Searching for Škoda

Ladislav’s creased and trembling hand lifts his schlaftrunk to his lips. The glass rocks gently against his bottom lip before finding its mark. “Škoda” he sighs, drawing another cigarette from the dwindling pack, a trail of smoke dancing idly upward. Outside the twisting limbs of the naked apple trees in the garden cast sinister shadows, as the snow silently fills our footsteps. Tears of condensation glow orange on the window in the lamplight, as we sink further into our armchairs. The whiskey and cigarettes burn my throat as Ladislav begins.

A sunny saturday marking the beginning of Spring does not reflect my mood as the bus rattles into first gear, leaving behind Prague’s eclectic energy. I am retracing Ladislav’s škoda. No, not the splutters and backfires of the aptly named Czech communist car of choice, but the pity and regret he feels for the wasted life of his generation.

Garbage bags piled high on the roadside spew rubbish as we round the final elbow towards the old mining town of Brandýsek. Down the straight, patchwork road, lined by pear trees, fruit rotting in the ditch below, towards the rusted head-frame of a disused mine at the towns fringe. It was on this road, that an endless flow of coal trucks now kick up dust and belch black smoke from their rears, that Ladislav had watched with dread from his window 72 years earlier as a tide of tightly coated German troops entered the town. Six years later he had fiercely chopped down trees to build roadblocks to ensure the German occupiers could not flee back down the road they had once marched with long strides of certainty. Little did he know that the arriving Soviet saviours would dictate their next four decades.

Aside from the seemingly load bearing satellite dishes clustered on the roof tops, Brandýsek is a picture of the past that has decayed with Ladislav’s aspirations and ideals. Chipped and crumbling ginger facades expose the bricks below, and stained terracotta tiles rise and fall like waves above. Dead flowers rest behind smeared windows, and vines and wires alike slither under cracking window frames. I even find a dead dog left unceremoniously atop a pile of rubbish.

The lingering reek of stale smoke hits my nose before I reach the door of the pub. “Pivo?” the mullet sporting owner yells across the room. I know better than to ask for tea in a place like this, and seat myself next to two workers enjoying a few liters of the world’s finest before lunch.

Disapproving black and white’s of Lenin and Marx glare across the room from their battered frames at the empty coke crates stacked to the ceiling - I never can tell what Stalin is thinking behind that dustpan brush mustache of his. The patrons sit in silence, staring at a dubbed American mining drama playing between the hunting trophies on the wall. It appears that change is on the move in Brandýsek, unfortunately too late for Ladislav.