We went out to look at the old houses in the street called Neruda with the carved signs of trade or family over the door—the stone key or the wheel—and looked at a few churches. He pointed out, with the builder’s expert eye and distaste, the places where the marble was faked or the carved cherubs had been replaced or touched up. We sat under the acacias on the terrace of a little café up by the superb piece of Baroque pride, the Cernin Palace (now the Foreign Ministry). We went out to the heights of old Prague with its quiet places of fine buildings and graceful gardens and park-like woods. We watched the wasps buzz, we listened to the chatter of very genteel old ladies in their best, drinking their coffee and eating their chocolate cake; we heard the sound of the sculptor’s chisel, as he chipped away at the statue of an angel in the doorway of a church down the road.
The motor-bikes with their girl pillion riders occasionally roared by: we walked down the old square where motor coaches unloaded a lot of Slovak girls in short, bunched-out peasant skirts—the peasant dresses are very fine and the girls have a full, placid beauty—young men clicked their cameras getting pictures of arcades and old towers. Old men sat reading papers in the café. Later on, teenagers—a local problem—were bawling at a street corner. One evening I saw about six hundred of these youngsters at a café concert, in their liveliest clothes, drinking wine, eating and listening to popular singers and an orchestra. They were spirited and gay. But the popular songs from the West are terribly out of date. One or two youths went on to the platform and sang songs like Sentimental Johnny and Sonny Boy. They sang in English. As far as they were concerned the popular culture of the West stopped twenty or thirty years ago. They rarely see an American, French or British film, and if they do it is always very old. On the other hand, modern Italian films are shown everywhere, even in very small towns. The best Czech films are the brilliant cartoons. One has the impression of great originality about to burst out, if only artists could be freed from political cliches, for the theatre is a traditional passion among the masses of this country.
To see the working crowd unbuttoned and enjoying itself I decided to go to Bratislava. I got a seat on one of those crowded little planes that fly seven times a day, except Sundays, from Prague. One is flying out of Bohemia, south-eastwards to the Danube at the point where Austria and Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia meet. It is a flight over high and forested country towards the plain of the Danube. There the air is soft and warm, for Czecho-Slovakia is a country with a number of very different pockets of climate. Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia. Historically it has always been an important military and trading town from the time of the Romans. It has known occupation by Slavs, Tartars, Turks, Magyars and Germans—Hungary still regards it as Hungarian—it was badly smashed up in the last war. The Russians liberated it and rebuilt the massive railway bridge across the wide, fast-flowing river and now it is a modern industrial town. Its factories and new housing estates spread out along the plain.
This region is the most attractive part of the whole country to the traveller. Its towns have all the beauty that grows out of an old aristocratic culture. Slovakia is rural, backward in education, very Catholic, difficult politically—the peasants dislike the collective or cooperative farm. I used to see an old peasant woman standing in a doorway in Prague selling Slovak cheese; a sly official in the Foreign Ministry said she was “probably the only unsocialised trader left in the city”. In Slovakia the Party has often been in trouble in its attempt to introduce industries, kill illiteracy and raise the standard of living. The Slovak has nothing Germanic in him. He is a wine drinker, excitable and independent.
The town was packed out, mainly with sun-reddened holiday-making workers, when I was there. Motor coaches packed into the main square, bringing thousands from East Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria. There were parties filing a hundred at a time into the huge cafés and restaurants and hotels, filling up with beer and wine, dancing in the hotels and celebrating the eastern international bicycle races. One of the sights of travel in these parts is the handsome blue Bulgarian six-wheeler trucks and the good-looking young men and women who drive in them. Only the Polish travellers looked poor. The river bank opposite the city was littered with globular sunbathers. There was dancing. There was a small fair. Hundreds of motor-bicycles and quite a few cars were parked under the trees and up and down the Danube went the smart white pleasure steamers. There was nothing of Coney Island or Blackpool in Bratislava. Its amusements were homely. A few people went to see the pictures in the historical exhibition of Czech and Polish painting. (It contained some excellent eighteenth-century pictures from Poland.) Most of the crowd wandered into the vegetable and fruit market, or listened to the military tunes played by a workers’ band in the square. A travelling exhibition coach from East Germany did a heavy trade in foreign stamps—stamp-collecting is a craze in all these countries; most Post Offices have a Philatelic department—and it was hard to get a seat among the crowd in the café of the best hotel, and harder still to get a glass of beer in the cheap open-air cafés under the chestnut trees.
