Time's Mistress by Steven Savile Read Free Book Online Page A

party cities. The only other “grown-up” in our carriage was a businessman who didn’t like flying. I know that because he said it at least five times in three hours. He kept telling the kids how they were fifteen years too late and how Prague had been the city to visit after the Gentle Revolution. He leaned over toward me and said, “It’s the closest we’ll ever come to the spirit of the Sixties,” conspiratorially. “Free love, if you know what I mean? Especially as a Westerner. We were like gods back then.” I didn’t say much to them, just leaned against the side of the compartment with my head resting against the window reading through the pages of the poems. I made it to the line about the lover weeping, and took it as an order.
    There were two places in Prague I wanted to visit, a restaurant we’d always talked about going to, Svata Klara , which wasn’t so much a restaurant as it was a treasure trove of history trapped in a seventeenth century wine cellar, and of course the Charles Bridge at midnight. I booked myself into the hotel, which had been an old Dominican monastery in a previous life, and then went out for a walk, wondering if I would somehow stumble upon Mácha’s so-called Alley of Sighs, the white chapel or the execution hill he wrote so hauntingly about. I knew the poem inside out now. Reading nothing but it for six hours will do that to a man.
    The Old Town center of Prague is like another world—a place out of time. Of course there are all the touristy bits you’d expect, the over-priced coffees thanks to the invasion of Starbucks, and the locals have really embraced the ideals of capitalism to the point that what’s theirs is theirs, and what’s mine is theirs seems to be the maxim of the day. Some of it, like the Jewish cemetery built on top of a row of shops, made me smile at the quirkiness of it, right up until I saw just how many gravestones were crammed into that tiny space. I started to think about what it really meant. Then there were other parts where the wealth of the city is on display with the rows of shop windows filled with Hermes, Dolce, Versace, and Bulgari. When you thought about the beggars on their knees two streets away it was kind of sickening, really, but that was the modern world all over.
    I walked around for a couple of hours. That was all it took for me to stumble on the underbelly to the city.
    Walking down Karlova, this wonderful Brothers Grimm kind of street that leads toward the Charles Bridge, I was confronted by a naked woman doing her best to walk seductively down the middle of the cobbled path. She had that vaguely stoned look to her brown eyes. And yes, I was looking at them; it was the only place I felt safe to look. She seemed to be finding it increasingly difficult to walk—never mind seductively—in heels without breaking her neck.
    A fat man with greased-back hair and a thick gold chain around his neck that made him look like something out of a Seventies Sexploitation movie was ten steps in front of her, walking backwards, and filming the looks of passersby for his website and encouraging her to bend and twist, dip a little thigh, flash a smile, be coy, and cover up, open up.
    Somewhere in the distance a brass band struck up the opening chords of the Indiana Jones theme tune. It couldn’t have been more surreal, or more perfect.
    It was nowhere near midnight and the bridge was on the other side of the tramlines, less than a minute’s walk. I could see the distinctive tower over the rooftops. I decided to check it out while the puppeteers and artists were plying their trade, so I waited for the old red tramcar to pass, and then joined the crowd moving toward the bridge.
    With the sun going down, the tower’s arch had transformed into a gothic picture frame, and inside it I could see the silhouette of the black castle and skyline on the other side of the river. I had to squint to see any of it clearly. I couldn’t help but smile. A guy was on