The Birch, Fall 2005

In Prague

Sophie Gorlin

Owen cannot help it; even though he feels like a green American kid -- every time he steps into a pub, he smells death. The Europeans dwell in this death, sitting in the thick of the smoke without batting an eyelid. They have known it since childhood. Owen, from the heartland of America, is painfully aware of his inexperience. As an impressionable youth, he was an easy victory in his culture's effort to win his generation's souls from the Marlboro Man. But what good does his increased life expectancy do him now? Owen's throat begins to scratch after an hour with Swedish Carl and German Flo smoking on either side of him. He tries to pass it off as an erudite clearing of the throat, but it soon becomes an undeniable cough, the teary-eyed gut reaction of a child not yet hardened against adult toxins. He slips out as though to use the bathroom and heads for the door. Outside, doubled over like the drunks puking on the cobblestones, Owen expels the tobacco from his suffering lungs and then sinks down against the building, breathing heavily and slowly. He pictures the twin balloons of his lungs quivering as they expand and contract - the tremor of the old, the brittle and frail - and curses himself for having aged them prematurely.

"I'm sorry," he says, chin to chest. Beneath the starless, night sky, with the sounds of life coming from behind the wall, Owen feels for a moment the preciousness and the fragility of this pulmonary function, of the rising and falling of his chest, as though each swell were a note vibrating on a string, a beauty produced by motion that in an instant would still into silence. "Thank you," he touches his chest lightly. "Please don't fail me. I won't put you through that again," knowing it is a lie even as he says it.

"Who are you talking to?" Carl kneels beside him, cigarette ashes falling into a crack between the cobblestones from the orange-tipped Marlboro between his fingers.

Owen's mind too thick with alcohol and preoccupied with death to think of a reasonable answer, he offers up the truth. "My lungs."

Carl stares skeptically from his roommate's face to the boy's scrawny chest, momentarily doubting his English comprehension until he sees that Owen's gaze, too, has followed Carl's down to the organs in question. Carl's laugh is loud and sincere. "Well, it's good to have two friends always with you, eh?" He gives Owen's chest a hearty thump.

"Oof."

"What do you call them? Ben and Jerry? Rocky and Bullwinkle? Oh, oh - Bert and Ernie?"

An image of Ernie with a rubber ducky in his jointless fingers flashes before Owen. "I can't name them after bath-taking children's puppets," he said, as if he has been trying to think up names for his lungs all along. "I'm trying to cultivate toughness, endurance, hardiness. Better to call them Napoleon and Caesar."

"That's no pair."

"No, no." Owen likes this game, finds himself hot to think up more personalities. "How about _i_ka and Cromwell? Wait, wait - Robespierre and Dzerzhinsky!"

"None of those are pairs. You can't just take any two names and apply them to your lungs - coupling is an art. You like history, huh? Unfortunately, great men, generals especially, tend to come in singles - they don't like to work in teams. Even Engels tends to get absorbed into Marx." Carl, who has been squatting the entire time, sits down beside Owen, extinguishes his cigarette against the cobblestones, and tips his head back against the wall in thought. "I'll be damned!" he exclaims at last. "All those wars on this continent, and not a single bloodthirsty duo! I can't think of a single goddamned warrior team!"

"Charlemagne," Owen begins to run through general-leaders on his fingers, "Cromwell, Napoleon…."

"Gustavus Adolphus, Pugachev, Hitler, of course…."

The frown on Owen's face, the knotted eyebrows, would have revealed to Carl, were he to turn his head, that Owen's sedated brain is trying to process a boundary that Owen understood was crossed, but for whose crossing he had seemingly not been present. He finds himself no longer in the game but dislocated into a space darker, disquieting and sinister. He raises his eyes to see a foreigner puke into a trash can across the street. But it is not nausea that suddenly overtakes Owen - no, it is exhaustion. "Let's hit the sack," he says, turning a questioning eye to Carl.

