Alice to Prague Read online

  In the bar, Michael returned with a glass of white wine for me and a Guinness for himself.

  ‘To your year here. Great effort.’ We clinked glasses.

  ‘I’ll miss you so much, Michael.’

  It was true. He’d encouraged me on every step of this trip. But there was something I hadn’t shared with him, or with anyone for that matter. My endeavour to recapture my childhood hadn’t been exactly what I’d hoped for and I knew I’d have to return home unfulfilled.

  If I tried to pinpoint the exact reason for this, the closest example I could give myself involved oak trees. On arrival I’d longed to feel firsthand the sense of magic and mystery I remembered so vividly that oak trees represented for me: the Secret Seven hiding in their thick, green leaves, protected from the rain and the robbers, and the Magic Faraway Tree children climbing them to reach swirling lands at the top of the branches. Oak trees had seemed a wondrous part of England, as far removed from my childhood world of dry gums and spindly mulga as you could imagine.

  But when I found oak trees, there were no children in them, no ladders to enchanted lands, and no magic. I spent hopeless hours gazing at the landscape, willing my heroines to emerge, wanting to have adventures and cycle down dales and eat ices. But all I found were a lot of cars on a lot of freeways, ugly fast-food outlets on the sides of roads, polluted skies, and no children who matched my daydreams.

  Sitting there with Michael, it dawned on me that the journey back to my inner childhood had always been doomed to fail. Time had moved on. The world I looked for belonged to the 1930s and ’40s. The world I’d arrived in was the late 1980s. The sacredness of the places and the stories of that time had gone. The sense of timelessness, of history, of beauty, seemed lost.

  Clearly it wasn’t possible to transcend the gap between the girl I once was and the dreams I had, and the reality I was now facing. Perhaps twenty-eight was too late to go hunting for childhood dreams anyway. The fantasies in my imagination simply slipped further away the more I searched for them. My fingers grasped at emptiness; my heart remained hollow. Like a clumsy lover who’d been away a long time, unaware, insensitive, I’d simply expected that by being in these places my imagination would spark back into life and the stories would write themselves afresh. But the stories I’d made up to transport myself there could not be revived.

  That realisation was deeply confronting. While I had spent the last decade trying to become a professional lawyer, deep inside I’d continued to carry the innocence and hopes of that young girl on the horse. My stories were precious, like silent, secret companions, and their very existence nurtured and sustained me through the rigours of law. The daydreamer had never truly gone away. I truly believed the Magic Faraway Tree existed somewhere. But despite searching high and low through English woods, I had not been able to find it.

  I couldn’t tell Michael any of this. I could barely admit it to myself. I’d started out the year feeling like a loser and a failure and was ending it feeling like a loser and a failure.

  So what now?

  ‘Will you go back to law?’ asked Michael.

  I sighed. ‘Probably—I’m pretty broke and my firm’s expecting me back.’ But as I said that, my heart sank.

  ‘The sooner you leave law, the better,’ said Michael. ‘Like I did.’

  He looked cheerful at that memory, as well he might.

  ‘You once wanted to be a foreign correspondent,’ he reminded me. ‘Look at this year. If there was ever a time to strike out and cover world events, it’s now.’

  He was right about the year. My trip had coincided with an unprecedented upheaval in Eastern Europe, the world behind the Iron Curtain. I didn’t know a great deal about that region, other than that it was a dark place, oppressed and cruelly controlled by the Soviets.

  The Cold War had been a hot topic throughout my whole life. I’d never known life without it. In fact, it had comprised a large part of conversations at home with Dad and my studies at school. Mrs Howe (Modern European History, Year 11, boarding school) and John le Carré’s books gave me more detailed insights into a bleak, grim and unforgiving regime. Even the highly fictionalised James Bond movies depicted the communists as pure evil and we all believed it. To give this context, I was born the year after Fidel Castro’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, during which the Soviet Union nearly blew up the world, so communism was considered in my family to be the greatest evil, ever.

