Alice to Prague

by Tanya Heaslip

  I said yes before they had finished describing their offer. I hoped the beer coasters would work; I had no other way of getting in contact with Míša and Jarda before then. There was a pay telephone at the Sedlčany post office but no guarantee I could get a line to Prague during the day to confirm plans. The phone lines were invariably congested or simply unavailable. The school had one fax line but none of the gang had access to a fax at their end. The post was slow and unreliable so even writing to each other to organise where and how to meet was risky. The beer coasters were my only hope of finding them.

  ‘Thank you! To all of you, so much. For everything. I can’t tell you what this day has meant to me.’ And what hope you have given me, I added silently.

  I stood up to go and catch my bus, unsteady, lightheaded.

  Karel quickly held out my coat and stood behind me to help me put it on. As I slipped my arms in the sleeves and pulled the coat around me, he straightened the collar, letting his hands linger on my shoulders. I was intensely aware of him, aware of his fingertips slowly and lightly tracing their way down my arms. He paused, just long enough for me to wonder if he was telling me something but not long enough to know for sure.

  I managed to turn around. My breath caught in my throat. ‘Thank you.’

  Inclining his head, he handed me the corner of a second beer coaster.

  ‘If you have problems, here is my phone number,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, there are more people wanting to talk in this country than there are phone lines, but it is for you as . . . how you say . . . a safety rug.’

  ‘Blanket,’ I said in a rush, putting both coasters in my pocket.

  Míša and Jarda hugged me and everyone shouted farewell. ‘Na shledanou!’

  Above me, Prague Castle was ablaze with lights and the city was a glittering fairyland.

  Karel turned and fixed his eyes on mine.

  Stars on velvet.

  14

  Do I stay or do I go?

  I returned to Sedlčany revived and reinvigorated.

  ‘You seem ten years younger after Prague!’ said Nad’a.

  I excitedly told her about my wonderful new friends Míša and Jarda and then added that I’d met a gorgeous man named Karel. When I mentioned the pending trip to Šumava, she clapped her hands in delight, and prophesied that I’d be staying in her country a lot longer than planned.

  But it wasn’t only me, and the birds and the bees, who’d been reborn.

  Spring had arrived and galvanised Sedlčany. The main square was now filled with teachers and students eating Czech ice cream (a delicacy of which the Czechs were very proud) and, to my surprise, more people were starting to smile. Not necessarily at me, but at each other. The school buzzed with the prospect of excursions near and far: cycling trips to the river, a baroque concert in a nearby castle in which English teacher Blanka lived, student classes in the wider community, and singing with guitars around fires at night. The invitations came thick and fast. I felt like I’d gone to Prague and come back to a different world.

  I was particularly excited to hear about the castle. ‘There is a castle here in Sedlčany too,’ Kamila told me. ‘It is very small and beautiful, called Red Castle. I will take you there after school. We can have a picnic.’

  I couldn’t believe it. To think I’d wasted so long shivering alone in my panelák when there was a bona fide castle within walking distance! Did this mean the town Sedlčany might once have been beautiful, in a time before paneláky?

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Kamila nodded. ‘Our town is nearly 700 years old. There will be big celebration in July. Fireworks and parades. You must be here to see it! We can go together and dance all night!’

  I leapt back into teaching with my soul restored, eager to embrace all that lay ahead of me. We played lots of music in class, working the nouns, verbs and adverbs around the songs, while the students continued to learn more vocabulary related to the wild outback of Australia. Fortunately the school continued to let me get away with these strange methods because the students seemed to love their lessons.

  The skies brightened earlier and evenings lingered. The landscape emerged from its barren cocoon and stretched out with colour and new life—as did I, enchanted at what was unfolding before me. Winding country lanes overhung with trees of pink apple and white cherry blossom. Delicate primroses and wild strawberry bushes lining the roads. Pretty shades of cream and apricot showering the once bare outline of orchards. Across the hilltops thickets of tall pine trees smelt sweet and musty with the fragrance of fallen cones, and sunlight strands interlaced the woods of oak and beech trees, thick with dense glossy leaves and alive with birds. The unfamiliar cacophony of their songs and calls could be heard from dawn until dusk.

  I couldn’t believe it. Not only had I just found the fairytale city of my childhood books, I’d found the countryside for which I’d searched in vain throughout England and Western Europe. This was exactly the untouched, fabled countryside I imagined the Famous Five would have cycled through.

  Indeed, this countryside was now filled with children cycling up hill and down dale. The students lent me bikes and took me with them on their excursions. I wasn’t an adept cyclist, which perplexed them—even three-year-olds were expert cyclists here—but they generously included me in their fun and I revelled in it. If I had had to leave and return to Australia right then, I would have been satisfied, that aching unmet need of 1989 now fulfilled.

  I also walked a great deal on my own, after school and on weekends, exploring the woodlands and copses and meadows, safe in my aloneness, singing with my own joy. ‘The nature’ and I had found one another at last, after a long, frosty beginning, and it was like an overdue meeting of lovers. I couldn’t wait to get out into it every spare moment I had, soaking it up, letting its gentle touch heal and caress my arms and legs and face. My soul was restored.

