Alice to Prague

by Tanya Heaslip

  ‘Er, no, Táničko . . . it does not sound nice for the beer. Not at all.’

  The following weekend I left Prosek and headed to meet Irena and her crowd of ‘hashers’. It was a two-hour journey from Prague by bus and train, with lots of stops and starts en route. I arrived weary and overheated. The last of my goodwill evaporated completely as I took in a large and very excitable group gathered on the edge of the platform.

  I expected these were the HHH reps; if so, this was no amateur’s picnic. Where were the gentle walkers and overweight beer-drinkers I was expecting? Most in the crowd were lean and fit and engaging in an assortment of stretching exercises. In the chilly afternoon air, their breath hovered in clouds. The majority had muscular runner’s legs. Almost all were wearing proper running gear: bright, skin-tight lycra tops and leggings with top-quality running shoes. I looked down at my own dilapidated and muddy sandshoes, not to mention my unfashionable brown jogging bottoms and thick pink parka. My stomach turned over as I realised how embarrassing I looked.

  But before I could scuttle back on the train, Irena spotted me and strode over. She was elegantly attired in a matching outfit of emerald green lycra.

  ‘You made it. Excellent!’ she breezed. ‘We’re about to head off. Join in as best you can. Bring your business cards?’

  I shoved my hand into my pocket and wriggled it around. There was only empty space inside. My stomach twisted. ‘Er . . .’

  Irena didn’t have time to wait for such inefficiencies. ‘I’ll be at the front as one of the leaders, but if you have any problems, you can tell me when we stop for beer. We’ll stop quite often.’

  She was interrupted by a tall, strapping German of indeterminate age and bulging biceps blowing a horn and shouting: ‘So! I am Heinz. We will go. You must all have map. We will make five beer stops in this run. You all know the penalty for failure to drink beer at each stop. On, on!’

  I looked around anxiously. My clothes didn’t match. I’d forgotten my business cards. I didn’t have a map. I didn’t know what the penalties were. I was certainly unable to drink beer at five pivo stops.

  But before I could find a map—or, better still, a strategy for escape—the German blew his horn again and about forty people tore off after him. This was a lot like a hunt and we were a mix of horses, dogs and fox.

  The next hour was a blur. I tried to keep up with the stragglers of the group and follow the distant shouts of ‘On, on!’ as Heinz and Irena led us up hill and down dale through the forest behind the railway station. Irena was right—the forest was beautiful, a mass of bright gold flecked with crimson and brown. As I ran and panted and sucked in snatches of sharp, clean pine-scented air, I told myself, through agonised breaths, to enjoy it. Tall conifers stretched high overhead and their leaves made a soft carpet underfoot for the runners. We cut across steep rocky slopes and then downhill towards a series of rushing, crystal-clear streams, pounded across several narrow footbridges, and puffed up the hills on the other side only to do it all again. Yes, it was truly beautiful and I would never, ever have found this place alone.

  I thought of the times I used to run from our homestead to the nearby water bore. I remembered a bowl of blue sky that ringed a flat red landscape, the air turning my skin crackly dry, straggly mulgas lining the low hills and thick dust caking my running shoes. The bore windmill always creaked as it turned slowly in the wind, crows cawing overhead.

  Back then I could never have imagined being able to run in pristine beauty like this—in soft greenery, with water everywhere. But while I knew I should be enjoying it more than I was, it was clear that neither my jogs back home nor those around Prosek were sufficient preparation for running with the HHH, and I was struggling.

  Heaving and wheezing, I ended up as one of the last runners trailing behind the others; for all I knew, the walkers were ahead of me too. It was hard to keep focused on the glorious surrounds when my only focus was making it to the finishing line.

  After twenty minutes or so I clambered over a rise towards a little wooden hut and staggered to a halt. I hacked and breathed and sucked in air. A stitch in my side threatened to cripple me. I thought I might just stay there and die. Then I lifted my eyes to the most bizarre sight imaginable.

