Me, Myself And Prague: An Unreliable Guide To Bohemia 2f6jn

Rachael Weiss currently lives in Prague where she is technically the in-house writer for a hotel but, since the only thing she has to write is the website and occasional stiff letters to defaulting customers, in reality she’s the odd-jobs girl. She supplements her income by writing horoscopes for a series of obscure suburban and specialist papers and thus feels justified in describing herself as a syndicated columnist. Rachael’s greatest achievement to date is a fourth place in the New South Wales scrabble tournament. One day she hopes to master Czech scrabble. She is the author of Are We There Yet (Allen & Unwin 2005) and is currently working on her third book.

Me, Myself & PRAGUE

An unreliable guide to Bohemia

RACHAEL WEISS

First published in 2008

Copyright © Rachael Weiss 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that isters it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Weiss, Rachael, 1964– . Me, myself & Prague : an unreliable guide to bohemia.

ISBN 978 1 7411 4820 6 (pbk.)

1. Travel - Voyages and travels - Humor. 2. Prague (Czech Republic) - Description and travel.

910.4

Typeset in Australia by Bookhouse, Sydney. Printed in Australia by Mherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my father Zdenìk Weiss

and my grandparents Karel Weiss and Bohumila Weissová

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 Becoming Bohemian

Chapter 2 Beer and Potatoes

Chapter 3 Friends at Last

Chapter 4 My Grandmother’s Favourite Café

Chapter 5 Family Matters

Chapter 6 I Fall in Love with the Czechs

Chapter 7 Bribery and Corruption

Chapter 8 A Brief History of Communism

Chapter 9 A Village in South Bohemia

Chapter 10 Hiking

Chapter 11 Am I a Bohemian?

Chapter 12 Marienbad with Andy

Chapter 13 Marienbad with Andy, Part Two

Chapter 14 Losers in Love

Chapter 15 Winter

Epilogue

Prologue

At thirty-nine I took stock of my life. I am the eldest of three, with one sister and one brother. My sister is a fitness instructor, has her own dental practice and is the mother of two perfect children. My brother is a lawyer, a partner in his firm, and the father of three perfect children. Both are energetic and rich; they are a source of pride and joy to my parents. I, too, was once a source of pride and joy to my parents. I was six.

The school principal had just told my parents that tests revealed I was a gifted child. It seemed like a good thing at the time. They boasted of it to all their friends. They gazed on me with satisfied eyes; they’d known all along I was someone special and now ‘tests’, ‘scientists’, ‘people who knew these things’, had proved it. My whole world looked down on me and said, ‘Now our friends have no choice but to believe it—we got the best baby’. Shortly after this event my parents divorced, bitterly.

My brother and sister, not gifted, managed to live through the turmoil and come out the other end moderately normal. I, gifted, did not. School, university and life seemed too much for me to comprehend, to the disappointment of my parents. They still told all their friends I was gifted—everyone hung on to that one with increasing obstinacy—but my giftedness never manifested itself again. Subsequent primary and high school tests relegated me to the B stream, my mother’s lips pursing at each fresh new evidence of the teachers’ blindness and incompetence. My giftedness came for one test when I was six, then left. Such is life.

Adulthood saw no improvement. Boyfriend after useless, bottle-wielding, unemployed boyfriend came and went, the average length of each relationship about six and a half months, unless he was married, in which case the affair dragged on for years. And I seemed unable to grasp the nature of working life. I

got a lucky break straight after university where, by the simple method of choosing English as a major—since the one thing I do seem to be fitted for is reading and English required nothing more of me than that—I’d managed to . I was hired by a company of management consultants, but corporate life shredded me.

All around me thin women in spiky suits and beefy, rowing-blue men celebrated their successes in topless bars and roared and flourished. I gazed helplessly at company reports and market analyses and thought: Surely this is all a crock? A giant con? These people seemed to have invented a raft of meaningless jargon and strung it together to sound important. But I was the only one who thought so. Everyone else seemed endlessly enthusiastic. The company gave me less and less work until I fell on my own sword and resigned.

After that I had several stabs at corporate life, since that seemed to be what a white, educated, middle-class woman was supposed to do, but I failed every time. My God, those people are tough—they ate me alive. At every defeat I blamed myself: What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I make a career? In my heart of hearts I really wanted to be a writer, but I felt that that was a frivolous, self-indulgent desire, so I suppressed it, never thinking that this might be what was wrong.

My parents were less concerned about my career and more concerned about my inability to fulfil the other tasks of the white, educated, middle-class woman— getting married and having children—although they each had different ways of expressing their dissatisfaction. My mother referred to me almost exclusively as ‘Poor Rachael’ and sighed a lot, but my father was more proactive, chivvying me to get on with it: ‘A woman is a hunter, darling.’

My relationship with my parents had settled into this state of affectionate despair after many years of difficulty. Six years after my parents had divorced, we children had been taken away from our father for good. It was a long and ghastly

separation process, but by the time I was twelve it was complete—we no longer saw Dad on the weekends. It wasn’t until I was twenty-eight (possibly in preparation for turning thirty, although I can’t now) that I had gone looking for him. When Dad and I finally met up again it had been awkward at first—what do you say to a father you barely recognise? The most difficult part had been the first few months when we were ever so polite to each other. We were both relieved when, almost a year after we became re-acquainted, we had our first fight and our relationship began to feel more normal. I still enjoy the times we get snippy with each other—they seem more precious to me even than the love.

My relationship with my mother, however, swung the other way. We developed a friendly, but distant, relationship. She did not take well to my reconnection with my father. I think she feared she would lose me and up to a point she was right. As I saw more of him, I saw less of her. I guess I figured she’d had my sole attention from when I was twelve to twenty-eight, so now it was his turn. I saw my father and my stepmother every Friday night, making up for lost time.

So this, then, was my situation at thirty-nine: I didn’t have a career or goals or partner or dependents, or even white goods, but I had a few close friends and two loving, if disappointed, parents. The sum of my life seemed to me to be a pretty small thing; a life lived mostly in fear of doing what I wanted and trying to be good in the eyes of others. And then, out of the blue, a miracle happened. A publishing company put out a small book I’d written about two single women on a road trip. For the first time in my life an organisation devoted to profit thought I might be of use to them. More, they thought I might be of use to them as a writer. The words ‘Seize the Day’ kept coming to me.

The big advantage of having avoided success in life is you’ve got nothing to lose. With forty menacing, I felt an uncontrollable urge to change everything in my life. Heck, I’d published one book. Why not another? Well, why not? A searing tale of a woman whose parents divorce, bitterly, and who struggles to find her way . . .

My sister had moved to London the year before, to my mother’s eternal misery, ‘Just when I get grandchildren, she deprives me of them. What did I do to deserve that?’ As I took stock, I thought, Why shouldn’t I do the same? At first I considered going to and living in lovely, romantic Paris, eating cheese and writing my novel in a sidewalk café, but then I did my sums. My only way of earning a living in a foreign country was either teaching English or doing temp work. London, Paris, New York, none of these places would be easy on a small salary. Sydney was brutal on the poor and I saw little point in moving from one economically crushing situation to another. It was my father who suggested Prague, and when he did I immediately wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself.

My father is Czech, a refugee from the Second World War; in fact on my father’s birth certificate the birthplace is given as Bohemia. Bohemian. Me? For the first time in my life it occurred to me that I am half Bohemian. And now that I had discovered my father and got to know him, I wanted to know more. I wanted to see where this Bohemian half of me came from. Where had the grandmother I had never known lived? Who were these relatives of mine who lived in a tiny village in South Bohemia? Just how much of me came from Bohemia?

I had a small amount of money saved up and Prague was cheap. Even the Australian dollar, plunging as it was at the time, could get you a long way in Prague. I quit my job as a secretary and bought a ticket to Prague and a life as a Bohemian writer. My father was thrilled: ‘In Prague you will find a husband in three months’; my mother was devastated: ‘First your sister deserts me and now you.’ I didn’t care. I smiled at my father, hugged my mother, and left.

Suddenly, forty wasn’t looking so bad.

Chapter 1 Becoming Bohemian

When the yearning artist leaves the comfort of home and friends in Sydney to find her soul in Bohemia, she pictures herself in a gorgeous high ceiling-ed attic apartment in a converted palace right in the heart of the Old Town, overlooking the Charles Bridge, perhaps, or a busy market square. This yearning artist, however, had been persuaded to stay in her father’s flat in the suburbs: ‘Why suffer, darling? It’s right there. The whole family uses it, why shouldn’t you?’ Considering the financial aspect it had seemed like the sensible thing to do.

I had about five thousand dollars all up when I arrived in Prague, enough to keep me going while I figured out what to do about work. I had that glorious feeling you get when you’ve taken your first step on an exciting journey—fresh and new —a feeling that everything would turn out well. A feeling that lasted all the way out of the airport . . . until I found myself in a shuttle bus driving further and further away from the gorgeous city into light industrial suburbia. Prague Castle receded into the background, lovely ornate nineteenth-century buildings gave way to increasingly less lovely communist-era apartment blocks and flat-roofed factories: Why, why, didn’t I spurn the easy option and get myself an attic studio with no electricity and no running water in a castle garret?

Then the bus turned up the destination street, which ran along a small, tree-lined river, much to this alarmed Bohemian’s relief. The bus slowed as we drove past some elegant older buildings and my spirits revived further—Is it that pretty one on the corner? This one here with the window boxes? But the buildings were getting squarer and more concrete until we came to the second last apartment block in the road. My seesawing emotions teetered to a moderately optimistic standstill. This is pretty, I thought. It’s blue, and has window boxes and stone carvings over the doorway. This is not bad, not bad at all. I could live here quite happily and feel bohemian. The bus slowed and finally stopped . . . just past the pretty, blue building, in front of the last building on the street—the ugliest,

greyest, squarest, most concrete of them all.

The minibus driver nodded to me and got out. I was the last one left, everyone else having alighted in front of an Art Nouveau hotel or converted palace, suitcases in hand and engagement rings twinkling. Now there was just me and the driver, who seemed to be in a bad mood. He hauled my cases out of the bowels of the bus and pointed to the grey building. This seemed a friendly thing for him to do, so I nodded and smiled and said, ‘Dìkuju’ (‘Thank you’), which I had laboriously learned on the plane. He nodded, completely unsmiling, and instantly my own smile became a thing of social convention rather than a matter from the heart. I briefly wondered if I should have tipped him, but tipping’s not the norm in Prague (I’d also read that on the plane) and no-one else had, so that wasn’t the reason behind his surliness. Was it the building? Me? Oh get a grip, I told myself as he drove off. He’s driving a minibus. Why should he smile? And I turned my attention to the rather more exciting matter of discovering my new home.

Four concrete steps at the front of the building led up to an aluminium-framed, double-glass door, with a set of buzzers to the left of the door displaying the names of the inhabitants under Plexiglas so scratched that most of them were illegible. They were typed on yellowing paper, scribbled out and overwritten, or pencilled onto lumpy Liquid Paper slashes on the surface of the Plexiglas. ‘Weiss’ was on number sixteen, and I was momentarily proud to note that at least ours was neat.

On the glass door was a typewritten note that I hoped wasn’t anything important. I’d already realised I was going to have serious difficulty with the language. At least in or or Italy or Spain the language is vaguely intelligible. You know that femme on the toilet door in Paris means ‘woman’, and you know what you’re going to get when you point to spaghetti on a Roman menu. The same happy familiarity was not evident in Prague. Even the signs at the airport, including the ones on the toilet doors (as I discovered when I opened a door onto a hideous smell and a profile of a naked penis, mid-stream) had been completely

meaningless. The message on the front door made me feel uneasy. It didn’t look like just any old ad; more likely it was a formal communication of some sort, probably quite important. I was sure I’d find out soon enough.

I hauled my suitcases up the concrete steps and across a linoleum floor to the lift. The lobby was the same as in most tenement buildings. A pinboard had officiallooking notices on it, and handwritten notes tacked on top of those. I peered at them while I waited for the lift, trying without success to find a familiar word. I couldn’t even guess at what they said. There were four doors to the ground floor flats, each with a rather horrible plastic number on it, none of them matching, and two brown metal doors which stood at the side of the lift. One had a word stencilled on it: Bojler. My spirits lifted. Boiler room? This might be easier than I thought. I’d just recognised my first Czech word. At least I knew where the boiler room was, should I need it.

At that moment the lift arrived and I was charmed by it; they don’t make lifts like this in Australia. It was tiny with led walls of plastic wood screwed onto the frame of the lift but not sealed, the roughened edges of the s just snuggling up to one another, gaps showing. There was room for two people, and only if they stood very, very close together. A tin sign was screwed into the fake wood at eye height, naming the maker (Schindler) and listing . . . something. The only thing I could figure out was a phone number. And here’s the best bit: when the door closed (and it opened and closed just like a regular door, swinging outwards, then swinging back) there was no inner door. As the lift rose, the wall of the shaft slid right past, an appalling safety hazard to western eyes. It was wonderful. It did have one safety feature, though: the buttons for the floors wouldn’t work and the lift wouldn’t move until the door was closed properly. And you couldn’t pull the door shut to speed things up; you just had to stand and wait. And wait. And wait, while the door . . . very slowly . . . closed.

My father bought this flat for an astonishingly cheap price after the communist regime fell in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The apartment block had been built by the communists, who are a byword for shoddy construction. They also built

the underground metro system, hailed at the time as a marvel of workmanship by the fatherland. It was fast, clean, efficient; the trains ran on time, and it had a special switch for flooding, because Prague is prone to flooding. I imagined the communist entrepreneur who built the metro showing his wonder of modern technology to a cluster of city fathers: ‘Look, comrades, see this switch here? Come the flood warning, all we have to do is flick this and, hey presto! Instant flood barrier to protect the metro system. All hail to the workers, comrades.’ Fast forward to 2000.

Huge floods washed through Prague, the city fathers flicked the switch and, hey presto! . . . nothing happened. It turned out the entrepreneur had simply taken the money and run. He hadn’t just built a shoddy barrier gate—he’d built no gate at all. And when the metro system was being repaired after the flood, they discovered that the glorious comrade workers, giving their all to the fatherland, had done such an appalling job it was a miracle the metro had lasted as long as it did. Instead of mixing the cement powder and water, and filling the walls in the customary manner, they’d simply thrown the bags of cement, unopened, into the space between the walls. Plastic bags with the name of the glorious state-run cement company on them floated out of the subway on the flood tide. Given that, and the general state of the entrance, lobby and lift of my new home, I was just the tiniest bit concerned about the condition in which I would find the flat itself.

My father and stepmother are finicky people, but they love a bargain, sometimes to the point of insanity. As I stood at the door of the apartment, key in hand, I imagined my next conversation with my father:

‘What do you think of the unit?’

‘It has no plumbing . . .’

‘You wouldn’t believe how cheap we got it . . .’

‘. . . and the walls are made of asbestos . . .’

‘. . . one hundred thousand crowns!’

‘. . . and there’s rat droppings.’

‘And I bargained them down. They were asking a hundred and fifty thousand.’

‘Is that a fish tank? Oh, no, it’s rising damp.’

‘Did I tell you how cheap I got this place?’

But I opened the door on a warm, light and surprisingly large apartment. ‘This really was a bargain’, I was able to tell my father when I phoned later that night.

‘Yes’, he replied. ‘Did I tell you how much?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did I tell you what they were asking?’

‘Yes.’

‘They were asking a hundred and fifty thousand crowns.’

‘I know.’

‘But I bargained them down to a hundred thousand.’

‘Okay, gotta go.’

‘A hundred thousand, darling. You can’t buy a place for that any more.’

Dad also told me that, should the lift break down, I had to go to a room in the attic and hand crank it back to the ground floor, then press a button and it would work again.

The apartment had a large, light-filled living room with a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The walls and ceiling were painted pale yellow and on two sides huge, double-glazed windows with sturdy wooden sashes ran from the ceiling halfway down to the floor. I instantly fell in love with those wooden sashes. It’s one of the reasons I got sick of Australia—no-one builds a wooden window any more. It’s a small point but those hideous, cheap, godawful

aluminium sashes bug me; that frenzy of builders out to save a buck at the expense of elegance. They don’t even keep out the cold or the heat—they’re completely energy inefficient. In a just world aluminium window manufacturers would be tried for treason and hanged. Since Prague is freezing most of the time, even the glorious communist fathers couldn’t stoop to cheap and ugly aluminium, so every window has broad wooden sashes. The sight of them in Dad’s flat stirred my soul. I really was in Europe. I was living somewhere that felt better, more artistic, more soulful, somewhere where I’d never have to be depressed by an aluminium sash again.

The wall facing the street had a glass door leading out onto a balcony that ran the length of the flat. I noticed a satellite dish screwed to the wall. Good ol’ Dad. My stepmother could live without television but Dad, never . . . and neither can I. From the balcony I had a long view to the west of tree-covered hills and, to the north, right in front of me, the river shrouded in greenery. On the opposite bank the flat roofs of factories punctuated the treetops that ran all the way to the horizon. Even the light industrial area of Prague is pretty, I thought to myself.

It was early spring when I arrived in Prague. I’d always previously done my travelling to Europe in the northern winter, when my university holidays came around and the flights were cheapest. I’d never seen a European spring, although I’d read enough about them in my English classes. Now, looking out at the green hills, delicate white blossoms peppering the landscape, the river sparkling up at me through the trees, my blood surged and my heart swelled. I was really here— not just on a holiday but here to stay, and in a season that poets and writers had been gushing over for centuries. At last, I, too, was getting to experience a spring in Europe, and it was everything I’d always hoped it would be—warm, light, green and lovely, even in the light industrial ’burbs. I was immensely happy.

I went back inside the living room. There was a television in one corner and an Eames leather chair and footstool smack dab in the centre of the room, facing the box. Dad’s chair, of course. Against one wall was a small, inlaid wooden table with an armchair, covered in a satin cherry stripe, on either side, and on the

opposite wall was a wide old-fashioned box couch made of caramel-coloured wood, with square tapestry cushions. This turned into a bed, so my father had told me. There were pictures on all the walls, mostly oil paintings of bucolic scenes. Some of them were by an artist called Dvoøak, who hailed from my father’s native village of Kamenièky, and the scenes were from that part of the country, so Dad had said. I looked at them closely, wondering if I’d feel a spooky sense of déjá vu, but, no, they just seemed like pretty village-scapes—a lake, storm clouds over rolling hills, a marketplace.

‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Dad had said on the phone. Actually, they seemed rather ordinary to me, but I didn’t tell him that. For Dad, everything from Kamenièky was super-special.

‘When I was a boy there were three schools for the violin in that one village’, Dad said; ‘Three.’ Dad’s a terrible exaggerator. I generally just nod and mentally scale it down by a factor of about a hundred. Sometimes a thousand. There were probably just three violins in Kamenièky when Dad was a boy, but I didn’t say that to him.

A door led from the living room to the kitchen, which also had a window covering the entire upper wall facing the river, but in this room the communist touch was more evident. The benches and cupboards were made of hideous vinyl, the edges peeling off the chipboard—ugly, but not unliveable. I turned on the fridge and opened the cupboard next to it. There, neatly packed into a cardboard box, were all of Dad’s spices for cooking, his favourite activity after watching telly. The labels were all in Czech but I figured I’d work out what they were in time. Next to them were a few staples—rice, spaghetti, sugar, instant noodles, enough to make a rudimentary dinner for that day—and on the floor were a couple of bottles of water.

The cupboards over the sink and the drawers next to it contained an assortment of cups, plates, saucepans and cutlery. Not too much, just enough for four

people, and no spares, rather like the kitchen equipment you find in holiday homes. And I suppose this was a holiday home: my father made regular trips here with my stepmother, always in the winter when she had her holidays (she’s a high school teacher); at other times my relatives from southern Bohemia used it when they came up to Prague. It bore the air of a neat, clean bolt-hole and now it was my refuge. This sense of being in a holiday home, the sparseness of the furnishings and the absence of bric-a-brac, made me feel, suddenly, marvellously light and free from the burdens of ordinary life.

At the other end of the kitchen a door led back to the front hall. The hall had two cupboards, one containing linen and one containing overcoats and some plastic bags. A rather magnificent mirror faced the front door, about a metre square with a burnished gold frame. Off the hall was a toilet, a white-tiled bathroom including a shower that had a nozzle with hearty water pressure—a frank improvement on the dribbling old pipe that watered me in my tiny rental flat back home—and two bedrooms. The bedrooms faced east, over a park with a children’s playground in it, paved in concrete. I sensed that suing hadn’t become a popular pastime in the Czech Republic as it had in the west.

One bedroom, the larger, was furnished with a double bed, a dresser with my stepmother’s brushes neatly laid out and a wardrobe containing my parents’ clothes. Although they only used the apartment as a holiday home, I didn’t feel right about sleeping in their room. The other room had a single bed and a dark wooden wardrobe. This would be mine, and I immediately warmed to it because it contained three intensely charming objects: a treadle Singer sewing machine in perfect condition; a walnut cupboard with bundles of old documents, letters and photographs stuffed into it; and a very old suitcase with an ocean liner’s sticker on it bearing my grandmother’s name, a grandmother I’d never known. It was the suitcase she had with her when she managed to wangle a visit to Australia in 1968, just before the Russians invaded Prague. I put my suitcase next to hers. Here we were, together at last.

I opened the linen cupboard in the hall to look for sheets. Layers of perfect

edges, neatly clamped on top of one another, greeted me and I couldn’t tell what each shelf contained. I pulled out a white cloth and opened it up to find a tea towel with embroidered red initials in one corner. It was made of linen and had been ironed into a perfect, cardboard-flat rectangle. All the corners lined up exactly and I saw that a hand far more accomplished at housework than mine had folded this tea towel. I put it in the kitchen and went back to the cupboard. Was the extremely ordered mind that looked after this cupboard my stepmother’s? She was neat and a good housekeeper, but there was a regimentation about this linen that soaked into the shelves, superseding ordinary tidiness.

I deduced the sheets would not share a shelf with the tea towels, so I plucked a rectangle from the next shelf down. This was a queen-sized sheet so at least I’d found the right shelf. I folded it up again, trying my hardest to keep the corners together and failing. It wasn’t too badly folded, but the edge wasn’t quite as crisp as it had been. It seemed to require at least eight hands to do the job properly. The final result was slightly wonky despite my best effort. I fished for another one and unfolded a large fitted sheet. It too had been a perfect cardboard rectangle when folded and I had to ire the handiwork. Never in my life have I ever seen a fitted sheet folded into anything other than a lumpy dome. It looked like the elastic sides had been folded down then ironed flat before folding. Do you think I could get it back into its original pristine state? Not a chance. The elastic bunched and pulled and refused to co-operate so I bundled it together into a cone shape and shoved it back on the shelf.

The next sheet, thank God, was single. The one after that was another large fitted sheet—another cone to the first—but the next one was the second single I was looking for. By the time I’d found two single sheets, a doona cover and a pillow case, the once regimental linen cupboard looked more like a pile of washing. Wearily, I promised myself that I’d make more of an effort tomorrow and try to get it back into shape. The problem with staying in someone else’s house is living up to standards higher than my own. Something told me this linen cupboard fiasco was going to be noted and commented on, unfavourably. How is it that I’ve never learned how to fold a fitted sheet?

The apartment was covered in Post-it Notes from my stepmother, who was apparently under the impression that if she didn’t leave me step-by-step instructions in home care I’d burn the place down . . . or flood it, as most of the notes were composed around a plumbing motif:

‘Don’t let your hairs go down the drain. It would cause a major problem!’

‘Wipe your feet before you leave the bathroom.’

‘Make sure the taps are turned off.’

‘Don’t let any scraps of food get into the kitchen sink.’

‘don’t pour coffee grinds down the drain.’

‘Don’t get water on the floor, the floor is sensitive to water.’

That last one had me puzzled. The floor looked as though it was very, very thin wood veneer. At first I thought it was a strange wood-grained wallpaper, but it did appear to be actual wood, if only just. My stepmother had told me earlier on the phone that I must never get water on the floor as it would ruin it.

‘We tried to get it fixed once before and it was terrible, darlink [my stepmother is Russian]. Very terrible. We looked all over Prague for a replacement. You wouldn’t believe how expensive it was. Alright, darlink? Never get water on the floor.’ To me it seemed hard to believe that this hideous plastic floor-paper could cost a lot, but I was anxious not to bring disaster into the flat, so I read all her notes and resolved to follow them to the letter. When I had a shower I carefully cleaned the bath of anything that looked like a hair or soap scum, wiped my feet on the bath towel—although I noticed here how my father’s love of a bargain had overcome him; the towels were so cheap they actually repelled water and it took quite some time to get my feet dry enough to step on my stepmother’s floor —then got into clean clothes and set out to discover Prague. As I left the apartment, I saw another yellow order plastered to the back of the front door:

‘Before you leave the apartment: TURN OFF the electricity CHECK the water taps in the bathroom are off CHECK the taps in the kitchen are off CHECK the fridge door is CLOSED properly CLOSE the blinds LOCK the windows DOUBLE LOCK the window bars ACTIVATE the alarm, and DOUBLE LOCK the doors!’

Did I really have to undertake this leaving ritual every time I left the flat? Surely not. It seemed onerous. I decided my stepmother must mean ‘when you leave the apartment for Sydney’ and I shut the door behind me, on my way to adventure.

They say Prague is the most beautiful city in the world, and they’re right. Architects and town planners with truly exquisite taste have built Prague over the centuries. Most cities have been developed by fat men in white shoes who see not a building, but profit per square metre. They bully councils into letting them turn the first eight floors into a car park. In Sydney, we pretend the buildings are just some old junk someone dumped in our back yard and turn visitors towards the harbour: ‘Look, isn’t that gorgeous? No, don’t turn around! Ooh, look, a whale! See it? There!’ The harbour is so very beautiful that we generally manage to fool everyone into not looking at the buildings. But Prague looks like an illustration from an ancient fairy tale. On top of a hill, on the left bank of the Vltava River, stands Prague Castle, looking down over a tightly clustered city of red-tiled roofs and narrow, winding cobblestone streets hugging both sides of the river. A fourteenth-century stone bridge, the Charles Bridge, connects the two sides of the city.

The first day of my life in Prague I wandered through the old city, guidebook in hand, just gazing up at the buildings and breathing in their beauty. The charm of these buildings lies in the extraordinary attention to detail; they’re the work of loving artists, elegantly proportioned and decorated with statues and balconies, relief work and murals. The windows are large and gracious with wide, wooden sashes and window boxes filled with red and pink flowers. The sun pours down onto narrow, cobbled streets that go through elegant archways into the courtyards of old palaces. Ancient shops still bear romantic names, such as ‘At the sign of the Three Ostriches’, and ‘At the sign of the Golden Lion’, that date from a time, or so my guidebook told me, when there were no house numbers and each shop relied on a name and a picture to make it stand out from the others.

Each building is painted a different colour: one a pecan green with the scrolls and windowsills picked out in dark green, the next pale yellow, the next lilac, the next Wedgwood blue with white trimmings, and the one after that orange. Orange! Who knew these colours could sit alongside one another and magically fit? But they do. In some of them, the coloured wall is interrupted by an irregular

stone wall that has been preserved from a previous, more ancient building, perhaps from the thirteenth century, that once stood on the spot. They haven’t been knocked down or painted over, nor has the surrounding building been made to replicate the older building. The walls are their own beautiful selves, preserved in the structure of the new building, and the whole is the more wonderful for it. I wandered through the streets thinking, I live here. I actually live here. And more than this, my father is Czech. Half of me is from this gorgeous city. I belong here.

The amazing thing about Prague’s beauty is that it is not just confined to certain quarters. It’s not just a cathedral here and there that is breathtaking, or a patch of streets left from a bygone era; the whole city is beautiful. Wherever you go, you need only look up to see something that will make you fall in love. It’s truly astonishing. How did they do it? There’s something about the Czechs themselves. They’ve preserved old Prague and erected new Prague in a way that really does make it the most beautiful city in the world.

I knew why Prague was like this from reading up on it before I left home. The city owes part of her beauty to, of all things, the German occupation. Because the Germans had control of Czechoslovakia from early on in the Second World War right up until the end, Prague was spared the bombs that utterly destroyed many other cities, although they did have to live under occupation. After the Germans were defeated, Czechoslovakia was overrun by the communists, and my grandmother and father became enthusiastic communists after the fall of the Nazis.

‘Communist ideals seemed like the answer to the world’s ills after fascism’, my father told me. ‘Anything but the fascists.’ But Prague after the war was a sad and hungry place, and in 1946 my father, only a teenager, left for Australia with a group of his friends to travel the world, thinking it would be a fun way to learn English. By the time he wanted to go home again the Iron Curtain had come down and his mother was behind it. My grandmother, now completely on her own, remained a member of the Communist Party and so was given a job for life

and a flat. She must have managed to keep her nose clean because she spent her whole life being a munitions inspector for the party, which I always thought was kinda cool and just a little bit scary. Dad started going back to visit her in the early 1980s when the regime got a bit looser, but she still made him get out of the taxi two blocks from her flat and walk the rest of the way so that her neighbours wouldn’t report her to the secret police for having a ‘rich, western son’. That’s how she survived—by being careful. Dad was always torn when he talked about those trips. On the one hand, the communists had allowed Prague to fall into appalling disrepair; on the other, they killed the economy so the prices were unbelievably cheap: ‘Look at this tablecloth, darling. Feel the quality. And you wouldn’t believe what it cost. Five crowns. It’s terrible what those bastards did to Prague. Look, it’s linen.’

Apparently the communist apparatchiks were the only Czechs in the history of the Bohemian lands to have no architectural taste or feeling whatsoever. Not only did they build the most ghastly, square concrete blocks for people to live in, believing, it seems, that colour and beauty and grace were for soft capitalist pigdogs, not fit for the utilitarian workers of the glorious fatherland, but they left the rest of it to rot. Not a building was cleaned, not a stone repaired while they were in power. When the cobblestone streets fell apart, they replaced them with serviceable, cheap asphalt—no doubt very practical, but what price beauty?

As soon as they’d rid themselves of the Communist Party, the Czechs set about restoring their city with a renewed will. For people with such an exquisite sense of architecture, the communists’ appalling taste must have been what offended the most. ‘Yes, yes, the secret police are a pain in the neck’, they probably said to themselves (quietly, in case the secret police were listening), ‘but would it hurt to at least put a lovely window box on one of these godawful buildings? I have to live here.’ They got out their squeegees and paint and cleaned off fifty years of grime, brightening the place up with a palette of carefully chosen colours. There was nothing much they could do with the comrade-built buildings, but some of them have been given a facelift—a lick of paint, a bit of exotic stonework, and you’d never know what lies underneath. After that, they took to ripping up the asphalt and replacing it all with carefully laid cobblestones. That to me is the ultimate symbol of Prague. What city on earth would go to the trouble of tearing

up asphalt and laying down impractical, yet unbearably romantic, cobblestones?

I went home that first day, my heart surging and my head misty with the romance of the city. Even my light industrial suburb looked prettier than it had from the shuttle bus. Taking a walking-pace look at the buildings along my street, I saw that most of them were solid, early twentieth-century, precommunist structures, a little grimy, but moderately ornate and elegant. Yes, a bohemian could live here quite happily. And as for my building, sure, it wasn’t a tall, graceful, nineteenth-century palace with stone statues of naked Greeks guarding the brass-patterned front door, but once inside, where I couldn’t see the grey cement cladding, I could gaze from its balcony onto the pretty river, the trees with the roofs of factories peeking through, and the wooded hills in the distance.

I went up to my apartment and into the kitchen for a glass of water after my long day’s walk. I turned on the tap. Nothing happened for a second, then with a hideous gasp the tap spat out a spray of brown, muddy water. It gave one more harsh gurgle, had another spit, then went dead. The water had been cut off. I began to perceive that perhaps I didn’t need to live in a garret to have my life blighted by unreliable amenities. I’m an artist, sure, but I’m a comfort-loving artist and I’d rejected the garret option precisely so I’d have a regular supply of water and electricity. I hoped there wasn’t going to be too much authentic bohemianness awaiting me, but I was just the tiniest bit worried about this water situation. It seemed to me that the communists still hadn’t quite left this country, and God knows what that might mean for daily life. I decided to worry about it the next day.

Chapter 2 Beer and Potatoes

The next morning I awoke to the sound of gunfire. I staggered, half-asleep, halfcardiac-arrested, to the window to see that it wasn’t gunfire at all but a jackhammer. Workmen, at six o’clock in the morning, dawn barely upon us, were breaking up the concrete playground. I had an awful feeling about this; for a suburb on the outskirts of town, it was proving to be a noisy place. One of the factories across the river was a glass recycling centre which rang out with the sound of crashing bottles every half-hour or so as the dump trucks emptied more onto the pile. Somewhere to the west was a sports stadium. I couldn’t see it, but I’d heard a muffled loudspeaker jabbering away excitedly long into the night and cars speeding around and around so loudly that at first I thought the Czech equivalent of the Hell’s Angels was tearing up my street. I’d gone out onto my balcony expecting to see a gang of overweight, middle-aged men with straggly beards revving their engines menacingly, but the street was empty.

The noise had abated around midnight, but I’m a girl who likes to get in a solid eight hours kip and I’d only had six. Now I lay in bed wondering if I shouldn’t be up at dawn anyway to greet this, the first full day of the rest of my exciting life, but with jackhammers jarring my back teeth I was feeling strangely similar to the way I felt back at home when woken before I want to be—annoyed. I valiantly tried to go back to sleep and, when that proved impossible, turned on the lamp and read my book for an hour and a half, cursing.

When got up I tried the water and to my relief the taps ran brown for a minute, then clear. I had a shower, scrubbed the shower clean of hair and soap scum, washed down the sink, dried my feet for a few centuries on the water-resistant towel, got dressed and left the flat, ignoring my stepmother’s long list. The sun shone, the sky was a glorious blue, birds sang in the trees along the river and I felt fresh and new and full of optimism. I was in Prague, it was spring and I was bounding down the street, a song in my heart and a smile on my lips, head high,

taking in everything around me. It was time to go shopping.

My street was tiny, hardly wide enough for two cars to , with not much traffic and very few pedestrians. Coming towards me was a young woman with a toddler, and as she approached I did what any Australian would do when you’re on a small street and you’re ing the only other person around: I nodded and smiled. But instead of smiling back, the young woman shot me a blank-eyed, hostile stare, glared at me, and then abruptly turned her head away. I was shocked. Was nodding a Czech sign for ‘up yours’? Was I wearing something that indicated I was a violent criminal type? As I turned onto the main street and continued to the supermarket, my spirits less chirpy than they had been when I set out, I tried to work out what had happened.

My local supermarket was called ‘The Norma’. From the outside, The Norma looked just like any other suburban supermarket. It was low and flat-roofed with a winding concrete ramp outside for trolleys, prams and wheelchairs, full glass frontage and two sets of sliding doors, one for the entrance and one for the exit. I couldn’t tell from the signs (vchod and východ) which door was the entrance so, not wanting to do the wrong thing, I waited to see which one other shoppers used, then followed them in.

The Norma seemed to service the poorer sectors of society—the pensioners clutching their coupons, the shambling single men who’d left marriage too late, the young wives of the working class dragging a gaggle of kids behind them. Inside, the supermarket had trolleys that look just like ours, only these ones were chained together. I watched the other shoppers inserting coins and when it was my turn was greatly relieved to see that the coins I needed were marked out in numerals—5 and 10 kc (crowns)—not words. Having released one from bondage I started down the aisle and noticed that, for some reason, Czech trolleys are a lot better behaved than Australian ones. Mine obeyed me implicitly and didn’t try to detour into stacks of jars.

However, within seconds knew I was in a different country. The very first item in the very first aisle in The Norma was potatoes. A giant bin of unwashed potatoes. No wait, two giant bins of potatoes clotted with dirt, and I do mean giant—the bins came up to shoulder height. A tiny old Czech lady in front of me was fishing around in them, her hand over her head, plucking out potatoes one at a time, inspecting them and throwing back the below-par ones. The old lady ignored me utterly, frowning in concentration at each potato before tossing it back or putting it in her trolley. Picking potatoes seemed to be serious business for the Czechs, so I thought I’d take it seriously, too. I put the same concentration into it, squeezing each one, inspecting it for holes. I stood next to her and extracted a few, throwing back one that had gone mouldy and one that was too soft, then another soft one, and another. I was the tiniest bit startled by how many dud ones there were. Still, I found five good ones and was rather proud to think I’d done my first Czech-style shopping.

The next item in the aisle, and taking up pretty much the whole aisle, was beer. First potatoes, then bins and bins of beer in bottles from all around the Republic. I’d read about the Czechs and their beer: it’s like cheese for the French or the stiff upper lip for the English. The Czechs have the highest beer consumption in the world, and it’s not just a bit higher—there’s daylight between the Czechs and the next on the list, the Irish. While each year the Irish, who’ve built an entire culture around being on the piss, consume one hundred and thirty-five litres per person, and the Germans one hundred and eighteen litres, the Czechs get through one hundred and fifty-nine litres per person. That means that every man, woman and child in the Czech Republic is drinking seventeen per cent more beer than the Irish and thirty-four per cent more than the Germans. A middle-aged man shuffled by me, his trolley piled high with beer, except for one tiny bottle of pickles balanced on top. Although I’m not really a drinker I put a couple of measly bottles into my trolley just to get into the swing of native life.

After the potatoes and the beer The Norma got more normal. Here’s what I couldn’t find, though: olive oil. And for the life of me I couldn’t find any rubber gloves, which was strange as you’d think rubber gloves would be a staple of a once-communist state—but perhaps I’ve seen too many reds-under-the-bed movies featuring uniformed matrons sporting rubber gloves and a moustache,

injecting western heroes with truth serum. Perhaps they didn’t have rubber gloves because they were rejecting this part of their past. Still, communism’s been over for more than fifteen years so could we have some rubber gloves in the supermarkets, please?

The last bastion of communism in the supermarket, though, was the toilet paper. Called ‘Big and Soft’ it was neither big, nor soft. It was small, one-ply, harsh, and a grim, dark-grey colour—the colour, and texture, of a cardboard box that’s been left out in the rain then dried in a furnace. It was communist toilet paper if ever I saw it.

I had fun pottering around The Norma, inspecting the pictures on the tins, trying to work what was what and watching the other shoppers. I’d managed to find bread and tomatoes but the dairy section was a puzzle. There was an enormous variety of products, but I couldn’t tell from the packaging what was inside. Plastic tubs with peelable lids were probably from the yoghurt family, but they also seemed to be desserts or something involving rice. Without words to help me it was impossible to distinguish between the many different oblong foil packs of fat. One of them had to be butter, but which one? The Czechs eat all sorts of animal fat—lard and dripping and goose fat. Dad keeps trying to make me eat goose fat—‘It’s a delicacy!’ Why use olive oil when you can use pork dripping? I picked one of the packs and prayed it wouldn’t be goose fat, which is white and grainy and disgusting. I thought I’d probably got the milk right. It was in a cardboard carton and there was a picture of a slim girl dancing on the outside, so I rather hoped I’d found the lite milk, but I couldn’t be sure. It had the words zakysané podmásli written on it. According to the Berlitz Guide, the word for ‘milk’ is mléko, but none of the cartons had mléko written on them. In fact, none of the packages contained any of the words that were listed in the food section of the Berlitz Guide.

I had one really wonderful moment in The Norma that day. I was trailing my eye across the shelves trying to make out what I was looking at when I was brought up short by a familiar sight, but one I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was a plastic

jar of plum povidla, a very thick plum jam, black as tar and made of nothing but plums and sugar. For one searing moment I was back in my Dad’s kitchen, six years old and watching him make buchty, a Czech pastry filled with plum povidla. He made them with raisins and cottage cheese, too, but my favourite was always the jam buchty. There was no other jam like povidla, never any as thick, as fruity, as sweet or as satisfying, and I spent my early years living out of home looking for it in every delicatessen. I finally found a pale imitation at a Polish deli, but here in The Norma, right in front of me, was Dad’s own brand. I bought two packs.

The checkout, to my relief, followed the same system as checkouts everywhere. But while I waited in line I watched a curious ritual going on to my right. People deposited their empty beer bottles in a machine which then spat out a docket. The bottles disappeared on a conveyor belt through an opening in the wall and I could hear them clinking as they fell into piles. Shoppers handed their dockets to the checkout chick and then seemed to get a discount on their food bill. It was beer bottle recycling at its best and, not surprisingly, every single shopper had one of those dockets.

My line moved rather slowly but when I finally got to plonk my goods on the rubber belt I did what I normally did and gave the checkout chick a cheery smile. Feeling adventurous, I tried out my Dobrý den on her, Czech for ‘hello’, the second word I’d learned on my flight. Not only did she not respond, she gave me the same hostile stare the young mother had given me. Grabbing my bread, she swiped it and threw it—there’s no other way to describe it—she threw it down onto the packing bench. The same fate awaited the milk, the potatoes, the jam and, curses, the tomatoes. When she’d itemised the bill she didn’t look at me, she just muttered a total. I didn’t hear her and even if I had I wouldn’t have understood her, so I said, Pardon? (Czech for ‘Pardon’) and looked puzzled. She rolled her eyes to the sky, sighed loudly and jabbed her finger at the till which showed the amount I had to pay.

In my whole life I’ve never experienced such rudeness from a checkout chick, or

from anybody for that matter, other than family . It was awful. I took my bags quickly and went to put my trolley back. I got to the bay at the same moment as another shopper, our trolleys angling in toward each other. Our eyes met and automatically I smiled and gestured for her to go first. She looked me up and down sourly and stomped past me. My smile faded and my heart sank. Is this because I’m a foreigner? Is there a code of conduct I am transgressing? Is there something about me that shrieks, ‘Stranger’, and invites all this horribleness? Is everyone going to treat me like this?

I ed by a delicatessen I’d seen on the way to the supermarket. There was no window dressing, just a door leading into a dimly lit shop with a linoleum floor. From outside I could see long glass counters overflowing with rows and rows of cheeses, hams, sliced meat and salami. It was completely different to any shop I’d ever been in back home—there were no shelves and no jars of spices, no bottles of sauces or, in fact, any other produce of any sort. I had pictured myself popping into this little shop on my way home to buy cheese and salami sliced off the round and wrapped in paper, being authentically European. But now I lurked outside, not having the courage to walk in. Someone would ask me what I wanted, I wouldn’t understand them, I’d have to point at the produce and they’d snarl at me. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I’d walk in and be authentically European.

Back home, I put away my purchases and turned on ‘CNN’. I had told myself when I saw the satellite dish that I would not watch English-language channels, I would watch only Czech television and become fully immersed in the culture, but after nearly two days I was desperate for the sound of English, and now I was also desperate to see happy, smiling Americans. With ‘CNN’ news in the background I made myself a cup of coffee and opened the milk. I poured it into the coffee and the stuff curdled instantly. I got out the Czech dictionary. Zakysané I couldn’t find; however podmásli, I now discovered, means ‘buttermilk’.

I soon learned that the checkout chick at The Norma was actually polite by

Czech standards, the Czechs being legendary for the rudeness of their waiters, their shop assistants, their postal workers, indeed any of their service personnel. I thought at first that it was the communist hangover, but I read later that a fourteenth-century Italian traveller wrote back home in shock at the treatment he had received in Bohemia. I knew how he felt. For the first week I, chirpy Australian that I am, bounded down the street greeting everyone I met only to be smacked in the face time and again by a killer look. I resolutely smiled at everyone I ed feeling certain they couldn’t all be grumpy. Then I stopped smiling at the men because a couple of them thought I was a street walker. Eventually I stopped smiling altogether. It just wasn’t worth the pain.

The difficulty with all this was me. When you’re a person anxious to please, a person who lives fearfully, trying to be good and not to disappoint, you rely on pleasant interaction. I tried not to worry about it, but it was unnerving. Little things were upending me terribly. For instance, in Prague, you drive on the righthand side of the road. That means pedestrians walk on the right-hand side of the footpath. You’d think that would be easy enough to but actually it’s really hard. I discovered that I didn’t think of the footpath rules as ‘right’ and ‘left’, I thought of them as ‘polite’ and ‘rude’. In my mind, I moved to the left when I came up against another walker on a narrow path, because that is the polite thing to do. Czechs, of course, move to their right, so we would go through this little dance. But where in Sydney your eyes would meet and you’d laugh, in Prague people snorted and frowned and muttered at me. God, it was awful. I was a stranger in a strange land; alone, desperate not to upset anyone, and so more than ever geared to do the polite thing. But I couldn’t help it— moving to the right took a real effort of memory and will.

What I hadn’t banked on when deciding to throw myself into a new culture was the appalling loneliness. No-one around me spoke any English and I was deprived of even friendly sign-language conversations by the uninterested Czechs. Not even the young Czechs who staffed the tourist bureaus would talk to me. ‘Ask for a map, get a map, get out’, seemed to be their service credo. I wandered the city, buoyed indeed by its glory but feeling increasingly helpless and hapless. Friends were sending me enthusiastic emails: ‘How wonderful it must be to be living in Prague. How exciting!’ Exciting? More like terrifying. I

kept that thought to myself.

The first week I gave myself permission to stay at home, watching television and eating plum povidla by the spoonful, but by the second week I had to give myself a stern talking to. When picturing myself in Prague I’d seen myself scribbling away in a garret, inspired to write a Booker Prize-winning novel, sitting in cafés with Continental friends drinking coffee and talking about Proust and politics, spending nights in jazz bars in the city’s basements. It didn’t occur to me this might be a touch unrealistic. In Sydney, I had a handful of very old friends with whom I went to the movies or dinner, or occasionally camping in the bush. I never, ever discussed Proust with these friends, mainly because the only thing I know about Proust is that he wrote an incredibly long and impenetrable seven-volume work called À la recherche du temps perdu—I laboriously learned the title so at least I could pretend I’d read it. Politics I discussed only on those increasingly less rare occasions when George Bush declared war on somebody. I did not go out of my way to meet people or have new experiences— quite the opposite. My friends had to drag me to parties and I hadn’t been to a nightclub since my mid-twenties. It didn’t occur to me that simply moving to an exotic location wouldn’t change my life instantly to one of glamour and excitement. But now I had moved there was no going back, at least not for a year. You’re in Prague, I told myself. You can’t stay at home eating 2 Minute Noodles and flipping between ‘Euronews’ and ‘CNN’. A week’s gone by. It’s time to explore the neighbourhood and look for a restaurant.

I left the flat and walked down to the arterial road. Running down the middle of the road was supposed to be a tram line, but it was undergoing a major overhaul. The tram lines had been dug out and a deep sandy trench ran the length of the road, with two narrow asphalt strips on either side allowing cars to . Planks had been nailed somewhat haphazardly over the trench at intervals to make bridges for pedestrians going from one side of the road to the other. The footpaths were being used as storage for the bricks that would eventually line the tram stops. To navigate all this I had to squeeze past people I met on the way. Unfortunately, the only people I met on the way were all unwashed, weaving men and I had to edge past them in the dying light, trying to quell my tendency to be fearful of the strange and smelly.

The buildings added to the general gloom—they looked like old industrial buildings fallen into disrepair. The few shops were sad and bedraggled, a second-hand clothes store with dreary items in the window, an odds-and-sods store with cheap, plastic toys and rainbow-coloured synthetic mittens, a general food store with tins piled on the floor. I walked on, hoping to come to an area with more light and vigour, and after about fifteen minutes I spotted a pub’s shingle and hope rose. When I got to it, however, what I saw was a door set into a grey, concrete wall. There was a menu outside but the windows were newspapered over. The picture swinging from the shingle was of the Good Soldier Švejk lofting a beer, his face shiny and cheerful.

The Good Soldier Švejk is a Czech classic, a side-splitting tale of a soldier who outwits the Austrian army by playing dumb and pretending to obey orders while actually causing chaos and getting his COs fired. It’s studied in universities around the world; professors of comic literature produce fat editions with notes on the minutiae of the Austrian army code; my father only has to hear the name ‘Švejk’ for tears of laughter to start rolling down his cheeks. And yet, it’s one of the dullest books I have ever read in my life. I battled through it out of a sense of duty because I figured if I was going to be Bohemian, I’d better have read The Good Soldier Švejk. I guess you have to have been oppressed by the Austrians to get the jokes. The picture of Švejk on the pub shingle was no doubt meant to indicate that inside all would be jolly and warm, but I was struggling with myself. I was on my own, the people were unfriendly, the area was seedy and barren, and I was just too afraid of what I’d find inside the pub despite the jolly sign swinging on the outside.

I turned back for home, cursing myself. What are you going to do if you don’t get over this fear? I had to find work and friends and a life and I couldn’t even find a restaurant. I was turning these thoughts over in my mind on my way home when I saw a sign I’d missed before. It hung over a pub just around the corner from my place. The ‘U Pecku’ had light streaming from its windows and through them I could see tables and chairs and people eating, so at least I knew what I was walking into. I was still nervous about going in alone but the thought of the

extreme loneliness I knew I’d feel if I didn’t made me open the door.

Inside, an unsmiling waiter lifted his head and stared at me. I smiled apologetically. He kept staring. I turned my head to the right, where the restaurant was, and looked back at him, a question on my face: ‘In there?’ He shrugged and gave the briefest nod a person is capable of giving. Goddammit, these people were starting to piss me off. I walked into the restaurant and every head swivelled to look at me. Feeling like the new girl at a boarding school, I made my way to the back and picked a table in a corner far away from everyone else. It had a sign on it, Reservace. Even with no Czech I could guess at its meaning, but I didn’t care. It was the darkest, quietest corner and I suddenly felt stubborn. If they wanted me off the table, they’d have to overcome the language barrier.

U Pecku was a study in the basic. The tables were sturdy and wooden, the air was blue with cigarette smoke, and rat-tailed dogs curled up at the feet of men in work pants and cardigans, talking loudly to each other with huge, foaming beers in hand. The customers were all men, apart from a middle-aged, canoodling couple sitting at a window seat. They were the only people in my line of vision and I felt better with a woman in sight.

The surly waiter put a beer and a menu down in front of me. I hadn’t intended to have a beer, but I didn’t get a chance to voice an opinion, the waiter simply plonked it in front of me as I sat down. Of course, I would have a beer. This was Prague. The waiter was slim and dark and mournful. He looked a bit like Buster Keaton.

‘Žyzrxcèšøž?’ he said, his face stony.

‘Erm . . .’

He looked at me in surprise. I don’t think they get too many non-Czechs out in the light industrial ’burbs.

‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

’ ‘Nein’—at least I knew how to say that in German—‘English.’ To my astonishment, one corner of his mouth lifted.

‘I . . . no . . . English.’ He went away and came back with, of all things, a menu written in English and he smiled again. I took a sip of the beer. Three words of English and a menu in English was an unlooked-for bonus.

Having a Czech father and eating Czech food every Friday night prepared me for the Czech menu, but even I was surprised by the lack of vegetables. My father thinks that the only real vegetable is the potato. Every other vegetable he treats as a nine-year-old boy would—with contempt. I thought it was just a war thing but it seems as though it’s a Czech thing. The main menu was brief and to the point: fried pork, pork knee, pork wrapped in potato pancake, pork schnitzel, fried chicken, chicken schnitzel, or goulash. At that moment the waiter came up and asked me (at least I assumed this is what he was asking me) what I wanted to eat. I hadn’t come to this meal unprepared. I’d brought along Teach Yourself Czech and the Berlitz Guide to Czech (the ‘World’s Best Guide’). I turned to the ‘Eating Out’ section in the guide and told the waiter I would like the fried pork, in Czech. I felt hugely proud of myself and it worked a charm on him, too. His small corner-lift of a smile turned into a positive V and he babbled something at me. Seeing the blank look on my face, he pointed to a section on the menu called ‘Side Dishes’. I could have boiled potato, roast potato, fried potato slices, fried potato wedges, potato pancakes, potato dumplings, potato chips, bread dumplings, bread, red sauerkraut, or white sauerkraut. I took the fried potatoes. Whereupon the waiter plonked down in front of me a scratched glass containing

red and white checked paper napkins and a set of cutlery.

Before turning back to the Teach Yourself Czech book to continue my exercises in adjectives (‘I have a red book’, ‘I have a clean car’, ‘He has a dirty bicycle’— riveting stuff) I did the calculations and did them again. This meal was going to cost three dollars. I perked up amazingly. If I could eat a full meal for three bucks I could live like a king. A king of an impoverished African nation, but still, a king. What with the cheapness of the food and the deliciousness of the beer, I began to feel better. The middle-aged couple were completely engrossed in themselves and they were getting rollicking drunk. She had started to slide onto his knee. I turned to my books with slightly embarrassed glee—some things don’t change.

My food, when it came, was fantastic. Total nursery food: bland, white, fried, salty and completely yummy. I ordered another beer—they came in half-litre jugs and by the second one I was having to read every sentence in my book six times before I could the beginning when I got to the end. Halfway through my meal, the middle-aged couple started singing old vaudeville tunes to each other, the woman shimmying provocatively on his lap, the man occasionally getting onto one knee and pressing her hand to his lips. They kept it up the whole time I was there; occasionally I’d look up from my books and catch his eye. We’d smile at each other, the old charmer. When they staggered out into the night, he stopped in front of my table and gave me a courtly bow.

I made the universal scribbling sign for the bill and Buster Keaton picked up the scrap of paper on my table, totted up the pencil marks that indicated how many beers I’d had, and gave me the total—four dollars by my calculation. I gave him a tip and staggered out, wishing him a fond Dobrou noc, or ‘Good night’, according to the Berlitz Guide.

I went back the next night, and the next, and the next. Each time I went back, the waiters ed me and smiled, bless them, and I practised a little more

Czech, asking for beer one night, and the bill the next. At last, I had a tiny foothold in Prague.

When I got home from my third day of wandering the town the water was off again. I turned on the tap to be greeted by few spurts of mud, then nothing. On my way from the metro, I’d seen people in the street collecting water from tanks parked outside the apartment block, and putting two and two together I figured the whole street must be down, which was a relief—I wouldn’t have to find a plumber. Someone else would have complained and my problem would be solved. Soon, I hoped. For the moment I chose to treat it as a romantic adventure and began composing in my head a lighthearted email to friends back home, with their dull lives of functioning plumbing and fresh vegetables, as I took the bucket I’d found in the hall closet down to the water tank in the street:

Dear Friends,

There seems to be some problem with the water. It keeps being shut off. But when that happens, I take my bucket down to the water tanks and gather around with the women of the street, laughing and talking, in much the same way as I imagine women did when they gathered around wells in villages before the advent of modern plumbing.

There were indeed three women gathered around the tank, and they were indeed laughing and talking. When they saw me come out of the apartment block one of the women turned to let me into the knot. ‘Žrrjèxxvyšìá!’ she said, giving me a huge grin. I assume she said, ‘How about those idiots who keep cutting off the water, eh?’

