Benesov was just the average Czech town. However, Benesov was also killing me.
There is an old I05 that always passes me when I walk home at night Perhaps it is the same car. Perhaps it is a different car each time. It is hard to tell when you are totally crashed. For the thrill of being a little frightened, I used to like to think it is the same car - pursuing me, tracking me. The cambering on Czech roads is wobbly, so you never knew where the cars will set off in pursuit next. Like paintings in art galleries, the nose and eyes always seem aimed straight at you. Coming behind me, ! would turn around and watch it take a corner, rocking like a pram, howling like an old dive bomber, seeming to vector straight at me. Despite the jokes about its age , despite its ubiquitousness, it was a handsome well-proportioned car and with the repetitiveness of bogus profound thoughts ! always look up and say, when it passed: What a good looker, with its nice little rump, and long nose, subversive embedded design of creative seventies engineers, in its unassuming way. Born in I982. Like Helena, in fact.
Perhaps it was driven by some night shift worker, or one of the many young people who takes Benesov's main international export, meta-amphetamines, heading home from the Red Dragon. One night I was walking along a section of road without pavement, past the brewery chimney church spire, when I heard a Stuka in my left ear. Turning around, swivelling out of the way, I was just able to avoid the car slicing into the kerb from knocking me down. It didn't stop. I went back to my white box, my time capsule, I stared at the ceiling for a long while. I felt like calling my ex-wife, and did so the next day. She told me her best friend's husband had been killed that very day. He had died in Poland, the country next to the Czech republic, and was hit by a car. But my death was soon back.
At 6 am having sucked off ten ice creams. Every night, I went down with the Titanic and came up with neuropathy. And I knew that, if death had sent a warning, or perhaps missed me accidentally and carried off an acquaintance in a neighbouring country, it might soon be back - albeit in another guise, of drink.
Next morning I bumped into Jarka the 28-year-old widow in the staff room.
She, too, taught English.
“I think I got warning from my death last night,” I said.
She gave me a strange look.
The Czechs were the world champion self intoxicators and dissipators, (mullet haired pissheads) even under communism, and they were drinking heavier still now. I thought the reason was cultural-historical. Communism was about having faith in the arrival of Utopian, conflict free world -because it was historically determined, brought on by the intellectuals: the common people just had to sit back and wait. Or so they were told, And they waited. And they drank. So, hey, another insight. After all, the Czechs almost endless beer consumption during Communism was also a kind of vamping, a kind of waiting, Waiting for what? Waiting for communism to deliver, effortlessly, as I waited for Helena to do so. Waiting for the intellectuals to deliver them into the perfect society. And sometimes I thought that; living under a pervasive religion, it was easy to grope for another opiate, as Marx would have put it. On the other hand, the opposite argument is just as plausible, In the absence of this pervasive religion, the Czechs at the moment really need a substitute. Which is why, since the end of communism, the Czechs were drinking more than ever- the coppery Budvar, the water, teary Ferdinand, the local beer; the bland Gambrinus, the dry continental-winter-tasting Krusovice.
For my part, I am wondering whether unrequited love wasn't giving me an appetite for drink. Helena. I saw her for half an hour a day - the rest of the day, even when sober, was wasted, nothing, unempowered.
I just lived for the moment of sobriety, as it were, of being in her presence. Being without her felt like the self obliteration of heavy drinking. From which it was but a short step to really start drinking. The Czechs and I - we were missing something from our lives.
Where did they do all this vamping? Where did I, a convert, follow them. Take your pick. The places are still there; in fact there are more of them. Where should I go for tonight's execution? Benesov has more bars than an English city ten times its size.
It is odd, almost elephantine, an extrusion, an enormity -this profusion of pubs and clubs. It hadn't seen anything like it since north-western Cameroon. For in any other respect Benesov, like most Czech small towns, is a normal European town. There is a large cut-price supermarket, which sells dumplings, white elongated things that looked like unbaked ciabatta (very London) and which eventually gives Czech males loads of white facial loaf to bake in the beer halls. (I too was getting the Benesov sunburn) It sells sprats, cheap non CAP salami from Moravia - porcine Auschwitz -which sometimes even has Paprika in it. There were pallets full of litre bricks of wine from which Benesov's degenerates helped themselves. The women meanwhile grazed among the packet goulash and the ersatz coffee, and the chewy, cowpat like loaves called Sumava that lasted for days and which I lived on during the second half of each month when my money had run out. Beer, at 20 pee an ice cream5 was cheap, but not that cheap. There was a large video store There was a small cinema, a few record shops - Karel Gott mostly, Scooter - there are loads of chemists. There is a Bata shoe store. I avoid Bata shoes because of a pair I bought two years ago which massacred my feet and split apart after two weeks - typical poor east bloc quality. Salon Diana sold nearly-up-to-date fashions. There was a municipal swimming pool and an indoor ice hockey stadium,
But Benesov had differences too. It was party town. You wouldn't believe this from walking the town centre on weekends, all commercial activity died at noon on Saturday until Monday morning. On the surface at least the town goes completely dead, like the surface of the ocean where a submarine has recently sunk.
If there are human beings in Benesov, I can see why there is the dichotomy between its subterranean and surface aspects. I could feel quotidian Benesov's emptiness in the pit of my stomach - even now. The forever war's drums would beat in my ear, like on dire Sunday evenings. Posters flapped in the wind Things would move in the corner of your eye which, when you look? turn out to be stationary. Spring was worse than winter, which gave an alibi to the eeriness. Sepulchral teenage marijuana floated between the Big child statues. (They have big child statues, there is a cult of children -socialist societies were large kindergartens -and the Czechs never fought a good war, There is one war monument: it alas a beautiful women embracing a broken soldier. No men on horseback) The cars stared inertly at you. The only commotion is when a Slovak gypsy car, if their contraptions can be called that, trundling down Vlasimska, with a gypsy running on the pavement behind. Sometimes a car with Austrian number plates will be creeping through. Always looking for somewhere to dump a bootful of rubbish.
But that, as said, on the surface. there were pubs - and clubs, and they were always heaving with activity. There are so many bars that it took my two months of fairly assiduous bar-hopping to discover the really exciting places. So, in the beginning I went to your typical Czech pub: stained table cloths, old men with exploded noses sitting on long wooden benches sinking pint after pint while watching the endless matches of ice hockey or the Czech version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I always got suspicious looks from the waiters. I, in turn, wondered if there were any under thirties, or young women, in Benesov, Two months of late night Brownian motion, a dragon fly drifting in the alcoholic randomness, finally brought me to where the circulating early twenties mingled.
There was the Dandy bar. I made friends with the military types from the parachute regiment, the elite unit of the Czech army which was based in Benesov, at the Dandy Bar, a mirror and dance pole affair with Wednesday stripteases, advertised by stencilled lettering on a plain office door, some of the letters were missing,, accessed via a smelly passage way next to a Moravian butchers. I would never have found it had I not been introduced by Mirek the lucky warrant officer, more about whom later. Shall I submerge myself there? The Czechs could make a bar out of a table and two chairs. It is an innate instinct, and the Dandy Bar was evidence of this genius. A globe revolving on the ceiling, it managed to conjure up the sleazy ambience of a New York singles bar. And then there was the Red Dragon, where a pimply crowd was as intoxicated on the vanity of being drugs abusers as they were on the drugs themselves.
The bars might be different, but after a few ice creams they were all the same to me.
Europeans listen to different pop music than Brits. It's big, warehouse (Nuremberg stadium?) type music. Goes well with searchlights - or their modern,scaled down disco equivalents, its melodious, like Bach: its immediate ancestors are the music of Kraftwerk and Jean Michel Jarre. It is composed by middle aged, softy-looking men in Frankfurt studios rather than young angry things who have grown of on wife beatings and baked beans and outdoor toilets and visits to the dole office and all the rest of it that turns the English rockstar into a corroded figure of bitter hatred, at least until he gets his gong and moves to St Johns Wood. Anglo-American pop music, which is as little a force in contemporary
Europe as its NATO presence these days is descended from scots-Irish folk music, and so sounds fiddly and diddiy, and plays the blue notes and is always sardonic,or sneering or, its Country and Western equivalent,is maudlin. The Germanic music which now dominates Europe - the last English biggies in the Czech Republic were probably Pink Floyd, whose imitators still draw Charles Bridge Crowds - is about bigness, about collectivism. The biggest band in Europe is called Scooter and its English lead singer begins the song, to a large rhythm; "Good morning, 3 am.". The band then riffs in a bit of super tramp, speeded up" When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful." The only thing the lead singer, more like a Thomas Mann Mario the magician figure, with his voice the crowd's whip, says is "Are you Ready. Scooter." it gets the crowd going in a way rock music doesn't: it is sublimated fascism, although as long as people continue to take ecstasy. I don't suppose it will take expression in wog-bashing. Indeed blacks imported into the Czech Republic from the banlieues of Paris are the guardians of the dance palaces, the SS troops dangerous troops atop the loudspeakers - mot eagles anymore, not columns -but big, fat loudspeakers flanking the altar, or the podium of the wizard of Oz musical demagogue who spins the tables.! went to one or two discos like that inn Benesov, bluffing my way in without a stamp on my hand, and they were awesome. But that didn't happen every day. I usually went to smaller affairs.
If German discos, those giant dance palatzen, always reminded of gas chambers, With every raver an Jew, writhing and squirming under the dry ice gas nozzles, Czech discos were less ecstatic. There was a gentle element of comedy. The girls had a strong sense of self parody, dancing with each other m imitation of those girls who had scored with men, and they were often so drunk that they broke glasses. The dancing was never so coordinated, so furious as to achieve critical momentum. In Dresden, the out often teen disco, semaphored by huge search lights searching the night sky (the war is still on) ,all the girls wore white, bright like Persil washing in the ultraviolet beams, and they were over made up - beautiful, statuesque and blonde/ I was with Eiizabeth,who was small and Asian, and whom several of the girls tripped up as she trailed past me. The Czechs on the other hand, whatever their faults, were not secret Nazis and didn't try too hard at anything. The self parody and the bad dancing of the smaller discos notwithstanding, however, I found the lace, whether the Red Dragon, the Pod Brankou or the Dandy Bar, ail the same after a while.
They became sub discos of the same meta disco. My descents were never facilitated by drugs however. Never start a war on two fronts, I said, quoting Hitler's generals, to the shoals of grinning morons around me.
Also, i secretly thought (like I secretly though the Czech language was for simpletons: sterile, like all small languages) that, in defiance of fashionable opinion, that marijuana made people stupider than alcohol ever did. People could drink a lot and still retain their intelligence, but go awry after their first spiiff. But perhaps drinkers understand drinkers, and spliffers enter a world of greater understanding — with each other, at any rate, if not with non spliffers.
I became known as the man who wouldn't sample a joint, as the group ritually left the Red Dragon, and standing outside, passed around a joint. "Jointa" they called it units accusative form. (Jointem in its instrumental form.
Czech was a language based on bird song. The Slavs were always close to nature. When i woke up, a bird was always singing "Dobre den -dobry den" outside my window. I knew I was hung-over, but I hadn't actually yet gone mad. On sobering up, I speculated that the early Slavs created a language based on the onomatopoeia around them - hence, Dobre Den, good morning. I later spoke to linguist and he said this was true. In the I3th century, this idiolect of primitives, spoken in the barn and in the nursery, mostly, needed a grammar. They stole the grammar of Latin, as Czechs were later to steal German people's property. They were squatters. And so too in their borrowing of "jointa" - although, bizarrely they went through a period in the early twentieth century where they rejected any loan words at all.
Rozhlas was TV, but in Polish and Russian TV was TV. Theatre,which was cognate in Polish and Russian, was Divadlo in Czech. And many other such examples. !t was always instructive to read the ingredients description in various languages on the back of crisp packets. (Yeah, I was that desperate). But jointa was easy to understand. The new generation were less pernickety at preserving the purity of the Czech language: especially when the borrowers were dope heads -lack of cultural hygiene as well as lack of personal hygiene characterised them. But what was worrying is how they always got their grammar right, Czech being one of the most difficult languages in the world after Chinese and Korean, according to the US state department which rates Czech three in difficulty compared to French and German's One. They talked nonsense, but as far as I could tell they talked nonsense correctly. Even their English never failed to be grammatically correct, and with the added fluency of loosened bow strings, and it made me worried, because my English was the mine canary for my excesses. In the beginning and in the end there was the word. Czech beer was so seductive, so cheap, the drinking of it so accepted. Freud, incidentally, was from around these parts. Why didn't he ever write about beer? Because it was always so easy to muff your face in the creamy, sweet tasting head that flowed over your hands when the bar man
had just poured it. Having another one was a substitute for scoring. And another. At some point, tipping over the event horizon, and falling down, down, everything became very difficult. Every flight of stairs became a ladder. The strobe lights became little back of retina explosions. The disco became a gas chamber, always managed to walk home - the observer in me, the one that shook his head at my antics, always managed to muster the strength to walk home, These were hallucinatory moments. Sometimes I took a very roundabout way. Once I was walking around the semi countryside around the mechanical school, and peered through ah hedge and saw playing fields, and I thought:! have been here before, in a dream. Christ. Premonition. But then I realised it hadn't been a dream, I had just been here, getting lost, when I had been very drunk. And I always I woke up with people's phone numbers in my pockets, like the notes left behind by men who survived the explosion of the Kursk
But what could I do?
Men are hunters, and we always have an exit strategy. Our greatest fear is being trapped. (At least men: we scan for exits where, at parties, women scan for faces.) And I was trapped. Helena insisted on coming to my classes. And it was a situation of unrequite .
