Wrote from 10:00-12:00. Read Auto-da-Fé. Lunch with the Novaks1 upstairs2. Went with Jan to have my photo taken for the tram-pass. Went with him to the very clandestine Czech equivalent of the video shop. Then at 3.45 met Tim Pyke and went to where he teaches. Met Ezra Klein. Watched first Ezra and then Tim. Dinner with the Novaks. I got on very well with their two year old son, Bobo. Then had instant coffee, watched a few videos. Downstairs for a shower. Am meeting the ex-pat-brits etc for a drink 8.30 Wenceslas Square. I am looking forward to starting with my classes next week. My English is becoming more monosyllabic all the time.
Only Tim turned up. We went for a drink off-Wenceslas Square. I don’t think he likes me very much. I was making all the conversation. We had a couple of Newcastle Brown-like beers and then went home. He got the shits the next day, I didn’t. I think he has a weak stomach.
How kind and welcoming they are to young-Toby. Jan is/has been an aristocrat of Communist society — because he works as a waiter in a restaurant, and therefore has access to foreign currency in the form of tips. He looks very like Paul McCartney during the period after he left The Beatles and started to be consciously happy. His and Jitka’s TV is bigger and better than the one owned by Toby’s Western parents’; they also have a satellite dish, endless ice cream, good coffee. Their son Bobo is a friendly red-cheeked little boy. But their marriage — beneath the smiles of welcome — is very unhappy. Jitka had been very pretty, but she is losing her looks to gloom. She often talks to young-Toby’s landlady (or, as she gets it wrong at first, landlorder) Barbora about this; they sometimes talk of nothing else.
They do go up the stairs to visit the Novaks. But to leave the building, young-Toby takes the lift down nine floors. This lift is worth mentioning. Lifts in tower blocks have a reputation for vandalism and piss. The one in Augustinova has been wallpapered and carpeted. And whoever did this has also installed a small mirror, at a convenient height, for anyone wishing to make a final check of their hair, and to prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet.
Young-Toby will visit other tower blocks nearby, and he’ll find that none of them have quite the same beautiful, welcoming lift — though all of them will be clean, unvandalised and rarely (in his limited experience) break down.
Whoever decorated the interior was making a sincere and successful attempt to improve the lives of their neighbours. And they were successful.
This reminds me of Unst bus shelter, on the Shetland island —
I later put a loved, decorated public bus shelter into a screenplay that never got made. In the story, Winona Ryder burnt it down, by accident.
Don’t ask.