Unfortunately, all I could do was say, ‘I’m sorry, Já nemluvím Èeský’, which translated, I hope, to ‘I don’t speak Czech’. Instantly their smiles faded. The

woman who spoke to me looked at the ground and shuffled her feet. Not only could they not talk to me, but they couldn’t talk to each other—it would have been rude to exclude me as there were only four of us standing clustered around the tap. How could they go on talking when I’d be so palpably left out of the conversation? They turned to the tank, probably hoping it would pour faster so they could get their water and depart. The silence swelled and with it my worst fears. I was paralysed with embarrassment.

I’m no good at this adventuring thing, I cursed myself. Anyone else would be chatting away to these women in sign language. But all I could do was smile apologetically and look blank and indicate that I knew no Czech. If I did, I might find out what’s going on, how long I’d be without water, and whether or not this is going to happen again. I got my water and slunk away. That night I switched on ‘CNN’ and watched the same half-hour of news over and over again, telling myself that I’d watch the local Czech version tomorrow night.

For the first three weeks of my life in Bohemia, I lived like this, speaking to noone and battling with the water tanks and grim Czech faces. I went into the salami and cheese delicatessen just once, armed in advance with the words for cheese (sýr) and ham (šunky). With a heavy heart, and trying to tell myself that really, this was fun and all part of the adventure, and everyone else seems to be able to live like this without needing to take a Valium first, so stop being so silly and just get on with it, I nervously stepped up to the till.

asked the woman behind the counter. ‘What the hell do you want?’ I surmised. I smiled and pointed to the cheese.

‘Sýr, prosím’ (‘Cheese, please’).

I took a stab she was asking me how much. I’d taken the effort to learn numbers

so I replied, ‘Devadesat gram’, which I thought meant twenty grams. By the look of astonishment she gave me I knew instantly that that was not the case. I was stuck. Helplessly, I held my hands out, palms facing each other and just a sliver between them. I nodded to the space. ‘That much’, I said. She just kept staring at me. During this fraught exchange, an old lady had came into the shop. I’d deliberately gone in when there were no other customers so any humiliation would go unwitnessed, and here she was, witnessing my humiliation. There was a silence as the two Czechs stared at me and I burned a bright red and wished I was back in Sydney. But then a lovely thing happened. The old lady turned and spoke in rapid Czech to the shop assistant, who muttered (probably), ‘Well if she meant twenty grams why didn’t she say so?’ and fetched me a few slices. The old lady grinned at me and I could have kissed her.

said the shop assistant, slapping my paper-covered cheese in front of me. I think she said ‘Anything else?’ I had been planning on ham but now I just wanted to get out, so I held out my coins. She took some and I left quickly. Back home I got out my dictionary. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I may have asked for nine hundred grams of cheese.

In my attempts to keep the water off the floor I quickly used up all the bath mats and towels. I kept them on the floor of the kitchen permanently so that no splashes from the sink would ruin it, and I was constantly mopping up droplets from the bathroom floor. The flat had no washing machine so I was washing towels and bath mats by hand and drying them on the balcony. Although I ironed them and the tea towels for what seemed like hours, I could never get them back into their original, pristine condition. Tea towels in particular seemed to iron into a lopsided parallelogram. I couldn’t work out how that was happening—I folded them and ironed over the folds and still they turned out crooked. Needless to say, the linen cupboard was by now a hopeless mess of dishevelled linen. I’d tried, I really had, to get the linen back into its crisp soldierly lines, and I’d failed completely. The fitted sheets were in chaos. I’d changed my bed sheets and that had caused another typhoon in the cupboard. Now that I had to wash my sheets, I was desperate for a laundrette but I couldn’t for the life of me find one despite having searched all the streets in my area. I called Dad for help.

‘What do you want a laundrette for?’

‘To wash my towels and sheets.’

‘Oh don’t worry about that, darling, Petra will do it for you.’

Petra was one of the relatives who lived in a tiny village in southern Bohemia, about six hours’ bus ride from Prague. She was a cousin of Dad’s and his contemporary—in other words she was about seventy years old.

‘I’m not going to make Petra wash my sheets. What do you do when you stay here?’

‘I get Petra to wash them. She doesn’t mind.’

‘Well, I do. Surely there’s a laundrette somewhere.’

‘There isn’t.’

‘There must be.’

‘There isn’t.’ Dad and I can keep going like this forever if we both have a mind to it.

‘There must be.’

‘I don’t understand. Why do that when you can just leave them for Petra?’

‘Because I don’t think an old woman should have to wash for me.’

‘Well, I don’t know where a laundrette is’, said Dad, sulking now.

‘Fine. I’ll do them by hand’, I replied snippily.

‘Must you be so stubborn?’

At least this conversation did clear up the mystery of who kept the linen cupboard in such good order—Petra. I made a mental note to really put some effort into it before Petra saw the carnage I’d wrought.

I tried one last time to find a laundrette. I’d looked up the word for ‘laundry’ in a dictionary, and then scoured the local Yellow Pages, which I thought was pretty enterprising of me. I found a tiny number of entries that might just possibly be laundrettes. True, none of them actually used the word ‘laundrette’, or ‘Laundromat’, but they did all seem to relate, in some way, to the word the

dictionary assured me meant ‘laundry’. So I set off with a load of towels weighing me down to one such place in the centre of town, which seemed safer than going to one in the suburbs; at least I knew the streets in the city by now. After lugging my load in the hot sun up and down the street and finding nothing, I turned into an arcade, my muscles and temper fraying at the edges. Finally, finally, I found the laundry. It was a drycleaners. I stomped off home and washed eight towels by hand.

The water went off at regular intervals, sometimes for days at a time. I began to dread the sight of the water tanks. How long was this going to go on? The children’s playground showed no sign of completion, despite the furious jackhammering as soon as the sun rose. The tram lines on the main road remained a giant hole in the ground surrounded by sand and bricks and wire and planks. And dealing with Czech shop assistants was a never-ending characterbuilding exercise. Was this what life was like in Bohemia? Then three weeks in I caught the most appalling flu.

My head was aching, my nose was completely stuffed up and no amount of blowing cleared it in the slightest. I hadn’t slept for days because I couldn’t lie down, not if I wanted to breathe, anyway. My muscles hurt, every single one of them, and I was constantly thirsty. My time was divided between drinking and peeing. I had one bottle of emergency water left but the tap water was running, and as I didn’t have the stamina to go shopping I thought I’d be fine. All I wanted was to lie down. I managed to doze, leaning back on the pillows until the call of nature jerked me back into life.

I staggered out of bed, and into the loo. Some seconds later, I flushed. Nothing happened. I flushed again. Nothing. I went to wash my hands—no water. None in the kitchen either. And even worse, when I looked out the window I saw no water tanks parked outside. I checked the kettle. Nothing there either. All at once I needed a drink, I needed to wash my hands, I was sweaty and needed a shower, I needed to flush the toilet, I needed to do all this now and I only had half a bottle of water. It was about 8 p.m., so I did what all good people do in

desperation, I switched on the television. Nothing. I flicked the lights. Nothing.

It was at that moment that I really did wonder whether I should just give up, go home and forget about trying to be a Bohemian. It was all too difficult. You don’t realise how plugged into the grid your life is until you’ve been unplugged. No water, no light, no television, no stove, no PC. You can’t read, you can’t cook, you can’t watch telly and you can’t surf the net. What I really wanted to do was sleep, but I was beginning to panic. I spent the night taking sips of water only when I really needed it while I contemplated the life of the sub-Saharan Africans.

The whole water thing was getting to me. The washing-by-hand thing had lost its romance, too, even though I tried valiantly to think of it as part of the romance of the Old World. They can keep the Old World, I thought, bitterly. I’ll take a Westinghouse front-loader, thanks very much. I don’t mind washing my lingerie by hand, but having never tried to wash a sheet by hand before, here’s a tip: as you wring it out, make sure the bits you’ve already wrung aren’t falling straight back into the washing basin. When I realised my mistake I’d wrung out almost the entire sheet. I could’ve cried. I looked down and saw that blasted sheet back in the water in the basin as my aching hands wrung the last corner and I found myself thinking, A mangle would improve my life considerably. Who knew I’d ever have that thought?

Somehow I got through the night, although my emergency supply of water ran out at about three in the morning. I woke up, propped against musty pillows and stinking from a night of sweat and no washing, and lay in a fug of misery, wondering if I was defeated. Unplugged from the grid, without friends, family or shower facilities, in a world where a mangle, of all things, would make a significant difference, I felt as lost and as miserable as I’ve ever felt in my life. When I finally managed to haul myself from bed I saw from my balcony that the stupid communist bastards had finally come back from their tea break and provided the neighbourhood with water. I took the bucket from the cupboard and trudged downstairs to cluster around the tank.

There was only one other woman there that morning, and I didn’t do anything other than smile briefly at her. I was depressed, so all I could manage was a halfhearted feint at the social graces; a brief lift of the corners of the mouth, a nanosecond eye and then back to my thoughts of loneliness. The woman was unfazed by this, however, and began to yack to me, presumably something about the annoying water services in this country. I watched her talking. She seemed like a nice woman, probably in her sixties and looking typically Czech: fluffy died blonde hair, soft blue eyes looking out of a round face, the lines etched very delicately. These women always dress well, even if they’ve just come down to collect water. They don’t wear house dresses and slippers like my old next-door neighbour in Sydney, Ivy, used to. Ivy was never out of her nightie and curlers, or so it seemed to me. The older Czech women wear sensible, neat, clean clothes, nothing new, everything looking as though it’s very old but very well cared for and not a hair out of place. At the moment when it was my turn to respond I said to her, ‘I don’t speak Czech,’ and waited with a heavy heart for her to look away, embarrassed, as all the others had done. But instead, the woman said, in perfect English: ‘Do you live in this block?’

I wanted to fling my arms around her neck, ‘Yes, do you?’

‘Yes’, she said, ‘which flat?’

‘Number sixteen.’

‘In the Weiss’s flat?’

‘Yes.’ I was astonished. How did she know?

‘I’ve been wondering who moved into that flat’, she said as we introduced ourselves. She was Mrs Jendliková and she lived on the same floor as I did, in number fourteen. Mrs Jendliková had indeed been lamenting the water supply problems to me. She said that she didn’t know when it was going on or off either. ‘No-one does, darlink. They are supposed to tell you when it’s going to be cut off but they never do.’ She thought the workers on the tram line probably kept cutting off the water supply accidentally. ‘Idiots!’

I told Mrs Jendliková about my electricity and she said hers had gone off, too. She came upstairs with me and showed me where to find the powerboard. Luckily for me, that was all I needed to do. I guess my stepmother’s list of instructions was not so totally spurious after all—if I’d turned off the electricity I could have saved myself a blowout. As we were talking I asked Mrs Jendliková about the official-looking note on the front door of the building, thinking I might prepare myself against further utility-related disasters.

‘The note? Oh, that note. It’s a reminder to close the door.’

Later that evening, Mrs Jendliková came back to my flat bearing a plate piled high with fried chicken schnitzels, a bowl of potatoes in sour cream and a honey cake: ‘I thought you might be hungry, darlink.’ I was no longer alone.

Chapter 3 Friends at Last

Meeting Mrs Jendliková gave me new heart to get back out into Prague and find a life. She and I had dinner together that night and she told me the story of her life. She was a widow and retired, living on a pension. Her husband had died about ten years ago. She had a son and a daughter, one living in Hungary and one in Romania, so she saw them and her grandchildren at Christmas only, unless she visited them on a holiday. It seemed a real shame because she missed them; ‘But what can you do?’ she said philosophically. ‘They have their own lives.’ She played cards with her friends every week, but she didn’t go to the theatre as much as she used to because Prague was getting terribly expensive. She wanted to get a new bathroom, but she couldn’t afford it. She had the money, ‘But what if something happens to me? What if I get sick? I might need it, just in case.’

I listened to all of this with great interest. It was wonderful to have someone actually talking to me, telling me things, sharing their views on life. Wonderful. I was so grateful to her. I think of myself as a person who needs plenty of time alone, a person who doesn’t like to do too much socialising. Before coming to Prague I would have said that a month speaking to no-one would be my idea of heaven, but after a month of actually doing it I was never more grateful to spend time with an elderly neighbour. I used to listen to Ivy back home, of course, usually complaining about her invalid husband, but I hardly drank her in as I was doing now with Mrs Jendliková.

I told her about my difficulty with the language and she agreed that Czech was impossible.

‘We will speak it together’, she said, smiling at me, ‘It is the only way to learn.’ I

begged her not to start immediately, I was so enjoying having a real conversation, but a couple of days later I went to her place and we had tea and biscuits and she broke into something incomprehensible. It was a good idea but it lasted all of two minutes. Really, the last thing I needed at that point was more Czech, so we contented ourselves with practising English instead.

Mrs Jendliková was, I felt, a sign from God, and indeed God followed up with another sign in the form of an internet site. While lurking in a dark café sending lying emails home to friends (‘I’m having a wonderful time, washing my sheets by hand makes me feel I’m living in another era’) I came across a website devoted to expatriates living in the Czech Republic. From the tone of the messages posted on the site, I appeared to have stumbled on some very bohemian Bohemians, if ‘bohemian’ is defined by promiscuity and sexual predatoriness. I ignored the post looking for ‘Sexy blonde to show me around Prague’, and ed over the ‘Couple looking for broad-minded friends’, to find a small post advertising a brunch for expats to meet and get to know one another. The next Sunday found me at a little café right behind Letna Park.

If you’re ever alone in Prague, go to the Fraktal café in Letna Square on a Sunday at about midday and you’ll be sure to meet a group of people, most of whom have nothing in common with you other than loneliness. I’m not complaining; loneliness is how most of my best relationships got started. Fraktal is a cool little café in the basement of one of Prague’s elegant nineteenth-century buildings. When I arrived I walked down a set of stone steps that led to an old and scarred wooden door. I pushed it open and found myself in a quiet, shadowy bar with stone flagging on the floor and tattered posters advertising jazz bands on the walls. It was as quiet as a mausoleum and had that ‘everyone’s just left after spending all night drinking here’ feel about it. I wondered if that was true. There was a strange assortment of tables scattered throughout the bar, some so high off the ground that a shorty like me sitting at one would have her feet dangling mid-air, and one table with abnormally squat legs, only six inches high, was tucked into an alcove above a small stone wall.

I circled through the café but the place was empty. Behind the bar a ratty pair of louvre swing doors led out to the loos, so I paid a visit. The walls had cerulean blue paint on them, roughly slopped on over the stonework, and a mirror that hung by an old chain. It was spotty with age, one corner broken off, but it had lovely bevelled edges and was bright with polish. On the way back the barman looked at me and smiled.

‘Looking for someone?’ He had an American accent.

‘Um . . . expats?’

‘They’re outside.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’ Why hadn’t I thought of migrating to the USA? They’re so nice.

Outside, a low iron fence surrounded four or five long wooden tables with bench seats alongside. Huge, bright orange umbrellas protected the drinkers from the sun, which was a good thing. What had struck me about the European spring was how brutal the sun was while the temperature was still incredibly cold. I’d assumed spring was spring the world over—you’d be wearing shorts and t-shirts. So far mine had gone unused. After a couple of lovely days when I arrived, the temperature suddenly plunged to five degrees Celsius. In spring? I was wearing three layers of clothing and my woollen scarf, and still shivering. When the sun finally warmed up again, it only raised the temperature to about fifteen degrees. Fifteen degrees! Isn’t that a winter temperature? And I, naively as it turned out,

walked around with no sun protection on the grounds that the European sun, no matter how bright, was piss-weak compared to the Australian sun. How embarrassingly wrong I was. I was seared pink on the first really sunny day and so burned on the second day that the skin on my décolletage has never really recovered.

In the courtyard there was only one occupied table. Feeling shy and fighting the urge to run I gave myself a shake: Oh come on, pull yourself together. I went up to the table and stood uncertainly at the edge of the group. Everyone was chatting and laughing, waving giant glass mugs of beer around and carving up schnitzels. I stood on one foot. Then the other. Should I tap someone on the shoulder? Should I dig a hole and keep digging until I got back to Australia? My throat tightened and my skin prickled.

A terrifically thin woman with dark circles under her eyes and dramatic makeup —thick black mascara, white foundation and a swollen, red mouth (plastic surgery? violent boyfriend?)— looked up and said, ‘Well, hi there. You’re looking for the expats, aren’t you?’ Another American—truly nice people. I nodded, a little awkwardly.

‘Well, pull up a pew, honey. Sven, wriggle over.’

‘Off course. Here, sere is plenty off room’, he said as I sat down.

‘This is Sven and Marta and Carol and Brad and Danny and Frank and Mike and Michael and Simeon and Don and . . . sorry honey I’ve forgotten your name . . . right, Liselotte, and Mischa and Suin and Desiree and Desiree’s dog Egypt and Inge and Katya and Giselle and I’m Laura’, said the wonderful American. I forgot everyone’s name immediately. ‘Everyone this is . . .’, she looked at me expectantly.

For one awful moment I was stumped. ‘Uh, oh . . . Rachael.’

‘Rachael’, repeated Laura. ‘So what are you doing in Prague?’

It was the first time I’d been asked that question. What was I doing in Prague?

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I’ve spent forty years in Sydney and it seemed time for a change. I thought I’d try to write while I was here.’

‘Ooh, a writer. There are a few of those here’, Laura smiled at me warmly. I felt as though I’d found my best friend. I loved her. ‘And how do you like Prague?’ was her next question.

Well, I hated it, didn’t I. It was hard and lonely and I couldn’t work anything out and the people were unfriendly and unhelpful. But I didn’t feel I could say any of that because I didn’t want to seem completely pathetic. I guessed that I couldn’t be the only foreigner to be given the special Prague service treatment, so I took the humorous route, pretending I thought it was all hilarious and a great adventure. Laura nodded and I felt she knew exactly what I meant, to my intense relief.

‘Yeah, the Chucks are like that. But once you get to know them, you’re family.’

An American fellow sitting next to me (Brad? Mike?) chimed in. ‘Oh yeah, the

Chucks are the worst, man, the worst. But when you’re in you’re in. Like, you’re brothers.’

Several other American voices ed in like a Greek chorus. I was to discover that in Prague the permanent expats, the ones who have left their home countries to start a new life, are mostly British and American and, more often than not, men. The Americans love to tell you all about the ‘Chucks’: ‘Oh yeah, the Chucks will never tell you what they really think’; ‘The Chucks are like that— once the Chucks get to know you, they’ll, like, do anything for you, man, anything’. They boast endlessly about their Chuck experiences and their Chuck wives and girlfriends.

The Brits, on the other hand, neither know nor care what the Czechs are like and they think everyone they meet is dumb. ‘I used to do research at Oxford’, said Simeon, ‘which is a university, and then I did research at Harvard, which is another university’. Quite frankly, I thought Simeon’s specs and haircut and his dweeby British voice rather precluded him from feeling superior to anyone. But the Americans, bless them, know how to make a stranger feel wanted. Laura spared me the necessity of having to cover up how I really felt about Prague by switching the subject to herself and telling me all about her life—she was an artist. At least, I suppose you could call Laura an artist. Laura’s art, so she told me, was her sex life, an evolving artistic experiment called the Act of Re/Creation. She told me all about it at great length and in mind-boggling detail. Although I’d like to tell you that I was terribly avant-garde and immediately appreciated her genius, I have to it that I’m still unclear about why having a lot of sex, even if it is a lot of sex involving birch twigs and small animals, is art. And it seemed art gallery directors were as puzzled and as reactionary as I was because, although she’d been working on it for eighteen years, no-one had offered to install her and her Act of Re/Creation in an exhibition yet. In the meantime, she ed herself teaching English, as most of the expats seemed to do.

I’d thought at first that I’d teach English for a living, but in the months leading

up to my arrival in Prague I started to imagine something a lot more romantic, a job in the theatre, maybe—I’d hang around with actors, reading first-night reviews at four in the morning, going to closing-night parties. My first month had knocked that out of me. I still didn’t even know what the Czech word for ‘theatre’ was, let alone where to find one. It had dawned on me that stagehands might need to know Czech, so I’d gone back to the more prosaic idea of teaching English. ‘The problem is, I don’t have a working visa’, I told Laura.

‘Neither do I. Hardly anyone does. You just have to put a post on expats.cz and offer to teach conversation one on one. That’s what I did.’ That seemed do-able. I was about to ask Laura more about it when an American man sitting next to me broke in.

‘So you’re a writer, huh? What do you write?’

Under normal circumstances, this would have been an innocuous enough question, but two things made me bristle. First, out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen this guy sit up straight as soon as he saw me, turning up the wattage on his face, grinning and preparing to laugh charmingly at my slightest utterance. It’d happened in a split second, but I’d ed it in the back of my mind. Second, his knee had been touching my thigh for some time and I could have sworn that I felt the pressure increasing. It seemed incredible and yet, when I moved my thigh, his knee followed. I’d met the guy ten minutes ago and he was playing kneesies with me!

‘Uh, sorry, I’ve forgotten your name?’ I really had forgotten it, but I also wanted to dampen his enthusiasm.

‘Danny’, said the American, giving me what I suspect he thought was a boyish grin. He was good looking in a light brown sort of a way. Nice enough face,

middle height and weight. Without the knees I might have embraced him with as much enthusiasm as I had Laura, but with the knees . . . No.

‘You’ll have to go on one of Danny’s tours of Prague’, said Laura. ‘He loves showing people the sights.’

‘Yes, any time’, Danny leaned forward and touched my arm.

‘Well, that’s very kind of you’, I said, scrabbling to catch the right tone between thanks and yikes, ‘I may take you up on that’.

‘You’ll get used to the Chucks’, Danny said confidentially. ‘Once you get to know them, you’ll see they’re really friendly. My ex-wife is Chuck. When I first met her she could hardly speak a word of English and I couldn’t speak any Chuck . . .’

‘Which is how you managed to marry ’er, eh Danny?’ drawled an Australian accent. I smiled at the guy who’d spoken. He looked to be about mid-fifties, well-leathered from life in the sun, with grey hair shaved close to his head.

‘I’m an Australian, too’, I told him, delighted by this voice from home.

‘Yeah’, he said, ‘I try and avoid Australians.’ Right. Nice to meet you, too. But then he relented. ‘Frank.’ He held out his hand.

‘Rachael.’ I shook it.

‘Frank’s a writer, too’, said Laura, chirpily. ‘He’s a poet.’

‘Really?’ I was impressed by this. A poet seems a serious sort of writer to me.

‘Yeah, well I don’t do that much.’

Danny, meanwhile, was holding his breath waiting to continue telling me about the Czechs. I hurried to forestall him. ‘So, have you been here long, Frank?’

‘’bout three months. Usually come every year.’

‘We can’t get rid of him’, said Danny.

‘You gotta try harder, mate’, replied Frank, lazily. ‘Say, Sven, what are those girls saying?’

Behind us, two young blondes were babbling away in a Nordic language, totally engrossed in each other’s conversation, which, from their likely age, probably centred on Christina Aguilera or a boy in their class. Frank had been eyeing them appreciatively.

‘Sey are saying, “Who is tat older guy? Do you tink he would go out wiss me?”’ I cracked up. That was the first really funny thing I’d heard anyone say in a month. Sven looked at me appreciatively— everyone loves a person who laughs at their jokes. Frank just said, ‘Bastard’.

Sven and Frank turned out to be buddies. Sven was a gentle, soulful Swede of about twenty-three, with beautiful hands, green/blue eyes, long lashes and blazing acne. They had a most unlikely friendship: tough, crude old Australian, and melancholy, sensitive young Swede, but they were a likeable pair. They cruised the bars together looking for girls, equally unsuccessfully—Sven was too shy and Frank too old and drunk, but I really took to them. Soon, they were telling me about their previous evening.

‘Mate, that Czech girl was yours. In like Flynn, mate.’

‘You know I can’t do anything about her.’

‘Mate! She had her hands all over you!’

‘I am interested in someone else.’

‘She only wanted you for one night.’ Frank turned to me and said, ‘Sven’s got his eye on a girl at his work.’

‘I am in luff’, said Sven earnestly, his green eyes going liquid and his acne reddening. ‘But I fear she does not luff me.’

‘How long have you known her?’ I asked him.

‘We have been friends for some months now. My feelings towards her have grown very warm but I do not know how to take the next step.’

‘Are you close friends?’

‘We go to the cinema together. We see each other every day at work. Most days we have lunch together, just the two of us. We talk on the phone, we send emails and we text during the day . . .’

‘Uh-huh . . .’

‘. . . but I worry. What if to her it is just a friendship? What if she does not share the warmth of my feelings? What then? I am afraid of losing the friendship. This closeness we have, she is a very special person, very smart, funny. She is sensitive, too. Perhaps I will offend her, perhaps she will not want to talk to me again. But we spend so much time together. Does this mean that she really does like me?’

‘It seems promising’, I said.

‘Yes.’ Sven was thoughtful. ‘Frank says it is time I “put the hard word on her”.’

‘Too right, mate’, Frank broke in. ‘She has to shit or get off the pot.’ How I loved this burst of Australiana. I didn’t miss Sydney, not at all, but I now realised that I sure missed Australians. We batted around the subject of Sven’s love life for a little longer and then I asked them something which had been on my mind for a while: ‘How safe is it in Prague?’ I’d been going home before sundown because I wasn’t sure how safe the streets were at night and wanted to know if I needed to take any extra precautions.

‘Mate’, Frank was reassuring, ‘Prague’s had one murder in the last five years. You can walk anywhere you want to, any time of night and you’ll be fine. The only people you have to watch out for are the English lads. It’s cheap to get here from London, so they fly over for their stag parties, drink beer for three days straight and rampage through the city starting fights and harassing women.’ Frank told me if I saw a group of men all dressed in matching t-shirts with ‘Bob’s Stag Night’ written on them, I should immediately walk the other way.

I had a wonderful time chatting to the group. Laura, who really did drink absinthe during lunch, seemed to be genuinely bohemian. Danny managed to tell me a lot more about the Chucks and then looked disappointed when I left without having sex with him. I had a feeling my new life had begun.

Chapter 4 My Grandmother’s Favourite Café

Having found the expats, I began to build myself a social life. At first, it was terribly difficult for me to kick myself out of the house and go to lunches and dinners with complete strangers. They all knew each other well and chatted about things they’d been doing together and other people they knew. I struggled to make conversation. What I was missing was friends, not acquaintances. These meals didn’t seem to do much to alleviate my feelings of isolation and I hadn’t shared the full extent of my difficulties with the folks at home. Dad, especially, was keen for me to thrive. I’d been calling him about once a week with fake versions of my life.

‘How is everything, darling?’

‘Great, really great, couldn’t be better.’

‘Are you making lots of friends?’

‘I sure am, Dad.’

‘Czech friends?’

Is nothing I do ever good enough? ‘Um, well I see the woman at the deli pretty

regularly.’

‘Nice woman?’

How to answer that one? ‘Um, yeah.’

‘Good, good’, he paused for a moment, ‘You should make Czech friends.’

‘Right. Okay, gotta go.’

The one person back home I had confided in was my friend Andy. Andy was a wedding photographer I’d known for a couple of years. A friendship had grown between us during my last year in Sydney owing to the fact that we were both going through a midlife crisis at the time. Andy was forty-two and wondering if his life was going to amount to anything more than making fat brides look thin. He did it terribly well, but he felt sure there was more to him than that. He wanted to be an art photographer, and when I announced I was dropping everything and moving to Prague for a year, Andy looked thoughtful. At first he wanted to drop everything too and come with me, which would have been wonderful, but he had a thriving business and he didn’t want to be an art photographer badly enough to be poor. We had agreed, however, that he would come to visit me and we’d go to a spa town, either Karlsbad or Marienbad, because he wanted to do a portfolio of photographs of famously romantic towns in Europe. Andy was the only person who knew just how horrible I’d been at finding my own romantic town, and he’d been wonderfully sympathetic.

‘All change is difficult. You just need to get out of the house. Go sit in a café and talk to the person next to you.’

‘But I can’t. I’m useless at just marching up to strangers.’

‘No-one likes it but you’re on an adventure now, so you’d better do it.’

‘But I can’t. I can’t! Why did I leave home?’

‘Hang in there, honey. I’m coming to visit you, so don’t leave yet. It’s early days. Give it time.’ And so on. Really, he was a miracle of patience. He sent me text messages every day just so I’d feel in touch with someone and when I found the expats, he made me go to the brunch every Sunday and a dinner every Thursday: ‘Get out. Go. Life is about turning up.’

I went, because I knew Andy was right, but twice a week I talked to complete strangers in nothing but dull clichés—the same old conversation over and over again: ‘What are you doing here? How long are you here? Really, is that what the Chucks are like?’ Gradually, though, a strange thing happened: I began to get rather good at that same old conversation. I began to have it with verve and flair —I began to understand that that same old conversation is a social code—it sends out a message of comradeship and comfort. It starts friendships.

To my own amazement I found a level of social assuredness I had no idea I possessed. I saw other newcomers look blank and miserable, and with the superb social skills of a New England political hostess I took these newcomers under my wing, chatted gently to them and steered them into conversations with other expats. One day, quite unexpectedly, I realised I was actually enjoying myself and had been for quite a while. Look at me, I thought, Who’d have thought I had it in me?

I began telling Andy that it was terribly important to constantly cultivate new skills and expand your horizons. ‘Challenge yourself’, I onished him. ‘Face your fears and overcome them. Then you’ll really know you’re alive. If you just stay in your comfortable rut, you’ll be only half living.’ Instead of faking the line dropping out, Andy told me how wonderful it was that I’d found friends.

Although I continued to meet new people throughout the year, my circle of friends winnowed down to a handful. I really took to Sven, who was a lovely, gentle fellow, permanently in love and always with the most ghastly girls. He’d followed Frank’s advice and tried to hold the hand of his beloved, and it was at that point that she’d revealed the existence of a boyfriend. Quite where the boyfriend had been during the daily lunches, the texting and the movies was a mystery, but apparently he had been around all that time. Sven was devastated.

He and I went to the movies once a week followed by a beer or two afterwards. Sometimes these beers were drunk in complete silence, he and I both having the gift of quiet, but all too often I listened while Sven ran the facts of his latest love by me: ‘I tink she likes me but I am not sure. She has had a hart life. It is hart for her to make friends. I want to help her.’ He was such a lovely guy, Sven, but so very misguided. I’d met this current one—she had had a hart life because she hated everyone and everything. She’d done nothing but glower sullenly and then demand to go home. ‘She is sensitive’, he said. (Uh-huh.) ‘She does not like to talk to people. We do not talk much.’ And then the poor guy was plunged into alcoholic misery when the misanthropic basket case decided she didn’t like him very much, either, suddenly ceasing to speak to him altogether. Just like that. ‘I do not understand’, he sobbed. ‘I luffed her.’ And I signalled for another beer.

Frank was another favourite of mine, although I saw less of him. He, too, was lovelorn, although he was more lustlorn and was trying to persuade Sven that women were sex objects and he should wise up. More than anything, I think I just liked listening to Frank’s accent and his faintly old-fashioned ockerisms. He

was having a good influence on Sven’s English: ‘Excoose me, I must go to the dunny.’

There weren’t many women in the expat crowd; in fact Laura was the only one in Prague for the long term. I met one or two other women, but as they were just ing through, Laura became by default my closest female friend. I couldn’t say I would have chosen Laura as a friend under normal circumstances. In fact, I could safely say I wouldn’t have, but she was exotic at least and I had to give her points for sheer courage in living free. We’d meet up for coffee every couple of weeks and Laura would share with me all the details of the night before: ‘Twenty-four, I like them young, gave him a happy ending—you know what that is, right?’ I nodded and wondered how she did it, where she got the energy and self-confidence from. Americans are full of self-confidence, of course. Laura and Danny were the two I got to know best. They were terrible know-it-alls, but since they really did know a lot they were often a mine of interesting information. Through Laura, I met a Czech woman, Zuzana, so I was at last able to tell Dad I had a Czech friend.

‘Just one?’

Zuzana worked in the Greek embassy. She spoke Greek, English, Russian and German, and was unably modest about this ability. In Europe, three languages is seen as the bare minimum. All Czechs speak German and most speak German and Russian. English is catching on as a must-have language now that capitalism has arrived. Zuzana was a slender, perky girl with straightened blonde hair, dyed to be a little bit blonder than she really was. She told me she liked to hang out with the expat crowd so she could get the international experience. She found being Czech stifling and longed to travel and be cosmopolitan. She found it completely incomprehensible that I would have left Australia to move to Prague, even for a year: ‘But why? You live in Australia. Why would you want to come here?’ I tried to explain to her that Australia was a long, long way away from where the action is.

Zuzana enjoyed meeting expats but she, like me, had found the sexual predatoriness a bit full on. ‘You the lunch at Fraktal where we first met?’ she asked me one day when we were discussing this aspect of expat life. ‘You and I were talking and Danny was pressing my foot. He actually started rubbing his foot up and down my leg.’ I laughed, but then stopped.

‘Wait a minute. The first time I met you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good Lord. He was playing kneesies with me at that lunch, too. He must have been feeling us both up at the same time!’

‘That figures’, she said. ‘He asked me to sleep with him the other day.’

‘He hasn’t got that far with me yet.’

‘He will.’ And I supposed she was right.

One night, a few weeks after I ed the expats, when I was feeling like one of the crowd, we went to a place called Café Slavia. Café Slavia was a somewhat upmarket café/restaurant on the river with a great view of the castle, and interior decoration that ran to burnished brass and pictures of 1940s’ movie stars. It’s a tourist venue now, but its great claim to fame is that this is where the

revolutionaries of the communist era used to hang out, most famously Václav Havel, plotting the undoing of the regime. It had much greater significance for me, however. I’d been on the phone to Dad the night before and told him where I was going, and he said, quite casually, ‘That was your grand mother’s favourite café. She used to go there after the theatre and look out at the river and the people ing by. She loved Café Slavia.’

I could never get a clear picture of my grandmother from my father, I’m not sure why. When I asked what she was like, he became very vague. After the Iron Curtain came down he hadn’t been in touch with her for many years. Not because he couldn’t, but because he was ashamed. When he first got to Australia he made his living chopping down trees in Tasmania and then as a labourer on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. He told me he hadn’t wanted to write to her until he was successful. It was ten years before he finally did his high school matriculation in Sydney and then another six before he finished his dentistry degree. Only then did he his mother. I never knew how she felt about this. Was she proud of him for being successful? Angry that he’d abandoned her? Would she really have preferred not to hear from him just because he was a labourer? Dad told me once that he’d seen a letter from a cousin of his mother’s saying, ‘Zdenìk claims he’s a dentist’. When he’d shown her his degree certificate she’d had to apologise to his mother.

Dad said this with immense satisfaction, so I guess the labourer thing would really have mattered to his mother. My feeling was, though, that Dad just didn’t want to think too much about the desertion of his mother and that was why I could never really get a true picture of her. Not thinking about things that are unpleasant to him is Dad’s way of coping in life. It has its plusses—he doesn’t dwell on things that go wrong—but the big drawback is that it often means seeing things through a Dad Filter; if it involved something unpleasant, as this did, getting to the nub of what had happened was impossible.

So I went to Café Slavia that night with special interest. If my grandmother had liked looking at the river and the castle, she must have sat at one of the window

seats. Which one? The windows of the café were almost floor to ceiling and extended the length of the two external walls. There were about a dozen tables against them, some for four or six people in railed-off banquettes, some for two, angled towards the castle. One of those, perhaps? I’d seen a photo of my grandmother taken when she was an old lady, another neat-as-a-pin old Czech, sitting at a café table across from my father, her hands folded in front of her, with soft grey hair, blues eyes and a slight smile—a ‘must-you-take-myphotograph?’ sort of smile. I mentally put that picture onto one of the tables for two and saw her calmly watching the crowds of sightseers outside with a hint of a smile. So I was only listening with half an ear to Danny, who was competing with Laura over who knew the most about the Czechs, when he said a word that caught my attention: ák.

I’d heard this word at these social gatherings frequently and I had no idea what it meant, although I could tell it was something deeply undesirable. After a while I figured out it was some sort of housing, but I couldn’t work out why it was so scorned. Danny was going on about áks now, with absolute disdain, and Laura was taking preparatory breaths, mouth open, waiting for him to stop so she could tell everyone how horrible she thought they were. Mid-intake, and before she could get out her first word, I ducked in and asked Danny: ‘What are áks?’

The effect was amazing. It unleashed a torrent from the crowd. Czechs and expats alike fell over themselves to give me the full picture: ‘áks are apartment blocks built by the communists’, explained Danny. ‘They’re called “áks” because they’re made out of prefabricated concrete s.’ I paused . . . my block of flats was made out of concrete s.

‘The walls are so thin you can hear everything going on next door’, said Pavel, a student of Laura’s. ‘I grew up in one and I used to live in one with my girlfriend. As soon as I got a job we moved out.’

‘My uncle lived in one’, said Zuzana. ‘You know, he was woken at five-thirty every morning of his life by his neighbour’s alarm clock playing incredibly loud oom pah pah music.’ I asked why her uncle hadn’t gone around to complain or even negotiate a different wake-up call sound with his neighbour.

Zuzana looked blank. ‘You don’t do that here.’

As I couldn’t hear my neighbours, I thought perhaps I didn’t live in a ák after all. Or maybe my neighbours were just really quiet? The early communistbuilt apartment blocks were apparently okay, because they were built out of brick by people who actually thought a new era of wealth shared by all was being ushered in, but after only a few years the party and the country began to run out of money. Those who were at first enthusiastic ers of the communist ideal began to run out of optimism, so that the later áks were made of thin concrete slabs attached to an iron framework by a state-run company that couldn’t care less.

‘They fall apart, the walls crack all the time, the plaster falls off.’

‘And the bathrooms . . .’

‘The bathrooms!’

‘What about the bathrooms?’

‘They’re the worst’, said Laura. ‘They’re prefabricated from brown plastic that

bends like a wobble board, and they’re stuck right in the middle of the flat, so that all the other rooms have to revolve around the bathroom. You share your plumbing with the flats above and below you, so the heat and pressure of your water depends on when your neighbours shower and for how long. There are no tiles, just this horrible brown plastic shell forming the walls, ceiling and floor.’

Everyone agreed they were the last word in hideous and I began to feel reassured —I couldn’t possibly be living in one of those. There are no cracks on my walls and my bathroom is tiled. I suggested that, given the Czech love of fine buildings, I was surprised they hadn’t just torn down the áks and replaced them with something gracious.

‘They tried that’, said Zuzana, ‘but they’re impossible to destroy. An explosives company tried their hardest on one apartment block and they only managed to blow up a corner of it. It’s the iron frame—it’s indestructible. The áks are jammed so close together’, Zuzana told me, ‘that’s how young Czechs get their sex education—by looking out their windows into their neighbours’ bedrooms.’

Well, that settled it. I couldn’t see anything other than river and trees and a few factories. áks were mostly built together in ‘estates’ bearing bitterly ironic names like Heaven’s Garden, which is a suburb on my metro line. I later went to Heaven’s Garden to see for myself. It should have been named Heaven’s Seedy and Depressing Parking Lot—row upon row of ghastly grey blocks of flats stacked together on asphalt.

I felt certain I didn’t live in a ák. Well, fairly certain. Well, not totally certain, but surely, surely I couldn’t live in a ák . . . Could I?

As the spring days lengthened and the weather warmed up in preparation for summer, my social life took off. Eating out was incredibly cheap, and every

expat’s favourite phrase was, ‘I know a place . . .’ Although that was the last time I went to the Café Slavia with the expats—it was considered a rather dud choice on the grounds that it was a tourist venue and we prided ourselves on avoiding the tourist traps. Danny, Laura, Sven and Zuzana, and occasionally Frank, came to the brunches and dinners, but the crowd was otherwise largely a transient one. Sometimes I met people once and never again, sometimes they became part of my life for a month or two. But while the company was often varied, the food never was.

The menu at U Pecku was replicated in every restaurant and pub in Prague. I did once find a French restaurant but it was insanely expensive, presumably on the grounds that it was the only place in the city offering something other than fried pork and potato pancakes. When I had no idea at all how to find my way around a menu, I went on a culinary adventure: I’d just pick something at random, point to it on the menu, and wait to see what turned up. Mostly it was pork or chicken schnitzel, or goulash, dumplings and sauerkraut. Occasionally I pointed to the house specialties and ended up eating pork stuffed with peach, ham and gorgonzola cheese; fried pork, breaded and stuffed with sausages and cheese and with more cheese melted over the top; fried pork covered in cornflakes and stuffed with ham and cheese; or, a true specialty of every Czech kitchen, the Bohemian Dish. It’s the equivalent of the Australian mixed grill only the meat is quarter of a duck, ham steak, pork schnitzels and pork sausages, and it comes with red cabbage sauerkraut and dumplings. I have to say, I absolutely love Czech food, and since my social life revolved around eating, I consumed a lot of it.

Food in general was a hot topic of conversation among the expats. Supermarkets greatly exercised us, everyone having their opinion on which was the best yoghurt/cheese/washing powder. This was particularly so for us non-Europeans. Nothing was the same as it was back home. The dairy section was as puzzling to others as it had been to me; however, it was also the most rewarding for me. I’d finally found the milk and when I put it in my coffee I was startled to see cream floating to the top in small lumps and then melting. I’m used to milk that’s been appropriately processed so that it’s completely different from what it was when it exited the cow’s udder. At least, I assume it still comes from a cow’s udder.

Czech milk, on the other hand, definitely comes from a cow. It goes off quicker than our milk and it tastes and smells a lot stronger. The butter was also noticeably richer, and there was no such thing as ‘95% fat-free cheese’. The cheese in the supermarket was d as either ‘30% fat’ or ‘45% fat’; the Czechs would be puzzled by a cheese that called itself ‘fat-free’.

It was the yoghurt that really killed me, though. Laura and I spent many hours comparing brands we’d found. I’d been buying a particularly delicious one, which I was eating by the bucketful. It was called Smetanový, which I thought was the brand name, but Laura broke it to me that it was actually a word meaning ‘made from cream’. She and I adored it, as you would, since it was just cultured cream. My favourite was the pear and chocolate smetanový yoghurt, and Laura’s was the raspberry and vanilla, but then she found a cheese-based dessert, even richer, called tvaroh. I’d seen it in my Norma and wondered what it was, but when I bought it on Laura’s recommendation I was unimpressed. It was a thick, cream cheese whip with chocolate chunks in it; too much for me. We kept up this common interest for months, searching out different flavours and brands and bickering over whether or not tvaroh was any good.

I learned that The Norma was the cheapest supermarket chain, getting in the bulk goods and flogging them cheap. Back home this is the type of place that would stock home-brand products almost exclusively. Strangely, the Czechs, who are a thrifty bunch, haven’t yet cottoned on to the home-brand concept. Possibly this is because they’ve only had fifteen years of ‘The Brand’ concept and they’re still excited about that. You can see the Czech word for ‘brand name’, znaèka, everywhere on shop windows, because being a brand name is a huge selling point here, even in the food sector. I wondered how long it would be before it became associated with ‘you’re paying fifty per cent extra for the printing on the box’.

As much as I was loving the schnitzels and mashed potato, the cream yoghurt and the forty-five per cent fat cheese, I’m from Sydney and I’m used to: a) fresh, crisp vegetables; and b) spices. Sydney has more Thai restaurants than Bangkok,

and in my suburb alone I could eat at any number of cheap Vietnamese, Indian, Greek, Korean and Malaysian restaurants. After a few months of Czech food, I started to crave spices, any spice. But the homogeneity of Prague, both the people who are uniformly blond and blue-eyed, and their food, is extraordinary. There is no Chinatown in Prague. How is that possible? There’s a Chinatown in every city in the world, surely?

It was an expat ing through, a Canadian called Alex, who saved me. Alex was one of those extraordinary people who know their way around a city within two days of arriving. He was telling me about places I’d never even heard of after he’d been here only a week. We were sitting on the balcony of the Grand Orient, a Cubist café, which I thought could have put just a bit more Cubist effort in. It felt like a nineteenth-century hotel despite the lightning-jag coat hooks and the angular brass chandeliers. Sure, cubed mirrors lined one wall and the building itself was made of burnt clay cubes, but I was expecting something a lot more in-your-face than the slightly decayed elegance of green silk upholstery and parquet floors. I’d read that outside the Grand Orient was a Cubist lamp post—the only Cubist lamp post in the world. I searched the entire street corner and, although I found a few vaguely angular lamp posts, none of them stood out as being Cubist. While the café was slightly disappointing, the balcony was a great place to sit and see the world go by. We were watching a group of Czech workmen digging a hole in the ground, which they were doing very badly, as is the wont of Czech workmen.

‘They’re stopping. Oh, I see, it’s smoko time.’

‘Okay, now this guy is going to get tangled up in his ladder.’

‘Wait, should this be a hole?’

‘D’oh! It’s supposed to be a shopping mall.’

‘Okay, stop work everyone. Now stand around looking vague.’

I was telling Alex about the Thai restaurants in Sydney, and how much I missed Thai food, when he said, ‘I had a great Vietnamese soup at the markets yesterday.’

I thought I couldn’t have heard him right: ‘The what?’

‘You know, the Vietnamese markets.’

By that time, I’d been in Prague for two months and this was the first I’d heard of any Vietnamese markets, and yet Alex had found them in less than a week.

‘They haven’t got a Chinatown. What are the Vietnamese doing here?’ I asked.

‘Communists’, said Alex. ‘They’re from North Vietnam.’

I found this immensely comforting. In Sydney we have a huge Vietnamese population, mostly people who came as refugees and boat people during and after the war in Vietnam, but the ones in Sydney come from South Vietnam. Here in Prague were their cousins, either fleeing the northern regime or migrating here from one communist country to another. They were people

completely unknown to me yet deeply familiar. But I hadn’t seen any in the city or even in the suburbs around my place, and this seemed to be because the Vietnamese enclave was miles away from me, in the deep industrial heartland.

It took me over an hour to get there, after catching a tram and two buses. When I got off at the bus stop I was in a featureless industrial landscape, utterly flat, with tin buildings and driveways running off the highway. If Alex hadn’t given me good instructions I’d never have known which drive to go down. Sure enough, tucked behind the highway was a thriving market, trucks of produce careening through the narrow streets, three-walled shops selling brightly coloured, plastic kids’ toys and bulk t-shirts, the Vietnamese women sitting on low stools and talking to each other. It was a strange feeling when they addressed me in Asianaccented Czech. Most importantly, the market was filled with Asian food—chilli and bok choy and soy sauce and coriander and flat noodles and white radish and fish sauce and pickled ginger and rice noodles and, and, and, and . . . I went completely mad. I had a tom yum goong at a restaurant, then I bought as much as I could carry and ate Asian food for two weeks straight. When I ran out, I went back for more.

Finding the food at the Vietnamese markets was the first time that I really, really missed Sydney. Prague had not been easy during my first month here, but as tough as it had been, I hadn’t missed Sydney so much as hated the adventure I’d rashly embarked upon. Finding Asian food made me feel sentimental. Even the rudeness of the Czechs hadn’t started me pining for sunny Australian faces the way a bottle of sweet chilli sauce did. And the rudeness of the Czechs continued unabated. What I’d told Dad was true—I saw the woman at the deli at least once a week. But I braved the experience only as often as I needed cheese and salami to be sure I was doing something authentically local. It wouldn’t do to just go to the supermarket—why bother leaving Australia if all I did was shop in a supermarket, even if The Norma was equipped with beer and a beer bottlerecycling system? But not once, not once, did the woman behind the deli counter smile at me or even acknowledge that she recognised me.

I discovered that the Czechs don’t just reserve this rudeness for foreigners. They’re rude to everybody. A few months into my year I was at a supermarket in town, standing in the checkout queue, and a tiny old lady was standing in front of me with one packet of bread rolls in her hand. My shopping was on the rubber conveyor belt. The checkout chick grabbed my stuff, swiped it and tossed it onto the packing bench, then demanded money. The little old lady was still standing there, bread in hand, so I said (in Czech because I could speak a little by that time), ‘Oh, no, this lady was first’.

The checkout chick just shrugged. The old lady hadn’t been quick enough to hand up her rolls, so she’d just have to wait. I looked startled, and I apologised to the little old lady, who smiled sweetly at me, saying, ‘That’s okay’. She knew I hadn’t pushed in, and she knew the score in supermarkets. She was old and weak, so naturally the staff took out their frustrations on her. The checkout chick was utterly unashamed at treating an old lady so brutally.

Eventually I just stopped being pleasant to checkout chicks and waiters—it only made them think I was weak and they’d behave worse. It was an eye-opener, though. I realised that it’s just social convention that keeps a smile on our face. Freed from that, you can see how miserable people really are. Hooray for social convention, I say. The Americans may have taken the chirpy smile and the ‘have a nice day’ too far, but the Czechs have taken displaying one’s real feelings to a level that can’t be healthy. All this rudeness just engenders more misery and rudeness. There came a day when I was walking down my street and a woman who was ing me smiled. I gazed blankly at her, then turned my head away. I didn’t mean to, it was automatic. She was past me before I realised what I’d done, and then I knew that I’d have to go back to my pleasant, open-faced Australian ways, no matter what hostility I might get in return. I wanted to be Bohemian, but not that Bohemian.

Chapter 5 Family Matters

This, then, was my life: eating out . . . oh, and keeping my father’s flat in a spotless and, most crucially, dry order. I was in a fine old state over that last one. The tiniest droplet sent me into a frenzy of mopping, dreading that I might carelessly ruin my stepmother’s floor and cause her further expense. Or rather, cause me an expense I could well do without. It made no difference who paid for it, though, because for a family of war survivors, money spent needlessly is a calamity. Whether it was me or my father who forked out for the repairs, it would cause equal amounts of anguish. Fortunately, I’d discovered a laundry through the expats so I could finally stop washing the towels by hand.

It was in the city, a twenty-minute tram journey from the sticks where I lived and then a ten-minute walk from the tram stop. So there I went, laden with bundled sheets and linen. I didn’t care. I was well and truly over the ‘romance’ of living without a washing machine. How on earth do people do it? And who came up with the ridiculous term ‘women’s work’ for light work? Were they insane? The muscles on my forearms from washing and wringing by hand were bulging through my shirt by the time I gave it away.

As enjoyable as all this eating out and meeting people was, I was getting very little done on my novel, the reason, after all, why I’d come to Prague. Once I’d trekked through the city, seen all the tourist spots and sorted my social life I could avoid the inevitable no longer. I’m not a person who can go for too long without doing something goal-oriented. In this I differ markedly from Dad, who has taken to retirement with gusto. Unlike most people who suffer from Relevance Deprivation Syndrome, needing therapy to deal with retirement, Dad plunged into retirement, happily dividing his time between watching television, napping and calling to tell me how to run my life. Me, I’m always striving for something . . . never really getting there, but always on the road.

Now to my novel, a searing novel, a tale of . . . well . . . something very searing and serious. One that a serious writer would write when in Prague. Something that would win me the Nobel Prize for literature, for instance, or world fame, or a place alongside Kafka and Proust in the literary canon. I switched on my old PC, opened up Word, cracked my fingers and placed them on the keys. Ten seconds later I was in front of the open fridge, wondering if there was any cheese left. There was, so I had a cheese sandwich. Refreshed, I returned to the PC.

It’s not a good idea to work on an empty stomach, I excused myself. It distracts you. Your mind switches away from the business of painting a doomed heroine to the tug of your appetite. It’s a primeval thing—your belly giving you the jungle signal to gather herbs and hunt mastodon. I ed I’d seen some salami in the fridge . . . three hours later I hadn’t written a word but the fridge was empty.

Now I was contemplating the floor and thinking it looked as though it could do with a vacuum when to my intense delight the front doorbell rang. When I opened it, an old man came in and started to take off his shoes. A stranger to me —not one of my neighbours, and probably not a polite thief or door-to-door salesman come to use my flat as a dressing room. Having divested himself of his shopping bag and shoes he gave me a smile and said, ‘Jsem Jiøí’ (‘I am Jiøí’). Ah . . . my father’s cousin, come from the ancestral village in the south to collect the mail. About time. I’d been getting concerned about the letters piling up.

My Czech was getting slightly better but I still couldn’t get past the ‘Dear Sir’ on the letters. I was starting to worry that they may well continue on with, ‘as you haven’t replied to any of our previous correspondence, we will assume that you have no intention of paying our bill and will therefore be cutting off the electricity/ repossessing your house/sacrificing your first-born child’. I was relieved, therefore, to see this old gent. I knew the Czech for ‘would you like a cup of coffee?’, and ‘yes’, (his reply), so we got that far into the social niceties before conversation began to get tricky.

I managed to ask him about his new granddaughter, who, so my father had told me, had been born not that long ago. He told me her name, Hana, and I asked how her mother was doing. He said something, and I caught a word that sounded a lot like ‘caesarean’, which I knew she’d had. Jiøí made a cutting motion along his stomach, smiling, then I heard the word normální, which I deduced meant she was doing fine. I was beginning to feel quite pleased with myself, being able to chat away in Czech. Then he unleashed a barrage of rapid words and I felt less smug.

‘What?’ I repeated the word I thought might be the key one in the sentence and gave a lift to my voice at the end, making it a question, in the hope that he might help me out and mime its meaning. It was then that he did the strangest thing. Instead of repeating himself s-l-o-w-l-y, he repeated himself loudly, and just as rapidly as the first time. Seeing that I was still puzzled, he did it again, only this time even LOUDER. Amazingly, that was no help at all. I could see from his face that he was beginning to think I was a halfwit. I got out my dictionary and tried to look up the word I thought he said, but of course it wasn’t there. Trying not to slam the stupid, useless thing onto the table, I asked him to slowly repeat what he’d just said, one word at a time. Or, rather, I said ‘one word’. Patiently, and loudly, he repeated his sentence one - word - at - a - time. I scrabbled through the dictionary and after about fifteen minutes of agonising pencil work I finally worked out that he was telling me he would come again next Tuesday, but if he was sick he would call me to cancel.

I managed to repeat this back to him, showing that I understood, and his face broke into a giant smile. Unfortunately, he seemed to think that since I’d grasped this one sentence I must now be able to conduct an entire conversation in Czech and he launched once more into a voluble spiel. I tried the trick of looking as if I understood and nodding now and then, but then he asked a question and waited expectantly for me to give the right answer. There was an awkward silence. I thought fast. It might be that the answer was just either yes or no. But if yes, I may have to expand; if no, we could then get on to another topic altogether. I said ‘Ne’, and immediately realised I had answered incorrectly.

He looked offended. He reddened and shuffled his hands over the table. He looked at the floor. I panicked. What had I said ‘Ne’ to? There seemed to be no way to tell him that we’d had a misunderstanding and I couldn’t even mime something because he wasn’t looking at me, so acute was his embarrassment. And I was now tiring of trying to get it through to this guy that I didn’t speak his language. If he was going to take offence at something, well, too bad. It was too late to fix it, so instead I asked my father’s cousin about his health, since he’d brought it up. It was, as I had hoped, a stroke of genius. Jiøí gave me a detailed summary of his health which seemed to be failing reliably. Interestingly, carpal tunnel syndrome has the same name in Czech and English.

