The Thing About Prague... E-Book

Rachael Weiss

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

When Rachael Weiss left a good job, Thelma the cat and a normal life in Sydney for the romantic dream of being a writer in Prague she intended to stay forever. She lasted just three years, exasperated by the eccentricities of her ancestral city and its mind-boggling bureaucracy and customs. In this surprising and generous memoir full of warmth and unstoppable sociability, Rachael attempts to write her great novel, buy an apartment (any apartment!), dodge unscrupulous employers, and perhaps find love. She gets lost in the woods with a Kyrgyzstani software engineer who wants to eat humans, finds herself leading services at the Spanish synagogue with no real idea of what she is doing and spends long nights drinking beer with a colourful cast of crazy, warm and slightly mad locals and expats. Rich in absurdities and gentle humour, The Thing About Prague... is rife with insight, culture clashes, friendships and above all charm.

Leseprobe

First published in 2014

Copyright © Rachael Weiss 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone:  [phone] Email:  [email protected] Web:  www.allenandunwin.com/uk

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australiawww.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 76011 102 1

E-book ISBN 978 1 92557 617 7

Set in 13/17pt Garamond Pro by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

For my mother, Angela Karpin and my grandmother, Suzanne McLeod

Prague never lets you go . . . this dear little mother has sharp claws.

—Franz Kafka

1

In 2005, I took a year out of my life to live in romantic Prague and write a novel of literary genius. I returned to Sydney after my year was up with a manila folder full of scribbled notes and half-formed ideas, no nearer to joining Kafka in the literary canon, but at least having produced a light travelogue about my year abroad. I resumed my ordinary life, fully expecting to simply pick up where I had left off. Life did return to its normal rhythm but something was not sitting right—I was restless. I was forty-one, still unmarried and childless. I made my living as a mid-level administrator—I had a nice boss and engaging work managing a team of personal assistants. It’s not a bad life, being an administrator, but it’s not the most exciting life either.

It was a visit to my doctor that decided me. I was there for my annual check-up.

‘Are you exercising?’ she asked, her eyes on the blood pressure valve.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘What do you do?’

‘Yoga twice a week and I walk to work.’ I felt like I used to at school when I’d done my homework—proud, and relieved that I could give the right answer.

‘That’s good,’ she said, still gazing at the valve and twitching her hand on the pump. ‘A regular exercise routine is important in middle age. Sets you up for a good old age.’

There was a stunned silence. At least, I was stunned. The doctor seemed to think nothing had happened. Did she just call me ‘middle-aged’? Did she just say old age?! So I’m middle-aged, with old age just around the corner?

In the office bathroom the next day, somewhat hungover, I noticed in the mirror that my eyelashes were holding up my eyelids. I put a thumb under my eyebrows and lifted. The lids lifted too. I slowly let the pressure off. The lids dropped back, exhausted, onto my lashes.

Up to then I had thought my year’s stay in Prague had been the same as my years anywhere else, just surrounded by castles. But as I poked fruitlessly at my eyebrows, thinking, aging is just one daily indignity after another, isn’t it? it occurred to me that if I had to cope with varicose veins, with crease lines from my pillow staying on my cheek until mid-morning, with mysteriously swelling feet (I don’t even want to think what that’s all about), with, in fact, middle age, I’d rather do it somewhere with romantic cobbled streets, midnight-blue evenings, snowflakes and cheap beer. Not in a dreary office block in Sydney. I felt that if I stayed here I might just as well choose a plot at Rookwood Cemetery and get it over with.

I’d like to say that my decision to move to Prague permanently was based on something grand and noble—a desire to trace my roots, a sense of adventure, my literary heart yearning to burst into flower in the sweet soil of Old Europe—but I can’t. The truth is that I had nothing better to do. If anyone asked me why I was going (and everyone did), I said airily, ‘Oh, you know, to cast my bread upon the waters and see what happens—do something different.’ Giving them the impression that I was brave and adventurous beyond words when in fact I was simply rudderless beyond words and frightened of getting old.

The decision, once made, brought with it a raft of other decisions. What should I take? What would I do when I got there? Should I tell my mother, or wait until I landed and then give her a phone call? All of them too difficult to contemplate.

I looked around at my belongings. My sister, who had once spent a year in London, had had a garage sale—‘I made a thousand dollars, just like that!’ A thousand dollars would come in handy. Mind you, my sister had had a house full of interesting artefacts from Africa, top quality china, vases, silver spoons and children’s toys. I had a few bookshelves made of particle board held together with the red paint I’d used on them fifteen years ago when I picked them up off the street, plus some aluminium pots and pans, an unused Mixmaster I’d won in a trivia quiz, a couple of pot plants and a cat.

I’d picked up Thelma along with the bookshelves and what to do with her was quite a problem. I loved that little cat. She and I had been together for most of my adult life and all of hers. She’d been a tiny scrap no bigger than the palm of my hand when I found her and had started purring the instant I stroked her little ears.

Thelma had been abandoned, poor little mite, so I took her in and loved her. I read somewhere that feral animals become domestic after five generations of being bred as domestic. My little Thelma took one. She was a cat who loved to snuggle up by the fireside, snooze through Saturday morning on my bed, and eat. A lap only had to form in the house and Thelma was on it.

She had a special affection for men, the little minx. The only people she wouldn’t sit on were people who adored cats and wanted nothing more than for Thelma to sit on them their entire stay.

What to do with Thelma was my first problem. I really didn’t feel I could take her with me, as much as I wanted to. She was fifteen years old and I worried that the trip would kill her. Also, I didn’t know where I was going to live when I got there and I didn’t want her having to change locations too many times. We’d moved a lot when she was little but in her old age we’d stayed put, mainly because I noticed she was finding it harder and harder to orient herself when we moved. She’d stay at home for weeks before she ventured out and, even when she did, she didn’t go very far.

