Prague Bathtub

On my first American Halloween in seven years, I attend a house party in the suburbs of New Orleans. I do not know the couple who has just moved in; I’ve been invited by mutual friends who have taken momentary pity on me, given my status as a newcomer with few friends and no life. It’s only been a few months since I moved back to the US after six years in Europe and socializing has been difficult. I am grateful to the hosts for my inclusion in the evening, but crossing the threshold of their four-bedroom ranch catapults me into a state of internal squirm that stays with me long after the weekend comes to a close.

The house is scantily furnished, and the party has no nucleus. There are so many half-empty rooms to choose from, a cornucopia of negative space. I sit on the L-shaped couch, perched atop beige wall-to-wall carpeting, facing a giant flatscreen displaying The Football Game. A thought crosses my mind that traipses itself obsessively back and forth across my brain in the months to come: This was a mistake. I’m not supposed to be here. I miss the one-bedroom Czech flats that I and my friends once inhabited. They were cozy by nature, forcing even the smallest of crowds to bump up against each other over the hearth of a hissing radiator, our shins perpetually bruised by the edges of coffee tables taking up the entire living room. This is all the past tense now.

When I decided to move to Prague, almost a decade ago now, I cooked up a highly specific fantasy in which I’d spend long winter evenings in a clawfoot tub reading Kafka and drinking mug after mug of steaming herbal tea. For some reason, the tub sat in the middle of the bedroom. Naturally, the water never got cold and my mug refilled itself spontaneously. As for Kafka, he would help me understand the impenetrable Czech spirit, equal parts humor and darkness mingling together in a stew of existential dread and jovial capitulation. Looking around the Halloween party, it is this image that comes to mind, followed by the real Prague bathtubs. I long for their claustrophobia and comfort; any of them would do right about now. There was always one, except for the rare occasion when there wasn’t, and I would have to squirrel my way into the unoccupied flat of a friend on vacation. In my memory, the Prague bathtub was no less magical for the absence of its supernatural abilities.

Everything was wrong with the flat I moved into in February 2021. I was making a hasty escape from a pair of roommates whose presence had become so unbearable to me that I really only slept and showered in our shared abode. It was the height of the pandemic, and while I felt myself to be on the very prudent side of caution, they made me look like I was spending my evenings in an underground speakeasy by comparison. They never left the apartment, not even to go on a daily walk, and I believe the lack of sunlight and fresh air had begun to addle their brains. They settled into the living room and never left, their possessions and misery leeching out into the space that was supposed to be common.

They had groceries delivered, and took to preparing a grand feast every night after I’d gone to sleep. I would wake up in the morning with our tiny kitchen destroyed. Every pot, pan, utensil, and bowl, it seemed, had been used, strewn across the countertop and overflowing from the sink, some mysterious batter-like substance dripping down the lowers. I snuck out of the house in the dark by 7am, grabbing a brown roll from the bakery section of the supermarket on the way to work. I would delay returning in the evening, walking around the city in the cold until I couldn’t take it anymore. I once found myself attempting to eat the takeaway noodles I’d ordered for dinner in the park behind our building. My hands were gray and numb from the cold and I couldn’t maneuver my chopsticks, watching the steam from the udon dissipate into the dark. This had gone too far. I decided it was time to leave.

February is not a popular month to move in the best of times. In the middle of lockdown, even less so. I found a cheap flat with character about thirty steps from the edge of Stromovka Park in the gritty, avant-garde neighborhood of Holesovice, on the north bank of the Vltava. The floor in the kitchen was unfinished, which I only discovered after signing the lease and taking off my shoes for the first time. I called my new landlord in confusion while picking splinters out of my heels. He told me, in a tone that was both baffled and cheerful, to simply wear slippers inside. In his eyes, I had already violated the first rule of Czech society, which is to trade your outdoor shoes for indoor shoes when returning home. The idea that I would let my feet go naked and cold in the middle of winter was particularly scandalous.

The appliances were all from before the Berlin Wall came down, the stove top in particular had seen better days, the electric burners warped by time, forcing me to cook pasta in pots perched precariously on a 20-degree slant. I spent exactly one night on the mattress in the loft above the living room, which creaked so severely under me throughout the night that I slept on the couch thereafter. There was so much junk, seemingly decades of objects left by generations of young and unwitting female expats inside every drawer and cabinet, that I spent a full week dragging bags down to the curb before I was ready to unpack my own belongings.

The bathroom in and of itself was bizarre. The floors were wooden, the walls made of standard drywall painted bright yellow. Not a tile was in sight, and the landlord warned me that I must do my very best to not get anything wet (He demonstrated for me how to position the standing fan in the doorway of the bathroom after every shower to prevent mildew and mold from forming). But there was the tub. Unusually deep and narrow, painted lime green, missing porcelain in a few rough patches, but ready to use in any case.

