Alice to Prague

by Tanya Heaslip

  Then something very strange happened.

  The waiter’s eyes lit up and he spoke rapidly to me, gesturing for me to stand up and follow him. Glancing anxiously at my hostess, I took her nod as an assurance I wouldn’t end up in a gulag and warily followed the waiter towards the back of the restaurant, wondering what awaited me. An English menu? We walked through a haze of smoke and the waiter stopped in front of the group of the men who’d greeted each other earlier. They looked at me and looked at the waiter. There was lots more hand-waving and gesticulating and then raised eyebrows. Panic trickled through me. Who were these guys? Did they have a menu? No. Were they secret police?

  Just as I was turning to run, the man nearest to me grinned and extended a big furry paw.

  ‘G’day. How are ya, mate? I am Míša.’

  My whole body rooted itself to the floor. I stared blankly at this man’s laughing eyes, his short and stout physique, his dark hair and dark beard. My mouth opened but no words came out.

  Míša pointed to the tall, bearded man he’d walked in with. ‘This is Jarda.’ Speaking English in a strong Czech accent, he went on. ‘Welcome! Jarda and me—we are Czech-Australians. Would you like to join us?’

  My tongue still would not work. Neither would my legs.

  The tall man also spoke with a strong Czech accent. ‘And so, please, what is your name?’

  ‘Tanya,’ I finally managed but my brain and body could not compute what was happening. Finally, I managed to blurt out, inanely, ‘Who are you?’

  Míša answered, his eyes deep dark pools of amusement.

  ‘We are Czechs, born here, now live in Australia. We are here to do some business with our colleagues, Pavel and Honza,’ he pointed to the other two men. ‘When Jarda and I walked in, Pavel and Honza were already here, and Pavel stood up and called out very loudly, “The Australian kangaroo arrives!” The waiter heard this.’

  They all laughed some more as I continued to stare, bemused.

  ‘Tak! Tanya,’ Míša said cheerfully, pulling out a chair and helping me into it. ‘Why are you here yourself—and so far out in the countryside? This is a place where only Czechs come, not foreigners. Four years ago, you’d be shot for being here, or arrested at least. It is lucky the waiter brought you to us!’

  Both Czech-Australians laughed and I started talking. Then I couldn’t stop.

  ‘You need a drink!’ Jarda decided. He called the waiter over and ordered me a small beer. ‘Please, if you like, we will arrange with your friends for you to have dinner with us tonight.’

  With undoubted relief, Jarka handed me over to the custody of my Czech-Australian saviours for the evening.

  ‘So now we can explain the menu for you. What would you like to eat?

  ‘Anything but řízek! Please, no řízek!’

  They laughed. They thought it hilarious that I was desperate to avoid their beloved pork schnitzel. Instead they ordered me trout with almonds (which I said I would only believe existed when I saw it with my own eyes), and they further explained that the reason I’d been served řízek everywhere I went was that the dish represented Czech hospitality. ‘People have done it to be kind to you, Tanya,’ said Jarda. A stab of shame hit me, but not hard enough to override my relief at finding something non-pork-based on the menu. If I couldn’t have a steak, trout would be sensational.

  ‘Please,’ I pressed, still confused about the scenario in which I’d found myself, and grappling with cultural niceties that were clearly beyond me. ‘What is your connection to Australia? Why did you go there?’

  Míša and Jarda told me their story and a strange sense of serendipity flooded through me as they talked.

  They had grown up in Prague under communism but fled the Russian tanks after the Prague Spring of 1968, that dark stain on the already very dark stain of Czechoslovakia’s decades of occupation. I remembered it from The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  They gave me a potted history. The Prague Spring infamously represented the Soviet crushing of a short period of ‘socialism with a human face’, a liberal approach to life developed under the Prime Minister at the time, Alexander Dubček. It was the 1960s, and intellectuals and artists flourished; free speech was allowed. Václav Havel was in his element at the time, writing plays and criticising communism. But the Moscow masters took a dim view of such human-like behaviour.

