Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

STAYING IN AN HISTORICAL APARTMENT

Forgive me for unloading yet another traveller’s tale upon you (though I must add there are plenty more to come); but in December of last year, we found ourselves in a situation that New Zealanders experience rarely. We were staying for a week in an historical building of some antiquity. Well alright… not all that much antiquity, but sufficiently antique for New Zealanders, and enough to set us thinking.

It happened like this.

We’d flown down from Amsterdam to spend a week in Prague.

Our arrival was an unhappy one. The taxi we had pre-booked to drive us to our apartment didn’t turn up, and after a long and irritating wait, we had to hire another cab off the rank, only now getting used to the fact that we were no longer in the Eurozone. Fortunately the price to make the long trip to the old city was 850 Koruna, which translates as a very reasonable price. The taxi-driver was of limited – or at least heavily-accented - English, but he was cheerful and trying to be helpful by pointing out the obvious. “Smetana was a very famous composer,” he said, as we passed a large poster announcing a performance of Smetana’s works. Going by the Czech National Theatre – now called the Estates Theatre - he said that was where some of Mozart’s work was premiered. We nodded, having already booked to see The Magic Flute there (though I would have much preferred to be seeing Don Giovanni, which premiered in Prague in October 1787). He eventually dropped us off in the tiny, narrow, old-city alleyway where out apartment was.

We were met by the guy who handed over the keys to us. He was a loquacious Frenchman – and he explained that it was forbidden to instal elevators in the old apartment blocks of the old city. So, with our very, very heavy trunks (they were carrying what we needed for three months’ worth of journey), and with the Frenchman saying he couldn’t carry anything for us because he had a hernia, we trundled up four floors to our apartment. I was once again forcibly reminded why, in pre-elevator days, the upper-storey apartments were the cheap ones (and it was in garrets that artists and grisettes starved and worked). I also reflected that the four flights of stairs were probably what kept the price down for budget-strained tourists like us. And I had some scepticism about the key-man’s hernia.

Outside our door, I paused to look down the deep stairwell and immediately thought how anxious parents must have been for their children in the days when this solid building accommodated familes. Did any plunge to their death over the rails? My Hitchcock-stuffed brain at once registered images of the pulsating stairwell in Vertigo.

And so into the apartment.

It was huge.

Here were the two of us, renting it for a week, yet the entrance hall alone was large enough to be an apartment in itself. The kitchen was the size of a dining hall, and there were fully three large bedrooms, all of them with more than king-sized double-beds; and an even larger lounge with a massive television screen and cushioned sofas broad enough to serve as beds. The fact is, eight or nine adults could have been housed here comfortably, with room to spare, and yet here we were on our own. Only the shower room and the lavatory were of modest size.

The Frenchman handed over the keys to us, explained security matters, gave us a map of the nearer parts of the city and put in some plugs for local restaurants and shops (for which service he is doubtless paid a retainer).

And there we were.

We were tired. It was night. We had been promised a distant view of the castle across the Vtlava, but all we could see out the window were near lights. When we had flung our things down, we slumped onto the cushioned sofas and rested a while.

We let the place sink in. The building must have been mid-nineteenth century at latest. Clearly this ample apartment would once have been a family home, or rather the home of a succession of families over many years. It had maintained its spacious shape since the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so ghosts started walking with me.

What were people who lived here thinking at the time Austria decided to share power with the Kingdom of Hungary in the 1860s? Were there Czechs living here who resented not being equal partners in the empire? Or were only German-speakers so well housed? How did they feel when the empire turned authoritarian during the First World War, clamped down on the newspapers with heavy censorship and conscripted unwilling soldiers like Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk? And what about the rioting and shooting after the war, the messy disintegration of the empire and setting up of the new republic of Czechoslovakia, and the Czech Legion checking the Bolsheviks? Surely some of these events would have caused an uproar in the streets below? And then the sellout of 1938-39 and five years of Nazi occupation. And more years of repression and terror after the Communist takeover of 1948. And what did people in this apartment think of the “Prague Spring” in 1968, and the Soviet invasion that followed? And of the “Velvet Revolution” that removed the Communists and then the break with Slovakia and the creation of the Czech Republic? There was greater or lesser turmoil in all these things across a century and a half.

My ghosts did not suggest Kafkaesque images of impenetrable authority (see the posting Author intoTourist Icon for notes on Kafka’s Prague). Rather, they suggested pure fear. Was that what successive families felt in this apartment and others in this building – or were they complacent people, willing to roll with the status quo or whatever replaced it? There is no way of knowing.

I let the ghosts tramp around me for a while and then, despite our still both being rather tired, we decided to explore a little. Down the many stairs we went and out the front door, to discover there was an Italian restaurant next door to the old apartment block and a wine-and-spirits bottle shop across the road. Pig’s heaven. We walked to a local market, and bought mandarins and bananas and a punnet of juicy blackberries which we devoured at once, sitting on the deep and accommodating window ledge of a restaurant. Then we wound through streets, narrow streets, of jewellery stores, more restaurants, tourist-souvenir-and-trinket sellers and a “museum” of “sex machines”. The streets were crowded with tourists like us, but most of them younger than we are, some obviously looking to go clubbing but all, absolutely all, wearing heavy winter clothes and woollen headgear as we were.

The central square was lit up with Christmas lights, a huge Christmas tree and a display in the shape of the two-towered cathedral with, of course, the real cathedral in the background and the old town-hall with its mobile clock and other buildings of reputable antiquity.

We were still calculating anxiously the price of things in Koruna. I fell upon, and gorged myself upon, a delicious, grilled spicy sausage, a speciality of these parts. She drank mulled wine while I drank mulled cider, and later she bought from another stall goulash soup (yes, it’s Hungarian, not Czech) and a cheese delicacy. As she always does, she admired the patient and handsome horses that draw carriages around the square for tourists with more money than sense.

But oh the crush of tourists as a light snow began to fall!

I assume for most of them, Christmas is a purely secular festival now. The Czech Republic itself is said to be one of the least religious countries in what is now a largely de-Christianised continent. Even so, when we heard a band, in one screened-off corner of the square, playing loudly and a little off-key, we joined the large group of people listening to them; and found they were a youth band of high-school age. Their repertoire had at least some genuine Christmas carols among them. From the Czech-singing woman soloist, I could make out such words as “Bethlehem” and “Maria” and “Gloria”. And nearby, there was a life-sized Nativity scene, though not quite like the spectacular one made of straw that we found some days later up at the castle.

We tramped, now genuinely weary, back to our large four-up apartment, and slumped into bed, letting the ghosts dance a little longer before sleep.

There was again a light snow when we looked out the window in the morning and we could see across the tiled rooftops to a nearby church. But a white-out still denied us the distant view of the castle.

One hundred-and-fifty years is not real antiquity to Europeans or, for that matter, to most of the world’s population. But it is antiquity to most New Zealanders. Surely family tales spanning that much time could be told about preserved villas in Freeman’s Bay or Wadestown or Corstorphine. Somehow, though, they would not seem to echo so much turbulent history, or history that had major effects across the world.

For the week that followed, the large apartment creaked, like its parquet flooring, to the sounds of the two of us, and of the many people who once lived here.