*



 

KAFKA WAS BORN IN A building on the square of Prague's Old Town on July 3, I883. He moved several times, but never far from the city of his birth. His Hebrew teacher recalled him saying, "Here was my secondary school, over there in that building facing us was the university, and a little further to the left, my office. My whole life-" and he drew a few small circles with his finger "-is confined to this small circle."

The building where Kafka was born was destroyed by a great fire in I889. When it was rebuilt in 1902, only a part of it was preserved. In 1995, a bust of Kafka was set into the building's outer wall. A portent of the Prague Spring, Kafka was finally recognized by the Czech communist authorities, hailed as a "revolutionary critic of capitalist alienation."

In a letter to a friend, he wrote: "There is within everyone a devil which gnaws the nights to destruction, and that is neither good nor bad, rather, it is life: if you did not have it, you could not live. So what you curse in yourself is your life. This devil is the material (and a fundamentally wonderful one) which you have been given and which you must now make use of. . . . On the Charles Bridge in Prague, there is a relief under the statue of a saint, which tells your story. The saint is sloughing a field there and has harnessed a devil to the plough. Of course, the devil is still furious (hence the transitional stage; as long as the devil is not satisfied the victory is not complete), he bares his teeth, looks back at his master with a crooked, nasty expression and convulsively retracts his tail; nevertheless, he is submitted to the yoke. . . ."

Kafka ra đời tại một building ở quảng trường Cổ Thành Prague, ngày 3 Tháng Bẩy, 1883. Ông di chuyển vài lần, nhưng không bao giờ ra khỏi thành phố. Ông thầy dạy tiếng Hebrew còn nhớ là vị học trò của mình có lần nói, “Đây là ngôi trường trung học của tôi, ở chỗ kia kìa, trong cái toà building đối diện chúng ta, là đại học, xa tí nữa, về phía trái, là văn phòng của tôi. Trọn đời tôi” – ông học trò khua vòng vòng ngón tay – “thì đóng khung ở trong cái vòng tròn nho nhỏ này”.

Tòa nhà nơi Kafka ra đời, bị một trận cháy lớn tiêu hủy vào năm 1889. Khi xây cất lại vào năm 1902, chỉ 1 phần được giữ lại. Vào năm 1995, một bức tượng nửa người của ông được dựng lên trong toà nhà, tường phía ngoài. Một điềm triệu của Mùa Xuân Prague, Kafka sau cùng được nhà cầm quyền CS Czech công nhận, như là một “nhà phê bình cách mạng về sự tha hóa của chế độ tư bản”.

Trong 1 lá thư cho bạn, Kafka viết, luần quần trong bất cứ 1 ai, là một con quỉ, nó gậm đêm, đến tang thương, đến hủy hoại, và điều này, đếch VC, và cũng đếch Ngụy, hay đúng hơn, đời Mít là như thế:
Nếu bạn đếch phải như thế, thì bạn đếch phải là Mít!
Bạn không thể sống, đúng hơn.

Còn quỉ này là… hàng – như trong cái ý, Nam Kít nhận họ, Bắc Kít nhận hàng – và bởi thế, hàng này mới thật là tuyệt vời, "ơi Thi ơi Thi ơi", một em Bắc Kít chẳng đã từng nghe, đến vãi lệ, 1 giọng Nam Kít, phát ra từ cặp loa Akai, tặng phẩm-chiến lợi phẩm của cuộc ăn cướp - Bạn ăn cướp và bây giờ bạn phải sử dụng nó, làm cho nó trở thành có ích… Trên cây cầu Charles Bridge ở Prague, có một cái bệ, bên dưới 1 bức tượng thánh, nó kể câu chuyện của bạn. Vị thánh trầm mình xuống một cánh bùn, kéo theo với ông một con quỉ. Lẽ dĩ nhiên, con quỉ đếch hài lòng, và tỏ ra hết sức giận dữ (và đây là ý nghĩa của ẩn dụ, một khi mà con quỉ cuộc chiến Mít chưa hài lòng, dù có dâng hết biển đảo cho nó, thì chiến thắng đỉnh cao vưỡn chưa hoàn tất), nó nhe răng, tính ngoạm lại sư phụ của nó 1 phát!
*

Bắc Đảo dùng từ như thể ông ta vật lộn đời mình với chúng [Ông] kiếm ra đường, để nói với tất cả chúng ta.

