Alice to Prague

by Tanya Heaslip

  After an hour, we pulled up outside a long, low building running the length of a street. The evening shadows had lengthened. Maruška told me this was a former communist headquarters and that we would eat here.

  I stumbled out, stiff, the feeling of dislocation growing once again. Three days ago I couldn’t have imagined entering a room where Czech secret police once plotted against the enemies of the state. I represented those enemies, or at least I once did. I wondered if it all still felt strange to my hosts. I wondered if there was a chance I’d be strip-searched or arrested.

  But no. Ex-communist headquarters or not, it was now just a noisy bar, full of people eating and drinking and smoking at small tables covered in red-checked tablecloths, and no one noticed us. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. We took a table and Maruška consulted the menu.

  ‘You can have pork four ways here, some prepared now and some prepared earlier today. Boiled, roasted, fried, in the pot, with and without dumplings, which can be made with the flour or with the potato . . .’

  Zdeněk interrupted. Maruška translated. ‘And you will have some beer, yes? Zdeněk says to you: Czech beer is best in the world!’

  I wasn’t much of a beer drinker—more of a bubbles or G & T gal—but it didn’t seem the right time to refuse, so I smiled politely as a waiter with greasy hair plonked down three enormous glasses of beer.

  ‘In our pubs, waiter brings you beer when you sit down,’ Maruška explained. ‘If you do not want beer, you need to tell the waiter you want something else and he will take the beer away. Okay?’

  I learnt that beer was cheaper than water—such was the devotion to beer, especially for the men—and for a panicked moment I wondered if I’d spend most of my time dehydrated and drunk. Excusing myself, I headed for a door marked with ‘WC’ and a lady’s hat.

  The room offered three cramped cubicles, each with a bowl almost overflowing with water and a weird-looking handle on the side. A small box attached to the wall provided squares of brown, cardboard-like paper. They were rough and barely did the job. The floor was filthy and wet, and the drains stank.

  But worst of all, a horror-film image stared back from the mirror when I washed my hands: green eyes now bloodshot; short, mousy brown bob bedraggled; mascara caked. Not the look of an inspiring teacher-in-the-making. Nor of Julie Andrews, her shining face alight with confidence, on her way to the von Trapp household. Nor of my beloved Mrs Hodder, for that matter.

  In desperation I splashed my face with water and reapplied my lipstick, but my shirt simply got wet, and no amount of blusher could help my face. I blocked my nose, grabbed my bag, and rushed back to the table, trying to look like the relaxed, happy traveller I’m sure Peter Barr was.

  Back at the table I drank my beer and smiled to show I was enjoying it very much, all the while wondering how much I could drink before I collapsed and lost all feeling in my body. The beer—a Pilsner Urquell—came from the local town Plzeň. Pilsner . . . Plzeň . . . piss. Weird neural connections were rewiring themselves in my brain and I hoped my hosts hadn’t guessed I was falling apart inside.

  A sour-faced waitress in a short skirt arrived to take food orders, returning shortly with enormous plates of pork schnitzel. Maruška told me it was called řízek. The glistening meat fell over the edges of the plate. Exhaustion swamped me as thoughts of constipation, scurvy, alcoholism and serious weight gain loomed. But my hosts ate quickly, undaunted.

  Before long we were back in the car, and to distract myself from the řízek and beer churning in my stomach, I asked Maruška to tell me about Sedlčany.

  ‘Tak, Sedlčany is industrial town. It has approximately 8000 people. Many people come there to live because they need work. In the factories. And also because there is cheaper housing.’

  Industrial town? Factories? Cheaper housing?

  I sat back and tried to breathe deeply, feel calm. I’d seen factory towns at a distance during my 1989 travels through Europe but never been in one. I’d sought out places with light, space and clean air, as I was wired for that kind of thing from growing up in the bush. Had I missed the fine print in Peter Barr’s descriptions?

  It was dark when we arrived in Sedlčany.

