Rachael Lane Stedman | nonfiction | Czech Fairy Tale

  
  
  
Czech Fairy Tale
 
 
 
Letter from Božena Němcová, 29 July, 1851
                                                            – I don’t feel free anywhere this year, clouds everywhere, everywhere
 
 
It is the middle of winter, I am broke, and again I need to move. Prague feels grim, like the faces of the people who line the bench seats of the subway trains that cross it. It is a city that has suffered and has not healed; a silence and a grayness, left over from its darker years, has not yet lifted. I work hard to scrape out a young adult version of a life here – teaching English classes, learning to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes, pretending to be part of the conversation I have yearned for and feel I have finally found. I live in rented rooms that never fit quite right, moving often. My jobs change as often as my living space. Language schools start up, hire teachers, open their doors, and close again without warning. Nothing feels permanent or stable. Between classes and cheap restaurant meals, I walk endlessly over cobblestone streets, soaking myself in the dark beauty of the city and allowing myself to escape into the anonymity of being at a distance from everything I know and all who know me.

I find a room to sublet for only one month, in an old yellow building that sits on the edge of a square, close to the river and an ancient bridge lined with stone saints. A statue stands in the center of the square, encircled by a cobblestone road and a cluster of irregular buildings with tiny alleyways between them. The streetlights are attached to the sides of the buildings, countless spider webs hanging in the spaces between them. A music school with four stories of tall windows faces the yellow building. When I visit the square for the first time, I see young students inside, framed like photographs in the windows, practicing stringed instruments. A number in the 1300s, the year the building was built, is carved above the giant wooden doors that I pass through into the courtyard. Here I meet Vincent, an American poet who has lived in this building for many years and is well-versed in this system of subletting his room to strangers so that he can exit when needed and have it waiting for him when he returns. A curved wooden staircase takes us to the fourth floor, where I am introduced to my next temporary home, and we make arrangements.

A few days later, with the key to Vincent’s room like a treasure in my pocket, I haul my belongings onto the subway, across town and over the bridge to the square, up the wooden staircase. The room feels like a personal space, not easy to make oneself a part of, but with my one bag of belongings, I settle in. I love the typewriter set up next to the tiny window and the small pieces of Vincent’s life that I find in every nook. Stacks of literary magazines, English newspapers, and poetry books fill the shelf next to his bed. Photographs and small drawings are stuck everywhere – between the pages of books, in corners of frames. I read his books, water his plants, eat his granola. I wrap myself in his giant purple bathrobe to travel down the hallway to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I sit at his typewriter and make my first try at poetry, hoping some of his magic will come through his machine and into my words.

Inhabiting a room that feels lived in gives me the false feeling that I have a home. My month here passes too quickly, and the pressure looms to find the next place to live. As the last days pass and the pressure builds, I scan bulletin boards for housing advertisements, buy phone cards to use at pay phones to follow leads, and leave many unreturned messages. In a stroke of luck, I run into the owner of Vincent’s building in the hallway, a man named Rudy who loves to speak English, loves to rent his rooms to foreigners in order to up his English-speaking 3 opportunities. Just in time, I learn that another room in the building is opening up, and I am right there to claim it before anyone else can.

 
 
 
Rudy’s family has owned this building for generations. When Rudy was a young man and the communist government took control of his country and his family’s property, he escaped. He tells me that he swam the river south to Austria and found his way to Florida, where he married an American woman and lived an entirely different life. I don't ask him where his wife is now. Instead, I listen as he tells me with pride of his years there, pulls out his wallet and shows me a worn picture of a younger version of himself, wearing white shorts and standing next to his boat. He is proud of his American style of speaking English and takes every opportunity to show off his vocabulary. He is most delighted by phrases like okey-dokey and sure thing, phrases that to him suggest an intimate knowledge of the language.

While Rudy lived in Florida, the government designated his family’s building as housing for widowed women. After the fall of communism, he returned to Prague to lay claim to his inheritance, and the building was returned to him under the condition that the women who lived here could stay without a rent increase. Rudy’s building houses a fascinating mixture of people, divided into two groups – foreigners, who are able to pay the most rent and with whom Rudy can use his English phrases, and elderly Czech women who have lived here for decades, watching as their friends die and their rooms become inhabited by strangers. Sharing these hallways are those who live in the building until they die, and those who come and go endlessly.

Rudy takes me to the second floor to see the room that will be available at the end of the month, which is only a few days away. At the door, I am introduced to Levi, the young American man who is preparing to move out. Walking into the room, my eyes lock on the desk in front of the window. Large and old and made of wood, its presence in the room dwarfs all the other features that lack comfort. I love it and want it – I can picture myself sitting in front of it, facing the window with a cup of coffee and my notebook, looking out at the windows of the school across the square. A small row of metal cupboards hangs on one wall, a freestanding sink next to them. A metal framed twin bed, various other large pieces of furniture that don’t seem to fit. The room lacks the character and nooks of my borrowed poet’s space, feels cold and unloved, but the flaws are balanced by the desk.