I had vowed I wouldn’t move her again. I could see her getting happier and happier as the months passed and she made the territory her own. What would she do in an entirely new country? And what about the snow? Thelma thought the heater should go on as soon as she saw a cloud in the sky. If she was like that in Sydney, how would she cope in a Czech winter? No, Thelma would have to stay.

She had boarded at her Aunt Cynthia’s place when I went to Prague the first time. Thelma’s Aunt Cynthia had two other cats, both of whom lived like kings. They had their own baskets with a special electric warming pad each, and Cynthia, who worked from home, spent her days moving their baskets around the verandah, the cats sitting superbly within, following the sun.

I told myself that sending Thelma to live there was like putting her in a luxury retirement home. I took her over, put her in her special basket, stayed and chatted for a bit, then stood up to leave.

Never will I forget that moment. I opened the front door and walked out. Thelma came pounding up the hall and Cynthia quickly shut the screen door. Thelma scrabbled at the mesh frantically, panic stricken. As she saw me move away, saying goodbye, not coming back to rescue her, she stayed at the door, her front paws pressed against the mesh, her eyes huge and glued to me—betrayed.

For the first time it occurred to me that the decision ‘I will move countries’ had unforeseen consequences. To this day I’m haunted by that look on Thelma’s face. She’d never panicked like that when I left her with her Aunt Cynthia for holidays. I don’t know how she knew that we wouldn’t be living together again, but she did. My heart still stops with missing her.

As for my possessions, I decided to set them free. I contemplated selling them on eBay but my brother-in-law pointed out that they were worthless. I thought you could sell anything on eBay, but apparently that’s just propaganda. The neighbourhood Thelma and I had washed up in was a down-at-heel, inner-city suburb, full of drug addicts and council houses and single mothers with screaming kids. It was also full of first-time immigrants, scraping together money from laundry and corner-store businesses to send their kids to university so that the kids would not have to live in this suburb as adults.

My block of flats was a mini-Vietnam. Most of the displaced elderly inhabitants, relying solely on their neighbours and daughters for community, had fussed over Thelma, so I had a special affection for them. In my last day in the flat, I knocked on my neighbour’s door and told her, in sign language, that I was leaving, that she could come and raid my place for anything she wanted and could she please tell the other Vietnamese. A flood of Vietnamese mixed-goods merchants’ mothers descended and swept the place clean.

My fridge, which had originally been given to me by a friend who got a pay rise and decided to upgrade her white-goods, went to a young couple who were living with the single mum upstairs and who were unable to afford even knives and forks. He had no teeth and she was covered in tatts. As he took the fridge off my hands (and the hideous white-plastic-handled cutlery I’d been loathing for the last decade) he said, ‘We’re really grateful. We’ve just found a place to live. I’m really going to try this time. I know hitting her’s wrong.’

I almost took the fridge back, but then she came in and asked if she could take a bookshelf—‘we don’t have one’—and she seemed so nice. Why make judgement calls about her choice of man? That was her business.

My own parents had done as the Vietnamese were doing—made sacrifices so I could get a proper education and rise from the bottom of the heap. I and the woman across the hall, who was the same age as me and single as well, were nevertheless still living on the bottom of the heap. In a city as expensive and fast-paced as Sydney, if you were single and only earning a moderate wage, your accommodation options were quite limited.

The Vietnamese were first-time immigrants, but their children would live in a better suburb. The rest, however—the single mums and the terminally unemployed—were stuck there from birth to death, and their kids would be too. For them, living on an even grimmer wage than my own, life was horrifyingly precarious. How much lower could any of us go? A caravan? The street?

The only things I couldn’t part with were my books. Like everything else I owned I’d been carting those books around for twenty years. But, unlike everything else (except Thelma), they had real value for me—they were like old friends. I contemplated setting them free but after the trauma of parting with Thelma I was more careful to ask myself how much I actually cared.

The question of moving my books caused a terrible family commotion. I investigated moving companies. The first one offered to move them for six thousand dollars. After I’d come to, I called others, thinking I must have struck pirates. But no, apparently it was going to cost me at least five thousand dollars to move my books from Sydney to Prague and the company who gave me that quote was so dodgy that I finally settled on one that would do it for five thousand five hundred, but who wasn’t proposing to ship them via Kazakhstan to keep costs down.

I only needed a minute to ask myself if it was worth it. Of course it was. I’d lost Thelma, I couldn’t lose my books as well. They were all I had. But then, in an unthinking moment, I revealed these plans to my father.

‘Why are you taking your books?’

‘Because I love them.’

‘But they will take up so much space.’

‘I don’t love space, I love my books.’

‘How are you going to get them there?’

‘A moving company.’

‘A moving company?! How much is that going to cost you?’

‘. . . Um . . .’ Curses! Why didn’t I see that coming? Quick, lie!

‘How much?’

‘. . . Um . . .’ Dammit, lie better than that!

‘A lot? It’s a lot, isn’t it? How much?’

‘Well it’s. . . well it’s. . . okay, it’s about five thousand dollars. But I can’t live without them.’

‘Five thousand dollars!!’

Sigh. This was not going to go away quickly. Dad enumerated for me the many, many ways in which five thousand dollars could be better spent. I tried not to disagree too much, finally putting an end to this agonising conversation by saying, ‘Yes, well, I’ll think about it.’ The coward’s response.

Naturally, it became the subject of scandalised horror for my family. When I called my father a few days later, my stepmother answered the phone.

