Roots

While I was blogging about art deco and architecture, Reno was unearthing my roots.   In more ways than one.   He began with trying to find a copy of a book that my father, writing under the pen name of Walter Storm (where I got my Susan Storm from) and my mother wrote under Beryl Storm, as Harry and Beryl Bloom (Jewish) had an entirely different, and dangerous, connotation considering the place and time.

On the net, Reno found 2 pro communist books written by my father - The Crisis in Czechoslovakia, written in 1948 by Walter Storm, on Amazon, which we had  delivered to my brother Steve who we'll be visiting in London next week. Then we found The People's Victory in Czechoslovakia on Ebay, also written in 1948.  What we couldn't - and still can't - find is a copy of We Meet the Czechoslovaks, about life in the country at the same time, and written by my parents. My brother Steve has one copy, probably the only one in existence.  My mother was pregnant with me at the time, and I was born just as the book was published, but her pregnancy is not mentioned at all. Which means neither am I, which is par for the course, and which is why it's so important that I find out if I really happened, or if I am just a figment of my own imagination.

In reality though, my mother had had 7 miscarriages, one baby who died at 6 weeks, and another miscarriage before I was born.  She also was confined to a Czech maternity hospital for several months prior to my birth so she wouldn't lose me.  It would have been difficult to bond with anything if you had constant evidence it wouldn't survive.  So I didn't hear stories about Prague and have always had a sense of lost identity and geography.


The discovery of my father's books didn't happen as easily as one paragraph. We trawled so many dusty bookshops in twisting lanes. We walked into old and crusty bookshops where crumbling books were stacked halfway to the ceiling, asking crinkled dusty men and young intellectuals if they'd heard of the books.  The books were published in English because I would imagine they were contraband here.  One helpful seller found "What happened in Czechoslovakia" in a German translation, on line. So we searched for this on the internet,  and to our surprise and excitement found the English copy on Ebay, which we bought immediately as it is probably the only copy in captivity.

I asked the seller if he knew anything about this book. He replied: "Hi Susan. This is my favorite part of doing what I do. I am thrilled that this will reach hands that can best appreciate it. The little that I can add to this is that I bought a collection of communist booklets and pamphlets and union material from a a gentleman at a local flea market here in Oregon. He in turn had acquired the materials from the estate of a union organizer (a stevedore) out of Coos Bay, Oregon."

In the bookshop trawling process, we went into Palace of Books, five floors of everything you can imagine half way up Wenceslas Square.  There were books by JK Rowlingova, ad Colleen McCulloghova, and a copy of Henry Miller's hand written and illustrated literary jottings of his lust and desire for a young Japanese prostitute, which we bought for $10.

On the way up to Prague Castle, battling bitter winds and biting cold, we ducked into a tiny bookshop with cracked and faded titles, run by a man with one blind eye and one roving eye, who hadn't heard of my father's books,  but we found a book of a play which we thought was called  "Slovnik",  illustrated with erotic etchings from 1864 and an Ergon Schiele's splayed naked woman on the cover.  It was in Czech, so we thought we'd ask our hotel concierge to translate it for us, as the characters seemed very colourful and complicated.  Underneath their names in bold font were their small italicised parts, and they appeared in alphabetical order:  Kokarda, Kokota, Priazet, Prirozena Radost, Pririrodni, Prijimat pod oboji, Promiskuita, Prostitutka.  But hold on, these sounded vaguely sexy.

The drawings were quite fabulous and raunchy for their time, and incredibly anatomically sexually detailed.  When I realised the characters only appeared once, I looked up the word "Slovnik".  Well, whadda know, it means Dictionary.  We had bought an erotic dictionary.  We had a hilarious couple of hours using the translation device on Reno's phone and reading it as if it was a play.

The search for my parentage continued. Prague is beautiful beyond belief but it's a city that I can't comprehend.  We walked for 5-6 hours a day, and while Reno looked up at the gargoyles and gutterings, I needed to focus my camera down, to the cobbles, shadows, textures and designs under my feet.  I felt lost and anxious, alienated and detached. We visited the Jewish quarter, where Reno innocently proclaimed that my father would have been a frequent visitor here.  "He was a communist," I snapped irritably, "not a religious Jew".  Quietly, in his "that wasn't a necessary reaction", mode, Reno bought a hand crocheted yarmulke from the woman behind the counter, to wear at my daughter's Jewish do's.  I felt as if Prague was drowning me, suffocating me.  It had been very cold for days, the light was heavy and bleak.  We'd had fun and been to concerts, and explored, but Prague hung over my head, unknown.  I wanted to leave the city, go into the country, see some green and feel some space.

