certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
--- Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright, dissident and politician
It was nearly eighteen hours by Eurolines bus to Prague.
Cramped seats, dishevelled sleep, casual slugs from Albert's flask of Oude Ginever, the strong juniper flavoured Dutch liquor from which gin is rumoured to have evolved, fuelled my insomnia along with the excitement of the destination ahead of us, and instead of sleep, quietly humming to myself, covered in a barely comprehensible issue of De Volkskrant purchased at the origin of the journey in Amsterdam, a comically coloured weekend edition of USA Today as well as the International Herald Tribune, whose crossword Albert had completed at the journey's onset in less than a half hour, I stared out the window and lost myself in thought.
In the end, we’d decided on the bus instead of the train because it
didn’t involve having to change and thus didn’t require Albert to
have to lug his awkward bass from station to station. You get on
the bus and you stay on the bus until the bus reaches your destination. It was quite uncomfortable at times but far less mobility was required.
Once we’d decided to leave Utrecht we didn’t stick around for long
goodbyes. It was already nearly November and by Albert’s
calculations, an inner clockwork of seemingly unrelated calendars,
the window of opportunity for making a move was closing. Once
it was November, it’d be nearly December and trying to move from
one country to another, pulling yourself out of the orbit of one city
into another during December wouldn’t be feasible. You’ll want to
be settled far in advance of Christmas, he cautioned. Otherwise we’ll
be living out of bags until next year. Besides, we’re moving to what
is, in essence, a third world country with an underdeveloped
infrastructure. Without linguistic skills, we’ll be forced to rely on the
Expat community at first and who knows what kind of ghost town
they’ll leave behind at Christmas time.
So the day after our Amsterdam debut, we informed our Somalian hosts that we were splitting. It wasn’t much notice but unlike the previous tenant, we gave them time to plan. Three days later we had our tickets and were on the move. It boggled the mind a little, our swift departure, like a retreating army, only we weren’t retreating we were going on the offensive.
In those three short days we binned most of our accumulated junk,
stripping back down to the bare essentials; our instruments and our
memories, a few unread books and a few CDs. I even managed a very
brief, cryptic postcard to Anastasia in the unlikely event she’d have
had second thoughts and arrived unannounced at the door of the
Somalian take away again only to discover we’d already moved on.
Goodbye Utrecht, I’d written to her on the back of a coffee-stained
snapshot of the Dom Tower. Hello, Prague.
I snuck peeks, through the dancing moonlight of a German sky, at
Jiri Weil's Life With A Star, whose reading I'd timed for this trip, this
story of Josef Roubicek, a Jewish bank teller who is waiting to be called up for deportation to Terezin whilst his fellow Jews were increasingly persecuted in a Nazi-dominated Prague…
Neither of us had known much more than a communist Czechoslovakia in the entirety of our collective existence and the idea of this one-two punch, the Nazis followed up by the Russians, seemed like a positively devastating set of circumstances. Not as gutting as a letter from your lover saying good bye, I might add parenthetically, but devastating nonetheless.
….and all this after the promise of the Treaty of St Germain in 1919,
Albert began to read aloud, upon successful conclusion of the
International Herald Tribune crossword without breaking a sweat, from some notes he'd scribbled in anticipation of our journey, some background fillers, arcanea and trivia, solid facts and useful information he'd been gleaning in his spare time for weeks once he'd known in his mind he was ready to leave Utrecht.
You see, he began, warming up to his topic as we left some truck
stop somewhere between Belgium and Germany by late afternoon,
offloading a few travellers, uploading a few more whilst giving
passengers a chance to stuff themselves with cafeteria snacks and
junk food for the journey ahead, Czechoslovakia itself was the one
of the many offspring of the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire after World War One and with that treaty, the return to the
romantic notion of the medieval Czech statehood
Now, how did they lose that statehood to begin with, he smirked, I'm
glad you asked. He pulled at his beard, staring out the window with
cosmogony in his eyes.
