The Best of Electric Velocipede (31 page)

Daughters of Fortune

Cyril Simsa

T
he thing is, I never expected to fall in love.

Not in Prague. Not really.

I had always considered myself far too cynical for that, which only goes to show how little I knew back then—how naïve I had been to think myself a connoisseur of life and art and contingency . . . Of the strangely intoxicating whims of beauty and sadness, of the tendency of the world to play the fool with our best intentions.

I had come to Prague to escape from Paris, which, I know, must sound like the words of a madwoman. But living in a third-generation community of self-proclaimed artists in a fifth-generation sublet on the far side of Montmartre, can get to be rather like taking the waters in a goldfish bowl after a while. I mean, let’s be honest here, how many second-hand Ernest Hemingway anecdotes do you truly want (or need) to establish your artistic credentials? How many parties and jazz-bands and drunken brawls on the frozen embankments of the Ile de la Cité? How many tired conversations on the ineffable genius of James Joyce and the book-buying policy at Shakespeare & Co.? Oh, the novelty is all well and good the first few weeks, but there comes a time when it starts to turn your brain into molasses.

Not that I hadn’t achieved a certain notoriety in my short, breathless life. I had been photographed by Van Vechten in New York, and Man Ray in Paris—but then, who hadn’t?—and I had published two slim volumes of poetry,
Unnatural Selection
and
Lepers of the Moon
, with the justly-forgotten Invocations Press of rue Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Marais. Perhaps my greatest claim to fame, though, had been the nude photograph—backlit and solarized—which had had to be withdrawn from export copies of
This Quarter
for fear of running foul of HM Customs. (It was not the nudity as such, apparently, but the glowing tip of the cigarette, with which I had chosen to highlight the blurry darkness of my shadowy crotch. It seems we British were not, as yet, ready for any such thing as a woman’s brazenly concealed pudenda—at least, not in Dover. And who can blame us, given our schooling?)

Anyway, this is just to explain why, in the spring of 1932, I decided to go to Prague. I was twenty-three, though there were times I felt decades older. And while I was sure that Prague must also have its writers and cabarets and artists’ ateliers, I didn’t know where to find them, and I thought I might be protected by not speaking the language.

Well, it wasn’t that simple, of course. Partly because curiosity got the better of me, but mostly because men are incorrigible. I don’t know what it is about those strange creatures with their Y chromosomes. Maybe they have some kind of congenital aversion to rationality, or maybe they just have toxic physiologies. Whatever, they always assume love will find a way—or failing that, lust—even if they have nothing to say to a woman, nor so much as a viable way of saying it. Somehow, in their strangely illogical gender algebra, perfume and roses and cheap champagne are supposed to transmute into a Shakespearean sonnet or an ode by Andrew Marvell, while flashing eyes and jittery hands assume the deceptive simplicity of haiku. As if all our social interactions could be boiled down to a kind of solipsistic, primal semaphore, like the dance of the honey-bees.

Needless to say, it was a man who led me to be, alone, at the Kino Metro, that particular night. Some polished jackal of an accountant from the bank where I had changed my francs had invited me to an early screening, and stood me up. Which, to tell the truth, was almost relief, as it was obvious he had a wife somewhere (to say nothing of an attractive house maid, an elegant mistress, and an addiction to underage show-girls . . . ) These predatory guys always do.

So there I was in the basement of this rather overbearing pseudo-Classical shopping arcade, waiting for my non-existent host and a much-delayed screening of F.W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu
. The original idea had been that, seeing as the film was a silent, we would not have to deal with the issue of language. However, before it started, this fat man got up to make a speech—a very fat man, and a very long speech. (I later found out he was some kind of surrealist poet.) He spoke in Czech, of course, and though he was passionate, he was incomprehensible. All I managed to catch were a few names: Edgar Allan Poe, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, the Marquis de Sade, Max von Kastell . . . All the usual suspects. Then there was a supporting program of jumbled scenes from some bizarre Czech melodrama to the accompaniment of a middle-aged lady in a shocking pink frock, who somehow managed to produce unearthly warbling sounds by waving her hands between the twin antennae of an RCA Theremin. And after
that
, there was an interval.