One way was to find an alternative to Helena. Like Elizabeth for example. Elizabeth and I had had along history together. There was the first trip around Europe. cost to her, about two thousand pounds. We had seen the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia and Italy, in 48 hours. That was one good thing about Elizabeth - she did things fast, as a New Yorker. She was determined and direct. Once, she sliced into my sister's shop, after I had moved to Prague - she moved to London to run after me and I ran away to Prague. She didn't have any eyes for the sex goods on display but walked straight, almost myopically, up to the counter where my sister was standing. Elizabeth's head was reportedly head bowed, like a charging ram. It had been the same when we met in Dublin. I had started talking to Elizabeth, like I talked to many women that evening (no ulterior motive except to get away briefly from the cloying company of my male travel companion). It was one of those literary tours that take in half a dozen pubs. In one, I remembered Elizabeth standing in a corner with her considerably thinner, boyish looking mother. He her head bowed, as if her forehead had a small weight of lead, and when I nodded at her and smiled., the weight keeled her head over, as she looked at me lengthwise along the horizontally of her charging forehead, and she had to run to keep up with the bowed head, and the bowed head was coming, with shark-like directness, straight towards me. Drinkers jumped out of the way, or were were elbowed in the back - she had broad shoulders. She didn't seem to
To walk either - she levitated above the ground, as if she had wheels instead of legs. She moved smoothly. She went straight for me: I was what she wanted, f looked and sounded like the expatriate British polemicist Christopher Hitchens - who just happened to be her hero, as five visits to his birth town of Portsmouth could testify. Americans are such cultists. Elizabeth went back to America and then came to stay with me in London, in November. I took her to my gastronomic security centre of Westbourne Grove, where she pronounced the Bill at Khan's, 25 pounds, as dead chap and gave a hundred percent tip. I contemplated scooping some of this tip when her back was turned: it would last me a week when she was back in the states. We then went to Oddbins and bought, on her instruction, two very expensive, heavy red, wines. They were extremely intoxicating, thank God, because it enabled me to fall into a heavy, dreamless sleeps on after we returned to the flat and she claimed her reward. "You are getting on," said my best friend about it. "She's witty. She's successful. She's nice. She does everything for you. I had a good feeling about her. Take her before it's too late."
I hated him for saying that. So I was getting on, was I? He also thought I was a dreamer, a fantasist and a loser in all aspects of my life. (qv. My career ambitions.) She was also Korean- American. Yeah, America really was different - really was multiracial in a way that Europe wasn't. "Where are you from," Europeans asked her. "America." "No. Where are you really from." "America." We Europeans couldn't get our heads around this. The day we do is the day we stop thinking of Americans as our cousins, with all the positive consequences this would have for our psychological independence and rejection of American pop culture. Why had she fallen for a bigot? I had difficulties with the concept of an Asian body: constructed differently, it was rubbery, jaundice looking, too smooth. But she had a nice, symmetrical, not too Asian looking face, with the brilliant teeth of her adopted nation. She had a nice nose: many many men pursued her. But I needed, really, someone like her like I needed a hole in the head. Within a year i would have grown gross and lazy on her solicitude. I think you always have to pursue your dreams, even if they kill you in the attempt. Although I realised this ran into a paradox. E!izabeth, who moved lock stock and barrel, with her expensive lithographs, her latest Apple Mac on which she did her newspaper page designs - she was in that kind of job, and was apparently very good at it, working for the ;largest firm in the States with the scalps of Die Zeit's, Newsweek’s and Bild's new logography under its belt. I was Elizabeth's dream. And how could I deny her from pursuing that? How could I expect mercy from Helena if I wasn't willing to extend mercy myself. As a consequence, I did. Against my better judgment, and because I was short of money, i asked her to come to the Czech Republic. I also asked her to bring what Sylva, the other English teacher, boringly called "Teaching materials" - the Oxford English dictionary of quotations, some novels and magazines. I didn't expect her to do it. But she did. My sister works very !ate hours. But Elizabeth skulked around in my street until my sister came home at half past midnight and responded to my requests. I then casually - never say anything casually to Elizabeth, I began to realise - suggested that we meet in the Bedrock restaurant, a place which Josef had introduced me to on my first day in the Czech Republic, when the sun cast the snow and the train was creaking and rolling through undulating, naked tree country, and I thought: this is paradise. Josef looked different from how. His surname was Vlach, which is the m Czech corruption of the Latin word Wallach which was their name for Romania. He had thick black, slicked back hair, and very Celtic features. But he didn't have swarthy skin. Reminded me of my friend Maxton, the Scot from Stirling who was on my journalism course and was poor but always had enough money to go for a pint of £1 Flowers. I trust people nowadays on the basis of phrenology. Maxton was easygoing and faithful, and so Josef proved to be. We met James, who had been doing stand in teaching for me for a week, and had a few drinks and therefore Bedrock, first landfall, became a place where I took Helena for our first few dates and where the class came to congregate when they bunked off our classes. The staff knew me all by sight and me by name, and two of the waitresses later said they fancied me. Bedrock was the name of the Flintstones' home, but it was also a rock climbing term and there were pictures of the Grand Canyon and a small waterfall in the corner and blinds that kept out the daylight, it had a fuggy atmosphere. But it was also, in Benesov terms, "trendy".
I said I would be there from seven to nine pm. No one ever listened to me, and I didn't expect anyone to do so this time either. But she did. She arrived on a business class flight - equivalent to five months of my ungenerous salary - and, not bothering with the elaborate instructions for taking the local train designed to save her a crown or two, she booked a taxi from the airport and, giving the driver a carte blanche to charge her whatever he wished, failed to negotiate a price and came down to Benesov immediately. Such keenness is off-putting. I wasn't there. Elizabeth spent five minutes in the restaurant, and then left. The taxi driver took her on a tour of BenesovI s environs. I dared not ask her what she had been charged.
The next day we exchanged emails- many emails. And finally we met in a bar in Prague.
There were some good things about Liz. She chose to play away - only talking about journalism, protecting perhaps wisely the core of her identity - her job - under the guise of not wanting to trump me - that damnable female modesty again; on the other hand, talking about herself would have her quite interesting and taken the pressure off me to perform all the time. I hated her asking me questions and just being so overawed with me, which, again in fairness to her, was not a problem with Helena, whose English was not so good I could awe her with my own command. But I did find Elizabeth boring, even if she did speak fast. I wanted to fast forward her even more. A bottom line, a sum sign would float before my eyes. Get to the point, get to the result. And then ! would order another drink.
But to be fair, I did feel a great deal of affection for her: i wanted a confidante, a friend and when wasn't telling me that she loved me all the time, as she did every five minutes, she could be quite witty. And perhaps, after a few drinks, I should like to go to bed with her. We went to Dresden, thence to Leipzig together. I thought:this is what life at forty could be like. A ageing girlfriend in a raincoat, of indeterminate race and background, snacking on culture together. At a disco full of teenagers, she looked so scrawny and frankly old. Always three steps behind me, physically and metaphorically. She cried a lot. I told her about Helena.
”Why do you give a young woman such power,” she said.
In London, she didn’t respond to my emails. Actually, in four months that was the most loving thing I was told.
Should I leave Benesov? But I couldn't let Josef, or my pupils, down.
Josef was the general manager of the secondary school who rang the British Council on the day I decided to live in the Czech Republic, met an Englishman on the tram, and walked into the British Council to ask for an English-teaching job five minutes after Josef’s first call
Josef was a Harry Potter fan, and a cheap children's map of neverneverland was on his office wall, along with a certificate from Microsoft. One of those useless things for to people who pay a lot to learn a little. It made me think he was kind o scholastic Robin Hood who liked peddling bogus certificates to the gullible and rich. The pupils were not a!! that intelligent -the large landmark Gymnasium down the road skimmed the cream -but their parents were entrepreneurs and well off businessmen.
Josef’s school was one of the first private schools in the Czech Republic, a total renovation job from ruins opposite Benesov's army barracks, in a country where anything private is still suspect (The privatised banks raked in millions for unscrupulous investors who just happened to be friends of the auditors who severely undervalued the flotation share price.
He had a big car, and a big house behind the school His dream was to turn his vocational school with pink walls, laid back pupils who shuffled around in plastic slippers - into something serious.! think- he was denying his school's strengths, however, by wanting to turn it Into Benesov!s equivalent of Winchester, He asked me to contact my old school, Westminster, to ask whether they wanted a joint venture with him.
Josef’s people's Security Bureau Trabant was notorious. It was your typical Dinky Toy, a coffee coloured Trabi estate that had once been the standard wheels of the Czech KGB. ft reminded me that Kundera had said that Communism had been innocence with a bloody smile. It was the Lenin statue that Benesov never had and post communists elsewhere foolishly | had taken and melted down, and the local police tried, but failed, to have it moved from its snug parking place in Taborska avenue, He was one person who wouldn't forget communism.
He had been fired from several jobs during Communism.
He was a bit of a spiv, paying me little. He had a thumbs up sign every time he walked past the door, an offered me another year's contract. Not in my worst nightmares I thought.
But Benesov had a way to make visitors stay. Permanently -eternally -or otherwise.
The job, in detail, was this: teaching English to girls and (fewer) boys aged I5 - I8 in a private school specialism; in tourism and travel. !t is easy to be cynical; tourism is a little bit like media studies. The girls (with the occasional dumb boy, dwarfs in every sense as they are at that age, among them) were doubtless complicated in their own way, but simple and homogeneous from my perch. Frankly that relieved me. Another thing you don't have to regret. Their production-line panties exposed by low cut jeans, seen from the back of class, bored me 2nd the way they kicked each other in the bum removed the romance of Lolitas.. But at I9 the girls became a little more interesting, or assertive. I also taught a class of post high school students.
Helena was one in my class of pre university students, basically a year's course for draft dodgers, and these I got to know well, since ! had them for twenty hours a week. There was Olda who always seemed as drained of energy as his marble white face framed by angelic blond hair seemed drained of blood. There was Zdenek, the handsome hero from Blanik, who lived in the world of Czech fairytales. Tall and handsome, he played amateur roles of Czech princes and princelings in the small twin town of Vlasim. Honza the dark horse, or perhaps dark pony. The boys didn’t interest me that much. They were the same from day to day. Their world was small: most of the time they were drawing models, complete with perspectives, of old skoda cars. It was a cruely that the Czechs, the most car obsessed and engineering minded of nations, should have been saddled with poor industrial equipment that allowed them only to churn out cars that were ten years behind their western equivalents.
! wrote them off, usually. Sometimes, though, they could surprise me with an intelligent phrase so maybe the misunderstanding was their lack of English, Driving me around the hill of Blanik, where the heroes who would one day save the Czech nation in its greatest hour of peril - capitalism, perhaps? - would emerge, sword on horseback, Olda was able to say in response to my apology that teachers became teachers even in real life (which is why they hated talking to real adults, who would undermine their self delusion of omnipotence) "professional deformation" he said with a wave of his hand. And then there was Honza, who hadn't even passed his high school exam, who nevertheless came in loyally, daily, to make us all quorate (two), we went walking around the town just the two of us, and I shopped in the supermarket. l was laughing and joking about the Space Odyssey Hal-like red lights that lit up every time you walked into a room at the school, the very communist feeling that you were always being watched, and I looked around and there was the headmistress -doing a - huge-weekend shopping, "Murphy's law," said Honza, who hitherto had never said anything intelligent about anything, That said, I asked the other English teacher and she said that level of English usually corresponded to level of intelligence so in fact there were no hidden intelligences that failed to be unearthed because of a linguistic barrier. But I did wonder.
Helena didn't interact so much with the boys. She was always very garrulous with them, having a nervous high pitched laugh. She looked at me, lazily, smiling cattishly, sceptically ,with squinting eyes, I put her down immediately as a difficult student to handle, someone who might turn the class against me.! liked her, but was afraid of her, and she wasn't a great beauty,
She came infrequently at first, Then – one day I told Olda off while she was having her legs draped over his knee, and she started coming more often.
She invited me after class to the Ferdinand Brewery down the road, where her father was a department head of the trouble shooting division, She carne even when others didn’t turn up, We went on daytime dates, to the pub, and got drunk -but now ! am going ahead of events. She said we should spend a weekend in her country cottage, that we visit a cinema together - that we visit the Carlsbad film festival together, camping out.
! remember, Helena, when came to school one morning a!ong Taborska avenue, first past the brewery with its tall ochre speckled brick chimney ? past the malt smells and the brewery lorries. Then, Taborska avenue with its trees, a bit French looking, with the casern and its incomprehensible shouts across the wall, and smartish low rise flats on the opposite side. Then the blue façade of the school, and she was standing outside. She kept her gaze on me, smiling slightly, never breaking off in my three hundred metre walk up the road, and then we went into class together.
Wednesday, 25 April 2007
Part II
One day we went for a fag break in the small municipal park, after their classes. The others left; Helena stayed. She suggested we go and play snooker together; go to the cinema and even spend a weekend at her country cottage.
But then there was Simon. I met him separately. Simon became my friend, a drinking companion I met one met one evening in some bar or other. He was unemployed, aged 25, had somehow missed out on university, and was the son of middle class doctors. He also played in a band. He was tall, had laser blue eyes, and drank huge amounts. He was also quite sensitive.
It gradually became clear that Simon and Helena – it’s a small town – had a past of sorts, and possibly a present.
There was that day at the theatre, during rehearsals of an amateur play which I attended I knew both were in the play.
When I turned up she was in the process of taking off her dress to reveal her bra to and sundry in the changing room. She spotted me, turned her back on me, and standing closely to Simon while holding her dress - it later turned out to be,as she said, her mother's wedding dress - in her bra. Seeing her naked back turned me on, as much as seeing the intimacy with which the two stood close together, her half naked in front of him, disturbed me. She berated him for bringing me along, She then put on her jumper, a nice affair with its of lines of colour, unlike what anyone else in Benesov was wearing, and walked off in a huff backstage.
I went up to the balcony,where I sadly observed Simon and Helena, a couple in the play, standing closer to each other than I thought necessary in these periods when another actor was doing his medley bit and they were standing in the background waiting for their turns.
Anyway, her part of the medley was Juliet's balcony lament (a joke from the director, perhaps?).
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” she said to the empty auditorium, and there I sat, on the balcony, She repeated the lament two days later at the Majals festivities in. the main square, !t was a hot day, plus thirty Celsius - spring lasted for about two days in Benesov ~ and this was the first of may. ten years ago they had had socialist parades and ail the rest of it. Now they had a funfair, near my hostel,tiny circus,without animals apart from goats as far as 1 could see, and and a large day market where the North Vietnamese sold new hiking boots for the equivalent of two pounds and everyone else sold not ut__mixes and CDs)And then there was Helena's and her small theatre group's ten minute performance* I arrived from school half way through Helenafs scene.
Standing on an especially constructed podium, in the hot sun, on the Masaryk Square, I saw her perform, amateurishly. I guess I was madly in love.
Somehow the trip to her country cottage and all the rest of it never materialised.
Simon and I avoided the subject of Helena, except once, in the theatre, when I asked him straight out of they were having an affair. He looked surprised and said no. I didn’t believe him. And I drank to quell the raging crush.
.
Language is my only weapon against alcohol
But Sylva, my fellow English teacher, gave me far too little to do, and as a result I improvised exercises. Once I did something on smoking with my 15-year-olds. The class was small, three people, because the rest of the class had gone on a study tour to Greece- they were well off - and lanced Jitka, a red hair pretty button nosed girl whom f had seen several times in the Red Dragonf In the company,of hoods wearing hoods, if they smoked. Half the class did she said/in fact, according to an Economist statistic, the Czechs, and Czech youths, are the heaviest smokers in the world. The tobacco companies who had greedily looked for new markets in the early nineties because they were faced with stagnating markets in western Europe had done their job well, I had remembered how crass the advertising had been: they were the only companies, apart from political parties, who had money to spend on poster adverts in the early nineties. Big hoardings in aggressive red had said: "Test the West. The West is the Best.
