Springtime for Czechoslovakia July 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Czech Republic, Europe, Hotels, Insurance, Moscow, Museum, Prague, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travel Clinic, Trip, Vietnam , trackbackIrena lived in a late-Seventies block of flats on the edge of town, half a mile from the Russian barracks, part of an ugly outer-urban sprawl. After buying me lunch in a new concrete hotel called, romantically, The Interflora, she drove me back at high Skoda speed through the centre of town — choke full out, engine howling in second gear as we skidded across wet cobblestones, clipping kerbs and narrowly avoiding the numerous potholes and dug-up sections where slow attempts were being made to repair the water mains, shattered by the minus-twenty-five February temperatures. The only vehicles Irena took any notice of were the thin double trams, locked inscrutably into their own system, clanging their way up and down the narrow streets making unmistakable tram noises. Saturday afternoon shoppers shared the pavements with soldiers in iron-grey overcoats wandering about in twos and threes.
“You can tell the difference by their boots,” Irena told me before I’d had a chance to ask the question. Some of the Russian soldiers (pull-on boots, no laces) looked Mongolian and very young.
“We hate them,” she remarked casually.
Olomouc, former capital of Moravia and reputed to be Czechoslovakia’s second most interesting city, doesn’t look its best in mid- March. The botanical gardens are bare and there are few signs of the famous flower festival exhibitions in the cold grey wet transition between winter and spring: on the four days I was there it rained every day, finally removing the last traces of soot-encrusted snow from the pavements but leaving everything streaked with a post-winter dampness. Even the drainpipes, clinging half-heartedly to cracked walls and rusty gutters, looked as if they’d had enough.
The Gothic and Baroque buildings in the centre of town seemed somehow to reflect the gloom with their peeling plaster and crumbling facades: a once-proud city of towers and spires, balconies, alleys and doorways, with the university — a jumbled collection of yellow buildings and small courtyards — standing on a rock above the River Morava gazing severely down on a gold-domed Russian Orthodox church, now boarded up, its green roof tiles slipped and broken. Everyone I met kept apologising for the shabby state of the buildings and I had the feeling that if I went back in ten years’ time it would look like the set for some grand-scale horror film, all broken banging shutters and cobwebbed windows. I tried to explain to Irena that I didn’t mind, that this was how I felt it should be — the real Central Europe — and anyway I preferred that kind of place to ordered museums and shining monuments. She gazed at me with ice-blue eyes and murmured, “I see.”
Olomouc is full of churches, huge and chillingly ornate, freezing inside and — as far as I could see — deserted during the week. Our Lady of the Snows was full of gilded pouting angels, but despite the heavy rain I was the only visitor, devout or otherwise. St Michael’s Church — “a gem of Baroque Moravian architecture” — was firmly shut and St Wenceslas Cathedral, founded in 1109 and rebuilt at the end of the last century on a vast neo-Gothic scale, was dark, impressive and so cold inside it made your head ache. In front of the church of St Maurice I met Lenka, a music student who had promised to show me what she described as “the biggest organ in Central Europe“, all 2,311 pipes of it, the largest more than thirty feet tall, the smallest eight millimetres of solid silver. Built in the 1740s and housed in the only remaining Gothic interior in the city, it’s now electronically operated and can imitate anything from bagpipes to a brass band. Lenka adjusted her fur coat, blew on her hands, opened it up and let rip: the noise nearly blew me off the balcony, a stupendous megalomaniac combination of centuries of Bach fugues and the Incredible Dr Phibes. She said it had taken her seven years to learn to play it, and the only problem was when there was a power cut. That and the temperature during the winter.
Irena took an unofficial day off work and we wandered through the damp streets while she told me about being a student at Palacky University in 1968 (and what happened afterwards: “It is strange how the history books of a country can change, isn’t it?”). Two soldiers (lace- up boots) were taking photos of their girlfriends in Peace Square, also known — at various times in its turbulent career — as Lenin Square and Hitler Square. Hiding from the rain in a smoky bar we missed the twelve o’clock chiming of the Town Hall clock. The original sixteenth-century clock was badly damaged in 1945 and has been restored, somewhat incongruously, with mosaic figures of model socialist workers.
“I am glad we are late,” Irena growled. “Look at them, they are ridiculous.”
Opposite the clock, angels and bishops stare moodily down from the Holy Trinity Column in what is now the middle of Red Army Square. As a change from wet feet and sightseeing I was smuggled into an English-language class where we drank home-made slivovitz and one of the students, a lugubrious-looking individual called Miroslav who played the bassoon in the Moravia Philharmonic Orchestra, invited me to a concert the following evening. Irena produced a suit from somewhere — I had nothing appropriate to wear and the Czechs dress up to go out — and on a cold wet evening Miroslav, who once behind his bassoon couldn’t stop smiling, dragged me in off Red Army Square where I’d been waiting under an umbrella watching a group of Czech soldiers trying to stand up, and escorted me up to the balcony of the Fucik Hall to watch the performance. He was wearing immaculate white tie and tails and the cloakroom lady kept shaking my hand and shouting “Welcome!”. Irena arrived looking stunning, and the entire audience spent the interval walking about studying each others’ clothes.
Olomouc has a population of about a hundred thousand but it’s a small town: I kept bumping into people I’d already met, and Irena appeared to know everybody.
“It is necessary to have connections, you do not understand,” she told me when I remarked on the fact, though even the normally impassive Czechs leapt to their feet and gallantly opened doors for her at every available opportunity. In the Post Office while I was trying to phone Prague, Irena was getting free phone calls in exchange for correcting a German text for the manager, and when we went to a bookshop she had a friend who sold her books at half price.
The morning I was due to leave — the day Chernenko died — I woke up to the sound of Russian troops singing marching songs from the nearby barracks. On the radio the Voice of Moscow was retelling their fifty per cent of the story of the Vietnam war, and every half-hour or so large green helicopters flew overhead as they did every day. Nobody I saw in the streets ever looked up.
Irena drove me to the station, past the monastery that is now a military hospital, along the main road north where tanks rumble across at night. We flew round corners and bounced over cobbled junctions, ignoring traffic lights and scattering innocent pedestrians, speeding through puddles and swerving to avoid the steaming manhole covers. As we parked outside the station Irena reversed into a 1964 Mark One Cortina, crushing a wing.
“Never mind,” she purred, “it is not important. I know the director of the insurance company. They are all bastards.”
She kissed me and wouldn’t let me pay for the ticket. It was still raining.
The train going west to Prague was empty and unheated, and arrived two hours late at a different station; but the weather in Bohemia was a few days ahead of Olomouc and the capital was clear and bright. Springtime for Czechoslovakia .. .
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