|
| |
| |
| |
Heart of Europe: letter pieces
Leila Rodd
‘As long ago as in the tenth century I was admired by a wealthy Arab merchant, Ibrahim Ibn Jacob, who, as the first to do so, inscribed the following words in my Visitors' Book: “Russians and other Slavs, Muslims, Jews and Turks come here”. And even at that time he mentioned the fact that my houses were made of stone joined with lime. Chroniclers expressed passionate words of praise for my stone beauty. And that the banks of my river were linked by the first stone bridge. In the fifteenth century I was designated the queen of European towns. J.W. von Goethe called me the most beautiful precious stone in the stone crown of the world. The towers of my churches and the tones of the music which first rang out in my walls will never grow old similarly as the lovers in my streets and on the banks of my river will never age. I am simply - Prague’.
(Čedok: czechoslovak travel agency pamphlet)
been trying to snow all day
with clouds hanging heavy
on those spires across the river:
(sacred spires / romantic river / magic city).
and air so sharp it pains.
Xavier's busy fixing a sheet of plastic he found somewhere onto the car radiator to help keep the engine running warm; doing it with gloves on, his breath suspended in a dense white vapour as happens with car exhaust in this below zero temperature. We're stopped in a dead-end road spelled Ǎĩcni or something by the bank of the Vlatava: ice forming on its washed-out green surface reminds me of lemon cordial frozen into lunch bottles on heat-wave school days. There's a park in front of us, not big, known apparently as the Kampa and the place for young mothers to walk their babies. The mothers must be at work. I see only two, three grandmothers and perhaps a grandfather pushing prams which date from their own generation, all wearing identical boots of black felt - wool lined ‘boots for the people’ you see everywhere at standard prices. Two men are sauntering past, hands in pockets. One fat in a russian fur hat, who goes up a staircase to a bridge. The other, younger, in light weight coat enters the Kampa: rather bleak in there with no leaves, grass worn yellow, benches too wintry to sit on; and disappears behind a stark branched tree. Way behind him silhouettes weave through the cobweb twilight beneath catholic statues on Karlův most, closed to traffic. These people, interminably crossing their famous bridge linking those steeples and domes of Malá Strana with those bridge towers of Staré Mesto, fulfill picture book fantasies: become day-dream characters from ancient times flowing in a mist more appealingly real than their modern images in synthetics. That Man who went behind that tree has started poking his bare head round its trunk, this side that side, as when playing peek-a-boo with a child. But there's no child. Another grandfather strolls into the Kampa trailing two toddlers wrapped up to
their red noses. That Man, can't take my eyes off That Man, odd, how he's behaving, That Man is spying on Xavier! Coming from behind his tree; stops; stretches out his left arm to free his wrist from its cuff; bends it; is lifting it to tell the time in slow motion to someone unseen. Or: is tightening his tie / tying his shoelaces / tickling his earlobe. Cops & Robbers. Late night TV. He must feel quite frozen being still for so long. Fur Hat appears at the top of his staircase and descends, with as much as nonchalance. They meet at the edge of the Kampa. Don't talk. Fall in together along the footpath their eyes riveted on Xavier's crouched form. It seems they haven't seen me. Their expressions are funereal. Don't stop, and only inches from Xavier. Don't look back but walk, too slowly, from sight. ‘Who?’ Xavier asked again and what they were doing and
| |
| |
when and why I hadn't said. Didn't know whether to believe me or not. Took off up that staircase. Wrong direction. Wouldn't wait. Nothing. No-one. When we get home Jaroslav'll probably grin and say we should've complained to local police, should've played tourists afraid being robbed, spoilt their game. Minutes later another fur hat, but brown, tears down a side street, panting, and is off. Three of them then. Xavier must've surprised him from his hiding place. Xavier follows but too late.
