Things Never Finished

Every writer has stories that started off fine, and then had no second act. You promise yourself that some day, you'll get around to finishing the things, bother to figure out the next link in the chain, the next puzzle piece, but the trip starts to fade away in your memory, new assignments come in, and the stories are nothing more than dusty folders on the hard drive.

Here are two of mine, from Budapest and Prague:

Budapest:

At the foot of the hill, terns are fishing the Danube, hovering the way we usually think only hummingbirds do. But here, 640 feet above the streets of Buda-Pest is on the other side of the river-I'm relieved to see they haven't done anything with the bones.

Maybe it's a bone. Hard to say. It's a sliver the size of half a fingernail cutting, a scrap of something that looks like a bit of rubber eraser after you've fixed a mistake on the Sunday crossword puzzle.

And maybe I'm the only one reading the labels. Despite being held in an elaborate silver shrine the size of a good bottle of wine, this bit of whatever it is doesn't seem to be getting any notice. It's in a side room of the Mattias Cathedral, part of Budapest's Castle Hill, and obviously the other people who come this far are anxious to get back outside and look at the two-thousand-year-old city, walk the shopping streets (amber, lace, souvenir t-shirts that I'm pretty sure I've seen in a dozen other countries), or hang out in the revived café culture. Hungary's biggest city doesn't have the obvious appeal of other central European hot spots, like Prague or Krakow, but Budapest has a vibe all it's own.

And it has this bit of, according to the label, St. Francis of Assisi.

For centuries, Budapest was rich beyond imagination with the glories of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And during that time, there were men who made their livings stealing bits of saints from one church, and carting them off to another. Furta sancta, it was called, and it was an art form. The right piece of the right saint, and you could guarantee a steady flow of pilgrims to your church.

There are bits of a dozen saints in this room.

Prague:

Franz Kafka turned into a cockroach right about where one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life stops to take a picture of Prague. Below us-although no doubt well above the level of a cockroach's eyes-the city sprawls, wrapped in the dark line of the river.

From up here, just outside the castle walls, you can see the people walking the Charles Bridge, the vendors hoping to catch their eyes. As best I can tell, somewhere in Prague there's a factory of artists, turning out thousands of quick watercolor sketches of the same five scenes: the bridge, the astrological clock, the castle, an open-air café, a cobblestone street.

These artists are probably thinking Kafka had it easy.

“I picture Prague all dark and Milan Kundera,” reads a note in my email. Ten years of economic boom, fifteen years being commie-free, Prague still can't shake off its image to a certain generation-my generation-of people. Just a little too young to remember Prague Spring, too young to remember the tanks rolling into the Old Town Square, but old enough to remember when the Soviet Union was the dark spot on the map and all those countries behind the Iron Curtain were eating borsht and wearing thick clothes.

We read the books-Kafka, Kundera, the marvelous The Good Soldier Sveck, where a patient in the mental hospital thinks he's turned into an encyclopedia, and someone must immediately look up “box stapling machine,” or he's done for.

The sun never shines in our Prague.

That's us, though. To the generation coming up behind us, the ones who always had cell phones and who are pretty sure wifi access is in the Bill of Rights, Prague is the promised land, where beer is cheap, absinthe is real, every meal comes with French fries, and from any major street corner, within fifteen minutes two dozen gorgeous members of the opposite sex are bound to walk by.

It's the traveler's lament: I'm here at the wrong time. Not the wrong time for Prague-this place hasn't been so hot since Charles II was king. But the wrong time for me. This is a place for twenty year olds to find out exactly how large the world is, and how full of possibilities.