7 The Threat of Pigeon-fanciers

I reached Daniel K's doorstep in one of the dismally grey tower-blocked suburbs of Prague so typical of East-Central Europe - it could as well have been Warsaw or Poznan or Bratislava -  after the usual dance, getting on one tram, getting off a stop or two down the line and getting on another traveling in the opposite direction. Who knows, Daniel's apartment may well have been under surveillance in any case but better to be sure of one's own interests.

In another part of the city, on the fourth floor of an elegant Old Town building overlooking the Vltava, representatives of the State would be sitting outside the door of the playwright and former prisoner Vaclav Havel, where they would examine papers, passports, and register any visitors having the temerity to be sociable.

At that time there was no need to explain what people with doctorates were doing laboring on building sites, why university professors were cleaning windows or stoking boilers. Or why former officials were sweeping floors.  Havel had at some time earned a living rolling barrels in a brewery. Daniel, normally a journalist, cleaned windows.

Havel would become the country's President.  

Daniel would become it's Ambassador to Israel. 

'I saw Prečan,' Daniel told me as he placed a bowl of pasta on the table in front of me. 'You know, the historian. He was working as cloakroom attendant in restaurant. He seemed to be quite good at it, I got some feeling he was actually enjoying it.'
'Are you being watched here?' I asked.
'Well,' said Daniel, looking towards the curtained window,' there are always Tatras around, but who knows really?'

The Tatra 613, vehicle of choice for all secret police.

'Actually I heard that the the pigeon-fanciers club is under surveillance, and you know what a threat to the system they are. No joking, this is true.' A wide grin spread across his black-bearded face. 'All that shit everywhere, how is totalitarianism supposed to function efficiently!'

While we were still eating, there was a knock at the door. Daniel placed his eye against the spyhole, and then said quietly... 'Jan.' Turning to me he said 'Listen, be careful what you say in front of this guy, ok?'
Jan, a neighbor, had called by, it appeared, to return a record. He was a young man in his twenties, ebullient, delighted to meet a new face, especially one from the west. Did I like jazz? Who were my favorite musicians? Had I seen them live? Did I know this or that recording? Would I like to see his collection of records?

Daniel shrugged. 'Actually, he wants you to see his fishpond.'
'Fishpond?'
'He's got a fishpond in his living room,' said Daniel wearily.

And so he had. Jan's apartment was two doors away. He led me into his living room and sure enough, framed by four heavy beams of wood with a sheet of plastic in support, with pebbles and sand forming a floor and a small waterfall cascading down across some rocks, there in the middle of his room was a fishpond. Four or five goldfish moved contentedly about.

I stayed as short a time as possible in Jan's company, before the discussion moved away from Chick Corea's collaboration with Gary Burton and onto my collaboration with his neighbor Daniel the dissident.


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Daniel stared at me in disbelief. 'You'll never get anywhere near him! The road will be full of fucking Tatras!'
'All I want to do' I said, 'is drop this into his letter box. If it's big enough.' I stood holding out the half bottle of Irish single malt whisky. 'If there's nobody watching of course.'

But of course there was someone watching. I had taken a taxi from the city center, for the airport, and asked the driver to go via the short road on the outskirts of Prague, where Seifert lived, to drop me at one end and wait for me at the other while I walked along past Seifert's large house. In front of it was a high mesh fence but with no sign of a post box set into it or behind, nothing which even resembled a post box. Where, I wondered, did he receive mail? But I didn't stop, I just kept walking as if I had no interest in the property because parked across the road was no black Tatra 613 with a couple of bored SB security men coating the interior with another layer of nicotine, but a police car.

'Do you like Irish whisky?' I asked the taxi driver as we approached the airport.
'I don't care which country it's from!' he said laughing. As I slipped out of the taxi I left the bottle on the back seat without saying anything and he drove off, stopping suddenly a few yards on, his door flying open.
'Hey man! Hey thanks, man!' he called, holding up the bottle - the famous Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, Nobel Laureate's bottle.

When a man like me travels far from home he wants to go back with something in his pocket.
Franz Kafka - The Castle

I had my cobblestone.

6 the Kafka stone

They used to say that 'the air swirled with the molecules of suspicion.'

I had climbed the steps to Castle Square for the first time a year previously and then, as now, it lay empty but for a single uniformed figure standing in front of a sentry box on the far side, in front of the building. On that first occasion, struck by the novelty of being alone but for a communist soldier facing me with a gun at his side, a hundred meters or so away, I had walked steadily towards him. The response had been no more than to see him pull to attention, snapping his weapon to his side, before I was halfway across, while he continued to look at me impassively. I admit, the pace of my heart as well as the rhythm of my step, changed momentarily. I stopped a few yards in front of him and nodded. Come on, it's just us two, I thought, here alone on the square on a pleasant evening, you might as well acknowledge a fellow solitary, duty or not.  But evidently satisfied that I was a mere wanderer with no apparent intent to storm the castle, his gaze moved away from mine to somewhere beyond the square. He remained firmly, unflinchingly, at attention. Your commanding officer would be proud, I thought.

This time I walked towards the side of the square, around to the far side, the sentry's eyes following me until he too lost interest. A different face, indifferent to me. I wanted to say to him something about a young man, blonde hair, green jacket over shoulder - to 'let him have a couple of rounds'.  I passed by the castle and headed towards the tree-lined avenues beyond and the cathedral precincts.

