by Tom Fort
That evening I stood on the wooden footbridge that crossed the Otava in the middle of the camp. A man was fishing a little way below me, but I had had enough. Looking downstream, with the sun setting behind me, I saw a huge cloud approaching above the water. It consisted of millions upon millions of insects – small sedges, maybe, or some kind of evening olive. Its front reached and passed me, but still it extended downstream as far as I could see, from the surface of the water up to the tops of the trees. Where the cloud met the shafts of sunlight, the insects were lit so that they resembled a blizzard of golden snowflakes.
I drove Tomáš back to Litvinov the next day, and retreated from the Brown Coal Basin without much regret. He presented me with a copy of the Czechoslovak–Soviet Friendship Petro-Chemicals Works company brochure in English. When I opened it months later, it still exuded the familiar odours of polyethylene and ethyl-benzene. In the photographs, all the buildings, turbines, silos and sections of pipework were spotlessly, lustrously clean. White-coated technicians were shown leaning over computers in attitudes of fierce and fruitful concentration. Scientists examined the contents of test-tubes. The ice-hockey team raced around the indoor sports arena. (‘It is a sport which offsets the one-sided mental and physical stress caused by work,’ the text stated.) Solemn couples in formal dress clasped each other on the club dance-floor in front of a fresco of white doves.
Tomáš had drawn a circle around a window in one of the blocks to indicate where he worked. I pictured him in his grey overalls, downy stubble framing his round chin, dreaming of the Mže and the Otava and the flash of a hooked fish.
Neither Czechoslovakia nor the Soviet Union lasted long after 1990, while the ‘friendship’ between them had never amounted to much more than a fiction promoted by party hacks in Prague and Moscow. The name of the complex at Litvinov was discarded; it is now Chemopetrol, a division of the Polish company PKN Orlen, which doesn’t have anything like the same ring to it, although it is doubtless an improvement in other ways. The workforce has shrunk from 11,000 to 3,000 but is still large enough to warrant its own tram station. The chimneys still smoke and the towers steam and the batteries of silos rear from the undergrowth of piping. But the power stations no longer discharge half a million tons of sulphur dioxide a year, and the sky over Litvinov is no longer yellow, and the children no longer wear breathing masks to go to school. The pines of the Ore Mountains have stopped dying and green is creeping back across the grey slopes.
The fuel to feed this beast – not the beast it was, but still hungry enough – no longer comes from the hole on Most’s doorstep. The railway that delivered the coal has been abandoned and the buildings beside the tracks have been left to crumble. The wagons stand in frozen lines, wheels rigid with rust, lapped by the encroaching tide of weeds and brambles. The great moonscape of the mine is silent and still. Efforts have been made to disguise it by smoothing down the ridges left by the excavators, sowing grass and planting groves of beeches and oaks. But no cosmetic surgery can conceal the scar tissue of the past, which leads in the centre to a pit, half-filled with grey, dead water, its edges gouged by the tracks of the departed machines.
A spanking new crematorium has been built on reclaimed land near the church. Most itself was much as I remembered: a dismal sprawl of apartment and office blocks deposited along windswept boulevards. There was a new shopping centre, and Tesco had arrived. Most’s entry in Wikipedia speaks of a depressing feel to the town, with ‘a huge share of people’ living in the apartment blocks known as panelaks, and unemployment at the highest level anywhere in the Czech Republic.
I found the block of flats in Litvinov where I had stayed with Tomáš and Jarka. Not surprisingly, they did not live there any more and no one I could find remembered them. I managed to talk my way into the personnel office at the petro-chemicals works, where they looked through the records. There had been many Kroupas, but none who fitted my description of Tomáš. I had more luck with Jarka. She had left some years before but a former colleague dug out a mobile number for her. I rang it several times without getting an answer. In the end I left the ruined landscape behind and went south-west in search of the little stream that had given Tomáš and me and the profoundly irritating expert on Bohemian trout-fishing such joy.
