The Cold War neighbour
Around a decade ago I had a flat in Vinohrady, near Flora. One day, not long after I’d moved in, a couple of older residents, members of the building committee, knocked on my door to check on something. While we were talking, one of them asked brusquely how much rent I paid.
From then on he always scowled whenever we met in the corridor. Dobrý dens were not forthcoming. He would climb the stairs on foot rather than share the lift with me.
To my mind, his hostile attitude fit with his physiognomy. With his prominent eyebrows and distinctly Slavic features, he looked a great deal like Leonid Brezhnev.
Honestly, comrades, this guy looked like a Communist straight out of Cold War central casting. It would have been very easy to imagine him kissing another Eastern Bloc leader on both cheeks while wearing one of those Papakhi fur hats. Never having registered his name, I called him the Commie.
Not long after my run-in with Pan Bushy Brows, I was flicking around the TV channels on a Saturday morning and was surprised to see a familiar face: my adversary, who was an extra on some dopey soap opera.
Years passed, I moved and, naturally, I never gave my erstwhile neighbour another thought.
But then one day I went to the cinema to watch a political thriller set in Communist Czechoslovakia. The film was rather underwhelming, despite the fact that it concerned events in the 1950s, the first and harshest decade of communism, and a period I find endlessly fascinating. However, towards the end something happened to revive my interest.
The film culminates in a show trial, of which there were several in those days, with one of the main characters standing in the dock. The camera pans across the set and there, sitting right in the front row of a painstakingly recreated ‘50s courtroom, is… the Commie! My Commie! I swear I almost jumped out of my seat. Honestly, if a mere extra can ever be said to have been given the role of a lifetime, then this was it, as far as I’m concerned.