  They invaded the country in August 1968, abducted Dubček and, high in the Ukrainian mountains, told him he would be executed. Russian tanks rumbled through Wenceslas Square, the country sat frozen with fear, Dubček was subsequently spared (but publicly humiliated; he would never speak in public again) and his ‘confession at the Kremlin’ led to a long period of Soviet ‘normalisation’ and harsh controls throughout the 1970s.

  The waiter interrupted. He put in front of me a plate of what was undeniably trout. The fish was large and whole with bones intact; it had been steamed in butter, sprinkled with parsley and scattered with slivered almonds. My eyes goggled, mouth watered, salivary glands jumped. I hadn’t known what to expect but this far exceeded my expectations. Fingers trembling, I picked up my knife and fork, took a small mouthful, avoiding the bones, and murmured, ‘Oh my God, this is delicious’.

  Jarda and Míša continued to talk, happily eating řízek themselves, while I devoured the fish and their story.

  Following the Prague Spring, most Czechs were fearful of wide-ranging executions and being shipped off to Siberia, a repeat of the Soviet’s tactics when they took over Czechoslovakia following the end of World War II. Back then, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, there were fake trials, and thousands of people ‘disappeared’. It was a time of tyranny and terror. Jarda and Míša had decided not to take the risk of history repeating itself. They fled one night in 1968, under cover of darkness, before the borders were closed, taking their wives and some friends, but otherwise leaving everything they knew and loved behind.

  They became immigrants, moving from camp to camp through Europe. Finally they washed up on Australia’s shores, where they lived for some years in migrant camps in Melbourne. The Nissen huts they lived in were primitive—freezing in winter, boiling in summer—but having reached the other side of the world, they knew there was no going back.

  ‘That sounds terrible,’ I said, feeling ashamed we’d put such lovely men into those kinds of camps.

  ‘It was okay. We were young, we survived,’ Jarda said, philosophically. The greatest problem was their homesickness for Czechoslovakia, exacerbated by the knowledge that they could not return to their home country again for fear of imprisonment—or worse. Imagine their joy following the fall of the Berlin Wall, which then triggered the Velvet Revolution and the opening of the Czech borders once more.

  I remembered the Velvet Revolution was a Havel term, given to describe the essentially bloodless coup he and his party, Občanské fórum (‘Civic Forum’), led to overthrow the communist regime in late 1989. Given nearly 200 students were beaten savagely and hospitalised as a precursor to the collapse, ‘Velvet’ was clearly a relative term. But this was a country that had known real savagery.

  ‘There are many of us visiting here in the Prague just now,’ Jarda went on. ‘Do you know of “restitution”?’

  I shook my head, so they told me about the current legal process of returning property unlawfully taken by the communists back to its original owners. Jarda and his brother had been handed back their family’s apartment block in Prague. In partnership with Míša, they were reconstructing this building. They had driven to meet Míša’s solicitor and colleague, who lived in Benešov, to finalise business over dinner. ‘So that is our story!’ they finished.

  ‘I can’t believe this coincidence,’ I kept repeating in disbelief. Pavel and Honza, who did not speak English, ordered more beer and spoke among themselves, resigned to the fact that business was over for the evening.

  Míša looked down at my feet.

  ‘I can guess you are from the Northern Territory, yes?’
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br />   My world—my heart—stopped.

  ‘I can see some red dust on your shoelaces. I know the Tropic of Capricorn that runs through that area. I have camped there.’

  I glanced down at the ochre red of Central Australia stained into the white shoelaces on my sandshoes and looked back at him dazedly. Despite my best efforts, I’d not been able to scrub the colour out.

  ‘You’ve been there? To Alice? To my home? No!’

  ‘Yes!’ He laughed wickedly, pleased at the connection himself.

  I didn’t believe him. It was a ridiculous, incomprehensible coincidence.

  ‘It is true,’ Míša nodded. ‘I have loved your outback ever since I came to Australia. I have travelled to Central Australia and all over Australia. When I saw the red dust, I knew you were from there.’