By the time Max Schreck and his Melody Boys were due to come on, I must admit I was feeling more than a little jaded. But then Murnau’s magisterially spooky images finally took their place centre stage, and I was carried away once again by his grimly translucent skies; his haunting, shadowy cityscapes; and by the mysterious Schreck, with his curious mixture of menace and vulnerability—his strangely deformed head and his wasted body—his wounded eyes, his feral claws and his dangerously sensual mouth . . .

I was elated afterward, and it must have shown, for a woman came up to me and smiled.

“It is wonderful, is it not?”

She spoke in that strangely-accented, under-emphatic English so typical of Prague, and for a moment I wondered how she could possibly know I was foreign—because, like every other traveller, I like to think of myself as invisible. But there is always something . . . An unfamiliar item of clothing. A peculiar manner of sitting or walking. A way of looking that is too direct, or just the tiniest shade too evasive. In my case, I realized belatedly, it was probably the week-old copy of the Paris
Herald-Tribune
that was still rolled up in a clump in my shoulder-bag.

“This film,” she continued, “I think it helps me to understand what it must feel like to be persecuted and outcast . . . To be so completely beyond society’s norms that you are automatically judged evil.”

She held out her hand.

“I am Frida, by the way,” she said. “Frida Hroznysova . . .”

“Zora,” I replied automatically. “Zora Dienstbier.”

Her grip was firm.

“But Frida, surely that is not a Czech name?”

She shrugged. “Outside society’s norms, does it matter?”

Her answer surprised me, for at first glance she seemed unexceptional enough. What, with her long, olive-green dress, and her matching silk wrap, she was elegant to the point of vanishing. I would have guessed her to be solidly middle-class, perhaps even a bit of a blue stocking. Only the hooded eyes, and an almost sculptural quality about the face, hinted at anything more dynamic. Her chin had the sort of angularity that an African mask might have had, after a Picasso or a Gaudier-Brzeska had remodelled it.

“So . . .” She resumed, pulling long, brown gloves of a completely impractical filmy material out of her hand-bag. “Would you like to go for a coffee?” And she smiled so disarmingly, from her translucent, greenish-blue eyes to her luminous, gray-stockinged feet, that I nodded my shocked acquiescence.

Pretty soon I found myself in a rather grand cafe-bar just across National Boulevard, with a fake Moorish fountain in the lobby and a marble terrarium full of pygmy alligators—Andalusian chic, as filtered through the sensibilities of a small town with aspirations to Hollywood—and she ordered us both an “Algerian.” This strangely-named cocktail, when it came, proved to be a composed of alternate layers of hot coffee, advocaat and cream, and with a little sugar, it turned out to be surprisingly invigorating. By the time we had switched to wine, she was telling me the story of her life.

Her father was a professor of sociology. Her mother was a society hostess, who had once used to write, but who now invested that same energy only in applauding the works of others, and in discussing the spiritual health of the nation, usually at much greater length than anybody else in their right mind would want to. She had grown up in a sprawling apartment in the Royal Vineyards district, surrounded by servants and a vast library of books, reading Homer at ten and J.G. Frazer by the age of eleven. By twelve she had become one of her parents’ favorite party tricks, being brought out to show off her precociously adult conversational skills, though by fourteen she had usually done her best to avoid this. Still, she had met any number of Europe’s leading artists and writers at a very young age. Gustav Klimt. Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Paul Wegener, hot off the set of
The Golem
. Even Freud of Vienna had come for a visit once.

It made my own childhood seem extraordinarily provincial, for all that my father had been relatively prosperous. There was really nothing exotic about growing up in Chislehurst, except my American mother and the occasional visits of my American cousins; though perhaps even this minor accident of parentage had been enough to place me outside the pale in the eyes of my schoolmates. Having an absentee father in Natal, or a birth certificate from Calcutta, was, of course, perfectly normal, but cousins in Iowa? No wonder I had felt such a need to escape to New York, and then to Paris.

