Memorias de un Refugiado · Chapter 7 ·
Chapter 7:
Back to the Golden Harp
Václav Nový · translated from the Spanish original by Jaroslav Sokol · 6 min read
This chapter begins the way every war story should end. The family returns to Mariánské Lázně, his mother gets the house back, the Golden Harp fills up with tenants.
Václav is fourteen. He is training as an electrician, he has a motorbike, and for the first time in his life it looks as though things will be all right.
I have to warn you in advance: this instalment does not end well.
What follows is an excerpt from Memorias de un Refugiado, which I am translating from the Spanish original. This is not fiction, it is an autobiography, the true story of Václav Nový. The full chapter appears in the book.
My Life in Europe, Chapter 7: Back to the Golden Harp
Around that time I made friends with a girl my own age and we spent long hours together. She was keen on photography and had a darkroom set up at home. She developed her own pictures there and made enlargements, even photographic tricks, she was a real expert. I helped her with the work and I think I learned something.
She also played the guitar, so we would meet at our house with my sister and play as a trio. By then my sister played the piano very well and I had learned a fair amount on the violin, so the three of us went together excellently.
In time I realised I was very fond of that girl, and today I think she was my first love. I spent every free moment with her, at her house or at ours; her parents were friends of ours too, so nothing stood in our way. I had a motorbike then and we rode a great deal around beautiful places, because that country is magnificent.
A few weeks later the girl did not come home. They found her in a remote building in the woods, dead. It was not suicide. Václav was taken in for questioning as the first suspect, because he was her closest friend. It was never discovered who did it. How that interrogation went, what he thought about it, and why her parents never spoke to him again, that is in the book.
My take
This chapter has two halves, and between them a break after which nothing is the same.
The first half is almost an idyll. The house came back, his mother put the papers in order, the Golden Harp filled up with tenants. Václav has his room again, he is training as an electrician, he carries coal up three flights from the cellar. He takes the train to Cheb and watches the steam locomotives. He has a motorbike. He has a girl who can develop photographs and plays the guitar while his sister plays the piano and he plays the violin.
He is fourteen, fifteen, and for the first time in his life it looks as though things will be all right.
The second half fits into a single sentence. They found her in the woods, shot in the head.
Václav disposes of the whole tragedy in a few paragraphs. No investigation, no theories, no accusations. He writes only that he never entirely got over it, that he became withdrawn and began to seek solitude.
I sat over that translation for a long time wondering whether it was even worth publishing. It is not a nice story. But it belongs there, because without this chapter the next one makes no sense.
A boy who lost his house, then his father, then a friend by a tree, and finally his first love, and who found that there wasn't much to lean on at home either, because his mother played cards and he and his sister didn't get on a boy like that packs a suitcase a few years later and walks across the border alone.
I don't think he left because of communism. That was the reason. But he was able to leave because nothing was holding him at home any more.
About the book
Memorias de un Refugiado is being published in Czech for the first time by Aysén Fjord Editions. Chapters appear gradually, first in the Sokol v Patagonii newsletter on LinkedIn, then here. All proceeds go to the author's family in Chile.
Next: Chapter 8: Communism. Prague of a hundred spires, an electric train set at a cousin's house, and a bobsleigh run they called the death curve.
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