Free Complication by Isaac Adamson Page B

either side, sleepy little storybook dwellings painted the colors of Easter eggs. Prague Unbound went out of its way to warn that at night, the area was frequented by the ghost of a cuckolded locksmith with a rusty nail driven through his skull, condemned to wander the streets in search of some soul brave enough to remove the spike and release him from his torment.
    I didn’t run into any ghostly locksmiths, but halfway down the sloping U Lužického Semináře Street on the Malá Strana side of the canal, I found the gallery and went inside . The display room was roughly the size of a racquetball court only with much lower ceilings. A series of photographs was mounted on the walls. There were a couple racks of art books, and a postcard carousel sat near a front desk manned only by a box with a recommended gallery donation sign. I tried picturing Vera behind this desk. The top of her head would nearly have brushed the ceiling.
    I dropped some coins into the collection box and wandered the floor, pretending to take in the photographs. The first picture featured a young man standing in front of a tank, his leather coat held defiantly open, as a soldier perched atop the tank’s turret half-heartedly aimed a machine gun at his chest. Another showed a gaunt old man dejectedly facing the camera, eyes sunk in heavy
shadows, while behind him people sifted through broken furniture beneath a ruined façade of unglassed windows and walls mottled with bullet holes.
    â€œGood morning,” called a man emerging from a staircase at the back of the room. He was somewhere in his sixties, had an oblong face framed by iron gray hair pulled into a ponytail, and was dressed in a brown sweater, loose corduroys, and Lennon spectacles. He looked like an old hippie who’d aged into uneasy respectability through no apparent fault of his own.
    â€œJosef Koudelka,” he said, assuming a spot beside me.
    â€œNice to meet you, Josef.”
    â€œAh, no,” he chuckled. “My name is Gustav. Josef Koudelka is the man whose work you’re admiring. Famous Czech photographer. Our show features his work from 1965–1970, before he was forced to emigrate.” The man’s impeccable English was delivered accent free with a genial, avuncular air that reminded me of one of those professors in the movies, the kind who smokes pipes and quotes Shakespeare and helps inner city kids rise above their bleak circumstances through slam poetry or whatever. Even in my still mostly unwrinkled and expensive suit, curator Gustav had instantly sized me up as an English-speaking tourist with no clue what he was looking at.
    None of which boded well for my plan.
    â€œThis is probably his most famous,” Gustav said, directing my attention to another picture. In the photo, the cameraman’s arm jutted into frame, elbow cocked, wrist turned to show his watch. A first person POV of someone checking the time, nothing out of the ordinary until you noticed the watch said noon, and the broad city avenue spread below was eerily unpeopled.
    â€œAugust 21, 1968,” the man resumed. “Wenceslas Square just before the Soviets literally entered the picture. They’d taken over the airport in the middle of the night, shut down the borders,
moved 7,000 tanks and half a million troops into our country. Not so much soldiers as kids really, ruddy cheeked, blue-eyed farm boys with guns and oversized uniforms and no idea where they were or why. We tried disorienting them even more by tearing down all the street signs in the city, rendering their maps unusable. They’d get lost, run out of gas, sit there sweating in the heat and begging for water. Lots of people here spoke Russian then, had to learn it in school, but you’d never have known it if you were a Russian T-55 tank commander. I’ll never forget those tanks. Massive, gray, loud as hell. Like antediluvian monsters assembled from scrap