I tried to tell Frida all this, and how I envied her, but she laughed.

“Ah, if only you knew . . . No-one in the world is more petit-bourgeois than we former Austrians. No-one is better at superficially observing the social niceties, while stealing the turf off your lawn and denouncing your daughter to the chief of police for wearing just the wrong shade of lipstick. And we can give you a certificate with two different duty stamps, and the seals of three different government offices to prove it—one circular; one rectangular, in exact mathematical proportion to the spire of St Vitus’s cathedral; and one with a bad representation of the Czech lion of state rampant—one scarlet, one indigo, and one a very particular tone of violet, as if that color alone were enough to grant us a heritage stretching back to Imperial Rome.”

She took a vicious sip at her drink.

“Where did you say your cousins are from?”

“Oh, they live in this little regional centre called Cedar Rapids.” After all the incomprehension and sarcasm I had experienced in the past on account of my parentage, I deliberately played it down. “You’ll never have heard of it . . .”

But I underestimated her, because her face opened up into a smile of knowing amusement.

“Yes, of course . . .” Her eyes watched me intently, as if searching for signs of a long-extinct matrilineal civilization on the distant steppe. “Isn’t there a big Czech community out there?”

I had to concede that there was.

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Subconsciously, I mean . . . I wondered. You’ve come to Prague in a quest for your roots.”

I started to protest—to tell her that I had never been any further west from Manhattan than Buffalo, and that only to see the Falls—but then I realized that she might, after all, have a point. Throughout my childhood I had heard my cousins describing their peculiar neighbors in what they still called “Bohemytown.” The distressingly neglected roads, pot-holed and dirty, lined by beautifully ordered kitchen gardens and ramshackle country cottages . . . The wiry, mustachioed men, and the wrinkly old grandmothers, sitting out on their porches in their embroidered skirts, watching their pumpkins grow fat in the late summer sun, and tending their chickens . . . All those family histories about Sara Hurok, our cousins’ favorite servant girl, and Miss Wokoun, the banker’s daughter, who years ago went to Coe College with my mother . . .

Perhaps it was true I might have been curious. Subconsciously, that is. Of course, it’s much more romantic to believe that our lives are governed by chance, or by the blind twists of fate—by the gods playing dice, or by Nature picking us up in her bloody maw and spitting out only the fittest—but human psychology is trickier than that. It likes to create order, patterns, connections . . . Meanings. Explicitly or implicitly, our lives have resonances.

“So what do you do?” I asked, trying to redirect our conversation to a more conventional channel, though by now I should perhaps have known better.

She smiled again and this time the expression seemed to make her face softer.

“Oh, I’m what you might call a folklorist . . . I travel the country making a record of people’s beliefs and customs. Not the things they’re
supposed
to believe and do, of course—the way they act when they’re summoned by the priest or the lord of the manor—but what they really do, when they think nobody’s looking. Folk etymologies, traditional remedies, popular explanations of natural phenomena, the kinds of thing that less enlightened observers might call superstitions . . . I’m sure you know what I mean. You British pioneered the whole field of enquiry, back in the days of the great antiquaries.”

I wondered for a moment if I should tell her that my Britishness was just as uncertain as the folklore taught in a suburban schoolroom, but the impulse passed.

“Last year, for instance,” she continued, “I spent a fair part of my summer cataloguing the menhirs of Central Bohemia. You wouldn’t believe how many Stone Maidens and Enchanted Monks there are in our much-vaunted Bohemian woods and meadows: Petrified Capuchins, Frozen Shepherds, Hags of ironstone and Commanders of ferrous conglomerate . . . The nearest one is just north of Prague, in a village called Chabry. That one’s a Petrified Chamberlain, though judging by his height, he could never have served anywhere but in the chambers of Faerie . . . And then I’ve been chronicling the habit of well-dressing at the healing spring in Lysolaje. They have this little round chapel, plastered with icons, which they cover in candles and flowers, and on a good day, a group of nuns will come to perform a hymn just before sundown. Really, the most eerie of plainsongs . . . But I suppose my most famous piece of work is this . . .”