The Czechs, you see, were in a pretty good position if you go back
to the 14th century. Their King Charles IV, King of Bohemia and even
Holy Roman Emperor, believe it or not, the All-Time chief of Czech
chiefs, had set it all up proper-like. Not only that but he was the
one who commissioned so many of the Gothic buildings that still
stand in Prague, also started up the University of Prague, etc.
You'll see half the city will have bridges and streets and buildings and
maybe even entire neighbourhoods named after him. A national, historic hero.
Anyway, he led this golden age for the Czech Empire and diplomat
that he was, later on he established several treaties of his own, of
primary importance that with the Hapsburg family in Austria and
surprise surprise, surprise, the Arpads in Hungary which, you
guessed it, was the foundation of the very Austro-Hungarian Empire
that needed to be dismantled some 550 years or so later.
His daughter married Rudolf IV, the Habsburg King and they entered
into a contract of mutual inheritance between his family and the
Habsburgs wherein if one family became extinct, the other took over.
Another Rudolf eventually became the Czech King but this wasn't the
proper downfall - no, that came because of, yes you guessed it,
internal religious wars between the Catholics and Protestants. We'll
save Jan Hus and the Hussites for another day, Witold but suffice it
to say that from that point on, the Czechs were no longer their own,
they were the Germans' and it wasn't until that treaty of St Germaine
in 1919 that they became so again, however short lived.
Hitler once bellowed, sometime in 1937 I think, Czechoslovakia
would be wiped off the map! Smashed with military power, he
threatened. England, France and Italy helped sign his power to do
so in Munich a month later and by the Spring of 1939 not only was
so-called Sudetenland under the Nazi thumb, but their troops had
entered Prague itself.
So that, as they say, was that, Albert moaned, rolling his back to
me, head against the window, long legs curled inward in a futile
effort to fit his frame into a comfortable position for sleep. I returned to Jiri Weil's book:
“..Ruzena, I said, people are now drinking coffee, well, perhaps not real coffee, but they are sitting somewhere warm, after a satisfying lunch, and I am freezing, Ruzena, and I am hungry…”
It was a thoroughly demoralising book about human cruelty and the
rooms of mild insanity that thrived within them. By the time I'd
finished, I'd temporarily forgotten my fixation with Soviet Prague
and resolved to spend one afternoon, like Josef Roubicek, sweeping
leaves in a Prague cemetery. I hadn’t forgotten my fixation with
Anastasia, of course, but at least the book put my suffering in
perspective.
Meanwhile Albert slept from the start, I noted jealously. You have
long hours to stare out the window yet most of the journey was made
in darkness so even staring out the window gave you the feeling that
you were enduring rather than travelling, transported anonymously
through historical lands in a god damned bus stinking of the bad
breath of two dozen snoozing foreigners instead of riding horses
like Sugambrians and the Suebian Tribes raiding along the Rhine.
Morning slowly unveiled and with its unveiling, the countryside
danced naked.
As we made our approach to what we assumed was Prague there was
a growing ill ease. Everywhere had a hue of grey, industrial soot,
abused and staggered.
Expecting Bohemia, anarchy, surrealism and intoxication, we were
disappointed at our dropping point, a bleak Želivského bus station on
what appeared to be the outskirts of town.
You think you know a place by reading about it, reading the literature
spawned from it, listening to the stories of other travellers but ultimately,it’s like trying to imagine what it would have been like to sleep with the vintage photo version of Marilyn Monroe or Ingrid Bergman – you might conjure up the face, fill in the blanks of the intimate curves of the body,cobble together personality traits from movie clips, interviews and photographs but in the end, the imagination is dulled by the inability to make it real.
This is Prague? Albert managed to moan, setting down his bag,
quickly lighting a long-awaited Winston and pulling the collar of
his coat up around his chin and grimacing. Prague's first nucleus
was founded in the latter part of the 9th century as a castle on a
hill commanding the right bank of the Vltava: this is known as
Vyšehrad or the high castle, to differentiate from the castle which was
later erected on the opposite bank, the future Hradčany. Soon the
city became the seat of the Země koruny české, the Kings of Bohemia,
some of whom also later reigned as emperors of the Holy Roman
Empire. At the moment, it looked like a wasteland.