  This man was psychic too?

  The connection was overwhelming. Not only did Míša know Australia, he knew the outback, my country. He had probably slept on the hard earth under the enormous black sky of dazzling stars. Felt the red dirt under his feet, held it in his hands. Smelt the heat, heard the crackling of dried leaves under the midday sun, tasted the burnt air, listened to the explosion of bird sounds at dawn. I clenched my knuckles furiously under the table. Tears stung for the second time that night. Then I laughed at the impossibility and improbability and sheer serendipity of everything that had happened that evening.

  ‘Come and visit us in Prague,’ Míša suggested.

  ‘Prague!’ My knees felt weak.

  ‘Prague is such beautiful city. Have you not been there yet? We will be there next weekend.’ He added, as an incentive: ‘You can talk English for a whole day—and no řízek!’

  Jarda nodded slowly. ‘You can meet my friend from boyhood days, Karel. He still lives in Prague and speaks English. I am sure he will be able to help you. He is an engineer and reconstructs buildings all over Prague. He has many contacts if you would want to try for work in Prague when you finish at Sedlčany.’

  I hesitated. I was two-thirds through my time in Sedlčany and didn’t want to be disloyal. I hadn’t even thought about what I’d do when I got to the end of my time there. There was something else niggling at me too. These men were strangers. Lovely men, yes, but still strangers. It was one thing to meet them here, with the protection of my host family barely five tables away, but in a foreign city? Were they really trustworthy? And how would I find them? What if I got on the wrong train and really did end up in Poland?

  But Míša persisted.

  ‘There is so much beauty and history in Prague that was not destroyed by our former occupiers. We will meet our friends on an island in the famous River Vltava—next to the Žofín Palace where there are winter balls. You cannot miss this!’

  Images of Viennese balls and violins and swirling men in black tie and women in gowns danced in my head and I could hold out no longer. ‘But how will I find you?’

  ‘It is easy. We will draw you map. We will meet you in the Old Town Square in Prague under the clock.’

  Under a clock? I stared at them in disbelief.

  ‘It is big clock,’ said Jarda, scribbling on a beer mat, adding times and names. ‘Astronomical clock.’

  ‘I wish to tell you something before I go, Tanya,’ Jarda said, as we all shook hands. ‘I hope it will help you with your struggles. Míša and me, and our families, we went to Australia with nothing. We had no English and it was unbelievably hard. But we managed. Just accept where you are right now. Make the most of it. Nothing lasts forever. You have only two months before you can leave again, if you so wish. We had to wait twenty years for that luck. And we didn’t even know it would happen. We just got lucky.’

  In that moment I wanted to dissolve. Jarda had guessed what I hadn’t wanted to put in words. They understood. They had been there too—only for them it had been much, much worse.

  Míša touched my cheek gently, as if I was a child. ‘Your face is open book.’

  ‘Karel will help you, I know it,’ Jarda repeated, thoughtfully.

  13

  Fairytale Prague

  ‘Pardon, prosím vás . . . excuse me, please . . . promiňte . . . pardon . . .’

  The alleyway was narrow and my attempts at Czech were lost in the babble of teenagers crowding around a woman with an umbrella above her head. The group filled the stone passage and blocked my access to the far end.

  No one took any notice of my attempts to get past them. The anxiety in my stomach rose and fell with each breath. How would I get out of there? I was running out of time.

  It had been a long morning already. I’d headed out from Sedlčany on the 6.30 a.m. bus, clutching Kamila’s written instructions on what to pay, when to get off and how to get into the Old Town. En route we stopped at a village. There we were delayed fifteen minutes as the bus driver shared a beer and chat with some locals. (A beer? At 7.30 a.m.?) Once we did finally reach the Prague terminal, I had to find my way through

  the complex metro system. Now I was stuck in an alley—and possibly lost.

