I like the Petřin Tower more. It lights up more beautifully at night, I think, both because it’s smaller and less showy, and because, looking up from Mala Strana or the Faculty of Arts building at my old university, it’s always shown me where home is. Karlův most, the Charles Bridge, is lauded for its spooky yet regal quality, but the next bridge just to the north, Mánesův most, lets me see the tower and the castle in almost perfect synchronicity. Both of my Prague neighborhoods have been behind these two landmarks, and they’re always what I look forward to seeing when I’m headed back to whatever bed I’ve learned to sleep in.

When I saw the tower on this morning I smiled. I walked through a small entrance in the wall to my left, thinking I could make it to the tower from there. But I couldn’t. It turned out the way I was headed was closed off, as a man who’d yelled to me from behind had informed me. So I walked around to another entrance, dressed in a black wool coat, leather gloves, and a wool hat I’d bought at a Kmart back in Chicago, feeling a little underdressed for the morning cold.

I reached the other entrance, and there was a small playground I’d seen once before, on a summer night, now covered in snow. I say “playground” because it looked like a place for children, but there weren’t any slides or merry-go-rounds or monkey bars—just a small trampoline maybe four feet in diameter, and a pyramid made of red rope. An adventure to climb, I’m sure.

I walked over to the tower, then thought for a second about going to the top. But it was 9:30 in the morning, the tower tours wouldn’t begin until 10:00, and it was too cold outside to stand around and wait. And no one else was around, save for a man who I assumed worked at the tower, dressed like a train conductor and standing outside smoking a cigarette. The little beer stand across the way was closed and the umbrellas were folded up, frozen to their tables, and by the time I’d noticed all of this I realized I didn’t care about seeing Prague from its highest point. I’d gotten what I wanted out of the city’s winter views almost every other day before this one, and I didn’t want to pay for a perspective that was probably prettier in spring and summer.

So I walked back to my dorm, this time taking the route I knew, down a winding, slippery trail. Back to a garden next to a monastery overlooking the city, the one place in Prague I’d ever seen a sunrise.

There would be no sunrise, though. Aside from it being too late in the day, even if I’d shown up here at five or six in the morning, the haze covering the city would have kept it gray, would have kept me from seeing the kind of clear sky that makes a sunrise worth it. I thought then that maybe I never want to return here in winter. That, maybe, I was too used to the comfort of American warmth to let myself really absorb all of this, and that I was too afraid to return here another winter at the risk of ever hating this place.

 

Micah McCrary is a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. His essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Essay Daily,Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Brevity, Third Coast, and Midwestern Gothic, among other publications. He co-edits con•text, is an assistant editor at Hotel Amerika, and a doctoral student in English at Ohio University. He holds an MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. His book manuscript, Island in the City, was a finalist in the Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2015 Essay Collection Competition and a semifinalist in Ohio State University Press’s 2016 Non/Fiction Collection Prize Competition.