Kamil Kotab - lost love in the Caucasus
Kamil Kotab is a Prague banker in his mid thirties. But he does not spend all his time behind a desk. Kamil has a strong sense of adventure, and ever since the Czech borders were opened with the fall of communism he has travelled to many of the world's more isolated places, especially in the former Soviet Union. Here Kamil recalls a sad, but open-ended Czech-Russian love story from one of his many trips to Russia, a story that has its roots in a time when Russian soldiers were still stationed in this country.
"I have one story which happened to me a couple of years ago, when I was travelling in the Caucasus, in the mountains near the border of Georgia and Russia. I went to very isolated places, out of any tourist routes. And I was basically walking up the hill for a whole day, not knowing where I was going at the time, and I went to a cottage where I met a Russian guy, forty-five - roughly - years old and he told me his story. He was a soldier who had served in the far-east in Vladivostok, and his brother had served in Milovice, in a Russian army base in the Czech Republic. His brother met here a Marketa Svobodova, a girl who was at that time around sixteen, in high school. They exchanged addresses, and he handed over the address of his brother in Vladivostok. And they started sending letters to each other, and this guy from Vladivostok became in love with her - seriously - even though he had never seen her. He had only one picture of her. So he was in love and he wanted to marry her, but after the changes in Russia she stopped sending him letters. So he tried to get to the Czech Republic, but he'd left the army and he couldn't get to the Czech Republic. So he was depressed and he went to the mountains and stayed in this cottage, and having only the picture of Marketa and thinking about her, without any wife or woman.
And when I said I am from the Czech Republic, he started yelling and said: "Well you have to find Marketa and tell her I'm still waiting." And I got an address, so I went to Pardubice, to a small village close to Pardubice, and I found Marketa and I handed over the message. And she promised to call him back or to contact him. I don't know what happened afterwards, but maybe it happened that they met finally. But at the time that I met her, she was happily married and had two kids, so it's not probable. But it shows how difficult sometimes relationships can be - Czech-Russian especially."
