Hanza’s Spectacles
Hanza awoke one morning and wrote a letter to the Prague Post. He proclaimed, “Prague, I shall make you laugh, but I will be crushed and silenced for it. Yours Sincerely, Hanza, Artist.” He posted it, but as he expected, it wasn’t published.
Hanza was a little known artist. Most days, people would find him drawing religious images onto footpaths. With an old tray of pastels, he would render magnificent images that would appear one day and be washed or dusted away into the bowels of the city the next. He would often talk with passersby, taking great pleasure in the small wonders he created for mere moments in those who came and went.
With the money he might sometimes collect, he would save to repair his spectacles. Without fail, at least once a week he would accidentally crack a lens. Today, after he had written his letter to the Prague Post, he considered saving for contacts.
One week later, early morning commuters passing through Staromestke nam were brought to a halt at each and every corner of the plaza. Staromestke was filled with cars. Cars of all makes, size and colour. They’d been parked, almost wedged together. No one could get through.
By mid-morning, Staromestke nam was surrounded by police, the media and dozens of car owners, who the night before, had reported their cars stolen. Helicopters hovered overhead. From the air, one could make out a kind of reptilian shape carved out of the arrangement of cars. They were parked carefully, the lighter colours on the outer, the darker colours towards the centre. If you got high enough, you could make out something, not unlike a gecko. It made for a stunning front-page photo in the next issue of the Prague Post.
By mid-afternoon, hundreds of people had descended upon the plaza, surrounding it from every conceivable point of entry. The Police were busily dusting the cars for fingerprints. Numerous owners had by now gathered, some of which found the whole affair quite hilarious, others were not so impressed.
It was a bonza day for tow trucks. More than 50 arrived and by late afternoon were hauling one car out after another. As more and more space between each vehicle was being made, they were opened one by one and checked for stolen property. Everything was intact. Nothing was stolen. Each car was as their owners had left them, except many of them were curiously perfumed with frankincense, others with myrrh.
By the time the evening television news went to air, not only did all of Prague know about it, but all across the world people were marvelling at the mysterious appearance of some 300 stolen cars, perfectly arranged to mark out the silhouette of a gecko. Ufologists were announcing it as the next phase beyond the crop circle. They claimed such a phenomenon had already occurred in various other parts of the world. Everyone in Prague was talking about it. Not since the days which preceded the Velvet Revolution had Prague enjoyed itself so much. Complete strangers struck up discussions in the Metro, in the beer halls, along Karlov Most… Everyone had a theory, everyone had a story, everyone was happy.
Within a week, Hanza was arrested and charged with three hundred counts of car theft, 300 counts of tampering with private property and 300 parking infringements. In court he pleaded innocent, stating that he simply arranged for the cars to “moved” not “stolen”. He was found guilty and sentenced to spend 30 years in prison. He was never asked how he managed to move so many cars to a single destination in less than 12 hours, nor was he asked about the gecko. He was last seen in the courtroom looking back out at the press gallery. Both his lenses were cracked.
Hanza’s letter was finally published in the Prague Post, but within a fortnight of its debut in the paper, nothing more was to be heard of him ever again and Prague soon forgot the day it laughed. It never happened.
Andrew Garton, March / April 1997