  But by 1989, the year of my travels, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had decided to create a new era of restructuring (perestroika) and openness (glasnost) throughout the Soviet Union, and some of the Eastern Bloc satellite states were taking their own steps towards freedom. Poland agreed to open elections and Hungary dismantled the electrified barbed-wire fences along its border with Austria. However, hard-line regimes elsewhere, like East Germany and Czechoslovakia, refused to budge and there were riots. Hundreds of thousands of East Germans flooded the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, calling for basic human rights. People were beaten and incarcerated but the demonstrations grew.

  I observed these developments with fear and fascination as I travelled around Western Europe. However, to be honest, the quest to recover my dreams took precedence over visiting a part of the planet I didn’t want to visit. Nothing about the Soviet states of Eastern Europe made me wish to experience a daytrip to grim East Berlin or a week of thin borsch soup in Moscow where I might disappear and never be seen again.

  On the other hand, the US President, Ronald Reagan, had been optimistic about the Soviets’ intentions. He’d focused on the place where the Iron Curtain was most starkly represented: the foreboding Berlin Wall that divided East and West Germany. The Wall in question had been built by the Soviets in 1961, the year before I was born. Overnight, the Soviets divided streets, families and communities with forty-three kilometres of steel, concrete, barbed wire, watchtowers and gun emplacements.

  The Wall was a symbol of tyranny and fear, a raw gash through the heart of Europe. It was perhaps the greatest symbol of the Cold War.

  So in June 1987, Ronald Reagan had stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and, in front of thousands, called out, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’

  US President Bush subsequently came into office. But the Wall remained firmly in place, despite ongoing international political pressure.

  ‘Well?’ prompted Michael, raising his voice. ‘Madame Foreign Correspondent?’

  The pub was really noisy and it was hard to hear. I leant forward. ‘I like that idea!’ Michael always found a way to perk me up. ‘Perhaps I could stay here and write stories about developments in Eastern Europe and not go back and face reality.’

  ‘You can stay in my garret,’ Michael said with a grin, ‘but you and the rat would have to fight for the cheese.’ He swivelled in his seat. ‘What is going on here?’

  A large roar erupted from the bar. We strained our necks to see. A television had been set up on the counter and people milled about in front of it. On the screen were flashing images of something—people, darkness, spotlights. What was happening?

  Michael got it first. ‘My God, it’s the Berlin Wall!’

  We rushed forward to join the chaotic crowd around the screen. Images of a huge, graffitied wall bore down upon us. There were thousands of people in a square; enormous black gates were opening.

  ‘East Berlin tonight is a city in chaos,’ a journalist shouted to camera. He stood against a backdrop of barbed wire and towers and piercing lights. ‘The East German government appears to have collapsed, people are escaping into the West and no one is stopping them. Are we seeing the fall of the Berlin Wall at last? The end of the Cold War? Whatever the outcome, history is rewriting itself before our very eyes.’

  The bar was overflowing and the place was in uproar. People were glued to the screen. More pints were pulled; Michael and I ordered another round and watched, agog. Before I knew it, my words were out, breathless, rushed.

  ‘Michael, we’ve got to g
et tickets. We’ve got to get to Berlin—we’ve got to see this ourselves!’

  Michael pushed his glasses up his nose and, uncharacteristically, shook his head. ‘We’ll never get tickets—’

  ‘—but we can try!’

  ‘I’ve got a conference tomorrow, in Manchester. It’s really important. My boss is expecting me . . .’

  Really? The greatest antidote to misery was action and I’d had enough misery. No one had ever thought the Berlin Wall might fall and the Cold War might end. Certainly not Mrs Howe, who in Year 11 predicted that Stalin’s evil legacy would live on forever. I was driven by a force greater than me.

  ‘Michael, come on! We’re here, we’re so close. It’s meant to be. Your boring old conference can wait . . . and besides’—this was the clincher—‘this is my chance to be a foreign correspondent. If we go together I’ll write a story about it for you!’

  Michael looked at me as if I was mad. But I was on fire. I’d had enough of travelling alone for months, looking for something that no longer existed. Now I had the chance to share something extraordinary that did exist, something that in fact was taking form and shape as we spoke. I wasn’t going to give it up.

