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A quote: “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt.” ~~ Erma Bombeck
I’ll start with a story …
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I scout film locations. As long as the studio hands me a ticket and a generous expense account …
Today I am in Prague, wandering cobbled streets between buildings that haven’t changed much since medieval times. But the nightlife? Nightclubbing Czech style is wild.
I got a drink and sat watching the action. I missed her approach but as she sat next to me, she got my full attention.
Intrigued by my reason for visiting, she became my guide. Showing me the views and quiet neighborhoods that tourists didn’t visit. The days were a delight, the evenings back in the club heady with her leaning on me, dancing with me. I wanted … oh … I wanted
I looked up from the table to the man standing there, dripping wet from the rain. His eyes only leave mine for a moment to glance at her. She lifts her chin and moves toward the door.
“She has had her fun and now goes home. As you will. You have a good soul. You keep it for her sake.”
As he turns, I start to rise. A hand on my arm stops me. The Czech shakes his head. “Don’t,” he whispers.
“Vodník.”
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Trogluddite says: The studio’s letter was formal, overflowing with legal mumbo-jumbo – all to say “…no longer in need of your services.” Not surprising, after my last trip to Prague. Arguing with the old Roma hag who sold tourists lies and children scary bedtime stories in the Krannerova kasna put me on the Policie’s radar, but I was still just an obnoxious drunk American.
I saw her when I walked into the pulsing barrage of techno-musik at Klub FAMU. She was dancing with an old fat guy – the typical east European bureaucrat, skimming and extorting enough to keep his boss happy with a cut, to keep his wife happy with a country dacha, and to keep young, beautiful women happy with promises of lifting them out of poverty. I didn’t let the fact that I’m too old to fight my way through a bar stop me from trying.
I know it was her. Prague is full of twenty-somethings from the countryside with firm, fresh cheeks, eyes filled with lightning, and hair as dark as a moonless night. But I saw a flash of recognition in those eyes. I heard the sharp catch of her breath as clear as if we were standing alone in a quiet Old Town backstreet. And I would have caught her as she ran down to the Vltava, but Czech police aren’t all that worried about use of force, particularly if you’re an obnoxious drunk American.
Scott says: Thanks Darleen, I had to look up “Vodnik”, and add a new word to my vocaublary.
Cameron says: “May I join you?” Hm. She’s about my age and I’d consider her my type. I nodded and offered her the empty chair.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
“No idea yet,” I replied. “I wasn’t supposed to be here by myself. I had it all planned: I was going to propose, she’d say yes and then we would leave on the next flight out for here to spend some time together. But just before I could ask, she ended it because she wanted more excitement in her life. What’s so funny?”
“Sorry,” she said with a smile. “My situation was just as bad. We’d been together for two years and I walked in on him and my sister. Apparently, I was pretty boring. So I flew out here after grabbing my passport and some clothes.”
We watched the couple stroll down the road, eyes only for each other. I asked the waiter to bring us some wine.
“This early in the day?” she said.
“You have other plans?”
“It could be kind of boring,” she said in a tone of mock warning.
I never saw her after that week but she did teach me that boring can be just fine.
I still remember the day everything changed.
I was fifteen, and while my folks had reservations about bringing me with them when they were posted to the diplomatic mission in Prague, they had stronger reservations about all the other options. No relatives back home were really good options for keeping me, and Dad had some really bad experiences with boarding schools when his folks were sent abroad.
So I got a ringside seat for the day when the impossible happened and the verities of the Cold War all came crashing down in a heap. Sure, we’d been aware of the unrest in the southern part of the Soviet Union, the wild rumors and the even stranger truths. But we’d assumed that in time it would be crushed, just like all the previous ones in the USSR proper and in the Warsaw Pact nations. Right here the Prague Spring had been squashed the year before I was born, with hopes crushed by tanks in these very streets.
So we’d been keeping a very close eye on the evolving situation in the Transcaucasus. My folks were rather conventionally religious Protestant Christians, with the view that the age of miracles ended with the completion of Scripture. Even when they saw the video feed, they were hesitant to regard the events as anything but a coincidence. Sure, the lightning bolt had struck mere moments after that Lanakhidze guy had shouted, “God, these people want a tsar. Give them a tsar.” However, attributing it to supernatural intervention felt too much like superstition — and while we might admire Pope John Paul II for his anti-Communist stance, there was still a strong streak of anti-Catholicism in our family’s religious belief.
In the weeks and months that followed, everything changed. As the Soviet government in Moscow became increasingly desperate, they called back the Red Army forces who’d been occupying the Warsaw Pact countries under the guise of “fraternal aid” — only to find about half of them defecting to the side of the man everyone was now calling “the Lightning-rod.” A man who, on a single Easter Sunday, had gone from a committed atheist to a believer.
That summer still has a certain glow to it in my memories. Sure, there was still a lingering worry that the crumbling regime might use nukes in a “taking my ball and going home” gambit — but as power slipped away from them, the atmosphere of dread gave way to hope as the peoples of countries so long under Communist tyrannies claimed their freedom. And one of the first signs of that freedom was the disintegration of the invisible walls of fear that had separated them from any foreigner, any Westerner they might encounter.
Her name was Marketa, and I still remember her face, her laugh which had for so many years been stifled. We spent so many hours together, walking through these streets, older than anything that even the cities of the eastern seaboard and the Spanish mission towns of California could boast. She’d tell me the stories of this house and that streetcorner, and the castle that towered above it all.
It was young love, and deep inside I knew it couldn’t last forever. Even if taking a foreign bride would’ve made my career plans difficult, there was enough between us that would’ve been difficult to bridge, and too many years before either of us reached our majority. That winter brought a new posting for my parents, so Marketa and I said our good-byes. We exchanged addresses and made the usual promises to write — but that was the days before widespread Internet access, and snail mail was just cumbersome enough that getting a letter written and posted proved too high a hurdle.
And today I was checking one of my favorite social media outlets and what should I find but a “you might know” for one Marketa Bartos. She’s aged in the four decades and change since we last saw each other, but there’s no question that it’s her.
So here I sit, hesitating. If she’d reached out for the connection, I wouldn’t be so concerned. But this is just an algorithm, and I have no idea what paths her life may have taken since ours last crossed. Would an effort at reconnection be seen as mere nostalgia, or might others in her life perceive something inappropriate?
Perhaps it’d be just as well to let the memory remain, unsullied by whatever changes the intervening years may have wrought.
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