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Reality: Czech
| Article
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19090 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
3,645 Words |
| Author
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Maya Wallach
Maya Wallach is a dance writer, critic, and photographer
currently based in Los Angeles |
Going to Czechoslovakia is something like eating all your lima beans: It may not be very appetizing but it is good for you. Educational. Enlightening. Endlessly depressing. Wipes that western innocence away faster that you can say "Welcome to a postcommunist wonderland."
I went to Prague in early June, seven months after the "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989. I was so excited to cross the border into Eastern Europe that I parked and set foot on Czech soil right at the border station. There was a small parking lot full of West German cars nestled between the chain link fences and the quiet green forest, right beside the prefab bank where I waited to change my money.
The bank had all the charm of a Bronx unemployment office: linoleum, fluorescent lighting, cheap partitions creating three desks when it seemed obvious that only one was ever used. There was no sign indicating the exchange rate. The truck driver in line behind me advised me to save my cash for Prague's black market. I decided to change only thirty-five dollars.
On the drive toward Prague from Nuremberg, crossing the border is like passing through a time warp. On either side, the two-lane highway winds through hilly forests, farmland, and small villages, but where German fields are a patchwork of individually worked plots, each its own delicate shade of green, Czech fields are one deep hue spread over many hills without a break, like great feudal pastures.
Germany's wealth is palpable in traffic jams composed solely of Mercedes and BMWs; its exuberance is expressed by the geraniums and roses that fill every windowsill and garden to bursting. Czechoslovakia's poverty is just as overwhelming. There aren't enough of the tiny tin traps they call cars to clog the roads, and the only color round the crumbling houses is provided by scrounging chickens.
I stared in amazement as I drove past a woman with a load of hay wrapped in a shawl on her back. Two stone angels embraced on a wall that was being dismantled for its bricks. Army helicopters clattered overhead--in sharp contrast to the U.S. jets buzzing West German airspace--and convoys chugged along the roads with soldiers sticking their heads out of the canvas, hair flying in the wind.
I saw a soldier hitchhiking and offered him a ride. He didn't speak any English or German and I don't speak any Czech, but together we swore
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