reve (oh, but you could) how “the system of money” worked with us at the flat. We were always lending each other money. It was something to be loaned, borrowed, spent and repaid. “Money never in one place,” Islam would say.
Anyway, Reve would come in to Konspirace to smoke a joint (he had a girlfriend then, Kristina, who disapproved of both smoking and Konspirace, and he did his best to keep both a secret. So he’d come in and sit with me and we’d talk. Kristina was quite beautiful, lithe, with long, chestnut hair and a kind of grave, haunting mouth. I had seen her and was always teasing Reve to introduce us. “Oh, you’ll meet her,” he’d say, then dropping his gaze. “But when you do – we’ve known each other for three years and this place doesn’t exist.”
“This place doesn’t exist?”
“Hell, no!” Reve would quietly puff his joint.
“And why three years?”
“Otherwise she’ll wonder how the hell I know you!”
So that was our agreement. Eventually I did get to know Kristina, although her English wasn’t good and we were a bit standoffish toward each other. She really did do her best to get behind Reve and support his ambitions. But over time, as one promising show after another busted, and – more to the point – she caught Reve smoking once too many times, she eventually broke it off, telling Reve, “I hope you’ll be happy some day.”
Reve took it hard, and as a result he poured more energy into the Prodigal. He was forced to borrow money from his family, and gave them part ownership. Then one night that summer he struck gold, sort of. A party of 300 people booked the place for a business party, and it went over quite well. At midnight Reve and his bar staff passed around glasses of champagne.
"You should've been there," Reve told me a few days later at Konspirace. “I was thinking about you,” he said, and in a veiled way I could tell he really meant Kristina. "I was thinking: he would have finally seen the place up and running the way it was meant to."
I congratulated him.
He asked me if I was still serious about Turkey.
“I could use you in the place if we really get up and running,” Reve went on. To be honest, the idea didn’t appeal to me. As much as I wanted to, I still couldn’t make myself believe in the place.
Anyway, over the next few weeks there were other shows, but after that happy big night, it appeared Reve had once again crashed. One night only about seven people came, and this after he'd been promised by the organizers that 150 would be there and he spent nearly $1,000 on stock for the event. On top of that the electric bill, some three months over due, needed to be paid or they would shut the power off -- a potential death blow for any start-up business. He got some help, from his family, but that was getting harder to do. But he kept the lights on, and by the middle of July the good shows, big groups of people, started returning.
All this time, I'd been half-heartedly considering Reve’s offer for employment as a kind of back-up plan. I was still back and forth about going to Istanbul and staying in Prague some way.
One evening, while I was at Zaba, Reve came in, which created a minor stir. He never came into the Zaba. “I need a favor,” he said. "I need you in the shatna tonight.”
Shatna means cloak room in Czech. It was not an inviting task. I was comfortable, sitting with Kuba and Lenka and we were getting ready to watch the Czech team play in the World Hockey Championship. With all the rain the city had had it was likely that people would show up wearing coats, so Reve really could use a hand. “Just a couple hours,” he reassurred me. “As soon as it slows down, I’ll cut you loose. Oh, and all the beer you can drink!”
So reluctantly, I paid my bill and followed him across the street to the Prodigal. About 150 people were expected that night.
It was a good thing Rick was working. He was this big, stocky guy from Santa Cruz, married to a Czech, and had lots of nightclub experience, mostly as a bouncer. He knew how to properly set up a coat room. When the first customers began arriving, about seven o’clock, mostly parents and small children, Nick answered their queries, collected the coins and handed the coats to me to hang in back, along with a number. It was raining hard outside, and it was chilly and grey, so we had a lot of business that night. People handed us jackets, scarves, sweaters, hats, all of which we stuffed into the sleeves. After a few times it was easy. Rick saw I had things under control and said he’d be back and went upstairs to have a cigarette. A few more people came and I took care of them, then Rick came back with two beers from the bar. We put them in back, out of sight, so as to appear professional and because Reve wouldn’t like us drinking so early.
More people came over the next hour, and before long we had fifty jackets, not counting the children (we gave families a group rate). The show started; Rick and I took turns in the shatna so we could enjoy the performance. It was a fun show, I remember, children’s theatre. There were two men stuffed into a giant elk costume running around stalking the children; there were bright colored balloons and live music and lots of food, a great contrast to the dreary cold outside. After a while the children, discovering the extensiveness of the old theatre, broke down into groups of hide-and-seek, chasing each other and laughing in and out of the rooms.
That was just the early part of the evening. Sometime around nine o’clock the parents came and collected the children’s jackets and the children were ushered home. Meanwhile, more people arrived. A group of men, all dressed in powder-blue tuxedos, went on stage and performed traditional Czech and Moravian songs, complete with accordions and horn. “Na zdravichko! Na zdravichko!” went the chorus to one song, the singer waving his beer glass to the crowd. After that there was a tombola, with chickens and pig’s heads given away as prizes. Later on a group of women went up on stage and sang lovely a cappela tunes in cat-like, diva style.
The party was organized, I soon found out, by a local gynecologist. When I met him he was very drunk, and it was still early, maybe 11. He was drinking from my glass, and when I pointed out his error, he just looked at me and said, in the best Czech way, “Well you should put your beer somewhere else!”
All in all, it wasn’t a bad first night. Sometime after midnight the party thinned out considerably. There were maybe 10 jackets left in the shatna, so Reve had me lock it up, with a note directing customers to the bar, and I was free for the rest of the night. Most of the party had by then migrated upstairs to the bar, so I sat at the bar with Rick and had a beer. The gynecologist was pretty wasted by then, he was hitting on some of the girls at the bar while his wife was downstairs cleaning up.
Then the police came, there was a complaint about the noise. That frightened me with visions of cops asking to see my papers. Then the gynaecologist started to stumble outside, determined to resolve the matter himself, in fine Czech fashion. Fortunately Andrea waved him off and dealt with the police herself. After the police left, the music was turned down. I was pretty drunk by then and, seeing I wasn’t needed, went back down the street to the flat and crashed.
XII
The next night, Saturday, I was on my own. Everything went OK (nothing stands out about that night). Actually I remember Reve telling me I was doing, “a real professional job.” And I was, to a degree. I mean, it’s true I drank too much (it’s hard not to; once the people arrive, there’s lots of down time and not much to do in the shatna), but I made a point of keeping everything organized. All the jackets were lined up and numbered in order as much as possible. I didn’t lose anything and nothing was stolen. That was important, Reve said: people won’t come to a place where their stuff gets ripped off.
I started doing it regularly every weekend, or rather, every weekend that there were shows. During this time, I got to know the others on the crew better. Foremost there was Andrea, Reve’s hand-picked assistant. He’d met her at Circus, one of the bars in the neighborhood. She was selling marijuana at that time and Reve was one of her customers. A pretty girl, in her early twenties, with raven hair and dark eyes; a self-contained, guarded way about her. She spoke English but generally didn’t like to, and you sometimes got the feeling that unless you had some pressing business with her, she’d rather not be bothered. Reve she treated respectfully, as he was paying her salary, the rest of us she dealt with on a need-to-know basis. Not that she was that bad; actually it was she who I think insisted on paying me on really busy nights, even though by rights Reve didn’t have to pay me anything, since I was already staying for free at his flat. She drank, but not too much and took her work seriously. There were nights I watched her put in a 12-hour shiftwith only one five-minute break. She was energetic, resourceful and organized, I know Reve turned to her to help get his paperwork, taxes, bills, etc, long neglected, into some semblance of order. She was on salary, though I can’t say how much, and I think Reve had great expectations. Early on his expectations even branched into hopes of intimacy, but over time Andrea had made it clear theirs was only a business relationship. To be fair, Andrea also had expectations. When they initially met, it was understood that Andrea was tired of selling marijuana and looking for “something steady.”
There were the bar girls, Agnes and Kristina, and another girl I never got to know well, all in their early twenties, students, who rotated different nights and were all pleasant to work with. There was a sound guy, “Rock,” was his nickname, a bull-dog of a man, who liked to sip whisky behind the controls of the P.A. Like most soundguys he was in love with volume, lots of it, and often had to be restrained by Reve.
Finally there were Mirek and Standa, who also helped with the bar and promotion and who had entered into some kind of profit sharing agreement with Reve. The initial impression you got of them was that they were brothers, which they were not, since they looked and sounded so much alike. They were both slightly built, with light brown hair, bright, almost anxious eyes, and collegiate manner. They both worked hard, seldom complained, even though there were nights they weren’t paid and were honest, as far as anyone working in the clubs can be – meaning they didn’t steal. They also had done the website and designed drink menus.
So that was the crew. As for me, I fell into a kind of routine. During the week, I’d teach my classes, head to Zaba after work, and then on the weekends, if there were shows, help Reve out in the shatna. There was an old guy in the neighborhood, David, a pensioner with a bad heart and a weakness for rum. He cleaned the toilets, swept up and took out trash for a shot of rum and hot water. “Holy water!” he’d proclaim, his eyes shining, raising his glass, still breathing hard from his tasks. David also helped out with the shows, even with the shatna though to be honest he drove me crazy. He was always rambling, in bits of English and Czech, on about this and that and bumming cigarettes.
The shows were generally on Friday and Saturday nights. Come Friday afternoon, if I managed to get away from my classses, I’d go with Reve to get the beer and we’d drag the kegs downstairs, and he and Andrea would go and get the rest of the supplies. Around 8 or 9 the shows would start, really get going by 11, and the afterparty would go on until dawn or even later. Most people left around 1 or 2 o’clock, and when the shatna thinned out, Reve was usually pretty good about letting me lock up the shatna and leave word at the bar. He knew I wasn’t used to working those kinds of hours.