  ‘Alright, alright.’ Michael finally capitulated like an exhausted parent with a pesky child. ‘Better find a phone box and ring my boss.’

  The next morning we caught a flight to Berlin, scoring two of the few remaining seats. As Michael predicted, the entire world’s media had the same idea, and the flight was abuzz with the uncontrolled energy of the first day on a school bus trip—just without the singing.

  We landed in fog. Berlin was icy, dirty and unforgiving to physical extremities. My feet, fingers and nose froze. But I didn’t care. The scenes down at the Wall were everything the TV journalist had reported, and more. My eyes worked overtime, soaking in the expressions of thousands of bewildered, ecstatic East Berliners flooding to freedom through the Brandenburg Gate.

  It was the euphoria of the end of a war.

  Germans from both sides drank champagne and shouted victory on the top of the hated Wall. Men and women danced. At Checkpoint Charlie, a girl with laughing eyes clutched flowers and kissed a man in uniform. Did she know him? Nobody knew, nobody cared, because the unimaginable, the unthinkable had happened, and journalists now predicted we would see the rest of the Soviet Bloc states fall like dominoes across Eastern Europe.

  When an East German soldier in hobnailed boots with nowhere to go and no job to do hacked me off a piece of the Wall, I knew that one day I would return. I would find a way to get behind the Iron Curtain and learn firsthand what the world of the Cold War had really been like, what our history books had never really told us, never been able to tell us: the story of forty long, brutal years of communism and a decade of Nazi occupation before that, of the evil things that Mrs Howe could only hint at.

  I knew it was ironic. A day earlier, nothing would have persuaded me to undertake such a venture. Now I was fuelled by a hunger I could barely comprehend. After a year of indecision and dithering, the purpose of my trip had come into focus; shiny, sharp, clear and thrilling. I might not have found what I was looking for in Western Europe but in Eastern Europe, who knew what might happen? In the adrenaline rush of the moment, I was a risk-taker and an adventurer again, a horserider and pioneer from the wildness of the outback. I’d been given a miracle to pursue. Real magic had broken through and I intended to honour it.

  Of course I had to go home and return to my law firm for a while. That was a promise I also had to honour. There was a more prosaic reason too. I was broke.

  ‘Always a couch here if you come back!’ Michael grinned, hugging me before I boarded my plane at Heathrow. ‘Just don’t take me across any eastern borders.’

  I arrived back in Australia clutching my bit of the Wall, while euphoric commentators declared, ‘This is the greatest event of the last five decades, if not the century . . . thin edge of the wedge for countries like Czechoslovakia and Romania . . . only a matter of time before their socialist governments secede to the masses . . .’

  Now I had to find a way to get back.

  2

  Adventures, ahoy!

  November 1993

  Back at my old law firm in Alice Springs, bit of Berlin Wall on my desk, I started rebuilding my bank balance and planning my new life. At night I dreamt of crossing the Iron Curtain to hear the stories of the people who’d been freed. I dreamt of learning what their lives had been like and writing it all down. That dream kept me going through divorce cases, contract arguments, contested wills, criminal matters, and the endless stream of angry people who turned up at my desk, hating someone or something, unable to resolve a dispute themselves and wanting me to fix it for them.

  That dream kept me going for the next four years, which was how long it took me to extract myself from law again and find a way back to Europe. It also took a spot of divine intervention in the form of international lawyer and barrister Peter Barr, who lived in Darwin. ‘He worked in Eastern Europe after communism fell,’ a mutual colleague told me during her visit to Alice. Stunned at what seemed like such an extraordinary coincidence, I begged, ‘Would he meet with me?’ Yes, apparently he would, if I could get to Darwin.

  Once again I was driven by an energy akin to fire, just as I had been that night in the London pub. I wangled a court case in Darwin and boarded a plane in Alice Springs to fly north, all my hopes flooding back.

  Darwin was sweltering and cyclonic when I arrived, thunderclouds circling. I made it to court and, when I finished with witnesses for the day, I discarded wig and gown and rushed to the Hotel Darwin to meet my fate. I arrived in a state, trembling, with perspiration pouring down my back.

