“Yes.” He looked around. “It’s a little bit nicer than it was. I think it’s…what do you say…the next popular neighbourhood?”
“Up-and-coming,” supplied Lydia.
“Yes. Up-and-coming neighbourhood. When I was here it was a down-and-going-nowhere neighbourhood.”
He took Lydia’s hand and walked with her past students and staggering drunks, headscarved women and loitering men in ripped vests.
“But you’re an international-level violinist. This looks like a really poor area.”
“It is a really poor area.” Milan laughed. “We were really poor.”
“So…how did you get to be a famous musician then?”
He stopped and scanned a bar on the corner.
“It’s changed its name,” he said. “Let’s try it anyway. Come in and I’ll tell you.”
Inside, the bar was dark and rickety and empty save for a whistling barman drying glasses in a corner. Milan ordered them a half-litre glass of Staropramen beer each and looked around.
“It’s been painted, and the pictures on the wall are different.” He shrugged and sipped at his beer. “I grew up on this street. I got drunk in this bar the night before I left Prague.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen. They shouldn’t have served me, really. But they knew me. And, like I said, the rules are different in Žižkov. They don’t apply.”
“So…you were going to tell me how you came from here to where you are now?”
“Where I am now? I’m in Žižkov. Full circle.” He grinned wolfishly, then switched the smile off like a light. “No. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t born here. I was born a little to the south, in Vinohrady. Now, Vinohrady is a nice neighbourhood, very bourgeois, and we lived there in one of those lovely, pink-painted houses you see everywhere. There was a little garden and we had a better lifestyle than most families. Why? Because my father played in the Prague Symphony Orchestra, and our Communist overlords liked good classical musicians. Not as much as they liked good sportsmen and women, but almost as much.”
“Did your father play the violin?”
“He did. He was the leader of the orchestra, in fact. He met my mother at the Conservatoire—she played the harp. She gave up when my brother was born, though.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Yes. He is a lot older than me. Ten years older.”
&n
bsp; “Where does he live?”
“Hush, listen and I’ll tell you. So, we are all living together, as happily as a family can live under a totalitarian regime, when something happens. What happens? My brother, Jan, is a wonderful violinist also. At the age of fourteen, he is selected to compete in an international competition. This is an incredible honour and everyone is very excited for him, even me, though I am only four years old. Because he is still a boy, my father accompanies him to San Diego, USA, where the contest is being held. I don’t know if he wins or not, because they never come back.”
Lydia’s mouth dropped open. The first thing to spring to her mind was an air disaster, or some kind of terrible illness.
“What…happened to them?”
Milan shook his head and tutted. “You are so young, Lydia. You don’t know how it was. Nothing happened to them. They just didn’t come back.”
“Oh! I see! You mean they… What did they used to call it…?”
“Defected. Yes.”
“They stayed in America? Are they still there?”
“I know Jan is. He plays for some orchestra in Seattle.”
“Are you… Do you see him?”