Me, Myself & Prague: An Unreliable Guide to Bohemia

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

Me, Myself &

PRAGUE

An unreliable

guide to Bohemia

RACHAEL WEISS

First published in 2008

Copyright © Rachael Weiss 2008

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

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

Email: info@allenandunwin.com

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Weiss, Rachael, 1964– .

    Me, myself & Prague : an unreliable guide to bohemia.

    ISBN 978 1 7411 4820 6 (pbk.)

    1. Travel - Voyages and travels - Humor. 2. Prague

    (Czech Republic) - Description and travel.

910.4

Typeset in Australia by Bookhouse, Sydney.

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Maryborough.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my father

Zdenìk Weiss

and my grandparents

Karel Weiss and Bohumila Weissová

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 Becoming Bohemian

Chapter 2 Beer and Potatoes

Chapter 3 Friends at Last

Chapter 4 My Grandmother’s Favourite Café

Chapter 5 Family Matters

Chapter 6 I Fall in Love with the Czechs

Chapter 7 Bribery and Corruption

Chapter 8 A Brief History of Communism

Chapter 9 A Village in South Bohemia

Chapter 10 Hiking

Chapter 11 Am I a Bohemian?

Chapter 12 Marienbad with Andy

Chapter 13 Marienbad with Andy, Part Two

Chapter 14 Losers in Love

Chapter 15 Winter

Epilogue

Prologue

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

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

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

Adulthood saw no improvement. Boyfriend after useless, bottle-wielding, unemployed boyfriend came and went, the average length of each relationship about six and a half months, unless he was married, in which case the affair dragged on for years. And I seemed unable to grasp the nature of working life. I got a lucky break straight after university where, by the simple method of choosing English as a major—since the one thing I do seem to be fitted for is reading and English required nothing more of me than that—I’d managed to pass. I was hired by a company of management consultants, but corporate life shredded me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly, forty wasn’t looking so bad.

Chapter 1

Becoming Bohemian

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

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

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

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

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

On the glass door was a typewritten note that I hoped wasn’t anything important. I’d already realised I was going to have serious difficulty with the language. At least in France or Germany or Italy or Spain the language is vaguely intelligible. You know that femme on the toilet door in Paris means ‘woman’, and you know what you’re going to get when you point to spaghetti on a Roman menu. The same happy familiarity was not evident in Prague. Even the signs at the airport, including the ones on the toilet doors (as I discovered when I opened a door onto a hideous smell and a profile of a naked penis, mid-stream) had been completely meaningless. The message on the front door made me feel uneasy. It didn’t look like just any old ad; more likely it was a formal communication of some sort, probably quite important. I was sure I’d find out soon enough.

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

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

My father bought this flat for an astonishingly cheap price after the communist regime fell in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The apartment block had been built by the communists, who are a byword for shoddy construction. They also built the underground metro system, hailed at the time as a marvel of workmanship by the fatherland. It was fast, clean, efficient; the trains ran on time, and it had a special switch for flooding, because Prague is prone to flooding. I imagined the communist entrepreneur who built the metro showing his wonder of modern technology to a cluster of city fathers: ‘Look, comrades, see this switch here? Come the flood warning, all we have to do is flick this and, hey presto! Instant flood barrier to protect the metro system. All hail to the workers, comrades.’ Fast forward to 2000.

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

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

‘What do you think of the unit?’

‘It has no plumbing . . .’

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

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

‘. . . one hundred thousand crowns!’

‘. . . and there’s rat droppings.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘Did I tell you what they were asking?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘I know.’

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

‘Okay, gotta go.’

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

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

The apartment had a large, light-filled living room with a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The walls and ceiling were painted pale yellow and on two sides huge, double-glazed windows with sturdy wooden sashes ran from the ceiling halfway down to the floor. I instantly fell in love with those wooden sashes. It’s one of the reasons I got sick of Australia—no-one builds a wooden window any more. It’s a small point but those hideous, cheap, godawful aluminium sashes bug me; that frenzy of builders out to save a buck at the expense of elegance. They don’t even keep out the cold or the heat—they’re completely energy inefficient. In a just world aluminium window manufacturers would be tried for treason and hanged. Since Prague is freezing most of the time, even the glorious communist fathers couldn’t stoop to cheap and ugly aluminium, so every window has broad wooden sashes. The sight of them in Dad’s flat stirred my soul. I really was in Europe. I was living somewhere that felt better, more artistic, more soulful, somewhere where I’d never have to be depressed by an aluminium sash again.

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

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

I went back inside the living room. There was a television in one corner and an Eames leather chair and footstool smack dab in the centre of the room, facing the box. Dad’s chair, of course. Against one wall was a small, inlaid wooden table with an armchair, covered in a satin cherry stripe, on either side, and on the opposite wall was a wide old-fashioned box couch made of caramel-coloured wood, with square tapestry cushions. This turned into a bed, so my father had told me. There were pictures on all the walls, mostly oil paintings of bucolic scenes. Some of them were by an artist called Dvoøak, who hailed from my father’s native village of Kamenièky, and the scenes were from that part of the country, so Dad had said. I looked at them closely, wondering if I’d feel a spooky sense of déjá vu, but, no, they just seemed like pretty village-scapes—a lake, storm clouds over rolling hills, a marketplace.

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

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

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

The cupboards over the sink and the drawers next to it contained an assortment of cups, plates, saucepans and cutlery. Not too much, just enough for four people, and no spares, rather like the kitchen equipment you find in holiday homes. And I suppose this was a holiday home: my father made regular trips here with my stepmother, always in the winter when she had her holidays (she’s a high school teacher); at other times my relatives from southern Bohemia used it when they came up to Prague. It bore the air of a neat, clean bolt-hole and now it was my refuge. This sense of being in a holiday home, the sparseness of the furnishings and the absence of bric-a-brac, made me feel, suddenly, marvellously light and free from the burdens of ordinary life.

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

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

I opened the linen cupboard in the hall to look for sheets. Layers of perfect edges, neatly clamped on top of one another, greeted me and I couldn’t tell what each shelf contained. I pulled out a white cloth and opened it up to find a tea