Well, of course it was. West was a cigarette brand. (Czechs liked simple English words: the favoured mineral water was, for no obvious reason, Trendy. Their new Skoda sports car, expensive Bnd much desired was called, somewhat obviously, 'The Skoda Superb) Cigarettes were as cheap relative to its price in the west as beer was: fifty crowns a packet. I asked Jitka if she smoked, and felt an erotic charge when she said yes, as she was sharing an intimacy with me. She looked me over. The only boy who was in the class on this day, Michal, an attention seeking but nice fellow who always finished his exercises (badly spelt) in five seconds, sniggered, and perhaps he shared vicariously in this
revelation. Jitka gave me an arch smile, played with her pen and looked up at me from beneath her fringe. Did her parents know? They would kill her. How iong had she been smoking? Since puberty, she said. The sexual link seemed an invitation: I thought. She wants me to ask about her sex life. '• AT fifteen had she had sex yet?
But my superego landed, and I sublimated the urge to find out by asking ner a very perverted question, with who / knew where it would lead, to a merely dubious exercise; I asked them to write an advertising slogan for a condom.yes, my motives were perverted. But I don't think they were unappreciative, perhaps because the pupils were obsessed with sex (Obese Timothy, the Englishman who taught in Cercany, said his teenage girl pupils turned up in skirts without panties, for a dare, and he had to keep asking them to stop crossing and uncrossing their iegs. He had three young girlfriend. Tim was 46, and weighed 280 pounds, if he could so it….Michal, who always used to tease the girl in front of him. "She wants your phone number" he would shout.
“With this you will be OK." Was his slogan. Jitka, on other hand, asked for a dictionary. She pouted her lips, looked up the word and wrote it down. Her slogan said "Always catch your top moment."
.
A novel offers a substitute escape from a night of drinking. Deprived of one intoxicant, we seek another. Was the attractions of the King James bible its language or its message? I tried to moderate my suffering by investigating the rotting piers struts of English grammar. We stroll on the surface of this pier, unaware that the structure on which it sits is a real chaotic dog’s breakfast. I selfishly taught this - or tried to find my way around rhyme and reason - rather than the culture, history and slang of England for which I was hiredj
(Anyway, I suffered from amnesia.! couldn't remember anything about England, my past, my school days. I was as blanked as if I had passed through an airport X-ray machine.)
Maybe my brain had just died. Or maybe it is the way that you are of a culture rather than know about it. I always thought it fatuous to describe London as a tourist brochure because it was it true. It wasn't my London. My London wasn't puffy clouds of eternal May and the self conscious Big Ben of TEFL textbooks written by middle aged Oxford Not in my London. My London was90 percent ethnic. My London was always 8 pm in 1934. My London was sitting in the prison like yard of my wife's night school, watching the viscous rain wash down the windscreen, like flush water from a loo-rim. The air tasted of warm spittle. Trains creaked and rumbled in the distance.
My London was all the same - so orange, a gigantic conglomeration of fractals of inter curling bnck terracing -a gigantic four dimensional nightmare of opportunities for an unhappy wife to slip away. That was my London. My London was about hate. Hating evening classes, these bottom rungs of self esteem for London's herbivores. My London was being toid off by Negroes as ramrod-backed as Kipling's mission boy mouthing the pieties of the orthodoxy of self empowerment as they had once, Negro wide eyed, sung missionary songs. The man in the night school, with a striped Westminster council tie -how proud he had to be to wear that -would escort me out with the righteousness of a believing local government employee saying my presence in the school was against fire regulations. Like the nigger security guards in Kilburn thrift shops who always followed me around: racism was a two-way street. I couldn't., remembering all this -and I wanted to forget it -describe London in the sunnily telegraphic and summary way that was expected of me. City of eight million peopie, e. Seat of the Queen. Famous for its high teas and punk fashion.
The upshot was that I had to teach grammar. This was not only out of necessity, I admit. Perhaps we teach what we wish to learn, and grammar was a blind spot as for so many native speakers. had no idea there were seven future tenses, and eight past tense. ln my ignorance I was not alone. In my postgraduate journalism school some of my fellow pupils hadn't even known what an adverb was, let alone a tense. And so I set about learning their names. Like much invisible structure we take it for granted.. But remove them -read a composition in Czech English, which uses only the past, and you realise what a flat souffle lack of tense command means. I would explain to my pupils, somewhat fantastically, that tenses are the music of English, which gives the language lift and dimension. It was beyond their grasp, because they were understanding English through Czech. To learn a language you must think in that language.
Only one or two demoralised students turned up each day - with pity and guilt in their faces, all playing the game of calculus of attendance. One or two lessons a week assuaged their guilt and convinced them that their English was good enough. I now understood doctors better, who tel! patients that one day's exercise a week is just not enough, with the patient honestly believing that to the contrary he knows better,
Helena, the one who really believed in me? turned up just often enough to keep the flames of desire - hope, are they contradictory or similar? -alive, and worked diligently, and often went out for a drink after work with me, Then, suddenly, after my second declaration of love, she almost stopped coming at all.
There was a shortage of teaching materials, since Josef wou!dn’t allow me access to the internet, meant that! couldn't recourse to showing them articles, or other information beyond the extremely out of date information in the Headway teaching books* which mixed limited grammar, reprinted and rewritten articles from the eighties and nineties on totally irrelevant tropics as the Bradford Football stadium fire (English language interested them; British cu!ture, and still less British media hysterias of yore, interested them stiff less) and staples such as "What technology will we use in fifty years'1 or "what are the seven greatest inventions in the world?”)
Had these writers ever taught students? Normal, well -adjusted 19 year old Czechs were not the Brains Trust, How on earth did they expect interesting contributions? And yet when I skipped these speculative exercises the Headway chapters lost their semblance of conceptual unity of topic which presumably was their main advantage. When Helena had gone, there was no one left to teach: how embarrassing. The unrequited.
Yet I wanted to minimise the pain when she was laughing with a man she brought into the bedrock restaurant.
! couldn't stay in my fiat. !t was a white box, overlooking dry pine needless forest and a schooi for mechanics. White rooms symbolise death, and the dust gathering in little whiris of ash coloured fiuff under the radiator were another reminder of my mortality. Plastic recycled (by me) coffee mugs . / pilfered from a Nescafe automatic dispenser and used for two months, with risible bite marks. All my books, read simultaneously, hovering
gull wing position
Lucky Mirek was off to Brussels, the top of seven hundred candidates, and presumably he felt an obligation to me as the/|$ of international he would be rubbing shoulders with every day in Brussels. As a warrant officer from a m background who never went to university, but who was nevertheless smart enough to do so, he respected me as an intellectual. He looked quite stunned when he heard me mention the name of James O'Shea, the NATO spokesman in Brussels.
As a result of a bravura performance of imposition one evening when I was walking around, adrenalin pumping. (John Gray would have caiied it the uncertainty phase), and barged in one Mirek speaking to his wife-to-be at the Dandy, asking questions at a mile a minute, the English disease -which he parried somewhat self consciously with the slight pomposity of someone who has just been awarded top secret security clearance - he wouldn't tell me the name of his birthplace, even - he invited me to his stag party. The Czech army was known for its enormous capacity for beer, and was often used as a Slavic conduit between NATO and the native Serbian and Bosnian forces in Bosnia, as well as a unit that lowered the temperature. The stag party didn't lower my temperature, however, the fellow warrant officers drank heavily, and urged me to seduce Mirek's future sister in law, who certainly behaved encouragingly. This has} been preceded by several accounts of sex in the Dandy Bar's toilets. The sister turned out to be married with children - never an obstacle, I was told, in the Czech Republic - and said this repeatedly as we cuddled on the dance floor. She then pulled my hair and windmilled me, so I retreated like a man attacked by birds. After that my friendship with Mirek cooled \somewhat. The next time we met in the Dandy bar, with a British squaddie Who hated Catholics and liked the prots who gave them cups of tea -
Bosnians a piece of cake (my feelings for the Czech Republic exactly) - his sister-in-!aw!s attack seemed forgotten. Like many working class Englishmen, the ex-squaddie whom Mirek had befriend as the man was a liaison between units in Bosnia, humoured Mirek with a domestic monicker, in this case Mikey. "Mikey and I are opening a bar and so on. Why dtdn’t foreigners give the English Serbian or German nicknames on the reasoning that the English names were too difficult to pronounce?) We started talking about religion - like most Czechs, Mirek was an atheist, but he was explaining that his family, and his future baby was his religion. He got quite heated about this. He also told me that Jarka, my fellow English teacher, was shunned in Benesov; only Josef would give her work. She had been the wife of one of the parachute regiment officers on Mirek’s barracks. One night, she had slept with another man. Her husband
Having had such serious conversations, Mirek withdrew. Me wet in the Pod Brankou, another night club, ten minutes later, always a problem rn Benesov, smiling wolfishly a teach other. And so ended a conduit into potentially interesting army life - and something to keep my mind off Helena. !
I had better luck with my rival, Simon. He was a true Bohemian as well as bohemian.. What does it say about the Czechs that when you flick through the Vienna or Prague phonebook, Czech names when translated, into English, read as ”He who falls out of a window laughing?" (drunk, needless to say) . Sometimes you get the feeling the country is a one joke act, like the Good soldier Schweik. Simon once said that he had no brakes, but in fact ali of them lacked brakes.
That was why they still were in Benesov. l hate Benesov became one of my catch phrases and surprisingly few people objected. lf you remember Benesov you weren't there" was a tired catch phrase lifted from someone's descriptions about the sixties, but the good thing about Czech isolation was that you could try out old tricks on them.
They were easy going company. I didn't only seek their company to keep my mind off Helena, but because staying with Simon meant watching his moves, I also felt some strange transference of feeling. One evening, prowling around Benesov -the man who walks into cafes and then out again -1 saw Simon in
a bar and sat by his side? like a dumb and supportive wife, hand on chin,
while he made occasional asides from his dice game to regale me with a performative joke at which I would appreciatively laugh. It was curiously satisfying, and calmed me down. The others gave me a glance:! was going insane. This was not me
t other times our casual friendships took on a semblance of normality, and it was so easy to sit with them, because they were always there, always so easy going. We shared the solidarity of being unsuccessful artists. In fact, it was some of my best moments. One evening, after the bad theatre rehearsals, going with relief, with Simon, I saw (Helena, always startled when she saw me, looked up from her cigarette in he mirrored bar where I had spent a happy hour listening to the repetition f toreador over and over again through thick doors, raising her eye rows simultaneously. Had she been waiting for me - outfoxed by decision o see Simon, Or was she waiting for her friend? Afterwards we went to the Knrzak, or snail, we played dice a!! evening. I prepared my infamous crib sheet: thirty words of Czech, thirty words of English: this was all you needed to know, Forget vocabulary, Just the Words for11 this1 and1 'that*, Anthony Burgess wrote that British troops occupying Germany at the end of the war could have learnt basic language shorn of all articles and cases, and irregular verbs,
My Czech/English crib sheet, with the four basic verbs and their conjugations worked wonders in the pubs with monoglot Czechs. We both learnt from it, The Knizak was truly seedy: it was like having a pint with old friends in a giant, cigarette butt-filled unflushed urinal. The name as written on a board above the doors in careless paint, Like so many of ttie best pubs, ft had frostedy urine coloured, unadorned glass doors leading onto the main square (no outside tables: the Czechs never drank outdoors, presumably because fresh air was never rank enough)* North Vietnamese, whose parents were the Communist bloc's equivalent of mobile guest workers, would be, true to gambling obsessions of their race, aggressively punching slot machines by the entrance kept open by a large four foot over spilling ashtray. Further in? on long square white formica tables lit by strip lighting, underemphasising the redness of the punters1 faces, sat the North Vietnamese, also true to their race, playing cards in which young Czechs they would be furtively joining in/the beer was said to be the best in Benesov, because the head was given by the air pump, not a CO2 canister -an excuse for the waiter, called Schulda, to under serve me by five percent. Around the large shared tables sat different constellations of degenerates who had turned drinking into a marathon art: they had the poise and stillness of sumo wrestlers.
Of course she denied having slept with Simon, However, once, when we had arranged a date, for a Friday evening, well-oiled in delusional anticipation, had phoned her mobile and Simon had answered. They were at a party outside Benesov. Yeah right. She had taken the receiver and said that she was afraid of telling me not to come because she didn't want me to be cold to her, and afraid of telling me to come because she didn't want to think she had started to like me. That said,! had seen them apart on many occasions in Benesov, and at a disco I saw them one they had separated p!atonically,after which Simon looked devastated, Maybe Helena, the Queen of Benesov, was the face that launched a thousand ships and all that. And I was encouraged by the fact that Thomas, who had spent two years with Simon in the army, said that Simon was really homosexual. Perhaps he was indeed. A photograph of us taken by Schulda showed Simon in a gay, tea pot pose, holding his cigarette in a faggotty, slightly bird-like, recoiling way, (Why had I not seen this when with him. Why did photos show the truth and reality not?) I didn't believe he was completely homosexual Helena had told me, during one of our last evenings together In the bedrock, a secret: that he had loved her, three years earlier, but that she had been too young. She looked slightly rueful. The way he drank three beers very quickly after Helena had left him that night at the Red Dragon, He sat with his head sunk to his chest,, and swept his head several times over the top of his crew-cut head: a standard gesture, I think, of defeat. Anyway, the feeling that I was being seen as a chump, that I might be
But then, one evening, Simon confessed he had fucked Helena, and I believed him.
And so I went to Prague. Prague was a city of possibilities. If it hadn't been for the attacks on the world trade centre, my Prague might have been different. For I usually headed to the Globe bookstore. I would walk down Jindrisska street, past where Helena had biweekly courses in psychology, a university entrance ambition she said she was going to fail, down tawdry, prostitute and neon-sign ridden Wenceslas Square, where I had rendezvoused with Helena after she had failed to wait for me outside her psychology weekend classes in our first daytime date.