It lies on 50°05′19″ of northern latitude and 14°25′17″ of eastern longitude, i.e. in the natural heart of Europe. Height above sea level 176m up to 380m. The highest point - Bilá hora (White Mountain) - lies only 383 metres above sea level. Area: 289 sq. kilometers, it spreads out on five hills on both banks of the river Vlatava which are connected by twelve bridges. The Vlatava: length in town 23 km, greatest width 300 m. Temperature July: 19,2°C; January: 0°C. Rainfall: yearly average 487 mm. Population: 1,091,500 (31.12.1973). Accommodation facilities are divided into the following price categories according to the standard of their service: A * de Luxe, A*, B*, B and C.
(Čedok)
as compared to a night in a B*
on single beds in separated corners.
Or hot water in our hot water tap or heating during the day nor during the night. There are evening showers, to wash and get dry underclothes and hair. Mixed. Cubicles without curtains. And you have to write down your name and pay extra to be given a key for twenty-five minutes, performing balancing tricks with towel by the on-or-off heater and with toes over the ice-block space between. Other people's hair on the tiles. I meet women cleaning every morning but there's a limit to what muscles and rags can do without what ‘cleans cleaner than clean’. When we came back to our room our things had been touched. We don't use it much except for sleeping and we'd sleep in except for girls' giggling team along the corridor, for it gets light very late. After breakfast - a ritual of boiled water served in a glass with a silverplated handle from long ago, teabag and lemon slice on its saucer - we only return if in need of the toilet: with its roll of toiletpaper threaded on a chain padlocked round a pipe. Usually our beds go unmade, not this time. Though our sheets were still unchanged, the hand basin uncleaned, and our things had been touched. Our radio wasn't quite the same on the shelf. We'd covered the telephone with a cushion, now moved... we'd been told it listened, and we'd heard: ‘Please Sargeant (to us: they're not sargeants at all you know but it flatters them), please Sargeant don't cut me off it's my mother's birthday’, shouted by Jaroslav over long-distance. We looked for other possible listening devices... we'd been told someone'd found one in their ceiling light. We found nothing. Apart from labels: numbered stamped on aluminium rectangles screwed underneath every piece of furniture or fixture. We suspect a search. We could have something worth finding, books. Two nuns we met on the way warned us about bibles and prayerbooks but this is nothing subversive... there's no banned list we've been told. We also have packets of Douwe
Egberts coffee and Drum tobacco. It makes our suitcases heavy. We whispered possibilities outside our room by the worn wooden bannisters, panelled mirrors of a past elegance. Xavier walked down to the hall to ask had somebody been up to our room. A man was sitting there on well-matured mahogany, waiting. Our porter, who speaks an english faded with age and disuse, wasn't on duty. Of pre-war politeness, he's the only one who understands us. When we'd arrived late at night we hadn't booked, couldn't guarantee a departure date: not booking's not normal, hotels claim to be full in the middle of January; in the country we'd spent a russian-novel night on a railway station; in the city in a tourist office upon enquiries about hotels a uniform had appeared with a notebook to copy down all details, so we'd got on a tram - even a night in the car in the snow is preferable for the freedom of it. Our soft-eyed porter hadn't minded, had left blanks in his ink writing in filling-in his forms, and we'd laughed our relief into the lift after he closed us and our luggage in with a ‘Cheerio’ and a key to a room. Xavier wasted his time on the german-speaking porter who's a defensive look in his eye for us. He wouldn't understand. Much later, when we check-out but have to come back he'll know nothing, either, about my norwegian greasy-wool
| |
| |
socks left drying or of our soapbox forgotten in a shower with a film inside (for somewhere to put it): Xavier posing with aluminium hammer-and-sickles with red stars and ribbons in the snow. And even later we'll remember a man sitting on matured mahogany, waiting; and a man, that last time, leafing a telephone book by the counter.
