Moravsky

It was, Anthony thought, perhaps a hangover from the only recently departed days of communism – as soon as you got beyond Austria there was a very noticeable shortage of vowels. Street signs and notices at the railway stations became incomprehensible conglomerations of consonants.

Probably, some inept dictator had included production of consonants in a five-year plan and simply overlooked the other letters, leaving the repressed population queuing for vowels all of each lunchbreak in some Kafkaesque nightmare for years.

‘Moravsky Krumlov’ seemed to be the exception – a placename with an almost Anglo-Saxon supply of vowels.

In the bus station at Brno (see!) Anthony deduced that the bus for Moravsky Krumlov departed from Platform 35 and that one paid the driver on boarding.

The bus wound its way through the green Moravian countryside, down narrow lanes, past villages with unpaved roads and drains down the middle of the streets, prolific garden allotments, fruit trees, wayside crosses and shrines to St John Nepomuk.

And it pulled up right outside the Hotel Jednota, Moravsky Krumlov’s tiny guesthouse.

Miming sleep and holding up two fingers was enough to convey to the pleasant woman behind the desk what he required, and he paid his 620 Kc. The room was simple but had a view up to St Florian’s on the hill.

At 9.05 the next morning Anthony was at ‘the chateau’.

 On his hike there from the hotel – through the Mittel Europe rural idyll – a truck driver had stopped to ask directions of him – Anthony, the only person from Invercargill in the whole of Moravia that day!

‘The chateau’ was old and dilapidated – faded, with plaster falling in large chunks off its walls, sizeable trees growing from the sagging guttering round the roof. Not so long before it had been used to store coal, but now inside was the great gesamtkunstwerk, the ten-year labour of Czechoslovakia’s greatest artist – the twenty giant canvases of ‘The Epic of the Slav People’ by the sublime Alphonse Mucha.

Anthony had long been a devotee but now here he finally was – a pilgrim at the tattered and glorious shrine. He paid the 40 Kc and donned the felt galoshes that were deemed necessary to protect the floors – not so long ago trod by shovel-wielding coalmen in hobnail boots – from the destructive feet of half a dozen art enthusiasts. He entered that sanctuary of art.

The next morning Anthony sat in his hotel room going through the travel guide’s inadequate Czech language section.

He wrote out what seemed to be ‘please may I book another night’s accommodation,’ and practised getting his tongue round those consonants.

There was no way he could remember this collection of sounds, so he took the paper with him to the reception area and read the phrase to the nice woman there. Her bemused look indicated that his efforts had not been successful. She took the piece of paper and read it and smiled. He paid another 310 Kc. He would stay a little bit longer.

Barnaby McBryde