"The night is young!" Carl laughs, but claps a hand on his roommate's back and follows him back to the dorm. Carl feels a sense of responsibility for this American who seems to him somehow like a child with his weak lungs and his feelings written so openly on his face. He wouldn't last a second in a game of poker, Carl muses. But as he lies in the dark in the bunk beneath Owen's, Carl finds himself wishing to preserve, against all odds, this innocence that is not naivety, but rather a sort of earnestness, a willingness to engage directly with the world and a disregard for ironic distance that could only come from never having been broken.

It is on his fourth day in Prague, following three late nights at the pub that have replaced his jet lag with a perpetual tiredness, that Owen begins his Czech course droopy-lidded and fuzzy-brained, his eyes following a little plastic cup of coffee as it moves across the classroom in a classmate's hand, but his body lacking the energy to ask the owner where it came from. This is not, Owen thinks to himself, the state in which to take on the most formidable - as his teacher says with unabashed pride - of the Slavic languages. "The first rule you must learn," says Professor Jablko to this beginner class of eight students, "is that the exception is the rule - ha!"

Owen has trouble following the introductions in English, let alone the rudimentary Czech. A girl from Boston with a peculiar eye - one static eyeball, it seems to Owen; a tanned boy from Australia; German Flo from the night before, the proprietor of the coffee. Owen perks up - to find that he has completely tuned out for two introductions - at the Russian voice that exudes kindness in a way that he can't quite place…it carries no trace of anxiety or irritability, no coldness or hostility, just warmth. He hears in this voice a purity, an unadulterated goodness that he has heard until now only in music, in his beloved romantics…and Owen, a cellist from the age of seven, has always gone by his ear. It is the voice of Irina, the Muscovite with lace-up sandals and a braid stretching down the length of her back, whose name Owen gets from Carl at the coffee machine during the mid-morning break.

"This is not me." Owen looks apologetically at Carl from under his eyebrows. "I'm not usually so scatter-brained. I've never been so tired in my life."

"Hey, it's the first day, don't beat yourself up." Owen, lost in thought, does not see the grin dancing on his roommate's lips: is this the farthest Owen has fallen into sin?

"That girl intrigues me." And he vows, as he gulps down his espresso, that he will drop this lifestyle whose unsustainability he can feel in his listless limbs, his dulled mind. He has never been selfdestructive - he always started off his days with a run, made a point to eat a green vegetable every night, recycled.… But in the face of - of what, Owen? - crippled children, elderly tram-riders, cheap synthetic clothing…of a country still recovering from the havoc that the twentieth century wreaked upon it - in the face of this, these gestures seem small, pathetic, like holding out a candy bar against death. He has come to seek destruction, but not his own…no, on the contrary, he feels that he must find a way of being that tends toward goodness, toward life amidst these shambles, if not for his own well-being, then at least to get a girl.

But in the classroom, where, from the second day on, English is forbidden and the students find themselves limited to the present tense with a pitiful vocabulary, Owen is at an utter loss for what to talk about. "How was your weekend?" is out of the question, let alone her life story, which he is dying to know. He likes life stories, likes to have a sense of a person's narrative, not just this free-floating snapshot of their present. He's always been a reader of Russian novels: the family history going back generations, the protagonist in the context of his environment. Owen wonders about her ancestors - did they walk in knee-high peasant boots among fields of rye? Did they ride in horsedrawn sleighs through snow-covered streets? Were her parents dissidents? Communists? The thought gives him a jolt as he imagines that history. Did her grandparents die in the War? Did her great-grandparents wave red flags and break windows for bread in 1917? Or were they aristocrats, killed like Nabokov's father? Well, not all her ancestors could have died, or else how would she be here? Owen reasons with himself. Though there was no shortage of opportunities for death in modern Russian history, he thinks. All he knows is that she is from Moscow. And that she wears her dark hair in a long braid down her back, that her fingernails are short and square, like a boy's, and that her skin is as pale as marble - the result of those long Russian winters, he figures. He wonders what she's like in wintertime (Russia is bound up for him with winter). Does she go ice skating? Do snowflakes dust her eyelashes? Does she wear one of those furry hats with earflaps? He wants to ask all this, but he doesn't have the words. He cannot ask her anything except how she is doing and where she is from. Luckily one of those questions is inexhaustible.

