2022
24 April, Sunday
There was hassle on the mid-morning train from Vienna to Brno when an Italian near me lost his ticket. Maybe he was a Slovene, as I’d thought there was a woman speaking a Slavic tongue to him on the platform when I boarded. Maybe he was a junkie, he was looking rough and bewildered, and smelling of smoke. He had no English or Czech and, on getting no satisfaction out of a stereotypically indifferent Spanish couple across the aisle (he had earlier offered them sweets), he turned back to me for help. He’d already required considerable reassurance about where he was going, which meant I’d actually seen his ticket, whatever he did with it. I looked over him to the window side of his seat but only saw two or three crushed beer cans.
The mature lady conductor quickly invoked the police. A bit too quickly, to be fair. He hadn’t even emptied all his pockets but, given he kept looking back at me, as if for a miracle, I remembered enough survival Czech to assure her that he and I were strangers.
Pointing at him and going, “Neznám” (‘I don’t know [him]’) aimed to allay any suspicion that we were working a scam. Nevertheless, I added that he did have a ticket, at the outset, and did have cash (“Má hotovost”) for another, and that he was only going to Brno. In the end she took very little money off him and gave him another ticket.
When we disembarked, he stuck to me and asked for help to find cambio in the station. By then my rusty Italian was showing signs of life but he stopped two sceptical yet business-like security guards for information. That’s how I had to think of some more Czech to explain he only wanted to exchange his euros, while making a rollover motion with my hands.
“Má euro. Chce vyměnit. Eh, cambio.”
Once we were shown to a willing hatch, the two beefy guards in black rolled their eyes and walked away, and I too said a quick ciao to my new friend (“Max, Massimo”) as my work there was done. I wasn’t going to let him buy me a drink at any rate, and I too vanished when the lady behind the glass distracted him.
This incident and the one in The Good Soldier Švejk where the fictional Czech hero pulls a train handbrake both recall a story told to me by a Jewish Englishman in a Belfast pub on a snowy day in 1987. In 1969, G. was on a train somewhere in Czechoslovakia, enjoying the luxury of a Cuban cigar, when a representative of state security slid back the door to tell him to put it out. The railways minister was in the next compartment and didn’t like the smell. After attempting to engage the minister in a fraternal socialist debate about the cigar, G. got thrown off the train at the next station. As the translator Cecil Parrott described Švejk’s creator Jaroslav Hašek, he (H.) was a very untypical Czech.
Even the paving stones of Brno are bigger than I’d imagined and I hadn’t expected the sloping, undulating aspect of the main square, Svobody. The city centre does have vulgar touches, like the two monument cocks (clock and horse), and the KB and Omega blocks on Svobody are more bad teeth, but there’s quite a number of strikingly good-looking buildings, in colour and texture. The dark cathedral stands on Petrov, an enticing little hill above a corner of the cabbage market square (Zelný trh).
From Vienna one can, by train, in less than an hour and a half, reach Brno to the north, Bratislava to the east, Sopron to the south and Linz to the west. Brno, the capital of Moravia, is the second city of the Czechs and home to 380,000 people. I just went to have a look, just because it was there. The striking theme from Czech YouTube videos about Ireland is that our mentality is alien to them. The same theme hardly features at all among similar videos made by Croats.
Dr. John Flynn 