Unbreakable
Page 8
But Ra – unlike the Brandises – could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as short of worldly possessions. Notwithstanding land reform, his estates, much of which were devoted to forestry, remained vast beyond any normal imagining. His father, Zdenko, continued to inhabit Karlova Koruna in Chlumec. Ra’s main home was the grand family hunting lodge in Obora, eight miles to the west. But it was not the only property to which he had access. In 1921, he had married Eleonora (‘Lori’), widow of the fifth Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, and the couple had spent much of their time since either at Lori’s palace in Prague (the Clam-Gallas) or at Orlik, the Schwarzenbergs’ magnificent cream-coloured cliff-top castle overlooking the Vltava between Pĭíbram and Tábor. Strictly speaking, Orlík belonged to Ra’s stepson, the sixth Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, who had inherited it at the age of three, but that didn’t prevent Ra and Eleonora from enjoying extended periods there. Such palace-hopping was not unusual for the high nobility. It had little in common with the lifestyle of the cash-strapped Brandises, whose only home was shabby and full of pets.
But Orlík was barely thirty miles from Řitka, and in 1926 Ra paid his first visit to the Brandis home. This led to an invitation for Leopold to pay a return visit – and to bring Lata with him. Despite the gulf in wealth and status, Ra and Lata had much in common. Both had strong moral principles; each had lost a brother in the war. They also shared a lighter side. They thrived outdoors and loved to express their athleticism and energy in exuberant games. Most of all, they both loved horses.
Ra owned a string of horses for racing, hunting and breeding. He kept most of them in or around Obora and Chlumec, but there were usually quite a few at Orlík as well; including, sometimes, racehorses that he was having trained for steeplechases in Pardubice. For that first visit, Ra took Lata and her father for an ‘extensive, brisk’ ride through the countryside, on a route punctuated with significant obstacles – which I take to mean the kind of hedges, fences and gates that a Pardubice hunt might have encountered. Lata understood the basics of jumping but had never tried anything on this scale before. At the first obstacle, her horse refused. When it refused again at the second attempt, Ra suggested that, instead, he should take the horse over the obstacle. Are you worried about the horse?’ asked Lata. ‘No,’ said Ra – whereupon Lata insisted on a third attempt and cleared the jump successfully. Thereafter, there were no more problems: Lata had mastered jumping. The ride continued ‘happily’ and, she recalled, ‘I jumped everything that came in our way.’
Lata was invited back. She was offered other rides. One of them, in November 1926, was Ra’s favourite horse: Nedbal. A fast, well-bred stallion – his sire, Magyarád, won the Velká Pardubická twice – Nedbal had a notoriously difficult temperament. Ra asked Lata to try her hand with him, and although she soon realised that he was, as she put it, ‘a very wilful gentleman’, somehow she persuaded him to become her willing partner and friend. Ra watched in awe – and the seed of an idea was planted in his head.
Soon Lata was visiting Orlík regularly. She and Lori became warm friends, and in due course Lata became a much-loved aunt-like figure to Lori’s children: Karel and František Schwarzenberg, the teenage sons from her first marriage; and, later, Norbert, Génilde and Radslav Kinský (who were born in 1924, 1925 and 1928 respectively).
The journey on horseback to Orlík took much longer than the bike ride to Velká Chuchle, but Lata was happy – when the opportunity arose – to spend most of a morning getting there and to start the long ride back to Řitka before the afternoon was over. She was not averse to making the journey by moonlight, either, on warm nights. Each trip took her several hours, on paths and dirt roads through undulating woodland. It seems reasonable to assume that these were happy times for Lata; but the distances tell us something about her stamina, and about her enthusiasm for developing her jumping skills.
They also tell us something about another attraction. Ra’s horses were not ordinary horses: they were Kinský horses.