‘Hello, darlink,’ she said, very lovingly, because we do get on well, my stepmother and I. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fi—’

‘WHY ARE YOU TAKING YOUR BOOKS TO PRAGUE?’

‘Well, you know how it is, I just . . .’ But she wasn’t listening. Her feelings were running too high.

‘I took all my books from Russia, and what do they do? They just sit there on the shelves! Gathering dust! I had read them all. All! I never picked them up again. You have read your books! Why must you take them with you?’

And so on. No point arguing. I just went ahead and shipped them, and the hot topic in the family gossip circle became my stubbornness in the face of reason.

I visited Thelma again every week before I left. Cynthia and I wanted her to know that she had two mums now, not that she’d lost one. We were as deluded as any parent who’s abandoned their children in divorce. (‘Mummy and Daddy love you just as much, and here’s a new bike to prove it.’) Thelma knew she didn’t have two mothers.

She punished me mightily at first. On my next visit, she sat with her back pointed towards me and pretended to be absorbed in something outside in the garden. I stroked her ear and she bit me. Who can blame her? She had right on her side. On my second visit, she thawed a little, enough to let me tickle her chin for a few minutes—before biting me. After that, things got easier. She never really forgave me but she did eventually pad up to me and demand some lap time.

I think Thelma had done her calculations. She’d looked around—at the electric heating pad, at the aunt who was home all day and who fed her roast chicken for lunch if she was looking like she needed cheering up, at the two cat companions, both of whom she’d managed to boss into submission—and she’d asked herself if she was doing badly on this deal. I think she realised that in fact her life had improved although, like me, she was living without the special bond we had. But she was bonding with Cynthia. When it was time for me to leave for good, Thelma, to my relief, was talking to me again and had settled in to her new home.

2

I arrived in Prague in March. I love a new beginning. I could see my life in Prague spreading before me, glowing and new. I’ll get up at dawn, meditate, do my yoga, then have a healthy breakfast, followed by a day of writing my new novel. And when I need a break from writing, I’ll go to the gym, or study my Czech or write amusing columns to sell to the New Yorker. I calculated that at the end of a year I would be thin, calm, flexible, and have a world-famous, really cool blog and a three-book deal. Yes, beginnings are fun for me, mainly because I really believe my life is going to be just as I am imagining it, forgetting the little matter of the self-discipline I so manifestly lack and the forty or so years of modest failures to prove it.

Actually, for the first two months I really did have a great time. Having already lived there a year, I knew enough of Prague and the language to feel at home. When I emerged from the baggage claim area into the Arrivals hall, wheeling the suitcase that contained my world, I strode past the bored taxi drivers holding cardboard signs—I didn’t need anyone to pick me up!—straight to the Information Desk. Not to ask how one gets to the centre, in apologetic English, as the polite but panicked American man in front of me was, but to buy a monthly pass, in the Czech language I’d been practising on the plane.

‘Dobrý den. Ráda bych měsíční jízdenku, prosím.’ Hello. I would like a monthly travel pass, please.

The woman behind the glass looked astonished, as well she might, and then she lit up. At last! Someone had bothered to learn Czech!

‘Žžřťňčéčďřťňžéčřďžž!ĎáččňóúšřřřřžáážýŽďťéúšžř!ŤŽďáňč óřúřřďť!’

Ah.

She saw the blank look on my face and smiled indulgently. ‘Your Czech is very good,’ she said, in perfect English.

‘I must practise more,’ I replied, also in English but still feeling buoyant, and took the pass from her. What a nice woman, and how much she must have been impressed by me, a tourist who knew her way around the airport and transport system and even a bit of non-pidgin Czech. I wheeled the bag to the 119 bus queue, thrilled I could remember exactly where it was. Thrilled, in fact, with everything about the first few minutes of my new life.

I made my way by bus and metro to my father’s flat, a communist-built concrete block (panelák in Czech) in a light industrial district where I was going to stay until I found a place of my own. His flat was kept there for him and any of our Czech family to stay in when they came to Prague. It was clean and light, floors and surfaces as uncluttered as a hotel room, cosy enough but lacking the personality of a lived-in flat. That suited me exactly. I wanted a space that was unmarked, somewhere to simply be while I gradually invented my new existence. I parked my bag on the bare wood floor, removed my toothbrush and pyjamas, and hung up my few clothes in the wardrobe, which was empty apart from my father’s winter coat.

My inner clock had stopped owing to jetlag but I could see that the late winter dark was closing in. I remembered the pub around the corner; a quiet, cosy place full of locals, which served cheap and hearty Czech meals—dumplings, pork and the truly amazing, unbeatably world-class Czech beer. When I got there the tables were mostly empty, it being only about 5.30. My favourite spot—up the back where I could watch the crowd and not feel too exposed myself—was free and I sank into it.

A waiter, whose face I remembered and who seemed to remember me by the smile he gave me as he plonked down the cutlery jar, took my order, which I delivered to my immense personal satisfaction in Czech. Although, to be honest, ‘Beer and schnitzel, please’ is hardly Shakespeare. Nevertheless, it was Czech, and it was understood. I felt talented and strong. I felt home.

That first night in the pub, in the jetlag dreamworld that is like being in a space pod, I splashed down the beer like a local and ordered a second, while I read my Czech grammar book. Looking back on that night, I’d recommend selling everything you own, leaving all your friends and your family and moving to the other side of the world if only to experience the feeling I had of actual, real, unalloyed, joyful, baggage-free freedom.

