On Pest and Heroes Square, and Alms for Oblivion

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion."

                        Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

Buda is the glamour half of Budapest, east side of the Danube, home of the Castle District, Matthias Church, the Fishermen's Bastion, and highly expensive housing.

Pest, on the other hand, is the place where Hungarian things get done, from the Parliament east to Heroes Square, that brilliant, almost sepulchral plaza of arches and statuary nearby our lodgings while we stayed in the city.

The first night in Budapest, wearied by the long flights and a delay in London Heathrow, we decided on a walk toward Heroes Square (or Hősök tere),  the tourist site on my map that was closest to the hotel.  I was unprepared for Heroes Square, proceeding under the assumption that it was the Statue Park, the odd reliquary for Soviet communism that in reality lies a short distance outside the city—a place that we ended up not visiting this time in Budapest.  So I imagined those dismal Eastern Bloc constructions—outsized remnants of socialist realism, where the men all looked like Stalin, and those women who didn't look like Stalin looked like Stalin's mistresses.  We were headed, I assumed, toward the kind of display that our own Cold Warriors would have warned us about in the Missile Crisis days had they cared anything at all about poetry or art, had they not vied with the bleak propaganda of communist art by simply not caring about any form of artistic expression that didn't sell.

In short, I expected very little.  It was a first-night, off-the-plane excursion.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The statues around Heroes Square were indeed outsized, and a kind of late 19^th century Romanticism that's not necessarily to my liking.  But at least it wasn't the Politburo.

Two colonnades form a half circle at the eastern edge of the plaza, atop them symbolic figures representing War and Peace, Work and Welfare.  Within the colonnade stand the Heroes, and it is immediately apparent that War is the most influential of the stone emblems: kings and commanders dominate the lineup.  I suppose that the sentiment of its time was not unlike 19^th century America's love affair with its generals.  And yet among them were men of peace—or at least the peaceful faces of men of war.  King Matthias and his scholars.  Coloman of Hungary, king and bishop, who stood against the witch burnings of his time, burnings still recalled by the sculpture at our hotel entrance, where the witch, entangled in blackened bronze, fades into the surrounding buildings and the power lines.

A more magnificent statue dominates Heroes Square. Standing tall and brilliant in front of the intersection of the colonnades is the famous statue of the Archangel Gabriel.  We were told by our guide the next day that this statue was "voted the best statue of Gabriel in the world, by those who know"—an enigmatic statement that left me wondering who those Gabriel experts might be.  Nevertheless, the statue—the archangel holding a crown—is impressive, and perhaps “those who know” are altogether right in this matter.

The square is framed by art museums.  On the north side is the Museum of Fine Arts, which when we visited was, to my delight, housing a traveling Caravaggio exhibition. The Palace of Arts, on the south side of the square, was a center of performing arts, and the events scheduled for the time of our stay were specifically national and contemporary, so we picked tradition over exploration and planned our Caravaggio visit for the following day.

Which speaks to a point.  As an artist of sorts, I am usually inclined toward the new and experimental.  But here on markedly foreign turf, more tourist than artist, I gravitated toward the known, the sanctioned, the familiar.  Caravaggio wasn't even Hungarian, I would remind myself in the days that followed, as the opportunity offered by the Palace of Arts faded behind me on the train to Vienna.  In Hungary I brushed against a vivid culture and history almost completely alien from my own, and it made me think about anonymity, that sometimes good work is lost in place as well as in time. 

And as an artist of minor sorts, I am more and more humbled by the inevitability that the survival of my own work is dependent on these large and immovable things: that it is limited by the restraints of home geography and sequestered talents.  That as writers we see things pass from print, search for recommended books to find they haven't been published in years and that the search in the most obscure sites may roust no words out of oblivion and decay.

Only a block or two from the square is the bizarrely eclectic Vajdahunyad castle, a relative newcomer to the cityscape when you consider the old origins of some of the structures across the Danube. Built in the same era (and with the same impulse) as Heroes Square, it is a gallimaufry of architectural styles—Baroque, Gothic, Renaissance, Romanesque all gathered together and lost in a strange larger purpose—entire in its oddness, occasional awkwardness, and beauty.  It houses two famous statues: one of Bela Lugosi, of course, and another of Anonymous.

