Luke, around the world.

“My colleague is trying to tell you that you validated your ticket slip from the wrong side,” a controller says sternly while I am already calculating how much a fine will set me back. “But you are ok,” he finishes, so what? All I can see is my tram disappearing behind the corner, never to be entered again. I think of an excellent Hungarian movie Kontroll, how I watched it years ago with M, and then with K, and I think to myself, fuck, it is a very ungrateful occupation. But then it’s also a golden opportunity for police academy dropouts to abuse the single iota of power they still hold over our civilian heads.

I get to the apartment without any further adventures. “First time in Brno?” smiles the lady I am renting a room from, and I proceed to explain my entire plan to her. She stares at me with a bit of disbelief, but as soon as I add, only if I am fortunate enough, she regains her composure and seems to be positively envious, “you are living the dream.”

Not really. I still haven’t found my rhythm, but I hope I will get there soon. Brno is my second stop in the Czech Republic; it is slightly bigger than Ostrava, and although both cities have a long history reaching back to medieval times, Brno seems to express its historicity better. A bit more compact and rich in its core, it extends a more heartfelt invitation than Ostrava. 

Maybe it is connected with the time of the year; it’s the end of school for soon-to-be high school graduates, and while the Polish tradition is centered around a hundred-day countdown until the final exams, the teenagers of Brno seize that one day at the end of April. Several lanky boys dressed up in Squid Game uniforms are playing ddakji on the pavement; a girl accompanying them ambushes me and with a wide smile, her braces glittering, she asks for a little donation, but I have no cash and the QR code only works with Czech bank accounts. I am about to leave when she smiles at me once more, a bit let down but still genuinely grateful, thank you anyway. Later I meet many more: teenage mutant ninja turtles, sheet-draped Egyptian slaves carrying their pharaoh in a litter, a few adolescents trundling a Christ-like figure in a shopping cart. They are scenes of joy and of youthful innocence, and I want to scream at them, cherish it, imprint it deep in your minds before adulthood grinds you all to a halt, before you become embittered and full of anxiety, before a single ray of sun turns you to dust.

…which is somehow connected with where I am heading, an ossuary below the Church of Saint James. It isn’t the only place in Central Europe filled with human bones and skulls, but it is the first I am seeing in person. It instantly becomes a sanctuary from the razzmatazz upstairs; the strings playing some kind of oratory are plaintive and comforting, and in each musty room I find more confirmation that maybe what awaits us after we die is not so tragic, just a storage room underground, our bones laid to rest, anonymous, peaceful. In some twisted way, I don’t really want to get back upstairs. A solitary thought crosses my mind, a call of the void that flares up and then disappears immediately, what if I was done with it right now, such bliss, such ignorance…

But I cannot shirk my responsibilities as a wannabe world traveller, and I am compelled to re-enter the underground the next day, this time visiting a Communist bunker. “It’s the place where the dignitaries would have gone if the Cold War had turned to a hot one,” explains the receptionist, and he doesn’t need to tell me any of this: my own country would have become the epicentre of nuclear holocaust had things turned out differently. Unfortunately, we are going back to those horrifying times, another great war is looming on the horizon, and while it may pass by as an underdeveloped thunderstorm, it makes the generation I belong to frantic, uneasy, lost.

The masks, the coats, the medkits scattered across the bunker halls all tell a story of the previous generation facing the same fears. The TV screen in one of the rooms is playing a piece of anti-Western propaganda. The hippies are painted as amoral miscreants, the imperialist United States are the devil incarnate, the only genuine and right way of living is on this side of the Iron Curtain, among your socialist friends. It is interesting how my outlook has changed over the years. I believe we need more socialism, I don’t think there is any better way to treat humans as actual living and feeling beings, and not as columns and rows of a spreadsheet. And yet I will always be against totalitarianism, against imperialist tendencies of all kinds of radicals: religious, capitalist, (post)communist. Today’s Russia should be treated as an enemy, riding on the same narratives and casus belli as it did one hundred years ago, once again they are up in arms against the degenerate Westerners, once again they only want to secure the future of the Russian-speaking minorities. And just like a century ago, we have misguided poor souls from the West swayed by the denigrating rhetoric, convinced that this war could actually be a just war, a necessary war to cleanse and purge the liberal tendencies from the collective mind of Europe.

Overwhelmed by a vision of a country in flames, I step outside. It is a sunny afternoon and before I revisit the Lokal u Caipla to have a beer and some fried edam with tartare sauce, I walk up the hill to see the Spilberk Castle. It’s a demanding stroll in a city rudely awakened by a scorching May sun, but the trees give me shelter and comfort, they are shedding pollen, there is birdsong trembling in the air. Something is still bothering me, maybe that there is not enough appreciation of where we are as a society, that we are progressing (in pain, but still) towards a place where everyone can feel equal and safe and taken care of. The agents of chaos aren’t just politicians; it could be the people we know, our family, our friends, trapped in the pitfall of intolerant tribalism.

And what if we need wars to reoccur, if only to keep ourselves in check?