The voice on the other end of the line speaks loudly, excitedly. “Allo, allo.”
I do the same. “Allo, allo. Tunnel. In tunnel. Car no go, Triple A,” I say.
“Allo, allo. Tunnel? No go?” she repeats, her puzzled tone suggesting this is not understandable input.
“Help me, Aidez-moi,” I say over and over, drawing upon all the languages I know, Spanish unfortunately not among them.
The operator and I continue to get acquainted while Rudy runs along the concrete edge, gesturing wildly, trying to slow cars. Suddenly we see across the lanes a police car pulling up behind our Ford, lights flashing and bringing traffic to a halt. Red lights flash outside the tunnel now too, apparently signaling oncoming cars not to enter. This must be some sort of automatic system triggered by lifting the phone; gratefully, my linguistic skills do not determine our fate. A tow truck appears, and the police gesture us to cross in front of the stopped rows of traffic and climb into its cab. Our crippled car grasps a tow bar and off we go.
The light is at the end of the tunnel, but it is slightly dimmed. From what we can understand from the mechanic who arrives, the Ford’s needed part is not available within one hundred kilometers. Our tow driver refuses to abandon us, so we three sit on a curb outside the repair shop, waiting hours in the heat while the part makes its way by air-conditioned taxi. It is a convenient system: the cab arrives, the tow driver lifts the precious part from its backseat into the repair shop, then tow driver, taxi driver, Rudy, and I head to the nearest bar.
There is little to talk about while time and car repair go by. We share no language other than gestures and an interest in Rudy’s knockoff Rolex watch ($21 from a lower Manhattan street merchant).
“I have to get this across, that it is imitation, Mare,” Rudy whispers. “I can’t let them think I can afford a real one.”
“I’m buying you a kid’s Timex in the morning.”
We needn’t have worried. The costliest part of our expenses is our bar bill.
IT is time for a slowed down, restful beach vacation. No traffic or tunnels for us for awhile. We head south to Portugal’s slower pace and dramatic Algarve beaches. Passing by more recently developed resort towns, we select a small seaside village where a few inns sit side by side with colorful open-air cafés, and just behind rows of small, brightly painted fishing boats pulled up onto the sand. From our deck, Rudy can watch the boats come in and the tuna fishermen untangle their nets over the afternoon’s first beer. Actually, he can’t just watch. Packing up his tattered towel, old hat, and worn sandals, Rudy moves down to the beach. When I join him an hour or so later, he is enjoying his second beer.
“Hon, I found the most charming, authéntico little bar. Really nice people.”
He points up the hill to a bungalow where a dozen or more fishermen stand on a concrete porch enjoying their beverages. “I can get you a drink and put it on my tab. I didn’t have a wallet but they said that was okay.”
I have coins and small bills in my money belt and walk with him to pay his tab and start one of my own. Several men standing inside seem to know Rudy—they pat him on the back and gesture for him to open the large, old refrigerator, saying something like “Help American.” I look around for a cash register, a waitress, an owner—anything that would say this is a bar. Nothing does. Everything says it is a home: two children watching TV in a living area, a woman making soup on the stove, the fishermen enjoying a friend’s hospitality.
Rudy and I insist on paying for our drinks, but our insistence is ignored as they press two more bottles in our hands. “Help American,” they say.
The week goes by. Rudy has figured out a way to keep going to his favorite bar, bringing a six-pack each time to restock the refrigerator.
One of his Rules is in full force here. Blinds are drawn back at bedtime so the sun wakes him early for a daily beach walk. As he leaves each morning, he closes the curtains and I continue to sleep. I am impressed with his new fitness routine, but I don’t want to be like him. I wake slowly this morning and, just as I step out onto our balcony, I hear a familiar screech.
“Ahhhh . . . Oouw . . . Dammit . . .”
The last time I heard that cry was when Rudy’s favorite college team, the Oregon Ducks, lost a football championship in the final three minutes of their game. This is how agony sounds.