NYRB

Thiên tài Bắc Đảo và cơn hăm dọa của ông ta, là ở trong cái sự liền lạc, không mối nối, không sứt mẻ, nhưng thật là hài hòa, khi thực hiện cuộc hôn nhân giữa ẩn dụ và chính trị: ông là 1 chiến sĩ, 1 tên du kích, đúng hơn, trong 1 cuộc chiến đấu ở mức ngôn ngữ.

Chicago Tribune
**

Kafka’s Prague

Bei Dao

 

I

MICHAEL TOLD ME ON THE PHONE, "Don't worry, somebody will be there to pick you up. He's really tall, like a basketball player. . . ." Sure enough, as soon as I came out of customs I saw him holding a sign up in the air, his head bobbing above the crowd. He was very tall and skinny; his smiling face looked tired, but warm. His name was Stanislav, a musician who was also the chauffer for the Prague Writers' Festival. His English was not very good and he asked me if I spoke German. I said I didn't. He said that he was going to Germany at the end of the month to perform. I asked what instrument he played. He said something in German, and pantomimed with his hands. Piano? No. Pipe organ? He nodded emphatically. I asked him where he usually performed. He said usually for sick people. In a hospital? No. In a convalescent home? He nodded his head emphatically again. As long as it isn't a funeral home, I thought to myself. I abandoned my curiosity about two of the greatest details of his life, and looked out the window at the scenery.

    I was in Berlin in the summer of 1989. Michael and his wife set out from Oslo, picked me up, and we drove through East Germany into Czechoslovakia. After crossing the border, we had lunch at the first city we entered. The waitress couldn't speak English, so with gestures and a few words of Russian, we ordered colas and Hungarian beef soup. We were happy when the bill came as the meal was virtually free. This was the first time I experienced the Western tourist's sense of superiority.

When we crossed the bridge across the Vltava River and entered downtown Prague, it was already dark. We parked the car on a bustling street and Michael gave me the telephone number of a sinologist named Olga. When I called, Olga's husband said that she was vacationing with their children in the country, but he welcomed us to stay at their house anyway. He was an architect and knew Prague like the back of his hand. We went out that night to have some drinks and wander around. He took us to Kafka's home beside the square of the Old Town, and pointed out that beneath our feet flowed a huge vein of ore. Prague's beauty is unique, especially at night. The ancient streetlamps lead wanderers into darkness until all sense of direction is lost. Under the light of the lamps, shadows turn and echoes rise and fall. I suddenly realized that Kafka's fiction is like this reality, a reality that can be touched.

It was the eve of the Velvet Revolution. I was introduced to Martin, who was Olga's colleague at the university and an editor of the underground literary journal, Kritická Príloha (Revolver Revue). At the time, he was busy secretly circulating a petition in support of the nephew of the former king, restoring the monarchy. He wanted us to sign it, but I'm not a fan of monarchies, so I refused.

Four years later, the Revolver Revue invited the European editor of Today and Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee from Harvard to hold a symposium in Prague. After eight or nine years, one of these underground publications enjoyed a well-earned reputation, while the other was totally discredited. On the eve of our departure, our hosts organized a poetry reading for us in a medieval cellar. Afterward, an angel appeared. Martin introduced us: "This is the editor-in-chief of the Revolver Revue." She gracefully sat down at our table, causing a disturbance in the Chinese literary world. Leo Ou-fan Lee, his forehead shining, lavished high praise on Czech dramatists; Zhang Ji, clutching a cigarette, violently attacked the incursions of American cultural hegemony; and I am certain that whatever I said was utterly incoherent.

The third time I visited Prague was in the spring of 1995. I was living in Paris at the time, and in response to Michael's insistence, I took part in the Prague Writers' Festival at my own expense. Michael is from New York, but he moved to London in search of his spiritual home, got married, had children, and was trapped there for more than twenty years. There was no room for him in the conservative world of English poetry. He was like a Kafka in London. In I99I, he organized the first Prague Writers' Festival. At the time, Michael was the lackey of an English company that hosted the annual Prague International Book Fair, with the Writers' Festival incidentally tacked on to it. It seemed just about everyone was Michael's boss, arrogantly ordering him around, making him spin like a top.