  All around the hut, grown men and women were downing litre jugs of pivo, splashing beer all over themselves (despite the chilled afternoon air), shouting and challenging one another, throwing down empty jugs as soon as they were finished and racing off again, roaring, ‘On, on!’

  Irena was fitting in a few short stretches as I came to a ragged halt. ‘This is a great way to keep warm, isn’t it?’ she called out. ‘And then, just when you need it, the beer cools you down! See you at the next stop!’ She waved gaily and dashed off.

  A stout Czech man was distributing the beer in the little hut. He passed me a huge glass jug frothing over with amber liquid. I staggered under its weight. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a small group watching. Someone jotted down notes on a small writing pad. Dear God—were they the modern-day hashing equivalent of the secret police?

  The pressure was on. I heaved the glass up to my lips but couldn’t manage any more than two gulps. The note-taker shook his head at this cardinal sin, wrote something rapidly, tucked his pad away and jogged off. I put the jug down quickly, thanked the man in the hut and ran after the note-taker, hoping he’d already forgotten me.

  As the hour wore on, the back of my legs burnt with lactic acid and my lungs were ready to burst. Each pivo stop offered short-lived relief but I couldn’t manage any more than a few sips each time. Irena, who threw back pivo jugs with the best of them, shouted a warning at me as she sprinted past: ‘You may be called upon at the end to scull a jug if you can’t do better than that, my dear!’

  Alarmed, I put on a spurt for the last leg of the hash and finally staggered across the finishing line in a blur of nausea and pain. I collapsed at the bottom of a nearby tree.

  The rest of the runners swarmed backwards and forwards, slapping each other’s backs and cheering. The winners had to scull large jugs of beer, as did the losers; everyone appeared to take it in their stride, with much hooting and laughing. I remained in a heap at a distance, hoping the note-taker had forgotten me.

  Irena, though, had not.

  ‘Well then!’ she shouted cheerfully, extracting herself from a gaggle of men and women and jogging towards me. She shoved her business cards into her running belt as she did so. ‘How did you like it then?’

  ‘Fabulous, thank you!’ I wheezed, struggling to breathe.

  ‘Excellent!’ said Irena happily, then called back to me as she jogged off towards another group. ‘Luckily you weren’t forced to scull this time. But next time we won’t be as easy on you!’

  Hashing the Czech way was clearly an acquired skill and possibly required Czech genes. I did go with Irena whenever I could, though, spurred on by my desperation to find work and spend time with this extraordinary woman. I hoped some of her brilliance and success might rub off on me. It didn’t, although hashing did give me the chance to find hidden pockets of magical countryside around Prague I would never have discovered on my own.

  And I never did manage to hand out a business card.

  26

  Love is for nothing (part 2)

  A week later, Radka was having more boyfriend trouble.

  ‘It is too much for me to survive,’ Karel said, shaking his head after trying without success to talk to his daughter. ‘Things should be light, easy—not with problems at her age.’

  From my bitter experience I knew that age was irrelevant to whether love was easy or not. Being younger often made it harder. But I’d been waiting for the opportunity to raise the ‘love is for nothing’ issue and decided this was as good a time as any. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Karel, what’s so wrong with hoping for love?’

  I realised this was dangerous territory but I wanted to draw out Karel’s real concerns. If I knew what they were, I could work ou
t how to address them. Surely he didn’t really mean ‘love is for nothing’. How could he? That was not normální. And for the first time in a long time, I had something riding on this: my Qantas ticket deadline, looming in late March. It was just over four months away.

  ‘Love?’ Karel’s eyes turned wide with shock, as though I’d asked him what was so wrong with life under Stalin. ‘Do we have to go through this again?’

  ‘Well, why don’t you believe in it?’ I persisted.

  For a moment I thought Karel might have a heart attack. He paced around, spluttering. ‘You are beautiful flower, Táničko, and you live in a daydream. I need to tell you: there is no “happy ever after” for love, except in fairytales.’