Czech food is as pithy and rich as Czech humour. Slovak food manifests the sparkle of the csárdás and the lively temperament of the Slovaks. Catering establishments are classified according to their quality, furnishings, size, standard and, naturally, prices into five groups: select, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th. Outstanding among which are establishments in the select and 1st groups. The standard of their interior is very high, food is served mainly on silver and drinks prevailingly in cut or quality blown glass and thin-walled or medium thick china is used. There is practically no language problem in the catering establishments in the select and 1st groups where the staff has a knowledge of Russian and German, English and French - usually in this order and often in these combinations. The price you will be asked to pay does not include a tip or service charge. The staff has no automatic right to a tip, but if you wish to express your extraordinary satisfaction you may give one.
(Čedok)
reminiscent of childhood matinées:
‘What was on at the pictures Lynette pet?’
between the movietone news and interval
spooky / english / black & white
or rather tones of grey invisibility
patches of wet london footpath, iron railings
footsteps hurrying into deadened sound
others, slow and heavy, the bobby on his beat
‘Out late, Sir. Lucky to see your feet
A whistle pierces the fog.
Somewhere a tram screeches along its slippery tracks. On the other side of the road a gaslight shimmers blue as we step out onto rain moist cobbles to find a place to eat. A coatless man is standing there, smoking. We walk a bit, talk a bit. Xavier runs back as though something is forgotten. The cigarette drops and goes out. I move quietly away. The man, not smoking now, deliberates before also rushing inside. Underneath the lamp post the pink patterned pavement glistens: river pebbles in sun filtered water or autumn colours floating in a puddle. That Man and Fur Hat hurry up the hill, see me see them, slacken; I turn towards them, our hotel in between, they almost stop but continue and pass and go on up. Xavier rejoins me, alone. Alone we set off again. Not always. A woman and a men holding arms enter an exhibition of scenographists ahead of us and linger with us beside the best, Svoboda; I'm surprised by the woman and try to get close to her reaction to me and therefore they're already gone when we leave. In an ice-cream parlour at a table opposite a sad small man with his hat still on sits and stares without any ice-cream. We don't always see the same: some person pacing nearby corners, car chases, a control of who's meeting whom at the theatre. Imagined or real. We study faces. ‘Paranoia?’, we ask ourselves eating dinner of brown sauce poured on a slice or two of meat and dumplings, what we get everytime no matter how we try our dictionary. The grams of the meat are marked on the menu. Some order only dumplings with their brown sauce. Some have potatoes instead. These places to eat are not easy to find till you learn to recognise a thick curtain in an entrance. We can sit for hours after the cream cakes stay tasteless-sweet on our tongues, it's warm here to do things like read or write. Xavier has us play amongst crumbs on the white tablecloth a game of having been picked-up because at least part of what we think we see we must see correctly.
Through lace curtains and runnels of condensation we can see a young man in blue overalls at the open door of a van - what's he doing there for so long in the dark with his tools? ‘Don't say anything... just what you have to... might be searched, body search, naked, have heard they look up inside you too... what've we got to hide?’. We frighten ourselves a little. ‘Isn't that what they're trying to do with their hide-and-seek games?’. Other friends will think so yet Jaroslav will say no that's theitr technique, they're stupid, and have no connection with a computer like the one in Wiesbaden. There are no mirrors, walkie-talkie security, video in their supermarkets. But here there is one thing, Siberia: it's their spook of fear their black-and-white horror which, however irrational, persists into this restaurant where it hushes talk over the one drink of
| |
| |
the evening. At school we were told by the nuns about classrooms where children's eardrums were burst and their nun taken away so they couldn't hear god's word; and about nuns who swept up with their tongues eucharists spilled on altar steps after their priest was taken away; and there was that Hungarian girl we had to be kind to in our class. Committed people will tell us they won't do it - media people/university people/political people - bring books in, printed words. ‘They put you in gaol of spotting planes... they catch you for currency dealings... probably CIA funded anyway...’. We listened to those who told us, ‘as a tourist there's nothing to fear.’ We do get stomach contractions from borders and from, for example, this man here outside the window with his open van. We'll hand in our numbers to be helped on with our coats and scarves and hats, we'll leave a tip - another leftover custom. Go and pause by the man with the van to pull on our gloves and shiver a bit. He'll close his van with his reddened hands. It'll be a pity to double back on him to empty our pockets into a litterbin, perhaps there'll be someone else to walk with us.