The Kinskýs had been breeding horses for centuries. Most were ultimately descended from Old Spanish and Old Italian breeds; from the nineteenth century onwards, however, the family had also imported thoroughbreds purchased in England. They bred from those mainly at the Kněžičky stud and, from about 1836, at Ostrov (both near Chlumec). The resulting horses were admired all over Europe, for their stamina, for their amenable character and, not least, for their striking good looks. Some – roughly two in five – were distinctively coloured, thanks to a gene known as the ‘cream dilution’ gene. Racing folk call the shade ‘buckskin’, but ‘golden’ gives a better sense of its beauty. (In sunlight, according to the modern Czech breeder Petr Půlpán, the best Kinský horses should and do ‘shine like molten gold’.) For those who rode for leisure, it was hard to think of a more stylish accessory. When the Countess Kristina Kinský-Liechtenstein arrived at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with four such horses, it was the talk of high society.
But Oktavian Kinský – Uncle Taffy – was interested in performance as well as looks. In 1838, with that in mind, he bred one of his mares with an English thoroughbred, and tried to register its progeny in the Vienna Jockey Club’s studbook. The attempt was rebuffed: the Club objected to the foal’s particularly golden buckskin colouring. Oktavian was furious: he was not in the habit of being rebuffed. Rather than admit defeat, he decided that from now on the Kinský horse would constitute its own distinct breed.
In conventional racing language, Kinský horses are ‘warm-bloods’: part thoroughbred rather than the pure, untainted item. In practical terms, their pedigrees are monitored, managed and recorded in the Kinský stud- book as meticulously as those of any ‘hot-blood’ thoroughbreds (although much of the breed was wiped out by world war and Communism). Among connoisseurs of rare equine breeds, they are prized for their distinctive elegance and occasionally presented as exquisite gifts: the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was given one as a hundredth birthday present. Others love the horses for their sheer niceness. Each one is different, but Kinský horses as a breed seem to have something uniquely lovable about them. They are soft to the touch, pleasing to the eye, mostly gentle by temperament, and as curious as puppies about humans and their intentions. I cannot believe that Lata was indifferent to such pleasures.
But the breed also has another idiosyncrasy: its pedigrees are matrilineal. In the Kinský studbook, the primary bloodline passes down through the female line, not the male; and the conventions for naming the horses reflect this. It is said that Oktavian insisted on this relatively unusual quirk, in the hope that it would annoy the Jockey Club. It probably did. It also stands as a neat symbol of the spirit of the Kinskýs and their role in our story. It would be easy to take against them for their vast, unearned privilege. Yet there is something about the family’s most prominent members – their charm, their panache, their quirkiness, their appetite for imprudent adventure – that commands sympathy, if not admiration. They were free spirits, when others of their class were not. And occasionally this led them to align themselves with causes far bigger than their own caste’s narrow concerns.
Over the next few months, Lata continued to visit Ra and Lori when she could: mainly at Orlík but also, at least once, at their hunting lodge at Obora. The latter was a ninety-mile journey by train and bicycle, yet Lata obviously felt that it was worth the effort. Over the next few years, she would become a regular visitor.
The lodge was wonderfully situated, just outside Chlumec, in the middle of almost 1,000 hectares of enclosed forest, with a lake so close to the back of the house that you could almost jump into it from a window. Ra saw Obora as an almost spiritual haven: a place where he could return to the innocence of his childhood. But he invited Lata here in 1927 with two specific purposes in mind: to help him get the very best out of the horses he had in training at Chlumec; and to develop the idea whose seed had been sown when he first saw her ride Nedbal.
Accounts differ as to when and how he first ex
pressed this idea to Lata. Some say that he did so in late 1926; others that it was not until she had tamed another of his difficult horses, a pale mare called Nevěsta. What we do know is that, when he did so (no later than early 1927), and when Lata realised that he was not attempting ‘a bad joke’, she was stunned. She found the proposal in turn astonishing, unbelievable, frightening, upsetting – and indescribably thrilling. The idea was simple. Ra wanted Lata to ride one of his horses for him in a race – but not just any race. The race he had in mind was the Velká Pardubická.
11.
The great game
In Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March there is a haunting passage in which, on the eve of the First World War, army officers stationed on the Habsburg empire’s eastern border drink schnapps with their Russian counterparts, who will soon be their enemies: ‘And none of the Tsar’s officers, and none of the officers of His Apostolic Majesty, knew that over the glass bumpers from which they drank, Death had already crossed his bony invisible hands.’ It was much the same for the aristocrats and officers – Czechoslovak, German, French, Austrian, Italian, Polish – who raced and partied together in Pardubice in the years dividing the First World War from the Second.
