Democracy on the loose! — Here I am in Střitež, arrived by train and sitting in an old barn house with Veronika (the photographer) and waiting for Ivan and the poll results.
You see, today are the elections in Střitež, and Veronika’s partner Ivan is running for a seat on the town council. This is important because the town council is ignorant and shortsighted. At least, that’s what Ivan told me.
“All the buildings that look new are the weekend houses,” he said as we drove through the town. “No one seems to have a problem with this, the people who only live here some of the time. But when someone wants to add something nice to his farm — say, a straw-bail building for tools and a working area, then problems begin with the town council.”
Ivan and I spoke about a lot of things, comparing life in Prague with the countryside and life in America. He only had a few questions for me, and they were easy ones such as, “What is freedom in America?” or “Are the Americans still individuals?” We talked for a long time, and Ivan eventually told me he’d become fed up with this whole notion of individualism. “What does it mean when I can live out here and make my own cheese and smoke my own grass and nobody stops me because nobody cares? Why do people care so much elsewhere?”
He moved from Prague to this tiny village near the border of Bohemia and Moravia about eleven years ago to live a simpler life. To me this is admirable because I’ve read Walden and I have an idealized vision of the lifestyle Ivan has carved for himself. I say carved because that’s exactly what he did — this whole house is handmade from wood, built onto an old barn once scheduled for demolition, now transformed and given new life with purpose.
Yesterday I witnessed Ivan’s craft in motion. It was the pounding of the blacksmith’s anvil meeting the fold of origami. The sound of the whirling blade filled the workshop. Ivan ran long boards through saws and planers until they became slender. With a flick the blade stopped. Ivan unfastened his hand tools from the leather notches where they hung and sat at his bench, working the tools over the surface as a sculptor molds clay. They were extensions of his hands, so fluid the occasional swap for a different one — or pass from one hand to the other — was not a pause, but rather a lyrical transition to a different phrase — the turn of a note, the squeak of a chair.
Ivan comes in through the door and Veronika and I hold our breath. He’s smiling. “I didn’t win,” he says, and hands us both a beer.
“But you should have!” I say.
“No,” he responds, “the man that won has many family members here, so he is the natural choice. I am the outsider from Prague, and they think I am an anarchist.”
Ivan and Veronika laugh at this. We drink beer and move outside to enjoy a campfire.
The other night Ivan and I spoke about the cat problem. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked me, holding a small orange cat named Sládeček. “If I do nothing they will breed and then we have cats everywhere, but I could also take them out and shoot them. I don’t want to do that.”
“Could you neuter them?” I asked. He looked confused. I motioned a snipping with my fingers.
“Oh no,” he responded, looking at Sládeček. “There are certainly better solutions than that.”
Joe Taylor 