I began my new life full of starry-eyed resolutions. The next morning I woke up at 5.30, radiant and energetic, the pre-dawn light just brushing the room in a way that made me feel at one with the burgeoning, pearl-grey day. I got up and put a cushion on the floor to sit on, then one for my back, two for my knees, a final one for my right ankle, which always gives me trouble when I sit cross-legged, and meditated. At least I did what I think is meditating, as commanded by my How to Meditate book.

For me, meditating is trying not to think of anything but sitting . . . and then daydreaming relentlessly. Every few minutes I’d realise I wasn’t meditating—I’d pull myself back (like pulling a cow back onto the path, says my book), count backwards from 100 and try to concentrate on every number. 100 . . . 99 . . . So far, so good. Gosh I’m hungry—can I remember where to buy eggs? I think I’ll need eggs for breakfast. Fried? Mmm. I love fried eggs, and I’m quite good at them, getting a soft yolk and slightly crispy white. Do they sell bread in the corner store or only rohlíky? Hmm. I think I’ll have ro—D’oh! Start again. For some reason, the book commands you to start again if (if!) you lose count.

100 . . . 99 . . . Good, good . . . 98 . . . You can do it . . . 9—Ha ha, how cute is the cartoon at the end of the Czech news? Off to bed now kids, look—the little kid on TV is going to bed, time for you to bugger off too so Mummy and Daddy can get stuck into the slivovice. Can’t think why every country doesn’t do it . . . D’oh! 100 . . . 99 . . . And so on.

Astoundingly, I meditated every morning for the first week. But then it started to eat into my day, because I was getting up at 9 am. So by the time I’d put out the cushions, got comfortable, done the initial relaxation exercises—a deathly dull routine of breathing in one nostril and out the other, which only served to significantly increase my tension levels—it was 10.30 and half the morning was gone.

I made feeble resolutions to get up at 5 o’clock again, but they came to nought. I wasn’t very good at meditating to start with and I didn’t seem to be getting any better. I never really relaxed and my knees hurt. I tried lying down but then I just fell asleep.

The trouble with beginnings is they quickly turn into middles, where it’s all about avoiding the daily grind and lying around cursing myself for my laziness and watching my fantasies evaporate. Although I tried to maintain a sense of wonder and joy in my bright new life, within a couple of weeks mundanities began to press in on my dreamworld ever so slightly and as more weeks passed they pressed more urgently. I needed a job and I needed a flat, I needed some kind of internet connection and I needed a phone service. I barely spoke any Czech—just enough to say, ‘I’ll have a beer and schnitzel, please’—and that one phrase, as helpful as it was, wasn’t going to solve any of these problems for me.

Job hunting in those first three months proved increasingly depressing. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to teach English like every other expat, although my father was pushing me to. ‘Look, darling, get yourself a certificate and you can teach at the university,’ he’d said.

He was obsessed with the idea of my being a teacher at ‘the university’, meaning Charles University in Prague, one of the oldest in Europe.

‘It’s not that easy, Dad.’

‘Of course it is! They need English speakers!’

‘No they don’t.’

‘How do you know? Have you been there?’

Well, no, I hadn’t been there, but Dad had this strange idea that I’d just be able to walk into Charles University speaking English and everyone would reel back in amazement and offer me a job as a professor of English. The Czechs are some of the best educated people in the world. Everyone goes to university. Charles University didn’t need me.

‘Well, no I haven’t been there but . . .’

‘Why must you be so stubborn!?’ It was the usual ending to our conversations.

I suppose I could have got a teaching certificate and joined the hordes of Brits and Americans working for horrible cowboy outfits for a pittance, but two things stopped me.

First, I don’t have what it takes to work for a horrible cowboy outfit. There are plenty of them in Prague. ‘Schools’ set up by glassy-eyed bandits, mainly from Russia and America—men who’d arrived in Prague like rats off a cargo ship that’d washed up on a tropical paradise filled with vulnerable foreigners who had no other way of earning a living, and natives desperate to learn the language of the internet. Living was cheap, wages were low and labour was plentiful.

I heard tale after tale of teachers working for minimal rates a few hours a week, having to travel three hours for every one they worked and not getting paid for their travel time, being done out of their pay, being promised visas that never materialised. I kept hearing of jobs lost with no notice and ghastly bosses. I’m no good at screaming at people just to get paid. I did have to do it once, when I worked for a cowboy outfit in Sydney that had taught computer skills to the unemployed. I know myself; I can’t stand that sort of stress.

Second, I didn’t want to teach English because that was the job that all the expats did, and I didn’t want to be in the expat crowd. I didn’t want to work with a whole lot of Americans and Brits, where I’d have to talk endlessly about the food and television we’d left at home. I wanted a job, any job, one that was more like an ordinary job. Somewhere where I might actually get to talk to some Czechs in Czech. I wanted to make a life here, a permanent life. I wanted to be Czech.

Unfortunately, with no Czech language the jobs I could apply for were limited. In fact, there weren’t any. None. There were jobs for people who couldn’t speak Czech but they were for people who had other useful languages, like Norwegian and Dutch. These were call centre jobs—not the most glamorous work, but I’d have done it if I’d had just one other European language. The horrible fact was that everyone in Europe could speak English. That’s why I was so sure Charles University wouldn’t be impressed by my English if I went there. They’d only be astonished by my inability to speak so much as a single other international language. Not many people in Europe can boast such a handicap.

No, non-Czech speakers were useful only if they could also speak another European language. The call centres were set up in cheap Prague to service more expensive European locations—Scandinavia and Holland, for instance. Not Australia or America.

Day after day I trawled the internet looking for a job I could actually do, anything, anything at all. I spent my first month in Prague searching on www.expats.cz, then my second searching on www.expats.cz and biting my fingernails. By the third month, feeling sicker and sicker with anxiety, I was looking at courses in Teaching English as a Second Language, ‘just in case’.