Michael always took me to discos to show me Prague's younger generation, hoping we would also breathe in some of that same youthful spirit. But the music rattled my insides so much that I had trouble holding my drink. Michael was going through a divorce and suffering at the hands of the English merchants. Under the flashing lights, his face was mournful. I called him "my successful friend," which succeeded in cheering him up a little. In a thick English accent, he laughed, "Me, mother-fucking successful? Successful my arse!" 

 

2

 

KAFKA WAS BORN IN A building on the square of Prague's Old Town on July 3, I883. He moved several times, but never far from the city of his birth. His Hebrew teacher recalled him saying, "Here was my secondary school, over there in that building facing us was the university, and a little further to the left, my office. My whole life-" and he drew a few small circles with his finger "-is confined to this small circle."

The building where Kafka was born was destroyed by a great fire in I889. When it was rebuilt in 1902, only a part of it was preserved. In 1995, a bust of Kafka was set into the building's outer wall. A portent of the Prague Spring, Kafka was finally recognized by the Czech communist authorities, hailed as a "revolutionary critic of capitalist alienation."

During the first year of Kafka's life, his father, Hermann Kafka, opened a small general store on the north side of the old town square, first dealing in retail and later in wholesale. Kafka wrote in an un mailed letter to his father, "But since you gradually began to terrify me on all sides, and the shop and you became inseparable for me, the shop was no longer a pleasant place for me to be. Things which had at first been a matter of course for me began to torment and shame me, especially your treatment of the staff . . . You I heard and saw screaming, cursing and raging in the shop, in a manner that, in my opinion at the time, had no equal anywhere in the world."

In another letter to his father, he wrote, "You could, for instance, rail at the Czechs, then at the Germans, then at the Jews, and not only selectively but in every respect, and finally no one was left but you. For me, you took on that enigmatic something that all tyrants have whose law is founded in their person, not their reasoning."

Between 1889 and 1893, when the family moved to a building called "At the Minute," Kafka's three sisters were born. These sisters eventually perished in Nazi concentration camps. Kafka went to a German elementary school. Many years later, in a letter to a friend, he described the following incident from his childhood: "Once, as a small boy, I received a sixpence and wanted very much to give it to an old beggar woman who was sitting between Old Town Square and Small Square. Now, this seemed to me an outrageous sum, a sum which most likely had never been given a beggar before, and I felt embarrassed in front of the woman to be doing something so outrageous, so I changed the sixpence and gave the woman a penny, walked around the entire complex of the Town Hall and the arcade along the Small Square, reappeared from the left as a completely new do-gooder, gave the woman another penny, started again to walk and happily did this ten times (or perhaps a little less, for I believe the woman later lost patience and left). In any case, in the end I was so exhausted, morally too, that I went home right away and cried until my mother replaced the sixpence."

In another letter to the same friend, Kafka relates the details of how he walked to school every morning: "Our cook, a small, dry, skinny, sharp-nosed, hollow-cheeked, yellowish yet firm, energetic, and superior woman, led me to school each morning .... Upon leaving the house the cook would say that she was going to tell the teacher how bad I'd been at home. . . . School itself was already a horror, and now the cook wanted to make it even more difficult for me. I would begin to plead, she would shake her head; the more I pleaded, the more I felt what I was pleading for to be of value, the greater the danger; I would stand still and beg for forgiveness, she dragged me along; I would threaten her with retaliation through my parents, she laughed, here she was almighty; I held on to the doorframes of the shops, on to the corner- stones, I didn't want to go on until she had forgiven me, I tore her back by her skirt (she didn't have it easy either), but she dragged me further, assuring me that even this she was going to report to the teacher; it would get late, the clock of the Church of St. James struck 8:00, you could hear the school bells, other children began to run, I was always most afraid of being late, by now we would have to run as well and always the thought, 'She's going to tell, she's not going to tell'; as it happened, she did not tell, ever, but she always had the opportunity, and a seemingly increasing one (yesterday I did not tell, but today I will for sure), and from that she never desisted. And sometimes-think of it, Milena-she would stamp her feet in anger at me in the lane and a coal merchant was sometimes around and would watch us. Milena, what foolishness, and how I belong to you with all the cooks and threats and all that enormous amount of dust that thirty-eight years has whirled up and which has settled in my lungs."

 

3

 

THE GUEST HOUSE OF A certain ministry is near the Old Town Square, and when I came to Prague in 1995, this was where I stayed. The rooms were tolerably clean, the furniture old and solid, and the longest long-distance call you could make was to the desk downstairs; it recalled the socialist years before the Velvet Revolution. The old doorkeeper was clearly a relic of that era, sleepy-eyed and wearing the smiling face of a transitional period.