Now this I knew how to listen to sympathetically. I could tell when to nod because of the rise and fall of the cadences, the pauses, the emphases; they are all the same when the old outline their illnesses, whether in Czech, English or Swahili. I swear, if an ancient Martian came to take over the earth, I’d be able to do the same motions and he’d never realise I didn’t understand a word he said, but he would probably spare me the bloodshed on the grounds that I was a nice girl who appreciated the importance of being old and unwell.

Once Jiøí had come to the end of his complaints, I, with the smooth assurance of many years of practice (I have a family full of elderly hypochondriacs), asked about his wife. Her health, he was able to assure me, was also only so-so. Unfortunately, even this old standby came to an end and we were left with Jiøí simply shouting at me and my begging him to wait while I consulted my almost entirely redundant dictionary. He left, taking the mail with him.

It was a relief to see him go, but now I was worried about what would happen next Tuesday. We’d run out of my entire stock of Czech and surely we couldn’t have the same illness conversation again? I decided I’d had enough stress for one day, so I closed my PC and switched on ‘CNN’. The vacuuming could wait, too.

Not long afterwards, a second old man came to visit me—I seemed to be attracting them. He was a friend of my father’s, a Czech, but he spoke perfect English. He was one of Dad’s circle of war refugee friends who made his home in both Sydney and Prague, and he’d come at my father’s behest to make sure I was okay, which was very sweet of both him and Dad. He turned up on my doorstep, sprightly and dressed the way old Europeans do when they go visiting —polished leather shoes, sports coat and cravat, buttons on his shirt done up right to the neck and at the wrists, despite the 34-degree heat of the early summer.

‘Please, come in, Mr Hrabal. Have a seat.’ Bless him, I didn’t need to resort to the ‘World’s Bestselling Phrase Book’ or dictionary, nor suffer a bucketful of stress. In my gratitude I bustled around being the perfect hostess, ‘Would you like something to eat? A cup of coffee?’

‘No senk you, dullink, I em fine’, said the old boy, sinking into the Eames chair, his knees popping up to chest height. ‘How are you getting on?’

‘Great, Mr Hrabal. No problems at all’, I reassured him, and my father at the same time.

‘Zet’s good, dullink. Are you enjoying yourself here in Prague?’

‘I sure am, Mr Hrabal, it’s a lovely place.’

‘Yes, I like it, alzough my vife doesn’t so much.’

‘Your wife’s not here with you?’

‘No, dullink, she is stayink in Sydney.’

‘And are you in town for long?’

‘I vill be here some months. I go back end forth.’

‘That’s a nice way to live.’

‘Yes, it is.’

There was a short silence as we both fished around for another topic. Thankfully, Mr Hrabal found one. ‘And are you makink friends here?’

‘I’ve met some lovely people, Mr Hrabal, so I’m not lonely.’

‘Zet’s good to hear, dullink. Friends are important.’

Scintillating stuff, I think you’ll agree. We carried on in this vein for a while, and then Mr Hrabal, an odd look on his face, suddenly switched the topic. ‘I hear you

wrote a book?’ he said.

‘Yes, yes I did.’

‘End vat is zis book about?’

‘About? Erm, it’s about two single women on a road trip.’ Well, it was a bit embarrassing, really, it’s not like it was Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice, and at the rate I was managing to write my next one it was likely to be my first and last.

‘End zere is sex in zis book?’

‘What?’ I thought I must have misheard him.

‘I em told by your aunt Jana zat zere is sex in zis book?’

Nope, I hadn’t misheard him. ‘Er, um, well, not really. It’s about being single. That there is no sex is kind of the point.’

‘Huh. Jana said zere is sex in zis book. So vat is ze sex in zis book?’ He seemed very insistent. This was obviously important to him and being a well brought up girl I felt obliged to consider the matter.

Jana is an aunt in the loose sense of the word. She’s another war refugee who is part of Dad’s extended family just by virtue of having escaped from Czechoslovakia and having no family of her own. I have a special fondness for Jana because she’s the only one who thinks my writing is more worthwhile than sitting for dentistry exams. She must have told him something to make him think there was sex in my book. I turned the chapters over in my mind, trying not to consider the more obvious problem of what an old man was doing quizzing me about sex. Eventually I ed that I had written a chapter about staying in a hotel with thin walls. That must have been it.

‘There were people having very loud sex in the next room’, I told him.

‘Tell me about zet.’ Alright, see, now I felt we were going too far. Time to get out the wet blanket.

‘There was nothing else. Really.’

Mr Hrabal looked disappointed. ‘Nussing?’

‘Nothing’, I said firmly.

‘I em a sex edict’, said Mr Hrabal, before I could change the subject to something a bit less fraught. Then I ed. Mr Hrabal made his living in the sex trade; he published porn magazines and ran sex shops. You know, it’s times like these I wonder what war does to you?

‘I hev fucked ten souzand vimmin’, Mr Hrabal continued happily, ‘I hev hed Chinese end Japanese end blek. I hev hed mother end daughter, mother end two daughters. I hev fucked vimmin in every country in ze vorld . . .’

Well, you know how it is. Once someone gets onto their favourite topic it’s hard to stop them. And indeed Mr Hrabal wasn’t going to stop. ‘My vife isn’t jealous. I go to svinger’s parties and zen I tell her all about it.’ Lucky her. ‘I hev seven vimmin in a brothel. It doesn’t bother her!’

Oh, Lordy. I looked at Mr Hrabal, an apparently harmless old man sitting deep in the chair opposite me, his tros fastened just below his little old man breasts, burbling on happily about his sexual conquests, and I wondered, as I so often do, about people’s capacity to kid themselves. This guy was eighty if he was a day (eighty-six I later discovered), and here he was boasting about his ‘svinger’s parties’. Apart from any other consideration, that’s so disco balls and sunken purple velvet couches.

‘I hev written a book about my life. It is about my childhood and some business. But mostly it is about sex. Do you read Czech?’

‘No!’ I said quickly.

‘Zet’s alright. I hev ze English translation. It’s not as good as ze Czech because Czech language has many vords for “fuck” . . .’ and here he listed some of them for me, proving the point, ‘vereas English hes just ze one vord. I give you ze Czech book as vell so you vill hev ze pictures.’

Oh, good. That’s just great. I suppose I really should have told him to stick it up his jumper, but I’m afraid, confronted with a well-dressed elderly gent, a friend of my father’s, I was compelled to be polite. I told Mr Hrabal I’d love to read his book. ‘Please, give me both—the Czech and the English versions.’

‘You vill like it, dullink. You must tell me vat you sink of it.’

‘Right, right.’

‘Vell, darlink, I vill tell your father zat you are vell. If you need anything, alvays call me.’

‘Huh, um, sure thing, Mr Hrabal.’

On that note he left. I was half-afraid he’d try to kiss me on the way out, since he’d been regaling me with the story of the fifteen-year-old daughter of a friend of his who had thrown herself on him in a burst of uncontrollable ion, begging him to rip her dress off and fuck her, but luckily he confined himself to a handshake. Perhaps I was just too old for him.

It was only after he’d gone, while I was replaying the conversation in my head, wondering why on earth I hadn’t just told the old goat to put a sock in it, that I realised with horror why Mr Hrabal had wanted me to describe a sex scene. He wanted me to talk dirty. Eeeeeooooooow!

My two visitors reminded me of the family memorabilia tucked away in the

wardrobe in my room. The day after Jiøí’s visit, wondering if I would recognise him in any of the pictures, I unearthed the photographs and old letters from the ancient cupboard to snoop. My father survived the war, as did his mother, but most of the rest of his family died, including my grandfather, who died while on a forced march from Terezín, the concentration camp where he was interned. He almost made it to the end of the war, poor guy, but he starved to death—my father says he never eats food without thinking about how it might have saved him. Dad was twelve when his father was taken away from him. In a bizarre twist to our lives, that’s the age I was as well when my father was taken away from me. At least I’d been able to find mine again. Dad lost his forever.

For this reason, and the little matter of the Iron Curtain, I knew very little about my Czech relatives. In my first days in Prague I had found in the flat an old 1974 guide to the city, and when I opened it a family tree fell out. It didn’t just record names and dates, there was a whole lot of writing next to the names, written in Czech. So no, I couldn’t read it, despite having completed Teach Yourself Czech, ‘Chapter One: Greetings’, but I did recognise my grandfather’s and my father’s names towards the end, and we children listed under Dad’s name. It was strange to see my own name on this ancient bit of paper, the typewritten blue letters faded and leaching into the thin paper. My name must have been written down by a relative to whom I was a complete stranger living on the other side of the world.

Poring over old photographs from one of the bags in the wardrobe, I could pick out my father, my grandmother and, once or twice, someone I thought might be my grandfather, but not Jiøí. I took the letters and postcards out of this bag with special reverence, feeling as though I were holding a part of my grandmother and my father as a young man. I could see that a lot of them were sent from my father to his mother, but of course they were written in Czech, so I had no idea what they said. Not being able to read them, the feeling of reverence began to subside, although I felt guilty about that. Should I feel bored when I held in my hands a postcard written from my long-lost father to my never-known grandmother? Shouldn’t I feel every word is sacred? I didn’t; I flipped through them faster and faster until I found one in English, from my mother to her mother-in-law, reporting on the progress of the eight-week-old Rachael. That’s

me!

Apparently my father fed me orange juice in the afternoon and chatted to me extensively. How little has changed, except I am older now so it’s safe to feed me pork chops in the afternoon while chatting to me. It had recently been his birthday, but, wrote my mother, he had been unable to enjoy his cake as he was on a fruit and vegetable diet. Nothing changed there, either. Dad fights a constant losing battle with his weight. His last effort was the Atkins Diet, which he enjoyed tremendously. He packed away bacon and eggs and steak, and exercised tremendous self-discipline in refusing to touch unhealthy, fattening foods like vegetables and fruit. When my distraught stepmother told him he was eating his way to an early grave and was highly unlikely to lose so much as a pound while doing so, he said stoutly (and I use that word advisedly), ‘Nonsense!’, adding, ‘It’s in the book!’, then turned around and promptly fried himself another piece of fat. It was only after he’d gained another five kilograms that he agreed the Atkins Diet, perfectly scientifically sound though it was, might not be the diet for him. Besides, he was dying for a piece of bread.

I read this of my father’s fruit and vegetable diet with some horror, for at the time of my birth my father was the age I am now, and I, too, am frequently to be found on a fruit and vegetable diet, convinced each time that this time I’ll get thin and stay thin. This evidence that I might be mistaken and that another forty or so years of unsuccessful dieting awaits me filled me with a certain deathly calm. The Czech diet I’d been enjoying—cream, potatoes and fried schnitzel— had started to cause a certain strain around the waistline of my jeans and I’d been contemplating a crash fast to remedy the situation. Now it seemed as though that might be a waste of time. Perhaps I should just accept my fate.

I could understand some of the documents in the bag, even though they were written in Czech and sometimes German, which has been the official language of the Czechs periodically. Here was my grandmother’s birth certificate—born 24 September 1908 in the Bohemian village of Studenice. Her mother’s name was Navratilová. (I’m a huge fan of Martina—could it be we’re related? She is

Czech, after all.) I found my grandfather’s birth certificate—born 9 October 1902 in the neighbouring village of Kamenièky. There were some other official papers bearing my grandmother’s name, perhaps her identification papers, as they were written in German and dated during the war years. I found, and managed to decipher, my father’s school reports. It wasn’t easy to read them but I put in a determined effort in the hopes I’d find a ‘Fail’ that I could hold over his head. No such luck. The little swot seemed to have been ‘Satisfactory’ in everything and even ‘Very satisfactory’ now and again.

There were more papers, but I began to flick through them faster as the majority seemed to be identification papers without any interesting place names or photographs in them. However, towards the end of the first pile I came across a document written in German, mentioning the name of my grandfather. It was dated 1944 and I feared, I very much feared, that I held in my hands communication to my grandmother from officials at Terezín. I put it back quickly. Perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t. I didn’t want to read it just yet.

There were more photographs in the second bag, but they were disappointing for the main part. Tiny and ancient, they mostly showed young people—among them I could occasionally identify my father—on various camping trips. More recent were the many, many photos of a wedding, presumably a relative’s, although I still couldn’t spot Jiøí in them. They did contain shots of my grandmother, aged sixty perhaps, looking very fit for her age, which gave me some hope—perhaps a fat old age isn’t written into my genes after all.

Also in the bag were four large framed photographs, which I lined up on the couch so that I wouldn’t be alone in this little flat. The first one was of my father as a baby of about nine months old. He was a gorgeous little boy, too. Every time I looked at it I thought how proud his mother must have been. There was one strange thing about this photo: the hands of baby Dad looked exactly the same as his grown hands do now, only smaller.

The next photograph was of my grandparents on their wedding day. Two unthinkably young people embarking on their journey together: my grandfather with lean cheeks and wavy hair brushed back, wearing a solemn expression and looking slightly away from the camera; my grandmother, still bearing her puppy fat, inclining a little towards him, her head tilted in his direction and looking directly into the camera. She was so young! I looked closely at them and saw, with a blink of surprise, my own mouth and chin on my grandmother’s face.

The other two photographs were taken from a smaller one I had seen in another one of the bags. The original photograph was of both my father and grandmother. In these larger frames they were separated and blown up. He looked about fifteen, and I am guessing that it was taken in 1946, shortly before he would leave for Australia. My grandmother’s face had lost the puppy fat of her earlier photograph. She was not looking into the camera, but away, her mouth set hard and unsmiling, her eyes distant. Despite this being a formal portrait, her hair was springing up on one side—so that’s who’s to blame! My own hair is completely chaotic. My father was looking at the camera, his face determined, his lower lip slightly protruding. It looked as though he and his mother had been arguing about whether or not he would go, and with the taking of this photo she finally realised her will was not going to prevail, which must have come as a shock to her. Dad’s a man who’ll go along to get along, which is very Czech of him. Apparently, though, on this occasion he was going to get his own way. He left and the communists took care of the rest.

While Dad was making his fortune in the west, his mother and her extended family were trapped behind the Iron Curtain. When Dad started going back, he’d take an extra suitcase of clothes to give to his cousins who were stuck on a dirtpoor farm in a dirt-poor village six hours’ bus ride south of Prague. It was Jiøí’s wife, Petra, who Dad said washed the linen. When I told Dad that Jiøí had come to visit me he said, ‘I know. I called him and told him to take you back to the village.’

‘Oh. When’s that happening?’

‘Next Tuesday. Didn’t he tell you?’ I must have missed that bit.

‘You’re going to stay there for two weeks’, Dad said.

‘What?!’

‘Don’t you want to visit them?’

‘Yes, of course I do, but two weeks?’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘They don’t speak a word of English, and I don’t speak Czech.’

‘So?’

‘So? So, it will be awkward for me.’

‘Why will it be awkward?’ asked Dad in a tone of genuine astonishment.

‘Because I don’t speak Czech so I won’t be able to talk to them.’

‘They won’t mind.’

‘Dad, I can’t stay there for a fortnight and not talk to anyone.’

‘Well, it’s too late, I’ve already arranged it.’

I dug my heels in. ‘No. Call him and tell him I’m going there for only one night.’

‘One night?! But you’ll hardly get to know them in two days.’

‘I’m hardly going to get to know them anyway if I can’t understand anything they say.’

‘What does that matter?’

There’s a certain circularity to my arguments with my father that I can’t quite put my finger on. ‘Could you just tell him I’m only going overnight? Please?’

‘Why bother going at all?’ Now he was in a huff.

‘Because I do want to meet them’, I said, placating him. ‘I just don’t want to be stuck there for weeks on end. Please.’

Long pause.

‘Alright then, if your mind is made up.’

‘Thank you.’

I had no idea whether or not Dad would actually call Jiøí and re-make the arrangement. With no Czech I was helpless in all this and my father can be stubborn. To appease him, I told him I’d taken the four photos out and lined them up on the couch.

‘Did you, darling?’ His voice was filled with delight. He really is easy to bring around, my father.

‘I love the one of you as a baby.’

‘I’m a good-looking boy, aren’t I?’ replied Dad, who doesn’t lack selfconfidence. I didn’t mention the hands.

Chapter 6 I Fall in Love with the Czechs

Jiøí did not return the next Tuesday (Thank God, I thought secretly), but he turned up instead about three weeks later. On that occasion I called Dad in Sydney to get him to translate and to try to gain some control over the visit to my family’s village. I often wonder if anything I say actually s with Dad. ‘Why don’t you want to go there for a proper amount of time?’ he asked, sounding puzzled, when I told him to tell Jiøí I’d be staying for just one night.

‘Because I don’t speak the language!’

‘But what does that matter, darling?’ and so on, as though we hadn’t had exactly this conversation only weeks before. Dad and Jiøí spoke at length and an arrangement was made for the following Thursday. Later that week Dad called to say that Jiøí wasn’t coming but he didn’t know why. So with one thing and another I got through half the summer without having to visit the relatives. This gave me time to learn a bit more Czech so that at least I wouldn’t be completely stumped for something to say when I did get there.

With spring turning into summer the days grew longer—incredibly long for a Sydney girl. The sun came up at five in the morning, and at nine at night it was still light. The evening sky turned a colour I’d only ever seen in illustrations in old European fairy-tale books, a dark yet bright and warm blue. I couldn’t stop looking at it, it was so beautiful. It was also astonishingly hot, considering the spring had been so astonishingly cold. I was expecting a tepid summer and instead I got a blazing one. I loved it. In the summer everyone, Czechs and expats alike, stayed out until two or three in the morning, drinking, carousing, dancing, and then we all made our way home again on the night trams. On one of these nights when I’d been to a bar with Sven, I was walking home through

the city at three in the morning, dressed for the heat in a very short skirt, a lowslung top and high heels. I was not completely steady on my feet and as I turned a corner I saw up ahead a group of really very unsteady Czech men.

Alarm bells immediately rang inside me. It was late, dark, I was alone and seminaked, drunk and in high heels. I looked for an exit but there was none, so I steeled myself to ditch the shoes and start running should they attack. Standing straight and walking confidently, striding strong so they’d think twice about it, I swung past them. In Sydney, you’d be sure to have to fend off at least an insult —‘I’d like to bone that’, or something equally witty—if not a more serious attack. I needn’t have worried. Frank had been spot on: Prague is amazingly safe. The men just looked at me bleary-eyed and took no notice apart from that. It turned into one of the great pleasures of Prague—being able to walk anywhere, absolutely anywhere, on my own without fear of assault.

Sven and I spent many hours in bars during the summer. In addition to being a very funny man, he had a ion for American sitcoms of the 1970s: ‘Gilligan’s Island’, ‘My Three Sons’, ‘Green-acres’, ‘I Dream of Jeannie’, ‘Bewitched’— he’d seen them all, every episode. He told me he watched them on videotape when he was a tweenie and he loved them. Since I was actually there for the original black-and-white screenings on television when I was a tweenie, I too had watched every single one, and we spent a great deal of time hashing over episodes and writing down the words to the theme tunes. We also amused ourselves competing over who could all the states of America (Sven, except for Maine, which I ed on the metro home) and who knew the most world capitals (Sven again. Why didn’t I come up with a game I could win?). Sven knew the best sports bars and I made him watch Wimbledon with me, which he didn’t stop complaining about for weeks.

To my astonishment, the workmen actually finished jack-hammering in the playground and now there was a sand-covered area, fully equipped with brightly painted swings and wooden climbing bars. As the days warmed up, tiny tots and their parents came to play so that from my apartment I could hear birds singing

and small children laughing and yelling. The roadworks on the arterial road also came to an end and with that the cutting off our water supply ceased. It seemed as though all the annoying things about my first few months were being timed to stop for a wonderful summer. With the road no longer a hole in the ground, the trams started running and I was able to catch a tram home, instead of the metro.

The trams weren’t easy to work out as the maps from the tourist centres were insanely complicated—either a spaghetti tangle of lines on tiny squares or so abstract and representational as to be entirely useless. I eventually found a reasonably clear map from a hotel that housed a lot of expats. The only reason it was clear was that it was enormous, about the size of a dining room table, so it was impractical to carry around. I had to work out my route before I left home and, even then, it was not always obvious when I got to the tram stop which direction I needed to go. Nevertheless, I eventually caught on.

On 21 June, the summer solstice and the longest day of the year, I was catching the number nine tram to my first Czech language class. I was standing at the museum tram stop and next to me were two tourists looking at the list of stops, then back at their map, then back at the list. They seemed like a nice couple; she a short and chirpy brunette and he a blond guy with a beard and a gentle face, both in about their thirties. All of a sudden, the woman turned to me and, very politely and quite slowly, asked, ‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’

It was a marvellous moment. Two tourists had mistaken me for a local and, not only that, if I heard her accent correctly they were Australian tourists. I gave her a sympathetic grin. ‘I do’, I replied. ‘Do you need a hand finding your way?’

With a look of relief she said, ‘We just can’t understand what the map means’, as if it was their fault and not that of the ridiculous Czech tourist offices, who operated on the basis that if you come to Prague you should first be familiar with all the Czech systems and not expect the Czechs to explain every little detail to you.

‘It takes a while to figure it out’, I reassured her. ‘It’s by no means obvious.’ They were going the same way as me so we boarded the tram together.

Ken and Cheryl were from Adelaide, a small city notorious for the niceness of its inhabitants and its disproportionate number of serial killers. ‘Are you staying here long?’ asked Cheryl.

Another wonderful moment came. ‘For a year’, I said, with a surge of pride. ‘I live here.’ Ken and Cheryl were impressed, almost as impressed as I was with myself. Yes, I lived here, in a foreign and difficult country and all by myself. Ken and Cheryl seemed to think it was a terribly romantic and adventurous thing to have done and wished that they, too, could live in Prague. In the glow of their iration, I forgot all about the loneliness and the isolation and the frustration of not knowing how anything worked or how to speak the language. For this one tram ride I felt as I had imagined I would feel here when I was back in Sydney— glamorous. Full of good will for these lovely people who’d reminded me how lucky I was, I steered them off the tram at their stop, having told them how to get from there to their hotel. They wished me luck and I wished them well. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Ken and Cheryl from Adelaide.

My own stop was only one farther down the line. I’d tried valiantly to teach myself Czech with my guidebooks but I was struggling. The language seemed to be nothing but difficult consonants—ž’s, j’s and rolled r’s—strung together. Ordinary everyday words were incredibly long and complex. The word for ‘of course’ is samozøejmì. It’s pronounced samozrrrrrzzhayemnye—a truckload of consonants and tongue rolling for a word that in essence means ‘yes’. It took me three weeks of practice to get that one word right. Knowing the words, though, wasn’t enough. The words change completely depending on where they are placed in a sentence, which is why I hadn’t been able to find anything in the dictionary when I was shopping or trying to make conversation with Jiøí. Every noun is either feminine, masculine inanimate, masculine animate or neuter.

There are four different forms of feminine, four of neuter and two each of masculine animate and inanimate, and each form has a different ending, depending on its declension: twelve different noun types, each declined seven different ways. That’s eighty-four altogether, and double that number because that’s only singular and every noun is either singular or plural. So there are one hundred and sixty-eight forms a noun can take. All the adjectives have to have different endings, too, because they have to agree with the nouns. Verbs take different endings depending on who you’re speaking about or to, and how you’re speaking to them. There are twelve different endings for verbs just for speaking in the ordinary way, and then another set of endings if you’re ordering someone about. In short, the whole business is a nightmare.

Teaching myself Czech had got me as far as, ‘His bicycle is clean but her car is dirty’; as useful as that might be in certain circumstances, it hadn’t featured heavily in any of my conversations with the locals. Nor were the adventures of Mr Navratil and his friend Miss Novaková who, in the Colloquial Czech for Beginners, were trying to get to the theatre from the hotel—without much success I have to say—of any help to me. I was also the tiniest bit concerned that, being colloquial and written in 1962, the book might be teaching me to say, ‘Where’s the groovy theatre, hepcat?’

My neighbour Mrs Jendliková frequently offered to switch to Czech when she and I had tea together, but after two minutes we always reverted to English, the agony being just too great. So I enrolled in a Czech language course run by a lovely fellow called Miroslav. He and I had gone back and forth, filling in forms and contracts in order to satisfy the resolutely communist-era bureaucracy, and finally, on the day of the summer solstice, I was due to have my first lesson.

There were only two of us in the class, me and a German guy called Lars. Where Miroslav was a touch shorter than I am, Lars towered over me; he was at least seven-foot tall. Standing together the two guys looked like a picture out of the Guinness World Records book—the tallest man in the world next to the shortest. We began the lesson by saying something about ourselves in Czech. Lars said

‘Já jsem Nìmec’, which means ‘I am German’. Miroslav, who was a man who’d thought a lot about language, told us that the word for ‘German’ means ‘man who can’t speak’ in Czech: ‘The theory is that the Germans were the first foreigners the Slavs came across and because they were unable to say anything intelligible to the Slavs, they earned themselves the tag’.

Lars wanted to know if that was when the Germans had first invaded Bohemia, but I had read about how the Slavs had conquered the territory in about the sixth century, when they’d slaughtered the Franks. I asked Miroslav, ‘Who was invading whom?’ Before Miroslav could answer, Lars blushed and said, ‘Well, it was the Germans, so I think we can guess’. It still astonishes me how pervasive the effects of the Second World War are. Lars, a man born a good thirty or so years after the war ended, obviously felt guilty enough about it to think he had to apologise for it some sixty years after the event. Will we never let the Germans off the hook?

We began our first lesson with an outline of what we would learn. We would stick to useful subjects, said Miroslav, such as how to ask for food and drink in restaurants and shops (I breathed a sigh of relief). We’d learn to describe things and carry on ordinary first-meeting type conversations: ‘What do you do?’ ‘I have five sisters’, ‘Peanut butter is my favourite food’, and so on. And we’d learn how to buy clothes and shoes: ‘Do you have this in large?’ ‘I’ll take one in every colour’. This all sounded much more helpful than the gripping tale of Mr Navratil and Miss Novaková. Lars was happy, too. In fact Lars was amusingly German on the subject. ‘I like ze verk to be hard and efficient’, he said, approvingly. Lars was the achieving type.

Miroslav then went on to tell us about a ten-year-old boy who’d been his most successful student. This boy had come to class twice a week for a year and at the end of the year he was so good at Czech he could go to a Czech school. ‘You only had to tell him something once and he never forgot it’, said Miroslav, his eyes brightening at the memory of his best-ever pupil.

Lars, laughing, said, ‘I don’t know about once, but if you tell me something twice I never forget it.’ I laughed merrily along, too . . . ahem! I didn’t have the courage to break it to Miroslav that he’d have to tell me things a sight more than twice if my school days were anything to go by. He could find that out for himself— why spoil a happy beginning?

Miroslav proved to be a mine of interesting information on the Czechs. He was about thirty years old, probably around fifteen when communism fell. He told me that learning in Czech schools was a grim affair. You are not supposed to enjoy it, you rote learn a lot of lists and no-one bothers to put anything into context. The student is simply supposed to do what the teacher says and questions are regarded as the height of impertinence. I was surprised that my understanding of communist schools from my western background was right, and not just propaganda.

After gaining his university degree, Miroslav had gone to London to study English and a whole new world of learning had opened up before him. He told us that in the west we’ve taken to the idea that if learning is enjoyable it progresses faster than if it’s a grim task. However, the western innovations have not, to date, taken hold in ex-Eastern Bloc countries. Miroslav said he had a wonderful time in London and came back to the Czech Republic fired up with enthusiasm, which was quickly beaten out of him. When he suggested to primary schools that children learn better if they think what they are learning has something to do with the outside world he was first ridiculed then reviled.

Czechs, Miroslav said, resented being told that the west has better ideas than they do. Innovations in learning, thought the Czech teachers, were evidence that western children were soft and weak, unlike Czech children who could endure twelve years of boredom and slavery without buckling. If he suggested bringing a newspaper into the classroom, his fellow teachers would say, ‘No. Our system has worked for a hundred years, why change it with fancy new tricks like

reading from newspapers?’ They said that if Miroslav thought the English were better than the Czechs then he should ‘Go back to England’. Eventually, Miroslav asked himself if he needed this grief every day and decided that no, he didn’t, and so he opened a language school of his own. And since he’s gone to all this trouble, and even managed to teach me basic Czech without strangling me, I’ll give him a plug: his school is Czech Language Training and you can find it in Táboritská 15, Prague 3; telephone: 222 713 270; website: www.czlt.cz.

After our lesson I left a relieved woman. Miroslav was a good teacher and obviously a bit of a philosopher. The feminine form of Czech nouns usually ends in ‘a’ and he had an entire theory on the fundamental nature of the feminine linked to that letter. I didn’t quite follow it all—it had something to do with Eva being in the garden with Adam—but it was good to be learning a language from a person who treated it so earnestly and well; I could quietly and thankfully shelve Mr Navratil and Miss Novaková.

I headed back into town to Wenceslas Square (or Václavské Námìstí, as we locals called it) to meet Frank, Sven and Danny. Danny had been living in Prague for ten years, having married a Czech girl shortly after he arrived from America. Unfortunately, this Czech girl had left him as soon as she could speak English and had landed herself a job with a foreign company. As a result, Danny, who seemed never to have got over her, was on the bitter side. He had indeed put the hard word on me one night when we’d been out drinking, but I’d managed to sidestep the issue by saying I didn’t really do the casual sex thing. He’d gazed owlishly into my eyes and assured me that his feelings for me were profound, but I was able to laugh and say, ‘No-one can compete with Martina’, his ex-wife, and he’d looked sad. Poor guy. I really felt for him. It was true, though. Laura hadn’t refused him but there’d been no return match, due, so she told me, to his unable desire to talk about his ex-wife before, after and during sex. Even a sex artist has her limitations.

Although I often found Danny’s desire to constantly tell me what the Chucks were really like irritating, he did know his way around Prague. I often went on

treks with him to see things missed by most visitors. Today Danny was taking us to see a sculpture exhibition in Wenceslas Square, the heart of Prague. Wenceslas is a long, sloping avenue with the massive, stonework-and-columns National Museum looking commanding at the top, tram lines running across at the bottom and a thriving community of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes and scam artists in between. I loved this square for a few things—the beautiful Empire Hotel covered in balconies, scrolls and lace ironwork, gold highlights glinting in the sun; the Palace Bookshop with its four floors of books and maps; the silent sounds of the past, the picture I can see in my mind of thousands of Czechs pouring out of their homes and gathering here to throw out the Germans first, then the Russians and communism. To celebrate the summer, the Czechs had mounted an exhibition of giant sculptures down the centre of the square.

We wandered down Wenceslas Square, inspecting the works of art. Oppression and warmongering seemed to be the abiding themes, the anguished artists expressing themselves in rusting steel, concrete and barbed wire. ‘Warmonger’ was in fact the title of the first sculpture, a line of red metal squares topped with helmets. The plaque boldly stated it was ‘a monument to all aggressors’. A couple of burnt-out cars with their front ends leaning together to form a pyramid was called ‘Cars Crashing’—‘Inventive’, said Sven. A big concrete oblong about twice my height, with boots and shoes sticking out of it, was called ‘Holocaust’; a rusty steel cage, open at the top with barbed wire around the perimeter, ‘Neighbour’s Yard’—Sven liked that one a lot. A line of naked, metal men with bolts jammed into their rusting steel heads and necks was called ‘Iron Men’, described by the artist as ‘products of industrial, totalitarian society’, and rather well hung, I noticed.

All of this bitterness was becoming oppressive, and so my eye fell gratefully on an artwork that seemed to be happy and full of hope. It was a soft, round stone with a racing car wheel in it and bits of futuristic foil sticking out. It was called ‘Forever’, and my heart lifted as I looked at it. Here, I thought, was a small boy’s dream of being an astronaut or a racing-car driver. At last, a happy artist. I read the plaque: ‘This is a clash of sleeping mass holding excised part of car, trauma represented in art’. As I was reading this and feeling oppressed anew at the determined misery of these young artists, Danny came up and said, ‘Oh, a space

ship’.

‘Exactly. My God, does all art have to be depressing?’ I asked.

‘This is crap’, said Danny. ‘I gotta show you something.’ He led us down to the end of Wenceslas Square, Sven complaining that he hadn’t seen all the sculptures and Frank wondering if we should stop for a beer. ‘It’s worth it. Beer can wait’, said Danny, taking us up a cobbled side street. He turned right into a pasáž, a age through a building with an archway at each end connecting one street to another. There are many of these in Prague and this one was the Lucerna Pasáž, Danny told us. A mosaic floor swept from one end to the other, with a café tucked into one corner and a glass-fronted box office on the right with posters advertising the films showing in the cinema on the floor above. A stone staircase with delicate iron railings curved out of sight to the cinema and restaurant overhead, the ceiling two stories above us.

‘Okay. Look there.’

‘Where?’

‘Up.’

And there, hanging from the ceiling at the opposite end of the pasáž was a giant sculpture of Jesus in the traditional crucifix position, arms out to each side, head and feet hanging down. Only, instead of being ed by the Cross, Jesus’s hands gripped two large metal rings at a perpendicular angle. And instead of wearing a loincloth, he was wearing a white full-length leotard. ‘It’s called “Jesus is a Gymnast”,’ said Danny. I gasped.

At that moment I felt my first stirrings of real love for the Czechs. Only in the Czech Republic, I felt, would you see something so irreverent, so sacrilegious, so hilarious on public display. The Czechs are a nation of people almost entirely free of religious fervour. They’re constantly being invaded and their customary method of survival is just to hunker down and wait for the invader to go away. The Austrians introduced Catholicism and the Czechs, not wishing to create unnecessary unpleasantness, dutifully clacked rosary beads and bowed their heads in cathedrals. Now, out of habit, ninety-five per cent of the population identify themselves as Catholic, but only five per cent actually believe any of it.

‘Oh, that’s bad’, said Sven. And it was. irably bad.

‘Now turn around’, Danny told us. We turned around and saw behind us, also hanging from the ceiling, a sculpture of a general sitting astride an upside-down horse. The general straddled the horse’s stomach, his sword raised high, as though going into battle. The horse was clearly dead, its head dangling and its tongue lolling out. I was less impressed with this one. Where ‘Jesus is a Gymnast’ had gone straight to my viscerals, this . . . nothing happened. I stayed silent just in case it was really, really meaningful and outrageous and I’d simply missed the point.

‘I like that’, said Frank, so I probably had missed the point.

‘It’s okay’, Sven responded, sounding as tepid about it as I was.

‘Look at the face’, said Danny. I did, but still didn’t get it.

‘Uh-huh . . .’ Neither did Sven.

‘Oh my God’, cried Frank. ‘Is that Klaus?’

‘Yep’, Danny grinned.

David Èerný, the sculptor in question, and probably the Czech Republic’s most famous living artist, had moulded the face of President Václav Klaus onto the ridiculous general. Klaus is a Bohemian Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a bigoted narrowminded embarrassment to the cultured elements of the Republic.

‘Klaus has no idea it’s his face’, Danny laughed. It seemed hard to believe that Klaus could be that dumb, but the Prague intelligentsia is united in their opinion about that one.

Unlike the tortured young artists of Wenceslas Square, David Èerný is a very funny man whose sense of optimism and humour sticks in the craw of officialdom in a way bitter angst never could. In this he is supremely Czech. I might have found The Good Soldier Švejk a struggle, but Czechs who’ve lived under communism think it’s hilarious and it goes straight to an essential of the Czech character—when you’re being oppressed, look like you’re conforming and quietly poke fun at the oppressor.

Miroslav later told me that, during the communist era, a special underground language developed. People gathered in small bars to listen to entertainers apparently toeing the party line, but each sentence was really doublespeak. If you listened carefully you soon learned to pick up the codes—while extolling the ruling ideals on the surface, underneath they were having a dig at the secret

police. I found it hard to believe that the secret police hadn’t worked out the code, but I guess if you actually are the secret police, you don’t require comedy to make living in a police state bearable and it’s in your interest to believe that entertainers are toeing the party line.

Shortly after the Velvet Revolution, David Èerný painted a Soviet tank a flamingo pink colour and parked it in the city. City officials nervously removed it but, for the politically aware, he is a hero. He was awarded the Jindøich Chalupecký Award in 2000, the Republic’s most prestigious art prize. Out of principle he refused to set foot in the National Gallery to accept it, and so Václav Havel, the leader of the revolution and the first Czech president after the fall of communism, left the auditorium and presented it to him on the pavement. The Czechs take their artists seriously.

As we left the pasáž, I saw a group of men lying on the ground in Wenceslas Square near the sculptures. They were absolutely motionless. ‘Oh’, I cried, suddenly able to be knowledgeable about art, ‘I’ve seen this. I saw it in the Tate Gallery in London. It’s called a living sculpture.’ In London the living sculpture had been two women lying still on the ground, a crowd of interested spectators gathered around them. On that occasion, the two young women had been dressed in identical black costumes. These men seemed to have chosen a blue theme. A small crowd was inspecting them so we went for a closer look. The t-shirts said ‘Dennis’ Stag Party’. I suppose you could call a group of ed-out young Brits art. I’m sure Laura would.

Chapter 7 Bribery and Corruption

One thing that was becoming clearer to me was how difficult it was to find work under the radar. The Europeans could work legally so they could do anything on offer—Sven had rather a good job at an ATM help centre servicing the Scandinavian countries—but the Americans, Canadians and Australians could not. Danny had a ten-year working visa, which he’d got through his Czech wife (so at least she’d done him that much good), and he made a living being an extra in American films, and made more than most because, being an English speaker, he could be given lines. A lot of Hollywood films are made in Prague because the labour is cheap and, by an historical accident, the post-production facilities here are fantastic. Hollywood had outsourced cartoon drawing and production to Czechoslovakia when it was under communist rule. I’m not sure how that came about, but the result is that lots of films are now shot in and around Prague. They made Casino Royale in Karlový Varý, and I rather fancied a job on that set, anything that would involve getting close to Daniel Craig.

Laura was applying for her working visa, but she’d been in Prague for two years and was still filling in forms. Meanwhile, she taught English on the black market. It was a tough life. She couldn’t be employed by any of the language teaching schools, which would have earned her a modest but regular wage, so she had to on the net. Since the competition was cutthroat—there are a lot of people teaching English under the table in Prague—she could only charge below market rates. Some months she had enough students, but then she’d lose a couple and her earning would become precarious. It was a lucky thing she was good at self-promotion because she seemed to have to herself constantly.

I had been avoiding the whole matter. As soon as I realised that my only option was to teach on the black market and spend my life scrabbling for students, I started to calculate how far my $5000 might stretch. The incredible cheapness of

the food and the city transport, and the fact that I didn’t have to pay rent, meant that $5000 could, if I nursed it along, last for quite a few months. Whether I’d make the whole year was another matter. Frank had saved up enough money so he didn’t have to work. He lived part time in Sydney, working and saving money, and part time in Prague writing his poetry. That looked infinitely appealing to me, although I still thought I’d like to be a film extra, if I could manage it.

‘You know Daniel Craig’s gay’, said Sven.

‘Daniel Craig is not gay’, I shot back. ‘He’s straight and he has a thing for Australian women.’

‘Men. He has a thing for Australian men.’

In order to avoid working illegally I had been valiantly applying for a working visa, but it was clear I wasn’t going to get one in just a year. I’d had my first taste of the red tape back in Australia when I had tried to apply for citizenship, thinking it would make life easier while I was in Prague. I’d foolishly thought that it would be simple enough, given I was half Czech. The conversation with the Czech consulate went like this:

‘I’d like to apply for citizenship.’

‘Are you a citizen of the European Union?’

‘No, I’m an Australian citizen.’

‘That is very bad. It is very difficult to get citizenship if you are not a member of the European Union.’

‘My father is a Czech citizen.’

‘That is maybe not so bad. Were you born in the Czech Republic?’

‘No, I was born in Australia.’

‘That is very bad. But maybe it is not so bad. When were you born?’

‘1964.’

‘That is very bad. Children born outside the country between 1957 and 1979 aren’t eligible for citizenship, even if their parents are citizens.’

‘Why not?’

‘That is the rule. Did your father your birth with the Czechoslovakian government at the time of your birth?’

‘Erm . . . I don’t know, but probably not.’

‘That is very bad. Without registration it is very difficult to help you.’

‘Right, right. Look, is there anything I can do? Is there a form I can fill out?’

Long, heavy silence at the other end of the phone.

‘Here is what you must do. You must write us a letter. You must tell us your name, where you were born and when you were born. You must tell us your father’s name, where he was born and when he was born. You must tell us your mother’s name, where she was born and when she was born. You must tell us when your father left Czechoslovakia. You must tell us his Rodina Èíslo [the Czech social security number]. You must tell us your address and your father’s address. You must tell us where your father lived in Czechoslovakia. You must tell us his parents’ names, where his parents lived and when they were born. You must tell us what your job is and what your father’s job is. You must tell us what your father’s job was in Czechoslovakia. You must write a letter and tell us all these things. You must give us your birth certificate. You must give us a copy of your port. You must give us a copy of your health insurance and the name of your bank. You must tell us about your superannuation. Then we will send these documents to the Czech Republic. Maybe something can be done.’

‘Right. Thanks very much for your help’, I lied, and hung up.

I figured that once I got to Prague I could apply for something simpler, like a

working visa. As it turned out, applying for a working visa was a long, Kafkaesque experience involving many hours of brutal paperwork and a strange inability to get your hands on a bit of paper that led to an actual result. All bits of paper just seemed to lead to other bits of paper via a surly interior ministry official. I wondered if what was required was a bribe, but having no experience of such things I could only guess at how this might be conducted. On one occasion, the official was a young man, no more than twenty years old, with baby-blond hair and gentle eyes. If I was going to try it out on anyone it’d be this guy, so when he said to me, ‘This is the wrong form. You need to fill in this form here’, a phrase I’d heard many times before, I leaned in confidentially and said, ‘Is there something I can do to get my working visa . . . faster?’ and gave him what I hoped was a knowing look.

He looked back at me puzzled: ‘Yes, you can lodge this form.’

‘Yes’, I said, leaning close to him, ‘but is there a way to make the process . . .’ and here I raised both eyebrows ‘. . . smoother?’

There was a small silence. The young man looked intently at me, his eyes growing dark with meaning. ‘Yes’, he said.

Ah! Now we were getting somewhere, I thought. I leaned in closer, ‘And that is . . . ?’

‘Lodge this form.’

I gave up trying to be Mata Hari. How do you go about bribing an official? I probably should have taken some cash along, but I had no idea what the going

rate was and I didn’t want to risk it being too little, or indeed too much.

‘It’s very difficult to know how to do it when you come from a country where bribes are unusual,’ said Sven when I told him, Frank and Danny later. He was such a sympathetic soul.

‘Ya just gotta be bold’, Danny insisted. His attitude about being the expert was starting to get on my nerves.

‘So how much do you hand over for a bribe?’

‘Depends on the transaction.’ Danny really had no idea, and I was getting annoyed at being patronised.

‘For a working visa’, I said, looking him straight in the eye and waiting for a useful answer.

‘I guess, I dunno, about . . . it depends, like I say.’

‘On what?’

‘Who the official is, what Klaus is telling them that day about foreigners, you know.’

‘No, I don’t’, I replied, not letting him off the hook. ‘So, around about how much would you bribe an interior ministry official for a working visa?’

Frank stepped in: ‘I’ll tell you how it works if you’re stopped in your car by the traffic police.’

‘Oh right’, Danny laughed knowingly, ‘the traffic police’.

But Frank continued quickly before I could turn on Danny again. ‘The essential to car ownership is the two-wallet system. In one wallet you have all your money and identity papers. You’ve got to hide this wallet under your car seat. In the other you have nothing but two hundred crowns [about ten Australian dollars] and this wallet must be in your bag. When you are stopped by the police —and you will be stopped by the police—you will be accused of something: speeding, going the wrong way down a one-way street, not stopping at a traffic light. That you are innocent of the crime is of no interest to the police officer. He will say to you, “There is a fine of one thousand crowns”. You will argue, but he will just keep repeating, “There is a fine of one thousand crowns”. You will protest some more, but eventually you will sigh and give in. “Alright, alright, I’ll pay the fine.” At that point you reach for your fake wallet, opening your bag wide so the police officer can see you have no other wallet hiding in there. Open the wallet and affect despair. “But I only have two hundred crowns on me!” The officer will look annoyed. You will look helpless. Then you will say, “Listen, can you send me the fine?” The officer will look away down the street, and then back at you. There will be a short silence while he contemplates the situation, and then he will say, “There is a fine of two hundred crowns”, and hold out his hand. Give him the two hundred crowns and drive away, and be prepared to do it all again next week when you are stopped for a broken tail light.’

‘Yeah, man, that is so true’, broke in Danny. Really, I was starting to loathe him.

Still, incipient loathing or no, when you’ve got no-one else, you’re friends with anyone.

We were on a tram to Andìl, a district in the south of the city, where the boys were taking me to introduce me to Bar Punto, one of Prague’s charming beer houses, known locally as hospodas. We were stopped at a red light when all of a sudden the carriage rocked sideways, violently, and we heard a loud crunch and the scrape of metal on metal. A car had driven right into the tram, and then had tried to keep on going. The tram driver, a woman, came out of her cabin and we all rushed over to the interesting side of the tram to see what was happening.

Czech men had poured out of the nearby hospodas, beers in hand. They were all standing around inspecting the damage to the car and the tram, giving each other their opinion on the likely facts of the case and helping the car driver (who seemed to have only just come from a hospoda himself) out of the car. The tram driver wasn’t saying much, just watching them all with her arms folded and a look of fury on her face. This was not like a Czech woman—they’re usually more on the voluble, expressive side. Danny started to laugh.

‘Do you know what they’re saying?’ I asked.

‘They’re all saying, “Women drivers! See? They’re hopeless.”

They’re blaming her.’

‘But that’s unbelievable. The tram wasn’t moving!’

‘It’s still her fault’, said Danny. ‘What do you expect from women drivers? She should be in the kitchen cooking for her man, not out of the house and working.’

‘My God, this is like Australia in 1953.’

‘The good old days’, said Frank as we were ordered off the tram, since the police would have to come and take an enormously long time to get everyone’s statements. The state machinery grinds slowly and everything comes to a halt for three days if it’s grinding in your direction, so we escaped the drama to the bar, which was not far from where we’d stopped.

The entrance to Bar Punto was a nondescript wooden door in the side of a building. The reason I needed the boys to take me was I could never distinguish one door from another and had been unable to find one of these Bohemian bars on my own. There was something thrilling about walking down the street then turning suddenly at a door with no sign and no decoration— nothing to indicate it was the entrance to something—and walking through it, confidently. There was a grille at head height in the door, and I was so hoping it would slide back and a pair of eyes would appear and demand the (‘The geese fly south in the winter, comrade.’ ‘Yes, comrade. And Great-Aunt Marta is cooking goulash.’) but, disappointingly, Danny just pushed open the door.

We went down a flight of stone steps into a tiny room barely larger than Mrs Jendliková’s living room. A semicircular wooden bar enclosed a space no bigger than a laundry cupboard and in this space were squished three bartenders. Frank said to me, ‘You can have beer, beer, beer or beer. What would you like?’

‘Beer, then.’

‘Ten or twelve?’

I gave him a withering look.

‘Just asking,’ he laughed.

Beer comes in two strengths in the Republic, mysteriously called ‘ten’ and ‘twelve’. These numbers don’t seem to relate to anything in the contents of the beer itself, or at least I haven’t been able to find any rationale for them, but in practice there’s quite a difference. If you stick to ten strength you can drink all night before falling flat on your face, but twelve means you can only drink half the night before falling flat on your face. However, ten is considered by the Czechs to be for the elderly and infirm. I had ordered small, ten-strength beers, being a light drinker, when I first arrived but the culture had seeped into me and only four months into my life in Prague I would no more have ordered ten strength than I would ask for a Zimmer frame to help me down Punto’s stone staircase.

We met up with Zuzana, and Simeon—the Englishman who’d explained the concept of ‘university’ to me at my first expat brunch—and some Czech guys I didn’t know, but who shook my hand with infinite charm, smiling into my eyes. I now knew the Americans had been right, once the Czechs get to know you, they’re the friendliest people on earth. It’s only strangers they stare at coldly. I sat down and looked around me. Men and women were sitting around small tables drinking giant beers one after another without pause. The atmosphere in the club was charming—relaxed and casual, the men dressed in cotton pants and shirts and the women in practically nothing.

Czech women are mind-bendingly beautiful: they’re tall and slender, have smooth European skin, strong cheekbones and long legs. They dress as if they’ve

just stepped out of an escort agency catering to young, trailer-trash rock stars: skirts barely covering fannies, which can be embarrassing as knickers are optional; bras definitely out; tops without a back or sides; heels high and legs bare. In the bars, as well as on the streets and in the trams, it can be a real problem knowing where to fix your eyes, not just because you want to avoid actually staring at naked upper thighs but because the chances are high that her boyfriend will have his hand on that thigh, heading under the skirt and brushing against her pubes, that is if he doesn’t already have his full body pressed against hers, his tongue deep in her mouth and his hips bucking. These people aren’t shy; I often sensed there’s a lot of good sex being had in this country. The emblem of the Czech Republic is a lion standing on its hind legs. Known in flag literature as a ‘lion rampant’, it is rampant in more ways than one—it’s waving around an erect penis.

Sitting at the Bar Punto watching these women, I pondered the strange disconnect between sexuality and sexism. Czech men think women can’t drive, are dumber than men, and should be at home having babies and keeping the bathroom spotless. And yet, a woman can wear a see-through top and a skirt made of just enough material to produce one and a half man-sized handkerchiefs while walking drunk down a dark street at three in the morning, and still feel safe. Simeon, who, like Danny, had married a Czech woman, told me, ‘My wife works longer hours than I do, but still she does all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, everything for the house. Sometimes at midnight when I’m in bed, I hear her come home and put a load of washing on. Then the next morning she’s up early ironing my shirts.’

I was appalled. ‘You let your wife iron your shirts? Why don’t you do your own laundry?’

‘I tried’, he said, ‘but she told me it was an insult. She said it meant she wasn’t able to look after me.’ Which may explain why there are ten thousand American men living in Prague married to Czech women. The economy may be booming in the Republic but that’s comparative, considering the low base left by the

communists, so for many Czech women American men are a ticket to comfort. If she marries a Czech man and he doesn’t earn enough to keep them both, she’ll be forced to find a job and still do all the housework. If she marries an American, his income will always keep them both in high style in Prague. It’s a no-brainer.

Frank said, ‘When I first got here I tried to set up a Czech– English language exchange on expats.cz, swapping English lessons for Czech so I’d get some practice. After a while, I had to stop responding to the Czech women and just stick to the Czech men, because every time I met a women she only wanted to tell me what a good cook she was, and how clean she kept her house and how she was looking for a man who wanted a good wife to take care of his every need, and I was being worn down by refusing their advances. I only want to sleep with them, I don’t want to marry them.’ I’d been assailed by offers of sex when I ed on the expats website so it was interesting to hear the story from the bloke’s side.

Just like Australia in the 1950s, mothers are given goddess-like status while being confined to the kitchen. No Czech man would ever dream of giving backchat to his mother, and his mother will always take precedence over his wife. It’s a study to see a Czech man on the phone to his mother. One minute he’s a burly sportsman with large hands and beer on its way to his mouth, the next he’s like a little baby, curled over the phone, cooing to his maminka, translated as: ‘Ahoj, mummykins, of course I’m coming over for dinny-poos tonight, could I live without your wonderful foody-woody? I wuv you, too, mummykins.’ I must add, though, the Czech language is bizarrely dotted with these cute-isms; no-one orders a pivo (beer) or a kávu (coffee), they order pivièku and kávièku, the English equivalent of a ‘beerikins’ or ‘coffeekins’.

I don’t know why I was surprised to find the Czechs stuck in the 1950s when it comes to the relations between the sexes. My father is completely unreconstructed. Australian women are vilified as bra-burning crazies, always whingeing, never happy. Continental women, Jewish women, women who stay

at home and look after the children, these women are happy because they haven’t disrupted the ‘natural order of things’.

‘Look at Germaine Greer’, he’d say. ‘Always arguing. No wonder she can’t get married.’

Only occasionally do I put up a fight: ‘How do you know women are happy doing all the housework?’

‘You don’t hear Czech women complaining, or Jewish women, so of course they’re happy. Men couldn’t do the housework. It’s not natural. Besides’, Dad says, apparently under the impression that he’s delivering the clincher to the argument, ‘they don’t think of it as work, because it’s a pleasure for them to serve the family’. I saw my stepmother’s lips tighten at that one, but what could she do? She too thinks that women should do all the housework. Bizarrely, in their house it’s Dad who does all the shopping and cooking and most of the vacuuming. Arguing is not worth the effort. Personally, I just thank Germaine Greer and all her sisters for the work they did for us, but hearing talk about the experiences of Czech women from Frank and Simeon I wondered if maybe I was doing Dad an injustice? Perhaps he was right, perhaps Czech women are happy as is.

Zuzana was in her late twenties so I decided to do some market research on her. I told her about my family’s attitude to feminism. ‘They think that women in the Czech Republic are happy because they never complain.’

Zuzana choked and turned red. She was scathing: ‘Oh yes, for women housework is a hobby.’ There was a short, seething silence before all her pent-up frustrations really broke out. ‘Men just sit around drinking and putting on weight. In my hometown, Písek, the women have to go to work, then come home

and do all the housework. A man finishes work at three in the afternoon, then goes to the pub, then if he’s not happy he comes home and beats his wife. It’s a terrible life. She asks him to help with the shopping and he says he doesn’t want to look like a poof. This is why I moved to Prague and this is why I will never marry a Czech man.’

I noticed one of the young Czech man at our table, Tomáš, was blushing and I asked, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Písek.’

And did he think that men should do the shopping?

‘Not if he is earning the money.’

It was four in the morning and the first dawn light was showing when I left Bar Punto that night. I stopped off at a Czech fast-food outlet, which sells food designed for the beer-drunk—crumbed and fried camembert on a soft white bun with mayonnaise. As you eat this you can feel your arteries seizing up, begging for mercy, but it’s delicious. Quite how Czech women stay so lithe on a Czech diet is a mystery to me. Myself, I could sense I was adding pounds just standing next to the food. I ate my deep-fried camembert burger as I made my way up to the Charles Bridge, the famous fourteenth-century stone bridge that crosses the Vltava River. I think one of the reasons Prague is the most beautiful city in the world is its river. It’s enormously wide and fast flowing, and it sweeps in an arc through the city, breaking it in two—the castle on one side and the old market town on the other. When my father was a child, the river would freeze over and children would hop, giggling, from ice floe to ice floe, risking certain death if they fell off into the freezing river underneath. Nowadays there are ice breakers on the river to prevent the ice from buckling the bridges.