I dress rapidly and follow the scream that is fading gradually to a pitiful yelp. Five men stand in a circle over a body sitting on the sand. One of the men knows me, as we met yesterday. I trust he has explained to the others that I am the wife of the guy who mistook his beachfront bungalow for a public bar. The man looks at me sympathetically now.
Rudy, seated in the center of the circle, holds a big toe that seems to be turning purple. He sees me and points indignantly at the culprit, a large, jagged rock formation sticking far out of the sand. The men exchange looks among themselves. Then they point as one to a volleyball game taking place beside the rock, and wait with their heads down while I comprehend the situation. The volleyball players are tall, bronzed, shapely women. Tall, bronzed, topless shapely women. Have you ever wanted to feign sympathy but found it impossible?
We frequently meet new teachers who ask to sit with us at meals. They are expected to teach English in the schools but know little of the practical language. Tourists are their training ground, idioms and slang phrases their delight.
Pointing to Rudy’s bandaged foot, one young teacher asks sympathetically, “What is it you call that in America? Accident, accidental?”
I clarify. “In America, we call it Fitting Punishment. We call it Justice.”
Even with Rudy on crutches for a broken toe and sprained foot, Portugal and the Portuguese enchant us. Each night after a grilled fish dinner on the beach, we take a taxi to a nightclub with fado singers to hear haunting, mournful songs about poverty, death, the unforgiving, murderous sea, and the glory that was once Lisboa. After a few nights, we know enough refrains to be able to hum in the chorus of patrons. Rudy with his handicap finds some comfort in communal sadness. I cry with the audience sometimes. There is something universal, something cleansing in the sad songs.
CHAPTER NINE
THIS IS MY FAULT. FOR ONCE I AM NOT ABLE TO BLAME Rudy for plunging us into drama and risk. Instead, it was I who drew the line on the map from the rent-a-car office in Frankfurt, Germany, straight to Prague, Czechoslovakia. I am looking for my roots.
The grandfather I had never met was born and raised in the region. I visualize the country populated by my cousins, equally unknown, and I suspect that if my inner bohemian is ever to emerge it will be as I stand in the middle of Charles Bridge. Grandfather left the bridge one day eighty years earlier and immigrated to America. My own father could tell me little about the man. The last time he had seen him was when, at age ten, he said good-bye to the near-stranger in the bowler hat and shiny black suit who boarded a train headed for Deadwood, South Dakota, and to all accounts, a career in gambling and selling worthless gold-mining stocks. I have higher expectations of a bohemian life (think strumming guitar and writing poetry) and cannot stop humming on my way to the land of my kinsmen.
My father had told me of Czechoslovakia’s noble history— national monuments rivaling those in London and Paris, contributions to the worlds of education, opera, and literature. But as Rudy and I approach the border, my humming slows to a stop. The stark gates and barren fields do not evoke memories of Dvořák or Renaissance glory. Instead, we face evidence of the Soviet invasion fifteen years earlier: the Soviet hammer and sickle embroidered on the sole flag and upon the jackets of the machine-gun-armed guards. We would learn more in Prague, but for now we judge that the Soviets are successfully squelching Czech resistance and liberalization.
We take our place in line before a twenty-foot-high gate, maneuvering our tiny, red, dusty Ford Fiesta behind a military convoy, eleven new and shiny tanks that each rise a full story above us. After a cursory look at our car, a guard gestures us to drive
ahead.
“That was easy,” I say prematurely, stopping my sentence short when I realize we are not being sent through the border crossing; we are being directed onto a side lane where a half dozen armed young Soviet guards begin to inspect our car, our visas, and our state-arranged hotel reservations. Of particular interest is an envelope they find in the bottom of the glove compartment showing the return address “Frankfurt American High School/APO NY.” We have visited Elisabeth and Robert, friends who teach for the U.S. Department of Defense. We are suspects, and the small map of Prague I have torn from a tourist book is further clear evidence of our ill intent. The inspectors are perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old and have the eyes of heavy drinkers. Their two-hour ceremony of furrowed brows, dismayed looks, and shaking heads continues until at last The General arrives to confer, and in a gesture that I swear is akin to a papal blessing, waves us through the gates.