  Blocks of the grey concrete paneláky rose up before us through the blackness, hung thickly with washing lines from each window. I pushed back in the seat, squeezed my eyes to shut it out, then I choked. A putrid stench swamped the car. I wrenched my eyes open again, gasped, couldn’t find air, croaked, started coughing.

  ‘Ah yes,’ Maruška sighed once more and Zdeněk tightened the window. ‘I am afraid the pollution in Sedlčany is very bad. We have two furnaces in the town. Everyone in winter uses brown coal which gives out a lot of—how you call—sulphur?’

  Sulphur? I was allergic to sulphur. It made me swell up, choke and go to hospital. The last time it had happened, my throat had caved in and I’d thought I would suffocate. A stern-looking doctor warned me to never go near sulphur again—and that time it had just been an ingredient in a prescription drug. Now I was about to live in a town drowning in it?

  I tried to focus on breathing as Maruška kept sighing. ‘It is made worse because our town is in this valley.’ She pointed to the hills rising on either side of us. ‘So, the smog gets trapped here all winter. But’—she finished hopefully—‘when spring comes, it will get better.’

  Zdeněk drove into an old cobbled square with a fountain in the middle. ‘The Old Town Square,’ said Maruška. A group of old men stood outside a pub, no doubt enjoying their beers. They were the only signs of life.

  She pointed to a demountable building on one side. It was long and low, like an Australian mining donga dumped in the wrong place by accident.

  ‘Tanya, this is supermarket. You can get your food here.’

  Out of the supermarket roof grew a Gothic tower and dome.

  Maruška said, matter-of-factly, ‘Former regime put this supermarket in front of the church.’

  Seriously? In my increasingly overwhelmed state, I imagined the conversation: ‘Comrades, let’s stick a supermarket in front of a church, so the workers can’t see the church. Then they won’t be tempted to go into it, unsupervised, dreaming up incendiary ideas and threatening state control. Hurrah! What a plan! Instead the workers can quickly buy necessities from this hideous supermarket and get back to toiling in the fields and factories.’

  ‘It is okay,’ shrugged my hostess, as though the architectural, spiritual and political barbarity of the former occupiers had long ceased to move her. ‘You can still find a way into church through some side door on side street. It is fourteenth-century, very nice to visit.’

  Zdeněk drove out of the square and up a steep hill until we reached what Maruška called ‘Panelák Block Four’. I swivelled my neck up to see a high, soulless building staring down at me. Zdeněk motioned me out of the car: ‘Tak, jdeme!’

  I stumbled, coughed. My eyes stung. Then the back of my neck crawled. It took a moment to realise what had unnerved me, and when I understood my stomach twisted.

  I’d arrived in a ghost town. Everything was silent.

  But it made no sense. This town had 8000 people. And it was only seven o’clock at night. Where were the snatches of conversation floating out of windows, babies crying, children playing? Music, even the sound of television? The town was silent. Had everyone been locked up and forbidden to talk?

  ‘Maruška,’ I blurted out. ‘Why is it so quiet?’

  She looked sideways at me and said, ‘This is normální.’

  I followed her, confused. Had the whole town been kidnapped? Were we in some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare where no one acknowledged what was happening?

  The fact was that this was a normální state for Sedlčany. Over time, I began to call it the Silence of Sedlčany—the fear-induced silence of people who had lived for decades under domination. And it was a fear so deeply ingrained that people couldn’t bring themselves to start talking openly, even at night, even after the
occupiers had gone. The shackles may have been officially taken off but, as one elderly man later put it, ‘You could never be too sure who could hear you speak, at any time, what might be reported, how it might be misunderstood. You could disappear at night and never be seen again . . . how can we trust it to be different now?’

  Survival habits, self-preservation and silence lived on.

  It briefly occurred to me that this was what I’d come for—to learn what it had been like for the people under communism, to discover firsthand what they’d gone through. But now I was here my courage deserted me like a traitor. As my hosts pushed open the door to a tiny entranceway, I felt like the next inmate being delivered to prison. The air was foul, the floor littered with rubbish and cigarette butts. To the right-hand side sat a concrete staircase. In front of us loomed a tiny antiquated lift.