SOCIALIST PRAGUE
celebrates its First of May and Liberty
centre of the victory won by the workers
Metropolis of the Socialist Republic
Capital of the Federated State of the
celebrates for the thirtieth time its First of
(Čedok)
We are a socialist opposition.
We believe in a socialism
Notes taken by Xavier often contain these comments. ‘It is difficult for you from the west to understand. We have always been compromisers, we have no choice, we do not go for the dramatic solution. Our position is sad but it is our temperament to survive.’ These people we visit mourn their spring, hibernate in their homes. Often all day now their jobs are taken away. Quietly, in carpeted comfort between their police raided book-lined walls. ‘Books are precious. A book we cherish, conceal, circulate with the loving trust of a mother for a surviving child.’ Younger ones live in apartments with bookshelves built from bricks and wooden planks; pottery mugs; vitamin C and sambal in the kitchen. One woman has chosen coca-cola: replicas of advertisements painted on mirrors; ashtrays, aprons, t-shirts, trays; upturned crates for chairs; a yo-yo; ‘things-go-better’ with smiles all over her walls. In Hamburg a student had chosen che-guevara. They tell us we each have a rich father and live in more luxury - though we live in less - and that we have no conflicts between career and children. Our problems of unemployment, women's liberation, multi-nationals, are not serious. Theirs is real, freedom. And food - a bottle of vodka to the butcher for meat for the family. Would they want that coffee or tobacco we'd not yet offered, eating their paprika cream cheese spread on homemade bread and drinking their aromatic tea? They never eat, amazed we come all the way from Australia, tell us about a person gaoled for two years on suspicion of reading books similar to those we give. ‘Things are not as bad as they seem, yet worse.’ We sit on solid furniture, admire original paintings and antiques. The daughter speaks perfect english. The mother, accountant/painter/teacher, uses german. The son barred from higher study is confident. The husband, historian/sociologist/writer, cleans windows. Their grand-aunt born during the
austro-hungarian empire cooks dinner while we are told their dates: Tenth century ruler Wenceslaus I, murdered on the orders of his brother for spreading christianity, is the nation's first martyr; in 1415 the first great protestant reformer and nationalist, Jan Huss, is burned at the stake as a heretic; on March 10, 1948 foreign minister Jan Masaryk, son of the founder of the Czechoslovak Republic, is found dead, a victim of a fall from the window of his office; in january, 1969 a young man, Jan Palach, burns himself to death on Wenceslaus Square to protest the occupation. They don't worry that we are
| |
| |
followed, we are followed because they are followed constantly. A car parked outside their house can conceal a microphone. We are told their New Year's Eve story: how they went to the house of a friend for a party; how most guests were followed; how around midnight they saw from the windows those men grouped and stamping under a tree watching the house so invited them into the alcoholic warmth, but were refused so offered bottles of champagne instead; and how in the early frosted hours those men were waiting to walk them each home through the snow. ‘We are freer than before, we don't have to attend to marches and meetings anymore.’ Not many people speak with them. There is gossip, pessimistic, and rumours. An unknown ring on their bell caused panic, then shame. The contents of a briefcase, that had taken so long to fetch half an hour earlier, were secreted from the room before the door opened to a neighbour. ‘Every member of our family as well as close friends has a special ring, a code, one two or three fast or slow.’ There are memories that bring tears prickling the eyelids or a lump to the throat or a tingling down the spine, this is one. Another, a replayed broadcast by the BBC of an underground radio relaying a woman's voice pleading for truth above tank guns vying with the national anthem in Wenceslaus Square. It had snowed at last when we left, our footsteps crunching the icing-sugar consistency were the only tracks to our car. Driving off, Xavier skidded his wheels in delight.
