Fahrt ins Blaue

Out of Order

Armed border guards stare down the incoming Eurostar passengers at Brussels Zuid, as no one declares anything and we funnel through the green channel. Will they haul me aside and discover the half empty bottle of Harrogate water in my bag…..

Two hours later I board the European Sleeper to Prague, a long, old, tired train almost entirely composed of empty couchette compartments.

The stewards are teenagers - I just hope the driver has a licence. Ash trays in the corridors tell of the train’s tobacco stained history:

Supper, as advertised below, in the cramped, twenty-four seat dining car, is noisy and reminiscent of the ground floor of the Tower of Babel - conversations take place in several tongues at the same time. I drink a red beer from Dresden and am given a bowl of bright yellow pumpkin soup…

To follow, I am served ‘Schnitzel’ though, disregarding the bright yellow lumpy mashed potato, it is less schnitzel and more deep fried rissole…. But I am not going to write to the management. One of the values (?) of international travel is that, through changes in routine, and variety of custom, it may induce a little homesickness…..

It is time for bed, and, having been downgraded from Sleeper to Couchette (due to a technical fault, you understand? The stewardess suggests I make the best of it…..) Slightly uncomfortably, I climb the metal ladder to slide into my sheet sleeping bag on the middle level, as per the instructions on the wall.  ‘Snuggle,’ and ‘cozy,’ are not the words that are foremost in my attempt to sleep.

It is now very dark, and we stop for ages at Roosendaal, though nothing at all happens.  Nothing.  Then, without warning, we judder off again into the night, towards Amsterdam.

Despite another set of ‘rules’ in five languages) (We kindly ask you to be considerate of other travellers and not cause any noise nuisance….. We also ask you to not have loud conversations between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. in order to respect the night’s sleep.) I couldn’t tell you how well the night slept, but at midnight the corridor is loud with Slavic tongues, possibly fuelled by red beer and schnitzel. I think about it, but I don’t actually say Shush!  Call me what you want, but I am not in the mood for fighting.

At 3.30 a.m. we stand silently, for maybe half an hour, in the utterly deserted Hannover Hauptbahnhof.  Nothing happens.  Nothing. Then, clanking, we lurch on. It is, I dream, like being in a bathyscape, with strange pinging sounds, and a swaying, waving, plunging series of movements, as though a giant squid is caressing the carriage.  As though implosion is a possibility.

At precisely 6.36 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, a disembodied voice comes over a crackling tannoy, saying, with no detectable emotion, Guten Morgen, before relapsing into disembodied silence. Perhaps this is obligatory, the Muezzin of the Lutheran Church, one of the 95 precepts nailed to a door in Wittenberg. Or perhaps it is a recording activated by the decreasing balance of darkness over light - like the electronic dawn in ‘Metropolis?’

Aurora rises up like wet newspaper in a muddy stream. The teenage stewardess brings a box of breakfast at 8.15 (despite my request for earlier).  I haven’t had margarine since we used to anoint diced beetroot with it for school lunch.  Meanwhile drizzle falls on passing allotments. 

We pass through Dresden in rain, the Elbe in flood, the landscape just on the turning edge of autumn.  Wet-roofed houses shuttered down.  Nobody about.

Not far now to the Czech border, then the last trundle down towards Prague. The sky is breaking up a bit and daylight doesn’t seem quite so depressing, but I’m a long way from home, and my thoughts stray to my quiet village, my house, my family - my late cat….. I am a little confused, just a bit on the homesick side of happiness, perhaps.  I stare out the wet window, wondering why I am here.

Then, the train arrives and a plaque on the wall welcomes me in the underpass with a picture of Woodrow Wilson and his words, delivered to Congress in 1917 when seeking a declaration of war against Germany, The world must be made safe for democracy, (though it was President of the USA George Bushe (sic) who quoted this on a visit in 1990 when he was drumming up European support for bellicose intentions in the Middle East….) 

Within the original Entrance Hall of the historic art nouveau Prague Hlavni Nadrazi (Praha hl or Prague main station) there is the Fantova Kavarna, where time passes easily with a goat’s cheese and beetroot bagety (but no margarine) and a Pilsner Urquell to drown the hour.  Then it is time for the Railjet to Brno, a busy train that is heading for Vienna and Graz.

They say that travel broadens the mind.  Well, partly due to the two men behind me who prattle loudly for the entire two and a half hours of the trip, my cortex has been so broadened that it is flatter than gold leaf - broad, maybe, but not deep.  

Once in Brno (pronounced, I think, Burn-oh), a short walk up a slippery cobbled lane takes me to a boutique hotel, whose lobby sports a photo of Vaclav Havel that he signed in November 2009.

It is grey, and damp, but I climb the tower of the old town hall, from the balcony of which Queen Elizabeth II addressed the crowds, with Havel by her side, in 1996.  (And, incidentally, where author Simon Mawer was photographed some twenty  years later.  Simon tells me that the last celebrity photographed here before Queen Elizabeth was Adolf Hitler). The vegetable market square lies before me, then there is the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, its twin neo-gothic spires scratching at the clouds.  

On the hill behind me squats the solid Spielberk Castle, with a ghastly history of successive regimes of torture and imprisonment, going back through the Red Army, the Nazis, the Austrians, Napoleon and the rest.  

And then across the city, part hidden among some mature trees, a bright white slab is all I can see of Mies van Der Rohe’s 1929/30 Villa Tugendhat, the inspiration for Simon Mawer’s 2009 Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Glass Room, and the reason for my visit…..

But that is for tomorrow.  Now is the time for goulasch and unfiltered pivo.  And perhaps a shot of  Becherovka……

Until tomorrow…..

And in the meantime: 

Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred. 

Vaclav Havel

https://www.visitczechia.com/en-us/news/2021/12/n-vaclav-havel