Rachael Weiss currently lives in Prague where she is technically the in-house writer for a hotel but, since the only thing she has to write is the website and occasional stiff letters to defaulting customers, in reality she’s the odd-jobs girl. She supplements her income by writing horoscopes for a series of obscure suburban and specialist papers and thus feels justified in describing herself as a syndicated columnist. Rachael’s greatest achievement to date is a fourth place in the New South Wales scrabble tournament. One day she hopes to master Czech scrabble. She is the author of Are We There Yet (Allen & Unwin 2005) and is currently working on her third book.
Me, Myself &
PRAGUE
An unreliable
guide to Bohemia
RACHAEL WEISS
First published in 2008
Copyright © Rachael Weiss 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Weiss, Rachael, 1964– .
Me, myself & Prague : an unreliable guide to bohemia.
ISBN 978 1 7411 4820 6 (pbk.)
1. Travel - Voyages and travels - Humor. 2. Prague
(Czech Republic) - Description and travel.
910.4
Typeset in Australia by Bookhouse, Sydney.
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my father
Zdenìk Weiss
and my grandparents
Karel Weiss and Bohumila Weissová
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1 Becoming Bohemian
Chapter 2 Beer and Potatoes
Chapter 3 Friends at Last
Chapter 4 My Grandmother’s Favourite Café
Chapter 5 Family Matters
Chapter 6 I Fall in Love with the Czechs
Chapter 7 Bribery and Corruption
Chapter 8 A Brief History of Communism
Chapter 9 A Village in South Bohemia
Chapter 10 Hiking
Chapter 11 Am I a Bohemian?
Chapter 12 Marienbad with Andy
Chapter 13 Marienbad with Andy, Part Two
Chapter 14 Losers in Love
Chapter 15 Winter
Epilogue
Prologue
At thirty-nine I took stock of my life. I am the eldest of three, with one sister and one brother. My sister is a fitness instructor, has her own dental practice and is the mother of two perfect children. My brother is a lawyer, a partner in his firm, and the father of three perfect children. Both are energetic and rich; they are a source of pride and joy to my parents. I, too, was once a source of pride and joy to my parents. I was six.
The school principal had just told my parents that tests revealed I was a gifted child. It seemed like a good thing at the time. They boasted of it to all their friends. They gazed on me with satisfied eyes; they’d known all along I was someone special and now ‘tests’, ‘scientists’, ‘people who knew these things’, had proved it. My whole world looked down on me and said, ‘Now our friends have no choice but to believe it—we got the best baby’. Shortly after this event my parents divorced, bitterly.
My brother and sister, not gifted, managed to live through the turmoil and come out the other end moderately normal. I, gifted, did not. School, university and life seemed too much for me to comprehend, to the disappointment of my parents. They still told all their friends I was gifted—everyone hung on to that one with increasing obstinacy—but my giftedness never manifested itself again. Subsequent primary and high school tests relegated me to the B stream, my mother’s lips pursing at each fresh new evidence of the teachers’ blindness and incompetence. My giftedness came for one test when I was six, then left. Such is life.
Adulthood saw no improvement. Boyfriend after useless, bottle-wielding, unemployed boyfriend came and went, the average length of each relationship about six and a half months, unless he was married, in which case the affair dragged on for years. And I seemed unable to grasp the nature of working life. I got a lucky break straight after university where, by the simple method of choosing English as a major—since the one thing I do seem to be fitted for is reading and English required nothing more of me than that—I’d managed to pass. I was hired by a company of management consultants, but corporate life shredded me.
All around me thin women in spiky suits and beefy, rowing-blue men celebrated their successes in topless bars and roared and flourished. I gazed helplessly at company reports and market analyses and thought: Surely this is all a crock? A giant con? These people seemed to have invented a raft of meaningless jargon and strung it together to sound important. But I was the only one who thought so. Everyone else seemed endlessly enthusiastic. The company gave me less and less work until I fell on my own sword and resigned.
After that I had several stabs at corporate life, since that seemed to be what a white, educated, middle-class woman was supposed to do, but I failed every time. My God, those people are tough—they ate me alive. At every defeat I blamed myself: What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I make a career? In my heart of hearts I really wanted to be a writer, but I felt that that was a frivolous, self-indulgent desire, so I suppressed it, never thinking that this might be what was wrong.
My parents were less concerned about my career and more concerned about my inability to fulfil the other tasks of the white, educated, middle-class woman—getting married and having children—although they each had different ways of expressing their dissatisfaction. My mother referred to me almost exclusively as ‘Poor Rachael’ and sighed a lot, but my father was more proactive, chivvying me to get on with it: ‘A woman is a hunter, darling.’