I think so, I noted cautiously, sniffing the sulphuric air around me
and looking around for something familiar. Imagine if we were like,
dropped in here in like August 1968 when the troops of the USSR,
Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria were rolling in to douse the Prague
Spring. Imagine the euphoria of a greater democracy, economic
reforms and the abandonment of controls over mass media doused in a matter of a few nights of occupation.
Jan Palach, Albert muttered, puffing greedily on the Winston and
wondering where the first pub might be located even though it was
barely seven in the morning. I've read this city is loaded with
non-stop bars, he explained in a typically distracted sidebar before
returning to his original thought.
Less than five months after the Russian entered Prague, Albert recited dutifully as though standing over a grave, Jan Palach infamously performed an act of self immolation in protest of the Soviet disbursement of reform, the entering of their troops and tanks. If you want to imagine something, try imagining making the decision not Only to protest, but to kill yourself in protest and not only kill yourself in protest but kill yourself by setting fire to yourself in protest.
That, he said, tossing the cigarette butt on the ground with
hundreds of others, and two historic acts of defenestration, are
what Prague symbolises to me before I've even had my first Czech
beer.
Did you know, Albert, that the average Czech drinks 11 beers a day?
Go on, that's not possible - that means some are drinking 20 some
beers a day whilst others, only a few…it would be a country of
drunkards, surely the ratio is skewed…
We carried on out of the depot and began the slow, uncertain walk
towards what we sensed was the city centre. It was clear from
looking up and down the Vinohodská that the east end was a trail of
the city trickling away into suburbs and the west direction appeared
to be the only other choice. Fortunately for us, unwittingly, it led
straight down, albeit after quite a pace, into the symbolic ground zero
of town, the Národní Muzeum.
So we carried on, Albert lugging his bass with only a small duffel
bag over one shoulder and I, with the saxophone in its case, also
travelling lightly – clothes we would buy on the cheap – these were
third world prices, after all and despite effusions about history
and literature, like most others who had come, we were there for the
cheap lifestyle.
Ten minutes down the street and the strap on a bag snapped and fell
harshly into the slush of the sidewalk as a menacing dog held on a
leash by a disapproving old lady began barking at us. Fuck off,
Albert growled back at the dog as the old lady shouted something at
us incomprehensibly.
So this is the dream? Albert demanded after twenty minutes of
walking got us closer to what passed as the skyline. This fucking
dreary slum of a city?
I said nothing, tight-lipped.
First impressions are not always the right impressions. I couldn’t
bring myself to believe, and nor apparently could Albert, that
a place which had such a fabulous reputation could look like
such a miserable place. Maybe we were on entering from the
wrong side of town. We trudged on silently, expecting to be
dazzled at any street corner.
And sure enough, a few hours later we’d not only encountered our
First views, had our first sniffs what the hubbub had been about,
but had visited Cedok, the Czech tourist agency, and had found
accommodation in what we considered after months on the lam in
that flat above the Somali takeaway, a quasi-posh hotel, had showered off the dirt of the bus ride, found a street-side stand to gobble incredibly greasy potato pancakes lathered in sour cream and thick, crunchy sausages dipped in mustard, served on a cardboard square with a hunk of brown bread, had a flyer for a promising youth hostel and were on our way to a famous watering hole called U Zlatého Tygre where
great writers like Hrabal and Karel Hynek Mácha once drank.
You can accomplish an amazing number of things in a short period
of time when you arrive somewhere for the first time.
*****
The religious split between Catholics and Protestants is followed
everywhere on an historical trail and Prague is no different. The
rationalist reaction against devotional Roman Catholic literature
was a constant spasm, like a dodgy sphincter, Albert explained as we
strode swiftly now to the pub, eager to begin. Sort of on par with the
literary rebellion against white males hogging all the good lit publicity for themselves, he added. And look, in the 16th century, the predominately and fevered Catholics of the Habsburgs took over, pushing the Protestants aside, much like the Spanish king did to the Protestants in the Netherlands. See the pattern of Europe during these times? Religious intolerance.
