Pavel, Paris, Prague
Leslie Li
Word Count 1669
I left New York for France in September 1968, a few months after les évènements de mai — the student riots, the barricaded cobblestone streets, the Molotov cocktails—and the end of a two-year love affair. The civil unrest in Paris still made the news but no longer the headlines. In a mood as gloomy as mine and a cityscape as grim as la Ville Lumière, I would easily fit in, dressed in black, sitting in sidewalk cafés, drinking endless cups of exprès, and smoking Gitanes.
It was not to be.
At the Alliance Française, one of my classmates is Czech. He fled to Paris soon after the Soviet Union invaded his homeland with $5 in Western currency in his pocket and a visa good for three months. For two months, Pavel and I practice our French together, explore Paris together, become lovers. With ten days remaining on his visa, instead of seeking asylum and remaining in the West, Pavel decides to return to Prague with stops along the way in Avignon, Nice, and Rome. He asks me to accompany him as far as Rome. I say yes.
In early December, we take the train to Avignon. We dance our way across the Pont d’Avignon, that bare minimum of bridge yearning towards the other bank of the Rhone. In Nice, we saunter along the Baie des Anges and dance to the tune “L’important, c’est la rose.” Pavel presents me with a single rose, blackly red, caught between bud and blossom.
Rome is our next—and final—destination together. We both anticipate it and hold it at arm’s length. The seven hills, the Tiber running through them, the Baroque buildings. They all remind Pavel of home. From the Eternal City, he will travel on to Prague, and I will go back to Paris. He asks me to come to Prague in springtime. I say yes.
I don’t board a train back to Paris as I thought, and Pavel assumed, I would. In late December, I buy a map of Europe and chart my course to the Czech capital from Rome. My itinerary is random— Corfu, Athens, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Budapest, Salzburg, Vienna. I want to spend at least one week and no more than ten days in as many or as few of these places, which I know only by name, before arriving in Prague in three months’ time.
When I arrive at the end of March, it is snowing. For all nine days of my stay, it either snows or it is windless, raw, and damp, or blustery, cold and gray. But more leaden than the sky and more numbing than the temperature are the psychological doldrums of the people. The Soviet soldiers, the tanks, are nowhere to be seen, yet their presence is everywhere in evidence — in the bullet-riddled buildings on Wenceslas Square and, even more, in the dejection of the Praguers themselves.
In Pavel, most of all. He is an absent presence, whereas, after he left me in Rome, he was a present absence, an embodied longing. There are entire days when he is simply absent, when his family and friends stand in for his presence. When he finally does appear, he is a frozen façade, as frigid as the weather, an impersonal tour guide of a fallen city. His Russian brethren aren’t the only ones who have betrayed him. Besides falling in love with the walled city of Dubrovnik, I’d also fallen in love with a man I met there. I’d said as much in a letter I sent to Pavel in the foolish, naive, romantic belief that our relationship could withstand, would even welcome, a ménage à trois.The protagonists of the French film Jules and Jim did. But I am not Catherine, and Pavel is neither Jules nor Jim.
He takes me to Wenceslas Square and shows me the machine-gunned grooves and gouges marring the buildings’ façades. He invites me to insert my fingers, à la doubting Thomas, into one of them. Touch it, his request implies. I want you to be a witness to our pain and loss. I want you to acknowledge our pain and loss. That is all you can do, but it is something. My fingers run the length of a sandstone scar.
It is a sporting event that dissolves Pavel’s frozen façade and our ménage à deux in a single stroke—the penultimate hockey game of the winter Olympics between Czechoslovakia and Russia. Prague is a ghost town of rapt citizens glued to flickering TV screens who will either thrill to a national victory or suffer something akin to a second invasion.
Pavel and I watch the game in the home of his friend Petr, who has gathered together a few of their friends. When the Czech team wins, the room erupts in a brief pandemonium of triumph and vindication. Brief because Soviet tanks are concealed on the outskirts of the city, and a deafening celebration of the Russian defeat could bring swift retaliation. I watch the revelers hug each other in both congratulation and consolation. Consolation because they must suppress their euphoria and because a win in hockey is no substitute for the loss of a country, in fact, only intensifies the pain of that loss. I witness the desperate bonhomie all around me and feel myself shrinking, becoming invisible. An absent presence. The initial gladness I felt for their victory becomes a creeping sense of guilt. I have no right to be here. Not only am I superfluous, my very presence is an imposition, an intrusion. Not only am I an intruder, I am an alien, American and free, who cannot possibly know their joy or their grief. To pretend to do so would be patronizing, insulting. All I can do is witness and acknowledge their joy and their grief. It is all I can do, but it is something. Pavel makes his way across the room and wraps his arms around me. His tepid embrace, meant to comfort me, completes the circle of my exile.