My relationship with my parents had settled into this state of affectionate despair after many years of difficulty. Six years after my parents had divorced, we children had been taken away from our father for good. It was a long and ghastly separation process, but by the time I was twelve it was complete—we no longer saw Dad on the weekends. It wasn’t until I was twenty-eight (possibly in preparation for turning thirty, although I can’t remember now) that I had gone looking for him. When Dad and I finally met up again it had been awkward at first—what do you say to a father you barely recognise? The most difficult part had been the first few months when we were ever so polite to each other. We were both relieved when, almost a year after we became re-acquainted, we had our first fight and our relationship began to feel more normal. I still enjoy the times we get snippy with each other—they seem more precious to me even than the love.
My relationship with my mother, however, swung the other way. We developed a friendly, but distant, relationship. She did not take well to my reconnection with my father. I think she feared she would lose me and up to a point she was right. As I saw more of him, I saw less of her. I guess I figured she’d had my sole attention from when I was twelve to twenty-eight, so now it was his turn. I saw my father and my stepmother every Friday night, making up for lost time.
So this, then, was my situation at thirty-nine: I didn’t have a career or goals or partner or dependents, or even white goods, but I had a few close friends and two loving, if disappointed, parents. The sum of my life seemed to me to be a pretty small thing; a life lived mostly in fear of doing what I wanted and trying to be good in the eyes of others. And then, out of the blue, a miracle happened. A publishing company put out a small book I’d written about two single women on a road trip. For the first time in my life an organisation devoted to profit thought I might be of use to them. More, they thought I might be of use to them as a writer. The words ‘Seize the Day’ kept coming to me.
The big advantage of having avoided success in life is you’ve got nothing to lose. With forty menacing, I felt an uncontrollable urge to change everything in my life. Heck, I’d published one book. Why not another? Well, why not? A searing tale of a woman whose parents divorce, bitterly, and who struggles to find her way . . .
My sister had moved to London the year before, to my mother’s eternal misery, ‘Just when I get grandchildren, she deprives me of them. What did I do to deserve that?’ As I took stock, I thought, Why shouldn’t I do the same? At first I considered going to France and living in lovely, romantic Paris, eating cheese and writing my novel in a sidewalk café, but then I did my sums. My only way of earning a living in a foreign country was either teaching English or doing temp work. London, Paris, New York, none of these places would be easy on a small salary. Sydney was brutal on the poor and I saw little point in moving from one economically crushing situation to another. It was my father who suggested Prague, and when he did I immediately wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself.
My father is Czech, a refugee from the Second World War; in fact on my father’s birth certificate the birthplace is given as Bohemia. Bohemian. Me? For the first time in my life it occurred to me that I am half Bohemian. And now that I had discovered my father and got to know him, I wanted to know more. I wanted to see where this Bohemian half of me came from. Where had the grandmother I had never known lived? Who were these relatives of mine who lived in a tiny village in South Bohemia? Just how much of me came from Bohemia?
I had a small amount of money saved up and Prague was cheap. Even the Australian dollar, plunging as it was at the time, could get you a long way in Prague. I quit my job as a secretary and bought a ticket to Prague and a life as a Bohemian writer. My father was thrilled: ‘In Prague you will find a husband in three months’; my mother was devastated: ‘First your sister deserts me and now you.’ I didn’t care. I smiled at my father, hugged my mother, and left.
Suddenly, forty wasn’t looking so bad.
Chapter 1
Becoming Bohemian
When the yearning artist leaves the comfort of home and friends in Sydney to find her soul in Bohemia, she pictures herself in a gorgeous high ceiling-ed attic apartment in a converted palace right in the heart of the Old Town, overlooking the Charles Bridge, perhaps, or a busy market square. This yearning artist, however, had been persuaded to stay in her father’s flat in the suburbs: ‘Why suffer, darling? It’s right there. The whole family uses it, why shouldn’t you?’ Considering the financial aspect it had seemed like the sensible thing to do.
I had about five thousand dollars all up when I arrived in Prague, enough to keep me going while I figured out what to do about work. I had that glorious feeling you get when you’ve taken your first step on an exciting journey—fresh and new—a feeling that everything would turn out well. A feeling that lasted all the way out of the airport . . . until I found myself in a shuttle bus driving further and further away from the gorgeous city into light industrial suburbia. Prague Castle receded into the background, lovely ornate nineteenth-century buildings gave way to increasingly less lovely communist-era apartment blocks and flat-roofed factories: Why, why, didn’t I spurn the easy option and get myself an attic studio with no electricity and no running water in a castle garret?
Then the bus turned up the destination street, which ran along a small, tree-lined river, much to this alarmed Bohemian’s relief. The bus slowed as we drove past some elegant older buildings and my spirits revived further—Is it that pretty one on the corner? This one here with the window boxes? But the buildings were getting squarer and more concrete until we came to the second last apartment block in the road. My seesawing emotions teetered to a moderately optimistic standstill. This is pretty, I thought. It’s blue, and has window boxes and stone carvings over the doorway. This is not bad, not bad at all. I could live here quite happily and feel bohemian. The bus slowed and finally stopped . . . just past the pretty, blue building, in front of the last building on the street—the ugliest, greyest, squarest, most concrete of them all.