Most of the time I didn’t need much Czech. The vocabulary of the shatna was fairly standard. “Kolik?” meaning, “How much?” “Deset,” or ten crowns, and that was about it. And if there were other questions I didn’t understand, most of the people would promptly switch to English. Often I got the question: “Where are you from?” When I told them “ America ,” they would ask, “What are you doing working in the shatna?” or “Have you ever considered teaching English?” They were curious, and often after they’d had a few drinks would come back and talk about my situation. “ Turkey ? And what do you want to do in Turkey ? Do you like Czech Republic?” and so on. I remember one guy who was pretty drunk, a guitarist with one of the bands, he came and sat with me an hour or so. He wanted to visit America and had many questions. Other times people would sit at the tables smoking joints and they’d come over and offer me a a hit. It was nice of them but I generally said no, since I was already drinking and had to keep some semblance of sobriety to run the shatna.
Understand: even though I had never worked in a club, like most people, I’d spent a lot of time in them, enough time to know what goes on late at night (I’m thinking of La Clan, Studio, Nebe – God!). The owner is always wondering who’s stealing from him, there are people doing coke and ecstasy in the toilet (that happened at quite a few shows), there are sudden jealousies and rages and fights that can erupt at any moment the later it gets, and always worries about the police, especially since Reve at that point was not properly permitted.
It was important for me to do the job right and have Reve know that he could trust me. I was deadly afraid of the shatna coming up short, even though it was small potatoes for Reve, and having to account for it, so I wanted my wits about me should that ever happen. A certain bond develops in clubs between the crew. After 10 pm, midnight, 3, 4 o’clock anything can happen. Someone pukes all over the floor (expect this at least once a night) and it has to be cleaned up. Sometimes the customer, feeling embarrassed and suddenly sobered, wants to help but usually not. There’s a fight, and the police show up because a neighbour complained about the noise. All of these things happened, sometimes all on the same night.
More about Reve: before opening the club, he’d worked in bars and clubs in Prague ’s center for years. As I said before, he’d helped build the George and Dragon, one of the biggest bars on Old Town Square . After that he’d worked as a tour guide and tried, briefly, to launch a tour business himself (at a bad time, when the recession was hitting and Prague ’s tourism honeymoon was beginning to end).
He’d come across the old theatre by chance. The club itself was located at the bottom of a building of flats, owned by several people, including a man named George, said to be descended from an old Czech aristocratic family. George took a shine to Reve, for whatever reason, and decided to buy into Reve’s idea of revamping the theatre.
This George was an interesting character. I never spoke to him much, as he only came by when he had business to discuss with Reve. At first glance he resembled a traveling salesman, with a cheap-looking suit, with thinning hair combed across his balding forehead; in his fifties, he was thin and dour-looking, yet he had a certain dignity, perhaps a remnant of his aristocratic pedigree. Reve told me his family had an old chateau outside Prague with something like 75 rooms.
Anyway, George was the biggest shareholder of the building, and the rest was divided up among the other owners, whom I never saw. Apparently the other owners didn’t like the fact that Reve was running the club, and were always conspiring to get control of the building and get Reve (and George) out of the picture. I suppose that’s what drew them together; an alliance against their enemies. But as much as George liked Reve, his patience had limits. At least once in my hearing, he left after a cup of coffee and status report, and over his shoulder said, “By the way, Reve, put some rent money in the account this week, if you can.”
XIII
Not long before Islam left for Italy we went to see Obama in Prague. The city was really excited he was coming. I was at the Czech Inn the afternoon Obama arrived, on the TV there was footage of Obama and the first lady getting on Air Force One to depart for the G20 Summit in London. There was speculation in the press for weeks. Ideally, Obama indicated he wanted to give a public speech with the Prague Castle in the background. The best spot would have been Letna Park on a high hill above the city with the prerequisite regal view; however, that site is out of commission at the moment because of ongoing construction on a road tunnel connecting to the center. Other spots considered included in front of the Rudolfinium and Old Town Square.
Islam and I got up early and went up to the castle together. When we arrived, some time around 630 am, there were already thousands of people there, and a phalanx of police. One of my students was working security, and she called me and I saw her waving at the front. I started to cram past the people -- some almost wouldn't let me by. I reached back to find Islam; I saw him for a second, but then the crowd had pushed him back. When I finally managed to get to the front, my student gave me the VIP tickets. I waited awhile, scanning the crowd for Islam, but I couldn't see him. Finally, I just went in through the security and out to the VIP area.
The crowd was a tossed salad of nationalities, more than a few Americans. The closest feeling I could compare would be at a summer festival. Or a trip to the Foreign Police. Everyone, at least in the invited section (perhaps we were subconsciously 'earning our tickets') looked at each other and exchanged little grins of expectation. Unfortunately, the dense crowd wasn't for everybody. One young woman feinted, perhaps from lack of air, and had to be taken away and helped by personnel on hand.
Beforehand student volunteers had passed out Czech and American flags, and these waved in the air covering the crowds like red, white and blue confetti. I was waving an American flag myself. Surrounding me were a German family, a young man from Brussels working at Exxon in Prague, an elderly American woman and her granddaughter. The German family were very excited. 'So in America Obama is much more famous than Bush?' the German man asked. By 'famous,' a slight language mis-transfer, I gathered he meant 'popular.'
At one point, I turned to the elderly American woman and, in somewhat incautious reference to the Bush Administration, said it felt good to proudly wave the flag again. The woman fixed me with a reproachful eye.
'Always be proud of that flag,' she said. 'People have died for you to wave it.' The granddaughter pulled the woman aside and whispered something. 'What?' the woman said. 'I'm right, I think.'
All of this was stampeded out during the Obamas' entrance. The president flashed the smile we'd seen so often on TV, in news reports. Michelle Obama shared the spotlight with easeA large video screen offered both a view for those on the far side of the square, and Czech subtitles. That morning Obama outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons, to big roars from the crowd.
Islam told me he watched the speech, which lasted about an hour, on the big screen.
When I got home later Islam was already home was finishing a meal with Sugit. I felt bad because Islam and I had set out together that morning, but in the crush and confusion of the crowds we'd become separated and even though I had tried to wait for him and find him, I hadnt tried very hard. So instead of being near the podium with me, Islam had watched everything in the general public section.
'It's OK,' Islam said. 'There was nothing you could do. The crowd was very crazy.'
It was becoming a familiar scenario, Islam and I in a desperate crowd, with police all over the place. We always seemed to find each other in these situations, and to lose each other in the crowd. Always “fighting.” Fight for visa, fight to see the president.
Actually the brothers Sugit and Nikash were very amused when they heard what happened. They chided Islam for being too easygoing. They said he should have been more aggressive, should have pushed his way through the crowd. "Islam! We must fight!" they said.
Liam wasn't impressed.
“The underclass,” he remarked as we sat one night talking about Islam and the brothers. “But I still think in your case it’s all part of the same mentality you’ve allowed yourself to slip into. It’s easy. All this ‘Life is fight,’ business. It just gives you a reason to sit on your problems and not do anything about them or to wait for somebody else to solve them for you.”
He didn’t have any problem with Islam, and in fact was sympathetic. When he heard Islam was leaving for Italy , he asked if I was going to get Islam a farewell gift. I hadn’t thought of that. “Oh, but really you should!” Liam said. “Really, the way you talk about him, I get the impression that he means a lot to you. In that case you really should get him something.”
I gave it some thought, but to be honest had no idea of a suitable gift. Something practical, perhaps, like phone credit so he could keep in touch. But then that seemed paltry. Or even just a card. In the end I didn’t get him anything. Islam himself didn’t seem to expect anything; on the contrary I suspect that he thought it best I look after my money and let him look out for himself.
Danny Boy lost his job at Sazka. He came into the Zaba the night it happened. I was sitting with Vick having a beer. Danny Boy was already drunk when he arrived and as he sat with us he was inconsolable, difficult.
“I fucking hate this fucking Republic!” he yelled at us, weaving back and forth in the booth, standing up and shouting other things and waving his arms, making proclamations and singing bits of songs. “Ah, you are lucky you are not from Czech Republic ,” he told us.
We tried to calm him down, but he was past that point. He got up and seized a nearby empty Coke bottle and waved it around as he attempted to make a speech. The barman, Jirka, came around and while Danny Boy was still searching for his next point to make, quietly disarmed him of the Coke bottle and we sat Danny Boy down. Then all of a sudden he seemed to come to his senses, quieted down and fell asleep, his head resting on his chest.
I asked Victor if he’d found a new job yet and he shook his head, and he didn’t want to talk about it. He had some Czech relatives in Prague who he did some odd jobs for, so that gave him some money. He also had a court appeal coming up on his drug conviction, but I didn’t ask about that. Kuba and Lenka were away at a reggae festival outside Prague, and I missed seeing them, and Ondrej just came by for a quick Coke before heading home (he said he was taking a break for a few days). A couple of the younger girls, Bara and her friends, were at the bar but they were busy talking among themselves and didn’t seem to want company. The place felt stale, as it sometimes got. I looked at Danny, his head still in his lap, while Vick rolled a joint. Why he was so upset about losing a job he even like or feel suited for I don’t know. He was living with his mother, so he wasn’t homeless, but then he probably helped with the bills. I remember when he used to work with Vick at the podatelna at Exxon. They had a manager Mrs. Zadkova, a dictator whom they both hated, but especially Danny Boy. Every day he’d come into the Zaba the first thing out of his mouth would be “Fucking Mrs. Zadkova!” When he lost that job he didn’t seem surprised, or even that upset, at least not nearly as upset as we was now that he’d lost the Sazka job.
I talked with Vick a little bit but we had to be discreet since we couldn’t tell how much Danny Boy might be listening.
