And then
into the museum, a shadowy foyer with a tightly spiraled boat's stair leading
up to the exhibit.
Some travelers reviewed this
place as "quirky"—a word I have come to hate, not only because it's
been tagged to my work in the past as a kind of dismissal, but also because in
general it condescends to the pure strangeness of things. Here initial letters and manuscripts from
Kafka's ancestors—of course the oppressive and intimidating father among them
prominently—and a family tree illustrated with photographs and other portraits
receding as you followed back to the family origins in the 17th
century, obscure ancestors of Baroque Prague, the faces leading up to Kafka
himself and the childhood portraits of his three lovely sisters—Ottla, Elli,
and Valli, their lines ending abruptly at Chelmno and Auschwitz. This display circles a small, makeshift
theatre, a classroom screen, five folding chairs in front of it.
On the screen, early films of
Prague cascade and ripple as though you were watching the city through
water. Recognizable buildings emerge
from the light—St. Vitus', the Astronomical Clock, the buildings that frame the
Old Town Square –but not in the light that we had been seeing them over the
past three days, the beautiful architectural "sights" and
"vistas". Instead, they formed
the circumference of an oppressive round followed by the child Kafka to and
from school.
I did a walk like that myself—or one of the same distance—but hardly
through beautiful and narrow Baroque streets. Mine was over desolate, working-class suburban terrain., but the desolation was external for that time and for a few years following, a span in
which I felt celebrated and loved, lacking the genius and insight of young
Kafka, his nerve-end sense of the nuanced, atmospheric menace of his
home life. Later he would write of this almost preternaturally beautiful city,
in language that appeared on the provisional screen in front of me: Prague doesn’t let go of us. This mother has
claws. We have to submit or –. We would have to set fire to it in two places,
at Vyšehrad and at the Prague Castle, then we might get away.
I wondered how anyone could want to burn this city in order to leave it
entirely. It seems impossible until you
think of your own town, its particular pull and drain on its every inhabitant,
no more or less in these cities than in any others, no more extraordinary
because you are the young it has tried to eat, you are the one confined and
injured by its custom. Is it every city,
every home, that celebrates the wrong children while wronging the ones it
overlooks? Or does it wrong the ones its
celebrates, limning them in a tight circle whose outer edge is its own castles
and high places?
And yes, I was thinking these things, weighed down by museum dark and
ambiguous light, as I picked myself up to move to the next room on the journey. ©2014 Michael Williams
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