(Back story: 1 March 2002. Our first pub date, after school, with Honza. We had lots of wine, and Honza dropped out at five. When she didn't take the excuse to leave him, I knew something was afoot.. She had a tendency to gulp her drinks, while looking up from her glass at me, while holding her cigarette high. We had two more glasses of wine.) Then another ten minute walk through old town labyrinth of small streets, because the tourists followed the Don Giovanni puppet shop lined tourist route from Wenceslas square to the Charles bridge, with its jewellery shops, and its bureaux de change owned by financial wizards of the wicked west, that charged twenty percent commission on buying but advertised 10% commission - in almost invisible letters - on "selling'1. Since most of the victims came from the wicked west themselves, perhaps it didn't matter,
There were also tons and tons of Don Giovanni puppet staffs (Mozart had staged his first performance of Don Giovanni here in 1787, and incidentally Casanova had a very flourishing career in Bohemia, a fact that always made my stomach turn). And squeezed between the shops, their entrance signs invisible between the thronging crowds, dank little pubs with trapped, red faced tourists, Euro-tourists, Eurists sipping their happy hour twenty crown beers. Prague was a city where everyone was intoxicated on beer, or intoxicated in waiting, intoxicated but they didn't know it yet, might even be opposed to it, little dames with dainty handbags from local administration in sober places like Stockholm, Helsinki, Berne, You would seem them, in high colour,traipsing across Charles Bridge with the other hordes, back and forth? back and forth. They too had discovered there was nothing else to do, unless you counted the puppet performances with Don Giovanni, or the river cruise on the Moldau. (Guess which Dvorak music plays, in tenfold dissonance, as the boats, like swimming sea birds with only one leg, do their circular tour in the immediate vicinity of the Charles Bridge arches. Yeah, I had loved Prague too once.^ But the old town was an old postcard being devoured by
an army of soldier ants.
There were more races in the Old Town Square
than in the latest Star Wars movie. Lookingfor Prague's vanished virtue in which the makeup of wax shows a Museum dedicated to communism, and endless mime shows and puppet shows with
Don Giovanni failed to conceal.
The old town, I swear, had five dimensions: Ten minutes* walk, more or less, through tourist thronged streets with graffiti that always had me lost and always, as usual, had me trying to focus on exactly what parts of my brain had been destroyed by drink. The verbal faculty is always the last to go; ten minutes of walking would bring me to the
Bookstore. Which was your typical American place: At least they went easy with the ambient odour in the air conditioning, but it had the fern-bedecked terracotta coloured wails, the right music, the easy Starbucks cum Borders leather sofas for read browsing of an upmarket book shop in a Los Angeles mall; ! would chat up the punters, underpaid teachers like me, most likely, reading books they never intended to pay for, but the books at least excusing their vagabond appearance and unwashed clothes that reeked of batch, for all their inadequacies, Czech men, even the Benesovfs degenerates, never reeked of batch. Bastards, /
It was most impossible to jive with them about the differences between home and the Czech Republic, the obvious and universal and occasionally even interesting icebreaker with all foreigners. These jives usually started., in a statement of concealed patriotism, with some criticism of the home country. Even the stag nighters in the city of stag night, as opposed to city oftlght? with their Bolan wigs, their vulgar habit of glass breaking and their identical vests, could be cornered into a drink or two and reveal pink attitudes about Britain's inferiority to ways continental one thing, their beer was always cheaper. (And women never shaved their armpits). Initially there was always the usual Shavian defensiveness: half the country hating the other half and a!! that - everyone ! met seemed to come from Nottingum, and were cab drivers. And they would always ask if i was a homosexual, more on my accent than on my habit of sidling up to the staggers and opening conversation, But no, I was lustful only for English, not for men,. But then they would say: England is shit.
This evening, the evening of Simon’s revelation, I met a Korean American third year student of literature from the University of[Washington - where else but Seattle would she be from? - at Charles University to study literature. She was reading a book called Fast Food nation, which I happen to know, from reading the New York Review of Books, that European Gibraltar abutting the Castilian desert of American high culture, deals with about how feca! matter enters the McDonald burger production process, that there was more bacteria in the average Big Mac than on the average toilet seat, and that one butcher can eviscerate 200 cows an hour, and that one cow carrying the E coli virus czn contaminate a batch of up to 15,000 cattle, and other stories you didn't want to know- a typical Seattle book, I thought - and so I opened up with an anti globalisation rant.
She had had three gin and tonics, she confessed, before I arrived, and she looked forward to hangin' out some hours with me. She said that American culture was everywhere and there was no point arguing with it. I said that, in Benesov at east, it was just a topsoil: underneath their baseball caps they were thoroughly Czech. I had a theory that you when you said American culture was overwhelming it was because you knew nothing about anything else and only picked out the trivia! but important indications of Americanness, blind to the deep underpinnings of the rest of the culture. McDonalds, the odd baseball cap, They wore glasses that only demonstrated the spectrum occupied by the stars and stripes. She said Europeans hated tourists but tourists brought in money. And then she said; I am sorry, I gotta blow you out-
I couldn't recognise young siren-like Prague that brought to be broken on the rocks of teenage rejection, with the filthy crone of a city that chose to piss down with ram and parade its prostitutes on my caffeine fuelled walk home, along tram lined cobbled streets lined with cafes that no longer attracted and girls whose occasional sideways glances were cats eyes leading down long roads that ended nowhere.
I went to another American bookstore café serving the expat teachers.
His name was John Sweeney, he was from
Colorado, and had an income from his own firm, he said, so he hadn’t been
working for the last two years. He paused for effect. Was he another
disability pensioner? He had taught film to classes K-12, and English
literature and was about to teach adult Czechs from a bank.
I told them
they would love grammar. He told me that if they wouldn't study literature
with enthusiasm he would make up a bogus report to their superiors and
said that failure to read Hamlet in the original would reduce their salary. I
said he obviously yet hadn't encountered Czech passive resistance. He
then said fuck Czech passive resistance. We then talked about Czech
history. "Weren't these guys part of the Soviet Union or something?”
'”hey were part of the Soviet bloc”
About forty, fit, a ladies man, divorced, with two kids? his
Handsome bearded face looked confused - between Soviet Union and Soviet
bloc.
"It reminds me of Vienna,” he said,
"Have you been to Vienna.”
"Read about it in John Irving's novels. He lived in Vienna, There is always a
reference to Vienna in John Irving/1
"What do you think of Prague?!f
"Great. Great women. My neck is sore, great women, I love Europe.
'They have preserved their heritage by being cowards* The Soviet Union
also incubated them,11
“They just came out of Communism.man.”!
"They had no immigration. They live a paradise. Look at a!! the old
buildings. Look at how stable their families are. Have you been to Russia?”
| Jove Russia. Did you realise that the second world war was really the
German-Russian war. The Anglo American effort was piddling, Ninety-five
percent of German troops were engaged in fighting the Russians. So in a
sense they really did liberate the Czechs, despite what the Czechs tell
you.”
"I thought Patton liberated the Czech Republic/1
f”The Czechs love to play the two sides off. A Czech is some one who
enters a revolving door behind you and comes out in front of you. And
Europeans are famously ungrateful for people who help them.”
Taking his email address,! entered the nadir. That particular evening, it started to rain, I walked back through a lonely city, penniless, made hungry by the coffee. Just as well I was penniless, because I was intent on keeping my weight down. But I had to run the gauntlet of fast food places on Wenceslas Square, up whose entire length I had to walk if I wanted to get back to the station. I would walk past delicious sausage stands, past four fast food change, every time the hole in my stomach would get bigger. And it was raining.
Prague hadn't always been like this, I thought back to my visit two years earlier, and my thoughts then - thoughts about travelling.
The sun was hot on my back and a willing waitress kept on bringing steins of beer and ludicrously cheap plates of salami and cheese. A faint smell of wet concrete wafted through the station restaurant doors, and I played my favourite game of spotting nationalities. Germans waved their Deutsche mark notes impatiently. There was a rock garden, the twittering of birds was loud, the square of intense blue sky gave the promise of an excellent day ahead..
i iooked at the weather map of the newspaper someone had left behind. It was raining in London. Too bad for the homeless. London was often depressing, but it was the homeless, floating now on little islands of cardboard, huddled in mouldy sleeping bags that depressed me the most: they were the larvae of London's circles of hell. AS the thought ran through my head, I showered and inhaled the wet concrete, speared another slice of salami and took another draught of beer as I returned to the here and now. And it was like that: drinking at its best. And the promise of more happiness to come. A week passed like that.
Many people, I think, mistake the rapid turnover of sensation from being in a new country, or perhaps the achievements of travel, for true freedom. I too felt a sense of achievement when knocking off Blue Guide sights like orienteering markers. But something doing nothing, and knowing fun was out there – that was fun in itself.
No I had no such luxuries of being calm.
"Knowing this didn't make me feel any better about walking back to the station to catch the evening train back to Benesov, where my alternatives would be: sleeping on the floor of the school teachers' room to catch a few hours early writing work before the German teacher came in at 6.30 am, (I never got up on time if I went back to my white box. So little light came in I never knew if it was night or day. ) However the floor was hard, here was no pillow but Sylva's scrunched up cardigan. I couldn't divest myself of my jacket because it was too cold at night: it was easy to forget that Benesov was four hundred metres above sea level. Josef never heated at night. Failing asleep would be difficult with ail the caffeine. Every time I shifted position the little bloody red light on a box hanging from the ceiling would blink.. Was it attached to leads that ran Into Josef’s house opposite. Was this their night time entertainment? If it was, he never let it on, though I did detect a less effusive air about him than in the beginning as if he realised he had been stuck with a weirdo but couldn't do anything about it: too great a shortage of English teachers in the country. (That, rather than, meeting of minds, a mutual leap of faith, was perhaps the reason why Josef had so hired me after thirty second phone call I could go to the Pit-Pat bar, the only venue open on Wednesday nights( for a few swift pints, thus breaking my pledge on only drinking coffee, and feeling rotten the next morning. If I did drink, i might as well drink in Prague and make that part of my evening enjoyable too. Or ! could do the unthinkable: go back to my white box, lie on a bed of four square orange cushions on a very hard rectangular wooden block, almost as hard as the school floor, and stare up at the ceiiing pumped upon adrenaline and caffeine and a sense of great disappointment with my evening,! knew I would not be able to sleep. And I knew the word "frustration" would not accurately describe how I felt. And ! had finished every single of my five books: Lolita, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Hamlet. A book from Elizabeth in which a dead man is shown mummified, holding up his whole body skin - and they call this art!
I could not remember what happened between my returning from Prague and my waking up a day later on a settee in the lobby of the block of flats. I had glimpses of memory, of utter horror. I went to a newsagent and saw the date: two days later. I went to a supermarket and saw Jarka standing in a still pose, everyone else as if frozen, she was in half profile, her skin white. And I knew my death had arrived to collect me. I knew I had to leave. I went
But would I be able to. I knew on previous Saturday trips to Prague.
My train left at 3,10. The restaurant dock where I was drinking beer showed 3.08; S went out, and realised the restaurant clock was five minutes late and the train had gone, I would shrug, go indoors and sucked off another beer.
I was walking around the centre of Benesov, and bumped into Helena, in a black cashmere wraparound top that eased her cleavage, and a yellow tight skirt with flowers. Her hair was tied up with those Chinese chopsticks. She looked as usual startled when I called her and she stood there frozen on the street when ! came up to her.
“Hi,” I said, squinting.
"Hi.”
"Have you stopped coming into my class.”
"Maybe I will come in Monday,” she said
Well fuck this, I thought. What the He!! am I doing here?
"I am leaving.”
She said something, I can't remember.
"I am leaving, " I said. "Do you want to go for a coffee?"
"Bedrock?"
"Blue cafe.”
Her creamy presence was finally in front of me after a month of yearning. She stretched out her arms, and looked down at the table. She
had a lovely, hanging upper lip. She was so fresh and young, and drank two
glasses of wine - making her face gob right red - and smoked about ten
cigarettes, lighting them from each other. I told her how much I loved her
and how I written this and she got redder in the face from her wine allergy
and was smiling ironically to herself as she looked down at the table, She
said she would !ive in London, as an au pair, but with another agency, not
through me. Weil, i thought, there's always hope.
She said she had never had a relationship with Simon but wanted to talk to
him many times, how angry she had been at me because she had heard we
were going out and thought I had spread the rumour. She said I tried it out
with Katka, and Paulina (my other girl students in her class) and didn't like her especially - just with any
woman.
I said how untrue this was and that they were just my pupils and i
liked to go out for drinks with them, Her father came to pick her up and
and said look me in the eye and she did for about seconds, holding my
gaze, but I don't know if they were showing love and she left without
touching, me, shaking hands or hugging. I don't want you to think I like
you, she had said. But she stood at the car door, and looked up, and saw
me through the window, and got into the car and drive off.
That evening I missed my train and went to Bedrock. At 11 pm she came in,
laughing hysterically with a young man,. They were sitting at a bat
and I sat alone at a table and when I turned up she gave me a nasty look
and paid the bill and left. The next morning I phoned her and the
conversation went like this.
"Hi, it is me." I said in my best light, boyish voice, a voice asking for
contrition.
There was a sigh. Helena used a light voice too.
"Hi."
"You hate me don't you?"
"Yeah."
It was a resigned, not unfriendly voice.
"Why?"
"Because you call me many times to say that you love me, and I think you
don't understand simple things."
I gave her my phone number in London but she couldn't promise to look me
up. I said I would call her again and then prolonged my goodbyes.
"Bye bye."
"Bye."
"Take care of yourself."
"Ok."
"OK. So see you."
"Bye."
In the middle of my third goodbye she abruptly, and entirely deliberately,
hung up.
I missed the bus from Prague to London on two successive nights, as if I
was really testing my resolve to leave. On each occasion I missed the bus,
having come by tedious train all the way up from Benesov, by two or three
minutes. The first night f was actually on time, but just on occasion, it
seemed* the normally quite time pedantic Czechs leave early, just to keep you on your toes, On each occasion I went back to Benesov and spent the evening in the Pod Brankou. The first night, as said, I saw Helena with friend late at night in the Bedrock. (When I called her the next day for that last, rather hopeless time ! had already missed my bus once) f then got very drunk and didn’t remember much. The second time ! came back to Pod Brankou and had actually run out of money as well as left my keys. (Because I left my keys behind in a bag in the school, including the keys to the school, so that Josef could easily find them) a friend called Martin saved me: he lent me a thousand crowns, enough to stay in the Posta Hotel And so there was an elegant symmetry: on the evening i arrived, Josef had invited me to the annual ball of his graduation class. Here I was first introduced to the bizarre traditions (to me) of the Czech Republic. The set up seemed normal enough, a little like an American proms which all the parents had also been invited. The men in normal, albeit slightly shabby in a socialist sort of way suits, the girls in attractive ball gowns or black short dresses, I remember Sylva, slim and beautiful, introduced as my supervisor and glancing over at me from her next table. She shouldn't have worn her glasses, which reflected light and made me intensely iof the movement of her head in my direction. She was never so attractive as then. The eight 19 year old girls of the graduation class, which ! so gradually later got to despise, because they were so lazy and disrespectful and cheeky -by Czech standards - during my lessons, then went onto the stage, the same stage as Helena and Simon were to perform, were they were pelted by coins from the assorted teachers, fellow pupils, old pupils, and parents - a tradition that is said to bring luck. Then, with excruciating self consciousness, the girls, with awkward swan necks and boys iin figures - as said, I didn't like this particular class -dragged a plastic self around the stage and gracelessly picked up the coins, depositing them In the sled. This was followed by dancing. I had been introduced to the headmistress by Josef She was a good ten years older than him, in her early fifties, and at no point did he say the two were married at that the school was the from a ruin to their riches project, I knew there was some kind of complex relationship between them, but I thought it was more like that of a respectful, nay worshipful younger janitor.
