Golden pig
Waiting for the golden pig
by Eric Ormsby
On the Christmas season in the Czech capital.
In the week before Christmas, carp farmers from Southern Bohemia begin setting up their tables in the center of Prague, and as Christmas Eve approaches the sounds of their mallets and cleavers echo through the ancient stony squares. The carp, who have spent the past year lolling on murky pond-bottoms, have been subjected since September to infusions of fresh water to remove their muddy flavor, and now they turn sluggishly in their tubs, their coarse scales a sooty emerald shade. When you select your fish, the salesman scoops it out in a net, lays it on a chopping board, and delivers two or three brutal whacks to its gasping head; he then runs a knife behind its gills and drains the blood into the gutter before slicing the still twitching thing into vivid pink fillets. The fishermen’s aprons, the sidewalks, and the gutters run with blood and thick scales the size of a man’s thumbnail. Czechs are the least sentimental of people, especially, it would seem, at Christmas-time.
Whenever I come upon the annual spectacle I remember Robert Lowell’s lines about the Nativity—"The Child is born in blood, O child of blood"—and wonder whether this ubiquitous carp-whacking is not some dim re-enactment of the Massacre of the Innocents; but then, Czechs would doubtless dub me a rank sentimentalist.
Czechs are the least sentimental of people, especially, it would seem, at Christmas-time.
I cannot say I share the Bohemian taste for bottom-feeders, a taste which shows up in other, less likely contexts. Over the past century, Czechs have produced art and music and literature which stand comparison with those of any modern nation; and yet, when it comes to foreign art and artists, their normally impeccable sense of fitness often deserts them. Their long isolation from the West no doubt accounts for this otherwise puzzling tendency, which was nowhere more apparent than in the splendid new Kampa Museum on the left bank of the Vltava, not far from the Charles Bridge. The museum was due to open two years ago but was inundated in the great flood of the Elbe and Vltava (the artworks were saved in the nick of time). The museum has now finally opened and the permanent collections are a marvel, drawn as they are from the lifelong efforts of Meda Mladek, the well-known, and formidable, Czech-American collector of the works of Kupka, Gutfreund, Kolar, and others, especially from the younger generation of Dissident artists. Ramming her project through the opposition of various bureaucrats and an outraged posse of Czech city-planners, the unstoppable octogenarian has erected what is easily the most beautiful new museum building in Prague. Inside the spacious and light-flooded galleries, carved out of the old Sova Mill (the sluices have been incorporated into the design), one proceeds through various levels, each with its own glass-floored terrace affording spectacular views of the old city. The jagged and sinuous Cubist sculptures of Otto Gutfreund, a visionary artist of genius who died in his late forties, reportedly of sheer exhaustion, are positioned with tactful delicacy amid the coolly blazing canvases of Frantis’ek Kupka in his more abstract mode. Outside the windows, and mounted on a dyke that juts into the river, stands the nine-foot-high sculpture of a massive rough-hewn wooden chair by the contemporary Czech artist Magdalena Jetelová. (The first chair-sculpture bobbed away in the flood, and its replacement has been fashioned from debris and flotsam collected after the waters subsided.)
Unfortunately, despite the unerring taste on exhibit in the main halls of the Kampa Museum, the administration has consigned an outbuilding to a retrospective of the work of Yoko Ono. Entitled with inadvertent exactitude "The Women’s Room," the exhibition devotes lavish space to pitifully little indeed. The main "creation" on display consists of twenty-one utterly identical composite photos of Ms. Ono’s father, husband, and son, all three of which mysteriously form a visage that is a dead-ringer for Yoko herself. The first photo bears the caption: "Doctor 1: I remember being born and looking into his eyes. He picked me up and slapped my bottom. I screamed." Yoko Ono notes that the series is meant to convey "what percentage of my life did I take it lying down?" (The "it" is tactfully left unspecified.) In the flagstone courtyard outside, Ms. Ono had a Christmas tree installed where visitors were invited to hang written messages promoting "world peace" (is anyone opposed?). Flipping through predictable pieties, I find on one the bracingly ungrateful comment: "Yoko Ono sucks."
No Czech I met professed admiration for this Ononistic exhibition; nevertheless, much hoopla surrounded it. There is, it seems, a palpable need to demonstrate that Praguers are firmly in the know, however egregious that savvy may prove to be. And indeed, at first glance, one might conclude that Czechs have given themselves over wholeheartedly to an indiscriminate and fervent consumerism that encompasses art as well as commerce. There are now brand-new shopping malls all over, such as the vast (and rather beautiful) new complex designed by Jean Nouvel in our Smíchov neighborhood which has not one, but two, vast "cineplexes," as well as boutiques—or butiks, as the Czechs call them—chock-full of designer goods at designer prices.
