This extract is taken from the book “Hoří chemička, něco si přej”, which describes the author’s stay on the outskirts of the North Bohemian town Litvínov, concretelly in the Janov housing estate, which is considered the largest excluded marginalised neighbourhood in Czech. Janov is home to predominantly Romani families living in private or cooperative housing, for whom a way out of the “ghetto” is, due to long-term structural inequality, almost unimaginable. The book is written in the form of diary entries and offers a perspective on the cultural encounter between two realities that exist in proximity to one another, yet remain mutually alienated.
5 September 2021
The train journey between Ústí nad Labem and Litvínov was lined with a green jungle. My friend Vanda decided to travel with me back to Janov and brought along her flatmate Václav, who, despite holding a degree in education from Prague’s famous film-making university, works in Ústí nad Labem behind the bar. So we went together, taking in the jungle in the warm sunshine of Indian summer, and it made us feel so content that, rather than heading back to the Janov housing estate, I wanted to head off somewhere into the hills, to wander through the woods and meadows all the way to the nearby mountains. But I was afraid and my shoes weren’t up to it, so we cowardly got off the town bus at the Janov-škola stop. There was a car parked in front of the entrance to the block, and when we arrived and I started to open the gate, someone from inside the car asked me if we were looking for anything.
“We’re not looking for anything,” I said and carried on unlocking the gate. A white woman with long hair got out of the car; she introduced herself as Martina, along with a Romani man without long hair, who said his name was Pepa. They’d been waiting for someone to arrive because they didn’t want to sit in the garden on their own. We chatted for a while on the doorstep. Pepa and Martina worked in social services in Trmice (a separate district of Ústí nad Labem) and that was also where they’d met the owner of the community house Libuše, Petr. Pepa avoided my gaze and had his hands folded across his chest. I had the feeling he’d like to leave, but I wanted to get everything out of him that might help me in my thinking. He said that in Trmice they work with young people aged between 16 and 20, whom they had made contact with whilst they were still children, and that, thanks to their long-term collaboration, as many as 70 per cent of them go on to further education after finishing primary school. He spoke about how important it is to get to know one’s ‘clients’ first and only then to devise a plan for how to proceed, because otherwise one presents oneself to others far more than one offers them the opportunity for their own development. When I told him that I was in Litvínov on a month-long residency, he smirked a little and I felt awkward. When a call suddenly rang out from the window on the ground floor (“Pepo”), he disappeared with relief through the dilapidated door.
Meanwhile, Monika and Matěj arrived – they came across as community workers at Libuše – and through the open gate, a stream of children and mums with prams began pouring into the garden. I took out the papers and drawing materials, set up the tables, sat Vanda and Václav down at them, and went inside to look for the attendance forms, which Petr had asked me to have the adults sign. But no sooner had I stepped back out of the door than the mums with their prams started leaving the garden en masse. I looked at them in surprise, wondering why they hadn’t stayed a little longer.
“Don’t you have any yoghurts?” they said, “Or lemonade?” “Give us some water for the little one.”
I went back inside to fetch a couple of bottles of water, hoping that some of them might then stay a while longer, but it didn’t work. They wanted the yoghurts from the food bank that Monika had brought in last week, but as the yoghurts had run out, their motivation to stay practically vanished. They couldn’t see what else we could offer them; perhaps they weren’t even interested. We were not friends yet; we were outsiders, and it suddenly began to strike me that our (mine,my colleague`s, Tranzit’s) presence here in Libuše might, for the long-term work of Petr, Monika and the Libuše collective, disrupt their own process of integrating with the local community. The children, however, didn’t leave; on the contrary, their numbers kept growing in the garden, only for them to run off and then return with endless questions.
“Are you a lesbian?” “Do you smoke weed?” “Are you a rocker?” “What’s techno?” “Can I borrow a ball to play at home?” “Do you take drugs?” (Obviously meaning meth.)
