combination of the 5K, the 10K, and the marathon. An entire fitness culture sprang up around his legend, and I met Karel at a “Zatopek Movement” cross-country race for boys, where we finished one-two in a hilly romp through Petrin Park.
Karel’s English was far better than my Czech, and he taught me the ways of the city. In return, I instructed him in American slang and pop music, which I might have had trouble mastering myself if not for my classmates at the American school, who’d spent far more time in the States.
It never occurred to me then that our friendship posed any risk for Karel’s family-not until we visited the machine shop where his dad worked to deliver a lunch pail. Just inside the door, next to a counter where the manager sat, there was a clock and a wooden box, where the workers punched their time cards. Posted above it was a sign with underlined words and an exclamation mark.
“What’s it say?” I asked. Karel laughed.
“It’s about you.” He translated: “Timely arrival to work strikes a decisive blow against the American aggressors!”
I didn’t think it was funny.
“Well, this aggressor’s hungry. Let’s get a sausage.”
The manager, hearing our English, scowled and muttered a curse. We burst out laughing and ran into the street. Probably not the sort of thing that showed up well in his father’s personnel file.
Litzi and I arrived at dusk with an hour to kill before meeting Karel for dinner, so we checked in to our hotel and walked through the Old Town. I kept an eye out for both Lothar and the Hammerhead, but as usual, Prague was mobbed.
The city’s refurbished beauty bowled me over even as it dismayed me. When I was a boy the buildings were sooty and tarnished, grandeur in decline. Now every surface looked scrubbed, every brick repointed. But city boosters had overlaid it with neon, corporate logos, and all these tourists, so many of them that the locals looked like infiltrators, as beleaguered as when the Soviets were in charge. To make matters worse, there was a soccer match that night between the Czech Republic and Scotland, so the streets were filled with the blue plaid soldiers of the Tartan Army, Scotland’s die-hard, drink-harder legion of fans.
We tried to take refuge in a pivnice, or beer pub, but all of them were thronged with Scots. Then Litzi spotted a promising oasis, a trim bar with red walls and enough bookshelves to furnish a small library.
“How wonderful,” she said. “And it’s called Bar and Books.”
We settled happily onto a leather bench, but a single overpriced drink was all it took for us to see that it was more of a cigar parlor for the trendy than a haven for literary types.
“This is the future for people like us,” she said. “Books as decor, something to put on the wall where you sip your whisky.”
A man over her shoulder caught my eye. He stood by the door, attempting to project a casual air. Was it my imagination, or was he the same fellow I’d spotted reading a Russian newspaper outside the train station?
“Don’t turn around,” I said, “but tell me if you recognize that man by the door.” I looked away to keep from making him suspicious. Litzi leaned back against the bench and idly scanned the room.
“Which one?” she whispered.
I turned. He was gone. An operative for the Hammerhead, or a product of my overactive imagination?
“Never mind. Let’s go. We’re due at Karel’s in another fifteen minutes anyway.”
The Old Town Square was pandemonium, an invasion not of tanks but of kilted drunks, peeing against the walls of sixteenth-century chapels and kicking soccer balls high in the air to land on the heads of the hordes below, like cannonballs from siege guns.
“Poor Prague,” Litzi said.
We threaded our way toward Karel’s.
“How many years has it been?” Litzi asked as I pressed the button for his apartment.
“Forty. We moved the year after the Russians rolled in. Haven’t seen him since.”
The buzzer sounded. No sooner had we pushed through the entrance than a door rattled open two stories above. A shaggy head loomed above the railing, and a big voice boomed down the stairwell.
“My friend Bill! You are most welcome!”
I laughed appreciatively. Litzi and I hustled up the steps to find him grinning hugely with his arms spread wide. Karel had grown into a woolly bear of a man. His brown-gray hair was clean but uncombed, in contrast to the Trotskyite beard that he’d trimmed to a point. He wore a folksy sweater of thick wool and a threadbare corduroy jacket that draped him like a horse blanket. His eyes were the same sparkling blue they’d been at age fourteen, with a gleam that said he was still up for anything.
I introduced Litzi and he ushered us inside. Books and magazines were everywhere. Dust coated the screen of a small rabbit-ear television that barely postdated our friendship. Abstract paintings covered every wall.
“First things first,” he said. He poured three amber shots of Becherovka, the local herbal liqueur, and passed them around.
“To Bill,” he said, raising his glass, “who taught me to sing like John Lennon, party like Keith Richards, and sneak around like James Bond.”
Litzi, who had never seen much of the Keith Richards side, seemed greatly amused. I grimaced at the medicinal bite of the Becherovka, but it released a flood of memory-two teen boys plotting their stratagems in alleyways and on riverbanks, with one eye out for parents and another for any available girl.
“To Karel,” I said, “who taught me to run like the great Zatopek. For a lap or two, anyway. And who helped engineer my first real kiss.”
He burst into laughter.
“She is married again, you know. Three times now!”
“And who was this lucky girl?” Litzi was enjoying our nostalgia.
“Karel’s sister. She was sixteen.”
“You were punching above your weight, old man. But she was willing, very willing.”
“It was in that little courtyard near Maltese Square, the one with the funny statue of Saint George.”
“The one you used to call Saint Lecher.”
“Because of the creepy look on his face, like he was about to molest the dragon.”
His sister wanted nothing more to do with me afterward. It turned out she’d only wanted to satisfy her curiosity about what it felt like to kiss a boy from the land of Elvis, Hemingway, and Radio Free Europe. The answer: Nothing special. I swallowed the last of the Becherovka, and couldn’t help but shudder.
“Remember our first night of drinking this stuff?” Karel held up the green bottle, offering more as I held up my hand in refusal.
“What I remember better is the hangover.”
From the street below, a chorus of singing Scotsmen carried up through an open window. Karel stepped over for a look, smiling down toward the cobbles.
“They’re everywhere,” I said. “Grown men with hairy legs.”
“By dawn there won’t be a drop of single malt to be found in the city.”
“In the square they were all drinking Pils.”
“That’s just to get their courage up. After the final whistle they’ll need the real stuff.”
“The square is a shambles,” Litzi said. “Cans and bottles everywhere.”
“Better than shell casings,” Karel said. “Although not nearly as much fun to dodge.”
Another glimmer of his old self. He gestured toward the door.
“Let us go and eat sausages and pig’s knuckles! Unless you’d rather have pizza like the Tartans?”
“Pig’s knuckles it is.”
As we walked to dinner we caught up on each other’s lives. Karel was teaching mathematics at a second-tier university and still listening to any new music from the West, now on an iPod. There was a Mrs. Vitova, but she had left the premises four years ago, when the last of their three children moved out on his own.
He took us to a cozy restaurant where most of the diners spoke Czech. But when Litzi insisted on a nonsmoking table, they ushered us to an empty room in the back, where the hostess had to switch on a light. They must have concluded we were tourists, even with Karel along, because the waiter brought us sweet red wine in shot glasses nestled on beds of dry ice in goblets. He poured water over the ice to make the goblets steam like cauldrons, then grandly announced in English, “Our special cocktail, on the house!”