  There were trips further afield too. I was invited to go with the final-year students for a week in Moravia, a region in the south. There would be swimming in the lakes and wine tasting in famous cellars buried in the hillsides.

  ‘Do you really take students for wine tasting?’ I asked Nad’a, to make sure I’d understood correctly.

  ‘Of course—is very cheap.’

  That wasn’t the point of my question but it raised my curiosity. How much? Approximately twenty cents a carafe. Marvellous! I thought, but they were still students.

  ‘Yes,’ she shrugged. ‘But our students are sixteen, seventeen or nearly eighteen and why not for them to be part of the experience?’ I explained our drinking rules back home. She thought those rules draconian.

  ‘We teachers are happy to have the camaraderie with our senior students. It makes them responsible. Soon they will be in the outside world and it prepares them.’

  I was reminded yet again of the difference between our two worlds. Sedlčany was locked in time in so many ways, yet it had both preserved the innocence of childhood for its youngsters and treated them with respect as young adults. Every day I scribbled more and more in my diary, increasingly fascinated by this new world.

  ‘Tanya, please come with my cousin and me, and we will cycle to the river this Saturday. I will take you out on my uncle’s sailing boat,’ said Pavel later that week. ‘I want to show you some history and tell you all about how I am going to America as soon as I finish gymnázium. Also, you told me you grew up riding horses. Well, my uncle has horses, and we can go there another time too.’ Pavel could always be relied on to come up with great ideas for adventures.

  It was bone-chillingly cold on the river that Saturday but exquisitely beautiful as Pavel and his young cousin navigated a little white yacht along the wide, gleaming waterway. We ate sausage and rye bread, followed by apples from Pavel’s parents’ cellar. On either side of the river, darkly wooded hills towered over the banks, and campfire smoke lazily drifted from the banks where locals were fishing. The water was smooth and reflected the triangular peaks and feathery clouds above us. Canoes
and other yachts wound their way up and back along the river and we waved and shouted ‘Ahoj!’ as they passed. As the day wore on, we saw their occupants heading back to campsites. Soft reds smudged the tips of the clouds overhead and in the water below, and all around us was absolute stillness.

  It was complete bliss.

  ‘Look here, Tanya, you now see this very big house in field in front of us? It is 300 years old. We will stop by side of river and walk to it.’

  A large house, almost overgrown with ivy and crumbling with neglect, stood alone in a grassy patch. Yet with its fading frescoes on the walls, a large entrance hall and high windows, it had evidently once been a stately home. We peered into the dust and cobwebs hanging off the cracked chandeliers and Pavel told me the story.

  ‘When the communists took over our country after the war, they sent many people to jail. Like the man who owned this house. They chopped off his finger, let him starve to forty-five kilos.’

  ‘Why?’

  Pavel explained that the communists intended to make it clear that there was no place anymore for the bourgeoisie. Property, business and money now belonged to the state, for the greater glory of the Soviet Union. Industries and businesses were nationalised, and private properties, like this one, were confiscated. The owners were tortured to ‘send the message’.

  I tried to imagine what that would be like: a rap on the door in the middle of the night, the secret police descending upon our home to take Dad away as punishment for having spent his whole life working hard to build a business and provide for his family. I shuddered at the thought of him locked away in a solitary cell, starving, minus a finger.

  Yet perhaps this man was lucky, Pavel said. In the nearby village lived an eighty-year-old woman whose husband had survived a Nazi concentration camp in Poland only to be executed by the communists on his return home to Czechoslovakia. His crime? Also for being ‘too bourgeoisie’—a term, it seemed, designed to catch anyone who did not worship Stalin and his so-called Marxist theories and the Revolution in Russia.

  Pavel stared out over the field, his face set.

  ‘That old thinking is still here, everywhere, in my country, even though former regime has gone.’

  This was becoming a familiar refrain.

  ‘If you want money or want to build a better life, Tanya, there is still shame about that. People gossip, say bad things. They have been—how you say—indoctrinated so long to think it is wrong. It is why I must learn the good English and get out.’

  We walked back to the yacht and he hoisted the sail. ‘I want to start somewhere new. Travel to America and make money where it is good to do so.’

  Those paradoxes again. The East and the West were back-to-front in so many ways, and not just regarding the location of boots and bonnets in cars. The Czech shame of which Pavel spoke was a reference to all that the West held sacrosanct—free commerce and trade, personal wealth, financial freedom—while shame in the West was all about the personal freedoms that the Czechs considered normální.

  If one took these differences to their logical conclusions, they were both a farce. What was so-called right and what was so-called wrong were simply determined by which side of the Iron Curtain you were born on, or on which side of the globe, or the equator . . . or who was in power, where and when.

  Absurd.

  It was also the great thing about travel. You could take the views that you had grown up with and tip them upside down, looking at them in a different way, through a different prism. You could come to realise that life was not black and white—as most of us are brought up to believe—but much more complex than that.

  I reflected on Pavel’s bravery. He might not find the streets of America paved with gold but he’d have a damn good try.

