Time's Magpie by Myla Goldberg

Author:Myla Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307422521
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-09T10:00:00+00:00

Political Theatro

OLD TOWN SQUARE LIES AT THE VERY HEART of the Stare Msto district. For eight centuries, the square served as a marketplace, rows of merchants’ stalls filling the cobbled plaza. Today the square is dominated by an Art Nouveau monument to Jan Hus, fifteenth-century Czech religious martyr and a celebrated symbol of Czech nationalism. The monument serves as a convenient meeting place for tourists and as a focal point for buskers and souvenir hawkers. Cafes and shops the pastel shades of after-dinner mints line the square’s periphery. Their Baroque roofs are interrupted at one end by the Gothic tower of a thirteenth-century bell house and at the other by an ornate fifteenth-century astronomical clock that every hour unleashes a mechanical morality play from two cuckoo-clock windows.

Over the centuries, Old Town Square’s size and location has made it an epicenter for celebrations, cataclysms, political enunciations, and executions. In the fourteenth century, King Wenceslas threw massive parties on the cobbles once the market had closed for the night; in 1600 the square was host to the world’s first public dissection of a corpse. The square was the headquarters of the Resistance during the 1944 Prague Uprising, in which five thousand Czechs died in four days of fierce fighting against the Nazi occupation of the city. In 1948, a time when the Communists were still popularly viewed as the country’s liberators, massive crowds gathered here to hear the words of Czechoslovakia’s first Communist president. Compared to such events, the antiwar protest that occurs in the week preceding Bush’s invasion of Iraq merits barely a faint parenthesis in the square’s long history.

Turnout for demonstrations in Prague these days is generally slim; public dissent tends to be organized by the anarchists and the Communists, groups most Czechs want nothing to do with. At the appointed time of the antiwar rally, fewer than ten protesters are in evidence. They stand to the left of the Jan Hus monument, holding hand-painted signs. A young American woman in a bright orange NO BLOOD FOR OIL T-shirt distributes Czech information sheets to native passersby. She explains to the scant arrivals that they are early: the protest is not scheduled to start until two. The first antiwar rally was held three months ago and they are still tinkering with starting times.

The square is filled with tour groups and hawkers of marionettes, cheap jewelry, and glass. A few feet from the fledgling protest, a five-piece band is playing jaunty jazz standards. An American tourist interposes herself between two of the protesters so that her husband can snap a picture. If the woman could read Czech she would know that the sign being held by her photo op translates as AMERICAN AGAINST THE WAR, but the expatriate American protester is either too obliging or too embarrassed to spoil the couple’s documentation of genuine Czech counterculture. After the husband snaps the shutter the couple heads toward the astronomical clock.

A small hatchback drives into the square and unloads an amateur sound system, several painted placards, and a skull-headed effigy wearing an I LOVE USA T-shirt and an Uncle Sam hat.

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