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Four years ago, when I last spent a long visit in Prague, it was virtually impossible to find olive oil in any of the stores; now the shelves groan under every known olive oil from Sicily to Australia. Jewelry stores especially have proliferated, perhaps because the Russian Mafia, who are much in evidence throughout the Czech Republic (and especially in Marienbad and Carlsbad), employ them as money-laundering outlets. Their blazing display windows give new luster to the city’s appellation of "Prague the Golden." (And in any case, the most overworked and best-loved word in the Czech language must be zlatý or "golden," which appears on innumerable shop signs.) But Czech shoppers have an unexpectedly affluent look too, and no one seems unduly perturbed about the proposed introduction of the euro in 2007, when prices are expected to skyrocket. According to the Prague Post, during this shopping season, they spent over one billion crowns more on gifts than in the preceding year. But while consumerism is firmly and visibly ensconced in Prague, it is far from representing the true face of Czech society, always well hidden.
Thus, a few days before Christmas, my Prague-born wife, Irena, and I were invited to a private caroling party, held by Czech architects, in "The King of Brabant," a Malá Strana pub. Wedged in on narrow benches and amply provided with foaming mugs of sublime Gambrinus beer and homemade sausages, we found ourselves amid some fifty full-voiced carolers, the men exuberantly bearded and moustachioed, the women lissom and willowy in the best post-revolutionary Czech mode. All knew by heart the words and tunes of scores of carols; even better, all knew how to sing and harmonize. Czech Christmas carols, or koledy, are very unlike our own. These carols are grave and tender and immensely moving; but just when you feel lured to the verge of unseemly sentiment, you’re pulled back by wacky nonsense refrains, such as my own favorite: "dudli dudli dudli dudli, dudli dudli dudli, dá."
The stubborn sense of belonging to a common culture, so obvious to an outsider like myself (and so scorned at present in North America in favor of a tinselled "diversity"), was made stronger and more poignant by the knowledge that certain of the carols, which sound so innocent, had been strictly forbidden for over forty years under the Communists on pain of imprisonment. These simple melodies in old Czech or Moravian dialect or Slovak shone like precious artifacts as the singers’ voices rose, and it was clear even to me that to sing them was an act of fealty to a common past not to be forgotten or forsworn.
Consumerism may now be rampant in Prague, but that past is never very far away. Czechs, to their great credit, refuse to give in to a comfy amnesia. Two recently erected monuments attest to this with commendable tenacity. The first is the new memorial to the victims of Communism which was dedicated in late 2002 and which stands on Ujezd Street, directly across from the thriving Bohemia Bagel café. The memorial, by the well known Czech artist Olbram Zoubek, is deceptively simple in conception: a flight of wide stone steps leads in two distinct tiers from the sidewalk up the slope of Petrín Hill. The first nine steps are oversized and hard to maneuver; you have to stretch and grapple to climb them, and for good reason: at their base and running up the center of each step are strips of bronze enumerating the exact tally of the victims: 205,486 persons arrested, 248 hanged or beheaded, 4,500 dead in prison, 327 shot crossing the border, 170,938 driven into exile. For so small a nation these are crushing statistics. When you reach the landing and the upper flight of stairs, you encounter five bronze figures of naked men. The first, stooped, slack-jawed, in a posture of immense weariness, is whole. Each successive statue, however, has been progressively slashed and disfigured until the final figure displays nothing but a shard of torso and two mutilated legs. At night, from the Bridge of the Legions, the obliquely illuminated figures cast sharp shadows on the white steps and seem to loom out of some pitiless fog.
The war of the present with the past in Czech minds flared up when this memorial was unveiled. Many detested it and various protests erupted. Prague feminists objected vehemently to the fact that the five figures were male. Later, persons unknown planted explosives in two of the figures and blew them to smithereens. Nobody I spoke to believed that the feminists would go that far, but when I asked whether disgruntled members of the ancien régime might have been responsible, I got only non-committal shrugs in reply. The figures have been restored, and that is what matters most.
Consumerism may now be rampant in Prague, but that past is never very far away.
The second new monument is a towering statue of Franz Kafka, located near the venerable Spanish Synagogue, not far from Old Town Square. The Kafka industry seems a bit on the skids at present; the profusion of tee shirts, postcards, and other souvenirs has shrunk and even in the Kafka-Buchhandlung, in the old Kafka family house, the selection of the master’s work is surprisingly skimpy, and the bookstore itself has been reduced by half. The Kafka monument, hewn from glossy black marble by the sculptor Jaroslav Rona, rises some ten feet in the air in the midst of a diminutive circle of black and white flagstones. Kafka is represented quite realistically in his trademark Homburg hat, three-piece suit and tie, and spiffy shoes, but instead of merely standing or strolling, he sits astride the shoulders of a huge empty suit which—headless, handless, and footless—looks to be shambling forward with its jaunty passenger.
Praguers have mixed feelings about the Kafka monument. There appears to be something a bit too confident, too optimistic, too poised about the statue that ill befits its subject. But the deliberate absurdity of the concept has its winning side: after all, who in his right mind would ever have conceived of an equestrian statue of Franz Kafka, presiding like some Habsburg potentate over his native stomping-grounds? The monument grows on you, and by the end of our stay I had even become rather fond of its improbable humor and brash momentum.