A testimony to all writers, artists (and people in general) whose names have been lost to geography and time, the statue supposedly commemorates a chronicler of King Bela (not Lugosi, but a 12^th or 13^th century Hungarian monarch—for here the trouble lies, in that there are several King Belas, and we don't know to which this writer attached himself).  At the foot of the statue, I'm told by a favorite student of mine, the mathematician Paul Erdos met with a number of his fellows, apparently an unparalleled assemblage of mathematical genius, although again these are names as lost to me as that of Coloman, Matthias, or the "true identity" behind this statue.  The pen the statue holds is the subject of a local superstition: it seems that students rub it for good luck on their exams, summoning recall out of bronze and oblivion, hoping that memory and insight will have their academic backs until the test is over and time begins again.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the City, and Freedom, and Light

So there it was, and here I was.  Alone in the last room of the museum, in front of me a floating display of a city caught in mist and light.

It was supposedly Prague, of course: Prague filled with the light at the end of the Burrow you glimpse on occasion in some of Kafka's fiction—the Castle, perhaps, or the world born from Grete Samsa's music in the last section of "The Metamorphosis".  Kafka calls it "the unknown nourishment".  Gregor Samsa looks for it and fails to find it, as does the Hunger Artist:

"Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little…"because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else." These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was continuing to fast. ("The Hunger Artist", tr. Ian Johnston)

That search for the missing place, the forgotten place, or the place that may not exist (or if it does, is remote and bathed in impenetrable light) is a part of the desire and yearning of Kafka's work that drew me from the start—not only because it was so well rendered but also because I shared it, have always shared it.  And in a way, this trip—and for that matter, all my trips and journeys—are toward a place I imagine very much as the museum notes proposed it, rather vaguely and tentatively and perhaps even mundanely, as "free of evil".


"Free of evil," indeed.  If it can't be a place of good, an eternal place (because such places have always been impossible to imagine, at least for me), let it at least carry that much  freedom and release. 

As I had entered the museum, for the first time I had been asked by the clerk if I were eligible for the senior discount.  Of course it was insulting (I am still a few years away), and Rhonda kindly assured me it had to do with my hair, gray since 40.  But for some reason now, it made sense in the presence of that nebulous light, the buildings in the fog, a lone man walking.

We don't have long in any place, people.  Our stay here is a trip, a journey, a holiday. There's a good in that as well as a sadness.  No matter how often epiphany comes, no matter the moments of time outside time, the holidays of soul, we slip back into the mundane and forgetful, where nourishment fades and vanishes into imagined distances. And perhaps knowing that for what it is, settling into it and finding the good there, is one form of difficult nourishment.


I walked back into the city, lightstruck and cold on the west bank of the Vltava, and over the Charles Bridge, where dozens of statues played at immortality, their subjects and inspirations eternally free somewhere.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Burrow

It was a descent into what the Museum calls "the Burrow"—an image famous in the Kafka stories, of course, especially the one by that very name.  The congested dark, the maze-like confusion and comfort, the peace and fascination with the elaborate burrow which stands for your consciousness, your mind, your work—all of those things and none of them.  How you love and hate that hermetically sealed privacy of soul, how you want and don't want company there.  It's an image from Kafka's "The Burrow" I bought into at once, but this stairway, lit in a heat-lamp red, goes down into a dreadful depth, and those who designed the museum have stripped all elements of refuge and retreat from this cellar lined with file cabinets, drawers opened now and then to reveal letters, manuscript pages, glassed-in first editions of the books.  You wander in it like in a glossy, smothering maze, its harsh surfaces making you forget those simultaneous moments of contentment, of self-containment, like when the narrator of "The Burrow" talks about the peace and silence of the place:

But the most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over. For the time being, however, the silence is still with me. For hours I can stroll through my passages  and hear nothing except the rustling of some little creature, which I immediately  reduce to silence between my jaws, or the pattering of soil, which draws my attention  to the need for repair; otherwise all is still. The fragrance of the woods floats in; the place feels both warm and cool. Sometimes I lie down and roll about in the passage with pure joy. When autumn sets in, to possess a burrow like mine, and a roof over your head, is great good fortune for anyone getting on in years. Every hundred yards I have widened the passages into little round cells; there I can curl myself up in comfort and lie warm. There I sleep the sweet sleep of tranquility, of satisfied desire, of achieved ambition; for I possess a house. I do not know whether it is a habit that still persists from former days, or whether the perils even of this house of mine are great enough to awaken me; but invariably every now and then I start up out of profound sleep and listen, listen into the stillness which reigns here unchanged day and night, smile contentedly, and then sink with loosened limbs into still profounder sleep. (Complete Stories, tr. Willa & Edwin Muir, Schocken, 1972, p.327).