The Charles Bridge is a tourist magnet. There is no time, winter or summer, when it’s not thronged with excited Japanese snapping pictures of each other, backpackers of all nationalities, elderly Germans on bus tours, honeymooners, English yobs, pickpockets and beggars. You can never make your way across it without saying ‘Excuse me’ every twenty seconds, or being assailed by a beggar sitting on the ground with a bloodied and filthy bandage wrapped around his leg. I gave them money at first, until I saw one knock off from work one day. He got up and just strolled away, leg perfectly stable. Take a closer look at the blood and you see it is brown dye. Still, I don’t hold it against them—you’ve got to make a living somehow.

This night I wanted to see the bridge in all its glory without being asked to photograph a tour group in front of the statue you rub for good luck. The bridge is lined with statues added during the seventeenth-century, installed at the time to inspire the locals. The one that every tourist rubs for good luck I’ve done twice. The spot you rub is now worn to a golden shine. My favourite statue is one of three heretics gaoled in a tiny cell, the bars of which are made of iron. The three are jammed inside, wailing. Outside, a burly fellow with a walrus moustache and a fat stomach hanging over his belt guards them. He once had a sword but over time it snapped off. It’s the marvellous realness of the statue that captures me; I feel too afraid to touch it in case the guard throws me in with the wailing men.

I tripped across the Charles Bridge just before the first light, all alone apart from a sleepy pickpocket just clocking on for the morning shift, my heels clacking on the cobblestones, the early morning sky a beautiful deep blue. All was hushed and serene, even the river seemed to have ceased moving. Early morning birds were beginning to swoop down to pluck breakfast from the quiet waters and a mother duck shepherded her ducklings along one of the sandstone banks. I rubbed the golden statue once again for good luck, gazing at the faint sheen of mist rising off the river. I ed by my gaoler and stopped to look at him, his brutal laughing fatness and the distraught faces of his inmates utterly spooky in the stillness of the breaking daylight. For a long time I stood in the middle of the Charles Bridge, all alone with the dawn. I left the bridge and waited in the half-

light for the last of the night trams. When it came I boarded with a heart full of the romance of the bridge and sat, dreamily, among the drunken, snoring Czechs going home after a night of pivièku.

Chapter 8 A Brief History of Communism

The summer rolled on in this way and I began to feel that at last I was living the bohemian life. There were two bohemian activities, however, that I was missing out on. The first was hiking. I had discovered that hiking was a beloved pastime of the Czechs and I very much wanted to see the countryside, but I couldn’t persuade any of my friends to me. Sven’s response was, ‘Hmmm. Fresh air and exercise. Let me sink’. He raised his beer to his lips and took a swig: ‘No.’ Laura was equally dismissive, her weekends being full enough with her Act of Re/Creation. I thought Zuzana was a sure bet, but for some reason this aspect of Czech life didn’t appeal to her. She was the sort of girl who was never without high heels and makeup, so maybe it just wasn’t in her nature. Stumped, I gave up on going hiking. I wasn’t brave enough to go by myself, my orienteering skills being in the toilet, and I was afraid of getting lost.

I was also getting no nearer to that other bohemian activity— the ionate love affair. I wanted to have sex but, more, I wanted to have a European lover, someone suave and handsome and young who’d whisper sweet nothings in broken English on the Charles Bridge and read poetry to me as we lay on his mattress in his artist’s abode after a night of unbridled European ion. However, the only men I met were British and American expats, and the occasional Czech friend of Zuzana’s or student of Laura’s. The expats were on a planet of sleaze I could never visit and the Czechs, well I would have liked to have had an affair with one of them, but flirting with someone where the only vocabulary you have in common is, ‘I’ll have a pivièku’ and ‘I’m from Sydney/Písek’, means you both lapse into silence afterwards, which made progressing to an affair difficult, indeed, impossible. Not for Laura, who only needed to know how to say, ‘How about it? No strings attached’, and possibly ‘Do you mind if I leave the video camera running?’ Her dance card was full. She archly tried to set me up from time to time: ‘Pavel’s cute and he does this really hot thing with his tongue. He . . .’

‘That’s okay! I don’t need to know.’

‘No, really, you wouldn’t believe it. He takes your clit and . . .’

I could barely listen to it, and I certainly couldn’t have slept with Pavel, or indeed any of her other lovers. I knew too much about them—way, way more than I wanted to. Laura had no sense of boundaries when it came to sex, and she regarded mine as quaint and unworthy of serious consideration. It seemed to her inexplicable that I should want a lover and not just take one, anyone. She was rather patronising about it, being so much hipper and more bohemian than me. Sometimes, after being joshed by her, I also wondered why I didn’t just throw myself into a meaningless affair, but not for long; even a casual lover has to have some degree of simpatico for me. I couldn’t have sex with someone I couldn’t talk to. I came to the conclusion that Sydney women are wrong—the men are as scarce on the ground in Europe as they are in Australia.

While I didn’t get to see my family until later in summer, Mr Hrabal called on me regularly to make sure I was still alive. He brought his books as promised, the Czech original and the English translation, and I developed a bout of what Laura called ‘Train Wreck Syndrome’: I simply had to look. I opened the Czech book first and found that I could read the first sentence, mainly because I’d just learned numbers and colours and of family. I was thus able to read, ‘I have had them all, Chinese, Japanese, black, mother and daughter, mother and two daughters, two sisters . . .’ For a moment I felt quite chuffed; Look at me! I’m reading a book in Czech! Then I realised what I was reading, and dropped it quickly. Apart from anything, I rather feared Mr Hrabal’s copy may have been used on those occasions when Mr Hrabal wasn’t paying for it but was providing the service to himself.

Tedious bodice-ripping episodes (‘Her mother rang me in tears to thank me for

having cured her daughter of her fear of sex’) aside, Mr Hrabal’s book was actually fascinating. Mr Hrabal had survived the war living in Czechoslovakia and, being a descendent of a war survivor, I was curious about that. Families of war survivors fall into two categories: those who know every tiny detail of the horrors their parents survived, and those who know almost nothing. My family is in the latter category. Dad, bless him, believes in leaving the past in the past. Small markers stay with us, of course—we were never allowed to waste food, and Dad never buys anything German—but he never mentions the war. He did once buy me a German-made nail kit, saying, ‘It cut me to the core, darling, to give those bastards any money. I tried to find another one, but this one was the best.’ The odd result of all this silence is that I know very little about what it had been like for him. And a Jewish historian once told me that children of ‘forgetters’ have difficulty retaining the facts. This was definitely true of me. I had always been ashamed that I kept forgetting the concentration camp in which my grandfather had been interred. It was only when I saw the official notification to my grandmother that I’d found in the cupboard that the name Terezín (Theresienstadt) became fixed in my mind, forever.

Mr Hrabal wrote about how he and his mother had been extraordinarily poor in his early years, so poor that for much of his childhood he was unable to live with her as she couldn’t them both. He was shipped from grandparents to aunts to cousins. During the times they were together, he would go with her to the markets to sell anything they could lay their hands on. It was at the markets, as a little boy of six years of age selling toffee to wealthy strangers, that he learned how to sell and how to make a profit. He sold more than his mother because he would offer more inducements: ‘For one crown I’ll give you a toffee cone, alright then, two toffee cones . . . you’re driving a hard bargain, three toffee cones, but that’s my last offer.’ When the wealthy patrons came back the next week they’d say to his mother, ‘No, not you. I want to buy from the boy.’

In his teenage years Mr Hrabal learned arbitrage on the black market and began to make his fortune, as clever, poor boys will. The war years came and he used his black money to get his mother out of the country to England. His own war years were spent in hiding and at the end of the war, Mr Hrabal was in the Slovak east when the Russians came to liberate the Czechoslovakians. The

Americans entered from the Czech side and the Russians from the Slovak side. What he saw of the Russians was terrible. Mr Hrabal was in hiding with a family, and when the Russians came they raped all the women of the family. The husband begged them not to, the women were screaming and crying. Mr Hrabal wrote that the more they screamed, the more Russians ed in. They gang raped them. All over Czechoslovakia, the liberating Russian troops were raping women—virgins, children, pregnant women.

I wondered, as I read his book, if it was this terrible childhood and youth that had created Mr Hrabal’s obsession with sex. Later, when he came to get his books back, Mr Hrabal said to me, ‘Alright, if you’re invading a country you expect rape, but these pigs had come to liberate us. They were brutal. That’s why we hate the Russians so much today. The Americans, they knew how to do it. They’d put up a banner announcing a dance, then they’d clean themselves up, put on some cologne, dance with a girl, and if she wanted to fuck, well alright, they’d fuck. That’s the way to get sex. But the Russians . . . they’d come to liberate us—and this is what they did.’

I had to ire Mr Hrabal. How had he managed to go on after witnessing such brutality and carnage? How had any of them managed to carry on? How had Dad managed to carry on? I Dad once told me he and his mother had so little during the war they actually collected nuts in the forest to make coffee. I wondered if Dad’s refusal to hear anything he didn’t want to hear was a coping mechanism, learned during the war and never discarded. I suppose we’re all full of these coping mechanisms. His is to pretend bad things aren’t happening and to forget about all disputes the second they’re over. My stepmother and I are grudge-bearers. I once had an argument with Dad, I think it was about feminism because that’s the one that can make me behave really badly and say sharp things I later regret. When I went around the next Friday, I could tell my stepmother hadn’t forgiven me. She didn’t say anything but she was unsmiling and overly polite, always an unmistakeable sign. Because I’m me, I responded by being equally sniffy and sullen. There we were, the two of us, sitting across the table from each other, not speaking, arms folded, grudges at ten paces, when Dad came in, buttoning his pants because he’d been on the loo.

‘Darling!’ he cried. ‘How good to see you!’ He was so genuinely happy to see me, even though he sees me every Friday night, and had so clearly forgotten that we’d fought, that my stepmother and I were immediately disarmed. We glanced at each other in surprise. How could we keep fighting when he wasn’t going to? Immediately we relaxed and things were back to normal. It can be annoying when he just won’t hear my side of an issue, but it’s a coping mechanism with more plusses than minuses: it got him through the war and he came out the other end a man capable of being positive about human beings. That’s a miracle in itself.

After the war, the communist way of life had seemed like a pretty good idea to the Czechs. Communism was the polar opposite of fascism and people were beguiled by the ideals of comradeship and community. Dad signed up but luckily for him he left in 1946, because it didn’t take long for the communist ideal to warp and only four years after the end of the war the Czechs found themselves saddled with rulers every bit as vicious as the Nazis. By 1949 the Communist Party had demolished all political opposition. Any Czechs who disagreed with the party’s decisions were committed to political trial, executed or sent to concentration camps, which had been thoughtfully established near uranium mines. Property was confiscated and farmers were forced into agriculture collectives. The economy was throttled and pretty soon there were two classes of people—powerful Communist Party officials who had big houses, holiday villas, cars and food; and the rest.

The rest had to queue for every daily staple whenever it happened to be released to the store—bread, toilet paper, shoes, soap—and the supplies were capricious. You never knew what was going to be made available or when, and you never knew how long it would be before the next release, so when something was in the shops everyone rushed to stock up, and if you were tied up doing something else, working for instance, you were out of luck. Mrs Jendliková told me that her daughter had once had to send her ten-year-old son to queue for tampons. He’d wanted to know what they were and his mother had hurriedly said, ‘Never mind that, just get them’. He’d found out what they were for when he was in the line

and twenty years later, Mrs Jendliková said, her daughter and grandson still recall the searing embarrassment of that incident. That’s the thing about poverty —you’ve got no privacy.

In a totalitarian state you’ve got no safety either. Everyone is terrified that they’ll be the next person to be taken away in the dead of night for questioning by the secret police, after having your door smashed down at three o’clock in the morning when you’re asleep and in your pyjamas, confused and vulnerable. In a country where the state dictates how you will think and enforces that with violence, people will turn you in out of fear or spite, and you never know which innocent word is going to get you beaten up by the authorities. In my grandmother’s block of flats, the building supervisor was a spy for the Communist Party; but then again, ‘All building supervisors were spies for the Communist Party’, Mrs Jendliková told me. She said that under communism, you weren’t allowed to eat meat on Thursdays as there were shortages. ‘My building supervisor used to walk down the corridors sniffing at the doors to make sure no-one was breaking the rules.’

I was astonished to learn that communism had been every bit as ghastly as we’d been led to believe in the west. I’d assumed some of my ideas of life behind the Iron Curtain must have been capitalist propaganda, but who needs propaganda when the real thing speaks for itself?

During the war, the Czechs had been ruled by Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s number three man and a notorious bastard. They had a strong resistance movement, the Czechs, because they’re brave . . . they’re incredibly brave. One of their greatest literary works is about a soldier who subverts authority and avoids fighting and any unpleasantness, but put the Czechs to war and they fight as though they don’t know what fear is.

One day in late summer, when the days were still long and warm, Danny took me on one of his spontaneous tours. It really was the best thing about Danny, his

love of Prague and his desire to share it. We had just left Fraktal and were wondering if we should go to Letna Park, which is right behind Fraktal and where the Czechs hang out on a Sunday, drinking beer and smoking dope, when he suddenly said, ‘Come with me. I’ll show you one of my favourite places in Prague’. That, from Danny, was an invitation I couldn’t refuse. We walked through the park and back across the river, then south along the river through a maze of tiny, winding, cobblestone alleys lined with ancient houses, finally ending up on Resslová Street. Danny walked down the middle of the deserted road, looking to the left and right, searching for something. Finally, he stopped in front of an old, stone church.

‘See those marks in the wall?’ I looked to where he was pointing and saw that there were circular chunks pockmarked into the stone and some of the corner work had broken off, although the scars were weathered smooth.

‘This is where the Nazis found the guys who killed Reinhard Heydrich. They were hiding in the basement of the church. The Nazis surrounded the church and opened fire. That’s the gunshots you can see. The rebels shot themselves rather than surrender. The Czechs have left the marks in the walls so we’ll never forget those guys were heroes.’

In 1942, Czech fighter pilots who risked all and escaped by flying their planes to England to fight for the British did an unthinkably courageous thing—they parachuted back into Czechoslovakia, behind enemy lines, to assassinate Heydrich. They were successful, and in revenge the Nazis liquidated two villages—Lidice and Ležáky—killing nearly all the inhabitants. In the five weeks of martial law imposed following the assassination, the regime murdered three thousand people until they found the seven Czech pilots.

The significance of the bullet holes on the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius on Resslová Street had a profound effect on me. They were a silent memorial to unthinkable bravery and an ending so sad I wanted to cry. Danny told me they’d

been betrayed by one of their own, too frightened to hold out any longer. I went home to look them up, so I’d never forget their names. I felt, being from a family of forgetters, that I needed to cement these men in my mind. The betrayer was Karel Èurda. The war heroes who died that day in the church were Jozef Gabèík, Jan Kubiš, Josef Valèík, Adolf Opálka, Josef Bublík, Jan Hrubý and Jaroslav Švarc.

You’d think that the communists would have venerated the Czech war heroes, but the opposite was true. When the communists seized total power in 1948, the heroes of the Second World War, who’d fought with the west, were declared traitors to the party and arrested, tortured and sent to concentration camps. Some twenty years later, in 1968, the Czechs tried to free themselves of the communists. Everyone knew Stalin was a criminal, and artists and economists alike were beginning to speak out. I came across two s of the Prague Spring, one written under capitalism and one under communism, both wildly different from each other. Here’s what Petr Èornej, writing in a 1992 pamphlet called The Fundamentals of Czech History, said about the Prague Spring:

Khrushchev was being nice about the west, so the Czech government, led by Alexandr Dubèek, began to gently ease up on the torture and state terrorism. It must have seemed as though the time for change was right. How terribly wrong Dubèek was. The Soviets sent half a million troops into Prague, arrested Dubèek, killed protestors and crushed the resistance.

The . . . Czechoslovakian model of ‘Socialism with a human face’ . . . allowed for progressive reforms in the areas of politics and the economy. The ‘Prague Spring’ lasted only until August 21, 1968, when the armies of five Warsaw Pact countries . . . occupied the state.

In contrast, the 1974 Olympia Guidebook to Czechoslovakia by Nový and Adamec describes the Prague Spring as:

[After 1945] Czechoslovakia . . . began to build up a socially just society . . . All power is in the hands of the working people. Close alliance with the Soviet Union . . . ensures external security and economic stability. In 1968 right wing forces endeavoured to revoke this development, but, with the assistance of the countries of the Warsaw Agreement, their efforts were defeated.

The 1974 book has an entire section devoted to the ‘glorious tradition of the workers’ movement’ even though the workers actually failed to rally to the of the Russians in the 1968 invasion. In January of 1969, Jan Palach, a twenty-year-old student, burned himself alive in Wenceslas Square in protest at the Soviet occupation. He was supposed to start a chain reaction of selfimmolating students, but as he lay dying he begged them not to go through with it.

In 1989, the people of Czechoslovakia staged the Velvet Revolution, which began with demonstrations on the twentieth anniversary of Jan Palach’s death. This time, Gorbachev was in power and communism was genuinely cracking. The secret police still took batons to the demonstrators but at last the government, knowing it was beaten and with the USSR crumbling, quietly packed up and left. Shortly afterwards, the Czechs and the Slovaks separated and so what was once Czechoslovakia is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Living in the Czech Republic I soon found that communism permeated everything, not just my own family history. Its brutality turned the population surly with strangers. My own grandmother changed from soft-faced child bride to wary munitions inspector. Its credo that a woman’s job was to both work and take care of the house and family has made the women tough, and their selfperception, their pride in themselves, resides in this toughness and stops feminism cold. Women will tell you they’re stronger than the men, that men are soft, with a certain grim satisfaction. Young women who want to break free of this are despised by the older women, making it doubly hard to escape the chains

of social expectation.

After a few months in Èesko (this is what the Czechs call their country and so does everyone else who has to live there for more than a week—you soon get sick of calling it The Czech Republic), Sven and I went to the Museum of Communism to try to get a flavour of the real thing. The museum is on Wenceslas Square, ‘next door to McDonald’s and opposite Benetton’ as they themselves. We went up the stairs to the entrance counter, and when we saw the ticket price Sven and I drew in our breaths sharply and glanced at each other with a look full of meaning—what a rip-off. However, we coughed up the three hundred crowns, an outrageous price although standard for a tourist attraction, because we had no choice. By this time, I was rather proudly boycotting any business that had the gall to try to charge me triple the going rate for food or clothing just because it was on a tourist strip. I had that deliciously superior feeling of the locals—I knew where the good, cheap Czech shops were and I looked down on the throttling crowds of tourists who trekked the Golden Mile from Wenceslas Square to the Castle via the Charles Bridge and saw nothing else of Prague. ‘It’s just so awful, that road. Who in their right mind would go there?’ I asked Danny.

‘Yeah, they’ve ruined it for the locals. And now they come in winter, too. Prague used to be ours in the winter.’

‘And there’s so much more to Prague than you can see on those few streets’, I said, forgetting how much I’d despised the Americans for boasting of their local knowledge when I first arrived.

‘They never see the real Prague’, agreed Danny. Not like us, we both thought, smugly.

The museum divided the exhibits into themed sections. The first part was devoted to the household and displayed mostly the cute and quaint—green tin boxes for flour, old soap packets, aprons, wooden 1950s’ furniture and the history of queuing for staples written on the walls. It had a big sentimental factor and Sven and I oh’ed and sighed over the tin artefacts: ‘Isn’t this adorable?’ ‘I’d love that for my coffee table’, and so on. There was an air of simplicity that beguiled us into that hoary old sentiment that life was so much more manageable and enjoyable in our grandparents’ time, before the advent of modern angsts like choice and freedom, a time when values were more than monetary. We were quite wrong, of course, values have never been more than monetary. Your grandparents’ time only seems more certain because you know how it ends, but you never actually think those sentiments through at the time, you just have a feeling that you’re suffering more than your ancestors did.

The second section was devoted to work. This was a little less cute and little more impressive. One thing you can say for communists, they have the right idea about work. It really does matter and being engaged in it is essential to a sense of self-worth. Here were posters of women in overalls wielding spanners and standing in front of aircraft they’d presumably just built themselves, looking sturdy and efficient, both aircraft and women. They had a mock-up of a workshop with wood-handled tools on the benches, lace-up leather boots and cloth caps lying about. Taped onto the walls were old posters extolling the virtue of working for the glory of the fatherland, clenched fists predominating. The communists used the hand to express the rectitude of the person who owned it. Intellectuals had useless, thin white hands, so they were sent to the uranium mines. Truly worthy people had rough hands, large hands with blunt fingers curled up tight in solidarity with the other workers of the nation.

The third section was devoted to art. Communist art was a revelation to me. It’s called ‘social realism’, and I’d never been aware of it before. Essentially, the state took control of art and decreed that the only acceptable art was straight down the line real depictions of people doing ordinary things. Pictures couldn’t be painted using fuzzy, arty sorts of techniques, like Monet used, for instance, where you have to stand back a pace to see past the brush strokes; no, these paintings had to have defined lines around solid blocks of colour. They had to be

of people hoeing fields or hammering iron or carrying shopping bags. Picasso would have been consigned to the gulag. This art, this social realism, which had a certain third-grader’s charm, was the only acceptable art. Nothing else was approved or hung for display.

‘You know these things are getting to be collector’s items now?’ said Sven.

‘Really?’ It seemed hardly credible. ‘They’re so . . . dull. The same style, over and over again, showing happy workers in factories and on collective farms. It’s sheer propaganda.’

‘Expensive propaganda now’, said Sven.

And it was true that there was a resurgence of sentimentality for the communist era taking hold in the former Eastern Bloc countries. ‘Ostalgia’ they were calling it. But this seemed to be taking it to unwarranted extremes. Shaking our heads we moved on to the fourth section, and here we were brought up short by what a truly sick travesty ostalgia is. The area was devoted to the secret police.

The room was bare except for a table in the middle, a naked bulb hanging over the table, two chairs on one side and one on the other. A metal truncheon and handcuffs lay casually, menacingly, on the table. The floor was concrete and there were no windows. Around the walls, the story of life under the secret police was told: how many killed, how many disappeared forever, how many arrested, gaoled, tortured, sent to concentration camps. People came into the room and stopped talking instantly. We all edged about the room, reading the commentary and trying not to look at the table. It felt like we were at the site of a massacre—we all wanted to pay silent respect to the victims.

The last part of the exhibit was a video. Here, again, a room full of aghast tourists, some crying as I was, watched in silence. It was a collection of film footage shot by demonstrators and officials in Wenceslas Square in the protests of 1989. There was a lot of shouting, people being beaten up, rocks being thrown at police lines, followed by a panicked scatter as the police charged, then protesters curled up on the ground, heavy sticks pounding down on them. At the end of the video was the most searing footage of all. A very young man, only sixteen or seventeen, was being interrogated by the police, the questioning filmed for official records. The young man was terrified. He didn’t know this was the last time the communists would have power. He didn’t know that this revolution would be the last for his country. He thought he was being filmed by a powerful police force and that he was going to be beaten up, gaoled. He thought he had brought his family to the notice of the police and he was terrified of the consequences. The police menaced him: ‘What are you doing here? Do your parents know you’re here? What is your address? What is your address?’ He was trying to get away but he was trapped, they had his arms pinned, and he thought he was in terrible danger—facing torture, probably, as were his parents. I never walked through Wenceslas Square again the same way after seeing that video. In my mind’s eye I saw that boy’s terrified white face every time.

Sixty years of totalitarianism and the secret police have left the Czechs scarred. The longer I lived in the country, the more firmly I renounced any leftist idealism I may have had lingering from my university days. Communism is a shocking thing. The more control the state has over your life, the more miserable and frightened your life will be. A country full of miserable, frightened citizens is doomed to poverty. The Americans—a bunch of lunatics, granted—are on the money, ideologically speaking. They believe fervently in the right of the individual to live with as little interference from their government as possible. When they claim the right of every citizen to bear arms, they aren’t thinking of the threat from foreign invasion, or even from robbers and murderers; they’re thinking that if everyone is armed the government will think twice before turning the army on its citizens.

There’s a sculpture at the bottom of Petrin Hill in Prague, one of my favourites, that tells the story of communism. Six metal men stand in a line, one behind the

other. The first is a full figure, but as the figures disappear up the hill, they become more and more disintegrated until the last one is just a few shreds.

What happened to all the old communists? It’s a question you have to ask yourself when you live here. Unfortunately, the answer is ‘not much’. Miroslav, my Czech language teacher, said to me, ‘What is a picture that sums up the Czech Republic today? It’s a war hero living in poverty and a communist criminal living in wealth.’ And he is right.

We’d been talking in class about a trial that was presently underway in the Prague courts. A man had committed torture under the communist reign. His victim knew him. The victim had a doctor’s certificate from the time confirming his injuries, and that he could only have suffered those injuries from torture. Yet all the perpetrator had to do was to get five communist mates to say it never happened and the court’s hands were tied. That communist left court every day with a big smile on his face and every day Czechs saw this. The only communists brought to justice, of a sorts, were the ones who had perpetrated crimes right at the end of the era, who had been televised beating students in the square in 1989. But even so, those few were only given sentences of two to three years and were released after six months, smiling. People who’d been in concentration camps, who’d been brutalised by the regime, hoped for justice, but the democratic istration hasn’t been able to deliver.

Communists got away with it and are thriving. They’re heading up the major industries, they have good pensions, their party is even experiencing a resurgence. Of course, there’s no such thing as justice, but the Czechs have to live with this rank injustice shoved under their noses every day. In Australia, and in other wealthy democracies, we kid ourselves along with a veneer of justice. We pretend the law prevails over money and power. But here they have to live with the raw fact that power is everything. This, I think, explains a key characteristic of the Czechs—their ion for getting around the law.

I had been astonished at the openness with which people smoke dope here. The Czechs are furious dope smokers (which may explain the docility of the men) and in Letna Park on a Sunday afternoon you can get high from all the ive reefer smoke just from sitting in the beer garden nearby. Danny, still anxious to show me that he really did know how to bribe someone, told me that the law on marijuana says you may legally possess ‘a not larger than small amount’. No-one has ever defined what this small amount actually is. Should a policeman come along and ask to see your stash, you can feel free to show it to him. The policeman will say, ‘That is not a small amount’, to which you will obviously reply, ‘If I give half of it to you, will it be a small amount?’ If the policeman is a smoker he will accept that half your stash is a small amount. If he is not a smoker, he will tell you that five hundred crowns will make your stash look like a small amount to him.

My favourite story about the Czechs getting around the law is one Zuzana told me. With the end of the war, the Czechs ceased fighting bravely and went back to living the life of the Good Soldier Švejk—getting out from under authorities who insisted they should do national service. ‘Army service is compulsory unless you can get what’s known as a blue card’, she said.

‘A blue card?’

‘It’s a certification from your doctor that you are unfit for the army’, Danny told me, ‘and every Czech male over eighteen I have ever met has a blue card.’

‘I’ve got one’, interjected Sven. The whole table looked at him. ‘It’s for the Swedish army. I have a nervous condition.’ He grinned.

‘Right’, said Zuzana, ‘that’s the sort of thing. It’s considered such a joke that doctors don’t even bother coming up with a real disease. My cousin’s says he has

a “non-manifesting skin disorder”. Get it? Non-manifesting. So you can’t see it.’

‘Wow. He got away with that?’ I was impressed.

‘No-one cares’, said Zuzana. ‘Even if, by accident or because you’re actually interested in an armed services career, you do end up in the army, compulsory service is a national joke. It’s the only army in the world where they eat better food than the rest of the population. Mostly, they just sit around, smoke dope, drink and eat. My brother actually wanted to go, he really wanted to be a soldier, but it’s so useless he hates it. His group had just one bicycle, since all their other bicycles were stolen, and fake guns. In the event of an attack, their defence strategy is to put their sergeant on a bike, roll her down the hill and run after her. They have no strategy other than retreat. Meanwhile, he’s eating better than we are at home.’

When Zuzana said that there was talk of making national service compulsory for women the table fell silent. While it’s full of Czech men it’s a joke, but an army of Czech women, that would be something to worry about.

Zuzana was very dismissive of the Czech army. Ashamed even. She was one of the new breed of Czechs—up and coming, richer than her parents ever dreamed of being, embracing the consumer society, with a rising career and an enthusiasm for all things international. I think she felt the Czech army was a ridiculous hangover from the old days, an embarrassment on the world stage. But I liked all this underground rebellion in the Czechs. I liked the way everyone, even policemen and doctors, subverted laws they thought were ridiculous without making a big fuss about it. I was glad the Czechs had returned to laughing at the army. Better that than getting themselves shot being heroes in a real war. They may have to see corrupt old communists living on the hog, but they’re evening the score in a very Švejk way.

Chapter 9 A Village in South Bohemia

Towards the middle of summer, a day was finally fixed for the visit to my relatives in the village in South Bohemia.

The final conversation with my father on the subject bore an uncanny resemblance to all the others:

‘They’ll pick you up this Tuesday, darling.’

‘It’s very sweet of them. I could just take a bus.’

‘Oh no, darling, they wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘Well, that’s very kind of them.’

‘They are kind people. They’ll be there at eight a.m.’

‘Eight a.m.? I’ll be at Czech class at eight a.m. I won’t be back until midday.’

‘But they leave at five a.m.’

‘But I have a class until twelve.’

‘But they’ll be there at eight’, said Dad in a tone that suggested I was not listening.

‘Okay, so can’t they leave at nine?’

‘But they are leaving at five.’

‘But I’m in class until midday.’

‘Can’t you skip class?’

Well, yes, I could, but I was getting annoyed at having my time treated as though it was of no importance. It took me weeks to get Dad to agree to the idea of an overnight visit, and even then he was grudging about it. Yes, it was very kind of them to come and get me, but why should I miss my class because of plans made without consulting me? I didn’t say any of this, of course, I’m programmed to be good and not to make a fuss, but I did say, ‘Dad, I’ve got a class and I’ve already paid for it’, which was a cunning interjection. Dad hates to waste money and this had him stumped.

‘Couldn’t you ask for your money back?’ he said after a pause.

‘No. I pay up-front and if I miss a class I don’t get a refund.’

He thought for a moment, then said reluctantly, ‘Alright, I’ll call Jiøí.’

‘Thank you’, I said. But really, I was a bit irritated. Actually, at the time I was arranging to meet my unknown family, my known family was well and truly giving me the pip. My sister Linda had called a couple of times from London to check up on me and to report on the amazing success of her life. The dental practice she ran with her husband was flourishing. Naomi had started the violin and her music teacher said she was exceptionally gifted. (Watch out, Nomes, I thought. ‘Gifted’ can blight your entire life.) Alexander was playing cricket and rugby and was hugely popular with all the other children. My sister’s fitness classes were filling up and she barely had a second to talk to me, but she wanted to let me know she loved me and to hear how I was doing.

I always suspected she regarded my inability to get married, have a successful career and stay thin as evidence of my lack of discipline, and so during my first few months in Prague I lied to her: ‘Fine. Everything’s great. It’s the best decision I ever made.’ As things improved for me it got easier to tell her the truth. I was able to tell her about the friends I’d made, how I was discovering Prague and that I was writing. Well, that last bit was a lie; I’d made zero progress on the Great Australian Novel, although I was getting very skilled at Spider Solitaire. When I checked up on my highest score, I discovered I’d played one thousand four hundred and thirty-eight games. Appalled, I trashed it from my computer immediately, although I left the rest of the games. I figured ordinary Solitaire was too dull, so I wouldn’t be tempted to play it. How wrong I was. After a day of dealing the cyber decks and dying inside with the boredom of it, yet somehow unable to stop, I finally deleted the entire games folder. I didn’t tell my sister any of this, of course, Linda being the sort of person who does not get distracted from her goals. Then I made the mistake of telling her

how much I loved Czech cuisine and describing it to her.

‘Sounds fattening’, she said.

‘Yeah’, I said, without thinking, ‘my clothes are getting quite tight’.

There was an intake of breath on the other end of the line. ‘Are you exercising?’

‘Er, well, I . . . um . . . I walk a lot.’ Ugh! Why was I justifying myself to my sister? I guess old habits die hard; my role in the family is to be the one who, if only she would try harder, might live up to her potential.

‘It’s quite simple, Rachael’, Linda said briskly, ‘if you eat fatty food and don’t exercise properly, you have only yourself to blame if you get fat. It’s not rocket science, love. It’s just energy in and energy out.’ And what followed was wellmeaning and kindly, but firm, advice about the exercise regimen and diet a woman of forty needed to follow in order to stay thin. I listened, as I always did, but my sister is the only person I know who has never broken a diet, mainly because she’s never been on one. Her food intake has always been carefully controlled. It’s impossible for me to tell her that my chubbiness is the normal and sane state of being. I got off the phone weary and fed up, and when I had to battle with Dad over the disposability of my time, I really felt as though my family had become used to treating me with breezy contempt. For the first time in my life, I began to wonder if things might not be different. I was living in Prague and I was a writer with a book published. Shouldn’t I be getting respect and iration?

Now, I was dreading the visit to my Czech relatives. I seemed to be the only

person in the world who didn’t think that time spent trying to observe social niceties in a house full of strangers with no common language was a burden. Laura carried on a treat about how much she enjoyed spending weeks at a time with people she could only sign to: ‘My student Jirka invited me to spend a week in his chata [a holiday house in the countryside— nearly all Czechs have one] with him and twenty of his friends. No-one spoke English, I had the most wonderful time’, she said, adding, ‘Once I found myself in a train carriage with a Finn who spoke only Finnish and Swedish, a Spaniard who spoke only Basque, an old Czech lady who spoke only Czech, a family of gypsies, and me. No-one could understand a word anyone was saying, but we talked all the way from Dresden to Prague!’

I wondered if there was something wrong with me. If I found myself in the company of a Finn, a Basque, a Czech and a family of gypsies, I’d smile at them to indicate friendly intentions, then gratefully open my book and enjoy a quiet trip. My expat friends said about my impending visit, ‘How lucky!’ I didn’t say what I thought: I can’t wait for it to be over. Then the conversation turned to life in a Czech village. Danny’s ex-wife had been from a tiny village north of Prague and he said her father had a prize-winning dog, which was his pride and joy. It was handsome, fast, smart. Its ears were regulation pointiness, its gait graceful and its colour perfect. It had an impeccable pedigree: both its mother and its father had been show winners. It was the centre of her father’s life. Then one day he came home to find it dead in his front garden. He suspected it was poisoned. He was understandably upset, and he bought another dog from the same kennel to help get over it. When it, too, died on his lawn, he knew his suspicions had been right.

‘Six dogs, he’s up to now’, said Danny. ‘He knows who’s poisoning the dogs, and everyone else in the village knows who’s poisoning them, but there’s nothing he can do about it.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because’, said Danny, ‘if he acknowledges that his dogs have been poisoned, then he has to confront the man who’s doing it and beat him up or something. And if he does that he’d disturb the equilibrium of the village, and then who knows what would happen? No, they just have to keep pretending the dogs are dying by accident. The Czechs’, Danny said, ‘agree they’re an envious people’. Then he told us a joke to illustrate the point: ‘A Frenchman, an Englishman and a Czech are all told by God that they can have anything they want. The Frenchman longs to be a famous chef, so he says, “Let me make the world’s most delicious dishes for every meal for the rest of my life”. The Englishman is poor, living in a council estate, and his wife wants nothing more than to be the best-dressed woman in London: “Give me more wealth than I can ever spend so I can buy my wife a new dress every day.” The Czech lives in a village where his neighbour has a wonderful goat that he boasts about to all the other villagers. The Czech thinks about it, then asks God to, “Kill my neighbour’s goat”.’

Zuzana agreed with Danny about this national trait: ‘We’re trained when we’re children never to big-note ourselves. If I won something, a prize say, or came first in my class, my parents would tell me not to talk about it in case I made people envious.’

It occurred to me that envy may indeed be a characteristic of all Slavic peoples. I’d heard a Russian joke where a Russian also got a visit from God, who said, ‘You can have anything you want, the only condition is that whatever you ask for, your neighbour will get twice as much’. The Russian was stumped. What could he ask for? Then he hit upon the solution: ‘Take out one of my eyes!’

Possibly, envy comes from having lived under communism for too long, from being unable to gain anything without graft and corruption, from seeing laziness and venality rewarded with holidays and big cars, and war heroism rewarded with gaol and áks.

When I got home from my Czech class that Thursday I knew immediately that my message to come after midday had not been conveyed: there were four pairs of shoes in my hallway—a certain indication I had Czech visitors as they don’t wear shoes in the house, ever. As I turned into the kitchen I saw two things almost simultaneously. First, Jiøí and three other people sitting around the kitchen table and, second, to my horror, the sun shining brightly on the living room floor, illuminating about six weeks of dust settled on furniture and under the chairs. I’m not one for much cleaning, but as I’ve said, Czech housewives are insane about it. A woman’s self-esteem is deeply bonded to the state of her floors; men boast about the pristine perfection of their wives’ bathrooms rather than their looks. I thought about all the wasted time I’d spent playing Solitaire— couldn’t I have distracted myself by dusting? I knew instantly they’d been there since eight that morning—there was an air in the place of lengthy occupation— so they’d been sitting in the dust all that time. Then another horrible thought occurred to me: did they look in the linen cupboard? Curses! Why couldn’t I fold laundry and clean floors like other people? I quietly thanked God that the kitchen wasn’t piled high with unwashed dishes.

Jiøí was looking annoyed, another sure sign they’d been there for hours, but his daughter, her name was Markéta, was one of those people who exude niceness. You didn’t have to speak her language to see she was a gentle soul, anxious to please. Her eyes were permanently rounded, the brows ever so slightly lifted with the look of those infernal questions: ‘Is everything alright? Have I done anything wrong?’ I related to her immediately. The two other people sitting at the table were her children, which surprised me. They were only fifteen and seventeen, but they were huge, towering over all of us, and I wondered whether they had any more growing left in them. The boy at fifteen was already the size of a small Škoda.

Indeed, the car they had arrived in was a small Škoda. After introductions we headed downstairs where we had a little difficulty getting ourselves into their ancient car, so old it had certainly been made during the communist era. Jiøí was walking with a cane and had an injured hand, so his daughter held the front

enger door as wide open as it could go while his granddaughter took one elbow and his grandson the other. The kids carefully turned him around, gripping his arms as he lowered himself onto the seat. Then he agitatedly said something to them, and I would guess from what followed it was, ‘Alright, alright, you can let go now’. So they did . . . perhaps sooner than he had intended. He fell the last few inches into the seat and yelled. Markéta bit her lip and her eyebrows wiggled like two nervous garden worms, but the kids seemed completely unaffected and just continued grinning at him. Markéta gave him his cane and waited to close the door but he shooed her off.

Markéta then got into the driver’s seat and the two kids and I started to scramble into the back. But Jiøí, having got his legs into the car, couldn’t reach the door so it remained wide open, his hand waving ineffectually in the air trying to reach it. He was staring straight ahead, his expression stony. Markéta looked at the door, the arm and the face, and thought better of asking him if he needed help. She got out, went back around to the enger side and started closing the door. When it reached the old man’s hand, he grabbed it, pulling it to, and started shouting irritably at her. ‘I said, “I’ve got it!”’ would be my best guess at a translation.

Meanwhile, I was getting into the back, squishing in next to the Incredible Hulk, Roman. He had hands like two pink hams. His head needed to lift about four more feet but was prevented by the car’s roof, so he was forced to hunch over, his huge body filling the back seat. His sister, Renáta, only marginally smaller than a Fijian weightlifter, took what space was left on the other side of him. When I tried to close my door I was confronted by another problem: it didn’t actually close. The door was broken and the two teenagers indicated to me that I had to slam it shut. I slammed and it swung open. I slammed again, and it swung open again. My puny city arms weren’t strong enough for the job. Once more Markéta left the driver’s seat and made her way to the other side of the car in order to close the door for a weakling. She slammed; it shut.

As Markéta started up the car I reached my hand over my shoulder for the seat belt, only to find it missing. Not broken, not twisted, not jammed under the

cushion of the seat, but simply not there. I looked around. No-one else had any seat belts either.

The Czechs are the worst drivers in the world. This is due to the same characteristic that makes them such fearless war heroes: they think they’re invincible. While that’s great for war, during peacetime it kills off quite a few of them each year. They’re always freezing on mountain tops or dying in snow avalanches or drowning in torrential rivers because they feel as though they will never die. They ignore warning signs; oh yes, they believe the place might be dangerous, but not for them. They may suffer some slight injury, but death . . . don’t be silly. Road fatalities for most deaths in the Czech Republic— sleet, black ice, driving rain, none of these things make the Czechs drive slower. Mind you, they’re also strangely patient.

I’ve seen a car stopped in the middle of a narrow cobble-stoned street, map spread out over the dashboard, and driver and enger in close consultation, peering at the map then at the street signs, while a mile-long line of traffic banks up behind them. No-one in the traffic jam asks what’s going on, no-one honks their horn, they all just sit there stoically, queue-inured, probably thinking, ‘So, now the traffic has stopped, but soon it will move again’. And, indeed, when the lost driver has finally satisfied himself that he should take the next left, he smashes his foot down onto the accelerator, zooming across an intersection and three lanes of traffic without looking, and the queue starts to move again.

The road rules state that you give way to pedestrians on pedestrian crossings but if you are a pedestrian and you want to use a pedestrian crossing, you must ignore this rule unless you want an early death. The actual rule is that drivers accelerate at pedestrian crossings if they see a pedestrian anywhere near it. If you decide to cross anyway, drivers will swerve around you at the last minute rather than stop.

Markéta was a countrywoman and not accustomed to the amount and speed of

traffic, the number of lanes and the profusion of traffic lights and signs on the city’s roads. She was used to one main road—turn left outside her house to go to Brno and right to go to Prague—and village roads that you could drive along all day without meeting another car. She was a woman given to nerves anyway, and so confronted with unfamiliar streets, whizzing traffic, and stop signs lightly regarded, the poor woman’s eyes were bulging with fear as she hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it tight. In addition to a flustered driver and no seat belt, one more problem appeared: as soon as Markéta bunny-hopped off the pavement where she had parked, my door rattled ominously.

I could see the door straining against its hinge. I wondered whether it was closed at all, or if it could actually be closed. With one hand I grasped the strap above the door and with the other the door handle. I tugged. Nothing happened. I tugged again. Useless. I kept both hands where they were and a wary eye on the rattling door. Meanwhile, Markéta was being steered through the Prague streets by her father and two children to a soundtrack of screeching brakes from the road around us and nervous giggles from the driver’s seat. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I imagine it went something like this:

‘Which way do I turn?’

‘Left, Mum.’

‘Which way did you say?’

‘He said, “Left”, Mum.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, yes, left, Mum!’

‘But can I turn left here?’

‘Markéta! Get into the left lane!’

‘Is there anyone behind me?’

‘We missed the turn!’

‘Now what do I do?!’

‘Just keep going and we’ll take the next left.’

‘This one?’

‘No, no this is a driveway, Mum, a driveway.’

‘For God’s sake, Markéta, what are you doing??’

‘Okay, just back out . . . watch the truck!’

And so on. Actually, I thought Markéta was doing okay, what with the Prague drivers and three irritated navigators. I have a lot of empathy with people driving in crazy traffic in unfamiliar streets. In Sydney, the third driving lesson you take when you’re sixteen is hill starts—how to use the handbrake while giving the ‘up yours’ signal to the driver behind you. The only Sydney road rule is ‘honk angrily at people who aren’t driving fast enough for your liking’ until you’re in an area you don’t know, in which case ‘wave a finger at all the angry hornhonkers you’re holding up’.

I was concentrating on my door so I didn’t notice that we’d slowed to a stop in the middle of a narrow street. The kids were trying to attract my attention, pointing to me and then pointing to a block of flats. What were they saying? I looked closely at the building. It didn’t seem remarkable. A solid grey block built around the 1930s, five storeys high and elegantly proportioned, but not covered in scrolls and statues as the nineteenth-century buildings are, not glinting gold in the sun. Why would I want to see this one? Renáta, the more patient of the two children, said, ‘You’, and pointed to the building.

‘Uh . . . huh.’

‘You’, she said again, then paused before she shook her head, thinking. ‘You. Babièka.’

‘Ah . . .’ I realised they were showing me the flat where my babièka, my grandmother, had lived. Renáta could see from my face that I had got it at last and hers broke into a huge smile.

‘Yes. You. Babièka.’

There was a silence in the car as they let me take it in. My grandmother had lived in this street, in this building. Which apartment? I wondered. The kids had pointed up to the top of the building, the fourth or fifth floor, and I was glad of it. A woman who liked to sit in the Café Slavia watching the castle and the river in the spring sun would need a sunny apartment. And she’d lived in a quiet street, too. That was good for an old lady.

After a few minutes, Markéta started off again. I forgot about the door as I thought about my grandmother. They must have visited her here, Roman and Renáta. They must have come here on important occasions—birthdays and graduations and weddings and so on. I wasn’t entirely sure what relation they were to her, but I heard them call her teta, which means ‘aunt’. I’m an aunt myself and it’s a wonderful thing to be. Aunts get special treatment that parents don’t. We can indulge our nieces and nephews, and when it comes time for discipline, we get to look helpless and hand them back to their parents for the tough stuff. We get to buy them special presents and run around playing games with them. Roman and Renáta seemed to me to have been close to their aunt, I could tell from the way they looked when they showed me her flat.

My thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a more immediate concern for my personal safety. Just outside Prague we hit a freeway and Markéta seemed to be going to pieces. On freeways, Czechs abandon any semblance of order. The speed limit is ‘as fast as your Škoda will go’; the lane markings are regarded as suggestions only—if you’re in one lane and a car going the same speed is in the lane next to you, any car that wants to overtake both of you will simply hop onto the white line and squeeze through the gap. And with the cars screaming past her, Markéta lost the last of her nerve.

Her eyebrows were clinging to her hairline, her eyes were trying to reach the windscreen and her knuckles were white. At one point we had to make a lane

change to avoid a wrong exit, and the car was in pandemonium. The two kids, looking back to see when it was clear to go, started shouting, ‘Mužeš! Mama, mužeš!’ Markéta spent so long screwing up her courage to make the change that by the time she turned the wheel, another stream of cars was zooming past our little rattler. If Markéta saw them she didn’t let them alter her course. She just kept on moving into the lane full of traffic.

‘NE! Mama, NE!’ screamed the kids. Markéta froze, seemingly unable to get back into her original lane, the lane markings zipping underneath our car and traffic blazing past, honking furiously. As the car swung to and fro I swung with it, one hand glued to the hand strap, the other to the door, pulling on it with all my might and desperately hoping it wouldn’t burst open under the strain, flinging me onto the freeway.

The kids were looking back again and, seeing a space open up, started screaming, ‘Mužeš! Mama, mužeš!’ again, and I found myself thinking, mužeš? They say you things you learn under stress better than things you learn when you’re calm. I think they might be right. I had been getting very confused about the modal verbs—may, should and must. I’ve certainly never forgotten since then that mužeš means ‘you may’.

Markéta managed to change lanes, but worse was to come. We were travelling along a four-lane highway—two lanes going one way and two the other. We were now in the inside lane on our side of the highway, and a truck was in the outside lane. From the look on Markéta’s face and her anxious glances towards it, I don’t think she liked trucks. It was a heap of old junk, but it was a big heap of old junk. She must have decided that ing it was the best way of getting rid of it, as she had her foot firmly on the accelerator. She kept her foot jammed to the floor but the poor old Škoda, doing its absolute best, just seemed to crawl past the truck at a very slow rate. We were like two grannies in a wheelchair race, one putting its all into ing the other and the other going full throttle to prevent it, both vehicles straining mightily to reach speeds of sixty kilometres an hour.

Then I saw up ahead that the median strip was about to widen, which meant the lane we were in was going to drastically narrow. This is not unusual on a Czech freeway (I believe the European Union is giving the Czechs money to improve their infrastructure before accepting them—you can’t the union with your roads in the state the Czechs keep them). It became obvious to all of us that in a matter of seconds the road was about to turn into a one-lane goat track, too narrow for Markéta and the truck to travel side by side; obvious to all, that is, except Markéta. Her decision-making faculties had switched off completely. She kept her foot on the accelerator, the rattling Škoda going as fast as it could. She was determined to the truck no matter what. She must have thought the median strip would somehow just disappear. It was only when she hit it and the car angled up onto the strip that her children started screaming at her to hit the brakes, which she did, allowing the truck to get in front and us to become level again.

As I swung from the hand strap, still clutching the broken door with my body leaning with the car towards the bitumen, I thought, I can’t even claim insurance as I got into this car in the full knowledge that it had no seat belt and that the Czechs are crazy. The trip along the freeway continued in this frenzy of screaming kids, honking horns and a sweating driver, so I was grateful when we finally turned onto the quieter country roads. Only then did Markéta’s nerves seem to improve and the kids calm down. We travelled along in this happy state, but after a while I noticed some worried consultation among the family. Eventually, Markéta rocketed up an embankment and skidded to a halt. She got herself untangled from the front seat and got out, her two children squeezed out the back door and the old man slowly extricated himself from the front enger seat. Following suit, I popped open my door.

We all gathered around the open bonnet of the car as Roman fiddled with the engine, then sent his mother back in to rev it. He fiddled some more, then ordered her to switch it off, to restart it and to rev it again. They repeated this several times, Roman getting more and more unhappy. After about fifteen minutes we were back on the road, but it was clear from the tenor of the

conversation that whatever the problem was, it hadn’t been fixed. So we hit the kerb again, squeezed and staggered out, and fiddled with the mechanics once more. Somehow, although this happened five or six times and I could hear that the engine wasn’t quite right, the car made it to my father’s cousin’s tiny village, Studenice, four hours after leaving Prague.

The house my relatives lived in was much the same as any house in a small country village. It had a lopsided metal gate at the start of a short, dirt driveway and ducks in the front yard. The house was a sturdy brick that put me in mind of 1940s Australian suburbia, except the ducks were on the ground and not on the wall. Inside the front door was a tiled area where everyone had to take off their shoes and put on slippers. Markéta provided me with some slippers and ushered me into the kitchen where I was greeted by my father’s cousin’s wife, Petra. She couldn’t speak a word of English either.

I’d been silently practising a few sentences in the car on the way up, in between praying for my life, and now I swung into action. I thanked Petra for the invitation to her house, she said . . . something. I looked blank then asked her to say it again, slowly. She said, in Czech, which I translated silently, ‘it . . . is . . . a . . . pleasure . . . to . . . have . . . you . . . here’. I smiled and thanked her, and told her, excruciatingly slowly, that I was learning Czech but that it was a hard language. She nodded and smiled, then gestured for me to sit down.

The family gathered around and the quizzing began in earnest. The Czechs have another defining characteristic which now manifested itself—they’re direct. They ask questions which in Australia we would never ask; questions about money and status. My relatives wanted to know how much my Czech classes cost. I was worried because I knew the classes had been expensive by Czech standards and the stories of Czech envy made me anxious not to appear like a wealthy westerner. Still, they’d asked.

‘Two hundred crowns per lesson’, I said, quite pleased at my use of the

language. In Australian this is only twelve dollars and fifty cents, but that’s a lot to the Czechs.

‘Wow, that’s a good price’, said Markéta.

‘Yeah, that’s really good’, the others nodded and agreed.

I looked around at their faces, they seemed genuinely impressed at the bargain, and I felt great. In a nation that likes a good deal, I felt that I’d done the family proud.

‘What’s that for, half an hour?’ asked Roman.

‘No, an hour and a half.’ At that they again all nodded approvingly.

‘That’s a great price. Twenty crowns for an hour and a half.’

Uh-oh. ‘What?’

‘I said, that’s a great price. Twenty crowns for an hour and a half.’

Well, okay, I’m not great on the language, and I’m definitely weak on Czech numbers; I get my tens and hundreds and thousands confused and I can never

nineteen—I probably need someone to try to kill me while saying ‘nineteen’ over and over again in order to get it to sink in.

‘Ah . . . no. No, two hundred crowns for an hour and a half.’

‘Two hundred crowns?! My God that’s expensive!’ They all reeled back, shocked. I blushed. I’d let the family down. There was a long, thoughtful silence, then they shook themselves and changed the subject to something less embarrassing for me.

‘What do you do?’ asked Renáta.

For the first time in my life I was grateful for being an abject failure. ‘I’m a secretary. I do temp work for people while they’re away.’ No-one could think I had much money now. We spent some time discussing what I actually did during the day (Ha! Good question—many an HR manager has wondered the same thing) and how much I got paid. When we’d gone over that we turned to Australia, the weather there, the sea and the beaches (I’d cunningly learned these words in Czech over the previous weeks, knowing I’d need them). We discussed the weather in the Czech Republic, especially the snow, which was so unfamiliar to me. We went over the family we had in common. I’d finally recovered from the embarrassment of the money conversation when Petra asked, kindly, ‘Are you married?’

‘Um, no.’ An awkward silence fell. I was forty. How could I not be married? I suppose Petra must have thought that was a safe bet and we could get on to discussing the wonders of my husband. Then she had a bright idea.

‘Boyfriend?’ and everyone sat up expectantly.

‘No’, and their shoulders slumped again. Another embarrassed silence followed, worse than the first. If I didn’t even have a boyfriend I was in a really bad way. I began to perceive that relatives in Bohemia are exactly the same as relatives in Australia. The silence lengthened. I’d run out of vocabulary and they’d run out of things to say. I sneaked a look at my watch. An hour had ed. Only twentythree to go. Oh, good.

I’ve always wondered about people who talk about how they stayed for a week with a yak-herding family in outer Mongolia and, despite the fact that neither party spoke the other’s language, a warm friendship was founded over the nightly yak’s spit soup—‘It was delicious!’—shared from the same bowl. I think they’re lying. My relatives were clearly very sweet people—well, as sweet as anyone else; not axe murderers, not cross-eyed lunatics, just warm and hospitable—but after that first hour I’d run out of topics I could discuss easily with them. Although I tried, my dictionary proved useless.

You think you’ll be able to look up the words you don’t understand and get on to the next sentence, but whole conversations are much more than individual words. I did manage to say I loved the Czech potatoes, which I do—they are without question the finest in the world: yellow, waxy, they roast beautifully and they make the most delicious creamy mash. Petra nodded and said something in return but I didn’t understand. I asked her to repeat it slowly, which she did, and I thought about it for a while, then realised the key word was at the end of the sentence, the first words were modal verbs—‘it must be’, or ‘it might be’, or something like that. So I repeated the last word she’d said, ‘pùda’, and ploughed through my dictionary.

