An unforgettable toast over Prague | iRADIO
Actually, the following memory is slightly delayed. But with Russian data, and it concerns one, I’ve been confused ever since I went to celebrate the October Revolution in November with a lantern as a schoolboy.
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So then: I walk like this on November 10, around eleven in the morning forty years ago across the Old Town Square… Steel gray sky above Prague and humidity in the air. And that’s when I meet a friend, an employee of Prague’s historic preservation office, based in the neighboring Malé rynk. And she immediately, if I don’t want to take a look at the recently repaired Tyn tower, where I have to see if everything is going as it should. Damn, such an offer comes once in a lifetime! So when you have an enormous handle.
And so, at the foot of the temple, we climbed into the elevator cage without much talk, and in a moment I was already standing on the walkway and couldn’t help myself. Both to the chirping below, and to the undulating surface of the surrounding roofs and turrets, but also above the vigorous activity of several stone restorers, young men with broad shoulders and smiles, willingly showing and explaining everything to me.
And a friend, a Chartist by the way, who was kept at work as an indispensable expert by the respectable conservation bosses under pressure from above, solved something and researched something with those friendly lamzhelazes, it all made my head spin.
The radio is reporting!
It was windy up there, but the boys were out with cups of tea, it was all like a wonderful dream. The really high point of which came immediately in the form of one of the restorers, who emerged from inside the tower, a bottle of rum in his hand, and said, as if he still didn’t believe it himself: “The radio just announced that Brezhnev had died!” And let it circulate.
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The bottle passed from mouth to mouth, and though it was not exactly Christian, considering the building on the top of which we were, we were married with sincere joy.
I looked again at the square, where the pedestrians were swarming, probably still unaware that a guy so hated was behind him. Quite physically repulsive by the way. About whose eyebrows, as Raymond Chandler writes, “the Fuller company, brushes and brooms, might be interested.”
We drank once more, this time to something completely different, that is, to our health, and once again scuttled through the wire cage into Týnská Ulička. “Ugh,” I say, “thanks, Zoro, that was something!” And slightly dazed by everything, I continued on my way somewhere.
And he had no illusions that something fundamentally would change, despite his greater joy over the death of the occupying tyrant. Also no. But again, we didn’t wait that long. After all, only seven years were left of the constant threat “for ever and ever”. They lasted like forever anyway.
The author is a commentator on Czech Radio
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