This week, having no responsibilities at the university, we went with our friend and officemate Lucie to her cousin’s cottage in northern Moravia, a three-hour-long series of rides on two trains and a bus from Brno, in a tiny village called Suchá Rudna which lies a half-hour walk from the tiny village called Andělská Hora (Angel Mountain), where the bus line ended.

(In Czech, a cottage like this is called a chalupa, but it has nothing to do with the Taco Bell entrée of the same name: the ch at the beginning is pronounced like ultralingual precisionists say the sound at the end of Bach. I should mention that ch is actually a letter unto itself in Czech. It comes after h in the alphabet, like this:

and when shops print their name descendingly down signs by the door, those letters refuse to separate, like this:

which means “showers.”)

I remember reading about these chalupas while we were still in the US and wondering, if Czechs were as poor as they are described, how nearly every Czech family could afford to have a second home out in the country. The reason actually requires a bit of explanation. First of all, under communism, every family was allowed to own a cottage or an out-of-town garden plot, even though they weren’t actually allowed to own the apartments and houses in which they lived in town; these belonged to a collective. So, given a chance to own a bit of private property, everyone who could do so jumped at the chance. The gardens that people owned are almost exactly like the one in our landlady’s backyard, long narrow meticulously-ordered patches that people spend an inordinate amount of time plowing, weeding, planting, tidying, pruning, and otherwise tending in the long slow evenings and on the weekends, whenever possible. Second only perhaps to beer and hockey, it’s the national pastime.

Secondly, since food was in such short supply under communism, and the variety of available food, from tales we hear now, was often restricted to not much more than potatoes and cabbage, people had little choice but to grow some of their own food. The cottage industry, so to speak, sprang up partly to compensate for the lack. C. and I have at times lamented that the Czech garden aesthetic insists on tiny orderly rows of rectanges with little fences, not to mention the sporadically-placed inverted plastic bottles on steel pipes thrust into the ground which, when the wind rattles the plastic against, the pipe, frighten away moles. C. is especially bothered by this, since her father is a landscape architect who prefers sweeping curves and staggered terraces to right angles, and for good reason.

This rectangular aesthetic is transferred to people’s front-yard gardens as well, which usually consist of nothing but rows of rectangles: a rectangular patch of daisies next to a rectangular patch of tulips next to a rectangular patch of marigolds. Although it is not necessarily attractive to Americans raised in luxury, Americans who have never had to grow their own food, who would spend a couple of years lean on the learning curve if times suddenly forced them to fend for themselves vegetable-wise, this rectangular practicality maximizes the productivity of the small garden plot. Our landlady’s garden could feed a person for months on potatoes, carrots, kohlrabi, leeks, herbs, parsley, celery root, cabbage, peppers, not to mention a few carefully-pruned plum, apple, and apricot trees and, of course, the rabbits. Her neighbor, in addition to such a selection, keeps a few beehives. It is already June, and our landlady’s potato cellar is still half-full from last fall’s harvest. Although she must be fairly affluent now (her monthly rent income from her three tenants alone is more than most people’s salaries), she spends almost every afternoon bent over in the back yard, on hot days wearing a pink bikini bottom and a bra, tending to one area or another of what will be this fall’s harvest. Her love of gardening may well serve also to fill the empty hours her husband and children used to occupy, but nonetheless, it stands as evidence that old habits die hard.

The fact that spending time at one’s cottage in the country is still so popular, half a generation after the fall of the communist regime, attests also to the Czechs’ love of what my students refer to in their essays as “the beautiful green nature.” Although it is changing quickly, Czech village life still seems to encapsulate a part of the national identity that the city never will. People live in the city because, after all, it’s the 21st century now, and they have embraced their new freedom to earn and buy, but a large part of the heart is still reserved for the village.

Lucie’s cousin’s cottage had a kind of rustic luxury that I wasn’t expecting. I was expecting something only slightly larger than the huts in the out-of-town garden plots that line the railroad tracks. (On our first train ride into the country last summer, before we knew better, we wondered if we were passing through a lace-curtained shantytown, if times were so hard that whole families really lived in these little one-room peaked-roof houses along the tracks. Now we know that they serve as a place to sit and sip lemonade while taking a break from gardening). Instead of such a hut, we were led into an old stuccoed farmhouse with a large yard and a quickly flowing creek running along one edge. On the right side of the central low-arched-roof hallway (anyone over 5'6" would have to stoop) were a kitchen heated by an old tile-stove and a couple of bedrooms; on the left, another bedroom and a sitting room with a fireplace, deep leather chairs, and several boar skins on the walls (no, that’s not a typo; think tusks). At the end of the hallway was a knotty-pine-paneled sunroom with an attached jacuzzi/sauna complex. A recent issue of Chalupář (“Chalupa Owner”)—a monthly magazine for young chalupa-owning professionals, dedicated to decorating ideas and simple low-maintenance improvements to modernize your chalupa while maintaining that country feel—revealed the inclinations of Lucie’s cousin.

Some of the wall hangings in the cottage included pictures and maps of the village of Suchá Rudna, back in the days when it had a German name. When I asked Lucie about these, I learned that we were right in the middle of the Sudatenland, the strip along the Polish-Czech border that before the Second World War had been heavily populated by Germans, which fact Hitler used to justify claiming it as a part of Germany and annexing it prior to his invasion of Poland (if my sparse knowledge of history has things in the right order). We spent a while the following day, during our four-hour hike through the beautiful green nature in the mountains, talking about the unfortunate period in the late 1940s when the newly communist government forced almost all of the Germans living in Czechoslovakia to leave, took away their houses, and reassigned them to Czechoslovak families.

When we innocently asked if the German families who had inhabited all these homes, such as the one we were staying in, had ever been compensated in any way, it was clear that we had stumbled upon a sensitive subject. Lucie pointed out that, after the war, Germany had paid war reparations to every country in the region except Czechoslovakia, and that the combined value of what the Czechs owe the Germans in terms of lost real estate is absolutely trivial compared to what the Germans still owe the Czechs in terms of war damages. Further, because there are no longer any Germans living in the area, the children of the people who were evicted cannot possibly want the houses returned to them so that they can move back to the area. They just want the money.

All in all, despite the touchy politics and the unending rain, we had a wonderful time and learned a bit about another aspect of Czech life that we would otherwise have remained ignorant of. It’s funny how many rocks you have to turn over in order to discover the more interesting things.

AND THEN, he continued, WE WENT TO SEE THE SHORTEST PLAY IN THE HISTORY OF EVER!
geez. you leave out some important stuff sometimes, my friend.