First I turned to the wrong section, the English-to-Czech section, and wasted a bit of time wondering why I couldn’t find the word. Then flipped to the Czechto-English section, got confused about the alphabet (because it’s not the same as

the English alphabet, it’s got a few more letters and some in different order) and finally found the right word. It meant ‘country, land, soil, ground or earth’. I thought about this—What makes most sense in this context? It must be the country? What, the Czech Republic? No. It must be the land? No, that doesn’t make sense.It must be the soil? Yes! I’ve heard that sentence before, it makes sense—then turned to Petra and said, in Czech, ‘I understand. Yes, it must be the soil.’ To my delight she smiled and we were both pleased to have had a successful conversation. But let’s face it, fully six minutes had ed while I went through this routine to comprehend just two, not terribly complicated, sentences. Then I had to think more—what do I say in response to this? Frankly, after all the messing about, my mind was a blank.

It’s stressful being a guest. You want to tune in to the house, be sensitive to your surroundings, pick up some of the house rules, contribute something—washing up or setting the table, or just listening to an older family member repeat their stock of stories and jokes so everyone else in the family will get a break from them. How can you be sensitive to your surroundings if you don’t understand what’s going on? It’s awful. The strain of making small talk with an unknown woman when you have a vocabulary and understanding slightly lower than that of a two-year-old was telling on all. Eventually I just lapsed into silence and they carried on around me. What else could we do?

The hulking teenagers came in and out, another daughter came with a tiny baby and that provided some entertainment for me—the six-month-old infant was about my level—and her husband came later bearing a couple of bottles of wine. They took me out for a drive to meet other relatives, old ladies who offered me fried bread and ice cream. The teenagers, Markéta and her father were with me, and they sat around and chatted, explained who I was, counted up relatives and connected the dots: ‘So her father’s great-aunt married my mother’s third cousin, Jiøí, in 1936. Or did she marry Honza? No, not Honza who was Miloš’s father’s stepfather’s nephew, Honza who came from Hlinsko. No, Maria married Jiøí. I don’t mean Maria, your mother’s half-sister’s husband’s aunt, but Maria, Jan’s father’s uncle’s cousin, once removed.’ It all seemed rather jolly and warm. The teenagers obviously loved these old women, and after a while they just chatted around me, as though I were a fly-on-the-wall documentary-maker.

I thought of the tiny wedding photographs at the bottom of the cupboard back in the flat. The young bride looked most like Markéta, I thought. And these old women must have been in the photos, too, and my grandmother. Watching them all, I imagined my grandmother, sitting where I was sitting perhaps, surrounded by the old women, her contemporaries, and the kids. How had she felt, knowing that she had grandchildren, but not having the pleasure of loving them? How often had she wished her son and grandchildren could have been around the table? Had she felt lonely? Or deprived, while the other old women had their children and grandchildren? It had felt strange when Renáta said ‘babièka’ to me. I had always referred to her as ‘your mother’ to Dad, too embarrassed to claim her as my grandmother, as though my parents’ divorce and our subsequent separation had been my fault; as though my grandmother’s loss was my fault and not my loss, too. Now I caught myself thinking, I suppose they blame me for not ing her. The thought was so stark it startled me.

For the first time in my life I was brought up short by the appalling guilt I had been carrying around inside myself. It was true, I blamed myself for my separation from Dad and his mother. ‘My grandmother’, I said out loud to try the awkward phrase verbally for the first time. Why should I not refer to her as my grandmother? I thought, vehemently. How did this come to be my fault? My father was taken away from me when I was twelve. What could I do about that? The more I thought about it, the more it became clear that I have carried with me all my life a permanent, low-level fear that it was somehow down to me, my fault. Somehow, I always managed to feel sad for Dad’s loss and for his mother’s loss, for everyone else’s plight, but not mine. I reserved only shame and guilt for myself. Looking at these people, who would have been my family while I was a child but were taken away from me at the same time my father was, I reconsidered my thoughts. What they were more likely to be doing is not blaming me for the separation of the family, but feeling sad for me because I never had my grandmother.

It was as though a key had turned in a lock. Years of guilt fell away at a single twist. Sitting here, a stranger in a strange land, had brought into sharp focus a

feeling I’d have been hard pressed to even identify, let alone see or touch on, in my life back in Sydney. It was not my fault my father had been taken away from me. It was not my fault I hadn’t met my grandmother. It was not—and on this point I was positively delirious with relief—my fault that I was not a child genius. That one test at school when I was six had turned the rest of my life into a big disappointment to all concerned. Was this sane? No. I’m fine. It was the test that was wrong.

I sat there and watched the kids and the old women with love and a swelling heart. Then it looked as though one of the women was saying something about me, and they all looked at me nodding and smiling warmly. Renáta, patient as ever, tried to explain it to me.

‘You’, she said, waving her finger in a circle over her face. ‘You look like . . .

Who? I wondered.

‘. . . girl from village.’

Good Lord. I was absurdly pleased by this. Everyone was smiling. I looked like a local, like a Studenice girl.

That night I was made welcome at Markéta’s place, after Renáta was turfed out of her pink and fluffy bedroom. The next day I took a break from making stilted conversation and went for a walk around the village and through the pine forests that nestled around it. It was really beautiful. On my way back I came across a charming, rustic old pub and went inside in search of a quiet beer. I opened the door and the first thing I saw was my brother. It was astonishing. Then I realised

I was not looking at my brother but at a man who had borrowed my brother’s eyes, nose, hair and forehead. I’m afraid I kept my eyes on him for a little too long, absorbed in contemplating his face. I didn’t realise the pub had fallen silent and that all eyes were on me. My brother’s double started to glower at me, my brother’s brows lowering over my brother’s eyes. I looked around. The silence deepened. Slowly, I backed out.

I began to notice that many people in the village had missing fingers and teeth, and that their skin was grey and deeply lined. It seemed that life in this small village was hard, despite the scenic surroundings. Dad frequently carried on a treat about the romance of village life—the pine trees, the humble village folk, the simple way of life—and how he’d really rather have been living in the village. If he hadn’t been forced to move to the city he’d have lived the simple, untroubled life of the village, he often declared. My father said of his cousins, ‘They have a wonderful life, you know. They grow their own potatoes, and if they need meat they kill a rabbit or a chicken. What else do they need? Everything is in their own back yard. Oh sure, they complain, but that’s just habit. They really have everything they could possibly want’, he’d say as he tucked into the Häagen Dazs ice cream he’d just bought from the twenty-fourhour Coles downstairs from his flat. Now, standing in this village, I began to think I’d been extraordinarily lucky to be born in a rich city. Life in the city with gyms and shops devoted exclusively to mineral water, with juice bars and sushi trains and massage therapy, seems to ward off rustic injuries and premature ageing.

Later that day, Jiøí told me that Markéta would drive me home. I insisted that they’d been far too kind already and that I could take the train. Markéta was as relieved as I when her father gave in and let me take public transport back to Prague. But I wasn’t allowed to leave without Petra making me a food parcel of two schnitzels, one pork and one chicken, two pieces of rye bread and a cut-up capsicum, just in case I starved on the three-hour ride home. No Czech will ever allow a member of the family to travel for more than an hour unequipped with a pork schnitzel. I left them, my family, full of love and joy, grateful for their kindness and for their warmth, which had allowed me to overcome dead feelings of guilt that had weighed me down for years. Renáta asked me to practise

English with her next time I visited, and I promised her I would be delighted to. I resolved to work extra hard on my Czech so I could get to know my family better.

On the train I found myself a carriage with three other people in it. They were native Czechs, and although I’m sure my expat friends would have chatted to them all the way home and made life-long friends, going to stay with them and four hundred of their Czech-speaking friends in a chata the next weekend, I simply smiled to show my good intentions and opened my book.

Chapter 10 Hiking

On my way home I reflected on my newfound insight. When I was a teenager I’d dealt with my parents’ divorce by keeping my head down and going along with whatever my mother, the dominant parent, wanted. Mutiny, in the form of demanding to see my father, seemed a sure way to have punishment rain down upon me. I had told myself that when I grew up, when I could escape from the yoke, I’d do and say what I wanted, but that while I had the yoke upon me, I’d better just pretend to go along with it. What a very Czech response, I now thought. When I grew up, though, I remained just as yoked as ever, until I found myself in a warm Czech kitchen, having schnitzels pressed upon me and being likened to a village girl. The feeling of lightness and freedom from the relief of an age-old burden stayed with me all the way home, and has never really gone away.

Back in Prague, I called Dad and reported on my stay, telling him how much I liked my new-found relatives. He was very pleased.

‘Oh, yes’, he said, emphatically, ‘they’re the kindest people you’ll ever meet’.

‘They showed me my grandmother’s flat.’ That sentence had come out after a pause and was met by a silence of equal length from Dad’s end of the phone. I guess it was as strange for him to hear me say ‘my grandmother’ as it was for me to say it.

‘Lovely part of town, isn’t it?’ Bless his heart.

‘Looks like a nice flat.’

‘She loved that flat. The furniture in Prague is all hers. I couldn’t bear to part with it.’

I looked at the furniture with renewed interest, the cherry striped chairs and the box sofa; it was all in such good condition. We talked some more about my trip. Dad seemed disappointed that I hadn’t had more intimate conversations with Petra and Markéta.

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Not much, really. Czech potatoes, the weather.’ I mean, what did he think we’d talk about? America’s intentions in Iraq? The condition of the English monarchy? Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree’? I think he wanted a more exciting report, something along the lines of ‘I’m pen pals with my cousin and I’m engaged to their neighbour’, but perhaps he just wanted to get back to his television program. ‘Seinfeld’ was on and he loves ‘Seinfeld’.

I went over to see Mrs Jendliková a couple of days after getting back, fully determined to have another go at our Czech conversation, but it lasted just as long as our first attempt. I’m not sure what it was about Mrs Jendliková, but I never understood a word she said in Czech. I think she may have had an unusual accent because even when she spoke slowly I couldn’t make out what she was saying, let alone respond to it. After picturing my grandmother bereft of her grandchildren, I was feeling magnanimous about time spent with Mrs Jendliková, pleased with myself for being so diligent in my attention to a lonely, older woman. With this newly discovered solicitude I took her some biscuits that

I’d bought for her specially, picturing her pleasure in the gift. However, when I gave them to her she asked what it was in a happy tone, then, in a much less happy tone, said ‘Biscuits, lovely’. She politely put them out on a plate then gazed longingly at them, but didn’t touch even one.

‘I’m trying to cut out sweets. They’re so fattening’, she said. And so it is with women: We all seem to have a strange obsession with food, I thought, as I considered my sister.

Mrs Jendliková chatted away comfortably once this initial awkward moment had ed. Then she told me she was going away in a month’s time to visit her son and then on a walking tour with some friends to . She would be away for two weeks. On this note, reality turned right and gave me a swift kick in the ego. I had just started imagining myself in a grand, powerful role, a kindly and magnanimous neighbour, but truthfully Mrs Jendliková had no need of my charity. She had a full life and plenty of friends, making me think wryly, I bet my grandmother had a full life, too. Grandchildren aren’t everything. I wondered if my babièka had had a lover and very much hoped so.

That visit also delivered a second swift kick to my ego. After several cups of coffee Mrs Jendliková was in the middle of telling me about her German travel plans when I felt the urgent call of nature. Normally, I’d wait until I got home, which was only next door, but I could see Mrs Jendliková was going to give me the full itinerary—walking trails, sights, hostels, with menus included—so I asked if I could use her bathroom. The bathroom walls, floors and ceilings were a brown, plastic shell. My horror, when I saw this, was unsured. The evidence was incontrovertible— I lived in a ák.

I resolved to be myself, no more and no less, and to distance myself from my sister’s and Mrs Jendliková’s and, indeed, all women’s weight obsession, but with limited success. They were victims of the warped western body image, I told myself, and I would not be a victim along with them. However, after five

months of Czech food I was unable to fit into any of my clothes other than my tracksuit pants and one elastic-waisted skirt. I was telling myself that I was merely delightfully plump, and that no true bohemian would concern herself with getting back to a size twelve, but my western-trained self, which panics at the first appearance of lines or any slight expansion of the thighs, began to think once more, and more determinedly, of hiking.

The incredible length of the summer days is, to someone from the southern hemisphere, magic. The weather was gorgeous and I felt the need to get out into the fresh air and see the Bohemian countryside. I wondered if vigorous hikes every weekend was how Czech girls stayed slim in spite of a diet of fried cheese and beer. Since my friends refused to go with me, I put a post on the expats site asking if anyone else would like to accompany me on a day trip. I received about a dozen replies, all from men, all claiming to be keen walkers, and all suggesting a remote location where just the two of us could go. Apparently, ‘Does anyone want to go hiking with me?’ is code for ‘Does anyone want to have sex with me?’, or so it would seem. Needless to say, I didn’t answer any of them. However, two weeks later a woman posted a notice asking if anyone wanted to go to Èeský Ráj with her. Helen, a Singaporean, was suggesting a two-day trip to the area. I emailed her offering her my company and she responded immediately with a yes.

‘You have no idea how many men have written to me saying they’re looking for an Asian woman’, she wrote. I told her I had no difficulty believing it.

We met at the bus station at seven-thirty one Tuesday morning in mid-August. I’d had nothing for breakfast, thinking to get a head start on this weight loss thing by starvation. My strategy was to eat nothing, walk a lot, and at the end of two days I calculated I should look like Kate Moss. I’d meant to start the diet the night before but I’d gone around to Mrs Jendliková’s flat to let her know I would be away for two days and she’d pressed fried potatoes and a couple of schnitzels on me.

‘But you must have dinner’, she said, when I’d baulked. It felt churlish to refuse and besides, her cooking was fantastic, so I recalibrated my strategy to begin my diet the next day. Then when I met Helen she handed me an almond croissant with a friendly, ‘I brought us breakfast’. After the briefest pause I re-recalibrated my strategy to begin my diet after breakfast. It’s important to be flexible.

As we sat waiting for the bus and eating our croissants, Helen, a short, chirpy woman of forty, opened up the guidebook she’d brought and showed me the area we were going to. Èeský Ráj means ‘Czech Paradise’, and the nation has declared it a Protected Landscape Area because it’s just so damn gorgeous. It’s also huge, and the map seemed to be a spaghetti muddle of rivers and trails and contour lines, with black dots indicating churches, castles and towns scattered throughout.

‘I thought we’d go to Turnov’, said Helen, pointing to a dot in the north of the map. ‘We could go to Trosky castle, which is here’, she moved her finger down the river, ‘or we could take the green trail east and then south. Or would you prefer to see one of the other castles? I don’t mind, I just thought this looked good.’

I felt a surge of liking for this Helen. How blessed it was to have a decisionmaker with me; a relief not to have to do it myself. If there was one thing I was finding difficult about living the free-wheeling life of a bohemian, it was having to make all my own decisions. Stuck in a dreary job back in Sydney I’d imagined this sort of freedom would be one of the delights of my year in Prague, but the reality was more burdensome than I’d anticipated. With a job I had to be at a specific place at a specific time doing a specific task, all of which was decided for me by others. itedly I did those tasks late and badly and complained incessantly about the fact that my day was constricted and marked out, but at least I got them done. Whereas in Prague, where every minute I was free to set my own tasks, such as ‘write every day’, I still did them late, or not at

all. And here was this wonderful woman taking command and making all my decisions for me.

‘I’m totally happy with Turnov and Trosky Castle’, I said, positively fervently.

‘Because if you want to do something else, I don’t mind.’

‘Nope, this is just fine.’

‘Okay, good.’

As we waited for the bus, Helen and I asked each other the inevitable question: ‘What are you doing in Prague?’ Helen’s story was different to the usual, ‘My company sent me/I married a Czech/I hated America so I’m here teaching English’ story.

‘I’d been in banking for fifteen years and I left to become an independent trader.’

‘Which means?’

‘I trade on the stock market.’

‘Wow. Isn’t that risky?’

‘For a novice, yes, but I know what I’m doing.’ Helen then described her method, ‘I have no more than ten companies at any one time. I do my research. That’s key. Nothing beats research, there are no easy “methods”. I subscribe to financial newsletters and I read the papers every day. Then when I think I’ve got a likely one, I buy. The trick is not to care. You don’t buy or sell with your heart but with your head.’

It sounded remarkably simple to me. ‘Are you trading on the European stock markets?’

‘No, Singaporean. I don’t know anything about the European markets.’

‘You can do that from Prague?’

‘Sure, I can do it from anywhere. All it means is sometimes I have to work at night, if the time zones are tricky. Got to be up for the trading hours.’

‘You mean you can travel and work at the same time?’ This all seemed so easy I began to wonder if I too might not be an independent trader. If the key was research, how hard could it be? ‘How much do you make?’ I asked.

‘Depends. Sometimes fifteen/twenty thousand a month.’

‘A month?! That’s more than I make in some years.’

‘Yeah, it’s a good living. Mind you, sometimes I lose that in a month. Trick is, you can’t care. Lose ten thousand dollars, you just cut your losses and sell. That’s my limit for a stock fall in one month, ten thousand.’

And right there my fantasy ended. There is no way I have the balls to do a job where you have to be prepared to lose that much in one month. I took a closer look at Helen, fit and brisk with bright, inquisitive eyes taking in every detail around her, and saw that she had a decisive, rubber-clad personality, the polar opposite to my own sensitive, vacillating character, crippled by self-doubt and existential angst. I sensed that existential angst might not be the key to effective trading.

The bus stop had been gradually filling up with tall, bronzed young Czechs in shorts with backpacks, and by the time the bus arrived there were about fifty people waiting. Helen and I stood in the queue and just as we were about to board the crowded bus, Helen turned to me and said, ‘I can’t speak Czech. Can you?’

I assured her that I could and went ahead of her onto the bus. I asked the driver for two tickets to Turnov and he gave them to me. I gave Helen hers and she took it, impressed, ‘Gee, that’s amazing. You really do speak Czech. I was worried about getting around, but I’ll be fine now I’ve got you.’ I was so proud of myself.

We whiled away our time on the bus to Turnov taking in the scenery and chatting of this and that, mostly of her trading job, which sounded more and more horrendous the more she revealed, and I was impressed anew by her toughness. The trip took about two hours and by the time we got to Turnov it was ten o’clock. We got off the bus and so did a few other people. We’d agreed that our first action would be to find ourselves a place to stay and get detailed

maps of the area. I gazed about me helplessly. We were in a tiny, ugly street lined with bus-stop poles, the sun blazing down on shabby, concrete buildings.

‘Um . . .’ I began, ‘where do you think . . .’ But Helen was already marching ahead, her backpack slung over her shoulder.

‘There, at the information office.’

‘What information office?’ All I could see was a featureless, grey sweep of buildings.

‘That one there.’

‘Where?’ I couldn’t work out what she could possibly mean.

‘There, where the “I” sign is.’ I peered in the direction she was pointing and sure enough, attached to one of the buildings was the blue ‘I’ sign—the international sign meaning ‘Information’.

‘Oh there’, I said running after her, pretending any idiot would have seen it. In fact, Helen was the first by a mile to spot it. Everyone else who’d alighted from the bus was still gazing around, wondering what to do next while Helen was already inside. She was flipping through some pamphlets on the counter by the time I pushed open the glass doors.

‘Humph. These are no good’, she said. The office was tiny, most of it being taken up by the counter. A woman in a uniform appeared from a back room and stood behind the counter, waiting in stony silence for us to state our business, looking as though she’d never cracked a smile in her life, except possibly for the time her neighbour’s prize bitch bore mixed-breed puppies. I smiled at her. She blanked me. This I was used to by now, but I have to say that it still made me feel tense. When I got that dead-eyed stare, I thought, She’s being hostile because I’ve done something wrong, or because I’m a foreigner. I mentally had to shake myself: Don’t be silly, she’s just bored and bitter. Still, my heart sank.

Helen stood at my elbow, our packs crushed against our feet, and said, ‘Ask her if these are all the pamphlets she has?’

My first move in these situations is to say in Czech to the person from whom I need information, ‘I don’t speak much Czech’, just to prepare them for the ordeal ahead. I did this now and the tourist officer asked me, in German, ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ to which I had to reply, ‘Ne’. (Czech for, ‘German? Of course I don’t speak German! I speak English! Second most popular international language after Sport! German? That’s not an international language. I don’t want to be whiney, but why can’t everyone make my life easier and just speak English?’) She just nodded, and waited for me to continue.

I smiled gamely and pointed to the pamphlets. ‘Are these the maps?’

‘No.’

Silence. I was stumped.

‘Find out what accommodation there is in the town’, demanded Helen, rapid-fire now that she was getting down to business, ‘and we need a map of the area’. Helen’s tone was commanding and it wasn’t helping my confidence. I took a deep breath and asked as best as I could for a list of accommodation available in the town of Turnov. Cheap accommodation. She nodded again, and put a piece of paper in front of us, a much photocopied list of pensions. Helen grabbed it and subjected it to the glare of the trained professional.

‘Okay’, she barked, ‘there are some here. Has she got any more? A booklet, maybe?’ I must say that this seemed an unnecessary request. The list was obviously the one everyone got and, besides, I didn’t know the word for booklet. However, I didn’t argue, I took the simplest approach and just pointed to the list and said, ‘All?’ in Czech and the grim tourist officer said, ‘All’, and waited for me to continue.

I turned to Helen, ‘She says this is all.’

‘This can’t be the complete list, though. Don’t they have a directory?’ I felt a shard of irritation stabbing at my eyeballs. Why did we need more? We had something that would do. Wouldn’t this list do? Did we really need a complete inventory of every inn, hotel, pension and camp ground in the Greater Èeský Ráj region? Really? I didn’t say any of this, of course. Instead I sighed, ‘I’m not sure’.

Helen gave the list a critical look for a moment and decided that it ed muster. ‘Okay. We can use this. Ask her for a hiking map.’

‘Yes, yes, Helen, I’m getting to it.’ This Helen was used to commanding bank tellers to hop to it, and I’m not good under pressure. While she was firing instructions at me my mental filing cabinets started to slam themselves shut in a

panic. To add to my stress levels, the tiny information office was now crowded with people. Three more travellers from the bus had jammed themselves and their luggage into the room and were waiting for us to get on with it so they could have their go at being given the grim-faced treatment by the tourist officer. I could barely turn from Helen back to the tourist officer to discharge Helen’s orders and my backpack was pressed so hard against my legs I feared I was going to fall backwards at any moment.

My problem in asking for a hiking map was that I hadn’t actually got up to complex adjectives in my Czech class. I could have asked for a pretty map or a hot, cold, or even freezing map, I could have asked for a blue map, but I wasn’t sure how to ask for a hiking map. I thought for a moment, then told the grim tourist officer, ‘Budeme trampovat’ (‘We will hike’), and asked, ‘Do you have any maps?’ hoping she would make the connection between my friendly ‘We will hike’ with my request for maps and produce hiking maps, rather than assume I was making idle conversation in between pleas for information. She did. She produced two scaled hiking maps of the region and plonked them on the counter, then proceeded to give me a volley of Czech, while pointing to the two maps.

‘What’s she saying?’ Helen wanted to be kept abreast of developments.

‘I don’t know’, I said, trying valiantly to untangle what important information the officer might be telling us, but as she was speaking, Helen piped up again.

‘We need a map of the town, too.’ I was beginning to think I might strangle Helen shortly.

The information officer stopped talking. I took a deep breath, which had no effect at all on my heart rate, and asked for a map of the town, ‘Mapa Turnov?’

(the most basic pidgin, but I was now beyond being able to come up with niceties like ‘Please could I have/We would like/Do you have . . .’) and the tourist officer produced two of those, too, slapping them impatiently onto the counter as much as to say, ‘When are you two going to stop asking me pointless questions and go away?’

Helen inspected them and then rejected them. ‘No, these are no good. Hasn’t she got one with more detail?’ I gave up at that point.

‘Okay, that’s enough, let’s just pick one of these.’

The crowd in the office had swelled by another two now, and more kept opening the door to see if this was where they should pick up their maps. Helen and I were almost cut in two by the counter, we were pressed so hard against it. It was a hot day and my stress levels were now red lining. Helen didn’t appear to notice the mob or indeed the tourist officer’s dour expression, absorbed as she was in thoughtful examination of all four maps. I tried to tell myself not to be so concerned, the crowd could wait their turn while we got what we wanted. But it was no good. I couldn’t help but glance nervously around me, expecting any moment one of them to shout, ‘Oh, hurry up!’

Thank God, Helen came to a decision, although I’m sure it wasn’t because she sensed I’d had enough, or out of courtesy to the queue of people behind her, but simply that she’d made up her mind.

‘We’ll take this one, but not these’, Helen said, discarding the rest. The tourist officer babbled out some number, which I was too harassed to understand, so I just took out a large note and accepted whatever change she gave me. Outside, Helen said, slightly disgruntled, ‘I think she charged us for both maps’. I thought she had too but I wasn’t going back to argue the point. We were out of there and

the torture was over.

Fortunately, the pensions were easy to find. It’s a big hiking area for the Czechs so there were signs pointing us to the centrum, basically a word meaning ‘town centre’. Helen perused our list again and then, making an executive decision, she threw it away, saying, ‘We’ll stop off at the first clean pension we see, so we can be close to the station when it’s time to go.’

It crossed my mind to push her under a ing truck, but I suppressed the urge; her plan was a sensible one and, besides, people who can make decisions are a gift and you have to give them room to get a bit demanding when they’re assessing the options.

We had our backpacks on and our hiking map unfolded in front of us, I was holding one side and Helen the other, as we walked towards the centrum. We were engrossed in discussing our first route for the day, when I heard a commotion behind us. Turning, I saw that two men were trying to attract our attention. They were in a car, and the man in the enger seat was calling out to us. In Australia you’d ignore them and walk on, but Czech men are perfectly safe. Their car pulled alongside us and stopped. We stopped too, and the enger put his question to us, which, by some miracle, I was able to understand.

‘They want to know where the nearest supermarket is’, I told Helen. We looked at each other, startled. I turned back to the men and said, ‘We don’t know where the supermarket is. We’re tourists.’ At which the men thanked us politely and drove on. It really was a window into the mind of a Czech man. There we were, fully kitted out tourists, backpacks on, hiking map out, going from the bus station into town, but, of course, we were women, so naturally we’d know where the supermarket is, wouldn’t we?

The first pension we came to was down a small alley, located easily by the sign standing on the pavement saying ‘pension’ next to an enormous arrow pointing to the right. Two comfortably upholstered middle-aged women in jeans and a young man were playing cards on the porch. At our approach, one of the women smiled at us, got up and beckoned us in behind her. Once again, it was my job to negotiate . I started to explain that we needed a room with two beds for two nights. Unfortunately, as Helen was blabbering in my ear, ‘Tell them we need it for two nights . . . We only need one room—you don’t mind sharing, do you? . . . Ask what time checkout is . . . Do they have real coffee here, or only instant?’ I was getting more and more rattled. The word for ‘room’, which I’d learned only the day before, refused to come to mind, so I was reduced to asking for two beds (literally—‘We need two beds’) and miming the rest.

‘Yes, yes’, nodded the lovely pension manager. We signalled back and forth, waving our arms about and holding up fingers to indicate numbers of nights/rooms/breakfasts required, me scratching for words and Helen demanding to see the tariff breakdown, wanting to know where the good restaurants were and asking for the breakfast menu, when the pension manager decided to put an end to this fruitless pantomiming, got some keys and motioned for us to follow her. She showed us into a clean, bright room with an en suite . . . and one double bed.

The pension manager thought we were a couple. By now I was thoroughly tired of trying to make myself understood in Czech, and I didn’t think I had it in me to try to untangle the misconception with the manager. I shot a pleading glance at Helen, who, to my relief, said, ‘Yeah, that’s alright, I don’t mind sharing a bed’, so I was spared any further agony. In this strange country, where I felt I was living at a different speed and in a different century, sharing a bed with a travelling companion I’d known for a day seemed very nineteenth century and rather fun.

We dropped our bags, got out our day packs and set out for a hike through Èeský Ráj. Hiking in the Czech Republic is dead easy. You pick which bit of the

country you want to walk in and buy a corresponding map. The whole country has been mapped out for hikers, cross-country skiers and cyclists. The maps show trails in red, blue, green and yellow with different symbols for the routes, depending on whether they’re walking or cycling routes. The symbol for the walking trails is a two-coloured horizontal line with a white line in the middle. You go to the beginning of the trail, which is usually a train station or a castle, or something else easy to locate. If you’ve decided on a yellow walking trail you look for the horizontal yellow lines on a feature of the landscape that doesn’t change, usually a tree, but sometimes a fence post, then you just follow the paint markers.

With thick pine forest in front of me, a blue sky above and no prospect of having to produce more Czech words from memory, I felt suddenly wonderful. The area we explored on that first day was Hrubá Skála, a so-called rock town. It’s called a rock town, according to the Èeský Ráj guidebook Helen had brought along, because the huge sandstone rocks standing up out of the landscape are supposed to look like a rock town. To be quite frank, they just looked like pretty impressively big rocks sticking out of the ground. I think I may suffer from a lack of imagination. Shouldn’t the rocks be shaped like churches and shops and schools if it was a rock town? Still, it was gorgeous. According to the guidebook, the whole area surrounding the upstanding sandstone pillars is one giant rock covered in forests and villages and farms. Tall pine forests, with trees disappearing straight up to the sun, feed off what seems to be no more than a thin layer of sand on top of the rock. It’s amazing to think they can get enough nutrients.

Helen had studied the map and decided that we’d be taking the red route, which started at the Hrubá Skála Castle, which the guidebook very importantly told us stands on the site of a fourteenth-century castle. It went on to say that the castle was destroyed and replaced by a Renaissance chateau in the sixteenth century. This chateau, the guidebook said, was replaced by a neo-Gothic building in the second half of the nineteenth century and was then reconstructed into a recreation centre in the 1960s.

Now, here’s the thing. I’m impressed by the words ‘fourteenth century’ and even ‘sixteenth century’, and I’d be impressed by ‘gothic’ if it didn’t have ‘neo’ next to it, indicating ‘fake’, but when we get to ‘1960s recreation centre’ I think it’s a bit of cheek to try and talk it up. Oh, a fourteenth-century castle used to stand here? Well, a fourteenth-century Aboriginal tribe used to live in my mum’s back yard, but you don’t see her putting out a guidebook and charging tourists seventy crowns to look at her swimming pool.

We spurned this rather cheesy tourist attraction, refusing to pay the entrance fee to look at the recreation centre and whatever bit of foundation of the fourteenthcentury castle that might still be there, and began our twenty-kilometre trek through the countryside. We walked through tiny little villages, through beautiful pine and birch forests, through open fields where we had an aerial view of forests dotted with Hansel and Gretel houses with immaculately kept gardens, some ancient ruins and the occasional truly magnificent castle.

After a couple of months in the Czech Republic, you get a bit blasé about ruined castles, there are so many of them lying around. You can barely walk three feet before a signpost points you to some crumbling edifice, usually at the top of a murderously steep hill. At first a vague feeling of guilt made me climb up to those castles, pay the entrance fee and wander about reading the breathless information displays describing the castle’s architecture and history. I always found it difficult to make any sense of them, although the tone indicated that I should fall back amazed. But who can which century was Gothic and which Renaissance (1640 . . . hmmm . . . so that’s when, um, was it Cromwell then?1640 . . . okay, that’s after Shakespeare. It is after Shakespeare, right?), and in the end, who cares? Eventually I stopped reading the commentary and trying to place the castle in history, and just took to standing on the ramparts, or looking through the tiny windows in the castle walls through which they sent fire arrows at enemies, imagining what it must have been like to see an invading army approaching, knowing that your days as lord and master in that bit of Bohemia were over. Pretty bloody brutal, I should think.

But some of the old royal buildings make even the seasoned Czech traveller stop and gasp, and the Trosky Castle is one of those. Just south of Turnov, two basalt rocks rise up suddenly out of the ground, looking like two high towers, so high that you can see them from all around the countryside. In 1380, some guy called Lord Èeòek of Vartenburk built a stone castle on top of each of them. There’s a low saddle of rocks ing the two towers which bears the ruins of lesser buildings for lesser mortals of the time. (I’ll have a castle there and one there . . . and some huts on the bit in between, for my peasants). The castles are really a sight to see. For a start, you can’t believe anyone could have carted such big stones all the way up those steep rocks. They rise right out of the basalt tower: a tower on a tower. Any invading army would take one look at Trosky Castle and re-think the whole looting and raping idea. It’s a castle that means business.

Helen and I walked through this magnificent Bohemian countryside, drinking water from clear running streams, stopping to inspect the statues and monuments carved out of the rocks, some built right into the streams so that the water flowed through them. I wondered if these monuments doubled up as devices to tame the water flow, channelling it into a steady stream falling through the stone so people could catch it in their pots. Some of the edifices were dedicated to saints and some of them had dates inscribed on them, mostly from the early nineteenth century.

As we walked, we exchanged our views on Prague. We both loved the place, loved the river and the cobblestones and the ancientness of it, and we especially loved the food. I told her I was a bit concerned because I’d been gaining pounds since I came to this country. To be completely honest I expected her to reply that I had nothing to worry about. I assumed she’d say, as Dad does when I’ve put on weight, ‘Oh you’re a little chubby but it suits you’. Instead she said, ‘Oh yes, I used to be like you, but then I went on a diet’.

Like you? With that one phrase my tiny concern blew into a major catastrophe. I was not delightfully plump; I was fat. Helen used to be like me, but then she got better. Helen, oblivious, was blithely telling me about her diet success. She was

really very caring and helpful. She gave me the diet she had been on, she outlined the minimum amount of exercise I would need to do, and she gave me encouragement. If she could do it, then so could I. ‘Like you?’ Oh my God, I was a blimp. Other women were looking at me in pity, eyeing my thighs and silently crossing themselves and saying, ‘There but for the grace of God . . .’ ‘Like you?’ This was much, much worse than I thought. I didn’t care if it wasn’t bohemian, I was going back on my diet—nuts and berries, salads and water, and three-hour workouts in the gym every day.

Later, after we had returned to our pension and showered and changed, Helen and I went out to dinner to a local pub. Helen, her appetite sharpened by six hours of walking, had delicious crumbed, fried pork with a side order of bread dumplings and a small beer. I asked for a small salad and water. The greens came with tartar sauce, because the Czechs don’t know how to serve a meal without something creamy. I put the container under the table where I wouldn’t have to see it. As fired up as I was by that ‘I was once like you’ remark, I was convinced I would stick to this diet for more than twenty-four hours.

The next day, after a sleepless night, I hustled Helen out of bed early, determined to walk off another few ounces. Helen was unfazed by this maniacal enthusiasm —she’d been bounding out of bed at four-thirty in the morning ever since the start of her adult life, studying ancy while simultaneously holding down three jobs and caring for her four younger siblings. I, who have carefully honed the skill of getting out of bed at the last possible second and ing exams by the barest margin in order that no lazing around time should be wasted on pointless study, babbled on about the value of the disciplined life of diet and exercise. The twenty kilometres we did yesterday were going to pale beside the thirty we would do today. Raining? A few drops, it would soon .

Actually, it was pouring but Helen good humouredly donned her wet-weather gear and listened to me outline my plans for a diet of raw salad vegetables and water combined with many miles of hiking as we slushed along the street in the last of the dawn light. After about ten minutes of teeming rain I ceased lecturing

her on the value of exercise and began to wonder how I might bring up the value of sitting in a warm hospoda, listening to the rain and drinking all day. As I was turning over plausible phrases in my mind (I’m afraid I might be catching a cold; We should check out the local pubs, since we’re here) the rain began to ease and after a few minutes had stopped altogether. The sun came out and with that I was able to tell myself that walking in the rain was fun; it was almost a pity the sun had come out to spoil the day.

After four hours of walking, Helen and I ed by a hospoda in the middle of the forest. A local gent and his two grandkids were sitting on a stone bench propped against the wall. They had a rather picturesque basket of mushrooms sitting on the bench next to them. Helen and I greeted them and Helen wanted to know if they’d been out picking the mushrooms, so I put the question to the old gent and got a stream of Czech in reply.

‘What’s he saying?’ asked Helen.

‘“Yes”, I think.’ The old gent could see I didn’t completely follow so he made a wiggling gesture with his fingers and waved his hands up and down at the same time.

‘Oh, I think he’s saying there are lots out because it’s been raining.’ Then he said something I actually understood, ‘. . . and he picked all these in three hours.’

‘Where did he get them from?’ asked Helen, never satisfied.

‘I don’t know. The woods I guess. We’ll just have to keep our eyes open.’

Mushroom picking is the Czechs’ third most popular sport after ice hockey and drinking beer. Every weekend, hordes of Czechs invade the forests with their wicker baskets and strip the place bare. Both Helen and I had heard a lot about this activity from Czechs and expats so we were in a high state of excitement at the prospect of finding mushrooms to pick. A little further down the track Helen cried out, ‘Look! A mushroom!’ Sure enough there, growing right out of the ground, was a white, misshapen lump. Not a champignon to be sure, but most certainly a mushroom. I had a plastic bag with my lunch in it, so I emptied it of cheese sandwiches and carefully, thrillingly, we picked our first mushroom and reverently placed it in the bag.

As we walked deeper into the forest we saw that all the glades on each side of the path were thick with people bent double, plucking. Mushroom picking is an intensely competitive business for the Czechs. We stopped by one of these clearings wondering if we could the crowd, but an old man near us undoubled to give us a glare, and what appeared to be his family—an assortment of middle-aged women, teenagers, tots and a young man—glanced up to see why he was slacking off, saw us and stared too. We smiled, ‘Eh . . . he’, and backed away.

At the next people-free forest clearing we came to Helen and I left the track and began our picking in earnest. Our little glen rang to the sounds of, ‘Ooh, look I’ve found a whole bunch of the thin-stemmed ones!’ and ‘Come and have a look at these—do you think they’re poisonous?’ Every so often a hopeful family would peer into our clearing and then disappear again when they saw the patch was occupied. We were the mushroom queens.

It has to be said that none of the mushrooms we picked looked like anything I’d ever seen before in a grocer’s. Some were a hideous bright yellow and some were suspiciously slimy. We weren’t sure which were edible and which weren’t, but we picked them all anyway. One we both recognised straightaway was a

toadstool—it was just as they are described in fairy tales, a thick white stem with a red and white spotted hood. When we’d filled half a plastic bag I called a halt. Before now I had no idea how heavy mushrooms were—this is because they are mostly water, and water, my mushroom informant assured me, is very heavy stuff. Half a bag seemed plenty to lug about on a hike.

‘Maybe the manager will cook them for our breakfast’, said Helen, full of mushroom enthusiasm. I winced at the thought of the Czech I’d have to summon up to make that request, and privately thought that if Helen wanted cooked mushrooms for breakfast, she could do the pantomiming.

The mushrooms weren’t the only food we picked on that trip. Another of the wonders of hiking in the Czech Republic is the abundance of delicious fruit growing by the roadside. We first noticed a plum tree, growing all by itself at a fork in the path. At first, being city girls and unfamiliar with the concept of free fruit, we thought it must belong to someone. Were we allowed to eat from it? Surely not. We looked around but there was no fence in sight, no signs, no indication of ownership. It had very small, just ripened green/purple plums, and they looked so inviting we finally decided to risk breaking a law—we’d have just one. But that first one was so yummy, and so small. Perhaps another? Ooh, this one looks nice, it’s more purple than green. Have you tried the green ones? A delightful sour taste. De-licious! Ooh, ooh, here’s a really ripe one. And so on, until at last Helen observed, ‘Hmmm, we can’t reach any more’.

Then we saw there was another plum tree next to the first, and another, and another—six in a row. We had to force ourselves to stop eating and keep walking, but now we were looking out for more plum trees along the way and that was how we found the pear trees and the apple trees, all just standing at the side of the path waiting for hikers to stop by for a snack. When Helen bent over to pick up a pear she’d dropped, she found blueberries and raspberries growing on banks by the side of the road. Who cares about castles? Spotting blueberries and mushrooms was far more exciting.

The early morning rain returned, but only lightly. There’s a picture Helen took of me soon after: I’m standing under an umbrella, the rain’s hitting a lake behind me and I’m smiling. We hiked about thirty kilometres that day. After marching up a horrendously steep hill we stopped off at a mountain café for a break and to wait out the rain. The only person there was the old gent who ran the place. He regretfully told us that everything on the menu was unavailable, except coffee and some food item which no amount of halting Czech and acting out could make clear. We decided against the mystery food and ordered coffee. The old gent smiled when he heard my Czech and asked us where we were from and what we were doing in the country. When he came back with the coffee, he brought with him the mysterious and sole available food item—a chocolate bar, one for each of us. My hand hesitated, I contemplated my waist, I contemplated the gradient of the hill we’d just climbed. Oh, what the heck. I ate the chocolate bar.

We came down from the mountain and crossed a field to a tiny railway station, surrounded entirely by pasture except for a narrow country road running alongside the tracks, which, according to our map, would produce the train that would take us back to our pension at Turnov. Czech railway timetables are written in a code I have yet to decipher. There are all sorts of unexplained numbers on these timetables, some of them I think might even be the train’s serial number, they’re so long and apparently meaningless. You really have to study hard to find the arrival and departure times, but we finally worked out that the train we wanted would arrive in twenty minutes.

The station was deserted and too small to have a ticket seller so there was no-one we could ask about which train to catch, but we weren’t worried. The timetables might be indecipherable, but Bohemian trains are strangely German—they arrive when they say they will. We sat in knackered silence and contemplated the view while we waited. Fifteen minutes later, and five minutes before it was due, the train pulled into the station. That seemed odd to me. Czech trains aren’t early or late. They’re on time. They’re always on time. I wondered if this really was our train?

‘Of course it is’, replied Helen, confidently slinging her pack on her back. ‘Come on.’

‘Maybe I should just check the timetable again’, I said, heading back to the timetable to see if I could find a confirming number.

But it was even less clear than before. Now I couldn’t even find our train.

‘Come on’, cried Helen, as she boarded.

The guard was standing at the door looking expectantly at me. I had a funny feeling all was not right but with Helen pushing me and the guard waiting my mind froze under the pressure. The numbers were so long and there were so many of them they just turned into worms wiggling across the page. I couldn’t make a convincing counter-argument so at Helen’s command I boarded the train. Still . . . five minutes early?

‘Stop worrying’, said Helen settling into her seat. ‘It’s our train.’

I put my pack on the seat beside me and looked out of the window. So did Helen. I saw Trosky castle in the distance and pointed it out to her.

‘Look, you can see it from here.’

‘Mmm’, said Helen.

Pause.

Her eyes narrowed. Suddenly she leapt and grabbed her pack. ‘Get off the train’, she yelled. ‘Quick!’ She stumbled into the aisle and started running for the door.

‘Wha . . . ?’ I was halfway out of my seat. The guard’s whistle blew.

‘It doesn’t go to Turnov!’ she screamed. I grabbed my pack and raced after her. She wrenched open the door and we leapt onto the platform just as the train started to pull away. I crashed to the ground, falling on my hands and knees over my pack. I could hear the guard shouting at us, his words receding into the distance. When I’d got my breath back I said, ‘How did you know?’

‘It was going the wrong way. We were heading towards Trosky castle and we should have been heading away from it.’

I nodded and allowed a small pause to fall. ‘And, of course, it was five minutes early!’

Helen agreed that she should have listened to me. Two minutes later, dead on time, a train going the other way pulled into the station.

Back at the pension I was saved from having to ask them to cook the mushrooms for us. The comfortably upholstered women and the young man were playing cards on the porch just as they had been when we first arrived. We showed them our mushrooms and asked if any of them were poisonous. They emptied our plastic bag onto the table and peered at the contents, puzzled. After some consultation, one of them got on the phone and had an extended conversation as she turned over the mushrooms one by one. She got off the phone and shook her head regretfully. No, they couldn’t tell us if they were poisonous or not, which seemed astonishing for a Czech.

My only experience of strange mushrooms was when I ate some that an Indonesian man in a sarong had given me on a Bali beach. I’d been hoping for a psychedelic experience, but all that happened was one minute I felt fine and the next I was on the great, white telephone to God. I’ve never vomited so much in my life. That incident came back to me now as Helen and I debated whether or not we’d take the risk. We badly wanted to eat them, but at the memory of Bali I convinced her we’d had enough of the Czech experience and we didn’t need to be greedy, so we donated them to the garden compost for the trees to eat.

The next morning, our trip ended where it had begun—the information office at the Turnov bus terminal. And, just as she had two days earlier, Helen stood at my elbow jabbering away about bus timetables and stand numbers. Nervously, my internal filing cabinets locking shut out of sheer exhaustion, I braved the counter to find out when the bus went back. To my absolute relief, a lovely tourist officer with a gorgeous smile who could speak English and grinned affectionately at my pidgin Czech, gave us the exact time and the stand number, and wished us a good journey home. Sometimes the Czechs will surprise you.

Chapter 11 Am 1 a Bohemian?

After my trip with Helen I took up hiking with a vengeance. I became the hiking queen. I started a thread on the expats.cz site and the next Saturday took six walkers to Karlštejn, a little town with a big castle just south of Prague. From there we walked to Beroun, about twenty kilometres further west. Every Saturday after that, half a dozen expats and I lined up with the Czechs at bus stops and railway stations, heading off in search of nature trails. It was unbelievably easy. All I had to do was go to the Palác bookshop on Václavské Námìstí on the Monday and browse through their maps, looking for a national park with a station nearby. Once I’d found one I liked the sound of, I’d buy the map and put a post on the website.

Mostly my fellow hikers were people in town for no more than a month, or people wanting to try something new, who showed up once and then never again. But there were one or two people who turned up every weekend: Helen was one of them and there was also a hearty girl from Tasmania, who, on the frequent occasions when we got lost, would gaze at the landscape, shading her eyes from the sun, then stride off through fields of waist-high sunflowers, saying, ‘If we go in this direction we must come to the river. We’ll find the trail to the nor’-east.’ Quite how she knew that was beyond me, but she was always right. Being from Tasmania, she regarded Czech walking trails as one rung below six-lane highways and the hiking group must have seemed like a church social outing to her, but she was very good-humoured and it was a tremendous relief to have her around, since the only slight drawback to my leading a hike was my inability to read maps—just a slight drawback.

I felt just like a Czech on those early Saturday mornings while I waited for my walking group to arrive. I would be standing in the bus line with a whole lot of other Czechs heading out for a trek, all of us in shorts and backpacks. I noticed that usually, in among the mostly young Czechs, there’d be a group of women

kitted out in hats and sturdy walking shoes, seventy years old if they were a day. I used to watch them, healthy and fit from a lifetime of walking, and think, That’s what I’d like to be doing when I’m seventy: setting out on a day trip with my friends and a packed lunch. One Saturday, as I waited in line behind one of these sturdy old ladies, four of her friends turned up. They were yakking away, pushing in line really, when the first old lady, not wanting to be impolite, turned to me and invited me to go in front of them.

‘That’s okay’, I said to her, ‘I’m waiting on friends, too.’ They smiled at me and I thought, I am just like the locals. However, it was this aspect of the Czechs, the one I was so comfortably taking on now, that was puzzling me. They are such vigorous, sporty people. Surely the definition of a bohemian, though, is someone who lives in a garret drinking absinthe, poverty-stricken, writing tortured verse and sleeping with artist’s models. None of the Bohemians I had met—and I knew two quite well, Mrs Jendliková and Zuzana—were anything like that. Zuzana’s friends, for instance, were all pretty much yuppies, in a 1950s kind of way. They were the first generation after communism to feel the benefits of the free market—they had jobs in marketing and human resources, money to travel and buy cars, 3G technology. The trams in Prague sang and beeped with the sounds of text-message alerts. Far from being white-faced, brooding aesthetes, they were frugal and conservative, healthy outdoor types. The Czechs as a nation took their artists seriously, but individually they were mostly obsessed with sport. Miroslav told me that as far as the Czechs are concerned, their greatest achievement of the last decade was being world ice hockey champions three years in a row. In fact, they were a lot like Australians in that regard.

How did dissolute artists living free from the bondage of bourgeois concerns like money and hygiene get the name ‘bohemian’ when the actual Bohemians are preoccupied with ring tones and hockey? I looked it up on the net. It turns out that the word ‘bohemian’ comes from the French bohemien, a fifteenth-century term used to describe the Romany people, or gypsies, who travelled to via the Czech Bohemian lands. The French thought that’s where they originated. In fact, the gypsies were just travelling through Bohemia. No-one knows for sure where they came from, but consensus seems to be that the gypsies are a nomadic tribe originating in India. They were widely despised as thieves and vagabonds

in fifteenth-century , and they have the same unhappy reputation in modern-day Prague, where they’re considered the scum of the earth. The hatred and fear of gypsies is absorbed so thoroughly into Czech culture that it’s almost invisible. You can feel it and taste it but you can’t separate it out and point to it. Every thought and sentence is flavoured with it, but you can’t pick individual phrases and say, ‘See, there? That’s not fact, that’s just bigotry.’ Gypsies occupy the squalid and run-down parts of Prague, and are being unceremoniously shoved out of the old buildings as aspirational Prague expands and the derelict buildings are sold to developers. The tide of hostility towards them was an unexpected shadow to find behind the brightly coloured palette of Prague’s revived nineteenth-century buildings.

In the early 1800s, in a leap that no-one can explain, French writers began to use the word ‘bohemian’ in its current meaning— that of a prolonged, but courageously freewheeling and expressive, adolescence. In order to distinguish these bohemians from the thieving bohemiens—who were also freewheeling and expressive but in a feral and lawless, as opposed to an artistic and revolutionary, way—the Europeans began to refer to the Slavic inhabitants of Bohemia as Czechs.

As it happened, there were two characteristics of artistic bohemians which overlapped with Slavic Czech inhabitants of Bohemia. First, plenty of Czechs, mainly men, die of alcohol poisoning, thanks to the massive life-long beer consumption, but they die old and decrepit, not young and romantic. Second, Czechs lived up to the name of bohemian in the matter of sexual freedom. Zuzana was emphatic on the subject. ‘No Czech man is ever faithful to his wife. Ever.’ She herself was single and bitter. Sven had fallen in love with her briefly, but Zuzana was too bitter even for Sven.

‘That’s true’, agreed Danny, ‘no-one’s faithful. Václav Klaus has a mistress and the Czechs are ashamed, not because he’s having an affair but because she’s so ugly. They think a man with his power should have had the decency to pick a good-looking mistress.’

However absent bohemian-ness might have been in Bohemia, back home in Australia, bohemian-ness seemed to have broken out in a rash. Towards the end of a hot and fragrant summer, Dad called with shattering news from home— Auntie Minnie, my stepmother’s sister, was leaving her husband, Uncle Sol, for her toy boy. These were not Dad’s words, of course. They were my sister’s, as we discussed this piece of dynamite gossip. It was staggering. Auntie Minnie is seventy-two; she’d been married to Sol, ittedly the world’s most boring man, whose consuming ion is pools and pool installation, for thirty-six years. Her lover, who’d been around, we now discovered, for fifteen of those thirty-six years, was considerably younger than her—a sprightly fifty-eight.

‘Seriously’, I said to Linda, ‘where does she get the energy from? Aren’t you supposed to be tired out at seventy-two? Longing for a bit of peace and quiet and a nice, hot cup of tea at the end of the day?’ God knows I’d have killed Uncle Sol a long time ago if I’d been married to him—the thought crosses most people’s mind at some time or other during a conversation with him—but surely he was an ideal husband for a nice old lady of seventy-two. Quiet, inoffensive, a good provider . . . Min has a hearing aid—doesn’t she just turn it off when he starts talking about chlorine and filter mechanisms?

Sol is a Hungarian refugee. He came to Australia after the war, like Dad, a boy of only seventeen or eighteen. In the 1970s, Sol went into the pool business, and struck instant pool gold. Australia was booming and everyone wanted a pool. Uncle Sol’s business thrived and, bless him, he never stopped being grateful to pools for giving him the good life. Unfortunately for the rest of us, his gratitude took the form of ceaseless yap on the subject. ‘Clark Pools have brought out a new filter’, Uncle Sol would say, before you had a chance to sprint for the door. ‘I’ve had to visit every customer to unclog them. Every customer, darling. Do you know what was wrong? I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes . . .’ and Uncle Sol would attach himself to you firmly and describe, in excruciating detail, the exact nature of the problem, the variety of difficulties it caused his customers, the hours he had spent trying to figure it out . . . until he ‘finally realised they had the wrong mesh. Can you imagine that?’

Ah, no, Uncle Sol, I’m too busy imagining my escape—How did the British prisoners of war tunnel their way out of Colditz? Would you notice if I replaced myself with a dummy made of old toilet rolls and quietly slipped away? The only thing that ever stopped Uncle Sol, once he got onto his favourite topic, was Auntie Minnie calling him to come eat his matzah ball soup before it got cold, and to stop carrying on about pools already. At this thought, my mind stopped dead in its tracks. Selfish I know, but suddenly all I could think was, Without Minnie to put the brakes on, what will prevent Uncle Sol from trapping me in the living room and talking about pools forever?

Apparently what really killed Uncle Sol was, he caught Auntie Minnie and her lover cavorting naked in the pool house, clearly having been swimming naked (and God knows what else—I’d rather not think about it) in the pool. The pool! His two great loves—Minnie and the pool—defiled in one ghastly moment. How could she? Minnie was defiant, so my stepmother told me when I spoke to her a few days later, hoping for more details than my notoriously unreliable father could give me. Sol was boring, he’d ruined her life. She wanted to get out and really live while she still had a chance. My stepmother was purse-lipped about the whole business. I could tell from the clipped and martyred note in her voice that she was looking at my father and thinking, I have to live with a dentist, so why shouldn’t Minnie have to live with a pool salesman? She’d argued with Minnie: What about Sol? How could you leave him after all this time? What about your family? Your son? What about the fact that you’re seventy-two? Shouldn’t you start behaving like an adult for a change? (My stepmother is the elder sister by a year and has always behaved like an adult, right from when she was a little girl. Minnie, on the other hand, has always behaved like a little girl right into adulthood.)

Minnie paid no heed to my stepmother’s disapproval, in fact she had the chutzpah to blame it all on Sol. ‘Sol had made me unhappy’, she said. ‘I’ve sacrificed my life for that man and does he appreciate it? No! I was forced to take a lover, just to make life bearable.’ My stepmother pursed her lips some more, but Minnie was blind and deaf to moral opposition, determined to go off

with Leonard.

Leonard? So that was her toy boy’s name. He sang on cruise ships apparently, and Minnie was going to travel with him. I must say, at the news of Leonard’s occupation, I felt a flicker of unease. A singer on cruise ships? Visions of velvet jackets fraying at the cuffs, hairpieces and rendezvous with fat, heavily mascaraed widows in honeymoon suites rose before me. A singer on a cruise ship? Wasn’t that rather . . . naff? Apparently not for my Auntie Minnie, who was grabbing her ticket to the high life while she could. And to think, this man had been my Auntie’s lover for the past fifteen years. I was secretly dead impressed— Lord knows I’ve barely managed even to have sex in all that time. But why was all this happening now? I vaguely wondered how she’d managed to persuade Leonard to make their love legitimate. ‘Minnie’, so my stepmother told me, barely concealing her distaste at the girlish confession, ‘says she never really loved Sol [and who in their heart of hearts can blame her?] and that Leonard is the fire of her loins, the light of her life. She’s going to break free and live her love in its glory and heat.’

