| Author: |
Bela Hermanek |
| Dated: |
Tuesday, January 13 2004 @ 04:00 PM EST |
| Viewed: |
1634 times |
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For as long as I can remember, and I was born in forty seven, the Soviet red flag with hammer and sickle had to be placed next to our Czech red and white flag with the wedge of blue. Big brother was watching: who dared to display only the Czech flag alone?
Red was the colour of communism. Every 1st of May we had to march in the mandatory enthusiastic workers' parade. It was full of red flags, red banners, and the red kerchiefs of the Pioneers Youth Brigade. Every municipal building had to show this display of an uneasy marriage of Czech and Soviet flags. People got so sick of it; they stopped buying red clothing or anything red. We were all suffocating in the brotherly Russian bear hug.
Years later, in the seventies, foreigners who traveled in Czechoslovakia reported seeing just sad, pale, mute and depressed people. It was as if everyone's blood had been drawn out into those bloody red flags. From a traditional colour of poppies, strawberries and friendly Easter eggs, red became a fierce, politically correct, vulgar whore.
After my emigration, living ten years in Switzerland, I still could not wear anything red. It didn't matter much; nobody except Turkish or Italian labourers wore red. The Swiss people wore elegant, subdued colours. The Swiss flag was red, but it was not my flag. One had to wait twelve years for citizenship there.
In perfect Switzerland everything had already been invented. We could see the long and boring tunnel of a successful career, another way of suffocation. So my Czech emigrant husband and I chose to move to a new, young land, the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) in the Pacific NorthWest of Canada. There, grey was the sky, grey-blue was the ocean, grey was the rain, and green was the rest. These Islands could also have been called The Total Absence of Red!
How refreshing!
How monotone!
The second summer on Haida Gwaii I started to be attracted to the red berries of the Mountain Ash trees. I gathered them, even when told they were inedible, made bitter jam out of them with tons of sugar (still bitter). I was giving the red colour a chance. Delicately, berry-by-berry, red came back to my life.
Later on, we moved to the town of Masset, bought an old house, and started renovating it. I was supposed to choose a colour for the kitchen counter. They had a blood-red arborite among others. The red would really make the kitchen look warm, I thought. Okay, what's done is done. After fifteen years in emigration it should be all behind me, and I chose it.
That summer my parents from Czechoslovakia came to visit. Even though they were retired, their mail was still occasionally been opened. All these years they kept applying for a telephone, but never got one--a price to pay for a daughter who defected. When touring the house, my Mother stopped in the kitchen, horrified:
"Communism!" she gasped to the uncomprehending worker, who was just finishing the kitchen counter.
My poor mother. We really had grown fairly apart...
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