1 The Bridge

I am looking at an image of the crowds filling Prague's Charles Bridge and beyond as they followed, yesterday, the sleek black hearse containing the coffin of Vaclav Havel - propmaker, playwright, prisoner, president of his country who used a scooter to get around the castle, and godfather to a generation of dissidents, the man who articulated the restarting of 'the clock of history' in his atrophied, sullen and resentful portion of a rebellious Europe, son of an architect and the architect of the Velvet Revolution.
The crowd have gradually slowed to a stop behind the vehicle as it maneuvers to exit the bridge.  There are so many people on the bridge that it seems they might overflow the balustrades and cascade into the cold waters below.
Today it was Havel's funeral, the privately flown-in dutiful, politicians, princes, gathering in  contemplation of the tousled haired, Zappa-loving hero-poet-president, while his compatriots and their children, waiting outside in the damp chill in their thousands, planted fields of glittering candles and notes which simply said 'thank you'.

1984.

The bridge is empty. It's a warm, late evening in August, and for the third time that day I cross the Charles Bridge towards Marta's apartment on Nerudova, just below the Castle steps. The river flows peacefully and silently below, only the distant weir offering a murmuring  of sound.

I listen to my own footsteps.

The saints, looking down from the balustrades on either side, remain stonily mute. A man with a small dog is walking towards me, and though at that moment we are the only two people on the bridge he walks by without acknowledging my presence.  In the still and sultry air it seems that the whole city is either sleeping or has been abandoned altogether by it's citizens who have retreated to the cool lakes and trees and rivers of the countryside. It is August, the holiday month. Prague has been left to stew in it's own heat, it's light absorbed by the grey stone.

Once across the bridge I wait, leaning back against the balustrade, away from betraying lantern pools of light, looking back towards the Old Town and it's darkening shapes of dome and tower...looking for movement of dark on darkness.