Rameau's Niece (13 page)

Late that morning Margaret met with a white-haired professor of philosophy who spoke so quietly she had to lean very close to hear him. He had studied with members of the Vienna Circle in his youth, established himself as a distinguished university professor in Prague, then become an important dissident, a teacher with no post, an underground writer and translator, a man who chose not to emigrate, a political prisoner off and on for years. Margaret wondered if that was why he spoke softly, out of habit, the habit of not wanting to be overheard. She leaned toward him, grateful to listen to this gentlemanly figure, cultivated and generous. Frail and ancient physically, he was so robust spiritually that his hushed, weak voice was irresistible. He did not blame the Allies for giving Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Why didn't Beneš fight? Beneš had one of the best-equipped armies in the world! Margaret, in her entire life, had never heard anyone say such a thing, not any Democrat, not any Republican, not anyone. He loved "The Star-Spangled Banner," calling it "almost as nice as 'The Marseillaise.'" Margaret had never heard anyone say he liked "The Star-Spangled Banner." He quoted from Shakespeare, from
Henry VI,
a play Margaret had barely heard of, much less read. He quoted from Henry James and Jane Austen and Balzac and Auden and Wittgenstein. He was funny in a way that forgave the victims of his wit, and easily, comfortably learned, as if these books and these ideas were his chums (hers, too!). He drank his coffee and murmured gorgeously. She wanted to reach out and take hold of his hand. If Americans were tolerant, unaffected, sensible—if Americans were really American, Margaret thought—they would be like him.

Instead of discussing the revolution itself, he seemed to be enjoying the freedom to chat afforded him by his revolution. "Look," he said at one point, pointing to an empty bracket on the wall. "That's where they used to keep their cameras." Then he went back to discussing the state of Czech theater in the seventies. Margaret had spent so many late nights with so many graduate-student revolutionaries that this real revolutionary seemed almost impossible to her. He told stories about a Czech surrealist poet and remarked on Slav theorists between the world wars and their influence on French structuralist thought and then taught her a limerick by Edward Lear.

There was an Old Lady of Prague, whose language was horribly
vague;
When they said, 'Are these caps?' she answered, 'Perhaps!'
That oracular Lady of Prague.

This somehow led to a quotation from Karl Popper, an unfashionable philosopher of science, so far out of the circuit that, just for a moment, Margaret thought her new friend was referring to a children's book about penguins. "Popper once wrote that the greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature perishes, philosophers continue to talk, sometimes cleverly and sometimes not, about the question of whether this world exists." His voice wavered. His complexion was pink and white, as delicate as a girl's. He smiled and patted her hand reassuringly.

"It is the human condition," he said, "to theorize and criticize theory. It is our mechanism of adaptation to the world. Like flippers. Or a sharp beak. Like a giraffe's long neck!" He laughed, almost inaudibly. He coughed for some time. Margaret leaned closer, afraid the old man would die, his lovely white hair tipped forward into the dark espresso.

"To see is not to believe," he said finally, smiling again. "To see is to philosophize."

Margaret was supposed to speak at the Charles University, not under the auspices of the history department (still staffed by professors who had learned their stuff under the Communist regime, while more independent-minded professors swept floors), but by an independent group of students and intellectuals who had organized a series of talks by visiting scholars.

Margaret was shown around by one of the students, a small, earnest girl named Anna, who took her on a streetcar to see "the real Prague," apartment blocks from the twenties, black with coal dust.

"These buildings could be beautiful, very beautiful, if they were restored," said Anna. "But the Communists would rather tear down and build a new, ugly building."

"How capitalistic of them," said Margaret.

Anna looked at her in disbelief. "But why?"

Margaret was silent. How did one answer such a question? It was like asking why people breathe. Why
do
people breathe? Margaret thought.

Then Anna took out some photos she had in her purse. "This is the trip my boyfriend and I took to Paris," she said.

Margaret smiled as she remembered her first trip to Paris. There would be snapshots of the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, the Seine.

"This is Jim Morrison's grave," Anna was saying. "This is another view of it, and here's the back, and this graffiti we liked very much..."

