The deepest layer of Prague is spiky, medieval, dark with coal dust. For years Vaclav Havel could look out from his dilapidated apartment building, across the fast, shallow Vltava River, and see the castle on the hill -- Hradcany, the high, elaborate complex that dominates the city. He could cross the river by the 14th century Charles Bridge, lined on either side with beseeching, tormented statuary -- church fathers, age-blackened saints.
On top of the medieval lies Prague's socialist layer, the residue of neglect and cynicism, the peeling paint, the shop shelves half empty from the day before yesterday when the Bohemians and Moravians and Slovaks were under occupation -- a nation landbound and Lenin-bound as well.
Above all that, quickening the surfaces now, is the newest thing, a lively entrepreneurial city -- Western glitz and electronics and hard money flowing in; the platzes swarming with backpackers; McDonald's opening a second branch, this one on Wenceslas Square, where the "velvet revolution" transpired in November 1989. The new McDonald's is in sight of the spot where Jan Palach set himself on fire for Czechoslovak freedom in 1969, the spot where Havel laid flowers in 1989 and was arrested for the deed. Now a deadpan sword swallower resembling Leonid Brezhnev draws a crowd of American children, and punkers with spiked Mohawk haircuts wander the medieval lanes.
On street corners the old communist empire is for sale: young Czechs peddle Soviet army garrison caps and belts and military watches, and even, forlornly, old Communist Party identification papers, with someone's staring photograph and years of official stamps layered like multiple exposures.
Peeping out everywhere is Franz Kafka's haunted, haunting face. Kafka is a poster and T-shirt industry. Shining out from the Central European confectionery window frames and snowflake Bohemian crystal: the consumptive's black, intelligent eyes. He is Prague's presiding household god, part of the city's neurotic Shinto.
It was Kafka who invented the castle as literature -- the Prague castle of his novel being the symbolic seat of mysterious, anonymous power, an effect the Communists had a genius for. That Havel came to preside over the castle seemed the Czechoslovaks' graceful, transcendent leap out of the dark, a sort of miracle -- and an impish historical touch.
Havel, born in 1935 and raised in a well-to-do bourgeois family, began as an absurdist playwright in the style of Ionesco or Pinter or Beckett. An attitude of surrealist paranoia turned out to be the right moral optic through which to see the Communist world clearly, and Havel had keen eyesight. Constricted as a playwright, he became a dissident. Imprisoned as a dissident, he became a symbol. Communism was brutal and stupid and corrupt. Havel was Czechoslovakia with brains -- the country's better self, its idealist, its moral philosopher, the visionary of "living in truth." When the Communist state fell away in November 1989, it made some giddy, noble sense to install Havel as the first President of Czechoslovakia's new age.