Her shoulder blades stuck out like offensive weapons, and I had to manoeuvre out of the way: the stumps of a castrated harpy, they bespoke a life of irregular meals and casual drug abuse as the wages of
loneliness. Not for a. moment did I imagine they lived a comfortable house with two teenagers on the usual French-lesson-piano-lesson-basketball lesson circuit. For as the dance in the municipal theatre petered out, we down to the basement of the hotel Posta where there was one of those late night herna bars of which there are so many in the Czech Republic. There was sexual, suggestive music, and a dancing pole. Marcela, the headmistress, was sitting with about four of her older students on a barstool, knocking back tequilas with salt, and Josef each time, scoping us both with his most lugubrious and almost subservient expression, was taking note after note out of his wallet to pay for our drinks. Marcela only had eyes for the next tequila, and her students were drinking with her, I don't think you would see this in England. ! then had Joseff who had hired me, down as a general factotum who wanted to impress his asexual alcoholic possibly lesbian boss* What was she doing sitting around all those girls in slinky black dresses, I was impressed by the lack of sexual or status hang ups however: we all went onto the dance floor and rocked to the music. One pupil cavorted at the dance pole, oblivious and happy and decadent,
I wasn’t able to find my fiat because I had forgotten the address Josef had given me, i had to check into the Hotel Posta, in whose interior was situated, as said, the municipal theatre. St was cheap, three hundred crowns, as everything else had been in the Czech Republic.! then thought, snugly ensconced in the very epicentre of Benesov, because the Hotel Posta,a hundred year landmark, was the corner building the Czech Republic was to be a six month sexual feast, Was it? Put it this way, with dear Marty's money, Dane geld against anti Irishness, I spent my last night in the Hotel Posta, alone, and dry mouthed and as memoryless as the white fetid sky outside, dulling even the mustard facade of the German helmet town hall. My memory was blank too - indeed, this essay could have been twice as long had i remained teetotal. I remembered some essentials though, such as the fact that 1 had to go home. I couldn't go on like this, couldn't go on fuelling my monomania by blanking out little details of my life. My life was turning into a map with motorways leading nowhere: alcohol was killing off side roads of my minor interests as sure as it was nuking my neurons. So I had to go: Third time lucky. But first I had to say goodbye to Simon, I went to the Knizak and, sure enough, within half an hour there was Lucas, on e of Simon’s band members, arrested once in
Spain for playing the Bonga in Algeciras, frustratingly short of the hash paradise of Morocco. He had a book about tantric sex, another little signal that Benesovites were not so deculturated as if had made up my mind that
they were and felt a sort of melodramatic and self regarding isolation -prince across the water feeling about. Too bad. I had already made my
mind up. Lucas got himself a beer and called Simon on his mobile.
Simon had undergone a shape change. Gone was the man with bulging veins around his eyes who did pelvic thrusts as he went out of the Red Dragon to have a joint or was it perhaps an amphetamine pill, with my Helena. The man who dressed in an lumber checked shirt over a mango coloured T-shirt, who had insouciant rips in his old jeans and expensive caterpillar boots, who always had a cigarette hanging off his lip and worked on a building site in addition to claiming the dole. He had shape changed to the worried figure, dwarfed by his dfArtagnan hat, moments before Helena nuzzled up to him in that torturous rehearsal when the bottom dropped out of my world, for 24 hours. His childlike blue eyes fixed mine, in an anxious face- He was wearing short shorts that went badly with his long thin legs, and he was drinking orange juice.
I was a cynic, Simon knew I wouldn't have the madman of Benesov to stay -I would never get him out. Nut perhaps he also really was a boy, I was eight years older, something i had forgotten as I went into the time machine of weight loss and even girls I said looked 23. Simon saw me off at the station- We ate pizza together on a bench, he declining his fair half share with the self sacrificial air of a liege sending off his lord to dangerous lands, and that would have been that when Schweik turned up with his girlfriend Monika, she of the glowing blond hair, the odd chicken like dance, the propensity to kiss me, albeit dryly on the lips in the discotheque and the girl who had brought me and Simon together at was my happiest moment. Again, it made me wonder Simon was the only person who loved me in Benesov, because he surrounded my time there with harmony. We met at Pod Brankou, in one of those early dawn hours subject To the parallax effect. Midnight crashes into dawn because you are standing from the scope like perspective of high pissation, The countdown to reluctant closing in Benesovfs clean and well-lighted place, the candle burning through the night for one of Benesov’s emotional and sexual vagabonds, and suddenly I found myself in Monika’s flat. Simon and Lucas slept in Monika’s bed; Monika, wearing one sock, slept on the sofa, and ! slept on her brother's couch. The next morning he let me check my email, and we played a desultory game of Quake, At noon, on the first Spring Day, Simonfs best friend, in an old Skoda drove us back to Benesov. Loud Arab music blared from his car stereo. So the Bohemians really were bohemian.
The trip back to London was uneventful. There was a man with white socks and a shaved head, and scarification marks of over dissipation under his eye sockets -I took for an English security guard at some overpriced centra! Prague nightclub. It turned out he wasn't.
But then there was Simon. I met him separately. Simon became my friend, a drinking companion I met one met one evening in some bar or other. He was unemployed, aged 25, had somehow missed out on university, and was the son of middle class doctors. He also played in a band. He was tall, had laser blue eyes, and drank huge amounts. He was also quite sensitive.
It gradually became clear that Simon and Helena – it’s a small town – had a past of sorts, and possibly a present.
There was that day at the theatre, during rehearsals of an amateur play which I attended I knew both were in the play.
When I turned up she was in the process of taking off her dress to reveal her bra to and sundry in the changing room. She spotted me, turned her back on me, and standing closely to Simon while holding her dress - it later turned out to be,as she said, her mother's wedding dress - in her bra. Seeing her naked back turned me on, as much as seeing the intimacy with which the two stood close together, her half naked in front of him, disturbed me. She berated him for bringing me along, She then put on her jumper, a nice affair with its of lines of colour, unlike what anyone else in Benesov was wearing, and walked off in a huff backstage.
I went up to the balcony,where I sadly observed Simon and Helena, a couple in the play, standing closer to each other than I thought necessary in these periods when another actor was doing his medley bit and they were standing in the background waiting for their turns.
Anyway, her part of the medley was Juliet's balcony lament (a joke from the director, perhaps?).
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” she said to the empty auditorium, and there I sat, on the balcony, She repeated the lament two days later at the Majals festivities in. the main square, !t was a hot day, plus thirty Celsius - spring lasted for about two days in Benesov ~ and this was the first of may. ten years ago they had had socialist parades and ail the rest of it. Now they had a funfair, near my hostel,tiny circus,without animals apart from goats as far as 1 could see, and and a large day market where the North Vietnamese sold new hiking boots for the equivalent of two pounds and everyone else sold not ut__mixes and CDs)And then there was Helena's and her small theatre group's ten minute performance* I arrived from school half way through Helenafs scene.
Standing on an especially constructed podium, in the hot sun, on the Masaryk Square, I saw her perform, amateurishly. I guess I was madly in love.
Somehow the trip to her country cottage and all the rest of it never materialised.
Simon and I avoided the subject of Helena, except once, in the theatre, when I asked him straight out of they were having an affair. He looked surprised and said no. I didn’t believe him. And I drank to quell the raging crush.
.
Language is my only weapon against alcohol
But Sylva, my fellow English teacher, gave me far too little to do, and as a result I improvised exercises. Once I did something on smoking with my 15-year-olds. The class was small, three people, because the rest of the class had gone on a study tour to Greece- they were well off - and lanced Jitka, a red hair pretty button nosed girl whom f had seen several times in the Red Dragonf In the company,of hoods wearing hoods, if they smoked. Half the class did she said/in fact, according to an Economist statistic, the Czechs, and Czech youths, are the heaviest smokers in the world. The tobacco companies who had greedily looked for new markets in the early nineties because they were faced with stagnating markets in western Europe had done their job well, I had remembered how crass the advertising had been: they were the only companies, apart from political parties, who had money to spend on poster adverts in the early nineties. Big hoardings in aggressive red had said: "Test the West. The West is the Best.
Well, of course it was. West was a cigarette brand. (Czechs liked simple English words: the favoured mineral water was, for no obvious reason, Trendy. Their new Skoda sports car, expensive Bnd much desired was called, somewhat obviously, 'The Skoda Superb) Cigarettes were as cheap relative to its price in the west as beer was: fifty crowns a packet. I asked Jitka if she smoked, and felt an erotic charge when she said yes, as she was sharing an intimacy with me. She looked me over. The only boy who was in the class on this day, Michal, an attention seeking but nice fellow who always finished his exercises (badly spelt) in five seconds, sniggered, and perhaps he shared vicariously in this
revelation. Jitka gave me an arch smile, played with her pen and looked up at me from beneath her fringe. Did her parents know? They would kill her. How iong had she been smoking? Since puberty, she said. The sexual link seemed an invitation: I thought. She wants me to ask about her sex life. '• AT fifteen had she had sex yet?
But my superego landed, and I sublimated the urge to find out by asking ner a very perverted question, with who / knew where it would lead, to a merely dubious exercise; I asked them to write an advertising slogan for a condom.yes, my motives were perverted. But I don't think they were unappreciative, perhaps because the pupils were obsessed with sex (Obese Timothy, the Englishman who taught in Cercany, said his teenage girl pupils turned up in skirts without panties, for a dare, and he had to keep asking them to stop crossing and uncrossing their iegs. He had three young girlfriend. Tim was 46, and weighed 280 pounds, if he could so it….Michal, who always used to tease the girl in front of him. "She wants your phone number" he would shout.
“With this you will be OK." Was his slogan. Jitka, on other hand, asked for a dictionary. She pouted her lips, looked up the word and wrote it down. Her slogan said "Always catch your top moment."
.
A novel offers a substitute escape from a night of drinking. Deprived of one intoxicant, we seek another. Was the attractions of the King James bible its language or its message? I tried to moderate my suffering by investigating the rotting piers struts of English grammar. We stroll on the surface of this pier, unaware that the structure on which it sits is a real chaotic dog’s breakfast. I selfishly taught this - or tried to find my way around rhyme and reason - rather than the culture, history and slang of England for which I was hiredj
(Anyway, I suffered from amnesia.! couldn't remember anything about England, my past, my school days. I was as blanked as if I had passed through an airport X-ray machine.)
Maybe my brain had just died. Or maybe it is the way that you are of a culture rather than know about it. I always thought it fatuous to describe London as a tourist brochure because it was it true. It wasn't my London. My London wasn't puffy clouds of eternal May and the self conscious Big Ben of TEFL textbooks written by middle aged Oxford Not in my London. My London was90 percent ethnic. My London was always 8 pm in 1934. My London was sitting in the prison like yard of my wife's night school, watching the viscous rain wash down the windscreen, like flush water from a loo-rim. The air tasted of warm spittle. Trains creaked and rumbled in the distance.
My London was all the same - so orange, a gigantic conglomeration of fractals of inter curling bnck terracing -a gigantic four dimensional nightmare of opportunities for an unhappy wife to slip away. That was my London. My London was about hate. Hating evening classes, these bottom rungs of self esteem for London's herbivores. My London was being toid off by Negroes as ramrod-backed as Kipling's mission boy mouthing the pieties of the orthodoxy of self empowerment as they had once, Negro wide eyed, sung missionary songs. The man in the night school, with a striped Westminster council tie -how proud he had to be to wear that -would escort me out with the righteousness of a believing local government employee saying my presence in the school was against fire regulations. Like the nigger security guards in Kilburn thrift shops who always followed me around: racism was a two-way street. I couldn't., remembering all this -and I wanted to forget it -describe London in the sunnily telegraphic and summary way that was expected of me. City of eight million peopie, e. Seat of the Queen. Famous for its high teas and punk fashion.
The upshot was that I had to teach grammar. This was not only out of necessity, I admit. Perhaps we teach what we wish to learn, and grammar was a blind spot as for so many native speakers. had no idea there were seven future tenses, and eight past tense. ln my ignorance I was not alone. In my postgraduate journalism school some of my fellow pupils hadn't even known what an adverb was, let alone a tense. And so I set about learning their names. Like much invisible structure we take it for granted.. But remove them -read a composition in Czech English, which uses only the past, and you realise what a flat souffle lack of tense command means. I would explain to my pupils, somewhat fantastically, that tenses are the music of English, which gives the language lift and dimension. It was beyond their grasp, because they were understanding English through Czech. To learn a language you must think in that language.
Only one or two demoralised students turned up each day - with pity and guilt in their faces, all playing the game of calculus of attendance. One or two lessons a week assuaged their guilt and convinced them that their English was good enough. I now understood doctors better, who tel! patients that one day's exercise a week is just not enough, with the patient honestly believing that to the contrary he knows better,
Helena, the one who really believed in me? turned up just often enough to keep the flames of desire - hope, are they contradictory or similar? -alive, and worked diligently, and often went out for a drink after work with me, Then, suddenly, after my second declaration of love, she almost stopped coming at all.
There was a shortage of teaching materials, since Josef wou!dn’t allow me access to the internet, meant that! couldn't recourse to showing them articles, or other information beyond the extremely out of date information in the Headway teaching books* which mixed limited grammar, reprinted and rewritten articles from the eighties and nineties on totally irrelevant tropics as the Bradford Football stadium fire (English language interested them; British cu!ture, and still less British media hysterias of yore, interested them stiff less) and staples such as "What technology will we use in fifty years'1 or "what are the seven greatest inventions in the world?”)