On the morning of my departure, I take myself to the train station. I’m about to board when I see Pavel running down the platform towards me, a bouquet of white snowdrops in his hand. White, for Chinese people, is the color of mourning.
“These were the only ones I could find. Winter, you know.” He smiles apologetically. “You came too early, Leslinka. You should have come in spring.”
I nod my head dumbly, not for having come too early but too late. To repair what’s been broken. To recover what’s been lost. When the whistle blows, I board the train and take a seat by a window. Pavel appears under it. I see his mouth form the words better than I can hear them through the thick glass. Seen, they have more presence and power for their absence of sound. “L’important, c’est la rose,” he’s saying.“Crois-moi.”
When I’m back in Paris, I learn that while I was making my three-month pilgrimage to Prague, a university student named Jan Palach, in response to the Soviet “intervention,” died by self-immolation. His desperate and defiant act prompted 25 other Czechs to follow suit, 7 of whom also died. I also learn that 30,000 people left Czechoslovakia (among them film director Milos Forman and novelist Milan Kundera) after the Soviet troops invaded their country, troops I learn much later that would remain outside of Prague for 23 years. I learn too that days after I left Prague, Aleksandr Dubcek, who inaugurated the Prague Spring and introduced its democratic reforms—among them, free speech and assembly, travel abroad, and the abolition of censorship— resigned as first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and was succeeded by staunch pro-Moscow Gustav Husak who then rescinded them. Some of these things I learn because ever since I left Prague, Pavel and I have been writing to each other intermittently and because I’ve taken it upon myself to know something about his country and his people.
After several months in Paris working as an au-pair, I leave for Sicily to join the man I met in Dubrovnik. When I become pregnant with his child, I head back to Paris. Pavel knows that I am pregnant, have left the biological father, and intend to bear and raise the child alone. “Ma chère oie [goose], he writes to me, “It is a romanticism of the worst kind, your wanting to have Heinz’s child.” And then this, which makes me weep: “I think that much of your unhappiness is due to your permanent voyage. Man, I believe, is a bit like a tree. When you transplant it often, it soon becomes weak and finally, it dies. Leslinka, when you are sad and when you free yourself from Heinz, you may come here to Prague to find the earth you need for your roots.”
The Czechs have a metaphor for idleness: gazing at the windows of God. Sometimes, when that blessed state comes over me, I remember Pavel in Nice. One memory is this: he presents me with a single red rose caught between bud and blossom and insists that I believe him—crois-moi—when he says that la rose—what we choose to remember, to live by, and to live for—is the important thing in life. But my most ardent memory of Pavel in Nice is this: without warning, he leaps from the Promenade des Anglais, flings off all his clothes as he races towards the beach, and hurls himself headlong into the slate-colored surf. December, even on the Cote d’Azur, is still December. But a baptism is still a baptism, and Pavel demands full, if frigid, initiation. For someone who has never seen a body of water larger than Hungary’s Lake Balaton, the Mediterranean is a profound mystery, nothing short of a miracle. He reappears, breaking free of a scruffy wave, beaming, slippery as a seal. In place of Poseidon’s crown, he sets on his head his cast-off Jockey shorts and advances towards me, radiant, powerful as a god.
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Leslie is the author of Daughter of Heaven: A Memoir With Earthly Recipes (Arcade Publishing); BIttersweet: A Novel (Tuttle Publishing); and Just Us Girls (Four Seasons Press), the official companion book to The Kim Loo Sisters, her forthcoming documentary about a Chinese American jazz vocal quartet popular in the 1930s and '40s who became the first Asian American act to star in Broadway musical revues. Her personal essays and feature articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Gourmet, Travel & Leisure, Saveur, Modern Maturity, Garden Design, and other print publications.