“Wake up, Danny,” Vick said, then switching to Czech. “Vole!”
Danny Boy mumbled something, then in his sleep let out a “… do prdele!”
“He just needs to stop drinking so much, grow up and face things,” Vick said.
Thoughts on The Man Called Paquito Montana
You may notice a passing resemblance between Vick and Danny Boy and the brother and Paquito Montana, just in the sense that one is always having to bail out the other, and Danny Boy, like Paquito Montana, carries within him a seemingly fixed, albeit incandescent view of the world. You might think Vick’s is darker (“Sanity is a full-time job!”), but really that’s just on the surface. What about Paquito Montana and Islam, how do they compare. You are right when you say, “Well, they come across as stereotypes, or literary symbols, with these pet expressions (“Systema! Systema, versus “Life is fight!”) My only defense is they are not literary characters, but people, and these pet phrases came straight from their lips.
I wrote “The Man Called Paquito Montana,” or at least conceived the idea for writing it, in the summer of 2005, six months after my arrival in Prague. It was based on a real person I met my first year in the city, an ex-“action star” of the Mexican cinema, so the guy said, who had ended up another habitué in Prague ’s Old Town bars and cafes. He was adept at maintaining a showy, flamboyant front, and by virtue of a charismatic personality and an album of photos showing him, long ago as a handsome young actor, managed to persuade a great many people to support his nights out among the Old Town populace. He tells everyone he is making a new movie in Prague and this assures him credit everywhere he goes. There was one Italian man and his wife who owned a restaurant near Tyn Church and they were so taken by him they put him up in an expensive guest room they reserved for tourists. Over the course of the story the tab begins to mount, and doubts begin to rise about this movie venture Paquito Montana is endlessly talking about. A man, who professes to be a long lost brother, arrives on the scene and tells us more about Paquito Montana ’s past. It turns out that in truth he really was an actor, had emigrated illegally to America and been moderately successful in Hollywood , but had aged and run out of luck. He was eventually deported, whereupon he sought refuge in Europe . As we are learning this, there are scenes, confrontations, a particularly bitter one with the Italian host who is tired of being taken advantage of. At the end of the story, gathering up his frayed dignity, the man called Paquito Montana pronounces, “I am homeless! I serve everybody!” and marches out into the Prague sunset. We never see him again.
As I wrote the story, I saw Paquito Montana as a kind of Gatsby, a doomed romantic, a beguiling lost soul (which perhaps he really was); I added to him and subtracted. He once came into a café wearing a rapier he had found somewhere. In my story, I had him wear this rapier all the time. I saw him a sort of modern day Don Quixote (coincidently, when I wrote the story, two years later, I’d just finished reading that book and that had a great influence on how my final conception of the story).
Looking back now, I can see the holes in that story, too. In the story, Paquito Montana marches off into a glorious sunset. A nearby Russian doorman in front of a cafe, when asked of the hero’s whereabouts, proclaims, “Paquito Montana is everywhere and nowhere.” The truth is, I later found out our hero was living, quite prosaically, in Bratislava , where a girlfriend kept his wanderings in check. All his past, about emigrating to America and Hollywood I made up myself; ironically, I infused the man with as much fiction as he himself did. Instead of clarifying the picture, I merely muddled it all the more.
In my defense, I was then experimenting with “invention,” “making composite characters,” “juxtaposing events for effect,” and all the other modernist tricks of masters Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al. At one point, while struggling with the story, I had beers at Riegrove sady with an American friend, himself an aspiring writer (he was a big fan of Wallace Stevens and Brice D’J Pancake). The friend encouraged me in this pursuit, and I quickly agreed.
“We need to know more about this guy’s past, we know nothing about him,” the friend said.
“But I don’t know it!” I protested. “I mean, not enough.”
“Well – make it up!”
So I did, and it was glorious fun. You really felt like you were letting yourself go, rushing to the embrace of Art. I finished the story in a fever over the last weeks of August, and in the fall, anxiously sent it out via email to friends in Europe and America . Most never read it (who, after all, reads the novels emailed to them by friends?), and as the months passed, I gradually felt the old disappointment coming back. I’d been so sure about Paquito Montana , that everyone else would be as captivated and perplexed by him as I’d been.
The truth was, Paquito Montana was my invention. The real guy, the one I’d met in Prague , was an interesting guy but not as interesting as I’d made him out to be. Or if he was, I’d skipped a few key steps, hadn’t been curious enough. But then that would be journalism, say, recording everything word for word. That’s not what I wanted. But even as fiction I’d failed, serving him up as a sort of warmed-over Gatsby, leftover Don Quixote. I’d taken a man who was perhaps a little pathetic, but a man, and made him a piece of literary kitsch.
Even now I struggle with the fine line between what is life and what is called art. I have a vivid imagination and this certainly doesn’t help; with art yes, and to a great degree life also, but together, well ... I’m a daydreamer, and would much prefer to invent, fantasize, indulge my imagination, rather than get to know people, how they talk and behave, merely “report.”
XIV
One afternoon, sometime in February I think, I showed up and Reve and Andrea were already there.
"We’ve got a lot of work today,” Reve announced abruptly, just as I sat down.
He said we had to get everything out of the building – everything! – that very day. It turns out the neighbors had filed some sort of administrative complaint with the city. Some health and noise inspectors were expected to drop by in the morning, 8 o’clock sharp. Reve had obtained a permit to run a business (the old tour business) but could still be shut down since he was still not legally permitted to run a nightclub.
“That would be end of me,” he had said, on more than one occasion. “If they shut the place down, I’ll never be able to get it back open.”
By that, he meant having to pay fines for not having the licensing, but also because his cash and credit flows were already depleted, and the only thing keeping him above water were the shows. And there were some big shows scheduled for the coming weekend, shows that had been booked for months. So I could understand the urgency in his tone.
“There can’t be any evidence that there’s a bar here or that we have shows,” Reve said. “I have my lawyer telling the city now that I hang out here myself and just like to turn the music up occasionally – you know, just for me.”
We didn't have time to stop and wonder if the city, or anyone, would believe that. Reve was by then on the phone to the sound guys to come and haul all their equipment out. There was a storage room in the basement of the building, and all the stuff was to go down there, including the lights and the stage, which was to be broken up and hauled downstairs. I was glad Reve wasn’t counting on me to do any of that. Instead, over the next few hours, me, him and Andrea packed up the bar, and put everything in boxes and carried them next door to the basement.
In the evening Mirek and Standa (they were both university students and went to classes in the day) arrived, as well as some people interested in renting the place for a party. Reve had them stay upstairs while the work went on dismantling everything downstairs.
“This comes at a very bad time,” Mirek said to me in a gloomy voice. “People finally are coming to know about this place, and now we may have to cancel some actions. It’s very bad for our reputation. How do you say in English? Word travels?”
Mirek was right. It was terrible timing. After nearly two years of constant uphill climbing, of disappointment and loss, the club was finally starting to get on its feet. The last five shows had made money, or at least covered expenses. And in just a couple of weeks the club was set to host Aqua Sky, said to be one of the world’s most renowned DJs. I’d never heard of them but that doesn’t mean anything, since I’m ignorant of electronic music. At least 300 people were expected, the maximum the club could hold. A sold-out house. Reve was banking on this gig to finally put him on the map of Prague ’s club scene, and also to finally put him ahead. He had, as I’ve already said, tremendous debts – he estimated about 500,000 Czech crowns, which is about $25,000. He was also hoping to get away, to Italy perhaps, to get a break from the club.
We stayed late that night. A few other people came and helped out, and by midnight the place was totally empty.
In the morning, I had some business in the center (Reve had insisted everyone except Andrea stay away anyway), so I wasn’t there when the city inspectors arrived. After lunchtime, I dropped by. Reve was there.
“They’ll be back next week,” he said. Meanwhile, he was planning to “quietly” go ahead with the weekend’s scheduled events.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t taken chances before. Growing up in Australia , he used to sell weed, and one night, he was in his car carrying a half-pound of marijuana when suddenly a police car appeared, lights flashing. Instead of pulling over immediately, Reve speeded up, raced ahead over the dark hills and tossed the bag out the window. When he finally did pull over, the cop gave him hell. Reve just apologized, saying he didn’t at first see the police lights. The cop let him off, and the next day Reve drove back to the spot and picked up his weed.
He wasn’t so lucky in Greece a few years later. He and some friends were high-diving off some cliffs into the Aegean Sea . On a dare, Reve jumped off a cliff that was some 70 feet, high enough that he estimated he was at terminal velocity when he hit the water. But in mid-air, the wind was too strong and he couldn’t keep his feet together. He hit the surface of the water so hard he broke his back, and would have surely drowned if his friends hadn’t come to his rescue.
How this gamble would pay off remained to be seen. It wasn’t my business – I’d be in shatna again, but either way I could walk – but I worried about the neighbors. The people on Donska Street were split on Reve. Most of the old ladies in the building loved him, thought him handsome and considerate. It’s true there was one old lady, Elizabeta, in her eighties, who used to come in and sit and talk with Reve for hours, did so because she had no one else to talk to. She died the previous summer, and Reve was the only person from the neighborhood who went to her funeral. And it’s also true during the winter, when the sidewalks were covered in ice and snow, Reve shovelled and swept the area in front of the building so that the older people wouldn’t fall.
But these people, and George as I said, were in the minority. Most of the neighborhood resented him, outright disliked him – partly because he, a foreigner, had such a “valued” old property (though it had sat vacant at least a year before he took it over). Part of the resentment was Reve’s fault; he could come across as aloof and superior at times because he was generally a private person and didn’t like talking with people he didn’t know. That’s important because in Prague , in the Czech Republic in general, or in any country, I suppose, when you’re a stranger, and people approach you, you’re expected to receive them politely and answer whatever questions they have.