Not far away, a near contemporary of Kafka was enjoying an exuberant rediscovery. This was the artist and writer Josef ?apek, brother of the more famous writer Karel, whose Cubist-influenced paintings were on sumptuous display in the gallery of the Municipal House, that gorgeous art nouveau structure lovingly restored in the decade since 1989. The exhibition was entitled "The Humblest Art" and concentrated on ?apek’s work in the early years of the past century; the title comes from his 1920 book of the same name in which the artist laid out his aesthetic credo.
Handpainted nineteenth-century signs advertising everything from coffee to shaving cream, engravings torn from old magazines, illustrations in penny-thrillers, all of them shrill, garish, lurid, and strangely innocent, supplied ?apek with the raw materials of his art. An early aficionado of the silent screen, he was much taken with the figure of Fantômas, that French detective series crammed with fiendish plots and crudely bedaggered villains, and the exhibition has one of these films running at one end of the gallery. The notion of "the humblest art," which entails the use and transformation of nondescript and commonplace objects from daily life, is of course no longer new, having become almost the dominant aesthetic theme for much of the intervening century; even so, ?apek’s work retains a freshness and boldness that lifts it above the merely temporal. He had his own special gift for softening and injecting the gently humorous, even the tender, into the most austere Cubist geometries. His lurid painting of Fantômas, one of several, has the spectral glimmer of a geode in its panoply of hues but for all the menace of the knife-wielding malefactor, he is portrayed with an oblique affection; there is something forgiving, nearly companionable, even in ?apek’s ostensibly bloodiest canvases.
According to time-honored Czech custom, if you fast on the day before Christmas you may be favored, as midnight approaches, with a vision of a golden pig. The apparition is considered highly auspicious, but I must confess that I have never seen so much as the tail of the fabled piglet. This whimsical tradition says much about the Czech attitude to the festive season; it is fanciful but it is also humorous. The ancient Israelites may have hankered after the Golden Calf, but Czechs prefer their fantasies to be earthier, basted in golden juices, enfolded in the magical but also palpable, as homely as the ingredients of a ?apek painting and so, true to life, yet hinting at grander and richer possibilities.
The solid unsentimentality of the Czech Christmas was brought home to me at the annual Christmas concert of the great Czech mezzo-soprano Dagmar Pecková, on December 21, in the Smetana Hall of the Municipal House. Pecková comes in for some sniping from her compatriots since, with her close-cropped head and austere dress, she resolutely refuses to play the diva; but when she opens her mouth to sing, all criticisms evaporate. While I knew that the singer would be magnificent—and she was, in both Wagner and Beethoven—I was not prepared for the conclusion of the concert. The last piece was by Zdeněk Fibich, who died in 1900, and was represented as a kind of musical "melodrama," with accompanying recitation by the singer and actress Zora Jandová of a poem by the great nineteenth-century poet Karel Jaromír Erben.
Erben wrote some of the most famous and compelling ballads in the Czech language, all of which manage to combine horrific subject matter with a grimly rollicking form, and the poem presented, entitled "Blessed Day" ("Št?drý den"), was no exception. This was "The Night Before Christmas" rewritten by Poe or H. P. Lovecraft, and as its ghastly stanzas unfurled the audience hushed in suspense-filled reverence. Two young girls gaze into a frozen lake and see their fortunes for the coming year mirrored there; one is promised a handsome fiancé, the other a cruel death. The prophecies come to pass, and the poem ends with the lucky girl mourning over the cold grave of her less fortunate friend. No golden pigs for her! Here is a sample of one of the more cheerful stanzas:
One girl, with covered head,
Is making baby clothes.
The other, for three months dead,
Rots in the cold black ground.
Zora Jandová recited the ballad from memory in a beautifully modulated voice to the accompaniment of the lugubrious and plangent strains of the orchestra; the performance sent shivers down my spine. I won’t be gazing into any frozen lakes this winter! This was a bracing prelude to the obligatory carp soup on Christmas Eve.
Outside the Municipal House, on the upscale boulevard known as Na P?ikop? where the most luxurious butiks are located, a few late Christmas shoppers were hurrying home, their arms laden with designer shopping-bags. The only pig, golden or otherwise, that I’d glimpsed in Prague this time had been in the ads for the film "Babe in the City"—translated somewhat unfortunately into Czech as Prasátko v M?st?, roughly, "Swinelet on the Town"—and I was about to give up hope when I glimpsed flashes of gold along the foggy and damp-slicked cobblestones. As we neared, I saw that there were three young musicians in the shelter of a bus stop who formed a brass trio. They were playing the carols we had sung a week before. Trumpet, trombone, and French horn tootled melodiously, and, though their instrument cases brimmed with coins, the musicians were clearly playing for the sheer pleasure of it. I took it as a subtle reminder that however much Prague might change outwardly, a stubborn love of custom and a faithfulness to hard-won traditions would keep this most golden of cities firmly rooted to its ancient soil.
Eric Ormsby is a poet and translator whose most recent collection is The Baboons of Hada: Selected Poems(Carcanet Press).