How to Boil a Frog

On the New Normalization

There are a few days every March in Prokop Valley when the toads make love. It’s no small feat, for their mating migrations are imperiled by boots, bikes, and cars.

On first sighting the toads are solitary, hopping down the steep sides of the valley towards the stream below. Once down the hill, they also like  to use the paved trail to get around, just like we do. And boy do they use it. By the time the willows begin budding, they are seen bouncing across and along the path, the smaller male riding atop his mate.

Each year people who live in the area post homemade signs that say “POZOR ZABY,” meaning  ATTENTION FROGS, warning cyclists and drivers to slow down and keep an eye out for our lumpy friends. Despite all the warnings, every spring there are casualties – two toads squashed in a lover’s embrace like ashen statues in Pompeii.

There’s a great Czech movie delightfully translated as, Those Wonderful Years that Sucked (Báječná Léta Pod Psa). The story follows a family in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of the Czech Republic in 1968. The invasion brought an end to the Prague Spring, a short era in which the authoritarian government loosened its grip, and began the soul crushing period, ironically called “Normalization” (normalizace), which ended with the Velvet Revolution and the collapse of the regime in 1989.

The story revolves around a likable, though clumsy, protagonist named Franta, his wife, and their son Kvido.

On the night of August 15^th, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, Franta’s parents awaken to the sound of Soviet trucks and helicopters in the gray dawn. To their dismay, their beloved blue parakeets that usually fly freely around the apartment, coming and going as they please through the open window, have gone.

The grandfather is angry, cursing “those damn Commies.” The grandmother is distraught, holding back sobs as she listens to the radio announcer describe the siege of the radio headquarters, the building now pocket marked with bullets, Soviet soldiers advancing.

Granny grasps her purse, fumbling for a cigarette and then suddenly is calm. She takes a pad of paper and pen, sits down at the kitchen table, lights her cigarette, and tells Kvido to get dressed. He runs off, and after a pause, she begins writing.

The next scene shows the grandpa and Kvido on the streets of Prague posting fliers for lost blue parakeets, amid the chaos of tanks firing machine guns wildly and people fleeing for cover. The grandpa seems unphased. When a man running by reads the flier, he yells at the grandpa, asking how he can think of some birds in a time like this. The grandpa tells him to go to hell, that he always saw through those “Commie bastards”.

And thus begins the “Normalization.”  Franta starts off as a loyal husband and a loyal Czech, resenting the invasion. He moves his family to a small factory town, working as a translator and engineer, initially resisting joining the Communist Party despite the badgering of his boss and watching his good friend, who quickly concedes, receive a promotion and get sent on work trips abroad. Quite the luxury when travel to the west was restricted.

Franta, grudgingly at first, begins to give in. What else can he do? His family of four live in a glass conservatory on the side of someone else’s house. His wife is unhappy and Kvido is sick and cold.

Franta starts “getting visible” as his boss keeps insisting. Displaying that he’s on board with the new normal by attending meetings to listen to some buffoon drum on about the wisdom of Marx and Lenin, he joins the town’s football team, and starts hanging the Soviet flag. He’s rewarded with a new house and a promotion. Then comes the trips abroad, the mistresses, and of course in the end, the fall. It’s a humanizing tale. It’s easy to imagine Franta’s incremental compromises to make the life of his family more comfortable.

I took my dad to a dive bar when he was here in Prague. We stood around in the small gravel courtyard smoking cigars with a group of Czech friends. Despite the beer, the conversation, for a time, was sobering. There was real concern about the direction of what we are told is our “New Normal.” The group had some choice words about inflation and the seemingly inevitable move towards digitization and control of our money by the politically enthroned. The freedom to move, meet, and work, that we all took for granted just a few years ago is now exposed as an illusion - just a crisis away from being snatched once again.

“It’s like boiling a frog,” Dad said.

“If you throw a frog into a boiling pot of water it’ll try to jump out. But if you drop it in a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t realize what’s happening till it’s too late. Then you can just stick a fork in it.”

When it seemed like the whole world shut down three years ago now, spring was just beginning. The day it happened I was planting potatoes. I kept looking up each hour when the train went by, staring into the empty cabins as they passed. Each passing brought on the feeling of sinking further into a dark, muddy pond.

When the evening came, I walked my bike home. I wanted to see the toads. The whole way, I didn’t pass a single person, but toads were on the move in mass. Hopping along the trail, making love as they went.

Towards the edge of the valley, just before the streetlights begin, there it was, where there had been nothing in the morning.

 A hand-drawn sign, “Pozor Žáby.”