In the beginning, when nothing much was happening at the club, few took notice. But now that it was starting to get off the ground, to literally make some noise, and attracting new people to the neighborhood, that got under their skin. They felt like strangers in their own neighborhood, even though I suspect that secretly they liked it. It wasn’t just ‘their’ street anymore. Understand, this is how Reve saw it, and how he told it to me. Everyone was against him, he felt.
Of course, not “everyone.” Again there was George (that was important), some of the old ladies in the building (also important, they’d lived in the building since the beginning of time), and some of the younger people in the neighborhood were at least curious and receptive, and a handful, for instance some of the people from Shakespeare and Sons, the café and bookshop down the street, even dropped by.
I should point out too that, like many bar owners, and many reserved, private men, Reve was not a good drinker. During the three years I knew him, there were occasions when a perfectly good night would be spoiled when he let the guests buy him too many shots. He had a temper that came out when he'd been drinking, and his frustrations also boiled to the surface. At least once during my stay there Andrea left in tears from some vicious dressing down in Reve's office, usually over a trifle, or something she wasn't really responsible for.
"These people -- they don't understand," Reve would tell me, during one of these episodes. "The only thing that makes this place go is me! I'm the one who did everything! If it weren't for me they'd be out on the street!" And so on. The next morning, invariably, he'd be sober and chastened, and hand out a string of apologies. This didn't happen to often, these episodes (usually after one of them he'd drink only Coca-Cola the next few shows), but it was these kinds of episodes that made it hard for people to get close to him.
XV
I went to a morning class near Strossmayerovo Náměsti and then at noon had lunch at the Bohemia Bagel on Veletržní Street . A young woman got on and sat in front of me. She had gold-colored hair, wet and tied back, and was dressed as though she’d just come from the gym. As the tram rolled along she reached back and massaged her hair to dry it. A distinct scent came off her hair, a sweet, fresh scent, and I recognized it. Her face, as though she were offering it for view, was in profile, the smooth cheek partially appearing behind her gold-colored hair; the faint ripe smile … the same! But no it couldn’t be! After nearly four years … Prague is a city of nearly two million people. I tapped her shoulder and she turned. Her eyes widened, she couldn’t believe it either. “Jak se mas?” Danya asked, smiling politely. We talked for a couple minutes was the tram crossed the river and headed for Old Town . Her English was better than I remembered. Oh, she had a teacher now. He was good. She had a new job, too, a marketing company. And she was legal, finally! Great, great! She asked how things were going. “Stene. Padesat na padesat.” The same, fifty-fifty. She always teased me for using the same Czech expressions. With you it is always stene. Padesat-padesat. This time she just smiled. “What is new for you?” she asked.
At Staromětska metro station I got off, and thought about asking for her number (the number lost several mobile phones ago), but at the last second didn’t. She handed me her business card, and I put that in my wallet and got off. As I got off she smiled and offered a small wink, a kind of nod to old times. At the crosswalk I turned and watched as the tram rolled away, and she looked back one last time and smiled again.
“What is new for you?”
Danya … you never had many conversations with her. That was your first winter in Prague . She was from Russia and had lived in Prague two years by then, doing graphic design for a tourist magazine geared toward Russian tourists in Prague . She wasn’t legal then and was having some problem with it, was worried about it. In those days I wasn’t worried about much of anything. Prague was the romantic city, all romantic then. Danya … I call her Danya, that wasn’t her name. There were actually several Danyas that first year and a few after, but they all in the end were like Danya. She didn’t speak much English and I hadn’t learned much Czech and so communication was difficult. We used to save our “serious” talks for the computer in her bedroom. She would have me type what I said into the computer and she translated it to Russian and vice versa. It was winter then and after having sex we'd go to sleep in her bed with the snow falling outside, naked and warm under the covers, and in the morning it would still be snowing when I dressed and hurried to get the metro. But some mornings if there was time, Danya would make breakfast and coffee. She didn’t like to eat breakfast herself; instead she liked to sit and watch me eat and smile that strange, wistful smile, like she was a proud mother watching a son eat all his vegetables. She had a girlfriend too, a dwarfish, evil-eyed woman (or at least evil eyed to me) who I only met once. But it wasn’t the girlfriend who broke us up, or the communication. I was just in too much a hurry and there were too many Prague nights to enjoy, beers to drink, more Danyas to meet. She always seemed to understand, on some intuitive level. Numerology was a pet hobby of hers and once she gave me a reading, based on my birth date and a few other personal numbers. “For you always must be new,” she pronounced, after reading the numbers. That’s why she always asked that, and why she smiled that smile, I think. There always had to be something new.
One Friday, the sun finally broke through the clouds. I taught in the morning and then cut the rest of the day. I got on the No. 17 tram at Veletržní, the same stop where Danya had got on the day before. There was the same seat she had sat, and I sat directly behind it, with the strange expectation she would get on again.
She didn’t. Almost perversely, an old woman got on and sat in her place. I wanted to throw her down the aisle. Instead I rode the tram one stop to Strossmayerovo Náměsti and got off and walked to the metro station at Vltávska. It was warm and sunny and many young women and girls were wearing shorts. I looked for Danya among them, saw her in one face, another, a flash of her gold-colored hair passing along that shoulder, her neck. In that remote afternoon I saw her everywhere, but I couldn’t find her.
XVI
On Friday we went ahead with the show – and of course the police showed up. It was about midnight. There was a birthday party, with a DJ. From what Mirek and Standa told me later, a lot of people were popping pills and snorting coke. I didn’t see any of this because Reve closed the shatna that night (it was slow). He stationed me upstairs at the bar to watch the front door, and moved everyone downstairs to reduce the noise level. So all I had to do was just sit behind the bar and watch the door. One guy came up and passed out on the sofa; I ignored him and watched a movie on Reve’s laptop.
Then the police suddenly came in the door, the wide-shouldered types with the blue “Metro” overhaul-type police uniforms. Two of them marched right up to me. Without speaking, I just motioned for them to follow me downstairs. They ignored the passed out guy.
At the bar downstairs, the music was pumping and people were dancing under flickering blue lights. I waved Reve over, then went back upstairs. A few minutes later they all came up, the cops and Reve and Andrea. They checked Reve’s passport and asked to see his papers. Apparently they didn’t ask to see licenses, because after a couple minutes, they handed the papers back, satisfied, told Reve to turn the music down and to post his open hours on the door out front. Then they left.
We got out late, sometime near dawn. I remember talking with Standa about the police. He was worried. “Next time if the police come,” he said. “they could file a complaint with the magistrate.”
So the next night, Saturday, we all held our breath. That evening it was “Fresh n’ Flesh,” an art exhibition organized by students, young artists, actors and musicians. Their leader was a young Czech woman, annoyingly supercilious and dishing out orders to the staff. But overall it was a good night. There were paintings, films (it was nice, I might add, to see movies being played again in the old movie theatre); stage performances, including one skit where someone dressed as an astronaut and, with Thus Spake Therasthrusta playing on the speakers, planted the Czech flag on the moon (a nod, I think, to the Czech comic sketch Zimmerman, who "discovered the North Pole," "invented the light bulb," etc. Now the Czechs, not Neil Armstrong, were the first on the moon.
After that there was a dance party.
I had a slight crisis in the shatna that night. We’d managed to get everything moved back into the club after the city inspectors’ visit, but apparently in the process some of the coat racks had been lost or stolen. So when we got busy that night I didn’t have enough coat racks. One of them actually broke, snapped, because I had overloaded it. Reve came in and we sort of jury-rigged it. After that I just started piling the coats up on a table. When I had over 75 coats I just started turning people away. They weren’t happy about it, but I didn’t care. It wasn’t my dream to be a perfect shatna boy, and when they looked in and saw the colossal pile of jackets dumped on the table they understood and walked away.
I got a bit too drunk – it was hard not to on those late nights. There was a blonde girl with a sharp profile sitting on the steps going down into the theatre. She and her date were smoking cigarettes and ashing on the floor. Everyone did this and by then the stairs were littered with butts. For some reason I got angry and took it out on the girl and her date. Then I started sweeping up the butts. She came over and said she was sorry. “We appreciate your job,” she said earnestly. That made me want to get the hell out of there and back to Turkey more than ever; I think that’s why I got mad in the first place, to be honest. I was starting to “lose my identity” on those late nights, hanging up coats and sweeping floors, while everyone else was enjoying themselves. After that I saw the girl and her date sitting at a table. They pointed to the ashtray, where they were carefully aiming their ashes, and smiled.
As it turned out, the cops didn’t come by, and the show ended relatively early, like maybe three or four. After the people left, we all sat at the bar and had our own small staff party. When I took the shatna money up to Reve, he counted it up and gave me half, and later I learned he’d made enough to pay his staff and his electric bill.
Our relief was short-lived. The very next day Reve told me one of the women in the building (not the ones who liked him) had filed a complaint with the Prague 10 municipality, and had posted a notice in the building describing how Reve had “deviously” moved everything out of the building before the inspection, and was now continuing to do shows “under the city’s nose,” in short telling about all that had happened.
“You should talk to her,” I said.
“Well, it’s not just her,” Reve said. “There’s a few people, and now she’s trying to get the rest of the building to turn against me.”
I suggested inviting the neighbors to a show, perhaps even giving them VIP seats.
“If it were only that simple,” Reve sighed.
“If you could talk to that woman,” I said. “Maybe you could work out a compromise.”
“She doesn’t have to compromise.”
The next weekend was the weekend, the Aqua Sky show, the weekend that was supposed to bring in three times more than what Reve had made on the New Year’s Eve show. This was money in the bank, that Reve was counting on. He’d looked forward to this for months, and now it seemed, forces were at work to once again snatch away the security he was working for.