The whole situation thickened for a moment, as if you’d poured a roux into soup, and I felt I couldn’t stir fast enough to prevent lumps from forming. This was a particular risk because there were bonds between the different groups of children that were as yet unknown to me, and which created complex dynamics based on various clan affiliations and social status to which individual families were integrated. I wasn’t yet sure exactly how those dynamics worked, but at first glance I had the impression that the most marginalised were the least articulate children, probably from the poorest families (unlike from the others, they hadn’t brought their own drinks or anything else with them; they couldn’t write or speak very well; they were shy in front of others; they were worse at drawing and their clothes were dirty and had holes).
We had a discussion about their future. Some of the children (aged 10–12) envisaged themselves as part of mainstream society. One of the girls wanted to be a confectioner, another a nurse; one of the boys told me he wanted to be a graphic designer, which surprised me – I was struck by the level of abstraction involved and his ability to navigate it. I asked him if they had a computer at home, and he said no. I didn’t manage to find out where he’d learnt about this sort of profession.
At some point amidst the chaos of that afternoon, Denisa, one of the mothers, stopped to talk with me. She was too shy to go out into the garden, where it was all a bit too lively for her, but she sat with me on the doorstep. Her visit meant a lot to me; it was clear she hadn’t come for anything material, but purely so that we could have a chat and get to know one another. She’d come so she wouldn’t be at home alone with the children or with her perpetually silent neighbour. It seemed to me that she didn’t feel entirely at ease, but she stayed until I gave her my full attention. Unfortunately, that didn’t last long, because a moment later Monika, the community worker, arrived and needed to discuss something. I handed Denisa and her silent neighbour a bag of clothes that Vanda and I had found in a bin in Ústí (we’d washed, dried and folded all), and I asked her to come round sometime in the morning, when the children would be at school and it would be quiet at Libuše’s garden.
The conversation with Monika turned out to be more than just important. She told me that they are always ‘open’ on Sundays and Wednesdays at Libuše and that she tries to teach the neighbourhood children not just to come here to play (to take), but also to help out with the work in the garden or around the house (to give). That’s obviously a clever strategy, and I felt a bit silly that I’d just spent the day with the children folding origami and playing Scrabble.
When everyone had left the garden in the evening, my colleague Lenka arrived and we discussed how to incorporate our daily new insights into the framework of our work here in Janov. Although we’d known from the start that the short duration of our residency was problematic, we hadn’t quite managed to describe and explain all the reasons why this was the case. Now we were beginning to feel them almost tangibly. After just one afternoon spent together, we felt that if we focused solely on creating momentary pleasant experiences, we would be perpetuating the current problematic relationship between the voluntary sector and the Roma minority. A relationship in which one side gives and the other receives without any need to contribute to the shared outcome (which could be more equal relationships between people of different ethnicities, skin colours, social status), and the current inequality merely shifts into a different form. The relationships between the individual parties then become a sort of charity, the primary function of which is to assuage the historically rooted guilty conscience of those who give. Sharing one’s own privileges may be possible on a personal level – looking after a neighbour’s children so that she, too, can go out alone with her husband one day – but at an institutional level, this strategy becomes considerably more complicated and takes on further, undesirable dimensions.
Another reason why our work in Libuše proved problematic for us can be explained using the example of a patriarchal family structure, in which many of us grew up. Monika and Petr, or any of the entities still operating in Janov, represent, in this parable, the ever-present mother who sets the basic boundaries of how we interact, based partly on intuition and partly on her own experience. My colleague Lenka, myself and Tranzit (-the institution) are the absent father who returns from a business trip, takes the child in his arms and overwhelm them with an excessive amount of care, attention and love (based on a real, albeit momentary, feeling of insufficient involvement), before disappearing again shortly afterwards and leaving the crying, frustrated child in the care of a desperate mother, whose world is falling apart because of someone who is, in reality, not entirely available to either her or the child, and who acts primarily in the interests of fulfilling their own needs.