That was the Burrow I knew and loved—the comfort of the mind and of the work.  And of course, Kafka is having fun at its expense: not that of the mind or the work, but of the comfort.  Of course the stillness of the Burrow is about to be shot to hell in the narrator's anxieties, his fear of encroachment, but it's there as well in the story.  The Kafka Museum, however, has made the Burrow into a Bureau, a bleak landscape of drawers and paperwork that taps into one of the things we call Kafkaesque—the nightmarish modern landscape of duplicate copies, signings and cosigning, initialing and dating each page.  It's only part of the Burrow, but the part we recognize at once. 

And the part that inhabits dozens of my nightmares. No wonder it unsettles me, this museum cellar, striking fear into the only person I know who messed up three attempts at applying for a library card (Name? Address? Phone #?) because of my phobia of filling out forms.  It is a gauntlet of cabinets: I test one, then another, but the only drawers that open are the ones they have opened already.  Of course I want to look at the first editions, want the sights I expected from a still and safe museum, but the landscape is smothering me, the passage is too tight.  

Probably every good museum gives each visitor, at its best, a sense of "what it was like being there"—an atmosphere, an insight, a tone of setting and design.  I had glimpsed the Kafkaesque bureaucratic mazes in the fiction, inhaled their unhealthy disquiet like secondary smoke.  But it was here, on the killing floor of the Burrow, that I felt it all most viscerally, knew why I had been scared to descend those steps, and that my apprehension was right and modern and profound.  And personal.  I looked for the exit.  I wanted this to be over.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Ghosts of Kafka's Women

And now, in the shadow of a large room I remember as windowless (though I might be mistaken, because my attentions were focused on making sense of the displays around me), Rhonda and I split up briefly, she bound for an exhibit that sets forth Kafka's connections to the Jewish dramatic community in the city.  There was an odd cylindrical structure here, in which you could stand and be immersed in images of the Prague Yiddish theater of Kafka's time, the photos on a kind of wavering, plexi-glass tube that swirled around you—uncomfortably for me, because it was too much immersion, no place for distance or perspective or repose.  It was a question of temperament: I am forever a book guy, I believe, who dips in and out of the artist's world at the reader's discretion.  If a scene in a book becomes too immediate, too raw, I can close the covers and gather my breath, regroup before I read again.  Theatre, on the other hand, presumes: it is all around you, and it unnerves me.

             So as a respite, while Rhonda watches ghostly shapes dance around her, I move into the next alcove, devoted to the women in Kafka's life.

What makes us pick another person is usually unclear when we look back.  Many people don't know that I met Rhonda relatively late, that it may end up that I spent half of my life without knowing her. The time before her was roundabout and vague, not all of it ill spent, but much of it chasing after companions that were not the right ones, not really.  There was a marriage before I met her that was unhappy, that was too much immersion and no solitude—one that I was glad to leave by the time I left it.  I look back on it as though it was someone else's life, glimpsed through glass cases and without definite shape or emotional insides.  It happened—there are records that testify—but I no longer remember, no longer think of it, as my life with Rhonda is the only life there is, and the older memories—those before Rhonda, before the first marriage even—are more vivid to me, but like recollections of childhood, though they lasted into my twenties.  The loves of the past come as characters in varied textures of ghostliness, and only Rhonda is completely and utterly real.

Felice Bauer

Kafka was hardly austere when it came to romance, I was to find out.  A number of women figured in his life, and he managed to be engaged three times—twice to the same woman, the Felice Bauer to whom he dedicated that first great story "The Judgment". In her photos she looks heavy-featured, assuring, decent.  There had to be something in her character that drew him, then pushed him away, then drew him again after several intervening years.  Perhaps she stood for something reputable, something stable and upright that he courted and rejected and could not stop longing for in what should have been the midlife of his thirties.  This part felt intrusive, gossipy, but I kept at the speculation anyway: maybe Kafka thought, as some people think, preparing their way for marital disaster, that because the beloved seems to display certain qualities, admirable qualities, that he or she stands for those virtues or joys or comforts.  Like a character in a story or a play, the person you love can be both fleshly, intelligent creature and a gathering of words, ideas, images, all of which are in danger of being solely yours.  It's the old inside/outside song and dance, object and subject, Apollo and Dionysus, actor and role, and a cluster of all those tensions that go into your choosing whom you choose and why that person chooses you.