For now, it seemed, the cops were sure to come – 300 people! – there’s no way to keep a show of that size quiet, and surely it would last all night into the next morning. But if the cops came again, this time they could close the doors, hand him over to the local courts to pay a big fine – in effect, shut him down.
We knew that the neighbors, though nosy and uptight, were within their rights to complain. As Reve pointed out, they had the upper hand. Of course, I had selfish reasons for siding with Reve. Not only was he putting me up, but also, one night, after we’d had a few, in a sentimental mood Reve indicated, if all went well, it might be possible to “set aside” a little money to help me get back to Turkey (but I didn’t count on this; he had enough problems; as it turned out this 'set aside money never materialized, but that's nothing).
But it wasn't just that. I think it's important to add that, on the good nights, like the Fresh n’ Flesh show, it was like – to me anyway – the ghost of old Prague were roused in that theater, and Reve was helping bring it back. Like the shows when people brought their own lighting, changed the atmosphere to a misty blue or New Orleans red, for example, and when the artists arrived with their canvases they could hang them on the walls and change the atmosphere that way; and of course with each show the music was always changing, from old Bohemian folk to break beats to drum and bass to punk, to jazz, to reggae and hip hop, and so on. It’s a shame, looking back now, that I didn’t really have much time to soak it in – meaning, absorb those nights enough to really repaint them with the proper shading, vividness, that the reader would probably like. But I was busy in the shatna most nights, and usually drunk besides.
Still, there were the good shows, the good nights, and for those, I really hoped Reve could pull through.
XVII
The following week was sunny but the city was humid, the air thick with distant rolling thunder and the sound of sirens. I'd received a brief message from the school to "drop by." I was afraid it was about my visa. With a deep breath I went to the school. As it turned out they just wanted me to sign a payslip I’d forgotten to sign the month before. After work, I went to the Zaba but there were only a few people. Lenka and Kuba were back from the reggae festival though. Lenka hung a Jamaican flag they bought at the festival from the ceiling near the bar, and for a while I sat with them and they told me about the festival, and Kuba went to You Tube to find some of the reggae groups they’d seen. Then later they pulled down the big screen and showed everyone photos they’d taken. That was pretty common at the Zaba. People who went on holiday or to festivals came back and showed pictures – often a lot of the Zaba crowd went on excursions together – and everyone drank beer and laughed and talked about the pictures. That evening the bar felt lonely though; Lenka and Kuba and a couple of other people talking with Jirka at the bar. So I left while it was still light out, and walked down Donská Street past the Vietnamese potraviny, where inside the daughter of the owner sat behind the cash desk, stretching with boredom.
I went down the hill to Grěbovká Park, with a Colette novel I’d found in a local bookshop. I decided to check how the grapes were doing in the vineyard. It was a sort of occupation I’d picked up last summer. I’d gone in the winter, when everything was all frozen and dead, then returned at intervals throughout the spring, watching the vines begin to creep around the iron rods, exploding into bright green in mid-summer and finally at harvest time, at Tomáš’ suggestion, I went to Náměstí Míru, where borčák, or virgin wine; from the vineyard was served in little plastic cups, the first hint of autumn in the air. That evening after I left the Zaba three men were still at work near the entrance to the vineyard. They were working on a new gate and wall. The wall was white plastered and run up the steps alongside the vineyard leading to the park at the top of the steps. Some sections of the vineyard had been dug up to allow for a stone pathway that wound through the vineyard, as well as a kind of raised section, where fresh vines had been planted. The rust-colored rods rose up from the soil, oddly naked, while the rest of the vineyard was in full summer bloom, the red and white grapes already hanging from the leaves. I sat on the new stone pathway up near the top of the vineyard. One of the workers saw me but he didn’t seem to mind. The pathway was crawling with ladybugs, and the air was thick and warm, but the silver chant of birds lightened the air, mingled with the drifting vine leaves. The sky over Nusle was a pensive grey, as though about to rain, but the rest of the city still basked in lazy sunlight. I felt some of the loneliness and depression I’d felt at the Zaba lift, there in my Colette vineyard, and entered a more humid, fragrant world. I thought about the summer before visiting the vineyard each day, and feeling good about the growing vines. After the borčák (which was good but too sweet, almost syrupy, red and white both), I felt a little bit sad but in a good way. My students and friends at Zaba and Konspirace said it was impossible to find truly fresh borčák since it ages within minutes, an hour at most. I read my Colette book for a while longer, then put it away and smoked a cigarette. It was those moments I tried most to appreciate, Prague spring, sitting outside in the vineyard in the dusk; the soil, still moist from the weeks of rain, had a fecund, slightly moldy scent, the air a color of melting bronze.
Things were up and down with Sugit. One night I came home from the Zaba drunk and we had an argument, I don't remember what it about. The next day we were OK though. Another night his girlfriend stayed over and I met her. She was older than Sugit, in her thirties, a dark-complexioned, Asiatic woman, but but friendly. We were both shy around each other but pleasant. In the morning they left before I woke up. And a night or two later the front door got jammed somehow and Sugit and I worked together to fix it and we joked together while we worked. The next morning he had to report to the migrant camp.
He was up very early, like four a.m. I heard him getting ready but went back to sleep. When I woke up to go to work he was already an hour gone. He returned that evening with a 30-day visa. Nikash had gone to the camp a couple of weeks before. I asked if Sugit had seen Nikash and he said no.
Nikash finally returned sometime at the end of June, he’d been there about three weeks. He was outwardly buoyant and full of his smiles as always, but as always despondent about his visa and general situation. This time, like Islam before, he’d been issued a seven-day visa. He thought about going to Italy. “Here fight is finished,” Nikash said.
Actually there was one good thing going for him. His girlfriend had come around, after all. Nikash credited my advice. “You tell me no call to her and you are right!” he said, one evening. “She call me and apologize.” They were back together again, and Nikash thanked me for advising him against killing himself. Not to pat myself on the back; I don’t think he really meant it, killing himself, he just has a very dramatic personality. In the evenings the girlfriend, I just remember her as “Honey,” since she was also shy and we didn’t speak except in pleasantries, came over and sometimes cooked Thai food and sometimes she came in the afternoons and I would slip out and leave the flat to her and Nikash.
Neither of the brothers, nor I, had heard anything from Islam since he left for Italy. I thought, a little guiltily, about emailing him now and again, but I was too absorbed by my own worries. Any day now it seemed the floor of my comfortable existence could drop. The police would knock at the door, or else the school would call and say they could no longer employ me without a visa, something else. Visions of a life like Aiden Greenworth’s, scrounging, sifting trash even for a few crowns, sleeping in the park, tempted me not at all. Not that my life was much better, but at least I had a roof and a steady paycheck.
As the summer wore on the anxiety rose and fell with the heat, the rain, and passing days. Mostly I tried not to think about it. I even welcomed rainy days, cloudy days, which almost seemed to offer a place to hide from my troubles; I could hide out at places like the Bagel by day and the Zaba by night. The days were humid, almost tropical, and the trams were sweaty and crowded. I found myself looking for Danya on those trams but I didn’t see her again.
In the evenings the summer storms came back and drenched the streets. The cobblestones on Donská Street disappeared beneath torrents of water. Often we stood at the door of the Zaba and watched people running up the hill to catch the tram, or else others across the street who, also under cover, watched the rain with us. We heard there were floods in Moravia and that twelve people had died, and in the bar we watched the news, and I heard Jirka talking with Ondrej and some other people about the floods. There was a big summer festival in Slovakia too where the big tent had collapsed and some people were killed and we talked about that too and looked at pictures on the Internet.
Kuba and Lenka always made me feel better, lighter. We put on reggae music or a new favorite, Dknob, and listened to the music and sang together and sometimes Kuba bought shots. Ondrej usually came in after work and we talked at the bar for awhile. Even Danny Boy found a new job, part-time at least, but he wasn’t sure how long it would last. He said he had also been going to see a psychiatrist to try and sort out his head and emotions.
Most nights I stayed until about ten or so and then headed back to the flat, and the brothers would be cooking dinner. One evening I asked Nikash the Bangladeshe word for ‘brother’ and he said “Dhada,” and so after this sometimes I called him and Sugit “Dhada” and this amused and pleased them.
“We are the same!” Nikash proclaimed. “We must fight. Cannot get visa. We must go out!”
One evening Nikash told me about a lawyer he’d heard about, somewhere in the center, who could secure a visa “guaranteed” if you paid 25,000 crowns. He offered to take me to the lawyer. But it sounded shady to me, and besides, I didn’t have the 25,000 crowns.
Why didn’t we just leave, seek for active solutions, instead of just lingering over the same old “fight?” On my side, it was easy: I just wasn’t ready or willing to face the realities of my situation; it was easier to hide, to drift, to see myself as the romantic vagabond (reading my Colette!). The simple fact was I didn’t want to leave.
The brothers’ situation was different. Both, like Islam, had come to Prague for very practical reasons: better work, better money. Sugit had dreams of making enough money to return to Bangladesh one day and care for his parents in their old age. “In our country,” he told me, “we take care of family. I tell father, ‘You don’t worry. You take care of me when I was boy, now I take care of you. You don’t need work.”
Nikash and his girlfriend, who also had visa problems, were thinking about sticking it out long enough in Prague to get enough money somehow to one day move to Thailand, where she could be nearer her family.
So in both cases, the brothers saw staying in Prague as a means to an end, that end being family, but didn’t want to go home empty-handed.