But like the Dutch revolt, the bubble burst eventually when at the
Prague Castle, an assembly of Protestants tried two Imperial
governors, Wilhelm Slavata and Jaroslav somebody, for violating the
right of freedom of religion, found them both guilty, and threw them
out of the high castle windows, There you have your first Czech
defenestration.
Undeniably, the euphoria of historical partaking in Prague had long
since worn away within the last decade between the first intrepid
Western youth settlers to today's overindulged yobs, stag parties
and frat boy mentality sweating through pint after pint in one
trendy location after another. There were few remnants of Communist Prague to sip on a leisurely afternoon, the aura had been vacuumed
and binned and its place cropped up a nihilistic subculture of
intellectual sewage who came to Prague much in the same way they
came to Amsterdam. Hedonism as an art form.
That isn't to say Prague didn't have its charms. It would be
hypocritical to pretend that for determined drunkards like Albert
and I, latter day successors to the son of the esteemed Charles IV,
King Wenceslaus, the Greatest 14th and 15th century drunkard, this
wasn't a sort of beer Mecca we might have dreamt about once the
idea of alighting in Prague became apparent. Not solely because
Czech custom, being one of the greatest consumers, per capita of ale
in Europe, of imbibing but also because the beers were bigger and
cheaper.
They've been brewing beer here what, 1200 years? 8th century? Albert was salivating as he spoke.
Bohemian hops are in the eyes of some, the worlds best, he continued
with his dutiful recitation. Whereas it started off people just brewing
on consuming on their own property, by the 11th century they started pooling their resources, brewing collectively. And here it is, dirt cheap and consumed en masse. We will live the auld days of communism; smoky cafes, drinking lots of and lots of cheap domestic beer.
And we knew there would also be more exotic yet powerful pit stops
along the beer super highway like plum brandy in the form of
Slivovice or the herb-laden Beckerovka and even absinthe.
But more importantly there were the Disney-like facades of what
remained a sort of fairyland architectural backdrop. There were the
working class pivnices in Zizkov where men traditionally supped on
gallons of beer in dingy yet church-like reverential quarters. There
was the cheap cost of living which made life a bearable bargain. There
was Vaclav Havel running the country instead of the literary resistance.
There was the underlying hum of informality when it came to proving
competencies. You didn't need a sparkling CV to do something, you
merely had to do it. And one can barely mention Prague without
mentioning the birds of Prague, sexually liberated with superior
Intellects yet charming naivité, or, as the Czech poet Mácha described them; pale as an amaranth, withered in the spring
Albert didn't need much convincing, once we'd established quarters
in U Zlatého tygra which a guidebook had directed us to.
Albert judges every place he goes based upon the cost of a pint of
beer. Cheap beer in Albert's mind equals worthy society. Expensive
beer means they're all more than likely just a bunch of yuppies,
flesh merchants or worse, snobs. The upper classes lack poetry, he
was fond of repeating whenever we were accosted by ridiculous
prices. Life is found in simplicity, in cheap prices.
So when we ordered our very first pints in Prague the first thing he did was a little jitterbug on the way to sitting at a table singing to himself, it's true, it's true! The beer is cheaper than water!
Do you understand what we are creating by hopping now to this new
location, abandoning incomplete the experience first of New York and
then Utrecht? This is a poetic of surprise and variety giving us
the illusion of motion and expansion. Our acts are begun and never
completed. Our equilibrium is unstable because we are constructing
on several levels at once, each level with a different perspective.
And now we throw into the blender, the abundance of cheap beer, an
even deeper hedonism, a surreal blur of experiences. If this doesn't
emancipate our music, nothing will!
This is better than Mexico, he went on after having his first few
sips. I hate Mexican beer, he sneered, even though it's cheap like
this. This, this Pilsner Urquel from Bohemian hops, he sang, holding
the pint up in front of my face as though I wouldn't understand his
subject without visual aids, is the sign of times to come! And he
chugged down the remaining eleven gulps without breathing, placing
the glass softly on the table top and wiping his chin with his right
wrist.