There is a gypsyish, Hungarian side to life in Bratislava, and some streets of lazy Hungarian poverty. There are some quarters where swarthy mothers chase half-naked children down the street. The crowd walked slowly up and down along the promenade by the Danube, the girls sat decorously on the benches; youths sat on the walls, whistling and shouting to attract the girls. The great event was the start and the finish of the international bicycle race. A good number of rural holiday-makers had turned up in their peasant dress. One saw men in short black-and-white embroidered jackets, white shirts and white linen trousers, or in long soft Russian boots, and wearing broad red and green sashes—these last 3 Bulgarians. One or two of the heroic cyclists lay on the ground and had an exhibitionist massage; a procession of schoolgirls turned up with bouquets of flowers for the starters who, when the race began, threw them to the crowd. No cheers, no shouts, but general hand-clapping.
Meals at Bratislava were good, due to Hungarian influence and the Moravian wine, but I had a curious experience in the packed hotel one lunchtime. I shared a table with an explosive businessman from Beirut who had spent several months in Czecho-Slovakia and who had with him a young Czech engineer. We were at once caught by persecution mania. Mr. Beirut was a loud-voiced man who shouted to his friend:
“Every hotel has its spies. I bet they’ll break up this party: one Czech talking to two foreigners! Especially with me. I never mince matters. I tell everyone what I think.”
He certainly did, as loudly as possible. Almost at once, a waiter tapped the Czech on the shoulder and said he was wanted on the telephone.
“What did I tell you!” exclaimed Mr. Beirut. “The telephone trick. They’ve made enquiries and are warning him already.”
The young man came back.
“Well,” said Mr. Beirut, “who was the call from?”
“From my home,” said the young man.
“You are sure it wasn’t from your ‘other home’,” suggested Mr. Beirut. “Who spoke to you? Your father?”
“My grandfather,” said the young man simply.
“But he is in bed ill, you told me.”
“He is better,” said the young man with a smile.
Czechs are very deep. I think there was nothing in it and that Mr. Beirut was just showing off. We had a long and pleasant lunch. We argued about everything. We even argued about whether Tolstoy’s Resurrection, his last novel, was an “optimistic” or a “pessimistic” work: an important point, because Czech writers are directed to have an optimistic outlook. More important: when I said that, to judge by the crowd, Bratislava was a totally working-class city, the young Czech shook his head. Only five per cent of the large middle class were visible, he said. The rest had taken protective colouring and had pretended to merge—which must be true when one considers that tens of thousands of professional men, shopkeepers and the so-called “village rich” were deprived of their living at the time of the revolut
ion.
The young man had the sly, quiet, ironical manner of many Czechs. He came, he said, from a “suspect social background”, for his father had been a lawyer. The father had been thrown out of his job in the revolution, and had become a waiter, an hotel porter and so on, and had at last gone in for the making of musical instruments. “In fact, it is an old hobby of his and he is very happy in it and he makes a little money.”
“But your prospects aren’t very good,” shouted Mr. Beirut.
“Well, no,” said the young Czech. “I am very poorly paid and I shan’t get promotion for a long time. One has to be patient. I know I would be far better off in West Germany or anywhere at all outside Eastern Europe.”