Had these writers ever taught students? Normal, well -adjusted 19 year old Czechs were not the Brains Trust, How on earth did they expect interesting contributions? And yet when I skipped these speculative exercises the Headway chapters lost their semblance of conceptual unity of topic which presumably was their main advantage. When Helena had gone, there was no one left to teach: how embarrassing. The unrequited.
Yet I wanted to minimise the pain when she was laughing with a man she brought into the bedrock restaurant.
! couldn't stay in my fiat. !t was a white box, overlooking dry pine needless forest and a schooi for mechanics. White rooms symbolise death, and the dust gathering in little whiris of ash coloured fiuff under the radiator were another reminder of my mortality. Plastic recycled (by me) coffee mugs . / pilfered from a Nescafe automatic dispenser and used for two months, with risible bite marks. All my books, read simultaneously, hovering
gull wing position
Lucky Mirek was off to Brussels, the top of seven hundred candidates, and presumably he felt an obligation to me as the/|$ of international he would be rubbing shoulders with every day in Brussels. As a warrant officer from a m background who never went to university, but who was nevertheless smart enough to do so, he respected me as an intellectual. He looked quite stunned when he heard me mention the name of James O'Shea, the NATO spokesman in Brussels.
As a result of a bravura performance of imposition one evening when I was walking around, adrenalin pumping. (John Gray would have caiied it the uncertainty phase), and barged in one Mirek speaking to his wife-to-be at the Dandy, asking questions at a mile a minute, the English disease -which he parried somewhat self consciously with the slight pomposity of someone who has just been awarded top secret security clearance - he wouldn't tell me the name of his birthplace, even - he invited me to his stag party. The Czech army was known for its enormous capacity for beer, and was often used as a Slavic conduit between NATO and the native Serbian and Bosnian forces in Bosnia, as well as a unit that lowered the temperature. The stag party didn't lower my temperature, however, the fellow warrant officers drank heavily, and urged me to seduce Mirek's future sister in law, who certainly behaved encouragingly. This has} been preceded by several accounts of sex in the Dandy Bar's toilets. The sister turned out to be married with children - never an obstacle, I was told, in the Czech Republic - and said this repeatedly as we cuddled on the dance floor. She then pulled my hair and windmilled me, so I retreated like a man attacked by birds. After that my friendship with Mirek cooled \somewhat. The next time we met in the Dandy bar, with a British squaddie Who hated Catholics and liked the prots who gave them cups of tea -
Bosnians a piece of cake (my feelings for the Czech Republic exactly) - his sister-in-!aw!s attack seemed forgotten. Like many working class Englishmen, the ex-squaddie whom Mirek had befriend as the man was a liaison between units in Bosnia, humoured Mirek with a domestic monicker, in this case Mikey. "Mikey and I are opening a bar and so on. Why dtdn’t foreigners give the English Serbian or German nicknames on the reasoning that the English names were too difficult to pronounce?) We started talking about religion - like most Czechs, Mirek was an atheist, but he was explaining that his family, and his future baby was his religion. He got quite heated about this. He also told me that Jarka, my fellow English teacher, was shunned in Benesov; only Josef would give her work. She had been the wife of one of the parachute regiment officers on Mirek’s barracks. One night, she had slept with another man. Her husband
Having had such serious conversations, Mirek withdrew. Me wet in the Pod Brankou, another night club, ten minutes later, always a problem rn Benesov, smiling wolfishly a teach other. And so ended a conduit into potentially interesting army life - and something to keep my mind off Helena. !
I had better luck with my rival, Simon. He was a true Bohemian as well as bohemian.. What does it say about the Czechs that when you flick through the Vienna or Prague phonebook, Czech names when translated, into English, read as ”He who falls out of a window laughing?" (drunk, needless to say) . Sometimes you get the feeling the country is a one joke act, like the Good soldier Schweik. Simon once said that he had no brakes, but in fact ali of them lacked brakes.
That was why they still were in Benesov. l hate Benesov became one of my catch phrases and surprisingly few people objected. lf you remember Benesov you weren't there" was a tired catch phrase lifted from someone's descriptions about the sixties, but the good thing about Czech isolation was that you could try out old tricks on them.
They were easy going company. I didn't only seek their company to keep my mind off Helena, but because staying with Simon meant watching his moves, I also felt some strange transference of feeling. One evening, prowling around Benesov -the man who walks into cafes and then out again -1 saw Simon in
a bar and sat by his side? like a dumb and supportive wife, hand on chin,
while he made occasional asides from his dice game to regale me with a performative joke at which I would appreciatively laugh. It was curiously satisfying, and calmed me down. The others gave me a glance:! was going insane. This was not me
t other times our casual friendships took on a semblance of normality, and it was so easy to sit with them, because they were always there, always so easy going. We shared the solidarity of being unsuccessful artists. In fact, it was some of my best moments. One evening, after the bad theatre rehearsals, going with relief, with Simon, I saw (Helena, always startled when she saw me, looked up from her cigarette in he mirrored bar where I had spent a happy hour listening to the repetition f toreador over and over again through thick doors, raising her eye rows simultaneously. Had she been waiting for me - outfoxed by decision o see Simon, Or was she waiting for her friend? Afterwards we went to the Knrzak, or snail, we played dice a!! evening. I prepared my infamous crib sheet: thirty words of Czech, thirty words of English: this was all you needed to know, Forget vocabulary, Just the Words for11 this1 and1 'that*, Anthony Burgess wrote that British troops occupying Germany at the end of the war could have learnt basic language shorn of all articles and cases, and irregular verbs,
My Czech/English crib sheet, with the four basic verbs and their conjugations worked wonders in the pubs with monoglot Czechs. We both learnt from it, The Knizak was truly seedy: it was like having a pint with old friends in a giant, cigarette butt-filled unflushed urinal. The name as written on a board above the doors in careless paint, Like so many of ttie best pubs, ft had frostedy urine coloured, unadorned glass doors leading onto the main square (no outside tables: the Czechs never drank outdoors, presumably because fresh air was never rank enough)* North Vietnamese, whose parents were the Communist bloc's equivalent of mobile guest workers, would be, true to gambling obsessions of their race, aggressively punching slot machines by the entrance kept open by a large four foot over spilling ashtray. Further in? on long square white formica tables lit by strip lighting, underemphasising the redness of the punters1 faces, sat the North Vietnamese, also true to their race, playing cards in which young Czechs they would be furtively joining in/the beer was said to be the best in Benesov, because the head was given by the air pump, not a CO2 canister -an excuse for the waiter, called Schulda, to under serve me by five percent. Around the large shared tables sat different constellations of degenerates who had turned drinking into a marathon art: they had the poise and stillness of sumo wrestlers.
Of course she denied having slept with Simon, However, once, when we had arranged a date, for a Friday evening, well-oiled in delusional anticipation, had phoned her mobile and Simon had answered. They were at a party outside Benesov. Yeah right. She had taken the receiver and said that she was afraid of telling me not to come because she didn't want me to be cold to her, and afraid of telling me to come because she didn't want to think she had started to like me. That said,! had seen them apart on many occasions in Benesov, and at a disco I saw them one they had separated p!atonically,after which Simon looked devastated, Maybe Helena, the Queen of Benesov, was the face that launched a thousand ships and all that. And I was encouraged by the fact that Thomas, who had spent two years with Simon in the army, said that Simon was really homosexual. Perhaps he was indeed. A photograph of us taken by Schulda showed Simon in a gay, tea pot pose, holding his cigarette in a faggotty, slightly bird-like, recoiling way, (Why had I not seen this when with him. Why did photos show the truth and reality not?) I didn't believe he was completely homosexual Helena had told me, during one of our last evenings together In the bedrock, a secret: that he had loved her, three years earlier, but that she had been too young. She looked slightly rueful. The way he drank three beers very quickly after Helena had left him that night at the Red Dragon, He sat with his head sunk to his chest,, and swept his head several times over the top of his crew-cut head: a standard gesture, I think, of defeat. Anyway, the feeling that I was being seen as a chump, that I might be
But then, one evening, Simon confessed he had fucked Helena, and I believed him.
And so I went to Prague. Prague was a city of possibilities. If it hadn't been for the attacks on the world trade centre, my Prague might have been different. For I usually headed to the Globe bookstore. I would walk down Jindrisska street, past where Helena had biweekly courses in psychology, a university entrance ambition she said she was going to fail, down tawdry, prostitute and neon-sign ridden Wenceslas Square, where I had rendezvoused with Helena after she had failed to wait for me outside her psychology weekend classes in our first daytime date.
(Back story: 1 March 2002. Our first pub date, after school, with Honza. We had lots of wine, and Honza dropped out at five. When she didn't take the excuse to leave him, I knew something was afoot.. She had a tendency to gulp her drinks, while looking up from her glass at me, while holding her cigarette high. We had two more glasses of wine.) Then another ten minute walk through old town labyrinth of small streets, because the tourists followed the Don Giovanni puppet shop lined tourist route from Wenceslas square to the Charles bridge, with its jewellery shops, and its bureaux de change owned by financial wizards of the wicked west, that charged twenty percent commission on buying but advertised 10% commission - in almost invisible letters - on "selling'1. Since most of the victims came from the wicked west themselves, perhaps it didn't matter,
There were also tons and tons of Don Giovanni puppet staffs (Mozart had staged his first performance of Don Giovanni here in 1787, and incidentally Casanova had a very flourishing career in Bohemia, a fact that always made my stomach turn). And squeezed between the shops, their entrance signs invisible between the thronging crowds, dank little pubs with trapped, red faced tourists, Euro-tourists, Eurists sipping their happy hour twenty crown beers. Prague was a city where everyone was intoxicated on beer, or intoxicated in waiting, intoxicated but they didn't know it yet, might even be opposed to it, little dames with dainty handbags from local administration in sober places like Stockholm, Helsinki, Berne, You would seem them, in high colour,traipsing across Charles Bridge with the other hordes, back and forth? back and forth. They too had discovered there was nothing else to do, unless you counted the puppet performances with Don Giovanni, or the river cruise on the Moldau. (Guess which Dvorak music plays, in tenfold dissonance, as the boats, like swimming sea birds with only one leg, do their circular tour in the immediate vicinity of the Charles Bridge arches. Yeah, I had loved Prague too once.^ But the old town was an old postcard being devoured by
an army of soldier ants.
There were more races in the Old Town Square
than in the latest Star Wars movie. Lookingfor Prague's vanished virtue in which the makeup of wax shows a Museum dedicated to communism, and endless mime shows and puppet shows with
Don Giovanni failed to conceal.
The old town, I swear, had five dimensions: Ten minutes* walk, more or less, through tourist thronged streets with graffiti that always had me lost and always, as usual, had me trying to focus on exactly what parts of my brain had been destroyed by drink. The verbal faculty is always the last to go; ten minutes of walking would bring me to the
Bookstore. Which was your typical American place: At least they went easy with the ambient odour in the air conditioning, but it had the fern-bedecked terracotta coloured wails, the right music, the easy Starbucks cum Borders leather sofas for read browsing of an upmarket book shop in a Los Angeles mall; ! would chat up the punters, underpaid teachers like me, most likely, reading books they never intended to pay for, but the books at least excusing their vagabond appearance and unwashed clothes that reeked of batch, for all their inadequacies, Czech men, even the Benesovfs degenerates, never reeked of batch. Bastards, /
It was most impossible to jive with them about the differences between home and the Czech Republic, the obvious and universal and occasionally even interesting icebreaker with all foreigners. These jives usually started., in a statement of concealed patriotism, with some criticism of the home country. Even the stag nighters in the city of stag night, as opposed to city oftlght? with their Bolan wigs, their vulgar habit of glass breaking and their identical vests, could be cornered into a drink or two and reveal pink attitudes about Britain's inferiority to ways continental one thing, their beer was always cheaper. (And women never shaved their armpits). Initially there was always the usual Shavian defensiveness: half the country hating the other half and a!! that - everyone ! met seemed to come from Nottingum, and were cab drivers. And they would always ask if i was a homosexual, more on my accent than on my habit of sidling up to the staggers and opening conversation, But no, I was lustful only for English, not for men,. But then they would say: England is shit.
This evening, the evening of Simon’s revelation, I met a Korean American third year student of literature from the University of[Washington - where else but Seattle would she be from? - at Charles University to study literature. She was reading a book called Fast Food nation, which I happen to know, from reading the New York Review of Books, that European Gibraltar abutting the Castilian desert of American high culture, deals with about how feca! matter enters the McDonald burger production process, that there was more bacteria in the average Big Mac than on the average toilet seat, and that one butcher can eviscerate 200 cows an hour, and that one cow carrying the E coli virus czn contaminate a batch of up to 15,000 cattle, and other stories you didn't want to know- a typical Seattle book, I thought - and so I opened up with an anti globalisation rant.
She had had three gin and tonics, she confessed, before I arrived, and she looked forward to hangin' out some hours with me. She said that American culture was everywhere and there was no point arguing with it. I said that, in Benesov at east, it was just a topsoil: underneath their baseball caps they were thoroughly Czech. I had a theory that you when you said American culture was overwhelming it was because you knew nothing about anything else and only picked out the trivia! but important indications of Americanness, blind to the deep underpinnings of the rest of the culture. McDonalds, the odd baseball cap, They wore glasses that only demonstrated the spectrum occupied by the stars and stripes. She said Europeans hated tourists but tourists brought in money. And then she said; I am sorry, I gotta blow you out-
I couldn't recognise young siren-like Prague that brought to be broken on the rocks of teenage rejection, with the filthy crone of a city that chose to piss down with ram and parade its prostitutes on my caffeine fuelled walk home, along tram lined cobbled streets lined with cafes that no longer attracted and girls whose occasional sideways glances were cats eyes leading down long roads that ended nowhere.
I went to another American bookstore café serving the expat teachers.
His name was John Sweeney, he was from
Colorado, and had an income from his own firm, he said, so he hadn’t been
working for the last two years. He paused for effect. Was he another
disability pensioner? He had taught film to classes K-12, and English
literature and was about to teach adult Czechs from a bank.
I told them
they would love grammar. He told me that if they wouldn't study literature
with enthusiasm he would make up a bogus report to their superiors and
said that failure to read Hamlet in the original would reduce their salary. I
said he obviously yet hadn't encountered Czech passive resistance. He
then said fuck Czech passive resistance. We then talked about Czech
history. "Weren't these guys part of the Soviet Union or something?”
'”hey were part of the Soviet bloc”
About forty, fit, a ladies man, divorced, with two kids? his
Handsome bearded face looked confused - between Soviet Union and Soviet
bloc.
"It reminds me of Vienna,” he said,
"Have you been to Vienna.”