  Zdeněk opened the lift door like we were at The Ritz and motioned me inside; not even the irony of this could cheer me up. One stark light hung down above our faces, as if we were in an interrogation cell. I kept my eyes down, kept trying to breathe. Vaguely, I heard Maruška speaking.

  ‘We go to floor seven, the top floor, but in the morning, you may wish to go up and down these stairs because there are many people in this panelák, and only one lift.’

  The lift was also very slow. Finally, it disgorged us into the middle of a narrow concrete corridor, with more cigarette butts on the floor and many doors around us. Zdeněk headed to a heavy door at the far right, produced an enormous key and turned it.

  ‘Your new home,’ Maruška said kindly, leading me in.

  4

  First night at boarding school

  My new home was a tiny bedsit.

  It reeked of the same stale cigarette smoke as everywhere else I’d been that day. It came with a couch bed and a filthy bolthole at one end that passed as a bathroom and toilet. Its sole redeeming feature was a set of large windows in both rooms. I immediately tried to open them but they were locked; Zdeněk shook his head, frowning. Windows were kept shut to keep out the cold and pollution, Maruška explained.

  I bit my lip—it was freezing in here anyway. But how else would I get rid of the cigarette stink? As Mum always said, ‘All houses should have fresh air!’ Having grown up under the clear, empty skies of the outback, I found myself (wherever I was) rushing to open windows and bring in outside air. Only then could I feel safe, breathe properly. Breathe anyway, I told myself, breathe anyway. Don’t let them think I’m worried, not coping. The worst outcome would be for me to fall below Peter Barr’s standards.

  Maruška walked into the tiny kitchenette next to the windows and opened the door of a small fridge. She pointed to a hunk of cheese, some salted butter, several winter apples and a loaf of dark rye bread.

  ‘This is good.’ She was pleased. ‘Some teachers have left you food. We will see you at gymnázium tomorrow. It will only take you about twenty minutes to walk. Go down the hill the way we came up.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Thank you so much for everything today, Zdeněk and Maruška.’ I hoped I sounded as confident as Peter Barr would have been on his first night. ‘I look forward to becoming a teacher at your school.’ I also wanted to apologise for talking non-stop all day and asking so many questions, as I’d already worked out that wasn’t normální. Now we were here, though, I couldn’t find the words.

  The heavy door banged behind them, the lock clicking shut on my cell. My pretence at confidence collapsed and I sank onto the couch bed, staring numbly out the window. For a long time I sat unmoving. I felt like an aeroplane coming into land, unable to work out how to put down its landing gear. I was stuck circling blindly in no-man’s-land, waiting for a word or a light or a direction that would not—could not—materialise.

  In my heart I was twelve years old again, arriving at boarding school in Adelaide to start a new life behind high stone walls, leaving behind all I knew, a thousand miles south of my home and another world entirely. I had been clueless about how to inhabit it—a concrete wilderness without reference points or markers. That was 1975. This was 1994.

  Not much felt different.

  In 1975, I was put into a dormitory of twenty-four girls. On my first night I climbed out of bed, up into a large bay window, and peered into the night sky. If we had stars in common, I thought, I might be able to see home somehow. Outback skies were smothered with stars—the Southern Cross, the Saucepan, the crowded Milky Way. Now I remembered the paint on the wooden window frame flaking under my small fingers as I tore unsuccessfully at the latch; the foreboding shadow of a large, locked iron gate below; and the hard sob in my chest when I found no stars at all, only blackness. What was this boarding school? Who was I, now that I was in it? How would I exist, confined to buildings in which I could not run and walls through which I could not pass, and no stars or sky with which to commune?

  It occurred to me, as I rocked on the Sedlčany bedsit couch, that 1975 and 1994 had two things in common. Both involved arriving in strange and scary places, miles from home and from anything I knew, and both involved a school. Perhaps it would have been useful to have thought this through before leaving Australia. Perhaps I could have saved myself a lot of heartache before inadvertently reinventing 1975. After all, I hadn’t been forced to come here, not like I had been back then. Boarding school was the hell that had instilled in me a terror of entrapment, a fear of being controlled by others, panic attacks if I thought I couldn’t escape from someone, something or somewhere.