Minnie, with her blue perm and her rock cakes; Minnie, with her suspicion of black people and gypsies. Who would have thought Auntie Minnie would’ve had, could’ve had, a secret, ionate life? My stepmother was not amused.

Shortly after receiving this news from home, I went on a day trip to Èeský Krumlov with Laura, who was possibly the only genuine bohemian in Bohemia. It was August and all of Laura’s students had gone home to spend the holidays with their families in their chatas. Prague practically closes down in August, so Laura had plenty of time on her hands, although she was strapped for cash. Lack of money didn’t seem to bother her, though, and in this she was truly irable. Laura had been living the precarious artist’s life for two decades, and how it hadn’t worn her down was beyond me. It takes a sort of hi-octane energy and self-belief, which both she and Auntie Minnie display in abundance, to live the bohemian life. I felt exhausted just thinking about it.

The American expats were strangely offended by the closure of Prague during August. They seemed to think it was a sign of moral torpor. I’d never had much to do with Americans before coming to Prague, but a fellow called Bill, who I met through Laura, was very vocal on the subject. He had some incomprehensible job in finance with Accenture, which had a huge office in Prague, and he and Laura and Danny assured me that in America, corporate types only have one week off a year. Technically, they’re entitled to two, but noone takes two—it’s considered slacking off to do so. They work from eight in the morning until ten at night.

‘But you’re Americans’, I said to Bill. ‘You’re the richest people on earth. Why are you working such ridiculous hours?’

‘It’s the culture. You have to.’

‘But you could be lying on hammocks all day. What’s the point of being the leaders of the free world and the wealthiest if you’re slaves to your offices?’

The Americans never quite got it. They remained scandalised by the notion of the Czechs taking summer off to spend it quietly with their families, while I was scandalised by the insanity of the Americans. It surely is the definition of insanity to work for wealth and then, when you have it, to keep working instead of doing what every poor person in the world would do—put your feet up and spend some free time with the people you love. For the first time, I could see something good in communism. People worked hard but they weren’t so obsessed with making money that they never stopped working. The Czechs work just hard enough to afford plenty of time off. For them, work buys them leisure time—a month in the country in August, for instance. No-one would dream of going into work on a weekend. Weekends are for taking your family on a hundred-kilometre bike ride and overnight camping trip. Bill told me that no

weekend went by in the States when he was not called into work, and if there was no reason to go into work, his boss would call a weekend brainstorming meeting.

‘You’re all completely mad’, was my verdict. I fervently hoped the Czechs never embraced capitalism to this extent. Laura agreed with me.

‘It was one of the reasons I left America’, she said. ‘I couldn’t stand the pressure.’ If she was feeling the pressure of having no students and no money for August, she didn’t show it.

Laura arrived at the station straight from an all-night party that had started in a hole-in-the-wall bar, where she’d met a French film director who was in Prague to shoot a horror flick, the new fashion in movies according to Laura. They moved on to an industry party and a threesome with the director and the horror film’s lead in a linen cupboard. On the train she updated me on her work.

‘. . . four hands feeling my body . . . fucked me standing while I gave Marcel a blowjob . . . think I saw him in Alien Spies . . .’ Laura was giving me these intimate details at about forty thousand decibels. I glanced around nervously. Could anyone on the train speak English? From the look on the face of the elderly lady sitting across the aisle, I’d have said yes, and she appeared to be familiar with colloquial American, too.

‘. . . two cocks, one uncut, one cut . . . came five times . . . post-production facilities in Prague . . .’ I began to wonder whether I really wanted a blow-byblow , so to speak. I think I was impressed enough by the phrase ‘sex with two men’ without needing to hear the gory details. I felt sure the elderly lady would agree with me, as carefree as the Czechs are about sex. At last, though, Laura came to the end of the linen-cupboard story and turned her

conversation to a more conventional topic—what to do with Franta.

Franta was a Czech boy of nineteen. Laura had slept with him one night when she had nothing else to do and now, to her astonishment, it appeared Franta had fallen for her. He kept taking her out on dates and holding her hand. He sent her flowers every day and wanted her to meet his mother. Although at first bemused by this puppy love, she was finding it more and more appealing. She’d never been in a conventional relationship. It might be quite fun, she said.

‘The problem is, I think he might expect fidelity, and you know me—I like to fuck anything that moves’, Laura confided to everyone within a ten-kilometre radius, ‘And now Jouni’s back in town.’ Jouni was a Finnish lover who liked her to beat him during sex. He’d arrived two days before and was pressing Laura to get out the birch twigs and come play. Which way was she going to jump? Young, hand-kissing Franta, or somewhat older, nipple-twisting Jouni? She’d never had to choose before. ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

What did I think? What I thought was, He’s nineteen. You’re forty. For God’s sake leave the boy alone, and a small part of me also wondered if Laura’s Act of Re/Creation might be failing to attract the attention of curators because it was boring. Perhaps she wasn’t an artist so much as a woman compelled to boast of her sexual conquests. Impressive sexual conquests, of course, but the effort of having to be constantly amazed by her sex life was making me begin to regret I’d agreed to spend an entire day with her.

‘I don’t know’, I mumbled as discouragingly as I could. It made no difference. She whiled away another twenty minutes discussing the pros and cons of romantic love versus sado-masochistic love, and from there to a thesis on sexual boundaries in western democracies and how many of them she, personally, had broken. Three and a half hours later . . .

The road from the station to the town was downhill, steep and long. There was only one train back from Èeský Krumlov to Prague and I wanted to be sure we caught it. I mentioned this to Laura, ‘We should give ourselves extra time at the end of the day to get up this hill,’ to which Laura replied blithely, ‘Oh, we’ll be fine’. I made a mental note to take responsibility for our leaving time. She was skipping down the hill like a spring lamb, babbling on about a great restaurant on the river one of her students had told her about.

As we rounded a bend in the road, an extremely pretty town, with red-tiled, medieval roofs catching the sun and filling the little valley leading down to a winding river, appeared before us. We crossed a small stone bridge and walked through cobbled streets so narrow they were barely the width of a car. The ancient quaintness was slightly marred by the obvious tourist bent of the place. The shops on either side of the street were made of square blond stone and had low, splintery doorways, but they sold hideous plastic medieval memorabilia and tour groups buzzed from one side of the street to the other, their excitedly waving mass-produced wooden toys at each other. Yellow pamphlets outside the tourist office in the main square told us that we could take a tour of the town and go to a marionette show and visit the old pharmacy, a couple of churches, the town square and the castle courtyards. Laura and I, however, were there to see one thing: the fully functioning original Renaissance theatre.

It had been Laura’s idea to come to Èeský Krumlov. She had done her degree in arts, majoring in theatre, and for once it was fascinating listening to her discourse. This was a theatre, she told me as we made our way to the castle, that had been left precisely as it was when the last owners of the castle packed up and left (or were brutally butchered) in about 1607. ‘Most Renaissance theatres burned down because they were lit with candles, so only one or two have survived. This one is special, because not only is it really, really old, but all the really, really old bits of it work—the trap doors, the wings, all the pulleys, the backdrops— and it’s got original costumes as well. I’m so excited.’

She gave me a potted history of theatre during the Renaissance and I quite

forgave her for her earlier tediousness on the train. She was a smart woman genuinely interested in her subject, and I found myself getting caught up in her enthusiasm. When we arrived at the castle, however, a handwritten sign told us that the theatre tours had sold out. Having got up at four in the morning and travelled three and half hours just to see this theatre, not to mention the prospect of climbing back up a murderous hill to get home, I did what any red-blooded Australian would do—I cursed the authorities and fretted helplessly. Laura, being American, was not so easily discouraged.

Laura was a woman who could get into a rock star’s party with nothing but a fake Rolling Stone and a winning smile. She was silent for a moment and then she said, ‘The tour starts in ten minutes. Let’s just hang around and see if we can’t tag along at the back.’ I didn’t like the sound of that. If the authorities say it’s sold out, then it’s sold out.

‘Are you sure? It’s full up. There won’t be room.’

‘Maybe’, said Laura, ‘Or maybe someone might not turn up’.

‘I don’t think that’s likely.’

‘Well, we’ll see.’

‘But they’ll ask to see our tickets.’ Instead of telling me to put a sock in it, Laura just smiled and said, ‘We’ll see’, again. It’s in my nature to be frightened of authority and my instinctive reactions were only being exacerbated by six months in Prague, where officials have a distinctly Stalinist air about them. You don’t argue with officials in Prague. You line up, are polite, have all your

documents ready and filled in correctly. You don’t smile at them because that just makes them suspect you might be hiding something. If even one thing is wrong with your documents—like you haven’t filled in the date—they say, ‘This is wrong. You must come back when it is right.’ And you do.

We hung around at the entrance, Laura relaxed and taking in the scenery, me wearing the hunted look of someone imagining the fearsome face of the large and irate communist tour guide when we tried to put one over her. After ten minutes, the doors opened and a slim young girl came out. At first I didn’t that she was the guide, but tourists clutching guidebooks and cameras milled around and the girl took their tickets and let them through the door. Laura milled around, too, and when the last of them had gone in, she glided up to the tour guide, looking innocent, a remarkable feat in itself, all things considered. Although the guide looked harmless I was so nervous I could barely restrain myself from tugging at Laura’s sleeve.

‘Tickets, please’, said the guide.

‘Ooooh’, said Laura, mildly surprised to be asked, ‘we were hoping to get a ticket here.’

‘You can buy tickets downstairs at the box office’, said the guide helpfully.

‘We went there, but they said this tour was sold out. We wondered if maybe someone didn’t show, we could just get a ticket from you.’

‘No, I’m sorry, this tour is full, but the next English language tour is at four.’

Laura’s face fell, ‘That one’s sold out, too. Isn’t it possible for us just to come along for this one? We’re happy to pay.’ I was tugging at Laura’s sleeve, sure that pressing officials only makes them mad.

‘Are you here tomorrow?’ asked the girl politely, ‘There’s another tour then.’ Laura’s face fell even further. I thought she was going to cry, and so did the tour guide.

‘No, we’re only here for a day and we’ve come all the way from Prague just to see the theatre.’ Her eyes lifted to gaze into the girl’s eyes with a look I could only describe as beseeching. To my utter astonishment, instead of saying, ‘Too bad, now go away’, the tour guide looked around furtively, and said, ‘Okay, you can come in but if anyone asks to see your ticket, tell them you’re friends of mine.’ And just like that, we were in.

Laura beamed. She grabbed my arm and whispered ‘Hee hee hee’ into my ear as she pulled me with her into the theatre. This theatre meant more to her than just some very, very old thing carefully preserved—she actually knew what she was looking at. Even for me, who had no clue what I was looking at, the theatre was amazing. There were thirty changes of scene that could be made from the flaps and the backdrops—a forest, a castle, the inside of a tavern, a street scene, a riverbank—anything the play required. The flaps were manoeuvred using a pulley system, disappearing into the wings when not in use, and the stage, still with the original boards, sloped down towards the audience and narrowed at the back to make it appear much larger than it really was. We sat on original wooden benches, quite high off the ground, right where Renaissance theatregoers might have sat watching Shakespeare performed almost as soon as the old boy had churned them out.

The restoration of the theatre, we learned, had taken forty years so far and it was

still going. It had taken that long because everything, I mean everything, was being restored. They were taking out every nail, straightening them, cleaning them up, then putting them back. Incredible. We got to go under the stage and see the systems of ropes and pulleys that moved the scenery. The theatre had all the real costumes—lace, gloves, shoes, mirrors—everything precisely as it was in the early seventeenth century. Only a few people are allowed in at a time to prevent any disastrous changes in humidity, which is why the tour had sold out so quickly. Once a year they put on a play in the original Renaissance style to an invitation-only audience of enthusiasts.

‘Now that’s a party I have to get into’, said Laura, and I was quite sure she would.

After the tour, we went down to the river and found the restaurant that Laura’s student had recommended to her. It was the usual Czech offering—a bit dark, with unadorned, thick wooden tables and benches, and utterly standard fare—but its great charm was out the back where a grassy strip ran right to the edge of the river. On it were a row of highly sought-after tables. There were four or five restaurants backing out onto the river and the bank was alive with beer-drinking adults and little kids playing tag. The whole atmosphere along the bank was like a communal picnic. Although we were early we got the last table going— Laura’s student had warned us to get in quick—and we sat down with the feeling of well-being you get when you have played your cards right. Ten minutes later and our faces would have worn the look of disappointment that played on the faces of those who came after us, and there were many.

We ordered beer and schnitzels, and while we waited for our food we watched the river where a steady stream of tall, handsome and lightly tanned young Czechs was sailing down the river in a casual assortment of craft. There were kayaks with just one or two young men in them, row boats with beer-drinking parties, even a gondola bearing a group of girls lolling about chatting while the punt was being pushed by two gorgeous men with aqua eyes and strong hands. I wouldn’t have noticed the eyes or the hands but Laura was giving me a running

commentary: ‘Ooh, look at him, the one just going under the bridge now, look at those legs! And the one standing up, see? Next to him? Great buns. Did you see the eyes on that one? Ooh, lycra bike shorts . . .’, and so on. I couldn’t miss them.

The river was picture perfect. In among the boats swans glided by, their heads held high, paddling superbly through the wake from the boats. Right in front of us was a small, densely green island, a sliver of sand running along its fringe. Charming stone cottages backed onto the opposite bank, and rising above them was the town, with the castle looking magnificent right at the top of the hill. It was an idyllic setting, and when our meal came I steered Laura back onto the subject of theatre so I wouldn’t have to kill her. Thankfully, we had a most enjoyable meal. Towards the end a couple ed us, as is the way in restaurants like this. We had a table for four and it’s a convention in the region that if you’re at a wooden-bench restaurant you share your table if it’s required. So we shimmied up and let the couple have half the table, exchanging pleasantries in the sun. Just as we had paid our bill, a rowboat came alongside us and a stupendously good-looking man, barely out of his teens, hurled a rope around our table leg and tethered his boat. Laura and I watched as he and his equally dazzling friend pulled their craft close to the bank and scrambled out. As they ed by our table, the young man turned to us—well, he had just used us as an anchor—gave us a blinding smile, and said, Ahoj! (‘Hi there’). Laura coo-ed ahoj back, lowering her eyelashes to half-mast. His eyes latched onto hers. She simpered, he tautened his shoulders. They smouldered at each other. It was all over in five seconds and if I hadn’t been there I’m sure she’d have clinched the deal. What struck me about it was how damn easy it was to pick up a bronzed, athletic Czech with straight teeth and transparent, green eyes. Surely I was capable of it? I can bat my eyelids. I can flutter.

We left the restaurant, Laura giving her oarsman a final come-hither glance, and went for a walk through the town. Cars had to fight for space with people but they were badly outnumbered. Drivers with one hand on the steering wheel and the other ing a drooping head, looking fed up, were forced to go at a walking pace along the narrow lanes. We headed towards the centre and then quickly turned away when we realised a mock jousting match was taking place

in ye olde towne square. We escaped down a side street, away from the sounds of trumpets and tin drums and ‘Hear Ye, Hear Ye!’ It was on this side street that we came across the sculptor.

He was standing on the pavement in front of his gallery, carving a female torso out of stone. As soon as she saw him, Laura brought up short and stood gazing at him from the opposite pavement, nudging me: ‘Will you look at those hands?’

I looked at those hands and they were indeed worth looking at. They were large and square and covered in stone dust, and at that very moment they were brushing gently and lovingly over a stone nipple.

‘And that torso . . .’ Laura added, her eyes fixed on the smooth neck and the revealing triangle of his chest. He was wearing a loose, white, linen shirt and a sculptor’s apron. The effect was slightly ruined by the fact that he was wearing socks with his sandals, a Czech fashion statement that defies analysis. (You would not believe how many people, young and old, wear socks with sandals— that and the eighties hair are two eternal Bohemian mysteries.) Of course, it was only natural that Laura should introduce herself to him. I would never have interrupted the artist at work for fear of being angrily rebuffed, but Laura was chatting away gaily in no time, iring his work, iring his hands, telling him about all the rich people she knew who may be interested in buying his work.

He invited us into the gallery for a drink. It was an open-air affair in a small courtyard. His sculptures were dotted around, some nudes, some sun gods, more nudes. Quite a lot of nudes, actually. They seemed okay to me but nothing really special. In fact, they seemed pretty darned ordinary, the sort of thing that gets mass produced for cheap garden centres. Laura seemed smitten with them, though, so I wondered if I was missing something. The courtyard backed onto a café and the sculptor, Petr, ordered coffee for us. Laura had been asking him questions about his sculptures and I’d been relieved of the necessity of having to

think of something to say, but now Petr turned to me: ‘So you like my work?’

‘Yes, very much.’ Well, I could hardly say, ‘No, it looks like McSculpture to me’, could I? ‘I like that one the most, I think’, I said, pointing to a cubist female figure, mainly because it was the least nude of all the nudes, and I was feeling embarrassed by the amount of sex on display. Laura seemed completely at ease, babbling away about the beauty of the female form, touching his arm, and I was kicking myself for feeling so awkward. Why couldn’t I just relax? I tried to think of something to say about the cubist nude: ‘I’d put that in my garden’, I mumbled.

‘My work is not for the garden. It is for the house.’

Right. So glad I opened my mouth.

‘What I love about your work is, it’s so organic’, chimed in Laura, coming to my rescue. This was clearly correct because Petr glowed and moved in closer to her.

‘I see the work in the stone. First I look at the stone. I think about this stone. I dream of this stone. After a day, a night, another day, I see what is inside the stone and I free it. You will try my slivovice?’

Well, it was only one in the afternoon, so why the heck not? Petr retrieved his homemade slivovice, a plain green bottle bearing a white label with just the figures ‘1999’ written on it in texta. Yes, we’d try his slivovice. There were no glasses so we swigged it from the bottle. Almost immediately I started to relax. Alcohol! Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I sat back in the late summer sunshine sipping seventy per cent proof and listened as Petr continued

his tale of the essential nature of his work: ‘. . . I feel the curve of the woman . . . The nude is sensual . . . I make love to her as I draw her from the stone . . .’

Laura and he were sitting next to each other, she leaning forward to gaze into his eyes as he talked, speaking exclusively to her. I was beginning to feel that perhaps I should make myself scarce, this being the sort of conversation that only two can have—well, if you’re Laura, I suppose this is a conversation three could have—when a young man ing through the gallery stopped at our table and said, in the unmistakeable Australian twang, ‘You speak English’.

I looked up and said, ‘Even better, I speak Australian’.

His face lit up. ‘No kiddin’. Where you from?’ His twang was even broader than Frank’s.

‘Marrickville. You?’

‘Strathfield, mate. What are you doing here?’ Or rather, ‘Wuhyuhdunnear?’

I could see out of the corner of my eye that Laura and Petr were looking puzzled, wondering what on earth we were saying. It was a strange feeling, but I could see they simply didn’t understand our accent. I’d never realised before that Australians speak a dialect that can be completely incomprehensible to people from other countries, whether or not English is their native language. I warmed to this man; we were part of a brotherhood of Aussies. And he was a goodlooking guy, too, with a charming smile. Blue eyes. Smooth skin. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, and he was probably younger. I wondered . . . maybe . . .

Here we were, in a sculptor’s courtyard in Bohemia, surrounded by erotic art, drinking, not absinthe, but at least slivovice. I thought of Auntie Minnie, seventy-two and kicking over the traces, breaking free and risking all for love and ion. I thought of my own life—hedged about with caution, endlessly worried about consequences. I thought of Laura, scraping out a living so she could devote herself to her art, about to embark on a breezy affair with a bohemian she’d just met, while I hadn’t managed to as much as kiss anyone in the entire seven months I’d been in Prague. Suddenly I wanted, more than anything, to live on the wild side, free of fear and worry, bravely offering up my heart to the river of life, whatever it may bring. I looked at this man from Australia—young, charming, handsome—smiling down at me. Laura and Petr had gone back to their intense commune. I invited Mr Strathfield to me.

Once settled in his seat, the good-looking young guy exhibited appropriate interest in the fascinating older woman sitting opposite him: ‘So, what are you doing here?’

I leaned in close to him—Barry was his name—and told him, in a voice I hoped would convey mystery and allure, that I was a writer.

‘Geez, a writer, eh? You could write about my life.’

I was momentarily stumped. Shouldn’t he have said, ‘Ah, that is why you are so mysterious and alluring. May I kiss your hand?’

‘Um . . .’

‘People hear just one story from my life and they can’t believe I’m still here to tell the tale.’

‘Really?’ He seemed far too young, but who knows? Sky-diving champion? Racing-car driver? International spy?

‘Yeah. I had a psychotic episode once and I was misdiagnosed at the hospital. They gave me the wrong medication and then they sent me to another hospital where they gave me more wrong medication and by the time they figured out what had happened none of the doctors could believe I’d survived, I’d taken so many drugs. Just taking some of those drugs together was enough to kill me, but they were for the wrong disease.’

I sighed. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah. I get bouts of deep depression.’

Don’t we all, mate? I thought. I can feel one coming on now. But once he was on his favourite topic, there was no stopping him. He was intensely interested in himself and convinced that his life experiences were unique, unknown to the rest of mankind, just waiting to be turned into a blockbuster novel. I tried to catch Laura’s eye but she was completely absorbed by her sculptor. I tried to kick her but she was too far away. I was stuck. Barry told me about his psychologists, the anti-depressants he’d been on, the effect they’d had, the astonishment of the hospital staff when told the amount of the anti-depressants he’d been istered, the amazement of his friends when he shared his experiences with them, how no-one could believe he’d had such a bad life. He went on and on and on, and because I too have been an oversensitive, self-absorbed teenager, I listened patiently, swigging periodically from the slivovice bottle and refrained from grabbing him by the neck and shoving his head through the stylised vagina

of the cubist nude.

Finally, finally, many swigs later, Laura looked my way and I practically dived across the table towards her.

‘How are we going for time?’ I said to her, with emphasis. She twigged immediately, being a woman with an exquisite sense for social signals.

‘Oops, we’re late for our train!’ she cried. She began to wrap it up with Petr and I said goodbye to Barry.

‘I should get your email’, said Barry, undaunted by my lack of interest. ‘My friends and I are writing a film script about our lives and I’d like to show it to you.’

‘Oh, I’m no good to you for film scripts. I write books. Totally different thing. Well, goodbye and good luck’, I said firmly, shaking his hand as we parted company.

‘Bad?’ Laura asked as we walked away from the gallery where the sculptor was now back at work on his torso.

‘Appalling. Angst-ridden teenager. You?’

‘Ooh, he’s adorable. Those hands! He’s coming to Prague next week. There’s an opening night party for one of his friends’ exhibitions, so I’ll probably go along.’

Well, naturally. He’d also invited her out for a drink later on in the evening, but she’d turned him down. ‘I said we had a train to catch, but maybe we should go?’ Laura looked at me speculatively. ‘He’s a fun guy. We could stay at his place.’

‘No.’ I was resolute. The last thing I wanted was to get stuck with Laura in bohemian mode and me with no means of escape. We could stay at his place! The mind boggled. I could imagine exactly what that might entail, the two of us sleeping over at the sculptor’s flat. I could see Laura wanted to stay now she had found a playmate, but she could equally see I didn’t, and she generously didn’t press the point. It was, anyway, time to start making our way back to the train.

Coming down from the station it had seemed to me that we’d find our way back easily—just look for the bloody great hill and climb up it. Now, however, I perceived we had a problem. All around us were bloody great hills. Which one was ours? One of the things that makes getting around Èesko difficult is the lack of signage. We had a map of the town which, like most maps you get from tourist centres, was more of a sketch, but it did name the main roads. The trouble was that the actual main roads had no street names on them. The Czechs took them down all over the country when the Russians invaded in 1968 to crush the Prague Spring, so that the bastards would lose their way. They’re not a violent people, the Czechs. Where the Poles or the Hungarians would have got out their Molotov cocktails and formed armed guerrilla units, the Czechs just took down the street signs. Normally, it was one of the things that made me love them, but at that moment I was finding the lack of street signs annoying. The Russians stayed in the country for the next twenty years, however, and I suppose the Czechs didn’t keep the signs all that time.

Laura assured me that she had a perfect sense of direction and never got lost.

After looking around us I thought I’d pinpointed our position on the map—there was a small square behind us and a fork in front of us—and I was turning the map around, trying to match it up to our direction. Laura took it out of my hands, had a look and said, ‘We want to go that way’, and pointed to a road disappearing up and to the left.

‘Do we?’ I peered at the map. ‘Surely we want to go to the right?’

‘No, to the left. I recognise the road.’

‘But on the map the station seems to be on the right.’

‘The map’s useless’, said Laura, impatiently. ‘I’m telling you. We came down by that road.’

She seemed so certain, and a little annoyed that I was doubting her worldfamous directional skills, that I stopped arguing the point and we took the road to the right. We had forty-five minutes to go before our train arrived, so we took the hill gently and Laura returned to rhapsodising about her newfound friend. I listened with half my attention and with the rest looked around for signs saying ‘Station this way’, or any equivalent. Although Laura seemed confident I must say I wasn’t getting any familiar zings from this hill. It was steep, yes, and winding, but nothing else about it reminded me of the one we’d come down. Laura babbled on as we toiled up it.

Time was ticking away. After twenty-five minutes of climbing, with my temper fraying, I flagged down a motorcyclist to ask about the whereabouts of the station. As rough as my Czech was, it became abundantly clear that we were on

the wrong road and that the station was back down the hill, and on the other side of town, although the motorcyclist wasn’t exactly sure where it was. There was a moment of complete silence. Then Laura said, ‘This isn’t the way to the station?’

‘No’, I said, shortly, ‘it’s not’.

‘Huh. Whaddya know? I could’ve sworn this was our hill.’

‘Well, it’s not.’

We were now in urgent need of the station. Our train was leaving in twenty minutes. While Laura wondered out loud how she could possibly have got it wrong, with her perfect sense of direction and her history of never getting lost, I hustled her back down the way we’d come. We ed a bus stop and tried to figure out if we could get a bus back to Prague. Again, there were no signs.

‘I hate these people’, I burst out. ‘What’s their beef with signs? The Russians are gone now, people. Put the fucking signs back.’

We tried to hitch a lift, but after the first three cars refused to stop I, rapidly losing patience, spotted a petrol station and raced in, with Laura jogging reluctantly behind me.

‘How far to the station? Our train leaves in ten minutes’, I yelled.

The shop girl shook her head. ‘You’ll never make it.’ I swore, I cursed. Laura wondered if she could catch Petr at the end of his working day, after all. I told her to put a sock in it. Then the shop girl said, ‘Taxi?’

‘Taxi! Of course!’

She made the call and I paced around outside doing the calculations. It was four kilometres to the station, which would take the taxi say, five minutes, so if he arrived in the next three minutes, we’d just make it. ‘Come on, baby, come on.’ Laura lost interest and tried to tell me more about her sculptor, but I curtly cut her short. I paced some more. With six minutes before our train left, I saw the yellow taxi sign approaching. He pulled into the petrol station and we jumped into the back.

‘Quick!’ I cried, ‘Our train’s about to leave!’ The taxi driver turned around and looked me deep in the eyes. He smiled a slow smile and his gaze intensified. Then he nodded, turned around and hit the gas. As he burst into the oncoming traffic, just missing a speeding truck, I remained frozen.

What was that look about? Did that smile mean anything? Is he going this fast and challenging trucks to impress me? The meaning of the look mattered only because the one thing I’d noticed about him was that he was the dead spit of Clive Owen, and I love Clive Owen. I want to have Clive Owen’s babies. What if this taxi driver was keen on me? I’d get to sleep with Clive Owen. Naturally, Laura had seen all of this. She nudged me: ‘Clive Owen.’

‘I know. Gorgeous.’

‘And keen.’

‘You think so?’ If anyone was going to get that right, it’d be Laura.

‘Oh, I know so. Are you sure you want to go back to Prague?’ She was wheedling now. ‘We could ask this guy out and take him to meet Petr. We’ll go dancing, drink some slivovice. C’mon, it’ll be fun.’

I thought about it. Would that be fun? Was that what I wanted to do? Spend all night drinking and carousing in a fairy-tale town with a sculptor and a performance artist, then have sex with Clive Owen? It sounded as though it was the sort of thing anybody would think was fun, and yet I found myself feeling weary and miserable at the thought. Did I really want to hear more of Petr’s bollocks about his worthless art and Laura’s boasting about her sex-life? I’d have to listen to that for hours before I got to sleep with Clive Owen. And yes, the taxi driver looked like Clive Owen, but was that any guarantee he’d be a good kisser? What if he turned out to be a performance artist, too? Would I have to watch his King Lear in expressive dance form before finding out he was terrible in bed? I suddenly ed that Petr had invited us to a party full of people just like him and Laura. I’d be stuck with a whole houseful of these tedious people in Èeský Krumlov with no means of escape. The fact is, I realised, I found ordinary old Mrs Jendliková and Helen the trader and Sven the call-centre operator infinitely better company than these artists, who seemed to be nothing more than drunk and self-obsessed. Let Minnie run off with her cruise ship singer, and good luck to her. Let Laura live on the cliff edge of poverty, expressing her inner angst. Me, I like a quiet, regular life with not too much stress.

‘No. I need sleep’, I said. I’d had quite enough of this bohemian thing for one day.

Chapter 12 Marienbad with Andy

One area in which I did want to be more bohemian was my dedication to my art. By the time autumn was in full swing I’d been in Prague for eight months and I was starting to seriously worry about my lack of productivity. I was worrying less about getting a job because I’d worked out that by living carefully my five thousand Australian dollars could last me a full year, and this gave me heart: Plenty of time to devote to my writing, or so I was thinking. In that time I’d discovered Snake, Logic and Memory in the games folder of my phone, and there seemed to be no way to delete them. Every day I had to force myself to put away the phone and to sit down at the computer. When I flipped the computer open, turned it on, fired up Word, opened the document optimistically entitled ‘Novel’, re-read the three paragraphs I’d managed to produce in eight months, changed a word, changed another word, changed the first word back to its original, I suddenly leapt up out of my chair with a strong urge for coffee. Can’t write without coffee!

With coffee in hand, I’d think, I’ll just drink this first, then work. I’d switch on the television just to learn a little Czech, of course, and to watch programs I was familiar with from Australia, just to check out the cultural differences. Czech television had its own version of ‘Funniest Home Video’, which, like the Australian one, largely featured small children having horrendous accidents. The Czech show, though, was more rural—kids falling off horses rather than out of cars—but the music was similarly Benny Hill-esque and the laughter was just as canned. Most of the Czech game shows were also recognisable—‘Deal or No Deal’, ‘One Against a Hundred’—but some during the afternoon, my prime viewing time, seemed very Eastern Bloc in nature.

The sets were cheap and creaky, decorated with plastic blocks backlit with orange and purple lights that strobed whenever a contestant answered correctly. The models wore long dresses tied at the back, a fashion last seen elsewhere in

1979, and the contestants won things in plastic bags. On one show, the winning contestant was shown a series of books that looked rather like cheap reference books. They were hard-bound in shiny cardboard and had pictures of rocks and castles on them. That’s a lame prize, I said to myself; my coffee was finished by now but I was able to soothe myself with the idea that I was studying Czech. Then the contestant was asked to pick just one of these books as his prize. Seriously, seriously lame. I did note with interest that ads work even when they’re in a foreign language. Once I saw one for a chocolate biscuit and I had to restrain myself from going to the shops to buy a packet.

The Czech food by now was fighting with my hiking forays for control of my body. I’d reached a stasis point. I didn’t lose any weight, but I was getting fitter despite the fried potato pancakes, and I was able to go on longer and longer hikes. One of the amazing things about hiking was seeing the dramatic change of seasons up close. Autumn painted a completely different picture of the scenery. Prague, for example, is a tremendously green place but slowly, very slowly, the trees turned to gold and then to red. The red was really extraordinary; I had no idea a tree could change to its polar opposite hue. I watched this transformation from my window as entire hills to the west slowly changed colour. At first I saw a solitary leaf on the trees across the street from me morph, then slowly, one by one, more followed suit. I was touched by those leaves, the first ones to go. How did they decide that they’d be the ones to take the plunge? Did they change colour, then nervously look around to see if the rest were following? I would; I’d be sweating on it. It’s such a slow process that for sure there’d be at least a couple of days when that first leaf, glowing gold all on its own, would be saying to itself, ‘Uh-oh. It is September, right?’

It was in autumn that Andy, my wedding photographer friend from Sydney, finally came to visit me. His main purpose was not so much to visit me as to work on an idea he had of taking arty photos of old Europe based on classic films, hoping to break out of the wedding photography business and into the famous artist business. He would spend a week with me taking shots of Marienbad, as homage to Last Year in Marienbad, before going to Rome to take photos of the Trevi Fountain—Three Coins in a Fountain, of course. It didn’t sound like high art to me, but who was I to criticise? At least he was producing

something, which was more than I was doing. Andy was impressed that I was following my dream; I, on the other hand, was carefully concealing the fact that I was more avoiding my dream than following it.

On his first day in Prague, I gave Andy the low-down on the place: ‘The only real danger in Prague is the pickpockets on the trams and metros, and in tourist hotspots you have to watch out for the money changers as well.’ Pickpockets were a constant topic among the expats. Simple precautions prevented robbery— bags with zippers and zips always kept in sight on trams and on the metro stations. Only once did I nearly get caught. I had an open evening bag with me because I was all dressed up and ready to dance the night away. I did think a bit about the bag’s poor security before deciding to take it with me, but it just looked so damn great with my shoes and skirt. I’d figured it was worth the extra vigilance. The metro was crowded and I was standing in the well of the tram, hanging on to one of the metal uprights. People were pressed around me but not too closely—no body-to-body . I had my handbag in front of me where I could see it and I did periodically look down to check it. On one of those glances I noticed the man in front of me had his coat thrown over it. I immediately put my hand in the bag’s opening and was shocked to feel a warm, living thing where the cold clasp should have been. The little bugger had his hand in there, fishing for my wallet. I slapped it away and looked up at him, outraged: ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ He had the cheek to shrug and smile! He was well-dressed, too, but that figures. Why dress like a pickpocket if you’re going into the profession?

The expats were very dismissive of tourists who get robbed. The general view was that those who lost their wallets must have done something stupid. Laura in particular was scathing about them, feeling that if tourists make themselves visible with their maps and cameras they get what they deserve: ‘So there she was, “Oh, look at me, I’m a silly tourist, with my map out, not watching out”, and she was actually surprised to lose her port.’ I thought this was a little mean-spirited of Laura. You can hardly get around a city and see the sights without a map if you’re only there for a few days, and surely not every tourist actually deserves to be robbed. But it felt good to be able to give Andy the benefit of my experience on the subject.

In Sydney, our relationship had been more the other way around. Andy is one of those suave guys who is at home in expensive restaurants and yacht clubs, who knows which celebrities are in town, what the next fashion from New York will be and where the hottest nightclubs are. He is on the short side and going a touch bald, but he is always impeccably dressed in the latest Oxford Street has to offer. No wonder I initially thought he was gay. Andy always took the lead in our friendship. If I suggested a place to eat before we went to see a movie you could be sure that it would be last summer’s hotspot and too, too é now. Mind you, I don’t mind being behind with fashion of any sort, it being a subject I find dull, so I generally let Andy take the lead and lord it over me. Occasionally I’d suggest we go to the cricket rather than the theatre or a film, but I only did that to kid him along. Andy thought sport was beneath contempt. But here in Prague I was in a position to take the lead and I told him to change his money at a bank.

‘Those money-changing shopfronts you see advertising “0% commission—what you see is what you get!!!” are thieves. What you see is what you get, but only if you see the tiny sign at the bottom of the large sign advertising what seems to be excellent rates of exchange. The tiny sign tells you that you will only get this rate of exchange if you are changing over one million crowns. Otherwise, you get the really, really, lousy rate of exchange in the tiny print d right by your feet.’ Good, sound advice from a knowledgeable local. And I thought he was listening to me, until I saw his wallet in his back pocket, pretty much a red flashing light for a pickpocket.

‘Mate, put your wallet in your front pocket.’

‘What?’

‘Your wallet. It’s in your back pocket.’

‘Oh, it’ll be fine. I can feel it.’

At first, I wanted to clock him one. Had he listened to anything I’d said? Or did he think I was making it up? Was there a reason he wasn’t taking me seriously? That question brought me closer to the truth of the matter. This was my home. I knew the rules. I knew how to keep safe and I wanted Andy to have the home advantage. He wasn’t taking it and I felt cut down. Fine, I thought, touchily, let him be robbed. Perhaps Laura had a point, and tourists do deserve what they get.

Andy was so delighted with Prague and so happy to be taken to local restaurants and ancient stone ageways hidden in the back alleys that I quickly forgot my hurt pride as I took him on my insider’s tour of the town, showing him my favourite haunts. ‘Places’, I assured him, ‘other tourists don’t usually see.’ We finished up at Vyšehrad in the south of the city. Vyšehrad is the most wonderful place, and no-one goes there apart from young couples and solitary pensioners. It’s set in a huge park full of statues, and gardens and benches under shade trees. From the edge of the park you can look down on the river, Prague and the biggest, most impressive fortress wall I’ve ever seen in my life. Vyšehrad also has a gorgeous little church that has been ornately decorated in the Art Nouveau style by artists from the early twentieth century. It’s a truly beautiful place, not a magnificent cathedral, just an endless delight, right down to the finger bones of saints on display, lovingly preserved in satin boxes and protected by Plexiglas. The cemetery at Vyšehrad is packed full with Czech celebrities, and Andy and I wandered through, finding Jan Neruda and Antonin Dvoøák and Smetana. I’d heard that the composer Janáèek was buried there as well, but we couldn’t locate him.

We took the tram back to Wenceslas Square and it was there that the question of safe travelling in Prague came to the fore again. Andy needed to change money. At first I really thought he was going to use one of the zero per cent commission places and I strenuously objected. We were standing at the bottom of the square,

the absolute red hot centre of the tourist trade, arguing the point.

‘But it’s right there, why don’t I just use it? It can’t be that bad.’

‘Look, you can use them but you’ll be ripped off. I know a place that’s honest and charges only one per cent commission.’

‘Let’s see, how much have I got here?’ said Andy as, to my horror, he pulled out his wallet. I’m sure he only opened it and looked inside, but to my eyes it was as if he waved it in the air, a bright beacon for every scam artist in the area.

‘For God’s sake! Put it away!’ I hissed.

‘What?’ bawled the oblivious Andy, thinking he couldn’t hear me because of the ambient noise. But it was too late. A street money changer had seen a pigeon. A heavy-set man in corduroys and a sports jacket sidled up to us and stood about half a metre away from Andy, looking in the opposite direction. The reason he was taking such care is that his profession is grift. Street changers offer their targets fabulously good rates of exchange, saying they need the money quickly to pay for their mother’s heart operation in and have no choice but to change it on the streets. You will indeed get all the money owing to you. Unfortunately, it will be in Bulgarian notes, uncannily similar to Czech notes and worth a fraction of the price. It was Mr Hrabal who’d wised me up to this one. Police throng the square looking for just such transactions as the one the heavyset man now put to Andy. Out of the corner of his mouth, speaking very quietly and not looking at Andy, he said, ‘Change money?’

‘Why, yes’, bellowed Andy, ‘I do want to change money’.

For a moment I actually felt sorry for the con man. He leapt, literally leapt, back. I’d never seen anyone spring from one point to another with such speed, and the height he got would have done Nijinsky proud. The poor man’s face whitened and he was gone before Andy’s sentence was finished, leaving the naïf gazing about him, wondering where the nice, helpful man had gone. I gave up trying to protect Andy after that. He could clearly look after himself, in a way.

Andy changed his money at the bank and we parted company. ‘I’ll let you get on with your writing’, he said, sounding just a little bit impressed with me as he headed for the castle. And I didn’t deny that I’d be ‘working’. We planned to meet up again at five p.m., back at my place. Five came, then six, then seven. He finally arrived at seven-thirty, furious. He’d gone to the castle and waited in ‘an interminable queue, really fantastically long and slow moving’, for two hours before getting to the front and realising what the hold-up was.

‘So the old bag behind the counter says, “Which tour do you want?”, and rudely, too, scowling at me.’

‘Ah, how well I know that look.’

‘I didn’t know what she was talking about. Which tour? I just wanted to get into the castle. And she pointed to this sign, sighing and saying something which I’m sure was “Useless foreigner”. There were five different options to choose from, right? All with different parts of the castle complex. So you can’t just get into the place, you have to decide which bits of it you want to see. And how did I know which bits I wanted to see? So I had to stand there reading through them all, trying to work out which one I wanted. And can you believe it, everyone had to do the same thing. What, they couldn’t just put signs up along the queue so you make your mind up before you get to the counter?’

‘No, they couldn’t. This is not a service culture.’

‘You’re telling me’, said Andy, steam coming out of his ears. I took him off to the pub for schnitzel and beer.

When I told Lars and Miroslav from my Czech class that I was going to Marienbad with Andy they had both looked uncomprehendingly at me.

‘Where?’ asked Lars.

‘Marienbad. You know. Like the film.’

‘I’ve never heard of it’, said Miroslav, puzzled.

‘I’m sure you have. It’s famous.’ Who hasn’t heard of Marienbad? And surely any European would know it.

‘Say it again slowly’, Lars said.

‘Marian—bad.’

‘Not Marianské Lazné?’ asked Miroslav, using its Czech name. He sounded as though he couldn’t possibly have guessed right.

‘That’s the one.’

‘Oh, Marrr—EEN—butt’, exclaimed Lars, saying it the German way. ‘But how did you pronounce it? MAR-ion-bad? What is that?’ he asked as he and Miroslav exchanged a wry look.

‘It’s Australian’, I said, defensively, and they both raised their eyebrows further.

The next day Andy and I took the train to Marienbad. We were staying at the Esplanade Hotel, Andy having decided he wanted to go in style. He had booked us a suite so we’d have a room each and a luxurious bath. Andy felt that if we were going to do the nineteenth-century spa thing we weren’t going to be dossing down in any cheap old place. Myself, I’m so used to travelling cheap I’d suggested a pension, only to have Andy sigh on the other end of the phone. He couldn’t bear the thought. He needed thick towels and room service; he needed a bathroom you could walk across, not a shower stall jammed up against the toilet. We had a bit of a tussle about money, and then Andy said either I let him pay for it or he was going alone. I gave in—secretly I was rather looking forward to fluffy white dressing gowns and giant bubble baths.

The Esplanade was a grand old hotel on a hill overlooking Marienbad. We’d decided to take a taxi from the station, even though I’d tried to persuade Andy to walk—I’m suspicious of taxis in this country, and I’m cheap. ‘It’s only two kilometres. Look!’ I’d said as I pointed to the hotel’s location on the map at the station, trying to convince him. ‘Straight up the main road. We can’t miss it.’

‘Where do we get a taxi?’ asked Andy, who’s totally against walking as a form of transport. We’d been outside near a sign with a picture of a taxi on it, but there were no taxis in evidence. After ten minutes of waiting, we were wondering how we were going to get to our hotel.

‘Who knows? And who cares? We can walk. It’ll be easy’, I said.

‘Excuse me, do you speak English?’ Andy asked, accosting a little old lady rugged up in a beanie and parka. The little old lady turned a beady eye up to him, but softened after giving him the once-over. Andy is very neat and unthreatening.

‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’ she asked.

‘Do you speak English?’ Andy seemed not to have understood her.

‘Deutsch?

’ ‘English?’

‘Deutsch?

’ ‘English?’

I could see this might have gone on forever. Andy is one of those tourists who thinks if people aren’t speaking English it’s only out of their unreasoning hatred of foreigners. Everyone speaks English, according to Andy; they have to, because of the internet. That’s all in English, so everyone must speak English, right?

‘Andy, she doesn’t speak English, German is her other language.’

‘Well, ask her where the taxi rank is.’

I sighed and asked her, in Czech, where the taxi-cab rank was. To which she replied, ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

’ Uh-huh. ‘Danke schön’, I replied. Meanwhile, Andy had found the ticket sales clerk and was hailing her through the counter window.

‘Where. Is. The. Taxi?’

‘Train tickets here’, said the ticket sales clerk, not unreasonably.

‘Taxi?’

‘Train.’

‘Taxi?’

Andy has a gift for communication. I gently shoved him out of the way and asked where we could get a taxi. The ticket seller pointed to the street and made a buzzing noise. ‘Bzz, bzz.’

‘Pardon?’ (One of those words that is conveniently the same in Czech and English.)

‘Bzz, bzz’, she said again. ‘Taxi come.’

Puzzled, I went back out onto the street and over to the taxi stand. I saw that there was a buzzer to press. It struck me as a pretty cute way to summon a driver, and Andy and I both pressed it. Within seconds, a man with ginger hair cut into a terrible mullet came down the hill from the local hospoda, wiping the beer foam from his mouth. Our taxi had arrived.

It’s just as well we didn’t walk because, while the Esplanade was only two kilometres from the station, those two kilometres were practically vertical. We had to walk it every day thereafter to get back to the hotel, and toiling up that hill we looked like a couple of those toy wooden birds that bounce back and forth drinking from a cup—foot out in front and body sways back, foot goes down and nose hits the ground; next foot out in front, body sways back again, foot down, nose down on road, and so on. We’d often have to remind ourselves on the hike uphill how gorgeous our hotel was, and wasn’t the walk worth the view.

When we arrived at the hotel, the driver turned around and said, ‘One hundred and fifty crowns’. I thought I must have heard incorrectly.

‘Fifty crowns?’

‘No, one hundred fifty crowns’, said the thieving bastard without a blink.

‘What?? That can’t be right’, I said. He had the chutzpah to look hurt at my remark. He pointed at the meter. Sure enough, it read ‘150 kc’. I cursed myself for not having checked it when we started, which any street-smart local would do. He was now looking at me with that blank look a man gets when he knows all he has to do is tough it out. He had our bags in the boot and they weren’t coming out until he was paid. I felt sick. I hate being ripped off, especially when I know it’s happening at the time. I shook my head and pursed my lips, but I handed over the one hundred and fifty crowns. Andy was already out of the car and waiting by the boot. The cab driver took out our bags and waved us goodbye. I ground my teeth.

‘How much was it?’ asked Andy, who wasn’t going to let me pay for anything.

‘One hundred and fifty crowns!’ I burst out.

‘Hmm, that’s about . . . six dollars. Wow, that’s cheap.’

I was about to tell him that it was in fact incredibly expensive, and that we’d been mightily ripped off by a thief with a bad haircut masquerading as a taxi driver, when it occurred to me that one of us feeling bad was enough. If Andy thought it was cheap, let him keep on feeling good.

Andy was in heaven. The Esplanade looked like a large white wedding cake. Rows of arched windows and white stone balconies ed by statues of naked women draped in stone gauze caught the sunlight, sparkling down at us. Huge glass doors with burnished brass trimmings swung open at our approach, ushering us into a small marble-floored vestibule. It took us three steps to cross it upon which another pair of glass doors opened to reveal a giant foyer before us. A pale stone staircase with a Persian carpet curved up one wall to a mezzanine floor that overlooked the gleaming expanse of marble foyer below. Andy glided happily across this marble prairie to the desk and addressed the woman at reception.

‘We have a booking under the name Andy Meadows.’ He sat in a spindly-legged gold-leaf chair and I sat on the one beside him, carefully, in case it collapsed under me. The woman behind the desk smiled and nodded and said, in perfect English, ‘Of course. We’ve been expecting you, Mr Meadows.’

We’ve been expecting you? I was soooo impressed. I’ve never, in my whole life, stayed anywhere where you’re greeted by name, let alone given to understand that the entire world has been on hold pending your arrival. A man in a uniform with gold epaulettes approached and offered us two glasses of champagne on a tray. I was just about to say, ‘Oh, these aren’t for us, we just got here’, when Andy took his with a gracious ‘Thank you’. I took mine before anyone could change their mind.

‘So, you have the honeymoon package . . .’

What?

‘That’s right’, cooed Andy, ‘my wife and I have just come from Prague’.

What?

‘So, that includes champagne on arrival, three treatments at our spa facility, sauna, swimming pool, dinner for two, and breakfast of course . . .’

‘Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it, darling?’ said Andy, turning to me and squeezing my hand.

What?

But Andy was already up and following the man with the gold epaulettes, who was wheeling away our luggage—Andy’s matched set of Gucci (who would’ve thought there was so much money to be made out of wedding photography?) and my battered and stained old backpack. It was a bit embarrassing, really. If I’d comprehended the luxury of a luxury hotel I’d have borrowed something a bit smarter. We followed the porter into a glass elevator, all its buttons glowing old brass, and slid up to the third floor. The porter took us around a mezzanine balustraded with white marble pillars, and used a card key to unlock our room. Actually it was two rooms, or three if I counted the enormous bathroom. The porter gave us the run-down on the services available to us—too many to , although I made sure I understood how to work the TV when I heard him say we had two hundred channels and that many were in English—at last I was going to see something other than ‘CNN’ in English—as well as Arab channels, SkySports—I was very excited about that one—and European

channels that came in several different languages; you just had to use your remote to select which language you wanted.

‘Too, too European, dahlink!’ I cried.

Andy flitted around with the porter getting the lowdown on everything else while I flicked to SkySports and played with the language button. As soon as the porter had left I dropped the remote and accosted Andy.

‘Honeymoon package?, “My wife and I”?, “Darling”? What was that all about?’

‘Oh, will you relax, it’s just a little misunderstanding’, Andy said, unpacking his bags, lining up his shoes, putting underwear in drawers, carefully draping his tros on hangers. ‘The honeymoon package is always the most luxurious and besides, if the staff think we’re newlyweds, we get treated like old wine. Everybody loves a lover, and all that sort of thing. You’ll see, it’ll be fun. C’mon, you don’t really mind, do you?’

No, I didn’t. In fact if I was going to go on a fake honeymoon I figured it may as well be a honeymoon with champagne on arrival, marble bathrooms the size of Belgium and two hundred cable TV channels.

‘If I ever do get married’, I said to Andy, ‘chances are I’ll disappoint my parents and marry a man with no prospects, and it’ll be a honeymoon in a caravan.’

‘You’d better enjoy this one, then. Now, let’s see’, he said as he retrieved the

Marienbad brochure from the desk and began flipping through it. ‘Ooh, this sounds like fun. We can go to one of the bath houses in town. You can have a flotation session in water imported all the way from the Dead Sea. Gosh!’ Andy looked suddenly thoughtful. ‘That must have been difficult. Do they fly it over? But you’d need a lot of Dead Sea water for a fresh tank every flotation, wouldn’t you? Surely they wouldn’t reuse the water . . . No, on second thoughts, perhaps not the Dead Sea flotation. Massage? Look, you can have lymphatic drainage; you can have electric massage (sounds dangerous!); you can have a mineral water bath, a peat slime wrap (eeeooow!); a mineral slime bath (ick!). The mineral water bath sounds by far the safest. What do you think? A nice long soak in a mineral bath, then we can have a sauna, and then dinner and champagne. Sound like a plan?’

Andy really was the sweetest guy in the world. I agreed that this was indeed a plan, and finished my unpacking by simply lifting my t-shirts and shorts in one bundle and tossing them in a drawer. Andy spent another ten minutes setting up his toiletries in the bathroom, then he took me by the arm and we sauntered through our magnificent hotel and out into the afternoon sun.

Immediately, it was apparent that I had severely underestimated autumn in a European mountain town. I was dressed warmly—as an Australian dresses warmly, in a skirt and a long-sleeved t-shirt—but the wind whipped straight through the t-shirt and turned my skin blue. ‘Jesus! What is this?’ I cried.

‘Here, put your sweater on’, Andy said, holding it out to me. It was only thin, so barely a defence against the north wind blowing straight in from Alaska, but it was also the only one I had. Andy offered me his jacket, but I didn’t feel I could deprive him of his warmth, although I privately thought it was very gentlemanly of him. He’s old fashioned in that way. He likes to hold doors open for women and always walks on the car side of the pavement. I have to say there’s a tremendous charm to men who still do things like that. We bent our heads against the wind and hurried down the hill to the Nové Láznì—the ‘New Baths’—which is a bath house built right on top of a spring.

Marienbad’s entire meaningful history began in the early 1800s when some enterprising soul built a spa on top of one of the springs that gush up from the bowels of an old volcano. The town gradually became more and more prosperous and then, at the end of the nineteenth century, a momentous event occurred which had an enormous impact on Marienbad, an event that seared her very soul and which the Marienbaders are still talking about in hushed tones over one hundred and twenty years later: King Edward VII of England came for a holiday. He liked it so much he came for his next nine holidays and Marienbad became very, very wealthy. Once the King had been there, everyone—the Shah of Persia, the Indian maharajahs, anyone who was anyone and everyone else— had to come to Marienbad to take the waters and undergo the health-restoring medical treatments. Kings and shahs and maharajahs booked out eight hotels at a time and spent buckets of money on mineral water and waffles, these two items being Marienbad’s principal produce, as listed in the brochure Andy had brought along. That’s it. She’s never produced anything else.

Unfortunately for Marienbad, the kings and shahs and maharajahs ceased coming for the waters once King Edward did. The young Prince Edward, third son of Queen Elizabeth II, was the last royal blood to visit. He came here a few years ago to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the golf club. The brochure got pretty breathless about this visit but somehow, ‘Edward, third son of Elizabeth II’, and quite a few fratricides away from the throne, doesn’t have the same ring as ‘Shah of Persia and harem’. Nevertheless, the brochure devoted no less than two whole stories to the occasion, and noted that sea fish, poultry and sundaes were delicacies offered at the gala feast in the young Prince’s honour.

Nové Láznì was where both Edwards had stayed and Andy, being the sort of guy who liked to go anywhere royalty’s been, had booked our mineral bath there. It was just a short walk down the almost vertical descent, which we did in doublequick time owing to the breeze threatening to cryogenically preserve us for all time. Mercifully, the road straightened out enough at the bottom of the street for us to make a dignified entry after our hurtle down. The first thing we noticed about the spas was the line of expensive German cars outside. Mercedes Benzs

and BMWs and Porsches interlaced, each one more gorgeously appurtenanced than the last. Andy paused for an envious roll call—‘the 745, I’d love to have one of those. Oh look, a C55 AMG! Oh, here’s a 996 Turbo! Why can’t I have a 996 Turbo!’

The front doors to the Nové Láznì were the same as the Esplanade’s—brass and glass affairs swinging open at the merest suggestion you might want to enter, a small foyer, then a reception area where an impeccably groomed woman in her fifties with hair starched into a beehive and a fake tan the colour of which can only be described as bright orange, continued to fiddle with her nails without giving any sign she had seen us. Andy, who is used to the silver-service treatment, raised his eyebrows at me, then tapped on the counter.

