Against the Flow

by Tom Fort

  Another road wound north out of Litvinov towards the border with East Germany. At first, as it climbed, it turned this way and that through luxuriant woods of oak, beech and sycamore, and you could fool yourself that you were getting away from the worst of it. Then the deciduous belt gave way to the coniferous forests that have cloaked these mountains – to the Germans the Erzgebirge, to the Czechs the Krušné Hore – through the ages.

  A pox was rampant here, devouring and destroying. Whole hillsides of trees were dead. Pale grey skeletons, trunks mottled with lichen and ivy, stood in lines among their fallen comrades. In some places the tops of the firs and the tips of the branches still showed green, but the leprous grey was advancing. Efforts had been made to clear some of the casualties and plant new species, in particular Canadian spruce said to be resistant to the acid rain and infestations of bark beetle that came with it. A few plantations, protected from the prevailing winds, seemed to have escaped the plague. But overall, silence and death reigned over the sick forest.

  The Kroupas – Tomáš, his wife Jarka, and a chubby son, aged two, also called Tomáš – lived in a first-floor flat at 821 Lenin Street, Litvinov. The balcony looked out over the Czechoslovak–Soviet Friendship Petro-Chemicals Works, where Tomáš and Jarka both worked. They had met as chemistry students at university in Prague and had come to Litvinov because their contract with the state required them to do so. Tomáš came from the ancient silver mining town of Kutná Hora, where his parents still lived and to which he longed to return. But there were no jobs or flats in Kutná Hora; and as for Prague, you had to bribe your way on to the housing waiting list, and even then it could take 20 years to be offered anything.

  Litvinov guaranteed them work, somewhere to live, schooling, health care, leisure facilities. In return, the Kroupas and thousands like them agreed to put down as a deposit their health and that of their children. They knew well enough that the yellow cloud of dioxides was poisoning them, but what choice did they have? They were not Communists in any ideological sense, but the fact of Communism had been the only reality they knew.

  Now, in a matter of weeks, it had all been swept away like the stands of dead trees in the mountains. There were many for whom the revolution brought the hope of a better life. But for the Kroupas it meant bewilderment and fear. Their lives had been a wearying grind but uncomplicated, the system taking care of everything. Now the system was no more. The one improvement they could see in their lives was in the quality of TV: they could watch Havel’s banned plays, satires on Husak and the old gang, documentaries exposing the scandals of the past. Yes, they could talk, demonstrate, vote, but to what end? Who was going to save them and their jobs in a manufacturing process that had polluted half of Europe?

  Tomáš spoke decent English and was mad about fishing. He had contributed a number of highly technical articles about catching pike to the main Czechoslovak fishing magazine. At his request I had brought with me an English video about pike-fishing, which he watched intently while I tried to convey the gist of the commentary, delivered in a thick Brummie accent. He asked me a number of technical questions, which I struggled to answer to his satisfaction, and sought my opinion of leading figures in the English pike-fishing scene, none of whom I had heard of.

  By nine o’clock in the evening he and Jarka were yawning hard. Their shift began at 6.40 a.m., by which time they had deposited young Tomáš at the company crèche. There were two bedrooms in the flat, so I shared one with the boy. The walls were cardboard-thin, making every sound audible; not that there were many, inside or outside, for the whole town was soon asleep. I lay awake for two or three hours, trying to get used to the chemical smell, listening to little Tomáš snoring and snuffling and bouncing around in his cot.

  In the morning we left Litvinov to go fishing. It turned out that, because of fatherhood, lack of money and lack of transport, Tomáš had not fished at all for two years. Moreover he knew very little about fly-fishing, which was the purpose of the trip. No matter, he said. He had enlisted the help of an expert, a fellow contributor to the same angling magazine, a man with unrivalled experience of Bohemian trout streams. But first there was the small matter of my licence.

  My cheerful, ignorant assumption was that this would be no problem. I was an Englishman and would therefore be welcome – doubly so because I was an Englishman with dollars. Tomáš shook his head gloomily. He had never heard of a Westerner coming to Bohemia to fish. It may well be that none ever had. Therefore there would be no precedent. Officialdom – Czech officialdom – worked according to precedents. Therefore there would be obstacles.