"All the furniture will stay," Levi tells me.

"The desk?" I ask, making clear the importance of this item.

"Yes," he assures me, "the desk will stay."

"Okey-dokey," says Rudy, and I pay my deposit, hopeful that I have at long last found a home for a while. I tell myself that the vague dislike I feel for Levi during this short exchange doesn’t really matter.





Walking into the room on the day it becomes mine, I find it changed. This time, my eyes lock on the bare space where the desk was. This time, it is the absence of the desk that dwarfs all the other features. I am given a key, and I have a space, but I do not have a home. The missing desk and the feeling of having been betrayed creates a barrier between myself and this room.

Listlessly, I carry my bag down the curved wooden staircase from the fourth floor to the second. I fold my few items of clothing and set them on the shelf of the armoire, which sticks out into the room unpleasantly. I set my small collection of books and tapes on the metal heater box next to the bed. There’s not much more I can do. In a matter of minutes, I have moved in.

I half-heartedly attempt to shift some things around, to rouse some sense of motivation in myself to make this room feel like mine. When I move the bed frame, I find a black spiral notebook that has fallen between the bed and the wall. Levi has written the word Nothing in black marker on the cover, and I spend the evening lying on his sheets, reading his late-night, sometimes drunken thoughts. I imagine him at the desk I wanted so badly, or in this exact spot on the bed where I lay, scribbling away. Why do all of my heroes either find God or kill themselves? he asks, and adds, I just pissed in the sink. I look over at the small sink in the corner and my dislike for Levi grows again. It feels like it is beginning to matter.

I eat granola every morning out of the one bowl left in the room – a pale blue plastic bowl with a cigarette burn on the inside. Two aluminum spoons have also been left behind, light enough to feel like they are disposable. I keep an opened box of UHT milk on the counter for this morning meal. There is no refrigerator, no burner on which to cook. Just my open box of milk.

The only space I create for myself is a left-behind desk drawer, propped on top of the heater box as a shelf. My favorite books are lined up here with care, the poetry I’ve been living on all year – Rilke and e.e. cummings. The books sit next to my few notebooks scribbled with quotes and stuffed with letters. Three or four cassette tapes are stacked here as well, a recent gift sent by my sister in her consistent efforts to connect me to her life despite our distance. After the first listen on an old cassette player left by a friend leaving town, I attach myself to Elliot Smith and ignore the others, soaking myself in his songs every night. A flowered metal tea tin holds my pencils. My earrings sit in a pile inside of a small pottery dish; another dish serves as an ashtray. A small plant sits on top of the drawer. On the other side of the bed, my stash of money hides in the pocket of a coat that hangs in the armoire, pushed to the back and out of sight.

Against the wall by the sink sits another piece of furniture. It stands off the ground on legs and has a top, like a chest of drawers except that there are no drawers, no openings in the front. It is an unfamiliar piece of furniture to me, and I can’t recognize a use for it. My mind dismisses it, hardly noticing it other than to use it as a surface for my toothbrush.

 
 
 
 
In the hallway, I meet an old Czech woman who lives down the hall and she beckons me into her room. She has long white hair and a beautiful weathered face. With my few Czech words, I clumsily attempt to communicate, but she doesn’t understand. I resort to only a smile, and we walk around her room and look at the artwork that fills her walls. She tells me about each piece and I smile and nod, understanding nothing other than the importance of these items to her. I notice a framed certificate of credentials and can decipher enough of the language to understand that in her working years she was a doctor. I notice the beauty of her space, the care with which each item is chosen and arranged. It feels like a home. I want so badly to sit with her and share tea, to listen to her stories. When we finish touring the room, there is nothing to do but leave.

….when I observe that vague emptiness, I feel sad and chilly and I wish I had wings

I leave for work and walk. Being on the move feels better, being out in the city and a part of it. On foot, I cover a lot of ground during the day, traveling between makeshift classrooms to teach a one-hour class in each. I skim the surface of many relationships during these work hours – thin connections with other American teachers, Czech students, co-workers. I smile and laugh with them, go through the motions and pretend all is well, but I give nothing of myself away. When I’m not working, I haunt my favorite coffee shops and write lesson plans, walk aimlessly and often through parks.

I find spots that speak to me, spaces in the city where I often return in my wanderings. In a park that sits above the river, a stone statue of a woman who stands in a long dress, the simple shape of a bird resting in her hands. In front of a church, a bronze statue of a girl in a dress that appears to be moving in the wind, her arms reaching towards the sky and just barely touching the tail feathers of a dove – her reach suggesting freedom and release. A tall and serene statue of a woman presiding over a grave in the cemetery, a blue dress covering the swaying shape of her body, an enormous pair of wings folded on her back. I visit these women as if they are my friends and pray my prayers by their sides. I feel comforted by their presence, find some sense of home in their permanence.