  As I turned back, a shaft of soft spring sunshine hit my face. Following the light, I found myself unexpectedly in a side street. It was lined with high houses that went straight up into the sky, their narrow windows looking down onto curving cobbles. Red flowers spilled out of baskets along the windows and the air was fragrant with blossom.

  I stopped, breathed in and out, steadied myself.

  I was here. I was really here.

  In Prague. Exactly two months to the day since I’d arrived in Sedlčany.

  Now all I had to do was find my Czech-Australian friends.

  In a square with a clock.

  When I did find the Old Town Square—Staroměstské náměstí—it felt like time had stopped. For a moment I was Alice, falling into my own wonderland, stretching out my arms to fantasy, then landing on tiptoes and gazing around at an enchanted world as far from my idea of reality as could be imagined. Yet in the same instant I knew this scene was magically close to my childhood imaginings. In that split second of glorious realisation, I wanted to fall on my knees in wonder and gratitude. I’d found the home of fairytales! And I’d not only found it, I was in it, with worn cobblestones underfoot and a glittering castle presiding grandly over me.

  I leant against a corner wall, Kamila’s crushed piece of paper hanging limp from my fingers.

  Let’s Go Europe told me this square—surrounded by palaces and churches, shining silver and gold in the morning light—had been around since the eleventh century. Tiny shops were painted in different shades of soft pastel yellows, pinks and blues. They looked like dolls’ houses, yet my guidebook told me Kafka had lived in one of them and had also written there. There was the clip-clop of hooves on the cobblestones and two beautiful black horses trotted past, pulling a carriage presided over by a master adorned in red-and-gold braid and a top hat. There was no royalty inside, but two glamorous girls with their hair shining in the sun. They waved as they passed by, princesses for the day.

  I tried to breathe.

  I was standing in a place I instantly felt I belonged, had always belonged. It was utterly familiar. Old patterns and lines traced their way through my heart, brain and soul, emerging into the light as though surprised but glad to be back where they belonged—in a city that was as familiar to me as every vision and tale of my childhood.

  I was seized with the desire to dance wildly, twirling around and around, singing and laughing. I had waited my whole life for this moment, and now it had arrived it was smiling and saying, ‘Welcome, old friend.’

  ‘Ahoj, Táničko!’

  Míša’s cheery face came into view. He wrapped me in a huge bear hug and I crumpled at being in the warmth of someone’s arms. I also noticed, with a happy shock, that he had used the diminutive of my name. Czechs did that for their lovers, children, relatives or people they cared for. It was like calling me something like ‘Tanyikens-cootsy-coo’. Happiness flooded me from top to toe. I was one of them, now.

>   ‘Your timing is perfect,’ he grinned. ‘Now you can see our famous Astronomical Clock in operation.’

  We stood back, me somewhat unsteadily. Míša pointed to an enormous, ornate clock on the edge of the square. The clock boomed the hour. Wait—there were two clock faces, and a procession of miniature and vividly painted sculptures moved above them both. The air was filled with a frenzy of shrieks and snapping cameras. Through the din, Míša yelled that one clock represented the sun and moon, and the other months of the year, and that the sculptures represented the twelve Apostles. The oldest part of the clock had been created more than 500 years before I was born. Everything felt unreal, surreal; I was now Tanya in Wonderland.

  A tall, bearded man emerged from the crowd—Jarda—and the moment of happiness was complete. He hugged me too, and even though I barely came past his knees I felt overwhelming joy at being hugged by a second human being in the space of five minutes.

  Jarda introduced me to his wife and a nearby group of friends, all of whom smiled warmly and welcomed me in English. Most of them were also Czech-Australians. I shook lots of hands and trembled with gladness. From the darkness of Sedlčany to the lightness of Prague—it was like coming up from the deep without stopping midway for the decompression process.

  ‘There is one more person to join us,’ Jarda told me with a frown. ‘Karel. But he is late. He is always late.’

  ‘Tak! Jak se máš, Táničko?’ Míša asked kindly, and I was so relieved to be asked ‘How are you?’ that I poured out my bus- and-beer story.