  Pavel told me more stories of the history of his country. It was difficult to get the stories out of older people; mostly they didn’t want to talk about it. But Pavel was open and as keen to teach me as I was to learn. Studying Modern European History with Mrs Howe in Year 11 was an entirely different experience to hearing it live, especially from someone whose country had been so affected and traumatised during the twentieth century. Pavel made it clear it wasn’t just the communists who had caused great trauma. There had been many occupiers prior to that time.

  The Czech Republic’s location seemed to be its major problem. Being situated in the geographical centre of Europe without natural borders (like mountains or a sea or a port) and without a large, fierce army, made the region a natural and easy target for aggressive predators. For centuries the Kingdom of Bohemia was controlled by the Holy Roman Empire; then by the seventeenth century it was controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg empire. After World War I and the collapse of the empire, independent Czechoslovakia was born to much celebration. For twenty precious years, literature, music and political debate flourished.

  Nazi Germany, however, changed all that. They marched in with their hobnailed boots and tanks to occupy the country prior to and during World War II and did their best to wipe out all the Czech Jews and anyone else they didn’t like.

  Pavel mentioned the name of a village close to Sedlčany.

  ‘When the Nazi soldiers arrived into those villages, young boys, much younger than me, were forced to dig graves for their parents. They had to watch as their parents were shot, then put the bodies in the graves. They were loaded into trucks for Polish concentration camp. Most did not return. That village is filled with headstones and sadness that cannot be cured.’

  As I was coming to terms with that, he added, ‘There is one Czech village called Lidice that the Nazis totally destroyed. They killed everyone and burnt the town and buried it so it did not exist anymore. The Nazis even took the name of the town off the Czechoslovakian map.’

  Then he told me about Terezín, a town that the Nazis turned into a concentration camp. ‘More than 200,000 people were sent there. Nearly three-quarters died from terrible conditions, hunger, torture. If you visit, you can still see some children’s drawings. The children drew of the life around them. It is very’—he paused, tilted his head—‘special. Today we can be thankful many of these pictures survived even if the children and their parents did not.’

  I wondered how people could grow up with these layers of atrocity without being affected. I supposed the answer was that they grew up anyway, and the atrocities did affect them. The silent, closed faces of the people in Sedlčany reflected lives that had known more oppression, grief, terror and sorrow than someone like me could ever imagine.

  It occurred to me that the history of oppression of this country must be one of the reasons the Czechs celebrated their ‘nature’, as they called it, so intensely and held onto their culture so proudly. When so much else was taken away from them, the essence of their souls was still represented in those lovely things, embodying what it meant to them to be Czech.

  I knew I’d soon have to decide what to do once the school term ended. The teachers had kindly invited me to stay on for the next term and I was thrilled at their faith in me. I loved my students and felt there was so much more I could do in my role to help them grow in their knowledge and use of English. There was also a great deal more I could learn from the students; unlike the adults, they were neither closed nor intimidated by speaking out on anything in which they were interested. My hand could barely keep up with my thoughts each night as I recorded all I learnt in my diary.

  Yet, like a mythical siren, Prague called through my dreams.

  Míša and Jarda had reiterated the greater possibilities that existed in Prague and Karel had gallantly offered to assist. It was an intoxicating thought. Not only would there be the chance to speak more English, but perhaps I could carve out a life in that fairytale city—and, I had to admit, be closer to Karel. While I’d only met him once, I’d seen something in his eyes that I knew I wanted to connect with further.

  It was a struggle to decide on the right thing to do.

  Sedlčany now held my heart in a way I�
��d never expected. And I didn’t know anyone in Prague apart from Karel, and had nowhere to stay and no job to go to. Even Karel admitted he had no teaching contacts there, nor did he know of any English-language schools.

  I decided to wait until the Šumava weekend before making my mind up.

  15

  Šumava weekend

  The roads to Šumava were lined with pastel-coloured statues of saints where one could rest and pray, and wave down a bus if needed. But I was nestled inside Míša’s little car with one of his colleagues, Pepík, and spent most of the trip to the mountains gazing, enraptured, at the spring scenery, and the real home of fairytales.

  Little roads off to the sides were marked with wooden signposts, their squiggly words seemingly designed for fairy folk and leprechauns. We passed through villages where craggy men in peaked caps presided over clip-clopping horses and carts. Tumbledown stone houses of faded yellow were tucked along narrow, twisting streets, and blue chimney smoke curled high into the sky.

  In my excitement I talked to Míša non-stop. It was such a relief to speak quickly in English again, without having to stop to explain words. I suspected Pepík, who did not speak English, found it a much longer trip than I did.

  At lunchtime we stopped at a tiny wooden hospoda at the foot of the mountains. It was smoky and filled with old men drinking beer. Deer antlers and old paintings of Czech hunts lined the walls. It also smelt a lot like drains. After the obligatory řízek and pivo, I looked around for the ‘Ladies WC’. I couldn’t find it so asked Míša for help.

  He grinned and pointed to a door with a picture of a man in a cap. ‘You go in there.’