3

While I was looking for a job I looked for a place to live. Getting a place of my own had even more urgency about it than getting a job because getting my own place was about putting down roots, about making a home. I had left nothing—literally nothing, except Thelma—back in Australia.

As of March I had been completely without roots. Everything I owned was on the high seas, no doubt shortly to be plundered by Romanian Customs, and I had no more than a passport, some clothes and a dawning realisation that complete freedom’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s dislocating. At first it’s marvellous but after a while you begin to crave boundaries, for something that ties you to the ground. For the first couple of weeks I lay back and revelled in the feeling that no-one and nothing ruled my life. Then as the blurry, unstructured days passed, I began to long for people to make demands of me, to make me get out of bed, do something, do anything.

No, I needed a house and a job. The house-hunting was important, not least because it gave me something productive to do while I waited for a job to provide me with deadlines. I was determined to buy a flat in Prague. Before I had looked at house prices I’d taken a walk along the river and decided that what I’d really like would be a lovely flat in the top of a building overlooking the river—a converted nineteenth-century palace, preferably with a statue of a couple of naked Greek men over the portico. Then I looked at house prices. The glassy-eyed Americans and Russians already owned those flats. They were as expensive as New York warehouse loft conversions.

So I fished around and came up with the area I thought would suit me. Like any city, there are different areas for different sections of the community. The industrial area on the river bend in an area called Holešovice had a certain amount of investment appeal. It was slowly, slowly being transformed from industrial dump to exclusive residential paradise, but not fast enough for my liking. You’d have to wait twenty years before it became really desirable and—what with my middle age, the foot swelling and the dropping eyelids—I didn’t think I had twenty years to hang about. I needed somewhere I could love now, not somewhere I’d love in a decade when I’d quadrupled my money but when I might very well be dead from some medieval fluid-retention disease.

The inner city of Prague, the bits with all the thirteenth-century stone houses, was out of the question. It was too expensive for a start, but also thronged with tourists. You’d have to fight like a salmon struggling upstream just to get to your front door. The outer suburbs were unappealing—I was already living in one and the strain was beginning to tell. I needed to live somewhere where I could stay out drinking all night and be able to stagger home without having to wait for night trams for forty minutes.

I know that sounds like my life was ordered around alcohol consumption but I was single, middle-aged and rootless. Quite frankly, I would’ve been insane not to be factoring in alcohol consumption. Besides, if I was going to live in a romantic city, I wanted to live in the bits that had cobbled streets and high ceilings. I finally settled on Žižkov.

Žižkov was a poor area so I could afford to buy property there, and it was also an interesting area. Gypsies lived there, artists lived there. Revolutionaries had gathered there in Prague’s history to fight off the Austrians and the communists. It had a seedy, down-at-heel, comfortable feeling about it—a bit tatty around the edges, but gradually being burnished up. The streets were cobbled, or being cobbled. The houses were old, apart from a few patches of crumbling housing-estate blocks built by the communists. I made a mental note to avoid those streets. I wandered around getting a feel for the place and every time I did I was more and more convinced Žižkov was the place for me. And it was in Prague 3, a perfectly acceptable postal code.

‘You know they are selling a flat in my block?’ said my father, who was apparently completely serious. My father’s flat, although lovely on the inside, was in a dreadful communist-built apartment block in Prague 9, the last word in concrete-cancer and scratched aluminium—grey and decrepit. I wouldn’t live there if Daniel Craig . . . Oh no, wait, yes I would. I’d live anywhere I might be near Daniel Craig. Okay, well I wouldn’t live there unless Daniel Craig lived there too.

‘Uh-huh. Um, no I don’t think I want to live there.’

‘What is wrong with it?’ cried Dad, his voice rising, preparing to be offended.

‘Uhh . . . I need to be more in the centre.’

‘Centre! What is more central that Prague 9? You have the metro and the tram—in fifteen minutes you are in the Old Town. What are you talking about, not central? In Sydney, fifteen minutes from The Rocks is central.’

He did have a point, but to get to most places from Prague 9 I had to take two trams. I had already decided that I needed to live on the Tram 9 route, because Tram 9 comes every three minutes. It really makes a difference to your life, waiting three minutes or waiting twenty for a tram, if you rely on them. In Sydney, I’d had to drive everywhere, and that was the thing I was most grateful to be free of—the damn car. I’d started to really loathe having to drive, no matter where I wanted to go. In Prague, I could walk or take the tram. Prague’s compact. The trams are electric and easy. This aspect of life, the ease of getting around, I really wanted to take advantage of.

‘Yes, yes, it’s close,’ I said, soothingly.

‘Look, darling, you have to be sensible. You can have a new flat—big, right on the metro line. What more do you want?’

It was useless to tell him that what I wanted was romance. My father’s answer would have been ‘Can you afford romance?’ Well, no, of course I couldn’t. But I was still going to buy it.

Finding the real estate wasn’t so hard because there was a real-estate boom in Prague and crates of real-estate magazines jammed every doorway. There were three of these mags, and I took to picking them up every week. At first, everything being in Czech, it took me a little while to work out what I was looking at. A couple of times I saw something unbelievably cheap right in the centre, like in a thirteenth-century building at the foot of the Castle, and—forgetting that something that’s too good to be true usually is—I’d get all excited. Then I’d discover, after half an hour with the dictionary, that what they were offering was an option to make a bid at a later date. That gave me a clue as to the likely final price: astronomically out of my league.