XVIII
The meeting with the neighbors was set for a Monday evening, the week of the AquaSky show. Reve politely indicated that I should get lost while the meeting was taking place (it would be Reve, Andrea, Standa and Mirek, along with the neighbors), but I helped with preparations. We cleaned the whole place up, upstairs and down, brought up an extra table and chairs, and a beer keg that was still half full, along with a few bottles of wine. A few paintings were left over from the last show (the artists hadn’t come back for them yet), so we hung these conspicuously downstairs in case the neighbors desired a tour.
That evening I went to the u Rozjeta Zaba, a bar down the street, and had a few beers until the meeting was over. Then I went back to the club.
Reve was glowing. Turns out the meeting had gone better than he expected. The neighbors agreed to let the AquaSky show go forward, in exchange for a promise not to have any more techno shows. Reve agreed to keep the music down after midnight, and if the neighbors had a complaint, they could call Andrea on her mobile – rather than the police.
It was the meeting itself that made the difference. Most of the residents on the floor directly above the club were elderly, had lived in the building for years. They were lonely. They felt disregarded, disrespected. So when Reve invited them down, served them wine and, with Andrea and the boys translating, listened to them, they were charmed, subdued, appreciative. That was what they wanted: someone to tell them what was going on, to seek their approval. They were, in granting it, nearly magnanimous.
So we went about preparing for the big weekend; Reve was in a good mood. This was to be, he said, the weekend that , if all went well, would finally put him on the map.
“And then I could think about having a normal life again,” he said.
Reve stocked up for the weekend: a dozen kegs of beer, six Staropramen 12 and six Gambrinus 10; two dozen cases of wine, a dozen bottles of vodka, another dozen of Bacardi, those were just some of the bigger purchases. Over the weekend I know he ran out at least once, and he and Standa had to make emergency runs to the non-stop brewery in Prague 9, as well as to the potravinys.
I, of course, was in the shatna, but because so many people were coming, I had help from the old guy David. As I said before, he was a talky old fella, with merry eyes and a drinker’s red nose and cheeks. He’d do just about anything for a spot of rum, “holy water!” When you handed him a glass, he’d beam, look heavenward and cross himself. “Holy water! Holy water!”
In the shatna he was more of a distraction than a help, although for a time he did the cash desk and tickets while I hung and organized the jackets. But as the evening wore on he got drunker and talkier and I took over. Still, I came to respect him that night – I and the others – for a nearly 70-year-old retired pensioner with a bad heart he hung in there. He stayed all night, both nights, was even there after I pooped out and went upstairs. One girl beerily asked, “Is that your father?” to me, but she was just being drunk and cheeky.
That Friday there were six DJs. Later on I learned that AquaSky came on about 2 am, and I missed it, which disappointed me, the boys had built them up so much, but we were still pretty busy in the shatna. Everybody worked that night. The old guy David was also assigned to look after the toilets, which got downright rotten on those busy nights. He came back from re-stocking the toilet paper and told me people were shooting up in the toilets. That was no surprise. Over the course of the night, some people came to resemble zombies, their faces blue and gargoylish, eyes rolling, with their mouths in a frozen grimace. It was even worse the following night, Saturday night. Even more people came, nearly 200, and they got all coked up. There were more DJs – Mittik, Dan Vandal, I remember these names from the program – and the stage was stacked with something like 20 TV monitors and there was a multi-media light show. But again we were too busy to really watch.
Sometime near midnight the cops came – but not because of the show. Some of the “guests” were outside on the sidewalk, drunk and raising hell in the classic Czech fashion. Reve, Andrea and Mirek took care of the cops, agreeing to keep things under control. Reve himself nearly got into a big fight that night. He told me later he walked by a table where people were openly doing cocaine. He’d had a few drinks by then himself, but he told me it “irritated” him to see them doing it so openly right in front of him. There was a confrontation, but then Mirek and Standa suddenly appeared and separated Reve from the offenders, and the boys escorted them out and that was the end of it.
The party wore on and on. Sometime after 6 a.m. the power abruptly went out (the circuits overheated). I was upstairs in the bar by that point, laying on the sofa, exhausted. I have a memory of daylight being visible, a pink-blue spray, coming in through the glass doors. A fleet of taxis were waiting outside. As people left they swayed back and forth and tossed a farewell over the shoulder on their way out. Then suddenly the music came back on downstairs – the party was starting up again.
Speaking of those hours … cigarette butts, broken beer glasses, crushed coffee grinds, filters for the event scattered everywhere: these were the aftermath of those shows. And the lost hours, the feeling of weightlessness, when your day begins at 4, 5 p.m. and ends the next morning: you begin to feel like those cigarette butts and discarded fliers, somehow sticky and rumpled, useless. I think that’s what bound us together, the crew; like vampires, we kept the same hours.
Not everybody had the same contract agreements with Reve (as he once explained, he had a kind of “menu of contracts,” depending on what the organizer needed and could afford). So after some shows we had to come back the next day and clean up in time for the next night. Those were the most grueling days – between the Friday night and Saturday night shows. Sundays everybody was wiped out, but, as Reve noted, we would have four days off. After the AquaSky show, Reve seemed satisfied. Although we’d fallen short of the promised 300, still a lot of people had come, and they’d drunk a lot (thanks to cocaine). He’d made enough to cover his most pressing debts, pay his staff and stock up for the next weekend. That’s not to say he was in the clear. One of his allies in the building, perhaps George, sent an email saying that at least one of the building residents was still after him, had in fact hired a lawyer and was trying to get Reve from the tax angle (he owed a fair amount of back taxes). This pressured Reve all the more to get his affairs in order. The friend also reported that the other owners of the building were conspiring to get rid of Reve and George, cut them out all together and “take back” the theater.
“It looks like they will shut me down after all,” Reve said, gloomily. This was the Monday night after the AquaSky weekend and his euphoria had worn off.
“What can you do?” I asked.
”Keep fighting,” he said. He paused, “You know, I was just thinking –“ he brightened. “The guy who emailed me, I don’t think he knows about the meeting we had with the neighbors …”
“—old news?” I put in.
“Right,” Reve said. “Could be – old news.”
XIX
In the back room at the Zaba, hanging on the wall, was an old clock. The clock hadn’t worked for a long time, and so the time was always fixed at 1204. The hands were frozen at this time, now and forevermore, or at least until Jirka got around to fixing it. There also used to be a sign, a kind of banner in Czech. I asked what it meant one day and no one knew, until one guy told me it was an old sign for the People’s Socialist Party of Czechoslovakia, a relic of Communist times. A few days later I noticed the banner had been taken down and thrown out.
Up at the bar hang license plates collected who knows where. Behind the bar are multitudes of frogs, rubber and plastic, a cute nod to the pub’s name. People were always bringing in stuff, and so the pub had that feeling of being put together by the people who went there; everything was familiar, pohoda.
In Czech you say, “pohoda,” or “pohodička,” to mean everything is OK, or cool, or comfortable. The Zaba was pohoda.
It was all pohoda. My problem was I just got too pohoda, to the point of offense. It’s one thing to be a rude drinker, but quite another to be so abroad, because as a foreigner everything you do stands out, and people always remember you. Everything you say and do gets magnified. It had taken me a long time – too long – to learn that, at the cost of several good friends, not to mention my visa.
But having said all that, the folks at the Zaba in the end gave me a fair shake: Once a Czech guy from the neighborhood, who’d already developed a reputation as a leech, stole one of the barmen’s mobile phones sitting on the bar. A small posse tracked him down to a bar up the street. The guy denied stealing the phone and even tried to blame it me (since I’d been sitting next to him). They didn’t believe him and shook him down until he finally coughed up the phone. After that the thief, feeling a need to save face perhaps, went back to the Zaba and tried to start a fight with the barman he had stolen from. The fight was broken up, but not before the thief had broken his hand trying to punch the barman.
Everyone told me about it the next day. “We said,” Kuba told me later, “that James maybe is a little crazy sometimes, but we know he is not a thief.”
I was always glad he said that, even though I’d already apologized for the “Son of Stalin” night, and he had already forgiven me, it felt good to hear that despite what had happened in the past, he and the others there didn’t think the worst of me. And we still had many good times that summer.
July was humid, tropical, stifling. The days were long and hot, and the air heavy and thick. In the evenings the baked air changed and then the rains came fast and hard until the gutters splurged and rainwater leaped and gurgled down the streets. The pigeons (holuby) all gathered underneath the roofs of the buildings and we could hear them warbling, huddled thickly together. Sometimes we stepped outside the Zaba and stood at the entrance watching the rain and the people running to catch the trams or to get home. The girl from the pizzeria down the hill passed back and forth, regardless of weather, as she made deliveries to the hotel. Sometimes we called out to her, and she looked over at us from across the street and smiled and kept going. If she was in a hurry she took no notice at all.
On Jan Hus Day we all had a free day from work. Sugit cooked chicken curry with rice. Jajuna just ate the rice. It was very comfortable in the little basement flat; Indian music played from Sugit’s laptop while we ate. Sugit told me he talked with Islam the day before. He was working in his brother’s shop in Venice but was worried. “There are police controls everywhere,” Sugit said. “He worried about getting a visa. He say he try to call you.”
Nikash reported to the camp again the next morning. I didn’t know if this time I would see him again. Sugit said if Nikash couldn’t get a visa he would go to Italy to join Islam. Nikash very early in the morning, I got up for a brief goodbye before getting ready for work.
XX
… Mid-summer gave way to late summer. There were lessons with the Japanese student, who worked on the outskirts of the city. He wanted me to give lessons to his Korean wife. They spoke English to communicate. The wife was an opera singer in Dresden and was in Prague on holiday. We met for a couple of weeks; the wife was very cheerful and eager to learn, conscientious and our lessons went well
… Good news, by way of Tomas. The Czech government announced beginning in September complete amnesty to all persons living illegally in the country and who wanted to leave. That meant I could go back to America, or take a job I had been offered in İstanbul, without worrying about hassle at the border over my expired visa.