  I was momentarily miffed. Why couldn’t fairytales be real? Growing up, I’d been told that the full version of Tanya—Tatiana—meant ‘fairy princess’ in Russian. Tatiana was also a Fairy Queen in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fairytales could be as real as you wanted them to be, dammit. I’d also staked a great deal of my life’s hopes and dreams on finding love and wasn’t letting this drop.

  ‘That’s not true!’ I said defensively. ‘Lots of people around the world believe in love.’

  Karel breathed heavily. ‘I need not to keep enduring this conversation, so I will tell you why I do not believe in it.’

  He folded his arms, his voice grave. ‘I once loved very much, very deeply, my wife.’

  What?!

  In my wildest nightmares, I’d not anticipated a response involving his wife.

  ‘I collected from her the “down” . . . the special covering on a butterfly . . . that is Czech expression for when we find and take a true love. We take that special covering from the butterfly and it becomes our own.’

  Butterfly ‘down’?

  ‘But eventually my wife left me. I took my girls and raised them myself. It has taken me and my girls many years to recover from this. Yes, I have had other women, as you know, but I said I would never let that hurt happen to me again.’

  Oh my God.

  ‘The only thing that matters is some nice friendship. That is what I want with you. It means no one gets hurt.’

  This was worse than what I’d expected—far, far worse. I wanted the floor to swallow me up; I wanted to catch that Qantas flight out of there tomorrow morning. I turned away, tears welling, ashamed at myself and my stupidity. I’d ignored the first rule of cross-examination: don’t ask a question unless you know the answer.

  Karel pressed on. ‘Czech friendship is the one thing that lasts forever. It is the highest of all feelings between people because it does not die or get broken.’

  I remembered Pavel saying this to me in Sedlčany. Czech friendship was so special and important it had its own name—přítel or přátelství.

  But I didn’t want some noble Czech friendship with Karel. I had fallen in love with him and I wanted him to love me back. I wanted more than a flaky holiday romance, a happy fling. I wanted a relationship with him that could grow and mean something, where we were on the ‘same board’, like Anne and Dickie.

  True, I’d not wanted this before. But I’d never met anyone like Karel before. I’d never lived anywhere like Prague before. I’d never felt so alive and happy before. For the first time I’d met someone with whom I felt free to be who I truly was, and I felt empowered by the possibilities and potential of a future life with him.

  I pressed the tears back into my eyes, wanting to curl up and die.

  He went on, relentlessly, far beyond what I’d intended, perhaps reading my mind.

  ‘Táničko, if I love you, I will marry you and have children with you here—and then one day you will leave me and return to Australia. It is normální. Then I will be broken again. Completely. And I will never recover.’

  ‘You’ll never recover?’ I heard my anguished voice as though from a distance.

  ‘The truth is, one day you will have husband your own age and children in Australia—yes, I know you will, because your family is there, you have good career there, and the chance for this so-called love you talk about. That is normální.’

  Finally, my voice came—rushed denials and heated words—but he put his fingers to my lips. His voice was weary. ‘You can stay with me forever if you want. I’ve told you before now. But that is your choice. This is the highest thing that I can do for you. Do you want to keep arguing with me?’

  The following weekend included a public holiday so I went away by bus with Headmistress Anne and Czech-English lawyer Vera.

  Anne had suggested a girls’ long weekend in the beautiful medieval town český Krumlov and I couldn’t take up her offer fast enough.

  I needed time apart from Karel to tend to my wounded soul and regain my sense of self. As we were heading somewhere new, it would be a distraction from the stark realisation confronting me. I couldn’t have what I wanted with Karel and I was a fool.

  Perhaps if I had that special butterfly down, things might be different, and Karel would, could, love me. I’d seen a photograph of his former wife. She was beautiful, just like Radka—slim waist, dark hair, high cheekbones. I couldn’t even begin to compare, with my small, dumpy Celtic genes. Instead, my hopes of finding love with Karel were dashed—which, according to him, was the inevitable consequence of love anyway.

  Once with the girls, I shared my sorry tale with them. And over mulled wine they were both sympathetic and supportive. God, I loved my girlfriends.