We still had a week to go, and I still didn't know about my parentage or more answers to my early days.  I'd withdrawn a bit from Reno, battling my roots and become quite cranky with Prague and its refusal to let me understand it.

Then the sun came out, the temperature rose 20 degrees and we unpacked t-shirts and exposed our skin for the first time in months.  We went to the controversial building, Dancing House, the fabulously off beat building constructed in the 1960's, in a hole left by WW2bombing.  The building is astonishing and electrifying and exciting, so we paid seniors tickets (we cheated) for the modern art exhibition it houses.  Which were so modern it was a graffitti ridden three floors of splattered paint and electrical wires that resembled a construction site.  We were the only visitors.

Traffic noise and trams, tourists and touts thrusting leaflets in our hands,  were getting to both of us.  I was over Prague.  Reno was close to being over me because I was fed up with the iphone attached to his hand, and he couldn't understand why I had to read my 3 d interactive monument map and stop at the passing monuments, when he had it all in his iPhone in a straight blue line.  We had a tiff about him being interested in the destination, while I was interested in the journey.
I felt fragile and lost and detached, quiet and introverted. He was being his usual warm and wondrous self, but I was in another, isolated, zone. Prague was so ... tall. Art Deco was everywhere, but 50 feet up.

He took my hand and sans either means of navigation we found the bagel and coffee shop of our first frosty morning, where we sat in the same leather armchairs and talked.  I could see he was perturbed that I'd withdrawn from him.  I told him that I was having difficulty being close to him in this city, perhaps because my mother hadn't held me much as a baby, that I'd always managed on my own, that I was feeling suffocated by Prague and angry with my parents. He wanted to know why knowing about my parents so was important, because wasn't I who I am because of what I've done and where I've been? Without parents?   I started to cry, and said I have a right to be acknowledged by my parents, a right to be educated by them, a right to know what I was like when small. The waitress brought the bagels and coffee and watched us from a distance as Reno dried my tears with his fingertips.  I cried from a very deep place, bringing my childhood abandonment wounds to the surface, and my closeness issues. Reno held my hand, and wiped some cappuccino froth from my mouth, and dried my tears with a Pilsener beer napkin.  Sun struggled through the windows, and Reno listened like his life depended on it.

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.” 
― Milan Kundera

I want to buy some of Milan Kundera's books, I said, looking to the green Gothic spires and gargoyles and art deco embellishments. I want to know why this place is familiar but forbidding.  I want to understand this city, like I understand Venice. I want to know the incredible lightness of being.

Let's go back to the Palace of Books, said Reno, taking my hand and leaving the gps in his pocket, and let's buy some Milan Kundera, (who wrote about the Prague Spring of '65.)


(I started this blog by saying that Reno was helping me get back to my roots in more ways that one. In Italy, I'd realised I needed to put a colour in my hair. He'd searched supermarkets with me, and we'd finally found a non permanent in a farmacia. Back at our apartment, he was back on google, translating the ingredients for me.  They contain ammonia, he said, you can't use this, and returned with me to the farmacia to get a refund. In Prague, the hair colour situation had become critically orange, and after a two hour hunt we eventually found a department store, well hidden in the heritage buildings, which contained every hair colour, lotion, potion and cream you could desire.  I couldn't find my particular L'Oreal amongst the hundreds of different kinds, in Czech. So Reno stood there, using his iPhone to translate ingredients from Czech to English, then googling the English to see if they'd damage my hair. He would have inspected 25 different boxes.

I was resigning myself to spending the next three months with increasingly orange hair and in the later stages, a turban as I was too terrified to try something that looked like it meant fried Titan pig on a spit with a bit of Zlotnik mixed in.  Then there it was - Mahoganyova - on the shelf. Reno translated, and it passed the chemical test.  He queued with the Czech women buying lipstick and deodorant, and bought two boxes of hair colour, just in case the wastes of Morocco were devoid of L'Oreal.

That's my husband.  When we go into a computer shop, I sit on the floor, snoring.  As I write, because I have something to expiate - later - this remarkable man has made us a salad in a champagne bucket, used the food stolen from our breakfast table to make an aperitif, and is boiling up a pasta bianco that he found in the supermarket, after we'd tried to work out if we were buying mayonnaise or body lotion.
We took a different route to the book shop, and accidentally passed the stall of an artist we'd ignored the first day when we were trying to work out what butter and milk looked like.  We both immediately fell in love with an oil painting of a large eyed woman with red hair and red lips, with Prague Castle behind her, done by an Albanian artist whose works were in collections all over the world.  His wife was an adroit and adept seller. She slashed the price, we paid in cash, and she rolled up our painting. Reno was levitating.  What does that painting mean to you? he asked.  I was still rattled and unhappy, so I replied that it was obviously me in Prague. Reno said - it's your past, your present and your future.  This is a good omen.

