I told this to a grey-suited businessman fromLeicester, sitting in the seat next to me, but he didn’t laugh at all. Instead, he called a stewardess and said he thought I had a bomb in my luggage. I had to tell the story again to the stewardess, and a third time to the co-pilot who came back and squatted at my feet with a scowl on his face. I’m never going to make polite conversation ever again.
Perhaps I’d misjudged how people feel about bombs on aeroplanes. That’s possible. A more likely explanation is that I was the only person on the flight who knew where the hoax bomb call had come from, and what it meant.
It was the first, lumbering, scene-setting move of Operation Dead Wood.
Pragueairport is slightly smaller than the sign which says ‘PragueAirport’, at the front of the terminal building. The thumping Stalinist scale of it made me wonder whether the sign had been built before radio navigation, so that pilots could read it while still only half-way across the Atlantic.
Inside, well, an airport is an airport is an airport. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you have to have stone floors for the luggage trolleys, you have to have luggage trolleys, and you have to have glass cases displaying crocodile skin belts that no one will ever want to buy in a thousand years of civilisation.
News of Czecho’s escape from the Soviet maw hadn’t reached the immigration officials, who sat in their glass boxes and re-fought the Cold War with every disgusted flick of their eyes from passport photograph to decadent imperialist standing before them. I was that imperialist, and I’d made the mistake of wearing a Hawaiian shirt, which, I suppose, emphasised my decadence. I’ll know better next time. Except that maybe by next time, someone will have found the key to the glass boxes and told these poor buggers that they’re now sharing cultural and economic floor space with Euro-Disney. I decided to try and learn the Czech for ‘missing you already’.
I changed some money and went outside to hail a taxi. It was a cool evening, and the broad, Stalinist puddles in the car-park, splashing blue and grey reflections of the newly built neon advertisements around the sky, made it seem even cooler. I rounded the corner of the terminal building and the wind bounded up to greet me, licking at my face with diesel flavoured rain and then skipping, playfully around my shins, tugging at my trousers. I stood there for a moment, soaking up the strangeness of the place, heavily conscious that I had, in all kinds of ways, gone from one state to another.
I found a cab eventually, and told the driver in fluent English that I wantedWenceslas Square. This request, I now know, is phonically identical to the Czech phrase for ‘I am an air-brained tourist, please take everything I have’. The car was a Tatra, and the driver was a bastard; he drove fast and well, humming happily to himself, like a man who’s just won the pools.
It was one of the most beautiful sights I’ve ever seen in any city.Wenceslas Square is not a square at all, but a double avenue, running down a slope from the massiveNationalMuseum which overlooks it. Even if I’d known nothing of the place, I would have felt that this was important. History ancient and modern had happened in large dollops over this half-mile of grey and yellow stone, and it had left a smell. L’AirDu Temps de Praha.Prague Springs, Summers, Winters and Autumns had come and gone, and would probably come again.
When the driver told me how much money he wanted, I had to spend a few minutes explaining that I didn’t actually want to buy the cab, I just wanted to settle up for the fifteen minutes I’d spent in it. He told me that it was a limousine service, or at least he said ‘limousine’ and shrugged a lot, and after a while agreed to reduce his demands to the merely astronomical. I hefted my bag and started to walk.
The Americans had told me to find my own digs, and the only sure way to look like a man who’s spent a long time looking for somewhere to stay is to spend a long time looking for somewhere to stay. So I settled into a comfortable march and did Prague One, which is the central district of the old city, in about two hours. Twenty-six churches, fourteen galleries and museums, an opera house - where the boy Mozart had staged his first-ever performance ofDon Giovanni -eight theatres, and a McDonald’s. One of the above had a fifty-yard queue outside it.
I stopped in a few bars to soak up some ambience, which came in tall, straight glasses with ‘Budweiser’ written on the side, and watched to see how the modern Czech walks, talks, dresses and disports himself. Most of the waiters assumed I was German, which was a fair enough mistake to make considering the city was heaving with them. They travelled in groups of twelve, with back-packs and huge thighs, and strung themselves out across the street when they walked. But then of course, for most Germans,Prague is only a few hours away by fast tank, so it’s hardly surprising that they treat the place like the end of their garden.
I had a plate of boiled pork and dumplings in a cafe by the river and, on the advice of a Welsh couple at the next table, took a stroll across theCharlesBridge. Mr and Mrs Welsh had assured me that it was a spectacular construction, but thanks to the thousand buskers draped over every yard of parapet, all of them singing Dylan songs, I never saw any of it.
I found lodgings eventually at the Zlata Praha, a tatty boarding-house on the hill near the castle. The landlady gave me a choice between a big dirty room or a small clean one, and I chose the big dirty one, thinking I could clean it myself. After she’d gone I realised how silly that was. I’ve never even cleaned my own flat.
I unpacked my things, lay down on the bed and smoked. I thought about Sarah, and her father, and Barnes. I thought about my own parents, and Ronnie, and helicopters and motorcycles and Germans and McDonald’s hamburgers.
I thought about a lot of things.
I woke at eight, and listened to the sounds of the city hauling itself up and taking itself to work. The only unfamiliar noise came from the trams, clattering and hissing their way across cobbled streets and over the bridges. I wondered whether I should stay with the Hawaiian shirt or not.
Bynine o’clock I was in the town square, being pestered by a short man with a moustache offering me a tour of the city by horse-drawn carriage. I was supposed to be swayed by the quaint authenticity of his conveyance, but on casual inspection it looked to me extremely like the bottom-half of a Mini Moke, with the engine taken out and shafts for the horse where the headlights used to be. I said no thank you a dozen times, and fuck off once.
I was looking for a cafe with Coca-Cola umbrellas over its tables. That was what they’d said. Tom, when you get there, you’ll see a cafe with Coca-Cola shades over the tables. What they hadn’t said, or hadn’t realised, was that the Coca-Cola rep had been quite fantastically conscientious around these parts, unloading his umbrellas on twenty or so establishments in a hundred yard radius of the square. The Camel Cigarettes rep had only scored twice, so he was presumably dead in a ditch somewhere while the Coca-Cola man was receiving brass plaques and a personalised car-parking space at headquarters inUtah.
I found it after twenty minutes. The Nicholas. Two pounds for a cup of coffee.
They’d told me to go indoors, but it was a beautiful morning and I felt like not doing what I was told, so I sat outside with a view of the square and the passing Germans. I ordered coffee, and as I did so I saw two men emerge from the cafe and sit down at a nearby table. They were both young and fit-looking, and both wore sunglasses. Neither of them looked in my direction. They’d probably been inside for an hour, getting themselves nicely positioned for the meeting, and I’d gone and spoilt everything.