I hurriedly washed up and went downstairs to the lobby where Stanislav was waiting for me. Once again, we had a difficult time making ourselves understood. He gestured, where do you want to go, and I nodded and said, yes, yes. While walking through the Old Town Square, he stopped and, with his face full of awe, whispered, "There is Josef Skvorecky." All I knew about him was that he was a Czech novelist who lived in Canada and with whom I was supposed to read on Thursday evening. I was led to City Hall and I showed my invitation. When I went inside, I was stunned to see everyone else dressed in formal attire-the men in suits and leather shoes, the women all made-up and in long dresses. I was the only unkempt and ragged one there in my leather jacket, blue jeans, and tennis shoes, with a big book bag still slung over my shoulder. I looked like a refugee. But there was no place to run, no place to hide, nothing but to brace myself and head up to the third floor auditorium. City Hall is one of the historic sights of Prague, dating back to the thirteenth century. How many changes of rule has it witnessed over the past seven hundred years? How many lives and deaths?

His honor the mayor spoke first in fluent English. He kidded Michael about his short stature. Michael joked back, throwing in a reference to his recent collection of poems, Disappearance. Disappearance. What a good topic in this age of exhibition where not many people understand all its implications. At Michael's side was his girlfriend, Vlasta, the vice-chair of the Writers' Festival, a warm and outgoing woman in her forties. Michael mentioned the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert. The evening's reading was in his memory. Michael raised his face and closed his eyes as he spoke, as though nostalgic for lost poems and the dead.

I enjoyed strolling the streets of Prague. Going back and forth between the reception center and the theater, I had to pass through the Old Town Square. It was the night before Easter and tourists surrounded the open-air stages; vendors were selling colored eggs, traditional wooden toys, and crystal at their stalls. I went into a clothing store and transformed myself into a real pillar of society for the nightly receptions at the various embassies so that I would not become a public disgrace again. Compared to five years earlier, Prague had changed quite a bit. It was becoming more commercialized, and there were advertisements everywhere for the name brand products of multinational corporations. One could also see that the Czech people maintained a certain self-confidence that kept them from being totally consumed by the battering waves of commercialism, The streets were full of dazzling Czech girls. They have an unworldly beauty that you don't usually see in the U.S. or Western Europe, a kind of earthy beauty often extinguished by modernization.

It surprised me to find so many young Americans living in Prague, enough for them to have their own newspaper. Michael explained, "The cost of living is so low here they can escape the pressures of American life. And Prague is like Paris in the '30s, so some come here for artistic inspiration." Shaking his head, he added, "But why haven't I seen anyone get anywhere with it?"

Michael took me to see his new house. As we left the tourist district, there were fewer people on the streets. Michael was carrying a pile of books in his arms and, as if in a dream, said as he walked, "Look, the only one in this world who loves me is Vlasta... I've found no one else in Prague who I can get into a deep conversation with. Everything is superficial, shiny, feigned happiness .... Most Czech writers are nationalists and they don't like it that a foreigner is running the Writers' Festival. No matter where I go, I am a foreigner. And the English are worse, snobbish conservatives convinced of their own correctness. New York used to be my home, but my home doesn't exist any more. . . ."

Every morning there was a press conference for the Writers' Festival at the Globe Bookstore. Most of the books sold there were in English, and there was a coffee shop inside. Several computers lined the wall, available for customers to check their e-mail. There were no chairs, so customers had to perch like birds, unable to settle in and refuse to leave. I headed over to a computer thinking I might catch up a little on this new age, but I didn't know how to use it. I asked the young fellow sitting next to me and he deftly used the cursor to lead me into the labyrinth. But as soon as he left me alone, the screen froze and I instantly broke into a cold sweat.

A man draped in cameras greeted me. He introduced himself as Rossano, the designated photographer for the Writers' Festival. His head was covered with ruffled hair, and his eyes were as shiny as his camera lenses. I followed him into the street. Rossano had a unique way of taking pictures, either making me stand on a stone block in front of a church like a martyr, or enclosing me in a telephone kiosk like a prisoner. He came from Florence, and was a typical Italian-warm and hearty. "Why do you live in Prague?" I asked him. "Simple. 1 married a girl from Prague and we just had a child," he sighed.