I, too, grew up in such a family constellation, and I am all too well aware that, regardless of the more than adequate material resources (provided by my absent father), I did not grow up to be a neurologically healthy person. Perhaps I am capable of studying, formulating my thoughts and growing intellectually. However, my emotional life is full of anxiety, a damaged sense of self-worth and feelings of inadequacy, caused, amongst other things, by my father’s often absence.
We have therefore agreed that, going forward, we will coordinate our work in line with Monika’s suggestions and what we agree upon together with her.
6 September 2021
“Baáá-roóóó” “Léén-koóóó”
Lenka and I were sitting on the second floor, where ‘our room’ was, planning the upcoming week, whilst downstairs by the gate stood several children who were tirelessly calling out our names. We pretended not to hear them, because one of Monica’s requests had been that we limit individual meetings to pre-arranged times. At some point, however, Lenka couldn’t take it any longer, went downstairs, and the calls stopped for a while.
Less than an hour had passed when the calls started up again. This time, we went downstairs, and Lila—one of Libuše’s most frequent visitors—handed me a piece of paper with a telephone number on it.
“Uncle Tomáš says he might be able to come with us to the ZOO on Saturday as a chaperone.”
I opened the metal gate, took the note, and whilst Lila ran off somewhere with her group of girls (Eliska and Anicka), I remained standing on the pavement in front of Libuše, basking in the warm sunshine. A moment later, Dušan appeared, along with a group of girls I hadn’t met before. One of them had thick black eyebrows, and her skin was extremely dark. Her black eyes, framed by thick, long lashes, shone in a way I’d never seen before, and above her upper lip grew a black tuft of soft hairs. She was beautiful and ugly at the same time, and I felt so spellbound by her appearance that I forgot all about our plans and sat down with the children on the road, right in the middle of the street. We chatted about what each of us wanted to do when we grew up, and Dušan insisted he wanted to be a thief. The girls laughed and said it was dangerous. That “they’d” catch him and then he’d end up in prison.
“I’ll have a car and I’ll drive off,” Dušan protested, but the girls wouldn’t have it.
“The coppers have a car too, and besides, they might not catch you straight away, but they’ll catch you eventually; they’ll know it was you, they’ll have you on CCTV.”
Dušan gave up and said he’d be a policeman instead. The girls laughed even more and started telling stories about how, where and what they’d stolen. How they stuffed biscuits down their sleeves and how they tried on everything they liked in the shops and then walked out wearing it. Then they talked about their families, and one of them – Nella – said that her dad lives in England and has a swimming pool in his garden, and that captivating girl (Gábina) said that there were lots of them living in their flat – not just her family of seven, but also another aunt and her children. We sat around on the sun-drenched road for a while longer before going our separate ways.
That evening, I found myself alone again at Libuše. I thought about Gabina and why I was so drawn to her appearance. I recalled how my mother and I once met my father’s distant cousin on the Underground; she had her hair styled into a punk star and her whole face was adorned with piercings of various sizes and colours. I was about three years old, but I still remember to this day (perhaps partly through second-hand recollection) my fascination with her unconventional appearance, my bated breath, and my struggle to decide whether what I was seeing struck me as beautiful or ugly. Perhaps it was precisely this contradiction that caught my attention; perhaps it was her distinctly different ethnicity, for which I felt a little ashamed even to myself.
Thoughts were swirling round in my head, and so, instead of resting, I spent most of the night listening to what the old walls had to tell me about those who were once people and are now ghosts.