The minibus driver nodded to me and got out. I was the last one left, everyone else having alighted in front of an Art Nouveau hotel or converted palace, suitcases in hand and engagement rings twinkling. Now there was just me and the driver, who seemed to be in a bad mood. He hauled my cases out of the bowels of the bus and pointed to the grey building. This seemed a friendly thing for him to do, so I nodded and smiled and said, ‘Dìkuju’ (‘Thank you’), which I had laboriously learned on the plane. He nodded, completely unsmiling, and instantly my own smile became a thing of social convention rather than a matter from the heart. I briefly wondered if I should have tipped him, but tipping’s not the norm in Prague (I’d also read that on the plane) and no-one else had, so that wasn’t the reason behind his surliness. Was it the building? Me? Oh get a grip, I told myself as he drove off. He’s driving a minibus. Why should he smile? And I turned my attention to the rather more exciting matter of discovering my new home.
Four concrete steps at the front of the building led up to an aluminium-framed, double-glass door, with a set of buzzers to the left of the door displaying the names of the inhabitants under Plexiglas so scratched that most of them were illegible. They were typed on yellowing paper, scribbled out and overwritten, or pencilled onto lumpy Liquid Paper slashes on the surface of the Plexiglas. ‘Weiss’ was on number sixteen, and I was momentarily proud to note that at least ours was neat.
On the glass door was a typewritten note that I hoped wasn’t anything important. I’d already realised I was going to have serious difficulty with the language. At least in France or Germany or Italy or Spain the language is vaguely intelligible. You know that femme on the toilet door in Paris means ‘woman’, and you know what you’re going to get when you point to spaghetti on a Roman menu. The same happy familiarity was not evident in Prague. Even the signs at the airport, including the ones on the toilet doors (as I discovered when I opened a door onto a hideous smell and a profile of a naked penis, mid-stream) had been completely meaningless. The message on the front door made me feel uneasy. It didn’t look like just any old ad; more likely it was a formal communication of some sort, probably quite important. I was sure I’d find out soon enough.
I hauled my suitcases up the concrete steps and across a linoleum floor to the lift. The lobby was the same as in most tenement buildings. A pinboard had official-looking notices on it, and handwritten notes tacked on top of those. I peered at them while I waited for the lift, trying without success to find a familiar word. I couldn’t even guess at what they said. There were four doors to the ground floor flats, each with a rather horrible plastic number on it, none of them matching, and two brown metal doors which stood at the side of the lift. One had a word stencilled on it: Bojler. My spirits lifted. Boiler room? This might be easier than I thought. I’d just recognised my first Czech word. At least I knew where the boiler room was, should I need it.
At that moment the lift arrived and I was charmed by it; they don’t make lifts like this in Australia. It was tiny with panelled walls of plastic wood screwed onto the frame of the lift but not sealed, the roughened edges of the panels just snuggling up to one another, gaps showing. There was room for two people, and only if they stood very, very close together. A tin sign was screwed into the fake wood at eye height, naming the maker (Schindler) and listing . . . something. The only thing I could figure out was a phone number. And here’s the best bit: when the door closed (and it opened and closed just like a regular door, swinging outwards, then swinging back) there was no inner door. As the lift rose, the wall of the shaft slid right past, an appalling safety hazard to western eyes. It was wonderful. It did have one safety feature, though: the buttons for the floors wouldn’t work and the lift wouldn’t move until the door was closed properly. And you couldn’t pull the door shut to speed things up; you just had to stand and wait. And wait. And wait, while the door . . . very slowly . . . closed.
My father bought this flat for an astonishingly cheap price after the communist regime fell in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The apartment block had been built by the communists, who are a byword for shoddy construction. They also built the underground metro system, hailed at the time as a marvel of workmanship by the fatherland. It was fast, clean, efficient; the trains ran on time, and it had a special switch for flooding, because Prague is prone to flooding. I imagined the communist entrepreneur who built the metro showing his wonder of modern technology to a cluster of city fathers: ‘Look, comrades, see this switch here? Come the flood warning, all we have to do is flick this and, hey presto! Instant flood barrier to protect the metro system. All hail to the workers, comrades.’ Fast forward to 2000.
Huge floods washed through Prague, the city fathers flicked the switch and, hey presto! . . . nothing happened. It turned out the entrepreneur had simply taken the money and run. He hadn’t just built a shoddy barrier gate—he’d built no gate at all. And when the metro system was being repaired after the flood, they discovered that the glorious comrade workers, giving their all to the fatherland, had done such an appalling job it was a miracle the metro had lasted as long as it did. Instead of mixing the cement powder and water, and filling the walls in the customary manner, they’d simply thrown the bags of cement, unopened, into the space between the walls. Plastic bags with the name of the glorious state-run cement company on them floated out of the subway on the flood tide. Given that, and the general state of the entrance, lobby and lift of my new home, I was just the tiniest bit concerned about the condition in which I would find the flat itself.
