Alice to Prague Page 8

  And despite the kindness of so many people, I was gut-achingly lonely much of the time. The teachers were busy, my time with them was invariably limited, and the lack of shared language was deeply isolating. Out of school I spent many long, empty hours in my panelák.

  Oh God, I hated the loneliness. It ate me alive. I realised for the first time how much I was sustained by family, and by a familiar community and language. In the absence of them I was lost, freefalling. But I couldn’t tell anyone. That would be shameful, an admission of failure. So I kept fronting up to school with my best cheery face on—fake it till you make it—and spent as much time inside those comforting walls as I could.

  My fever and coughing also continued to intensify. Eventually, I lost my voice altogether and arrived at school in a state of collapse. Jindra took one look at me and marched me to the Sedlčany hospital. There she told me the doctor would decide what to do next.

  We waited in a big, white cement room lined with long benches, like something straight out of a Cold War sanatorium. I curled up on a bench in the corner, while Jindra sat upright, focused. There was no reservation desk or appointment times, and the wait seemed endless. When I finally got called in, it was into an identical large room with more benches where a doctor was moving between patients. He wore a white coat and did not speak English. According to Jindra, his prognosis—when it came—was pretty much the same as hers. My system couldn’t cope with the change and not only was I not going anywhere, I was sentenced to bed indefinitely. But as Jindra looked into my horror-stricken eyes, she said comfortingly, ‘I will take you to my apartment.’

  Dearest Jindra. She saved me from the fate I’d been dreading most of all: being stuck in my panelák with circling spies ready to pounce. I wanted to cry with gratitude.

  Jindra was, I decided, an angel. Despite teaching full-time, walking several miles to and from school every day (carrying shopping and books), and caring for two daughters and a husband, she tucked me into spotless white sheets on a couch in her spotless living room and let me sleep for a week. For the first few days I was delirious with fever and fantasised about sunshine and blue skies and red earth, dreaming of the touch of Mum’s hands. But Jindra was not going to let me die on her watch.

  She had a special regime that involved waking me at regular hours throughout the night to give me ‘special pills’ and pouring me liberal doses of Becherovka, a savage herbal liqueur that the Czechs swore by for ‘health benefits’. It tasted disgusting but Jindra had bought it on the way back from school for me and I was to drink it whether I liked it or not.

  During the day, when Jindra and her family were out, I had a lot of time on my own to think about how I could manage things once I got better. I had constant flashbacks to home. One particular memory kept sliding through my befuddled brain.

  It involved my sister M’Lis. One day, when she was six, we went out with Dad and our Head Stockman at the time, Charlie, to get the monthly ‘killer’. That was a big event in the life of the station. It was how we got our monthly supply of meat to feed the many mouths Mum catered for. There could be up to thirty people to feed every day and she often held two sittings per meal. Beef—fresh, grilled, roasted, salted, brined, curried—was the mainstay of our diet. You couldn’t run a cattle station, and keep the stockmen working, without meat—and lots of it.

  Getting a killer was a hugely exciting experience for us kids. On that day, as with every other time we went for a killer, M’Lis, Brett and I climbed up on the back of the Land Rover, with Dad and Charlie in the front. Nestled in pouches next to the two men were their precious carving knives, and on the front of the Land Rover lay Dad’s long .22 rifle. Normally we left in the mid-afternoon to ensure plenty of daylight but it was already late afternoon when we headed off that day. Dad was in a hurry to get the killer before sunset. It took nearly three quarters of an hour of bouncing over narrow, corrugated dirt roads until Dad found the right mob of cattle.

  I watched the sun dipping towards the horizon, feeling Dad’s anxiety. Choosing the beast was always a difficult decision. It had to be big enough to provide sufficient meat for a month but not so old that the flesh would be tough or stringy.

  Finally, Dad chose his target and pulled up a sufficient distance away so as not to frighten the mob to flight. We huddled in the back, our giggling and carry-on silenced by his hissed ‘Quiet!’ He then pulled out his .22, leant out of the driver’s window, took aim and fired.

