I didn’t think too much about this unexpectedly accommodating and generous organization. On the other hand, when I mentioned this marvelous offer at home, my twenty-year-old brother noted drily, “They’re trying to buy you off.”
The book I almost had ready was of course too thin — I needed one more story. I decided to set off on an assignment in the hope that fate would offer a marvelous subject. Several ideas came to mind, but in the end, I set out for the Most region northwest of Prague. I descended the Victorious February mine shaft and paid a visit to a chemical factory that was awesome in its enormousness. I even had time to look at the house whose foundations I had helped lay seven years earlier. I also learned that as winter approached one finds only smoke, fog, dirt, waste dumps, and smoldering mine shafts. The air finally got to me; I came down with the flu, and when my temperature topped forty degrees Celsius, I called home not knowing what to do.
Father had to go to work but he said that right away he would send Jenda, who would at least get some driving practice. He had just received his license. He would arrive in two hours and bring me some blankets that mother told me to wrap myself in. I waited. A fog fell so thick that the car trip might take double the time.
After more than three hours, I was called to the telephone, and Father, in a somewhat agitated voice, informed me that my brother had had an accident. The car was ready for the scrap heap, but Jenda had by some miracle come through without a scratch.
I arrived home on the bus wrapped in borrowed blankets.
*
I quickly recovered from the flu and set out on another reporting assignment. I went to the Plzeň region, where the University Art Ensemble, of which Helena was a member, was having an assembly at the Žinkovy Chateau. Here I met several of her friends, among them the excellent graphic artist Mirek Klomínek. We started talking, and when I told him about my plan for a reportage expedition, he asked if I needed someone to create a pictorial accompaniment to my writing.
Right there on the spot we agreed to travel to eastern Slovakia, to the strip of land that lay between the borders of Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union (not long ago it had been Carpathian Ruthenia and inhabited by Ruthenians, but today it is called Ukraine and populated by Ukrainians). I offered to write several reports for Literární noviny about this most remote part of our republic. So far nobody had written about these parts of the republic, and no one knew much about them, so my offer was gratefully accepted.
Mirek Klomínek was not only a talented artist and good singer but also an athlete with a sense of adventure. When we laid out all the maps of the area we could get our hands on, we saw that the railway line ended in Stakčin. From there we could identify only small, often unpaved roads. Some villages, according to the maps, were accessible only by field paths. It seemed highly improbable that buses ran in this area. Neither of us owned a motorcycle (not to mention a car), so we decided to use our default means of transportation — bicycles.
At the beginning of the summer of 1958, Mirek and I loaded our backpacks and boarded a train that would spirit us to the final station before the border with the Soviet Union.
Královský Chlmec was not a very interesting town. Low, squat buildings stretched far and wide. The people spoke mostly Hungarian, and the capital, from where we had come, was for them almost another country, which, owing to an accidental series of historical circumstances, now ruled over them. We didn’t linger here, and after a couple of hours set off northward on our bicycles. From the first day of our journey I remember only one adventure. On a vast plain we took refuge from the taxing heat in a wine cellar. About two hours later we went back and mounted our bikes, but after a few minutes, worn out by the heat and drunk on wine, we lay down on the scorching ground. I must have fallen asleep for a little while because I was suddenly awakened by a curious thundering and the feeling that the earth below me was shuddering. I looked around and saw a herd of cattle approaching in a cloud of fine dust. It was something out of an American western, and I realized at once we were in fact in a foreign country.
Slowly but surely we made our way across this exotic plain with the Laborec River flowing above our heads, or so it seemed, restrained by several-meter-tall embankments. Then we boarded a motor coach along with our bicycles and made it all the way to Snina.
The most pitiful and backward region in the whole republic was ruled from Snina. The people here spoke a local dialect resembling a combination of Slovak and Russian. The first few days we more or less guessed at the meaning of what we heard. We visited local functionaries (who mostly spoke Slovak) and received many recommendations about people to meet.
The maps had not lied — the asphalt roads soon came to an end, and all that remained were narrow and worn stony paths. Every few kilometers we had to patch up a punctured wheel.
Then we set off for Uličská doliny. I had expected a romantic trip, I had expected poverty. But in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined all the things we stumbled upon here. In this still untouched countryside we chanced upon tiny cottages with minuscule windows, walls of unfired bricks, often just trampled dirt instead of a floor, and animals sometimes living together with people — though there were rarely any animals except chickens. Once we came upon a small wooden chapel on a hilltop, something out of a fairy tale. Inside were cheap icons, but when the worshippers (primarily women) gathered, we heard Eastern hymns so marvelous, so untamed and wild, that they knocked us off our feet. The women wore plain black dresses and skirts. And everywhere we came across the crippled and mentally ill. The former were victims of the war that had passed through here with all its cruelty fourteen years earlier. The latter were victims of moonshine.
Most of the villages had no shops, or if there were shops, there was nothing to buy. The people lived on what they grew, and every now and then would purchase salt, sugar, yeast (as much as was needed to distill moonshine), and denatured alcohol (which could also be imbibed). Because there were no taverns along the way, we ate out of tin cans and slept wherever we could thanks to the hospitality of the villagers, usually somewhere in the kitchen — one on a bench, the other on the floor.
The nearest doctor was in Snina. Sometimes a medic who had learned to treat battle wounds during the war could be found in a village — this skill came in handy because unexploded mines and other munitions lay scattered in the woods. Midwives, herbalists, and exorcists made up for the lack of doctors.
Soon I saw how advantageous it was for my work that I had taken along an artist instead of a photographer. The ability to quickly draw a house, a cow, or a figure of the owner aroused admiration and wonder and was an excellent conversation starter. I listened to and recorded a great number of stories, legends, and superstitions; I heard epic, often tragic tales from the war.
I also discovered something else one found only in such backward regions: how an old and venerable culture — habits and a way of life, costumes, songs, and rituals — quickly crumbles and disappears. A new culture of pop music, kitsch, transistor radios, nylon, and ready-made clothing was making its way into these regions. It was brought primarily by young men who had gone off for their two years of military training somewhere in the western part of the republic (it was a rule of the military authorities to place the recruits as far away from their homes as possible) and also by those who had left the village for work, and when they returned, they saw everything as unacceptably backward and unsophisticated. The new era, of course, penetrated these parts wearing comradely vestments. One goal was to establish agricultural cooperatives. I heard stories of agitators placing upon the table their strongest argument — a pistol — when trying to convince farmers to join.