My father and stepmother are finicky people, but they love a bargain, sometimes to the point of insanity. As I stood at the door of the apartment, key in hand, I imagined my next conversation with my father:
‘What do you think of the unit?’
‘It has no plumbing . . .’
‘You wouldn’t believe how cheap we got it . . .’
‘. . . and the walls are made of asbestos . . .’
‘. . . one hundred thousand crowns!’
‘. . . and there’s rat droppings.’
‘And I bargained them down. They were asking a hundred and fifty thousand.’
‘Is that a fish tank? Oh, no, it’s rising damp.’
‘Did I tell you how cheap I got this place?’
But I opened the door on a warm, light and surprisingly large apartment. ‘This really was a bargain’, I was able to tell my father when I phoned later that night.
‘Yes’, he replied. ‘Did I tell you how much?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did I tell you what they were asking?’
‘Yes.’
‘They were asking a hundred and fifty thousand crowns.’
‘I know.’
‘But I bargained them down to a hundred thousand.’
‘Okay, gotta go.’
‘A hundred thousand, darling. You can’t buy a place for that any more.’
Dad also told me that, should the lift break down, I had to go to a room in the attic and hand crank it back to the ground floor, then press a button and it would work again.
The apartment had a large, light-filled living room with a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The walls and ceiling were painted pale yellow and on two sides huge, double-glazed windows with sturdy wooden sashes ran from the ceiling halfway down to the floor. I instantly fell in love with those wooden sashes. It’s one of the reasons I got sick of Australia—no-one builds a wooden window any more. It’s a small point but those hideous, cheap, godawful aluminium sashes bug me; that frenzy of builders out to save a buck at the expense of elegance. They don’t even keep out the cold or the heat—they’re completely energy inefficient. In a just world aluminium window manufacturers would be tried for treason and hanged. Since Prague is freezing most of the time, even the glorious communist fathers couldn’t stoop to cheap and ugly aluminium, so every window has broad wooden sashes. The sight of them in Dad’s flat stirred my soul. I really was in Europe. I was living somewhere that felt better, more artistic, more soulful, somewhere where I’d never have to be depressed by an aluminium sash again.
The wall facing the street had a glass door leading out onto a balcony that ran the length of the flat. I noticed a satellite dish screwed to the wall. Good ol’ Dad. My stepmother could live without television but Dad, never . . . and neither can I. From the balcony I had a long view to the west of tree-covered hills and, to the north, right in front of me, the river shrouded in greenery. On the opposite bank the flat roofs of factories punctuated the treetops that ran all the way to the horizon. Even the light industrial area of Prague is pretty, I thought to myself.
It was early spring when I arrived in Prague. I’d always previously done my travelling to Europe in the northern winter, when my university holidays came around and the flights were cheapest. I’d never seen a European spring, although I’d read enough about them in my English classes. Now, looking out at the green hills, delicate white blossoms peppering the landscape, the river sparkling up at me through the trees, my blood surged and my heart swelled. I was really here—not just on a holiday but here to stay, and in a season that poets and writers had been gushing over for centuries. At last, I, too, was getting to experience a spring in Europe, and it was everything I’d always hoped it would be—warm, light, green and lovely, even in the light industrial ’burbs. I was immensely happy.
I went back inside the living room. There was a television in one corner and an Eames leather chair and footstool smack dab in the centre of the room, facing the box. Dad’s chair, of course. Against one wall was a small, inlaid wooden table with an armchair, covered in a satin cherry stripe, on either side, and on the opposite wall was a wide old-fashioned box couch made of caramel-coloured wood, with square tapestry cushions. This turned into a bed, so my father had told me. There were pictures on all the walls, mostly oil paintings of bucolic scenes. Some of them were by an artist called Dvoøak, who hailed from my father’s native village of Kamenièky, and the scenes were from that part of the country, so Dad had said. I looked at them closely, wondering if I’d feel a spooky sense of déjá vu, but, no, they just seemed like pretty village-scapes—a lake, storm clouds over rolling hills, a marketplace.
‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Dad had said on the phone. Actually, they seemed rather ordinary to me, but I didn’t tell him that. For Dad, everything from Kamenièky was super-special.
‘When I was a boy there were three schools for the violin in that one village’, Dad said; ‘Three.’ Dad’s a terrible exaggerator. I generally just nod and mentally scale it down by a factor of about a hundred. Sometimes a thousand. There were probably just three violins in Kamenièky when Dad was a boy, but I didn’t say that to him.
A door led from the living room to the kitchen, which also had a window covering the entire upper wall facing the river, but in this room the communist touch was more evident. The benches and cupboards were made of hideous vinyl, the edges peeling off the chipboard—ugly, but not unliveable. I turned on the fridge and opened the cupboard next to it. There, neatly packed into a cardboard box, were all of Dad’s spices for cooking, his favourite activity after watching telly. The labels were all in Czech but I figured I’d work out what they were in time. Next to them were a few staples—rice, spaghetti, sugar, instant noodles, enough to make a rudimentary dinner for that day—and on the floor were a couple of bottles of water.