I find another scrap of comfort in the steep climb that begins not far behind my building, a hill that is covered with hundreds of fruit trees that make up a large public orchard. My path up this hill leads to a stone ruin at the top, where I sit in an old window opening and look over all the rooftops of Prague. I need this perspective, a view of where I am. From there, it is a short walk to a massive cathedral that sits atop the city like a crown, a stone structure filled with light filtered through stained glass and a silence that visitors cannot penetrate, the main room of the church large enough that one can feel alone here despite the milling tourists. I often take this walk to my perch in the window, and then to my bench in the cathedral. I patch together these pieces of comfort like a thin quilt that barely covers me, barely provides enough warmth. Each day that passes, I settle a little more into my days in the city and my walks across bridges and along the river. I settle into friendships and routines and finally into a stable job, but I do not settle into my room.

 
 
 
 
Most single rooms for rent in Prague are furnished and include bedding. In the rooms where I have lived so far, the bedding has been plentiful and soft – filled with feathers housed in thick cotton. In these final winter months, I have only what Levi left for me – one small lap blanket from an airline made of a cheap synthetic fleece, and a scrap of an old scratchy wool blanket. The metal heater box next to the large window emits some heat, but its place in the room is poorly chosen, and it is not enough to keep me warm.

I have no energy in reserve to solve problems like this. Despite the money stashed away and plenty of free time, I don’t try to find a place to buy a blanket. These stores are not in the places where I walk. They feel inaccessible, positioned at the end of long subway rides to the suburbs. Instead, I wrap my feet and legs in my two small scraps and wear my winter coat to sleep at night. I resign to my long and uncomfortable hibernation. I have no bird in my hands, nor am I graced with wings.

….turn the gray sky blue and line it with gold – breathe fresh life into the wilted blooms

A new neighbor, Lucie, moves into the room next to me. She is from Prague and is returning after a long absence. She has brought her new husband home with her, a Canadian man she met while living and studying dance in Africa. Their faces lack the grimness of winter in Prague and look vibrant, full of life. I hear sounds of music through our shared wall, the sound of conversation. Lucie greets me in the hallway, her long hair wrapped up in a colorful scarf. She invites me to come and share tea with her. We sit on her floor on pillows and she plays old Czech folk songs on the guitar and sings. The guardedness I have been carrying with me everywhere is broken in this one visit, urged to its knees by her singing voice and generous smile. During our long visit among the rugs and pillows and colors of her lively room, a hot cup of tea in hand, I confess my fears.

"I’m afraid that I’m changing," I try to explain. "I can feel myself closing up. I hardly recognize myself."

"No," she says. "You’re probably just growing. If you're already open to others, you grow inward, that’s all. That’s what you’re doing here. You’re learning the inside of yourself."

 
 
 
 
I continue to climb the hill behind my building, walking underneath the trees to reach the spectacular view of rooftops from the top, and as I do, the city beneath me begins to change before my eyes, at first gradually but then astonishingly. The fruit trees suddenly blossom; the whole hill turns a pale pink. A carpet of new green grass grows up underneath my feet. Walking over bridges, I lift my face to the spring air and feel it pass over me on its way down the river. I sit near the river’s edge and watch the birds busily working to make temporary homes. The frequent trips to my bench in the cathedral become something new, as sunlight shines brilliantly through the colors of the leaded glass windows, reflecting on the stone floor at my feet and piercing the grayness. I feel a readiness inside of me that I have been wishing for all winter. At last, fueled by the light and air, I feel enough life inside of me to create needed change, and I take to my room.

I open my one window out onto the square and hear music coming through the windows of the school. The sounds and the moving air sweep into the room and soften the stain of the winter days that resides here. With new energy, I begin to clean, scrubbing away the dull days and nights and their difficulties. I wet a cloth, and down on my hands and knees, I wash the old 10 linoleum floor, cleaning carefully along the edges. For the first time, I notice that the browns and yellows of the floor are created by a thatching design, like a woven mat. I realize that I’ve never looked closely at this space. I realize that I’ve hardly touched it, have offered it no care. I slide a tape into the cassette player and keep working, choosing David Bowie instead of Elliot Smith for once. Yes, this can work, I think. I can live here. I can make this my place. Everything is going to be okay. I am not always going to feel so lost and small and cold. Little by little, I’m going to find my way.

I begin to push the furniture around, trying new arrangements, and by myself, I move the giant armoire, the bed, then move to the corner of the room by the sink where the strange piece of furniture stands holding my toothbrush. Not quite sure what to do with this clunky piece, I can at least try to give it a new space, perhaps even a greater purpose. With my fingers under the top, I lift. To my surprise, the top comes off easily, like a lid, and I set it on the floor. The movement of air in the room suddenly quickens, making a slight wind, and I reach inside. My hand touches something soft, like a feather, and I pull out a blanket—a thick, golden-colored, velvet blanket that has been hiding here all along like a buried treasure, waiting for me to recognize that what I needed was within my grasp, but required a reach.


Work Cited
Letter from Božena Němcová to Jan (Ivan) Helcelet, 29 July 1851. Iggers, Wilma. Women of Prague. Berghahn Books, 1995. 60.




**2024 Pushcart nominee