Alas for memory! For sure, many, many things had changed for the better for Bohemia and its people in those 18 years … but not for the Mže. They had slapped down a motorway a few miles south of the river, bringing its valley within a couple of hours’ drive of Prague. The meadows I remembered had been parcelled into plots for cabins, cottages and chalets, with window-boxes, garages and paved parking spaces. Mowers hummed and strimmers snarled in the miniature gardens. I saw an elderly man dead-heading roses. Next door a woman had stacked up her dirty plates and dishes at the water’s edge. Every clearing in the woods seemed to have its picnic benches and tables.
I could not find the track we had taken off the road from Tachov, or the dilapidated wooden bridge, or the meadow bright with flowers. But the river was there. The water, which I remembered as clear with a peaty, amber tinge, was now murky and sluggish. I tramped a long way along a well-worn path extending from Kočov, where Tomáš, Standa and I had stopped, downstream to the next village, Pavlovice. My spirits revived briefly as a result of catching two small grayling in the first pool I fished. Thereafter they sank and kept on sinking. On the bridge back where I had started I met two blokes who pointed at the water and shook their heads. ‘Nicht gut – alles essen.’ No good, all eaten.
Fishing permit for the Mže, 2008
The Otava near Sušice was no better. Unlike the Milava campsite on the Poprad, the Annin campsite where Tomáš, Standa and I had stayed was still in business, but its haphazard distribution of cabins, tents and caravans now struck me as scruffy rather than picturesque. Its main attraction, the river, had been ruined by someone deciding it would be a good idea to drag a dredger along it and dump the spoil in an unsightly levee along the bank. Dank and dreary weather added to my sense of melancholy. Families shrouded in raincoats wandered around under the dripping branches. Dads played soggy games of football with their sons. Radios tinkled from inside tents and caravans. I didn’t see anyone fishing.
I went up through the little village with its church and steeple in search of the bridge and the pool where the trout had obliged. The bridge was gone, washed away by a flood, leaving two jagged ends and chunks of masonry strewn across the riverbed. I stood on the new wooden footbridge that had been strung across the water, looking downstream, trying to work out how my picture fitted. There was a pool, but it was six times bigger than it should have been. There was no beech, no gentle curl of water, but a strong, deep flow the colour of stewed tea. There was no hatch of insects. Not a trout showed itself.
I felt I should go through the motions, so I pulled on my waders and spent half an hour covering the lower half of the pool. I caught nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing. There was none of that sense of latent life that a fisherman draws from a river just by being in it, even when the fish are not feeding. The spirit I had found there before was absent; whether permanently or not, I cannot say.
I finally caught up with Tomáš by phone a few weeks after I got back to England. He and Jarka were living in a village a few miles east of Litvinov. They had both prospered since leaving the petro-chemicals industry. He was working for Ford, testing cars; she had a job in the electricity supply industry. They had built themselves a big house. Tomáš told me at some length about how big their swimming pool was. He still fished occasionally for pike and carp, he said, but had never been back to the Mže and the Otava. He had heard they were no good any more: too many fishermen, too much poaching.
I asked after the expert on Bohemian trout streams. Tomáš said they had lost touch. The last he’d heard, Standa was not well; too much smoking, probably. Tomáš said he came to England once or twice a year, on business. I urged him to give me a call so that we could meet up and have a drink, but I hav
en’t heard from him yet.
Chapter 15
Subtle fish, fool’s gold, fallen angels
ONE OF MY favourite monuments anywhere in the world stands on a roundabout on the western side of the town of Třeboň in central Bohemia. It is a bronze cast of four fish entwined around a central pillar garlanded with four roses. Two slender lights rise above the ensemble, which at night bathe it in a lambent glow.
It may not qualify as high art. I suspect that the critics, if they came this way and happened to notice it at all, would probably laugh at it. Never mind them. As an expression of civic pride and a statement of a town’s sense of identity, it transcends criticism.
The twin emblems – a fish, a flower – would mean nothing to a casual passer-by. But if he or she stopped long enough for a ramble around the delightful old town of Třeboň, and they observed and enquired intelligently, they would find both pleasingly woven together through the long history of the place.
The flower is a red rose and was the badge of the dynasty that ruled this part of the world in the manner of kings throughout the Middle Ages almost until the onset of the religious wars that tore the region apart in the first half of the seventeenth century. Their family name was Rožmberk, and they styled themselves Lords of the Rose.
