“I had traveled from the haven of my hopelessness, and I was still traveling; the journey was also conversation; it was present and past, memory and fantasy; it was not life for me, but it was movement...”  Elio Vittorini

If Jules Verne had entered a volcano in Iceland and exited in Sicily, than why could not something in the reverse have happened in Grandpa and Rikki's case – some reverse spiritual migration manifested in countenance, I wonder?

I leave Iceland for Europe with a gift of Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, a cross with mallet-like tips and a sphinx head. I wear Thor's mallet – a pagan cross – nestled on top of my Christian cross as I continue my travels.

Church of Bones

I stand face to face with skull stacked upon skull. I’m awe-struck by the macabre beauty and hard whiteness of chalices and pillars built from skeletal remains. One skull has perfect teeth. Another has only two – not so perfect. Each skull grips a pair of humerus bones in its mouth.

A necklace of femurs and pelvic bones loops to sculpt a chandelier in the chapel of what was once a Cistercian monastery. In the ossuary outside of Prague in the town of Sedlec Kutna Hora, the bones of 40,000 people knit a lace-like décor. Begun in 1511 by a half-blind monk, the bones are from abolished graves that were filled with victims of the 1318 plague and casualties of the Hussite Wars of the early 1400s. 

Travel is conversation – conversation with the unexpected, places as well as people.

A Hue of Years Past

In early January not long after the Velvet Revolution, I arrive by train in mid-afternoon at the main station in Prague. One of my colleagues runs below my window next to the arriving train as if he is steering it into place.

We go directly to the Institute by metro while another one of my co-workers and one of the lucky few who own a car deposits my bag at my flat. While nursing her daughter, my co-worker’s copious breasts had filled enough bottles which the state had purchased for less plentiful mothers to in turn purchase her car.

Our colleagues await us in a small, smoky office drinking Slivovic. Guitar music and song drown the soft shuffle of feet clad in house slippers on linoleum as Turkish coffee is poured for some. Sugar cubes in the shapes of hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds slip noiselessly to the bottoms of cups, precipitously privy to the fortunes the coffee grounds will tell.

Late in the evening, some of us go out to dinner. Situated outside the center of Prague, our choice of restaurants is limited. There is only one reasonably nearby and open. Everyone, except me, eats slowly and in quiet as if in prayer of thanksgiving for the food. Mealtimes seem to be a holy time, no matter if the food is good, bad, plentiful or meager.

It is a very long tram, metro and bus ride back to my flat in Barrandov. With few street lamps, the night is a bottomless-black. As I wait at the bus stop, I am enveloped by another time and place that is utterly outside of my experience. The bus shelter does not cry out at me with enticements, but instead lays mute, devoid of advertising. A cold, strong wind snaps, snorting and growling as it encounters resistance in its path. I pull my coat tighter, afraid of being sucked into the shadows.

The darkness of this night stays with me as a reminder of a time that is irrevocably obscured. Under communism there was relative equality, but not true liberty. Under capitalism there is liberty, but great imbalance in equality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin pondered in great depth the question of equality and the concept of liberty, and came to the conclusion that there is no one, all-encompassing answer, but rather, the idea of a single answer can only be a dangerous illusion. Living in Prague grafted to her branches, I could not help but also mull these questions as I watched my Czech friends falter in the wind that wrenched Prague’s boughs.

At this time, I felt for the only moments in my life left entirely alone to my own inner thoughts. As powerful as the media is, its absence is also powerful. I had no desires for things that I might need or must have. Extraneous colors and words, pictures and slogans, did not bombard my train of thought or subliminally distract me from the person with whom I communed or the architecture that surrounded me.

The Iron Curtain modestly and unexpectedly sheltered innocence within its folds. I give thanks for the visual and auditory silence that connected me with the collective consciousness of Prague – as it was then.

The Snow Picnic

Fourteen inches of fresh, unmarred snow cradles my daughter and me with hills and hollows as if a great white horse lay down in our yard. A crisp shuffle of golden sun and grey-blue clouds casts a kaleidoscope of shadows from the Midwestern sky. Under cloaked elms, each branch sleeved in demi-white, we spread out our picnic blanket at the foot of yesterday's snowman. Carrots are scattered around the bushes for the rabbits, who are also invited.

We lounge on the blanket eating peanut butter sandwiches and drinking juice from a coffee thermos. Initially reticent to implement my daughter’s unorthodox idea, I now marvel at the white beauty. All is turned inward, and from within, we draw our warmth. My thoughts soar over continents, through time...

In a hazy and blustery Prague noon heat, I stand on the boulevard Vaclavske Namesti below a bronzed replica of the horse that Wenceslas rode. Ardo’s hooves curl above the perennial one or two flowers placed in memory of Jan Palach, a dissident who left this world aflame like a sunset that lingered for several days charred on the horizon...

