A letter from Prague.

What's new in Prague? From the window to the left of my computer, I see the back faces of two buildings, closing a courtyard. I dare to start my letter from Prague, Czech Republic, by telling you very short stories of these two houses.

On the right side, there is an elementary school. It is an excellent, modern looking, construction from the end of the thirties, originally belonging to a convent. After the Communist coup d'etat in February 1948, the religious mosaic in the entry of the school was carefully covered and the so-called socialist school started to pump the red sauce into the children's brains. After 'the velvet revolution' in November 1989, the sisters came back, the mosaic was carefully recovered and the nouveaux riches, some of them without any trace of religious faith, started to bring their children in luxurious cars to the doors of the school, no more a socialist one, but now a religious one. Their expectation was that pious sisters would pump a nobler sauce into the brains of their children in comparison with the rest of the secular, postcommunist educational institutions, overflowing with the ex-teachers of Russian.

The idea that the main role of the school consists in pumping remained generally untouched in the majority of Czech schools.

The rest of my horizon is made from metal, glass and unidentifiable plastic. One of the most aggressive architects of the Communist regime, able to destroy half of Prague only if having sufficient occasions to it, ironically enough named Prager, built here an extremely ugly 'modernist' complement to the neo-renaissance jewel of the National Theatre. After 'the velvet revolution', the attempts to get some profit from the gigantomaniac spaces were done. A nice restaurant in the intermediary tract was finally exchanged by a 'fund'. There emerged hundreds of such mysterious 'funds' in the Czech Republic, allegedly as necessary instruments of the famous coupon privatisation. Some of them survive until now, another part of them evaded the impact of a new strict legislation by transforming themselves into 'holdings', the majority of them simply vanished.

The physical result of all mutations of this building is that its intermediary tract is empty and closed.

When I leave our house (please do not press me to tell you its story), there were in the past at the right corner of the opposite block two small shops, with food and with vegetables. There are now two pubs. At the left corner there was a wholesale shop with some electrical parts and equipment. Now, after a long period of hesitating (with the rooms empty and closed), there has arisen a new shop with expensive wines and missing clients. Commercial losses can be scarcely balanced by the complimentary selling of a poor choice of vegetables.

Somewhere at this corner begins a vague, pulsating border of a vast region, occupied by drug dealers. This undoubtedly profitable job flourishes right at the opposite side of the religious school.

The citizens of our district cannot claim that we are out of the range of care of the city police. We can see these men and women, in fashionable black uniforms, anxiously avoiding any conflicts with the dealers and their less or more devastated clients in the nearest surroundings. They have found in our corner a fully renewable source of profit, coming from the penalties for the illegally parked cars.

Every car belonging to a citizen living in our district in the very centre of Prague has basically four chances where to park: very rare and/or expensive garages, an annual ticket for parking behind the blue stripes for a reasonable price, short time stand controlled by a coin glutton, and fully free places which, theoretically, exist in our district too.

The mayor of Prague two or three years ago signed a contract with a foreign firm, lending them the most attractive localities in the city and a free hand in their pricing. They built at first tens and hundreds of spaces and only then announced publicly the price for one hour of parking. It was the day when a new citizen's initiative was born. The drivers refused to pay, Prague's mayor was shocked by the endangering of his position, and the prices were, after a few weeks of fights, drastically reduced. Many wise people recommended in those days to the mayor that it would be very useful, instead of arousing such conflicts, to open some procedure of a public participation before introducing a new policy.

I am afraid that in the very moment when the media shifted their attention to some other city affair the whole set of elected representatives of Prague erased this lesson from their memory.

Forget about cars in a city with medieval curved streets and make a trip as a pedestrian. There are a lot of fresh facades not only in the centre of the town. Some of these facades are the only remnant of the house behind, now completely rebuilt. Sadly, there is not yet a law able to forbid this dirty trick in a town which ought to be one of nine European Cities of Culture for the year 2000.

Walking in the town you can buy foreign newspapers and books from an abundant selection, enter naturalistic copies of American pubs, or accept an offer of 'sexual services'. You can make an act of charity to some homeless beggar. If you are attacked by some violent physiques in the night make sure whether your life is really endangered before you use your gun. Czech law does not favour the victim.

All these phenomena are new in Prague: religious schools, selling of drugs in public spaces, citizen initiatives, homeless and begging people in the city, free access to personal firearms, a dramatically changing balance of despair and hope instead of the morbid calm of ideological rituals.

Displaying the National and Soviet flag was obligatory many times a year in those totalitarian times: large ones for every house, small ones for every window. Now, in a restored democracy, you can meet Czech national flags in the streets not on the most sacred days of the national history but when our hockey or football team becomes a champion. Living in the close neighbourhood of the National Theatre, I have to state with a certain satisfaction: the vividness of nationalism in this city of brave soldier Svejk is near to zero. The Czech national anthem is felt by the general public as a moving tune prevailing on the occasion of a sport victory. The countless decades under the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, under the Nazi Protektorat Bohmen und Mahren and under the wings of Soviet 'peace camp' made us, hopefully, immune to this spiritual drug at the waning of the second millennium.

A sad story of a recent exodus of Czech Gipsies to England and Canada however suggests that racism is nothing but another mask of the same monster, posing before the cameras in the Czech Republic more often in the costume of nationalism.

The level of irony and scepticism which in most civilized countries of the Western world can be met exclusively in the narrow intellectual circles, seems, in the Czech Republic, more widespread, but alas, only to a certain limit: there is very little self-scepticism among the Czechs.

And this is not new in Prague. It is old hat or, in the original Czech phrasing, old waistcoat.

Bohuslav Blazek has written about twenty non-fiction books, mainly on human communication and social ecology. He is a director of the influential Czech foundation EcoTerra and vice-president of the Rural Revival Association.

COUNTRY CROSS-ROADS

White-striped, official as a frontier-crossing The sign-post looms above the dock-filled ditch: Wooden arms frozen in the act of tossing Directions to detour down by-roads which Hide themselves from the summer's solemn glare Between millenium-old hedgerows, haystacks And vistas of wide-angled wheatfields where The wind's invisible feet leave short-lived tracks Leading towards the suicide's slimed pond; Lettering glimpsed too fleetingly to catch More than 'stead' or 'ham, though somehow you know The word just ends - dissolves in void - beyond The third turning, and the village cricket match Was rainedoff for ever five decades ago.

A.D. Harvey