6 Dec 1991
Being in Czechoslovakia, you begin to understand the meaning of "Kafkaesque." I mean, you live it! You go into a shop with four more lines, and you can’t distinguish between them, but every once in a while you know you will spend much time waiting only to be told you are on the wrong line, or, even worse, to be denied your request with some response that you cannot understand.
Or you go into a waiting room, like the one I’m in now, with many doors leading off it, and several other "waiters" who stare at you as you walk across the room to examine a sign you can’t even understand. But you have to wonder, "how do they know that I am out here waiting?" "How do I know if what I am waiting for is in fact behind one of those doors?" and other similar questions. There seems to be some lack of lucidity about "the way things are done." It’s very nerve wracking to know that you could just be sitting in a room of people looking at you strangely, only to be ignored because you didn’t check in to the right person, and finally, when you inquire far enough, to be told that you should have been waiting in some other room with some other people who look at you strangely and some other officials who ignore you.
People go in and out of the doors, but no one has said a single thing to anyone waiting here except some doctors took away one girl with a cast who had a special piece of paper. So how long do I sit here and be simultaneously stared at and ignored before I decide I must leave and go put something in my stomach before my five hours of hell class?
This reminds me exactly of a movie I saw Monday called "A figure to support," in which a guy looks for his friend and can’t find him, so he comes across a "Rent-a-Cat" store and decides to borrow a cat. Only, when he goes to return it the next day, the store is gone. So he goes to see all kinds of people and they are upset with him because he doesn’t know why he borrowed the cat, but they send him to this one room, which he wanders around many halls looking for. When he gets to the room, it is a waiting room filled with people who stare at him as he crosses the room to sit in an empty chair by the office door. Everyone waits for a really long time and then someone runs into the office and they discover that there is nothing, no one, in there. Except a phone, which rings and someone asks for J. Kilian (which is the name of the guy’s friend and various other people who are also unfindable).
It makes me feel like crying. The movie was great – surreal & funny & weird & wacky, but actually living it is not quite so amusing somehow.