He had been lucky to be allowed to go to the university. There are tens of thousands of Czechs who have been victimised as far as higher education is concerned by political policy. When I was back in Prague I asked my Party friend about this. He did not deny the young engineer’s story but said, as he always did, that it was less likely to happen since 1956 and that the regimé was liberalising itself. But there was another side to it (he said). Not only in Czecho-Slovakia but in Central Europe generally, the ambition of middle-class families was to get their sons into the liberal professions and the bureaucracy which had always been overcrowded. It was a middle-class vice. Nowadays, the government diverted students from overcrowded faculties and the overcrowded ones were those in which the ex-bourgeois were often most numerous. He agreed that all things being equal, the preference and freedom of choice went to the labourers’ and factory workers’ sons.
In a large number of Bohemian and Slovak towns the traveller finds lovely examples of Baroque and Gothic architecture, delicate wall paintings and carving and the country has always been famous for its medicinal spas. Such attractive things are carefully preserved. The roads are not disfigured by commercial signs and hoardings; advertising can be said not to exist. In this respect, Eastern Europe is soothing. One is never pestered by touts and cheats and those who prey upon the tourist. Bills are honest and when foreigners give tips the Czechs accept them with a pleasant sense of nostalgia for old sins, for Czechs themselves rarely tip.
Leaning on the wall of the Charles Bridge in Prague I watched the broad river, the Vltava, flowing over the weirs northward slowly toward the vineyards of Melnik. There the Elbe joins it and cuts through the narrow break into the hills to Dresden across the frontier. Except for the Vltava valley and the valleys that open south-east from Brno or Gottwaldov, the shoemaking town, in Moravia down to the plain of the Danube, Czechoslovakia is a high plateau broken into hummocks, hills, cliffs, ravines and mountains. To get out of Prague west or south the train has to climb. It is a country of trees, of dark firs, speckled birches, the oak, the ash and the chestnut and is one of the most heavily forested countries in Europe. Even in the outskirts of Prague, in the wide rolling stretches of grain-bearing land, where the rivers are slow and the lakes are still, the horizon always closes in little woods or long, deep parades of forest.
I took the train out to Kutna Hora, a town of 14,000 inhabitants, which lies an hour and a half to the east. There was an amusing racing-car mechanic in my compartment, one of those droll, laughing-and-winking, energetic young Czechs who often seem to have a touch of the Irish countryman about them. He put on a naive manner as he joked about not being allowed to go to the big Western motor races, such as Le Mans or Monte Carlo. The Czechs have had a long training under the Austrian empire in the art of playing the simpleton in order to hide their thoughts. Someone else came into the compartment and the mechanic stopped talking at once, but every now and then he gave me a wink and a childlike grin. No one spoke for the rest of the journey. He got out at some wayside place, a village of bungalows where the gardens were hot with flowers. I saw him walking off with the dreamy, smiling look of misleading naïveté on his eager face.
The country on the way to Kutna Hora was mild and green, changing from cornland to hills, from hills to long watery stretches of birch and fir; but it is a landscape of surprises. The spotless station at Kutna Hora stands near a large factory where the vale is wide, but the dusty road up from the station climbs and climbs until you find yourself in the classical small Bohemian town, on the edge of a dramatic rocky ravine, where the sunny woods hang down richly over a river. From the top you see a countryside chopped into hills. It is the region of the silver mines which enriched the kings of Bohemia even before the seventeenth century. In the fine Gothic cathedral church in what must have been the citadel there is a strange statue, painted in the Baroque style, of a silver miner with imploring eyes, holding his lamp. He makes a startling emotional appearance among the saints and angels.
I arrived late in the afternoon when the sun was slanting through the trees and few people were about. They were working in the fields or the factory. The hotel was one of those dingy old places where provincial salesmen would stay in the old days, with the wide stone passageway and the enormous whitewashed and vaulted kitchen of stagecoach times. I have seen many kitchens like this in Czecho-Slovakia. They belong, by nature, to the stone buildings and the arcaded streets of older Bohemia and give the country its character. The hotel was simple, bare and clean, the rooms immensely high. You climb long flights of stone stairs. The great iron, wood-burning stove in the bedroom reminds the traveller that the winters of Czecho-Slovakia are severe. I passed a goodish night there on a mattress filled, I guessed, with wood shavings or lump straw. I thought I was sleeping on mice.
