Life in a Prague hostel, or, the Saddest Finn in the World
I don’t think anyone who’s ever tried it ever forgets the time they lived in a hostel. I certainly won’t. I was 22 and had just come to Prague, and I lived there for a month while I looked for a flat.
The hostel was like a purgatory of wandering spirits, mostly young ones seeking heaven somewhere, and an inevitable few who had ascended there from some hell. I passed my days with scheming Puerto Rican separatists, roving Celtic minstrels, and the Japanese guy who was as friendly and fun as he was entirely incomprehensible. Everyone was interesting.
Even the passport thief was interesting. Sure, he had rendered about ten of us temporarily stateless, but we all secretly admired him for his singular linguistic prowess. Everyone had seen him at one point, but he was a Scot to some, a German to others - and though he looked like the Frenchman that a French girl had been robbed by, I thought no more of it when I heard his broad American accent. In the end, after he was almost arrested, our only reward was the satisfaction of learning from the police that, wherever he was from, he wasn’t a Czech, because apparently that was one language that was too hard even for him.
Another person I won’t forget was the Saddest Finn in the World, whose real name I don’t think I’d remember even if I had known him longer than 24 hours. The Saddest Finn in the World was a tall, blonde soft-spoken Finn with a tall, blonde and incredibly beautiful girlfriend. He had come to Prague late the night before, and finding the hostel closed, he settled into a sleeping bag on Střelecký Island, taking care to stuff his belongings into the bag with him and leaving only his shoes outside. The result of this tactful precaution was that he checked into the hostel the next morning with every possession except for his shoes. And that was how we first saw him: trying to squeeze his girlfriend’s spare sneakers on his feet. And it was in his girlfriend’s sneakers that we saw him the second time as well, a few hours later, now seeking a telephone because, on his way to buy himself some shoes, an ATM machine had devoured his credit card. He was an awful sight already, a destitute Finn in girls’ footwear and we quickly made a collection for him to tide him over until something started going right for him. But nothing could help him, because, as everyone knew by midnight that day, some force of insidious ill-will was contriving to destroy him before our very eyes. All was well for long enough for me to accidentally break a window, and it was in leaning out this window – I suppose meditating on how things couldn’t get worse – that the man on his way to becoming the Saddest Finn in the World sliced a tendon on his arm and had to be rushed to the hospital.
For the rest of the day we fretted over him, imagining him there, on his first day in Prague, in hospital. Feeling guilty for that last bit of evilness that befell him, I resolved to personally fulfil his every wish the moment he got back; that ended up being all too easy: a vodka, a beer, a vodka, a beer, and so on until the Saddest Finn in the World was left staring at the table, his arm plastered into a Roman salute, in his little girls’ shoes and penniless, drunk and all alone, because everyone else in the bar was trying to seduce his beautiful girlfriend.
And that’s the last memory I have of him. I was always afraid to try to find out what became of him, because I’m afraid of learning that his ship sank on the way home. But after his horrible experience I always imagine him running some kind of charity – perhaps a special one for counselling destitute, one-armed survivors of Prague hostels.