A Funeral Ceremony (published in A2 magazine, 2025
A Funeral Ceremony
It’s freezing outside. The grass is covered in hoarfrost, and the warm breath exhaled at regular intervals by people waiting at the tram stop instantly condenses into a cloud of steam. I’m sitting in the second trolley; rays of sunlight are flickering through the window. It seems to me that we’re not quite in the city anymore; apart from me, there are only three or four other passangers sitting here. I turn my face towards the sun outside the window and survey the surroundings of the railway line: a petrol station, a golf course, a hotel that looks like cheap staff accommodation. I’ve been here once before. I came here, to this very same place, for the same reason – it must have been about fifteen years ago. My colleague hanged himself in a psychiatric hospital using a shoelace. We didn’t know each other very well; he was a little older than me, but we grew up in similar social circles. One evening we got drunk – it must have been about two weeks before his death – and ended up kissing at the bar. It didn’t go any further than that; hardly anything happened, and apart from that drunken encounter, I only knew him in passing. I don’t know why I went there back then – probably just because everyone else was going. My memory of that day is captured in a single photograph – we’re standing in front of the ceremonial hall; it’s warm, and there’s some awful music playing. Maybe it wasn’t a shoelace, but a trouser belt – I can’t remember anymore. ‘Motol Crematorium’ stop is up next, announces the tram’s public address system. I’m standing by the door, dressed all in black, pressing the button to get off, while the other passengers watch me. It strikes me as cynical and somehow comical, that they made this stop only on demand.
I’d forgotten to buy a flower; it had seemed pointless at first, but now I feel it wouldn’t be right to turn up empty-handed. There’s a florist’s at the entrance to the cemetery, just like at all large cemeteries, especially those where funeral ceremonies are held. People buy gerberas or carnations here and then place them on the grave or beside the coffin. The shop is reminiscent of a foyer; everything here is disproportionately far apart and quiet, with a marble-like chill in the air. Behind the counter stand three women; they aren’t talking to one another, but there isn’t even a radio playing. The one serving me looks as though she’s from a roadside café, isolated somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert. Bleached hair, high heels, lipstick – everything about her seems cheap and hollow, just like this whole shop selling funeral flowers. “One rose, please,” I say. “One hundred and twenty,” she says. Behind me, other mourners are already standing; the awkward silence of this incongruous business swallows up any further words, as well as the scent of all those cut flowers – there’s nothing to be smelled here. Not even grief. It seems a bit pricey to me, but I pay and leave.
Outside, small groups are forming – a black cloud of mourners. I take a look at the first one: about ten people in their sixties, laughing; looks like they’re leaving. A little further on, a trio of women with bouquets are standing uncertainly; they’re smoking, or perhaps it’s just smoke coming from their mouths – I don’t want to stare at them too much. They’re speaking Bulgarian and, unlike the people in the first group, you can sense a tension in them associated with the anticipation of a ceremony or an exam.
I watch them from a distance and, when they disperse, I follow them. The cemetery is vast and merges almost seamlessly into the woods, on the path, a huge sheepdog crossed with a Czechoslovakian wolf comes bounding down from somewhere above, energetic and full of life, without a collar. Behind him walks a boy in a hoodie; they are both young, and their energy is captivating in contrast to the stiff faces and gestures of the mourners. He strides briskly past, catches the dog by the eye with a rope, and disappears amongst the graves. For a moment, we stand uncertainly in front of the ceremonial hall, until finally someone opens the door and gestures for us to come in.