"Read about it in John Irving's novels. He lived in Vienna, There is always a
reference to Vienna in John Irving/1
"What do you think of Prague?!f
"Great. Great women. My neck is sore, great women, I love Europe.
'They have preserved their heritage by being cowards* The Soviet Union
also incubated them,11
“They just came out of Communism.man.”!
"They had no immigration. They live a paradise. Look at a!! the old
buildings. Look at how stable their families are. Have you been to Russia?”
| Jove Russia. Did you realise that the second world war was really the
German-Russian war. The Anglo American effort was piddling, Ninety-five
percent of German troops were engaged in fighting the Russians. So in a
sense they really did liberate the Czechs, despite what the Czechs tell
you.”
"I thought Patton liberated the Czech Republic/1
f”The Czechs love to play the two sides off. A Czech is some one who
enters a revolving door behind you and comes out in front of you. And
Europeans are famously ungrateful for people who help them.”
Taking his email address,! entered the nadir. That particular evening, it started to rain, I walked back through a lonely city, penniless, made hungry by the coffee. Just as well I was penniless, because I was intent on keeping my weight down. But I had to run the gauntlet of fast food places on Wenceslas Square, up whose entire length I had to walk if I wanted to get back to the station. I would walk past delicious sausage stands, past four fast food change, every time the hole in my stomach would get bigger. And it was raining.
Prague hadn't always been like this, I thought back to my visit two years earlier, and my thoughts then - thoughts about travelling.
The sun was hot on my back and a willing waitress kept on bringing steins of beer and ludicrously cheap plates of salami and cheese. A faint smell of wet concrete wafted through the station restaurant doors, and I played my favourite game of spotting nationalities. Germans waved their Deutsche mark notes impatiently. There was a rock garden, the twittering of birds was loud, the square of intense blue sky gave the promise of an excellent day ahead..
i iooked at the weather map of the newspaper someone had left behind. It was raining in London. Too bad for the homeless. London was often depressing, but it was the homeless, floating now on little islands of cardboard, huddled in mouldy sleeping bags that depressed me the most: they were the larvae of London's circles of hell. AS the thought ran through my head, I showered and inhaled the wet concrete, speared another slice of salami and took another draught of beer as I returned to the here and now. And it was like that: drinking at its best. And the promise of more happiness to come. A week passed like that.
Many people, I think, mistake the rapid turnover of sensation from being in a new country, or perhaps the achievements of travel, for true freedom. I too felt a sense of achievement when knocking off Blue Guide sights like orienteering markers. But something doing nothing, and knowing fun was out there – that was fun in itself.
No I had no such luxuries of being calm.
"Knowing this didn't make me feel any better about walking back to the station to catch the evening train back to Benesov, where my alternatives would be: sleeping on the floor of the school teachers' room to catch a few hours early writing work before the German teacher came in at 6.30 am, (I never got up on time if I went back to my white box. So little light came in I never knew if it was night or day. ) However the floor was hard, here was no pillow but Sylva's scrunched up cardigan. I couldn't divest myself of my jacket because it was too cold at night: it was easy to forget that Benesov was four hundred metres above sea level. Josef never heated at night. Failing asleep would be difficult with ail the caffeine. Every time I shifted position the little bloody red light on a box hanging from the ceiling would blink.. Was it attached to leads that ran Into Josef’s house opposite. Was this their night time entertainment? If it was, he never let it on, though I did detect a less effusive air about him than in the beginning as if he realised he had been stuck with a weirdo but couldn't do anything about it: too great a shortage of English teachers in the country. (That, rather than, meeting of minds, a mutual leap of faith, was perhaps the reason why Josef had so hired me after thirty second phone call I could go to the Pit-Pat bar, the only venue open on Wednesday nights( for a few swift pints, thus breaking my pledge on only drinking coffee, and feeling rotten the next morning. If I did drink, i might as well drink in Prague and make that part of my evening enjoyable too. Or ! could do the unthinkable: go back to my white box, lie on a bed of four square orange cushions on a very hard rectangular wooden block, almost as hard as the school floor, and stare up at the ceiiing pumped upon adrenaline and caffeine and a sense of great disappointment with my evening,! knew I would not be able to sleep. And I knew the word "frustration" would not accurately describe how I felt. And ! had finished every single of my five books: Lolita, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Hamlet. A book from Elizabeth in which a dead man is shown mummified, holding up his whole body skin - and they call this art!
I could not remember what happened between my returning from Prague and my waking up a day later on a settee in the lobby of the block of flats. I had glimpses of memory, of utter horror. I went to a newsagent and saw the date: two days later. I went to a supermarket and saw Jarka standing in a still pose, everyone else as if frozen, she was in half profile, her skin white. And I knew my death had arrived to collect me. I knew I had to leave. I went
But would I be able to. I knew on previous Saturday trips to Prague.
My train left at 3,10. The restaurant dock where I was drinking beer showed 3.08; S went out, and realised the restaurant clock was five minutes late and the train had gone, I would shrug, go indoors and sucked off another beer.
I was walking around the centre of Benesov, and bumped into Helena, in a black cashmere wraparound top that eased her cleavage, and a yellow tight skirt with flowers. Her hair was tied up with those Chinese chopsticks. She looked as usual startled when I called her and she stood there frozen on the street when ! came up to her.
“Hi,” I said, squinting.
"Hi.”
"Have you stopped coming into my class.”
"Maybe I will come in Monday,” she said
Well fuck this, I thought. What the He!! am I doing here?
"I am leaving.”
She said something, I can't remember.
"I am leaving, " I said. "Do you want to go for a coffee?"
"Bedrock?"
"Blue cafe.”
Her creamy presence was finally in front of me after a month of yearning. She stretched out her arms, and looked down at the table. She
had a lovely, hanging upper lip. She was so fresh and young, and drank two
glasses of wine - making her face gob right red - and smoked about ten
cigarettes, lighting them from each other. I told her how much I loved her
and how I written this and she got redder in the face from her wine allergy
and was smiling ironically to herself as she looked down at the table, She
said she would !ive in London, as an au pair, but with another agency, not
through me. Weil, i thought, there's always hope.
She said she had never had a relationship with Simon but wanted to talk to
him many times, how angry she had been at me because she had heard we
were going out and thought I had spread the rumour. She said I tried it out
with Katka, and Paulina (my other girl students in her class) and didn't like her especially - just with any
woman.
I said how untrue this was and that they were just my pupils and i
liked to go out for drinks with them, Her father came to pick her up and
and said look me in the eye and she did for about seconds, holding my
gaze, but I don't know if they were showing love and she left without
touching, me, shaking hands or hugging. I don't want you to think I like
you, she had said. But she stood at the car door, and looked up, and saw
me through the window, and got into the car and drive off.
That evening I missed my train and went to Bedrock. At 11 pm she came in,
laughing hysterically with a young man,. They were sitting at a bat
and I sat alone at a table and when I turned up she gave me a nasty look
and paid the bill and left. The next morning I phoned her and the
conversation went like this.
"Hi, it is me." I said in my best light, boyish voice, a voice asking for
contrition.
There was a sigh. Helena used a light voice too.
"Hi."
"You hate me don't you?"
"Yeah."
It was a resigned, not unfriendly voice.
"Why?"
"Because you call me many times to say that you love me, and I think you
don't understand simple things."
I gave her my phone number in London but she couldn't promise to look me
up. I said I would call her again and then prolonged my goodbyes.
"Bye bye."
"Bye."
"Take care of yourself."
"Ok."
"OK. So see you."
"Bye."
In the middle of my third goodbye she abruptly, and entirely deliberately,
hung up.
I missed the bus from Prague to London on two successive nights, as if I
was really testing my resolve to leave. On each occasion I missed the bus,
having come by tedious train all the way up from Benesov, by two or three
minutes. The first night f was actually on time, but just on occasion, it
seemed* the normally quite time pedantic Czechs leave early, just to keep you on your toes, On each occasion I went back to Benesov and spent the evening in the Pod Brankou. The first night, as said, I saw Helena with friend late at night in the Bedrock. (When I called her the next day for that last, rather hopeless time ! had already missed my bus once) f then got very drunk and didn’t remember much. The second time ! came back to Pod Brankou and had actually run out of money as well as left my keys. (Because I left my keys behind in a bag in the school, including the keys to the school, so that Josef could easily find them) a friend called Martin saved me: he lent me a thousand crowns, enough to stay in the Posta Hotel And so there was an elegant symmetry: on the evening i arrived, Josef had invited me to the annual ball of his graduation class. Here I was first introduced to the bizarre traditions (to me) of the Czech Republic. The set up seemed normal enough, a little like an American proms which all the parents had also been invited. The men in normal, albeit slightly shabby in a socialist sort of way suits, the girls in attractive ball gowns or black short dresses, I remember Sylva, slim and beautiful, introduced as my supervisor and glancing over at me from her next table. She shouldn't have worn her glasses, which reflected light and made me intensely iof the movement of her head in my direction. She was never so attractive as then. The eight 19 year old girls of the graduation class, which ! so gradually later got to despise, because they were so lazy and disrespectful and cheeky -by Czech standards - during my lessons, then went onto the stage, the same stage as Helena and Simon were to perform, were they were pelted by coins from the assorted teachers, fellow pupils, old pupils, and parents - a tradition that is said to bring luck. Then, with excruciating self consciousness, the girls, with awkward swan necks and boys iin figures - as said, I didn't like this particular class -dragged a plastic self around the stage and gracelessly picked up the coins, depositing them In the sled. This was followed by dancing. I had been introduced to the headmistress by Josef She was a good ten years older than him, in her early fifties, and at no point did he say the two were married at that the school was the from a ruin to their riches project, I knew there was some kind of complex relationship between them, but I thought it was more like that of a respectful, nay worshipful younger janitor.
Her shoulder blades stuck out like offensive weapons, and I had to manoeuvre out of the way: the stumps of a castrated harpy, they bespoke a life of irregular meals and casual drug abuse as the wages of
loneliness. Not for a. moment did I imagine they lived a comfortable house with two teenagers on the usual French-lesson-piano-lesson-basketball lesson circuit. For as the dance in the municipal theatre petered out, we down to the basement of the hotel Posta where there was one of those late night herna bars of which there are so many in the Czech Republic. There was sexual, suggestive music, and a dancing pole. Marcela, the headmistress, was sitting with about four of her older students on a barstool, knocking back tequilas with salt, and Josef each time, scoping us both with his most lugubrious and almost subservient expression, was taking note after note out of his wallet to pay for our drinks. Marcela only had eyes for the next tequila, and her students were drinking with her, I don't think you would see this in England. ! then had Joseff who had hired me, down as a general factotum who wanted to impress his asexual alcoholic possibly lesbian boss* What was she doing sitting around all those girls in slinky black dresses, I was impressed by the lack of sexual or status hang ups however: we all went onto the dance floor and rocked to the music. One pupil cavorted at the dance pole, oblivious and happy and decadent,
I wasn’t able to find my fiat because I had forgotten the address Josef had given me, i had to check into the Hotel Posta, in whose interior was situated, as said, the municipal theatre. St was cheap, three hundred crowns, as everything else had been in the Czech Republic.! then thought, snugly ensconced in the very epicentre of Benesov, because the Hotel Posta,a hundred year landmark, was the corner building the Czech Republic was to be a six month sexual feast, Was it? Put it this way, with dear Marty's money, Dane geld against anti Irishness, I spent my last night in the Hotel Posta, alone, and dry mouthed and as memoryless as the white fetid sky outside, dulling even the mustard facade of the German helmet town hall. My memory was blank too - indeed, this essay could have been twice as long had i remained teetotal. I remembered some essentials though, such as the fact that 1 had to go home. I couldn't go on like this, couldn't go on fuelling my monomania by blanking out little details of my life. My life was turning into a map with motorways leading nowhere: alcohol was killing off side roads of my minor interests as sure as it was nuking my neurons. So I had to go: Third time lucky. But first I had to say goodbye to Simon, I went to the Knizak and, sure enough, within half an hour there was Lucas, on e of Simon’s band members, arrested once in
Spain for playing the Bonga in Algeciras, frustratingly short of the hash paradise of Morocco. He had a book about tantric sex, another little signal that Benesovites were not so deculturated as if had made up my mind that
they were and felt a sort of melodramatic and self regarding isolation -prince across the water feeling about. Too bad. I had already made my
mind up. Lucas got himself a beer and called Simon on his mobile.
Simon had undergone a shape change. Gone was the man with bulging veins around his eyes who did pelvic thrusts as he went out of the Red Dragon to have a joint or was it perhaps an amphetamine pill, with my Helena. The man who dressed in an lumber checked shirt over a mango coloured T-shirt, who had insouciant rips in his old jeans and expensive caterpillar boots, who always had a cigarette hanging off his lip and worked on a building site in addition to claiming the dole. He had shape changed to the worried figure, dwarfed by his dfArtagnan hat, moments before Helena nuzzled up to him in that torturous rehearsal when the bottom dropped out of my world, for 24 hours. His childlike blue eyes fixed mine, in an anxious face- He was wearing short shorts that went badly with his long thin legs, and he was drinking orange juice.
I was a cynic, Simon knew I wouldn't have the madman of Benesov to stay -I would never get him out. Nut perhaps he also really was a boy, I was eight years older, something i had forgotten as I went into the time machine of weight loss and even girls I said looked 23. Simon saw me off at the station- We ate pizza together on a bench, he declining his fair half share with the self sacrificial air of a liege sending off his lord to dangerous lands, and that would have been that when Schweik turned up with his girlfriend Monika, she of the glowing blond hair, the odd chicken like dance, the propensity to kiss me, albeit dryly on the lips in the discotheque and the girl who had brought me and Simon together at was my happiest moment. Again, it made me wonder Simon was the only person who loved me in Benesov, because he surrounded my time there with harmony. We met at Pod Brankou, in one of those early dawn hours subject To the parallax effect. Midnight crashes into dawn because you are standing from the scope like perspective of high pissation, The countdown to reluctant closing in Benesovfs clean and well-lighted place, the candle burning through the night for one of Benesov’s emotional and sexual vagabonds, and suddenly I found myself in Monika’s flat. Simon and Lucas slept in Monika’s bed; Monika, wearing one sock, slept on the sofa, and ! slept on her brother's couch. The next morning he let me check my email, and we played a desultory game of Quake, At noon, on the first Spring Day, Simonfs best friend, in an old Skoda drove us back to Benesov. Loud Arab music blared from his car stereo. So the Bohemians really were bohemian.
The trip back to London was uneventful. There was a man with white socks and a shaved head, and scarification marks of over dissipation under his eye sockets -I took for an English security guard at some overpriced centra! Prague nightclub. It turned out he wasn't.