I told myself I didn’t want to live with all those tourists anyway, which was true, but I couldn’t guarantee that if I’d had the money I wouldn’t have bought a thirteenth-century palace right at the Charles Bridge.

The looking in the magazines was easy. There were lots of flats and lots of agents. It was making the phone calls that was hard. At the high end of the market, exclusive agents with glossy ads pitched to the glassy-eyed cowboys or the American expats who had jobs with Accenture and who were looking to buy in Prague 1. These agents all spoke English. In frayed and grimy Prague 3, only Czechs were looking to buy. While Czechs, like all Europeans, have two or three languages at their command, the three they mostly have are Czech, German and Russian, their communist heritage still being played out in their schoolrooms where these languages are the standard. English has yet to become common linguistic currency. So, I had to call agents and in my halting Czech ask about the flats I’d seen in the magazines.

I learned the words and numbers I needed before every phone call—‘Flat’, ‘Reference Number 31490’, ‘Can I see it tomorrow?’ Invariably, and I mean every single time, a long, long string of Czech, as long and complex and incomprehensible as a blackboard full of quantum theory, came pouring out of the phone at me.

‘I am. Sorry,’ I would say, my Czech being at the stage where I had to translate every word in my head before saying it, ‘I do not. Speak. Much Czech. Please. Could you. Speak. Slowly.’

Which would be followed by another long and incomprehensible stream. I could, however, pick out a few words. Usually what it sounded like to me was this:

‘ŽzyšúkzsáříňřňčůTuesdayščzžýěšuíáéíásáíéšířájscibiuaéí áěýh.’

‘Please. I can. See it. On. Tuesday?’

‘ŽzyšúkYesříňřňčůTuesdayščzžýěšuíáéíásáíéšířájscibiuaéí áěýh.’

Intensely relieved that I’d managed to guess right, it was on to the next thing:

‘Please. What. Time?’

‘ĚáéétgýgnqpoiwputáéíáuščůlkafnTeněéíášýčžžéqíáýč.’

‘Please. Ten am?’

‘Yes, yes,’ and then more Czech. This time I could tell from the tone that 10 am was what they had said and they were getting ticked off with this conversation with someone who, while foreign, was also obviously a halfwit.

To a people-pleaser like me, the agony was excruciating. I said ‘please’ a lot because I knew that, in business, the Czechs are very, very polite and formal people. When speaking to a stranger, particularly in a business context, they weigh down their sentences with elaborate flourishes. What they were saying to me was something like ‘If it would be a matter of convenience to you, Mrs Weiss, we may possibly be able to visit the flat on the morning of the 14th, if it should also happen to be an appropriate time for Dr Engineer Svoboda, the owner of the property. If you are agreeable, I will call Dr Engineer Svoboda and endeavour to make arrangements with him that will be of convenience to all parties.’ When all I could cope with, especially over the phone, was ‘Flat free. Tuesday. 4 pm. Yes.’

Now multiply this experience by one thousand. I made five phone calls a day and every one required a preliminary pep talk from my sensible, brave self to my cowardly, whimpering self. Every single one was a nightmare of Czech. On the occasions when I did manage to make an appointment, two out of every five times the agent simply didn’t turn up. The market was so booming and the Czechs so frankly unattuned to basic business concepts like ‘selling’ after fifty years of communism, that agents would turn up only if they didn’t have something better to do.

Staggeringly, when they did turn up, most times the places they showed me were unspeakable—smelling of mould and dead cat, the walls falling in, a room full of yellowing patches of plaster and exposed wires where a bathroom should be. For a Sydneysider accustomed to the business of real estate—where you paint your house and scatter IKEA cushions around to make it look like it is always in that glossy, Better-Homes- and-Gardens state, hoping to add an extra grand or two to the price—the idea that you might put a doss house on the market at the going rate (they sold by the square metre in Prague) was extraordinary to me.

The real estate agents didn’t even look apologetic, or refer to the ‘investment opportunity’. Mostly they stared out the window, smoked a cig and waited for me to finish looking around. Truly, Czechs had a long way to go in the business of consumption.

4

The whole focus of my life in those first few months was putting down roots and establishing myself in my new city; casting on, as it were, so I could knit myself into the life and soul of Prague. In addition to a job and a home, a social life was imperative.

Having already been an expat was a major bonus, because I could at least start by tapping into the networks I’d found the first time around. One of these was the Lazy Vinohradians, a weekly social group started years ago and carried on religiously by a lanky, laconic Englishman, Mike. Vinohrady was a rather cool area of Prague, the place where you lived if you were earning a Western wage but still wanted to live among real Czechs rather than in the tourist areas. Apartments there were large and light, beautifully renovated in sculpted buildings. There was a decent shopping mall, a famous wine cellar and tea rooms. The idea was that Vinohrady had loads of good places to eat and plenty of people to dine with, so there was no reason for Lazy Vinohradians to leave the area except to go to work. Every Thursday a different restaurant was nominated, sometimes one of the established favourites and sometimes an experiment.

On the first Thursday of my return to Prague I checked the expats.cz site and saw that the LV dinner was being held at one of the old standbys, U Tří Prasátek, At the Sign of the Three Pigs. Turning up was one of those times when the world is perfect and fresh. There they were—Mike and two of my old hiking friends, Irish Pam and Mathematics Neil. There I was, free of all baggage and newly arrived in my new life, which was now delightfully sprinkled with familiar old friends who were surprised and delighted to see me again (I’d not advertised my return). I slotted into the long dining bench like I’d just been there yesterday. During the year I’d previously spent in Prague this group had provided me with many friends and casual acquaintances—people to go to the movies with, go hiking, swap information.