But being cleared for entrance does not mean the end of stress. The Fiesta has been showing low levels of petrol since the last town, where the station pumps had run dry. We had looked forward to reaching this border area, confident we would find a supply of petrol in the government-run stations and still reach our hotel in Prague by nightfall.
Victory! Once clear of the border gate, we can see a station with attendants busily filling the tanks of freight trucks. We pull the Fiesta into line and Rudy grabs his wallet with its collection of currencies and traveler’s checks to be shared generously with the station man.
The clerk knows just enough German to clarify. “Russian money good. Czech money good.”
Rudy knows the same amount of German. “Have Deutsche Marks, German money, good money. And dollars. Good money U.S. You know U.S.?”
That is the wrong question. They know too much about the U.S.
Rudy also knows the international language of bribery. He waves bills before the clerk, but there is no compromising the man’s communist ideals.
He insists, “German no good. Dollar no good.”
“Have traveler’s checks.”
“Checks okay. Go bank to cash.”
Rudy looks about and asks, “Where is bank?”
“No. No bank here.”
“Where IS bank? Have no petrol.”
“Next town. Far.”
Rudy in a crisis is not above self-humiliation. He gestures to his eyes, pantomiming the sadness and tears that would arise from being stranded the rest of his life at the Czech border. Then he points to me and I realize he is saying it is my tears that will flow. In truth, it does not take much for my eyes to fill at that very moment, and two or three tears begin to descend my cheeks. This is not acting.
I pull from my pocket a small map I had secreted from the guards and locate the nearest town some fifty kilometers away, unfortunately in the opposite direction from Prague. We get back into the car, see the gas needle lying flat on the dashboard, and take time for the briefest of spats.
Rudy is ready for a prison break. “We drive to that little town as fast as we can, get money, get petrol, and make Prague tonight.”
I have been taught this as a teen with a first car. “Driving fast uses up your petrol fast. We go slowly, spend the night there, and head early tomorrow for Prague.”
On our fifty-kilometer trek, I do what I do. I count my deep breaths: “In through the nose, 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . Relax . . . out slowly through the mouth . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . Relax.”
Somehow, the tiny town not only has a bank, but a petrol station, an inn, and the only Chinese restaurant we are to see all summer. We toast our good fortune with what seems like very strong white wine, forgetting for the moment that we are now officially missing—missing from our state-arranged hotel in Prague, that is.
The next morning the road heading east to Prague looks like any other quiet, rural highway, with lush green crops on either side.
“This looks like an ordinary, normal road . . . not any guard stations in sight,” I say. “After yesterday, I didn’t know what to expect.”
“Well, Prague must just be different than that border area. More sophisticated.”
We slow to a stop at an intersection at the outside edge of the city. Coming literally from nowhere, two armed soldiers step directly in front of us, rifles pointed to our car. There is only one thing worse than two armed soldiers pointing rifles at you, and that is two drunken armed soldiers pointing rifles at you. Drunken soldiers do not hold their weapons steady. They are young and know no English and little German, but we understand it is paperwork they want, so from the cavern of my purse I produce our Czech government visas, passports, and prepaid hotel vouchers from the state travel agency. After looking briefly at the documents, and being openly amused at our passport photos, they wave us forward.
IRONICALLY, our stark, aged hotel is located on Wenceslas Square, directly in the middle of what six years later was to become the hub of the Velvet Revolution, the site of countless demonstrations that marked the transition from years of Soviet control to Czech independence. But on this day, the day of our arrival, there is no sign of ferment and no gatherings. As a seasoned shopper, the first thing I notice is that windows in nearby storefronts are nearly empty. The doorman, clad in a shabby navy topcoat and black pants, opens our car doors and extends his hand for our keys. Rudy and I exchange a look that says, “This might be the last time we see this little car. Take everything out.” As we move through an empty lobby to the registration area, the clerk behind the desk begins striking the bell on the counter, then picks up the phone and quietly communicates. Time moves on, but his eyes never rise to see us until at last a taller man appears, dressed in a newer suit and with a name badge that seems to say Manager. He speaks some German and is direct. “You late. Give Veesas, passport.”