Illusion hangs over the former East Block. For me, it is the illusion of life without the pressures of market economy. The comfort of worn clothes and job security, no telephones and weekend gardens looms large. For everyone around me, after years under Communism, the illusion of Jack Kerouac, freedom on the road, freedom period, beckons... 

In Barrandov on the edge of Prague, I live in a complex of block houses which rise with monotonous proportions from a windy hill. No matter what time of day or evening I leave or return do I ever encounter a solitary neighbor, even though fresh laundry – mostly underwear, mostly white – waves eternally from the balconies like tattered homecoming flags welcoming the newly triumphant and the weary...

President Vaclav Havel's picture hangs in kitchens and shop windows. His eloquent voice speaks continuously in support of moral spirituality in his weekly Sunday afternoon “Conversations from Lany”...

Reading the headstones in the graveyard as I amble home from work, I roll the foreign names on my tongue and delight in alters of artifacts carefully arranged in homage. On weekends, great throngs of visitors come, arms laden with brooms to sweep, rags to wipe, cement to repair, tools to prune, and seeds to plant. I am in awe of this care for the dead...

A daytime moon sticks in the sky like a large white gum ball. In front of the food market in my Czech neighborhood, lined up like horses outside of a saloon, is a long tidy row of large, old perambulators. In each pram, sleeps a bundled newborn. I park my daughter in tow...

Snow languidly melts from its capture in the boughs above us, hesitant irregular rain, like a staccato underscoring, serenades our picnic and jostles me back to the present. I want to bask in the whiteness forever. The world seems at rest, only an occasional car, thickly muffled by the snow, silently inches down the street. I am thankful for my daughter’s small, wild ideas that are really, large and generous.

The Buddha on the Mountain 

Arcs built of smooth, centuries old, stone blocks rise in tiers behind me. The brilliant silver-blue of the Mediterranean peeks through the shards of pocked columns and makes me squint.

“How did these theatres fall into such ruin?” I ask over the bellows of my father and daughter as they test the acoustics in the Greek amphitheatre outside Taromina, Sicily.

My father looks at me curiously, his favorite black, wool tam tilted on his grey head of hair, “Didn’t you ever take theatre history?”

“I guess not.” I’m just as puzzled at this hole in my education as he is. Growing up, our home had been a library of theatre. Dad had taught theatre history, acting, and directing for 34 years. He was not just my father, but also my mentor.

“The Roman Empire believed in keeping the masses fed and entertained. When Christianity challenged paganism, entertainment was often at the expense of the Christians who were brutally killed as sport. In the third century, when the emperor, Constantine, became a Christian, the amphitheatres were closed.” Tall and thin, with only a slight stoop, Dad meanders toward the proscenium, more at home in a theatre than anywhere else. “Ironically, it was the Christians who reignited public theatre six centuries later, using pageants to enact Bible stories.”

Looking up, seeming to measure the height of the columns, Dad, a deeply religious man, smiles. “This place feels a little like a church. One of the first theatres I directed in was a church turned into a summer theatre.”

Dad directed a then-unknown Paul Newman doing summer stock in Lake Geneva. My mother was his leading lady.

“These amphitheatres produced glamorous spectacles, but glamour isn’t the important aspect of theatre. Hard work is important. It’s the lighting man, the stage manager – the ones you don’t hear about – who keep the theatre going.”

“Hello!” The theatre reverberates with the echo of a tiny voice. High on an upper bank of seats, my daughter is still experimenting with the sound system.

“Hello!” My father’s refrain echoes back. Dad turns to me. “Public theatre has certainly had its ups and downs.”

“What do you think saves it from dying?”

“Theatre is action – it presents an action. You are allowed to reflect and hopefully take a better action. Theatre gives us reflection. That’s why there will always be theatre,” Dad says, looking out at the water, shielding the sun from his eyes.

The Stranger

Mount Etna exhales its smoky breath into the night. A grey gauze swaths the Sicilian village of Taormina which clings to the cliffs above the Mediterranean Sea.

Over the many centuries that Taormina has drawn visitors to Sicily, wintering here is no longer fashionable. In early January the streets are empty as my parents and my daughter and I embark on an evening promenade after dinner with relatives at a tiny restaurant around the corner from our hotel. Even though the Mediterranean air is warm enough to go without a wrap, Mother is draped in a fur coat.

“That’s ridiculous,” they tell me as we wander further and further away from our hotel.

We pass the town square which juts out like a gabled balcony over the sea. It is a square where lovers can lose themselves. The sweet smell of the stranger’s tobacco lingers. At the far end of town near what once a rambling monastery – now a hotel closed for winter – we stop for coffee at the only open café and pastry shop.

Seated, I peek outside the door to look for the stranger, but he has disappeared. Several minutes later, I feel cold as I notice him skulking outside the café window. The stranger eyes us, and walks away, heading back in the direction we have come from.

I cannot eat my cannoli or drink my espresso. I know he knows we must return in the direction from which we have come. He is lying in wait. I am sure. I encourage everyone to quickly finish dessert – whipped cream, almonds, chocolate and biscuits go unappreciated in the haste. Mother, Father and my daughter are annoyed with me.