  The explosive noise of the gun reverberated across the landscape and we crouched, trembling, our hands firmly clamped over our ears until the ringing stopped. Dad then put away the gun and drove straight to the dead beast. Dad was a good shot and never believed in cruelty to animals. He almost always got the beast on the first shot, right in the forehead, to ensure there was no suffering.

  ‘Righto!’ he yelled when satisfied the beast was dead, and we three kids jumped off the back of the Land Rover and rushed straight to the closest mulga trees, pulling off branches and leaves to lay out a carpet of about three square metres. The carpet was designed to keep dirt and ants off the meat during the butchering process. We helped to drag the beast onto it, and Dad and Charlie pulled out their razor-sharp carving knives. Sharpening the knives was labour- and time-intensive, and had taken place before we headed out; Dad and Charlie had sharpened each knife on an old turning wheel down at the shed, water dripping down, in a slow and precise process. It was a tough job for two men to carve up a big bullock and they needed their knives to be in prime condition.

  We kids moved into position for our next job: holding down the legs to keep the beast stable while Dad and Charlie skinned it, taking off the hide and slipping the knife between the skin and the ribs. This was a difficult and delicate task. You don’t want the dead beast to wobble or roll as you are carving. On this occasion M’Lis was on the ground, struggling to hold the foreleg into which Charlie was about to slip his knife, when we saw a flash of silver and heard M’Lis scream. Charlie’s super-sharp weapon had nicked her arm, just above the wrist, barely a millimetre from her main vein. Blood gushed from it like a tap had been turned on. For a moment it was difficult to distinguish the blood of the bullock from the blood of M’Lis. Brett and I stared in horror, expecting her to die there and then.

  Dad dropped his knife, ran to the front of the Land Rover, pulled out an old bottle of kerosene and a rag covered in oil and dirt. He grabbed M’Lis’s wrist, splashed it with kerosene and wound the rag tight around the bleeding gash. M’Lis sat still through the process, white-faced, biting back a cry as the kero’ stung.

  Dad then returned to the task at hand with a terse, ‘That should do it. You’ll be right, Lis. Hold on.’ Dad and Charlie had work to do, the beast was precious, it was already late, there were many mouths waiting to be fed, and we had to get the meat home before dark.

  Brett and I thought there was every chance M’Lis might die before we got home. The butchering process took a long time, about an hour, and she did not look well. But we still had more work to do, so we got on with it, gathering more clean branches and leaves to put on the floor at the back of the Land Rover. Once the beast was quartered, the large pieces would be heaved onto the floor, along with the various entrails, and we kids would have to sit on the bloodied quarters to keep them safe until we got home. We would be covered in red of all shades by the time we tumbled out the back of the vehicle, along with the rib bones and ‘curly gut’ that would go on the barbecue for dinner.

  M’Lis sat on the ground in deepening shock. We tried to distract her with our usual game of pulling out the bullock’s lungs and blowing them up, which left huge blood circles around our mouths and made us fall about laughing. This was our favourite adventure every month. We made different faces at each other as we tried to make the lungs inflate and collapse. The one who blew up the lungs the most was the winner. Like all our games, they were based on the only world we knew—one that was rough and raw, with loads of space and opportunity for invention.
But M’Lis didn’t laugh that day.

  Finally, the beast was quartered and laid out carefully in the back of the Land Rover. We pushed M’Lis up onto the back, where she clung onto the forequarter and some branches as we thumped our way over the dirt roads again. Brett and I held onto her the whole way, telling her to stay alive. It took nearly another hour and was dark by the time we drove into the station yard. Mum took over, washing off dirt and kero’ from the wound, putting Dettol on it, wrapping it in a clean bandage, then putting M’Lis to bed. There was not much else that could be done in the bush.

  M’Lis was incredibly lucky—just one millimetre more and Charlie would have taken out her vein. That really would have been the end of M’Lis. She still bears the scar today.

