Mon 30 Jun 2008
I’m standing in front of the door of my apartment with keys in hand yet I can’t open the door. It’s not for lack of motor ability, but because my mind—my whole mechanism of reason and logic—is laboring through a pool of molasses. “I’m going to sleep here,” he says—or I think he says. I swear that’s what he’s saying in Russian, but maybe I’m missing a case or it’s an expression.
“You can’t sleep here,” I say (or I think I say).
“Open the door,” he replies, stone faced gazing forward coolly.
“Go home.” I’m sure to use the command, no matter how rude it sounds to my English mind, it’s ordinary here. In fact it would even be too meek to say, “Go home, please.” Please—It’s so unnecessary.
“I will sleep and then I will go home. Open the door.”
I wonder about the probabilities—What are the chances that he really means “to sleep,” as in he’ll come in and curl up on the floor like a dog and snore until the vodka wears off. If he meant, “sleep with,” wouldn’t that sound different? A different word, expression? Sure, I tease myself, that’s what he means—as if language was ever direct with that request. I curse myself for the impulse to translate directly. “Do I need to call the police?” I ask him.
He shrugs. The momentum of his shoulders seems to challenge his balance and he grasps for the wall to steady himself. “Go,” he says. “They won’t do anything.” A soft gurgling belch. “02—the number. Call it.”
Anxiety swells as I think of a painful conversation in Russian with an actual official.
I was visiting Dniperpetrovsk, a large industrial city in the southeast of Ukraine that sits along the Dniper. Curious to see, I visited the local planeterium, nearly empty on a Saturday afternoon. A small hall greeted the visitor. A few golden plaques decorated the wall—first satellite launch, first man in space. I took note of the lack of Neil Armstrong photos, panoramas of the moon and the American flag (but why would I expect to see those here?). And then… there it was a spacecraft, looking so phallic, a famous scene from “Dr. Strangelove” danced through my head. I whipped out my cell phone to snap this very bad picture, giggling. When I turned the woman selling postcards looked at me severely, as if I was on something. Feeling conspicuous, I bought a ticket and watched the presentation—30 minute tour of our galaxy (in Russian)—half hoping Dr. Strangelove would streak across the night sky like Santa Claus.
Across the street from my hotel is Kinsky Garden, a lovely and wild park in Prague. Walking through it today, I happened upon a lovely and understated monument to the victims of communism. Here, as in Budapest and Ukraine, there are reminders of the regime, but there is rarely more than that. There are not great statues commemorating the fall, or the rise of the new (but old) nation. There is more the sense of a simple and quiet reclamation of national identity, but there are no screams of freedom, or monuments to triumph. But these eastern European countries have lost millions over the years and were always forced into silence by a regime that often purged itself of enemies. I don’t know that anything has communicated how quiet and deep that struggle went more aptly than this simple statue in Prague.
“Okay, now lean back, tilt your head up. Cross one leg over the other—yeah, yeah.” Directions from a husband to his posing wife—his much younger wife—on Charles Bridge in Prague. Stopping for every one of the 30 Baroque statues and statuaries that line the bridge on either side. Yes, the man must like his photogenic wife, but the fact that I watch them with an intent disgust for 30 minutes probably speaks to my tourist saturation, at this point in the big trip. This is what the hot tourist spots always do. On one hand, you feel it necessary to see them, and on the other you dread the tourist onslaught and return to your hotel room feeling that you have just spent all day in a live museum. In Prague, the big tourist area is from old town, over Charles Bridge to Castle Hill. The buildings are beautiful, the scenery outstanding, the traffic a sucking eddy of despair, and so I find that I lose my present to a constant ranting inner voice. 
Prague is well known for its beer and its beer gardens. It’s number one standing as the country that consumes the most beer per capita is easily understood when one visits the popular beer halls in the capital city. Here they fill your glass until you beg them to stop or pass out cold. Yes, it’s automatic and completely up to you NOT to get sloppy. I used the following very helpful website as a guide to drinking in Prague: http://www.classiccitybrew.com/prague.html. If you’re into beer, you might have to schedule two weeks just to hit all the pubs and sample the wide variety of microbrews, some of which haven’t changed since the monks started up the boilers 500 years ago. Even if you don’t have a refined beer pallet, the atmosphere of a few of these is certainly worth a look, most notable among them is U Fleku, which dates back to 1499.
Just down river from Prague Castle is an old mill. An ordinary building from all sides, square, without many windows or decorations, and like most buildings in these old European cities, there’s a book’s worth of history sitting on its foundation. For a mill, the history is what one would expect: limekiln, barley-mill, draper’s mill, burnt down, rebuilt, farmstead, artillery bulwark, flood, rebuilt, steam-mill. From as far back as the 10th century someone has dreamt up a purpose for the premises, and just a few years ago Meda Mladek dreamt it into a different purpose: a museum that featured eastern European artists who had suffered in silence behind the wall of the iron curtain. 
Today I arrived at the third largest city in Austria, Linz, a smallish large city, sitting on the Danube half way between Vienna and Salzburg. Here too, Austria’s favorite son, Mozart, is commemorated and plaques reside seemingly wherever his foot touched ground. Here, it’s at the hotel where he is said to have composed a symphony, however, some of the locals who grew up here never heard of that piece of historical information, which makes me wonder how significant it is.