The Prague Post
October 10th, 2008

My neighbor's secrets in the basement

A tormented artist, Ales Formanek left a very unusual legacy

It's harmless enough now, but this building once harbored a terrifying tenant -- and weapon.
By Brant C. Hadaway
For The Prague Post
(February 26, 2003)


I used to think that every person needed at least one bona fide madman in his life. In our building in Vinohrady we had Ales Formanek. Ales is dead now, but he left a lasting impression on me -- and to us and our neighbors, a frightening legacy: a weapon of mass destruction, hidden in the basement, that without time and luck might have been our end.

Ales was a short, balding man who could have been any age between 50 and 65. He had the pale, sallow skin of someone who rarely saw the sun. Years of smoking in the closed confines of his basement studio had stained his silver-white hair a sickly tobacco-yellow. Thick glasses magnified his eyes, making them seem wildly askew.

For reasons I could never quite comprehend, Ales always spoke to me in German. (He didn't really speak so much as yell.) I tried to convince him that I didn't understand German. He didn't believe me. My wife and I told him that I was an American. He didn't believe that, either.

To the very end, he was convinced that I was a German, and my efforts to speak to him in Czech proved futile. Nevertheless, I couldn't help liking him.

Ales was nominally an artist; at least, that was his formal vocation. The official address of his studio was in the basement of our building on Balbinova street. He was violently anti-communist and often carried on at great length about how the communists had done everything they could to ruin him.

Before the 1989 revolution, he once said to my wife-to-be and her mother that if the communists ever came for him, he had something that would kill them and most of the people in the neighborhood. Naturally, he wasn't taken seriously.


Off-color character

I soon learned what an outrageously vulgar man Ales was. Wherever he went, he could be counted on to create a minor disturbance. Rather, I should say that he was the disturbance. He made people uncomfortable. Lenny Bruce might have blushed.

Sometimes for amusement, my wife and I invited Ales to tag along with us to the Nad Rozhlasem pub, located around the block from us on Italska. There, several Czechoslovak members of Parliament were after-hours regulars. (This was before the 1993 split, so the Czechoslovak Federal Parliament still occupied the building that is now the decidedly inconvenient address of Radio Free Europe.) To Ales, the parliamentarians were irresistible targets.

He accosted one female member of Parliament as she tried to enjoy a beer with some colleagues and gave her a vivid lecture on how people nowadays were ordering manufactured body parts. Each body part had a number, such as "Buttocks No. 9" or "Tits No. 5," and so on. What these numbers were supposed to correspond to seemed to be anybody's guess, until he extended his hand in an unmistakable gesture and, at the top of his voice, told this poor woman he would like to give her the benefit of his "Big No. 10."

Ales's studio was a proven fire hazard. All manner of junk was piled to the arches of its low ceilings. On one stack of old newspapers sat an electric hot plate. Under a worktable he had cans of flammable epoxies and paints for making plastic figurines. To make matters worse, Ales frequently fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand.

Fires in Ales's studio were regular events. Acrid smoke would fill our stairwell. The fire department would come. Ales would be told to remove some of his junk. The stench from burned electrical components would endure for weeks. Nothing changed.

When our daughter was an infant, and my concerns for safety grew more urgent, I began to see Ales as a menace. I wondered aloud if we could have him evicted. I was told that it had already been tried but that it wasn't so easy.

The communists had used many forms of harassment against artists. One favorite technique (I was told) was to evict them from their studios when they caused trouble. That's why the post-communist government made a point of passing a law that made it virtually impossible to evict any artist from his or her studio. For me as a lawyer, this became a lesson in the law of unintended consequences.


A nasty surprise

There came a weekend when Ales's family hadn't heard from him in three days. They called my mother-in-law, who had a key to his studio. She found him on his dusty single mattress. He had died of a heart attack in his sleep.

The news hardly came as a shock. But I felt a certain self-loathing for letting my anger get in the way of my appreciation for him. This feeling was compounded by guilt when I recognized the relief I felt at the prospect of finally being able to empty out his studio.

After waiting a respectful spell, our building association arranged for the removal of Ales's junk. In September 1995 a crew parked a construction-waste bin in front of our building and went to work.

One day I walked home from my office on Senovazne namesti to have lunch with my wife, daughter and mother, who was visiting from the States. As I opened the large wooden door at the front of our building, I immediately noticed a hazy orange light in the stairwell. Through the frosted glass at the back of the building I saw burnt-orange smoke filling the sky above the courtyard. Something deep in my brain urgently told me that this was the color of doomsday.

A sharp chlorine smell hit my nostrils as I approached the stairs. Covering my face with a handkerchief, I raced up to our apartment and ordered my family out of the building. Other neighbors had noticed the smoke, too, and they also were evacuating.

We learned later that the cleanup workers had taken some nondescript-looking bottles from Ales's studio and tossed them into a junk pile in the courtyard. The bottles had broken and emitted this noxious gas. The fire department came and sprayed it down.

I asked a fireman what the gas was. He spoke a word I didn't understand. I asked him to please explain. He said that it was a potentially deadly substance. I turned to my wife: "What was it?"

She looked at me, puzzled. "What do you call that gas they used in World War I? It caused people to cough up their --" she pantomimed entrails pouring out of her mouth.

"Mustard gas?" I said.

"Yes, that's it," she said emphatically.

A shudder ran through me. A look of realization came over my wife's face. She recalled what Ales had said about how he would cope with the communists. She shook her head in disbelief and said: "We thought he was joking." Apparently not.

Luckily, Ales's weapon of mass destruction had lost much of its potency over the years. We all had a mild cough for a few days but were otherwise none the worse. The cleanup crew had taken the worst hit, but we heard that they were fine after a brief hospital visit.
Alan Levy is giving readings and lectures across the United States. His Prague Profile will resume March 12.

Although we recovered, my impression of Prague darkened. What other terrible secrets would these old walls reveal, if only they could whisper?

And I wondered whether I could bring Ales Formanek back from the dead and kill him myself.

Brant C. Hadaway is a Miami lawyer who lived in Prague from 1992 to 1997.

Brant C. Hadaway can be reached at features@praguepost.com




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