  Peter Barr was waiting in the bar, wearing a pressed linen suit and Panama hat, looking cool and elegant. He stood to meet me and ordered gin and tonics in a beautifully cultivated accent. We sipped them under the leisurely thwat-thwat of an overhead fan (well, he sipped; I sculled, fingers unsteady), while he told me his story and I listened, dizzy with the possibilities he was outlining.

  ‘I taught English in Czechoslovakia, in a country town called Sedlčany. I wanted a break from law and it was a fascinating time over there. You ought to go.’

  The thoughts that rushed through my mind were as fizzy as the tonic in my glass. Peter himself was fascinating. Very few people that I knew were particularly aware of Eastern Europe or indeed interested in it. I gazed at Peter like he was the Messiah and slowly repeated the name of the town: ‘Sed-dool-char-ny.’ Peter nodded approvingly.

  ‘Tanya, I’ve still got contacts. I could find you a position. Three months to start with, and if things work out, maybe six months, or even a year? I loved it—I’m sure you will.’

  Teaching! Such a thing had never occurred to me. Yet I remembered the teaching style of my School of the Air teacher, Mrs Hodder, from many years before. Mrs Hodder spoke to us every day on air and she had the most beautiful voice. Growing up I was surrounded by stockmen who barely spoke, and when they did it was usually to swear or shout at cattle (or at me, for daydreaming). But Mrs Hodder had sounded like the Queen. She spoke graciously to her subjects. She brought lessons alive. I waited every day for my half-hour lesson like I’d wait for water on a muster. If I could channel her, I’d be right. I just had to inspire students the way she inspired me.

  Peter Barr read my thoughts. ‘Obviously, I wasn’t a teacher either but the school is always happy for assistance, to give their students new opportunities not available under the old regime. They will call you’—he paused—‘a “native speaker”.’

  The stormy evening air was fragrant with frangipanis and I was intoxicated by the thrilling prospects that lay ahead. I pummelled him with questions. Peter answered in his cultivated voice like a British agent in the exotic East, or a spy in Casablanca. I felt like I ought to have a tape recorder hidden in my bag.

  ‘The country is now called the Czech Republic. It is made up of Bohemia, Moravia and a slice
of Silesia. Slovakia split off during my time there. The Czechs consider themselves more connected to the West and the Slovaks to the East.’ He paused, smiled boyishly. ‘The Czechs are the original bohemians.’

  Free-spirited people in cheesecloth, free love and lots of music? Really? Perfect.

  ‘Mmm, what else? Okay, Václav Havel—from prison to presidency!’ he quipped. When he saw my expression he explained further. ‘Havel was the greatest dissident voice under communism, a writer and poet. He was elected president after the fall of communism. Once in power, he pardoned his jailers and those who’d persecuted him. He is known as the Nelson Mandela of the East.’

  My head whirled.

  Peter added, ‘He lives in Prague Castle now but meets journalists and diplomats for a cigarette and a beer at his local pub!’

  I momentarily thought of Michael in London and how much he’d love the sound of that.

  ‘Prague is the most beautiful city imaginable, Tanya—music, literature, culture. It is still largely hidden from the outside world. You must catch a bus from Sedlčany one weekend and visit it.’

  Bohemians dancing through a beautiful city, a poet who became a president, me soaking it all in—I was in heaven.

  ‘Three pieces of advice.’ Peter folded one perfectly pressed trousered leg over the other. ‘Read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a small masterpiece about, among other things, the 1968 Prague Spring. And anything Kafka.’

  ‘Er, right.’ I had read some Kafka but not enjoyed it.

  ‘And you must learn about the Velvet Revolution, which is the term used to describe the collapse of communism in 1989. Allegedly’—he paused, as though addressing a jury—‘there were no deaths then, hence the term Velvet. There was plenty of brutality though. Hundreds of students beaten, hospitalised. The history of Czech occupation is appalling.’ He paused again and tapped his finger on his knee. ‘But the resilience of the people is extraordinary.’