‘Ja?’, said the woman looking up. Isn’t that German?

‘We have a booking for four o’clock’, said Andy, managing to sound just slightly surprised that she didn’t know who he was.

‘Bitte?’ That is German.

Andy simply looked at her, waiting for her to speak English, but I was outraged. Bitte? I decided to take over and told her, in Czech, that we had an appointment at four. She looked blankly at me, and then said, ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

’ Sprechen Sie Deutsch? No, of course I don’t ‘sprechen Deutsch’, and why aren’t you speaking Czech? I’ve put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into getting around this language. I can speak it, in a way, and now I want people to understand me when I’m in the Czech Republic. My brain exploded. ‘Nein’, I

replied, meekly.

‘I spik little English’, she said. ‘Name?’

‘Meadows’, said Andy, back on familiar territory now that the foreigner had itted she spoke English. He knew it! ‘Andy Meadows. We’ve got two baths at four o’clock.’

‘Ja. You go, pliss, up. One.’ Andy and I looked at each other, puzzled. I had a stab at what I thought she meant.

‘Up one floor?’

‘Ja.

’ And that was that. She returned to her nails and we went through the archway on the left and found ourselves in another foyer. A restaurant opened up on one side, and there were stairs straight in front of us.

The first floor was a long, long hall, reminiscent of a hospital corridor. Doors lined each side and there were two trolleys stacked with white towels and linen at the top of the stairs. We looked left, we looked right. No-one. Outside each of the doors was a chair. We saw a woman in a nurse’s uniform at the end of the hall, but she was too far away for us to hail and before we could get close enough to her to say something, she disappeared. Another nurse appeared at the opposite end so we dashed back the way we’d come. That nurse, too,

disappeared. Andy was beginning to get huffy and I was ing him. Sprechen Sie Deutsch! How many languages do I have to speak?

There was a reservations book on a stand next to the top of the stairs and Andy stopped to see if it would tell us where we had to go.

‘I can’t see my name here’, his huffiness growing by the second. ‘I hope they haven’t got the booking wrong.’

‘No, I’m sure it will be alright.’

‘Bitte?

’ Like magic, a bossy nurse appeared, looking aggrieved that we were interfering with her paperwork. Andy and I indicated we had an appointment and she nodded.

‘Ja. You, this way’, she said to me, pointing west, and then pointed east and said to Andy, ‘You, that way’.

‘These people could do with a lesson in the social graces’, muttered Andy as he was being led by another nurse, who had materialised out of the vacuum and attached herself to him at the bidding of the first. Mine led me in the other direction, and then they parked us each on a chair outside a room and left without another word. I could see Andy but he was too far away to hear. We waved, and then waited expectantly.

After ten minutes, I got the hump and decided to disobey a German’s orders. I went to Andy.

‘What on earth’s going on?’ Andy demanded to know. He’s a good-tempered fellow, but his vast experience of the luxury lifestyle hadn’t prepared him for the Czech version.

‘I have no idea, maybe they’re running late.’

‘Be nice if they told us so’, he said.

‘Welcome to the Czech Republic.’ We chatted idly about the communist hangover and Andy gave me his full and frank opinion on the Czech service credo, and at last, after another ten minutes, my nurse came to take me to my allotted room, without acknowledging Andy in the slightest, leaving him flicking through an FHM magazine he’d dug from his bag.

The room housing the bath was long and narrow with a window high up on the wall opposite the door. The floor and walls were white tiled all the way up to the ceiling. It was a bit of a letdown, really. I’d been expecting something a bit more gorgeous, a bit more ornate and nineteenth century. The ceilings, however, were tremendously, luxuriously high, which gave me the sense of Old World and quality. On one side of the room was a massage table and on the other, a metal bath, adding to the clinical feel of the room. I inspected it with interest since I’d never seen a metal bath before. Running into the bath, coming from the ground beneath the building, was the famed mineral water.

The nurse, an elderly German lady, told me to take off all my clothes, which was a tad embarrassing in front of a complete stranger. With the water still running, I stepped into the bath and had to suppress the urge to step right out again. It was as tepid as the baths I ran for my sister’s small children. I’d expected that a mineral bath would be steaming hot. The water was fizzing and bubbling and there was a distinct gassiness in the air; I felt like I was breathing in tiny bubbles. The nurse turned off the water and watched as I lowered myself in. Once I was seated, the gassiness of the air seem to increase. It felt a mite suffocating but I told myself that if it was good enough for Edward VII it was good enough for me.

It was a strange sensation, sitting in a metal bath filled with tepid soda water, in a bare, tiled room being watched by a nurse. The air felt thick and the gassiness was becoming oppressive. Leaning back against the tub I slid down until my chin touched the water. Instantly, the world turned black and my lungs stopped working. They seemed confused and, for the first time in their lives, unable to decide whether they should go in or out. White lights exploded in tiny bursts in front of my eyes as I struggled to sit upright, my arms flailing wildly, gasping for air. Between the white explosions, I could see the German nurse nodding and smiling. She was flapping a towel at me and saying, ‘Gas. Carbon dioxide.’

Carbon dioxide! I’m breathing in carbon dioxide? I’m going to out, I’m going to die. My lungs need oxygen, not carbon dioxide. I can’t breathe. Carbon dioxide? The world swam before me, and the German towel flapper seemed very far away.

You know, it’s funny. At the moment of my imminent death through lung paralysis, what do you think went through my head? My father reading me fairy tales when I was a little girl? The sun pouring through my mother’s hair? My sister’s children? My first great love? No, none of these. At this critical moment in my life—this critical and probably last moment in my life—my inner vision was filled with ginger-haired Mr Matolscy, my science teacher in Year 10, looking gravely at his class of doodling, com-jabbing, daydreaming fifteen-

year-olds and saying, through his beard, a slight and permanent thread of spittle moving up and down with his lips as he talked, ‘We breathe not to take in oxygen, but to expel carbon dioxide.’

Why on earth would anyone recommend a bath in carbon dioxide? Why not just run a car in a sealed garage and charge customers to sit inside and revel in the health-giving properties of the exhaust fumes? Who are these crazy people that they’ve built an entire town on the medical benefits of breathing in the stuff your body is completely geared to breathing out as waste matter? I’m going to die in a metal bath with Nurse Ratchett waving a towel at me and a ginger-bearded science teacher giving me a lecture on lung function. This is what I was thinking in my death throes.

I managed to struggle upright by clinging onto the edges of the bath and my breath became easier. The nurse continued flapping and smiling and saying, ‘Sometimes happens, sometimes happens’. She bent down and looked into my face, ‘Alright?’

Was I alright? I could breathe again, I didn’t feel any ill effects, my head wasn’t exploding any more. ‘Yes’, I said, ‘alright’. She motioned for me to lie down again. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to but the bubbling and fizzing in the water had died down somewhat and the gassiness in the air had abated, and it seemed like making a fuss to refuse to continue, so I once more lowered myself into the water. The nurse waited to see that no loss of life would occur, then put away her towels and left me to my therapeutic soak.

The bath was still only slightly warmer than body temperature, so not quite enjoyable, and the water had died down to just a slight fizz. Lying in fizzy water was a new experience which kept me occupied for, oh, a few minutes. After that I was scratching around for something to keep my mind off the goose bumps. An activity I highly recommend is to wait until your body is covered in a quilt of bubbles, then put your hand on your stomach, fingers outspread. When you take

your hand away, you can see your hand print. Cool. I amused myself like that for about fifteen minutes and was mighty glad to see Nurse Ratchett return. I had initially thought twenty minutes wouldn’t be nearly enough time in my rehabilitative bath, but by the end I was heartily bored, quite cold and glad to get out. Fortunately, the next bit was fun. The nurse wrapped me in a huge linen sheet and laid me down on the massage table to dry. I felt like a little baby coddled up in a huge towel, and it was immensely comforting.

After being released from the linen baby sheet I dressed and met Andy in the hall. He’d been less than impressed and said how embarrassed he’d been at having to take his clothes off in front of his nurse.

‘Yeah, I was too’, I said. ‘But then I thought she must have seen worse than me —well, the other one had to see you.’ Andy took no offence but laughed and agreed that his nurse had the worst deal. I never found out what the point of inhaling carbon dioxide was, and I don’t think there is a good answer to that one.

It was getting on for five o’clock and Andy decided we should go back to the hotel for a sauna and our champagne dinner. So began our first ascent of the hill to the Esplanade, both of us feeling like mountaineers ascending Machu Picchu, stopping every few minutes to catch our breaths, our hands on our knees, our hairlines brushing the gravel. We made it, and back in our room we changed into our fluffy white bathrobes and hotel slippers. It was marvellous. The bathrobes were thick, soft and luxurious. I swanned around feeling like a woman who’s had the good sense to marry a rich man. After my constrained life of eating at cheap restaurants and eking out my small capital to buy only those things I absolutely needed, apart from occasional luxuries like scented soap or candles, this sudden transportation into a world of absolute comfort was pure delight. I walked from end to end of our huge room, opening the drawers, playing with the tassles on the heavy, velvet curtains, flicking on all the technology. I rolled on the king-sized bed, wrapping myself up in the duvet and testing out the pillows. The bathroom was a particular pleasure. I opened the soaps and tried the face cream and buried my face in the towels. Andy grinned and let me go crazy, but

finally said, ‘There’s more like this in the rest of the hotel, you know. C’mon, it’s sauna time.’

‘Like this? In our bathrobes?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

‘I’m naked.’

‘No you’re not, you’re fully covered.’

‘But won’t they think we should be dressed?’

‘No, in places like this, everyone walks to the sauna in bathrobes.’

This was news to me, but I trusted him. Besides, he’d be in his robe, too, but I decided to huddle close to him, just in case we were arrested for indecent exposure.

There were very few other people in the hotel, which was just as well because I couldn’t get over feeling embarrassingly underdressed, but Andy seemed to have no such inhibitions. When we got to the sauna we found it hot, marvellous and empty, and we spent an hour wrapped in towels, sweating and chatting and laughing. He’s terrifically good company, Andy, with an opinion on everything

and a dry sense of humour. When we were sweated out, we went back to our room and he got a bottle of champagne out of the fridge to drink while we showered and dressed. The champagne was wonderful and by the time we emerged for dinner later that evening, bathed, sauna-ed, showered—as clean as two people are ever likely to be—we were just slightly happy on bubbles.

‘All we need now is a high colonic’, said Andy. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.

The hotel dining room, a series of three rooms separated by archways, was off the bar. We arrived arm in arm and Andy set about being the young milord. He allowed a waiter to usher us to a table, perused the menu, ordered the meal and wine and in general took complete charge, just as he always did in Sydney. After many months of looking after myself, I sat back and enjoyed the experience. We were served by a very amusing waitress, who was friendly and charming and enjoyed practising her English on us. I practised my halting Czech on her and she flattered me shamelessly. I knew she had to be kidding when she called my Czech ‘brilliant’.

Andy and I talked about the last few months, what he’d been up to (not much and he was well over the wedding business, although business was booming) and what I’d been up to (not much, as I now itted to him). He ordered more champagne— French wine, not Czech, because Czech wine is execrable—and then a dessert wine. He was just lovely—funny and charming, the perfect date. When she brought us the dessert wine, our waitress said, ‘You’re such a happy couple. I hope I find such a wonderful love one day.’

To which Andy replied, ‘Yes, I’m a lucky man’, and we smiled at each other.

We staggered up to our room and fell onto the king-sized bed, and then, while I

was still giggling about the waitress calling us a wonderful couple, Andy hesitantly, gently, took my face in his hands and kissed me. I looked into his soft eyes and only paused for a second before I kissed him back. He put a hand around my waist and pulled me closer. He undid the buttons on my skirt, one thing led to another, and I have to report that Andy really knew what he was doing, to my surprise. Afterwards, we fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.

Chapter 13 Marienbad with Andy, Part Two

And that’s how we woke up. We’d slept intertwined, neither of us stirring. When I opened my eyes, my first thought was, I feel marvellous, but in the next instant, because I’m me, I began to worry. What did this mean? What did Andy think? Was this serious? I tried to examine my own feelings, but as soon as my brain started to apply itself it I realised it had a hangover to deal with. Best just to lie here and feel warm and snug, I thought. Andy stirred, opened his eyes and looked at me. Then he slowly smiled.

‘Hi, beautiful.’

I smiled back: ‘Hi.’

‘That was an unexpected surprise.’

‘Wasn’t it, though?’

‘How you feeling?’

‘Hungover. You?’

‘Same. We need breakfast, but first . . .’

We had breakfast, delivered to our room—about forty-five minutes later.

I’ve heard about an experiment where women who had male sex hormones brushed onto their upper lip reported feeling safe, sleeping better, waking more refreshed and generally feeling happier than the other women in the control group, who did not have a dose of the hormone, in life or in lab. It appears that just breathing in men makes us happier, increases our well-being, and probably prevents cancer and cures wooden legs. That certainly is how I felt the day after my tryst with Andy. I’m not the most sexed-up girl in the world. I know women who have to have sex twice a day, Laura for instance, and I am full of iration for them. They seem like real women to me. If I go without sex for long enough, and I usually do, my body just closes off the function, switches it into hibernation mode, as it were. I don’t even own a vibrator—I did have one once, but I forgot to remove the batteries and when I finally unearthed it from my bottom drawer in a moment of desperation, the decaying batteries were leaking some awful yellow substance that quite put me off. But at Andy’s first kiss, my body threw the switch to on. The pilot light in my ovaries fired up and suddenly I ed how great it was to have really good sex. It’s great! Isn’t it great? It’s really great! And, just as the lab experiments predicted, I woke up after a deep sleep, refreshed, happy and with a fabulous feeling of well-being. What is it with that male sex hormone? Can I get a bottle of it?

Andy, too, had a smile on his face, but he’s a man, so what do you expect. We pottered around the room getting ready for our day. At least, Andy pottered around. I was showered and changed in ten minutes flat. It comes from my days as a student, memorising the French titles of Proust’s novels. I was working in a window factory and had to be at Smithfield, about four hundred light years away from the inner-city suburb where I lived, at seven in the morning, four mornings a week. Since I’m not a person who’s really awake until ten, I learned to get up at quarter to six, shower and dress and get to the station to catch the ten past six train to the industrial wastelands, all in my sleep. That was nearly twenty years

ago, but the ability to wash and dress at the speed of light has never left me.

Andy, I can safely say, has never worked in a factory. I spent a happy hour flicking through the European sports channels and watching the ‘Al Jazeera’ news while Andy took a long shower, then applied his lotions, one for the body, one for his hands, one for his face and one for his eyes. Andy had only recently started worrying about his burgeoning crow’s feet but he was worried enough to affect Elizabeth Arden’s share price. I cannot believe what people have the gall to charge for a tiny tub of, ittedly gorgeous-smelling, cream. Andy thought it was worth it. My happiness that morning was only slightly marred by an unfortunate incident. Andy came out of the bathroom holding a cake of soap and looking mildly upset.

‘What’s up?’

‘Did you use this soap?’

Did I? I wasn’t sure. It looked like any other soap to me. ‘Was that the soap in the shower?’ I asked.

‘It was one of the soaps in the shower. The other is unused.’

I sensed that something was severely wrong, but for the life of me I couldn’t work out what. Logic suggested only one thing: ‘As I’m the only one who’s had a shower, I guess I must have used that soap. Why? Is there something wrong with it?’

Andy sighed. ‘No, but it’s not the shower soap. The other soap is the shower soap. It’s got the hotel’s name written on it. I suppose you used this on your body?’

‘Ye—es’, for some reason I hated to it it.

‘It’s my face soap.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’s for my face. It’s not ordinary body soap.’

I must say that I didn’t think using face soap on one’s body was really that bad, but I suppose face soap, since it’s specialised, is expensive, and I asked myself how I’d like it if someone used my expensive perfume to wash their car. Not happy. Some things are dear to one.

‘Sorry about that, chief, it won’t happen again.’ When you’ve transgressed it’s best just to apologise and to not try and justify your actions. It only makes your victim madder.

‘Oh well, no harm done, I suppose’, he said, sounding as though he was diplomatically avoiding a national scandal of Watergate proportions as he went back into the bathroom.

Face soap, eh? Who knew men used these things? I returned to the ‘Eurosport’ where Andy Murray was making a surprise burst up the rankings. Finally my Andy was washed, dressed, creamed and cologned, and we could leave our room. And not before time. He’d recovered from the Great Soap Incident and was as chirpy as you could hope for in a travel companion.

At breakfast, the chatty waitress gazed at us and said, ‘I’ve never seen such a happy couple’, and Andy gave me a little grin. Then, on the way out of the hotel, Andy did something which made my heart turn over and obliterated the niggling doubts that had arisen with the face soap: he took my hand.

We spent the day wandering around Marienbad, inspecting its magnificent old buildings dating from the late 1800s when the town, according to Andy’s brochure, was at her peak. Up until the First World War, it said, the place boomed.

‘Hmm! Is there any escaping these world wars in Europe?’ I exclaimed. ‘It seems as though every aspect of life here is defined by them.’

Unfortunately, ever since the demise of the Austro–Hungarian empire, Marienbad has been gradually falling to bits. Now the magnificent old buildings were in a state of appalling disrepair, their cladding falling off and balconies teetering. We noticed some of the buildings had been restored so we surmised the place might be undergoing a bit of a resurgence, although no-one could confirm this for us. The centre of the town was just gorgeous, and it was there that most of the restoration had been done.

As in Prague, the Marienbaders had brightened up the place with colourful paintwork. These beautiful buildings with their intricate scroll work and delicate balconies, with their statues framed in alcoves or holding up stone awnings, with

their geraniums falling in enormous bunches from window boxes, caught the mountain sun and shone down gold and pink and pale green onto the squares below. Most of the streets were arranged around a little square, with a lawn in the centre, stepped and dotted with trees and shrubs, the occasional statue peeping through.

The main town square was actually a rectangle with a fountain at one end, a spa pavilion at the other and a beautiful old colonnade down one side. The colonnade was terribly grand and Old World. Giant, white, iron arches shaped like walking sticks and decorated with iron scrolls and curlicues ed a wooden roof that curved over the top. Dropping down the sides were enormous glass panes letting in the light. Walking through this colonnade felt like stepping into a Jane Austen novel, despite the internet café tucked between the cake shops. The wooden s were decorated with soft, crayon-like paintings, swathes of colour, depicting mythological creatures and scenes. I got very carried away with those images, and waxed long and lyrical to Andy about the nineteenth century’s romantic leanings, their longing for the mythological and how it was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Then Andy read in the guidebook that the paintings were done in 1979.

‘Still, no doubt a completely authentic copy’, I said, hanging on to my theory.

The striking thing about Marienbad was its sense of time stopped. No building showed any sign of wanting to do anything other than replicate its heyday. The spa pavilion at the end of the square was called the Pavilion of the Cross Spring, originally built in 1818 and restored to its full glory in 1912, so at least that was authentically old. Its roof was a cupola ed by Ionic columns and adorned with a golden cross. It was a gracious old building housing taps running from each of Marienbad’s springs. There were other, smaller pavilions dotted through the tiny town but they housed only one spring each. The Pavilion of the Cross Spring was designed to give the invalids a taste of each one before tottering out to visit their favourite spring at the source. Here you could pay three crowns for a plastic cup, or you could pay a lot more and buy a rather naff, blue and white

ceramic mug with a picture of a spa house on it, and a sipping spout coming out of the handle. There was an ad for these mugs in the hotel’s brochure: two tourists looking coyly at each other as they sucked their spa water from the spouts. They both had hair styles that were the cutting edge of fashion when ABBA won the Eurovision song contest, and they wore checked woollen vests. That was enough for us—we got the plastic cups.

Andy and I started at the three basins fed by the Rudolf Spring. The waters could be taken hot, cold or warm. I went first, filling my plastic cup from the thin copper spout that produced the cold water (seeming a safer bet than hot or warm), and immediately wished I hadn’t.

‘Blechhhh. Pure sulphur.’

‘Oh dear’, said Andy. ‘I did wonder if it would be horrible.’

I recalled Georgette Heyer novels where her characters were frequently going to Bath to take the waters and always hated it.

‘You can try the next one’, I told Andy.

Andy bravely tried a warm drink at the spout emanating from the Maria springs. ‘Actually it’s not bad. Sort of fizzy’, he said.

I tried the hot, just so we’d have our bases covered, and he was right. It wasn’t bad at all. We made our way around the pavilion and tried all seven of the

springs and it was surprisingly delicious. We instantly forgot which was which, except for the Rudolf Springs, but we had fun being nineteenth-century invalids.

The atmosphere in the pavilion was one of good cheer. Here, the tourists gathered at the start of their stay. The average age of these Marienbad tourists looked to be about a hundred and four and they were all, without exception, speaking German. It also seemed as though we were the only ones too embarrassed to be seen using a ceramic sipping cup. Once we’d tried all the waters we left the pavilion, clutching our plastic cups, and made our way down to the Singing Fountain at the end of the square.

The fountain was beautifully constructed along very clean, metallic lines. The water was channelled through round spouts in interlocking, steel plates and leapt about with German precision in lots of intricate patterns. Every two hours, the Singing Fountain played a song. There were eight of these songs, played on rotation according to a timetable printed in the guidebook, all of them popular tunes dating from the height of the Austro–Hungarian Empire. We stopped and waited with the growing crowd for the hour to strike. When it did, the fountain started to play ‘Ave Maria’ and the water jets danced in accompaniment. It was almost unbearably touching.

I took Andy’s arm, tears nearly brimming, and said, ‘You know who built this fountain? Extremely wealthy, romantic nineteenth-century souls, building something beautiful out of the industrial age. People who wanted to marry the apex of engineering with the apex of art.’

‘It says here the fountain was built in 1982’, said Andy.

Walking through the town we spotted invalids tottering from one spa treatment to the next on canes or in wheelchairs. Other, hardier, groups whizzed across the

lawns outside the smaller pavilions on foot, using skiing stocks as walking sticks, tanned fitness instructors shouting encouragement to propel them along. On our wanderings we came across a ruined building that looked like it may have been a hotel. We pushed open a splintered old door and found inside a series of decaying rooms with concrete floors and ancient tile work on the walls. We guessed we were in what was once the kitchen complex. It was very spooky, and we could feel the ghosts of centuries-old servants breathing down our necks. We tried to egg each other on to go further in, but neither of us had the courage. Ghosts aside, it smelled of long-forgotten disease—plague came to mind—and it looked as though it was going to fall into a rubble heap at any second.

Nevertheless, the gardens around it were beautiful; lush and green and carefully laid out with paths disappearing around bends, and a mossy, wooden bridge crossing a deep creek, ferns sprouting from either side. There was a smaller house that had been restored next to the ruin. This turned out to be the Ferdinand Spa, which, in addition to the waters spouting forth into three copper basins, had a lovely anachronism—the Gargle Room. This was a long white-tiled room with a wall down the centre. There was a copper basin at one end where you collected your hot spring water and a series of tiled cubicles attached to the centre wall, each containing a porcelain basin. The basins were for spitting into, after you’d gargled your spring water. Well, we couldn’t miss this one, so we went into ading cubicles and gargled and spat along with all the other people in the cubicles around us.

Andy and I decided we needed to have another go at the bath treatment, although we had to abandon one spa house when we refused to have a health check done by a nurse. They got very annoyed when Andy said we just wanted a bath. Can’t have one of those unless you pay for blood tests, apparently. We’d seen in the brochures back at the Nové Láznì how seriously the locals took the idea of the rehabilitative spa. Teams of doctors and nurses were on hand to give a full examination to the ‘patient’, identify all their ills, and then design a program of drinking, floating and rehabilitation massage with essential oils. The pamphlets these hotels used to spruik the water were written in hilarious pseudo-scientific speak: ‘The water influences urine composition by inducing a water diuresis, it stimulates kidneys into faster activity and positively affects intestine peristalsis.’

In other words, drinking this water will make you pee a lot. And since the recommended dose is two litres a day, this seems inevitable, no matter what the special minerals are in the water.

We abandoned our plans for a bath and decided to have lunch instead. After looking for some time for a halfway decent restaurant we walked into one promising place (‘promising’ meaning ‘has Czech food and charges reasonably’) and almost instantly walked out again. The smell of food fried in stale oil wafted past our noses, and the dining room, spread empty before us, was a vision of peeling laminate, dusty plastic flowers and cheap, paper napkins. We did find a decent restaurant, finally, but there is a sense in Marienbad of sluggishness, of a tourist trade that consists of either very wealthy Germans who arrive in BMWs for personalised care packages provided by hotel doctors, including a diet prepared by the hotel, or moderately well-off Germans who arrive by the bus load and eat canteen-style food at horrible restaurants. It felt as though food not often eaten—prawns, for instance—would happily be left in the freezer for years before being microwaved when an optimistic tourist orders the prawn cocktail.

A sense of time warp pervades the shops as well. Not since 1981 have I seen such terrible clothes on display in store windows. In Marienbad they’re still selling batwing sweaters with shoulder pads. ‘Where does all the eighties stuff come from?’ I asked Andy. ‘Could there be a factory somewhere still churning out fluffy, purple sweaters with shiny gold shot through them?’

‘And who in their right mind would buy this junk, let alone wear it?’ Andy replied. He took as many photographs of the appalling clothes as he did of the magnificent buildings.

Andy was just adorable that day. He held my hand, worried about whether or not I was warm enough, opened doors for me, was witty and warm as he always is, and I began to wonder whether or not he and I might have been missing something— perhaps we were made for each other, just as the waitress had said.

That night, we ate, we made love, we drank champagne, we sat on our balcony and talked, we made love again, and then we slept. I was a very happy woman.

The next day was a hiking day, and here’s where I took over arranging things from Andy, keen to show off my newfound hiking skills. I had the maps and I knew where we were going. Once again, I was ready in twenty minutes, having carefully showered with the shower soap. And once again, Andy took an hour and a half. I was getting a bit annoyed.

‘We’re going on a hike, not dinner and dancing.’

But Andy was unperturbed; so what if he was going to get sweaty straight away, ‘I still need to put on my sun block, don’t I?’

I’d planned on a red trail, and took us down the steep hill from our hotel—we’d started referring to it as the North Face— because that was where I’d seen the red marker for the trail. When we got there, I consulted my map again and found that the track led straight back up the hill.

‘You mean, we came down and now we have to go up again?

Why did we come down?’

‘Because the red marker is here.’

‘But the trail goes up. Couldn’t we have just stayed up?’

‘I don’t know where the trail goes.’

‘It goes up.’

‘Yes, obviously it goes up, but I’m not sure up where exactly. This is the only trail marker I’ve seen.’

There was a silence. Then Andy sighed. ‘Right-o, then. We go up again.’

I sympathised, of course. I didn’t want to have to climb the hill again either, but I’m not the greatest orienteer that ever lived, and I wasn’t prepared to risk missing the trail by guessing and getting us lost before we even started.

Andy had assured me he was very fit and keen for exercise, so I’d chosen a hike to a spot called Prameny, to the north of Marienbad. I’d done my calculations— each of the grid squares on the map was a one-kilometre square, so I counted up the grids and told Andy that the hike was fifteen kilometres there and back. If we walked four kilometres an hour we should do the whole trip in about four hours, or four and a half counting stops along the way, which seemed a reasonable day’s hiking to me. I wondered if fifteen kilometres might be a bit much for a beginner, but Andy was fit, and also a man, so he insisted that whatever I could do, he could do, too.

Andy had bought himself some hiking shoes from the Bata shop in town, since

he didn’t own any. When I saw the Bata shop, I was brought up short. I wore those shoes at school and this was the first time I learned Bata was a Czech company. I never knew that my school shoes were made in my Dad’s home country. It made me feel as though, unbeknownst to me, I’d had a little part of my Dad with me every day even though I didn’t see him in those years. While Andy tried on shoes, I looked around me, especially at the school shoes, my heart humming but just a little bit sad.

Andy was very proud of his new shoes. They had a buckle on them which he particularly liked, and which I thought only a man who liked musicals would wear, but I kept my opinion to myself. Apart from the small matter of going down the first hill only to have to go up it again, the day began well. The air was so fresh and sparkling, it was like breathing in pure mineral water. It was marvellous, almost intoxicating. It was such a pleasure I found myself standing still and inhaling just for the novelty experience. What with the air quality and the drinking lots of water, it’s no wonder people feel better after being there.

The trail took us through typical Czech pine forests, the trees tall and straight, the sun pouring through the foliage onto the moss-covered rocks and soft forest floor below. To the north of the town, we ed through the park that held the Ferdinand Spring, the path winding through carefully laid gardens. We were about fifteen minutes into our walk and it was at this point that I realised that the medical pamphlets, although hilariously used-car-salesman-ish in tone, had been right about one thing. The spring waters are a diuretic. We’d slugged back half a litre before setting out and suddenly, urgently, I needed to pee. I needed to pee now. I needed to pee so badly I was sweating with the effort to keep it in. I was walking beside Andy, my eyes swinging to and fro in a frantic search for those two little letters: ‘W’ and ‘C’. My bladder was sending code-red signals to my brain. I told Andy my emergency.

‘Me, too’, he replied in a strained voice, ‘and I can’t see a toilet sign anywhere!’

We rounded a bend and I saw we were alone. No tottering Germans behind us and none in front. There was a bush about chest-high to the right. I made a snap decision.

‘I’m going in!’ I plunged into the bush and ducked my head down into the greenery so no-one could see me. Straight away I could see I was no pioneer. The bush, although thickly foliaged and hard to negotiate, had scraps of toilet paper trampled into the ground near its base. ‘Eeeeeoow’, but who cares when you’re desperate?

Andy had dived behind the bush next to mine and, on emerging, reported that his, too, had shown signs of previous use. Deeply relieved, we carried on, leaving the parkland and entering the forest. Thanks to the diuretic nature of the spa water, Andy and I communed with nature approximately once every half an hour that day. It seems as though half a litre of mineral water can be transformed into four hundred litres of pee. In the forest we could at least pee freely. Back in the town I was caught out several times on a road or in a park, and I never dived into a bush without finding evidence of a previous reliever. We wondered how the old Germans coped with this, the elderly having much less reliable bladders, more underwear and less agility for clambering into thick undergrowth.

Andy and I tramped along the trail in good charity with one another. The initial hill had evened out—there were others, of course, but Andy couldn’t blame me for those—and the forests and fields were filled with remnants of Marienbad’s decayed glory. Early on we came across a small, decrepit, although obviously once rather marvellous, gazebo tucked away in the forest. On peering inside, we saw that this gazebo housed a well. The water fizzing up smelled strongly of sulphur—could this be a spring in the middle of the forest? The only way we’d know was if we drank the water. I was game but Andy wasn’t going to have a bar of it.

‘Wild boar and other diseased and filthy animals would have drunk from that

well, wouldn’t they?’ He wasn’t too keen on my doing it either. Looking back, Andy may have been thinking he’d have to kiss me later, and what if he got a wild boar disease from me? I just thought he was being a bit of a wuss, so I ignored both him and the smell and scooped a handful of water into my mouth. I’m glad I did. It was the most delicious water I’ve ever tasted—sweet and soft and fizzy—and coming straight out of the ground. According to the sign next to the well, it was replete with iron, too. I drank some more, exhorting Andy to try it, but the filthy animals were exercising his mind and he couldn’t overcome it. Shame, he really missed something. It’s not often you come across a well of mineral water in a forest.

I was longing to share with Andy the delights of eating fruit right off the trees or berries from brambles by the side of the path, but the fruit season was ending. I did find four raspberries, the most delicious I’ve ever tasted, two for Andy and two for me.

These he liked, but when I spied an apple tree in a tiny village and plucked an apple off for him, he screwed up his nose.

‘It’s got spots on it.’

‘It’s right off the tree. Nature’s own. You’ll never taste anything like it again.’

‘I don’t like spots on my fruit. And there are dents in it. Is that a hole? What if there’s a bug in it?’

‘How can you not like fruit right off the trees?’ We were city people. The only fruit we ever saw was either in a net wrapping, nestled in styrofoam or floating

in syrup in a can, and always picked unripe and stored in a cold room, never sun ripened. This was a tart, juicy and, yes, spotty apple. Right off the tree. I wasn’t having any of this. ‘Just eat it!’ I said. You can turn down one too many experiences.

Andy took a bite, made a face, and handed it back to me. ‘Yuk’.

I took the apple back frostily.

‘Fine. I’ll enjoy it myself.’

I seemed to have slightly underestimated the time it would take us to reach our endpoint. We had been tramping for about two hours before stumbling across a tiny village. The village was so small it wasn’t on the map, but we were looking forward to a beer. There’s almost no village in the Czech Republic that doesn’t have its own hospoda. Except this one. We stopped a woman on the street to ask the way and, after looking blankly at me, she indicated that she only spoke German. Much g later, she let us know that there was no pub but pointed down the road to a tiny square in the middle of the village. There we saw a water pump made of iron and painted blue, the paint flaking off. It was as tall as I was, with a great iron handle that took all my strength to manoeuvre up and down. One push and air gasped from the pipe mouth. Another and water started to dribble through with a gurgle. A third and a thin stream ran into my free hand. I loved it—so terribly nineteenth century.

The water didn’t taste great so maybe Andy was right to refuse it. But how many times in your life are you a weary traveller drinking from the village well using a big iron hand pump? We looked around and saw the decrepit nature of the village, cladding falling off the buildings, no people to be seen. The lack of hospoda indicated a level of decay in this village that was beyond poor. The

story was the same in every village we came to. The buildings were collapsing on themselves, people were not much in evidence, and none had a pub—an indication of the hard times that Marienbad and her satellite villages had endured. Strangest of all, though, was the complete lack of Czech language in these villages. We were in the Sudetenland, only a few kilometres from the German border. It makes you realise how very tightly the German and Czech nations are woven together. You can live your whole life in one of these villages, technically Czech, without ever having to learn a language other than German. It was a strange little part of the world.

According to my calculations, at the two-hour mark we should have reached Prameny, a village big enough to have a pub. I assumed that economic depression affects the country in the Czech Republic in the same way it affects the country in Australia—really tiny one-horse towns die and fall off the map, but medium-sized towns and villages prosper as the inhabitants of the dead, onehorse towns move in. Prameny was written in sizeable letters on the map so we’d get a beer there for sure. If we ever got there. After four hours of walking, an increasingly silent Andy finally demanded to look at the map. I showed him the trail we were on.

‘We’re on the red trail?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Andy sighed. ‘To Prameny?’

‘Yes.’ I’m sure I could hear his teeth grinding together.

‘And how did you figure it was fifteen kilometres?’

‘I counted the grids. Each grid is one kilometre.’

‘I see.’ There was a short silence as Andy took some deep breaths. Call me psychic—but I could tell he wasn’t happy about something.

‘So, did you notice that the trail sometimes crosses the grid diagonally?’

‘Yes.’

‘And did you count that as one kilometre?’

‘Ye-e-s.’

‘If the trail crosses a grid, it’s not one kilometre. It’s more like one and a half kilometres.’

‘Oh.’ I began to see the problem.

‘And did you notice that the trail has a lot of twists and turns?’

I felt that Andy had had his time as inquisitor, so I said, ‘Okay, how long do you think the trail is?’

He got a piece of string out of his pocket (What is that doing there, by the way? Who is he, Mary Poppins?) and did what I suppose I should have done in the first place. He placed the string along the trail on the map, twists and turns included, then he straightened it out and measured it on the grid lines. There was a short, seething silence. I wondered if I should break it with a merry quip, but thought better of it. Who knows how far the poor man’s patience would go?

‘How long do you think this trail is?’

‘Longer than fifteen k’s?’ It seemed a good bet.

‘It’s thirty-two kilometres long. We’ve walked four hours and we should reach Prameny any minute now.’

I looked around me, wondering what to say. I suppose I could have come up with something better, but I said, ‘Lucky it’s a nice day for it.’

I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I’ve never actually seen anyone turn purple before. Andy let me have it. His feet hurt, his new shoes were too tight, he was thirsty, he didn’t want to spend all day in the jungle, he wanted a Mai Tai in a luxury hotel, not a beer in a crumbling village, should this village even have a pub which he very much doubted, and if only I’d been more careful in planning this trip we wouldn’t be in this situation. Didn’t I ever think? Did I never prepare? I could have got us both killed if this terrain had been harsher! Did I think about that?

I didn’t point out that the terrain wasn’t harsh and that the worst that was going to happen to us was that we’d be very tired at the end of the day—a feeling I always enjoy, but something told me Andy didn’t feel the same way. I was pretty miffed, though. This seemed over the top. I let him finish and said, with what I wanted to be quiet calm, but which I very much fear was instead injured snippiness, that we should at least struggle on to Prameny for a much needed beer. Andy agreed and we marched forward in silence. Prameny, thank God, had beer, and that went a long way to cheering us both up. I did the right thing and apologised for not working out the distance properly, and he handsomely apologised for yelling at me.

The trail back was glorious. It took us another four hours and I loved every minute of it, but poor Andy had a terrible time. At one point the forest became very muddy and sodden and he got his new shoes filthy. The amount of mud sticking to them caused him great distress: he’d never get it off; his shoes would be stained and they were only a day old. Just as he was bemoaning all this, we ran into a herd of gnats, which took advantage of his open mouth to explore an interesting cave. Andy coughed most of them out but swallowed one or two as he flailed his arms around trying to wave them away from his face, squealing, his eyes screwed shut. Andy hates insects. After that he just endured. I bounded along, with Andy trailing behind me longing for it to be over.

When we got back to Marienbad, he headed straight for the bathroom and stayed there for two hours, soaking in a tub and giving himself a facial. His mood improved after that, but I fear the day ruined the romance for me. His refusal to eat the apple or drink from the wells, his distress over mud and gnats, his preference for spa baths over hiking, I just couldn’t get past these things. Andy, too, had revised his opinion. A sports-watching, outdoors type like me, as fun as the sex was, was no long-term proposition for an elegant man like Andy. We didn’t say anything, but we both knew it.

At breakfast the next morning, the chatty waitress gazed at us with soppy blue eyes and said again, ‘You’re so much in love!’ Some people are just blind.

Chapter 14 Losers in Love

If my love life had come to a crashing halt, so too had Minnie’s. It turned out that Leonard the cruise ship singer toy boy had a girl in every port, the blackguard, and it was not part of his plan to take on Minnie permanently. So Minnie returned to Sol. He came back home from a filter convention one day to find her in the kitchen making rock cakes as though nothing had happened. Sol blinked, then he too carried on as though nothing had happened, and apart from the fact that he’s taken to chlorinating the pool so obsessively that you can’t swim in it without suffering permanent eye damage, so my stepmother told me, things seemed to be back to normal. Minnie just said she’d ‘changed her mind’, according to my stepmother (who couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice), and besides, Minnie said, ‘Sol can’t look after himself’, which is perfectly true, if disingenuous.

The sad fact is that the object of her wild ion, her free-spirited, exotic lover, had turned out to be just as dull and sordid as the rest of us. There was no more bohemian-ness at home than there was in Bohemia. Nevertheless, I felt for Minnie. I felt for myself, too. I didn’t want to be Andy’s girlfriend, that was for sure, but he had awakened in me an acknowledgment of my almost desperate loneliness. No, I didn’t want to be in love with Andy, but I did want to be in love —more than anything I wanted to be in love. Minnie was right—what is life without love? Why should we not have buckets of the stuff, every day, pouring into our lives, creating sunshine and warmth and ease? Why shouldn’t we have ion and affection, if not romance, which is, after all, an ephemeral thing, and unsustainable in the long run.

I was lonely in Prague. I had friends, but no-one to call my own. No-one whose job it was to look after me when I was sick, or to be there, on hand, every Saturday night. Things were a little awkward between Andy and me during the two days he was in Prague after Marienbad. We didn’t talk about it. We had both

come to the conclusion that our fling was a mistake, and we both knew the other agreed, but it seemed gauche, somehow, to say, ‘You? You must be joking.’ We both made an effort, but my heart was sore with the idea that I may have lost a friend. I said goodbye to him at the main train station, waving him off to Rome, then went home and had a hearty cry.

Bless him, Andy called me from Rome. ‘I just wanted to say’, he said, ‘that I love you’.

I burst into tears.

‘Oh, honey, don’t cry.’ He waited for a moment, then continued in a speech I could hear he’d given thought to: ‘You’re a good friend, one of my closest, and I’d hate to think that a fling, which was deeply enjoyable but I think we both agree, ill-advised, would come between us. I’d hate to lose you.’

I wept some more and told him that I’d hate to lose him, too.

‘Love comes in all sorts of forms’, said my lovely Andy, ‘and ours, while it doesn’t involve sex or a relationship, is precious to me.’

‘Me too’, I gulped.

We both started to laugh. Relieved, Andy told me all about the Trevi Fountain, and the Colosseum—‘Didn’t Anita Ekberg make a film using the Colosseum as a set?’—and the Circus Maximus—‘It’s just a grass oval, but that might be arty,

don’t you think?’ I agreed that photos of a grass oval would be arty, particularly if done in black and white.

‘Good idea, and grainy. Maybe taken in the rain.’ He carried on happily about the sights of Rome and about the clothes and the shoes he’d seen, and went into some detail about the amount of weight he could take back in his luggage without having to pay extra, since he could see that he was going to get next year’s wardrobe in Italy. After half an hour of this, when I was starting to tire of the subject of cufflinks and brogues, we rang off, back to normal.

The question of friendship—meaningful, affectionate friendship, the kind I’d had plenty of in Sydney, thanks to forty years of finding and keeping people I liked —continued to plague me. I had acquaintances in Prague. I had people I hung out with, did things with, but they were people I would not normally be friends with. Sometimes this had been a part of the adventure, a new type of relationship I wouldn’t have experienced in Australia. I got to know the lovely Mrs Jendliková in a way I had never known Ivy, my ancient next-door neighbour in Sydney, and we took care of each other, keeping each other informed of our comings and goings, making meals for one another. This had been a sweetness in my life, a sense that two people on their own would look out for each other just by virtue of being close and alone, a sort of village feel. But I wasn’t really soul mates with Mrs Jendliková.

Zuzana I liked, but again, yuppies aren’t really my thing. Laura, well, Laura I ired and I appreciated her generous side, but I often had to remind myself of this as she was telling me about her adventures with strap-ons and video cameras. Danny was just a guy I hung out with because he was around and moderately interesting. The only person I really felt akin to was Sven. He was the only person who genuinely made me laugh out loud, the only one I felt completely comfortable with being myself. We didn’t talk much, except when his heart was breaking, and even these conversations were mostly one or two sentences followed by a contemplative silence. But he felt like a real friend, the kind I was otherwise missing in my life in Prague, and he was fun, too. It was

Sven who introduced me to burèak.

Burèak is very young, fermented wine that’s been siphoned off early in the wine production cycle. Every autumn, the Burèak Drinking Festival breaks out all over Prague and people stop drinking beer briefly to drink burèak. I’m not sure why the Czechs started drinking the young wine, but it’s murderously alcoholic so I assume that had something to do with it. At Fraktal brunches all through the burèak season, expats who’d been drinking it the night before could do no more than groan and lie under the table trying to lift their heads off the floor.

The reason I hadn’t tried it was that you can’t just buy it in the shops. In order to drink it, you have to go along to one of the special celebrations, and I just hadn’t had the courage because these burèak celebrations were always in the form of a cheesy ye olde medieval faire. The Czechs are obsessed with medieval fairs. No public holiday is complete without going to a park to see knights in a jousting tourney. Here I part company with the Bohemians. Somehow, I always managed to have something better to do than travel to ye faire to buy ye olde jug of wine from ye Maid Marione. But on the last Sunday in autumn, in the dying days of the burèak season, Sven invited me to go with him to ye parke at Karlovo Námìstí after the Sunday brunch to try the stuff. Not wishing to miss a quintessential Czech tradition, I tagged along.

We heard the noise as we got off the metro—a knee-high fog of sound that reached us as we came up the escalator and got louder and more disparate as we crossed the square to the park. By the time we arrived, we could hear shrieks of laughter, yelling and singing, and above it all the tinny sound of tambourines and recorders. The Czechs are nothing if not enthusiastic celebrators, and the promise of strong wine and mock-medieval entertainment had packed out the park. Just inside the entrance, a wide expanse of green grass was covered in revellers, little children playing tag, teenagers lounging around being cool and impressing each other, adults wandering about shouting at the kids, singing, or, and there seemed to be quite a few of these, lying face down on the grass snoring.

Above the crowd, long thin pointed flags fluttered in the breeze. At the back of the grassed area, in about the middle of the park, was a small stage where five people dressed in green leggings and puffy shirts pranced around with tambourines singing medieval songs, which were being broadcast over the whole park for the benefit of all ye merrie-makers. In front of the tambourine players, teenagers in medieval costume performed a badly rehearsed square dance, frequently bumping into each other and missing hands as they went to clap them together, giggling hysterically.

Behind the stage, in the back half of the park, were two semicircles of shop fronts, one behind the other, where ye maidens in bodices sold mead, medieval knick-knacks, gingerbread, sweets and honey. The tiny shops were straight out of a fairy story, wooden with crenulated roofs and teeny windows shaped like the ace of spades carved out of the walls.

‘Cu-u-te’, said Sven, who’s easily pleased.

‘Cute, yes. And I see plenty of gingerbread, but where is the burèak?’ I had imagined that a burèak festival would be running rivers of burèak. Although we had walked halfway around the first set of shops we had yet to see anything alcoholic, even beer. There’s only so much medieval twee-ness I can stand and after fifteen minutes in the park I was reaching my limit.

‘Must be here, though’, said Sven. ‘See? That guy’s got a cup and so has that guy.’

I looked more closely and saw that indeed most people were clutching a plastic glass of red or white wine. ‘But where did they get it?’

‘We’ll find it’, said Sven, soothingly. He really was a lovely fellow, Sven, and for once our positions were reversed. Remarkably, no-one had broken his heart in the last week, so instead of my listening sympathetically to his misery, he had been listening to my love-lorn unhappiness. Now he was smoothing down my overwrought nerves at finding myself in a medieval fair with no alcohol.

‘Maybe it’s all gone.’ We’d arrived late-ish in the day after all.

‘I’m sure it hasn’t.’

‘Then where is it?’

‘It’ll be here.’

‘Wouldn’t they be selling it in one of these stalls?’ I persisted, as we ed by yet another gingerbread stall. I was leading up to ‘Can we go now?’ but Sven just laughed.

‘It’ll be here.’

We rounded one end of the stalls and made our way to the half of the park behind the shopfronts. This area was jam-packed with people. I had to stick right on Sven’s heels so as not to lose him, occasionally clutching at his shirt.

‘Aha!’ Being taller and in front, Sven spotted the burèak before I did and pushed his way through the crowd until he came to a small area backing onto a stall. Here a man stood at a long, white table covered in hundreds of plastic cups with two clear, plastic vats at one end—one with white liquid in it and one with red. The crowd had formed into an orderly queue and we ed the end of it.

Opinion among my friends had varied as to which was best, red or white burèak. Despite the fact that I suspected it was just paint stripper, I wanted to have the best one. I feared choosing the white only to discover later that the cognoscenti favoured the red.

‘There is no best one’, said Sven, he recently having spent a Sunday with his head pressed to the tiles of his bathroom floor after his first night on burèak.

‘I’m having one of each, just in case.’

Sven looked doubtful, but at that moment we came to the head of the queue and my mind was made up for me—the red was all gone. Instantly I fretted. If the red was gone, didn’t that mean it was better? Dammit, now I was only going to get to try the lesser wine. Sven assured me the white was just as good as the red. The wine-seller, with a brimming plastic cup in his hand, was waiting impatiently for me to take it. It’s not like a wine bar, where you get to hang around and dither over year and vineyard. Here you just pay your three crowns, take your cup and move along so the seller can shove another cup at the next punter. Sven took the cup from him and handed it to me, then quickly took his own and steered me out of the line. Once clear, I took a sip. I was prepared for a bang but in fact what I tasted was more like a yeasty apple cider.

‘Doesn’t taste too alcoholic.’

‘It doesn’t, does it’, Sven agreed, balancing his glass.

I took another sip to make the quantity in the cup more manageable. ‘Actually, I see why people like it. I wonder if anyone’s selling red here?’

‘Maybe. We’ll walk around.’

That seemed like an excellent idea. ‘Yes, we could look at all the lovely shops, maybe buy one of those adorable gingerbread biscuits. I haven’t had gingerbread since I was a tot.’ It was such a beautiful day and everyone seemed so happy. I was so happy. So happy to be there. ‘Isn’t this great?’

Sven looked at me affectionately. ‘Yes, it’s great.’

‘I love the Czechs, don’t you? And I’m loving this whole medieval thing. Why do you think they’re so obsessed with jousting and knights in armour?’

‘I dunno.’ He’s spare with words, Sven.

‘Because they’re such an astonishingly gentle people, the Czechs, don’t you think?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I saw this guy on the tram today. He was about forty, fair and getting a bit solid. His clothes were nothing flash: clean and neat but conservative. I thought he might be a clerical worker. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped together. Have you ever noticed that Czech men’s hands are lovely. Square and solid with even fingers and nails.’

‘Uh, I don’t notice men’s hands. As a rule.’

‘Well, they’re lovely. He had his clasped together and he was staring at the floor, his shoulders just starting to bow with middle age and I was struck, really mesmerised, by his air of ineffable gentleness and quiet despair, and over all that, acceptance of his fate. I imagined he was a father, with teenage kids and a job that had stopped going anywhere, shouldering life’s disappointments, just staring at the floor. It seemed to me that I was looking at the essence of the Czech man.’

At this point I ed that when I start yabbering, it means I’m drunk. ‘Gosh, this must be strong’, I said, faintly astonished.

‘I warned you.’

I decided to wait a few minutes before drinking any more. We had been wandering around the little stalls looking at the wooden knick-knacks and frilled jars of honey that are the staple of the medieval fair. There was a moderately

interesting stall that sold replicas of ye olde medieval instruments of torture, and another where ye blacksmith was making metal toys, but mostly people were selling the usual suspects—stale gingerbread, cheap plastic toys, hot mead (you can’t have a medieval fair without hot mead) and more gingerbread. The tambourine players were still beating away when we came across an archery competition behind the stalls and stopped to watch the action.

It was a competition in the broadest sense of the word. Tiny tots were lining up to be helped by a man in a Robin Hood outfit twang their arrows over, under, around and occasionally on to a painted target. We watched as a small child of three shot his arrow into the ground at his feet, then as another toddler put his in his mouth and refused to let go. We were thinking that surely even a medieval fair had to offer better entertainment than this when things started to get interesting.

A girl of about ten stepped up to the plate and, looking like Geena Davis going for gold, blasted her arrow straight into the target. Sven and I burst into spontaneous applause. The girl blushed prettily and handed the bow back to Robin. Here, we thought, was surely the champion. The next player was a girl of about five, who shot her arrow into the back of a gingerbread stall, then another tiny tot who dropped his and yet another who managed a shot with Robin Hood holding the arrow for him. Then a boy in a jester’s costume strode up to the mark, grabbed the bow and arrow, and without waiting for instruction made a confident shot and hit the target. He was about a foot closer to the centre than the ten-year-old girl had been.

‘Oh, well played, Sir!’ shouted Sven. The boy took no notice but strode purposefully back to the line.

‘One hundred crowns says the boy beats the girl’, said Sven to me.

‘You’re on.’ I took a swig of the burèak. We waited impatiently while the tinies dropped or ate their arrows. When Geena stepped up to take her next shot, I held my breath. She may have seen her moment of glory about to be snatched by Sven’s athlete, for her eyes narrowed as she took careful aim, then buzzed her arrow at the target.

‘You go, girl!’ I shouted. She’d played a considerably better shot than her first and had pipped the boy by an inch or two. He’d have to fight to beat her now. She made her way back to her mother’s side with a confident air as the next three shooters showed how unfit they were for serious competition, one even refusing to take the arrow from Robin Hood, apparently failing to grasp its significance. The boy in the jester’s costume stepped up to the plate and, nervously, I took another sip of burèak.

‘We have a winnaaaaaah!’ yelled Sven when the boy almost struck the bullseye. Indeed, the boy seemed to be the winner, with me down by one hundred crowns, when the last round got underway. The three-year-old managed a better shot than last time, hitting the ground four feet away from him, and the arrow-eater put on a return performance. His mother disqualified him from the competition when he once again refused to dislodge his equipment from his mouth.

‘Poor sportsmanship’, said Sven disapprovingly to the toddler as he and his mother ed by. I shushed him. Geena had her arrow in place and was eyeing up her target. The crowd fell silent. She raised her bow, she pulled back her elbow, and just as she fired, Sven yelled out, ‘Karaoke!’ Geena’s arrow flew into the air, about a mile above the target. There was a terrible silence, then she burst into tears and fell sobbing into her mother’s arms. Robin Hood glared at Sven and, as though a master puppeteer had pulled a string, the head of every small child in the line swivelled to gaze at him, open-mouthed. I froze but Sven was already moving. I unfroze and ran after him, grabbing his sleeve to get him to slow down.

‘What did you do that for?’ I demanded.

‘Karaoke!’

‘You didn’t win the bet. You cheated.’

‘Karaoke!’

I tripped over a guy rope, but managed to stay upright by swinging from Sven’s sleeve. That at least got him to stop.

‘You’ve traumatised that poor girl for life’, I said to him.

‘All the greatest sportsmen suffered setbacks in their early careers.’ He gazed about him, swigging back the last of his burèak. ‘Ooh, look! Karaoke! C’mon!’

As I followed him, I wondered where this karaoke stand was. Sven surged ahead, a Swede on a mission. All I could see was the empty stage where the green-legged singers had been.

‘I think this burèak might be more alcoholic than we realised.’

‘And now, the theme from ‘Gilligan’s Island’!’ Sven was on stage and bellowing

into the microphone, which had been set to ‘tambourine’ sensitivity. It screeched in protest.

‘Oops.’ He held it at arm’s length. ‘With Gilliga-a-a-a-n. The skipper tooooooo . . .’

I’m not sure that ‘Gilligan’s Island’ has made it onto post-communist Czech TV, and I’m absolutely certain that they can never have seen ‘Greenacres’ or heard the theme. However, when Sven and I sang it, he playing the part of Zsa Zsa Gabor and I the part of her husband . . .

‘The chores!’ I bawled.

‘Ze stores!’ he squeaked.

. . . we were the hit of the century. We’d have kept going—I was pressing for ‘FTroop’, a particular favourite of mine—but a young giant in a breastplate and helmet leapt onto the stage and grabbed the mike from Sven. He didn’t grab it hard, just enthusiastically, but with just enough force to send Sven staggering sideways into the spot I happened to be occupying. I staggered and grabbed Sven, who grabbed me in an effort to stay upright and together we collapsed in a heap on the stage. We took a while to disentangle ourselves, he insisting that I was holding him down and I equally sure that if he’d only get his lumping great carcass off my legs we could unravel ourselves. We thrashed around cursing each other and, perhaps inevitably, rolled off the stage and fell to the ground.