The cupboards over the sink and the drawers next to it contained an assortment of cups, plates, saucepans and cutlery. Not too much, just enough for four people, and no spares, rather like the kitchen equipment you find in holiday homes. And I suppose this was a holiday home: my father made regular trips here with my stepmother, always in the winter when she had her holidays (she’s a high school teacher); at other times my relatives from southern Bohemia used it when they came up to Prague. It bore the air of a neat, clean bolt-hole and now it was my refuge. This sense of being in a holiday home, the sparseness of the furnishings and the absence of bric-a-brac, made me feel, suddenly, marvellously light and free from the burdens of ordinary life.
At the other end of the kitchen a door led back to the front hall. The hall had two cupboards, one containing linen and one containing overcoats and some plastic bags. A rather magnificent mirror faced the front door, about a metre square with a burnished gold frame. Off the hall was a toilet, a white-tiled bathroom including a shower that had a nozzle with hearty water pressure—a frank improvement on the dribbling old pipe that watered me in my tiny rental flat back home—and two bedrooms. The bedrooms faced east, over a park with a children’s playground in it, paved in concrete. I sensed that suing hadn’t become a popular pastime in the Czech Republic as it had in the west.
One bedroom, the larger, was furnished with a double bed, a dresser with my stepmother’s brushes neatly laid out and a wardrobe containing my parents’ clothes. Although they only used the apartment as a holiday home, I didn’t feel right about sleeping in their room. The other room had a single bed and a dark wooden wardrobe. This would be mine, and I immediately warmed to it because it contained three intensely charming objects: a treadle Singer sewing machine in perfect condition; a walnut cupboard with bundles of old documents, letters and photographs stuffed into it; and a very old suitcase with an ocean liner’s sticker on it bearing my grandmother’s name, a grandmother I’d never known. It was the suitcase she had with her when she managed to wangle a visit to Australia in 1968, just before the Russians invaded Prague. I put my suitcase next to hers. Here we were, together at last.
I opened the linen cupboard in the hall to look for sheets. Layers of perfect edges, neatly clamped on top of one another, greeted me and I couldn’t tell what each shelf contained. I pulled out a white cloth and opened it up to find a tea towel with embroidered red initials in one corner. It was made of linen and had been ironed into a perfect, cardboard-flat rectangle. All the corners lined up exactly and I saw that a hand far more accomplished at housework than mine had folded this tea towel. I put it in the kitchen and went back to the cupboard. Was the extremely ordered mind that looked after this cupboard my stepmother’s? She was neat and a good housekeeper, but there was a regimentation about this linen that soaked into the shelves, superseding ordinary tidiness.
I deduced the sheets would not share a shelf with the tea towels, so I plucked a rectangle from the next shelf down. This was a queen-sized sheet so at least I’d found the right shelf. I folded it up again, trying my hardest to keep the corners together and failing. It wasn’t too badly folded, but the edge wasn’t quite as crisp as it had been. It seemed to require at least eight hands to do the job properly. The final result was slightly wonky despite my best effort. I fished for another one and unfolded a large fitted sheet. It too had been a perfect cardboard rectangle when folded and I had to admire the handiwork. Never in my life have I ever seen a fitted sheet folded into anything other than a lumpy dome. It looked like the elastic sides had been folded down then ironed flat before folding. Do you think I could get it back into its original pristine state? Not a chance. The elastic bunched and pulled and refused to co-operate so I bundled it together into a cone shape and shoved it back on the shelf.
The next sheet, thank God, was single. The one after that was another large fitted sheet—another cone to join the first—but the next one was the second single I was looking for. By the time I’d found two single sheets, a doona cover and a pillow case, the once regimental linen cupboard looked more like a pile of washing. Wearily, I promised myself that I’d make more of an effort tomorrow and try to get it back into shape. The problem with staying in someone else’s house is living up to standards higher than my own. Something told me this linen cupboard fiasco was going to be noted and commented on, unfavourably. How is it that I’ve never learned how to fold a fitted sheet?
The apartment was covered in Post-it Notes from my stepmother, who was apparently under the impression that if she didn’t leave me step-by-step instructions in home care I’d burn the place down . . . or flood it, as most of the notes were composed around a plumbing motif:
‘Don’t let your hairs go down the drain. It would cause a major problem!’
‘Wipe your feet before you leave the bathroom.’
‘Make sure the taps are turned off.’
‘Don’t let any scraps of food get into the kitchen sink.’
‘don’t pour coffee grinds down the drain.’
‘Don’t get water on the floor, the floor is sensitive to water.’
That last one had me puzzled. The floor looked as though it was very, very thin wood veneer. At first I thought it was a strange wood-grained wallpaper, but it did appear to be actual wood, if only just. My stepmother had told me earlier on the phone that I must never get water on the floor as it would ruin it.
