The boundless intimacy of strangers.(Prague Tales)(Critical essay)

Prague Tales, eds. John aBeckett et al; New Europe Writers, 2007, 5.99 euro.

FOR THE TOURIST, Prague yields up its distinctive atmosphere, captured in this impressive collection of recent writing on Prague: stone alleys, music in churches, tram brakes screeching on bends, the Vltava River and its bridges, cafes and beer cellars, eager bustling crowds in the town squares, construction sites, restored Baroque facades in gaudy pinks and yellows. By day it amounts to a colourful theatrical display. Daniela Hodrova describes Wenceslas Square:

 
   The city has had for me some mysterious link with 
   theatre. The curtain of the playhouse-city is to be 
   found somewhere near the National Museum, 
   where the Horse Gate once stood. Before the eyes 
   of the audience standing on the forestage in front of 
   the museum, overlooking a fountain that never 
   plays, the curtain parts and tableaux vivants begin 
   to file past. Come to think of it, the downward 
   slope of the square also reminds one of a stage. 

This is magic Prague, channing, alluring. For the visitor and resident expatriates, the city is a potential paradise which provokes desire, and stimulates longing for unexpected relationships and transcendent experiences. People believe the city will bring about alchemical changes. But Prague doesn't necessarily provide them. Writing on Prague is saturated with unfulfilled yearning, with a sense of let-down. It is, as Sasha Skenerija understands, a city of chance encounters:

 
   My three-day friend from Slovenia is suddenly 
   going to Berlin. He's leaving. We got drunk in 
   some bar, confided some painful masculine things 
   to each other. At 2am we're saying goodbye at the 
   railway station, it lasts too long, we fall silent in the 
   boundless intimacy of people who are sure they 
   won't meet again. 

With the coming of dusk the colours and the spell begin to fade; the street stalls, the crowds, the artists and the spruikers are gone. It's windy, cold and melancholy, as you emerge from a warm bar suffering Prague Blues. Like the memory of "groped waitresses carrying round the drinks", experiences tend to be vicarious. Justin Quinn, an Irish poet living in Prague, captures the emptiness of sexual fantasies in his poem "Saint Nicholas Cafe":

 
      ... love is the eddy 
   that floats and swerves and flicks 
   out rippling through the hips 
   of this girl bringing me a beer just now. 
   She barely lingers, midriff bared, 
   and seems amidst all this so Tao. 
   And oh how smoothly, quickly, she now slips 
   high tight back trousers fared, 
   backs into the flows and systems of her global 
      clientele, 
   the press of KOOKAI and GAP clothes, 
   their jet-lagged, blue-chip ironies, 
   and her flesh taken with their push and swell. 
   Her mouth, her hands, her eyes ... 
   I find the bill days later-- 
   the date, the time, my itemized half-litre, 
   full record of our brief transaction, 
   the printed chit with till ID, 
   which is her numbered name relieved of accent-- 
      SARKO 03.