Part III
While the Czechs, with their plastic files containing bank statements, letters of employment back home, invitations from UK family, and evidence of ability to support themselves, were undergoing the usual insulting interview process at Calais, we grandstanded a little about our Britishness on the wet Atlantic sun shining on fresh grass. Humidity filled my longs, and then seagulls too, soaring in the thermals of my sadness, for I was close to home and thought of my family. Paul was a marine, based at Dover castle after combat tours of Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Macedonia and of course Ulster, and he wished that his battalion, instead of underpaid security guards of poor old Euro tunnel, fined for every refugee who sticks spider like to a freight train's undercarriage, they should have first para guarding the entrance. (Not to mention flics who patrolled the perimeter fence.) Paul had been to see his girlfriend: stayed twenty four hours, two night trips on a bus sandwiching the visit. Very army: I had once met Canadian soldiers in Bosnia who drove 800 kays to Budapest and back in a night. And then there was me, who spent five days travelling to the Ukraine, and five days back, and spent two days that. Perhaps I was a soldier manque.
Deceptively feline, rough edges worn off by years of Belfast patrols, he was still quite uncharismatic, as blackish as the computer polygon fighters of the latest three-dee shooter, and about my age, yet had a girlfriend of 21. He could do it. On the seesaw of the Euro star coach shuttle's platform, halfway underneath the channel, I felt unbalanced, torn apart by responsibilities to my family, myself and my career, and to the powerful tug of an unslaked sex drive. Perhaps I ought to go back to my unrequited battlefields.
"Civvy street's the problem. There's no one to look after ye," he said, looking me over. "You like Prague."
"Love it. The beer's cheap, food's excellent. Tell the lads, better than Tenerife."
"Many British military people like the east bloc."
I thought of Mirek's friend, "something to do with seeing the other side. A cold war fascination." West is the land of men. East is the land of women. That was my
unappreciated contribution to political science of my twenties.
"Got anywhere to doss down tonight then?"
"I am staying with my Dad. It is his seventieth birthday,"
"Can't stand London meself. It's everyone for himself. "
! thought: no, that's why army people liked socialism. It looked after you.
Maybe that was what was missing from all our lives, a little collectivism,
and we went to the Czech Republic to get it: the warm bath of group love,
not meta-amphetamines, was the drug that, if they could reproduce it in
pili form, would be a successful Czech export. He got off at the Tesco's
in Folkestone and I realised, as he hitched up his green army backpack,
how short he was: a miner's son, lost in the new post Scargill’s England,
perhaps? He was going to phone for an army Landrover to pick him up, and
for some reason I was reminded of the way my exwife always had people
to pick her up, whether she was returning to London or visiting Poland.
I planned, as usual, to walk the last bit. What was travel if you couldn't spring a surprise on your loved ones: this was the crackling of the bacon. I had been coming back to Dover, on coaches, or thumbing it, because these were the best ways, too many times to count, of coming back to England. It was a pivot of all these trips abroad, the corpus callosum of my split Identity, my divided needs. It wasn't only the pivot of my travel experiences. The most significant passage in my opinion of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is the last lines when he describes coming home to England of red phone boxes, ragged posters fluttering in the breeze of silver jubilee announcements, the heavy coins and gentle crowds with bad teeth, the undisturbed flower of the railway cuttings of England sleeping its own deep, deep sleep from which only the roar of bombs, he wrote prophetically, would jerk it awake. It put his Spain of hard jagged limestone peaks, powerful garlic sausage, sausage. Sate trains. constant diarrhoea and hot clear spring skies in contrast. My England too was a contrast, albeit a mutating one. Returning from Spain my England was always a study in charcoal: the black faces, the black tarmac, the dark cashmere coats and skirt suits of serious people, - that was coming in by air, and at night, in November. If I came back in August which was common, the silence and the coolness and the greenesss, whether coming into London by car or by the tube. I would always remember the ticking sounds of the air brakes as the tube doors remained open in the suburban, foliage ciad stations of the Piccadilly line. No one would be speaking, and a good many people would be rubbing their faces with tiredness. London, a serious city.
Coming in from the Czech Republic, in contrast, which was always via Dover was always a disappointment. I always thought London a city
hollowed out of quaility of life and of emotion. This feeling stretches back the years. There was that time when ! hitchhiked back from Prague to Brussels (i cheated and took the tram the rest of the way), in the pre Euro star days,! slept at the ferry terminal in Ostende, And then I took the local train from Dover to London, that stopped in places like Crawley and Croydon. On the train was a man in the army, telling jokes 2nd army anecdotes to some young au pair. I joined in, saying that I was a journalist, which i was? then, and he told me to fuck off: AT Victoria as ! sped towards the tube station entrance he intercepted me and unnecessarily apologised for the necessity of confidentiality. It brought me down to the serious city with a bump, and helped me store away memories of that hot late spring - pictures that lodged in iny subconscious until they motivated me one day to return, at the fag end of my youth. There was Anna with the dirty white socks dancing on the roadside on the way to the German order, as cars carrying garden gnomes and other whatnots catering to German tastes boomed towards the border, I hid in a bush, and a sports car pulled up, and we both got in. He claimed to have to make a turning due north and dropped me off soon after depositing her on a graffiti ridden doorway in Pisek, She got out, and both our minds worked in tandem. So don't blame him5 the driver, a bald kraut. Or the end of term girls in Carlsbad, sitting on wooden pub benches, under a canopy of trees, weeping and laughing with faces buried in their hands while I watched them and thought:! want to creep into their shells, to lead them, And so I was to do eventually, with another generation, But! won't be there for their end of term. This pained me: another fuck up.
The thought of this lost chance pursued me all the way to London, and perhaps jaundiced my views. Yes, there were still George Orwell's kind and polite crowds, easy to push off the pavement, the red post boxes and heavy coins. These were good things, tempting me Into another waltz, with another culture. But Londoners also struck me as shabby, the women as having bad complexions for which not even skirt suits and Gucci bags could compensate. I walked back through Belgravia, and jibbed at the flaking facades of even the embassy buildings, and the uncosiness of the pubs compared to those in Benesov.(Not to mention the higher prices) And then: The Edgware Road? with its boarded up shops covered in ripped posters the late opening groceries sentinelled by pot bellied^ pop eyed Arabs, the grim underpasses where troglodytes, cubit and fragmented in the vast mirrors of Westminster's cleanest public toilets for the Year 2001 laboured for the minimum wage. . Even the advertising, which ! had always thought was a bright spot of the English scene compared to the simplicities of European advertising, now seemed banal and puerile. An advert for a car said “ Bull" and then, underneath a mountain to which a
Road led far away. “Red Rag.” compared this to the subtle humour of my teen queen. The hall of mirrors, when she was ironically looking down at the table, never meeting my gaze, smiling, her elongated upper lip which overhung her lower lip so eminently kissable, quiet except when she suppressed a subtle hiccup. And she was smiling, because she was thinking he thinks ! like him because ! am sitting here and smiling at him and so he thinks I am smiling at him because he thinks I think he thinks I like him, and so he thinks I don't - except I do. Or do I? You have to laugh.
The papers also seemed puerile, trivial, shrill: the British journalistic corps, living In a lunatic asylum of triviality. The media had been my surrogate home but these media arenas, these comfort for the lonely - my London was a beer-stained newspaper spread like a fan next to my bedside - searching the lowest common denominator had only the virtue of their untrammelled authority of their newsstand monopoly. The Emperor's nakedness was exposed by foreign travel The main Czech newspaper’s skull-like reflection of British newspapers' ephemerality was called Blesk and the onomatopeia applied to British newspapers too, even the Times, Well, Tempus Fugit, Fuck the Times.
But f have said all this before, I have only one story, one narrative, which just improves over time. Maybe. Going out and coming back. And then, sweaty and In ink stained shirt, what's new, I surprised Elizabeth and I was swept into another arabesque.
Deceptively feline, rough edges worn off by years of Belfast patrols, he was still quite uncharismatic, as blackish as the computer polygon fighters of the latest three-dee shooter, and about my age, yet had a girlfriend of 21. He could do it. On the seesaw of the Euro star coach shuttle's platform, halfway underneath the channel, I felt unbalanced, torn apart by responsibilities to my family, myself and my career, and to the powerful tug of an unslaked sex drive. Perhaps I ought to go back to my unrequited battlefields.
"Civvy street's the problem. There's no one to look after ye," he said, looking me over. "You like Prague."
"Love it. The beer's cheap, food's excellent. Tell the lads, better than Tenerife."
"Many British military people like the east bloc."
I thought of Mirek's friend, "something to do with seeing the other side. A cold war fascination." West is the land of men. East is the land of women. That was my
unappreciated contribution to political science of my twenties.
"Got anywhere to doss down tonight then?"
"I am staying with my Dad. It is his seventieth birthday,"
"Can't stand London meself. It's everyone for himself. "
! thought: no, that's why army people liked socialism. It looked after you.
Maybe that was what was missing from all our lives, a little collectivism,
and we went to the Czech Republic to get it: the warm bath of group love,
not meta-amphetamines, was the drug that, if they could reproduce it in
pili form, would be a successful Czech export. He got off at the Tesco's
in Folkestone and I realised, as he hitched up his green army backpack,
how short he was: a miner's son, lost in the new post Scargill’s England,
perhaps? He was going to phone for an army Landrover to pick him up, and
for some reason I was reminded of the way my exwife always had people
to pick her up, whether she was returning to London or visiting Poland.
I planned, as usual, to walk the last bit. What was travel if you couldn't spring a surprise on your loved ones: this was the crackling of the bacon. I had been coming back to Dover, on coaches, or thumbing it, because these were the best ways, too many times to count, of coming back to England. It was a pivot of all these trips abroad, the corpus callosum of my split Identity, my divided needs. It wasn't only the pivot of my travel experiences. The most significant passage in my opinion of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is the last lines when he describes coming home to England of red phone boxes, ragged posters fluttering in the breeze of silver jubilee announcements, the heavy coins and gentle crowds with bad teeth, the undisturbed flower of the railway cuttings of England sleeping its own deep, deep sleep from which only the roar of bombs, he wrote prophetically, would jerk it awake. It put his Spain of hard jagged limestone peaks, powerful garlic sausage, sausage. Sate trains. constant diarrhoea and hot clear spring skies in contrast. My England too was a contrast, albeit a mutating one. Returning from Spain my England was always a study in charcoal: the black faces, the black tarmac, the dark cashmere coats and skirt suits of serious people, - that was coming in by air, and at night, in November. If I came back in August which was common, the silence and the coolness and the greenesss, whether coming into London by car or by the tube. I would always remember the ticking sounds of the air brakes as the tube doors remained open in the suburban, foliage ciad stations of the Piccadilly line. No one would be speaking, and a good many people would be rubbing their faces with tiredness. London, a serious city.
Coming in from the Czech Republic, in contrast, which was always via Dover was always a disappointment. I always thought London a city
hollowed out of quaility of life and of emotion. This feeling stretches back the years. There was that time when ! hitchhiked back from Prague to Brussels (i cheated and took the tram the rest of the way), in the pre Euro star days,! slept at the ferry terminal in Ostende, And then I took the local train from Dover to London, that stopped in places like Crawley and Croydon. On the train was a man in the army, telling jokes 2nd army anecdotes to some young au pair. I joined in, saying that I was a journalist, which i was? then, and he told me to fuck off: AT Victoria as ! sped towards the tube station entrance he intercepted me and unnecessarily apologised for the necessity of confidentiality. It brought me down to the serious city with a bump, and helped me store away memories of that hot late spring - pictures that lodged in iny subconscious until they motivated me one day to return, at the fag end of my youth. There was Anna with the dirty white socks dancing on the roadside on the way to the German order, as cars carrying garden gnomes and other whatnots catering to German tastes boomed towards the border, I hid in a bush, and a sports car pulled up, and we both got in. He claimed to have to make a turning due north and dropped me off soon after depositing her on a graffiti ridden doorway in Pisek, She got out, and both our minds worked in tandem. So don't blame him5 the driver, a bald kraut. Or the end of term girls in Carlsbad, sitting on wooden pub benches, under a canopy of trees, weeping and laughing with faces buried in their hands while I watched them and thought:! want to creep into their shells, to lead them, And so I was to do eventually, with another generation, But! won't be there for their end of term. This pained me: another fuck up.
The thought of this lost chance pursued me all the way to London, and perhaps jaundiced my views. Yes, there were still George Orwell's kind and polite crowds, easy to push off the pavement, the red post boxes and heavy coins. These were good things, tempting me Into another waltz, with another culture. But Londoners also struck me as shabby, the women as having bad complexions for which not even skirt suits and Gucci bags could compensate. I walked back through Belgravia, and jibbed at the flaking facades of even the embassy buildings, and the uncosiness of the pubs compared to those in Benesov.(Not to mention the higher prices) And then: The Edgware Road? with its boarded up shops covered in ripped posters the late opening groceries sentinelled by pot bellied^ pop eyed Arabs, the grim underpasses where troglodytes, cubit and fragmented in the vast mirrors of Westminster's cleanest public toilets for the Year 2001 laboured for the minimum wage. . Even the advertising, which ! had always thought was a bright spot of the English scene compared to the simplicities of European advertising, now seemed banal and puerile. An advert for a car said “ Bull" and then, underneath a mountain to which a
Road led far away. “Red Rag.” compared this to the subtle humour of my teen queen. The hall of mirrors, when she was ironically looking down at the table, never meeting my gaze, smiling, her elongated upper lip which overhung her lower lip so eminently kissable, quiet except when she suppressed a subtle hiccup. And she was smiling, because she was thinking he thinks ! like him because ! am sitting here and smiling at him and so he thinks I am smiling at him because he thinks I think he thinks I like him, and so he thinks I don't - except I do. Or do I? You have to laugh.
The papers also seemed puerile, trivial, shrill: the British journalistic corps, living In a lunatic asylum of triviality. The media had been my surrogate home but these media arenas, these comfort for the lonely - my London was a beer-stained newspaper spread like a fan next to my bedside - searching the lowest common denominator had only the virtue of their untrammelled authority of their newsstand monopoly. The Emperor's nakedness was exposed by foreign travel The main Czech newspaper’s skull-like reflection of British newspapers' ephemerality was called Blesk and the onomatopeia applied to British newspapers too, even the Times, Well, Tempus Fugit, Fuck the Times.
But f have said all this before, I have only one story, one narrative, which just improves over time. Maybe. Going out and coming back. And then, sweaty and In ink stained shirt, what's new, I surprised Elizabeth and I was swept into another arabesque.
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