The hot water always ran out after a few minutes, so I devised a routine that left me hovering somewhere between my modern life and that of a 19th-century scullery maid. I’d turn on the faucet in the tub and walk back out into the kitchen and fill two big pots with water to boil on the stove. Once I got those going, I would also fill the electric kettle. I did this so often that it became a science: In the time it took the two pots to boil, I would have already delivered three electric kettles to the bath. At this point, the tub would be full enough to submerge myself satisfactorily and the surface of the water steaming. The water was so hot to begin with that I had to wait to get in, and I could sometimes stay in there soaking for up to forty-five minutes or an hour before the water cooled down to exiting temperatures.

One time, I made it to ninety minutes. For a few days after this miraculous event, I touted this anecdote around to friends like it was news worth delivering. Can you believe it? The water was still warm when I got out! To me, this was the stuff of legend.

In Prague I learned that winter was a serious matter. I had only ever lived in the Northeast of the United States, so it’s not as if winter was a new phenomenon to me, but the Czech version could be undeniably more brutal at times. My first year there, as autumn rapidly gave way to winter, I sat in a classroom at the small language school where I taught private English lessons after work a few days a week. The gray of the carpet and furnishings matched the sky outside the window. I was chatting with my student, a bright and enthusiastic fourteen-year old girl, when the owner of the school, Jana, opened the door to check on us. “Holky, je už zima!” Girls, it’s already winter! She chided us and wouldn’t leave until we both put our coats on.

Jana had a point; I was always shivering at work. The problem for the Czechs was that heat had been provided by the state during the Soviet Era, so while meat may have been scarce, warmth was unlimited. Nearly thirty years later, they hadn’t adjusted to the indignity of being asked to pay for it themselves, and it was freezing everywhere. The exception was the public buses and trams, which were heated to such an extent that commuters, bundled up and packed in together, suffocating, often cracked the windows and let the icy air in to fight the vents.

During the five years I lived in Prague, my other expat friends and I would frequently comment on what initially seemed to be an irrational fear of the cold. Working at an international school, we had a view of how other cultures viewed the matter. Children who came from families from warm climates had an understandably difficult time adjusting, and responded with extra layers. Even as April brought the first warm spring days, students from India, Mexico, and Ghana still went out to recess in their snow suits while their American teachers shed their coats and showed their armpits to the sun.

The Czechs, Russians, and Ukrainians had the memory of winters long ago etched into their bones, and abided by ancient knowledge accordingly. Sniffles were met with a mandatory five-day stay at home and there was no ailment that couldn’t be at least improved by ginger, onion, and garlic. I once had an Uzbek student return to school after such a period of convalescence. At ten years old, she looked at me very seriously and relayed the following instructions from her mother: “I can’t go to PE or play at recess, so you have to watch me and make sure I don’t run around. Also, you can’t let me eat or drink anything cold. And don’t let me take off my scarf because I have to keep my neck covered all day.” These students also donned their ski bibs and parkas well into the springtime and it became obvious that we, the arrogant Americans, were the exception.

These habits began to rub off. A friend showed me how to make fresh ginger tea and I made it nearly every winter’s evening for years, waiting until the root stained the water a shade of dark gold before taking the pot off the stove and straining the mixture into my mug, which then accompanied me into the tub. I admit that I came to believe that the heat, both internal and external, would drive out whatever pathogens may have been lurking before having time to take hold. I also came to understand the true value of rest.

At the next flat I lived in, the hot water wasn’t a problem but there was no faucet, only a hand-held showerhead attachment. Every afternoon in the winter, I got home from work around 4:30pm after spending all day staring at my hands in despair, dry and cracked no matter how much lotion I rubbed between them. It was already dark outside and I went straight to the tub, fixing the showerhead in place and supervising it as it ran. I had made the mistake of walking away from it a few times, only to return a minute later to find the showerhead writhing around, spraying water all over the ceiling. I took to turning off all the lights, bathing with a candle perched next to me. I’m not sure how this touch from another century worked its way into my ritual, and it certainly did nothing to stave off the seasonal fatigue that always follows Daylight Savings for me. Indeed, staying awake for the requisite four hours after my bath before bedtime was a challenge.

I would strip off my clothing as the tub filled and my pot of tea simmered in the other room—it never failed to horrify me how my legs seemed to match my hands. Winter is aging me, I thought. With its shorter days, the season has a habit of erasing time, and the withering I experienced in the face of the cold was completely visceral. In modern life, we are not permitted to stray much from the daily routine despite what the season threatens to unleash on us if we aren’t careful. The ritual of soaking in the tub felt like laughing in the face of the disappearing day, reclaiming time that made itself sparse. In a way, it slowed down time to the point of reversing it. I emerged with fresh, soft skin, left the safety and comfort of the womb of my own accord at my moment of choosing, momentarily transformed, keeping me from further metamorphosizing into something hard, unrecognizable, and inhuman.