No 11.

Back at the hotel, I flopped on the bed, exhausted. The sun was blazing, the spires were shining, but I wanted to curl up under the doona and sleep.  The trail of my parents had run cold.

View from rooftop of parents flat, visible on other side from our hotel.

Reno stood on the balcony and looked across the rooftops, across our part of Prague.

Get up, he said, as he put his shoes back on. We're going now, he said, back to Provenizska street. We're going to find where your parents lived.   But I want to blog, I protested. No, he said, now, we're going now.  Don't even finish your tea. He dragged me out, with my tear stained face and knotty lank hair and the grey jumper I'd been lolling around in.  Depressed and embarassed, he dragged me into the cobbled streets, past the high end clothing shops and into the graffiti molested back entrance of my street.  The gutters were clogged with KFC packets, cigarettes, tram tickets and plastic bags. Windows were broken. An African drug dealer was shrieking into his mobile phone in English and French.  People were rushing into and out of the underground metro, which Reno and I went into - he saying that must be where my father travelled into the city and out to the country where they were living according to my father's book he was reading, I protesting the underground was too young and modern.  We said we'd buy tickets the following day and ride the metro to see where it went, as We Meet the Czechoslovaks was about my parents life in the Czech countryside.

I photographed the buildings in the street, as we had the idea of going to some sort of bureau in Prague to see if any of them had been a hospital at some time. But I kept going back to one building, at the end of the street.  Reno asked if I had a street number in my head, for where I'd lived. No, I said, no, I don't remember.  Bring your childhood back, he said, concentrate, feel the street.

Eleven, I said, the number 11 keeps coming up.  We walked from 3, where I was standing, to 5 to 7, to 9 .. to 11.   (later, we remembered that 1,3,5,7,9, is the password for wifi in our hotel ... )A mid forties man was helping load a washing machine into the building, which we could see now was being renovated.  In reasonable English he asked if we needed help.  I told him that I thought I had been born in this building.  "Oh, no, "he said, "it's never been a hospital, it's flats.  The man who owns them is now 90 and lives in London. His name is Kollinsky - he is Jewish - and maybe he knew your parents!  He has a textile business and we are renovating his flat."  We're going to London next week, we said, maybe we should look him up?

Me in tears, with the man who knew my parents in 1948.

Would you like to see inside the building, our new friend Radek Hodan asked.  Reno and I were speechless.  We went up in the minute lift, through which we could see the various floors winding along the stairwell. We were shown Kollinsky's flat, now made into offices which had been sectioned off from a much larger area. We walked around a large,  100 square metre flat, which was originally 200 metres, in mint 1940's condition, with original stove and plumbing.  We were taken up to the rooftop, from where we could see two balconies away from our hotel balcony ...  and then our friend rushed downstairs to bang on the door of his neighbour, a 90 year old man who'd lived there his whole life.

My mother mentioned lots of stairs, and an attic.

Who knew, and remembered, my parents.  They lived here, he said, pointing to the doorway three steps away from his.

Who, without prompting apart from their names, real and invented, remembered that my mother was blonde and elegant.  That my father was a writer and reporter. He asked if my mother was a teacher.  Now I need to find out if she taught English at some stage but there is no body alive to tell me.  He remembered a baby.   He looked at me and said he'd held me, as a baby, when I'd been brought home from the hospital. He remembered that they had a lot of friends, with a lot of comings and goings. And that they'd gone back to Africa.   And that maybe (after a lot of concerned looks and much Czech that wasn't translated) there was a scandal.

Unionist plaque on the wall of my parent's building

By this time I was crying. Our friend's wife had come out of their door, and she was cross translating with a squirming baby in her arms and a 3 year old who'd stripped to nakedness on the landing while we were talking.

The man asked if I knew anything about a Mrs Evans.   I hadn't.

After profuse thanks to Radek and with his email address in hand for exchange of photos and more information, we went downstairs. The old man followed us.  At the door, he shook our hands and then fell to his knees against the wall, and put his hands over his head,  and in Czech, told the story of Mrs Evan to our friend who translated for us.  She had gassed herself in my mother's Czech oven, in flat 3,  no 11 Provizneska Street.  Three owners had lived there since.
 

Interior of flat similar to my parents

When I returned to our room, there was a message from my mother's opera singer friend, Denver Smith, who we are due to see in London next week.   I have lots of stories to tell you of your mother's life in Prague, he wrote.  She spoke of lots of stairs, and an attic. " Did she ever tell you of a Mrs Evans?" I wrote.   "God, I have the shivers," he replied, but I can't remember."

"Work on those shivers," I wrote.  "We will talk about them next week."

My parents flat, No. 3.