Читать книгу Czechmate - Michael Condé-Jahnel - Страница 7

I recalled the first time I had walked down the narrow steps leading to the small basement of Edi’s house a few years earlier. I had been stunned at the sight that awaited me. Several large shelves were spread across the room.

Perched on top were row upon row of heavy-duty ‘Leitz Ordners’, large and clunky compressed cardboard binders with two-hole steel prongs and a ‘mouse-trap’ closure. The binders stood rigid like so many soldiers on parade, memorial slates in salute of those, whose life stories they contained. Theirs were stories of lesser or greater misfortune, of surrender and of triumph of the human spirit in the face of stark adversity.

Rachel had declined to join me on this trip, consistent with our growing estrangement. It had taken a few weeks to persuade my son Simon, seventeen then, to part with his buddies for a couple of weeks to join his father in Europe.

We had managed to get a direct charter flight from Halifax into Munich-Riem. Before taking the S7 train to Edi’s house, Simon had walked over to the information board with the multi-coloured grid of suburban train connections inside Greater Munich. The S7 pointed a crooked line, like an admonishing finger, northwest toward Dachau. Days later, our visit to the camp had left a deep and lasting impression on both of us. There was the foreboding black wrought iron structure at the entrance with the single door insert. Above it, the Nazi slogan: ‘Arbeit macht frei’.

After a few days in Munich, Edi had accompanied both of us on our drive north to the Czech Republic, having separated from its Slovakian neighbour to the south some five years earlier. Reichenberg – now called Liberec – was our destination, after brief stops in Pilzen to visit the famous brewery and also Prague, where Edi had spent a couple of years in boarding school during the mid thirties. When our car pulled up in front of the hotel in Liberec, we noticed the barely visible, washed out writing on the side wall. ‘Goldener Loewe’, it said, no longer a proclamation of welcome, but simply a reminder of days long past. The brightly illuminated, garishly red translation of ‘Zlaty Lev’ now shouted at us from the main entrance.

“This place was filled with townsfolk in their finest for your grandfather’s silver wedding anniversary.”

I remembered hearing my mother’s voice. We had looked at old photos together in her nursing home years earlier. It would be the last time I would see her alive.

Our trio had climbed the red carpeted stairs leading to the spacious front lobby of the hotel. Edi had struck up a conversation with the receptionist. Ever since crossing the border into the Czech Republic earlier that day, he had taken delight in practicing his remaining knowledge of the language on unassuming passersby. Who in our grandfather’s wedding party might have slept in the room Simon and I were about to occupy?

The rich luster of expansive mahogany paneling had faded, some of it replaced by darkened and stained wallpaper. Where presumably there had been gleaming floors and thick carpets once, cheap vinyl tiles had been installed. And over at the dining room bar, where the hotel had once catered to royalty, city luminaries, high-ranking Nazi and finally Russian officers, now were what appeared to be a couple of hookers plying their trade, hoping for business to pick up before the night was over.

And was this not the ballroom where the ‘Schlaraffia Order’ had met more than sixty years earlier, when the menacing sound of a thousand boots in goosestep had not been heard – yet? The place where those that were still believing in mankind had placed themselves knowingly into harms way.

Edi had been our perfect guide then. He proudly proclaimed that he had been back numerous times since retiring half a dozen years earlier, when researching the past had become his present, much to the chagrin of some of those close to him.

We only stayed at the hotel for the first night. For the next several nights, Edi had arranged private quarters for us. In the attic of the house of an old Czech university friend on the outskirts of Liberec. Two sleeping spaces had been separated by some linens hung from the ceiling with a make-shift kitchen, breakfast table and chairs on the other side. When I awoke one morning two days later, Simon was seated at the table with a sheet of paper and pencil.

“I am trying to figure out the family connections,” he remarked while drawing a family tree on the paper. Touched and surprised by his interest, I offered help; yet it fell to Edi later that morning to complete the circle by filling in the names in all of the blank squares.

Prior to leaving my birth place the following day, we headed down a picturesque country road lined with tall poplars toward Voigtsbach, the birth place of my mother. The hollowed out shell of her family house on the main street of the village was still there; overgrown shrubbery, weeds and debris on the outside, a clear sign of neglect over many years.

We parked our car and took a brief walk up the village road, deserted during the early morning hour. Two elderly women dressed in black were heading in our direction. As he had done since crossing the border several days earlier, Edi greeted and engaged them in conversation. Their exchange became more and more animated as one of the women pointed to what appeared to be a storage building a few hundred meters up the road. Then one of the elderly women, perhaps nothing short of ninety, ambled over in my direction, gave me a hug with tears in her eyes.

Edi looked over to me with a wide grin.

“This building used to be one of the textile factories owned by your maternal grandfather before the war; now being used for storage of pharmaceutical products. Both of these ladies were born in this village and worked for your grandfather in the textile factory.”

I squeezed both of their hands and asked Edi to convey my pleasure in having met them. I knew this trip down memory lane with both Edi and Simon would remain as one of the more poignant moments in my life.

It would be almost a decade before returning to my home town, this time with a specific purpose in mind.