  Our first port of call was Karlovy Vary, which was full of Germans calling it Carlsbad. I parked next to a dishwater-grey block of flats. As we walked away I noticed a message in rusting letters ten feet tall stuck to the top of the building:

  SOVĚTSKA ŽELEZNIČNÍ DOPRAVA POHODLNE – BEZPEČNE – VŽDY VČAS.

  Underneath was an English translation:

  SOVIET RAILWAY TRANSPORT COMFORTABLY – QUICKLY – ALWAYS IN TIME.

  Tomáš laughed angrily. ‘You have ever been in Russian train? No? You must try. Is bloody cold, bloody slow, always bloody late. Maybe it doesn’t arrive ever. That is one incredible bloody Russian lie.’

  We walked along the Tepla, the small river that snakes through the centre of town, past a monumental and remarkably hideous 1970s thermal sanatorium, with the colonnades, terraces and grand avenues of imperial Carlsbad rising on either side. Tomáš had no interest in the history of this most splendid of spa towns, nor in any of its imposing buildings and monuments. Instead he closely studied the roach and chub finning in the clear shallow stream, clearly believing that anyone who would come here to take the waters rather than fish them must have something seriously wrong with them.

  Opposite the Yuri Gagarin Colonnade and next to the exquisite Church of St Mary Magdalene were the offices of the proverbially inefficient and obstructive national tourist authority, Čedok. Tomáš’s inquiry about a licence for me prompted a decisive shake of the head from the matron behind the long polished counter. He tried again. Eventually she condescended to inform him that, on that very day, Čedok had assumed the responsibility for issuing fishing licences to foreigners. Unfortunately, in the case of Karlovy Vary – she could not, of course, speak for other outposts of the Čedok empire – the administrative transfer had not been accompanied by the necessary forms.

  We proceeded further west, to Sokolov, another sooty centre of brown coal mining, where we picked up the expert on Bohemian trout streams. His name was Standa, an abbreviation of Stanislav. He was a little older than Tomáš, a little younger than me, with a long, drooping body to go with a long, drooping black moustache and long, lank, black hair. Together the three of us went to the Čedok office in Sokolov, where an exchange identical in its essentials to that in Karlovy Vary took place. We were advised to try at Cheb, another 25 miles to the west.

  On the way to Cheb I expressed irritation and surprise at the difficulties we were encountering. Surely, I asked, that kind of bureaucratic nonsense must be on its way out? Tomáš and Standa looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘What about the changes?’ I asked. Tomáš shook his head. Čedok was Čedok. It was an institution, a feature of the landscape. It would take more than the end of Communism to get rid of Čedok.

  I had an idea. I would fish without a licence and plead ignorance if caught. Tomáš was appalled.

  ‘It is against the law,’ he said sternly. ‘You have laws in England?’

  ‘Yes, but this is fishing.’

  ‘Don’t you have laws for fishing in England?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘And don’t you obey the laws?’

  ‘Of course. Well, most of the time.’

  ‘In Bohemia fishermen obey the laws. Maybe it is different in Slovakia.’

  The forms for issuing fishing licences to foreigners had arrived in Cheb that morning. They were in German, and the completion of one was a lengthy b
usiness, beginning with the insertion of multiple carbons to provide copies in triplicate, quadruplicate, or, quite possibly, octuplicate. Each of the many sections had to be translated from German into Czech for the benefit of Tomáš, and by him into English for me. My responses then made the return journey. The process took half an hour. Tomáš then formally advised me of the main terms. I must carry the licence at all times. I must be equipped with various essentials including a net, a pair of scissors, a pair of forceps for removing the hook, and a tape measure to ascertain if a fish was big enough to kill. I must supply a written record of dates, times, locations and catches. The licence allowed me to fish on no more than two days in any one week, only on rivers designated as trout and grayling waters, in just two of the eleven districts into which Bohemia was divided for the purpose of administering fishing. The cost was $68. He must have assumed that, like everyone from the West, I was enormously rich, because he did not blink at this outrageous charge, which was not far off a month’s salary for him.