… Danny Boy was going downhill. Every time I saw him he was beyond drunk. He was emotional and headstrong by nature, and when he was drunk all his problems and drama boiled to the surface. He shouted, sang at the top of his lungs, had to be restrained from violence, and after he would collapse into a chair and fall into a deep sleep, his chin lying on his chest. Vick was becoming fed up.
“I can’t afford to sponsor him,” Vick told me one night, shaking his head.
“Oh, did I tell you?” Vick’s eyes gleamed. “I’m going back to Canada!”
“Wow! When?”
“September.” He saw me looking at him. “Yeah,” he said. “What the hell, can’t do any worse than I’m doing over here.”
XXI
Friday. In the afternoon a light rain fell on the city. I walked up Revoluční Street past the Opera House and down Na Příkope, the busy shopping street. A lot of people sat under umbrellas in front of McDonald’s. The clothes shops were not busy. At Wenceslas Square I saw tables on the pavement outside the cafes were empty. A waiter went from table to table straightening tablecloths and cutlery moved by the wind. A nun stood outside the police station taking up a collection. It was a big difference from summers past in Prague, when the square would be packed with tourists streaming from Old Town.
I was not productive that day. My early class had cancelled, my second student was tied up in meetings, and a third busy as well. I skipped the fourth, it being Friday and all. I went to the school and browsed the Internet. On Facebook a friend from Ireland had invited me to be friends. Another friend, from university days, and who was now working in Alaska, wrote asking how the hell did I end up in Prague? We worked on the student newspaper together, me an editor and he a cartoonist. It felt strange looking back; ten years gone. Perhaps in ten years my time in Prague would seem just as strange and vanished.
I was headed somewhere, and knew that the time was coming soon. I tried not to think about it, and talked about it incessantly. The departure gave the days and nights a feeling of fading glory, a hint of sadness and anxiety, but above all a rich excitement that comes with all departures. At the Zaba everyone treated me well, and I made a point to look out for myself and not cause trouble before I left. Looking back, I suppose the truth was I was afraid; not of leaving, but beginning all over again somewhere else. At a certain point in life you wonder how many more beginnings you have, and how many endings, and will this be the one you’ve been waiting for? I’d felt that way about Prague, that it was what I’d been looking for, a destination; I’d felt that way for a long while. To a degree, I still felt it. Would the next step – Istanbul, or America, wherever, be the true destination, or another sidestreet, a false ending, like those ducks swimming by against the current at the conclusion of “Beyond the AM Crowd?” Would the crisis that hero faced continue to be unresolved, left to the vague dimensions of the “peripheral world?”
A few nights later the Zaba was closed. It was closed all weekend, and then on Sunday night it reopened and it turned out they’d spent all weekend doing renovations. The walls were repainted, and now featured a series of frogs and a new room was being added in back. But I also noticed that the old clock in back, the one that perpetually read “12:04” had been taken down and thrown out.
XXII
I finally screwed up the courage to tell my schools about the visa situation, and that I was leaving for Istanbul. And there was no problem at all; they were completely understanding, and offered help if I needed it. They also arranged to pay me early in time for my departure. All they asked was that I provide a run-down of my classes for the next teacher. I guess it’s really true: what seems so difficult in our minds is often quite easy, if you just face it and take a step forward.
Sugit already knew I was leaving. He had a friend, a guy from Pakistan, who was to take over my bed after I left, or maybe even before, which would allow us to split the rent threeways and save money. Nikash was still at the camp, and we weren’t sure when he would be back.
One fragrant, humid morning I took the tram to Veletržní Street and had breakfast at the Bagel, while waiting for my class at a nearby pharmaceutical company. It was pay day so I treated myself to three eggs, sausage and potatoes, but I couldn’t finish it. I was too full of thoughts about the near future. It felt good to be thinking ahead again, for a change. I wondered how things were going for Islam in Italy. Probably about the same. Sugit said he tried to call him a few times but had not got through. It was too bad I didn’t get a chance to tell Islam about my plans, but I knew what he would have said.
Sitting in the café that morning, I thought about the time when we decided to go to Prague Castle. I’d been there many times, but Islam had never been there before, not in the whole two years he’d lived in the city. We walked through one of the entrances into the main courtyard, and waited in line to get into St. Vitus. As we waited Islam’s eyes roamed upward over the Gothic and Baroque spires, the intricate carvings, and I remember feeling happy that he was getting to see something of the city besides the bar and the Foreign Police. We went inside the cathedral, and the vast interior was dark-lit and somber-quiet, though there were many tourists. We checked out the various frescos, the icons, Jesus and Mary, the saints, and then went outside and walked down the hill past the Golden Avenue and to Mala Strana. The visit seemed to revive Islam. We walked down the hill in high spirits.
And then there were the times I went with him when Islam had to get things for the restaurant. He was always doing stuff like that, going to the markets to check out the prices for fish and chicken, fresh potatoes. “Fresh is best,” he would say. “Best for the health.” He usually bought everything for the bar, but he brought some of it home too. Unfortunately not enough people at the bar were buying his curry dishes, so he tried other things: vegetable sandwiches, egg sandwiches, a kind of chicken burger he slapped together, to serve as munchies for the regulars after they smoked their joints. They sold, but not nearly enough, and after that I think, along with his personal problems, is when Islam started to stop caring. He had a computer in the kitchen and very often, after I’d finished teaching, I dropped by the bar to see him. He’d be sitting at the computer, either reading the news (in English or Bangladeshe), listening to Bangladeshe music, or calling home. There were all these free Internet call services he was always digging up.
Sometimes I’d sit and discuss the day’s news with him. We talked of the war, of Afghanistan and Iraq, of the uprising by the militia in Bangladesh, of Bush, Bin Laden, and later, Obama. Then the bar manager told Islam to get rid of the computer. He said it was because he was afraid a health code inspector might drop by, but really I think it was because he thought Islam was spending too much time on the computer, or maybe he was trying to cut costs.
Later, when the bar manager wouldn’t pay him the back wages, Islam fumed about it privately, I know he did, but he didn’t want to raise a fuss. He told me he thought about making a call to the police and telling them that marijuana was being bought and sold at the bar, but then he discarded that idea. He didn’t want to make trouble. “Life is life,” he said.
XXIII
A Sunday in August, a crystal clear day, towering blue skies. The streets were dead: everyone in the neighborhood, in all of Prague for that matter, had fled the city for the countryside, the cottages and festivals.. In the evening the skies darkened again and a huge thunderstorm erupted and it rained all night.
The cafes in the center were empty; on Old Town Square the tables were set out on the square waiting for guests. What few tourists there were drifted about aimlessly, seeking amusement, diversion. In five years, I couldn’t remember such a slow season, but then the newspapers had commented on it too. Some said it was the crisis. Others said tourists had already seen Prague, and didn’t return because of poor city services, pickpockets, scamming taxi drivers, or that the strong crown had driven tourists further east, toward Bulgaria, Latvia, other cheaper holiday destinations. For me it was symbolic: for five years I’d been a kind of permanent tourist in Prague. The holiday was over.
In the abortive novel, “Beyond the AM Crowd.” In the closing pages of that story, the ex-journalist, having fled to Prague to escape his “crisis,” over war, of lost love, of “confusion,” and after his arrival, had sunk into drink and depression, had beaten a Communist, landed on the front page of Czech newspapers, went into hiding; after all of this, he goes to Zofin Island and watches a pair of ducks, who conveniently swim by, allowing him to ponder why they swam against the current rather than with it. In those closing moments, too, the unnamed hero reflects on the beauty of his fading city. Is it true what Woody Allen said that our creative acts, no matter how contrived or inspired, good or bad, are in fact an attempt to impose our dreams upon our everyday life?
Actually, for me the ending of the story was much simpler: I’d just been putting off making any choices. And as Woody Allen himself would say, "What do you want? It was my first book!"
At any rate, Prague really did shine in those last days, but if it shined I think it was in that light things take on when we know we have made a decision. With all the rain that summer, the city felt tropical, overgown. The trees in the parks and along the streets, in the squares, the junipers at Náměsti Míru, and in the vineyard at Grabovka were all full and rich, bright green so late in the year.
XXIV
Meanwhile, I was marking the days till my departure for Istanbul. One morning the following week, I woke up and a crisp wind was coming through the window. Fall! The long Prague tropical summer was finally over. With the new season, I really began to switch into travel mode. With the colder weather, people wore jackets more and more, which made the shatna busier than ever, so Reve got some more help, especially since he knew I was leaving. He actually pulled me out and had me help out by emptying ashtrays here and there, sweeping up broken glasses, etc.
Then, on one of my last weekends, a near-disaster struck. It was a private party, organized by some students; I don’t remember if they were from Prague or from the outskirts. At first it looked like it was going to be a dead evening – near midnight there were only about 20 people. I was sitting upstairs, just watching the door. I played music on YouTube and drank a beer. Then after midnight more people began to arrive, in threes and fours, so that by 2 a.m. we had a decent party going on downstairs. About 3 a.m. Reve came up and had me lock the front doors. It was about an hour later the craziness started. One of the organizers, this tall, thin guy, who earlier had sat at the bar rambling to me drunkenly about “how underground” our place was, “really underground!” he kept saying. Well, this guy came up, with this girl at his side, and tells me they are going across the street to the Zaba, which was also still open. I let them out, thinking it would be good to throw some business to the neighborhood (normally, a charitable thought, but at 4 a.m.?). About 15 minutes later, they came back and the girl (who by the way had been drinking absinthe) was upset about something, and I dimly gathered (to be honest at that time I didn’t really care, it was late) something had happened across the street. They went downstairs and came back up with small group of people (the guys at the Zaba later claimed it was “15 people” but I think they exaggerate, if only slightly). This small posse (I later learned it was a posse), all went across the street, telling me to keep the door open. Of course, looking back, I should have been a little quicker, but like I said it was late and I was just waiting for the party to be over. They all came back a few minutes later, and after I let them in, the leader, the tall, skinny guy, told me, “We have some problem at Zaba but we ---!” he made a gesture, slamming his fist into his palm. “We take care of!”