Almost immediately, though, the trouble with expat life became obvious. Nearly all of the people I had hiked and chatted with were gone. Mike, Pam and Neil were long-term expats, the kind that I wanted to be—they had ordinary jobs and Czech friends; they came to expat events to keep their social lives interesting. Mike was in IT, Neil taught maths at one of the universities and Pam did something that sounded like money for jam with a telecommunications company. She said she was a project manager, but she didn’t seem to do any actual work.

‘Are you here to stay now?’ she asked.

‘I’m here for good—or at least for ten years.’

‘Have you got your živno yet?’ This was Mike.

‘My what?’

‘Oh, you don’t know about this.’ He and Neil exchanged a grin. ‘The Czechs are joining the Schengen zone, so all you non-EU folks need to get a visa.’

‘The Americans are going crazy,’ said Neil. He and Mike were both English.

‘What’s the Schengen zone?’

‘It’s the European borderless zone. The Czechs want to join it but for you that means they’ll tighten up visa restrictions to comply with the EU regs, so you can’t just hop over to Dresden to renew your three-month visa. You have to have a real visa. Most people get a živno.’

A vague unease stirred within me. If there’s one thing I really loathe in life it’s paperwork. Forms, regulations, sentences like ‘In order to get your PX53 you first need to complete your IF1X5495(b), but only if you are a non-contributor. If you are a contributor, you need to get a D26 permit and only then can you apply for a 99(c)3PO.’ And so on. You’d think this aversion would be a handicap to an administrator but in fact it’s not. In my administrative life I was the person in charge of the people who could talk that language all day, every day. I had immense respect for them. I did the strategy and they made the paperwork fit. My job was way easier, in my view.

What I’d previously liked about Prague was the laxity of their visa regulations. In my year in Prague I’d just hopped over to Dresden every three months, put a foot over the border, had my passport stamped in the train and, voilà, I was legal. This, this Schengen and živno . . . this sounded complicated. The smug look on Neil and Mike’s faces told me I was right to feel unease.

Pam saved me with a change of subject. ‘Can we go hiking? I haven’t been since you were here last.’

I promised to start the hiking group again. Mike said he’d hike when hell froze over, but I could help him run the LV if I liked.

Pam wanted to go hiking because it’s a great way to meet new people, especially other expats, but I needed something more stable than expat company. I needed something real, something embedded in Czech society, to form my true social grounding. Hiking and LV meet-ups were all very well but they were only going to meet my peripheral needs, they weren’t going to be the foundation of my life. One day, sitting in my father’s flat, perusing the Prague Post for jobs, flats, anything really, I came across a small ad: ‘English service. Spanish Synagogue. Rabbi Morton Narrowe.’ Yes! The Jewish community. That’d be fun. I’ll go along there and offer to volunteer. Maybe a Purim play needs writing, perhaps they need an alto in their choir.

The next Friday, I went in search of Rabbi Narrowe and the Spanish Synagogue. According to the map, it was not far off the Old Town Square—Staroměstské náměstí—a fabulously ornate, cobblestoned square bounded by buildings of Austro-Hungarian magnificence. It’s a miracle of wealth and privilege in the heart of Prague, servicing tourists, expats and ambassadors. At its edge the buildings house EU ambassadors and an art gallery or two. Shaded cafés fringe the feet of these buildings, offering ‘Authentic Czech Food’ and beer to the tourist trade. Swarowski crystal and traditional Czech handicrafts shops nestle together next to ATMs in the narrow streets leading off the square.

To get to the Jewish quarter you have to go down Pařížská, one of the streets off the square and the most expensive street in all of Prague. An Yves Saint Laurent shop—the word ‘shop’ seems wildly inappropriate, so let’s say ‘salon’—is on the corner of Pařížská and the Old Town Square. I have never set foot in this place where terrifically slim, smooth women glide on thick carpet and young men in dark uniforms are poised to spring forward and open the door. In my casual jeans and tatty bag, I never had the social courage to enter.

Off Pařížská is Široká and down Široká should have been, according to Google Maps, the Spanish Synagogue. I walked all the way down, then all the way back, then down again and back. It wasn’t there. I was looking for something ornate, Moroccan, cupola-ed. I walked past the grey concrete façade that my map assured me was the site of the Spanish Synagogue several times, puzzled, and then I reached the coffee shop the map told me came after the synagogue. It was only when I saw a security guard appear at some wooden double doors set in the middle of the nondescript grey wall that I realised that here—looking more like a communist warehouse than a thousand-year-old breathtaking edifice—must indeed be it.

‘Je to tady služby?’ I asked the guard. Is the service here?

He nodded, not smiling and not offering anything more to the nice, friendly, inoffensive person in front of him. If there is one thing the Czechs like to do, it is to be rude to people who need their services. Small shops are a nightmare of sullen aggression.

I pinched my nose and reminded myself that I had brought this adventure on myself and that, if I’d wanted life to be easy, I could have stayed in the office in Sydney and built up my pension.

‘Teď?’ Now?

He shook his head and held up six fingers. ‘Osmnáct hodin.’ Whatever he’d said didn’t sound like ‘six’ to me, which was ‘šest’, but I took his meaning. The service started at six, and it wasn’t six. Come back later.

When I got back at just before six, there was a queue outside the Spanish Synagogue, and disappointed tourists were being firmly turned away by three security guards. The Jewish quarter is a must-see on every tourist’s tick list. It was not bombed during the war, in common with so much of Prague, which was occupied early and thus spared aerial destruction—so it is beautiful. It is steeped in mystic history: golems, thousand-year-old graveyards and dark, low-lintelled stone synagogues from a time when no-one stood taller than five foot three. It has an air of the deeply tragic overlying the mythical—an ancient world, well beyond the understanding of this one, mixed with centuries of pogroms and oppression.