The fish, whose representation is splendidly lifelike, should be recognised by anyone who knows anything about the subject. They have wide, powerful, twin-bladed tails, flanks mailed with scales like golden guineas or doubloons, round, slightly protuberant eyes, and great, fat-lipped mouths purpose-built for the sucking in of bloodworms, larvae, and all the other good and nourishing things hidden in the mud at the bottom of ponds and lakes. They are carp, as is confirmed by the legend inscribed into the circular plinth on which they perform their aquatic ballet. It reads: TŘEBOŇSKÝ KAPR, which I roughly translate as TŘEBOŇ CARP TOWN.
Fishy welcome to Třeboň
But why carp?
‘The carp,’ Izaak Walton wrote in The Compleat Angler, ‘is the Queen of Rivers: a stately, good, and a very subtle fish.’ Actually, although they are content enough in unhurried flowing water, the carp’s natural domain is still water: reed-fringed lakes and meres, monastic ponds, castle moats and the like; where the water is dark but clear, with trees around to keep off the wind, and trailing willow branches to provide refuge, and beds of lilies with waxy leaves in whose shadow the fish may hang motionless, but for the occasional languid wave of a fin and the opening and closing of gills and mouth.
Carp have long had a reputation among anglers for being exceptionally cautious and hard to catch. Walton recommends fishing for them with a bluish marsh or meadow worm, a paste of bean flour flavoured with honey and the flesh of either cat or rabbit ‘cut small’, or gentles, otherwise known as maggots. Having caught your carp (the hard part), Walton suggests stewing it in sweet marjoram, thyme, parsley, rosemary, savory, onions, mace, orange and lemon rind, pickled oysters, anchovies, claret, butter, eggs and salt – ‘and so serve it up and much good to you’.
It is usually assumed that carp have been around for ever. In fact, our carp originated in the eastern part of the Danube, probably in what is now Slovakia. Scholars argue, as scholars do, about how they first came to western Europe. One version is that the Romans sampled carp flesh on their travels and liked it so well that they arranged for specimens to be transported back to their piscinae. However, the first incontestable references date from much later, the eleventh century, and are to carp being reared in Bavaria, Franconia and Swabia – although that simply means they were definitely being eaten in Germany a thousand years ago, not that they didn’t grace tables in Rome a lot earlier without anyone taking the trouble to record the fact.
Medieval cooks and their patrons embraced the carp eagerly. The first recipe for them appeared in a French cookbook in the late-thirteenth century, by which time carp ponds had been dug in Picardy, Burgundy, and principalities all the way to the Rhine. Carp became popular because they grew fast to a considerable size, were catholic in their eating habits, tolerant of wide variations in temperature (they like it warm but can survive all but the hardest frosts), could be kept alive out of water for lengthy periods if wrapped in damp cloth, and made for good feasting.
England lagged far behind in the emergent technology of fish farming because sea fish and migratory fish – particularly salmon – were more readily available. Where ponds were created, they were more status symbols for the Norman aristocrats than material contributors to a market economy, and were generally used to store favoured species like pike, eels and bream rather than to rear fish. Walton, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, noted that carp ‘nor hath been long in England’, and attributed their introduction to ‘one Mr Mascal, a gentleman that then lived at Plumsted in Sussex, a county that abounds more in this fish than any in the nation’.
The Mascal referred to by Walton is assumed to have been Leonard Mascall, a prolific producer of useful volumes on gardening, growing fruit, managing livestock and kindred subjects, who died in 1589. By then the carp culture of continental Europe had flourished mightily – nowhere more so than in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Outside Prague, power in Bohemia lay not with the king, but with the noble dynasties, of which the two noblest were the Perňstejns and the Rožmberks. Occasional allies, more often rivals, they shared a keen interest in the business of carp and carp ponds.
These, however, were not ponds as we might understand the word. For example, the one Vilem of Perňstejn had excavated below his castle at Hluboká nad Vltavou in the 1490s covered 450 hectares; and the network of waters around his principal strong-hold at Pardubice, east of Prague, was fed with water from the Elbe via a canal 20 miles long.
