Granta 165, page 12
‘Nothing. You want a top-up?’ Tanja did, but she shook her head. ‘I’m going to let this one wear off and then go home.’ Janis nodded. ‘Sounds good. Have a nice evening.’ Then he disappeared towards the toilets.
Tanja got the final message from Jerome at 1.14. As he was going to bed, he texted her: Enjoy, baby. I’m off to dream about you now. In the taxi at 2.15, Tanja still felt blissful. She studied her face in the rear-view mirror and saw that she looked better than her sister did under the influence of drugs. Maybe she was more careful about the dose, or she simply benefited from not having a metabolic disorder or depression like Sarah did. In the back seat of the taxi, Tanja was sure that she was lucky in a lot of ways. At home she would have no trouble falling asleep from honest physical exhaustion; she wouldn’t dream about anything, and when she woke up she would launch herself into a pleasant, unplanned Monday. She would probably go for some fast food, make some phone calls, send some texts. ‘Good night?’ the taxi driver asked her. ‘Yeah, really good,’ said Tanja, and gave him a €2 tip as she got out. She would feel weary and demotivated on Tuesday at the earliest, and probably again on Wednesday. Tanja decided to take a positive attitude towards this state as well.
LAST WEEK AT MARIENBAD
Lauren Oyler
We went because we thought it would be funny; we came to realize the movie isn’t even really set there. It takes place, if not in the mind, then in a composite setting of several nineteenth-century Central European spa towns, in a sense of vague possibility and in danger of being lost. The misunderstanding was Thom’s fault. He had seen the movie once before, a long time ago; I had not, but I knew I would have to eventually, because it’s one of those movies you have to see. ‘It’s a trip,’ he told me.
Our relationship had recently undergone a series of unlikely transformations, and it was vital to the development of its narrative that we go on a trip. A trip would confirm that we were in a relationship, and that this relationship was not going to remain forever stuck in the past, in a phase of remembering and fighting over what we remembered – over things that had happened, seriously, the previous year. According to the couple clichés, a trip is a new memory you make together. It’s also a test: how moody one of you might become at a setback; how neurotic the other might be about the schedule; how fundamentally incompatible you are suddenly revealed, in an unfamiliar setting, to be. Kafka knew this. When he and his on-again, off-again fiancée Felice Bauer met at Marienbad for ten days in July 1916, they fought the entire time, unable to overcome the ceaseless rain and ‘the hardships of living together. Forced upon us by strangeness, pity, lust, cowardice, vanity, and only deep down, perhaps, a thin little stream worthy of the name of love, impossible to seek out, flashing once in the moment of a moment.’
Neither I nor Thom is anything like Kafka. I would prefer to stay in bed all the time, but I don’t have tuberculosis, or any serious physical ailment, just melancholy and probably a few minor vitamin deficiencies. Thom thinks this is cute and integral to my artistic process. The problem we had was that we both had a lot of work, meaning I would want, or need, to lie down even more than usual, and I didn’t want to go on any more trips. ‘You’ve become one of those people who lives in Berlin and is never there,’ a friend said when I found myself in Italy for the fourth time in a year. I don’t even like Italy. I love Berlin. You can bring golden handcuffs in your carry-on if you upgrade to easyJet Flexi. After what I vowed would be my last distressing international vacation for at least three months, yet another unlikely event required me to go on a cocaine bender across Europe. ‘That’s horrible,’ people would say when I told the story. Truly, it was, and maybe still is.
The idea to visit a fading grand Central European spa town was Thom’s; I suggested Marienbad because its literary reputation for an atmosphere of romantic melancholy and attractiveness to great neurasthenic historical figures appealed. Though others, like Karlsbad or Baden-Baden, are reachable by train from Berlin – a key element of the semi-ironic Central European nostalgia tourist experience – Marienbad overpowers, significance-wise. If I’d known anything about the film, I might have thought the trip too on the nose. But it’s hard to make decisions, and if there’s some arbitrary theme or parameter you can set, it’s easier. We would go to Marienbad and watch the movie, which, as it turns out, is kind of about how it’s hard to make decisions.
On the train from Berlin we had the strange and ultimately prescient feeling that we were too young to be doing this. How was it possible that we had purchased tickets, booked hotel rooms, packed bags? It was as if we were embarking on a mission that we did not fully understand, and perhaps by the end we would only understand that this was precisely why we had been given this mission. We stopped for a night in Pilsen to see where the beer comes from, and the beautiful hotel we stayed in was furnished in comically gigantic proportions. The hallways empty, the grand staircase dark, the functioning of the front desk dependent on a spooky little bell. We felt like naughty orphans or the kids who slept in the Met. We loved all this, of course, in the innocently condescending way of the sophisticated intellectual tourist who, in an era of mass awareness and ease of travel, rarely gets to see something so relatively undiscovered without raising ethical questions. The next morning we departed for the spa.