Pardubice in the late 1920s was a very different place from the small provincial backwater in which Oktavian Kinský and his friends had unveiled their great test of recklessness more than half a century earlier. What had been a modest settlement of barely 15,000 people was now a bustling town with a population of around 40,000. It had new homes, new infrastructure, new industries. The latter included the A. C. Nobel factory, in nearby Semtín, which in the Cold War era would become notorious – under the name Explosia – for its manufacture of Semtex plastic explosive. But much of the town’s wealth in Lata’s day came from the Velká Pardubická, which had helped make it one of Europe’s grander tourist destinations.
The rich and fashionable had begun to visit Pardubice almost from the beginning, drawn partly by Oktavian’s hunts and hospitality but mainly and more numerously by the risk to life and limb that was his steeplechase’s most distinctive feature. For some, the fascination verged – and still verges – on the ghoulish: as an English observer once put it, ‘they might as well be at a public hanging’. But many visitors were drawn to Pardubice by a subtler magnetism. To those who understood what was involved, Velká Pardubická horses had a nobility that other horses lacked, while their jockeys shone with that special kind of glamour that attaches only to those who laugh in the face of death. This had been true since the race’s earliest days: all that death-defying boldness was magnetic. It often is. Risk takers – mountaineers, adventurers, sky divers, racing drivers – tend to seem more brilliantly alive than the prudent majority. Even when they are not actively flirting with danger, they are fun to be around. Repeated exposure to what the TT motorcycle racer Guy Martin famously called ‘that near–death thing’ makes them intolerant of boredom; and there is a special intimacy between those who share that exposure, even if they are fierce rivals. Their energy, intensity and focus – their ability to inhabit the moment – serve them well in action but also lend an extra edge to their subsequent celebrations. The more chances they take with their lives, the more fervent their joie de vivre becomes.
For some spectators who came to Pardubice in the race’s early decades, the competitors themselves were the attraction: George Williamson – the only jockey to win both the Grand National (in 1899, with Manifesto) and the Velká Pardubická (in 1890 and 1893, with Alphabet and Hadnagy respectively) – appears to have been something of a sex symbol. Others were drawn indirectly, by the broader attractions of a town that soon shone with reflected glamour; or perhaps by the hope that, as hangerson, they would shine by association.
The town grew with its reputation. Its wide avenues acquired bold new buildings, created by fashionable architects such as Josef Gočář and Antonín Balšánek, which would not have looked out of place in Europe’s grandest capitals. Luxury hotels were built to entertain the new breed of thrill-seeking visitor. (Not everyone could stay with Oktavian in Chlumec.) The Hotel Střebský (later the Sochor), which was known for its whisky, billiards and gourmet restaurant, became popular with foreigners, especially the English. (After the First World War, the English stayed away and the French and Germans took their place.) Visitors from the Habsburg – and, later, Czechoslovak – lands were more likely to be found at the Hotel Veselka, next to the cavalry barracks and the military riding school. The Veselka – whose owner was father of the daredevil aviator Jan Kašpar – specialised in banquets, balls and piano concerts; Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák both performed there. By the late 1920s, the Prague Jockey Club had taken to basing itself at the Veselka during the Velká Pardubická meeting, and on race day, according to one account, the hotel was overwhelmed by ‘a constant coming and going of racegoers, trainers, owners, gentleman riders, jockeys, etc’.
Many visitors arrived on special race-day trains – the one from Vienna had been introduced in 1886. A few preferred to drive, perhaps less for the convenience than for the opportunity to show off their new-fangled vehicles. The combined effect was that on the day of the race, according to one German visitor who drove for six hours to get there, the town resembled a ‘disturbed ant–hill’. It made more sense, if you could spare the time and money, to stay longer, especially since the Velká Pardubická meeting now ran for three days. There were plenty of other fine hotels: the Imperial, for example, or the Bouček or the Zlatá štika. There was a casino, too (in the Střebský); and since 1909 there had been a magnificent new theatre, its vast stone façade – neo-Renaissance with an art nouveau twist – the physical embodiment of the town’s confidence and prosperity. For pleasure seekers in touch with the spirit of the age, the buzz was irresistible. Pardubice was not just a place to go, but the place to go.
