Read Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City for Free Online

and humour, and even compassion. I thought as well of the two gentlemen in frock coats, with the air of broken-down actors, pale and fat and wearing top hats, 'apparently the non-collapsible kind', who come to K.'s apartment on the eve of his thirty-first birthday to fetch him away to his execution in the little quarry in what is most likely the Strahov district of the city. 'There was nothing heroic in resisting, in making difficulties for the gentlemen now, in putting up a defence at this point in an effort to enjoy a final glimmer of life.' . . .
    All at once I was cold; an empty cathedral is a chilly place. The Professor was standing a little way off with J. and G., pointing upward to one of the stained-glass windows and explaining some fine detail of the depicted scene. Now, suddenly, and at no particular prompting, it was my turn to feel embarrassed. As I looked at him there, in his shabby raincoat, with his pale, thin hair, the high, Slavic cheekbones, those touchingly inoffensive spectacles, I asked myself what did I know of the difficulties of this man's life, of the stratagems he had been compelled to engage in over the years in order to preserve dignity and self-respect, or in order simply to feed and clothe himself and his wife and son. My friendhad made a Czech version of Hamlet before the war which was very popular and continued to be put on even after 1968. Although his name as the translator was suppressed, he did receive a small royalty from these productions. T would walk past the theatre in the first snow of the season,' he said, 'shivering in my thin jacket, and see Hamlet announced as a coming attraction, and I would think, good, Vll have an overcoat by Christmas!' That was how they lived, in those days, he said, 'hand to mouth' whatever you say, say nothing - and then covered his lips with his fingers and laughed, enjoying his own wordplay.for all his regrets - 'It was too late for me,' he would cry, 'the Havel revolution, too late!' - is a great laugher. One day, when we were in his car and I had been pressing him for details of his life in 'those days', he began to chuckle, and waved a hand at me, saying, 'Stop, stop! You are like the ones who used to interrogate me then, the nameless ones!' But then his smile faded and he turned a grim face to the windscreen again. What do I know?
    The day was dying when we got back to the hotel. The Professor left us, promising to pick us up later and take us to his home. In the lobby the two black-eyed beauties were at their post again under the potted palm, fingering their coffee cups and appraising the passing men, potential trade. Such beautiful creatures, I wondered aloud as we entered the lift, why did they take up such a profession? T suppose,' J. said, 'they do it for kecks' We were too tired to laugh.
    It is a peculiarly affecting, regressive sensation to wake up from an involuntary sleep at evening in a strange hotel room, the daylight all gone from the window, and a lamp, an impassive sentinel, burning on the bedside table. The unfamiliar furniture crouches in the shadows, looking as if it had been engaged in a furtive passacaglia and had stopped in its paces an instant before one opened one's eyes. The noises from outside are different now, more indistinct, it would seem, as if muffled by the falling darkness. There is the hum of the great concourse of office workers going home; voices sound, and a radio buzzes somewhere, and car tyres make a watery hissing in the dry streets. One's day-clothes restrict, there is a hot dampness in the crevices of elbows, behind the knees. Sluggishly one's mind casts about, fumbling like a hand on the bed covers, trying to grasp something, a fragment of thought, a dream, a memory, and failing. What is it the moment is reminiscent of? The silence, the hum in the air, the woolly warmth . . . all this is out of the far, the immemorial, past. Is it childhood that is nudging at the blunted edges of consciousness, a jumbled