The word Marienbad is German for ‘Mary’s Bath’. Given that it is located in contemporary western Czechia – which I am still used to calling the Czech Republic, though that also sounds awkward in English – but also in the former Sudetenland, which had a majority German-speaking population until they were expelled and the area repopulated after World War II, Marienbad is not really the town’s name, but it also kind of is. The local thermal spring has been called Marienbad since the Thirty Years War when, legendarily, a soldier healed his wounds there, next to a tree where he’d hung a picture of the Virgin. ‘The implication was that Mary herself took ablutions there,’ David Clay Large writes in The Grand Spas of Central Europe, ‘though doubtlessly not in tandem with the troops.’ The town itself is relatively young, as far as historical European spa towns go, and it has always been primarily a tourist destination, and thus always a bit otherworldly in the sense that it does not give a visitor a sense, however illusory, of the country where it’s located, or of the people who live there. There were no buildings in the area until the late eighteenth century, and the place name was officially recognized in 1810. Then a Czech gardener named Václav Skalník had his way with the landscape, transforming it into what he bragged ‘could have been confused with the Garden of Eden.’ When discussing the trip elsewhere I referred to the town as Marienbad, because pretty much everyone I talk to in my pretentious Berlin expat circle knows the film as well as the desire to make a kind of kitschy train trip to a bygone Central European spa, but when we arrived I called it Mariánské Lázně in what I thought might be a respectful counterbalance to the German visitors. As a practiced sophisticated intellectual tourist, I feared offending the local population by using the German name, but given the entangled history, I haven’t encountered anyone who seems to care. As a Kurort Marienbad is German in nature, and remains popular among German tourists. It was until recently also popular with Russians, but after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the Czech government barred Russians from visiting the country as tourists, which generated mixed reactions among hoteliers and tour operators who were interviewed for a February 2023 New York Times article about the absence of the ruble in Karlsbad/Karlovy Vary and, by implication, the entire West Bohemian Spa Triangle, of which Marienbad is a part.
I didn’t know much about how the history of tourism created linguistic trends in Marienbad before I visited, so I was mostly excited to hear Thom, who is Polish-American, speak Czech, because the languages are similar enough that you can, as he says, ‘speak Polish in a Czech way’ and get by, and vice versa. If you know Polish, he claims, Czech is ‘cute’; I asked another Polish speaker if this is true and she said, ‘Yes, definitely cute.’ I expected that this would be a key facet of the couple-development project. What I did not expect was that we would have to speak German. German is Thom’s fourth language, which means he has some fun with it; he speaks it with what I refer to as a Habsburg accent – though it’s not quite Austrian or southern German, he rolls the r’s exaggeratedly, ups the cadence and often deepens it ironically. I am more demure. No one knows how good I am at German, including me. While I have taken many classes and sound pretty good, I have never ‘used’ my German, by which I mean I have never truly needed to speak German to communicate. This is because I live in Berlin, which is ‘not really Germany’. It’s of course more complicated, but it is also true that most Germans who live in Berlin speak English better than the many, many people who speak German badly. There is just no reason to seek out a German-speaking experience if your reason for living in Germany is not Germanophilia, which is a strange syndrome most people would not admit to having even if they did. But the working languages in Mariánské Lázně are Czech, Russian and German, so if you enjoy little ironies of life in twenty-first-century Europe such as ‘I spoke more German in the Czech Republic – uh, Czechia – than I ever speak in Germany’, it’s a good place to visit.
It was raining when we arrived, and it didn’t stop, except when it kind of snowed. This was fine; we picked the hotel where we were staying, the Ensana Nové Lázně, in large part because it is connected to two other hotels in the Ensana group by a long underground passageway where we assumed we could get our steps while pretending, again, to be insomniac orphans. Our taxi driver from the train station assured us it was the best hotel in Marienbad, and while we were not undertaking the rapacious kind of travel experience whereby you trek to an ‘exotic’ suffering region where your presence is questionably ethical in order to torture the local population with your unbelievably valuable currency, the best hotel in Marienbad is affordable ‘for what it is’, as the saying goes for us members of the easyJet Flexi class. Two meals at the buffet and unlimited access to the marble Roman baths in the basement are included in the daily rate. I also suspected I might be able to write it all off as a business expense. When the driver, who was already delighted by Thom’s Czech Polish, learned we were from the United States, he was downright thrilled: his cousin plays hockey in the NHL. I’d noticed hockey games on televisions at the train station in Prague. ‘Do Czechs like hockey?’ I asked the driver. I can’t get a handle on them except that they seem fun to drink with. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘but we have no NHL.’