"I'm well, Owen. And you?" Beaming at him with a sincerity that he is not used to hearing in the question, asked so often by acquaintances who don't even slow down to hear the response.

"Also well." The answer is automatic, but he means it, he realizes, as he can't help the giant grin that spreads across his face.

Carl, who already speaks five languages, picks up faster and manages to find out that she's a vegetarian. "Not just a vegetarian," he tells Owen back at the dormitory Tuesday evening, "but a vegetarian with a higher aim. It's all part of her spiritual journey. 'Vegetarianism is a path to a higher aim,' she said."

“What's the aim?" Owen rolls over on the top bunk to peer over the side at Carl drawing a cartoon in his sketchpad on the bunk below.

"I dunno. I wasn't sure how to ask." Carl is a perfectionist, Owen learned, when Carl remade his bed twice the first morning, tucking in the sheets hotel-style. He doesn't like to learn by messing up. Carl learned Italian entirely on his own, and didn't speak a word of it with anyone until he had the language down perfectly. Owen didn't believe it when Carl told him the first day, but after living with Carl for a week, observing him recopy his grammar exercises every night and once measure the water for pasta, pouring it alternatively from the faucet to the cup and the cup to the sink until, the cup standing on the flat surface of the table, Carl got the meniscus precisely at the one-liter line - after this, Owen finds it entirely plausible. "Einstein was a perfectionist, too, you know," Carl says in answer to Owen's sarcastic jibe. "He didn't speak a word until he was four years old, and then he started speaking in complete sentences. People thought he was retarded, but really he was only waiting until he could do it right."

The only decoration Carl brought with him is a photograph, neatly clipped from a magazine, of Einstein in an overcoat walking against the wind, a soft smile beneath his mustache, and tufts of white hair flying from under his hat. "He taught here, you know," says Carl. "At Charles University. When his hair was still dark, before he left Europe. They have photographs of him walking through Old Town Square, but no one knows him like that. No, he's frozen as an old guy with crazy white hair and a mustache. Who resided in Princeton, New Jersey. People forget that he was once young in Europe before the War."

The smoke from a hookah floats gracefully over the heads of three pen-and-ink figures seated cross-legged in a luxurious office - one a stodgy, mddle-aged man with his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up, the second a twenty-something in a polo shirt, and the third wearing a full-body bird suit. Carl inks in the border to create the first panel of his cartoon, in which God, the CEO of a paper goods corporation, gets stoned with his son and his son's eccentric, mute friend.

"It wasn't even a choice, Owen. The idea of not being an atheist was never even presented to me."

"In the States a lot of kids have crises of faith when they come of age. Or if not outright crises, they at least examine the faith in which they were raised from a critical perspective. And then they choose for themselves what they believe. But they think about believing in something, at least."

"Well, hurrah for belief. Will we ever live in an enlightened age? No. But do we even live in an age of enlightenment?" He looks dubiously at Owen sitting beside him on the bottom bunk, the light of a clip-on lamp casting dramatic shadows on his soft, Anglo-Saxon face.

Owen's own spiritual dilemma came on the drive home from McDonald's with his father one winter afternoon not long after his twelfth birthday. "Owen," his father looking straight ahead at the road as they drove by the drab block buildings of Wal-Mart and Linens n' Things and Dunkin' Donuts (one big box after another), "You need to believe in something."

"Huh?"

"Your mother and I raised you without any religion. She and I have no faith to speak of, but we have our beliefs. But you need to choose for yourself what you believe in. Because it's important to believe in something." His eyes never veered from the gray straightaway of Route 2.