Tourism in the Jewish quarter is tightly regulated. You cannot just go and see one synagogue, you have to buy a ticket that will give you access to all six of them. There is no choice about this. The Jewish Museum dictates that it shall be so, and every synagogue has this regulation posted prominently on a tin sign at its main door—you have to buy the one-and-only type of ticket at the one-and-only outlet, and it’s not cheap. It’s six synagogues’ worth, whether you like it or not.

I had some sympathy with non-Jewish tourists who tried to pretend they were worshippers so they could avoid the fee and see an ancient temple in action, but they had no hope. Even I could tell who was an ordinary tourist and who a Jewish tourist taking time out from their holiday to come and pray at a Friday night service. The non-Jewish tourists craned their necks to see through the doors as they opened to let each person in, hoping to get a glance of the interior. They bounced back and forth, chittering in excitement and anticipation. Jewish tourist worshippers looked disconsolate and complained about the service starting at six. They thought it was supposed to be seven—when had it changed to six? They might have missed it—the website really shouldn’t be so vague. It was only because they knew, from people in the States who’d just got back from Prague and had told them that, no, it was still six and it wouldn’t change to seven until later in the year. They kept their faces impassive and serious for the guards, submitting to an inspection with the grudgingly proud feeling of doing their duty to the community. The non-Jewish tourists looked surprised to be asked to do this. No, it wasn’t hard for the guards to pick them out and tell them they couldn’t come in.

It was something of a secret thrill to be let in after hours, one of the genuine punters, in a part of town that was given over to tourists for the other 166 hours in the week. It gave me the feeling I was craving—that I belonged, that I had a right to be where I was, a person with business to do in this thousand-year-old building in Prague. When my turn came at the door, I submitted to the guards with a studiously expressionless face, making eye contact only to nod that I understood the drill. They dug through my bag and ran the metal detector around my coat.

Already, after my previous year in Prague, I’d picked up a peculiar fact about Europe: anti-Semitism remained spookily strong. You grew up in Australia and you didn’t realise that hatred of Jews was this thing that was soaked into the soil of Europe—a throbbing vein. I hardly know how to explain it, except that you could feel it. You could feel it in their literature, all around you. National Guard skinheads hated Jews. I was used to a Hating Right that hated black people or Asians. But Jews? It seemed so eighteenth century, so Oliver Twist and Ivanhoe.

My father had a cousin who was given over to the Nazis by a man in his village. In his village. They’re only small, those villages. Everyone knows everyone else from babyhood. This man, who’d known my father’s cousin from boyhood, told the Nazis he was a Jew and got him sent off to camp. My cousin did not survive but, when his mother got out, she went back to her village, sought out the denouncer, marched up to him and socked him one. My father says the women in his family were hefty, sturdy types who could get a crack in when they chose.

The three security guards at the Spanish Synagogue presented a formidable force. In Sydney, on a Friday night, kids and parents mill about outside the synagogue, moving like a tide in and out of its doors. Was there even a security guard? Not that I could recall. And that was for a couple of hundred people. Here there were three—for a congregation of about twenty.

And at last I was inside and sitting in a pew, waiting to pray. The Spanish Synagogue might have been blank concrete on the outside, but it was pure Moroccan baroque on the inside. It had been designed in the Moorish style: graceful, embossed arches supported a mezzanine along the walls. Every surface on the walls and ceiling was decorated with intricate, tessellated art nouveau designs brightly picked out in reds and greens and shining gold. On each side, glass-topped cabinets displayed ancient torahs and letters, silk kippahs from previous centuries and silver cups and medallions. The floor was smooth and cool, wet-grey granite slabs. Two small sets of darkly golden pews took up the centre, with a wooden pulpit at the front. I sat in the pews and rested my eyes on its magnificence, filled with joy and love.

That first Friday night the shul was hushed—there was just the shuffling and clicking of reverent feet, the quiet whispers and rustles of a handful of people settling in its cavernous space. We exchanged brief smiles of hello if we happened to be in the same pew, but we largely ignored each other, all of us concentrating on the business of preparing for communion with God.

At the stroke of six, just as the service was about to start, the inner doors burst open and a fantastically noisy horde of teenagers barrelled through, laughing and poking at each other, yammering at the tops of their voices. From their conversation I gathered they were Israeli teenagers on a youth-group tour. Their noise was extraordinary.

After ten minutes, the kids were relatively settled in their seats but still shrieking. Then a rabbi appeared at the podium and held up a commanding hand, saying, ‘Guys, guys, a little shush.’ They only abated a fraction but the rabbi—a young, blond man with a distinctly American twang to his accent, clearly well accustomed to Israeli youth groups—started anyway, giving an introduction in English, to my relief, and then launching into the Kabbalat Shabbat.

The service wasn’t the same as the one I was used to. All the songs were different, except for one or two. There was a lot less singing and a lot more talking, and some of the spoken service was in Czech. I kept up as best I could. There’s a section of the service in which we all fall silent, the quiet in the room allowing each person to commune with God. During this bit you are supposed to read pages and pages of a prayer called the Amidah.

When I first started going to shul in Sydney I used to read this section devoutly, bowing in all the places where the Sydney prayer book helpfully added ‘Bow Here’. After a few months I began to skip the boring passages and then I ditched the lot—I simply turned the pages at regular intervals, timed to look like I was reading it, and bowed when my neighbours bowed. After a while I pulled myself together and stopped pretending for the rest of the congregation. By that time I’d realised that most people were as unconscientious about the Amidah as I was.