The Odd Old Couple

I just walked past a man with a beard, grizzled in the way that old man beards get. It was long, and came from all sides of his face and out form under his black-brimmed, flat top hat. His hair though, that was cropped close to his head. It reminded me of nothing so much as an Orthodox Jewish man. His wife however, looked perfectly modern and Czech, with dark lipstick, and a brownish-purple eye shadow layered on too thick over her cake of foundation and wrinkle-cream. I think that the lipstick may have been chosen to compliment her strangely dyed hair, which was also a darkish reddish color. She was berating him as he held what looked to be a joint, made out of a Marlboro 100, that he held and spun nervously in his old hands, fingernails yellowed with tobacco and age, and far too long, the way that old Caribbean man sometimes keep them.
He wasn’t listening to her and she seemed to know it. She was walking with that awkward sideways gait people use when they’re trying to face someone and not run into a fire hydrant at the same time. As she grew more agitated, his face became more and more placid, and the joint came closer and closer to his mouth, as if he were a long-suffering rabbi, and he knew that if only he made it through the pains that were given to him on Earth, he would be rewarded with Heaven.
This public display was typical of Czech culture in many ways. The public sphere is unusually quiet here. People don’t laugh or joke, or cavort with their friends on the streets. They don’t eat or talk on the subway. They don’t even get out of each other’s way on the street. Except, and this is a big exception, romantic couples. They feel no qualms about having public lovers’ spats, about making up from those spats wherever that happens to occur, about touching each other inappropriately in front of the eyes of the entire crowded tram. Whereas that old man’s wife would never have a fight with her sister, neighbor, or friend in front of me on Varsavska, she felt perfectly comfortable doing so in front of me.
Another aspect of Czech life that they exhibited was his joint. Weed is not illegal in the Czech Republic “in small amounts,” amounts which are not objectively quantified but subject to police discretion. He didn’t worry about the way the pungent scent wafted out of his marijuana cigarette strongly enough for me to smell it because he didn’t have to. This reflects a general laxness about rules here. Not only are there less of them, but those that do exist are persistently, even actively being broken. Everything from cutting lines to riding the subway without a ticket to blatantly and deliberately flouting the advertising codes to bribing politicians, it’s all taken without comment or question. It’s mildly disconcerting, but also intensely liberating. It’s one of the aspects of life here that most reminds me I’m not in Kansas anymore.