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.