Flowers are laid in front of the stage, which is draped with a black curtain; on the right-hand side, a black-and-white photograph of Strahil stands on a stand. He looks to be in his thirties in the photograph; he has a black moustache and prominent cheekbones, thick hair and a mesmerising gaze. Above the photograph hangs a screen displaying the full name of the deceased. The hall is slowly filling up; I go over to my friend’s mum, who is gesturing at me and pointing to the seat where I’m supposed to sit. They’re both wearing dark glasses and crying. On the steps below the stage, overpriced flowers from the cemetery florist are piled high; one woman places a rose amongst the others, then she approaches the photograph and runs the fingers of her right hand back and forth over the moustache. Almost all the chairs are taken; the daughters-in-law are sitting at the front; apart from me, they are the only Czech women in the hall. Finally, the immediate family arrives. Spaska, the wife of the deceased, stands between her two sons. She is petite, perhaps a hundred and fifty centimetres tall; she sits down and is now at the centre of the whole gathering; she must feel the sympathetic glances of her friends, as well as their support. She has tears in her eyes, but she isn’t sobbing; as she stands up, I can see she is holding her younger son’s hand. Background music plays from the speaker, and on the screen, where his name had previously been displayed, photographs from Strahil’s life now flash by. In many of them I don’t recognise him; he looks like an old man with grey hair, so very different from the image I’ve kept of him. He was never old to me; I only noticed his grey hairs during our last meeting about a month ago, and perhaps I wouldn’t even have seen them then had it not been for the fear in his otherwise cheerful eyes. After the photographs have been projected, the curtain parts and, behind it, in the centre of the stage, lies a simple wooden coffin, adorned with large wreaths. Green fir branches, white and red roses. An elegant, white-haired man in a well-tailored suit takes the floor. He steps up to the lectern and bows deeply and solemnly; it makes a strong impression on me. Then he begins to speak in Bulgarian; I understand only a little. I understand just enough to see he is not a priest, but a friend, he obviously knows everyone, or at least most of the people in the hall; or perhaps he doesn’t know them, but he speaks to them very personally, sometimes addressing Spaska directly, looking her in the eye. Then he recites poems; I don’t understand what they’re about, but his delivery is heartfelt, compassionate and gentle. At the end of his speech, he bows once more, once to the bereaved and once to the coffin. Then we all stand up; an unfamiliar French chanson plays over the loudspeakers and the coffin is wheeled offstage. Whilst the coffin is being wheeled away, one of the funeral guests begins to clap loudly, but the others do not join in, so he soon gives up.
Apart from that surprising gesture, the atmosphere of dignity is disrupted by the sharp and discordant voice of the funeral hall manager, who urges us to offer our condolences fast, not to hold up the next funeral. I imagine the touch of cold hands, glassy, absent-minded gazes cast down to the ground. But this is different. Everyone is hugging one another, weeping, weeping in each other’s arms, looking into one another’s tear-stained eyes. They move slowly, much to the irritation of the institutional attendant, who would like us to clear off already. As we stand on the pavement in front of that impersonal, unsightly space intended for profound shared experience, the tension amongst those present is melting away. The tears dry up, and life seeps into the sombre atmosphere.
The funeral reception is taking place at Spaska’s home; in their modest Bulgarian flat, which is warm and full of carpets. There are so many of us here at the beginning, that we can barely fit in. A fairly large group of people remain on the sun-drenched terrace, with the once-beautiful ancient city spreading out below them. We drink rakija, chat about our lives, and reminisce about Strahil; we’ve all drunk rakija with him. The tables are laden with homemade delicacies. Banica, baklava, savoury cakes, aubergine salad and tzatziki. Bulgarian leavened bread, fruit and vegetables magnificently arranged in multiple bowls, meat, biscuits and chocolate, everything beautifully decorated, so Spaska has to encourage her guests to eat as nobody wants to be the first to dip into this loving feast creation. Soft light filters through the room; fresh air streams in through the doors onto the terrace, and the mourners mingle with one another, sipping drinks, laughing, eating, washing the crockery and then making a mess of it all again. At the edge of one of the tables stands a bottle of red wine, with a glass and an empty plate beside it; whoever takes food from the table is supposed to set a piece aside on the plate and pour some into the glass. My friend, the younger son of Strahil, explains to me that it’s an Orthodox tradition; they don’t know of any others – they are not religious. It was only his father who had himself baptised. Why they don’t really know. He was fifty at the time.
When the company thins out, we chat in the doorway to the room. My friend talks about how Strahil died. He died at home. All three of them were with him for a long time; then it was just him and Spaska, who held his hand. In a strange state of rapture, he recounts to me, in minute detail, beautiful story of his father’s last journey. Everything he says is important and suddenly he seems so grown-up to me. He is grown-up. The head of the family.