  The weekend was fun and I jammed my despair down inside me, not wanting to miss out on the new adventure, and nodded in agreement when they reassured me that I just needed to meet the right person and everything would fall into place. At night I breathed through the hot, heavy ache in my heart and thought sadly that Radka and I weren’t that different after all.

  At our prompting, Anne also filled us in on her letters to and from Dickie. When she said, ‘He’s coming back to Prague to see me’, with her cheeks pink, eyes bright, I was thrilled for her but wanted to cry for myself. After all, that was what real love looked like, wasn’t it?

  I was so thankful to have these girlfriends. I reminded myself that it was one of the best things about boarding school. Those years had taught me about the beauty of friendships between girls and women and I treasured my connections with these two.

  What lay ahead was unknown. The worst-case scenario was surviving four more months, then flying home to forget all about Karel, my hopes and my dreams.

  I thought about a recent conversation with Dr Holub. When I’d told him of my attempts to find more work in Prague he’d looked sad. ‘I am very sorry to tell you this, Tanya. This will not be possible because you are not Czech.’

  ‘But I’m learning Czech, I’m trying really hard, I’m studying Czech, I could be a real help to the Ministry and the courts. Surely anything is possible?’

  He’d looked even sadder. ‘Not in our country. Surely our history should tell you that.’ He sighed. ‘You must return to Australia if you wish to work in law.’

  My heart had sunk. Was this payback for the West’s betrayals? Why were the Czechs so wretchedly pessimistic? But I hadn’t lived through two world wars and communism like Dr Holub had, where virtually no dreams had come true, ever.

  With a jolt, I remembered him saying, ‘We just want our country back to ourselves.’

  27

  A toilet in the kitchen

  Arriving back at Prosek after my long weekend away in český Krumlov, I opened the front door and stopped, stunned.

  The interior walls of the apartment were gone.

  The kitchen, living room, toilet and bathroom had been turned into a one-room building site.

  Remnants of walls were lying in untidy, chaotic piles all over the cramped space. Ugly grey pipes, once well-hidden, now crawled visibly over the floor, ceiling and walls. It was like a basement boiler room that had been freshly bombed.

  The only rooms left standing were the two small bedrooms at the back.

  And there was dust,
dust, dust everywhere.

  Not a fine layer, but thick, choking wads of dust—over the pillows, the ancient lounge suite, the lino floor and carpets, the kitchen sink and rusty stove, the bathroom cabinets, the old television and the ubiquitous long Czech living room dresser filled with glassware. The bedrooms hadn’t escaped either: the bed linen, duvets and pillows were all smothered in dust. Every inch of space in the tiny apartment was littered with hammers, nails, drills and buckets. Rows of bricks were stacked in each available corner, as were pieces of timber of all sizes and shapes. The furniture had been moved, stacked high, and anything with a level surface had become a workbench.

  And, most astonishing of all, the bathroom and toilet were now the centrepieces in this one-room construction site. Without walls around them, they were barely a metre in any direction from whatever else was left standing—the kitchen stove and cupboards, the lounge suite and the bedroom doors. They brazenly boasted a 360-degree view of the entire apartment.

  I dropped my backpack, speechless.

  Then I saw Karel. Standing in the bath, presumably because there was nowhere else to stand, he was caked in dust and hammering at some pipes. A tape measure was draped around his neck; one hand held a power tool, the other a beer. He was wearing grey baggy trousers that were filthy and held up with ancient braces. His reading glasses were coated in dust and pushed high on his head, and there were huge dark rings under his eyes.

  ‘Karel, what is going on?’

  ‘Ah yes . . . Táničko,’ he said distractedly. ‘I have one reconstruction project that has been delayed so I decided to take this time to renovate our apartment. As you know, I have wanted to do it for a long time and now seems good opportunity.’

  ‘Now? For how long?’

  ‘Perhaps one month.’

  ‘You must be joking! How can we live and sleep in all this . . . this . . . dust? And what about cooking? Privacy?’ I choked on the last two words. ‘The bath? The toilet?’