  We spent the night at Standa’s flat in Sokolov. Two or three times on the way there he opened the window and hailed policemen who were directing traffic. Tomáš explained that, until recently, Standa had been a traffic policeman himself. He was now working as a self-employed engraver. Inside the flat were a number of slabs of marble and slate awaiting inscription. Standa presented me with a glass goblet engraved with a lion rampant, which I suspected of being from unsold stock. There was, I gathered, a Mrs Standa, but she had temporarily moved out to make way for us. For supper we shared a tasty but rather small eel that Standa had caught. He and Tomáš talked incessantly about fishing, their voices mixing with blasts of rock music from the hi-fi. Standa smoked one cigarette after another, but neither of them drank alcohol. There was only tea. I daydreamed of Budvar and Pilsner Urquell.

  In the early morning we drove south to Tachov, a small town a few miles from the German border. It was grey, chilly, devoid of life or any prospect of breakfast. We stopped near a bridge next to a truck and bus depot. A brownish stream flowed sluggishly beneath it, the surface broken by several wheels and petrol drums.

  ‘Standa says we fish here,’ Tomáš said. ‘He says he has caught big grayling here.’ Standa stood smoking.

  I did not wish to seem unappreciative of my first Bohemian trout stream. ‘Here? It doesn’t look very …’ Tomáš and I stood together and stared into the dark, lifeless water.

  ‘I will tell him we don’t like to fish here.’

  Standa shrugged his shoulders.

  Standa and Tomáš, Bohemia, 1990

  We drove east out of Tachov, following the course of the stream, the Mže. The sky lightened, grey mutating into pale blue. The countryside was of the rolling variety, enormous undulating hedgeless fields bounded by distant forest, broken by an occasional copse or cluster of long, low concrete barns. We drove into a village of whitewashed, red-roofed houses. There was a track to the right that led between walls of maize to a rickety wooden bridge where we stopped.

  Tomáš and Standa took their tackle and marched off across a meadow bright with buttercups, marigolds, columbines, and other flowers in shades of blue, violet and yellow. I followed them at a distance. They walked up and down for a time, pausing frequently to consult the map that came with the licences. They examined a sign nailed to a willow, referred to the map, examined the sign again, referred to their rule booklet, discussed the matter and finally pronounced that this was a place we might legitimately fish. They took out pens and began to write in their licences. Tomáš looked up at me.

  ‘You must also write,’ he said in his schoolmasterly way. ‘The date, time, location, what we fish for.’

  ‘I’ve left my licence in the car. I’ll fill it in later.’

  Tomáš was scandalised. ‘That is not possible. You must write before fishing. The rules state this.’ He waved the booklet at me. I trudged resentfully back to the car.

  But it was not possible to be bad-tempered for long on such a day, beside such a stream. It was unrecognisable as the dull, lethargic thing we had seen in Tachov. It weaved its twisting way between willows and alders and clumps of fir trees, racing over pebbly runs, slowing into reflective pools. Where the sun struck the surface, the colour was amber. But there were dark, shaded corners and places where the sunshine was filtered by foliage into a spangle of gold. Butterflies and bees shimmered over the wildflowers.

  Standa’s reputation as the leading expert on Bohemian trout and grayling streams was significantly enhanced by a delightful morning’s fishing. After visiting the nearby town of Stříbro for a wretched lunch of fat pork, cold gravy and cold dumplings – I was sternly forbidden even one little beer because I was driving – we meandered south in accordance with Standa’s instructions. In the early evening we reached Sušice, the main centre for the Šumava Mountains, a range of green, thickly wooded hills straddling the border with Austria. At the heart of the town, once we had got through the usual sprawl of factories, depots, dreary stores and drearier apartment blocks, was a fine, spacious square, on which stood the fine, elegant Hotel Fialka, where we booked rooms for one night only.

