Fancy Nancy and the Czech Chick

by T. D. White

“Prague (Praha) should be a painter’s paradise. It’s all about perspective –all shapes all sizes all heights all depths all colors; for the artist, this is doma (home).”  So I write on the yellow pad what millions of others have thought as they walk or sit in the Mala Strana section (Lesser Town) of Prague which is to Prague what the West Village is to New York, what the Latin Quarter is to New Orleans.  I’m with the Princess of Prague, my wife of three years, cohabitive (new word here, eh?) for twelve (my third, her second) in the Café U Jana, outdoors, next to the pictures of Havel and Clinton. We have met after apologies on both sides for slight lateness, Helena, widow of a famous Czech artist, and longtime friend to my wife. She lives very near the “Castle,” the most notable of Prague’s landmarks, with an exquisite view of the “threshhold,” red-roofed Praha. Tatjana has offered a four-pound Kapr ( Carp, the fish, yes) to Helena after she reluctantly bought it from another friend, Jana, whose husband had recently – how recently? - caught it. The fish has lain quiet now, wrapped in newspaper and butcher paper, for a few hours in a “Duty Free” Czech Airlines plastic shopping bag. Three white wines for Helena now, two reds for my wife, probably five “cigarety” for Helena, and none for my COPD wife (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder) who was forced to stop by NYU Medical Center after an incident on 6th Avenue and 28th St. in NYC in which Tat, or Kaca as she is known to people in Prague (that’s Cah-tcha) found herself damn near infinitely short of breath.
 

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I’ve enjoyed a couple of short cafes, and a couple of short walks around this rare and rarefied neighborhood. Drop of rain here and there …a stiff cool breeze has forced the women to don the sweaters which they always seem to foresee needing, a thick cover of dark cloud at dusk this, the ninth of June, 2004, as the women, Czech-born both, have never ceased to converse. Czech is a language that has no intermediary between brain and tongue for those born to it, as deeply woven into the neurons and synapses as perhaps no other language that I at fifty-seven fairly well-traveled years, have ever heard.

The fish transaction took place earlier in the afternoon during Cenda Lysicky’s haircut on Vezenska Street (that’s Chenda Lye-sitzky). The 80 year-old artist, Tat’s oncle, lives in his studio on the 6th floor overlooking Prague’s rooftops with some 600 cacti. Rex Stout had his orchids, Cenda has his cacti. Jana’s friend Roysta was snipping away as a small amount of koruns (crowns, Czech money) changed hands. Everybody spoke at once, except me, and everybody understood each other, except me, and everybody drank some scotch or beer or wine, except me ( I had prematurely and unwittingly exhausted my lifetime supply some eighteen years earlier).
 

This is, in Prague, not for me an unusual day. At all. News “junkie” at home on 28th St. in NYC, all I have heard through the chatter is that former President Ronald Reagan has passed from this time. My wife of course was running around in her underwear. She had unscrewed something bottled badly and the contents had splashed her pants which now hung from an open skylight window. “What’s the harm,” I thought.
 

 
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“I’m married to her, Jana’s female, the uncle’s 80, and the hairdresser is stereotypical.” “Tomasku (Toe-Mahsh-koo – my name is Tom), what am I going to do with the fish?”  That was then, this is later, heading out of Kelly’s after a storm and a meal, taking a tram to the Dejvicka section of Prague where we were bedding down and I’m complaining how the gulac (goulash) is kicking my ass, and Tat says she hears a cat, and she does, and yes, it’s black, and yes she sweet talks it into following us home and she feeds it some pate after I tell her there’s probably no litter in the apartment , you know, and geez, “why not feed the cat the fish?” Why not feed ole Fancy Nancy there the fish? Cats like fish.” So she did.

Was it all planned? Did she know, you know, somewhere? As Polonius about Hamlet didst say “though this be madness, yet there’s method in it.”  A divine plan I’m not on to? But a day with Tat is always a day full of mystery and wonder. Like I wonder how I found her. Same way she found the cat?