Prague was the first non-English speaking city I visited. I went there by myself when I was 20 and discovered - among many other things - Kafka. Well, not him exactly; I saw the memorial plaque making the place where he had lived, just around the corner from the main square, just down from a stretch of those repetitive glassware shops. And I bought a nice edition of some of his short stories (1904-1923) from a bookshop named “Shakespeare and Co” – not the same as the famous Parisian bookstore where (at that time) you could get a free night’s accommodation in exchange for a bit of re-shelving.
This bookshop was a bit more upmarket and had its own café. It was cold that day; I walked to the book store, crossing the city and the river via one of the old bridges, and bought the book and sat in the warm café which was filled with middle-class looking students. I had a hot chocolate, pretending to read my book but really content to just sit back and watch and listen.
That was my first try at reading Kafka. I tried again later, back in the hostel, but there were too many distractions. The hostel was in the upper floors of a clock tower; downstairs, the belly of the tower opened out into a main train station, and from there train lines seeped out like entrails. So I could hear the noise of the trains, the ringing of bell when the clock reached an hour, and if I kneeled on a shelf, I could peer out of the window placed high up in the wall, and watch a city.
Another girl in the hostel – a Canadian – and I went out in the evening to one of the beer halls, and drank jugs of beer for the amazing price of 40 aussie cents. Walking home I remember being a bit disorientated – the glow of light from an Italian pizzeria on the cobblestones – huddling inside my coat against the cold – stopping and buying a hot dog, which turned out to be a weiner with saukraut in a bread roll, and not half bad.
It wasn’t until I’d been back in Australia for a while that I picked up Kafka’s stories again. But I couldn’t get into the style of the writing, whether it was his or the translator’s; soon I put it down, and wandered away. This has happened several times over the years since then. I brought the book over to PNG with me, thinking that this would be the time to really discover Kafka. But I still can’t get past the first few pages. It crosses my mind to leave the book here when I go. Kafka in PNG. Maybe I will. And yet I’ve become attached to it, for the stories it reminds me of, the cobbles, the cold.
I bought a book in every major place I travelled through on that trip, a tradition I’ve stuck to until PNG, where there are none.
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