The press conference was about to end. The coffee shop was filled with people. Susan Sontag sat at the rostrum, handling the various maneuvers of the reporters' questions that ranged from the war in Kosovo to globalization. She had just gotten off the airplane, but there seemed to be no sign of fatigue at all, her words were sharp-edged, and she had the courage of her convictions. I waited until Michael announced that the press conference was over and walked over to greet Susan. She brushed away a lock of white hair that had slipped down onto her forehead. We agreed to meet for dinner to talk-no reporters, no interviews, no cameras.

 

4

 

Prague isn't willing to leave nor will it let us leave. This girl has claws and people must line up or we will have to light a fire at Vysehrad and the Old Town Square before we can possibly depart.

-Excerpt from a letter from Kafka to Oskar Pollak

 

CHARLES UNIVERSITY WAS ESTABLISHED in 1348-the oldest university in Central Europe. In 1882 it was divided into a German university and a Czech university. Kafka enrolled in the German university in 1901, his academic performance mediocre. For him, studying law was simply a matter of expedience since Jews could only pursue professional degrees such as medicine and law.

In a letter to a friend, he described his first sexual experience: "We were living in Zeltnergasse at that time. Opposite was a clothes shop, a shop girl was always standing in the doorway, I was little over the age of twenty, ceaselessly pacing back and forth in my room, preoccupied with the nerve-racking rote-learning of what I considered to be senseless things for the first state exam. It was summer, very hot at this time I guess, it was absolutely unbearable, at the window I remained, the disgusting Roman Law History between my teeth, always standing. Finally, we communicated through signs. I was to fetch her at eight o'clock in the evening, but when I went down, another was already there, well, that did not change a lot, I was afraid of the entire world, and also of this man; had he not been there, I would still have been afraid of him. But though the girl slipped her arm through his, she gave me a sign that I should follow them. Thus we came to Schutzeninsel, drank beer there, I at the neighboring table, then we slowly walked, with me behind, to the girl's flat, somewhere around the Fleischmarkt. There the man took his leave, the girl disappeared into the house, I waited for a bit until she came out again, and then we went to a hotel on the Kleinseite. All that was charming, exciting, and disgusting, even before the hotel, and in the hotel it was no different.

And when, towards morning, it was still hot and beautiful, we went back home over the Charles Bridge, I was, of course, happy, but this happiness meant only that my eternally moaning body had finally found relief, but most of all, this happiness consisted of the fact that the whole thing had not been even more disgusting, even dirtier."

In the winter of I904, the twenty-one-year-old Kafka began to write the first draft of Description of a Struggle. In a letter to a friend from that time, he wrote, "A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. I believe that." In this book, I -the narrator- describes his night ramblings with a classmate through a cold and bleak Prague. But his other books are not like this one, where Prague plays such a central role. The famous landmarks Kafka touches on in the course of these midnight rambles are still there with the exception of a few that were destroyed in the Second World War. The Charles Bridge is the oldest and most famous bridge in Prague, crossing the Vltava River, linking the Old Town with the opposite bank. This bridge's predecessor was destroyed by floodwaters and ice floes. In 1357, Charles IV instructed his architects to build the Charles Bridge. Except for two arches damaged in a flood in 1890, it has miraculously survived wars and disasters down to the present day.

In the diary entry for June 19, 1919, Kafka wrote, "With Ottla. She is fetched by her English teacher. Over the quay, stone bridge, small piece of Mala Strana, new bridge, home. Exciting statues of saints on Charles Bridge. The odd evening light of summertime when the bridge is deserted at night."

In a letter to a friend, he wrote: "There is within everyone a devil which gnaws the nights to destruction, and that is neither good nor bad, rather, it is life: if you did not have it, you could not live. So what you curse in yourself is your life. This devil is the material (and a fundamentally wonderful one) which you have been given and which you must now make use of. . . . On the Charles Bridge in Prague, there is a relief under the statue of a saint, which tells your story. The saint is sloughing a field there and has harnessed a devil to the plough. Of course, the devil is still furious (hence the transitional stage; as long as the devil is not satisfied the victory is not complete), he bares his teeth, looks back at his master with a crooked, nasty expression and convulsively retracts his tail; nevertheless, he is submitted to the yoke. . . ."