Take it slow, lad – an old man who had been sitting dead for all we
knew, across from us, suddenly came to life, holding out a wrinkled,
age-spotted hand in caution. You lads are all the same. Your first
beers you drink like the first girl you fuck, quickly and without
comprehending what you are doing. If you are to be drinking many
beers in my city, eventually you will learn there is no hurry. There
is always another beer waiting somewhere just around the corner.
The old man introduced himself with an outstretched hand as Pavel
and when he got around after a few puffs on his pipe to asking us
what we were doing in Prague, we let it out quite casually that we
were here to start a jazz collective and slip into an irredeemable
vortex of hedonism in the process. No small feat and his eyes seemed
to instantaneously lose their tired sheen and first light
brilliantly with memory and then as the memory apparently slipped
gears from the pleasant to the unpleasant and back to the pleasant
again, he volunteered that his command of English, be patient, he
cautioned, this might become a long story, was owed to migration as
a boy of 14, just after the Communist's final coup for power.
Actually, only a few days after Jan Masaryk, he added as an aside,
the Minister for Foreign Affairs, was found under the window of the
apartment. They called it suicide but we all knew better. We were a
drop in a river of emigrants flowing out of Czechoslovakia,
disgusted and powerless, carried by the tide of that disgust and
powerlessness we went hiked through a thick forest for days and days
until finally arriving at the Austrian border.
He paused here, perhaps for dramatic effect or perhaps distracted by
a sudden outburst of laughter from three young men seated at a
corner table whose heated discussions were incomprehensible to our
ears but whose slurring demeanour and loud gesticulations
demonstrated them to be clearly in the hold of an early afternoon
bender.
During this pause I searched Pavel's eyes for perhaps a hint of
those of perhaps my own grandfather who had emigrated from Poland
just after the second world war. For the first time since we'd left
New York I was beginning to feel the stirrings of my own heritage,
even if this were a different country, a different background the
stories were similar. Homelands overtaken by ideologies, oppression
and force.
Unlike my father, who had been born in America, had set roots in
America and had ultimately killed himself in that same America,
the same East River he'd grown up around, Pavel had actually seen
his homeland before and after the ravages, not once, but twice and
then again a third time, the euphoria of the revolution in 1989, as he
called it, by then an auld man of 55, resigned to the fate dealt to him
and thousands of others…
Well, I say “we“, he admitted, coughing lightly, but I hadn't really
had a say in the matter. My mother and father wouldn't have dreamt
of leaving me behind, not to mention the fear of what kind of
retribution I'd have been exposed to from the government once the
disappearance of my parents was discovered. So from the beginning, I was told I was going and that was that.
The problem was, a girl of course. I was in love with a girl, Jitka,
and we were inseparable and because of the goddamned Communists,
because my father worked for Lidove Noviny, the paper whose editor
was once Karel Capek and whose publication was banned by the
Communists in 1948, my father decided it was time to emigrate.
What that meant of course to me was separation from Jitka. Well not
just separation. Not like your summer camp romances. Jitka and I had known each other since we were small children; she grew up in a flat two blocks from our own. We spent all our time together growing up and of course, as the human body and sexuality began to take shape our friendship became one of experimentation.
What you must understand is that if it hadn't been for the
Communists, if it hadn't been for the decision of my mother and
father, fearful of persecution, to leave and to make me go with
them, I quite probably would have married Jitka and we would have
had a family and life history of our own. But this was not to be our
fate. Instead, our fate was sealed by events out of our control and
so, no matter how much I cried and pouted and stamped my feet and
sulked and screamed and threatened and cursed, my parents were
steadfast in their refusal to allow me to stay behind.
Of course, like any young couple in love faced with a forced
separation, this only made our will stronger and we decided on our
own to run away. We wouldn't have to flee in the back of a pickup
hiding under piles of straw, crossing under the eye of a well-bribed
and perhaps even sympathetic border guards. We didn't care about the Communists, it was my parents we had to escape, not the Communists.