I leave after dark; it isn’t late, but I’m drunk. Only the family and a handful of the closest friends remain. ‘Are you leaving already?’ they ask me as if five minutes had passed from our arrival rather than five hours. Spaska hands me some funeral reception favors. Sweet barley, a couple of slices of roulade, a schnitzel and some yeast bread. She’s run out of boxes; so she must have given them all away over Christmas along with the potato salad, so now, with her last remaining strength, she’s packing the food for those leaving into empty bin bags. We hug, shake hands. We hug again. It occurs to me how many similar goodbyes she must have give through that day. It’s sad, but then again, it isn’t.
It’s like watching a river on a winter’s evening, that merges peacefully into the sea.
If you were to come and visit me one day, I’d come and pick you up at the station. You’d come by train, sometime after dusk on Friday; Misses Mejstříková would certainly not let you leave before five, she wants that windowsill finished as soon as possible so she can put the box of fuchsias, which is currently left outside under the arbour (where nobody can see it), back on, but you know that better than I do.
I’d pick you up at the station and it would be chilly outside – not as cold as it is at yours, but we are in the foothills after all. We’d have a beer or two, maybe three, in the trainstation pub; we’d sit at a table a bit off to the side until one of the locals took us under their wing. We’d then have to drink a few shots, so they wouldn’t think we were snobs; they’d feed our dogs some cheese and pickled sausages, and the dark-haired woman behind the bar, with her ever-present cigarette in the corner of her mouth, would let us smoke inside even though it’s not allowed. We wouldn’t stay long, though; I’d drag you home across the footbridge, which is lit up at night with blue light, as if we were somewhere in Boston. Across the footbridge, through the park—maybe we’d stop by the river, where the damp earth smells—and after a while I’d start shivering from the cold, and you’d say: ‘Come on, let’s go.’ Before you arrived, I’d clean the bathroom—don't you know why, by any chance? I know for a fact you don’t care about a clean bathroom; you wouldn’t even notice if I hadn’t done it, and yet I’d do it anyway. ‘If it makes you happy,’ you’d say, and I wouldn’t be able to answer; I wouldn’t be able to say whether it makes me happy, whether I enjoy sweeping and making the beds in the morning, or washing the bed sheets. We’d lie beneath the open window, under feather-filled duvets, and you’d slip your arms beneath my body and press me against you so tightly I couldn’t breathe. In the morning, you’d wake up early. You’d have to go out for a while, walk along the river and smoke heartily; you wouldn’t be able to bear it all – that light and its tenderness, that morning stillness, potentially empty, potentially full of expectations – not least my own potential expectations – you’re not interested in that; you certainly don’t want to fulfil them, whether they’re mine or not. That tranquility would torment you. I’d lie there for a while longer in the silent flat, buried in my pillow, I’d think about what brings me joy, what doesn’t, and what use it is to me than, and then I’d get up and make some eggs for breakfast, coffee, and black tea with honey. We’d wander all day through the hills, where we’d be safe from one another, where we could spread out across a clearing and sink into the earth. I’d show you a meadow hidden beneath the woods, where you could almost feel the scent of thyme, and apple trees would be in bloom along the path. We’d crawl under the fence and, passing a herd of cows gazing peacefully at us, we’d make our way to the headland of the neighbouring field. We’d have to make our way through young spruce trees, wade across a stream, and by afternoon we’d be running down into the valley; the river’s meanders would lead us along the rocks, where the path turns into a tree-lined ally, with the branches of plane trees arching overhead. We’d stop at the bakery, which fills the whole street with its aroma in the evening and where, from seven to nine, they sell warm pastries, meat products, cheeses and eggs. We’d gaze from behind the window at hundreds, or perhaps thousands of rolls—some sprinkled with poppy seeds, some without—as they came rolling out on the conveyor belt from somewhere deep within the bakery, but in the end we’d buy some bread instead and three black pudding sausages; one for you, one for me, and one for the dogs. On the way back from