‘We tried to get it fixed once before and it was terrible, darlink [my stepmother is Russian]. Very terrible. We looked all over Prague for a replacement. You wouldn’t believe how expensive it was. Alright, darlink? Never get water on the floor.’ To me it seemed hard to believe that this hideous plastic floor-paper could cost a lot, but I was anxious not to bring disaster into the flat, so I read all her notes and resolved to follow them to the letter. When I had a shower I carefully cleaned the bath of anything that looked like a hair or soap scum, wiped my feet on the bath towel—although I noticed here how my father’s love of a bargain had overcome him; the towels were so cheap they actually repelled water and it took quite some time to get my feet dry enough to step on my stepmother’s floor—then got into clean clothes and set out to discover Prague. As I left the apartment, I saw another yellow order plastered to the back of the front door:
‘Before you leave the apartment:
TURN OFF the electricity
CHECK the water taps in the bathroom are off
CHECK the taps in the kitchen are off
CHECK the fridge door is CLOSED properly
CLOSE the blinds
LOCK the windows
DOUBLE LOCK the window bars
ACTIVATE the alarm, and
DOUBLE LOCK the doors!’
Did I really have to undertake this leaving ritual every time I left the flat? Surely not. It seemed onerous. I decided my stepmother must mean ‘when you leave the apartment for Sydney’ and I shut the door behind me, on my way to adventure.
They say Prague is the most beautiful city in the world, and they’re right. Architects and town planners with truly exquisite taste have built Prague over the centuries. Most cities have been developed by fat men in white shoes who see not a building, but profit per square metre. They bully councils into letting them turn the first eight floors into a car park. In Sydney, we pretend the buildings are just some old junk someone dumped in our back yard and turn visitors towards the harbour: ‘Look, isn’t that gorgeous? No, don’t turn around! Ooh, look, a whale! See it? There!’ The harbour is so very beautiful that we generally manage to fool everyone into not looking at the buildings. But Prague looks like an illustration from an ancient fairy tale. On top of a hill, on the left bank of the Vltava River, stands Prague Castle, looking down over a tightly clustered city of red-tiled roofs and narrow, winding cobblestone streets hugging both sides of the river. A fourteenth-century stone bridge, the Charles Bridge, connects the two sides of the city.
The first day of my life in Prague I wandered through the old city, guidebook in hand, just gazing up at the buildings and breathing in their beauty. The charm of these buildings lies in the extraordinary attention to detail; they’re the work of loving artists, elegantly proportioned and decorated with statues and balconies, relief work and murals. The windows are large and gracious with wide, wooden sashes and window boxes filled with red and pink flowers. The sun pours down onto narrow, cobbled streets that go through elegant archways into the courtyards of old palaces. Ancient shops still bear romantic names, such as ‘At the sign of the Three Ostriches’, and ‘At the sign of the Golden Lion’, that date from a time, or so my guidebook told me, when there were no house numbers and each shop relied on a name and a picture to make it stand out from the others.
Each building is painted a different colour: one a pecan green with the scrolls and windowsills picked out in dark green, the next pale yellow, the next lilac, the next Wedgwood blue with white trimmings, and the one after that orange. Orange! Who knew these colours could sit alongside one another and magically fit? But they do. In some of them, the coloured wall is interrupted by an irregular stone wall that has been preserved from a previous, more ancient building, perhaps from the thirteenth century, that once stood on the spot. They haven’t been knocked down or painted over, nor has the surrounding building been made to replicate the older building. The walls are their own beautiful selves, preserved in the structure of the new building, and the whole is the more wonderful for it. I wandered through the streets thinking, I live here. I actually live here. And more than this, my father is Czech. Half of me is from this gorgeous city. I belong here.
The amazing thing about Prague’s beauty is that it is not just confined to certain quarters. It’s not just a cathedral here and there that is breathtaking, or a patch of streets left from a bygone era; the whole city is beautiful. Wherever you go, you need only look up to see something that will make you fall in love. It’s truly astonishing. How did they do it? There’s something about the Czechs themselves. They’ve preserved old Prague and erected new Prague in a way that really does make it the most beautiful city in the world.
I knew why Prague was like this from reading up on it before I left home. The city owes part of her beauty to, of all things, the German occupation. Because the Germans had control of Czechoslovakia from early on in the Second World War right up until the end, Prague was spared the bombs that utterly destroyed many other cities, although they did have to live under occupation. After the Germans were defeated, Czechoslovakia was overrun by the communists, and my grandmother and father became enthusiastic communists after the fall of the Nazis.
