by Gerald Huml
Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.
—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
I. Café Arco
The wood paneling was a comfort.
Though singed by the cigarette butts of Nazis
its dull hue collected thoughts of pea soup
and bread dumplings flooded with gravy.
The afternoon sun would pierce the windows
and warm the paneling and back tables.
I drank weak tea and read novels
till the light reversed across my table,
the waiters tolerating me not for what I ordered
but for the stacked coins becoming theirs.
The local intelligentsia and businessmen crowded
around me in the evening, ordering beer and food
and talking too fast for me to understand.
As always, before I left, my fingers
traced the initial M and the date 1922
carved waist-high into the paneling.
Under the table, the feel of the letter and year
warded off my hunger. I was thankful
for the café noise because with the smells
of pork tenderloin, fresh bread, and sauerkraut
my stomach rumbled and complained, not understanding
that this was a test to endure, a test to surpass.
I remember thinking that soon I would not
come here anymore, that I would be too weak
in the morning to read or get out of bed.
One day past that point I would order room service
and sip carefully from a flute of champagne.
II. Golden Lane
Backed against the castle wall the houses
were brighter than a cartoon and pleasing
in a Lilliputian way. As always, I walked close
to the doors and windows, hating the puppets
dangling in an embrace or crossing swords,
rejecting the crystal bowls and decanters, the toys
made from untreated wood painted simply but clever.
Once the chimneys emptied a perpetual fog
into the lane that choked with the putrescence
of burnt mercury and sulfur, the nigredo
wafting over the castle wall and down the grass hill,
making this line of houses spectral at night,
windows glowing a molten orange.
I counted down the house numbers and stopped
before the squat 22, the same one-story
where Kafka learned Hebrew and began
coughing blood. I was the base metal lead
looking into a shop window of propped books,
their covers shiny and foreign, save for one novella.
I continued walking, the tourists moving around me.
I hated their looks over my body, listening
as they passed to the words dünn, mince, thin.
They did not understand that alchemists worked
and still worked here, Kafka last century
and this century, that day, me.
III. The Astronomical Clock
This was why I came to Prague.
The two spears of the clock
neared the hour when I could give up tea and water,
ending nine days of iron-strong renunciation.
Eyes shut in the dark, head propped
against the headboard, from my hotel bed
I listened for the first bell from the clock tower.
One toll and it was daylight a week before,
standing with the other tourists as Christ
then the Apostles looked down on me one by one,
a procession I knew no one could join.
The last, eleventh toll, and I remembered watching
the movement of skeletal arms inverting an hourglass
then a cock flapping its wings, its long crow.
Milena, Milena. Different century, same story.
Same goddamned triangle where the woman is miserable
but won’t leave for a better life.
I thought this eating soup and a plain salad.
The next day, stronger, I walked again the flattened
cobblestones, the winding streets, daylight
creating deep shadows in Baroque and Gothic windows.
Under the clock tower again, this time studying
the Astronomical Clock fixed between Libra and Scorpio,
I thought how sunshine bores me, the clock’s circles
within circles keeping track of the moon and days,
the numerals and glyphs painted yellow on metal,
the morning shining off them better than gold.
IV. Wenceslas Square
Like the philosophy student Jan Palach,
I walked there. In the evening I joined the haunters
drifting against one another on the sidewalks,
looking for diversion in the casinos and alleys,
for hope or oblivion in the shops and clubs.
A woman passed out political flyers
in front of a hotel. She was a vampire
with her emphasized eyeliner, her jet-black hair.
I visualized her draining my throat as I approached,
clutching my wallet, elbow close in the stream
of humanity and pickpockets flowing towards her.
She thrust a cigarette in her mouth and lit it,
taking a break as the crowd carried me past her,
regret drying my throat at the square’s end.
Between the steps of the National Museum
and the monument to St. Wenceslas, I imagined fire,
1969 and a Charles University student pouring
gasoline from a bucket down his beautiful face.
With a match he ignited into living yellows,
stood firm beneath the steps with his arms wide,
determined never to scream, just burn,
but scream he did as a rocket over the pavement.
A tram dispatcher put him out with a coat.
Jan’s numbers were twenty-years old, third-degree burns
over eighty-five percent of his body. He spoke
for two days to the nurses and doctors. He explained
to the journalists about the note left in his room.
Tell them this was not a suicide. Tell them
I am torch number one. Tell them we are on the verge of hopelessness.
V. Charles Bridge
The crowd moved too slowly across the stones,
the mix of Czech, German, and French creating
such a cacophony that I nearly leapt from the bridge.
It was lunchtime, one of my last hours in the city.
A hat merchant dressed in bright harlequin
and masquerade eyes approached me, miming
a wall and pushing it over with an inaudible crash.
She then froze a smile and reached under her cape.
Hat in one hand, she exalted me with a curtsy
then rolled a fedora down her shoulders and into her hand.
I countered with a low bow and flourish, shook my head,
and moved from the crowd. The Vltava was bluer than usual,
gulls and pigeons circling and disappearing in the reflection.
The crowd threw them bread. The birds caught it
or dove into the water, survival cries
as their shadows flickered across the bridge.
As for me, I could not find the food I liked.
Nothing under the sun had taste or sustenance.
A young student read in the shade of a statue
that suited him, a bishop with a curled staff and beckoning hand.
With his glasses and mustache the student could
have been Max Brod reading beneath statue number 22,
last master number no human being can operate above.
It was then a pigeon crapped on my head,
the mess splattering my jaw and forehead.
Damn squab I thought, watching it fly, ignoring
the laughter of young Max as he offered me a napkin.
The bird circled the bridge and settled on the last statue.
Behind it, the west bank towers joined the church spires,
a background of needles against a noon sky
or wands raised aloft to channel the heavens.
Now I had something to write about, to live on,
something to contemplate and turn into gold.
