Part I

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.