Ivan Motýl

“Paradoxically, I realised there were miners and steel workers by reading the books of Bohumil Hrabal, whom I loved. I read those books at a terribly premature age, I realise that. I started reading them when I was in my seventh year at school, that Poldinka and the things that were going on in Kladno. And based on Hrabal, I understood that my father was also working in a steelworks, and that there are huge ironworks in Vítkovice. And I started seeing it through Hrabal’s eyes. I reckoned: This is the world he’s writing about, I have it here, that’s beautiful. And now all I need is to discover those pubs and that palavering, and then I can start talking with those steelworkers and miners (although Hrabal didn’t write about miners, but I reckoned they’d be similar). I started to apply this in practice when I began drinking beer at the end of the first year of grammar school [which would be around the age of 16 - trans.]. I began making lone forays into the pubs around the ironworks and the mine shafts, and I find out that it was a completely different world. That the Ostrava miners and steelworkers have a completely different character than what Hrabal depicts. That they don’t talk, that they’re terribly vulgar, that they usually speak in some dialect, or they’re Slovaks; they don’t drink beer, their beer’s left idle the whole time there, they go through ten shots of rum while having two beers as an aside, mostly. They don’t feel the need to solve any palavering problems, like stamp collections or astronomy... The things that Hrabal loved about the working class and that the Prague workers have to this day. In Ostrava, they only care about the babes and the work, and it was such a primitive and surprising environment for me back then. I’m awfully disappointed by it. And of course, I didn’t fit in there, so of course, when they see someone with a bit more hair watching them, there’d often be some minor conflict, like: ‘What’re you staring at? A student? What’s your business here, what do you want? ’ And if you wanted to get on well with them, you’d have a shot with them, but I mostly just made myself scarce without a fuss. It was disappointing. So then, paradoxically, I started travelling to Prague in search of workers, or even to Kladno [another prominent steelworking city at the time - trans.]; from when I was fifteen, I kept taking the train to Prague. I had a favourite train, which left Ostrava at midnight on Saturday, I was in Prague at six in the morning, and I went back to Ostrava by the midnight train again. I’d do that, say, twice a month while at the grammar school, in my Prague euphoria. And I found Hrabal there, whereas I couldn’t find him here. And I was kind of pissed off that things were different here.”

“Communism was terribly inconsistent in how it punished its enemies. It tried to punish my parents by denying them any work in Klatovy, threatening to lock them up for freeloading, and so on. But when my parents moved to Ostrava, it was as if they’d forgotten them or the District Committee of the CPC [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia - trans.] was too far from Ostrava. So, well, they knew that they mustn’t work as journalists or as teachers, but the paradox is that my father actually got a job - because he had a technical education - at the gas holder in Nová huť [New Works]. But he was some kind of head employee there with responsibility for ensuring the gas holder wouldn’t blow up, because it’d wipe out half of Ostrava if it happened. So that was a very well-paid position. It wasn’t a miner’s wage, but I think it was very much above-average for the time, so he didn’t really know what to do with the money. No one really knew what to do with their money in Ostrava. Because the miners earned say 8,000 crowns, when they worked somewhere at the front or in extraction. And you couldn’t spend that kind of money back then. At a time when a teacher’s pay was 1,200 crowns and a stage hand, which is what I did in 1988, earned 900 crowns. My father solved the matter by - because the shops in Ostrava were well stocked; just a note, Ostrava wasn’t like the countryside, where you couldn’t buy anything in the self-service shops... I remember that in my child’s eyes, [Ostrava] was full of goods. The House of Food stood in the centre, full of open sandwiches and Pilsen beer... For me, Pilsen beer was a symbol of wealth, I had it connected to the fact that my father was from Pilsen. So Dad would go buy Pilsen beer in the House of Food, they had a delicatessen section there, where they sold [Hungarian] winter salami and csabai sausages... And we had all of that at home all the time. My father frequented the same butcher’s shop that miners did, which offered expensive beef steaks as a matter of course. I know that we had beef steaks something like twice a week. For me, beef steaks are a symbol of childhood. I wouldn’t buy a beef steak today, but paradoxically back when I was growing up, because Communism didn’t know how to squeeze the life out of some of its enemies (it knew how to with others), it actually allowed my parents to live in this curious kind of state of wealth, which they sufficiently enjoyed.”