Wrote  about compiling a city yesterday:  overlaying the here-and-now city of Prague with the has-been. A perfect instance happened to me a couple of hours later, at the public garden at Pod Bruskou. Which is right next to the Furstenberg garden, and more quiet. It has great opportunities for using my crayons, but I did not need to take them out  as someone had been at it before.  Found footage! The little girl soon found 1001 ways to make use of it.

Her games made a scene from a book that I´m reading come back to me.  I´ve just finished  ‘love and freedom’  by Rosemary Kavan. She”s an Englishwoman that married a Chech shortly after World War II and went back to Prague with him to live. This is the scene she describes, set  in the fall of ´46 (my translation from the Dutch):

`You are a hot-tempered people, are you not? I said to Pavel when I came home one afternoon. There had been some trouble at the grocers, caused I think by a client that was short-changed by the proprietor. This ended in a verbal slinging match between the grocer and his middle-class supporters on one side and the injured worker and his support group on the other, which developed into a furious political debate. Afterwards, on the street, I saw a group of Chech people forcing two German women to lick off  a giant swastika that had been drawn on the sidewalk with chalk. Bits of bleached hair I saw lying around here and there pointed at  punishment meted out earlier.´

There is no innocence in drawing, only forgetfulness.