The Communists didn't care if we held hands or made love or got
married.
But our escape lasted less than 24 hours before we were discovered
and when I was forced back home my father said that was it, that was
too close a call, we were leaving that night - no more could the
effort be postponed.
There wasn't much I could do. My father and mother both begged and
whispered and cajoled all that day about our having to leave,
regardless of what I felt about Jitka, this was our only way of
survival. Jitka would still be here when we returned, they promised.
But of course, they never returned. I made efforts to write to Jitka
but of course do you think for one moment those letters ever reached
her? Or even if they had, that any letter she wrote in reply to
escaped émigrés living in a foreign land, flouting the failure of
Communism, did anyone really come to believe that such letters would be delivered, regardless of how devoid of political content and how utterly overflowing they were with descriptions of painful unrequited love that had been forced from our clutches cruelly? Of course not. Well, I can't be certain. Perhaps the censors rode roughshod through my correspondences with a black marker line but I never bothered with the political. Sure, I tried to express the differences which would have been apolitical to the paranoid mind of the state censor, but the rest of the letters, they were filled with nothing but love, expressions of longing, elaborate detailing of minutely sculptured suffering. The minute my parents had convinced me I had no other options was the minute that I would never see Jitka again.
From Austria, he continued slowly, taking a sip of his beer and
accepting a light to set the pipe afire anew from Albert whilst
sitting back slightly in his seat to see if we were sufficiently
captivated, we made our way to England. Slough precisely, where my
father got a job in the brickworks.
I suppose the initial excitement about escaping, the boyhood craving
for the exotic, allowed me to make the decision I wouldn't have made
otherwise. But once we'd made it out, past the border, a new reality
struck me. The reality that I would not allowed to go back, not
ever. The problem was of course, Jitka. My heart burned. Every
morning I woke up, both in Austria and then in England, my stomach
was compelled by bile, a sickness, a longing. Do either of you know
what it's like to have love torn from your clutches like that,
irretrievable?
We didn't need to look each other. And although it was presumably a
rhetorical question on the basis of building to a crescendo of
disappointment, disillusionment, we both shook our heads solemnly.
We needn't bother with our own silly little tales. Pavel and Jitka,
the love which had never been allowed to flourish, eclipsed anything
Albert or I might have imagined.
Pavel shook his head sadly, even to this day. He knocked out the
embers of his pipe and took another long swallow of beer. I noted
then, perhaps for the first time or perhaps for the second, that
Pavel had the kind of pinched, broken blood vessel-lined face that
you could instantly recognise in an alcoholic. A sort of club
membership symbolism, like a fencing scar for drunks.
Before I was forced to leave, Jitka and I had often discussed how we
would be able to reunite. It was out of the question of course, once
I with my mother and father had crossed into the West, to return to
Prague and thus it would be up to Jitka to escape on her own. We
both agreed it was too risky and she too young to attempt something
like an escape but agreed we would both wait for 4 years; 1952 when
we were both 18 and then she would cross into Austria, just as I had
and we would meet on Christmas Eve, 1952 in front of the Sudbahnhof.
For four long, desperate, delirious years I waited for that
Christmas even to arrive. In the interim of course we had no true
means of communication. About a year and a half after we'd gotten to
England, the Zelnices, a family who had lived in our building who
had also emigrated, were able to contact us from their new home in
Canada and with that contact came a small box of precious, precious
letters Jitka had handed to the Zelnices and begged for them to
forward on to me once they were settled.
They were letters from her to me, a year's worth which had been
edited and cut so that they would all fit into this tiny box that
the Zelnices smuggled out with them as a favour to both families.
I'm afraid rather than making the transition easier, I became even
more despondent. I was to have been practicing music, my parents
insisting of course that I was a protégé and yes, I admit, the
musical studies and hours upon hours of practice were indeed a
welcomed distraction. But once those letters arrived and I read them
through and through, over and over again, every single day since
they're arrival, the wait to 1952 was becoming unbearable.
