It took me a decade to get there. We changed train in Vienna and stopped shortly after at the border. The train had slats on the window and we waited for hours. The usual dogs and soldiers going through every compartment. Fucking boots. Then some cool Western-looking type would sit down to handle formalities, which always involved exchanging money and shit questions. Then we'd get some fantastic Boris Karloff character at 5 in the morning in some small station at an utter lose on how to deal with us. All I wanted was a coffee and there were lines for that, Turkish coffee you could say out of charity.

If you did a slow-motion of dawn that lasted a decade that would be Bohemia for me. Grandpa finally let me come and we'd drive over the soft hills, more towns entwined than anywhere in Europe with fruit trees never ending. Apples and prune dumplings. Kynute pvestkové knedlìky, charms of childhood, our madeleines.

Ya, Prague then was one of the most beautiful cities I had ever seen. It was a grey silent city that closed at 5 PM. There were lines for ice cream, a sort of frosty ice similar to snow, sugar and vanilla- and meat was mostly tough grizzle soaked in thin gravy. The big thing was our dollars for crystal and goose down quilts. Jazz clubs and the magic lantern theatre stood the day silently as an idea that things could be different. But generally the evening was passed in a backstreet room next to wall long pissoirs and the beer was simply the best. So long as the accordion didn't get too loud. Prague had Russian tanks in the squares yet every corner seemed carved out of spirit and humour. The Italians let themselves go with architecture there and Czech baroque lengthened limbs, shadows far more than elsewhere dared. Fingers and smiles fiddle with space in a sort of complicit jouissance that makes Italian baroque stately boring. The crannies for Hrabal's farts were carved centuries ago. Where else could Mozart let loose?

Grandpa would take us across the woods of his childhood stopping to chat with most anyone. Time was easy and people were courteous. And grandpa's language was from long ago, enchanting as his calligraphy, unfailing even into his nineties.  He said he never would visit Italy because the last time he was there they shot him. And when I talked to him well over a century old, he was angry his body had let him down. He was ready for another two centuries, by golly. We had stood on Hussite battle fields and stooped through cold silver mines. He pared apples for pie and lifted cars with one hand.

Prague was once another world.