This was a shock, briefly, but then for some reason we both started to laugh hysterically. Meanwhile, the giant was singing his song and a delighted crowd

was ing in. Whatever he was singing must have been a woman’s song because he was using a high, girlish voice and skipping around the stage holding out an imaginary skirt. As he got more and more camp, the crowd roared their approval and tears of laughter poured down their cheeks. Even without knowing the song, Sven and I got swept up in the moment and started to sing along. What did it matter if we were singing something different? People near us put their arms around us and we all swayed together, laughing and singing. When the giant finished, he swan-dived off the stage into the arms of his friends.

Another boy pulled a girl onto the stage and the crowd yelled encouragement. I, too, would have yelled encouragement, but suddenly, desperately suddenly, I needed to lie down. I pushed my way unsteadily out of the crowd and sank to the grass near a knight templar who seemed to have had a glass of burèak, too. He was snoring on a bench under a tree. I lay for some time with my eyes closed listening to the sounds of the festival, which seemed strangely distant and distorted, my head lurching horribly. When I opened my eyes Sven was gazing thoughtfully down at me.

‘Oh good, you’re still awake.’

‘Yes, only just.’

‘How are you feeling?’

‘We’ll skip the red burèak, I think, don’t you?’

‘You are a big girl’s blouse.’

‘You are correct in your surmise. I am indeed a big girl’s blouse’, I said, ‘and I am going to lie here quietly until my sense of balance returns.’

Sven lay down next to me and we stared up at the underside of the leaves on the tree. After a while Sven said, ‘I need to talk to you about something.’

‘Shoot.’

There was a long silence.

‘Sven?’

‘It is difficult for me.’ Despite my reeling head I could hear an unusually serious note in Sven’s voice.

‘Take your time.’

There was another, even longer silence. ‘No, I don’t think I can tell you drunk, I think I need to be sober.’

‘My God, are you okay?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. I just need to talk to you about something. But not now. Maybe tomorrow?’

‘Of course.’ I was alarmed by this because Sven suffers from a habitually broken heart and it nearly kills him every time, so if it was more serious than that, it was serious indeed. Sven must have heard the concern in my voice because he smiled at me and stood up, holding out his hand for mine.

‘Come on, I have to show you the most amazing thing.’

Before I knew it, we were standing, not completely steadily, on the platform at Karlovo Námìstí, waiting for the metro. Sven’s moment of crisis had ed completely and we were discussing the age-old question that has puzzled mankind for decades—which Darren was the better Darren in ‘Bewitched’— when Sven said, ‘What’s that?’

‘What’s what?’

‘That noise. Someone’s yelling.’

We listened, and sure enough, a furious Czech voice was ringing through the metro station, a woman.

‘She sounds as though she’s using a megaphone.’

‘Is it coming through the loudspeakers?’

We looked around us to see where this furious Czech woman might be.

‘Do you notice something?’

‘You mean, that everyone seems to be looking at us?’

‘Correct.’

Strangely, the attention of the entire metro station was upon us. I knew we weren’t completely sober, but we weren’t that drunk, either. What could be the problem? The furious Czech screaming became more frenzied. I caught the eye of a man standing near us. He smiled at me and made a ‘get back’ movement with his hand. I looked down and saw that we happened to be standing right on the edge of the platform, on the wrong side of the white line.

‘Sven, we’re too close to the edge.’

We looked at the man and he did the ‘get back’ wave again. We stepped back. The Czech screaming didn’t stop. The man with the wave gave us the thumbs up, then jerked his shoulder at the loudspeaker and grinned: we were being told off.

The Czechs have a funny relationship with safety. Some rules are sacrosanct and enforced with surveillance and abuse, like the rule about standing too close to the edge of the platform on the metro, and some rules are non-existent. There was a building site right next to my local metro station that seemed to be run on completely laissez-faire principles. Chunks of concrete bounced onto the pavement, cranes swung wildly overhead, and pedestrians were forced onto the highway if they wanted to avoid being crushed by the dump trucks roaring out of the site. It’s not clear to me which rules are the result of communism and which the result of European Union demands. You’d think that the surveillance on the metro station would be a communist hangover, but the escalators tell a different story.

There are two types of escalators in the Czech Republic— incredibly fast ones that fling you off at the end, and incredibly slow ones that can double the length of your entire journey. Counter-intuitively, the fast ones were built under communism, when it was every man for himself, and the slow ones have been built to EU specifications. The amazing thing Sven wanted to show me was from the communist era.

‘This is the most incredible thing you’ll ever see in your life’, he said.

‘I’ve seen the Taj Mahal, you know, so is it more incredible than that?’

‘This is more incredible, more amazing, more wonderful than the Taj Mahal. I don’t want to get your hopes up, though. You may not think it is.’

‘I’m prepared to be amazed’, I said.

He took me to the ABC Divadlo Building. I’d have missed it from the street as the entrance is so drab and unlit, not to say positively communist era. Even Sven had to look carefully, walking straight past it the first time. Once inside the entrance, though, a short, whitewashed hall opened up to a gallery magically lit by sun pouring down from skylights onto mosaic tiles set into a white marble floor, stone steps, black iron handrails and sparkling glass façades of clothes shops. Sven took me through this gallery and into another one, then opened a door onto a small foyer. At first I didn’t see the amazing thing until Sven turned me around.

‘There it is’, he said. In front of us was a lift, but not an ordinary lift. This lift was a series of open-faced wooden boxes. Beautiful wooden boxes with brass handrails along the walls, ascending on the right side and descending on the left side. The boxes appeared one after the other, like a dumb waiter for people, and —and here’s the amazing bit—to get on you had to leap aboard. The dumb waiter never stopped. When you got to your floor, you just had to be nimble and jump off.

‘Are you ready?’ said Sven. And he dived in. I had only just enough time to follow him before the bottom of the lift glided up the wall and the lift entrance got too small for me. We were aboard.

‘Isn’t this incredible?’

‘Sven, that is indeed the most amazing thing I have ever seen.

This is better than the Taj Mahal.’

‘I don’t know what happens at the top’, said Sven, ‘I’ve never dared to stay on it past the last floor.’ He looked at me. I looked at him. Adventure called.

‘We’re staying on it today, then’, I said, bravely.

We glided up the floors, first, second, third, all the way to the sixth, and at the bottom of the sixth floor we saw a sign telling us to ‘Alight now’. What with the Czech schizophrenia around safety I found myself fixated on that sign. When the pavement around my metro station was heaving with cranes and trucks, a small sign, routinely ignored by all, stated that the pavement was closed. I and all other pedestrians just walked around it and picked our way through the heavy machinery. So a small sign saying ‘Alight now’ might mean, ‘This is the last floor’, or it might mean, ‘You are about to be crushed to death by industrial cogs’.

As the lift slid upwards, and our means of escape closed over, Sven said, ‘I’m afraid we’re going to turn upside down.’

I had visions of enormous wooden wheels churning into the lift and battering us lifeless. I clutched Sven’s arm, terrified. The lift reached its apex, moved slowly to the left, and without skipping a beat, started its slow descent. I let go of Sven and we both let go of our breaths. We were so relieved, we started laughing hysterically. When we got to the bottom floor, we both leapt out, by common consent too scared to see what happened to the lift when it went below the bottom floor and began its ascent.

The day after the burèak festival I woke up to the sound of moaning. Mine, unfortunately. For a long while I lay in bed trying not to make any sudden movements. There was a roaring in my head that sounded like a thousand trains thundering through an underground tunnel. So vivid was the likeness that I

started to see them in my mind’s eye—vrooooom, vroooooom, vroooom—and then I couldn’t stop, no matter how much I tried to turn my thoughts to still lakes in valleys and the eternal silence of the grave. At one point I tried to look at the clock, but when I turned my head my eyeballs started pumping like a panicked accordion player and my stomach churned. I fell back on the pillow and tried to cease all movement except breathing.

It was in this perhaps less than balanced state that Sven’s words of the day before came back to me, and the seriousness of his tone. What could he possibly want to talk to me about that required such delicacy? He’d been careful with his words, obviously weighing them up. If it was just another of his loves he needed to discuss, drunkenness wouldn’t have stopped him. God knows we’d had many a drunken conversation about why some bunny boiler didn’t want to kiss him and what he should do about it. What would he have to talk to me about that required sobriety? And what would he have to say to me that he couldn’t just come right out and say. We had no secrets, we were completely free with each other. I knew about his most tender, intimate feelings and he’d never shown any sign that he couldn’t trust me with them. Indeed, he had every reason to know that he could.

Burèak must have been coursing through my veins or I would never have had the next thought, I’m sure: What if he’s fallen in love with me?

Although we were very fond of each other, the question of romance had never raised its head for two reasons. One, he was twenty-two and I was forty; and, two, there’d never been a time in the whole year when Sven wasn’t hopelessly in love with some dreadful girl. He seemed to have a radar for highly-strung, neurotic women. The only ones who appealed to him were either weird past the point of ‘delightfully eccentric’ or just plain horrible. Many was the time I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from saying, ‘Are you insane?’ as Sven confided his relationship troubles to me: ‘She says her ex needs to stay on her couch or his parole officer will send him back to gaol’; ‘It irritates her when I get English words wrong’; ‘Her psychic said I was bad for her’. I’d nod sympathetically,

never letting on that I thought he needed immediate psychiatric help. Then he’d fall in love the next day with the next axe-wielding lunatic that came along and the cycle would start again.

There had never been a moment when he wasn’t smitten with someone. The last one had been a real doozy. To everyone but Sven I called her CrimeHilda. CrimeHilda was a coked-up little bundle of personality disorders, ghost-white and razor-thin, with a habit of saying, ‘You don’t like me, do you?’ to anyone who happened to be sitting next to her at dinner. In my case she was right, I couldn’t stand her, but Sven loved her and wanted nothing more in this world than to protect her from all the world’s evils. Luckily for my self-control, she’d decided Sven wasn’t good enough for her and went off to make someone else’s life a misery. But there hadn’t been another one after CrimeHilda. Possibly Prague was running low on ghastly women. For the first time since I’d known him, he had no love interest.

What if he did have a thing for me? What if he wanted to talk to me about . . . us? What did I think about that? What about me and Sven? Was the age difference really that great? (Ha! Yes! Who are you kidding?) Plenty of fortyyear-old men had twenty-year-old girlfriends, why not the other way around? (Because that’s not the way it works, Mrs Robinson.) Was I interested in him in that way? His acne was terrible, of course, but could I look past that? We got on so well. What if . . .?

Longing for love, my body lit up from its rediscovery of sex, fantastically hungover and lonely, I went berserk. I completely ignored every practical thought, telling myself that I was just afraid of doing something outside conventional expectations. In seconds, I had us married (the speeches at the wedding were very touching—‘Sven and I met when we both ran away from home.’ ‘I loved her from the beginning, I just didn’t know it’); I’d bought our flat, our first home together, in the hippest area in Prague, Žižkov, with a view and parquetry floors; then our second house, with a garden, near Letna Park, so the kids could get exercise. Two kids, or maybe just one—a woman of forty has

to be realistic. I tried to stop, I really did. I told myself that even if he was in love with me, I wasn’t in love with him. I really wasn’t. But somehow I couldn’t hear myself. It was no use: I needed love.

That night we were meeting at our favourite bar, the Staro-pramen in Andìl. He was there when I arrived, and had already ordered me a beer, something we always did but this time I was struck by the intimacy of the gesture. How well we know one another, I thought. We talked about the day before, about the amazing lift and the burèak festival and the small child who insisted on eating the arrows. Finally, though, on our third beer, Sven said, ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You and I have become very close . . .’ he began.

Good Lord, I thought, this really is .

‘. . . I feel I can say anything to you . . .’

For once, it seemed like the crazy dreams of a lonely, single woman were maybe not so crazy after all. He really was going to say he’d fallen for me.

‘. . . I trust you and you know that you can trust me . . .’

There’s a pimple right next to his mouth. Could I kiss that?

‘. . . that’s why I talk to you about all my deepest feelings . . .’

Of course I could. I must have kissed many acned mouths when I was a teenager.

‘. . . I know you’ll always be honest with me . . .’

I looked at his face and studied his beautiful eyes. Yes, I could get past the acne. It won’t last, after all. Me and Sven. Sven and me. Well, why not? At that moment Sven looked deep into my eyes.

‘So I have something very delicate to ask you.’

‘Sure’, I said, gently, ‘What is it?’

‘Do you think that it matters if there’s a big age difference between two people, when the man is a lot younger than the woman?’

I held my breath. Did I want him to make a move? I looked into his eyes. I thought of my life, I thought of warmth and kissing and Saturday nights. Yes, yes I did. I put my hand on his arm and leaned in close.

‘I think if those two people are right for each other, then it shouldn’t make any difference in the world.’

‘So do you think Laura would mind if I asked her out?’

‘What?’

‘I want to ask Laura out but I’m afraid she’ll laugh at me because I’m so much younger than she is, and she’s such a woman of the world.’

I took my hand off his arm. I was silent for a long time, puffs of smoke in my mind where only seconds before a whole new life had been. Finally I said, ‘Sven are you out of your tiny mind? Laura? Laura!? Sure, ask Laura out, just don’t forget to take along a silver stake and garlic.’ And I banged down my beer and left, abruptly, leaving Sven looking after me, genuinely puzzled.

Chapter 15 Winter

Iwas pretty depressed over Sven’s rejection. He hadn’t rejected me per se, since he never knew what I’d been thinking, but it felt like a rejection. I’d got myself all tangled up in a fantasy of love—me and Sven, my younger, Swedish lover. How very European, how very bohemian I would be. Andy changing his mind hadn’t been so bad, since we’d changed our minds at the same time. But Sven? He wanted to ask Laura out! How was it that it had never occurred to him to ask me out? Why couldn’t I be the older woman he’d lost his heart to? This was all crazy stuff of course, but I’d been in Prague for ten months and I seemed to have achieved nothing, not even a lover I could call my own.

I fell into a fog of despair. Winter came and with incredible suddenness; it was cold, bitterly cold. It was not only cold, it was dark. Daylight didn’t arrive until late in the morning, and when it did it struggled through leaden skies. Then, as if the effort had been too much for it, it would be gone by four in the afternoon when darkness descended. I’d heard that the Czechs went on a frenzy of suicide in winter, throwing themselves off bridges and shooting themselves. It affects them and it was affecting me. I’d written nothing, absolutely nothing, that looked anything like the Great Australian Novel. It looked more like the Great Australian Mishmash, a conglomerate of half-started stories and disparate paragraphs, none of which inspired me to continue. My great adventure in a romantic city seemed to me nothing more than a year spent failing to achieve anything of note, not even love. In fact, a year pretty much like all my other years, only surrounded by castles.

I didn’t enlighten Sven about my sudden mood swing on the night he declared his love for Laura, I just explained it away as a burèak hangover and told him I had been the tiniest bit worried that Laura might not be right for him. He accepted this explanation, although a week later he ignored my advice and made a play for Laura.

‘She laughed at me’, Sven said sadly over a beer. But she’d been kind about it. Just told him she wasn’t into serious relationships. ‘She is a wonderful woman’, he said. But the resumption of good relations between Sven and me did nothing to lift my mood. Four weeks into winter I couldn’t stand it any more. I decided to break my depression by getting completely trashed. The Norma supermarket opened at nine a.m. on Sundays, so at ten I went around the corner, swathed in a parka against the biting cold, and unleashed a trolley. Let’s see, what would I have?

‘Swiss muesli? No. Skim milk? No. Potatoes? No. Vodka? Yes. Just one bottle? You’re right, I’ll take two. Vegetables? No. Fruit? No. Bacon and cheese flavoured chips? Yes. Anything else? No, I think I have all I need for today.’ I steered my trolley to the checkout and stood moodily in line behind the pathetic single men with trolleys full of beer. When my turn came, I didn’t say anything to the checkout chick. I’d long ago given up being nice to them. Nearly a year I’d been going to that supermarket and not once had one of them so much as looked me in the eye. After two months of smiling and being friendly and having my soft, western bonhomie spurned with stony, communist stares I’d given up. I dumped the contents of the trolley on the belt and stared glumly ahead, wallet in hand ready to fling money at her when commanded to do so. But then a strange thing happened.

The checkout chick looked at the contents of my trolley, then she looked at me, and then, to my utter amazement, she smiled. A nice, sympathetic smile it was, too. Ten months of chirpy Dobrý den’s from me and not a peep out of any of them, but one trolley full of Slavic despair and she was all smiles and friendly disposition. Finally. I smiled back. I guess I should have just stared at her, but I’m too much of an Australian.

With my bottles clinking in their plastic bag, I trudged back out onto the street. The cold was excruciating. My face hurt and my eyes stung. I’d forgotten my

gloves and my hands were raw and numb. No wonder they commit suicide. I’m beginning to think about it myself, I thought. Something hit my face. ‘Oh good, rain. I’ll be soaked as well as freezing’, I said out loud. Another drop hit my face and then another, and then one fell on my hand.

There was something strange about this rain. It wasn’t falling the way rain should and it looked odd. I stopped thinking about how miserable I was and narrowed my eyes. The raindrops were strangely thick and on closer inspection they weren’t clear, they seemed to be whitish, like hail. But if it was hail it was a bizarre sort of hail, more flakes of hail than solid ice. ‘It’s snow!’

Suddenly the air around me was swirling with it, eddies of snow dancing around my head, drifting slowly down to my feet. Right in front of me flakes fell on the ground, then more and more until a sparkling white dust covered the pavement. I held my arms out and watched the flakes fall and melt on my parka. I put my head back to see the snow falling straight down on me. I reached my hands up to catch it and bent over it to see if it was true what they said, that no two flakes were alike. The Czechs must have thought I was mad, standing in the snow and gazing at it instead of running home to get out of it, but I was mesmerised. In my whole life, snow had never fallen on me.

I put my bags on the ground and stood there with arms held out wide and head back, letting the snow fall straight down onto my face. I put out my tongue to taste it and stamped on the ground to see my footprint in it. I walked a few steps, then looked back to see my trail. I caught the flakes in my hands and held them close to my eyes to see, for the first time, a snowflake up close, its bright, tiny arms slowly melting away. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.

The cold finally won, though, and I stopped poring over the crystals, investigating the shape and size before they disappeared, and picked up my bags and hurried home. Once inside, I put the vodka in the kitchen and stood at the

window, watching the snow. The first flakes had been quite small, hovering uncertainly in the air in their gradual drift down, but the snowfall was getting thicker and with it the individual flakes. The wind increased until it fairly howled and the flakes started to hurtle horizontally towards the window. In an very short space of time, it seemed like only minutes, the entire ground was covered in white. Whorls of white dust blew behind cars and banks started to form on the pavements. Even the trees, their branches brown and dry, turned white.

I stayed at the window for a long time, watching the storm. After a couple of hours I turned my attention back to the flat. I ed that I’d scheduled the day to get drunk but now, somehow, the need to obliterate myself had gone. Instead of pouring a vodka, I made a cup of coffee and wandered back into my room to find a book, thinking I’d spend the afternoon reading by my window and watching the snow. In my grandmother’s cabinet, where I kept the books I’d bought, I moved my finger along the row, looking for one only partially read, or one I thought I’d like to read again, perhaps one featuring a European winter. My eye fell on the 1974 guide to Prague and I pulled it out, wondering if I might be interested in reading more about the communist view of the city.

As I opened it, a piece of paper fluttered to the ground. It was the old family tree with the ancient blue typewritten notes that I’d found in my first days. I glanced at it, and saw that now, after my Czech classes, I was able to make out a few words. I brought it to my window seat with my dictionary, took a sip of coffee, and set about deciphering it.

The title said, ‘Borges Family from Skuteè’, but I couldn’t be sure about that. I’d never heard the name Borges from Dad and, indeed, all the people underneath seemed to be called Weiss. The first name was Františka, who married Joachim Weiss, so perhaps she was the Borges who started it all. Underneath Františka and Joachim was a list of names, although it wasn’t clear if these people were their children. Next to each person’s name was a sentence about them. It talked about what they did for a living, where they lived, who they married, and how

many sons and daughters they had and what their names were. I didn’t recognise any of the names, apart from a few familiar villages—my father’s for instance, Kamenièky, and Jiøí’s village, Studenice. And then I saw a name I recognised, ‘Jindøich Weiss’, with the words ‘my father’ written next to it.

So my father didn’t write this, then, because his father, I knew, was Jindøich’s son, Karel. Must have been my father’s uncle or aunt, who wrote all this down, I thought. Here was recorded the name of Jindøich’s oldest child, Olga, and her two sons, one daughter and grandson. This was my father’s aunt and cousins. I could make out their names, but there was a phrase next to their names, zahynuli v Osvìtimi, which I couldn’t understand. I reached for the Czech– English/English–Czech dictionary. Zahynuli meant ‘put out’, according to my dictionary. Put out at a place called Osvìtimi? Lived there? Expelled from a village? I didn’t get it, so I moved on.

After Olga there was another daughter, Štìpánka, who had more children, and this one married well, she married a head teacher, apparently. Then came Artur, his wife and his daughter, Ruth. Artur had done well for himself—he was the manager in a company. Next to Artur and his wife and daughter was the phrase, všichni zahynuli v plynu. I reached for the dictionary again. Všichni meant ‘all’ and zahynuli meant ‘put out’, as I’d just discovered. I looked up plynu. It meant ‘gas’. All put out by gas?

It took me a few minutes but I finally worked it out. Artur, his wife, and their daughter had died in the gas chambers. Olga, her husband, three children and grandson had died in a concentration camp. Now I knew what zahynuli meant— not ‘put out’ but ‘killed’. I read zahynuli v Dachau for Milan, a carpet-maker and bachelor (I silently cheered the unmarried Milan—I’m not the only one who’s single, then). Marta survived. Irma died by gas, although her daughter Stanislava survived and married an evangelical priest. Her son, Jaromir, said this document, died tragically. I wondered how? Not courtesy of the Nazis, I felt sure. Perhaps he killed himself. Hedvika survived. Karel, my grandfather, did not. He died on 20 January 1945. And there, right near the end of the family tree, was my father,

who left Prague for Australia in 1946, his family decimated, his father and aunts and uncles and cousins murdered. There was my name right under his. No wonder they want me married with children.

Then I ed that this family tree had been written by a son or daughter of Jindøich, one who’d survived. I wondered which one had had to write down the fates of their brothers and sisters. I thought of my own siblings and of my treasured nieces and nephews. No, it really didn’t bear thinking about.

I had put off going to Terezín while I’d been in Prague. Although I knew very little about my grandfather’s death, I knew that he had been interned there. I never liked to ask my father about it. All Dad ever said was that he died of starvation on a forced march from Terezín to whichever concentration camp the Nazis were sending him to. I never knew which camp that was, or, if I’d ever been told, I had forgotten. I don’t know why I hadn’t wanted to go to Terezín. It had something to do with not wanting to come face to face with the things we all kept locked away. Dad had once been asked if he would go to a concentration camp and he had looked shocked: ‘Why would I do anything that morbid? Who wants to see it?’ So I couldn’t tell him what I was going to do.

Dad was coming to have Christmas with me. In my mind, I knew I had to go to Terezín before he got here, as I couldn’t go while he was staying with me, but somehow I managed to put it off until it was too late. He and my stepmother arrived in the second week of December. It was such a pleasure to be able to open the door and say, Veselé Vánoce to Dad—Czech for ‘Merry Christmas’. His face split into a huge grin and he babbled some lengthy Czech response, none of which I caught, so I gave him a hug and said, ‘English, please’.

My stepmother dropped her bags, kissed me, and went on an inspection of the flat. Anticipating this, I had actually hired a cleaner, figuring that as hard as I might try I’d never clean it well enough for her, but a Czech woman would have the place in such spotless order that not even my stepmother would be able to

find fault. I figured correctly. My father had been bustling about the kitchen, trying to hide his anxiety. If she found anything wrong there’d be a scene and he’d be blamed since I was his daughter. I bustled about, too, pretending that my stepmother was just settling herself in, not scouring the place for a reason to be bitter.

There was a nasty moment when she opened the linen cupboard. I’d sent everything off to the laundrette to be cleaned and folded by a professional, but when I’d gone to put it away I realised I’d forgotten exactly what went where. Even if I’d ed I was unable to tell the single from the double sheets, the towels from the hand towels, because in order to check I’d have had to unfold them, and that I was not prepared to do. So I just stacked them neatly, knowing the categorisation had been destroyed. I saw my stepmother’s eyes dart and narrow when she opened the cupboard. Her fingers lifted a towel and she clicked her tongue. But she must have decided that the crime of unsorting the linen was a small one because when she appeared in the kitchen she was beaming, and my father visibly loosened. Despite my faith in Czech cleaners, I, too, felt a distinct release of pressure.

My stepmother, relaxed now, chatted to me about my life in Prague, what I’d been up to, how I’d liked it, what I thought I might do next year and so on. My father ed in and we had a wonderful afternoon, drinking coffee and catching up. When dinner time came, my father insisted, as he always does, on cooking. He really is a fabulous cook, Dad, if a little devoted to the fat and meat food groups. We went to The Norma to stock up on potatoes and onions and pork, and I was fascinated to see that the checkout chick was just as rude to him as she had been to me for a year. Dad not only spoke to her in fluent, accentless Czech, he spoke in the charming and jovial way he speaks to everyone. It made no difference. She threw his potatoes aside and demanded money, refusing to look him in the eye.

Moving away, I said, ‘Do they never smile for anyone?’

‘Never!’ cried Dad. ‘It’s a matter of national pride. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

Back home, Dad wanted to start cooking but my stepmother insisted on washing the coffee cups and percolator first. Slinging on rubber gloves, she turned on the tap and stuck a cup under it. The water whooshed into the mug and a great spray hit the floor. She picked up the wash cloth and shook it out, sending a stream of tiny droplets onto the fake wood.

‘Um . . .’ I said, wanting to point out the disaster that had just occurred but my stepmother seemed not to have noticed.

‘Um . . . the water?

‘What, darlink?’

‘The water. It’s getting on the floor. Do you want me to wipe it up?’

‘Oh, a few little drops don’t matter, darlink’, she said, shaking the cup and sending another waterfall to the first. I watched with feelings I could ill define as she and my father cleaned and cooked, splashing water around, spraying rivers of the stuff onto the fake wooden floor, sending floods cascading onto the fragile covering below. When I thought of how I had panicked over the tiniest droplet, soaking through endless towels and bathmats to keep the bloody thing bone dry I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself saying, ‘So what about the yellow Post-it Notes that have ruled my life for the last year? Eh? Explain

yourself, woman!’

It would have been no use. If I got myself all worked up over the notes that was my fault, not hers. She had simply put them there to remind me of the important things.

In the run up to Christmas, festive markets sprung up all over Prague: collections of tiny huts like the ones they’d had at the burèak celebrations, tinsel-covered stalls with crenulated wooden roofs, selling mittens and gingerbread and svaøák, the Czech equivalent of glühwein, a hot spiced red wine. Dad and I wandered all over Prague, talking and buying presents and drinking the svaøák. On one of our walks, I asked him about the sudden proliferation of tiny, exquisitely decorated biscuits I’d noticed in the shops and stalls. ‘Are these traditional Czech Christmas biscuits?’

‘No, the tradition is that Czech housewives cook biscuits and cakes and take them to neighbours and family. What they really do these days is buy them and pretend they’re home-baked.’ His tone suggested that standards among modern Czechs had fallen to a level of moral degeneracy only marginally higher than those found in a Columbian crack house. Not wanting to be behind in anything Czech, I toyed with the idea of making some cakes for my friends and neighbours, but laziness won out and I ended up doing what everyone else did. I bought a tin of them—a selection of pink hearts, chocolate and vanilla fudges and some shortbread—took them home, discarded the packaging, put them on a kitchen plate and took them around to Mrs Jendliková.

‘Why have you bought me these?’ said Mrs Jendliková when she opened the door. I smiled at her.

‘Because I’m Czech.’ And she laughed.

‘You are, aren’t you.’

We had a cup of tea and one biscuit each. Mrs Jendliková was all alone in the run up to Christmas. Her children and grandchildren were coming to visit her but not until the day before Christmas. She was occupying her time buying presents and packing, but all her friends had gone to stay with their families so she was feeling a bit desperate for conversation. She came over for dinner that night, at my invitation, since I couldn’t bear to think of her alone and lonely in her flat. She and my parents knew each other, of course, but not so well since Dad didn’t spend all that much time in the Prague flat. Her isolation at this time made me think about all my friends who had no family of their own to spend Christmas with—Danny, Laura and Sven. Actually, all three of them had told me at one time or another that the best thing about being in Prague was skipping the family holidays, when everyone was sure to get drunk and say unforgivable things, but still, I felt the urge to bring them into the warmth of my own family. I suggested to Dad that we could have a Christmas dinner so that he could meet all my friends.

‘Wonderful idea, darling. Invite all your Czech friends.’

‘Uh. Yes.’ All my Czech friends. How to field this one? I had only one Czech friend, Zuzana. I would have happily invited her but she had gone to her chata with her family. I didn’t want to explain this using the singular ‘she’ because that would have invited disappointment over my failure to make lots of Czech friends. I thought fast.

‘They’re all with their families.’ It was only a little white lie. I followed it up with an appeal to his heart. ‘I thought we could give a dinner for all the people I know who don’t have families here.’

Dad beamed. ‘What a lovely idea!’ He does so love to be kind. ‘Of course we should. I will cook carp for them.’

Strangely, carp is the traditional Czech Christmas meal. On every street corner, sellers set up blue, plastic pools crammed full of wriggling carp, swimming furiously between the other carp, like impatient drivers in heavy traffic. By my calculations, carp-sellers made their entire year’s profit in those two weeks. There was a butcher’s block and a knife standing next to each of these pools, along with a long queue of Czechs. Dad knew to get there early because by the afternoon the lines snaked around whole blocks. The queues were long not only because every Czech in Prague must have a carp but also because everyone has to spend time weighing up the qualities of the thrashing carp, making sure that they select just the right one, not too big, not too small, firm, good colour, healthy looking. Sometimes, the seller scoops out the wrong carp and, when that happens, there is inevitably a dispute.

‘I got the one you pointed to.’

‘No, you didn’t, this one doesn’t look full grown. You’re trying to foist your worst one on me.’

‘My worst! What worst? All my carp are the finest in Prague.’

‘Then why is this one so sick looking? I want the one I chose’, and so on.

At the front of the queue, Dad also took his turn to carefully inspect the flashing

carp. ‘I’ll take that one’, he said, pointing into the plastic pool. The carp-seller fished his choice out with a net and dumped it on the butcher’s block, where it flopped and gasped, desperately trying to fling itself back into the pool. He held its tail down with a firm, wet hand, raised his chopper and with a swift, brutal blow, whacked its head off. The head flew into a basket and a river of carp blood flowed into the gutter. Disgusting, but weirdly fascinating.

‘We got the best one, darling. I really know how to pick a carp. Dinner is going to be delicious.’

I had invited Laura and Danny and Sven to dinner, saying, ‘Come and have a real Czech Christmas at our place’, to which both Danny and Laura replied, ‘Oh, a Czech Christmas, I’ve been to plenty of those.’ I had also invited Mrs Jendliková and Mr Hrabal, who’d been so kind to me. Mrs Jendliková arrived first, bearing a selection of miniature cakes and biscuits, carefully decorated with icing stars. I felt abashed that I’d given her store-bought biscuits, showing just how quickly we become acclimatised to what is and is not shameful in a culture.

Sven came, and I gave him a look, knowing what he was going to say. It was the first time he’d been to my place. As soon as he walked in the door he said to me, his eyes twinkling, ‘You live in a ák. You kept pretty quiet about that.’

I tried to look unconcerned, ‘And your point is?’

‘Nussing. You live in a ák.’

Winter ‘Yes, well, my innate sense of style allows me to carry it off. Besides, at least it’s authentically Czech.’

‘True. Still, a ák. You’re never going to live this down.’

I sighed. ‘I suppose it’s no good asking you to keep this just between ourselves?’

‘No good at all.’

‘Thought as much.’

Sven blushed a bit when he saw Laura, but she had practice with young men she’d discarded and she made a point of hailing him like an old friend and chatting to him about inconsequential nothings until he realised he had nothing to fear. She really does have a good heart, that Laura. I’d been a bit worried about inviting both of them, but why should a little thing like a blip of the heart come between friendships?

They didn’t talk for long. My parents button-holed Sven, possibly thinking that here at last was a husband. Little did they know. Danny was the last to appear.

‘You live in a ák.’

‘So I’m told.’

‘State secret. So do I.’

‘Really? You never said anything.’

‘Neither did you. They’re actually not so bad if you get a decent one. Notice how warm they are? High ceilings are fool’s gold. You can never heat those turnof-the-century old palaces.’

‘Yeah, well, I still wish I lived in one of them.’

‘Nonsense, darling’, Dad broke in, ‘what’s wrong with this place?’ He turned to Danny. ‘Do you know how much I got it for? One hundred thousand crowns.’

‘What a steal!’

‘Ha! I bargained them down. Do you know what they were asking?’

‘What?’

‘They were asking one hundred and fifty thousand.’

‘That’s a good price.’

‘Not good enough.’ Buoyed by a fresh audience who could be guaranteed not to cut him short, Dad told Danny the story of his amazing bargain and just how it had happened, who had said what to whom, how long it had taken; in short, every detail of the incredible deal. Danny listened with suitable respect, then went on to tell Dad about the amazing bargain he had made on his car, a secondhand Trabant.

‘Now, they’re a fashion item’, he said. ‘I’ve doubled my money and the value is still rising.’

‘I think I’d like one of those. Who was the dealer?’

Dad really took to Danny because he could speak Czech and had lived in Prague for ten years. That made him almost Czech in Dad’s eyes. They monopolised each other for nearly the entire evening, swapping bargain stories and poring over their favourite Prague landmarks, both genuinely knowledgeable about it.

Interestingly, Laura and Mr Hrabal seemed to scent one another.

‘I hev fucked ten souzand vimmin.’

‘Wow. Impressive. How long did that take you?’

‘Let me see. I start ven I em fourteen end now I em . . . vell, a gentleman never

tells, eh?’

Laura thought this over. ‘I started when I was eleven.’

‘Vow. Impressive.’

For our Christmas dinner, Dad fried the fish in batter and made fried potato pancakes (known as bramboraèky), sauerkraut and bread dumplings to go with it. To be completely truthful, carp is horrible. It’s got so much fat it almost amounts to blubber and it’s full of bones. I can’t understand why the Czechs eat it when they could be eating turkey or ham, but I found that if I cut around the bones and blobs and scratched out the meat, covering it in plenty of bramboraèky and sauerkraut, it was just edible.

‘It’s a fantastic carp, isn’t it, darling?’ Dad said.

‘Mm-hmm,’ I replied non-committally, not wishing to be drawn on the subject. I might have become more aware of my innate compulsion to be good, but that didn’t mean I could change myself.

‘I don’t like it’, said my stepmother, not burdened by any similar fear of controversy. ‘It’s got too many bones.’

‘Darling, you never like anything I cook’, replied Dad. ‘More dumplings, Danny?’

‘Yes, please’, said Danny, cementing himself in Dad’s heart. I could see Dad was giving up on Sven and thinking maybe Danny would make a good son-in-law. My stepmother was still working on Sven. I ate my meal and listened to all the people I loved talking.

‘And then I said to him, “You must be joking asking one hundred and fifty thousand” . . .’

‘. . . I vill send you ze book, you vill like it . . .’

‘. . . Uh, no I don’t have a girlfriend right now, Mrs Weiss . . .’

‘. . . Just one bramboraèka for me . . . oh well, maybe just one more. It’s Christmas after all, and they’re delicious.’

‘Aren’t they? I am a fantastic cook, you know. I have often thought I should open a restaurant . . .’

‘. . . Zere are many words for “fuck” in ze Czech language . . . Oh, you know zem!’

‘. . . but vy does it have to have so many bones?!’

‘. . . She is gifted, of course . . .’

I listened to all these lovely people and thought how strange it is, the people who end up in your life. You really have no control over it at all, it seemed to me. I thought about my friends at home and what would happen if I got them all together in the same room. They were just as eccentric and warm as these people, my Prague friends, but until I sat and listened to them that evening, I didn’t realise how much I’d come to depend on them, and how dependable they were.

The phone rang. It was my sister.

‘I’m just calling to say Merry Christmas’, she said. I could hear the kids screaming blue murder in the background.

‘Everything okay over there?’

‘Oh, you know how it is’, she sighed. ‘They’ve had too much sugar and Alexander’s teasing her again. He’s going through a stage, but it seems to be taking a long time to work out.’ Suddenly she sounded very tired. ‘I’ve just got back home, the au pair’s going spare and threatening to quit, and I’ve still got to go to the gym.’

It occurred to me for the first time that living the perfect life must be exhausting. My sister suddenly summoned up bright energy, which she’s so good at doing: ‘How are things there?’

I told her we were having a party for my friends. There was a short pause.

‘You know, Rachael, I’ve wanted to say all year, how much I ire you for going to Prague on your own. I don’t know that I’d have had the courage.’

I was so touched. I think it was the first time in our lives my sister had expressed approval.

‘Thanks, that means a lot to me.’

‘What are you having for dinner?’

Ah, now we were back on more familiar territory. I told her about the carp and the bramboraèky, and she warned me against eating too much. I was grinning on the other end of the phone, and it’s lucky she couldn’t see my face or she’d have been offended. She doesn’t mean to call me fat, it’s just her way of showing her love. I told her I’d follow her advice and we rang off, in better charity with each other than we had been in years.

The party broke up at around midnight, since three of the old people were looking worn out—it being well past their bed time. Mr Hrabal didn’t look worn out, but he was an eternal fount of energy. Just shows you what a lifetime of sex will do for you. Laura and Mr Hrabal exchanged numbers. God knows what they’re going to get up to, I’d rather not think about it. He was looking roguish as he left, the old charmer. Danny was the last to go, and I had to prise Dad away from him.

‘He seems a nice boy . . .’

‘Yes, well you can stop right there. I’m not marrying, you know. Ever.’

‘I think being single suits you, darling. You look well on it’, said Dad, ever generous.

When my friends had left and we were cleaning up, I found Mrs Jendliková’s cakes in the fridge.

‘Drat it, we forgot to serve these.’ I looked at the pretty, delicate sweets. ‘Aren’t they great? I can’t believe she actually made them.’

Dad peered at them and replied dismissively, ‘They’re store-bought’.

‘Really?’ She’d never said they were homemade, but she bought them on a kitchen plate, so I just assumed they were. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘They’re too perfect’, said my stepmother, sniffing at them. I smiled at how they managed to be superior without actually making biscuits themselves, and I couldn’t believe Mrs Jendliková had played the same trick on me that I’d played on her. It must have been going on all over Prague.

During the whole time he was in Prague, I never told Dad about finding the

family tree. I’m not sure why. I think because it seemed an intrusion. The family tree was in his flat, in his guidebook; he’d never shown it to me, never told me about it. Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to know about it, or maybe he’d forgotten about it and if he had, who was I to bring it up again? I guess that’s what it came down to—Dad was the war survivor, not me. It was his history, it was up to him to decide how he wanted to cope with it, and he chose forgetfulness, so why should I thrust it under his nose? After forty years of silence, I just couldn’t bring myself to open up the subject, but it was ever on my mind: my grandmother, my grandfather, all my father’s dead aunts and uncles and cousins.

My parents left Prague two weeks after Christmas, in the deep dark of winter, and I finally went to Terezín.

On the day I did I dressed carefully. I emptied out my small satin jewellery bag onto the bed, chose my best silver rings, four of them, and was reaching for my winter earrings, which are olive coloured, when I caught sight of my favourite earrings. They’re mainly for summer because they’re bright aqua glass cubes. Not really right for winter, but I felt as though I should be in my gayest attire for this trip. I asked myself, what would my grandfather have said? I think he would have said, ‘Don’t dress for a funeral.’ Aqua cubes it was. I also wore jeans and my favourite sweater, sneakers and a beanie. I looked sleek, casual and young. Somehow, that was very, very important to me.

The bus to Terezín took an hour. I was glad to be alone and silent. Those bound for the Terezín concentration camp during the war had gone by train. I looked out the bus window at the snow-covered fields and the concrete walls of the houses, and when the road coincided with the train track I wondered what my grandfather and his sisters and brothers saw as they took this trip. That house? Yes, it would have been here then. But this one is too new. They wouldn’t have seen this house. Did they see these fields? Almost certainly. And that forest. The trees would have been different trees, some of them, but the forest would have been there. Did they wonder if they’d ever see Prague again? Of course they did. Jews knew what was waiting for them.

My grandfather’s relatives stopped off at my Catholic grandmother’s place in Prague the night before they had to go to the train. They filled their suitcases with dried bread, knowing there was not enough food at the camp. My father took them to the train station to say goodbye. Dad said to me once that he never boards a train without thinking about the transports. I began to feel apprehensive, my heart beating. The bus driver looked in his rear-vision mirror and nodded to me when he pulled up at the bus stop. I was the only person to get off.

On the street, I looked around. I could see what seemed to be a brick fortress down the road from the direction I’d just come from and the town appeared to be in the other direction. The brick building might have been the camp, but I wasn’t sure so I splashed my way through the slush towards the town. I saw a sign directing me to the Ghetto Museum and headed that way, thinking I’d find out there where the concentration camp had been. The slush turned to ice on the cobblestones and I slipped and slid, trying to keep my footing. Then I reached a square and the signs disappeared. A boy leaned out his window, blond, blue-eyed with a classic Slav face, a bright smile and friendly eyes. A bit embarrassed, I told him I was looking for the internment camp. Completely unfazed he gave me directions. I thought about how strange it must be to be a ten-year-old boy living where a concentration camp had been, directing tourists to it.

Following the boy’s directions I found the museum. It was there that I discovered that the entire fortress town of Terezín had been used as a concentration camp for Jews before they were sent to the extermination camps. I hadn’t fully grasped that before. I thought the concentration camp had been somewhere inside the town. I knew Dad had brought food to his father and I’d always wondered how he’d managed to get it to him over the prison walls. But now I realised he must have given it to sympathetic locals until they were sent away by the Germans. The non-Jews were displaced in 1942 so that the whole town could be used for the internees, and from then on my family could no longer get food to my grandfather and his family. Milan’s girlfriend, Dad told me, had sent her brother to the town to find out what had happened to him. Her brother had been walking from the train station when he saw a detachment of

Nazi soldiers coming towards him. Terrified, he hid in a ditch, then returned to Prague. After that, there was no word from those at Terezín, only official notifications about where the ‘prisoners’ were being sent.

At the museum, one of the first things I did was see the rooms devoted to the children of Terezín. The reception the film Life is Beautiful got has always puzzled me. It’s about an Italian Jew who is sent to a concentration camp with his son. While there, he pretends to his son that they’re part of a game, a fun game that everyone is playing. Some people are playing the baddies, so we have to be careful of them, and other people are playing the prisoners of the baddies. It’s celebrated as a portrait of optimism in a world of hell and yet it’s always seemed to me that the trouble is that kids aren’t stupid. They know what’s a game and what’s not. And after more than a day playing that game any kid I know would be demanding to be at home with Mum. A far more touching portrait of optimism in the midst of hell is the world that was created for the children of Terezín by the adult inmates, particularly by the musicians and actors and teachers.

They made sure the children went to school during the day, said their prayers and learned about Jewish tradition. With meagre materials to hand, they wrote plays and musicals and operas and put them on. The children painted and drew— pictures of their old lives and their future lives and the lives they led in the camp. They wrote diaries and stories, they designed playbills and acted in plays. This, it seemed to me, was the real optimism. In such conditions, how did they keep it up?

There was a re-creation of a dormitory room in the museum. Rows of rough wooden bunks, three and four beds high, were squeezed into the room with narrow ageways between them and a square wooden space at the end of each bunk for the person’s suitcase. They were only allowed to bring twenty kilograms of luggage with them. There wasn’t enough water to drink let alone to wash with, so the best they could do was make sure everyone at least washed their hands before eating. The smell must have been appalling. As the war went

on, the overcrowding worsened until people were simply shoved into attics to live pressed up against each other. There was a typhoid epidemic in the last month of the war, creating a terrible death toll even after the Nazis had fled. My own grandfather died in January, a mere five months before the end of the war. It’s a bitter thought.

I looked out for the Weiss names on the walls and in the paintings. I saw a painting by Helga Weiss, but we had no Helga’s in our family tree, so she wasn’t one of ours. In the rooms devoted to the musicians, I saw an Otto Weiss who’d been in a jazz band. It was apparently quite a famous jazz band and, although we had one or two Ottos, I felt sure I’d have heard about it if he’d been one of ours. Dad is convinced we’re related to Mahler, although he’s not clear just how. We’re actually descended from poverty-stricken Czech potato farmers, but that doesn’t stop him dreaming. No, if we’d had a famous artist actually related to us I’d have heard about it with the same regularity and unconcern for my interest levels that Sol shows when regaling me with stories about chlorine.

On the wall of one of the rooms I saw a list of names, the names of all the children who had been interned at Terezín. There I saw Ruth Weiss. Actually, there were three Ruth Weiss’s, but only one was older than Dad. This must be the daughter of Artur, my father’s uncle, the cousin Dad told me he’d been head over heels in love with. He said all the young boys of the family used to be in love with Ruthy, although she was terribly spoilt and a frightful bitch, because she was drop-dead gorgeous and, being a teenager, an older woman. Here she was then, spoilt beautiful Ruthy, recorded on the walls of Terezín Ghetto Museum. I said hello to her.

I left the museum and walked back through the town to the brick complex known as the Small Fortress that I’d ed on the way in on the bus. As I walked I thought, My grandfather ed this building, and saw that square, fenced off from the prisoners, only for guards to use. And in winter he walked through this slush, cold and hungry.

I approached the entrance to the Small Fortress over a bridge, its flagging slippery with ice, past a cemetery with a Christian section and a Jewish section, then through a stone archway. The rain started to fall as I walked and it seemed fitting, somehow. The Small Fortress was used as a prison for offenders. Some of the artists from a technical drawing workshop had been imprisoned and tortured there for making and hiding realistic drawings of life in Terezín, when they were supposed to be drawing either plans for buildings or producing propaganda. At least half the artists I’d seen in the museum had the words ‘Tortured and killed’ and the year next to their names. Hardly anyone survived internment in the Small Fortress.

For something called the Small Fortress it was enormous. I paid my entrance fee at the stone archway, then walked in the rain through the deserted complex. I went down a ageway that opened up into a snow-covered square. On each side of the square were low concrete walls with small metal doors in them. Doors so small, they were like the ones you see in really old houses, when you realise people two centuries ago were dwarves. I opened the first one. Inside was a long low room with four-bed bunks on one side. The top man would have been only inches from the roof when he lay down. The bunks were made from untreated wood and there were no mattresses. These rooms made the quarters in the main town look like luxury.

In one corner was a thick, wooden door. I pushed it open to a small concrete room, not more than one metre square at the most, and a toilet that even sixty years later made me worry about disease. One small toilet. No shower, no wash basin. It was awful. All the doors led to quarters just like the first one and each time I was compelled to open the toilet door. Somehow, it was the toilet that appalled me the most; one filthy toilet for all those people.

Since I’d arrived in Terezín I had been looking for one thing in particular: the Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Makes You Free’, sign that has such resonance for

holocaust survivors. I knew about the sign in Auschwitz, of course, but I’d had no idea there was one at Terezín, too, until I’d seen a picture of it in a brochure I’d picked up in Prague. It was painted in a semicircle over a metal gate that I thought would be the main entrance. It wasn’t. When I left the square at the Small Fortress I consulted my map again, sure it had to be nearby. After some twisting and turning of the map for directions, I finally saw it. Although I thought I was prepared for it, I wasn’t. My stomach churned in fear. The rest of the place had been horrible but at the sight of a gate with that sign above it, I knew worse must be ahead.

The Arbeit Macht Frei sign is a metallic signpost that really means we will torture you and kill you, we will cut out your eyes and smash your head against the concrete, and we will sing while we’re doing it. I almost didn’t go any further beyond the sign’s gate, but I had to. My grandfather had been interned here. I needed to be brave. I went under it and found myself in another square with more small doors, these ones leading to minute cells with no window and nothing in them: solitary confinement cells. I stopped breathing the second I went into one. Just a look, then out again. In and out of the cells, and then I walked into one and saw the manacles on the wall. How do people become torturers? Who gets pleasure out of it? What sort of person?

I found myself in front of a ageway entrance and I don’t know why I went in, but I did. A sign warned me that it was five hundred metres long. I walked through the tunnel, the roof only a handspan above my head, barred doors leading into tiny rooms dug into the side of the tunnel. Torture rooms, holding cells. My shoes crashed down on the stone in rhythm. After five minutes, which seemed more like five hours, I thought, I have to get out of here, and started to walk faster.

I was panicking. When does this end? How far is it? I must be halfway. The ageway was too low to run and, besides, I reasoned, if people have been dragged down here the least I can do is walk the walk. I thought I was never going to get out, but at last I emerged into the sunshine. All I could think about

was my grandfather. What was he like? Was he the type to keep his head down? Stay out of trouble? Please God, don’t let him have been here.

My father says he was a mild man, never angry with anyone. He was a salesman, a gregarious man, a man with many friends who liked to play cards and chat away into the night. So that had to be good. A salesman, the type who likes to get along with people, not the wave-making type. Not the sort who’d do something rash, like drawing a picture of Terezín as it really was, and get himself locked in the Small Fortress. God how I hoped he’d kept his head down.

I ed by a small memorial in a minuscule courtyard and stopped. On one side was a door. I went in, because that’s what I was doing that day—opening doors and going in. Inside was a wall made of concrete with intermittent glass strips. Behind each pane of glass was a round metal tray with dirt and small stones on it. And inscribed on the wall in front of each tray was a name—Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen–Bergen—the names of all the concentration camps. I looked at the one from Dachau and the one from Auschwitz and the one from Golleschau and thought of Marta and Olga and Artur and Karel and all my great-aunts and uncles who had been interned there, died there. This was earth and rocks from where they’d been, maybe they’d even stepped on it. Somehow, it was a terrible and wonderful, this earth and these small stones that had actually been there.

The Russians liberated the camp in 1945, evacuated the inmates and helped to eradicate the spotted typhus epidemic (at last, a good word to be said about the Russians). But the Small Fortress was used as a prison again, this time by the Czechs, who expelled the Germans from the Sudetenland in the aftermath of the war. There is a deep rift in Czech society that I’d been reading about in the papers—not everyone feels comfortable about having done to the Germans what the Germans did to them. Some Czechs think an apology is in order. Other Czechs refuse. Why should they apologise? It was the Germans’ fault. Who cares if those Germans were Czech citizens? Myself, I’m paralysed. I’d like to say I think the Czechs should apologise for killing their German citizens, who after all were not responsible for Nazism—they just happened to live in the

Sudetenland—but I can’t. I have to stand by my father.

I didn’t want to spend a night in Terezín so I left on the only bus out of town. I’d been there for four hours. My grandfather was here for four years. One hour for each of his years. I was glad I’d worn my aqua earrings. My grandfather liked to dress well, I knew.

Epilogue

When I was a child in Sydney, alone and puzzled in a school system I was resolutely failing thanks to some daft sociologist with a faulty test, no-one knew my middle name. I was ashamed of it. It was a foreign name, a strange name, not one the Kates and Annas and Lucys had.

It was not something even my closest friends knew about. I did once tell it to a girl at school on the promise of absolute secrecy and she immediately told the most popular girl who told everyone else who then razzed me mercilessly: ‘Who has a name like that?’ Only a girl with a foreign father with a strange accent who flung me over his shoulder and said, as he carried me around, ‘I carry you like a sack of potatoes’, just as his father had said to him when he was a small boy in Kamenièky. None of my school mates had fathers who carried them around ‘like a sack of potatoes’. But I did. And then he was taken away from me. I never got over it.

I left Prague in late February 2006, nearly a year to the day after I arrived. My money had run out and I arrived in Sydney penniless, a folder full of sketchy paragraphs and unfinished novels in my suitcase, a true bohemian at last. The scent of gum trees, the deafening sound of cicadas, the dry, heavy heat fell on my skin, filling my pores with fragrant summer, the sun soaking into my bones. I love Australia. I love her shape and her red earth. I love her dry, crackling smells and her arid heart. But back in the country where I’d spent forty years of my life, surrounded by the familiar, I realised that by imperceptible degrees over the year, something had changed. I had changed. I had come face to face with the fears that have ruled my life. They didn’t go away, but just seeing them made a difference. Battling the Czech rudeness I saw, in sharp relief, how fearful I was, how anxious to be good. What had made me that way? The guilt I felt over the loss of my father, the shame I felt at having never met my grandmother, all this crippling dread of other people’s anger—how had I ended up like this? Bizarrely, it seemed to me that my life, my tiny, insignificant life, had been shaped by a

world war, a communist regime and a bitter divorce. I’d responded to all the battering in my life in a uniquely Czech way—by keeping my head down.

Yet my sister ired my courage. So, too, did friends at home, who seemed to think that going to live in Prague had been an amazing adventure. They envied me. Andy had abandoned the idea of living in Europe, taking art photographs, because he couldn’t face the loss of security. That made me feel differently about myself, too. Despite my fear, my insecurity, I’d still managed to go to a strange, difficult country where they spoke a strange, difficult language, and carve out a path for myself—making friends, weaving the fabric of a life out of nothing. And I thought that courage was pretty Czech, too.

Mostly what my year in Prague gave me was hope. I saw that no matter what had happened in the past, there was always hope for the future. I lost my father, but fourteen years later we found each other again, strangers who started to talk, politely at first, then lovingly. I lost my grandmother, but I found my family in Studenice, with no common language but still able to reach out to me, to show me my grandmother’s old apartment and to see in my face the shape of a village girl. Out of tiny shoots, trees will grow.

I felt I had only just begun my life in Prague. I had glimpsed my grandmother and my grandfather, shadows and light appearing in the corner of my eye and evaporating when I turned my face to them; ghosts flickering in the impenetrable conversations of kindly cousins in a little village in southern Bohemia.

I never wrote my Great Australian Novel. I wrote this book instead, the story of my year in Prague. A year in which I had no great adventures, nothing happened, I didn’t find the love of my life, but in which, indefinably, something seismic occurred. I found myself.

For a year I worked in Sydney, back in my old life as a temp, seeing my father and stepmother every Friday night, then I sold all my possessions and bought a one-way ticket to Prague. I live here now. I’ve been here for three months. I still don’t have a visa and I still don’t have a job. I still think one day I’ll write a novel that will make me famous, but I’ve discovered Spider Solitaire on the net . . .

My middle name is Bohumila. My grandmother’s name.