“You’re acting silly,” they tell me, but I see fear growing in their eyes.

The stranger emerges on cue. I scream. I don’t know if he tries to apprehend us. I don’t look back. Short of breath, we scurry to the nearest open trattoria. Now, I can turn around and look. The stranger is gone. The street is quiet. We relate the incident to the restaurant owner, the patrons. Everyone gets involved in our drama.

The police are called in to scour the nearby streets and the alleyway which leads to the ancient ruin. No one is found. We are escorted to our hotel. The police seem pleased to be engaged and tell us they are very strict with bandits, lest the tourist trade be destroyed. They will keep a watch on us while we are in town.

The tempest was in full fury in the December late evening hour. A savage rain blew hard and heavy. Trees bent every-which-way with a wind that bellowed woeful moans. Raw with the residual of emotional fatigue and the physical fatigue of travel, my other senses seemed heightened. My daughter and I had only arrived in Switzerland earlier that day.

While she slept, I stood deafened and soaking wet on our balcony with outstretched arms and welcomed the angry waves of Lac Leman that licked the sandstone patina at the base of Castle Wing, ancestral property from the house of Couvreu.  

The chateau evoked some strange feeling in me. Like time turned inside out, it was as if I had run into an old and understanding friend from the past, albeit a troubled one. Built in the mid-16th century to replace an ancient market, the original structure was a commercial building which doubled as an inn. Its useful purpose had mutated willy-nilly until a more illustrious occupancy in the 19th century, when the chateau was given the respectability of a name and an ornate neo-Gothic facade. In the last several hundred years the chateau’s walls had been privy to philosophical discourse. A prevalent musty smell emanated from the walls, the bedding, the needlepoint of the armchair, even the outside air was tinged, tainting the wisteria that like a withered and aged Romeo clung to the balcony. I felt peculiarly captive of the chateau, and I knew I would not easily leave it, in the same way that I knew I would not easily leave the lake and the mountains.

Long before dawn as the storm still raged, I woke, the wind now snarling like beasts on a rampage, the thunder pummeling through my body. A woman appeared in my room and caressed my arm. Gently, the woman told me to get up and move to the kitchen. It was another one of my intermittent episodes with the dead. As I sat alone in the kitchen nursing espresso in a big bowl, there was a horrible crash.

The glass doors to our balcony have blown in, I thought, as I closed my eyes and saw the glass clearly shattered.

When I arrived at the entrance to our room to confirm my suspicion, the great, tall, seemingly sturdy wooden doors with wrought iron handles stood naked of their paned-windows, and a large and ragged shard of glass lay on my pillow. Miraculously, my daughter’s bed was untouched. I shuddered to imagine the possible damage had I still been lounging in bed, as I normally would have, after transcontinental travel and a very late night. I had hardly slept.

After clearing the room and balcony of its debris, I put cardboard in place of the glass panes. From the balcony, I could see many fallen trees amid the candelabrum planes. Wreckage was strewn everywhere. A small piazza lay to my left. It was the center of a town that was small, inconsequential, and seemed overlooked by outsiders, existing as if a fluttering theatrical scrim surrounded it, allowing its inhabitants to look out but not allowing those beyond the curtain to look in.

Without allowing myself the luxury of a nap and running on adrenaline, I spent the day writing in my notebooks and taking espresso breaks with the family from whom we were renting our room while my daughter played with the children. The phones were down, the electricity out, and the shops closed. The lazy, dim, windy and drizzly day felt like a centuries-old throwback until early evening when partially-working utilities returned it to the present. 

In late January, the sun lowers to embrace Lake Como and a rose blush blankets the clatter of our heels on the ancient cobblestones of Bellagio, Italy.

On this impetuous visit from Switzerland where we are living, my six-year-old daughter and I find out, one by one, that the hotels, a patina of pastels along the lake, are closed for winter renovations.

“Mom, I could live here,” my daughter says, head tilted, surveying the underbelly of the colonnaded archways along the waterfront. Her words echo in the empty streets. “But it’s a little too quiet,” she notes.

The town is still like glass. We roam shadowy, narrow corridors, feeling as if we have discovered some precious, but forgotten artifact. As it grows darker, we wonder nervously where we will sleep.

“Excuse me,” I flag down the only person stirring on the street. I ask her if any hotel nearby might be open, already knowing the answer and secretly hoping she will invite us home. Instead, she tells us she knows someone who knows the manager of a small private villa – the satellite of Villa Serbellioni, the grandest hotel in Bellagio.

Within minutes, as if in a dream with abrupt scene changes, we are ensconced in a crisp, classical suite of the villa – offered to us at great discount. My daughter and I are the villa’s only occupants, I realize with pleasure as we bask on the balcony with a lake view. The mountains seem to rock us in their arms. I, too, could stay here forever.