Prague

Driving in Portland, I occasionally glimpse a steep, hill-side narrow street with tall buildings, and, as intriguing as it looks, I don’t turn down it because this way it can remain in my imagination a portal to similar streets I walked a decade ago in Prague. I look for strings of continuity to the person I was when I walked around Prague (we never had a car, nor needed one) and they are hard to find at first. The baby always strapped to my chest is now almost as tall as I am, and has three younger brothers. And though the odd Czech word or name of a subway stop will rise unbidden, it seems like it all belongs to a different lifetime.

My first response to what it was to me to be in Prague (twelve years ago we went, next week, and ten years ago we came back, next week) is to reference the movie Lost in Translation. I saw that and was a little spooked at how it captured the girl with the newly minted philosophy degree come to a city where she doesn’t speak the language with a new husband who has a job and place to go every morning. That was me, minus Bill Murray and plus the six months along fetus in my belly.

I don’t think I have a coherent narrative of what those two years were, more these impressions of reading voraciously (I can still map routes to the two bookstores, U Knihomola and The Globe that sold overpriced English books) walking and writing, and throwing myself down canyon-like narrow streets of tall, gorgeously historic-looking buildings, taking random turns trying to see if I could get good and lost but inevitably arriving at a landmark I knew. Of the earnest attempts to learn Czech being dishearteningly not enough. The disapproving looks I got for strapping the baby to my chest and roaming instead of protecting his delicate spine and confining him to lying flat in a large prom, confining myself to where I could walk to with a bulky pram that one person could never get up or down stairs unassisted. Being told, always, that the baby was cold, and needed another layer of clothing, when he was in fact, quite happy and content and showing no signs of hypothermia.

We lived in two different attic apartments, and I spent lots of time staring out over the rooftops of Prague, horror struck about envisioning accidents where a child falls out these high windows, not yet quite trusting myself as the mother responsible for protecting him. I remember walking through a graveyard on all-saint’s day, my four week old son strapped to my chest, feeling so far from where my grandparents were buried, feeling this deep empathy for the graves not visited or decorated by any living family, wondering if there were no family or if they had emigrated, as my husband’s grandparents and great grandparents had. I remember marveling at the care taken of these graves by a supposedly atheist people, and feeling so displaced and mortal and just not rooted. An upstart, with little sense of my own history, and the whole new baby, who was a new generation displacing my generation, not quite responsible for the passing on of my grandparents six years earlier, but somehow connected to it, turning my parents into grandparents.

It’s very hard to separate out my state, newly wed to a man I had known exactly one year, and getting used to the idea of motherhood, giving up roles of student, employee, daughter and sister, from my experience of this alien city. It was my first experience of living in a big city — Albuquerque when I left was a city of about 600,000, Prague’s population was closer to 1.2 million. That so much of Prague for young, hip American ex-pats was about smoky bars and drinking, artistic experimentation or capitalist expansion, and the ex-pat mothers I got to know tended to have at least a decade on me and thus intimidate me. Some of the negatives were so vivid and are so much closer to hand than the great experiences, the one time I boarded a bus with the baby, following usual procedures of public transportation, sitting, and having the bus drive say something I didn’t understand over the public announcement system, having everyone turn and look at me, until, cheeks burning, I decided to get off the bus at the next stop, feeling helpless and teary. I don’t think I thought the hardness of all the adjustment was peculiar to being in Prague, it just did the pathetic fallacy thing of reflecting how hard things were inside me, the things given up, the being unsure if I was ready for this new life. It echoed the vertiginous free-fall feeling I experienced the weekend when my parents dropped me off at college for the first time with time for orientation before classes started and there were whole mornings and afternoons when not only did I not have to be anywhere in particular, nobody was asking me to account for myself or let them know where I was and the freedom was truly frightening, paralyzing.

I have said that it was probably the best thing that we could have done for our marriage, to move to a city where we had no one to turn to but each other, where phone calls to our parents or friends were costly and had to be carefully timed across the time zones, not to be made in fits of frustration. The internet was a primitive thing, the dial-up connections slow, email a new marvel, the digital pictures we put up of our new son cutting-edge, Amazon an expensive last resort for getting English reading material. My mother-in-law would video tape and send us American sit-coms which were this sweet relief. We had a pediatrician who spoke English, but her receptionist really didn’t so making an appointment was always a test in my understanding of time and date, and when the baby seemed sick, it was easier to thumb through Dr. Spock than call anyone, so we early on developed a sense of ourselves as the experts on our son, doing what worked for us without realizing that there were labels for different child-rearing philosophies. It’s easy to look back at our time in Prague and wonder at all the things we were almost blind to, just as I wish I could re-do my first year of college. I wish I could see the imprint that the experience left on me, it might have left me stronger and more independent, but, on the other hand, it might also have left me a little more tentative and doubtful.