‘Communist ideals seemed like the answer to the world’s ills after fascism’, my father told me. ‘Anything but the fascists.’ But Prague after the war was a sad and hungry place, and in 1946 my father, only a teenager, left for Australia with a group of his friends to travel the world, thinking it would be a fun way to learn English. By the time he wanted to go home again the Iron Curtain had come down and his mother was behind it. My grandmother, now completely on her own, remained a member of the Communist Party and so was given a job for life and a flat. She must have managed to keep her nose clean because she spent her whole life being a munitions inspector for the party, which I always thought was kinda cool and just a little bit scary. Dad started going back to visit her in the early 1980s when the regime got a bit looser, but she still made him get out of the taxi two blocks from her flat and walk the rest of the way so that her neighbours wouldn’t report her to the secret police for having a ‘rich, western son’. That’s how she survived—by being careful. Dad was always torn when he talked about those trips. On the one hand, the communists had allowed Prague to fall into appalling disrepair; on the other, they killed the economy so the prices were unbelievably cheap: ‘Look at this tablecloth, darling. Feel the quality. And you wouldn’t believe what it cost. Five crowns. It’s terrible what those bastards did to Prague. Look, it’s linen.’
Apparently the communist apparatchiks were the only Czechs in the history of the Bohemian lands to have no architectural taste or feeling whatsoever. Not only did they build the most ghastly, square concrete blocks for people to live in, believing, it seems, that colour and beauty and grace were for soft capitalist pig-dogs, not fit for the utilitarian workers of the glorious fatherland, but they left the rest of it to rot. Not a building was cleaned, not a stone repaired while they were in power. When the cobblestone streets fell apart, they replaced them with serviceable, cheap asphalt—no doubt very practical, but what price beauty?
As soon as they’d rid themselves of the Communist Party, the Czechs set about restoring their city with a renewed will. For people with such an exquisite sense of architecture, the communists’ appalling taste must have been what offended the most. ‘Yes, yes, the secret police are a pain in the neck’, they probably said to themselves (quietly, in case the secret police were listening), ‘but would it hurt to at least put a lovely window box on one of these godawful buildings? I have to live here.’ They got out their squeegees and paint and cleaned off fifty years of grime, brightening the place up with a palette of carefully chosen colours. There was nothing much they could do with the comrade-built buildings, but some of them have been given a facelift—a lick of paint, a bit of exotic stonework, and you’d never know what lies underneath. After that, they took to ripping up the asphalt and replacing it all with carefully laid cobblestones. That to me is the ultimate symbol of Prague. What city on earth would go to the trouble of tearing up asphalt and laying down impractical, yet unbearably romantic, cobblestones?
I went home that first day, my heart surging and my head misty with the romance of the city. Even my light industrial suburb looked prettier than it had from the shuttle bus. Taking a walking-pace look at the buildings along my street, I saw that most of them were solid, early twentieth-century, pre-communist structures, a little grimy, but moderately ornate and elegant. Yes, a bohemian could live here quite happily. And as for my building, sure, it wasn’t a tall, graceful, nineteenth-century palace with stone statues of naked Greeks guarding the brass-patterned front door, but once inside, where I couldn’t see the grey cement cladding, I could gaze from its balcony onto the pretty river, the trees with the roofs of factories peeking through, and the wooded hills in the distance.
I went up to my apartment and into the kitchen for a glass of water after my long day’s walk. I turned on the tap. Nothing happened for a second, then with a hideous gasp the tap spat out a spray of brown, muddy water. It gave one more harsh gurgle, had another spit, then went dead. The water had been cut off. I began to perceive that perhaps I didn’t need to live in a garret to have my life blighted by unreliable amenities. I’m an artist, sure, but I’m a comfort-loving artist and I’d rejected the garret option precisely so I’d have a regular supply of water and electricity. I hoped there wasn’t going to be too much authentic bohemianness awaiting me, but I was just the tiniest bit worried about this water situation. It seemed to me that the communists still hadn’t quite left this country, and God knows what that might mean for daily life. I decided to worry about it the next day.
Chapter 2
Beer and Potatoes
The next morning I awoke to the sound of gunfire. I staggered, half-asleep, half-cardiac-arrested, to the window to see that it wasn’t gunfire at all but a jackhammer. Workmen, at six o’clock in the morning, dawn barely upon us, were breaking up the concrete playground. I had an awful feeling about this; for a suburb on the outskirts of town, it was proving to be a noisy place. One of the factories across the river was a glass recycling centre which rang out with the sound of crashing bottles every half-hour or so as the dump trucks emptied more onto the pile. Somewhere to the west was a sports stadium. I couldn’t see it, but I’d heard a muffled loudspeaker jabbering away excitedly long into the night and cars speeding around and around so loudly that at first I thought the Czech equivalent of the Hell’s Angels was tearing up my street. I’d gone out onto my balcony expecting to see a gang of overweight, middle-aged men with straggly beards revving their engines menacingly, but the street was empty.
The noise had abated around midnight, but I’m a girl who likes to get in a solid eight hours kip and I’d only had six. Now I lay in bed wondering if I shouldn’t be up at dawn anyway to greet this, the first full day of the rest of my exciting life, but with jackhammers jarring my back teeth I was feeling strangely similar to the way I felt back at home when woken before I want to be—annoyed. I valiantly tried to go back to sleep and, when that proved impossible, turned on the lamp and read my book for an hour and a half, cursing.