Julie Wohyrzek

And after his engagements to Felice, Kafka was engaged a third time, to a more simple, less educated Julie Wohyrzek, whose Zionist beliefs were objectionable to his domineering father.  It is tempting to see Wohyrzek's role as a kind of rescuer—from complexities and ambiguities and striving for paternal approval into the freedom of setting it all aside, the intensities of thinking and thinking too much.  During this period of his life, he supposedly had a brief affair with Grete Bloch, with whom he may or may not have fathered a son.  The last two loves of his life—the intense Milena Jisenská, Czech writer and activist, to whom the "Letter to Milena" was addressed, and Dora Diamant, who I understand sparked his interest in the Talmud, who survived him, and who (of all the women I have mentioned) alone survived the death camps.  In each case, the need of the soul emerged in human form, in female form, and at least in retrospect, these women, no doubt full and vibrant and beautiful in their own lives (because those things, too, drew the Master, they had to) survive in glass cases as the pictures I show you, as hieroglyphs that tell and conceal fragments of inner lives that brushed against his, like stories that mask human truths as they reveal.  They are characters in a play or book now: I read them obliquely and at my peril as I passed through them toward a stairwell leading down, toward a narrow corridor red-lit and unsettling. 

Milena  Jisenská 

I actually did not want to go there.  Physically, even viscerally.  It was like the stairwell to the cellar in the final chapters of my own Trajan's Arch, as though, in a kind of homage to Kafka, a doorway had opened between his work and my own--cramped and diminished and, from where I stood, intimidating. Something stopped me at the top of those stairs.  But you had to descend to see it all, so I took a deep, uncomfortable breath and moved down the stairs.  Text ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Museum Ghosts of Prague

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 17^th 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

On the Kafka Museum: Getting There

Like many a flawed pilgrim, I had decided the meaning of this journey before I took it.  I would end up in the Kafka museum, after a trip that confirmed something I had expected in the first place.  There I would see things to reaffirm my comfort and my confident position in the universe. 

                But this is what happened on the journey.  My task is to set down the process, to suspend some judgment even now, until I have it on the page.

                We emerged from the Underground into the cold Prague sunlight at the Malestranska Station, at once faced with yet another slippery tangle of streets, an overpass leading me (as Google Maps had promised and as I had planned) along a street running parallel to the Vltava River.  So far, so good: the turns written down in my little notebook leading to the destination, I guessed, within two city blocks or so, one way or another.

                And it was haywire from there, I'm afraid.  Unmapped or unreckoned, roads sprouted from the seminary street that was my directional plumb line, then the Charles Bridge (our second and, for me, secondary destination of the day) loomed straight in front of us.  It meant that we were past the museum, and no matter the most celebrated bridge in a city of bridges—and no matter my desire to see it—the search for the museum was not over.

                So around the labyrinth of side roads and alleys and cul-de-sacs we wandered, as I found other landmarks—ones to which I had listed directions from the yet-to-be-visible Kafka Museum.  I tried reversing those directions, figuring that you could reach the Kafka Museum from Shakespeare & Sons Bookstore by simply flipping the directions to Shakespeare & Sons from the Kafka Museum, but it wasn't happening: like the old Vermont farmer said, "You can't get there from here," and somewhere in ghostly Prague the Master had to be smiling.  I found myself back at the foot of bridge, increasingly irritated at Rhonda's calm and kindly suggestion that we might be able to see something (the museum, perhaps?) over its span.

                You see where this is heading.  If you don't, you are as clueless as I was, when I consented to the bridge, climbed up among the subversive and Baroque statues lining its cobblestoned arch, to discover if you walked about 100 feet up its arch, moving toward the eastern side, you could look over the railing and see the big red-and-white sign for the Kafka Museum hard against the western bank of the Vltava.

                Was it a version of John Lennon's saying that "life is what happens when you're thinking about something else"?   So I was thinking as I congratulated myself on resolutions, like a plot line in a story clicking into place, the answer somewhere between the Lennon quote and the setting aside of my bull-headed masculine refusal to ask directions—in short, listening to Rhonda in matters of logistics and simple compass sense, where, quite frankly, she is definitely superior to me when all is said and done.  Such could have marked the story's end, were it not for our losing our way the instant we came down from the bridge.

                Because without the distance, all Prague closed in, towered over us.  Our expected path by the riverside was cut off by a fenced-in canal, and an alternate route was blocked by friendly but insistent waiter, standing in a restaurant courtyard we were trying to cross and directing us, with no negotiation permitted, around to the front side of the building.

                We ended up beside Shakespeare & Sons, full circle from an earlier route and, frankly, no less sure of our destination, no matter how clearly we had glimpsed it from the bridge.  I felt like Joseph K. in The Trial, lost in the maze of the city's plan and my own suppositions.  Here we were, no longer certain of where we stood, as though the compass points themselves were moving.