Jim Morrison was buried in Paris? Well, he would be, wouldn't he? Maybe she, Margaret, could contrive to be buried in Prague. No, no, that was Kafka territory. She'd have to find her own city. Bridgeport, perhaps.

She looked at Anna, to whom Jim Morrison meant something. In Prague, rock still meant something. Not just nostalgia or marketing spin-offs or pretentious videos, but something.

That night Anna took her to the Stalin Monument high on a hill overlooking the Vltava. The monument itself, a statue of Stalin almost as large as the Statue of Liberty, had been torn down in the early sixties. Underneath it, a warren of tunnels and concrete reinforced bunkers had been discovered: a bomb shelter and command center built in the fifties as a home for the elite after Armageddon. The new Czech government had turned it over to a group of students who had turned it into an art gallery and rock club called Totalitarian Zone.

Margaret stood rather uncomfortably in the cold cave of a place. Tomorrow she would deliver her talk. She was supposed to inform a roomful of people who had recently risked their lives in pursuit of the ideals of the Enlightenment about the Enlightenment. To tell a group of Czech students about an erotic bastardization of Locke when they were in the midst of an authentic realization of Locke's ideas—this was absurd, this was preposterous, this was chutzpah!

Water dripped from the concrete beams onto the dirt floor. Papier-mâché grotesques, huge murals, metal sculptures, and mobiles of standard SoHo design sprawled through these dark catacombs, lit by bare, hanging bulbs. Whether the works were interesting or not, Margaret could not tell because there, underground in Stalin's abandoned legacy of a bunker, they were more than interesting—they were inspired. This was a celebration. The kids lounged against piles of cement rubble, and in spite of being dressed in generic European semipunk style, they did not look like German or French youth, angry and disgusted, posturing selfconsciously. They weren't angry or disgusted. They were delighted.

Margaret stood beside a sculpture—boots and catsup bottles hanging from ribbons and wires. She began to feel more comfortable, that she somehow belonged here, that there existed a certain affinity, not so much between her and the students as between her and their exhibits. With a flood of relief, Margaret realized that she was expected not so much to instruct her betters as to be another colorful part of the celebration. Her talk, which she had worried would be irrelevant and trivial, an offense to the real business of democratic revolution that was taking place, was important simply because it was possible for it to be given. Oh, thank God, Margaret thought. I'm just part of the fun, an example of Western culture to be freely displayed.
Ich bin eine
catsup bottle.

She was an American abroad, and no one minded. In Prague, people liked Americans. Intellectuals liked Americans. Intellectuals in America didn't like Americans. And there was Anna, an authentically revolutionary student, carrying in the pocket of her black leather jacket a Penguin edition of
The Princess Casamassima.
Margaret gazed at the sculptures and listened to the crude Euro-rock coming from the stage. The Enlightenment lived.

The lecture went smoothly. She talked, they listened, and Margaret was relieved. She read from
Rameau's Niece,
then spoke, carefully reading her notecards, on which she had written every single word she would say, underlining those she ought to stress.

Was
Rameau's Niece
a libertine novel? she asked them. Or was it a philosophical tract exploring empiricism? Or was it both? In the eighteenth century the desire to know was wedded to desire itself. In order to fool customs officials, smugglers placed pages of
Beneath the Naughty Nun's Nightgown
between pages of geography books or the Gospels. This interlarding was called "marrying," an amusing and rather suggestive name, Margaret said.

Pornography was used to discredit the clergy and aristocracy as decadent, perverted, impotent, and scrofulous. Philosophical, political, and pornographic works were lumped together by the book trade, which called them all "philosophical books." Why? Because empiricism and philosophy itself are both sensuous and sensual. The desire to know is desire.

Her audience, about fifty students and writers, seemed satisfied but rushed immediately off to a reading by Allen Ginsberg which had been inadvertently scheduled to overlap with Margaret's talk. Margaret sighed with relief that her performance was over. What nice, well-mannered revolutionary young people, she thought, watching the students file out. And she went alone to lunch in a kosher restaurant, the only one in Prague, located in what was once a synagogue. Above the doorway was a framed photograph of Barbra Streisand.