When got up I tried the water and to my relief the taps ran brown for a minute, then clear. I had a shower, scrubbed the shower clean of hair and soap scum, washed down the sink, dried my feet for a few centuries on the water-resistant towel, got dressed and left the flat, ignoring my stepmother’s long list. The sun shone, the sky was a glorious blue, birds sang in the trees along the river and I felt fresh and new and full of optimism. I was in Prague, it was spring and I was bounding down the street, a song in my heart and a smile on my lips, head high, taking in everything around me. It was time to go shopping.
My street was tiny, hardly wide enough for two cars to pass, with not much traffic and very few pedestrians. Coming towards me was a young woman with a toddler, and as she approached I did what any Australian would do when you’re on a small street and you’re passing the only other person around: I nodded and smiled. But instead of smiling back, the young woman shot me a blank-eyed, hostile stare, glared at me, and then abruptly turned her head away. I was shocked. Was nodding a Czech sign for ‘up yours’? Was I wearing something that indicated I was a violent criminal type? As I turned onto the main street and continued to the supermarket, my spirits less chirpy than they had been when I set out, I tried to work out what had happened.
My local supermarket was called ‘The Norma’. From the outside, The Norma looked just like any other suburban supermarket. It was low and flat-roofed with a winding concrete ramp outside for trolleys, prams and wheelchairs, full glass frontage and two sets of sliding doors, one for the entrance and one for the exit. I couldn’t tell from the signs (vchod and východ) which door was the entrance so, not wanting to do the wrong thing, I waited to see which one other shoppers used, then followed them in.
The Norma seemed to service the poorer sectors of society—the pensioners clutching their coupons, the shambling single men who’d left marriage too late, the young wives of the working class dragging a gaggle of kids behind them. Inside, the supermarket had trolleys that look just like ours, only these ones were chained together. I watched the other shoppers inserting coins and when it was my turn was greatly relieved to see that the coins I needed were marked out in numerals—5 and 10 kc (crowns)—not words. Having released one from bondage I started down the aisle and noticed that, for some reason, Czech trolleys are a lot better behaved than Australian ones. Mine obeyed me implicitly and didn’t try to detour into stacks of jars.
However, within seconds knew I was in a different country. The very first item in the very first aisle in The Norma was potatoes. A giant bin of unwashed potatoes. No wait, two giant bins of potatoes clotted with dirt, and I do mean giant—the bins came up to shoulder height. A tiny old Czech lady in front of me was fishing around in them, her hand over her head, plucking out potatoes one at a time, inspecting them and throwing back the below-par ones. The old lady ignored me utterly, frowning in concentration at each potato before tossing it back or putting it in her trolley. Picking potatoes seemed to be serious business for the Czechs, so I thought I’d take it seriously, too. I put the same concentration into it, squeezing each one, inspecting it for holes. I stood next to her and extracted a few, throwing back one that had gone mouldy and one that was too soft, then another soft one, and another. I was the tiniest bit startled by how many dud ones there were. Still, I found five good ones and was rather proud to think I’d done my first Czech-style shopping.
The next item in the aisle, and taking up pretty much the whole aisle, was beer. First potatoes, then bins and bins of beer in bottles from all around the Republic. I’d read about the Czechs and their beer: it’s like cheese for the French or the stiff upper lip for the English. The Czechs have the highest beer consumption in the world, and it’s not just a bit higher—there’s daylight between the Czechs and the next on the list, the Irish. While each year the Irish, who’ve built an entire culture around being on the piss, consume one hundred and thirty-five litres per person, and the Germans one hundred and eighteen litres, the Czechs get through one hundred and fifty-nine litres per person. That means that every man, woman and child in the Czech Republic is drinking seventeen per cent more beer than the Irish and thirty-four per cent more than the Germans. A middle-aged man shuffled by me, his trolley piled high with beer, except for one tiny bottle of pickles balanced on top. Although I’m not really a drinker I put a couple of measly bottles into my trolley just to get into the swing of native life.
After the potatoes and the beer The Norma got more normal. Here’s what I couldn’t find, though: olive oil. And for the life of me I couldn’t find any rubber gloves, which was strange as you’d think rubber gloves would be a staple of a once-communist state—but perhaps I’ve seen too many reds-under-the-bed movies featuring uniformed matrons sporting rubber gloves and a moustache, injecting western heroes with truth serum. Perhaps they didn’t have rubber gloves because they were rejecting this part of their past. Still, communism’s been over for more than fifteen years so could we have some rubber gloves in the supermarkets, please?
The last bastion of communism in the supermarket, though, was the toilet paper. Called ‘Big and Soft’ it was neither big, nor soft. It was small, one-ply, harsh, and a grim, dark-grey colour—the colour, and texture, of a cardboard box that’s been left out in the rain then dried in a furnace. It was communist toilet paper if ever I saw it.
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