  There was still time for more fishing. Sušice stands on the Otava, a big, strong river that flows north-east out of the hills to join the Vltava north of Písek. Standa said he knew it well. The place to go to was downstream from the town. He had caught many large grayling there. We took a rough track off the main road and crawled along it for what seemed like miles, repeatedly crunching the bottom of my car against the ridge down the middle, until the way was blocked by a fallen lime tree. This was the spot, Standa announced. I got out. There was an insistent rumbling sound in the air, and I noticed that the trees were coated in fine white dust. As we neared the river the rumbling grew louder. A limestone quarry revealed itself beyond the far bank, with a cement factory attached going at full throttle. Standa, oblivious to my scowls of hatred, set off downstream, reappearing later with a tale of a big trout lost at the net. I fished for a time to the accompaniment of limestone being excavated and crushed into powder, but saw no sign of fish life.

  The next day we struck gold. We spent the morning driving up and down the Otava valley while Standa alternated between staring intently at the map and blankly at passing landmarks, shrugging his shoulders, uttering expressions of mystification and burning cigarettes. In the end Tomáš and I tired of this, and I drove into a field next to which the Otava flowed swift and clear. It was a delicious day, too good for any more of it to be spent cooped up in the car with Standa and his diminishing store of tobacco. We fished downstream, and in almost every glide and pool we caught trout with golden flanks and big crimson and black spots. The one distraction was the regular passing through of flotillas of kayaks propelled by beefy, talkative Bohemians. I hooked a muscular female paddler on my backcast, prompting a screech of surprise, but she was all smiles when I detached the hook from her lifejacket.

  Tents and cabins appeared among the pine trees. Tomáš came over, grinning broadly, his jumble of teeth gleaming. Was this not a beautiful river? Was the fishing not excellent? It turned out that this was the very place Standa had been thinking of all along. It seemed odd to me that he could have forgotten the existence of a campsite strung out along a mile or so of river, but I said nothing. We went to the campsite office and enquired about cabins. Tomáš proposed that we all share one, but the thought of nights next to Standa and his brimming ashtray did not appeal, and I insisted on a billet for myself. The cabins were raised on legs close enough to the water to hear its cadences. Mine was deathly cold and smelled of mildewed sleeping bags.

  Setting off in the evening for more fishing, we passed the campsite canteen, where a band was playing a medley of hearty camping songs. Smoke mixed with the scent of pork grilling on a barbecue. It was my thirty-ninth birthday, and I had visions of a birthday dinner: sizzling ribs and fillet, cool beer, the three of us talking over the day and our successes. When we returned a couple of hours later, the bar w
as shut, the barbecue had been dismantled, and the members of the band were lolling around in a state of drunken hilarity while someone loaded their trumpets, horns and cornets into a van. Very reluctantly the woman in the kitchen produced three plates with a slice of cold ham, a gherkin and a stale bread roll on each. Before we could finish this feast she switched off the lights. It was a quarter past nine. We walked to our frigid quarters under a sky winking with starlight, our feet crunching on the frosted carpet of pine needles.

  TF fishing the Otava, 1990

  Despite the austere living conditions and provisions, those days beside the Otava were magical. Each night the temperature dropped well below freezing. Each morning revealed a sky of flawless blue above the spiky tops of the pines, the river flashing silver and gold in the sunlight. The fishing was consistently good, its one drawback – from my oh-so-English point of view – being its highly sociable character. Any fish caught within view of another angler, however far away, was regarded as an invitation to splash over and join in the fun. When I shouted ‘Oi’, which I did a few times, it was interpreted as the universal Bohemian greeting – ‘Ahoy’ – and met with a wave and a smile.

  On our last day I felt a pressing need for space and solitude, so I explored well upstream from the camp, passing through a little village where a church poked its steeple above a screen of beech trees. There was a bridge with a pool below where the trout were very obliging. On my way back to camp I passed an old man in a shapeless black hat, pulling a cart heaped with newly cut grass. His dog raced over to pick an argument with my waders. He called the animal off, then asked me what success I’d had. I held up my hand, raising the fingers one by one. He grinned, evidently pleased that his river had not failed me.