Читать книгу Sketches from Childhood - Milan Svanderlik - Страница 7

CHAPTER 3

OF NUNS, RABBITS AND RAILWAY TRAINS

At that time, there must have been a convent nearby because, once a week, a group of nuns, dressed in the flowing, sombre habits of those days, would walk past our house on their way to the local church. Watching them through our iron gates, I was fascinated by these strange beings. One day they caught sight of me and stopped; they asked me a few questions about my name and age and suchlike - the sort of questions adults always put to small children they don’t know - and, as I responded, they looked at me in what I felt was a kind and friendly way - several of them even smiled at me. I didn’t see many people passing by like this, close to our house, and even when they did, they most assuredly did not smile; they usually turned and looked away. The nuns were completely different: they might all have been draped, head to foot, in black habits and pure white wimples, but they almost seemed to radiate goodness and light. One Sunday, seeing them make their usual weekly progress towards the house, I ran out to meet them; to my great surprise and delight, they passed through the gate to me a little parcel of what proved to contain vanilla crescent biscuits (Vanilkové rohlíčky) - in English, they are called ‘Viennese Fingers’. The smell of vanilla was wonderfully exotic and the taste of the soft, sweet, crumbly hazelnut pastry I shall never forget. (I still have a soft spot for these particular biscuits!) Anyway, I was in heaven.

After that, every week, when the sisters came past our house, they would always slip me the same little parcel of deliciousness - they must have made them fresh every week. But nothing lasts: one week, to my bitter disappointment, they failed to make their customary visit and I was heartbroken; I never saw them again. Many years later, I learned that the convent had been dismantled by the state and who knows what happened to the sisters. I hope they were safe and were able to keep on making Vanilkové rohlíčky for many more years. Religion was to play no part in the building of a bright, Socialist future, of course, but I for one will never forget the kindness of these nuns, their smiling faces and their tender touches through the garden gate. Even more, I shall never forget the delicious biscuits they brought me every week. Was I not a lucky little boy?

Despite my gifts of scrumptious biscuits, I gradually became aware that my parents were having difficulty obtaining certain foodstuffs, though I wasn’t sure exactly why. Luckily, my mother grew most of our vegetables herself, together with some fruit; she also kept rabbits in the basement, not as pets, of course, but as our only source of fresh meat. At one time though, we did have one of these large, tame rabbits living with us in the house, and he was definitely a family pet. He was big and beautiful. I loved to stroke his gorgeous, soft fur and to feed him carrots, which he consumed with amazing gusto. I think his name was Bimbo and my brother, Mirko, adored him. Whenever Mirko came to the house, Bimbo would bounce on to his lap, where he would settle happily, occasionally managing to chew off completely one of the buttons on Mirko’s shirt. If Mirko found this amusing, my mother was not pleased at all. Bimbo was certainly no saint: he loved to chew through anything that looked interesting and vaguely edible, so no shoelace was safe from his voracious appetite and his destructive incisors. His nemesis came on the day he succeeded in gnawing his way through an electric cable; my mother finally lost patience at this wanton destruction and decided that Bimbo’s end was definitely nigh. His fate was to come in the form of a ‘Bimbo stew’, a delicious, heartwarming dish much enjoyed by everyone around the table, in blissful ignorance of its grim ingredients. Searching for Bimbo some time later, my brother discovered the terrible truth about his beloved Bimbo’s end; he refused to speak to our mother for weeks afterwards. No mention was ever made of Bimbo thereafter, but I don’t think my brother ever quite forgave my mother for the slaughter of his darling rabbit.

One day, long after the cooking of Bimbo, my parents were summoned to attend some official meeting in the administrative capital of the region, Liberec, and I was allowed to go too. As this was my first trip on a railway train, I was really excited. I remember vividly boarding the train, with its four carriages pulled by a big, black steam engine that to me looked huge, noisy and rather frightening, but somehow also magnificent. There was so much steam, so much smoke and soot, but so much raw power. As soon as the train pulled out of the station, I noticed two uniformed railway staff locking the doors at each end of our carriage. I could also see armed guards at either end of the train. As I know now, this part of Czechoslovakia shared a frontier with Germany and Poland and to get to Liberec, the train had to cross international borders. There were high, barbed-wire fences, with watchtowers, as we travelled through East German territory (DDR) and I was fascinated at being in a foreign country for the first time. The people at stations we passed through were foreigners, I suddenly realised, yet they all looked just the same as us. And certainly one might have justly wondered, if these were our “friendly Communist neighbours”, why exactly were there such high fences? Curiously, the thought that actually came into my mind was entirely different, something much more akin to the interests of a child: I remember naively asking my mother, “Surely the deer can't like these fences; they won’t be able to roam, will they?” It was only years later when I understood that these fences were there, not to frustrate the local deer herds, but to keep the people in.

The train only stopped when we reached Liberec and we had arrived back into Czechoslovak territory. Though I can still conjure up in my mind many details from that exceptional journey, I remember little about our destination itself. My parents found their way to, and entered, some vast, dreary building; they waited to be seen in dull, grey, nondescript interiors for what seemed like forever; and they eventually had a meeting with some official-looking people, who were every bit as grey as their surroundings. Though not in uniform, these officials struck me as hostile, for like the uniformed personnel who came to our house, they never once smiled, and I knew I did not like them. This was my first train journey, my first experience of travelling through a foreign country, and my first encounter with the bureaucracy that would, before too long, change my entire life.