And what Owen came to believe in, after several anxious years of reading, was enlightened atheism, a reasoned ethics: the moral imperative, the social contract. Sure, it was trendy, he found in college, to be down on the Enlightenment, but what else was there to believe in? Owen bends the light away from his eyes as he turns to face Carl and notices now in the lamp's beam a new photograph on Carl's wall. An exuberant little Carl, wielding a chisel and smiling with a candor that Owen has never seen on his adult face, kneeling on the snow beside a foot-tall -- pine tree, is it? -- carved out of ice. "Hey, what's that?"

"Oh, I didn't tell you?" It turns out that Carl also taught himself to sculpt ice, which, Owen imagines, there is no shortage of in Sweden. "For half the year it gets dark around three in the afternoon. There are only five hours of sunlight a day, maybe," Carl says as he gets out his portfolio. Within the Arctic Circle, on the outskirts of Gallivare, Carl learned to sculpt by chiseling away at the massive icicles that formed outside his home from October to April, sometimes starting as early as September and not melting completely until May. He whips his portfolio out from under the bed. "Those are my early works." He peers over Owen's shoulder as Owen flips through the photographs. Swans, castles, princesses - typical genre pieces, Owen thinks. "I won a prize for that one," Carl interjects at a photo of an ice rendering of -

"Is that the Amiens Cathedral?" Owen squints and tilts the photo to get a sense of depth among the intricately-chiseled buttresses, rose windows, crochets, and pinnacles - translucent, glistening ice upon ice.

"Yeah. That's a gargoyle, there, see?" Carl brings a finger close to, but doesn't touch, the picture. "Be careful of fingerprints," he warns Owen.

Carl spent as much film as time on the Cathedral, it seems to Owen as he continues through photographs from various zooms and angles. "West façade," Carl narrates, "crossing, east apse…."

Owen has never looked at a Cathedral before the way he does now at this one made of ice -- only in ice does the real structure of stone seem incredible: such hardness stretched thin and rounded, pointed and chiseled and hollowed - an intricacy belying a faith and dedication that no longer exists and that seems, when rendered in ice, so fragile, so tenuous….

Now Carl sculpts part-time for corporations mostly to earn a little extra money for beer and travel while studying toward a law degree in Stockholm. "I made it to the final round at the junior national ice sculpting competition three years ago," Carl tells Owen.

"Why did you give it up? You've got a real talent."

"I didn't give up. I just do corporate sculpture. It's quick and easy - and profitable. There's not much of a market for - well, for Gothica in ice. Even the market for swans and princesses is dwindling - one can only find temp jobs around Christmastime. I made the decision after I finished high school - that was the year I made it to the finals at nationals. I was at this crossroads where I could have gone on to pursue ice sculpture seriously, found an apprenticeship with a professional. But I thought, Do I want to commit myself to ice? I just pictured myself carving the details on those flying buttresses - can you imagine the precision and patience it took to make sure that they didn't snap - ice is hard as stone when it's thick, but fragile as" - cupping his hands -- "as a baby bird. I just couldn't bear to give myself completely to the ice and then have nothing come of it. There's no future in ice," Carl sighs, pensively staring down at his hands resting idly in his lap as he sits on the bottom bunk beside Owen. Owen realizes that he is getting his first peek at an inner Carl, at something as delicate as the finely chiseled ice, at what, were Owen Russian, he could call without embarrassment, Carl's soul. "So, anyway," Carl takes them back into the realm of the safe, the superficial, "corporate sculpture is really the only practical option for an ice sculptor."

Owen continues to flip through the pictures. Carl's talent has gone to chiseling "Pfizer" and "Ikea" and the Nike swish.

"Once, McDonald's asked me to carve them an 'M,' but I refused. It was for the opening of the first McDonald's in my city. It was good money, too, but a man must have some principles, right?"

Owen meets Carl's eyes, which are gray and pale, but soft, cushioned by his long, thick lashes. The handful of principles a person can keep from sacrificing in this world seem to Owen like the creaking wooden masts of ships encountering arctic ice - a threadbare and futile protection against something great.