A very old woman seemed to run the hotel and I imagined it was deserted. I was wrong. By six o’clock two large dining-rooms were full of local people and remained so until nearly midnight. The following day fifty young children from a nursery school came in for lunch with their teachers. Since the State obliges the married women to work outside the home, men, women and children eat out where and when they can. Every day you notice more and more instances of group life. The restaurant was unlike the Prague restaurant, in one respect: the waiters rushed about in the old capitalist manner. Pint after pint of beer, trayloads of it, appeared at once on the tables, followed by those large plates of veal or kidney soup which are regarded as the absolute necessities of life.
There were only a few shops in Kutna Hora: a draper’s, a yarn shop, a newspaper shop, a place for pots and pans, a pharmacy—I don’t know by what freak of circumstances it had a bottle of Chanel 5 in its window. It must have been there before the Communists took over and trade with the West dwindled, and it was the only bottle of French perfume I saw in weeks of travel from Warsaw to the Black Sea. One tiny shop had a window filled with photographs of dogs and I suddenly realized I had seen hardly any dogs in the country. It turned out that the Czechs rarely keep them, and certainly never keep a mongrel. If they have a dog it must be of the finest breed, and this little shop window was really a canine beauty show.
The country buses pulled in and a couple of international buses brought in parties of visiting workers from Poland and Hungary, and a load of children who had come to see the famous cathedral. In the market square a single stall was set out; it sold yellow and green mushrooms of many varieties. Among the mushroom, sauerkraut, cucumber and the yellow pepper the Czech cook passes his life and, meat being short this summer, people filled up on potatoes.
A few months before I had been in a French town of the same kind, and Kutna Hora was lifeless by comparison; it was placid. Up in the cathedral gardens mothers sat sewing beside their perambulators; old men sat under the limes; a college girl posed romantically on a rock under a tree writing in her exercise book. A group of sixty or seventy lively teenagers were taken round the church, which is full of beautiful things. The head boy translated the guide’s comments into German for me. They were a gay lot of young people dressed like their kind anywhere in the West, and all Catholics—the boy said—for Czechoslovakia is a predominantly Catholic country. While I was looking over the garden wall of the fine, once-Jesuit seminary close to the cathedral, I spotted a
tavern with a garden down in the ravine. It was hot. I was thirsty. I climbed down and drank a couple of the pleasantest glasses of beer of my life under a chestnut tree, listening to the postman getting drunk with some rural cronies. (The Czechs are not as serious and stolid as they often sound.) At the height of a war story he was telling, and which I couldn’t quite understand, except that it was about the Nazis, he fell off his bench into the yard and the ducks and chickens rushed off in a cloud of dust. It was a slow, warm, lazy hour and the stream jingled under the woods.
By the evening the little town went dead again. There was a historical film and an Italian film on at the cinema; one or two motor-bicycles roared through; at ten a lorry set down a couple of very fat, trousered women from the factory. The only other people about were a few waiting for the last bus, and they were being entertained by the town drunk, a house painter, who having daubed himself with paint, reeled about scaring the girls and making speeches about Communism and Capitalism. His antics caused embarrassed sniggers.
There are places of far greater interest than Kutna Hora in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. Almost due south of the town in the mountains close to the Austrian border there is, for example, the exquisite town of Tele, where the deeply arcaded streets and the beautiful Baroque façades take the breath of the connoisseur. In palaces, mansions, castles, in mural paintings and carvings, the country is rich, indeed one of the richest in Europe. In Slovakia, the wilder landscape and the old peasant life give a romantic accent to the scene. The conflict between the aristocratic culture of “foreign” Austria and the native Czech has been, in the course of history, fructifying, and the state carefully preserves all beautiful things.
Foreign Faces Page 3