  Eventually, I realised I was stiff all over, and cold, and I dragged myself to my feet. No one was coming to save me, no one could help me, and no one could erase my past. Nor was there any point looking out the window for stars here. Even if I could see them through the pollution, it was a different sky—we were on the other side of the world. And there was no use trying to rip open the windows. Zdeněk had checked, for good measure, that they were firmly locked.

  To distract myself, I headed to the kitchenette. There was a little old electric stove operated by a black switch on the wall. There were no knobs on the stove, but it came with a tiny hotplate covered over by a tin lid. There was no sink, but a plastic bowl was positioned under two taps, which presumably would fill the plastic basin and provide drinking water. What would I do with the water when I was finished with it? Down the toilet, I supposed.

  There was no kettle or mug to be seen, but there was a saucepan, a glass and some unrecognisable tea bags, so I dribbled water into the pan, put it on the stove and turned it on. I stared at the stove maniacally, willing it to show life, to demonstrate normality. After a good old-fashioned cup of tea, I’d surely feel better.

  But it took twenty minutes for a bubble to even appear in the water. Frustrated at its slowness, I ripped the saucepan off and poured lukewarm water into the glass over the tea bag. But the tea tasted strange—local herbs or flowers, perhaps—and I felt nauseous so poured it down the toilet, despairing, ashamed. I wished I’d had another one of Zdeněk’s beers.

  Eventually, I could no longer delay the inevitable. Time to pull down the landing gear. Time to unpack.

  There was one tiny chest of drawers but no cupboard, so in the end there wasn’t much unpacking to do. Most of my stuff remained in my case, which I shoved under the table near the window. I used the one small chair to arrange a few photos of family, and toiletries—brush and comb, moisturiser, lip balm. It was like the first night at boarding school all over again. I was too paralysed inside to do anything but stumble about, going through the motions.

  That included braving the bathroom again.

  Blocking my nose, I entered into an area so small I could barely turn in it, much less imagine having a proper wash. It featured a small, grimy tin bath with an attached nozzle and basin at one end. I guessed that was where I would also have to wash my clothes. I would soon learn the art of crouching in the tub and sluicing myself with a trickle of water that always seemed as grubby as the bath itself. There was very little water pressure.r />
  There was also no towel. I dried my hands and face with my shirt.

  The loneliness was deafening.

  I wanted to scream. But then I’d surely disturb the neighbours, and the faceless men in trench coats and felt hats would arrive, inject me with a drug, bundle me into a car and take me to Siberia for experiments. The only two people in this entire country who knew me, Maruška and Zdeněk, would be none the wiser.

  Perhaps I could escape. But how, and where to? I was totally vulnerable, trapped. I had no sense of direction here. Ironic, really: I could spend hours alone in the bush; I knew the miles of emptiness like the lines on my palm. I could look to the sun to determine the time. I could identify north, south and east from the peaks and rises of different hills, and I knew that where there were no hills, it was always west. I could work out which way to go by the lines of the scrub, the different shades of the red earth, and the curve of the creek beds. I was never safer than when I was in the bush. Here, however, I could be eaten alive and die a long, lonely, miserable death—and no one would know. Someone from the school might come looking eventually but it would be too late. Desperation rose in my chest like a mad, trapped bird.

  What had I been thinking? I’d devoured stories about Europe and been lost in fantasies about it for as long as I could remember. I’d longed to know these places and people firsthand; they often felt more real to me than my own reality. Now I’d landed in a reality as far from my dreams as I could have imagined. Shivering with cold, I thought about Peter Barr. What had made me think I could go where he went, carry out what he did? That was the problem, of course: I didn’t think. I hadn’t thought at all. I’d simply leapt into this void with lots of hope and precious little planning.