I was dying in that home in Slough, I tell you. By the beginning of
1951 it was becoming too much for me and not even the music was a
significant distraction. I became a member of the London Schools
Symphony that year , as my dedication and need for distraction
through music probably turned me into a much more talented musician than I'd have ever become on my own but none of it was enough.
He exhaled a long bluish stream of smoke and rubbed the side of his
face nostalgically. Somehow however, I did survive. And do you know why? Jazz. Jazz, he repeated softly and slowly as if it were Jitka's name, melodic and mysterious, pronounced by the 18 year old Pavel in front of the Ostbahnhof station in Vienna on Christmas Eve 1952.
Well, perhaps I am over dramatising, he chuckled to himself with
amusement. Not simply jazz, any jazz. I was a classically trained
musician, not a jazz musician, you see. It wasn't until I first
heard of Oscar Peterson that I became fascinated. You see Oscar
Peterson had been classically trained, just like myself. He'd
studied under Paul de Marky, a Hungarian concert pianist.
The thing is, he also studied under a classically trained veteran of
the Harlem jazz scene and was rather enamoured with the swing music of Benny Goodman which he heard via the radio. Rather than pursue the concert pianist route, he chose jazz piano. I had never heard of him although he'd spent several seeming fruitless years in Canada exhausting the jazz scene there.
But in '49, Carnegie Hall, as part of a concert of Jazz at the
Philharmonic, Oscar Peterson made his debut in America as a jazz
pianist.
And in 1951, as I was pining away for Jitka and trying to
concentrate instead on studying music, the Oscar Peterson Trio was
formed with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith. Ah, and this trio, Pavel
cooed, was the beginning of my life being saved.
It wasn't until he paused further still that we were like children
sitting at the feet of our grandfather recounting war stories. Like
Oscar Peterson, Pavel also traded in his years of classical training
at the conservatorium, he explained, because he instantly loved,
upon hearing his first bootleg copies, Thelonius Monk and Oscar
Peterson and because the music distracted him from Jitka.
Jitka, of course, although she loved music, had no idea that . After
the Nazi occupation jazz flourished in Prague. Jazz was that
yearning for freedom we all craved. Not only did I play, but I read
and learned about the history as well. The history, for example, of
Bedrich "Fricek" Weiss, who was deported to the concentration camp
Terézin, where he led the Ghetto Swingers. In 1944 he, together with
his father, was transported to Auschwitz and directly to the gas
chamber.
And 1952 was a bad time for Czechoslovakia. I worried increasingly
for Jitka's safety. By then the communist show trials had begun and
even from England we could feel the fear bred during the trial of
Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist personalities
in November and December 1952. Whilst Jitka and I were busy planning our reunion in Vienna, Slánský was executed, and many others were sentenced to death or to forced labour in prison camps.
It was very difficult to obtain a passport in those days, he
explained wearily recollecting sadness. You had to apply for
official permission and to get official permission you had to have
an employer. Well, Jitka was able to convince her employer to deem
her a reliable person and she was able to obtain permission but due
to bureaucratic twists and turns I had no knowledge of, it was not
until February of 1953.
Of course, I was there, Christmas Eve in front of the Ostbahnhof
station in Wien. I waited there in the snow and the biting cold
expectantly without having had any confirmation that she would in
fact be arriving and yet belief, faith, made me wait.
I waited for several days out there, sleeping in the station to keep
warm before the idea began creeping into my head that perhaps I
should somehow get closer to the border so that she wouldn't have as
far to go. I could imagine millions of scenarios; being shot by
border guards, getting lost, starving in the forest, getting
frost-bite, dying, a million different things that could happen to
her that could have happened to her to prevent her from reaching our mutually agreed destination at the appointed time.