The reputation fed off itself. The rich attracted the fashionable. The fashionable attracted the rich. Both were a magnet for the not-quite-so-rich and the not-quite-so- fashionable. The process continued until Pardubice was filled to capacity. Nor was it just a question of wealth and style. Politicians and cultural celebrities joined the party. So did diplomats from many nations: it would have been hard to imagine a better place for international networking. There was probably a spy or two among them. And then there were the soldiers.
In the late 1920s, military men – specifically cavalry officers – influenced the ethos of the race to a degree that was out of all proportion to their numbers. Several factors caused this. The English had mostly gone, driven away by war and changing fashions; so, for the time being, had the titled amateur riders. Some of the latter may have felt that, in the new egalitarian climate, it was better to keep their heads down than to take a public role in an event so rooted in aristocratic excess. The result, in any case, was a vacuum. Army officers of various nationalities filled it, both as competitors and as hangers-on.
In October, when Pardubice became a party town, the officers were a small minority. None the less, their talk set the tone. The Velká Pardubická had become an event at which the military celebrated itself, in many languages. Before and after the race, officers from different armies toasted their shared love of boldness and honour. Civilians agreed what a fine thing it was to be a dashing, fearless cavalry officer. The agreement became all the more enthusiastic when All Right II won the 1926 race. Its rider, Captain Rudolf Popler, was as dashing and fearless a cavalry officer as it was possible to imagine.
Most of these officers (including Popler) belonged to the Czechoslovak army; many were attached to Pardubice’s military riding school, which under Colonel Jindřich Ott was in the process of becoming one of Europe’s finest. A substantial minority wore the uniforms of other nations. All subscribed to codes of honour that required them to scorn fear and rejoice in danger. The very obvious perils of the Velká Pardubická seemed to reinforce their sense of military identity. Those who could, rode in it. The rest, like spectators at a boxing match, swel
led with vicarious machismo. If they weren’t tough enough to take part, they could at least talk as if they were.
There was a catch, of course. To anyone who stopped to think about it, it was obvious that, if the war for which these officers’ careers and codes prepared them ever did break out, they would not all be fighting on the same side. They were trained to kill one another, and riding in the Velká Pardubická was part of the training. But no one was mad enough to imagine – yet – that the killing would actually happen: not again; not already. Instead, courage, patriotism and fighting spirit were channelled into the ritual of a reckless, ridiculous, suicidally dangerous horse race; and those who survived it took pride, as they celebrated, in being part of an exclusive band of brave brothers, united in sport if not in language.
As a former cavalry officer himself, Ra was part of this tradition. But he did not accept its narrow exclusivity, and what he proposed with Lata and Nevěsta was a direct challenge to it. As he saw it, the race had other traditions: for example, as a celebration of aristocratic bravado and, in particular, of the free spirit of the Kinskýs. No doubt he explained this to Lata.
She already knew that the great steeplechase was her great-uncle’s brainchild. Ra would have made sure that she also knew about the exploits of her more distant relative, Karel Kinský, rider and owner of the 1883 Grand National winner and owner of the 1904 Velká Pardubická winner. And he would certainly have talked about Count Zdenko Kinský, his own father, who took over the castle in Chlumec after Oktavian’s death in 1896. Famous for his stamina – he once swam down the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava without resting – Zdenko was one of the first aristocrats to ride in the Velká Pardubická himself, rather than entrusting all his horses to the professionals. He had a fiery temper: when one of his horses ran badly in Vienna in 1893, he was reported to have knocked its trainer to the ground and attacked its jockey with a whip. But no one doubted his hardness or resolve. He achieved a second place and a third place in the Velká in the early 1880s, but was arguably more famous for coming fourth in 1901, at the age of fifty-nine. His grey beard and flowing white hair made a deep impression on spectators, especially when he remounted after falling at Taxis.