                Then I saw a queue of tourists, their line crossing the sidewalk, spilling into the street, and ending on the opposite curb. I'm thinking, "wouldn't they all line up for Kafka?"  But given our luck over the last hour, I took nothing for granted, circled the line, and found it led to a narrow passage between buildings, too narrow even for an alley, that ended in a little alcove where someone had placed a crossing light, flashing "walk" to "don't walk" and back again, a young woman striking poses in front of it for the benefit of passers-by and their cameras.  And I was thinking that now I'd seen everything until Rhonda jostled me out of stupor and disappointment by calling out that here it was, that, yes, there was a sign ahead, and an archway, it turned out, that opened into a court ringed with two cafes, a gift shop, the pissing statue, and the museum we'd been hunting for two hours.  She took the picture of me by the statue, urging me to remove my hat for the shot, because obviously a bedraggled, half-old and ankle-tired man standing between two urinating statues should preserve his dignity by going hatless, am I right?

                And still, the odd pride I felt in having stumbled upon the place.  I had set aside the directions I had taken down carefully and mapped at home, had walked every street in Malastranska (including, I am sure, this one several times), had seen the destination from the height of the famous bridge and then across a narrow canal, only to get there by accident.  Peace, resolution, and complacency were my brief reward.  

               

But the museum lay in front of me.  And the journey darkens from here.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Kafka Museum: A Prologue

 One example of Prague's translucency (and, for me, at first an uncomfortable one, by no means as charming as the circuitry and misdirection around the big squares like Old Town and Wenceslas) is the route to the Kafka museum, over on the west side of the river in Malastranska, just north of the Charles Bridge,

                The whole experience of the place—and, most importantly, of getting to the place—spanned several hours of a Friday, and felt like something from the stories of the Master himself, that shadowy presence you can see everywhere in the city if you just attend to shadows.  Setting off on the underground, our chief goal was my personal pilgrimage, because those who know me know that, perhaps next to Yeats, Franz Kafka is my patron saint.  Perhaps even more than Yeats these days, because though Yeats continued to blossom as an artist into his 70s (a last act that looks increasingly attractive to me these days, when physical weariness alone can weigh down the course of a book's coming into being), he remains a young man's poet, filled with gauzy idealism and enormous ambitions.  Kafka, on the other hand, didn't live to 45.  He has other lessons for me—lessons, oddly, for my late middle age, ones I haven't faced until recently and, once discovered, pretty hard to learn.

                Humility is difficult for all of us.  It contains the dangerous trap of priding yourself on your humility.  I have had little danger of falling into that trap, because I've managed to avoid humility at its deepest level, always thinking that the "big break" was right over the horizon, just ahead of my own idealism and aspiration.  Of late, though, some things have changed: I approach the increasing awareness that at my age I am unlikely to see my "name made", that I'm not that special, not really.  It's time to set down the nagging hunger for celebrity that I inherited and am shaking off of me late, to own up that the most important remaining task is the one I have always professed without really, deep down, believing with the faith I should believe it: that you must find peace in the process of the work, find the joy there and perhaps its larger good.  To be more than constant with that, to grow up and own up, to see the process as the best one can do, without the glamour and lure of fame or understanding (the readers who "get" you), or even of earned respect.  Because you can earn respect and not get it, and what matters when that happens is not the fata morgana of acclaim, nor even your self-respect, but a deep and abiding passion for the undertaking, for the process of moving from one point to the next in a love of doing your best at what you do.
              It is Kafka, more than any other artist,  who reminds me of this truth.  His relentless devotion to his art is paired with a temperament so free of vanity that he could set aside not only all amenities, but all of what we would call necessities—a personal life, health, even, ultimately, a sense of identity, to lose himself in his art.  “All I am is literature," he said, "and I am not able or willing to be anything else.”  He is not the only artist who asked that his unfinished work be burned after his death; he is, however, the only one who I believe meant it.  His devotion to his art was so intent that he was willing to sacrifice its immortality or its endurance, like a saint who gives up eternal life out of love for God. In short, the price was nothing short of everything, and a cost too steep for ordinary mortals to pay.  He sets a bar so high that we can't see it, much less clear it, weighed down by our own egos, our blinding self-images as we congratulate ourselves for "being authors." 

                That's why the notorious statue outside the Kafka Museum struck me as especially appropriate and funny. Two men streaming water into the pool, facing one another.  You must leave behind the "pissing contest"—a good old American phrase for useless competition—in order to enter the sanctuary.  But passing by the statue is symbolic.  You can do it in front of the museum, for here it is a ritual gesture, far safer than Kafka's wild and holy abandonment.

                But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I was talking about the path to this point, to the little arch through which you walk, past the statue and to the museum.  I have to tell you how we got there, and what we would find.  And why Kafka would have enjoyed the story of our journey. 

                That will be the next entry in this tale of pilgrimage.  ©2014 Michael Williams