It was insanity of course, to believe this could turn about into
reality. After several more days my money was running out and new
fears began to play in my head; evil fears of infidelity to the
dream. Who was to say, even though she'd written those letters,
those letters had been written two years before, who was to say that
in the interim she hadn't met someone else. Someone whom she
wouldn't have to escape her country to meet with. Someone for whom
she wouldn't have to pull up roots and futures to be with. Someone
perhaps better looking, more accommodating, anything. Anything
anything was possible! He slammed his hand on the table gently as
though living through every moment of those days in Wien again.
And what the hell did I know? I was 18. I had no real experience in
the world. Not from Slough. But I would not go back, not ever. I
decided in the end I would wait and in doing so, I auditioned for a
job in a Viennese bar to play piano, jazz piano. And whilst doing so
I waited and I waited and I waited.
The problem of course with a lack of communication was that I had no idea of her situation back in Prague and she had no idea that I would have waited for her. Without the confidence of knowing I would be meeting her, the idea of simply getting out and leaving, of disembarking in Vienna and never returning home again, without the sanctity of knowing I was going to be there waiting for her, was too much.
How do I know all this? He laughed bitterly. Because in fact, we
were finally reunited one day. 1990. She had married by 1955 and
started a family of her own. We weren't children after all, any more
and whatever dreams we had once had of reuniting, they were gone
forever. She could never again have the opportunity to escape Prague
and even if she did she would have no idea of how to find me. And so
that was that.
She married and raised a family of two children, became a
grandmother by 1980. And where was I? Still in Vienna.
Teaching kids, he confessed into his waning beer as the barman slid
through collecting empty glasses, taking orders and working the room with a beer gathering mania that bordered on shamanism. I was teaching kids who had no interest in learning about the piano but were forced by their parents who saw classicism in them instead of western consumerism. I didn't play in any more concert halls. I played in pubs and bars around Austria and Germany when the need to move forward fit but by and large, I stayed in Vienna until that one day, that one day that was always a piece of my hypothetical life, that one day…
It took me nearly a year to track her down now with a different
surname although the husband had died some time before. And of
course by the time I had tracked her down it was 1990, 38 years
later than expected, a lifetime's ocean between us.
I don't know which made me more sad. That we hadn't met at all in
1952 or that we were finally reunited in 1990 knowing it had already
passed us by.
But enough about these things, he suddenly waved away, digressing
into pity and sadness. What instruments do you play and what sort of
jazz is it you are conspiring?
I play the bass, Albert volunteered as the barman returned with
three more pints and ticked off three little slashes on our scrap
paper tally sheet which we watched with amazement. And Witold plays the horn, neither of us very well, I might add.
Lacking astounding talent, Albert continued, we prefer a minimalist
approach to music. We don't play fancy 15 minute solos, we don't
spiral, we don't necessarily shake or groove or incarnate anything.
We try our best not to remind our audience that we struggle with
even the most rudimentary of beats and that neither of us could read
a music sheet any easier than we could read a newspaper written in
Sanskrit. In fact, to call us musicians might even be a stretch.
Conceptualists, perhaps. Like children who haven't yet conquered
speech.
Pavel stared at us for a few moments before taking the pipe out of his
coat pocket and relighting it, a shot of flame from a match struck
on the floor, audible puffs and the Pope-like smoke firing out of
the top of the bowl indicating he had finally digested Albert's
words in full. You will be very successful here then, I would
suppose, Pavel smiled slyly. This is precisely the kind of place
where you could pull something like that off.
We've already been a hit in Holland, I added unnecessarily because Pavel is clearly a talented musician and despite this hearing this hollow self-endorsement in my ears, I could not stop.
We are in the middle of a series of six month tours from one country
to the next, enough time to ingest the cultural and regurgitate it in our music, all patterned locally.
Unfortunately, most of my contemporaries are long passed, Pavel
mentioned, thinking aloud. But if you are interested, perhaps one
afternoon you could come by my apartment and we could organise a
little session of sorts. It sounds as though it could be very
intriguing indeed.
Prague would eventually reveal herself like that in so many ways. By
like that, I mean opportunities seemed to fall from the sky. It would come to seem that with a little initiative, a distinct lack of fear and a modicum of self confidence, there wasn't very much in Prague that couldn't be accomplished given time.
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