I know only one Czech person, Roman, so I asked him for tips for a short trip to Marienbad. ‘That is only like small Karlovy Vary,’ he replied. ‘I have no tips.’ An American friend added, ‘Mostly do not under any circumstances eat at Churchill’s.’ Roman’s American wife, Laurel, recommended we go to Jáchymov, a small, disturbing spa town near Karlovy Vary where you can take a radon bath. Marie Curie studied the wastewater from the town’s paint factory to eventually isolate polonium and radium; the discovery that radiation killed cancer cells soon followed, and led to a craze for radioactive treatments at the beginning of the twentieth century. The grand hotel in the center of this radiation village is called the Hotel Radium Palace. ‘Did you know about this?’ I asked Thom. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but I would happily undergo radioactive therapy.’ He loves Marie Skłodowska-Curie because she was Polish. Thankfully the radiation village is only really accessible by car.
Tips are unnecessary in Marienbad anyway. ‘There really is nothing to do here,’ one character writes to another in Sholem Aleichem’s 1911 epistolary novel Marienbad. ‘One can go crazy from boredom.’ If the idea of Marienbad is nostalgic, or if Marienbad represents ‘one of those places (rather like Venice) whose future was in its past’, according to Large, being in Marienbad is, for rootlessly aware people like us, a distinct break from any kind of yearning for a historical moment we didn’t experience. In Marienbad we were relieved from the feeling that we’d missed a heyday – we did, but it doesn’t matter. The heydays I wish I could have experienced are characterized by a desire to destroy rather than dubiously regenerate the physical body. I can enjoy and pity the German spa town’s gestures to its past resplendence; I can smile at how badly it has adapted to competitors in the ‘wellness’ space. There is no pressure to have an ‘authentic’ historical German spa town experience or to wish I had been alive to see it decades earlier. I’ve lived in Berlin for several years, sort of, and the pressure to resurrect the city as it exists impossibly in the collective expatriate mind, prone to romance and nostalgia for eras it didn’t experience, is exhausting; living there can feel, at times, like the kind of vacation I hate, full of stuff I’m afraid I’ll regret not having done.
As soon as we arrived, I realized I just wasn’t excited about being in the town where old Goethe fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl. The only thing on the schedule was spa. Given the amount of work I had to do, it wouldn’t be full spa, but it might help. Everyone I know fantasizes about taking a one-to-six-month Kur in a calming natural setting. No one that I’m aware of wants to take the waters – they are stinky and one suspects similar results could be achieved through supplements and regular hydration – but we all believe that a luxurious convalescence, consisting only of massages, slow shuffling walks around the grounds in a bathrobe, and the making of intergenerational friends would cure us. In Germany, the concept of ‘burnout’ is widespread and much discussed; to an American this is precious, bordering on cultural appropriation. I took an online quiz to assess my burnout levels and it told me to ‘seek help urgently’. What might that mean, realistically? You can purchase long-term packages at the best hotel in Mariánské Lázně; we stayed for four days.
The hotel was indeed very nice, opulent, decorated in deep green and ivory and gold, with endless treatment rooms labeled with fin-de-siècle fonts. We immediately wanted to walk the underground passageway, which takes about fifteen minutes one way and involves occasionally passing through soothingly soundtracked hallways as well as the creepy medi-spa. At intervals appear fountains of flowing, dribbling or, at that time, out-of-order mineral water, each sourced from different springs and so of different compositions, with different bad smells and alleged benefits. The water tastes of nothing, but just to reiterate, it stinks. All the hotels, as well as the souvenir shops in town, sell special ceramic sippy cups; they’re designed so you don’t have to put your nose near the water to drink from it. The juxtaposition of nineteenth-century splendor and doctor’s office decor is disorienting, as are the elevation changes throughout the passage. One elevator has you exiting on the fourth floor; you arrive at the next elevator to find you are two levels below ground.
‘Zwei große Menschen,’ I heard an elderly German voice say at one such juncture. Standing in the elevator with her husband, she gestured to us. ‘Zwei große Menschen,’ she said again, looking at us expectantly, like a grandmother awaiting acknowledgment for her cookie recipe. Thom and I are both very tall. In boots, we are taller. Despite the benders, we radiate an image of what is theoretically sought at Marienbad: clear skin, shiny hair, bright eyes, athletic builds. We look like we could save someone’s life, and in fact we have. We quickly realized that despite the relative obviousness of Marienbad as a weekend getaway, two beautiful giants in their early thirties are still a sight to behold there. Except the boring blond couple who showed up in the sauna area on our last night, whom we despised and sought to destroy, the only other young person I saw the entire time was an approximately ten-year-old girl skipping alone down an empty sulfur-smelling hallway. I smiled at the German couple standing in the elevator with my mouth closed, like an American.