  But she was still here.

  Now, through my anxious and fearful dreams, I knew I needed to become strong again too, like M’Lis had been that day. I also felt ashamed of the letters I’d been sending back home through the school’s fax machine. In them I’d poured out stories of my homesickness and loneliness, and of course they had been read (well, what else had I expected?). Now not only were the teachers dismayed and disappointed to learn my innermost thoughts (which cost me A$6 a page), but Headmaster Zdeněk was furious that I had been clogging up his fax machine.

  On my last day in Jindra’s lovely, clean apartment, it snowed outside. Cars slid all over the roads and there were accidents across Sedlčany. Snow wasn’t expected this late in the year and, unhelpfully, all the snow sweepers had been put away. While the town struggled to deal with injuries and the logistical difficulties caused by this environmental upset, I watched the soft white waves float down outside Jindra’s window and made a pact with myself.

  When I got better, when I got back to the school, I would give my all, and I would make this the best adventure ever. I’d wasted long enough in my own transition. It was time to adjust and get on with it.

  10

  Sex and free will!

  To my joy, the students and teachers greeted me back at school as their long-lost friend, as someone they’d missed. I was incredibly touched by their cards and flowers, and realised how lucky I was. Then I threw myself into teaching.

  Well, to be more truthful, I played a lot of music to the students, got them to sing along, and set grammatical and language exercises from English for Beginners to music. We worked initially on ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and then progressed to a video made by my brother, Brett, called This is the Life. I’d brought it with me on a whim and it became my number one teaching tool. The video featured Brett and his friends mustering cattle on horseback under the wide blue Centralian skies, set to a catchy country-rock tune Brett had written and performed with his friends. Bookending the video was footage of Brett and his friend Troy swooping in a helicopter and a Cessna 182 over breakaway bullocks at sunrise and sunset.

  ‘This video is like the true John Wayne Western, but better,’ Pavel enthused.

  ‘You have such handsome brother,’ Kamila cooed.

  The video gave me unexpected credibility with these teenagers, who enthusiastically chanted, ‘This is the life!’ back to me.

  The teachers let me get away with this strange teaching approach, which was lucky, as it meant every class was full of fun and cheek and more than a hint of Australian sex appeal. I had to admit my brother and his friends did look better than movie cowboys as they galloped wildly after cattle, horses gleaming, hooves and dust flying, helicopter blades whirring, the muster culminating in a riotous dance of guys and gals in boots and hats.

  The games of my brother and his friends arose out of working like ‘little men’ all our childhoods. But in Sedlčany, students of all ages carried a different but no less important obligation—they had to care for each other during the day like little adults.

  I was shocked to learn that, when they were not in lessons, students wandered around the town or spent time at friends’ houses because there was nowhere else for them to go. There were not enough teachers during ordinary school hours to run lessons for the students at once, nor enough classrooms to accommodate them, nor any sports grounds at the school.

  Parents weren’t usually available because under the former regime they’d been forced to work, so the older students also carried the additional responsibilities of caring for the younger ones. They walked or cycled everywhere, riding bikes to and from school—up to fifty kilometres a day—without complaint.

  I couldn’t imagine teenage students being so responsible and self-sufficient back in Australia. Perhaps that was because, in my experience at least, Australian schools deemed students irresponsible and incapable of self-regulation unless proved otherwise. With draconian rules imposed upon them, Australian students were always looking to break those rules. In the absence of those kind of rules, the students of Sedlčany stepped up and enjoyed other privileges.

  Sex among teenagers, for example, was normální here, as was staying at each other’s homes in order to have sex—according to Pavel, who one afternoon decided to educate me on the finer points of teenage activities. There was no accommodation in Sedlčany: ‘So, Tanya, where else would we go, if not our own bed?’

  He was surprised at my surprise.