For all I knew, young green-jacket was no more interested in my perambulations than anyone else would have been, if they'd been a visitor to the city. In any case he had a Scandinavian look about him, his blondness rendering him fairly noticeable. In the shadowed avenues beyond the cathedral he would, possibly, glow like a torch. But below the castle square had been the last I saw of him. In the late evening the trees offered an oasis of cool at the end of a stifling day and I lingered, indulging my sense of assurance before moving on, driven back towards the city by hunger and the need for a number 24 tram.

Situated within the castle and cathedral precincts, Golden Lane was originally built to house the Castle's marksmen, and later, it's craftsmen. Between 1916 and 1917 number 22 was rented by Franz Kafka's sister Ottla for him to work in.


I had done my own Kafka tour of Prague on a previous occasion, searching out views of his various apartments, the insurance building where he worked, taking walks through the same vaulted archways and twisting alleys that he, man and boy, would have taken. On a building in Maiselova Street in the Old Town there is a black bronze plaque commemorating Kafka's birthplace, a three dimensional portrait, rather too gaunt. In the entrance to Strašnice cemetery, a large board indicates, black letters on white, the way to the grave of 'DR FRANZ KAFKA'. It came as a surprise to find this obvious, tangible evidence of a writer who's work was yet still banned.

There is a small plaque, too, on the wall of 22 Golden Lane. Close to the house, work had been done on setting drains and several discarded cobblestones lay nearby. I knelt and picked up one of the small black granite cubes so typical of Prague's old roads and pavements and thought how likely it was that Kafka himself would have stepped on it, to and from the house. I slipped it into my pocket. I would, I thought, take something away with me, if not a filmed acceptance speech by the newly appointed Nobel Laureate for Literature, then at least a small part of Prague upon which his illustrious but proscribed forbear might very well have trodden.

And then, with my hand in my pocket,  I remembered the Irish whisky. Seifert's whisky.

5 The ticket

It was pleasant under the shade of trees in the park, but I was restless. I strolled to the end of Kampa and back again. I sat for a while with a beer.  I stood next to a statue of a kneeling girl while eating a sausage and listening to a large bosomed woman sing operetta to the accompaniment of the Czech Army band. There were girls in summer blouses and loose fitting T-shirts. It was mid afternoon and hot.

I took the double steps from the island up onto Charles Bridge and made my way back towards Nerudova, but this time not to Marta's apartment. Now would not be a good time to visit, unexpectedly or otherwise. Now I needed the clear spaces of the castle's precincts to insure for myself a safe and unfettered journey, eventually, on the number 24 tram.

On my first visit to Prague, a year before, I had taken a tram to the Sparta Prague football stadium, near where a woman called Hana, a school teacher, was providing me with a room, only to miss the stop. I'm normally good with maps. Show me directions once and that's normally enough, the map is logged as an image in my mind, but I expected the tram to stop by the stadium and it didn't, it continued to carry me deeper into the suburbs and I lost my bearings. I would have to get off as soon as possible and walk back. I peered through the tram's windows for memorable landmarks as we rumbled along, twisting and turning through the streets, and just when I thought, from the movement of other passengers towards the doors, that a stop was imminent and I could get off, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. Less than hour had passed since the airport bus had dropped me off in the city center. Was my visit being cut short already? By a stocky middle aged woman in a brown coat?

The woman, dressed like most others on that tram, said something briefly, curtly. I turned away to look out for the stop. The woman tapped me again on the shoulder, this time a little more firmly, and repeated what she had said before in the same deliberate, firm tones. I shrugged, reluctant to speak. This time she began to raise her voice, and I recognized the word 'policie'. I was going to be arrested by a mum, or at least be given up to the police by one.

In these years it was difficult to avoid being noticed for the westerner that you clearly might be, just from your clothes. Some time shortly before, a young man had crossed a wide boulevard in Warsaw to ask me, in Polish, where I'd found my Levi's. He was crestfallen when I replied 'Oxford Street'. Now, on the tram, whatever I was wearing made me evidently in need of a translator. A woman passenger leaned towards me and said something in German. 'Thank you, but I'm English,' I said.
'She wants ticket', replied the passenger. 'She is...official,' said the woman, trying to find the terminology.
'Inspector?'
'Yes, inspector'.

I had a ticket, but had crumpled it into one of my pockets without a thought, and had forgotten to have it punched in one of the tram's machines. I searched, conscious of the rapidly approaching stop. I rummaged, pulling out tissues and other scraps from every pocket. I had even forgotten what it looked like and began to fluster. 'My stop', I said. 'Next stop, my stop'. The official stared impassively at me. She then looked at my hand in which several old tickets from other countries lay, quite a collection, and dipped her fingers into them. She held a small green ticket up, looked straight at me, and pursing her lips, tilted her head slightly to one side.
'It's ok,' said my translator.

I managed to get off the tram just before the doors closed on me.

Now, slowly making my way through 'The Little Quarter' in the heavy warmth of a late August afternoon, I aimed to take my time and walk to Daniel K's, whose apartment I would be staying in that night before flying home. But not through any lingering fear of ticket inspectors. The young man with a green nylon jacket over his shoulder, who had bought an ice cream while I savored my cold frothy beer, wouldn't have any trouble keeping up with me at all - but I wasn't going to rush. Neither did I want a traveling companion to Daniel K's.