The documents disappear into his inside jacket pocket. Like the rental car, we hope to see them again someday.
“And our room key?” Rudy asks.
A bellhop is summoned and given a room key; we are not.
The manager explains, “Key safe with hotel.”
Our room is tiny but equipped with the essential bed and bathroom. Rudy tests out the latter and reports to me.
“Hey, honey, this toilet has a special feature. It overflows with every flush.”
The essentials of the room do not include a phone. When we find the manager downstairs he explains that no, we cannot change rooms, that our room is government-selected. This does not make us happy, and probably to get the disgruntled Americans out of his lobby, he directs us two doors down to the state tourist bureau. We enter a large office space, with a row of clerks seated behind windows, somewhat like our Social Security offices back home. But this office has a level of customer service beyond any Social Security office: before we can identify ourselves, a voice booms out of the quiet.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jensen. Welcome.”
I whisper to Rudy, “Are we the only Americans in this city?”
The tourist office welcome unfortunately does not include a room with a functioning toilet, since ours is a special guest room. Indeed, it would be a long week, we would make the hotel handyman our best friend, and to Rudy’s credit he would last four days before he asks me, “Are you sure you’re related to these people?”
Walking into the hotel dining room that first evening, we note that the dining area is in some contrast to our dingy hotel room. It is old European, with pleasantly faded murals on the walls, white tablecloths, unlit candles, and floral-patterned china. We are eating early and so are not alarmed that there is only one other couple in the dining room. We should have been.
The menu is large and heavy, leather bound and written in Czechoslovakian but with tiny photos that illustrate some offerings. Rudy ventures to do the ordering in his bilingual fashion, first in English, then attempting German for good measure.
“We will each have a small salad and a beefsteak.”
“So sorry. No beef.”
“Roast chicken.”
“So
sorry. No chicken.”
“Pork?”
“So sorry.”
Rudy decides to play the ordering game differently. “Tell us what you have. Tell us what is in the kitchen.”
The waiter grows quiet as he apparently searches for a memory of food in the kitchen.
Time for another strategy. We point to the other couple across the room, asking what they are eating. Yes, we could love spaghetti with some sort of red on top, with its accompanying salad best described as slice of tomato over slice of lettuce.
Cleaning our plates, we look up to see the waiter bringing a platter of large fruit kolaches, the traditional Czech pastry my grandmother used to make. Maybe I do belong here after all. I vow that this week I will go to a phone booth, look up my very Czech maiden name, and start calling until I find family.
Surely you know to be careful what you wish for. Rudy does not and he continues to wish for beef and that is a mistake. Our second evening in the dining room, the waiter beams as he announces he has one beefsteak for a lucky guest. That night Rudy is as ill as one can be when one wishes for the last beefsteak in a Czechoslovakian food shortage. The hotel doctor brings potions and prescribes three days’ bed rest with tea and rice. While Rudy heals, I venture out into Prague.
THE fourth of July. I am walking the streets of Prague, seeing what I am seeing, yet in some overlay of images, picturing my California neighbors in their red, white, and blue t-shirts, opening packages of hot dogs, lighting barbecues, and talking of fireworks and music from the Capitol Mall. I don’t know that last year or any other year I spent time on July Fourth thinking of freedom, but this year I can think of little else.
Banners with the Soviet red hammer and sickle advertise a peace conference in Prague later this summer. Perhaps in preparation, prominent shop windows educate residents about American life, with photos of U.S. air bases, missiles, the Viet Nam war, the Kent State deaths, and the Watts riots. The twenty-year-old photographs are neatly labeled in Czech and in English: “News of America.” In the background, tall apartment houses rise gray and dingy, with laundry hanging from windows and balconies. A few black-market money changers appear from alleyways. The occasional dark-windowed limousine drives by, reminding me there is aristocracy even in socialism.
Rudy's Rules for Travel Page 5