Whatever the Perňstejns did, the Rožmberks liked to do bigger and better. One of their many domains was centred on Třeboň, and included great expanses of wetland and peatbog which were ideal for fish farming. Under the direction of their celebrated superintendent of fisheries, Josef Štěpánek Netolický, a system of ponds great and small was dug to the north and south of Třeboň, fed from the River Lužnice by an artificial channel almost 30 miles long called the Golden Canal, the Zlatá Stoka, not on account of its colour, which was muddy brown, but because of the steady stream of income it brought into the Rožmberk coffers.
Two generations later a young man of modest background, Jakub Krčín, was appointed regent of the Rožmberk estates. Krčín seems to have been in the grip of an obscure form of piscine megalomania. It inspired in him the ambition to create an empire of carp ponds that would eclipse the 215 or so surrounding the Perňstejn castle at Pardubice. He began with a big hole just beyond the walls of the Rožmberk castle in Třeboň, which was called Svet, meaning World. He extended various of Netolický’s ponds and added to them. All the time he was dreaming of a new masterpiece, the pond of ponds, that would surpass anything his predecessors or the Perňstejn lackeys had managed, and would keep his master’s name resounding through the ages.
To make room for the 500-hectare Rožmberk Pond, villages to the north of Třeboň were razed, tracts of farmland appropriated, and the dispossessed local peasantry reduced to beggary. A vast army of ditchers and diggers spent five years on the project, the most challenging aspect of which was the construction of a dam a mile long and 30 feet high, held in place by a triple avenue of oaks.
Krčín’s master, Vilém Rožmberk, might well have shrugged off the firestorm of protests from his starving tenants, but the cost of his regent’s mad scheme was another matter. Upon completion of the pond Krčín was pensioned off and banished. Three years later, in 1592, Vilém himself died, leaving the exchequer so depleted and the estates so burdened by debt that his successor – his younger brother, Petr Vok – was forced into drastic retrenchment. Castles and estates were auctioned off and the family seat was transferred first from Rožmberk nad Vltavou to Český Krumlov, and then from Krumlov to Třeboň. Within a decade the childless Petr Vok was dead too, and the Lords of the Rose were finished.<
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So much for the waxing and waning of great men. The great sheet of water that bears the Rožmberk name has lasted longer. The Czechs are still very fond of their carp; fried carp with potato salad is eaten in 2 million Czech households each Christmas. Five hundred years after the ponds were dug, they still produce 2,500 tons of carp a year, and the main fish restaurant in Třeboň listed no fewer than 26 ways of preparing them.
Bohemia’s rich piscine heritage is celebrated lovingly in a fine museum not far from the Perňstejn pond system at Hluboká nad Vltavou. It occupies the ground floor of a mansion built in the early-eighteenth century for Prince Adam Franz Schwarzenberg, head of the dynasty that succeeded the Rožmberks as top dogs in southern Bohemia. Most tourists who come to Hluboká do so to goggle at the grotesque pastiche castle built on top of the hill for the pleasure of a later Schwarzenberg. Compared with this ludicrous riot of battlements and crenellations, Prince Adam’s hunting lodge is a modest affair – though quite big enough to accommodate a few score of the cream of central European nobility in proper style.
The Schwarzenbergs were enormously rich and considered themselves enormously important. For such as they, the killing of animals was pretty much an obligatory hobby (one that cost Prince Adam dearly, as he was fatally wounded on one of his own hunts by the Emperor Charles VI). The upper floor of what is now the Hunting and Fishing Museum testifies to their passion for it. In the central hall, beneath crude frescoes of stags in various attitudes of death and suffering, an immense table constructed mainly of antlers stands on a carpet of fox pelts, surrounded by sofas and chairs covered in deer hide, the whole scene watched over by portraits of generations of Schwarzenberg hunters and their like-minded chums. The corridor outside is lined with the heads of lions, buffaloes, kudu, giraffes, cheetahs and other trophies accumulated on safari in Africa in the 1930s by Count Adam Schwarzenberg and – to judge from the photographs – his equally trigger-happy wife Hilda.