 

5

 

I WAS STANDING IN FRONT of the French windows of the Mlynec restaurant, gazing out at the glowing Charles Bridge. The coffee shop was too extravagant, too nouveau riche. I was reading an English edition of Franz Kafka and Prague by Harald Salfellner. The back cover of the book cites the words of Kafka's friend Johannes Urzidil: "Kafka was Prague, and Prague was Kafka. It was never so wholly and typically Prague, and would never again be as it was in Kafka's lifetime. And we, his friends, 'the happy few,' ... we knew that this Prague is contained in the smallest quanta everywhere in his works."

The Prague Writers' Festival went smoothly. Writers ascended to and descended from the podium one after another, the applause from the audience rose and fell, the theater filled and emptied. If Kafka had been alive, he would certainly have found the Writers' Festival absurd, and perhaps he would have written a story about it. Today's entire activity is called "Prague" and all the writers are Czech-except for me. In the evening, Josef Skvorecky and I will share the stage for a reading. How did I get placed in the ranks of the Czech writers? It was Michael's idea. He said he had originally planned to have me read with Vaclav Havel, and to do this he went right over to the presidential residence; but Havel's advisor sent him away with the excuse that he did not understand English. The fortress refused invitations from another world.

In the afternoon, I was interviewed on the national television station. The host of the program told me that in 1968, after Soviet troops had occupied Prague, this studio number nine, due to its isolated location, still kept up the cry of resistance. It took the Russians two days to find it.

There was not an empty seat in the house that evening. The audience had come to see Skvorecky, who enjoyed even more fame in the Czech Republic than Milan Kundera. In 1968, not long after the Soviet invasion, Skvorecky fled to Toronto, began teaching at a university there, and assisted his wife in setting up the 68 Publishers, which specialized in banned books by Czech authors. A Czech scholar told me that after Skvorecky fled he still made a great contribution to the Czech cause, but Kundera has always disdained his homeland and identified himself as French.

Skvorecky had caught a bad cold and was sitting at the rear podium drinking brandy. He had gotten old, he said to me, and wasn't fit for traveling long distances. Then he went to the podium, still drinking brandy, and read his story "Bass Saxophone," first in his native language, then in English. Applause thundered, someone shouted something in a loud voice, and the Czech people saluted their hero. It was my turn to read for the second half, but first Michael gave a brief introduction. He closed his eyes as though thinking about the past.

My "date" the previous evening with Susan Sontag had been bruited around, causing quite a stir. Susan was too famous, cold as an icebox, and had an aura of mystery. Rossano asked me to try to work out a photo op for him; the undersecretary at the Swedish consulate asked me to pass his business card to her, to give her his highest regards, and to tell her that he had adored her for many years. Entrusted with these important missions, I waited at the hotel where she was staying.

At 9:40, Susan finally returned from her television interview. "Oh, all the stupid questions, it was torture. Let's go, I'm starving."

We took a taxi to a Chinese restaurant. I noticed that the driver hadn't turned on the meter and was circling the city on his way to the restaurant. When we got to our destination, he asked for a fare more than three times higher than it should have been. I signaled to Susan to get out of the car first, stuffing half the fare that he was asking for into his hands. He began cursing me in Czech, but fortunately I didn't understand him.

At the dinner table, I passed on the Italian's request and the Swede's admiration. Susan took the business card and sighed. "Whenever I accept an invitation, I always forget about the media and their endless questions."

When I brought up Havel, Susan said that many Czechs criticized him but she always spoke up for him. When she last visited Prague, Havel had invited her to a tête-à-tête dinner in a restaurant, but his bodyguards were seated nearby. She had wanted to ask him his real feelings about a number of things. "You know, under those circumstances, I couldn't bring myself to ask them."

I replied, "What I don't understand is, as a writer, how can he tolerate that kind of life? It isn't much better than being in jail. For example, he can't just walk down the street anymore, or talk with ordinary people."

At midnight, we took a walk down the street, neon signs representing the Western world flirted with the Prague night. Susan suddenly said, "That's right, nobody wants to bring back the old system, but could it be that this emptiness is what they want?" I suggested that we have another drink. We turned into a bar, ordered two beers, and talked some more.  I spoke about my daughter, American schools, and the problems of today's youth; Susan spoke about her son who was studying history-he was her best friend in the world. Walking Susan back to her hotel, the streetlamps of Prague made us lose our way.

Bei Dao, in Midnight's Gate. Essays. A New Direction Book, 2005