I happen to know the barman – all of them, in fact – at Zaba very well. I knew that evening the owner was out of town and that Bolek was working, Bolek! – who I or anybody who knew him knew was the last guy you’d ever want to hit. He’s one of those hopelessly gentle, likeable guys who work their shift at the bar day in, day out, without causing any problems.
“You hit Bolek?” was all that had time to register with me, but they were already heading back downstairs – seeking, as I was beginning to realize – the safety of the club downstairs, knowing that the upstairs would be locked. They said something, as they were going down, that Bolek had cheated the girl (the one who did the absinthe) and that there had been words exchanged, etc.
So that explained why, in a matter of moments, the people from the Zaba (I recognized most of them, there were about four or five) were standing outside on the sidewalk, looking really pissed off. Reve came upstairs at that moment and surveyed the situation. I hardly had time to explain anything (not that I knew that much) when suddenly the lights of a patrol car appeared outside. Reve at that point had opened the front door long enough to tell the Zaba folks that he wasn’t going to let them in. They wanted to go in and find the guys that had hit Bolek. Reve had to literally shove the door closed and lock it. “Turn everything off up here,” Reve instructed. “And don’t let anyone in.” I turned off the computer and blew out the candles.
But then the police were there, in full riot gear, with flashlights beaming through the glass. The Zaba folks were talking to the police, gesturing toward the club. I unlocked the door myself and let the police in (you could see they meant business) and they followed me as I went to get Reve.
“Go home,” he told me.
Outside I ran into Bolek. He was white as a sheet, and upset, but otherwise unharmed. I told him I was sorry about what happened.
“I know,” he said. “Tell Reve – I am sorry.”
I went upstairs to his flat, relieved. But I could still hear the commotion downstairs, so I got up and looked out the window. Down in the street, four stories below, everyone, or at least a large group, had assembled on the sidewalk. It looked like a scene from a movie. The police had brought the culprits up and they had all of them, a dozen of them, and their friends, and the Zaba people, were all talking at once and this great din rose up in the streets (even from the fourth floor high up you could hear it), a riotous clamor. In the other buildings the lights were coming on and the neighbors were looking out the windows. Outside the first blue streaks of dawn were spreading across the sky.
“Nothing happened,” Reve said later. This must have been the next afternoon, when we were having lunch at a restaurant near the club. It turned out the police asked Bolek if he wanted to press charges against the guys that hit him. Bolek said no, he didn’t, and that was it. Reve shut the party down (he gave back the deposit because the contract stipulated the party would go on until 6 a.m. – after I filled him in on what had happened upstairs, he got angry and said he wished he’d known that sooner, he would’ve kept the deposit).
At first I thought Reve was angry at me for opening the door for the police after he’d told me not to let anyone in, but then again the police are not just anybody.
“They’d have crashed the door in,” Reve said. “And I could have sued them, but …” But of course he still wasn’t fully licensed, so his lawsuit probably wouldn’t have gone very far.
So the net result of the fiasco: it could have been worse. Nobody was injured, not even Bolek, he was just shaken up, nothing was broken or damaged, and even with the police visit and all the neighbors being woken up, at least for the moment no one was knocking at the door. Reve could even plan for the next week’s shows.
Over at the Zaba, people were still pissed off for the next week or so. Bolek himself shrugged it off. “Nevoli!” he said. “No pain!” The others, the regulars, were pissed because “15 guys” – again they were fixed on this number, as if anyone had time to count! – had come into their bar and hit their bar guy, and most of them weren’t even there when it happened, they just heard about it. What bugged them most, other than the odds, was the fact that we had locked the door when Bolek and his band of avengers had appeared on the scene.
I defended Reve, explaining that the assholes who hit Bolek were not Reve’s friends, just people who had rented the theater for the show, and who had got drunk and created problems at Zaba on their own. “How is Reve supposed to know what goes on at another bar?” I asked. “He was busy with the show downstairs, how is he supposed to know people are causing fights at another bar?”
And I explained that we had locked the door because we saw the police coming, and we didn’t want a fight to happen just as the police were showing up. It would have been chaos.
They still weren’t happy about it, but we had drinks and gradually, as the story got told and re-told, it started to settle a little better with people. I brought Reve over a night or two later, even though he always resisted going into the Zaba (a strange aloofness, one of the reasons people mistrusted him, I think) and he had beers with the same people who were cursing him a few nights before.
XXV
Nikash got a 30-day visa and got a job somewhere outside Prague in one of the villages. We also heard from Islam. He was working in his brother’s shop in Venice, but was having problems with his visa. “He say now he think he leave Prague too quickly,” Sugit said.
Hearing this added a jolt of apprehension about my journey to Istanbul. Was I too being premature? The thought of arriving in an unknown city, Istanbul, with virtually no contacts, and having to start all over again, made me look at my situation in Prague all over again. Prague was continuing to flash before my eyes like in old moving pictures. Everywhere lay memories, strewn like discarded dolls in streets and cafes and bars. A tram ride through Nusle, passing under the Vysehrad Bridge (“Suicide Bridge,” as the locals say), and past a hotel where friends of mine once stayed three years ago; the nearby theater, Divaldo na Fidlovačce, where across the street in an office building I had my first class. Past Náměsti Brátsi Sínku, the square with its shops and restaurants, where up the hill I shared a flat with two young American girls, and further on, other avenues and corridors with their own distinct scents and impressions.
I got off the tram at Palacek Square and walked through New Town. Traffic was light and the sky overcast. It was nice to walk without any particular destination, no appointments to keep. I could retire into my daydreams and fancies. Passing under the rubix cube-like dome of the National Theater, a gypsy man was selling copies of New Presence. At the tram stop an elderly blind woman asked me when the Number 18 tram was coming. It was coming just then so I helped her get on, and then rode it to Old Town, got out and kept walking until I reached the city library. Inside there was a café that sold and excellent roast chicken with buttered mashed potatoes and cabbage, all for like 70 crowns. I tried thinking about Istanbul as I ate but nothing came to my head. It was an afternoon for nostalgia, a season of nostalgia, and I think I held on to it as if it could slow down time.
But of course that’s impossible. The last couple weeks passed quickly, and by the middle of August I was packed and ready to leave. I was to arrive in Istanbul at the end of August, and begin teaching in September. I ran into Aiden Greenworth a few nights before I left. He was in a good mood. He’d found some prospects for work. It wasn't much but at least it was steady. And one of the girls from the hotel liked him and they had gone out a few times.
"So maybe things are looking up for both of us," Aiden said. "I know you, man. Man. You're going to go to Istanbul and you're going to get rid of 'Jim' and come back someday a healthy, bad-ass motherfucker! I know it, man!"
I wished him well, too.
And one afternoon, I ran into Danya again just off Wenceslas Square. She was on her way to work. "Istanbul?" she asked, her eyes glowing. She smiled. "So it is something new for you."
"Maybe you can come see me."
"Maybe," she said." Then she sighed:
"For you it must always be new."
… In the news that summer was the story of a young man, a Roma gypsy who drowned in the river. The young man had been traveling through the country with friends. Later, after his drowing, it was reported that the young man was a prince, descended from an old Roma family. In the news reports there were efforts to trace the man’s background, to verify whether he was a true prince or not. I ran the story by several friends, who seemed skeptical.
“Well, you know,” one of them said. “Every gypsy you meet will say he is a prince.”
I wonder what they would say about us, when we’re gone. People like Islam, Sugit, and Nikash. Like Liam and Aiden Greenworth. Or Reve. Or Mirka. Vick and Danny Boy. Vrata. Danya. Paquito Montana. Me. It’s best not to think about it and move on.
Systema, systema, we said. Home is best, we said. Life is fight, we said. But did we really believe any of that? Of course we did. Didn't we believe anything else, something more, say, delicate or higher? Hadn’t our travels and hardships taught us anything else than these tired bromides? I think yes, but I guess we just never got around to talking about it, and even if we had I don’t know how much we could have expressed, just as I can’t express it now.
The Prodigal, believe it or not, is still open. I don’t know how Reve manages, I heard from Andrea that he was looking for a part-time job, and was even pondering a move back to Ireland or Australia, but for now is hanging in there and more shows are scheduled. Vick did go back to Canada and is working for a car company. Last I heard, Aiden Greenworth was still in the neighborhood, batting 50-50 as always. Actually we keep in touch on Facebook. Danny Boy found another job and isn’t happy with it.
As for Islam ... After I left for Istanbul I heard from him. He was living in a flat with twelve other people in Italy. Nikash was with him. Initially, they had the same problems they had in Prague: no visa, no work. He enclosed in the email a picture of his wife and child in Bangladesh. It was the first time I'd ever seen them. The wife was beautiful, radiating an exotic serenity. The child is a spitting image of her father, the same fat cheeks and restive eyes.
"I trying to get home," he wrote. "Home is best."
Then I found Sugit on Facebook, and we stayed in touch that way. Islam wrote and said things were better, but he had no time for email. Last I heard, Sugit told me NIkash had found a job in Venice and got a visa, as had Islam, and that at Islam was at that time in Bangladesh visiting his wife and child. So I'm happy to say Islam did make it home after all.
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