One sunny day during the late summer of '68 a pedestrian who had been walking peaceably along a tree-shaded street, came charging into a local police station and rushing towards the policeman sitting at the desk, shouted:
‘Iwasjustwalkingalongthestreetandtwoswisssoldierscameupbehindmeandsnatchedmyrussianwatchoffmywrist’. Policeman: ‘Now, now. Take it easy, just calm down a minute, and then say it again, slowly.’ Pedestrian: ‘Iwasjust... walkingalongthestreet... whenthesetwoswisssoldiers... cameandtookmyrussianwatch’.
Policeman: ‘You mean two russian soldiers took your swiss watch.’
Pedestrian: ‘You said it, not me.’
(Joke)
Snowman =
human figure
formed from mass of snow
set up by children etc.
and of brief span.
We built him in the quiet of night, rolled balls gathering the fluffy stuff off the grass. Of the Kampa. Deserted. The glow from its gaslights sparkling falling flakes into a Snow Queen's dress. Xavier conceived his face. He was short, stout, leaned precariously forwards and we gave him that face:
| |
| |
melancholic mouth curved wrong way down; deep-set mud for sad eyes; a blob for a nose; too low ears; and gravity pulled at his jowls. Trepidation flickered across that face while with numb hands we shaped him, down and out in body and soul, shivering in the cotton-wool silence. Our snowman was afraid of the shadows. ‘Sartre even deals with their recurring tragedy’, we voiced our thoughts, ‘his Reprieve captures its essence of alternating hope and betrayal’. Some mystery is lost, though, experiencing the reality of inspiration: van Gogh's green tree trunks are alive-and-well, grown over with living lichen in the forests of Holland... afternoon rays of autumn sun on northern Italian hills are the Great Masters' light from Heaven... Scandinavia's winter funerals become Bergman's portentous openings... and captive princesses let down their hair from fairy-tale turrets to be found in this city. ‘And those war time films’, we went on, ‘from long ago, remember, the first or the second. Someone always having to flee, usually a son; a mother at the kitchen door of a farm house weeping into her apron; a gril with her scarf tied under her chin smiling bravely to cheer a disappearing train.’ We put our man of snow up opposite a naked female carved emotively in stone. The parks are scattered with such sculptures evoking romance, recalling those couples we've seen on bridges or in doorways kissing their goodnights or he stroking her cheek for long after the coffee stains have set in their cups. ‘Sex is a good indication of liberalisation; now we're back to the waist stage, in '68 we had full nudity’, they tell us. There are no bare breasts nor pubic hairs on newspaper stands. No nudity nor sex in those two performances we saw. Na Zábradlí (Theatre on the Balcony) showed us Ladislav Fialka's pantomime Loves - modern pieces on the old
theme aided by innovative settings: pantomime: = dramatic entertainment usually based on fairy-tale, with singing, dancing, clowning, topical jokes, transformation scene, and stock roles. ‘Some of us play one personality for public life, another for private; this does not cause schizophrenia because we know it is a game, because our private connections, our trust of our friends, is so strong that we can survive the game’, they tell us. Laterna Magica (Magic Lantern Theatre) mutely performed Love In The Colours Of A Carnival - harlequins and pierrots, painted faces, melodrama under strobe lights with technological backdrop: mime = simple farcical drama marked by mimicry with gestures and usually without words. Their plays reflect their life. Wenceslas Square after work when the city is opaque yet is beautiful in its iciness which suits - summer should be offensive to its mood; people going home with not many words, dream drifters past light for translucent display, jewels fascinating most: puppet = figure, usually small, representing human being and moved by various means as entertainment. Our snowman froze alone all night. Next morning we went to photograph him but the children had got there first, their curious play had made his chin sink almost to his belly and our efforts to raise that unfortunate face ended in his falling flat on it. So we walked for a last photo to the waterwheel iced into its stream. And I bought from the glass case on the reception desk, as we paid our bill, a smiling doll of green felt swinging on a black thread: a Good Soldier ˚vejk.
|
|
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd