#7 Next Time

My husband asked me if I thought there would ever have been a revolution if the Communists had allowed more color. Of course, he was partly joking, his comment being more about the increasing colorful improvements we’ve noticed this trip than about world politics.

Houses and buildings and streets and sidewalks are now steadily undergoing improvements which during the Communist regime would have been unthinkable. Concrete and asphalt streets and sidewalks are being torn up and replaced with paving bricks and cobblestones more like what had been in place before 1948. Many of the graying concrete-colored houses we used to walk by are now painted in yellows, greens and blues. When I asked my friend why so many people were choosing to paint their houses a color, she said, “Because they can now.” She explained that during the Communist regime colored house paint was simply not available.

I remembered her mother telling us about how she had been allowed to travel to Austria as a part of some trip for musicians, and how for her returning to Brno was like going from a color world back to one in black and white. It seemed to me a terribly sad observation for an artist to make.

I spent my last Saturday afternoon in Brno in the city center. I spent some time on a bench in Namesti Svobody (Freedom Square), the main plaza which is in the center of the old part of town. When we were here before, the entire square, except for some room to walk along in front of the buildings, was under construction.

Many residents complain that the newly renovated square hasn’t any trees or green areas, that the barrenness makes it look like a military parade ground. In spite of these shortcomings, I think the square is beautiful, and I like to sit on one of the seven or so benches there, look at the square, the buildings around it, the trams that go through it and to watch the people.

In warm weather children play in the fountain which is in one corner and walk the poetry in relief on the concentric circles around it. In the afternoons Gypsies offer a little free entertainment in the form of what I call “dispute theater.” The usual cast is rarely fewer than five and involves some apparent disagreement, which gets played out in ever increasing distance between and loudness of the players until the number decreases to two, then none. Or that is how it seems to me. But then, I’m likely to tire of the act or become distracted by some momentarily more interesting sight like the advertisements on the side of the green Number 5 tram which make the riders appear to be sitting on toilets, or the nun with the fashionable leather purse and high heels making her way across the square and past the lingerie shop.

I look at the 17th Century plague column rising some thirty feet and topped with a nearly life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary, magnificent in a shining gold full-body halo. Below her, on each of the four corners of the base, are golden haloed saints, and on three sides are carved the names of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century plagues that the people of Brno were saved from. Many of the larger cities and some of the smaller towns I’ve visited here have at least one such tower, which rises, predictably, in a central square, just like Confederate war memorials in the South. And sadly, like those monuments, its relevance also seems lost to those around it.

When the Petrov Bells tolled five, I thought about the time I climbed the bell tower of the Cathedral two days in a row, the second time on purpose to hear the tremendous bells ring again just a few feet above my head. I had hoped to go just once more to hear these same bells mark noon. Maybe next time.