  His easy revelations and the relaxed way students here talked about relationships stood in stark contrast to my own strict Protestant upbringing. In the 1960s and ’70s, sex before marriage was considered taboo. Illicit liaisons, if they occurred at all, were fumbling and awkward and usually in the back seat of someone’s borrowed car, certainly not in the comfort of one’s own bed. The ‘fire and brimstone’ shame associated with teenage sex, and the risk of an unwanted pregnancy, still made me feel slightly sick at age thirty-one.

  But here, teenage pregnancy was rare.

  Students talked about nights entwined with their fellow students in the same casual way they talked about the pleasure of singing a song, cycling through the woods, sailing a canoe down the river or quoting poetry (which they apparently did, quite often, even the boys; many even wrote poetry).

  Pavel went on to tell me, with all the confidence of a blond, handsome seventeen-year-old, that sex was better with love, but that Czech friendship, in a special way, was the ‘highest form of love’.

  ‘We even have special words for Czech friendship in our language—přítel or přátelství.’

  Kamila confirmed this was true. She also told me that the first of May was called the Day of Love when the Czechs carried out their special tradition of Guarding the Maypole.

  ‘Under former regime we had to dress up in special uniform and march in May Day parades. Now we just have fun. Our boys build the maypole from some tree in the forest and take care of it all night so that boys from the other village cannot come and cut it down. There can be ribbons, flowers and dancing—and drinking!’

  She paused. ‘In earlier times, tradition was the boy would build a maypole in front of the garden of the girl he wished to marry. She would wear circle of ribbons on her hair if she liked him!’ To explain the significance of the ritual, Kamila put two fingers together to make a circle, then put her finger from the other hand deep inside the circle and wiggled it. I must have looked startled as she giggled some more. The maypole and the head wreath were sexual symbols? ‘In this case there would usually be a wedding within one year.’

  Fertility, spring, pagan rituals. Magic!

  She twirled a long blonde strand of hair. ‘And on this day, first of May, a boy can take a girl under a blooming tree and kiss her.’

  A blooming tree! I loved it.

  We might have had political freedom in the West over the decades but did we have personal and sexual freedoms? Not like this, at least not at my all-girl Methodist boarding school. And while the East suffered from stifling political control, perhaps in other ways its people enjoyed a form of personal freedom—a sort of individual, sexual free will.

  I was learning a lot more from my students than they were learning from me.

  What the Cz
echs did not have was free will in their supermarkets.

  When I received my first packet of Czech koruna as ‘advance wages’, I rushed to the supermarket on the main square. It might have been uninspiring to look at but I was determined to buy some food to get my system back in order—some fruit, some vegetables, something healthy. Surely fruit and vegetables looked the same the world over? I thought I’d be alright without an escort.

  I entered through the sliding door and came face to face with three aisles stacked to the ceiling with Czech beer, spirits and wine. I’d never seen alcohol in a supermarket before. I could hardly believe half the supermarket space was dedicated to it. Perhaps it was a form of self-medication under communism that had lived on. On the last shelf, bottles of the dreaded Becherovka herbal tonic loomed before me, so I hurried off to find food.

  I found it at the back of the supermarket. The fresh fruit and vegetable options were limited—expensive bananas and some wilted apples, potatoes and cabbage, and not much else. There were piles of pumpkin, but it was only used as food for pigs. I was the only foreigner in town and everyone knew where I lived, so I couldn’t even pretend I had a pig in my panelák.

  To my dismay there were shelves of tins and packets filled with things and named with words that made no sense to me. There was also a large dairy and pork section, with many attendants assisting, but as I didn’t know what anything was, and people were staring at me, I lost my nerve. Instead, I decided to just grab some essentials and come back later with a student or teacher to help me. Collecting two bananas, two apples, a loaf of dark bread and cheese, I headed for the cashier. I really wanted milk but I’d only seen it in UHT cartons. Apparently fresh milk was sold in ‘large sacks’ but that was beyond my skill set to find today. I wondered if I’d ever learn enough language to shop here properly.