the bakery, we’d bump into Misses Havlová and she’d be gesticulating wildly, a cigarette smouldering between her fingers, she’d tell some old story about how, as a young woman, she’d have to wake her husband up at night when she’d come home from the pub and wanted to cuddle up to him, and then she’d rant about the Gypsies – why, actually, Vlasta?, I wouldn’t have asked that question out of cowardice; we’d better have run off to hide in the pub behind my father’s house instead. At the bar would be sitting my closest friend from our village, whose mother was a Hungarian Romani woman; ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘Now your house is all set up here, look, there sit your Neonazi neighbours,’ that’s what he’d say, and he’d cheerfully raise his glass of beer in the direction of the inside of the pub, and truly, my Neonazi neighbours would be sitting there and would nod back at him, and she, with her perfectly manicured nails and plucked eyebrows, would probably be ranting about Ukrainians or junkies, whilst he would stubbornly proclaim that Hitler was the last ruler, who wanted good life for us – which he occasionally claims and it is hard to dispute, because with him in particular, Hitler probably really wouldn’t have meant any harm, what Hitler might have thought of us is, understandably, of no interest to my Neonazi neighbour at this moment; moreover, he is unable to properly recognise who we are, even though it is more or less written on our foreheads. Nor could his wife tell, when, in the summer, she unwittingly invited my Jewish friend – whose grandmother had been imprisoned in Terezín – to sit with her on their garden swing. In his wife’s defence, she could not have known that there were still some Jews living in Europe; she probably (rightly) thought that, with negligible exceptions, they had been exterminated during the Second World War and that there was therefore no need to fear their presence, especially here, on the edge of the Sudetenland, where, in place of the last of the houses belonging to local Jewish family, stands a peeling, cheap information sign, whilst the rest of the property is taken up by the concrete forecourt of a florist’s shop, which, although it bears the sign ‘Flowers’ above the entrance, serves as a front for a methamphetamine dealer store. A certain friend of my village friend, whom I had never met before, would join us. He would choose his words carefully, with intellectual concentration – ‘I don’t want to come across as anti-Romani in any way,’ he would say, ’but they’, he would continue, ’aren’t interested in culture at all’, he would say, and by ‘they’ he would mean the Roma, whilst by the term ‘culture’ he would mean a sort of general white cultural output, an exhibition of generic paintings on the unfortunately dark-blue walls of the municipal gallery, or a concert of an not even so alternative rock band at the cultural centre with a ticket costing four hundred and fifty crowns. ’And why should they,’ as our mutual friend would say, ‘Culture here isn’t worth a thing’ – that’s what he’d rightfully say – but the other one, that so-called intellectual from somewhere from Moravia, wouldn’t listen to him at all, after all, he himself is a cultured man; and although he’s only lived here for a short while, unlike us, he has a clear view of the situation, and that’s why he knows that the town hall isn’t to blame for anything; the town hall is trying, unlike the Roma, who, on the contrary, make no effort at all, and yet it is precisely they who, in his view, ought to be making the effort. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ I’d say to you afterwards, and we’d sit down for a while with my Neonazi neighbours. You’d chat about work, you and her husband, while my half-Roma village friend would flirt with his wife, whom he fancies and about whom he’s sure that she is undoubtedly not white. We’d have a couple of house liquor shots and Dita, an attractive waitress in her fifties, would kindly kick us out just before midnight, even though officially the place closes at ten o’clock in the evening.
But perhaps it would be raining from the morning. It would be cold and it would be a Saturday, and the bakery would be closed. Perhaps it would be raining, just as it’s about to start raining in a moment – I know that, it’s a fact; this morning by the river I saw swallows flying low over the water. But don’t get the wrong idea – I’m certainly not waiting for you under any circumstances; it’s just something that crosses my mind from time to time;
what if you came to visit me one day?