M
ARGARET SAT
at breakfast and consulted her
Baedeker's
and planned her day of sightseeing. She loved guidebooks. Even the idea of a guidebook appealed to her: a vade mecum, so sure of itself, so accommodating and considerate. Come with me and I will reveal to you the house that Jack built, the house that Jack slept in, the house from which Jack was expelled by a rival political faction, the house where Jack died a violent and untimely death. I will tell you the architectural significance of the house of Jack's mistress. I will tell you where you are, and I will tell you why you are there.

It was her last day in Prague, and she planned to use it wisely. First she would go to the Castle, which lay on the other side of the Vltava, then back again across the Charles Bridge to the Old Town. Margaret had not been sightseeing like this in years, and she thought again what a strange and strangely satisfying activity it was, superficial yet intense. She turned down corners of the guidebook's pages; she marked different buildings with a red pen. She studied maps in anticipation of studying the city. It was true that information never lingered for long in her mind, but every fact, all knowledge, was welcome for a visit. Sightseeing was a pure, sensual encounter, a subtle, deeply moving flirtation with a stranger.

She got into a taxi, which backed up at dizzying speed for two blocks, then shot off down a side street in what seemed to be the wrong direction, twisted and turned past beautiful, run-down buildings, baroque palaces, and turn-of-the-century apartment houses, then across the river to a wooded park and up a long hill toward the Gothic spires of St. Vitus's, the huge cathedral within the Castle walls. In the square, she got put, paid, and stood looking around her at the palaces, large and damp in the gray morning.

"Excuse me," said a man, coming up beside her. "I noticed your guidebook there. Are you American? Can you tell me what this is? Sorry to bother you, but I'm from New Jersey."

He was balding and wore a round-collared raincoat. He shivered and smiled, and even though he was from New Jersey and was, in all probability, a terrible driver, Margaret handed him the guidebook.

"That's the Schwarzenberg Palace?" he said, pointing. "Thanks, thanks so much. I should have brought one of these. You certainly can't get one in Prague. I'm here on business," he said, and Margaret feared he would begin a lecture on how the Czechs didn't know the first thing about making a profit. "But I snuck away this morning. I couldn't help myself. I've never seen a city like this."

"Neither have I," Margaret said.

Then they parted, he heading toward the Castle gate, she to the art museum in a cold, drafty palace staffed by stern, glaring Slavic matrons.

Margaret leaned forward to stare at one painting that struck her as curiously chàotic. A naked, expressionless Mary Magdalene, tresses trailing luxuriously over her breasts, was swarmed by cherubs, winged naked babies perched on her back, straddling her shoulders, fat cherub feet planted on her head. On their identical faces were identical expressions—disappointed, doubtful, tiny mouths all turning down on one side in an odd, halfhearted frown. One cherub pointed up, but toward what, it was not clear.

A thickset museum matron appeared suddenly, from nowhere, waving her heavy arms at Margaret, charging, a round, female, uniformed bull. Her face was closer, close, her nose red from the cold. Fine red veins crisscrossed her cheeks. She will arrest me, Margaret thought. Who now do they put in the jail? the little Belgian judge had asked. Why, tourists!

The matron said something, gesturing toward the painting, then began making noises like an alarm, then melted back into the shadows, where a folding chair draped with a sheepskin awaited her.

Margaret moved on past a Rubens portrait of a mountain of female flesh wrapped in a green snake, to which she was careful not to draw too close; past more matrons glaring dutifully from folding chairs; through large wooden doors and chilly echoing corridors. She bought some postcards from a woman downstairs and walked past a pile of coal, up the steep, narrow alley to the square.

Margaret heard the bleat of a trumpet. Around the gates to the Castle stood a large crowd, many of them schoolchildren. A group of five or six boys, about thirteen years old, their cheeks and the tips of their noses pink in the cold, were laughing and pushing each other. They began to move their arms, their hands, their fingers. They were deaf, Margaret realized, and were speaking to each other in sign language with the speed and exuberance of adolescence, shrieking with laughter, covering their faces in mock embarrassment, punching, shoving, and laughing again.